A Woman Alone, pt. 1
After disconnecting the blog feeds for a few weeks to finish up my semester, I reemerged to a deluge of top ten lists and other wind-up capsules. After spending so much real time envisioning the year’s trajectory (I hit the “refresh” button on my internet browser more than ever in 2008), summation seems a simple case of overkill. I have made the rounds, however, and submitted my lists to the Guardian and sf360 (more links forthcoming). My music top-ten is provincial, sheltered: the fruits of a year of narrow listening. I also did it in a bit of a rush, realizing right after I turned it in that I had left off two durable favorites: (1) Lost Wisdom, a becalming collaboration between Phil Elverum and Julie Doiron on the order of Mimi and Richard Farina’s Celebrations for a Grey Day and (2) Oh, Run Into me, But Don’t Hurt Me!, the Sub Rosa label’s full-tilt anthology of rare sides by women blues singers of the 20s.
The Sub Rosa compilation is important to me as it helps tie together a thread running through my film and music lists: female solitude. I find these kinds of year-enders most appealing when they reflect the idiosyncrasies of taste, the soft impression of a critic’s obsessions, so I’ll veer off from The Dark Knight, Hunger, et al. and spend a little time here tracing an arc of contemplation.
You might naturally assume that I’m thinking of The Headless Woman & Wendy and Lucy, though these are two of many 2008 festival films I haven’t yet seen (though I can vouch for the clear-eyed pathos of Jon Raymond’s “Train Choir,” the short story on which Wendy and Lucy is based). With that said, there were a few movies (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Let the Right One In, The Last Mistress) which further nourished my interest in the recent prevalence of a certain female protagonist who is narrated at a remove; she is unpredictable, distressed & dispossessed, entranced & entrancing. The type is touched by the ghosts of Dreyer&Bresson&Cassavetes&Feuillades past, though I like to think of Agnès Varda’s films as playing a crucial instigating role. Maggie Cheung’s character in Irma Vep and Samantha Morton’s in Morvern Caller further inscribe the type as an introspective inversion of the typical woman-in-peril. If you ever care to share any striking instances of female solitude in narrative film, this blog’s door is always open.
This obscure object of cinephilia laps up my listener’s devotion to lone-wolf women singer-songwriters like Karen Dalton, Judee Sill & Sibylle Baier. My year-end music piece for the Guardian considers a group of women musicians who I take to be further staking out this territory, using drones, loop pedals and treated guitars and pianos to establish a new solitary sound, not so different in effect from the stuff on Oh, Run Into Me, But Don’t Hurt Me! (Arthur Russell’s echo corresponds to all this too, but disentangling that will have to wait for another post). I am reluctant to draw direct comparisons between autonomous musicians and character fictions, but there is nonetheless a common registry of opacity, disorientation, feverish aloneness. There is a certain ambience running through these performances, with elements of tone, gesture, staging, reverb & silence occupying the foreground of the frame. Here’s hoping that Grouper scores the next Lynne Ramsay movie.
Pictured below: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Lau Nau, Valet, Morvern Caller, Grouper.
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