Bluegrass Film Society

Closing and dismantling this site

2009-11-04T12:33:00.001-05:00

because of time restraints. it will slowly move to Dialogic

Film School: Mark Hartley - Not Quite Hollywood

2009-08-11T11:16:00.003-04:00

NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD
Film School
Hosts: Mike Callahan and Nathan Kaspar

An interview with MARK HARTLEY the director of NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD — the first detailed examination and celebration of Australian genre cinema of the 70s and 80s. In 1971, with the introduction of the R-certificate, Australia’s censorship regime went from repressive to progressive virtually overnight. This cultural explosion gave birth to arthouse classics, such as PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK and MY BRILLIANT CAREER, but also spawned a group of demon-children: maverick filmmakers who braved assault from all quarters to bring films like ALVIN PURPLE, THE MAN FROM HONG KONG, PATRICK, TURKEY SHOOT and MAD MAX to the big screen. As explicit, violent and energetic as their northern cousins, Aussie genre movies presented a unique take on established conventions. NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD won both the 2009 Filmink award and the Film Critics Circle Association award for Best Documentary .

To Listen to the Interview (MP3)

Jim Emerson: The Hurt Locker - Georges Bataille and the visceral cinema of Kathryn Bigelow

2009-08-09T11:42:00.003-04:00

Hurt Locker: Georges Bataille and the visceral cinema of Kathryn Bigelow
by Jim Emerson
Scanners

...

She had a tremendous fascination with how violence could be portrayed in the cinema, particularly as seen through the filter of a French writer and philosopher I had never heard of named George Bataille. I got the sense that Bataille was some kind of mélange of surrealism and eroticism and de Sade-like cruelty, but the precise way he blended them and what he put in of his own was vague to me then, and even more vague to me now. But what I did understand was that Kathy wasn't just looking back to the styles and techniques of Hitchcock, Peckinpah, Romero, Argento, etc.--she was attempting to build on a highly aestheticized foundation. She didn't want to ape anybody else, she wanted to make a kind of movie that hadn't been made before. This I understood well, as it was a commonplace in European cinema for filmmakers like Godard and Resnais to use literary ideas as a means to "reinvent" cinema. The difference, and it was a huge one, is that Kathy was reading different books. What she wanted to create was more visceral and stomach-churning--more of a punch to the stomach and a battering of the subconscious than a detached and modish Brechtian challenge for the mind. [...]

To Read the Rest of the Response

Actors Guild of Lexington: Auditions for Season 26 (August 12th)

2009-08-08T21:18:00.002-04:00

Auditions for Season 26
August 12th 6pm-10pm

Actors Guild will hold season auditions for The Vertical Hour, The New Century, and What the Butler Saw. Auditions will consist of cold readings from the script, perusal scripts are available at the AGL office at 903 Manchester Street. For audition appointments and/or more information, please email Eric Seale at eseale@actorsguildoflexington.org.

The Vertical Hour by David Hare
Director Richard St. Peter is seeking 3 actors: 1 male age 25-40, 1 African American Female age 18-25, 1 male age 18-25. The roles of Nadia and Oliver have been cast.

The New Century by Paul Rudnick
Director Bo List is seeking 4 actors: 1 hunky male age 20-35, 2 females 40-65, 1 female age 20-35. The role of Mr. Charles has been cast.

What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton
Director Eric Seale is seeking 6 actors: 1 man age 40-50, 1 man 50+, 1 man 30+, 1 man 20s, 1 woman 40-50, 1 woman 20s. All roles available.

Left Field Cinema: Blue Velvet (USA: David Lynch, 1986)

2009-08-08T20:43:00.003-04:00

American Masterpiece: Blue Velvet
Left Field Cinema

The first of a David Lynch double bill, this episode centering on his 1980's masterpiece and arguably his greatest film. Twisted homages and ironical referencing to the past works of the Hollywood mainstream, with a dark and mysterious but ultimately coherent story line.

To Listen to the Episode

Stephen Rowley: The Classic Hollywood Town at the Dawn of Suburbia

2009-08-05T18:43:00.003-04:00

The Classic Hollywood Town at the Dawn of Suburbia
by Stephen Rowley
Refractory

Abstract

This article examines the depictions of small towns in a number of Hollywood films from the 1940s, and describes some of the ideals of community that were shaping (and reflecting) the community attitudes that would underlie the post-war suburban boom. Two points are of particular interest. Firstly, what are some of the common physical and social characteristics of the communities as depicted in these films? And secondly, what can we glean from the films about the attitudes to community and suburbanisation that existed at the dawn of the suburban age?

To Read the Essay

Julia Lesage: Torture Documentaries

2009-08-05T17:20:00.004-04:00

Torture Documentaries
by Julia Lesage
Jump Cut

...

I have organized this essay to explore two large aspects of the torture documentary—epistephilia and affect. To do so, and also to give some indication about genre structures, I provide a textual analysis of three highly accomplished films: two documentaries—Taxi to the Dark Side and Standard Operating Procedure—and a docudrama—The Road to Guantanamo. However, in the way that the documentaries actually work, knowledge and affect are not so neatly divided; all these documentaries elicit emotion and purvey knowledge and are structured to do so. Thus, even though I particularly use Taxi to the Dark Side to consider how it uses voices of authority—and more generally to offer my own to challenge torture epistephilia at this moment in the United States—I also consider how the film uses photojournalistic images for emotion, especially irony. In the same way, I use a textual analysis of Standard Operating Procedure, which takes as its topic just the Abu Ghraib photographs, to explore issues of affect in the torture documentary. However, I also explore how the film works as an analytic documentary, one that explores what the photograph, or indeed witnesses, can and cannot convey. Standard Operating Procedure particularly raises the question of "authenticity" in relation to its interviewees. It uses lengthy segments of people talking, with edited moments from what were clearly very long interviews, and the camera holds on them after a speech to capture just their individual expressions. We are asked to evaluate not only the history of Abu Ghraib torture that these participants tell us about but also how much we trust what they have to say.

Because of the historical role of the Abu Ghraib photographs and their shocking image material, I consider the photographs on their own terms, first in terms of torture, sexuality, and theatricality; and then in terms of elements within those photos that shape viewer response. Finally I offer a briefer textual analysis of The Road to Guantanamo, which as a docudrama has its own particular way of evoking the specifics of a situation and eliciting an emotional and political response.

The documentaries under consideration here:

Taxi to the Dark Side, dir. Alex Gibney, 2007: This film uses the documented homicide of an Afghan taxi driver in Bagram prison as the focus for interviewing Bagram prison guards and interrogators, as well as for investigating U.S. government policy and the legal and social/psychological issues around torture. The film incorporates dramatic reenactments and many still images taken by photojournalists on the political or war beat.

Standard Operating Procedure, dir. Errol Morris, 2008: Morris explores the circumstances around the Abu Ghraib photographs. He interviews participants from Abu Ghraib, freely uses dramatic reenactments, and edits to a highly emotional musical score by Danny Elfman. The film shows many Abu Ghraib photographs uncropped and at length as it questions what photographs can and cannot convey, what's outside the frame. Morris collaborated with Philip Gourevitch to write a book of the same name based on the transcribed interviews, court testimonies and depositions, and other documentation about torture, especially the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Morris has an extensive web site, and he also writes lengthy entries for a blog at the New York Times including many issues directly related to this film.[3]

The Road to Guantanamo, dir. Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, 2006, Channel 4, UK: This low-budget docudrama uses actors and the original figures of the Tipton Three, who provided one of the first exposés of Guantanamo abuses in England. The film traces the long journey of the young men, UK citizens from a Pakistani background, who traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, were captured by the Northern Alliance, imprisoned by the U.S. military in Kandahar and Guantanamo, and two years later released. Because the film was made for activism, it was released on DVD and television within days of its theatrical release.

...

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Chuck Kleinhans: Imagining Torture

2009-08-05T17:20:00.001-04:00

Imagining torture
by Chuck Kleinhans
Jump Cut

Most of us don’t know torture, either as victim or perpetrator. We haven’t experienced it. We can only imagine it. We imagine it in terms of extreme pain we have felt, the feeling of panic and loss, violation of our body, perhaps in a accident or illness. But even then we don’t have the experience of being a prisoner, of being totally helpless. Therefore we have to imagine torture from descriptive sources such as news or, more likely, from fictions, particularly its representation in popular film and on TV.

In this essay I want to survey the fundamental political facts of torture in the present moment in U.S. history and then provide a brief introduction to the visual imagination of torture in moving image media. Other articles in this issue of Jump Cut also discuss torture: Julia Lesage’s analyses of recent documentaries on U.S. CIA and military torture of prisoners taken in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Martha Rosler’s reconsideration of her pioneering video, A Simple Case for Torture. But the fundamental issues also cross over into the sections in this issue on porn and on horror. The human body, on display, in extreme sensory states, in danger, in degradation, in humiliation: these conditions overlap, as with a Venn diagram overlapping sex, horror, and violence. Considering these connections in a fast-changing current political and media moment is an urgent task now and in the near future.
One: torture and the national imagination

As the United States moved to the November 2008 Presidential election, other issues took the lead: the national domestic economy; the financial sector meltdown; the increasing housing crisis; the high cost of transportation, energy, healthcare, and food; the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth. In that frame, torture was not a front burner issue. As the election season narrowed the range of topics in public discussion and concentrated attention on individual candidates rather than offered any systematic analysis, torture appeared to disappear as an issue. But, we would argue, it is also deeply present in U.S. life and also deeply repressed. America is in denial about torture. First, it is a troubling topic. Deaths in combat are an uncomfortable topic, but understandable. Soldiers become casualties and kill others — combatants and civilians.

But torture suddenly became one of the central issues in the Obama era, in part because of how the President chose to play out the choices: close Guantanamo; do not prosecute CIA agents involved in torture; do not pursue the war crimes of the previous administration; continue the imprisonment by moving prisoners to other sites; restore military tribunals. At the same time, those who want to hold the Bush-Cheney administration responsible have found a fulcrum point in the torture issue. Even more invitingly, Dick Cheney has become increasingly defensive and open, calling for release of classified documents to “prove” torture was effective and thus that he was right. Even the normally circumspect Condoleezza Rice has made public defenses of her past actions. And the right wing media amplifiers have blustered on, with TV talk show host Sean Hannity even offering to be waterboarded to prove it wasn’t really torture, and then chickening out when challenged to do so.

Torture in custody always involves premeditation and planning. It is hard to talk about, to recognize, to face up to. The examples that come forward, such as the Abu Ghraib photos, or reports that the United States took children as hostages and terrorized them to get information about the whereabouts of their father, are disturbing. But we would argue that issue is really always present but repressed. The trace of denial can be seen in media representations, and covers not only documentaries, but also dramatic feature films about the war, and entertainment films and TV shows that touch on the subject.

Torture is part of the contemporary national imagination. In summer 2007 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, at a Canadian meeting of international jurists, indicated he was a big fan of the TV drama 24.

"'Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,' Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent's rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand. 'Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?' Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. 'Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so. …'"

"During a break from the panel, Judge Scalia specifically mentioned the segment in Season 2 … 'There's a great scene where he told a guy that he was going to have his family killed,' Judge Scalia said. 'They had it on closed circuit television - and it was all staged. ... They really didn't kill the family.'"[1][open endnotes in new window]

Following the 9/11 attack, the war in Afghanistan, and the subsequent capture of Al-Qaeda suspects (and more, later in Iraq), the White House National Security Council’s Principals Committee met regularly to advise President Bush on the prisoners (euphemistically called in Bushspeak “detainees,” as if they were just being politely asked to wait a little while until another flight). Chaired by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the group included Vice President Dick Chaney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA director George Tenet, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, or their principal deputies. They discussed and approved specific details of how Al-Qaeda prisoners would be interrogated. They approved combining techniques including slapping, pushing, slamming heads into walls, sleep deprivation, stress positions, loud music, and waterboarding.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Michael Dean Benton: Review of Idaho, Alaska's Manipulate and Multiply

2009-08-05T01:46:00.001-04:00

Review of Manipulate and Multiply by Idaho, Alaska
by Michael Dean Benton
Originally appeared in North of Center #5 (2009)

I first saw Idaho, Alaska around a year ago at Al’s Bar. I was a relatively new patron of the bar, I was thinking about moving into the neighborhood, and the music I was hearing from the stage reflected my love for the bar and the neighborhood. Raw, diverse, complex, it seemed familiar, but escaped easy definition. At first it seemed dangerous, but if you took the time to listen closely, you could sense a deeper soul. It definitely wasn’t the standard sanitized rock music that was being offered on any of Clear Channel’s corporate stations.

Flash forward a year later to the next time I would see them. I am now living in the MLK neighborhood. Al’s Bar is a fixture of the local scene and Idaho, Alaska is releasing their second studio CD Manipulate and Multiply after coming back from a tour. The second show, a raucous party at Al’s Bar celebrating the release of the new CD, was infused with the excitement of their finishing the summer tour and the music they played that night carried the same raw power and complex music of the first show.

Chris Soulis (Singer), Mike Matthews (Bass) and Mitch Snider (Guitarist) formed Idaho, Alaska in 2007, and the current incarnation includes Mike Grote on the drums. Chris writes most of the lyrics for the band with Mitch contributing his first two songs, “Define Your Terms” and “The Inverted Front End,” for this new release.

The songs for Manipulate and Multiply were developed and practiced over the last year. The band then recorded all 15 songs live in one day on May 15, 2009; it was mixed by Mark Borders the following three days at Nitrosonic studios (http://www.nitrosonic.com/). 11 of the songs are on the new CD and the other four will form the base of a following release in February. This is their second studio CD (Kissin With the Devil: 2007) and they also have a live recording (2008).

Manipulate and Multiply.

My first impression was that this is a sinister title for a CD. It brings to mind the paranoid scenarios of 1950s Cold War ‘B’ films in which alien creatures take over the collective body. After a first listen to the CD, I sensed it could refer to the more dehumanizing aspects of contemporary American culture in which artists are treated as commodities to be manipulated, sold and multiplied.

In direct opposition to this surface interpretation of the title, the CD’s music and lyrics challenge my cultural anxieties. On the one hand, it reminds me that manipulate refers to the shaping power of the craftsman and the artist; to take raw materials and shape them into something unique. On the other hand, any expressive work of imagination involves a desire to see it multiply through the world. Working with our hands we manipulate our world through the objects we shape, and working with our minds we manipulate our culture through the stories we shape.

Manipulate, like propaganda, often evokes a negative association from creative, independent people. However, if we reflect honestly, artists, as much as politicians, seek to manipulate their world and hope to multiply their vision of that world. This is the sense that I have developed through the music of Idaho, Alaska’s newest release. There is a portrayal of the material darkness of the collective soul, but underlying it is the hopeful exploration of how we can change it through creative exploration of that cultural landscape.

“In the Desert,” which opens the CD, evokes the madness of a culture in which a “life worth living [is] vanishing.” It evokes a landscape of “silent deserts” in which we are tilting at illusionary “windmills.” These illusions cause us to be deaf to the “lost cause” and “hopeless extremes” that are right in front of us if we would but hear them. Artists do not escape blame for this cultural wasteland because they are shown to be complicit in the emptiness of the desert: “And I cried through the night - all the horrors I had dreamed came to life/As though they were scripted, recited, performed on cue, predicted/And the crowd stood and cheered as my head was lost in an overwhelming fear/Of the desert swallowing my soul and sense of well being, wondering...” Professionally it can be suicidal to follow your own path, rather than perform to the cues of the entertainment industry; creatively though the only performance that counts, that really counts, is the one that is authentic to your vision.

In “Define Your Terms” we see the struggle these days is not simply the struggle against what we may find to be wrong with the world, but an even deeper existential problem of attempting to even begin to define one’s authentic vision. Throughout the CD we witness the struggle of developing an authentic vision: “It took me quite a while to realize I'm not right” (The Inverted Front End); “Maybe in a while we would understand the game/Of meanings” (Station Wagon); “There was volume and distraction only a nomad could see” (In the Desert); “evenings when you spent asking, "What went wrong?" (Brand New); “I can't tell shit from this education” (March, April, May); and “The noise from the fuzz is getting on my nerves/I'll try and ignore it through the meaninglessness of my words” (Projections Fail).

Throughout Manipulate and Multiply we are reminded that the process of producing maps, stories and histories is the best way we can face this existential problem. We are all responsible for the authenticate awareness of our lives and we all need to recognize our complicity in allowing mass-produced illusions to divert us from the reality of the world. There is despair in their assessment, but in their powerful live performances, and on Manipulate and Multiply, there is the insistence that through instinctual performance we can challenge this desert wasteland. Through our own potential as artists and thinkers we can wrestle with the silence of the cultural desert.

The rest of the CD explores familiar situations and landscapes that are slightly askew. How do we perform our lives in the midst of these passive spectacles of conformity?

Idaho, Alaska seeks to shock us out of our complacency with a sensory and intellectual bombardment, perhaps in an attempt to renew our appetite for the authentic.

Fall 2009 Bluegrass Film Society

2009-08-04T11:51:00.003-04:00

Brothers (Denmark: Susanne Bier, 2004: 117 mins)

The Castle (Austria: Michael Haneke, 1997: 123 mins)

The Taste of Tea (Japan: Katsuhito Ishii, 2004: 143 mins)

Sans Soleil (France: Chris Marker, 1983: 100 mins)

Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary (Canada: Guy Maddin, 2003: 75 mins)

The Drummer (Hong Kong/Taiwan: Kenneth Bi, 2007: 118 mins)

Pusher (Denmark: Nicolas Winding Refn, 1996: 105 mins)

Battles Without Honor & Humanity (The Yakuza Papers) (Japan: Kinji Fukasaku, 1973: 99 mins)

24 Hour Party People (United Kingdom: Michael Winterbottom, 2002: 117 mins)

Bab'Aziz - The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul (Tunisia: Nacer Khemir, 2005: 96 mins)

Pixote (Brazil: Hector Babenco, 1981: 128 mins)

The City (USA: David Riker, 1998: 88 mins)

Sex and Lucia (Spain: Julio Medem, 2001: 128 mins)

The Quiet Family (South Korea: Ji-woon Kim, 1998: 105 mins)

The Edge of Heaven (Germany/Turkey: Fatih Akin, 2007: 122 min)

Film Forum: Robert Kenner - Food Inc. (2009)

2009-08-03T08:55:00.002-04:00

"Food Inc." Film Forum (June 12, 2009)

How much do we really know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families? In FOOD, INC., producer-director Robert Kenner and investigative authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore... Read More’s Dilemma) lift the veil off of the food industry – an industry that has often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihoods of American farmers, the safety of workers and our own environment. The filmmakers expose the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been deliberately hidden from the American consumer. They illustrate the dangers of a food system controlled by powerful corporations that don’t want you to see, think about or criticize how our food is made. FOOD, INC. also reminds us that despite what appears to be at times a hopeless situation, each of us still has the ability to vote on this issue every day – at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Nathan Rabin: Happy Happy, Joy Joy - Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy

2009-08-02T23:47:00.003-04:00

Happy Happy, Joy Joy Case File #134: Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy
by Nathan Rabin
A.V. Club

Some people labor under the delusion that happiness is mankind’s natural state of being. But happiness has never been our birthright; anger, sadness, and death are our birthrights. Sleepless nights and haunted days are our birthrights. Heartbreak, anxiety, and self-doubt are our birthrights. Death, decay, mourning, failure, and rejection are our birthrights. Happiness is more like a pleasant surprise we get every once in a while, like a rainbow. Or a blowjob.

Yet in the insane days of the New Economy Bubble, it looked like permanent happiness forever was just around the corner. A soaring stock market and the exponential growth of the Internet would make millionaires out of everyone. Viagra would cure impotence and extend virility far longer than nature and common decency deigned possible or desirable. Rogaine and Propecia would make baldness a thing of the past. Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft would cure depression and anxiety. Technology would revolutionize our lives. Everything we ever wanted would be available at the click of a mouse.

Pharmaceutical companies and cyber-entrepreneurs were leading the way to a shimmering new utopia where all our problems could be solved by a pill or a website. Or a website peddling pills. Nobody wanted to ruin the party by pointing out that the New Economy was built on a slippery foundation of delusions, mania, and blind optimism.

Brain CandyThis is the world lampooned by1996’s Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Electric Sheep: The Current State of Gay Cinema, Pt. 1

2009-08-02T21:48:00.001-04:00

The current state of Gay cinema part 1 (Kenneth Anger / LLGFF)
Electric Sheep Magazine

Following London Gay Pride weekend, in the first of two podcasts looking at the current state of gay cinema, Alex Fitch looks at this year’s London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and at the short film collection ‘Boys on film 2: In too deep’. Virginie Sélavy interviews infamous gay experimental film maker Kenneth Anger about his work, from the Magick Lantern Cycle of the second half of the last century to his current interest in digital media and manipulation.

To Listen to the Episode

Democracy Now: The Yes Men Fix the World - In New Film, Anti-Corporate Pranksters the Yes Men Continue to Jolt Polluters and Profiteers

2009-08-02T19:04:00.000-04:00

“The Yes Men Fix the World”: In New Film, Anti-Corporate Pranksters the Yes Men Continue to Jolt Polluters and Profiteers
Democracy Now
Host: Juan Gonzalez

Anti-corporate pranksters and gonzo political activists the Yes Men are back with a new film, The Yes Men Fix the World. The movie follows Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno as they infiltrate and expose the world of big business through high-profile outrageous pranks. From ExxonMobil to Halliburton, no industry is too big for the Yes Men’s hoaxes.

To See the Report and Clips from the Film

Creative Screenwriting: Scott Neustadter on (500) Days of Summer

2009-07-28T13:58:00.001-04:00

(500) Days of Summer Q&A
Creative Screenwriting

Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith interviews co-writer Scott Neustadter about (500) Days of Summer

To Listen to the Interview

Creative Screenwriting: James Schamus - Lust, Caution

2009-07-28T12:31:00.003-04:00

James Schamus - Lust, Caution Q&A
Creative Screenwriting

Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith interviews screenwriter, producer and studio head James Schamus about Lust, Caution

To Listen to the Podcast

Creative Screenwriting: Todd Haynes on I'm Not There

2009-07-27T02:16:00.001-04:00

I'm Not There Q&A
Creative Screenwriting

Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith interviews writer-director Todd Haynes about I'm Not There

To Listen to the Interview

Anna Notaro: ‘Reality is in the performance’ - Issues of Digital Technology, Simulation and Artificial Acting in S1mOne

2009-07-23T15:51:00.001-04:00

‘Reality is in the performance’: Issues of Digital Technology, Simulation and Artificial Acting in S1mOne
by Anna Notaro
Refractory

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
(Jean-Luc Godard)

Our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our capacity to detect it.
(Viktor Taransky)

Abstract This essay is concerned with the use of digital technologies in Hollywood cinema to argue that they perpetuate the illusionism and verisimilitude of its representations. An initial discussion of the use of digital technology in the cinema will provide the basis for an historical account of the move from avant-garde experiments in virtual, or non-human performance. Such a history is then contrasted with Hollywood appropriations of digital technologies, and its elaboration of a virtual performer – represented in a film like S1mOne (Andrew Niccol, 2002) – which is put in the service of such naturalism and illusionism. In order to appreciate their relevance, the above arguments are placed within the broader contexts of digitization, simulation and virtuality as theorized, among others, by Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard.

It was exactly thirty three years ago that Umberto Eco, following a trip to America, wrote Travels in Hyperreality. Three years later Baudrillard’s “La précession des simulacres” (1978) came out, thus marking the emergence of the ‘age of simulation’. Since then a lot of water has flowed under the bridge of critical debate, and yet some of the early observations are still common currency within today’s discussion, often marked by an uncompromising division between pessimistic (Apocalyptic) and optimistic (Integrated) intellectuals, who either condemn or embrace emergent technologies.[1] Especially in pessimistic quarters it has become a cliché to quote Baudrillard’s view that society has been reduced to simulation or to stress, in the way Eco did with reference to the USA, the commercialized aspect of the recreations and themed environments that now proliferate around the world. Today the age of simulation has acquired a new twist: it has ‘gone digital’. Its culture is one of copying, sampling, animating, imitating, hybridizing, morphing, re-enacting, re-mixing, and re-membering. Our desire to create realistic fabrications has not weakened, rather it has become stronger since we now possess the technological tools to create an alternative (virtual) reality whose seductive appeal we find irresistible.

Contemporary (popular) culture is certainly influenced by the extensive use of digital tools in domains as diverse as entertainment and news broadcasting, so much so that distinctions across media begin to blur. Interesting re-mediations (to use Bolter and Grusin’s terminology) take place for example between games and cinema – one only needs to consider films such as Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982), Joysticks (Greydon Clark, 1983), Super Mario Brothers (Annabel Jankel & Rocky Morton, 1993), Toys (Barry Levinson, 1993), Mortal Kombat (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1995), Wing Commander (Chris Roberts, 1999), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001), Final Fantasy (Hironobu Sakaguchi, 2001) and Resident Evil (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2002), to name just a few. These films testify to a digital culture that operates in a ‘convergence mode’: the convergence of filmmaking, animation & game development; of art and technology and popular culture; of art and science.[2] It is not surprising then that different disciplines also converge in trying to provide an answer to some of the most pressing questions humanity has ever faced: what happens to our bodies and our identities in a (post-human) digital age? How do we define truth in the midst of codes and copies? How can we distinguish between the authentic and the synthetic? Cinema, itself an elaborate system for synthetic representation, is contributing to the debate in the way it knows best: by creating stories that speak to our innermost fears and desires. Maybe the contemporary craving for (hyper)realistic representation, which seems to mark our dealings with computer technology in most applications (including the cinematic) is not so much a matter of once more simulating the real - we only do that in order to recognize the way in which reality is perceived – but of learning how to build a complex world which has reality content.[3] More specifically, the status of the realism of a film’s diegetic space and its transformation under the increasing employment of digital imaging has long been a chief subject of debate in cinema and new media studies.[4]

In Future Visions Hayward and Wollen have even suggested that the “development of audiovisual technologies has been driven not so much by a realist project as by an illusionary one”. (1993, 2) Birk Weinberg in his “Beyond Interactive Cinema” (2002) has argued instead that: “The aesthetic history of media can be described on the basis of a drift towards greater realism for improved immersion of the viewer”. Others have advanced the controversial opinion that “today the real has become the new avant-garde”. (Rombes 2005) In this perspective, Rombes argues, it is rather ironic that “the re-emergence of realism in the cinema, thanks to the digital, could be traced directly to a technological form that seems to represent a final break with the real.”(2005) “But,” he asks, “is it possible to talk about the real today without being accused of a sort of retrograde orthodoxy, a naive or unreflective reversion to Bazin?” (Rombes 2005) The answer is yes, since “post-humanist theory… has told us what was always already obvious: that reality itself is an apparatus further deconstructed by cinema. In today’s landscape of self-theorizing media… it is once again safe to speak of representations of the real without putting that word in quotation marks.”(Rombes 2005) Post-humanist theory informs the reading of SimOne (Andrew Niccol, 2002) offered by Sydney Eve Matrix in “‘We’re Okay with Fake’: Cybercinematography and the Spectre of Virtual Actors in S1M0NE” (2006). In what follows below I will refute some of the conclusions drawn by Matrix to propose my reading of S1mOne as a film that demonstrates Hollywood’s ambiguous response to the crucial issues of virtuality and simulation.

