Volume three in Kino’s Avant-Garde series includes some rare titles from Eastman House, among them Alberto Cavalcanti’s amazing anticipation of Godardian political montage, “Rien que les heures,” while Icarus offers Martina Kudlacek’s 2006 documentary “Notes on Marie Menken” (which includes three Menken films) and Microcinema comes up with an elaborately produced edition of Jonas Mekas’s epic cycle “Walden” (1969) — all in time for holiday giving! A round-up review here in the New York Times.
One way to sum up Michael Bay’s desecration of the Pearl Harbor attack is to state that he took all the historical, military, and personal cross-currents of this momentous event and reduced them to a pea-brained video game — at least judging by the ten minutes of the movie that were all I could endure.
Far better is the old-fashioned, fairly plodding, sometimes waxworks-like, but genuinely serious “Tora! Tora! Tora!”
Kent and Glenn, I don’t understand what your beef is with the visual style of Hurt Locker. Are you saying it’s overly-spatially coherent? Maybe I’m just used to seeing contemporary action set pieces that rush by in a confusing impressionistic flurry, but the way she shot and cut that movie together really impressed me, especially the firefight in the desert scene.
I also thought the scene where the guys beat the shit out of each other was really funny – as a kind of over the top satire of machismo.
I thought I’d read that the press saw the whole movie at Pearl Harbor, but maybe not. The offensiveness of the movie is summed up in the “wow” shot featured in the trailer — the POV shot following a bomb going down to blow up a ship. Only Michael Bay would take the viewpoint of a bomb killing people and try to force us to share it. It’s a prime example of how technique negates substance in modern American films. And among the gross ineptitudes of the screenplay is somehow contriving to have the two leads thirty-five miles away from Pearl Harbor when the attacks take place. Then there is the way the military nurses are all portrayed as whorish. And the insulting attempt to add a “happy ending” to the Pearl Harbor disaster by tacking on the Doolittle Raid. And on and on . . .
I agree with Michael that TORA (3) (as Variety used to call it) is a surprisingly OK movie. Among its other virtues, it cross-cuts between the American and Japanese points of view, giving a remarkably broad perspective on the event and avoiding some of the usual jingoism of the war-movie genre. The action is truly spectacular in a way Bay can’t rival, since he slices and dices everything into nonsense.
Kent – didn’t really got you there, why can’t I talk about narrative regrading Weerasethkaul? It seems to me like a very legitimate and inviting thing to do…
Also, I Like your Bay-Grandreiux comparision. I Wonder how would the opening scenes of UN LAC will look like in Bay’s hands.
It’s no insult to call Maya Deren’s films amateur. In fact, Meshes in the Afternoon received an honorable mention (!) citation on the Amateur Cinema League’s 1943 honor roll.
Kenneth Anger is most definitely not the changeling in the Reinhardt/Dieterle Midsummer Night’s Dream. George Eastman House, which has an extensive collection of Warner Brothers pressbooks and stills, holds something like 200 photographs for that title. The film stills archivist there, Nancy Kauffman, will proudly tell you that she’s looked through every one for MIDSUMMER and the child actor playing the changeling is duly credited on the corresponding still. The name escapes me, but it’s not Anger.
Far be it for me to criticism an off-topic thread on this site, but AG’s earlier observation resonates with me–I find it disconcerting that every avant-garde discussion seems to either to fizzle out or lead back to the vaguely avant-garde moments in familiar auteurist fare. I wouldn’t disagree that, say, Don Siegel’s montages for Warner Brothers (c.f. BLUES IN THE NIGHT) are radical and kinetic enough to deserve comparison with bonafide avant-garde cinema, but I don’t think this observation gets us particularly far, especially when there’s a surfeit of real avant-garde films out there with an ever-expanding history. (As I said before, the Kino set is a good example of this, as it’s resurrecting titles that will never be confused for classics, but obviously enrich our sense of the breadth of the field, and the way influences stirred and traveled between different filmmakers, at a particular moment.)
