A: The Image Wanted Me to Tell You Hello
Open Five: half of the one-two combination executed with Holy Land, two Audley features debuted more or less simultaneously this past April, Audley opening brows. The consumer-grade image of HL (which I wrote about here) buckles the ropes ordained by officiating bodies, makes of its shot-sequence an object-lesson in geometry, trajectory: an inward-piling fracture of space and of time. The prosumer of Open Five (Joe Swanberg is DP with the Panasonic HVX-200) slows down onlookers' attempts to count to ten (that impulse conditioned by best-of lists), — it's like stopping around seven-and-a....... lines gone back to parallel, and... The concentric ripples of the water at the end of Holy Land seem to have pervaded the sister film, sallying wider, all quiet... Still: not a dialectic, but a complicity between the two movies at the same time ambiguous: thus a question, and one directed outward, "What do you think of an image?"
Here's what I think: that the Image is a strong alive space, that I know it when I see it and it can't be taught, that it's a square for fighters (which angle that you come in with what at where) and a little piazza for lovers (harmony of the sentiments), — that it is home to the brave, that Home is instinctively known, that it's been a long time since I've had occasion to use the phrase "perfect fifth" though I know I've said "open."
I got into an argument on the Fourth of July with a hedge-fund manager ("...") who asked me what I "[did] with myself" and when I told him, I got an earful about Martin Scorsese and Taxi Driver. Told him I didn't care too much for that one, nothing against Scorsese, I like a few of his movies. For whatever reason incensed, the guy pointed his spork at my eyes and ventured you're probably one of those socialists right [!], and what would you do that would be so much "better" than Martin Fucking Scorsese, and you know what whatever but I'll tell you what, if someone [like me i.e. CK] wants to make movies and they decide they're gonna make a movie for themselves rather than "create something that can bring millions and millions of people genuine pleasure and joy" then they are [i.e. I am] "just being fucking selfish, dude, seriously, that is fucking selfish." So I guess I told him this wasn't a conversation or at least that there was no mutual empathy toward one another's motivations but before I headed again for the grill out back I couldn't stop from telling him look, here's two things you can take away from this encounter: that as far as the obligations of a filmmaker to the audience go this man Brecht was working in Hollywood when he memorialized his routine, writing each morning he wakes up and takes his place in line at the market where lies are sold, A, and B, google for instance Kentucker Audley and write him a huge check because he makes movies all about pleasure and joy. — At night's end this jerk, fourteen Yuenglings in, gave me a hug full of hops and belched a couple drawn-out vowels of apology and then we parted ways, both of us aware his fund will never do anything for the Image (let alone Crohn's disease and the 'artisanal' triggerfish, but that one's a movie in and of itself).
On the car-ride home two things occurred to me which I can pretty much take or leave or be of two minds on, but they were —
(1) If a random scene from, for example, Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers took $350,000 to stage, and if the viewer finds the aesthetic pleasure he gets from watching the scene to be "quantifiably worth, on a pleasure-level" $349,500 more than whatever Welles or Monteiro put together with a painted backdrop in either The Love of the Three Pomegranates or Macbeth, then after choosing some source-material, this theoretical viewer should consider as a worthwhile goal initiating and funding a no-strings-attached commission for a film scene that would cost a comparable sum. If this sounds absurd on its face, or if the viewer finds himself unwilling to finance his own valuation, then one might deem this proof that the extra-greatness of the pleasure effervesced by the Expensive Scene is illusory, and that what our viewer is responding to has nothing to do with aesthetic or the Image, rather everything to do with the window-dressing affixed to the narrative conceit. I'm just saying, if one thinks "more is more," he should own it. Sidenote: When people talk about "craft" they mean the precise opposite of the "craft" part of "craft foods."
Forgive a sidenote splintered in two, starting with another setting-into-opposition: the oil-rig sets of There Will Be Blood vs. the oil-rig statuette at the end of Written on the Wind.
(From Wikipedia: “The Torrey Canyon was the first of the big supertankers, capable of carrying a cargo of 120,000 tons of crude oil and was wrecked just off the South West coast of England in 1967 causing an environmental disaster. She was built in the United States in 1959 and originally had a capacity of 60,000 tons but she was enlarged in Japan to 120,000 tons capacity. At the time of the accident she was owned by Barracuda Tanker Corporation, a subsidiary of Union Oil Company of California but chartered to British Petroleum.”)
Original lyrics by Gainsbourg, followed by my English translation —
Je suis né
Dans les chantiers japonais.
En vérité, j’appartiens
Aux américains.
Une filiale
D’une compagnie navale
Dont j’ai oublié l’adresse
A Los Angeles.
Cent vingt mille tonnes de pétrole brut,
Cent vingt mille tonnes —
Dans le Torrey Canyon,
Le Torrey Canyon...
