Supposed Aura

Bachelor Flat

2010-11-22T01:30:00.006Z

The chaos/choreography of things hidden and revealed :

[Images from Frank Tashlin's Bachelor Flat (1962).]

Gradiva, and the secret rediscovery of movement

2010-09-02T02:22:00.001+01:00

*** *** ***

Raymonde Carasco's Gradiva - esquisse I (1978) :

A dream of betweenness materialised.

Movement and suspension. Promulgation and dissolution. Flesh and stone. (Shadow and stone. Stone and stone.) Horizontal and vertical. The visible movement of garment and heat.

A fragmented but concrete presence is expressed as its dissolving gestures. The terrible mystery and monumentality of motion. Raymonde Carasco was there (with Bruno Nuytten) with her camera, filming atoms in motion, and all the exhumed gestures of our existence contained therein.

http://raymonde.carasco.free.fr/

"...to testify in favour of the interminable nature of things."

*** *** ***

Siddheshwari, Maya Darpan: a montage of rasas

2010-06-15T20:47:00.011+01:00

1. Siddheshwari (Mani Kaul, 1989), with Mita Vasishth.

(Siddheshwari Devi, with unknown vocalist - 'Pani Chagarni Laya')

Mani Kaul:

The meaning and feeling in films centre on what is organized for the eyes and ears with what is seen and heard in a way that leads more to the production of space than to a realization of time. Time in such films is a thing just present there; intarsia entrenched available as a result of a progression of events, as a consequence of, as something absent and only directly experienced. It is rarely present and directly experienced as a revelation of multiple durations conscious in the way it’s found in music.

Bresson ‘s single shot present itself as fragment (often with only hands, feet, door, faces, bodies, etc.) of an intangible whole not displaying any particular intention. ... Bereft of “intention” (on the part of characters and the camera) the mechanism is not driven by facial or for those matter authentic psychological motivations. The mechanism itself contains no intention at all. It is the ellipsis between fragments, the difference between fragments which finally conveys a sense of intangible intentions. That difference becomes a specific relation between the two fragments when bridged in the head of a spectator. ... Cinema itself then appears a hub of multiple intentions in conflict with each other like music.

*** *** ***

2. Maya Darpan / Mirror of Illusion (Kumar Shahani, 1972), with Aditi.

(Padma Talwalkar - 'Hameer')

Kumar Shahani:

Censorship confirms the extension of assigned social roles not only along caste and class lines but along the lines of family functions and sex as well. The heights of feminine heroism are still found in a bovine version of motherhood. Even as the country starves. It is far removed from the vitality of Kali or the other fertility goddess images.

The docile heroine must look like a whore but must neither bare her body in its raw splendour nor show her human desire. The censorship laws allow cabarets which fragment the female body into cut-out objects for male acquisitiveness. The nude, however, is dangerous, for she can be a whole person with her own subjectivity. When will we learn, once again, to take pride in ourselves as human beings? If not like the athletes of the citystate, can we not restore the graceful line reserved for our goddesses of Elephanta and Bahrut to the humans in whose image they were made? Before we can do that, we will have to change our ideology transmitted through myth. Because ideas of masculinity and femininity in these metonymical constructs are also worked out in irreconcilable opposites. Contradiction without a possibility of actual synthesis, since it denies change, movement. ...

According to the mythical system, the female has to prepare everything for consumption, including food and herself. And the male has to produce. Men have to project and women withdraw. Right down to the last detail where masculinity may allow smoking and femininity forbid it. When such detail - or in the more sophisticated films, formal elements stand irreversibly for concepts - replace meaning itself, one does not have to wait for ideas to degenerate into ritual rather than praxis. The language of myth by its very nature of replacing the symbol for its content spreads false conciousness: the more vulgarly sensate form in the commercial cinema and the more abstract ahistorical form in the 'art' cinema.

Laleen Jayamanne, on the character of Tejo, played by Mita Vasishth, in Shahani's Kasba:

Tejo's walk, stance, gesture and speech are all seemingly naturalist, fitting in with her role as an efficient business woman and loyal daughter-in-law, and yet her clothes seem more like costumes, too ornate, too mysteriously beautiful in colour, so that one begins to observe that her walk is also similarly ornamented, as are her other movements and especially her poses. The pose, a dynamic equilibrium in Indian dance and sculpture, is animated in the miniature tradition to bring into focus everyday gestures as well. Shahani taps into this dynamism of the pose and brings it into play in contemporary everyday gestures and movements... Shahani says that the function of the Nayika and Nayaka (which literally means female and male leader) is to lead the viewer to the enjoyment of the rasa. Shahani uses this aspect of classical Indian aesthetic theory to abstract or rather extract a virtual story from the actual Chekhov tale, which he does however follow with great care and tenderness. ...

Through a dance-like walk and holding several poses at a series of large windows, moving her body out of the frame, Tejo observes something below, as though she were Radha looking for Krishna. The camera picks up some falling leaves and floats down to pick up Nandini walking out with her dead child bundled in her alms. Thereafter an urgent, rapid camera movement creates a vertical concatenating barrier of the series of windows splitting the screen in half, into the inside and the outside of the house. And Tejo's movement outside the window, holding a pose evocative of Indian dance; the falling of leaves; Nandini walking away; the movement of the camera attentive to each of these; all create a delicate sensation transposing the mythico-iconic duo into the worldly woman and the motherly; torn halves of a composite, jagged, modern entity.

Geeta Kapur:

In Maya Darpan (1972), Tarang (1984) and Kasba (1990), the theme is at the first level pedagogical: industrialization and the emancipation of women; capitalist development as part of a historical process toward socialism; the desired breaking up of the feudal family, and of the nation, into class categories. He builds up a national allegory - but not to confirm the nation. It is a framing device for an analysis of class; from an altogether different point of view, it is a space for the location of artistic traditions that have a civilizational spread and therefore extend the nationalist discourse... If the national is broken up, so for that matter is the male collective of the working class: both are disciplinary concepts and in the later, more abstracted phases often authoritarian. They are broken up through futurist projections into states of plenitude, among other devices through the sheer beauty of image, the excess of which allows imagist cinema to signal a surplus attraction and break open hermetic constructs. Shahani's own brief is precisely to not let the one subsume the other: to not let the symbolic over the imaginary, or vice versa. He keeps hold of the "real" through demonstrating a condition of concrete immanence in the actual work...

... Such issues as these are often "resolved" by Shahani through the female presence that always takes the shape of a dual persona of nature and death, an actual duo that combines to make an elegiac figure of disinterested desire. It is in that metaphysical moment of self-naughting that a dialectical move into the third alternative is made. Shahani uses this dialectic to arrive at the figure of the "true beloved", a hypothetical figure who embodies the erotics of pain and resurrects herself in the uncharted space of transfigured knowledge.

*** *** ***

"The dialectical way invests chaotic power in the creation of little machineries of the heterogeneous. By fragmenting continuums and distancing terms that call for each other, or, conversely, by assimiliting heterogeneous elements and combining incomparable things, it creates clashes. And it makes the clashes thus developed small measuring tools, conducive to revealing a disruptive power of community, which itself establishes another term of measurement. (...) The encounter therein of incompatible elements highlights the power of a different community imposing a different measure; it establishes the absolute reality of desires and dreams. But it can also be activist photomontage à la John Heartfield, which exposes capitalist gold in Adolf Hitler's gullet - i.e. the reality of economic domination behind the lyricism of national revolution - or, forty years later, that of Martha Rosler, who 'brings back home' the Vietnam War by mixing her images with those of adverts for American domestic bliss. Even closer to us, it can be the images of the homeless projected by Krzystof Wodiczko on official American monuments, or the paintings that Hans Haacke accompanies with little notices indicating how much they have cost each of their successive buyers. In all these cases, what is involved is revealing one world behind another: the far-off conflict behind home comforts; the homeless expelled by urban renovation behind the new buildings and old emblems of the polity; the gold of exploitation behind the rhetoric of community or the sublimity of art; the community of capital behind all the separations of spheres and the class war behind all communities. It involves organizing a clash, presenting the strangeness of the familiar, in order to reveal a different order of measurement that is only uncovered by the violence of a conflict."

- Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (trans. Gregory Elliott), 2007.

*** *** ***

Upalēkha sūtra :

Listen, a heave of wings,

the turning of a wheel.

A forest fire spreading out

And ashes

from my body's skin.

And then stillness...

Trees, veils of fragrance.

Forests, rustling

boundless.

grün/rot

2010-06-15T20:04:00.007+01:00

Some words on Daïchi Saïto's Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (2009) :

Danièle's hands, and the chorus of trees

2010-03-10T20:53:00.015Z

New world

and a brazen vault

Heaven hangs over us, a curse
freezes the limbs of mortals, and the strengthening,
joy-giving presents of Earth are like chaff, the
Mother mocks us with her gifts
and all is mere semblance --
O when, when

will it break at last,

the flood over the parched land.

[Danièle Huillet, as the Chorus in Schwarze Sünde (Black Sin, Huillet-Straub, 1989).]

"That which happened forces me to painfully concentrate on the joyous memory of Peccato nero (1989), the first film by Straub I ever saw in the cinema. It is an image that continuously comes to mind in these days. Danièle is sitting on a mound of earth. She is holding her head in her hands, as if she were delicately holding full amphora, suspended like a just sculpted statue; her gesture is violently angry yet meek. She has the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen, and the ground shakes for her. She is sitting on a volcano. She manages to be both the friend and the custodian of the fire." (Giulio Bursi, for the 24th Turin Film Festival.)

[Jean-Marie Straub und Danièle Huillet bei der Arbeit an einem Film nach Franz Kafkas Romanfragment Amerika (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at work on a film based on Franz Kafka's Amerika, Harun Farocki, 1983)].

"Harun Farocki documents two days of rehearsal (1st and 3rd March) and a day of shooting (23rd August) only in sequence shots, an essay that invents cinematic forms of empathy, of pure visual Witz: this is, first of all, a smile, in the form of a cut to Danièle Huillet: the first day, Jean-Marie, who is out of shot, calls action; Danièle claps, so Harun cuts his film - formal sylleptic gag, since it is as if Danièle's hands were scissors on Harun's film stock, but, at the same time, Harun stopped filming her to give Jean-Marie's mise-en-scène its full range. The second day, Danièle gets ready to clap, but Jean-Marie anticipates her out of shot; Danièle smiles at Harun's camera and the gesture of joined hands is transformed into a profane prayer." (Nicole Brenez, 'Harun Farocki and the Romantic Genesis of the Principle of Visual Critique' (2009)).

*** *** ***

(Of a people who are missing.)

*** *** ***

[Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (Kuhle Wampe or: To whom does the world belong?, Dudow/Brecht, 1932)].

"The modern feeling of nature—and its representation that would culminate in Cézanne—was invented at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Hölderlin is the exact contemporary of this audacious representation of nature that dispenses with the justification of a prerequisite and explicit discourse (religious, philosophical, or poetic). Also it is not by the accident of a vague intellectual attraction that drove the Straubs to direct this Death of Empedocles by Hölderlin and to draw the text—without forcing it very much—toward a cry of anguish in regard to the outrages to which nature submits today." (Dominique Païni, quoted in Barton Byg's Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.)

[Der Tod des Empedokles, oder: Wenn dann der Erde Grün von neuem Euch erglänzt (The Death of Empedocles, or: When the green of the earth will gleam for you anew, Huillet-Straub, 1987)].

work, red persimmons, time

2010-02-08T21:27:00.006Z

"“Documentary”: an action more than a genre, a commitment to the matter, a transformation of the world as it is always to be reviewed like an immediate and concrete utopia. Documentary action: operation about the world and the image expressing it, where the filming subject forgets what he knew initially about the filmed subject to the benefit of a new relationship born from the cinematic action itself in the present time of filming and editing, with the availability of their contingencies. The film work designed in such a manner, as it builds up, is precisely what documents at the same time the world, the cinema, the filmmaker and ultimately the viewer in front of a screen."

(Patrick Leboutte, from the programme notes of the 2004 États généraux du film documentaire.)

"... The Ogawa method was born: complete immersion in the filmed community, the repetition of the filmed gesture to the point of exhausting the subject matter (the Narita cycle finishes five years later). This method was refined in 1974 when Ogawa decided to settle in the province of Yamagata where he and his team mixed with the farmers to learn, to physically experience the cultivation of rice before deciding to film it. The crew lived as a community on meagre rations. The budgets were microscopic and the films hardly shown, but Ogawa obstinately continued in spite of difficulties and successive splits with crew members and collaborators... "

"Hence the splendid surprise of Manzan Benigaki directed by a young Chinese woman filmmaker who wanted to finally show the unfinished work of the master. The film deals with knowledge and transmission. We find the classical components of the Ogawa method: words which form the narrative (much more than interviewed testimony), the length necessary to enter a world and the rhythm of a scene, to understand technically how it works. Ogawa's fascination with the gesture of craftsmanship (or the gesture of the cultivator) resonates with his own conception of his craft. He films as one craftsman working with another, including himself in the process."

"With time, even though Ogawa has often filmed gestures and tales on the point of disappearing, his very method seems itself threatened with extinction, this generous and expensive use of chemical film, this taste for collective work. This explains the emotion provoked by Manzan Benigaki; these images shot twenty years ago bring to life melancholy ghosts. Ogawa filmed the individual anchored in History through myth... "

(Gaël Lépingle, from the programme notes of the 2002 États généraux du film documentaire.)

("Because when you do a film, it's generally five, six or seven weeks at the most. We had the ambition to do it for a year and a half, and that changes a lot of things and we were not in the same state of mind... When you spend a year and half with the film, you are just there and life is much more together. You have lots of other things. You have people who are born, people who die and seasons change. So the film becomes, really, almost organic. You don't really think about the film. Or you think about the film and life at the same time. So it's good. It's because it brings down the importance of cinema. The balance is more correct, I think. In what you live, that a film should not be the main thing in your life. Perhaps it's one of the things. It's your work. It's like the guy in the office, or the guy who makes food, or the guy who makes shoes. They do it everyday, from 9-7. It should be the same thing... It's like the idea of trying to make it all your life, because I like it, it's what I chose, and make it day to day, everyday... And with this small budget crew and in this place where people are very generous." - Pedro Costa )

[Images from Shinsuke Ogawa's Manzan benigaki (Red Persimmons, 2001), completed by Xiaolian Peng after Ogawa's death in 1992.]

the image will come at the time of resurrection

2009-12-27T12:48:00.010Z

"Film was projected and everyone saw that the world was there. A world almost yet without history, but a world which recounts. But so that in the venue of uncertainty it establishes idea and sensation, the two great stories have been sex and death." (Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma: Une histoire seule.)

(Images of Vidor's Duel in the Sun, as they appear in Histoire(s) du cinéma: Une histoire seule.)

"We live in a dilemma that our perception is filled up with image and sounds. There're world and images of the world and sounds from the world. Anyway, the task is to show what people haven't seen yet, or to show what is seen in different way, or to show what they want to show, they're to turn eye's way. Basically the task of cinematography is to show them for the second times... In the past we could trust almost physical relationship between the real object and its image because of its granted through photography. Of course now in visual age, the physical relationship isn't guaranteed any more. But I think it is a mistake to trust only on this physicality of the process of cinema and of photography. In fact, when you can make a documentary, you do two things, to look at the world and to create the image of it." (Hartmut Bitomsky; text as it appears on Daisuke Akasaka's site.)

[Images of Duel in the Sun, as they appear in Das Kino und der Tod (Bitomsky, 1988).]

*** *** ***

"Philippe Garrel creates a liturgy of bodies, because he delivers them to a secret ceremony whose only characters are Mary, Joseph, and the child, or their equivalents. His is not however a pious cinema, although it is a cinema of revelation." (Gilles Deleuze)

"Whether it is a cave painting, an Egyptian statue of Ka, the Colossus of Rhodes, an image in a mirror or an image on the screen, there is always some sort of magical dimension in the image related to desire, to death, to shadows, to doubles, to immortality... It is no accident that almost immediately after after Lumière, Méliès arrived to make the magic of the image emerge from the image of reality." (Youssef Ishaghpour)

...what plunges into the night
is the echo
of what engulfs the silence,
what engulfs the silence
prolongs into the light
what plunges into the night.
Images and sounds
are like people
who become acquainted
on the journey
and can never again
be separated.

(now the tragedy is anatomical...)

"To things and beings in their most frigid semblance, the cinema thus grants the greatest gift unto death: life." (Jean Epstein)

[Images from La frontière de l'aube (Philippe Garrel, 2008) and Coeur fidèle (Jean Epstein, 1923).]

my hand outstretched to the winged distance and sightless measure: a confluence of fragments

2009-10-13T22:48:00.004+01:00

"For a long time I have wanted to try and see if I could create a drama with the simplicity of action which the Ancients so favoured. There are those who believe that this very simplicity is a sign of a lack of inventiveness. They do not consider that, on the contrary, all invention is to create something out of nothing." [Racine, in the preface to Bérénice (1670), revisited in Jean-Claude Rousseau's De Son Appartement (2007).]

I started filming myself. A hand, a foot, what was nearest at that moment. Then I started filming other people and the character of the hands and feet turned into another character, whose whole figure never appears, I don't know why. I didn't make any toil in this film. Places appeared, actors appeared, music appeared. Nothing was foreseen, everything appeared, like in a dream. (Adolfo Arrieta, on one of his recent films, Vacanza permanente).

The words of Philippe-Alain Michaud, on the 16mm short films of Hannes Schüpbach: "The distribution of the figures, isolated by black intervals and placed in a network switching and repetition, sets out a formal link from assembly work to the gesture of weaving. Cinematographic images, which often caught detail and are sometimes blurred, overlapping or colored with a filter as if they were dyed, succeed and meet each other in the distance, and thus act as a distinct events color and placed in a temporary canvas. "

Nathaniel Dorsky in Devotional Cinema: "If you have ever looked at your hand and seen it freshly without concept, realized the simultaneity of its beauty, its efficiency, its detail, you are awed into appreciation. The total genius of your hand is more profound than anything you could have calculated with your intellect. One's hand is a devotional object."

If a film fails to take advantage of the self-existing magic of things, if it uses objects merely to mean something, it has thrown away one of its great possibilities. When we take an object and make it mean something, what we are doing, in a subtle ot not so subtle way, is confirming ourselves. We are confirming our own concepts of who we are and what the world is. But allowing things to be seen for what they are offers a more open, more fertile ground than the realm of predetermined symbolic meaning. After all, the unknown is pure adventure."

(Gregory Markopoulos: It is in the insignificant moment that significance becomes disturbed and the power of filmmaking is established.)

(Robert Beavers: Sustained by the awakening of emotion united to strength, I reach beyond the life-likeness of the actor and the shadow of performance to the figure gathering the light-- the life itself of the image.

