On to black-and-white, a surveillance aesthetic and apparatus, the somewhere else that's not here. A cat passes through, and that's the something here that's living, keeping the place presenced.
Observe the difference between the cat's body's felicity and the lumbering bulk of the character Nick (Adam Craycroft), eyes fixed to the computer. And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You — a nice title, funny, pulled from later on in the picture during a dispute that's comical and harsh. But also a reminder we're somewhere between the lands of the living and of the dead, where he just comes around and dances with you. Everything's washed in brushed-aluminum greys, like the waters seen from the ferry.
And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You by Kentucker Audley, 2007:
Or a CTA train. Dateline Chicago. A passenger's got a stud off-center beneath her lower lip. Nick's agaze. He's a stocky and beaten Richard Garriott. As much as he'd like it to be his eyes can't operate independent of that twisting mouth, he's a mouth-breather on the inside, like how nowadays folks drink milk only inside of the movies. He does a bad job of spying on himself — what does Nick think he's putting forward when he evades a neighbor that passes in the stairwell with "I kind've been lookin' forward to gettin' dinner on, so.", or hunkers with his cell to tell Jessica, who's in England, whose apartment he's either sitting for or squatting at, "So you know what babe I think I'm gonna get ready for bed."? This man with a moustache like the pedipalps of a spider who cuts things short. This man with the expression like he's not sure whether he just shit his pants.
And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You by Kentucker Audley, 2007:
It's a lead-up to later — he's Sour Disgust-Puss as he audio-iChats the girlfriend about a guy who's "teaching her how to dance" ("a real whiz on the dancefloor"), and the "fuckin'"s start to flow like leachate. It's as though the caller to the talk-radio show's managed to teleport in-studio, moustache an extra frown above his lip. Bad-humor's quantum with this guy, next you know he'll be in your kitchen, and he'll be drinking your milk, and what's more he'll be doing it in an inside-out t-shirt, motherfucker. Kentucker Audley knows that two-gallon jugs are the dumbest-looking containers and that a marble counter can help exploit this reality.
And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You by Kentucker Audley, 2007:
The movie ends on a dream-sequence — well, not really, it's more another 'manifestation' in-film, another interzone. A woman's on the train-platform speaking in Spanish. Nick — or Craycroft — is wearing glasses now and reacting in stammers, his face ping-ponging confusion and (at last) focus. Inside and outside, here and not here, reacting but wanting: one expression vacant with wondering re: a tax refund and the other seeming serious to convey: "Stop the Genocide of the Tamils in Sri Lanka."
And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You by Kentucker Audley, 2007:
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Click here to go to the next page and read about Team Picture.
Perseverance, or: Postcards from the South of Cinema
From the omega to the alpha, from the hosing-up of a 90%-inflated baby-pool to its sad-lawn emptying, thank the prince of Hell and lightbringer Lucifer, or only Sony and Apple, for helping develop Team Picture and all the alternate American cinema not geared toward rec-room jerks, serial assessors, terminal hobbyists, '70s-apotheosisists, or the guy sitting next to me as I write this — unless of course the lot's up for getting onboard with Feelings and Life-Shit and abandoning Wednesdays spent working out where they presently stand with early-Oughts Scorsese.
Furthermore? It turns out there're other places for an American to shoot in aside from New York. In this sense alone, Team Picture stands like a beautiful fable of reconsideration.
Obviously film festivals are glutted with dispatches that originate from contiguous States. The vast number of these pictures barely dark their ink enough on a schematic index of world cinema relevance to warrant pause; traces of personality and worldview, the impress of philosophical or storytelling ideas — these things are mostly absent from those movies, and when the shots aren't "handheld" their color-timing barely registers much past the hue of steamed clams.
Now it was really rich, whenever Coppola would suggest his anticipation of these little devices inventing a new Orson Welles. (The machinery makes the man!) The interviewer would ask him which young filmmakers he admired and of course he'd say Wes Anderson and Darren Aronofsky... Even if you're not pigging out on "content" to fill the hole of your days I'd think you'd detect a note or two in the semiosphere of something different from movie-movies having been happening over the last couple years in American cinema. In short, the blood's back on the tracks, better instincts are starting to strangle the 'whimsical' per capita, and little indication of being bowled over by the films of Akira Kurosawa's getting much display.
One of the worst motivations for becoming a filmmaker is having wanted to become a filmmaker. I don't think you can make good films, wanting to make films. Even if I'm making a film now that's ostensibly about cinema or some filmmaker, what I'm really doing is fighting the light from my mother's closet at 7 on any cold school-morning from age 6 or 11. Neither Kentucker Audley, nor his fellow-Tennessean Harmony Korine, nor Audley's conspirator-in-NYC-lancing Lena Dunham make their movies out of anything but a need to make-non-evanescent the experiences more murderous than movie-memories, to capture the exposed-to things shaken in respective humors.
A little to wit: Louis Skorecki, one of the damnedest writers-about-film ever, these days does the best 'film writing' possible by not 'writing' very much of it at all — instead, is blog-embedding YouTube clips of the latest Bob Dylan performances, which seems about right to me. Seems just as worthy as typing: The color of the sky in Osaka...
Likewise Kentucker Audley understands that the important things 'are already there.' The color of the late-afternoon Memphis sky, the overgrown lawns in maybe-never need of mowing, the air whose thickness you gauge just from the lean and relent of cicadas' mass clicking. Miasmic air modifying light. Air too hot for lots of shirt-wearing.
A miracle the equipment worked. — And even when Amanda Harris tosses the blankets on the hotel room floor for a suddenly chastened Audley, there's a give-two-shits quality that says: "Never had use for this many sheets anyhow." Even the body language is hot — butterknife cruel.
Team Picture by Kentucker Audley, 2007:
It might do to draw attention here to the fact that, as luck will have these things, Audley's a better actor than Al Pacino. Here he is in the first episode of Joe Swanberg's web serial with Ronnie Bronstein, at around the 1m 20s mark —
Like with the best performers, some immutable persona eddies the surface as shin-budging undercurrents inflect the 'consciousness' of the thing. A selected Kentuckerography: the smarmy standoffish'ness of the Butterknife porchsitter; his invocation of a sort of Slothrop's dæmon in Dustin Guy Defa's forthcoming Bad Fever; and the un-self-conscious bodily cool of the Audley turn in Pillowface by Lena Dunham — who, by the way, might be justifiably deemed Tribeca's answer to Luc Moullet. ("Luca Moullet," whatever.) In Team Picture diffidence and good manners preside. When his character David quits the job at the sporting-goods store owned by his hepped-up stepdad (Greg Gaston, in one of the picture's several spot-on characterizations — alongside Bill Baker's David's-dad in dungarees, that Arkansas kitchen, Chapultepec in Germantown, the living-room hanging-plant, and then some), Kentucker breaks the news by twice offering, "I enjoyed it," gets 'gracious,' 'congenial,' 'endearing,' and 'hilarious' across all at once, and the whole moment's right as rain.
Team Picture by Kentucker Audley, 2007:
The language runs in rivulets, branching around, not exactly evading, whatever's out there. You really have to see Team Picture to hear Audley's ear, but consider the following:
— David and his girlfriend: "What're you doin'?" "I'm leavin' for my art show." "What time does it start?" "It starts at six." "That's early, i'n't it?" "No." "What is it, normal?" "Yeah, it's normal."