Aux Bermudes
A 30 degrés de latitude
Se tient la Barracuda Tankers Corporation.
Son patron
M’a donné en location
A l’Union Oil Company
De Californie.
Cent vingt mille tonnes de pétrole brut,
Cent vingt mille tonnes —
Dans le Torrey Canyon,
Le Torrey Canyon...
Si je bats
Pavillon du Liberia
Le cap’tain et les marins
Sont tous italiens.
Le mazout,
Dont on m’a rempli les soutes,
C’est celui du consortium British Petroleum.
Cent vingt mille tonnes espèces de brut,
Cent vingt mille tonnes —
Dans le Torrey Canyon,
Le Torrey Canyon...
I was born
In the Japanese shipyards.
To tell the truth, I belong
To the Americans.
A subsidiary
Of a shipping company,
Whose address I’ve forgotten,
In Los Angeles.
A hundred twenty thousand tons of crude oil,
A hundred twenty thousand tons —
In the Torrey Canyon,
The Torrey Canyon...
In Bermuda
At 30 degrees latitude
Lies the Barracuda Tankers Corporation.
Its chief
Put me in
With the Union Oil Company
Of California.
A hundred twenty thousand tons of crude oil,
A hundred twenty thousand tons —
In the Torrey Canyon,
The Torrey Canyon...
If I’m flying Liberia’s flag,
The captain and the sailors
Are all Italian.
The fuel
Which filled up my tanks
Comes from the British Petroleum consortium.
A hundred twenty thousand tons of raw cash,
A hundred twenty thousand tons —
In the Torrey Canyon,
The Torrey Canyon...
Part of me likes the fact that a von Max or van Gogh can be auctioned off at 120 million, because even if the motivations are sick, at least one can pretend: "Finally a real Image that took no dollars-budget to make has got attached to it a figure, a term the snakes can relate to when they entertain themselves daydreaming the life of the martyr — empathy as thought-experiment." I pause to say that I never bought into this formulation: "The last library on a post-apocalyptic earth has gone up in flames and you (you are there) either get to save the librarian, or the last copies of Shakespeare," — clearly, Shakespeare has to burn, and in any case, this scenario is ridiculous. Besides — and speaking of burning — generally the snakes' imagination only goes as far as being sensate of the smell of the martyr's ankles as they're licking them at the stake. (Snake, on the stake: "Have you ever seen such craftsmanship!")
(2) About Jacques Rivette's Holy Land, i.e., Jeanne la pucelle, namely its recent UK DVD release from Artificial Eye: What happens when a particular film stock and attendant apparatus have been used to make the image of the celluloid film (courtesy here of William Lubtchansky in consultation with Rivette) and then the film's 'owner' in probably the mid-'90s telecines a print (or in the case of this two-instalment work, prints) to an SD PAL Digibeta... and the generation of the source print and authoring methods vary between the transfers of Part I and Part II... and the standards used were not ideal even for the time? In fact, Part II retains on its DVD a look similar to just such 'not hugely-grossing foreign-language film' transfers with which one might have been familiar during the era of VHS. Obviously, what happens is the Image is not only transformed, it is not simply 'degraded' — it is taken to a new, arguably more beautiful level, one in which the darker saturations, the indistinctions, attest to the basic, crucial, quantum cinematographic fact: Things are never what they are, when filmed or photographed. One step of removal from the 'emulsion' — suddenly we can see the true work, the hidden work, but the true work, same as with watching a film while smoking pot. Don't ever let anyone speak to you of realism or verisimilitude, — there is always a space between (which is why the modern amateurs in the best sense of the word prefer taking camera snapshots with ShakeItPhoto, etc.); I talked about some aspects of this here. Look at these two images from the disc of Part II of the film. —
Do you think the gap between the real and the photographed is wider in Holy Land or in Open Five? This is the question at the heart of the conversation taking place between these two films — a better dialogue than the one I experienced this less-than-perfect Fourth.
Now the 'narrative,' as they say on Keith Olbermann, is the image set free from ideas of 'refinement' vs. 'off-the-shelf / shabby,' and it might take the one, Open Five, to see the whole of the other, Holy Land, — literally the one becomes the Other and vice-versa, an equality of (to appropriate Hitchcock) richness and strangeness, just as the child in photographs is the stranger, and it's the adult's face which will 'keep' much longer, on into old age. Freedom, then, with the emulsion no longer existing and having crossed totally and purely now into the realm of metaphor, nothing less than freedom, and it's Holy Land which resolves my April proposition on Open Five:
"A boy wants a girl to love him again but she says it's complicated. An email asks where the money will come from and the answer is it's complicated. Can't do a full withdrawal of the forces on the ground — it's too complicated. And you say this land is your land but don't you know it's complicated.
