48 Hrs.

Lobby cards for Walter Hill's 48 Hrs.

48 Hrs. is a mysterious film.
The greatest puzzles in Walter Hill's 1982 action flick are the lights: frequently out of focus in the foreground, they pop up seemingly unexplained. Streetlights become will-o-wisps at the edge of the frame; streets are photographed from above through of clusters China lanterns that form glowing clouds. We can still tell what they are—ordinary, familiar objects—but in the way they’re introduced, they become foreign. Suddenly the ordinary warrants an explanation. San Francisco is some place we've never heard of; when its hilly streets are used to set the film's car chase, we're surprised--the streets that we've seen a million times have become unfamiliar.
The film seems shot through binoculars—or, rather, with a zoom lens. We’re aware of the zooming (every time the camera moves, we notice the tell-tale distortion of space), but it doesn’t suggest physical distance—rather what we become aware of are the numerous objects, many of them obviously far from the actors, in the foreground. The zoom lens becomes a way to sketch telling details while allowing them to remain vague; we take these details for granted, yet we can’t completely make them out--they’re like the false memories a dream leaves behind, readily accepted but not completely understood. These qualities are all reinforced by the film’s numerous unresolved plot points, which don’t seem messy, but rather consistent with its aesthetic—even with its acting, with that odd chemistry between Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. It leaves you with a sensation that doesn’t easily submit to written or spoken language—one that can only be described by making another film.

John Ford's Imaginary Film

John Ford and members of the cast on the set of The Quiet Man

The Quiet Man is the sequel to an imaginary film noir: the movie that details John Wayne’s life as a boxer in America prior to his return to Ireland. It’s one of the great imaginary movies that exists only in the mind of the audience, up there with Odile and Franz’s silent adventures in South America.

Bits of this phantom film sneak through—in the way Wayne lights and smokes his cigarettes, or the way he grabs Maureen O’Hara by the hair and kisses her. These are desperate actions, at odds with Wayne’s screen persona. We even get a glimpse of this film—the flashback sequence, which breaks with Ford’s visual style for give us a few minutes of stunning color noir, all alienating close-ups, sweaty brows and vague signifiers (we see a doctor’s briefcase, but never a doctor). Wayne looks stunning uneasy in this scene; it’s as if he’s realized that he’s in the wrong film, and therefore escapes somewhere where he feels more at home: a John Ford picture.

***

There’s a big difference between most noir--or in this case, color noir, a genre in an of itself--and Ford. Chiefly, there’s distance, the sense of space that places several characters into a frame when a noir film would linger on the face of one; this distance, by allowing us to examine the characters surroundings while they carry out their actions, or to see other characters’ reactions, allows us to analyze them. There is no urgency, no desperation here—instead, we can always see alternate solutions. The camera, after all, can make us aware of details we wouldn’t normally notice just as well as it can make us single-minded, unaware of the subject’s surroundings. In medium and wide shots, noir’s desperation would seem foolish—we would see a possibility, another course of action the characters, invariably trapped, don’t realize. The noir carryovers John Wayne brings in his baggage to The Quiet Man--his constantly abandoned cigarettes, the way he sulks in the shadows on his wedding night—are shot from a Fordian distance and seem awkward. Noir is a close-up without possibilities, while Ford is a medium shot, controlled but nonetheless giving us room to think; in noir, the story is a downward straight line, while in Ford it’s just one of many possible paths across an open field.

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 Deaf Photographer

The world must be more ambiguous for the deaf—at least for Tony Leung’s character, the deaf photographer in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s City of Sadness. It was reportedly the first contemporary Taiwanese production to be shot entirely with direct sound, and so much of our experience of the film is colored by the sounds that accompany its often still compositions. One scene springs to mind specifically—Leung waiting in a prison cell while his friends are executed. We, like Leung, can only see the interior of the prison cell, and we hear the terrifying sound of gunshots in the distance. As the take continues, we realize Leung’s character cannot hear the gunshots—but that makes the prison cell no less terrifying for him. He doesn’t have even the slightest clue as to his fate, and, in effect, neither do we. Later, at his own wedding, he has to take cues from the bride in order to correctly participate in the ceremony—for a brief moment, he glances at her bowing before he knows to bow, and someone has to touch him on the shoulder before he knows to kneel.

