Category: Film

One thing that most people have failed to notice about Kathryn Bigelow is that she is an ultra-formalist. Admittedly, this is something she never talks about in any of the interviews with her that I have seen or read. But it is a big reason why she is one of my favorite filmmakers, across a wide variety of genres and themes. I fell in love with her work when I first saw her revisionist vampire film Near Dark in 1987; and in subsequent years and decades she has never disappointed me — not even when a lot of people on the left whose opinions, and in some cases friendships, I value highly, criticized Zero Dark Thirty (2012) for its depiction (without overt critique) of CIA torture of political prisoners. Bigelow, despite being the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director, has made far fewer films than I would wish; and this is in part due to the fact that she has had a much harder time raising money for her projects than male directors at the same level of accomplishment do.

In any case, her new film A House of Dynamite is as brilliant and powerful as anything she has done, and this is at least partly the case for formalist reasons. The film is about an apparent nuclear attack on the United States: a single nuclear missile incoming, launched from somewhere in the North Pacific, and headed for Chicago; the American Armed Forces are unable to stop it. The film gives us the same time sequence, the twenty minutes or so between when the missile is first detected and when it is about to hit its target, three times from three different locations and perspectives. First we see the command center where threats are evaluated and recommendations are made; second, we see the military command center which is responsible for execution; and third we see the President of the United States, who must decide whether and how to respond. The President is played, quite convincingly, by Idris Elba. The role is sui generis, reminding us of neither of Obama nor Trump. This President is not a superman, he is clearly unsure about what to do. We see him first in the White House and then traveling through the streets of Washington DC in a car under the protection of the Secret Service. His shifting location contrasts with the two bunkers, or securitized command centers, in the previous segments of the film.

Importantly, nobody knows the source of the missile, and no country or force has claimed responsibility. Russia denies involvement, and vouches for China’s non-involvement as well. This leaves North Korea as the obvious suspect, but this is never confirmed. The film concludes, in all three iterations, with the missile about to hit, in just a single second. But the film withholds what then happens from us. Is there catastrophic destruction? Or does the bomb fail to explode? And in any case, what will the President decide to do? Bigelow quite deliberately leaves us at the threshold, in a non-cathartic suspension. I think that this was absolutely the right decision; any conclusion would diminish the film’s intensity, and seem to partly answer or foreclose the questions it leaves us with.

I should also mention that each of the three segments is well over twenty minutes in duration; in other words, film time is dilated, rather than compressed, in comparison to the time of the story being recounted. This is quite unusual for any Hollywood film; it only happens in movies where a time limit is a central feature of the narrative. (I believe that High Noon is supposed to take place in a single hour, although that film is 85 minutes long; but examples of this sort of time dilation are quite rare).

I started by calling Bigelow an ultra-formalist. One sees this in all of her films, expressed in different ways. It certainly includes her nigh-perfect sense for camera movement and editing, but it goes beyond that. I have written in the past about how many of her earlier films are structured around a richly depicted milieu (nighttime in the rural Southwest for Near Dark; the beach for Point Break, even the desert for The Hurt Locker). We have some of that here, in the vast in size but nonetheless claustrophobic bunkers of the two command centers. These spaces are both vast and claustrophobically enclosed; and somehow Bigelow is able to communicate both of these feelings at once. We get a few establishing shots, but they are not enough to orient us visually within spaces that are bureaucratically organized into identical cubicles or identical rows or chairs facing computer screens. We get a kind of allover space, but without a link between micro and macro levels. There are a lot of tight closeups, but also ubiquitous links which are not spatial but telecommunicational. I haven’t seen another film that depicts this new organization of space (as far beyond the postmodern space of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel that Fredric Jameson wrote about in the 1980s, as that space was beyond the older and more linear space of cities in the age of modernism). There was some depiction of military and security command space in Zero Dark Thirty, but Bigelow pushes her vision of this spatial configuration much further in A House of Dynamite.

But there is more. The formal organization of A House of Dynamite, reflecting the formal organization of the security apparatus that it depicts, is a matter of time as well as one of space. Not only are most of the conversations in the film conducted through microphones and screens, we also have a sort of syncopation of events. We will see and hear one side of a conversation in one segment, and the other side in a different segment; for instance, when people communicate with the President in the first two sections of the film, we hear his voice, but his face does not appear on any of the screens that the people in the two command centers can see. We learn in the third segment that this is because the President is not in his office but on the move. A similar effect at a lesser level occurs when the Deputy Security Director Jake Baerington, played by Gabriel Basso, is speaking with people in the bunker while he is still on the way over — so that he communicates by mobile phone while walking quickly, leading to a shaky image that the people already in the bunker complain about.

Since nearly all the discussions that would be depicted via shot-reverse shot structures in an ordinary film are now between people located in different physical spaces, as well as the fact that we so often see one side of a conversation in one segment, while the other side is given us in a later segment, the structures that ordinarily suture a movie together are here divided up: precisely calibrated, but yet diffused over different segments of the film as we are watching it. This may just slip by as we are watching the film, but it is a mind-boggling formal feat for everything to be calibrated so carefully, and yet dispersed into different segments of the movie. It is both that everything is very nearly simultaneous, and also that there is no synoptic point of view that can grasp this simultaneity all at once. Everything is funneled through the apparatuses of capture and comprehension to the President and other top officials. This is conveyed in another way when we meet the Secretary of Defense, who cannot rescue his estranged daughter in Chicago from the impending holocaust, nor tell her about it, but who nonetheless futilely calls her to say somewhat lamely that he loves her. This is only one of several personal touches that the movie inserts, in order to give us some sense of the characters’ lives outside their jobs and procedural duties. But part of the point here is that these asides are all quite brief; Bigelow refuses the temptation to sentimentalize them in a way that would ‘humanize’ the film and detract from its insistence on the bureaucratic and procedural nature of everything that is otherwise depicted.