"It's very complicated, and it's difficult to express all the dimensions of a matter. So Kentucker Audley made something called Open Five — the first film of the new decade in more dimensions than three. With it comes the feeling, at last and all over again, that the cinema's finally free."
Holy Land and Open Five taken together form a diptych, a secret film and a dare carrying the title Sense and Sensibility.
Now let's go to Memphis.
===
//
B: Go for the Face
There are two sides to every story, and as in Holy Land, things in Open Five are and are not what they seem. Jake Rabinbach of Jump Back Jake and Francis and the Lights plays Jake Rabinbach, of Jump Back Jake, and Kentucker Audley plays Kentucker Audley, maker of films, "poor ones".
1.The first twenty-five minutes unfurl like a dream. Opening scene: Jake and Lucy (Shannon Esper) reconnect on a New York fire escape. Jake, the sort of chronic liar who buys his own horseshit wholesale and whose every move in life gets rationalized as a justification for his so-called lifestyle, wants Lucy to come stay for a while down south; his ex-girlfriend (Amy Seimetz) is in the process of packing up her stuff and hauling out of his house. "You make it sound magic in Memphis," says Lucy, hardly believing she in turn's buying into the fact that she buys into her frontman's baby-voiced non-implorations. In the distance of the spiral-frame, the blinking skein of Manhattan: transformation of the Holy Land lightning-bugs into the residue of Eyes Wide Shut's parallel-universe.
A few cuts and a zoom, the words "ex-girlfriend-free house", and we're in Memphis.
2. Women in love hear what they want to; certain boys tell them what they want to hear. Open Five is Rabinbach and Audley casting a spell both within and via the film-world's atmosphere of Southern gothic, and by way of the material film itself (again, continuing the conversation with Holy Land) whose strange rhythms and restarts figure as the components of this spell. (In the end credits, a title signifies Audley as the director of the film, and another title notes the film is "created by" Audley and Rabinbach.) The trouble on Lucy's horizon is underscored by the jump from the NYC night-realm to the slightly blown-out day exterior of Seimetz saying her goodbye to Jake, who has by now apparently arrived back in Memphis. But rather than present the dissolution of Jake's bond with Lucy (or the other way around) as the climactic event, the film airs the crisis at the twenty-minute mark following an extended scene at the appropriately named Lamplighter. All the characters go to sleep, and when they wake up the next morning, things settle down. That is to say, the scenario settles into a binary rhythm of calm/crisis dictated by the vagaries of Jake's colossal narcissism. Stop, restart, crisis, pause, so on.
3. Lucy and her friend Rose (Genevieve Angelson), two loopy broads, Rose even more the naïve than Lucy, are beamed Brigitte et Brigitte-like into a world that awaited their arrival with lethargy — ginger-ale cans busting up at potshots; Jake's sloppy para-nudist tramp through the summer swelter, like some visual embodiment of Dylan's "It's All Good"... an image which returns in the film's final quarter after the NYC chicks have been sent back on a plane. Unsolicited advice to female readers: Beware of any guy whose idea of happiness involves hanging out with his dog.
That is: the type Seimetz's character totally seems to at least flirt with buying into later in the picture in a bull-session with Kentucker: "I don't think all men romanticize wanting to be alone. It's just, artistic-type men. ... I think that actually Jake even moreso romanticizes the idea of being alone? because he wants so desperately to be an artistic type? and he like, is like, is very creative but not an artistic type if that makes sense?"
4. Audley supplies in three or four shots the jump-back!story of this character Jake: he gets by cleaning houses, his office the band-van that sports a WFMU badge. (Go here to pledge. Nearly an hour in to Open Five, JBJ's sitting around listening to Scharpling & Wurster / Philly Boy Roy do their thing on The Best Show.)
Kitchen and mealtimes in Audley remark an awful lot about class and money and place and upbringing and personal sagas, take a refrigerator, a stove, a countertop in Team Picture, And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You, Ginger Sand, or here, where Kentucker makes some oatmeal (or, as my father calls it, "mother's-oats") for Rose who's spent the night, a girl in gross denial of the proposed healthy start who prefers to chomp candy from a plastic bag, which alone tells you it's never going anywhere with her. Kentucker: "You hate this? This is what food tastes like." (N.B.: I've already written in another piece about KA's ear and delivery. Oddly enough "Audleyesque" still hasn't met the right dictionary.)
