Cut and Paste

While working through some ideas on archival images at the movies this morning, I came across the following two items. The first is excerpted from Craig Baldwin’s jubilant essay on the signal importance of found footage to a Bay Area avant-garde (“From Junk to Funk to Punk to Link,” collected in Radical Light). The second comes from a recent email to the students of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia.

The dadaists tried to grind letter-forms down into pure non-sense, while the Beats…wanted to get past intentionality with their I Ching. But you and I have been through that, and that is not our fate. For this here semiological guerilla, during wartime (never stops), the crucial work is at the level of the symbolic—exposing intentions, harnessing meanings, and then the redeployment onto the, ahem, metacinematic plane.

* * *

Hi students,

We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.

The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.

Regards,

Office of Career Services

Sound of Leather, Color of Rain

Thomas Arslan’s In the Shadows plays the Castro tomorrow at 2pm, and while I already wrote about the film here, I’m worried that it’s getting lost in Berlin & Beyond’s festive glare. For all the fine writing being done about how Olivier Assayas’s Carlos (which gets a local run starting November 5th, just in time to soak up some of the midterm election’s bloated rhetoric) brokers an ambivalent, “distanced” interest in its ubiquitous lead, I can’t help but think that Arslan’s zero degree heist flick works a similar angle with much greater grace. Who knows if it will come back, so see this movie now! (And also see Girish’s recent post for an excellent entryway to the Berlin School, an important backdrop for Arslan’s films).

Table of Elements

Just wanted to make special mention here of Paul Clipson’s show at SF MoMA Wednesday evening. It’s fitting that this event is sandwiched in with the Radical Light season, as Clipson’s cinematographic montage and loose performance reels flow from the same waters as Baillie, Conner, and many others. I did not have space in the article I wrote about Clipson’s work  to mention the striking collages he produces using stills from his films, such as the one featured in the above poster (images from Union, showing tomorrow night), but their grid layouts provide a nice gloss on the material pleasure of his films, their lyrical fluidity and bold compositional sense.

Also, an extended version of my interview with Yael Hersonski about A Film Unfinished is online at the Guardian site, here. And a special mention for the first two entries (here and here) in what promises to be a wonderful series on the mysteries of Christopher Maclaine by Brecht Andersch with help from Brian Darr. The End blows up at the PFA tonight.

City in Time

Dear L—,

You remember Market Street, of course—one of those parts of the city where you never feel at home. Anomalously for San Francisco, Market mostly holds its straight, flat course. The vertical streets collide there, forever confusing tourists looking for Third, Geary and Kearny at one corner. Driving, it’s impossible to take a left; on bicycle, there are many shocks. I remember when you called to tell me that you’d taken a fall after trying to cross the rails…

Those same rails conduct one of my favorite films of cinema’s early period. If San Francisco is a “cinema city,” as per a recent program curated by Rebecca Solnit, then A Trip Down Market Street was its first parade, the answer-film to Muybridge’s photographic panoramas of the city (from on high down into the street). A Trip Down Market Street is simple to describe and complex to behold: a camera is positioned on the front of a trolley en route to the Ferry Building. For about ten minutes, in what seems a continuous take, we survey the clamoring width of Market Street until eventually the Ferry Building terminus fills the screen. The trolley rotates for its reverse route, and the film ends upon first sight of this southwesterly perspective.

Even watching just a few minutes of the film—available online at the Internet Archive thanks to the laudable efforts of the Prelinger Archives—is enough to get the flavor of the chaotic vectors of new street traffic: automobiles, trolleys, horse-drawn carriages, bicycles, and, most precariously, pedestrians tangoing for the right-of-way. There are no collisions—amazingly, we think—but for those in our imagination.

