Moving Target

“Perhaps we should see this literature of crime, which proliferated around a few exemplary figures, neither as a spontaneous form of ‘popular expression,’ nor as a concerted programme of propaganda and moralization from above; it was a locus in which the two investments of penal practice met—a sort of battleground around the crime, its punishment and its memory.”

That’s Foucault from Discipline and Punish, though the passage serves as a pretty fair exegesis of Michael Mann’s latest firefight, Public Enemies. “Battleground” is especially apropos, as Mann’s film, like Soderbergh’s Che, sloughs off the psychodrama spadework of the biopic for structuralist combat—Babyface Nelson’s hideout in the woods especially looking like  a set stolen from some earlier WWII movie. Mann thankfully dials down his usual mythic equation of cops and robbers here—it’s there, certainly, but like the film’s romance, flitting historical context (J. Edgar Hoover gassing up his paranoid policy of retribution for the more insidious witch-hunt to come), period touches, and everything else that makes this a Hollywood snore, it’s way down in the mix, smeared by the digital night.

It is interesting, given the money involved, that Mann chooses to violate the sepia nostalgia of the period process with an incongruously modern visual style. Gordon Willis’s cinematography in The Godfather cast gangsters as Renaissance angels etched in light; Mann’s makes John Dillinger look like Johnny Depp caught by aesthete paparazzi. Gordon’s compositions are frescoes; Mann’s are moving targets. A small scene, like the one in which Dillinger first takes Billie out to dinner in a fancy restaurant, scrambles familiar conventions of establishing shots and shot-reverse-shot. They’re there too, like the overarching structural motifs, but shouted down by a rapid exchange of handheld close-ups—it’s reality TV squared, with a surplus of visual information and energy ricocheting within an enervating story of forestalled death.

Every subsequent American generation has subjected the romance of the Depression outlaw to its own prides and prejudices; most of these revisions are guileless, but a few are formally strong enough to furnish a fork in the road to nowhere (Badlands and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska make a natural pair). In almost all of these works, there is some code of realism used to position this telling of the story as the authentic article. Whether it’s provided by Bruce’s stark 4-track hiss (all the more striking for coming between mega-albums The River and Born in the U.S.A.) or Arthur Penn’s ropes of blood, N.W.A.’s unapologetic profanity or Truman Capote’s solemn reportage, this realism is as constant as is it contradictory.

Mann stretches some of our current visual codes of realism to their representational limits, but he also looks on the Dillinger saga as one comprised of competing fictions. Everyone in the movie agrees Dillinger is in the public domain, but as Foucault indicates, there’s disagreement about who the icon belongs to. Dillinger’s own view of himself, as an early pop star who does what his fans wish they could, cuts against Hoover’s view of him as a wound and a trophy (in a supremely unironic gesture of power, Hoover displayed Dillinger’s death-mask in FBI headquarters after his demise). Ever eager to play both sides against the middle as long as it meant a buck, Hollywood furnished both these romances. On the one hand, we have the series of noirs termed film gris by Thom Andersen—film made by lefty, soon-to-be blacklisted writers and directors in which the outlaw is a sacrificial lamb and realism trained on social desperation. In the same period, however, Hollywood began turning out “semi-documentary” police procedurals, often made with direct input from Hoover himself. I wrote a paper about these semi-documentaries last fall, in part because it seemed to me that too many historians counted the era’s “realism” as an intrinsically lefty proposition. To the contrary, realism is just as likely to extol the panopticon as it is lament the forgotten man. (One of the latter, thered-baiting I Was A Communist for the FBI, pulled off the neat trick of winning the Best Documentary Oscar in spite of being a patent fiction — James Frey, eat your heart out).

What’s it got to do with Mann’s Dillinger? Nothing, except that here the film’s realism does nothing so well as gloss a very Foucouldian common ground: the elusive obsession with visualizing the criminal, an activity which, as accounted for in the fine book Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence, played an important role in the origins of photography itself. In perhaps the finest scene of Public Enemies, Depp as Dillinger wanders the taskforce of fice dedicated to his capture, contemplating his own mug shot like some dreamy flâneur, forestalling his and the movie’s end. No guns are drawn. He peers into the future, lingers, and then leaves for the last picture show.

Solstice and a Seminar

Traveling tomorrow under the sagging skies of Massachusetts and New York for the weeklong Flaherty Seminar at Colgate University. This year’s program is being curated by Irina Leimbacher who, in her adventurous work for SF Cinematheque and kino21, has done much to enrich film culture by the bay. As someone who has learned much from her, especially with regards to documentary form, I’m duly jazzed for her Flaherty program, titled “Witnesses, Monuments, Ruins.” Sounds a little doom metal album, perhaps, though the changing technology of testimony is certainly front and center in the news from Iran.