— His housemate Eric (Timothy Morton), on borrowing an extension of garden-hose to fill the pool: "Why don't you go next door and borrow one of theirs? They love to share."
— David introducing his song at a café open-mic: "Hello everyone tonight, hello everyone tonight. It's probably not night, it's probably, uh, 7:30. It's pretty close to night." (Some girl at the earlier poets' open-mic waxes existential — "in françois, of course.")
— Eric yelling to David from the living-room: "What are you doin'?" "Um, I'm makin' some changes around my room."
— David's mom (Terry Hamilton) addresses her son after hearing he quit the sporting-goods shop: "All of a sudden you don't like this job?" "No, I always didn't like it."
Eric/Morton brings the action of the film to a close — it's time to empty that baby-pool and get off the lawn for good — with a near-Faulknerian flourish: "Thank God, because all this business talk was makin' me feel like a real business-talkin' man. ... We're gonna worry our future out."
Team Picture by Kentucker Audley, 2007:
And so the cycle that began with filling the pool, and proceeded through coaxing Sarah (Harris) to come stick her feet in it while sipping a Pabst (S: "Sounds enjoyable." D: "Well yeah, it's great. Do you uh, do you like, uh, enjoyment? There's actually room for, uh, more than one enjoyer."), ends in deflation and the girl gone off to Chicago. One last melody from troubadour Audley — "I came down with the perseverance. / The perseverance. / The perseverance." — and one final shot that transfigures the yard into a place of abstraction, ambivalence, nullity and renewal.
Team Picture by Kentucker Audley, 2007:
Such is the perseverance. I like Audley and I like his films because through them he's saying: "Will not serve." His pictures dispense with the bullshit to express experience and everything that's deeply felt, especially the dusk-truth of life as something sad, and beautiful, but mostly sad. I like how he's sharing the secret it's always pretty close to night.
"It was like whole numbers. The man could count the gradations in the movement of Anthony Perkins' head. Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental movements rather than one continuous motion. It was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or a bird. Then again it was not like or unlike anything. Anthony Perkins' head swiveling over time on his long thin neck."
•••
"Everybody remembers the killer's name. Norman Bates, but nobody remembers the victim's name. Anthony Perkins is Norman Bates, Janet Leigh is Janet Leigh. The victim is required to share the name of the actress who plays her. It is Janet Leigh who enters the remote motel owned by Norman Bates."
(cf. the Histoire(s) du cinéma, Episode 4A — "Le Contrôle de l'univers")
•••
"Janet Leigh in the long interval of her unawareness. He watched her begin to drop her robe. He understood for the first time that black-and-white was the only true medium for film as an idea, film in the mind. He almost knew why but not quite. The men standing nearby would know why. For this film, in this cold dark space, it was completely necessary, black-and-white, one more neutralizing element, a way in which the action becomes something near to elemental life, a thing receding into its drugged parts. Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her."
•••
"Arbogast. The name deeply seeded in some obscure niche in the left brain. Norman Bates and Detective Arbogast. These were the names he remembered through the years that had passed since he'd seen the original movie. Arbogast on the stairs, falling forever."
•••
"They see one brain-dead room in six gleaming floors of crowded art."
•••
"The knife, the silence, the spinning rings.
"It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at."
•••
"He began to think of one thing's relationship to another. This film had the same relationship to the original movie that the original movie had to real lived experience. This was the departure from the departure. The original movie was fiction, this was real."
•••
"He found deeper interest in a scene when there was only one character to look at, or, better maybe, none."
•••
"Light and sound, wordless monotone, an intimation of life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that's not the movies."
•••
"I arrived after dark.
" 'No plush armchair with warm lighting and books on a shelf in the background. Just a man and a wall,' I told him. 'The man stands there and relates the complete experience, everything that comes to mind, personalities, theories, details, feelings. You're the man. There's no offscreen voice asking questions. There's no interspersed combat footage or comments from others, on-camera or off.'
" 'What else?'
" 'A simple head shot.'
" 'What else?' he said.
" 'Any pauses, they're your pauses, I keep shooting.'
" 'What else?'
" 'Camera with a hard drive. One continuous take.'
" 'How long a take?'
" 'Depends on you. There's a Russian film, feature film, Russian Ark, Aleksandr Sokurov. A single extended shot, about a thousand actors and extras, three orchestras, history, fantasy, crowd scenes, ballroom scenes and then an hour into the movie a waiter drops a napkin, no cut, can't cut, camera flying down hallways and around corners. Ninety-nine minutes,' I said.
" 'But that was a man named Aleksandr Sokurov. Your name is Jim Finley.' "
•••
"I'd done one film only, an idea for a film, some people said. I did it, I finished it, people saw it but what did they see? An idea, they said, that remains an idea.
"I didn't want to call it a documentary, although it was assembled completely from documents, old film footage, kinescopes of TV shows from the 1950s. This was social and historical material but edited well beyond the limits of information and objectivity and not itself a document. I found something religious in it, maybe I was the only one, religious, rapturous, a man transported.
"The man was the one individual on-screen throughout, the comedian Jerry Lewis. This was Jerry Lewis of the early telethons, the TV shows broadcast once a year to benefit people suffering from muscular dystrophy, Jerry Lewis day and night and into the following day, heroic, tragicomic, surreal.
"I looked at kinescopes of the early years, every distant minute, it was another civilization, midcentury America, the footage resembling some deviant technological lifeform struggling out of the irradiated dust of the atomic age. I edited out all the guest appearances, the lounge acts, movie stars, dancers, disabled children, the studio audience, the band. The film was all Jerry, pure performance, Jerry talking, singing, weeping, Jerry with his ruffled shirt open at the collar, bow tie undone, a raccoon flung over his shoulders, Jerry inviting the nation's love and wonder at four in the morning, in closeup, a crew-cut sweating man in semidelirium, a disease artist, begging us to send money to cure his afflicted children.
"I had him babbling in unsequential edits, one year shading into another, or Jerry soundless, clowning, he is knock-kneed and bucktoothed, bouncing on a trampoline in slow motion, the old flawed footage, the disturbed signals, random noise on the soundtrack, streaky patterns on the screen. He inserts drumsticks in his nostrils, he sticks the handmike in his mouth. I added intervals of modern music to the track, rows of tones, the sound of a certain re-echoing drone. There was an element of austere drama in the music, it placed Jerry outside the moment, in some larger surround, ahistorical, a man on a mission from God.
"I tormented myself over the running time, settling finally on a freakish fifty-seven-minute movie that was screened at a couple of documentary festivals. It could have been a hundred and fifty-seven minutes, could have been four hours, six hours. It wore me out, beat me down, I became Jerry's frenzied double, eyeballs popping out of my head. Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. This was not wrong. But I didn't want Elster to know about it. Because how would it make him feel, being a successor, a straight man to a rampaging comic."
