Posts
Monday, October 14, 2013
Air Force: Museum of the Moving Image, October 19, 2013
My piece on Howard Hawks' Air Force, playing this Saturday in the Museum of the Moving Image's Hawks retrospective, is now up at the MUBI Notebook.
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Antoine et Antoinette: Film Forum, through Thursday, October 3
I wrote a short piece on Jacques Becker's wonderful 1947 comedy-drama Antoine et Antoinette at the MUBI Notebook. If you drop everything and run to Film Forum right now, the movie is in the last night of its one-week run.
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
I Hate Myself :)
Joanna Arnow’s remarkable I Hate Myself :) presents as a diary film about Arnow’s attempt to document and thereby understand her bumpy relationship with her larger-than-life, serially provocative boyfriend James. The comparison that came to mind immediately was Jim McBride’s 1967 David Holzman’s Diary, which is a fiction film in documentary clothes. And Arnow too includes enough signifiers of fiction – most conspicuously the editing-room debates with her friend Max, who is accurately introduced as “The Naked Editor” – that we can’t comfortably regard the film as a pure document. But it seems impossible as well for it to be completely fictional: setting aside a host of practical considerations, James’s character is so extreme and so coherent in subterranean ways that one has difficulty imagining it as an actor’s or writer’s construction. Ultimately the film wends its way to on-camera display of erections and penetration, where the distinction between fiction and documentary loses relevance.
However we choose to frame them, the human issues that I Hate Myself :) deals with are unusual and compelling. James has a wide streak of rebellion in his personality that is directed against our values, the values of the presumed audience of the movie. As is often the case, his rebellion partly is channeled in constructive directions – his racially confrontational interactions with the residents of his Harlem neighborhood are clearly based on his conviction that liberal assumptions about race and class need to be broken down – and partly floats free to inflict collateral damage on Arnow and others. By contrast, Arnow is mild in demeanor, a good-girl type who tempts us to an early assumption that she is James’ masochistic subordinate. But we quickly see that she admires James’s rejection of societal niceties and counts herself as one of his tribe, even as his jagged social interface takes its toll on her peace of mind. The couple seems to split as the film-within-a-film she is making approaches the rough-cut stage, but the film itself, the one we watch, remains a record of her journey toward him and away from us. The scarlet letter that Arnow dons by including footage of her on-camera sex with James, and the outrage of showing the footage to her parents, are gestures of solidarity with the transgressive mode of being that comes so naturally to James.
This journey, which can reasonably be called spiritual, is expressed via increasingly wild formal play that blurs the distinction between film-within-a-film and film-we-are-watching, to witty effect. Arnow’s first rough cut, already topped with the cherry of unsimulated sex, is subjected to a hall-of-mirrors effect, as she screens the film repeatedly for its cast of participants, each time photographing their reaction and inserting the footage into subsequent cuts. The trick is more than mere play, as the repetition creates a crazy centrifugal effect that latches onto and accelerates the transgression that Arnow rather joyfully embraces. I especially liked the clever way that Arnow excerpts the film’s soundtrack as we watch the faces of her perplexed preview audiences. At one point we think that a piece of dialogue has accidentally been repeated, only to realize that the cut we are listening to has already looped back on itself with multiple iterations of the same dialogue. And it gradually dawns on us that the unfamiliar music we hear during the rough cut screenings is surely the end-credit music that we’ll be the very last to experience.
I left before Arnow’s question-and-answer session at Rooftop Films last week, not because I didn’t want to hear what she had to say – she’s clearly an intelligent and aware artist – but because her post-film commentary was necessarily going to add yet one more layer of reflexivity to the viewing process, and I found myself deciding arbitrarily to stop the merry-go-round at the point when the projector was turned off.
However we choose to frame them, the human issues that I Hate Myself :) deals with are unusual and compelling. James has a wide streak of rebellion in his personality that is directed against our values, the values of the presumed audience of the movie. As is often the case, his rebellion partly is channeled in constructive directions – his racially confrontational interactions with the residents of his Harlem neighborhood are clearly based on his conviction that liberal assumptions about race and class need to be broken down – and partly floats free to inflict collateral damage on Arnow and others. By contrast, Arnow is mild in demeanor, a good-girl type who tempts us to an early assumption that she is James’ masochistic subordinate. But we quickly see that she admires James’s rejection of societal niceties and counts herself as one of his tribe, even as his jagged social interface takes its toll on her peace of mind. The couple seems to split as the film-within-a-film she is making approaches the rough-cut stage, but the film itself, the one we watch, remains a record of her journey toward him and away from us. The scarlet letter that Arnow dons by including footage of her on-camera sex with James, and the outrage of showing the footage to her parents, are gestures of solidarity with the transgressive mode of being that comes so naturally to James.
