girish

Adieu Philippine: Mise-en-scène de la jeunesse

2009-06-18T23:45:00.004-04:00

"Men are dangerous at forty: at that age they get sentimental." -- One teen to another in "Adieu Philippine".

Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto has kicked off its summer season. The highlights: French New Wave, Otto Preminger, Surrealism and the cinema, Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre Melville, and leading ladies of Italian cinema.

Playing in the New Wave series is Jacques Rozier's rare Adieu Philippine (1962). What a smart, lyrical and witty film this is! A young TV camera operator meets, befriends and tries to seduce two young women who are aspiring actresses. Upon the film's release, both Rivette and Rohmer named it a masterpiece and Truffaut found a genius "in the balance between the insignificance of the events filmed and the density of reality."

The film is also a great inventory of the 'signs' of a nouvelle vague film: slender plot with episodic unfolding; documentary-like hand-held camerawork; location shooting; a looseness of framing and composition; the 'un-authoritarian' camera often following the actors around rather than choreographing them; naturalistic dialogue; sexual candor, and so on.

But what makes this film distinctive is a through-line of theme not uncommon to New Wave films but elevated here to a masterful organizing principle: the gulf between young and old.

New Wave histories by Richard Neupert and Michel Marie tell us that France of the 1950s was deeply interested in the manners and mores of the postwar generation. The journalist Françoise Giroud coined the term "New Wave" in a series of articles she wrote in the magazine L'Express (the equivalent of Time or Newsweek). They summarized the results of a mammoth sociological survey of youth; 8 million people between the ages of 18 and 30 were surveyed. This was the generation, she wrote, that soon "will have taken France in hand, their elders taking leave, the younger ones helping them move out." The survey, by training a microscope on the lives of the young, also exhaustively set that generation apart from the older one.

It is precisely this distance--even alienness--with which youths viewed adults that is enacted ingeniously in the very mise-en-scène of Adieu Philippine. Adults in this film generally fall into two groups: (1) they are seen but not heard, only the young being privileged with speaking parts; or, (2) when they do speak, they come off as foolish, sentimental, gauche or out of touch. (An exception is a great family dinner-table scene with Maurice Garrel.)

In one scene in an auto-repair shop, four teens kick the tires and size up a used car ("The tires are as bald as Yul Brynner", "We'll never pick up any girls in this jalopy"). As their raucous repartee flies back and forth, there's a cut to an older mechanic who is looking on at them silent and google-eyed as if he plainly doesn't comprehend what language they're speaking. In another scene shot guerrilla-style at an airplane landing strip, a boy and two girls flirt and wisecrack with each other while adults (bystanders who happened upon the film's shooting, no doubt) hover and stare at the youths, as if gaping at specimens of some strange species at the zoo. In one of the film's virtuosic passages, two girl-friends are followed on a busy Paris street by a non-stop lateral tracking camera. Passing them is a stream of older people, but we hear only the girls, loud and clear, and none of the adults (the film has silenced them).

Of course, the keen awareness of one generation succeeding another is also an important aspect of the story of French New Wave cinema itself. The "young Turks" who led the New Wave revolt against "le cinéma de papa" were trying to make their voices heard loud and clear first through their criticism and then through their films. In 1958, after the L'Express survey, Pierre Billard, the editor of Cinéma, put together an issue of "Forty Under Forty," in which he identified 40 young filmmakers to watch. The New Wave was being born.

Some other interesting or off-the-beaten-path films showing this season:

-- In the surrealism program: She Done Him Wrong, Monkey Business (Marx, not Hawks), Pour Vos Beaux Yeux (Henri Storck), and Hans Richter's narrative feature Dreams That Money Can Buy (I'd never heard of this but it sounds fascinating).

-- A Preminger series that includes The 13th Letter, Margin for Error and Such Good Friends, although Skidoo is absent because the estate refused permission.

-- Chabrol's ultra-rare Les Godelureaux (1961), which I've hunted in vain for years.

-- An eclectic "leading lady" Italian series.

Any thoughts/comments on the season's films? Please feel free to share.

This just in: there's a large, brand-new issue of Jump Cut now online.

pic: Adults in the foreground, youths in the background. We see the adults' lips move but we hear no sound. Instead, the soundtrack is given over to the four young men.

Recent Web-Reads

2009-06-02T21:40:00.002-04:00

-- Catherine Grant, with characteristic generosity, has put up two enormously valuable posts of links: on cinephilia and on auteurism and film authorship.

-- There is a lot to read at Jonathan's place: his best-of list for 1998, with detailed annotations; "Le Vrai Coupable: Two Kinds of Criticism in Godard's Work," an essay that appeared previously in Screen; a piece on Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma written originally for Trafic; and a 1973 review of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Also: an essay on video art at Moving Image Source.

-- From "Collages," Adrian's current column at Filmkrant: "One of the most beautiful books I have ever read is by a visionary Italian artist (now in his 80s, and recently the director of a powerful video piece about prisons) named Gianfranco Baruchello; the book is 'Why Duchamp', and bears the subtitle 'An Essay on Aesthetic Impact'. In this wide-ranging and far-reaching discourse, Baruchello speaks of his 'art of collecting': 'Maybe one day I'll make an inventory of all the things that clutter up my mind in a way that implies that each of these things is a complement of all the others, and that what they're looking for is the secret of what all of them can mean together'. But, in the meantime, he says, he will just continue to work, putting one thing next to another [...] In May, the Spanish version of 'Cahiers du cinéma' gave a sign that old-style print magazines are truly changing to accommodate the influence of the Internet: included as part of an excellent supplement devoted to the great Portuguese director Pedro Costa is a vivid, three-page collage by Andy Rector, mixing images from films by Costa, Ford, Chaplin, Raoul Walsh and Charles Laughton. It is an argument in images, posing resonances between filmmakers who, however separated by history or nationality, nonetheless form a tradition of cinematic purity and resistance."

-- More Adrian-watch: A new essay on Will Ferrell (in English) at the Spanish magazine Miradas de Cine; an excoriating review of Richard Brody's Godard biography (reproduced with an introductory note by Andy Rector at Andy's place); "Poetics of Garrel," a 2006 piece; and a link to a podcast lecture on video art delivered in Sydney recently.

-- There is a vigorous discussion on Philippe Garrel in progress at Dave Kehr's. Also: Dave's Garrel DVD review in the NYT.

-- The indispensable David Hudson rounds up the summer issue of Cineaste for us.

-- Doug Cummings on Armand Gatti: "One of the most acclaimed theater writer/directors of the 20th century, Gatti was originally a member of the informal Left Bank group of filmmakers that included Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi, and Jean Cayrol, but due to the fact that none of his films have been released on video in the US, he remains an elusive figure for many cinephiles."

-- Next week Dudley Andrew is giving a series of 4 lectures at York University in Toronto. His upcoming book is Where Cinema is! André Bazin’s Line of Thought.

-- At The Auteurs: the first two installments of B. Kite's video essay on Orson Welles.

-- I've just discovered an Indian online magazine called Phalanx, founded and run by M.K. Raghavendra, which focuses mostly on politics, cinema and current affairs. Recent essays include: an editorial on the liberal media response to the Mumbai attacks; Asian women writers in Britain; depiction of Bihar in Telugu cinema; and the aesthetics of cricket.

-- Bruce Jenkins on Paul Sharits at Artforum: "[Sharits's] shift to installation—what he termed “locational film pieces”—returned his work to the gallery and brought “the act of presenting and viewing a film as close as possible to the conditions of hanging and looking at painting.” What made these works manifestly ready for the white cube was in part his singular rejection of film’s representational content, its traditional reliance on mimesis and language..."

