Rosenbaum, Dreyer and cynicism (4)

Take a look at Rosenbaum's review (in Chicago Reader) for Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves and let me know if you can spot a pattern between Bergman and von Trier in regard to a certain NYT op-ed piece. Déjà vu? Also interesting to note the generational argument that Bordwell also lifts in his recent post. Here are the highlights :

"I'm far from sharing von Trier's cynicism, but I think there are many reasons for respecting it, most of them generational. People born before 1950 often had good reason to feel hopeful, at least during the late 60s and 70s; those born later -- von Trier was born in 1956-- had less and less reasons to feel that way. A massive backlash against the earlier generation's optimism is still going on, an indication of how potent the optimism was. (...) Within such a context, a passionate desire to create and even respect a character like Bess--however many stylistic and thematic paradoxes this entails--is clearly a heroic aspiration.
Von Trier may be deeply cynical, but he's less so than Terrence Rafferty was when he recentlly wrote in the New Yorker, "If Breaking the Waves becomes a hit, von Trier will have proved that the american audience for foreign films wants today precisely what it wanted in the boom years of the 50s and early 60s: nudity plus theology." A little later he added, "It's tempting to attribute the decline of the European film to the increase, over the years, in the erotic explicitness of American movies." When he says "decline" and "the European film" it can only be in the context of the American marketplace--specificaly the European films selected by American distributors, the tip of the iceberg Rafferty seems happy to accept as a whole. Apparently he believes the only reason films are made in Europe is to satisfy Americans who want to see tits and ass mixed in with their theology, and if these needs can't be met, European filmmakers might as well han over their assignments to "pure" American artists working free of such pressures. (...)

I can't recall much nudity or theology in European movies such as Mon Oncle, Breathless, The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, Last Year in Marienbad, Eclipse, Ashes and Diamonds, or [Bergman's] The Magician--to cite only a few of my favorites that did well during those "boom years" (alongside such commercial flops as Pickpocket, Lola and Dreyer's Gertrud). (...)

I can certainly understand Rafferty's anger at the sarcasm and falsity underlying von Trier's approach--since I become angry every time I think of Breaking the Waves "replacing" Ordet (though that's surely a false syllogism). (...)

A less sympathetic reading of this flexibility might be that von Trier is "too cynical to believe even his own cynicism"--as Andrew Sarris once said of Billy Wilder. But I would prefer to regard Breaking the Waves as a search for belief that acknowledges the land mines separating a 70s consciousness from that goal, a search that burrows ever deeper into irony and ambiguity without reaching the sincerity it strives for--but without collapsing into the nihilism that I see all around me in commercial fare. (...)

Is Breaking the Waves a religious film? I doubt that von Trier knows the answer to that question--just as I doubt that Dreyer would have known the answer if he'd been asked the same question about Ordet. A vast universe of thought, feeling, and artistry divides the two films, made over 40 years apart, but this uncertainty is the point at which both of them become interesting."

Jonathan Rosenbaum in "Mixed Emotions" : review of Breaking the Waves, Chicago Reader, Dec. 6, 1996. Also in Essential Cinema (2004), chapter "special problems"

Now I can agree with Rosenbaum's 1996 reasoning. Thank you for correcting what sounded wrong in the 2007 NYT.
Though it seems that anyone making films around Denmark must be compared to Dreyer... I see the connection between Breaking the Waves and Ordet, but Dreyer is not the end all argument to judge a film in particular. Not every cinema has to be about Dreyer, has it? We certainly could look past this aspect to focus on the film itself. What is the connection between Bergman and Lars von Trier?

My unanswered comment at the Chicago Reader's blog [EDIT: Rosenbaum replied on his blog since]:

"Why would Bergman's use of "torture" on his fictional characters be different, in principle, to Dreyer's (or Bresson's)?
Jonathan, in your Essential Cinema essay, you seem to be more generous towards Lars Von Trier's cynicism in Breaking the Waves, than you are for the entire oeuvre of Bergman. You reckon there are creative, interesting ways to deal with misantropy.
If the debate is about the content and moral purpose of such sadism, then we shouldn't stigmatize "misanthropy" in itself, and focus on Bergman's hollowness (if that's the case) rather than "sadism" (which is a cliché).
I don't know what you think of these following auteurs, but on the specific case of "misantropic treatment" what degrees separate the "cynicism" of, say, Bresson (Balthazar, Une Femme Douce, L'argent, Le Diable Probablement), Kaurismaki, Herzog, Cassavetes, Elaine May (Mickey and Nicky), Peter Watkins, Alan Clarke, Polanski, Kubrick, Kurosawa (Dodesukaden, The Lower Depths) , Kim Ki-duk...
If you admire any of these, what justifies their harassment of fictional characters that doesn't work with Bergman (and I think he's at least greater than a few on the list)."

Could someone answer me?

Rosenbaum v Bergman (3)

(Continuation from posts 1 and 2)

I'm having trouble to finish my commentary because I can't wrap my head around his talking points. They sound self-contradictory and we could track down quotes from his past articles where old Rosenbaum disagrees with new Rosenbaum. Nothing really makes sense, and I need someone to explain it all.
Although he knew what he was doing when he wrote that (he called it upon himself), I feel bad about continuing this investigation because Jonathan is understandably worn out by all the heat he got... And I still admire the cause he defends. I just can't accept that he would point finger to a scapegoat in order to raise attention for his victimized champions. In the end this is about the lack of wide public fame of Dreyer and Bresson, because within the private circles of auteurists, scholars and cinephiles, none of these masters have been forgotten. His only rational to apply different standards to various parts of cinema is to oppose favorite auteurs to least favorite auteurs.
I agree that it's a shame that other masters' death have been overlooked, but that's not a reason to scorn Bergman because he's lucky to get more posthumous attention. The mainstream attention is elective and lacunary... so what? We're not going to change the mass by burning idols... Rosenbaum's wrath goes against the mainstream cultural awareness, yet all his accusation are directed at Bergman himself, who had no business in moving and shaking public trends...

"Of course, if anyone wants to argue that Bergman deeply altered our sense of film language and/or had fresh things to say about the modern world to the same degree as these other filmmakers, I'm all ears. The article is meant to stir the pot, not close the lid. (...) I'm perfectly happy to listen to counter-arguments defending the beauty, seriousness, authenticity, and/or importance of Bergman's thoughts and emotions and what they contributed to our own thoughts and feelings. Maybe Bergman DID have something to teach us all about the Death of God." J. Rosenbaum (at a_film_by)

So the burden of proof rests onto Bergman's defenders, as if we had to justify ourselves. Before to bring counter-arguments, we'd like to see solid arguments in the first place. It was his job to at least sketch out a potent framework, an insightful angle that seriously puts into question Bergman's merits. He didn't. That's not a fair debate.

"I'd just like to hear more about (...) what he did to enrich (as opposed to confirm or ratify) other people's views of the world, hopefully in terms that I don't find overly familiar or glib or boring. All of which I find in some of the larger claims made for Bergman that I've been hearing for almost half a century. This is what my piece was reacting to." J. Rosenbaum (at Scanners)

Now he wants us to write a book-length appreciation of Bergman's legacy with never-heard-before ideas, to disprove his 1000 words-long unsubstenciated gratuitous mood piece...
This is very difficult to engage with this polemic without starting from scratch to debunk the classic shortcomings reproached to any controversial filmmaker. The tabula rasa proposed to re-evaluate every steps of the oeuvre makes Bergman an exception in the auteurist realm, where we ought to demonstrate all over again his legit signature and the cinematic value of his style.
It doesn't seem to me that he's shown a willingness to open and encourage this debate.

If at least he would distanciate himself from this shaky article, I could reconcile his usual sound arguments with this one-time provocational rant. But he's in denial. All he's been doing lately was to justify his editorial line through formal limitations (he blames the NYT editor, the word count, the imposed timing, the NYT hype, the short notice, the --not so forgotten-- Bergman fandom...) instead of backing up or revisiting his allegations.
He's on defensive mode and doesn't make the discussion easy to engage for his contenders, raising the stake of legit dissent to hard-to-meet requirements. Now he has seen Fanny And Alexander, he asks his detractors to watch both versions, the theatrical and the long TV version before they could dare to dispute his claims...

I appreciate how Jonathan took the time to respond to the attacks on several blogs, replying to Ebert, Bordwell and the guys at a_film_by. Though all my comments (on his blog in particular) have been ignored so far [EDIT: he's replied since, see the comments in my next post]. I thus undersand my response is not welcome to stir his pot. He hasn't developped further any of his arguments either, patiently waiting for detractors to come up with all the ground work to re-demonstrate that Bergman is not a minor auteur. Even if it is flagrant, it is not as quick and easy than to ruin a reputation with a few punchlines.

