Category: Film

Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales is an amazing movie, and I will try to do it justice in what follows, although all I can do for the moment is spew out a series of speculations and observations, in a random, and no doubt contradictory as well as repetitive, order. But I think that this is not only a brilliant film, but an extraordinarily important one, in that it is one of those rare works that is “as radical as reality itself,” and that reflects upon our real situation while at the same time inserting itself within that situation, rather than taking a pretended distance from it. The film is a demented fabulation, but in such a way that it can best be described as hyperreal. Its “science fiction” is scientifically and technologically unsound, and could best be described as delirious — but that is precisely why it is directly relevant to a world that has increasingly come to be “indistinguishable from science fiction.” Southland Tales makes nearly all other contemporary movies seem inadequate, outdated, and guilty of fleeing our actual social world in search of nostalgic consolations. I cannot help suspect that the radicality of Southland Tales is the reason why the film has received such a savagely negative response from most reviewers, and has been such a disastrous flop at the box office. (Several of the film critics I most respect, including Amy Taubin, J. Hoberman, and Manohla Dargis, have praised the movie; but most have regarded it as unspeakably awful, an unmitigated disaster. As for general audiences, the film has only made something like $160,000 in box office gross, nearly a month after its initial release).

Southland Tales is all about the flow of images, the multimedia feed. Although it is very much a movie, in the way that it is big and spectacular and meant to be viewed on an enormous screen, it is also deeply post-cinematic, both in terms of contents and of form. Southland Tales takes place in an alternative universe to our own: one in which atomic bombs detonated by terrorists in Texas in 2005 have led us into World War III, reconfiguring both the political landscape and the development of internet and alternative-fuel technologies. Nonetheless, the movie is recognizably contemporary, in that it is set firmly in a world of handheld video cameras, and You Tube, and 24-hour cable news channels, and ubiquitous surveillance cameras, and celebrity-tracking papparazzi.

Southland Tales‘s visual flow is also that of these post-cinematic media that play such a role within it. Properly cinematic images are intermixed with a barrage of home video footage, internet and cable-TV news feeds, commercials, simulated CGI environments, and especially sequences in which the film’s characters are watching all of the above on multiple computer windows or screens. The compositional logic of Southland Tales is paratactic and additive, having little to do with conventional film syntax. Indeed, Kelly’s disjunctive flow is almost the polar opposite of Eisensteinian montage. Eisenstein wanted his contradictory images to interact, dialectically or alchemically, in order to produce by their clash a higher order image/concept, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. But Kelly’s discordant images refuse thus to come together; they don’t even clash, but co-exist in their distance from one another, their “incompossibility” (to use a word that Deleuze adapts from Leibniz). In Southland Tales, chains of cause and effect both multiply and break down entirely, in defiance of linear or narrative logic; everything in the film is a matter, neither of causality, nor of action grounded in character, nor even of dialectical contrast; but rather of juxtaposition, “free” association, and the proliferation of multiple levels of self-referential feedback loops.

For instance: a pair of hip, “underground” performance artists, a black man and a white woman, who are a couple in “real life” and in their performances, disguise themselves in facial prosthetics so that they will not be recognized. In this disguise, they pretend to be an arguing married couple, in order to simulate a scenario in which they will be murdered by a racist cop. There are doing this apparently for a political cause; but it also seems that they are interested in blackmail for financial advantage (seed money to feed back into their “art”). The racist cop who is supposed to seem to murder them, after responding to a domestic violence call, is himself being impersonated by his twin brother, and accompanied by an actor trying to research his own forthcoming role as a cop by slipping into character on the (ostensibly) real cop’s rounds, as well as by hauling around a video camera with which he records everything that happens. The fake racist cop is supposed to fire blanks, and the performance artists will pretend to be hit, while a hidden accomplice presses a button in order to make fake blood spurt out. But the whole scenario is detourned when a second cop barges in on the scene and fires real bullets, so that the performing couple (who have already, in their desparation not to be really killed, gone out of character and revealed themselves as the notorious performers they are) are actually killed — though, as they fall, the hidden accomplice still pushes the special-effects button at the sound of gunfire, in order to make the prosthetic blood spill out. In a subsequent scene, the second, killer cop is revealed also to be an impersonator rather than an actual cop, who has performed the killing, and confiscated the video camera that recorded it, in service to yet another confused agenda that also seems to involve both political activism and blackmail for cash…

I’ve described at such cumbersome length a scene that only takes up a few minutes of Southland Tales‘s two-and-a-quarter-hour running time, simply to give a sense of how twisted and multi-leveled the film is. These convolutions of content go along with the sensory-overload barrage of multiple media images that fill the screen, or often multiple screens within the screen. I haven’t even mentioned the fact that everything that happens in the film is under surveillance, so that most of what we see on screen is viewed in progress, or a second time, by the evil Republican homeland-security czar (played by Miranda Richardson, channeling Angela Lansbury’s performance in The Manchurian Candidate), who monitors multiple screens from her command center at the heart of US-Ident, a “think tank” turned spy facility that (in the interest of “national security”) tracks everything that streams across the Internet.

The great theoretician of film sound Michel Chion notes that, while in cinema the sound subliminally supports the primacy of the image, in video the sound becomes up-front central, and weaves together and makes coherent what otherwise might appear to be an utterly random stream of images. In cinema the images are primary, the coherence of the film coming mostly from mise en scene and cinematography and montage, and the soundtrack really serves as a support for the images, by giving them emotional resonance and a guarantee of (seeming) naturalism. Video, to the contrary, is more like “illustrated radio,” according to Chion: the sound is primary (whether it be the voice in a news report, or the music in a music video), and the images have no intrinsic logic of their own, but are only strung together through the guidance provided by the sound. This does not necessarily mean that images tend to disappear; it more likely means that there is a proliferation of images, due to the fact that they are no longer constrained by an imagistic logic, but instead opened up by the fact that a logic external to them, based instead in the sonic, is the only regulating principle. (Chion’s formulation should be compared with Marshall McLuhan’s claim that television and computer-based media are audio-tactile, rather than predominantly visual).

In any case, this is yet another sense in which Southland Tales is resolutely post-cinematic. Its use of sound is much closer to that of television and music video than it is to that of anything recognizable in the history of cinema. We are guided through the labyrinth of the movie’s proliferating images almost exclusively by Justin Timberlake’s voiceover narration (together with other forms of narration, like those from various CNN-style news reports) and Moby’s musical score. While the electronic music modulates our mood, the voiceover makes connections between layers and levels of imagery that otherwise could not emerge. Stylistically, Kelly’s images tend toward televisual flatness, and conventional character positioning (either two-shots or shot/reverse-shot setups). He does, however, throw in more heavily stylized cinematography every once in a while (I recall an extraordinary long take, towards the end of the film, in the mega-zeppelin, as the camera weaves through the partying crowds, following first one character, then another, without a cut). But the emphasis is never on strictly optical tableaux: there is always too much of a welter of too-flat images, which need the soundtrack to be unscrambled.

This is not a matter of “telling instead of showing” (the accusation that is usually made against the use of voiceover in more traditional Hollywood films, e.g. in the films of Billy Wilder), but rather of voice enunciating what literally cannot be shown, because it exceeds the limits of the visual. I am thinking here of Jameson’s dictum that postmodern capitalist society cannot be imaged or represented; this does not mean that it cannot be known, or “mapped,” but that such a mapping itself exceeds what can be imaged or represented or “visualized.” And I am also thinking of Deleuze’s notion is to make us sense and feel that which literally cannot be sensed or felt, but which remains implicit in whatever it is that we do sense or feel, and which therefore cannot be registered in any other way, but can only be sensed or felt. For both Jameson and Deleuze, and despite their radically different orientations (since Jameson is focused on cognition, and Deleuze on affect), what’s needed is a certain rupture or disparity: in the case of any medium involving images in motion, this means both disjunction among the images, and discordance between the images and the sounds (words and speech, music, noise) that underly them.

In Southland Tales, as in the network society we live in, the world is entirely composed of images: bodies are not only registered on video as images, but are themselves images; and images are themselves entirely real, because they are what,to a large extent, compose the material substance of the real. But this means that everything is flat or two-dimensional, everything is laid out in a configuration that is essentially spatial and simultaneous, even if not conforming to any literal geography. Sound is what energizes this configuration; it provides the temporality (both the existential duration, and the principle of ordering) for this labyrinthine array of images; it thereby realizes the actual connections between images that, on the image track itself, are merely latent or virtual.

This means that Kelly is one of the very few contemporary directors — alongside David Lynch, David Fincher, and really I am not sure who else — who is actually rethinking what film might mean, and what sense it might make, in our post-cinematic, videocentric and thoroughly digitized age. We can profitably contrast Southland Tales with Lynch’s Inland Empire: these films are complementary to one another. Lynch’s film is shot on digital video, and constructed in such a way that it is no longer a movie any longer, but some newer media form. It is intimate and interior in a way that traditional movies (because they are public and collective and operate on a grand scale) are incapable of, and that therefore can only be attained by fracturing and fragmenting cinematic codes, and by rejecting 35mm film for digital video. But the deep logic of Inland Empire is still a cinematic one, precisely because it refers back to the cinematic codes that it deconstructs. Inland Empire is based on the enigma of images, all the more so in that Lynch’s digital camera flattens out and makes more glaring the images whose subtleties he used to capture on film. Lynch’s sound design provides an exquisite support for these deconstructed images, but the images still come first. Southland Tales, to the contrary, no longer recognizes cinematic logic at all, not even in order to deconstruct it. This is because it is no longer based on cinema’s image-centric logic at all — despite the fact that, as a media object, it is still (in contrast to Inland Empire) a movie. The two works thus explore the same contested territory, but from opposite perspectives, moving in opposite directions. I am not saying that Southland Tales is as great an accomplishment as Inland Empire, but nothing I have seen recently, aside from Lynch’s work, comes close to matching it.

As for the content of Southland Tales — since it is anything but a formal exercise — this has as much to do with the auras of the actors making up the cast, as it does with what the characters played by these actors actually do on screen. Everybody in the film is a pop culture icon of one sort or another. The main characters are played by such actors as Dwayne Johnson (The Rock, of both wrestling and action-picture fame); Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy); Seann William Scott (from American Pie). The minor roles are played by the likes of Wallace Shawn (as a mad-scientist dwarf), and Mandy Moore (as a fashion-victim Republican Senator’s daughter). All the minor roles are acted by people whom I can recognize, even if I cannot actually place them without the help of the IMDB. (Thus, Christopher Lambert — Highlander — plays a brutal and crazed cynic who sells heavy weaponry from inside an ice cream truck usually parked in Venice Beach). But nearly all these actors are cast against type, playing roles that largely contradict the characterizations for which they are best known. Thus, the Rock is denied action-hero status, as he spends most of the film as an amnesiac Hollywood actor, lost in various varieties of fear and befuddlement. Sarah Michelle Gellar is hilarious as a humorless porn actress with her own business plan, that includes a talk show (sort of an X-rated version of The View), a pop record (“Teenage Horniness is Not a Crime”), and an energy drink.

