Long Pauses

Author: Darren

  • Godard ’66-’67

    Godard ’66-’67

    Seven or eight years ago, when I was just beginning to explore world cinema, I went through a Godard phase during which I watched most of his early features — Breathless, Les Carabiniers, Contempt, and five of the Anna Karina films. I ended my run with Pierrot le Fou, partly because the later films weren’t then available on DVD but also because Godard’s turn at that point in his career threw me for a loop. It wasn’t the formal complexity of Pierrot that startled me (formally, it isn’t terribly different from the films that preceded it); it was the anger, bitterness, and despair. The final sequence in that film — Belmondo painting his face, wrapping his head in dynamite, lighting the fuse, struggling for a few terrifying seconds to put it out again, and then (after a cut to a long shot) blowing himself to pieces — scared the hell out of me. I wasn’t sure I was ready to follow Godard in this new direction.

    Over the last few weeks I’ve watched for the first time the five features that followed Pierrot le Fou, all of them released in 1966 and 1967: Masculin Feminin, Made in U.S.A., 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, La Chinoise, and Weekend. They mark several key transitions in Godard’s career. As his marriage to Karina dissolved, so did their working relationship, and Made in U.S.A. would be their last collaboration. Jean-Pierre Leaud, who’d made uncredited appearances in a few of Godard’s earlier films, stars in four of the five here, the exception being 2 or 3 Things . . . , which Godard filmed concurrently with Made in U.S.A. (one was shot in the morning, the other at night). Godard’s use of Leaud seems to reflect his growing disenchantment with his own generation, who are increasingly represented as grotesque bourgeois decadents (the couple in Weekend, for example) by comparison to the young radicals who were then animating so much political unrest in France and the rest of the world. We see this also in Godard’s use of his new young wife and leading lady, Anne Wiazemsky, whose expressionless face offers a stark contrast to Karina’s glamour, and whose characters are more likely to assassinate government dignitaries or spraypaint Maoist slogans than to sing or dance.

    It’s the formal turns, though, that make these films so damn exciting. I happened to have watched Masculin Feminin just a few hours before meeting Caveh Zahedi for dinner last month, and I was surprised when he told me he’d never seen it all the way through. Always the Brechtian, Godard had been using distancing effects and winks to the camera (both literal and metaphoric) since his pre-Breathless days, but the interview segments in Masculin Feminin disregard, once and for all, the documentary/fiction distinction. (They also strike me as the most Caveh-like sequences in any Godard film I’ve seen.) I especially love the long interview with France’s “real” Miss Nineteen, which begins as an innocuous enough conversation before turning to more sensitive and awkward subjects like birth control and reactionary politics. Godard echoes the interview with similar conversations between his “fictional” characters. By La Chinoise, one year later, Godard has dropped the formal artifice completely, including in the final cut his off-camera questions to Leaud, the actor/character — questions about the film itself!

    Tearing down the distinctions between documentary and fiction is a key step in Godard’s deliberate move away from genre (the gangsters, singers, soldiers, and sci-fi detectives of his early films) and toward something closer in spirit to an essay. Juliette Jeanson of 2 or 3 Things . . . might call to mind Nana of My Life to Live, but her turn to prostitution isn’t some inevitable concession to narrative convention; it’s an economic transaction. Godard’s growing dissatisfaction with commercial cinema is palpable here. With 2 or 3 Things . . . he is exploring film, instead, as an explicit method of analysis — in this case to study and critique the suburbanization of Paris and the growing middle class. In this context, the apocalyptic violence and decay of Weekend is downright sublime. “End of film. End of cinema.”

    I’m less willing at this point to comment on the political content of these films. I still hope to track down a few of the Dziga Vertov Group projects, which, I assume, will help to unravel Godard’s thinking in this regard. That a film like La Chinoise even exists says a great deal about the tenor of the times in which it was made, and I’m eager to give it another viewing. (I watched it last night, so it’s just begun to percolate.) For now, I’m content to allow the sloganeering and the recitations stream right on by and to enjoy, instead, the revolutionary dissonances of Godard’s aesthetic choices (and surely that was his intent): His Mondrian-like use of blue, white, red, and yellow (see image above); the minutes-long tracking and crane shots; the piles of burning wreckage; the urgent absurdity of it all.

  • Schuss! (2005)

    Schuss! (2005)

    Dir. by Nicolas Rey

    “Do you ski?”
    Pause. Sly grin. “I used to.”
    — First question at the Q&A with Rey, TIFF 2006

    Nicolas Rey’s Schuss! is an experimental essay film that is concerned, ultimately, with the spoils of capitalism. More specifically, it’s about the rise of the aluminum industry, the building of a French ski resort, and the economic interests that joined the two. Also, Schuss! is about the cinema, which, I realize, is one of those lazy critical phrases that gets attached to every film that pushes, in even the vaguest of ways, the boundaries of film form. But in this case it’s a fair assessment, I think. During the post-screening Q&A, Rey told us that the overarching subject of his work is the 20th century, and in this film he’s particularly interested in chemistry — specifically, the radical innovations that improved manufacturing processes and that made possible both weapons of mass destruction and, eventually, multi-national capital. Rey participates actively in his investigation by scavenging decades-old film stock, shooting it with restored cameras, and processing his footage by hand. (His previous film, Les Soviets plus l’electricite, was apparently shot on Soviet-era Super 8. Not surprisingly, he’s in no hurry to buy a DV cam, and he doesn’t want you to either.)

    Schuss! is divided into several chapters, each of which includes: early 9 1/2mm skiing footage, recent footage shot atop a ski slope, archival documents that unearth the history of an aluminum manufacturing plant and the local economy it fueled, and contemporary images of that plant and the owner’s large home that towers over it. A voice-over (I can’t recall if it’s Rey’s or an interviewee’s) comments on the images, filling in some — but not all — of the gaps. I’m ambivalent about the film’s rigid structure, but the aspect of the film that I most admire would be impossible without it: the repetition of the skiing footage. The man in the image above is one of the sixty or seventy vacationers we watch take off from the same spot. Each acts in precisely the same manner. They pause briefly, stare down the slope, push off (“schuss” is a German word that describes a fast downhill run), and turn to pose for Rey’s camera as they pass. Rey cuts the skiers together into a montage that begins to feel like a loop until interrupted, from time to time, by black, “empty” frames. (I’ve been following Zach’s recent posts on cinema violence and flicker films with interest because I suspect that much that I liked about Schuss! is wrapped up, somehow, in those ideas. I remember, after the screening, making some vague comment to a friend about how I wanted to understand “what those black frames were doing to my eyes.” Any guidance in this area would be much appreciated.) Schuss! is a long film — unnecessarily long according to the few reviews I’ve found online — but the effect of the duration, the constant repetitions, is to defamiliarize those skiers, making them . . . well . . . gross.

  • Counsellor at Law (1933)

    Counsellor at Law (1933)

    Dir. by William Wyler

    In the foreground sits Harry Becker (Vincent Sherman), a young radical who only the night before was beaten and arrested by the police for, as his mother explains it, “making Communist speeches.” He sits here with George Simon (John Barrymore), a high-powered attorney whose office overlooks Manhattan from atop the Empire State Building. Harry is in Mr. Simon’s office begrudgingly, having only come at the behest of his mother, a stereotypically diffident immigrant who had once lived down the street from George’s family. That was back in “the old days,” back before George had worked his way through school and made his name and fortune as a ruthless defender of promiscuous divorcees, corrupt politicians, and rapacious business leaders. “Keep your charity for your parasites!” barks Harry, shaking with rage. Simon, both wounded and piqued by the comment, turns to look at the angry young man. And then the fun begins.

    Adapted from a successful stage play by Elmer Rice, Counsellor at Law was a production of Universal Pictures, then still under the control of founder Carl Laemmle and his son, Carl Jr. In 1925, the elder Laemmle had allowed a cousin’s young son to direct his first film, a two-reel western called Crook Buster, and in the eight years since, William Wyler had made forty or fifty pictures for Universal. Except for The Love Trap (1929), a charming romantic comedy and Wyler’s first talkie, none of these early films are, as far as I know, readily available on DVD. While I enjoyed The Love Trap — and enjoyed the natural and nuanced lead performances, especially — I wasn’t quite prepared for Counsellor at Law, which, unlike so many other studio dramas of the ’20s and ’30s, is shockingly contemporary in tone, characterization, and mise-en-scene. It is also the perfect introduction to the films of William Wyler.

    Rice’s play premiered at the Plymouth Theatre on November 6, 1931, some six months after the Empire State first opened its doors. It was the second of two new plays written and produced by Rice that year, joining The Left Bank as a great critical and commercial success. Rice sold both scripts to Universal, but only Counsellor at Law made it into production. Carl Jr.’s growing confidence in Wyler was evident in his handing over of such a valuable property to the young director. Laemmle had paid Rice $150,000 for the play, an impressive sum during the Depression, and as a kind of insurance on his investment had also contracted Rice to adapt the play himself. After a quick first meeting between the writer and director in Mexico City, Rice flew home to New York to begin revisions and Wyler returned to Los Angeles to begin casting. Principal photography began three weeks later, and exactly three months after that the film opened at Radio City Music Hall to rave reviews.

    Pauline Kael later described Wyler’s film as “energetic, naïve, melodramatic, goodhearted, and full of gold-diggers, social climbers, and dedicated radicals.” That is to say, it is a product of those peculiar days of the early-1930s, when the collapse of world markets revealed for all to see the diseases that plague capitalism and when “being Left” in America was still uncomplicated by Stalin and Mao. Counsellor at Law is no Waiting for Lefty (1935) — Rice was a generation older than Clifford Odets and the other founding members of the Group Theatre, and didn’t share their idealism or fervor — but the play/film is still very much of the era in its ambivalence about (if not quite antagonism toward) economies founded on greed and exploitation. Waiting for Lefty ends, famously, with a chorus of actors chanting “Strike!” as they make their way off stage and past the seated audience. If Counsellor at Law can be criticized for surrendering to a “happy ending” convention that mucks up any would-be “sound-as-brickwork-logic” Marxist reading of the text (to borrow a phrase from Norman Mailer), then it should also be commended for sparing audiences Odett’s brand of didacticism. As would be the case again and again throughout his long career, Wyler mines the source material for its humanity and, in doing so, gives us a compelling critique of specific historical conditions that rises above sloganeering.

    Note: I hope to return to this post someday and give Counsellor at Law the formal reading it deserves. It’s really a fantastic film.

  • Half Nelson (2006)

    Half Nelson (2006)

    Dir. by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden

    It’s rare these days when I find myself identifying with a character in the same way that, say, the 7-year-old version of me identified with Charlie Bucket or the 15-year-old version of me identified with Holden Caulfield. But Dan Dunne, the crack-addicted, idealistic History teacher played by Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson, is more like me than any other character I’ve met in quite some time. I don’t share his drug problems, fortunately, but I identify with what they represent in his life — the hypocrisy and disillusionment and isolation. (We all have our fatal flaws, right?)

