Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)

“As we awake refreshed from our dreams, better able to meet the tasks of reality, so the fairy store ends with the hero returning, or being returned to the real world, much better able to master life.”

- Bruno Bettelheim

A wolf-suited blur of unfocussed aggression, Max hurtles down the staircase – a fork clenched in his fist – in pursuit of the terrified family dog. The camera, handheld, careens with him like an accomplice. Wildness, yes. But not the exhilaration, the temporary unbounded freedom of acting out – of trapping one’s hurt like lightning in a bottle to release it later in a burst of electric, savage creativity. Here, there is only the white-hot immediateness of anger, the confusion and helplessness that turns on and snarls at smaller things. Almost immediately, however, the frame freezes, and Max’s furious pursuit is cruelly halted – not as an authoritative preventive measure, but as an authorial intercession that denies the boy any liberation from the bewilderment of his young life.

For Maurice Sendak, a private jungle emerges from a boy’s bedroom in order to offer up a dark haven where he might disgorge all his fears and anger in a secret rumpus. This is not to be taken as the condescending reduction of a child’s tantrum; it is a measure of respect for their attempts at fashioning dimensions of solitude where they cannot be dominated or frightened or disappointed – where we cannot touch them. It is also Sendak’s achievement to insist that the inevitable decision to return from this solitude belongs to the young adventurer in question. A hot supper will await him, yes, but the journey back to familial concord will be on his terms, and that private jungle will recede at his behest.

For Spike Jonze, by contrast, family becomes yet another incomprehensible structure from which his young protagonist cannot escape, as befuddling and pathetic a universe as those found in Being John Malkovich or Adaptation (or even some of his more downbeat music videos). Max is driven from his house into the night – away from the perceived betrayals and tyrannies of his sister and mother – towards the little boat that bears him away. Already Jonze has forsaken the crucial autonomy that the book accords the boy. Subsequently, the world into which Max burrows is not an expansive kingdom within the confines of a bedroom, but a hermetic dimension beyond the constrictive boundaries of the familiar. His voyage is an exilic retreat rather than a restorative adventure.

Just as Max is paralysed by the opening freeze-frame, so too is he pitilessly condemned to a realm that is a warped and cryptically refracted image of his home. These wild things are haunted by an unnamed sadness, riven by jealousies and petty resentments, and given to inexplicable bouts of rage and reactionary hostility. Even the initially exquisite natural lighting becomes oppressive in its unvarying twilit tones – as if the sun really were dying, as Max and Carol (his monstrous analogue) fear.

On the one hand, Jonze and Eggers’ screenplay is admirable for its attempt to adopt an amorphous child-like logic: Max attempts to work out these all-too-familiar mystifying conflicts and half-understood problems through improvisational stories and games with ever-evolving rules. On the other, the film pessimistically thwarts every effort to resolve these troubles. Max’s time with the wild things is profoundly melancholic, and characterised by confusion, loss, and ultimately defeat. Although he is declared “King” of this realm, his fraudulence is eventually exposed and he is driven away once again. Unlike the intentional abdication of the throne in Sendak’s story, Max is overwhelmed by his circumstances and surrenders.

Jonze subsequently ends the film ambiguously with Max watching his mother succumb to an exhausted sleep at the kitchen table, but nothing we have seen so far warrants an interpretation of his gaze as an epiphanic reversal of parent-child relationships. The mother remains an inscrutable mystery – yielding up none of her secrets in sleep – and the son can only look upon her with a yearning that is never to be appeased. Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are offers no respite from the fundamental incapacities that it perceives at the heart of childhood, and no opportunity for an emergent self-sovereignty to establish the beginnings of a dominion.

