Moving Pictures

There was a period in the early to mid-1960s when almost every French or Italian director contributed to an anthology film. There was a theme, a sarcastic or snappy tone and an awkward title. Filmmakers mixed unassumingly: young turks and old hacks, the brilliant and the uninspired. So you would have Godard and De Broca sharing a movie. One of the weakest of those movies features one of the strongest segments: Rene Clair's "Marriage," in 1960's Love and the Frenchwoman, one of the film's two interesting episodes, the other being Michel Boisrond's attempt at being the French Bergman, "Virginity."


Boisrond's an interesting character in his own right, but what's interesting, for our purposes, is Clair's episode--or, rather, its setting. A little cross section of young marriage: a newlywed couple bickers on the short train ride from their wedding "back home" to their new apartment "in the city." The wedding itself isn't important enough for a motion picture camera: it's shown as a series of still photos, from the car arriving at city hall to the church to their exit down its steps to the reception with the dancing relatives. Suddenly, the pictures are in the hands of a photographer in his darkroom, one of Clair's little men, and the film begins to move as he rushes to deliver them in time, handing them to the bride through the window of a moving train.

There's a reason to why Alexander Medvedkin and his comrades built a movie studio into a train car, and why cameras are placed on tracks for dolly shots. Trains are moving dramas. There's a sort of script--the route--with a clear beginning and a definite end. A group of people are put together into a space that isn't terribly different from a theater: a long front hall like a stage, with windowed compartments and sliding doors. They cross from one side to the other but rarely leave. Sometimes they go off stage, closing doors or locking themselves in the bathroom, and sometimes minor characters--conductors, etc.--will enter from one side and leave out the other. The noise of a train, especially outside of your compartment, means you have to talk loudly, and clearly. And when the train stops, the passengers become like a traveling theatre troupe, strange actors spilling out of the doors to entertain the locals for fifteen minutes.

Train travel, like any genre, is simultaneously schematic and unpredictable. In a Western, you know there'll be a gun fight, but you don't know when; on a train, you know there'll be a delay, but you're never sure when it'll happen, or if you'll even notice it. The passengers usually don't know each other, and though they know where they're going, they keep looking out the windows at the passing scenery, surprised by the journey itself. And every passenger must consciously make the decision to either engage or ignore every other passenger.

It's interesting that American films have never had much of a knack for train travel; it took until Wes Anderson and The Darjeeling Limited for the drama of the sleeping compartment to be fully explored. No, American cinema loves cars, and the forced intimacy and shared sense of purpose they create between those in them. Two people on a train are passengers; two people in a car are a relationship. Train travelers, equally powerless, are therefore equal as characters; between the driver of a car and his or her passenger(s), there's always some sort of dynamic. Someone has to have power over someone else: the driver is making the passenger go somewhere, the driver and the passenger try to decide where to drive, the passenger has a gun to the driver's head, etc., etc.

There's another important thing about trains, one that distinguishes them from cars. The car moves when it's driven; the movement of a car is always a conscious action. But even when people on a train are standing still, or sleeping, they continue to move. The train is inevitable. It travels to its destination regardless of whether the people on it want to go there or not. The train ride is the tragedy or the comedy or the romance that sucks people in, turning them into its characters, hurtling them towards an abrupt conclusion: the arrival. And there are few things as terminal and irreversible as a train's arrival at its destination. Train passengers don't have the luxury of hesitating.

And in Clair's episode, the arrival marks the terminal end of the argument: unloading their luggage, they leave behind the things they were bickering about--he his cigarettes, she her garish hat. The fight, like a train ride, is completely self-contained. Watched by a surprised conductor, the couple walks into a different, unfilmed story hand-in-hand.

Cinema Museum (Mark Lewis, 2008)

Noroît (Jacques Rivette, 1976; photographed by William Lubtchansky)

The Map

A map is not the same thing as the place it represents. The globe is not the Earth. The map is a way of systemizing an indescribable whole. When I look at Chicago on a map, I’m not looking directly at the city where I live, but I’m looking at a reference, a sort of text that uses measurements to give me a rough idea of where this city is in relation to other cities. The dot is a variable that stands for the city; if I get a magnifying glass, I won’t be able to discern any more than what I see right now.