Special mention must go, of course, to Justin Timberlake, who narrates the film with omniscient voiceovers — even though at the same time he is a character within the film, who could not possibly know most of the things that his voiceover confides to us. His character is an Iraqi-war vet, Pilot Abilene, who was wounded (and facially disfigured) by “friendly fire” (shot, in fact, by the Seann William Scott character). He spends most of the movie sitting in a sniper’s post over Venice Beach, seated at the controls of a long-range machine gun with telephoto lens, which he occasionally uses to pick off people on the beach, when the film’s narrative demands it. The rest of the time, he both deals and takes Fluid Karma, an illicit psychedelic drug, manufactured by the mad scientist’s company and used in Army trials on unwitting soldiers. Fluid Karma is injected by a syringe into the neck, and it is supposed to promote both telepathy and transcendent visions.

Probably the high point of the film is when we actually get to see one of these visions. The sequence is a sort of music video, in which Timberlake/Abilene, under the drug’s influence, dances and lip-synchs to the Killers’ “All These Things I’ve Done,” stumbling about in a blood-stained T-shirt, flipping his dog tags to the repeated line “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier,” and drinking beer and pouring it over his head like a frat-boy party dude — all the while surrounded by a bevy of Busby Berkeley-esque nearly-identical women wearing skimpy nurses’ uniforms as they gyrate and kick their legs. Timberlake, here as everywhere else in American pop culture today, displays a charisma that seems incompatible with, and yet that somehow arises seamlessly out of, his bland-as-white-bread, blue-eyed-soul persona. His Killers-inspired hallucination is at once utterly depraved, and yet also oddly impersonal, as well as being flat, self-contained, and without resonance, as if it were being performed in a special chamber designed to muffle and absorb anything that might exceed the literal, or that might lead us to connotations beyond the obvious. The scene is nearly unspeakably ridiculous, at the same time that it is creepily menacing, and yet also exhilarating. Let the forces of the cosmos stream through you, and you will find yourself channeling chintzy advertising specials and reality shows. Which is not to say that such material is devoid of impact. Watching Timberlake strut and lip-sync among the fake-porno nurses, it’s almost as if time had stopped for the duration of the song, looping back upon itself in order to intensify, by a sort of positive feedback, the film’s overall sense of apocalyptic imminence — of something catastrophic not so much happening, as always being about to happen. Teetering on a precipice without actually falling over; or better, falling over but never finishing falling over, never quite hitting the ground.

What I have just been trying to say about the Timberlake music video scene applies to the movie as a whole: it is utterly hallucinatory, and yet it possesses at the same time a sort of flatness, or lack of resonance, something that is extremely claustrophobic. It is as if the film were always holding something back, or running repeatedly through a holding pattern, like an airplane circling the airport but never landing. Timberlake/Abilene repeatedly tells us that we are watching the end of the world, and that this end is coming (in a reversal of T.S. Eliot), not with a whimper but with a bang. But this end is repeatedly deferred. We hear of tidal drag causing the earth’s rotation to slow down, and of rifts in the spacetime continuum. But it is never clear how these apocalyptic events are manifested in the media flow that proclaims and amplifies them. Kelly strongly suggests that even nuclear holcaust, World War III, and the institution of a totalitarian police state do not much interfere with life as usual. People are still partying and drinking, filling the boutiques and cafes of Venice Beach and Santa Monica. The July 4th celebration with which the film concludes involves not only fireworks, and partying among the rich and powerful on Wallace Shawn’s “mega-zeppelin,” but also gun battles between “neo-Marxist” guerrillas and the police on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. But these latter only add to the general sense of carnivalesque release, of the sort that we are all too used to gawking at on TV. (And even the people who are there, in the streets, act in the full knowledge of being on TV). Even when the promised apocalyptic bang finally comes, in the last few minutes of the film, it seems weirdly anti-climactic, if only because we are all too familiar with seeing disaster footage on TV. Seann William Scott apparently becomes the Messiah, taking over a role that should have, by right, gone to The Rock; and Justin Timberlake is his John the Baptist.

Southland Tales is both infinitely diverse and expansive, and yet at the same time oddly claustrophobic, because of the way that all of its crazy tangents, detours, irrational cuts, and meta-fictional leaps are all enclosed within the self-validating feedback loop of its multimedia bubble (the network, the Net, the communications infrastructure, what have you). This claustrophobia is what gives the film its compulsive power. The narrative is filled with conspiracies and rumors of conspiracy, with plots and schemes that go nowhere, or that implode upon the schemers and plotters themselves, and with paranoid and apocalyptic premonitions that have their effect precisely as premonitions, rather than on account of what they actually foresee or prophesy. In the course of his voiceover narration, Timberlake/Abilene incessantly quotes from the Book of Revelations; only in such a way that it becomes impossible to tell which are the powers of light and which the powers of darkness. The Book of Revelations is not so much a guide to the final days, as it is a funhouse-mirror roadmap of the actually existing mediasphere. Everyone in the film is under surveillance by somebody else, and is being plotted against by somebody else. The excesses of the Security State are matched by the blind, grandilquent self-delusions of everybody who is a subject of that State, or a self-declared enemy of that State. The only characters more or less free from this grandiloquence are the disfigured Timberlake/Abilene, and the befuddled amnesiacs played by The Rock and by Scott.

Grandiloquence and amnesia, and a continual sense of performing for an audience that one desperately invokes, but that one cannot actually see are all parts of the model of subjectivity that Southland Tales presents to us. We are probably all familiar by now with the description of postmodern subjectivity as the experience of oddly impersonal fluxes of affect, flows that traverse me much more than they can be said to be “mine.” You can find such descriptions in Jameson, in Deleuze/Guattari, in Baudrillard, in Lyotard, and in others, dating back to the 1970s (or, perhaps, even to certain aspects of McLuhan in the 1960s). These thinkers are all vastly different, of course, in how they describe the phenomenon, and the (positive or negative) value they place upon it; but still it’s a thread that can be followed through all of them. Southland Tales does not expound such a theory, so much as it takes it for granted and explores its consequences. Indeed, the movie takes it as a self-evident axiom that this is the only form of subjectivity that one can even imagine. Within it, however, we get a whole series of fluctuations and hesitations, and back-and-forth negotiations.

For instance, the Rock’s character, Boxer Santaros, is amnesiac and literally beside himself (we ultimately learn that this amnesia is the effect of space/time displacement, together with the murder of his “other” self). Apparently he is a a rich and famous Hollywood star with Republican Party connections (as The Rock himself more or less is in “real life”). But he doesn’t remember any of this, which means that, although everybody else recognizes him, he does not recognize himself. Amnesia takes away his knowledge of his own stardom, but it also turns him into even more of an actor, since anything he does feels like a fictive role, and his only possible mode of being is to imagine himself into such a role. No wonder he keeps slipping into the role of a character in an apocalyptic screenplay that he is supposed to have written — though he doesn’t remember writing it either, but only having read it. The Rock gives a brilliant performance as such a performer — you can see him trying on the various roles, being touched by fear and anxiety and surprise, and above all a sort of bemused puzzlement, but always braving it out and trying to act in the way the situation demands. Is it possible to be a method actor, inhabiting your role, when you don’t have any personal memories to call upon in order to think yourself into that role? Is it possible to be a method actor, drawing upon personal memories in order to inhabit the role of somebody without such personal memories? Boxer Santaros’ performative, or improvisational, simulation of interiority is one model of subjectivity in Southland Tales; Pilot Abilene’s odd, soft-spoken cool, and toned-down but ecstatic nihilism is another; Krysta Now (the porn starlet played by Sarah Michelle Gellar), with her business plan, her self-imposed instrumentalization of pleasure, her immediate reduction of feeling to self-conscious enactment, offers another. These are all types; and Kelly’s attempt to typologize the sorts of “subjective expression” that are generated and enabled within the overriding multimedia flow is one main reason for the meandering length of his narrative.

I’ll stop here, though I feel that I could go on indefinitely, because Southland Tales is so rich and convoluted, at the same time that (and precisely because) it pursues its vision of chaos and dread and media flow with such a monomaniacal intensity. Booed at Cannes in 2006, and both a critical and box-office disaster in 2007, the film obviously has not found its niche, nor found its cult, nor even made the sort of negative impact that would qualify it as a Cultural Event on the order of all the things that it narrates. I’m inclined to think that this is simply because the film is too prophetic: which is also to say, too real, too close to the actuality of which it is a part and which it anatomizes and mirrors, to be receivable at this point in time. The most alien messages are the ones that point out clearly what is staring us in the face. All the more so, in that such messages can have no sense of detachment, no critical perspective, to provide a justification for what they say. Southland Tales declines to exempt itself in the slightest from the overall situation that it describes; it declines even to overtly criticize that situation, as this would mean having to step outside it, as well as because simply presenting it, in its own compulsive mirroring and feeding back of itself, is already more than enough. Kelly’s film is too weird to be taken up by a mainstream audience; but also too mainstream, too much a part of the so-called mainstream, to please viewers and critics who are looking for either visionary, experimental formalism, or an informed oppositional politics. It also explodes the very being of cinema (including experimental cinema) so slyly and casually that it unavoidably offends most cinephiles. It immerses us in the present, in the Now, relentlessly and without release. (It even makes a joke of this valuation of the Now, in the person of Gellar’s character, Krysta, who takes on the last name “Now” because she is so doggedly interested in freedom and sexual gratification Now: not in the future, or tomorrow, or in ten minutes, but right Now). This immersion in the Now is what makes Southland Tales such a brilliantly futuristic film. (Krysta even remarks, at one point, something to the effect that futurists now think the future will be much more futuristic than they had previously believed). It is because it speaks in and to the Now that Southland Tales cannot be received now, but must look to the future for its reception. Combining irony and prophecy, it is at once too ironic for its meanings to be acceptable, and yet too earnest and visionary for the kind of ironic acceptance that we otherwise revel in.