This journey, which can reasonably be called spiritual, is expressed via increasingly wild formal play that blurs the distinction between film-within-a-film and film-we-are-watching, to witty effect. Arnow’s first rough cut, already topped with the cherry of unsimulated sex, is subjected to a hall-of-mirrors effect, as she screens the film repeatedly for its cast of participants, each time photographing their reaction and inserting the footage into subsequent cuts. The trick is more than mere play, as the repetition creates a crazy centrifugal effect that latches onto and accelerates the transgression that Arnow rather joyfully embraces. I especially liked the clever way that Arnow excerpts the film’s soundtrack as we watch the faces of her perplexed preview audiences. At one point we think that a piece of dialogue has accidentally been repeated, only to realize that the cut we are listening to has already looped back on itself with multiple iterations of the same dialogue. And it gradually dawns on us that the unfamiliar music we hear during the rough cut screenings is surely the end-credit music that we’ll be the very last to experience.
I left before Arnow’s question-and-answer session at Rooftop Films last week, not because I didn’t want to hear what she had to say – she’s clearly an intelligent and aware artist – but because her post-film commentary was necessarily going to add yet one more layer of reflexivity to the viewing process, and I found myself deciding arbitrarily to stop the merry-go-round at the point when the projector was turned off.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Notes on the Extant Films of Mikio Naruse
I've been writing short blurbs on Mikio Naruse's films as I've been seeing them over the last eight or so years, and recently I came to the end of the pile and compiled the blurbs of all extant Naruse works into a 35-page document. Sadly, I wrote much shorter and sketchier blurbs at the beginning of the project than at the end, and the compilation is way too inconsistent to be publishable, but Naruse buffs may want to use it as a reference.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Rio Bravo
Generally regarded as a career peak for Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo is both the culmination of the Hawksian action ethos and the gateway to Hawks’ relaxed late period. In his ground-breaking 1968 book on Hawks, Robin Wood identified a post facto trilogy - Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, and Rio Bravo - that forms the backbone of Hawks’ oeuvre. Though Wood described the films as loose remakes of each other, their plots aren’t very similar. On the surface, what they have in common is a lot of recycled dialogue and bits of business. Below that, all three films are centered on idealized characters whose state of being is not at risk. Because they themselves are not put up as the stakes for the drama, the drama is subtly devalued. More important to the film’s effect is a performance space, carved out from the plot, where these heroes and their group of allies and comrades can enjoy themselves when they are not dealing with story issues. Though that space corresponds to real locations – in Rio Bravo, the jail and the hotel – it’s really more of a space within the fiction, in that events there enjoy some degree of independence from story concerns.
In addition to being the capstone of this central trilogy, Rio Bravo also bears a relationship to the five films that Hawks would make in the final decade of his career. Rio Bravo was a substantial commercial success, after a dodgy period in the early 50s when Hawks wondered how to position himself with regard to a changing industry. Speaking to Peter Bogdanovich, Hawks described the lesson he took away from Rio Bravo: “I also decided that audiences were getting tired of plots and, as you know, Rio Bravo and Hatari! have very little in the way of plot – more characterization and the fun of just telling a story. And it worked out very well. People seem to like it better than the other way.” Certainly Hatari!, Hawks’ next film, pushed the boundaries of how little narrative structure a Hollywood film could get away with. Here the performance space expands to become the film’s dominant feature: it’s the lightly-borne plot that is hemmed in by walls of behavioral pleasure. The genie would not go back into the bottle: though none of Hawks’ later films were quite as daring as Hatari! about discarding narrative, all of them liberate performance from story to a large extent, and wind up feeling like documentaries of actors hanging out on sets.
But, though one understands why Hawks thinks of Rio Bravo as a film of characterization, its plot is more prominent and functional than Hawks lets on. In fact, if Rio Bravo stands out in Hawks’ filmography, I’d say it’s because it adds to Hawks’ more familiar virtues a distinctive command of storytelling, organizing small events within overarching story movements so adroitly that the viewer has few opportunities to check his or her wristwatch during the film’s 141 minutes.