Working through some of the recommended reading for the seminar, I paused on this little passage from Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas’ excellent introduction to a volume on trauma and visual culture, The Image and the Witness:

“The social and political role of the image as icon dates back to early Christian times when the image was bestowed with metaphysical power as not simply in the likeness of God and the Saints. Rather, people behaved to certain images as to the very abode of God. In the conventional use of religious icons, some of the earliest uses of images ‘were kissed and venerated with bended knee…they were treated like personages who were being approached with personal supplications.’”

In the context of Guerin and Hallas’ essay, this passage situates the claims made for visual representation, but it also serves to illuminate auteurism’s vaguely Christian doctrine — the Saints of Sarris or whoever. The idea of images being the “abode” of an invisible presence is a nice way of thinking about the auteur principle’s essential gambit.

I’m missing a wealth of film programming during my stint back east (onwards with Oshima, Canyon and the Kuchars at Frameline, Lucrecia Martel’s YBCA visit), but I had the good fortune of catching eight or nine reels of Lawrence Jordan’s gigantic compilation film, Circus Savage, last Saturday. He screened it as part of an exhibition of his still art at Gallery Extrana in Berkeley, just a quick ride up the hill from my house. The compression of architecture, cats, love, friends, poetry, texture, color and surrealism was mesmerizing — all the more so for unspooling in a modest Berkeley woodframe. In the longstanding love affair between Bay Area experimental filmmakers (Dorsky, Baillie, Sonbert, etc.) and their gardens, Jordan’s forays are nearly neon in their enamored slow-motion. But there I go constructing another abode…Happy longest day of the year if I don’t write before.

No Depression

In his essay on the Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye exhibition showing through the summer at the Berkeley Art Museum, my Guardian confrere Johnny Ray Huston wisely observes that a recession can, in the case of a museum, have the welcome effect of encouraging reflection and reexamination in place of acquisition. The Galaxy show goes well beyond simply dusting off some old favorites; the cabinet of curiosity that is the archive is reinvigorated by the spirit of collage and chance, fostering fresh lines of sight, eccentric cross-references and a wayward index of inspiration. I enjoy museum captioning as a genre of writing, but the decision taken here not to freight the artworks with any kind of informational appendage (there’s a gallery guide book available to peruse) presumes a wandering eye: it’s not trying to sell you on a story. This puts you in the mood to discover connections between Paul Sharits’ frozen film frames (pictured above) and Bruce Connor’s inkblot drawings, William Blake’s etchings and Ajit Chauhan’s salty recitation, Giovanni Caracciolo’s erotic portrait of Saint John and De Kooning’s figure studies, Goya’s etching of a bullfight and Zoe Leonard’s vertiginous photograph of the same, and on and on. The marquee names are scrambled with lesser knowns in a hurly burly of eras and materials. It’s one of my favorite shows in a long time and a perfect demonstration of a small museum’s particular charm.

Critics are subject to the fever of acquisition too, especially as the gap between exhibition and publication is twittered away. In her book On Photography, Susan Sontag memorably described the camera as “the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.” Is there any doubt that web communications have stepped into this fray? Some of the Cannes coverage I read was quite good, but wearying nonetheless—a Dexedrine errand. Ideally, critics can cultivate the same lingering spirit as Galaxy.

There’s certainly no shortage of troves. We’re in a golden age of music reissues, whether they come in the form of a terminal collection like Goodbye, Babylon, a spacious, unknown corner of pop history turned up by any number of reliable labels, or the bare voraciousness of the  Mississippi Records releases. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “Global Discoveries on DVD” column for Cinema Scope charts out the similarly labyrinthine world of DVD (sample the last one here). The packaging of these objects can get pretty elaborate, but many are done with a care that invites you to hole away for a long time, studying and loving. That’s certainly the case with Take Me to the River, a beautiful new book of found gospel photography published by Dust-to-Digital (the same folks that did Goodbye, Babylon). The book comes with a CD of scratchy gospel recording gleaned, hiss and all, from old 78s—a terrifically immersive project.