September Film Journal

Ikiru (1952) * * * * *
Silent Light (2007) * * * * *

Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922) * * * *1/2
Let the Right One In (2008) * * * *1/2

Inglorious Basterds (2009) * * * *
When Did You Last See Your Father (2008) * * * *

Duplicity (2009) * * * 1/2

Lou Reed's Berlin (2008) * * *1/2

I Love You, Man (2009) * * *
Body of Lies (2008) * * *
51 Birch Street (2006) * * *

The International (2009) * *1/2
La Strada (1954) * *1/2

Crisis (1950) * *
The Reader (2008) * *
Taken (2009) * *

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) *
Watchmen (2009) *

Summer Viewing

Hello fellow cinemaniacs,

You may have noticed the Film Journal sidebar. I hope to be maintaining it on a biweekly basis. For those who might be curious about my summer viewings, I present the following list (from the seminal to the deplorable):

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) * * * * *

Synecdoche, New York (2008) * * * * *

Bamako (2007) * * * *1/2

The Decline of the American Empire (1986) * * * *1/2

Up (2009) * * * *1/2

Bolt (2008) * * * *

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) * * * *

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1984) * * * *

Rachel Getting Married (2008) * * * *
Wendy and Lucy (2008) * * * *

Ashes of Time Redux (2008) * * *1/2

Blast of Silence (1961) * * *1/2

The Class (2008) * * *1/2

Frozen River (2008) * * *1/2

Lake of Fire (2007) * * *1/2

Milk (2008) * * *1/2

Pontypool (2009) * * *1/2

Revolutionary Road (2008) * * *1/2

Snow Angels (2008) * * *1/2

Son of Rambow (2008) * * *1/2

Star Trek (2009) * * *1/2

Still Life (2007) * * *1/2

The Wrestler (2008) * * *1/2

Appaloosa (2008) * * *

Changeling (2008) * * *

Diary of the Dead (2008) * * *

Encounters at the End of the World (2008) * * *

Frost/Nixon (2008) * * *

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) * * *

House of Flying Daggers (2004) * * *

Ichi the Killer (2001) * * *

I've Loved You So Long (2008) * * *

JCVD (2008) * * *

Quantum of Solace (2008) * * *

Role Models (2008) * * *

Standard Operating Procedure (2008) * * *

Valkyrie (2008) * * *

Cadillac Records * *1/2

Gran Torino (2008) * *1/2

Hamlet 2 (2008) * *1/2

Of Time and the City (2009) * */12

Step Brothers (2008) * *1/2

W. (2008) * *1/2

Yes Man (2008) * *1/2

Doubt (2008) * *

The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) * *

Mongol (2008) * *

Religulous (2008) * *

Sukiyaki Western Django (2008) * *

Sunshine Clearing (2009) * *

Watchmen (2009) *

Wolverine (2009) *

Feel free to chime in with comments, criticisms, or suggestions for my ever-expanding viewing list.

For all of you cinephiles who don't already know about this enterprise, check out the following sites: The 1,000 Greatest Films and The 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films, both sponsored by the indispensable They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (see my sidebar Links for their home page).

Duplicity (Tony Gilroy, 2009)

Duplicity commences with an engaging pas de deux between two predatory cats – a series of shifting tactics, performative evaluations, and self-aware flirtations – that winds its way into the bedroom of a four star hotel in Dubai. The dance ends in an unconventional manner – Julia Roberts drugging Clive Owen and making off with top-secret documents left in his charge – and with a stylistic, Soderberghian flourish: moving split-screens present several moments from various stages of Roberts post-coital departure. In one frame, she has already left the room; in another, she simultaneously checks on the slumbering Owen. This spy is forever in two places at once – caught between an impossible but undeniable attraction on the one hand and a kind of self-interested professionalism that could only erode the trust from which that attraction might flourish.

This is Duplicity’s central dilemma, and the stuff of true screwball fantasies. It is followed immediately by another dance of sorts – this time between the CEOs of two cosmetic juggernauts – and its petty brutality and clumsiness is a hilarious contrast to the sleek, animal elegance of its precursor. On a greyish landing strip of an anonymous airport, two parked Lear jets face off against one another in frank symmetry. Rattling his finger like a sabre in super slow-motion on the right side of the frame in the following cut – his face somehow undulating with hatred – is Tom Wilkinson venting his spleen towards someone out of frame. With a cut, Paul Giamatti is revealed on the far left of the frame, equally enraged. As if slogging through currents of bile, the two gradually make their way toward one another, while their horrified cronies look on. The two titans meet, and the ensuing clash seems to last hours, even though it’s only a brief scuffle: the professorial Wilkinson and the gnomish Giamatti flail about on the tarmac in a brutish reduction of the corporate warfare upon which Roberts and Wilson will try to capitalize.