Anton Corbijn’s Control, about the life and death of Ian Curtis, the singer for Joy Division, is a film that is fully worthy of its subject. Control is beautiful and bleak, affectively compelling because of (rather than in spite of) its reticence and downbeat everydayness. It’s shot in a high-contrast black and white, which effectively conveys — even as it also aestheticizes and beautifies — the bleakness of its 1970s-working-class (or should I say, lower middle class?) settings. The performances, especially those of Sam Riley as Curtis, and the always-great Samantha Morton as his long-suffering wife Deborah, are utterly compelling in their understatedness. There is no psychologizing here; we only see Curtis from the outside, and are given no clues as to his motivations. This even remains the case when we get voiceovers of his poetry, or at one point even of his internal monologue (as a bandmate attempts, unsuccessfully, of course, to relieve his torment through hypnosis).

But I need to be more specific about this. There’s a certain international-art-film style that works to convey a sense of desolation through the rigorous avoidance of any interiority. These films are shot mostly in long shots and long takes, with a camera that either remains entirely still, or moves slowly, in order to continually but discreetly reframe. The acting is generally low-affect, or entirely affectless; the plot is sufficiently elliptical, oblique, and estranging, as to prevent us from assigning any motivations, or even emotional qualities, to the characters. There are great films in this style (like the works of Bela Tarr, which make us feel like we are seeing the world in an entirely new way), as well as a lot of less successful ones that come across as strained, pretentious, and desperately arty (I’d prefer not to finger any specific bad examples; anyone who watches lots of international art films will have their own sense of this).

Now, what’s great and surprising about Control is that it does not fit into this paradigm at all, even though it shares some of its superficial characteristics. The film’s reticence doesn’t come from distance or an objectifying tendency. In fact, for all its visual austerity, Control is quite an intimate film; it often expresses its characters’ moods with closeups, shot/reverse shot setups, and other conventions of more straighforward narrative cinema. What this means is that Control doesn’t in the least distance us from Ian Curtis; rather, it reveals reticence and distance as Ian Curtis’ own inner experience of himself. We are unable to parse his inner emotional life, only to the extent, and exactly to the extent, that he is unable to parse it himself. Curtis, as portrayed by Riley, is sufficiently out of touch with his own emotions that he even experiences depression only, as it were, at second hand. He seems both vulnerable and soulful, and even a bit annoyingly sorry for himself: but these qualities are also always muffled, as if they were not quite there, or as if Curtis couldn’t understand these sides of himself either. Portraying Curtis in this way makes for a film that is quite melancholy, but that cannot be accused of miserablism, or of kitchen-sink depressive naturalism.

In addition to the compellingly low-key acting, the film stands out by its visual stylization. Corbijn edits anti-dramatically and anti-climactically; that is, he shows us the lead-up to, and the aftermath, of emotionally important moments and turning-points, but often does not show us those moments themselves. There’s never a sense of climax or explosion; in that respect, the film is intriguingly anti-melodramatic. The exceptions to this are Curtis’ epileptic seizures, which are shown to us at uncomfortable length; and also the many performance scenes. Riley entirely captures what I imagine to have been Curtis’ on-stage charisma (as he killed himself shortly before what would have been the band’s first tour of the United States, I never got the chance to see him live). He stands stock-still as the band begins to play, breaks into jerky motions that are not quite dance moves, then grabs the mic with a sort of controlled avidity and intones (rather than shouts) the songs’ lyrics.

Curtis’ dancing/singing style, as expressed through Riley’s body language, is also the visual style of the film as a whole. Corbijn is famous as a still photographer (in fact, his photos of the actual Curtis, back in 1979/1980, did a lot to cement Curtis’ image, and to give a face to the stifled depressiveness and anguish of he music); so it is perhaps not surprising that Control’s luminous black-and-white often takes on the aura, and arranged beauty, of arty still photography. (Indeed, it is often a stock complaint about either still photographers, or cinematographers, turned filmmakers, that they present images that are merely pretty, without being cinematically compelling. Further discussion of this will have to await Rosalind Galt‘s forthcoming theorization of the problem of the “pretty” in film). But again, part of the brilliance and power of Control lies precisely in the way that it is organized around the play of stillness and motion (much as Curtis’ performance style, at least as portrayed by Riley, is organized around such a play). Many shots begin by looking like stills; we have to wait several seconds before a body or head in frame moves a bit (when Riley or Morton open their eyes, or light a cigarette, or whatever). The life of the film is a matter of these moments of stillness and motion, and of the discontinuous transitions between them. The film has a lot of empty time in it: Curtis is just lying in bed, smoking, or sitting on the sofa with a whiskey bottle, watching the telly. Minimal motions sometimes disrupt or modulate this stillness, and beyond that there are all sorts of degrees of motion in-frame, up to the spasmodic motions of the epileptic attacks. Also, although there are lots of shots of people in cars (the band going to a gig, etc.), there’s never really a sense of getting anywhere. We are always either in-between or back at the starting point. No matter how popular Joy Division becomes, the film never gives us any sense of (either literal or metaphorical) arrival. Control is a film that leaves us with a lot to ponder, but very little to say; and this inconclusiveness, applied to the fatality of Curtis’ tragically short life- and career-trajectory, is precisely what the film means, and how it makes us feel (or at least, how it made me feel).

David Cronenberg’s latest, Eastern Promises, is a powerful movie, better than nearly anything else (David Lynch aside) being made in the English-speaking world these days. But even though it had a powerful impact, I felt blank afterwards thinking about what could be said about it. This has something to do with Cronenberg’s tightness and closure: like many of his more recent films, Eastern Promises is so tightly organized, and so perfectly self-enclosed, that it doesn’t leave the viewer with any wriggle room. But also, Eastern Promises seems less interesting, somehow, than Cronenberg’s previous excursion into the crime/gangster genre, A History of Violence.

This is partly the result of the films’ respective directions of focus. Where A History of Violence focused on both American genre assumptions and on American society more generally, with Cronenberg the Canadian able to view the USA both from inside and from outside, Eastern Promises entirely displaces its focus onto a group of exoticized Others (Russian gangsters in London). There is no inside perspective, and hence no inside critique, but only an outward one. This has the advantage of presenting Masculinity as something bizarre, ritualized, and coded (rather as being in any way “natural”); but it has the disadvantage of not reflecting back upon the film’s primary (American, and more generally, Western) audience. This is made all the stranger, or more estranging, by the curious fact that all the major Russian characters are played by non-Russian actors: they are, respectively, Danish-American (Viggo Mortensen), French (Vincent Cassel), German (Armin Mueller-Stahl), and Polish (Jerzy Skloimowski). Cronenberg masters an amazing combination of visceral grippingness and radical estrangement; I think this is a brilliant combination, but I also can’t help feeling that, in Eastern Promises, the result is just too icily perfect, or too closed.

Kim has already discussed in brilliant detail how Eastern Promises is yet another Cronenberg excursion into the visceral dimensions of masculinity. The rituals of the Russian gangsters are all about male embodiment, and the way that masculine anguish and masculine recognition alike are grounded in the flesh. Tis is reflected in everything from the fight and murder scenes, which do not dwell on the violence, but are direct and abrupt enough as not to be for the squeamish, to the full-body tattoos that are the gangsters’ signifiers of power, status, and belonging. They are incised visibly in the flesh because every aspect of power — from Armin Mueller-Stahl’z vicious avuncularity to Vincent Cassell’s dissoluteness to Viggo Mortensen’s impassive more-than-cool — has to be enacted and embodied, in order to be effective.

On the other hand, the one important female character, played by Naomi Watts, is entirely marginalized. Despite the fact that she is a kind of surrogate for the viewer, and that her investigations — stumbling unexpectedly upon a dangerous underworld that has existed in proximity to her, but unseen and unfelt, all this time– are what lead us into the heart of the film — despite all this, she nonetheless doesn’t really enter into the affect of the story at all. The sexual attractiveness of Viggo Mortensen isn’t really channeled through her sensibility at all; and her curiosity about her Russian father’s past, and her urgings toward motherhood, are the most conventionalized (and therefore least reworked, least energized) aspects of the pregiven genre that Cronenberg is otherwise so energetically reworking.

In other words, it’s all about the men. I entirely agree with Kim’s suggestions as to how Eastern Promises reworks (under the guise of gangster fiction) Cronenberg’s body obsessions in his earlier work like Videodrome (which of course is as much about ritualized masculinity, and its dismembering or “castration” when James Wood’s belly turns into a VCR-cum-vaginal-slit). But what I miss in Eastern Promises is the sense I get from Scanners and Videodrome and The Fly of something crazily transformative — the metamorphoses of the flesh. My friend William Beard (the author of a massive and very smart and detailed book about Cronenberg) sees those earlier films as being basically about masculine angst, and unreservedly horrified at the loss of male power, virility, and authority. But I think that those earlier films are also deeply hilarious in some way that (obviously without being sappily new-agey and upbeat) nonetheless points to the “joy of becoming” even amidst the horrors of self-destruction (to paraphrase Nietzsche a bit).

And this has something to do with the fact that these earlier films are also directly about “new media” and new technologies, in ways that Cronenberg’s more recent films are not. I mean, James Woods’ orifice is not simply a vagina; it is a VCR as well. And this is related to the way that, as Woods is told in the course of the film, the forces fighting over the Videodrome technology — the corporate fascists at Spectacular Optical and the new-age social activists led Bianca O’Blivion and her late father, the McLuhanoid Brian O’Blivion — are political,in ways that he, Woods, is not. Because communications media, and expressive media, are directly political in their own right. This is a much broader sense of the “new flesh,” and of politics, than the mere power struggles (who’s going to be the boss? what role will the governments play?) that are the ultimate background to the masculine rituals of Eastern Promises.

This larger sense of a technology that is also a politics, and the consequent intimations of transformation — not of something better, let alone utopian, but at least of some dynamism of becoming — is missing in nearly all of Cronenberg’s more recent films. Which is why films like Spider (and also, alas, even the Burroughs and Ballard adaptations) really do seem to me to be just about masculine angst and dissolution. Which is why I felt bummed and depressed about them, despite their masterfulness and tragic intensity. To a certain extent, by making himself into a formally more powerful and contained director, by transcending or giving up the sloppiness and (even) exploitativeness of his earlier films, Cronenberg in effect undermined his films’ very significance. The recent films are aesthetically superior to the earlier ones (taking “aesthetically” in a narrowly formalist sense), but there is something sterile about them: their fascination is too narrowly focused, too contained. A History of Violence represented something of a change of direction, and, I thought, a substantial reinvigoration. But Eastern Promises, despite being the same genre as A History of Violence, somehow doesn’t seem anywhere near as fresh or as thoughtful (or affectful). This is all relative, of course: I only find Cronenberg at fault because I expect so much more of him. I am holding him to higher standards than I do most other contemporary filmmakers. But a lot more needs to be said than I managed to say in the past (when I wrote academically about him) about the allure of techno-metamorphosis in Cronenberg’s earlier films, and why this is neither a geeky utopia nor mere masculinist backlash, but something orthogonal to the categories we are stuck in when we discuss either masculinity or media. I don’t know if I will ever manage to get back to this. But I think there are still things to discover in Cronenberg’s earlier horror films that I don’t see being taken up in his more recent work — nor in any work in the horror genre that I have come across recently.