•••
" 'Film is the barricade,' I told him. 'The one we erect, you and I. The one where somebody stands and tells the truth.' "
I received a comment early this morning from someone at the Cinémathèque Française announcing that Godard's new homage-film for Eric Rohmer had been placed on the organization's site, here. The page also includes video of remarks by Toubiana, Douchet, Chabrol, and Barbet Schroeder, alongside comments from Arielle Dombasle, Fabrice Luchini, Frédéric Mitterand, and a collection of Rohmer's actors and collaborators. I've embedded Godard's film here.
Hommage à Eric Rohmer by Jean-Luc Godard, 2010
Last month after news about the Godard film broke I posted the following:
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I woke up this morning to find an email from Andy Rector, via Samuel Bréan who wrote: "In this week's issue of Les Inrockuptibles (742, 17/2/2010), Jean-Marc Lalanne describes the recent evening that the Cinémathèque Française dedicated to Eric Rohmer, with onstage tributes by collaborators, a screening of Le genou de Claire, etc."
The article ends with the following (my translation appears below the French version) —
•••
Mais le choc de la soirée vint de la découverte d'un petit film signé Jean-Luc Godard réalisé pour l'occasion. Sur un écran noir se succèdent les titres des plus célèbres articles de Rohmer dans les Cahiers. En voix off, Godard évoque des images sorties des limbes : deux jeunes amis, parlant ensemble dans la nuit ; les mêmes dans la cuisine de la mère de l'un, leur préparant à manger, débattant encore de films... Rarement on avait entendu Godard parler de choses si personnelles, très simples et très nues. Le film se clôt sur un plan furtif du cinéaste, un peu hagard face à sa webcam. Déjà il a disparu. On aimerait le retenir. On aimerait les retenir tous les deux.
•••
But the shock of the evening came with the discovery of a small film by Jean-Luc Godard created for the occasion. Over a black screen, the titles of Rohmer's most famous articles from the Cahiers appear one after another. In voice-over, Godard evokes images pulled from the ether: two young friends, speaking to one another through the night; the same pair in the kitchen of one of their mothers, making food, going back and forth discussing films... Rarely have we heard Godard speak of such personal things, very simple and very exposed. The film closes with a furtive shot of the filmmaker, face slightly haggard in his webcam. With that, he's gone. You want to hold onto him. You want to hold onto both of them.
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A piece I wrote about Rohmer on the day his death was announced appears here.
Tributes by Louis Skorecki and Michel Mourlet appear here.
"Gainsbourg's lyrics [as sung by France Gall] obviously have nothing to do with the worldview expressed by other teenage vocalists of the time; of course the world [of those vocalists] has its charms, but it has not a single atom of depth. In the lyrics of Gainsbourg's songs in general, and "Laisse tomber les filles" in particular, there is a startling lucidity coupled with a refusal to be taken in by "the great farce of love", defined in terms of "never" and "always". But, with "Laisse tomber les filles", we are not presented with a male narrator of thirty or thirty-five years, but rather a teenager." —Gilles Verlant, Gainsbourg [2000]
"In the Mouth a Desert" "Trigger Cut" "Elevate Me Later" "Shady Lane" "Father to a Sister of Thought" "Rattled by the Rush" "Perfume-V" "Summer Babe" "Kennel District" "Silence Kit" "Range Life" "Unfair" "Stop Breathin'" "No Life Singed Her" "Fight This Generation" "Date w/ IKEA" "Box Elder" "Grounded" "Gold Soundz" "The Hexx" "Give It a Day" "Cut Your Hair"
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"Stereo" "Spit on a Stranger" "Conduit for Sale!" "Loretta's Scars" "Here*"
House [1977] by Nobuhiko Obayashi. Available in a DVD edition, with an anamorphic presentation of its original 1.55:1 ratio. The cinema revival event of 2010 on both sides of the Atlantic is one of the purest author expressions ever detonated, the blood of the poet splashed through the cage of the Super Ape. It's relentlessly worked, and a truly free film: something on par with the masterpieces of Seijun Suzuki from 1980's Zigeunerweisen onward but of a worldview all Obayashi's own. A tremendous interior vision articulates the truth of the real sky, the perfect manor moonlit isolate, the eminence of the exurbs. House preserves, protects, and reaffirms the retardant: for a soul was on fire.
The original Japanese theatrical trailer accompanies the feature, along with ninety minutes of video interviews with Obayashi and associates that take the elegiac "we had such crazy ideas in the day" tack. A 40-page full-color booklet contains a 2009 essay by Paul Roquet and loads of production stills.
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A selection of Ernst Lubitsch's excellent pre-Hollywood works have been brought together in a six-disc DVD boxset, Lubitsch in Berlin: Fairy-Tales, Melodramas, and Sex Comedies: Six Films by Ernst Lubitsch, 1918-1921. Each film is presented with optional English subtitles and in its original 1.37:1 ratio — German-language intertitles intact.
Ich möchte kein Mann sein [I Wouldn't Like to Be a Man, 1918] — A deleterious pore-ridden elder gets invited into the home of the young Ossi Oswalda (who anyway is never ingenuous) for discipline-and-punish. He ends up possessing her. We never find out what the absent uncle makes of it all. One of the first entries in a genre that Lubitsch alone invented and Fritz Lang proceeded to develop: the comedy of cigar-fucking.
Die Puppe. [The Doll., 1919] — The doll-girl (that is, Ossi again, here in imitation of an automaton) becomes an agent of freedom in a stilted, mechanistic social strata-sphere. This massively ironic picture is Lubitsch's most extreme early iteration of his obsessive "mistaken-identity" theme.
Die Austernprinzessin. [The Oyster Princess., 1919] — Several viewings might reveal this to be the strangest of the Ossi-Lubitsch collaborations: for all its kineticism (the movie's got an epic foxtrot scene in its center) one feels that the director has begun to explore the possibilities of equilibrium, of turning scenes into 'blocks,' of slowing things down, not keeping the machine so tightly wound. It's important: he'll need a new rhythm for the films that immediately follow, then again in '29.
Sumurun [1920] — Next to the following film in this set, one of the two circulating Lubitsch movies not many people can find a lot of love for. (His final silent, 1929's Eternal Love, might also share this dubious distinction.) It's worth revisiting, pocked as it is with stabs at ambiance — and more. For example: Imagine if there were a scene in a Star Wars film in which George Lucas had a band of traveling minstrels show up in a town, and one of the troupers is a hunchbacked lutist, and a crowd gathers, but then another member of the group starts performing a belly-dance in the immediate vicinity, and this distracts the crowd away from the original performer so that they all skirt off to watch the more provocative show. The hunchback gets mad, rushes over and slaps the belly-dancer in front of her spectators, who jeer as he drags her back inside one of the troupe's wagons. It would be a beautiful example of a perfect scenaristic episode. Except it doesn't happen in George Lucas. It happens in Ernst Lubitsch.
Anna Boleyn [1920] — The titular "Anna" being a Germanization of the historical "Anne." Maybe a little heavy, arguably a little too long, but still one of the great films about open secrets.
Die Bergkatze [The Mountain-Lion / The Wildcat, 1921] — This one's almost totally about shapes and forms. There's a part where the fortress commander's sitting down in his throne enjoying a smoke, flanked by swooping geometry and a pure sphere at rest atop a cylinder. It's a 'representation' or an 'indication' of artillery, but sublimated into form for the sake of form. Because ordnance, by its nature, is too idiotic to really deserve being filmed.
