The Shorts Project – Obvious Child (2009)
I don't watch Friday Night Lights but apparently it's very good and apparently it did a very good job dealing with abortion in its most recent episode. I'll probably give it a shot at some point.
Until then, I'm going to ask people to watch Obvious Child when they need an example of a film that intelligently and unpatronizingly addresses abortion. It's a romantic comedy. It stars Jenny Slate, who nearly got herself fired from SNL on her first episode for dropping the f-bomb, and is directed by Gillian Robespierre, whom I've never heard of outside the context of this film but seems a very promising talent.
It's not a perfect film by any stretch - it could use some tightening in the editing department, and some of the lighting is wonky. But there's an easygoing charm to it that I really appreciate and an aesthetic that neither indulges in the grotesquely twee nor the self-consciously aggrieved. Unlike The Cult of Mumblecore, it gets at The Way Our Generation Interacts without resorting to imbecilic mannerism or conformity to some vague anti-style. It's funny, and it's charming.
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The Shorts Project – Boy and Bicycle (1962)
Thoughts on this movie.
1) Ridley Scott has been bad for so long that it's hard to remember that he was ever good. Boy and Bicycle isn't great, but it's a hell of a lot more alive than American Gangster or Gladiator. It reminds me that this filmmaker - who's dissolved so much into a parody of himself over the last decade with his endless cycle of shitty Russell Crowe vehicles -- used to be a really innovative and masterful genre filmmaker.
The narrative is a trifle: a disaffected young man goes for a ride around his coastal town, the cloud of thoughts in his head informing us of his ride. That's it. It's thematically of a piece with a lot of what was going on in English film and theater in that area - the Angry Young Men of Osborne and early Pinter, but it has a lackadaisical melancholy that sets it apart from those writers. It's a very low-budget affair, shot on non-sync 16mm, and very noodly-film-school-experimental in a way I don't like very much. But there's a certain degree of activity to the film that I find admirable, a synchronization of form and function.
2) Why do we pay so much credence to the idea of a French New Wave (defined in relation to the Cahiers du Cinema writers)? I mean, yes, yes, they were ruthless self-promoters, those Cahiers fellows, and no doubt talented filmmakers, but Agnes Varda and Louis Malle and the American Jules Dassin were making New Wavey films in France before Truffaut and Godard even picked up cameras, Carlos Saura's phenomenal, hugely underseen bullfighting-youthpic Los Golfos was released in 1960 (the same year as Breathless), Nikkatsu spent the early part of the sixties releasing morally complex and stylistically confrontational genre films by directors like Seijun Suzuki and Toshio Masuda and here, in 1962, a twerpy twenty-one year old Brit was making a film that is entirely in the spirit of New Wave aesthetics -- and he wasn't the only one, of course: Tony Richardson and Richard Lester were among the best and most aesthetically innovative New Wave filmmakers.
Which is to say: Boy and Bicycle really makes you question the idea of whether style can ever be considered elemental to a national cinema. And Truffaut and Godard are the most massively praised international filmmakers of their era not because they were Incomparable Stylistic Innovators but because they were film critics and theorists, and other film critics and theorists saw what they were doing and championed it. The clubbishness of the Euro film culture cannot be understressed.
3) The single worst thing about Ridley Scott's filmmaking career is that of his younger brother Tony, who has never been a good filmmaker and never will be (and whose painfully overproduced pieces of shit Ridley has been trying to emulate lately). He's here, starring as the boy on the bicycle. I've never liked him more. His mumbling, underenunciated line readings of the film's fakey beatnik-poetry narration really work for me.
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Roman Polanski and Mel Gibson
What does it take to end a career in the film industry?
It's more complex than you'd think.
Mel Gibson's career ended, effectively, this past week. Oh, sure, he'll be able to make some more movies -- I'm sure some producer somewhere will be unscrupulous enough to test the waters for a Mel Gibson film at some point, and he of course has a few marketing disasters coming out in the next year or so. But unless he decides to plunk down some more of his own money on features -- and we all know he could -- he's basically poison as far as the film industry is concerned.
And that's a good thing. What Mel Gibson did and said was horrific. It should not be rewarded with a slap on the wrist. It should be marginalized, and it has been. He's been dropped by his agency, ostracized from the Hollywood community, and left just as much a pariah as he should be.
