Tag: Genre: American Indie

  • Lucky Life (2010)

    Lucky Life (2010)

    Dir. by Lee Isaac Chung

    There’s a sequence about 25 minutes into Lee Isaac Chung’s new film Lucky Life that I’ve watched countless times over the past few months. In an earlier scene, the film’s four main characters — old college friends who reunite each year at a beach house on the Outer Banks — are sitting around a table outside a restaurant, telling stories late into the night, and one of them, Jason (Kenyon Adams), mentions that he’s never watched the sun rise over the ocean. “Well, you have to do that,” Karen (Megan McKenna) says with enthusiasm. “We’ll do that!” In a few typically elliptical cuts, Chung then moves us from their conversation to a scene back at the beach house, which is followed soon after by the three cuts I can’t stop watching: 1. a point-of-view shot from within a car that is pulling onto a ferry, 2. a medium close-up of the back of Jason’s head, and 3. a long, high-angle shot of the four friends walking slowly onto the beach, each of them staged like a visitor to the gardens of Resnais’s Marienbad. It’s well past sunrise by the time they reach the water’s edge, but like so much of the film’s plot, this seems utterly, delightfully beside the point.

    Movies about the lives of college-educated-but-still-rambling young professionals are a staple of low-budget American cinema, and it’s tempting in the opening scenes of Lucky Life to graph onto it all of the conventions of the genre. But there are several clues that Chung is up to something different here, that his cinematic points of reference extend well beyond Austin and Park City. The ferry sequence, for example, is held together by a music cue and by an oddly — and beautifully — subjective camera, the likes of which I rarely see in American film. Chung shifts regularly throughout Lucky Life from an objective perspective that captures conversations and the occasional shards of narrative to a more searching, melancholic point-of-view that is clearly designed or authored. It’s often reflected in the form itself, as he alternates between the kind of handheld photography we’ve come to think of, post-Dardennes, as “realist” and a combination of composed tracking shots and long, static takes. Isaac mentioned in a recent interview that he watched a lot of Mizoguchi before making Lucky Life; after watching the ferry scene eight or ten times, I sent him a stack of Claire Denis films. It’s that kind of subjectivity.

    Another clue to Chung’s strategy is the lead performance from Daniel O’Keefe. Mark is a recognizable “indie” protagonist. He’s a 30-year-old writer and husband. He sleeps late, works on his laptop at a neighborhood coffee shop, and seems resigned to his impending fatherhood. But he’s also introverted, soft-spoken, and moody, traits that make him a difficult point of entry into the film’s world. Or, at least, I assume other viewers will have trouble empathizing with Mark. He can be a bit of a prick. (He’s also more like me than any character I’ve ever seen on screen. For an insight into all that my endlessly-patient wife has endured over the years, watch Lucky Life’s crib-building scene. I shrink in shame each time I see it.)

    But Mark’s personality is somehow at the core of this film, which is deeply serious like Tarkovsky’s films are serious. Jason, we quickly discover, is dying and making what will likely be his last trip to the beach. Despite this loss and other personal trials, however, Mark shows few outward signs of mourning or emotional turmoil. He’s a young, American version of the stone-faced cipher we regularly see in art house cinema from Eastern Europe and Asia. But there’s not a shred of irony in Chung’s authorial voice. The film’s main concerns – How does one remain hopeful in the face of suffering? How can the artist transform the stuff of life into a harbinger of beauty and grace? – were heavy subjects when Tarkovsky tackled them, and they’re heavy now. The slightest wink to the audience would cripple Lucky Life, and it’s to Chung’s great credit that this deceptively ambitious film maintains its balance through to the final shot. (I’m eager to see how others respond to that shot, which is so painfully real to my own experience I can barely stand to watch it.)

    A few other random observations. First, I don’t make the Tarkovsky comparison lightly. When I interviewed Isaac a few years ago about his first film, Munyurangabo, we talked a lot about Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on History,” so I was thrilled to see how Lucky Life weaves together Benjamin’s “storm of progress” with Tarkovsky’s apocalyptic visions. One particular tracking shot makes it look like ocean waves are crashing against the old beach house, just as flames consume the house at the end of The Sacrifice. The recurring recitations of Gerald Stern’s poetry, which inspired the film, and Chung’s striking use of archival footage also call to mind Tarkovsky’s Mirror.

  • 2009 SFIFF Diary 2

    2009 SFIFF Diary 2

    Oblivion (Heddy Honigmann)

    Four years ago, on my first trip to the San Francisco International Film Festival, a couple friends and I had our liveliest debate after a screening of Ellen Perry’s The Fall of Fujimori, a documentary about Peru’s recent political history told mostly in the first person by Fujimori himself. On one side of the debate were those of us who felt the strength of the film was its subtle ironies, particularly its use of the contemporary context (the early days of Bush’s war on terror) to undermine the elected dictator’s self-aggrandizing justifications of his anti-democratic domestic policies. On the other side were those who argued that people in power are afforded ample opportunity to speak for themselves and that the filmmaker was morally obligated to condemn Fujimori outright. It was a fun — and heated — exchange. Heddy Honigmann’s latest film is a fascinating answer to that discussion. Oblivion is also told in the first person, though this time mostly by aging, blue-collar workers who, in several cases, literally served (whether food or drink or services) several past presidents and dictators, including Fujimori. I’ve only seen two Honigmann films, but in both I’ve been startled by the candor she elicits from her interview subjects. Here, her camera lingers awkwardly on a man who admits with some shame that after working for more than 30 years in one of Lima’s finest restaurants, he had never had an opportunity to take his wife there. A 60-year-old leather worker hides his face when he’s overcome by emotion while remembering all he lost during the days of runaway inflation. An adolescent shoeshine boy stares blankly into the camera and tells Honigmann, “No, I don’t have any dreams. No, I don’t have any happy memories.” She intercuts these stories with footage of young, self-taught jugglers and acrobats — homeless kids — who perform in busy intersections during red lights. They’re graceful and full of life, their performances have a startling and kinetic beauty. The juxtaposition is complex and loaded with ambiguities — a reflection, I suspect, of Honigmann’s personal relationship with her home country.

    Everything Strange and New (Frazer Bradshaw)

    Everything Strange and New (Frazer Bradshaw)

    To recycle a line I’ve used before, I’m often more interested in what a film does than what it’s about, and Bradshaw’s first narrative feature, Everything Strange and New, does quite a lot. The opening shot (pictured above) is a long, static take accompanied by an explosion of percussive, dissonant music — a self-conscious announcement that this is not another of those suburban stories about disaffected fathers and husbands. As it turns out, it is one of those films, but I’ll credit Bradshaw for his experiments with the genre, particularly his working-class lead character, Wayne, and for his often fascinating photography. One or two shots approach Bela Tarr territory (if Tarr shot a low-budget dv movie). Had the film ended 20 minutes sooner, I would have even applauded Bradshaw’s success at blending avant-garde techniques with more naturalistic storytelling. But a plot turn in the final act — and, more importantly, Bradshaw’s cynical handling of it — caused me to reevaluate everything that came before. Everything Strange and New is cruel to its characters in a way that comes off as smug rather than searching.

    35 Shots of Rum (Denis, 2009)

    35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)

    I’ve already written a bit about this film, but I want to quickly mention a scene that, to me, encapsulates all that distinguishes Denis’s take on the small, family drama from most other films in the genre. The morning after the “Nightshift,” Noé (Grégoire Colin) announces to Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué) and Joséphine (Mati Diop) that he’s leaving for a job in Gabon. Rather than dealing explicitly with the fallout from his decision, Denis cuts, instead, to a closeup of Lionel (Alex Descas), who’s walking home, presumably after a one-night-stand. She then cuts on an eyeline match to Joséphine climbing precariously out of their top-story window with a bottle of cleaner and towels in her hand. We are given, cinematically, the perspective of a father watching his child in danger. Or, at least that’s how I read the image the first time. On repeat viewings, there’s something much more interesting in Lionel’s expression: his intimate and hard-won understanding of his daughter’s behavior, his realization that she’s cleaning, which means that she’s upset, which means that it’s his job to go soothe and protect her. This plays out in the next few minutes in a wonderful scene in which their history is revealed through gestures. There’s text — Joséphine shaking out the bedsheets, looking through family photos, and arguing with her father — and there’s subtext — not only the loss of their mother/wife but also their deep familiarity with each other and with moments like this. (We can immediately imagine them having a hundred other similar confrontations — her cleaning, him stoic, with arms folded.) Characters in movies expertly express their feelings; real people, in my experience, typically don’t. Yet those of us in successful, long-term relationships manage to communicate anyway. 35 Shots of Rum is rare for managing to capture that peculiar kind of intimacy on screen. Ozu would approve.

    Zift (Javor Gardev)

    Zift (Javor Gardev)

    A Bulgarian film noir? Yes, please. Although a bit too stylized (in the Tarantino sense) for my tastes, Zift is a hell of a lot of fun and could probably find a decent audience in the States if a distributor packaged it properly. (First-time director Gardev must surely be taking studio offers for his next film as we speak.) The movie borrows liberally from classic Hollywood noirs, most notably a reenactment of Rita Hayworth’s iconic number in Gilda, and the black-and-white cinematography honors that legacy while updating the camera movements for contemporary audiences accustomed to a more frenetic pace. The two lead actors are fun discoveries, too, particularly Tanya Ilieva, who, frankly, is one of the sexiest women I’ve ever seen on screen. Zift was on my radar last September at TIFF, so I’m glad to have finally had a chance to catch up with it.

    Wild Field (Mikheil Kalatozishvili)

    Wild Field (Mikheil Kalatozishvili)

    Wild Field belongs to a class of films I’m drawn to at festivals. I rarely expect them to be great (and they rarely are), but I see them less for their stories or formal innovations than for the opportunity they provide to watch people in a part of the world I would never have a chance to see otherwise. (Tulpan is another recent example.) Wild Field is set in a remote region of the Kazakh steppes, where a young doctor lives Thoreau-like, tends to a handful of locals, and pines for his girlfriend back in civilization. Although I can’t find confirmation for this, I suspect this is an adaptation of a novel. I can imagine the protagonist’s inner life being a playhouse of ideas for a gifted writer, and the moments of magical realism that pockmark the film could flower beautifully in prose, but Kalatozishvili fails to find a cinematographic analogue, and the pacing of the film suffers for it. Still, I was perfectly content to study the landscape and faces for 90 minutes or so.

  • St. Nick (2009)

    St. Nick (2009)

    Dir. by David Lowery

    In the interest of full disclosure I should acknowledge first that, although we’ve never met face-to-face, David Lowery and I have been exchanging emails for about three years now. I’ve long admired David’s writing, and, at the risk of speaking for him, I think we both recognized in the other a shared sensibility. Even before seeing a single frame of David’s first feature, I was rooting for it, curious to see what his style would look like when stretched to 85 minutes, and hopeful for him as well, both personally and professionally. This perhaps leaves me unqualified to be a true critic of the film, though I’d like to think that if I didn’t care for St. Nick, I’d have the integrity to say so — if for no other reason than because I believe David would be genuinely curious to hear the unvarnished truth.

    I also want to mention up front that I hold an irrational bias against “child in peril” stories, so when I first read the plot synapsis — “The adventures of a brother and sister trying to survive, all on their own, out on the plains of Texas” — I worried that I’d be kept at some emotional or intellectual remove from the film. I’m happy to report that’s not the case.

