All the Ships at Sea in Park Slope, Brooklyn

My movie All the Ships at Sea will be screened (on DVD) on Sunday, March 15 at 7:30 pm at Congregation Beth Elohim, 274 Garfield Place (at 8th Ave. in Park Slope), Brooklyn. Series co-programmer Keith Uhlich and I will select one or two short films to be screened before the feature, and will lead a discussion. The suggested admission price is $5.00.

On Realism, Beauty, and "Exposure Crisis"

As a quarrelsome discussion about the merits of Joe Swanberg was dying down on Glenn Kenny's Some Came Running site, I put my two cents in, and in the process made the following, perhaps excessively ambitious claim:

"…on the subject of the beauty or ugliness of compositions, I'd like to point out that "beauty" and "realism" are opposed concepts, that they will always be defined by their relationship to each other. Realism is always relative to prevailing practices, and the energy and newness that it aspires to, the ability to revivify the mystery of the photographic image, is totally dependent upon tearing down or neglecting or violating something that we've come to expect. When Rossellini or de Toth decided to let the camera shake, they were a) consciously or unconsciously evoking the newsreel footage that came out of WWII; and b) inviting criticism for undermining the beauty of the composed image. Ditto Cassavetes finding inspiration in cutting that evoked the tension of live TV when the control room punches up the wrong camera for a second; ditto Kubrick shining lights at the camera as if he were a street photographer unable to control light sources; ditto countless other attempts to make the image seem alive again. In each case something nice-looking was destroyed; in each case a new generation of filmgoers learned to find the innovation nice-looking."

The point, which I left as an implication, was that comparing Swanberg's visuals to YouTube uploads was not necessarily an insult. This subject is interesting enough that I didn't want it to get lost in a busy comments section, though I'd like to dial down that authoritative tone, which seems inappropriate on subjects as elusive as "beauty" and "realism."

The idea that realism is relative to prevailing practices is pretty well established, at least in my mind. In this longish 2003 post from a_film_by, I summarized my thoughts about the relativism of realism, during an attempt to establish a baseline for a difficult discussion I was having with Tag Gallagher.

(Apropos the examples from that post, here's a brief excerpt from André Bazin's article "Will CinemaScope Save the Film Industry?" published in Esprit in 1953 and translated in Bazin at Work: "It would be equally naïve to believe that the filmic image tends toward total identification with the universe that it copies, through the successive addition of supplementary qualities from that universe. Perception, on the part of the artist as well as the audience of art, is a synthesis - an artificial process - each of whose elements acts on all the others. And, for example, it is not true that color, in the way that we are able to reproduce it - as an addition to the image framed by the narrow window of the screen - is an aspect of pure realism. On the contrary, color brings with it a whole set of new conventions that, all things considered, may make film look more like painting than reality.")

The motion in the opposite direction, from realism (based as it is on a renunciation of expressive possibilities) to beauty, is difficult to nail down. If one considers beauty as relative to anything at all, one is cast adrift on a sea of subjectivity. I tried to get around this issue in that comment on Swanberg by making an appeal to consensus, giving only examples of visual ploys that are widely regarded as attractive.

If I move away from consensus, and risk irrelevance by permitting unqualified subjectivity, the example that is most on my mind lately has to do with the limitations of the recording process. Very often, when an image strikes me as uncommonly beautiful, I note that the filmmaker has challenged the ability of celluloid or tape to register a full range of light or color values. This idea first occurred to me ten or fifteen years ago, when filmmakers began using faster stock that could record twilight landscapes without supplementary lighting while still avoiding an excessively grainy look. These images necessarily hover on the black side of the black-white continuum; but I have an immediate emotional reaction to crepuscular displays of contrasting colors, and I think I have the reaction precisely because the colors cannot be brought into the middle-range sweet spot of exposure.

I was reminded of the "beauty via exposure crisis" theory after a recent screening of Jacques Rozier's wonderful, too-little-seen Du côté d'Orouët (which has recently become available on English-subtitled Region 2 DVD as part of a Rozier box set). In one scene, Rozier uses a subjective shot through the windshield of a car to show his protagonists driving to a remote rural tavern, with the wooded terrain barely illuminated (perhaps only by the car's real headlights). I didn't immediately realize why the darkness in this image felt so primal and threatening. Easier to process was a later, stunning scene of a day-long sailing trip, where Rozier did not (or could not) adjust his 16mm exposure to prevent his characters' faces from glowing an unnatural red as the sun went down over the water behind them.