-- The New Republic has created a site where it's running a 'retrospective' of the film criticism of Stanley Kauffmann.

-- An interesting interview at Frieze with experimental artist, composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad.

Any favorite recent online reads? Please feel free to suggest them in the comments.

pic: Philippe Garrel's I Can No Longer Hear The Guitar (1993).

John Ford in "Undercurrent"

2009-05-18T16:15:00.001-04:00

Chris Fujiwara has assembled a wonderful, diverse dossier of essays on John Ford in the new issue of Undercurrent. The roster of 18 writers is first-rate--and the range of pieces a real treat.

One of my favorite 'minor' Fords is She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and since it doesn't appear in the Undercurrent special section, I thought I'd say a few words about it.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon--the first thing we notice about it is the searing Technicolor!--is the middle work of the Cavalry trilogy, sandwiched between Fort Apache (1948) and Rio Grande (1950), both of which are in black-and-white. It is a comedy, a romance, an adventure film, but most of all it strikes me as a Cavalry procedural. An elaborate web of rituals--and their underlying rules--envelops this film. These rituals aren't grand but small-scale, ordinary, everyday.

For Ford, these Cavalry rules and procedures form a grid that serves two purposes: (1) To ground the film, moment by moment, in the minutiae of the work that Cavalrymen do; and (2) To provide a solid support structure within the film through which emerge its humor, romance, and pathos.

Ford uses, repeatedly and with great imagination, that lowliest and least-respected of bureaucratic activities: making a report. In a moving moment, a corporal is rescued after being seriously wounded in a Cheyenne attack. But before being attended to, and half-fainting, he insists on delivering his report. Capt. Brittles (John Wayne) listens attentively, then replies according to proper procedure without acknowledging the man's wounds: "That's a good clear report. It'll join your record. You'll come up with that extra stripe in 2 or 3 years." As written, the words are unemotional but Wayne's expression and delivery undercut their neutral, businesslike quality with sadness. Later, when the corporal is being operated upon by a surgeon, Brittles refuses to bend the rules and stop the troop for even a few minutes ("You know I can't halt even if it were my own son!"), and so the operation takes place on a wobbling, lurching wagon with the inebriated nurse (Mildred Natwick) singing a lusty perversion of the title tune ("She wore a yellow garter/wore it for her lover/in the US Cavalry").

In another report-making instance, a former Confederate brigadier-general, now a trooper for the US Army, spends the final moment before his death praising, with Cavalry formality, the sergeant (Ben Johnson) who aided him. At the close of the film, Brittles is brought out of retirement in a photo-finish--just as he is about disappear into a flaming-red John Ford sunset--and returns to the fort. A celebration dance--that Fordian axiom--is about to begin. But business comes first: Brittles must make a report. We see him exit through a door but puzzlingly, the camera stays in the ballroom, with his commanding officer (to whom he would ostensibly report) in full view. Who on earth could Brittles be making his report to instead? To his long-dead wife, it turns out, as he kneels at her grave.

In his essay on Fort Apache, Dan Sallitt proposes the fascinating idea of the Fordian "container"--a deliberate authorial setting of mood that operates independently of story, often undercutting or deflecting the deep tragedy and sadness of the film. There is nothing in Yellow Ribbon that is close to the shattering ending of Fort Apache but when we peer through the thick net of work and ritual, procedure and process in Yellow Ribbon, we find that at the heart of the film lies defeat: the complete and utter failure of "the last patrol," the mission that forms the film's central section and occupies most of its running time.

Leaving aside what are often considered to be the 'major' Fords--The Searchers, My Darling Clementine, Liberty Valance, Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, etc.--I'm curious to learn if you have any favorites among his other, possibly 'minor' works?

The Ford at Fox collection has gathered great praise but its very size (21 DVDs!) has daunted me. I'm wondering: what are (in your opinion) the high points of this set, the films you might recommend first?

Also, any ideas or comments on the Undercurrent essays? Please feel free to share.

Cavalry procedure? A lieutenant (John Agar) embraces his sweetheart (Joanne Dru) and turns around to ask his captain (John Wayne) a silent question. The captain barks: "Well, haul off and kiss her back, blast you, we haven't got all day!"

A Cinema Haunted By Writing

2009-05-03T15:15:00.003-04:00

Film criticism has been often been drawn to the metaphor of cinema as writing.

1. One of my favorite interviews with a film critic is the one conducted with Serge Daney by Bill Krohn, originally published in the zine The Thousand Eyes in 1977. In it Daney says: "...the cinema loved by the Cahiers--from the beginning--is a cinema haunted by writing. This is the key which makes it possible to understand successive tastes and choices. This is also explained by the fact that the best French filmmakers have always been--at the same time--writers (Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Pagnol, Sacha Guitry, Jean Epstein, etc.)"

Daney is referring here not only literally to film artists who were gifted writers but also in a broader sense to writing as an act of "personal utterance" (this is how Susan Sontag translates Roland Barthes' notion of écriture).

2. The figurative heart of auteurism was that of the author who inscribes his [sic] personal vision into a film often made in a collaborative fashion within an industrial context. Alexandre Astruc, in "The Birth of a New Avant-garde" (1948), one of the most famous essays in French film history, used the figure of the caméra-stylo, or camera-pen, to symbolize the means of expression for future film artists. Jean Douchet wrote that Astruc "dared to claim that like literature and philosophy, film could tackle any subject, that the subject was part of the writing, and the camera the pen of modern times."

But Astruc was not only a critic. According to Richard Neupert, he was the earliest model of critic-turned-filmmaker for the young Jean-Luc Godard. Such a dual vocation was not uncommon in an earlier era of French cinema (the 1920s) in the work of Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac and Jean Epstein. (Astruc himself was once dubbed the "Louis Delluc of the sound cinema.") Godard, in turn, considered criticism and filmmaking to be common, closely allied, expressive activities.

3. Robert Stam points out that the graphological trope of film-as-writing has been especially dominant in France since the fifties. The New Wave films contain a surfeit of writing imagery: "From Truffaut's Les Mistons (1958) through Godard's 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (1967) we encounter people writing: on walls (Jules et Jim), on cars (Masculin, Feminin), in dairies (Pierrot le Fou), on advertisements (Le Gai Savoir), and in notebooks (2 ou 3 choses)."

Stam shows how Truffaut's 400 Blows prefigures this obsession. In the credit sequence, the director's name is superimposed on an image of the cinémathèque. The first shot following the credits shows a student writing at a desk. Antoine writes a poem on a wall, and is punished by having to conjugate a sentence. He forges a note from his mother, and later steals a typewriter to avoid having his handwriting recognized. And so on.

4. Auteurism has traditionally been a male-dominated movement but one of the key pre-New Wave films was La Pointe Courte (1954), made by Agnès Varda after she had established her reputation as a photographer. The activity she often refers to when she describes her cinema isn't still or motion-picture photography but writing. She calls her work "cinécriture" (cine-writing):

I am so fed up with hearing: "It's a well-written film," when I know that the compliment is meant for the scenario and the dialogue. A well-written film is also well-filmed, the actors are well-chosen, so are the locations. The cutting, the movement, the points-of-view, the rhythm of filming and editing have been felt and considered in the way a writer chooses the depth and meaning of sentences, the type of words, number of adverbs, paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the story or break its flow, etc. In writing, it's called style. In the cinema, style is cinécriture.

