Why I Love Ozu

This is not the great big Ozu screed I alluded to last night - that involves some unloved Ozu films that, well, I love... but it has occurred to me that I have never, here or (really) anywhere else, quite written a simple statement of Why I Love Ozu. Allusions here and there, and some reasonably precise comments on the Film Walrus blog - but nothing definitive. But a blogathon is perfect excuse for this sort of thing, so off we go.

It was watching this shot, roughly, when I realized Ozu was my favorite filmmaker:



That's from Late Spring - Chishu Ryu's character has been convinced that to get his daughter to marry, he has to convince her he is going to marry - so at a Noh performance, he nods and smiles at the pretty widow people have been whispering about. Setsuko Hara's character sees - and reacts, while her father sits beside her, impassive, absorbed (or pretending to be) in the performance. Late Spring always floors me - always surprises me, with how funny it is, then floors me, again, with how heart-breaking it is. The famous scene at the end, when Ryu tells Hara to go and be happy - is horrifying. The way it forces him to empty his soul, to lie to her, even more cruelly than in pretending to marry - but even more than that, the fact that what he says is almost certainly true. She will become happy - settle into her family, work through the disappointment... but it doesn't make this moment of parting any less terrible. And it doesn't change the way the film itself plays as a charting of her reduction from a free, exuberant, happy woman to a bride, dressed up like a doll. (Ozu's late films often play like a panagyric against the insanity of Japanese marriage customs - or they would, if you ignore the fact that all the films involving marriage treat it almost completely differently - in Late Spring, Hara is forced to marry; in Early Summer, she marries a man of her choice, against the will of her family (and indeed, against the values her Late Spring character had asserted - this Noriko has nothing against second marriages.) Equinox Flower has a girl choosing her husband over her father's resistance; Late Autumn has a girl stumbling into a love marriage completely by accident; and Autumn Afternoon has a girl in an arranged marriage, like in Late Spring, but significantly happier about it.)



It’s probably not an accident that this scene takes place in Kyoto, where they have been visiting Buddhist shrines - it's probably also not exactly an accident that Ryu's character has been reading Nietzsche. What he says - telling her how he was unhappy with her mother (and she with him), but they found happiness, grew into it - and how she will do the same, the pain now will not last, and her story is the same story everyone else lives - is not exactly what Nietzsche meant by the eternal return of the same, but it’s not far off. This is where Ozu comes closest to earning his reputation as a Buddhist, in these ideas of acceptance, and the natural cycles of life.... But it's also important that the film is resisting those recurring patterns here - there is a lot of weight brought to bear on the ways this wedding is a Very Bad Thing, people giving in to social expectations, abdicating responsibility for their lives, and letting their relatives and friends dictate how they will live - giving up their individuality to become types: a bride, a wife, a mother.... This too, I suppose, is not far from Nietzsche -the idea that your individual life is absolutely on you - it is too easy to be swept into what the world makes you - but that is defeat. Individuals are free - when they enter into roles, they become false - but they really can't live without taking a role: it is a dilemma...

I think this is, in fact, Ozu's greatest strength, at least as a humanist - and one of his great strengths as a filmmaker, in the way his themes resonate with his style. HIs films are about that contradiction, between people as individuals, and people as types - self as imposed from outside, and self as we enact it, and the ways anything we do is caught up into society. The style and structure of his films and stories emphasize this - the repeated use of actors, in similar roles, with the same names, the same problems, generalizes the characters, but also particularizes them - from Tatsuo Saito and Takeshi Sakamoto and Tomio Aoki to Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara and Shin Saburi - bring their own distinctiveness to their roles. And the roles change - everything he does works on the principal of repetition and variation. So five films about marriage work through half a dozen (maybe more) types of marriages (or not marriages, if you count Ryu in Late Spring, or Hara in Late Autumn). So three Noriko films offer one who is bullied into marriage, one who marries on her own against her family's will, one who does not remarry; one who condemns remarriage and one who marries a widow. And so on...

It's easy to get absorbed into Ozu's style - especially for me. But what makes him the flat out best director of them all, I think, is the way he combines total formal command with a profound humanism. Ozu and Capra (and Renoir, though I have seen fewer of his films), I say, do this better than anyone - they offer a truly sophisticated view of life and how to live it, along with complete mastery of the medium. In Ozu's case, the mastery goes further, and is as formally rigorous and challenging as Eisenstein or Dreyer or Godard - he challenges how films work, how they mean, while making them work and mean. And I say again, he has a sophisticated view of the world. What I admire in Ozu and Capra both is the way they give the appropriate weight to everything we are. They pose individuals against society - but they do it in ways that make us aware of just how important families and communities, marriages, friendships, are... and how constricting they can be, even at their best. Individuality and communities both have their values - and Ozu (and Capra) give all the relevant values weight. Society vs. individual, tradition vs. change, freedom vs. responsibility, justice vs. responsibility - Ozu never lets anyone off the hook. You don't get to choose one or the other - you don't get to have both all the time (sometimes they are real conflicts) - everything counts.

All right. I guess that sums it up, for now anyway. I'll leave you with a lovely picture of what happens when daughters (and wives) get their way - Shin Saburi pouts.... Though I can't deny that a lot of the reason I love Ozu is in the green squares and stripes (I mean, it's almost perfectly horizontal, across at least three planes!), the lamp, the red and black radio, and the way the bottles are arranged with the labels forming a perfect left to right descending diagonal.

Japanese Cinematography Sampler

I've been pointing to Wildgrounds' Japanese Cinema Blogathon for a while now - I suppose it's time to add something of my own. It should come as no surprise (just look at the top of the page) that this is a subject near and very dear to my heart. I've been working on a somewhat more - uh, what's the word? geeky? cerebral? wordy? - essay for a while - that's taking a while to get right... So let's jump in with something a bit simpler - a fairly quick celebration of one of the most wonderful aspects of Japanese film - their utterly unapologetic love for extravagant cinematography and compositions...

And where better to start than the director/DP combination that for my money created the most consistently astonishing images in cinema: Shohei Imamura and Shinsaku Himeda. I mean, look at that fish on the banner! look at the composition, the lighting, through water even! Damn... and look at these shots:







That last shot reminds me - contemporary Japanese filmmakers still know their way around the image - compare it to this shor from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's (and Akiko Ashizawa's) Retribution:



There's plenty more where that came from...




I can do this for pretty much any Japanese films I can put my hands on - I may before I'm done. (I haven't been collecting screenshots off my (Akira) Kurosawas, my Mizoguchis, my Suzukis - I may be back here with some more of this...) Right now, I'll leave you all with a hint of the essay to come - shot from a filmmaker perhaps not noted for his stylistic extravagance, this shot - it's almost worthy of Yoshida, or Oshima - it's the man you can see going down the stairs in the window that makes the shot...

