Friday, June 24, 2011
Twin Peaks
It's incredible to think that even twenty-one years ago the precepts of Mac OS GUI were in place (the window, the bar, the scroll) and embedded within this device: the Macintosh Portable. An Apple computer displayed in Twin Peaks, whether product-placed or not, in the post-(+pre-)Jobs, John Sculley era, as a kind of totem of technoliteracy.*
*["In 1987, Sculley made several famous predictions in a Playboy interview. He predicted that the Soviet Union would land a man on Mars within the next 20 years and claimed that optical storage media such as the CD-ROM would revolutionize the use of personal computers. Some of his ideas for the Knowledge Navigator would eventually be fulfilled, not by Apple itself, but by the Internet and the World Wide Web during the 1990s. Condé Nast Portfolio ranked Sculley as the 14th worst American CEO of all time." —Wikipedia]
After the climactic Episode 14 of Twin Peaks — directed by Lynch himself, and obviously steeped as a most personal concoction... it represents one of the artistic high-points of Lynch's entire oeuvre, a work of power in thrall to beyond... — the wisdom is that the show (a series that remarked upon "noir," and as enough time passed, by 2011, simply exists as "noir") 'falls off', Lynch claiming to have lost interest after Ep. 14 (until the final episode of the series)... but even in an episode such as 18, technically directed by Duwayne Dunham, 102,000 things exist to be discussed... it's by no means bad... rather excellent... nothing is stupid, or 'off'... It's exciting to watch the characters be pushed into a register and idiom "post-" the ignitional narrative-arc of Laura Palmer's death... to watch Lara Flynn Boyle and Wendy Robie (a satirical self-reflexive proxy w/r/t the casting's over-aged teens) reciting lines against high-school lockers poised seven inches higher than appropriate... to watch Kyle MacLachlan perform his Agent Cooper schtick in freer berth, the soap-thread flung in a distant dugout...
Sherilyn Fenn, woman of cinema, avatar to justify fortune and zealous Ideal...
There's nothing to complain about!
["David Lynch, who had experienced previous success with the acclaimed The Elephant Man (1980) and Blue Velvet (1986), was hired by a Warner Bros. executive to direct a film about the life of Marilyn Monroe, based on the best-selling book The Goddess. Lynch recalls being 'sort of interested. I loved the idea of this woman in trouble, but I didn't know if I liked it being a real story'." —Wikipedia]
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Tillie's Punctured Romance
The final Chaplin Keystone film marks a final return by Mack Sennett to directing Charlie, also is the first feature-length production with Chaplin's involvement. It is one of the vulgar-worst of the Chaplin-Keystone films, a histrionic, 81-minute tit-flap notable only for its historical status as Chaplin's send-off from the studio. But no harm done — from here, Chaplin was free. If you know this film, neutralize your ghastly shivers in remembrance with passages from two of the recent Roth novels, high-summit controls against kitsch which rank among his concentrated-best work. (I've been especially 'indignant' about contemporary critical reception of 2009's 140-page-long The Humbling, which only testified to the fact that most American book critics don't know how to closely read: wands, magick, performance surely aren't the stuff of most marble kitchen-islands, but they are transforming motifs within Roth's novel; Milton Glaser's brilliant sleeve art for the U.S. hardcover unifies the lot. An essential Roth novel, and one of the finest American artworks of the last five years.)