The film is from 1906, not 1905 as was previously thought. Introducing the film, and the entire Radical Light series, Steve Anker noted that this correction came of a little photographic sleuthing (not for nothing did the detective become lodged in the literary imagination in the same decades photography was popularized). Apparently, research dated a license plate seen in the film to 1906 (the researcher was David Kiehn; there’s more on this story here). From the stunning print of the film shown at the PFA, I can testify to indeed being able to discern several license numbers, and that, moreover, when the cars are jolted by the unsteady road, these same plates flash bright in the sun. A nice little précis on the documentary image: the same thing that furnishes “proof” might also simply glint as actuality.

Being from 1906, the film runs in even closer anticipation of the Great Earthquake than was earlier assumed. This is only the most obvious account for a city at once recognizable and fundamentally different. Along the film’s trip, we pass by many landmarks unfamiliar to us now, like that same corner of Third, Kearny and Geary: ground zero for the turn-of-the century newspaper war between de Young’s Chronicle, Hearst’s Examiner and the Spreckels’ San Francisco Call. Then there are those landmarks yet to be and now no longer, like the Embarcadero Freeway.

We become dizzy contemplating these interceding specters and so focus instead on the film’s enunciation of the new medium’s curious properties. Cinema still seems something of an “attraction” here, resembling both an amusement-park ride and a moving picture postcard. But A Trip Down Market Street is also most certainly an experimental film, marked by technological ingenuity and a certain self-consciousness of the riddles of motion pictures. The fact that the edges of the frame stay fixed even as the diegetic space to which they refer is constantly changing, for instance; or that the camera is simultaneously still and moving; or that we experience a tremendous liberty to look within a constricted field of vision. And what of the curious intermingling of spontaneous and staged reality? The film is obviously staged in the sense of its predetermined course—but we also see the same cars and pedestrians swoop before the image several times, giving the impression that the filmmakers took pains to guarantee a dynamic frame. From the very start, a certain uncertainty shades the world viewed.

All of these paradoxes seem axiomatic not only of the cinema, but of the modern city. Indeed, insofar as “cinema helped make the complex experience of modern cities more legible,” (see Paul Arthur’s essay, “The Redemption of the City”), A Trip Down Market Street is exemplary cinema. What better illustration might we have of the way in which the city at once standardizes time (the commute hours) and reveals its different subjective modalities (the commuters)? We smoothly move through space along this clear axis of standardized time, the trolley en route, while dozens of different subjects—walking, running, riding—cross our path every which way. The route is defined, the intersections chance encounters. Think of it in terms of our eventual destination: though we are on a scheduled course to the Ferry Building, the scene that greets us there is one of happenstance (a man’s 19^th century beard stays in mind).

As such, the film articulates two modes of consciousness often attributed to city living: one hyper-stimulated, the other smoothed out and mechanical. Writing only three years A Trip Down Market, Georg Simmel isolated “the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli” as being emblematic of “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” writing,

Lasting impressions, the slightness in their differences, the habituated regularity of their course and contrasts between them, consume, so to speak, less mental energy than the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of visual stimuli. To the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological conditions—with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life—it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as creatures dependent on differences, a deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental place of small town and rural existence.

While many would surely take issue with Simmel binary of city (requiring intellectual detachment to smother all these stimuli) and country living (“rests more on feelings and emotional relationships”), it nonetheless seems he might as well have consulted with the Miles Brothers before the making of A Trip Down Market Street. The modern city is more than any individual set of eyes can take in; the photograph takes in more visual information than any set of eyes can. Bringing the two into alignment, we strain.

Perhaps no single element is so emblematic of the collapse of space and time we experience watching A Trip Down Market Street as the presence of the Ferry Building. The controlling point of reference for both the street (perspective) and film (duration), it is also the most prominent landmark that remains more than a century later. Now we buy our organic strawberries there. Uncannily, the Ferry Building represents both the literal, spatial destination of the film as well as the present moment from which we watch. It’s a bit like contemplating the distance of stars.