    The opening shot of St. Nick lasts for just under 90 seconds, the first minute of which is from a fixed camera position. Along with occasional, diegetic noises, the soundtrack also includes manufactured sounds — an unnatural wind and a synthesized drone of some sort (you can hear it in the trailer above). In combination, the sound and image, especially after the camera begins unexpectedly to dolly back, announce that St. Nick, despite its “regional” setting and digital video aesthetic, is a self-consciously authored film in the formal sense — more “Euro art house” than “American indie” (to borrow two marketing cliches); more The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan, 1997) than Shotgun Stories (Nichols, 2007). Atom Egoyan is a surprising but useful point of comparison, I think. Lowery’s slow dollies over the wooden floorboards of the abandoned house where the brother and sister take refuge reads like a poignant homage to Ian Holm’s dream sequence in The Sweet Hereafter. There’s a sorrowful nostalgia in both shots.

    And there’s a sorrowful nostalgia in both films, too, which points to the most interesting aspect of St. Nick: it’s point of view, which, while attaching itself most closely to the brother’s perspective, always remains just outside of it, in the same way that great children’s books usually do. I have no complaints about the look of St. Nick — particularly in the interior shots, Lowery and cinematographer Clay Liford make images that belie their small budget — but I couldn’t help but wonder how it would all look in rich black-and-white film. In a recent blog post, Lowery acknowledges that Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955) is a source of inspiration, and I was also reminded of To Kill a Mockingbird (Mulligan, 1962), both in the basic plot setup and in its careful, childlike attention to things — crayons, rolls of string, discovered bones, makeshift tools, matchbooks, and other bits of miscellania that kids collect and transform imaginatively in play. I use the word “things” deliberately, because one reason St. Nick avoids being the typical “child in peril” film is by observing the thing-ness of the objects without reducing them to symbols. Symbols require a doubled perspective — that of the filmed world, where a cigar is just a cigar, and that of the author, who winks knowingly at the audience, thereby inviting us to feel superior. It’s a recipe for sentiment and pity, neither of which, thankfully, are of much interest to Lowery. (I’ll resist the urge to quote Tarkovsky yet again on this site, although I think he’s also a useful touchstone for discussing this film.)

    The best example is the way Lowery shoots the Texas plains. American “regional” cinema (again with the ironic scare quotes), especially that of the indie variety, has an unfortunate tendency to come off like tourism, in the sense that the camera is too often set up in front of objects that only reinforce our preexisting sense of the place. “The South,” for example, is often reduced to a now-vacant and picturesque block of what was once a small town’s main street before the interstate and Wal-Mart moved in. By comparison, I realized only a few minutes into St. Nick that I had no idea what the Texas plains looked like, especially not in winter (I assume), when the trees have dropped their leaves and taken on the aspect of a Tim Burton film or a Chris Van Allsburg book:

    St. Nick (Lowery, 2009)

    St. Nick (Lowery, 2009)

    St. Nick (Lowery, 2009)

    St. Nick (Lowery, 2009)

    Lowery loves these trees, but there’s nothing explicitly symbolic in the way he shoots them. Rather, they’re true images of the particular place from which this particular story and its particular emotions sprung. And that, I think, is the source of the film’s lingering resonance. The nostalgia is Lowery’s, and because it’s true for him, it’s true for us as well.

    (Apologies if that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. The older I get, the less capable I am of articulating what it is I most admire about art.)

    In an effort to write something that sounds a bit more like a film review, let me add this. First, the performances Lowery gets out of Tucker and Savanna Sears are something special. There’s very little dialog in the film, but when they do speak, each listens intently and reacts naturally and without self-consciousness. Perhaps the best compliment I can give to the young actors and the crew is to say that I was often reminded of those great films Haskell Wexler shot in the late-’60s and ’70s, when he’d hold his camera at a distance and just observe the performers, always managing to catch them just as the mask dropped. I’m also grateful to St. Nick for sidestepping a couple potential pitfalls. When the boy attempts to make serious conversation (and does so in a way that sounds an awful lot like a character in a movie attempting to make serious conversation), the girl diffuses the moment like all little sisters would — with a smile and a fistfull of dirt. And when Barlow Jacobs (Kid from Shotgun Stories) shows up briefly as the reluctant authority figure, Lowery allows him to be a well-rounded and recognizably real character. I was dreading that scene from the moment it became inevitable, but each time I’ve watched St. Nick it’s been among my favorites.

  • Lee Isaac Chung: The Storm of Progress

    Lee Isaac Chung: The Storm of Progress

    This interview was originally published at Sojourners.

    * * *

    In early 1940, just months before he would die while fleeing the Gestapo in Spain, the Jew­ish-German literary critic Walter Benjamin assembled his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” a brief collection of observations that is equal parts theology and Marxist analysis. In Thesis IX, he studies Paul Klee’s modernist painting “Angelus Novus” and finds in it a usable metaphor for history. Klee’s work depicts a magnificent, expressionist angel whose face is turned toward the past. His mouth is agape and his wings are fully extended as he concentrates his gaze on the ever-growing catastrophe behind him. The angel wishes to pause so that he might revive and redeem human history, but “a storm is blowing from Paradise.” “This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” Benjamin concludes, “This storm is what we call progress.”

    Lee Isaac Chung alludes to “Angelus Novus” when describing his first feature-length film, Munyurangabo, a poetic and beautifully humane snapshot of Rwanda as it exists today, nearly a decade and a half after the genocide. The film, which premiered in May 2007 at the Cannes Film Festival and has since played at fests in Toronto, Los Angeles, London, Rotterdam, Berlin, and elsewhere, adopts a view of “progress” similar to Benjamin’s. “One audience member in Berlin challenged us for ending the movie on a note of hopefulness,” Chung says. “But it’s not a naive or simple hope. Any progress made in Rwanda will come from the hard work of reconciliation combined with a wide-eyed acknowledgment of the past. That’s why we conceived of this simple story of two young boys. Munyurangabo is, in part, about how memory shapes the formation of identity—personal, cultural, and national—and how that identity shapes our behavior.”

    The heroes of Chung’s film are ‘Ngabo (short for Munyur­angabo, played by Jeff Ruta­gengwa) and Sangwa (Eric Ndo­r­un­kundiye), teen­age boys who became friends while working as porters in a market in Kigali. At the start of the film, they set off together on a journey, stopping first at the remote village that Sangwa had fled three years earlier. They intend to stay for only a few hours, but Sangwa’s reunion with his mother and father is promising, and the glimpse of domestic happiness it offers leaves him increasingly unnerved about the real purpose of their trip: to avenge the murder of ‘Ngabo’s father by finding and killing the man responsible. “I heard so many similar stories from children their age,” Chung says. “Eric’s father was killed in the genocide, and Jeff’s went missing as well. Like so many of the orphans who can be found in the ghettoes of Kigali, they’ve both really struggled. The film is a composite of their stories and others like them.”

    CHUNG GAINED access to the orphans of Kigali through his association with Youth With a Mission (YWAM), a relief organization that provides Christian discipleship training and ministers to children, widows, and people suffering the effects of HIV/AIDS. “Soon after we got married, my wife decided that she wanted to spend another summer in Rwanda. She’d volunteered with YWAM several times already and was eager to return. Rather than continue agonizing over the stalled plans for my first big film, I decided, instead, to just drop it completely and go with her.” Taking with him two friends from college and a camera he’d bought on eBay, Chung set out to teach filmmaking. “I’d taught some classes as a graduate assistant in film school and figured this was something unique I could offer.”

    Chung’s goal was to make a film there—in Rwanda, with a small budget and a small crew made up of orphans and others he’d met in Kigali. “After looking at the types of films that were coming out of Rwanda and finding no narrative films that Rwandans could claim as their own, it became clear to us that we should treat this project seriously with the goal that it could be a Rwandan film, primarily for their audience.” He and one of his partners, Samuel Anderson, composed a treatment for the film but never fully scripted it, choosing instead to improvise the dialog during rehearsals with their cast of first-time actors. As the project evolved, Chung, Anderson, and their other partner, Jenny Lund, also decided to shoot the movie on film, a relatively risky and expensive proposition in this age of cheap, high-quality digital video. “It just kept getting bigger,” Chung laughs. “Our ambition for the production, I mean. The more we talked, the more we wanted it to look a certain way. We needed film.”

    Presumably, Munyurangabo’s in­clusion in the lineups of so many prestigious festivals can be attributed in part to Chung’s photography. It is a strikingly beautiful film. And, particularly for a first-time director, Chung demonstrates a genuine talent for an essential aspect of his craft: He knows where to put the camera. When I ask about my favorite shot in the film, a simple image of Sangwa’s and ‘Ngabo’s faces in profile, he thanks me for the compliment but seems reticent to talk at length about the scene. “I knew what shots would come before it and what would come after it, and I knew I needed to break the rhythm with a quieter moment.” Chung’s humility can actually be felt in the image itself. Like the filmmakers to whom he owes the greatest debt—Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne—Chung has a sensitive curiosity about the human face, and the style of his film invites viewers to reflect upon their shared dignity rather than to simply pass judgment, as films so often do.

    With some embarrassment, Chung admits another reason his film has found an audience at international festivals: “Several programmers have told me the film isn’t what they expected it to be.”

    “Which is what, exactly?” I ask.

    “I guess they expected another film about white guilt.”

    We both laugh.

    CHUNG WAS BORN in rural Arkansas, where his Korean father had moved to raise his children and establish a farm. “I guess it isn’t the typical immigrant story,” he admits. “Most leave the land in order to find economic opportunity in the city, but my father had other ideas.” After getting his first glimpse of New York City as a teenager, Chung followed his older sister to Yale, where he pursued his interests in politics and studied biology. His long-term plans changed, however, after he and a group of friends began watching foreign and classic art films together. Instead of medical school, Chung moved to Salt Lake City to study film at the University of Utah.

    “Munyurangabo is a tricky movie for the festivals to categorize,” he continues. “It’s usually programmed as an African film, and I guess it is in many respects. In fact, it’s the first narrative feature film ever made in the Kinyarwanda language. But I’m an American, obviously, and so that complicates things.” Recently, several Hollywood productions have taken on the subject of African genocide, including the Oscar-nominated films Hotel Rwanda and The Last King of Scotland, the latter of which reimagines the murderous dictatorship of Idi Amin through the eyes of a young white European doctor. The film adopts that perspective to a fault, I think, turning the people of Uganda into incomprehensible and exotic curiosities. As a result, Scotland’s most affecting moments appeal to sentiments like pity and horror—and to our shared guilt—but at the expense of lasting understanding or empathy.

    What distinguishes Munyuran­gabo from the slew of “white guilt” films is best typified by a scene in which Sangwa, hoping to regain his father’s respect, joins his neighbors in the fields. Chung’s camera watches from a distance as they work together to till the hard, packed soil. Sangwa’s movements are labored and unnatural; his father raises and drops his hoe with a practiced grace. (“I joke that what Akira Kurosawa did for rain-soaked samurai battles, I want to do for farming scenes.”) Were it not for Chung’s tasteful use of traditional Rwandan music and several seconds of slow motion, the scene could be mistaken for documentary footage. Jean Marie Nkurikiyinka (the father) really is a farmer, Ndorunkundiye (Sangwa) really has raised himself on the streets of Kigali, and, regardless of the fact that Chung’s story is manufactured, all that real human history and experience is captured there in his images of bodies in motion. “Here,” the father says, “like this,” demonstrating for his son the proper technique. And with that unexpected moment of encouragement, the possibility of hope is suddenly made tangible.

