I imagine this movie stripped of all the communitarian big-heartedness and psychological healing. Leave everything as it is, minus the parts about how nutty Lars is and what should be done about it.
29 November 2009
26 November 2009
20 October 2009
15 October 2009
Appliance Attachment
For some reason — no, I believe I know the reason — I found myself thinking about The Brave Little Toaster this morning. It’s a movie our daughter used to watch as a kid, about a group of home appliances stuck in an abandoned posthuman house, deserted by the former owners. Left to their own devices (so to speak), the appliances continue to keep the house tidy in the futile hope that some day the owners will return. Eventually they set out in a Quest to find “The Master” — the son of the homeowners, to whom these household objects formed a particularly strong attachment. The moral to the story: objects are subjectively destitute when not plugged into The Correlation with humans.
Here’s a clip. That’s the late Phil Hartman doing the Nicholson impression.
4 September 2009
Prawn Basterds
*SPOILER ALERTS* The Jews’ spaceship stalls in the airspace just above Warsaw. When it becomes apparent that the ship is no longer capable of transporting the Jews back to their Promised Land, the humans move the Jews, whom they disdainfully refer to as Prawns, into a big ghetto called The District. To accommodate rapid population increases among the Prawns, many more Districts are established throughout Europe. The Jews start to escape from the Districts, disguising themselves as humans by eating non-kosher food and learning to speak European languages. The Nazis decide they’ve had enough: they start implementing the Ultimate Solution to resolve “the Prawn problem.” Prawn Hunters scour the countryside rounding up the renegades.
Brad Pitt is a Nazi. One day, while clearing all the Jews from District 9 and sending them to “resettlement camps,” Brad comes across a secret moyel hideout and, while inspecting the “weapons,” accidentally circumcises himself. Brad considers cutting off the offending member but can’t make himself do it. Pretty soon the “infection” starts to spread: horrified, Brad finds himself gradually transforming from human into Jew. After awhile, though, he realizes that he kind of likes his new Jewishness. Pocketing the moyel’s knife, Brad starts roaming the countryside killing Nazis. The ones he lets go he circumcises.
Eventually Brad joins up with a ragtag group of American Jews. Together they form a vigilante posse known as the Prawn Basterds. One day they come across a Jew in hiding who has figured out a way to get the Jewish spaceship, still stalled over Warsaw, operational again. It turns out that the ship’s movie projector somehow jettisoned the fourth reel, which fell into a Warsaw junk heap where it was torn to bits by scavengers. Without the fourth reel, which contains all the footage describing the return voyage, the ship came to a standstill. Word reaches Brad that Louie B. Mayer and David O. Selsnick have painstakingly reconstructed the lost footage. The Prawn Basterds undertake the perilous voyage to Hollywood, where they secure the precious fourth reel remake. They head back to Europe.
By the time they reach Warsaw the legendary Prawn Basterds have been decimated, leaving only Brad and one Jew, whose name is CHRISTopher, to fulfill the mission. The two of them become trapped in a movie theater with hundreds of Nazis, including Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, and Hitler. Brad, who is able to use his prawnized member to operate a super-sophisticated Jewish weapon, burns the theater to the ground, killing everyone in the theater, regrettably including CHRISTopher. Somehow Brad manages to escape; he recedes heartbroken into the war-torn Warsaw squalor.
Three days later, Brad casts his eyes skyward in astonishment to watch CHRISTopher miraculously rising from the smouldering pile of rubble. He carries under his arm the canister containing the Fourth Reel, which somehow survived the theatrical holocaust. He ascends bodily to the space ship, puts the reel into the projector, turns it on, and sits down at the controls. Brad, awestruck, watches the great airship rumble to life and veer off toward the southeast. Is CHRISTopher escaping, or will he return with a rescue party to ferry the rest of the Prawns home? The movie ends well-positioned for a sequel.
I hope I didn’t leave anything out…
29 August 2009
18 July 2009
Miller’s Crossing by the Coens, 1990
“Now if you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust? For a good return, you gotta go bettin’ on chance. And then, you’re back with anarchy, right back in the jungle. That’s why ethics is important, what separates us from the animals, beasts of burden, beasts of prey. Ethics.”
“What are you chewin’ over?”
“Dream I had once. I was walking in the woods. I don’t know why. Wind came whippin’. Blew me hat off.”