5. Put differently, this is what Audley's serving: a double-helping of New York career actresses, egos easily blown-up gorged on mysterious matters of attraction ("Do you think you'll end up with an actor?" "I feel like — ...unavoidable. I don't see how I could not." Sorry, Jake.) then punctured before next week's new adventure — wandering through the Stax Museum like fairy-tale sisters — musing on the perils of kissing your opposite lead in a project (echoes of Swanberg's incredible Alexander the Last, which also features Seimetz who, P.S., is given the floor there, and who, P.P.S., has a fifty-year career ahead of her) — browsing at a thrift-store babbling about becoming a screenwriter ("or playwright"), all in earshot of a black local with ergot-dye setting that's carrying on its own dialogue with Rose's hairsprayed coiffure and Lucy's Pocahontas get-up... a dialogue neither girl overhears.
6. Jake's sotto voce: conveying how reasonable, how earnest, are his intentions. A darkness, stoic and smooth, all predatory undertones and conniving calculation. Rabinbach's character's an 'intense' guy emitting like it's space-radiation one bad fucking vibe. You know things are off to a bad start when he delays on telling Lucy, freshly arrived since the prophetic fire-escape vortex that she doesn't have to sleep on the air-mattress and that it's "not a big deal" if she sleeps in his room, the pitch of his voice while speaking the line rising gratingly without leveling-off, as though he's siphoning helium out of his ass. (This escalating tone-scale sincerity-thing creeps back into his speech at the end of the movie when he's trying to get back with the Seimetz-ex.) Once Lucy hits the sack, Jake gets out of bed to smoke a bowl in the kitchen.
Later in the movie: "What do you want to do?" "I don't know, I don't, want to be here..." "I can see that. — It's not so bad, c'mon."
Later still in the movie: "You don't want to be here?" "I didn't say that." "It looks like it," last-words Jake, all demented foreshortening in the two-shot.
Jake's references to his "lifestyle" (first brought up during the monologue about his blood pressure) are his equivalent of using Walter Ulbricht as an example to win an argument. Afterward, his off-handed mentioning to Lucy in not-arguments-but-'discussions' that her resistance "makes him sad" and "hurts his feelings" is just the Stasi-icing on the berliner.
7. By contrast: cross-cut with Kentucker and Rose fooling around. She asks him to stop (things moving fast for the New York girl in Memphis! — she should read Sanctuary), and the picture goes into this sincerely tender section where Kentucker pours out some wine into two pint-glasses, eyeballing them to ensure they're equal. Cut to a chat that marks Kentucker-character as a wholly different breed than Jake-character: "Tell me about yourself." It's really nice. "I grew up in Switzerland." "You didn't?" "I did." (The "You didn't?", btw, isn't played as a "You didn't!")
8. Yes, there's a fair measure of loveliness. Kentucker on the loss of his father. Exultant yuletide hush of light at Graceland vigil. Neon angels roaming the strip. Jake performing at the jukejoint, the crowd stepping, twirling. Even the bittersweet restarts of Lucy and Jake let's-try-this-again'ing.
9. Cole Weintraub from Holy Land too, with his band (who sound pretty good to me), half-materialized like a revenant from the other film.
10. The tourist and the native. Just as French girls visiting America ask if you can take them to see a "real" gospel choir, Lucy and Rose are game for the Baptist megachurch, where the minister resembles Ice-T. Its service is the open and welcoming sort, for which you can choose or decline to don your funeral shoes; a place where even Kentucker and Jake get transformed into tourists. Says Jake: "It's a singin'-and-dancin' church. You'll get the whole experience, you'll get the Saturday-night-Sunday-morning, the whole,... that's Memphis right there. You fuck up on Saturday, and you repent on Sunday."
No word on whether Lucy and Rose made it to Arkansas; that's where "you go over to get liquor by the drink."
Open Five: a road-movie that stays put, or: a moving picture about perspective and context, about stay-the-course v. come-and-go, about permanence v. dilettanting. It tests the tragic-romantic tension between the flash-in-the-pan things that seem serious for all of three months, and inescapable tradition mingled with blood-history — the accorded vibrations are what propel story and life. In other words a real record: a film 'cut' like a 45: so light, but so heavy.
a. As one's youth defines the later life hold your rejections dear. b. Remember chance. c. Give credence to love-letters. d. Trust in the fleeting. e. Suspend time. f. Bring on the pleasure and the joy. g. Welcome tactility.
"The Internet is not outside on giant screens." "Not yet."
(Word has it Kentucker Audley's readying a new film, and it's got a working-title which I think's probably one of the best and the funniest in motion-picture history, right up there with The Man in Lincoln's Nose:
Open Five 2.
I hope it sticks.)
Craig, I've got nothing substantial to add here, but I did want to note that I really appreciate these occasional long posts on these 'shoestring' works of new/young American cinema - they help me think about the material and if not always get over problems I may have with the work, than at least advance & develop with all the problems. The criticism in this case isn't meant to convince so much as expand and extrude.
ReplyDeleteLook forward to sampling more Audler. Cheers.