Manny Farber, In Memoriam

First, a big thanks to David Hudson for attentively and patiently gathering links to a variety of Manny Farber tributes this week.

If I might wax personal for a second, Farber happened to provide a turning point for this blog. A little over two years ago, I did a post on termite art and white elephant art. In the process of writing it and in discussing Farber in the comments with others, primarily Zach, I discovered that my film-blogging interests lay not simply in films but in discourse about films: reading, writing, talking about them. For occasioning this turn in the road for the blog, among many other reasons, I'm grateful to Farber and his essay.

Let me offer, as a small homage, ten reasons why I like Manny Farber.

(1) His great gift for describing the surfaces of films. Donald Phelps, in an essential essay on him called "Critic Going Everywhere," wrote that Farber is often trying to convince readers and spectators that the 'depths' of art lie in its surfaces. And Farber's writing is itself composed of surfaces that are one-of-a-kind, thick, and "all-over" as in an abstract expressionist painting.

(2) The Phelps essay is collected in a terrific book by him, now out of print, called Covering Ground (1969). The title might well stand for Farber's own writing practice. Phelps opens his essay like this:

Manny Farber's criticism is an extension of his painting, of his talk. Extension is the theme of his work. The fretful energy which births his virtues and sometimes faults, is an energy through which work covers ground: the terrain existing only to be covered, not occupied, not (for too long a time) staked out. Thus, the work, painting or movie criticism or art criticism, advances horizontally, in all possible directions, never seeming to exist for a simple progress from A to B; and getting away as far as possible from any pivot, any centripetal force.

(3) One of my favorite Jonathan Rosenbaum essays is "They Drive By Night: The Criticism of Manny Farber" (1993). It can be found in his collection Placing Movies, and last week he put it up on his website. I find this piece moving because it tracks, with an acute sense of personal vulnerability, the vicissitudes of Rosenbaum's personal relationship with the volatile Farber. The entire piece is a must-read, but let me excerpt this bit on Farber's prescient mode of viewing:

Discontinuous viewing was his preferred way of watching a movie, a method he shared with Godard; if a movie he really liked such as ORDET was being shown several times in the campus screening room over a given week, he’d turn up each time for a different reel or two—maybe even for the same reels, whatever happened to be on.

(4) I like the deep ambivalence that Farber feels for a certain relentlessly evaluative critical impulse that he describes below. It's ironic that Farber himself was sometimes guilty of exercising this impulse.

It's terrible that a certain language and capacity to make judgments come so easily. It should be hard to write on these films. Whatever the film, we are told endlessly, shot by shot, scene by scene, what's good or bad. It's crazy, totally crazy. I'd like to see that mode of criticism applied to Cezanne or Mozart, saying what does and doesn't work at every step [...] In short, the resistance posed to artistic criticism has vanished; it's turned into a pie that critics quickly slice into pieces.

(5) Farber is rare among critics in attempting to de-emphasize the place of meaning in the criticism of an artwork:

I don't see how or why anyone should be expected to get the meaning of an event in a movie or a painting. That's a place where criticism goes wrong: it keeps trying for a complete solution. I think the point of criticism is to build up the mystery. And the point is to find movies which have a lot of puzzle in them.

(6) Starting in the late '60s, many of Farber's pieces were written in collaboration with Patricia Patterson. It's interesting to contrast the earlier and later Farber essays and speculate about the nature of Patterson's influence. He puts it thus:

Patricia's got a photographic ear; she remembers conversations from a movie. She is a fierce anti-solutions person, against identifying a movie as a single thing, period. She is also an antagonist of value judgments. What does she replace it with? Relating a movie to other sources, getting the plot, the idea behind a movie--getting the abstract idea out of it. She brings that into the writing and takes the assertiveness out.

(7) Bill Krohn, in an another essential piece called "My Budd by Manny Farber," wonderfully characterizes Farber's criticism as being all-inclusive without being systematic:

[I]t's often impossible to tell from the beginning of an essay on a film or a filmmaker where it is going to end up: There is no thesis, no antithesis, no possibility of synthesis, in part because the need to "get it all in" works against the more traditional critical ambition to "say everything" about a work by constructing a microcosmic model that includes by definition, everything that can be said. Farber works against that idea of system by creating a microcosm whose powers of control over the object of its discourse are seriously handicapped by playful gestures which deny its internal coherence.

(8) The expanded (1998) edition of Negative Space concludes with a list by Farber and Patterson of their seven critical precepts. One of them is: "Willingness to put in a great deal of time and discomfort: long drives to see films again and again; nonstop writing sessions." Farber says:

I'm unable to write at all without extraordinary amounts of rewriting. The "Underground Movies" piece took several years to write. An article on bit players was stolen from the car--a funny thing to steal on Second Avenue and Second Street, but it was stored in the lid of an Underwood at about the fifth year of its evolution. I'm not a work-ethic nut, but the surface-tone-composition in everything I do--painting, carpentering, writing, teaching--comes from working and reworking the material.

(9) The carefulness of his observation--not just of a movie's details but more importantly of the world at large--can be a great inspiration to us to open our eyes a little wider and pay a little more attention to the world around us.

It's a silly thing to say, but it's very important to me that people know exactly the way our house looked, and where it was situated; that there was the Lyric Theatre across the street from us, and at what angle, and how dark it was inside, and what kind of candy they sold, that it was next to a pool hall--that's an icon of my memory, that street.

(10) There are a handful of Farber essays, like "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" or "Underground Films," that get cited over and over again (and of course, they're great). But one of the relatively lesser-known pieces I like a lot is "Cartooned Hip Acting" (1967). Here's an excerpt from it in an older post; it's on John Boorman's Point Blank.

Notes: In the '60s, Donald Phelps put together a Farber collection for his magazine For Now. It's available here. The Bill Krohn essay first appeared as an afterword in Charles Tatum Jr.'s Ride Lonesome (Belgium: Editions Yellow Now, 1988). All of Manny Farber's own words above are from his interview with Richard Thompson and Patricia Patterson that appears in Negative Space, save his remarks on the evaluative impulse which are from Jean-Pierre Gorin et al.'s essay in Framework's special Manny Farber issue (1999). However, I took this latter quotation not from the Framework issue but from Adrian Martin's Movie Mutations letter exchange with James Naremore. I've searched far and wide but have not been able to lay my hands on this Framework special issue--any tips or help will be hugely appreciated!

And now it's over to you all: Your thoughts and sentiments on anything and everything to do with Manny Farber? Please feel welcome to share.

pic: Delphine Seyrig in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, the subject of Farber and Patterson's famous "Kitchen Without Kitsch" essay. Recently I read Jonathan Rosenbaum's piece on his favorite non-region-1 box sets at DVD Beaver, and ordered his #2 pick, the Akerman 5-disc set from the Belgian Cinéart label. It's a beaut.

TIFF 2008 Film-List

Here is the Toronto International Film Festival film-list at Darren's TIFF blog, 1st Thursday.

The festival runs for 10 days starting September 4th, and I plan to be there for 8 of those 10 days. I'll drive back once mid-festival to teach my classes.

Here are some films I expect to get tickets for, although I suspect the list will look a bit different when the festival schedule is announced. I'm listing them by program.

-- Special Presentations: 35 Rhums (Claire Denis); Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar-wai); Che: parts 1 and 2 (Stephen Soderbergh); Un conte de Noël (Arnaud Desplechin); Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater); Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman); Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman); Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone); Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda); Un Barrage Contre le Pacifique (Rithy Panh); Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (Peter Sollett).

