Love Exposure (Shion Sono, 2008)

I’m a fan of long movies. For one, it makes you feel like you’re getting your movie moneys worth. For two, it provides the viewer with a fully engrossing experience. Which is why it’s worthwhile in our age of ‘cool’ media to occasionally devote three to five hours to a picture such as this, or say Lawrence of Arabia, Carlos, Histoire(s) du Cinema, and to watch it in one sitting.¹ Anyway, this is basically a disclaimer to say that I’m predisposed to take a shine to a nearly four hour Japanese romantic comedy (the director’s own description). You should be too though, because this picture is like five movies in one, often all at the same time. An incomplete list of elements and themes this movie includes: Jesus as pop-star, kung-fu, up-skirt photography (panchira), Kung-fu panchira, coming of age, familial trauma, cross-dressing, cults,and castration. If this picture seems—on description—to be merely a crazy grab bag of inchoate ideas. It isn’t. The characters are grounded, despite their rather extreme neuroses, in credible trauma. For all its tangents, break-neck pacing, and whiplash tonal shifts the film ends up being a serious and seriously moving exegesis of Corinthians 13. In the rather desolate landscape that is the contemporary romantic comedy; where love is equated with consumerism, divorced from any moral universe. Where sentimentality is equivalent to romance. Where shoe mad shrews fall for gym rat man-boys. Love Exposure provides hope for the future of this stagnating genre. Simultaneously, it succeeds in my least favorite genre² the cumming-of-age story (I even hated Adventureland, because my heart is two sizes too small). Love Exposure ultimately works so well because, as in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, it ties love not to grand romantic gestures (although the film contains plenty of those) but to selflessness. That to love as an adult is to take responsibility for that love. Not to revel in mutual neuroticism and shared taste in awesome bands, but to overcome selfishness in order to be with another person. Not to possess, but to see face to face. Which is work. The picture’s conclusion, while positive, provides no pat happily ever after. It portrays beginning the work of being together. The protagonists, at the end, see face to face, which makes the final romantic gesture affecting and moral. In conclusion; Stanley Cavell would dig this picture.

¹You need a break to pee, or fix another scotch? Fine, you can have that. But did you ever think that maybe you wouldn’t have to pee so much if you didn’t spend the entire movie guzzling scotch? At least do it at a natural break in the film. Gawd!

²I have prejudices and they are legion. 

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

When people find out I’m a movie geek, they ask what my favorite film is. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just going to say Rio Bravo. This is at once true and a lie of convenience. It’s true because it contains certain values of cinema that are dear to me and seem in danger. It has a perspective on masculinity that is still valuable (in its own way it is a film as mythic—if not more so—than Ford’s The Searchers). It is a film of totemic wisdom unadorned by sentimentality. Perhaps it will convert someone to an initiate. Lastly, why not Rio Bravo? It is a lie though because to name a single film as my favorite or even to name ten (or fifty) would be to deny the essential pluralism of cinephilia. We don’t go to films for a single type of experience. We take in films (and all art for that matter) in order to explore and deepen our understanding of life. Which is not to say that I don’t believe that there are objective categories with which to determine whether a work of art is “good.” But, rather that to name one film as the best or even my favorite would be to deny that very pluralism. The frame that we use in order to determine what is the best compounds this problem. Breathless is Jean-Luc Godard’s most important film. Although, I’m more partial to Jim McBride’s interpretation. However, McBride’s picture is not as powerful or ‘great’ as Contempt, Masculin Feminin, Week End, etc.  So while Godard’s Breathless may the most important film of the last sixty years, does that mean it’s the best.  Our understanding of greatness is also determined by numerous historical factors: availability, impact (“The first Velvet Underground album only sold ten-thousand copies but everyone who bought it formed a band.”), critical consensus, scope, ‘seriousness.’ The act of creating a canon, which is essentially the function of these lists, flattens the discourse around an entire medium. In doing so it not only denies the medium’s pluralism, but also denies a pluralist discourse, critically and artistically, around that medium. The thing is though; I love lists! I love making them. I love reading them. I’m just all about lists, categorizing, indexing, codifying, classifying, rating, evaluating, itemizing, enumerating. Lists lead us to discover something new, especially the further down one goes. Lists lead to arguments, or new avenues of thought which can be more valuable than the list itself. Most of all though, lists are fun!

