Saturday, June 03, 2023

Hannah Gadsby and Pablo Picasso

"All the Lazy Dykes" (Morrissey), or: Stranger to a Train of Thought


Where to begin? Where to begin at, looking intensely at Picasso's supreme masterpiece "Les demoiselles d'Avignon"? Perhaps at the weird spread cunt? Which, in a sense, leads us to Hannah Gadsby, who, 'in a sense,' is one with the subject-matter of Picasso's complex and profound canvas, which, 'in a sense,' is but a projection screen to the gross Gadsby.

For those not in the "If You Know You Know" demographic, Gadsby is an Ozzie-demimonde "comedienne" — or rather, as she would likely approve being termed, a "storyteller." Which is one way to characterize, as per uzh, a deeply sado-masochistic unfunny lecture-scold. (Malus.) Let's take a moment to think about this unusual and much-fêted modern term: "storytelling," parallel to "my truth" or "our truth," which always reminds me of the British term "our kid" (e.g., Liam Gallagher) or Morrissey's great "Our Frank". ("Our frank and open, deep conversations... / ...I'm gonna be sick all over / Your frankly vulgar / Red pull-over / Oh see how the two colours blend..."). There's either the truth, or there isn't: "your" truth connotes hallucination. Picasso told the truth. Hannah Gadsby, on the other hand, possesses "her truth," which is total hallucination. Hence storytelling. A few years ago, a cabal of groupthinkers decided to brand the phrase "storytelling," (Spielberg, not Solondz) (Malus.) as the ultimate goal of cinema and, I don't know, probably dance too, to leave themselves open to offers for episodic television work and the occasional Max toss-off. Stories have always been a component of cinema — not the re-fried goooooaaaaalllllll, much to the chagrin of football/soccer fans all too willing to genuflect on the sod (cf. Soderbergh) of Soder-berg. And thus, God is a spider.

Life is hard, said my good friend Marianna the other day. A cliché, but the truth. It reminded me of an Instagram story I saw from an acquaintance recently, a quote by (the still underrated) Aldous Huxley: something to the effect of, after all these years of living, the deepest advice one can give is to be kinder to one another. I am charged and guilty. I make stupid remarks sometimes and unthinkingly insult my friends and nearest. "Sometimes I get over-charged..." (Radiohead). I am the zombified cliché: a "work in progress," and "a walking disaster" (Radiohead). The stars are alienated and arrange in strange positions.

For Hannah Gadsby, life is blacker and whiter, a tornadic Michael Curtiz film shot like a Burroughs Lawrence pumpkin. High contrast! She was gifted the gimmick of a "present" Brooklyn Museum exhibition called "It's Pablo-Matic," in which neither the artist nor the curator is present. The title of the exhibit (actually, "exhibition" above was both poor diction yet tellingly ironic) is moronic, a mongoloidal mixup of Gadsby's knee-jerk automatism, in which the automat becomes the essential metaphor for "the people," as outlined in Jason Farago's crucial review in The New York Times, available to read here. The farrago is Gadsby's, and that's being far too generous. She has never exhibited any clear sense of art appreciation or understanding, and why would she? But why, then, should she be granted museum hours? Hers is a practical special-affect (unpack it) of provocateuse-ism. And, like so much similar jissom, her cognizance of what makes art Art is aimed at the lowest common denominator of "train your vague eyes at this and move on," a podcast earbud wave-through with no ending but men-ding. Throw your pretty white body down, son (Morrissey). Loveless, she hates herself, and has a grievance "whilst" in search of every lost dime.

Let me tell you about Picasso's painting posted above. Two of the women share the features of Picasso's face, specifically his eyes, where he presents in caricature his earlier work in which his eyes highlight their very own prominent feature. He is two at once, and he projects himself onto his own canvas, valid property, and eminent domain. Picasso possessed, as Richardson noted, the power of "ocular rape." The raping gaze. Voilà or as it's always misspelled, "Viol-a." "Two of Us"? Maybe one last tango-round. (Malus.)

So 'in a sense' Gadsby and Picasso are united forever. She did it to herself. Just the easy cue for a humorless hussy caught in the web of a superior genius. Inescapable, his "right back atcha, bitch" — for Fraülein G. has run amok. I hope she goes to Switzerland.

