Apparently this is bullshit
Apparently this is bullshit, but if Oliver Stone needs a scriptwriter with local knowledge… accept no substitutes.
December 10th, 2004
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Two docs in shaky-cam.
Two docs in shaky-cam.
1: Mondovino, in cinemas today, arguably the best of this year’s documentary explosion. Like The Corporation it’s an investigation of global capitalism, but rooted in a concrete analysis of one product: wine, opening out from an immediate symptom — an Bove-via-Ealing-style counteroffensive against a giant Napa Valley combine in a corner of France — to reveal the massive number of contradictory factors in play. The ‘amateur’ camerawork (with the lensman concentrating mainly on the interviewees’ pets) actually pays off: better this than the blank ‘talking head’ style that makes everyone an equivalent voice.
2: Don’t Look Back (1965): a famous ‘direct cinema’ piece following the still-acoustic Bob Dylan on his May 1965 tour of England. Bob ends up playing the Albert Hall, but before doing so asks a hanger-on whether England has any poets like Allen Ginsberg. The answer comes in the negative. Just a month later saw the Albert Hall Incarnation (at which Ginsberg performed, along with a plethora of transatlantic beats), usually seen as the ‘year zero’ of the English underground, and which provided the material for the first work of English cinema-verite: Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion. Alas, Bob leaves with the impression that this is an island of bible-bashing, adulating know-nothings — so much for ’synchronicity’, that watchword of the ’60s.
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December 9th, 2004
Politics Can’t Kill The Situationist International
Politics Can’t Kill The Situationist International. Not really DYS, but this needs attention. Having spent the ’70s making trad-left agit-prop plays, David Edgar now sees the ‘light’: ‘Thirty years later, the miners’ triumph in 1974 looks hubristic, an ironic prologue to the tragedy of 1984-85. On the other hand, the libertarian socialist critique of consumerism appears surprisingly, if not uncomfortably pertinent. This is a world in which challenges to oppression have been downgraded into lifestyle choices, the political process has been turned into a form of shopping, and (to quote a Situationist slogan) the ideology of consumption has become the consumption of ideology.’ Splitting the movements from Marxism, the Situationist canon becomes just another arrow in the quiver of cultural criticism…
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A heart-warming and implicitly anti-rockist letter
A heart-warming and implicitly anti-rockist letter to The Times from an Oxford legend:
Sir, The outcry against David and Victoria Beckham as Joseph and Mary is risible. What character tests were imposed on the persons so portrayed in the churches and art galleries of the world?
How many courtesans (and no one is calling Posh that) must have served as models for the Virgin — or do the critics imagine that painters and sculptors were all vouchsafed personal visions?
Yours faithfully,
LEOFRANC HOLFORD-STREVENS
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December 8th, 2004
Does the umpteenth rehashing of rockism-bashing get your blood boiling?
Does the umpteenth rehashing of rockism-bashing get your blood boiling? Not as much as rockism itself, and the upcoming NFT ‘Easy Riders, Raging Hormones I [Heart] the ’70s’ Fest provides plenty of that. The programme notes posit an interesting film/life split which also finds its way into David Thomson this week:
‘Closer is the kind of picture one had nearly given up hopes of seeing: it’s just four people, talking to or watching each other, sniping, taunting, rebuking, all in the matter-of-fact tone whereby Julia’s character will tell one of her two men that yes, having oral sex with the other guy was much the same as serving him, but sweeter. Some critics in America have flinched from Closer and from the encounter with Julia Roberts talking in that kind of way. Those doubters say Closer is so depressing it reminds you too much of life. And, of course, that is revealing of the wretched state in which film and film comment find themselves nowadays. Once upon a time, we used to hope for films that reminded us of life. Now we put up with attempts to make us forget life, or discredit it.’
I don’t want to sound like Mark ‘Rock’n'roll, Dope, and Fucking in the Streets’ K-Punk or anything, but the link between talking game and being ‘honest’ in a ur-’70s Carnal Knowledge kinda way is so pre-Foucault (not that I’ve read him, or seen Closer). The appeal to the olden days when DT was able to enjoy such slice o’ life classics as Citizen Kane and Taxi Driver is of a piece.
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December 6th, 2004
Love is colder than death.