A sixth disc contains Robert Fischer's 2006 feature-length documentary Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin: From Schönhauser Allee to Hollywood. The set also includes fantastic short essays for each of the films, written by David Cairns (Sumurun, Anna Boleyn), Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (Die Puppe., Die Austernprinzessin.), and Anna Thorngate (Ich möchte kein Mann sein, Die Bergkatze). A newly commissioned score written, performed, and recorded by Bernard Wrigley soundtracks Die Puppe., and is a great example of silent-film-accompaniment done (and recorded) with some sensibility — that is, it lacks histrionic piano plinky-plonk and chilly-razor digital tonality.
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Une femme mariée, fragments d'un film tourné en 1964 en noir et blanc [A Married Woman: Fragments of a Film Shot in 1964 in Black and White, 1964] by Jean-Luc Godard, newly reissued in a Blu-ray edition in its original 1.37:1 ratio, with a glorious 1080p image, exquisite grain-structure, and a truly robust uncompressed soundtrack. All of the features of the DVD edition have been retained and updated for the Blu-ray. In April I wrote here about the DVD edition:
••••••••••
[I]ncluded [...] is the original 3-1/2-minute trailer for the film (approx. two minutes longer than that listed in the filmography of the Centre Pompidou's 2006 volume Jean-Luc Godard: Documents), created and edited by Godard himself (presented in true 1080p HD, non-uprezzed, for the Blu-ray).
Accompanying the disc: an 80-page perfectly-bound book (cited by voters in the 2009 DVDBeaver year-end poll as among the best DVD 'extras' of the year) that contains:
— A carefully crafted cover.
— Film-credits for both the feature and the trailer.
— An editorial preface on the release, on "Godard-style" graphic pastiches in JLG-related media collateral, and on the commodification of cinema and physical/virtual "home video" media.
— A short inquiry into the nature and use of "production stills" in media and press.
— A new two-page 'overture' to the film by Luc Moullet....
— A new 20-page roundtable discussion on the film, and its relationship to the entirety of Godard's oeuvre from the '60s to the '00s, between Luc Moullet, Bill Krohn (of "Kinbrody and the Ceejays" notoriety), and me.
— A new 21-page investigation into and analysis of the film, by Bill Krohn.
— A new statement about the film by its star, Macha Méril.
— A new and exclusive English translation by me, running 12 pages, of Godard's genius 1978 lecture on the film, and its relationship to Ingmar Bergman's work, to Flaherty's Nanook of the North, to Rossellini's Francesco giullare di Dio, and to the world and the Image at large, as originally transcribed and presented in the long-unavailable and absolutely vital Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma.
— JLG's Hitchcock collage.
— The relevant excerpts from Jean Racine's Bérénice, presented in the original French, with new parallel English translations by me.
— Endnotes, featuring remarks by myself and Andy Rector.
••••••••••
This is the Godard film (a) in which time tends to stand still the most (as always in Godard, both analysis and sensuality are being presented and are occurring; moreover, in Une femme mariée we get the sensuality of this analysis alongside the analysis of sensuality); (b) in which JLG proves (in the mathematical sense) 'documentary' ≠ 'acting', that is, he reveals the precise moments when the former reveals, in turn, its subsumption of the latter.
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City Girl [1930] by F. W. Murnau. Available in a Blu-ray edition, in a 1080p presentation with original 1.19:1 aspect ratio. The most overlooked late-Murnau film has been given new life in high-definition, and the results are stunning. It seems to me impossible from here on out to relegate City Girl to "minor" status; it could very well come down to the Blu-ray format's bringing us as close to celluloid as we're ever likely to experience in a home setting (on a TV/display-esque device) that the strengths even of the Fox-imposed sequences alone have been made freshly and powerfully evident. (Yes, Blu-ray might well be the site of the first truce between the projection purists and the home-theater'acs.) To speak briefly of the qualities of the film as a whole: It's the sequel of sorts to 1927's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, insofar as Murnau takes the denuded premise — a 'simple' man and a 'simple' woman love each other, have their love tested across the milieux of city and country, and in the end achieve an apotheosis or platonic ideal of Love and are thus redeemed (thus "Love Is All," a sentiment not unfamiliar to those who've seen the close of the director's Faust) — and hones it further at the level of story and a newly linear mise-en-scène, thereby accessing previously untapped and soaringly lyrical modulations in the emotional array. This latest viewing also revealed to me something I hadn't picked up on in previous screenings: a mystical 'transference' of blame and guilt that leaps from one character to another in the course of the proceedings like an electrical charge (articulated by the postures of the bodies), or as though these people are connected by a psychic chain, with each successive manifestation of the transference betraying a 'prime,' then 'double-prime' (etc.) set of characteristics at the "leap". To diagram all the permutations of this phenomenon in detail will require its own blog-post — but I did just want to make a public note of the fact, which will also hopefully serve as a reminder for me to explicate it when a few free hours come my way.
The disc also includes a new and exclusive audio commentary by David Kalat, and a production-still-heavy 28-page booklet with a 2003 essay by Adrian Danks.
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M [1931] by Fritz Lang. Available in both Blu-ray and DVD editions — with a to-die-for 1080p presentation on the former, and a high-def progressive transfer on the latter, the film appearing on both in its restored form and with its original 1.19:1 aspect ratio. M is linked to Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse in the same way that the end of each scene in both films is linked (or rather, 'rhymes') with the opening image or sound of the scene directly following. While this internal architecture is fairly pronounced in both works, I only reiterate here its existence to forefront the idea that these two films constitute as concerted a diptych in the Lang oeuvre as the bi-fold structures of Die Spinnen, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler., Die Nibelungen, or the Indian Epic. (M and Das Testament even share a common character in Otto Wernicke's Herr Kommissar Lohmann.)
Two separate audio commentaries supplement the feature: one with Anton Kaes and Eric Rentschler; the other with Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Koerber, Torsten Kaiser, and intermittent excerpts from Bogdanovich's 1965 audio interview with Fritz Lang. Also included: the rarely seen 1932 British release version of M created by committee after Lang's original had left German theaters — this version features different actors, takes, and Peter Lorre's first English-language performance. Last but not least, Erwin Leiser's fascinating 1968 documentary Zum Beispiel Fritz Lang [For Example: Fritz Lang], in which Lang discusses his career at Ufa. A 48-page booklet contains Fritz Lang's 1931 essay "My Film M — A Factual Report"; a 1963 interview with Lang; detailed notes by Anton Kaes and the relevant script excerpt pertaining to a scene still missing from the restored version of the film; an essay by Robert Fischer titled "Mörder — Meurtrier — Murderer: The Multi-Language Versions of Fritz Lang's M"; and a massive amount of production stills and original production artwork.
