The Year in Film

As much as a number of my colleagues seem to be convinced that 2005 was a great year for film-going, I remain somewhat unimpressed by the quality of new work which I saw during the previous twelve months. To say this is not to imply that there was a dearth of films worthy of mention as one of the year's best: I was reasonably satisfied with the quality of all ten films I mentioned for my Senses of Cinema ten best list which I submitted a couple of weeks ago, even before I saw an eleventh which I feel definitely deserves mention (which I will in my 'top 11' to follow). However, it is my belief that there has been noticeably few all-time great films released in the past three or four years. Put another way, I would say of the half-dozen or so best films that have been made since the conclusion of the 90s, only one was made after 2001 (and that was 2002's Russian Ark). And concerning these masterpieces -- Yi Yi, Werckmeister Harmonies, The House of Mirth, In the Mood for Love, I'm Going Home, Mulholland Drive, Spirited Away, Russian Ark -- I'm not sure any (save the first) would rate with the half dozen or so best films of the previous decade, which were in a few cases were made by the same directors (Edward Yang, Bela Tarr, Wong Kar-wai, Manoel de Oliveira) who had made clearly superior films during the prior ten years.

All of this is to wonder whether we are beginning to find ourselves between generations of great filmmakers -- as we did, I would submit in the late 70s and early 80s before the Asian new wave which was ushered in by such talents as Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tian Zhunagzhuang, John Woo, Takeshi Kitano and Hayao Miyazaki. Perhaps my number one will prove to be the first great film by one of the next generation's greatest artists, Apichatpong Weerasethakul? Perhaps Lisandro Alonso and his Argentine cinema will become this decade's [early] Abbas Kiarostami and Iran? Perhaps Lucile Hadzihalilovic will experience a peak comparable to Jane Campion's in the early to mid 90s? Hopefully, 2005 will prove ultimately to be the beginning of something new, not the trough that seems from its final days.

Here they are, the eleven best films of 2005 (1-10 in order of preference, plus an 11th not in order):

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 04)
2046 (Wong Kar-wai, 04)
The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov)
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)
Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso, 04)
Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, 04)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
L'Enfant (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne)
Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, 04)
13 Lakes (James Benning, 04)

And the eleventh that I saw after my initial submission of the list:
Caché (Michael Haneke)

(For more detailed analyses of the best of these, see my annual annotated 'ten best' lists with a 2005 version to follow sometime next year.)


Then again, it was less the above films that truly rewarded my love of film this year than it was the rarely-screened silent, classical & post-classical Japanese pictures I saw as part of "The Beauty of the Everyday: Japan's Shochiku Company at 110," "Early Autumn: Masterworks of Japanese Cinema from the National Film Center, Tokyo," "The IFC Center's Weekend Classics," and "Naruse: The Unknown Master." For this cinephile, 2005 was the year of classical Japanese film in New York. It is only fitting that the best of these celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this past year.

Here are fifteen of the best:

Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 55)
Humanity and Paper Balloons (Sadao Yamanaka, 37)
Boy (Nagisa Oshima, 69)
Wife! Be Like a Rose! (Naruse, 35)
Sound of the Mountain (Naruse, 54)
Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, 36)
Scattered Clouds (Naruse, 67)
Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 60)
The Whole Family Works (Naruse, 39)
Ornamental Hairpin (Shimizu, 41)
Flowing (Naruse, 56)
Every Night Dreams (Naruse, 33)
Women of the Night (Kenji Mizoguchi, 48)
Our Neighbor Miss Yae (Yasujiro Shimazu, 34)
Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Shimizu, 33)

New Film: Brokeback Mountain & The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Over the past two days, Ang Lee's gay-themed western, Brokeback Mountain, has been named the year's best picture and Lee best director by both the New York and the Los Angeles film critics circles. Add to these honors record-setting box office (per-screen for a live action film) and the only thing that appears to stand between 'Brokeback and an Academy 'best picture' statuette seems to be a giant ape. If Lee's film therefore seems to represent the latest blue-state victory in America's on-going culture wars, it is a success predicated upon the [well-groomed] middle-brow sensibilities of America's urban tastemakers. Not so much a film for the masses, Ang Lee sets his sights on the mass of elites for whom prohibitions on gay marriage smack of being today's equivalent of Jim Crow.

This is to neither praise nor damn Brokeback Mountain, even if much of Lee's support would seem commensurate with the film's political stance. The quality (or lack, as in this instance) of Lee's film rests in its negotiation of the terms of its generic origins. This is to say that Brokeback Mountain's ultimate failures can be traced to its inadequate engagements with the western and queer cinema. To the first, in particular, it is worth observing that Brokeback Mountain fails to employ landscape in any fashion other than for its ability to give two lovers cover for their illicit affair. In this way, Lee eschews the pictorial and iconographic values of the western landscape in exchange for narrative expedience. While this alone does not preclude 'Brokeback from taking its place among the canon of westerns -- Rio Bravo (1959, Howard Hawks) for instance uses a similarly indescript space as per the director's programmatic artlessness -- Lee combines this visual imperviousness with a glibness towards the geographic West manifesting itself in Anne Hathaway's teased hair and her Texas farm implement magnate father's insistences that a young boy must watch football if he is going to ever grow up to become a man. All of this is to say that Mr. Lee shows no affection for the setting of his film.

However, lest it be said that Brokeback Mountain is not fundamentally a western, as apparently the director has claimed, Lee does hold to the basic homo-social structure of the genre (at least for the film's first half). Indeed, 'Brokeback proceeds according to the suggestion that the ties of fraternity which play such a defining role in the history of the genre are irreducibly possessed of a latent homosexuality. In so doing, Lee does not so much revise his genre of choice as underscore its political deficiencies (just as Far From Heaven [Todd Haynes, 2002] indicates a need to revise Sirk which frankly I don't see). Ultimately, it is easy to see why Lee decided to make a film in a genre for which he has little regard in a geographical location he likes even less: because it allows him to score easy points with his middle-brow crowd; this is a film made to make those that agree with it feel morally superior.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Andrew Adamson's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe offers red-state safe, mass entertainment in a richly sketched, lovingly-crafted space which is already well-known to millions of young readers. As a former reader of the 'Chronicles myself, let me attest to the justice that Adamson has done to Lewis' children's classic. Indeed, I would use that last word, "classic," or better yet instant children's classic, to describe the results of Adamson's adaptation. One can imagine that this version of the beloved first volume will introduce future generations to Lewis' stories, while giving its many readers the satisfaction of seeing Lewis' world come to CGI life.

Of course, The Chronicles of Narnia are no less imbued with a perspective than is Lee's film; nevertheless, Lewis' (and now Adamson's) Christian allegory allows its viewer a space that is absent in Brokeback Mountain. Surely there is Aslan, the Christ-figure, who dies for the sins of the young Edmund (in betraying his siblings for the fleeting pleasures of Turkish Delight) before rising again to liberate the people of Narnia from eternal winter; and certainly there is the faith of young Lucy which offers a prototype for Christian faith. Yet, there is also the pagan iconography of Lewis' and Adamson's world and its unmistakable critique of fascism (its World War II setting, Narnia's secret police force) which allow for separate readings -- quite unlike Lee's propagandic denunciation of society.

Yes, those with a penchant for the Christian faith will see Aslan's suffering servant as a propitiation for the children's and possibly their own sins, while those without will encounter a narrative filled with wonder and magic -- quite literally. Part of this magic, to be sure, rests in the performances that Adamson summons from Tilda Swinton (there will never be a more perfect White Witch) and the children, particularly Georgie Henley as Lucy Pevensie. Indeed, it is the wonder and the pathos of her performance that truly sustains Adamson's Narnia -- a wonder shared by anyone who has fancied themselves to be Lucy or Susan or Peter or even Edmund.

It is curious then that it is in Lewis' tale that we find characters who are flawed but whom ultimately attain redemption, and not in Lee's very grown up piece of Oscar-baiting, where no enlightened member of the audience is to blame. It is society itself, and one which is comfortably distant (in time and space) from its New York and Los Angeles advocates, which is at fault; would that they would have just allow these two men to be happy together -- and would that we might do the same today. To take my cue from Lewis and not Lee, let me just ask which is closer to the truth: is everyone else to blame or sometimes are we ourselves at fault? And if society was as we would like it, would the attainment of happiness be a simple matter of knowing ourselves?