I found David Fincher’s Zodiac to be compelling and absorbing. Though, interestingly, the reasons I liked the movie are not far from the reasons Kim hated it. Zodiac is so cool and detached as to be almost hysterical, as well as creepy, in its insistence upon objectivity (both in terms of its point of view, and in terms of its excessive care in making supposedly “authentic” re-creations of 1970s decors).

How does the film work? Despite what I might have expected from the director of Seven, Zodiac is not interested at all in the inner motivations of the serial killer, nor even in the spectacle of gore that his acts created. Even the murders we see on-screen are oblique and deadpan; we have little sympathy for the victims, but also no sense of identification or complicity with the masked killer — the Zodiac killer is no Michael Myers. The movie has no shock effects, and no unplumbed depths. What you see is what you get, without any residue of mystery or suggestiveness or (even) danger. This is a world that is cooly and carefully visualized, and that doesn’t seem to have anything lurking in the shadows, anything beyond the literal givenness of what is visualized. This makes Zodiac almost the exact polar opposite of, say, Dario Argento’s films, with their baroque flourishes and arcane visual conceptions.

In part, this is because the focus of Zodiac is upon the investigation of the crimes, rather than upon the crimes themselves. It belongs, more or less, to the genre of the “police procedural.” This genre is a popular one in American culture today, as witness the success of TV shows like Lae and Order and (in a more specialized sense) CSI. The focus is on the investigators, rather than the perpetrator, and we see the effects of the investigation upon the investigators’ personal lives. Yet even this formula is skewed in Fincher’s treatment — since the (real-life) case is never neatly wound up in the way it is on TV. We end with the identification of the probable killer, but he is never brought to justice, and even this identification remains twisted up in the maze of false inferences and ambiguous clues and mistaken identifications out of which it emerges.

The narrative of Zodiac is quite literally linear, since it starts with the first Zodiac murder, and then moves doggedly forward in time, without any flashbacks or interludes from subjective POVs or pauses to contemplate the significance of one event or another. One scene follows another, with no blackouts or other ways of emphasizing the cuts; we are only informed of time passing by small titles that appear at the bottom of the screen. The exact same transition marks “an hour later” and “eight months later”; the passage of time is thereby weirdly homogenized. The unsettling result is that sequence (the order in which things happen) seems to have nothing to do with duration and time passing (how long it takes for an event to happen, and how long we have to wait between one event and the next).

Of course, this skewing of ‘real time’ in order to construct a more exciting or engaging ‘narrative time’ is a feature of the overwhelming majority of narrative films; but Fincher pushes it so far, and does it so understatedly, and at such great length (the film is something like 2 hours 40 minutes long), that the effect is entirely uncanny. The movie seems affected with a time disorder malady, a sort of dyschronia. This is all the more the case in that, for the first two thirds of the film at least, the movie switches its focus among characters almost as capriciously as it jumps forward at irregular intervals. In terms of both temporality and point of view, the movie at once revels in absolute disjunctions and disparities, and yet at the same time smooths these all out into a stylistic uniformity. The result, for the viewer, is a kind of stupefied absorption, but one that cannot crystallize or coalesce into any sort of “identification.”

Towards the end of the film, there is in fact one “time-passing” montage of the sort that usually orients us in other narrative films. But even this has no subjective center: rather, we see a rapid animation of the San Francisco skyline changing as the Transamerica Pyramid goes up. And, in the last third of the film, the splitting among multiple investigative subjects is reduced, as most of the concerned parties just give up on the case, and Jake Gyllenhaal is the only one who continues obsessively searching for the identity of the killer. But even here, the results are far from straightforward. Just as, in the earlier portions of the film, the various cops and newspapermen investigating the Zodiac killings never coalesces into a group the way they do in the TV procedurals, so, in the latter portion, the actions of the single protagonist to remain active do not fuse into any stable point of reference. The narrative is simply too choppy and gap-ridden for this to happen.

For instance, Gyllenhaal has a blind date with Chloe Sevigny: it is awkward and embarrassing, as the two don’t hit it off at all, there is no chemistry between them, etc.; and even this devoles into a even worse date from hell when Gyllenhaal drags Sevigny off into his Zodiac investigations. The next time we see Sevigny, however, she is married to Gyllenhaal and they have had a baby. The time after that, she is worried by his continuing obsession with Zodiac — it is both potentially dangerous, and somethng that gets in the way of family life. So she eventually takes the kids and walks out on him (all this conveyed off-screen). Everything here is off-kilter, and by design: the point being, that Gyllenhaal doesn’t have any sort of intelligible private life, but has been completely consumed by his obsession.

Perhaps I am exaggerating this, because of my general bafflement and incomprehension with regard to the younger generation of actors. But here both Gyllenhaall as the newspaper-cartoonist-turned-investigator, and Mark Ruffalo as the San Francisco detective who does most of the work on the case, appear to me like “men without qualities” — to my jaded senses, there is simply nothing distinguishable or charismatic or even interesting about them, so I don’t quite understand how they became movie stars. (The same is true for me of other actors of their generation, like Ed Norton, for instance, or Keanu Reeves. The brilliance of Norton’s role in Fight Club consists precisely in the contrast between his blankness and the floridity of Brad Pitt). Here, in Zodiac, both Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo seem utterly bland to me even when they become a bit crazed or obsessive — but they are set off against the floridity of (of course) Robert Downey, Jr. as the crime reporter who falls into a spiral of bitter cynicism and alcoholic self-destruction, and (in a more minor, character-actor sort of role) Brian Cox, who does a wonderful, utterly bizarre turn as famous defense attorney Melvin Belli.

In any case, the acting in Zodiac is overwhelmed by Fincher’s cinematography, with its dull colors, relative flatness, ceaselessly panning camera, and exploration of bureaucratic spaces (most notably, the newspaper offices, and various police headquarters). Nothing ever feels quite right, and so even the creepiest and strangest sequences (like one in which the cops search the trailer of their prime suspect, and find it overrun with squirrels, cavorting amidst the assault rifles and porno magazines) don’t seem out of place, but of a piece with the scense set in (always slightly inhuman) “ordinary” spaces. All in all, Fincher’s treatment of space is as expansive as his treatment of time is clipped and understated. But the effect is roughly the same: the exploration, almost as if it were being done by an alien, of a world of surfaces that connect and ramify, but also block one another; yet without anything that we could call a hidden dimesion of depth. (The expectation of depth is even parodied at one point, when Gyllenhaal visits the home of an informant, perhaps a suspect or the friend of a suspect, who runs a movie theater that shows old silent films, and whose archives — one of the rare basements in California — have a kind of Gothic creepiness to them. Gyllenhaal gets paranoid and flees, but it becomes clear to us that the creepy movie man isn’t the Zodiac killer).

The world so described is also a world permeated by media. The murders themselves have less presence in the movie than do the letters that the killer sends to the newspapers. We see the letters themselves, and the ciphers that the killer also sends, in extreme-close up on the screen, or superimposed over other images; much is made in the plot of handwriting analysis, though that turns out to be another dead end. The presence of media is epitomized in a scene where Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo meet at a screening of Dirty Harry (released in 1971, and in fact a fictionalization of the very Zodiac murders that the present film is about). Zodiac is so filled with false or misleading clues, with data that seems significant and turns out not to be, and so on, that from a logical-deduction point of view it can only be frustrating. But the sense that all this welter of evidence makes, is that it is all mediated in some fashion. The killer wants, most of all, to be in the papers; reporters bypass the cops with evidence they have found, and go straight to TV; Gyllenhaal wants to solve the case so that he can write a book about it, which is the only way he sees of justifying his existence; and so on. A particularly apt (and “postmodern”) touch is that Fincher deals not just with the media of Spectacle, but also with little media and dispersed media — records in police archives, TV seen on small screens, etc. — which makes for a link between the time depicted (30 to 40 years ago) and the present moment, of ever more widely dispersed media, in which the film was made.

In all these ways, Zodiac creates a overwhelming, but distanced, sense of flatness, mobility, and creepiness: a kind of low-key affectivity that is as much an expression of our general mediascape as it is of the mind of a serial killer. Gyllenhaal, no less than the killer, is consumed by a cold obsession, one that drives him utterly yet seems altogether dispassionate. And Gyllenhaal’s obsession doesn’t even really seem unique to him, since it emerges out of the “noise” and jumpiness of the multiple POVs of the first two thirds of the movie. In any case, when asked why he is interested, Gyllenhaal can say little more than that he enjoys solving puzzles; he has as litle interest in, or understanding of, his own motivations as does George W. Bush. And Fincher seems to suggest that this shallowness and disinterest is symptomatic of “postmodern” American society in general; it is in this sense that our situation today has its roots, not in the 1960s but in the 1970s, or in that aspect of the 70s that this movie depicts. And, to his credit, Fincher doesn’t portray this situation as one of deprivation or lack; there is no mourning here for lost subjective depths. It is rather the case that Fincher has mapped the stylistics, or the geography if you will, of our contemporary form of subjectivity. This is the situation in which we live right now, the field in which we have to operate. And it’s up to us to do what we can with it.

Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (1974) is his follow-up to WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and the last truly radical movie he was given the money to make. Like WR, Sweet Movie is a dense montage of disparate political and sexual elements, but overall it is much more cryptic and baffling. There are two main plotlines. The first involves Miss World, the winner of a virgin’s beauty contest, who is married to the world’s wealthiest man, who of course is a crass American capitalist. The other concerns a young sailor from the Battleship Potemkin, a “sexual proletarian,” who becomes the lover of Anna Planeta, the captain of a ship, called SURVIVAL, with Marx’s head for a figurehead, which sails around the canals of Amsterdam.

Two allegorical/sexual sequences, then: one is capitalism and the other is communism. Both are sinister: both are fueled by libidinal energies, which they co-opt and transform into a surplus of seductive power. Makavejev shows us these transformations, without explicit judgment. We have to make what we can of them, and of their juxtapositions.

Miss World runs screaming from her wedding-night bed with Mr. Kapital. It’s less his obsessive cleanliness ritual that upsets her — he wipes both her and himself down with some sort of rubbing alcohol or antiseptic — than his golden dick, from which streams forth an abundant liquid flow (urine? oil? water? I wasn’t sure). She goes through a series of erotic and therapeutic encounters — with a stereotypical black American stud, with a fake-Mexican macho, etc. — and ends up in advertising: masturbating for the camera while wallowing in liquid chocolate that is being poured all over her — they are shooting a commercial that is supposed to make this particular brand of chocolate unforgettable.