Shortly afterwards, I saw Raymond Depardon's Une femme en Afrique, in which the filmmaker lets the detail in sunlit images vanish into white to convey an unusually vivid sense of desert light and heat.

Other countries are generally more willing to flirt with exposure problems than the US, but the remarkable oneness of the interior and exterior scenes in last year's Ballast is largely due to the exclusive use of "God's own natural light," as Lance Hammer put it.

Assorted Screenings in NYC: March 2009

1. If you aren't attending the Jacques Doillon retro at the French Institute (every Tuesday through the end of March), you're missing out: the films are even better than I remembered. I wrote a series summary a few weeks back for the Auteurs' Notebook.

2. Y'all probably don't need to be sold on the one-week revivals of Marco Ferreri's Dillinger è morto (Dillinger Is Dead) , at BAM from February 27 to March 5, and John M. Stahl's Leave Her to Heaven, at Film Forum from March 6 to 12. Each is probably the best film by its director. Here's a little teaser for Dillinger that I wrote a while back:

"The exposition of Dillinger Is Dead feels a lot like other expositions: Glauco (Michel Piccoli) drives home from his job as a manufacturer of industrial masks, greets his wife who is in bed with a headache, sits down to a prepared meal, then decides that he'd rather eat something special. As we follow Glauco around his house and watch him play idly with objects or make small decisions about what to do next, we wait for the event that will get the narrative ball rolling. But the event is slow in coming, and we start to wonder how long director/co-writer Marco Ferreri plans to stretch out this meandering introduction. Glauco browses in a cookbook and begins making a late-night gourmet dinner, listening to the radio while he cooks - and as the film chains little causes and effects together and teases our story expectations, three songs play from beginning to end, complete with disc-jockey chatter. This extraordinary use of stasis on the soundtrack (stasis but not tedium, thanks to Ferreri's narrative sleight-of-hand) shifts us to an indeterminate state of spectatorship: we now know that Ferreri is capable of leaving the film on this mundane level forever; but he continues to open new storytelling doors. In fact, while looking for a spice, Glauco opens an actual closet door, rummages around, and finds...a gun. Does this time-honored Chekhovian signifier mean that a suspense film is finally beginning? Perhaps, but Glauco still has a meal on the stove to attend to...."

3. Celina Murga's Una Semana solos (A Week Alone) is by far the title I'm most excited about in the Walter Reade's Film Comment Selects series. Murga's 2003 Ana y los otros (Ana and the Others) was one of the best debuts of recent years, a gentle mystery story with a keen eye for good performance moments. Rohmer's influence on Murga's first feature was so strong that the film almost seemed an homage, but it's hard to think of another homage this good. Una Semana solos screens on Monday, March 2 at 8:30 pm and Tuesday, March 3 at 6:30 pm, with another screening in the Young Friends of Film series on Wednesday, March 4 at 7:30 pm.

4. Czech director Ivan Passer gets a short retrospective at MOMA on March 6-13. I'm a bit sad that the series doesn't include either Silver Bears or Crime and Passion, the films I'd most readily cite to make a case for Passer's peculiar mixture of Forman-like drollery and unexpected bursts of emotional revelation. Of the films on display, I most recommend Cutter's Way, showing Friday, March 6 at 8 pm and Sunday, March 8 at 6 pm. The rarest film in the series is certainly 1974's bizarre Law and Disorder, with Ernest Borgnine and Carroll O'Connor - I never thought I'd see that projected again. It plays Sunday, March 8 at 1:30 pm and Friday, March 13 at 6 pm.

5. BAM's Focus on IFC Films series on March 6-12 is of special interest because some of these films may go to IFC's Video on Demand instead of receiving theatrical releases. I'm looking forward to Gerardo Naranjo's Voy a explotar (I'm Gonna Explode), as I was an admirer of Naranjo's 2006 Drama/Mex. Voy a explotar screens Saturday, March 7 at 9:30 pm.