    INSPIRED BY A Christian survivor of the genocide who once quoted the passage to him, Chung uses Isaiah 51:19-20 as an epigraph for the film: “These double calamities have come upon you; Who can comfort you? Ruin and destruction, famine and sword; Who can console you? Your sons have fainted. They lie at the head of every street, like antelope caught in a net. They are filled with the wrath of the Lord and the rebuke of your God.”

    “Is this an Old Testament film or a New Testament film?” I ask.

    After a slight pause, Chung answers: “I have great respect for people who put all of their hope in a future in which the world has been redeemed and made perfect. I have a faith in that future, too. But we’re here now, and the world is far from perfect, and we’re required to work. It’s complicated. It’s like that storm in ‘Angelus Novus.’ Are you familiar with it?”

  • 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.

  • Abel Ferrara’s Battle with the Irrational

    Abel Ferrara’s Battle with the Irrational

    Religious faith is utterly irrational. By calling myself a Christian, I claim to believe at least this: that we are all born into a fallen world and that each of us is in need of grace, an undeserved forgiveness possible only through the sacrifice of Christ. It makes no sense. From a rational perspective, it’s not terribly different from a belief in “Leda and the Swan” or the practices of New Age mysticism. All might otherwise be described as man-invented responses to the irrational tendencies of human experience — things like creativity, desire, curiosity, grief, suffering, injustice, and good ol’ existential dread. Faith offers a kind of all-encompassing framework of understanding, a culturally- and historically rich narrative that provides, at the very least, the appearance of meaning, even if not Meaning itself.

    To watch the body of Abel Ferrara’s films, as I’ve tried my best to do over the last month and a half, is to see a man wrestling obsessively — sadomasochistically, even — with the Irrational. The stylized violence, the scenery-chewing performances, the gratuitous and exploitative female nudity — all are window dressing. What’s at stake here is nothing less than the very possibility of grace. If looking at a woman lustfully is ultimately (or Ultimately) no different from committing adultery itself — if, in other words, each of us is equally depraved, equally culpable — then all of us are trapped in a world very much like Ferrara’s, where good and bad have blended to a shade of deep, dark gray.

    It’s this quality, I suspect, that led Brad Stevens to name his critical biography Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision, and it’s also what other participants in today’s blog-a-thon have called Ferrara’s “humanism.” I don’t think humanist is the right word for him, though. His films, in fact, seem to me to be deeply cynical. While his characters often act badly with the very best intentions — I’m thinking of Tom Berrenger’s washed up boxer in Fear City, Christopher Walken’s Robin Hood-like drug lord in King of New York, and the husband and wife of ‘R X-Mas — and while Ferrara refuses to rule over them as a moral judge (and prevents us from doing so as well), he most definitely situates them in a world corrupted tragically and completely by our cultural institutions (capital, politics, and religion, to name just three) and by man’s basest instincts. It’s an ugly, ugly place.

    But despite its ugliness, Ferrara’s world is occasionally illuminated by brief moments of redemption, and I’m tempted to say that, in each case, its an explicitly transcendent, transhuman redemption. These are Ferrara’s encounters with the Irrational. The most obvious and affecting example is the bad lieutenant, who, after witnessing the victimized nun’s extraordinary forgiveness of her attackers, confronts the very Source of her strength before performing a charitable act of grace himself. That same moment is reenacted in The Mother of Mirrors, the film-within-a-film in Dangerous Game. Sarah Jennings’ (Madonna) character has experienced a kind of religious epiphany that has allowed her to reform, and in doing so she has brought into relief the depravity of the world she and her husband have created. There is a specifically Christian character to these transformations in Ferrara’s work, just as there’s a specifically Christian character to, say, Bresson’s and the Dardennes’.

    Briefly, I want to add, also, that I think this battle with the Irrational is part of what makes Ferrara an American filmmaker. We are a confused and compromised lot, are we not? Two centuries later, our political rhetoric remains heavy with allusions to the protestant work ethic, to the Deistic ideals of the Enlightenment, and to the One God under which our Nation stands. Meanwhile, we consume, degrade, exploit, and dehumanize with the best of ’em. Which is probably why we’re so fond of transcendent redemption as a concept — so much so that we’ve made it a hallmark of American tradition. What I most appreciate about Ferrara is the messy collision of his cynicism and, for lack of a better word, his faith: grace is never cheap in his world, and that’s as it should be.

    Until this point in my post, I’ve carefully avoided making any aesthetic judgments on Ferrara’s work. Counting the early shorts, I think I’ve now seen fourteen of his films, and I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s a director of genuine importance whose films are almost all fundamentally flawed. Bad Lieutenant is, I think, his most coherent and best picture; Dangerous Game is his most interesting; and King of New York is his most traditionally entertaining. Ms. 45 is probably the best low-budget exploitation film I’ve ever seen (for whatever that’s worth); and, given a choice of which of his films to rewatch tonight, I’d pick New Rose Hotel without a moment of hesitation.

    If I were a bigger fan of Ferrara’s work, I’m sure I could put together a well-reasoned apology for the pacing problems, the tone problems, the performance problems, and the basic narrative problems that characterize, to various degrees, all of his films. (Even as a fan, though, I doubt I could justify his misogyny — I’m talking to you, Cat Chaser.) Part of me wishes he would find a strong-willed producer and editor, people willing to reign him in just enough to un-kink the various lines of thought that wind through his work. The ideas are compelling, and the execution is occasionally stunning. (I really, really love those long takes in Bad Lieutenant and Dangerous Game, especially the scene between Zoe Lund and Harvey Keitel, and Madonna’s “What do you want from me?” moment in front of Eddie Israel’s camera.) Until that happens, I’ll continue seeing his new films and, I suspect, continue being frustrated by them.

    See also:

    [with more to come]

  • Diving Deep into Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World

    Diving Deep into Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World

    Dir. by Caveh Zahedi

    This essay was presented at the 2005 conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.

    – – –

    When asked recently about the trend toward reality programming on television, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi called it a “good thing,” arguing that, despite the inevitable and corrupting influences of advertising and profit margins, reality TV does satisfy, to a certain extent, the viewing public’s craving for the “genuine article.” “Reality is where it’s at,” Zahedi said. “It’s where people ‘live,’ it’s what’s deep and true.” “Genuine, “reality,” “live,” “deep,” and “true” are, of course, among the most loaded of terms in discussions of documentary filmmaking, a fact not lost on Zahedi, who has spent the majority of his career blurring the lines between fact and fiction in his own peculiar brand of autobiographical cinema.

    In his official filmography, Zahedi lists four features and three shorts. A Little Stiff, his 1991 feature debut, co-directed with Greg Watkins, re-enacts his failed attempt to win the affection of a fellow art student. Constructed almost entirely of static master shots, the film is quite different formally from his other work — he has described it as an “aesthetic reaction to the kind of by-the-numbers filmmaking that [he was] being taught in film school” — but it introduces many of what would become Zahedi’s signatures. He himself stars as “Caveh Zahedi,” a sincere and strangely charismatic filmmaker whose charm (or off-putting eccentricity, depending on one’s general opinion of him) stems from his refusal to mask what he considers his most basic human desires, opinions and, perhaps most notably, his faults behind the guise of socially-constructed, “acceptable” behavior.

    That’s not to say, though, that Zahedi is a hedonist. Far from it, in fact. When exploring the most shameful and transgressive aspects of his nature, as he does, for example, with unflinching candor in his most recent feature, I Am a Sex Addict, there is actually a conspicuous element of moral instruction in his work. Rather, what interests Zahedi is what he consistently refers to as the “ego” — that manifestation of self-image that each of us performs in the day-to-day narrative of our public life. For Zahedi, the problem of the ego touches upon the most fundamental questions of life, art, and (for lack of a better word) God, all of which, in his view, are inextricably intertwined. As man lost faith in the Divine, Zahedi argues, the artist grew in self-importance — no longer a humble servant of Creation but, instead, a new kind of hero: the artist/performer as celebrity. “This problem of the ego in art,” Zahedi writes:

    stems in part from the fact that our self-worth has been severely eroded. To compensate for this erosion, artists have tended to emphasize their specialness, and to attempt to make themselves appear better than those around them. This is a big problem for the arts because if all art is in fact “channeled,” then Art rests on a connection to the Source of all creation. The problem with the ego in art is that it destroys this connection to the source by positing itself as the source, much like the Satan figure in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

    By virtue of its mechanical ability to capture and re-present photographed reality, or so the argument goes, film has a unique relationship with the ego. On the one hand, a camera establishes a power relationship not unlike Foucault’s panoptic gaze — and, indeed, Zahedi has cited Sartre’s policeman as a metaphor for the situation. Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, there’s the sense that a camera — or an editor’s cut, for that matter — inevitably distorts “reality” by the very act of its observation. Under the scrutiny of a spotlight, the guilt and self-hatred we’ve internalized feel threatened with exposure, and so the ego blossoms, becoming large in order to protect its own integrity. On the other hand, film is also uniquely shaped by randomness, or by what Zahedi describes as “Fate or Reality or God.” It’s that peculiar aspect of the cinema that he calls a “Holy Moment” in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Because God is manifest in all of creation, and because film is able to capture and re-present those manifestations, the cinema, once loosened of ego, can reorient our perspectives not only toward the arts but also toward the beautifully varied and complex creation in which we live.

    In each of his films since A Little Stiff, Zahedi has attempted to create a “complex dialectic” between these two qualities of cinema, a dialectic, more or less, between “the will” and “chaos.” In order to do so, he’s employed very particular narrative and formal strategies, the most essential of which is his devotion to autobiography. Zahedi has jokingly referred to his on-screen persona as a “Mascot of Humanity,” as if he were somehow redeeming us all through his willing sacrifice to this artistic project. In I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, he dispenses with his script entirely, trusting, instead, that God will become revealed in the chaos of filmed life. In both I Was Possessed by God and Tripping with Caveh, Zahedi ingests large doses of hallucinogenic mushrooms in an effort to completely obliterate, temporarily, his own ego. And in his latest work, I Am a Sex Addict, he has taken an almost-Brechtian turn, carefully balancing the intellectual distance of meta-narrative with the emotional immediacy of “real” human experience.

    Which brings me, finally, to In the Bathtub of the World. Zahedi has written of the film:

    [It] exploits the most democratic genre that exists, the home movie, in order to reveal the workings of the divine in all of our lives. I had no idea what would happen in the film, but I knew that only a subtle combination of will (demanding of myself that I shoot one minute everyday) and surrender (I would try to listen each day to “hear” what I was supposed to do that day) would lead to the result that I desired, namely a film that would also be a work of art, meaning a work that has in some way been channeled.