With this in mind I decided to create a list of the ten greatest films of all time using Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s method. The first time I did it I felt that I had relied too much on what is considered canonical alongside the films that I thought were the best. Or do I mean greatest? Or do I mean favorite? On this go round I just decided to do it completely off the top of my head, and imposing a time limit, and using a perpetually shifting metric that was different for each film:

1. Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)
2. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
3. Carlito’s Way (Brian De Palma, 1993)
4. Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)
5. Notre Musique (Jean-Luc Godard, 2004)
6. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
7. Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch, 1989)
8. Hard Boiled (John Woo, 1992)
9. I Know Where I’m Going! (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1945)
10. The General (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926)

Hey look at that the first four pictures were made under the auspices of the movie brats. Well I couldn’t let the boomer hegemony stand so I made another set of integers and came up with another list from the same master list:

1. Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
2. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
3. Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1962)
4. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
5. Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)
6. Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch, 1989)
7. Holiday (George Cukor, 1938)
8. They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949)
9. A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)
10. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (Adam Mckay, 2004) 

This one is more satisfying to me.  Especially since it starts with Duck Soup is followed by two grave religious dramas and finishes off with Anchorman. Neither list may reflect any kind of canon, but the second one especially strikes me as a great list.

White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

The usual route for Walsh is to slow the development by increasing specificity. It is very cunning: by the time his gangster comes apart, is shot down, or shoots his way through an ambush, Waslh has slyly doubled and tripled every move that the gangster makes in terms of height, texture, path, angle, and sound. Cagney’s psychotic break in the penitentiary dining hall involves a messy noisy tantrum after he hears his beloved Ma has been gunned down. Every move Cagney makes has been counterpointed and varied. His incredible frenzy literally swimming through cutlery and china down the length of a table has been twice anticipated with a slow camera dolly down the table and back, picking out each diner who gets splashed and shocked by Cagney’s tantrum crawl across the table. Cagney’s running battle through a half-dozen guards spaced at crucial spots around the hall has been anticipated by a quiet over-the-hall long shot as the prisoners file in and angle off into the various aisles. The battle itself is a frenzy improvised with perfect Cagney instincts: characteristically it is a mesh of variations on pace and height ending with Cagney being carried by the guards down the aisles and out the hall, above their heads like a frantically struggling fish on a tray.

Manny Farber, “Raoul Walsh,” in Farber on Film (Library of America, 2009), 702-03.

Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002)

How did I miss what a dense and knotty picture this is? So I have the good people over at Reverse Shot (seriously why aren’t you reading their amazing Spielberg series) to thank for that. The film in its repeating motifs: eyes, mirrors, shifting perspectives, images doubling and overlaying each other call to mind DePalma making a futuristic Hitchcock wrong man picture. On repeated viewings the film’s metatextual concerns surface as Spielberg’s usual concerns (the reunification of the family) fade into the background.  So if A.I. is Spielberg’s most thematically audacious film, Minority Report is his most formally audacious. With A.I. Spielberg was interrogating his themes, whereas here he interrogates his method.

Filled with elaborate sequences, from a director who knows his way around elaborate, Report transcends the merely byzantine by crafting these sequences with a wit and playfulness that belies the film’s essential darkness, while simultaneously expressing a complex understanding of the nature of film, and moreover an understanding of how we construct reality through vision.  Moreover how images within cinema are constructed to create understanding. So while it the connection between the way John Anderton analyses, chooses, and discards images generated from the pre-cogs is represents how a film is edited, the entire films is constantly addressing seeing and crafting images. Most especially in the films greatest sequence, wherein Anderton and Agatha escape through the mall by directing their movements based on where the police are going to be. The scene perfectly encapsulates the way in which editing and camera placement determine the interplay of the objective and subjective views. Yet the camera is always subjective, even though it is essentially an objective recording device. It is through the editing of images that meaning is derived. What one is left with is the picture’s profound ambivalence about the nature of this process. So that while Spielberg in the opening of the film demonstrates how this process can illuminate truth, he spends the remainder of the film, undermining his initial hypothesis. Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in Agatha’s desperate inquiry “Is this now?”