We should be cautious to pat the film community on the back, however. Irin Carmon has already written on this subject here, but I think it needs to be underlined in triplicate: Mel Gibson's misogyny and abuse of his wife probably didn't have anything to do with why his career is in jeopardy right now. As Carmon notes, Charlie Sheen is being welcomed back to his family sitcom after threatening his wife with a knife. In the rare cases where a celebrity has had his career effectively ended because of his abusive behavior, it's not because they abused their partner, but because they abused a partner who was more famous than they were: Chris Brown and Rihanna, Ike Turner and Tina Turner.
So why is Mel Gibson's career basically over? Because he's a racist. An unreconstructed racist with a toxic ideology and paranoia against blacks, Hispanics, Jews. But not because he's an unreconstructed wife-beater.
Violence and abuse toward women is the last hate crime viewed as acceptable within the film community. Which is why they make so many movies fetishizing it and justifying that fetishization as 'a commentary on violence against women.'
In other news, Roman Polanski was released from his beautiful ski chalet this week after seven months of detention by the Swiss government, who have claimed it's not in their interest to extradite him to America.
Roman Polanski, in case you are unaware, forcibly raped a child thirty years ago and has been the toast and cause celebre of the international film community for fleeing justice.
When he won an Oscar for Best Director for The Pianist he received a standing ovation. So did Mel Gibson, who received the same Oscar for Braveheart.
Two Best Director winners whose admittedly accomplished films betray their toxic ideologies: Gibson's xenophobia and martyr-complex in Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto, and, to a lesser extent, The Man Without a Face. Polanski's well-documented contempt for women in What?, Repulsion, Knife in the Water and other movies.
One of them had a very bad week and one of them a very good week.
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The Shorts Project – Gasman (1997)
Another massively great awards-winning short by Lynne Ramsay, whose Small Deaths I featured on here a few weeks ago. Gasman is perhaps even less narratively focused than that short, focusing on a young girl's inability to understand that the two children she's been made to spend her day with (at some surreal, Boschian Christmas party) are also her father's children. It's certainly of a piece, narratively and thematically, with Small Deaths, and even includes the same father-daughter pairing from that film (James Ramsay and Lynne Ramsay, Jnr.), but there's something larger and more poetic about this film - there's a surreal quality to the light, with noticeable vignetting and wide-angle lensing that never verges on the cartoonish.
Ramsay's facility with child actors is truly remarkable: she manages to coax performances from children that are neither cloying nor inauthentic - her children are real, sometimes annoying, sometimes charming, but always emotionally authentic. She neither sentimentalizes nor bemoans childhood, but has an authentic eye for the way children experience the world.
What really struck me watching Gasman this time around, though, is how expertly the sound design works to explore the experience of Lynne (Ramsay Jnr.) - the way the music drops in and out as she watches his father's illegitimate daughter climb onto her father's knee. Dialogue - what I can understand of it (I lack subtitles and an ear for thick Scottish brogue) doesn't pop out from the soundscape of the raucous scene, but sort of emerges. It's really remarkable and something I'm going to think about a lot in the next few years as I think about the way sound and image interplay.
Gasman can be seen on Cinema 16's European Short Films DVD and on Criterion's DVD of Ratcatcher.
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The Shorts Project – La Ruta Natural (2004)
I just can't get behind this.
I recommended Alex Pastor's La Ruta Natural for the film festival (where it played), mostly because it was the first competent film I actually came across the first year I was screening shorts, but it truly falls apart on second viewing - it's a parlor trick rather than a film, and it really makes you admire those filmmakers who experiment with time as a formal construct in a serious and intelligent way (this is where I say Christopher Nolan).
La Ruta Natural is a mystery of sorts, the story of a man's life told as he dies in a bathtub, his synapses misfiring and experiencing and reinterpreting his life in reverse. We see him and his wife fighting, the 'birth' of his grown son (as a coffin emerges from a wall mausoleum), his child shrinking, the life-giving power of violence (etc. etc.) I never really thought this film was especially profound, but at this point it feels more like it was conceived in a haze of pot smoke and should have stayed there for its own good.
And I think part of what's such a problem with the film is that the protagonist is such a generic character. I suppose it's born out of a desire on part of the filmmaker to create cute reverses of common every-day experiences, but the result is that, unlike Memento for example, the actual narrative of the protagonist's life is not compelling - in fact, it's really boring. And reversing it and dressing up that reversal with faux-naive narration just seems silly. It's a film by the cleverest kid in your middle school drama class.