    To approach In the Bathtub of the World from Zahedi’s perspective, then, would see it as a document of a life — a representative life — freed of the fictions of ego. If we take him at his word, we must assume that the Caveh we “meet” on-screen is the “real” Caveh. When he looks into the camera and makes a frank confession like, “I had a wet dream this morning” or “I have a problem. I don’t know how to live,” we must trust that these statements — in combination with the unspoken language of his facial and body movements and the aesthetic effect of the cinematic reproduction — are as honest an articulation of his immediate experience as he is capable of expressing. “In that particularity” of his own experience, “there is universality,” he has said. “Your life is meaningful and unique. . . . It is the expression of creation happening.” As far as I can tell, it is Zahedi’s deeply sincere belief that the socially-constructed ego-masks we wear degrade human worth and human relationships, and In the Bathtub of the World is his purest and most egalitarian (if such a word is appropriate here) argument for the healing power of honesty.

    Okay, so two important points need to be made here.

    First, we’ve gathered here this morning to participate in a panel called “Reality Effects: Documentary in Film, TV, and Video.” And so I assume that, after watching the first few minutes of the film, and after listening to this overview of Zahedi’s career and guiding principles, at least a few of you are skeptical. If so, you’re certainly not alone. His work is routinely derided as “narcissistic and vain, in the pejorative sense” (to quote a great line from Bathtub). His intrusive use of the camera — for example, turning it on friends, family, and strangers against their expressed wishes — has been condemned as unethical. Popular critics often dismiss his films simply for being banal and boring. (In fact, on their DVD commentary, Zahedi and co-editor Thomas Logoreci recite by memory lines from Bathtub‘s original reviews: “There is no art here” and “The year 2000 couldn’t come soon enough.”) And then, of course, there are the theoretical problems of any post-Enlightenment aesthetic that calls upon transcendence or mystification for its epistemology.

    My second point is something of a confession. Despite my own reservations, I really like most of Zahedi’s films, and Bathtub, in particular. I’ve probably watched it fifteen times now, and I never fail to be moved by Caveh’s humor and sincerity. I suspect this speaks to my own peculiar and evolving ideas about art, democracy, humanism, and (again for lack of a better word) God, but it is also testament, I think, to Zahedi’s skill as a filmmaker. And so, with the remainder of my time, I want to begin to look more closely at the formal strategies he employs here in his effort to dig “deep” into reality.

    The first observation worth noting is that, despite Zahedi’s frequent calls to a kind of divine intervention, there is very little connecting his cinematographic style to that of the filmmakers most often associated with the term “transcendental.” Tarkovsky’s demand that images spring from the memories or “subjective impressions” of the author may have influenced Zahedi’s general approach to filmmaking — he has even cited, as a direct inspiration for Bathtub, Tarkovsky’s discussion of a theoretical film sculpted from the entirety of a single person’s filmed life — but little of the Russian’s uncanny, poetic logic is apparent here. Likewise, Bresson’s formal rigor, Ozu’s meticulous shot breakdowns, and Dreyer’s long tracking shots are all conspicuously absent.

    Bathtub also does not sit comfortably beside the films of other prominent autobiographical filmmakers. Although it raises interesting questions about, say, the nature of addiction and the sacrifices of art-making, Bathtub does not craft a specific argument along the lines of the essay-like films of Ross McElwee or Agnes Varda, for example. If Bathtub can be described as documentary filmmaking, then it’s a strange hybrid of documentary, performance art (here, I’m thinking specifically of Tehching Hsieh’s Time Piece, in which Hsieh photographed himself punching a time card every hour for a year), and also experimental filmmaking. Certain shots in the film are reminiscent, for example, of Jim Jennings’ meditations on the beauty that is to be found in the everyday. I especially like Zahedi’s strangely affecting compositions of stickers affixed to his bathroom tile and the shots of sunlight pouring through his apartment windows.

    Like I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, Bathtub is, in its final form, a deceptively conventional narrative. Granted, it originated from an unconventional conceit, but Zahedi has crafted from the raw footage a collection of compelling (if elliptical) stories. Assuming that he did, in fact, shoot at least one minute each day for a year, then his 80-minute film is cut and pasted together from approximately one-fifth of the available footage, allowing ample room to pick and choose which particular stories to develop. Among the narrative strands weaving through Bathtub, we see Zahedi’s battles with sex-, food-, celebrity-, and art addiction; we watch him struggle to survive as a poor independent filmmaker, teaching classes, applying for grants, and acting in others’ films in order to make a living; we experience the very real drama of his family life, particularly when his father suffers a massive heart attack, and Caveh, visibly shaken, fears for the man’s life; we get to share in the mundane details of an average routine — vacuuming, mailing letters, cooking dinner, traveling; and, most essential of all, we watch the evolution of Zahedi’s relationship with his live-in girlfriend (and now wife), Amanda Field. I’m tempted to call Bathtub a docu-romantic-dramedy (or something like that).

    Zahedi’s editing strategy is apparent from the opening moments of the film. The first shot is a medium-close-up of his almost-motionless face, a quiet, static image followed immediately by the more lively and kinetic scenes in which Amanda cuts his hair and Caveh discovers the contours of his own skull. His entry for January 4 th is an efficient narrative in miniature. He begins by echoing the opening shot in another direct confession to the camera (a recurring motif throughout the film), then cuts relatively-quickly to close-ups of a Frank Black CD and the front of a CD player, before pushing back to a medium-long shot of Caveh dancing. Another close-up, this time of a tape recorder, then a jump-cut confessional shot. January 6 th opens with a nicely-composed, still-life image of sunlight hitting shelves of books and fruit, followed by a shot of his kitchen window and the green wall on the other side.

    I mention the specific shot-pattern because, in the course of writing this paper, I’ve realized that there are two main reasons I find Bathtub so improbably watchable. The first is the complex rhythms of the piece — what Leo Charney calls the “peaks and valleys” of narrative. Even in that opening sequence I’ve just described, a sequence that lasts barely three-and-a-half minutes, Zahedi varies, quite deliberately, the shape and color of felt time. Juxtaposed against the quick pace of the earlier sequence’s efficient story-telling, those static images of light and shadow are made all the more strange and new. Likewise, the shot of Caveh’s body in motion, dancing ecstatically to a Frank Black song, is especially surprising after we’ve witnessed his first two, staid confessionals. Zahedi’s greatest talent, in fact, might be as an editor. I Am a Sex Addict is an even more impressive exercise in precise modulations of tone.

    Finally, though, I must concede that the greatest source of pleasure in this film is, for me, Caveh himself. In the Bathtub of the World seems to prove that a compelling narrative can be shaped from the “real” moments of “real” life, which shouldn’t come as too great a surprise, I suppose, to anyone who has read a decent autobiography or memoir. But what of the ego? And what of its relationship to cinema? Zahedi has said that a camera has the unique ability to capture “truth”: “You want to be accepted for the true self, not the false front. . . . . Love me despite all this.” Ultimately, despite my intellectual resistance as a critic, I find myself of the same mind as one of Zahedi’s film students, who, given a moment alone with his camera, looks it in the eye and says, “Caveh, I was touched by your sincerity.”

  • I Am a Sex Addict (2005)

    I Am a Sex Addict (2005)

    Dir. by Caveh Zahedi

    After staring at a blinking cursor for better than an hour, trying — and failing — to compose the opening sentence of this “review,” I’ve finally abandoned all hopes of objectivity. I can’t seem to find the right tone of third-person voice to describe this film, which is only appropriate, I guess. Like each of Caveh Zahedi’s previous features and shorts, I Am a Sex Addict is a work of autobiography in which Zahedi himself plays the starring role. In the opening shot, he addresses the camera directly, introduces himself as Caveh, and tells us that for many years he was a sex addict. His film is a frank, neatly-plotted, and curiously moving recreation of those years. It’s also incredibly transgressive and very, very funny. Quite a balancing act.

    Hi, Caveh. I’m Darren, and this is my attempt to make sense of how and why I reacted to your film as I did.

    By way of plot summary, I’ll just mention the two marriages and the three other relationships that were affected by Zahedi’s addiction. We meet all of these women over the course of the film. A few are glimpsed only briefly in old footage; others are brought to life by actresses. “Brought to life” is actually a curious choice of words here, given the film’s meta qualities. In several cases, we meet the “real” woman (via home movies), the performed version of her (via the film proper), and the “real” actress who plays her (via behind-the-scenes, documentary-like footage). I say documentary-like because the film’s form questions the truthfulness of cinematic representation at every turn. I mean, after Zahedi interrupts one of the opening scenes to tell us that the Paris street we are looking at is actually in San Francisco because he couldn’t raise enough money to shoot in France, and after he interrupts a later scene in Paris to inform us that they made the trip after all, all epistemological ground is up for grabs, including some of our most basic interpretive strategies. Home movies and behind-the-scenes hand-held footage are more “real” or trustworthy than staged recreations? Who says?

    What most impresses me about I Am a Sex Addict, and what makes it, I think, Zahedi’s most accomplished film, is the care with which he (in cooperation with co-editor Thomas Logoreci) controls its tone. The film feels as though it could fall apart at any moment, and that it doesn’t is some kind of miracle. After writing that sentence, it occurs to me that I’m quoting almost verbatim Hal Ashby’s description of Being There: “This is the most delicate film I’ve ever worked with as an editor,” he told Aljean Harmetz. “The balance is just incredible. It could be ruined in a second if you allow it to become too broad.” It’s not a perfect analogy. Ashby’s challenge was to illuminate the absurdities of simulacrum politics while preventing his satire from slipping into banal parody. Zahedi’s task, I think, is even more difficult. For I Am a Sex Addict to really work, it must humanize the victims of sex addiction, expose the very real consequences of addictive behavior, and, despite all that, remain watchable, which is easier said than done given the particular nature of Zahedi’s fetishes.

    Zahedi’s addiction became manifest most often in a desire to have sex with prostitutes. To combat that desire, he instituted a series of progressively destructive strategies, beginning with a genuine desire to openly and honestly acknowledge the problem with the support of his partner; by the time he attends his first Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting years later, his “prostitute fetish” has taken a much darker and sadistic turn.

    Zahedi shapes the film’s tone through careful modulations in humor, self-reflexivity, and music. The image of a sound mixer comes to mind — raising and lowering the levels of each voice to create a kind of satisfying harmony. I’m thinking of two difficult scenes, in particular. In the first, Zahedi tells his wife about his desire to receive oral sex from a prostitute. She responds by offering to satisfy the craving herself. Which she does. Three times. In the second scene, Zahedi visits a prostitute with the intent of enacting his deepest, most humiliating desires. Warning: the following blockquote is verygraphic:

    In my fantasies, I will grab whoever it is by the hair, and I’ll make her say things like, “I want to suck your dick” and stuff, and maybe call her a bitch or a slut. And then I start fucking her really hard in the mouth and make her gag and stuff. . . . What I’m thinking is that, if I went to a prostitute one last time and just did everything that I always fantasize about doing, then I think maybe I could get it out of my system once and for all.

    If Zahedi’s story had been told by a more naturalistic filmmaker, it would, I imagine, have looked something like Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms, and, in that case, my tendency as a critic would have been to describe — and to experience — the onscreen sex metaphorically. Zahedi, however, has a vested interest in exploring the psychological underpinnings of his own addiction, and so he constantly undermines our learned tendencies as “readers.” About Twentynine Palms, I wrote, “Audiences are forced to observe everything — the ordinary and the terrifying — unloosed from the safe comfort of quick cutting, manipulative sound design, or stylized photography.” Zahedi’s approach is the polar opposite, and, as a result, watching I Am a Sex Addict is, interestingly, a simultaneously intellectual and deeply personal or human experience.