There is a world of difference between these excavations of previously neglected works—if not critically, than commercially—and the grubby remastered 24-bit director’s cut cash-in. The appeal of genuine archive work in hard times is twofold: besides encouraging the kind of meditation Huston discusses, it often throws light upon work created within modest means. That’s certainly the case with the last two films I’ve watched on DVD, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks and Eagle Pennell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match. The former, which I’ve seen before, looks great thanks to a UCLA restoration. A perhaps insolent question struck me this time through: can Fireworks be called a noir? Not without stretching, I know, but it’s the right era (1947), the right plunge into night, the right swirl of fantasy and transgression…

The Whole Shootin’ Match was new to me and a happy find. Essential viewing for fans of Old Joy, California Split, Red River and any other movie that limns male friendship—it splits the difference between The Last Picture Show and Dazed & Confused as a Longhorn tragicomedy. The film’s Quixote picaresque traces two friends as they hopscotch between different moneymaking schemes: they don’t have enough, and what they do have, they spend at the bar. Like all good country music, good times and despair comingle in The Whole Shootin’ Match. The roughshod acting takes a little getting used to, but the spikes in mood tells a different truth from the smooth emotional curvature practiced by professionals. Lloyd and Frank are constantly rescuing each other, even when they don’t deserve to be, and while Roger Ebert had it right that Pennell’s film is about alcoholism, it is also concerned with what it means to be good company.

Take the “hellraising” sequence. Frank wrecks dinner by forbidding his son from accepting a would-be cuckold’s gift and then whacks him with his belt a couple of times for making a fuss (offscreen—Pennell’s film consistently uses offscreen to his advantage). Plainly derelict as father and husband, Frank shucks off for the easy grace of camraderie. One thinks of Montaigne: “If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.” Back at Lloyd’s garage, we get a great composition of the two friends in depth, framed in such a way that it seems as though they are leaning back-to-back. Lloyd chucks his gadgetry aside (at one point he likens life to spare parts; by life, he means Pennell’s film). Frank opens a wide grin and asks how long it’s been since they’ve had fun, a real hellraiser, and Lloyd says too long, and it’s clear they’ve had this conversation before, that they’re slipping into a comfortable groove. My friend Vince once proposed a rule of adventure: given a certain radius (was it 500 miles?) and a couple days of notice, he’d turn up on any trail or dive bar for some reckless friendship.

The following scene could be from a silent film or a dream. The girls at the bar tussle over insults, and Lloyd and Frank peel off with two of them (the fastest ones to leave?), repairing to a moonlit riverbed. There is no plan; everything goes according to plan. Meanwhile, Frank’s wife Paulette is at home, listening to the radio, sure that the preacher is talking to her. We feel sorry for her at our own risk—she has hope where Frank only has the night.

And since something has to pay the beer tab: links to two new pieces, one on Dillinger is Dead, the other a song of memory for the Lemonheads.

Finders Keepers

When I met with Lee Anne Schmitt a few weekends ago to discuss her film California Company Town, she named Robert Frank’s video-essays as one of her primary filmmaking influences. My knowledge of Frank’s film work had been limited to his beat-related curios (Pull My Daisy, Me and My Brother) until I saw  Home Improvements at MoMA last month. The other two films on the program gave me a greater jolt at the time (both 16mm collaborations with Rudy Wurlitzer, evoking the first line of “Howl”), but the deceptive calm of Home Improvements has been slower to fade. Now that I’ve been by the museum for a look at the exhibition on The Americans, I thought I’d put some words down.

The chemically-enhanced chiaroscuro of the gelatin-silver process is miles more seductive than the pixel smears of the early video camera Frank used for Home Improvements, but this technological downgrading does nothing to degrade the contemplative basis of Frank’s work: a deeply satisfying braid of art and the everyday, in which life shows up in the art and artistic discernment is cast back upon life. On first glance, Home Improvements appears a sketchbook, mere recording like so many YouTube confessionals to come. But the mundane snatches of life Frank deposits into the film [a visit to his wife in the hospital, images of Bleecker Street (or is it the smudged apartment window?), a playful wait for the garbage man by his rural Nova Scotia home, a visit to his son Pablo in a mental institution] are spliced together with an intrinsic, which is to say intimate, logic. The scenes become objects of contemplation, true reflections. Frank records televisions, roads, living space with droll banality (doubling down with the crude videography), but the freedom with which he cuts across distance and time—skipping between his lives in New York and Nova Scotia, for instance—seeds the associative glimmer of consciousness. There is no action, only commonplace; but one senses a roiling, migratory mind bringing these passages into focus. The shots are clearly talking to one another, even if only in a murmur. A single take following his visit to Pablo stands out as a clearing. It’s obviously been a difficult visit, even if Frank hasn’t said so. And so it is that he steals a postscript from the cloudy afternoon, catching a plane in the air (some people are flying away), reframing to a nearby highway (some are driving away) and then drawing back to the unseen anchor of the shot, the hospital he’s about to leave (some are just locked up). It’s rare to see a camera movement forging thought and emotion with such basic means.

