Return of the Grievous Angel

Kent Mackenzie’s 1961 film, The Exiles, was met with universal acclaim when it was re-released last year. And rightly so: UCLA’s restoration is breathtaking, and the film itself is an important test case against the increasingly sanitized state of American independent film. But in the rush to claim the film as a lost classic, I wonder if we haven’t overlooked the fissures and gaps that make it so modern. When a film is said to be “ahead of its time,” we must be on guard that we’re not applauding a critic’s self-congratulations. After watching the film several times these last couple of years, in several frames of mind, The Exiles has become a locus work for me—the kind that attracts comparison with innumerable, seemingly disparate modes of cinematic address without fully adhering to any one. The film’s disjointedness is as much a matter of history as style; its unorthodoxy lies in its reorientation of cinematic taxonomies.

Milestone’s superb DVD package substantiates a multifaceted, fragmentary view of the film. This is especially thanks to the crucial additions of Bunker Hill, the short documentary subject Mackenzie made in advance of The Exiles (a documentary map of the fiction to come), as well as Mackenzie’s USC master’s thesis, a kind of lab report on The Exiles. The thesis is an unusual document, tracing the film’s history in terms of its practical and intellectual challenges. This reflective work helps situate The Exiles as urban ethnography.

I’m writing an extended essay about the film’s melancholy mood, specifically the way its realism is purchased with emotional affect (from the Mackenzie thesis: “Some of us even felt that there might be a direct relationship between the amount of realism in a given film and the empathy which an audience would feel for it”). In the meantime, I’m collecting a few notes on the film here, in the hopes you might be motivated to check out Milestone’s DVD.

Firstly, the film is haunted: a grainy present-tense account shadowed by specters of past and future, each redoubling Main Street’s contingency and drift. In terms of cinema/photographic history—one of several histories the film takes up, along with Native American displacement and urban planning—the film is almost irresistibly prescient (it’s significant to note that the rediscovery was in large part prompted by its screen time in another film, Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself). The premonitory power of Mackenzie’s designs can be quite specific: a recessional tracking shot down the length of a rowdy bar snatches rock and roll cool and urban provincialism twelve years ahead of schedule (Mean Streets). The broader “lost classic” appeal hinged on the film’s being a precursor of modern American independent cinema, helping to explain the frequent invocation of Shadows. Other reviews were more specific still, citing Mackenzie as a homegrown neorealist (here’s where comparisons with Killer of Sheep float in) and operating with some of the same observational principles of Direct Cinema (though Mackenzie didn’t enjoy the lightweight sync sound technology these filmmakers relied upon—it’s evident from the thesis that he wishes he had this equipment , even if his strange non-sync solutions seem integral to the film’s multivalence). Other critics went so far as to posit a link between The Exiles’ looping lyricism with contemporary documentary hybridists, i.e. the Jia/Costa/Weerasethakul crowd (local programmer Chi-hui Yang presented an early screening of the restoration at the 2008 Flaherty Seminar, where Costa was a guest).

I want to address some of these “back to the future” through lines, but it’s important to note that Mackenzie, a student filmmaker, placed his film in view of the past. (Again, I will be writing about the film in terms of film/photographic history, but insofar as The Exiles is haunted, that clearly has much to do with the historical trauma shadowing each character’s experience). Mackenzie lists influences in his thesis: some are obvious enough (The Bicycle Thief, Song of Ceylon, Rain, L’Atalante), but others are surprising (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, A Place in the Sun) or now obscure (Mille Miglia, The Back of Beyond). There is a photographic lineage here too, of nighthawk street photographers (Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans) and Edward Weston’s famous portraits of Indians. A few of these latter compositions are shown in the film’s introduction; we transition directly from these to stills of Mackenzie’s players, indicating a shift in both Indian culture and representation.