Let me try to bring this to a conclusion, though there are lots of other features of the movie that I could discuss. But the crucial point for me is that, though Bigelow is an ultra-formalist, she is a hot one rather than a cool one (to use the distinction promoted by Marshall McLuhan). Most formalisms are cool and distanced; think of, for instance, of Alain Resnais’ and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad. My claim is that A House of Dynamite is in a real way every bit as much a structured formalist work as that film is; but at the same time, Bigelow pushes us into an intimacy and urgency that most formalist movies, in the manner of Marienbad, entirely refuse us. I now realize that the combination of intimacy and affective intensity with an otherwise anti-subjective formalism is precisely what sets Kathryn Bigelow’s films apart from nearly everything else in the entire history of the movies. And this aesthetico-affective approach (if it is at all acceptable for me to use such a verbally infelicitous expression) is what makes the experience of Bigelow’s films so important and indeed overwhelming for me. Most of the reviews I have seen of A House of Dynamite focus on the film’s warning to us about the danger, still today, decades after the end of the Cold War, of a nuclear catastrophe. And of course I am not in any sense denying this. (Other discussions have similarly criticized Zero Dark Thirty for its ‘war on terror’ content, and Detroit for not sufficiently digging into the Black sensibilities that fueled the 1967 rebellion). I have no answer to such comments; I can only say that, aside from them, what thrills and moves me so much about Bigelow is that her films are perhaps the closest I have come to an experience of what (decades ago) we cinephiles used to call (despite the phrase seeming out of date today) pure cinema.

The 1962 film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, has always been controversial and divisive. It has been praised as High Camp, and denounced as misogynistic caricature. Even for those of us who love it (myself included), the film is excruciating: it consists in more than two hours of aging, dueling divas Davis and Crawford tormenting and indeed torturing one another. Though it had some precursors, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? pretty much invented the “hagssploitation” subgenre. It renewed the careers of both stars, but did this by portraying them as delusional and violent, pretty much erasing their earlier accomplishments as glamorous stars and Oscar-winning actors. While male Hollywood stars are presented in such a way that allows them to preserve their allure into middle age and even beyond, female stars are considered to br washed up and devalued once they hit the age of 35 or so. They can only continue developing their personas by resigning their sexuality and vigor, and instead embracing monstrosity. In this respect, Davis and Crawford were preceded by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950); the pattern continues even today, as witness Demi Moore in The Substance (2024).

Johanna Isaacson renews our understanding of all this with her brilliant short book on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. She deals head-on with the film itself, in terms of both content and form, as well as with the dilemma faced by women who are no longer young –a kind of entrapment that the movie at once dramatizes, exploits, and exemplifies. In Isaacson’s account, Baby Jane indeed “registers older women’s devaluation”; however, “instead of responding with dejection or grim realism,” it “retaliates with fabulousness, excess, and pitch-black humor”. The film, she cogently argues, is “a bold manifesto on how to fight back with theatrical flair rather than meek apology”.

Isaacson’s book is wonderful for several reasons. Most importantly, for me, is how powerfully it gets at a level of aesthetic feeling, or aesthetic response, that is very difficult to put into words. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? overtly invokes sensations of disgust, as well as self-reflexive shame at one’s own implication in enjoying such disgust at the expense of others. The movie even invokes a sort of hilarity, as we cannot help laughing as well as grimacing at the over-the-top absurdity of what is happening on screen. But beyond all this, the film draws us into a mood, or an atmosphere, that doesn’t fit neatly into any of our descriptive categories: a kind of ferocious partial identification with, and partial enjoyment at a detached distance of, the very wrongness of everything that is happening on screen, and everything that the protagonists are doing. Isaacson conveys this sensation that is almost impossible to pin down: a complicated feeling of complicity, distance, and anger, one that can partly be situated in the terms of ideology critique (the feminist analysis of how older women are mistreated and devalued), but that somehow pushes beyond such terms in order to express a kind of joyous but oxymoronic intensity.

Isaacson evokes this mood throughout, but her discussion is anything but vague. She analyzes the film in exquisite depth, both going through the action scene by scene, and also considering its various informing contexts. There are careful discussions of what was happening in Hollywood at the time Baby Jane was made — the collapse of the old Hollywood studio system with which both actresses were identified — as well as of the overall careers of Aldrich, Crawford, and Davis, and even of the infamous Davis/Crawford feud (which may have actually existed to a certain extent, but which was grossly inflated and exaggerated in the press and in other venues in order to help sell the film).

If you are in any sense a fan of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, you certainly need to read this book. But even if you are not particularly attached to the film, you will learn a lot from it about American popular culture as it evolved over the course of the twentieth century, and about how the position of women (and in particular of privileged, but still discriminated-against, white women) is both refracted though, and to an extent produced by, the Hollywood dream factory and the mainstream media more generally.

RIP Jean-Luc Godard.

I can truthfully say that no artist or writer, in any medium, has had anywhere near as great an influence on my tastes and interests, and indeed on my life altogether, as Godard. I first encountered his work as a freshman in college (1971-1972). One evening, I went (pretty much at random, without any idea of what to expect) to a screening of PIERROT LE FOU. I was entirely shaken up and flabbergasted by seeing it (I am not sure I am using the correct words; most accurately, I was bouleversé, a French word that doesn’t have quite the right nuance in English translation). It was confusing, yet compelling; it echoed all sorts of movies that I had previously seen, but also seemed entirely fresh and new. I really didn’t know what to think, or how to parse the experience of seeing this film. So a few weeks later, they were showing another Godard film, and I went to see it. It was WEEKEND. This time, I felt like my head was going to explode. It was like being thrust into an entirely new and different universe.

Seeing those two Godard movies, at the age of 17, was a conversion experience, a rebirth — or at least, the closest I have ever come to such things. Those movies completely remade my aesthetic, and indeed existential, sense of myself, and of the world. They turned me into a cinephile, and ultimately into a film studies professor. And they colored my view of all other things — my other sensibilities, aesthetic attractions, philosophical interests, and so on. Godard’s movies, more than any other works of art, helped make me into the person I still am, today.