How was the strength found to gather the images? From within a solitude of being, enduring/accepting the moment when a single color is the only sign of feeling in an environment of which all else is opposition... )

"Never mind where we are, we see things. And, within these all things we do see, there must be something that is of the order of vision. In Spanish there is the same ambiguity as in French with respect to the “vision”. In French it is said “to have visions”. The vision is to see; but also, in a way, it is to lose vision. Having a vision is to be absent. It is the look directing to a non-concrete object. Image is, for me, that. It is an absence, and the prefect picture is the one that keeps the look in a sort of vision that makes the look go through it; that does not hit against what is being shown and can be indefinitely kept, because it is not just placed on anything." (J-C Rousseau)

The movement of atoms is eternal.
Thrown through the void,
either by their own weight
or by the impact of other atoms,
they wander
until chance brings them together.
Some of them manage to cling together;
they form the most solid bodies.
Others,
more mobile,
are separated by a greater distance;
they form the less dense bodies,
air and light.
Some have not been admitted to any group;
they move around uselessly in space
like dust motes lit up by rays of light in a dark room.

[from Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, recited by Rousseau in La vallée close.]

the limit of the metaphor

2009-10-11T03:52:00.006+01:00

Some brief things on the films and feelings of John Abraham.

Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother, 1986) :

"This film is an analysis of the extremist movement in Kerala during years' 70. Many of my friends legacies to that movement killed. They were much intelligent, sensitive and with a great aesthetic sense. Their dead women obsessed to me and that provoked in me desire to make this film. According to me the cinema would have to speak to people and people to speak through the cinema. The cinematographic experience would have to arouse the social conscience of the public. Through the Odessa Movies I want to show my films to people and who will not have the moneies in order to pay will be able to see them gratis."

- from the 1987 Torino Film Festival brochure.

On Agraharathil Kazhuthai (Donkey in an Elite Colony, 1978), from here:

"The neighbourhood is an agraharam, the settlement of Brahmins (considered one of the higher social classes in ancient India), where the mere notion of a donkey (an icon of the working class) replacing the sacred cow as a domestic animal breeds hostility."

*** *** ***

A Tribute to Ritwik Ghatak by John Abraham :

Ritwik Ghatak,
in partition, not physically of willingness
-the country departed
Out of his outer consciousness - cosmic consciousness
none of his mistakes,
Reactions - natural reactions - reflections
Ritwik Ghatak,
refugee, unborn, unwanted, unbearable
penetrative towards the Victorian hangover
of the Tagorian corruption of thinking

Life was more important to him
than the words in praise of god,
the god of Victorian Tagorian thinking.

Hence, he was rejected from the Bengalian thinking
Ritwik Ghatak - the name doesn't suit
the hierarchic thinking of
the Raynian Zamidarian thinking
Perhaps, the long echo of the forgotten factors
that becomes reminiscence of
the 'death of the salesman' or otherwise
the long columns and no more Chhabi Biswas,
Cardiac arrest is common.
The death of Ghatak is uncommon.

Nay, Ritwik Ghatak
I remember, a tall man
his hands moving around my shoulders,
catching me with the feeling of nearness,
rather than imperialism-
the man who stands before me
questioning my manliness
loosing his hands to shake my hands
in appreciation of manliness
recognizing each other-
abiding in each other
kicking on my an's and telling me
"Get up, awake shoot"
I remember, not with sentiments
with awakening proud, Ritwik Ghatak

Ritwik Daa,
let me call you Ritwik Daa,
I know that you are no more.
But I am, alive for you
Believe me. When the seventh seal is opened
I will use my camera as my gun
and I am sure the echo of the sound
will reverberate in your bones,
and feed back to me for my inspiration.

( ... )

*** *** ***

Of his films, seemingly impossible to see just a few months back and still with no dvd release in sight, Amma Ariyan is now partially available to watch (to be aware of) on YouTube and Donkey in an Elite Colony is available as a torrent download. But -- means to what end? Abraham, who is now labelled as an "avant-gardist", "anarchist", or "nomad of Indian cinema", was actually more directly engaged with people than any other Indian filmmaker of the period or since, having initiated the Odessa Collective, which managed to fund the production of the film through contributions during screenings of Chaplin's The Kid, and thereafter released non-commercially -- "for whomever so desires them". Donkey in an Elite Colony, with echoes of Vertov and Buñuel (and less significantly, Bresson), astonishes, considering the conditions in which it was made, put together, not for such substantial use of non-professional performers (unprecedented in Indian cinema?) nor for its rough manner of incorporating didacticism and poeticism, but for the delirious, short montage effects (in particular, the university graffiti sequence and later, a mountaintop killing) which articulate the visceral force with which Abraham is driving toward expressions of emotion and consciousness.

walk with Johnny Guitar

2009-07-30T20:33:00.006+01:00

(with)

you have a few books you never read, a few records you no longer listen to

2009-02-11T06:21:00.005Z

Double-bill of the day:

[extract from Un homme qui dort (Bernard Queysanne, Georges Perec, 1974)]

[extract from Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973)]

sometimes the images begin to tremble (2)

2009-01-30T12:08:00.005Z

"...the normal behaviour of the starving is violence; and the violence of the starving is not primitive.... From Cinema Novo it should be learned that an aesthetic of violence, before being primitive, is revolutionary. It is the initial moment when the colonizer becomes aware of the colonized..." (Glauber Rocha, 'An Aesthetic of Hunger', 1965)

Glauber Rocha's A Idade da Terra (The Age of the Earth, 1980) is an epic exercise in 'amateur' filmmaking, a relentless convergence of Soviet montage, Carmelo Bene, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and Cinema Novo, in the form of the essay film, the didactic film, the film poem. Beyond all labels. Here Rocha returns to his earlier manifesto, 'An Aesthetic of Hunger', by turning it over its head and presenting the spectator instead with wild excess. Excessive force, necessary chaos. The weight of the image and the magnitude of the sound that would announce a rejection of the industrial, Western cinema (here represented by the porcine imperialist, Brahms - as performed by the astonishing Maurício do Valle from Rocha's Antonio Das Mortes).

Everyone here seems to work with their gestures and voices towards the creation and transmission of sensations that are thrust into the chaotic dialogue between religion and politics, the saint and the revolutionary. The film, I think, is really a search for a language that can adequately express this struggle. Its epic scope and haphazard progression through near-symphonic movements means it occasionally drifts into long-winded, seemingly improvised passages (monologues and speech-duels, the psychedelic rigor of these scenes recalls Kenneth Anger) that we can easily lose ourselves in, but, perhaps as a formal reflection of the film's vortex of contradictions, punctuating these somewhat hypnotic, montage-driven exercises in the speech-act are extended plan-sequences that seem to render an awakening of a people as riotous street theatre ("The street belongs to the people, as the sky belongs to the condor").

Daney has said of it: "Like nothing known to man... a filmic flying saucer, no more, no less."

Among its most breathtaking ruptures is this sequence by the ocean, where we witness what seems to be nothing less than the birth of a revolution:

A man and a woman shout to each other, to the skies, to the ocean, to the earth, to all who would listen:

An atomic implosion has taken place at the earth's core.
A war between unknown beings.
Earth's core has imploded.
At any moment we may be swallowed by the abyss.

Kill Brahms! Kill Brahms!

Movement (of the camera) sans any defined vectors,
theatrical intonation,
rehearsal/repetition - a recurring weapon of the film - of passages...

...that contains within all its spontaneous motion and the fluxes in exposure, the materiality of its creation and that of a new world.

(Images from A Idade da Terra and Novyy Vavilon (Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, 1929.)

Ossang, again

2009-01-24T13:56:00.006Z

Drifters through landscapes, in exile, until the evening of the death of the world. Dust, light, the ocean, the sun flaring (thus, the poetics of reflection), rocks, wind, grass (that lies down in a cry). SKIES. Intertitles and irides. Murnau and Epstein. Burroughs and Trakl. Cigarettes lit. Tunnels and windmills. Throbbing Gristle. Eternal midnights. Trees. Fire. A man and a woman, (cold). Vodka. Sex. It rains on the bed! (Garrel). Silence.

...i fall asleep

in the electric plain...

...of the black falls.

[on, and from, F.J. Ossang's Silêncio (2007) and Ciel éteint! (2008).]

les filles du feu

2008-12-05T12:32:00.006Z

"Destruction of the scene: since no scene is treated for its own sake, all that subsists is a series of pure moments, of which all that is retained is the mediatory aspect; anything that might determine or actualize them more concretely is not abstracted or suppressed -- Lang is not Bresson -- but devalued and reduced to the condition of pure spatio-temporal reference, devoid of embodiment. Destruction, even, of the characters: each of them here is really no more than what he says and what he does. Who are Dana Andrews, Joan Fontaine, her father? Questions like this no longer have any meaning, for the characters have lost all individual quality, are not more than human concepts. "

mods

2008-10-27T11:58:00.002Z

The Calico Wall's 'I'm A Living Sickness' and The Seeds' 'A Faded Picture' from Serge Bozon's Mods (2002). [via panarchist]

to seek the invisible

2008-10-27T06:45:00.002Z

Cinema could have the almost anthropological function of reminding us of what is possible for the body, of sending us image constructions which make it impossible to limit the organism to its determining factors. Whether it records them or invents them from thin air, cinema sends us presumptions of bodies and this suppose the requestioning of the most elementary problems of figuration: "does a film sample, suppose, elaborate, give or subtract the body? What texture makes up the filmed body (flesh, shadow, project, affect, doxa)? What bone structure supports it (skeleton, resemblance, becoming, plasticity of the unformed)? To what regime of visibility is it subject (apparition, epiphany, extinction, fear, absence)? What are its means of surface appearance (clarity of outline, opacity, tactility, transparence, intermittance, mixed techniques)? By what events is it undone (the other, history, deformation)? Of what community of gesture does it allow perception (people, collection, an alignment of the identical)? What in truth does its story consist of (adventure, description, panoply)? Fundamentally what creature is it (a subject, an organism, a case, an ideological figure, a hypothesis)?"

- Nicole Brenez, 'On the Subject of Regrettable Searching - Body to Body, the Filmed Body' (2008)

Black and White Trypps Number Three (2007) - here lies all evidence one needs for the sublime epos of 'the short film'. From what I've seen, Ben Russell's films seem to foster a deep engagement with the history of the moving image, particularly with ethnographic and early silent cinema (if the earliest cinema audiences had gasped in wonder at the moving shadows caused by direct sunlight upon bodies in the Lumière Brothers' La Sortie des usines Lumière, Russell's Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai), also silent, shows us a relative absence of shadows in the looming presence of skyscrapers that block out the sun), while remaining works of our time in their formalist investigations of the collective spectatorial experience and "industrialised" representations of objects and bodies.

Trypps Number Three transports the documented transcendence of Jean Rouch's Les Maîtres Fous from the Hauka movement to a Lightning Bolt concert where overlapping bodies, swaying to noise rock, are framed in light beamed from the stage - we return to the models of Caravaggio or Garrel - bodies effectively transformed into islands of individual gestures and expressions via a spotlight and lingering camera, before the film cryptically bends upon itself: henceforth the image (through slow-motion effect) and sound (through Joseph Grimm's spacey drones) conspire to directly invoke the spectator into the raptures. Black and White Trypps Number Four (2008), a concert film of a different kind, evolves from the mitotically active images of Black and White Trypps Number Two (2006), that extraordinary symphony of negative images of tree branches engaged in a silent, cosmic dance. Here, a classic Richard Pryor routine on racial stereotypes from his 1979 Live in Concert disintegrates into a Rorschach storm before morphing into the most violent of all cinematic manifestations: the flicker film. Humour and horror, reflection and its shadow, black and white, appearance and disappearance [see also, Russell's Trypps #5 (Dubai)]; the film ultimately becomes a necessary search for traces of a disembodied 'thereness' as it moves through the reversals and the restrictions imposed upon it by the film's increasingly impenetrable spaces...

What you takin' my picture for? Who you gonna show it to?

Experimental Conversations 2

2008-10-27T05:28:00.004Z

"Tomorrow I'll leave this place, new spaces wait for me, other people, famous places which nobody knows, thousands of hidden rhythms that I will discover. The mirror will open its doors and we will see the... the... (sneeze).. the... the other! Uh.... so... stay still! Stay still, everybody! Stay still, world, because I'm coming!".

(from Ivan Zulueta's 1979 masterpiece, Arrebato, the subject of a must-read analysis in the second issue of the Maximilian Le Cain-edited, Experimental Conversations, by Alberte Pagán and Esperanza Collado.)

Guillaume Depardieu (1971 - 2008)

2008-10-14T06:22:00.006+01:00

The traces left behind --

[ From Ne touchez pas la hache (Jacques Rivette, 2007) : the sound of Armand/Guillaume's footsteps as he waits for the Duchess in her salon, evidence of a tremendous physical presence / un homme blessé - one of the most haunting, and haunted, in recent years - a performance that is free enough to attempt to seek the truth about "the nature of presence" itself, of searing emotion, desire, fear, pain, through an astonishing brutality in the face of powerlessness. A mortal investigation... ]

genre, testimone oculare, memorable images

2008-09-20T09:53:00.014+01:00

Truth-seekers : the eyewitnesses of The Girl Who Knew Too Much and The Bird With the Crystal Plumage.

"It should be understood then that the giallo is something different to that which is conventionally analysed as a genre. The Italians have the word filone, which is often used to refer to both genres and cycles as well as to currents and trends. This points to the limitations of genre theory built primarily on American film genres but also to the need for redefinition concerning how other popular film-producing nations understand and relate to their products. This introduction to the giallo, therefore, begins from the assumption that the giallo is not so much a genre, as its literary history might indicate, but a body of films that resists generic definition."
- Gary Needham

The more films I see from this "body of films", the more I realise just how permeable the borders existing between the gialli really are. One often hears of there being one or two prototypical films and the films that followed them to be stylised variations (the prototypes being Mario Bava's noirish The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), "the first true Italian giallo", with its haunted testimone oculare, or perhaps his subsequent Blood and Black Lace (1964), with its experimentations with colour and lurid violence on bodies), but that would be denying the strongly imagistic nature of the individual films that followed: their reliance and perpetual insistence upon memorable - at times, intense - images that eclipse narrative (in retrospect, one recalls who the killer is revealed to be in a particular film through the one or two big imagistic clues which lead the heroine to the answers); the importance placed upon them acknowledged within the film itself through diegetic paintings, photographs, materialised mental imagery and hallucinations, which function as origins of madness [The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (Argento, 1970), The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (Miraglia, 1972)], objects of confusion and terror [The House With the Laughing Windows (Avati, 1976), Lizard in a Woman's Skin (Fulci, 1971), Deep Red (Argento, 1975), Seven Notes in Black (Fulci, 1977), Death Laid an Egg (Giulio Questi, 1968)], and ultimately, vessels of resolution [most of the above films along with two more key Argento's: The Cat O'Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (both 1971)]. A significant motif that attests to these films as being part of "a cinema of memorable images, in the tradition of expressionism" (Sylvain L.) ...

death will come and it will have your eyes

2008-09-20T02:03:00.004+01:00

Superimpositions, reflections, impressions, phantoms, light, such harsh light!, gleamings, memorable images from La Donna del lago (Lady of the Lake, Luigi Bazzoni/Franco Rossellini, 1965), a companion to Giulio Questi's Death Laid an Egg (1968) in its interesting use of sound and somewhat tangential approach to the developing style of Italian giallo films, a black-and-white sibling of Bazzoni's subsequent classical giallo in colour, Giornata nera per l'ariete (The Fifth Cord, 1971), which, visually at least, is the equal of La Donna del lago...

(With Peter Baldwin, Virna Lisi, Valentina Cortese; photography by Leonida Barboni.)

Pilgrimage

2008-08-11T12:14:00.003+01:00

(Above, right: Henrietta Crosman as Hannah Jessop in John Ford's Pilgrimage.)

"Almost alone among Ford characters, Hannah changes — from virulent, raging intolerance to the sowing of tolerance. If she can surpass her myopia, suggests Ford, there is an alternative to wars and to worlds like Tabu’s, where lovers are sacrificed to ideas. Hannah epitomizes her world, yet her hyperbolic qualities lead her to a wisdom from which her interference can save others from moralistic hypocrisies similar to those that led her to murder her own son. Hannah reunites a family, then walks away. Perhaps she is only a deus ex machina wrenched out of the necessities of Ford’s fiction. Whatever, with this little old lady is born the first “Fordian hero,” whom we will encounter in most subsequent Ford pictures in the guise of Will Rogers, Henry Fonda, and John Wayne, among others, and whose judging, priesting, Christ-like interventions will momentarily but repeatedly redeem mankind from its myopic intolerance. Flowers mark Hannah’s passage. Ford’s most constant symbol, they mark most heroes’ loves — Lincoln, from and to Ann Rutledge; Nathan Brittles and Frank Skeffington, to their dead wives; Tom Doniphon, to and from Hallie; and so on. Hannah’s flowers signify not only conscious intention (to honor the dead) and reversal (Hannah’s initial refusal to honor her dead), but also their ultimate power: Hannah succumbs. Objects may do more than witness and judge. We so infuse the world with our feelings and thoughts, that eventually the world infuses us in return."

- Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man And His Movies (2007). (A reminder if any reader needs it: the revised edition of the book - immense and essential - is available as a pdf download from Tag's site.)

images of the day

2008-08-11T11:56:00.003+01:00

[... from Pilgrimage (John Ford, 1933).]

in what remains of the night

2008-08-11T10:51:00.003+01:00

Above: Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008) in Godard's Notre musique (2004).

An excerpt from Under Siege:

A woman told the cloud: cover my beloved
For my clothing is drenched with his blood.

If you are not rain, my love
Be tree
Sated with fertility, be tree
If you are not tree, my love
Be stone
Saturated with humidity, be stone
If you are not stone, my love
Be moon
In the dream of the beloved woman, be moon
[So spoke a woman
to her son at his funeral]

Oh watchmen! Are you not weary
Of lying in wait for the light in our salt
And of the incandescence of the rose in our wound
Are you not weary, oh watchmen?

A little of this absolute and blue infinity
Would be enough
To lighten the burden of these times
And to cleanse the mire of this place.

It is up to the soul to come down from its mount
And on its silken feet walk
By my side, hand in hand, like two longtime
Friends who share the ancient bread
And the antique glass of wine
May we walk this road together
And then our days will take different directions:
I, beyond nature, which in turn
Will choose to squat on a high-up rock.

On my rubble the shadow grows green,
And the wolf is dozing on the skin of my goat
He dreams as I do, as the angel does
That life is here...not over there.

(...)