Then again, he digs his own hole (about Bordwell's take on his op-ed piece) :

"Although I haven't yet made it to the end of David Bordwell's piece apart from skimming it (I tend to get bored when he writes long, no matter how accurate he often is), I agree with most of what he said in the first two-thirds or so. I even emailed him to agree with him that nothing I was arguing was especially new. I also agreed with his statements about generations. (...)
All perfectly true. And I do value a lot of David's work for these reasons. But as a nonacademic, I have to admit that there are times when I'm more interested in reading writers who are factually unreliable but do more to stimulate my imagination and sometimes do even more to change the way I watch films. The classic instance of this: Noel Burch." J. Rosenbaum (at Chicago Reader)

Are we to understand that his (factually unreliable) op-ed piece is meant to "stimulate the imagination"? I wonder how trashing unsubstentially any critically acclaimed master can change the way we watch films... since it's what any uneducated viewer could do when they are bored by a challenging work of art. He thought that the NYT was the right platform to further blur the line between gratuitous slander and educated, analytical criticism. Therefore degrading the level of film criticism in the public mind.
Bordwell took the time to elaborate a thought-out response to some of the challenges thrown out in the NYT, yet Rosenbaum doesn't even care to read Bordwell's post from end to end??? Did he want to open a debate or not?

Next : Rosenbaum, Dreyer and cynicism (4)

Rosenbaum v Bergman (2)

Continuation from first post (here):

I knew Rosenbaum didn't like Bergman as much as I did, because he prefered to have 19 Godard films in his Top1000 Personal Favorites and could only squeeze in 3 Bergman's (Sawdust And Tinsel, The Magician, and Persona, incidentally they are the ones cited in his article to point to Bergman's flaws, that's how much he loves them). Our tastes are opposite regarding this pair of auteurs as I would reverse the numbers (20 Bergman's and 3 Godard's). Ironically, if we replace "Bergman" with "Godard" in this op-ed piece, I would probably agree with everything he says about the intellectual hype, the idolatry around JLG, the ego, the absence of form invention, the fakery of his gimmicks, the fading of his aura, the overrated canonization. And that's bogus. It's so easy to give a caricatural overview actually. I can't wait for Godard's funeral... ;)

From the outrage of seeing such a wide coverage of obituaries in the mainstream press, Rosenbaum can't stand that this type of (popular) cinema would be associated any longer with "art cinema", the pure cinema (non theatrical, in Bazin's terms) thus redraws the line between him and the rest of hardline auteurs who never met critical or public success. Obviously Bergman's fame is too suspect for the low-budget, unpopular camp of obscur artists. Excommunication is inevitable. Bergman, "founding father" of "boring art films", must be excluded from his own family. If he gets so much love after his death, he can't be boring enough.
Basically Rosenbaum tells the world : "All of you who came to art films with Bergman and found it entertaining, well, you haven't seen boring yet, this isn't the real thing, art is not that easy to watch, I'm talking about Dreyer and Bresson, they couldn't entertain an audience to save their lives. If you have fun, if you see boobies, if you can follow the story... you're not seeing art, and I don't even call it cinema!" (sarcastic dramatization intended)
And I doubt insulting people who made the effort to go to Bergman has any chance to open Dreyer and Bresson to a wider audience (if that was the intended goal)... This baseless condemnation is not even going to help the "cause" anyway.
For the record, let me say that I do love all three, Bergman, Bresson and Dreyer! I can see a difference of style, ambition and achievements between them, but it's only a global estimation of all of their respective caracteristics (and my subjective taste) that would help me to rank them (if I had to). I wouldn't dismiss one just because he works differently from the other. I wouldn't use the quality of one to gauge all the others. I wouldn't oppose them. The referential standard should be external to the trio, a vision of cinema as an art, not as the embodiement of one particular auteur's craft, for all others to be compared to.

"Rosenbaum", "New York Times", "Bergman" : 3 reasons (each alone would suffice) why there shouldn't be any fallacious rhetorics in this article! There are more credible ways to propose a re-evaluation of a long time resident at the cinema pantheon. If it's ok to question Bergman's authority, we could legitimately question Rosenbaum's authority as well, right?
Though he has since posted a few needed clarifications (on a_film_by, at the Chicago Reader blog, and at Scanners) :

• "It's true that I praise Bergman as an entertainer and compare him to George Cukor (which to me is no insult)"
• "I'm certainly not trying to say that Bergman is beneath anyone's interest"
• "Welles could even alter our sense of film language while remaining a fluid storyteller, so I'm not even arguing that these values are always mutually exclusive"
• "Bergman's taste for silhouettes moving across horizons" was a compliment
• "Bergman's 'seeming contempt' for digital video in Saraband isn't a sin in my book but a plus"
• "Bergman is not a poor director"

Wasn't it Rosenbaum who reproached to Farber we couldn't tell a compliment from a blame in his criticism? This is the same situation here. Considering the controversy raised on a_film_by and on the blogosphere, I'm not alone being confused. If Rosenbaum had to explain that he didn't believe Bergman was bad there was something wrong with the overall irony in his writing.

What annoys me most is that his argumentation mixes legitimate issues that become dubious when combined. 1) Disputing canon, 2) Observing social trends and 3) Comparing auteurs. We could argue all year long about who the greastest filmmaker of all time is, rank them artificially, number their works, mesure their popularity... but in the end subjective popularity and critical evaluation only overlap by coincidence not by causality. Everything he describes (about overblown cult, overrated acclaim, under/overexposition), could be said of Bresson, Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Welles, Godard, Tarantino, Spielberg... given the proper timeframe and geographical context. Are we looking at the big picture or at minor historical incidents?

1. CANONIZATION
   "My reason for being rude was to bring up what I see as either limitations in his work or limitations in the way his work is usually received and discussed"
   Rosenbaum thinks Bergman's position in canons and pertinence in today's film culture should be re-evaluated. OK. We could blame academics and critics for overrating him. We could reconsider the reasons why history has given him so much importance THEN, and why it is obsolete NOW.
   What we can argue about are the critical judgments, the premise and limitations of certain theoretical concepts (such as "auteurism", "art film", "modern cinema"), whether Bergman's individual films or entire oeuvre belong or not to such or such label, whether such labels grant/deny him a seat in the pantheon.
   But we can NOT use a starting point nobody would agree on (the alleged fact that Bergman is forgotten) and use it as a common ground for the discussion. Reality is not debatable. And this fact is not even relevant, and never will be, to define someone's historical importance.
   We could compare the strengh and weakness of some auteurs. We could compare all sorts of dichotomic arguments : classic/modern, narrative/experimental, sophisticated/rough image, stylized/naturalist performances, auteur/acteur-driven stories, politicized/fictional inspiration... but to assume there is a consensual agreement about the hierarchy of these aspects of cinema that justifies a place in the canon requires at least a demonstration because I doubt everybody will agree to set the standards on this proposition.
   
2. FAME
   Rosenbaum thinks that Bergman's popularity is undeserved, that his audience likes his films for the wrong reasons. OK. He speaks of "availability", "uncontestable major figure" (among mainstream obituaries), "Google hits", "vitality", "visibility", "outsized reputation", "appeal", "New York audiences"... this is a rhetoric in reference to his public image which is unrelated to an academic estimation of his historic importance. The 2 phenomena are non sequitur, yet a causal tie underlies throughout the article. Fame has nothing to do with artistic authority. Bad artists can foster a huge fandom without any trace of talent.
   Rosenbaum declares he meant to emphasis "fashion" (Bergmania trend) for "its immediate impact" (on NYT readers). It's fine to highlight a sociological study on the good/bad reasons why cinema gets incorporated in the general culture at various levels. But the main issue with the piece is that it blames a social phenomenon on an academic canon, and vice-versa.
   
3. EQUIVALENCY
   "Part of what I was trying to get at in the article was the interesting paradox that Bresson and Dreyer were widely regarded as beyond the pale in the 60s, when Bergman was at the height of his fame, and that audiences are now beginning to catch up with what they were doing while we're less likely to understand more things about his work now than we did in the 60s or 70s." (a_film_by)
   Oh the irony! So what? How does this matter other than for the historical anecdote? Are we talking about how famous an auteur can get, or how high an auteur can climb the canon?
   Rosenbaum likes and prefers Dreyer and Bresson, so be it. He should write us a great book to celebrate them instead of blaming Bergman and complaining how the rest of the world doesn't share his personal taste. This hatchet job looks like getting rid of the top contender in order to undermine the competition and leave more room to the runner-ups (he would prefer to see at the top). We all have underdog favorites in our individual pantheon. But we have to realize that a global establishment is a collective consensus that doesn't match each individual pantheon perfectly. There will always be someone in the canon we don't like and it doesn't matter, because the canon doesn't represent us individualy, but a conservative highest common denominator.

"(...) I don't think history can ever be repeated -- either in film history or in the history of film reception and film appreciation. That's why I can only laugh when one of my colleagues remarks that none of the recent films can "duplicate" or "match" or "equal" or "approximate" the masterpieces or classics of the past, because my own definition of the singularity of a major film, tautologically speaking, is that it's singular."
Jonathan Rosenbaum in Essential Cinema (2004) -- Introduction.

Why confront auteurs in deathmatches if their works are singular?

To be continued ... (part 3)

Rosenbaum's prejudice in Bergman obituary

Bergman aside (we'll get to that later), Jonathan Rosenbaum's contrarian reaction to this filmmaker's legacy (article in NYT, August 4th) only demonstrates a selective memory, dishonest arguments, double standard principles and the poorest clichés on art cinema.