Today, there are other movies I value more highly (Godard wasn’t on my ten-best-of-all-time list that I sent off to Sight and Sound). I continue to love Godard’s early films, but I feel much more ambivalence about his subsequent work (always worth seeing, always producing insights, and yet also leaving me cold in other respects — I think that Godard’s modernism remained attached to an older world, in some ways very distant from the concerns of the 21st century). But for all that, I remain at heart Godardian; or, to put this in a different (Badiou-style) language, I cannot help but remain faithful to the Godard-event.

(first posted on Facebook, but re-posted here)

I initially posted this on Facebook, but I thought it would be good to present an expanded version here.

I just watched Abel Ferrara’s new movie, ZEROS AND ONES, and I was totally blown away by it. Though I realize that almost nobody will like it, aside from diehard Ferrara fans like myself. It’s entirely incomprehensible and opaque in conventional terms, but at the same time emotionally compelling and utterly gorgeous.

Incomprehensible and opaque: every scene screams genre (war film or spy film), and yet nothing adds up to a discernible narrative. Ethan Hawke walks or rides through the empty streets of COVID-ridden Rome at night. He wears military fatigues, and carries a gun and a video camera. He has enigmatic meetings with mysterious people, from Chinese heroin dealers, to a Muslim mullah who gives him advice, to military commandos who waterboard a prisoner, to Russian gangsters who kidnap him and oblige him to have sex with a woman while they record the scene on video, to a silent motorcyclist who takes him to a bridge from which he launches a drone. He also visits various people, including an Italian woman with a young child, with whom he seems to have some sort of pre-existing connection. And he comes across a number of disturbing tableaus; at one point he enters and explores a building that is littered with the bodies of murdered young women, blood splattered across their bodies. All through the movie, Hawke’s character remains dour and mostly silent, his voice is gruff when he does speak. Occasionally, we hear him in voiceover; here his comments are enigmatic. I don’t remember the exact words, but there is something to the effect that, for instance, “Jesus was just another soldier, killed in a three-thousand-year old war. But on whose side?” And again: “The world is the hiding place of God. To understand what’s outside of you, you must use what’s in you. If we hear what we already know, nothing new happens.”

There is no way to make sense of all this diverse footage, nor to figure out why precisely Hawke’s character is in Rome, or what his mission is. My Facebook friend, the film critic Steve Erickson, wrote in a response to my posting that “it feels like the subconscious of a 24 episode or Tom Clancy novel, with a seething id using similar imagery but making no literal sense.” In other words, the movie is composed from all the fears and fantasies that have fueled the “war on terror”, but without the accompanying ideology that binds them into narratives of good and evil. COVID is only an additional dimension of these fears and fantasies. Hawke’s character sometimes wears a mask, and sometimes doesn’t, without any necessary explanation as to why and when (sometimes deliberate continuity violations show him both ways in succeeding shots). Several times, as for instance when the Russian gangsters kidnap him, he is told something to the effect of: “don’t worry, we have all tested negative.”

Hawke also plays a second character, the twin brother of the first one, an imprisoned revolutionary (imprisoned in the US? in Italy? it isn’t clear). He is angry and florid in his rhetoric, whereas Hawke’s first character remains entirely undemonstrative. The brother’s amazing rant under interrogation (he is even injected with drugs to make him talk) sounds like a cross between Walt Whitman and Bakunin. The first Hawke character asks about his brother’s fate, sees footage of the brother’s interrogation (which is how we see it too, mediated by technological transmission), and eventually is told that the brother has been killed.

The movie is also punctuated by explosions, and by commando formations of armed soldiers (both male and female) in fatigues, guarding checkpoints or running off one is never sure where. As the film’s title suggests, digital technology is everywhere in the movie; images are continually being multiplied, transmitted, distorted, and viewed on screens (not to mention the way the film itself calls attention to how it is shot on digital video — something to which I will return). One minor character, the independent filmmaker Stephen Gurewitz, playing himself, only appears on screens as he talks to Hawke’s character on the phone and on computer monitors. At one point, Hawke’s primary character breaks into a room, where Guerwitz, on a huge computer monitor, immediately starts yelling at him to “get out — it’s a trap” — Hawke’s character exits the room through a window and fire escape just as armed troops are breaking down the door. Later Hawke’s character is told (if I followed this bit correctly) that Gurewitz has been killed; murder via video link actually makes a weird sort of sense in the ultra-mediated, yet for that very reason overwhelmingly visceral, world of this movie. The night footage of Rome, and of Hawke making his way through it, is taken from varying angles, including from up above. This footage has an almost documentary feel to it, at the same time it is ostentatiously digitized — I am not sure how to explain this paradox, but it does feel both these ways. The movie’s soundtrack, which plays a lot over the shots of Hawke moving through a nearly empty city, combines techno with bombastic rock; it feels entirely appropriate to the movie’s combination of lurid action and strange emptiness.

Emotionally compelling and utterly gorgeous: My favorite Ferrara films have always been the ones that work the visual image in remarkable ways, from the crisp black and white of The Addiction to the neon overload blur of so many of his films. Even when he adopts documentary plainnness (as in Welcome to New York), the raw looks he gives us are disconcerting. All these reworkings of the image depart literalness, and give the movies their pervasive emotional tones, which vary remarkably from one film to the next over the course of Ferrara’s career. In Zeros and Ones, Ferrara experiments with the image in new ways. The digital cinematography is murky, often deliberately underlit, and filled with a lot of noise. Ferrara previously did something like this in New Rose Hotel, with its combination of blurred digital images in some parts, oversaturated colors in other parts, and haunting indirect lighting in still others, even as the film displayed the vapidity of postmodern business hotel architecture.