What makes Frank’s work feel so eminently useful is this way he is able to chisel the long intelligence of a disquisition from the fleeting flotsam of unfurnished moments (no wonder Kerouac found so much). Home Improvements is not so elegantly dressed as the photographs, but this only makes Frank’s dramaturgy of the everyday seem all the much sturdier. Frank is cast as a Tocquevillean outsider in much of the literature on The Americans, but the fact that the pictures still speak is the result of his compositional sense rather than his Swiss background. To take one of the more expressly analytical plates of the book’s 83, New Orleans, 1955 inscribes American power differentials in a legible left-to-right fashion. There are multiple ways to read the photograph, but the basic facts are salient enough: the subjects are separated by gender, race and age, horizontally compartmentalized by frames within the frame, frames which together resemble nothing so much as a strip of film. The train is oddly transparent: we can see through it, and, along a top row of windows, we observe the obscure reflections of the world behind the camera. Each window is a separate photograph; taken together, they suggest the organization, the collage, the writing of the whole Americans project. The people are transparent too, in a way; idiosyncratic in their expressions and emblematic in their framing, they are what Bill Nichols might call social actors. If this blurring between being and representation can be said to be visible, it is surely in those three hands overhanging a window’s edge. In photographs and videos alike, Frank’s pictures exceed the frame—the only thing he seems to demand of his medium is that it travel well.

There’s more coverage of the Frank exhibition in this week’s Guardian. Links are up for my short piece on Phil Karlson in the same issue, as well as a week-old consideration of Windy & Carl and their marriage music.

May Flowers

Two new reviews linked, for Summer Hours and Night and Day, and a Dorothea Lange photograph to make it worth your while: file under “A Woman Alone.”

I’ve been watching a bunch of Phil Karlson films this past week for a short Guardian essay, and I’m convinced he deserves deeper study — for the signal, Cold War-era paranoia of his films, as well as their complex graphings of violence & masculinity (Clint Eastwood’s work is under the Karlson sign). It’s miserable that films like 99 River Street, The Phenix City Story, Tight Spot, and Gunman’s Walk aren’t available on DVD. To close, The Brothers Rico (based on a Simenon story!) has provided me this new favorite distillation of the noir species: “So I’m gonna die, but Eddie, you’ve got even bigger troubles: you’re going to live.” Typical of Karlson’s films, this line passes between brothers.

As It Lays

(Robert Frank, U.S. 285, New Mexico)

Went to see Frank Perry’s 1972 adaptation of Play It As It Lays the other night at the Castro, curious whether the negative space of Didion’s novel translated to the screen. A good crowd for a Monday, but half of it was gone within ten minutes due to a warbly soundtrack. Every other reel suffered this submerged rattle, though as my friend Kathryn pointed out, it seemed oddly fitting for Maria’s (Tuesday Weld) disembodied voice. One imagines Didion might have been pleased with an audience so attuned to the little dots indicating a new reel—the words reel change certainly wouldn’t be out of place in a novel of minimal stage directions and the fearful whiteness (thoughts of Melville) on the page.

The biggest change from book to screen comes by virtue of having live actors in the leading roles (one isn’t so sure in the book). Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, both excellent, burnish Mariah and BZ with the pathos which is so conspicuously absent from the novel. The characters are still blanks, but when the camera lingers on these fine actors, the desolation glows as an ember: they will not be extinguished. The concluding death scene is a final void in the book. Here it plays like a Townes Van Zandt song (or perhaps better to say Gram Parsons, given the desert motel setting).

Perhaps sensing Didion’s gauntness thrown off by the lushness of movie stars (they still had faces, it turns out), director Frank Perry compensates with shock cuts and zooms, the kind that ostentatiously declare Fragmentation. Setting the film’s frame amidst geometric hedges and runway-like lawns does nothing to improve the musty odor of Marienbads past. Many critics hold these effects in contempt, but it is worth asking why some clichés stick in the maw more than others. I suspect in many cases (my own, certainly) it has to do with the faint embarrassment over adolescent enthusiasm for loud aesthetics, aesthetics of violence and violation. Certainly, there is a kind of bankruptcy to the profligacy with these effects were at the time dialed up for subjects earmarked as “countercultural,” i.e. cashing in on experimentalism without the risks. Music effects have a much faster life cycle in this regard, so that we’re constantly seeing innovative sounds trivialized as commercial shorthand (interesting things happen when that sound gets dissembled and reconstructed, as has played out many times with psychedelic guitar distortion).