A Matter Of Life and Death & Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1946, 1947)

Britain’s masters of above board perversity produce two dissimilar yet singularly representative works. In the former, David Niven’s very David Niveny pilot fights to remain on Technicolor earth than the black and white afterlife when he survives a bomber crash. In the latter, a bunch of nuns are sent into an erotic/nostalgic reverie in their new exotic environment and by the sight of David Farrar’s shorts. Both films seemed filled with formal contradictions to accompany their narrative ones, the depiction of Life and Death’s aforementioned afterlife, Narcissus’s cold hothouse, whereas most stories of eroticism are enacted in claustrophobic interiors, this one’s is positively agoraphobic, despite being shot entirely on studio sets. Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth becoming more beautiful the more nutso she gets (although that could just be me). What sticks in the minds eye the strongest in the films are the moments of sheer beauty, a beauty borne out of neuroses (which is perhaps what links Scorsese so closely, explicitly and implicitly, to their pictures). Images as broad as the vastness of the Himalayas or as intimate as small town projected through a camera obscura, or as heartbreakingly unsentimental as Niven dictating a telegram to his family knowing that he’s certainly going to die. The irony of course is that he doesn’t but falls in love. It is not the auratic impressiveness of Wagner or Malick, but an interior vision depicted on the screen in otherworldly Technicolor. Driven by a veddy English brand of neuroticism their films are at once immediate and distant. Like I said, contradictory. The Archers give credence to the idea that films are the embodiment our collective dreamscape.

Liebelei (Max Ophüls 1933)

I saw this picture at the historic Portage Theater (in need of saving), in a perfectly fine 16mm print with rather eccentric subtitles. All in all it was an experience of viewing the past through a concatenation of filters. In 2012 watching a print of a film that I would guess was struck in the 70s of a film from 1933 of an 1895 play by Arthur Schnitzler. What makes this particularly unique is that every moment stands it seems at the brink of an entirely new epoch, historically and cinematically:

1895 End of the 19^th century, the publication of the Freud and Breur’s Studies on Hysteria, and the birth of the cinematograph.

1933 The rise of fascism, with Hitler’s ascendance to power. Since they were Jews, Schnitzler and Ophüls’s names were removed from the credits, So this a film that was neither written nor directed and instead appeared on the screen from nowhere. I would also note that this is around when sound cinema reached maturity.

2012 Digital age, death of film/cinema as a mechanical medium, as well as the mechanism itself?

The effect is one of seeing ghosts. The sense we are watching the shadows of the dead reanimated. Which is both true and untrue, the mechanistic/chemical medium so tied an external reality (the players, the sets, etc.). But it’s not re-presenting reality, they aren’t moving on the screen. It just looks like that. Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes? Still though I can’t shake the feeling that I was seeing a dream of the 20^th century that is about to become a nightmare. All this begs the question; what the fuck am I talking about? I don’t know. Film has aura.

The Raid: Redemption (Gareth Evans, 2011)

A work of anti-humanist cinema of space and movement made all the more exhilarating for its lack of irony or bloat vis-a-vis the essence of its technique. Art expressed through the collision of mechanized men cut and choreographed to within an inch of its life. The argument has been made that the film resembles a video game, point being that it lacks significant character development and the plot is thin; which are both true, but miss the point. Proof that, by and large, critics are still tied to Aristotelian (by way of Robert McKee bullshit) concept of dramatic construction, and dramatic construction-period as the cinema’s only appropriate mode. You can’t just make a picture where a bunch of guys kick the shit out of each other. However, I would posit that you can make a picture where a bunch of guys kick the shit out of each other artfully. And artfully they do. So while the camera may be shaky and the cutting may be fast; this is not the chaos cinema that everybody won’t shut up about. It takes skill, craft, and yes art to shoot these things right. All of which Evans has in abundance. An intuitive formalist, he knows that this picture doesn’t need anything more, so outside of a few half-hearted stabs at feeding the audience some pathos, he just lets the premise play out without gussying it up. And play out it does. Like an adrenaline shot to the gonads. Who could ask for anything more!