-- Masters: Les Plages d'Agnès (Agnès Varda); Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa); Nuit de chien (Werner Schroeter); 24 City (Jia Zhang-ke); Four Nights with Anna (Jerzy Skolimowski); Of Time and the City (Terence Davies); Le Silence de Lorna (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne); Three Monkeys (Nuri Bilge Ceylan).

-- Wavelengths (avant-garde): Films by James Benning, Jean-Marie Straub, Nathaniel Dorsky, Jim Jennings, Jennifer Reeves, Pat O'Neill, David Gatten, and others.

-- Visions: Birdsong (Albert Serra); Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso); Service (Brillante Mendoza); The Sky Crawlers (Mamoru Oshii); Uncertainty (Scott McGehee & David Siegel).

-- Contemporary World Cinema: L’Heure d’été (Olivier Assayas); Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt); Sugar (Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden); Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim); Two-Legged Horse (Samira Makhmalbaf).

-- Dialogues: Agnes Varda discussing La Pointe courte, and Terence Davies his trilogy, Children, Madonna and Child, and Transfiguration.

-- Discovery: Hunger (Steve McQueen).

* * *

I'll be looking to see the Denis film twice if I can. Soderbergh's Che films are also high on my list--who knows what theatrical fate awaits them? I've longed to see a Werner Schroeter movie, and this will be a good chance. Of the lesser-known filmmakers, I enjoyed Peter Sollett's Cannes award-winning short Five Feet High & Rising and the follow-up feature Raising Victor Vargas; I wish there were more good teen films in this vein. Similarly, So Young Kim's strong first film In Between Days has me curious to check out her new one.

Two big disappointments: no Lucretia Martel or Hong Sang-soo.

Here are some filmmakers on the list I've seen absolutely nothing by: Albert Serra, Mika Kaurismäki, Christian Petzold, Ramin Bahrani, Pablo Trapero, Kristian Levring, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Philippe Falardeau, Paolo Sorrentino.

Any thoughts, suggestions or recommendations of films or filmmakers on the TIFF film-list? They're all welcome.

Creative Geography in Cinema

The question I've been rolling around in my head all week is: How do real and imaginary geographies interact in the movies? But before we go there, let me back up and set the stage for a second.

There's a fascinating difference between the arts of painting and cinema, specifically the way in which they capture physical reality.

In painting it takes talent, hard work, and craft knowledge in order to reproduce reality with great detail and fidelity. Thus, realism is not something that comes easily or naturally in painting. Instead, what is overtly present in most paintings--all but the most 'realistic' ones--is unmistakable artifice.

In cinema, the opposite is true. The camera has a realistic urge: Capturing physical reality with great, detailed fidelity is easy. Turn on the camera and physical reality rushes in, automatically, with its excess of detail in tact. In this sense, realism comes naturally to cinema. No special talent, hard work and craft are required to turn on a camera. It is this 'automatism', Andre Bazin claimed, that is the reason for cinema's special vocation: that of realism. Bazin felt that in relation to all the other arts, this bestowed upon cinema a special responsibility--to capture reality.

But even if the camera is particularly suited--more so than the paintbrush--to perfectly capturing physical reality in all its detail, not all cinema embraces this vocation of realism and commits itself exclusively to it. Most cinema, as we all know, combines its raw material of images gleaned from physical reality with significant applications of artifice.

So now we can circle back to our starting point with the question: How do reality and artifice interact in one very specific case, that of geography? In other words: How do real and imaginary geographies co-exist in a film?

There's a great story about MGM producer Irving Thalberg who once decided to stage a scene that showed Paris with a moonlit ocean in the background. His art director, the famous Cedric Gibbons, objected. Thalberg replied:

We can't cater to a handful of people who know Paris. Audiences only see about ten percent of what's on screen, anyway, and if they're watching your background instead of my actors, the scene will be useless. Whatever you put there, they'll believe that's how it is. [1]

Whatever you put there, they'll believe that's how it is. Take Monument Valley: a very real place, and an iconic presence in the films of John Ford. He shot seven films there and it's said that filmmakers have shied away from using it as a location because he forged such a personal association with it. Not only its presence but even its absence (e.g. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) draws special attention and comment.

In Ford's The Searchers, Ethan and Marty spend seven years looking for Debbie. They ride through summer and snow, covering vast distances....but without ever leaving Monument Valley! In Stagecoach, the first Ford film to be set there, the coach spends most of the duration of the film traveling from Tonto to Lordsburg. But Monument Valley is clearly visible at both the place of origin and the destination. Finally, in Cheyenne Autumn, the Cheyenne journey a thousand miles, but amazingly, we as viewers never really lose sight of the Valley. [2]

More examples. In S. Ramanathan's Bombay to Goa (1972), real space and diegetic space are brought together in an interesting way (see this old post on rear projections). Most of the film takes place on a bus. When we're inside, we see Bombay and then the countryside speed by on rear projections. But each time the passengers disembark and the narrative events move outdoors, they do so at actual locations along the Bombay-Goa highway.

The subject of Thom Andersen's wonderful documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) is the manner in which that city has been represented in hundreds of films. "Silly geography makes for silly movies," says Andersen, and therein lies my one small complaint about his movie: its overly insistent protestations about how films have played fast and loose with the city's geography. While this is undeniably true, the movie's steady and enduring tone is one of disappointment with a long tradition of films that forsake realism in depicting the city.

Peter Wollen poses a contrasting view in an excellent piece on films about the twentieth-century city called "Delirious Projections". (It was published in Sight & Sound in 1992 but remains, to my knowledge, unanthologized.) In it he tries to show with a broad variety of examples that although it's been argued that films with social relevance and political critique should hew to a realist style (a problematic notion), some of the best 'city films' in history owe as much if not more to studio artifice as they do to the respect they accord the integrity of real urban spaces.

Let me provide one example of creative geography from his article. The 1920s saw a flowering of the 'city symphony' genre with films like Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta, Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures and Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: A Metropolitan Symphony, the form culminating in Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. But the Vertov film, I was surprised to learn, actually depicts not a real city but a 'compilation city' made up of urban areas in the Ukraine in addition to parts of Moscow.

So I'm wondering: Can we think of some interesting examples of the way real and imaginary geographies come together in films? Or the varied ways--both realistic and artificial--in which films approach geography? Any thoughts on the subject are welcome.

Notes: [1] The Irving Thalberg story originally appeared in Samuel Marx's Mayer and Thalberg: The Make-Believe Saints (1975). I discovered it through Robert B. Ray's The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (2008). [2] Edward Buscombe's BFI monograph on Stagecoach makes these points about Monument Valley.

* * *

Some links:

-- At Moving Image Source, Andrew Tracy on the films of Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, which are part of the Cinematheque Ontario retrospective "Memory/Montage/Modernism".

-- Also at the site: Livia Bloom on Malle, Varda, Akerman, Vigo, and the philosophy of the flâneur film; and Martin Rubin on economics and sex in a Depression-era Busby Berkeley musical.

-- Good news: the Notes section at Jonathan Rosenbaum's site has been outfitted with an RSS feed, so we can track those posts in addition to the main, featured writings. Recent posts at the site include: "Potential Perils of the Director's Cut," as well as notes on Ousmane Sembene, Charles Fort and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

-- At Strictly Film School: Acquarello posts a review of Randal Johnson's recent book on the films of Manoel de Oliveira; and a selected list of recent and upcoming DVD releases both US and worldwide.

-- DK Holm at the Vancouver Voice on the films of Powell/Pressburger.

-- At Culturemonkey: The Dark Knight.

-- At Michael J. Anderson's blog Tativille: pieces on "Rossellini and Sainthood" and Renoir's The Southerner.

Square Rock at Monument Valley (The Searchers). Comanche in the background--hugging the landscape--and white men in the foreground.