But in Zeros and Ones, Ferrara explores the ambiguities of the digital image as never before. If the content of the film is fragmented genre exploitation scenes, then the form is visuals that are dark and blurry almost to the point of abstraction — or should I say, of abstract expressionism? The image in Zeros and Ones is filled with glitches, always on the verge of breaking up. The often handheld camera roves around, continually and jerkily. Extreme closeups alternate with shots of dark, empty streets, sometimes with lit-up architectural landmarks emerging out of the murk. Instead of the overwrought, lurid lighting of movies like King of New York and Bad Lieutenant, here we have something on the order of Hito Steyerl’s “poor image”. These images are disorienting and disconcerting; but in their own way they are saturated with (mostly negative) affect, and they are (convulsively) beautiful.

Zeros and Ones is relentless, but actually quite short. It clocks in at less than an hour and a half; and even this includes the opening and closing credits, plus a prologue and an epilogue in which Ethan Hawke — speaking as himself, rather than as his characters — reflects on the movie. In the prologue, he says that he was excited to work with Ferrara, because he was blown away by the script. In the epilogue, interrupting the final credits, Hawke reveals that that prologue was actually shot before the movie, as a kind of teaser advertisement for investors. He adds that the pre-shooting script wasn’t really a script, and that even after making the movie and watching the final cut, he doesn’t really understand it. But he suggests that, just as he plays two characters, the revolutionary and the military operative of uncertain allegiances, so the movie dramatizes two opposing attitudes. One attitude is that everything is radically broken, the people who control the world are evil, and we are all going to die. The other attitude is that life is a miracle, and we should cherish it at every moment. He ends his epilogue by telling us that “this is part of the movie”; and then the final credits resume.

The entire movie takes place in a single night. It is dark when Hawke’s primary character arrives in Rome by train, and the night continues through most of the movie. Towards the end, he returns to the apartment of the Italian woman with a small child; he tells her that “it is finally happening” (though we have no idea as to what). Hawke’s character, the woman, and the child go up to the roof of her building, and watch troops assembling just as morning breaks. We are given no clues as to what the troops are doing; on the level of plot, nothing is resolved. As they daylight advances, we move from shots of the troops to shots of ordinary people watching whatever is going down (though we do not know what this is); and eventually to shots of children playing in the park. I guess that the dark night of the soul (understanding this both literally and figuratively) is finally over; though what succeeds it in the light of day is unclear.

In sum, I consider Zeros and Ones an amazing film. It comes out sort of like a collaboration between Samuel Fuller and Stan Brakhage — though I hesitate to make this comparison, because it is really pure Ferrara. You won’t like it if you are looking for any sort of coherent narrative. But if you have followed the arc of Abel Ferrara’s entire career, and see him as one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation, like I do, then you will probably appreciate this as a powerful expression of the now 70-year-old director’s extreme, yet oddly sober, “late style”.

I am teaching a class this semester on the New Hollywood (i.e. American filmmaking in the 1970s). Since the class is being conducted entirely online, I am posting my lectures on discussion boards for the students to read (and respond to). The first three films I have shown this semester are Taxi Driver, Dirty Harry, and Billy Jack. Here are my comments on the latter, with some comparisons to the previous two films.

Billy Jack makes for an interesting contrast with Dirty Harry. Both films were released in the same year, and both films deal with the theme of vigilanteism in the context of the political, social, and cultural divisions of the time — with regard to which they take opposite sides. Both films were wildly popular at the time. Billy Jack seems to have slightly edged out Dirty Harry at the box office (this is unclear; some sources I have found online say Dirty Harry earned more; but in any case, both films had high grosses, and it was very close). However, today Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character remains iconic and well known, even among people who have not seen the actual movies; whereas Billy Jack has been nearly forgotten (the few online sites I found that mentioned Billy Jack at all are mostly all about how awful, unintentionally funny, and incompetent the movie supposedly is). (Though Quentin Tarantino seems to like it).

While Dirty Harry is a mainstream Hollywood product, Billy Jack is an independent film all the way. Tom Laughlin and his wife Delores Taylor basically made the movie all by themselves. They self-financed it, they wrote the screenplay together, they starred in the movie (Laughlin as Billy Jack, and Talyor as Jean Roberts, the director of the school), and Laughlin directed and produced it — as well as taking personal charge of distributing the movie after the original distributor did a poor job. The film was an enormous hit, and its sequel, The Trial of Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin, 1974) also did extremely well at the box office. The figure of the character Billy Jack also expanded beyond the movies to become a popular culture hero.

There are certain aspects of Billy Jack that admittedly do not play well today. Most notably, Laughlin, who is white, plays a character who is supposed to be half-Native; and the film in other ways appropriates Native American culture. Nonetheless, the movie is one of the first American movies to acknowledge the injusices done by white settlers to Indigenous people. (Several revisionist Westerns of the 1970s did so as well; but Blly Jack is the only 1970s movie I know of to show this in the present, not just in the Old West). Billy Jack focuses on Native people much more than on Blacks and other minorities, but it clearly takes the side of the 1960s/1970s counterculture, and the anti-War and anti-racism movements of the period. (The American Indian Movement is not as well remembered today as, for instance, the Black Panther Party, but it was equally militant and active at the time the movie was made).

Billy Jack, like Dirty Harry — and for that matter, like Travis Bickle — is a Vietnam veteran turned avenger back home. (His backstory is fleshed out more in the sequel, The Trial of Billy Jack, where we learn he was a Green Beret who grew disgusted at American massacres of Vietnamese people). But Billy Jack is not a police officer, and his concern is not to clear the world of “scum” or “punks”. Rather, he seeks to protect his people and their land, and especially to protect the experimental Freedom School and its children. (Laughlin and Taylor actually ran a Montessori School in Los Angeles for a number of years, before making this movie). The portrayal of the police in Billy Jack is also interestingly ambiguous — the Sheriff seems to be a fairly decent guy, but his Deputy is a racist who also abuses his daughter and serves as a lackey of Posner, the rich man who runs the town. We first get to meet Billy Jack when he stops Posner and the deputy sheriff from killing wild horses in order to sell the meat for dogfood.