"Almost every statement in this rather shallow article could be challenged on the ground of irrelevance, biased vision,unfairness, questionable reasoning or sometimes even plain silliness. I am surprised that this comes from a critic of J. R.'s stature"
Jean-Pierre Coursodon (on a_film_by)

Let's just do that (for those who only skimmed through the article) :

1. Deception #1 : "Like many of his films, “The Magician” hasn’t been widely available here for ages." (Anecdotale Fallacy)
   
   Sure, from a filmography of 62 films, only few made it to DVD yet, but that's more than most auteurs have (including Bresson or Dreyer with a smaller filmography, respectively 14 and 23). Who are we kidding?
   He corrects on a_film_by : "I agree that many Bergman films are out on DVD, even though it's obviously a much smaller fraction of the whole work than one finds with Dreyer and Bresson."
   Only 34 of his films are available on DVD at FNAC !
   _
2. Deception #2 : "His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson" (Unrepresentative Sample Fallacy)
   
   Does Jonathan Rosenbaum (JR) assume the American distribution market alone defines the worldwide relevance of an auteur? I considered JR as the less insular of American critics until now.
   _
3. Manipulation #1 : DVD availability and Academic syllabus (hic et nunc) are the absolute reference to measure the long term relevance of an artist in film history. (Appeal to Authority Fallacy)
   
   JR usually protests the contrary when defending his overlooked champions (Burnett, Tashlin, Tarr, Ivens in his book Essential Cinema). Not to mention the entire history of film criticism proven wrong time and again after a misguided disdain (La Règle du Jeu, Lola Montes, Welles, Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Nick Ray, Ozu, Kurosawa) or premature appraisal (Duvivier, Autan-Lara, Delannoy, Clément, Wyler, Stevens, Zinnemann...). Of course JR didn't forget that, so why even trying to push THAT argument to demonstrate anything about an auteur's stature?
   I can't comment on the presence of Bergman in Academia, especially not in the USA, but I doubt it's true worldwide, and there are probably other possible, practical explanations than a fall in disgrace. Persona, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Cries and Whispers are often cited by film scholars and published in referencial books.
   Even if it was true, we could only regret that one filmmaker is forgotten. The idea to rejoice about certain films being left out of film studies is a sad thought, and a shame for the diversity of cinema culture as a whole. Why would an ecclectic critic like Rosenbaum use this argument to establish a false "common wisdom"?
   _
4. Simplification #1 : "Bergman isn’t being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard" (Unfair comparison)
   
   What JR disputes is that Bergman is "an uncontestable major figure in cinema" and he uses (greater) major figures to diminish his stature in comparison. But *if* he's inferior to these names (which is itself a whole aesthetical debate and certainly not a given), it doesn't mean that he's not part of these major figures. I can think of many mediocre films by these 3 masters that don't mesure up to Bergman's consistant oeuvre. Why even oppose masters against eachothers as if the unique quality of one excluded the other unique quality of the other.
   _
5. Manipulation #2 : "two master filmmakers [Dreyer and Bresson] widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman’s heyday"
   
   Bergman has always had a "boring" label attached to his cinema, though maybe not by the same public. But JR uses references of various reliability, eras and demographics (DVD industry, obituaries, film buffs or Google) to assert Bergman's reputation, then he equates that directly to the critical pan of a specific time and place for Dreyer and Bresson as if there was a valid correlation to find in such a nebulous comparison.
   Fame v. Critical appreciation (= equivalency?) .
   We can clearly read between the lines that JR's actual grudge is not Bergman (whom he kindly aknowledges some talent), but the circumstances that have given Bergman the celebrity his favorites (Bresson and Dreyer) deserved. Well, Bergman is not responsible for the blindness and favoristism of critics at large and the audience throughout ages, no more than he should feel guilty about the decent fame his films earned (within the Art Film league, which is definitely smaller than the Mainstream league!).
   _
6. Truism #1 : Obituaries are unanimously respectful, admirative and complacent.
   
   An obituary is a boring job, you remind people who the person was and what achievements of theirs are left in History. Have the "socially aware adults" lost any sense of respect for someone's funeral memory? Bergman's thunder had to be shared with Antonioni already!
   It's not an opportunity to spit on someone's grave, for curtesy sake! Bergman only made 1 film in the last 10 years. JR believes mourning has lasted long enough (5 days) to begin right away with the free bashing. If the biased adoration had lasted months after his death, I could understand JR's impatience to balance with a dissenting view. Sure, every proclaimed master can and should be scrutinized and desacralized, no question about that, but each thing in its own time.
   It's not like if JR had only this one time soapbox-opportunity to seize, in order to restore the truth... he's got a weekly column for himself in the Chicago Reader (among other platforms). [EDIT: Rosenbaum corrected this assumption of mine on his blog]
   _
7. Manipulation #3 : "If you Google 'Ingmar Bergman' and 'great,' you get almost six million hits." (Appeal to Popularity Fallacy)
   
   Now JR gets his audience poll from an internet search engine, with a laughable query! (it doesn't even mean that the adjective "great" on these pages is associated to Bergman, or that these pages shine a positive light on him. One could think of "great failure/disappointment" for example...) How come someone could publish THAT in the New York Times???
   If you like silly populist statistics, here's IMDb top250 The Seventh Seal makes #81 (18,700 votes!) and Wild Strawberries #158 (10,460 votes), Dreyer (film with most votes : 6,600 votes) and Bresson (film with most votes : 2,000 votes) are nowhere to be found. What does it prove about their respective popularity among IMDb voters?
   _
8. Simplification #2 : Bergman circa 50ies reduced to superficial clichés only the shameless populist reviewers would dare to mention : sexiness, nudity, beautiful actresses. (Caricature)
   _
9. Manipulation #4 : Blaming Bergman for his imitator (Woody Allen) and his incidental/local fan base crowd (which is assumed unworthy). (Guilt by Association Fallacy).
   _
10. Deception # 3 : "Mr. Bergman’s star has faded" (Begging the Question Fallacy)
    
    Evidences produced were false or deceiving so how is that conclusive? It's not because you say it or wish it that it's a reality. Here are some surveys showing that not everybody has forgotten about Bergman yet... (I'm not suggesting these consensual/local/timely polls represent a solid foundation to determine someone's universal pertinence but apparently they contradict JR's sense of reality)
    - The 13th Most Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker Poll)
    - Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)
    - The Top 100 Directors #7 (They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? December 2006) 11 films ranked in the top1000 (for comparison : Dreyer #13, 5 films in top1000 / Bresson #16, 9 films in top1000)

There is an ongoing debate around the article at a_film_by where Jonathan Rosenbaum responds to certain accusations.

Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity also debunks some of JR's fallacies.

Jonathan Lapper at Cinema Styles does the same breaking down job to uncover the fallacies.

And Girish shares his reservations too.

There are probably many things to denote about Bergman's stylistic (arguable) achievements and content (arguable) value, but serious critics shouldn't have to resort to fallacies and other smoke screens to put a critical point across in the hope to confuse and persuade an ignorant readership. This is low standard criticism in my opinion (for whatever it's worth).

Next we'll look into the critical accusations...

Blind spots in film history

"It's been four years since this prophetic and poetic masterwork was made, and it's just arriving in Chicago. But I wonder if we're ready for it even now. For starters, what do we know about Joris Ivens? Although he's generally considered to be one of only a handful of great documentary filmmakers, history and politics have conspired to make most of his work unavailable and unknown in this country. I suppose some would argue that this was partly his fault -- because he had the bad taste to become a communist filmmaker and to work for much of his life in communist countries as opposed to the "free world". Unfortunately, the freedoms granted in our "free world" haven't yet included the opportunity to see most of Iven's work. He's made more than sixty films, including antifascist work, work supporting Indonesian independence (which led to the withdrawal of his Dutch passport), and work in collaboration with Ernest Hemingway, Jacques Prévert, Gérard Philipe, Lewis Milestone, Frank Capra, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda (the last five worked with him on the 1967 sketch film Far From Vietnam). He died during the early summer of 1989, just before most of the communist world in the West collapsed.

A Word of advice to film artists who want to get ahead : don't move around too much. Film history often gets subsumed under national film history, so filmmakers who keep moving risk getting lost. And stay out of politics, since getting into them invariably puts you on either the winning side or the losing side. If you're on the losing side, many national film histories will write you out entirely; if you're on the winning side, chances are your film will date faster than last week's newspaper."