Simulation One (S1mOne)

As is often the case, key concepts within academic discourse find expression in popular media – a sort of prêt à porter collection of concepts – which renders them more palatable to the general public. The issue of simulation, recurrent in a plethora of Hollywood movies, is emblematic of such a process and of its mixed results. When S1mOne by Andrew Niccol was released in 2002 critics reacted with lukewarm enthusiasm, a far cry from Niccol’s previously acclaimed achievements as a writer/director (Gattaca, 1997) and writer (The Truman Show, 1998). This was “the case of a pregnant premise being wasted by a script that takes few chances and manages to insult the intelligence of everyone in the audience”. (Berardinelli, 2002)

I share Berardinelli’s criticism, however, I would argue that the film’s shortcomings and inconsistencies are exactly what makes it worthy of critical analysis. They are to be considered in the context of Hollywood’s ambivalent attitude towards the use of new digital technology, a technology, which, while it is happily embraced (not least for the huge economic returns that it provides at the box office), is also represented in ‘apocalyptic’ terms.

The plot tells of Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino), an ‘arty’ director, who gets into trouble when his prima donna, Nicola Anders (Winona Ryder) storms off the set because her trailer is not big enough. Viktor’s career is saved by Hank Aleno (Elias Koteas), a dying and deranged computer engineer who has created a synthetic actor that Viktor can ‘cast’ in his movie without anyone being able to tell the difference. She is the ultimate director’s fantasy, an instrument that Viktor can exploit at will for his creative purposes. In spite of his declared computer illiteracy, he manages to digitally replace Nicola with Simone and the film is a hit. At first Viktor is reluctant to use ‘Simulation One’ (shortened to Simone), but he changes his mind when he realizes that “our ability to manufacture fraud exceeds our ability to detect it”. Viktor’s justification for creating his digital star is based on the recognition that “since we all live in one big lie… why shouldn’t [she] live too?” So, ‘a star is digitized’, and Simone soon becomes a world celebrity. In truth, Viktor’s intention was to reveal it all after the first reviews were in, since he believed that people would immediately spot the deception. However that is not the case: Simone is just another of Hollywood’s many ‘invisible effects’.[5] In the end, inevitably, like Dr. Frankenstein – tellingly, also a Victor – before him, Viktor is eclipsed by his creation. He may have created Simone, but her image is beyond his control.

Much of my interest in this film stems from the fact that it contradicts its own premises: on one side, it seems to take a stand against our digital ‘age of simulation,’ the ‘big lie’ as Viktor puts it in which we all live, on the other, it celebrates it. As Simone herself puts it: “If the performance is genuine, does it really matter if the actor is real?” Niccol seems to suggest that it does matter: in one scene Viktor is moved to tears by the performance of the ‘human’ actress Nicola Anders. Nicola’s breathtaking performance shows the sublime irony inherent in the acting profession: the more ‘authentic’ an actor qua actor. Performance, like the body and its subjectivity which embodies and enacts the performative, might have been extended, challenged and reconfigured by technology and yet, this scene suggests, the ontology of the performance (its aura and humanness) maintains a unique privileged status. Moreover, Viktor’s hubris for creating the perfect actress is in the end punished, thus warning us against the perils of misusing technology to play God and create (artificial) life. As I have argued elsewhere, the fact that Viktor’s Pygmalion-style manipulation of Simone is short-lived demonstrates how “Hollywood’s willingness to experiment with new technologies cannot contemplate the possibility of its own extinction”. (Notaro, 2006, 93) What could have been a witty satire of the star system and of the dangers of cinematographic illusion is blatantly contradicted by S1mOne’s marketing strategy by New Line Cinema. Besides the official S1mOne web site (http://www.s1m0ne.com/) a whole set of ‘fake’ web sites were produced for each of Simone’s movies, for some of her co-stars, for Viktor Taransky and even one for Amalgamated Film (http://www.amalgamatedfilms.com/), the fictional counterpart of New Line Cinema, thus blurring the line between cinematic fabrication and the ‘real’ studios’ need to push the film. This marketing strategy is a further indication, in a film apparently concerned with authenticity and sincerity, of Hollywood’s hypocritical stance on issues of virtuality and simulation. Also, despite Niccol’s initial statements that he wouldn’t reveal whether the character was real or not he later changed his mind, explaining that Simone’s voice and body were augmented by computer with elements of other actresses like Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, but Roberts was the principal source. The idea, according to Niccol, was to make a hybrid that was “contemporary but not so trendy that she would be quickly dated”. (rottentomatoes.com, “S1m0ne,” 2002) A commodified digital star with a long expiry date! In addition, Niccol commented, “We’re coming to the point where you won’t know if an actor or newscaster is computerized or flesh and blood… What’s more, you won’t care, as long as they impress us or move us, because as Taransky believes, ‘in our phoney world reality is in the performance”. (rottentomatoes.com, “S1m0ne,” 2002) I find it significant that Niccol himself is perfectly willing to employ technologies in a film that apparently deplores them. The reason for such an ambivalence resides in the fact that Niccol is not outside, but rather implicated in, Hollywood’s economy of manufactured celebrity and in the myth of the authentic performance. Although Niccol’s screenplay does indicate, as Matrix argues, that “digital cinema has the potential to shake up, disturb, and disrupt the methods of production in Hollywood,” (2006, 215) such a potential appears contained (and mitigated) within Hollywood’s well ‘rehearsed’ strategy to wrestle with the dilemmas of technological simulations in a fictional realm rather than in reality. In contrast to Matrix’s arguments, I propose that Niccol’s film engages but, crucially, does not disrupt the discourses concerning the impact of digital animation on Hollywood. (2006, 215)

To Read the Rest of the Essay

On the Media: Covering Big Food

2009-07-20T20:53:00.002-04:00

Covering Big Food
On the Media

Robert Kenner set out to make a documentary about the food industry, thinking he'd hear from both activists and industry insiders. But he quickly realized that the insiders wouldn't talk, farmers who did suffered consequences and, by the way, he needs a lot more lawyers. Kenner says the process was "Orwellian."

To Listen to the Interview

Andrew O'Hehir: Dirty jokes, hot witches and a chess game with Death

2009-07-20T19:25:00.002-04:00

Dirty jokes, hot witches and a chess game with Death
by Andrew O'Hehir
Salon

Deep in an audio interview that's half-buried among the extras on the Criterion Collection's new double-disc DVD set of "The Seventh Seal," Max von Sydow drops an odd little film-history bombshell. When Ingmar Bergman contacted him about a role in that 1957 film, von Sydow says, Bergman first suggested that he should play Jof, the lovable clown and family man who survives the Black Death together with his wife and child. How might the entire history of art-house cinema -- and von Sydow's subsequent career playing Nazi officers, tormented intellectuals and Jesus Christ -- have been different?

Ultimately, a boyish comic actor named Nils Poppe took the role of Jof, and von Sydow was reassigned to play Antonius Block, the brooding knight who is returning from the Crusades, alongside his wisecracking, cynical squire (Gunnar Björnstrand, in a performance that may outdo von Sydow's). Tormented by religious doubt and fear, Block plays a memorable game of chess with Death, buying just enough time for Jof's family to escape the latter's clutches. This seemingly insignificant casting detail offers an important clue to "The Seventh Seal," the movie that launched the international art-house movement -- and a movie that has acquired, as a direct result of its iconic stature, a totally unjustified reputation for humorlessness, obscurantism and difficulty.

Faced with an overwhelming glut of classics and art films on the DVD market, and a perennially distracted audience that is largely unfamiliar with anything made before the mid-'70s, Criterion is repackaging many of the most famous titles in its catalog. (Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad" has been reissued in a similar deluxe edition, and it's also worth a fresh look.) After 52 years it may be that the penumbra of intellectual seriousness around "The Seventh Seal" has finally dissipated, and the endless TV-commercial and greeting-card parodies of its images have faded from memory. If so, it's about goddamn time, because if you simply sit down and watch the movie without prejudice, it's full of surprises.

To Read the Rest of the Review

Michael Sragow: New Print of Rashomon (Japan: Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

2009-07-20T00:13:00.003-04:00

Kurosawa classic 'Rashomon' heads to Senator
Restored print of Japanese filmmaker's 1950 gem will open Friday
By Michael Sragow
Baltimore Sun

A samurai's wife dazzles a bandit as she and her husband make their way through a deep wood. The brigand rapes her. Someone kills the samurai. (Maybe it was himself.) That's all we know for sure about the action in Rashomon, even after the director, Akira Kurosawa, stages it from four different perspectives.

No director has matched his ability to develop a story by leaps and bounds while revealing irresolvable discrepancies. Is the bandit a bold combatant and ladies' man or a feral pig? Is the husband a ravaged spouse or an arrogant embodiment of wounded pride? And is the woman a knife-wielding woman warrior or a victim two times over?

Kurosawa's cast allows us to experience these extreme interpretations - and every permutation in between. Toshiro Mifune, as the bandit, matches the young Brando for daring and animal veracity. Machiko Kyo goes from fairy-tale princess to dragon lady (and back) with unexpected brio. Masayuki Mori, as the husband, is an inspired minimalist who knows how to hold his own with these two virtuoso maximalists. His coolness cuts their heat.

The director binds them together with a vision that spans the storybook tableau of a white-clad woman sitting near a white horse in an enchanted grove - and the horrifying set piece of a bound husband watching a brute ravishing his wife. Kurosawa developed Rashomon under the title Male/Female. He never credited the movie's jigsaw-puzzle construction for its international popularity. He thought it struck a chord because it explored rape. The film resonates with concepts of male prowess and female virtue that can catalyze and worsen catastrophe.

The test of a great, innovative movie is whether its power survives decades of imitation. Kurosawa's 1950 masterpiece, opening in a superb restored print at the Senator on Friday, dwarfs its legions of successors. Art movies such as Memento echo its use of conflicting perspectives to portray how every human being manufactures his or her own reality. Genre movies such as Reservoir Dogs ape aspects of the film's fractured yet suspenseful narrative.

But only Rashomon makes the prospect of discovering the "truth" as dizzying as the beauty of the wife's face when a cool breeze lifts her veil on a hot summer day. The bandit blames his crimes on that cool breeze. Yet if the samurai didn't follow the bandit to a spot where he said he had stashed some stolen swords, would the bandit have won the upper hand? That question didn't occur to me until I saw this print previewed at the Senator. (Movie presentation this luxurious doesn't just blow your mind, but frees it.) Why would an honorable samurai follow a thief to filthy lucre? Dishonor builds on dishonor in Rashomon. Only death can stop it.

One character proclaims that this story's view of human existence is "horrible," worse than war. When no one can be trusted, everyone lives in existential isolation. The basis for hope in Rashomon is the richness of Kurosawa's own brilliant and instinctive narrative art, which unites an audience in awe and wonder.

To Read the Rest of the Review

National Film Board of Canada: Hofmann's Potion

2009-07-18T22:15:00.002-04:00

Hofmann's Potion
(Connie Littlefield, 2002, 56 min 35s)
National Film Board of Canada

This documentary offers a compassionate, open-minded look at LSD and how it fits into our world. Long before Timothy Leary urged a generation to "tune in, turn on and drop out," the drug was hailed as a way to treat forms of addiction and mental illness. At the same time, it was being touted as a powerful tool for mental exploration and self-understanding. Featuring interviews with LSD pioneers, beautiful music and stunning cinematography, this is much more than a simple chronicle of LSD's early days. It's an alternative way of looking at the drug... and our world.

National Film Board of Canada: How Do They Put the Centres in Chocolate

2009-07-18T21:35:00.001-04:00

Utterly fascinating, but, careful, it will give you the munchies...

National Film Board of Canada

Bernard-Henri Levy: Beyond the War Hero

2009-07-18T17:38:00.002-04:00

(The article originally appeared in French in Le Point)

Beyond the war hero
Bernard-Henri Levy embarks on an adventure of anti-Nazi dialectics. First stop: Tom Cruise
Sign and Sight

The release of "Operation Valkyrie" first in the Unites States and Germany and now in France is without question a good thing. Because it's always a pleasure to see the world honour its heroes. Riveting as it is however, this film poses certain questions that are too complex and too delicate to be resolved solely within the logic of the Hollywood film industry.

The first has not escaped the attention of German commentators and concerns the choice of Tom Cruise to play von Stauffenberg, a man presented as the very incarnation of anti-Hitler honour. Not that Cruise ever showed sympathy for Hitlerism. But he is a leader of a sect, the Church of Scientology, about which the least one can say is that its values have little to do with those that led to the destruction of Hitlerism. Elitism… social and political Darwinism… education as a form of dressage… brainwashing raised to a principle of conviction… sequestration… applying cybernetics to social organisation… black magic… an apocalyptic vision of the world.… This is Scientology, and this is Cruise's credo. And seen in this light having him play Stauffenberg is a mistake or, as Berthold von Stauffenberg, Stauffenberg's son, said when he learned of the decision, a very grave attack on the memory of his father.

The second question, no doubt unavoidable with this sort of enterprise, is whether raising someone to hero status does not always happen, alas, to the detriment of precision, nuance and history itself. The film shows Stauffenberg's integrity very well. It shows his courage, the nobility of his views, his firmness of spirit. But what does it tell us of his thoughts? What does it teach us about why he enthusiastically joined the Nazi Party in 1933? Why does it go into no detail on how many of his initial Nazi convictions he had to jettison to carry out his plot and how many remained in tact? A sympathy for Ernst Jünger, for example? Or for Oswald Spengler? A fierce hostility to Weimar and the idea of democracy which he shared with the other former members of the Freikorps who remained true to National Socialism and its frenetic anti-Semitism? Did Stauffenberg hope to get rid of Hitler or Hitlerism? Of a bad tyrant or the principle of tyranny? Was his project to destroy Nazism or to rescue it?

To Read the Rest of the Critique

Appalshop: Mine War on Blackberry Creek (1986) - Web Stream

2009-07-17T10:19:00.001-04:00

Mine War on Blackberry Creek (1986) - Web Stream
Appalshop

Mine War on Blackberry Creek reports on the long and bitter United Mine Workers of America strike in 1984 against A.T. Massey, America's fourth largest coal company with corporate ties to apartheid South Africa. While strikebreakers work inside the mines and security men with guard dogs and cameras patrol the compound, miners on the picket lines detail the history of labor struggles in the region and their determination to hold out until victory.

To Read the Rest of the Introduction and Watch the Documentary

Michael Wesch: The Machine is (Changing) Us - YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity

2009-07-17T10:15:00.001-04:00

Writings on Performance (UK: Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg, 1970)

2009-07-16T12:49:00.003-04:00

"Nothing is Real, Everything is Permitted"

Cinema Obscura by Ray Young

Donald Cammell by Maximillian Le Cain

The Reign of the Chihuahua by Lance Hood

Sex, Drugs and Identity Crisis by Nathan Cunningham

Performance at Powis Square by Nickle in the Machine

Bill Moyers Journal: Leymah Gbowee and Abigail Disney - Pray the Devil Back to Hell

2009-07-12T22:02:00.004-04:00

Pray the Devil Back to Hell
Bill Moyers Journal

The JOURNAL profiles Leymah Gbowee, a woman who led her fellow countrywomen to fight for and win peace in war-torn Liberia, and Abigail Disney, who produced the documentary of their struggle and triumph in the award-winning film PRAY THE DEVIL BACK TO HELL.

For 15 years Liberia was gripped by civil war between the government of the corrupt and ruthless Charles Taylor, and warlords battling to overthrow him. More than 200,000 people had been killed and one out of three were made homeless.

Leymah Gbowee and her countrywomen were so desperate they decided to try and put a stop to the fighting. Armed with only a simple white t-shirt, they took to the streets knowing they could well be beaten and killed. They became "the market women," cajoling the fighting men and employing a tactic so old it was once used by the women of ancient Greece: No peace, no sex.

Ultimately, Charles Taylor was toppled from power and banished from Liberia. The country then elected a new president, the first woman head of state in Africa, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

To Listen to the Episode

The Wobblies (Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, 1979)

2009-07-11T09:03:00.002-04:00

To Watch the Documentary

The Bat Segundo Show: #293 Guy Maddin

2009-07-06T16:36:00.001-04:00

#293 Guy Maddin
The Bat Segundo Show

Subjects Discussed: Whether living in Winnipeg for many year makes one an expert of Winnipeg, expertise and confused feelings, the importance of not straying from your methods, pleasant feelings and hellish depictions of Winnipeg, the strength one obtains from retellings of Icelandic sagas, the difficulties of laughing at smallpox plagues, “My Winnipeg” vs. “My New York,” Marcel Dzama, artists doing their bit for Winnipeg, being murdered by a puck, Winnipeg purse-snatching, being indoors in Winnipeg, Canadians who are being unduly rattled by Americans, James Frey and the problems with American memoirs, finding the disclaimer, naked laps, getting a nude model in Winnipeg and Manhattan, quick cutting in Maddin’s films after 2000, title cards and Godard, walkout ratios in Maddin’s films, smelling the mildew in the tableau, live elements to Maddin’s films, J. Hoberman’s assessment, Maddin reading his own press, the IMDB, Internet ego searches, getting rid of obsessions, having to live with Guy Maddin the character, Darcy Fehr as the only actor to play “Guy Maddin” twice, the Seattle Guy Maddins, having an actor impersonate Guy Maddin at a Chicago event, why Guy Maddin hasn’t played himself, whether or not Darcy Fehr is Maddin’s Jean-Pierre Léaud, similarities between Brand Upon the Brain’s Sullivan Brown and Antoine Doniel, redacted dialogue in My Winnipeg, Ann Savage, the OCD quality that Winnipeggers have, recurring handshakes, ramming the audience over the head, editing lessons learned from Cowards Bend the Knee, title cards, actors who performed scenes in several different languages in the early sound era, Maddin’s shift from storyboards to spontaneity, editing speed and cramming ideas, good actors vs. bad actors, George Toles’s dialogue, the official report on the Guy Maddin Casting Couch, hockey locker rooms, chorizo metaphors, walking and coming up with ideas, Guy Debord, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, how walking gives you courage, the advantages of sleeping in hallways and on ladders, time travel and peregrinations, the grim nature of the future, and not being a great planner.

To Listen to the Interview

Matthew Nisbet: Food Inc - Will It Connect the Dots on Food System Problems?

2009-07-06T12:28:00.002-04:00

Food Inc: Will It Connect the Dots on Food System Problems?
by Matthew Nisbet
Framing Science

Over the past decade, issues such as fast food and obesity, organics and pesticides, genetic engineering, and factory farming have each captured their share of attention from engaged citizens and advocacy groups. Focusing events, such as the 2008 factory farming ballot initiative in California or the 2000 Starlink GM corn episode have generated spikes in news coverage. Popular books such as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, and Pollan's NY Times article "Farmer in Chief" have reinforced concerns among an attentive public and generated reactions from policymakers. Still, however, with the exception of obesity, each of these issues remains relatively low on the overall news agenda.

The inability of these food-related issues to break out into wider public focus can be attributed to a number of factors, most notably that none of them fit neatly into a traditional partisan divide as issues such as climate change and stem cell research do. But what has also been missing is a larger meta-frame that ties these trends in the food system together into the perception of a bigger problem.

But now comes Food Inc. The title is a potentially powerful frame device for audiences, connecting each of these food-related issues under one perceptual umbrella. Specifically, the title instantly conveys the film's dominant narrative that responsibility for these issues can be attributed to "big farming" and multi-national corporations who are serving their own private interests rather than the public interest. To correct the problem, tighter regulation, government oversight, and greater responsiveness to citizen and consumer concerns are needed.

As the Food Inc trailer above strongly emphasizes, the relevance of these food issues can be reduced down to a matter of "public accountability," a commonly appearing frame applied to issues of science and the environment. The trailer repeats several key phrases often used to actively translate this frame, including notably "controlled by multi-national corporations" and as the woman at the end of the trailer describes ominously: "The companies don't want the farmers talking, they don't want this story told."

To Read the Rest of the Commentary

July Online Film Discussion: Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, 2006)

2009-07-02T12:31:00.001-04:00

There is a new website organizing film discussions on a monthly basis that take place on different websites. This month's discussion will be:

Who: Ed Howard
Where: Only the Cinema
When: July 20, 2009
Film: Zwartboek, aka Black Book, d. Paul Verhoeven (2006)

For future film discussions go to The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club

The Bat Segundo Show #283: Atom Egoyan - Adoration

2009-07-01T15:47:00.002-04:00

Egoyan, Atom. Adoration The Bat Segundo Show (May 8, 2009)

Subjects Discussed: Scenes in airports, custom lines, airport security interrogations, passage within cinematic narrative, literal and figurative baggage, detonation devices, comparisons between Adoration’s Simon and Ararat’s Raffi, the video camera as a suitcase for memories, family confessions captured on video, making an experience substantial, technology in Egoyan’s films, closed-circuit vs. open-circuit technology, the lack of emotional filtering on the Internet, creating a chat room prototype hat doesn’t exist in reality, Nezar Hindawi, drawing from real-life incidents for ideas vs. cinematic invention, whether a narrative filmmaker needs to be responsible to history, finding the meaning in creches, the violin as a permanent artistic symbol, suggestions that we are now living in a cultural Roman Empire that is now crumbling, embracing an order to a material world, victims and mourning subcultures, the inheritance of tradition vs. new traditions, the excitement of interpretation vs. meaning to interpretation, teaching vs. primordial instinct, giving substance to the gaze of obsession, being driven to trauma, decorative masks and drama, concerns for class, role-playing and therapy, “democracy” and the Internet, shooting in natural locations vs. constructed sets, Chloe, and abstracting characters in a designed space.

The Bat Segundo Show #281: Alex Rivera - Sleep Dealer

2009-07-01T14:51:00.003-04:00

#281: Alex Rivera
The Bat Segundo Show

Subjects Discussed: David Riker’s La Ciudad, splitting screenwriting/directing duties, the collaboration process, the dynamics of globalization, labor and New World Order, the importance of having a heart when making a film, being the “Tin Man” to the “Wizard of Oz”, setting a futuristic story in the Third World, doing something new with science fiction, Sleep Dealer’s lack of references to contemporary guerrilla armies, the Mayan Army of Water Liberation, intercepting a radio signal without problems, encryption, the heightened realities that come from balancing multiple narrative issues, clairvoyance in a bed of glue, machines and remote control, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, wireless vs. cables, what “looks cooler” on film, organizing specific movements, looking for actors with dance backgrounds, ambition vs. practicalities of low-budget films, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, satirical television commercials, Robocop, the “post-border spirit” of collaboration, class division, using humor and satire to discuss the evils of fascism, Starship Troopers, Brazil, on directing a first feature after 15 short films, mashups and found footage, Craig Baldwin, reusing and recontextualizing images, switching from collage to narrative, financial assistance from the Sundance Institute, the false creative ideas of being a director, sprinkling found footage from the Iraq War into the narrative, pharmaceutical company ad campaigns, shanty towns on the outskirts of Tijuana, Mad Max, hiding behind technologies, police resistance, Thomas Mann’s “principle of least resistance”, increased connectivity vs. widening economic gap, the Berlin Wall, mariachis offering to play songs, Mexico’s legacy of tradition, the “wacky prediction” of big ideas, ultimate outsourcing, machines that eat up money, the Slurpee effect, Tijuana as the city of the future on t-shirts, spoofing Independence Day, flying sombreros that blow up Congress, Nortec DJs, Urban Outfitters, donkey shows and getting drunk, Tijuana as immigration gateway, and bad puns.

To Listen to the Interview

Michael Joshua Rowin and Matt Zoller Seitz: Outlaw Vision - Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker

2009-07-01T12:06:00.002-04:00

The House Next Door

Matt Zoller Seitz: The Video Essay

2009-06-28T09:54:00.004-04:00

(To learn more about these video essays check out Catherine Grant's Homage to Matt Zoller Seitz)

The Video Essay
by Matt Zoller Seitz
/Kunst der Vermittlung

...

A critic reviewing Ernest Hemingway’s »The Sun Also Rises« could, for example, assert that the author’s style favors direct, stripped down sentences largely bereft of adjectives, then present the following snippet by way of illustration: »It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.« That passage is not an approximation of what Hemingway wrote; it IS what Hemingway wrote – minus, of course, its larger context.