So Perry’s adaptation has plenty of these cuts which are there to be there. The film, like many of its era, gets caught between coolly dismissing the Hollywood counterculture and reaching into its bag of tricks with a smug excuse in reflexivity. (A telling exception to this trend is Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind. Its parodies of Antonioni and the Maysles simultaneously obscure the central Huston figure and illuminate his time, much like Kane and the News on the March. It was Welles who described Los Angeles as “a bright, guilty place,” a good forecast of Didion’s lost city).

In some places, however, I found Perry’s use of shock cuts and zooms compelling and, not a word one often lends these techniques, necessary. I’m thinking of the freeway segments, which figure so prominently into the book’s peculiar entropy. The key here is that one actually does undergo an appreciable alteration of consciousness when driving (especially on the freeway), and so here the shock cuts are not so much accoutrement as apparatus. The oft-used tracking shot of passing buildings from the passenger side (one of those clichés people don’t typically complain about) is a holdover of the view from a train, an echo of film’s early correspondence with locomotive technology and phenomenology. The rapid decoupage of signage in Play It As It Lays, by contrast, represents driving’s jagged addition of vision (strange fact: Roy Lichtenstein is credited as “visual advisor” on the film), as well as raising its specter of elision—i.e. Where does the driver look when not looking? The film’s fusillade of panoptic aerial shots, frenetic horizons, dials, abstract yellow beams, sun, the eye itself—all of them are the objects of the driver’s imagination.

The form moves faster than we can think—and this is the same oblivion Didion is after:

“She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pulls of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour. Normandie ¼ Vermont ¾ Harbor Fwy 1.”

Driving in Los Angeles tends to play out in one of two ways in fictions: as the expression of freedom in speed and methamphetaminic control, the kind celebrated by car commercials, action movies, rock music and Reynar Banham, or else as the everyday dystopia of traffic. But the Didion is something else again: it’s the very lack of resistance, the surplus of freedom, which blots Maria out. Listen to Banham, in love with on his autotopia:

“The actual experience of driving on the freeways prints itself deeply on the conscious mind and unthinking reflexes. As you acquire the special skills involved, the Los Angeles freeways become a special way of being alive…The extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical”; “There is no alternative to complete surrender of will to the instructions on the signs”; “For the Freeway, quite as much as the Beach, is where the Angeleno is most himself, most integrally identified with his great city.”

He is intoxicated where Didion simply has a migraine. “The marginal gains in efficiency through automation might be offset by the psychological deprivations caused by destroying the residual illusions of free decision and driving skill surviving in the present situation,” Banham writes, to which Didion and Perry might respond, As if we had a choice. In Perry’s adaptation, the mechanization of driving fuses with that of watching: we’re not getting Maria’s POV (there’s no there there), but rather her dilated mode of apprehension.

Unwrapped

Wherever the months go, a broken blog haunts time. A post or a millstone, epigraph or inauguration—the blog isn’t fussy, so after some unusual May gray in Berkeley (a grey which, when combined with the long spring hours, totals an endless diffusion of light), I answer. The reason for this long absence is plain enough: I have been subsumed in words these last six weeks, working on a couple of term papers for school, and I’ve needed my free time to be elsewhere, in a body rather than at a desk. One of my papers is on Todd Haynes’s [Safe] and the idea of pathological space (with nods to Susan Sontag and Mike Davis), a subject which allowed me to expand upon the “a woman alone” thread I posted a few months back. Female solitude has also overhung many of my choices for the San Francisco International Film Festival, which concludes tomorrow. I haven’t been able to attend enough films to constitute a proper festival roundup, but this seems a logical a way of starting again. Since I haven’t posted any of my links for a while, either, I might as well indicate the short SFIFF preview I wrote for the Guardian, focusing mainly on Avi Mograbi’s troubling Z32 and Jean-Marie Teno’s fertile Sacred Places, in addition to a profile of Martha Colburn I wrote for Cinema Scope.

So my SFIFF is an embarrassingly short list this time around: besides early looks at the Mograbi, Teno and Modern Life, I played my chips for Snow, Oblivion, Summer Hours, 35 Shots of Rum, California Company Town and the new UCLA restoration of A Woman Under the Influence. I missed Irina Leimbacher and Kathy Geritz’s program of experimental shorts, Our Beloved Month of August, Lake Tahoe, Bluebeard, the restored Le Amiche, and a few others “must sees” I’m not remembering at the moment. That lens of female solitude couldn’t help but guide my viewing of Snow, the Cassavetes and California Company Town. The first, a Bosnian film by first-time director Aida Begic, is set in a remote village in 1997. The community is predominately populated by women, the men having been disappeared in the preceding years. Amidst the bitter fruit of killing, the women make jam—lava-like, deep magenta jam. As with many young filmmaking talents, Begic has a clear feeling for physical textures, and I liked the way this rich tactility plays off unspeakable memory, the abundance of harvest against the bitter appointments of loss. It’s too bad then that she loses this elegant balance in hackneyed magical realism and a serviceable “will they sell the farm?” plot.

