HopkinsCinemAddicts

Opening Night Re-examines and Refracts the "Aging Actress" Trope

“I’ll do just about anything to make my character more authentic. I always have.” 

John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977) is about a woman whose life is dedicated to performance. Myrtle Gordon subsumes herself in her acting roles. She has no children; her romantic relationships are with her co-star and her director; she has no age to which she will admit, lest her aging jeopardize her career. In her latest play, she stars as Virginia, an aging actress. After a car accident takes place outside the theater after a performance and a young fan is killed, Myrtle begins to hallucinate the young girl as she herself descends further into alcoholism and unreality. Myrtle speaks, like Gena Rowlands’ characters in Cassavetes’ films often do and are, like a mad person who believes she is the only sane one in the room. 

She may be the only sane one in a room of occultists preparing for a seance led by the playwright’s psychic, but her proclamations of self-knowledge are as forthcoming and easy to comprehend as they are tragically revealing of Myrtle’s own blind spots. In sacrificing herself for roles - not sleeping enough, drinking, smoking, all to “get into character” - she indulges in the hedonistic pleasures afforded her by the vocation of inhabiting another person. In pursuit of a character’s authenticity, Myrtle has lost herself; she is unable to see the young woman she once was in Virginia, the “second woman.” Because she inhabits every character so fully, Myrtle’s loss of self impedes her acting. Thus, the straightforward trope of the aging actress is reflected back upon itself, exposing the discrepancies between the artistic rendering and the reality. 

Myrtle moves between stage sets and real-life locales constantly, and themes established in the outside world recur in the narrative of the play. In Virginia’s apartment, two enormous black-and-white photographs of an old woman in a headscarf adorn the walls. Her face is etched with wrinkles, the quintessential babushka; the domineering presence of the photographs beats the play’s audience over the head with its theme of aging womanhood while serving as a clear juxtaposition with Myrtle/Virginia, whose “old” age is less obvious, more well-preserved than “decrepit.” We see the fine lines on Myrtle’s face only when she winces as she knocks back a drink in a close-up, a donning of armor before facing the audience. 

Myrtle is not as old as Virginia, and she identifies this to Sarah Goode, the playwright (played by 1930s movie star Joan Blondell, whose own career imbues the casting with the connotation of the washed-up starlet archetype) as a major sticking point in her artistic process. “You have me up there having hot flashes - I don’t have hot flashes!” Myrtle refers to herself as her character, indicating her increasing difficulty with separating the two, and implicitly accuses Sarah of humiliating her by writing such an old woman for her to play. Myrtle’s worries seem vain and ridiculous, like those of so many vain, ridiculous actresses who care more about how they appear than how accurately they portray the character: a variation on Norma Desmond, the butt of the joke. It’s a culturally accepted phenomenon, and it largely lets Hollywood off the hook for the superficial standards of practice that drive women to such hysterics. Myrtle explains it all: if she plays this role convincingly, her fate is sealed as an old actress relegated to old-woman roles. No matter how good this play might be, no matter how complex and rich of a character Virginia is, she is not an ingenue in the traditional sense and Myrtle will never be such an ingenue again. 

The paradoxical lucidity with which Myrtle analyzes her relationship to Nancy, the young fan killed in an accident outside the theater, further distinguishes her from the crazy actress trope while confirming that she is sort of textbook “crazy,” hallucinating the dead girl as a paragon of desirable youth who says things like, “I like to fuck. I like when men look at me.” Unable to let go of this version of herself who probably never was - first eighteen, then seventeen, impossibly young and beautiful and scarily willing to be used by men in ways that many aspiring actresses rationalize to themselves again and again - Myrtle conjures her and tortures herself with the phantom. When Nancy confronts Myrtle, it is the confirmation of Myrtle’s worst fears about her aging self through the eyes of the younger woman she “killed,” perhaps so no one would rise up, All About Eve -style, in her place? 

In the manner of an experimental character study, Opening Night atomizes and comments on the wider tendency of the actress to make everything about herself, the solipsism required by the profession that dramatizes every aspect of life, encouraged and pilloried by the people who want her to perform, who write plays and direct her in them. The car accident has a lingering effect on Myrtle because it is an awful thing that she witnessed and subsequently internalized, but also because the people in the car with her (her husband, Manny, the play’s director; and her co-star and stage husband, played by Cassavetes) tell the chauffeur to keep driving.

Writer's Block in Movies, and Barton Fink as a Meta-Film (Jaeyoung)

 The author Charles Bukowski once wrote, “Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all.” Therefore, I will write this blog about screenwriters experiencing writer’s block.

 There are actually many movies that feature this nightmare, including Stranger than Fiction, Ruby Sparks, Secret Window, Limitless, The Shining, Barton Fink, and Adaptation.

 In Limitless and Ruby Sparks, writer’s block is featured early in the plot. Both protagonists of these movies, Eddie Morra and Calvin Weir-Fields, stare at blank pages and become easily distracted, until drugs and romance cure them of their disease.

 Meanwhile, Steven King doesn’t let his characters move on from this debilitating syndrome; the Secret Window and The Shining were both adapted from his novels, and they both feature a struggling writer who slips into a murderous rampage. Perhaps murder is the answer to every writer’s frustration?

 These films portray the frustration of writer’s block creatively and artistically (the tantalizing flashing cursor in Limitless, the anxious blank page atop Calvin’s typewriter in Ruby Sparks, the repeated "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" in The Shining). However, the two films that fully explore the malaise of their respective screenwriters are Barton Fink and Adaptation, and I will view these works as meta-films.

 In the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink, the eponymous screenplay novice struggles to write a B-movie about boxer Wallace Beery. Unlike Limitless, Ruby's Spark, and The Shining, there is considerable emphasis on Barton Fink's environment; Barton's dilapidated hotel room, not him, seems to receive the most focus in the Writer's Block scenes. The slimy, peeling walls, the mysterious beach portrait, the persistent buzzing of mosquitos: it's almost as though the room is preventing him from writing.

 What makes Barton Fink so brilliant is how it meshes fantastical elements to explore Barton's frustration and confusion. It almost seems like the Coen Brothers knew poor Barton's situation intimately well...

 ...and they did! They wrote the Barton Fink when they themselves experienced writer's block with Miller's Crossing screenplay. In fact, there are so many connections between Barton and the Coen Brothers that it is difficult not to view Barton as a projection of the brothers' frustrated selves. Here are a few similarities:

• They wear glasses
• They are Jewish
• They all call New York their home
• They are highly educated
• They struggle with their writing material

 The first three similarities are fairly straightforward, but the fourth and fifth comparisons could use elaboration. Joel Coen went to NYU and Ethan Coen went to Princeton, where he wrote a 41-page essay titled, “Two Views on Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy.” If that title doesn’t scream “educated elite,” I don’t know what would. This characteristic is also found in Barton, when he talks to Charlie, the "common man."

                               CHARLIE

               And I could tell you some stories –

                               BARTON

               Sure you could!  And yet many writers

               do everything in their power to

               insulate themselves from the common

               man – from where they live, from

               where they trade, from where they

               fight and love and converse and –

               and – and... so naturally their work

               suffers, and regresses into empty

               formalism and – well, I'm spouting

               off again, but to put it in your

               language, the theater becomes as

               phony as a three dollar bill.

 

 I'm not sure if the Coen Brothers are pretentious; if they are, I would definitely draw another parallel there.

 I've written that they both struggle with their writing material, but the material they work with are very different; Coen Brothers had been having a difficult time with the highly convoluted plot of Miller’s Crossing, while Barton Fink was tasked to write a bio flick about a boxer. In addition, Barton and the Coen Brothers have different degrees of freedom. The Coen Brothers have almost complete control over their movies (they direct, produce, write, and edit all their major films; they later created their own production company, the Mike Ross Company), but Barton’s screenwriting was heavily scrutinized by Libnick, his boss (must have a lot of action, be fruity, but not too fruity, have the Barton Fink quality, etc.). This is why the brothers have stated that Barton's struggles were not meant to reflect their own experiences with the industry. It is rather their frustration as writers that they channel unto Barton.

 To summarize, the Coen Brothers created a less likable version of themselves and dragged him through hell.

 Charlie Kaufman, on the other hand, does the opposite in Adaptation; he splits himself into the sad, frustrated but sophisticated Charlie Kaufman and the happier, simpler fictional twin brother, Donald Kaufman. In the movie (and in real life, apparently) Charlie struggles to write a film adaptation about the Orchid Thief, partly because it lacks a "filmable" plot, and mostly because he is extremely worried about not doing the book justice. On the contrary, Donald writes cliched psychological thrillers. With Donald's help, the movie about a mopey writer finally develops a faster-paced (and pulpy) plot, as they discover the author of Orchid Thief's secret and fight to survive her murderous rampage.

 What's interesting to note is that Kaufman treats both his characters with sympathy; how Charlie feels, thinks, acts is all laid out for the audience to observe, and Donald's unsophisticated (suggests that Flowers for Algernon is about flowers) and enthusiastic view of life is lovable. As works of meta-cinema, Barton Fink and Adaptation are the antithesis to each other; while the Coen Brothers are the smart-aleck bullies that make their character's life hard, Charlie Kaufman is the parent who asks, "Tell me what what's wrong."

On Loving Flowers, and Saying Odd Things (Madison)

As some of you may know, April is National Poetry Month (and according to T.S Eliot, the cruelest month, but that's besides the point.) In honor of the occasion, I thought I would dedicate this blog post to a few films that deal with poetry and great poets, ranging from a broadly appealing romance about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, to an examination of an old South Korean grandmother suffering from dementia. With this post, I am trying to understand how we (the 'we' represented by a filmmaker creating movies for an audience) understand poetry, what examining poetry allows a filmmaker to do, and how this literary art translates onto the big screen. 

On the list for today are Poetry (2010), directed by Lee Chang-dong; Slam (1998), directed by Marc Levin; Howl (2010), directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffry Friedman; and Bright Star (2009), directed by Jane Campion. I've tried to compile a diverse group of films; films that look at the same subject in different ways, and that might enrich my own conception of poetry and what it should do. 

I think all of these films, different as they are, are asking the same question: what is poetry? They ask it in a few ways: some, like Poetry or Bright Star, have protagonists who want to learn how to write it; Howl shows us the 1957 obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who published Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl) where witnesses are asked to define literature and literary merit; Slam considers whether poetry can act as a form of non-violent protest, or as a means of rehabilitation. There is something opaque about poetry, something that keeps an audience removed; a film must necessarily overcome that barrier between content and viewer if it is to be well received, and one way of doing so is to try to answer that one fundamental question: what is poetry?

The answer, though, is never simple. In Poetry, Mija’s daughter defines a poet as “[someone] who loves flowers and always says odd things”; another woman says, “If you have feeling, you can write poetry.” In Bright Star, John Keats, trying to teach his next door neighbor how to read and write verse, explains, “Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.” In some films, poetry is defined by its inability to be explained; an astute witness in Howl explains to the prosecutor, “Sir, you can’t transpose poetry into prose—that’s why it’s poetry.”

Even as our protagonists read it, write it, recite it to us, they are unable to pin it down. We are, instead, ushered into a sort of understanding through the use of unconventional film techniques. Howl is half animated: as James Franco reads Ginsberg’s famous piece in voiceover, we are shown cartoon scenes of “angel headed hipsters” crawling through the streets, jumping off buildings, copulating. The film switches from black and white shots of Ginsberg reading his poem in 1955, to colored scenes of an interview Ginsberg is giving, and the obscenity trial in 1957, then to these odd, bright hued cartoons playing over frenzied jazz music. It is something of a jarring switch: the literal man to the drawing, the clean lines of a black and white café to the uncanny CGI version of a world ruled by a bullheaded monster, Moloch. It doesn’t make sense; but then, that departure from literal sense is an attempt to capture what poetry is, what it means.