5. In the new translation of Andre Bazin's What is Cinema? (see this previous post for an extensive discussion), Timothy Barnard has a translator's note on découpage. For Bazin, "the essence of cinema was situated in the act of writing the film visually through découpage." Similarly (Barnard writes), Astruc believed that when the silent era gave way to sound, montage

was replaced by a process of ‘picturising’ the script through mise en scène and camerawork, a form of narrative writing distinct from and prior to editing. For Astruc, sound cinema did not just adopt a style of editing different from silent montage cinema: it introduced a different way of conceiving and creating films, one which opened the door to ‘writing’ films with a caméra‐stylo.

6. Returning to where we started, to Daney in 1977:

In American cinema I think that it is easier to see, as it recedes, what interested us: always the excess of writing over ideology, and not the reverse (Huston, Delmer Daves, William Wyler, today Altman.) It's clearly a paradox: because this led us to take an interest in filmmakers who were not exactly left-wing. This excess of writing over ideology is only possible in the framework of a prosperous industry and a real consensus. This occurred in Hollywood until some time in the fifties; a little in France before the war; In Italy; in Egypt and India, no doubt; in Germany and England before the war. Outside this industrial framework (industry+craftsmanship), it's the reverse that happens: excess of ideology over writing. Look at the countries of the Third World, including China. This cinephilia is historically dated: the terrain from which it sprang is this mixture of industry and craftsmanship. It's not possible to revive it. But in the precision of the writing of Tourneur, Lang or de Mille, there is an exigency which continues with Godard, Straub, Robert Kramer, Wim Wenders, Akerman, Jean-Claude Biette, Benoit Jacquot.

A couple of questions I'm curious to pose to you: (1) Other examples (there are surely many) of critics or theorists employing the writing metaphor for cinema?; and (2) Favorite examples of films that depict the act of writing or instances of the written?

Also, any comments on the Daney passages and interview? Please feel free to share.

Good news: six more pieces are up at Rouge including Adrian's festival diary from Las Palmas. Which reminds me: his new column is online at Filmkrant. Finally: there's a new issue of Screening the Past.

The image above: Antoine Doinel in "The 400 Blows" writing what will be condemned as Balzac plagiarism. Resources for this post included: Richard Neupert's "A History of the French New Wave Cinema" (2002), Alison Smith's "Agnès Varda" (1998), and Robert Stam's "Reflexivity in Film and Literature from Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard" (1985).

Recent Web Reading

2009-04-17T18:55:00.002-04:00

Returning from Easter break, I've been catching up on some recent online cinema reading. Let me gather a few links here:

-- Chris Fujiwara interviews Japanese New Wave filmmaker Kiju Yoshida on his "anti-cinema" at Moving Image Source: "The common rule is that when you make a close-up, the focus of the shot should be at the center of the frame, so that for most people it's easy to look at, it's comfortable. Which also means that as part of the set of rules of cinema, the person at the center is often unconsciously defined as the protagonist. So I very often frame only half of the face of the actor. It's a kind of resistance, telling the audience, "Don't trust so blindly what you see on the screen. Please try to find by yourselves what is really important to you as the audience, in what you see within this frame.""

-- The new issue of Senses of Cinema includes three interviews by Darren (Claire Denis, Lisandro Alonso, Albert Serra) and this essay by Tag Gallagher on Samuel Fuller. An excerpt: "A gunfight in Forty Guns is parsed into isolated body parts, which Robert Bresson will copy in Lancelot du lac (1974), having already modelled Pickpocket (1959) on Pickup on South Street, not only for its pickpocket who works the subways using a newspaper, but in the Dostoevskian fantasies of a would-be hero compulsively clever and self-deceiving, wherein fragmenting montage alternates with long-take claustrophobia [...] Fuller’s last four films, all French productions, no longer look for solutions. They flee into cynicism and indulgence. Always his Hollywood movies had profited from avant-garde techniques, but toward telling a story. And if some of his projects began as theses, they had ended up, like Shock Corridor, centred on individual personalities, as did the abstract montage during the gunfight in Forty Guns. In the last films, in contrast, experiment is for its own sake, characters are mannequins and all is farce, pedantically reflexive."

-- On Gerald Peary's documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism: David Bordwell and Jonathan Rosenbaum.

-- At Film Studies for Free, Catherine Grant, in memory of recently deceased queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, has assembled a webliography "of links to high quality, freely accessible, scholarly writing (or recordings/videos) on the web on the topic of queer/glbt films and/or queer film theory, a number of which, unsurprisingly, employ her critical insights."

-- Adrian-watch: An essay on Aki Kaurismaki ("Poetic Realism and a Few Drinks") at a Finnish website; his new Filmkrant column ("Cinema Has Never Existed"); a new blog from Monash University on film festivals; and a tribute to Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara at Indian Auteur. Also available at the latter site is a Mani Kaul essay ("Beneath the Surface: Cinematography and Time").

-- Via Sudhir Mahadevan: Bioscope, a terrific blog on "the world of early and silent cinema."

-- Robert Koehler has been covering two film festivals (Buenos Aires, Guadalajara) at Film Journey.

-- Via Walter at Quiet Bubble: Ted Gioia has a new website and an essay on Conceptual Fiction. "Did sci-fi writers from the 1940s and 1950s anticipate the future of serious literature better than the so-called "serious writers" or, for that matter, the highbrow critics?"

-- Adrian Curry at The Auteurs on posters for Satyajit Ray films.

-- Dan North at Spectacular Attractions has an interesting links round-up.

-- New issues of film journals: Film Quarterly; Film-Philosophy; and Wide Screen (via Corey Creekmur).

-- More reads: Snippets from an interview with Serge Daney; an interesting "Top Ten" from Michael Almereyda in Artforum; and Andrew Patrick Nelson on "the recurring appearance of stereoscopes in Westerns."

Any recent good web reading--and not only cinema-related--that you'd like to recommend? Feel free to do so in the comments.

Satyajit Ray-designed poster for Devi (1960), courtesy satyajitrayworld.com.

Narrative Synthesis

2009-04-04T11:35:00.006-04:00

I blogged about Robert B. Ray's book The ABCs of Classic Hollywood a few months ago. In the recent collection New Media/New Methods, Ray has a fascinating essay called "Eight Film Studies Problems for the Twenty-First Century." The eight problems deserve their own post--actually, several posts!--but let me use one idea from the essay as a point of departure.

Ray addresses the problem of bridging the gulf between academic and non-academic readers. He cites the example of history scholar Thomas Bender, who, in the mid-80s, called for a "narrative synthesis" in his discipline--writing that would take the interpretations and findings of a number of specialized subfields (like gender, race, class, ethnicity, etc.) and synthesize them in a narrative format that was accessible and engaging to an audience-at-large that was interested in reading and learning about history.

To illustrate. According to historian James McPherson, the subject of the American Civil War has three distinct audiences: (a) professional historians--scholars working in the field--who are typically concerned with large questions like the causes and effects of war; (b) "Civil War buffs" who are interested primarily in military campaigns and battles; and (c) general readers who are interested in history but prefer the work not of professional scholars but non-academics like Shelby Foote or Ken Burns. McPherson writes:

[Ken] Burns consciously set out to provide the kind of narrative synthesis that neither the "old school" (as he termed it) nor the "new history" offered--the old school because while narrative in approach, it did not incorporate material on "women, labor, minorities, and the social transformation" accomplished by the war; the new history because it "often abandoned narrative completely.

For Ray, film studies resembles the Civil War in having at least two distinct audiences: academic scholars who only or largely read books and articles written by other scholars; and a non-academic cinema-interested audience of readers who typically don't read academics. Ray proposes that we need scholars who can devise a ""narrative synthesis" that will "propagate professional knowledge about the cinema" to a non-academic audience-at-large.