The crucial figure here, however, is Robert Flaherty. Mackenzie cites Nanook of the North, Moana and Louisiana Story in the thesis, and more broadly uses Flaherty’s same language of discovery and the necessity of poetic license in documentary realism (one thinks of John Grierson’s famous, seemingly nonsensical definition of documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality”). In his excellent Cineaste essay, Robert Koehler discusses The Exiles as having “a ghost of itself” in Mackenzie’s earlier Bunker Hill. This palimpsestic story of a film production echoes Flaherty’s own pilgrim’s progress with Nanook. In the opening titles of the film, Flaherty reflects about his own drafting process: “I had just completed editing the film in Toronto when the negative caught fire and I was minus all. The editing print, however, was not burned and was shown several times—just long enough to make me realize it was no good. But I did see that if I were to take a single character and make him typify the Eskimos as I had known them so long and well, the results would be well worth while.” That “typify” makes us flinch, but Flaherty’s statement remains a foundational myth of filmmaking.

Certainly, there are significant differences between Mackenzie’s film of American Indians and Flaherty’s of the Inuit. For one, Flaherty absents Nanook of modernity—e.g. the infamous phonograph scene; Flaherty’s refusing the admission of rifles—paradoxically filming the Inuit in an imaginary pre-contact space. Mackenzie’s focus on urban Native Americans looks beyond the primitive/civilization binary. Indeed, Nanook’s phonograph scene might profitably be compared to the mobile soundtrack (jukeboxes and radios, constantly) of The Exiles’ night out. This soundtrack is crucial to the way Mackenzie troubles the social problem film—i.e. the kind in which liberal pieties require a different class to be one thing or another (typically saint or criminal), but never just to have a good time.

This implicit critique of Hollywood’s patronizing (at best) approach to minorities is an important benchmark for American independent film. Another—and another distinction from Flaherty—is Mackenzie’s direction of non-actors to locate character in gesture and intonation more than broad mugging or emblematic diction. There is again much material evidence from Mackenzie’s thesis that this concern for texture and gesture occupied the entire production of the film. We often speak of independent cinema’s tendency towards the “low key” as an effect rather than a dramaturgical design, but The Exiles underscores the poetic lengths of authenticity. It’s also worth noting that acting is one of the ways Mackenzie perhaps anticipates the durational strategies of later filmmaker from Warhol to Costa. Though The Exiles is largely comprised of short takes by necessity—the crew filmed on leftover ends of celluloid—Mackenzie pines for the long take in his thesis: “As we worked on the film, we began to find that the shorter a scene was, the worse the acting would be. The longer a scene was allowed to run, the more the Indians would get into the mood and forget themselves in front of the camera.”

The emotional significance invested in gestures and objects also lassos the neorealism angle. The term is often flattened into shorthand for location shooting, a slice of life narration and focus on the working class. Mackenzie was certainly impressed by the early neorealist classics, but the existential texture of The Exiles is in accord with the formalist (and contemporaneous) rethinking of neorealism in films by Antonioni, Olmi, Pasolini, etc. In his wonderful book Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film, Jeffrey Skoller makes a similar point about the potentially misleading invocations of a “spontaneous” neorealism in reviews of Killer of Sheep. “While the film is located specifically in South Central Los Angeles, in the present day,” Skoller writes, “the highly formalized rhythms render the place and time slightly unfamiliar and ephemeral”—a tendency Skoller persuasively argues is closer to L’eclisse than The Bicycle Thief. Whereas the early neorealist films are “about” a given subject, Mackenzie’s form comes closer to the free indirect style in literature. Here is James Wood on that subject: “Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. A gap opens between author and character, and the bridge—which is free indirect style itself—between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance.” Accordingly, the provisional form of The Exiles—especially the non-sync sound, but also the jag of scenes, the Hopper-worthy compositions of urban loneliness—is conversant with the characters’ hand-to-mouth existence.

Ethnography and realism converge on questions of representation. Insofar as The Exiles moves away from Flaherty’s traditional ethnographic mode towards something more like an imaginary or auto-ethnography, its technique is complimentary to Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s crucial portrait of a  documentary, Chronicle of a Summer (from, you guessed it, 1961). Midway through his thesis, Mackenzie writes, “During this whole period, there was another question constantly under discussion which I don’t think we were ever really able to answer completely successfully. Was this primarily a film about Indian Problems or was it an existential film about the lives of some individuals?” This question strikes me as the heart of what makes The Exiles so modern. That doubt is something new; what’s more, it persists.