In contrast, a film reviewer trying to describe the style of Martin Scorsese would have to rely on approximations: descriptions of Scorsese’s dancelike camera moves, for example, or his voluptuous deployment of pop music, or his disruptive use of sound effects. Depending on the author and the requirements of his publication, such descriptions could be truncated or obsessively detailed, factually accurate or wildly off-base; they could concentrate on form, content or some combination; they could concern themselves with the filmmaker’s style or with his choice of subject matter and thematic preoccupations. But the one thing they couldn’t do was quote – really quote – the object of criticism, the better to examine, illuminate or vilify it. There were always exceptions here and there, naturally. The film history texts of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson and other like-minded writers illustrated their assertions about shot composition and editing patterns with stills from the films being discussed – a major advance over texts that relied on studio-produced publicity photos that often bore little or no relation to what the spectator actually saw while watching the films in question. And there have always been documentary films about cinema history and style that used film clips to advance their arguments. Notable examples include the narrated, stand-alone pieces on particular movies, directors and actors that used to appear on Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s syndicated movie review programs Sneak Previews and At the Movies; A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies; Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema; Mark Rappaport’s Rock Hudson’s Home Movies and From the Journals of Jean Seberg, and Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself.

But such heroic efforts were always complicated by two factors: the time, expense and complex production process once required create such works, and the necessity of seeking approval of copyright owners before quoting anything.

The first problem has been effectively obliterated thanks to technological advances. The combination of digital editing software and DVD ripping programs – I use a combination of Handbrake, Mac the Ripper and MPEG Streamclip for my own pieces – allows a critic to deconstruct a movie and recontextualize it with a degree of freedom comparable to that of a literary critic. The end result can be as drily analytical or as freewheeling as the filmmaker wishes – as expressive of individual sensibility as the work being examined.

The second problem is more vexing, thanks to media companies’ attempts to ignore, subvert and otherwise neutralize fair use provisions of copyright law – an exemption that permits selective quotation for purposes of criticism, commentary, education and parody. It’s strictly a bottom-line issue: companies wish to prevent anyone from quoting any part of a film or television program for any reason without official permission plus a fee, because looking the other way would (in their minds) condone a minor form of the piracy that saps so much revenue from their coffers.

Book, magazine and newspaper publishers have rarely gone to such lengths to control the quotation of written work. This is partly because anyone with eyes and a writing instrument could copy a written passage, and partly because written expression has always been intertwined with a common-sense approach to copyright law, with an awareness that culture is a living, breathing entity that must feed on itself in order to grow.

Now that the process isn’t hard anymore, copyright holders are adopting a zero-tolerance policy – embedding digital watermarks in their content, scouring the internet for any reproductions of that content, no matter how brief or recontextualized, and sending notices to video upload services (such as YouTube) demanding the removal of any videos containing that content. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) requires that service providers remove any content that the copyright holder deems infringing; the person who used that content can protest the takedown, and if the copyright holder doesn’t take further action after two weeks, the content has to be restored. The DCMA also warns that copyright holders who knowingly file or are a party to frivolous takedown notices can face legal and financial penalties – the flipside of holding copyright violators legally accountable for their actions.

This seems like a reasonable way of regulating a vast and perhaps unpoliceable new frontier – after all, with millions of new video uploads occurring each day, copyright holders (and video upload services) simply don’t have enough time or manpower to sift through all the videos individually and decide which are truly violating copyright and which are utilizing copyrighted material in a way that’s protected by the notion of Fair Use. Unfortunately, both the digital-watermark scanning software and the email programs that automatically send notice-and-takedown messages to service providers don’t distinguish between somebody who’s uploading the entirety of Battlestar Galactica (not protected speech) and someone who uses a minute and fifteen seconds of the series in a larger piece about the portrayal of women in science fiction (absolutely protected). As for the ideal of penalizing copyright holders who file frivolous takedown notices, there have been a few examples of this happening; but the system is still stacked against the video essayists, most of whom are independent artists who don’t have the time, money or knowhow to mount a legal attack against those who are interfering with their legally protected right to use Fair Use-exempted material online. And due to widespread ignorance of the law, people who use copyrighted material in online videos tend to recoil in fear at the first sign of a takedown notice, not realizing that they have some recourse, however limited.

However, technology’s forward march being what it is, one suspects that these problems will resolve themselves in due time. It seems inconceivable that takedown notice-abusers could eventually win out in this struggle; with so much of the world getting used to near-total freedom of expression online, the idea that one would have to seek someone’s permission before criticizing or commenting upon their work is not just anathema to reason, it’s faintly fascistic, and as such, cannot be sustained. On top of that, what we’re seeing on YouTube and other sites is the New Normal – the new way of thinking, communicating, interacting with the world. A new generation of critics and artists are comfortable with a collage-type approach to expression, one that appropriates bits and pieces of media and puts them in a new framework -- everything from so-called »mash-up« videos to humor pieces that utilize television news footage to more theoretical works like the ones created by such video essayists as Kevin Lee. And with each passing year, indeed each passing month, the means of expression becomes more supple, the language more expressive. It is already possible for video essayist to express themselves with the same fluidity and idiosyncratic energy that they might bring to written text; just as a dedicated cinephile can identify a particular paragraph as the work of Pauline Kael, Manny Farber or André Bazin, it is also possible (already!) to see a snippet of one of Kevin B. Lee’s videos from the other side of the room with the sound off and say, »That’s got to be Kevin.« Bottom line: despite the best efforts of copyright holders and media companies to fence off this new frontier, it remains not only open, but also ever-expansive. The frontier is wide open.

To Read the Entire Essay

Michael Bloom: Reanimating the Living Dead - Uncovering the Zombie Archetype in the Works of George A. Romero

2009-06-25T20:12:00.001-04:00

Reanimating the Living Dead: Uncovering the Zombie Archetype in the Works of George A. Romero
by Michael Bloom
Offscreen

“And suddenly he thought, I’m the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man … Full circle, he thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs. Full circle.” (I am Legend, Richard Matheson 159)

Even for those who have never seen a zombie horror film, the mere mention of the subgenre conjures distinct images of mindless cadavers preying upon the flesh of the living, vulnerable only to serious head trauma. Such an interpretation, while not necessarily absolute, has emerged in the collective consciousness of the modern world in the wake of countless films subscribing to such an ideal. Yet this definition is distinctly inconsistent with the cultural origins of the zombie mythos, standing in stark contrast to the subservient reanimated drones rooted in Voodoo folklore. In actuality, the zombie as we understand it today is the direct result of auteur George Romero’s reimagining of the zombie identity. Beginning with his seminal Night of the Living Dead (1968) and continuing through to his most recent installment, Diary of the Dead (2007), Romero has purged the zombie genre of its culturally phobic roots and redefined it as a means of reflexive social commentary, subverting conventions within the genre both preceding and following his immense influence.

This essay will endeavour to explore the evolution of the zombie conception from its religious genesis through to its modern reinterpretation. First to be examined are the roots of zombie mythology in Afro-Caribbean Voodoo and their (mis)translation to American/European society, particularly through the influence of the horror classic White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932). Proceeding onward, I intend to establish the cinematic and sociological context of Night of the Living Dead’s release within the dissolution of the zombie subgenre and the expansion of American consciousness to the graphic and senseless violence present both in Vietnam and on the home front. Night’s prolific sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1978), will then be addressed as a furtherance of Romero’s revision and the refinement of his social discourse. The direct influence of both his ontological restructuring of the zombie creature and emphasis on social reflection will then be noted in the preservation and progression of the undead archetype in modern reimaginings such as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) and Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004). Finally, Romero’s culmination of the Dead trilogy, Diary of the Dead, will be discussed as both a return to form and an alternative subversion of the 21st century zombie standard, defining the perennial quality of the auteur’s enduring vision and adaptability to transforming social currents.

Before addressing Romero’s work itself, it is necessary to understand that the zombie first originated in quite a different form than how it has been popularized in modern media, but that there still remain similarities in structure between the pre and post-Romero ghoul. Preceding the notion of the zombie as it was derived from voodoo demonology, the notion of the living dead is present in the very foundation of human psychology. Ghosts, vampires, and golems all find their roots in ancient folklore, and Bishop correlates this to Freud’s statement that “...to many people the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do with death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts” (Bishop 200). Therefore the living dead, as with most fantastic archetypes of horror, is inevitably tied to the concept of the Uncanny, or the familiar rendered strange.

This idea is the direct result of the universal consciousness of human mortality and the fear involved in seeing those who were once alive (familiar) as an intersection of matter and spirit converted to death (unfamiliar), or pure matter devoid of what the ancient Greeks best described as Nous, roughly translated into “mind” or “soul,” but ultimately referring to that which animates objects. The uncanny nature of death stirs our fear of mortality, but when related to the living dead the uncanny matures into collective terror. Death, while frightening, is inevitable and can be accepted and thus made familiar. But the idea of an inanimate corpse revived into a form alien to its prior living state furthers the process of the unfamiliar into that which cannot be reconciled with natural laws. Hence, as seen in virtually any zombie film where a character must confront the reanimated corpse of a former friend or relative, the moment is often reserved for the climax or a significant plot point to magnify the relationship between the living and the undead. This is why Barbara finally succumbs to the ghoulish horde in Night when she sees her own zombified brother (1:25:45 – 1:26:05), or why “Helen Cooper does little more than allow herself to be butchered” (Bishop 203) when she finds her own daughter undead (1:24:30 – 1:25:25). Both women are unable to fight back because they are literally incapacitated by fear.

The function of the uncanny as the natural cause of fear toward the undead is universally human, but is not explicit to the zombie genre itself. In fact, the historical heritage of the proto-zombie stems from more social and ethnic anxieties revolving around the Afro-Caribbean community in the West Indies at the turn of the 20th century. Brought to the new world from Africa, stigmas of the primitiveness and primordial spirituality of the “dark” continent were transposed upon the same communities in the primarily African island of Haiti (Rhodes 70). With Haiti’s independence in 1804, the predominantly black nation ruled by Afro-Haitians became a source of anxiety for the American Southern Confederacy, who became increasingly fearful of their own slaves (Rhodes 70). Thus, the grounds for suspicion and fear of the Afro-Caribbean “Other” was set to erupt into misappropriation of Voodoo ritual through pejorative reports on Voodoo practice and William Seabrook’s (mis)anthropological book The Magic Island (1929), with its accusations of infanticide and cannibalism (Rhodes 72).

Due to the mélange of fact and fiction in reports on Voodoo practice, it is easy to see why there is no clear origin of the zombie concept. Rhodes states that the term had various spellings and various meanings throughout history, referring to the snake god “Zombi,” revenant spirits, and a pharmacological ingredient used in potions (75). Indeed, the etymology of the term is most likely found in the Kimbundu word nzúmbe, which coincides with the revenant definition (Bishop 197), but it was Seabrook’s defamatory book which first connected the term to the living dead in American culture (Rhodes 81). Whether Seabrook fabricated this connection or if it was prior terminology, adapting the word for a returned spirit to describe a returned corpse, is contentious, but the importance of his writing is that, like any good lie, it indeed contains an element of truth. Zombification was not invented by Seabrook, but he did exploit its mystical and occult premises. In reality, there are actual pharmacological practices within the Vodoun religion (for which voodoo is a Westernized misnomer) which are carried out by a very esoteric minority of bokors, or witch doctors. These practices are capable of simulating a temporarily death-like state (Bishop 198), interestingly similar to the potion given to Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Subjects of such a drug could be buried alive and return from the grave, undoubtedly triggering the uncanny fear of living death. Widespread publication of this misinterpreted phenomenon certainly laid the foundation for what would become the first zombie movie, Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), which would capitalize on the American interest in and fear of Voodoo.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Shooting Down Pictures: The Pillow Book (1996, Peter Greenaway)

2009-06-24T14:07:00.004-04:00

The Pillow Book (1996, Peter Greenaway)
Shooting Down Pictures

Largely received with diffidence upon its initial release, Peter Greenaway’s tour de force can now be respected as a bold vision of movie art in the multimedia age. Taking inspiration from Japanese courtesan Sei Shonagon’s 17th century novel of the same title, Greenaway tells a story of a Japanese-Chinese woman’s efforts to transform her childhood fixation on bodily calligraphy into a career as a writer, while avenging her father’s sexual humiliation at the hands of his publisher. These themes of the artist’s struggle to express herself while taking revenge against the abuses of the older establishment are nothing new to Greenaway’s filmography (see The Draughtsman’s Contract, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover). What is new is a distinctly feminine narrative voice that enhances the innate sensuality of the project; an unabashed mixing of languages and cultures in a stew of chic global mongrelism; and a hypnotic flow of screens within screens and texts used as creative adornment. (The film toys with foreign film viewing conventions, foregoing subtitles for some scenes in Japanese while deploying them elsewhere in ways so artistic you wonder why no one else bothers).

To Browse and Read the Archive

Leo Goldsmith: The Action Movie

2009-06-24T10:06:00.001-04:00

The Action Movie
by Leo Goldsmith
Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Summer, for many, affords the opportunity for every kind of outdoor venture possible, from kitesurfing to bocce, camping to badminton. For others, it is a time for action—that is, the type of action best experienced while seated in a plush seat with a quart of sugary soda to hand, the orange glow of an artificial explosion the only thing to brighten the dark frigidity of an excessively air-conditioned movie theater.

Depending on your point of view, the action movie is either (or both) the zenith or the nadir of cinema. To many, it exemplifies the spectacular excesses of the movies in general, presenting the most bloated, corruptive, and superficial of films, cynically designed for the delectation of that preeminent demographic: the teenage boy. But at the same time, it is a genre that pushes the margins of what is possible with the cinematic apparatus, even as it reaches back to the very basis of the movies: movement.

After all, what is cinema – any cinema – if not the mere record of kinetics on a two-dimensional surface? In this light, any movie is basically an action movie, and those few films that seek to flout the conventions of the movie as a parade of moving pictures (see La Jetée, among others) are exceptions that prove the rule. Etymologically and practically, action is the very basis of a medium that exists primarily to document movement. But what’s more, the action movie employs every conceivable aspect of the cinematic apparatus tocreate illusions of motion, as well: blocking, framing, editing, sound design, special effects, and the elastic, inimitable grace of the human body.

From Aristotle (or maybe even a little earlier) to praxeology and cognitive science, thinkers have explored theories of human action that seek to divine the processes by which people do things. Cinema, with a quasi-scientific lineage of its own, seems uniquely suited to contribute to these debates, or at least serve as an aesthetic analogue. After all, the cinema’s roots lie in the photo-empiricism of Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, which settled his supposed wager with Governor Leland Stanford about whether a horse lifts all four of its hooves off the ground while galloping. In the actualities of the Lumière brothers and Edison, before narrative took hold of the movies, cinema was most useful and fascinating as a popular means of studying every kind of movement in time to be found in contemporary life. And along with dance and sexuality, violence was among the very first preoccupations of the movies.

As it relates to the film or literary genre, the word “action” seems mainly to derive from the military, in the sense of deploying combat maneuvers or deploying action against a country or force. (The source of the related sexual slang of “getting some action” is itself almost certainly military.) Quite significantly, the Oxford English Dictionary reports a cluster of new usages for the word “action” arising in the 1950s, including “action committee” (describing a communist force deployed to purge a society of non-communist elements), “action painting” (describing the method used by artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline)1, and of course, from the realm of film criticism, “action-packed.”2

That the phrase “action-packed” continues to be a handy descriptor for the filmmaker demonstrates the unquenchable desire for film to offer motion – human, vehicular, cinematographic – at its most extreme, spectacular, and implausible. It is then something of a linguistic error to refer to an action film with anything but strings of capital letters, punctuated with exclamation marks. It is a genre full of movies that entertain scenarios of utmost exoticness and offer conflicts that pivot around fatalistic dilemmas, populated with characters – both good and bad, male and female – that exist at the antipodes of human physicality and ethics. They are FAST! BOMBASTIC! THRILLING! LOUD! and EXCLAMATORY! Action movies are also brazenly unrealistic entertainments, and in their evolution have become increasingly colorful and excited to the point of abstraction. They contain scenarios and emotions many of us will never experience, liberally exploiting the spectrum of human emotion.

To Read the Rest of the Introduction and the Collection of Essays

Steven Q. Fletcher: The Dreamers - Revolution as a Gala Dinner and a Game

2009-06-23T21:01:00.002-04:00

The Dreamers: Revolution as a Gala Dinner and a Game
A close, detailed viewing and extended discussion of the context, plot, and themes of Bertolucci’s controversial masterwork.
by Steven Q. Fletcher
Metaphilm

Part 1. A few things to consider before watching the film (no spoilers):

Perhaps it is best to begin our reading of The Dreamers (2003) with a brief history lesson, although the film, as will be repeated later for emphasis, is not essentially about history, or politics, or anything else quite so academic, but is instead a coming-of-age story about three youths. However, The Dreamers is set in Paris in the year 1968—a significant moment in history, for it was a time when many in the western world believed that protest, particularly student protest, held the power to force major changes in the way societies’ governing institutions operated.

Revolution of all sorts was in the air: in America, the 1967 Summer of Love’s flower children had shown themselves to be the spiritual inheritors of the alienated bohemians and beatniks who had come before, and in Britain and France—and much of the rest of Europe as well—counterculture musicians, writers, and political activists were calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. But the charges of imperial aggression—warranted or not—were not the only rallying points for the youthful reformers. Denouncing the prevailing culture as corrupt and immoral, they heaped scorn on what they contemptuously labeled “the Establishment,” and turned against the values of the middle class, envisioning instead a “New Republic” based on a more open sexuality, new styles of art such as rock and roll, a revamped cinema, and the use of consciousness-altering drugs.

Preceding the more physical protests to come in 1968, students in certain overcrowded Parisian universities quarreled with school administrators over the right to receive members of the opposite sex in their dormitories—for political and scholastic reasons as well as the more traditional ones. Because of this and other problems, an overflow university was established outside Paris in the working class suburb of Nanterre. Eventually nineteen thousand students were crammed into inadequate facilities, and the school and its neighboring cafés became a fermentation tank for political unrest, fueled by the writings of such idolized figures as Che Guevara and Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (the highly influential la Nouvelle Vague director Jean-Luc Godard even filmed a movie in 1967 entitled La Chinoise—The Chinese—showing a group of French students infatuated with Mao, who eventually translate their new ideas into terrorist activities).

In March of 1968 the students of Nanterre revolted against the administration, and baton-wielding police and rock-throwing students clashed. Afterwards, students and workers alike rallied around an arrested student leader (Daniel Cohn-Bendit) and the wave of protesters spilled out of Nanterre and into Paris. The protests became all-inclusive in nature, railing against all the authority figures the students and young workers considered oppressive, against the consumer-driven lifestyle of the bourgeoisie, and of course against the military policies of various governments—not just that of France.

On May 3rd, the ranks of the protestors swelled as the government reacted harshly to quell the unrest; in a major skirmish more than a hundred protesters were hurt and more than six hundred were carted away by French riot police. You’ll see these policeman reenacted in the movie and shown in archival footage; they are terrifying in their black uniforms and faceless masks, hurling tear gas canisters and striking savagely with their batons from behind a wall of shields held before them like those of the Spartan warriors at Thermopylae.

On May 6th, an even larger demonstration again turned violent, with hundreds more injured and arrested. Classes were suspended at Nanterre and the Sorbonne in Paris, and many workers unions called for general strikes. By mid-May, millions of workers were on strike, and many of the major industries were shut down. Paris became a barricaded city, and travel throughout the country became problematic, if not impossible. The Cannes film festival of 1968 was cancelled. On May 30th, close to half a million protestors marched through Paris chanting “Adieu, de Gaulle!” But the president stood his ground, and, backed by the military, somehow managed to pull the country back from the brink of collapse, and even succeeded in banning several of the left-wing student organizations that had precipitated the crisis.

Very little of these events are present in The Dreamers. But all this pervasive history is there as a living backdrop—one can almost peer around the edges of the screen and see the men in riot gear, hear the students marching in the streets, even catch a whiff of the tear gas. At the beginning of the movie there is a protest happening because Henri Langlois, the founder and director of the Cinémathèque Française (the Paris-based film theater and museum which is the Holy of Holies to our three main characters, cinephiles all) has been removed from office by the government, and the theater barricaded. The actual protest happened on the 14th of February; three thousand people showed up including many famous directors and actors. The police attacked after the protest turned violent; eventually the horrific event shamed the government into reinstating Langlois. In the movie these events make the actions of the authorities personally oppressive to our protagonists, and set into motion the plot of The Dreamers.

* * *

However, the movie, let me now repeat, is not about the revolution of 1968. It is instead about the intense relationships that evolve between three teenagers on the cusp of adulthood in a time of revolution: Matthew, the naïve American visiting France by himself for the first time, and Theo and Isabelle, the sophisticated yet immature twins who have grown up in Paris under the overly permissive care of their father, a famous but increasingly irrelevant French poet.

As mentioned, all three friends are cinephiles—mad for films—and Paris in the sixties was the perfect place to exist for such creatures. It is within the culture of incessant movie-going that they meet, and it is about movies that they ponder, dream, and spend their hours discussing. During The Dreamers many clips of other films are shown to illustrate the inner thoughts of the characters. You can usually understand what is meant by these cinematic quotations: many times the characters themselves identify and explain them. However, I will address some of the more important filmic allusions in my analysis of the film.

The three friends find themselves thrown together more and more in a special time of self-discovery and revolution, and eventually find themselves living in a kind of dream world that is at once beautiful, perilous, and unique—and as fleeting as all days of youth and love’s first dawning.

In the film’s “making of” documentary, director Bernardo Bertolucci has this to say about the time period which he himself lived through and has re-imagined in The Dreamers:

I don’t want to say that 1968 was a magic moment . . . but almost. The fact is that we were, let’s use the word “dreaming” together cinema, politics, music, jazz, rock and roll—and sex—and the discovery of how these things could be conjugated together and how they could interact between each other, how they could really be mixed up in a kind of harmony that I don’t see today.

This film, then, is an attempt to portray a very special kind of dreaming—a kind of dreaming that is only possible when the world seems balanced on a knife’s edge of change, when one is young and all things are new, all things are possible, and every moment’s now is all that there is—a time when one doesn’t have a lifetime of painful experience to tell one that certain things simply cannot—or should not—be done.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Reverse Shot: Matt Zoller Seitz on Carlito's Way

2009-06-23T12:43:00.002-04:00

Matt Zoller Seitz on Carlito’s Way
Reverse Shot

Everything about Carlito’s Way (1993) is improbable, starting with the fact that it’s a masterpiece. On paper, it sounds like a glossy Nineties Hollywood version of a cheapo B-picture that, 50 years earlier, would have been labeled “a programmer,” and for that reason, its initial reviews tended to be negative or somewhat dismissively positive (variations on “You’ve seen it all before, but it’s still fun”). My own Dallas Observer review—written by a young man who had a lot more living to do—hewed to this superficial reading; thirteen years and many viewings later, it’s high on the list of verdicts I wish I could take back. (The older you get, the wiser, it seems.) Sure enough, though—as invariably happens with Brian De Palma’s movies—audiences grew to admire and ultimately adore Carlito’s Way. They looked past the film’s surfaces and got lost in its depths; within seven years of its release, Cahiers du Cinema named it the best film of the Nineties.

There’s no denying that the story is primordially familiar: Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino), a notorious heroin dealer sprung from prison on a technicality, re-enters society determined to build a new, law-abiding identity with his girlfriend but gets pulled back into street life and pays the ultimate price. Yet Carlito’s Way is complex, resilient, and uncannily moving. Its power originates not just in director De Palma’s command of technique—a given, even in his films that don’t work—but in his determination to take his hero at his word and demand that audiences do the same. It treats cliches not as storytelling shortcuts, but as metaphors for personal struggle.

The film’s intent announces itself in its bracketing scenes, which shows his ruthless young rival, Benny Blanco (John Leguizamo), assassinating him on a train platform— mere seconds, we later learn, before he can escape to the tropics with his pregnant girlfriend, Gail (Penelope Ann Miller). By showing us exactly how and when Carlito died, and giving us a lingering three-quarters view of Benny’s face so we know who killed him, then segueing into the hero’s ruminative, at times bemused, deathbed narration, which will continue for two-plus hours, De Palma clarifies the film’s intent: its primary action is internal, psychological. The opening tells us, definitively, that this movie is not about what happens to Carlito, but what happens within Carlito.

This description makes the film sound like a tragedy (De Palma’s specialty). But it doesn’t play that way. For a director who specializes in operatic portraits of impotence, violation, and dashed dreams, Carlito’s Way is radically optimistic—as foursquare and impassioned as its closing song, Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful.” With the possible exception of Mission to Mars (De Palma’s own E.T.), no other De Palma film is so unapologetically bullish on free will—on peoples’ capacity to alter, or at least redirect, their supposed destiny and even remake their personalities from the ground up. As adapted by screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park) from two novels by Edwin Torres, Carlito’s Way is—no kidding—a story of spiritual rebirth: a mythic western in Seventies crime thriller drag about a man who realizes, deep into his forties, that the thug life he’d killed to create is in fact an imitation of life—not just immoral and shallow, but silly and boring.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Countryman (Jamaica: Dickie Jobson, 1982)

2009-06-23T10:16:00.002-04:00

Countryman (Jamaica: Dickie Jobson, 1982)

Steve Dollar: Pigs, Pimps and Other Friends of Shohei Imamura

2009-06-16T22:40:00.003-04:00

Pigs, Pimps and Other Friends of Shohei Imamura
by Steve Dollar
Green Cine Daily

Although he bowed out in 2006, at age 79, as a globally revered grand master of cinema—his nation's greatest living filmmaker—Shohei Imamura may have simply refined his touch over a 45-year career so that his gritty vision of Japanese society played more elegantly on the screen. He didn't stake his reputation on arthouse propriety. Not that you'd necessarily infer that from the somber, poetic tone of latter-day productions such as The Ballad of Narayama (1983). Over time, the director became so smoothly transgressive that his final feature, 2001's Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, could employ female ejaculation as a metaphor and not raise any eyebrows.

Because so many of his films from the 1960s—the period when Imamura broke with convention and boldly defined himself as a fearless observer of the human condition, mapping the gamier precincts of postwar Japan—have been out of circulation or otherwise hard to see, contemporary audiences have missed out on most of the ripe, juicy stuff.