Between these contrasting “numbers,” are labyrinthine twists and turns of plots, layers of deception, and exquisitely played acts of self-conscious performances. James Naremore has spoken of “expressive incoherence” as being an important aspect of an evaluative assessment of acting: scenes in which we are presented with a performer consciously performing within the story (acts of deception, or moments of emotional repression are good examples). Duplicity – as its title implies – is rife with such moments: Clive Owen channelling Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (1938) as he masquerades as a clumsy Texan doctor is one delicious example. But a great part of the film’s pleasures are also built upon moments of performance that are surprisingly revealed as such, and scenes in which diegetic audiences explicitly mirror our own regard for the aptitude of the principal actors.

The pre-eminent example is the “rehearsed” encounter between Owen and Roberts, in which they literally replay a scripted version of one of their previous venomous encounters in order to throw off the suspicion of their employers (who may be – and in fact are – following their every move). This encounter is originally played straight, and we are provided with a forum to compare their biting repartee to the lacerations that the two actors inflicted upon one another in their previous outing, Closer (2004). A brief moment of surreality occurs later, when their dialogue is repeated word for word (with some notable variations) in a flashback: we are thrown for a loop (caught within the various crisscrossing nets of deception that the film deploys) until we realize that the originally presented encounter was an elaborate act, performed as part of the lovers’ scheme. Retroactively, we can then assess the qualities of these mirrored encounters and marvel at the shades of difference these two pre-eminent actors bring to the scenes. Certainly, Owens and Roberts have their diegetic fans within the film itself: two field agents chuckle over a play-by-play recording of the scene, taking turns mimicking Owen’s poshness (“Eye oh-wnnn yewww,” they chortle to one another). We are also treated to a literal rehearsal of the encounter during yet another flashback. Owens and Roberts wend their way through a line run of the encounter that they’ll play out the next day: he, gently reminding her to enunciate in between sips of chardonnay (“Are you directing me?” she teases); she, reclining in bed and chiding him for engaging in the star privilege of script revision (“Wrong,” says she, correcting his improvisatory vulgarity, “It’s ‘people I’ve slept with’”).

And yet, neither of these two players realize that their dress rehearsal is being observed by a hidden audience. We track up into a light fixture in the ceiling, through its wiring, and emerge from a speaker placed on the desk of the foxy Tom Wilkinson, who chuckles appreciatively – paternally, even – at their snappy interplay. Aren’t these two Hollywood luminaries simply marvellous? The two actor-cum-directors remain unaware that their “show” has been very craftily stage managed until they attempt to reap the dividends from their treachery (as the camera tracks backward from the dazed couple in the final shot – leaving them to their entangled futures of mutual suspicion – Owen intones, “Well, at least we have each other.” Roberts, as usual, has the final word: “It really is that bad, isn’t it?”). Duplicity is rife with such moments, with actors stepping out from the rhythms of their own “numbers” in order to stand in as our analogues – admiring the playfulness of talented stars at work. In an era in which Hollywood so seldom provides us with opportunities for admiration, such intricacy is an occasion for dancing.

Summer viewing... 2008?!

As it's been a very busy last month, I haven't had much time at all to post anything new these last few weeks. I'd like to try to get back to a weekly schedule, but like the best laid plans of mice and men...

At any rate, as a way of making up for my lack of new postings, I thought I'd be a little perverse and offer some, well, older musings on films that I was watching last year between January and June. I know, I know... it's a little bit like cutting the mold off the edges of the mozzarella that expired a week ago but it's either that, or no pizza pie at all. Hope I'll be forgiven this once!

Thanks for your indulgence, and enjoy the penicillin...