Even when the rupturing of reality is not quite so extreme, it is there: in Slam, in between narrative scenes, blurry, overlapped clips play, depicting things we have already seen in the film—a man getting shot, Ray running from the cops—blurring into the future, with Ray in cuffs, and into scenes that have no temporal signature at all: frames of graffiti, sad-eyed boys, crowded sidewalks. Poetry, too, makes some unusual choices. There is no soundtrack except for birdsong; we see frames filled only with glimmering water; we spend stretches of time watching an apple turning in the sunlight or an apricot fallen to the ground; in the last scene, we hear a girl who we saw in the opening drowned in the river recite a poem, we see her face the camera with a half smile before the screen goes dark; we do not know what happens to the protagonist, Mija—she leaves the film before the last five minutes, and we are never given closure. These are odd decisions, things that feel unusual, but that also fit into the landscape of the film, make sense in the artistic context.

These breaks with expectation are the filmmakers’ way of explaining to a viewer what poetry is; if it cannot be stated verbally, if Mija’s teacher cannot explain when one will find poetic inspiration, if Keats cannot tell Fanny Brawne how to become a poet (“if poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it had better not come at all”, he says during their first lesson), then it can be communicated visually. The business of poetry is breaking expectation, making the familiar seem unfamiliar—how better to do that than to disrupt the narrative flow of a film, to use the camera as a poet uses words, featuring images that might otherwise go unseen, forcing the viewer to look, to be confused, to feel something that cannot be identified even as it is familiar.

This focus that poetry allows is a wonderful tool to look at people on the margins of society; people who, like Allen Ginsberg, are gay, like Ray Joshua are black, are prisoners, like Mija are old, suffer from Alzheimer’s, like John Keats are poor, or dealing with depression. This vehicle allows us to look closely at people who might otherwise be ignored. Arm them with images, with a pen, and they speak: poetry becomes a very real force for social change as it allows the stories of marginalized writers to be shared. Poetry is a place, a cultural location that exists through change; unlike many other traditional social spaces, poetry is meant to evolve, to be altered, to tell many stories and take on many forms. It is the ideal vehicle for the ignored, as it is so amenable to change, so easy to take with you. As Ray says when offered a place in a prison gang, “No. All I need is some paper and a pen, then I can figure this out.”

Poetry also allows us to look at subjects that are otherwise uncomfortable, or ignored; sex, in particular, is addressed in surprising ways in these films about poetry. In Slam we see a woman receiving oral sex; in Poetry we watch an old woman have sex with a stroke victim; in Howl we are faced with a forest of (it makes me cringe to write this) playful penises waving in a cartoon wind. All of this is out of the ordinary: women are seldom the recipients of sexual pleasure in film; old people are portrayed as asexual; male genitalia are hidden at all costs. But in these films, the directors use poetry as a vehicle to confront these things, to look unflinchingly, even goofily, at those parts of our sexuality that make us so uncomfortable.

Mental illness too, is examined: we are familiar with the artist as a depressed figure, yet are often more comfortable ignoring mental health problems. These movies shine a spotlight on the depressed, the people who “have been half in love with easeful Death” like Keats, been forced into insane asylums and given shock therapy, like Ginsberg’s friend Solomon, have started forgetting nouns, who have become overwhelmed and confused like Mija. When looking at the biographies of poets, the presence of mental illness cannot be ignored; when looking at poets through the unflinching lens of art, mental illness cannot be left unaddressed or unexploited. 

Poetry, then, can do a lot for the marginalized, the outsiders; it may be confusing, may even seem inaccessible, but film allows us to understand visually what we might not be able to on the page. Film, too, allows us to hear poetry rather than read it; we are immersed in it, experience it unfiltered by sight, by the blankness of page margins. As we hear it we cannot look away, we can only let it wash over us. The act of hearing a poem is immersive and complete, allows us to experience a poem in a different way than we do when we see it on the page. Poetry, then, shares a special relationship with film: as it is interpreted visually, it is also delivered orally, presenting the viewer unique access to pieces that may seem alien in a book.

I’m afraid I’ve run out of space, so I will conclude with this: I have heard, as I think most people have, that poetry is dead or dying at best, that maybe a long time ago people got fired up about sonnets, but you'd be lucky if you met someone today who even knew what the word 'sonnet' meant. It was in the hope that what I've heard is wrong that I pursued films about poetry, and why I wrote about them today: poetry, if it can be a part of films like this, reaching audiences who most comfortably navigate culture through screen, is still very much alive and kicking. As poetry is adapted to film it maintains a place in our cultural landscape, and evolves to target an audience who, though they may no longer have Shakespeare or Keats or Ginsberg, have, as all humans do, a basic need for creative expression. 

 

 

Bon Appetit! Food in Film (Madison)

Growing up, I lived ten minutes away from my Pop-pop, an Italian chef who built his career in Philadelphia, working in restaurants and hospital kitchens. He wore newsboy caps and had a hatred of undercooked pasta, microwave dinners, sauce from a jar… and, well, anything he hadn’t made himself. Every Sunday, my mother, father, brother, and I would go to Pop-pop’s house for dinner; or, at least, what we called dinner, although it usually started around 3 in the afternoon. I can still remember the way his house always smelled of cooking oil, bacon fat, tomato sauce: his beige carpet had turned black after years of spills and the footsteps of dinner guests and family.

I shudder to think what Pop-pop would have said had he seen me eating lukewarm ravioli out of a can as I watched the films I want to discuss today. I’ve chosen five films that place a focus on food and cooking, ranging from light-hearted comedies to magical realist dramas, to answer the questions that brought me to this project: why do people want to watch movies about food? Why do people make them? What is so attractive about watching someone prepare a meal that you will never taste, and what is it that makes film an effective instrument with which to examine food?

The following are the films I salivated through in preparation for this post: Like Water for Chocolate (1992), directed by Alfonso Arau; Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), directed by Ang Lee; Julie and Julia (2009), directed by Nora Ephron; Romantics Anonymous (2010), directed by Jean-Pierre Améris; and The Lunchbox (2013), directed by Ritesh Batra. Each of these films is in a different language, and each (with the partial exception of Julie and Julia and Romantics Anonymous, which are both concerned with French cuisine, though the former has as much to do with American cooks as it does French) are concerned with different styles of food and take place in different cultural contexts. By discussing an international sampling of films (although it is by no means exhaustive) I am hoping to demonstrate the universality of what food signifies; although the meals and the tables at which they are eaten may change, people from all over the world want to watch films about food for similar reasons.

***

So, let’s start where most great meals do: in the kitchen. A great deal of the appeal of these films is watching chefs at work: in Julie and Julia, a film about a woman making every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking,we see raspberry jam being folded into white cream, red beef patted down in paper towels and seared in an orange frying pan, a chicken perfectly browned and emerging from the oven; here we are reminded of how beautiful food is, the truly engaging and surprising ways in which food resembles art, resembles painting, how delicately and artfully each ingredient is paired to another, and the visual play between parts of a meal. 

In The Lunchbox—a film set in Mumbai about a man who accidentally receives another man’s lunch, and strikes up a relationship with his wife, Ila—we hear the sizzle of dough fried in oil, the clicking of a stove as it’s being turned on; we are invited aurally into a woman’s kitchen, hearing sounds that are familiar even to those of us who don’t cook (who, like me, don't even have an oven). Our senses are engaged in more than just a visual way; we hear the food as music and we think of how it would smell, the frying oil, the gas from the stove, the aromatic sauces and spices. We recall how food engages the entire body as we see Ila slowly stuffing peppers with rice, when we watch her eat with her hands or dip her palm into a sauce to test it. Sound serves to more fully immerse us in the musical, corporeal pursuit of cooking, reminds us that a film about food is more than a picture on a screen, it should be an experience that stimulates all of our senses. 

 

In Eat Drink Man Woman—a film set in Taipei, about an aging master chef living with his three adult daughters, all of whom are struggling to figure out what they want—we watch Mr. Chu carve warriors onto the skin of a watermelon, or break a fish’s neck and debone it so carefully that a perfect skeleton emerges, and we see the care it takes to prepare food, the precision that great cooking requires. There is something oddly life-affirming about watching a man slice tofu into millimeter thin strips, or chop a root vegetable into perfectly even segments; the kitchen is a place of control, detail, exactitude. It is beautiful to see a person work so carefully at a pursuit that is entirely nutritive, that will be shared with others, and that, although it will be eaten and digested and entirely gone soon, for the moment deserves complete attention.

 

In Romantics Anonymous Anglique, a woman with crippling social anxiety, spreads melted chocolate across a cool metal counter, and her colleague whittles a perfect Eiffel Tower out of a block of chocolate, and we understand more than just texture (another means of engaging the viewer’s bodies with a filmic experience), we understand how cooking is therapeutic, how precision in the kitchen is more than just carefulness: to Anglique, who is typically a nervous wreck, the care and exactness of her profession allow her to heal, to exert power and demonstrate competency. Cooking is more than just ‘feeding work’, more than supplying fuel for a body; its intentional nature also does the ‘emotion work’ of improving the chef’s internal condition.

In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita, a young woman from a conservative Mexian family, in love with her sister’s husband, kneels on the floor she grinds corn for a tortilla, and we see her bare shoulders, a flash of her breast, the sweat on her neck: the film is deeply erotic, and we see how cooking becomes a means for Tita to express her sensuality in a socially acceptable way. Although she lacks power and agency in her life, controlled as she is by her mother, when she cooks she is free to use her body, to be passionate; she engages with her body erotically, and cooking becomes a way to end not only literal, but also sexual hunger.

 

In all five films, among these other images and sounds, there is the perpetual billowing of steam from pots, an ethereal presence in the kitchen that reminds the viewer how ascendant the process of making a meal is. Steam is the closest any visual can get to the otherworldly: it is a literal, visual means of communicating the mystical, of indicating that something if not divine, then at least fantastic is happening.

 

And food does allow fantastic things to happen: in The Lunchbox, two strangers pass notes along with bowls of paneer and rice, and start to fall in love; as the man eats Ila’s food, his life and hers become more aligned. She swats a fly away from her face at the same moment he swats one from his; as he reads her description of a fan slowing down and stopping, the fan whirring above his head slows and stops.

  

 

Even in Julie and Julia, a fairly down-to-earth film, two women who are separated by a span of sixty years are brought together by Julie Powell’s project to cook all of Julia Child’s recipes: in the film, scenes of Julie’s modern life are woven in between scenes of Julia’s in late 1950s Paris (in one scene, a room Julie is looking at in a museum literally becomes a scene from Julia’s life, as the camera zooms in and the light changes, and Julia Child bustles into the kitchen with her husband), and Julie constantly talks about feeling Julia’s presence in the kitchen as she cooks. Although this is not precisely ghostly, there is something magical about one woman being so connected to another (who she will never meet) through her recipes.

 

Another important and related thread connecting these films is the idea that cooking is a way for women to claim power, to reassert control over their lives and become meaningful, contented people: and, although there is a part of me that wishes cooking was not the only way women in these films could prove themselves (after all, who isn’t tired of the phrase “get back in the kitchen!”), there is something empowering about them. Although cooking is seen as a feminine pursuit domestically, the professional world of food is still male-dominated: seeing women enter that space is actually quite radical and feminist.

 

Still, it should be noted that even when women aren’t entering cooking in a professional sphere, food allows them to connect to others, to express things that they are forbidden to in regular life: through the lunches Ila prepares in The Lunchbox, she connects to a man who appreciates her, and eventually gains such a feeling of self-worth that she leaves her unfaithful husband (and not for another man, but for herself!—she remains single at the end of the film); in Like Water for Chocolate Tita pours her emotions into her food, causing those who eat it to weep if she is sad, to kiss if she is feeling sexy, to throw up if she is angry: she becomes powerful in a very literal way.

