Long Pauses

Tag: Blogathon

  • Collins and Jost

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

    First, the films . . .

    They Shoot Horses

    they shoot horses (2004)

    dir. by Phil Collins

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

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

    Plain Talk and Common Sense

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

    Dir. by Jon Jost

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

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

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

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

    The Long Take

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

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

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

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

  • 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]

  • Code Unknown (2000)

    Code Unknown (2000)

    Dir. by Michael Haneke

    “The guard is down and the mask is off, even more than in lone bedrooms where there’s a mirror. People’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway.”
    — Walker Evans

    “Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.”
    — Susan Sontag

    Twice during Code Unknown, director Michael Haneke cuts together montages of still photographs. The first is a series of grisly images from war-torn Kosovo; the second is a collection of portraits taken surreptitiously (if we are to believe the film’s narrative) on the Paris Metro. The second montage is actually the work of documentary photographer Luc Delahaye, but his obvious forebear is Walker Evans, whose hidden camera work on Depression-era New York subway trains resulted in the book, Many Are Called (1966).

    In “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” Susan Sontag calls Evans an heir to Walt Whitman’s “euphoric” humanism. “To photograph is to confer importance,” she writes, and Evans’ photos, or so the argument goes, democratize their subjects by leveling the playing field — “leveling up,” Sontag notes. Viewed through his lens, the Victorian homes of Boston are exactly as beautiful, as ugly, and as important as the dusty cotton towns of south Alabama. Evans’ images are, in his own words, “literate, authoritative, transcendent.” Sontag continues:

    The moral universe of the 1930s being no longer ours, these adjectives are barely credible today. Nobody demands that photography be literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative. Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent.

    I doubt I’ll be the only participant in today’s blog-a-thon to call upon Saint Susan. They’re too obvious a pairing, Sontag and Haneke — sharp intellects, determined moralists, and impossibly talented craftsmen, both. The question that’s nagging at me, though, is whether Haneke’s films, in general, and Code Unknown, specifically, achieve the egalitarian aims for which Sontag praises Evans. As opposed to the streams of self-canceling images that spray from television, Haneke’s films are, perhaps, as hyperselected as moving images can be — I admire his precise direction like I admire the prose of a great essayist — but to what ends, exactly?

    Haneke’s use of Delahaye’s “L’Autre” photos is, like so much of the film, a highly self-conscious gesture. In this allusion to Sontagian (?) romanticism, he critiques by juxtaposition the kind of contemporary, sado-pornographic photojournalism typified by George’s Kosovo pictures. (George’s dry voice-over reading of a letter to Anne as the montage of dismembered bodies and grieving faces spools by is another nice — if heavy — touch.) By comparison, the black and white portraits of disinterested subway riders are more artful and ambiguous, and, therefore, one might argue, more essentially human. After seriously considering the term for several years now, I still don’t understand what “transcendent” means, precisely, but I know that the second photo montage and the shots of deaf students drumming are my favorite moments in Code Unknown, perhaps because they short-circuit, temporarily, my intellectual processes during a film that, at times, feels too much like a high-minded parable.

    Haneke’s allusion to Evans’ literacy, authority, and transcendence is problematized, though, by the scene in which we watch George take his subway photos. When he sits down in front of an attractive young woman, their knees only inches apart, it feels like a predatory act, one nearly as taut and tense as Anne’s later confrontation with an aggressive teenager. Again, the scene is highly self-conscious. George’s camera is Haneke’s camera, and it’s also every other camera documenting and fragmenting our lives (and it’s a weapon and a phallus, to boot — quite a potent symbol, this camera).

    “People’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway,” Evans tells us, but why should we believe him? I’m not sure that I do, and Haneke almost certainly doesn’t. Even the photo that appears on the cover of the most recent edition of Many Are Called (see above) betrays the Heisenberg-like effect of Evans’ camera on his subjects. That woman on the left, it seems to me, is — if not wholly aware that she is being photographed — at least suspicious of that man sitting across the aisle from her. Or, perhaps Sontag is right, and Haneke and I are simply enjoying, begrudgingly, the symptoms of our postmodern cynicism. Literate in the debates surrounding image culture, we strike the moral pose, asking tough questions, complicating assumptions, conscious all the while of the vast gulf that separates our bourgeois thumb-twiddling from power.

    In Code Unknown, Haneke harkens toward the prelapsarian image — “the real face” — with the goal, I think, of infecting us with a similar nostalgia. Even the form of the film derives from that goal: each of the vignettes plays like one of Sontag’s “privileged moments . . . a slim object that one can keep and look at again.” Once afflicted by the longing for authority or for the proverbial “genuine article,” anything less — a traditional thriller like Anne’s new film, The Collector, for example — will be exposed as trivial or even morally harmful.

    See also:

  • Showgirls (1995)

    Showgirls (1995)

    Dir. by Paul Verhoeven

    Another post in today’s Showgirls-a-thon. (Or is that a-thong?)

    I can’t seem to find it now, but one of my all-time favorite Onion headlines is something like, “Area Man No Longer Able to Enjoy Ironically.” He’s a guy in his early-30s, married, maybe with a kid (I don’t remember), and one day he looks around his house, sees his Chia Pet or his KISS Meets the Phanton of the Park VHS tape or his collection of vintage mood rings or his David Soul albums — he sees whatever particular brands of kitsch he happens to have bought while thinking, “This is the greatest, stupidest thing I’ve ever seen!” — and he looks at this crap that litters his shelves and his walls and that fills his garage and his basement and he realizes, finally, that it’s crap. It’s all crap.

    I’m willing to admit a certain fondness for Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven’s satire of fascism and the pornography of violence, but whatever it is that inspires some to extoll the virtues of Showgirls . . . well, I just don’t got it. That’s not to say that there isn’t something intellectually interesting about a film that remakes All About Eve with hundreds of bare breasts and still manages to be less erotic than, say, an episode of Quincy. (Surely Verhoeven knew he was making the, um, limpest of blue movies. I mean, a single still image of Gina Gershon’s mouth is sexier than this entire film.) But, to me, whatever parodic or subversive effects might be at work in the film — and that’s a big “might” — are undone by the movie’s crassness and by its remarkable lack of wit.

    About thirty minutes into Showgirls — last night’s was my first viewing — I started fast-forwarding and continued doing so off and on throughout. I would guess that it took me about 90 minutes to watch the 128-minute film. I wanted it to end quickly because the scenes at the Cheetah Club gave me an urge to watch something else instead: John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The pathetic joke-teller in Showgirls, Henrietta ‘Mama’ Bazoom, reminded me of Mr. Sophistication, who is also pathetic, of course, but who is allowed some life and dignity as well. I prefer my entertainments non-ironic, I guess.