6. Jean-Marc Vallée's 2005 Quebecois film C.R.A.Z.Y., playing MOMA on March 18-23, was a hit in Canada, but issues with music rights kept it out of US theaters. I wrote about the film in my 2005 Toronto wrap-up for Senses of Cinema:

"A well-deserved smash hit in Quebec before its screenings at Venice and Toronto (where it won the Best Canadian Feature Film award), Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) has a narrative sweep that is unusual in the Quebecois cinema, where modesty of scale is the rule. A first-person, decades-spanning account of a young man's turbulent coming-out in the ‘60s and ‘70s, C.R.A.Z.Y. dwells nostalgically on period details and on the boy's memories of his family, a crazy quilt of Catholicism, machismo and hipsterism. Working off of the rhythms of the voiceover and the copious music selections (which both characterise the protagonist and serve as the film's true scenario), Vallée and co-scenarist François Boulay arrive at a dramatic depiction of the boy's inner life, which is shot through with the magical thinking and grandiose mythology of early childhood. Playing the charismatic, androgyne hero in his older incarnation, Marc-André Grondin is surprisingly able to hold his own in his lifelong power struggle with veteran Michel Côté's ultracool patriarch."

7. Pontypool, Bruce McDonald's follow-up to his remarkable The Tracey Fragments, plays MOMA on Thursday, March 19 at 6:15 pm and Saturday, March 21 at 8:45 pm in the Canadian Front series.

Stahl vs. Sirk

I wrote a wrapup piece on Anthology Film Archives' "Imitations of Life: Stahl vs. Sirk" series for the Auteurs' Notebook.

Bam gua nat (Night and Day): ImaginAsian Theater, February 12, 2009

Hong Sang-soo's superb 2008 film Bam gua nat (Night and Day). which I wrote about last fall, has been acquired by IFC Films for video on demand, and therefore may not get a theatrical release. But the Korean Cultural Society is sponsoring a screening of the film this Thursday, February 12 at 6:30 pm at the ImaginAsian Theater (at 239 E. 59th St.), with Hong doing a Q&A afterwards. No word on the format; let's hope it's 35mm and not DVD. Admission is free if you RSVP to 212 759 9550.

Jacques Doillon: French Institute, February 3 through March 31, 2009

For those of you who are interested in the Jacques Doillon retrospective coming to the French Institute on February 3 (and I hope all of you are), I wrote up a sort of scorecard for the series for the Auteurs' Notebook.

The House of Mirth

As I watched Gillian Anderson and Eric Stoltz sparring in the early scenes of The House of Mirth, I thought of Josef von Sternberg, because of the way Terence Davies exaggerates social behavior into abstraction. But the resemblance is superficial. Sternberg opens up a big space between the characters and the way they behave, and then fills that space with his own awareness. (I used to resist Susan Sontag's categorization of Sternberg as camp, but now it seems to me fairly accurate, if one allows that camp can be a serious business.) Whereas Davies loves the idea of behavior as ceremony, and fully commits his characters to it. The cross-currents and complexities in their personalities may eventually be revealed (more later about how they are revealed), but in the moment the actors represent a central idea very clearly and very forcefully.

The beauty of the careful compositions and the elaborate decor also seems to express the same emotional commitment to surfaces. A fascinating aspect of Davies' artistic personality is that he is willing to undercut all the sources of his and our pleasure: not just the joys of elegance and the love of ceremony, but also any delight to be had in the catfighting power struggles that organize the fiction. Some filmmakers might take a compensating spiritual pleasure in Lily Bart's hardwon but Pyrrhic moral discipline as she approaches her destiny - Davies takes none. Thus the remarkable bleakness in Davies' work: beyond the beautifully dressed women and the opera music, there is only absence and death. Perhaps there is a masochism at work here to make Sternberg's look trifling by comparison.

There is an elaborate psychological schema at work in this movie. Lily is not merely bushwhacked by predatory society: she is deeply complicit in her own downfall, reacting so violently against the part of her that desires social position that she destroys her own ability to cope and survive. This theme is present everywhere in the narrative; it does not require inference. The interesting thing is that this psychology barely manifests in Gillian Anderson's performance: Davies wants from her a tragic and ceremonial demeanor, not tipoffs. It's actually quite hard to tell whether there is a disconnect between the material and Davies' directorial sensibility, or whether Davies rigged the story to express the psychology (he did adapt Edith Wharton's novel, after all) and then suppressed that same psychology on the set.

In many writer-directors, one feels that the writing and the directing are of a piece, that they are aspects of the same process. Davies may be a test case for another paradigm, according to which the roles of writing and directing would be separated, and even opposed.