And in what remains of the dawn, I walk toward my exterior
And in what remains of the night, I hear the sound of footsteps inside me.

Greetings to the one who shares with me an attention to
The drunkenness of light, the light of the butterfly, in the
Blackness of this tunnel!

Greetings to the one who shares my glass with me
In the denseness of a night outflanking the two spaces:
Greetings to my apparition.

- Mahmoud Darwish. (Translated by Marjolijn De Jager.)

Also see: Andy Rector at Kino Slang.

syndromes

2008-07-30T09:28:00.004+01:00

Double-bill of the day:

Excerpt from The Stendhal Syndrome (Dario Argento, 1996), with Asia Argento.

La déraison du Louvre (Ange Leccia, 2006), with Laetitia Casta.

(These past two weeks have been busy catching up with some 'auteur cinema' from the past year at the Auckland International Film Festival, where I finally saw Rivette's Ne touchez pas la hache (2007). I'll wait till I see it again before I say much about it but, to me, this looks, sounds, feels like a masterpiece. Others I saw for the first time and liked include, among others, Night and Day (Hong, 2008); La France (Bozon, 2007), with elements of Rohmer's Perceval ('78) and Monteiro's Silvestre ('82) converging in a very concrete presence of light and shadow; Christopher Columbus, the Enigma (Oliveira, 2007); all the Edward Yang films I saw in the retrospective programme, especially Taipei Story (1985), and the mysteriously underrated, A Confucius Confusion (1994), both new to me, along with the previously-seen The Terrorizer (1986) and A Brighter Summer Day (1991); Blue Tide, Black Water (Eve Gordon, Sam Hamilton, 2008), and the magnificent films of Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, but more on them later, perhaps...)

Bruce Conner

2008-07-08T11:02:00.005+01:00

"It is part of my general point of view that the work is never finished, period. It's always changing, through time and how people experience it." (Bruce Conner, 1933-2008)

Thinking today of the filmmaker who has left behind such works as Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1976), Crossroads (1976), Marilyn Times Five (1973), Report (1967); personal landmark films for anyone who has seen them, works that impart great power to the images - found footage or otherwise - in their critical and elegiac usage (Brenez's terms) to arrive at forms of truth.

Mizoguchi/Sternberg

2008-07-07T01:16:00.001+01:00

[Images from The Straits of Love and Hate (Aien kyo, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1937) and The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928).]

song of the earth

2008-06-25T08:57:00.052+01:00

Words and sounds from the sixth and final movement - 'Der Abschied' - of Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (1908), the last few verses of which appear, accompanied by a black screen, in Jean-Marie Straub's Le Genou d'Artémide (2008). This version is conducted by Otto Klemperer with vocal work by Elsa Cavelti; accompanying text translated by Lionel Salter:

The Farewell

The sun is setting behind the mountains.
In every valley, evening is falling
with its shadows, full of coolness.

Look! The moon is floating upwards,
like a silver ship, on the blue lake of heaven.
I sense a soft breeze stirring
behind the dark pines.

The stream sings melodiously through the darkness,
the flowers turn pale in the twilight.

The earth breaths deeply in rest and sleep.
All longings now turn to dreaming;
weary mortals plod homeward

to find again in sleep
forgotten joys and youth.

The birds roost silently in the branches;
the world is falling asleep.

In blows cool in the shadow of my pines.
I stand here, waiting for my friend,
waiting to bid him a last farewell.

My friend, I long to savour the beauty
of this evening at your side.
Where are you lingering? You have left me alone so long!

I wander to and fro with my lute
on paths swelling with soft grass.
O beauty! O world eternally intoxicated with love and life!

He dismounted from his horse and handed him
the stirrup-cup. He asked him
where he was going, and also why it had to be.

He spoke, and his voice was veiled:
O my friend,
fortune did not smile on me in this world!
Where am I going? I shall wander in the mountains,
seeking peace for my lonely heart.

I shall journey to my native land, to my home,
I shall never stray abroad.
My heart is still and awaits its hour!

Everywhere the dear earth blossoms forth
in spring and grows green again!
Everywhere and forever, distant horizons gleam blue:

forever... forever...

*** *** ***

Endymion, the mortal shepherd granted immortality in his sleep, recounts his nocturnal encounter with Artemis, the virgin goddess of forests and hills, to a stranger in Cesare Pavese's 'La Belva'/'Lady of the Beasts' from Dialogues with Leucò (1947, trans. William Arrowsmith) :

(...) I had fallen asleep one evening on Latmos, propped against a tree. It was dark - I'd been wandering late. The moon was shining when I woke. In my dream I felt a shiver of dread at the thought of being there, in the clearing, in the moonlight.

Then I saw her. I saw her looking at me, looking at me with that sidelong glance of hers. But her eyes were steady, clear, with great deeps in them. I didn't know it then, nor even the next day, but I was already hers, utterly hers, caught within the circle of her eyes, in the space she filled, the clearing, and the hill. She smiled at me, timidly. "Lady," I said to her, and she frowned, like a girl, like a shy, wild thing, as though she understood that I was amazed, somehow dismayed, to find myself calling her Lady. The dismay I felt then was always between us.

Then she spoke my name and stood beside me - her tunic barely reached her knees - and stretched out her hand and touched my hair. There was something hesitant in the way she touched me, and she smiled, an incredible, mortal smile. I thought of all the names men call her by, and I would have fallen to my knees but she held me up, as one holds up a child, by putting her hand under my chin. Look at me, I'm a grown man. And she was just a wild thing, a slight awkward girl. Except for her eyes, those eyes of hers. I felt like a small boy. "You must never wake again," she said. "Don't try to follow. I'll come to you again." And she went off through the clearing.

I walked all over Latmos that night, until dawn. I followed the moon everywhere, through the gorges and the scrub, up to the peaks. I listened, listened, and all I could hear was her voice, like the sound of sea water, a hoarse voice, cold and maternal. Every rustle, every shadow stopped me. I caught glimpses of wild animals, running. When the light came - a livid, veiled light - I looked down on the plain, on this road where we're walking now, and I knew that my home was no longer among men. I was no longer one of them. I was waiting for the night. (...)

*** *** ***

Danièle Huillet: Take the example of Pavese. Ultimately, about Pavese himself we couldn't care less by the end of the film. What interests us are the good people who say Pavese's texts, what they do in life, how they say these texts, the problems they have saying what they say – which makes what they say all of sudden no longer belong to Pavese but to the good people who say it – who at the outset had never heard of Pavese. The only interest that the text or what you call the culture has is that the person who wrote it did a certain work, he produced something which touched us and which subsequently has resisted – from which one can judge that he did his work well.

Is the world still habitable? Deeply felt absences (both in front of, and behind, the camera) haunt, descend upon Straub's Le Genou d'Artémide in the form of a sighing forest, but the human voices remain absolute and the forests still breathe: living testaments to the alliance of the mysterious and the realist image that Huillet championed. This mystery, this wind in the trees, however, is something closer to, say, D.W. Griffith's One is Business, the Other Crime (1912) - the final image of which has already been called out to by the final image of Straub/Huillet's Quei loro incontri (2006) - than to, say, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, which seems to answer the question above, with its own awkward melancholies, in the negative.

Engaged in this dialogue of insomnia, of the fear of desired divine energies afloat in the night, are two men, at least one of whom is mortal (and perhaps it's not too difficult to tell them apart even without prior knowledge). The discovery of a 'human image' within a documentary on landscape as "a place of inscription of struggles, empty theatre of operations", what stands above it and what lies within: we are shown after a series of breathtaking pans, a path amidst the trees that leads to a mysterious grave, but not before we are conveyed, through the Stranger, the sensation of touch, as his hands come to rest upon the moss-covered tree, while Endymion talks of Artemis' untouched knee.

Emphases on the intonation and rhythm of the actors' delivery (and both Andrea Bacci and Dario Marconcini have performed in previous Pavese adaptations of Straub/Huillet), on the 'thereness' of living human bodies, their audible breaths mingling with the wind - creating that classic S/H intensification of the text to which nearly everything else seems to respond - capture and preserve a certain form of authenticity (what Barton Byg calls their "romanticism" in their German films). The rapidly drifting clouds above Buti that alter the light patterns in this forest so extraordinarily come across as accomplices and not mere witnesses. And I'm moved, again, by Straub's use of the diagonal composition here, as if the 'characters' had nowhere else to go but end up as spatial expressions of their irreconciliations (permanent insomnia from a state of heightened emotion!), surrounded by further verticals and diagonals of the surrounding trees.

But, in the end, let's not forget what Serge Daney has said of their films (I paraphrase): "If one considers that a filmmaker is important insofar as he looks, in film, a certain state of the human body, the films of Straub will remain as documentaries on two or three body positions: to be seated, bending to read, to walk. This is already a lot."

water

2008-06-17T11:07:00.006+01:00

Niko Pirosmani, Peasant Woman With Children Goes to Fetch Water (c. 1908)

a convergence

2008-06-04T07:44:00.012+01:00

Dynamics of a Molecule in a Cage: CH4 in NaA Zeolite (Alexis Martinet)

Transition de phase dans les cristaux liquides (Jean Painlevé, 1978)

Ironically however, the imagery which science produces, without any intention of being so, is surely the art of our time, and it is this imagery which inadvertently provokes us into contemplating death, even as we rush to avoid it. (This is perhaps why the imagery of science is so little seen outside specialist magazines and the laboratories in which it is used - precisely because its shadings are the stuff of art itself.) In the last decades much - even overwhelmingly most of this imagery, and is accompanying artifacts - has been digitally based...

- Jon Jost blogs .

the Oliveira Touch

2008-05-26T12:22:00.002+01:00

Your films, swimming in magnificent light and splendid women, need no explanations. One of your titles sums them up perfectly: The Uncertainty Principle. Strange and sublime metamorphoses recur in your work; changements à vue, as they say in theater, changes in plain sight. (...) Please excuse me. I'll cite one single example of the Oliveira Touch. It's in I'm Going Home, with the great Michel Piccoli. Remember, every morning, his character goes to the same Paris café, sits down at the same table, and orders a cup of coffee, which he drinks as he reads Le Figaro. Then he leaves. Almost as soon as he gets up, another customer comes in, rushes to the same table, and reads Libération. Another day, after Piccoli is gone, the Libération reader hurries in as usual, but the table is already taken by another regular, who is riveted to Le Monde. What is it about this enchanted table that attracts such a varied sample of the daily press? ...The only thing one can be certain of is that there's no explanation. That's just the way it is. But the very fact that we asked ourselves all these questions, and smiled, is a revelation of our whole universe, my dear Manoel, and, in this representation, of the entire history of humanity.

- Gilles Jacob to Manoel de Oliveira.

why sometimes the images begin to tremble

2008-05-25T08:37:00.008+01:00

The subject of their contemplation - whether intense (Vite, Acéphale) or seemingly in passing (Chromo sud) - originates in the period surrounding May '68, but perhaps the most striking intersecting feature is the (at times, unnerving) intensity of the expression, the materialisation, the performance, of emotions - contempt or radical solidarity, disillusionment or hope, boredom or rapture - that emerges in these Zanzibar films and their close cousins. Daniel Pommereulle's enigmatic severity in Rohmer's La collectionneuse is transformed into a near-Artaudian rage in Vite, which invokes bodies - human and celestial - toward nothing less than a reorganisation of civilisation itself. Pommereulle spits and hisses at the camera, creating a sensory vibration that is, at the very least, equivalent to the bleeding montage of Etienne O'Leary's Chromo sud, or the handheld-camera-in-action in Pierre Clementi's The Revolution is Not Over, Let's Continue Fighting, or the interplay of light/dark, extended silence/call for revolution in both Détruisez-vous and Acéphale.

angels of the night, silverframe my candlelight

2008-04-30T06:28:00.000+01:00

***

"White light lays above
The Henry Hudson riverbank

And you will see a lady standing

Stealing past a happy ending

Staring at the happy landing

Her heart beats loud and fast

Her love looks like a broken glass

White light lays above

The riverbank

A sinking ship has brought the light
Upon the land

And Henry Hudson knows not where
The lady's standing

A lonely shoulder must grow older

Waiting on the riverbank."

***

"The marvel of marvels was the close-up. I have never changed my opinion of this. Certain close-ups of Lilian Gish, of Mary Pickford and of Greta Garbo are imprinted on my memory for life. The enlargement enables us to delight in the texture of the skin, and a slight quivering of the lip tells us something about the inward life of the idealized woman. I am ready to bear with the most tedious film if it gives me a close-up of an actress I like. And in my passion for the close-up I have sometimes inserted perfectly irrelevant sequences in my films simply because they allowed me scope for a really good one."
- Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films, p. 45 (1974, trans. Norman Denny)

"Women, as amalgams of colour and sound in space/time, as paintings in motion, often impose their "show" onto the world around them, and onto their story world even more, a "show" of themselves. By their magic powers, they transform wherever they are into a set to enhance their performance, complete with men transformed into audience and supporting cast (simultaneously) or, sometimes, partners. "
- Tag Gallagher (on the films of Renoir)

"Garrel has succeeded in filming something we have never seen before: the faces of actors in silent films during those moments when the black intertitles, with their paltry, illuminated words, filled the screen."
- Serge Daney (on L'Enfant secret)

"The actor has his secrets as well -- of which the director is the spectator."
- Jacques Rivette

Two close-ups that have been reflecting off of each other in my mind as I happened to watch the films one after another: Renoir's Partie de campagne (1936, with Sylvia Bataille), and Garrel's Berceau de cristal (1976, with Nico), and I'm struck by the subtle gestural affinities on display - the movement of the eyes and lips as our respective heroine pulls away from a kiss or slowly blows smoke in the air - along with the dramatic dissolve/fade-to-black.

Garrel's film is the centre of a trio of 70s portrait films/mythic narratives/tableaux morts/narcotic reveries involving Nico, Tina Aumont, Jean Seberg, Zouzou, and others, and the only one to feature colour photography and sound; a deep cave where the liquid echoes of Ash Ra Tempel's organ/electronic drones move freely with the harsh light that illuminates all that is immediately important: faces, mesmerised by offscreen entities, remaining suspended in stillness and silence - the translucence of flesh and the geography of the images recalling the paintings of Georges de la Tour, which only deepens the relationship of Garrel's films to silent cinema. There is also the looming feel of diegetic exhaustion which haunts the spectator, perhaps owing more to the prolonged (vampiric?) stare of the camera (in one moment, Nico breaks down, as she does, overwhelmed, in Warhol's Chelsea Girls) than to whatever drug-induced stupor. Along with Les hautes solitudes and Le bleu des origines, Berceau seems to be an insistence upon the image as a concrete manifestation of the 'abstract' icon, while using the drama of tenebrism to rediscover the sensations possible to experience through the act of looking.

you may already know this, but...

2008-03-16T08:32:00.006Z

... Marcel Hanoun has made several of his films available for online viewing:

http://www.atelier-de-marcel-hanoun.com/

Despite the lack of subtitles and the compromised screen size, I'd recommend giving these films and videos some time. Included among the 15 films is his most recent work, Insaisissable Image (2007), a video diary shot using his mobile phone camera, along with such older masterworks like La Vérité sur l'imaginaire passion d'un inconnu (1974, with Bresson discoveries Anne Wiazemsky and Isabelle Weingarten, and Hanoun-favourite Michel Lonsdale), The Authentic Trial of Carl-Emmanuel Jung (1966), and Otage (1989), among others.

ADDENDUM: Just noticed Nicole Brenez's translated column in the latest (e-)Cahiers du Cinema, A Class War (pp. 46-47), which discusses this event and gives us a brief translation of Hanoun's manifesto from his website:

"With poor and derisory resources, with the help and goodwill of those who have worked with me, I have been able to make my films. I have stolen them, torn them from a place in the shadows rarely offered to the Public, forbidden. My films have been removed from the propaganda of a certain critical intelligentsia - conventional, servile, lacking creativity and a spirit of discovery, surviving solely via association with a single commercial prospective. Today I offer up my own accomplished creations to the creative side, the conscious side, for the awakening of each of us, for the one found perpetually locked inside an anonymous entity, depersonalized, reduced to a global mass, the Public. I offer up individually, to whomever so desires them, my stolen films."

More in the comments below...

Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922 - 2008)

2008-02-19T11:40:00.007Z

"Why all the games?"
"Just to see your reactions."

- dialogue from Trans-Europ-Express (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1966)

Anthony Fragola: What is it that film can accomplish that the written work cannot? There must be something intrinsic to film that draws you to it. What is there in film that allows you to express what you want to express?

Alain Robbe-Grillet: There is nothing I want to express. I have nothing to express. I feel like manipulating forms. I paint because plastic forms interest me. I write literature because the structures of sentences and words interest me, and I make films because the image and the sound interest me. But for me, there is no relationship among these different activities. Well, yes, there is a relationship -- myself; that is all. But I am not at all like Marguerite Duras who can make a film with a novel or a novel with a film. For me that would absolutely never come to mind. For me that is a completely different kind of activity.

- excerpt from The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews With Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films (1992, eds. Fragola and Smith).

The image above is from Robbe-Grillet's Eden and After (1970), possibly my favourite of the few films I've seen by him. It is a film that contains some of the most striking images of all within this catalogue of seductive, haunting, mind-boggling imagery constituting his cinema. Within this film, fantasies play themselves out in a Tunisian desert, beginning from optical illusions to do with bodily fluids, leading to the infamous scene with the blindfolded woman and a bucket of scorpions. There are references to the paintings of Marcel Duchamp, most of all to 'Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2', signalling a shift in focus to the female characters in Robbe-Grillet's films from now on. Repetition (seduced to repulsed to seduced) as rupture.

Vaude and links

2008-02-12T08:34:00.000Z

The image above is from Johanna Vaude's De l'amort, which I recently saw along with her Exploration (both from 2006), two very fascinating - and explosively beautiful - exploratory short films where the technical hybridisation of painting, Super-8 film, and video, seems to contain a symbiotic coexistence of abstract and narrative sensibilities, perhaps the driving force behind the universe of Vaude's images. The great French critic Raphaël Bassan has written that one needs to watch her earlier piece L'Oeil sauvage to understand her approach and I intend to attempt to do that as soon as I can. More later...

* * *

Links of the day: (1.) Over at Quintín's and Flavia's La Lectora Provisoria, Roger Alan Koza interviews Jonathan Rosenbaum, on global cinephilia and the cinematic canon. In Spanish, so use your favourite web-translator - it's well worth it, and (2.) 'From black box to white cube' - a roundtable discussion on 'cinema' in the museum, with Pedro Costa, Catherine David, and moderated by Chris Dercon: "Cinema is not about the artist. It’s about being in the world, our world, choosing a place and figuring out elements of time and space and limits that are common to all of us. I believe that, if cinema goes beyond its realistic borders, it loses all of its powers. Look at Chaplin: it is not about him, it’s about us, from crossing a street to fighting a dictator" - Costa (via new filmkritik).