Raoul Coutard’s Hoa Binh opens with a map. I’m getting a little ahead of myself here—let’s talk about Coutard for a minute. Why, for example, is he the greatest cinematographer? Answer: because, in making his moving pictures, he’s aware that he isn’t capturing the image of something, but an image of it. Free of having to define, he instead describes. A photograph of a thing, like a map, is not the thing itself. So Coutard has a certain freedom: he can use the wrong film stock, shoot under the wrong lighting conditions, use the lenses you’re not supposed to be using because he knows that the people who follow all of these rules make images just as subjective as his. Let other cameramen worry about science and mathematics: he can be a dramatist, a journalist or a poet. Coutard always points out that he has no style, and that the camerawork is different for every director he worked with. This is partly true; Coutard’s style is the ephemerality of images. The feeling that, say, a camera movement, even if duplicated for every take, will, on some level, never be the same twice.

So Coutard opens the film, which was his first as a director, with a shot of a map. There is a voice, helicopter noises, etc., etc. But let’s talk about the image, which, like all of Coutard’s greatest images, has a disposable quality. It could be any image, but it’s this one and we have to deal with that decision. So disposable, in fact, that the credits are shown over it, identifying the producer, the title of the film (and in classic French style, the title of the source novel and the names of its author and publisher) and, finally, the name of the director. All of these bits of text take precedence over the image under them in our viewing experience. As the credits roll, we get closer to the map, which we at first see as consisting of Asia, India, the Middle East, the horn of Africa and a bit of Australia. As we get closer, the frame becomes dominated by Cambodia and Vietnam. This is not a zoom; a zoom changes our view while maintaining the same position. The slight changes in perspective and lighting along the edges make it obvious that the camera is slowly dollying towards a map. We are physically getting closer; even this subtle movement is a physical experience—not of the world, but of a map.



Eventually, this specific image of a system (a false image) dissolves it into a specific image of something ephemeral: a helicopter pilot’s head, a reflective visor covering his eyes. A dissolve is always a struggle: one image conquers the other one. There is something deeply dramatic to dissolves, especially in older Hollywood films, which would often dissolve in the middle of an action. That action became the dying breath of a scene as the next one stood victorious over it. So we begin with the system of Vietnam: the map. Vietnam as a place on a globe, as a place in relation to other places. And slowly this image is overpowered by a real, fleeting experience—looking directly into a man’s face. His visor even reflects the cameraman.

Coutard was once a war photographer. He was in the French Indochina War and lived in Vietnam for 11 years. So imagine Coutard sitting down at his home in Paris or at some café and opening up a newspaper. Or maybe he’s watching television. He sees a map with arrows and lines and explanations. And as he looks at the map it becomes overpowered by his own specific experiences. He remembers the smell of Vietnam, the climate, the people. He knows war and he knows what war feels like in that region. He looks at this map, this empty system designed to give people with no specific experiences, no memories of a place a way to itemize it. And whereas others can toss it aside, turn to the next page to look at the sports section, this map, meaningless to them, is in a quiet struggle with an image in his head.

A fleeting, disposable image becomes beautiful through its disposability. It could be any image, but it’s this one. The first memory. The film editor is often in the act of remembering, of searching for a moment that has now passed but an aspect of which has been recorded, and creating something out of that aspect, that shadow. Movies are a shadow world, in that every action casts its shadow—every decision has an infinite number of counter-decisions. The image of the helicopter pilot’s head is only on the screen for a second after it finishes dissolving in. It is followed very quickly by other images—also of masked, helmeted heads, of an airfield and of smoke. From the stand point of production, they are identical: a cameraman is told to get footage of a helicopter crew, maybe to focus on their heads. From the point of planning, any of the first four images after the map could be the one that the map image dissolves into. But each attempt at creating the same image results in a different image. One image is chosen: the helicopter pilot’s head, staring at the camera man is the image that overpowers the map.

Nicholas Ray's The Janitor

For Joe Rubin

We like to say that the Internet allows us to explore "new forms." The Internet doesn't allow anything. It forces. YouTube’s length limitations mean that I’ve had to upload Nicholas Ray’s The Janitor as two six minute halves. Instead of looking at this as an interruption, a hiccup, the Internet’s equivalent of a reel change, it’s better to see it as an arbitrary cleaving: two videos have been created from one movie. Ray, of course, can survive any division. The troubled history of many of his productions isn’t a tragedy, but a testament. You could fire Nicholas Ray, but you couldn’t exorcize him from the movie. He ends up haunting whatever scenes of Wind Across the Everglades he didn't direct. Like Orson Welles, who could be cut and recut but could never be cut out. The reason they hold so much fascination as filmmakers, as figures, is because they didn't need total control for the films to be theirs.