Offside (Jafar Panahi, 2006)

One of the most joyous films I've seen in a while. A near perfect ensemble cast plays out endlessly inventive variations on their singular theme. The long take and centred framing of the girls during the final minutes of the game is unforgettable.

Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006)

Finally - an American film given over completely to the celebration of everyday carnality. A far cry - thankfully - from all the hate-fucking found in European cinema these days (to say nothing of The Brown Bunny). Frequently witty in its blissed-out frankness, Woody Allen should be taking notes.

Speed Racer (Andy & Larry Wachowski, 2008)

At last! An adaptation of a lousy Japanese cartoon, coloured only in neon, made by dunderheaded neo-"Marxists." Just what us poor, benighted proles have been waiting for. Racers of the world, unite!

Three Times (Hsiao-hsien Hou, 2005)

The opening segment taking place in the 1960s is a masterpiece in miniature - exquisite staging and perfectly chosen music ("Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "Tears in Rain"). The second segment is subtle, but powerful silent melodrama. And while the last segment is much less engaging than the first two, the lovers are so exquisite to watch, it doesn't matter. Chen Chang and Qi Shu are two of the loveliest creatures on the planet.

Election (Johnny To, 2005) & Triad Election (2007)

Scorsese would be proud. Rather routine power-play shenanigans at first, but the final fifteen minutes take the movie somewhere interesting. A worthy examination of honour among thieves, if nothing else.

* * * * * *

Johnny To crafts an emotionally complex study of greed and the erosion of tradition, drenched in shadow and blood. Certainly has "The Godfather" on its mind, but its utter lack of sentimentality and romance are a welcome corrective to Coppola's ambivalency. This is a powerful and ambitious sequel.

In the Shadow of the Moon (David Sington, 2007)

Despite being terrific NASA propaganda, this is also a grand tribute to the utopian impulses at the heart of exploration. A compelling use of some very charismatic talking heads (despite the inexplicable compulsion towards extreme close-ups). The juxtapositions between the elderly astronauts and images of their younger rocket-jockey incarnations made for compelling human drama.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

A near-perfect vivisection of the mythologizing of the West. Deakins' cinematography is breathtaking: both romantic and scalpel-edged (the vignetting gives many of the images the iconic appearance of period daguerreotypes, and the torchlight, night-time train robbery is extraordinary). The cold beauty of the cinematography is complimented by performances that burrow into the typography of the West. Garret Dillahunt is particularly haunting as he puts up a desperate front to circumvent Pitt's harrowing paranoia. Masterful, and quite worthy of its comparisons to early Terence Malick.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Steven Spielberg, 2008)

I thoroughly agree with a Metacritic amateur review of this film: Spielberg should stop indulging George Lucas. This is a listless, self-satisfied outing that brings out the worst instincts in a director with unmatchable craft and continually unrealized artistry (the best scene in the film is the rich, deep-focussed diner sequence, with intriguing pockets of teenaged activity blossoming behind Indy and Mutt as they trudge through more humdrum exposition). From the half-assed CGI, to Ford grimacing through every scene, everyone involved in this utterly forgettable dreck should've left well enough alone.

Elizabeth: The Golden Years (Shekhar Kapur, 2007)

Profoundly silly tosh, but oh so fabulous wigs. The performances are all variations on singular themes: Owen glowers, Rush slinks, Blanchett postures. Particularly camp are the terrifically bathetic Manichean exaggerations: the umbral Spanish Catholics (enshrouded in flickering candlelight) and the resplendence of the Virgin Queen (care of a supercharged CGI sunrise and a few dozen arc lamps) as she overlooks the retreat of the Spanish armada. Flat out goofy!

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley, 2006)

Begins as an enjoyable romp in unfamiliar generic territory for Hartley, but becomes ponderous in its purposefully Byzantine second half. Posey, Goldblum and Urbaniak are wonderfully adept at circumnavigating the deadpan cadences of Hartley's dialogue, but whimsy gives way to ponderous geo-political intrigue all too soon. Hartley's baroque style livens up the proceedings slightly - the exclusivity of Dutch angles, and the blurry stills during action sequences that serve as a riposte to Bourne-styled chop-socky - but all the same, a decline from the heights of his early career.