The touches of magical realism in Heddy Honigmann’s new documentary, Oblivion, work better for being located squarely in the realm of performance: the élan required to transform a busy crosswalk into a stage (for juggling, cartwheels, movement). This was a nice case of synchronicity for me, as the other paper I’m writing is about two of Heddy Honigmann’s earlier documentaries (Metal and Melancholy and The Underground Orchestra). The paper is titled “Passenger Side: Heddy Hongimann’s Aesthetics of Listening,” and in it, I try to map out how Honigmann’s approach to interview (solidly in the participatory style, with interviews always framed as encounters) relates to the musical ways she then stitches them together: two sides of the listening enterprise, ethics and poetics. There are a few exchanges in Oblivion which stand as classics in her canon, and if anything Honigmann now seems even freer interweaving melodies of gesture and testimony, memento and memory. The act of remembrance: it’s everywhere, in the indelible interviews themselves, but also in the way the film seems to listen to itself—there is, for instance, the way the afterimage of the prologue’s immaculate presentation of a fancy cocktail mingles with a frog-enhanced smoothie served from a garage (it’s thought to help the memory). Honigmann’s documentaries continue to give me the vertigo I associate with cinema of an especially high order.

As I pull up to those films already well-trodden by critics, it seems I’ve already run on too long. So, double-time for the rest. I’m writing a review of Summer Hours for the Guardian, soon to be linked, but for now I’ll say that while not amongst Assayas’ best—I prefer Les Destinées Sentimentales for the writer-director’s Proustian mode—it certainly wasn’t without its pleasure, chiefly in the drama of natural light and two sprightly bookending scenes of youthful oblivion which, taken with the oh-so French countryside, reminded of Varda’s Le Bonheur. Far more attuned to the circadian rhythms of family relations and the elliptical structures of dwelling was Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum, a remarkable film of patience and detail. The objects which reverberate through the film here (a rice cooker, for instance) are not marked with the same Musee d’Orsay pedigree as Summer Hours’ beautiful things, but they yield a richer field transience for not being so busily fussed over. Along similar lines, one could write a comparative essay on the way the two films configure relationships with meals. Rum has the usual great stuff from cinematographer Agnès Godard, including several shots to add to the already rich pantheon of train cinema.

(Below, trains as seen by cinema in 1895 and 2007 — for a full day’s worth of majestic locophilia see the four visual essays here, here, here and here)

Another is in California Company Town, though I feel I would be giving too much away by describing it here (strange to say for a landscape film, but there it is). I plan on writing about this film at length in the future, so for now I’ll just say I find it admirable and surprising. The structure seems like simplicity itself—we cut from the ruins one California company town to the next (roughly in chronological order of the industries represented), guided by filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt’s wavering experience of place (durational landscape cinema clearly inspired by James Benning, but exhibiting an eye for composition and comment all her own) and research (her essayistic voice-over). There is no map, except for a well-honed wilderness of field recordings and radio signals. And yet despite this minimalist structure—one gentleman at the screening I went to asked Schmitt, “Why did you make a motion picture?,” a question she answered beautifully—there is much to discuss here: in the idea of telling history through space;of a personal archive; of amnesia and the view from the road; on privatization’s privileges and erasures; on forgotten utopias, going back to the future; in finding a cinematic median for research and reflection; in land as palimpsest, something which has been written; and yes, on solitude of female origin. Much more to come.

And so the festival ends, but the regulars in town are keeping things interesting. kino21 is hosting a screening of Daniel Barnett’s White Heart tomorrow at ATA. The same folks screened Bruce Baillie’s Quick Billy and Roslyn Romance—two films which so turned inside out my idea of cinematic form that I’ve been scared to think of them too much since—on the same night the 50^th installment of the San Francisco Film Festival opened in 2007; there was a mischievous pleasure in attending one of the highlights of the year in San Francisco filmgoing  at ATA,  while just blocks from where the suits and partygoers politely sipped The Golden Door (I’m sure it was great). Always being one for bookends, I’ll be there tomorrow night. Also on the horizon, the PFA seems to have read my mind by programming a short Phil Karlson retrospective. I’ve been intrigued since seeing 99 River Street a couple of years back—file along with Act of Violence under FSWHM: Films Scorsese Wishes He Made. A few other things besides, but now that Text of Light is flickering again, they deserve their own turn.

