Something Siegfried Kracauer Said

About girls...



and men and machines...



that applies to politics...





...though more than politics...





though sometimes, more politics...



made me think about how images and politics work together...



...to do evil...



And how evil...



...might be countered:



by being reconfigured





Maybe?



...gave me something to write anyway.

New Theater, Misc Commentary

In the last couple days, a couple items about the availability of films caught my eye. The first, a very happy piece of news, comes from the Boston Globe's movie blog - a new movie theater is coming to Boston! The Stuart Street Playhouse, currently, as the name states, a theater, will reopen on October 9 as a movie theater - a nice big room, featuring indie and foreign films. (Details.) It will be programmed by the people who run the West Newton cinema - I've never been there, but it seems comparable to the Kendall, or maybe the Somerville Theater - two excellent cinemas across the river. Ty Burr's comments on the Globe's blog are to the point - Boston, now, has no commercial art houses. There are two big multiplexes - pretty good ones, I admit, with some decent semi-indie stuff along with the mainstream fare... It was not always thus - there used to be lots and lots of cinemas in Boston. Even in my filmgoing memory (serious for 15 years, sporadic for 8-10 years before that) half a dozen cinemas have disappeared - the Cheri, Copley Square, Nickolodeon, I think I remember this Stuart street cinema, there were screens out in Allston, there were screens downtown, on Washington Street... They all closed - creating a strange condition, before the Fenway opened - there was an art house (the Nicklolodeon), a quasi art house (the Copley - one of the most appalling excuses for a multiplex I have ever come across - 9 screens, most of them small, ugly, badly designed - hideous!), and the Cheri - which generally stuck to action films, some big, some small (saw Tigerland there, not long before it gave up the ghost) - But nothing for straightforward mainstream films. That's long been the situation in Cambridge/Somerville (unless you go out to the hinterlands) - art houses, rep houses, semi-mainstream fare - it was more pronounced in the late 90s. There were times when it was harder for me, living in the city (or on the red line) to get to a mainstream Hollywood film than to the latest Rohmer. Easier to see Expect the Unexpected than Babe: Pig in the City...

That's not the case now. The two big multiplexes (Fenway and the Boston Common) take care of the mainstream stuff - everything else, is on the Cambridge side of the river. Though the fact is - given the geography of Boston/Cambridge, there's not a great deal of difference between them - from most of Boston and suburbs, Harvard Square is as accessible as either of the Boston multiplexes - straight up the red line, straight up Mass Ave. The Kendall is pretty close to the subway - getting there by car can be a bit of adventure. The Coolidge, Somerville Theater, even the MFA, are all right on both the subway and major streets. All these places - Harvard Square (with its three film outlets - an AMC Loews theater; the Brattle and the Harvard Film Archive), Kendall, the Common and the Fenway - are within 2-3 miles of one another. Even the Coolidge and MFA or Somerville Theater are only another mile or so off - none of them are more than an hours walk from each other. Boston ain't big - add Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline, and it's still not big. This new theater is just as conveniently located, a bit closer to the South End, not far from the T...

And it is good news. Boston may not be able to match NY for films, but it's still a good city for a film lover. Though a lot better 15 years ago. Another theater can't hurt - I imagine in practice it will just add another screen for one of the films showing at the Kendall or Harvard Square or the Coolidge - but even just that can't be bad. Indie films that draw decent crowds often end up taking up a couple screens in those places - if one of them moves to Boston, it can open a screen somewhere else. Maybe dilute the effect of bland crowd pleasers that run for 6 months in those places... Anything, to get more options in the theaters. I hope this works - I certainly intend to give it my trade. I may be somewhat resigned to the fact that film as Film might become a museum piece only, a curio, something for the connoisseur - but I don't want to see that happen any time soon. And hate the idea that more adventurous, or at least, less commercial material, might become almost exclusively the domain of festivals, museums, and DVDs. I'm glad, yes, that DVDs are available - it probably has made it possible to see a lot more than I could have seen 20 years ago, or at least, to be less at the mercy of programmers and luck... But - film is Film, and that experience is well worth holding on to. Including all the peripheral elements - getting to the theater on time, getting across town in time for another show... Speaking just for myself - that is part of my life, a part I find quite enjoyable - the walks, the spaces, the seats in the theaters, the experience of walking out of a film, from dark to light... If I am sitting around home watching movies, I might as well read a book.

Meanwhile: on the other side of things, the DVD side - saw another odd post at Dan Schneider's Cinemension blog a day or so back. He starts out fairly reasonably - lamenting the difficulty of finding foreign films, and complaining about their cost. I suppose he protests a bit too much - the fact is, an astonishing amount of old and foreign material is available, and more all the time... though I suppose most cinephiles are always wanting something that's not around. (Me? Where's Night and Day? For example...) As for the prices - it's certainly irritating, though I suppose the prices aren't that extravagant. And they are certainly explicable - economies of scale, and all - you can charge minimal prices for popular films because you are going to move them in large quantities - not so much with Satantango or that new Gaumont Treasures set. Though that's on Netflix, so, you know... there are ways to ease the pain...