Meanwhile, Anna Planeta and the sailor from the Potemkin are endlessly fucking in an enormous vat of raw sugar. It’s Reichian sex-pol revolutionary bliss, until (and even still when) Anna grabs a knife and castrates, then kills him. He swoons and dies still completely happy, as the red of his blood mixes with the white of the sugar, giving it a unique and pungent texture. He may be glad to die for the revolution, but the communist ship of state has an overall stench of corpses, mixed with the sickly sweetness of the sugar and its supply of lollipops and other candies. When Anna Planeta is neither fucking the sailor nor brooding on the bow of her ship, just above the Marx figurehead, she is busy seducing underage teenage boys (they look to be about 14), whose violated corpses are later retrieved from the ship by the Dutch police.

But I still haven’t mentioned the most viscerally memorable parts of the film, which involve Otto Muehl‘s anti-psychiatric collective. Miss World is brought to them in a wheelbarrow, traumatized and in shock from her experiences of sexuality-as-commodity. Muehl and his collective (who really existed; it is unclear to what extent Makavejev’s portrait of them is documentary, and to what extent it is staged for the film) engage in all sorts of rituals, art performances, and behaviors designed to break down ego defenses and return the group to a state of (Norman O. Brown-ish?) polymorphous perversity. In the course of a communal dinner, members of the group play with their food, play with their testicles, smear bodily fluids/products on one another, and regurgitate amidst screams of delight. Later, they dance nude to a rendition of the Internationale played on a hurdy-gurdy, and shit into dinner plates that are then passed around as culinary delicacies. All this is quite self-consciously performative — rather than ‘primal’ — but it is definitely ‘real’ rather than simulated. None of this does very much for Miss World, who continues to sit in the midst of all the activity in a glum stupor, except when she is nourished from a lactating woman’s breast — but presumably (insofar as we grant the story any sort of linear narrative meaning) it ‘liberates’ her to wallow in the chocolate in the following sequence.

Makavejev also intercuts other material — as one might expect — including orgasmic shots of Niagara Falls, and, most notably, documentary footage of the unearthing of the corpses of Polish soldiers/prisoners who were massacred on Stalin’s orders during World War II; and some sort of German Nazi footage of an Aryan baby being manhandled by a doctor in the name of greater Health.
All in all, this makes for a film that is considerably more visceral (and less immediately delightful) than WR. Makavejev is pushing limits here: both in his frequent shots of (non-erect) male genitalia, together with scatalogical imagery, and in his touching on emotional areas — like an adult woman sexually performing for underage boys — that is far more taboo today than it was in 1974. Still, for all Sweet Movie‘s shocks and extremities, I cannot quite think of it as “transgressive,” in the sense that word holds in so much 20th century art. Because, although Makavejev is going where no filmmaker (except, perhaps, in the low-end of porn/exploitation moviemaking) had ever gone before, he absolutely insists on intertwining erotic release with power and domination, love with death, sex with shit, sweetness with putridity. There is none of the glee in being outrageous that one finds, so endearingly, even in the most reprehensible sex or slasher exploitation movies. But there is also nothing like the way, for instance, that Samuel Delany depicts orgies of golden showers and the like with a rich, naturalistic density, and an attention to the pleasures and satisfactions of the body. Rather, Makavejev directly links the sublime and abject bodies he depicts to the film’s overall allegorical abstractions, in which bodies stand for, or reveal themselves as symptoms of, social conditons (capitalism, communism) that they nonetheless cannot embody or coincide with.

It’s this knottiness, and this insistence upon “intellectual montage,” that makes the film so difficult to parse. And that forces the viewer to confront his or her own affective responses, as much as the images that provoke those responses. For me, the film was as much about my own anality (as I suppose one would have to call it in psychoanalytic terms) as it was about anything else. I mean, I have no trouble watching the violations of, and violence to, human bodies in horror films, even in the calculated sado-porn of movies like Hostel. But I find stuff like in-your-face regurgitation, and bodily immersion in chocolate or sugar (not to mention shit), somehow difficult to watch. Especially when it seems that the actors are not simulating, but doing it “for real.” I guess food (and slimy or greasy or already-partly-digested-liquefied food in particular) is just too Real (in the Lacanian sense) to me. Or, perhaps, it is the site where my inner fascist, with its fear of boundary dissolution and flows (cf. Theweleit) comes into play.

In any case, the gustatory (or, rather, digestive) imagery in Sweet Movie was the nodal point of the film for me — others may fixate more on other material instead. But overall, the film’s power comes largely from the way that it insists that bodies and their (sexual, gustatory, sensing, etc.) modalities are both in a certain sense primordial, and at the same time caught up in webs of power relations, exploitations, commercial or propagandist manipulations, and so forth. NOT caught up in a web of signs or significations (the way the “structuralism” of the 1960s and 1970s so famously insisted), but precisely caught up in relations of production and circulation and exploitation that are irreducible to, and at times even directly contradictory to, those signifying networks. The point of Makavejev’s allegorism is precisely to make a direct link between the Artaudian viscerality of bodies on the one hand, and the so-abstract-as-not-even-to-be-representable circuits of money/power/influence on the other, while signification or the Symbolic drops out of the equation, since it cannot possibly mediate this link between the most concrete and singular, and the most universal and abstract. In this way, affirming all this, Makavejev remains very much a Marxist (all the more so for his harsh critique of actually existing socialism); while as a Freudian he has moved beyond the sterile dichotomies between Reichian apocalyptic liberationism and the right-Freudian insistence upon primal repression, to a more politico-cynical understanding of bodies and their drives, and how they fit into power relations and flows.

Sweet Movie is, at one and the same time, too intellectual to be ecstatic, and too visceral to be theorizable. Certain questions the film asks simply can’t be answered: there is no way really to evaluate what goes on in Muehl’s commune, and no interest in determining what Makavejev actually thinks of it, or might intend us to think of it. Rather, the density of what we see in the sequences with Muehl and his group makes it impossible to maintain either the sense that it was truly liberatory, or the sense that it was a kind of enforced-fascist nightmare embodying the worst, most oppressive, side of 60s/70s utopian naivete and groupthink. It’s worth noting, in any case, that Muehl’s group belongs to the film’s capitalist series, rather than its communist one; it plays a role in the capitalist storylineequivalent to the one that Anna’s seduction of the adolescent boys plays in the communist storyline. Both are provocations in which pleasure and control are intertwined; both energize their participants only to precipitate them into the film’s double culmination: the “obscene” orgy as ultimate commodity spectacle on the capitalist side; a grim police procedural, against a background that combines overfull sweetness (sugar) and grim decay (the stench of corpses, the stench of history) on the communist side.

Still, the film ends with a still on a final shot in which the teenage boys murdered by Anna Planeta, whose corpses are laid out on the verge of the canal, stir into life and begin to emerge from their body bags. Shortly before, there’s a brief shot of the Potemkin sailor, also returned to life, watching the shooting of the Miss World chocolate commercial. This fleeting suggestion of resurrection would be Makavejev’s only (and tentative) answer to both communism’s regime of death, and capitalism’s total colonization of life (what would today be called biopolitics). Is it merely a crypto-religious yearning, that these bones may live? Or does Makavejev’s libidino-cognitive mapping of the deadlocks of the twentieth century hold out any prospects to us in the twenty-first?

Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales is both sweet and exhilarating. It’s almost Ferrara’s version of a Capraesque 1930s comedy, a pomo update of one of those films that was designed to make people feel good despite the Great Depression. It even risks a kind of old-fashioned corniness: since its theme is that, if you hold on and follow your dreams, there is always hope. And Ferrara pulls it off, with a panache that is all his own, but also with a kind of warm-hearted sincerity and sense of conviction reminiscent of the old movies: something that Hollywood today is utterly incapable of, being way too cynical, and way too driven by market research and special effects. Of course, nobody would confuse Go Go Tales with the old Hollywood, not when it is set entirely in a strip joint, and when it includes such scenes as the (already notorious) striptease by Asia Argento, in the course of which she French-kisses her Rottweiler.

Willem Dafoe stars as Ray Ruby, the proprietor of a strip club, and an obsessive gambler who blows all his money on the lottery. He’s beset by, among others: a landlady (Sylvia Miles, absolutely hilarious) who wants her back rent, but also threatens to close Ray down in order to rent out the space to Bed, Baths, and Beyond; a jealous medical student who has just discovered that his wife is one of the dancers; the dancers themselves, who are mad that Ray has fallen behind on paying them their wages; Ray’s brother Johnie (Matthew Modine) a successful hairdresser from Staten Island, who is tired of bankrolling Ray’s money-losing club; and many others. The film has almost no plot; Ray wins the lottery early on in the film, but then spends the rest of it looking frantically for the winning ticket, which he has somehow misplaced. Meanwhile we get a series of acts and vignettes, with various dancers, customers, sleazeballs and wise guys and befudddled passers-by. Pras from the Fugees plays the club’s chef, who is mad that Asia Argento’s Rottweiler has gone after his gourmet organic hot dogs; Bob Hoskins lurks around, as one of Ray’s tough-guy associates and general-purpose fixer and bouncer; and so on and so on.

So the film is really a frantic, never-ending series of vignettes, some of them things that are happening to, or between, the characters, and some of them explicitly presented as stage acts, the female dancers writhing alluringly for the benefit of the male customers (who are allowed to watch but not to touch, and who are never seen jerking off, but only sticking twenties (or hundreds?) into the waistbands of the dancers’ thongs. Ferrara has long been obsessed with strippers, who appear in many of his films (e.g., Fear City, Blackout, etc.), and with sex-as-exhibitionist display (e.g. Bad Lieutenant, in which Harvey Keitel does jerk off to an exhibitionist act he has coerced from a teenage girl, and New Rose Hotel), but here that whole obsession no longer feels sordid (or sinful, given the lapsed-Catholic twist of Ferrara’s obsession) — instead, it has been sublimated, beautified, so that both Dafoe’s character, and Ferrara himself via the camera, simply seem to be (respectfully, if you can believe that) worshipping beautiful women’s flesh.