Hide and Seek

Ethnographic films’ is likely the most problematic of canons, and I probably would not have arrived at heavy hitters like Flaherty, Gardner and The Ax Fight were it not for a course I took on the subject last autumn. Without wishing to diminish the richly developed critique of the ethnographic gaze, I would nonetheless suggest it has more cinematic currency than is commonly acknowledged (the exception being Herzog’s journeys to the deep). Besides being a zone where documentary and fiction are bound to overlap, where staging is intrinsically related to recreation, these films are all, in some way, about the problem of recording disappearance: theirs is a poetics of absence. This is typically effaced by the ethnographer’s hierarchy of knowledge, but not always and not forever. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (playing as part of JP-Gorin’s essay film series at the PFA on April 5^th) demonstrates the through lines of ethnography in at least two respects: (1) it is an early cinematic exemplar of auto-ethnography, and hence expressly deals with memory in addition to ritual and (2) it was shot by Michel Brault and the great New Wave cinematographer Raoul Coutard in the same year he did Breathless, another spoke of the elusive “documentary style” associated with neorealism. As an aside, James Clifford’s suggestive essay, “Ethnographic Surrealism,” from The Predicament of Culture, is an invaluable guide to the French interplay of ethnography and modernism — and does much to help explain a filmmaker like Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Three variations on this theme, drawn from my last couple of weeks of moviegoing:

1. 24 City, screened at the PFA as part of SFIAAFF. Jia’s complex, yet plain intermingling of portraiture, interview, recreation, architecture and quotation certainly shares much with the idea of auto-ethnographic surrealism. His ongoing development of digital form to adequately realize the migratory, volatile social realities in China is one of the indisputably great contributions to film culture today. Not to harp on the French, but I couldn’t help but connect the film’s periodic frontal framings of the munitions factory front gate — a kind of watermark for the area’s rapid restructuring — to the famous one-shot of the Lumières’ Workers Leaving the Factory. In that crucial moving image, the solidity of the building and the fixed camera position frame the flowing mass of individuals; here, Jia’s precocious digital lensing models structural instability. Jia’s version could be called Factory Leaving the Workers.

2. Chris Chong’s Block B, screened as part of Chi-hui Yang’s program of shorts, “The Secret Lives of Urban Space” at SFIAFF. Quite simply one of the most breathtaking, satisfying interpretations of structuralist form I’ve yet encountered. The 20-minute short consists of a single camera position — a standby of ethnographic film — surveying eleven floors of a Malaysian apartment building housing migrant workers from India. Each story hosts its own stories and — as long as we’re being meta — visually resembles a strip of film. An Empire view with a case of Rear Window, the scene from night to morning to evening to night is drawn together by the wandering sound design’s fictive presence. This is the rare case of the ear leading the eye. We dart around the distant composition to spot the source of a small exchange: a romance, a photo opportunity, children at play and so forth. There is a tremendous wellspring of simultaneity which, when drawn to the consolidated view, positions the audience with contradictory, parallel lines of access more evocative of modern life than most cosseted films “about” globalization.

3. The short horror and portraits of British filmmaker Ben Rivers. I will not prattle on about his inspired work here, as I’ve written about these delicate wonders elsewhere, but Bay Area cinephiles should by all means try to make the weekend programs hosted by Other Cinema and Cinematheque. Besides being beautiful to look at and listen to, the films blur the lines of ethnography and expressionism, field recording and collage, explorative and domestic. Their sounds and images are harvested and pruned with evident care, but the ephemeral abandon with which they flit through the projector resembles sunlight or fire.

(This is My Land as projected in a hut)

Pop Fantastic

(Talkin’ College Rock Blues — my first Slumberland fave, Velocity Girl, circa ‘92)

For some reason the Guardian didn’t upload my profile of Mike Schulman to their site until a couple of days ago; I was very pleased to be able to write this appreciation of the man behind Slumberland Records and so wanted to make sure to post the link. I’m hard-pressed to think of another indie label of the 20-year vintage that’s maintained such a strong sense of purpose as Slumberland. Merge and Matador increasingly resemble Hollywood’s “specialty” studios (see “indiewood”). Drag City uses its remarkable roster of New American songwriters (Oldham, Callahan, Newsom, Berman) to proselytize on behalf of choice oddballs. K retains its geographic mandate & wooly production, but Schulman’s Slumberland is a uniquely well-defined “place.” The dispersal of music distribution continues to make the majors sweat, but smaller labels (whether original imprints or reissue outlets) have come to seem all the more important as arbiters of taste. The Aquarius liturgy records this phenomenon with reliable passion.