New Film: The Ice Harvest

Entering the final month of 2005, it has suddenly become clear to me just how atrocious this past eleven months have been for new American cinema. Aside from Canadian auteur David Cronenberg's masterful A History of Violence and German madman Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, it seems reasonable to me that the modest virtues of Harold Ramis' The Ice Harvest may just make it the second or third runner-up on what is thus far a dismal list (save us Brokeback Mountain and The New World). Indeed, it is only the former that will figure on my year end's top ten list, not that that says anything for the relative quality of Hollywood. For 2002, for instance, I would not include a single American-financed film among my ten best (though again there is a Cronenberg film, Spider) even if I could name perhaps a half dozen very good films which I prefer to everything but A History of Violence and Grizzly Man this season. The point in this is that one, much of the best of world cinema happens outside the U.S.; and two, usually we fare quite a bit better -- Hollywood-wise -- than we have in 2005.

So, yes, if you've confined yourself to Hollywood pictures this year, by choice or circumstance, you most likely have convinced yourself that there are no good movies out there... and largely, you're correct.
However, as I have said, there are modest virtues to be witnessed in the John Cusack-Billy Bob Thorton headliner, The Ice Harvest, which opened nationwide last week to below average reviews and an indifferent public -- judging by the poor box office. What critics and audiences have missed in passing over the über-cruel comedy cum neo-noir is this year's most extravagant reinterpretation of genre, in this case the Christmas film, even if the Ramis-helmer may at times seem like Bad Santa (2003) redux or a Coen Brothers retread.

In the Groundhog Day director's favor, however, is what might be judged to be the fuller reversal of genre (even if it can't equal Bad Santa's wicked pleasures) and the more generous picture, as it avoids the condescension of the Coen's, however nihilistic Ramis' perspective may be. The point is that The Ice Harvest operates according to a spatial logic that catalogues those places that Christmas movies tend to elide -- bars, strip-clubs... okay, lots of strip-clubs, etc. -- and a set of details that seem to cut against the holiday's mythical grain, be it Oliver Platt's Christmas Eve binge-drinking and subsequent purging, Thorton's porn video and even the (freezing) rainstorm itself, which Ramis snidely and economically introduces during the opening credit sequence with a few drops falling on a nativity Christ child. These are people and places which exist -- on Christmas just as they do anytime else -- but typically have no place in your typical Christmas movie... and rightfully so, one could argue.

Nevertheless, Ramis' Bad Santa set-up (which is surely the epochal film in this sub-subgenre) gives way to a Fargo (1996) or A Simple Plan (1998) without the accents -- or more importantly, given that we are talking about Witchita and not Minneapolis, the snow.
Consequently, Ramis reminds us of his postmodern street-cred by giving us another generic mash-up, just as he presaged Pulp Fiction a decade earlier with his experimental Groundhog Day-time structure. Still, it is less the director's adept generic/tonal shift than it is the cohesiveness of his heterocosm that marks The Ice Harvest as noteworthy new Hollywood cinema. The very fact that The Ice Harvest engages our sense of narrative expectation, let alone the rigor of its conceit, provides its anomaly in the wasteland that has been 2005.

New Film: L'Enfant (The Child)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Cannes Palme d'Or winner, L'Enfant (The Child), deserves perhaps the highest praise that can be bestowed upon a work of art -- that it is true. To make this claim is not to suggest that it speaks from a right perspective or that it possesses a style that commensurately depicts its setting; rather, to say that L'Enfant is true is to acknowledge the verisimilitude of its psychological description. From this its viewpoint is to be judged, not vice versa.


That viewpoint, a Jamesian Christianity (as in the works-driven epistle), extends the logic of the brothers' previous masterpiece, The Son (2002). If the earlier film manifested an artisanal purity in the singularity of its purpose, both narratively and formally, the latter is a far messier affair, consistent with the titular adult lead's indirect path to salvation. His is not an easy attainment of maturity founded upon self-actualization, but is instead a reaffirmation of The Son's earlier claim that man is to be judged by his actions. It is not enough for one to be contrite in their words; genuine behavior modification must follow. That this is so is not simply a matter of a divine calculus but is instead reflective of self-absorption's power to destroy the lives of others, whether it is the emotional destruction of Sofia after he sells their newborn child or Bruno's abandonment of his weakened adolescent protege after a robbery. This is the true meaning of 'love thy neighbor.'

Of course, the film's inclusion of the theft and the subsequent theme of redemption through imprisonment reference the brothers' most consistent source, Robert Bresson, and particularly Pickpocket (1959) -- just as their Rosetta (1999) refashioned Mouchette (1967). (So too there exaggerated use of sound and extreme reduction of depth of field.) In this way, they continue to be the master's most loyal followers, updating his inimitable cinema with their own Jamesian variation. Moreover, the film's absence of arc befits their own revision in L'Enfant: it is no longer the struggling saint but instead the sinner who is now the subject of their allegory -- a Child, helpless without the love of his Father.

New Film: The Weeping Meadow

There are anachronisms and then there are anachronisms. If in the past I have found it necessary to praise a director like Clint Eastwood for a technique more at home in 1962 than in its own age, I have done so with the feeling that for someone like him, form was only a means to an end. For Eastwood, style was (and is) never its own justification, but can be rather something to detract from the urgency of his narratives. To someone like Eastwood, modifications in form, rather than indicating some sort of aesthetic progress, possessed a danger in their potential to obscure his artistic intentions. At the same time, these same purposes were never themselves static, but instead experienced remolding in the image of their own particular moments. In short, while his technique stayed the same, his thought was evolving.

At first glance, Theo Angelopoulos might strike one as the same sort of figure. After all, The Weeping Meadow, whatever else it is, is a film from a different stylistic moment. Nonetheless, the ideas contained in The Weeping Meadow show the director's evolution from a Marxist historicism, focusing almost exclusively on Greek history (The Travelling Players, 1975), to a more existential consideration of Balkan realities (Ulysses' Gaze, 1995). Yet, there is one important difference between the aforementioned Eastwood and Angelopoulos: whereas invisibility of style is Eastwood's ultimate end, Angelopoulos has long foregrounded his own once dazzling technique. The problem is, it no longer seems as though the Greek auteur is utilizing his form to ask questions. If The Travelling Players established a fatal


continuity to the exigencies of Greek history, via a camera that moved from figure grouping to figure grouping, often bridging temporal discontinuities over the course of a single tracking shot, The Weeping Meadow's continued employment of this same style, minus its formally radical employment, fails to remain self-justified. If anything, The Weeping Meadow is a film that should have been made twenty-five plus years ago, considering its scant modifications of his own modernist form. (Sparing use of music psychologically is in fact the only reevaluation of Angelopoulos' Travelling Players' technique.) This is, in other words, a profoundly dated text. Of course,The Weeping Meadow has its moments of beauty -- which Angelopoulos, as always, never allow his spectators to forget -- but the ability to photograph a Greek landscape poetically loses some of its appeal as the film drags on toward the three hour mark. Its one thing to watch Angelopoulos reinvent the medium for four continuous hours in The Travelling Players; it's yet another thing to see him copying himself -- poorly -- for three.

So again, there are anachronisms and there are anachronisms. Unfortunately, a thirty-year late re-tread of late modernism is not exactly the most enticing variety. If anything, The Weeping Meadow reconfirms the necessity to understand films at the moment of their creation. If we can forgive a film like The Birth of a Nation (1915) for its aberrant politics (by today's standards) it is likewise important to understand the inadequacy of a film like The Weeping Meadow on the basis of its historical moment -- which unfortunately for the director ended long ago.

New Film: A History of Violence

*WARNING - THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FROM THE FIFTH PARAGRAPH ONWARD IN THIS ANALYSIS*

David Cronenberg's A History of Violence is to date the best English-language film of 2005. That it should be so will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the director's work over the last decade. To a film, there is perhaps no corpus in the Anglo-Saxon cinema during this time which has continued to examine the mysterious depths of personality in the way that Cronenberg's has. For the countless scores of movies that seek to awe and entertain us -- and make no mistake, Cronenberg does both -- here is a body of work that foremost seeks to ask the most essential of questions, what is it to be human? Indeed, a film like A History of Violence makes us wonder why all films don't attempt something similar, given the ease with which the visceral and the thought-provoking commingle within the film.

But of course A History of Violence is a rarity for Hollywood. Then again, as much as we sometimes like to pretend otherwise, a film like Cronenberg's has always been a rarity in Hollywood. Why does Alfred Hitchcock -- Cronenberg's most obvious influence in A History of Violence -- continue to engender such a cultish following? Because he was unique, because he was better than most... and so too is Cronenberg.

