(Click the full-screen icon on the video to view large.)
Via Kassandre, a not-for-profit organization that aims to promote and support a free and open cinema. Discovered this weekend on the Twitter for Les Films du Losange.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Jean-Luc Godard, On Authors' Rights (2012)
(Click the full-screen icon on the video to view large.)
Via Kassandre, a not-for-profit organization that aims to promote and support a free and open cinema. Discovered this weekend on the Twitter for Les Films du Losange.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Bob Dylan Interview with John Elderfield, 2012: In the Films of the '40s and '50s, "Individuals Overcame Problems Instead of Merely Surviving Them"
ELDERFIELD: An area of American visual art of great interest to you is, I know, movies of the 1950s, such as A Face in the Crowd, Ace in the Hole, and Sweet Smell of Success. What is it about these that attract you? And do you see a relationship between them and the kind of narrative dramas you have painted — more in The Brazil Series, though, than in The Asia Series?
DYLAN: Face in the Crowd — that's so current, isn't it? You can watch any of those TV personalities, and if you've seen Face in the Crowd, you know there's probably some Lonesome Rhodes in all of them. The whole country is like their flock of sheep. I grew up in a small town hidden from the outside world, and the films from the '40s and '50s were like a window into the future, like classic literature, and had great meaning. It's hard to explain that, especially in this age of narcissism and self-surveillance. A lot of people wouldn't know they are alive unless they have photos of themselves to prove it — from the cradle to the grave, actually. The movies that we grew up watching seemed to be tuned to a higher vibration. They weren't about us, they were about people bigger than us, living more on the edge than us — strange morality tales, more like Greek theater. Individuals overcame problems instead of merely surviving them, so you knew you could do that too. The people we saw on the screen were more real than real people. They were exemplary. Cult figures. Heroes and heroines. Anti-heroes. Top of the world. Brute force. Themes of salvation. Echoes of Shakespeare and of Aeschylus. Those films had a powerful effect on all of us who grew up with them. Like schoolboy lessons. Sure, I see a relationship. There's always been a relationship.
===
Monday, January 16, 2012
Marriage Material + Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011
Today Joe Swanberg premiered his latest and never-before-seen 55-minute feature, Marriage Material, at Vimeo, where it's available for viewing until the end of the month. It comes on the occasion of the release by Factory 25 of the Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011 box set, the first installment of which bows this week, and which will ultimately be comprised of the collectively amazing Silver Bullets, Art History, The Zone, and the still-unpremiered Privacy Settings. I haven't seen Privacy Settings yet, but I personally consider both Art History and The Zone, alongside the 2009 Alexander the Last, as maybe Swanberg's very best films to date. Joe gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times blog a few days ago about the newest film and the box set here. You can order Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011 here.
About Marriage Material: pic stars Kentucker Audley and Caroline White as they babysit Joe and Kris's son Jude Huckleberry Swanberg over the course of a day or two at their Memphis home. The presence of the baby occasions a hard look at the possibility of starting a family and a serious conversation about when/if/why to get married. Tensions boil, but never boil over, via such touchstones as diverse and oblique as government aid, Béla Tarr, and Mac vs. PC. The long central conversation between Kentucker and Caroline that takes place on the couple's bed with the family dog at their feet qualifies as one of the most intimate and powerful scenes Swanberg has presented to date. The entire film (beautiful, as these frames attest to, with Adam Wingard as DP) sort of represents a kind of prologue, epilogue, or companion-piece to Audley's own forthcoming — and unbelievable — Open Five 2, which should well be regarded as one of the most anticipated films of 2012.
You can watch Marriage Material right now, right here. Go full-screen, and plug in your earbuds.
Posts on Silver Bullets and Art History at Cinemasparagus:
Art History [2011]
Sunday, January 08, 2012
Scattered Junk
They say you bring what you know to a movie. Holds for the filmmaker, holds for the audience. If you didn't take the picture as a kind of documentary, you might proclaim Scattered Junk, in your sick little poll, winner of Best Production Design of any film of 2011. But the revolution is not a craft-service table, and Scattered Junk is the true document of real revolutionaries: this cell of dreamers, plotters, enact the same gestures of Carlos, transposed to an apartment not so much lived-in as occupied, embedded-within, just beneath the apex of a clapboard that recalls a similar form similarly haunted, halfway through The Night of the Hunter. Too real? Or just too earnest for a world (or movie landscape) where all is statecraft and lies?