Part 1: Le Coq et Le Clergyman


May 1973, 16mm, post-synced sound, a little West German money, a small studio in Amsterdam. One man, aptly named Max Fischer, handling both the camera and the editing table. The Janitor was shot as the 12th of a baker's dozen (or, even better, devil's dozen) of fantasies for the Wet Dreams anthology film. Nicholas Ray plays himself as two characters: a priest out of Bataille and a janitor out of Beckett. The priest is a preacher and a moralizer. Of course moralizers and the “deviants” they preach against have the same obsessions: sex and death. And sex and death are there in the priest's room, which is decorated with funeral parlor wallpaper and a rickety brothel bed. His thick-browed daughter pulls the stockings up over his skinny legs. Meanwhile, the bare-footed janitor bumbles around a sound stage like a bawdy silent comedian. His stage name could be Larry Semen.

Their voice is a French baritone that sounds like it's narrating even when delivering dialogue. The sort of voice that turns anyone engaging it into a talking point instead of an equal. The sound is as authoritative as the images are noisy. There's a jitter to the picture, a reminder that movies are made possible by electricity and that every shot can be made to spark.

Part 2: Ray vs. Ray


Whatever we dream about, we ultimately dream about ourselves. The wet dream, the abstract sexual desire, is a desire for ourselves, for some idea of others that exists only in our minds. The janitor dreams the priest. The priest is too caught up in his fervor to take note of his own incest. The janitor stops shitting just long enough to destroy him. The somebody who hallucinates his power against the nobody who can take an ultimately suicidal action.

The division created by the need to split up the film into two halves gives us two videos with different approaches. The first part becomes about the body as seen from a distance. The director's body as a marionette. The second part is self-expression in the most literal sense, a film that speaks through images of its director’s beautifully craggy face. Here the body is a fancy way for transporting the head. And there's something monumental about the human face. It's more of a landscape than the body. The mountain of Ray's nose, the ravine of his mouth, the forest of his hair. So whereas in the first half, the priest and the janitor are characters, here they become figures; the first half is a story, and the second is a myth.

Myths aren't to be confused with parables. Parables have morals; myths illustrate some vague and inarticulatable power. As long as films get made, every one of them is gonna be about filmmaking. So every mythic film is about the film myth. The idea of the movies, something popular and incredibly beautiful. And to Ray, if cinema can't be a salvation, it can be a testimony. If success is impossible, one should strive to make an honest record of failure. If there can't be a victory, there can be a struggle, even if it's only the struggle of the director against him or herself.

Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, 1981; photographed by Eric Saarinen)

The Ontology of the Recorded Sound

Andre Bazin's essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," maybe his most important, is now 63 years old, almost a quarter-century older than Bazin ever was. A gentle knife driven into the mind anyone who's ever read it and plenty of people you haven't. The blueprint for the third floor of the constantly growing tower of film theory, always almost reaching Heaven, but never quite getting there (once a floor is finished, we discover that there's one more to go).

Barely eight pages long in the University of California Press English edition of What is Cinema?, the one with the mauve color, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" is followed a few pages later in that edition by a composite essay called "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," edited from three pieces published in different magazines during the 1950s. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" is important to Bazin's ideas like a seed is important to the tree it grows into. A fruit-bearing tree. "Ontology" and "Evolution" are masterworks of thinking. In these few pages, Bazin establishes a world of possibilities circling around a single idea: ontology. Realism. Reliability. What is the "reliable aesthetic," the one that doesn't try to manipulate its audience? Here is the idea of cinema as something other than a manipulation of reality; cinema can be a window to something real. Where is the truth? "Depth of focus brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys in reality." The truth can be discerned in the long take. But while he talks about a deep focus image, he never talks about a deep focus sound. Welles, Bazin's great ontological poet, chose his sounds very selectively, making a radio play on the soundtrack and a shadow play on the screen. The great post-syncer who would sometimes dub in the lines of his actors himself, imitating their voices. Yes, sound made the deep focus long take possible, but it's seen as only that: a means to an end. Why?

The primacy of the image in Bazin's writing--and in most writing on film--is understandable: the moving image was our first way to express the notion of cinema. The relationship between sounds and images in films is like the relationship between two siblings born a few years apart. When cinema was young (or middle-aged) a difference of 30 years meant a lot; sound was an upstart kid. But now that cinema is over a century old, the age difference isn't that much of a factor. So why do we still treat sound like the image's kid sister? Why do we write so much about images and the ways they are edited together and so little about sounds and their editing?