    The passage of dialogue quoted above is from a conversation between Caveh and Greg Watkins, who was not only Caveh’s best friend at the time of his addiction but is also Sex Addict‘s cinematographer and co-producer. (Their conversation is also a nice echo of the opening scene in their first feature, A Little Stiff.) When we see Zahedi’s visit to a prostitute a few minutes later, his words — with all of their graphic detail and hopeless self-delusion — linger over the scene. The act portrayed in the scene is difficult to watch. It’s misogynist and sadistic. But the scene itself is fascinating. Zahedi interrupts the sequence several times with jokes and with his ubiquitous voice-over, both of which act, throughout the film, as Brechtian distancing devices. Whereas someone like Dumont dares you to keep looking (and assumes, probably, that many of us won’t), Zahedi needs you to look. It’s important. This is what he did to women, and not metaphorically speaking. A man who had once marched in an anti-pornography rally and who considers himself a feminist degraded himself and women, and did so recklessly. Asked recently about his approach to comedy in the film, Zahedi quoted Oscar Wilde: “If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you.”

    Zahedi’s attention to the personal and human dimension of his story pays emotional dividends in the film’s final act. Each time I’ve watched Sex Addict, I’ve felt my relationship with the material shift categorically at exactly the same moment. Soon after the release of A Little Stiff, Zahedi began a relationship with a woman named Devin, who, as it turns out, was an alcoholic. The actress who plays Devin, Amanda Henderson, is also an alcoholic — or, at least, so claims Zahedi, who interrupts the film to show us backstage footage of Henderson pulling her bottle from a brown paper bag. (I have no idea if she actually has a drinking problem. It’s impossible to know given the film’s hall-of-mirrors relationship with “truth.”) Sex Addict is structured around such revelations. The woman who plays Zahedi’s first wife, as it turns out, is actually a porn star. The woman who plays Zahedi’s girlfriend Christa, as it turns out, is unwilling to simulate on-screen sex.

    But the scene with Devin/Amanda is different, and I think the difference is owing both to the quality of Henderson’s performance (which is much better and more natural than either of the other two female leads’) and to the deftness of Zahedi’s direction. For the first 75 minutes of the film, I feel at some remove from the material. It’s an intellectual distance, the ironic distance of, say, Annie Hall writ large. But when Zahedi cuts from Henderson and her bottle to Devin drunk and spewing slurred insults, that comforting distance vanishes, and the effect is potent. I’ve been on the verge of tears both times I watched the film. I’m reminded suddenly of the “Eternal City” chapter in Catch-22, when Heller steps out of his satiric voice just long enough to send Yossarian on a walk through the grotesque streets of war-torn Rome.

    For the remainder of the film, Zahedi exists, by and large, outside of his mensch-y persona. There are fewer jokes, and the voice-over and recurring musical motif become less obtrusive. Like the lines of dialogue I’ve quoted above, images of Zahedi’s transgressive sexual encounters linger over the final twenty minutes of the film, but they’re suddenly transformed by the tragic human consequences of his behavior. We in the audience, in effect, undergo an awakening similar to his own. He “hits rock bottom” (to borrow from the language of recovery) and is forced, finally, to abandon his intellectual justifications. The stakes are high. And real. In the opening scene, Zahedi informs us that he’s narrating the film on his wedding day — his third — and those of us familiar with his previous feature, In the Bathtub of the World, know that it’s Mandy who will soon be walking down the aisle toward him. I can’t seem to resist the urge to paraphrase that cheesy Jack Nicholson line: Mandy clearly makes Caveh want to be a better man.

    I’ll be damned if the last scene in Sex Addict wasn’t the first time I’ve ever cried at a wedding.

  • Week in Review

    Week in Review

    • Films Watched: Nosferatu dir. by F.W. Murnau; 28 Up dir. by Michael Apted; Vers Nancy dir. by Claire Denis; Me and You and Everyone We Know dir. by Miranda July; Los Angeles Plays Itself dir. by Thom Andersen
    • Books Finished: The Public Burning by Robert Coover; Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction by Amy Elias
    • CDs Purchased: Until the End of the World (soundtrack) by various artists; Me and You and Everyone We Know (soundtrack) mostly by Michael Andrews

    With apologies to Nick Hornby. While reading The Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns from The Believer, two things occurred to me. First, Hornby’s columns are essentially blog posts by another name: they’re written in the first-person, they’re chronological (especially once collected in book form), and they’re unified by a single topic. Second, like Hornby, I could chart the course of my life by pacing slowly through a library full of books, CDs, and DVDs.

    Because Long Pauses is essentially a notebook, a diary, and an archive, all in one, I’ve decided to give this “Week in Review” idea a shot. Granted, seven days from now this will all likely have taken on the smell of a deadline, but for now, it seems a fine way to spend a Sunday morning. If I stick to it, the Song of the Moment feature will probably be absorbed into the weekly review, Borg-like.

    As I mentioned a few days ago, Miranda July’s first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, left quite an impact on me, though I sense the effect waning somewhat. I worry that, when all is said and done, the film’s message is only slightly more nuanced than “carpe diem,” though, really, as far as messages go, that’s a pretty good one, especially when handled with a certain grace. July has a deep, deep fondness for her characters and a child-like wonder about the world in which they live. As a storyteller and filmmaker, she’s ambitious in the best sense of the word, and her ability to capture something of the beauty and fear (often simultaneously) that characterize love and life in the modern world is something special. Maybe the best compliment I can give the film is to say it doesn’t feel like it was made in America. “When I call a Name” is the opening track from Michael Andrews’s fine soundtrack, which reminds me a bit of those Brian Eno Music for Films albums.

    Nosferatu is the latest entry in my Great Films series. I watched it last Sunday after a long weekend that involved two trips to the emergency room, an overnight stay in the hospital (for Joanna), and very little sleep. Which is to say that Nosferatu is an almost perfect film to watch in a waking dream state. Murnau’s brand of expressionism is so organically “uncanny,” and Max Schreck’s performance is so utterly alien. It’s my new favorite Dracula, bar none.

    Like any great essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself is almost too rich to be eaten in one bite. I want to watch it again before commenting at length, but three quick points for now: 1) It made me want to watch Blade Runner again. 2) It made me want to track down the films of Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Billie Woodberry, Julie Dash, and other independent black filmmakers of the 1970s. 3) I love the idea of looking for documentary moments in narrative films, an idea that was raised in Ross McElwee’s Bright Leaves, as well. (Doug has a really great essay on Los Angeles Plays Itself, by the way.) I’ll return to the 7 Up films and the Denis short in later weeks.

    Seeing only two titles on the “books finished” list undersells the size of my accomplishment, I think, considering that the novel weighs in at 534 pages and the other is a book of critical theory. The next chapter of my dissertation, ostensibly a tight reading of The Public Burning and E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, is actually about the rise of the academic Left in the 1970s and 1980s and the political problems of postmodernism. Elias’s book posits that “history is something we know we can’t learn, something we can only desire,” which she wraps into discussions of “the Sublime,” the traditional historical novel (think Walter Scott), and post-1960s American fiction, in particular those novels she calls “metahistorical romances.”

    Did I mention that Elias is on my dissertation committee? Or that her book was blurbed favorably by Linda Hutcheon? Or that in her preface she thanks Hayden White for his encouragement, advice, personal generosity, and kindness? (I know those two names mean, like, nothing to most people, but if you’re working in history and postmodern literature, they mean a lot.) The Public Burning comes up quite a bit in Elias’s book as an example of an avant-garde metahistorical romance, which is quite a nice way of describing it, I think. Its voice alternates between first- and third-person (the former from the p.o.v. of Vice President Richard Nixon), and Coover also cuts into “Intermezzos,” which take on various forms: a poem pasted together from snippets of text from President Eisenhower’s public statements, a dramatic dialogue between Ike and Ethel Rosenberg, and a mini-opera sung by the Rosenbergs and James Bennett, then-Federal Director of the Bureau of Prisons.

    The novel reaches its climax in the middle of Times Square, where all of American history has come undone. Betty Crocker, Uncle Sam, and the nation’s Poet Laureate (Time magazine) are all there to witness the Rosenberg execution, as are the Republican Elephant, the Democratic Donkey, Cecil B. DeMille (who’s producing the spectacle), Walt Disney (who’s selling souvenirs), and fighting bands of patriots and redcoats. Elias (via Soja, Jameson, Frank, and Foucault) would describe the scene as an example of spatialized metahistory: “What one gets is a view from above, a critical view akin to the perspective of aerial photography, flattening out time, space, and history in order to map them.” The question for my chapter is this: “What does this mean for a ‘real’ politics of the Left?” I’m intrigued by the line that ends Elias’s second chapter:

    The humanities [English and philosophy departments, for example] not only take seriously the challenge to history in fantasies and novels; they have forcefully asserted that history is fantasy and fiction allied with power, and have thrown down a gauntlet to the social sciences to prove otherwise.

    That “prove otherwise” puts an interesting spin on the debate, I think.

    That covers everything from this week except for the Until the End of the World soundtrack I picked up used for $7, proving once again that spontaneous buys are seldom good buys. I think I’ll enjoy these songs more when they show up randomly in iTunes. They don’t make for a very cohesive or compelling album.

  • Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

    Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

    Dir. by Xan Cassavetes

    Xan Cassavetes’s Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession tells the parallel, rise-and-fall stories of a Los Angeles pay-TV channel and Jerry Harvey, the man who acted as its chief programmer and svengali. Harvey, as the film informs us in the opening minutes, murdered his second wife in 1988 before turning the gun on himself, and the “tragedy” of his end is ostensibly at the heart of Cassavetes’s documentary. I say “ostensibly” and put scare quotes around “tragedy,” though, because in Z Channel the only real tragedy is the loss to film buffs of Harvey’s single-minded cinephilia. We’re reminded of this loss again and again, as talking head after talking head (Altman, Tarrantino, Payne, Jarmusch, Verhoeven, etc.) wax nostalgic for the days when any Los Angelino could turn on Z Channel and see Berlin Alexanderplatz, The 400 Blows, an Italian skin flick, or the premiere of Peckinpah’s cut of The Wild Bunch. Cassavetes includes a bounty of clips from Harvey’s favorite films and supplements her story with interviews of his co-workers and friends.

    I love many of the same films that Harvey loved. And I would pay quite a lot to have a station like Z Channel beamed into my home. Watching Cassavetes’s film, I was once again reminded — as I assume was Cassavetes’s intention — of how pedestrian and market-driven so much of current film programming is, both theatrically and on cable. But, so what? I knew that before the film began. When asked whether writing political theater is just “preaching to the choir,” Tony Kushner once responded:

    A good preacher rattles her congregants’ smugness and complacency, and congregants do the same for the preacher. Good preachers are exhilarating to listen to, and the converted have a lot to think about. So this “preaching to the converted” question doesn’t address all religious practice, or all theater — just crummy religion and inept theater.

    Z Channel is a crummy film. It’s poorly constructed from short segments that offer superficial observations about specific films (“the director’s cut is obviously better”), the film industry (“without studio support and marketing, a film doesn’t stand a chance”), and Harvey himself (“he was seeing a psychiatrist several afternoons a week”). As an aside, I was also annoyed by Cassavetes’s systematic use of only the most provocative film clips — for example, the hot tub scene from McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the pagans in Andrei Rublev. Instead of rattling her audience’s smugness, Cassavetes relies upon it, offering up a paean to cinephilia that is audacious enough to equate metaphorically the death of a TV station (and the eclectic programming it represented) with a murder/suicide.