Like Hitchcock, Cronenberg adapts the default form of Hollywood classicism to suit his own idiosyncratic narrative ends. 'Adapt' (rather than adopt) as his form, at times, evinces its own consubstantial logic quite apart from the basic codes of Hollywood storytelling. Perhaps the best example of Cronenberg's narratological flexibility occurs in the opening scene in which two outsider hoods "check out" of their motel. With the camera remaining outside their crummy roadside accommodations, Cronenberg introduces us to these characters by making a very important discursive point: they are cold-blooded killers. This point, indeed, is not made until Cronenberg cuts for the first time as the character who had remained outside the entire time enters the motel office. Inside we see, along with the indifferent henchman, that his protege has executed the two motel workers. That Cronenberg maintained the spatial and temporal continuity of the earlier shot confirms what has already been suggested: that he entered the space with the sole purpose of murdering the pair; that it was not accidental, that his execution did not involve a struggle or any sort of in-the-moment rationalization (had there been a cut, on the other hand, either would have been structurally possible). If this is not enough, the gentleman now in the room proceeds to kill a little girl who spots him looking through a cooler -- an on-screen variation of what had been already established through a singluar stylistic choice.

In the next shot we are introduced to the film's protagonists, Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), his beautiful wife (Maria Bello), his son and daughter. The screaming little girl is quickly reassured that there is no such thing as monsters as we are ominously introduced to this swath of small-town American perfection -- and their seemingly obvious future victimization. (Importantly, Cronenberg does not make fun of their ethos: visually he shows the natural beauty of the Midwest, while the couple's sexual life seems to indicate an uninhibited ideal.) However, before we get to this point, Cronenberg establishes the teenage son's victimhood -- to a high school bully -- giving us another character on whom we wish justice meted.

Subsequently, the two out-of-towners force their way into Tom's diner at closing time. Once it becomes clear that they are there to rob the establishment -- which we know will mean certain death for our protagonists -- and once one of the characters moves to rape the female waitress, Tom acts almost instinctively, killing the pair of assailants with breathless dexterity. Suffice to say that he is regarded as a hero and that we feel no sympathy for the dead, even if we might regret their physical pain (which Cronenberg carefully includes).

However, as any one who has ever seen a Cronenberg film knows, what follows is anything but straight narrative. Following Tom's heroic action, a mangled Ed Harris and a pair of his cronies arrive in the diner. Mr. Harris's character insists on calling Tom, Joey, which, for the naturalistic grace of Mortensen's performance, we find as odd as Tom evidently does. Regardless, the former persists, and Tom seems to have been thrust in a very Hitchcockian 'wrong man' scenario. As we soon learn, Harris is a mobster with a beef against this Joey who was responsible for carving up his face with barbed wire. Again, for those acclimated to the Cronenberg universe (think Spider, 2002) one begins to wonder if Tom is indeed Joey without knowing it -- that he is some kind of "schizo" as his wife wonders. Our answer comes shortly for this man who is strangely adept at killing, but who is nonetheless saved by his son at the last possible moment. (It is therefore implied that the young man might just share his father's violent acumen.)

The point is, whether or not Tom/Joey is aware of his past, that this violence exists within him, which is precisely where Cronenberg's big questions commence. Does Tom bare responsibility for Joey's past actions if he is not aware of them? Which is Tom/Joey's true personality? Can he be both of these people at once, and if so what makes him the person he is (if it is not a single personality)? Who is he, in other words, and what is it that makes him human if not a unified self?

Of course, there is another dimension in what would seem to be his suppressed former (perhaps true, though not necessarily) self: that there is violence living inside him. Indeed it is at this point that Cronenberg's film skips over any possible misreading as political allegory -- violence is a fact of life, or more precisely in the instance of this narrative, a former life. In fact, the history to which the title refers is that of Tom's self, a history which Cronenberg's narrative slight-of-hand shows to be in his everyman, and implicitly in all of us. That his physically timid son manifests the same violence (while finding a narrative causality in his genetics) reinforces the ubiquity of human violence. While it is true that Cronenberg is removing the too-perfect veneer of Middle America, it is of even greater importance that he is excoriating the illusory skin of human goodness. In this most perfectly ordered specimen there is untamed violence.

Quick take on Rossellini

Although Roberto Rossellini was indisputably one of the most influential of European directors, the fact that his influence was founded upon a philosophical or conceptual attitude rather than upon the imitation of stylistic devices or thematic preoccupations has meant that Anglo-American film historians in particular tend to pay little more than lip service to his achievement, when not ignoring it altogether. Yet such indifference constitutes a major injustice not merely to a director who redefined the parameters of the cinema but to one of the supreme "documenters," in any art form, of the latter half of the 20th century.

-Gilbert Adair

Roberto Rossellini is one of those curious figures in world cinema who seems to generate more respect than admiration. As Adair accurately points out, the reverence typically paid to the director is little more than tokenism. Certainly, his realist aesthetic -- location shooting, natural light, non-professional actors, longer-duration takes -- has benefited filmmakers of sparse means the world over. He is remembered as a figure of undeniable historical significance without being thought of as the equal to directors of a similar influence (such as Griffith, Renoir, Welles, Bresson, Godard). He certainly lacks the devotion many hold for his best-known countrymen, from Fellini to Antonioni to Bertolucci, among others. However, I would submit that he is at once their superior and the greatest of all Italian directors, without even making any allowance for his firm place in film history. This is to say that his corpus speaks for itself, outside of history, as one of the most beautiful and inspired that the medium has yet seen.

Yet, again he is underestimated. The reason for this, it would seem to me, is that Rossellini's style is too often considered for its historical circumstances, its facility for assimilation, and even for what he expresses through this style (or less opaquely, his themes) rather than for what this style says about the director's viewpoint. Indeed, it is in an examination of its conceptual genesis that a unity emerges to Rossellini's corpus, marking him as one of the medium's best.

Specifically, it seems to me that the key to appreciating Rossellini rests in his epistemological ideas. For Rossellini, the truth is evident on the surface of things. From his early, immediately post-war films (Rome, Open City [1945], Paisa [1946], Germany, Year Zero [1948]) to his Bergman cycle (including Stromboli [1950], Voyage in Italy [1953] and Fear [1954]), his historical recreations (The Flowers of St. Francis [1950] and The Rise to Power of Louis XIV [1966] among others) and more proper documentaries (such as India [1958]), what marks his entire body of mature work is a faith in humankind's perception of truth. Take the somewhat forgotten, small masterwork Fear: throughout the picture, Bergman's character attempts to conceal the truth of an adulterous affair. However, her body language belies the secret she is attempting to hide -- at one point her blackmailer asks rhetorically why she blushes, why her hands trembled and why she was so quick to give away her money. In other words, in spite of a shared Catholic faith with Robert Bresson, Rossellini departs from the Frenchmen (as well as from such directors as Michelangelo Antonioni, Wong Kar-wai, and even Eric Rohmer in Triple Agent [2004]) in the his view that psychology is discernible in gesture.

As it has been claimed, this basic understanding of the comprehensibility of truth is not limited in fact to the psychologically-intensive Bergman cycle, but manifests itself throughout his ouevre. The post-war texts offer their morals within the context (another key theme in Rossellini) of a war-ravaged Europe. In seeing the condition of Germany in the 1948 film, one understands the despair of the child protagonist. Surface reality discloses truth. Similarly, The Flowers of St. Francis, perhaps his greatest work, shows (key theme number three) the basic rhythm of a long-since extinct life -- a life lived absent of any goals other than the service of the Lord -- which as such reveals Christianity's distinct understanding of time; less abstractly, India proposes that its presentation of Indian life is sufficient to reveal essential truths of the nation.

In this basic understanding of epistemology, I would argue, Rossellini shows himself to be an artist seeking a form to express his ideas, not simply the innovator of a technique born of historical circumstance. It is in this consistency of viewpoint, manifesting itself in his form, that the beauty of his work becomes clear. Rossellini's cinema deserves to be appreciated not only for its historical value, but indeed for the beauty of its expression of content. In this lies its grace.

Unheroic Martial Art Missteps

Upon the urging of a reader -- and for the Gaza piece which was posted on this site last night -- I have been asked to share my thoughts on what might be best described as a cycle of revisionist martial arts films made in the past five years. Since what I am about to say differs from his own opinion, and that of at least one other very knowledgeable friend's of mine, I hope this post will generate non-scatalogical disagreement in the comments section. So let me begin with a film that I viewed for the first time, belatedly, to offer as thoughtful an analysis as I could: Hero.

Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002), a revisionist martial arts epic starring Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi -- a veritable who's who of Chinese art cinema -- was itself only belatedly released in the U.S., more than two years after its completion. Of course, when it did finally hit screens, the Miramax co-production did exceedingly well at the box office, confirming the commercial promise of the record-breaking Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)While it goes without saying that box office success does not entail quality, it is still worth noting that few other foreign-language films have connected with American audiences the way that these films have. Ultimately, what strikes me about these martial art epics and parodies is the place that spectacle plays in their administration of pleasure. Upon its release, it seemed that much of the hype concerning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon stemmed from the director's renunciation of computer effects in exchange for the wires that allowed the protagonists' to engage in combat on the tops of the trees. The exhilaration of flight, of soaring was key to the film's visceral impact, just as it is for Hero or Zhang's House of Flying Daggers (2004). There is a sense in each of these that the impossible is being depicted; the laws of nature are no longer impediments to these works of exceptional dexterity. Similarly it is this quality, dexterity, which fills the parodic work of Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, 2004): the impossible is euphorically brought to the screen, though it is here tempered by Chow's caustic wit and postmodern sensibility.