The distinction I’m making, though, isn’t all about branding certain films as the genuine article and simply sloughing off others. It’s limiting, I feel, to approach avant-garde films on purely formal terms; they’re also distinguished by, and probably more readily identified by, a particular exhibition circumstance–a film society or cooperative or gallery-related group that readily programs in a way that almost makes literal its marginality. (There are, of course, always exceptions: Cinema 16 at its height, the semi-theatrical releases of THE CHELSEA GIRLS and CHAFED ELBOWS…) During the formative years, the American ‘experimentals,’ as they were then called, were often billed with classroom films about painters and primitive art and the like; they were regarded as innovative and off-beat and somewhat egg-headed in approach, incubators for feel-good technical innovation in the way Dave alluded to. Times change and taste ebbs, but there’s most certainly a distinct thing called avant-garde film, even if we’re still working out its contours.
Kent, I agree with you THE HURT LOCKER, which left me with the same feeling.
I showed to a friend of mine, who runs a gallery of contemporary art, the last scene of ZABRISKIE POINT. She was just stunned. 2001 is of course another example of “bridge” between avant-garde and mainstream film. We should also add that a lot of contemporary art and “guerilla” avant-garde filmmamking often uses stock footage or even clips from mainstream cinema. Other rexent example of “avant garde” in mainstream film: the super 8 ilmages at the beginning of THE GAME.
Joseph: I don’t know that I’d go so far to call stuntwoman Zoe Bell the lead actress in DEATH PROOF. I’m not sure any of them quite qualify, since none is in more than half the film, but I doubt Bell has more screen time or dialogue than, say, Rosario Dawson. It seems like a true ensemble to me. At any rate, I love that film; can’t seem to turn it off if I channel-surf upon it, even though I own the DVD.
michaelgsmith, I have no beef whatsoever with the visual style of THE HURT LOCKER. Compared to your average Hollywood action sequence of the moment, it’s great. But in the final analysis, I just don’t think it’s THAT great. There were moments when I wanted the camera to settle down a little, and found myself wishing she would stop cutting to new angles. I thought that it affected the performances a little, and that it occasionally numbed what I took to be the desired intensity. Meanwhile, I’m glad you enjoyed the fight scene in the barracks. I didn’t find it funny, and I took it to be yet another Kathryn Bigelow scene of men pushing and pulsing their way to peak experience.
Dan, I didn’t say that you shouldn’t talk about Apichatpong in relation to narrative. I said that calling him a fellow traveler of the avant garde seemed insufficient: he and Paradjanov seem to me to be at once avant-garde filmmakers AND narrative filmmakers. As for Michael Bay and Philippe Grandrieux, maybe they should try swapping projects from time to time.
Thanks for the clarification on Anger in MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, Kyle. Your point about branding makes a lot of sense. I think it would be a quantum leap forward to drop the rigid categorizing that has ghettoized avant-garde cinema, and speak of films in terms of facts and particulars, of which their exhibition history is one crucial part. Among Dave’s and Jonathan’s and Jim’s many virtues as writers and historians is that they have always operated in just this manner.
I wanted to respond to Michael G. Smith before the tide took his question too far out. It’s an interesting question, whether I found “Hurt Locker” “overly spatially coherent.” Obviously I wouldn’t put it that way, but in a sense, yes. It can often be a matter of two or three shots that makes the difference between engaging suspense and drawing things out to a fault. Compare and contrast with Mann’s “Men At War,” a picture I feel it has a lot in common with.
I can’t speak for Kent, but what I shared with him was a feeling that the film was somewhat overvalued. As he said, we both believe it is very very good indeed. But…if any place on the web is one where you can pick cinematic nits, this is the one. For me the picture wasn’t you-know-who coming down from the you-know-what, as it was for so many others. On the other hand, the Bay aesthetic represents exactly why this film is overvalued, and maybe justifies that.
A commenter on my blog took me to task (in a very nice way) for not considering experimental work (citing Klahr and Tscherkassky) for my 70-greatest-of-the-decade list, calling my Ken Jacobs citation “token.” His larger point was objecting to the tacit acceptance of commerce in the consideration of cinematic “bests.” An interesting point, I thought.