 

Food, too, creates a network between women: Julie learns to cook from Julia Child, Tita learns from her nanny Nacha and cooks with her friend Chencha, Ila borrows ingredients and gets advice from her “Auntie” in the upstairs apartment: cooking connects people, connects women, in a way that empowers them, draws them together and gives them strength.

 

Food is such a meaningful part of our lives, whether our parents made us dinner, or our babysitters, or our Pop-pops did, whether we eat out every night or make mac and cheese in a microwave. It is important both as something we experience every day out of necessity, and as something we use to mark special occasions, to pass on cultural values, and to bridge distances (both personal and temporal) that might otherwise be insurmountable. Food is a lens through which to view female agency, sexual politics, romantic and filial love, and internationalism; and, most basically, it’s fun. People (or, most people I know) enjoy eating, especially when the food is good, just as people (at least, all the best people) enjoy good films. So, I invite you all to make yourself some popcorn (with extra butter!), and dig in to all of the movies in this post; I promise you, you’re in for a real treat.  

Time in Movies, Movies in Time (Ian)

 

Some years just aren’t good to moviegoers.  2004 birthed few movies worth mentioning (Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind, Kill Bill Vol. 2, and Mean Girls practically finish the list).  Conversely, some years are great to film--2007 for instance saw There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly all grace the silver screen.

Fortunately, the stars aligned, and 2014 was a stellar year in film.  We got Boyhood, and Birdman, and Foxcatcher, and Whiplash, and Nightcrawler, AND The Babadook--the list goes on, but I’ll stop there.

Funny enough, the good years seem to come with a theme that stretches across their respective filmographies (coincidence? self-projection?).  2007 saw a type of rejuvenation of the “lonely man” archetype popularized by Paul Schrader’s “Night Worker” series of films.  Upon reflection, 2014 saw many of its films measure their ability to be “revolutionary” in hours, and minutes, and seconds; they pushed cinematic boundaries by manipulating how films portray time.

Boyhood seems like the most obvious example of a film representing time in a “new” way, and its deceiving because of it.  The film has received widespread acclaim for its portrayal of twelve years in a family’s life, filmed across twelve years real-time.  Certainly there is technically no other film like it, simply because no other film was produced over a twelve-year period.  And while it is interesting to see Boyhood’s Mason and co. age twelve years throughout the span of three hours (and in the process to relive moments in time like the book release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows unstaged), beneath the glamour of the movie’s unprecedented production schedule, it’s time trick is just that--a trick.  Obviously the movie examines time, but not uniquely, like it wants you to believe; rather, it examines time like anyone else would--like everyone else has to.

Alejandro G. Inarritu’s Birdman stands at the opposite end of the spectrum, presenting time in a highly formalistic way.  Whereas time passes in Boyhood it flows in Birdman, making it the truly unique interpretation of the fourth dimension (despite what the former would have you believe).  The camera floats continuously not just through space, but time as well, trimming away the “fat” of the narrative and conflating scenes of “artists” producing “art” into a pressure-cooker that eventually reaches its breaking point and bursts into surrealism and absurdity.

Somewhere in the middle lies the lesser-seen Locke, directed by Steven Knight and starring Tom Hardy.  The film’s narrative takes place across one single, 84 minute car ride, with the camera never leaving the car.  Locke is the only passenger, meaning he is the only character ever on screen, and speaks to other characters only via his car’s speaker phone.  By the end of Locke’s hour-and-a-half drive into London he has successfully annihilated his professional and personal lives.  While the premise isn’t exactly “cinematic”, by staying with Locke in-real time the film lets the viewer witness every second of the man’s disintegration.

Way back in the third paragraph I mentioned that the “theme” I draw from a given year’s filmography may be self-projected rather than widely felt, but that issue becomes irrelevant the more I think about it.  After all, studying the films in 2014 through the lens of time has been fruitful, if only for my sake.  Even if it’s “uniqueness” is ultimately glib, by making a spectacle of the objectively mundane maturation process, Boyhood makes everyone’s past seem special, or somehow larger-than-life; a treat to be savored, rather than a given to be endured.  Meanwhile, the blurring of time and space in Birdman layers spectacle on spectacle until eventually absurdity replaces reality--not a bad representation of life in a world with increasingly bleaker political and social climates that make it ever-harder to understand.  Locke emphasizes that no moment should be wasted, because in every moment lies the potential for life-changing events.

Birdman manipulated time to make art look absurd; 2014, however, used time to make films that were great.  Tit for tat, the films produced in 2014 cement it as one of the richest years recent history.  Let’s hope for an equally profound (and thematic) 2015.

 

Charlie Kaufman and the Artist’s Mind (Josh)

    One of the wonders of cinema is the potential to reach inside the human psyche and explore the nature of the mind itself.  A master of exploring the complexity of the human mind is Charlie Kaufman, an acclaimed screenwriter and director, who has written such films as Spike Jonzes', Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, as well as Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Then in 2008 Charlie Kaufman wrote and directed his ambitious masterpiece, Synecdoche, New York.   Kaufman’s films, like Adaptation and Synecdoche New York, like to explore the internal mechanisms of his protagonist’s thoughts and fears.  His movies use the tools of cinema to replicate the complexity of his character’s ambitions, feelings, and desires.

    Adaptation is a film whose very concept gives the viewer a glimpse into its own creation.   Charlie Kaufman even goes so far as to give his fictional brother Donald, a character in the movie who becomes a writer, screenwriting credit in the film.  The protagonist of Adaptation is Charlie Kaufman who is attempting to adapt the memoir The Orchid Thief into a motion picture.  Throughout the film, Spike Jonze and Kaufman employ techniques to make the viewer aware of the internal struggle of the writer’s mind.  Kaufman speaks in voiceover to himself repeatedly throughout the film, beginning the story questioning whether he is even capable of any original thought whatsoever. The screenplay describes the story structure of the script as it continues.  The visual style alternates between the dreary life inside Kaufman’s apartment and the lush, saturated adventure film that the protagonist ultimately writes.  Kaufman writes in an identical twin character named Donald, the visual representation of the writer’s inner turmoil about the attempt to create unique ideas within a strict set of traditional standards.  Donald’s character represents the desire of any artist to be original and interesting, while at the same time, constantly fighting against the constrictions of what is expected of them by mass tastes.  Donald’s desire is to write a film that is almost completely formula and written in mainstream Hollywood style.  Kaufman illustrates this tension later in the film during a scene set at a screenplay conference taught by Robert McKee, the famous teacher responsible for many storytelling conventions.  Mckee berates Kaufman for having the audacity to believe that nothing happens in the world and a story should reflect that fact.  Unfortunately, the quote is a bit too obscene to print on the blog, but to sum up McKee’s response, he counters by describing the turmoils of people all over the world that happen constantly.  He accuses Kaufman of making nothing worthy of the audience’s time if he believes that nothing really happens in life.  Adaptation describes the thought processes of a creator trying to find the proper balance between his desire for originality and the trappings of appealing to an audience.

    Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche New York functions as a visual representation of a character that desperately wants to find and create the truth about his own humanity,  but is unable to get out of his own head and realize the changes in the world around him. Kaufman begins the film with what appears at first glance like a single ordinary morning, but in the span of minutes, he moves the chronology across several months.  When the protagonist, Caden Cotard lifts up a newspaper, the date reads September.  A moment later, the television references a date in October, and the newspaper references a date in December.  Caden is experiencing life disappear right before his eyes and he, like a viewer not paying close attention to the details, does not notice.  He is a playwright, making art that takes years of work, but that does not seem to offer him fulfillment and in no way impresses his wife.  Caden sees various doctors for an illness that consistently rots his body from the inside.  Kaufman includes new symptoms continually throughout the many years of the chronology of the film.  They often appear ghastly at first, but then they become a normal part of the mise-en-scene.  Caden’s wife leaves him to go on vacation in Berlin, which quickly becomes permanent.  He, of course, does not notice this fact, believing it has been only a few weeks, at most.  After Caden receives a Genius Grant, giving him practically unlimited money to accomplish any goal he so desires, he finally feels ready to construct his masterpiece, constructing a replication of the reality of his world in a massive warehouse in New York.  Kaufman constructs a visual representation of a New York that constantly expands, growing increasingly elaborate and bizarre.  The play has so many layers of reality that Caden gets lost in the world.  Meanwhile, the world outside is becoming a dystopian nightmare, but no one working on the play seems to notice or care.  Kaufman includes these images only in the background of frames, never focusing on any of the turmoil in the world outside of the creation of the play.  The characters are stuck because of the the prisons of their own mind, desperately trying to create something worth remembering, but never getting there.  Human beings, according to Synecdoche New York, try desperately to make their existence matter, but most of them are end up getting trapped in their own heads and fail, always grasping, but never reaching.

    One important note about both these films by Charlie Kaufman, is that the worlds he creates are not miserable.  While he constructs universes that represent our fears and insecurities, he does so in his own darkly comic manner.  His work identifies that life is absurd, and there is always some level of black humor in that fact.  For instance, Synecdoche New York, features a character that spends the majority of her life living inside a house that is constantly on fire.  The fire is a symbol for the lack of control human beings have when approaching death.  Still, the motif is played for the absurdity.  It is meaningful but profoundly funny. Kaufman’s characters represent the inner desires that are nearly universal, but do in a way that is consistently complex, fascinating, unique, and humorous.

Dystopian Love Stories: Heartbreak in the Digital Age (Helen)

I usually find romantic film to be a subject that’s all too sugary-sweet, but the sub genre that has been building steam in recent years provides a refreshing, albeit somewhat terrifying, discussion on human intimacy with the ever-evolving technology of convenience. In the same way, generations adapted to telephones, Internet access, and smart phones, these fictional characters must tackle the paradox between having complete access to world from their fingertips and the strange sense of alienation from never having to leave their home to do so. These films ask the question, is such a thing as too much access? Too much information? Is contentment possible when there seem to be infinite options? Is the technology that is made to assist us, perhaps stunting us?

 

Spike Jonze’s most recent film, Her (2013), looks into these questions with a slightly different spin in what I would consider to be a fairly convincing realistic look at artificial intelligence and the moral ambiguity of developing a personal assistance technology that is capable of independent thoughts and feelings.  The story follows a recently divorced introvert named Theodore Twombly in the year 2025. The ethical questions raised in this film revolve mostly around his developing romantic relationship with his OS “Samantha”. Although, it is worth noting that there are a lot of interesting moral quandaries for the viewer to consider within the background of the main storyline. For example, Theodore works at a company that ghostwrites romantic letters to the customer’s significant other under the assumption that it was written by their spouse and of course, not contracted out to a stranger. Although this deceit seems to be with the best intentions, that ethical grey area is the crux of the film. Both his career and the OS provide parallel examples of modern services meant to make life simpler that seem to instead desensitize an over stimulated population. Although this film shows the delight and feverish highs of Theodore’s relationship with “Samantha” through beautiful cinematography, it is clear from the start that his love will end in tragedy.

 

One of the most striking scenes in the film is when Theodore goes on a blind date set up by his coworker Amy. The woman he meets, who is never given a name, is played by the stunning actress Olivia Wilde. Although she is awkward at first, the close camerawork is intimate rather than suffocating. Their interaction is slow to spark, but develops into a romantic chemistry. However, when she asks him about permanence and commitment he hesitates and recedes. After his failed date he speaks at lengths to “Samantha” about it. It is a subtle reminder than Theordore is retreating from life itself, comforted by the convenience of technology. As time passes, it becomes clear that more people have begun dating their OS, including his only close friend, Amy who is also struggling with her “human” relationship. Towards the end of the film, Theodore descends down the stairs to the subway, with his blue tooth in ear speaking to “Samantha”. As the camera follows him, the same blue tooth can be seen on the various strangers passing him by. This film is less of a cautionary tale, and more of a discourse on the complexity of human intimacy and desire being swept away in the changing tides of modern advancements.