In an odd way, I wouldn’t even call Go Go Tales voyeuristic, because the camera doesn’t isolate the dancers or their acts, but lovingly pans over them in the course of its restless, almost ADD-fueled (or cocaine-fueled?), explorations of the space of Ray Ruby’s Paradise. The dancers embody the little fantasies of the male clientele, but these dancers also have their own little fantasies, as is accentuated in the last part of the film, when the club is shut down and converted to a (non-sexual) cabaret, so that the “girls” (and Johnie as well) have the opportunity to express themselves artistically in ways that will hopefully (but obviously won’t really) appeal to the talent scouts and agents who are ostensibly (but not actually) in the audience. The club is an incubator of wishful fantasies — and as a whole, it is Ray Ruby’s fantasy of succeeding in the “business” by having a “joint” of his own — even though he is evidently clueless about how to attract an audience, let alone about holding on to his money instead of gambling it away. The club really is a paradise — one whose potential loss hovers movingly over the entire film — because of the way that it is a space of vicarious fantasy and redemption: not exactly a space of actual happiness, but certainly one of “the promise of happiness” (in precisely the terms of Stendhal’s famous quote: “La beaute n’est que la promesse de bonheur”). In so beautifully embodying this promise, the film as a whole (and Ray’s Paradise within it) implicitly expresses a whole theory of fantasy and desire — a theory that is quite different from the Freudian/Lacanian one with which we are familiar.

But I need to say more about the camera. As is always the case in Ferrara’s films — and as almost nobody seems to understand — the real libidinal force of the movie lies, less in the (often sleazy, and here somewhat de-sleazified, but still, let us say, “provocative”) content, than it does in the force field of intensities created by set design, lighting, and especially camera movement. Some of Ferrara’s films have an astringent visual austerity (I would put The Addiction and R-Xmas in this category), but many of them, including Go Go Tales, are lush and absorbing. Go Go Tales has only one location — the club itself, constructed in Rome on a Cinecitta sound stage — but the set is as alluring as anything in Fellini. Relative dimness, with relatively garish neon lights. The entire screen is split or multiplied into zones and patterns of garish, yet also dampened, color (is there a word to express what I want here? something like the equivalent for color film of what chiaroscuro is for black and white). There are also lost of shots mediated through video screens, or having the graininess of surveillance video footage. The camera roves restlessly through the space, usually gliding horizontally back and forth, in shallow focus, so that only one or some of the performers whose bodies are panned over appear clearly, while everything in another plane, either closer to or further from the camera, is blurred. Also, very often the camera is at not-quite-close-up distance: so that the pan passes over just a head, or just a torso, or just the feet, but there is always additional space to the left or right in the rectangle of the frame — it is rare (except at special climactic moments) to get either a distant shot that conveys a sense of the entire space, or a close-up that emphasizes the head, or head and upper torso, of a single character centered in the frame. The result is not a fragmentation of the body, so much as it is a melding of body and space, so that the bodies of the dancers, especially, seem to emerge out of the space of garish light and deep shadow, as if their glitter-sprinkled flesh were a sort of congelation of the club’s atmosphere itself. (The very fact of shallow focus and plane of obscurity only heightens this sense of congelation). The camerawork itself is what I can only call low-key ecstatic, never peaking to an orgasmic climax, but continually building intensity, alluring, seducing, expressing a desire that is not frustrated by its unfulfillment, but whose enjoyment is precisely its own teasing elaboration and elongation.

The acting is great, Dafoe and many others bundling life and energy into what, in other circumstances, could easily have been cornball roles. You can see how Dafoe/Ray is both a huckster and utterly sincere, whenever he makes one of his speeches about how he cares for his employees, how the club is “family,” and so on and so forth. In one scene, two of the dancers, evidently a couple, come in to Ray’s office to announce that one of them is pregnant and will not be able to dance for a while — but saying that nonetheless, in order to get by, they need for her to be paid during her time off. Ray is all solicitude and reassurance and caring while he talks with them; then he explodes into curses once they have left — this is yet another expense that he cannot afford when the club is about to go under. Yet, even though the solicitude is so evidently a shtick, it comes off with the sense that Ray actually means it. He’s sincere, even though, or precisely because, he is an actor. In the old Hollywood show biz sense, putting on a show is as “real” as anything else, and enaction makes the act genuine.

There’s also the scene where Dafoe/Ray is assuring Pras’ character that he enjoys his gourmet organic hot dogs. He takes a bit off a tray and sticks it in his mouth. Pras, a bit alarmed, says that these are the ones he hasn’t cooked yet; Dafoe continues to chew, assuring Pras all the while that his hot dogs are so good that they are even good raw, they are the “sushi of hot dogs,” etc. — even as the look on his face indicates how distasteful and indigestible this raw meat is. Ray is lying when he says that the morsel tastes good, but his desire to ingratiate, to reassure, to seduce and soothe both his workers and his clientele, is itself unfeigned. There’s an implicit theory of acting, simulation, becoming through performance here, alongside the implicit theory of fantasy and desire. To feign an affect is to put it on, to enter into it, and thereby to render it “true.”

The ending of Go Go Tales is magnificent, as we get (for once) a classical medium close-up on Dafoe as he gives a long, inspirational speech, confessing his errors, pleading for another chance, defiantly insisting that he will not give up his dreams (or give way on his desire) etc. — and finally, at the very last moment, finding the winning lottery ticket in a pocket of his “lucky jacket” that has just been returned to him from the cleaners. Dafoe’s speech is as wonderful as any of the orations Jimmy Stewart delivered for Frank Capra, with that same combination of hysteria, hokeyness, and yet passional intensity proving its assertions by the very fact of their enactment. Several reviews I have read have compared Go Go Tales to Cassavetes’ Killing of a Chinese Bookie; I am inclined to say that Ferrara’s film somehow combines the acting theories, or acting-effects of Capra and Cassavetes, weird a conjunction as that sounds.

I was fortunate enough to see the “international premiere” (i.e. the first public screening aside from Cannes) of Go Go Tales at the Montreal World Film Festival. Ferrara himself was in attendance. Introduced before the film, he looked out over the auditorium (in which there were many empty seats) and said, “Every empty seat is a knife in the heart of the director.” Afterwards, taking questions from the audience, Ferrara was somehow both relaxed and hyper, informative but also very funny. He seemed both aware of his own achievement as a director, and having come to terms with the fact that he will never receive the recognition he deserves as a director. At this point, I think that Ferrara has created a more powerful, and also (despite his obsessiveness) more varied body of work than even Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee, let alone others of his American contemporaries. But he is probably too on the edge, with too anarchic and obsessive (even if these terms seem contradictory to one another) an imagination, to ever transcend his (merely) cult following. Yet this is one “cult” I am happy to be a member of.

I’ve always felt that the people who describe Antonioni’s movies as being about ennui, anomie, and alienation are… not wrong, exactly, but largely missing the point. The point being that Antonioni’s movies, above all, are about seeing and feeling the world, about the look of things — including when those things seem to look back, or when they seem to look through us, to ignore us. There are so many scenes that continue to haunt me, years after I last saw them: some shots of the volcanic islands in L’Avventura, where the woman disappears; the final sequence of that same movie, in which Monica Vitti strokes the male lead’s hair, forgiving him (perhaps), despite the fact that he has been unfaithful to her, and has proved himself to be a worthless cad. There’s the scene of panic at the stock exchange, in L’eclisse, and of course the (justly) famous final sequence of that film, the montage of an entirely deserted city, scenes of the rendezvous to which neither of the troubled lovers managed, or was willing, to show up.

Of course, Antonioni is especially great at endings. There’s also the long travelling shot that ends The Passenger, moving out of Jack Nicholson’s hotel room onto and through a largely deserted square, baking in the hot sun, then eventually back into the hotel room to find Nicholson’s corpse. And above all, perhaps, there’s the ending of Zabriskie Point, with that hideous house in the desert exploding again and again, and all those commodities floating through the sky, slowly floating, to the unworldly music of Pink Floyd, until Daria leaves, and it blends into a pure colorism of the desert.

And so much more. There are scenes that I cannot even place — I will have to watch all those films again: deserted squares with the sun beating down (someplace in the trilogy, as well as in The Passenger). Even in Blow Up, which is sometimes deprecated, because it is Antonioni’s most “pop” movie, as well as his most popular one at the box office, there are astonishing visions, and not necessarily the most obvious ones: like the scene where Jeff Beck is playing in a club, and he wrecks his guitar and throws it into the crowd, and David Hemmings struggles against all the other fans in order to grab it; and finally, after he gets it, he exits the club and throws it down (negligently? disgustedly? I can’t quite remember) into the trash. Or that other scene, near the end, where Hemmings is at a party, he smokes a joint (I think?) with Verushka, in any case he is too stoned, too tired, too worn out to care any more… Not to mention the exploitation scene, in the middle, with the nude cavorting models…

I may not be remembering these scenes quite accurately; it’s too long since I last watched any of them. But even if I have distorted them in my mind, the very fact that I am groping after them like this, that they have the sort of insistence they do in my memory, and that my remembrance of them, however inexact, stirs up all sorts of emotional currents, is a testimony to how visionary a filmmaker Antonioni was — meaning this word in the literal sense of ‘having visions’ as well as in the sense of an obsession with the visual, with the visible (and the invisible), with “the surface of the world” (to quote the subtitle of Seymour Chatman’s 1985 book on Antonioni). Antonioni shows us the world — sometimes the “natural” world, but more often the human-built world, including the human beings who are figures in that world — as we scarcely ever see it: he shows us the world as image, the world retreated into its image, the world “made image” (in precisely the way that the Word is “made flesh”). Which is why one gets the vertiginous sense, watching Antonioni’s films that what we are seeing is not the least bit objective, since everything we see is inflected, affected, by the characters’ catastrophic subjectivity, by their narcissism, their neuroticism, their (yes) ennui and anomie; and yet, at the very same time , that what we are seeing is entirely separate from human subjectivity, that in fact we are seeing inhumanly, from an entirely alien sensibility, as if the camera were a being from another planet, for whom human behavior is as distant and enigmatic as insect behavior is for us. It’s the impossible combination of a subjectivity so excessive as to be sick unto death, and an inhuman distance so great as to defy explication, that makes Antonioni’s films so compellingly enigmatic, so alluring for their surfaces or their look.

Antonioni’s movies are also about time, about how time passes, about the feeling of duration. As Bergson said, you have to wait for the sugar to dissolve in your tea; it doesn’t happen instantaneously. Antonioni’s films are about waiting; the wait can be for something as trivial as sugar dissolving, or for something as momentous as death. But in any case, Antonioni captures this waiting, the way that (as Kant, Bergson, Proust, and Husserl all say) time passing is the very essence of our interiority (or of what we are perhaps too ready and eager to claim as an “inner life”): Antonioni captures this, in its misery and splendor, more accurately and more fully than any other film director (except possibly Chantal Akerman) has ever done. I think that his ability to plumb the depths of time — which like vision, is both deeply subjective and deeply inhuman, in his treatment of it — is why Antonioni has so often been taken to be either boring (which he never is for me) or about boredom and ennui (which I think he is only in a very limited and derivative sense).