Double Bills

The new issue of Sight & Sound has a fun feature on double bills. (Here's the pdf.) A number of writers propose their own, for example:

Geoff Andrew -- Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg and Terence Davies' Of Time and the City, along with Victor Erice's short film La Morte Rouge. All 'city films'.

Michael Atkinson -- William Klein's Mr. Freedom and Trey Parker's Team America: World Police. ("The two most merciless, sophomoric films ever, made 35 years apart but during identically idiotic imperialist wars.")

Ian Christie -- Ken Jacobs' Tom Tom The Piper's Son and Douglas Sirk's Imitation Of Life.

Roger Clarke -- Wang Xiaoshuai's Frozen and Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably.

Kieron Corless -- Alexander Kluge's Strongman Ferdinand and Chris Petit's Unrequited Love. ("Both Petit and Kluge are thorns in their respective film cultures; a marriage of inconvenients.")

Mark Cousins -- Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Gods Of The Plague and Djibril Diop Mambety's Hyenas. ("in the spirit of surrealism and the chance encounter, and because I think there are affinities between the directors I don't quite understand.")

Chris Darke -- Chris Petit's Radio On and Bruce Robinson's Withnail & I. ("One film sings, the other doesn't--Petit can't get a word in over Robinson's gargling.")

Graham Fuller -- Werner Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath Of God and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. ("Herzog's and Coppola's odysseys seem like episodes from the same demented dream. They share the river, the jungle, the mythic quest and wonderfully portentous rock music.")

Maria Delgado -- Juan Antonio Bardem's Main Street and Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men. ("Both films offer a brilliant commentary on the sadistic excesses of a competitive culture that fails to respect ethical boundaries.")

Charlotte Garson -- David O. Russell's I ♥ Huckabees and Jean-Luc Godard's Two Or Three Things I Know About Her. ("focusing alternately on the face and on the landscape, with the same mania for transforming ideas into objects.")

Alexander Horwath -- Carl-Theodor Dreyer's Ordet and Larry Cohen's God Told Me To.

Mark Le Fanu -- Elan Kolirin's The Band's Visit and Ivan Passer's Intimate Lighting. ("Some of the best and most endurable films turn out to be those little 'unambitious' comedies that nonetheless capture the hopes and disappointments of ordinary life with miraculous accuracy.")

Tim Lucas -- Georges Franju's Les yeux sans visage and George P. Breakston & Kenneth G. Crane's The Manster.

Adrian Martin -- Mark L. Lester's The Ex and Alan Rudolph's Remember My Name. ("When it comes to intriguing stories about menacing ex-spouses, there's a lot more on the ground than the Fatal Attraction (1987) misogynist thriller formula.")

Peter Matthews -- "To illustrate the decline of an authentic cinéma de scandale, I propose the coupling of Makavejev's abominable, lyrical Sweet Movie with its milder epigone, The Idiots."

Olaf Moller -- Hanns Springer & Rolf von Sonjewski-Jamrowski's Ewiger Wald and Reinhard Kahn & Michel Leiner's Waldi. ("Everything you'll ever need to know about Germany in a double feature that'll never make it to a cinema near you.")

Kim Newman -- Peter Sykes' Demons of the Mind and Jim O'Connolly's Tower of Evil. ("Part of the surreal wonder of 1970s British horror was the use of well-spoken actors we knew from bland TV sitcoms and adventure shows in demented settings.")

James Quandt -- Frank Borzage's Three Comrades and Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale. ("Both are wartime accounts of a trio of friends whose lives are transformed by a fourth figure.")

Jonathan Rosenbaum -- Gordon Douglas' The Iron Mistress and Fritz Lang's Clash By Night. ("[S]ometimes, from a business angle, one film becomes the hook to lure audiences to see another. In my Friday evening film series at college, I once showed The Wild One (1953) + Orphée, two motorcycle movies, back to back with that rationale.")

Brad Stevens -- David Lynch's Inland Empire and Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating. (""Nothing analyses a film better than another film," wrote French critic Nicole Brenez.")

David Thomson -- Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped and Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel. ("[M]y favourite double bills are secret, thematic pairings, films where deep below the surface one picture is speaking to another.")

Noel Vera -- Ishmael Bernal's At the Top and Mario O'Hara's Woman on a Tin Roof. ("a pair of lovely bookends for the dawning and passing of an era.")

Linda Ruth Williams -- Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits and Bruce Robinson's Withnail & I. ("Clever, quotable scripts, flawless performances, intelligent direction--can British cinema boast a more resoundingly entertaining pairing?")

* * *

Now let me toss in my proposal for a double bill: 3 Godfathers (John Ford, 1948) and Amar Akbar Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977).

They're both, in a way, 'masala movies' that combine many flavors--drama, adventure, comedy, and pathos. They're both mythic tales: Biblical in the Ford, secular-nationalist in the Desai.

In the Ford film, three men (including John Wayne) find the course of their lives drastically changed when they unexpectedly take on godfatherly (actually, step-motherly) duties for a baby. In the Desai film, three boys are abandoned by their father under a statue of Mahatma Gandhi (!), and get separated. They are then discovered, adopted, and raised in, respectively, Hindu, Muslim and Christian families; thus their names and the name of the film.

And now, your turn: one (or more) double bill(s) you might program if you had the chance?

* * *

Some links:

-- Ryland and Mubarak present their double bills.

-- At The House Next Door, Man On Wire director James Marsh responds to Godfrey Cheshire's criticisms of his film, more specifically its use of Michael Nyman's music from Peter Greenaway's films.

-- via One-Way Street: Walter Benjamin's "1940 Survey of French Literature" is published for the first time in English, in the New Left Review.

-- Michael Newman at Zigzigger: "Notes on Cult Films and New Media Technology".

-- Ed Howard on Stephanie Zacharek's review of Richard Brody's Godard biography.

-- Steven Shaviro on Grace Jones' new "Corporate Cannibal" video.

Pics: (1) Rattle, baby Pedrito and gun in 3 Godfathers (John Ford, 1948); and (2) Shabana Azmi (at right) is a modern Indian art-film icon, what Jeanne Moreau was to the nouvelle vague. Here she moonlights in the thoroughly 'commercial' Amar Akbar Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977).

Analyses To Sink Your Teeth Into

At the beginning of this year I embarked on a personal project: revisiting a film and then, immediately afterwards, reading a detailed, lengthy, meaty analysis of it. I've tried to do this with at least 1-2 films a week.

My objective is to target films that are (1) either well-reputed, or (2) ones for which I have a special affinity. My hope is that this will help me construct and 'fix' in my memory, however sparse and skeletal, a small matrix of details about each film.

There has been another, unanticipated benefit to this exercise: a reminder that no close analysis is 'objective' or 'neutral'. Every reading occurs from a certain reading position, and employs a certain methodology. Thus, it's been a great, practical way to be exposed, on an ongoing basis, to a broad range of interpretative approaches: e.g., mise-en-scene analysis (V.F. Perkins on The Magnificent Ambersons), structuralism (Peter Wollen on Ford and Hawks), feminism (Tania Modleski on Hitchcock), psychoanalysis (Laura Mulvey on Citizen Kane), urbanism and cultural studies (Edward Dimendberg on Phantom Lady), liberal humanism (Robin Wood on Hawks), textual analysis (Raymond Bellour on The Birds), ideological analysis (Robert B. Ray on Casablanca and Taxi Driver), Marxist critique of postmodernism (Fredric Jameson on The Terrorizer), etc.

It has also resulted in my having to read a wide variety of writers, much greater than a few years ago when nearly all my movie-related reading was journalistic and I read the same writers (the ones I gravitated towards) all the time. Suddenly, the horizon of writing models available to learn from has opened up considerably.