Everyone will be cruel to this film — let's have no illusions that the critics are anything other than animals. The title of the picture applies to settings — to a final mixtape by subject Tim Cushing — to fragile emotions of fragile moments — to the approach by director Timothy Morton which might be characterized as junkle-rough, its thick-stitched and very kinetic patchwork the jigsaw signature of some second-, third-cousin to Trash Humpers, Gummo, or the recent films by HK's pal Jonas Mekas. Scattered Junk defies the viewer (it doesn't matter what his 'class' is or where she lays her regional roots) to reckon the whole affair sad, to deem the self-constructed squalor, the morning misery windshields, the implied prospectlessness, the suicide absent and central to the matters at hand, as all so sad. And this Whole is sad, and Morton celebrates its beauty accordingly with just about as little use for patronizing-"sad" as one might any slice of time.
Aside from his talents as a filmmaker, Timothy Morton is one of the most interesting actors/personalities in movies today: see his notable appearances in Kentucker Audley's Team Picture, Ginger Sand, Family Tree (playing Lena Dunham's brother), or the great Holy Land. You can watch Scattered Junk in its entirety on your laptop, desktop, iPad, or phone for free at Audley's excellent No Budge site here. (Just be good and watch in full-screen mode if you can, and plug in some headphones.)
Team Picture
Ginger Sand
Family Tree
Holy Land
Saturday, December 24, 2011
The Winter's Tale
Come, I'll question you / Of my lord's tricks, and yours, when you were boys: / You were pretty lordlings then?
We were, fair Queen, / Two lads that thought there was no more behind / But such a day tomorrow as today, / And to be boy eternal.
Was not my lord / The verier wag o' th' two?
We were as twinned lambs, that did frisk i' th' sun, / And bleat the one at th' other; what we changed / Was innocence for innocence; we knew not / The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dreamed / That any did; had we pursued that life, / And our weak spirits ne'er been higher reared / With stronger blood, we should have answered heaven / Boldly, "not guilty"; the imposition cleared, / Hereditary ours.
Mamillius, / Art thou my boy?
Ay, my good lord.
I' fecks! / Why, that's my bawcock. What, hast smutched thy nose? / They say it is a copy out of mine. Come, Captain, / We must be neat — not neat, but cleanly, Captain: / And yet the steer, the heifer, and the calf, / Are all called neat. Still virginaling / Upon his palm? How now, you wanton calf, / Art thou my calf?
Yes, if you will, my lord.
Thou want'st a rough pash, and the shoots that I have / To be full like me: yet they say we are / Almost as like as eggs; women say so, / That will say anything. But were they false / As o'er-dyed blacks, as wind, as waters; false / As dice are to be wished, by one that fixes / No bourn 'twixt his and mine — yet were it true / To say this boy were like me. Come, Sir Page, / Look on me with your welkin eye. Sweet villain, / Most dear'st, my collop! Can thy dam, may 't be? / Affection! Thy intention stabs the center. / Thou dost make possible things not so held, / Communicat'st with dreams — how can this be? — / With what's unreal thou coactive art, / And fellow'st nothing. Then 'tis very credent / Thou mayst co-join with something, and thou dost, / And that beyond commission, and I find it, / And that to the infection of my brains, / And hardening of my brows.
Gone already! / Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears a forked one! / Go play, boy, play: thy mother plays, and I / Play too — but so disgraced a part, whose issue / Will hiss me to my grave; contempt and clamour / Will be my knell. Go play, boy, play. There have been, / Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now, / And many a man there is, even at this present, / Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by th' arm, / That little thinks she has been sluiced in 's absence, / And his pond fished by his next neighbour, by / Sir Smile, his neighbour; nay, there's comfort in 't, / Whiles other men have gates, and those gates opened, / As mine against their will. Should all despair, / That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind / Would hang themselves. Physic for 't there's none; / It is a bawdy planet, that will strike / Where 'tis predominant, and 'tis powerful, think it, / From east, west, north, and south. Be it concluded, / No barricado for a belly. Know 't / It will let in and out the enemy, / With bag and baggage. Many thousand on 's / Have the disease, and feel 't not. How now, boy!
Is whispering nothing? / Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? / Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career / Of laughter with a sigh (a note infallible / Of breaking honesty)? Horsing foot on foot? / Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift? / Hours, minutes? Noon, midnight? And all eyes / Blind with the pin and web, but theirs; theirs only, / That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing? / Why, then the world and all that's in 't is nothing, / The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, / My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, / If this be nothing.
I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting. Hark you now! Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather? They have scared away two of my best sheep, which I fear the wolf will sooner find than the master; if anywhere I have them, 'tis by the seaside, browsing of ivy. Good luck, an 't be thy will, what have we here? Mercy on 's, a barne! A very pretty barne; a boy or a child, I wonder? A pretty one, a very pretty one; sure, some scape; though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work; they were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here.
My traffic is sheets; when the kite builds, look to lesser linen. My father named me Autolycus, who being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. With die and drab, I purchased this caparison, and my revenue is the silly cheat. Gallows and knock are too powerful on the highway. Beating and hanging are terrors to me; for the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it.