All that fairly reasonable commentary is followed, though, by one of his stranger hobby horses - the need for dubbing instead of subtitles. He keeps repeating this - it's an opinion he mostly has to himself, at least among people who would, in theory, watch a foreign language film. (Most people who complain about subs aren't really candidates for anything beyond foreign pop films - Jacky Chan, anime and the occasional European melodrama are about as far as that goes.) The flaw in his argument is obvious enough - he says film is a visual medium - this is wrong: film is an audio-visual medium. Adding text to a film is certainly far less intrusive than changing the entire soundtrack. Anyway - I suppose he's being consistent - he seems generally to have little respect for the materiality of art - his view seems to be, Art=Representation - words in a film are what they mean, nothing else - he does not seem interesting in words as sound. Or take this bit - he says:

Furthermore, if one watches classic foreign films from the 1950s and 1960s, which were routinely dubbed for American audiences (often retained in DVD releases), one can see how superior dubbing is. As example, Ingmar Bergman's Spider Trilogy is dubbed, and the fact that different actors and voices are used for the characters played by Max Von Sydow actually enhances all the characterizations, for we really get that it is not Max Von Sydow in all three films, but characters who merely look like Von Sydow, but sound different, even down to the peculiarities of their emotional vocal choices.

That strikes me as a very odd way to think about acting. Though it is consistent - he sees acting as the portrayal of a character, as what is represented. Not as material, so to speak. It's a different approach to art to see the signifier, the material, as having artistic importance, as carrying as much function as the meaning of what is on screen. But - I think you are bound to run into trouble sooner or later if you dismiss the signifier... it might lead you to declare Ulysses overrated.... a result, again, of reducing a work of art to its story, ignoring the means by which it is told.

An Aside on Film and Poetry

I'm in another posting slump. There might be reasons. I have been taking a class - a poetry class, for pure edification. It keeps me busy, it's been draining off whatever energy I might be putting into blogging.

I suppose I could get around that by blogging about the class - or about ideas the class inspires. I could write about poems that work "cinematically" - often hundreds of years before the invention of cinema. I suppose that's an old game - spotting things in novels or poems or Shakespeare or such that anticipate techniques we think of as cinematic. It's probably a silly game - the point is probably that things happen in the world, and have always happened in much the same way - in space and time, and we experience them and remember them, and try to put them into other forms - words or pictures or stories - and the forms we put them in will resemble one another. (I think I am quoting someone here: is it Manny Farber? or Jean Mitry? someone I have read in the last few months, who wrote about "cinematic" techniques that predate cinema.... Mitry I think...) Anyway - it's not too useful, probably - but it's fun - and might be useful. "Cinematic" techniques are techniques that use space and time as their basic building blocks. Poets and novelists and obviously painters always used space and time as building blocks - so analogies are inevitable.

Take Shelley's Ozymandias: there's a poem that's almost a camera ready script. Scenes and shots are all laid out: the poet meets a traveler from an ancient land, who starts to tell of what he's seen. As he does, the poem almost cross fades (across an ellipse) to shots of the ruined statue of Ozymandias in the desert. We are give a series of shots - as analytically edited as a Russian: "legs of stone... shattered visage... lip and sneer..." - described like a series of shots, edited together - though you could do it as a track past the pieces, though still fairly close... with maybe superimposed ghosts of the old days, the artist's hands carving the scowling face.... then in - cut or track in, to the inscription:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

And then - what I would call a shock cut, to a long, long shot of the site: "Nothing beside remains." says the poem - and describes the scene in its full context - the desert sands, "boundless and bare" - with what amounts to a zoom out or pan away from the statue to the empty sands - "The lone and level sands stretch far away."

It's a thing of beauty. I suppose treating it like a film doesn't really add much - that might be the point, though. Poets, novelists, playwrights, painters manipulate space, time, combine images, vary their position relative to their imagery, to create their effects - you have to pay attention to how they treat space, when they do manipulate it. It's more or less a given with film - the way manipulation of words is a given in poetry, manipulation of stories and characters are in novels or plays - but novels and films manipulate words, poems manipulate characters - cross media techniques are a valuable device for any and all....