The bootleg DVD of the film inadvertently replicates this sensation by failing to subtitle the various inter titles and letters used in the film—therefore creating an effect of disorientation similar to the one Leung’s character must be experiencing, somehow left out on key texts that help make sense of the world. Before starting conversations, which he is forced to write on paper (and which I, therefore, cannot understand), he stares at people, trying to make sense of what their world must be like based on the few clues their facial expressions give away. I end up feeling the same way, having to guess from character's reserved reactions as to what secrets his writing might have contained.

La Ronde / Private Fears in Public Places: The Theatre

I followed up the EU Fest screening of of Alain Resnais's Private Fears in Public Places with a VHS copy of Max Ophüls's La Ronde. Both films are based on plays, and neither attempts to hide the theatricality inherent--but at the same time the way it's handled and used in the two is radically different.


1. First, Ophüls's film: several vignettes, linked by a narrator who pops in bit parts, costumed, and returns us to the visual metaphor of the merry-go-round (ronde) as a linking set. The stories transition from one another slowly, spending as much time in between as it would take the stage hands to move new set pieces out behind the curtain in a live production. It's an element of the theatre, that live fluidity, that Resnais's film disposes of by linking its stories with a cross-dissolve to falling snow, therefore suggesting a white and icy Paris while managing to show the city itself once--and even that evokes a theatrical trick, some choice lighting and a backdrop.
But here things go in an odd direction: Ophüls, whose film is meant to replicate the feeling of attending a performance, right down to timing, lack the immediacy of seeing something performed. After all, popular theatre (including opera and ballet) derives its power from being immediate--from the fact that the sets are being changed in a room with us, or that the singers or dancers are on an immobile stage, performing for us. Watching someone sing in a movie and seeing them do in real life is not the same thing, and Ophüls circumvents the problem by replacing every theatrical trick with a cinematic one--scenes that rely on the presence of live actors in a play are reinforced by camera movements, long takes that by their very nature seem more impressive than the long take of real life.

2. Resnais, on the other hand, transposes and footnotes. In La Ronde, cinema is substituted for theatre, but in Public Fears in Private Places, theatrical performance is presented in its true form with cinema as a form of commentary. The sets are sets, with some photographed from up above with a transparent ceiling; most are only ever shown from one side, like the bartender's cozy kitchen, framed so as to never show his bed-ridden father yelling from the next room. Even the detail is used theatrically--objects and details are never lingered on (as they would be only specks to a live audience), and on close inspection one realizes that a TV in one of the main sets is not plugged into anything.
For the most part, the film evokes a European television project from the 1960s/1970s in its two-medium-shot set-ups and waist-level camera--it's something that put me off at first, but you have to fight that aesthetic fascism within yourself and see whether it's genuine dislike or simply prejudice. But occasionally a cut or a camera placement radically alters the (theatrical) space, re-describing in ways that can only be done in the aftermath of a live performance. And it's not just the acting that is altered by cinema: by cutting between differently lit versions of the same set, Resnais is able to use lighting both theatrically (as drama) and cinematically (as expression). In one sequence, a warmly lit room becomes a cold and foreboding interior during a minute's worth of difficult conversation; in another, the garish hotel bar, whose purples now seem intertwined with the film in memory, is re-lit with a single spot-light, suddenly showing it as a place no different from any other fashionable bar--not the comforting Technicolor lounge the characters hang around.

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.

Cinema as a Revue

The Gene Siskel just concluded the first half of Jacqueline Stewart's excellent African American Auteurs series, which focuses on two race film directors (Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams) and two middle-aged, contemporary black directors (Spike Lee and Charles Burnett).
I wrote this down in my notebook after the screening of Spencer Williams' Juke Joint (shown as a double feature with the Dirty Gertie From Harlem, which is probably the best way to see Williams' films):

Juke Joint don't seem to come from a cinematic source--rather, it seems like an attempt to film "performance" and put it on the screen.
You've got to think of all the wide shots as performances--every edit within a set-up, every close-up, is not as much a cut as a digression. The cutaways feel awkward because they are canned inserts into what is essentially documentary (the documentary of how these actors and musicians perform fiction). Scenes with several characters seem jarring because every character is performing their "routine," their vaudeville act, without seemingly any cooperation. The film feels most natural when an "audience" is present--such as the extras in the juke joint scene, who react and laugh at the dialogue.