“Bay appeals to viewers who don’t care about continuity and simply enjoy the momentary effects…. without a narrative or characters to care about”
J. McBride’s quote here nicely articulates Goeffey King’s extensively developed and illustraded conception of the post-Jaws “action spectacle,” and it’s tensions with (Bordwell’s) Classical Narrative Cinema [see SPECTACULAR NARRATIVE (2001) and NEW HOLLYWOOD CINEMA (2002)].
King, actually views much of the blockbuster-motivated and technologically facilitated impact of action spectacle on narrative coherence rather sympathetically, for example regarding THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, if not THE ROCK, as sufficiently narrative centered.
Exploding objects in slow motion, which makes most of the “finale” of ZABRISKIE POINT, is now part of the “blockbuster” culture since the first films produced by Joel Silver and Lawrence Gordon. Interestingly enough, it is often a “visual motif” found in many underground, avant-garde films and of course in contemporary art videos. As if the joy of destruction became a political visual theme, a “collage”. Now, I would not jump to conclusions on that basis. Shapes and colours are used by good and bad artists.
Glenn, I share your opinion and Kent’s on HURT LOCKER. I kept thinking when I was looking at the movie “what makes this different from a very very good HBO drama or series ?”. The films has some great moments, the best being that “beckettian” scene in the desert with Ralph Fiennes. But, is HURT LOCKER better than, for instance, JARHEAD ? or rather, what makes it better than JARHEAD ? It seems that a lot of people will find arguments for this.
A little fun story for you all. I had a strange feeling of “deja vu” when I saw Haneke’s WHITE RIBBON. I realized that it had reminiscences of Edgar Reitz’ wonderful HEIMAT. I watched episodes from season 1 of the series again, and was struck by the parallels between HEIMAT and WHITE RIBBON. I then relaized that Haneke started as a television director in the 804s and I can imagine the impact of Reitz ‘film on his craft. Then I also discivered that Reitz was one of Kubrick’s favorite directors (Jan Harlan connection perhaps) and that Kubrick had asked the german director to supervize the dubbing of FUL METAL JACKET and EYES WIDE SHUT. But to tie everything in; some of the best scenes in HEIMAT 1 are ion the “wartime episodes” (1943-45) which introduce the character of Otto who defuses bombs that haven’t explosed. Well these scenes equal in intensity HURT LOCKER. HEIMAT is also avant-garde in its mix of colour and black and white. It’s an extraordinary piece of work.
Glenn, I’m glad you share my love of LOONEY TUNES BACK IN ACTION. That Louvre scene is so great that I am seriously thinking of starting a petition for the immediate inclusion of Joe Dante in the Musée d’Orsay ongoing cinema projects fund.
Kent, I think it does’nt really work the other way around (meaning Grandrieux making a Bay film). I can’t say I’m as eager to see a Grandrieux version of “The Island” as I’m eager to see Bay’s “La Vie Nouvelle”. Just imagine Magen Fox taking an haircut…
Mike Grost, not to deflate your lovely theory about Mekas and Zemeckis, but Zemeckis is of Greek heritage, not Lithuanian.
I would say that the costliest art film ever made remains Gus Van Sandt’s PSYCHO, a film that I am personally very fond of. Gus Van Sandt pushed the avant-garde as far as he coud with this film without anyone in teh studio realizing he was just making the ultimate experimental blockbuster.
Clips from “mainstream films” that ypu could show as a serie sof “avant-garde”
MURDER MY SWEET dream/drugs montage
SPELLBOUND dream scene
2001 “travel scenes”
PLANET OF THE APES “pov of the rocket” scene
Gremillon’s DAINAH LA METISSE Duke Ellington montage
Ken Russel’s extravaganza’s
The kidnapping in BRANDED TO KILL
PERSONA’s prologue
Dream scene with the bullfighting in Lumet’s FAIL SAFE
The scene with the child in HOUR OF THE WOLF
‘The offensiveness of the movie is summed up in the “wow” shot featured in the trailer — the POV shot following a bomb going down to blow up a ship.’
Joseph PEARL HARBOR was so bad movie, because of shot like that, video game movie. But before that there was scene of nurse entering telephone booth shot from too many angles including overhead. Why? No reason.