Shepherdess — / A fair one are you — well you fit our ages / With flow'rs of winter.
Sir, the year growing ancient, / Not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth / Of trembling winter, the fairest flow'rs o' th' season / Are our carnations, and streaked gillyvors, / Which some call Nature's bastards; of that kind / Our rustic garden's barren; and I care not / To get slips of them.
Wherefore, gentle maiden, / Do you neglect them?
For I have heard it said, / There is an art, which in their piedness shares / With great creating Nature.
Say there be; / Yet Nature is made better by no mean / But Nature makes that means; so over that art, / Which you say adds to Nature, is an art, / That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry / A gentler scion to the wildest stock, / And make conceive a bark of baser kind / By bud of nobler race. This is an art / Which does mend Nature, change it rather; but / The art itself is Nature.
So it is.
Then make your garden rich in gillyvors, / And do not call them bastards.
I'll not put / The dibble in earth, to set one slip of them; / No more than were I painted, I would wish / This youth should say 'twere well, and only therefore / Desire to breed by me. Here's flow'rs for you: / Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram, / The marigold that goes to bed wi' th' sun, / And with him rises, weeping; these are flow'rs / Of middle summer, and I think they are given / To men of middle age. You're very welcome.
He sings several tunes faster than you'll tell money; he utters them as he had eaten ballads, and all men's ears grew to his tunes.
He could never come better; he shall come in; I love a ballad but even too well, if it be doleful matter merrily set down; or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.
He hath songs for man or woman of all sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He has the prettiest love songs for maids, so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burdens of dildos and fadings: "Jump her, and thump her"; and where some stretch-mouthed rascal would, as it were, mean mischief, and break a foul gap into the matter, he makes the maid to answer, "Whoop, do me no harm, good man"; puts him off, slights him, with "Whoop, do me no harm, good man."
Mark your divorce, young sir, / Whom son I dare not call; thou art too base / To be acknowledged. Thou, a scepter's heir, / That thus affect'st a sheep-hook! Thou, old traitor, / I am sorry that by hanging thee, I can / But shorten thy life one week. And thou, fresh piece / Of excellent witchcraft, who of force must know / The royal fool thou cop'st with —
O my heart!
I'll have thy beauty scratched with briers and made / More homely than thy state. For thee, fond boy, / If I may ever know thou dost but sigh / That thou no more shalt see this knack — as never / I mean thou shalt — we'll bar thee from succession; / Not hold thee of our blood, no not our kin, / Farre than Deucalion off. Mark thou my words. / Follow us to the court. Thou, churl, for this time, / Though full of our displeasure, yet we free thee / From the dead blow of it. And you, enchantment, / Worthy enough a herdsman — yea him, too, / That makes himself, but for our honour therein, / Unworthy thee — if ever henceforth thou / These rural latches to his entrance open, / Or hoop his body more with thy embraces, / I will devise a death as cruel for thee / As thou art tender to 't.
Even here undone!
I understand the business, I hear it. To have an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand, is necessary for a cutpurse; a good nose is requisite also, to smell out work for th' other senses. I see this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive. What an exchange had this been without boot! What a boot is here, with this exchange! Sure, the gods do this year connive at us, and we may do anything extempore.
Give me thy hand. I will swear to the Prince thou art as honest a true fellow as any is in Bohemia.
You may say it, but not swear it.
Not swear it, now I am a gentleman? Let boors and franklins say it, I'll swear it.
How if it be false, son?
If it be ne'er so false, a true gentleman may swear it in the behalf of his friend; and I'll swear to the Prince thou art a tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt not be drunk; but I know thou art no tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt be drunk; but I'll swear it, and I would thou wouldst be a tall fellow of thy hands.
I will prove so, sir, to my power.
Ay, by any means prove a tall fellow. If I do not wonder how thou dar'st venture to be drunk, not being a tall fellow, trust me not.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Cymbeline
You must not so prefer her 'fore ours of Italy.
Being so far provoked as I was in France, I would abate her nothing, though I profess myself her adorer, not her friend.
As fair and as good — a kind of hand-in-hand comparison — had been something too fair and too good for any lady in Britain. If she went before others I have seen, as that diamond of yours outlusters many I have beheld, I could not but believe she excelled many; but I have not seen the most precious diamond that is, nor you the lady.
I praised her as I rated her. So do I my stone.
What do you esteem it at?
More than the world enjoys.
Either your unparagoned mistress is dead, or she's outprized by a trifle.
You are mistaken. The one may be sold or given, or if there were wealth enough for the purchase or merit for the gift. The other is not a thing for sale, and only the gift of the gods.