Anyway - it's all very interesting. One thing this class has done is emphasize the value of close reading - I notice that the techniques of close reading are pretty consistent across all art forms. The specifics vary, as one looks at different elements that go into making a poem or a panting or a film - but the general principals remains. Repetition - patterns of repetition and variation, parallels, series, related pieces: all the sound effects of poetry (rhyme, alliteration and assonance, meter), semantic patterns, patterns of imagery... in films: manipulation of space is primary; repetition of patterns of things on the screen, editing, how images connect... I might get ambitious and pursue some of this - it occurs to me that all films are in fact more poetry than prose: there is a reliance of the detail of the shots and sequences of shots in film that seems more like the pressure poems put on words and lines and sentences, than like the way prose uses those things. But if I start down that road I may never get to stop.

Blogs and Criticism

Another blogger weighing in on the role of criticism on the internet, on blogs, specifically - David Bordwell, no less. As one would hope, he takes the broad view, asking what criticism is and offering a description before moving into the specifics of blogging. Or more accurately - he asks what criticism does, what critics do: well - describe art - analyze art - interpret art - and evaluate art. And what forms does it take? reviews - critical essays - academic writing. And how do these functions and formats interact? And after exploring these questions, he returns to the web - what do we find on the web What could we use more of? Critical essays! That is - he notes that while the web tends to encourage and be dominated by shorter, evaluative pieces, it is also well suited to longer pieces. A good many exist - his site is a prime example, but he cites other examples - Jim Emerson, Senses of Cinema, Rouge - that use longer forms. There are others beside - Ted Pigeon, say; the Self-Styled Siren.

I'm all for it. I like longer pieces: I like posts that take a couple reads to go through. And I like that these kinds of essays on the web can use the internet's rather easy multimedia capabilities. Pictures, video, sound - as well as words - and interacting with words. (And sometimes without words. Or the words integrated into the pictures, as with Kevin Lee's video essays.)

But another thing I like about the web, that plays in the middle between the short, fast posts (reviews, news, gossip, links, little bits of nonsense like video clips or lists) and the (potential for) longer essay-like posts is its cumulative nature. And its collaborative nature, for for this purpose, collaboration is a form of accumulation. Take, for example, most of Girish's posts: he starts with a topic - a book, a film, a group of films, a topic like blogging - and sketches in some thoughts about it. Then opens the floor, basically: and the comments take the subject(s) and explore it (them), work through the possibilities. It becomes a group essay, in a way - trying on ideas, working through the various perspectives... Blogathons work like that as well - a bunch of people, pooling their ideas and information and arguments, creating a cloud of information about a subject...

But this can happen even without the collaboration. Take David Cairns' site - this week he's writing about Joseph Losey - a one man blogathon! The posts are longer than simple reviews or comments - but maybe not, individually, full on critical essays - but together, with their illustrations, and a video clip or two - they add up. (To something damned great...)

I think this is one of the genuine advantages of the web in general and blogging in particular: it allows you to work on things over time, to build an argument, to work toward an essay. Bordwell's crack about "idlers, hobbyists, obsessives, and retirees" isn't far off: blogging doesn't pay - we all have to pay the bills somehow, and if we aren't paid writers or academics, we have to find the time to write about films after we pay the rent. Which works against long, well researched, carefully reasoned work. But blogging, in particular, allows us to move toward more substantive work if we want to. It allows us to be part of the exploration of films - and it allows us to present ideas in pieces. Posts can act as notes for an essay that might pass muster in school or print - drafts of an essay... And at its best - these drafts are critiqued and considered by other people, who can build on them, react to them...

Notes on Variations, Mostly

As the second contemplative cinema blogathon comes to a close, I want to write up some thoughts on "parametric" explorations in contemplative cinema. I am not sure what this means, if it means anything. I suppose I start from the notion (outlined in my previous post on this) that "contemplative" cinema is a refinement of the "art film" - that it derives its style mostly from that tradition, and shares most of its concerns, and its orientation toward reality, human subjectivity, expressiveness, and so on, with the art film. That is - style and content are, usually, aligned - silence and stillness and ambiguity in contemplative films, like in art films, are meaningful - they express either the subjective experience of their characters, or of the filmmaker. This is one of the points where they differ from the "parametric" film - the "modernist", or maybe "formalist" film. These are films where elements of the style function on their own - the style still conveys the experience of the characters and ideas of the filmmaker, but they take on other functions as well.

So how do these kinds of formal play work in contemplative films? I can't pretend to answer that - but I will offer some observations on a couple films that do play with those kinds of ideas. Particularly Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century...

Syndromes does some parametric things. It is split in half, and the two halves are related in a number of ways: same actors, playing the same (or similar) characters; both set in hospitals; the second one starts in a new, modern hospital but later moves into the basement, which uses the sets from the first half. It's structured as two sides of a love affair (or anticipated love affair) - in the first half we follow a woman doctor, her affairs, or non-affairs; in the second, a man, and the end of an affair, rendered with great subtlety. The plot turns on this continuity - both stories are about one of these characters not falling in love, or falling out of love, with someone else. And the two halves echo images and ideas - repeating or reversing them. The most powerful, probably, the pairing of a solar eclipse in the first half with a long strange shot of a piece of machinery, a hose or lamp or something, which, like the eclipsed sun, fills the screen with a huge black circle....