Maybe someone has seen HAWAI MIDDOUEI DAIKAISENEN: TAIHEIYO NO ARASHI (1960)? It is about victory of Pearl Harbor and defeat of Midway, opposite of Michael Bay movie, but it is from memoir of aviator who was fighting in both battle. Tsuruta Koji acted in this movie. He was surviving kamikaze pilot who became enka singer and also actor after war.
HAWAI MIDDOUEI DAIKAISENEN: TAIHEIYO NO ARASHI was anti-war action movie, typical post-war Japanese war movie, theme is futile heroism and duty. It was not re-make of HAWAI MARE OKI KAISEN (1942) that some people have written.
TORA TORA TORA had some part of Kurosawa screenplay left, one scene he shot before fired from movie. Best Japanese part was shot by Fukusaku Kinji. I cannot see the movie without disappointment because I know it was bad effect on Kurosawa career, scandal for Japanese film industry.
Junko, thanks for the comments. I wish I could see the Japanese movie you mention. And wish Kurosawa had remained the director of the Japanese segments of TORA (3). That would have been something. As for overcutting, I am so tired of that and can’t stand ninety percent of trailers today since each shot lasts no more than two seconds. When a trailer actually takes its time and does something different, I am thrilled and want to see the movie. The same goes for the full movies, though the cutting is usually not THAT extreme (except for Michael Bay movies and some others).
One thing about experimental movies is how difficult it is for most people to watch them. “The Art of Vision,” “Scenes from Under Childhood” and “La Region Centrale” are supposedly among the greatest movies ever made. I say supposedly because I don’t know how to actually see them. If these movies only show up every three years so in New York and half a dozen other cities on the continent I don’t know how I, living in Canada’s sixth largest city, is ever going to catch them.
For the list: a clip from DARK PASSAGE (plastic surgery fantasy). Also the opening scenes where we have Bogart’s voice, but not his face is great and out of the mainstream for Classical Hollywood.
Nicolas: glad to see some love for Van Sant’s PSYCHO. Every time I watch it I find it more and more fascinating. MILK is a film that can be understood (in one way) as an avant garde biopic.
How about THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER as an example of a potentially avant-garde mainstream Hollywood film? It has a Brechtian structure in it’s use of folk images and themes and then you have that montage of the two kids sailing down the river which looks like nothing else in American cinema at that time. And of course a very avant-garde quotation of the painting, Whistler’s Mother with Lillian Gish holding a shotgun as she’s sitting on her porch.
And then that scene with Shelley Winters underwater in her car seems like the kind that’s quite famous. Whether it’s quoted in avant-garde movies I don’t know? But it sure looks like it should be!
Junko, thank you for mentioning HAWAI MIDDOUEI DAIKAISENEN: TAIHEIYO NO ARASHI. There’s a shortened American version called I BOMBED PEARL HARBOR. I’d like to see the original Japanese version.
Partisan,
I saw the three films you mention for the first time at student-run college film society screenings. Experimental films are not expensive to rent, and the places that are responsible for distributing them — non-profit cooperatives in most cases — are usually pretty easy to deal with if you are respectful and ensure good conditions (which, of course, means having good projectors and projectionists, an entirely separate and not always inexpensive cost). But it’s possible. You can buy a 16mm projector online for cheap and learn how to project it yourself, etc. There are lots of ways to do this, you just have to motivated to do it.
Kyle,
I agree and share a similar frustration with you about the discussions on the avant-garde fizzling out or reverting back to the same familiar places, when there is really so much more that is being done in experimental cinema — in a way that makes the circumstances of actually showing the work more present and meaningful, as you mention in other words — than is being discussed.
Unfortunately, I think it comes down to having the right tools to be able to analyze it. For the time being, art scholars seem to be doing a better job than film critics. We don’t even have the right vocabulary to discuss a film like TRASH HUMPERS, which can easily be categorized as experimental or conceptual, but the discussion usually ends there and then we’re back to talking about whether or not the film is entertaining, or justifies its length, or has a point (my favorite dead-end question that only film people seem capable of demanding of a work of art). Even if people haven’t been taking Korine seriously, it seems to me completely ridiculous that any of a number of film critics on the internet would even dare tackle the film when the most they could say about it is that it bored them or they found it pointless. Korine may be a crossover example, and that why I mention him, but it’s this type of argument that film people use to stay away from experimental film time and time again.