Bloomsday

While I work on a couple posts for the Japanese Cinema Blogathon - let us honor the day - though how, how? It has been some years since I have read the book - making it hard to come up with a neat little commemorative quote. NOt that you're going to get too far trying to sum up Joyce in a sentence or two... but still... I know reading it, the first time, it was the newspaper section - "IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS" - that gave me the first jolt - the first indication that things were going to change. (Though I knew enough of the book to know they were going to change.) This is what they were talking about, I thought. But I think what used to stymie me (when I tried reading it, in my youth, in early college I suppose it must have been - I remember one summer out of school I determined I was going to read it) - came later. I made it, twice at least, well into the book - only to come a cropper somewhere in the middle - "Send us, bright one, light one, Herhorn, quickening and wombfruit." Somewhere after that. I ground along, but expired on the shores of that section (what do they call it? Oxen of the Sun?) - maybe in its depths, in later days. I tried it more than once, and that is where it ended - until it didn't: somewhere I learned to read it (could I blame Flann O'Brien? not impossible) - and now, it probably is my favorite part...

Our worth acquaintance, Mr Malachi Mulligan, now appeared in the doorway as the students were finishing their apologue accompanied with a friend whom he had just reencountered, a young gentleman, his name Alec Bannon, who had late come to town, it being his intention to buy a colour or a cornetcy in the fencibles and list for the wars. Mr Mulligan was civil enough to express some relish of it all the more as it jumped with a project of his own for the cure of the very evil that had been touched upon. Whareat he handed round to the company a set of pasteboard cards which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell's bearing a legend printed in fair italics: Mr Malachi Mulligan, Fertiliser and Incubator, Lambay Island. HIs project, he went on to expound, was to withdraw from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and devote himself to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed. Well, let us hear of it, good friend, said Mr Dixon. I make no doubt it smacks of wenching.

And so on, in increasingly wonderfully purpling prose.

Thank you, Mr. Joyce...

Links and Anticipation

Just stopping by - a few links on a Wednesday evening...

At the Film of the Month Club, a new film for June - ...no lies, by Mitchell Block - the film (16 minutes long) is embedded at the site, for the time being anyway - if possible, watch it before jumping into the conversation on the blog. Reasons will become clear when you've seen it, I think. Peter Rinaldi hosts this month - an interview with Mitchell Block, the director, will appear in the upcoming days....

Roger Ebert celebrates John Wayne on the 30th anniversary of his death.

The Nagisa Oshima retrospective is coming to Berkeley, and MIchael Guillen has details, and a long interview with James Quandt.

Pacze Moj has Oshima links, for those of us not in Berkeley.

And that's a reminder that Wildgrounds is hosting a Japanese Cinema Blogathon, starting Monday - I shall be diving into that...

D Day

65 years ago today, the Allies landed on the beaches at Normandy. A day to remember...

Sam Fuller remembered, and gets it down in two shots....

Books - Very Lush and Full of Ostriches

First - goodbye to David Carradine - I can't say I watched a lot of Kung Fu as a kid, but it was one of those shows everyone seemed to breath - at least, everyone my age.... Every time I've seen him since he's held the screen... Keith probably means more to me, given my Altman worship, but David Carradine's presence in anything was reason to watch it.


Now - trying to keep from backsliding into the postaweek mode of this spring, I think I'll try my hand at one of the memes going around - the Reading the movies meme, courtesy of The Dancing Image... I don't know if I've been tagged, but it looks like everyone's diving in with enthusiasm, so me too. The twist is - I did this 2 1/2 years ago, during Andy Horbal's Film Criticism blogathon: two posts of it, in fact! But that's no reason not to do it again...

I'm not sure I can improve on the 10 books listed then (see below, or the posts linked above) - but I can add to them.

1. Noel Burch - To the Distant Observer - on Japanese films. Probably where I became a formalist. Not that I bought everything he said, especially his value judgments - but I loved that he dug into the formal elements of films, how they work, and how they relate form to meaning. My interest in the difference between representational and presentational art, between expressionism and formalism (and my ideas about what those things mean) come from reading Burch. I stilll find myself thinking in those terms, usually hearing Burch's claims in the back of my head....

2. Godard on Godard - probably not surprising how often this comes up in these lists - Ed Howard, Glenn Kenny, etc. - for good reasons, Godard is simply a superb essayist, a characteristic that carried over to his films. He's also, when pinned down, as clear and careful an analyst of his own work as any filmmmaker gets - his essay on Two or Three Things I Know About Her got me a paper once - about McCabe and Mrs. Miller...

3. Sergei Eisenstein - though Eisenstein was no slouch. I read a few of his books - Film form or Notes of a Film Director, maybe Lessons with Eisenstein, a long long time ago - I saw Ivan the Terrible on TV one night, out of the blue with no preparation, and decided I had to learn more... I read all of them, before I read anything else about film, or before I had seen much more than Ivan the Terrible of the films one might see as a cinephile... I was probably a film formalist before I'd seen an appreciable number of films, come to think of it...

4. Paul Schrader - Transcendental Style in Film - This is another book I don't quite believe, but I still admire it deeply. It's a fascinating attempt to put films in the context of the rest of the culture - philosophy, the arts, religion, and though I can't accept all his claims, the attempt is inspiring.

5. Rick Altman - any of several, but The American Film Musical is one that really set me going a few years ago. Though the truth is - the Busby Berkeley films touring a few years ago sent me to Altman, and Altman sent me on from there... I could list a couple other of his books - A Theory of Narrative, for instance, from last year, was a treat - I find myself thinking in his terms: single focus narratives, double, multiple...

6. More recently, by German Film Class put me onto a couple works that live up to any standards: Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler is a seminal work, and argument aside, is one of the most detailed broad scale works of criticism I know....

7. and Tom Gunning's The Films of Fritz Lang is, like the books on Ozu, Capra and Kurosawa noted below, a magisterial assessment of the career of one of the essential directors.

8. And the class reminded me what a great book the Herzog on Herzog volume is. Herzog is as good a talker as anyone alive, and Paul Cronin guides him through his career in a fine way. It's revealing and fascinating (though I doubt I'd take much of it as gospel truth) - though, as he might say, that's just the accountant's truth. What he says illuminates the films, the ideas behind the films, himself, and he is endlessly fascinating....

9. Speaking of filmmakers who are totally compelling speakers, and writers - Guy Maddin's From the Atelier Tovar is another wonder. Trtuth is, Maddin's commentaries might rival Herzog's - and this book is a marvellous read. I can always find a quote there (or a post title.)

10. Oh god - another dozen possibilities occur to me, from Christian Metz (Film Language) or Peter Wollen (Signs and Meaning) to Jane Feur on the American musical (again) to Bunuel's My Last Sigh to Robert Ray's ABCs of Classical Hollywood Cinema - but no - let's actually dial it back: to Halliwell's Film Guide - which one? I don't know - 1994, I think, is the one I bought, way back in, about, 1994. And used as just that in those dark days before the IMDB. I'm not sure I ever agreed with its judgments - it didn't matter, because it was where I could find information, about pretty much anything, as long as it had been released in the UK.....

So that's that! And for old times sake - here are the first 10, from 2006 - all of which I value as much as ever now...