“And you chased it, right? You ran and ran. You finally caught up to it. And you picked it up, but it wasn’t a hat anymore. It had changed into something else, something wonderful.”
“No, it stayed a hat. And no, I didn’t chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasin’ his hat.”
The hat dream occupies the prophecy slot, a vision of the old school. And so we figure: the fix is in on this movie. But if it’s just a hat, then all bets are off.
17 July 2009
Blow Up and Out
Reading the Blow Out chapter in Peretz’s Becoming Visionary, I found myself both agreeing and disagreeing with the author’s take on DePalma’s film. Not until after I’d read all 73 pages did I realize that Peretz had made only a brief passing mention of Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Now I’ll grant that DePalma does more than slavishly repeat the earlier film, just as Antonioni did more than merely film Cortázar’s short story. But in my memory it’s Antonioni’s film that more directly manifests the kind of visionary openness that Peretz writes about.
The photographer in Antonioni’s Blow-Up thinks that he may have witnessed a murder. On the developed film we see foregrounded the man who is about to be killed; behind him two shadowy figures lurk. One of them is holding something shiny, metallic — a gun? The photographer blows up the image trying to zero in on the possible murderer and weapon, but the larger he makes the image the more indistinct it becomes. Even the body disappears without a trace, leaving no evidence whatever. Maybe the murder never occurred at all. This is precisely the sort of becoming-visionary Peretz has in mind: looking into the opaqueness of the revelation not in order to perceive its essential truth and meaning but rather to see the irreducible indeterminacy.
DePalma takes all the guesswork out of it. A man is dead: was it a murder? The soundman tries to reconstruct the crime with audiotape and evidence from the scene. He’s not sure. But DePalma is sure: his vision transcends the soundman’s; he knows what happened. Eventually we know it too, as does the soundman, but it’s too late to prevent the murderer from striking again. The unfolding is not unlike that of Carrie from my last post: the director knows, then we know, and we want the heroes to know, but they don’t have access to our visions. These are tragedies of the old school, where a fate dimly glimpsed reveals itself fully only in its inevitable fulfillment.
Granted, the photographer in Antonioni’s film doesn’t celebrate his visionary blindness. This is European high-modernism after all, when auteurs nostalgically lamented the post-war loss of certainty and faced indeterminacy with ambivalence and angst. DePalma exhibits a dynamic visual style that’s perhaps had greater impact on Hollywood than Antonioni’s almost architectural compositions. But DePalma’s rendering of the story is, in Peretz’s terms, more old-school than Antonioni’s.
5 July 2009
2 July 2009
Becoming Visionary, Chapter 1
Per Dejan’s suggestion I secured through inter-library loan a copy of Eyal Peretz’s 2008 book Becoming Visionary: Brian DePalma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses. Most of the book is devoted to extended treatments of three DePalma films: Carrie, The Fury, and Blow Out. The introductory chapter establishes the theoretical context for discussing the films. My interest in the book lies less in film theory than in a possible psychological and artistic praxis of “becoming visionary.” So we’ll see how that goes.
Peretz begins by describing Plato’s distinction between an object and its image. The image is accessible to the senses; behind the image are those properties of the object that are closed to the senses. These “real properties” can be reached only through the mediation of the realm of Ideas, where the meanings of things reside. The image is a kind of poor copy of the real thing, pointing beyond itself to an excess that’s inaccessible to sensation and perception. Another kind of non-sensible “eye” is required to see this excess, which is the intellect.
There’s a materialistic tendency to reverse Platonism by affirming the sensory order of reality while disavowing the separate realm of “objective” or ideal meaning. What Peretz wants to do is to retain the Platonic distinction between image and meaning without assigning them to two separate realities.
Peretz contends that, in parallel to the philosophical tradition, there’s an alternative artistic construal of the split between sense and meaning. The artist, claims Peretz, reveals that the sensory opening onto the world has at its center a blindness to what’s already there, something that blocks clear vision. Art doesn’t try to eliminate this blindness or to bypass it through another channel like intellect or insight. Instead, the artist enters into the blindness itself, opening it up, activating the blindness itself.