"Here she took me in those arms of hers, arms as strong as mine, if not stronger, and she said, 'You are an emotional boy. Emotional like your father and all of his brothers. You are a Messner like all the Messners. Once your father was the sensible one, the reasonable one, the only one with a head on his shoulders. Now, for whatever reason, he's as crazy as the rest. The Messners aren't just a family of butchers. They're a family of shouters and a family of screamers and a family of putting their foot down and banging their heads against the wall, and now, out of the blue, your father is as bad as the rest of them. Don't you be. You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you—life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again. Feelings can be life's biggest problem. Feelings can play the most terrible tricks. They played them on me when I came to you and said I was going to divorce your father. Now I have dealt with those feelings. Promise me you will deal the same with yours.' "
— Philip Roth, Indignation
+
"He was asked to play Prospero and Macbeth at the Kennedy Center—it was hard to think of a more ambitious double bill—and he failed appallingly in both, but especially as Macbeth. He couldn't do low-intensity Shakespeare and he couldn't do high-intensity Shakespeare—and he'd been doing Shakespeare all his life. His Macbeth was ludicrous and everyone who saw it said as much, and so did many who hadn't seen it. 'No, they don't even have to have been there,' he said, 'to insult you.' A lot of actors would have turned to drink to help themselves out; an old joke had it that there was an actor who would always drink before he went onstage, and when he was warned 'You mustn't drink,' he replied, 'What, and go out there alone?' But Axler didn't drink, and so he collapsed instead. His breakdown was colossal."
— Philip Roth, The Humbling
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
His Prehistoric Past
"The neurologist was not suggesting that migraines were necessarily symptomatic of a neurotic personality disturbance; rather he was responding, he said, to what he took to be 'a Freudian orientation' in the questions I asked him and in the manner in which I had gone about presenting the history of the disorder.
"I did not know that it was a Freudian orientation so much as a literary habit of mind which the neurologist was not accustomed to: that is to say, I could not resist reflecting upon my migraines in the same supramedical way that I might consider the illnesses of Milly Theale or Hans Castorp or the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, or ruminate upon the transformation of Gregor Samsa into a cockroach, or search out the 'meaning' in Gogol's short story of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev's temporary loss of his nose. Whereas an ordinary man might complain, 'I get these damn headaches' (and have been content to leave it at that), I tended, like a student of high literature or a savage who paints his body blue, to see the migraines as standing for something, as a disclosure or 'epiphany,' isolated or accidental or inexplicable only to one who was blind to the design of a life or a book. What did my migraines signify?"
— Philip Roth, My Life as a Man
+
"Yes, almost nothing is necessary to set me in pursuit of a perfect stranger, nothing, say, but the knowledge that while taking notes from the encyclopedia with her right hand, she cannot keep the index finger of her left hand from tracing circles on her lips. I refuse — out of an incapacity that I elevate to a principle — to resist whatever I find irresistible, regardless of how unsubstantial and quirky, or childish and perverse, the source of the appeal might strike anyone else. Of course this leads me to seek out girls I might otherwise find commonplace or silly or dull, but I for one am convinced that dullness isn't their whole story, and that because my desire is desire, it is not to be belittled or despised.
" 'Please,' they plead, 'why don't you just talk and be nice? You can be so nice, if you want to be.' 'Yes, so they tell me.' 'But don't you see, this is only my body. I don't want to relate to you on that level.' 'You're out of luck. Nothing can be done about it. Your body is sensational.' 'Oh, don't start saying that again.' 'Your ass is sensational.' 'Please don't be crude. You don't talk that way in class. I love listening to you, but not when you insult me like this.' 'Insult? It's high praise. Your ass is marvelous. It's perfect. You should be thrilled to have it.' 'It's only what I sit on, David.' 'The hell it is. Ask a girl who doesn't own one quite that shape if she'd like to swap. That should bring you to your senses.' 'Please stop making fun of me and being sarcastic. Please.' 'I'm not making fun of you. I'm taking you as seriously as anybody has ever taken you in your life. Your ass is a masterpiece.' "
— Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
Getting Acquainted
"Stuck into her English book, right there on the floor, was the essay she had written on 'Ozymandias.' B-plus and across the front the professor had written, 'Excellent paragraph development; good understanding of meaning; good use of quotations; but please don't stuff your sentences so.' And maybe she had overdone the main topic sentence somewhat, but her intention had been to state at the outset all those ideas that she would later take up in the body of the essay. 'Even a great king,' her paper began, 'such as Ozymandias apparently had been, could not predict or control what the future, or Fate, held in store for him and his kingdom; that, I think, is the message that Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet, means for us to come away with from his romantic poem "Ozymandias," which not only reveals the theme of the vanity of human wishes — even a king's — but deals also with the concept of the immensity of "boundless and bare" life and the inevitability of the "colossal wreck" of everything, as compared to the "sneer of cold command," which is all many mere mortals have at their command, unfortunately.' "
— Philip Roth, When She Was Good
+
"Why he brought her home, he said, was 'for a real Jewish meal.' For weeks he had been jabbering about the new goyische cashier ('a very plain drab person,' he said, 'who dresses in shmattas') who had been pestering him — so went the story he couldn't stop telling us — for a real Jewish meal from the day she had come to work in the Boston & Northeastern office. Finally my mother couldn't take any more. 'All right, bring her already — she needs it so bad, so I'll give her one.' Was he caught a little by surprise? Who will ever know.