The film's juke joint sequence, which inspired these notes, is standard race film fare--a few dance teams, a band--the kind of number you find in any Micheaux or Williams film. At the start of the scene, a pair of dancers--Mack and Ace--perform several a lengthy routine. The female dancer has thighs out of an R. Crumb comic. At one point, she does a handstand while the male dancer pretends to mimes the bass part of the backing band on her leg, transforming her body into an upright bass. Suddenly, you can hear some snickering, and realize that there is a live audience behind the camera (Williams' films use one-track sound, so the soundtrack is always either direct, or completely post-synced; more on that later).
After another, less impressive duo performs (with a much shorter routine), the film's featured band, Red Calhoun's Orchestra, begins to play. Extras wander into the shot and dance naturally--the feeling is of total documentary, perhaps even a tad voyeuristic. The microphones have been placed near the band, so we can't hear the dancers talking, but we can see their lips move as they flirt and joke around.
Occasionally, cutaways of the band (possibly the only angled shots in a film full of room-encompassing wide shots and above-the-waist medium framings) are inserted, but they feel like interruptions--not only because they are clearly shot at a different time, but because they seem to break the flow of the "performance." Which is what Juke Joint essentially is--a revue, a set of performances, broad comic acts and beauty pageants. In Juke Joint (and in Dirty Gertie), Williams builds films out of neither the tradition of sound nor image nor narrative nor even acting, but out of the simple idea of watching people "perform"--the idea of a stage rather than a theater, if you will.
The film's strongest scenes therefore all occur towards the end, in the titular juke joint, where the actors, with their clashing talents and acting styles, have a real audience to perform to. Extras turn and laugh to each other in the foreground as Inez Newell attacks Leonard Duncan, playing the part of her philandering, lazy husband. At one point, Katherine Moore, playing the black sheep daughter who wants to run away with the juke joint owner to Chicago, almost swears, but the take is kept (no doubt due to budget constraints). It's almost like everyone is waiting for their number: tap dancer Howard Galloway, who plays the aforementioned juke joint owner, stumbles over dialogue, but in a scene where he has to introduce the band and attract the (real) audience's attention, he shines as only a showman would.

In the more visually dynamic Dirtie Gertie from Harlem, which features many of the same actors (including Spencer Williams himself in drag), it the sound and not the cutaway that creates digressions from the performance. The film's island setting requires effects to be added to the soundtrack (such as the sound of steam ship announcing its arrival), and these drown out all dialogue. The acting in the film is also more traditional, more caricaturish than archetypal. The film also features a dance number, featuring Howard Galloway as one of the lead tap dancers--his routine is fantastic, but the sound has been replaced by a crisper recording of the band, therefore leaving us with the eerie result of a tap number with no clicking-and-clacking sounds.
Dirty Gertie does feature the most astounding single "performance," though: a non-actor, a servant playing a servant, whose single line, "Yes, ma'am," is said in a way that more instinctual and automatic than any actor could ever manage. It takes more than a lifetime to perfect it: it takes generations.

Eugène Atget's Parisian Reflections

The George Eastman House has a large archive of Atget photographs online.

"Street Song," by Cesare Pavese

Why be ashamed? When one has done time,
if they let one out, it's because like everybody else
who belongs to the streets, one has been in prison.

From morning till evening we wander the avenues
whether it's raining or a beautiful sun's showing its face.
It's a joy to meet on the avenues people who talk
and talking among ourselves, bump into girls.
It's a joy to wait and whistle at girls from doorways,
hug them on the streets and take them to movies
and smoking in secret, lean on their beautiful knees.
It's a joy to talk and finger them laughing,
and at night in bed, feeling flung on one's neck
their two arms pulling you down, thinking of morning
when one is released from prison in the fresh sunlight.

From morning till evening wandering drunk
and watching laughing passersby enjoying everybody
—even ugly people—just to feel themselves on the streets.
From morning till evening singing drunkenly
and meeting drunkards and starting discussions
that last a long time and make us thirsty.
All these characters who go talking among themselves,
we want them with us at night, down in the trough,
and to hound them with our guitar
that skips drunkenly and cannot stay confined
but throws the doors wide open to echo in the air—
outside water or stars may rain down. It doesn't matter
if on the avenues at this hour no beautiful girls are strolling:
among us is one who laughs to himself
because he has also been released from prison tonight,
and with him, raising a ruckus and singing, we'll make it to morning.
--translated from Italian by Linh Dinh
(more of Dinh's translations can be found at Milk Magazine)

Two Brief Notes on Neon Bible

the cover art of the Arcade Fire's album Neon Bible

• I felt ready to write about the new Arcade Fire album a long time ago. Maybe before I'd even heard the whole thing. But I had to wait, not only until after I been listening to it for a month, but until others had listened to it as well. (The) Arcade Fire is a pop band, not in the sense of format or style, but in the sense of scope: their music gains its power and context by finding its way into popular culture in the same way an artwork gains its power from being hung in a gallery--their popularity is in many ways their statement, possibly even their subconscious concept. So listening to it earlier only gave me a preview, as the actual meaning could only be derived once I'd talked to other people who'd listened to the album: their popularity with a certain sub-set makes the release a small cultural event, and the event cannot be understood until it transpires. Until then it can only be predicted.
  