(About Joris Iven's A Tale of the Wind) Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader, May 29, 1992. Also in Essential Cinema : On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004)

Deauville 2007 - Asian cinema festival

Deauville 2007 - Asian cinema festival
March 28 - April 1st 2007 official website

• Homage to Park Chan Wook (South Korea) 9 films - the "asian Gus Van Sant"
• Homage to James Lee (Malaysia) 5 films - almost the "asian Bresson", young promising chinese talent based in Malaysia.
• 3 documentaries on sports in North Korea, by Daniel GORDON (the only filmmaker allowed to export cinema outside N. Korea)

03-31-2007 : Michel Ciment on France Culture (REAL audio, French, online for a week)
Guests :
- Bruno Barde (Artistic director of the Deauville festival)
- Jean-Pierre Dionnet (Video editor for popular asian movies, who introduced Kitano, Miyazaki, Johnny To, Kim Ki-duk to the West)
- Pierre Rissient (critic, filmmaker, festival curator, discovered Eric Khoo, Lino Brocka, King Hu, and helped Lester James Peries, HHH, Edward Yang, Hong Sang-soo)

Here are my notes, rough transcript of the conversation (if you're interested in following the talk in French with the audio file)

• P. Rissient : in 1975 he restored for the Cannes Festival the director's cut of King HU's Touch of Zen (1973), which was a commercial and critical bomb. Brings Lino Brocka's Insiang (1976) in Cannes in 1978.
  Showed a film by LEE Han-sang to WANG Bing (West of Tracks) who said it was the most mandarin film he saw.
  James LEE (Things We Do When We Fall In Love) is part of a chinese trend of young cinema in Kuala-Lumpur, Malaysia, with HO Yuhang (Sanctuary) or TAN Chui Mui (Love Conquers All).
• J-P Dionnet : lots young Hong Kong filmmakers look now towards mainland China, a market opening to violent movies. Tsui Hark, John Woo, Ringo Lam return from Hollywood to work in China. Hideo Nakata says he lost 5 years of his life in Hollywood. Friedkins said, upon watching Nakata's film, he's a master of fear, it's more frieghtening than The Exorcist, which used more grandilocant ways.
• J-P Dionnet : Odd inspiration of the new asian generation from the popular european cinema, maybe unacademic. Mamoru Oshii's favorite film is Kawalerowicz's Mother Joan of the Angels (1961). PARK Chan-wook projected Chabrol's Le Boucher (1970) during shooting of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002). John WOO's slow-mo were inspired by Lelouch's Un Homme et Une Femme (1966), and the idea of trio protagonists is from Robert Enrico.
• P. Rissient : SHIN Sang-ok's lost film, Arch of Chastity, (restored for Cannes Classic 2007).
• B. Barde : Festival jury members, especially in France, aren't enthused by asian cinema in general, and need to be convinced, seduced more. While asian cinema is the most inventive today, succeeding in festivals around the world.
  Only 38 asian films officialy distributed in theatres in 2006 (5 % on a total 700 films distributed in France) = 1% of total audience.
• M. Ciment says French filmmakers are attracted by Asia. Benoit Jacquot filmed in India, Olivier Assayas in Hong Kong.
• J-P. Dionnet : cultural barrier between the West and Asia. We don't understand the mix of genres, the rhythm. Pang's Re-Cycle (at Cannes 2006) about the culture of abortion in China (for a male heir desired by families) dealt with the memory of these forgotten "lost" babies, while the West misinterpretated it as a pro-life film. The asian culture has its own aesthetical referents so should be explained to western audience.
• M. Ciment : The first and only asian film awarded a Palme D'Or in Cannes was Farewell My Concubine (1993). While Venice awarded Rashomon in 1951, and continues to celebrate asian cinema. French and European audience for asian films is not as wide as it should.
• P. Rissient : HHH (only popular success is City of Sadness because of the Golden Lion) and Tsai Ming-liang have a very small audience at home in Taiwan. Jia Zhang-ke only begins to be projected in China with a small audience. Auteurist cinema in Korea beguins to struggle (Hong Sang-soo, Im Song-soo, Im Kwon-taek). Im Kwon-taek's Seopyeonje sold 1 milion admissions in 1992 (record breaking before the new soar of Korean market). Lee Chang-dong's Peppermint Candy in 2000 (700,000). Bong Joon-ho's The Host in 2006 (15 milion, record to date). Then Park Chan-wok I'm a Cyborg, but that's ok in 2007 makes 700,000 and is considered a bomb because his previous films made 3 or 4 milion admissions, because of a new culture of blockbuster in Korea. Korean auteurs struggle because actors refuse to work with non-bankable directors.
• J-P Dionnet : Kitano was despised in Japan until he received a Golden Lion in Venice, and could then make a career at home. Miike went from direct-to-video to theatre distribution thanks to his European fame. Kyioshi Kurosawa's films have more success in Europe than in Japan. The auteurist asian cinema in Japan, Taiwan or Korea is essentially supported by its European success.
• P. Rissient : Korean producers irrealistically want to mimic Hollywood big budget debauchery. Actors are overpaid.
• B. Barde : Dangerous economical inflation in Asian cinema. Kurosawa's last films were supported by USA or France production (Anatole Dauman, Serge Silberman). Asian distributors ask for excessive fees just because the film was selected in a major international festival in Europe. The major French distributors who know the market prices make a pass. The big films end up with small distributors that postpone distribution for years because they don't have the budget to market them appropriately. While the internet-savvy fans know very well how old is the movie. Fans can't maintain the original excitation so long. Fans wants the fresh movies.
• P. Rissient : international distributors for asian exports ignore the reality of the market prices and hold back releases because of high prices. Like for Hong Sang-soo's Woman on The Beach, still not distributed in France, despite the friendly support of Marin Karmitz (who distributed his last 3 films with success) who proposed to buy the film before its production, an offer too small was turned down. [Which explains why I still haven't seen this film, while usually Hong's film were released every year after Cannes] His new film will be in Cannes this year and will compete in theatres with the previous one. Hong Sang-soo is like Rohmer, needs a release with 2 years apart to let the audience wants for more.
• J-P Dionnet : Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983), and the japanese new wave was supported by European funds. There should be a better cooperation between Asia and Europe or USA if it wasn't about absurd market prices and regulations/quotas, treaties, institutional disagreement to define the nationality of the production of a film. Korea wanted to sell Samsung and Hyundai to the USA, thus agreed to drop the cinema quotas (that protected national films).
• P. Rissient : KOFIC subsidies ($400,000), unchanged, didn't go up with the market boom so is not a significant help for production anymore.

DIGEST : Mars 2007

Unreviewed screenings, current reads, links, recommendations, free talk, questions, thoughts, informal conversation, anything... comments welcome.

>> updates below (sticky entry for a month)

Digital filmotheque of Alexandria

"Digitizing film ashes"

Following the recent debate around a universal cinema digital database started by 3 articles in the New York Times (March 18 2007) :

• Manohla Dargis : The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (If You’re Patient)
• A. O . Scott : The Shape of Cinema, Transformed at the Click of a Mouse
• Noah Robischon : Little Films on Little Screens (but Both Seem Set to Grow)

Later put into perspective with a reality check and some ethical questions :

• Dave Kehr
• Kristin Thompson : The Celestial Multiplex (thorough analysis)

"A screen is a screen is a screen" (Dargis)

From the consumer's POV, maybe, but from a critic I'd expect a little more subtlety in comparing a Kinetoscope, a theatre and an iPod...The miniaturization of the image causes obvious aesthetic issues that we can't just ignore because everybody else doesn't mind. If the audience only cares for stories, whatever size they come in, critics at least should defend the inherent properties of a projected image and the fine details on a panoramic screen.
I prefer to hear critics complain about how the frame composition of a widescreen movie was optimized to fit the 4/3 TV ratio. Do we want the film grammar to become iPod-complient with adjusted colors and extreme close ups to compensate the end-size loss?

There are 3 ways to look at the situation. The consumer, the producer and the historian perspectives. Each have their own desirs and limitations. They aren't quite compatible.

1. The average consumer wants access to fashionable movies, here and now, and doesn't care about copyright infringement or the way of living of its makers, cost of the digital-transfer, scarcity of the print, perenity of the source, authenticity of the version (director's cut, censorship, bootleg, betrayal of translation), profitability of the transaction. The consumer is not stubborn, if the download is not accessible it's easier to click on another title that could be seen now. There is too much choice, too little time and the unicity of films doesn't stand out to them. Movies are interchangeable commodities.
   Not everyone in the world wants to see every films ever made, even if they are available and free!
   
2. The producer (in a broad sense, including director, copyright holders and distributors, everyone with financial interest) follows the natural law of the market : demand and supply. Popularity makes profitability. They want to reach the masses, the mainstream taste and sell a product to the wider population even if it means adapting non-offensive material, P.C. cuts. They want to invest in what can pay back, and prefer to shelf an item that becomes too costly to maintain available to the public. They don't have a long term historical perspective, but the terms of their bank loans. Perennity of "out-dated" (non-marketable) sources is not their priority.
   
3. The historian (archive, scholars, festivals, critics, filmmakers, cinephiles) doesn't care about availabilty to the public, or profitability of any given title, but unlike everyone else, they care about the survival of films, undiscriminatively. And if we let films decay and get lost we'll never have a universal cinemathèque...

The priority here is not universal access to a miniaturized digital version of every movies, because that's not even what consumers ask for. Kristin Thompson explains very well how this utopia is not only unpractical, but also unreachable.
The priority is to save original prints! It's no time for arguments... film stocks' lives are limited and original colors fade away quickly.

Oddly enough Dargis and Scott both embrace the consumer perspective, in a blissful and naive technological utopia, without considering films that will never be digitzed. Instead of complaining about the poor distribution of foreign and older films on american theatre screens (ruled by Hollywood hegemony : 95% of projections!), critics in the New York Times apparently prefer to speculate on whatever might become available on iPods... as if it was a society column about new behaviors rather than their take on the fate of cinema.
Kristin Thompson checks the feasability of the operation assuming the Producer's perspective.