Now as for defining the contours of an avant-garde, it’s up to the artists as well as the writers, and in a way the label is not sufficient, if you ask me, even applied to the Kino set, as most of the films there could be assigned to completely differed areas of historical interest as they are no longer avant but rather part of larger art and film constellations of the past, and that the new gardes are simply addressing those old theories or throwing them out completely (as someone might accuse Harmony Korine of doing). The problem is attempting to legitimize the avant-garde by saying that its best or most successful aspects have been appropriated by commercial filmmakers (a tradition that exists since the beginning of cinema, really, from even before William Fox and Walt Disney started to give “risky”, “offbeat” and “egg-headed” people jobs in the industry). This cancels out the possibility for a real discussion to happen about some of the best aspects of many commercial films.
Arthur S: Whistler’s mother is not holding a gun, though…
nicolas: Van Sant’s PSYCHO is indeed an avant garde “experiment” based on a conceptual approach reminiscent of many avant garde films. In some ways Resnais’s MELO is doing the same thing. The challenge is similar: to recreate a work of art with such “faithfulness” that the re-creator seems (only seems!) to vanish behind the original one.
I don’t think anyone mentioned Duras’s films. They are narrative movies of traditional feature length, telling a story with characters played by actors (all characteristics that are hardly ever found in AG films) yet at the same time they are thorougly avant garde in concept, especially INDIA SONG. Of course Duras crashed into “pure” avant garde with INDIA SONG’s doppelganger SON NOM DE VENISE… (which Jacques Lourcelles called “a kind of avantgardist scam”!)
J-P, the Mona Lisa doesn’t have a moustache either!
Gus Van Sandt managed to accomplish what no contemporary artsit would have dared: he asked the studio which had financed the original PSYCHO to finance its shot by shot remake. Any contemporary artist would have just made a shot by shot remake for a museum or a gallery. But Van Sandt pushed his gesture as an artist once step further, in exposing worldwide, theatrically, a pure work of art. I am quite admirative of this !!!!
Yikes!
Have I been sideswiped by the Wikipedia?
The Wikipedia entry on Zemeckis states:
“Zemeckis was born in Chicago, Illinois to a Lithuanian father and Italian American [4]”
The link is to an article in the St Paul Pioneer Press newspaper.
I’m not really sure ethnic or racial heritage ever really explains anything about art and artists. Maybe the movies of Mekas and Zemeckis would be the same if their creators were born in Spain or Zimbabwe.
Still, I try hard not to spread misinformation.
My apologies to everyone.
Van Sandt’s “Psycho” is by no means a shot by shot remake, but a lifeless reduction of Hitchcock’s work much like Todd Haynes’s assassination of Sirk in “Far from Heaven.” Having Norman masturbate before he kills Marion may seem like a daring update of poor old repressed Alfred, but in fact in renders the film — on at least one level about the consequences of sexual repression — nonsensical. Van Sandt was very clear in interviews at the time of the film’s release that his only intention was to try to absorb Hitchcock’s style by imitating it; I don’t believe there was any mention of postmodernist appropriation a la Sherrie Levine and Walker Evans. Of course, the film you are thinking of does exist, Douglas Gordon’s “23 Hour Psycho” of 1993.
Junko, Thanks for those Japanese war movie references. I wish they were available over here. Also, I knew that Tsurata Koji was a former kamikaze pilot who survived but did not know about his singing career. Fukasaku used him superbly in his yakuza movies. You may already know that there is a documentary WINGS OF DEFEAT dealing with kamikaze survivors (produced by Linda Hoagland), one of whom is very scathing towards an Emperor they were supposed to sacrifice themselves for.
According to Scott McQueen’s commentary on the MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM dvd, not only is that not Kenneth Anger, the changeling boy isn’t even a boy.
Dave, although I do not agree with you on PSYCHO, I have to add that the idea of imitation-counterfeting-was at its peak in the contemporary art world in the 90′s: Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huygues. But there was John Baldessari before that. Actually, Gus Van Sandt’s film has never annoyed me in regard to the original. I see the films as two distinct works.