Landmarks are one of the features of urban design that makes the city “legible” according to Kevin Lynch’s 1960 book, The Image of the City. But clearly there are many kinds of landmarks, which register differently according to one’s station in the city (pedestrian, shopper, CEO, tourist, laborer, etc.). Lynch writes, “Distant landmarks, prominent points visible from many positions, were often well known, but only people unfamiliar with Boston seemed to use them to any great extent in organizing the city and selecting routes for trips. It is the novice who guides himself by reference to the John Hancock Building and the Custom House.” Indeed, no one pictured in A Trip Down Market Street seems to orient him or herself according to the Ferry Building; they look at the camera instead. It’s some measure of our remove that no matter how long we’ve lived in or around San Francisco, we need the Ferry Building to locate the scene before us.

—MG

Seeing

It was a huge treat getting to participate in this reading last night. Chris Duncan (look here and here) asked the nine folks above to contribute a piece of writing on the subject of seeing, and the results were varied and inspired. Chris’s current show at Baer Ridgeway, Eye Against I, is itself a perceptual adventure — I’m sure I’ll experience it differently each time I visit. This was the first in a series of many events, listed here. Tomorrow, Donal Mosher presents his film October Country after telling ghost stories. Below is the piece I read.

Too Much Light

1.  In 1851, London’s Great Exhibition opened in an enormous glass structure designed by Joseph Paxton, soon to be dubbed the Crystal Palace. By virtue of the dazzling totality of light admitted by the greenhouse-like panels and the vastness of their construct—enclosing nearly a million square feet—the Crystal Palace dissolved the hard line between light and shadow that had theretofore defined the indoors. Contemporary accounts were not concerned with the building, per say, but rather with the perceptual experience it evoked. Wolfgang Schivelbusch quotes one such report in his book, The Railway Journey:

We see a fine network of symmetrical lines that does not, however, provide any clues whereby one could estimate its distance from the eye or the actual size of the mesh. The side walls stand too far apart to be taken in at a glance, and instead of meeting a facing wall, the eye moves upward over an endless perspective, or one whose end appears diffuse and blue.

The novel experience of light will always throw basic assumptions of time and space into doubt. In this and other accounts of the Crystal Palace, we can hear premonitions of the initial reports of cinema four decades later, in which similar notes of confusion and wonder were sounded at an unprecedented channeling of natural light, the spectacle of the outdoors being brought inside.

2.  I was eleven or twelve when the migraines began. Perhaps four times a year during middle school, I would be sent home to wait it out. Each migraine had progressive symptoms, like the acts of a play. Knowing the plot never helped; the pain was always new. In the hour before the headache, my vision would waver. This kind of sensory premonition is not uncommon—it’s known as the migraine’s aura. When the chalk seemed to slide off the blackboard, my heart sank. I would look around to see if any of my classmates noticed the change. No: still laughing, dreaming, oblivious. Then the test: I would bring whatever printed matter was at hand up to my eyes. If the words did not cohere—and by the point I arrived at this test they never would—than it was time I pack up my bag. Within an hour, I would be slumped in the passenger seat of my Mom’s car, shielding my eyes against the daylight, which would by that point have become unbearable. The calm following the migraine gave me an early sense of what clarity feels like—but I remain unnerved by how easily the visual world can come unspooled.

3.  We can follow that word, aura, to both aesthetic and spiritual ends. It strikes me now that I am stunned by a work of art with about the same frequency as I was stricken with the headaches. To be stunned in this way is to be made clear and freshly vulnerable. Inevitably, these experiences suggest religious language: revelation, epiphany, awe. For to feel that you are really seeing is also to feel that in the moment before you were blind, and that brings us right back to “Amazing Grace.” In a chapter on the “shining and transfigured” look the world takes on to the recently converted, William James pays special attention to “hallucinatory or pseudo-hallucinatory luminous phenomena, photisms,” as in Saint Paul’s blinding heavenly vision and Constantine’s cross in the sky. He quotes one man’s account of the conversion experience,

A light perfectly ineffable shone in my soul, that almost prostrated me on the ground…This light seemed like the brightness of the sun in every direction…It was surely a light such as I could not have endured long.