I'd like to ignore consumerism and capitalism for a moment, and recall the invaluable mission of Henri Langlois.
The idea of a Cinémathèque, that seems natural today, was born in total illegality. Thanksfully Langlois identified the only rightful priority before it was too late. Regardless for copyrights, legitimacy, maintenance or restoration costs, he went for the urgency and saved, stole, bribed, deceived, exchanged, bought on the black market everything he could. Many key treasures of cinema history would be unknown and forgotten for ever had he respected the rules and waited for funds or a commercial viability. The reason I mention Langlois is because the digital stage of film history brings up the same problems he once faced.
Clearly the idea of a universal cinematheque shall not be put in the hands of the market or copy right holders. Public availability is minor issue. I don't care if I can't watch all films I want, here and now, as long as I know the masters are all in a safe place and that they will make film prints or digital versions become accessible one day, to me or my children and their children.
The history of cinema is over 100 years old and it's about time its preservation should be taken into consideration on a global scale, as a worldwide heritage! We lost too many originals already.
Just like architectural sites meaningful to humanity are protected worldwide by international laws (UNESCO), we need an international consensus and uniformization of regulations, control and formats to ensure, facilitate and optimize the preservation of a maximum of films across the globe.

The superior ethical question is to protect the source material. Only afterward could you contemplate the wonders of making it available at the click of a mouse... And I don't care much which format the majority of consumers will choose to watch them on. We can't stop the progress of technology, and we can't control the (bad) habits of new generations. The critic is there to set an example not to encourage the latest ephemeral and silly trends. The VHS came and went, leaving us with the same problem of film masters unchanged.

• It's intolerable, in the face of art history, that studios have the final decision on keeping films on the shelf for ever.
• It's intolerable that countries who can't afford a decent restoration would let their archive perish.
• It's intolerable that films keep on dying every year despite the available technology to save them today.

What can be done about it?

The Air Is On Fire!

david K lynch

I visited the David Lynch exhibition yesterday at the Paris Fondation Cartier. Having seen some of his paintings online already, some of his photographs and most of his short films/animation, I wasn't as overwhelmed/surprised as I imagined. The scenography is rough and colossal (industrial scafolding structures) but there are only 4 rooms to cross, bathed in a semi-darkness, kinda half-night. Although some of the pieces are really impressive and worth a direct contact. Others require some explanations/guidance... You can imagine the typical Lynchian soundscape resonating in the speakers, especially certain paintings have their own sound with a pushbutton.

There are about 30 canvas, and some big ones, bigger than me. The hall they are installed in is a glassbox where the sun casts changing shadows on the painting surfaces. They are in tune with the work he did at the Art School (like the ones we see in his short films : Six Figures Getting Sick only more abstract/trash formally and more focused on sexual trauma and dreamwork). He refused to order them chronologically so it's impossible to make correlation with the evolution of his filmography... it's a shame.

With his return to the roots in INLAND EMPIRE, especially the scene towards the end, when Nikki/Grace shoots The Phantom in the face, that looks a lot like one of his large canvas titled "This Man Was Shot 0.9502 Seconds Ago" from 2004 (see e-Cahiers Feb. 2007, p. 28). I would love to see him develop this kind of experimental video-collage palimpsest in his future features, as well as playing around with non-representional sculptures like he did in The Grandmother or Eraserhead. That would create captivating atmospheres, and shake up the classicist establishment of movies.

Although among his hundreds of doodles (on post-it's, napkins, script pages, bills...) we can note the current obsession with a certain movie, either by the inclusion of names, words or special design refering to one of his film. Hey there is even one doodle with "Jonathan Rosenbaum" written on it! aint it cool? are they friends? ;)
There are also tel numbers, addresses, overheard lines, various notes incorporated under the drawing or decorated around. This guy never stops drawing everywhere he goes it seems, on any material, with any pen and with a free wheel inspiration. More than with his films, we could talk of the surrealist gameplay of automatic writing for his doodles (or canvas). "Automatic doodle". The shapes developped to fill the page with geometrical pattern carefuly avoid the usual conventions of classicism symetry, orthogonality, equilibrium, continuity. Rarely does he include ready-made recognizable shapes, sometimes diformed characters. It's a universe of texture and lighting vibration rather than a representation. It's fascinating to see his constant research for original creativity, something that doesn't look like something else, new shapes, new signs, a life of its own striking the imagination of the viewer (and Lynch himself too obviously) in unexpected ways. It's a kind of a Rorschach inkblot test Lynch imposes onto himself. Or maybe the tentative re-enactment of a nightmare peculiar atmosphere. His canvas too eschew formality, but melting a 3D amorphous character into the background of the same color. Meanwhile he likes to add letters and words as if to spell out each elements, each action, each moment.

He has blown up a few of his doodle in large serigraphies, which highlights a powerful design with the scale leap (harmonious abstract composition, simple colors, graphical dynamics). Lynch says they'd make amazing rugs and I agree, a huge thick "contemporean design" carpet or a mural Aubusson tapestry (like Cocteau used to do).

The mini drawing of a room materialized into a piece of set we can walk in is a cool experience. The carpet is made out of a handdrawn pattern and the walls with childlike paintings, even funky furniture with soft edges.

They also installed a small theatre, with black curtains and the 4th wall opened, where Lynch's experimental shorts and web animation are projected in loop. There I watched Out Younder, Six Figures Getting Sick, The Alphabet and The Grandmother.
So it's funny to stand there watching his films, surrounded by his photographic work on the walls. I really like the wall projected films in exhibitions, it adds a multimedia experience and also decontextualize the animated image. It's like watching a movie in a cinema while walking around the room, without sitting at the same place all the time.
They do that at the Cinémathèque exhibitions too. Last year they projected Renoir films on the walls (next to Auguste Renoir paintings), Almodovar clips on transluscent panes hanging from the ceiling (visible from both sides), and for the German Expressionism exhibition too, loops of silent scenes next to the wall sized posters. Films used to animate screen-walls create such an interactive theatrality within our environment.

The Photoshop doctoring of old pornographic photographs or recent nudes, dismembering their bodies into alien shapes, is among the most interesting researches. We can feel a distant influence of Max Ernst collages, Dali's soft bodies, and of course Bacon's carnal butchery. Which takes a disturbing dimension when fabricated from photos of real-life people, rather than from paintings.

Cinema Talk Webcast Vault

You will find here various audio/video broadcast (radio, TV, internet, ciné-club, conference, YouTube) available online (permanently or temporarily) regarding the broad topic of cinema. Critics debate, weekly radio broadcasts, lectures, Cinémathèque Ciné-Club discussions, interviews, soundbytes... In French or English, from the past or the present.
Some links might go broken after a while (usually a week for the regular broadcasts), others are archived by the server, so you never know if they are still available.

I'll post all the audio links here, for archival purpose, instead of placing them in the monthly DIGEST posts. Feel free to add your own precious findings here and to discuss the content. The thread of comments will serve both as a link/updates log and open comments for visitors.

Access to this archive post from the Navigation Menu at the top of the sidebar. Subscribe to the updates of this post with this RSS feed.

Find below the links to websites with permanent collections of feeds, archive and links :

LATEST MUST LISTEN

• Où va la critique? Nouveaux objets, nouveaux supports, nouveaux enjeux Roundtables (Centre Pompidou, Paris) Video 1h52' FRENCH
  

PERMANENT ARCHIVES

• Video-on-demand schedule/archive at Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris MoMA) FRENCH
• Les Belles Captives Cinématographiques : conferences from La Cinémathèque Française (recorded on France Culture) FRENCH
• Mardi Cinéma (France Culture) FRENCH
• INA : Institut National de l'Audiovisuel - Archive pour tous FRENCH
• La Voix de Gilles Deleuze (Université Paris 8) FRENCH
• La Cinéphilie - Antoine de Baecque 2005 - part 1 & 2 (France Culture) FRENCH
• Profession Critique (by Jullier) : Michel Ciment / Jean-Michel Frodon / Serge Kaganski FRENCH
• Le Son des Cahiers - Interviews FRENCH
• UBUweb Sound (music, interview, poem) ENGLISH-FRENCH
• Roundtable on Jean Eustache (Centre Pompidou) FRENCH
• "Director's Cut" Symposium (Toulouse, 01-31-2007) 1, 2, 3, 4 FRENCH
• Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub with Thierry Jousse (1997) (Film de Culte/net4image) FRENCH
• German Expressionism, Paris Cinémathèque lectures : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
• La Lumière au Cinéma, Paris Cinémathèque lectures : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
• The Film-makers' Coop (Avant Garde interviews) ENGLISH
• Arte-audio (soundbites, Flash player, free MP3 download) FRENCH
• La Machine et l'Artiste Jean Douchet, 26 parts (France Culture) Radio FRENCH
• Film Forum (archive) Q&A podcasts ENGLISH
• Moving Image Pinewood Dialogues (MP3 + transcripts) ENGLISH
• Monash University Film & TV studies (MP3 + videos) ENGLISH
  