“The artistic tradition tries to bring about a visionary eye that sees out of blindness, that senses its opening out of a closure beyond it, rather than conceptualizing a non-sensual eye that perceives objects of a superior kind.” (p. 12)
This isn’t just a blindness to what’s out there in the world; it’s also a blindness to one’s self. And the source of this blindness? Peretz says that it’s the inescapable human position as “a being inscribed in time.” By being embedded in the present we are blind to time itself, and especially to the future. According to this formulation, the future is what “makes sense” of the sensible world in which we’re immersed, but this future is unknown and unknowable to us.
In more traditional explorations of the artistic tradition the future already exists, such that each of us is embedded in an unfolding destiny to which we are blind. There may be visionaries who can see through the blindness into the future: seers, prophets, gods, visionary artists, omniscient narrators of stories.
In some contemporary variants of the artistic tradition future time can never be glimpsed through the blindness because the future does not yet exist. Instead of seeing destiny, the artist looks into an impenetrable and undifferentiated whiteness, a “haunting no-thingness traced in the field of vision and of the world… a blind spot with no content, with no object.” The excess beyond the sensory image resides beyond anyone’s understanding, outside of meaning. To gaze into the whiteness is to confront the incompleteness of the world, an incompleteness caused by the future’s absence from the present. The present isn’t informed by a meaningful future when all accounts are settled and all loose ends are tied up. Instead, the present is haunted by the multiple trajectories of the present that lead into a future that doesn’t yet exist.
The beyond of meaning, therefore, doesn’t transcend the sensory order of the present time. It’s immanent to sensory reality, continuous with the present in a way that fades to the nonexistence of an open future. Paradoxically, it is this impenetrable open future that gives the present world its meaning: the world, by its very nature, is open to transformation. What the contemporary artist sees in the blind spot is a blindness inherent in the world itself, which is the world’s futurity:
“not the fact of the future as something we can predict, but the fact that the world is transformable in essence and open to unpredictable change, an openness that is part of what the world is… [W]hat one is blind to is thus simply the future or futurity, its potential openness.” (p. 14)
It is this seeing into the blind spot, becoming aware of the world’s open futurity, that Peretz calls “becoming visionary.”
28 June 2009
Chinatown by Polanski, 1974
This to me is as iconic — as portalic — an image sequence as the one in Vertigo where Jimmy Stewart sees Kim Novak fully revealed as the dead version of herself. Jimmy realizes the uncanny haunting he’s entered; Jack doesn’t get it yet.
[Originally I posted only the second shot; I added the first one in light of discussion.]
22 June 2009
21 June 2009
Black Orpheus by Camus, 1959
Not having read the story, I can’t offer much help to Kvond in assembling an Antigone Complex, but watching Black Orpheus last night gave me a chance to think about retrofitting mythic stories to contemporary lives. Throughout the film the characters pulsate with music and movement, animated by the inchoate and protean spirit of life. Though seemingly chaotic, the Greco-Deleuzian lines of flight seem predetermined to assemble themselves into the same configurations again and again. Many recurrent patterns are trivial, mundane, insignificant, ignored except by those who experience them directly. Assemblies that carry particularly intense and universal meanings become commemorated in myth.
Are these mythologized events purely empirical, purely materialistic, the meaning conveyed on them retrospectively from a vantage point outside the event by creative storytellers? Or is the commemorated event already imbued with meaning that the observer can apprehend directly? In terms of the film, is spirit bestowed on passive flesh, or is spirit inseparably embodied in a particular material life?
2 February 2009
29 January 2009
Once in a Lullaby
In my last post I mentioned having watched some very good student films at the university earlier this week. I emailed the filmmakers of my two favorites, asking them if they had put their films online, and if so whether it would be okay if I posted the link on Ktismatics. Last night Joshua Minor, creator of the film Once in a Lullaby, sent me the link to his movie, saying that he’d be happy with my putting it up on the blog. It’s a rather disturbing 5-minute re-envisioning of The Wizard of Oz; Josh says at the bottom of the video link that he thinks of his film as “a dream gone wrong.”
I’m getting ready to launch a new blog where I put up films, writing excerpts, music clips, etc., along with a video interview of the artist. So Josh says he’s willing to subject himself to my interview, which I hope to arrange for next week. Meanwhile, if you have any comments or questions about his movie I suspect Josh would reply if I let him know about your interest.
So, to see the video, click HERE.
9 January 2009
5 January 2009
29 December 2008
Let the Right One In, 2008
Something I just realized: in each of the last three movies I’ve watched — Abre los Ojos, The Passenger, and now this one — the central theme is death and resurrection.