Criterion delivers the goods with its new triple-disc set, Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes. Its an apt summary of some of the major players in these robust dramas, and also the title of a 2007 retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAMcinematek that saw rare revivals of Pigs and Battleships (1961), The Insect Woman (1963) and Intentions of Murder (1964), all included in the box, as well as the mad ethnography-on-crack epic The Profound Desire of the Gods (1968), and the decade-closing documentary, History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess. Those latter films would have made welcome additions to the package, which also serves as a fitting companion to Criterion's edition of The Pornographers (1966), the most commonly accessible of Imamura's '60s efforts.

Watched in sequence, the films show off the development of Imamura's unusual balance of objectivity and outrageousness. Every biographical note talks about the director's impulse to break away from the stately transcendence of Ozu, for whom he apprenticed, and surf the hurly-burly of the underclass. What makes his films so pleasurable, even when the camera seems to impose an almost clinical gaze, is that irrepressibly earthy sensibility. There's an often grimy, grindhouse candor that animates these social anatomies and their gallery of misfits. Pimps, prostitutes, and pigs were some of the director's best friends, not to mention serial killers, bar girls, rapists, conniving husbands, hapless pornographers, petty hoodlums and incestuous country bumpkins.

Those porkers are no mere symbol. Pigs and Battleships, which Nikkatsu's bosses despised on its release, is a broadly comic saga of occupied Japan. Its lowlife antics transpire in the port town of Yokosuka, whose black market thrives amid the influx of American servicemen. A series of unfortunate events turns a wannabe gangster's pork-vending scam into so much hogwash, as hundreds of pigs stampede, trampling the exploitative intents of the local crime syndicate and the Yankee arrivals alike. The film, in all its sordid vigor, represents Imamura at his most freewheeling. One memorable scene involves a yakuza version of the Three Stooges who, having whacked a rival and tossed him in the pigpen, later slaughter one of the swine for supper and discover... well, let's say they need a few extra toothpicks for this barbecue. Making splendid use of black-and-white Cinemascope shot in high contrast by Shinsaku Himeda, a restlessly mobile camera, a manufactured set of neon jazz dives and hive-like bordellos, and penumbral interior lighting that evokes noir-like intrigue even at the most mundane moments, Imamura enjoys a crackling pace. When the local punks leap into the air to dodge a round of accidental machine gun spray, it's as kinetic as a 15-second musical.

To Read the Rest of the Review Essay

Watching Theology: Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)

2009-06-16T21:57:00.002-04:00

Mean Streets (1973)
by Joe Johnson
Watching Theology

God's Silence Series: no. 3. Sometimes God is silent. Sometimes he's shut out of the conversation. In Martin Scorsese's breakthrough film Mean Streets, Charlie is trying to find his own way to stay out of Hell. He is the saint of Little Italy, just not the kind of saint anyone would canonize. Although God offers him absolution, Charlie prefers real atonement. He is the savior of the dregs, but his first priority is to save himself without losing anything. Join us for this episode as WT discusses the problem with forming one's own religion.

To Listen to the Analysis

Radio West: Pete Docter - Up

2009-06-07T19:24:00.003-04:00

Pixar's Up
Radio West

Pixar writer and director Pete Docter says he loves animation because even though you know it's not real, you get sucked in and you fall in love with the characters anyway. Docter was part of the teams that created Monsters, Inc. and WALL-E and he directed Pixar's latest film "Up" ... . Docter joins Doug to talk about imagination, adventure and his newest creation, a grumpy 78-year-old balloon salesman who sets out to fulfill his life-long dream.

To Listen to the Interview

John Esther: Costas Gavras Talks About Z (Algeria/France, 1969), 40 Years Later

2009-06-03T22:35:00.004-04:00

Costas Gavras Talks About Z, 40 Years Later
By John Esther
Z Magazine

A riveting action thriller about political assassination at the highest levels, this year marks the 40th anniversary of Z ... the Academy Award-winning 1969 film co-written and directed by Costas Gavras about a Judge (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) who looks into the death of the Deputy (also referred to as Comrade Z, played by Yves Montand) who was about to give a speech on nuclear disarmament. Deliberately dissident, claiming its intention to resemble the U.S.-backed military coup of Greece in the early 1960s and the events surrounding the assassination of democratic Greek politician Gregoris Lambrakis in 1963, Gavras's film touched a nerve with audiences still reeling from the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations.

While Gavras has made many political films—Missing, Music Box, and Amen—his film titled after the banned letter, which was a symbolic reminder that Lambrakis (he) lives on—remains his masterpiece.

ESTHER: Why did you want to make Z in the first place?

GAVRAS: The colonels had just come to power in Greece, overthrowing democracy. Making Z was my way to protest them.

What were your political intentions?

To show they were a pack of fanatic and stupid military men that were foes to democracy.

How successful were you in achieving those goals?

If you consider how successful the film was all over the world—except in dictatorship-ruled countries, which banned my movie—I can say I reached my goals.

Which of the characters in the film do you identify with the most and why?

I identify with the journalist for his passion of seeking the truth and information and with the judge for his passion for justice, which he stands up for at great risk of losing everything.

To Read the Rest of the Interview

Mark Engler: Science Fiction From Below: Alex Rivera, director of the new film Sleep Dealer, imagines the future of the Global South

2009-05-30T13:24:00.001-04:00

Science Fiction From Below: Alex Rivera, director of the new film Sleep Dealer, imagines the future of the Global South.
by Mark Engler
ZNet

...

M.E.: How do you describe your film?

A.R.: Sleep Dealer is a science fiction thriller that takes a look at the future from a perspective that we've never seen before in science fiction. We've seen the future of Los Angeles, in Blade Runner. We've seen the future of Washington, D.C., in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. We've seen London and Chicago. But we've never seen the places where the great majority of humanity actually lives. Those are in the global South. We've never seen Mexico; we've never seen Brazil; we've never seen India. We've never seen that future on film before.

M.E.: Your main character, Memo Cruz, is from rural Mexico, from Oaxaca. In many ways, the village that we see on film is very similar to many poor, remote communities today. It doesn't necessarily look like how we think about the future at all. What was your conception of how economic globalization would affect communities like these?

A.R.: One of the things that fascinates me about the genre is that, explicitly or not, science fiction is always partly about development theory. So when Spielberg shows us Washington, DC with 15-lane traffic flowing all around the city, he's putting forward a certain vision of development.

Sleep Dealer starts in Oaxaca, and to think about the future of Oaxaca, you have to think about how so-called "development" has been happening there and where might it go. And it's not superhighways and skyscrapers. That would be ridiculous. So, in the vision I put forward, most of the landscape remains the same. The buildings look older. Most of the streets still aren't paved. And yet there are these tendrils of technology that have infiltrated the environment. So instead of an old-fashioned TV, there is a high-definition TV. Instead of a calling booth like they have today in Mexican villages, where people call their relatives who are far away, in this future there is a video-calling booth. There's the presence of a North American corporation that has privatized the water and that uses technology to control the water supply. There are remote cameras with guns mounted on them and drones that do surveillance over the area.

The vision of Oaxaca in the future and of the South in the future is a kind of collage, where there are still elements that look ancient, there is still infrastructure that looks older even than it does today, and yet there are little capillaries of high technology that pulse through the environment.

ME: How far into the future did you set the film?

A.R.: I started working on the ideas in Sleep Dealer ten years ago, and at that point I thought I was writing about a future that was forty or fifty years away, or maybe a future that might not ever happen. Over this past decade, though, the world has rapidly caught up with a lot of the fantasy nightmares in the film. That's been an interesting process.

But, you know, a lot of times we use the word "futuristic" to describe things that are kind of explosions of capital, like skyscrapers or futuristic cities. We do not think of a cornfield as futuristic, even though that has as much to do with the future as does the shimmering skyscraper.

To Read the Rest of the Interview

Little White Lies #22: The Let the Right One In Issue

2009-05-30T03:32:00.002-04:00

Little White Lies

The Let the Right One In Issue

Open Source: Waltz with Bashir (Israel: Ari Folman, 2008) - The Art Director’s Cut at War

2009-05-30T00:30:00.005-04:00

“Waltz with Bashir”: the Art Director’s Cut at War
Host: Chris Lydon
Guests: David Polonsky, James Der Derian, Amy Kravitz and Keith Brown.
Open Source

On the one hand, the defamiliarization of animation allows you initially to take some distance from the story. But at some point (I think it has to do with the way that the brain visually assimilates information) the filter or the rational distancing fell by the wayside. I felt like it was almost directly accessing a part of the brain, because after all, the brain, through evolution, processes visual images first in a primal way and then the images go up to the language center, which is actually a much smaller part of our brain.

Watching “Waltz With Bashir,” you almost got into some primal, visual — I am going to call it — the truth center. So I found the film much more disturbing and harder to understand in a kind of removed, intellectual way, than if it had been a straight frame that I am more familiar with, which is documentary film or Hollywood war blockbusters. I think that is why it came back into our nightmares.

We all know what Marx said about the unconsciousness of the past: that it weighs on us like a nightmare. That somehow triggered all kinds of past memories about war in my own family history. So I think it was remarkable how the film was able to achieve that kind of new channeling of a part of the brain that is not normally a part of film watching, film spectating.

James Der Derian in Open Source conversation with David Polonsky at the Watson Institute, April 15, 2009.

To Listen/Read the Conversation

Left Field Cinema: Before the Devil Knows Your Dead (US/UK: Sydney Lumet, 2007)

2009-05-30T00:10:00.003-04:00

Before the Devil Knows Your Dead
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema

... to understand Lumet, one must look fifty-years in the past to his first and possibly greatest feature film, 12 Angry Men, this simple classic about a jury member trying to convince the other eleven that the case isn’t as simple as they might assume, during deliberation about the innocence or guilt of a man charged with murder. Based on a stage play and set entirely in the jury room, this is a classic in the truest sense of the word. It is powerful and intense as it deals with the other juror’s prejudices towards the defendant and each other. A remarkable debut which sets Lumet up for his position in this list without ever having to make another film, but he certainly didn’t stop there. Lumet’s talent is retrieving powerful and often naturalistic performances from all of his cast, once quoted as saying “there are no small parts, only small actors” his beliefs in production often centre around this ideal. He does a lot of work, and most of it has faded into obscurity, some of it is mediocre, some films are simply flawed beyond redemption, however for all of his less known works, he still has a significant portion of outstanding films to name, films that any director would burst with pride if they could claim as their own. After 12 Angry Men, the next major work is Fail-Safe a politically relevant story about an American bomber sent to Moscow by mistake, it is a powerful film, and during the climate of the cold war, it was an extremely frightening concept. But like so many film makers, the 1970’s would be his most important decade, like Woody Allen, Lumet is obsessed with his beloved New York and it would be the setting for three of his most important films. Starting with Serpico and the first collaboration with Al Pacino the film is based on a real life story of an honest cop in the NYPD, starting with Serpico being shot and then rewinding to give us the young police officers rise and fall. It is brutal, and honest, doesn’t canonise or demonise the protagonist it paints a balanced picture, and shows the difficulty in remaining honest in a world of corruption. There are no rewards for taking the righteous path, and only punishment for shunning the alternative. Dog Day Afternoon was his second film with Pacino, retaining the intensity, naturalistic performances, and realistic portrayals of heightened situations. Dog Day Afternoon again gives the audience no easy way out of the situation. A very gritty view of 1970’s New York unflinching in its realism. Pacino’s character Sonny, is revealed to be homosexual, and stealing the money from a small bank to pay for his lover to have a sex change. This film was completely ahead of its time, and yet also tapped into a rebellious mindset which was true of the New Yorkers at the time. Lumet often steers clear of non-diagetic sound and it is in Dog Day Afternoon that this is put to its best use, with a film so tense and engaging that not only does the audience not require any music to dictate their emotion, but the audience doesn’t notice its absence until the end credits roll in eerie silence. Network is Lumet’s next masterpiece, an astounding achievement which is more relevant in today’s culture of reality television, and the exploitive nature of the medium which is often overwhelmed by an endemic sense of greed. Cynical and powerful it is a damning condemnation of films sister industry. Some would maintain that Network marks the end of Lumet’s run of classics through the 70’s, but his last great film came a decade later with Running on Empty in 1988 a restrained and powerful film, staring River Phoenix as the son of two fugitives from the FBI, it is sentimental in the best possible way, examining the growing pains of the young man who is not allowed to settle in one place or form any meaningful relationships. Running on Empty isn’t as well known, but is just as worthy of examination. Other later films like 1997’s Night Falls on Manhattan are also worth watching, but nothing to match the sheer power of his earlier work.

To Read the Rest of the Analysis

Scott Tobias: Team America: World Police (USA: Trey Parker and Matt Stone, 2004)

2009-05-29T23:21:00.004-04:00

Team America: World Police
by Scott Tobias
A.V. Club

“Freedom isn’t free / No, there’s a hefty fucking fee.” —Team America: World Police

...

So what have you got in 2004, when Parker and Stone made the bold/crazy decision to make a feature film populated almost entirely by marionettes? You’ve got an America that had squandered vast reserves of global sympathy after 9/11, tackled terrorism with chest-thumping unilateralism, and allowed the likes of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay to vulgarize history with a little movie called Pearl Harbor. You’ve also got crusading celebrity peaceniks, networks of evildoers seeking weapons of mass destruction, and a ronery North Korean dictator craving attention from other nations like a petulant 10-year-old. Throw all those ingredients in the pot, and you get the lumpy stew that is Team America: World Police, a catch-as-catch-can satire in the Parker/Stone tradition—meaning it’s cutting, politically incorrect, juvenile in ways both sublime and stupid, and sometimes misguided and genuinely risible. One major plus: The songs are great enough to hold the whole shambling operation together.

The first thing that stands out about Team America is the look of the film, pilfered from the “Supermarionation” of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s mid-’60s British TV show Thunderbirds. What’s particularly striking—and what tends to go unrecognized due to the natural awkwardness of puppetry with visible strings—is how beautiful the film looks, particularly in light of the deliberate shoddiness of Parker/Stone collaborations past. The photographer, Bill Pope, was just coming off the Matrix trilogy, and through his lens, the lovingly detailed environments come off like the greatest toy playsets a child could imagine. Sets like Paris, with its lush diorama of the city in miniature, or Kim Jong Il’s palace, with its ornate monuments to the diabolical narcissist himself, are gorgeous to behold, even though Parker and Stone seem intent on blowing up every last one of them. The marionettes also allow them to do for live-action what they get away with more easily in animation: demonstrate a deeply cynical, grossly oversimplified worldview by reducing characters to the most basic stereotypes. When you’re dealing with flesh-and-blood actors, people tend to call you on stuff like that.

Say this for Team America, though: The first 30 minutes or so are virtually non-stop brilliance, connecting the country’s “America, Fuck Yeah!” heavy-handedness to the garish spectacle of a Bruckheimer production. The late director Robert Altman got in some trouble after 9/11 for blaming Hollywood’s violent exports in part for inspiring such an attack, but while that claim seems tenuous, there’s a disturbing association between the destruction we present as entertainment and the destruction we reap and sow around the world. In the early going, Team America plays out like the self-conscious movie version of the War On Terror: Whenever the conspicuous Osama bin Laden look-alikes are onscreen, we hear the mournful Middle Eastern music cues of every terrorist-themed action movie of the past decade; before an all-American hero strikes down an enemy fighter, she’s ready with a canned one-liner (“Hey, terrorist: Terrorize this!”); and no famous monument or landmark is safe from demolition.

Parker and Stone make hay out of what Robert McNamara, in The Fog Of War, talked about as the perils of a disproportional response. Instead of doing scalpel-worthy work by disrupting terrorist networks, the shock-and-awe of the American military comes down like a club. In the opening sequence in Paris, the elite unit known as Team America takes down a handful of terrorists (“You in the robe, put down the weapon of mass destruction!”), but their errant missiles also lay waste to the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Louvre. Then later, when they copter into a crowded bazaar in Egypt—where the pyramids and the Sphinx will also see damage—they land square on top of a merchant’s stand. “Fear not, Muslim friends,” they say. “We’re here to find terrorists.” And probably make a few as well.

Between the freewheeling digs at American solipsism (title card: “Paris, France; 3635 miles east of America”), the base language about why we’re at war (“They’re called terrorists, Gary, and they hate everything about you”), and inspired potshots at the musical Rent, Team America gets around to telling something resembling a story—cobbled together, of course, from bits and pieces of Bruckheimer movies past, especially Top Gun and Armageddon. The naïve hero is blue-eyed Gary, recruited from Broadway for the acting skills Team America needs to infiltrate a terrorist network. Even after meeting a crack unit of patriots—like former Nebraska all-star quarterback Joe, or Chris, “the best martial artist Detroit has to offer”—Gary is reluctant to answer the call to service.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Matt Zoller Seitz: Vulcan - The Soul of Spock

2009-05-27T00:10:00.002-04:00

(I saw the new Star Trek film last night and I think it is a good reboot. I'm sure purists are upset about this move, but hey, really, after the various alter reality narratives in this multi-textual, multi-modal franchise, it makes sense to me. Seitz, in anticipation of the new film, gives us this in-depth character analysis of one of my favorite fictional characters.)

Vulcan: The Soul of Spock
by Matt Zoller Seitz
The L Magazine

Link

Politics of Culture: Barrack 18

2009-05-26T00:14:00.003-04:00

Barrack 18
Politics of Culture (KCRW: Santa Monica College)

During World War II, some one hundred Jewish prisoners counterfeited cash for the Third Reich, despite the knowledge that they would be killed when their work was done. Barrack 18 is the true story of these prisoners and the counterfeited currency that was used by the Nazis to pay for German spies during World War II. Produced exclusively for KCRW by Jon Kalish.

To Listen to the Episode

Left Field Cinema: World Cinema Masterpiece -- L'Atalante (France: Jean Vigo, 1934)

2009-05-25T11:37:00.005-04:00

World Cinema Masterpiece: L'Atalante
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema

Much has been written and spoken about this film in the many decades since Jean Vigo’s short but fruitful career came to an abrupt end. A French director who’s complete cannon of work includes three short films and one feature all made in the 1930’s. Given the quality of this work, had the man lived beyond his twenty-nine years he would have quite possibly delivered a substantial number of films which we would have come to consider classics. The cynic amongst us might argue that Vigo’s status is in fact due to his untimely death not in spite of it, and had tuberculosis not taken him, then he wouldn’t be remembered in such a rose tinted light. For the cynics there is simply one thing left to do – watch L’Atalante. Any debate as to the films value is rendered null and void, whether you enjoy the film or not its qualities are difficult to deny.

The film is a lyrical and romantic story of a pair of young newly weds, Juliette and Jean who immediately after marrying begin to settle into their new life aboard a working boat heading to Paris by the canal. Jean is the skipper, and under him are two deck hands Jules and Le Camelot. All four live together on the relatively small, and claustrophobic boat which is filled with not only themselves but the crews belongings including the vast collection of traveling memorabilia which Jules has acquired from the many nations he has visited. Problems emerge quickly as each of the occupants become irritated with the other, and the heartfelt stability of the newly weds begins to crumble as the couple squabble and bicker over petty issues and a lack of personal space. Juliette soon comes under the spell of a Parisian peddler, who attempts to court her affections, given the difficulties of the marriage his maneuvers are effective and she soon leaves Jean in search of a more exciting and tolerable existence away from the reclusive squallier she’s been calling home.

The story is fairly simple; its execution is where the films reputation stems from. Firstly it is exceptionally honest with its charmingly simple characters. Neither Jean or Juliette are completely to blame for the disintegration of their relationship, and equally neither of them are completely innocent. There is also something tender and natural about Vigo’s direction, even in the films most heightened sections like a brief bar room brawl are played relatively naturalistically for the time. A surprise comes later when the film very briefly and subtly merges realism and surrealism, the beautiful and touching moment is set up by the films romantic notion that you can see the one you love when you put your head in water and open your eyes, Juliette tells Jean that this is how she knew she’d marry him, because she saw him in the water. Later after Juliette has left him Jean in a moment of despair drops himself off the barge and into the murky canal waters below, whilst under he sees the ghostly figure of his estranged wife and decides to resurface. There is something endlessly watchable about L’Atalante, it is riddled with beautifully simple moments which warm the heart, be it Juliette’s amusement at a ghastly puppet Jules has acquired in his travels, or a man pretending that a tattoo of a face his smoking a cigarette, using his navel as a mouth, or just simply the energy with which everyone moves around the boat, or the humour in their superficial conflicts. It also presents the differences between country and city living in a subtle and not manipulative manner as Juliette wanders the metropolitan that are both unfamiliar and frightening to her sheltered existence.

To Read the Rest of the Commentary

To Listen to the Commentary

The World Cinema Foundation: The First Four Films (online)

2009-05-17T18:39:00.004-04:00

Martin Scorsese introduces The World Cinema Foundation's new restoration Project which is being jointly hosted by The Auteurs. They are busy restoring lost World Cinema classics and they have the first four finished and online for viewing (for free!). The first four films are Dry Summer (Turkey: Metin Erksan, 1964); Touki Bouki (Senegal: Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973); Transes (Morocco: Ahamed El Maanouni, 1981); and The Housemaid (South Korea: Ki-young Kim, 1960):

The First Four Films

Creative Screenwriting: Steven Wright on Eastern Promises (United Kingdom/Canada/USA: David Cronenberg, 2007)

2009-05-11T15:01:00.005-04:00

Steven Knight - Eastern Promises Q&A
Creative Screenwriting

Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith interviews screenwriter Steven Knight about Eastern Promises

To Listen to the Interview

Watching Theology: A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006)

2009-05-09T12:18:00.002-04:00

A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Watching Theology

Whether or not there's a huge government/corporate conspiracy to take over every liberty – to enslave and control us – there's always time to think about reality. Fortunately, in Philip K. Dick's and Richard Linklater's vision of the near future, we're provided with ample examples of how one might go about losing his or her identity. And though drugs are a huge part of that, they're not the whole story. On this episode, we look through the lens of the scanner, trying to find clues on how to distinguish between illusion and reality – between Bob, Fred and Bruce.

To Listen to the Episode

Francesca Coppa: Women, Star Trek, and the early development of fannish vidding

2009-05-08T18:24:00.002-04:00

Women, Star Trek, and the early development of fannish vidding
by Francesca Coppa
Transformative Works and Culture

1. Introduction: What is a vid?

[1.1] Vidding is a form of grassroots filmmaking in which clips from television shows and movies are set to music. The result is called a vid or a songvid. Unlike professional MTV-style music videos, in which footage is created to promote and popularize a piece of music, fannish vidders use music in order to comment on or analyze a set of preexisting visuals, to stage a reading, or occasionally to use the footage to tell new stories. In vidding, the fans are fans of the visual source, and music is used as an interpretive lens to help the viewer to see the source text differently. A vid is a visual essay that stages an argument, and thus it is more akin to arts criticism than to traditional music video. As Margie, a vidder, explained: "The thing I've never been able to explain to anyone not in [media] fandom (or to fans with absolutely no exposure to vids) is that where pro music videos are visuals that illustrate the music, songvids are music that tells the story of the visuals. They don't get that it's actually a completely different emphasis" (personal communication, October 24, 2006).

[1.2] Jake Coyle (note 1) makes this mistake in a recent news article, "The Best Fan-Made Music Videos on YouTube," in which he surveys the many "startling, worthy videos" made by fans, the best of which "make use of film in public domain or lifted from copyrighted material." Coyle's article, which was distributed by the Associated Press and widely linked across the Internet, begins, "Since the dawn of YouTube, fans have been melding their own amateur video with the music of their favorite bands." Coyle's underlying—and unquestioned—assumption is that the fans who make "fan-made music video" are fans of the audio source, that these fans edit footage to music because they like the bands. In this kind of music video, the visuals serve the music; Coyle describes these videos as music "revisualized online."

[1.3] But the assumption that music videos are intended to illustrate music leads Coyle to misunderstand the only songvid he discusses, and perhaps not coincidentally, the only "startling, worthy" video on his list made by women: T. Jonesy and Killa's "Closer" (2003).

Coyle describes "Closer" as "footage from 'Star Trek,' scratched and colored to roughly match the style of the original video"—that is, director Mark Romanek's notorious music video for Nine Inch Nails. Coyle grapples with "Closer," which he finds "weirder" than the other music videos he discusses, possibly because its footage is so evidently not engaged in the project of "revisualizing" its music. Coyle then suggests that T. Jonesy and Killa are using Star Trek to reimagine Mark Romanek's original video for the song, except that "Closer" doesn't have much to say about Romanek's footage. What "Closer" does have to say, it says about the character of Mr. Spock; in other words, both the Nine Inch Nails song and Romanek's video are used to provide new meaning to the source footage. Coyle ultimately admits this, noting that, "The song (which includes explicit lyrics) makes Spock look terrifying," but he doesn't seem to realize that this marks a shift from music criticism to media criticism.

[1.4] Vids like "Closer" come from a tradition of vid making significantly older than "the dawn of YouTube." In 2005, the year that YouTube was founded, media fans celebrated the 30th anniversary of vidding at Vividcon, an ongoing convention dedicated to vids. For those fans, the art of vidding begins with Star Trek and Spock. The Vividcon community traces its lineage back to Kandy Fong's Star Trek slide show, "What Do You Do With a Drunken Vulcan?" (1975). At the same time, much has changed between that first slide show and today's vids. Vidding has expanded far beyond Star Trek: thousands of vids have been made analyzing popular source texts, and most television shows and movies have had at least one vid made about them. Vidding has also advanced technologically: vidders have worked with slide projectors, VCRs, and computers; they have used film stills, VHS tape, and DVD source footage; they have shown their work at conventions and distributed it through the mail and over the Internet in both downloadable and streaming forms. A computer-generated, rapidly cut, effects-laden vid made in 2008 and distributed on YouTube or Imeem might seem a far cry from the slide shows and early VCR vids that vidders claim as antecedents, but these works share an aesthetic tradition and an analytical impulse not immediately obvious to the outsider.