 

Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) offers another perspective on the romantic drama with a science fiction twist. This film however, begins with the end of a relationship and shows the lengths to which someone will go to forget and suppress their former flame. While the technology in this film is entirely familiar with the exception of the memory-erasing machine from the fictional company, Lacuna Inc. Gondry mixes aspects of life that are entirely relatable into this science fiction story. The film opens completely unremarkably with Joel Barish waking up and commuting to the Long Island Railroad on a Valentines Day like any other, so he thinks. In reality, most of the film is presumed to be Joel’s memories running through his head as he is having them erased. Much of the film is shot in montage with Joel’s narration over top, similarly to how memory is perceived. The non-linear timeline forces to viewer to recall and reorder the scenes to piece together the story just as Joel does.

 

Although the story mostly works backwards through a relationship retroactively, the flashbacks recall moments of genuine tenderness and pain for Joel and the object of his affections, Clementine. However, just as in Her (2013), the technology meant to soothe proves to be harmful for Joel. The oversimplified solution to a breakup is too permanent for fickle human desire. The film raises other ethical dilemmas through the various relationships in addition to Joel and Clementine’s. For example, Patrick, the Lacuna employee that erases Clementine’s memories falls in love with her and begins dating her. He uses Joel’s journal to relive his experiences with Clementine in order to manipulate her affections, knowing she won’t remember them with Joel. Lacuna’s receptionist Mary, also learns that she had an affair with the married doctor that runs the company, but had all of this memory erased. Even though she had her memories erased, the attraction she had for her boss developed again. Proving, that the system is not only traumatic but also ineffective. Learning of their own pasts, Joel and Clementine decided to try their relationship again, with a somewhat optimistic ending. Although, the greater implication is that their relationship is likely doomed to fail again.

 

Both of these films and the subgenre of science fiction romantic dramas address an anxiety between technology simultaneously simplifying our lives, but also making things much more complicated, especially in how we interact with one another. I'm not sure how things will be in ten or twenty years, or if these fever dream ideas will ever be realized, but it's something to keep you up at night. To put it simply in the immortal words of 1986 one hit wonder, Timbuk3, "the future's so bright, I gotta wear shades".

 

 

Motion as a Foundation: Len Lye's Free Radicals (Steven)

Len Lye, an artist from New Zealand, endeavored to treat motion as a foundational element of art, much like color or sound. With this idea in focus, he created works in a number of mediums, including kinetic sculpture, poetry, painting, and film. In many of his films, he employed direct animation: manually scratching or painting the film. While he wasn't the first to use this technique, he was largely responsible for its rise out of complete obscurity following his release of A Colour Box in 1935.

In the four-minute short Free Radicals, which Lye first released in 1958 and then finished in 1979, white etchings in black film leader throb to a drum and vocal solo performed by the Bagirmi tribe of Chad. Free radicals are unstable and reactive chemical species. Of course, the title can also be read as radicals who are free, and Lye's attempt to realize a new movement-based medium is certainly non-traditional. Lye's frames are bonded to the tradition and regularity of the music, but, at the same time, such a rhythmically-focused art form may also have been different and new to many in his audiences. As the title might suggest, the forms Lye creates are incessantly unstable. They writhe and contort until blinking into blackness, lasting between several seconds and a single frame. 

Lye complements the tones and timbres of the music with his animation. The vocals are accompanied by long, swaying lines which reach from the bottom to top of the screen, reflecting the rich, full tones of the vocalist. The more staccato drumbeats receive smaller jagged lines. Lye uses many different instruments to scratch the film, and the resultant textures also tie in to the associated music, with vocal lines being smoother than drum lines.

The most striking element of the film is the hypnotically convincing animation of the forms. Curved lines are projected into space through the emulation of rotation: narrowing sections become more and more foreshortened until they disappear and appear again, reversed, on the other side of the form. Even without the rigid constraints of perspective drawing, simple lines are given shape and mass. The lines bulge and twist around one another, responding and reacting to the beat of the music. Shortly after the halfway point in the film, the only line currently on screen grows and explodes into dozens of tiny strokes, which give way to yet more lines, these sinuous and fat.

In the last minute of the film, events begin to pass more hurriedly. Lines rush towards each other from either side of the screen and meld into one, asterisk-like constructs warp from location to location and then disintegrate into toothy lines, and brushy textures coalesce into dots. There's a sensation of ritualistic intensity and the indeterminate scope of the forms becomes evident: are these forms subatomic particles, bolts of lightning, or galaxies? Foremost, they are motion and light, and anything else is more suggestion than symbolism.

For the most part, Lye's other films employ a greater variety of colors and shades. There is a particular rawness and power to his approach in Free Radicals, though. The dichromatic, spare style strips away everything but the sensation of movement and sound, yet the film is far from the austere perfectionism of many minimalists. It's a primeval, kinesthetic minimalism, closer to cave paintings than to Piet Mondrian. The gritty, imperfect scratches reinforce the idea that this film represents the first few stumblings into a new artform, or rather, one which had always been hiding in film, waiting for Len Lye to recognize, extract, and purify it.

Life is Cinema (Mina)

    Leos Carax's Holy Motors (2012) is a film about a film. But what exactly is "film?" How can we define cinema? Carax tries to answer these questions by blurring the boundary line between real life and film, between the real and the imaginary through Holy Motors. When the two intersect we are able to realize that our life, our reality is essentially a performance.

    Carax believes the essence of film is acting and performing by using one's physical body. From 19th century Etienne-Jules Marey's chronophotographic gun to today's ditigal technology, the cinema has been developing for over 130 years. The improvement of machinery enabled mass production in the film industry, makeing more films accessible to the society. The epilogue of Holy Motors starts with brief clips of a running man. Next we see a mysterious man waking up and discovering a secret door hidden in the wall in his apartment room. He enters a crowded, yet silent movie house. The eyes of the audience are closed, their bodies stiff; they almost look dead. The opening clips in the beginning of the epilogue belong to Etienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist who conducted numerous studies on human body and motion. His clips thus convey a tone of nostalgia of earlier days of the film industry. Unlike the passive, mechanical movements of the audience, the man in the clips carries out active physical performancs. The mystery man (played by Carax, the director himself) looks feeble, so small in front of the huge movie screen. In all, I believe the epilogue celebrates the development of the cinema, but simultaneously points out the lack of physical movement in today's digitalized films and the passiveness of the audience.

    Carax's affection for pure physical performance continues to be shown in the character named Oscar in the next nine episodes (divided into Act I and Act II). Act I of the episodes focuses on portraying the beauty of performing. Oscar comes out of his luxurious house, posing himself as a wealthy businessman. His assistant Céline is waiting for him in a limousine. She tells Oscar that he has nine "appointments" in that day. For his first appointment, Oscar dresses up as an old beggar in the streets. We directly see Oscar combing a wig and putting makeup on his face before he act. In the next sequence, he is a motion capture actor who vividly performs a simulated sex with an actress (which once again underlines the digitalized technology in film). The importance of the use of body constantly reappears in the sequences.

In Act II, acting starts to pervade the real life. Act II, the boundary line that differentiates the real world and the cinema fades away. In the fifth and sixth sequence, for example, Oscar "kills" people who look identical to him and Oscar himself also gets "murdered" by others. At the end, however, Oscar returns to the limousine, alive, and gets ready for his next appointment as if nothing happened. When we saw the sequences in Act I, where he assumes the role of a beggar or a motion capture actor, we were fairly certain that what Oscar is doing is “acting”; in other word, it is not real. Now, we are no longer certain if this is real or not. We now recall the first time Oscar we met in Holy Motors. We believed that when he walked out of his house, he was the true version of Oscar. Every role Oscar has appears looks real and unreal at the same time. The act of making distinction between reality and film becomes useless. The prologue of Holy Motors further completes the identification of the real world and the unreal world. Céline drives the limousine to the Holy Motors garage then she places a mask as if she readying herself for a performance. As soon as we believe this eventually might be the end of the fantasy, another fantasy appears. The reality is then inseparable from the cinema, the fantasy.

    Oscar transforms into a different person each time he gets out of his limousine; the limousine is the movie theater, and also the place where film is made. Moreover, at the end of the prologue, the limousines talks to one another, expressing their fears that they may be considered outdated and unwanted. As we hear the discription, "outdated", we might be able to think about the Lumière Brothers’ train. In the 19th century, the screening of a train itsef was an exciting spectacle for the audience. But now, trains are "outdated". They are old, bulky, just as the limousines. Ultimately the limousines represent the one of the earliest cameras, the earliest period of the cinema history. Taking Oscar from one place to another, the whole travel and distance indicates the passage of time in the film industry.

    Through the prologue and epilogue which starts and ends Holy Motors, we realize we are the lifeless audience from the prologue. We also realize life is a mask, a mask is an act, an act is a movement, and movement is the "motor" of cinema, the causation which makes film appear beautiful. Within this interconnection, we find deep awe and beauty. Life is cinema.

The Fall, a Masterpiece you Might have Missed (Sophie)

When I call The Fall, by Tarsem Singh, a fairy tale or a fantasy, I mean that it is this aesthetic, and this story telling mode that propels this masterpiece of a film, not that it should in any way be taken as a lightweight tale for children. In fact, with it's R rating, The Fall, deals with themes and shows vivid imagery that can be troubling or graphic even for some adults. It is a fantasy because it is driven by fantasy and imagination on every level. The story is of one narrative, that of of how a stunt actor, Roy, (Lee Pace), in the face of shattered legs, and dreams of stardom and love, turns his imagination towards creating a second narrative, fueled by his new fantasy of suicide. He tells a tale of an epic journey to a young patient of the same hospital, and in her imagination, the story becomes sprawling landscapes and rich costumes that the film shows the viewer in stunning color. Even the creation of the movie is driven by fantasy. The project, called a "vanity project" on the part of Tarsem Singh by Variety, was filled over four years and across seven countries, always on location rather than adding the surreal and ornate landscape in during editing.

The film is carried in part by these visuals. If there was ever a movie that will suffer on a small cell or tablet screen with poor contrast it is this one. In place of the quick cutting and digitally rendered backgrounds of so many modern films, The Fall opts primarily for long takes of locations the reader recognizes from photographs out of national geographic archives and lists of exotic architecture. All of these locations are put to use, in their rich palettes, complex geometrical patterns, and mind blowing spaces, to create a dreamlike air to the inner narrative. While some viewers might be looking for a film with tighter action and setting, once you buy into Tarsem Singh's different mode of visual story telling, he has a truly mesmerizing world to show you.

Despite these surreal landscapes, this is a fantasy movie that still remains entirely within the genre of realism. Keeping the realm of the majestic inside the imagination rich mind of a five year old girl gives both the inner and outer story an added air of credibility and emotional impact. In fact, the entire movie is told from the point of view of Alexandria, a five year old child of a migrant worker family in the hospital for a badly broken arm. She speaks poor English, and rarely gets visitors, but she is well enough to wander around the grounds. The viewer learns Roy's story (barring a brief introduction scene) only as she sneaks peeks of it around corners, or as she is hurried in or out of rooms. The outside plot, set in a color drained, confined space, could not be more different from the epic tale Roy tells her, but as Alexandria slowly unravels both, they both become tales of intrigue.

As the movie progresses, parts of the two worlds start to combine. Imagery from the hospital finds it's way into Roy's epic story of revenge, and fantasy characters gain the identities of people around the hospital. The reverse is true as well. Roy's story finds it's way into Alexandria's life in the hospital, informing her actions and reactions. Roy, having intended this from the beginning, uses the girl's interest and dedication to the story to have her help in his suicide plot. As both stories near their climax, Alexandria refuses to be a passive observer, and both stories become as much her own as they are anyone else's.