Here’s an example of how Hawks uses the jail/hotel axis and the characters’ motifs to sustain actions for long stretches of time. The night of the story’s second day starts with Dude fighting the DTs in the jail, prompting Chance to take him out for “a turn around the town.” (The last sentence, like those to follow, represents a fully developed and leisurely paced scene.) The walk gives rise to a number of small events (a few false alarms, a confrontation with a Burdett henchman) and, in the fullness of time, carries Chance and Dude to the busy hotel bar, where Chance has a long talk with his friend Pat Wheeler about the futility of offering help to the lawmen, ending with Wheeler’s employee Colorado opting for “minding my own business.” Chance’s attention shifts to a card game in a corner of the room, and he follows Feathers upstairs as she leaves the game, leading to a confrontation in which Feathers is accused of cheating. Colorado interrupts their talk to propose that “the man in the checkered vest,” not Feathers, was the cheat in the card game, and everyone goes downstairs to watch Colorado expose the perpetrator. Chance and Feathers have one more conversation, partially resolving their conflict, before Chance and Dude finally leave the hotel – only to see Wheeler gunned down on the street. The pursuit of Wheeler’s killer begins, first with Chance charging into a barn from which the killer manages to escape, and then with the famous saloon confrontation, itself a graded dramatic module in which the alcoholic Dude, seemingly heading for public humiliation, shoots the killer out of the rafters with angelic grace, setting the stage for Chance’s vengeful, act-closing warning to the Burdett men. In a lengthy postscript to the night’s action, the heroes talk over their exploit in the jail, with Dude’s inability to roll his own cigarettes signifying his continued psychic vulnerability; finally Chance goes to sleep at the hotel, where he has a late-night talk with Feathers in which he makes peace by offering to call in the sheriff’s flyers that identify her as a criminal’s accomplice. Only here does the action that began with Dude’s DTs in the jail, nearly 35 minutes of screen time earlier, come to rest.
This long continuous development of a single action is not unique in Rio Bravo. Perhaps an even better example occurs on Day Four, in which a jail-to-hotel-to-jail movement that encompasses both the flowerpot-throw gunfight and Dude’s uncanny redemption from alcoholism is honeycombed with ancillary conversations in which Dude, Feathers and Colorado are pushed along a step or two in their journey to membership in the Hawksian commune. One wonders which of the script collaborators was principally responsible for the film’s intricate, difficult plotting, or how this job of work fell out of Hawks’ memory. In any case, the pleasure of watching Rio Bravo is slightly different from (and, I would say, slightly greater than) that of any other Hawks film, thanks to the intertwining of Hawks’ ambient, behavioral vision and this framework of deceptively compelling storytelling.
More than any Hawks film I can remember, Rio Bravo is keyed to characters watching each other, to cross-cutting on glances. Chance and Stumpy watching Dude's withdrawal symptoms in the jail; Dude watching from across the street as Chance’s authority forces a Burdett henchman to retreat; Feathers wincing as Chance pulls a chair from under a bad guy; Chance monitoring Dude’s performance in the precarious saloon confrontation with Burdett’s men; the glances of amazement as Dude pours the whiskey back into the bottle – in all cases the cross-cutting feels primary rather than secondary, a way of creating a film about relationships rather than exploits. Robin Wood, noting that Chance is a moral leader but dependent on his cohort’s help at every turn, and that his virtue seems to exclude him from the communal song sequence, suggested that Hawks was problematizing the image of the self-sufficient hero. But I'd say that Hawks was never deeply invested in the notion of self-sufficiency. He uses it as part of the thematic structure of films like Only Angels Have Wings and To Have and Have Not, but Hawks is always inclined to start his movies from a foundation of such genre-defined cultural associations, and the solitary inclinations of Geoff Carter and Harry Morgan are more story premises than sources of artistic inspiration. (Don Siegel would be a counterexample of an artist whose exciting ideas generally form around the mystery and mythology of solitary figures.) Hawks’ greatest enthusiasm is reserved for the web of personal connections that his characters happily weave around themselves. That Rio Bravo contains no substantial struggle between self-sufficiency and communal life feels less like a new tack for Hawks than a step in the process of purification and de-genre-fication that was to become marked in Hawks’ late period.