1. David Bordwell on Ozu
2. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's Kurosawa book.
3. Stanley Cavell - Pursuits of Happiness
4. Ray Carney on Frank Capra
5. Pier Paolo Pasolini - Heretical Empiricism.
6. Sarris' American CInema
7. Audie Bock - Japanese Film Directors
8. Stephen Teo - Hong Kong Cinema
9. Truffaut/Hitchcock
10. James Sanders' Celluloid Skylines (on New York in the movies)

Blogathons of the Future

The blogathon seems to have fallen into disuse lately - used to be, you'd get three a week (look at the entries for last spring and summer on my index - three a week may be an exaggeration, but one a week isn't...) Now? they are few and far between. Summer, though, seems to be an inspiration to try a few more - three coming up in June/July, all of them looking good. A Japanese cinema blogathon is obviously my cup of tea - that should get me to actually write a post....

June 15-21: Wildgrounds hosts a Japanese Cinema Blogathon.

June 21-30: Claude Chabrol blogathon, hosted by Flickhead.

June 28-July 4: Michael Mann week at Radiator Heaven.

One reason blogathons seem to have disappeared in the last year is the number of memes going around - favorite characters, favorite actors, various A to Z memes - fun stuff, without the challenge of forming quite so many complete sentences... There are a couple of those underway right now - which, judging from the early entries, do require the use of complete sentences: well worth checking out and returning to....

The Dancing Image asks about Reading the Movies. "A list of the movie books which had the greatest impact on me." He offers - he invites.

And Getafilm fires up a meme - Favorite movie period/place. There are rules:

1.) Think of a place (real or fictional) and time (past, present, future) portrayed in a movie (or a few) that you would love to visit.
2.) List the setting, period, applicable movie, and year of the applicable movie's release (for reference).
3.) Explain why, however you'd like (bullet points, list, essay form, screenshots, etc.). If this is a time and place that you have intimate knowledge of, feel free to describe what was done well and what wasn't done well in portraying it.
4.) If possible, list and provide links to any related movies, websites, books, and/or articles that relate to your choice (s).
5.) Modify Rules #1-4 to your liking. And come up with a better name for this meme.
6.) Link back to this Getafilm post in your post, please.
7.) Tag at least five others to participate!

And finally - Iain Stott is conducting a poll for the 50 Greatest Films of all time.

UPDATE: Jason Bellamy just announced a Pauline Kael week, June 15-19. He will post Kael excerpts, and loose the dogs of Internet Commentary upon them... people generally have opinions about Pauline Kael, so that should be lively...

Nomenclature

I've mostly given up politics here, but once in a while - sort of - at an angle... for instance, there is this exchange going on n the blogs: Mark Krikorian at the Corner comments on how to pronounce "Sotomayor" - response is predictable, and he comments again. The first time he's bland - "So, are we supposed to use the Spanish pronunciation, so-toe-my-OR, or the natural English pronunciation, SO-tuh-my-er, like Niedermeyer? " - the next time, he's a bit more pointed:

This may seem like carping, but it's not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

Response has not been favorable, at least not from the lefty blogs (and since I certainly don't read The Corner, without lefty blogs, I'd never have heard of this "controversy". I notice as of today, they are yukking it up about this, as if every word they say about it didn't make them look a little more ignorant...). Is it a "controversy"? Right wing responses to Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the court have not edified - a good chunk of the commentariat is going straight to the race and gender stuff, though I suppose a few are trying to gin up controversy about her record or comments made through the years... I don't know. If the pronunciation thing is anything more than bloggers pissing on each other over a snide remark someone made - that's very sad.

The follow up comments at the Corner are particularly sad. They do tend to get to their point - that Sotomayor is a weird foreigner (born in the Bronx! or whatever) trying to ruin our beautiful mother tongue... they might be taking the piss, of course. The simple answer to the initial question is - try to pronounce a person's name the way they do, or your best guess, if you haven't heard it. Along with a corollary - don't get too worked up when people mispronounce your name, unless you've corrected them recently and they're being stubborn - or taking the piss. I suppose it's equally true - when you are in a country where people speak a different language, do your best to make pronouncing your name easy for them.

What's sad, though, is that under it all, this is a pretty fascinating subject: the political, social, linguistic implications of names - of words and pronunciations, as words flow between languages. It's a window on the ways languages functions - how they evolve and interact; questions about names are themselves fascinating to look at. The ways questions like this are handled change between cultures - I've had Chinese friends, and Vietnamese friends, for example - immigrants, as children, now naturalized citizens - the Chinese friends, more than one of them, adapt English names. The Vietnamese friends do not. Does that mean anything, other than the different communities take slightly different approaches to how they relate to English in America? You see it in other areas too, more public - sticking with Asian names, for a long time, in film books, and film writing (to name one example), Japanese names were given in western order - Akira Kurosawa; but Chinese names are usually given in Asian order: Wong Kar-wei. There are bound to be interesting historical reasons for that...

As for pronunciation - the obvious problem the Corner people have is that they are underestimating the English language. It is, after all, a notoriously greedy language - it takes in anything, accommodates other languages - there is no standard way to pronounce words in English, partly because English from the first was made up of French and Latin and Anglo-Saxon and big chunks of half digested Celtic languages, all of them maintaining their collection of sounds, while redistributing them around the letters used to represent this mess... and it continues apace. Never mind arguing how to pronounce Sotomayor in English - try to get people outside New England to pronounce "Quincy" correctly. (For that matter imagine a Kennedy pronouncing Sotomayor.) The idea of defending proper English pronunciation from the incursion of Spanish derived pronunciations is defending something that doesn't exist from something that made English what it is...

Blog? What Blog?

Closing in on two weeks since my last post? That doesn't seem possible.... there are reasons, I suppose, but as usual, they aren't very convincing - I'm not convinced. Anyway, with nothing profound to add here, I will provide the barest kind of links roundup:

A comment from Sean Axmaker on the coming DVD release of Cronenberg's M. Butterfly - a film (or rather, play) very much relevant to the lack of blog content in the last couple weeks.

Joseph B. on films missing from DVD.

Bright Lights after Dark on Marlene in The Scarlett Empress.

Almost a week ago - Ed Howard's take on Yesterday Girl - German films are on my mind.

...one of which just won Cannes - German language, anyway. Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon.

...not to mention, Kristin Thompson's comments on Lotte Reninger, the German animator... and some other new DVD releases from the archives...

Girish's post on John Ford and Undercurrent's Ford issue is more than a week old... modern drama and Spring have cut me off from the web in terrible ways.

And finally - the first issue of Unspoken: Journal for Contemplative Cinema has been online for 2 weeks itself. A project growing out of the Unspoken Cinema blog, and featuring some very interesting work on Bela Tarr.

Hopefully, my next post will come before June...