"At any rate, a Jewish meal is what she got all right. I don't think I have ever heard the word 'Jewish' spoken so many times in one evening in my life, and let me tell you, I am a person who has heard the word 'Jewish' spoken.
" 'This is your real Jewish chopped liver, Anne. Have you ever had real Jewish chopped liver before? Well, my wife makes the real thing, you can bet your life on that. Here, you eat it with a piece of bread. This is real Jewish rye bread, with seeds. That's it, Anne, you're doing very good, ain't she doing good, Sophie, for her first time? That's it, take a nice piece of real Jewish rye, now take a big fork full of the real Jewish chopped liver' — and on and on, right down to the jello — 'that's right, Anne, the jello is kosher too, sure, of course, has to be — oh no, oh no, no cream in your coffee, not after meat, ha ha, hear what Anne wanted, Alex — ?'
"But babble-babble all you want, Dad dear, a question has just occurred to me, twenty-five years later (not that I have a single shred of evidence, not that until this moment I have ever imagined my father capable of even the slightest infraction of domestic law... but since infraction seems to hold for me a certain fascination), a question has arisen in the audience: why did you bring a shikse, of all things, into our home? Because you couldn't bear that a gentile woman should go through life without the experience of eating a dish of Jewish jello? Or because you could no longer live your own life without making Jewish confession? Without confronting your wife with your crime, so she might accuse, castigate, humiliate, punish, and thus bleed you forever of your forbidden lusts! Yes, a regular Jewish desperado, my father. I recognize the syndrome perfectly. Come, someone, anyone, find me out and condemn me — I did the most terrible thing you can think of: I took what I am not supposed to have! Chose pleasure for myself over duty to my loved ones! Please, catch me, incarcerate me, before God forbid I get away with it completely — and go out and do again something I actually like!
"And did my mother oblige? Did Sophie put together the two tits and the two legs and come up with four? Me it seems to have taken two and a half decades to do such steep calculation. Oh, I must be making this up, really. My father... and a shikse? Can't be. Was beyond his ken. My own father — fucked shikses? I'll admit under duress that he fucked my mother... but shikses? I can no more imagine him knocking over a gas station."
— Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
His Trysting Places
"With that unhasteful celerity Mrs. Hait turned and set the scuttle down on the brick coping of the cellar entrance and she and old Het turned the corner of the house in time to see the now wraithlike mule at the moment when its course converged with that of a choleric-looking rooster and eight Rhode Island Red hens emerging from beneath the house. Then for an instant its progress assumed the appearance and trappings of an apotheosis: hell-born and hell-returning, in the act of dissolving completely into the fog, it seemed to rise vanishing into a sunless and dimensionless medium borne upon and enclosed by small winged goblins.
" 'Dey's mo in de front!' old Het cried.