Love is colder than death. A jogger collapses, dead. A child is born. Intertitle: ‘Ten years later’. These are the first three events in ‘Birth’ and already it has the Luis Bunuel feeling — in spades. This was only confirmed when the end credits listed one of Bunuel’s collaborators as a co-writer. Freudian theory was relatively easily incoporated into Hollywood storytelling, with the basic Oedipal plot underpinning films across genres: ‘Birth’, like Bunuel’s films, cannot be reduced the the Freudian ideas that inspire them. The ten-year-old who claims to reincarnate — in fact, be — Kidman’s late husband is not simply a surrogate son. In other words, I can’t really figure it out. As a suspense film, it’s a bust: the ‘explanation’ for the kid’s behaviour is so weak that the director actually buries crucial plot information: the revelation is blink-and-miss. Music dominates the film, and the film resembles music — I guess: it orchestrates emotions, sometimes obscure. Its treatment of ‘content’ (which is present: social tension, family tension) is oblique. Glazer is clearly a fan of Kubirck, but no Kubrick film contains a scene as gutwrenching as the finale here.
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December 5th, 2004
Down With Skool
or Don’t Look Back in Anger
Shot during the Prague Spring and released after the Russian invasion, Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If….’ would seem to have earned its parenthetical (1968). With its violent anti-authoritarianism, long-haired hero and touches of surrealism, the film is ideal double-bill material for ‘La Chinoise’ or ‘Easy Rider’. Yet, if you can characterise a man by the marches he goes on, Lindsay Anderson was more Aldermarston than Grosvenor Square, and the hero of his film owes less to Danny Cohn-Bendit than to James Dean and Jimmy Porter. ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and ‘Look Back in Anger’. Today the two works signify a generalized discontent at the conformist Fifties. But for Anderson they held more personal meanings.
Anderson began his film career in 1947 while still at Oxford as co-editor of the undergraduate journal Sequence. Although the magazine itself lasted just 14 issues, its personnel and ethos were taken up by Sight and Sound under Anderson’s childhood friend (and future biographer) Gavin Lambert in the early Fifties. Generally credited as one of the first attempts to ‘take Hollywood seriously’, the magazine is best understood not as a precursor to Cahiers du Cinema (whose pro-Hollywood crusade commenced about 1953) but as a partial blow against puritan-left orthodoxy, whose values, chief among them ‘realism’, derived from the British documentary movement of the ’30s.
The new emphasis comprised a concern for ‘poetic’ style — a quality found in both the European art cinema of Jean Vigo and the westerns of John Ford — and a somewhat revised political-moral commitment: left-wing, but not Communist, as much of the preceding generation had been. ‘Poetry’ became the alibi of favoured Hollywood directors, but in general the Hollywood cinema was seen to debase its audiences: British directors who went there, like Hitchcock (in person), or David Lean (in spirit) were not well regarded. Attempts to discern the serious from the meretricious among Hollywood films constituted much of Anderson’s critical work, and ‘Rebel Without A Cause’, Nicholas Ray’s global sensation of 1955, was a pertinent example of the latter. Anderson’s own early films, made under the banner of Free Cinema, and like Sight and Sound, sponsored by the BFI, were not intended as calling cards for more remunerative engagements abroad. They dealt with working-class subjects and expressed, in the words of one sage, ‘a kind of exterior, poetic pathos on behalf of anything poor and old’. The movement’s breakthrough moment came in early 1956, which saw the first screenings of the Free Cinema films by Anderson and his Sight and Sound colleagues Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, and the yet more seismic debut of ‘Look Back in Anger’ at the Royal Court theatre under Richardson’s direction.
While never writing off Hollywood cinema tout court, Sight and Sound generally assumed that good work was only possible by accident or by luck, and that excepting privileged figures like Ford (about whom Anderson wrote a book), popular cinema was not only frivolous but dangerous. Much of this stemmed from the journal’s patchy left-wing commitment. One of Anderson’s celebrated polemics roasted Elia Kazan’s ‘On the Waterfront’ (1954), whose anti-union bias he traced to the director’s treacherous role in the HUAC hearings. The fact that it was shot by the same man — Russian cinematographer Boris Kaufman — who was ‘man with a movie camera’ on Vigo’s films (Dziga Vertov was his brother) was demonstration enough of Hollywood’s power to corrupt. If John Ford’s ultra-conservatism somehow escaped censure, Nicholas Ray, a veteran of New York’s Group Theatre in the 1940s along with Kazan, was damned by association; if not exactly reactionary, ‘Rebel Without a Cause’, Anderson wrote in 1957, was ‘an obsessed film, in which the artist completely identifies with his subject, unable to show it in any sort of perspective’.
