I always find Jane Campion a compelling director, even when her films are bogged down by dubious material, as many of them have been. In the Cut, which flopped in the theaters last year, is no exception.
Start with the worst. The film is based on a novel by Susanna Moore, which I haven’t read; but as a film narrative, at least, it is pretty lame. It’s a not very compelling or tense who’s-the-psycho-murderer thriller, combined with a “descent into the erotic depths” that is totally faux. If Moore’s novel is anything like the screenplay (which she collaborated with Campion on), then it is a calculated simulacrum of “transgression” for readers of The New Yorker that bears about the same relation to the writing of, say, Bataille or Kathy Acker as the singing of Celine Dion does to that of Diamanda Galas, or the exhortations of Tom Peters do to the philosophy of Nietzsche.
Also, as I am scarcely the only one to note, Meg Ryan is totally out of her depth, in a role that was originally intended for Nicole Kidman. Kidman might well have made the eroticism — and the anguish — compelling in a way that Ryan is utterly incapable of doing.
An uncredited Kevin Bacon is wasted in a lame, meaningless role.
And there’s also one black male character whose only function in the film seems to be to add a titillating frisson of dubious racial and sexual stereotypes to the mix. This is a part, I suppose, of the overall strategy of pseudo-transgression: what’s more a taboo object, desired yet feared by the novel’s and film’s presumptive middle class white female audience than a black man?
And yet, and yet… frame by frame, and scene by scene, Campion remains an incredibly brilliant and powerful director. This is partly a matter of composition: the cluttered and fragmented mise en scene, the poetically murky nocturnal lighting, the fragmentation of vision, and the oblique placement of the actors within the frame, all combine to create a grim urban landscape, shot through with an intensity that actors and script are little more than irrelevant occasions for.
But more than this, it’s a matter of what I can only call rhythm. It’s the speed at which shots and scenes unfold, something that’s never constant, but that stutters sometimes, pauses other times, pulls back still other times. Or it’s the way that Campion pauses on an incongruous detail, or conversely, that she pans over such a detail without really giving us time to contemplate it. The reason Campion’s visuals never feel fetishistic is because they never seem to freeze time. Rather, something you can’t quite see is always being unfolded at a speed you can’t quite grasp. The speed is never the “right,” straightforward one, but always oblique to that at which we are accustomed to have narrative develop. It’s not the slowness which so many recent art directors have affected, in lame attempts to emulate Antonioni, but a deeper sense of time folding and unfolding. (This has something to do, of course, with the use of music on the soundtrack: Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson’s music here, somewhat like Michael Nyman’s music in The Piano, provides a sort of temporal structure to the film. But I don’t think what I am calling rhythm is only a function of sound; it is also inscribed directly by camera movement or non-movement).
I’m not sure I understand this well enough to give a more rigorous and focused description. But Campion’s films, it seems to me, have a unique way of modulating affect or mood via metamorphoses of duration. And this is what makes In the Cut so powerful and gripping, at least in part, even when acting and plot are completely unconvincing.
I always find Jane Campion a compelling director, even when her films are bogged down by dubious material, as many of them have been. In the Cut, which flopped in the theaters last year, is no exception.
Start with the worst. The film is based on a novel by Susanna Moore, which I haven’t read; but as a film narrative, at least, it is pretty lame. It’s a not very compelling or tense who’s-the-psycho-murderer thriller, combined with a “descent into the erotic depths” that is totally faux. If Moore’s novel is anything like the screenplay (which she collaborated with Campion on), then it is a calculated simulacrum of “transgression” for readers of The New Yorker that bears about the same relation to the writing of, say, Bataille or Kathy Acker as the singing of Celine Dion does to that of Diamanda Galas, or the exhortations of Tom Peters do to the philosophy of Nietzsche.
Also, as I am scarcely the only one to note, Meg Ryan is totally out of her depth, in a role that was originally intended for Nicole Kidman. Kidman might well have made the eroticism — and the anguish — compelling in a way that Ryan is utterly incapable of doing.
An uncredited Kevin Bacon is wasted in a lame, meaningless role.
And there’s also one black male character whose only function in the film seems to be to add a titillating frisson of dubious racial and sexual stereotypes to the mix. This is a part, I suppose, of the overall strategy of pseudo-transgression: what’s more a taboo object, desired yet feared by the novel’s and film’s presumptive middle class white female audience than a black man?
And yet, and yet… frame by frame, and scene by scene, Campion remains an incredibly brilliant and powerful director. This is partly a matter of composition: the cluttered and fragmented mise en scene, the poetically murky nocturnal lighting, the fragmentation of vision, and the oblique placement of the actors within the frame, all combine to create a grim urban landscape, shot through with an intensity that actors and script are little more than irrelevant occasions for.
But more than this, it’s a matter of what I can only call rhythm. It’s the speed at which shots and scenes unfold, something that’s never constant, but that stutters sometimes, pauses other times, pulls back still other times. Or it’s the way that Campion pauses on an incongruous detail, or conversely, that she pans over such a detail without really giving us time to contemplate it. The reason Campion’s visuals never feel fetishistic is because they never seem to freeze time. Rather, something you can’t quite see is always being unfolded at a speed you can’t quite grasp. The speed is never the “right,” straightforward one, but always oblique to that at which we are accustomed to have narrative develop. It’s not the slowness which so many recent art directors have affected, in lame attempts to emulate Antonioni, but a deeper sense of time folding and unfolding. (This has something to do, of course, with the use of music on the soundtrack: Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson’s music here, somewhat like Michael Nyman’s music in The Piano, provides a sort of temporal structure to the film. But I don’t think what I am calling rhythm is only a function of sound; it is also inscribed directly by camera movement or non-movement).