" 'Them sons of bitches,' Mrs. Hait said, again in that grim, prescient voice without rancor or heat. It was not even the owner of them. It was her whole town-dwelling history as dated from that April dawn ten years ago when what was left of Hait had been gathered from the mangled remains of five mules and several feet of new Manila rope on a blind curve of the railroad just out of town; the geographical hap of her very home; the very components of her bereavement—the mules, the defunct husband, and the owner of them. His name was Snopes; in the town they knew about him too—how he bought his stock at the Memphis market and brought it to Jefferson and sold it to farmers and widows and orphans black and white, for whatever he could contrive—down to a certain figure; and about how (usually in the dead season of winter) teams and even small droves of his stock would escape from the fenced pasture where he kept them and, tied one to another with sometimes quite new hemp rope (and which item Snopes included in the subsequent claim), would be annihilated by freight trains on the same blind curve which was to be the scene of Hait's exit from this world; once a town wag sent him through the mail a printed train schedule for the division. A squat, pasty man perennially tieless and with a strained, harried expression, at stated intervals he passed athwart the peaceful and somnolent life of the town in dust and uproar, his advent heralded by shouts and cries, his passing marked by a yellow cloud filled with tossing jug-shaped heads and clattering hooves and the same forlorn and earnest cries of the drovers; and last of all and well back out of the dust, Snopes himself moving at a harried and panting trot, since it was said in the town that he was deathly afraid of the very beasts in which he cleverly dealt."
— William Faulkner, "Mule in the Yard"
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
His Musical Career
"It had an effect on him — he stood staring. The subject of their contention had finished singing; he left the piano, and his recognition of what — a little awkwardly — didn't take place in celebration of this might nevertheless have been an acclaimed operatic tenor's series of repeated ducks before the curtain. So he bowed himself over to Daisy. 'Won't you come to the other room and have some tea?' he asked — offering Mrs. Walker's slightly thin refreshment as he might have done all the kingdoms of the earth."
— Henry James, Daisy Miller
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
Gentlemen of Nerve
"There came an evening during my novitiate when, after being fed but lightly, I was taken to a Chamber, and there laced into an expensive Corset, black as Midnight, imported, I was told, from Paris, from the very workshop of the Corsetier to the Queen. They painted my face into a wanton Sister of itself, showing me, in a Hand-Mirror,— 'twas a Woman I'd never seen before,— whom, upon the Instant, sinfully, I desir'd."
— Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
Dough and Dynamite
"Here it is impossible to tell whether sexual assault took place as well as murder. The undressing, again, may have been the work of cops or physicians."
— Luc Sante, Evidence: NYPD Crime Scene Photographs: 1914-1918
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
Those Love Pangs
"So we sat there quiet with her hands against my hands like Colonel Sanders and his wife at LI 87345, where he is in jail for refusing to give up the recipe for KFC Haitian MiniBreasts, and then Carolyn said, I didn't mean that thing about the rabbit, and I scrinkled up my nose rabbit-like to make her laugh."
— George Saunders, "Jon", In Persuasion Nation
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
The New Janitor
"Did you go to't so young? Were you a gamester at five, or at seven?"
— William Shakespeare, Pericles
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
The Rounders
"En mars 1972, Resnais fit un voyage aux Etats-Unis de Providence (Rhode Island), à Newport, Salem et Marblehead sur les traces de Howard Philipp [sic] Lovecraft, sur lequel il voulait réaliser une espèce de documentaire."
— Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais, arpenteur de l'imaginaire: de Hiroshima à Mélo
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
His New Profession
" 'Thinks she's like something in the works of Tennyson. You know, chemically pure. ...' "
— Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
The Masquerader
"Palm Springs. Deciding about God."
— Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals & Notebooks: 1947-1963
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
Recreation
Split-reel, 6 minute 22 second runthrough of various Keystone motifs: meeting a woman in a park, sitting on a bench, ducking a blow so the lady takes the punch, winging a brick (across cuts — the long shot wasn't in the vocabulary yet), people falling in water... the cop on the scene / Charlie wears the same sportcoat as in The Face on the Barroom Floor, paint splotch on the rear / Recreation is phoned-in, but the compositions (once the non-duped footage kicks in, fairly pristine) are a definite refinement over previous Keystone efforts, the natural setting here alive and charged
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
The Face on the Barroom Floor
Based on the poem / The tale of a fine-artist turned drunk, The Face on the Barroom Floor marks a progression toward storyline rather than premise, arc of development / Splatter of paint on his shirttail, he sees the woman who left him for the portrait sitter, pushing a carriage in a park, their children trailing them — a remarkable response crosses Charlie's face / The pathos of his attempt to draw Medeline's face in chalk on the barroom floor, the pathetic scribble, the birth of Chaplin
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
The Property Man
Hides a pitcher of beer in his sagging overalls, then bends over to pick up the purse a dame has dropped / Have to define oneself as one thing — the property master: part of the story doesn't get underway till the end of the first reel / There's more continuity across cuts here than in any of the Sennett-Chaplin films / Get out there and make my voice listenable / When a star rises up to his boss — 'Do you know who that was? — Jack Dempsey' / Ends in another chaos blitz, well-executed, well-executed / I hate clever comedians / Comedians who entertain the eyebrows, coax your grin / Chaplin was no Reggie Watts
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
Laughing Gas
Charlie, assistant to the dentist "Dr. Pain" / Hits two men in the face with Keystone bricks; they consequently drool broken teeth / Has a day ever passed in the United States where no citizen bashed the tooth of another? / The end goes back to the beginning — in and out of rooms, A Countess from Hong Kong, the final Chaplin film, the one sanctioning bodies don't acknowledge
Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
Sunday, June 19, 2011
There Was a Father
Le Salaire du zappeur from José Oliveira on Vimeo.
The condition of "early Ozu" which in parlance = "before Late Spring" / The father and son close the shôji simultaneously, the bond that cannot be broken
will the end / An incredible encapsulation of time / A funeral of all events
d
The angle and the paradise / Begins, in the second shot, after credits, by repeating with the women the angle and parade of the opening Only Son / Like Ryôsuke in that film / _____ / Horikawa (Chishû Ryû) teaches geometry / on a class excursion, / the student Yoshida disobeys / teacher's orders to stay
Lifeboat [Alfred Hitchcock, 1944]
he; /
"Pillow shot" as teens yell out onto the lake / the soundtrack
the Iowa Writers' Workshop
one of the Buddhist markers / capsized boat /
Horikawa, Hirata sit and talk, Horikawa announcing his resignation from the school deflecting Hirata's advice to the contrary: a tree bound to support stake in background echoes chalkboard image from schoolroom lesson of circumscribed forms, angles,
what is between these men /
"The grave next to your mother's is your grandfather's.
He sold that house to put me through school." /
Holidays alone without a wife
Dad went through the roof, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Alex Ross Perry
the sewing and son, synchronously fishing: the Tale of Floating Weeds / The spinning wheels, The Only Son, Horikawa, Tokyo job, overseer at a textile plant, Ryôhei's boarding-highschool, / The Only Son, the mother's occupation — now automated wartime,
and jobs for men /
He meets Hirata in a go — thirteen years since, and Hirata's daughter grown —
but he is a YOUNG SON, SEIICHI (where is mother?) /
Ryôhei is leading! = teaching chemistry — specifically, manufacture molecular makeup of TNT / First event mentor: "Your older brother was drafted, wasn't he?" /
The son offers the father spending money, the father's pledge to offer it to the dead mother's and wife's
star altar /
Old students a former teacher no longer recognizes by face, but honors their call / Ryôhei's shaved his head for the draft / At the dinner for Horikawa and Hirata:
"Sensei, remember how you punished Iwamoto and me for fighting in third grade?"
"I'm afraid I don't." /
The shot past these same former students, into the hospital room and deathbed of Horikawa, surrounded by family and friends, his head, face, dim / "It's nothing to be sad about. I did the very best I could."
— not entirely definitively ring, though perhaps they do, — "I am happy."