    Z Channel comes to life for only one brief moment during the very end. After describing the last few days of Harvey’s life, Cassavetes includes a brief snippet from one of his former friends and colleagues. Barely containing his emotion, he says something to the effect of, “There’s a danger of turning Jerry into a hero here, and I’ve got a real problem with that.” I sat upright in my chair. It was the sentiment I’d been waiting for more than an hour to hear expressed. Lest we take this warning too seriously, though, Cassavetes then cuts to Robert Altman, who, when asked the same question about Harvey, pronounces with little hesitation, “I like him.”

    I did a quick scan of other online reviews of Z Channel and was disappointed to find so many critics accepting this redemptive narrative of the inspiring soul who was taken from us, tragically, and whose work for the integrity of cinema we should take up in his stead. Such a reading is possible only because of Cassavetes’s decision to elide the violence of Harvey’s end. How would the tone of the film change, for example, had she included reports from the crime scene or interviews with his wife’s surviving family? Instead, we are offered only one quick glance at a photo of the woman who later would be brutally murdered, and a few fond remembrances of her from Harvey’s friends.

  • Slacker (1991)

    Slacker (1991)

    Dir. by Richard Linklater

    Fifteen minutes or so into Slacker, a college-aged guy (Tom Pallotta) steps out of a coffee shop and is greeted by Jerry Deloney, a fast-talking, 40-something conspiracy theorist in a Batman T-shirt. Tom is headed home, and Jerry invites himself along for the walk, unloading a stream of paranoid fantasies as they go. Anti-gravity technologies, Mars landings, “secret groups in charge of the government,” drug cartels, missing scientists—Jerry’s ideas sound deluded and absurd even when they creep into the realm of verifiable fact. (Fifteen years later, his warnings about greenhouse effects seem eerily prescient.)

    On his commentary track on the Criterion DVD release of Slacker, writer/director Richard Linklater recalls his one direction to Tom:

    “It’s very important how you react. This is the tone of the movie.” I didn’t want any judgment. I said, “Don’t look at him weird. Don’t judge him. That’s up to the audience to do.”

    That refusal to judge, I’m finally realizing, is what attracts me again and again to Linklater’s films. Even in a genre picture like Dazed and Confused he avoids the typical teen movie cliches by affording equal value to all of his characters, regardless of their clique or social standing. That some of the characters come off looking worse than others (Ben Affleck’s O’Bannion and Parker Posey’s Darla, for example) is more the product of their particular behavior—a kind of socially-sanctioned sadism not uncommon among teens (and adults, for that matter)—than any too-simple, prescribed plot device.

    Linklater, perhaps more than any other contemporary filmmaker, is alive to the potential and the basic human value of the men and women who walk in and out of his films. And he seems to have a particular fondness for the folks who live on the margins, whether by choice or necessity. Slacker takes on one particular marginalized community—that class of restless, searching, “underemployed” artists, musicians, and drop-outs who seem to congregate in the corners of all American college towns—but his attitude toward them is not markedly different from his treatment of those teenagers in Dazed, the lovers in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, or the philosophers, scientists, and poets who drift through Waking Life: all are people of ideas with active imaginations and complex human desires. That we instantly fall into the habit of judging them is a bad thing, Linklater reminds us again and again.

    The young men and women of Slacker often talk nonsense. Their ideas are seldom fully-formed, and the most articulate of the lot are occasionally guilty of parroting whatever book they’ve read most recently. There’s the “Dostoyevsky Wannabe” who grabs a pencil to transcribe his own pretentious ideas at the moment of inspiration, and the “jilted boyfriend” who reads from Ulysses as he tosses his friend’s typewriter from a bridge. The film is smart enough and self-aware enough to acknowledge that simply parroting others’ ideas isn’t enough. As in Waking Life, there’s an existential bent to much of the film, a constant debate between theory and action. “You just pull in these things from the shit you read, and you haven’t thought it out for yourself, no bearing on the world around us, and totally unoriginal,” one girl tells her boyfriend. “It’s like you just pasted together these bits and pieces from your ‘authoritative sources.’ I don’t know. I’m beginning to suspect there’s nothing really in there.” And by that point in the film, we’re already feeling a bit bored and a bit superior, and so we nod our heads in agreement.

    But, while it’s not enough, reading and debating, becoming engaged with the world of ideas, is something of value, even when in its earliest stages of development and even though it can’t be easily commodified by a consumerist culture. Linklater refers to several of his characters as “uncredentialed authorities”—people like the JFK assassination buff, the old anarchist, and the video backpacker. They are experts in their various fields, knowledgeable and articulate, and yet they remain marginalized just the same. With a Ph.D. after their names or a five-figure price tag beside their art installations—with a credential—their place in society would be more secure, their market value more easily quantifiable. But, instead, they’re “slackers,” a term that has become derogatory in the years since the film’s release.

    There’s something wonderfully subversive about Slacker. I think so, at least. Linklater gives us a world functioning within a different economy. People live communally in shared houses, taking with them little more than a pile of clothes and books. They repair their own cars using borrowed tools and junked parts. One stamp and a few licks gets several people into a bar for free. “I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work at it,” one guy says. Of course, as anyone who has ever toyed with radical ideas knows, even alternative economies are slaves to “the real thing,” and so viewers of Slacker are forced to balance whatever romantic idealism they find in the film with the practical questions of life in capitalist America. I enjoy wobbly discussions of the Smurfs as much as the next guy, but somebody’s got to buy the next round of beers, know what I’m saying?

    Is there a single issue more important in America today and more absent from our movie screens than class? We occasionally get one of those fairy tales about some guy (usually white) who has it all but who doesn’t learn to live until he is befriended by some world-weary and wise person (usually black) from the wrong side of the tracks. Or we get satires of the suburbs that ask us to “look closer.” But we seldom see films that fundamentally challenge the system itself. I love that Slacker, like a good documentary, explores this other world, this other economy, while allowing us relative freedom to judge its merits.

    In one of Slacker‘s final sequences, an old man walks alone, speaking into a tape recorder.

    My life, my loves, where are they now? But the more the pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself. The necessary beauty in life is in giving yourself to it completely. Only later will it clarify itself and become coherent.

    It’s as close to a defining moment for Slacker as you’re likely to find. The first time I watched the film, I fixated on that last sentence, reading it as a challenge to anyone who would dismiss Linklater’s experiments in form. “Coherence is a lie of narrative cinema,” he seemed to be saying. (And I still believe that, by the way.) But now I can’t seem to get past the old man’s comments about the “necessary beauty” of the struggles of life. Or perhaps that should be the struggles with life. Active rather than passive.

  • Fallen Creatures in a Fallen World: The Films of John Cassavetes

    Fallen Creatures in a Fallen World: The Films of John Cassavetes

    This essay was originally published at Sojourners.

    – – –

    Superficiality is the curse of our age.” So begins Celebration of Discipline, Richard J. Foster’s classic defense of traditional spiritual practices such as meditation, fasting, study, simplicity, and solitude. Published in 1978, Foster’s book offered a corrective to America’s increasingly alienating and shortsighted cultural values – values that had inevitably infected the life of the church as well. Three decades later, Foster’s critique of the “doctrine of instant satisfaction” is more vital than ever, for technology now mediates all aspects of our lives, putting gigabytes of information in our hands (or handheld devices) but offering us little incentive to process it meaningfully. As a result, we are a people driven to distraction by trivia – by facts and figures, sound-bites, and rhetoric divorced from meaning or human consequence.

    The traditional Hollywood cinema is a direct contributor to this superficiality. Most films playing at your local multiplex – like most television shows, political speeches, and pharmaceutical advertisements – actively reinforce the comforting notion that all determining forces, whether social, political, economic, or biological, can be overcome through some combination of will, effort, and, if need be, superhuman or transcendent goodness. The assumption is that a narrative can and will be written that will discover a perfect order amid the filmed world’s chaos. Think of the standard comic book blockbuster, murder mystery, courtroom drama, or police procedural. The clues will all add up in the end. The dissonances will all be resolved. And in two hours or less.

    John Cassavetes, best remembered for his starring performances in such films as The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary’s Baby, countered Hollywood’s lazier, dehumanizing tendencies in a series of landmark films made between 1959 and 1984. Serving variously as writer, director, actor, financier, and all-around master of ceremonies, Cassavetes crafted a handful of films that, collectively, give lie to Hollywood’s faith in melodramatic plotting. Instead of stock character types, his films are populated by people who exist in constant flux, defining and redefining their social roles in relation to ever-changing circumstances. Rather than plotting a traditional narrative arc, Cassavetes’ films resist resolution (and often exposition, climaxes, and denouement as well), offering us poignant glimpses of recognizable lives, messy details and all.

    The Criterion Collection’s recent release of a Cassavetes DVD box set offers the perfect opportunity to discover five of his most important films: Shadows (1959), Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1977). The collection also features an impressive, if regrettably uncritical, assortment of DVD extras, including a new documentary, interviews, and archival materials that provide further insight into Cassavetes’ working methods and his defining preoccupations.

    CASSAVETES WAS BORN in New York City in 1929, the son of Greek immigrants. After graduating from the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts and finding moderate success on stage, on television, and in the movies, he opened a method-acting workshop in Manhattan that attracted a core group of young talent. Recognizing the dramatic potential in his students’ improvisations and eager to explore alternative approaches to filmmaking, Cassavetes scavenged $20,000 and over a two-year period developed Shadows, a jazz-scored, Beat-infused document of disillusioned youth and race relations. In doing so, Cassavetes essentially gave birth to America’s independent cinema.

    Shot with a handheld 16mm camera, Shadows feels at times like a documentary, and indeed Cassavetes’ early methods owe more to the work of documentarian Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) and to the Italian Neorealists (Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti) than to the classic Hollywood studio system. Shadows achieves additional verisimilitude by means of its improvisatory nature. Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney offers a useful distinction between our typical understanding of “improvisation” – that is, an actor spontaneously inventing dialogue – and Cassavetes’ approach, which, though meticulously scripted, captures the performative nature of our daily lives, those moments when we improvise conversations, struggling to find the right words and too often stumbling upon the wrong ones instead. His characters, Carney writes, “are not denied moments of zaniness, inconsistency, or improvisatory inspiration because these would violate some tidy, coherent, package of ‘character’ – an entity, it is easy to forget, that exists only in certain forms of art and almost never in life.”

    This preoccupation with capturing the complex rhythms of “real life” extends to the structure of Cassavetes’ films as well. The average movie is composed of 50 or more brief sequences, each typically lasting less than five minutes, and each is designed with a particular end in mind – say, to move the plot from point G to point H or to develop a significant aspect of a character or relationship. Faces and A Woman Under the Influence, both starring Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands, throw off this traditional plotting and are instead built from a relatively small number of extended scenes. The result can be disorienting for the first-time viewer. Without the familiar tropes of melodrama (good vs. evil, love triangles, comedic relief, etc.), viewers are freed to explore the film without bias. As Carney writes, “every moment becomes as potentially important, interesting, and worthy of our attention as every other.” The multiplex is where we go to “lose ourselves” for a few hours at a time. Films like A Woman Under the Influence deliberately frustrate this tendency at every turn, forcing us to participate actively in the lives depicted onscreen.