• Canal-U Université Ouverte des Humanités (MP3 + videos) FRENCH
• La critique de cinéma et le défi Internet : de la revue au blog ? Roundtable (Cinémathèque) Video 1h58' FRENCH
• Film Criticism in Crisis (Film comment - NYFF2008) Videos + transcript ENGLISH
• La Cinémathèque Française (conferences, events videos) FRENCH
• Movies and the Imagination (videos + transcript) Berkeley ENGLISH
  

AUDIO BROADCAST

• Projection Privée (France Culture) Radio FRENCH RSS Feed
• Le Masque et la Plume (France Inter) Radio FRENCH RSS Feed
• L'Avventura (France Culture) Radio FRENCH RSS Feed
• Actualité du Cinéma (RFI) Radio FRENCH
• Le Cercle des Cinéphiles (Cadrage) Radio FRENCH
• La Bande à Bonnaud (France Inter) Radio FRENCH
• Errata (Robert Davis) Webcast ENGLISH RSS Feed
• TSPDT Project video essays (alsolikelife) Video webcast ENGLISH
• Edelstein (npr) Radio ENGLISH
• This conference is being recorded (Workproject) Webcast ENGLISH
• Rocchie's Online Film Community (Cinematical) Podcast ENGLISH
• Expanded Cinema (Joao Ribas) Webcast audio-video ENGLISH RSS Feed
• Hors Champ (Radio Campus Paris) Podcast FRENCH RSS Feed
• Cinéma et Dépendances (France Inter) Radio FRENCH RSS Feed
• Pierre Murat (Télérama) Webcast FRENCH RSS Feed

I Graduated But... (1929/Ozu)

Daigaku wa deta keredo / I graduated, but... (1929/Ozu Yasujiro/Japan)

10th B&W silent film made (Shochiku Kamata studio), 3rd surviving film (incomplete). Only 12 minutes remain from this feature length film, completed by intertitles. But it's not too difficult to follow the plot. Original screenplay by Hiroshi Shimizu, friend of Ozu. Filmed and released in the summer before the NY stock market crash (October 1929). The economic crisis is perceptible, young graduates struggle to find a job.

Tetsuo, the protagonist, is proud and turns down a receptionist job offer because it is not good enough for his level of qualification. When his mother visits him and his young wife, afraid to lose face, he lies about having found a great job. The japanese social status is identified through the work position held. It is primordial never to lose face in society. This distance between the fantasized role expected by the parents, the significant other, the neighbors, the colleagues... and a more modest reality is the root of many dramatical situations in japanese films. Saving appearances in the present is prioritized over the planning of a comfortable future. Thus extravagant expenses are made to impress visitors even if the family cannot afford it. Likewise the poor couple in The Only Son (1936), will sacrifice savings to honor the visiting mother.

Nevertheless he's happy to take out his mother for Tokyo sightseeings, but she's worried taking a day off from his new job would be impolite. So he's forced to live up to the condition of his lie, to wake up early and not spend time with his family like he'd want to.

After his mother left, he confesses to his wife through a visual cue, an interesting interplay between the silent image and the written intertitle. We see the cover of a "Sunday" newspaper, and the carton says "For me, everyday is like this". A discreet allusion, an euphemism, helping to communicate a shameful truth without the obligation of spelling it all out.

A wall-sized poster of Harold Lloyd's movie Speedy (1928/Ted Wild) takes a prominent place in the interior scenes, sometimes filling the entire background of a medium shot. I haven't seen this film, so I don't know what comparison we could thread from this citation. Although it's fascinating to see a contemporary foreign movie exposed this way, which is frequent in early Ozu silent films. The release of Speedy is only a few months earlier than I graduated, but...
We couldn't imagine this type of honor in today's cinema, with movies citing each other or showing the poster of last year's movie (except for intentional parodies), let alone the copyrights infringement and studio competition issues!

Ultimately, Tetsuo takes down his personal pride and lowers his expectations in order to find the smallest job at all costs, when he finds out the temporary job his wife has found to support the household was of a bar hostess, in a bar he visited with one of his student friend. We find this socially degrading situation in Brothers and Sisters of the Today Family (1941), where the unmarried daugther of a rich family is lectured by her older sister(-in-law?) about family humiliation. She's opposed to her project to take a job as a shop clerk, in the case she would face the humiliation to be served by her own relative.
The job of a bar hostess, who lights the cigarettes of customers, is also highly connoted sexualy.

Tetsuo comes back to the first company to accept the receptionist job. The moral lesson is well stated: His boss, who had a smirk and complicite looks with a colleague to emphasize the pressure in the first scene. Since Tetsuo has matured since their last interview, he concedes to give him a decent position in the company. It was only a test of modesty and submission to channel his young ego.

What Did the Lady Forget? (1937/Ozu)

Shukujo wa nani o wasureta ka / What Did the Lady Forget? (1937/Ozu Yasujiro/Japan) ++

37th B&W film made (Shochiku studio), 19th surviving film. 2nd Talky fiction.

Opening Sequence : Camera onboard a car, looking into the reflection of the back of a chrome spherical headlight. The car is driving across the rich neighborhood of a Tokyo suburb (Kojimachi). An odd shot we see in The Lady and The Beard (1931) and Dragnet Girl (1933), or in Epstein's La Glace à trois faces (1927).

Wealthy wives are established as castrating dominators in the house, controlling their husbands' timetable and activities, sharing gossips on neighbors and concerned by fashion and beauty. In an hilarious scene, the older lady tells the others how she muffles her laughter to avoid aging lines around the eyes. This ravishing comedy departs from Ozu's usual filmography (student films, mafia films, family drama) with an upperclass setting and a world essentialy dominated by powerful women.

Komiya, the husband, is a respected doctor at the university, cheerful and relaxed. We meet him his eyes into a binocular, answering the phone without looking away, and comfirming abruptly to the caller his sterilty from what he sees. Whereas at home he's bland and submissive. He lies and hides away to pass the compulsary golf weekend imposed by his ruling wife, Tokio.

The arrival of their liberated niece from Osaka, Setsuko, will expose the contradictions of their sustained routine. Setsuko, 16 yold, came to Tokyo for its modern life, and feels sorry for what she finds in this backward household. She wears western clothes, drives, smokes, drinks sake, and goes to the Geisha house. The spoiled brat of a rich provincial family, but so cute and high-spirited. Unexpectedly, as open-minded as she may be, she lectures her uncle for his passive attitude, and begs him to take control of the house back like a real man, even suggesting to beat his wife!

"I drink upon occasion, sometimes upon no occasion." Don Quixote

Ozu films twice this citation written in big letters above the bar counter, in a slow Close Up shot revealing word after word. We also see this citation in the bar of the film The Munekata Sisters (1950).
There is a scene in a Kabuki theatre where we see the faces of the audience, but never the stage, only music and voices are heard off screen.
Again Ozu repeats the trick at the Geisha house, until he finally films the dance number of 2 geishas in a long uninterrupted take!

Many comical situations punctuate the little household until the secret is discovered. Notably another hilarious scene where Komiya is supposed to lecture the undisciplined niece, but was asking her a favor instead, as his wife enters and they fake the argument.
Finally, Komiya explains to the young girl that sometimes a man should take the "opposite approach" : to let the wife believe she's in control. And she automatically notices this gimmick in the behavior of her boyfriend because he seems to approve whatever she says too often. A great comedic treatment of a critique of the conversational phrases and the mundane etiquette, just like in Ohayo (1959).

The ending is beautiful! After telling her (admirative) friends she got slapped in the face, almost proud, Tokio is transformed, in love again, as if she had lost hope in the virility of her husband. Back home she's all sweet and treats her husband with a late coffee, even though he's afraid to be unable to sleep if he takes a cup. Precisely it's what she has in mind. And he understands her unspoken desire while she's away, with a smile on his face. In one ultimate stationary shot : the lights go down in the house, one by one. All excited he walks in circle, backlit in the bedroom. And his wife comes back with the coffee at the end of the corridor. Black. The End. Isn't it a more subtle and amusing allegory for marital sex than Hitchcock's train/tunnel or fireworks metaphors? ;)

(s) + (w) ++ (m) ++ (i) ++ (c) +

DIGEST : Fevrier 2007

Unreviewed screenings, current reads, links, recommendations, free talk, radio webcast, questions, thoughts, informal conversation, anything... comments welcome.

>> updates below (sticky entry for a month)

Painting and Cinema

On the French website of the Caen Ciné-Club, there is a great synopsis of the taxonomy developped by Gilles Deleuze in L'image-Mouvement (1983) / L'Image-Temps (1985).
Notably the analogy between the aesthetic schools of Cinema and Plastic Arts. The list order follows the chronology of cinema movements. Thus, the matching Art movements don't fall in their own chronological timeline.

It looks like "The Cristals of Time" is the category that corresponds best to the trend we considered as "Contemplative Cinema" at the Unspoken Cinema blogathon in January. And I'm reading this book at the moment and will return to the trend of contemplation in cinema, and continue to contribute to our collective blog.