So, each's ability to produce a unique sensorial experience, to 'wow' its audience should be enough to commend these works, should it not? Well, with the exception of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (certainly overrated, but still pretty good) I would say it is now. Let us return to Hero.First, let us concede that there are certain spectacular scenes in the film: the zero gravity fighting, the cloud of arrows cutting through the sky, the absurd hand-to-hand combat abilities of the protagonists -- this is a film that has some "sick" action sequences, nobody will deny that. Surely, in fact, this is a film that follows the Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968, 'The Man with No Name' trilogy) model of genre revisionism -- which it references in its nameless protagonist: because it is a film about its genre, a mind-numbing, almost glib degree of skill is appropriate.

Yet, there is something to remember when one talks about a cinema that is inherently revisionist in its telos -- because it is a film about film history, it is inherently historic in its critique. In other words, for one of these films to possess merit at a critical level, it must come at a specific moment in the evolution of the genre. King Hu's revisionist martial arts classic A Touch of Zen(1969) does, the Leone films do, but it is hard to claim a similar importance for the Lee or Zhang films. (This was the same problem I had with Todd Haynes' hopelessly overrated Far From Heaven (2002): what exactly is the point of revising Sirk fifty years after the fact? And does the earlier film truly want for its recourse to subtext?) Okay, so these people defy the laws of nature, so women are particularly skilled in their films, so what? Neither genre revisionism nor feminism are exactly new to our critical discourse.

So we go searching for other qualities in these films. What we find in Zhang's films are a reactionary pro-Chinese sentiment propped up by its export exoticism. As with his Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Zhang seems to be directing his nationalist epics at an international art-house audience: Zhang doesn't stop at portraying his culture; he explains it to his non-acclimated audiences. Furthermore, Hero in particular belies a naivete when it comes to its political sentiments -- peace is held to be the noblest cause of all. In this, Zhang seems to support the acquiescences to a dictator so long as it means that one can go about their life unimpeded. Troubling sentiments for someone who lived through the Cultural Revolution and Tienamen.

While as a rule I advocate judging films not in what they say but in how they say it, works such as Hero emerge as something of an exception by virtue of the fact that their 'how' does not relate to their 'what.' It is not that Zhang's craft is invisible; quite the opposite, in fact. Rather, it is that the form is spectacle for its own sake and its political message, which is quite clear in Hero, is not integrated into the work's form. As such, a film like Hero requires precisely this mode of compartmentalized critique as this is how the various elements of its form relate to one another. It is on this basis that I criticize it and the other films mentioned, again save for Crouching Tiger.

Okay, so Kung Fu Hustle operates according to different laws itself, though I am no less unequivocal in my distaste for this much-hyped parody. If you want to know what sort of humor Chow employs, turn on Univision on a Saturday night, look for the cross-eyed dweeb staring at the buxom fake blonde, watch her scorn a number of hunky male model types for the wallflower, and there, in a nutshell, is the humor of Kung Fu Hustle's. Chow wraps this hopelessly over-the-top broadness in a cloak of postmodernism. And like Hero this gratuity adds up to nothing much at all.

Gaza Pullout, by Dr. X

While modesty, typically, is not one of my better virtues -- or something I possess in any form -- on the topic of the Gaza pullout I did feel a bit ill-suited to offer my commentary. So in my place, here is the mysteriously-christened Dr. X, a one-time resident of Israel and in my view, one of the most insightful people I know on the topic of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Please read his piece in its entirety -- the good Dr. offers an exceptionally well-reasoned analysis of the current situation and its future trajectory. (And a memo to the author: Dr. X, you have an open invitation any time you would like to turn this Tativille thing into a two person blog. You could write about things people actually care about and I'll stick to my speciality, irrelevancies.) Here it is:

Greetings fellow Tativille reader(s?)! Dr. X here. Ordinarily your eyes would be graced with the witty and insightful words of Michael J. Anderson. However, today's topic concerns Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip, and since Mike prefers to eat his falafel in lower Manhattan rather than Kfar Darom, he followed his capitalist instincts and outsourced the job to me. So today I'll be playing the political version of a teenage East New Delhian calling myself "Jerome" and asking you if you would like to take advantage of our introductory long distance service prices. The good news is that as a two year resident of suburban Jerusalem (albeit nearly 10 years ago) I am more qualified to talk about Israeli politics than anyone you're likely to run into in the blogosphere. The bad news is that by "more" I mean "less," and by "blogosphere" I mean "average bum in the gutter."

Having said that, let me begin by observing that the Gaza pullout is a bold but partial step towards the development of a fully sovereign Palestinian state. The trouble with predicting the results of bold but partial steps is that they are equally fertile ground for eventual spectacular success and immediate spectacular failure. For instance, the development of limited institutions of rights and representation in the Anglo-Saxon world (the Magna Carta, the House of Commons) acted as progressive footholds for liberty, and helped to usher into existence the freest and most prosperous nations in human history. On the side of the spectrum, the deregulation of California's wholesale power markets (without the concurrent deregulation of retail power prices) led to record rolling blackouts and considerable backlash against deregulation. Perhaps in an alternate reality there is a California where energy companies were able to build more plants in the state; where low rainfall in the Pacific Northwest didn't cut the amount of available hydroelectric power; where a booming tech industry didn't put record demand on the power grid; where corrupt companies didn't realize that the regulated pricing structure could be played like a finely tuned fiddle. In that reality Californians are probably enjoying a fully deregulated market and the blissful lack of a Teutonic Gubernator. But in this reality what could have been the first step toward freer trade at home turned into a cautionary tale against liberalization.

The Gaza pullout has similar potential for success or failure. On the one hand it signals a willingness on Israel's part to take Palestinian territorial claims seriously. It will ostensibly improve freedom of movement within Gaza, remove barriers to Palestinians using their own private lands, and give the fledgling government a chance at proving its legitimacy. On the other hand, the Palestinians (especially the rabble rousers among them) will still have plenty to complain about. Land and sea barriers will likely prevent extensive commerce between Gaza and the world at large, perpetuating its 50% unemployment rate and abysmal per capita income. (Anyone who thinks that rotten domestic government can't inflame Arab hatred of Israel need look no further than Beirut or Damascus for a categorical rebuttal.) Moreover, the removal of the Gaza settlements represents only about 3.3% of settlers in the combined territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (and less than 2% if you include Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem). And while the good people of Gaza may be released from the heavy hand of the IDF, it is only to be replaced by the corrupt hand of the PA.

Thus, the worst fears of IsraelÂ’s most ardent Zionists may be realized. An autonomous (but by no means sovereign) Gaza Strip could give Palestinian extremists a safe haven for future terrorism while insufficiently undercutting the message that those extremists preach to their less zealous neighbors. Indeed, the recent launching of Qassam rockets into Israel from Gaza may well be a small taste of things to come. If this be the case, Israel's right wing will point to the pullout as "proof" that only force will ensure national security, and the peace process will likely be in a worse position than it was before (if such a thing is possible). If instead the Palestinians of Gaza are able to govern themselves and suppress the terrorists in their midst, the pullout will almost certainly be a significant stepping stone to a self-reliant state.

In the grand scheme of things, the Gaza pullout is unlikely to be the event that leads to Palestinian sovereignty if it is a success, and it is even less likely to lower the curtain on Palestinian sovereignty if it is a failure. Ironically, the day will come when Palestinians will very likely achieve full sovereignty with the whole-hearted support of the Israeli right. Simple demographic trends will see to that. The current population of Gaza and the West Bank is about 3,760,000 compared to Israel's 6,276,000. But the population growth rate in the Palestinian territories is a smoking 3.4%, compared to Israel's rather meager 1.2%. (Cue Mahmoud Abas wearing a Disco Stu jacket: "If these trends continue . . . heeeeeyyyyy.") Assuming these rates stay constant, Palestinians will make up 47% of the area's population in twenty years. In twenty-five years, they will be in the majority. Somewhere along the line Palestinians with no right to rule themselves will come to realize that they can rule themselves and the Israelis too if they are willing to unify the Territories with Israel proper. And if there's one thing the hard right in Israel would hate to see more than a sovereign Palestine, it is a Palestinian-controlled Israel.