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There's Always Tomorrow [1956] by Douglas Sirk. Available in a DVD edition, with a high-definition anamorphic transfer of the film presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Sirk was one of the two or three greatest film-namers in cinema history — I mean, the titles of his films throughout the Hollywood phase are exceptional and stand as doubly, sometimes trebly ironical commentary upon the events their pictures disclose. — ALL I DESIRE. — MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION. — ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. — THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW. — WRITTEN ON THE WIND. — THE TARNISHED ANGELS. — A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE. — IMITATION OF LIFE. And the titles are all the more extraordinary, or surprising — or magnificent — because the vision of the cinema that they would seem to 'advertise' (for so often in Hollywood cinema, especially that of the '40s and '50s, the titles were like circus-barkers) not only lives up to but exceeds the promotion. "THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW" is one of my favorites. In one sense, the title's hopeful, averring: "If not today, then the next day," and invoking the eternal promise of tomorrow. But listen closely and you can hear, as though under the breath: "It's never gonna happen" — because anyone who ever says "there's always tomorrow" never makes a move in the present — and reality is all only past-and-present. And the title is, therefore, shattering. Among the picture's other brilliant aspects there's Barbara Stanwyck, one of the greatest of all screen actresses in one of her greatest performances. And then there's the theme of the home as a prison, carried over from Sirk's 1949 Shockproof, and given form not only in the claustrophobic clouds of parlor furniture and a series of arbitrary dividing walls and screens (erected so as to 'define rooms' or, as was often explained unironically by the wise adults of my childhood years, to 'divide up space'), but in the candlesticks that rise from the dining room table like spears and (via Sirk's brilliantly shifting camera) unite and divide characters in tableau-like compartments, and would-be conspiratorial alliance versus one another. (Stanwyck and MacMurray positioned in the space between two candles, with the son in the segment demarcated to the right; then the camera shifts at the precise moment where dialogue constructs a new tension/alliance, and new demarcations form — etc. This occurs three or four times in the scene.)
Also included on the disc is a rough only-extant version of the original American theatrical trailer, a 1956 dialogue and continuity script (as an on-disc PDF file), and Pascal Thomas's and Dominique Rabourdin's incredible 61-minute 2008 documentary Quelques jours avec Sirk [A Few Days with Sirk]. A 40-page booklet contains an essay by Andrew Klevan and excerpts from a wonderful 1977 interview with Sirk by Michael Stern.
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On an unrelated note: I finally saw Casablanca for the first time ever. It's a film by Michael Curtiz, by the way, though the studio and the collective unconsciousness fails to acknowledge that it has an author — these Stadt-der-Arbeiter-esque entities often opt to credit it to "the genius of the system" instead, whatever that means. Anyway, there's a separate essay for that; right now, it's enough to say I thought it was great. (Or maybe not entirely enough to say such. Not to take the sentiment off the rails, but it's important to remark that I watched Casablanca on the Blu-ray that was a released a couple years ago — and that Blu-ray is awful. After viewing the movie, try though I might have, I couldn't find any indication about its awfulness in any of the reviews online; were reviewers at that point just too grateful to have Blu-ray technology in their hands at last? It's perplexing. It is very obviously awful. Here's how: The film grain has been scrubbed out of the image. Every shot looks flat, and every human being's skin casts a 'gleam' akin to light bouncing off a white plastic surface in Kubrick's 2001. I'll never watch this disc again, and can only hope it gets revisited for a re-re-re-re-remastering somewhere down the line. As it stands, the Blu-ray of Casablanca is a crime against film preservation.) (Quick sidenote: and another unremarked-upon awful Blu-ray release: The Godfather, in which a strange 'MotionFlow'-esque/frame-smoothing algorithm has been seemingly applied at some stage in the authoring, such that the film no longer appears to play back at 24-frames-per-second, but rather some 'inbetween-24-and-30' video standard. Again: unwatchable. And, from what I can tell, undetected! I swear I'm not losing my mind — and that my television settings are perfectly calibrated, from MotionFlow OFF to Full Pixel Mode and all the rest... Every other Blu-ray I've seen on my 'set-up' looks not only superb but downright just.)
So back to Casablanca by Michael Curtiz. It was delightful finally to glean some context for all the legendary lines from Julius Epstein's, Philip Epstein's, and Howard Koch's script that have permeated culture, from "Here's lookin' at you kid" through to "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" and on to the non-existence of "Play it again, Sam." But one extract sneaked up quietly... I'd never heard this line before seeing the film, and it struck me as maybe the most poetic and personally resonant of them all:
I woke up this morning to find an email from Andy Rector, via Samuel Bréan who wrote: "In this week's issue of Les Inrockuptibles (742, 17/2/2010), Jean-Marc Lalanne describes the recent evening that the Cinémathèque Française dedicated to Eric Rohmer, with onstage tributes by collaborators, a screening of Le genou de Claire, etc."
The article ends with the following (my translation appears below the French version) —
•••
Mais le choc de la soirée vint de la découverte d'un petit film signé Jean-Luc Godard réalisé pour l'occasion. Sur un écran noir se succèdent les titres des plus célèbres articles de Rohmer dans les Cahiers. En voix off, Godard évoque des images sorties des limbes : deux jeunes amis, parlant ensemble dans la nuit ; les mêmes dans la cuisine de la mère de l'un, leur préparant à manger, débattant encore de films... Rarement on avait entendu Godard parler de choses si personnelles, très simples et très nues. Le film se clôt sur un plan furtif du cinéaste, un peu hagard face à sa webcam. Déjà il a disparu. On aimerait le retenir. On aimerait les retenir tous les deux.
•••
But the shock of the evening came with the discovery of a small film by Jean-Luc Godard created for the occasion. Over a black screen, the titles of Rohmer's most famous articles from the Cahiers appear one after another. In voice-over, Godard evokes images pulled from the ether: two young friends, speaking to one another through the night; the same pair in the kitchen of one of their mothers, making food, going back and forth discussing films... Rarely have we heard Godard speak of such personal things, very simple and very exposed. The film closes with a furtive shot of the filmmaker, face slightly haggard in his webcam. With that, he's gone. You want to hold onto him. You want to hold onto both of them.
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A piece I wrote about Rohmer on the day his death was announced appears here.
Tributes by Louis Skorecki and Michel Mourlet appear here.
From Jack Webb's Dragnet. Episode 42: "The Big Departure" [1968]. (Transcript via Badge714.com.) —
FRIDAY: "Yeah, well, [the Pilgrims] had a few things going for them that you don't. They knew how to hunt. How to use an axe. How to build a house. Start a fire without matches and bank it at night so it wouldn't go out. You know how to do all that, of course. And you're going to grow this."
[Friday holds up a packet of asparagus seeds, which the kid claims he bought.]
MOBLEY: "Oh, yeah, I really dig fresh asparagus."
FRIDAY: "When do you think you'll eat it?"
MOBLEY: "This summer."
FRIDAY: "Asparagus takes two years. The Pilgrims could raise their own food — which you can't. And even so, half of them died the first year. But you prepared for that too, didn't you?"
MOBLEY: "I don't know what you mean."
FRIDAY: "You've got shovels."
MOBLEY: "Alright. Big deal. We're not the frontiersmen of all time. But Dennis and Paul are very bright people — mature, intelligent — "
FRIDAY: "And high-principled."
MOBLEY: "That's right."
FRIDAY: "What was that one about materialism?"
MOBLEY: "We've rejected material values."
FRIDAY: "Oh, yeah. Well, what are you going to do when the batteries run down?"