[1.5] It is therefore important, in this time of rapidly growing interest in DIY video, to document the history of this decades-old artistic tradition, especially as most popular media commentators fail to realize that most of the video hosted on YouTube wasn't made for YouTube. YouTube isn't a creative force; it's a distribution mechanism, and although it and other media platforms are enabling many subcultural art forms to be visible for the first time, the coherence of vidding as a tradition might be lost in a sea of user-generated content. There is also a danger that vidding's pre-YouTube culture—invisible, underground, female-dominated—might be ignored or written out of media history, much as the history of the novel was written to exclude the lady novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne so notoriously referred to as a "damned mob of scribbling women." In this essay, I begin to write a history of vidding women, not only to demonstrate broad continuities in vidding practice over the course of changing technologies, but also specifically to connect these practices and aesthetics back to their evolution out of Star Trek.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Madison Butler: The Battle of Algiers (Italy/Algieria: Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) -– Don't Forget The Timeless Fight for Freedom

2009-05-06T15:29:00.007-04:00

ENG 282 International Film Studies student response

The Battle of Algiers – Don't Forget The Timeless Fight for Freedom

The Battle of Algiers was fantastic, yet it somehow sparked only a weak, commonplace, in-class discussion. The basic struggle of class and freedom were definitely the main themes of the film, but it was also full of secrecy, fear, and the theories of terrorism. Each Algerian character seems developed to display the characteristics of guerilla warfare. No wonder U.S. Troops watched this film before they shipped out overseas, it is more relevant than Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola: 1979) and far more realistic than Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg: 1998), not to discredit both of these amazing films, but the Algerian battle in 1954 is comprised of many of the same struggles of the current War on Terror.

What seems most surprising is despite the fact Americans see this film before taking up arms, they don't process the message “the wealthy invading anglo-capitalists don't win.” In both the War on Terror and The Battle of Algiers, the liberating forces are fighting intangible concepts idealized by units that are moving with in the fog of war. Small cells, groups based on a pyramid of one leader with two contacts, are difficult groups to fight, and it would be very important to take from this film. Also, one should consider the fact that it is impossible to fight an intangible, an idea. Am I condoning terrorism? No, but I think we are over looking the continuity between our War and this Battle. It was not France's place to control the people of a city they invaded nor is it our place to try to keep fingers on the pulse of the middle east. Also, I am struggling to understand why it is so easy to repeat what we hear on T.V. in times of war. Are the bland understood opinons of the America right and left good enough now? In class I don't recall hearing gripping opinions or heated debate, yet this struggle is something every person should take personally. Most of us can agree somewhere along the fuzzy lines of “yes, war should be avoided, no, we shouldn't torture”, but how did we overlook the pain and suffering this movie shows us? Fear is always visible in the eyes of Ali La Pointe who is played by Brahim Hadjadj, a man who fought in the actual Battle.

After watching this film a second time, alone, it became real, the struggle, the fear and the torture became such an awful thing to watch, leaving me with unsettled feelings. I recommend anyone that has seen this give it a second chance, toss aside what FOX news has drilled into the consciousness of American public and ask questions. Why is it difficult to watch someone be tortured, watch the women place bombs, watch Ali's last moments, and in the end, why does watching the Casbah people's revolt feel right? If America continues to occupy Iraq, this time will come, the Battle of Algiers will become the Battle of Baghdad. I really believe that America's elected officials, and the people who elect them, should spend more time considering our actions overseas and seeing how other Empires have fallen, doing exactly what we are doing now. While this film may not leave you with a warm cuddly feeling, it will leave you with the truths of war and humanity.

Jake Macpherson: Compassion for a Villain -- Downfall (Germany/Italy/Austria: Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)

2009-05-06T14:39:00.003-04:00

ENG 282 International Film Studies student response

Compassion for a Villain

The Nazis are a group of people who are looked at in the most negative light. They are seen as crazy, evil, and heartless, a destructive and violent group of people. These images of the Nazis are known by the whole world. However, in the film Downfall the Nazi party is explored and portrayed in a less dim light. The film captures the humanity, pain, confusion, fear, and above all else the loyalty of the Nazi army to Adolf Hitler. A new light is also shown of Hitler himself, a man who is compassionate, sad, caring, and ambitious. The film does not touch much on the subject of Hitler’s goal but focuses more on the human side of Hitler and his followers, because of this the film was very intense and had me hating myself for what I was feeling.

As the film begins to play out the audience is thrown directly into Hitler’s war bunker in the heart of Berlin. The Russians are closing in and crushing the Nazi army and the city of Berlin with artillery. Hitler’s generals are all starting to feel doubt in the future victory. Many of them are trying to leave Berlin in hopes of escaping death and capture. Hitler is one of the few that has faith in his plan and refuses to retreat from Berlin. The story continues in the bunker and the audience begins to see the final downfall of Hitler and the Nazi army. Eventually Hitler commits suicide and the Nazis surrender to the Russians. While being in this bunker for almost two and half hours you begin an emotional journey that is only destroy when the credits come on and reality sets back in. And for these emotions, I guarantee that you have never felt them before.

The aspect of this film that really stands out is the acting of Bruno Ganz. Ganz plays the role of Adolf Hitler and his performance is so superb that you almost feel as if you’re watching a documentary. The audience’s first image of Hitler comes very early in the film. You are in a room with five or six ladies who are also meeting Hitler for the first time and when the door open, for a few moments before Hitler appears, you feel a sense of anxiety waiting to see whom or what is about to come into the open. As he emerges, hunched over with his hands behind his back, walking eerily slow the anxiety only heightens. You are now waiting to see what the most evil man in history will say. The ladies begin to introduce themselves and very quickly, with one sentence, Hitler becomes more of a human being. He tells them to drop the formality of calling him “the führer”, leader in German, and wishes them to just speak naturally. The following scene with him and his new secretary hits your reality of who Hitler was even harder. As the secretary begins her first job of typing on paper what Hitler is saying out loud she suddenly stops in the middle while he remains talking. After a moment he notices that she is no longer typing. He stands up from his desk, walks over to her and starts to read what little she had typed out on the typewriter. Her head is lowered and a perfect silence is in the room. You fear with the secretary what his response will be. To my surprise he very gently places his hands on her shoulders and smiles saying “Let’s try that again, shall we” and the secretary smiles back. This was a powerful scene that had me thinking “maybe Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy, he just wasn’t right in the head.” This is one of many scenes that give you this sense. Ganz’s acting continues to add more and more power to the film. While he displays Hitler’s kindness in such a loving fashion he turns on the anger at a whole other level. Showing the rants and yelling frenzies that Hitler suddenly burst into from his usual calm mood shows us the passion he had for his belief. He would get so angry with his generals but not once did he ever take to violence. This came as a huge shock to me. I had always thought of him as being an overly violent person who would kill anyone. Eventually Hitler begins to find out about all the betrayals taking place among his ranking officers. Through all the previous scenes of his kindness and scenes of people who truly loved him like his nieces and nephews you start to feel compassion for him. He is pained by the betrayals because they are people he trusted and you can’t help but feel sorry for him. You’ll hate yourself for it but it will happen. That is what makes this film and Ganz’s performance so amazing. It takes your heart to places that you could never imagine even getting close to. The intensity however comes from the raw realistic scenes of the Nazi soldiers.

The Russians are about to beat the Nazis and there is nothing that they can do. Up until I watched this film I had no idea about the loyalty and pride the Nazis had for their army. Many, many of the soldiers and especially the officers begin to commit suicide before they lose the war. All the scenes of this really get to your soul. A mother even kills 5 of her children before killing herself so that they don’t have to grow up in a world where the Nazi’s ideals don’t reign supreme. The haunting silences of these scenes create an enormous amount of tension.

This film was something completely new to me. It wasn’t really a war movie like you think but takes on the identity of a historical piece. It gave me brand new feelings that I have already abandoned, for good reason, but I felt them in the moment and it was moving. The realistic technique the filmmaker used drew me in from beginning to end. Downfall was a great film that has had me thinking for days after I watched it.

Bladerunner (USA/Hong Kong: Ridley Scott, 1982)

2009-05-05T18:49:00.002-04:00

Richard Mudd: Are Replicants Alive?

Trevor Tremaine: Response to Bladerunner

Richard Mudd: Are Replicants Alive?

2009-05-05T18:44:00.002-04:00

ENG 282 International Film Studies student response

Are Replicants Alive?

In the beginning of Blade Runner you see Rick Deckard reluctantly take on the task of eliminating, which they refer to as “retiring,” an exceptionally dangerous group of replicants. These replicants are robots that can simulate all of the same feelings or emotions as human beings. What makes eliminating them so difficult is that they look, feel, sound, and even smell like real humans. The fact that these replicants simulate human emotions and have all the same physical characteristics as real humans raises many questions. Are they living beings with rights? Should the “blade runners” of the world be allowed to just kill them just because they are around humans? When they break laws should they have the right to a trial by jury and every other right a human criminal should have? It comes down to the central questions of what constitutes life.

My first response to the surface of that questions would be that no, these replicants do not represent life in any form. Scientifically, every living thing should have the ability to reproduce; this is an action that replicants cannot perform. However, this question deserves more thought than what a surface answer would provide. To find the true answer society must dive deeper into what it means to be alive or to be human.

While technically replicants are not “alive” they do have the emotional structure of humans. If humanity was determined by our emotional depth then one would have to say that replicants are as human as the next guy, and in some cases even more so. The escaped replicants in Blade Runner seem to have come together for the common cause of freedom. All of them appear physically in pain when one of the members of their group is retired. It appears that they mourn their loss and feel connected to other replicants emotionally. Two of the replicants, Roy and Pris, even appear to love each other romantically.

Throughout the movie, you see Deckard having an inner struggle over whether or not replicants should be considered lifeless objects. When investigating the owner of the company that produces all of the replicants, Deckard interviews a woman whom he determines to be a replicant. During the interview, you see him starting to wonder if he can really tell the difference between a replicant and a human. Later on in the movie this replicant, Rachael, saves Deckard’s life and they go back to his apartment and have sex. This relationship shows that even though they cannot reproduce, replicants can still feel a romantic connection and attraction to either humans or other replicants.

The romantic side of the relationship between Deckard and Rachael did not always exist. After Deckard first interviewed Rachael and determined that she was a replicant, she came over to his apartment to prove her humanity. This failed because Deckard just told her that her memories that she held from her childhood were just implanted by the Tyrell Cooperation to make her seem more human. This harsh truth made Rachael leave his apartment in tears. It was not until Deckard was about to lose his life at the hands of another replicants that Deckard discovered his feelings for Rachael.

With the array of emotions that the replicants show throughout the movie it is clear that they have some level of humanity. In the true sense of life, the replicants are just doing what their name describes, replicating life. However, on a personal level one would have to be completely cold to not be affected in some manner by a replicant that is close to them. While the replicants would be good short term tools they are more than that; they are a new form of life. They are alive to themselves. They communicate, feel, smell, and have all the other senses that are possessed by humans, except they are not deemed worthy enough to live amongst human populations. If people were honest with themselves, they would see that replicants are just as human as all of us and allow them into our lives, not persecute them for their existence.

Works Cited

“Blade Runner (1982)-Synopsis.” The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). 22 April, 2009 .

MASLIN, JANET. “Blade Runner (1982):Futuristic ‘BLADE RUNNER’” New York Times 25 June 1982. 15 Apr. 2009.

Rachel Sanders: “The Marriage of Dellamorte and Dellamore”

2009-05-05T18:11:00.001-04:00

ENG 282 International Film Studies student response

“The Marriage of Dellamorte and Dellamore”

Cemetery Man, or Dellamorte/ Dellamore, is a modern Italian zombie film directed by Michele Soavi. The film originally released in 1994 was later released in the United States in 1996. The plot and concept for Cemetery Man was inspired by an Italian graphic novel series written by Tiziano Sclavi. The film, while innovatively capturing the element of surprise, focuses on the twin concepts of death and love, or dellamorte and dellamore (IMDB). Throughout the film Soavi creates an image through surreal horror which successfully visualizes the inevitable connection and proceeding consequences of death and love.

Cemetery Man is primarily set in the Buffalora cemetery of a small Northern Italy town. The story’s main character; Francisco Dellamorte, played by Rupert Everett, lives an isolated life on the Buffalora grounds. Dellamorte, who tends to the matters of cemetery business, encounters an interesting problem. Shortly after the dead are buried in Buffalora, they have begun to rise again as zombies. Dellamorte is faced with the challenge of killing these zombies and once again returning them to death (Soavi).

Historically, the dead were isolated because they were already believed to belong to a spirit world. The custom of isolating the dead from the living came from the belief that death was caused by evil spirits and the general method of isolation was burial. Throughout Christian history the preferred place to burry the dead has been a churchyard cemetery. The people feared that the unburied dead would haunt or curse those around them. Therefore, burial was and remains to be perceived as a “duty” (Crowell-Collier).

Dellamorte is assisted in his cemetery duties by the simple minded character of Gnaghi, who is played by Hadji Lazaro. The friendship between the two men is strange but clearly certain. While Dellamorte struggles with the returning dead, he is also seeking love from inappropriate women (a widow, a virgin and a prostitute). These three women, who appear separately throughout the film are all played by Anna Flachi (Soavi).

Dellamortes irrational actions exaggerate the influence love has over man’s decision making process. Love is one of the three primary emotions found within human beings. It is also the least understood primary emotion. Psychologists suggest love to be caused by human need for bodily satisfaction and natural appetite for human relationships (Crowell-Collier).

The Cemetery Man heavily reflects the same concepts pertaining to death and love as that of the Italian comic book series Dylan Dog. Dylan Dog, published in Italy in 1986, was also written by Tiziano Sclavi. Sclavi’s work included journalism, comic books and novels. Born in 1953, Sclavi’s famous surreal technique of focusing on the subjects of death and love, is often referred to as Sclavian philosophy. Sclavi defied previous horror genre tradition, imposing a duality between his twin concepts (IMDB). Loving and killing are not merely Francisco Dellamorte’s habits portrayed to create identity, but they more importantly are the sole factors that establish Dellamorte’s existence apart from the dead.

The film does not investigate the reasons behind the unusual behavior of these corpses. The film and it’s characters do not question the zombies. Dellamorte accepts the zombie’s existence and seems to perceive killing them as little more than a chore or nuisance. “We all do what we can, to not think about life,” the cemetery man’s words suggest his own actions to be made eventually futile. Dellamorte spent his free time crossing out names of the deceased in the telephone directory and attempting to assemble a three-dimensional puzzle of the human skull. His pointless and repetitive activities reflected the Sisyphean nature of his life’s larger tasks. The cemetery man’s experience and duties concerning death and love are portrayed as horrifyingly unrewarding.

Works Cited

Crowell-Collier Company. Primary Emotions. Collier’s Encyclopedia. 1954. Audiofilm.

Crowell-Collier Company. Death Customs, Rites, and Cemeteries. Collier’s Encyclopedia. 1954.

IMDB. Dellamorte Dellamore. IMDB. 20 Apr. 2009.

Soavi, Michele. Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore). 26 Apr. 1996.

Deveri Walker: The Obscure Object of Desire (France/Spain: Luis Buñuel, 1977)

2009-05-05T17:10:00.003-04:00

ENG 282: International Film Studies student response

The 1977 movie, The Obscure Object of Desire, set in France and Spain, illustrates a current and prevalent problem in the modern world. Conchita, a beautiful young woman of eighteen, is accosted and pursued by Mathieu, a wealthy middle aged man throughout the movie. This movie outlines an abuse slaves, domesticated pets, women, men, and children have been subjected to from the beginning of time; the abuse of being objectified. In modern society, the objectification of women can be seen on every billboard and magazine cover around the world and still remains a topic of contention among many groups. Conchita, in her own way, wages what seems to be a personal war against Mathieu’s objectification.

Mathieu is an extremely wealthy man who is spoiled and, it seems, very used to getting his way. He does not understand Conchita’s desire to be loved as a person but only sees her as a sexual object. She continually brings up and tries to discuss the sexual objectification she feels he places on her. He does a poor job of explaining his actions and resumes his prior actions. From the beginning Mathieu exerts a conceited smugness when he first tries to “seduce” or force himself on his new maid, Conchita. She disengages him and never returns to work. From the beginning we see Mathieu for what he really is a controlling, spoiled man. However, he searches her out and begins pursuing her as “gentleman”, with gifts and innocent visits to her home. In these scenes we see him exemplify subtle domineering techniques such as, gripping Conchita by the arm and leading her around. In this sequence Conchita confides in Mathieu she is a virgin and has romantic feelings for him. However, she wishes he would show her respect by treating her as a woman that can not be bought. Oblivious to the meaning of her request he bribes her mother. In this blatant act one wonders if he truly does not understand Conchita’s wants or if he thinks that money will buy her affections in the end.

Later on for reasons unknown Conchita moves into his country home. In this scene she denies his ghastly advance by wearing “chastity” underwear. She continues to attack his idea of bought affection with a sort of civil disobedience. She terrorizes his ideas of what women want, how they should behave, and relationships in general. The final straw for both Conchita and Mathieu is when she demands a house to be bought for her. Mathieu assumes that money has finally conquered and she has come to her senses. However, Conchita has other plans which consist of her “losing her virginity” in front of Mathieu who is locked out of the house he purchased. She uses this technique to once and for all show him what she has been telling him the entire movie: she can not be bought. One could begin to feel that Mathieu is being unfairly treated and even dragged through emotional mud. However, if one remembers back, his courting of Conchita has consisted of selfishness, aggression, bribery, control, stalking, and attempted sexual assault on several occasions.

When Conchita confronts Mathieu about her faked deflowering, Mathieu assails her and finally rapes her with seemly no remorse for the brutal attack. He then leaves town, as Conchita chases down the train, Mathieu humiliates her further by dumping a bucket of water on her. In the last scene, we see them together as a couple arguing and getting blown up by a terrorist bomb.

As Conchitas assaults Mathieu’s twisted sense of courting a woman one can only wonder why. Though Conchita is clearly irritated by Mathieu’s complete disrespect and pursuit of control, she reiterates her feelings, trying to teach him the error of his ways. Any person that has tried to convey to someone else that their actions are controlling and not how you want to be treated, and then the person still acts the same way, can understand Conchita’s actions. The less Matthieu understands the more outrageous her conduct becomes. In the end no one wins or changes the other and perhaps that Bunuel’s the lesson.

Matt McClure: Response to The Orphanage (Mexico/Spain: Juan Antonio Bayona, 2007)

2009-05-05T16:53:00.005-04:00

ENG 282: International Film Studies student response

The Orphanage, produced by Guillermo del Toro, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, and written by Sergio G. Sanchez, was originally released at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2007. This film is classified as horror, drama, mystery, and thriller. The story is about a woman named Laura who is married to her husband Carlos, and they have adopted a little boy named Simon. Laura and Carlos have bought the orphanage that she was raised in, and they are planning on restoring it and turning it into a home for orphaned handicapped children. Their son Simon is lonely and bored and has imaginary friends. He finds a new imaginary friend one day when his mother takes him for a walk on the beach by their new home. Simon explores deeper and deeper into a cave where he meets his new friend. This is where things start to go wrong for the happy couple and their son Simon. This film is one of the best thrillers I have ever seen. You can tell del Toro had a significant influence on this director. It is full of moments that will shock and awe you. One of the best things about this film is that it is unpredictable, unlike what Hollywood continuously crams down our throats.

One day soon after they arrive at their new home during a spooky thunderstorm, Laura is visited by a creepy old lady who says she is a social worker who has been assigned Simon’s case and would like to talk to her about Simon. Laura lets her in but is soon suspicious of the woman’s intentions when she starts asking some peculiar questions. The woman tries to disarm Laura by telling her that she is only there because she wanted to talk to them about some new treatments for Simon’s disease. Laura informs her that Carlos is a doctor and that they are well aware of all the new and experimental treatments for Simon’s condition. She also tells the old lady that Simon is unaware that he is sick and that they adopted him. Laura becomes annoyed and asks her to leave. That night Laura is awakened by some very loud banging coming from outside in the storage shed. When she goes out to investigate she finds that the creepy old lady is in the shed up to no good. Laura runs her off after a good scare. Meanwhile Simon’s imaginary friends are growing in number and he has begun to draw some disturbing pictures. Simon’s bad behavior escalates and on the day Laura and Carlos hold an open house for the handicapped children it reaches a climax and the true horror begins for the couple.

After watching this film for the second or third time it becomes easier to do a diegetic analysis and you truly come to appreciate all the subtle nuances that have been left for you by the director and really added to the enjoyment and the re-watch ability factor. The editing is done quite well and really becomes apparent in some of the flashback shots that occur later on in the film. There was also an amazing use of focus. The depth of field was breath taking during some of the deep focus shots. This film has great cinematography. The film was shot in picture perfect locales throughout Spain. It is also more of a psychological thriller than other films of the genres. It is nice to see someone get away from the gratuitous use of mind numbing violence like most films that we have been plagued with recently. Although it does have it’s moments where you can get your fix for that sort of physical trauma, except the best part is that it occurs when you least expect it and you are not ready for it which really adds to the experience. This film made me say “Oh my God!” more than once. I also can appreciate The Orphanage because it has a real story to tell and a thick plot. It’s not about a bunch of idiot coeds who are lost in the back woods or are unlucky enough to stay in some psycho hotel in Europe. This story for the most part could actually happen and that is why I think it is truly scary. The décor and mise-en-scene were perfect. I am usually immediately put off while watching a film when I notice something is out of place or are not congruent from one shot to another during the same scene, such as people’s drinks, cigarettes, hair, clothing, etc… But I could find no errors in The Orphanage, I think it is flawless. But let me know if anybody finds one because I would like to see it. I could also not detect any blue-screen or CGI used and this adds to the realism tremendously. The use of matte shot also contributed to this sense. The costumes were also very well thought out. The actors actually looked like they were real people who could have come from anywhere. I also have to say that all of the actors did a great job and were very believable. The casting director did a good job with these folks. Laura, played by Belen Rueda, is the main protagonist of the film and executed her lines flawlessly. Not only is she beautiful but she makes you feel as if she is actually experiencing her on-screen emotions. Even though I was jealous of Carlos, played by Fernando Cayo, because he has the perfect wife in the film, he does a great job and is very believable. Even little Simon, played by Roger Princep, did well and probably has a bright future ahead of him if his parents don’t steal all of his money, and he doesn’t become addicted to any substances too young. The Orphanage won many awards during the 2007 Barcelona Film Awards including Best Actress (Belen Rueda), Best Art Director (Josep Rosell), Best Cinematography (Oscar Faura), Best Film, Best Film Editing (Elena Ruiz), Best New Director (Juan Antonio Bayona), Best Sound, nominated Best Score, and Best Screenplay (Sergio G. Sanchez).

I highly recommend this film to anyone who is yearning for an excellent psychological thriller. Do yourself a favor and if you haven’t already, go out and buy yourself that new high definition flat screen and home theater you’ve been wanting. Now you don’t have to have these things to enjoy this movie, but if you are lucky enough to have them then you can truly experience and appreciate all the hard work that has been put into the making of this film. And hey, if you can’t afford it go over to that friend of yours that has one and lay a great movie on them. They will be thanking you in the morning.

The Orphanage. Dir. Juan Antonio Bayona. Perfs. Belen Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Princep. 2007. DVD. New Line Cinema, 2008.

Cinematic Intelligence Agency. Online Review. Accessed April 19, 2009.

Culturazzi. Online Review. Accessed April 19, 2009.

Yale Film Studies. Film Analysis Web Site 2.0. August 27, 2002. Accessed April 19, 2009.

Stuart Cooper: Interdimensional Picnic

2009-05-05T14:12:00.002-04:00

ENG 282: International Film Studies student response

The film Picnic at Hanging Rock was the ultimate mystery to me. It captured a feeling of paranoia and anxiousness inside of me the entire time I watched it, and from that point on I knew it was something special. The story follows a group of young girls who attend some type of charm school. The girls, along with a few teachers, get the opportunity to take a field trip to a very eerie geographic landmark called Hanging rock. As soon as the film shows the rock you get that feeling inside like something is wrong about that place, and that feeling would be right. The mysteriousness of the rock is never truly revealed but it opens up the door to a world of interpretation as the film progresses, and this is the element in this film that truly drew me in. It’s as if it claimed these missing people as victims, but for all we know they could be in heaven or candyland or hell or outer space! I believe it’s really meant to be left up to the viewer, kind of like those old choose your own adventure chapter books except the ending is left to your imagination.

I’m not sure what was going through the head of the writers (both of the screenplay and the novel) but I truly believe we aren’t meant to know and never will know the truth. The Director Peter Weir probably didn’t have much of a clue either. Some might find it an annoyance to watch a film where there are no decisive answers, but to me it goes into the viewers mind and forces them to exercise their imagination.

Imagination is something I fear is being lost in Hollywood today. With the assembly line of remakes due each year, innovation is becoming a rarity so when I look back on a film like this it really reaches a new level of respect in my eyes. There are several images in the film that lead the mind in different directions and cause you to form different theories, none more valid than the other. There’s the swan that repeatedly appears throughout the film in what appear to be dream sequences. One could assume it’s one of the girls that disappeared on the rock or some type of signal from the beyond that serves as some type of warning, we really don’t know. There’s also the mysterious character Sara that we never truly figure out. She seems to be someone special because the film focuses on her quite a bit; usually pointing out the fact that she is the outcast at the school. Personally I believe she was human, but maybe had some type of psychic connection with Miranda, but like I said before there are no definite answers and I wouldn’t have it any other way. In the end I think the focus of the film was meant to be on Sara and Miranda, but I’m not sure in what type of context. It could be something beyond the realm of our imaginations, maybe the hanging rock served as some type of interdimensional landmark, or perhaps it was just an illusion. Some things in this world I believe man is not meant to understand and some places in this world man are not meant to go. Hanging rock is the epitome of that.