And I have finally added some links further down the page to other sites - mostly cinema-related (for now) blogs - that I frequent. This will remain a work in progress.

the body in its entirety

2008-02-06T07:56:00.000Z

Daney: As a filmmaker, what does the human face mean to you? You've admired this aspect of other directors' work, people like Dreyer or Bresson or Godard, for example, who continues filming faces. What is a face to you? Is it something that demands respect because it's too intimate or can we no longer film faces like Griffith did and we have to do it differently?

Rivette: I don't think it's a question of having the right... It's more that I don't want to separate... to split things up... I know that a lot of filmmakers, whether consciously or not, who have this notion of splitting the body into bits. Not just the face, it can be the hand or any part of the body. But obviously the face is the main focus of the body. But I know that, when I stand behind the camera and look into the eyepiece, I always have a tendency that I sometimes regret of stepping back somewhat, because when I have just the face I want to see the hands and when I have the hands I want to see the body. I always want to see the body in its entirety. And then the person or the backdrop... the elements in relation to which this body acts, reacts, moves, etc. I think it's simply linked to the fact that I don't have the temperament, the taste or the talent to make heavily edited films. My films focus more on the continuity of events taken as a whole. (...) With Anna, as with Juliet or Bulle - to name just three when I could name others - what I like about these actresses and indeed other actors like Jean-Pierre Léaud or Jean-Pierre Kalfon, is their entire body, the overall way the body moves and reacts from head to toe. And that's what I want to capture on film. I know what I'm saying is only half true. Because a filmmaker like Jean-Luc, who films very close in, knows that as he's filming a particular detail, what he's not filming will come across. If he's filming the face or another part of the body, you can feel the parts of the body that you can't see.

- Serge Daney and Jacques Rivette, from Jacques Rivette - Le veilleur (Claire Denis/Serge Daney, 1989).

Also see, very loosely-related: this post on 'Designated Sleeper', displaying the (unparalleled?) sartorial elegance of Juliet Berto in Rivette's Duelle.

"at your age, grief soon wears off"

2008-02-03T09:13:00.000Z

[from Toute une nuit (Chantal Akerman, 1982)]

[from Les Années 80 (Akerman, 1983)]

to a year gone

2008-01-02T06:29:00.000Z

This past year was a strange one when it came to my film-viewing habits. Frustratingly, my cinephilia only seemed to manifest itself in intermittent waves (usually to watch something utterly new to me, going against my resolution to go back to 'basics' - older favourites - this past year) which is when I dug into my unwatched pile of mostly older films with a pure desire for filmic sustenance, knowing that I won't be watching another film for days... (which, in reality, at times, stretched on for a week, sometimes two). As a result of the utter unpredictability of my viewing habits, my blogging suffered a great deal in these past few months. As per usual, the resolution this year is to watch more, write more, particularly on films which don't get seen enough, written about enough... Consider the following lists of films as subjects of potential posts that swirled in my head, never materialising (at least, not in the year that is gone).

Favourite new-ish films/film events experienced in 2007, in alphabetical order:

Autohystoria (Raya Martin)
Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako)
Belle toujours (Manoel de Oliveira)
De son appartement (Jean-Claude Rousseau)
Honor de cavalleria (Albert Serra)
Je suis une amoureuse (Jocelyne Desverchère)
July Trip (Waël Noureddine)
Juventude em Marcha / Tarrafal (Pedro Costa)
Profit motive and the whispering wind (John Gianvito)
Quei loro incontri (Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub) - seen for the first time in late 2006, but I returned to this several times earlier in 2007.
The Search (Kyle Canterbury)
Les Signes (Eugène Green)
Silêncio (François-Jacques Ossang)
State Legislature (Frederick Wiseman)
Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke)
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Tout est pardonné (Mia Hansen-Love)
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (Adam Curtis)
Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia (José Luis Guerín)
Viscera (Leighton Pierce)
Zodiac (David Fincher)
...and not to forget the untitled performance of filmic transformations spliced with live musique concrète deep into the night by La Cellule d'Intervention Metamkine.

Special mention goes to Johnny Gaddaar (Sriram Raghavan), the pulpy throwback to James Hadley Chase, The Asphalt Jungle, and Dev Anand thrillers from the 70s; despite its many flaws, it's one of the most compulsively watchable mainstream Hindi films in years.

Older films - masterpieces and near-masterpieces - seen for the first time in 2007 (there's bound to be others that I'm forgetting, and I wouldn't be surprised if I suddenly realise that I've included films here which I actually saw before 2007. I should keep a record of the films I see, even if things like this don't really matter much) :

Sicîlia! (Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, 1999)
La Nuit claire (Marcel Hanoun, 1979) - even without subtitles, this is one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen. I look forward to a more 'politically-correct' encounter and hopefully a write-up in the future... Can 2008 finally be the year of Marcel Hanoun?
Le Lit de la vierge (Philippe Garrel, 1969)
Angel Face (Otto Preminger, 1952)
The Old Place (Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville, 1998)
Route One USA (Robert Kramer, 1989)
H Story (Nobuhiro Suwa, 2001)
Parpaillon (Luc Moullet, 1993)
Les photos d'Alix (Jean Eustache, 1980)
The Connection (Shirley Clarke, 1962)
Silvestre (João César Monteiro, 1982)
Sleepwalk (Sara Driver, 1986)
Transition de phase dans les cristaux liquides (Jean Painlevé, 1978)
Diary (David Perlov, 1983) / Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre (Jean-Claude Rousseau, 1984) / Le Filmeur (Alain Cavalier, 2005)
Certificate No. X (Pierre Clementi, 1967-75)
Star Spangled to Death (Ken Jacobs, 2004)
'Rameau's Nephew' by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (Michael Snow, 1974)
The Fall (Peter Whitehead, 1969)
Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha, 1964)
Love Affair: Or, The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Dušan Makavejev, 1967)
Harold Stevenson #1 and #2 (Danny Williams, 1965)
Toutes les nuits (Eugène Green, 2001)
Trade Tattoo (Len Lye, 1937)
Sergeant Rutledge (John Ford, 1960)
Ixe (Lionel Soukaz, 1980)
Death Powder (Shigeru Izumiya, 1986)
The Power of Emotion (Alexander Kluge, 1983)
The Red Light Bandit (Rogério Sganzerla, 1968)
L'Acadie, l'Acadie?!? (Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault, 1971)

...and special mention goes to my late-night, back-to-back viewings of Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, 1964) and Strip Nude For Your Killer (Andrea Bianchi, 1975). I must watch more giallo!

And finally, for the sake of closure, here's my favourite music of '07, new and old:

Karen Dalton - Cotton Eyed Joe: The Loop Tapes/ Live in Boulder 1962
Alice Coltrane - Journey in Satchidananda and Ptah, the El Daoud
Suicide - Suicide ('77)
Robert Wyatt - Comicopera *best new album of the year, as far as I'm concerned. Everything leading up to and including 'Out of the Blue' is just jaw-dropping...
Marin Marais - La Folia (Purcell Quartet)
Panda Bear - Person Pitch
Abida Parveen - Raqs-e-Bismil
The Pentangle - Sweet Child
William Basinski - El Camino Real
Hala Strana - Heave the Gambrel Roof
Death Ambient - Drunken Forest
M.I.A. - Kala
Me'Shell NdegéOcello - The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams
Earth - Hibernaculum
Pearls Before Swine - Balaklava
John Dowland - Complete Lute Works Vol. 1-5
Martha & the Muffins - This is the Ice Age
Shuggie Otis - Inspiration Information
Throbbing Gristle - Part Two: The Endless Not

Happy 2008, all!!

untangle

2007-12-16T01:40:00.000Z

grids within grids

2007-12-05T07:37:00.000Z

"The verbal dialectic in Muybridge's catalogue between the generalising titles and the precise data of the notes corresponds to a dialectic within the images. It might be called a dialectic of subject and method. The inherently compelling subject - naked men and women - is set into a neutral framework. The timeless, functionless, autonomous human actions depicted - actions often adapted from Romantic painting - are countered by the site in which they take place, commanded by the gridwork. The grid, in turn, implies the systematic methodology of which it is part. It's use was suggested by Thomas Aikens, a painter noted for his careful studies of perspective and anatomy, to facilitate analysis of the movements. The white crosslines formed a network of regular coordinates making it possible to plot the movements superimposed on them in the photographs. But the grid has another effect: because it is the most inert, inorganic mode of delineating space, the rectangular grid provides the most dramatic means of establishing the separateness of human beings from the physical objects surrounding them."

[Image: 'A Shock to the Nervous System', taken from Muybridge's The Human Figure in Motion: An Electrophotographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Muscular Actions (p. 117). Text: Narration in Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (Thom Andersen, 1975).]

of questioning, of experience

2007-11-08T11:30:00.000Z

"An image in avant-garde cinema is something irreducible to one conception, it's the exploration of all possible conceptions, which don't pre-exist the exploration itself - for example, the industrial cinema falls within Hegel's formula "art is what decorates our internal and external environments", this 'impoverished' conception of art is precisely what the dominant cinema insists on, that it be a psychic and social ornament, what's called a 'diversion', a conception not reprehensible per se but which is a problem because it is imperialistic... because it occupies the entire field of images... Experimental cinema implies the field, the site, of a critical questioning of the world in general, of experience in the political, ethnological, anthropological and metaphysical senses...

"... I prefer to think that an ouevre doesn't fix any mission for itself, but that it exists, breaks things open, introduces disorder into what was believed to be an ineluctable political and in particular ideological order, art as catastrophe in fact."

- Nicole Brenez, interviewed in Fergus Daly's indispensable and "heroic" (to use critic/filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain's apt description) film-essay, Experimental Conversations (2006), a work that draws compelling associations between French avant-garde cinema culture and the contemporary Irish experimental film/video scene, unfolding in a series of chapters with titles such as 'Every Potentiality of the Medium', 'From Futurism to Rock N'Roll - In Praise of Artisans' and 'The Redemptive Power of Cinema?', their fluid unraveling charged by the juxtaposition of excerpts of several of the works under discussion, and the genuinely stimulating discourse; besides Brenez, there's also Philippe Grandrieux, Raymond Bellour, Jackie Raynal, Vivienne Dick, FJ Ossang, Gerard Byrne, Malcolm Le Grice, Max Le Cain, and several other voices, singular yet magnificently entangled within the movement of the essay.

(Above: Two excerpts from Experimental Conversations, the first featuring commentary by Brenez, and the second featuring Grandrieux and Brenez.)

the domestic interiors of Jean-Claude Rousseau

2007-11-02T11:00:00.000Z

"La beauté n'est jamais fictive."
- Jean-Claude Rousseau

"But in such a short film which consists of extremely simple images and sounds,we feel Rousseau gives his absolute confidence to space and sounds.-as if each shot answers"yes" when you ask " Is such an image valuable?"."
- Daisuke Akasaka

"The deceptively simple filming technique, too, provides us with many opportunities for surprise, an emotion requiring a transfer of energy: a lightning bolt. Rousseau’s films feed this courant by using different methods of exposure: exposure of light, hazy through the curtains of a room, changing at the whim of the hours, burning the white surfaces, scarring the black interiors with a golden rectangle, veiling the film from time to time like a stained-glass window. Exposure of places, each mapped out by the filmmaker, lighted differently according to their orientation. Exposure of the main musical theme, variations of which the film declines. Exposure of the film strip, revealing the filler and the uninterrupted takes. Exposure, also, of the filmmaker as he enters the scene, sits, glances occasionally at the camera, explores the frame for the length of this shot that he himself, conceived, and disappears. It must be said that one can also undergo “exposure” to pillory and torture. The filmmaker’s process is long and agonizingly lonely; the periods of waiting exacerbate the bitterness of his hypothesis as well as the sensuality of his moments of bedazzlement."
- Erik Bullot

A few scattered thoughts follow on this remarkable release by Dérives from earlier this year: three key Jean-Claude Rousseau short films - Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre (1984), Deux fois le tour du monde (2006), and Faux départ (2006). Here is a chance to discover this filmmaker whom Jean-Marie Straub has called, along with Frans Van de Staak and Peter Nestler, the greatest working in Europe in these times (Rousseau has, in addition, shot and edited Straub-Huillet's Cinétract: Europa 2005 - 27 octobre).

Each of the three shorts included is an absolute wonder, unexpectedly coherent (in the 'mise-en-scene' - a lonely (hotel) room with an open window and the landscape in view just beyond, shifting patterns of light within this enclosed space, and the constant movements of the filmmaker into and out of this frame) and dramatically self-reflexive (we watch as the filmmaker arranges his 'set' or captures a self-portrait in a mirror or, seemingly, does nothing).

These films and videos constitute an intense exploration of composition, geometry, and light in relation to sound, or the absence of it. Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre (shot on 8mm) approaches this by exposing a breach between image and sound, but the latter videos use direct sound to invite us to discover the image through the sound - in Deux Fois le tour du monde , we see an image of a still landscape first, only to discover its material reality upon hearing the sound it produces as the shot continues. "No music which covers the images, but musical sounds." The human voice, usually Rousseau's, whether in conversation with another on the phone, or reading an existing text (a letter, Racine), announces itself in a similar way as in Straub-Huillet's films and lends a certain potency, a veritable endurance to the images.

Words and silences embedded within a two-dimensional image (supported by 8mm film or video), the flatness invoking Vermeer-esque domestic interiors, as in Jeune femme, which, of course, takes its cue from the Vermeer painting... :

Femme lisant une lettre face à une fenêtre ouverte (Jan Vermeer, 1657)

...or seems to echo the compositional studies in the interiors of Vilhelm Hammershøi:

Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunlight, Interior of the Artist's Home (Hammershøi, 1900)

It is as Alain Cavalier comments to his off-screen wife in his wonderful video diary, La Rencontre: "I wanted to bring you something wonderful but all I've got is a description of a room... It's just occurred to me how striking it is, perhaps because I can film it."

Rousseau's films not just make objects and landscapes visible, or sounds and voices audible, but find different ways of making use of light, creating a spectacle - an event - out of its capturing on film, even if what we are actually seeing is the simplest of acts. Recorded - and appreciated - silently, in a shared temporary solitude.

Painlevé and Eisenstein

2007-09-09T12:37:00.000+01:00

"Painlevé would often champion the work of others, paying particular attention to films that faced government censorship. One such film was Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, which chronicled the unsuccessful 1905 revolution against the Russian tsar. Viewed as Communist propaganda, the film was deemed "subversive" by European officials and censored. Thus, when Painlevé and his friend, the documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, screened it in Amsterdam, they posted sentries at the theater door to watch for police. When the police did arrive, Painlevé and Ivens quickly stopped the projection, grabbed the film reels, and with the audience in tow, scurried to another theater. There, too, the screening was interrupted by police. So the group moved again. In the course of one evening, the group moved six times, but in the end Battleship Potemkin was shown in its entirety.

When Eisenstein himself came to Paris in 1930, Painlevé asked his father for help with with the officials. Paul Painlevé ordered the head of the French police to leave the filmmaker alone. During the visit, Painleve took Eisenstein on a grand tour of Paris: to Palais Royal square, to a café where poet Alfred de Musset reputedly sipped absinthe, to the Comédie-Française to ogle at the lavishly dressed crowd. "He enjoyed this classic bourgeouis scene," Painlevé would later recall. "I also took him to the Cigale theater to see an exceptional American film Red Christmas. Afterward, we wandered around the Clichy fairgrounds... and had our photo taken in a mock airplane." Painlevé also arranged for Eisenstein to travel secretly to Switzerland: "I had him hidden in a van of dirty laundry. He wanted to see Valeska Gert, a Swiss actress he adored." When Eisenstein left Europe for the United States and Mexico, he wrote a series of postcards to Painlevé in which he chronicled his travels."

- an anecdote or two, from Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé (eds: Bellows and McDougall), an excellent text to accompany while viewing Painlevé's films.

absence

2007-09-04T13:03:00.000+01:00

Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot With a Fan (1872)

Costa carte blanche

2007-08-26T11:23:00.000+01:00

Just recently while looking for any information on De Son Appartement, the new film by Jean-Claude Rousseau, I came across the program for the Festival International du Documentaire de Marseille, held back in early July, which sounds like the place to have been. Pedro Costa was the guest of honour: in addition to a complete retrospective of Costa's films, the festival also screened a number of his carte blanche selections:

Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur)
Beauty #2 (Andy Warhol)
Jaime ( António Reis)
Os Verdes Anos (Paolo Rocha)
Billie Holiday sings 'Fine and Mellow' (segment from The Sound of Jazz )
From the Clouds to the Resistance (Straub-Huillet)
Unknown Chaplin (Kevin Brownlow / David Gill)

Also, in the same festival, Apichatpong Weerasethakul presided over a jury which awarded prizes to De Son Appartement (Rousseau), He Fengming (Wang Bing), and Autohystoria (Raya Martin), all of which I long to see...

Lothringen!

2007-08-26T10:33:00.000+01:00

"Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow.

Would the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments."

-Khalil Gibran, The Prophet: Houses

For their 21-minute film, Lothringen! (1994), Straub and Huillet return to Straub's place of birth, Metz, in the Lorraine region (in German: Lothringen) in the northeast of France. All their films that I've seen are landscape films in some respect, and this is no exception. Horizontal axes anchor the images in almost every frame: horizons, borders, lines of confluence between rivers, roads, villages, valleys, distant mountains, the sky, just as vertical structures emerge and announce their materiality: trees, lamp posts, statues, bodies. And the wind that blows through the landscape, as resisting and absolute as the voices of the two characters* (he is German, she is French, in a post-1870 War encounter), in a seemingly concise summation of Maurice Barrès' Colette Baudoche (which I haven't read) - the 'narrative' in the film existing outside the panoramic shots of the countryside, captured in spectacular slow pans in either direction (the spectacle, the surprise of discovery through sight and sound as potent here as in any other Straub-Huillet film) that recall their earlier Too Early, Too Late. Lothringen! appears to be a reflection on Metz, its history and geography (Lorraine borders with three other countries including Germany, where Straub's reported self-exile will take him during the Algerian War, and the film was made in separate French and German versions) and, to an extent, I think, a blurring of the margins associated with this landscape, thus resisting Barrès' nationalist text.

(* or are they phantoms, or perhaps mythical creatures, who have wandered through time - Colette's costumes intact! - into one that resembles ours...?)