What is meant, exactly, by the term "narrative synthesis"? I would say that, in the context of film writing, it names an approach that does two things: (a) it is simultaneously "high-level" (broad in scope--drawing upon a number of specialized subfields within cinema studies) AND "low-level" (paying attention to individual films and their details); and (b) it weaves together a "story" of sorts--just like a good piece of film criticism always "tells a story"--that interests and engages the non-academic reader.

There are scores of examples of such writing in film. Let me quote from one: the opening of Edward Buscombe's BFI Classics monograph on John Ford's Stagecoach. Buscombe begins by describing John Wayne's first appearance in the film, unusual because it takes us by surprise, forsaking Ford's customary style for a second by dollying in for a close-up, the camera not even able to maintain perfect focus as it lunges forward. Buck (Andy Devine) calls out, "Hey look, it's Ringo!"

Ringo is dressed in jeans, with the trouser bottoms rolled up and worn outside his boots. He wears army-style braces, a neckerchief and a placket-front shirt, which has a panel buttoned on it. Wayne was to make this style of shirt his trademark, and Jane Gaines has suggested that it gives the wearer a kind of fortified or armoured look, reinforcing the authoritarian aura of the mature John Wayne persona. By 1938 there were two distinct styles of Western costume in the movies. One derived originally from the flamboyant outfits affected by such real-life Western self-publicists as George Armstrong Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody, who went in for elaborately fringed buckskin jackets, thigh-length boots and shoulder-length hair. Mingled with the influence of Mexican vaqueros, rodeo cowboys and the fantasies of showbiz, this style had been brought to a peak of extravagance in the 1920s by Tom Mix, whose sartorial flourishes were to be adopted wholesale by the singing cowboys of the later 1930s.

But there was another vital if less exuberant tradition, best exemplified in the early 1920s by William S. Hart. Though in some ways as stylised a performer as Mix, Hart claimed his films took a more realistic look at the old West. Characteristically his costume is more functional than fancy; it favours, in its use of gauntlets and heavy leather chaps, the protective rather than the ornamental. [...] Wayne, in Stagecoach and in all his subsequent Westerns, was squarely in the Hart tradition.

The passage is typical of the three Buscombe monographs for BFI, the other two being The Searchers and Unforgiven. They bring together erudition and ideas from many disciplinary realms (e.g. in the above passage: film history, the Western genre, fashion) and present them in a skillful, easy-to-read style that might appeal equally to scholars and non-scholars alike.

So much of Peter Wollen's writing--his collections like Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture, Paris Manhattan: Writings on Art--also works in this narrative-synthetic mode. His pieces tells sweeping stories, polymathically reaching into diverse realms of knowledge, sometimes rewriting history in new and unexpected ways. For example, his essay "The Last New Wave" tracks the artistic fortunes of British cinema over the course of a century. (The piece is an argument against Truffaut's infamous putdown of British cinema as "a contradiction in terms"). "Who the Hell is Howard Hawks?" tells the story of Hawks' career and his canonization, first in France, then in the US, thus painting a study in contrasts between the histories of American and French film cultures. The essay "JLG" manages, in 20 pages, to give the best overview of this filmmaker I have ever read. In "An Alphabet of Cinema," Wollen playfully condenses his cinephilic passions into 26 entries, one for each letter of the alphabet. (All the above essays can be found in Paris Hollywood.) His writing style--clear, crisp, direct--works to compress vast coverage into unified essay-length pieces that never lose their storytelling momentum.

An eminent example of narrative synthesis that appears weekly on the web is Dave Kehr's NYT column: always elegantly, engagingly written, with a broad and deep film-historical knowledge standing behind it. (Also: I enjoy Kehr's acerbic wit--one of the funniest pieces of film writing I've ever read is the personal account of his youth and his cinephilia in the collection Citizen Sarris, edited by Emanuel Levy.)

And so, I'm wondering: Do you have any favorite pieces of writing or examples of writers--not just in film but in any other field you can think of--that practice some form of "narrative synthesis," putting scholarly heft and insight to work in pieces written accessibly for a somewhat broader readership? I'd love to discover examples of writing in this vein. Thanks much!

I quickly want to point out that the previous post, on Bazin, sparked one of the best and meatiest discussions this blog has ever had the fortune of hosting. Thank you, all, for taking part and for reading--the dialogue still continues there...

André Bazin & caboose

2009-03-11T16:00:00.004-04:00

I first became aware of Montreal-based publisher caboose when they approached me last year to pen a volume in their Kino-Agora series. (Series details can be found here.)

Today, some momentous news for film culture: caboose is releasing a brand new translation, by Timothy Barnard, of André Bazin's What is Cinema?

In a recent Film Quarterly, Dudley Andrew pointed out that less than 7% of Bazin's writings are available in English translation. Spurred by this startling observation, I put up a post on Bazin's writings a few months ago that sparked a lively and informative discussion.

Bazin's Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? originally appeared in French in 4 volumes beginning in 1958, soon after his death at age 40. The 2-volume English-language What is Cinema?, translated by Hugh Gray, came out about a decade later. It included a selection of essays from Bazin's original, and was put out by the University of California Press.

The new Barnard translation collects several key essays from Bazin's original volumes, and includes three pieces that don't appear in Gray's translation: on Wyler, Tati and Painlevé, the last of these never before translated into English. Samples from all 13 essays in the book are available to read online. The publisher promises: "This is the only corrected and annotated edition of Bazin in any language [...] Rarely does a new translation radically alter our understanding of a thinker's work. This is that book."

Gray's rendering of Bazin has remained invaluable but has also provoked mixed feelings and controversy. Richard Roud wrote a scathing critique of it in Sight and Sound in 1967. Adrian Martin remarked in the comments to the previously mentioned post: "Gray's Bazin is the rather cosmic/mystic/Catholic/realist Bazin that many (most) Anglos think of, which is why Cardullo's Bazin at Work is such a crucial corrective to it."

We are in the midst of a Bazin revival, evident from the recent twin-venue conference held in Paris and at Yale to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. Further, recent writing like Daniel Morgan's well-regarded essay "Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics" (Critical Inquiry, 2006) has served to enlarge and complicate our view of this versatile theorist.

Despite the strong resurgence of interest in Bazin, why has it taken so long--over 40 years--for an alternate translation of his key work to appear in English? The answer has to do with copyright issues. In many countries--including Canada, Japan, China, New Zealand, and others--copyright is retained for 50 years after an author's death before works enter the public domain. In fact, this used to be the international norm until the U.S. and France moved to a 70-year rule. Today the U.S. stipulates this as an explicit part of bilateral trade deals, and has persuaded Australia and South Korea, and more recently, Argentina and Chile, to move from 50 to 70 years. Canada has been lobbied by the U.S. on this issue but has passed no legislation yet to alter the 50-year rule. Since Bazin died in 1958, his writings passed into the public domain last year in Canada; this has made the new translation possible. (For more on copyright: here's the Wikipedia entry on public domain.)

The new issue of Offscreen is titled "Bazin Renewed." It includes an interview with Timothy Barnard about the new translation and a piece by Donato Totaro called "What is a Good Translation? Bazin Revisited".

There is also an essay at the caboose site that makes for particularly stimulating scholarly reading: Barnard's translator note on the word "découpage." It runs to over 20 printed pages and carefully traces the uses and meanings of the word over the course of the last one hundred years. Also of interest: Barnard's foreword (not available online) details the "meticulous research into Bazin's sources which has led him to a connection between the ideas of Bazin and Bertolt Brecht and to a pseudonymous article believed to have been written by Siegfried Kracauer."