Out of Joint

Ken and Flo Jacobs presented some of their signature rewirings of cinema’s hardware (i.e. projectors, brains) Wednesday night at the PFA. The main event was an hour-long live performance of Jacobs’ Nervous Magic Lantern, but I’m still agog at Capitalism: Child Labor, one of two shorter works that opened the program. I caught the companion piece, Capitalism: Slavery (both 2006), a couple of weeks ago as part of a wide ranging experimental animation program at the PFA. Both films are constructed by flickering between a pair of 19^th century stereoscope photographs. In Capitalism: Slavery the twinned images depict black field workers picking cotton under the watchful eye of a white man perched on a horse, a rifle on his lap; in Capitalism: Child Labor, the images show a long factory line of cotton machines shooting off into the terrible distance, with several children laborers in the relative foreground of the shot, some of them looking at the camera, as are two adult supervisors. The oscillation interval creates an effect of movement and three-dimensionality. Note that the still above is somewhat misleading, as we never see the image in its totality (Jacobs does show the two photographs comprising Capitalism: Slavery at rest at the end of its three minutes). The animating flicker is such that we’re effectively lost in a closed infinity of partial views. Our eyes might follow the pulse of the flicker or its illusion of lateral movement, flatness and dimensionality locked in a jerky dance. Michael Sicinski describes it well: “The use of Nervous System animation — binocular vibration, looped partial rotations, details in the image folding inward against the larger photographic ground — makes the image itself into a kind of factory, a space for the production of a frightening counternarrative.”

Each pair of photographs depicts totemic scenes of exploitation; as photographic documents, they have a haunting presence in themselves. But Jacobs’ Nervous System finds a seductive pull in those intervals. In the illusion of movement, we often feel we are on the verge of rotating the image so that we can see, for instance, the backs of the little boy’s legs standing in the aisle. This is akin to the experience of closely inspecting an old photograph, visually pleading it to give up some unseen detail, but Jacobs actually animates the process. The formal desire to see more of the image rebounds the ethical desire to see right done. We don’t get what we want in either case, but we strain nonetheless. If the phenomenological effect creates another kind of factory, so too does it impart a prism/prison of perception. This has resonance both in the particular (what happened to these boys?) and global (as Jacobs succinctly put it after the screening, “Child labor still exists”).

After seeing Capitalism: Slavery, I marveled over the coordination of form and content; after Capitalism: Child Labor, I’m thinking of it more in terms of perception and content. The films’ counternarrative(s)—whatever those might be—stem from a bodily experience (Jacobs doesn’t call it Nervous System animation for nothing). This idea of perceptual-based knowledge strikes me as being especially important in light of the way archival documents, especially photographs, are usually employed in social documentaries as a “cheap coinage” (David MacDougall’s phrase) of the past. It is typically assumed, all signs to the contrary, that the evidence speaks for itself. Jacobs’ Capitalism films worries this production of meaning. Thus, the chilling details of a boss’s gaze or a child laborer’ bare feet evoke less the “telltale clue” than “the charge of the real,” a phrase Vivian Sobchack reserves for those momentary referents (not whole films) which excite both our perceptual and ethical sense.

I came across a passage in MacDougall’s excellent book, The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses, yesterday afternoon that helps explain further:

“Visual knowledge (as well as other forms of sensory knowledge) provides one of our primary means of comprehending the experience of other people. Unlike the knowledge communicated by words, what we show in images has no transparency or volition — it is a different knowledge, stubborn and opaque, but with a capacity for the finest detail. How we reconcile this with other forms of knowledge — of explanation, metaphor, analogy — is one of the great themes of film itself, which more explicitly than writing pits being against meaning.”

That damning look coming from the boy in the aisle (wish I could find a more detailed frame) reminds me of another frozen adolescence: the one concluding The 400 Blows.