I’m not sure I understand this well enough to give a more rigorous and focused description. But Campion’s films, it seems to me, have a unique way of modulating affect or mood via metamorphoses of duration. And this is what makes In the Cut so powerful and gripping, at least in part, even when acting and plot are completely unconvincing.
At the recommendation of filmbrain, I watched the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs (2002), starring Tony Leung and Andy Lau, and directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. And I’m glad I did.
Infernal Affairs is a crime thriller with a twist, or rather a pair of twists. Tony Leung is a cop working undercover as a gang member in a triad. Andy Lau is a member of the triad who has, conversely, infiltrated the police. They both report secretly to father figures: Leung to Lau’s chief in the police force, Lau to the boss of Leung’s triad. And they are both on the verge of cracking from the strain of their double roles. The film starts there, and continually ups the ante, as each of them is assigned to uncover the “mole” that each of them in fact is. The result is an elegant, stylish genre film, which gets its energy more from psychological tension than from shootouts and such.
Visually, Infernal Affairs is similar to — though not nearly as powerful as — Johnny To’s revisionist crime films. What makes the film is the acting, together with the tight plotting and scripting: without being metaphysically heavy, or having any sort of extra-generic pretensions, it manages to convey the sort of passionate intelligence and intensity that mainstream Hollywood (and apparently mainstream Hong Kong filmmaking as well) can’t be bothered to try for any more.
At the recommendation of filmbrain, I watched the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs (2002), starring Tony Leung and Andy Lau, and directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. And I’m glad I did.
Infernal Affairs is a crime thriller with a twist, or rather a pair of twists. Tony Leung is a cop working undercover as a gang member in a triad. Andy Lau is a member of the triad who has, conversely, infiltrated the police. They both report secretly to father figures: Leung to Lau’s chief in the police force, Lau to the boss of Leung’s triad. And they are both on the verge of cracking from the strain of their double roles. The film starts there, and continually ups the ante, as each of them is assigned to uncover the “mole” that each of them in fact is. The result is an elegant, stylish genre film, which gets its energy more from psychological tension than from shootouts and such.
Visually, Infernal Affairs is similar to — though not nearly as powerful as — Johnny To’s revisionist crime films. What makes the film is the acting, together with the tight plotting and scripting: without being metaphysically heavy, or having any sort of extra-generic pretensions, it manages to convey the sort of passionate intelligence and intensity that mainstream Hollywood (and apparently mainstream Hong Kong filmmaking as well) can’t be bothered to try for any more.
Eli Roth”s Cabin Fever doesn’t break any new ground in horror, but it’s a shrewd and effective little film, combining dread about infection and bodily fluids with clever revisionist takes on many genre cliches. You’ve got your five young people trapped in the woods, far away from civilization (they are all quite disagreeable college-student types, from the loutish frat boy to the sensitive trixie), and your surrounding community of “rednecks” (all played, unlike the college kids, so as to upend the usual stereotypes). Many horror films are really about a small group, some sort of recognizable microcosm of society, and what happens to its members when placed under conditions of extreme stress. But the small group in Cabin Fever is so atomized, its members so utterly selfish — each of them regarding others only as sources of potential profit or danger, and ready to betray lovers or long-term friends at the drop of a hat, if that is what ‘looking out for number one’ seems to require — that they barely constitute a “society” at all; they are instead the reductio ad absurdum of post-Reagan Homo economicus.
Eli Roth”s Cabin Fever doesn’t break any new ground in horror, but it’s a shrewd and effective little film, combining dread about infection and bodily fluids with clever revisionist takes on many genre cliches. You’ve got your five young people trapped in the woods, far away from civilization (they are all quite disagreeable college-student types, from the loutish frat boy to the sensitive trixie), and your surrounding community of “rednecks” (all played, unlike the college kids, so as to upend the usual stereotypes). Many horror films are really about a small group, some sort of recognizable microcosm of society, and what happens to its members when placed under conditions of extreme stress. But the small group in Cabin Fever is so atomized, its members so utterly selfish — each of them regarding others only as sources of potential profit or danger, and ready to betray lovers or long-term friends at the drop of a hat, if that is what ‘looking out for number one’ seems to require — that they barely constitute a “society” at all; they are instead the reductio ad absurdum of post-Reagan Homo economicus.
Ernest Dickerson’s Never Die Alone, from the novel by the great Donald Goines, is a first-rate genre picture. DMX is ice cold charismatic as “King” David, a nasty, sadistic drug dealer who is shot dead just as he is about to repent and seek redemption. The direction is taut and concise, with economical naration, a complex temporal scheme, powerful (but carefully restrained) use of noir lighting and tilts and odd angles, and violent action sequences which pack a punch without being dwelt on (a la Mel Gibson) or inflated (a la Quentin Tarantino). On the evidence of not only this film, but all his work, Dickerson seems to me every bit the peer and equal of Don Siegel and Walter Hill, as far as action genre directors are concerned.
But of course, there’s more to Never Die Alone than just a genre picture. Because of Dickerson’s ambitions as a director; because of what it means to bring Donald Goines to film; and, subsuming both of the above, because this is an African American themed film.
Never Die Alone, to a certain extent, tries to have things both ways. It solicits (male) viewers with its gangsta cool at the same time that it claims to provide an edifying lesson on how wrongdoing and crime don’t pay.
Now in fact the film’s less guilty of this than many other films are, not to mention hip hop lyrics; overall, it’s a pretty grim movie, and its relentless speed doesn’t allow any time to revel either in bloodshed or in the glories of acquiring “money and pussy,” the only two things that matter according to one ganglord character. I really didn’t see this film as selling a minstrelized version of ghetto pimp cool blackness to white suburban kids, the way so many commercial enterprises do these days. (This is probably the reason for its relatively poor box office showing).