While the stunning visuals are what set this film apart, it is Catinca Untaru's portrayal of Alexandria that allows it survive. Herself a 6 year old Romanian actress, her character is about as genuine and natural as I have ever seen a child in a movie. Her scenes throughout the hospital were film in order on purpose, so that as Untaru's English improved, so did Alexandria's, and as the actress's front teeth grew back in, that, too was incorporated into the script. Alexandria, unlike many children characters, feels real, active, and motivated. Her actions, because they were partly improvised by Untaru, belong genuinely to a girl, struggling to learn English, in a world of adults.

The film ends, with an old film reel of stunts from early silent films, though I will let you find out the emotional impact yourself, to avoid giving away the resolution. Its impact, artistically, is to reinforce that this is a movie about how films have been made, and continue to be made, the choices directors, producers and actors make. It is Tarsem Singh acknowledging that he is fully aware this is not the kind of movie his viewer might be used to, but that each movie is about what can be done weighed against what the crew makes efforts to do, and ultimately, how the audience receives it. It is, at its core, a movie about movie making, and a story about storytelling.

Neckface, Sweet Toof, Cyclops and Swoon: The Banksy Phenomenon (Shauna)

Aside from providing a wealth of beautiful imagery documenting a transient art form subject to weathering, urban renewal, vandalism, and natural decay, Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) provokes a number of questions relevant to the production and consumption of art. Exit unsettles deeply rooted ideas about ownership, authenticity, the creative process and the derivative, as well the aesthetic and monetary value inherent in a piece of work. There is also an undercurrent of anxiety related to whether the film qualifies as documentary. The alien footage, urban landscapes, and candid humanity of the street artists are enthralling and cinematic. But the film retains a level of realism despite its hyperbole. The formal attention to process is quite vivid. Perhaps a narrative framework was imposed on the footage, but the footage itself could not have been contrived.

Art by Swoon. Creative Commons. Photo credit: guero:

 

Perhaps because the universe of the graffiti artist is so foreign to most viewers, we assume Thierry (who later adopts the pseudonym Mr. Brainwash) is sincere, in his words, expressions and affectations. To use his adoring quote of Banksy, we believe that he is “what he represents.” Transparency is indeed critical to Thierry, or so we are told, and we resist the idea that he might be complicit in a falsified documentary. We accept the street art universe as Thierry presents it — through footage of works by Swoon, Sweet Toof, Cyclops, Buffmonster, Neckface, Invader, Fairey and, of course, the iconic Banksy. Yet, there is more than footage to convince us; Thierry’s narrative perpetually asserts and validates his involvement in the scaling of buildings and plastering of billboards, all in an effort to record artists augmenting their landscapes.

If the environments and characters portrayed in Exit are slightly bizarre, that’s acceptable within the film’s logic. For one, the credibility of the street artist depends on his occasional ludicrous display of passion. Secondly, the graffiti artist, working invisibly and at night, symbolizes the unnerving, distorted quality of the urban night landscape. In a moment evocative of Philippe Petit’s climatic walk in Man On Wire (2008), Thierry films himself scaling a Parisian rooftop with Fairey. In that sequence, the total focus of the film is on procedural execution, not of a heist, bank robbery, or murder, but of a subversive act that claims the cityscape for the artist and for the viewer, and repudiates the concept of private ownership. The art contests authority and the status quo, even if its content are not overtly political. For however long it is preserved, the work extends a message to everyone, including the disenfranchised “other.” It upsets the uniformity and organization of the public space.

   Art by Swoon. New North Place, London. Creative Commons. Photo credit: AdversMedia.

 

  Art by Swoon. New Orleans. Creative Commons. Photo credit: Dingler1109.

If Thierry seems slightly “crazy” with his ever-present camera and obsessive need to film everything (“it was unimportant how it was made — it was important what it was”), his apparent authenticity is reinforced by his naiveté, expertly and inadvertently communicated whenever he comes into contact with law enforcement officials. Juxtaposed against Bansky’s cutting wit, these run-ins make Thierry seem all the more credulous. Banksy’s description cuts to the core of Thierry’s weirdness: “So this guy shows up looking like something out of the 1860s, with these, like, huge sideburns sweatin’, telling me he could do anything, he could take me anywhere, he could get me whatever I wanted. He could fix it all up.” In any other context, Thierry’s strong French accent and frequent inversion of idiomatic phrases might push the character too far, into the realm of cliché. But, in the particular world of Swoon, Invader and Neckface, where individuals regularly risk arrest to make a visual statement through installations, stencils, spray paint and drawing, Thierry is convincing.

His distinctiveness infuses potentially banal sequences with a vivid and verbose theatricality. His flamboyant affectations, expressive language, and over-the-top art (all commissioned, mostly “meaningless”) complement Banksy’s reserve, sparse and scathing dialogue, and high quality, purposeful art.

 

Art by Sweet Toof. Regent's Canal, London. Creative Commons. Photo credit: bobaliciouslondon.

 

 

 
Art by Neckface. Creative Commons. Photo credit: urbandata.

Of course, the film challenges us when Thierry violates the “conservative” code practiced by street and studio artists. He bypasses the labor, the training, the education (independent or institutional), and the formation of an identity. Instead, he adopts a vacuous persona (MBW) and transforms himself into a corporate managerial type, delivering orders in lieu of creating work. It’s all the more horrifying because we are led to believe that Thierry wants to emulate and honor Banksy. Thierry becomes totally enamored with material excess, quantity, size and scale. He refinances his home multiple times to rent a large gallery space, which ends up resembling some kind of psychedelic mall. Viewed as a collection, the work is rather grotesque, and viewed individually, the pieces are sophomoric. Banksy’s intermittent commentary provides an analytical critique that is sufficiently cynical without completely undercutting the genuine hilarity of Thierry’s performance and dialogue.

  Art by Banksy. Chalk Farm, London. Creative Commons. Photo credit: Dan Brady.

Thierry qualifies as an odd bird, even by Banksy’s standards. This is remarkable, given some of Banksky’s stunts documented in the film. One iconic sequence reveals Banksy and his accomplices (all rather wary of Thierry) slicing through a London telephone booth and subsequently welding it back together in a newly contorted form. The altered icon communicates a sense of violent assault on the urban space. Yet, the booth is made more beautiful through its reinvention. Though static, it retains the memory of movement and dynamism, visually implying the manipulations that transfigured it. Banksy and his men, wearing official-looking neon work suits and driving a tarp-covered construction vehicle, return the surreal sculpture in a ritualistic procession and then rapidly depart the alley.

The booth provides a grim ambiance, as though the urban alley had just witnessed a violent assault. Yet, strangely, it lacks the broken glass, the jagged edges, and the generally ugly chaos that follows an attack. One Brit in his thirties snaps an image on his camera phone and declares it an effective Banksy “installation.” An older woman smiles, observing, “Someone must be annoyed with BT Telephone!” Their disparate responses suggest the artist’s hesitance to ascribe unequivocal “symbolic” meanings to his work. Banksy would rather provoke discussion than train observers to read the syntax of his visual texts.

Art by Banksy. Park Row, Bristol. Creative Commons. Photo credit: daz smith.

Whether documentary or not, the film is admirable in its subtle complexity. It frames a documentary within a documentary, and refuses to assign moral supremacy to either Thierry or Banksy. Finally, there is the question of whether any of it actually transpired. If Mr. Brainwash had succeeded in promoting his work, his persona, and his legacy prior to creating a single piece of art or selecting any of the works for his show, it leaves us feeling a bit uneasy about individuals’ capacities to judge good work. Towards the end of the film, Bansky laments, “I used to encourage everyone to make art. I don’t do that so much anymore.”

 

Art by Banksy. Brighton. Creative Commons. Photo credit: simonbooth.

 

Art by Banksy. Bristol Council Sexual Health Clinic. Creative Commons. Photo credit: nicesenzatesta.

Appropriating the Artist: One + One/Sympathy for the Devil (Mike)

Looking as though it were finger-painted, the opening intertitle of Godard’s One + One/Sympathy for the Devil reads, “The Stones Rolling;” already Godard has begun to play with language.  The letters E-O-N-E-O-N, or O-N-E-O-N-E in the correct ordering of the band’s name, are highlighted in red.  One + One.  For Godard here One + One is never unified into the end result, the final product.  Instead, One + One is just that, one and one; two individual, separate pieces, together.  In many ways, this will come to define the film, as Godard presents us with two worlds, two separate realities.  The first is a world beyond Godard’s control, the world of the Rolling Stones, as he documents their process of writing and recording their song “Sympathy for the Devil.”   The second is a world the filmmaker does control, the world of film, a sphere of fragmented narratives whose figures act as his ideological mouthpieces.  He doesn’t present us with a single message, a unified ideological, social, or political critique.  Instead, these sections are meant to conflict and clash, to raise more questions than they answer, and, ultimately, to alter and shape how we view the Stones at work. 

In the opening shot, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones sit on the studio floor, guitars in hand, the camera hovering around them slowly (as it does throughout the film).  The song has yet to take shape; it is the creative process in its beginning stage, in its rawest form. Following the rhythm of the guitar, Jagger sing-speaks variations of the same few words of jumbled, even baby-like, rambling.  There are no words, just gibberish.  Language is secondary here (at least at first); we are introduced, first, to sound; pure sound, before there is any meaning assigned to it.  Whereas Godard has too much to say throughout the film, overwhelming us with multiple and conflicting voices and sounds that overlap one another into an incomprehensible noise, Jagger here speaks only gibberish.

Godard cuts from the studio to a London hotel room, where Wiazemsky (who plays Eve Democracy later on in the film) spray paints the words “Hilton” and “Stalin” onto the hotel window, crossing the two at the “t.”  It is a mixing of terms and ideologies that we will see throughout the film.  “Sovietcong.”  “Cinemarxism.”  “Freudemocracy.”  All of them are One + One; conceptual and ideological combinations he never explores specifically, only mentioning them on the walls and streets in spray paint, inviting questions and provoking questions, but ultimately offering no answers.  Over the image, the narrator begins telling us that he’s a Bolivian hiding in a London toilet to escape from the police.  He reads from a pornographic novel (which he calls a “political novel”), replacing the names of the characters with political figures and cultural icons, mixing politics, pornography and pop culture into one philosophical mess.  We are never fully sure what their connection is.  “Raising the toilet lid I could see Elizabeth’s fat white behind on which Lyndon Johnson was projecting an Andy Warhol movie,” the narrator tells us.  Like Jagger’s singing in the beginning, it is gibberish to us.  The narration will continue throughout the film, running over the image of the Stones in the studio.  What is their role in this political, cultural, and pornographic mess?  Could we just as easily substitute Jagger’s name or Richard’s for Johnson’s and Warhol’s?

“Outside Black Novel” reads the second intertitle in red, the acronym “love” spelled out this time in black.  A Black militant sits in a wheel barrel in a junkyard, reading to us about the history of the blues, its roots, its development, and ultimately its appropriation by young Whites and popular culture for White consumption. “Any group of middle class White boys who need a haircut and male hormones can be a pop group.  That’s what pop means,” he tells us.  We cannot help but think of the Stones in the studio from the scene before, and this is Godard’s intention. Originally starting as a skiffle band (a popular but now-neglected subgenre of music popular in Britain in the 1950s, combining blues, roots, and country), drawing on the styles of Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf, the Stones exemplify this appropriation of “Black music” by the White youth culture.