Joan Acocella offers an intriguingly pithy explanation of “cult” books in her piece on Draculas past and present in the current New Yorker: “But why does the book have a cult? Well, cults often gather around powerful works of the second rank.”

Blissfully Yours

What a fortuitous week to finally catch up with Nathaniel Dorsky’s portrait of San Francisco winter — “a season unto itself.” It screened with Song of Solitude and Sarabande last night at a sold-out Cinematheque presentation, and this morning the sun has reappeared after a long migration; a week’s worth of “chance of showers” shimmers the grass and plants which Dorsky animates with such intensity as to make me feel that I was “seeing” photosynthesis. Dorsky joked this was the first time he was introducing Winter to an audience (audibly rapt) who didn’t need an explanation of the variatel particular to Northern California. There are shots in Sarabande and Song of Solitude which capture the leveling Spanish light that sometimes washes over downtown San Francisco, leaving the impression of an interminable fresco; the close-ups of luminous clothing (red corduroy, checkered jackets) and leaves, in particular, invite a tactile vision, what San Francisco poet-teacher Bill Berkson described as “extreme seeing” in his introductary remarks. But the evocation of San Francisco winter, which is all intermittency, was rather more peripheral. Some shots do directly represent the miles of gray and rich plumage of clouds (e.g. a majestic sequence of five images of the gathering sky reflected by the hood of a car baring voluptuous raindrops) — but the feeling of the season was located in camera movements, blurred composition, centerless framings.

I could live here, I scribbled in my notebook during Sarabande; is there any doubt that Dorsky’s San Francisco is as much a place as Hitchcock’s? It may sound obsequious, but I find such original, intense visions of beauty to carry a similar charge as certain political documentaries (Profit motive and the whispering wind and An Injury to One come to mind). Lyricism and rhetoric, after all, are both meant to have a rousing effect; at their most elevated, they challenge us to see the world differently. They are good for living.

The three films themselves were elegant as expected, and drew some nice connections — geographical and formal — with the Warren Sonbert films kino21 screened last year. (An aside: Has anyone ever addressed the leitmotif of cats in experimental film, the natural affinity between felicity and the feline expressed in Sonbert & Dorsky’s work, as well as Stan Brakhage’s incomparable Cat’s Cradle?). Funny and full of wisdom, Dorsky said many remarkable things between films — about the screen’s needing to be alive when it’s not functioning as a stage; praising the elegance of silence; about finding the “soul” of Kodachrome in its lower color register; that 80% of his films are shot within walking distance of his apartment; his fondness for the play of neon, rain and glass in floral displays; his dislike of high white skies; of the “cross-dissolve” of sycamore leaves and blossoms in San Francisco winter — but there was one point I’d like to draw special attention to:

His description of viewing footage — a weekly ritual of picking up film, bringing it back to his apartment and projecting it straightaway. “There needs to be a screen,” he said of his editing-selection, a process he shared with his friend Susan Vigil during the last year of his life (the result is Song of Solitude). I like this image of filmmaking, as it implies a second layer of discovery and an unusual webbing of the filmmaker-audience perspectives, one which must be heightened by the bittersweet knowledge that no one else will see the film looking so beautiful as it does in that virginal run. This fact must influence Dorsky’s editing decisions which, like Sonbert, fleece the eyes, giving form and breath to a “passion for the lost chord” (Berkson’s opening remarks). Is this the root of the olfactory quality of Dorsky’s light? By limiting the films to the visual sense, he awakens the ones not usually accessed by film. Most of the time, sound + vision occupy us with enough verisimilitude to send our other senses into hibernation; to which Dorsky’s films would seem to say, What a waste.

In his introduction, Berkson promised that each of these films would make twenty minutes of our lives coherent, melodious, vibrant. Dorsky later told the audience that the films are “for you.” The ride home on BART was everything the films were not: stuffy, vexed with delay, vaguely annoyed, disinterested. But I could see it for what it was, and this lightened the load.

***

More interesting Dorsky material here, here and here.

The PFA opens its Agnès Varda retrospective tonight with La Pointe Courte, from the very avant-nouvelle vague year of 1954. Varda is one of my deep favorites; Clèo from 5 to 7 and The Gleaners & I are unique peaks of films history as far as I’m concerned, and I’m still reeling from my first encounter with Le Bonheur last week. Like Dorsky’s films, it transmit vast melancholy in immaterial telegrams of color and weather.