Which the gods have given you?
Which by their graces I will keep.
You may wear her in title yours, but you know strange fowl light upon neighbouring ponds. Your ring may be stol'n too. So your brace of unprizable estimations, the one is but frail and the other casual. A cunning thief or a that-way-accomplished courtier would hazard the winning both of first and last.
Is there no way for men to be, but women / Must be half-workers? We are all bastards, / And that most venerable man which I / Did call my father was I know not where / When I was stamped. Some coiner with his tools / Made me a counterfeit; yet my mother seemed / The Dian of that time. So doth my wife / The nonpareil of this. O, vengeance, vengeance! / Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained / And prayed me oft forbearance — did it with / A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on't / Might well have warmed old Saturn — that I thought her / As chaste as unsunned snow. O, all the devils! / This yellow Iachimo in an hour, was't not? / Or less? At first? Perchance he spoke not, but, / Like a full-acorned boar, a German one, / Cried "O!" and mounted; found no opposition / But what he looked for should oppose and she / Should from encounter guard. Could I find out / The woman's part in me! For there's no motion / That tends to vice in man but I affirm / It is the woman's part. Be it lying, note it, / The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers; / Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers; / Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain, / Nice longings, slanders, mutability, / All faults that man may name, nay, that hell knows, / Why, hers, in part or all, but rather all. / For even to vice / They are not constant, but are changing still / One vice but of a minute old for one / Not half so old as that. I'll write against them, / Detest them, curse them. Yet 'tis greater skill / In a true hate to pray they have their will; / The very devils cannot plague them better.
Some jay of Italy, / Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him. / Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion, / And, for I am richer than to hang by th' walls, / I must be ripped. To pieces with me! O, / Men's vows are women's traitors! All good seeming, / By thy revolt, O husband, shall be thought / Put on for villainy, nor born where't grows, / But worn a bait for ladies.
A heavy reckoning for you, sir. But the comfort is, you shall be called to no more payments, fear no more tavern bills, which are often the sadness of parting, as the procuring of mirth. You come in faint for want of meat, depart reeling with too much drink; sorry that you have paid too much, and sorry that you are paid too much; purse and brain both empty; the brain the heavier for being too light, the purse too light, being drawn of heaviness. O, of this contradiction you shall now be quit. O, the charity of a penny cord! It sums up thousands in a trice. You have no true debitor and creditor but it; of what's past, is, and to come, the discharge. Your neck, sir, is pen, book, and counters; so the acquittance follows.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
The Godfather: Parts I & II
"I dedicate my performance as Connie to Nicholas Dean Des Barres."
—Talia Shire
Monday, November 07, 2011
Chapter Seventeen: Icarus
"Jobs and Sculley asked for other ideas, but the agency folks pushed back. 'You guys didn't want to run "1984" last year,' one of them said. According to Sculley, Lee Clow added, 'I will put my whole reputation, everything, on this commercial.' When the filmed version, done by Ridley Scott's brother Tony, came in, the concept looked even worse. The mindless managers marching off the cliff were singing a funeral-paced version of the Snow White song 'Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho,' and the dreary filmmaking made it even more depressing than the storyboards portended. 'I can't believe you're going to insult businesspeople across America by running that,' Debi Coleman yelled at Jobs when she saw the ad. At the marketing meetings, she stood up to make her point about how much she hated it. 'I literally put a resignation letter on his desk. I wrote it on my Mac. I thought it was an affront to corporate managers. We were just beginning to get a toehold with desktop publishing.' "
— from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, p. 187.
Friday, November 04, 2011
The Prague Orgy
" 'Yes! Yes! I would iron your shirts all day long.'
" 'That would be the first week,' Bolotka says. 'Then would begin the second week and the excitement of being Mr. Olga.'
" 'That isn't true,' she says, 'I would leave him alone.'
" 'Then would begin the vodka,' Bolotka says. 'Then would begin the adventures.'
" 'Not in America,' weeps Olga.
" 'Oh,' says Bolotka, 'you would not be homesick for Prague in New York City?'
" 'No!'
" 'Olga, in America you would shoot yourself.'
" 'I will shoot myself here!'
" 'With what?' asks Bolotka.
" 'A tank! Tonight! I will steal a Russian tank and I will shoot myself with it tonight!' "
"Someone stares at me from a nearby table while I continue sizing up the floor and with it the unforeseen consequences of art. I am remembering the actress Eva Kalinova and how they have used Anne Frank as a whip to drive her from the stage, how the ghost of the Jewish saint has returned to haunt her as a demon. Anne Frank as a curse and a stigma! No, there's nothing that can't be done to a book, no cause in which even the most innocent of all books cannot be enlisted, not only by them, but by you and me. Had Eva Kalinova been born in New Jersey she too would have wished that Anne Frank had never died as she did; but coming, like Anne Frank, from the wrong continent at the wrong time, she could only wish that the Jewish girl and her little diary had never even existed."