The camera is the unifying force in the film.  It is what connects these fragmented sections together: the Stones, the Black militant group, Eve Democracy, and even the seedy fascist bookstore later on.  It remains consistent in its style throughout, always slow and controlled in its movement, always moving laterally, always circulating back to where it started.  We watch as it hovers throughout the studio, never intruding on the band as they work, drifting around them as an observer (embodying the perspective of the filmmaker himself), capturing the artist and the creative process at work.  We watch as the song evolves from the simple strumming of Jones and primitive mumbling of Jagger into a complex and layered work.  The lyrics begin to take shape, and the guitars from the beginning disappear and are replaced by maracas, congas, and a chorus group.  We watch in real time as the band starts and stops repeatedly, tweaking different sections each time. The song is never the same twice; the instrumentation, rhythm, beat, speed, and Jagger’s lyrics and inflection change each time.  What is significant here, though, is that unlike the other figures and scenes in the film, the Stones, their process and their output, are outside Godard’s control.  The filmmaker here has no real power over them; they are not a mouthpiece for him to convey his ideological questions and theories, at least not directly.  Nor is this necessarily his intention.  Instead, he works to control everything around them, to place them within a context that he creates.

In filming the artist at work, the artist and his or her creative process come to serve different functions for this filmmaker.  For Clouzot and Parreno and Gordon, the artist is a mystery to be unraveled, a hieroglyphic to be deciphered, and yet in filming them we inevitably realize we can’t ever fully know what drives them creatively.  What, though, is Godard’s interest in capturing the Stones at work here?  What does he hope to learn from filming them?  The song itself would seemingly fit with Godard’s own political position; it is an anti-establishment statement that would come to define 60s youth, highlighting atrocities of the past and present (the Holocaust, the Kennedy assassinations, and the 100 years war) as a way to signify their own break with the generations before them.  And yet Godard here is not interested in (or at least he’s not focused on) that.  His interest instead lies in what the Stones represent and to what their creative process tends. This is a study in control: in its creation and its limits.  The limit of creative control, Godard seems to suggest, is at base in its commerciality.  Although “Sympathy for the Devil” became an anthem of the 1960s counterculture, it is also simultaneously a cultural product that is to be commodified and commercialized, bought and sold by record companies and corporations to the masses.  By placing them in the context of the Black Panthers and Eve Democracy, juxtaposing scenes of the Stones in the studio with these other fragmented narratives, we are forced to understand The Stones in a different way.  We must re-examine and re-contextualize them within a larger social, economic, and cultural frame; and in doing so, Godard is questioning not the art itself, not its content, but instead what the art and the artist are used for, how they are to be packaged and consumed.  We come to view them less as artists and more as appropriators and as tools and products.  And by placing them within this context, Godard ultimately exerts his authority as the filmmaker over the band, seizing control from them and placing it back into his hands.

A Dancer's World (Mike)

A Dancer’s World, the first of Peter Glushanok’s three films on Martha Graham, cuts from the title screen of Graham’s company, standing in the dressing room stretching, to three figurines.  The figurine to the right is a dancer, its left leg raised and turned upwards at an impossible ninety-degree angle, with a third arm stretching out from its faceless head.  Next to it, on its left, is a small stone sculpture of an arm, raised on a pedestal, its hand held up like a dancer’s.  To the left of the arm is another figure of a dancer, this time standing with its feet crossed, its back arched slightly, its hands held out in front of it.  Like these three, Glushanok’s film will present us with its own representation of dance, a new, cinematic examination and experience of the medium and of one of its seminal figures.  We do not see her at first, though, only the faint shadow of her on the dressing partition behind the statues.  Over the image, her voiceover begins.  It is controlled, composed, and authoritative, speaking to us almost as a higher power.  “The theatre is a very special place,” she tells us.  “It is where the act of theatre begins.”  The camera is drawn to her here, moving upwards at the sound of her voice, floating slowly towards her shadow on the right and eventually landing on Graham herself, sitting in front of the dressing room mirror.

 

Glushanok’s film doesn’t focus on Graham’s past, who she is and why she’s significant.  Nor does it ever show Graham herself dancing, creating or choreographing a piece, or instructing her company.  Instead, we see her in the theatre dressing room as she applies her make-up and prepares her hair for her role as Jocasta.  Whereas others might pass it off simply as a place to prepare for the show, an interim space between the studio and stage, the dressing room, for Graham, is an integral part of the dancer’s world; it is where the dancer becomes the character she is to play. This transformation is, on one level, physical.  “Make-up,” she says, “is a magic.  It’s a ritual.  It’s the means by which you transform yourself into the character you hope to play.”  But the change is not only external for her, not only the way she styles her hair or the costume she puts on, but internal as well.  As Graham tells us, there comes a moment in which she looks into the mirror and the character looks back at her, recognizing the reflection not as Martha Graham, but as the character herself.  It is through her that her character and her character’s “hopes, fears, love and terror,” will be expressed.

 It is through dance, through how Graham communicates her character, though, that differentiates her as an artist; and yet Glushanok never shows her at work.  We never actually see her on stage or in the studio.  She is presented here not as a dancer or chorographer, but as an actress (both an actress for the stage and within Glushanok’s film).  The image of Graham at the mirror changes and we are brought out of the world of the dressing room and into the studio.  The stark setting, the plain white walls and wood floor, stands in contrast to the cluttered dressing room from before.  From this point on, the film will alternate between the two, with Graham in one, explicating and expounding her artistic philosophies that drive and shape her work, and her company in the other, illustrating the different techniques that define her style: the awareness of the head and throat, the attention on flexibility and control, the mastery of the turn of the body on its axis, the focus on contracting and releasing the breath.  Glushanok and Graham thus provide us with the tools, the raw materials with which she can construct a narrative, but not with the vocabulary of meanings attached to them, nor with the final product or narrative to be interpreted.

 Graham controls these two worlds.  She dictates the action, blocking, dances, dancers, uniforms, and setting.  The mise-en-scene belongs to her.  There is thus a certain struggle here, an inherent tension in the balance of power between Graham as both subject and actress and Glushanok as the filmmaker.  He exercises his own authority over the film, though.  The mise-en-scene may be that of Graham, but the frame is not.  We view the dancers here as Glushanok, not Graham, wants us to view them.  In the first shot of the studio, the camera follows a dancer as she enters the studio and moves across the floor; like her, it is mobile, controlled yet fluid, moving freely throughout the room.  It is its own entity, separate from Graham, elaborating what she says but presenting us with its own perspective, its own point of view. 

The filmmaker inherently imposes himself here, and by filming the dances our experience of them is different than if we were to view them in the theatre.  Dance is a medium without cuts and without close-ups.  Editing and cinematography create their own rhythm that is both intrinsically connected to and separate from the action.  The shifting angles and distances, the movement of the camera, and the length of the shots have their own beat, tempo, and pace that gives us a different emotional response.  Halfway through the film, we watch as two dancers express “youth’s lyric joy and sadness at being in love for the first time.”  It’s a light, energetic dance, captured at first through a long shot, with the two dancers making up only a small portion of the frame, their bodies and the studio in full view.  29 seconds in, though, our experience changes.  Glushanok cuts from the long shot to a medium of the two, the man standing behind the woman, holding her arms as she raises them above her, their eyes locked. There is an emotional shift here as their figures become bigger within the frame, the world around them smaller.  A stronger intimacy and spark between the characters is established, and we feel a new connection with them.  Glushanok gives a new power and significance to the moment between them. The electricity of the live performance is lost on screen, but it’s replaced by a new way to view and experience the work, by a new and different language with which the narrative and characters can be expressed and captured.  The world within the frame may be a dancer's, but our experience is something new entirely; and one that is as reliant on Glushanok as it is on Graham.

 

The Painted Screen: Le mystére Picasso, The Mystery of Picasso, The Picasso Mystery (Mike)

“We’d love to know the secret process guiding the creator through his perilous adventures.”– Henri-Georges Clouzot, Le Mystére Picasso (1956)

Picasso, seated shirtless in the studio, stares at the easel opposite him (its back turned to us), a rare moment in which the figure of the artist is shown.  Two paintings hang on a wood partition to his left, positioned between the artist and his canvas.  As Picasso stands and approaches the partition, Clouzot cuts to the painter examining his work, his eyes staring intently, matador-like, before cutting to the works themselves.  Even without the filmmaker’s voiceover, his question, his underlying conundrum is stated clearly in these opening three shots.  There is the artist and there is his completed work; what, though, was his process in making them, what was his “secret” method?  In the 75 minutes that follow Clouzot will challenge his viewer to examine this question, to try and understand the artist not through his biography, past work, or what he says about himself, but instead through what he creates before us.

Clouzot cuts to the easel, the blank canvas standing out in the shadows of the studio.  A cloud of smoke is blown from the right into the frame, an introduction to the painter as he approaches the paper.  Picasso doesn’t pause or wait to examine the canvas as he did before with the previous two, but instead begins drawing immediately.  We don’t see him put the pen to paper, though, as Clouzot cuts from the wide angle of the artist and easel to a close-up of the canvas.  Picasso’s hand moves across the paper, sketching a cartoon-like face with a dove behind it.  The filmmaker then cuts to the shadowed face of the artist and back again to the paper.  It is only after he’s finished drawing that Picasso steps back to examine his work.  The artist and canvas are separated here.  It is the hand that connects them; and it is through the hand, as Clouzot states in voiceover, that we can see and experience “what’s going through [his] mind.”  Although this here is made as a statement, it seems as though the filmmaker is inherently asking whether we can ever truly know the inner dynamics that drive the artist’s work.

Clouzot narrates over these opening shots that we can only wonder what Rimbaud was thinking when he wrote “The Drunken Boat,” or Mozart when he composed his symphony “Jupiter.”  What were their secret processes?  Painting, Clouzot says, is different in that it allows us to follow the artist’s hand at work.  By mounting the camera on a frame behind a semi-translucent piece of canvas, Clouzot is able to make the figure of Picasso (and thus his hand) disappear, leaving only the lines, colors (the only instances of color in the film.  All the shots of Picasso and Clouzot in the studio are filmed in black and white), and figures that he paints visible to the audience.  Image is layered over image, constantly changing and transforming.  Characters are drawn, altered, erased, redrawn, erased again, and redrawn again.  Clouzot here raises a question of medium.  As he states in the film, “what is impossible to know for poetry and music is not the case for painting.”  It is difficult to know whether Clouzot is intentionally elliptical here or not.  What is it that separates the painter from the poet or musician?  Couldn’t we just as easily follow the artistic processes of music and poetry as with painting?  It is film, as a medium, that stands apart here then.  It is film, with its unique temporality that makes it possible for us to view the artist at work.  Like Picasso who paints himself painting in the studio throughout the film, Clouzot films himself filming the painter in the studio.  The Mystery of Picasso thus has as much to do with the medium of film as it does with painting; it is a film that exemplifies Clouzot’s skills as a filmmaker as much as it does Picasso’s as a painter.

In Clouzot’s earlier film The Wages of Fear (1953), four men must drive two trucks of nitroglycerine 300 miles from Las Piedras over mountainous roads in South America.  Over the course of the film, Clouzot (often referred to as the French Hitchcock) creates one of the most intense experiences in cinematic history.  There is an undercurrent of suspense and tension in The Mystery of Picasso as well.  The drama here, though, comes from the creation and transformation of the images, their construction and deconstruction, from imagining what will appear next, from watching the scene as it unfolds. The subject matter of many of these is deeply personal for the painter, as Picasso often portrays himself and his friends and inspirations (Matisse, Delacroix, and Miró and his then lover Jacqueline)[1].  Like a film, these works tell stories, they employ a cinematic narrative; they have settings and situations, characters and relationships that grow, change and develop.

By filming Picasso in process, Clouzot forces us to establish a complex relationship with these paintings.  Our emotions are manipulated as the artist blots out large sections he’s meticulously crafted or repetitively tinkers with a face, shape, or detail over and over again.  By watching the artist work, layering figures, colors, and new designs on top of each other and weaving them seamlessly together, the images become inextricable from one another.  As viewers, we’re unable to look at the final product without seeing the series of transformations and changes that went into creating it.  We can hate the image one minute, love it the next, hate it again, and be ultimately left unsure of how to feel.