Plenty of new published material in the links pages since my last post here, by the way, including two pieces on Heddy Honigmann (here and here), a review of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, an enthusiastic survey of the current Cinematheque calendar, as well as brief views of Ermanno Olmi, Liverpool, and a set of British noir at the Castro. Coming soon: considerations of Robert Beavers and Chick Strand. It’s a great month for experimental cinema by the Bay.

The Plot Against…

I know I’m about a zillion blog posts too late on Inglourious Basterds, but then again, one of the best pieces I’ve read on the film as myth was published thirty-three years ago in Rolling Stone: Greil Marcus’s article on Nazi-hunting thrillers, “Götterdämmerung after Thirty-One Years,” collected in The Dustbin of History. (It should be said the film has prompted an unbelievable torrent of web criticism, much of it impressive—and, giving me hope yet, some of the best stuff is coming along after the first several waves, e.g. the immersive conversation between Ed Howard and Jason Bellamy at The House Next Door and this very strong piece by Chris Stangl).

Anyhow, “Götterdämmerung” is one of my favorite essays by Marcus, and certainly an elegant encapsulation of his primary themes: the allure of counter-history, the intersection of mystery and myth. In it, Marcus details the way these thrillers, no matter how tactless, give the disquieting sense that history is not through. Marcus wrote the article at a time when Nazi power was first being historicized, the Holocaust subjected to statistics, economic rationales, and other materialist causeways by which, in his words, “the irrational vanishes”—at the same time, it wasn’t so long after that the rumors of Nazis living comfortably abroad in South America, the Middle East and the United States wouldn’t send a tingle down the spine. Most of the thrillers he describes run the opposite direction of Tarantino—instead of reimagining the sudden and total end of the Nazi era coming at the hands of avenging Jews (and cinema), these conspiratorial novels uncovered former Nazis infiltrating governments around the world, a claim which, whatever its factual merits, does nonetheless speak to the stubborn persistence of the “unimaginable” (genocidal evil) in contemporary times.

Marcus’s essay cannot be read either for or against Inglourious Basterds, but there are several passages which might enrich the conversation, starting with the opening:

“Thanks to a birth date falling between V-E and V-J days, I absorbed a fair amount of World War II folklore, and grew up with more or less conventional, popular-culture ideas about Nazis. They were bogeyman (albeit more personal bogey-men for me than for my friends, because I was Jewish and my friends weren’t). Thinking about what the Nazis had done to the Jews was scary, but it was scary in the way thinking about kidnappers was scary: I couldn’t sleep, but I knew my father would never let anyone do that to me. Sometimes I tried to think hard about atrocities, about crimes I knew were as tangible as streets and houses, but I couldn’t do it. I drew a line between the world of the war in which I had been conceived and the world into which I had been born. Fantasies—not all of them self-produced—replaced flesh and blood. As the movies I would later see defined the men my parents’ generation had fought—cold, blond, thin-lipped automatons with riding crops—Nazis were merely the most effective component of a mythology that I, like other children, sometimes liked to scare myself with. They stood in for Grimms’ fairy tales. Nazis had another function: since I was raised in a strongly liberal household where one learned not to hate people because they belonged to a certain national or racial group, Nazis were the single commonality onto which one could project fantasies of hatred without the slightest feeling of guilt. Like other children, I found guilt-free object of hatred useful.”

But the speculative thrillers produce the same dissonance in him as Hannah Arendt’s philosophical inquiries and a documentary about German adults reconnecting with their birth parents, Jews who were forced to put their children (“lucky” because they had Aryan features) up for adoption. “Here were people close to my own age who were just now emerging from Nazism,” he writes of the documentary.

“What the Nazis did, Arendt said, was something new: they altered the limits of human action. In doing so the Nazis provided humanity with more than a burden—the need to comprehend their actions—they also provided a legacy: ‘It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past…Once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.” It is this sort of uncompromised language, and this sort of daring, daunting thinking, that has mostly disappeared from respectable works on Nazism—and it is this sort of vision, which incorporates [Isser] Harel’s vision, or anti-vision, that the thriller writers have taken up and used as the basis for the contemporary genre of Nazi-hunting books…

…This is a powerful basis for any genre of fiction. No matter how luridly the theme may be carried out, it raises a moral question that, given the Nazis living and holding economic and political power in South America, the United States, the Arab countries, or present-day Germany, has not been resolved, and in serious fiction has hardly been addressed, because the Nazi-hunting theme is so sensationalistic as to destroy the pretensions of serious fiction in advance. Thus the Nazis belonged to the thriller writers, and they have seized on them, these best-selling authors of The Boys from Brazil, The Odessa File, Marathon Man, The Wind Chill Factor, and so many more, for many reasons, no doubt most of them less than noble.”