I went about the project in two ways: either (a) working backwards from books or essays I identified, or (b) working forwards from films I felt were important to see and read about in depth. Here are some examples of the books and films:

(a) Books/Essays:

-- The James Quandt-edited Bresson anthology.

-- Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, edited by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye. La Ceremonie (Deborah Thomas), Letter from an Unknown Woman (Steve Neale), Bonjour Tristesse (Gibbs/Pye), etc.

-- Gilberto Perez's The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium. Rules of the Game, Earth, Nosferatu, L'Eclisse, A Day in the Country, etc.

-- Adrian Martin's books on the Mad Max series and Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America.

-- Joe McElhaney's The Death of Classical Cinema: a full-length book devoted to three films, Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Hitchcock's Marnie and Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town.

-- David Bordwell's book on Ozu (available online).

-- The Cinema of Victor Erice, edited by Linda Ehrlich.

-- Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View by George M. Wilson. You Only Live Once, North by Northwest, Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Devil is a Woman, Rebel Without a Cause.

-- James Naremore's books on Kubrick and Minnelli.

-- Robert B. Ray's The ABCs of Classic Hollywood. (A post I wrote on it.)

-- Dudley Andrew's Film in the Aura of Art. Broken Blossoms, Sunrise, L'Atalante, Meet John Doe, La Symphonie Pastorale, Diary of a Country Priest.

-- Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (ed. Geiger and Rutsky), with over forty essays.

-- Jim Kitses's Horizons West. Ford, Mann, Boetticher, Peckinpah, Leone, Eastwood.

(b) Films:

-- Rules of the Game: Perez, Andre Bazin, Peter Wollen, Raymond Durgnat, Leo Braudy, Alexander Sesonske.

-- Passion: Peter Wollen, Harun Farocki and Kaja Silverman, Fredric Jameson.

-- Marnie: Robin Wood, Murray Pomerance, Joe McElhaney.

-- The Searchers: Edward Buscombe, Tag Gallagher, Brian Henderson, Douglas Pye, Peter Lehman.

-- Blade Runner: I didn't realize that an army of people have written about this film!

-- The Scarlet Empress: Robin Wood, George Toles, Andrew Sarris, Carole Zucker.

-- Brokeback Mountain (which I just saw for the first time): Film Quarterly special issue in 2007 with D.A. Miller (this essay is a tour de force--highly recommended), Jim Kitses, Chris Berry, B. Ruby Rich, etc.

* * *

I realize this is a vast topic, but I thought we'd try to turn this post into a modest little resource that others might find helpful. So, let me ask you: Would you like to share any examples of your favorite film analyses (either books or essays)? And/or any good analyses you might've read recently that you'd like to recommend?

Many of the examples I've listed above are probably known to the cinephile or cinema student. Any off-the-beaten-path or under-appreciated pieces of analysis that you'd like to turn us on to? Your suggestions are welcome.

* * *

Links:

-- Adam Nayman at Reverse Shot on The Dark Knight.

-- At Errata, Rob Davis and J. Robert Parks have a discussion, on podcast, of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep.

-- Phillip Lopate has a piece at Film in Focus called "Critics in Crisis."

-- via David at Greencine, the Stanley Kubrick site has loads of material: interviews, essays, reviews, etc.

-- Youssef Chahine has died. He was 82.

John Ford has said that he made it plenty clear in The Searchers that Ethan and his sister-in-law Martha were in love. Here they share an intimate moment, and Clayton (Ward Bond) pretends not to notice.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival

I must begin with a word of gratitude to the wonderfully generous Michael ("Maya") Guillen of The Evening Class, who invited me to the festival, offered his fabulous pad for me to stay in, and arranged for my press credentials.

A highlight of my trip was meeting up and spending time with Darren, who flew in from Tennessee. Michael threw us a party and invited the San Francisco film/cinephile community to it (thanks again, Michael!). It was fun to meet and hang out with fellow film-bloggers like Brian Darr of Hell On Frisco Bay, Ryland Walker Knight of Vinyl Is Heavy, The House Next Door, and Free Nikes, Shahn of Six Martinis and the Seventh Art, Michael Hawley of The Evening Class, Miljenko Skoknic, and Adam Hartzell.

I was startled by the high level of quality of the films at the festival (both the terrific prints and the films themselves). My favorites were: Dreyer's Mikael (rich, delicious mise-en-scene, and a knockout, transcendent ending); Kinugasa's Jujiro (expressionist avant-garde Japanese film packed with nonstop formal experimentation); William Desmond Taylor's The Soul of Youth (a moving social problem melodrama that is included in the DVD box set Treasures III, Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934); Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother (a good analysis might be written about the imaginative way in which geometric thinking not only drives the film's gags but also becomes fused with its mise-en-scene and camera movement); Tod Browning's The Unknown (while containing no overtly 'fancy' composition or cutting, every frame of this film is imbued with an audacious perversity); Rene Clair's Les Deux Timides (all those wonderful split screens and speculative flashbacks); and H.P. Carver's The Silent Enemy (save Nanook, the only silent ethnographic film I've seen--it makes me want to go exploring about in this genre).

I should make particular mention of the festival program book, which contains a specially commissioned scholarly essay for each film. (In a perfect film-world, every festival would do this.) Brian Darr's piece on Jujiro, for instance, enormously helped my appreciation of this movie.

* * *

Some links:

-- At The House Next Door, Ryland writes in detail about his festival experience and also helpfully collects links to other coverage.

-- I reecently realized that Jonathan Rosenbaum's website has an entire section called "Notes" that I'd been unaware of: lots of good reading there. Also, he has an informative report from the Bologna Ritrovato at Moving Image Source.

-- David Bordwell has a terrific, must-read post that begins with this 1927 H.L. Mencken quote: "The first moving-pictures, as I remember them thirty years ago, presented more or less continuous scenes. They were played like ordinary plays, and so one could follow them lazily and at ease. But the modern movie is no such organic whole; it is simply a maddening chaos of discrete fragments. The average scene, if the two shows I attempted were typical, cannot run for more than six or seven seconds. Many are far shorter, and very few are appreciably longer. The result is confusion horribly confounded. How can one work up any rational interest in a fable that changes its locale and its characters ten times a minute?"

-- Andrew Tracy opens his Reverse Shot piece on Hellboy II thus: "Talking faux-seriously about juvenilia has become a marvelous way to avoid talking seriously about the serious."

-- Exciting news from the Toronto International Film Festival: the avant-garde program will include work by Jean-Marie Straub, Nathaniel Dorsky, James Benning, Jim Jennings, Jennifer Reeves, and Pat O'Neill, among others.

-- Craig Keller: "If we have to classify the films of Louis Feuillade — and we don't, because there are no rules in cinema or criticism (love or war) — ...we'd do well to stop deferring to the contemporary marketing that announced them as adventure serials, and start referring to these (un-/)determinedly recursive five-plus-hour sagas by what they really are, which are extended psychodramas — dangerous, occult, quasi-cathartic manipulations of the spectating psyche."

-- A commenter at Dan's place indicates that a Murnau/Borzage DVD box is imminent from Fox. (Wow.)

pic: The Danish director Benjamin Christensen (of Haxan and The Mysterious X) plays a painter in Dreyer's Mikael.

Paul Schrader/Dead Magazines

I have a piece at Artforum on Paul Schrader's Mishima (1985) and Mishima's only film as director, Patriotism (1966).