The book can be ordered online through the caboose site but for shipping only to Japan, China (including Hong Kong), New Zealand, and other countries who follow the 50-year rule. Pages is selling the book online and at their store on Queen Street in Toronto. Apparently, it doesn't matter where the order originates--Pages will ship only to Canadian addresses. The book will also be on sale at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Tokyo in May.

Your thoughts on Bazin, film-writing translations, or copyright issues? All are welcome!

cover pic: "Sharlo Takes a Bow," a woodcut of Charlie Chaplin created by the Soviet artist, book designer and illustrator Varvara Stepanova for issue #3 of the journal Kino-Fot in 1922.

Around & About

2009-03-06T16:10:00.015-05:00

First, there's a new issue of Rouge, titled "Teenage Wildlife," devoted to accounts of youth in cinema. Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin and Grant Mcdonald begin their introduction thus:

There are many ways, in cinema, to tell the story of youth. One can tell it as a reassuring ‘rite of passage’ that takes us safely (with a few thrills and tears along the way) from childhood innocence to adult maturity. One can tell it nostalgically, as an adult reminiscence of the ‘days gone by’, the world as a simpler place back then ... One can show teenagers slowly integrating themselves, becoming part of a family, a community, a nation, a world.

Or we can tell another story: the story of Teenage Wildlife. The story of teenagers living in an eternal present moment, like a savage, roaming pack of animals. Living violently, impulsively, on their wits and instincts. Without ties to family, to adults, to any kind of civilised society. Teenagers in a world apart, their own, separate universe which is incomprehensible to the concerned adults (parents, police, social workers, politicians) who look on, aghast. Teenagers who (in the immortal words of the Surrealist Robert Benayoun) exhibit all the ‘normal qualities of youth: naiveté, idealism, humour, hatred of tradition, erotomania, and a sense of injustice’.

Alluding to Marcos Uzal on Jerzy Skolimowski, they write:

Skolimowski remained fixed, according to Uzal, on ‘awkward adolescents and immature adults, on the insolence of sons and the disillusionment of fathers. What do we gain and what do we lose in leaving our youth?’ There is an intensely physical struggle betrayed by each youthful body, as Skolimowki’s beloved author Gombrowicz put it: a fight between the ‘inconsolable boy’ and the ‘made man’. At stake, at all times, is the difficult – perhaps impossible – entry of youth into the larger ‘social body’, the certified world of maturity and ‘experience’ (as Benjamin mocked it). For many constituent members of the teenage wildlife, that passage will not be achieved at all; the bubble that defines their tumultuous eternal present will be burst only in the instant of death.

The issue also features a couple of cinephile-bloggers including Zach Campbell and Jenna Ng.

* * *

Other recent web reading:

-- David Lowery, whom we have long known as a presence in the film-blogosphere, has made his first feature film. It's called St. Nick, and the trailer looks tantalizing. I wrote a post about David's short films a couple of years ago.

-- Anthony Kaufman has a piece on the demise of VHS at Moving Image Source. Some of the responses to it include: Craig Keller at Cinemasparagus; and a discussion around Peter Martin's post at Cinematical.

-- Do you google up every film you see, new or old? I do, and that's why one-stop collections of links to writings on a film are so invaluable. Here are two recent excellent examples: Michael Guillen's round-up on Chantal Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle; and Kevin Lee's links post with hefty excerpts on Frank Borzage's Moonrise.

-- Chris Fujiwara on Paul Schrader: "It feels cold to write of someone who has been directing for 30 years that his first film is his best, but I have little hesitation in declaring BLUE COLLAR (1978)...Schrader's strongest and sharpest movie to date. One of the few American commercial films to take a sustained, insightful, and informed look at the problems of workers, Blue Collar is stringent in its treatment of the dehumanization and occasional violence of an auto-assembly line, the financial pressures on the middle class, the need to escape through alcohol and cocaine."

-- Dave Kehr in the NYT on the newly released 26-film DVD set Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film 1947-1986: "Movies are among the most fragile of art forms, and avant-garde films are among the most fragile of movies. Usually made on delicate, narrow-gauge stock (16 millimeter, 8 millimeter and Super 8, formats made virtually obsolete by video), printed directly from the original camera materials and distributed informally in a small number of copies, many of the avant-garde films of the 20th century have become difficult to see in anything like their original state."

-- Also on this DVD set: Ed Halter at Moving Image Source. I noticed recently that Halter has put together a most useful webpage of experimental resources.

-- More at Moving Image Source: Jonathan Rosenbaum on Cinéma Cinémas, a French TV series devoted to cinephilia. Also: Jonathan on Molly Haskell's new book, Frankly My Dear: Gone With The Wind Revisited: "I’m glad that Armond White gave this book a favorable review in the New York Times, which it clearly deserves. But I wish he hadn’t muddied his kindness with lazy misinformation and lazier prose."

-- A 'Film Festival Research' bibliography gathered by Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck for Universität Hamburg. Via Adrian Martin's new column at Filmkrant, which is on web film resources and film festivals.

-- There are hundreds of film essays available to read at the Criterion website.

-- At The Auteurs' Notebook, Danny Kasman, Ry Knight and Andrew Grant interview Film Comment's Gavin Smith.

-- I've been catching up on some great blogosphere reading lately, especially new posts at: Vinyl Is Heavy; Film Studies for Free; Tativille; and Serge Daney in English (new links to two Daney pieces);

-- A 1928 interview with King Vidor from the British film magazine Close Up is reproduced at Man Without A Star.

-- David Bordwell has a terrific piece on documentary:

People tend to think that documentary films are typified by two conditions. First, the events we see are unstaged, or at least unstaged by the filmmaker. If you mount a parade, the way that Coppola staged the Corpus Christi procession in The Godfather Part II, then you aren’t making a documentary. But if you go to a town that is holding such a procession and shoot it, you are making a doc—even though the parade was organized to some extent by others. Fiction films stage their events for the camera, but documentaries, we tend to think, capture spontaneous happenings.

Secondly, in a documentary the camera is seizing those events photographically. The great film theorist André Bazin saw cinema’s defining characteristic as its capacity to record the actual unfolding of events with little human intervention. All the other arts rely on human creation at a basic level: the novelist selects words, the painter chooses colors. But the photographer or filmmaker employs a machine that impassively records what is happening in front of it. “All the arts are based on the presence of man,” Bazin writes; “only photography derives an advantage from his absence.” This isn’t to say that cinema can’t be artful, only that it offers a different sort of creativity than we find in the traditional arts. The filmmaker works not with pure imaginings but obstinate chunks of actual time and space. [...]

Film theorist Noël Carroll defines documentary as the film of “purported fact.” Carl Plantinga makes a similar point in saying that documentaries take “an assertive stance.” Both these writers argue that we take it for granted that a documentary is claiming something to be true about the world. The persons and actions are to be taken as representing states of affairs that exist, or once existed. This is not something that is presumed by The Gold Rush, Magnificent Obsession, or Speed Racer. These films come to us labeled as fictional, and they do not assert that their events and agents ever existed.

pic: From David Lowery's St. Nick (2009).

Strombolian Films

2009-02-21T19:45:00.002-05:00

I'm curious to hear about your experiences with films that you weren't ready for when you first encountered them--films that required considerable effort before you could understand and love them. Nicole Brenez calls these Strombolian films; for her, Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli (1949) was such a work. She writes in Movie Mutations: "These are films that resist, that one must surmount just as Ingrid Bergman scaled her volcano, and that change you forever..."

Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express (1994) was, for me, a key Strombolian film. The first time I watched it, I remember this: I reached for a pillow and hurled it at the screen! It was at the very moment that Faye Wong put on the Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'" for the umpteenth time. The film seemed to be caught in an infinite loop, uninterested in moving forward. At the time I had been discovering the pleasures of character-driven cinema--like Howard Hawks and Eric Rohmer--and in comparison, Wong's film seemed to care not a whit about 'advancing' plot or character. The reigning mood was one of stasis.

A few years later, when I revisited the film, I was led to an important self-realization: that I had privileged and held as 'natural' a certain economy between form and content in a film work. According to this economy, matters of form and style--composition, cutting, rhythm, color, texture, movement, mood--had a specific function. They served something 'higher': narrative and character. Of course, this classicist criterion for judging an artwork seems embarrassingly restrictive to me today--but there was a time when I applied its yardstick to every film that came along. In fact, I suspect that such an economy between form and content is widely held as the norm by the viewing public at large today.

The content of Chungking Express might be about stasis, but its form--I realized upon second viewing--is all about movement! The film burns with stylistic bravura, most remarkably Wong's signature stretch printing of action which smears colors and shapes voluptuously across the screen. The French critic Jean-Marc Lalanne has written:

In cutting and recomposition through editing each movement of the actors, the mise-en-scène invents a kind of 'ballet mécanique' of human movements, a choreography in which each gesture becomes abstract, loses its functionality in favor of a purely musical value.

Brenez's notion of Strombolian films holds at least three lessons: (1) A viewing experience is often contingent upon where we happen to be situated--in our lives at a certain point in time--in relation to a work and its aesthetic; (2) It is important to revisit films that frustrated or disappointed us the first time around, and do so with a willingness--even eagerness--to struggle with the work while we simultaneously de-emphasize evaluative judgment for a little while; and (3) The resistance we encounter from an artwork can be put to great and productive use.

I'm wondering: What are your experiences of films that you weren't ready for when you first encountered them? Please feel free to share.

pic: Faye Wong, in pink cleaning gloves, plunges a toy United Airlines plane into Tony Leung's aquarium.

Teenage Flashback

2009-02-01T19:20:00.000-05:00

It's a delight for me to present here the debut publication of a precocious teenage Adrian Martin. Enjoy! -- Girish.

* * *

This was my first published piece, in the Australian magazine Cinema Papers no. 19 (January-February 1979) – a review of the book Authorship and Narrative in the Cinema by William Luhr and Peter Lehman (who later became specialists of Blake Edwards). I was 19, and had just dropped out of university education; I got the gig through my teacher-mentor (and eventually friend), Tom Ryan. Although the tone of the piece is somewhat righteous and finger-wagging – a typical ’get with the program’ rhetorical pose of the time – it raises at least one issue in film aesthetics that, thirty years later, I am still trying to resolve: the gap between thematic and formalist approaches (one can easily read my own ambivalence, poised as I was between ‘traditionalist’ and ‘progressive’ identifications). As for the book under discussion (I still have my review copy), published in 1977, it makes for instructive reading today as a ‘transitional’ text, although it has been little referenced in the intervening years; its context of aesthetic theory is one I did not exactly appreciate or give a decent account of in this review, because it did not look like anything that was new or radical in the late ‘70s. But the book is also of its time, in a very charming way: its ‘frame captures’ are meticulous, finely-textured pencil drawings! (30/01/09).

Authorship and Narrative in the Cinema: Issues in Contemporary Aesthetics and Criticism by William Luhr and Peter Lehman (Capricorn Books, New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1977)

Review by Adrian Martin

In the past ten years, film criticism has undergone major changes. Each new approach has ushered in another, each one bringing with it considerable theoretical material from other disciplines: semiotics, psychoanalysis, linguistics, etc. The result, particularly evident in Screen journal, is that every approach ideally needs to be integrated with those related to it. Thus Stephen Heath, for instance, calls for a grand synthesis of all the radical criticism so far developed, a system he titles the cinematic machine. The super-intellectual effort required for such a task is daunting – if indeed such a synthesis is desirable, or even possible.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that some critics have felt the need to specialise. William Luhr and Peter Lehman provide such a specialisation. Indeed, they see their aesthetic analysis as the necessary prerequisite to any other critical work: “Only when the nature of the object itself has been precisely established can it be fruitfully related to larger constructs […] other constructs – social, political, psychological, and so on – are worthwhile, but beyond the specifically aesthetic concern of this work”.

Luhr and Lehman work in the traditional area of mise en scène analysis, a minute discussion of how the various elements of cinematic style – composition, lighting, décor, movement of camera and actors, etc – cohere into a unified expression of the film’s fictional world.

The long chapters on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers painstakingly trace the recurring motifs in John Ford’s direction: the use of doorways, association of characters with certain times of day, changing positions of characters in the frame to indicate spatially the change in their relationships, etc. For those who have any regard for these films, the analyses provide fascinating insights into their seemingly inexhaustible complexities.

Similarly, the auteurist account of Ford’s developing concerns as revealed in the body of his work will be of interest to Ford admirers, though Luhr and Lehman insist – rightly I believe – that deciphering patterns of coherence between different works by the same author is only a secondary aesthetic concern.

However, anyone coming to the book without a prior regard for Ford is likely to find it somewhat puzzling. In their introduction, the authors explain that they picked these films for analysis simply because they provide examples of “effective” films in the narrative tradition. The analysis seems to imply a great deal more – that the films are in fact masterpieces.

Presumably, within the area of traditional criticism, that evaluation would be worth stating and then being put under scrutiny by the analysis – as Robin Wood does, brilliantly, in his piece on Letter from an Unknown Woman in Personal Views. This is eloquent of a central confusion in the book’s method. Luhr and Lehman appear to find it enough merely to outline the precise symmetry of motifs and associations in the films – “how the work functions as an artistic unit”.

But a doorway is just a doorway, no matter how many times it appears, or whichever director decided to put it there in the shot. The point is precisely what that motif expresses, and how well or badly it achieves this end.

This is Wood’s great strength as a critic: the way he constantly strives to evaluate the worth of a film’s realisation, the way it works itself out. Luhr and Lehman’s chapter on The Searchers is better than the one on Liberty Valance in this respect, because their description of the film’s pattern of ellipses directly entails a discussion of how we can – or cannot – read the psychology of Ethan’s character.

The authors are shy when it comes to identifying theme. Yet if one is committed to working in a traditional mode of criticism, that is always the foremost question: what is this film about? This leads to: how does it say it? How well is it said?

In the classical narrative cinema, formal operations always stand for something else – they represent an idea; the world of the fiction embodies something and is charged with meaning.

An alternative critical approach radically counterposes to this idea the notion that form – the material construction of the film – is important in itself, leading to a new revaluation of the output of independent filmmakers that focuses on the ‘film work’ itself. This is a direct challenge to – often a dismantling of – traditional narrative cinema. Luhr and Lehman try to sit astride both worlds:

The non-narrative challenge should ultimately lead to a more precise evaluation of the narrative cinema. Both, ultimately, share the same formal attributes (mise en scène, editing, sound, and so on) and skill in both lies in the configuration of these attributes, for whatever purpose. Such an evaluation cannot help but highlight the genius of men like Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, and their peers.

The phrase “for whatever purpose” ignores the fact that the purposes are opposed to each other: in narrative cinema, form (ideally) disappears under the illusion mounted by the fictional world; while in alternative films, however we wish to label them, form moves to the foreground and works against the production of a fixed, coherent, readable meaning (or theme in the traditional sense).