Earth of the People

2007-07-31T11:41:00.000+01:00

Mardkants yerkire / Earth of the People (Artavazd Peleshian, 1966)

(via Daniel Hayes)

essence

2007-07-31T11:04:00.000+01:00

"I make films and videos that are short experiences in transformative time. I strive to capture an active and immediate emotional state during shooting, often by photographing seemingly mundane activities. In editing, I distill the images to get to what I would call “emotionally charged nodes”. This process begins with a recognition of the emotional and rhythmic potential of an image, continues as I sequence the images, and finishes with the rendering and juxtaposition of these images against the filter of a carefully constructed soundtrack. The sounds are never the sound heard while recording the image. Rather, the soundscape is a construction that seems to come from the visual image but, in reality, works to isolate the emotional potential of the images. My films and videos are not ideas that are then executed. They are elaborations of active engagements with a present moment that is already past. In many ways, my work is more similar to the process of image construction in poetry, music, and painting, than it is to that of narrative or argumentative forms of filmmaking. It is a process that allows viewers to invest a great deal of their own imagination and memory, their own emotion, into these audio/visual episodes. It is that process of creating an image in the mind of the viewer--the psychological filling-in of the imagined space, not the actual photograph of a space--that interests me the most."

-Leighton Pierce.

Eight of Leighton Pierce's recent, short digital video experiments were screened during the AIFF last week. My memory of these already-evasive films is fading fast (it is unforgivable that I now can't recall the soundscape of most of these films, and it is an element that's as important as the image in Pierce's films - he was a musician before he was a filmmaker) and I'm left with rushes of exuberant colours and enigmatic forms and a strong desire of discovering some of them again (esp. Viscera, but also Water Seeking Its Level and A Private Happiness). Transitions between images are indecipherable here and they exist in a seeming flux, like the subject of water-as-an-element which these films keep returning to. At times, it seems Pierce is capturing the beauty, the ecstasy contained in matter before its inevitable disappearance (Evaporation, Wood), while in others his work comes across as a wondrous, childlike rediscovery of the world (literally in Fall, and also Water Seeking Its Level with its precious exclamation "Dad, look!") or documentaries on the assemblage of memories (A Private Happiness, Viscera). Each of these short works is an exploration of such transient rhythms in a specific environment (the hotel room in A Private Happiness, the backyard in Wood, the stream in Water Seeking Its Level), seemingly refracted and folded such that the captured quotidian moment becomes protracted, eternal. This is perfectly rendered in The Back Steps which repeats a lush, dissolved shot of Pierce's children - a girl and a boy, dressed for Halloween - as they joyously move down steps into the wilderness that is the backyard, "a moving Velasquez", as Jon Jost himself notes. And then there is Viscera, an astonishing piece on the recreation of a presence through remnants of their being, memories of their gestures, as molded in the impressionistic contours of light. A film built upon cascading refractions. The film dissolves in the memory as one watches it and (perhaps compounded by my own increasingly treacherous short-term memory) now I barely have any concrete recollection of it at all...

passing through ruins...

2007-07-30T08:50:00.000+01:00

... in Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa) and Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke).

Metamkine

2007-07-19T13:14:00.000+01:00

Heinrich Deisl:

Metamkine deal with a rudimentary, even archaeological understanding of cinema and music in order to arrive at the essence of the respective medium... The musical rhythm loops, which are at times perceived as pulsating, other times below the perception threshold, do not fall into the trance-like, repetitive machine beat of techno music. (Metamkine) view rhythm as layers of sound, sound colouration, drones or sequencing which, apart from intensely territorialising the body, at the same time also captures the largest human hearing organ, the skin, by making use of the complete frequency range....

Since 1987 the French artists Jérôme Noetinger, Christophe Auger und Xavier Quérel have been working together as Celulle d'Intervention Metamkine. Their performances have a rather haptic air about them, since they exclusively handle various Super8- and 16mm-films and vintage synthesisers. What makes them differ from other formations is simply that Auger and Quérel, by manually controlling projectors, convert them practically into visual instruments which enter into spontaneous interaction with the analogue music and by doing so, significantly determine the overall composition... Operational sounds such as the clattering of projectors blend in with partially crude analogue layers of sound or sound fragments of the prefabricated magnetic tapes; at times the smell of (un)intentionally burnt filmstrips fills the air. The filmstrips, which are edited as loops, are self-produced or found footage, and through the choreographies which are evaluated in extensive rehearsals, they generate a performative image space in which the depicted transforms into a sculptural replica. Adding to this, Metamkine work with a set of mirrors, so that through extra deflections and refractions the projections are ad infinitum expanded, fragmented, bent – beyond recognition.

More here. Also see: Yann Beauvais.

It was an ecstatic performance. I'm not entirely sure how they were doing it but whatever I saw that night was a result of live transformation of mostly original material on 8mm and 16mm. I could count four projectors and two mirrors, perhaps there were more. The above paragraphs offer a much better description of their aesthetic than I can at this moment...

prelude

2007-07-13T14:01:00.000+01:00

As part of the 39th Auckland IFF, La Cellule d'Intervention Metamkine will be performing their Lettrist experiments and live celluloid transformations tonight. I'm intrigued by the tantalising images on their site - I think I'm going for this.

As always, there's several films on the programme this year which I'll be seeing over the next two weeks (while taking no time off work, by the way), but, strangely, few which I'm truly excited about. I think I'll get into the swing of the festival once the actual encounters with the films begin... Bitter disappointment over the films that were surely left out to make room for the many hip documentaries and audience favourites that decorate the programme has by now subsided and given way to an anxiousness over keeping up the energy levels (what's Olaf Möller's secret when it comes to this?!) to experience whatever is screening - Killer of Sheep, for instance, with Charles Burnett in attendance (that alone makes up for any programming fuck-ups this year). Also on the bright side, the festival's more experimental selections continue to impress: along with Metamkine, there's a selection of films by Leighton Pierce, a handful by Danny Williams, and perhaps a couple others which I have to look into. Plus Weerasethakul, Jia, Oliveira, Lynch, Ferran, Serra, Van Sant, Sissako... OK, so maybe now I'm getting excited... In the meantime, I've just received a package from a cine-comrade (to borrow a term from Zach Campbell) containing the latest works by Ossang and Noureddine, so perhaps, if time allows, I'll watch these soon and tell myself they also screened at the festival. Just as long as I'm not betrayed by my inertia...

#100

2007-07-13T11:46:00.000+01:00

Above: A phantom materialises at the will of the spoken word in Eugène Green's Le Monde vivant (2003), and Monteverdi's 'Lamento della Ninfa' (Cantus Cölln et. al.), which makes several appearances in Green's Le Pont des Arts (2004).

----- ----- -----

Even though theatre and cinema can arrive at the same spiritual result, the means they use are completely different, and even opposite. That's why I had problems in the theatre. For me the reality of theatre is always based on something completely false, and assumed as such; that is, for the theatre to be real, the actors and the audience have to be aware at all times that they are in the theatre, and that they are using and recognizing codes: it's through the absolute falsity of these codes that they arrive at an absolute truth. Whereas in the cinema - which is of course also a representation - the basic raw material is always a reality, whether it's that of a human being, an inanimate object, some sort of material, a tree, or an animal: in every case, the shot contains a real energy. The specificity of cinema is to capture fragments of reality, and to make the spectator see in them things that he wouldn't have been aware of had he observed them in their natural context. That's why for me cinema is always a spiritual expression: it can make you see things which are invisible in the material world...

A psychological interpretation is always false. If you manage to capture the inner truth of a human being, you always capture a mystery which resists analysis. But psychology is rational analysis, and psychological acting is a rationalization. An actor thinks: I'm supposed to be angry‚ and he's going to do something with his voice or his body to show he's angry, thinking at the same time that the audience mustn't realise he's thinking about it: that means there's an intellectual process between his inner energy and what he shows. Whereas I want the words to hit him and release his emotions directly: I want the emotions to be absolutely real and authentic, coming from his inner life, with all its mystery, which is the thing that interests me the most. In that I resemble Bresson, I think.

- Eugène Green

A couple more links for now: Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope, and Ken Chen in Film International.

another loss

2007-07-02T12:40:00.000+01:00

"I have a hundred stories to tell, one for each character in A Brighter Summer Day..."
- Edward Yang (1947 - 2007)

scenes from a parallel life

2007-06-23T06:00:00.000+01:00

Some notes on Sara Driver's Sleepwalk (1986):

An eerie, clambering sense of paranoia runs through Sleepwalk's progressively nocturnal space, making a somewhat surprising engagement with Cat People and Kiss Me Deadly (visually, Driver's film compares especially well with Tourneur's). More interestingly, is this, despite whatever technical modesties of 'the debut feature', the secret response of contemporary American cinema to the narrative traditions of Feuillade, Cocteau, and Rivette?

At least Rosenbaum, I think, has compared the film favourably to Duelle, and it's a fascinating alignment that is making Sleepwalk richer in memory by the passing day. In isolated events, such as the chilling scream that comes out of nowhere and shatters the silence in both films: Hermine Karagheuz in Duelle, and Ann Magnuson in Sleepwalk, the latter upon losing all her hair, just like the selfish woman in the ancient Chinese text that her roommate Nicole (Suzanne Fletcher) is translating till late in the night, alone in the run-down building that houses the print shop where she works, where lights and machines silently switch on and come alive when no one is around. In the fact that the characters in the two films are circling around an object that is desired for its supernatural powers, passed from one to the other in acts of confidence and/or subsequent betrayal.

There is also the context of the fiction resulting from the process of the engulfment of one narrative by another (cf. Duelle, where there is a progressive construction of the 'narrative' by goddesses after a magical gem that possesses transformative powers, directly controlling the actions of all other characters), as the events from the manuscript invade 'reality', and of the terror that is conveyed by this gradual dissolution of any difference between the reality of Nicole's daily life and the fantastic occurrences seemingly unleashed by the manuscript, the centre of which is the nightmarish sequence in the elevator, immediately followed by Nicole's long walk back to her downtown Manhattan apartment through dark, deserted streets and alleys that seem to be charged by her somehow-transformed presence.

Speaking about Rivette's Histoire de Marie et Julien, Michael J. Anderson says:

"Rivette structures his film not as a dream or a series of dreams, but instead eviscerates any distinction between dream and reality, establishing a logic present only in fiction – there is no distinction between consciousness and subconsciousness, dream and reality, life and death, but rather, all is fiction."

All is fiction. The smell of almonds, the bleeding fingers, eyes that glow green, the barking man, Ecco Ecco, the 'kidnapped' son and his feeble attempt to escape from the suitcase he's been zipped in.

I think I'll have some more to say about the film after another viewing, which I look forward to.

tenebroso

2007-06-23T05:56:00.000+01:00

Caravaggio, Salome With the Head of John the Baptist (c. 1609, oil on canvas)

Georges de La Tour, Repenting Magdalene / Magdalene Before Mirror (late 1630s, oil on canvas)

not necessarily something visible

2007-05-30T12:45:00.000+01:00

(Who knows when I'll get to see the film, but...) Naomi Kawase, upon receiving the Grand Prix at Cannes for The Mourning Forest:

It's wonderful to have been able to make films and to continue making them. I'm happy. It's very difficult to make a film. I think it's as difficult as living; it is similar to live. In a life, you also encounter many difficulties, many things that make you suffer; there are many things that make you hesitate or stumble on your path. At those moments, I believe, you look for something deep within that can restore your confidence and strength. You try to find strengths – and I don't mean money, cars, or clothing – it's not necessarily something visible. It can be the wind, the light, the memory of the Ancients which gives us their strength. And when you find that foothold in the world, you can be all alone and go on. Thank you for appreciating my film, for recognizing what I wanted to say with it. Thank you very much! This is a wonderful world.

recent listens

2007-05-26T10:36:00.000+01:00

Shirley Collins' very unique 1969 album, Anthems in Eden, is a collection of medieval folk songs, starting with the 28-minute 'A Song-Story' that traces a doomed love affair through a string of stories - her voice is raw and affecting, and the musical accompaniment (provided by her sister, Dolly, among other artists) recreates a Renaissance soundscape with the use of primitive instruments like the sackbut and the crumhorn. These are songs which would not be out of place in John Huston's A Walk With Love and Death or Joao César Monteiro's Silvestre (two great films that I saw for the first time some weeks ago). The subsequent album, Love, Death & the Lady (1970), is a sparer, darker work, and perhaps as essential. Reportedly recorded during the breakdown of the two sisters' marriages, these are songs about loss, loneliness and at times, violence. Josephine Foster, I now realise, is a direct musical descendent.

To add to these is another discovery: Dorothy Carter and her first album, Troubadour (1976). This beautiful, dreamy clamour of medieval-sounding instruments (I'm told they include the hammer dulcimer and the psaltery) deserves a closer examination. For now, it's just waiting to be discovered. Along with playing these ancient instruments, Carter sings on four songs, her voice almost a psychedelic element in itself, at different times quivering with childlike wonder, or manifesting the aged wisdom of an old, old woman. I have to look into her later albums (she kept recording until her death in 2003), but they don't seem to be easy to track down... For me, these recordings are up there with Anne Briggs' The Time Has Come, Vashti Bunyan's Just Another Diamond Day, and Karen Dalton's It's So Hard To Tell... as the great 'primitive-maiden-folk' albums of their time.

Some other recent discoveries and repeat listens:
Pandit Pran Nath - Midnight: Raga Malkauns
Roshan Ara Begum (many more ultra-rare performances by legendary classical Indian musicians to explore)
Pearls Before Swine - Balaklava
Pentangle - Cruel Sister / Sweet Child
William Basinski - Shortwavemusic
Arnold Schoenberg - The Piano Music (Maurizio Pollini)
Alexander von Schlippenbach - Pakistani Pomade
A. K. Salim - Afro Soul/Drum Orgy
And lots of Alice Coltrane.

(2007 music: electro-melancholy and long dusty roads.)

sing the body electric

2007-05-26T09:57:00.001+01:00

Images from, and quotes on, the films of Matthias Müller:

Aus der ferne (1989)
"By emphasizing the materiality of the film, Müller sets up one of its most striking metaphors: the film as body. The metaphor is enacted through both the celluloid film strip and the camera. Müller's reshooting and hand-processing techniques demonstrate a fetishistic attitude to the medium. The film materializes as an object to be cherished, but it is one that can be touched and felt, subsequently undergoing a variety of transformations at the hands of its filmmaker. There is indeed a distinct eroticism to Müller's treatment of the film footage, particularly in the way his transformations of the film appear as imprints on a sensuous surface." (Roger Hallas)

Sleepy Haven (1993)
"Its mottled, fissured surfaces resemble nothing so much as a body, its solarized apertures imparting a hallucinatory beauty which threatens always to break apart entirely, the skin of its material support pitilessly stretched across their fantastical recline." (Mike Hoolboom)

Scattering Stars (1994)
"...a paean to light, a glittering bodice of a film that rapturously unfolds its subject with a shimmering luminosity. Photographed in a luminously grainy super-8, its depiction of an orgasmic fireworks display, rendered here in monochromatic explosions of light and dark, underscores a furtive male passion, bodies glimpsed in retreat..." (Mike Hoolboom)

the pataphysical gag considered as an uphill bicycle race

2007-05-16T12:47:00.000+01:00

Gag: "More narrative and often more abstract than a sketch, the gag is short in form and relatively autonomous, and in itself does not necessarily belong to film (there are theatrical, and even musical or pictorial gags). In its most general form, it is characterised by the incongruous and surprising resolution of a situation that may or may not be realistic in its premises ... The gag, in most cases, is less inclined to mobilise cinematic language than body language." [Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, as cited by Fabien Boully in his essay on Luc Moullet's Parpaillon (1993).]

There is a great example in Parpaillon of a kind of situational gag - one among numerous others in the film - to which the film keeps returning to: that of the girl who cannot unlock her bike from a tree (because she brought the wrong key during this important cycling rally through the Parpaillon mountain pass), tracing her narrative-fragment solely through her expressions and body language (until she eventually, triumphantly brings herself back into the race!).

43:20

52:26

55:13

1:00:52

on Pyaasa

2007-05-07T11:05:00.000+01:00

"In a way, Bombay Cinema had anticipated Pyaasa. Devdas, the hero troubled by a death wish, makes way for Vijay, the poet unable to come to grips with the redefinition of the poetic vocation under postcolonial Indian capitalism. But this is to overlook what Guru Dutt finally does with the form. In his hands the form is twisted quite radically, the narrative loosened up, and we get glimpses of the possibility of the reworking of the epic form in the new capitalist order. In this reworking, the text is less rigidly structured, its plot not quite so carefully measured, and the heroic action remains ambiguous to the end. To achieve this, Guru Dutt introduces the figure of the heroine who is neither an achhut kanya (the untouchable girl of Himansu Rai's film of that name) nor a crippled nartaki (the dancer of Kismet). What we get instead is the figure of the "unromanticized" prostitute, someone like P.C. Barua's Chandramukhi (in Devdas) but without her reformist tendencies. For a brief moment women in Bombay Cinema come of age and begin to anticipate their radical representation in Indian Middle Cinema films such as Ankur (The Seedling, 1974) and Arth (Substance, 1983). But for a moment only, as Guru Dutt continues to work within what Ashis Nandy has referred to as popular middle-class cinema. Pyaasa must be read, in the final analysis, not through the thematizations of the hero as poet but through the manner in which it reads the marginalized Indian woman. With all his Romantic limitations -- Waheeda Rehman as Gulabo is both far too attractive and her sensibility is far too labored -- Guru Dutt nevertheless makes the relationship between stars and audience much more complex. In the end the text remains fragile. Despite the elements of the popular -- songs and sanitized representations that characterize the genre -- the text's fragility (formal and ideological) draws us to Guru Dutt as auteur."

- Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (2002).

From left: Waheeda Rehman in Pyaasa (1957); Shabana Azmi in Ankur (1974); Smita Patil in Bhumika (1977).