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Monday, May 22, 2023

Marcos Uzal's First Impression of Jean-Luc Godard's TRAILER OF THE FILM THAT WILL NEVER EXIST: "PHONY WARS" at Cannes 2023

I've translated the following dispatch from Cannes by Marcos Uzal that was posted at the Cahiers du Cinéma site yesterday:

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JLG: Torn Pages

Even if his closest collaborators (Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battaggia, and Nicole Brenez) have announced that other films for which Jean-Luc Godard has left materials and instructions will soon see the light of day, Film annonce du film qui n'existera jamais «Drôles de guerres» [Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist "Phony Wars", 2022/2023] is the final one that he'll have totally completed and approved while he was still alive. At the image level, it's essentially made up of shots showing the pages from the preparatory notebook for the trailer of a film that he won't end up shooting (Phony Wars). It is thus the rough outline for the announcement of a film. Even if it is going unreleased under that form, the act is not new. Scénario de Sauve qui peut (la vie) [Scenario of Sauve qui peut (la vie), 1979], Scénario du film Passion [Scenario of the Film Passion, 1982], Petites notes à propos du film Je vous salue, Marie [Small Notes Regarding the Film Je vous salue, Marie, 1983] — showing how many ideas at the origins of the films are applied to the feature-films themselves are only at base the sum of associations of images and sounds, of sensations and forms, and that in this they never constitute a completed, full whole. For Godard, whose very first short-film, Opération béton [Operation Concrete, 1955] was a documentary about the construction of a dam, every movie is a construction site, and every film construction site is itself a film. In its radicalness, in the proper sense (at the roots) Film annonce... thereby synthesizes all of his art: a cinema of collage, that encompasses painting (images fixes free in a precise temporality), music (sound and rhythm, even before the image), and poetry (cited text, as a color, a vision, a music). A film that would also be a book, an exposition, a conversation between friends...

The emotion that embraces us is also due to the way in which Godard is present here. First off, because we hold more than ever to the work of his hands, which wrote, underlined with colors, and glued together these papers and these sentences. And then, between bits of music and fragments from the soundtracks of his films, we hear his old-man's-voice, soft, quavering to the extreme. Notably, he dwells on the evocation of the Belgian communist writer Charles Plisnier whose short story "Carlotta" he would have liked to adapt. At one point, he says of him: "He made portraits of faces." And suddenly the stripping of pages from the notebook is broken to give way to shots of women's faces taken from his films (Notre musique in particular), and we understand that through Plisnier it's indeed a result of him that he also spoke, and that here Godard has just given us what might be a posthumous definition of his own work. Yes, he made portraits of faces. Elsewhere, it is written on one page of the notebook: "Just a share." ("Juste un faire part.") And this Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist moves us like the last murmur of a man who is preparing to leave. It is not sad; it is absolutely luminous. Simple and clean, like the ultimate sketch of a genius.

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Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Yumeji

 No. 2 Dream


This is the tale of a man, an artist, named Yumeji Takehisa (Kenji Sawada). The film (1991) starts off not with wedding bells but lanterns resembling beach balls aflight. A young woman stands in a tree. Yumeji fights through the crowd to approach her, this vision/miracle/Madonn'. 

He's heading to Kanazawa to elope to a 22-year-old named Hikono Kasai (Masumi Miyazaki). She tells Yumeji her ex drowned in the lake. The clothes he's wearing are his. So does Wong Kar-wai 'open [or adopt] the kimono' with his appropriation of a single music-cue by Shigeru Umebayashi in Yumeji, a film which contains so many wonderful musical pieces by both that composer and Kaname Kawachi, for In the Mood for Love. (Another cue is present, I believe, in 2046.)

Other than to note that there's a character named Onimatsu (the Devil Matsu), i.e., Matsukichi (Kazuhiko Hasegawa), and that Hikono rocks mirror-warped in the gap of a facade, and that the tans and browns are unappealing compared to Yumeji's interior life, and that Yumeji robo-dances at Hikono's spot, the Evening Primrose, — I'll leave the rest to you to discover.

Suzuki films are akin to children's nursery rhymes: Find a bladder cherry in your hair after you yank your arch-nemesis to death...



