Even if we choose, as critics, to work in the familiar world of evaluative criticism, this book brings up problems that cannot be easily ignored. The analysis in the book restructures films, in Barthes’ phrase, into “blocks of meaning”; i.e., patterns of coherence are carefully described as they are seen to be at work in the film. The result of this and all mise en scène criticism is that it picks out the ‘striking images’ (and sounds) from a film, makes a case around them, and then conveniently forgets the dross. For, as Raymond Bellour has observed, the most profound tendency in the classical narrative film is towards repetition.

Mise en scène critics have a field day with low/high angles or elaborate crane shots. But what can they say about that most common figure of film language, namely the dreary old reverse shot that cuts from actor A speaking in mid-shot to actor B speaking in mid-shot? Which is not to say that the reverse shot structure is never complex or expressive (quite the contrary), but in the majority of cases it is the moment when cinematic style shrinks to zero.

Why is this technique so prominent in narrative film? A theory needs to be evolved that reaches beyond traditional criticism. If this is not the task Luhr and Lehman set themselves, then they might reasonably be expected to recognise and refer to the problem.

The second half of the book, on narrative, is naïve and disappointing. The authors appear dismayed over the “much needless controversy” around the subject. Their solution, in line with the book’s first half, is to argue that the story is simply one formal element that the director may use to communicate his or her ‘vision’ – although, as noted, they are reluctant to speak of an auteur’s thematic viewpoint and discuss instead the “elaborate formal patterns … [that have] much more to do with the film’s aesthetic than the ostensible narrative”. Hitchcock, for instance, is seen to:

… provide a film that works expertly as narrative and thus ensure his ability to finance films, while at the same time produce cinematic masterworks whose impact far exceeds that of the narrative elements within them.

Luhr and Lehman, in order to make such statements, have managed to ignore most of the interesting and important work done on narrative. The writing of Barthes, Propp, Metz, Genette, Bellour and others goes unnoticed. This is not to say that a critic has to refer to everyone who has previously discussed the same topic (an impossibility, certainly in this instance). But in this case it means that the key questions are not explored: what are the ‘rules’ of narrative? How does a narrative situate the viewer in a certain position of knowledge and pleasure (or unpleasure)?

The long comparison of various versions of the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story on film with the original novel serves to point out that significant changes can be wrought upon a similar storyline – “extensive and essential differences”. The aim is finally to eulogise the “creative process” – the ways in which different artists, whatever their worth, will necessarily produce individual variations on the pre-existing plot line.

The study of narrative carried out by others has aimed precisely to see what structures and effects exist in the act of narrative irrespective of the particular narrator, be it John Ford or Tex Avery. What makes this part of the book so shallow is that the authors see narrative as something utterly unproblematic – merely the events of a story – and ignore the real theoretical issues. Any book that subtitles itself “issues in contemporary criticism” needs to involve itself with those issues.

© Adrian Martin January 1979.

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Links:

-- The current issue of Filmkrant has a special section called "Slow Criticism" featuring, among others Jonathan Rosenbaum, Olaf Möller, Kent Jones, and Adrian, who also has a column on one of America's "very worst film critics," Ben Lyons.

-- At The Auteurs, a round-table of conversations called "The Epilogue" with Andrew Grant, Harry Tuttle, Kevin Lee, Edwin Mak, Alexis Tioseco and Nitesh Rohit.

-- There's a new issue of Senses of Cinema.

-- Recent pieces posted at Jonathan Rosenbaum's place: on undistributed films, The Godfather, and Ritwik Ghatak.

-- Some new posts and pieces from: Mubarak Ali, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Doug Cummings, and Walter at Quiet Bubble.

pic: Pencil drawing of a shot from a Freudian sequence in Victor Fleming's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) from the William Luhr-Peter Lehman book.

Favorite Cinema Discoveries in '08

2009-01-19T23:40:00.002-05:00

Of the 300 or so films I managed to catch last year, over 250 were older, non-current films. Let me collect some of my favorites here, in no particular order, and then I'd like to ask you for yours:

(1) Two '70s films by Basu Bhattacharya: Anubhav ("Experience"--1971) and Aavishkar ("Invention"--1973). Neither full-blown commercial Bollywood films nor part of the arthouse Indian Parallel Cinema (the Indian New Wave), these films occupy a fascinating in-between space informally known as "Middle Cinema". They feature leading stars (Sharmila Tagore, Rajesh Khanna, Sanjeev Kumar) but are made on low budgets, and follow few genre conventions. Both films examine the modern-day, urban Indian married couple--in microscopic, messy detail.

(2) Imtiaz Ali's Jab We Met (2007). For me, the main attraction of this film is its spoken dialogue: nearly every single line is multilingual--an inventive mix with bits of English and Hindi wedged together, jammed willy-nilly, with some Punjabi thrown in for good measure. The movie is a romantic drama with echoes of Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, and has a strong performance by Kareena Kapoor.

(3) Two '80s Bollywood B-movies by B. Subhash, Disco Dancer (1983) and Kasam Paida Karne Waale Ki (1984). Both these movies show a refreshing lack of smoothness, coherence and high production values, instead featuring a home-grown, inadvertent surrealism, with narrative and formal gestures that leave you gasping in disbelief, laughing at their outrageousness. An example: Mithun Chakraborty in Disco Dancer plays a disco musician who contracts a mysterious disease called "guitar-phobia" which leaves him unable to approach his instrument, until he is "cured" of his ailment (!).

(4) The films of Tamil filmmaker Mani Ratnam, the way he turns even ordinary moments into occasions for his almost absurdly rhapsodic mise-en-scène . His films may not all be 'perfect' but every one of them contains delirious sequences that give me goosebumps. Dil Se (1998) is, for me, his masterpiece, but I also enjoy Bombay, Roja, Nayakan, A Peck on the Cheek, and Alaipayuthe.

(5) Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Namak Haraam (1975), a 'buddy film' starring Bollywood heavyweights Amitabh Bachchan and Rajesh Khanna. On the one hand a thoroughly mainstream and commercial movie, and on the other, fiercely socialist, pro-labor--a workers' film. Where are such passionately left-wing films in today's slick Bollywood landscape?

(6) Edward Yang's Taipei Story (1985), a Taiwanese narrative fiction film whose story and characters I remember less than its vivid images of modernity. An expressionless Hou Hsiao-hsien plays the lead. A favorite moment: Hou brings back a VHS tape of baseball games he recorded in Japan. His sister pops the tape in, and fast-forwards past the games to watch only the commercials. I could relate to this, having been spellbound by the first Western commercials I saw in India as a child.

(7) A trip to San Francisco at the invitation of the generous Michael Guillen to catch the city's Silent Film Festival. The films included: Dreyer's Mikael, Kinugasa's Jujiro, William Desmond Taylor's The Soul of Youth, and Tod Browning's The Unknown. (See this post.)

(8) The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987), Kazuo Hara's radical documentary. Here are the posts and discussions at Film of the Month Club.

(9) Fergus Daly's documentary Experimental Conversations (2006). (See this post.)

(10) Kenji Mizoguchi's final film, Street of Shame (1956), an unsparing, unsentimental and devastating film about prostitution. The final scene (and final words) are shattering--the most indelible moment of my movie year.

And now: your favorite discoveries of older cinema in 2008? I'd love to hear about them.

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Links:

-- First, best wishes for new beginnings!--to David Hudson at IFC; and Aaron Hillis at Greencine Daily.

-- Adrian's current column at Filmkrant on "The Criterion Effect"; and an interview with him at André Dias's Portuguese-language blog, We have yet to start thinking.

-- Dave Kehr in the NYT on: Rossellini's history films; and on two recent Michael Powell DVDs.

-- Also at the NYT: Stanley Fish posts a list of his "10 Best American Movies."

-- David Bordwell on "movie bugs" ("those little channel logos and watermarks that hop onto your screen"); and on the ten best films of 1918.