MOBLEY: "We've got a generator."
FRIDAY: "And when there's no more gas?"
MOBLEY: "Okay. So we won't listen to the radios."
WAGNER: "That's not vital!"
GANNON: "But food is. And you'll run out of it sooner than you think. Then you figure you'll start eating wild goat. Well, it's not prime rib. But maybe you'll acquire a taste for it. You'd better — three times a day."
I've had a bunch of conversations with friends since January 27th regarding the latest Apple device, and most of these chats have found me circling around the fact that the press and the 'commenters' are not grasping (yet) the profound implications and unison endgame of the iPad — are not drawing conclusions far enough out to the paradigm shift that the device certainly signals in terms of human beings' relationship to a 'computing interface' (and their potential and actual facility with a grammar of interface) and in terms of revenue acquisition for beleaguered publishers and 'content'-creators. Above all, the self-assumed pundits miss the base essence of the iPad's 'is'ness' as a kind of Athenian, or essentially Delphic — or, neo-platonic — ideal of mobility and fluidity, as a means of access to and connection (not even just 'interaction') with content, i.e., contemplatable stuff with which to interface, s'exposer. There's been so much hand-wringing instead over the "annihilation of the physical book," which I don't for a second believe in (because there's a pre-disposed compulsion in mankind toward tactility, and because 'computing' never did extinguish inscription — speaking for myself [though I'm sure millions would agree], not being able to underline or make notes in the margins of novels would amount to a totally unacceptable self-effacement, would basically incinerate a whole history of [re-]reads, of workings through aesthetic/intellectual schemata),.......... or over the lack of support for Flash, or the present absence of a built-in camera.
So that's a really brief abstract of my feelings re: the iPad. Due to lack of time and lots of work, I'll hand things over now to quotes from / links to a few articles I read today (on my iPhone, at dinner) that get to the codexical crux of the matter —
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"By the time the bells, whooshes and clicks died down, I couldn’t say the future had arrived, but I’m pretty sure we can see it from here.
" 'It was like someone came back from five years into the future and handed this to us,' said John Gruber of Daring Fireball, a respected tech blog.
"The iPad’s promise was hinted at before Mr. Jobs hit the stage. The set was dominated by a large, comfy chair. Since the birth of the personal computer, we have been hunched over, squinting at screens — great big terminals, laptop displays, tiny screens on PDAs. With the iPad, the screen has come to us as we lean back in ease.
"Critics who suggested that Apple unveiled little more than an iPhone that won’t fit in your pocket don’t seem to understand that by scaling the iPhone experience, the iPad becomes a different species. Media companies now have a new platform that presents content in an intimate way."
— David Carr, in The New York Times — the full piece is here.
"In the rush to slobber over one's self, the real point of the iPad was either missed or dismissed in a whiff of epic proportions. To whit [sic] I submit this humble rejoinder to the hordes. At the end of the day, at the end of this decade, the iPad will be seen as the first device that collected all the media together in one truly portable place. The real power of the iPad model will thus come not from the monetization of any one thing but in the creation of a whole new form — a form of forms, if you will."
— Michael Conniff, at The Huffington Post — the full piece is here.
"The iPad represents a fundamental shift in the metaphors and language of 'computing.' Or rather it extends that shift that was tested first in our pockets with the iPhone, and brings it to our desks, our coffee tables... everywhere else. The iPad is a huge change.
"We have lived for the past thirty-plus years in an engineer's universe of computing, where layers of implicit understanding — about file structures, multiple programs, menu idiosyncrasies, nomenclature — are required to figure out how to make your computer do what you want it to do. To many of us, these metaphors are completely embedded in our brains. So we can't understand how someone like, say, my mother, can't figure out how to use her scanner software. ....
"I don't know if the iPad will be commercially successful, but I believe it represents a fundamental shift in the metaphors of computing, as significant as the move from text to graphical interfaces."
— Hugh McGuire, at The Huffington Post — the full piece is here.
"What you're seeing in the industry's reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.
"For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.
"Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.
"Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that's because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won't work on their local roads. ....
"With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.
"Not the entire world, though. The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what's happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there's no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn't have any windows open, understand what's happening here. ....
"The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get 'real work' done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the 'real work'.
"It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
"The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party."
Steve Jobs throughout the 1990s, in the NeXT years and his return to Apple in 1997 (his comments from a few years ago on 60 Minutes about The Beatles that I wanted to include are unembeddable):
Just released from the magnificent Versus Entertainment label in Spain: a gorgeous and beautifully designed new DVD edition of Jean Renoir's 1956 masterpiece Eléna et les hommes [Eléna and the Men], bearing the title Elena y los hombres.
Included across the two discs: Renoir's introduction of the film made for the 1962 series of French television broadcasts. — The extraordinary L'Album de famille de Jean Renoir [Jean Renoir's Family Album], Roland Gritti's 16-minute 1956 documentary screened in French cinemas with Eléna et les hommes at the time of the feature's original release, in which Renoir discusses his family and his father the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir in particular. — And last but not least, the first part (of three) of Jacques Rivette's classic 1967 film made for Cinéastes de notre temps, Jean Renoir, le patron [Jean Renoir: The Boss]. The discs feature removable Spanish subtitles across all elements; in the case of L'Album de famille de Jean Renoir the removable Spanish subtitles appear on black bars to cover up... English subtitles burnt into the master.
The package's physical centerpiece is the perfect-bound, glossy, full-color 72-page book that contains a short 1995 essay about the film by Carlos Losilla; an extract from a 1998 essay by Àngel Quintana; and a full reprint of the conversation that Andy Rector and myself had about the film in 2008 at this blog and at Kino Slang, translated into Spanish by Stefan Ivancic and retaining all the original imagery from the version that appeared at Cinemasparagus. (Earlier today I caught word that Cahiers du cinéma España described the discussion in their review of the release as "a great lesson in cinema.")
You can read our conversation in its original English-language form —
or here (in the version with Andy's image-selection)
Congratulations and sincere thanks to the entire Versus team who put together this outstanding release: Adrián Guerra, Gonzalo del Pozo, Juan Molero, Nuria Bermejo, Pepe Tito, and Alejandro Miranda.
Above all — if you haven't seen it, watch, rewatch, and rewatch again Eléna et les hommes! It's one of the most sublime films ever made, and must be at least 412 times more three-dimensional than Avatar.
"I think that for years we have recognized the author by what he writes. An author will always — you will do the same, Chris — a writer tips his mitt. If a writer would like to be completely anonymous about the character and fabric of the man, don't write, 'cause you can't hide in writing. I just believe it. I'm sure there are people who will tell me that I'm crazy — 'Oh, well, what about J. D. Salinger?' That was J. D. Salinger. J. D. Salinger was Holden Caulfield. Don't tell me that was a fictitious character out of the mind of his deep deep deep imagination. Bullshit. He was Holden Caulfield."
—Jerry Lewis, in conversation with Chris Fujiwara, in the powerful 32-page 2003 interview transcribed in Fujiwara's new book, Jerry Lewis.