CLASSIC CINEMA

1. Image-action <=> Art : Renaissance (CLASSIC) XVth c.
   Documentary - Social Film - Film Noir - Western
   David Wark Griffith, Cecil B. De Mille, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Robert Flaherty, King Vidor, Akira Kurosawa
2. Image-situation <=> Art : Renaissance (CLASSIC) XVth c.
   Comedy - Burelesque - Western - Film Noir
   Charles Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, George Cukor, Kenji Mizoguchi, Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn
3. Soviet Montage <=> Art : Minimal Art (MODERN) 1960
   Serguei Mikhaïlovitch Eisenstein, Vsevolod Poudovkine, Alexandre Dovjenko, Dziga Vertov
4. Expressionism <=> Art : Expressionism (MODERN) 1900
   Friedrich W.Murnau, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Fritz Lang, Claude Chabrol, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Quentin Tarantino
5. Impressionism <=> Art : Impressionism (CLASSIC) 1880
   Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier, Abel Gance, René Clair, Jean Vigo, Germaine Dulac, Jean Grémillon
6. Abstract lyrism <=> Art : Abstract Expressionism (MODERN) 1930
   Jacques Tourneur, Joseph von Sternberg, Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Philippe Garrel
7. Naturalism <=> Art : Realism-Naturalism (CLASSIC) 1850
   Erich von Stroheim, Luis Bunuel, Nicholas Ray, Joseph Losey, David Lynch, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Claude Brisseau
8. Image-action crisis <=> Art : Mannerism (CLASSIC) XVIth c.
   Alfred Hictchock, Marx brothers, Tex Avery, Sergio Leone, Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma, Wong Kar-wai

MODERN CINEMA

1. Neorealism <=> Art : Color Field painting (MODERN) 1950
   Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, De Santis, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Yasujiro Ozu
2. Nouvelle Vague <=> Art : Art in situ (MODERN) 1960
   François Truffaut, Jean Eustache, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Arnaud Desplechin, Olivier Assayas, Pascal Bonitzer, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch
3. Resistance of the bodies <=> Art : Informal Art (MODERN) 1944
   John Cassavetes, Andy Warhol, Maurice Pialat, Patrice Chéreau, Chantal Akerman, Jacques Doillon, Bruno Dumont
4. The cinema of the brain <=> Art : Abstract Geometry (MODERN) 1920
   Stanley Kubrick, Alain Resnais, André Téchiné, Benoît Jacquot, Nanni Moretti
5. Peaks of present/Sheets of past <=> Art : Romantism (CLASSIC) 1810
   Marcel Carné, Joseph Mankiewicz, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Clint Eastwood, Pedro Almodovar
6. The cristals of time <=> Art : Random Painting (MODERN) 1960
   Mirror - Theatre Stage - Ship - Large Rooms
   Max Ophuls, Jean Renoir, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr, Alexandre Sokourov, Gus van Sant, Sofia Coppola
7. The powers of the false <=> Art : Baroque (CLASSIC) XVIth c.
   Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Lars von Trier, Raoul Ruiz
8. Thought and cinema <=> Art : Conceptual Art (MODERN) 1960
   Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Guy Debord, Stan Brakhage

In an earlier post I had posted a correspondance between History of Arts and Psychiatry.

The Lady and the Beard (1931/Ozu)

Shukujo to hige / The Lady and the Beard (1931/Ozu Yasujiro/Japan) ++

19th silent film made at the Shochiku Kamata studio, shot in 8 days. 7th surviving film.

Comedy of manners confronting a poor misogynist bachelor, Kiichi, with 3 cute women : the street thug, the innocent low-class clerk and an aristocrat.

Kiichi is a Kendo champion, brave and honest, with a childish and asocial behavior, lives alone in a dirty appartment. His beard and repaired clothes ridiculize him in society. Ozu portrays here a stereotypical world opposing the ancient regime incarnated by the martial art tradition, kimono and facial hair, to the modern Japan of the westernized fashion, suits, office work. We can sense the inspiration of Chaplin humor in this negligent tramp causing etiquette troubles in public because he doesn't fit in.

The film opens at a Kendo tournament showing Kiichi hidden under his Kendo helmet, delaying the revelation of the face of the popular actor, Okada Tokihiko, and his notorious beard. During his domination of all opponents, only body language conveys the visual gags. His purely physical performance already identifies a peculiar personality, like Mifune Toshiro with his famous shoulder shake. It's an interesting establishing scene for a silent movie, where the audience cannot identify to the voice nor the face of the lead actor. And we have to contemplate the spectacle of this choreography of lookalike "puppets" battling together until we understand who is who.

In the street his confident saber skills help him to rescue a lone woman racketed by a street gang, conducted by a female thug. Invited at the fancy birthday party of an aristocrat heiress he scares away all the girls but leaves a strong impression with his traditional dance. Once convinced to shave his antic beard to become a modern gentleman, women will fall for him and he'll be embarassed by marriage proposals. The coincidence of three women from different social classes running after him creates a series of humorous misunderstandings. From unpleasant and clumsy he tries hard to seduce his chosen sweetheart.

Pure entertainment routine (one of the last ones) from Ozu's early period. The visual running gags are quite funny and staged with originality. Very amusing. There is an exterior travelling with the camera looking into a spherical chrome headlight of a driving car, which reflects the city streets, deformed. A shot Ozu used in other early films as well.

(s) 0 (w) + (m) ++ (i) ++ (c) +

Outlandish Dargis Empire

I'm a contrarian all year round on this blog, thus for the fun of participating in Jim Emerson's Contrarianism blogathon at Scanners, I'll make it an exercice de style. Following up on Andy Horbal's initiative to study the buzz generated by Manohla Dargis NYT review of INLAND EMPIRE, I've decided to take the aggressive detractor approach and give a detailed reader's feedback.
This is a gameplay of course, as Dargis is a great critic and my tentative analysis is pretentious. Nitpicky mode intentionally exaggerated. For the fun of being contrarian, at least let's not bash a little helpless reviewer, let's go for the best and see where it takes us. Why not? Keep in mind I'm not familiar with american TV culture and English is a second language, this should relativize my following remarks, but what any reader gets from a review says something about the writer. Moreover I happen to share Dargis opinion that INLAND EMPIRE is a masterpiece, and I have nothing but respect for her critiques.

I've read this article back in December and only saw the film last week. I had already a few objections back then when it was celebrated "the most significant piece of criticism she wrote for the NYT". Now reading it again, with hindsight of seeing the film, I'm able to qualify my troubled impressions.

Contradictions of my own contradictions are of course welcome and encouraged.

"The Trippy Dream Factory of David Lynch" by Manohla Dargis (NYT, Dec. 6 2006)

Dargis calls it "art", ranks it in her top10 of the year, people call her review her best job ever... Then I'd like to know what is an art review and how good can get criticism with great literary style.
I'm not siding with John Podhoretz and Andrew Sullivan who called her "pretentious" and "poser", on the contrary, I think she is too superficial and dilutes the density of Lynch works in a populist rhetoric meant to vulgarize "art", which obviously goes against her stated intention to place this movie above all.
Where is the critical reflexion about Lynch's world vision? Where is the aesthetic analysis other than qualifying actors and set furniture with colorful adjectives, and dropping as much pop culture references as possible? I don't know what was the bottom line for this review, and maybe the editor watered it down afterall.

paragraph 1 : lyrical intro, obligatory(?) filmography reminder.

• I wouldn't even mention the triviality of the "vine" metaphor, and the insisting cliché about Lynch's "creppy-creepy" persona if this article wasn't acclaimed as a model of criticism.

paragraph 2 : vague overall description of the atmosphere

• I wholeheartedly agree with the infamous A-bomb, INLAND EMPIRE is art. I wish Dargis had developped this angle and actually treated it as a work of art by giving up any reference to conventional filmmaking and conventional reviewing. Instead she produces a standard movie review with a plot rundown, nods to the actors, nods to the image, trivia, name-dropping...
• "Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate" : not so subtle wording.
• I'm not sure what to think of the Mad Magazine reference... is it really appropriate? Are we really in the same kind of humor there?
• I'll pass on the TV reference (Ralph Kramden) which I don't know, and the painting style (Edward Hopper) which is another recurring cliché associated with Lynch (will critics bring it up in every Lynch movie?).
• "I’m still trying to figure out what the giant talking rabbits have to do with the weepy Polish woman" : useless bit of non-information. Some think that the stream-of-consciousness note-to-self creates an informal tone that feels like a confidence... I think this is more appropriate to the blog format, while in print we don't need all the speculations going through the critics head, just to fill space in a word-limited column. Or at least could be formulated in way to commit the reader's imagination instead of laying down straightforwardly key pieces of the puzzle and revealing an approximate link between them at the risk of spoiling the experience for readers who didn't see the film. I'm not against spoilers in general (thus the critic can develop a thorough analysis of every elements). But droping a spoiler without any critical point to make is just a mean space filler.
• "weepy" : The tone of the whole sentence is very light and almost mocking. I don't see why. I take offense to this pejorative qualifier, it gives the wrong impression to the reader who hasn't seen the film. We see the face of a woman in tears indeed, but nothing says her emotion is exagerated or faked (she weeps already when the TV show starts), in fact she might have serious troubles. Lynch films her in a very dignified way.
• "may be a whore or merely lost or, because this is a David Lynch film (after all), probably both" : oversimplifying generalisation. Is she saying that whores and lost girls are Lynch's auteur trademark or that he systematically mixes up prostitution and confusion when portraying women? I doubt either are insightful propositions. (see comment above about useless spoilers)

paragraph 3 : plot rundown, caricatural description of characters

• The Wizard of Oz reference was already a stretch for Mulholland Dr., it's dubious for INLAND EMPIRE.
• The "once upon a time" reference to fairytale is also out there.
• Although one thing is important there is to pay attention to how the film starts.
• Now, the derogatory terms to caricature the screen appearance of actors with funny words : "hilarious", "bulging eyes", "East European accent" was it really necessary? are they really representative of the scene or just a cheap shot at the most superficial details? Dargis seems to enjoy laughing at a freak show, while Lynch was installing the quirky calm of a possessive inescapable encounter.
  Why not talk about the gradual oppressive intrusion of this stranger in her intimate space. Or the awkward silences, the poses, the offbeat timing as if suspended in time. The time feels soft, actually making uncomfortable moments last longer, until it jumps to tomorrow, leaving the scene unfinished, as if it never happened...

paragraph 4 : Mulholland Dr. (tabloid-friendly) synopsis.