Southland Tales (Richard Kelly 2006)

A textbook example of producers utterly failing at their central responsibility - to support, nurture and focus unruly talent. After a promising debut, Kelly squanders his potential by chanelling David Lynch at his most comically unhinged. The problem is that while Lynch has a sense of humour, Kelley evidently does not (but thank God for the charismatic mugging of the Rock). While it certainly begs for repeated viewings, it doesn't warrant them. And yes, the film bristles with ideas (albeit of the half-baked variety), it ultimately fails as a satire. I'm willing to admit that it may work better as a comic book, but ultimately, l'll have to agree with Jonathan Rosenbaum on its effectiveness: you can't be political and willfully incoherent at the same time.

Shi gan (Time) - Ki-duk Kim

Kim Ki-Duk proves himself to be an expert at quickly shifting affective registers - comedy to melodrama to suspense - with compelling aggression. Certainly more dialogue-driven than his combined previous work, his figures here attack the film's corporeal conceit with often frightening gusto. A disturbing study of the central tension in any romantic relationship: the dangerous dialectic between the promise of novelty and the exhaustion of familiarity.

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007)

It's tempting to dismiss this as watered-down McEwan, or hyper-produced Masterpiece Theatre, but every moment in this meditation on the dangers and shortcomings of fiction are carefully considered and finely crafted. And perhaps this is the sole flaw in an otherwise superlative adaptation. Wright carefully attempts to correlate the rigidity of the framing, the expansive mobile camera (the five-minute long take of the beach at Dunkirk), and the percussive choreography of motion, rhythm and light (the close-up of the adolescent Briony on the subway, plunging in and out of darkness) to the protagonist's florid imagination. But our retrospective consideration of the narrration as Briony's fictive construction renders the drama somewhat lifeless and inert. While this final revelation should wound, it settles for dejection. A considerable compromise, but an otherwise extraordinarily beautiful film.

The Politics of Interruption - Bamako

Admittedly, it’s been some time since I’ve engaged with a work as explicitly didactic as Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006) – outside of my forays into activist documentary. For this reason (and never mind the fact that I’m hardly an expert an African cinema), I was somewhat nervous to feature it as my first meditation on the films I’ve recently been watching. And yet, the film refuses to leave me alone: its impassioned critique of globalization as neo-colonial enterprise cannot readily be ignored. So it seems an appropriate enough work with which to begin these entries.

In a small courtyard in Bamako belonging to Mélé – an incredibly beautiful nightclub singer – and her unemployed husband, Chaka, a conceptual trial of sorts is being held. The plaintiff is Africa itself, represented by numerous Malian representatives: a farmer, a schoolteacher, an economist, an unemployed worker, even Aminata Traoré – Mali’s former minister of culture. The defendants are the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – represented by real life defence lawyer, Roland Rappaport (who tries on a pair of sunglasses in one humorous scene, and demands that the street vendor prove that they are genuine Gucci). The G8’s liberalized economy is on trial here, and the defendants are called to account for the disastrous failures of the various economic restructuring programs initiated in Africa over the past twenty years. Surprisingly and often comically, however, the proceedings are often interrupted as various members of the community pass through the courtyard – oblivious to the solemnity of the occasion as they go about their daily business.

Sissako’s fifth feature is the most strident and allegorical of his work so far, but also the most intricately structured (despite its deceptively simple concept and plotting). At first, I must admit that I found its structure both hyperbolic and repetitive. In the spirit of Marxist-inflected third cinema, most of the film features heated debates between the bewigged magistrates and the various witnesses, as well as a number of lengthy monologues, lectures and personal testimonies. These exchanges are typically framed in medium close-up, with Sissako frequently holding on the speakers for extended durations. While this strategy respects the impassioned testimony of the various speakers and is an aesthetic that honours the film’s resistant subjects, it does not always make for compulsive cinema.