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The Shorts Project – The Last Farm (2004)
I know I have some catching up to do for The Shorts Project, so I'm gonna try to knock most of it out over the next few hours...
This film comes recommended to me from Vince, a future classmate of mine at Columbia - as it happens, this was a submission to the film festival two years in a row, and was rejected by higher-ups both years before eventually playing at Sundance and getting an Oscar nomination. It's a very good little film, and though I strain not to ruin the ending, it manages to be appropriately emotionally gripping without even coming close to verging on schmaltz. Like the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, it mines pathos from emotional restraint and like Halldor Laxness's phenomenal and underread novel Independent People it writes an emotionally microscopic narrative onto Iceland's massive and oppressive landscape.
The Last Farm is probably the most polite and sentimental Icelandic film I've seen - which doesn't mean much considering some of what that island has to offer cinematically (Jar City and Noi being the two most seen Icelandic films in the US). But what interests me the most is the way that it uses specific strains of art cinema as a means of getting at ideas that wouldn't be possible with conventional narrative cinema. Much of the action is, in a way, rather tedious - an old man goes about his day-to-day activities on his farm, sawing wood and digging a hole. The film offers little in the way of conventional close-up or even dialogue as a means of getting us inside the old man's head. Instead, we're left to pick at little details - the way he deflects a friend from a neighboring farm from sharing a cup of coffee, the lies of a seemingly unremarkable phone call to his daughter - hint at what he's doing.
For those of you (like Noam) who have told me it's too hard to commit to watching all these movies, let me be unambiguous about this film: it's worth fifteen minutes of your life.
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I know carping about the Emmys is really dumb, but…
The fact that the following people didn't get nominations is a pretty good indicator that the Emmy nomination board is also really dumb:
I just realized I only watch four shows. Nevertheless, these actors are all great at what they do and it bums me out that they aren't getting the recognition they deserve.
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The Shorts Project – Gone with the Wine (2002)
Corneliu Porumboiu’s debut short film Gone with the Wine does not shed light on the talent later films like 12:08 East of Bucharest would demonstrate. It’s a trifle of a film that relies far too heavily on narration and far too little on purely cinematic language to tell the story of an abstemious young man attempting to leave his alcoholic rural family for a job on an oil rig.
Strangely for Porumboiu, whose later films are characterized by a stylistic deadpan, Gone with the Wine betrays the influence of Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica both in its use of heavily distorting wide-angle lenses and the ironically chipper Slavic folk on the soundtrack.
I admire what I’ve seen of Kusturica (admittedly little) and this reminds me that I should watch more, so I’m thankful for that, if nothing else. A curiosity piece if you’re interested in the early stirrings of the Romanian New Wave, but otherwise not really worth the nine minutes.
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The Shorts Project – An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (1982)
Jane Campion directed this strange, stylish film about the way a family completely dissolves on the side of the road. It won the Palme d'Or for short films. It's both a fascinating first act for a major filmmaker and a unique entry into New Zealand's then-burgeoning national cinema.
As you can probably tell, I'm having quite a bit of trouble making any declarative statements about this film and its content. I think it's very good, but I have trouble determining why. Or where this film comes from: there are some obvious influences detectable, including mid-60s Godard and Antonioni (the ending, in particular, with its digression into abstraction, is very Antonioni.), but I'm a bit at a loss as to say much more.
You should see this and tell me your thoughts. I'd love to see if someone can parse what you think Campion is doing at the end.
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The Shorts Project – The Horse (1973)
Charles Burnett’s The Horse is a difficult film, less emotionally available than his masterpiece Killer of Sheep and of a deliberate and slow pace that seems more in concert with modern-day art film aesthetics than those in vogue in the early ‘70s, when the film was produced. Burnett makes deliberately languid decisions like playing two separate musical cues, in succession, on top of a single still landscape image to begin the film, allowing the viewer time to familiarize himself or herself with the milieu: a dilapidated American farm where a quartet of white workers wait for the farm's black owner to arrive, hired to kill the man's son's horse.
As much as I admire Burnett, I find The Horse needlessly obscure – the off-rhythm pacing and aggressively unlikable characters set it off as ‘art object’ rather than compelling narrative work. There are moments which elevate it – the way the Samuel Barber piece swells on a beautiful close-up of the horse’s face, the way the pace of the film picks up radically when Ray (Larry Clark) finally arrives.