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More writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Seijun Suzuki: 

8-jikan no kyōfu [8 Hours' Terror, 1957]

Ankokugai no bijo [Underworld Beauty, 1958]

Fumi hazushita hara [Trampled Springtime, 1958]























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Monday, April 17, 2023

Kagerō-za (aka Heat-Shimmer Theater)

 Bladder Cherries



Why do doubles still fascinate me? I suppose because of others' fascinations with the trope, and because they at once project the Self inside and the Self outside, — and because of all that goes with the stuff round the projection of the psyche, the impossibility of the mirror as a 1:1 phenomenon... We've heard it all before... And anyway I shouldn't say I'm 'fascinated' by the Double; that takes a lot but to consider it in the Feuilladean sense maybe it's fair use: let's say I'm 'mesmerized' when something happens within some form of this construct that brings it all back home to the double-crib, the twin in shadow, back to Hitchcock, Nabokov,... the latter's "poshlost"-nemesis Dostoevsky... In any case, the Double constitutes an axiom of the cinema: the master-shot, then two closer shots set 180º from each personage, in the construct's roughest permutation and most basic permission. 

Time in Suzuki's Kagerō-za [Heat-Shimmer Theater, 1981] overlaid with time: an opening title card in English lettering that reads: "TAISHO 1926 TOKYO"; I'd presume to say no parallels are to be drawn between the eras in question — the Taishō era of 1912 to 1926, in which Japan launched into mostly-global contemporaneity; and Akihito's Heisei period of 1989 to 2019. The contrast is the thing: the pre-pre-war to the post-post-war, style or technique of 1981 teasing out the evidence of 1926 Modernism. A 'man who fell to Earth,' a man from nowhere, standing upright on some paving stones parsing a bridge, facing a stone staircase. An old woman offers him "bladder cherries" — from them, one can hear the cries of women's souls. She bears too a message for him, this Shunko Matsuzaki (Yūsaku Matsuda)... "You're hiding your true self." "My true self? Then get to know it."

The other woman mentioned by Matsuzaki: Miyo (Mariko Kaga), Tamawaki's (Katsuo Nakamura's) maid before he left for Germany to teach literature (cf. Zigeunerweisen) — repeat encounter on the outdoor steps outside the hospital; Tamawaki's wife Oine (Eriko Kusuda) has passed away that morning... but "Irene" was her German name. Miyo explains: "He has two wives — the old one and the new one." Tamawaki, upon meeting Oine/Irene, "ordered her to become a Japanese woman"; he dyed her hair a sea-kelp blonde and "put dark lenses in her eyes" — dark as in blue; in other words he transforms her into a Japanese-made-ersatz-Aryan. "They tormented each other and one of them died."

The professorial look. New Orleans funeral music. Mrs. Tamawaki (Shinako, played by Michiyo Okusu) didn't write the letter to Matsuzaki, delivered in origami in Kanazawa; despite the identical handwriting, she asserts, before disappearing behind a revolving panel the rear side of which displays the painting of a demon.

Excuse the plot parley — in part Kagerō-za [Heat-Shimmer Theater] is intended to illustrate a response to: "Why is this deconstructivist film so plot driven?" The tension between the découpage and the execution represents Suzuki-classicism. Shinako Tamawaki: "If we never had to wake up, it wouldn't be a dream anymore." She leaves behind a a bladder cherry and a notebook inscribed with circles, triangles, and squares.

Looking up the dolls' kimonos moves the folds away from a concealed, internalized sex. "The flowers placed on graves are the most beautiful of all." Before Matsuzaki sleeps with her (Shinako/Oine), she intones, "My dyed hair cannot deceive the moonlight."

The play begins around the 1 hour 44 minute mark of the film and relays the tale of Tamawaki and his lovers and, by virtue of his stance as playwright, that of Matsuzaki. The brown palette begins to dissipate, replaced now with vibrant bloody reds, azures, and violets; cherry petals fall from the rafters, as in Ozu's A Tale of Floating Weeds. The ventriloquism of voices possessing bodies; the theater at last on cinema rather than the other way around. 

"You simply must watch it." For there are many transformations before the theater collapses under the weight of its own psychic weight... or of the mass of bladder cherries which bubble to the surface in a tub. Matsuzaki's head is cropped in one framing by a ceiling beam.

Now as ancient and old. Nicolas Saada asked me rhetorically the other day, Will people still appreciate the movies signed Raoul Walsh? Let's add to that classical category the films of Seijun Suzuki. Both involve gunplay. Like a camera, a target is sought and locked upon. To whom does the responsibility lie, calling "Fire" in a crowded theater?

































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More writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Seijun Suzuki: 

8-jikan no kyōfu [8 Hours' Terror, 1957]

Ankokugai no bijo [Underworld Beauty, 1958]

Fumi hazushita hara [Trampled Springtime, 1958]






















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