But what is the value of seeing these works transform and unfold, what is our fascination with the process?  Is there the hope that by watching Picasso work we will somehow unravel what pushes him, what drives him creatively, artistically, or intellectually?  Clouzot creates a “documentary” on Picasso in process in order to reveal to the viewer the inner dynamics that compel his work.  But while it shows us the transformative stages and evolution his paintings undergo, does it ever truly reveal anything about the artist himself?  As Clouzot leads us to believe (and as the film’s title would suggest), the artist is a mystery, something to be to solved or unraveled.  And yet, is the real Picasso revealed here through his work, or is he simply putting on a show for the viewer.  Even by the end of the film, we are still left wondering, who is Picasso?  Is he a performer, a showman?  Is he the creative genius we expect him to be?  To a certain extent, Clouzot is right; we can follow what the painter is thinking through his hand.  The creation and evolution of these images give us a momentary glimpse into the artist’s mind, and through filming the transformation of the image Clouzot allows us to see what Picasso sees, experience what Picasso experiences.  But by allowing us to follow Picasso’s hand as he works, Clouzot is ultimately showing us that we cannot solve the mystery of the artist, especially in the case of Picasso.  The painter’s secret process is not simply how his works transform on the canvas, but instead what happens internally, the psychologically charged creative forces that drive his hand.  Clouzot’s true focus in the film then is not simply in unraveling the process behind the artist’s work to better understand him, but instead to raise a certain deeper question of media.

What is this final product, what is the medium here?  Does Clouzot transform the screen into a canvas or the canvas into a screen?  Is this painting, is it film?  Is it animation, or maybe a medium in between?  Clouzot doesn’t necessarily create something entirely new; the photographer Hans Namuth had worked on a similar project with Jackson Pollock previously in 1951.  But where as Namuth’s film focuses only on Pollock’s process of working, Clouzot moves further by creating something that challenges us to define it, that pushes us to respond to a work of art in a different way.  The Mystery of Picasso is, in the literal sense, painting filmed.  And yet by turning the dimensions of the screen into the canvas we are no longer able to view the film as we would a typical narrative or documentary; our approach and response is inherently different.  We’re driven to look at and consider these works as paintings as well, and yet somehow we can’t.  The temporality of film changes our experience with them; by seeing how they transform and evolve, we’re unable to look at them as if they were hanging on a wall.

Currently Watching: The Wages of Fear (Clouzot, 1953), The Class (Cantet, 2009), Moon (Jones, 2009), Sugar (Boden and Fleck, 2008), In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000), Bio-Dome (Bloom, 1996), The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2009), Breaking Away (Yates, 1979), Gomorrah (Garrone, 2009), The New World (Malick, 2005), The Pest (Miller, 1997), Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009), The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 2009)

 

 

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[1] Archie Rand, painter and professor of Art at Columbia University

Havana, Lisbon and Wim Wenders (Shauna)

It is in an incredible risk to create a film about the struggle of making a film.  A movie partly devoted to the study of sound, not only the production of music by trained vocalists and musicians, but the accumulation of everyday noises by a man with a boom mic seems equally ambitious.  For anyone else, the results might be forced and superficial, but Wim Wenders' products are at once astounding and spontaneous.  Both in Lisbon Story and Buena Vista Social Club, Wenders seamlessly integrates the passionate, fatal and trivial aspects of cinema and musical performance.  Whether staged or improvised his narratives never veer into the dreadful realm of predictability.  It is through his profound sensitivity to place, reflected in the local musical and chromatic vibrancy of Cuba in Buena Vista, and the hybrid medieval-industrialized Lisbon basking in Mediterranean light, that the questions of art, music and cinema are raised.  He grounds the two films so authentically in their locales that we eagerly embrace the topics of music and movie-making.

Wenders is not interested in strictly replicating the structure, lighting, energy and mood of the two respective cities, though he masterfully captures the form and atmosphere of each urban place.  He goes beyond simply conveying the essence of a city as an entity: he suggests the emotional sentiments a city might elicit and characterizes the bond between his characters and their environments.  The crosscut is used particularly effectively in Buena Vista to create a coherent portrait of an intimate cast of characters who retain their mannerisms, humor, technical skill, wit and dignity whether at home or on the stage, whether in Cuba, Amsterdam, or New York.  A specific building, street, figure or piece of debris might trigger the memory of another place or time, but Wenders plays visually with nostalgia in such a way that he avoids overt sentimentalism. 

 

Guitarist Ochoa Bustamante (left) and vocalist/guitarist Compay Segundo. Creative Commons, by Hiabba (2008). http://search.creativecommons.org/

Most of the emotional responses and dynamics between character and place are sufficiently subtle to require full attention and multiple viewings.  In Buena Vista, a group of elderly Cuban male musicians and one female vocalist come together to record and perform the nation's provincial and popular music.  They are musicians who have been forgotten or fazed out -- some had abandoned their instruments for a decade or more -- but performers endowed with a striking vitality, humanity and appreciation for their Caribbean culture.  Working with Ry Cooder, Wenders captures the centrality of music to their lives: in the studio, on the streets, in ornate pre-Revolution gambling houses and in abandoned bars.  Rhythm is inescapable, permeating all aspects of life.  Wenders recognizes that the discovery of a culture and locale so inherently bound to music constitutes something refreshing and unique.  Particularly from the European or American perspective, he acknowledged in the commentary, we tend to think of music as a separate entity, something we listen to for a duration and then set aside.  We occasionally go to concerts, listen to the radio or improvise, but these are less integral elements in the fabric of life than they are exceptional circumstances.  In contrast, Cubans constantly discover, produce and collaborate in formal and informal musical exchanges. 

 

Extreme Right: Trumpet player Manuel Mirabal Vázquez. Creative Commons, by Moyo Taxiguerrilla (2006).

One of the film's most revealing sequences occurs when singer Omara Portuondo, clad in a bold print dress, strolls down the street of her old neighborhood amid residents standing on the curbs and in front of dilapidated buildings.  As she wanders through the street, Portuondo sings, partly to herself and partly offering an impromptu performance to the audience that has gathered for her.  One woman of African descent joins her in song, invoking their common career experience and suggesting Cuba's ethnoracial heterogeneity.  During the commentary, Wenders emphasized that the neighborhood promenade scene unfolded spontaneously, a fact that is at first difficult to believe.  The individuals who gather to hear Portuondo balance reverence with anonymity.  They convey interest and desire to hear her voice, yet maintain relative nonchalance and refrain from pressuring or bombarding their locale celebrity.  Their expressions also appear unaffected by the presence of the camera.  The audience embodies civility and appreciation, without the self-consciousness or egotism that often accompanies the presence of a camera.  Indeed, as Wenders asserted, there is nothing "fake" about the people of Cuba. 

Interestingly, the concept of cinematic authenticity is a motif that recurs in Lisbon Story.  Towards the conclusion of the film, the mysterious German filmmaker Frederick challenges the very act of movie-making.  In his diatribe with his sound recorder he equates "Pointing a camera" with "pointing a weapon" and reflects, "...Every time I pointed at something, I had the feeling of depriving things of their life."  The very presence of the camera changes the subject, and the very eye of the cinematographer distorts it even further.  That is Frederick's unhappy conclusion, anyway.  The only way to escape these limitations is to capture figures without their knowledge or consent and without the corrupting influence of the filmmaker's own eye.  Frederick fashions plastic shopping bags, small backpacks and garbage cans into vessels for hidden cameras.  The flimsy blue plastic shopping bag seems appropriated directly from Buena Vista, where it also functioned as a vehicle, but one holding sacred visual elements from the past, rather than illicitly capturing unknown moments in the present. Cuban pianist Rubén González's uses a blue plastic bag to transport photographs of himself and other musicians at the height of their careers.  Against his characteristic orange zigzag button down, Rubén's insubstantial bag of treasured images intimates the pervasiveness of Cuban poverty, but also visually encapsulates Cuban values of relationships, authenticity and meaning in images and lyrics.  Armed only with a minimal plastic shopping bag, Rubén manages to protect the photographs from any blemish, indentation or tear.

 

Bassist Orland Lopez "Cachaito." Creative Commons, by Volume12 (2008).

Visual parallels between the two films run far more deeply than mere recurrent props.  In fact, Wenders captures environmental structures and geographies with suggestive doubles in Havana and Lisbon.  Train tracks function as one structural motif and symbol of transport, change, interconnectedness and, paradoxically, divisiveness.  In Buena Vista Social Club, Ochoa Bustamante sings and plays his guitar with a provincial folksiness as he walks towards the steady cam, following the tracks.  In Lisbon, the pace of life around the tracks is slightly more frantic and mechanized.  Trolley tracks in Lisbon Story help propel the protagonist Winter towards the mysterious child employed by Frederick.  Other analogues to the Lisbon trolleys are the putrid green and pink buses imported from the Soviet Union, seeming anachronisms that are actually critical to Havana's contemporary transport infrastructure.   

Wenders grapples with the environmental opposition between old and new in both films, and plays extensively with boundaries.  Boundaries may be physical thresholds, such as the coastal waters crashing against Havana's highways, or may exist in space and time, as with the cross cuts between the group's performance in Amsterdam and their work in the Cuban recording studio weeks earlier.  Diegetic sound bridges across these cuts (Silencio, sung by Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo) lend a sense of continuity to an editing technique that might otherwise create temporal confusion. 

In both films, cinematography works to suggest navigation and exploration.  It evokes another breed of tension, this time between familiarity and newness.  The mobile camera ventures through the streets of Havana and Lisbon in a series of long takes that capture not only the neighborhood architecture and lighting, but the residents' attitudes and body language.  Wenders relied fully on the mobile cam and two heavier cameras with tripods (no tracking or dolleying), and the subtle irregularities in camera stability humanize the framing.  We are somewhat conscious of the street venturer recording the sights.  He is not a blatant tourist, but rather a selective observer, an outsider who also experiences a sense of connection with the new city.  In Lisbon Story, Winter embodies that "outsider."  En route to Lisbon, he listens to a Portuguese language cassette and struggles to replicate comical phrases.  Yet, although certain cultural and linguistic aspects of life in Lisbon are quite foreign, other elements -- like the exotic voice of Madredeus (Teresa Salgueiro) -- exist independent of national bounds and deeply resound with Winter.  A similar tension arises in Buena Vista Social Club, when the members of the band arrive in New York City for the first time.  In souvenir shops, the musicians recognize certain bobble-heads (Charlie Chaplin, for instance), but struggle and fail to name others (Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy).  By including such sequences detailing cultural connections and deviations, the director reveals something about himself.  Wenders has thoroughly established himself as an international figure in cinema.  Yet, he too must experience the strange, exciting imbalance that comes from traveling: the alien and unsettling juxtaposed with the familiar and universal.  And this opposition is what makes his local environments so vivid, so authentic and so approachable, regardless of a viewer's experiences or background.

Against the Odds - Chris & Don: A Love Story (Carlos)

You could argue that “Chris & Don: A Love Story” is a documentary about two gay men who serendipitously meet and fall in love. You could also say that it's about a thirty-plus year relationship between two individuals thirty years of age apart. It's also about an acclaimed and accomplished novelist who takes a young lover under his wing and inspires him to become a prolific portrait artist. The filmmakers contend that these aspects, while relevant, are merely incidental: the documentary at its core is a moving story about two people who felt an ineffable connection to one another and fell madly in love, and a lot of good can come from just that.

British author Christopher Isherwood (The Berlin Stories) meets 18-year-old LA-native Don Bachardy at a Santa Monica beach on Valentine's Day 1953. He and Chris hit it off with a bang: their clumsy first kiss smashed a glass window. This event was the start of an unconventional thirty-four year relationship between two openly gay men embedded in Hollywood society at a time where such a thing was strictly taboo. 