After the father passes, the son Ryôhei tells Fumiko his new wife that the time he spent together with his father was "the best week of [his] life" / She buries her face in a handkerchief and weeps, / and Ryôhei off to war
Previous pieces on Ozu at Cinemasparagus:
Friends Fighting Japanese-Style [1929]
Tokyo Chorus [1931]
A Picture-Book for Grown-Ups: I Was Born, But... [1932]
Where Have the Dreams of Youth All Gone? [1932]
Passing Fancy [1933]
A Tale of Floating Weeds [1934]
Kagamijishi [1936]
The Only Son [1936]
Monday, June 13, 2011
Sam Wells
A little over a week ago, Sam Wells died. Sam, ever humble and self-effacing, was a gifted filmmaker and photographer; a lifelong and devout cinephile; an expert on movie and Mac tech; a fellow Princetonian and friend. With Jason Murphy, Sam did the image-lighting and sound-recording on my film Finding the Criminal, a two-hour conversation-picture featuring Pedro Costa, myself, and Andy Rector, which was shot in late 2008, and which I was finally able to finish work on only a few months ago.
I first encountered Sam on an online listserv in the early '00s. I remember him expressing at times his admiration for the work of Stan Brakhage and Hou Hsiao-hsien, and, when called for, demonstrating a far-reaching grasp of the science and (im)practical limitations of optics, lighting, the apparatus of filmmaking.
When it came time to assemble a crew for Finding the Criminal, Dan Sallitt suggested Sam, noting his Princeton vicinity. As it so happened, Sam was the same guy I'd spotted a couple times a week for the last few years, hanging out in front of Small World on Witherspoon, drinking coffee, chain-smoking, chatting with passing acquaintances, and whom I'd catch sight of at some of the (rare) film screenings on campus: Gehr, Kluge, Kiarostami, Bresson.
Sam was thrilled to take part in the shoot. When I told him in no more than forty-five seconds what I wanted in the way of lighting and sound, he replied with a refreshing matter-of-factness assuring me there would be no problems, suggesting we use this, that, and the other. Perfect. No bullshit, no film-technician preciousness. Three days later, we filmed in a single session lasting from 8 at night until 4 in the morning. An hour setup, hour break-down; the only difficulties arose from minor paranormal incidents at the start of the shoot. (We filmed in a friend's studio loft which had once been part of an enormous 'funeral home complex' on the outskirts of Williamsburg.) We got everything exactly as we'd set out to. During the car-ride back to Jersey, Sam raved about various things that Pedro had said in the course of the filming, exclaiming that finally someone gets it, how finally someone had put a certain idea into words.
One evening last summer I ran into Sam outside the A&B. He told me he had finally caught up with watching both In Vanda's Room and Ne change rien, and clearly he was blown away: the ideas in both films moved way beyond words. Sam said: "Goddammit, he cracked it. Someone finally cracked the fucking digital video thing. Before it was only Godard, but now it's Costa too." He said: "Those images are as beautiful as Rembrandt. There's a Rembrandt living in our time. Now I've seen Ne change rien, and I can say I helped make a film in the presence of Rembrandt." It wasn't just that Sam was emotionally overwhelmed by the film itself — and he was, obviously — it's that Ne change rien had confirmed for him, shown him, the existence of New Possibilities that he was desperately eager to begin exploring in his own films, specifically the recent work(s)-in-progress he'd been shooting for several years.
A word about those films: I don't know what the status is of the materials or work(s)-in-progress that Sam has left behind. Hopefully he had time to prepare some kind of direction for their archiving and preservation. He had been hoping to screen his 1999 film Wired Angel in an outdoor park in town at some point last September, but various obstacles rose surrounding the availability of necessary equipment for the projection.
Because Sam was a fan of this blog, and because for Sam cinema was life (and often better), I'll post the following epitaph: the artists he loved:
Hou Hsiao-hsien
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Robert Bresson
Gregory Markopoulos
Kenji Mizoguchi
Peter Kubelka
Nathaniel Dorsky
Jean-Luc Godard
Josef von Sternberg
Abbas Kiarostami
Ernie Gehr
Jacques Rivette
Yasujirô Ozu
Jean Cocteau
Sergei Eisenstein
Fritz Lang
Chris Marker
Alfred Hitchcock
Douglas Sirk
Stanley Kubrick
Andrei Tarkovsky
Pedro Costa
I'm probably leaving out many others, but those are the names I'd heard him passionately invoke.
Ah: and one more: he had a special place in his heart for Bulle Ogier.