Indeed, the relation of the black/ghetto story to its white voyeurs and consumers is explicitly, and rather oddly, taken up within the film itself; David Arquette plays Paul, a white guy, a writer, who’s slumming (as his bourgeois black girlfriend tells him in no uncertain terms) in Harlem, ostensibly to find material for the novel he hopes to write. He gets this material. in the form of audio tapes that King David leaves behind. The film starts with DMX/David narrating from the grave; its flashbacks to his earlier career are motivated by Paul’s listening to the tapes. And the film’s penultimate scene has Paul producing the novel Never Die Alone, that was actually written by Donald Goines, and of which we are now watching the cinematic adaptation. Paul is told by the publisher that it’s too incredible a story to be believed; the irony resonates, even as genre conditions are fulfilled. While the film never quite resolves just what sort of jouissance Paul gets from witnessing (and identifying with, from a position of safety) King David’s career, we can’t doubt that something fairly unpleasant is at work here.
Nonetheless, there is one crucial respect in which the film treads on dubious ground, and does revel in its own nastiness. Its treatment of its protagonist’s misogyny is unpleasantly double-edged. The only thing that DMX’s nearly affectless character seems to get off on is reducing strong women (and especially strong black women) to abject misery and dependency, by hooking them on heroin and then cutting off the supply (and finally killing them, with a deliberately doctored dose). And although this is thematized (with an additional Oedipal twist) as the main reason why King David is brought low, this doesn’t negate a certain pleasure that the film takes in the process (i.e., that it proposes for the delectation of the viewer).
I suppose all this is not unfaithful to Donald Goines, a writer certainly not free of conventional misogyny, but whose power comes from his relentlessly horrific and dystopian view of the life of pimping and drug dealing in the ghetto. (The only exception to this downbeat vision being the black power fantasies of his final four “Kenyatta” novels). Goines, like hip hop artists of the 1990s and since, gained a cult following on the razor’s edge between proclaiming coolness and unsparingly “keeping it real”; but his negativity has never been matched by Biggie, Tupac, or anybody else. This is probably why so few films have been made from his novels, despite the way their genre aspects and ghetto settings seem to cry out for cinematic treatment. (I’ve never seen Crime Partners, the only one ever made prior to Never Die Alone, but it sounds like a stinker, and unfaithful to the novel to boot). Adapting Goines to the screen is much more difficult than it might at first appear to be; and though Dickerson hasn’t entirely succeeded in capturing the full measure of Goines’ bleak and disturbing vision — at once naturalistic and almost apocalyptic — he’s at least gone beyond blaxploitation cliches to make a largely compelling film.
Ernest Dickerson’s Never Die Alone, from the novel by the great Donald Goines, is a first-rate genre picture. DMX is ice cold charismatic as “King” David, a nasty, sadistic drug dealer who is shot dead just as he is about to repent and seek redemption. The direction is taut and concise, with economical naration, a complex temporal scheme, powerful (but carefully restrained) use of noir lighting and tilts and odd angles, and violent action sequences which pack a punch without being dwelt on (a la Mel Gibson) or inflated (a la Quentin Tarantino). On the evidence of not only this film, but all his work, Dickerson seems to me every bit the peer and equal of Don Siegel and Walter Hill, as far as action genre directors are concerned.
But of course, there’s more to Never Die Alone than just a genre picture. Because of Dickerson’s ambitions as a director; because of what it means to bring Donald Goines to film; and, subsuming both of the above, because this is an African American themed film.
Never Die Alone, to a certain extent, tries to have things both ways. It solicits (male) viewers with its gangsta cool at the same time that it claims to provide an edifying lesson on how wrongdoing and crime don’t pay.
Now in fact the film’s less guilty of this than many other films are, not to mention hip hop lyrics; overall, it’s a pretty grim movie, and its relentless speed doesn’t allow any time to revel either in bloodshed or in the glories of acquiring “money and pussy,” the only two things that matter according to one ganglord character. I really didn’t see this film as selling a minstrelized version of ghetto pimp cool blackness to white suburban kids, the way so many commercial enterprises do these days. (This is probably the reason for its relatively poor box office showing).
Indeed, the relation of the black/ghetto story to its white voyeurs and consumers is explicitly, and rather oddly, taken up within the film itself; David Arquette plays Paul, a white guy, a writer, who’s slumming (as his bourgeois black girlfriend tells him in no uncertain terms) in Harlem, ostensibly to find material for the novel he hopes to write. He gets this material. in the form of audio tapes that King David leaves behind. The film starts with DMX/David narrating from the grave; its flashbacks to his earlier career are motivated by Paul’s listening to the tapes. And the film’s penultimate scene has Paul producing the novel Never Die Alone, that was actually written by Donald Goines, and of which we are now watching the cinematic adaptation. Paul is told by the publisher that it’s too incredible a story to be believed; the irony resonates, even as genre conditions are fulfilled. While the film never quite resolves just what sort of jouissance Paul gets from witnessing (and identifying with, from a position of safety) King David’s career, we can’t doubt that something fairly unpleasant is at work here.
Nonetheless, there is one crucial respect in which the film treads on dubious ground, and does revel in its own nastiness. Its treatment of its protagonist’s misogyny is unpleasantly double-edged. The only thing that DMX’s nearly affectless character seems to get off on is reducing strong women (and especially strong black women) to abject misery and dependency, by hooking them on heroin and then cutting off the supply (and finally killing them, with a deliberately doctored dose). And although this is thematized (with an additional Oedipal twist) as the main reason why King David is brought low, this doesn’t negate a certain pleasure that the film takes in the process (i.e., that it proposes for the delectation of the viewer).