Billy Jack carries a rifle, in contrast to the .44 Magnum favored by both Dirty Harry and Travis Bickle. He seems equally at home on a horse and on a motorcycle. But Billy is also an expert in martial arts. Billy Jack is one of the first American films to feature Asian martial arts; this came several years after Bruce Lee displayed his martial arts skills in the late-1960s TV series The Green Hornet, but before Lee’s movies, made in Hong Kong, were shown in the US and really popularized martial arts. Billy Jack also precedes the popular American TV series Kung Fu, starring David Carradine (yet another white actor playing a non-white character), that also did a lot to popularize Asian martial arts in the US during the 1970s).

I am very interested in thinking about how the figure of Billy Jack became such a cultural icon in the 1970s (and also about why he was forgotten in subsequent decades). Laughlin’s Billy, like Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, is a sort of throwback, a figure of pre-1960s masculinity: strong and fairly silent, keeping his own counsel, utterly righteous (though the films have vastly different definitions of righteousness), entirely courageous, and unbending in his commitment to his goals, which involves serving and saving other people (the honest citizens menaced by punks for Harry, and the Indians and schoolkids for Billy). They are both tightly reined in, but they both seem to get off on their own violence when they have the occasion to exercise it. One might even compare Eastwood’s “feeling lucky” speech to Lauglin’s speech to Posner before attacking him (“I’m gonna take this right foot, and I’m gonna whop you on that side of your face. And you wanna know something? There’s not a damn thing you’re gonna be able to do about it”). But Harry and Billy nonetheless feel utterly different from one another in terms of their screen presence. How can we describe this difference?

Part of it has to do, of course, with the difference between the big-city environment of Dirty Harry (and also of Taxi Driver), and the largely rural environment of Billy Jack (which was shot in New Mexico and Arizona). (Though as a lifelong urban person, I myself tend to see big cities as places of multicultural vibrancy, rather than as places of danger and decay). But it also has to do with the ways the characters’ surroundings are depicted. In Dirty Harry’s San Francisco (and also in Travis Bickle’s Manhattan) there seems to be no sense of community or of interpersonal contact. Everybody is completely alone, or at most part of a couple (like Harry’s partner and his wife). Crowds of people go down the street with complete anonymity and no real interaction. At best, Harry knows the owner of the joint where he gets the exact same lunch every day, and the guy who lend him surveillance microphones. There’s also the liquor store owner who carries a gun because he has been robbed so many times; Scorpio pretends to be friendly and sympathetic, only to rob him yet again.

The situation in entirely different in Billy Jack. The school is an interdependent community; and the town seems to be so to some degree as well. Even the ugliest actions, like the way Bernard (the son of the rich guy who controls the town) abuses some of the kids from the school has much more of a social context than the interactions between total strangers in Dirty Harry. I think that this is emphasized by the activities engaged in by the students from the school. Even if you don’t enjoy their frequent forays into folk singing and improv theater, you have to accept that these are forms of engagement and interaction. They even include the Sheriff and the members of the city council in these activities; they are anxious to show the straight world that they are sincere and creative, and just want to live and let live. I read one online review that criticized the movie on the grounds that Jean’s “no drugs” policy at the school was completely unrealistic; but in fact this is addressed within the movie itself, when the students do a skit about dope smoking and parental disapproval of it, in which the young people take on the role of parents and cops, and city council members are inveigled into playing the disaffected, dope-smoking teens.

Also, the vigilanteism that is uncritically celebrated as necessary in Dirty Harry is itself overtly scrutinized in Billy Jack. There’s the time when Billy Jack is going to beat up Bernard, but Jean convinces him to just force Bernard to drive his car into the lake instead. When Bernard abuses the non-white kids in the ice cream parlor, Billy Jack comes to their rescue, but he forces Bernard to back off without beating him up. We then have the martial arts set piece in the city park, where Billy Jack solo uses his martial arts skill to defeat close to a dozen of Bernard’s friends, before finally being overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers. That seems a lot cooler to me than Harry’s .44 Magnum. It’s true that we root for Billy Jack when he finally kills Bernard — because Bernard has both raped Jean, and is having sex with an underage girl. But even this is not unambiguous, since Jean retains her pacifism and calls Billy to account for the killing.

A lot of critics, both when Billy Jack was originally released, and more recently, have criticized the movie for trying to have it both ways: giving us lectures about pacifism, yet at the same time giving us the gratification of seeing Billy beat up the bad guys. But this seems to me to be an unfair criticism, since again the movie explicitly sets up a kind of dialectic between pacifism (argued for mostly by Jean) and vigilante revenge (which motivates Billy). Billy keeps on saying that he is trying to be a pacifist, but not succeeding, and feeling guilty as a result. And then there is the moment during the siege of the building where Billy is making his last stand. Billy tells Jean that she has a peaceful soul, in contrast to his anguished and violent one. But Jean responds that this is a load of crap. She has no equanimity or acceptance of having been raped; she says that she has been fantasizing continually about making Bernard pay for what he did. But she held back, she says, because her taking revenge would ultimately harm the young people in the school, and their welfare is her biggest responsibility.

All this is exemplified by the movie’s ending. It isn’t what we expect from this genre of movie. Billy neither holds out singlehandedly against numerous assailants, nor goes out in a final blaze of glory. Instead, he surrenders, and allows himself to be taken away by the police, in return for promises that the government will continue to fund the school and leave Jean as its head. He mentions that the government has again and again broken all its promises to Native Americans, but hopes that this time it will be different. And as Billy is taken away, all the students from the school stand up and raise their fists in the Black Power salute (which was still a highly controversial gesture in the United States at this time). The movie leaves us with a grim but nonetheless hopeful assessment of what is to come, rather than indulging in myths of either redemption or destruction (myths which are invoked ad nauseam in American culture, and which are arguably fascistic in their implications).