Yes, for a long time moving images were exclusive to movies. But now they've become a part of so many other media that there is no longer a direction correlation between the two. The Godardian notion of the Death of Cinema is the death of the orthodox cinema (a movie as a moving image) and the beginning of a more ambiguous notion of cinema, the birth of Cinema as a pure idea, like Art (which, let's not forget, was once inseparable from specific forms and subjects). When cinema dies (if it hasn't already), it will continue to haunt the world as a ghost, imbuing every action with its spirit. We are coming to a point where a moving image is no longer necessary to make a "film." Sounds and images have become equals, and so we should begin thinking of them that way. And, in order to do this, we've got to start at square one: to begin rethinking old, established theories and how they work in this context. The placement of the microphones should be just as important as the placement of the camera. Bazin's ontology is the foundation of many of the last half-century's ideas about cinema. If we believe in a "realist" (ontological) image, then we must believe in a "realist" sound. So what defines an ontological sound recording?

In 1930, Erich von Stroheim was given the opportunity to remake Blind Husbands as a sound film. The film was written and cast, but production was shut down a week before shooting was supposed to start; the problem was with Stroheim and his ideas about making a sound film. Stroheim wanted to record all of the sound directly. He believed that sound effects recorded in a studio were not the same as the actual sounds. He wanted to hear the actor's footsteps, and not the footsteps of a sound engineer putting on a pair of prop shoes and stomping on plywood. He wanted to record coach bells jangling by a lake because he felt it would not be the same sound as the one a foley artist's bells would make. He wanted a waltz band to perform live during a shot instead of having the musicians mime so that a pristine recording of the music could be dubbed in later. Stroheim's unrealized idea represents the two most important facets of what could be called an ontological sound: its importance in terms of the filmmaker's relationship to the viewer (that they are not "manipulating" but trying to present the microphone's view of "reality) and its importance as a gesture--that even if a post-synced sound and a directly recorded sound are identical, there is a moral distinction, an action, being made by using the original.

Of all the New Wave filmmakers, Jacques Rivette was the most Bazinian, and his films, full of creaking floors and camera noise, represent ontology not only in their long takes but in their use of direct sound. I think of The Nun and its noisy footsteps, and The Duchess of Langeias and its loud furniture. Hou Hsiao-Hsien made the first Taiwanese film to use exclusively direct sound, City of Sadness, shooting (and recording) in long takes not only as a way to bring out the truth of a past world but to capture the noise of a passed time, the little irregularities of dialects and accents that would probably be replaced with an easier-to-understand, general Taiwanese Mandarin if he went to post-sync it at a studio. Here is the ontological sound inseparable from the ontological image. A dual "realism." A completed circle.

The ontological image is not superior to the manipulated one; both are equally "cinema." But the idea of its importance led to so many ideas and counter-ideas, just like the auteur theory did. It's a statement made to provoke responses. So if we attach importance to the ontological sound, what is the place of sound-montage, or of the mixture of ontological and artificial sounds that makes up the bulk of most movie soundtracks? There is more, of course. There's no such thing as a complete answer to a question--only more questions.

The Color Green

An Affair to Remember and Police Beat

Would anyone remember Lee Marvin's scarf in Seven Men from Now so well if it was the usual red or yellow instead of that fertile green that stands out against the dusty brown of Lone Pine?

Why does the color green always stand out so vividly in movies? Is it because we see it so rarely? It's like the George Harrison of the movie palett: an essential (and underrated) element, and it's always a pleasure to see it take the lead.

It seems like filmmakers' passions always lie with red or blue, never with green. Maybe Technicolor is to blame: it was so good and vivid with those colors and green was more the domain of Agfacolor (also known as Ansocolor). Jacques Tourneur's Stranger on Horseback has some of the sharpest greens in cinema, thanks to the Anscocolor, but they say the director was never happy with it.

Blue was fashionable for a while. I hope green will be all the rage some time soon.

Small Head of E.O.W., by Frank Auerbach

Oil on board, 1957-58

Some things about what I imagine the painting to look like make me uncomfortable. I think of the feces-stained walls of Hunger's prison cells, and how this vaguely fecal color forms a face. Small Head of E.O.W. doesn't look pretty, but it seems beautiful. The basic outline of a head, neck and hair interrupted by a single Egyptian eye that seems to be pointed at something behind the sitter. The suggestion of shoulders that are both delicate and hulking. This human shape being something that exists on the surface of an undulating mass, like sea foam forming on waves. A persona shaping. Auerbach, successor to Joyce.