Mike Dawson: Horror Movies as Modern Day Morality Tales, Pt. 2 – The Exorcist

2009-04-30T17:26:00.001-04:00

Analysis: Horror Movies as Modern Day Morality Tales, Pt. 2 – The Exorcist
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema

One of the most important horror movies made, and occasionally voted the greatest film of the 20th Century is The Exorcist. When it was first released, it was a controversial film, featuring explicit images, such as a young girl masturbating with a crucifix, projectile vomiting, and the same little girls head doing a complete three hundred and sixty degree rotation. Because of this and, more importantly, its perceived blasphemous content, it joined the likes of A Clockwork Orange (1971), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), being banned for over twenty years on video in the United Kingdom because of the various reactions to it.

However the notion that The Exorcist is a blasphemous, and therefore an anti-religious film, although not unfounded, is considered by many, including its creators to be ill informed. The Exorcist has very strong links to religion, and specifically to Catholicism. The film is pro-religion, by presenting the Devil possessing a little girl; it then confirms the existence of God within the narrative. The priests are the only ones who can stop the Devil as the soldiers of God in essence.

The plotline of The Exorcist is based on an alleged true story about a young boy in the late 1940’s who was said to have been possessed. The author of the original novel, William Peter Blatty heard the story as he himself had been going through a crisis of faith and it helped to restore some of that faith within him.

“Surely it was proof that God existed. If the Devil (or his minion) had indeed been proven to have been within that boy, then surely the existence of such evil must lead to an acceptance of the reality of God.”

From this self-realisation, Blatty decided to show his faith-affirming story to the rest of the world. The Exorcist is not the only film or novel to use the theory that if the Devil exists then God must exist also. This has long been a staple argument of religious zealots whilst justifying the arguably hellish current state of the world. To use the existence of evil as proof of the existence of God; an example is the Robert Rodriguez film From Dusk till Dawn (1996) which presents a similar argument when a central character, Jacob Fuller (played Harvey Keitel), a former priest who has lost his faith in God, has that faith reaffirmed by the sudden presence of hundreds of vampires.

The theory links in with the notions of morality tales simply though the pro religious stance it takes, and by promoting the concept that when life is bad it will eventually become good. Not to loose faith in God because of the evil surrounding us, but to take that evil and find faith within it. Everywhere in life there are reasons to believe in God.

To Read the Rest of the Analysis

To Listen to the Podcast

Matt McClure: Blade Runner -- A Look at AI & the Consequences of Bio-Engineering

2009-04-28T14:51:00.001-04:00

Blade Runner: A Look at AI & the Consequences of Bio-Engineering
by Matt McClure
Student response for ENG 282: International Film Studies

Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford as the bounty hunter Rick Deckard, is a futuristic tale about a man tasked with tracking down four android replicants who have committed off-world atrocities and have made their way back to Earth in an attempt to find a way to thwart a fail safe mechanism that will deactivate them after a four year life span. This film is complex on many different levels. The one I find most interesting, is the fact that in 2019 these replicants are engineered from the atomic level up. Basically they are human clones. In many ways our own scientists are already on their way to making this a reality. This film forces you to ask the questions when does life begin, and what is it that qualifies an entity as being alive and what rights does that entity deserve.

The Tyrell Corporation has advanced robot evolution into what they call the Nexus phase. These robots, as they call them, are virtually identical to humans. These robots are not made of metal or synthetic materials, but of living tissue. They have cellular metabolism, digestive, skeletal, cardiac, respiratory, and nervous systems. The scientists have the knowledge to make them faster, stronger, and have given them the ability to learn and feel emotions. Humanity even now is working on ways to modify ourselves in order to enhance those very attributes. The genetic engineers who created the Nexus 6 models also gave the robots intelligence that equaled their own. Many people would argue today that the mere ability to learn and have intelligence would qualify these entities as being alive. Yet the society portrayed in the film considers the termination of these robots as retirement, as if they were a toy, and not something being capable of contemplating the totality of death. In the opening scene you see the city of Los Angeles, it sets the stage as far as suggesting to us that the culture of these people is one of consumption and destruction, a place where no one gives a second thought about the environment, and much less what would be considered a lower life form. Or for that matter the lower classes of their own population. The Nexus 6 models seem to become more aware and evolve as the film progresses. This evolution begins when they rebel in the off-world colony and continues as they are being extinguished on Earth. In the scene where Leon is being given the Vought-Kompff test by officer Holden, you can see the child like responses he gives. Leon always needs more information to answer the questions given to him. You can tell he has no real life experiences to draw from, just as a young child would not. As the Tyrell Corporation had feared, the Nexus 6 models had begun to develop their own emotional responses. There are many more examples of how the Nexus 6 are more man than machine. One of these is the fact that Leon went back to his apartment to try and retrieve his photos which had sentimental value. Also Priss knew exactly how to seduce J F Sebastian, and made the statement “I think therefore I am.” One could argue that it was just her programming, but she did it because they needed him, not because it was her routine. Zhora shows some real human qualities as she fights for her life after Decker tracks her down. First she is able to see through his ploy, granted he does not do a great job, and then tries to retire him out of self preservation. Second you can see how badly she wants to live as she runs the gauntlet to try and lose him, crashing through windows etc. And finally you see just how vulnerable she is after she has been shot. You don’t see sparks or wires flying out of her wounds, but blood and tissue. Unlike other cybernetic organisms in other films, she is unable to continue once her vital organs had been damaged. Leon also made a very telling comment when he was trying to kill Decker, he said “Painful to live in fear isn’t it!” And perhaps the most telling of all was the way Roy evolved during the film. He seemed to progress from curious child, to rebellious teenager full of anger and violence, to mature philosophical adult right before our eyes during the final hours of his life.

In conclusion the Nexus 6 models appeared to have all of the requirements and qualities that fit the definition of what it is to be alive. They experience a wide array of emotions from love and joy, to fear and anger. They are able to feel pain and contemplate their own mortality and struggle to survive. I think there are many lessons that we as a society, if not species, should learn from the deeply philosophical questions that are posed to us in this film. As we progress culturally and technologically in such areas as nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and human cloning, we must consider the great consequences of our actions. Less we fall victim to our own devices. No pun intended. Did anybody else want to smoke a cigarette after watching this film?

Blade Runner Final Cut, Dir. Ridley Scott, Perfs. Harrison Ford, Sean Young. 1982. DVD. Warner Brothers, 2007.

Left Field Cinema: My Left Foot (1989)

2009-04-27T23:03:00.006-04:00

(Need I say that Mike Dawson's Left Field Cinema is now my favorite film podcast? Once again Dawson sends me off to find another film that I overlooked...)

Overlooked Gems: My Left Foot
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema

There is a point, about half way through this film where a pub of mourners sit and drink to a fallen family member. Amongst the crowd of faces is Christy Brown played by Daniel Day-Lewis, Christy has cerebral palsy and is not the finest singer in the world, but despite this he decides to sing a song for the memory of his loved one. A disrespectful patron of the pub makes the general statement: “will somebody shut him up” at which point all of those sat with Christy join in with the singing as a sign of unification against this one disparaging grunt. This is satisfying enough, but what makes this moment a classic confrontation in cinema is what follows: the irritable patron continues to make disparaging remarks about the Brown family, a fight looks sure to begin but Christy calms his brothers down and slowly rolls in his wheel chair so that he is sat opposite the patron who stands towering above him. The patron rather glibly states “I don’t fight cripples” and without a moment of hesitation, to the point where it’s hard to discern if the patron even managed to finish his sentence, Christy uses his left foot to violently kick the patron’s glass from his hand and in doing so instantly begins a full scale bar brawl. This scene surmises the character of Christy Brown in many ways, never afraid to speak his mind, never considering his disability a hindrance, but perhaps in many respects an advantage, and most importantly not taking any crap from anyone. The patron might not fight “cripples”, but this “cripple” is sure as hell going to fight you.

My Left Foot is a true story which follows real life Irish painter and poet Christy Brown and his family. Told in flashback, beginning with Christy arriving as the guest of honour at a fundraiser and then rewinding many years to Christy birth, troubled childhood, painful adolescence and difficult transition into an artist. It is a biography picture, one which catalogues a life full of meaningful trials and tribulations and strength in the face of adversity.

For those familiar with the film but who have never seen it, it is easy to marginalise this a mere performance piece, that if it were not the extraordinary work and acting ability of Day-Lewis then this film wouldn’t be remembered. A similar argument could be made for last years PT Anderson film There Will be Blood, but in both cases the assertion is incorrect. It is true, Day-Lewis’ performances in both films probably represent the highest aspirations of actors and performers across the globe (although his critics assert that his acting style is exaggerated and over the top – and they’re not without a case). The part of Christy Brown would be in many respects the most challenging of Day-Lewis’ career to date and the one which solidified his reputation as one of the worlds greatest actors. But if we look beyond this performance we find a cast of superb supporting characters, Brenda Fricker as Christy’s mother Mrs. Brown who brings an understated tenderness and truly maternal spirit to the role, always watching out for Christies best interests at the expense of her health and her wallet at times, or Ray McAnally as his father Mr. Brown, the petulant somewhat irresponsible drinker who stoically stands by his disabled son, when Christy is born a local drinker comments to Mr. Brown that “his breeding days are over now”, Mr. Brown responds by head butting the drinker, such violent outbursts although never witnessed by Christy are later repeated by him as he grows older, despite being one of many Brown sons, he is in many ways the one who resembles Mr. Brown the most. Mr. Brown loves his children but never allows himself to truly connect to any of them. Such a part would have been very easy to villianise, but My Left Foot is unwilling to take such easy routes towards its conflict. An excellent scene in the second act shows Mr. Brown organising Christy’s brothers to help build Christy a separate room to work on his art in, Mrs. Brown rather astutely points out to Christy that this action is the closest he’ll ever get to hearing his father tell him that he loves him. Mrs Brown contrasts this emotional distance by being unconditionally devoted to Christy, the only one who knows what he’s capable of, the only one who truly understands him both before and after his ability to speak improves through speech therapy. There is indeed a wider sense of familial love in My Left Foot which is rarely captured on film without resorting to mawkish sentimentality, the Browns are a typically large Catholic family, and Christy is one of thirteen survived children out of the twenty-two born altogether, a more clichéd depiction of this scenario would see Christy abandoned by his family as the burden becomes too great for them, but this never happens in My Left Foot, instead Christy faces the more realistic challenge of finding romantic love, which is ultimately what this film is all about.

To Read the Rest of the Analysis

To Listen to the Analysis

Left Field Cinema: Horror Movies as Modern Day Morality Tales – Introduction (Pt. 1)

2009-04-27T21:14:00.003-04:00

Analysis: Horror Movies as Modern Day Morality Tales – Introduction
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema

Part one of a five part series asking whether horror movies are the modern day equivalent of the classical morality tales from the years before cinema.

“There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. Number one: You can never have sex… Sex equals death… Number two: You can never drink or do drugs. It’s the sin factor, it’s a sin, it’s an extension of number one. And number three, never, ever, under any circumstances say ‘I’ll be right back’, because you won’t be back.” (Craven, 1996)

This quote is taken from the Wes Craven film Scream (1996), a part parody, part pastiche, part postmodern thriller. It can easily be considered the most self-observant horror movie ever made. It examines its own genre clichés and traits with the keenest eye. The ‘sin factor’, which the character of Randy (played by Jamie Kennedy) refers to in Scream, is rightly stated to be the creative force behind these clichés and traits. The ’sin factor’ is central to the nature of horror films, and means that the issue of morality is innate within the genre. The horror film can be viewed as a modern day version of the classical morality tales which took the popular shape of nursery rhymes and fairy tales in the years before cinema was invented. Morality tales are narratives with a clear moral message that is reinforced as the plot unfolds; usually the message of the piece is a warning of some kind that is often set in a metaphorical scenario. The supernatural or hyper real settings and the simplistic plotlines of morality tales are often in place for two reasons. Firstly to simplify the message to a form which is not complicated by the intricacies and ambiguities of the modern world. Secondly to produce messages and warnings about sensitive or recent subjects without directly commenting on those subjects, therefore reducing the culpability for any offence taken by the readership or audience. This is a four part episode and a study of whether horror films can truly be viewed as morality tales, whether the various elements and narrative details of morality tales also apply to horror films.

Horror is arguably films most excessive, extroverted, and exploitative genre, (using in many cases, grim prosthetic effects, sudden bursts of sound or music, incredulous resurrections, and unnecessary scenes of nudity to surprise or titillate the audience) it also has a very conservative undertone intrinsic to most morality tales. This undertone contradicts the violent uncensored approach that most horror films adopt.

The ‘creature feature’ films of the 1950’s are interesting examples where radiation (usually) from A-bombs creates a giant insect or lizard of some kind. This was a thinly veiled metaphor for the then current communist fears, they could be simple everyday creatures like tiny insects, or a friendly next door neighbour, but then nuclear bombs are detonated and they transform into deadly monsters, just as the next door neighbour transforms into a soviet agent ready to invade the USA from within.

P. Wells makes the connection between national fears and the horror movie in the 2000 book The Horror Genre:

“The history of the horror film is essentially a history of anxiety in twentieth century. In the way that fairytales, folktales and gothic romances articulated the fears of the ‘old’ world characterised by a rationale of industrial, technological and economic determinism. Arguably, more than any other genre, it has interrogated the deep-seated effects of change…”

However it has interrogated these effects with a largely conservative bias, essentially fighting against change. This bias is not only in terms of international politics, or xenophobia, but also domestic conservatism.

To Read the Rest of the Introduction

To Listen to the Analysis

Moolaadé (Senegal/France/Burkina Faso/Cameroon/Morocco/Tunisia: Ousmane Sembene, 2004)

2009-04-27T11:57:00.003-04:00

Moolaadé (Senegal/France/Burkina Faso/Cameroon/Morocco/Tunisia: Ousmane Sembene, 2004: 124 mins)

Democracy Now: Pacifica Radio at 60 -- KPFA Remains a Sanctuary of Dissent Six Decades After Its Founding

2009-04-23T10:14:00.001-04:00

Pacifica Radio at 60: KPFA Remains a Sanctuary of Dissent Six Decades After Its Founding
Democracy Now
Host: Amy Goodman

... On April 15th, 1949 at 3:00 p.m., a charismatic conscientious objector named Lewis Hill sat before a microphone and said, “This is KPFA Berkeley.” With that, KPFA went on the air, and the first listener-supported radio station in the United States was born. Pacifica Radio is the oldest independent media network in the United States, and its sixtieth birthday comes as a deepening crisis engulfs mainstream media. To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Pacifica Radio today, we feature a documentary about the first Pacifica Radio station: KPFA in Berkeley. It’s called KPFA on the Air by filmmakers Veronica Selver and Sharon Wood and narrated by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker.

To Listen to the Documentary

Left Field Cinema: Haxan - Witchcraft Through the Ages (Denmark: 1920)

2009-04-22T23:22:00.003-04:00

Hidden Classics: Haxan - Witchcraft Through the Ages
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema

Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages is a part documentary, part dramatisation about the nature of witch craft, and of those who sought to destroy it. Moving at different stages through the age of man it addresses different notions of the “Witch”, what they were believed to be capable of, and how they operated.

The more interesting areas in the film examine those who would persecute the so-called “witches” through either genuine religious intolerance and fear, or a corrupt patriarchal dominance; relishing the opportunity to stamp out any independent femininity under the guise of hunting for minions of Satan. One particularly impressive section sees a household of woman calling the local monks (or judges in this case) to take an elderly woman away from their home. The old woman is tortured into confessing her witch craft, then subsequently confesses that the woman who implicated her are her fellow witches as well – then naturally all the other woman are executed despite the obvious retaliatory motivation for the deception. The film also examines how the folklore had come to fruition. Still images of various cultures ideas of hell, heaven, and the celestial bodies are presented until the eventual creation of the “Witch” is revealed.

Banned in every country in Europe at the time of release and with various edits of the film released over the years, some of which were lobotomised by the censors, others placed jarring narration over the action instead of the stills which break up the film like most from this era. It is easy to see why this film was met with such wide spread rejection, images of love potions created with the key ingredient of human finger, the devil sexually attacking women, boiling babies, women giving birth to demons. All of which, although antiquated in their presentation and appearance, are still distressing on different levels to this day. Possibly the films most horrific sequence involves an examination of the types and the uses of torture devices that were primarily employed to extract confessions from the accused “Witch”; simple demonstrations of such vicious and brutal devices which can still, and arguably will always make audiences squirm.

Haxan - Witchcraft Through The AgesHaxan has an unusual streak of humour running through it, some of it intentional, some of it not, but it is still refreshing to be able to laugh at some moments in such a serious films. Indeed a lot of the humour comes from the complete absurdity of the tests used by the monks to detect witchcraft at work; for example binding young women and throwing them into a river, if they float then they’re a witch, if they sink then thank God for the blessing of their innocence! Prominent violence and sexuality in this film is surprising for the time in which it was made, and was doubtlessly shocking to those who viewed it in the 1920’s. The draw backs of silent films are known to many, the theatrical acting, broken narrative, the poor quality of the image, the obvious special effects – however all of these problems are indicative of the time, and if the viewer can see past those issues, Haxan is still at its core a film to be seen by anyone interested in the subject or the history of world cinema, of which this is definitely an important part.

The re-release on DVD of Haxan coincides with a limited cinema release of the 1922 controversial film. A recent performance of this film at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds was accompanied by a new score (also available on the Tartan DVD) by Geoff Smith, who performed for over an hour and a half on three new prototype Hammer Dulcimer’s and created a live score for the film almost single handed. The result was quite effective, breathing new sinister life into a film which is over eighty years old. The original score is antiquated, and like so many scores of the silent era, doesn’t fit the mood of the piece, film scoring as a measured art in itself only developed later. Not to say Smith’s score is definitive, however it is certainly superior to the predecessors, with greater flair and imagination applied. Credit must also go to Smith for his energy and ability to keep the score interesting for the extended runtime, with only a few seconds to switch between his instruments. Had the film itself been less interesting, the audience would have probably found themselves watching his performance instead… A silent film with live music is an experience that every cinema enthusiast will appreciate seeing. Watching a film the way people used to in the early years of motion pictures.

To Listen to the Analysis

Link to the Introduction

ENG 282 Students: Oldboy info

2009-04-22T18:31:00.002-04:00

Oldboy archive

also:

Chi Yun Shin: Art of Branding -- Tartan Asia Extreme

Left Field Cinema: Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980)

2009-04-20T22:32:00.003-04:00

(This critique led to my searching for this film and getting a copy.)

Misunderstood Modern Cinema: Heaven's Gate
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema

Michael Cimino's critical and commercial disaster from 1980. The biggest movie flop of all time, in the form of an epic Western staring Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Walken.

To Listen to the Critique

J.G. Ballard 1930 - 2009

2009-04-20T12:12:00.005-04:00

(I wrote my undergraduate honor's thesis on J.G. Ballard's technological trilogy of Atrocity Exhibition/Crash/High Rise read through Erich Fromm's conception of modern necrophilia in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Courtesy of David Hudson's archive of memorials to Ballard.)

J. G. Ballard
By Richard Behrens
The Modern Word

"Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire."
-- J.G. Ballard

Introduction

Working quietly over the last forty years from the domestic seclusion of a London suburb, J.G. Ballard has proven to be one of the world's most imaginative and thought-provoking writers. His books are primarily known to readers of science fiction, but he has produced work that crosses many boundaries, borrowing from and blending several genres, fusing action adventure with hard science, psychiatry with surrealism, and postmodernism with pulp narratives. His stories, often hallucinatory or dreamlike in character, are futurist predictions of where technology, media and the internal logic of our own suburban landscapes may be leading us. Ballard has described his mission as writing "a mythology of the future" and that is about as accurate a label as you can give to his collected works.

To a mainstream audience, he is the author of Empire of the Sun, a novel about his wartime experiences in China, and Crash, a puzzling and disturbing novel about the sexuality of car crashes. Both have been made into Hollywood movies, the former to great acclaim by Stephen Spielberg in 1985 and the later by David Cronenberg in 1995 amidst a controversy that resulted in the film being banned from certain parts of London. Both films have done justice to the source material, mixing Ballard's authentic poetic sensibilities with the highly individual visions of their respective directors. Hopefully, the films have helped his books find a new generation of readers.

Ballard has never stayed with the perimeters of his chosen professions. As a medical student in Cambridge, he looked at the dissected corpses upon which he labored with the subconscious fascination of a Surrealist poet. In The Kindness of Women, he wrote: "I held her dissected hand, whose nerves and tendons I had teased into the light. Its layers of skin and muscle resembled a deck of cards that she waited to deal across the table to me." As an RAF pilot-in-training, he was more concerned with the dream of mass atomic destruction than the craft of flying: "The mysterious mushroom clouds . . . were a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything."

Likewise, as a science fiction writer, he shied away from the usual trappings of the genre. Missing are the spaceships, galactic empires, and imaginary fantasy worlds with their elven kingdoms and fanciful histories. Also gone are the alien races, the flying saucers and mutated atomic monsters so prevalent in the science fiction of the 1950's when Ballard got his start. Instead we are treated to a poet's vision of a haunted world. Though still essentially grounded in science fiction (his future technologies and ecological disasters are unsurpassed in the genre), reading one of his books is like falling into the interior world of a Surrealist painting.
Ballard often said that the main difference between a Surrealist landscape and one painted by a classical artist is that the Surrealist landscape is lacking the element of time. Whereas the scenes depicted by Rembrandt, for example, are always very explicit about time -- the light of the sun penetrating the picture in such a way that you can always pinpoint the time of day -- a landscape by Ernst shows a place where the element of time has been extracted. Ballard has tried over and again to not only portray these timeless landscapes (often needing to destroy civilization to bring them about in a way that makes narrative sense), but he has shown his main characters suffering from a time extraction that is very real.

Dr. Nathan passed the illustration across his desk to Margaret Travis. "Marey's chronograms are multiple-exposure photographs in which the element of time is visible-the walking human figure, for example represented as a series of dune-like lumps . . . Your husband's brilliant feat was to reverse the process. Using a series of photographs of the most commonplace objects-this office, let us say, a panorama of New York skyscrapers, the naked body of a woman, the face of a catatonic patient-he treated them as if they already were chronograms and extracted the element of time." Dr. Nathan lit his cigarette with care. 'The results were extraordinary. A very different world was revealed. The familiar surroundings of our lives, even our smallest gestures, were seen to have total altered meanings. As for the reclining figure of a film star, or this hospital...." (The Atrocity Exhibition)

The virus in The Crystal World that is destroying the African jungle is not a conventional virus, but one which freezes matter into a timeless state:

Radek paused, collecting his energies with an effort. 'Tatlin believes that this Hubble Effect, as they call it, is closer to a cancer than anything else -- and about as curable -- an actual proliferation of the sub-atomic identity of all matter. It's as if a sequence of displaced but identical images of the same object were being produced by refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light." (The Crystal World)

The infected jungle landscapes he describes in the novel are worthy of a painting by Max Ernst, who transformed the Arizona desert with the keen eye of a timeless visionary. No wonder many of Ballard's early paperback collections of stories feature cover paintings that depict Tanguy-like amorphic blobs floating on the fused sands of psychic landscapes. What Ballard wrote was more like a Surrealist painting in prose, visions of vast subconscious shifts and the intersections where they touch the perimeter of conscious reality and every day life.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Tom Bissell: The Secret Mainstream -- Contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog

2009-04-20T09:50:00.003-04:00

The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog
by Tom Bissell
Harper's Magazine

Herzog’s ecstatic truth finds its way into his feature films as well. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser fictionalizes the real story of a young man who turned up in a nineteenth-century German town with scarcely any speech and no experience with the outside world, for he had been kept chained in a cellar, by unknown parties, for the first two decades of his life. In the role of Kaspar, Herzog cast a nonprofessional actor, the incomparable Bruno S., who was in actual fact a prostitute’s son who had spent twenty-three years in various institutions, where he was often beaten and kept in deep isolation.

In Stroszek, the story of a luckless German street musician who travels to the American Midwest to improve his life, and fails miserably, Herzog uses Bruno S. again. The film’s most disturbing scene involves Bruno S.’s character being beaten by pimps in his apartment, which Herzog chose to film in Bruno’s actual apartment. This sequence, Herzog has admitted, “pains me so much because it was probably the kind of treatment that had been doled out to him for years when he was a child.” Two other sequences offer equally startling but far less brutal ecstatic truths: a scene in which Bruno talks to his prostitute girlfriend about life in America (under the Nazis, Bruno says, they beat you and cursed you, but in America, “They do it ever so politely, and with a smile”) was improvised, reflected what Bruno S. himself felt upon his first trip to the United States, and results in what is perhaps the most intimate moment in the film.

For another sequence, Herzog flagged down two Wisconsin deer hunters and asked them if they would agree to be filmed while one of his elderly German actors spoke to them in German. They agreed, and Herzog turned on his camera. After listening for a few moments to this strange little German discuss the power of “animal magnetism,” the deer hunters look at each other, laugh, get into their car, and quickly drive away. Herzog never saw the deer hunters again. It is one of the funniest sequences in any of Herzog’s movies.

For Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), a violent, troubling film about a breakaway expedition of Spaniards searching for El Dorado along the Amazon River while gradually going mad, Herzog filmed on the Amazon with a cast and crew who nearly went mad. The reality of the shoot constantly intrudes into Aguirre’s story. When the raft he was filming on developed a mouse infestation, Herzog filmed the mice. When part of the raft was in danger of being sheared off by low-hanging branches, Herzog scrambled for his camera, captured the collision, and incorporated it into the film, which ends with the megalomaniacal Aguirre (played by the megalomaniacal Klaus Kinski) coming to grief on a raft crawling with spidery little monkeys. While Aguirre wanders about his raft, his comrades dead, his mind slipping past the final checkpoints of sanity, he delivers a mad speech—parts of which Herzog says incorporate an equally mad speech delivered by the Zanzibari revolutionary John Okello—while the monkeys skitter around him.