-- Lots of new posts at Zach's place, including this year-end entry.

-- A marvelous collage post at The Art of Memory on the sea in art.

-- A year-end series of posts at Hell on Frisco Bay: Brian Darr invites a dozen or more writers to contribute their lists.

-- Michael Guillen collects links of Jonathan Rosenbaum's writings on Chantal Akerman.

-- Catherine Grant has two collections of links on Kevin Lee vs. YouTube: One; and Two.

-- Jason Mittell at Just TV: "The media library in a post-disc world."

-- At Film of the Month Club: Curtis Hanson's Bad Influence (1990).

-- At Critical Culture, Pacze Moj collects some Rossellini readings.

pic: Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore in Basu Bhattacharya's Aavishkar (1973).

Robert Mulligan; Links

2008-12-21T22:10:00.004-05:00

The filmmaker Robert Mulligan has died. Here's David Hudson's entry at Greencine. John Belton had an essay in the special Mulligan issue of The Film Journal a couple of years ago:

Mulligan is clearly not the author of his films in the same way that Ingmar Bergman is; he does not create his own characters or stories or write the dialogue. But Mulligan is a storyteller, interpreting the stories of others. As Mulligan describes his role, “Things have to sift through me. That’s me up there on the screen. The shooting, the editing, the use of music—all that represents my attitude toward the material.” In his role as storyteller, Mulligan interposes his personality and sensitivity between the tale and the audience; he makes the story his own by supplying attitude. It is this attitude or tone that becomes the true subject of a Mulligan film, not character or plot. Thus in a Mulligan film, no single individual—director, screenwriter, producer, or actor—stamps the film with his personality; the feelings generated by Mulligan’s view of specific characters in specific situations and settings are what count most.

Mulligan, as interpreter, chooses preexisting plots and characters for the stories of his films. His best films have been based on best-selling novels that have in common strong subjective narrations and settings that are inseparable from character and plot.

I know he's much admired but I've seen only two of Mulligan's films, To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) and Summer of '42 (1971). The former has been forever transfigured in my memory since I encountered Austrian filmmaker Martin Arnold's appropriation and deformation of it in his avant-garde classic Passage À L’Acte (1993).

I'm wondering: Do you have any favorites among Mulligan's films? Perhaps we can collect some ideas and recommendations here?

* * *

Adrian Martin has a new essay--on William Klein. Here is an excerpt:

William Klein is a remarkable figure in film history, a law unto himself, ultimately beyond (while overlapping with) many movements and trends. To look at the 1964 footage that constitutes the first half of Muhammad Ali, The Greatest (1974) - with its lack of voice-over narration and its relentlessly energetic 'in the moment' reportage - one might imagine him to have issued from the American cinéma-vérité school of Leacock, Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers. But, crucially, there is no spurious objectivity in Klein: just one look at the deliberately ugly way he frames the boxer's Southern white 'owners' (another lateral 'defilement') in contrast to the open, generous way he films Ali and his intimate entourage, is enough to palpably convey who the filmmaker is for and against, who he likes and dislikes. So, there is an aspect of Klein that anticipates the cooler, more analytical - although still indirect - gaze of Frederick Wiseman's documentaries about every kind of social institution (prison, school, office, abattoir, monastery ... ) as well as the more loquacious essay-films of Chris Marker, who first encouraged Klein to turn his photographic eye into a cinematographic eye in the (literally) dazzling short Broadway by Light (1958).

* * *

More links:

-- Michael Newman at Zigzigger has one of my favorite 'end-of-the-year favorites' posts.

-- The latest (#3) in Ry Knight's wonderful series of 'quotation collage' posts.

-- A recent blog discovery: Some Landscapes, devoted to "landscapes evoked or depicted in the arts: painting, literature, music, film etc. and [...] the creation or alteration of landscapes by architects, artists and garden designers."

-- Beaucoup reading at The Auteurs Notebook including David Phelps (on Oshima--lots!), Danny Kasman, David Cairns, Andrew Tracy, and Glenn Kenny.

-- Michael Sicinski's December page has a number of interesting reviews including: Iron Man, Trouble the Water, Encounters at the Edge of the World, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, W., Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Frost/Nixon, and Slumdog Millionaire.

-- Several new and interesting posts at Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's blog, Sounds, Images, including a Bazinian entry called "The Ontology of the Recorded Sound."

-- Also, Ignatiy kicks off the newest Film of the Month, Julien Temple's Absolute Beginners (1986).

-- A sneak peek at the top 20 released and unreleased films of the year in the Film Comment poll at the FilmLinc blog.

-- Two recent and useful end-of-year posts at Joe Bowman's place, Fin de Cinema: on region-1 DVD releases, and the best and worst of television.

-- Catherine Grant has a links-filled post on Daniel Frampton's Filmosophy.

-- Ed Howard is hosting an Early Hawks blog-a-thon next month.

-- At his blog Remains of the Day, Harmanjit Singh has an interesting entry that begins thus: "The practice of Actualism is to minimize, and finally remove, malice and sorrow in oneself, so that one may live happily and harmlessly. There is usually little argument on the happiness aspect, but there can be a lot of confusion about being harmless."

-- Dave Kehr in the NYT on the Murnau/Borzage box set, which, he writes, "also functions as a miniature history of the transition from silent films to sound. The free-floating camera and dramatic fluidity of the silents seem to screech to a halt with Borzage’s first all-talking picture, the 1929 Will Rogers vehicle “They Had to See Paris.” He recovers a bit of his camera mobility with the interesting 1930 “Song o’ My Heart,” a musical starring the hugely popular Irish tenor John McCormack, in which Borzage experiments for the first time with sound to create a bridge between lovers separated by space. But sound also constrains Borzage’s gossamer romanticism, and his films take on the straightforward, slightly embittered social realism that was beginning to dominate over at Warner Brothers."

-- David Bordwell: "Like many Hong Kong movies, nearly every one of Wong Kar-wai’s films went through multiple versions. But unlike many directors he seems to enjoy tweaking and rethinking his work. In production he shoots scenes, watches them, reshoots them, recuts them, and reshoots again. Editing and mixing involve the same play with variants. He adds different shots, juggles the order, adds or subtracts music at will. [...] His drive to redo his films seems to go beyond indecision or commercial calculation. Wong seems to have taken to heart his central theme of the transient moment, the fact that love can be extinguished at any instant. So why not change your films to match your mood today? Further, like Warhol, he seems to enjoy prodigality for its own sake. He enjoys conjuring up one variation after another, multiplying just barely different avatars, and draping in mist the notion of any original text. His films’ basic constructive principle—the constant repetitions that create parallels and slight differences, loops of vaguely familiar images and sounds and situations—gets enacted in his very mode of production."

-- Steven Shaviro on presses (in this case, Continuum) with extremely restrictive agreements that prohibit authors from disseminating their own work, thus limiting their readership. He writes: "Some of the best theory books of the last decade have received far less notice than they deserved, all because they have been caught in the limbo of this sort of publishing arrangement. [...] There obviously needs to be some sort of open access policy for scholarship in the humanities, as there already is to a great extent in the sciences. We don’t really get paid for our writing, except very indirectly in the sense that a scholarly reputation increases your “marketability” and hence the kind of salary you can get as a professor. In these cases, the policies of presses like Continuum (which I am singling out here only because of my own dealings with them; many other academic presses are just as bad) serve the interests neither of writers nor of readers. I don’t have a blueprint of how to get there (open access) from here (restrictive copyright arrangements), but a first step would be for those academics who, like me, can afford to forgo the lines on their vitas, to refuse to publish with presses that have such policies."