Fantasies are unavoidable, and while this fact surely shouldn’t prevent us from interrogating historical representation, so too does it make it illogical to argue against a version for being a fantasy. Or as Michael Wood puts it at the close of his Basterds review, “We can accuse Tarantino of seeing reality as a movie, which he certainly does. But then we need to make sure we don’t just mean we prefer another, more sentimental movie.” The amoral braid of Tarantino’s representations of cinema—as corrosive propaganda, subversive salvation—is, at the very least, bound to foul up a lot of well-intentioned arguments. As far as the film’s “high” aspirations, I’ll still take Army of Shadows—but Tarantino’s booby-trapped comedy of manners (no battle, no sex) is quite a bouquet.

But transcribing all that Greil Marcus has me thinking two things. First, it’s great to read criticism written as an essay, not a response. And second: really? Rolling Stone?

The Big Hurt

A week after seeing The Hurt Locker at a two-screen theater now split between it and G.I. Joe, the architectures of its peculiar combat sequences, which is to say the bulk of the film, remains fresh. Amy Taubin is right to attribute this unusual clarity of vision to the “rare combination” of kinetic movement and spatial coherence—what other explanation for my ability to reconstruct and dissemble the corridors of danger particular to each situation zone? Bigelow’s accomplishment is primarily formal, in its dramaturgy of corporal vulnerability—a curious place for an American action picture to reside. Sgt. William James is every bit the last action hero, but his cowboy courage never translates as invincibility; rather, Bigelow’s film is structured by situations in which the soldier’s very presence defines harm’s way. In an insurgency war film like this, the soldier does not travel into the combat zone but rather is, intrinsically, that zone. Within The Hurt Locker’s fiction, James lives this fact rather than dying by it; he is the inverse of the suicide bomber in exposing his body as the epicenter of threat, but their opposition is not diametric (in terms of cinematic representations of this negatory self-determination, Battle of Algiers is a necessary comparison point).

Bigelow’s movie is a remarkable representation of danger. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else. For all the tension, the soldiers are never exposed to compromising doubt; they do not risk misjudging an enemy; the danger is all theirs. It’s frustrating then to read so many critics who want to reduce the film as an argument for or against. Much of this revolves around the inane suggestion (approving or not) that the film is “apolitical” or “non-ideological.” The idea that a Hollywood-produced Iraq combat film in which Iraqis are largely unseen could be non-ideological does not merit serious discussion. Neither does an interpretation which refuses to admit itself as such, as is the case with A.S. Hamrah’s declarative notes for N+1: “Kathryn Bigelow’s film explicitly states that it is better to spend every day of your life risking getting blown to pieces defusing IEDs in Baghdad that it is to spend even one day in the US shopping for cereal at Costco with your family.” It does no such thing; the explicitness is all Hamrah’s. The bleak supermarket scene Hamrah refers to is not one of the film’s strong points: a rote, mercifully brief description of the banality of the American everyday, borrowed from DeLillo’s White Noise. It is there to economically highlight the contrast, in this case irreconcilable, between coming home and being there. There is no “better.”

It certainly is true that these peripheral scenes pale next to those in the field. The characterizations roughly chiseled out at the base (listening to heavy metal, deflecting the staff psychologist, etc.) are forgettable, but important in that they let us see how these traits are reframed in the combat zone; once in this intensified present, character is another circumstance to be dealt with, like a pile of debris or a blind corner. What bothers me about a review like this one isn’t its shallow emphasis (“While many films have tried to present the American family’s consumerist nightmare before, Bigelow’s film is one that really makes you feel it.”) so much as its misdirection. Hamrah forgoes what to my mind is so compelling about the film—its formal construction—to try to spin an “original” interpretation.