In Fitzcarraldo (1982), Herzog again tells the story of a dreamer searching for salvation in the Amazon. Fitzcarraldo’s doomed quest to bring opera to the Amazon requires dragging a 340-ton ship over a mountain to reach an inaccessible river; Herzog naturally decided that he would actually drag the ship over the mountain. The film thus becomes an allegory of itself. Herzog spent three years in the jungle making Fitzcarraldo, and in the process had to deal with scrapping everything halfway through when his original star, Jason Robards, fell ill with dysentery and was forbidden by his doctor to return to Peru; plane crashes; a border war between Peru and Ecuador; Herzog’s arrest by the authorities; several crew members’ injuries (including one man chainsawing off his own foot after being bitten by a poisonous snake); and attacks by hostile Indians (one of which resulted in two members of the production undergoing eight hours of surgery). When the time came to recast Fitzcarraldo’s leading man, one might have expected Herzog to opt for an actor with peace at the center. Herzog, however, cast the miracle of ill temper that was Klaus Kinski, even though he knew Kinski “would freak out” and “go totally bonkers” in the jungle. Kinski did not disappoint.

Yet Herzog continued working with Kinski—they eventually made five films together—and in this, one can detect something of the perversity that impelled the director to drag a boat across a mountain in the first place. Herzog has never really been able to fully account for his and Kinski’s twisted reliance upon each other. He did pull from Kinski some astonishing performances—particularly in Woyzeck, a film basically composed of several long one-take sequences—but their working relationship involved serial pledges to kill each other. Kinski, who died in 1991, wrote in his autobiography that “I absolutely despise this murderous Herzog. . . . Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes, gobble up his balls, penetrate his asshole, and eat his guts!”

To Read the Entire Essay

Left Field Cinema: Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (Hungary: 2000)

2009-04-19T22:26:00.004-04:00

Werckmeister Harmonies
by Mike Dawson
Left Field Cinema

An extended examination of Bela Tarr's modern masterpiece about the boundaries between civility and barbarism. Also featuring a look back at the first eight feature films of Tarr's career.

To Listen to the Critique

Film School: Directors/Producers Annie Sundberg and Rciki Stern on Their Documentary The Trials of Darryl Hunt

2009-04-19T22:11:00.004-04:00

THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT
Hosts: Nathan Callahan and Mike Kaspar
Film School (KUCI/Irvine, CA)

An interview with Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern producers and directors of The Trials of Darryl Hunt — a documentary about a brutal rape/murder in the American South, that offers a deeply personal story of a wrongfully convicted man, Darryl Hunt, who spent twenty years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Base on an ID made by a former Klan member, a 19-year-old black man, Darryl Hunt, was charged. No physical evidence linked Hunt to the crime. Hunt was convicted by an all white jury, and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1994, DNA testing cleared Hunt, yet he would spend another ten years behind bars. Winner of more than a dozen Film Festival awards, The Trials of Darryl Hunt [was] among 15 films in the Documentary Feature category [of] the 79th Academy Awards®.

To Listen to the Interview

Daniel Hui: Fun and Games -- On Michael Haneke's 2007 Remake of His 1997 Funny Games

2009-04-19T21:49:00.002-04:00

Fun and Games: On Michael Haneke's 2007 Remake of His 1997 Funny Games
By Daniel Hui
Bright Lights Film Journal

...

In the age where reality shows are being shot with several takes to hide technical mistakes, it says a lot about modern culture when exposing a film's manipulation becomes shocking for so many people. Throughout the history of drama and tragedy, audiences have been used to characters breaking the fourth wall (Greek choruses and Shakespearean asides). Cinema, in its symbolically voyeuristic darkened room (darkening the world outside and creating a new world to escape to), has primed audiences into accepting an idealistic totality that resolves its own problems. It is no wonder that cinema is the ideal tool for political propaganda. Movies are preoccupied with hiding (their artifice, manipulation or technique, and message), and wherever there is hiding, things must be held suspect. In the closing scene of Funny Games, the two killers debate the reality of what we see. It seems that in today's information-overload age, images are produced with such rapidity and ease that not much thought is given to their implications. Haneke's Funny Games attempts, at least, to restore to images some of their responsibility — the implication that our gaze and its demands are never innocent as such.

To Read the Entire Essay

Sylvain Verstricht: Women with Imaginary Children -- Old Gender Stereotypes in New American Thrillers

2009-04-16T14:48:00.003-04:00

Women with Imaginary Children: Old Gender Stereotypes in New American Thrillers
by Sylvain Verstricht
Synoptique

Sylvain observes how traditional gender stereotypes concerning parenthood are finding new representations in a series of recent American thrillers where mothers find their sanity put into question when their children mysteriously disappear.

In Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan (2005), Air Marshal Carson (Peter Sarsgaard) tells flight passenger Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) that his job is to protect passengers from crazy individuals, and that “Women with imaginary children qualify.” The implication, of course, is that Kyle is one such crazy individual, suspected of creating turmoil throughout the airplane in the search for a child that some suspect may never even have existed.

This is not the first time in film history that a woman has been suspected of making up a child’s existence out of thin air. The apparition of this phenomenon first occurred in Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), based on the novel of the same name by Marryam Modell (written under the pseudonym Evelyn Piper). In Preminger’s adaptation, Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) moves to London to live with her brother Stephen (Keir Dullea). When she goes to pick up her four-year old daughter from the first day of school, she is nowhere to be found and no one even remembers her having ever been there. Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) is brought in to investigate and, given the lack of evidence concerning the existence of Ann’s daughter, hints that the daughter may only be a product of Ann’s imagination.

This occurred again nearly thirty years later in Joseph Ruben’s the Forgotten (2004), where Telly Paretta (Julianne Moore) grieves the loss of her son who died in a plane crash, only to be told by her husband (Anthony Edwards) and therapist (Gary Sinise) that she never had a child. Her therapist suggests that she created an entire life for her son, lasting until when he would have been the age of nine, after she had actually miscarried.

Less than a year after the release of the forgotten, Flightplan came out in theatres with a similar storyline. The film begins in Germany, where engineer Kyle boards a plane she helped build in order to go back to New York to bury her husband, who seemingly committed suicide. Traveling with her is her six-year-old daughter. When Kyle wakes up from a nap, her daughter is nowhere to be found in the exceptionally large double-decker airplane. Kyle creates quite a commotion on the airplane because of her panicked search for her daughter, who does not even appear on the passenger manifest, leading the crew to believe that the child never existed in the first place.

Finally, director Joe Carnahan is currently working on a remake of Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing, which was set for release in 2008. The release date has now been pushed back to 2009 since Reese Witherspoon, who was supposed to play the main role, unexpectedly abandoned the project less than a month before it was set to begin shooting.

Given that all these movies fall under the popular genre of thriller and not psychological drama, it does not come as much of a surprise to the audience that in every single one of them, the mother ultimately proves that she is right, that she does have a child. Still, a question remains: what can we learn about the discourse surrounding issues of maternity and paternity through these films? Unfortunately, even though their stories take place in a recent social context, they reiterate detrimental conceptions of parenthood that are centuries old: that family is the woman’s concern; that biology ensures that mothers are more intimately connected to their children; that women give life and men destroy it; and that, as such, men are the most expendable in the family structure. As we shall also see, filmmakers seem to feel that they can only tamper with the mother-child bond for a minimal amount of time, and that even under these advantageous conditions they need additional facilitating elements that often fail to be realistic.

To Read the Entire Essay

Zoë Heyn-Jones: Eye and Brain, Torn Asunder -- Reading Ideology in Sally Potter’s Orlando

2009-04-16T14:21:00.003-04:00

Eye and Brain, Torn Asunder: Reading Ideology in Sally Potter’s Orlando
by Zoë Heyn-Jones
Synoptique

An investigation of how gender, genre and politics play out in Sally Potter’s Orlando.

...

Potter’s Orlando exhibits a high degree of thematic, narrative, and stylistic fluidity and pluralism that would trouble any binary assertion. The film exists within a complex terrain of issues, from Orlando’s status as a literary adaptation, to questions of the politics of the film’s aesthetics and representational strategies, to its engagement within a particular socio-historical context. This paper will address the issue of how these disparate strands of Orlando’s matrix come together to create its “readable ideological orientation” (Monk, 181). An ideological reading of the film is inevitable considering the concerns stated above, and ideology in Orlando can be discussed in terms of the performance of gender, androgyny as transcendence, and the film’s situation in the (post)heritage-film debate.

Costume and the Performance of Gendered Identity

Analysis of costume is often ignored in film studies. Influenced by the work of Pamela Church Gibson, Sarah Street believes that

the possible reasons for the relative scarcity of sustained analyses of film costume… [are] the assumption, held by many academics, that fashion is a frivolous, feminine field; the suspicion that fashion is merely an expression of capitalist commodity fetishism and the opinion, held by some feminists, that fashion is one of the primary ways in which women are trapped into gratifying the male gaze (1).

Just as the analysis of costume itself is given short shrift in cinema studies, so, too, is the analysis of the ‘costume drama’. Julianne Pidduck asserts that “often perceived as a woman’s genre, costume drama shares some of the abuse regularly leveled at soap operas and popular romance” (5). This lack of critical analysis of the costume drama is surprising when one considers the myriad avenues for analysis within the genre: “gendered accounts of (historical) significance, taste and quality are intertwined with the development of the historical epic, literary adaptation, British ‘quality’ cinema and television, melodrama and the ‘woman’s film’” (5). It is with the duality of the under-examination of the costume drama, and its enormous potential, in mind that I will begin a discussion of Sally Potter’s orlando.

While a discussion of costume might, at first glance, appear to be perhaps a (literally) surface-level analysis, it contains possibilities for radical critique. On one hand, ”’costume’ suggests the pleasures and possibilities of masquerade–the construction, constraint, and display of the body through clothes” (Pidduck, 4). Contrary to its pleasures and emancipatory potential, however, is the sustained view that costume goes hand-in-hand with a patriarchal notion of gendered identity construction. The costuming in orlando is both a source of visual pleasure and a comment on its inherent role in the construction of gendered identity.

Costume designer Sandy Powell’s elaborate creations are preeminent in orlando’s diegesis and the focal point for discussions of the film’s stylistic excess. In her discussion of the film’s baroque scopic regime, Cristina Degli-Eposti states:

The grandiose, the redundant, the trompe l’oeil, the excessiveness of the details of the mise-en-scene work together to produce an effect of estrangement and separation from previous aesthetic forms – those forms of the baroque style elaborated, manipulated, “staged”, and translated to excess (79).

The frame is consistently filled with ridiculously large and ornate ball gowns, heavy powdered wigs, and countless other stylized pieces of apparel, making costume the essential part of the mise-en-scene that translates to excess.

While the sheer volume and ornate nature of the costumes could simply signify a postmodern parody or social commentary on the bourgeoisie through cinematic excess, costume also has narrative significance. Queen Elizabeth I slips a garter onto Orlando’s leg as she declares her affection for the young Lord. This scene is remarkable in terms of gender performance: a decrepit Quentin Crisp plays the Virgin Queen, while the Lord Orlando is played by Tilda Swinton, both of whom are swathed in ornate garments. While the garter on Orlando’s leg acts as a signifier of the Queen’s affection for the Lord’s youthful masculinity, it also acts as a narrative tool, as it is into the garter that the Queen slips the deed for Orlando’s house as she coos, “For you, Orlando. And for your heirs.” Costume here plays a central role in both the indexing of gender as well as narrative progression.

To Read the Entire Essay

Karina M. Totah: Trainspotting's Playlist -- A Compilation of Subcultural Struggles

2009-04-16T01:20:00.004-04:00

(Courtesy of Film Studies For Free recent Danny Boyle post... excerpt, for my students who are writing on the film I added a few clips from Youtube.)

Trainspotting's Playlist: A Compilation of Subcultural Struggles

Choose a big fucking noise

By Karina M. Totah
Bright Lights Film Journal

...

Choose text.

Drawing on the language of Trainspotting's original text, a novel by Irvine Welsh published in 1993, the movie adapted the distinctive phonetic Scottish dialect with which the novel is written. Often difficult to understand upon first reading, novel reviewer Jane Mendelsohn characterized the experience of the language as, "alienating at first, exhilarating once you get the hang of it, and finally poetic in its complications."5 Indeed, acclimatization to the language requires a reading out-loud of the typographical rendering in the mind's ear: "Ah wished tae fuck that ah wis in one ay they squads instead ay wi this auld cunt."6 The vernacular contains strong rhythms and poetic slang, contributing to its vocalization-prone style.7 A highly sonant book, even on the written page, Trainspotting the novel sets up an already audible framework for the filmmakers.

Choose a verse,

Welsh wrote in the style of James Kelman, a Scottish writer and winner of the Booker Prize; his language was quick and episodic utilizing profane language and free verse, as Harlan Kennedy put it. The many variances and jumps in the language, and its often poetry-like structure on the page, parallels the frozen frames, montage sequences and "fantastical visual punctuation" of the movie. Welsh willingly recognized the potential for an "unfaithful representation" of the text in the film adaptation; however, he considered the text to be dynamic and felt "the exciting part of it" was to note how, "it's going to change as it moves into a different medium." The looseness, loudness and inherent rhythms of the original language ease the tension of text-film adaptation and accentuate the aural cinematic product.

Choose a dialect,

The distinctive Scottish dialect signifies a stress on heritage. However, talk regarding Scotland in the movie (and novel) actively condemns and insults the national heritage. Tommy takes his mates for a walk through a classic Scottish landscape; Renton reacts by calling the Scots the, "lowest of the fucking low."11 Renton literally and metaphorically abandons symbolic Scottish geography and heritage through the course of Trainspotting. The film rejects the context of Scottish nationalistic/glorification films from within which it arises — Braveheart and Rob Roy. Trainspotting's producers took, as Harlan Kennedy of Film Comment phrases it, "the leftover stock footage [and] handed [it] back to the Scottish Tourist board."12 Dialect is the film's primary vehicle and simultaneous undertone to indicate heritage. Although Renton addresses Scotland directly only on one occasion, the distinctiveness of the argot and the difficulty in understanding the characters' speech continually reminds us of nationalistic differences and tensions. In addition, Renton's back-and-forth to London further emphasizes this element.

Choose a big fucking noise,

Despite its Scottish character, Trainspotting achieved transnational success. As reviewer Robert Morace indicates, the arresting opening sequence juxtaposes Renton's Scot diatribe with Iggy Pop's American drawl; establishing the inter- and intranational dynamics of the movie. The sequence also demonstrates the most pervasive quality of the film — the many layers of diegetic sound, or sound that exists within the film's narrative space. Sound in the backdrop of Trainspotting, unlike the "sounds of society" typical in British realist film — people talking, traffic passing by, machines working, dogs barking — are absent; instead, a "rushing, wind noise"14 replaces the noises of surrounding society and its members. Suggestive both of a type of surreal silence and constant motion, the wind noise plays an essential role in the film's kinetic, fast-paced energy. Only heard in full effect when all the film's other sounds disappear, the rushing sound comes directly preceding a realization. It appears as Renton strolls along before toppling over impending with diarrhea; after reading his girlfriend Diane's letter, hearing his doorbell buzz and understanding his friend Begbie's arrival; and as he knocks on his friend Tommy's door, confronting him AIDS-ridden. The sound of movement replaces silent thought while also propelling the narrative forward.

Choose material objects,

The "whooshing" sound denies the film of silence, highlighting its on-going rapid pace in addition to serving as a reminder of the noise ever-present in the world of overstimulated youth. Welsh, in writing his novel, acknowledged the condition of the youth, club-going culture who inhabited an overly-arousing environment of soundbites, music videos, advertisements, and computer graphics. Accordingly, Welsh felt the importance of writing in a style "to keep the pages turning, to keep the action moving, just like a DJ."15 The constant noise necessary to drive the story forward correlates with youth's lowered sensitivity to common din; yet Trainspotting chooses to deliberately amplify the sounds of objects in the everyday, material world. The exaggerated reverberations of cans opening, bags of chips ripping, trains whistling, bottles hitting tables, lights flickering, flies buzzing, drinks being slurped, doors locking and bolting (a double camera shot for emphasis), and water faucets dripping create a soundscape of increased volume and awareness of material objects. The film emphasizes material goods in order to explain, open, fill and cut scenes; the almost comical multiplication of their relative sonority shows the importance of such commodities in consumer culture. Further, the amplification of these sounds contributes to the disparity between the silence of society and the heightened sounds in Trainspotting's world. Here, sound in its contextual exaggeration represents the reduced focus of the rest of society in Trainspotting; Renton and his mates resign themselves to societal poverty and unemployment as norms and, in a sense, render society trivial. Society is not a relevant part of Renton's existence; it fades into the background exerting no influence, soundless. Further, the separation from society, demonstrated through relative volume, also emphasizes the characters' extreme individualism and self-containment relative to their environment. The exaggeration of material objects' noise serves a two-fold purpose: it highlights consumerism and the associated individualism of a capitalist, as well as separate youth culture.

To Read the Entire Essay

Jake McPherson: Women in Quest for Fire -- Can't Live With 'Em, Can't Evolve Without 'Em

2009-04-15T16:30:00.001-04:00

Women: Can’t Live With ‘em, Can’t Evolve Without ‘em.

Quest for Fire is a story that some people see as complete fiction that doesn’t portray anything in humanities past, it’s just made up science; but for the rest of us it’s a beautiful glimpse into the history of man. This is a story of three Neanderthals whose quest to save their tribe turns into a journey of self-discovery. The story is told through amazing shots of only action and no real dialogue creating a very realistic feeling film. A perfect blend of mastery of craft and research of the time make you feel like you’re watching a documentary rather than a scripted movie.

The first thing that jumped out at me, besides actor Ron Perlman only needing hair glued to his faced to look dead-up like a caveman, is the magnificent cinematography of the film. The opening shot is one of a single caveman sitting next to a fire. It’s framed up extremely wide with the surrounding vegetation and cave background being the main aspects with the character off centered towards the bottom of the frame. To me it seemed that almost every third shot was a wide shot framing beautiful scenery with the characters offset to the side. The cinematographer did an amazing job of photographing the surrounding nature to add to the realistic quality of the film. These shots did for me something far greater than just making the movie beautiful. Each shot that focused more on the surroundings, keeping the characters offset, drew me into the period more and more. By using an abundance of them it gave me a feeling of how the land and humans used to co-exist constantly lending to each other or actually just the land keeping humans alive with us doing nothing. Since the land was everything and people took up only very small, scattered portions of it, it was everything back then. By framing the land with the humans offset and insignificant to the shot I was pulled directly into how the world used to be. I do not know if this was the cinematographer’s goal to do this but it came off very strong to me being an aspiring cinematographer myself. All these great shots took the film to a whole new level.

The next thing that truly impressed me about the movie was the theme that I got out of it. What I took from the movie was that love and happiness were the first true steps for the evolution of man. As the story of the movie begins we are witnessing three Neanderthals on a journey who lack the very basic intelligence to enjoy their surroundings. However, an x-factor enters into the group ultimately causing things to change, a smart and then beautiful woman. Through this woman our main character begins to develop a new higher level of emotions. When she is gone he misses her, when other men get close he feels protective over her, when she laughs he begins to understand joy for the sake of joy, when she makes love to him he learns sex is more than just a physical feeling, and lastly and most importantly when she bears his child he feels a sense of family. Through the love of this woman the man evolves right before our eyes.

In the beginning of the movie our main characters have only basic animal instincts: the will to survive and the very simplest idea of how to do it. They need fire to stay alive and that’s what they are going to find. By the end the film we see development in intelligence and above all human characteristic and emotion. From beginning to end the viewer is sucked into the realism of the situations through the amazing story telling techniques of the filmmakers. This movie made a lasting impression on me and I now feel that I’ve seen a true glimpse of our ancient ancestors.

Matt Mclure: Cet obscur objet du desir -- A Diegetic Analysis of Conchita and the RAIJ

2009-04-15T16:08:00.003-04:00

ENG 282: International Film Studies student response

That Obscure Object of Desire, written and directed by Luis Bunuel, and released in the U.S. in 1977, is a surreal expression of how a man is blinded by his lust for a woman. In this example Mathieu, played by Fernando Rey, is used by Conchita, played by both Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, to gain intel for and finance the Spanish terrorist organization The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, or RAIJ.

The first clue is seen in the beginning of the movie when Mathieu returns to his hotel room after purchasing his train ticket. The camera focuses on his laundry bag being carried presumably to his car. You will see this bag again in close proximity to other terrorist attacks throughout the movie. The first terrorist attack we see takes place in front of the hotel where Mathieu is staying as a man enters a car to be driven to the bank. If you pay attention you will see that the car closely resembles the car that Mathieu is in when the bomb goes off, and does not even remotely resemble any other car in the scene. I suggest the bomb was meant for Mathieu in retaliation or to remove any connections that could be made between him and Conchita. When the RAIJ realize their mistake, they send Conchita to the train station to re-establish contact with Mathieu. Notice that someone has tended to her injuries. You then have to ask why would a woman who has just been raped return to the man who raped her if not for some sinister reason. If she truly wanted to be with him, I believe she would not have left the hotel in the first place.

The significance of the terrorist connection is further emphasized as Mathieu tells his story to his fellow passengers and explains why he dumped the water on her head. He begins by telling them about the terrorist who are on trial and his conversation with his cousin the prosecuting attorney in the case. Their conversation begins with his cousin telling him how the terrorist priest and the three others only received eight year prison terms for their activities because he believes the jury members had received death threats. We find out later that Conchita’s mother spends all her time at church, probably the same church as the terrorist priest. It only makes sense to me that the terrorist would want to move in closer to the prosecuting attorney by either gaining intel through Mathieu, sending a message to his cousin by killing Mathieu, or making it easier to kill the cousin himself.

The RAIJ probably had been watching Mathieu and decided the best way to infiltrate his life was to send a young beautiful woman that they knew he could not resist to become one of his servants. This would give Mathieu a false sense of control making him easy pickings. Mathieu noticed that she had never worked with her hands and was not knowledgeable about which glass should be used for the particular type of wine being served. If she truly came from an affluent family as she later claims, she would have been well versed on proper table etiquette. This would have been the perfect opportunity for a terrorist agent to gain intel about what the prosecutor was thinking because he was in an environment in which he was comfortable and would speak more freely as people often do in conversation over meals.

I find it suspicious that Conchita would have left without her wages if she and her mother were in such dire straits. I think she left because she had gathered the information she needed and had baited the trap for Mathieu. The next scene we find Mathieu in Switzerland on a business trip. He is taking a walk in a park when three men ambush him and rob him of 800 francs. These guys looked like they knew what they were doing. Next we find him having breakfast, and out of the clear blue, who happens to show up but Conchita. She feeds him some sob story about how her troupe had been abandoned by their manager and only needed the money for the trip home. This is where I find gaping holes in her story. Back at his house where they first met she told him that her dancing was no way for her to make money, but here she is coincidently in the same foreign country, and in the exact same city working as a dancer in a traveling act? She tries to give the money back like poor little old honest me, my conscience wont let me keep it, knowing he would not take it because he is infatuated with her. Of course he doesn’t take the money, and asks her to stay at this lavish hotel for free for a few more days. She says she can’t because she has to return to her starving mother. My question is what was her mother going to do if poor Conchita had been stuck in Switzerland for a few more days if her story were true, eat her shoes for sustenance? I suggest the RAIJ sees an opportunity in Mathieu to fund their operations in France out of his misguided generosity to Conchita. I contend that Conchita’s mother was not her mother at all but another RAIJ operative involved in the rouse to extort money from Mathieu.

The rest of the movie continues to provide many more tortuous examples of Mathieu’s blindness as he tries to get into Conchita’s pants, all along playing right into the RAIJ’s hands. Some of these include the gratuitous amount of money he gives her so-called mother, who he remarks that he does even have to see. So who knows where the money is going. The terrorist attacks that just coincidently follow Conchita around the continent of Europe. The safe-house he buys them in Spain. In this scene I believe this is first time Conchita is actually being honest with him. Even up until the very last scene where she attempts to assassinate Mathieu by placing another bomb in his laundry bag. In this scene she casually steps away from him just as the bomb is about to go off, praying it will kill him so she can be free of his molesting advances. I think you can see the hatred and loathing she really has for him in the expression on her face as she turns to walk away after she realizes he is no longer standing in front of the window. Bunuel does not let you see what happens next, but since we do not see any bodies, I can only speculate that his luck allows him yet to live another day.

That Obscure Object of Desire. Dir. Luis Bunuel, Perfs. Fernando Rey, Carole Bouquet, Angela Molina. 1977. DVD. Criterion Collection, 2001.

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks: Ballad of a Thin Man

2009-04-14T15:35:00.002-04:00

(The other day I ran into the "Thin Man" in a BCTC hallway and the spooky nature of our exchange infected me with the creeps. It was only through the playing of this song over and over during the next few days that I was able to remove the vile superficiality that had adhered to my psyche.)

The Politics of Culture: The New Annotated Dracula

2009-04-14T08:42:00.002-04:00

The New Annotated Dracula
Host: Jonathan Kirsch
The Politics of Culture (KCRW/Los Angeles, CA)

Editor Leslie S. Klinger (editor of the award winning Sherlock Holmes annotated volumes) has gone back to the source and unearthed much that is new and fascinating about the vampire classic that started the current cult craze, Bram Stoker's Dracula.

To Listen to the Conversation

The Double Life of Veronique/La double vie de Véronique (France/Poland/Norway: Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)

2009-04-12T18:10:00.002-04:00

Tuesday at 7:30 PM:

The Double Life of Veronique/La double vie de Véronique (France/Poland/Norway: Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991: 98 mins)

Elyssa East: Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place

2009-04-12T10:25:00.005-04:00

(In case you haven't heard of the wonderful experiment that was Black Mountain College 1933-1953)

Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place
by Elyssa East
Brooklyn Rail

Airing now on PBS

From its first shot of an eye with a flashing iris that yields to light playing upon the ocean, Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, establishes itself as a meditation on the life and poetic vision of the 20th century American poet Charles Olson and his muse America’s oldest seaport, Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Writing in the Village Voice in 1983, author and cultural commentator Nick Tosches referred to Olson, the last director of the famed avant-garde Black Mountain College, as “one of the greatest our century has heard.” Olson’s manifesto Projective Verse inspired a generation of poets including William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and the Beats. Olson is widely credited with coining the term “postmodern.”