As an experiment in pacing and the relationship between cinematic time and space it’s fascinating: the way that the long shots and face-obscuring medium shots of the first half of the film give way to tight close-ups once Ray arrives – the film demonstrates the rhythmic quality to shot composition, which is something I had never thought about before. But as a narrative work, I find little to connect to emotionally. Dave Kehr, in his review of the Burnett box set for the Times, compares the film to Faulkner, and I understand it to a certain degree: both the film and Faulkner operate within a modernist rural-grotesque style, but there's so little for me to grab hold of here that I find the film less a work unto itself than a compelling stepping stone for Burnett toward later, better films.
I do think Kehr's point with the comparison is especially apt - though I don't connect with this piece, I certainly think it would be a higher-regarded work within critical literature if it were not for Burnett being an African American filmmaker whose first major work languished in semi-obscurity behind copyright protections for its first three decades.
The Horse is available to watch here on New York magazine’s website. I still can’t figure out how to embed their videos.
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Olive Cotton
Third in a continuing series of posts about still photographers following posts on Alfred Palmer and Arthur Rothstein.
Olive Cotton, you should know, spent much of her life marginalized. As with many great female artists, the sexist dictums of her day proclaimed her husband, Max Dupain, the greater photographer, and of course he was the great Australian photographer of advertising and fashion editorial of the midcentury.
But in 1985, an Olive Cotton retrospective shed light on her remarkable talent: though thoroughly uncommercial, Cotton's work is stunningly pictorial, drawing on German expressionist and French impressionist influences. Cotton's subject matter - flowers, teacups, shadows - becomes haunting through her lens.
Here is her most famous work, Teacup Ballet (1935). Cotton often left her work slightly out of focus, the fuzziness producing a dreamlike quality to her images:
Her Shasta Daisies (1937) uses a full, active frame and a narrow depth of field to give the image a childlike, almost fairy-tale beauty:
Dead Sunflowers (1984) works in a similar vein and wide-angle lensing to produce a moody, expressionistic image:
Cotton was a photographer with a strong investment in the inner life of objects and landscapes. Here are a pair of stunning landscapes where individual elements (the cloud, the tree branch) are drawn with full personalities:
Cotton could invest herself in seemingly uninspired subjects and find a compelling play of light and shadow, as in Fence and Tree (1937):
Cotton's portraiture is less successful than her still-life and landscape work. There's a telling lack of engagement with the subject in this fashion still she shot for the Dupain studio:
Cotton's work is on a continuum with a certain Australian visual tradition that Russell Boyd explores in his work as cinematographer on Peter Weir's film Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Olive Cotton's The Way Through the Trees (1938)
Russell Boyd, Still from Picnic at Hanging Rock
And then there are images beautiful enough to defy analysis:
Olive Cotton, Photographer is out of print but can be purchased for a lot of money here.
Two Things That I Saw Before The Kids are All Right
The second was a trailer for the movie Charlie St. Cloud. I don't think I've ever heard an audience react so derisively to a trailer before - everyone started laughing riotously, and the realization that everyone was laughing made everyone laugh even more.
On the other hand, I'm glad there's still a place for the Charlie St. Clouds of American film: this is a drama without any real ambitions to awards or massive critical acclaim. It exists because there's still a market for shameless melodrama and old-fashioned storytelling. It's hokey, schlocky, and almost undoubtedly awful, but I'd trade a dozen cynically slapped-together superhero movies or bromances for a single ridiculously earnest-looking Zac Efron vehicle.
The first was this:
It's by John Hillcoat (The Road, The Proposition), and it's the newest in Levi's Go Forth campaign, which also brought us those amazing Walt Whitman commercials -- Cary Fukunaga's "America" and M. Blash's "O Pioneers!" Part of me really loves it, because, duh, and part of me thinks it's the most shameless act of aesthetic thievery imaginable, stealing imagery, ideas, and even direct shots from films by Charles Burnett, David Gordon Green, and Terrence Malick (he even swipes the Wagner piece from Das Rheingold Malick uses multiple times in The New World*).
This post on Blackbook's Deep Focus blog points out the obvious fucked-up quality of Levi's making an ad about a community broken down by plant closures.
Your thoughts?
Oh, and The Kids Are All Right is really boss. You should see it.
*Of course, this piece was also used by Herzog in Nosferatu the Vampyre, but my point is that Hillcoat had to be thinking of Malick when he made this ad, and to use the same piece of music as a means of producing a similar response is pretty cheap.