    What rescues Half Nelson from the trappings of Movie of the Week melodrama — and what makes it one of my favorite new films of 2006 — is the care with which Fleck and partner Anna Boden ground Dunne’s struggles in a specific historical and political context. He’s not some Everyman Teacher fighting a universal battle for the hearts and minds of Today’s Youth; he’s the child, both literally and philosophically, of the ’60s generation that fought bravely and successfully for Civil Rights and Free Speech before watching their idealism shattered by personal excess, in-fighting, the horrors of Vietnam (or their inability to stop it), creeping apathy, and, eventually, the dawning of a new “Morning in America.”

    In the classroom, Dunne throws out the approved curriculum and, instead, teaches his students dialectics, forcing them to recognize the complexity — the counter-arguments, the push and pull — of every issue. As a simple echo of Dunne’s own swings between good and bad, light and dark, all the talk of dialectics is, perhaps, too easy a metaphor. But Fleck and Boden, I think, are interested in larger issues as well: the essential nature of debate for the health of a Democracy, for example, and, more specifically, the difficult but necessary intersection between idealism (even naive idealism) and pragmatism that every movement must maneuver in search of a progressive politics.

    I continued writing my dissertation long after I’d lost my enthusiasm for academia and the specific texts with which I was working because I was (and still am) personally invested in the central questions of the project: How do I take this “theory” — specifically, the ideas about democracy that animated the best aspects of the American New Left — and transfer them into “action”? How do I find “praxis” at the historical moment when capitalism won? How do I fight off the cynicism of my generation and participate, in a practical and meaningful way, in a progressive movement toward goodness and justice? How do I hold onto hope when I see so little cause for it?

    There’s a moment two-thirds of the way through Half Nelson when Dunne drives across town to confront Frank, a drug dealer who is angling to pull one of Dunne’s favorite students out of school and into the business. Dunne is high. He’s bought drugs from Frank (and other dealers just like him) many, many times. The right/wrong dialectic here has exploded into a dizzying miasma, and Gosling’s performance nails it. “What am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to do something, right?” he finally gasps. I didn’t know whether to cry or cheer.

  • Satantango (1994)

    Satantango (1994)

    Dir. by Bela Tarr

    Perhaps the best way to begin this response is to just be out with it: Satantango is not the Greatest. Film. Ever. Also, seeing it projected in 35mm at a good theater and in one sitting (minus two fifteen-minute intermissions) was not one of the defining experiences of my cinema-going life. And unlike Susan Sontag, I’m in no hurry to watch it again, once a year, for the rest of my life. Nevertheless, it was still one of my favorite film moments of 2006. How could it not be? After my only other experience with a Bela Tarr film, I wrote:

    The opening image in Damnation is a remarkable, three-minute shot of coal buckets soaring like cable cars into the horizon. It’s the high point of the film, I think, because it lacks context. We are forced to sit patiently (or not so patiently), listening to the mechanical hum, watching as the buckets come and go, suspended in a moment of Gertrude Stein-like presence: “A bucket is a bucket is a bucket.” The image is alive and contradictory and frustrating and beautiful. By the end of the film, though — after watching our hero repeatedly fail in his attempts to capture love, and, finally, giving up in his efforts entirely — those buckets have become just another symbol of meaningless motion.

    I felt the same frustrations throughout the seven-and-a-half hours of Satantango. There’s an odd tension generated by the collision of Tarr’s form/aesthetic (long takes, slow tracking shots, expressionless faces in close-up) and his vision of the world, which strikes me as pessimistic in the extreme. The influence of Tarkovsky is so heavy, I can’t help but compare the two, and what most fascinates me about the comparison is how Tarkovsky’s films, even at their most bleak (Ivan’s Childhood, Nostalghia), feel guided by a generous (spiritual?) wisdom, while Tarr’s seem to have been constructed in Nature’s laboratory. In contrast to Tarkovsky the Mystic, I imagine Tarr as the Skeptical Scientist, training his eye on his human subjects, determined to prove his cynical hypotheses.

    Take, for example, the story of Estike, a young girl who is pulled from a sanitarium by her mother and brought back home, where she suffers all manner of neglect and abuse. We meet her just as she’s being tricked out of her last few cents by a thieving older brother, and then, over the next forty minutes or so, Satantango becomes her film. We see her act out in a desperate effort to take control of some aspect of her life, wrestling with her cat in one of the most disturbing film sequences I have ever seen. (“I am stronger than you,” she hisses at the terrified cat.) We see her make one last attempt at human contact, but, cursed and rejected, she is sent running off alone into the dark woods. We see her walk, without blinking, down an empty road, and this time we watch her even more closely; Tarr holds her face in focus for minutes at a time (“a face is a face is a face”). And then we see her die. We watch as she curls up beside her dead cat and eats the same rat poison that killed it.

    Before she dies, Estike imagines an angel looking down on her with sympathy. Right now, as I struggle to find the next sentence — and despite the many misgivings I’ve already expressed — I’m aware of a tenderness in Tarr’s gaze that I didn’t experience during the film itself. I keep thinking of another shot, a minutes-long close-up of Estike’s face as she peers through a window at the drunken townspeople dancing in a pub. Why has she been rejected by this human community? Is she too pure? Too uncorruptable? (Are these even the appropriate questions to be asking of her?) And, even more importantly, does this human community have access to any means of redemption, whether transcendent or humanist? My sense is that it does not, but I’m feeling an urge to reacquaint myself with Tarkovsky’s Ivan, Bresson’s Mouchette, and the Dardennes’ Rosetta to test my own hypothesis.

    Satantango is, inevitably, a defining experience in one respect: As a self-proclaimed lover of boring art films and a proselyte for the long take, I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to immerse myself in that aesthetic for an entire day. (I’m reminded of a friend in Toronto who recounted Andrea Picard‘s response when he expressed his misgivings about spending a weekend with Warhol’s Empire. “But what happens?” he asked. “Life happens,” she said.) Like the coal buckets in Damnation, the opening shot of cows being loosed into the fields in Satantango is as beautifully strange and breath-taking as any image I saw all year. Following it with a hundred more long takes pushes, in interesting ways, the limits of the affect. At times I became fatigued by it all and began praying for a cut. But two or three shots later I would become mystified again. I’d be curious to get the DVDs and hold the “boring” (in the best sense) shots up beside the “boring” (in the worst sense) shots to get a clearer sense of the distinction. Is it a matter of aesthetics? (Is beauty more compelling?) Is it a function of narrative? (The cat-wrestling scene was certainly the most heart-pounding.) Is it an elemental question of form? (Given similar content and cinematographic style, how would variations to mise-en-scene, for example, affect our viewing pleasure?)

  • Silk Ties (2006)

    Silk Ties (2006)

    Dir. by Jim Jennings

    Avant-garde cinema remains a new frontier for me. I don’t have the vocabulary for it yet, and I often find myself mystified (in the best sense of the word) by the experience of most experimental films. At this point I trust my critical judgment only to the point of distinguishing the very, very good from the very, very bad, and Jim Jennings’s Close Quarters (2004), which I saw at TIFF 2005, impressed me to the extent that I now use it as shorthand for the style of filmmaking that discovers transcendent beauty in the everyday. Close Quarters, which was shot entirely within Jennings’s New York home, is a montage of near-abstract images — shadows moving against a wall, light pouring through a curtain, the face of his cat — but his mastery of chiaroscuro never subsumes the “real” subjects of his gaze. Or, as Michael Sicinski puts it (much better than I could):

    The film is a play between the urge to “escape” the domestic via an aesthetic sensibility, and an undiluted love for the domestic, a gathering of bodies and shadows as co-equal loved ones. This is the film that a certain segment of the avant-garde has been trying to make for nearly fifty years, and the painful, radiant beauty of it — its full embrasure of a sliver of ordinary life, one that shines forth simply because it is so unreservedly loved — brought tears to my eyes.

    Jennings’s latest, Silk Ties (2006), is a lesser film, I think, but it was still among the best shorts I saw in 2006. A city symphony in miniature, Silk Ties is never short of stunning to look at. Like so many great photographs, the stark black-and-white images here seem to have been stolen from some slightly more magical reality. (After seeing the Jennings film and Nathanial Dorsky’s Song and Solitude on the same program, I walked away wishing I could recalibrate my view of the world around me, which, I guess, is one of the more noble functions of a-g cinema.) If I was less moved by Silk Ties than by Jennings’s previous film, then (borrowing from Michael’s comments) I wonder if it’s simply a matter of his moving from a domestic space to a more impersonal cityscape. His changed relationship to his subject would, perhaps, necessitate a changed relationship for the viewer as well.

  • Happy Thanksgiving

    We had our annual Thanksgiving pot luck dinner last night. Along with the traditional turkey, stuffing, cranberry relish, and pumpkin pie, we had Polish mushroom rolls and potato salad, smoked salmon sushi, Mexican bread pudding, and two Taiwanese dishes: a sweet bean dessert and beef viscera. (Andrew, who brought the viscera, had been warned by his friends that no Americans would be willing to try it, and he seemed genuinely pleased when we proved them wrong.)

    Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

  • Mix: Needle Drops

    Mix: Needle Drops

    Ever since Mr. Blonde carved up that guy to the sound of Stealer Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You,” a certain brand of American “indie” cinema has been defined (and marketed) as much by its “needle drops” (the use of pre-existing music) as by its mode of production and distribution. Think “Sister Christian” in Boogie Nights, “Making Time” in Rushmore, and “The Seeker” in American Beauty. The practice hardly began with Quentin Tarantino and Zach Braff, of course. The American filmmakers of the ’60s and ’70s were/are especially good at it. “The End” in Apocalypse Now. “Layla” in Goodfellas. Assemble a small group of even casual film watchers, give them ten minutes, and I bet they could put together a list of a hundred more examples.

    This mix began with a single iTunes download. My all-time favorite needle drop accompanies my favorite sequence in what also happens to be my favorite film, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Midway through the film, Tarkovsky interjects a strange sequence in which a party of Spanish immigrants tell stories of the Civil War and bullfighting. (It’s all part of his on-going meditation on the meanings of nostalgia.) Tarkovsky augments their stories with found footage of Spaniards fleeing the war, building his montage to a crescendo with the sounds of frantic crowds and squealing trains and ending on a shot of a young, frightened girl who stares directly into the camera. And then silence. And a cut to more found footage — this time of early Soviet ballooners and a ticker-tape parade. I always cry at the precise moment Tarkovsky fades in the sound of Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater, No 12: Quando corpus.”

    So what we have here is a collection of some of my other favorite needle drops. Some are meaningful to me because of their placement in a film I adore (“The Rhythm of the Night” from Beau Travail, for example). Others are memorable only because they are unexpected surprises in an otherwise disappointing film (“You Know, You Know” is about the only thing I loved about Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies.) Regardless, each of these songs/pieces is now inextricably bound in my memory to a particular scene and the emotions it evokes.