Retroactive 2008 Best Of

I need some content here, and what's better than a list? Like every year, come May (sometimes June), I get around to posting a Best of Last Year, including all the films that get released in the spring. It's a nuisance, waiting for films to show up - but now, I have seen most of what I want to - with a couple Absolute Requirements finally getting screened (if not released), in Still Walking and Tokyo Sonata - though there are a couple more, 35 Rhums, maybe Night and Day, that ought to count as absolutes... But I said - I need content - so... here's a list. I have to say - even now - 08 doesn't look like all that great a year - a nice selection of films, but nothing like the blitz of great stuff that came out (somewhere) in 07. Anyway - here are 25 films from last year, roughly in order:

1. Che - USA - Steven Soderburgh
2. Tokyo Sonata - Japan - Kiroshi Kurosawa
3. The Headless Woman - Argentina - Lucretia Martel
4. Birdsongs - Spain - Albert Serra
5. Hunger - UK - Steve McQueen
6. Christmas Tale - France - Arnaud Desplechins
7. My Winnepeg - Canada - Guy Maddin
8. Still Walking - Japan - Hirokazu Kore-Eda
9. Wall-E - USA - Andrew Stanton
10. Revanche - Austria - Gotz Spielman
11. The Class - France - Laurent Cantet
12. Encounters at the End of the World - USA - Werner Herzog
13. Gomorrah - Italy - Matteo Garrone
14. Man on Wire - UK - James Marsh
15. Ballast - USA - Lance Hammer
16. Waltz With Bashir - Israel - Ari Folman
17. Momma's Man - USA - Azezel Jacobs
18. Burn After Reading - USA - Coens
19. Wendy and Lucy - USA - Kelly Reichardt
20. Goodbye Solo - USA - Ramin Bahrani
21. Rachel Getting Married - USA - Jonathan Demme
22. Sita Sings the Blues - USA - Nina Paley
23. Happy Go Lucky - UK - Mike Leigh
24. Speed Racer - USA - Wachowskis
25. Tokyo! - Japan (France, Korea) - Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon ho

(And for reference - what I had seen in January:)

1. The Headless Woman - Lucrecia Martel
2. A Christmas Tale - Arnaud Desplechin
3. My Winnipeg - Guy Maddin
4. Encounters at the End of the World - Werner Herzog
5. Man on Wire - James Marsh
6. Ballast - Lance Hammer
7. Burn After Reading - Coen Brothers
8. Momma's Man - Azazel Jacobs
9. Rachel Getting Married - Jonathan Demme
10. Happy Go Lucky - Mike Leigh

Manny Manny Manny...

Oh dear - poor Manny - makes it even easier to love having Jason Bay instead. (Along with another three run shot tonight...) Manny though - what the hell? I mean, it is one thing to hear about A-Rod or whoever, juicing up back in the day - but anyone getting caught now, friends, is begging for it...

On the other hand - articles like this, saying baseball should ban juicers - no... Unless you want to see 3-4 players a year banned forever. Because there is no way this is going to stop. It's not a good thing - I'm glad they're trying, and hope it brings things back under control - but this is a fact of the game now. Look at the Olympics, look at bicycle racing - it keeps going, no matter what they do - it's a technological battle, drugs vs. enforcement...

I don't know how to stop it. There is too much money on the table for players not to try to find an edge; you can't just accept it, you certainly can't encourage players to do it (and accepting it is demanding it, really) - and the option is always going to be there. It's a technological fact of life now - it won't go away. So - who knows what will happen? This is just going to be part of baseball from now on.

Though still - hard to feel much sympathy for anyone caught using now. I take it as given that more players than not were using from the late 90s - but now? they're going to do it, but if they do, they deserve what they get.

Season's Greetings

Happy May Day, from Billy Bragg:

Film Clubs

Another week without a post here - at least I managed to get up another installment of my Dr. Mabusethon at the Film of the Month Club. Hopefully a couple more of those to come before the month is over. I am endlessly intrigued by those films. And by Fritz Lang, who I've never paid enough attention to, but am becoming utterly fascinated by...

Meanwhile, today is the day for the TOERIFC's discussion of the Serpent's Egg - which, as it happens, appears to be Ingmar Bergman's stab at a Fritz Lang film... And I clicked on The Kind of Face You Hate today, rather than just read through RSS - and was reminded just who's sinister mug graces the banner there. Is there nowhere to turn? Can there be any escape? from -

Mark "The Bird" Fidrych

Oh, no - Mark Fidrych has died. Only 54. His baseball career was sad enough - in a way - coming up, brilliant, just brilliant, for a year, then hurt, and done, after scratching around a few more years... Though more than brilliant, how many players have been more fun to watch? I can just about remember watching him - certainly remember all the highlights every weekend on TWIB. (Or would if TWIB had been on the air in 1976 - it started in 1977? holy crap! So where did I see him? Game of the week? 18 games against Boston? Weird.) (What a different game it was then: compare those strikeout numbers, 1976 to 2008 - 2 teams struck out 900 in 1976 - everyone struck out 900 last year. 4 Red Sox starters matched or exceeded anyone on the '76 Tigers in K's - the Tigers, of course, were led by their closer - who threw 121 innings... All this to provide context to the remark at Lawyers, Guns and Money, that Fidrych only had 97 strikeouts in 250 innings that year.) I wanted to watch him for years - what a shame that he couldn't do it... And now - what a shame that he's not going to get to live out a long good life...

And a hell of a week for baseball - Nick Adenhart, Phillies announcer Harry Kalas, now the Bird...

And finally - very weird that there's nothing on YouTube, though it's hard to say who has tapes of those old games... Here's an interview from 1985, which has a few clips of him pitching, and gives a good idea of his personality... and that cool western Mass accent...

Breathless

This is my second contribution to Joseph B's New Wave blogathon - or, since the two started out together, but both got a bit out of hand - part 2 of the first... Anyway - turn our attention to one film... The 400 Blows may be the founding film of the new wave, but for me, the definitive film remains, Breathless. It's the one, the early example, that sets the parameters for the new wave as it developed. It's all there - the jump cuts, the loose style, the movie madness, the appropriation of genres, the natural locations (shooting in the street, often enough), the seedy glamor - all there. And it establishes one of the key elements of these films - their mixed modes of discourse (to get nerdy about it.) In a number of ways - in the sense of appropriating genres and styles (the crime film); in the ways it incorporates other texts and images (newspapers, comics, films, ads, street signs, you name it); in the way it shifts registers - direct addresses to the camera, people stepping out of character, the in jokes, quotes of all sorts... This is a pretty significant change from most previous films: these films, especially Godard, but you get it from quite a bit of the new wave, do not present a unified "discourse" - what you see and hear does not all come from inside the fiction, or have the same relationship to the fiction. These films tell their stories - don't just show them. They keep the forms, the act of telling, of shaping the film, in view. And they don't pretend they are just telling a story that existed somewhere, sometime - their stories come from other texts, they are - the fictions, I mean - performances themselves - they are not to be taken as the real world...

All of which is there from the beginning:



This remains as audacious a film as I have ever seen - it's still more challenging and strange than most of its descendants. That blend of experimentation, art film, genre film, its loose humor, the whole breeziness of the story and style - and its pretty convincing melancholy - still holds up. Because it is beautiful - look at the light and space and smoke in this shot:



And - well - underrated as a straight fiction. Godard can tell a story - can get characters on screen - quick, without conventional detailing, but a shot like this, the first meeting between Michel and Patricia, packs so much of the film's style into it, a style that does sketch these people... Here they are - on the street - back tot he camera (they are indifferent to it, though they never seem to forget it) - moving, as always, the camera moving - glamorous, cool, and a bit shabby...