Blind to the formal brilliance of Ray’s best films, Anderson was crippled by the anti-Americanism typical of his magazine, his generation, and his class (’energy without depth’ was, says Lambert, his verdict on the USA). But there was perhaps a more intimate reason for the attack. Early in 1956 Gavin Lambert had quit London, Sight and Sound, and his friend after meeting Nicholas Ray, and being summoned (as personal assistant and lover) to Hollywood — just as the rest of the gang were making their mark. Anderson would protest, but ‘Rebel’, symbol of a vulgar culture that habit would not allow him to embrace, was a shaping force in his life and work. The film (’starring our favourite our favourite actor, James Dean, whom we constantly imitate with buddy-buddy talk and pretend knife-fights’) not only inspired the writers of ‘If….’; its director came close to making what turned out to be Anderson’s film after one its Oxford undergraduate co-authors, David Sherwin, having sent off a hopeful draft, was lucky enough to win a meeting with Ray. (In fact, the great man offered him a similar ‘PA’ job to that which he had given to Lambert a few years before.)
Personal ties and coincidences apart, ‘If….’ itself stands out from Anderson’s earlier work because it, like ‘Rebel’, is ‘an obsessed film’, in which there is minimal distance between its subject and its author — Anderson’s old school tie secured him access to film on location at Cheltenham College. Traces of Anderson’s other concerns as a critic emerge — the film’s surrealist edge, for example, is clear, and recalls not only the Czech New Wave (personally present in the figure of cinematographer Mirek Ondricek), whose stance against Soviet Socialist Realism mirrored Anderson’s hostility to the McCarthyite Kazan school of direction, but also Jean Vigo, whose ‘Zero de Conduite’ (1933) was itself a classic take on classroom rebellion.
Nevertheless, the film was far stronger than Anderson’s earlier work precisely because it had abandoned the kitchen-sink spirit of ‘56. The Free Cinema films, like Anderson’s feature debut ‘This Sporting Life’ (1963), had traced the alleged impoverishment of working-class cultural traditions in the context of post-war affluence and the modern ‘American’ consumer capitalism of which ‘Rebel’ was a contradictory kind of product — their literary counterpart is Hoggart’s ‘The Uses of Literacy’. But because this world was totally alien to Anderson (unlike Hoggart), his attitude towards it was always in contradiction his own Free Cinema motto: ‘no film can be too personal’. The success of ‘If….’ can be put down in part to the fact that it dealt with his own class experience, could not have been more personal, and that it is as a result far more anti-traditional. Fifties Anderson celebrates the anachronism of Covent Garden porters; Sixties Anderson rages against the archaism of the public school system. Within its cultural DNA is an archetype of American teen rebellion that Anderson (described by Iain Sinclair as a ‘leather-coated patrician’) could only ever consciously regard as other, giving a dissonant edge to this seemingly uber-English, super-personal film. As Jimmy Porter once said, ‘perhaps all our children will be Americans’.
Henry K. Miller
Posted by HKM in Essays | No Comments
December 2nd, 2004
RUB QUIZ MORE LIKE.
RUB QUIZ MORE LIKE. Comments on the boorish, unfunny compere at the movie quiz in my local minor sleb hangout would be better suited to Pumpkin Publog, so I won’t make them here. But the content of the quiz itself is indicative of wider trends (really OLD and CRAP trends). Not one question on non-US cinema. Hardly any on films from before ‘The Godfather’. And, here speaking as a member of the only team to have a female component exceeding 49%, a distinctly laddish, Hotdoggish bias: successive questions on the careers of Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken! And in NO WAY is my snarkiness related to my crew’s poor showing. Certainly not.
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December 1st, 2004
The revisionist logic
The revisionist logic of the ‘New Cold War’ is worked through in the ideological forging-house of Amazon.com customer reviews:
‘As you might expect, a 70 year old communist propoganda film is not gripping entertainment.
The first “song” [In Dziga Vertov's 'Three songs of Lenin'] is the saga of how the revolution liberated a woman from the oppression and ignorance of Islam. A powerful topic that not many people would dare to tackle today. She goes from being imprisoned in her veil to a free woman, attending school, driving a tractor and learning to shoot a gun.
But as we know, communism was no utopia either.’
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November 24th, 2004
Post idea 2:
Post idea 2: Old film mags had a local-paper quality lost among the glossies: a regular lament was the infelicities of NFT programming. So my two cents is: why seemingly every ruddy film ever made by George Cukor and a very incomplete selection of Lindsay Anderson? I’m not knocking Cukor, but just because he directed some fine films doesn’t mean anyone needs to see all he did. It is, to use an old saw, the National Film Theatre, and Anderson launched a major post-war film cycle at the NFT. Some gratitude. And the time slots suck too.
Post idea 1: Waaah, I’m going to miss ‘The White Bus’ (1967) tonight.
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