 

Don Bachardy recalls the early years as ecstasy. Despite the jeers and homophobic remarks from such people as actor Joseph Cotton, who regarded Chris and Don as "half-men" (never to Chris's face, of course), the electric couple was blissfully happy, each man confessing that they'd finally felt complete. Don explains that although he was born and bred in California, he began to develop a British accent and a heightened tone of speaking, as a result of spending so much time with Chris during those years. He likened himself to a chameleon, unconsciously mimicking his lover, idol, and father figure. As the documentary states, Don had successfully cloned himself... "In some weird way." 

 

“Chris & Don” is peppered with enriching anecdotes, of both the relevant and extraneous sort. One of the more memorable stories involves Bachardy's first encounter with hashish on a trip to Morocco with Isherwood. The drug doesn't sit well with him and he spends the rest of the night in a state of horrific paranoia. Curled up in bed, Chris holds and comforts Don throughout the night. Filmmakers Guido Santi and Tina Mascara have chosen all the right events to recount. Moments like these are particularly poignant in that they illustrate a truly affectionate and unconditional romance between two men who care deeply for one another. 

 

What make the film a treat to watch are the featured clips of home movies captured by Chris and Don themselves. The 16mm color film footage is vibrant and pristine -- without any evidence of deterioration or discoloration. It looked as though it could have been shot yesterday. After the screening the directors concurred it was miracle the footage had survived all this time. Don had "stored" them for years at room temperature, in the living room cabinet, facing the ocean. The footage documents the couple passing time with friends and traveling together, giving all the talk about a loyal and loving relationship weight and texture. Also interwoven are animated sequences reflecting Chris’s and Don's correspondences in which each was assigned a symbolic animal: a horse and a kitten, respectfully. Over these sequences we hear their letters spoken. What first appears to be a silly and playful exercise develops into a device demonstrating stalwart devotion and mutual respect, introducing a dimension of tenderness that continues to resonate throughout the length of the film. 

 

A brilliant and thoughtful move by the filmmakers was their approach to documenting Isherwood's passing. Stricken with prostate cancer, the last months of Chris's life were tough on the couple. Don stayed very close and tended to Chris's every need. He continued to sketch portraits of Chris until his dying day -- sometimes up to nine or ten drawings a day. Over Don's narration, the documentary runs through these intimate portraits and the result is incredibly moving. Don asserts that as an artist he cannot help but identify with his subjects, and in Chris's case Don was dying alongside him. 

 

Always in the shadow of his accomplished significant other, it was very difficult for Don Bachardy during the early years of their relationship. It was only until Don established himself as a gifted portrait artist that he was able to overcome this stigma. The tail end of the film documents Don's prolific artistic career, which was spurred by Chris's insistence that he attend art school. Even today, at 74 Don continues to paint and sketch portraits, most notably of celebrities and other painters. It's clear Don's talent is all his own; the filmmakers confirm for any lingering doubters that “Chris & Don” is a story about not one, but two extraordinary men in their own right. 

 

“Chris & Don” for others may be about two gay men triumphing over constraining societal conventions, but for me it stands well enough as a touching love story that craftily and elegantly pulls at the heart strings and convinces viewers to acknowledge, quite persuasively, that love can happen between anyone, and if you give it your all it gives back plenty.

 

"Chris & Don: A Love Story" (2007). 90 minutes. Directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara

Painting & Film: The Work of Salvador Dali (Daniel)

    Painting and film have always been intimately intertwined.  Many painters, most notably, Leonardo da Vinci and Jan Vermeer, were acquainted with the camera obscura, a sort of proto-camera used by many artists for meticulous image analysis.  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of Impressionism’s founding fathers, also begot Jean Renoir, the towering auteur behind films like The Grand Illusion (RAC, 1937) and The Rules of the Game (Nouvelle edition française, 1939), both of which have been counted among the greatest films ever made.  Andy Warhol, one of modern art’s most iconic figures, dabbled in cinema for a significant portion of his career, adding over sixty films to his name.  But beyond these somewhat gimmicky parallels, painting and film are fundamentally united as visual media.  They are different dialects of a shared aesthetic language.  Painting has informed nearly every film with which I’m familiar, or at least every film with a sophisticated cinematographic approach.  It is a fundamental, and what’s more, inextricable part of all visual culture.  There is Rembrandt van Rijn in The Godfather (Paramount Pictures, 1972) and its chiaroscuro lighting, there is Andrew Wyeth in Days of Heaven (Paramount Pictures, 1978) and its pastoral vistas, there is Edward Hopper in Dark City (New Line Cinema, 1998) and it’s urban nightmares; there is paint behind every frame of celluloid. (Plow, Spring 2008)
    This past summer, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art celebrated the synergy between painting and film with an exhibition devoted to the cinematic endeavors of Salvador Dali.  Dali dabbled in film for over thirty years, writing and directing with a flare found only in art’s most outrageous practitioners.  In 1929, together with Luis Buñuel, Dali set out to make Un Chien Andalou (Billancourt studios), a film now considered to be the touchstone of surrealist cinema.  At the time, Dali, and many surrealists like him, had become disillusioned by art and all it had come to represent.  Dali was disgusted with conventional conceptions of beauty, with anything that smacked of aestheticism.  Art had fixated on that which was pleasing to the eye, failing to do what it did best: reveal in stunning fashion the truth and beauty of experience.  So Dali fell on film as a weapon in the war against art.  Film, because of its uniquely revelatory properties, was to be Dali’s “anti-art,” Dali’s medium for change, his Barack Obama, if you will.  Thus, Un Chien Andalou was a film on a mission.  The mission: to shatter art at its core, to shake the very foundations of beauty.  But Dali was a shrewd warrior, an artist unwilling to fight such a momentous battle from a single front.  Dali’s offensive can be seen in all his paintings from this period.  These paintings hover over all of Un Chien Andalou just as Un Chien hovers over all of them in turn.  The two share a sort of whispered dialogue, a dialogue that exemplifies the give and take painting and film have enjoyed since the latter’s inception.
    Un Chien Andalou’s most famous sequence, its opening sequence, is perhaps the closest the film comes to metaphor, or allegorizing of any kind.  In this scene, Simone Mareuil’s eye is seemingly sliced in two by a sharp, shiny razor.  This shocking, brutal image serves as our induction into Dali’s world.  For Dali, the eye represented everything he was trying to debunk: the mind’s constant, tedious effort to make sense of the sensual world and the eye’s constant and equally tedious thirst for visual pleasure.  Dali would not subject himself to the eye of the viewer.  He would not make things make sense, nor would he make things look pretty.  Dali chose to shock and challenge his audience rather than cater to their expectations.  In fact, the cutting of the eye, alludes to a particular mode of Dalinian agitation: the body as object.  Throughout Un Chien Andalou and many of Dali’s contemporary paintings, the human body is degraded and defiled to the point of total objectification.
    At one point in the film, Pierre Batcheff gazes thoughtfully at his hand as a swarm of ants scurry forth from a hole at the center of his palm.  This sort of ant-orifice image was something that haunted and inspired Dali for most of his life, and, like melting clocks, became an essential part of his artistic signature.  It is a symbol that appears in Dali’s First Days of Spring (Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg) and his Accommodations of Desire (Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation/ARS, New York), both of which were painted around the time of the film’s debut.  Dali harnessed the body for its ability to astonish.  That jolt of revulsion, that was the lightning Dali used to rouse his viewers from their aesthetic slumber.  It was a jolt that went especially well with the cinema, with the meticulous, visceral eye of the camera.  Film rendered the human form in a way no other medium could.  Film had a kind of ocular exactitude that made any assault on the body all the more horrifying.
    Jan Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (Musée du Louvre, Paris) was a painting that fascinated Dali for its focus on objects.  Dali believed that even the most mundane objects should be recognized for their transcendent poetry.  He loved Vermeer for the quiet way he would weave magic into a pillow or whispers into a book.  Dali nods to Vermeer and his emphasis on the overlooked in Un Chien Andalou.  When Simone Mareuil throws down her copy of the The Lacemaker, Dali signifies his commitment to the task of object elevation.  Simone herself seems bent on bringing objects to life.  In one scene, she lays out Batcheff’s eccentric outfit as if to call him forth from his clothing.  His tie, shirt and petticoat are all arranged in the form his body would take should he be somehow conjured into his clothing.  It’s as if objects have a soul that can be summoned under the right conditions.  Sure enough, in the next shot of the bed, Batcheff lies there fully clothed.  His position seems to suggest that he has indeed materialized to fill the sartorial outline.  Thus, for Dali, objects boasted a sort of anthropomorphic poetry.
    “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”  The surrealist slogan hails from Le Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror), a poetic novel lauded by surrealists as one of the signal precursors to the movement.  The phrase encapsulates much of the punch behind surrealist imagery: the discordant, arbitrary juxtaposition of objects.  One can see this sort of emphasis on objects and their “chance encounter” in Dali’s Study for Honey is Sweeter Than Blood (Private Collection).  The putrefying donkey, the dismembered body, the needle-like figures in the background, all are arranged as anecdotes amid a severely disjointed composition.  Dali lets each object tell its own story.  The donkey, the body, the needles, each image has its own sense of visual autonomy.  But it is their arrangement that gives the painting its energy.  It is the way these objects have been thrown together, the way they have been given a sort of miscellaneous unity.  It is their chance encounter on a canvas that is so compelling.
    Dali made use of this chance encounter in Un Chien Andalou.  In one stunning sequence, Batcheff advances upon Mareuil.  Straining against the weight of two grand pianos, Batcheff dutifully drags them both across the room to reach her.  Donkeys lie rotting atop each piano’s lid while two clerics (one of them Dali himself) slide along their backs underneath.  Again, the image resonates with Lautréamont and his sewing machine.  The pianos, the donkeys, the clerics, simply stringing the words together evokes something of what Dali was trying to accomplish
    The paranoid-critical method was perhaps Dali’s most important contribution to Surrealism.  The method was an artistic technique built around man’s paranoid tendency to detect causal relationships between unrelated stimuli. Dali went about provoking these sorts of delusions by embedding double-images into many of his works.  Offering up two images, Dali left the viewer locked in a maze of interpretive contradictions. Dali’s Invisible Man (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid) exemplifies the paranoid-critical method in its depiction of a figure embedded into, and comprised of, his surroundings.  The viewer perceives the invisible man and yet cannot shake off the feeling that he might merely be the figment of an addled imagination.  The composition is so fluid that one can’t really tell where one figure ends and the other begins.  All the images seem to bleed into one another, creating a morass of overlapping ambiguities.
    Dali found an even greater fluidity in film and its ability to literally lay one image upon another.  In Un Chien Andalou’s most famous dissolve we are taken from Pierre Batcheff’s ant-ridden hand, to his spindly armpit hair, to a spiky sea urchin, and finally, to a severed hand rolling about in the street.  This procession of discordant images perfectly expresses the paranoid-critical aesthetic and its ability to encourage hallucinatory associations.  Batcheff’s hair and the spiny sea urchin are in no way connected to one another.  They are not linked by any sort of narrative cause and effect, nor do they share any inherent or symbolic properties.  They merely suggest one another; they have strong visual associations without sharing any sort of causal connection.  This may be the paranoid-critical aesthetic in a nutshell.  Thus, again we can see strong stylistic parallels between Un Chien Andalou and the paintings Dali did during the same period.
    Painting and film have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship.  The two are simply different windows into the same sort of mimesis.  Salvador Dali exemplifies this brotherhood as a surrealist who straddled the line between both media, dipping into one or the other at will.  Dali was a great painter and a great filmmaker.  But above all, he was a great artist, and that is what matters most.

Bibliography

Gale, Matthew, ed. Dali & Film. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2007. 06-238.

Plow, Brian. Lectures on lighting and cinematography. 061.348, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, Spring 2008