Not all of Schrader's films work for me, but in addition to Mishima and Affliction, I like his insomniac night-worker cycle: American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, Scorsese's Taxi Driver. There's a lengthy and interesting interview with him in the most recent issue of Rouge that's worth reading. Schrader is often open-minded and un-defensive about evaluating his own films and the choices he made in them. Here are two examples of things I've had trouble with in his films: (1) The bombast of Michael Been's songs in Light Sleeper and the over-insistent Philip Glass score in Mishima (although Giorgio Moroder's synth-rock score for American Gigolo works beautifully); and (2) The easy reaching for redemptive endings in Gigolo and Sleeper by pasting the ending of Bresson's Pickpocket on to them. But even this repeated Bresson gesture--I hear Patty Hearst also ends this way--bothers me less than it used to, and is even a bit touching in its slightly awkward doggedness.

I recently discovered to my surprise that one of Schrader's formative influences was the architect-inventor-filmmaker Charles Eames. Schrader wrote a lengthy essay on Eames for Film Quarterly in 1970 called "Poetry of Ideas"; it's available on his site in pdf form. In an interview in Schrader on Schrader, he speaks about his own strict Calvinist upbringing and how Eames introduced him to something new:

I had been raised in an environment that believed that ideas were the province of language, and that if you had something to say you used words to say it, and that if you wanted to speak of beauty or of spirituality you used words. This is what Calvin had used,, this is what Luther had used, this is what Knox had used. What Charles taught me, and taught me with great patience and dilgence, was that an image or an object can also be an idea.

So, for example, you have the word 'wineglass', a nine-letter linguistic concept, and you have this object, a wineglass, which is related to the word by a semantic code but which is not the same idea. And if you have a different wineglass, you have a different idea again, and again; and only when you appreciate that those ideas have as much validity as the word 'wineglass' will you be visually literate.

Eames taught me that there is a visual logic in life and that to be a poet, or a poet of ideas (which is what I called my piece), doesn't mean you have to use language. I was like Paul on the road to Damascus when I heard this. I had always believed that people who thought visually were inferior thinkers, and that painting was essentially an illustration of ideas, which is how it was taught at Calvin, rather than an idea in its own right. Whenever any truly powerful idea hits you it overwhelms you, and that just knocked me out and I was changed permanently.

* * *

Adrian's new column at Filmkrant is on "dead magazines":

[W]e must recognise the spectre of mortality which looms over Internet magazines - not to mention even more ephemeral sites such as blogs and 'listserv' discussions. How many of us print out the entire contents of the film pages we read on-line? One day, that may be the only trace left of them...On the other hand, the Internet gives us the spectacle of something that is just as ghostly but nonetheless gratifying: magazines that have reached their final issue, perhaps years ago, but still remain on-line, thanks to the good graces of whoever pays the archive bill.

In the comments to the previous post, Andy Rector wondered about the André Bazin unofficial tribute site, which seems to have vanished. A couple of years ago, I remember stumbling upon an interesting magazine called Cinemad and returning to it later to discover that it had gone poof, archives and all. And I've never manually archived the contents of this blog, simply assuming that nothing could possibly happen to it: a foolish assumption, perhaps?

Here's my nomination for archival resurrection of a "dead magazine": the CinemaTexas Notes archives that collect, in pdf form, hundreds of detailed program note/essays written in the 1970s at the University of Texas at Austin.

* * *

Links:

-- Dan Sallitt at Auteurs' Notebook: "I can’t think of too many current directors of Hiroki Ryuichi’s stature and skill who work almost exclusively from scripts written by others. Is he a modern-day Jacques Tourneur, submitting to random collaboration in order to explore the dimensions of his personality? Or does he have the clout to work with writers to develop material that is meaningful to him? He was unknown on the international scene before his excellent 2003 Vibrator - but the IMDb gives him 44 directing credits, and 33 of them are before Vibrator. Many of these are allegedly “pink films,” soft-core pornography. At what point did he turn into an important filmmaker?"

-- via Jim Emerson and David Hudson: At Test Pattern, Kathleen Murphy on Last Year at Marienbad and Jay Kuehner on James Benning.

-- Zach asks: "What Is Cinema (For)?"

-- David Hudson rounds up the new issue of Film Comment.

-- In that new issue, the following Marco Ferreri films have been announced for DVD release here: El Cochito, The Seed of Man, La Grande Bouffe, Don't Touch the White Woman, Bye Bye Monkey, Seeking Asylum, Tales of Ordinary Madness, The House of Smiles. For those, unlike me, who are familiar with Ferreri: might you have any specific recommendations among these films?

-- Blog discovery of the week, via David Cairns: Unsung Joe ("Where bit-part actors go when they die").

-- At The Evening Class, Michael Guillen posts a 2-part interview with Stephen Salmons, director of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which I'll be heading out West to attend in a couple of days.

Two hands, one pulling back, the other hanging on: Dana Delany and Willem Dafoe in the cafeteria scene in Light Sleeper.

André Bazin's Writings

Dudley Andrew's essay on Bazin and Sartre in the new Film Quarterly opens with a shocking fact:

Stacked nearly a meter high in my attic are photocopies of all--or nearly all--Bazin's published writings. This amounts to over 2600 items, of which, scandalously, less than seven per cent are available in French or English.

To which Andrew appends this uncertain note: "Cahiers du Cinéma has rights to all Bazin's published writings. They hope to bring out a complete works some day." For someone who is often thought to be cinema's best-known theorist and critic, and who further was instrumental in the eventual creation of the film studies discipline, this seems baffling.

I've been doing a Bazin immersion the last few weeks, and I'm amazed especially by two things. First, his writings are not about developing a "theory of cinema" in an abstract and 'systematic' manner. Instead, he puts in motion a process of continual exchange between film criticism and film theory. He begins with the films themselves, and their details--formal, stylistic, thematic, etc. His theoretical reflections then arise from a scrutiny of these details. Second, it's striking to see how he did all his theory and criticism work in full public view. As Bert Cardullo points out, Bazin's writings were produced for a range of publications that were variously aligned: liberal (L'Écran Francais); socialist (France-Observateur); left-wing Catholic (Esprit and Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, now Télérama); non-religious and state-run (L'Education Nationale); and conservative (Le Parisien libéré). In addition, of course, he co-founded and wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma. It's staggering to be reminded of how much he accomplished before he contracted leukemia at 36 and died at 40 in 1958.

Today I've been inventorying all the English-language translations of Bazin's writings on my shelves:

-- The two volumes of What is Cinema? (1967, 1971), translated by Hugh Gray. They contain many of his best-known pieces like "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage," "In Defense of Mixed Cinema," and his essays on Italian neo-realism, the Western, Rossellini, Chaplin, Bresson, De Sica, and so on. (I wonder: do these two volumes of translations contain all the essays from the original 4-volume set of Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?)

-- Bazin at Work (1997), edited by Bert Cardullo, with essays on Wyler, Pagnol, adaptation, cinema and theology, Citizen Kane, etc.

-- Jean Renoir (1973), edited by Truffaut.

-- Orson Welles (1978), translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

-- The Cinema of Cruelty (1982), with separate sections on: von Stroheim, Dreyer, Sturges, Buñuel, Hitchcock and Kurosawa.

I'm curious: Am I missing any of Bazin's writings available in English?

Starting in the late '60s, the rise of a certain brand of theory--ideological, psychoanalytic, semiotic--was inhospitable and downright hostile to Bazin and his theories of realism inflected by Catholicism and existentialism. In retrospect this was understandable but since the 1980's cinema studies has witnessed the rise of a 'historical turn'. I'm wondering: Has the discipline seen a consequent return to and recuperation of Bazin? Are there signs this might come to pass?

Any ideas you may have on Bazin are welcome.