4.  I have been reading about George Ellery Hale, a rich turn-of-the-century American who left his mark on seeing. He invented the spectrohelioscope, used to photograph the sun, as an undergraduate in 1889. At that point photography was still a controversial technology in astronomical circles, but Hale cared only for seeing more. Like many visionaries, he was given to hallucinations—in his case, an elf. In the book, Seeing and Believing, Richard Panek tell us that,

The elf first visited [Hale] during a recuperative stay in Egypt in 1910, following one of [his] periodic ‘nervous breaks.’ The elf returned a few weeks later in Rome, hectoring Hale to put down the book he was reading and get back to work. ‘How to escape this new form of torment, which is incessant, I do not know,’ Hale wrote to a friend on that occasion, but over the years, as the elf continued to visit him, and as he withdrew from public life, Hale came to regard these intrusions as a peculiar kind of companionship.

Hale’s culminating achievement was the 200-inch refractor housed in the Mount Palomar observatory in San Diego County. By the time it first registered light in 1948, ten years after Hale’s death, astronomers had begun reckoning with the invisible in earnest. Testing missions confirmed ultraviolet radiation and X-Rays in 1946 and 1949. Hale’s observatories were instrumental in charting this new frontier, but it remains a humbling story: the more and more we could see, the less and less it seemed. We came to understand that visible light constituted only a narrow band of what the universe had to say. Given this, hallucinations do not seem so strange.

5.  My first year in California, I drifted. I often found myself in San Francisco during the day, uncertain why I was there. One such afternoon, I went to the Museum of Modern Art. I cannot now recall what I saw there, but a moment just after leaving sticks. Third Street was bitter with wind and noise, but I dawdled in the migratory frame of mind that sometimes comes on after leaving a cinema or gallery when it is still light outside. In this mild reverie, I was predictably dazzled by the little crystal stars deposited in the sidewalk on Third—so much so that I nearly collided with a walker headed my way. We both stabbed to the right and then, awkwardly, made the same move to the left. I raised my head and, in a moment during which I seemed to slip waking life, I realized I was facing my own reflection: a glass panel juts out from the museum where I had been ambling along. I can only imagine how comic this little routine might have appeared to the passerby, but for me it was disconcerting. How often might we see ourselves without expecting to? In any case, I have not run into myself since.

—Max Goldberg

Men at the End

Dear L—,

I only made it to a half dozen of the “Not Necessarily Noir” programs at the Roxie, but the films I saw all put me in the mind of the Dylan lyric, “As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes…” Certainly, this had something to do with leads like William Devane, Harvey Keitel, Ben Gazzera, and Robert Ryan — all of them revealing the raging hollowed core: the sociopath’s inscrutable smile, a hard stare that makes the world fall away. The programmer of the series, Elliot Lavine, has sensible things to say about the appeal of genre pictures in an interview with Michael Guillen. I especially like his evocation of Sam Fuller movies — “all this raw shit” that comes of being abandoned to the id — and only hope that he continues pursuing the crooked path of emotional intensity in his noir programs.

“One thing is clear,” James Naremore writes, concluding his compressed intellectual history of noir (the opening chapter of his book More Than Night), “The last film noir is no easier to name than the first.” Quite so, though several of the Roxie films made in the Vietnam mood (never mind that one dates from 1959) intimate the death drive with a frankness unimaginable in the classics. In many respects, nothing changes: the films remain, as Naremore writes, “an existential allegory of the white male condition,” with “passive, masochistic, morbidly curious” protagonists sent through narratives of entrapment. Brutality takes the place of convolution — it’s as if the 70s/80s directors don’t have breath enough for the plot contortions of the great era of flashbacks.