The Trouble with Hats

Those Awful Hats (1909), directed by D.W.Griffith


Fantasmagorie (1908), by Émile Cohl

Movies as windows into the past. Both D.W.Griffith's Those Awful Hats and Émile Cohl's early animation Fantasmagorie feature jokes about something that was apparently a big problem for filmgoers a century ago: women's hats blocking the screen.

I think of the countless clever shorts played in American movie theaters (especially AMC) nowadays that tell the audience to turn off their cell phones--the Indians sneaking up on a herd of buffalo only to have it scared away by an obnoxious ringtone, the submarine whose presence is given away to the enemy--and I hope that someone will preserve them so that people will watch them a hundred years from now and laugh that we fussed so much about phone calls.

The Missing Passage

The recent Region 1 boxed set of David Lynch's work--"The Lime Green Set," as it's called--includes, amongst deluxe versions of his short films, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, a DVD that's referred to as the "Mystery Disc" on the packaging. Its contents are fascinating: the Rabbits online show, a large collection of shorts and, most interestingly, deleted scenes from the Wild at Heart work print.

It seems like the most accurate term for describing any moments ("scenes") from Lynch's films is to call them passages, a term that's also handy with Godard. So these aren't so much deleted scenes as omitted passages, sentences cut from the ends of paragraphs, the Gypsies that were trimmed out and painted over on the canvas of Manet's Boy with a Pitcher.

Importantly, these missing passages aren't included on the Wild at Heart disc--by being placed o the Mystery Disc, they serve as an afterword, a collection of numbered moments that we can insert into the Wild at Heart of our imagination.

The sequence labeled Scene 78 is the most fascinating, as potent and doomed as the famous Winkie's scenario in Mulholland Dr. or the phone call in Lost Highway. Like those sequences, it's in some ways completely self-contained. Viewed outside of the context of the movie, it could be a short film. On the other hand, if imagined as part of the whole of Wild at Heart--or, more importantly, once viewed, remembered as being part of Wild at Heart (and with Lynch the memory of a film is as important as the act of watching it)--it becomes significantly more ambiguous. It's both completely fathomable and a total mystery.




The Tradition of Consistency

Theophrastus gives us 30 characters. His intention isn't dramaturgy or social observation. He wants to be a guide (like a guidebook), to create a text that would help describe (you could say characterize) people in the same way a map describes a city (incompletely, that is, creating a set of names and coordinates to navigate through a whole with infinite social possibilities). So we have The Boor in the same way we have Logan Square and The Coward in the same way we have Lakeshore Drive. R.C.Jebb's 1870 translation has the old Greek writing:

"I will describe to you, class by class, the several kinds of conduct which characterise [people] and the mode in which they administer their affairs; for I conceive, Polycles, that our sons will be the better if such memorials are bequeathed to them, using which as examples they shall choose to live and consort with men of the fairest lives, in order that they may not fall short of them."

We've invented many more systems--as many systems as there are people, probably even more. Advertising is a system for dividing a population into consumer groups. Politicians create a system that clearly delineates people into us and them. A system is always a knife. It's for carving up a whole into pieces so that it can be more easily digested. People are not characters; character, characteristics are a system we use to more easily analyze something. When we think of any person as a character (and, in our memories and our experiences, we frequently do) we cut off part of them, and we can keep cutting. Perhaps this is the great Utopian aspect of cinema: that it does not include a system for dividing up its audience.

So why is it that film analysis -- whether it's published criticism or two people talking in a lobby -- wants to tether itself to a notion of character -- a very clearly delineated, orthodox concept of character, whether in respect to the subjects or the filmmakers (in auteurism, themselves characters)? There is nothing wrong with the character system -- many films have been made with it in mind. But it is never a good idea to use the same system for everything. Every film calls for a new approach. Though literature is our favorite scapegoat when it comes to attacking lazy criticism, adherence to the character system, the character tradition, is more likely the fault of the guide we frequently use to describe what we think constitutes "good" acting: consistency. A person has to be like an equation ("X would never do that!" when we should instead accept what X has done and try to understand it, and that involves more systems--morality, ethics, etc--illustrating that the mind is a sort of infinitely regressing trap).

The art of creating an "original character" is like the art of cooking: a new combination of old ingredients. Any original idea can be subdivided into older ideas. This does not discredit originality--but we should see things for what they are. Behind every new idea is a transposition of an old idea, a previous assumption. There will be new ideas as long as there are old ones. The older the better.