Billy Jack is admittedly fairly pedestrian in its cinematography and editing; there is nothing here on the level on Don Siegel’s finely honed action editing in Dirty Harry, let alone the formal mastery of Scorsese in Taxi Driver. But there is still much to admire in Billy Jack, including its earnest vision of political hope, its rather dialectical approach to issues that are treated much more one-sidedly even in aesthetically more accomplished Hollywood films, and the way Laughlin’s Billy Jack functions as an iconic figure of masculinity (but in startling contrast to such contemporaneous figures as Eastwood’s Harry and to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle). As little tolerance as I have for improv theater, nonetheless I cannot regard Billy Jack as incoherently over the top, or as camp — which seems to be the main way it is regarded today, by the few people who remember it at all. Billy Jack deserves a far better place than it currently has within the history of American film; and I would even say that it is worthy of consideration, and indeed emulation, by those who are still thinking about the possibilities of making politically progressive art today.

I have been teaching exclusively online since March 2020, and I will continue to do so until at least the end of 2021. This means, among other things, that I have to write out all my comments that might otherwise have just been delivered verbally, during class discussion. Last spring, I posted some of my remarks on music videos on this blog, but I haven’t posted any class notes since. But I wanted to post my notes on Marguerite Duras’ movie India Song (1975), since I think this film is still under-discussed (though revered by many cinephiles).

Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) was one of the major French novelists of the second half of the 20th century. Her movies are not as well known as her prose fiction, but she directed close to twenty films, wrote the screenplays for several others, and had a lot of her novels adapted into movies by others. Duras was a white French woman, but she was born in Vietnam, which was a French colony (part of French Indochina) at the time (Vietnam only became an independent country after World War II; it then went through decades of war before the Communist north and the pro-US south were finally united in 1975). Duras’ parents were schoolteachers, which is to say they were minor bureaucrats in the French colonial apparatus that ruled Indochina at the time. Duras moved to France itself in 1932, when she was 18 years old, and lived there for the rest of her life. During the Nazi occupation in World War II, she was active in the Underground resistance. She started publishing fiction towards the end of the War, and continued prolifically from the 1950s through the 1980s. Her first involvement with cinema came when she wrote the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ first feature film, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), one of the key works of the early French New Wave. She started directing her own films in the late 1960s, and continued doing so right through until the early 1980s. Often her work crossed genres and used the same characters and situations in different works; thus India Song was first written as a play before it was made into a movie, and it contains elements and characters from a number of Duras’ novels from the previous decade (most notably The Vice Consul from 1965, but there are others as well). India Song itself was further transformed in a later movie by Duras, Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976), which used the identical soundtrack but had entirely different visuals.

The most surprising and challenging thing about India Song, in formalist terms, is the separation between the images and the sound. We see the main characters of the story — Anne Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig) and her husband and various lovers, as well as the Vice Consul (MIchael Lonsdale) who is in love with her — but they never speak on screen. (Besides these main characters, the only other human figure we see is that of a single Indian servant who turns on lights and passes out champagne glasses on occasion). On the soundtrack, we hear a number of disembodied female and male voices who tell us (or tell each other) the story of these characters. We also hear music (the song called “India Song”, which the voices at times refer to directly, as well as a number of other 1930s-style not-quite-tango dance numbers, all composed specifically for the movie by Carlos d’Alessio), and some background ambient sounds, plus the untranslated speech and singing of the Laotian (? – it seems) beggar woman coming from outside. The music may or may not be diegetic; the story includes at its center a big party at the French embassy, but we never see this event, since the camera remains in a different room, with an unused piano and a gigantic mirror, into which some of the characters occasionally wander). There is also, from time to time, in addition to the main voices, barely discernible background murmuring, in both French and English, which is perhaps the chatter of the guests at the party (we cannot tell for sure whether this is diegetic sound or not; part of the effect of the movie is to make the diegetic/non-diegetic distinction itself break down).

The voices recount to each other the story of Anne Marie Stretter and the Vice Consul; sometimes this is in the past tense, and sometimes in the present. Sometimes the voices describe what they see: but this is not always the same scene that we see on screen. At other times, the voices speak the characters’ own dialogue, instead of commenting on the characters in the third person. These dialogue sequences seem to coincide more or less with what is happening visually on screen at the time, but we do not see the actors’ mouths moving; we don’t really know for sure if the characters are actually saying these things, or only thinking them. At a climactic point in the film, there is a dialogue between Anne Marie Stretter and the Vice Consul, in which he tells her of his love for her; she responds that she feels the same way, but will not stay with him. The offscreen dialogue starts as they are dancing together on screen; but they soon move offscreen as the dialogue continues. After this, the Vice Consul starts screaming (he has already said to her that he will do this); apparently (as far as we gather from the voices) he is kicked out from the party for acting this way, but he still continues screaming from outside afterwards. We hear the screaming, on the soundtrack, on and off for a good stretch of time, but we never see the Vice Consul making a scene or actually screaming. After he has left, we only see him in a single shot where he is walking down the road away from the camera (and not screaming).

As for the images, most of the film takes place in the French ambassador’s mansion in Calcutta. The setting is a lavish mansion, but crumbling into decrepitude. Most of the interior shots are set in a single room, with a piano and an enormous ceiling-to-floor mirror. The camera never moves when it is in this room, but Duras gets amazing effects from the mirror, as we sometimes see characters only in the actual room, sometimes only in the mirror, and sometimes both. All this energizes our sense of space, although the room’s decrepitude and gloomy color scheme (sort of a pukey green, which is contrasted with Anne Marie’s red dress) conversely makes the room feel dead. There are some other shots in other rooms of the mansion, which are also fairly dark and often show the characters in nearly motionless tableaus. Early in the film, we see Anne Marie and several of the others lying on the floor, nearly passed out from the heat; closer to the end, there is a tableau of her and the five men (all but the Vice Consul) standing on a sort of verandah, as the light varies from murky to bright and back again. Interspersed with these fixed-camera shots are a number of sequences of the ruined mansion from outside, or of the park surrounding it; these are usually left-to-right tracking shots.