Ryan is one of the progenitors of the new masculine type, shed of the tragic consciousness of the social-realist noir hero (John Garfield), the one who says, “Someone is punching me but I don’t know who” (Dark Corner). The Ryan anti-hero is the shadow of a former self — in some cases this past is made explicit; other times it’s a howling void — who doesn’t have reasons, only rage and sleep. The characters following his wake have either learned to love the beating (Devane in Rolling Thunder) or to simply inhale death (Keitel in Bad Lieutenant). Indeed, there’s real question as to whether they’re living at all (see Zoe Lund’s vampire spiel in Bad Lieutenant, the Devane character’s explanation that as a POW in Vietnam, he would refer to the past by saying, “When I was alive…”). They are neither resigned to (Mitchum) nor panicked by (Widmark) a romantically doomed end — they are the end. The various “ticking clock” mechanisms of the film’s plots (the storm that keeps the rabid band of ex-Confederate marauders occupying a frontier town in Day of the Outlaw, the revenge plot that nominally animates Rolling Thunder, and, most ingeniously, a fictionalized Mets-Dodgers playoff series in Bad Lieutenant) are the nubs about which the whirlpool roars.

But much like a baseball series, the film does have to end (of course the game goes on indeterminately, whereas a film can only seem to). So how does the filmmaker finally cast out these very embodiments of “no exit?” They massacre, sacrifice, disappear, riding into sunsets drained of color. Day of the Outlaw’s final-act death march is unusually grim for its era. I was sure the film was finished when Ryan’s outlier, Blaise Starrett, leads the mob out of the frontier town on the promise of a hidden mountain pass and a last-ditch escape from the coming cavalry. We know there is no such pass, and that Starrett is condemning himself in order to save the village that is no longer his (Alonso has seen this, yes?). The whole line of pass into the white-out distance in a long shot framed on a diagonal. Given this composition and the extended duration of the shot, we might easily expect a fade to black. Instead, the film enters its protracted stasis, a dirge on the order of Dead Man. Death does not come all at once. The repetitive shots, thudding score, and the evident cruelty to the horses (Ryan whips his mercilessly through the snow) make for an excruciating processional: the end in place of “The End.” One image is stunning: the men ride by the camera one by one, the steam of breath and snow swirling in blinding sunlight, as if Von Sternberg’s camera turned up in Flaherty’s terrain. At last, the meanest of this wild bunch grabs his rifle to shoot Starrett off his horse. But his frozen fingers will not grip the trigger.

Whether Starrett is redeemed or simply cheating death, his reckoning in the snow echoes the same actor’s trajectory in On Dangerous Ground, made seven years earlier and, for various reasons, never far from mind. To wit, On Dangerous Ground also seems a kind of premonition of Ferrara’s film — Bad Lieutenant is the urban-nightmare half of Ray’s movie continued on its stark course. The Ryan character’s bleak apartment would surely seem familiar to Keitel’s nameless bad cop. As for Bad Lieutenant‘s ending…wow. We know what’s coming — the bookies always collect — though knowing what hardly matters in Ferrara’s fantasia. The lieutenant puts two nun-rapists on the bus out of town after waving his gun in their faces; the moment after he earns his “redemption” (which I can hardly understand), he’s gone. Long shot from the opposite side of a busy Manhattan street: we watch Keitel drop into his cruiser before another car pulls up alongside his, obstructing our view. Bullets and burning rubber. It’s hard to escape the feeling that this particular death was foretold in the lieutenant’s two previous encounters of automotive crime scenes—to say nothing of his own habit of sexualizing (and violating) strangers in their cars. Then there is the clear echo of Mean Streets’ violent end, thus bookending the passion of Keitel. But unlike all these earlier images, here we keep our distance from the car and its corpse. The street swarms back over the interruption, a nice Naked City-style turn. A bus goes by, and a woman looks in the car and begins flailing (we don’t hear what she says).  Two other pedestrians flee — who knows what they’re running from? More people gather, and eventually a cop tapes off the last crime scene of the film — all of it unfolding underneath a giant banner advertising a casino with the slogan, “It all happens here.”

– MG

Correspondences

Dear L—,

I’m sorry not to have responded sooner. There are too many stray petals that have gathered by my windowsill—I cannot see from where—to begin to describe the view.