Repetition and parallelism are common in art films - and contemplative films. Hong Sang-soo, for instance, usually builds his films around repeated scenes and stories. But Weerasethakul seems to be handling this a bit differently, here and in Tropical Malady (the two of his I've seen so far - though with luck, I'll see Blissfully Yours next week). Hong naturalizes the repetitions - he tends to repeat scenes as they are experienced by different characters: so in Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, for example, we see the same story from the two main characters' points of view. Syndromes and a Century may be doing something like that, but not exactly - because it is creating a different story world, where different things happen. It is not the same story seen two different ways, with differences that can be attributed to varying memories and attitudes: it is a different story.

This moves it closer to what Bordwell calls "parametric" films. It highlights the act of telling a story even more than usual for art films. It is not presented as multiple versions of the same story, but of multiple stories with a related purpose. It plays, then, like two passes through the same material, running the changes on the basic stuff of the story. In this, it recalls Ozu's films - the way he kept reusing his actors, his story situations (a daughter marrying, usually), character names, family relationships - but arranged differently, as if trying out all the possible permutations. This begins to suggest a way of considering these films different from Bordwell's. Bordwell focuses on narration, on how the story is told, on the relationship, in a film, between the telling and the story world being created. But while there are stylistic variations in Syndromes and a Century, the main changes are to the story world - the "fabula". This creates a different dynamic - one that calls to mind Brian McHale's characterization of post-modern fiction as being driven by ontological concerns. McHale argues that modernism was driven by epistemological questions - what can be known about the world? how does ones subjective experience of the world shape it? Post-modernism, though, is driven by ontological questions - what is real? The distinction is neatly illustrated by comparing Hong's double narratives to Weerasethakul's. Hong's films show a stable ontology from multiple points of view - his films are about point of view, memory, individual interpretation of events. Syndromes, though, shows two different possible worlds, linked by various elements - characters, actors, situations - but they don't create the same story from two angles. They create different stories.

Bordwell, as it happens, covers something similar to this in his new book. One of the chapters discusses forking path films: Run Lola Run - Too Many Ways to be Number One - Sliding Doors - Blind Chance.... films that explicitly pose varying possible futures. Syndromes and a Century doesn't present itself explicitly as an alternative future film, but it is similar. In some ways, it might be more radical - it doesn't rationalize its style as fantasy or science fiction or explicit options or allegories. It just tells 2 similar, but not identical stories about similar, but not necessarily identical characters, in similar, but not identical worlds, populated by similar, but not identical people. Using similar, but not identical locations, images, conversations and so on. Which if you're a bit of as formalist like me is just endlessly fascinating....

Getting back to the question of contemplative cinema - this sort of formal game play may seem to be at odds with the expectation for muted narrative, blankness, silence and so on, but it's not unknown. Divided stories turn up quite often in films of this sort. Some, possibly most, follow the fairly conventional art film patterns of Hong Sang-soo's films: exploring different points of view, following different characters in turn, etc. is common enough. But this can be linked to some degree and type of parametric storytelling as well. Sometimes safely within the "fabula" - Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry, say, is structured around three variations of one conversation... Sometimes by imposing formal strangeness on a relatively stable story world - as in Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, with its parallel stories, each centered on a different Lee Kang-sheng character.... And sometimes, films push the variations quite far into the realm of style. In Vanda's Room, Pedro Costa alternates between scenes shot with Vanda and her family and friends, and scenes shot with a group of men, living (mostly) in a condemned, abandoned, room. All of them share the basic look - digital camera, natural light, long takes, etc. - but there are significant stylistic differences as well. He has said that he looks at the scenes with Vanda as theater - the men as cinema: he films her in her room, usually on her bed, holding forth, quite often, with her family or friends, fairly vocal, very performative. The bed is a stage - he frames and shoots to emphasize the stage, the frontality of the room. The men, though, are cinema - which emerges in the way he shoots them. While the camera is fixed in any given shot, he shoots from a much greater variety of placements; the room has much more of a sense of 360 degree space. There is a stronger sense of offscreen space as well, with sounds coming from the street, with visible doors, people coming and going, and so on. Vanda's room tends to be closed in: it is what you see (though not always what you can hear.) I'd even say that the variation extends to the type of drugs they use: the women smoke heroin - the men shoot it. I don't know what that means - but in the film, it serves to create a kind of structural, formal pattern. Its meaninglessness, in fact, emphasizes its formal functionality - it slides toward being a purely formal device. Which, again, pushes the film toward "parametric" filmmaking....