"The stuff that I do that's really good is when I have the right intention. It's not necessarily the material as much as it is the intention and the material. When my intention was to make it soft and sensitive and loving, that's what I got out of it. Whether it belonged in the movie or not. You'll get your naysayers to say, 'What was that for?' What was it for when Chaplin sat at the edge of the street and just watched people walking by? I mean, what did that mean? It meant something: it meant he wasn't going anywhere.
[...]
"That statement ['nothing is more dramatic than comedy'] comes from doing comedy. In order to make your audience laugh, you have to dramatically change who you are. I won't trip over that piece of wood on the stage if it's me walking there. But Jerry [the character] will, or Stanley, or the Idiot, or whatever we call him in that moment. He has to trip over it. Now, he has to turn into something that isn't truly him, so we're taking a piece of vanity and rubbing it out, a little ego, burying it, sandpapering all that down, and bringing up all of the gargoyles. Because in England they say what he does is grotesque. The first time I read that, I was heartbroken, but they say, 'No, that's a compliment.' Okay. When I stand in front of an audience on New Year's Eve, let's say, years ago, and I see the young man and his girl, man and his wife, girl, boyfriend, couples, lovers, all that wonderful stuff ringside. I'm standing up there alone and making a fucking fool of myself to entertain all of them. There's nothing more dramatic than that moment, Chris. It's very dramatic. Because I have to call on something that's not what I want to be at that moment. I want to be there with my girl or my wife watching some other schmuck make a fool of himself. But I never ever thought of what I did as demeaning. What I thought of it was: other than me at that moment. So it's very dramatic."
—Jerry Lewis, in conversation with Chris Fujiwara, in the destined-for-the-ages 32-page 2003 interview transcribed in Fujiwara's new book, Jerry Lewis.
Two tributes to Eric Rohmer I've translated, from the respective blogs of Louis Skorecki and Michel Mourlet:
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On Rohmer
by Louis Skorecki (original French version appeared here, on January 14, 2010)
Entretien sur Pascal [Interview on Pascal] by Eric Rohmer, 1965:
That a man of that quality can pass away in the blink of an eye, without a peep, on tiptoe, says everything about his nobility... That the media, and TV especially, remain silent in the face of his death (he filmed hours and hours of pure leçons de cinéma for educational television) speaks volumes about the lack of culture in these same media-outlets... He was obviously the greatest French filmmaker after Bresson, and before Brisseau and Moullet, two of his most brilliant disciples... We're still going to try our hand at two or three other words (which will be added to the only decent text to have been published upon Rohmer's death — that of Philippe Azoury in Libération), but we can already put forward the notion, without fear of slipping up, that he was one of a kind in the cinema, and that he taught everything to Jean-Claude Biette, Marguerite Duras, Jean Eustache, and also a certain... Woody Allen (La Collectionneuse is from 1967, Annie Hall from 1977).
Regarding the quietude surrounding Eric Rohmer's death, we can already remark upon one thing: only his actors were faithful to him, humbly testifying about what they learned from him, with an intelligence and a modesty that compels admiration.
P.S.: Rohmer's death at last allows us to do away with the foundational heresy of Bresson's cinema, that sublime myopia that would hold theatre as the sole entity accountable for all the evils of the cinema — while he [Bresson] will go down by far as the most brilliantly theatrical of filmmakers, from his two inaugural films, Les Anges du péché (sublime incursion into the Mizoguchian porno), and Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (contamination of the narrative by way of a parallel sado-lesbian intrigue)... Rohmer on the other hand will linger, obliquely, upon the perversities of Les Petites filles modèles, Bresson holding to a more frontal, more Balthusian eroticism — but all this will, in the end, stand only as theater, sublime theater, and nothing more...
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Eric Rohmer
by Michel Mourlet (original French version appeared here, on January 21, 2010)
Six contes moraux: III: Ma nuit chez Maud [Six Moral Tales: III: My Night at Maud's] by Eric Rohmer, 1969:
Starting off a new year with one man's passing which should scarcely provoke any optimism, and yet it must, as little as that might be, in order to nourish the ardor for writing. It's a syllogism, rather vicious, as with all syllogisms: I write whenever I despair; and yet to write is to have hope (to communicate, to endure, to be acknowledged, to find a solution, and to put the chaos of thoughts into order, etc.); therefore I have hope when I despair.
But to have hope when Eric Rohmer leaves us? To hope for something, yes, and I think I know what: that we'll still live long enough to see certain people, certain things, find their right place, a place for the the rectitude of the gaze, a place for approximation and error, a place for authentic creators, a place for impostors and snake-oil salesmen. A place for "that which is spoken," a place for truth.
An astonishing symptom of the era: the exclusion of one of the most singular and most startling films in French cinema, L'Anglaise et le Duc, rejected in 2008 [sic — I believe Mourlet means 2001. -CK] from the proposed selection at the Cannes Festival for reasons whose ideological stupidity could only belong to France — the official France, that of taboos and la Parole unique, goes along with the flow. It seems that every mishap of our arts and letters over these past forty years can be found sketched out in this episode, which explains in large part why, once so brilliant and admirable, these letters and these arts cut so drab a figure in the world today.
I came to know Eric Rohmer at the end of the Fifties. In name, he shared the post of editor-in-chief of the Cahiers du cinéma with André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. In reality, he was the group's kingpin. He worked there from morning till night. I was a very young cinephile itching to write about the movies. This cinephile had published two or three articles in a few inconsequential little periodicals of the sort that crop up all over the place, and he dreamt of seeing his prose sparkle upon the paper belonging to the prestigious revue in which a new body of cinematographic thought was being elaborated. Of that body of thought, one of the pillars was obviously Le Celluloïd et le marbre, which Rohmer pursued in serial publication and which seemed to us, along with the articles by Rivette, that which got closest to our own ideas.
Thanks to Rohmer, who among other gifts had that of knowing how to distinguish and bring talent back together, the Cahiers enjoyed at that time, and up to the point of his eviction (which I was told about in vague terms much later on, without being given any names or details) by apparatchiks whose obscurantism would have made comrade Zhdanov blush, enjoyed, as I was saying, its apex, as much in terms of the writing as in critical discoveries and analytical finesse. I'm not going to rehash once again the points of the little Story now familiar to the specialists: the Macmahonians landing at the Cahiers, my protest printed entirely in italics, the special issue dedicated to Losey, events only made possible by the tutelary presence of, and the exceptionally intelligent overture from, Rohmer.
After Jean Curtelin handed me the reins of Présence du cinéma, I lost touch with Eric Rohmer, although I'd often get word of him through his good friend Jean Parvulesco. (Bear in mind the scene from L'Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque.) I didn't see him again until 1985, when I was heading up a class at l'U.E.R. d'Art et d'Archéologie de Paris I where he was also teaching. He hadn't changed one iota: thin, elegant, the bony face à la Clint Eastwood, always a bit entrenched behind a smiling distance, the rapid, choppy, sometimes near-stammering elocution, betraying a shyness that he had held onto like a charm from his youth.
His first feature, Le Signe du Lion — in which I portrayed a patron at a café terrace! — didn't do much for me; neither did La Collectionneuse. The film that turned me on to his oeuvre and at the same time created a definitive bond with myself was Ma nuit chez Maud. This film and the ones that follow seemed to me like some paradoxical continuation of Marivaux in contemporary society, paradoxical essentially because this cinema shifted the focal point of the image onto the dialogue, and because the language of mise-en-scène became the mise-en-scène of language.