People who dislike David Lynch's work, or at least certain aspects of it, will occasionally mention the "poor characterizations"--especially in Wild at Heart. But with Lynch a person is never a character--instead, a character is ascribed to them. They are given names, but those names aren't theirs to keep. Sometimes a single set of characteristics can travel between actors (Mulholland Dr., Lost Highway) or the same actor can be given multiple distinct sets of characteristics and names (Inland Empire). Or, as in Twin Peaks, a notion (whether it's a character, a feeling of guilt) can spread out like an umbrella and cover multiple persons at different times.

There are no "characters" in Ozu's late films. Instead, familiar faces are given names and roles, but they're never characters in the orthodox sense. There are no "characters" in late Hitchcock (certainly not in Topaz): instead, images of people serve as magnets for the metal filings of our emotions. And the people of Cassavetes and Pialat are like quotes with ellipses on either side: there is a acknowledgment that we are seeing something out of context, removed from its reality, but it is important that this removed passage be quoted.

Lynch, along with Abel Ferrara, presents the most intelligent portrayal of identity of any contemporary American filmmaker: in every one of us, there is a million, and sometimes a million of us are one. It depends on the system.


Cut-Ups

Laura Dern in Inland Empire is as many characters as the viewers wish to divide her into (the more adventurous can say that she is really only one). Inland Empire and Mulholland Dr. are films without scenes--a scene, after all, is a system by which a whole can be clearly delineated. Instead, by presenting the work as an interconnected whole, Lynch gives us the opportunity to create our own systems, to cut them up as many ways as we want. Mulholland Dr., especially early on, frequently coalesces into something akin to scenes. But Inland Empire is a long cinematic superimposition, posing the same question a double exposure poses: are we looking at a single image, two distinct images, something else? As behind every new idea there are old ideas, behind every recognizable image is complete abstraction.

In 1984, a young Austrian named Peter Tscherkassky, a former student of journalism (the system of shaping experience into "news") and philosophy (the system of systems!), laid three minutes worth of celluloid down in a darkroom in the shape of a film frame and exposed a single still image from the Lumiere's first "actuality" (really the second take) on it, each blown-up microscopic section of the frame creating a new image. Concreteness—"realism"—is something that only exists on the surface, and the moment you begin to divide you find abstraction.

As a painter, Lynch knows this well. The painter coalesces, combining something completely separate from the painting (the paint) to create an image. Even in a "realistic" image, if we look far enough, we will see that there are "abstract" elements: colors.

This is what makes the Bible one of the greatest works of art. With its numerous versions, translations and rewordings, it is a text that can be subdivided infinitely. It provides us--like the concept of characterization when applied to people--with a rudimentary system (chapters and verses) as a guide (like a map), but it can be broken up and re-contextualized any number of ways: by word, by sentence, by any number of pages, verses, words, sentences, chapters, and, of course, passages. The Bible is a machine capable of generating an infinite number of meanings, working as long as someone somewhere is even thinking of it. And so is the cinema.



The Intruder

The first image of Scene 78 is one of its two close-ups. Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton) is playing with a novelty pen. A wide shot: two men--who will be named later as Reggie and Dropshadow (or, rather, they will have those names ascribed to them) arrive and introduce themselves. They're embodied (and supporting players in Lynch films are always embodying something), respectively, by Calvin Lockhart and David Patrick Kelly.

The preservation of the original splices in the work print gives every cut a jittering quality, like a snare hit. Even the most casual viewer becomes aware that the image consists of pieces attached to each other to form a chain. The soundtrack is finished, crisp, clear almost as if to contrast with the unfinished nature of the images. It is a pair of ominous arms trying to hold something together, trying to keep it from falling apart.

Stanton, with his beige suit and dapperly held cigarette, is doing his best Cary Grant, his best American cool to Lockhart's affable Honduran. Lockhart is playing friendly, talkative, but what comes through is a subliminal menace. His blue shirt seems tuned to the low hum on the soundtrack, its electrical blue seeming more and more intrusive as the dialogue progresses. Lockhart says he runs an appliance repair shop and then tells Stanton he works for the Honduran government. He has a license to kill. He tells Stanton that he and Kelly are going fishing and them offers to show him his combat pistol, holding up a metal briefcase. You could edit out half of his lines and make him into a friendly tourist. Or you could edit out the other half and make him into a dangerous rogue. As Stanton stands up to leave, there is a close-up of a tattoo, somewhat illegible, across Kelly's knuckles.

Lynch is a filmmaker who is sometimes criticized for his simplistic worldview. That observation is accurate, though the idea that it's a detriment is misplaced. His work consists of many conflicting simplistic wordviews operating side by side, several systems going at once. In Lockhart's character alone, there are two possible pieces we can cut out and make something easy to understand (he is a friendly foreigner with a thick accent on a trip to New Orleans / he is a killer working for a foreign government), both originating from archetypes. Simple ideas an ordinary American like Stanton might have about people from other countries. Lynch does not reject the notion of "consistent character"--he embraces it more than any of his contemporaries. The more "consistent characters" a person can be, the merrier.