• It didn't seem like much at first: in fact, Neon Bible is a bit of letdown on the first listen. But the horns at the end of "Windowsill" stick in the back of the mind stronger than the disco strings of "Crown of Love" or even the first appearance of Regine Chassagne's voice in "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)" ever could. It's a harder album to approach because it's more earnest, more heavy-handed, but these weaknesses also make it more endearing.

The Sound of Airports

Airplanes and movies were born around the same time, but the movies grew up faster. Perhaps it's because the airplane exists to satisfy only a few desires or needs, whereas the possibilities of the cinema seemed endless in its early years.

There is also the economic question--even with the rising price of movie tickets, it's still cheaper to catch a two-hour film than a two-hour flight. Airplanes were just out of reach for common people for a long time, so it seems unsurprising that (like the movies) they captivated the public imagination, impressing as much with their single-mindedness as the movies did with their variations.

And now, like the movies, airplanes are an everyday miracle. Airports are as banal as movie theaters nowadays.

Movies have an advantage over airplanes--airplanes have little opportunity to portray movies, but the cinema has had a field day with air travel and the locations associated with it. In American cinema, there is a tendency to emphasize the loud noise of airports, hoping to play off the audience's (perceived) anti-social tendencies. Most movie airports are like the busy town in the second scene of Heaven's Gate--an undercurrent of loudness, unfamiliar. Unlike Heaven's Gate, most American films seem to play off the idea of the community as something threatening--there can't be anything good about this many people in one place. Airports (and subway stations) are boring and suspicious. The emphasis on background sound suggests a belief that airports (and public spaces in general) cause people to lose their individuality (by robbing characters of their voices, or at least of some of their voices' power). Even in Billy Wilder's Avanti!, the drone of the airplane is used to disorient the audience in order to set them up for a joke involving confusion at the airport's passport check, where Jack Lemmon has to prove his own identity. The culture of public space in American cinema is an anti-flânerie, where places like airports rob individuals rather than allow them to reinforce their identities.

This is not to say that airports are comfortable or even friendly places, but nonetheless the view in mainstream (or, for that matter, any) American films is to follow a model when it comes to their portrayal and the portrayal of other public spaces. We reinforce these ideas without really understanding them, or being completely honest to our experiences.

Two Weeks Since You've Been Gone: Notes on Action Movies

Charles Bronson with his Wildey .475 in a promotional still for Death Wish 3

I've been watching a lot of Anerican action films lately--the kind of pure action that flourished from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Before that, action had to have at least a bit of adventure to it--a sense of removal. In the pure action film, though, reasons and locations are treated as banal--every house, jungle, fortress and oil rig is introduced with the same auspicious pomp, so that we no longer assign locations or motivations significance. The pure action film is the opposite of the noir film--not only does the situation of the world not seem hopeless, but in fact there is no situation at all. Even in films such as the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Cobra, which, like many pure action movies, builds it basic premise around the audience's moral outrage at crime, the underworld seems not to matter because it is emphasized as much as the ordinary world. There is no class struggle in the pure action film--only the struggle of individuals against each other.
This is because the concept of a class struggle not only opposes the predominantly right-wing politics of American action movies, but also destroys the hermiticism inherent to the genre. Action movies must exist in a vacuum. The forces we are expected to rally against--liberal neglect, drug cartels, kidnapping rings--are reduced and personified. In order to give the film a sense of resolve, the enemy is always quantifiable and defeatable; there is a concrete solution to a concrete problem. Even in the Death Wish movies, where Charles Bronson, with his middle-aged man's physique and dour expression, seems to be fighting the whole world, there is always a sense of complete resolution in the end. The entire series rests on the denial of the existence of other problems--Bronson seems endlessly surprised whenever he stumbles upon a gang or a crime syndicate, moving from city to city. The action movie rests of the denial of the big picture--not only moral questions (the prevalence of political intervention, or, for that matter, murder), but contexts as well (and this includes contexts familiar to the films' intended Reagan/Bush American audiences). The films therefore paradoxically strive to play off of the audiences' fears (reductionism, ascribed values, and other products of capitalism) while simultaneously attempting to deny outside influences or possibilities making them, therefore, material in every respect.