The general experience of the film, after all, is one of proximity. We are not James and are not meant to understand him, but we are placed within that potential impact zone, tensing our own muscles for a possible detonation (this physical experience is perhaps what critics mean to highlight when they discuss the film as “apolitical”; we’re as likely to physically tense up following the one setting the bomb as the one defusing it; the crucial thing is a proximate body exposed to danger). Part of what makes Bigelow’s spaces “coherent,” however, is that this physical intimacy ricochets within the lines of sight and fluid boundaries that constitute the event horizon.

The narrative unit that most resembles a typical combat film battle is played at such a distance that the opposing figures are completely obscure; even under magnification, they are smudged by the desert’s heat waves. Remoteness, as much as proximity, is central to the film. There is the remote trigger of the IED, of course, which simultaneously serves a need to detonate and document. Hence the uncanny tension of the UN-building site, in which a distant Iraqi stands posted with a camcorder, an act of surveillance that conceivably augurs an explosion. Bigelow teases us with a frame of the event outside the one supplied by her four mobile cameras. Our position is someplace between the physical encounter and remote view. Later in the film, after our cavalry rides in following a nighttime explosion (thoughts of Touch of Evil), they look for evidence within the blast radius to determine whether it was a suicide mission. James voices doubts, and the three raise their flashlights outside the immediate circumference, searching for unseen eyes. The way that the shot is framed, their beams are pointed back at the camera, and for a bottomless moment our own remoteness seems less a shortcoming than a complete breach.

2001, meet 2004

More on The Hurt Locker tomorrow.

Take Me to the Water (Extended Mix)

One of my favorite objects of the summer is Take Me to the Water, another remarkable excavation from Dust-to-Digital. Where Goodbye, Babylon is monumental, the present book/cd acts is more intimately shuddered, and a remarkable manifestation of the memorial function of photography. My review ran in this week’s Guardian, but only after I sheared a couple hundred words. Here’s the original copy:

Take Me to the Water (Dust-to-Digital, 96 pages, $32.50) is both a labor of love and a portal to the past. The elegant volume comprises both book (75 weathered sepia photograph reproductions of full immersion baptism scenes performed in lakes, ponds, rivers, and the occasional pool) and accompanying CD (a baptism-themed tour of sermons, blues, spirituals and other sanctified 78s). Like Dust-to-Digital’s earlier ark of covenants, Goodbye, Babylon (2003), the new set is under the bewildering sign of Harry Smith’s epochal Anthology of American Folk Music jigsaw. As collections collaged into experiential texts, they are all eccentric archives.

Smith’s set teaches us to listen again in blurring context by subjective association. Something similar happens with Take Me to the Water. The book doesn’t present a transparent window on bygone baptism rites; its object, rather, is the peculiar beauty of baptism’s representation in music and photography. The book’s thesis is that these records do more than merely provide documentation, but are somehow transfigured by their subject.

The images were made at a time when photography was reserved for occasion (one shudders to think of the contemporaneous lineage of lynching scenes). A photograph, like a baptism, was something you dressed up for. In his perceptive introduction, Luc Sante mentions the historic scarcity of photographs of worship, and it’s not hard to see why this might be so: participants often seem conflicted as to whether to look at the minister or the photographer. Some images are staged as group portraits, while others are action shots. Most are busy with life, but not all. One haunting image looks as if it were shot under cover of trees: we peer through shrubs at a minister and convert, rippling the water alone.

There is always a danger of mystifying the past with such gorgeous ephemeral evidence, but it would be foolhardy to think that these photographs’ invocatory power is purely the invention of contemporary eyes—if anything, the images restore the spiritual sense in which photography was first labeled a medium. The believers follow God’s light, the photograph the world’s.