But say we put those two halves together, like Scene 78 does. What we are left with is not two characters, but a sort of infinite whole. Something that by contradicting itself (as the placidity of the wide shots is contradicted by the menacing second close-up) in every direction creates an ambiguous image from which ideas can be carved by anyone willing to hold a knife. Lynch can be cut up forever.

Abel's Portrait of Helena

Abel's portrait of Helena was a tremendous success. There was always someone standing before the show window where it was exhibited. "Another great painter among us," it was said. And Helena made a point of passing near the place where the portrait was hanging in order to hear the comments, and she strolled through the streets of the city like an immortal portrait imbued with life, like a work of art with a full train.
--Miguel de Unamuno, Abel Sanchez

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?

2007 in Review: The 21st Century / Uncle To / Free Women

Frame from Flight of the Red Balloon (2007)

Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a filmmaker from the 20th century, has become, like David Lynch, a filmmaker of the 21st century at a time when so many 21st century filmmakers still make 20th century films with 20th century ideas. He's 60, but old people are always putting the young to shame. It's what they do best.
In Flight of the Red Balloon, he floats around 2007 with his camera and his microphone and turns the concrete into the vague and the vague into the concrete. Like People on Sunday, it's a memoir of the present: proof that cinema is greater than poetry. It is only as nostalgic for Albert Lamorisse's film as the present is for the past; an impossible gulf separate the two, and yet the latter is always inescapable, present in the form of places, memories, connotations. In the 21st century, we are always reminded that there has been so much history as now.

The main characters pose for a picture in Exiled (2006; released in the States in 2007)

Fred Camper is braver than most of us. He dared to write about Johnnie To in terms we secretly wanted to use. In the language we wanted to apply: not in misleading Peckinpah and Leone comparisons, but in sacred words reserved for Grandpas Ford and Hawks, for classical cinema.
Exiled is the marriage of To, the pulp dramatist and comedian, and To, the poet of gangs and personal histories. Sympathetic critics compare the film to a late western, but only because westerns and film noir are the only genres to no longer carry a stigma--they've become sacred cannon. Others meekly say the movies is "more than an action flick," as if a work in that genre is incapable of greatness by default--to be good, it has to be similar to something else.
Exiled is certainly an action film, nothing more, and that is more than enough. It's a gun operetta, with choice solos by Anthony Wong's austerely jowled face, one of the most beautiful in modern cinema.
An actioner is as much about shootouts as a western is about horses and Indians or a film noir is about criminals. Most reviewers need new glasses; they mistake a ricocheting bullet for nihilism. Do they still mix up musical numbers with escapism?

A promotional still for Death Proof (2007)

Why is Jackie Brown Quentin Tarantino's most lasting film? Because it's his least ironic. It's the work of a lover, not an expert. Of a friend, not a taxonomist. Most importantly, it's a movie by someone who believes in the exploitation film, not someone trying to sell their knowledge of the genre. Coincidentally, it's one of his least popular and commercially successful projects.
The extended cut of Death Proof, shown abroad and available on DVD in the US, will last, too. It treats the world of genre movies and general business of commercial filmmaking unironically. It emulates rather than imitates. It has a secret ambition: to move beyond Kill Bill's brand of Jack Hill "sexy feminism." Liberation through transgression: Tarantino's sexual fetishes are no longer suggested, but are instead lingered on; the abrupt, violent conclusion doesn't bring closure--it creates possibilities. Death Proof's free women are in the imagination of a free man.

2007 in Review: Two Subtle Leaps

Everyone has already written about their favorites. I've been lazy. I've spent January cleaning the salt off of my shoes; my fingers stink of vinegar. "What was your top ten for the year?" was a December question. It was asked on slow buses and in movie theater lobbies. Everyone agreed it'd been a "good year." Everyone wanted to know your favorites.
There's a difference between speaking and writing about movies. The problem with writing is that movies age differently from essays. Written words always feel like they're a million years old, already so far behind, but at the same time they don't get old quickly like films, which are so much like people--they get wrinkles, gray hair, they start to forget. What once seemed right becomes questionable. Movies are hard to judge, at least with traditional language. They shift in your memory and they tailor themselves to your experiences. What was a bad movie six months ago becomes a good one. The last year's masterpiece crumbles.