I suppose all this is not unfaithful to Donald Goines, a writer certainly not free of conventional misogyny, but whose power comes from his relentlessly horrific and dystopian view of the life of pimping and drug dealing in the ghetto. (The only exception to this downbeat vision being the black power fantasies of his final four “Kenyatta” novels). Goines, like hip hop artists of the 1990s and since, gained a cult following on the razor’s edge between proclaiming coolness and unsparingly “keeping it real”; but his negativity has never been matched by Biggie, Tupac, or anybody else. This is probably why so few films have been made from his novels, despite the way their genre aspects and ghetto settings seem to cry out for cinematic treatment. (I’ve never seen Crime Partners, the only one ever made prior to Never Die Alone, but it sounds like a stinker, and unfaithful to the novel to boot). Adapting Goines to the screen is much more difficult than it might at first appear to be; and though Dickerson hasn’t entirely succeeded in capturing the full measure of Goines’ bleak and disturbing vision — at once naturalistic and almost apocalyptic — he’s at least gone beyond blaxploitation cliches to make a largely compelling film.
I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the new Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry film. It manages to be both funny and poignant, and to feel fresh even though it’s recycling some fairly hoary chestnuts of romantic comedy. As you’d expect from Charlie Kaufman, form trumps content, in a cleverly self-referential way. But to call the film “clever” is a bit unfair; such a characterization doesn’t do justice to the way its affect is simultaneously goofy and heartfelt.
It’s hard to talk about the film without, to some extent, giving it away. It’s not that the plot contains any real surprises, once you accept its outrageous premise. But the manner of presentation is frequently surprising.
The premise is a technology that allows you to selectively erase your memories. You can forget everything about an unhappy love affair, forget even the other person’s existence, with nothing else being affected. As presented in the film, this technology is hilariously sleazy and tacky — it’s done overnight in your bedroom, while you sleep, and the techs party, have sex, and drink up all your liquor, while they are supposedly monitoring the state of your brain on their laptops. (They chase down emotional memories that pop out in green from an MRI scan photo on the computer, as if they were killing enemies in a computer game).
So, Jim Carrey (pitch-perfect: unusually subdued, rather morose in fact, but also without the heavyhanded seriousness of his previous efforts to “act” in films like The Truman Show) and Kate Winslet (manic and overbearing, but engagingly and believably so) are a couple who break up: they love each other, but also get on each other’s nerves and wear themselves down through constant bickering. One day, after walking out on Jim, Kate has her memories of him wiped. When Jim finds out about this, he is distraught; he decides he needs to get his memories of her wiped as well. Most of the movie takes place in Jim’s brain, while he’s asleep, and the techs are giving his brain a washing. In the middle of it all, Jim changes his mind: he doesn’t want to forget Kate after all. He runs with her through memory after memory, trying to evade the relentless process of erasure. Hilarity ensues, as well as non-linear narrative hijinks.
So the narrative is scrambled; and it changes before our eyes, since truth is always a function of — always subject to — the vagaries of memory and desire. It’s not that it’s hard to follow: Kaufman isn’t interested in luring us into trying to solve a puzzle, the way Christopher Nolan does in Memento. Much more interestingly, the non-linearity of Eternal Sunshine allows Kaufman to link memories (plot events) associatively, like music, developing themes, repeating with variations, changing the feel of a scene by undermining and altering its context. This, together with Gondry’s quicksilver direction (continually varying mood through subtle visual and musical cues, plays of color and sound) is what makes the film so engaging and enthralling. Gondry uses a lot of technical tricks from his music videos, especially various sorts of visual composting; and miraculously (unlike what usually happens), they survive their transplant from the world of 3-minute videos to the vastly different world of feature films. They seem expressive, and not just gimmicky.
David Edelstein rightly compares Eternal Sunshine to the great screwball comedies of the 1930s and early 40s. But where Edelstein is referring to the way that Sunshine, like those earlier films, is what Stanley Cavell calls a “comedy of remarriage,” the most striking parallel for me is one of agility and speed. I’m thinking of the rapid-fire exchanges of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, and even better the manic exchanges between Grant and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. In those films, Howard Hawks was a slyly laid-back director, cunningly arranging camerawork and editing in order to foreground his stars, and their repartee, as effectively as possible. Though Carrey and Winslet are terrific, Gondry and Kaufman don’t rely as exclusively on dialogue as Hawks did; but Sunshine‘s conceptual and visual conceits have the same effects of density and wit through sheer velocity that the screwball comedies had through dialogue and the stars’ physical presence alone.
I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface here; there’s a lot more to say. But that will have to wait until the film comes out on DVD and I can watch it again, several times. Suffice it to say that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is Charlie Kaufman’s best work yet; together with Mulholland Drive and Punch Drunk Love and perhaps Lost in Translation, it’s evidence that American filmmaking is still alive, in spite of everything, in the twenty-first century.
I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the new Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry film. It manages to be both funny and poignant, and to feel fresh even though it’s recycling some fairly hoary chestnuts of romantic comedy. As you’d expect from Charlie Kaufman, form trumps content, in a cleverly self-referential way. But to call the film “clever” is a bit unfair; such a characterization doesn’t do justice to the way its affect is simultaneously goofy and heartfelt.
It’s hard to talk about the film without, to some extent, giving it away. It’s not that the plot contains any real surprises, once you accept its outrageous premise. But the manner of presentation is frequently surprising.