    1. “Golden Hair” by Slowdive
      Mysterious Skin (2004) dir. Gregg Araki
    2. “Safeway Cart” by Neil Young
      Beau Travail (1999) dir. Claire Denis
    3. “Die Walkure: Orchestervorspiel” by Richard Wagner
      Birth (2004) dir. Jonathan Glazer
    4. “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
      Stranger than Paradise (1984) dir. Jim Jarmusch
    5. “You Know, You Know” by Mahavishnu Orchestra
      Where the Truth Lies (2005) dir. Atom Egoyan
    6. “Trouble” by Cat Stevens
      Harold and Maude (1971) dir. Hal Ashby
    7. “Gayane Ballet Suite” by Aram Khachaturyan
      2001 (1968) dir. Stanley Kubrick
    8. “Snow” by The Innocence Mission
      In the Bathtub of the World (2001) dir. Caveh Zahedi
    9. Tunic (Song for Karen)” by Sonic Youth
      Irma Vep (1996) dir. Olivier Assayas
    10. “Heart of the Sunrise” by Yes
      Buffalo ’66 (1998) dir. Vincent Gallo
    11. “Once I Was” by Tim Buckley
      Coming Home (1978) dir. Hal Ashby
    12. “Coney Island Baby” by Lou Reed
      Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000) dir. Tran Anh Hung
    13. “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Deodato
      Being There (1980) dir. Hal Ashby
    14. “Stabat Mater: Quando Corpus” by Giovanni Pergolesi
      Mirror (1975) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
    15. “The Rhythm of the Night” by Corona
      Beau Travail (1999) dir. Claire Denis
  • Fassbinder

    Fassbinder

    Last night I watched Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) for the first time in six or seven years. Along with Ali, I think I’ve seen only Fox and His Friends, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Whity, so I’m relatively unfamiliar with Fassbinder and have never had much of a sense of his style. What struck me last night was how avant-garde, formally, Ali is. In fact, the film I was reminded of most often was Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth. Both find their dramatic and emotional impact in impeccably composed images. Obviously, Fassbinder’s film has a much more traditional narrative than Costa’s, but the flat, staged performances given by his actors undermines any comfortable sort of identification we might have forged with their characters otherwise. It’s like Fassbinder has reduced melodrama to its first principles then blown them up into full-color, super-saturation, not unlike the images of the film itself.

    Until I finish working through all of those Godard films, I won’t have time to really dig into Fassbinder as I’d like, but can anyone recommend a handful of his films that I should check out? Are the camera work and formal devices employed in Ali typical?

  • So Awfully, Irreducibly Real

    JOE: Why are you sitting in the dark? Turn on the light.

    HARPER: No. I heard the sounds in the bedroom again. I know someone was in there.

    JOE: No one was.

    HARPER: Maybe actually in the bed, under the covers with a knife.
    Oh, boy. Joe. I, um, I’m thinking of going away. By which I mean: I think I’m going off again. You . . . you know what I mean?

    JOE: Please don’t. Stay. We can fix it. I pray for that. This is my fault, but I can correct it. You have to try too . . .

    (He turns on the light. She turns it off again.)

    HARPER: When you pray, what do you pray for?

    JOE: I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again.

    HARPER: Oh. Please. Don’t pray that.

    JOE: I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I’d look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don’t really remember the story, or why the wrestling — just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is . . . a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I’m . . . It’s me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It’s not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God’s. But you can’t not lose.

    HARPER: In the whole entire world, you are the only person, the only person I love or have ever loved. And I love you terribly. Terribly. That’s what’s so awfully, irreducibly real. I can make up anything but I can’t dream that away.

    — Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, Act 2, Scene 2

    Tony Kushner is taken to task from time to time for his harsh treatment of Joe Pitts, the closeted, Republican, Mormon lawyer whose self-hatred motivates so much of the plays’ drama (and poisons his marriage to Harper). Those critics must ignore this passage, which is among the most beautiful and heartbreaking Kushner has written. It’s been at the very back of my mind for nearly a week now but came front and center earlier this evening.

  • Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

    Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

    “Well, I guess you ain’t never seen anything as big as this country.”
    “Yes. A couple of oceans.”

    William Wyler’s The Big Country (1958) is one of those westerns about men proving themselves in the unforgiving and sublime conditions of the American southwest. Gregory Peck, a dandy sea captain from back east, rides into town to claim his bride and immediately finds himself embroiled in a raging family feud over “the Big Muddy,” a tract of land that offers the only source of water available to both families’ thousands of head of cattle. It’s a beautifully photographed film that goes out of its way — most notoriously in the big fist fight between Peck and Charlton Heston — to dwarf man by the surrounding landscape. Consider the latest batch of Songs of the Moment music to listen to while riding through the big country.

    I first heard Richard Shindell more than a year ago when a friend posted “Che Guevara T-Shirt” on his blog, and I immediately fell in love with Shindell’s voice. “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” seemed an obvious choice for this batch of tunes. His song is set in Louisiana, but, as far as I’m concerned, that’s entirely beside the point.

  • Aimee Mann at the Bijou

    Aimee Mann at the Bijou

    I’d brought along Joanna’s bite-sized Sony Cyber-shot camera in hopes of getting some decent stills, but the light was too low (even from the third row) and, as a result, all of the photos were streaked by motion blurs. So, instead, I experimented with the video capture, and I’m really pleased with the results — especially with the sound.

    The show was a lot of fun. As her band members joke on the Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse DVD, Aimee Mann can only stand to tour for a few weeks at a time. Apparently, she’s a bit of a homebody. Her show at the Bijou last Wesdensday was the last night of this “acoustic” tour (she brought along a bass player and pianist), and she celebrated by opening up the middle of the set to audience requests. Instead of just responding to shouts from the crowd, though, she placed a box at the edge of the stage and invited us to fill it with written requests. Those whose songs were selected (at random) not only got to hear a spontaneous performance of their request but were also invited on-stage to play bongos and received a gift basket comprised of what Aimee referred to as “tour bus leftovers” — unopened Clif bars, peanut butter, and jelly; a re-gifted vegan snack basket; an assortment of soaps, gels, and a loofah; and the one genuinely cool prize, two books Aimee had read on the bus but now couldn’t fit in her suitcase (Jonathon Kozol and Patricia Highsmith, if you’re curious.)

    That she’s a bit introverted doesn’t prevent Aimee from putting on a great show, though. She’s just an incredibly charming woman — talented, beautiful, self-effacing, funny.

  • The Black Dahlia (2006)

    The Black Dahlia (2006)

    Dir. by Brian De Palma

    De Palma’s introduction of “The Black Dahlia” (the character, not the film) is a show-stopper. As I recall, the camera begins more or less at eye level, following police officers Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) as they race toward a rowhouse in pursuit of criminals. Rather than going into the building, though, the camera instead floats up and over it, pausing for only a few seconds as it spots the Dahlia off in the far distance. There she is: the nude, disemboweled, disfigured body; the image that, if you’ve ever seen it in oft-duplicated black and white, is likely seared into your memory. (Here’s the image I first saw in a bookstore copy of Hollywood Babylon when I was way too young. Scroll down. Warning: graphic content.)

    A woman spots the Dahlia’s remains, screams, and then runs into traffic, crying for help. De Palma at first appears to be following her. “Twenty minutes into a film called The Black Dahlia we’re finally going to get to her story,” we think, relieved. But De Palma’s not interested in the frantic woman; he doesn’t appear, even, to be concerned with the victim. Instead, his camera, in a continuing, unbroken shot, chases after a bicyclist, who leads the crane back down and around the building, back, eventually, to Bucky and Lee, our main characters. Another five minutes or so pass before there is any mention of the poor woman whose mutilated body lies in the grass a few hundred feet away.

    I’m nowhere near deciding yet whether or not The Black Dahlia is good, but it’s certainly among the strangest and most fascinating Hollywood films I’ve seen in quite some time. As we were walking out of the theater last night, Joanna asked the key question, and I’m still wrestling with it: “That was supposed to be a satire, right?” I’m not sure if “satire” is the right word, exactly, but The Black Dahlia is self-aware to the point of distraction. (Poor Scarlett Johansson comes close to out-Showgirls-ing Elizabeth Berkley.) I haven’t done much reading about the film yet, but I do recall seeing one comparison to A History of Violence, which seems about right. Like Cronenberg, De Palma has made a decent-enough genre film that comments constantly on the genre itself — not in a snarky, wink-wink way but, rather, with a bit of bite.

    Noir has always been ripe for psychoanalytic readings, as have many of De Palma’s films, especially those that are more explicitly Hitchcock-inspired. What I find so interesting about The Black Dahlia is its making real and visible what has been suppressed in so many of the films that preceded it. In one sense, The Black Dahlia isn’t about “The Black Dahlia” at all. (That was Joanna’s main disappointment. She wanted an account of the murder that stayed within the wide bounds of established fact, and became frustrated when the film didn’t match her expectations.) And yet, one could also argue that every noir is about “The Black Dahlia” — namely, she is an embodiment (with all of the troubling connotations attached to that word in this context) of noir desire. She’s a hyper-sexualized femme fatale, dangerous and beautiful, the subject of our voyeuristic gaze, a helpless victim and sly manipulator, and a site of horrific violence. Now, in 2006, “The Black Dahlia” is also infected with sensationalism. She’s not just a murder victim; she’s the murder victim who was photographed and whose photographs have entered the public consciousness. She’s a media event. (Just imagine what Nancy Grace would have done with this story.)

    Traditionally, Film Noir heroes have been haunted by this repressed desire. (Hell, some would argue that this particular ghost infests all of cinema. I’m talkin’ to you, Mulvey.) Well, repression be damned. In the closing moments of The Black Dahlia, when Bucky returns for one final reunion with Johansson’s icy blonde Kay, De Palma kicks the proverbial psychic doors wide open. Bucky, who has been betrayed at every turn and who has just committed a sex-charged act of violence himself, sees the high-contrast, severed remains of “The Black Dahlia” everywhere he turns. In what I can only assume is meant to be a joke, he’s rescued from his reverie, finally, by Kay’s none-too-subtle invitation to “come inside.” I thought it was funny, at least.

  • Getting Ready for Godard

    In the next week or so, I’ll finish my five-month “study” of William Wyler (with some write-ups still to come), and I’ve decided for my next project to spend the fall and winter with Godard. I’ve seen ten or fifteen of his films over the last decade but I still have no real sense of his evolution as a filmmaker. In my defense, that’s because his films from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s are so damn difficult to see. By my count 21 Godard films are (or will soon be) available on R1 DVD:

    • Breathless (1960)
    • A Woman Is a Woman (1961)
    • My Life to Live (1962)
    • Le Petit Soldat (1960)
    • Les Carabiniers (1963)
    • Contempt (1963)
    • Band of Outsiders (1964)
    • Alphaville (1965)
    • Pierrot le fou (1965) [out of print]
    • Masculine Feminine (1966)
    • Weekend (1967)
    • Sympathy for the Devil (1968)
    • Love and Anger (1969)
    • Tout Va Bien (1972)
    • First Name: Carmen (1983)
    • Hail Mary (1985)
    • Keep Your Right Up! (1987)
    • Aria (1987)
    • For Ever Mozart (1996)
    • In Praise of Love (2001)
    • Notre Musique (2004)

    Now I’m looking for help. First, I’ll gladly take any and all reading suggestions. But, more importantly, I’m looking for films. I believe some not listed above are available on R2 DVD but I’m not sure which have English subs (a requirement for me, unfortunately). I don’t mind buying DVDs from overseas.

  • In a Nutshell

    The Toronto International Film Festival is exactly the right length. After seeing thirty or forty film programs in nine-and-a-half days, I’m always ready for it to end. I hate that it’ll be another year before I get to walk down Yonge Street again, discuss movies over sushi with friends again, and discover so many great new films again, but, for the time being at least, I’m glad to be home. Or, as a friend put it two years ago, “I wish there were more films; thank God there are no more films.”

