Thoughts inspired by seeing Richard Kelly's The Box a week after Scorsese's birthday

Scorsese might be the father of American "post-classical" cinema. He - along with De Palma, Bogdanovich, Spielberg, Milius, and Lucas - developed a style that grew out of his love for classical Hollywood filmmaking. Scorsese took the expressive techniques of Ford, Hitchcock, and Lang and used them in such a way that his original emotional and intellectual reaction to those techniques became part of how his movies make meaning. Scorsese's personal take on film history is woven into the texture of his movies, even if - as in Raging Bull or After Hours - the explicit subject has nothing to do with cinema.

I would differentiate Scorsese et al. from Robert Altman and Terrence Malick. Though Altman's movies were in dialogue with those from Classical Hollywood (i.e. The Long Goodbye with The Big Sleep, McCabe and Mrs. Miller with My Darling Clementine), Altman's style isn't informed by his attachment to those older movies in any way. (Richard Linklater is a modern Altman in this respect). While Malick - like Michael Mann and M. Night Shyamalan - makes movies as if no one has ever made a movie before.

Today's "post-classical" directors - P.T. Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Steven Soderbergh, and Richard Kelly - go even farther, making movies where their original emotional and intellectual reaction to the movies they loved exists not only as a subdermal layer of meaning but becomes, in some ways, the primary layer of meaning. The Box, for example, is more of an exploration of Lynchian acting and an exercise in turning suburbia into one of Kubrick's dream/nightmare realms than it is an ethical parable or sci-fi thriller.

This movement is toward decadence and Tarantino is it's Oscar Wilde: his great subject has become the way that our relationship to the movies we love can act as a way of being in the world - a way of coming to a greater sense of self-understanding.

Reeling and 5001 Nights at the Movies by Pauline Kael

Continuing a closer look at this...

I first read Pauline Kael's film criticism not long after finishing the paper that had led me to Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Considering I was a burgeoning film buff, I'm sure I would have gotten around to reading her work on purpose, although I ended up discovering it by accident. Our neighbors across the street were renovating their basement, which they had been using to store all of their books and they offered to pay me to box them all up. I noticed that they had quite a few books of film criticism and while taking a break (it was a hot day - I needed to stay hydrated) I picked up a copy of Reeling and started skimming through it.

By this time, I was already familar with, if not the exact movies she was wiritng about in Reeling, many movies from that era. One of the "major events" in my cine-biography was moving from a rural New York town of 10,000 that had a good, solid video store (Village Video on Raymond Street in Malone) and a single screen theatre to Montreal, a genuine, world-class city with a number of great video stores, multiplexes, and (at the time) even a few rep houses. And given that I was a fan of Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman, I had ended up watching quite a few movies from the "American New Wave". So, my brief look at the book was enough to get me hooked: passionate writing about the kind of movies that I was just beginning to get passionate about - a perfect match!

I went to the bookstore the next weekend to get my own copy, but, since I couldn't find Reeling, I bough 5001 Nights at the Movies, which replaced the Halliwell's Film Guide that I was contiually checking out of the library as my main source for movie recommendations. Over the years, my copy of 5001 Nights stayed with me, moving from house to dorm to various apartments, getting pretty beat up along the way from almost constant reference.

Over the years, I've come to agree with Michael Blowhard that Kael's criticism is more valuable as writing - for its humour, its voice, its passion - than as film criticism, per se. As a critic, Kael is perhaps too reliant on her immediate reaction: her wisecracking confidence doesn't leave any room for doubt or self-reflection. Too often she writes as if she's trying to have the last word rather than start a conversation. But the things she taught me to value in movies - mainly a sense of vitality and emotional truth - are still important to me today. And I still use too many em dashes.

The Greatest

Over in the comments at Sean Collins' blog, I talk a little bit about Casino - one of my favorite Scorsese movies - and different ways to measure greatness (by way of answering the question of Scorsese vs. Malick).

A Decade of Lists

I really liked Chris Stangl's first entry in his look back at his favorite movies of the decade. I fully endorse his philosophy towards making top ten lists:

Each citizen in a world of moviegoers builds a little history of film for themselves, complete with private pantheons, household classics, the unjustly dismissed, overpraised or overlooked. These histories are influenced by our selective blind spots, parents and gurus, taste economies, social engineering and pure dumb chance. List-making is an act of criticism all by itself. It winnows and excludes, reveals and conceals, and for the list-maker causes at least cursory examination of critical values and assumptions.