On the one hand I understand and share Partisan’s frustrations and have not, as of yet, seen any of those films either (Gabe, if I recall, you called in sick at your day job–a knife factory at the time?–to catch a screening of La Regione centrale a few years back…) On some level, many of these films are, these days, fashions of an urban elite.
I’m not sure, though, that this is especially a bad thing; in the age of DVD, when every last scrap of film history is supposedly available (or imminently available for download, as Dave’s colleague A.O. Scott predicted some years ago), there’s a great risk of a kind of homogenized cinephilia, where everyone shares the same favorites and the same blind spots. It’s great that anyone in Spokane or Fresno (or even Culpeper) can see films by Yevgeni Bauer on DVD–a privilege that even New Yorkers scarcely enjoyed twenty-five years ago. At the same time, though, I don’t think a national (or even global) living room repertory is as exciting or challenging as a genuinely local film culture.
I’m not sure whether I’ll ever have another chance to see Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth. It was shown during a queer avant-garde retrospective at the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago, in accordance with Rubin’s original instructions: with the images of one reel ‘penetrating’ those of the other, with assorted colored gels wavering over the lenses, with a radio broadcast as the soundtrack. I pick this as an extreme example–the experience itself is midway between performance art and cinema, with each screening obviously a distinct and different thing due to these variables. But it’s important, too, that I was sitting there, in that seat, in that auditorium, on that evening. Life is full of choices and we take in what we can.
This is what I starting to get at in my last comment–if we regard avant-garde cinema simply as scenes that run contrary to established formal norms, we’re stuck in a rhetorical circle. There are strange, beguiling moments in many Hollywood films–but achieved within the very normative framework they’re supposedly defying. (This is where, incidentally, I thought the Unseen Cinema project strained credulity, seizing upon a respectable contrarian impulse to find avant-gardes before P. Adams Sitney’s canon and discovering avant-garde affinities in so many places that the appellation was almost entirely academic.)
Certainly there are moments of cross-pollination, as it were, the late ’60s being a particularly complex moment for both Hollywood and ‘underground’ filmmaking. Without context, these distinctions are meaningless. Where and how these films were (and weren’t) shown seems the most potent channel to me.
Jean-Pierre: It is exactly that “seeming to vanish” that makes Van Sant’s PSYCHO so wonderful. It is fascinating to watch a queer filmmaker re-make/re-shape a classic film so embedded in heteronormativity (and as Dave K. points out, the film is not a “shot-for-shot re-make. Van Sant plays variations on the original scenes with varying degrees of faithfulness. Van Sant’s fidelity to the original moves about like a jazz improvisation, creating its own suspense and sense of anticipation). Van Sant is also able to excise the homophobic aspects of the first film, changing Norman from a crypto-faggot into a heterosexual. Lila is now the movie’s resident queer, complete with power kick to Norman’s jaw in the fruit cellar. Van Sant’s camera also is more lovingly engaged with Norman’s and Sam’s bodies, where Hitchcock gave pride of place to the women: gone is the blurry shot of Marion’s breast as she clutches at the shower curtain and in are some nice butt shots of Norman and Sam.
Nicolas: I think of Van Sant’s PSYCHO as more impure than pure (look how Van Sant imports the sick green color of NxNW’s credits into those of his own film). As it draws on Hitchcock’s original, the film is infected by its predecessor, (dis)infecting it in return with its own queer sensibility. In general, I have not understood or been in sympathy with the notion of pure cinema (or pure art of any stripe) since the aesthetic experience has always been a dialogic one to me, with subsequent viewings adding new contributions to the already existent impurities. Also, being queer and having grown up under oppressive notions of a pure sexuality I was incapable of attaining, made me determined to leave the pursuit of purity to religious fundamentalists with their pretty little rings and chastity balls.
Dave: Just because Van Sant does not talk about postmodernism in those interviews does not mean he was not working in that vein. Those interviews were to promote a studio product, and I doubt that the subject of postmodernism would have been a welcome one. Nor do I think anything is gained by constricting spectatorship to conform to what a director says about his films. Also, I do not think either Todd Haynes or Gus Van Sant is guilty of assassination: they are merely queering texts, expanding the range of possible understanding and aesthetic experience, not reducing them. Haynes and Van Sant no more commit murder than activists working to secure same-sex marriage denigrate/assassinate the institution of marriage.