While I still have a national audience, I would like to cling to my 15 minutes for another 30 seconds to dole out shame to both sides regarding the pullout. The PA's complaint that the pullout is unilateral is a complete non-sequitur unless we can understand it to mean they are upset that they can't claim the credit for it. Way to put your petty political ambitions above the good of your countrymen, gents. And the gut-wrenching sorrow of the Israeli people to be pulling their fellow-citizens out of their houses is nothing more than lewd hypocrisy. Last I checked there was no national soul searching when a Palestinian home was bull-dozed for the crimes of a family member, or a Palestinian family was impoverished when a security wall denied them access to their own property, or a "targeted retaliation" (read assassination) killed innocent Palestinian bystanders. Human tragedy is just that: human tragedy, regardless of whether the human involved wears a kaffiya or a yarmulke. If Israelis and Palestinians are unable or unwilling to recognize that fact, the prospects for peace between them (with or without Palestinian sovereignty) are dim indeed.

New Film: The 40-Year-Old Virgin & Grizzly Man

Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin does not hit screens without a certain amount of promise: after all, Apatow was the creator of the highly underrated television series "Undeclared" (2001), the follow-up to the exceptional "Freaks and Geeks" (1999), where he likewise worked in the capacities of both writer and director. Moreover, The 40-Year-Old Virgin seems to represent the belated break-through of its undeniably talented lead, Steve Carell, who has thus far shown brightest in his supporting roles in Anchorman (2004), as a correspondent on "The Daily Show," and most recently as America's answer to David Brent in NBC's remake of "The Office." While the latter may in fact come to fruition, The 40-Year-Old Virgin suffers most from its authorial viewpoint. To back-track, "Undeclared" is an under-appreciated series, to be sure, which hopefully will be remedied by its recent release on DVD, but this does not mean that it is without its deficiencies. Particularly, "Undeclared," like The 40 Year-Old-Virgin, showcases a lack of moral assessment when it comes to the sexual conduct of its character. If there is an ethos in Apatow's world -- of which "Freaks and Geeks" can be excluded on the basis that it is ultimately Paul Feig's creation -- it is that people will have sex, period. There is no moral reckoning based on abstract principles.

At this point, any viewer of The 40-Year-Old Virgin (or "Undeclared") might challenge this interpretation on the basis that Carell's character final contests that his prolonged virginity has found a meaning in his love for Trish (Catherine Keener, Being John Malkovich), leading them to a very family value-friendly consummation (in terms of its circumstances at least). Even so, up to this point, Carell's sojourn in the land of the untouched proceeded not from a moral calculus of his own but rather out of his particular romantic ineptitude -- he would have if he could have. In other words, Carell's character uses the convenience of his inadequacies to steak out a moral position: his virginity is an accident, meted by his peculiar character flaws. What all of this means is that Apatow has to find a way to redeem Carell, short of simply getting his character laid -- hence the recourse to a love of a lifetime, Firehouse-style.

On the level of conceit, what Apatow has on his hands is a sitcom plot, demanding a twenty-two minute narrative. At 110 minutes, our prolonged wait for Carell's loss of virginity might just resemble his own 40-year frustration. While Apatow deftly pulls off a Hitchcockian shift in audience desire -- we go from wanting to see the poor guy get some to hoping that he will not forsake his love for Trish -- he sure takes his time in getting there. When finally he does, we get one of the most singularly incompetent instances of cross-cutting I can remember in recent cinema -- somebody needs to bone-up on old Griffith. (Oh, and a memo to Judd, there is a difference between racism on-screen in 1915 and in 2005 -- you don't get the same pass that some of us are willing to extend to The Birth of a Nation, provided its very different social circumstances.) When you cut between two plot lines, conceivably to heighten tension and raise the possibility that things won't turn out the way we might like them to, it is best that they somehow intersect. Since it is Beth's (Elizabeth Banks) and not his apartment that they go back to, there is no danger that Trish will walk in on them, thereby deflating any potential for suspense in his use of a technique then generally connotes exactly that; the principle is so elementary, in fact, that one wonders how it is possible for a director with Apatow's experience to screw it up that badly.

Really, though, it is not really Apatow's lack of a moral intelligence and his inadequate filmmaking that makes The 40-Year-Old Virgin frequently unpleasurable viewing. Instead, it is the film's unrelenting profanity and repetitiveness that truly tests the patience of its audience. The scene where Carell's chest hair is removed in one section after another seems to be the perfect metaphor for the viewer who might not automatically embrace Apatow's profane perspective. In the end, The 40-Year-Old Virgin shares its basic structure with another of this summer's most highly-anticipated comedy's, The Aristocrats: the same joke is repeated time and again, with only the slightest of modifications. What does Apatow call his act? The 40-Year-Old Virgin!

There is no similar limitation of scope to Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, yet another major work from the poet laureate of ecological antagonism and civilizational abandonment. As the director himself puts it in his endlessly fascinating voice-over, nature is not the harmonious entity that the film's subject (and grizzly meal) Timothy Treadwell posits, but is instead characterized by "chaos, disharmony and murder." This is to say that in the story of Treadwell, Herzog has found a subject as comfortable in the director's archetypal universe as were Kaspar Hauser or Fitzcarraldo.

That story, of a man who has left civilization to record and protect Alaskan Brown Bears, only to himself to be devoured by one of the great creatures -- along with his girlfriend -- is presented in a series of home movies made by Treadwell and later assembled and narrated, with additional commentary footage and interviews, by Herzog. More than any other film in recent memory, Grizzly Man thus stands as a case study in the auteur theory: namely that the ultimate measure of a film consists not only in the text but in its extra-textual circumstances and relation to a broader corpus of work as well.

In other words, it gains value by virtue of its status within the director's body of work, which in this case is as a film that presents nature's passive indifference contraposed with a protagonist who thirsts for an escape from a cruel civilization. However it is precisely Treadwell's false, romanticized notions of the ecological other that precipitates his real-life killing: as one bumpkin-ish character notes, Treadwell seemed to treat these beasts as if they were human beings in bear suits rather than the soul-less creatures that Herzog himself memorably analyzes.

Indeed, Grizzly Man is filled with moments of such hermeneutical insight, showing not only the delusions of an individual who had been burnt one too many times by human order, but further of man's subjugation to the cosmos, particularly in this mode of existence. When Treadwell, in spite of his belief system, prays for divine intervention to save the creatures at a moment of ecological crisis, Herzog allows an interpretative space which would seem the only honest conveyance of a causality whose immaterial reality precludes a visual expression. This is to say that Herzog, in his clearly crafted re-presentation of the Treadwell story, does not simply tell, but indeed allows the viewer to contemplate the surfaces that comprise his art. In the end, the stare of the grizzly that Herzog fashions as disinterestedness -- surely the most reasonable explanation, mind you -- retains its inherent ambiguity by virtue of its surface materiality. This is a cinema, in other words, which could not exist in any other medium; this, we might observe, is the very opposite of Apatow's brand of comic filmmaking.

Current Exhibition: Oteiza: Myth and Modernism

The Guggenheim's Oteiza: Myth and Modernism, running now through the 24th, is the first comprehensive survey of the Basque sculptor's work ever to be mounted in this country. That his art not only prefigures 1960s-era minimalism but even exceeds much of it in its theoretical complexity renders any Jorge Oteiza exhibition essential. Yet, because of his limited exposure, Oteiza's reputation isn't what it deserves to be: as one of the key sculptors of the twentieth century.

The corpus of Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003) represents an early expression of the minimalist aesthetic in sculpture, presaging the work of Donald Judd and Basque countryman Eduardo Chillida by more than a decade. Yet it is not simply his timing in art historical terms that lends Oteiza's art its substantial merit, but instead it is the success of his formal experimentation in finding an original idiom through which to express his spiritual content. To be sure, this is an art that seeks to express immaterial, metaphysical reality through the decidedly material means of the sculptural medium. However, it is less matter that dictates the tenor of his work, but rather space which defines Oteiza's aesthetic.Particularly, Oteiza, by the mid 1950s, sought to give life to the negative space that conditioned his craft: in carving slits and "light condensers" into slabs of marble and alabaster, Oteiza called attention to the spatial transformations undergone in the process of sculpture, and moreover, to the fact of an invisible presence in the location of a negative space. Oteiza's work instantiates a world unseen; in absence and through absence, Oteiza depicts presence.

Naturally, this formal idiom translates religious allegory to the extent that the latter is similarly concerned with the metaphysical. The fact that Oteiza's corpus features such titles as "You are Peter" and "Portrait of the Holy Ghost" confirms this confluence of formal concerns and religious subject matter. Yet, Oteiza's work retains a clear pedagogical dimension apart from its utilization for religious expression. First, there is its function in shaping one's perception of the medium: no longer is sculpture defined by matter, but instead by the space of which that matter is only a part.