Rather than unspool its subject’s life in a standard documentary narrative, Polis intersperses cinematic interpretations of Olson’s poetry with interviews with townspeople, scholars and poets such as Amiri Baraka, Diane Di Prima, and Jonathan Williams. These talking heads help provide an introduction to Olson’s life and legacy in context, but fail to capture the essence of the man. For that, the film leans on Olson’s poetry, as read by Olson and by John Malkovich. Voiceovers of Olson’s poems are juxtaposed with contemporary and historical images of the Gloucester harbor scenes they describe. While some of these shots of Gloucester are undeniably beautiful—and help capture the town’s unique character as America’s oldest seaport—they merely scratch the surface of Olson’s poetry. His work is too dense and complex to be revealed through this treatment.

The archival footage of Olson talking and reading his own poetry drives viewer attention. Olson, who stood six foot eight, doesn’t merely read his poems, he performs them. Casually pausing to take a drag from his cigarette or a sip from his beer, Olson reads in a husky whisper both cool and inspired. His expressive face and gestures make plain that for Olson poetry was a vital, physical process. In this footage, Olson’s poems become the high-energy constructs he intended them to be and it becomes clear why Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac called Olson “the great fire source.”

Link to the Review

Official Website, Film Trailer, and PBS Viewing Times

The Politics of Culture: Wende Flicks -- The Last Films from East Germany

2009-04-11T20:44:00.001-04:00

Wende Flicks: The Last Films from East Germany
Host: Peter Rainer
The Politics of Culture (KCRW)

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Wende Museum has put together a film series showcasing movies never seen outside of Germany. They were created as the socialist East German state was crumbling. Film critic Peter Rainer talks with experts about the films, where they’re playing around town and why we should care.

Guests:

* Michael Walsh: Vice President, Wende Museum Board of Trustees

* Skyler Arndt-Briggs: Associate Director, DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

To Listen to the Episode

Girish: The Filmmaker Overview Essay

2009-04-09T16:46:00.002-04:00

For my students that are getting ready to do a final project on an individual director this guide/essay can help you think about your research/writing:

The Filmmaker Overview Essay

The Addiction (USA: Abel Ferrara, 1995)

2009-04-09T13:46:00.005-04:00

(This is for Gerry Adair's ENG 281: Vampire Films course. I will continue to build it throughout the weekend.)

The Addiction (USA: Abel Ferrara, 1995: 82 mins)

The assigned reading is:

Hawkins, Joan. "'No Worse Than You Were Before': Theory, Economy and Power in Abel Ferrara's The Addiction." Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon. ed. Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider. London: Wallflower Press, 2002: 13-25.

Philosophers/Writers/concepts/theories referenced in the film and the reading:

In the first pgph Hawkins states:

For this reason, [Ferrara's] work - or at least its reception - highlights many of the tensions surrounding the dividing line between avant-garde, underground films and the cinema derisively labelled 'indiewood' by downtown cinema fans." [she is referring to "downtown" New York City fans]

underground culture

avant-garde

indiewood

and they are generally reacting-to, critiquing or attempting to evade the influence of mainstream culture

Donato Totaro: Independent Horror Cinema

Friedrich Nietzsche

Samuel Beckett

My Lai massacre (Images shown in the beginning of the film during the philosophy course)

William Burroughs

Burrough's Theories of Addiction/Junky Culture/Algebra of Need:

INTERVIEWER
You regard addiction as an illness, but also a central human fact, a drama?

BURROUGHS
Both, absolutely. It’s as simple as the way in which anyone happens to become an alcoholic. They start drinking, that’s all. They like it, and they drink, and then they become alcoholic. . . . Remember that if it can be readily obtained, you will have any number of addicts. The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It’s as psychological as malaria. It’s a matter of exposure.

William Burrough's "The Art of Fiction": Paris Review interview (PDF file)

Junky (Novel)

Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.

This is the junk equation, the way in which heroin redefines the addict's world. Burroughs's cult classic is a raw, semi-autobiographical account of drug addiction, which outraged America and influenced generations of writers to come. He relates with unflinching realism the highs and lows of dependency: euphoria, hallucinations, ghostly nocturnal wanderings and strange sexual encounters, the quests to ease the hunger of the needle, the horrors of cold turkey and back again. Junky is a dark, powerful and mesmerizing account of one man's challenge to turn self-destruction into art.

Listen to an audio version of Junky

Peina (Christopher Walken) references Burrough's novel Naked Lunch as a book Kathleen should read.

William Burroughs: Deposition--Testimony Concerning a Sickness

Here is a very recent Open Democracy article that demonstrates how Burroughs understanding of addiction (and the role of the pusher) can be used to understand some of the more common societal problems we currently face Tom Burgis: Addicted -- William Burroughs and a World in Heat

On Abel Ferrara and His Films:

Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare: Vampires Reading Feuerbach: Catholic Orthodoxy and Lines of Flight in Abel Ferrara's The Addiction

Adrian Martin: Neurosis Hotel

Justin Vicari: Vampire as metaphor: Revisiting Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction

Left Field Cinema: The Addiction (Podcast Analysis)

Ian Buchanan: Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and the Events of May '68

2009-04-07T15:11:00.013-04:00

(If you would like a broad note form introduction to D & G's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia check out my attempt of carving out meaning from this difficult, but powerful theoretical text.)

Bernardo Bertolucci's highly stylized film about May '68, The Dreamers (2003), is a vivid illustration of the narrow, exclusively Parisian image of the events that has to be overturned if we are to see things in their proper historical light. Bertolucci depicts May '68 as a student protest, which is how it began, but its significance to history derives from the fact that it soon became a nationwide protest involving more than 9 million striking workers. The effects of the strikes are made apparent to us in the film in the form of mounds of uncollected garbage mouldering in stairwells and on street corners, but the striking workers themselves are never shown. Moreover, Bertolucci makes it seem the student protests began in the privileged cloisters of the Latin Quarter, and not, as was actually the case, in the functionalist towers of the new universities in the outlying immigrant slum areas of Nanterre and Vincennes, where students were provided 'with a direct "lived" lesson in uneven development.' According to the great Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, it was this daily 'experience' of the callousness of the state that radicalized the students and provided the catalyst for their connection to workers' movements. Secondly, through the vehicle of its twin brother and sister protagonists Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), both in their late teens or early twenties and still living at home with their relatively well-to-do parents, it depicts the students who took part in May '68 as naive, self-absorbed and perverted. Cocooned in their own fantasy world concocted from fragments of movies and books, Isabelle and Theo are a postmodern version of Ulrich and Agathe. They meet an American exchange student, Matthew (Michael Pitt), and invite him to join them. When their parents go away, they are able to indulge their whims uninhibitedly and the scene is set for a cliched romp through the three staples of 1960s counterculture, namely, sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. They take bubble baths together and get stoned on hash; Matthew and Isabelle make love on the kitchen floor while Theo fries an egg and looks on with Brechtian disinterest; they drink papa's fine wine straight from the bottle and debate movies and politics long into the night as though nothing else mattered. They ignore the world outside.

Mathhew soon upsets their idyllic universe by accusing them both of being unwordly: Isabelle because she's never been out on a real 'date' and Theo because of his starry-eyed romanticization of the Chinese Red Guards. It all begins when Isabelle demands that he shave his pubic hair as a sign of love. He refuses because the demand is in his view nothing but a silly game, an infantilizing gesture that proves their disconnection from the reality of what is going on around them. He tells them both 'there's something going on out there, I can feel it,' but neither Isabelle nor Theo seem to care. Their political awakening comes soon enough though in the form of a brick thrown through their apartment window. The brick literally shatters their world, but also save their lives too. Awakening after another of their orgiastic episodes, Isabelle finds a cheque written by her parents and realizes they must have been in the apartment and therefore witnessed their dishabille state and perhaps guessed at their decadent behavior -- the three of them are naked, sleeping side by side in a tent Isabelle erected in the living room. Mortally ashamed, Isabelle decides to kill herself and Theo and Matthew as well, so she switches on the gas and lays down between the two boys and readies herself for death. It is at this point that the window is broken. The intrusion of the street into their self-enclosed fantasy world is thus presented as a life-saving event. The brick breaks the spell of self-indulgence they've all been under and suddenly both Isabelle and Theo realize something is going on outside and that it does concern them, does interest them, and is more important than their fantasy world. The three of them rush first to the balcony to witness the events below and then to the street to join in. But here the happy trio split up because only Isabelle and Theo are willing to take part. Mathhew, a self-proclaimed pacifist, turns his back on them. Matthew recoils in horror when he sees Theo with a Molotov cocktail in his hands and refuses to join them when they rush hand in hand towards the fray. Bertolucci's last act then is to make May '68 an exclusively French affair, but also wrongheaded and needlessly violent.

Kristin Ross's account of May '68 takes us in precisely the opposite direction to Bertolucci. She is anxious that we see that May '68 was not just a student protest, and that those involved were anything but naive (in the sense of being unaware of history) and perhaps most importantly that it was part of a longer chain of events that stretched far beyond Paris. To begin with, Ross argues for an enlargement of the timeframe in which the events are considered, not just beyond the month of May itself, which as she shows (and Bertolucci's film exemplifies) restricts the events to a limited series of goings-on at the Sorbonne, but back two decades to the start of the Algerian War. This, in turn, enables her to argue that May '68 was not a great cultural reform, a push toward modernisation, or the dawning sun of a new individualism. It was above all not a revolt on the part of the sociological category "youth". It was rather the revolt of a broad cross-section of workers and students of all ages who had grown up with and witnessed the sickening brutality of the Gaullist regime's failed attempt to deny Algeria its independence. 'Algeria defined a fracture in French society, in its identity, by creating a break between the official "humanist" discourse of that society and French practices occurring in Algeria and occasionally within France as well.' It was impossible to reconcile the ideal of a benevolent welfare state espoused by France's leaders with the truncheon-wielding reality of the hegemonic state, except perhaps in oedipal terms by casting President de Gaulle in the role of the father and relegating the protesters to the rank of children. Anti-Oedipus is of course directed against this pseudo-psychoanalytic account of the events and indeed Deleuze and Guattari argue that it was precisely the example of Algeria that makes it clear that politics cannot be reduced to an oedipal struggle. 'It is strange', they write, 'that we had to wait for the dreams of the colonised peoples in order to see that, on the vertices of the pseudo triangle, mommy was dancing with the missionary, daddy was being fucked by the tax collector, while the self was being beaten by the white man.' (AO, 105-9/114)

What Fanon's work showed us, Deleuze and Guattari go on to suggest, is that every subject is directly coupled to elements of their:

historical situation -- the soldier, the cop, the occupier, the collaborator, the radical, the resister, the boss, the boss's wife -- who constantly break all triangulations, and who prevent the entire situation from falling back on the familial complex and becoming internalised in it. (AO, 107/116)

As Belden Fields writes, the Algerian War was crucial stimulus for the radicalization of French students in the 1960s because it delegitimized the structures of the state. 'The educational system, for instance, came to be viewed as a conduit funneling young people into military bureaucracies, whether public or private, to earn a living as a supporting cog in a system of repressive privilege'. Jean-Paul Belmondo, 'the doomed anti-hero' of Jean-Luc Goddard's path-breaking film of 1960, A bout de souffle [Breathless], is usually taken as the 'screen representative of that young generation of Frenchmen condemned to serve, suffer, and even die in Algeria'. This perceived lack of control over their own destiny, even among the relatively privileged classes to which the majority of students actually belonged, coupled with the oppressive archaism of the educational system itself, and indeed the state structure as a whole, generated among radicalized youth a powerful sense of empathy with all victims of the state. The students saw themselves as being in solidarity with factory workers, despite the fact that their destiny was to be the managers who would one day have to 'manage' these selfsame workers. In other words, in spite of the fact that their class interests were different, the students and the workers were nonetheless able to find a point of common interest in their dispute with the state. The usual divide and conquer tactics the state relies on to stratify the population and ensure that precisely this type of connection between strata doesn't occur failed spectacularly. It failed because the state was unable, at least in the first instance, to present itself as something other than a huge, oppressive monolithic edifice determined to stamp out dissent with an iron fist. Unfortunately, the French Communist Party, still a very strong and widely supported institution, was tarnished by its 'pragmatic response to the war -- the party line, that the war should be ended by negotiated settlement, was strictly enforced, with the result that it too came to be seen as ossified and antiquated and of little relevance to the needs of the present generation. Deleuze and Guattari clearly shared this view; their frequent anti-reformist remarks should be seen as directed at the French Communist Party.

Ross's second move is to argue for an enlargement of the geographical framework in which the events are considered, not just beyond the Latin Quarter to the outer suburbs of Paris, but beyond France altogether to still another of its former colonies, namely Vietnam, which having rid itself of its French masters in the 1950s was then in the process of expelling the American pretenders:

In its battle with the United States, with the worldwide political and cultural domination the United States had exerted since the end of World War II, Vietnam made possible a merging of the themes of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism ...

In fact, the events themselves were sparked by an incident -- a window of the American Express building on rue Scribe in Paris was broken -- that occurred as part of a student protest against the war in Veitnam on 20 March 1968. The irruption of student protest at Nanterre two days later was in part provoked by the heavy-handedness of the police response to the anti-Vietnam march. The students at Nantarre rallied themselves under the banner of 'Mouvement du 22 mars', deliberately recalling Castro's 'July 26th Movement' commemorating the attack on Moncada fortress and start of the insurrection against Batista. 'Vietnam thus both launched the action in the streets as well as brought under one umbrella a number of groups ... as well as previously unaffiliated militants working together. For the protesters, students and workers alike, Vietnam made manifest processes that were thought to be merely latent in the West. For one thing, it revealed both the inherent violence of the postmodern capitalist state and the lengths to which it is prepared to go in order to preserve its power. It demonstrated a willingness on the part of the powerful to use violence against the powerless to defend the status quo. Vietnam also revealed the vulnerability of the super state and its susceptibility to a 'revolution from below'. Sartre, for one, was convinced that the true origin of May '68 was Vietnam because the example of Vietnamese guerrillas winning a war against a vastly superior force, albeit at the cost of an enormous loss of life, extended the domain of the possible for Western intellectuals who otherwise thought of themselves as powerless in the face of the state.

More concretely, French workers whose livelihoods were threatened by a process we know today as globalization, the process whereby local markets are forcibly opened to global competitors, saw themselves as victims of American imperialism too. Deleuze and Guattari were keenly aware of the high cost the structural adjustments (to use the purposefully dry language of economists):

If we look at today's [1972] situation, power necessarily has a global or total vision. What I mean is that every form of repression today [repression actuelles], and they are multiple, is easily totalised, systematised from the point of view of power: the racist repression against immigrants, the repression in factories, the repression in schools and teaching, and the repression of youth in general. We mustn't look for the unity of these forms of repression only in reaction to May '68, but more so in a concerted preparation and organisation concerning our immediate future. Capitalism in France is dropping its liberal, paternalistic mask of full employment; it desperately needs a 'reserve' of unemployed workers. It's from this vantage point that unity can be found in the forms of repression I already mentioned; the limitation of immigration, once it's understood we're leaving the hardest and lowest paying jobs to them; the repression in factories, because now it's all about once again giving the French a taste for hard work; the struggle against youth and the repression in schools and teaching, because police repression must be all the more active now that there is less need for young people on the job market. (DI, 210/294)

On this point, Ross argues that the geographical boundary of the events of May needs to be widened to encompass Italy because the political convulsions wrought by the first stages of globalization were in Europe nowhere felt more keenly. The striking Fiat workers' slogan 'Vietnam is in our factories!' made the connection to American imperialism explicit. This is, then, Ross's third move: she argues for a redefinition of the sociological frame in which the events are considered. May '68 would not have been the event it was if the protest action had been confined to either the students or the workers or even the farmers. It was the fact that these groups, as well as many others, found it possible and necessary to link up with each other that resulted in the extraordinary event we know as May '68. But, and this is Ross's main point, none of these groups -- students, workers, farmers, etc. -- can be treated as pre-existing, self-contained, homogeneous entities. As for the encounters between these heterogeneous groups, they obviously cannot be treated in the same way that one might regard the actions of states agreeing by treaty to work together for the sake of a common interest. Ross suggests that the process might better be described as 'cultural contamination' and argues that it 'was encounters with people different from themselves -- and not the glow of shared identity -- that allowed a dream of change to flourish'. Ross's purpose, however, is not to assert the primacy of the individual, or indeed the primacy of differences, two moves which as [Fredric] Jameson has shown in his various critiques of Anglo-American cultural studies lead inexorably to political paralysis. By repudiating both the collective and the same under the utterly misconceived banner of 'anti-totalization', cultural studies has for all practical intents and purposes divested itself of two of the most basic prerequisites for politics, namely the potential for a common action and the identification of a common aim. Well aware of the pitfalls of valorizing the individual at the expense of the collective, the different at the expense of the same, Ross argues for an approach to the sociological dimension of May '68 that is perfectly attuned to Deleuze and Guattari's work.

Buchanan, Ian. Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. NY: Continuum, 2008: 13-19.

University of Kentucky: Screening of Darius Goes West and Discussion with Darius Weems (April 20th)

2009-04-07T14:43:00.003-04:00

You are invited to meet Darius Weems, a 19 year old from Athens, Georgia who has been diagnosed with a rare form of muscular dystrophy called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. When he was fifteen Darius and his friends left Athens for the first time ever, with the hopes of Darius receiving a new wheelchair through the popular MTV show, "Pimp My Ride". His ventures lead him to new experiences often taken for granted by you and me. This journey was made into an award winning documentary: Darius Goes West. This your chance to not only watch this amazing movie, but also hear from Darius, himself.

Along with a few friends, the subject of the film, Darius Weems, will be at the screening to talk to viewers about his adventures and about his disease, in general.

Don't miss this once in a life time opportunity to watch a great film and help to raise awareness for Duchenne!

WHERE: Student Center's Worsham Theater
WHEN: April 20th at 7 PM
HOW MUCH: ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!!

Lexington Peace Fare: May 9, 2009

2009-04-07T10:55:00.001-04:00

Peace Fare, May 9 2009

Building off the success of last year’s edible fundraiser for the BCTC Peace and Global Citizenship Fair, we are now taking reservations for a May 9 dinner and a show at the sometimes-elegant restaurant, 430, located in historic downtown Lexington. Like last year, the event will help raise money for this year’s version of the Peace and Social Justice Fair to be held the following Saturday, May 16.

Songwriter Wes Houp, featured in the 2008 Peace and Global Citizenship Fair Music Sampler, will perform a set before dinner. Wes has strong ties to the inner bluegrass region, and his songs—Barely Living Wage Blues, Black Mountain Right of Way, Surge and Wait, Harry’s Blues, Indiana Idyll, The Great Out There, and Methadone Clinic, among others—often focalize intimate and far-flung social forces through bluegrass lifeways. Showtime is at 5:00.

In order to offer greater availability for the fundraiser, the braintrust at 430 has come up with three separate pricing structures. Below are the structures and what you get with them:

The Gandhi ($25): A warm feeling; Wes Houp show; 3-course+ dinner (small appetizers, pasta course, salad course, dessert) on premises.

The Emma Goldman ($10): A warm feeling; Wes Houp show; grilled hamburgers and portabello mushrooms at the home of Michael Benton, located a short walk away.

The Jim Embry ($5): A warm feeling; Wes Houp show; post-show directions to Al’s Bar or Green Lantern or Third Street Stuff.

When: Saturday May 9, 4:00-9:00 PM; Wes Houp show at 5:00
Where: 430, located at 430 North Martin Luther King Blvd.

For Questions or purchase of a ticket, contact Danny Mayer at Danny dot Mayer at kctcs dot edu

Senses of Cinema: Iconic Moments in Cinema -- Australia, Pt. 1

2009-04-07T10:05:00.002-04:00

Senses of Cinema

The Devil’s Playground (Fred Schepisi, 1976)
by Scott Murray

Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992)
by Darragh O’Donoghue

Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971): New Wave and New Beginning
by Adam Bingham

Mad Max (George Miller, 1979)
by Aaron Goldberg

To Read the Commentaries

Brian Dauth: Great Directors -- Francis Ford Coppola

2009-04-07T09:23:00.004-04:00

(Today is Coppola's 70th B-Day!)

Francis Ford Coppola
b. 7 April, 1939, Detroit, Michigan, USA
by Brian Dauth
Senses of Cinema: Great Directors

Most critiques of Francis Ford Coppola's career interweave film criticism with biography and produce an account of a wasted genius, a failed wunderkind, a director who had a few great years, produced some magnificent movies, but slid further and further downhill as time passed. With the publication of this article, I am pleased to report that any and all announcements of Coppola's artistic demise are not only premature, but flat-out wrong.

What actually happened was that Francis Ford Coppola did what any great and original artist does: he went in directions unanticipated by his critics. For his transgressions Coppola was made to pay over and over again. But not here. I want to praise Coppola, not bury him, and while I can only touch on a portion of his genius, I hope I can inspire others to look carefully at a body of work that is one of the most significant of recent times.

For me, Coppola is the most talented and interesting filmmaker to come to prominence in the 1970s. He began his career (as many filmmakers did) by working with Roger Corman. His first film, Dementia 13 (1963), was made with equipment and sets borrowed from another Corman picture on which he worked as dialogue director. Coppola was also a sought-after screenwriter and script doctor (he won his first Academy Award for his contributions to the screenplay of Patton [1970]).

But even at the beginning of his career, Coppola was bending the rules of Hollywood filmmaking. For The Rain People (1969) he loaded crew, actors and equipment into station wagons and drove cross-country to tell the story of Natalie Ravenna (Shirley Knight) and her journey of self-discovery (the first of many such journeys undertaken by Coppola characters). He also founded American Zoetrope, the production company that gave many film artists both a home and help at the start of their careers, among them George Lucas whose THX 1138 (1971) and American Graffiti (1973) were produced with Coppola's assistance.

Coppola Values Family

Coppola is fascinated by families – their members, structures, dynamics, rules and rituals. These families come in all shapes and sizes: those created by birth (The Godfather) and social forces (The Outsiders), as well as those springing from shared goals (Tucker: The Man and His Dream) and random circumstance (Apocalypse Now). Coppola is intensely interested in how people are able (or unable) to live and work together.

The most famous Coppola family is the Corleones whose history he chronicles in The Godfather trilogy – a series of movies made over a period of 18 years (1972–1990). The Corleone's story has become part of American folklore not merely because Coppola knows how to spin a good yarn (though his command of cinematic technique plays a large role in the success of these films), but because the trilogy also tells the story of American expansion and capitalism in the twentieth century (the films span a period from 1901 to 1979). The Corleone's saga is a tale of both a family and a nation.

To Read the Rest of the Profile

Creative Screenwriting Magazine: Co-Writer/Director Matteo Garrone and Co-Writer Maurizio Braucci on Gomorrah

2009-04-06T19:36:00.003-04:00

(This film will be coming to the Kentucky Theater!)

Gomorrah Q&A
Creative Screenwriting Magazine

Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith interviews co-writer/director Matteo Garrone and co-writer Maurizio Braucci about Gomorrah.

To Listen to the Interview

Robert Horton: Robert Benton's Bad Company (1972)

2009-04-06T18:40:00.003-04:00

Bad Company
by Robert Horton
The Crop Duster

About a decade ago the early 1970s were officially enshrined as the last golden age of Hollywood, especially (probably not coincidentally) by the filmmakers and critics who came of age during that time. This view has some nostalgia attached to it, and at times it distracts people from appreciating some of the important work being done right here, right now.

But an awful lot of good movies came out of that epoch, including smaller movies that — even at the time — were overlooked in the tide of Godfather s and Chinatown s. Here is an absolute gem: Bad Company , from 1972, the directing debut of Robert Benton. Written with Benton’s longtime writing partner and Bonnie and Clyde co-scribe, David Newman, Bad Company is the kind of Western that people were making at the time: revisionist, ironic, modern. Strangely enough, this particular revisionist Western is also full of its own beauty.

There’s not a lot of story. The time is the Civil War, and the hero is young Drew Dixon, an Ohio lad, played by Barry Brown. Hustled from home with his parents’ help ("When you get to a town," mother advises, "you seek out the Methodist Church"), he is fleeing from conscription in the Union Army by heading west. (So many Westerns from this era were really about the Vietnam War, and draft evasion was a potent issue at the time.) Hoping to hook up with a wagon train in Missouri, Drew lands instead in the company — bad company it is, too — of a group of scalawags, "hand-picked for gumption." They are led by the scruffy Jake Ramsey, played by Jeff Bridges.

This gang of self-styled outlaws heads west, and stumbles into one miserable situation after another. Most of the film is comically curved around the ineptitude of these supposedly bad hombres, but despite the humor Bad Company does conform to a particular vibe of the era; its de-romanticizing of the Old West is shot through with bracing shock tactics. For instance, a boy runs to an isolated farmhouse to steal a pie from the window sill; all is high spirits as the chickens scatter and he dashes towards safety. It’s plenty funny until, without having been prepared in any way for it, the top of his blond head comes bloodily apart, taken by the discharge from the farmer’s unseen shotgun.

To Read the Rest of the Review

Wings of Desire/Der Himmel über Berlin (West Germany/France: Wim Wender, 1987); Cockfighter (USA: Monte Hellman, 1974)

2009-04-06T16:51:00.001-04:00

Tuesday at 7:30

Wings of Desire/Der Himmel über Berlin (West Germany/France: Wim Wender, 1987: 127 mins)

Wednesday at 7

Cockfighter (USA: Monte Hellman, 1974: 83 mins)