It is not the most insightful critical practice. List-making is also rife with problems and begs a lot of questions, particularly of the apple/orange variety, and can easily slip into attempt to stratify and quantify the unquantifiable. As much as an awards show, the building of lists can transform art appreciation into a sporting event. When it comes to matters of “Greatest” and “Best,” what we’re really talking about is “Favorites” perfumed with false objectivity. We don’t cotton to objectivity at Exploding Kinetoscope. An objective observation on a movie would read something like “the film was projected onto a screen at a rate of 24 frames per second.” Farber also said in interview that the last thing that matters is whether a writer “liked” the movie or not. Point taken to heart, but it is also the inevitable starting point for all that follows, all critical arguments and observations proceed from preference....

The only qualities I am making conscious effort to project are honesty and a degree of eclecticism. The lists were not built with an eye to looking smart, sophisticated, worldly, populist or contrarian. If they end up that way, so be it.

Chris is insightful on all ten of the movies he writes about here, although I especially appreciated his comments on Mission to Mars and Battle Royale, two of my favorites.

Looking at my own revised top ten list for 2000 (see below) I'm surprised by how many of the movies on it remain at the top of my "decade favorite" list. Partly this is a function of time: I've lived with these movies longer, had a chance to return to them over the years, and so my admiration and appreciation for them doesn't feel like it's based on momentary whims or being overpowered by novelty. They've earned their place in my personal pantheon by not letting go of my imagination over the last nine years. That said, perhaps I'm being unfair to those movies whose immediate, visceral effect on me was greater, but has faded over time.

Anyway, here's my 2000 Top Ten retrospective (with the caveat that I still haven't caught up with some likeyly contenders):

1. Yi-Yi
2. The Gleaners & I
3. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
4. Battle Royale
5. Mission to Mars
6. The Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors
7. Cast Away
8. The Claim
9. Unbreakable
10. Dr. T and the Women

Actually, going back on what I wrote up above, there is one fairly "new to me" movie on this list: I didn't start catching up with Hong Sang-soo until earlier this year. The Virgin is probably my least favorites of his movies that I've seen so far, but I still think it is something special. When I first saw it, it reminded me of Jim Jarmusch's early movies, but, as I have gotten more on Hong's wavelength, I've come to see it - and him - as possessing a one-of-a-kind sensibility.

Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan by Robin Wood

Beginning a step by step journey through this list...

My first steps towards cinephilia started with a love for action movies (especially those starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) and what my brothers and I called "epics" - i.e., movies that came on two VHS tapes (The Towering Inferno, The Right Stuff, The Great Escape), which we liked to rent because they gave us more bang for our (parents') buck.

After that I got into actors. My favorites were Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman, and for my 14th birthday, my parents got me - appropriately enough - coffee table "The Films of..." books for each of them. If I were making a list of books that were important to "my life as a movie watcher", those two would have a place on it, but this list is about my life as an amateur critic.

I checked Robin Wood's Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan out of the Westmount library in order to research a Grade 10 English paper that I was writing on The Graduate. Though I didn't find much in it that directly related to my thesis ("Coming of Age in The Graduate"), I ended up reading through the whole book. I wasn't entirely sure what to make of it.

I had, at this point, learned about the basics of literary analysis in English class, but this was the first book length work of criticism that I had ever read, the first work of criticism that assumed the reader was familiar with the basics of Freudianism and Marxism, and my first exposure to close readings of movies. I can still remember reading Wood's Feudian take on Blow Out and being shocked by all of the phallic symbols he was able to find.

I'm not sure that I found him entirely convincing. Today, I still don't quite agree with his arguments and I value his Howard Hawks book (even though there's lots I'd argue with there, too) more than this one. But what was important to me was less Wood's specific approach, than the idea that I could approach a movie with a critical frameworks in place. And that, by doing so, I might be able to unlock deeper meanings, hidden under the surfaces of the films I loved.

Targets

In the comments of Dave Kehr's most recent entry, Kent Jones asks:

I wonder: are the Coens really satirists? One powerful characteristic of their work is self-containment. Every film presents us with a completely self-contained world with its own rules, its own peculiar shared argot. Whenever I watch one of their movies, I feel like I’m looking inside a snow globe, but I don’t think it’s just a reflection of condescension or smug superiority. They seem obsessively devoted to confounding expectations, and that plays out partly in the way they twist a little here and tinker a little there and invariably come up with something out of Lewis Carroll.

I don't think that the Coen Brothers are just satirists and I agree that the various patterns and organizational strategies hidden in their movies is what makes their work interesting and rewarding. I do think that what makes them satirists has to do with their point-of-view towards their characters, in general, and less to do with having any specific targets, but, that said, the movies do have targets.