Second, as with his alabaster works, the permeability of the sculptural surface is underscored. Then again, this instability of surfaces retains a certain spiritual resonance to the degree that it elicits a fluidity of visible and invisible reality that denies the false posturings of skepticism. To deny immaterial existence is to twine one's epistemology to the very limited sensory experience of seeing. By the limiting means of sculpture, Oteiza conveys a world that far exceeds its material dimension. This is spiritual art of the first order because it asks the necessary formal questions.

Dimensions of Dialogue

With the DVD release of Jan Svankmajer's 12-minute animated bricolage Dimensions of Dialogue (1982) earlier this summer, one of the truly singular works of the animated cinema is finally available in the United States. Certainly, Svankmajer's reputation as one of the great Surrealists of his chosen medium was already secure with the wide availability of such recent major works as Conspirators of Pleasure (1996) and Little Otik (2000). However, it is with the relatively diminutive Dimensions of Dialogue that Svankmajer shows himself to be one of the three or four most important artists of the Communist twilight in Eastern Europe. Surely, for the brilliance of its form, the ambitiousness of its subject and the boldness of its critique, Dimensions of Dialogue deserves to be considered in the class of this epoch's greatest achievements and as Svankmajer's masterpiece to wit.

Divided into three separate dialogues entitled 'Exhaustive Discussion,' 'Passionate Discourse' and 'Factual Conversation,' Svankmajer indeed exhausts the subject of social interaction in this unbounded critique of human malfeasance. In the first dialogue, two anthropomorphized assemblages of food-stuffs and kitchen utensils respectively lurch towards one another with the latter devouring the former. In turn, this pattern is repeated when a collection of intellectual markers vies with the kitchen products destroying the returning collage with similarly ease. Next it is the now degraded food objects which sully the books, paints, etc., as though the two were mingling in some fictious trash bin. This process of disintegration continues with the resulting forms appearing closer and closer to the form of man himself.

The resulting clay human figure proceeds to spit out a facsimile of himself, as does the copy and so on. Consequently what this series of degradations finally produces is a human figure to be sure, but one lacking in any distinguishing characteristics. Given this lack of defining humanity, Svankmajer invites his spectator to read the inscribed process in negative terms: in turning over from one identity to the next there is a loss until ultimately, variation from one figure to the next ceases to exist. Moreover, the identities of these figures seem to cast light on the specificity of Svankmajer's critique -- the first seems to figure agrarianism, the second, industrialism, and the third a life of letters perhaps most closely associated with the bourgeoisie. In this series of revolutions, mankind destroys its uniqueness, which provides Svankmajer's 'Exhaustive Discussion' its critical heft; Marx's understanding of class antagonism is the subject of Svankmajer's critique.

Though it hardly seems possible, the second section of Dimensions of Dialogue exceeds even the first in its organic representation of critical discourse within an ostensibly analogical narrative. Here two clay figures, a man and a woman, commence an amorous affair. The two figures literally become indistinguishable from one another as Svankmajer manipulates the forms while utilizing his typical stop-motion technique (as he does in the first and third parts as well). In the midst of their passion, Svankmajer shows great economy depicting their love-making in such visuals as a hand and a breast alone amidst a large, amorphic blob of clay.

Once the pair finish, a small piece of their shared physical intercourse is left bouncing about on the table. Neither wishes to reclaim this lost substance, leading the pair to fling it -- their shared past -- at one another. This emerging antagonism becomes only a prelude as the two, now in full No Exit-mode, proceed to rip each other's faces out. What began as ecstatic passion ends in mutual annihilation; certainly, Svankmajer possesses no less skepticism towards the hope of romantic satisfaction than he does in the benefits of revolution seeded in class conflict.

The final section, 'Factual Conversation,' begins with the harmonious interaction of two male busts as they produce various complementary objects from their mouths. After this first concordant round, they produce objects that no longer work together, producing a relative absurdity and incongruence of interaction which is definitively surreal. Yet, their give-and-take does not stop here. The two continue in this exchange until their respective orifices begin to offer similar, competing objects, which eventually assures their mutual destruction. While it might be tempting to read part three, consequently, as a critique of capitalism -- which it may be -- the more compelling reading, given the film's historical circumstances and the undeniable tenor of the first part, would be as a breakdown of mutual benefit, thereby skewering socialism in equal measure. (Though it might also be tempting to view part three in light of the Cold War provided the above verbal analogy, the shared benefit inscribed would seem to rule out this possibility.)

Whatever the precise reading is of this third part, however, what does remain clear is that together, Svankmajer underlines the folly of human interaction on the levels of power (political), sex (interpersonal) and capital (financial).

Notes on recent viewings (edited)

I.
Alexei Guerman's My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984) remains one of the hidden jewels of the late Soviet cinema, screened only rarely as it was last night as part of the Kino summer repertory program at New York's Anthology Film Archives. Guerman, on the evidence of 'Ivan Lapshin and his later opus Khroustaliov, My Car! (1998), deserves to be rated among the most important figures of both the late Soviet and European fin-de-siecle cinemas, remaking the great tradition of Soviet poetical cinema (Barnet, Dovzhenko, Paradjanov, Tarkovsky, Sokurov) with an eye toward the absurdities of Stalinism. His dissent is presented indirectly, in the film's characterizations rather than in the exposition of dialogue. Of course, this impressionistic narrative technique (for a critical voice) was mandated by the Soviet Union's tight control of individual expression; however, the irony of his viewpoint is entirely his own, marking Guerman as a contemporary of the great Bela Tarr in his infusion of black humor into the rhythmic structure of cinema modeled on Soviet master Andrei Tarkovsky's.

II.
One of the scenes set on the frozen steppe landscape achieves an atmospheric tangiblity rivaled by only a handful of films (think La Nuit du carrefour [Jean Renoir, 1932] for instance). Here, the icy winter sky is represented with an exceptional tactility focused by the wafting truck exhaust and the escaping breath of the actors. At moments like these, cinema awakens to a third sense -- touch -- through the power of the film's visuals.

III.
see comments

IV.
Featured among the extras of The Sopranos: Season Five is Peter Bogdanovich's commentary for an episode he directed. Let me just say that as much as his clean, Hitchcock/Hawks-ian style speaks for itself, even on the small screen, his specific justifications for his shot selections remind us just how talented a director Bogdanovich can be: when he isolates Edie Falco's character in a reverse, it is not just a narratological technique but also a spatial expression of relational geometry; he withholds an establishing long until the end of one scene for maximum emotional resonance; etc. I also found it interesting -- and quite insightful -- that he continually singled out Falco, Steve Buscemi, and Robert Iler (Tony Jr.) for their superlative acting abilities. Also, his impressions of the two great auteurs are not to be missed.

New Film: Broken Flowers and 2046

How much of Broken Flowers can be attributed to director Jim Jarmusch's contribution and how much to Bill Murray's? Though the auteur theory seems to have been made for corpuses like Jarmusch's -- as uniform as it is in style and point-of-view -- there can be no mistaking the consistency of Murray's performance in Broken Flowers with his recent work for directors as disparate as Jarmusch (also Coffee and Cigarettes, 2003), Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, 2003) and Wes Anderson (Rushmore, 1998; The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001; and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, 2004). Increasingly, Mr. Murray looks as if he is little more than a Cossack away from starring in a series of lost Bresson features. Then again, performance style itself is meaningless without the manner in which the actors are framed and the quality of light that illuminates their gestures. Bill Murray may set a new standard for dead-pan in Broken Flowers, but without the over-arching structure and articulating style of the film, his performative restraint is meaningless.

So it is back to Jarmusch's contribution, which in terms of the work's style is unmistakable: typically, Broken Flowers features the director's use of fades to mark scene-changes, an often static camera, his frequent recourse to pillow shots -- especially in the film's numerous traveling sequences -- which once again mark the director as Ozu's clearest follower in the American cinema -- and even a Bressonian restraint which Murray brings flawlessly to screen. Collectively, these elements of style bring to life the story of Don Johnston -- not to be mistaken with, wait.. give me a second to catch my breath... Don Johnson -- an over-the-hill Don Juan (as we are told two hundred and forty-six times in the first ten minutes of the film) who discovers that he might have long-lost son from one of his many affairs. With Murray's Johnston being persistently brow-beaten by would-be private eye neighbor Jeffrey Wright, the former sets off in search of the mother of his potential off-spring, thereby mixing elements of detective fiction and the road movie, a favorite genre of the Stranger Than Paradise-auteur.