"I board a trolley by the river, then jump off halfway to the museum where Bolotka is expecting me to pay him a visit. On foot, and with the help of a Prague map, I proceed to lose my way but also to shake my escort. By the time I reach the museum this seems to me a city that I've known all my life. The old-time streetcars, the barren shops, the soot-blackened bridges, the tunneled alleys and medieval streets, the people in a state of impervious heaviness, their faces shut down by solemnity, faces that appear to be on strikes against life—this is the city I imagined during the war's worst years, when, as a Hebrew-school student of little more than nine, I went out after supper with my blue-and-white collection can to solicit from the neighbors for the Jewish National Fund. This is the city I imagined the Jews would buy when they had accumulated enough money for a homeland. I knew about Palestine and the hearty Jewish teenagers there reclaiming the desert and draining the swamps, but I also recalled, from our vague family chronicle, shadowy, cramped streets where the innkeepers and distillery workers who were our Old World forebears had dwelled apart, as strangers, from the notorious Poles—and so, what I privately pictured the Jews able to afford with the nickels and dimes I collected was a used city, a broken city, a city so worn and grim that nobody else would even put in a bid. It would go for a song, the owner delighted to be rid of it before it completely caved in. In this used city, one would hear endless stories being told—on benches in the park, in kitchens at night, while waiting your turn at the grocery or over the clothesline in the yard, anxious tales of harassment and flight, stories of fantastic endurance and pitiful collapse. What was to betoken a Jewish homeland to an impressionable, emotional nine-year-old child, highly susceptible to the emblems of pathos, was, first, the overpowering oldness of the homes, the centuries of deterioration that had made the property so cheap, the leaky pipes and moldy walls and rotting timbers and smoking stoves and simmering cabbages souring the air of the semidark stairwells; second were the stories, all the telling and listening to be done, their infinite interest in their own existence, the fascination with their alarming plight, the mining and refining of tons of these stories—the national industry of the Jewish homeland, if not the sole means of production (if not the sole source of satisfaction), the construction of narrative out of the exertions of survival; third were the jokes—because beneath the ordeal of perpetual melancholia and the tremendous strain of just getting through, a joke is always lurking somewhere, a derisory portrait, a scathing crack, a joke which builds with subtle self-savaging to the uproarious punch line, 'And this is what suffering does!' What you smell are centuries and what you hear are voices and what you see are Jews, wild with lament and rippling with amusement, their voices tremulous with rancor and vibrating with pain, a choral society proclaiming vehemently, 'Do you believe it? Can you imagine it?' even as they affirm with every wizardly trick in the book, by a thousand acoustical fluctuations of tempo, tone, inflection, and pitch, 'Yet this is exactly what happened!' That such things can happen—there's the moral of the stories—that such things happen to me, to him, to her, to you, to us. That is the national anthem of the Jewish homeland. By all rights, when you hear someone there begin telling a story—when you see the Jewish faces mastering anxiety and feigning innocence and registering astonishment at their own fortitude—you ought to stand and put your hand to your heart.
"Here where the literary culture is held hostage, the art of narration flourishes by mouth. In Prague, stories aren't simply stories; it's what they have instead of life. Here they have becomes their stories, in lieu of being permitted to be anything else. Storytelling is the form their resistance has taken against the coercion of the powers-that-be."
"No, one's story isn't a skin to be shed—it's inescapable, one's body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that's at once your invention and the invention of you."
Roth in 27-minute interview shortly after being awarded the Man Booker International Prize in May 2011:
Previous posts on Philip Roth at Cinemasparagus:
Zuckerman Unbound [1981]
The Anatomy Lesson [1984]
2006 and 2007 Interviews
See also some of the Chaplin entries.
Monday, October 24, 2011
The Anatomy Lesson
And Roth Still Hasn't Been Awarded the Nobel Prize
(And That's a Post for Another Night)
"Zuckerman's mother, a quiet, simple woman, dutiful and inoffensive though she was, always seemed to him a slightly more carefree and emancipated spirit. Redressing historical grievances, righting intolerable wrongs, changing the tragic course of Jewish history—all this she gladly left for her husband to accomplish during dinner. He made the noise and had the opinions, she contented herself with preparing their meal and feeding the children and enjoying, while it lasted, the harmonious family life. A year after his death she developed a brain tumor. For months she'd been complaining of episodes of dizziness, of headache, of little memory lapses. Her first time in the hospital, the doctors diagnosed a minor stroke, nothing to leave her seriously impaired; four months later, when they admitted her again, she was able to recognize her neurologist when he came by the room, but when he asked if she would write her name for him on a piece of paper, she took the pen from his hand and instead of 'Selma' wrote the word 'Holocaust,' perfectly spelled."