    The films of John Cassavetes will never be accused of being “mindless entertainment.” His characters are, like the rest of us, fallen creatures in a fallen world who suffer the consequences of their behavior, deserved and undeserved, but who hold out hope despite it all, egged on by occasional encounters with love and something like grace. That makes them rare finds among American movies: characters deserving of our time, our patience, our empathy. “I am a moralist,” Cassavetes once said, “in that I believe the greatest morality is to acknowledge the freedom of others; to be oneself and to not be in judgment.” He extends that freedom to his audience as well. It is a powerful corrective to Hollywood’s superficiality.

  • Tarnation (2004)

    Tarnation (2004)

    Dir. by Jonathan Caouette

    The theater where I saw Tarnation subjects early arrivals to “The Twenty,” an obnoxious barrage of advertisements that I tolerate for two reasons: first, because it helps to subsidize Knoxville’s only venue for foreign and independent cinema (and given the small crowds that typically greet me there, it would appear that those subsidies are essential); and, second, because I relish the moment immediately following “The Twenty.” The digital projector is quieted, the house lights dim, and the film projector comes to life. In those few seconds of silence before the first trailer begins, you can hear actual film spooling through a gate—a mechanical process with gears and a bulb and celluloid.

    I mention all that because when the projector kicked into motion yesterday, I wondered how much longer the sound would last. Jonathan Caouette, as we all know by now, constructed Tarnation on his Mac for a couple hundred bucks. It’s composed largely of still photos and home videos. Little film was exposed in the making of his movie, and the quality of its presentation would have suffered little had it been projected digitally. As most films will be. Soon enough. That’s what was I thinking, at least, as trailers for Kinsey and The Sea Inside streamed by. Two biopics of extraordinary men who led extraordinary lives. Two films I haven’t the slightest interest in seeing. I’m just not interested in extraordinary lives, apparently. Give me the ordinary. The mundane. But present them to me with a touch a grace, and do it honestly and artfully. That’s what I was thinking, at least, when the ads finally ended and Tarnation finally began—in darkness and to the diegetic rumblings of Caouette’s camera.

    A quick synopsis. When she was twelve years old, Renee LeBlanc, a strikingly beautiful child, fell from the roof of her home and suffered temporary paralysis. Her parents, convinced that Renee’s troubles were psychological, approved aggressive treatment, and over the next two years she was subjected to more than two hundred rounds of shock therapy. Whether her mental illness existed prior to the treatments or was, in fact, a result of them Tarnation does not make clear (and cannot make clear, given the vagaries of memory and denial). Caouette, Renee’s only child, suspects the latter, however, and his film is a blinding, visceral document of the anger, sorrow, desire, and hope (despite it all) that have forever colored his perceptions of art, family, and love.

    Drawn from nearly 160 hours of home movies, tape recordings, and clips from Caouette’s amateur narrative films, and complimented by odes to pop culture and by an aggressive soundtrack, Tarnation has been described by its executive producers Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell as a “movie of the home” and an “autobiographical documentary.” In the case of Tarnation, classification is no exercise in pedantry, for evaluating its success or its artfulness (for lack of better words) demands discussion of its aims and methods. The film is compelling, to be sure—always interesting and, at times, deeply moving. Only the most jaded could emerge from the experience of Tarnation without respect for its subjects, a mother and son who have somehow managed to emerge from the circumstances of their lives with a hard-fought love for one another and for the sacred moments of beauty in life. It’s worth seeing for that reason alone.

    But, finally, I think, the film’s formal problems—its haphazard construction, conflicted voice, and questionable representations of life—become too great to sustain the weight of Caouette’s noble ambitions. (Because this is a blog and not a formal essay, and because I really should be working on other projects, I’m going to make it easier for myself by tackling each of these critiques in turn. The best compliment I can give Tarnation is to say that it’s the first film I’ve seen in weeks that compelled me to write.)

    Construction. The first of my complaints with Tarnation is also perhaps the most petty, and it’s simply this: After the opening titles, I don’t recall a single moment of silence. The film moves from one montage to the next, each accompanied by music culled from Caouette’s personal collection of CDs and LPs. Occasionally the songs are manipulated for effect—tailored to enhance the images on screen—but much more frequently, the picture is cut to sound. Caouette’s much-discussed exploitation of iMovie’s editing features explodes his home movies into stunningly beautiful abstraction, but they find their rhythms too easily in the music. This, it seems to me, creates an aesthetic dissonance. I could too clearly imagine the filmmaker, exhausted by the endless decisions of editing, pulling an album from his shelf and allowing the song to determine the cuts. “Rhymed abstraction” (or some such makeshift term) might be employed to justify the technique. Perhaps it’s a fitting description of schizophrenia. I don’t know. I just felt that the form too often co-opted the content, which is most regrettable because when Tarnation does find its voice, it’s stunning. Which leads me to . . .

    Voice. Following a trip to visit his mother, the teenaged Jonathan smoked two joints that he later learned had been laced with PCP and dipped in formaldehyde. The resulting psychotic episode left him with depersonalization disorder, “a feeling of disconnection from the body and a constant sense of unreality.” Caouette writes:

    They don’t really have a cure for this disorder, so it’s something I have learned to live with. Tarnation is designed to mimic my thought processes so the audience can also feel like they’re in a living dream, which can be scary and intense, but also beautiful and glorious. Tarnation is a documentary in the sense that it’s a true story but it’s also a happening, an encounter, and a way for you to meet me and for me to meet you.

    Caouette mimics his thought processes through formal means, beginning with the narration, which is textual, rather than the expected voice-over, and which refers in the third person to the Jonathan we meet on screen. This is a Jonathan Caouette, the film implies, one of many that we will eventually meet. There is the young Jonathan with his first camera, acting the role of an abused woman “givin’ testimony” to her sins. There is the teenaged Jonathan, openly gay and directing his musical adaptation of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (brilliant!). There is the 20-something Jonathan, living (happily?) and acting in New York City. We are asked, in a sense, to read each of these personae as characters in a film about a boy’s search for the love of his mother. It’s all happening to them, the film implies, to those people.

    But the step into third person is a conceit, and, in my opinion, it’s an unnecessary and misguided one. In the final act of Tarnation, when Caouette is living in a long-term relationship and is choosing to take on the responsibility of caring for his mother, we meet the Jonathan whose voice has been, by turns, whispering, screaming, and crying in our ears. Caouette’s effort to dramatize the “disconnection from his body” is a posture: Tarnation is no less self-aware than one of Caveh Zahedi’s autobiographical films and it lacks Zahedi’s formal rigor. I like the idea of a film such as this deliberately fracturing the narrative voice, but the execution in this case is poor. A symptom of Caouette’s relative inexperience, I would guess. Which leads me to . . .

    Representing a Life. Look closely at the image I’ve posted above. Mother and son. Finally at rest. Finally at peace. It’s one of Tarnation‘s closing images and also one of its most poignant. A glimmer of hope. Love among the ruins. But here’s the thing: the scene is staged. Renee is, as far as we know, really asleep, but Jonathan is not. He and David (Jonathan’s boyfriend) found her there on the couch and apparently couldn’t resist the precious, pieta-like beauty of the moment. The film begins with a similar trick: the camera is fixed on television static when David returns home to their apartment and wakes Caouette from a nightmare. He’s been dreaming about Renee, we are told. He’s worried. Cut to the next morning. Jonathan and David wake to the sound of an alarm clock. Try to ignore the tripod. Try to ignore the fact that you’re now suddenly watching a narrative film.

    I was anticipating Tarnation with some excitement because I had assumed that, unlike the larger-budget biopics filling the multiplexes right now, it would, without compromise, elevate truth above affect. But it does feel compromised. Caouette betrays the integrity of his film by focusing again and again on images that seem to float outside of the film as aesthetic objects. Like his mother, Caouette is a striking beauty (as is David, actually), and portions of the film play like a love song to their remarkable faces. (Notice the slow zoom-ins on Jonathan’s and David’s dark eyes.) Perhaps it’s another symptom of depersonalization disorder to reduce people to two-dimensional characters, but, regardless, it doesn’t make for great filmmaking. Ultimately, Tarnation is a compelling film about extraordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives, and that, regrettably, is its greatest asset.

  • Random Musings . . .

    Random Musings . . .

    On some recent viewings . . .

    Shame (Bergman, 1968) — Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow star as Eva and Jan Rosenberg, cultured musicians who escape to a rural island when their orchestra is shut down during a war. Their new, more simple life as farmers is soon interrupted when their home is invaded, and they are forced to confront the violence that they had so meticulously avoided. Shame is typically described as a psychological portrait of the dehumanizing consequences of war. The splintering of Eva and Jan’s relationship, then, becomes representative of savage self-interest and alienation, and the interruption of their careers (captured most obviously in an image of Jan’s broken violin) serves as a metaphor for war’s denial of Art, beauty, and culture.

    Shame is my least favorite of the Bergman films I’ve seen. By setting the action amid some unspecific, fairy tale-like war, Bergman (who obviously knows a thing or two about the proper uses of symbolism) invests too much “Meaning” in his characters and in their actions. Shame is an Allegory with a capital A, trapped uncomfortably somewhere between absurd, dystopian satire and the real here and now. I think I would have preferred the film had it jumped completely to one of those extremes. As with all collaborations between Bergman, Ullman, von Sydow, and cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Shame is packed with remarkable performances and jaw-dropping photography, and it’s well worth seeing for those reasons alone. I was only disappointed because it fails to reach Bergman’s own ridiculously high bar.

    I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (Zahedi, 1994) — Zahedi, his father and half-brother, and a small film crew spend Christmas in Vegas, where Zahedi hopes, among other things, to heal his familial relationships and to prove the existence of God. With this film alone as evidence, I would say that he accomplishes neither, but the attempt is fascinating to watch. Caveh is a polarizing figure, to be sure, and Las Vegas shows him at his most obnoxious and manipulative, particularly during an extended sequence in which he attempts to talk his 62-year-old father and 16-year-old brother into taking Ecstasy. I’m still not sure whether or not he succeeded.

    To me, the appeal of Caveh Zahedi is his willingness to emote unapologetically, to subject those emotions to close scrutiny, and to do so all under the watchful eye of a camera in which he places an almost naive faith. In his more recent film, In the Bathtub of the World (2001), and in this interview with Film Threat, Caveh talks about his disappointment with an experience (reading a great book, attending a film festival) that failed to be “salvational,” and I think that word is the key to his project. There’s something beautiful about watching someone search so desperately for that salvational experience, particularly in a mostly Christian nation like America, where we are so comfortable with the language of grace and forgiveness. Caveh’s films remind me of a concept that I seem to come back to again and again: negative transcendence — “God appears only as the Absent One, as that which is signified only by the depth of the artfully expressed yearning.”

    Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995) and Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004) — I had planned to write up a full-length response to these films, which, when taken together, are something of a minor miracle. Sunset is my favorite film of the year so far. Told in real time, it captures an eighty minute conversation between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), a couple who spent “one magical night together in Vienna” nine years earlier, then never spoke again. When they finally reunite in Paris, they are older (their early-30s) and somewhat hardened by experience, and their reunion unravels the comfortable lies upon which their lives are founded. I can’t seem to write or talk about this film without rambling on about my wife, about how we met ten years ago, and about how our ideas of love and romance have evolved since, which is why I’m cutting this short. I’ll just say that Before Sunset is a remarkably well-crafted film that ends at precisely the right moment and that treats its characters and its audience with great tenderness and respect. Like I said: a minor miracle.