This is an old complaint about politicized filmmaking generally, and some of the less dynamic representatives of third cinema – those rooted in the stodginess of reductive, over-simplified Marx or Frantz Fanon – fall into the zero-sum territory of the illustrated lecture. However, I’m not advancing a superficially formalist argument here – that a successful film must be “cinematic.” Rather, I’m asserting that the most compelling representatives of radical, militant, or otherwise political cinema embraced an equally dynamic style to advance its argument. This was the genius of innovators like Solanas & Getino, Rocha, Sembene, Mambéty, etc. Moreover, it was not only that a tri-continental revolution never materialized that (arguably) lead to a diminishment of third cinema in the early 1990s. Not only did the category tend to homogenize class oppression in all three worlds and conflate varied experiences of colonialism, but it often didn’t account for ways that elements of commercial cinema can be used for political purposes – particularly music, humour, and sexuality. As Robert Stam has pointed out in his article on postcolonial filmmaking in The Cinema Book (p. 123), the greatest contemporary African filmmakers haven’t abandoned the militancy of classic third cinema; instead they have adopted an approach that leaves room for doubt, ambiguity, and multiplicity.

It was for this reason that I became an admirer of Sissako – particularly in his earlier works. Indeed, Bamako owes a great debt to his magnificent Life on Earth (1998). A semi-documentary and autobiographical love letter to Mali from a prodigal son, the film lingers on villagers in Sokolo on the eve of the new millennium. While villagers try to make international phone calls on hopelessly unreliable phones, and carry out their daily activities Sissako cuts to news images of other much more fevered millennial celebrations around the first world. Purposefully slow and meditative in its pacing (and featuring exquisite narration from the great Afro-Martinician poet, Aimé Césaire), Life on Earth depicts events that are hardly monumental but are of the utmost importance nonetheless.

This intermittent oscillation between the “important” and “ordinary,” or the “abstract” and the “concrete” is what gives Bamako its poetic force. Sissasko is hardly interested in representing the myth of a united African front: he cuts from the trial’s proceedings to shots of listless villagers outside the courtyard – many of whom become bored or annoyed by the lectures and testimonies broadcasted over shoddily wired loudspeakers and cheap radios. In between witnesses, we are also presented with instances of Chaka tending to his and Mélé’s sick child – real suffering and attempts at relief temporarily take precedence over philosophical disputes about the same subjects. The trial itself is interrupted by a funeral procession that passes through the courtyard (the judge himself suggests a recess, as he reminds us that “real life intrudes”). Finally, the film itself is disrupted by another one: a faux spaghetti Western entitled "Death in Timbuktu," which stars Palestinian filmmaker, Elia Suleiman and Danny Glover. A family gathers around the television to watch the spectacle of impoverished Malians being shot down by ruthless gunslingers, and its difficult to determine whether Sissako intends this parodic moment as an indictment of Hollywood-style entertainment, or canny political appropriation (Michael Sicinski sees it as a tongue-in-cheek poke at Rocha’s earlier radicalized Westerns and third cinema’s “aesthetics of poverty”).

The recurring trope of interruption is ingenious in its ambiguity. For one, it complicates the usual simplistic “West vs. the rest” discourse that reduces much that it is interesting in third cinema to stark dualities. Secondly, it avoids the temptation to make sweeping generalizations about economic circumstances in Africa, and to reduce represented peoples to noble victims – united in both suffering and resistance. Finally, it resists catering to the guilty conscience of privileged liberal viewers. Indeed, Bamako’s climatic moment occurs when an elderly witness addresses the court by singing his wrenching testimony in his native Bambara. It is a dramatic contrast to the silence of the schoolteacher who previously took the stand, and found he could not summon the words to express his anger with the G8’s contemptible 2005 debt relief package. By placing this chant at the film’s climax and refusing to translate the man’s songs for non-native viewers, Sissako resists the naïve inclinations of the social problem film and courtroom drama to provide easy solutions for near-insoluble dilemmas. But just as this strategy places the elder beyond the rhetorical reach of Rappaport, or other defenders of a liberalized global economy, and their ability to rationalize the continued exploitation of the third world, it also succinctly stresses the intractability of Africa’s plight. For despite the best intentions and efforts of a concerned West, the perpetual and enforced poverty of HIPC’s such as Mali is a calamity beyond the ability of privileged subjects to comprehend or appreciate. This is a sobering pessimism to which any would-be idealist should perhaps attend and respect whilst engaging in this remarkable work.