"The sharp smells, the decisive noises, the American ideals, the Zionist zeal, the Jewish indignation, all that to a boy was vivid and inspiring, almost superhuman, had belonged to his father; the mother who'd been so enormous to him for the first ten years of his life was as diaphanous in recollection as the chiffon hood. A breast, then a lap, then a fading voice calling after him, 'Be careful.' Then a long gap when there is nothing of her to remember, just the invisible somebody, anxious to please, reporting to him on the phone the weather in New Jersey. Then the Florida retirement and the blond hair. Neatly dressed for the tropics in pink cotton slacks and a monogrammed white blouse (wearing the pearl pin he'd bought years before in Orly Airport and brought home for her from his first summer in France), a little brown-skinned blond-haired woman waiting down at the end of the corridor when he gets off the elevator with his bag: the unconstrained grin, the encompassing dark eyes, the sad clinging embrace, instantly followed by the gratitude. Such gratitude! It was as though the President of the United States had arrived at the condominium to call upon some lucky citizen whose name and address had been drawn from a hat."
"Out past the new condominium that had gone up next door, he saw a wide slice of the bay. So long as her husband was alive, they used to look at the bay ritually from the bedroom balcony every evening after dinner and the TV news. 'Oh, Nathan, you should have seen the colors last night at sunset—only you would have the words to describe it.' But after Dr. Zuckerman's death, she couldn't face all that ineffable beauty alone and just kept watching television, no matter what was on."
"She sent the chauffeur all the way down to Allen Street for the stuffed peppers from Seymour's Parkway, and then came over in the car to heat them up for his dinner. She rushed into the little kitchenette in her red-fox Russian cossack coat and, when she came out with the steaming pot, was wearing only her heels. Gloria was nearing forty, a firm, hefty brunette with protruding circular breasts like targets, and electrifying growths of hair. Her face could have been a Spanish mulatto's: almond eyes, a wide, imposing jaw, and full rounded lips with peculiarly raised edges. There were bruises on her behind. He wasn't the only primitive she babied and he didn't care. He ate the food and he tasted the breasts. There was nothing Gloria didn't remember to carry in her bag: nippleless bra, crotchless panties, Polaroid camera, vibrating dildo, K-Y jelly, Gucci blindfold, a length of braided velvet rope—for a treat, on his birthday, a gram of cocaine. 'Times have changed,' said Zuckerman, 'since all you needed was a condom.' 'A child is sick,' she said, 'you bring toys.' True, and Dionysian rites were once believed to have a therapeutic effect on the physically afflicted. There was also the ancient treatment known as the imposition of hands. Gloria had classical history on her side. His own mother's means for effecting a cure were to play casino on the edge of the bed with him when he was home with a fever. So as not to fall behind in her housework, she'd set her ironing board up in his bedroom while they gossiped about school and his friends. He loved the smell of ironing still. Gloria, lubricating a finger and slipping it in his anus, talked about her marriage to Marvin.
"Zuckerman said to her, 'Gloria, you're the dirtiest woman I've ever met.'
" 'If I'm the dirtiest woman you've ever met, you're in trouble. I fuck Marvin twice a week. I put down my book, put out my cigarette, turn out the light, and roll over.'
" 'On your back?'
" 'What else? And then he puts it in and I know just what to do to make him come. And then he mumbles something about tits and love and he comes. Then I put on the light and roll on my side and light up a cigarette and get on with my book. I'm reading the one you told me about. Jean Rhys.'
" 'What do you do to make him come?'
" 'I make three circles this way, and three circles the other way, and I draw my fingernail down his spine like this—and he comes.'
" 'So you do seven things.'
" 'Right. Seven things. And then he says something about my tits and love, and he comes. And then he falls asleep and I can turn on the light again and read.' "
"...'I've been so busy with my old man I haven't even had time to think about my mother. That'll come later, I suppose. What's it like for you, without them? I still remember your folks and your kid brother when they all came out to visit on the train.'
"The differences in their family predicament Zuckerman preferred not discussing right then—it could only promote further dismissive interpretations of his motives. Zuckerman was still stunned by how matter-of-factly Bobby had opposed him. His plan to change his life had seemed as absurd to Bobby as it had to Diana when he'd invited her to come out with him to Chicago and go to school.
" 'What's it like,' Bobby asked him, 'three, four years after they're gone?'
" 'I miss them.' To miss. To feel the absence of. Also, to fail to do, as to miss an opportunity.
" 'What'd they make of Carnovsky?'