How Are You Doing Tonight

2007-04-20T12:13:00.000+01:00

Jonas Mekas sings with the Himalayas at Zebulon, Brooklyn, in his video for Day 39 (February 8, 2007) of his 365 Films project. I hope folks have been following this series - so far we've got all sorts of interesting clips, new and old, captured by Mekas' ever-alive camera and often coloured by his trademark poetic optimism: from encounters with Susan Sontag, Béla Tarr, Peter Kubelka, Yoko Ono, Ken Jacobs, Harmony Korine, Zoë Lund, Kenneth Anger, et al, to live performances by Nina Hagen, Ornette Coleman, Tony Conrad, and Madonna, to poetry recitals, Andy Warhol anecdotes, and great jokes involving a priest and a leprechaun.

deluge

2007-04-18T10:10:00.000+01:00

Carlo Carrà, The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911, Oil on canvas)

Image from Ma 6-T va crack-er (Jean-François Richet, 1997)

Pierre Clémenti (2)

2007-04-17T12:55:00.000+01:00

Staying with French 'underground' cinema: Five of the rarest and most personal films directed by Pierre Clémenti through the sixties and seventies have recently surfaced on DVD with English subtitles - an event that should not go uncelebrated. The two discs contain five radical works of concrete poetry that range from his first experiences with a Beaulieu 16mm camera to his years-in-the-making feature-length fiction, In the Shadow of the Blue Rascal. Clémenti eventually completed Blue Rascal after serving a 14-month jail term in 1977-78, and continued to perform in films and theatre until his death in 1999 at age 57. These films, a cascade of impressionistic, psychedelic images interlaced with diaristic narration and rock-and-roll, coalesced over years of filming within the Parisian underground art scene, with actors, musicians, friends, lovers serving as subjects, performers, technicians. In my attempt to describe these films, I can't do any better than quoting the one and only Nicole Brenez, whose following paragraph from her essay on the films of Peter Whitehead also largely applies to those of Clémenti's:

From plastic abstraction to documentary reportage, from psychic investigation to political pamphleteering, from the autobiographical essay to a demonstration of the powers of montage, from graphic and textural work to militant revindication – Whitehead's work accomplishes an exceptional synthesis, open to every different dimension of avant-garde cinema, tending towards perceptual explosion and euphoric fusion with phenomena.

All the films included on the discs are special in one way or another: New Old (1979) is a poetic journey through Clémenti's career - visible as an actor, invisible as a filmmaker - and chaotic stray images (some of which would later come to be part of Blue Rascal) shot from the very beginning, exist as multiple superimpositions that form Clémenti's fragmented and intensely personal ruminations on media, art, politics, relationships (Warhol Superstar, Viva features prominently), memory and rock-n-roll. The Revolution Is Only the Beginning, Let's Continue Fighting (1968): "Half family photo album, half ciné-tract, the film was shot in Paris during the events of May '68 and in Rome where the actor was featuring in the film Partner* by Bertolucci." Rediscovered in a basement in 1999, this silent film appears to be one of Clémenti's most purely beautiful and concentrated works, at times recalling Brakhage and Eisenstein. À l'ombre de la canaille bleue / In the Shadow of the Blue Rascal (1978-85), the only purely fictional film here, deserves its own separate post after subsequent viewings. Strangely, it reminded me of Ossang's Treasure of the Bitch Islands, with its absurdist humour and voiceover narration, perpetual wanderings in the night, its pre-industrial rock soundtrack. This also features one of the coolest end titles ever, a true testament to artistic fraternity and homage to Clémenti's frequent collaborators: Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Valerie Lagrange, Margareth Clémenti, Yves Beneyton, and many others. Le Soleil (1988) is Clémenti's favourite among his own works. I understand it forms a cinematic complement to his autobiographical final play, Chronique d'une mort retardée / Chronicles of a Delayed Death, a search for beauty and meaning in his life in the form of lengthy monologues, again, to the accompaniment of a wealth of images, trembling, superimposed with each other and with the author's thought processes. Clémenti at his most vulnerable and Rimbaud-esque (refer to Jeunesse from Illuminations).

And, most astonishing of all, Visa de Censure and Carte de voeux, both of which form Certificate No. X (1967-75), a shadow of a precursor to the films of Étant-Donnés. In these hardcore masterpieces, the screen attains the status of a giant perforation through which naked ritualism and elemental textures must dance: it's like witnessing the birth of Ecstasy! The film's rapturous use of colour brings to mind Kenneth Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother. It is this violent, hypnotic, defining presence of colour that is the film's driving energy, propelling bodies, texts, abstract figures, light, into each other, into new rhythmic forms. Clémenti: "The youth of this film (1967) was the emotions, the events, the reflections, the course of time... For the assembly, a selection of scenes over several years, like old wine, fragmented of new inventions, discoveries, new rates/rhythms gave to this first film all innocence and the joy of rediscovering intact the mystery of the cinematograph."

* According to Philippe Azoury, Garrel admires Bertolucci's Marx-/Freud-/Godard-inspired Partner and, of course, Clementi himself [the latter appeared in many of Garrel's experimental films (Le Lit de la vierge, La Cicatrice intérieure, Berceau de cristal)], and made his own masterpiece on the events of May '68 two years ago, Regular Lovers.

the faces of Pierre Clémenti

2007-04-17T11:29:00.000+01:00

He always seemed to pick the right filmmakers to work with, appearing in films by Garrel, Rivette, Pasolini, Rocha, Jancso, Makavejev, Buñuel, Monteiro, Bertolucci, Visconti, and others. His performances were always memorable, at times unforgettable - an uneasy fusion of devilish charm and angelic beauty (in the same year he appeared as Jesus in Garrel's La Lit de la vierge, he had a very special appearance as the Devil in Buñuel's The Milky Way).

Free Thai Cinema!

2007-04-17T11:13:00.000+01:00

The film “Sang Satawat” (“Syndromes and a Century”), recently submitted to the Censorship Board, was not approved for release in Thailand unless cuts are made. The Board would permit the release on the condition that four cuts were excised. As a result, director Apichatpong Weerasethakul decided to cancel commercial release of the film in Thailand and stood firm that these cuts not be made. He has issued a statement:

“I, a filmmaker, treat my works as my own sons or my daughters. When I conceived them, they have their own lives to live. I don't mind if people are fond of them, or despise them, as long as I created them with my best intentions and efforts. If these offspring of mine cannot live in their own country for whatever reasons, let them be free. Since there are other places that warmly welcome them as who they are, there is no reason to mutilate them from the fear of the system, or from greed. Otherwise there is no reason for one to continue making art.”

If you haven't already signed the petition that demands that changes be made to archaic legislations that mutilate films as this, you can do so here.

(P.S. - A new post should be up soon. Hold on!)

a just image / just an image

2007-04-04T13:06:00.000+01:00

"I beg your pardon for disturbing you during your class struggle. I know it is very important. But which way to the political film?"

- woman to Glauber Rocha in Vent d'est (Wind From the East, Godard, 1970)

"... a revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another..."

Mao Tse-Tung, as quoted in War in the Shadows: The Classic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Persia to the Present, Robert B. Asprey, p. 247

"In Vent d'Est (however, this) habitual passivity is challenged from the outset, as Godard gives us an opening shot that arouses our curiosity (a young man and woman are seen lying motionless on the ground, their arms bound together by a heavy chain) but systematically thwarts our expectations by simply holding the shot for nearly eight minutes without any action and without dialogue. In fact, when the voice-over 'commentary' finally breaks in (on the 'forest murmurs' we have been hearing), what we get is not dialogue but a critique of dialogue.

"Ostensibly talking about strike tactics in some labour dispute, the speaker states at one point that what is needed is dialogue, but that dialogue is usually handed over to a 'qualified representative' who translates the demands of the workers into the language of the bosses, and in doing so betrays the people he supposedly represents.... in a strange and insightful way, this discussion of the failure of dialogue in the hands of a 'qualified representative' also refers to the failure of dialogue within the 'bourgeois concept of representation' in the cinema."

- James Roy MacBean, Vent d’Est or Godard and Rocha at the Crossroads, 1971

"Godard, like Eisenstein before him, is more concerned with 'image-building' as a kind of pictography, in which images are liberated from their role as elements of representation and given a semantic function within a genuine iconic code, something like the baroque code of emblems. The sequences in which the image of Stalin is discussed are not simply - or even principally - about Stalin's politics, as much as they are about the problem of finding an image to siginify 'repression'. In fact, the whole project of writing in images must involve a high degree of foregrounding, because the construction of an adequate code can only take place if it is glossed and commented upon in the process of construction. Otherwise, it would remain a purely private language."

- Peter Wollen, Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d'est, 1972

"Sound (she)/Image (he) or, more precisely: Voice (She)/Eye (He). By talking too much about "images and sounds" in the abstract, we failed to notice that there was always and above all a body invoked. The Godardian body is what receives, what lodges the eye; it is the image. The image is the domain of the man (even when - Numéro Deux - nothing remains of it but fetal blackness), it is what he is answerable for. He is answerable for it as a filmmaker (the overwhelming majority of filmmakers are men), therefore as a voyeur. Cinema, voyeurism matters of the scopic drive, the erectile eye, the business of men until now. But he only answers for it because someone talks to him about it. Someone: a voice, a voiceover, always the voice of a woman.

"The voice of the woman as oral penis. It articulates the law, but a law made to order; what subjects the images, these images, his images. In the second part of Wind From the East it is the voice of a woman which makes him draw the lesson: "What to do? You've made a film. You've criticized it. You've made mistakes. You know more now, perhaps, about the production of sounds and images, etc." The same apparatus in Ici et Ailleurs, where it is again the voice of a woman that translates, unfolds, restores these images, already seen, too quickly run ("run out the ass," as they say). Even the theater of Tout Va Bien is one where the same division of roles is at work. She (Jane Fonda) works for the radio (the voice: political commentary). He (Yves Montand) works in film (the image: commercials). And this voice speaks only about the meaning of events ('68), about History, about the meaning of History. And this image is one of prostituted bodies prancing for the greater glory of Dim stockings and the shameful pleasure of the man who films them. It's by the voice that History descends on these images as what guts them, marks them, subjects them to its law. By the voice of a woman."

- Serge Daney, The T(h)errorized (Godardian Pedagogy), 1976 (trans. Bill Krohn and Charles Cameron Ball).

I hope to return to some of these quotes in the future in some form.

straight is the line from the heart to the star

2007-03-21T12:13:00.000Z

Since the eighties, France-based experimental group, Etant Donnés (composed of two Moroccan-born brothers, Eric and Marc Hurtado) have been creating poetry, accompanying them with their industrial music and extreme vocals, then giving Artaudian live performances of their music, and creating short 8mm films with their music as the soundtrack. Nicole Brenez has rediscovered and introduced them to a whole new audience after she programmed their films in her monumental retrospective, Jeune, dure et pure! : Une histoire du cinéma d'avant-garde et expérimental en France in 2000. Patrick Bossati on ED, as quoted by Henri Chopin:

Be it poetry, cinema, sound, stage, everything the two of them do is done with a kind of rage that leaves you stunned. Their sound, for example, extensive, grave and apocalyptic, mixed from amplified natural elements, make those who listen dumbfounded. Their art is staggering in every respect, in the 16th century sense of the French word 'sidérant', when it meant: 'influenced by the stars'. Their music is a radioscopy of the chaos of the universe and of matter.

The images in their films are eternally in a dense involutionary relationship with each other, forming violently colourful complexes that exist in various states of exaltation. Much like the monochrome superimpositions of Jean Epstein:

(images from The Three-Sided Mirror, L'Autre Rive, The Fall of the House of Usher, Le Soleil...)

A contemporary figure with whom they share their obsession with the use of scattered, intense light energies in their depiction of desire and rapture is Philippe Grandrieux (with whom the brothers worked to create the soundtrack to La Vie nouvelle), who takes these devices of plasticity to vaguely narrative territories:

(images from Sombre and ED's Bleu)

Along with their distinctive use of sound, slow motion effects and colour templates, superimpositions form the most important part of their investigation of textures. Xavier Baert, in his excellent analysis of their films:

Superimposition does not affect image only: within the image-sound connection, it finds a new element. Sound is not used as a dimension independent from or simply parallel to image: it offers a new surface that is superimposed on the pictures, another state, a sonorous state, of transparency. Several dimensions focus in the creation of sound: music, since first and foremost the Hurtado brothers are musicians, the processing of nature's tones (rustling, birds' singing, wasps' buzzing...) and poetry. Thus sound allows the tactility and plasticity of image to be extended: for instance, at the beginning of Bleu, the emergence of the word "soleil", that takes shape through the alternate reading of the repetition of "sol" and of the redtation of its letters (s ;o ;l ; etc), indicates that sound is worth its while at least as much through its rhythms and its plastic values as through the meaning it bears (which is conveyed by the very high sound volume of the films and the work on the strength of murmur, extending the work on sound as a material and sensation). As a result, even when there is only one picture (which is rarely the case in ETANT DONNÉS' films), the connection between image and sound helps indicate that there is already, here, a superimposition, both acoustic and visual.

So, the act of viewing Etant Donnés' films possibly equates with drifting through states of rapture, usually while trapped inside an (onscreen) body that is engulfed by the elements, consumed by light, while being ascended to the heavens (all through the magic of the superimposition). With these immersions into their imagery, the desire to feel constantly (re)emerges in the spectator, and, in their shifting, all-inclusive soundscapes, where their poetry rests first within screams and then whispers, one discovers a transformation of terror into pure sensation, pure love even.

(With thanks to Fergus Daly.)

Offenbarung Und Untergang

2007-03-21T11:27:00.000Z

The first two verses of the expressionist prose-poem, Offenbarung Und Untergang / Revelation And Decline (Georg Trakl, 1914) :

Seltsam sind die nächtigen Pfade des Menschen. Da ich nachtwandelnd an steinernen Zimmern hinging und es brannte in jedem ein stilles Lämpchen, ein kupferner Leuchter, und da ich frierend aufs Lager hinsank, stand zu Häupten wieder der schwarze Schatten der Fremdlingin und schweigend verbarg ich das Antlitz in den langsamen Händen. Auch war am Fenster blau die Hyazinthe aufgeblüht und es trat auf die Lippe des Odmenden das alte Gebet, sanken kristallne Tränen geweint um die bittere Welt. In dieser Stunde war ich im Tod meines Vaters der weiße Sohn. In blauen Schauern kam vom Hügel der Nachtwind, die dunkle Klage der Mutter, hinsterbend wieder und ich sah die schwarze Hölle in meinem Herzen; Minute schimmernder Stille. Leise trat aus kalkiger Mauer ein unsägliches Antlitz - ein sterbender Jüngling - die Schönheit eines heimkehrenden Geschlechts. Mondesweiß umfing die Kühle des Steins die wachende Schläfe, verklangen die Schritte der Schatten auf verfallenen Stufen, ein rosiger Reigen im Gärtchen.

Schweigend saß ich in verlassener Schenke unter verrauchtem Holzgebälk und einsam beim Wein; ein strahlender Leichnam über ein Dunkles geneigt und es lag ein totes Lamm zu meinen Füßen. Aus verwesender Bläue trat die bleiche Gestalt der Schwester und also sprach ihr blutender Mund: Stich schwarzer Dorn. Ach noch tönen von wilden Gewittern die silbernen Arme mir. Fließe Blut von den mondenen Füßen, blühend auf nächtigen Pfaden, darüber schreiend die Ratte huscht. Aufflackert ihr Sterne in meinen gewölbten Brauen; und es läutet leise das Herz in der Nacht. Einbrach ein roter Schatten mit flammendem Schwert in das Haus, floh mit schneeiger Stirne. O bitterer Tod.
Und es sprach eine dunkle Stimme aus mir: Meinem Rappen brach ich im Wald das Genick, da aus seinen purpurnen Augen der Wahnsinn sprang; die Schatten der Ulmen fielen auf mich, das blaue Lachen des Quells und die schwarze Kühle der Nacht, da ich ein wilder Jäger aufjagte ein schneeiges Wild; in steinerner Hölle mein Antlitz erstarb. Und schimmernd fiel ein Tropfen Blutes in des Einsamen Wein; und da ich davon trank, schmeckte er bitterer als Mohn; und eine schwärzliche Wolke umhüllte mein Haupt, die kristallenen Tränen verdammter Engel; und leise rann aus silberner Wunde der Schwester das Blut und fiel ein feuriger Regen auf mich.

(English translation by Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt via)

Strange are the nightly paths of men. As I moved sleepwalking past rooms of stone, and in each a still lamp burned, a copper candlestick, and as I sank freezing onto the bed, the black shadow of the strangeness stood overhead, and silently I hid my countenance in the slow-moving hands. Also the hyacinth had blossomed blue at the window and the old prayer rose on the purple lips of the breathing one, crystalline tears sank from the eyelids wept over the bitter world. In this hour I was the white son in my father's death. In blue showers the night wind came from the hill, the dark lament of the mother dying away again and I saw the black hell in my heart; minute of shimmering stillness. Quietly an unspeakable countenance stepped from the limy wall - a dying youth - the beauty of a race returning home. Moony-white the coolness of the stone embraced the waking temple, the steps of the shadows on decayed stairs faded, a rosy round dance in the small garden.

Silently I sat in a deserted inn under smoky rafters and lonely with wine; a radiant corpse bent over a dark shape and a dead lamb lay at my feet. Out of rotting blueness the pale figure of the sister stepped and thus her bleeding mouth spoke: stab black thorn. Alas my silver arms still resound from wild thunderstorms. Flow, blood, from the moony feet, blossoming on nightly paths, over which the rat shoos screaming. You stars, flicker in my arched brows; and the heart rings quietly in the night. A red shadow with a flaming sword broke into the house, fled with snowy forehead. O bitter death.
And a dark voice spoke out of me: I broke my black horse's neck in the nocturnal forest because insanity leapt from his purple eyes; the shadows of elms fell on me, the blue laughter of the well, and the black coolness of the night, as I, a wild hunter, roused a snowy deer; my countenance died off in a stony hell. And a drop of blood fell shimmering into the wine of the lonely; and when I drank, it tasted more bitter than poppy; and a blackish cloud encircled my head, the crystal tears of damned angels; and quietly blood ran from the silver wound of the sister and a fiery rain fell over me.

Verses 1 and 2 of Offenbarung Und Untergang; music/sounds by Etant Donnés, recited by Michael Gira and Saba Komossa (flash player required to listen to these mp3 files) :

Verse 1.

Verse 2.

melodic figures

2007-03-11T02:21:00.000Z

Zakir Hussain on tabla:

Also:
Aashish Khan on sarod
Ustad Allah Rakha (tabla) with Ravi Shankar: Tabla solo in jhaptal
Ravi Shankar (sitar) with Ustad Allah Rakha at Monterey: 1 and 2
Zakir Hussain (tabla) with Ustad Sultan Khan (sarangi)
Ustad Ali Akbar Khan on sarod.

Star Spangled To Death (II)

2007-03-09T14:08:00.000Z

Some quotes on the film by Ken Jacobs, from a couple of interviews available online:

From here (and also see his notes for that appearance):

...to me the mind is always in the making, and this is the most extraordinary thing about we humans. This consciousness, and this sense, among other things, of the comic and the tragic, this ability to feel something about existence. So we look at Baghdad right now and say, my god, these are kids, half the population is children, what are we doing? We're killing children, children we understand as young life, full of potential for life. Life is what we care about. We don't want to see heedless destruction, stupid destruction, cruel destruction of life — dismissal of life.

So a work of art, for me, is... like in Star Spangled to Death — which by the way, in my mind is very, very form-conscious — is the greatest intensification of this quality we consider life, the most vital essence of this life. And you save the world, you save the kids of Baghdad by making a work that is — I can't say it better than this — vital. Now it might not be vital to social issues, but it's vital in itself. It's an achievement of vitality. It's alive.