It's not deceiving oneself to make reference to Marivaux while considering this later man as a delicious draughtsman of verbal arabesques around the map of Tendre, an heir in some way to the amorous casuistry in fashion during the preceding century. Marivaux doesn't embroider marivaudages; he's an explorer of the freedom of will, and his plays are so many training manuals, sometimes cruel, for emotions in the light of reason. This was precisely the topic of Eric Rohmer, who defined across the Six Moral Tales the general theme of his films like such: "While the narrator (we can replace 'narrator' with 'hero') is in search of a woman, he meets someone else who captures his attention until the point that he rediscovers the first woman."
After this moral of coming-of-age and the primordial role of the verb — as though this Christian was telling us that "in the beginning was the verb" — as though speech is ever "theatrical" — a third characteristic allows us to place Rohmer's films in a category resolutely apart from that which gets made today: far from spraying them with the sociological foam of a present-day always threatened by obsolescence and removed from the deep permanence of a citizenry (as long as it's not replaced with another), this filmmaker didn't show the "legal" French society of the mediasphere, but the real French society of the second half of the 20th century. And he did it with a precision and, let's venture the word, a documentary joyousness that brings us back to his cinephilic and critical admirations, those he invokes in Le Celluloïd et le marbre: Flaherty, Murnau. Thirty years ago, I took the liberty of laying the cards on the table: "When our descendants seek out beneath the centuries' dust our true face, they'll find it more certainly in the reality of Rohmer's fictions than in the fiction of reportage and investigations."
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Some thoughts I posted about Rohmer on the day he died can be accessed here.
Alexandra Duguay was a spokeswoman for the United Nations. For the past seven months, she had been living in Haiti with her boyfriend Marc-André Franche, an aid worker also employed by the U.N.
I met Alexandra and Marc-André two summers ago at a party thrown on the rooftop of their beautiful residence in Manhattan's Financial District. At the time, Alexandra had still been working as a U.N. press officer in New York. I'd been invited to attend the get-together by my friend Thoma, but wasn't acquainted with anyone else who was booked to be present. Cut then to me, lugging one or two contribution bottles of red wine in my satchel-thing for blocks and blocks. It was really sweltering out, glasses-down-the-nose hot. So, obviously, when I showed up at the designated address and rang the buzzer — and subsequently was greeted by the host, a beautiful Québecer woman-in-red-dress — I felt like a total asshole, very wet-towel-slapped, and certain the impression I was exuding matched that of any thirtysomething deciding to revisit the college swim-test on a lark. And yet: no break of cool from my host — she, Alexandra, couldn't have been more gracious. As Ms. Duguay ushered me inside and started commiserating re: the heat (sensing, I sensed, that I felt I was personally looking pretty shit and haggard), it was apparent that her sense of hospitality and sympathetic instincts were, in equal parts, enormous, and as the night wore on her poise and intelligence also made lasting impressions. The same applied for Marc-André. I remember being stationed near the laptop while he diligently YouTube-searched for footage of Serge Gainsbourg's 'incident' with Whitney Houston on French TV in the '80s — after that, for clips of SG's defiant recitation of "La Marseillaise"/"Aux armes" before that unwholesomely FN-populated crowd. I recall too that after the videos went off, Marc-André and I spoke for a little while about L'Homme à tête de chou — which was nice, as he's the only person I've ever met who not only knew what it is, but knows it. Needless to say: we hit it off. And although I haven't spoken to Marc-André, or Alexandra, since then, I'll remember that night for its beautiful atmosphere, a molecular sense of camaraderie, and the fact that there I came into first-contact with two dear-to-this-day-friends in Danielle DiGiacomo and Tina Rodriguez.
Two nights ago around 12am local time, after a nearly seven-day search, Alexandra's body was pulled from the rubble of the collapsed U.N. headquarters at the Christopher Hotel in Port-au-Prince. I've read that rescue workers said she was likely killed instantly in the tremor's upheaval. Small consolation, and maybe hardly any at all when I think about Marc-André's working across more than six days at the U.N. site to recover the woman he loved and lived for, who might have been either dead or alive — his persevering in the effort with the single-mindedness that is all that can, and must, exist. Until the end, and the full, the total, disaster.
Over the last week, those who were close to Alex and Marc-André and their families — and those like myself who had only known them at the distance of acquaintance, never thinking there was any 'finality' to the last time we'd passed one another by (surely there'd be more occasions for catching-up) — kept continual vigil at a page on Facebook that was open to the public, refreshing it every couple of hours or minutes for news on the Wall conveyed by Marc-André in Haiti to Alexandra's mother, resilient, determined... Her mom delivered the final news a few hours after the recovery.
1,500 people became members of this Facebook group as a show of solidarity with Alexandra, her loved ones, her family — and it's impossible to say just how many thousands more both on and off Facebook have viewed the page across the last week. These figures reflect the grief surrounding one individual, the life knocked out of her body, crumpled, by the quake. — There are 200,000 like her.
The numbers and the stories are a dumb-show for the dead, and they are a bitter poison for the living.
Mais c'est l'aimée non tourmentée. L'aimée.
L'air et le monde point cherchés. La vie.
—Etait-ce donc ceci?
—Et le rêve fraîchit.
.........................
My friend Danielle, mentioned above, sent a note around the other night regarding Alexandra which I've asked her to share here.
===
As many of you know, I lost a wonderful friend in the horrible tragedy that was the earthquake in Haiti. Alexandra Duguay was an amazing woman I met two years ago, when I was her teacher at NYU Continuing Education. She was brilliant and passionate and hard-working; my star student. But she also immediately became a good friend. She was open and generous and wonderful and beautiful. She took me to the U.N. for drinks, for parties, to her apartment for a barbecue with her incredible boyfriend, who also worked at the U.N. They were a truly madly in love, adorable couple who were incredible, full of life people. He would pick her up from the U.N. on his Vespa every day, and they would cook and train for the marathon at night.
The last time I saw her, she was volunteering her time to help me research the documentary about Cambodia that I am now producing. She told me she and her boyfriend were moving to Haiti, because they felt working at the U.N. in New York was ineffectual and they reallly wanted to make a change. That was about 7 months ago, and it was the last time I saw her.
I have been devastated to lose such an incredible person; but she is one of more than 200,000 people to have been lost to such a senseless tragedy. So it is in Alexandra's honor that I have set up a charity page to help all the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. It's what she would've wanted.
Little Lexicon of Anglophone Cliché: A Work in Progress c. 2007
"2 or 3 things"
"A Novel"
"At once _________ and _________, ..."
"For [so-and-so, in dedication]" (exception: the Histoire(s) du cinéma, which invented the practice in cinemaville)
"I found myself unprepared for the emotional wallop"
"Love it or hate it, ... "
"Unfortunately, compared with Rohmer's earlier work, in particular the series known as 'Six Moral Tales,' The Romance of Astrea and Celadon has little to say about eros that's still relevant. It's a film so embarrassingly quaint it's crying out for a parody called Not Another Medieval Movie."