Antonioni is also — paradoxical as this may sound — a great poet of the body. As Deleuze says, Antonioni is very largely about “the immense tiredness of the body”, as well as other “attitudes or postures of the body.” In these attitudes or postures, Antonioni portrays “no longer experience, but ‘what remains of past experiences’, ‘what comes afterwards, when everything has been said’.” (Cinema 2, page 189). Antonioni gives us the vision of what is stirring when nothing has yet appeared, and of what remains when everything is gone: and this vision is embedded in the flesh, or at least in a certain sort of flesh, in attitudes and postures which are devoid of consciousness, and perhaps entirely inaccessible to thought. That is to say, Antonioni is a poet of the body, because he shows us what cannot be said, captures on screen what the body feels but does not know. It’s there mostly despairingly, in some of the scenes that I have already mentioned — like the ending of L’Avventura, or the pot-smoking party in Blow-Up; but also — if rarely — ecstatically, like the moment in Zabriskie Point when the protagonists are making love in the desert, and then, in a long shot, they are multiplied, a whole army (?!) of lovers stretching as far as the eye (or the camera) can see.

In all these ways, Antonioni gives us his own, highly original and unusual, inflection of modernism. The combination of ravishing (if severe) visual beauty and an underlying despair is, of course, very much a familiar modernist stance or trope. But Antonioni gives it a particular inflection, through the ways his characters are absorbed into a landscape (usually not a “natural” one) that changes them even as it reflects them: both expresses them and absorbs and digests them. The relation between human figures, and the spaces they inhabit (or feel uncomfortable in, and in that sense fail to fully inhabit) is a unique one in Antonioni’s films, and I am not sure I have adequate words for it.

But it’s here that I can best raise the question of the politics of Antonioni’s films. The Italian trilogy (or tetralogy, if you include Red Desert — and one might also group with them their later echo in Identification of a Woman) does indeed focus on rich, or at least haut-bourgeois, characters who haven’t a care in the world financially (despite that stock market panic in L’eclisse), but who suffer from loneliness, from an inability to connect with other people except on the most superficial level, and from — not frustration so much as anhedonia, an inability to take pleasure, and also (more deeply) an inability even to have the desires whose unfulfillment might lead to frustration. Often these characters are women; Antonioni treats them with considerable sympathy, even if he objectifies them sexually at the same time.

One common criticism of Antonioni is that any leftist critique of the privileged classes that he might have is subverted by the way he glamorizes these protagonists and their money-fueled lifestyles. But I think this objection is misguided. Antonioni’s films work as critiques of class relations, and of gender relations, precisely because they don’t at all moralize (and also because they don’t portray any working class alternatives to the lives of the bourgeoisie, in the manner of the neorealist films that Antonioni was reacting against). Rather, these films draw us into a paralysis, which we as viewers share with the characters whom we are watching on screen. This paralysis is the absurd consequence of what happens when class domination and gender stratification are pushed to the extreme points that they are in a certain sort of (medium-late) capitalist society. The characters’ neuroticism, their narcissism, their sterility, is the rigorous ‘subjective’ consequence of an ‘objective’ regime of accumulation for its own sake.

But this paralysis, is also, and as it were in spite of itself, a precondition for aesthetic rapture. Paralysis is Kantian “disinterest”; it is also what Deleuze — describing the neorealism that Antonioni is both the heir to and the rebel against — calls “pure optical and sound situations,” in which the sensori-motor linkages of “ordinary” perception are ruptured (see Cinema 2, pages 3-6). Antonioni’s characters don’t experience aesthetic bliss; but their paralysis is the precondition for the bliss that Antonioni, and his films’ spectators, are able to feel. As Deleuze also says, “the old curse which undermines the cinema” is that “time is money,” and that “there is not, and there never will be, equivalence in the mutual camera-money exchange.” (Cinema 2, page 77-78). Unequal exchange, the extraction of a surplus even when there is formal equivalence of the items exchanged: this capitalist logic is at the heart both of the neuroses of Antonioni’s characters, and of the delirious aestheticism that serves as an always-unequal counterpart, or counter-payment for those neuroses.

The situation is a bit different in Antonioni’s English-language films, where the paralyzed voyeur-characters are photographers (Blow-Up) or journalists (The Passenger), or even would-be radicals (Zabriskie Point who try (unsuccessfully) to escape the logic of equivalence/surplus/paralysis that is inscribed into the logic of capitalist society. I’m aware that a lot more needs to be said about Antonioni’s ambiguous treatment, in these films, of what Deleuze and Guattari call “lines of flight” or (when they are not successful, as is generally the case in Antonioni’s films) “lines of abolition.” More needs to be said, as well, about how gender relations (in addition to class relations) factor in here. But I think my general point stands — about how Antonioni’s aestheticism is both consciously inscribed within, and also mobilized against, the unacceptable social relations that remain Antonioni’s starting point.

I still haven’t said anything about my favorite Antonioni film — or at least the one that I have seen most often, and with which I am most familiar: Red Desert (1964). This was Antonioni’s first film in color, and its scenes of belching factory smoke, and overall muted, depressive palette, are unforgettable. These hideous colors are only accented by their contrast with the one fantasy sequence, the story Monica Vitti tells her son about a paradisaical beach: here the lighting and the colors are excessively bright and clear, too much so, with the airbrushed perfection of the most expensive advertising. This is the bourgeois vision of beauty as compensation and escape, as unrealizable ideal: Antonioni shows it to be only the flip side of the industrial pollution that dominates the rest of the film. Antonioni’s own aestheticism resides, rather, in the waste and pollution itself. I think of his use of the color red, as in the scene in the cabin, where Vitti tries (unsuccessfully) to transform herself into orgy mode; and also the scene in the hotel room, her tryst with the engineer, where the wall subtly changes color behind them as they writhe on the bed. Related to that, in turn, though with a different palette, is the scene in the ship yard, at night, where Vitti wandering alone is briefly propositioned by a foreign sailor: not speaking Italian, he tells her, in English, “I’ll love you, I’ll love you,” as she passes by. It’s a scene that could be an epigraph for all of Antonioni’s movies, with their pain and blocked eroticism, and with the force of the disinterest by means of which Antonioni transfigures them.

I will stop here, though I feel I could ramble on indefinitely. But I need to watch these movies again, before I write more about them. I will only add that, for all that Antonioni’s critical reputation declined over the past thirty years, he only became more and more influential among the younger generations of art filmmakers. As David Hudson notes, “now as we head into the late 00’s, the almost standardized “festival film” bears the mark of no other director more than Antonioni’s.” Indeed — where would Tsai Ming-liang, Bela Tarr, early Edward Yang, and Theo Angelopoulos be without Antonioni?

WIth Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day, we have lost two giants from the First Golden Age of Cinephilia (the 1960s and the 1970s, when — at least in the US — such a thing as a film culture came into existence for the first time). (I consider us to be living right now through the Second Golden Age of Cinephilia — DVDs have made a wider range of art films, from a broader part of the world, more available than ever before; and internet discussions have led to a more wide-ranging discussion of such films than was ever possible before). I will write about Bergman here, and Antonioni in a subsequent post.

My attitude towards Bergman has really changed a lot over the years. When I was in college and graduate school, in the 1970s, I worshipped him — he was second only to Godard in revealing to me the potentialities of film, the heights of artistry of which it was capable. I found many of his films, basically the whole series, ten major films or so, that ran from Virgin Spring (1960) through Persona (1966), and on to Cries and Whispers (1972), to be uniquely powerful, and indeed devastating. I think that The Passion of Anna (1969), Bergman’s first color film, was also the first film to teach me how powerful color could be as an element of film. I found Bergman’s portrayals of women to be deeply empathetic, and his themes of loss and cultural desolation resonated deeply within me.

As I grew older, my attitude changed. Sometime during or after Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Bergman’s artistry seemed to me to have lost its edge. Either he had become too sentimental, or else his continued vision of pain and destruction had become too shrill and one-dimensional. By the time of Fanny and Alexander (1982), I had completely lost interest in Bergman’s ongoing work. What’s more, I had become more than a bit embarrassed by my younger self’s enthusiasm even for his greatest work. What had once seemed profound now struck me as pretentious. Bergman’s existential anguish, his handwringing over the death of God, his laments about essential loneliness, his contrived psychodramas: all this seemed to me to add up to a moribund aesthetic, the last gasp of an old-fashioned humanism and high-culture snobbery that nobody with any sense could take seriously any longer, in an age of television and rock ‘n’ roll and the first personal computers.

Today, I think that my attitude of contemptuous rejection was as misguided as my earlier enthusiasm was exaggerated. Perhaps I am suffering from a general mellowing of my sensibility, which is one of the most horrible things that often tends to happen to people in middle age. But I can mention two film experiences that led to my current re-re-evaluation of Bergman’s stature as an artist. The first was seeing Sunday’s Children, a film directed by Daniel Bergman (Ingmar’s son) from Ingmar’s own script. This is not a bad film by any means; it is directed solidly and more than competently, if also a bit stolidly and unimaginatively. The content (or the script) is pure Ingmar Bergman, at his most intimate and (presumably) autobiographical. It recounts the solitude and alienation of a young (10-year-old) boy, his initiation into the mysteries of death and sexuality (if I am remembering correctly), and above all his painful relationship with a harsh, perfectionist, unloving pastor father. The film affected me precisely because it didn’t really work: what was missing was precisely Ingmar Bergman’s lyricism, the expressiveness he achieved through lighting, through painfully long-held closeups, and through the rhythms of speech and silence, of tension and anticipation and (all too rarely) release. Again, I don’t want this to sound like I am just dumping on Daniel Bergman; but the things that were missing from his film, the things that were recognizably Ingmar-Bergmanian, but that didn’t have the resonance that Ingmar’s own directed films had — all these things made me realize what my harshly negative judgment of Ingmar Bergman was forgetting, or failing to acknowledge. I came away from watching Sunday’s Children, ironically enough, with a renewed appreciation of Ingmar Bergman’s artistry, of the way he was a true poet of cinema in the visually minimal, and yet somehow ravishing, images and details of his films in the heartwrenching moments of suspension and deadlock and incapacity that these films came to again and again, scenes that moved me however much I remained suspicious of his grand statements and pseudo-profound themes.