" In the old days he would have told him the truth—back then Zuckerman would have kept Bobby up half the night telling him the truth. But to explain that his father had never forgiven the mockery that he saw in Carnovsky, of both the Zuckermans and the Jews; to describe his acquiescent mother's discomposure, the wounded pride, the confused emotions, the social embarrassment during the last year of her life, all because of the mother in Carnovsky, to tell him that his brother had gone so far as to claim that what he'd committed wasn't mockery but murder... well, he didn't consider it seemly, twenty years on, still to be complaining to his roommate that nobody from New Jersey knew how to read."
" ...'Shirley Temper happens to be as bright as any actress working in the legitimate theater. Why is she doing it? She's doing it because she is pulling in a thousand dollars a day. My money. Is that debasing women? She's doing it because a Broadway play opens and closes in a week and she's back with the unemployed, while with me she works all the time, has the dignity of a working person, and gets the chance to play a whole variety of roles. Sure, some of them are the classic woman who is looking for a strong pimp to rob them blind. Some people are always going to be exploited and not take responsibility for their own lives. Exploiting goes on everywhere there are people willing to be exploited. But Shirley says fuck that. And she didn't belong to the college sorority with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem. Scranton PA, that was her college.' "
"The last of the old-fashioned fathers. And we, thought Zuckerman, the last of the old-fashioned sons. Who that follows after us will understand how midway through the twentieth century, in this huge, lax, disjointed democracy, a father—and not even a father of learning or eminence or demonstrable power—could still assume the stature of a father in a Kafka story? No, the good old days are just about over, when half the time, without even knowing it, a father could sentence a son to punishment for his crimes, and the love and hatred of authority could be such a painful, tangled mess."
"He'd been considered a great mocker once himself, but never as diabolically inspired as this. Even without the aid of his glasses, he understood that he didn't look like he was on the ball. He thought, Just don't make me write about it after. Not everything has to be a book. Not that, too.
"But back in bed he thought, The burden isn't that everything has to be a book. It's that everything can be a book. And doesn't count as life until it is."
[from Philip Roth's 1984 introduction to the Franklin Library limited-edition of The Anatomy Lesson]:
"In The Ghost Writer, young Zuckerman imagines himself morally rescued by marrying the martyred Anne Frank, shielded by that fantasied union from charges of betraying his family, and Jews generally, with his reckless, ill-considered fiction. In The Anatomy Lesson he imagines himself, with no less exuberance, as the owner of a pornographic dynasty grossing seven million a year, an antisocial desperado with a filthy mouth and a fourteen-thousand-dollar watch, about whom he thinks, '...maybe he is what makes one secretly proudest of being a Jew after all. The more he sits with me, the more I find to like.' Anne Frank's husband has come a long way. [...]
"The Anatomy Lesson is a comedy about searching for relief from all that binds, a comedy of disappointment and imprisonment and loss. Why pain of such proportions should be funny is something I'm unable to explain, except to say that only inasmuch as I can see it as comic do I believe that what I've written originates in motives I can trust."
Previous posts on Philip Roth at Cinemasparagus:
Zuckerman Unbound [1981]
2006 and 2007 Interviews
See also some of the Chaplin entries.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
The Rink
• Charlie-as-waiter jots items on a patron's check: "spigitty", "mellon", "4 biers"
• Master of the physical universe.
• Why do men eat tools, impedimenta of men? 'Not anymore, Jack!'
• Chaplin's physical strength. When he tears the arms off chairs, there's no need to rig them in pre-production.
• A difficult film to follow, the mind skates along.
• You have seen nothing until you've seen Charlie on roller-skates. Anyone who watches Chaplin, from cinephile to 'popular spectator,' understands that he's the equal of Keaton. Aside from the tours-de-force of the two rink sequences, watch Charlie, seated on the bench next to Edna Purviance, use the lip of the moulding on the wall behind his head to make his hat "floop!" up repeatedly in expression of delight, as though it were attached to a string jerked by a grip in the rafters.
• The film's title becomes metaphor that you need not consciously comprehend, but you watch the film and you understand The Rink exactly.
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Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:
Sunday, September 25, 2011
He Who Awaits Dead Men's Shoes Dies Barefoot: A Cinematographic Proverb
Quem espera por sapatos de defunto morre descalço, um provérbio cinematográfico, Monteiro #2, begins with the remnants of a Nouvelle Vague-style film — the café scene out of Charlotte et Véronique, the girl with Chantal Goya bangs et son Jean-Pierre. No diegetic soundtrack to the footage — silent, except for the artificial layer of a projector-whirr. Rushes. The microscope and the scrutiny. Goya in a cab (or perhaps Cléo at 6pm). At last, JCM's voice-off cuts into l'écran sonore —
"In those days we led a hard life. We wanted to make films and, having just returned from London with our poor but suitably deluded minds, we were the classic figure of the enthusiast. The year was 1965, and many an innocence would in the meantime be ravished. This country, gentlemen, is a bottomless pit, an asshole one can't escape from. At any rate, a film, even though formless and sketchy as a stillborn, is a foretaste of our own history, the silent projection of our spectres. That is all. Let us move on without regrets."