Finally - since I am eye-deep in Fritz Lang at the moment, it's hard to miss the parallels - not just the imagery, but the themes. Advertisements - newspapers - messages - cityscapes - Breathless is most assuredly a picture of its time, as well. And Godard seems to be aiming for the same deliberate blend of art film and popular film that Lang went for. He never quite masters making popular films in a popular style - but he never leaves the genres and forms behind either. And, like Lang never forgets the importance of information...

Throw in all the references - to Lang himself with his eyepatch and monocle:



Characters framed in shop windows:





Irises:



Ads:



Working class detectives:





And always, the city as media:

50 Years of Nouvelle Vague

Joseph B. at itsamadmadblog has fired up the blogathonatron (ho lord), in honor of the 50th anniversary of the French New Wave. He's following the lead of the BFI, which is running 2 months of Nouvelle Vague films in honor of the same anniversary - specifically, I'd say, the anniversary of the release of The 400 Blows. That makes a pretty good place to start, even if it is a bit arbitrary - Resnais and Chabrol had released important films before then, but The 400 Blows probably marks the break: it played at Cannes, it was the touchpoint for the movement -and probably the first absolute masterpiece of the movement. And that's a good reason to celebrate now....

And we should be celebrating. It might be tempting to underrate the importance of famous moments and movements in film history - to look back at the new wave and shrug it off, note that it's nothing new, or a logical development of what was already there, or, I don't know, all the ways people dismiss revolutionary things. God knows I do it all the time. And there is no doubt that the idea of the "new wave" was quickly abused, using it to be anything - a marketing slogan; a way to dismiss anything innovative, or claim innovation for the same old thing (throw some jump cuts into your genre film and voila! new wave!); a way to reduce other kinds of movements and trends to something already understood (the way the Japanese new wave - which is every bit as innovative and jarring and crucial as the French one is sometimes treated as a kind of replay of the nouvelle vague); an excuse for exploitation films; a way to skate past the individuality of the films and filmmakers working in a "new wave" style - etc. etc. etc. All that is real. And - yes - there probably isn't a good, consistent, way to define new wave - French or otherwise - you can look at it stylistically, historically, as a specific movement (the Cahiers du Cinema, writers, say), as a specific group of filmmakers - you can try to generalize whatever definition you apply to similar revolutions in other film cultures (Japanese new wave, American versions, Young German cinema and New German Cinema, Czech new wave, Cinema Novo, what else? - all of which is still going strong: Hong Kong and Taiwan had new waves in the 80s; Iran in the 80s and 90s; Romanian films of the 2000s are called new wave, etc.) - all right. All that confusion can make the term, the idea, seem dubious - yes it can, but it is just confusion - none of it changes the impact of the Nouvelle Vague. All of that (good bad and indifferent) stands just as well as a testament to the power of the New Wave - because its ghost is in most of those disparate movements and traditions.

Things changed in the 60s for films. A lot of it had nothing to do with the likes of Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard - social, cultural, poitical, economic changes, industrial changes in filmmaking, technological changes - all did what they did. But the new wave directors were usually close to those changes - they may have jumped on the political and social changes after the fact, but they certainly jumped; and they were early to the technological changes (smaller cameras, better sound gear, support for and from television, etc.), the economic and industrial changes (they were independent filmmakers, and worked with the emerging independent and international producers), and so on. But mostly, the nouvelle vague was an artistic revolution. They brought new intellectual life to film - they were critics, cinephiles, many of them intellectuals, and they brought their cultural knowledge, their critical interests, their cinephilia into filmmaking.

And I know - none of that was completely new. The art film was going strong in the 50s, with Bergman, neo-realism and its offshoots in Italy, the beginning of awareness of Japanese films, the appearance of Indian filmmakers like Ray and Ghatak. Many of the big studio systems, Hollywood and Japan, notably, were turning out popular films with very high ambitions and accomplishments. Even the specific twists the new wave brought, their way of blending neo-realism, art cinema, Hollywood films, B-movies, had precedents, especially in Japan: check out some of the mid-50s Ichikawa or Masumura films, or even Kurosawa in that period - Japanese new wave came out of that as much as from French influence. And yet, and yet....



The nouvelle vague clarified things: the appearance of Godard and Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, eventually Rohmer, Moullet - and their fellow travelers, Resnais and Marker and Demy and Varda and the rest - gave the changes a sense of unity, gave other filmmakers a point of reference. It created a focal point for a different kind of art film - one with a bit more freedom than the tradition of Bergman and Antonioni and Fellini. It's an art cinema that could absorb other traditions with fewer limits than its predecessors - popular and genre films, experimental films, documentaries, newsreels - and start inventing its own - the essay film, notably... It sharpened the edges on film style - jump cuts and extravagant angles and rough acting styles and elliptical story telling and new approaches to narrative in many ways - all were boosted by the new wave (if not invented...) And it inspired people around the world - Japanese films may have been doing similar things in the 50s, but several directors quickly incorporated nouvelle vague influences into their work - Oshima, Yoshida, Shinoda, and so on... You see French influences in Italian directors of the 60s, especially Pasolini; Americans picked up on it (as well as our own parallels, like Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke). And so on (Brazil? Germany? eastern Europe?) The nouvelle vague became the model for any film movement with that sense of renewal, and increased adventurousness - even if it's lazy shorthand to call every interesting national movement a Blank New Wave - there are usually real ties. Even if it's just more jump cuts.

Coming soon - an appreciation for what I think is the new wave film, by the new wave director:

Nina Paley on Free Content

This may be relevant to my recent newspaper post - maybe. Here is Nina Paley (director the very fine animated film, Sita Sings the Blues), laying out her ideas on copyright: Understanding Free Content. What she says seems just about right to me - content is like water; books, DVDs, etc. are containers - water is (should be) free - containers are not, and should not be. There's much more... I think something like that will have to come about, especially now that information (content) can flow, as easily as it does... The internet gets around any particular barriers - but specific containers (books, DVDs, films as films, CDs, etc.) still have value. They do to me - I still buy books, CDs, go to movies, and prefer all of those things to downloading books or music or movies from the web... A lot of these things have to be worked out - especially with more ephemeral content like newspapers - it has value that changes with time. Is valuable the day it comes out - loses value fairly quickly - then regains it over time, as a record of a time and place. How that fits with containers - I don't know...

Anyway - I just wanted to pass that article on - it is very interesting...

Baseball Predictions 2009

This will make a veritable flurry of posts - when I hit Publish Post, this will be the third post of the month, one shy of my achievement in both February and March, in just 5 days! A dazzling achievement... Anyway - it is time for a baseball post - might as well go on record guessing what is going to happen.

AL EAST:

Boston - it is axiomatic that this is the toughest division in baseball. And if the principals stay healthy, there's not much doubt it will be. The Sox have to be the favorites though. They did not stay healthy last year, losing significant time from Ortiz, Lowell, Drew and Beckett - who were also off their A game when they were in the lineup. And yet they were in the playoffs, and probably would have won it all if Beckett or Lowell had been adequate in the playoffs. If they get reasonable performance from those 4 - especially Ortiz and Beckett - they should be in fine shape again this year. They are deep - very very deep, breaking camp with what looks like 6 major league ready starters and at least 2 more in reserve, 7 significant relievers, and a batting lineup that did a mess of damage last year. They weathered most of their troubles last year - they can weather injuries this year, probably. They will be hard to keep out of the playoffs.

Tampa Bay - they had some injuries last year as well, but they kept their rotation on the field, and that got them where they got. If that happens again, and especially if the guys who underperformed a bit last year (Upton, Crawford - Langoria, if you figure he can only improve) return to form, they should be just as formidable. They might even be able to afford losing a starter or two, if Price is ready (and he seems to be) - they may need to get lucky with the pen again as well, but they have lots of arms out there... They can't absorb as much adversity as Boston - but they have as good a core lineup and rotation.

New York - they spent a ton of money, basically to get themselves to the same level as Boston and Tampa. Sort of. There's a lot of mileage on this team - A Rod is hurt (more and more of that as he grows old without the help Modern Science provided the Bonds' and Clemens' of the world), and Jeter, Damon, Posada, Matsui, Rivera, Pettitte are all in the same age range... they have some kids who could step forward - and if they stay healthy, they do have a nice looking squad - but they are no better than the other two, and seem much more vulnerable...

Toronto - they missed their chance to step forward... they have some nice talent, but they have also had terrible luck - in a just world Shaun Marcum would be taking Burnett's place as a fine #2 - but instead he's taken his place on the DL... Their offense is dubious, they have some rickity pitchers... things could break right for them, but it would take a great year from them and none fo the other three having big years and that's not likely.

Baltimore - I don't think they have any pitchers. Actually it's worse than that - they have Adam Eaton. They seem to have a decent offense, and some emerging young players - but they won't be contending any time soon.

AL Central:

Cleveland - this is a very mysterious division. The Tribe has good pitching, fine position players, they've bolstered their bullpen, they have some guys who should come back - Martinez, Hafner maybe - why not? everyone in the division seems to have on/off years - they could be the on team this year.

Kansas City - You know what? you have to take at least one chance. If they win the division, I am going to come back and edit this post to make it look like I called it, too. (I seem to call it every year - I rated them higher than Tampa last year...) Because - given all the questions in the division - why not? They have some of the things Tampa had last year, the things most surprise teams have. 1) some nice young pitchers - Greinke, Meche, and some hope from other starters; 2) a good bullpen - Soria is fantastic, and though they traded 2 of their relievers for offense, they still have some talent in the pen; 3) a bunch of young hitters who are supposed to be ballplayers - Gordon, Butler etc. - they have not delivered yet, but none of them has washed out - they are young, they have had their growing pains, but if a couple of them break through - why not? 4) while Coco Crisp and Mike Jacobs are not superstars, they are solid contributors who do certain things very well - Crisp anchors the outfield; Jacobs puts a power bat in the lineup, a bit like Pena does in Tampa - if Coco has a good year with the bat, along with a ocuple kids stepping forward, this could be a pretty good team.

Minnesota - I would put them first, except Mauer and Baker are already on the DL - they don't have the depth to take that sort of thing. But they usually hang around, and they have some real talent - they are certainly capable of winning the division.

Chicago - same as last year - things break right they'll be fine - things don't, they'll be in the cellar. I'll go for the On/Off principal and guess they fade, but they could just as easily thrive...

Detroit - their pitching, which looked dominant a couple years ago, is a total mess - they have done very little to fix it. The offense is still an odd mix of magnificence and mess. I don't know what to expect. A couple breaks though - they could be back in it. Stranger things have happened - isn't Dontrelle Willis Cliff Lee with a better track record? brilliant young pitcher gone disastrously wrong? Those things can work themselves out. Ditto Bonderman, Robertson, though less dramatically... I doubt they'll do much, but it would be easy to be wrong.

AL West:

Anaheim - they missed all the stud free agents, but they still have a very strong team. They should run the table out west, though the playoffs will probably yield the traditional result.

Texas - not that they have any pitchers, but they have yet another crop of great hitters to trade in a year or two. If they ever did get some pitchers they would be a team to reckon with.

Oakland - actually this is probably a mistake. I don't trust their starters either - but they have some pretty decent offensive options this year. I could be very wrong - they could contend. I sort of doubt it though.

Seattle - ouch. Except, again - a couple breaks and they could be back around .500 - Bedard could be healthy, it's possible... King Felix is a fine pitcher - some of their young guys (Morrow etc.) are promising - so, I don't know. They can't get any worse.

National League:
AL East:

Philly - they need Hamels out there all the time, but otherwise, I see no reason not to expect more of the same. If they're healthy in October, they should be one of the prime contenders for the title again.

NY Mets - I see they just added Gary Sheffield - how that's relevant I don't know... They have spectacular talent at the top in Wright, Reyes and Beltran, though the rest is shakier - but could be quite good. Pitching - Santana has to be there all year, and they need some consistency from the rest of the staff, but it seems reasonable. They bolstered the pen - K-Rod and Putz are a good start... So - all things being equal, the Phillies probably win - but the Mets should be in it all the way again, and stand in good stead for at least a wild card spot.

Atlanta - has some nice, boring pitchers - not the most exciting offense ever, but not terrible. Be surprising if they contend, but not out of the question.

Florida - jeez - actually, they might be right in the thick of things again - they can hit, they have some decent looking starters - if they do contend, though, it's an open question whether they break the team up in August - though last year they were at least willing to talk about trading for Manny (not that he would have helped all that much - they were already hammering the living crap out of the ball) - don't they have a new park on the way? Will they try to spend to open it in style? not likely, but if they decide to try, they should have plenty of cap room available (or whatever you call it in baseball.)

Washington - they have some nice young hitters (Duke, Milledge, etc.), plus Adam Dunn to hit home runs. The pitching is another matter. Pitching is what gets young teams to respectability so I'm not holding my breath.

NL Central:
Cubbies - I hate the frigging cubs. I hate Lou Pinella. This has nothing to do with drafting Carlos Marmol as my closer, nothing. I think this division is soft everywhere else, and the Cubs have a free ride, unless Milwaukee or St. Louis bring in a Jake Peavy type. Deep rotation, deep bullpen, plenty of offense...

St. Louis - put them here until Milwaukee gets that starting pitcher.

Brewers - perfectly fine team on the field, Jeff Suppan as your ace? I suppose that's a technicality - Gallardo is the real ace, if he's healthy. Still... if they do get someone like they got Sabathia last year, they could get into the running...

Cincinnati - good gracious - they actually have some decent pitchers, don't they! Of course they need all of them to be effective - Aaron Harang got bad just as Volquez got good last year... Can they hit? Maybe. They could be a sleeper, no question.

Houston - I guess they still exist don't they? is Mike Hampton really being listed as their fourth starter?

Pittsburgh - probably some chance of a surprising improvement - a couple of their kids could turn out to be legit, they have a bunch of promising underachieving pitchers - possible. Not likely.

NL West:

Arizona - screw you Manny! Granted, they need their kids to all move forward - good years out of Drew, Upton, Young, possibly Snyder are a must - but why not?

LA - they are pretty loaded, I have to admit. I don't know if they can catch anything - I don't know... but they have offense, pitching, etc., so they will, I'm afraid, be hanging around the playoff picture. It will be fun to see what happens when Manny decides to be Manny again...

SF Giants - lots of pitching here, some of it maybe a bit risky, but still... they need some hitting, though they might get some modest improvements here and there.

Colorado - back to bland.

San Diego - so from a mediocre team able to pretend to contend because of the top of the rotation, they became Godawful indeed. Where they go from here probably depends on whether Chase Headley is any good and what they can get for Peavy.

So then! The results?

AL: Boston - Cleveland - Anaheim + Tampa: Boston should be the favorite to win that, though of course Tampa (or NY) should be perfectly capable. Best dark horse? Kansas City...
NL: Philly - Chicago - Arizona + NY Mets: I'd bet on Philly, but NY or Arizona could win the league championship. LA shouldn't be completely counted out. Dark Horse? Florida - Cincy isn't out of the question...
WS: Boston beats anyone they play, I'd say. Philly, possibly the Mets could beat Tampa or the Yankees if they got there.

Individuals?
AL MVP - Evan Langoria repeats Dustin Pedroia's repeat of Cal Ripken's feat - following up rookie of the year with the MVP
NL MVP - might as well keep picking David Wright until he wins one. Pujols being the default option, of course.
AL Cy Young - Roy Halladay is probably the most consistent pitchers going... I hope it's Beckett, of course.
NL Cy Young - lots to choose from - probably should have been Santana last year - if Hamels had won as many games as his stats seem to indicate, he would have won. It's odd to see w pitchers of their quality not getting enough wins to beat someone from San Francisco... I imagine whichever of the Santana, Hamels, Peavy, Lincecum group gets 18-20 wins gets the Cy Young as well. I think Santana will do it.
AL Rookie - they look like they are going to stash him in AAA for a while, but Price should be there...
NL - is Cameron Maybin ready? or Tommy Hanson?

Anyway - it's about time we started... Go Sox!

Newspaper Angst

I get up this morning to find this story headlining the Globe - Times Co. may shut Globe;
seeks union concessions. Ouch. There's nothing new, I guess, about stories of newspapers in trouble - but this is bringing it home in a particularly unpleasant way.

I know I am probably part of the problem: I've been reading the daily paper online for almost a decade (summer 2000, I think, is when I dropped it for good) - though I keep buying the Sunday edition most of the time... I don't know how that factors into this, though - it's ad revenues that pay for papers, and ads are there online as much as in paper. Just that I'm not sure anyone to this day has figured out how to measure the value of online ads. Circulation, I suppose, measures the value of print ads pretty well - but online? Subscriptions don't quite do it - they're too easy to circumvent...

But this is not just a question of format. I don't buy the paper, but I read it: I check the Boston Globe, every day. I read it the way I always have, more or less - check the big news stories, read the sports pages, look through the A&E section, and anything else that catches my eye. I do it online rather than the paper, but - I don't want to do without that. I want a local paper - I want the Globe, not the Herald, too - online, offline, whatever... This is terribly distressing. I am not sure how much the real problem is that the Boston Globe is owned by the New York Times - if the Globe were independent, would it have a different set of incentives to stay open? The Herald is independent - I don't know if that changes the dynamic in important ways - I suspect it does. It's all a mess.

And so - to take a bit of comfort - here's Roger Ebert celebrating the good old days in the newspaper world. As well he should! Though at some point, that is somewhat misleading - the romance of the old newspapers is fine, but some of it is dependent on the technology - the technology has changed: information increasingly circulates electronically now. That creates different ways of working, reading, all the rest. And that - while urging nostalgic regret - is not the same problem as the disappearance of independent local newspapers. Related, no doubt - indeed, probably driven by the close association of local reporting and writing with the facts of printing presses and papers and circulation figures and ad revenues and all the rest - but the two are still separable. The fact is - there will be good writing available somewhere. If not in papers, then online. But the other side of things - the local paper, the local reporters - the people who know everything in their corner of the world (that Ebert describes in that essay) - when that goes, it is harder to say that it will come back. Someone has to pay the people who know all the mobsters' nicknames - it's not obvious where that money will come from when newspapers are all online, all either completely centralized (all the big chain papers), or completely atomized into blogs and vanity sites....

April Things to Do

Checking in again: less than a week since my last post! Not much to say here - a few links, mostly.

First - it is April, and I am hosting the Film of the Month Club's April entry - Fritz Lang's Mabuse the Gambler. Given my wretched track record posting this year, this is a bit scary - fortunately, it ties in with the German film class I'm taking, so should work out pretty well. I'm taking it as a chance to both expand on what the class covers, and and to work through some of Lang's work a bit more systematically than I might. That and it's a hell of a film...

On a similar note - I've been lax in tracking blogathons lately: I totally missed the Underrated blogathon at Chicago Ex-Patriate... My old crony Joseph B. is hosting a blogathon in honor of the 50th year of the French New Wave, inspired by the BFI's celebration of the same. 50 years - given that even at this late date, one runs into people who seem utterly flummoxed by Nouvelle Vague, it is amazing to think that it is has been 50 years since 400 Blows, Breathless, etc. came out...

And speaking of New Waves - another reason I'm completely strapped for time is another fantastic series at the HFA - this one in honor of Kiju Yoshida and his wife and collaborator, Mariko Okada. They will be present this weekend with their films, and again next weekend, when they will be presenting and discussing Ozu's Autumn Afternoon. This is heaven....

And one more film link - Matt Zoller Seitz is working through a series of posts on Wes Anderson - starting with an essay on his influence. Inexplicably, he leaves out Ozu. But I won't deny that I think Anderson is the best American filmmaker since David Lynch, so any big project like this is manna...

And so? There's also baseball, days from beginning.... Spring is in the air - things are looking up. But I have plenty to do this month.... I'll need a tiger in the tank...

3 Recent Releases

Another 11 days between posts - terrible. Anyway - today, outside, we have an unmistakably spring day - what a joy! Kiju Yoshida retrospective playing in town - that will be good. These things keep me occupied and in a good mood, though they are perhaps not the best incentive to write.... So once more, some quick notes on some recent films, to try to maintain the illusion of being a blogger...

Sita Sings the Blues - *** - a neat animated musical adaptation of the Ramayana - inventive, funny, smart, a fine film all around. I'm not sure I have much to say beyond that - don't suppose I need to say much. Very enjoyable....

Watchmen * - I suppose I have something to say about this.... I didn't plan to see it, actually - considering it completely pointless. But there it was, and there I was, and so... It could have been terrible - I feared it would be terrible, but it was not. For all the slowmo and attempts at spectacular imagery, it's a remarkably conventional looking film. The fancy shots are all static - probably because they are copied from the comic book. It's an object lesson in a problem with adapting comics - films exist in time and space, comics just in space: the film uses a lot of the look of the comic, but the comic can plaster the words on top of the images, alongside the images - the film has to play the words over the images, in time. And that forces the filmmakers to find something to do while people are yapping away - and what Snyder does is what every B movie director since the invention of sound has one - he cuts back and forth between the people talking in a perfectly normal series of shot/countershots. Which is not quite a criticism - classical filmmaking has lasted all this time because it works very well. It is legible - and this film, dull as it is most of the time, is utterly legible. Now - things get a bit dicey during the action scenes - still legible, but also even more dull than the dialogue. Though here and there Snyder tries to get creative - show something from a distance, in a longer take, something like that - which just exposes the lame handling of the action itself. The actors can’t fight - the violence is slow and boring and unbelievable. There’s a reason modern American actions films slice up the action and blur it and confuse matters - they don’t know how to stage or perform fights. Snyder doesn’t either. The result is something that looks like an old Republic serial. Anyway - one reason I went was to find out if the film had anything interesting to say about adaptation - the answer is mostly no. The film removes most of the critical material from the comic - its exploration of the comics form, its attention to the media world, its relentless focus on signs and meanings, on reading - all gone, and not replaced by anything that could be considered a film equivalent. (And there are no lack of films dealing with those kinds of issues, from Fritz Lang to Frank Capra to Godard to the better Batman films.) All that’s left is the story, which is exposed as being very thin indeed; and the world - which has lost most of its depth, but is still pretty interesting. That’s about all that save the film, that and Snyder’s surprising B movie style eptitude...

Hunger **** - now this is an extraordinary film. About the death of Bobby Sands, but starting elsewhere - starts with a prison guard, showing his routine on the way to the jail - then a prisoner, Davey, who is brought in and introduced to the life - only slowly picks Sands out of the rest of the prisoners, getting a particularly bad beating. Continues to develop, slowly, showing the prisoners fighting, losing - finally building to Sands (and others) starting their strike. With the decisive moment shown in a central sequence - 20 plus minutes, including one very long (17 minute) take - of Sands and a priest discussing his plan. It’s a riveting scene: it might seem stagy, but it is not at all - the balance on the screen, two men in profile smoking and talking, on increasingly serious matters, while the light changes and wreathes their heads in halos - is utterly powerful, and what film was invented for. (And probably a reference, at least in part - at least reminiscent of - the train ride in La Chinoise - though more serious, and more balanced.) The rest shows Sands starving to death, sometimes in the same objective observational style, but sometimes with moments of subjectivity - as he loses control and slips into hallucination. Extraordinary film.

A Longish Post about Killing

Given how rarely I've been posting lately, it's almost a shame to devote a post to someone being wrong on the internet - but, given how rarely I've been posting lately, maybe I should grab at anything that gets me to write something....

Last week, Dan Schneider, sometime clogger of the Unspoken Cinema blog, recently took on the Dekalog. Things have taken an interesting turn - as is his wont, he devoted a big chunk of the review to declaring that The Critics Are Wrong - even when they agree with him... this review was unusual for naming names - including David Sterritt, who apparently saw the google alert and turned up to point out the error of Dan's ways. I doubt anything good will follow - Dan's first reply already concedes defeat - he's quoting the dictionary.

I should leave it alone - but I have been thinking about this review all week, since it popped up in Google Reader. Why? The films are a towering achievement of 80s cinema, and any extended consideration of them has to have some value - but Dan Schneider's views might be an exception. But this is a fascinating review, because it has a quality Dan has rather often - especially when he is lukewarm about great films. Most of his reviews are just in praise of great films - and for all his efforts to denounce the ignorance of critics, he usually sticks pretty close to the general line on the accepted classics. Nothing wrong with that - they are considered great films for a reason - but his reviews are far too vague and pompous to say much new about the films he reviews. Once in a while, he will attack a great film - Vertigo, Godard being frequent targets - those reviews - can get ugly... But in the middle - like this review, or another of Diary of a Country Priest, at the same site a week or so ago - he sometimes does things that are surprisingly illuminating. Perhaps he is obliged in such cases to be more specific in why the film fails to be a great film - he can't attack it from the word go, he has to work out the differences between what is good and bad - he has to get down to cases. And when he does -

Well - the problem is - in explaining the things that are wrong with these films, he almost always illustrates something crucial to the way they work. I will get to cases myself: one of the weakest episodes in the series, he says, is Episode Five - Thou Shalt Not Kill. Which I suspect is generally seen as the best of the series. I'd certainly say it is. The fascinating part is that Dan's reasons for disliking it are almost exactly backwards. To quote at some length:

Attempts to mitigate the youth’s crime, by showing his cowardice and tales of his sister’s tragic death years earlier simply ring false. In fact, one might cynically assume this is a pro-death penalty film if Kieślowski was not so adamant that it’s against death- murder and capital punishment. This is because the youth is so reprehensible and his crime so brutal that even ant-death penalty people must feel squeamish when confronted with the sort of reality the film portrays.

Isn't that as absolutely wrong about the film's logic and rhetoric as you can get? So far as it is about the death penalty (and that's not an unfair claim, though seems incomplete), the film seems to be making a moral argument against it. It is not making a legal or political case against the death penalty (except secondarily) - it is making a moral case against it. And the moral case against capital punishment has to account for the worst possible circumstances - if capital punishment is wrong, it must always be wrong. (That, again, is not necessary to making a legal, political, social case against the death penalty - those kinds of arguments proceed on other grounds: our limits of knowledge [and the chance of killing the innocent]; the possibility of redemption, of the killer becoming something better. This episode does not make those arguments - it is making a moral argument. Though the series as a whole is greatly concerned with the fallibility of man; and this episode's references to Dostoevsky at least raise the issue of redemption.) So we do not see anything mitigating about the killer: he is guilty - he is cruel - there is nothing redeeming about him. But we do not have a moral right to kill him - and if the state kills him, we are morally complicit in his death.

Now: that's just the theme of the episode. But that's basically all Dan deals with. The film itself offers a good deal more. It is the most striking looking of the series - the bleached out colors, the distorting lenses, the overall sickliness of the cinematography. It is one of the least talkative episodes - the parts devoted to the boy and the taxi driver are almost silent - two miserable men go about their business in bitter solitude until they meet. We see both killings in detail - the murder is ugly, cruel, messy, long drawn out... the execution, though not so gruesome, is presented with similar matter of fact explicitness. Both bring out the seriousness of what is happening - people are being killed: we are made to face the horror of what is being depicted. It's a harsh, efficient, brutal film on an important subject, organized with care and Kieslowski's characteristic sense of dramatic shape - the parallels between the killer and his victim, between the murder and the execution, the references to Dostoevsky, the explicitness and efficiency of the argument - it is a masterpiece.

The truth is - there's a lot more in that review that works the same way. Dan takes exception to something - in a way that makes you realize how important and effective the thing he objects to is. He quotes Stanley Kubrick, disapprovingly - Kubrick says: "These films have the very real ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them.…They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don’t realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart." - Dan answers: "One of the very reasons this series fails the ‘masterpiece’ litmus test is because there are too many times you can see exactly what is coming." But this makes me think - Kubrick said "ideas" - not "plots" - knowing how Episode 1 will end tells you almost nothing about either how it will get there, or what kinds of ideas will be raised along the way. And much of the effectiveness of the series is the way the plots and ideas play off one another - the way the questions about determinism, fate, the limits of knowledge and types of knowledge play out in the first episode, to name one - the way those themes interact with the explicit foreshadowing of the plot. Something like that - those themes, certainly - what we can know, and how we should act, given that knowledge (or lack of knowledge) - is operative in most of the series. We're let in on the stories early - to let us watch more carefully how the characters react...