The cameraperson typically shoots from an opposite bank, emphasizing the public nature of the ritual; the crowds are in the dozens, if not hundreds, draping bridges and packing every jut of land. The principle pictorial advantage of this framing is that it places as much emphasis on the water’s reflection as any other feature of the landscape. This reverse image coasting the water’s surface rhymes with the one produced by the camera’s lens. More immediately, the water’s reflection gives the impression of ghosts. Sante makes the point that many of these sites were repeatedly used for baptisms, and therefore “accrued layers of association and sentiment.” Ghosts were to be expected.

This is one resonance of the reflected bodies. Another is that baptism represents a point of contact with one’s destiny in another world, the hereafter. This is conveyed, breathtakingly, in images. Since the photographers justly wanted the full scope of the ritual, large sections of their compositions are often blurred. The surrounding space and faces buckle to the distant baptism’s sharp focus; time itself seems to bend around this point of clarity and calm. Since the person being baptized is most deeply submerged, theirs is the clearest reflection. Much of what the photographs communicate, then, is the way these baptisms were both public events and private passages. The individual is both a part of and apart from the community, in the same way death is to life.

Nearly all those pictured in Take Me to the Water have since crossed to the other side—the passage of time is everywhere apparent in splotches, creases and other markers of material age. The poignancy of these imperfections is that they remind us that these photographs belonged to people. In one image, a pen marking indicates one of many figures in the water—someone’s relation. Beauty balancing the ordinary and sublime is a strange gift indeed. The wonder isn’t that these photographs survived but that they existed in the first place.

The Moveable Archive

I first spotted this effervescent film-music meld on Nat Russell’s blog last week and have seen it corralled a few other places since. For good reason: the track, by Bethany Cosentino, taking a break from Pocahaunted’s more violent maundering, floats a girl group chorus on miles of smeared fuzz. It’s a great hook, served up inchoate — reaching for bliss with wistfulness, it makes a nice match for the images from Claude Lelouch’s 1966 film, Un Homme et Une Femme (the whole concoction comes courtesy of a YouTube impresario using the moniker khole71 — much more of his work is available here).

A simple question emerges: how different is this, in effect, from Tarantino quoting Hawks’s Red Line 7000 with a souped up Chuck Berry score? What about Wes Anderson putting the needle on “Hey Jude” while conjuring his own private Ambersons, those magnificent Tenenbaums? If we think of  groups like Vampire Weekend as channeling Anderson’s appreciation of the Kinks rather than the brothers Davies themselves, it seems that this nesting game is one of diminishing returns. What about recent albums by M83 and Odawas, both of them conceived as facsimiles of 80s movie music (the guys in Odawas cite the searching synths of Vangelis as a primary influence)? Brian Eno theorized music for imaginary films; Donnie Darko listens to Echo & the Bunnymen.

Music and moving image have always had a more heterogeneous, slipper relationship with one another than is commonly acknowledged. The silent film era was far from silent; some of the most musical American films produced in the 50s and 60s were (e.g. Brakhage). In Scorpio Rising and Where Did Our Love Go?, Kenneth Anger and Warren Sonbert molded pop music’s plastic meaning to images which, while certainly not conventional, were neither completely ironic (David Lynch tipped the scales still further in Blue Velvet). Anger and Sonbert evidently saw possibility in the way that this music spoke freedom without specificity. Scorsese, it is often pointed out, borrowed from their films, but he deserves his place as the American metier of extended musical quotations for Mean Streets alone. Critic Howard Hampton is very clear on this:

“From its beginning, Martin Scorsese’s 1973 Mean Streets is the most seductive union of movies and rock imaginable: a prowling, claustrophobic fever dream where the images and music are locked in an interpenetrating embrace, each intensifying, elaborating, and undermining the meanings of the other.”

Flipping the record over, I’ve always balked when critics describe pop music as “cinematic.” They mean widescreen: a packed production palette that exceeds the ears’ grasp as surely as the widescreen image does the eyes. Like all overused shorthand, it’s reductive to both sides of the metaphor and hopelessly vague. To point to just one of many counter-proofs, Bruce Sringsteen’s most cinematic album is also his starkest (Nebraska). There is something to be said for the way the overripe atmosphere of something like Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea resembles the claustrophic anxiety of Nick Ray and Anthony Mann’s capsized Cinemascope, but really the analogy probably shouldn’t be taken much further than West Side Story winning Best Picture the same year Phil Spector started laying the groundwork at Philles Records.

