Week in the Making

I've been lazy here lately - weird: three posts in three days last week, then... I've not been totally idle - poking around on another blog I started up with some of my old AOL cronies... setting up an RSS reader - as usual, years after everyone else started using them for all. It's an interesting way of reading blogs - I've been getting used to it. Thinking about how to make something of it: I like Harry Tuttle's Google shared page: maybe I should try something like that - here's a cut at it. I may experiment with that...

Somewhat more substantively, I have been following the discussion of auteurism at Girish's place. Reading along, composing replies and arguments, though I've only posted one so far. It's a vexed subject, as one of my english teachers used to say. It keeps coming up in film discussions, and when it does, I can never decide how much to dive in. There's a lot to be said about it - though most of it has been said somewhere already, and if I'm going to add my 2¢ I should do some due diligence and read up on the theorizing, and that fills me with dread... So, for now, I've stuck to offering generalities - Film is a Composite Art! Auteurism is best seen as a form of genre theory! I have not yet made the claim that auteurs don't make films, films make auteurs, but I might. While the auteur theory seems first to have been promoted to claim some of the prestige of literary authors for directors, I think it also served to undermine the idea of authorship - it made it more figurative; it conceived of authorship as something that emerges from the "text" as much as it precedes it. So - you might find a route from Truffaut to Barthes if you look for it....

Meanwhile, typing this, I'm listening to the recordings Charlie Parker made with the Dave Lambert singers: strange, strange stuff. Bird was certainly on top of his game, but the singing is almost surreal. Given the talent involved - Gil Evans arranging - boy... A quick google, though, comes up with this two part interview with Hal McKusick, a musician on the session.

And finally - I have seen films. Don't Touch the Axe - for some reason, renamed "The Duchess of Langeais" in English (probably to fool Americans into thinking it's a respectable literary adaptation and not a Jacques Rivette film.) Which is quite marvelous, if not up to the best Rivettes. It would have fit pretty well in the Oliveira series I've been attending - it is certainly a tale of doomed love. Though Rivette is a different kind of director than Oliveira: funnier, more knowing - the characters are older, and get into things willingly and consciously. Rivette certainly takes a different approach with his actors, giving Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu a good deal of freedom to fill the screen - they do, especially Balibar, who is perfectly magical on screen. Though Rivette is certainly capable of being as strange as Oliveira when he wants to be. Though usually hilarious at the same time - a scene of two drunken fops turning over 19th century cliches - "stunning" - "it's a drama" - is perfectly priceless....

Rivette, meanwhile, having reached the age of 80 without discernibly slowing his filmmaking output, is stalking Olveira from that angle too. I also saw Abraham's Valley last week, another Oliveira, from 15 years ago, when he was a fairly young 85. This is another literary adaptation, the life of a woman, married young to an older doctor, and who lives, too beautiful, too smart, too alive for her world (provincial Portugal, latter half of the 20th century) - shades of Madame Bovary, though perhaps not controlling. It's less a tale of doomed love than a melodrama of an unknown woman - though one who manages to insist on and get a fair amount of her own way, however limited this might be. Beautiful film, though somewhat domecticated compared to the 70s films - muc more naturalistic, though there is some direct address to the camera, and an impertinent cat.

Meanwhile, stcking with octogenarian directors, on DVD, I finally got around to watching Seijun Suzuki's Princess Raccoon. A fairy tale of doomed lovers and magic and evil christians (the Virgen Hag!) enacted in eye popping color on every imaginable variety of set... Here's a picture, far more informative than anything I could write:



And finally - another screenshot, from another wonderful DVD I watched - Douglas Fairbanks (auteur!) in the Black Pirate. Here he is in all his much-imitated glory: