Dance Party, USA

This Is Serious Early 'Mumblecore'

Dance Party, USA [2006], the debut from Aaron Katz, depicts an early-20-something/late-teens house party, and all the house parties out there, all the Americas within the United States. As such Katz's film's title hits all the spots. (I don't remember this program at all though I had to have seen some of it: "Dance Party USA is an American dance television show that aired daily on cable's USA Network from April 12, 1986, to June 27, 1992.") The film — and could Katz have known at the time of creation? — addresses the 'mumblecore' predilection for house parties: easy to shoot, full inventory of extras, all props drinkable.

Serial fuck-wizard Gus (Cole Pensinger) confesses to his best friend Bill (Ryan White) that he might have raped a 14-year-old named Kate at a party some months back. At one point, Gus pays an afternoon visit to the girl in an attempt to glean clues from the party and somewhat quieten his conscience. Gus almost 'wins our sympathy' in his avoidance of coming on to the would-be-Kate, who all but lays it out for him to take in her parents' house's basement rec room; it's painful to watch as it becomes clear that the girl has no recollection of Gus being at the party, let alone taking the role of her rapist, let alone having any idea whatsoever who this veritable stranger might be who has showed up on her doorstep.

The shame of male insecurities. Less fraught would be the thread involving Jessica (Anna Kavan) which — at a house party — coincides with Gus's. Any scene involving her involves beauty and calm, a slow rhythm. Before Jessica and Gus run into one another at a Portland fair, the latter wanders the exhibitions, with a crimson "S" emblazoned on the back of his t-shirt. Reputation-Gus unknowingly sports a scarlet letter. •

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Other writings in Cinemasparagus on the films of Aaron Katz:

Dance Party, USA [2006]

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De Sade

Barbs Were Traded

Cy Endfield grew up in Wilkes-Barre, PA, about twenty minutes from my hometown, Scranton. (Wilkes-Barre: the hometown too of Dan Sallitt.) De Sade, exhibited by Roger Corman's American International Pictures, is the filmmaker's 1969 follow-up to the 1964 epic Zulu. 

There's a gossamer pattern in the marquis's spacious chamber/theatre-space, a lattice of cobweb evoking draped semen strings. It goes without saying that even this Marquis de Sade version X has nothing on the novels in terms of an urgency to the rapacious libertinage. Yet unlike most fiction cinema, the deeply red-filtered orgy scenes of De Sade give one time to think (as opposed to whatever TV allows its audience — time to drift). De Sade (portrayed by Keir Dullea) enters into marriage contract with a physically sensational woman who upon the marquis's signature being laid to document, vanishes — or rather is replaced (as though nothing should be more normal) by a meek-jawed Briton, pretty in her own way but certainly of a different make... More metamorphoses involving buxom service-girls still as the movie progresses...

Simple découpage: ordering successive shots across space (location) and time (duration) like in most mainstream narrative films; here, normalcy that absorbs not just consideration of a scene's space-time allowance but also the cut that leads into the next scene's action. Examine time and space as an axiom of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. — another film wherein love and death / eros and thanatos create their dance, no matter how 'actually (and perversely) abstract.' Released a year prior to De Sade, time and aging will decisively conclude the Kubrick film.

Sade sheds psychic skins, shimmers like a boor-ealis... •

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Cosmos

Macro and Micro

Show me a cosmos, a deep-focus woods, a young woman standing in relief against a rather ancient garden wall creating by an ivy network running from the edge of one frame to the other. The opening verses of Dante's Inferno carry from a forest path, recited by Jonathan Genet, the main character of Żuławski's Cosmos [2015] based on the eponymous 1965 novel by Witold Gombrowicz. As Witold (Genet) progresses down the way toward camera, he discovers a ruffled bird hanged dead by the neck from a frayed cord affixed to a tree branch. Other members of Witold's friend's household, wherein Witold has taken a summer sublet (studying law, perhaps but giving more time to the composition on a novel or poem of high-pitch) variously find on the estate grounds a hanged plucked chicken, another hanged bird, and maybe most gruesomely, a travestied black and white cat tied dead to a slim tree limb.

Juxtaposed with the traditional French family dinners that make up at least half the scenes in Cosmos, the animal deaths speak to the anti-Tenenbaum quality of this crazy film, all menace and curse. Two performances stand out in particular and during these sequences: those of Jean-François Balmer (as Léon Woytis) and his partner Sabine Azéma (Mme. Woytis): tributes to the acting of the stage — tribute and shuffle this time not just using Godard as an element in earlier films like L'amour braque (make no mistake that Godardian invocations are however present) but also the force of structure and neoclassical + modernist notes of Alain Resnais and his specific type of artifice of stage and screen. Azéma was Resnais's partner in real-life, probably a perfect match, the couple together for decades till his passing, — she has only gotten greater an actress in my estimation as the years go on. (For some reason, Azéma never broke through — or didn't want to break through — to the American film scene in the same way that Binoche, Deneuve, Huppert, and most recently Seydoux have.)

Genet and his friend from the dwelling Johan Libéreau (Fuchs) go for a walk at the rainy strand by the sea. They pick up a rugby match with some other beach-goers. The spray from the water flings droplets onto the camera lens. "Cosmos" (a perfect title for more Żuławski than one) is not immaterial. •

Other writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Andrzej Żuławski:

L'important c'est d'aimer [1975]

L'amour braque [1985]

Cosmos [2015]

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