The premise is a technology that allows you to selectively erase your memories. You can forget everything about an unhappy love affair, forget even the other person’s existence, with nothing else being affected. As presented in the film, this technology is hilariously sleazy and tacky — it’s done overnight in your bedroom, while you sleep, and the techs party, have sex, and drink up all your liquor, while they are supposedly monitoring the state of your brain on their laptops. (They chase down emotional memories that pop out in green from an MRI scan photo on the computer, as if they were killing enemies in a computer game).
So, Jim Carrey (pitch-perfect: unusually subdued, rather morose in fact, but also without the heavyhanded seriousness of his previous efforts to “act” in films like The Truman Show) and Kate Winslet (manic and overbearing, but engagingly and believably so) are a couple who break up: they love each other, but also get on each other’s nerves and wear themselves down through constant bickering. One day, after walking out on Jim, Kate has her memories of him wiped. When Jim finds out about this, he is distraught; he decides he needs to get his memories of her wiped as well. Most of the movie takes place in Jim’s brain, while he’s asleep, and the techs are giving his brain a washing. In the middle of it all, Jim changes his mind: he doesn’t want to forget Kate after all. He runs with her through memory after memory, trying to evade the relentless process of erasure. Hilarity ensues, as well as non-linear narrative hijinks.
So the narrative is scrambled; and it changes before our eyes, since truth is always a function of — always subject to — the vagaries of memory and desire. It’s not that it’s hard to follow: Kaufman isn’t interested in luring us into trying to solve a puzzle, the way Christopher Nolan does in Memento. Much more interestingly, the non-linearity of Eternal Sunshine allows Kaufman to link memories (plot events) associatively, like music, developing themes, repeating with variations, changing the feel of a scene by undermining and altering its context. This, together with Gondry’s quicksilver direction (continually varying mood through subtle visual and musical cues, plays of color and sound) is what makes the film so engaging and enthralling. Gondry uses a lot of technical tricks from his music videos, especially various sorts of visual composting; and miraculously (unlike what usually happens), they survive their transplant from the world of 3-minute videos to the vastly different world of feature films. They seem expressive, and not just gimmicky.
David Edelstein rightly compares Eternal Sunshine to the great screwball comedies of the 1930s and early 40s. But where Edelstein is referring to the way that Sunshine, like those earlier films, is what Stanley Cavell calls a “comedy of remarriage,” the most striking parallel for me is one of agility and speed. I’m thinking of the rapid-fire exchanges of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, and even better the manic exchanges between Grant and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. In those films, Howard Hawks was a slyly laid-back director, cunningly arranging camerawork and editing in order to foreground his stars, and their repartee, as effectively as possible. Though Carrey and Winslet are terrific, Gondry and Kaufman don’t rely as exclusively on dialogue as Hawks did; but Sunshine‘s conceptual and visual conceits have the same effects of density and wit through sheer velocity that the screwball comedies had through dialogue and the stars’ physical presence alone.
I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface here; there’s a lot more to say. But that will have to wait until the film comes out on DVD and I can watch it again, several times. Suffice it to say that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is Charlie Kaufman’s best work yet; together with Mulholland Drive and Punch Drunk Love and perhaps Lost in Translation, it’s evidence that American filmmaking is still alive, in spite of everything, in the twenty-first century.
Forget Baghdad, a documentary film by Samir, tracks the complexities of “identity” in the Middle East. I caught it today at the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, after missing it last month at the Seattle Arab-Iranian Film Festival.
Samir, the director of Forget Baghdad, is a Shiite Muslim Iraqi emigre, living in Switzerland. (His father, an Iraqi Communist, had to flee the country to escape Saddam). In the film, he interviews four elderly Jewish Iraqi emigres, all ex-Communists, who were forced to leave Baghdad for Israel in 1951, when almost the entire Iraqi Jewish community was prevailed upon (by both the Iraqi and Israeli governments) to emigrate. (A fifth interviewee is Ella Shohat, born in Israel of Iraqi Jewish parents, and currently teaching film at NYU).
All the interviewees are articulate, and display very mixed emotions. They all miss Baghdad, and regret the disappearance of the multi-religious society that existed in Iraq (as in many parts of the Arab world) prior to 1948; they all feel their Arabness as fully as they do their Jewishness; they all have experienced discrimination in Israeli society, as Mizrahim (“Oriental” Jews) rather than Ashkenazim (European Jews).
By their accounts, no discrimination against Jews existed in Iraq before 1941, when a pogrom was unleashed by nationalist putsch against the pro-British monarchy, with support from the Nazis. (It remains true today: anti-Semitism, so-called, is a European import into the Arab world).
Forget Baghdad isn’t a great film, but it well demonstrates, once again, how the lines of ethnic and religious turmoil that bedevil the world today are not “age-old” rivalries, but modernist inventions. It shows, too, how “Jews” and “Arabs” are, culturally speaking, much closer kin than is usually acknowledged.
Forget Baghdad, a documentary film by Samir, tracks the complexities of “identity” in the Middle East. I caught it today at the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, after missing it last month at the Seattle Arab-Iranian Film Festival.
Samir, the director of Forget Baghdad, is a Shiite Muslim Iraqi emigre, living in Switzerland. (His father, an Iraqi Communist, had to flee the country to escape Saddam). In the film, he interviews four elderly Jewish Iraqi emigres, all ex-Communists, who were forced to leave Baghdad for Israel in 1951, when almost the entire Iraqi Jewish community was prevailed upon (by both the Iraqi and Israeli governments) to emigrate. (A fifth interviewee is Ella Shohat, born in Israel of Iraqi Jewish parents, and currently teaching film at NYU).