From KJ's screening notes:

Star Spangled to Death is an epic film costing hundreds of dollars! combining found-films with my own more-or-less staged filming (I once said directing Jack and Jerry was like directing the wind). It is a social critique picturing a stolen and dangerously sold out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict. Race and religion and monopolization of wealth and the purposeful dumbing down of citizens and addiction to war become props for clowning. In whimsy we trusted. A handful of artists costumed and performing unconvincingly appeal to audience imagination and understanding to complete the picture. Jack Smith's pre-Flaming Creatures performance is a cine-visitation of the divine (the movie has raggedly cosmic pretensions). His character, The Spirit Not Of Life But Of Living, celebrates Suffering, personified by poor, rattled, fierce Jerry Sims, as an inextricable essence of living.... My head, inside, isn't all that different from what it was, I didn't become someone else, but I did get the work together and, in a profound way, that's the problem. It was supposed to lie in a jumbled heap, errant energies going nowhere, the talented viewer inferring form. A Frankenstein that fizzled but twitching and still dangerous to approach. Thoroughly star spangled but still kicking.

From here (also, Jonas Mekas in the same issue here):

I could not make a film like Fahrenheit 9/11. I respect Moore for what he did. That film was urgently needed. I made an art film. I'm a child of the 30s and the Great Depression. I grew up in New York during World War 2 and watched McCarthyism take hold, so I heard the rhetoric about the war against fascism or the war against Communism. For a while, I believed the rhetoric about patriotism and all the other lies that were fed to me, that we were the good guys. For example, it was hard to come to understand that even during the war against fascism this country did horrible things like bombing civilians or neglecting Jews. Also, coming to understand the extermination of Native Americans or the hundreds of years of slavery was important to me. I had to come to terms with the glowing propaganda I was fed about America's greatness. Especially with what is happening today under Bush, it seemed like the proper time to let all these thoughts out. The film is not nihilistic. The footage I shot that is in the film includes two protagonists played by Jack Smith and Jerry Sims. Jerry represents the idea that America is basically good, corrupt, but good. Jack represents a hatred for American society, almost a death wish for it.

Star Spangled To Death

2007-03-09T13:34:00.000Z

[The brief, brief notes that follow refer to the 405-minute dvd version of Ken Jacobs' Star Spangled To Death (1957-2004).]

A monumental "life's work" (its making spanning almost half a century) by one of avant-garde cinema's most enduring figures, Star Spangled to Death is the colossal exhale that it always promised to be. A stimulating experience with equal measures of vitriol, humour and heart, the film finds its structure somewhere in the third hour (with still more than three hours to go before the final chapter) in its finding of a balance between Suffering (played by the fascinating, haunting Jerry Sims) and The Spirit Not Of Life But Of Living (played by the incomparable Jack Smith).

They are the core of the film, and their dazzling guerrilla street theatre forms part of the assemblage on display here, alternating with found footage of early documentaries, animated films, political ads, educational films, most of which play out in their entirety, and most of which form Jacobs' critical objects, exhibits of 20th-century American history. Everything is punctuated by the political exclamations of the intertitles, many of which are flash-texts, inviting the viewer to pause and read the film as a text when seen on dvd.

The film does find some sort of coincidental closure towards the end: Ken Jacobs is in the centre of the 2003 New York City anti-war protest and he sees a young protest leader swaying to a pulsating drumbeat as the group chants ("Drop Bush, Not Bombs!") and his camera absorbs him as "the spirit of Jack Smith", before we return, finally, to the image of Jack Smith himself as a source of ... life and energy. And soon after in that rally, Jacobs' DV camera suddenly dies on him, and (like the ending of his 1969 experiment, Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, when you can hear the original film finish its run through the projector) there is only a black screen left to contemplate while the hovering sense of incompletion reveals itself - with a hint of optimism ("Despair is collaboration with the enemy!") in the cosmic balance of his performers.

"Limbo is where
where outtakes drift
in no apparent order."

To see more images, view clips, or order the dvd, go here.

sensations materialised

2007-03-05T09:37:00.000Z

Above image taken from Straub-Huillet's Quei loro incontri (These Encounters of Theirs, 2006). Like the opening shots of the film when we're only seeing the backs of the male/female speakers, the sound of water is divorced from its source in these moments (and what is the source of this sound: a nearby stream? or invisible heavy rain, as in the chapter in Pavese's text, 'The Flood', from which this part is adapted from?). This frame is, nevertheless, saturated with this lush, peaceful sound, binding us sensually to this landscape and to nature.

(see also: dias felizes.)

seduction/abduction/surrender

2007-02-24T13:13:00.000Z

Paul Cézanne, The Abduction (1867, Oil on canvas)

Also:
Alexandre Cabanel, Nymphe et Saty (1860, Oil on canvas)
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Nymphs and Satyr (1873, Oil on canvas)
John William Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs (1896, Oil on canvas)
Henri Matisse, Satyr and Nymph (1909, Oil on canvas).

dance girl dance

2007-02-24T02:47:00.000Z

From 'Evil and the Senses: Philippe Grandrieux's Sombre and La Vie nouvelle' by Martine Beugnet:

Highly suspicious of pre-existing screenplays, Grandrieux describes the act of filming as a momentous and essentially sensual experience; the profilmic reality can take hold of the film-maker driven by a desire to make certain images. Rejecting the use of the steady-cam, which would sanitize the movement of a shot, Grandrieux insists on the importance of carrying the camera himself, working in the thick of things, to the point where he feels ‘completely sucked in the field of the shot’. Thus couched in surrealist terms, the definition of the director as author takes on an ambiguous character, as the subject who originates the work and seeks to express a personal vision, yet always seems pulled into the fluid field of the gaze, on the brink of dissolving and merging with the reality being filmed.

The shooting is but one aspect of this practice of cinema as sensual experience, both pleasurable and terrifying, into which Grandrieux hopes spectators will also let themselves be drawn. In effect, the films can be said to be explorations of cinema as, first and foremost, an aesthetic of sensation. Engaging with the legacy of the French surrealist and impressionist avant-gardes, Grandrieux thus equates a return to cinema’s first vocation - the evocation of that which lies at the margins of human consciousness - with the rediscovery of the cinematic image as visual and sound textures - a form of sculpting in movement. Accordingly, although a battery of techniques rendered possible by twenty-first-century technology is deployed, the manipulations are not put at the service of transparent or illusionist effects. On the contrary, realistic aesthetics, psychological elaboration, and narrative logic are abandoned in favour of a celebration of cinema as a visceral, synaesthetic experience, where movement, images and sounds operate as affects that precede the emergence of rational discourse.

--- --- ---

Clips from Sombre (1998) and La Vie nouvelle (2002), with music by Bauhaus and Etant-Donnes, respectively.

a place with no memory of itself

2007-02-19T07:54:00.000Z

In my soul's dark mirror
Are pictures of never-seen seas,
Of abandoned, tragic imaginary lands,
Dissolving in the blue, roughly.

- excerpt from Georg Trakl's Three Dreams.

This past week I finally saw my first F.J. Ossang film: Le Trésor des îles chiennes (Treasure of the Bitch Islands, 1990). The opening/closing of the iris, the intertitles, it's expressionistic black-and-white photography - like a Georg Trakl poem that has been drained of colour - take us back to Murnau and Epstein, and in other ways (worthy of further future investigation) brings to mind 'the b-movie', Eraserhead, New Rose Hotel, or a Ruiz elaboration. Similarly, its narrative objects are remnants of film noir: pursued heroes, invisible but oh-so-palpable evil, the femme fatale. Until another viewing, it's very difficult to say what's exactly happening at any given moment of the film since events just seem to dissolve into each other, but basically it's about a group of scientists (?) working for a mysterious organisation, the Kryo Corp, who return to the post-industrial Bitch Islands (which seems to be stuck in an eternal twilight, "the red night") to complete an earlier aborted attempt at securing an energy source.

Whatever generic sci-fi expectations one attributes to the plot description is actively thwarted by Ossang's suspending the film in a cloud of uncertainty and hallucinations, disseminated amnesia/hysteria, and a general post-punk approach to narrative (at times 'scenes' seem to exist only to accompany the industrial soundtrack, composed by Ossang and his band, the Messageros Killer Boys, who also provided music to the beautiful tracking shots in Waël Noureddine's From Beyrouth With Love). Later, perhaps unsurprisingly, the hunters become the hunted as the group begins to disintegrate, while the film transforms into a dark 'road movie'. A beautiful, poetic, elusive film about the flight of puppets, who can only go as far as the strings allow.

heroes

2007-02-15T08:31:00.000Z

Jean-Baptiste Thoret on Miami Vice (2006) in the latest Senses of Cinema (a reminder for me to get to that rewatch) :

The jerky and convulsive narrative unfolds less according to a classical logic of development of sequences (dilation, edited in power and explosion) than of rampant compilation and short-circuits. The speed of the linking of the actions, their extreme compression, thus prevents the emergence of the feeling of a time that disappears, of a length that takes hold, in favour of a constant and monotonous topicality subservient to the law of “the here and now” – “Right now” the characters do not cease repeating throughout the film. But topicality is the opposite of time and the excess (of actions, of characters, of ramifications, of narrative lines, of narrative forks, etc.) is the mask of an omnipresent lack – lack of space, lack of the Other, lack of time, above all. “Time is luck”, says Isabella on several occasions to Sonny: a tragic refrain and curse of all of Mann’s heroes. (...)

The use of HD allows Mann to forge a dense image, often opaque and viscous, which deepens the backgrounds and engulf the foregrounds. Thus, the characters gain in definition what they lose in contour, and thus in identity – visually, they free themselves with difficulty from the background and seem ceaselessly threatened with dissolution. This loss provokes an increased weight of the bodies (watch how they fall in the final shoot out), a constant swaying of space and, for the spectators, the feeling of a hypnotic pitching of shots.

Also on Senses: Tag Gallagher! Olaf Möller! (among others...) Elsewhere, most urgent of all: a conversation with Adrian Martin on Cinemascope.

two excerpts

2007-02-02T15:42:00.000Z

9 of the 200 minutes from Frederick Wiseman's Public Housing (1997).

Euro, a video by André Dias.

all words are flesh

2007-01-31T06:26:00.000Z

Some notes on Der Rosenkönig (The Rose King, Werner Schroeter, 1986) :

If there is a central image in the film, it has to be Magdalena Montezuma's pale hands, which could qualify as a discrete entity, a complete body in itself (she died two weeks after shooting for the film completed and the film is dedicated to her). Outside of this, things fall into various categories, sheets or fragments that exist only to merge into each other by the morbid, sexualised final moments.

In its operatic, high-camp poise and often-sublime fragmentation of narrative, Der Rosenkönig is reminiscent mostly of Carmelo Bene's work (as opposed to Syberberg, whom Schroeter is often compared to) - a contemporary of Schroeter in the sixties when they both started making highly idiosyncratic films. It seems to me that Schroeter is a creator of isolated images that slowly come to be suspended in viscous, passionate music. Words and music exist only to elevate and agitate. The movements of the performers are exaggerated (and Montezuma, Schroeter's muse, understands this more than anyone else here), yet still sensual.

There are around five or six languages spoken or heard through music in the film, and to some extent, an immediate incomprehensibility is encouraged (Schroeter apparently refused to include subtitles when the film was released). These 'texts' - in the form of the monologue, opera, poetry, prayer, and song - hover over the film as we observe the performers' movements in asynchrony with the music (as in his debut feature, Eika Katappa, but not as extreme), as we are consistently denied passage into their subconscious. But what we are given is more than sufficient! Of all the symbolist systems freely floating within this film, those to do with light and colour surpass everything else.

Reds and black dominate and meet in the final scenes. Fire and water are omnipresent, comforting.

(Some of the most memorable scenes of the film are on YouTube: 1, 2, and the 'spoiler'-rich 3.)

Dreamtigers

2007-01-31T05:43:00.000Z

Borges and I

It's the other one, it's Borges, that things happen to. I stroll about Buenos Aires and stop, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance or an iron gate. News of Borges reaches me through the mail and I see his name on an academic ballot or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson's prose. The other one shares these preferences with me, but in a vain way that converts them into the attributes of an actor. It would be too much to say that our relations are hostile; I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges may contrive his literature and that literature justifies my existence. I do not mind confessing that he has managed to write some worthwhile pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because the good part no longer belongs to anyone, not even to the other one, but rather to the Spanish language, or to tradition. Otherwise, I am destined to be lost, definitively, and only a few instants of me will be able to survive in the other one. Little by little I am yielding him everything, although I am well aware of his perverse habit of falsifying and exaggerating. Spinoza held that all things long to preserve their own nature: the rock wants to be rock forever and the tiger, a tiger. But I must live on in Borges, not in myself - if indeed I am anyone - though I recognize myself less in his books than in many others, or than in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and I passed from lower-middle-class myths to playing games with time and infinity, but those games are Borges' now, and I will have to conceive something else. Thus my life is running away, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other one.

I do not know which one of us two is writing this page.

- Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers (1964); translation by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland.

--- --- ---

Above: Jean-Louis Trintignant as Jean Robin/Boris Varissa in Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Man Who Lies (1968).

Ixe (Lionel Soukaz, 1980)

2007-01-21T11:02:00.000Z

Ixe by Lionel Soukaz, both an autobiographical essay and a political leaflet, utterly violent, constitutes a radical off-screen variation of Etant Donnés' films. And yet, in the pursuit of ecstasy though drugs, the film calls upon the same solutions: ecstasy as the connection with the cosmic (the cosmic as an imagery: galaxies and planets "re-filmed" on television) , slow motion (of sound, this time, establishing two different speeds of consciousness), ecstasy as a seriality and the camera-eye. Here, ecstasy is no plenitude, but some substraction, that gets renewed strength from its own pursuit as a political resistance to the horror of the world.

- Xavier Baert

A rather Godard-ian experiment in that its pursuit of truth and freedom emerges from the arrangement, the violent assemblage of images, as ideas and emotions bleed into each other. The image's material nature is preserved, and a certain metaphoric sense develops from the juxtapositions (the "third image"), while the whole thing is loosely held together by the electro-pop soundtrack and the mad laughter. A constant high is evoked in the latter half of the film in the form of drug-induced hallucinations and passionate sex, before the world explodes. This is a shocking map of a mind trapped in a specific time, witnessing History from inside his flat, on a television screen. I hope I can write something more coherent on this fascinating film in the future.

shot / reverse shot

2007-01-21T10:38:00.000Z

René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (1937, Oil on canvas)

But also:
Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait (1434)
Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (1656)
Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)

365 brief glimpses

2007-01-07T08:50:00.000Z

This great new Jonas Mekas project has begun:

A web project of 365 short films will be launched beginning January 1, 2007. Mekas will release the films, one for each day of the year, through www.jonasmekas.com. Inspired by a poet writing a poem each day of the year for his lover, he will create a similarly poetic statement through these deeply personal films, reflecting on his life and sentiments of both past and present. Working from his vast video archive of footage, these films aim to “celebrate the small forms of cinema, the lyrical form, the poem, the watercolor, etude, sketch, portrait, arabesque, and bagatelle, and little 8mm songs.”

I missed the videos from the first five days because I completely forgot about this, despite having bookmarked his site ever since this project was announced. The video for the day is free to download for around a day (although, as I type this, you can download the clips for Day 6 and Day 7 for free), so I'll be making it a habit to go there everyday. And if these two videos that I've seen so far are anything to go by, then we're in for a special treat. Every day!

the long voyage home

2007-01-06T04:52:00.000Z

I've been carrying images from Straub/Huillet's Quei loro incontri (These Encounters of Theirs, 2006) - some of the their final images - in my head since I saw an excellent dub of the Rai-Tre broadcast of the film last month. That broadcast was unsubtitled so I acquainted myself with Cesare Pavese's text, Dialogues With Leucò, the last five conversations of which the film adapts without much alteration (from what I can tell anyway).

Straub-Huillet have, of course, returned to the same Pavese text after 27 years: the first part of Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance, 1979) contains six of these brief dialogues between Greek mythological heroes and gods. Quei loro incontri is, at once, one of their most beautiful, most sensual films. We see carefully placed bodies, each with its own prescribed movements and in harmony with nature (the movement of the sun is reflected in their faces), set within the lush green of trees, the brown of the earth, and the blue of the sky. We hear a spectrum of voices - each with its own acoustic parameters of timbre and intonation - rising and falling in volume, as if competing with (/resisting) the ever-present, en concert, sounds of wind on trees and birds in the sky. Voices that announce living beings.

Deleuze: "The act of speech or music is a resistance: it must be economical and sparse, infinitely patient, in order to impose itself on what resists it, but extremely violent in order to be itself a resistance, an act of resistance. ... It is therefore now the visual image, the stratigraphic landscape, which in turn resists the speech-act and opposes it with a silent piling-up. Even letters, books and documents, that which the speech-act has torn itself from, have passed into the landscape, with the monuments, the ossuaries, the lapidary inscriptions. The word resistance has a lot of meaning with the Straubs, and it is now the earth, the tree and the rock which resist the speech act..." (Cinema 2: The Time-Image, pp. 254-255)

Like Dalla nube..., Quei loro incontri exists simultaneously in the past and the present - I think this is made relatively more explicit in the second part of Dalla nube when The Bastard returns to his village after the war and narrates his childhood memories to Nuto. In the latter film (as in many of their works), it is the earth itself which represents the mortal beings' past history of colossal struggle and death (while the horizon is something that is desired, a pursued idea of peace). The text is driven by a very pure form of class relations (between gods and mortals) and Straub and Huillet find striking ways to incorporate this divide into their images, such as in the third act - the only act in the film which features a conversation between a mortal (Hesiod) and a goddess (Mnemosyne) - when the positioning of the actors is in accordance with hierarchy (recalling the first segment from Dalla nube, with Ixion and The Cloud). Even the landscape immediately around them parallels this divide.

The film's soundscape (which is the natural sound of the world we occupy, in this case around the edges of/deep within a forest) is pure Renoir in its three-dimensionality and varies in intensity with every cut that moves closer to the actor. Daisuke Akasaka, in his recent write-up on the film, even notices a difference in the sound of the wind according to the direction it's blowing, an occurrence that is perhaps a little clearer on the big screen. Something about the perpetual wind in the trees brings to mind Sternberg's Saga of Anatahan. To say nothing of how these characters remind one of Ford's many literary and/or mythical figures in a landscape, or how the emotional complexity of the architecture of the landscape before the camera recalls Cézanne's paintings, and the final image of the film - a Final Image in so many ways - is Straub/Huillet's Mont Sainte-Victoire, their pursued horizon.