Contemplative Films as Art Films

The second annual contemplative cinema blogathon is up and running, with some good reading already up. I have to say - I like this idea: I like the chance to go back to something every now and then. Especially big, open ended topics, like this one, or things like the recent film endings or opening credits blogathons - things that are likely to hit you at intervals.... It's nice to swing back a couple times.

But now... there's no lack of things to write about contemplative cinema - the poetics, the history, the individual films - the criticism, which is getting some attention this year. What catches my interest, though, is pretty much the same as last year - the question of what "contemplative cinema" is - where it came from, how it relates to other kinds of films: the questions of style and history that I usually end up with, when I start trying to be serious... I keep coming back to them, because I really don't know the answers. That may be my point - that defining CC may be impossible - it has too many sources and lines of descent, the formal and stylistic devices that mark it are neither exclusive to it nor adequate to define it. Which isn't to say that there aren't identifiable films we can describe this way - it's just that we can't find one line of descent for them, or a completely stable set of features...

The fact that I'm reading David Bordwell's latest, The Poetics of Cinema, certainly encourages those questions. One chapter reprints an essay from the late 70s on the "art film", with new comments, bringing some of the arguments up to date. (He also extends this, with examples, in Narration in the Fiction Film.) I think it's reasonable to consider "contemplative cinema" as a refinement of Bordwell's "art film." These films (per Bordwell) emphasize realism (both external and subjective) and authorial expression: they operate through ambiguity (both in what happens, and how it is presented), psychological exploration; they are usually loosely plotted, deemphasizing causal connections, character motivations - they often have drifting, observing, passive protagonists (lots of journalists and prostitutes) who encounter events and whose story is more their perceptions and experiences than their goals, met and missed. Art films downplay the tight explanations and strings of causality that classical cinema emphasizes, both in what they tell (what a good Russian would call the syuzhet), and what happens (the fabula - the story world).

Contemplative films follow that pattern pretty closely. They are, perhaps, an "intensified" version - the art film's tendencies and structures extended: ambiguity, passive characters, emphasis on mood and tone, etc., lack of obvious story, elision of the plot at the level of the telling, all taken that much further. The new material in Poetics of Cinema discusses developments of the art film since 1980 or so, describing many of the stylistic features of contemplative films: long takes, longer shots, quietness, planimetric compositions (arrangements of people or objects in a row, along a plane parallel to the picture plane, often against a neutral flat background), etc. Bordwell also considers the history of art films: the development of art films out of neo-realism, first in Europe in the 40s and 50s, then, following similar patterns, in several other areas - notably Iran, China and Taiwan, Africa, Turkey, etc. It's still a valid question how to characterize CC's development of the art film: is it an extension? a refinement? a branch of the art film? a departure? I'm inclined to look at it as an extension and refinement - a tendency within art films that has evolved and thrived...

The wild card in this, though, is another type of film Bordwell discusses - the "modernist" film, or the "parametric" film. I'm tempted to call it the "formalist" film - though that might require another post or two to define. (It's got it's own chapter in Narration in the Fiction Film.) This type of film is marked by a split between the style and the storytelling - the style and the meaning. It is a film that gives style, structure, formal elements non-signifying functions - functions that do not mean anything. The classic examples are who you would expect, I suppose - Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Tati - Godard and Eisenstein in some modes - the tradition today is continued most obviously in Wes Anderson (all those frontal compositions and odd cuts and angles, none of which has any obvious meaning - it doesn't convey anyone's perception of the world, it doesn't really comment on the world or the stories - it's an arbitrary, graphic patterning meant to be enjoyed for its own sake). Bordwell contrasts art cinema with both classical, narrative cinema, and "modernist" or parametric cinema - not exactly splitting them into three types of films - more positing them as three modes of films, that might combine in different ways, in given films. (My Life to Live, say, might be read as an art film, if you concentrate on the story, on Nana's passage through life - or as parametric, if you concentrate instead on Godard's methods of staging and shooting and editing scenes, as he passes through a series of possibilities, that are not directly related to the story and its psychological meaning.)

Now: it seems to me, that given this scheme, contemplative cinema is mostly firmly within the tradition of the art film. Firmly enough that most examples of CC are more than adequately described as "art cinema" - as adequately as L'Avventura or Breathless or Shame might be. They might represent a particular type of art film, but they don't depart from the model in any fundamental ways.

Except when they do - or - when elements from CC start to migrate into more classical narrative films, or to parametric films. Or - when what are mostly "art films" incorporate elements of parametric film-making. This is when things get really interesting. But I think this is where I have to start a second post, maybe a third. Because there seem to me to be quite a few interesting examples of both types of film - "classical" films that have incorporated devices from contemplative cinema; contemplative films working with "parametric" devices. The former - take any of several excellent 2007 films: the way No Country for Old Men or There Will be Blood, say, both strip down the dialog, eliminating it, or reducing it to formula (Plainview's repeated sales pitches).... or the way those films, or Zodiac as well, dissipate their plots - moving significant events off screen, leaving things unresolved, and so on. They are, then, art films, in the older sense - but often through devices seen in contemplative films.