Historic Lethbridge Festival

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to plug the free screenings being held in the Lethbridge Public Library Gallery Theatre in conjunction with the Historic Lethbridge Festival.

Yours truly will be hosting a free screening of Swing Time this Friday, May 8 at 7PM. For a sneak preview, have a peek at the previous blog entry below.

http://www.uleth.ca/finearts/events/1530

See you there!

Fred 'n Ginger

An abbreviated version of my upcoming introduction to my public lecture on Swing Time:

Many students who become familiar with my taste for risqué material are often surprised when I declare my devotion to musicals. I suppose that musicals are slightly embarrassing for some. Perhaps this is why audiences either love them or hate them: the only other genre to evoke such a divided response of equal virulence is the horror film. Maybe musicals are equally horrifying, in a way. As with horror, it’s not so much that many find their flagrant disregard for realist conventions discomforting; perhaps it has more to do with our fear of exposure and vulnerability.

Musicals seek to evoke joy from audiences, but their aestheticizing of raw emotion can also be off-putting. I always find these kinds of responses surprising. Personally, I'm enthralled by the idea that characters in musicals sing and dance in order to tap into feelings that they can’t express through ordinary language. These characters give shape to their feelings through performance, and in so doing, they’re laying themselves bare for an audience. In fact, characters in musicals are doubly exposed and doubly vulnerable: 1) their performance is an offering of themselves to you for your approval; and 2) they declare their emotion in the most grand way possible - by proclaiming it through song and dance.

For me, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire represent the quintessential musical couple who offer themselves for your approval and declare their mutual affection in the grandest of terms. The pair were in ten films together between 1933 and 1939, all of which they made for RKO (discounting, of course, their one-off for MGM in 1949, The Barkleys of Broadway). It's not at all surprising that they're the most famous dance team in movie history: rarely have two dancers been so perfectly suited to each other’s rhythms.

One of the recurring comments about Astaire is that “he made them all look good,” and indeed it’s remarkable how he adapts himself to suit the character and style of his partners. Take a look at Easter Parade and Funny Face to see how Astaire plays off of and supports the strengths of Judy Garland and Audrey Hepburn respectively, neither of whom are known for their skill as dancers.Rogers, however, needs no such support. Her skill as a ballroom dancer is enviable, and one of the most iconic images from classical musicals is from Top Hat, with Rogers adorned in a feathered gown that give impression of weightlessness. She does not dance so much as she floats.

Ultimately, the pair takes on legendary status for their perfect symbiosis. They are the quintessence of elegance and effortlessness, and we return to them over and over to observe the alchemy of two bodies achieving perfect synchronicity. I love Fred and Ginger for the same reason I love screwball couples like Grant and Hepburn, Fonda and Stanwyck, Sandler and Watson: their dances evoke the dream of compatibility, of finding someone with whom you can move in perfect unison.

Some naysayers have pointed out that the Rogers/Astaire relationship frequently moves from one of equality to inequality. In Swing Time, for example, the “challenge” dance in which the two playfully perform as equals (“Pick Yourself Up”) eventually gives way to the ballroom dance in which Fred leads and Ginger follows (“Waltz in Swing Time”).

Of course, those who want to locate sexist ideology in the classical musical’s emphasis on romantic partnership will no doubt find it there. But for me, partnership in the musical is the means by which characters gain access to and articulate emotion that is otherwise unavailable and inexpressible. Again, musicals seem slightly embarrassing because they are unapologetic about the way they make the inward, private self manifest in the most spectacular way possible. In other words, characters literally make spectacles of themselves. It’s in this disregard for propriety that musicals have their greatest force: there’s nothing that violates middle-class decorum more than putting one’s self on display.