Andrew Bujalski Interview

As Mutual Appreciation is seeing a DVD release via HVE this month, I'm reposting a brief interview with its director, Andrew Bujalski, I conducted shortly before the film's Chicago premiere in the fall of 2006.

Mutual Appreciation is in black and white. Funny Ha Ha was in color. How is Mutual Appreciation more a black and white film than Funny Ha Ha? Was it something you intended while writing the film?
My quick answer is that I believed Mutual to be a (peculiar) comedy, and that I thought black & white would be funny. I can't remember at what stage in pre-production I settled on [black & white] but I'm sure Bob Dylan/Don't Look Back had something to do with it; that said my great fear was that people would read it as merely an allusion, a tip of the hat, to all the great cinema in that format, and I didn't mean it as such. The fact that [black & white] is relatively rarely used for narrative features these days doesn't mean that the medium isn't still alive and kicking and packing a punch. It's a great thrill to get [black & white] rushes back from the lab and project them on a wall; contrary to what that one Paul Simon song says, I'd argue that everything looks better in black and white.
We've reached a point where video and video-editing has developed very far--far enough, in fact, that it's a separate medium and a separate approach to the world from film-based editing and shooting. Why have you choosen film?
Because it's still better! I was hanging out with a friend the other night and we turned on the television and stumbled upon a very peculiar episode of The Monkees, which deviated from the regular sitcom-y format, this one was just a psychedelic documentary of the group on tour--the footage was all gorgeous, the editing was bizarre and gripping (old school avant-garde, there's an oxymoron for you), and whatever technology has come since to replace all that hasn't won my heart the same way.
I've read that Chantal Akerman was your thesis advisor. Has she been an influence on your work?
Chantal was indeed my thesis advisor. I'm hugely fond of her personally, am sure I learned a lot from her directly then, and of course [I] am a fan of her oeuvre as well. That said, as a cinematic forebear I don't think I've taken more (or less) from her than I have from 100 other filmmakers whose work has stuck with me.
Did you make any films before Funny Ha Ha? Shorts and the like?
Sure—my Chantal-advised thesis was a 26-minute fiction film. Not very good! But an incredible learning experience all around, there's no question I couldn't have made Funny Ha Ha without getting through that one first. Also a handful of other student shorts, both on my own and collaboratively. Some documentary work, which I think has been massively influential on how I approach fiction.
What was the documentary work like?
We learned from the ground up: here's how you load film in the camera, here's how you run the Nagra, here's how the Steenbeck works. Go out and shoot. The observational tradition.
A friend of mine once said that at a certain economic level, every movie becomes a documentary: i.e., with a low enough budget, filmmakers rely on places they actually know and the day jobs of their actors for material. Do you feel that there's a documentary aspect to your films, that in a way you're portraying the lives of people you know in a fictional manner? And is this your primary interest, or, as the friend suggested, a question of economics?
Most good fiction films borrow some energy from documentary, just as the reverse is also true. Which doesn't mean necessarily that I am "fictionalizing" my friends' lives, on the contrary, I'd more likely say they're "documentarizing" my made-up story. I sort of agree with your friend but think he's looking at it backwards—it takes a lot of money to bleed everything resembling life out of a film.

Godard on ABC

A clip from Breathless--just a few seconds of Jean Seberg selling The New York Herald Tribune in her yellow (gray) sweater--was shown on ABC's Nightline last night; it was a piece on how the French feel that they're losing the Champs-Élysées to American stores. What would Jean-Luc think? The archival film clip is a time-worn device of televised news narrative, a way of subtly tapping the (fictional) collective conscience; there are things we remember mostly through cinema.
Sometimes they are not even things cinema was present for. For example, cinema only came to the concentration camps after they were closed, but it's been atoning for that oversight with a half-century's worth of Holocaust movies whose television-like reliance on pre-established forms imbues the subject with a sort of boring seriousness, the distance of a news item. It's hard for us to feel about it because we've been told how to feel about for so many years, just as its difficult to feel empathy for the people on television. Rather, we process the information and then feel empathy--television language is indirect.

Another interesting juxtaposition (same channel): evening Oprah episode on wunderkinds (an Indian preteen studying to become a doctor, an Austrian girl with a photographic memory, etc.) followed by an advertisement for Harrington Learning Centers, a chain of "educational programs" to help your "underachieving child" get ahead.