All the interviewees are articulate, and display very mixed emotions. They all miss Baghdad, and regret the disappearance of the multi-religious society that existed in Iraq (as in many parts of the Arab world) prior to 1948; they all feel their Arabness as fully as they do their Jewishness; they all have experienced discrimination in Israeli society, as Mizrahim (“Oriental” Jews) rather than Ashkenazim (European Jews).
By their accounts, no discrimination against Jews existed in Iraq before 1941, when a pogrom was unleashed by nationalist putsch against the pro-British monarchy, with support from the Nazis. (It remains true today: anti-Semitism, so-called, is a European import into the Arab world).
Forget Baghdad isn’t a great film, but it well demonstrates, once again, how the lines of ethnic and religious turmoil that bedevil the world today are not “age-old” rivalries, but modernist inventions. It shows, too, how “Jews” and “Arabs” are, culturally speaking, much closer kin than is usually acknowledged.
Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, about the sex and drugs experiences of a 13-year-old girl, is a powerful movie, with great acting and interesting, lively direction. Digital camera, often handheld and shaky, lots of pans, lots of quick edits, manipulation of color to be supersaturated in druggy, decadent scenes and washed out in tragic family ones: these are all the kinds of things that many critics condemn as facile and gimmicky, but for me it works, it crackles and jumps, it moves; although it seems at this point less like auteurial expression than a style as codified as classical Hollywood ‘invisible’ editing ever was.
But I was bothered, finally, by how conservative and moralistic Thirteen is, once you get past its lurid will to shock (or, perhaps, such moralism is the inevitable correlate of a lurid will to shock). The film presents its thirteen-year-old protagonist’s giddy experiences (hedonism as a mask for despair) as a veritable descent into hell: Pleasure Is Bad For You. (Nothing she does would be all that shocking for a 16-year-old white girl in southern California: pot, beer, sniffing aerosol cans, heavier drugs only on rare occasions; shoplifitng, slutwear, piercing; going down on slightly older boys who — oh my god — are black; and a little scarification when the pain gets too great; but the movie wants to magnify it all by playing on our thoughts that thirteen is way too young).
And the anatomy of why she does what she does is pretty cliched, once you look past the great performances: broken home, a mom who doesn’t spend enough time with her daughter, an absent father, a manipulative slut of a best friend, etc: a “family values” analysis that is totally consonant with the Republican Party platform.
The film probably gets the teen slang and mores down (as far as I can guess; no way I could really know, since I’m 50 and my daughter is only 1 1/2). But alas, there is no Bataillean excess here. And as a portrait of teen girls’ folie a deux, Thirteen is far inferior to Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (his best movie, LOTR notwithstanding) or Rafal Zielinski’s almost entirely unknown and utterly brilliant Fun.
Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, about the sex and drugs experiences of a 13-year-old girl, is a powerful movie, with great acting and interesting, lively direction. Digital camera, often handheld and shaky, lots of pans, lots of quick edits, manipulation of color to be supersaturated in druggy, decadent scenes and washed out in tragic family ones: these are all the kinds of things that many critics condemn as facile and gimmicky, but for me it works, it crackles and jumps, it moves; although it seems at this point less like auteurial expression than a style as codified as classical Hollywood ‘invisible’ editing ever was.
But I was bothered, finally, by how conservative and moralistic Thirteen is, once you get past its lurid will to shock (or, perhaps, such moralism is the inevitable correlate of a lurid will to shock). The film presents its thirteen-year-old protagonist’s giddy experiences (hedonism as a mask for despair) as a veritable descent into hell: Pleasure Is Bad For You. (Nothing she does would be all that shocking for a 16-year-old white girl in southern California: pot, beer, sniffing aerosol cans, heavier drugs only on rare occasions; shoplifitng, slutwear, piercing; going down on slightly older boys who — oh my god — are black; and a little scarification when the pain gets too great; but the movie wants to magnify it all by playing on our thoughts that thirteen is way too young).
And the anatomy of why she does what she does is pretty cliched, once you look past the great performances: broken home, a mom who doesn’t spend enough time with her daughter, an absent father, a manipulative slut of a best friend, etc: a “family values” analysis that is totally consonant with the Republican Party platform.
The film probably gets the teen slang and mores down (as far as I can guess; no way I could really know, since I’m 50 and my daughter is only 1 1/2). But alas, there is no Bataillean excess here. And as a portrait of teen girls’ folie a deux, Thirteen is far inferior to Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (his best movie, LOTR notwithstanding) or Rafal Zielinski’s almost entirely unknown and utterly brilliant Fun.
Another brilliant Johnny To film: The Mission. This one is less extravagant than the others I’ve seen; but it has the same fragmented narrative, and the same gorgeously oblique nighttime cinematography. Only this one is more about things that don’t quite happen, about waiting for things to happen. A team of bodyguards is assembled to protect a crime boss from assassination. They succeed; the boss remains safe, and the rival responsible for the assassination attempts is found. But then, the group has other problems to face….
The memorable parts of this film are those poised on the brink of action. It’s all about waiting. The bodyguards frozen in posture, waiting for the next assault; or bored, since nothing is happening, they idly kick around a wadded-up ball of paper as if it were a soccer ball.
The assassins may come from anywhere; gunfire breaks out suddenly, with no chance of preparation. A sniper shoots from the top of a tall office building. Or shots ring out, seemingly from nowhere, in a largely deserted shopping mall. Or an ambush is launched from a seemingly deserted warehouse.
Johnny To sets up these scenes, their angles of vision and of shooting, with all the precision of John Woo (and before him, of Peckinpah, of Fuller, of classical action cinema); but the spaces in which these sightlines and shotlines are so precisely articulated, are the topologically twisted, non-Cartesian spaces of postmodernity.
Time is contorted as well as space; the moments of action are almost evanescent, you can’t keep them in mind, as they are surrounded and engulfed by the motionless stretches of before and after.