Astaire and Rogers’ means of expression seems to exceed "proper" communication. Indeed, in “Entertainment and Utopia” (2002), Richard Dyer suggests that their musicals offer a longed-for solution to the problems of communication. Complex or confused feelings are presented directly and vividly without being made to seem ambiguous as they are in real life, while the performers become absolutely certain about these feelings. When you can’t speak your mind in musicals, you’ve gotta' dance. In so doing, you look towards an other that can inspire you to proclaim emotion, someone who will understand you and move to your personal rhythms perfectly and naturally, someone who will simultaneously move you as elegantly as Fred and Ginger moved one another while dancing cheek to cheek.

Establishing Shot

Hello, everyone.

A curious thing happened when I turned thirty a few years ago. My ability to remember in lucid detail extended filmic moments began to erode - almost as if someone had flipped a switch. It was a particularly disturbing debilitation considering my profession as a film studies academic. In a way, I felt like a conservatory trained pianist unable to recall key passages in a sonata, or worse, like an amnesiac who's compelled to pull out old photographs to convince himself that he once had a history.

I first became conscious of this during a film theory seminar that I was teaching at the time. Attempting to describe the blouse Monica Vitti wears in L'Avventura when she and Gabriele Ferzetti stop for a tryst in the grass, I hit a total blank. Now admittedly, this is a pretty innocuous memory lapse. But when I first saw the film when I was twenty, the moment left an inexplicable imprint on me. Something about the contrasting textures: the weave of her blonde hair on grass flattened by lovemaking, and the stylish assertiveness of those tiny white polkadots and the sharp "V" of her neckline. Of course, there's nothing immediately profound about this observation, but for some reason, the image stuck and it's the one that always comes to mind immediately when I think about the film.

Obviously, my students didn't really care about this lapse (and thankfully, one of the more fashion-conscious of the lot bailed me out), but it threw me for a loop. During casual conversations about new films I had only just recently seen, I began to become more and more conscious of a growing inability to recall such detailed moments. I began to resign myself to a bleak future of film viewing (akin to my experience of literature, ironically): fully cognitively present in the moment of engagement, but damn if I could tell you much about the engagement a week afterwards.

Hence, this blog.

I would like to start committing some immediate impressions about films to writing. This is not a substitute for careful criticism, or even cursory "reviews," but an act of journaling that serves as a kind of memorybank. In many ways, it is both rescue act and preservation.

On one level, I do sympathize with Stanley Cavell when he writes in The World Viewed that "a few faulty memories will not themselves shake my conviction in what I've said, since I am as interested in how a memory went wrong as in why the memories that are right occur when they do." On another level, though, it is not that I'm afraid of misremembering films, but barely recalling them at all. Too many films that I professed to love at the time of reception have already "disappeared," so to speak. I'd like to ward off future dissolutions as much as possible with these writings.

To that end, this blog will not just serve as a mnemonic enterprise for its own sake, but will also serve as a series of informal and impressionistic responses to the current cinema. I'm hoping to post some notes on memorable forms of filmic engagements on a weekly basis if possible. "A list of things that quicken the heart," to borrow from Sans soleil, if I may. Somewhat in the spirit of Pauline Kael's dynamic rush to judgement (she was never one to linger over a film), my priority will be on immediacy in the hopes of responding in kind to the movement, energies, sensation and spirit of the movies I watch. Criticism here (I hope) will serve as an attempt to discover forms of permanence amidst the dissipation that haunts our engagement with all art.

It's my ambition that this project will simultaneously help solidify my own critical priorities, and in so doing, will also speak to you cinephiles out there engaged in your own ongoing search for the new, the visionary, and the momentous: cinematic instances that leave a trace, or an imprint - not unlike the crush of flattened grass that marked the idle dalliance of L'Avventura's two lovers.

I hope that you'll find these occasional musings helpful in your own acts of virtual film preservation, and I'll always be happy to hear your own thoughts as well.

Many thanks for joining me along the way!