* * *

And now ... fashion? There's a side of me that doesn't get out too much on this blog: a 'foreigner' who's lived in America for two decades but still finds its culture endlessly fascinating (and 'other'). The new issue of Entertainment Weekly has a list of pop culture moments of the last 25 years that influenced fashion. I've gathered here some of the interesting items on it:

Early Madonna (fingerless gloves, lingerie-styled wedding dress, crucifixes); Michael Jackson circa Thriller (Jheri curls, loafers with white socks); Ally McBeal (microminis); Miami Vice (roomy linen suits, sockless loafers); mid-'80s mall pop like Tiffany and Debbie Gibson (biker shorts, skorts, scrunchies); Jennifer Beals in Flashdance (scissored sweatshirts); Gwen Stefani circa No Doubt (white tanks, studded bra straps, bondage pants); Kanye West (those sunglasses); Rihanna (the bob); Janet Jackson circa Rhythm Nation (the military look--epaulets, cadet caps); Pretty in Pink (Molly Ringwald's DIY prom-dress, Duckie's bolo tie); Reality Bites (Lisa Loeb's cat-eye frames); Mr. T in The A-Team (a sort of proto-bling); The Golden Girls (shoulder pads, sequins); early Shania Twain (bare midriffs enter Nashville music culture); Puff Daddy and Mase's "Mo Money Mo Problems" (bright, baggy tracksuits); and Beverly Hills 90210 (sideburns).

* * *

Links:

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum on Pedro Costa: "I found that, even though I simultaneously loved and had to struggle in diverse ways with all of Costa’s films, Casa de Lava, his only landscape film, was the one that blew me away the most."

-- Two fascinating interviews by Michael Guillen: Catherine Breillat and Elvis Mitchell.

-- David Phelps has been on a roll. At his blog Videoarcadia, he has a post with some reflections and links to his writings including his new piece on Ken Jacobs's Razzle Dazzle at Auteurs' Notebook.

-- Glenn Kenny: "Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Brasillach, and Anti-Semitism: Some observations."

-- At his site Jigsaw Lounge, Neil Young on the Edinburgh film festival.

Received Ideas in Cinema

You may remember Christian Keathley from his stimulating guest post on "Uncanny Overlaps" a few months ago. In an e-mail last week, Chris was musing about "received ideas" in cinema, and I'd like to share his thought-provoking words here for us to read and talk about. -- Girish.

Jean-Marie Straub once remarked: “People think Eisenstein was the best editor because he had some theories about it. But the greatest and most precise editor was Chaplin, and Jacques Rivette is a close second.”

I love the way this remark turns upside down certain received ideas that we think are set in stone. The received idea here has to do less with Eisenstein than with Chaplin. The established line is that Chaplin was the great humanist filmmaker, and maybe the greatest movie actor of all time; but when it comes to “cinematic” qualities, Keaton is the one who shines. Apparently, Straub sees things differently.

I read this remark of Straub’s years ago, but was reminded of it when my friend Prakash Younger told me about Robert Bresson’s contribution to one of the Sight & Sound Top Ten polls.

1. City Lights
2. City Lights
3. The Gold Rush
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

In addition to being funny (indeed, Prakash described this as Bresson’s version of a Chaplinesque gag), this list reinforces something of Straub’s point: clearly, the modernists Straub and Bresson see in Chaplin a formal rigor that the general line does not account for. Even when the rest of us acknowledge the general line on Chaplin as a “received idea,” with all the limitations that term implies, that line still holds an influence that can blind us to these other virtues.

Similarly, there are possibly qualities in Eisenstein that the general line on him overlooks as well. Another of my favorite quotes comes from him: “Suppose some truant good fairy were to ask me … ‘Is there some American film you’d like me to make you the author of – with a wave of my wand?’ I would not hesitate to accept the offer, and I would at once name the film that I wish I had made. It would be Young Mr. Lincoln directed by John Ford.” This remark makes me want to re-watch Potemkin more than Young Mr. Lincoln. Are there common qualities, especially qualities in the Eisenstein, that I hadn’t seen before in these films that seem so obviously to contrast one another in so many ways? Those critics who have typically fawned over Eisenstein, Straub, and Bresson (I’m thinking here of the likes of Michelson, Burch, Sontag) never alerted me to any such correspondence.

A key part of the pleasure of these quotes is that each involves a filmmaker of the highest rank speaking candidly (and unexpectedly) about the work of another. None of this nonsense of a director saying what he thinks he's supposed to say. (In the 1952 Belgian Cinematheque poll, both Elia Kazan and Billy Wilder picked Potemkin as the greatest film of all time. I don’t believe it for a second.) A great example of a director speaking candidly about others is the fabulous interview with Jacques Rivette in Senses Of Cinema. It’s filled with great remarks about other directors. Two of my favorites: “Here's a good definition of mise en scène - it's what's lacking in the films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz.” And on Michael Haneke’s Funny Games: “What a disgrace, just a complete piece of shit!” The second remark is just funny, while the first raises a pretty important issue.

* * *

A word of thanks to Chris for those reflections. They've got me thinking. Sometimes received ideas become reinforced and cemented by being brought up repeatedly as critical short-hand. For example: Samuel Fuller's films are "primitive"; Lang is all about fate; Ozu celebrates quiet resignation, and keeps his camera low and static; Chabrol makes Hitchcockian films that are bourgeois satires; Bresson is austere and minimalist; Peckinpah's films revel in ultraviolence, etc, etc. Now, these pronouncements aren't exactly false, but by no means are they the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The problem is that they 'fix' filmmakers too easily and quickly, thus constraining our thinking about them to certain pre-determined pathways.

I'd enjoy hearing from you: What do you think are some "received ideas" in cinema, some too-familar wisdoms that might need questioning or doubting? And are there (like in Chris' examples above) filmmakers who might help us do this by expressing unexpected affinities for certain films or directors we wouldn't normally associate with them?

* * *

Links:

-- At Auteurs' Notebook, David Phelps has an epic, image-filled post on Rivette and Celine and Julie.

-- New articles at the Moving Image Source: Adam Nayman on Peter Lynch; Jonathan Rosenbaum on Marcel L'Herbier; Mark Asch on Tomu Uchida; and Tom Charity on the Chris Fujiwara-edited Defining Moments in Movies.

-- The debut issue of Experimental Conversations ("Cork Film Centre's online journal of experimental film, art cinema and video art"). via Albert Alcoz at Visionary Film.

-- Kevin Lee posts two enjoyable video essays: C. Mason Wells on Truffaut's Les deux anglaises et le continent; and Chris Fujiwara on Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon.

-- Michael Sicinski has me curious to check out Definitely, Maybe and The Invisible Circus ("I'm ready to conclude that this Adam Brooks fellow may well be a severely underrated pop filmmaker.")

-- On my list to track down at the library: the new issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, which is devoted to Hou Hsiao-hsien and includes pieces by Hou, Adrian Martin, Paul Willemen, Shigehiko Hasumi, Kumar Shahani, and others.

-- Kristin Thompson on types and characteristics of "turning points" in Hollywood storytelling.

-- At his blog The Cine File, Andrew Schenker reviews Richard Brody's new biography of Godard.

-- New DVD releases that I've just added to my 'queue': Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, Wittgenstein, and Blue; Andre Techine's The Witnesses; Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares; Anthony Mann's The Furies; and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

pic: Rivette from the interview: "Starship Troopers doesn't mock the American military or the clichés of war - that's just something Verhoeven says in interviews to appear politically correct. In fact, he loves clichés, and there's a comic strip side to Verhoeven, very close to Lichtenstein. And his bugs are wonderful and very funny, so much better than Spielberg's dinosaurs. I always defend Verhoeven, just as I've been defending Altman for the past twenty years."