On the other side - this definitely will require a further post - but consider the parametric structures of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films - specifically their bifurcations - their repetition of stories, events, etc. in different registers... this seems to me to change the way the films work, somewhat - complicating the idea of what a contemplative film might be...

Hooray for Hollywood

In a departure from my usual movie going habits, this week I took in two honest to god Hollywood movies. Good ones, too! 3:10 to Yuma is a decent update of a classic western, with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe glowering and charming their way across the Arizona landscape (actually New Mexico, if I read the credits right), en route to the title train. Let's give Ben Foster his due, since he gets to play the Crazy Sidekick, with all the scene chomping that entails. But I can't say much more for it than that. It's okay: you can see the story in there, know that you're supposed to be moved by the psychological drama, then - since it is a pretty well crafted bit of story telling - feel those things, or a reasonable approximation of them, when the long foreseen moments arrive.... but that's all there is. It looks okay, but nothing special. The drama is okay, but nothing special, nothing we haven't seen before, nothing worked out in great detail back in the 50s by films like the original 3:10 to Yuma (which I haven't seen) or any number of Budd Boetticher or Anthony Mann films that did it all much more efficiently and honestly. It doesn't add anything to the western - compare its view of heroism and good and evil to that of Deadwood, which does add something... It isn't anything special to look at - a straightforward looking cowboy movie, cut to fit in with the times... seems rather like The Proposition, with some of the mythic elements redistributed and naturalized, though not exactly eliminated, and with the requisite poetic psychopath at the center, the tortured hero poised between law and disorder, a grizzled old bounty hunter/Pinkerton played by an Old Pro, and certain symbolism of home and hearth vs. the howling wilderness. Though what does it mean that here, the poetic crook is an Aussie playing an American, and there an American playing an Aussie? It gets confusing sometimes.

Meanwhile, speaking of confusing: I also saw the Bourne Ultimatum this week. Here's a thought: what if Paul Greengrass had directed 3:10 to Yuma and James Mangold the Bourne movie? If someone wants to revive the western, that might have some hope. Bourne Ultimatum is utterly ridiculous stuff - the amnesiac superkiller, the sneering CIA villains, the supercomputer surveillance machines that always need another 30 seconds to tap into that phone, not to mention Bourne's apparent ability to teleport (the only plausible explanation for about half the plot.) This nonsense is completely redeemed by the infamous camera on a bungee cord shooting style. This has been much debated in the blogosphere - David Bordwell (twice), Jim Emerson, and others (Ebert's readers, say) weighing in - most at least somewhat against it. I cannot agree. I found the film quite legible, and fairly engaging. Bordwell notes that the style covers up a lot of problems - the idiocy of the plot, for example. Yes it does. It pushes the plot (and characters and all that jazz) into the background - and keeps the background in the background. It's all surface: but it's a pretty interesting surface. Even when I was laughing at the story, I was engrossed in the pictures.

I think there are two basic reasons for this. First: it just looks great. The camera movements, the cutting, the action are all combined to create a lot of pure rhythmic energy. All on the surface, yes - literally: one of Bordwell's points is how this film obscures space, fails to clarify what happens in space - that's right, I think. There’s very little done with staging or space, the action and fights don’t take place in the kinds of coherent spaces Hong Kong films use, the fights don't exploit the movements of the performers, real, or as perceived against some kind of effect - here, everything tends to be crammed onto the surface of the screen (wherever it is in relationship to other things on the shot) - it is all surface. Even things seen from a distance are treated as part of the surface of the screen. It is, I think, a relentlessly, and deliberately, two-dimensional film.

The second reason might be more important - and relates a bit to my disappointment with Mangold's western (maybe because I saw these two films the same week.) Bordwell talks about it's use of "intensified continuity" - especially the idea of putting one discreet piece of information into every (very brief) shot (a staple of the style). Ultimatum does this - but obscures the information - putting it out of focus sometimes, hiding it, decentering it (either physically or in time, slipping the information into only part of the shot. Bordwell also notes that a lot of the information in the film is on the soundtrack - things like the whoosh of a razor telling you what Bourne is using as a weapon. Now - I think this is part of the key to the film's ability to hold your attention. Every shot has one piece of information - sometimes hidden, obscured, sometimes implied, sometimes as much aural as visual. As you watch the film, you, first, realize that this is how it works - that every shot is going to show you something you will want to know to make sense of what is happening - and you know it may be hidden somehow - so you watch for it. I think, quite simply, the film functions like a game: it is presented, really, as a puzzle you have to figure out. And you CAN figure it out - it's not insoluble - you just have to commit to it - look at the pictures, pay attention to the soundtrack, and you will be able to follow it. Understand, at least in principal, what is happening - where people are and what they are doing - and so on. Bordwell also writes about genre conventions and expectations, and how they guide our ability to follow the film - this is certainly part of how it works. You know what should be coming - you have seen things like this before, so you look for the clues and hints and bits of detail that you know are part of the plot. The style and the conventions work together - the conventions, the expectations that there will be something important in every shot, etc. allow the filmmakers to hide this information - to make it harder to find, harder to see, or to divide the information between sound and vision. At the same time, this makes the puzzle solving harder and more engaging.