Bill Morrison (left) and Ralph Tyler (right) in a still from Peoples House (2007)

I watched Andrew Bujalski's short Peoples House on the little TV set in my living room, sitting with the remote in my hand. Peoples House is only 8 minutes long. It lives in the extras of the DVD of Mutual Appreciation, Bujalski's second feature, just above the commentary and the trailer. It's Bujaski's first work in video, and his first in widescreen.
Aesthetically, Andrew Bujalski is Maurice Pialat's cousin. He is also Pialat's opposite. We see the same techniques in their films, but used for completely different reasons. Pialat's elliptical edits nonchalantly jump across time; he treats a few seconds or a few months the same way. The things that happened in between, the events we didn't see, have been omitted because they didn't matter. Certain events that we experienced seemed important at the time, but they aren't worth a damn in the long run. It can be heartbreaking.
Bujalski's ellipses instead give us an expansiveness. We cut from scene to scene because those are the moments we're focusing on for now, but the film acknowledges that a lot happened in between, or might have happened at the same time as the actions we're watching.
Peoples House is Bujalski's most elliptical film and his most quickly paced. We see moments from a lazy afternoon: Jerry Peoples (Ralph Tyler) shows Walter (filmmaker Bill Morrison) around his house. They talk about a grand piano, Walter takes a piss, Jerry shows him a sculpture in his back yard where hornets nest. It's set in the outside world Mutual Appreciation's gaps suggest: the subjects are supporting characters from that film. They are not the twentysomethings Bujalski's famous for: they're well-off middle-aged men; they talk about retirement, their children, work. Removed from the aesthetics , settings and subjects of Bujalski's other films, the film shows the expansiveness of his vision. It is a leap forward, and, appropriately enough, a subtle one.

Lars von Trier during the production of The Boss of It All (2006; released in the States in 2007)

Lars von Trier is a liar. He's a traveling magician and a trickster. He distracts you this his left hand so you don't notice what his right hand is doing. He tells a cock-and-bull story while he's sliding your silverware into his jacket.
"The Boss of It All is a light movie," he says, and everyone nods along. We believe because it seems to make sense, like he's done all the detective work for us and, after all, he made it, so he must be right. It's a clever ruse: we don't notice that he's made the greatest leap of his career. He's the emperor who's fooled everyone into thinking he's got no clothes. The truth is that The Boss of It All is the first of von Trier's films to be moral instead of moralistic. Automavision is a fraud, but it's a fraud that's greater than the truth of Dogme.

An Opuls Film / The High Sign

A key concept of the classic women's film is the Women's Secret; as manhood is a badge of honor, womanhood is a secret society, a terrifying mystery, a password, The High Sign. The women's films are full of invisible ink and substitution cyphers; to watch them is to be admitted to their secret world. There's more intrigue than in a hundred spy films. There are coded transmissions and cloak-and-dagger adventures, but no one ever get any medals. Men die gloriously in war films, while women have to suffer in melodramas. The women of women's films (and their audiences) recognize each other with passing glances. They know each other’s secret.

"You don't know how a family can surround you at times," says Joan Bennet to James Mason in The Reckless Moment, and of course he responds with a tense "No, I don't." How could he understand?

A little math: Max Ophüls made four pictures in the United States, one every year 1947-1949; only the first one isn’t a "women's picture"; on those three films, he signed his name Max Opuls, ditching not only the umlaut over his (adopted) surname but that pesky "h" too; and finally, while the first of those was a period piece, the last two were set in contemporary America, and of those The Reckless Moment is the second, making it Ophüls / Opuls’ last American picture.

It’s a blackmail plot: Bennet is the suburban mother with the steely resolve and Mason is the downtown mobster with the Irish brogue. He’s got letters incriminating her teenage daughter in a sleazy older lover’s death; he trails off while reading one aloud before the suggestive details become too strong. He’s in over his head; he’s the innocent. Being a criminal doesn’t prepare you for being a woman. He’s a naïf, taking the blame with his dying breath at the end of the film; he might absolve her of police action, but it’s nothing compared to her personal burden. The closest she can ever come to showing her emotions is by lying. In the final shot, with three men dead—Mason, his co-conspirator, the lover—she tells her husband about the Christmas tree they’re going to get. As she goes down the stairs to answer his telephone call, the camera explores every emotional possibility. She’s in turmoil, but no one notices. We’re in on her secret, and it’s terrifying.

A Letter to Myself

Dear Ignatius,

The only things you've written lately are excuses. Get on top of it!

Sincerely,
You