Flesh + a letter

2007-01-06T04:02:00.000Z

Arnold Schoenberg, Flesh (ca. 1909), Oil on cardboard.

Schoenberg to Wassily Kandinsky, 4 May 1923:

Have you also forgotten how much disaster can be evoked by a particular mode of feeling? Don't you know that in peace-time everyone was horrified by a railway-accident in which four people were killed, and that during the war one could hear people talking about 100,000 dead without even trying to picture the misery, the pain, the fear, and the consequences? Yes, and that there were people who were delighted to read about as many enemy dead as possible; the more, the more so! I am no pacifist; being against war is as pointless as being against death. Both are inevitable, both depend only to the very slightest degree on ourselves, and are among the human race's methods of regeneration that have been invented not by us, but by higher powers. In the same way the shift in the social structure that is now going on isn't to be lodged to the guilty account of any individual. It is written in the stars and is an inevitable process. The middle classes were all too intent on ideals, no longer capable of fighting for anything, and that is why the wretched but robust elements are rising up out of the abysses of humanity in order to generate another sort of middle class, fit to exist. It's one that will buy a beautiful book printed on bad paper, and starve. This is the way it must be, and not otherwise...

[excerpt from the Schoenberg-Kandinsky correspondences, which appear in Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s "Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene" (1973)].

new layout

2007-01-06T03:48:00.000Z

For a long time now the old black background was making me gasp for breath. Hopefully this new layout looks good on most settings (let me know if something looks wrong). I'll probably do a bit more tweaking here and there... The skeletal archives have been moved to the footer for the time being.

songs of the year

2006-12-28T04:30:00.000Z

I'm (also!) not really as up-to-date with the latest in music as I'd like to be, and it can get hard for me to get out of comfort zones I have with certain folk or electronica artists, but I have heard some really good, varied stuff this year which I feel like sharing. At different times, these songs were the most repeatedly-played for me. For the most part, the source albums correspond with my favourite albums of the year (the unmentioned: Scott Walker's The Drift - how to pick a performance and separate it from the rest? - and William Basinski's amazing The Garden of Brokenness, which is one continuous piece). Anyway, here they are:

(I'd recommend right-clicking and then saving the mp3 file, rather than just clicking on the title which may not necessarily work)

Josephine Foster - 'An Die Musik' - scroll down for song (album)
Joanna Newsom - 'Sawdust & Diamonds' (album)
Espers - 'Dead Queen' (album)

Meg Baird's voice in 'Dead Queen' is the easiest to like from these three enchanting folky trillers, while Newsom's and Foster's seem to emerge from another time, another consciousness. Two songs surprise and awe us by the sudden appearance of an electric guitar, taking the songs to spooky new levels altogether, while the third is transporting on the strength of the words, a restless harp, and one of the most distinctive voices in music today.

The Skygreen Leopards - 'William & the Sacred Hammer' (album)
Tenhi - 'Sarastuskävijä' (album)
Akron/Family - 'Gone Beyond' (album)

Three more of my favourite folk outings of the year; male voices for a golden sunset.

Subtle - 'Midas Gutz' (album)
Matmos - 'Semen Song For James Bidgood' (album)

I'm not familiar with underground hip hop at all, but surely Subtle's very experimental For Hero: For Fool is one of the best things to happen to the genre? The surreal lyrics need closer attention. Matmos' tribute to James Bidgood is probably the most gorgeous song from their new conceptual artwork: delicate piano and harp, shimmering strings, and Antony's voice backgrounded by... semen?!

São Paulo Underground - 'Balão de gás' (album)

A fantastically busy song from a busy album. Come for the Afro-Brazilian drums and percussion, stay for the wandering trumpet and chanting.

Kettel - 'Sekt I Sing' (album)
AFX - 'Cilonen' (album)

From two highly listenable electronica outings of the year. 'Sekt I Sing' is a sexy mutating beast, and one of the most uplifting songs of the year. 'Cilonen' is just plain nasty (of the low-key Aphex Twin kind).

The Knife - 'We Share Our Mother's Health'
Ellen Allien & Apparat - 'Leave Me Alone'

Cut yourself on 'We Share Our Mother's Health' (or a couple other songs from Silent Shout). Wish Apparat sang more on Orchestra of Bubbles as he does on the gorgeous 'Leave Me Alone'.

El Perro Del Mar - 'Candy' (album)
The Pipettes - 'Because It's Not Love (But It's Still A Feeling)' (the awesome album)
Amber Smith - 'White' (album)
Beirut - 'Postcards from Italy' (album)

Pop/radio songs of the year, give or take Sean Paul's 'Temperature' or T.I.'s 'What You Know'.

images of the year

2006-12-28T03:07:00.000Z

Since I haven't yet seen most of the key films of 2006, I won't do a traditional 'top ten of the year'. This being a film-centric blog, however, I wanted to end the year with a set of film mentions - a personal greatest hits of 2006 - composed of excavated 'older' films, immortal images, if only for the sake of some clarity before the start of a new year, along with an expression of fondness for these films, which were seen in a variety of formats during the year - from theatrical screenings to DVDs to DVD-Rs to VHSs, etc. I didn't include videos streamed online from sites like YouTube, Ubuweb, or Directors' Lounge TV, although I should mention that there have been some wonderful additions during the year to all three (such as the Toshio Matsumoto short films added a few weeks ago at Ubuweb, or the original conceptual art videos of David Anthony Sant at YouTube, or the films of André Werner at DLTV). And I haven't been keeping a film log this year, so I hope I'm not forgetting something major...

Favourite film seen for the first time this year: Philippe Garrel's L'Enfant secret (1982), experienced not projected as has been a dream of mine for some time, but on the DVD release by a Japanese label, Uplink DVD Collection. This film marks the beginning of his narrative period and remains, from what I've seen of his works, his most stunning achievement to date: an extemporaneous convergence of fragmented autobiographical content and the (early) Garrelian experimental form, of seeming studies of portraiture and painfully intimate fiction that moves as if dictated by a pulse ("a camera in place of the heart"). By describing the film's characters (ex-Bressonian models, Anne Wiazemsky and Henri de Maublanc) as 'silent cinema phantoms' is not to deny them of their corporeality or their psychological force - which is on display here, perhaps more than anywhere else in Garrel's oeuvre - but to draw attention to Garrel's eternal engagement with the birth of cinema, the discovery of movements, the dawning of new eras. Also worthy of mention: his Elle a passé tant d'heures sous les sunlights... (1985), a 'meta' companion piece that anticipates the sublime incompleteness of Sauvage Innocence (2001).

Philippe Grandrieux has been a major discovery this year, a figure whose films I still find myself processing - La Vie nouvelle (2002) is surely one of the great films of the past few years, but Sombre (1998) is perhaps the more daring investigation of the plasticity of images, a descendent of L'Enfant secret in this respect, but instead of an exploration of the rhythm of sounds and expressions, we have an exploration of the rhythmic use of light and its absence, and its violence upon the body. The local Maurice Pialat retrospective which I attended in July brought forth films which specifically stressed the performative elements in the cinematographic 'window to the world'; films as agitated, wounded bodies. My favourite remains La Gueule ouverte (The Mouth Agape, 1974), an overwhelming cinematic measurement of death ('time exists to kill'), followed by Le Garçu (1995) and À nos amours (1983).

Île de beauté (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Ange Leccia, 1996): this hypnotic masterpiece is composed of a few wordless scenes of landscapes that seem to have been caught from a moving car, a boat, and a train, while pop songs and recordings of TV images form the flesh, the text. The spectator gets comfortably lost within the filmic space, and shares the loneliness in the unseen traveller's gaze (there is probably a story there, just beyond our reach). Its closest cinematic cousin is Bill Viola's video Hatsu-Yume (1981), which also offers the immobile spectator a long (and in its case, mystical) voyage to Japan associated with a mysterious and complex perspective. Hopefully more on their films in 2007 once I check out the precious MK2 release of 11 of their short films.

William A. Wellman's Track of the Cat (1954): a white canvas with bodies and landscape painted in broad strokes; of all things, its restrained use of colour (along with the image of Robert Mitchum by a dying fire in a frozen cave) haunts me. The frequently comic and astonishing, Talking To Strangers (Rob Tregenza, 1988), is also one of the most unique American films of its time: it's composed of nine ten-minute plan-séquences that follow a young, struggling artist and his encounters with an assortment of characters. The camera is in constant motion within the film's limited space, and as the film progresses, it becomes an exploration of the tension between the fictive process and reality within the frame that is beyond Tregenza's control. Godard himself puts it well: " fiction, the slut, trips up reality as soon as reality wants to possess her". Tregenza was one of the cinematographers for Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, and has made three other features following Talking to Strangers, which I look forward to seeing some day.

Others - ritualistic movements within (pseudo-)erotic performances: La Marge (Walerian Borowczyk, 1976), Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (Borowczyk, 1981), Score (Radley Metzger, 1973), The Story of Joanna (Gerard Damiano, 1975), Angel Mine (David Blyth, 1978); resisting, Land: Red Psalm (Miklós Jancsó, 1972), From the Cloud to the Resistance (Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, 1979), Subarnarekha (Ritwik Ghatak, 1965), 79 Primaveras (Santiago Álvarez, 1969), Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969); chased by/chasing memories in the night: Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948), Night of the Hunted (Jean Rollin, 1980); registering haunted spaces: In Vanda's Room (Pedro Costa, 2000), Méditerranée (Jean-Daniel Pollet, Volker Schlöndorff, 1963), Tren de Sombras (José Luis Guerín, 1997); boredom, consumptive inertia, madness: N-Zone (Arthur Lipsett, 1970), Last Chance For A Slow Dance (Jon Jost, 1977), Acéphale (Patrick Deval, 1969); new frontiers: The Land Beyond the Sunset (Dorothy G. Shore, 1912), India (Roberto Rossellini, 1959), Unstabile Materie (Jürgen Reble, 1995), On Top of the Whale (Raul Ruiz, 1982), The Last of England (Derek Jarman, 1987), X (Roger Corman, 1963).

emerging from the earth, like trees

2006-12-19T08:30:00.000Z

The Muses

MNEMOSYNE: My dear, has it ever happened to you that when you saw a plant, a stone, a gesture, you experienced the same thing?
HESIOD: Yes, it has.
MNEMOSYNE: And did you discover why?
HESIOD: It was only an instant, Melete. How could I grasp it?
MNEMOSYNE: Have you ever asked yourself why an instant can suddenly make you happy, happy as a god? You are looking, say, at the olive tree, the olive tree on the path you have taken every day for years, and suddenly there comes a day when the sense of staleness leaves you, and you caress the gnarled trunk with a look, as though you had recognized an old friend, and it spoke to you precisely the one word your heart was hoping for. At times it's the glance of a man passing in the street. Sometimes the rain that drives down for days on end. Or the hoarse cry of a bird. Or a cloud you think you've somewhere seen before. For an instant time stops, and you experience the trivial event as though before and after had no existence. Have you ever asked yourself why this should be?
HESIOD: It's you who say why. That instant has made the event a memory, a model.
MNEMOSYNE: Can't you conceive of an existence entirely composed of these instants?
HESIOD: I can conceive of it.
MNEMOSYNE: Then you know what my life is like.
HESIOD: I believe you, Melete, because your eyes confirm it. And the fact that many men call you Euterpe no longer surprises me. But these mortal instants are not a life. If I wanted to repeat them, they would lose their freshness. The staleness always comes back.
MNEMOSYNE: But you said that instant was a memory. And what else is memory but an experience repeated in its intensity? Do you understand me?
HESIOD: No. What do you mean?
MNEMOSYNE: I mean that you know what immortal life is like.
HESIOD: When I talk with you, it's hard for me not to believe. You saw things as they were in the beginning. You are the olive tree, the glance, the cloud. You speak a name, and the thing exists forever.

- Cesare Pavese, Dialogues With Leucò (1947); translation by William Arrowsmith.

night fever

2006-12-07T09:28:00.000Z

Images: Nude vampires and stony stairs in Lips of Blood (Jean Rollin, 1975).

I'm glad I persisted with Rollin's cinema after a frustrating initial encounter with The Living Dead Girl (1982). From what I've seen so far (which isn't much despite several of his films being available on DVD), his body of work can appear fairly uneven but his films always seem to be coming from another level of consciousness altogether. The somnambulist style of acting that is displayed by his amateur performers (many of whom were hardcore porn actors) is a more specific kind of performance rather than mere 'bad acting' and, when at his best, the leisurely unfolding of his elegant, expressionist images set in medieval Gothic castles and cemeteries, take on the form of sustained spectacles of violence, revised myths, the naked and the nude, while actively pursuing enduring obsessions such as memory, childhood romanticism, and performance. Are any readers admirers of his work?

A couple of links: Rollin interviewed, more from Kinoeye.

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Sounds: Tenhi - Maaäet, Ash Ra Temple - Le Berceau De Cristal (the soundtrack to the Garrel film from '76), Yo La Tengo - I'm Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, Fela Kuti & Africa '70 - Expensive Shit / He Miss Road.

regular phantoms

2006-12-07T06:57:00.000Z

It is recovered!
What? - Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of the sun in the sea.

O my eternal soul,
Hold fast to desire
In spite of the night
And the day on fire.

- excerpt from Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell.

Jackie Raynal's Deux Fois (1968) and Patrick Deval's Acéphale (1969): Both are key films made under the Zanzibar banner - which saw experimental works based on improvisation made by young artists and writers, many informed by the events of May '68, and mostly shot on 35mm, on tiny budgets and in small amounts of time - and both films with some striking similarities (Raynal and Deval were partners at the time, as Adrian Martin's profile of Raynal informs).

There seems to be an expression of a need to return to the origins of cinema in both films - a distinctly Garrelian fantasy involving a transformation of the film's characters into silent cinema phantoms. Le Révélateur is obviously an important immediate influence - for starters, its lack of sound and stark lighting effects are frequently reproduced in both films.

Deux Fois, which Raynal directed after some editing gigs for Eric Rohmer (namely, his early short films and La Collectionneuse, the star of which - Daniel Pommereulle - went on and directed his own unique short film under Zanzibar, Vite) and more significantly, Jean-Daniel Pollet (she had the important task of editing his magnificent, Méditerranée (1963)), is the more consciously theatrical of the two films - a theatricality that has been compared to Rivette's by Martin. It recalls the spirit of the Situationists and some of its imagery warrants a comparison to the surrealist works of Buñuel and Cocteau. Raynal's gazes toward the camera, her initial isolation from crowds, the ritualism of her actions recall Maya Deren's in Meshes of the Afternoon and anticipate Chantal Akerman's self-exile in her flat in the first segment of Je, Tu, Il, Elle.

But the one aspect which haunts me most about Deux Fois ('Twice Upon a Time'), this silent symphony of repetitions - a film which, like Acéphale, I can't really fully comprehend until I see it a few more times (Adrian Martin has attempted to comprehend its "phantasmal logic" and has come up with some fascinating observations) - is how there seems to be an almost symbiotic coexistence of violence (both literal and metaphoric) and sensuousness, primarily seen in the shifting balance between sound and silence. Next to the sheepish, smiling young girl on the train, we are shown the rapidity with which the outside world moves by: dangerous, violent. Jackie silently observes cameras lined out on a bench, but she also flashes a mirror reflecting the set lighting 'directly' into the spectator's eyes. Jackie looks at various brands of soap at the drugstore, but the repetition of the sequence becomes its own violence (or its own sensuality, depending on how you look at it), as when she skips along the dirt road like a child and falls. Later, her windblown hair is caressed by male hands which have slowly entered the frame - before being pulled, and Jackie with it, violently out of the frame, and, the most direct display of this co-existence being the neon billboard animation, which features a man and a woman appearing to be in physical combat. But their movements: balletic, erotic.

Acéphale (the title comes from the secret society founded by Bataille after he broke off from the Surrealists, and literally means, 'headless') is perhaps even more Garrelian than Deux Fois - it's intense ritualistic passages prefigure those in La Cicatrice intérieure , and the fragile gestures and some of the framing (of faces, of beds, of corridors, etc.) looks forward to his early narrative films. The aimless drifting of Youth caught in a transitional political (and seemingly, post-apocalyptic) landscape anticipates such '90s elegies of displacement and disenchantment as Fred Kelemen's Fate and Sharunas Bartas' Three Days.

So, coming back to Acéphale, what to make of this man and his amants réguliers (which includes Jackie Raynal, the unique beauty of her presence intact), who seem to be in search of something beyond themselves ("It's necessary to become quite someone else or else cease being...")? Of their retreat into a cavern where they talk about Nero around their fire torches? Of their drugged-out exiles into intensely whitewashed rooms? Five years later, Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore will bring these figures into the medium shot (leaving behind the overt image/sound experimentations associated with the Zanzibar films) and hold them there until they are embedded in our subconscious. Till then, there may be a glimmer of hope within Acéphale after all; perhaps in the form of an unextinguished desire that is communicated in the film's final images, not through words, but the gesture of an unending smile and an open embrace.

There will hopefully be more on these films (and other related ones from the same era, made with the same purpose/'logic') later as I properly discover them with time...

a few words on Odete

2006-11-29T10:20:00.000Z

Odete (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2005)

After O Fantasma's bold twists on Louis Feuillade, Tsai Ming-liang, and Pink Narcissus, Rodrigues continues to convert his deep cinephilic obsessions into startling images. This time, the primer seems to be the ever-influential Vertigo, and there are also suggestions of Douglas Sirk, Almodovar's Law of Desire, and - in the steam room long take - Warhol's Blow Job. And surely, if Sergio in O Fantasma is Rodrigues' Irma Vep, then Odete is his Nosferatu. The plot this time is more complicated than that of O Fantasma so I won't describe it here, but what it does demonstrate for the spectator, moreso than O Fantasma, is the possibility of faith in the body (or rather, the image of the body) being a harbour of spectres, whether it be the dead Pedro's unexplained haunting of Odete, or the possibility that Odete is herself a ghostly extrapolation of Sergio, undergoing a typically Rodrigues-ian (can we use this adjective already?) transformation, designed to carry them towards their respective desired constellations (an image, a body, a gesture, an object) in order to complete themselves - except hers is supraphysical and emotional ("hysterical" even), while Sergio's is corporeal and sensorial. The discontinuous melodrama is necessary here - it is actually what gives the film its own distinctive tone; the frequent invocations of wind and rain and songs at crucial moments swell the screen up in the most wonderful ways.

So, while this is not as formally adventurous and beautiful a work as O Fantasma (where the beauty existed in the nocturnal textures, in dark and dirty encounters) it's still very much worth watching, and Rodrigues worth keeping an eye on, because the next one might just be it.

"...one long film..."

2006-11-22T09:21:00.000Z

(for Robert Altman)