Scarface, Carlito's Way and the Internet

Al Pacino in a promotional still for Carlito's Way

Scarface and Carlito's Way are so intertwined for me that I often get them confused. In which one does he own the nightclub? Am I sure he didn't have a beard in both? Carlito's Way does not as much redeem the sins of Scarface as fill that film out--it's the missing chapters in between rather than an apologetic epilogue. The characters are not Carlito Brigante and Tony Montana, but Al Pacino and Brian De Palma. The existence of Carlito's Way makes Scarface a better film just as Scarface tarnishes Carlito's Way--and the other way 'round as well, for Scarface also makes Carlito's Way a better film and Carlito's Way mars Scarface.
It's an odd situation, considering the fact that we tend to view films as individual works, or as wholly independent parts of a community (the cinematic narrative). The advantage cinema has over literature is that a writer can only write what he or she notices, but in a movie there a million other outside factors that make their way into the production. And so Scarface had Carlito's Way waiting for it in the future, in our future collective memory, in a form of dependency alien to books.
This kind of relationship--the cinematic narrative, the cinematic history--is almost proto-Internet. We think about the Internt in ways we could never think about cinema or literature--a website, after all, is not a "work," since the "work" is the Internet itself. The Internet does not consist of many parts, but is rather a single whole--the presence of information on the Internet colors other information on the Internet. The relationship to other websites is an integral part of a website. It seems as though every medium we invent is treated more collectively--first television, then pop music, and now the Internet.

Daney with Les Straubs

The photograph is exactly as you'd imagine them--Huillet turned away (after all, Straub is the mouth, the "public figure"), but smiling, Straub impishly smoking a pipe. The photo accompanies a short Serge Daney piece from 1984, something I spent too long poring over with a dictionary, sad to discover that it yielded few secrets or revelations. The article is already gone from my memory, but the photograph remains.

The Weight of Money

Jens Lekman photographed in Athens, Greece

It's lucky for Jens Lekman that his native Sweden's currency rhymes with Barcelona. The title of "I Don't Know If She's Worth 900 kr," a light pop ditty built around coo-ing girl group backing vocals and a Jens' trademark lazy-electric-rhythm-guitar, is wonderfully casual in its mention of economic realities: the truth is, can Lekman spare the money to visit a girl in Spain? He starts the song by admitting that he falls in love too easily--that the gap of social reality (money) and social fantasy (a love affair) forces him to confront the validity of the latter. It's a natural though process we engage in daily; we greatly underestimate the role economics, or the concept of value in general, plays in the way we analyze our surroundings. We guage how much we liked a film by whether we'd pay to see it again, how much we enjoy the book we're reading by whether we'd buy it, how much we liked the song we heard based on whether we'd buy the CD.
It's the weight of money on our everyday decision making, and its a weight largely absent from the cinema and television of the United States. It's taboo to discuss exact sums in films unless they're unrealistically large heist takes--you're more likely to hear about hundreds of millions in a duffel bag than $67.50 for the electric bill. It's opposite of a noir film, where the world always felt so hopeless because the numbers were so exact. Sitting in the darkened theatre, we wondered whether a person's life was really worth the $200,000 (even after we adjusted it mentally for inflation) in Nightfall, or the few thousand dollars in Thieves' Highway.
Even poverty is a rootless conception, a vague state, the opposite of Chaplin, when we were constantly reminded of hunger, of running away from police and petty stealing just to get a bite to eat; instead, we just have the image of Chaplin, as though the tramp costume is enough for us to understand what it's like to be poor (or, for that matter, rich, as wealth is equally vague in American films). Poor people live in exaggerated squalor now in American films (David Fincher, after all, made decay art design fashionable), but this "hyper-reality" is only connected to social reality by a few choice buzzwords (Welfare, Medicaid), in the same way Casino Royale's James Bond is modernized with the invocation of 9/11.
By denying this social reality, we create a social fantasy that will define the American mindset as well as exact figures would: a desire to portray problems without describing their causes, a post-Left liberalism of gestures that are not as much empty as disconnected. It is the lie that will eventually tell the truth, for cinema has a capacity for history that exceeds that of the written word--a writer, after all, can only write down what he or she knows or notices, but in a movie, there are so many outside factors; an absence is as informative as a presence. We'll go down in history as the Imaginary Generation, using our sense of history to create a pre-historicized present that pretends to exist as a commentator outside of the American (and international) narrative rather than the latest episode of it. Or perhaps that is how every generation has been.