This is not the modernist waiting for a future that never arrives (as was the case in Waiting for Godot, in Blanchot’s novels, and for that matter in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo); it’s more that the action itself forms part of the waiting, the future is already enveloped in the present time of waiting, so that you are not waiting for something to happen that never does, but rather waiting precisely because it already is happening, it is here, it is now, and you have to wait in order to play your appointed part in it.
Another brilliant Johnny To film: The Mission. This one is less extravagant than the others I’ve seen; but it has the same fragmented narrative, and the same gorgeously oblique nighttime cinematography. Only this one is more about things that don’t quite happen, about waiting for things to happen. A team of bodyguards is assembled to protect a crime boss from assassination. They succeed; the boss remains safe, and the rival responsible for the assassination attempts is found. But then, the group has other problems to face….
The memorable parts of this film are those poised on the brink of action. It’s all about waiting. The bodyguards frozen in posture, waiting for the next assault; or bored, since nothing is happening, they idly kick around a wadded-up ball of paper as if it were a soccer ball.
The assassins may come from anywhere; gunfire breaks out suddenly, with no chance of preparation. A sniper shoots from the top of a tall office building. Or shots ring out, seemingly from nowhere, in a largely deserted shopping mall. Or an ambush is launched from a seemingly deserted warehouse.
Johnny To sets up these scenes, their angles of vision and of shooting, with all the precision of John Woo (and before him, of Peckinpah, of Fuller, of classical action cinema); but the spaces in which these sightlines and shotlines are so precisely articulated, are the topologically twisted, non-Cartesian spaces of postmodernity.
Time is contorted as well as space; the moments of action are almost evanescent, you can’t keep them in mind, as they are surrounded and engulfed by the motionless stretches of before and after.
This is not the modernist waiting for a future that never arrives (as was the case in Waiting for Godot, in Blanchot’s novels, and for that matter in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo); it’s more that the action itself forms part of the waiting, the future is already enveloped in the present time of waiting, so that you are not waiting for something to happen that never does, but rather waiting precisely because it already is happening, it is here, it is now, and you have to wait in order to play your appointed part in it.
Amy Ziering Kofman’s and Kirby Dick’s Derrida documentary is actually not bad, by which I mean that it is at least somewhat illuminating, and that the things about it that annoyed me are the same things that annoy me about Derrida himself.
Rather than trying to explain Derrida’s philosophy, or to tell his story (to the extent that he has one), the filmmakers are content to humanize him, and that is fine. So we see Derrida in everyday life, eating his breakfast and putting on his jacket and getting his hair cut, and we also hear him explain that this is not a “true” representation of his everyday life, because that life is itself changed by the presence of the camera.
The film shows rather well, I think, that Derrida has never been about making destructive arguments, or chopping logic for its own sake, but that his thought has always been about contingency and mortality; about the fragility and yet inescapability of the self; about how the basic experience of life involves being confronted with an Other — that is to say, with that which is not oneself and cannot be assimilated to oneself; about responsibility and forgiveness; about how the present relates to the past and to the future. Many of the great philosophical subjects, in short. And there is a certain wisdom in the careful and heavily qualified things Derrida says about all these subjects, in his simultaneous desire for clarity and meaning, and unwillingness to simplify and generalize.
The film also shows, and shares, Derrida’s extreme narrowness about these subjects. His main limitation as a philosopher, I think, is that he forever remains too narrowly just a philosopher, too much a part of the great Western tradition to ever venture outside it. He is never willing to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
When asked, for instance, whether he finds elements of deconstruction in Seinfeld, his response is categorical and uncomprehending: “deconstruction is not a sitcom,” he says. He is not horrified by the comparison, the way an older sort of high-culture snob would have been; but he is absolutely unable to grasp how it is possible that anyone would choose to watch an episode of Seinfeld in preference to reading a page of Heidegger.
Again, when the interviewer asks Derrida what he wishes he could ask one of the great philosophers of the past, Derrida rather charmingly replies that he’ d like to be able to ask Heidegger or Hegel about his sex life. He then spars coyly with the interviewer over the issue of whether or not he’d reveal anything about his own sex life (he encourages her to ask him, but says that he wouldn’t answer). But Derrida somewhat spoils the effect of all this when he says that, of course, he’s not thinking of “a porno of Hegel or Heidegger,” but rather something more dignified: that they admit that they cannot totally separate their thought from their private lives.
Me, I’d much rather witness the grotesque spectacle of Heidegger and Hannah Arendt fucking than read another essay by either of them.
Amy Ziering Kofman’s and Kirby Dick’s Derrida documentary is actually not bad, by which I mean that it is at least somewhat illuminating, and that the things about it that annoyed me are the same things that annoy me about Derrida himself.
Rather than trying to explain Derrida’s philosophy, or to tell his story (to the extent that he has one), the filmmakers are content to humanize him, and that is fine. So we see Derrida in everyday life, eating his breakfast and putting on his jacket and getting his hair cut, and we also hear him explain that this is not a “true” representation of his everyday life, because that life is itself changed by the presence of the camera.
The film shows rather well, I think, that Derrida has never been about making destructive arguments, or chopping logic for its own sake, but that his thought has always been about contingency and mortality; about the fragility and yet inescapability of the self; about how the basic experience of life involves being confronted with an Other — that is to say, with that which is not oneself and cannot be assimilated to oneself; about responsibility and forgiveness; about how the present relates to the past and to the future. Many of the great philosophical subjects, in short. And there is a certain wisdom in the careful and heavily qualified things Derrida says about all these subjects, in his simultaneous desire for clarity and meaning, and unwillingness to simplify and generalize.