“Van Sandt’s ‘Psycho’ is by no means a shot by shot remake, but a lifeless reduction of Hitchcock’s work much like Todd Haynes’s assassination of Sirk in ‘Far from Heaven.’”
Interesting. But for N. Saada’s opinion here of Van Sandt’s ‘Psycho’ I’d have thought Dave K.’s view of the film utterly consensual (even obvious), yet Todd Haynes’ ‘Far from Heaven’ had alrays struck me as rising fully to the level of the best of Sirk.
I’d be interested to get further indication whether many here don’t think Van Sandt’s ‘Psycho’ a BOMB, don’t think Todd Haynes’s ‘Far from Heaven’ a triumphant imitation?
I always thought of FAR FROM HEAVEN as a very, very fond tribute to Sirk. A post-modern style replication, but with a humane goal: to foreground explicitly issues that Sirk wasn’t fully allowed to explore or even engage in his time.
I don’t think the experiment is, in the end, all that disruptive. Actually, I might’ve been more enchanted had it been MORE disruptive…replications like these often end up feeling a little tedious.
Fond but a little tedious sounds right to me.
I certainly don’t think Todd Haynes’s FAR FROM HEAVEN is an assassination of Sirk (actually I believe Sirk is bullet proof), but I don’t really think it adds anything to Sirk either. I see it as a fair imitation, maybe a little watered down – in the same way that the title ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS allows you to work out for yourself that heaven in fact doesn’t allow very much where as spelling out FAR FROM HEAVEN tells you right from the start exactly what you should think.
I’m with john m. on FAR FROM HEAVEN. Something I wrote in another forum at the time:
“I think FAR FROM HEAVEN works beautifully as an ironic examination of the issues it raises. If it were simply depicting racial and sexual issues that couldn’t be fully examined in films of that era, it wouldn’t have much point. But Haynes pulls off some neat sleight-of-hand, I think. In keeping with the whole “beneath the surface” theme, he foregrounds the hot button issues (homosexuality, racism) but the real story is Cathy’s lack of options. She feels powerless in her predicament, given the times. Her husband and the gardener at least have communities outside the white, straight mainstream that will accept and support them. But Cathy ultimately has nowhere to go, even though she’s willing to accept a compromised life with either of the men.
It’s sad really, and it’s perfectly relevant to the era depicted, in the same way that Sirk’s melodramas tweaked contemporary social conventions while in the guise of soap opera. If nothing else, it may have relevance today as a
reminder of how far we’ve come since the fairly recent past and how far some of us still have to go.”
I haven’t seen Van Sant’s PSYCHO, but the film interests me because of its implications for screen acting. A commonplace of film criticism is that the camera promotes an identification of actor and role, which are more easily separated in the case of stage performance. I wonder whether this stage/screen distinction would exist to the same degree if two or more films were routinely made from the same script, so that audiences could on a regular basis watch different actors offering their respective interpretations of the same role.
Regarding FAR FROM HEAVEN, is it just me, or did Haynes’s Sirkian exercise, particularly through its use of Dennis Haysbert, make (unintentional?) reference to Jonathan Kaplan’s LOVE FIELD?
Van Sant’s “Psycho” is NOT a shot-by-shot remake as it purports to be. I leaves out one entire sequence. Any guesses which one?
Jean Renoir said in a 1961 interview with Jacques Rivette:
“I know one way we can save films, and it’s extremely simple. It would be to have the producers from a place like Hollywood or Paris decide that one year everyone would do one subject. Hollywood would decide, for example, that a certain Western would be made, that all the directors would make the same Western, and you would see the originality, the differences among the films. But instead of this, we pretend to be different by having different stories. In the end, though, we’re producing exact copies. People tell a different story, but with the same faces, the same makeup, the same vocal expressions, the same emotions, but . . . But it’s monotonous, don’t you think?”