Not a comprehensive list:

Raising Arizona - baby mania
Barton Fink - the movie business, idealistic writers
The Hudsucker Proxy - big business, fads
Fargo - capitalism
The Big Lebowski - David Mamet
O Brother, Where Art Thou? - the intersection of American politics, folk culture, and popular culture (see also Nashville)
Burn After Reading - the US intelligence establishment
A Serious Man - the search for meaning

"The Seinfeld Chronicles" by Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld

Here, at the beginning, we already have that focus on reading signs, on looking for the hidden meaning behind every moment of social interaction. Direct communcation - trying to cut through the signs - would mean dropping your defenses - taking the risk of appearing needy, uncool, incomplete. Of course, this leads to the awkwardness: with such imperfect information, how do you know which way to move?

Blue Grass Dreams

Last night I dreamt that I went to a screening of Resnais' Wild Grass, a film I've yet to see in my waking life. In my dream, the movie was made up exclusively of long duration, fixed camera shots, where in each shot, the left two thirds of the frame seems to have been painted over with green or blue paint. I somehow knew that this had been done by hand: Resnais himself had painted over the film, frame by frame, so that almost all of the action was obscured and we in the audience had to guess what was going on in the part of the image now covnered by paint.

Serious Men, Take 2

On the latest post at Dave Kehr's site, Kent Jones leaves a comment that speaks to the subject of my previous post:

Flaubert and James aren’t great artists because they’re overflowing with sympathy for their characters. They are intensely interested in them, which is a different matter. Sympathy for characters can be just as much of a hindrance as a help. Don’t all great works of art result from equal measures of cold detachment and warm engagement? In my opinion, that goes for Cassavetes as well as Kubrick. As for the idea that an artist’s attitude toward his or her characters reflects his or her attitude toward people, that’s a tough one. What are we talking about, humanity at large or people as individuals? And what people, loved ones or people you meet on the street? Then there’s the question of basic human contradiction, which allows people to be great humanitarians and monsters at home, or public misanthropes with an abiding love for their children. And on a more atomized level, don’t people’s stances shift continually? Who is wholly consistent on a moral level? If Cassavetes and Renoir and Elaine May and Aristophanes and Sophocles have taught us anything, isn’t it that people are entirely and maddeningly inconsistent?

I endorse the idea that an author having "intense interest" in their characters is probably more important than whether or not they love or hate them and whether they look upon them with approval or disapproval.

Serious Men

Here's Bill Krohn commenting on the Coen Brothers in an old post from the a_film_by discussion group:

The Coens are satirists, and as Northrop Frye (among others) has noted, critics always confuse satirists with their persona, the Satirist, who is by definition someone who mocks and criticizes people, portrays them as grotesque, stupid and so on. This is a mask which you can actually see in museums -- the Greeks and romans both made physical masks you could put on and be the Satirist. Later it became a literary persona: Swift and Pope are not their personae, their professional masks as satirists. The persona is part of the genre, even though a propensity to satire can go with a certain temperament, whose traits are exaggerated grotesquely in the persona.

There's a line of argument in a lot of literary/film criticism that suggests that it's a moral or ethical failing for an author to have contempt for his characters. That it is somehow "too easy" to make a fictional character look bad, and much more praiseworthy to embrace your characters, warts and all.

More Bill:

Satirists are always accused of hating people. It's simply a convention of the genre they work in. They are regularly described as mean misanthropes - and some of them are - but we should try to maintain some sense of history, particularly since we're in a period when satire is the dominant mythos, whether we like it or not.

Taking that kind of stance - where the author and audience stands above the characters - is an aesthetic choice: one that is as valid as any other. To suggest otherwise strikes me as misplaced indignation and an attempt to play a game of moral one-upsmanship. But it seems strange to advocate against an author on the behalf of something that doesn't exist.

Critical Influences

In approximate chronological order based on when I first encountered them, here are the works of criticism that, over the past 17 years, have most strongly shaped my approach to movies, comics, art, culture, criticism, etc.

Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan by Robin Wood
Reeling by Pauline Kael
5001 Nights at the Movies by Pauline Kael
The Western Canon and The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom
No Surprises Please by Steve Vineberg
Uncollected film criticism by Steve Vineberg
Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus
The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh
Movies by Manny Farber
The Jim Hillier-edited Cahiers du cinema collections
Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye
Tom Spurgeon's comics criticism in The Comics Journal and elsewhere
Gary Groth's comics criticism and commentary in The Comics Journal
The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris
Where Dead Voices Gather by Nick Tosches
Various blog posts on movies, books, art, and culture by Michael Blowhard of 2blowhards.com
Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide
Beauty: The Value of Values and other works by Frederick Turner
Reading the Funnies by Donald Phelps
Sean T. Collins' film and comics criticism on his blog
Jonathan Rosenbaum's film criticism in the Chicago Reader
Bill Krohn's posts on the a_film_by discussion group
Michael Sicinski's film criticism on his Academic Hack website
Various comments and articles strewn all over the web by Adrian Martin
Physical Evidence by Kent Jones

Against Symbolism

In a post on Mad Men, Zach Campbell writes:

What strikes me in the current Age of Quality Television (not like Norman Lear's 1970s, or the classic days of old Ernie Kovacs, who's still better than anything on television I've seen, as well as most things on the big screen) is the relation to the symbol. Because we are, presumably, detached post-existentialist quasi-ironic consumer-viewers, in the 21st century (the convergence century), we cannot always take a symbol. So this is how tasteful narratives—I suppose—develop symbolism now. They take something and then make it an object of explicit or implicit contemplation for one or more of the characters. Recall: the geese in Tony Soprano's pool (season one), or in Mad Men, the pigeons & their relationship to meek wife Betty in the episode titled "Shoot." Wary of what we'd recognize as a symbol, cautious of a con job or of the exposure of stunted faculties from our high school lit courses ("in The Scarlet Letter the A symbolizes..."), we tasteful viewers demand not to be confronted with any overt symbol, but to treat them obliquely. The characters themselves bear a relation to a symbol ('birds'), ponder out loud or through their behaviors the significance of such birds ('freedom'?). Nobody then is forced to make an interpretation they take too seriously because the act of interpreting is oblique—it's for them, not for us.

I think this is a really fascinating point, which applies to more than just these quality TV shows. In Wes Anderson's movies, for example, the characters often make self-conscious comments about the symbolic nature of their actions and behavior.

Appropriately enough, Zach is a admirer of James Gray, whose movies fully and unironically make use of symbolism and allegory (which is part of what makes them feel "classical").

Accept Mystery

Some observations/comments/thoughts on A Serious Man (the movie that is partially responsible for this blog):

-The final sequence/shot is one of my favorites of the year. It's poignant and moving in a way that is rare in the Brothers' movies.

-The movie stands out from the rest of their work in other ways, as well: it isn't a riff on a recognizable Hollywood genre, no pastiche of earlier film styles, and no perpetual motion farce mechanics pushing everything along. About 40 minutes into the movie, a guy sitting behind me asked his companion: "When's the movie going to start?" An understandable question, considering how central "the plot" is to most Coen Bros. movies, but misplaced here, where the mode is episodic, incremental, and observational. The movie slowly gives us the bits and pieces of its larger shape, but leaves it up to us to put them together.

-One of the Coens' "weaknesses", is that they are great screenwriters, but "merely" intelligent, well-schooled directors. They aren't necessarily the most inspired filmmakers, and I sometimes feel that they are too concerned about crossing all their scripts' T's to notice when concepts that work on paper don't quite translate to the screen. For instance: I think the Busby Berkeley number in The Big Lebowski is a funny joke, but as a piece of filmmaking, it's a little stiff; the last act of No Country for Old Men strikes me as being, all in all, too on the nose; the Baby Face Nelson scenes in O Brother make sense conceptually and thematically, but play much more shrilly than seems warranted; and with just about every other scene in The Hudsucker Proxy, their reach exceeds their grasp. Here, though, they're working on a more modest scale (even though their theme is cosmic), and almost every moment feels fully achieved.

Conceptual vs. Experiential

Inglourious Basterds vs. Safe Conduct
Ed Wood vs. The Player
O Brother, Where Art Thou? vs. Nashville
Batman Returns vs. Batman Begins
Metropolis vs. The Crime of M. Lange
Eyes Wide Shut vs. Blume in Love

Past Masterpieces

Even though the film buffs taking part in the discussion in the comments thread of this post are, perhaps too defensively, calling their argument "retarded", I think there are quite a few interesting points being made. The question under debate is: "Is Dogville a revolutionary masterpiece, along the lines of Last Year at Marienbad or Breathless?" What no one has brought up yet, though, is question lurking in the back of my mind, which is whether or not that kind of "masterpiece event" is possible today, considering all the changes in (i.e. fragmentation of) the world's film culture. I suspect not: we seem to have left behind the era of individual, world historical, revolutionary works of art and are now in one where the revolution is dispersed, contingent, and local.