Now: the film's defenders seem to focus on certain claims about the style: its supposed "realism", it's "immersive" qualities, it's representation of Bourne's experience of the world, prominently.... Bordwell's posts deal with those claims pretty well. What I think makes it work is different - it's the mixture of the engagement the viewer has with film as a puzzle, as a problem to be solved... and the tendency toward both a pure surface and a kind of "telling" not "showing". Now I will say - some of this does relate to the defenders' claims, especially Bourne's POV. The viewing experience - the active requirement to figure things out as things happen on screen is analogous to how Bourne experiences the world. But this is distanced - the camera work does not work as a representation of his experience of the world, in anything close to a literal sense. But as a sign of the way everyone in the film is, essentially, playing a kind of live action video game against everyone else - well - yes, it is a pretty good analogy of that. A sign of it. Similarly - I don't think the film is particularly immersive, or realistic - or visceral: I had the opposite impression. Nothing in the film has weight, there's almost nothing tactile about it. It doesn't seem to exist in space: it exists on the surface of the screen. If it's "immersive" it is immersive intellectually - it engages the mind in figuring it out, but not in imagining a real world where the events could be taking place.

So then.... I liked it. It's not a great film - it gives up too much. Space, staging, depth, realism, acting, characters, stories, reference to the real world - all those things are good, and if you get rid of too many, you end up with nothing more than a diversion. A cross-word puzzle is distinctly less satisfying than a poem; a video game distinctly less satisfying than a movie. But it is a fascinating film. On the surface, and as a puzzle, it looks great and is very satisfying. And I think - though this is a bad time to get into it - that there could be something more to it. The way it "tells" things instead of "showing" them is itself interesting: it doesn't act things out, it indicates them, signifies them - it seems to me much closer in its methods of telling a story to a comic book - especially a fairly adventurous comic book - than a movie. It feels written more than shown. I don't know how typical this is of contemporary action films - I don't see a lot of them, though what I've seen don't do it very well if they do it - Bourne does. BUt it is interesting - and something I hope I can return to. There's a whole argument there (that I have to confess is related to some of Burch's ideas, that I've alluded to before). But it has to wait.

For now - I'll end by coming back to 3:10 to Yuma. It could have benefited from the kind of showy style Bourne Ultimatum featured. Bordwell says the latter used its style to obscure the weakness of the story - true enough, and so it should. Yuma could have used some style to obscure the plot holes and absurd situations (the ending gun fight namely) and creaky old genre conventions it trotted out. I think the Bourne movie used its genre conventions as a skeleton to hang its style on - like musicians improvising off a 12 bar blues. Its genre conventions allow it a lot more freedom in the actual surface of the film - they free it to show things moving and colors and shapes forming and disappearing on screen, until it approaches abstraction - without losing coherence. Yuma ends up being a story I've seen before, done not as well as it was done before, and not doing anything different... Which is a bit disappointing.

Last Week's Argument Today!

This is last week's argument, I suppose, but what can you do. I want to add a couple things to all the controversy about Jonathan Rosenbaum's take on Ingmar Bergman. It's been much hashed out on the blogs: here's Harry Tuttle on Rosenbaum, and Part 2. And Jonathan Lapper's rather similar response. Also see Girish, Scanners, (several posts, including quite a few comments from JR himself), Elusive Lucidity, and nearly everyone else on the planet. Including this, David Bordwell's comments on Rosenbaum on Bergman (and Antonioni, and Scorsese and Woody Allen on their favorites...) The Bordwell post gets at a couple things I've been thinking about - first, the constraints of space on Rosenbaum's argument - the fact that it really doesn't amount to an argument at all, but the summary of an argument, referring to things (Dreyer's use of space, to name one) that have inspired whole books. And second - he starts to address some of the terms of the debate: what did Bergman do, stylistically? There have been claims made about Bergman - he is too theatrical, he is not cinematic enough, he is not formally innovative - but these claims tend to be just laid out there, without much detail or definition. What do you mean, cinematic? That sort of thing is worth thinking about....