The film also shows, and shares, Derrida’s extreme narrowness about these subjects. His main limitation as a philosopher, I think, is that he forever remains too narrowly just a philosopher, too much a part of the great Western tradition to ever venture outside it. He is never willing to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
When asked, for instance, whether he finds elements of deconstruction in Seinfeld, his response is categorical and uncomprehending: “deconstruction is not a sitcom,” he says. He is not horrified by the comparison, the way an older sort of high-culture snob would have been; but he is absolutely unable to grasp how it is possible that anyone would choose to watch an episode of Seinfeld in preference to reading a page of Heidegger.
Again, when the interviewer asks Derrida what he wishes he could ask one of the great philosophers of the past, Derrida rather charmingly replies that he’ d like to be able to ask Heidegger or Hegel about his sex life. He then spars coyly with the interviewer over the issue of whether or not he’d reveal anything about his own sex life (he encourages her to ask him, but says that he wouldn’t answer). But Derrida somewhat spoils the effect of all this when he says that, of course, he’s not thinking of “a porno of Hegel or Heidegger,” but rather something more dignified: that they admit that they cannot totally separate their thought from their private lives.
Me, I’d much rather witness the grotesque spectacle of Heidegger and Hannah Arendt fucking than read another essay by either of them.
Shunji Iwai’s Swallowtail Butterfly (1996) is a film about foreigners (mostly Chinese, but also European and American) in Japan. Most of these foreigners communicate with one another in English, which they know better than they do Japanese. The main character, Ageha (Butterfly) is a teenage girl, daughter of a dead Chinese prostitute, but who was born in Japan and only speaks Japanese and English. In the course of the film, we also meet Japanese-born children of Americans, white and black, but whose main language is Japanese, and who don’t speak English very well, if at all.
So the film is multi-lingual and multi-ethnic (though there don’t seem to be any Koreans, Japan’s largest minority group), giving the lie to the myth of Japanese homogeneity.
Swallowtail Butterfly is about these immigrants’ hopes of making it — their successes and failures — in the Japanese bubble economy of the late 80s/early 90s (I think). At times it has an almost documentary feel, at other times it is highly stylized and anti-realistic, as it flirts with the gangster thriller and with expressionist modes, as well as referencing music video (Iwai’s background, before he moved into film). Handheld camera is used throughout, supplemented by various filters and other visual effects. The film seems edited more for rhythm than for narrative, though its various narrative strands do converge towards the end.
What’s remarkable about Swallowtail Butterfly – as well as about Iwai’s later film All About Lily Chou-Chou (which I wrote about here) – is the way it drifts in and out of various moods or affects, as well as various genres. There are horrific moments (as when racist Japanese cops beat up and kill a Chinese man), and over-the-top film fantasy moments (as when the immigrants blow up several truck-loads of gangsters with a bazooka), and moments when time seems to stop (as when Ageha overdoses on heroin), and moments when time seems to expand into eternity (as when Glico, the Chinese prostitute turned singer, delivers a stunning rock ‘n’ roll version of “My Way” – played straight, and not in the mode of the Sid Vicious critique), and moments of sheer lyrical abstraction, pain and joy passed through the sieve of Iwai’s restless camera and savvy pop soundtrack. The film begins and (almost) ends with Chinese funerals, in which money – the Japanese yen for which the immigrants have come to Japan – is burned in a potlatch that consumes both the hypocrisies and racism of Japanese society, and the grief, rage, and desperation of which the immigrants’ lives are composed.
Shunji Iwai’s Swallowtail Butterfly (1996) is a film about foreigners (mostly Chinese, but also European and American) in Japan. Most of these foreigners communicate with one another in English, which they know better than they do Japanese. The main character, Ageha (Butterfly) is a teenage girl, daughter of a dead Chinese prostitute, but who was born in Japan and only speaks Japanese and English. In the course of the film, we also meet Japanese-born children of Americans, white and black, but whose main language is Japanese, and who don’t speak English very well, if at all.
So the film is multi-lingual and multi-ethnic (though there don’t seem to be any Koreans, Japan’s largest minority group), giving the lie to the myth of Japanese homogeneity.
Swallowtail Butterfly is about these immigrants’ hopes of making it — their successes and failures — in the Japanese bubble economy of the late 80s/early 90s (I think). At times it has an almost documentary feel, at other times it is highly stylized and anti-realistic, as it flirts with the gangster thriller and with expressionist modes, as well as referencing music video (Iwai’s background, before he moved into film). Handheld camera is used throughout, supplemented by various filters and other visual effects. The film seems edited more for rhythm than for narrative, though its various narrative strands do converge towards the end.
What’s remarkable about Swallowtail Butterfly – as well as about Iwai’s later film All About Lily Chou-Chou (which I wrote about here) – is the way it drifts in and out of various moods or affects, as well as various genres. There are horrific moments (as when racist Japanese cops beat up and kill a Chinese man), and over-the-top film fantasy moments (as when the immigrants blow up several truck-loads of gangsters with a bazooka), and moments when time seems to stop (as when Ageha overdoses on heroin), and moments when time seems to expand into eternity (as when Glico, the Chinese prostitute turned singer, delivers a stunning rock ‘n’ roll version of “My Way” – played straight, and not in the mode of the Sid Vicious critique), and moments of sheer lyrical abstraction, pain and joy passed through the sieve of Iwai’s restless camera and savvy pop soundtrack. The film begins and (almost) ends with Chinese funerals, in which money – the Japanese yen for which the immigrants have come to Japan – is burned in a potlatch that consumes both the hypocrisies and racism of Japanese society, and the grief, rage, and desperation of which the immigrants’ lives are composed.