A Blog-Pause

I'm scribbling away to meet three deadlines and need to take a brief blog break. I should be back within a week or two. Take care, all.

Links

-- The newly redesigned Artforum site now features a film column that is updated with new pieces a couple of times a week. Currently up: James Quandt on Sokurov's Alexandra; Brian Sholis on Derek Jarman; Jason Anderson on Steve McQueen's Hunger; Andrew Hultkrans on Godard; Cécile Whiting on the art documentary The Cool School, etc.

-- A trove of good reading at the Moving Image Source, including: Dan Sallitt on late Hawks; Jonathan Rosenbaum on William Klein; Chris Fujiwara on Naruse actor Tatsuya Nakadai; B. Kite on the new Richard Brody biography of Godard, etc.

-- Zach writes about Jonas Mekas and Hollis Frampton.

-- Dan in a post about Nakahira, Vadim, and composition: "When I watch a movie and think, “These images are intrinsically beautiful – this director really knows how to compose,” and then try to analyze the visual style, I often conclude that the compositions are balanced between two functions: showing the figure in the foreground, and showing the world. The balance is always managed in such a way that the shot can still function in the mind of the viewer as a depiction of the foreground figure; and yet the room or landscape is presented with some spatial integrity.

"And every time I watch a movie and think, “These images are dull and conventional,” I conclude upon further analysis that the compositions are framed as if they are trying to present only one object, or one idea, and that the image reduces in my mind to a concept."

-- The new issue of Cineaste has over a dozen essays available online, including several Web exclusives.

-- Two recently discovered blogs: Scarlett Cinema ("Women in Film Criticism"); and DinaView, run by Dina Iordanova, one of the contributors to the Chris Fujiwara-edited book, "Defining Moments in Movies".

-- via Keith Uhlich: Maxim Gorky in 1896 on seeing some Lumière films.

-- In the DVD Panache interview with David Hudson, we learn that one of his favorite film books is Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire.

-- David points to the online publication Triple Canopy. The new issue features works by Michael Robinson and Keren Cytter.

-- Lots of good reading in the Kino Fist work issue, including pieces on Akerman and Godard.

-- via Mubarak: Jon Jost's blog.

Cinema & Revulsion

I have a conflicted relationship with modern horror cinema because, to be honest, I’m a bit squeamish. Maybe this has something to do with my cinema upbringing—in Indian film history, horror has never been a strong presence.

The Indian film market as a whole is composed of three categories: ‘A’ (large cities, where I grew up); ‘B’ (towns); and ‘C’ (rural areas, where the majority of the Indian population lives). In my teen years, the ‘70s and ‘80s, horror films did exist, but they were low-budget films made mostly for the C market. These were films marked by a double disreputability: not only did they contain explicit violence (although nowhere near the extent that their low-budget Western counterparts of the period did), they also had strong sexual overtones. Overt sexuality in Indian films was taboo for a long time; even kissing on the lips didn’t appear on Indian screens until the mid-‘80s. For these reasons, horror films didn't circulate much in A and B markets because producers were nervous about provoking widespread middle-class moral outrage in urban centers with high concentrations of educated bourgeois.

So, being barely familiar with the genre, when I moved to America as an adult and wandered innocently into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time, the damn thing hit me like a truck. It took me 10 years to return to it, gingerly, and then I quickly recognized its genius.

I find that sometimes I need more than one exposure to such a film in order to surmount my revulsions, to try and push back the limits of my squeamishness. Cinema can be a source of rarefied emotions and spiritual edification but ultimately it’s much more than those things: it deals with the entire gamut of human experience and sensation. To be truly curious about art in all its variety also means opening oneself up to that wide range of experience and sensation. This is the rationale, the mantra I repeat to myself when trying to work on my squeamishness problem.

And sometimes it can be hard. Horror films make special demands on us, even if they ‘reward’ us with special sensations. In her famous, much-anthologized essay “Film Bodies” (1991), Linda Williams speaks of the three genres that have never attained respectability: horror, melodrama, and porn. All three deviate from the norms and economy of classical realist narrative cinema with displays of excess. They strike audiences as gratuitous, viscerally manipulative, and unseemly. Importantly, they collapse the ‘aesthetic distance’ that makes the spectator feel comfortable and safe.

Williams points out that there’s something else these three ‘body genres’ have in common: they create a spectacle of excess that is enacted in the film upon the human body (violence in horror; emotion in melodrama; and orgasm in porn) but they also induce in the spectator a mimicry of these effects (fear for horror; tears for melodrama; arousal/orgasm for porn). In other words, these films brush ‘aesthetic distance’ out of the way and act viscerally upon the spectator’s body. The spectator doesn’t watch these films calmly, but instead convulses with them. Which can result in a certain hesitancy, a squeamishness on the part of the viewer due to the excess of physical and emotional investment these films demand.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject. Are there certain films or filmmakers you will not watch because they gross you out or disturb you too much? Over the years, has your tolerance/threshold for graphic horror gone up or down? What, in your opinion, are the difficult-to-watch films that are nevertheless rewarding and valuable? And what has been the effect of time: do you approach or process horror films any differently now than you did when you were younger?

* * *

Links:

-- Adrian Martin at Filmkrant on Armond White's piece in the New York Press, "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Movies": "In the field of film criticism, White is against everyone: reviewers, promoters, bloggers, cinephiles. They are not merely myopic, in White's estimation, but 'wilfully blind' to the truth before them on the screen and in the world, because of ideological bias, or their desperate need to flee reality. But what is that truth, this reality? In his essay, White spontaneously offers 'ten current film culture fallacies' - ranging from 'Gus Van Sant is the new Visconti when he's really the new Fagin, a jailbait artful dodger', to 'Only non-pop Asian cinema from J-horror to Hou Hsiao Hsien counts, while Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Stephen Chow are rejected'. That list is Armond White in a nutshell: it's all dubious assertion (only 'non-pop' Asian cinema is acclaimed?) and even more aggressive counter-assertion (Van Sant is a phony), in a non-stop, strident loop. There is no argument, no development, no depth in this writing - for the simple reason that White is always dancing on the surface of ideas, a polemical 'moving target'. His modus operandi is confusion, as in this thumbnail account of Apichatpong Weerasethakul: all critics (except White) apparently ignore the 'fundamental terms', 'the facts of his Asianness, his sexual outlawry and his retreat into artistic and intellectual arrogance that evades social categorisation'. So is he for or against the filmmaker? Who can tell?"

-- In Artforum, a tribute by several writers to Alain Robbe-Grillet.

-- The summer season at Cinematheque Ontario features the following series: Robbe-Grillet & Alain Resnais; Jean Eustache; Luchino Visconti; Marcello Mastroianni; 24 Japanese Classics; Peter Lynch.

-- Michael Sicinski takes up Serge Bozon's La France, Craig Baldwin's Mock Up on Mu, Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues and Nanouk Leopold's Wolfsbergen.

-- Filmblog discovery of the week: Max Goldberg's Text of Light.

-- David Phelps (previously David Pratt-Robson) on "returns, escapes" in Rivette and Feuillade.

-- Michael Guillen on Joseph Campbell.

-- Danny Kasman's Cannes wrap-up piece with links to his reviews, at The Auteurs' Notebook.

-- via Joe Bowman at Fin de Cinema comes news of upcoming region-1 DVD releases: Demy's The Pied Piper and Jayasundara's The Forsaken Land. Also, picked up from Cannes were the new films by: Lucretia Martel, Arnaud Desplechin, the Dardennes, Leos Carax, Olivier Assayas, Steve McQueen, and Ari Folman.