    Rather than knock out capsule reviews, I’ve decided instead to spend some time over the next few weeks writing longer and, hopefully, more thoughtful essays about groups of films. For whatever reason — maybe it was all of the long discussions with friends or the general atmosphere of cinephilia (in every best sense of the word) that pervades Toronto each September — but I’ve finally gotten the itch to be a writer again. I realize now that it’s taken some time and distance to shake off the frustrations and disappointments of my dissertation. But it’s time to get back at it again — to get back to the hard work of processing and analyzing and organizing and scraping out just the right word. It should be fun, and the remarkable lineup at TIFF will give me plenty to work with.

    In the meantime here’s a general breakdown of my first impressions. If you have any questions, leave a comment. I already miss all of our post-film chats and am itching to continue them here and elsewhere in the blog-o-sphere.

    Masterpieces

    These will likely end up on my short list of favorite films of the decade:

    • Still Life / Dong (Jia Zhang-ke)
    • Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

    Stand Outs

    All will be on my Top 10 of 2006:

    • Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako)
    • Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
    • Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa)
    • Flandres (Bruno Dumont)
    • Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina)
    • I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang)
    • Schuss! (Nicolas Rey)

    Strong Recommendations

    If TIFF weren’t so strong this year, these would all be Stand Outs:

    • Belle toujours (Manoel de Oliveira)
    • In Between Days (So Yong Kim)
    • Rain Dogs (Ho Yuhang)
    • Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo)
    • Zidane: Un Portrait du XXIe Siècle (Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno)

    Solid Films

    I enjoyed each of these for a variety of reasons and would recommend them all:

    • 12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu)
    • Fantasma (Lisandro Alonso)
    • Gambling, Gods, and LSD (Peter Mettler)
    • Grbavica (Jasmila Zbanic)
    • Iran: Une Révolution cinématographique (Nader Takmil Homayoun)
    • Manufactured Landscapes (Jennifer Baichwal)
    • Offside (Jafar Panahi)
    • Prague (Ole Christian Madsen)
    • Summer ’04 (Stefan Krohmer)
    • Summercamp! (Sarha Price and Bradley Beesley)
    • Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer)

    Frustrations and Disappointments

    Only two this year. Both are well made and contain some fine moments, but they’re deeply flawed:

    • Day Night Day Night (Julia Loktev)
    • Red Road (Andrea Arnold)

    Wavelengths

    Among my favorites of the Wavelengths shorts were films by: Xavier Lukomski, Cynthia Madansky, Christina Battle, Peter Tscherkassky, Chris Curreri, Jim Jennings, and Nathaniel Dorsky. If anyone’s curious, the new Kiarostami is crap.

    Walk Outs

    Two were due to scheduling problems; one was due to exhaustion:

    • The Beales of Grey Gardens (Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Ian Markiewicz) — I left after the first hour to go buy a ticket for Still Life, which had just been announced. I did, however, get to see Psychiatry in Russia (1955), Albert Maysles’ first film, which had never before been screened in public.
    • Coeurs (Alain Resnais) — I regret leaving Coeurs at the mid-point, but the two-hour nap I took instead did me a world of good.
    • These Girls (Tahani Rached) — I missed the last twenty-five minutes in order to hustle over to Wavelengths 1.

    Skips and Reschedules

    I only skipped one film, Drama/Mex (Gerardo Naranjo), and I’m glad I did because, instead, I spent three hours eating sushi, drinking wine, and talking blogs and movies with Girish and Michael. It was one of the high points of the trip. Also, after hearing not-so-good things about Kore-eda’s HANA, I sold my ticket and saw Rain Dogs, which was a really nice find.

  • History and Politics

    History and Politics

    On Friday afternoon I met Girish for a screening of These Girls, Tahani Rached’s documentary about a small community of Egyptian teenagers who live on the streets of Paris. They survive on discarded food and pass their days sniffing glue, taking pills, avoiding arrest, fighting, and raising the small children who are only a few years younger than they themselves. Rached focuses most of her attention on four or five young girls, each of whom is trapped both by poverty and by the Islamic laws and customs that leave women at the mercy of men. Abused by their fathers, they turn to the streets where they’re abused again by the packs of homeless boys. One girl already has two children, another is pregnant, and several have been deliberately scarred with slashes across their cheeks.

    These Girls is a difficult film to watch. Rached avoids over-sentimentalizing her subject, and, frankly, the girls have been hardened to the point that, at times, I found it difficult to muster the appropriate sympathy for them. (I say that with embarrassment.) I had to leave twenty minutes before the film ended, so I’ll hold off on any kind of final evaluation. These Girls has been selected for the New York Film Festival and, if properly marketed, has the potential to find the same audience that went to see Born into Brothels.

    I scheduled These Girls mostly because it was paired with Toy, Waguih, a short essay film in which the filmmaker, Namir Abdel Messeeh, interviews his father, who forty years earlier had been arrested in Egypt for his activities with communist resistance movements. After five years in prison, he broke ties with his Leftist past, emigrated with his wife to France, and once there raised his family into a respectable, white collar world. At a retirement party, Messeeh’s father is applauded for his decades of quiet devotion to the job, and it’s clearly that dichotomy that so fascinates (and, perhaps, frustrates) his son. How could a political militant who survived torture and forced marches through the Sahara abandon his “principles” for a life of capitalist comfort? And how could he remain silent about the issue for so many years, not telling even his own son the details of his past life?

    I know too little about Egypt’s history to even attempt an analysis of Messeeh’s film, but it’s the kind of political movie I like best: a meditation on memory and on the waves of personal consequence that ripple through history. It’s what cinema can do that a written essay can’t. There’s something in the aesthetic experience of witnessing Messeeh’s father’s furrowed brow and pronounced lower lip (his son has the exact same lip) that encapsulates the ambivalences and dichotomies of his experience. Toy, Waguih isn’t Night and Fog, but it’s a deceptively complex and urgent piece. I liked it quite a lot.

    Already, I’m enjoying the heavy concentration of avant-garde films that I’ve scheduled this year, but I’m at a loss as to how I should go about blogging them. For now, I’ll stick to those pieces that impressed me in a way I feel capable of describing.

    Wavelengths 1 ended with Un Pont sur la Drina by Xavier Lukomski, which consists of five or six long (long in terms of both distance and time) static shots of the bridge that spans the Drina river in Višegrad. The film opens and closes with lines from Ivo Andric’s novel The Bridge on the Drina, lines that note the location’s national importance as a site of conflict. The film’s soundtrack is a mix of diegetic sound (wind, distant voices, occasional hints of traffic) and recorded testimony from a war crimes trial in which a young man describes the long nights he and his neighbors spent pulling out, searching, and burying the hundreds of mutilated bodies that floated under the bridge from battles upstream.

    Two days and six film programs later, I find myself thinking often of Un Pont sur la Drina. In one sense it’s a film about that uncanny experience we’ve all had as we’ve crossed into the Tower of London or walked across the battlefields of Gettysburg or viewed the shorelines near Normandy — the sense that we’ve stumbled upon a site that is simultaneously past and present. Lukomski’s long takes, which on one level are fairly innocuous landscape portraits, become haunted in some way. Again, unfortunately, I know too little about the history of the Balkans to risk specific analysis. I was, however, struck by the testimony itself, which is translated to French in the soundtrack (so that we hear the man’s actual voice for only a few seconds when he begins each new statement) and then translated again to English in the subtitles. That in itself is an interesting commentary, I think, on the impact of globalization on national identity, an idea I’ll likely return to in my next post, when I discuss Sissako’s Bamako.

  • Three for Three

    Three for Three

    Perhaps it’s simply the inevitable result of paring down my schedule from 44 films in 2005 (only 35 of which I actually saw) to “only” 33 this year, but my sense while researching and planning over the past weeks was that TIFF’s lineup is stronger, top to bottom, this time around than in previous years. I’m a bid disappointed that neither of my favorite filmmakers, Claire Denis and Hou Hsiao-hsien, has a new film here, but, otherwise, I feel good about all of my picks. None was chosen simply to fill a hole or out of convenience. None feels like a risk. And so far, three films in, my excitement over the quality of this year’s lineup has been confirmed.

    After spending two weeks meticulously filling in my TIFF spreadsheet, I was surprised to find Climates, the latest film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, at the top of the heap — surprised, mostly, because I’d never seen any of his previous work. I rented Distant (2002) last week and was completely captivated by it. Even before reaching the scenes that make explicit reference to Tarkovsky, I was smiling at the more subtle allusions — the clanging wind chimes, the mothers and sons, the struggling, alienated artists. How could I not love a film that was so obviously an homage to my all-time favorite, Mirror?

    Climates didn’t move me quite so powerfully, but it’s a very good film nonetheless. Ceylan and his wife (Ebru Ceylan) play the starring roles, a couple in the final throes of a failing relationship. He is older, a university professor struggling to finish his thesis; she is an art designer working to establish a career in television and film production. The film opens as they’re breaking up and then follows him over the next few months, as he attempts to begin the next — and hopefully more satisfying — phase of his life.

    Climates includes three or four key scenes — a daydream at the beach, a night in a hotel, and a brilliant sex scene — that will certainly be among my favorite moments of any film I see this year. Often employing incredibly shallow focus, Ceylan taps into that transcendent Tarkovsky “magic” by shattering his images into abstraction and, in doing so, offering shards of subjective emotion. At times, I was reminded of Denis’s sex scenes in Friday Night, but I haven’t decided yet if she and Ceylan are working toward similar ends. After I get home, I hope to give more thought and time to Climates, which, like Atom Egoyan’s Calendar, also uses photography and ancient religious architecture to raise questions about memory and national identity. (That last phrase is such an art film cliche [or maybe an art film criticism cliche], but I’m confident it’s true in this case, and it will make this film fun to write about and discuss.)

    12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu) is set on December 22, 2005, the sixteenth anniversary of the overthrow of communism in Romania. A small town news anchor celebrates the event by inviting two men to join him for a live, on-camera discussion of their experiences in 1989, and he frames the chat with this central question: “Was there or was there not an actual revolution in their home town?” (That question, actually, is a more accurate and literal translation of the film’s original title.) Did anyone participate, locally, in the dangerous rebellion against authority, or did they simply join the national celebration after the revolution was complete?

    12:08 East of Bucharest is neatly divided into two acts. In the first we meet the three main characters: a drunken school teacher, a retired principal, and the television “journalist.” The film works so well largely due to the lead performances, each of which is sympathetic and often hilarious. Porumboiu, an efficient storyteller, gives us snapshots of each man’s life and of life, in general, in 21st century Romania, begging the larger, more important question: what is the legacy of the revolution, and who, if anyone, benefited from it the most? When the three characters finally come together for the shooting of the TV program, the film shifts gears, and the final 45 minutes or so play more or less in real time. Their discussion, including the comments of call-in viewers, is pointed and at times even touching. It is also really, really funny. 12:08 East of Bucharest lends itself to over-simplified discussions of postmodernism and history, establishing “facts” before quickly dismantling them again as distorted and subjective memories. For every history of the revolution there is a counter-history, but Porumboiu, I think, finally comes down on the side of “the people,” in a liberal, humanist, and barely-political-at-all sense. For that reason — along with the laugh-out-loud comedy — I can see this becoming one of those films that, if properly marketed, is the foreign language film talked up by Americans who see only one or two foreign language films a year.