In addition to being the capstone of this central trilogy, Rio Bravo also bears a relationship to the five films that Hawks would make in the final decade of his career. Rio Bravo was a substantial commercial success, after a dodgy period in the early 50s when Hawks wondered how to position himself with regard to a changing industry. Speaking to Peter Bogdanovich, Hawks described the lesson he took away from Rio Bravo: “I also decided that audiences were getting tired of plots and, as you know, Rio Bravo and Hatari! have very little in the way of plot – more characterization and the fun of just telling a story. And it worked out very well. People seem to like it better than the other way.” Certainly Hatari!, Hawks’ next film, pushed the boundaries of how little narrative structure a Hollywood film could get away with. Here the performance space expands to become the film’s dominant feature: it’s the lightly-borne plot that is hemmed in by walls of behavioral pleasure. The genie would not go back into the bottle: though none of Hawks’ later films were quite as daring as Hatari! about discarding narrative, all of them liberate performance from story to a large extent, and wind up feeling like documentaries of actors hanging out on sets.
But, though one understands why Hawks thinks of Rio Bravo as a film of characterization, its plot is more prominent and functional than Hawks lets on. In fact, if Rio Bravo stands out in Hawks’ filmography, I’d say it’s because it adds to Hawks’ more familiar virtues a distinctive command of storytelling, organizing small events within overarching story movements so adroitly that the viewer has few opportunities to check his or her wristwatch during the film’s 141 minutes.
Here’s an example of how Hawks uses the jail/hotel axis and the characters’ motifs to sustain actions for long stretches of time. The night of the story’s second day starts with Dude fighting the DTs in the jail, prompting Chance to take him out for “a turn around the town.” (The last sentence, like those to follow, represents a fully developed and leisurely paced scene.) The walk gives rise to a number of small events (a few false alarms, a confrontation with a Burdett henchman) and, in the fullness of time, carries Chance and Dude to the busy hotel bar, where Chance has a long talk with his friend Pat Wheeler about the futility of offering help to the lawmen, ending with Wheeler’s employee Colorado opting for “minding my own business.” Chance’s attention shifts to a card game in a corner of the room, and he follows Feathers upstairs as she leaves the game, leading to a confrontation in which Feathers is accused of cheating. Colorado interrupts their talk to propose that “the man in the checkered vest,” not Feathers, was the cheat in the card game, and everyone goes downstairs to watch Colorado expose the perpetrator. Chance and Feathers have one more conversation, partially resolving their conflict, before Chance and Dude finally leave the hotel – only to see Wheeler gunned down on the street. The pursuit of Wheeler’s killer begins, first with Chance charging into a barn from which the killer manages to escape, and then with the famous saloon confrontation, itself a graded dramatic module in which the alcoholic Dude, seemingly heading for public humiliation, shoots the killer out of the rafters with angelic grace, setting the stage for Chance’s vengeful, act-closing warning to the Burdett men. In a lengthy postscript to the night’s action, the heroes talk over their exploit in the jail, with Dude’s inability to roll his own cigarettes signifying his continued psychic vulnerability; finally Chance goes to sleep at the hotel, where he has a late-night talk with Feathers in which he makes peace by offering to call in the sheriff’s flyers that identify her as a criminal’s accomplice. Only here does the action that began with Dude’s DTs in the jail, nearly 35 minutes of screen time earlier, come to rest.
This long continuous development of a single action is not unique in Rio Bravo. Perhaps an even better example occurs on Day Four, in which a jail-to-hotel-to-jail movement that encompasses both the flowerpot-throw gunfight and Dude’s uncanny redemption from alcoholism is honeycombed with ancillary conversations in which Dude, Feathers and Colorado are pushed along a step or two in their journey to membership in the Hawksian commune. One wonders which of the script collaborators was principally responsible for the film’s intricate, difficult plotting, or how this job of work fell out of Hawks’ memory. In any case, the pleasure of watching Rio Bravo is slightly different from (and, I would say, slightly greater than) that of any other Hawks film, thanks to the intertwining of Hawks’ ambient, behavioral vision and this framework of deceptively compelling storytelling.