So this little clip stands at the crossroads, though it’s tough to say which. Up through the couple’s 360-degree embrace (shades of Vertigo, Bernard Herrmann’s film, with storyboards by Alfred Hitchcock), it works better than any of these mash-ups have any business doing. There’s a nice calibration of scale and speed here, with Cosentino’s scuffed up pop rising into Lelouch’s shrunken, YouTube’d romance — both riff on familiar hooks, and remind us why we liked them in the first place.

Vorticism

I had the pleasure of speaking with Bay Area filmmaker-scholar Britta Sjogren yesterday about a series she’s programmed for the PFA based on her book, Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film (here’s the link to the interview). Sjogren details sound, and female voice in particular, as a site of dissonance and contradiction in Hollywood cinema of the 40s. These are films of tremendous narrative complication; they have served as test cases for all the major theoretical frameworks. Sjogren approaches this cinema of complication as a feminist, but one not entirely in accord with what feminist film theory has made of these films. Her study is refreshing for the way she articulates vexations with a certain theoretical stance without turning it into a vendetta. A critique ought to nudge open a door theory claims closed, and this is exactly what Sjogren does with Into the Vortex. Moreover, she brings a filmmaker’s sense of problem and possibility to theoretical questions, and doesn’t treat these familiar films as mere proxies of discourse. By considering female voice expressly in terms of sound, a formal element still subordinated to the image in the vast majority of film analysis, Sjogren in effect asks us to watch them again (quite unlike much academic work). Read her original program notes for some of the more canonical films in the series, like Letter from an Unknown Woman, and you’ll see what I mean.

Today, I’m thinking about how Sjogren’s idea of a “vortex” film narrative relates to the formally audacious work of several other women filmmakers recently on my radar. The vortex implies an unfathomable center, an invisible mass commanding velocity. It is the exertion of a pressure inwards, but not one with clear aim or psychological delineation. From which meaning does not emerge, but rather collapses, causing shockwaves and motion sickness. The main figure of Lucrecia Martel’s new film, The Headless Woman, doesn’t speak for long stretches of the film, but Martel, in a fantastic elaboration of Antonioni in his prime, realizes a recessed consciousness in its negative image, an overripened landscape. Martel keeps us on the lip of perception with such awesome concentration that The Headless Woman often seems a trance film—as with Todd Haynes’s Safe, a narrative’s drift sculpts meaning in its own concavity, like wind on rock.

Lee Anne Schmitt’s essay-film, California Company Town, won’t enjoy The Headless Woman’s distribution, but her discreet interlacing of personal and political represents a comparably rigorous game of hide-and-seek. Here the whirlpool is one of history and voice, the free-market and faith. Lee Anne Schmitt’s spoken commentary worries the desolate images of abandoned landscape, disallowing our view of any frame as an encompassing, complete picture, but rather as taking part in the revisionary trafficking back and forth between monument and ruin. The person-less compositions of Manifest Destiny unraveled tempt us into thinking they say it all (that old falsehood about a picture and a thousand words), but Schmitt’s film does not sustain any such illusion.  The dragging, desiccated quality of her voice lingers over facts—of natural history, social unrest, and the rewriting of the American west. Barren cultural amnesia furnishes a tangled, personal archive: always unfinished, spinning around some point of no return, which perhaps is Schmitt herself.  The relation between voice and image in California Company Town is contradictory, knotted, divergent—miles away from the bland “commentary” burdening so many documentary soundtracks.

The narrations of both The Headless Woman (which I wrote about for the Guardian) and California Company Town (my interview with Schmitt is in the latest Cinema Scope) keep us at arm’s length, so it’s interesting given Sjogren’s thesis that they both employ a sensuously detailed ambient sound design. Their’s is an abyss fuller than most. But not so full, perhaps, as Chick Strand’s 1979 film, Soft Fiction, an unyoked experiment in testimony, which I had the pleasure of seeing at the Flaherty Seminar and deserves its own subject heading.

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.