The second experience was encountering Persona again, for the first time in years, when –about five years ago — I was teaching a survey class on film of the 1960s and 1970s. I was struck by so many things: things that I didn’t remember from seeing the film in my period of Bergman-adulation, and that I certainly wasn’t even aware of in my period of Bergman-contempt. There was, first of all, the way that Bergman’s camera dwelt so lovingly — intimately and yet also with a certain respectful, or even worshipful distance — on Liv Ullman’s and Bibi Andersson’s faces, as these women smiled, or cried, or screamed, as they glanced lovingly or resentfully or jealously at one another. Then there was the visual tonality of the film, the black-and-white which was (how shall I put this?) stark but not harsh, with a luminosity that is too subdued and depressive to be called “radiant,” but too intensely saturated, too much a visible atmosphere, to be called anything else. The experimentalism of the film, which I had feared might come off as gimmicky and hokey, instead struck me as genuinely exploratory and even brave: I refer not just to the (justly) famous opening sequence, with its series of mysterious images (and, as Michel Chion reminds us, evocative sounds), but also the minimalist scene in the hospital, where Ullman watches the horrors of the Vietnam War on TV, and especially that moment towards the middle of the film, when the rupturing of the relationship between the two women is suddenly transformed into a rupturing of the cinematic apparatus itself. And then, in terms of narrative and thematics: what I had remembered as a murky and heavy-handed exercise in existential angst (Ullman is so distressed by Vietnam or whatever that she decides to stop speaking, because speech is necessarily impure and inauthentic) in fact turned out, upon my viewing the film again, to be something quite different. Something that at first seems stark and clear-cut turns out, as the film progresses, to be ever more ambiguous and equivocal, as everything Ullman and Andersson do, by themselves or to one another, gets entangled in a morass of mixed motives, uncertainties, confusions, and fabulations. The film becomes more and more a labyrinthine reflection upon its own fictionality, and (most remarkably of all) the affective currents which, in the first half of the film, relate quite firmly to the two main characters turn out themselves to apply, in a nearly impersonal way, to the confusions between those characters and their stories in the latter half of the film. In Persona , in short, Bergman deconstructs his own narrativity and thematics as rigorously as any of his European contemporaries of the 1960s were doing — and with more affective power than most.

All in all, Bergman still does not emotionally move me, or intellectually engage me, as profoundly as Godard, Fassbinder, and Antonioni do. But I think that now I am more able than I was for a long time to appreciate the considerable beauties and virtues of his art.

Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! is — together with Cowards Bend the Knee, to which it is a sort of sequel — the best thing Maddin has ever done. Cowards and Brain are alike quasi-autobiographical, with protagonists named “Guy Maddin” involved in all sorts of Oedipal entanglements. Maddin says, in a short documentary about shooting the film, something to the effect that Brain is “autobiographical” because it reproduces the emotions he remembers having felt years ago, during his childhood. That is to say, the film is affectively autobiographical, rather than literally so. It is not really the case that Maddin’s mother ran an orphanage, or that his father was a mad scientist — it is only that that is what they become, or how they feel to Maddin today, when they are refracted through the double delirium of memory and the movies. In all his films, Maddin seeks to present to us the reality of the past: which is to say, not the past as it really was, but the past as past, the past as a memory, the actuality of the past as it is re-called or re-presented, rather than actually present. The past is spectral, hauntological; it “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

All of Maddin’s films emulate, or recall, the styles of older film, and especially silent film. They look, intentionally, archaic. And they mimic specifically, the oldness of these older films — that is to say, they try to look, not like silent films must have looked at the time they were originally made and shown, but how they look today, in prints worn down by years of use and chemical decay. They deploy visual conventions and acting styles that look out of place, because they self-consciously correspond to what seemed like naturalism to audiences of 1917, and which therefore today seems entirely mannered and artificial, entirely at odds with what audiences take for naturalism in 2007. Against the myth that film preserves the living presence of what has passed away in reality (i.e. the idea that Garbo’s films preserve her youth and sensuality intact, despite the fact that the real Garbo grew old and died) — against this myth, Maddin equates the cinematic perpetuation of images with the pastness and inaccessibility of that to which the images refer. This is very nearly literalized in Brand Upon the Brain!, in the monstrous figure of the father who is murdered, but then brought back to a sort of zombified life, so that he may continue his vampiristic scientific experimentation, which consists of stealing the vital energies of the young, extracting vital fluids from their brains and spinal cords, in order to rejuvenate the older generation (in a process which is, at best, temporary and delusive).

In order to create the decayed-silent-film look, Maddin shot Brand Upon the Brain! in Super8, which he then blew up to 35mm, so that the predominantly black and white images (there are a few seconds in color) look, at various times, grainy, washed-out, overly-high-contrast, etc. There is no synchronized sound; the soundtrack combines music, a few songs, and Isabella Rossellini’s voiceover narration (supplemented by intertitles). (At some initial screenings in big cities, the soundtrack was provided live; but the screening I attended in Detroit used a prerecorded soundtrack). Many of the images, with the actors’ exaggerated gestures, and the scenes forming tableaux, were vaguely reminiscent of D W Griffith-style melodrama, with interpolations from German Expressionism. The editing style, however, is not like anything from the 1910s or 1920s. The delirious editing, with many scenes broken up into jump cuts between fragmentary closeups, might suggest Eisensteinian montage as a contrast to the Griffith-like mise en scene; but (at least at one viewing; I really need to see the film again) it didn’t really seem “constructivist” in the way that Maddin’s short Heart of the World, which explicitly referenced 1920s Soviet cinema, did. That is to say, Brand Upon the Brain! is edited emotively, rather than providing any sort of “intellectual montage.” It’s a bit too crude to say that the editing emphasized shock effects instead of comprehension; but everything Maddin does works to express how the events of the film might feel, or make us feel, rather than what is actually happening. In contrast to contemporary action montage, the emphasis is on gaps and disjunctions, on making us feel abruptly disconnected, lost and puzzled, rather than on piling on kinetic shocks as quickly as possible (in the way that filmmakers like Michael Bay like to do). Individual shots, or sequences of shots, are also often allusive to all sorts of stylistic tics and mannerisms from the history of film (and not just silent film — for instance, there is one shot, probably no more than two or three seconds, that references Night of the Living Dead). The film is edited so as to emphasize the impossibility of fully capturing the events that it nonetheless shows. It is noteworthy that the 12-year-old “Guy Maddin,” the protagonist of most of the film, repeated passes out in a swoon because the events he witnesses are too much for him.

The plot of Brand Upon the Brain! has so many twists and turns as to be nearly indescribable. It involves a basic Oedipal configuration — the smothering and controlling mother, the distant, detached, yet ultimately sadistic (and even more ultimately, dead or living-dead) father, the brother and sister with their incestuous desires. Both brother and sister fall madly in love with an androgynous “celebrity” figure, the alluring girl/boy detective, who comes to the island on which the film takes place in order to investigate the “mystery” of what the overwhelming and terrifying parents are really up to (which involves, as I have already mentioned, vampiric preying upon the young). The mother fluctuates in age throughout the movie, becoming younger whenever she imbibes the rejuvenating fluid that is extracted from the orphans in her care, and then becoming older again whenever (as often happens) her smothering love for her children transforms into a violently possessive rage. But within this basic scenario there are so many variations and changes of direction that it becomes impossible to summarize — it is as if all conceivable variations on the Oedipal triangle, and the androgynous-love triangle as well, had to be played out at some point in the course of the movie. There is therefore no real narrative progression, but only a series of peripeteias, punctuating passages of dread, suspense, and anticipation. Brand Upon the Brain! has a feel to it of lurching seasickness, and of nightmarish repetitions from which we (like the protagonist) are unable to awaken or escape.

The film is framed by the return of an adult “Guy Maddin” to the island which he left, as a child, thirty years previously. He is swamped by the childhood memories that comprise most of the film, and that invade and compromise his adult present with their ghostly insistence. We are told, repeatedly, that everything that happened before will happen again — twice. (This almost seems like a parody, both of Nietzsche’s eternal return, and of Marx’s observation that history happens twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce). Repeated intertitles invoke “The Past! The Past!” — and sometimes this is transformed into “The Future!” — for, evidently, no future time can be secure from the past that returns to fill it up.

As always in Maddin’s films, the intense emotional material is so hyperbolic, so over-the-top, and so outlandishly — and stiltedly — overacted, that it becomes campy and ridiculous. In Maddin’s earlier movies, I have generally tended to see this pattern as a sort of defense. The campiness and ridiculousness serves as a sort of (psychoanalytic) disavowal; disavowing the hyperemotionalism of the films’ basic material through ludicrousness is actually a way of protecting it from criticism. Maddin can get away with melodramatic hysteria precisely by pretending (to himself, as well as to the audience) that he isn’t serious about it — whereas any effort at a “sincere” presentation would immediately fall flat on its face. But even if that was what was happening in Maddin’s earlier films, I don’t really think it is the case anymore. Even in the earlier films, campy exaggeration and ludicrousness don’t only work as modes of disavowal; they are also, in a strange way, direct enablers of emotion, in that they serve as a medium of expression for feelings that “dare not speak their name.” But in Maddin’s most recent work — Cowards Bend the Knee, and now, Brand Upon the Brain — even a further transformation is at work. This has to do with modes of display, or of what I can only call (somewhat oxymoronically) a self-conscious obviousness. A Freudian depth-psychology reading of Brand Upon the Brain would make no sense, precisely because all the Freudian motifs are right there in front of us. They so fill up the overt, manifest content of the film, that there is no sense in looking for a hidden, latent meaning behind them. [This “self-conscious obviousness” is, I think, one of the ways in which Maddin is radically different from David Lynch, to whom in some other respects he can be closely compared]. There is a sort of hysterical overfullness to the way in which the film seems to cram into its plot every conceivable permutation of Oedipal desire, and also every conceivable generic twist of melodrama (with hints of horror as well). The campy exaggeration of Maddin’s earlier films is now an almost literal too-muchness, an overplenitude that is strictly coordinated with the film’s insistence on spectrality and absence, on the pastness of the past, on the ways in which memories, like movies, allure us without ever allowing us touch them. The result is that the film jumps the rails (jumps the shark?) in a certain sense. The only way to describe Brand Upon the Brain is with a Freudian account of trauma and Nachtraglichkeit, and with an ontological dialectic of presence and absence. Yet the film also seems to mock these terms, by demonstrating to us how utterly inadequate they are. You can’t separate the ridiculousness from the horror and the pain any more. Brand Upon the Brain develops a sort of flow, incessantly turning back upon itself, that fuses and confounds all the distinctions I have just been trying to make about it. I am tempted to say the film is finally more Deleuzian than Freudian/Lacanian, that it has to do with flows that almost become abstract, that traverse the earth in a way that is both so intimate, and so utterly artificial, as to break down such distinctions altogether. But even to say that would probably be to reduce the film, to put it in terms that it adamantly resists. Rather, it is something about the sheer beauty of Maddin’s images, the ways that they dissolve into one another, the ways that their very distance and inaccessibility registers affectively. The way it makes me run out of things to say about it, and only feel the need to see it again.