More than any Hawks film I can remember, Rio Bravo is keyed to characters watching each other, to cross-cutting on glances. Chance and Stumpy watching Dude's withdrawal symptoms in the jail; Dude watching from across the street as Chance’s authority forces a Burdett henchman to retreat; Feathers wincing as Chance pulls a chair from under a bad guy; Chance monitoring Dude’s performance in the precarious saloon confrontation with Burdett’s men; the glances of amazement as Dude pours the whiskey back into the bottle – in all cases the cross-cutting feels primary rather than secondary, a way of creating a film about relationships rather than exploits. Robin Wood, noting that Chance is a moral leader but dependent on his cohort’s help at every turn, and that his virtue seems to exclude him from the communal song sequence, suggested that Hawks was problematizing the image of the self-sufficient hero. But I'd say that Hawks was never deeply invested in the notion of self-sufficiency. He uses it as part of the thematic structure of films like Only Angels Have Wings and To Have and Have Not, but Hawks is always inclined to start his movies from a foundation of such genre-defined cultural associations, and the solitary inclinations of Geoff Carter and Harry Morgan are more story premises than sources of artistic inspiration. (Don Siegel would be a counterexample of an artist whose exciting ideas generally form around the mystery and mythology of solitary figures.) Hawks’ greatest enthusiasm is reserved for the web of personal connections that his characters happily weave around themselves. That Rio Bravo contains no substantial struggle between self-sufficiency and communal life feels less like a new tack for Hawks than a step in the process of purification and de-genre-fication that was to become marked in Hawks’ late period.
Saturday, January 19, 2013
2012 Manhattan One-Week Premieres
I've done as much post-Christmas viewing as I'm likely to do, and am ready to make a list of my favorite films that played at least one
week in Manhattan for the first time in 2012. I exclude films that were
made too long ago to feel contemporary (such as Lucien Pintilie's Niki and Flo).
In order of preference:
1. The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo)
2. Michael (Markus Schleinzer)
3. The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
4. Alms for a Blind Horse (Gurvinder Singh)
5. Amour (Michael Haneke)
6. This Must Be the Place (Paolo Sorrentino)
7. Generation P (Victor Ginzburg)
8. The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev)
9. Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari)
10. Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
11. Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
12. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)
Runners-up: Bernie (Richard Linklater), The Avengers (Joss Whedon), Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve), Happy Few (Four Lovers) (Antony Cordier), Artificial Paradises (Yulene Olaizola), and maybe even Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik).
In order of preference:
1. The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo)
2. Michael (Markus Schleinzer)
3. The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
4. Alms for a Blind Horse (Gurvinder Singh)
5. Amour (Michael Haneke)
6. This Must Be the Place (Paolo Sorrentino)
7. Generation P (Victor Ginzburg)
8. The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev)
9. Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari)
10. Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
11. Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
12. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)
Runners-up: Bernie (Richard Linklater), The Avengers (Joss Whedon), Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve), Happy Few (Four Lovers) (Antony Cordier), Artificial Paradises (Yulene Olaizola), and maybe even Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik).
Monday, May 7, 2012
2011 Manhattan One-Week Premieres
I got a little busy in the first quarter of 2012, and am finally getting around to making a list of my favorite films that played at least one week in Manhattan for the first time in 2011. I exclude films that were made too long ago to feel contemporary.
In order of preference:
1. The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat)
2. Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh)
3. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
4. Silver Bullets (Joe Swanberg)
5. To Die Like a Man (Joao Pedro Rodrigues)
6. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
7. Caitlin Plays Herself (Joe Swanberg)
8. The Descendants (Alexander Payne)
9. We Bought a Zoo (Cameron Crowe)
Runners-up, in alphabetical order: Art History (Joe Swanberg), Aurora (Cristi Puiu), Autoerotic (Joe Swanberg and Adam Wingard), Impolex (Alex Ross Perry), La pivellina (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel), London River (Rachid Bouchareb), Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan).
In order of preference:
1. The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat)
2. Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh)
3. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
4. Silver Bullets (Joe Swanberg)
5. To Die Like a Man (Joao Pedro Rodrigues)
6. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
7. Caitlin Plays Herself (Joe Swanberg)
8. The Descendants (Alexander Payne)
9. We Bought a Zoo (Cameron Crowe)
Runners-up, in alphabetical order: Art History (Joe Swanberg), Aurora (Cristi Puiu), Autoerotic (Joe Swanberg and Adam Wingard), Impolex (Alex Ross Perry), La pivellina (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel), London River (Rachid Bouchareb), Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan).
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