In terms of the women whom he visits -- played by Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton respectively -- Jarmusch tends towards schematics, producing something of a coiling miasma of Middle American banality: its not just that Jarmusch gets much of his financing from Europe, but no small portion of his perspective as well. Yet aside from this bit of slouching towards the Brothers Coen and a few flat jokes (including Sharon Stone's seductress daughter being named Lolita), the Director's typically-dry sense of humor remains in tact, which surely is a good thing given the work's dark denouement. In the end, Broken Flowers does offer a modicum of resolution even as it maintains the openness that has long signified the director's craft. Indeed, there is a fundamental relativity to his art which is best stated by Murray himself near the end of the film: "the past is gone... the future isn't here yet... so all there is is this, the present."

However, there does exist a fundamental flaw to Jarmusch's basic conceit: the present itself is the most unstable category of all, forever dying the moment it comes into existence. Wong Kar-wai's 2046 operates with this understanding, belying the impossibility of Jarmusch's philosophical gloss -- the present is never immune from the past, nor can the future escape an ever-constricting set of possibilities conditioned by what has already come into being. When Chow awakens to his feelings for Fei Wong's (Chungking Express, 1994) Wang, it becomes clear that they will never get together, not because she isn't interested, but rather for the fact that she is already in love. As the voice over narration states, "love is matter of timing; it is no use meeting the right person too early or too late."

Of course, Wang is not Chow's first love interest in 2046. She follows a series of one night-stands, her own incursion as a non-romantic presence, and Chow's fling with the incomparable Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi, House of Flying Daggers). In Wong's universe, nothing lasts -- people come into our lives, move out of them, and in some cases reappear, as with Faye Wong's character. In Chow and Wang's case, it is not a matter of lovers reuniting, but rather casual acquaintances who become much closer during a second go-round. In this second turn, she begins to assist Chow in his writing. He in turn pens "2047," named after the room in which he lives, and in which they now work. While this text is ostensibly concerned with her absent Japanese lover, the narrator admits that Chow is the true subject of this oblique take on his own feelings for Wang. Importantly, this same Japanese lover is the protagonist in a second novel, "2046," thereby establishing that the film of the same name is also about its author: Wong.

At the end of the film's prequel In the Mood for Love (2000), Leung's character whispers a secret into a wall. 2046 overtly instantiates the substance of his feelings -- or rather Wong's -- not only at the moment of confession but over the course of the director's entire career, even if he sustains the same degree of mystery that "2047" purportedly does: to everyone but (perhaps) those involved. In this way, 2046 is not only the most self-reflexive work of the director's career, but is in fact the fulfillment of a trilogy begun with Days of Being Wild (1991) and continued in In the Mood for Love. Wong shares the secrets of his deepest feelings -- and those of his art -- though with the same degree of abstraction as his fictional science fiction novel "2046." Significantly, this choice of genre is an organically-chosen means for referring to the same obliqueness with which Wong narrates his own feelings.

Lest all of this makes 2046 seem overly-intellectual, the reality is that Wong remains the most purely visceral filmmaker alive today. If Abbas Kiarostami's films pose the great formal questions of our time, Wong makes us feel as no other director can. He is the great aesthete of his time, attuned to the curve of a woman's hip and how the slit in her skirt rides up the side of her leg as no one else is. Then again, his films offer a form that is both original and that breathlessly express his own anxieties: just as people move in and out of other's lives, so do the narratives of his seemingly aleatory art emerge and collapse. 2046 becomes all the more essential for its role in the clarifying this very process.

Recommended Propaganda: Went the Day Well?

Alberto Cavalcanti's Went the Day Well? (1942) is the sort of film that gives me pause concerning one of my firmer held beliefs: that the measure of a film's value lies not in what is said, but in how it says it. You see, Cavalcanti's picture is a piece of British war propaganda, made in 1942, which paints the British public as a noble fraternity -- duplicitous double agents aside -- sacrificing everything in order to defeat the common enemy. It is not just the men of Bramley Green who put their lives on the line to defeat their German captors, but the women and even the children who do so as well. Went the Day Well? does not shy away from the collateral costs of war nor does it merely schematize the Germans as a bumbling, easy to defeat opponent. This is a work of the highest level of integrity that no less than expected its spectators to show the same vigilance as those who gave their lives to defeat the enemy force. Cavalcanti's picture is a work of profound nobility.

Of course, some of what I have just mentioned is not strictly a matter of content, but is likewise attributable to the film's particular form. For instance, Cavalcanti's representation of the Germans as a competent military force -- not always the rule in the period's films -- proves essential in the film's discourse, and ultimately its strength as propaganda: they cannot be easily beaten; it will take extreme fortitude. On a visceral level, moreover, Went the Day Well? also benefits from Cavalcanti's dexterous manipulation of suspense. (This quality is also evident in his subsequent They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), perhaps the greatest British postwar thriller -- exceeding even Carol Reed's better-remembered classic, The Third Man [1949]). With Went the Day Well, one of the key components of his mastery of tension is his use of sound. In one of the key scenes, where the British civilians have escaped their German captors, Cavalcanti completely cuts the sound altogether, thereby translating this affected silence into the veil of night that the medium's visual mandate precludes. No film, after all, can represent action in complete darkness. So, in this way the distinction established at the outset -- between the telling and the message -- is moot. Went the Day Well? excels in both its form and its moral resoluteness.

The American Cinema... Vol. 2?

I consider myself fortunate to have discovered Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema, Directors and Directions 1929-1968 when I did: just as I was beginning to sense that there might be more to the classical Hollywood cinema than meets the eye. Like many an old movie lover of my generation, I began with those supremely entertaining works of classical Hollywood which found their way onto lists like the AFI's top 100, unconcerned as I was by their deeper meanings. When it occurred to me finally that I should seek pleasures deeper than those provided by many of these films, I turned to the European cinema where I found meaning, more often than not, readily visible on the surface. Next, I began to suspect that I was giving Hollywood the short shrift, and sure enough, I found Sarris's text, enabling me to navigate the many glories (and pitfalls) of the classical American cinema. My new heroes where Lubitsch and Keaton, I now preferred Vertigo to North by Northwest and Wilder had become overrated. Lest it might sound like I was merely aping the opinions of Sarris, the reality was that he had forged a very precise method of judging artistic relevance upon which I enthusiastically latched: he was looking at the relation of form (and especially its space/mise-en-scene) to content. This seemed to me -- and still does for that matter -- a fine foundation for building a set of artistic values, a canon if you will. (That his method does depend so much upon form naturally lends itself to the auteur theory that he would come to champion: after all mise-en-scene is the very substance of the director's contribution.)

Of course, being an avid list-maker and canon-builder myself, I found great pleasure in Sarris's categorizations of various directors, which even now I find to be exceedingly perceptive. His highest distinction, the "Pantheon Directors," was reserved for a small but illustrious group: Chaplin, Flaherty, Ford, Griffith, Hawks, Hitchcock, Keaton, Lang, Lubitsch, Murnau, Ophuls, Renoir, von Sternberg, and Welles. If I were to construct a similarly exclusive group myself, I'm not sure I could have done any better. Okay, von Stroheim definitely deserves to be there -- above Flaherty, certainly -- and probably Leo McCarey too, but all-in-all this is a great group. Conversely, I have always thought that his dismissals of figures like Kazan, Lean, Wyler, and Zinnemann were dead on. However, Sarris has since come to champion the later works of Huston (rightly) and even named Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard one of the ten greatest films of all-time, after condemning the director to his "Less Than Meets the Eye" Hades, showing his own best instincts for self-revision.

The American Cinema's only deficiency, if you can call it one, is that it ends in 1968. Where would he place Scorsese, Eastwood, Spielberg, and Tarantino? Well, in his weekly Observer column, Sarris, having recently decided that he is going to "live forever," professes a will to revise his 1960s classic -- we can only hope that this isn't just a rhetorical tool for the sake of a single column, but that it will in fact reach book shelves someday soon.

Regardless, Sarris begins his so-called revision with the placement of Richard Linklater in the "Far Side of Paradise" category, populated by "directors who fall short of the Pantheon either because of a fragmentation of their personal vision or because of disruptive career problems." Not surprisingly, this got me thinking where I would myself rank Linklater... as well as the other twenty or so modern auteurs he lists. When all was said and done, I had only one sure addition to the "Pantheon Directors": Clint Eastwood. (Stanley Kubrick, would be a second, though Sarris doesn't mention him by name and actually originally placed him in the "Strained Seriousness" camp at the cusp of the director's greatness.) Would I include David Lynch? While Blue Velvet (1986) may be the best American film of its decade, and Mulholland Drive (2001) might just land the same distinction for the present one, there still seems to exist too much variability in the quality of his work. How about Terence Malick? He has made only three films -- Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998) -- but each is a master work.