For the last half hour or so, the setting is different; we are told that the ambassador and his entourage have moved from Calcutta to the Ganges delta. Here the indoor scenery is lighter and brighter. There is one extraordinary shot where Anne Marie and the five men walk through the central corridor of the empty hotel restaurant, the camera tracks backwards as they walk forward. They continue walking, left of the camera and out of the frame. The shot continues, with the camera now motionless. as the Vice Consul comes in, tracing their steps, walks all the way to the camera, and then out of the frame on the right. (I am not sure, but I think that this is the only time the camera moves in an indoor shot).

India Song could be regarded as what is now known as slow cinema, though the term hadn’t been invented yet in 1975. What’s certain is that there is nothing random about any of this; everything in the movie is quite planned and deliberate. Duras produced the soundtrack first, and then shot images to accompany it; this is a procedure that is almost never done in cinema (usually the images come first, and the soundtrack is calibrated to match the image track). (Music videos, which didn’t exist yet in 1975, are the only contemporary form in which images are matched to pre-existing sound, instead of the reverse). In any case, because the movie is not shot naturalistically, it invites us to think of the juxtapositions between sound and image in a new way. Most movies naturalize the relation of sound to images; when we hear people speaking, we see their lips moving, and the non-diegetic music matches the mood of what we see happening on screen. Other movies deliberately mess with image/sound coordination in certain ways, in order to get certain reactions from us (in some classes, I have shown a sequence from Takeshi Kitano’s 1989 film The Violent Cop, in which a vicious fight between a cop and a gangster is accompanied by music that sounds like it belongs in a softcore porn film instead; his whole point is to blow our minds with the incongruity). But India Song doesn’t take either of these approaches; the relation between what we see and what we hear is oblique, but always meaningful.

Since the people on screen never actually speak, we mostly respond to them by interpreting their body language. Mostly, they seem bored, enervated by the heat; their lives seem sterile and repetitious, drained of meaning. It is as if they share the decrepitude of their surroundings. Delphine Seyrig, as Anne Marie, dances listlessly and without energy, handled by whichever man she is dancing with at the moment; the dance postures are always sterotypically correct. Sometimes she breaks into a smile, but we don’t get the impression that this does much to alleviate the monotony. We are told by the voices that Anne Marie has sex with any number of men, with the tacit approval of her husband — it seems that the Vice Consul, who is the only man who is truly aroused by her, to the point of obsession, is the only man she will not sleep with. Often we see these people smoking, though they usually just hold the lit cigarettes, without actually taking a puff.

The decrepitude of these characters’ lavish surroundings is a powerfully anti-naturalistic feature of the movie; we would have to presume that the mansion was not decrepit like this when it was actually being lived in in 1937. Usually, because of the intensity of the action, movies seem to take place in a heightened present (regardless of the year or historical period in which they are set). India Song amazingly goes against this; because of the decrepitude both of the setting and the characters, it seems to be played out in the past tense (in other words, it is not just that it takes place in 1937 when the movie was made in 1975, but everything we see and hear radiates pastness, over-and-done-with-ness, instead of the present tense featured alike by historical epics, futuristic science fiction, and movies set in the present moment). This in itself is a remarkable achievement. I am inclined to think of the voices we hear on the soundtrack as ghosts: they are not really present; and the now that plays out for them, when they describe what they see and what the characters are saying, is an already long-past now, which for that reason can only be revived in this ghostly form of images without substance, and sounds without bodies to produce them. (Gilles Deleuze, who we will read later in the semester, is the only film theorist I know of who conceptualizes the idea of films not in the present tense; though he develops this idea independently of his discussion of Duras).

India Song works as a political commentary on European colonialism in Asia, something that Duras was concerned with, and all too familiar with as a result of her childhood as a French colonialist in Vietnam. The film shows us the lives of white European colonialists, bureaucrats of colonial occupation, who are rich and powerful but have no knowledge of, or connection to, the people whose lives they control, and who they oppress. The colonized masses are never seen in the film: they are represented only by the voice of the beggar woman, whose ongoing life, in conditions of extreme poverty, contrasts with the vapid existence of the white colonials. (There is also, as I have already mentioned, the discreet presence of the one Indian servant who we see briefly). The colonial rulers live in ignorance and isolation. The men are involved either in bureaucratic governance or in making money through business; the women (of whom we see only one, Anne Marie Stretter herself) have nothing to fill their lives, but are kept as trophy wives or mistresses by the men. We are told that Anne Marie Stretter has already tried to commit suicide once, with a lover, but the attempt failed. We also learn that Anne Marie used to be a concert pianist, but she has stopped playing and now basically does nothing. The abandoned piano (with the music of India Song, and a photo of Anne Marie in her youth) is prominent in the mise en scene, and it notably remains unplayed. (We are told at one point that it is out of tune, due to warping as a result of the heat).

There is a remarkable moment, in the latter part of the film, after everyone has gone to the islands. We see a tableau of Anne Marie and the five men (all but the Vice Consul) seated around a dining table, dressed mostly in white, and brightly lit (as was never the case in the mansion). The camera pulls back slowly from the group. The offscreen voices tell us, for the first and only time, that it is 1937. They add by cataloging what is going on in the world at this time. Japan is waging war against China, and they have just bombed Shanghai. In Spain, the civil war goes on, and the Republic is on the verge of being destroyed by the fascists. In Russia, the Revolution has been betrayed by Stalinist terror. In Germany, the Nazis have just held the gigantic Congress of Nuremberg rally, consolidating their power. Suddenly it all gets crystallized for us: these people live in a bubble, a sort of vacuum, unconnected to and unaware of not only their colonial subjects (the very people they oppress), but all the horrible things that are going on in the world. I find this an absolutely stunning moment, because of how it emerges from the otherwise even tone of the film, and how it both estranges us from what we have been seeing for over an hour and a half, and gives us a sudden deeper insight into it).

Why does Duras make a long movie about such worthless people? Why does she dwell upon their splendor and decadence? (I am thinking both of the characters’ wealth and privilege, and of the way they are ironically portrayed, by being shown in the ruins and decay of a retrospective view of their lives? (I say retrospective, because of the temporal disjunction at the heart of the film — the way it doesn’t seem to have a present tense, the way the decay of the mansion in which we see them is apparently decades removed from the life they lived in 1937). I think the answer to this is in the tale of passion at the heart of the story: the Vice Consul’s hopeless love for Anne Marie Stretter. Duras is, in a certain sense, an ultra-romantic novelist and filmmaker. Her compulsive subject, in nearly all of her work, is hopeless romantic passion. (Part of her claim to be a major feminist writer and filmmaker is the way she takes this stereotypically ‘feminine’ subject and twists it around, analyzing it, pushing it to extremes, suggesting both its inescapability and its failure or impossibility). Here, the Vice Consul is the only one of the male characters who realizes the full extent of his vacancy and nullity. He is madly in love with Anne Marie Stretter, despite barely having met her and knowing nothing whatsoever about her. He sacrifices everything in his life, including notably his privileged position in the diplomatic corps, to his overwhelming, and totally ungrounded, passion.

We learn that, in the backstory, the Vice Consul has been dismissed from his consular position because he started shooting at random into a leper’s colony, indiscriminately murdering the native inhabitants. I think the point of this is that he has only literalized what all the European colonialists are doing when they make their livings in Asia by oppressing the inhabitants. All the other colonials are every bit as racist as the Vice Consul, but only he has had the bad taste to overtly and publicly act it out. Leprosy is significant in the movie both literally and metaphorically. Lepers were in the past separated from the rest of society, because their illness was believed to be so highly communicable. In earlier times, leprosy was a menace in Europe as much as elsewhere, but by 1937 it had largely been eliminiated in the affluent West (although effective treatments were not developed until after World War II). Leprosy has therefore been traditionally metaphorized as a form of social stigma. But we are also told by the voices in the film that leprosy involves decay of the nerve endings, so that sufferers do not actually feel pain, even though their bodies are in a state of decay. In this sense, the voices describe the situation of the European characters in the film as a “leprosy of the heart.”

The Vice Consul’s passion is both a symptom of the malady of the European colonizers, and a desperate (and inevitably futile) effort to overcome it. His screaming about his unreciprocated love for Anne Marie Stretter — a screaming which we hear on the soundtrack, but do not see — is both a deliberate social transgression (it gets him ostracized from white colonial society in a way that even murdering native people did not do) and a desperate attempt to express what cannot possibly be expressed. For Duras, extreme erotic passion is both fascinating and delusive. It is a demand for something that cannot possibly be attained — my fusion with the person I love, at the same time as that other person remains unattainable, because the condition of my love is precisely that they are utterly different from and alien to myself.

In nearly all of Duras’ novels and movies, this excess of passion is at the center. The Vice Consul’s passion is a desire that ruptures all social bonds, and all structures of meaning. Duras romanticizes and celebrates this excess, because it is the ultimate rejection, both of all social constraints and of the very state of being self-enclosed or trapped within one’s own subjectivity. But at the same time, it is entirely futile, because such a crossing of all boundaries is impossible; and also because such extreme feelings are inexpressible. Anything you say or do is inadequate to the desire you are trying to express. All words fall short, and all deeds are ludicrously ineffectual. Such extreme desire cannot really be represented; to represent it in any positive way would be to sell it short, and thereby to trivialize it, and indeed even to betray it. In this sense, the sexual passion that is the ultimate subject of India Song is not represented anywhere in the movie. We neither see it nor hear it, although everything we do see and hear testifies to it — or rather, testifies to its absence. This is the deepest reason for the separation of sound and image in the movie (as in most of Duras’ movies). What the movie is really about is what falls between the cracks, what neither soundtrack nor imagetrack can contain.

Throughout the 20th century, and into the 21st, artists have been obsessed with transgression, insisting on images of extreme sexuality and violence in order to scandalize audiences and break taboos. Duras turns this impulse inside out, in effect suggesting that transgressive images themselves overly tame and normalize the actions that they present — the effort to shock only ends up making the “shocking” material banal. This is why Duras is interested instead in what cannot be presented at all, what resists being captured cinematically, what falls into the disjunction between sound and image. By showing us daily banality, she preserves the extreme passion from being banalized. Life is exhausted in these movements of excess.

India Song therefore ends with the voices informing us of Anne Marie Stretter’s suicide, which once again, of course, is not directly presented to us on screen, but only communicated to us indirectly. Anne Marie has sex with just about anybody; but this sex is evidently entirely insignificant. Perhaps it temporarily relieves Anne Marie’s boredom, but it doesn’t seem to mean anything emotionally. The one passion in the movie on the part of any of the white characters, that is not just idle and trivial, is the Vice Consul’s passion for Anne Marie. But it is for this very reason that she turns him down. She reciprocates his passion only by failing to connect with him as massively as he fails to connect with her. Were she to accept him, as she does with all her other prospective lovers, this would only trivialize his passion, and extinguish her own. Another way to put this is to say that there is no solution to, and no escape from, the sterile and empty lives of the colonists. The movie’s grim message is that only escape is death, and the only meaningful passion is the one that culminates, not in satisfaction, but in death. At least this is the case for the European characters; Duras said in a interview that the only non-tragic character in the movie is the beggar woman who we never see. The beggar woman, Duras says, goes on with her life despite conditions of deprivation; but this is something that the European characters, even or especially with all their affluence, are unable to do.