Each morning, the first sight is gray; the spreading fingers of blue only come in the afternoon, if at all. Everyone misses summer here. The Pacific Film Archive opens its long retrospective of Bay Area experimental film next month, Radical Light, and looking over some of the programming notes and accompanying galleys, I imagine it as a decades-spanning survey of weather reports.

The other night we watched The Rules of the Game again. What moved me this time was the way that each character is, in his or her own time, an outsider, shunted to the periphery of the group for having the “wrong” feeling. I read Bazin this morning, and he surprised me, seeming to anticipate the subsequent criticisms that his writing suffers a quaint faith in reality (we can be such cynics):

Look carefully at bad films and you will see that they are composed of nothing but symbolism and signs, of conventions, of dramatic, moral, and emotional hieroglyphs. It is this fact which lends a certain validity to the common sense critical standard which considers “realism” as a criterion of quality. The word “realism” as it is commonly used does not have an absolute and clear meaning, so much as it indicates a certain tendency toward the faithful rendering of reality on film. Given the fact that this movement toward the real can take a thousand different routes, the apologia for “realism” per se, strictly speaking, means nothing at all. The movement is valuable only insofar as it brings increased meaning (itself an abstraction) to what is created. Good cinema is necessarily, in one way or another, more realistic than bad cinema. But simply being realistic is not enough to make a film good. There is no point in rendering something realistically unless it is to make it more meaningful in an abstract sense. In this paradox lies the progress of the movies. In this paradox too lies the genius of Renoir, without doubt the greatest of all French directors.

But oh, how that “in one way or another” remains unsettled. No apologia necessary: I begin to think a critic’s value might be the measure of his or her doubts. The Rules of the Game’s “carousel of themes” (Bazin again) is both perfectly pitched and utterly mad; as has often been said, the film doesn’t allegorize the crack-up of a cultural arrangement so much as choreograph it. The whirling humans are shadowed by various automata on the one hand and the all too mortal rabbits on the other. The hunt sequence remains a moral thorn for all cinema, one made all the weirder by the revelation (from a Peter Schjeldahl review in The New Yorker) that Renoir’s friend Henri Cartier-Bresson, a good shot twice over, was on hand during filming to drop a few bunnies.

In any case, the recurring presence of automata, and what they tell us about the way we internalize or embody the crack-up, is much on my mind looking upon (for there is no “out”) this other window, the one registering these words. I’ve been away. Sitting again with the machine, I find that I am not so inured to its system of trapdoors; each search runs roughshod over my consciousness. I am certain I will quickly acclimate, but the lag, and its attendant manic-disorientation, gives me pause. The question, How did I get here?, which should properly attend history and politics, is given over to the seasick feeling particular to our information technology; I’m sure you would recognize the acute experience of amnesia that strikes me with such great force these last days. The lie of the frictionless journey seems realized by its disruption—typical, perhaps, of all encounters with industrial technology. Imagine being that early train traveler, the strange liberty of being able to read while moving through space, stillness at speed. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his book The Railway Journey, is very good on this point: “The dissolution of reality and its resurrection as panorama thus became agents for the total emancipation from the traversed landscape: the traveler’s gaze could then move into an imaginary surrogate landscape, that of his book.” Schivelbusch goes on to offer that reading in Europe’s upper-class train compartments (for the third and fourth class open cars were overcrowded) also “became a surrogate for the communication that no longer took place,” that is between passengers.

Technology is always read as utopia and malady in its own time—lately I tend to the latter, though it may simply be weakness of spirits. A few days ago, I wrote to a contact at Yerba Buena for a copy of a film called Vampire Hookers (for an article of course!)—you can imagine the Google ads this inquiry turned up. As we become further circumscribed by commercial enterprise—is progress simply being entrusted with one’s own surveillance?—the carousel spins faster, with fewer and fewer text characters required to charm the snake.

But blackberries hang over my neighbor’s fence even though the sun doesn’t. And they’re delicious.

What about you?

–MG