Kyle,
I was a knife salesman at the time, but you were close…
What I remember most distinctly about going to see avant-garde films as opposed to films in the multiplex or even arthouse theaters is that I knew exactly who had selected them. It was at screenings of experimental films that I began to understand the concept of the programmer, that this was a way to have a voice and share your knowledge. With LA REGION CENTRALE it was a guy named Ken Eisenstein who pulled my name from somewhere and thought I might be interested in the film. Just a hunch. And then I became a regular at all kinds of screenings like that. When I learned about how films were programmed at art houses it kind of disgusted me, the politics were too complicated and the people who ran these places were so jaded…
And the conditions of watching experimental films, in a room where the programmer often ran the projector, or where each film demanded its own very specific set of projection standards that everyone in the room seemed perfectly attuned to, seemed to me very intimate. I would go further and say it was even heroic.
You are right that we might get further along if we talk about these sort of circumstances… I mean, I remember trying to watch a bootleg of LA REGION CENTRALE years later and it certainly wasn’t the same.
A very apt quote, Joseph McBride. Thanks!
In a similar vein, Renoir once told me, “The marvelous thing about Westerns is that they are all the same movie. That gives a director unlimited freedom.”
Brian you’ve neglected to mention the contribution of felelow queer DP Chris Doyle to the van Sant Psycho, down to the LSD green that also adorns the micro CU of the fly in the final scene. I also enjoy it enormously.
David: I did not know Doyle was queer, but his photography in PSYCHO and PARANOID PARK (both of which I watched again today) is a wondrous celebration of male beauty and eroticism.
Have you seen Doyle’s ep in the portmanteau film Paris je t’aime? It’s extremely “gay”, but not in a great way. It’s really not so good. (Reakky ibky Gus’ and Alexander Payne’s ep make it worthwhile.) One should add his work for Wong Kar-wai is very striking, and original and I think he equallly rises to Wong’s celebration of beautiful women in motion, sumptuously clothed in Wong’s best work. Then again he also photographs Tony Leung very lovingly!
As for autoboigraphical confirmation, I recall Doyle more or less making the point in what might be a short extra on the Oz disc of 2046.
Chris Doyle is queer?? I seriously doubt it !!
Adrian, perhaps trying to pin the mercurial Doyle down to anything so banally prosaic may be futile, but I will try to find the extras disc of 2046 and confirm what he himself said. At the moment my library seems to have developed wormholes and things are either missing or out of order.
More generally, it was a great shame he and Wong fell out.
Every time I’ve encountered Doyle socially I’ve gotten the impression that he’s actually living out what Ronnie Hawkins promised Robbie Robertson and company in compensation for low wages if they toured with him. (See “The Last Waltz.”) I’ll be interested to hear what D.H. digs up!
Glenn, I also met Doyle late one night at a venue that could not be described as “Straight” or even straight friendly by any stretch of the imagination. It may even have been the night I took Roger McNiven there when he was briefly back in Sydney just a couple of years before he sadly died – too young.
This all means nothing of course, but yon Chris was one hell of a wild man – as is his work of course. The ep from Paris je t’aime is so bad it looks like a piece of hairdresser-fetishist porn.
I was saying something to Blake elsewhere about meaningless categorizations, and this must extend to notions of straight and gay. This nonsense is of course most fretted about in Anglo Saxon cultures and I’m as guilty of indulging it as anyone here (including you guys).
This in the shadow of just watching Dassin’s ludicrously entertaining Phaedra and Leisen’s most explicitly gay film No time for Love at the start of which Fred has to prance and model in front of a bunch of Fashion mag queens,including Paul McGrath (Crawford’s “gay” husband in Humoresque) sporting a Marcel wave perm. And Claudette. While the dialogue rings with ceaseless double entendre.
Glenn while you’re there I need to spring an alert about the otherwise superb BFI BluRay of The Leopard (I assume you will be looking at this some time soon.) There’s a serious transfer problem with the fourth file in the BD movie folder where something goes seriously wrong with black levels and the whole gamma and balance of the image becomes decontrasted with black predominating. So Far BFI are not properly responding to the issue, as though this were the product of someone’s fevered imagination. It’s a real shame because the whole thing, up to 1h 54m 30s on the disc is spectacularly beautiful. The last 72 minutes is a disaster.