    Judging by the snores, giggles, and sighs of frustration I heard around me in the theatre, I’m likely among the minority when I call Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina) a stunning piece of filmmaking. It is the prototype of the “boring art film.” By my count, in fact, there are only fourteen camera setups in the entire movie, and they’re employed with an almost geometric rigor. By the fourth sequence in the film, its rhythms become obvious — they’re observable and dissectable. I’m tempted even to plot out the film’s form on graph paper. But the strict construction is only so interesting and effective because Encina maintains a constant tension between it and what really drives her film: the mysterious grief and love shared by the main characters, an aging couple who await the return of their son from war.

    I use the word “mysterious” not because the couple’s love and grief are unmotivated. The plot, spare as it is, explains their son’s reasoning for going to war and it informs us that the man and woman have been together for decades. Rather, the “mystery” of the film is the mystery that haunts and shapes so much of human experience. It’s our strange tendency to deflect grief by talking about anything — anything — other than that which grieves us. It’s the rituals of intimacy. It’s the pendulum swings between hope and despair. I have a lot more to say about this film, and look forward to doing so when I have more time.

  • TIFF 2006

    It’s official. Late last night I received a confirmation email from the Toronto International Film Festival box office, notifying me that I would be seeing all thirty of my first choice films. Given that so many of my friends are still awaiting similar confirmation, mine appears to have been one of the first orders processed — just lucky in the lottery draw this year, I guess.

    After Girish’s avant-garde blog-a-thon last month, I decided to make a-g films a much higher priority at TIFF this year, so nearly half of my picks are from the Wavelengths and Visions programmes. This means that I won’t be seeing many of the most talked about films — not until they arrive in Knoxville, at least. No Pan’s Labyrinth or Shortbus or Rescue Dawn or Lights in the Dusk or The Host. Or, more in the mainstream, no Babel or The Fountain or Breaking and Entering or All the King’s Men. I’m eager to see all of those films, but I’m willing to wait.

    Instead, I’m going to use TIFF to bury myself under experimental and formally-inventive films. One nice side effect of this plan is that I’ve managed to avoid scheduling a single film in the massive and incredibly uncomfortable Ryerson Theatre. I’ve heard reports, though, that the Al Green theatre, where I will be seeing a lot of films and which is a new addition to the fest this year, is just as hard on the legs and back.

    Here’s my complete schedule. Titles noted by asterisks (**) are films that I might see, depending upon word-of-mouth, ticket availability, and, as the festival progresses, my physical and psychological stamina. Like last year, I plan to post daily capsule reviews of everything I see, with the goal of writing longer responses to select films after I return home.

    September 7

    September 8

    September 9

    September 10

    September 11

    September 12

    September 13

    September 14

    September 15

    September 16

  • Good Eats: Salmon and Mediterranean Rice

    When I visited Seattle a couple weeks ago, I had what was quite possibly the most satisfying meal of my life. 94 Stewart is a small, family-run place a block or two north of the Pike Street Market. “It made Food and Wine‘s Best New Wines Lists of 2006,” a saleswoman had told me earlier that afternoon. That was all she knew about the place, but she’d heard good things, so I gave it a shot.

    Since I was alone, and because the dining room only seats about 30, I was given a place at the bar, where I was soon greeted by my server, who also happened to be the wine steward. I gave a quick look at the menu (it all looked good), then told her that I would eat and drink whatever she decided to put in front of me. Being that I live in Tennessee and that I was at the time sitting a few yards from one of the most famous fish markets in the world, my only preference, I told her, was for seafood.

    “Do you like salmon?”
    “I love salmon.”
    “Do you drink red wines?”
    “I love red wine.”
    “Okay.”

    After a bowl of her mother’s white bean soup — her mother is the head chef — I was brought a plate of sockeye salmon served with rice and a fresh garden salsa. The salmon was local and in-season, perfectly fresh, perfectly cooked. But great salmon is great salmon. What made the meal was the rice and the wine. I was on my third or fourth bite before I recognized the taste of the rice. It was called “jasmine rice,” as I recall, but it tasted like an open bed of dolmades, or stuffed grape leaves. Such a simple but brilliant idea, and it paired perfectly with the fish. The wine was Big Fire, a fruity and acidic pinot noir from the R. Stuart and Co. winery in Oregon.

    I’ve been telling people about this meal for weeks now. But until just a few days ago, I’d been unable to track down a local bottle of Big Fire. After finding one, I decided to try to recreate the meal, and I have to say I did a damn fine job of it. Joanna, I’m pleased to announce, agrees. Here’s the recipe:

    Garden Salsa

    (I can’t remember what they served, exactly, so I improvised a kind of relish that we eat pretty often)

    Two roma tomatoes, diced
    Half an onion, diced
    Half a cucumber, diced
    1 Tablespoon olive oil
    1 Tablespoon red wine vinegar
    1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

    Mix it all together, salt to taste, refrigerate. Serves two.

    Grilled Salmon

    1/2 pound filet of sockeye salmon per person
    1 Tablespoon olive oil
    1 Tablespoon soy sauce
    Salt and pepper to taste

    Rub salmon with salt and pepper, then grill on low-medium heat for 15 minutes (or until done), brushing with mixture of olive oil and soy sauce every 4-5 minutes.

    Rice

    After looking at 15 or 20 recipes of dolmades, I settled on a modified version of Tyler Florence‘s. I skipped the fennel, but, otherwise, followed exactly his recommended proportions. I also followed the first paragraph of his instructions. In order to serve the dolmades as a rice side dish, replace the last three paragraphs of Florence’s recipe with this:

    Prepare the grape leaves by trimming any remaining stems and tearing into small, bite-sized portions. Place the seasoned, al dente rice in a 3+ quart saucepan or stock pot, then add the grape leaves. Pour the remaining cup of broth, remaining olive oil, and the lemon juice into the pot, then simmer for 30 minutes (or until done).

    And that, my friend, is good eats.

  • Live Music

    Is it Freck, or is it Adams?

    [With apologies to Richard Linklater, Philip K. Dick, and Rory Cochrane.]

    Singer, songwriter, guitarist, piano player, work-a-holic Ryan Adams has a reputation for being a belligerent asshole, which, apparently, is doubly true when he brings his show to Knoxville. His concert at the Bijou two weeks ago lasted just over an hour, making it, by comparison to other stops on this tour, exactly half a concert. At 11:05 he looked at his watch and then spoke to us for the first time all evening, launching into a tirade against someone at his record label who had apparently rejected his latest batch(es) of songs. Since he was already five minutes beyond the curfew — or so he informed us — the show was over. He walked off stage, his bass player thanked us for coming out, the roadies began tearing down the gear, and we in the sold-out crowd eventually — and in disbelief — filed out.

    But this post isn’t about Ryan Adams’ hissy fit. Or his distracting resemblance to Freck in A Scanner Darkly. Or the fact that The Bijou has never had a curfew. No, this post is about live music. And it’s about the years I spent as a broke-ass graduate student, unable to afford to see the shows that came through town. And it’s about the beautiful, beautiful Bijou Theatre, which, since reopening a few months ago, has booked a steady stream of fantastic acts, making Knoxville — finally — a worthwhile stop for all of those bands traveling to and from Nashville, Atlanta, and Asheville. Midway through his opening set the other night, Cardinals guitarist Neal Casal actually stopped for a minute or two to compliment the theater. “Usually a show only sounds good out where you’re sitting,” he told us. “But tonight it sounds really good up here, too.”

    I’ve only seen two shows at the Bijou so far, Ryan Adams and Richard Thompson, but I have tickets for four more over the coming weeks.

    • Bruce Cockburn, August 30, second row center
    • Rhys Chatham, September 5, second row center
    • Calexico and Oakley Hall, September 21, front row center
    • Aimee Mann, October 4, third row center

    Not bad, eh?

  • Impossibly, Even Scarily, Geeky *

    Five weeks from today I’ll be in Toronto, enjoying day two of the film festival. A little more than a week before then, I will have dropped my ticket requests in the nearest FedEx box. Which means there’re only 27 days left to choose which films to see. Time’s a wastin’, people! Let’s get a move on. The folks who have festival’d with me in the past probably know what’s coming next: It’s time for the spreadsheet.

    The idea of creating an Excel file to collect information about each of the 300+ films occurred to me two years ago, when a friend (and TIFF veteran) told me he chose his films based on very particular and personalized criteria. The idea appealed instantly to my more obsessive tendencies. I’m a total dork for research and analysis, not to mention cataloging and organization. After methodically determining and weighting (by points) my own criteria, I dropped them and every film title into a spreadsheet, set up a simple formula, and began digging for information.

    My criteria:

    • Availability (0 to 5) — I go to TIFF to see all of the films that will never make it to Knoxville or, in many cases, that will never make it even to home video.
    • Reviewability (0 to 5) — Are Long Pauses readers interested in the film?
    • Director (0 to 10) — I typically give 5 or 6 points to every first-time filmmaker. Discovering new directors is half the fun of a festival this diverse.
    • Actor (0 to 5) — a.k.a. “The Cate Blanchett Criterion”
    • Theme (0 to 5) — Films about violence usually get a 0; I’m a sucker for coming-of-age films and marriage dramas.
    • Buzz (0 to 15) — Word of mouth and reviews. Bonus points to films that played at Cannes and Venice.
    • Nation (0 to 10) — I have a weakness for films from France, China, Eastern Europe, and South America, and am less likely to see films from England, America, and South Korea. Also, I give bonus points to films from national cinemas that are completely unfamiliar to me. Again, it’s the thrill of discovery.
    • Length (-5 to 5) — When you’re seeing three to five films a day, nothing is more painful that a 3-hour film.
    • Etc. (0 to 10) — Any number of miscellaneous factors. Last year I gave a few bonus points to documentaries, this time it’s going to be experimental films.

    After doing this twice now, I’ve found that the top ten point-getters are films I would have seen anyway. (In 2005, the top four were L’Enfant, The Wayward Cloud, Cache, and Three Times, for example.) Where it becomes interesting is slots thirty through fifty. That’s where I found Angel, Marock, Something Like Happiness, and Little Fish, all really pleasant surprises.

    For anyone who’s interested, here’s the spreadsheet. It includes all of the films that have been announced so far except for the Canadian series films. I usually skim over those when the catalog arrives. Feel free to use, modify, and mock it however you see fit.

    * The title of this post was borrowed from an email exchange with Girish in which we were discussing my spreadsheet and the child-like, pre-TIFF anticipation we both begin to feel every August.

  • Collins and Jost

    I’m treading in deep and unfamiliar waters here. I’ve seen maybe thirty or forty films that could be considered avant-garde, and I have only the sketchiest understanding of the history and evolution of the genre. (Is “genre” even the right word? Surely not. And is there a useful distinction to be made between avant-garde and experimental films? Hopefully I’ll learn a thing or two during today’s blog-a-thon.) My goals for this post are simply to illustrate a particular formal connection I’ve noticed between two films, Phil Collins’ they shoot horses and Jon Jost’s Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses), and to begin exploring the potential political implications of that formal device.