• There is more critical analysis of Mulholland Dr. in this single paragraph than in the full article for INLAND EMPIRE!
• "Mr. Lynch loves women, or at least their representations" : again, underdevelopped generalisations. I'd like to know more about this.
• Should the form of a review attempt to match the form of the film, or at least adapt the review formula to its narrative specifity?

paragraph 5 : see paragraph 3

• Continuation of the rough plot description in a very face-value, lineary way that might not be the best approach to a Lynch movie, or to a film called "art". There is this, there is that, one, two, three characters, this is what they do, that is what happens then... INLAND EMPIRE is not made to be summarized to fit in a conventional plot. If it's art, let's take liberties with the usual narration of a film review...
• More uncalled-for derogatory terms "foreign-accented visitor", "butched-up as a neo-greaser". Maybe it's hip for a journalist, but is that GREAT film criticism I wonder?
• "almost-unrecognizable" : star-gazing type of remark for the fanboys. How insightful is it to the film?
• "(...) kind of" : mysterious unfinished sentence to hint at more twists, although the reasons (of the interruption and of the secret) will not be developped here.
• Why mentionning the porn-name anecdote, the costumes... instead of installing the love triangle tension, the cursed film, the mannered spelled out inhibition, the upper-class cordial uppity, the naive clumsy lust...?

paragraph 6 : synospsis of the "film(s)-within-the-film"

• Why go for a pedestrian description that is no use to grasp the originality of this one-of-a-kind film, nor to get a sense of its mysterious atmosphere? Citing the various disconnected scenes for the sake of an inventory without helping the reader to assemble it all in a coherent impression of the film and without adding the insight necessary to begin to interpretate the story only makes the review more unintelligible and disparate than the film actually is. At least in the film the montage and the recurrent places give an intuitive understanding of the circumvolutions, which the review lacks.
• "Susan spends a lot of time in a sinister house" : I don't know how much Dargis appreciated the film and how much she wants to convince her readers that this art is a must see, but this kind of tired sentence doesn't shine the best light on what Lynch meant to do. It denotes that time is wasted, and that the house is repulsive instead of captivating.
• "chew the fat and their naughty lower lips" : I guess to find 2 phrases using the same verb in a row is great poetry (is it?) but why choosing to highlight the listless aspect of the scene instead of its latent sexual ambivalence (conflation of adultary with prostitution, sex slavery with sweet infatuation)?

paragraph 7 : set design description

• The prevalent role of places and the labyrintine architecture gives the film its structure indeed. But again, the pedestrian inventory, disconnected from the scenes described in the previous paragraph miss the connections that would give us an idea of what is going on and what Lynchian ideas are at work.
• "weepy" changed to a preferable "weeping" here.
• "money-for-sex transaction" : I find the phrase used there to kill the possibilities left opened by Lynch. The woman who is asked to undress appears to be a prostitute indeed, but the ambiguity of the scene relies precisely on the absence of money. Both characters' faces are blurred as if on a surveillance tape trial exhibit. The guy asks "Do you know what prostitutes do?", but this could be role playing within a married couple/adulterous lovers (theme of the film), and the importance of multiple interpretations are key. A review narrowing down the freedom goes against the film.

paragraph 8 : The only reflexive analytical paragraph so far.

"How Nikki and the other characters wind up in these rooms — how, for instance, the pampered blonde ends up talking trash in a spooky, B-movie office — is less important than what happens inside these spaces. In “Inland Empire,” the classic hero’s journey has been supplanted by a series of jarringly discordant scenes, situations and setups that reflect one another much like the repeating images in
the splintered hall of mirrors at the end of Orson Welles’s “Lady From Shanghai.” The spaces in “Inland Empire” function as way stations, holding pens, states of minds (Nikki’s, Susan’s, Mr. Lynch’s), sites of revelation and negotiation, of violence and intimacy. They are cinematic spaces in which images flower and fester, and stories are born."

• "How Nikki and the other characters wind up in these rooms is less important than what happens inside these spaces" : 1st insight engaging with the film purpose. Although instead of asking why the same actress appears in milieux that have nothing to do with each other (without explanatory narrative transitions), a better insight would be to note the way Lynch re-use the same actress to play different roles in the same film. The fact we can recognize Laura Dern each time doesn't mean we are expected to believe she is the same person. This is art. Let's think outside the box and forget about long lived narrative conventions. Lynch obviously introduces a shift of time and place, possibly fantasized by the character itself. So the pertinent question is not to make sense of the logistical link between each story but the mood they describe and how they resonate in relation to each other. For instance Lynch puts rabbit heads on the sitcom actors so we don't identify them, he blurs faces (because they are symbolic/archetypal scenes) to prevent the viewer to draw immediate conclusion about the persons themselves.

paragraph 9 : 2nd insight of the review.

"Each new space also serves as a stage on which dramatic entrances and exits are continually being made. The theatricality of these entrances and exits underscores the mounting tension and frustrates any sense that the film is unfolding with the usual linear logic. Like characters rushing in and out of the same hallway doors in a slapstick comedy, Nikki/Susan keeps changing position, yet, for long stretches, doesn’t seem as if she were going anywhere new. For the most part, this strategy works (if nothing else, it’s truer to everyday life than most films), even if there are about 20 minutes in this admirably ambitious 179-minute film that feel superfluous. “Inland Empire” has the power of nightmares and at times the more prosaic letdown of self-indulgence."

• "Each new space also serves as a stage on which dramatic entrances and exits are continually being made" : Well, I used to find it interesting before seeing the film, but actually only a few scenes function that way in the film (sitcom, small house at the end).
• The "20 min too much" comment feels quite petty, the kind of thing you say of some pretentious director who doesn't know what he's doing, not of a film you call "art".
• "prosaic letdown of self-indulgence" WTF does it mean? again, I'm afraid Dargis has issues with artistic vision that are too personal, too far away from traditional cinema. I can't tell if she actually admires this film.

paragraph 10 : banalities about Lynch and subconscious. Nod to photography

• The kind of useless press-kit info that is repeated in every review. I realized by reading other interviews that this concerned only the preparatory phase of the work, then ideas came together and he had a larger crew and an uninterrupted shooting schedule that was prepared in advance. It's fine to mention it, but to build the buzz of a film on geeky trivia doesn't elevate it to art territory.
• Seriously though, the surrealist gameplay of automatic writing doesn't quite correspond to the practicality of a film set. It implies to write mindlessly, beyond attention span, in order for subconscious word associations to surface without the conscience to register and filter it. Maybe some improvised scenes allowed to last 40 min could take an actor to act subconsciously. But these are rare occasions in the film with Laura Dern alone. Most of the scenes are fairly constructed and reworked in post-production.

paragraph 11 : Impressionistic conclusion

• "Inland Empire seemed funnier, more playful and somehow heartfelt" : something the lame director Bob Brooker in Mulholland Dr. could say.
• Somehow Dargis attempts to sympathize with readers disappointed on first viewing, by sharing a similar experience, and then promising a funnier second viewing. In principle I don't approve appeal to sympathy, especially when it relates to (re)viewing recommendations. A critic should leave the decision to buy a ticket or not to the reader. The consumation-driven rhetoric is for the marketing campaign.
• "It’s easy to get lost in a David Lynch film, but Ms. Dern and her amazing rubber-band mouth, which laughs like the sun and cries us a river, proves a magnificent guide." ain't it corny?
• "rubber-band mouth" : derogatory qualifier, and only refering to a couple of shots of Dern's distorted face.

Conclusion:

I don't see how this particular review is any different from any other one. It doesn't strike me as such a writing mastery (I'm French, I wouldn't know), nor does it feature the greatest filmic insights we've read in a long time. As for the film, I'd wonder if she liked it if she didn't call it art and put it in her year-end top. Lots of nitpicky notes, seemingly off-the-cuff, on details of minor importance and few demonstrations of the greatness of the film. From the review alone I would say she liked it but will move on quickly to the less artsy fare. These words don't shine with passion and adoration as we could expect it from a glorified art piece. But maybe Dargis just doesn't like art that much... ;)