As for me - I don't have a lot to add to the debate. A couple notes, nothing too profound.... First - given a week or so to think about it all - I think the problems with Rosenbaum's article come down to three things: (1) space and format: he only has time to lay out what an argument would look like, not to make the argument. (2) the premise - that the best way to assess the value of an artist in in comparison to other artists: thus he writes an article that seems really about why Bergman is not as good as Godard or Bresson or Dreyer. (3) The rhetorical problem of presenting a comparative argument (Bergman is not as good as Bresson, etc.) in absolute terms (Bergman is not good.) That doesn't follow. It seems to me - the criteria you could use to show that Bergman is not as good as Bresson or Godard would still show that Bergman was damned good. In later comments, Rosenbaum seems to be saying that (see his comments at Emerson's place.) But the NYT article gave the strong impression that he was dismissing Bergman, a good deal more categorically.

And - moving on: thinking about these debates has gotten me thinking about some of the terms being thrown around in the middle. Like "theatrical." Some variation on the term comes up in a lot of this conversation, from Rosenbaum's article (claiming Bergman's cinematic innovations came from "his skill and experience as a theater director [rather] than a desire or capacity to change the language of cinema in order to say something new") onwards - but what does it mean? What does it mean when people answered that Dreyer or Rivette were as theatrical as Bergman? It's tempting to ask if it means anything - but I resist that temptation, and suggest, instead, that it can mean a bunch of things - that the term tends to function by pointing to certain elements of the theater that are relevant to the claims being made. Which better sound vague and obscure, because it is. At least shifty. But that's the point. The term is used to indicate any number of things associated with the theater (and its relationship with film), which can be quite incompatible with one another.

Such as? Theatrical can mean, looking like a play: the unity of time and space, the emphasis on the stage, specifically on the framing of the stage - limited audience point of view, maintaining the line between audience and action.... or, having almost nothing to do with that - Theatrical can refer to acting styles - projecting to the back of the room, outsized gestures, etc. - Warren William as Julius Caesar!... or - Theatrical can refer to a kind of notion of human nature - seeing human behavior as dominated by performance, the adoption of roles.... Etc.

Yet: to lump these types of things together raises all kinds of problems. The third example describes Renoir rather well, I think - but Renoir's use of space, the camera etc., has nothing to do with the first type of "theater." Or take "theatrical" acting - take Warren William if you want: how is his performance as Julius Caesar (in DeMille's Cleopatra) not cinematic? It fits the character certainly - he's Caesar! he's supposed to dominate the room when he comes in; the "theatricality" of the performance works within the film.

And more than that (building on a comment I made on Girish's post), in some ways, "theatrical" elements in films are more formally innovative and challenging than "cinematic" devices. Restricted use of space, emphasis on frames, on the proscenium arch, excessive acting styles, certain kinds of stagings and framings, inclusion of performances within the performance (a la Cassavetes or Rivette, or quite a few Bergmans), all create the formal breaks in the illusion that generate certain types of art. I'm thinking of Noel Burch, here - he wrote about the difference between presentational art and representational art. The latter attempts to make people forget the medium: to see the story being told. Presentational art, on the other hand, constantly calls your attention to the act of putting on a show. For Burch, conventional Hollywood continuity was representational - whereas primitive cinema, for example, was much more presentational - making the act of putting on a show manifest.

Enough... one of the things holding this post up has been that I don't have any of these thoughts worked out very well. And am cramming 2-3 different ideas together.... I want to think more about what makes something theatrical - what is meant when people call something "theatrical" - I'd love to see a kind of anatomy of things that can be called "theatrical" in films. And beyond that is the consideration of Burch's point: the ways theater can function in film, however we value them. The difference between presentational and representational art is an interesting one - and I find that a lot of the debate over Bergman is tied to issues like that. Or to the difference between expressionism and formalism - an even knottier set of definitions and categories that I shouldn't mention, though I think I mean by it something like what Zach Campbell wrote in comments to his piece:

My impression of Bergman is that he was always going for effects, conclusions. To put it very crudely, because I can't find a more articulate or eloquent way of stating it, when I'm moved by Bergman--unsettled, saddened, uplifted--I feel like this movement is the calculation of form, that the form did what it was "supposed" to do. This isn't a sin, but neither is it the pinnacle of film art as I experience it and choose to think it. Whereas in Dreyer, I am constantly challenged, shot-to-shot sometimes, by the frictions and (im)balances and of shots, pictorial compositions, cuts, camera movements, etc. I don't feel like Dreyer is leading me to conclusions at all; there's a richness and a weirdness to shot combinations or spatial articulations that just doesn't exist in most of what I've seen in Bergman.

Form can either signify, or resist (delay, complicate, exceed, etc.) signification. Formalism, presentational art, resists signification - forces attention on the act of signification. And - well, we all have our preferences, and that's where mines runs.... But I'd better leave this for now.