    First, the films . . .

    They Shoot Horses

    they shoot horses (2004)

    dir. by Phil Collins

    they shoot horses is currently installed at the Tate Britain in London. I saw it there when we visited in April. Or, to be more precise, I saw twenty random minutes of it — or roughly 5% of its 6 hour, 40 minute run time. The installation itself is a room of approximately twenty feet squared, consisting of only a sound system and two projectors positioned at ninety degrees relative to one another. Both project directly onto the opposite walls, presenting viewers with two video images that, consequently, are also at ninety degrees relative to one another. Imagine standing in a large, mostly-darkened room, staring directly into one corner of it, and having your peripheral vision on both sides engulfed by competing images. Graphically, the images are similar — both are long shots of people dancing against a pink and orange striped background (see above) — but the dancers and their movements vary from side to side.

    Gallery patrons hear they shoot horses before they see it; a din of break beats and pop vocals carries through much of the Tate’s contemporary art wing. In early 2004 Collins filmed two groups of teens in Ramallah as they danced all day without a break, and his installation is, in part, a visceral recreation of that moment. The low frequency thud of the disco music is as essential to the form and experience of they shoot horses as the piercing noise is to Michael Snow’s Wavelength. The only reprieves from the music come when the dance marathon is interrupted temporarily by occasional power outages and by calls to prayer from a nearby mosque. The dancers appear to have been given little instruction other than to dance and to stay more or less in the frame. I wasn’t able to watch enough of the film to describe Collins’ use of cuts (I never saw any), but the film reads as two simultaneous and continuous takes. I should also mention that, if I lived in London, I would gladly spend an entire day watching the film from start to finish. It has a simple but startling beauty.

    Plain Talk and Common Sense

    Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses) (1987)

    Dir. by Jon Jost

    Jon Jost has described Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses) (1987) as a “State of the Nation discourse.” Filmed in the wake of Reagan’s 525 to 13 electoral vote trouncing of Walter Mondale, Plain Talk is a critical portrait of an America in the final throes of its decades-long ideological battle with communism. Jost systematically appropriates and deconstructs American symbols throughout the film, beginning with an opening shot of leaves of grass and ending in a grain field located at the geographical center of the nation, a grain field whose amber waves happen to flow over missile silos.

    Plain Talk is an essay film that uses what I (perhaps naively) consider to be avant-garde techniques: collage (both images and sound), stop-motion photography, soundtrack manipulation, and a general preference for abstraction over narrative. Despite that preference, however, the film is rigorously structured like a traditional essay, with an introduction and nine chapters, each one building on the argument as developed in the preceding chapter. Plain Talk, as Jost writes:

    asks questions, poses riddles, and prods the viewer to ponder along with the filmmaker on the meaning of it all. And, in typical American fashion, at end it plops the matter directly in the individual’s lap, following in the manner of Walt Thoreau [sic]: in the recurring parlance of the times, “You are what you eat,” or what you do. America is, in sum, what Americans do, and let be done in their name.

    Plain Talk is a bit uneven. Two of the chapters, “Inside/Outside,” a send-up of Cold War America’s military and technology fetishes, and “Songs,” a travelogue of industrial excess, are more effective in theory than in practice. But I’m a great fan of the film, in general. “We hear the sound ‘America,’” Jost says in Chapter 3, “Crosscurrents,” “and instantly, without thought, our minds fill with received images.” Plain Talk is a clever, potent, and — two decades later — timely intervention that forces viewers to reconsider, thoughtfully, our images of America and our role in creating and propagating them.

    The Long Take

    Chapter 7 of Plain Talk, “Americans,” is a portrait series. Each is a medium shot against a black backdrop (see above); the framing erases all visual context, leaving viewers to deduce the subject’s location and social standing from other clues, such as accent or clothes or ambient sounds (street noise in the financial district of San Francisco, chirping insects in the rural South). Although no single portrait lasts for more than twenty or thirty seconds, the shots feel longer because Jost gives his subjects no direction. They step in front of the camera and do what they’ve been trained to do over a lifetime: they introduce themselves and smile directly into the lens, slyly posing to offer the camera their best sides. But when nothing happens, panic sets in. Their eyes begin to dart from the lens to Jost, back to the lens, back to Jost. Eventually the pose drops and we get a quick glimpse of the “real” face. (The screen captures don’t do them justice, but my two favorite examples are the woman in the left image and the man in the right.)

    they shoot horses has a similar effect. Over the course of the film, as Collins’ dancers become more and more exhausted from the marathon, their attitudes toward one another and toward the camera change in waves. They get bored, they lean against the wall or sit on the floor cross-legged, they flirt, they tap their toes and rock absent-mindedly, and then, from time to time, they find new stores of energy and return to their “performance,” dancing like the teenagers they see every day on satellite television.

    Jost’s film is explicitly political. It’s a Leftist critique of American military and economic imperialism, and of the degradation of American democracy. Its final chapter, “Heart of the Country,” takes place in the population center of the nation, a specific geographical location that, as Jost points out, was determined by statisticians and cartographers who worked from the assumption that every citizen exerts equal weight/power. Plain Talk attacks that assumption at every turn. Though much less explicit, they shoot horses offers a similar critique by finding a formal, egalitarian beauty in the citizens of a Palestinian city under Israeli occupation. I like the description in the Tate’s program: “The work is concerned with heroism and collapse and reveals beauty surviving under duress.”

    What most interests me — and what I lack a vocabulary to properly describe — is the direct connection between the form and political content in both of these films. That brief frisson that occurs when the pose drops — when a person who lives in an image-marketed and -mediated culture suddenly finds herself set adrift in the semiological flux — that moment, I think, is an instance of political resistance. It’s a temporary escape from the commodification and reification of our images and of our selves.

  • Looking at Photographs

    The Language of Light

    The Language of Light, 1952
    by Clarence John Laughlin

    Many of Clarence John Laughlin’s Photographs actually show ghosts: transparent but nonetheless corporeal ladies draped in sheets or period nightgowns, appearing from behind stone monuments or Ionic columns or other decaying relics of the Old South. In other of Laughlin’s pictures, like the one shown here, the ghosts have fled, and only the pattern of their spell remains.

    Any child abed in lazy and luxurious convalescence from measles or chicken pox, half-drunk with tea and hot lemonade, learns that the space between the window shade and the casement is a magic place, populated by spirits that cast their shifting, liquid shadows on the screen and tap out their secret messages on the window frame. Once each of us was open to such dramas of the senses, revealed in terms that were trivial and ephemeral: the reflection of the hand mirror on the dressing table, slowly tracing its elliptical course across the ceiling.

    Many of us forget the existence of such experiences when we learn to measure the priorities of practical life; some of us remember their existence but find that in the light of day they have become as shy and evasive as the hermit thrush; a few, whom we call artists, maintain an easy intimacy with the wonders of simple perception. In this century many of these have been photographers, and the exploration of our fundamental sensory experience has been in large part their work. It is photography that has continued to teach us of the pleasure and the adventure of disinterested seeing.

    — John Szarkowski

    A month ago I stumbled upon a summer reading list from David Schonauer, editor-in-chief at American Photo. There he states his intent to reread the “best book on photography ever written,” a collection that had been passed down to him years earlier by the out-going founding editor of the magazine, Sean Callahan. “It’s been sitting on a bookcase shelf in my office for years and years, dog-eared and finger-smudged from constant referencing,” Schonaeur writes. “This summer I’m going to pick it up again and look at it closely, from beginning to end. It will be like discovering the magic of photography all over again.”

    Curious, I walked over to the library and checked out its copy of Looking At Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski. I’m not at all qualified to crown this book champion, but I’ve enjoyed every moment I’ve spent with it — as much for Szarkowski’s writing as for the photos. (I have since bought my own copy, framed eight of the prints, and hung them in my office. Amazon allows you to sample a few more pages.) Szarkowski’s response to Laughlin’s The Language of Light is my favorite passage — it struck me immediately as a perfect Long Pause — but every page is a new discovery.

  • The Origin of Love

    The Origin of Love

    This is the second time “The Origin of Love” has been a Long Pauses Song of the Moment. Again, I was inspired by seeing a live performance of Hedwig and the Angry Inch — this time here in our own “scruffy little city,” Knoxville, Tennessee. K-Town did me proud. The Actors Co-op’s production is funnier, and its music is better, than the version we saw in Washington, D.C. three years ago. The show lives and dies on its Hedwig, and Joseph Beuerlein is impressive. I don’t know how anyone can do a two-hour show and still have the voice to shout “Lift Up Your Hands” at the end of “Midnight Radio,” but Beuerline just got stronger and stronger. My only complaint is that he’s a little too butch. For the play to really work, Hedwig must seduce everyone in the audience, including the heterosexual men, and he never quite did. (His effect on my wife is another story.)

    Jonathan Richman’s version of “The Origin of Love,” like the other links I posted yesterday, are all from Wig in a Box, which is perhaps the only “music from and inspired by” cover record I’ve ever heard that’s a fantastic album on its own terms. Hedwig‘s best songs — “Origin,” “Wicked Little Town,” “Wig in a Box” — are each given straight (no pun intended), respectful readings. Rufus Wainwright’s version of “Origin,” for example, sounds exactly like you’d expect it to sound. And The Polyphonic Spree’s cover of “Wig” is the only one of their songs I can stand to listen to a second time.

    What I love about the album, though, is its inspired reinventions. Spoon turns “Tear Me Down” into a Tommy-era Who song, and the pairing of Yoko Ono and Yo La Tengo on “Hedwig’s Lament / Exquisite Corpse” is just brilliant. Robyn Hitchcock’s “City of Women” won’t change the world, but it makes me strangely nostalgic for Bauhaus and Peter Murphy records.

  • SEX

    During one of my stints in the fast food industry, I had a manager who wrote SEX in bright block lettering atop every important message she tacked to the breakroom bulletin board. It was usually followed by the clever parenthetical: “Now that I’ve got your attention.”

    In a couple hours I’ll be joining some friends for a lunch-time discussion of Eyes Wide Shut. A month or so ago, we happened upon the theme of “the philosophy of sex” for our film group, and in the weeks since we’ve watched the remake of Solaris (we did the Tarkovsky last fall), Sex, Lies & Videotape, and, now, the Kubrick film. I get to make the next pick and, so, I’m looking for suggestions:

    What is your favorite film that touches upon the “philosophy of sex”? Feel free to interpret that phrase however you see fit.

    The first three films have worked fairly well together, though Videotape, which I’d never seen before, is awfully muddled. (It made me wish we’d watched Peeping Tom or Medium Cool, instead.) What energized our discussion of Solaris was the question of subjectivity — does Kelvin love Rheya, or does he love his purely subjective rendering of her, “Rheya”? Do I love Joanna, or do I love “Joanna,” this woman I know so intimately and yet will never actually know? Eyes Wide Shut, I think, is a nightmarish rendering of this question, so I’m looking forward to lunch.

    None of my friends have seen Birth, so it would be a logical and interesting next choice, but I’ve seen it so many times lately and have given it so much thought, I would rather select something a bit fresher. A couple ideas:

    Carnal Knowledge (Nichols, 1971) — Haven’t seen it for years. Also, it’s an obvious influence on Sex, Lies & Videotape.

    Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1972) — I was way too young the one time I saw this and had no context for making sense of it. Does it stand up?

    Shampoo (Ashby, 1975) — Zach’s recent posts have put this film on my mind lately. Plus, I’m always looking for an excuse to proselytize for Ashby.

    You’d think I was fixated on the 1970s film renaissance, but I promise it wasn’t by design. I’ll take recommendations from any era, any genre, any country. The only other criterion is that it be readily available on DVD. I have a week or so to come up with my pick.

    By the way, last night was the first time I’d watched Eyes Wide Shut in several years. I’d like to trim 1,500 words or so from the essay, but I stand by my reading of the film. The one difference for me this time was that it struck me as even more death-obsessed than I’d remembered. Also, I still can’t make sense of the very first image: Kidman slipping out of a black evening dress. It’s not the same dress she wears to the party. Obviously, the point of the shot is to show a beautiful naked woman — or, more specifically, a beautiful naked wife and mother — but does it have a narrative purpose? My pet theory is that this is the only “real” image in the entire film — the last sight Bill glimpses before drifting off to sleep.

  • North by Northwest

    I’m writing from the 22nd floor of the Sheraton hotel in downtown Seattle. Two weeks ago, in a flurry of end-of-the-fiscal-year spending, the director of our department popped her head into my office just long enough to tell me to book that trip to Web Design World, a conference I’d asked to attend some time earlier but that I’d assumed would be deemed too expensive by the Powers that Be. So, let’s hear it for the Powers that Be! Occasionally they still come through for the little guy!

    In a sure sign that leaving academia was for the best, this is the first time I’ve ever felt genuinely excited about the — what’s it called? — content of a conference. Of the fifteen or so academic gatherings in which I’ve participated over the years, I don’t recall ever attending more than two or three panels at any one of them. Folks from Microsoft and Google are here, of course, but I’m most excited about hearing talks and getting pointers from the design gurus and web standards experts: DL Bryon, Andy Clarke, Kelly Goto, Molly Holzschlag, Peter Merholz and Brandon Schauer, and Michael Ninness. A little over a week ago I was handed a massive design project — the largest and most prominent one I’m likely to ever get in this particular job, in fact — so I’m feeling motivated to learn. (That also helps to explain the recent silence here at Long Pauses.)

    Along with me for the trip are three new toys. After spending 45+ hours per week with OS X for the last two months, I could no longer stand to look at my 9-pound, glitchy, piece-o-crap Dell laptop. So I’ve replaced it with a new MacBook. It’s smaller, faster, and a hell of a lot sexier. Now that web design is officially my profession, rather than just a job, I’m totally indulging my tech geek fetishes. And along those lines, my second new toy came as a total surprise. When I placed the order for my MacBook, the kid at the university computer store asked, “So, um, do you want your free iPod with that?” I had no idea about the current promotion but was more than happy to grab a 2 Gig Nano.

    My third companion is a copy of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, which, thanks to Michael, I’m determined to finish this summer. The Recognitions has been on my to-read list since the days of comprehensive exams, when my life was more or less consumed by to-read lists. At nearly 1,000 pages, though, I couldn’t justify the hours it would steal then. Instead, I dug up some reviews, memorized the names of a couple characters, and learned just enough about Gaddis to be able to write four or five cogent sentences — all one needs, really, to answer an ID question or to make a knowing reference in an essay. Sixty pages in, I’m really enjoying The Recognitions and am eager to spend a leisurely month or two reading (and blogging) it. Also, I hope to benefit from the wisdom of similar, past ventures.

    This is my first visit to Seattle, so any recommendations would be much appreciated. After a nap, a shower, and a cup of coffee yesterday afternoon, I walked to Wild Ginger, a restaurant that was recommended by a local friend. The menus (yes, plural) were large, impressive, intimidating even, so I took the advice of my server and ordered a salmon satay appetizer, a bowl of prawn wonton soup, and these amazing lettuce wraps stuffed with seared sea bass in a sauce of chilis, ginger, cinnamon, and lime. Everything was well-prepared and full of flavor. Great stuff. After dinner I walked over to the Egyptian Theatre, where I caught A Scanner Darkly. I like the film a lot more this morning than I did while I was watching it, which is always a good sign.

  • Drunken Butterfly

    Drunken Butterfly

    Or, Random Observations Provoked by Seeing Sonic Youth Live for the First Time:

    • Sonic Youth’s show in Asheville, NC this past weekend seems to have served two purposes for the band: It was a logical stop on I-40 as they made their way west toward that music festival over in Manchester, and it gave them another chance to road test material from Rather Ripped.
    • Lee Ranaldo, apparently, is most in need of the practice. I noticed him laughing to himself several times as he fumbled his way through a couple of the new songs. They played all but one or two of them, and a couple really came to life. “Pink Steam,” “Turquoise Boy,” and “Rats” were probably the highlights.
    • I’ll likely never get a chance to see Spinal Tap play “Big Bottom” live, but I’ve now seen Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, and Mark Ibold all play bass on “Eric’s Trip.”
    • That spinning, rocking, jumping-jacks thing Kim Gordon does? She could totally put out a “Rad Mother” workout video. I’ve now seen her calves from about ten inches away, and, I’m telling you, they belong on a woman half her age. 53? Are you kidding me?
    • “Drunken Butterfly” (mp3) was the best three-and-a-half minutes of my concert-going life.
    • I need to go to more shows that risk permanently damaging my hearing. Bad for the ears, good for the soul.
    • Damn, that was fun.

  • A Long Way Down (2005)

    By Nick Hornby

    So what is the prevailing opinion of Michiko Kakutani? After finishing Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, I dug up her review and was suprised to find a piece that is, at best, a witless and contemptuous hammer job. Previously, I’d known her only for her thoughtful reviews of “high,” “literary” fiction by the likes of Philip Roth, Richard Ford, and Don Delillo. She seems much more at home there, and is certainly more willing to give those authors the benefit of the doubt, not to mention the benefit of her full attention and energy.

    That Kakutani dislikes Hornby’s book is just fine with me. I didn’t care for it too much myself. And, actually, scathing reviews are often the most fun to read, especially when the critic displays in abundance the exact qualities lacking in the art. Is anything more fun than watching a humorless spewer of banalities be pantsed by a clever critic? That’s not what we get in Kakutani’s review, though.

    This plot summary fascinates me:

    The premise of “A Long Way Down” feels like a formulaic idea for a cheesy made-for-television movie: one New Year’s Eve, four depressed people make their way to the roof of a London building known as Toppers’ House, with the intent of jumping to their deaths. One is a snarky former television host named Martin (think of Joe Pantoliano or a younger Tom Selleck in the role), who recently served a jail term for having sex with a 15-year-old girl. One is a long-suffering single mother named Maureen (think Sada Thompson), who spends all her time caring for her brain-damaged son. One is a foul-mouthed teenager named Jess (think Shannen Doherty on speed), who is constantly doing and saying wildly inappropriate things. And one is a geeky, wannabe rock star named JJ (think David Schwimmer), who’s aggrieved about his failure to become Mick Jagger or Keith Richards.

    I recently read an interesting critique of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral that pointed out how, despite its being set amid the turmoil of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the novel, surprisingly, has no music in it. When Swede Levov sneaks into the bedroom of his radical teenaged daughter, he doesn’t find a stack of Jimi Hendrix and CCR records. Instead, Roth gives us scenes like the one in The Human Stain, where Nathan Zuckerman and Coleman Silk dance to big band music from the ’40s. Roth, the critic argues, seems to have stopped listening to new music just before Elvis hit the scene and, as a result, spoils ever so slightly the hard-fought authenticity of his historical recreations.

    Judging by the paragraph snipped above, Kakutani seems to have lost touch with popular culture just before Elvis hit the porcelain floor of his Graceland bathroom. I had to look up Sada Thompson, best remembered as the mother on the Kristy McNichol TV series, Family (1976-80). And who is reminded of a younger Tom Selleck by anything these days, let alone by a novel set in contemporary London? With her anachronistic stabs at snark — really, who other than Robin Williams would think “on speed” qualifies as wit? — Kakutani comes off like a junior high guidance counselor with a comb-over (think Horatio Sanz in the “Wake Up Wakefield!” skits, natch).

    I’d be fine dismissing the review with, “Well, Kakutani is clearly just the wrong person to review a novel by Nick Hornby, arch purveyor of all-things-hip-and-now,” except that her cluelessness has caused her to fundamentally misread the book. To picture Tom Selleck when you read A Long Way Down is not just . . . well . . . creepy, it’s objectively wrong. It’s like saying, “I didn’t care for Lolita. That Humbert Humbert guy reminded me of Alan Alda, and I just couldn’t picture Hawkeye doing that to a little girl.” (Not that I’m comparing Hornby to Nabokov, but you get the point.) Martin is bitterly, aggressively sarcastic; he’s world-weary, arrogant, and vain in the way only a disgraced host of a British breakfast program can be world-weary, arrogant, and vain. He’s Eddie Izzard. Or, if you’re a film producer with a lot of money on the line, he’s Hugh Grant the day after his encounter with Divine Brown or the drunken, mean-spirited Colin Firth of Where the Truth Lies. Martin wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a Hawaiian floral shirt, Magnum P.I.-style.

    The same goes for JJ, the American rock star whose band breaks up after a decade of just-south-of-mainstream success. I assume Kakutani calls him “geeky” because he’s the most introspective of the lot and because he adores the same serious fiction she does (JJ namedrops Delillo, The Sportswriter, and American Pastoral). Hornby doesn’t spend more than a sentence or two describing the physical appearance of his protagonists, but we’re told that JJ is tall, good-looking, and long-haired. He’s decidedly not-geeky, but I suspect that only readers who are attuned to Hornby’s codes can see it. “Putting on my faded black jeans and my old Drive-By Truckers T-shirt was my way of being heard by the right people,” JJ says, and it works. Kakutani misses the call, but the girl JJ hooks up with for a one-night-stand doesn’t. David Schwimmer? Really?

    And there’s another thing. Kakutani writes:

    With the exception of Maureen – who comes across as truly disconsolate over her son’s plight – none of these people seems genuinely suicidal, or, for that matter, genuinely depressed. Martin is the sort of guy who jots down “Kill myself?” in a Courses of Action list. And Jess treats leaping off a building as another impulsive act – not unlike getting smashed and mouthing off at strangers, or having a high-decibel fight with her parents in public.

    None of these folks seems to have given any thought to getting therapy, taking antidepressants or finding a practical solution to their problems. It never occurs to Maureen – who is not without money or friends – that she might get help in taking care of her son. And it never occurs to JJ that there might be a middle ground between making the cover of Rolling Stone and ending it all.

    I agree with almost everything in the first paragraph, everything but the exception she’s allowed for Maureen, and Hornby would likely agree. They’re not suicidal; all four want desperately to live but can’t seem to find a way to manage. That’s kind of the point of the novel. I think. If they don’t seem “genuinely depressed,” it’s likely a result of Hornby’s decision to allow each character to tell his or her own story. Self-awareness isn’t a real strong suit for any of these characters, and Hornby isn’t one to dwell in sentiment. Rather, I like A Long Way Down best when we, the readers, are allowed the benefit of ironic distance, giving us a chance to see the self-destructive consequences of each character’s actions, even (especially) when he or she is unable to see them for him- or herself. There’s a nice scene near the end of the novel when the foul-mouthed teen, Jess, having reached her breaking point, finds herself alone on a street corner, smoking and muttering profanity. “It would be very easy for me to be a nutter,” she thinks. “I’m not saying it would be a piece of piss, living that life — I don’t mean that. I just mean that I had a lot in common with some of the people you see sitting on pavements swearing and rolling cigarettes.” A lot in common, indeed.