Ultimately, I am ashamed to report that this minor task bested me, at least when compared to the original American Cinema's... Herculean effort. Naturally, then, I should be all-the-more excited for Sarris's update. This certainly would be true were it not for the criteria he gives for his assessment of Linklater. A funny thing has happened to Sarris in the past thirty-seven years -- he is no longer the same dogmatic defender of aesthetic criteria he once was. As disappointing as this may be, it is certainly understandable. In the end, very few directors can claim the same mastery of the art form that the members of his initial pantheon can. That he has become ever-more concerned with narrative construction divorced from issues of form and style -- which is evident in his effusive praise for such works as Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987) and Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me (2000) -- can be regarded as nothing more than a critic's defense mechanism against an exclusivity that would deny he or she far too much pleasure. Unfortunately, this understandable drift towards a greater critical catholicism has left much of his writing wanting for the insight that pops off nearly every page of The American Cinema....

Then again, he still manages at least one great observation that reminds me of one of his best insights -- a moment of profound chivalry in The Searchers, when the sheriff discretely turns his back as Ethan Edwards' sister-in-law caresses his uniform. In discussing Before Sunset (2004), Linklater mentions a moment when Julie Delpy is about to touch Ethan Hawke's shoulder as he turns around, leading her to relent from the gesture. Such a sensitivity towards so small a gesture shows that Sarris still has it, even if observations like this are as rare for Sarris these days as are the movies in which they appear. Yet, not wanting to end this post on so sour a note, especially when talking about one of my all-time favorite critics, I still hope to see that second edition, and if you haven't yet picked up the first, do so immediately. (You can pick up a used copy for $4.50 here.) It will change the way you look at movies, for the better.

Looking at Ford, Looking through Hawks

"I repeat myself in keeping with Orson Welles who after viewing Stagecoach 40 times before embarking on Citizen Kane said he was influenced by the old guys; the 'classical' film makers, by which he meant 'John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.' If the pantheon of classical music is 'the three Bs' (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms), then it is arguable there is only one true great in cinema - and that's the man who won more Academy Awards (five) than anyone before or since."

-Richard Franklin

"The problem lies in Hawks's apparent transparency, in a stylistic presence that is relentlessly invisible, self-effacing, difficult to see, and extremely difficult to analyze. The subtlety of Hawks's style is one of the most significant features of his work, but it is also the greatest obstacle to the widespread recognition of his talent as a film-maker."

-John Belton

Atop the pantheon of great Hollywood directors, three men tower above the rest -- and with all due deference to Richard Franklin, these men are not named John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford. Well, one of them is, but the other two preferred to go by their given names, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. In the case of the former, no further allowances need be made at the present: few filmmaker's can claim an academic journal devoted entirely to the scholarly research of their career's as can the 'Master of Suspense' (for the record, the publication in question is the Hitchcock Annual, edited by a former professor of mine, Richard Allen). Hawks, on the other hand, remains the red-headed step child of the big three, never quite reaching the same level of international acclaim as the other two; his corpus seems to lack a Vertigo (1958) or a Searchers (1956), which is to say a single masterpiece generally considered to be not only his best, but further one of the great works of world cinema.

Again, much of the difficultly surrounding Hawks's work lies not so much in his choice of subjects or in his themes, but instead in the apparent invisibility of his style. Ford is the perfect counterpoint to the Hawks's visual schema. To paint the great director of western's in the broadest of brushstrokes, Ford's is a cinema devoted to a mythology of the West, whereby the wilderness is painstakingly brought under the thumb of civilization. This cursory explanation for his primary mega-theme is consequently translated into imagery that contraposes a nascent civilization and said wilds. Take for instance the adjacent image from My Darling Clementine (1946): here, Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp reclines on a porch overlooking the wilderness that surrounds the ominously-named Tombstone. In so doing, Ford has visualized his principle theme, inasmuch as Earp (and Tombstone) itself) stands for an ordering force challenging a brutal nature. A second exact visual expression of Ford's ideas occurs in the sequence where a dance is staged at the site of the church's construction. With the half-built structure allowing a vantage out onto the surrounding desert, Ford effectively imparts his basic conflict visually: the wilderness is being tamed with the aid of society's bedrock institutions, the church and the law. Our understanding of his art is therefore deepened by our reading of his imagery. In the interplay of the foreground and background, Ford establishes his principle dialectic.

The opposite is true of the cinema of Howard Hawks: if we look at the screen in Ford, we look through it in Hawks. First, while Ford is primarily concerned with the mythology of the West, Hawks seems to have no similar predilection for this subject matter. Rather what is most remarkable about the latter's corpus, famously dispersed over a wide variety genres -- including the western -- is its uniform interest in homo-social groups of men (and occasionally the spare woman) who are continually shown at work. As Andrew Sarris once put it so succinctly, the basic thread running through his cinema is that "man is measured by his work... not in his ability to communicate with women." This concern, again, manifests across genre boundaries, becoming the key theme in his own great western, Rio Bravo (1959), where Dude (Dean Martin) struggles with his own alcoholism, finally finding redemption in his renewed professional ability.


Similarly, John Wayne's John T. Chance, in an explicit reversal of Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952) matrix, must depend upon the help of others, even as he attempts to go it alone. This dialectic between an individualist ethos and his dependence upon the group is no less profoundly American in its analysis... but I digress; the point is that Ford's themes are central to the genre of which he is the most famous practitioner, while Hawks's manifest themselves time and again, across a wide array of genres.

But what does this have to do with the visual substance of Hawks's work? For the director, form is subservient to the greater themes of the work -- no less than Ford, in fact, form and discourse are consubstantial. Their intermingling, however, is expressed in a very different fashion: whereas, once more, Ford communicates the garden-wilderness dichotomy visually, among other ways, Hawks explicates his themes with a style that expresses his ideas cleanly and without distraction. He shoots his human subjects straight-on (just below eye-level) in comparison with Ford's favored lower angles, looking up at his heroic subject matter. Hawks's figures are commonly staged within the same space -- in two's, etc. -- at a medium distance. When his group is larger than two or three persons, his staging tends to recede to a middle distance that allows his character's to interact in a unified space. Very little action occurs in the background, which varies in size depending upon his utilization of the middle ground, which again flows from the number of characters who populate the scene. In any case, the interactions occur quite near to the camera.

A perfect illustration of Hawks's style can be found in the brilliant opening scene of His Girl Friday (1940). Here, Hawks cuts only when the content precipitates a change in framing or when it is merited, in order to accentuate an important moment in the drama. An example of the latter would be Hawks's cut when Hildy reacts to Walter's off-handed proposal of (re)marriage.

In so rigorously maintaining this schema, Hawks effects an invisibility to the degree the camera, in following the action with a very plain compositional style, refuses to call attention to itself. Thematically, his perpendicular camera, staging of characters so that they are able to interact within a single space, and unobtrusive editing all instantiate formal corollaries to the director's egalitarian vision. The problem is, with regard to his work's formal comprehension, that each of these techniques makes his artistry disappear. Then again, his egalitarian world view demands nothing less than his unpretentious mise-en-scene.

Ultimately, we look past the visual art of Hawks, through to a broader set of themes and concerns that appear and reappear in work after work. The form of his cinema is independent of the content in terms of its relation to genre; then again, Hawks's camera work and editing precisely enacts the ideology contained in his art. The point is that his world view necessitates an essential artlessness, and is protean mastery of genre demands light stylistic footprints, provided that his work is to maintain a thematic unity.

Returning thus to the above comparison, whereas Ford uses the space of his art to juxtapose conflict, Hawks's space is the location of his enacted subject matter. That his individual shots are so profoundly unmemorable, therefore, becomes part of this matrix. Again, we see through Hawks's films, figuratively, to the content, while in Ford's graphic constructions we see his ideology. In this basic difference, we see the very substance of their art.

Miroslav Tichý

This past month, the first ever exhibition of seventy-nine year old Moravian recluse Miroslav Tichý commenced at the Kunsthaus Zurich, thrusting a major new voice (in terms of the collective consciousness, at least) into the international art spotlight. For anyone interested in this "dissident" and "hermit" -- he spent eight years in Communist prisons and clinics for his nonconformity before building a camera out of trash as per his epic poverty -- let me commend Modern Painters' characteristically informative piece. (Though to read the piece in its entirety it is unfortunately necessary to purchase the publication; then again it is the best arts journal going, so just buy it!) I will also use the opportunity of this introduction to post photos on Tativille for the first time, which is perhaps not the best idea given his nude female subjects. Still, with the physical deterioration that he allows his images to suffer, there is an undeniable sense of the transience of physical beauty included in these exceptionally elegiac works. Their subject matter thus is not the nude figure alone -- thereby portending something other than pornography -- but rather beauty's passage, consequently reminding us all of life's evanescence. This is dimly-recalled eroticism, somehow closer to memory (making it all the more wistful) than it is to photographic reality. Take a look and see if you agree: