" "

Bad filmmakers (sadly for them) have no ideas.  Good filmmakers (it's what limits them) tend to have too many.  Great filmmakers (especially the inventors) have only one.  This idée fixe enables them to keep moving on, to take the idea through ever-renewing and ever-interesting landscapes.  The price to pay is well-known: a certain solitude.  What about great critics?  It is the same thing, except there are none. . . All but one.  Between 1943 and 1958 (the year of his death: he was only forty) André Bazin was this one.

--Serge Daney  

Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016)

There have already been a great many significant deaths this year, but Abbas Kiarostami's hit me harder than most.  I do not have the learning or experience to write a great eulogy for him, and his major features have all been lauded far beyond my poor power to add or subtract, so instead let me here mention a film of his that I believe many have overlooked.

In 2013, to celebrate its 70th anniversary, the Venice Film Festival commissioned short films from 70 world directors, broadly suggested to be about the future of cinema.  The films were all a minute-and-a-half in length, and have been posted to YouTube on the festival's channel here.  I watched many of them at the time, and it is still fascinating to view them now, because despite their brief run-times they nearly all clearly reflect the sensibilities and concerns of their directors.  (Claire Denis is one of the few exceptions: her short appears to be the view of a cell phone inside of a cloth bag--incongruously scored to the Tindersticks.)

This is not always a good thing: Catherine Breillat's short is bitter and ideologically puritanical, as is her wont; James Franco's is pretentious, semi-ironic, and self-exhibitionist, as is his; and Todd Solondz's film is kind of funny and kind of ugly and mocking.  On the other hand, Atom Egoyan manages to evoke mono no aware while deleting pictures from his phone; Ermanno Olmi the nostalgist presents a brief elegy for the moviola; and Apichatpong Weerasethakul creates something remarkably beautiful out of a dashboard shot of windshield wipers, catching strange yellow light and sound that suggests waves on a beach.

Fascinatingly, Jia Zhang-Ke and Wang Bing provide two opposing views of modern China: Jia depicts young professional millennials watching the classics of Chinese cinema on phones, tablets, and projected in malls--yet being moved by the emotions of the films nonetheless.  The environments depicted are hyper-modern, and the short seems like it could be a TV commercial for the newest iPhone.  Wang shows us a few moments of a poor dirt farmer whose livelihood has likely been the same for millennia, and seems to have little need for or experience of cinema in any form.  Thanks to cinema, however, thousands of people around the world have now seen a small part of his life.

Yet of all these films, my favorite would have to be Kiarostami's, embedded at the top of this post.  Within this brief 90-second window, we find a surprisingly large number of the themes of Kiarostami's career: children, the relation between young and old, a documentary-like depiction of life, non-professional actors, minimal camera movement or editing, a careful parceling out of information to the audience, the capabilities of the digital camera, sound design which is just as important as the image, and above all, a concern with the nature of cinema and how it reveals truth.  Of course, none of this is intrusive or even assertive, and the film can easily be appreciated and understood by a child. (One is reminded of his early short films for children, though this is not nearly as didactic.)  With this short, Kiarostami puts his faith in the future of cinema; it is significant also that the boy-director he shows us is making a film that harks back to the slapstick values of early film: to move forward, it is still necessary to remember the past and take its lessons with us.

Let us hope the filmmakers of the future remember the lessons of Abbas Kiarostami, for we shall need them.

" "

Gutenberg and post-Gutenberg literature contains communal dreams, shared myths or archetypes.  And it is distinguished by the mythopoeic color of its creators, their ability to sense what already existed in the popular mind, rather than by any unique vision or ability in executive skills.  For this reason popular works of literature tend to pass immediately into the public domain.
. . .
As a matter of fact, one of the distinctions between popular and high literature can be made on the basis of this, as Edgar Allan Poe, in a review of James Fenimore Cooper, pointed out.  There is a certain kind of book, he wrote, which is forgotten though its author is remembered (High Literature); and there is a certain kind of book whose author is forgotten though the work is remembered.
. . .
It is a characteristic of popular literature that it changes its medium because it never really belonged to any medium to begin with.  Popular Literature is not "words on the page," as some critics would have us believe.  Like all literature, it is finally, essentially, images in the head.  Once its images pass through words (the text is transparent, downright irrelevant) into our heads, such primordial images, or archetypes, or myths . . . can pass out again easily into any other medium. . . . They still retain their authenticity and the resonance of feeling that was originally connected with them.
. . .
But in the realm of Popular Art, overt and conscious ideas could not matter less.  What matters is the stirring up of the collective unconscious, the evocation of closely shared nightmares of race and sex: the drama of protecting little sister against the rapist, whoever she may be and whatever color: Black/White, White/Black.  You can mix them and match them and it makes no difference in popular appeal.  Is it white innocence assaulted by black bestiality?  Is it black innocence assaulted by white brutality?  The audience loves it in any case.  And this leads me to my final point about popular culture:  It is neither good nor bad--it is beyond good and evil, as we define the terms, in whatever culture we may live.
. . .
Maybe, then, just maybe it is possible for us to say that the value of popular literature, like the popular arts in general, is that it joins together at the level of the unconscious people who are, on ever conscious level, in this post-industrial society divided.  Our religion divides us, our politics divides us, our attitude toward education divides us: the only thing that holds us together is Kojak, Star Wars, Rich Man, Poor Man. . . . All literature--all art--is the same. . . . When I think of the books I have loved best in my life, I realize that what I admire in them is what I love in pop art at its most gross, flagrant, vulgar, brutal and unrefined: the mythopoeic power of the author.  Never mind his ability to instruct and delight, to create beautiful, elegant, architectonic forms to teach those thins which we think are important for the future of mankind.  Instruction and delight are optional . . . What really moves us to transport--what Longinus calls "ekstasis"--taking us out of our heads and out of our bodies, out of our normal consciousness is the ability of all great books, great pop books, great elite books, to turn us again into savages and children; and releasing us thus from bondage not merely to the restrictions of conscience or superego, but to consciousness and rationality, which is to say, the ego itself.

--Leslie Fiedler, "Giving the Devil His Due"

" "

Art was the speech of the folk revival--and yet, at bottom, the folk revival did not believe in art at all.  Rather, life--a certain kind of life--equaled art, which ultimately meant that life replaced it.  The kind of life that equaled art was defined by suffering, deprivation, poverty, and social exclusion . . . the poor are art because they sing their lives without the false consciousness of captialism and the false desires of advertising.
. . .
When art is confused with life, it is not merely art that is lost.  When art equals life there is no art, but when life equals art there are no people.

--Greil Marcus, The Old, Weird America

Dylan @ 75

(image source)

Happy 75th Birthday to Bob Dylan!

When I type "bob dylan" into the search box in my iTunes library, I come up with 551 items (including covers, duplicates, and alternate versions). And yet I know that there are vast depths out there that I haven't even heard, much less own, and my silly boasts wouldn't impress any of the long-time Dylan fans out there who have lived with his music for decades and know obsessive details about every song he's ever released. But as a salute to one of the great American artists, I hereby offer my (as of this minute and sure to change) Top 25 Bob Dylan Songs:

1. Tangled Up in Blue (Blood on the Tracks, 1975)
2. Mr. Tambourine Man (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)
3. Like a Rolling Stone (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)
4. Ring Them Bells (Oh Mercy, 1989)
5. A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, 1963)
6. Ain't Talkin' (Modern Times, 2006)
7. Shelter from the Storm (Blood on the Tracks, 1975)
8. Visions of Johanna (Blonde on Blonde, 1966)
9. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)
10. Sign on the Window (New Morning, 1970)
11. Blind Willie McTell (The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3: Rare & Unreleased 1961-1991, rec. 1983)
12. I Was Young When I Left Home (The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack, rec. 1961)
13. Every Grain of Sand (Shot of Love, 1981)
14. The Times They Are A-Changin' (The Times They Are A-Changin', 1964)
15. All Along the Watchtower (John Wesley Harding, 1967)
16. I Want You (Blonde on Blonde, 1966)
17. Ballad of a Thin Man (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)
18. Love Sick (Time Out of Mind, 1997)
19. Highway 61 Revisited (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)
20. Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (Blonde on Blonde, 1966)
21. Bob Dylan's 115th Dream (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)
22. High Water (For Charley Patton) (Love & Theft, 2001)
23. Lay Lady Lay (Nashville Skyline, 1969)
24. When I Paint My Masterpiece [Demo version] (The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait, 1969-1971, rec. 1971)
25. Mississippi (Love & Theft, 2001)

Midnight Special, Lemonade, Heat

Midnight Special (Nichols, 2016) Rating: 8/10 stars.

It could be a feature-length episode of The X-Files, or perhaps Escape to Witch Mountain as directed by John Carpenter.  Or it may answer the question, What if Tomorrowland was good?  The ending is a problem--Nichols always seems to have problems with endings--but I do not think it is an insurmountable one.  Sometimes you just have to go where a movie wants to take you.

One thing I found gratifying about the film was the faces.  In the Hollywood of past decades, particularly the 1970s, there were plenty of actors with weathered, craggy faces to fill roles of weathered, craggy men and women living in the American interior, or else the hard, meaty faces of blue-collar factory and dock workers from the coasts.  Lee Marvin, Warren Oates, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Strother Martin, Harry Dean Stanton, John Cazale--the list goes on.  Among actresses, we might mention Sissy Spacek, Shelley Duvall, or Talia Shire--but the demands on beauty have always been much greater for actresses.  These faces were memorable because directors then knew how to use them, knew that performers like that brought an authenticity you can't fake to their films.  Such faces have died out in modern Hollywood.  To a certain extent they have died down in American society, what with good plumbing and acne medication and all (most of the performers I just listed lived through the Great Depression, and a few fought in World War 2).

Jeff Nichols is one of the few directors in current American movies who seems to go looking for such faces, and even if what he finds can't equal the past, he still manages to create a convincing rural American through face and texture alone.  Here he casts Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Adam Driver, and Sam Shepard (not to mention character actors like Bill Camp and David Jensen), and even manages to transform Kirsten Dunst into utterly convincing Pennsylvania Dutch motherhood.  Such actors feel like blue collar America in a way so many others do not.  And when one takes a wider lay of the land and sees character actors like Shea Wigham, Jason Clarke, Ben Mendelsohn, and Scoot McNairy gaining in prominence and getting cast all over the place, why, it's almost enough to make one optimistic about Hollywood.

Lemonade (Knowles et al., 2016) Rating: 8/10 stars.

Watching this, I'm reminded of the review I read when Watch the Throne came out, which said the big thing that distinguished Kanye from Jay-Z was--humility.  Paradoxically true then, obvious now.

Love to see the references to everything from Ganja & Hess to David Lynch--Beyonce is really stretching herself, and this is going to lead a lot of people in a lot of new directions in their movie-watching.  I put Daughters of the Dust on my watchlist like 9 months ago and I still haven't gotten around to it, and now I feel like I'm late to the party or something!  I gotta get on that.  [UPDATE: I did, and it's wonderful.]  Beyonce reads Warsan Shire's poetry with rich and biting intonation that lends suspense to every line; I suspect these poems sound better aloud than read on a page.  The synergy between the music and the images is remarkable, with both visual and musical compositions striking and memorable.

I do have a few caveats, though: I remain a little uncomfortable with the way Beyonce, surely the second most powerful black woman in the country (maybe the world?), equates her personal problems with a cheating husband to the larger historical oppression of all poor and enslaved African-American women.  But the usual identity politics activists don't seem bothered by this point at all, and I'm a lot more uncomfortable with ever coming off more politically puritanical that that sort of commentator on such issues, so I guess I'll just shut up about it.  On more aesthetic grounds, let's get one thing clear: as much as this apes Malick throughout (in ways so obvious I'm not even going to list them), it's not "better than" or even (IMO) "as good as" Malick.  The editing here is nowhere near as radical, the interplay between music, voice, and image is nowhere near as complex, and the artistic risk and ambition is not as great.  Knight of Cups is in a different order of magnitude--and has more to say about the world we live in today besides.

(Not to mention the pacing problems--this is still a pop album first, experimental film second.)

But still, this is pretty darn good, and way better than I expected.

Heat (Richards, Jameson, 1986) Rating: 6/10 stars.

Odd, twisty little Las Vegas-set crime movie. Twisty not in the sense that it effectively manipulates the audience, but in the way it keeps shifting gears and tones in unusual/surprising ways. After opening with a fake-out confrontation that posits Burt Reynolds as a neanderthal attempted-rapist who gets beaten up by a weak-chinned but righteous boyfriend, the movie then reveals him as a weird cross between lovable loser and unbeatable hitman, and his various jobs include playacting, gambling, extortion, bodyguarding, and fight training (all taken in a quixotic attempt to move to Italy and retire).

The action scenes are chopped up into shards of slow-motion bloody violence in a way that isn't really successful, and the whole thing is alternately gritty and goofy, but it can still surprise with moments of poetry. I'm thinking here of the scene where Reynolds and his rich-kid trainee/employer bond while gazing out on the vividly lit Vegas strip from a balcony, and Reynolds admits:

-"I've never been here when the sun's up."

-"Why?"

-"I have a feeling it turns into the real world then."