    What’s clear from Kakutani’s review is that she was unable to muster the slightest bit of sympathy for Hornby’s characters. How else to explain the contempt she shows them in that second paragraph — the way she so snobbishly dismisses “these folks” for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and finding a rational, practical “solution to their problems”? Clearly, Hornby is partly to blame for her lack of empathy. His narrative strategy is a gimmick that fails to work at least as often as it succeeds, and I likewise found myself frustrated and annoyed from time to time by the voices in these particular heads. (There’s a reason Vardaman’s chapters are so short in As I Lay Dying.) But Kakutani’s reading seems lazy to me. She’s misjudged these folks — not to mention Hornby’s intentions — and is punching herself silly, chasing after her straw men.

  • David Sancious

    During the late-80s and early-90s, when I was preparing for what would prove to be a remarkably short stint in music school, much of my listening was piano-centric. I’ve already owned up to my obsession with all things Yes, but in earlier posts I was hesitant to admit just how deep those waters ran. For example, I not only owned, but proudly proclaimed the brilliance of Rick Wakeman’s solo albums, including the one he [shudder] staged as an ice show. I camped out for tickets to an Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, and Howe concert. I spent hours and hours trying to learn his “Six Wives of Henry the VIII” solo from Yessongs. I booed and hissed at the mere mention of Tony Kaye’s or Trevor Horn’s name. (Only Patrick Moraz’s playing on Relayer was up to Wakeman’s standard.)

    Good lord, it’s like I’m speaking some long forgotten dork language. And I haven’t even mentioned Keith Emerson yet.

    The player I most envied then was David Sancious. Not because he had Wakeman’s dexterity or massive rig of keyboards, but because he sat in both of my dream chairs. In 1988 Sancious joined Peter Gabriel’s band for the So tour and for the series of Amnesty International Human Rights Now concerts that followed. (That lineup, by the way — Sancious, Tony Levin, David Rhodes, and Manu Katche — is featured in the regrettably-not-on-DVD concert film, Point of View [PoV], best remembered today for the version of “In Your Eyes” that got some play on MTV after Say Anything made it a hit.) Sancious also joined Gabriel in the studio, lending his tasteful playing to both Passion and Us.

    From Gabriel’s band, Sancious then moved over to Sting’s. A note for any reader who is too hip for Sting: Get over yourself. Yeah, he’s taken the Elton-John-Disney route in recent years, but those first few solo albums are like songwriting 101. If you can’t appreciate a good lyric, a beautiful melody, and the most tasteful bass playing this side of Revolver, well . . . maybe this site is more to your liking. Sancious recorded and toured with Sting throughout the early-90s, often sharing duties with Kenny Kirkland. (Has it really been eight years since he died?) He can be heard on both The Soul Cages and Ten Summoner’s Tales.

    For most fans of rock music, though — fans who didn’t spend their teen years arguing over which was the coolest Roger Dean album cover — Sancious is best remembered for his time with the E Street Band. He and Springsteen met when both were still in their teens, but in 1972, when Springsteen set out to record Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., he had to recruit Sancious, who was then living in Virginia. He returned to New Jersey for the gig and stuck around long enough to play on the followup album, The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, and on the title track of Springsteen’s third record, Born to Run. After two years of recording and touring with the Boss, Sancious left to form his own band, Tone.

    It’s only been in the last few months that I’ve discovered those first three Springsteen records. It’s a breakthrough, really. I’m treading through a thick soup of anti-Springsteen bias that first began to congeal in 1984, when every damn time I turned on the radio I heard “Glory Days,” “My Hometown,” or “Dancing in the Dark.” I still really hate those songs. Springsteen’s early recordings, though, are just amazing. Messy, loud, and a shitload of fun — like a Stax review had stumbled into some East Coast beer hall.

    About three-and-a-half minutes into “Kitty’s Back,” just after Springsteen’s blaring, horn-backed solo, Sancious steps in with a squirrelly run on his Hammond organ, followed by a slew of percussive figures and arpeggios. Harmonically, it isn’t an especially interesting solo, but it’s exactly the kind of Booker T-inspired playing the song needs. (Compare with Sting’s “Saint Augustine in Hell,” one of the few songs I can think of that finds a deep groove in a 7 time signature). I suspect that his taste and restraint are exactly what Springsteen, Gabriel, and Sting most like about Sancious. All three put The Song on a pedestal and surround themselves with musicians who do the same.

  • Birth (2004)

    Birth (2004)

    Dir. by Jonathan Glazer

    The first image in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth is a nearly two-minute, uninterrupted high-angle shot of a jogger making his way through snow-covered Central Park. The camera follows a few steps behind him, floating dreamily twenty or thirty feet over his head. It trails the runner for several hundred meters, over hills, around bends, and, finally, under a quiet overpass before momentarily losing sight of him in the darkness. The first cut is to the opening title: Birth, rendered in an ornate, story-book script.

    Like most film viewers, apparently, I paid little attention to Birth during its theatrical run. What I remember of its marketing campaign cast the film as another Nicole Kidman prestige picture, one of the countless many that have appeared, with assembly line-like regularity, in recent years. My expectations, though, were completely undone by that first shot. While watching Birth‘s opening sequence I was struck by a feeling I’ve experienced again and again in the months since, as I’ve caught up with Glazer’s first feature film, Sexy Beast, and with his many television advertisements and music videos: I was watching a filmmaker whose mise-en-scene was purposeful, controlled, surprising, and stylized (in the sense that “stylized” is now commonly used to describe films by Quentin Tarrantino and Wes Anderson, for example) but always in the service of story and character. I trusted Glazer immediately and completely.

    I’m harping on this one shot because, having now seen Birth three or four times, and having watched the opening moments of the film more times still, I’m fascinated by the durability of its effect. The high angle perspective makes the jogger a small, dark (he’s dressed in all black), and indefinable mark against the white snow. It’s barely color photography at all, in fact — the palette is all shades of gray and beige. This, combined with Alexandre Desplat’s “Prelude,” puts us in a world that isn’t quite real. It’s more Chris Van Allsburg than Martin Scorsese. Central Park is recast as the Grimm Brothers’ forest; I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find the Billy Goats’ troll or a Frog Prince hiding in the shadows beneath that bridge.

    Like all good fairy tales, Birth is a dreamscape, really. Fantasy and suppressed desire are manifest in symbol-heavy ghosts and magic. Reason surrenders its claims to knowledge. Emotion reigns. The two films I think of most often when watching Birth are Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and David Cronenberg’s The Brood, both sublime and uncanny horror stories in their own right. Glazer’s debt to Kubrick is all over Birth — from the slow tracking shots and symmetrical compositions to the spanking scene, which is lifted, whole hog, from Barry Lyndon — but it’s their shared interest in the psychology of sex, death, and human subjectivity that links Glazer’s film most closely with that other Kidman-as-impossibly-wealthy-Manhattanite movie.

    Birth is, I think, a curious reimagining of the ideas that propel The Brood, the 1979 splatterfest in which an experimental form of self-actualization therapy gives birth, quite literally, to the anger and self-hatred that, until that point, had been safely repressed by each analysand’s super-ego. Always part satirist, Cronenberg treats 1970s psychotherapy with suspicion (if not downright contempt), but, as has become his trademark, the real horror of The Brood is his qrotesque rendering of deep-seated human anxiety — and, more specifically, anxiety about death, bound as it is to the corporeal, “flesh”-iness of our always-decaying bodies. (Forgive me if that all sounds obnoxiously pedantic. This notorious image from The Brood is more to-the-point.)

    The basic premise of Birth is simple enough: a decade after her husband’s death, a young woman meets a ten-year-old who claims to be his reincarnation. Although the boy is certainly a more rounded character than the knife-wielding homunculi of The Brood, he shares their function as a materialization of repressed trauma. (He doesn’t just serve this function, of course. It’s to the film’s credit that, while remaining largely within Anna’s subjectivity — at least from that amazing opera scene on — Glazer and his cowriters have built nice parallels into the story in order to emphasize the similarities between Anna and the young Sean. Their visits to Clara and Clifford’s apartment is one good example.)

    Entering spoilers territory . . .

    That the central mystery of Birth — is the boy her dead husband or isn’t he? — can be explained away by an important plot point is, impressively, both utterly beside the point and exactly what makes the entire premise of the film so damn interesting. Had Birth ended without revealing the dead Sean’s betrayal of Anna — had the mystery simply been left unresolved or resigned to the realm of the supernatural — Glazer’s portrait of mourning and grief would have been no less impressive or terrifying. (It likely would have become even more dreamlike, veering closer to the territory of a film like Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s À travers la forêt.) As it is, the secret ultimately remains hidden from Anna, so her character, at least when viewed from within the film’s world, is unaffected by any alterations to this particular plot point. Or think of it this way: Kidman would perform Anna exactly the same way, regardless of whether or not those letters existed.

    But the letters do exist. And although we never get a significant peek into them, we can make certain safe assumptions about their contents. They’re written by a woman desperately in love with her husband. They touch on the mundane details of the couple’s domestic life together. (“This is my desk. This is where I worked.”) They’re frank enough and intimate enough to include details about a secret romp on their brother-in-law’s couch. They express her regret over the amount of time they are forced to spend apart and her desire to be with him more often. (I wonder, even, if the very act of writing those letters could be a sublimation of Anna’s insecurities and suspicions about Sean’s fidelity.)

    I’ve always read Eyes Wide Shut as a hopeless attempt by a man to regain the fictional unity of his own identity after having it exploded by a wife who, as is always the case, turns out to be not at all the woman he had imagined her to be. Birth, I think, is essentially the same story. By way of comparison to another “trick” film, at the end of Birth the “real” Sean remains as much a mystery to us as Keyser Soze. Anna so quickly and so easily falls in love with the young Sean not because he’s a manifestation of her dead husband but because he so effortlessly performs a role that is wholly the work of Anna’s imagination. She has conjured an idealized version of Sean through the magical incantation of her love letters. “I can’t be him because I’m in love with Anna,” the boy tells a police officer, adrift in his own impressive whirl of identity confusion.

    My only complaint with Birth is its relatively clunky ending. The final image of Anna wailing in the surf is like a mash-up of The Awakening and The 400 Blows but without the inevitability or rightness of either. I wish it ended, instead, like Eyes Wide Shut, at the precise moment when all the horrors exposed in the film are once again safely repressed by a single word. In Kubrick’s film, the tension is superficially resolved in a toy shop, where Alice restores Bill’s sense of himself by simply telling him they should “fuck.” In Birth, Anna and her future husband negotiate in a corporate boardroom, where she surrenders all of her desires to more acceptable cultural norms. “I want to have a good life, and I want to be happy,” she says. “That’s all I want. Peace.”

    I wish the film ended here. “Okay,” he says. Cut to black. And like magic, the monsters disappear.