-- Michael Wood in the London Review of Books on three Bresson films.

pic: Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977).

San Francisco

Generously offering to be my host, Michael "Maya" Guillen has invited me to San Francisco to attend the SF Silent Film Festival in a few weeks. I haven't visited the Bay Area in many years, and I'm excited not just to see the films but also to meet up with all the San Fransiscan bloggers and cinephiles I've been reading for ages now.

The festival is showing: Mikael (by Dreyer; the only film at the festival I've seen), The Unknown (Tod Browning), The Kid Brother (Harold Lloyd), The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Les Deux Timides, The Man Who Laughs, The Soul of Youth, The Silent Enemy, Her Wild Oat, Jujiro(Crossways), and The Patsy.

Any suggestions or thoughts about the films, the festival, or cinema hotspots in the city? They're most welcome.

* * *

Links:

-- Here's a spot of Cannes coverage by Christoph Huber, Mark Peranson and Kent Jones at Quintin and Flavia de Fuente's blog, La Lectora Provisoria. Also: more from Kent Jones at Dave Kehr's blog.

-- Glenn Kenny on the Cannes awards.

-- David Bordwell blogs "some cuts I have known and loved."

-- Michael Newman at Zigzigger: "After four semesters now, I have collected some ideas about how a class blog works and doesn’t work that I thought would be worth sharing."

-- Edwin Mak at Faster Than Instant Noodles on Jia Zhang-ke's new film, 24 City.

pics: Dreyer's Mikael.

Quotational Writing

I’m fascinated by writing that juxtaposes quotations, allusions, and citations, ceaselessly making connections to other texts.

Of course, a postmodernist would say that all texts do precisely this. Roland Barthes’ famous essay, “The Death of the Author” (1968) calls any text “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” Similarly, Michel Foucault writes in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) that every book “is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences … The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands … its unity is variable and relative.”

Barthes and Foucault, in an early expression of the postmodern sensibility, were pointing out that intentionally or unintentionally, all texts are intertextual: Every text exists not in isolation or autonomy but as part of a vast ‘environment’ of texts.

But I’m after something a bit more specific here: I’m wondering about texts that literally collage together quotations and citations from a variety of sources. One example that leaps to mind is Lesley Stern’s amazing book, The Scorsese Connection (BFI, 1995).

Completely flouting every available model of the ‘director study’, Stern weaves her book around Scorsese’s cinema rather than writing narrowly or exclusively about it. All through, she interpolates passages large and small from a wonderfully diverse and stimulating set of writers and artists: Deren, Godard, Nietzsche, Proust, Benjamin, Irigaray, Roger Corman, Derrida, Robert Mitchum, Raul Ruiz, and many others.

These quotations are set off prominently in boxes throughout the book but in addition she draws in passing from the writing of scores of other writers. (The dense “Notes” section at the end of the book is a treat to pore over.) Her book does a whole lot more (like exploring the countless ways in which Scorsese’s films might be seen as ‘remaking’ other films) but I’m confining myself to a more narrow agenda here: the collaging of writings.

Robert B. Ray’s The ABCs of Classic Hollywood, which I wrote about last week, gathers together over a hundred entries; nearly every one of them draws upon formulations or observations made by other writers or artists. In the foreword to Ray’s previous book, How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (2001), James Naremore writes that Ray “sometimes aspires to a “readymade” or montage of quotations.”

At first glance the writing of Peter Wollen doesn’t appear to belong to this category, but in fact what powers Wollen’s writing is a furious erudition. Even his slender BFI Classics monograph on Singin’ in the Rain (a must-read) has a huge bibliography. He may not frequently interpolate quotations but it’s clear that the vast amount of writing he has read and digested stands behind his every line.

Wollen wrote a definitive short-introduction to Godard called “JLG,” a 20-page essay that can be found in Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (2002). In it he remarked that in the period immediately following May 1968, Godard’s famous quotational impulse continued to flower: his quotes of Romantics (Poe, Dostoyesvsky, Lorca) were now replaced by those of Marxism-Leninism and Mao. I read somewhere that every single line spoken in Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990) is a quotation.

Writers usually keep a repository of interesting quotes they encounter in what is known as a "commonplace book." The Pulitzer-winning book critic for the Washington Post, Michael Dirda, has published his own collection of favorite quotes in Book By Book (2005), a light and delightful read that exudes wisdom on every page. In recent months, this is the book I've given most frequently to friends as a gift; it never misses.

Finally, the epic example and summit of this mode of writing is, of course, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.

I'd love to learn about other books or essays that make heavy use of quotations. Any suggestions or recommendations will be most welcome.

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Links:

-- Chris Cagle's Film of the Month Club kicks off with its first film: I've just put up a post on Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987). The discussion will continue for the rest of the month, so there's still plenty of time for you to rent the film and join the conversation at the site if you feel like it.

-- New issue of Senses of Cinema.

-- Jonathan's Rosenbaum's latest blog entry is an unpublished 2004 review of Brad Stevens's book Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision.

-- Film-blogger discovery of the week: Marc Raymond, a cinephile living in Seoul and writing his dissertation on Martin Scorsese.

-- David Hudson, the hardest-working man in the film-blogosphere, puts up his big and indispensable Cannes index post, which will be updated throughout the festival. We'll be bookmarking and returning to this post for all our film festival needs until next Cannes.

pic: Scorsese cites The Wizard of Oz in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

The ABCs of Classic Hollywood

Speaking as an academic, it’s been a hard week: I gave and graded one hundred final exams. But speaking as a cinephile, it’s been a thrilling week. I revisited 4 films—Grand Hotel, The Philadelphia Story, The Maltese Falcon, and Meet Me in St. Louis—and read Robert B. Ray’s The ABCs of Classic Hollywood, the best new film book I’ve encountered in a long while. This strikingly unusual book is devoted to detailed exploration of the four films.

Ray’s starting point is this quote from Vincente Minnelli: “I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They’re things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate.” Ray proposes a fascinating and unorthodox method for discovering these hidden things. For each film, he puts together a collection of ‘entries’, one or more for every letter of the alphabet. (It’s pure chance that this blog entry follows the one on Peter Wollen’s “Alphabet of Cinema”.)

Here are some examples of entries for Grand Hotel: A for Art Deco; B for the Blue Danube waltz, which plays throughout the film; C for the great Coffin scene, which seems parachuted in from some forgotten documentary; D for John Barrymore’s Dachschund, and for Doors; F for Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford); I for “I want to be alone”; O for overhead shots; U for underwear, etc.

The entries are eclectic and omnivorous, drawing from a wide variety of sources: Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, the two repeatedly invoked touchstones in this book—but done so in a lucid, pedagogically plainspoken way; Hollywood histories and biographies; Surrealism; philosophers like Wittgenstein and Cavell; la politique des auteurs, etc. Most interestingly, the work is pitched as “a movie primer,” aiming perhaps to build a bridge between academic thinking about cinema and the ‘lay’ film enthusiast interested in ideas.

Ray writes that the book began for him with a single image: after returning to her room from a failed ballet performance, Grusinskaya (Garbo) sits on the floor to remove her costume.

In the midst of Grand Hotel’s creaky melodrama and steamy overacting, this image—mysterious, beautiful, unmoored from any character’s perspective, narratively unnecessary—offers a challenge: what can we say that will do it justice? The movies, of course, are full of such moments, and the discipline of film studies arose, at least in part, to explain them. That task has proved more difficult than it once appeared: “[T]he movies are difficult to explain,” Christian Metz once admitted in his famous epigram, “because they are easy to understand.”

Ray performs neit