    The School of Rock (Linklater, 2003) — A film that doesn’t for a minute divert from its by-the-numbers plot but that is a hell of a lot of fun to watch anyway. In other words, I laughed when Jack Black tried to be funny and I got goose bumps when the band played their big show. Plus, any film that mentions Rick Wakeman’s keyboard solo in “Roundabout” get bonus points. The School of Rock‘s biggest surprise: Who knew Joan Cusack was so hot?

  • From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996)

    From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996)

    Dir. by Mark Rappaport

    Inspired by my recent wanderings through Ray Carney’s Website, I rented Mark Rappaport’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg and watched it twice this weekend. Here, Rappaport — who Carney calls “a geographer of our fantasies, dreams, and obsessions” — splices together news footage, film clips, and original video, creating a documentary-ish collage that transforms Seberg’s life into a meditation on misogyny, the Hollywood star machine, and the morality of spectatorship. He also manages to chart America’s journey from Eisenhower-era consensus through the rise and fall of the New Left, and does it all with wit and authority and insight. Quite a feat for a 95 minute film.

    Journals is built around the performance of Mary Beth Hurt, who plays Seberg from beyond the grave. The actress stares directly into the camera — which is only appropriate for someone standing in for the star of Godard’s Breathless — and recounts her life in the first person: born in 1938 in America’s heartland, discovered in Otto Preminger’s nationwide talent search for his adaptation of Shaw’s Saint Joan, launched to international stardom by Godard, abused by a trio of husbands, excoriated for her involvement with the Black Panthers, ignored in a series of forgettable roles, dead from suicide at the age of 40.

    Rappaport follows this line in mostly chronological order, using Seberg’s major film roles as jumping off points. For instance, when discussing the artistic and commercial failings of Saint Joan, he wanders off through the lives of Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, and Alida Valli — all leading ladies who carried the “curse” of playing Joan of Arc. It’s a fascinating conceit — a kind of associative editing that, in a sense, hyperlinks the various threads of film history and, in the process, forces us to acknowledge the strangeness of narrative and symbolic archetypes. Why do we take such pleasure from watching a noble young woman burned before us? Or, as Rappaport asks when discussing Seberg’s most interesting role — her lead in Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964) — why must men (the writers, producers, and directors) always equate female madness with aberrant sexuality?

    Journals is at its best, I think, when Rappaport intertwines the lives and loves of Seberg, Jane Fonda, and Vanessa Redgrave. All are of the same age, all made films directed by their husbands (another of the film’s more interesting concerns), and all participated actively in radical political movements. Their stories ended quite differently, though. Redgrave retreated to the stage and to small, innocuous film roles. The public, Hurt’s Seberg tells us, doesn’t care to watch its young beauties grow old on screen. Fonda exploited her sexualized Barbarella persona by stretching and gyrating her way through a series of popular workout videos that earned her millions. My favorite of Hurt’s lines is when she mentions that in 1988, in order to stave off bad publicity, Fonda apologized to veterans groups for her Vietnam-era activities, but never, as far as Hurt could remember, apologized to feminists for being a bimbo.

    Seberg’s life ended in 1978, when she finally succeeded after a series of failed suicide attempts. The reasons for her depression are complicated, the film shows us — her lopsided marriage to Romain Gary, a lifetime spent “doing what she was told,” the death of her daughter, and the hounding pressures exerted on her by both Hoover’s F.B.I. and the popular press. But, ultimately, we’re left to wonder about the destructive effects of a life lived on screen. A life of being looked at. At one point, Rappaport draws a line from the Kuleshov effect to Breathless to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name — or, from Russian Formalism to the first Modern cinema to Reagan-era machismo. Seberg is stuck there in the middle. Her blind stare into the camera is “enigmatic” and “sphinx-like,” or so the male reviewers have said, and all I can do is project my own desires onto her beautiful, beautiful face. The story of her life.

    I look forward to sharing Rappaport’s film with students who bristle at the word “feminism,” because Journals is not the least bit preachy — in fact, it offers few pat answers at all — but it makes feminist concerns immediate and (I hesitate to use the word) entertaining. Quite a feat.

  • A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

    A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

    Dir. by John Cassavetes

    It took me three tries to make it through John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence. I wasn’t bored by the film; I was in agony. Gena Rowlands’s performance as Mabel Longhetti, a blue collar housewife collapsing under the weight of mental illness, is the single most painful experience of my film-watching life. Cassavetes doesn’t make it easy for us. His brand of cinema verite forces us to look on helplessly, passively, as if we were just a few more strangers in Mabel’s life, a few more strangers who refuse to stand up for her. He uses static medium shots to sit us down at the Longhetti’s large, loud dinner table, then denies us an escape route when the tension builds. These moments are balanced with equally painful close-ups that bring us into intimate contact with Mabel, someone with whom such intimacy is a constant threat and danger.

    Peter Falk plays Mabel’s husband, Nick, an abusive bastard who, though occasionally capable of stealing our sympathy, is one of the screen’s most loathsome villains. In the final act of the film — an hour-long scene that takes place on the evening of Mabel’s return from a six-month stay in a sanitarium — the depths of Nick’s depravity and the extent to which he has contributed to Mabel’s instability are revealed in a series of devastating sequences that play out in real time. I found myself literally squirming in my seat, gasping aloud and wiping away tears. Because of that I just can’t accept Roger Ebert’s take on the final image: “Only by the end of the film is it quietly made clear that Nick is about as crazy as his wife is, and that in a desperate way their two madnesses make a nice fit.” Calling that fit “nice” is a disgrace. I don’t get it.

    As he would be the first to point out, Ray Carney is the authority on and champion of John Cassavetes’s films. A professor of film and American studies at Boston University and director of the film studies program there, Carney is best known for being something of a polemicist and provocateur (and a damn fine film critic, to boot). I like to browse through his impressive Website when I’m feeling pessimistic about the current state of academia. Doing so certainly doesn’t cure me of my condition, but I find it strangely comforting to read such articulate and well-informed rants on the subject. It also helps that the guy seems to lack any kind of internal censor. Carney doesn’t pull punches, and it’s damn refreshing.

    In “‘A herd of Independent Minds’: Or, Intellectuals Are the Last to Know,” Carney sits down with an unnamed interviewer and skewers contemporary film criticism, Hollywood, the intellectual influence of the New York Times, academic biases against film art, and Citizen Kane. God bless him. The whole piece is worth a read (as is much of the other writing collected at his site), but I think Carney is at his best when he talks about the incestuous relationship between art, academia, and the cultural forces that shape critical opinion.

    Journalists and the things they write about have become part of the celebrity culture, which means that once someone or something appears in The New York Times or The New Yorker, he, she, or it is taken seriously. If someone’s name appears in the New York Times or The New Yorker a certain number of times, that’s all that it takes to constitute importance. And the people who appear in The New York Times or The New Yorker the most are journalists. So they are taken the most seriously. They become the cultural definition of what it is to be a thinker. If a journalist is merely a bit clever verbally and shows up on the breakfast table long enough, most academics and intellectuals mistake him or her for a thinker. No one ever asks if you are really important. Are you really smart? . . .

    My understanding of being an intellectual is that it is to be given a unique opportunity to stand just a little outside our culture’s system of hype and publicity. It is to be someone who refuses to be pulled into the muddy undertow of advertising, journalistic sensationalism and celebrity worship. While more or less everyone else is paid to sell something, the academic is paid to be independent. Or not paid. But is independent anyway. But what has happened in our culture is the opposite. At least in film, the intellectuals line up to sell out to the culture’s values. And for the people giving out the grants and prizes, the celebrity tail wags the intellectual dog. Our universities are no different.

    But academics, obviously, aren’t the only people getting wagged by that celebrity tail.

    This applies to every group. What is it Joyce says in Finnegan’s Wake? “We wipe our glosses with what we know.” For literary critics, a movie is good if it has clever dialogue or is a faithful adaptation. It’s no different from why multiculturalists judge a film in terms of how many minority characters are in it or what their income level is, why Jewish viewers like Schindler’s List, World War II vets like Saving Private Ryan, teenage girls like Titanic, and teenage boys like The Matrix. It’s identity politics. People enjoy seeing themselves and their own views represented — not their real selves and views of course, but a flattering, idealized version of them. It’s not a terribly sophisticated view of what makes great art. Yet how many times do you hear something like “Holocaust survivors said that Spielberg’s movie was accurate” invoked as proof that Schindler’s List is a great movie?

    Carney offers some advice for film-viewers — tips and tricks that he’s learned over the years as he’s tried to empower young film students and complacent professors alike:

    I do a lot of things to lever them out of their old ways of knowing — including deliberately destroying a lot of the pleasure of the screening, by calling things out during it, or stopping the film at a climactic moment and asking questions about it—so that they can’t just sit back and relax and watch the movie. I am reprogramming their brains, teaching them new sets of responses, new things to look and listen for. Sometimes I talk all the way through a film to prevent them from “dropping into it” even for a minute. I have to play a lot of mind games and sprinkle a lot of fairy dust to keep them motivated. Students really have to put themselves in my hands, and there may be a certain amount of resistance for the first couple months, but that too becomes part of the learning process—a lesson in how we resist change and hold onto past viewing habits. But the best ones stay with it because as the challenges get greater, the trust and personal bond grows. I can’t do any of that when I am showing the film to a professor. The relationship is entirely different. With twenty-year-olds who are malleable and open to new experiences it’s not that hard to orchestrate the changes, but for someone older and more set in their ways it’s much less likely to happen.

  • A Few Words Upon Discovering Cassavetes

    A Few Words Upon Discovering Cassavetes

    John Cassevetes is my latest obsession. On a whim, I recently picked up a used copy of Faces (1968), the story of Dicky and Maria Forst’s disastrous attempts to find peace and companionship outside of their loveless marriage. Shot entirely in stark, high-contrast black-and-white, and featuring Cassevetes’s trademark dialogue, Faces feels at times like a documentary — voyeuristic, discomforting, and brutally real.

    It took me about 15 minutes to fall into the film’s rhythms and style — the opening sequence might be its weakest — but by the time we see Dicky and Maria alone together at the dinner table, I was absolutely hooked. Faces is like the New Wave meets Edward Albee, as it builds its emotional conflict from the tension between the characters’ false surface bravado and all of those painfully insecure close-ups. I’m amazed by how genuine some of the shifts in emotion feel.

    The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) might be a more refined film, but it’s also, I think, less satisfying. Ben Gazarra’s performance as Cosmo Vitelli, a strip club owner deep in debt to dangerous men, is always convincing and occasionally brilliant. But nowhere does he (or maybe it’s the material) reach the same plaintive heights achieved by Lynn Carlin and Gena Rowlands in Faces. Still, though, his closing monologue is the best scene I’ve seen in some time. His fate is now sealed, yet he manages to inspire a strange joy and pride and community among his performers. It’s almost like a moment of grace.

    Special mention goes to Bookie for featuring the always fascinating Tim Carey, most memorable for his performances in the early Kubrick films, The Killing and Paths of Glory. There are several scenes here in which his castmates (especially Seymour Cassel) seem almost apprehensive — or even afraid — around Carey. Those moments give the film a nice spark, an odd bit of unpredictable energy.