Luís Miguel Cintra picks up in 1970 from the rushes-footage of the abandoned film — he and his friend sit at a table in a café, continuation of Masculin-Féminin. A roach falls from the ceiling into Cintra's water-glass. As always, the search for money.
It's as though João César's 1970 film — and its prologue made of rushes of the aborted 1965 feature — exist as records that attest to the fact: "Alas, once the world was young..."
JCM's tree (cf. Vai-e-vem...)
From the finagle of a newly deceased admiral's clothes in a pre-emptive estate sale (exchange), to the counter of a pawn-shop. To lunch (now affordable) with a bird — her purse leering in central position of the tableau. LMC recites from the collected works of Luís de Camões. But quotation, citation — dead men's shoes — this is not enough.
Cintra will sit in a rocking-chair and watch a couple beyond the threshold laze in bed and (of course) read Cahiers du cinéma. His voice-over narration declares: "In the end, crimes are things that keep repeating themselves."
A cinematographic proverb and an ethics. Yet nods to Alphaville and Vivre sa vie follow: with the negative exposure (repeat of a positive version, seconds before) of Cintra running on the platform at the train that pulls away with his love — the negative marks the shift to the event ("Cintra runs") as 'extra' to the woman's consciousness, the new P.O.V. (when Godard went negative in Alphaville, the citation was of Nosferatu by Murnau, the larger idea about the UFA cinema as metonym for the death camps) — trains. — This-all followed by an invocation of Poe's "The Oval Portrait", as re-poeticized by the doomed finale of JLG's Vivre sa vie. From there, a direct 'Godardian device': the hand that scrawls in a notebook as the camera films the act (and this hand inscribes an aphorism attributed to its master: "The cinema is a fraud (Godard), but that fraud might be overcome."
And then Mónica returns, Cintra sits at a café with her and her friend... João César intones a text over the soundtrack that begins like Cocteau (mirrors, two kingdoms) and gradually suggests the damnation in citation (mirror-people). — How to build the artform anew? beyond influences?
Remember too — the mirror-people are this boy, that girl. "You'd better leave..." he tells her twice across movie-time...
Remember too — the mirror is solipsism, and the cinephile mirror, well... inside and outside, how to escape such-kind of... terrible... self-portrait of the damned?
Previous pieces on João César Monteiro at Cinemasparagus:
Friday, September 23, 2011
Zuckerman Unbound
"He was reminded of a story about Flaubert coming out of his study one day and seeing a cousin of his, a young married woman, tending to her children, and Flaubert saying, ruefully, 'Ils sont dans le vrai.' A working title, Zuckerman thought, and recorded in the white window of the composition book cover the words Dans le Vrai. These composition books Zuckerman used for his notes were bound in the stiff covers of marbled black-and-white design that generations of Americans envision still in bad dreams about lessons unlearned. On the inside of the front cover, facing the blue ruled lines of the first page, was the chart where the student is to enter his class program, period by period, for the school week. Here Zuckerman composed his subtitle, printing in block letters across the rows of rectangles provided for the subject, room, and instructor: 'Or, How I Made a Fiasco of Fame and Fortune in My Spare Time.' "
"Pepler laughed his hearty appreciative laugh. God, he certainly seemed harmless enough. Dark glasses? A tourist indulgence. Going native. 'Whistle something else,' Pepler said. 'Anything. As far back in time as you want.'
" 'I really have to be off.'
" 'Please, Nathan. Just to test me out. To prove to you I'm on the level. That I am Pepler in the flesh!'
"Well, the war was on, the sirens had sounded, and his father, the street's chief air-raid warden, was out of the house in the prescribed sixty seconds. Henry, Nathan, and their mother sat at the rickety bridge table in the basement, playing casino by candlelight. Only a drill, not the real thing, never the real thing in America, but of course, if you were a ten-year-old American you never knew."
" 'Look,' said Zuckerman, you want the whole truth?'
" 'Yes!' Eyes big, eyes bulging, eyes asizzle in a glowing red face. 'Yes! But the truth unbiased, that's what I want! Unbiased by the fact that you only wrote that book because you could! Because of having every break in life there is! While the ones who didn't obviously couldn't! Unbiased by the fact that those hang-ups you wrote about happen to be mine, and that you knew it—that you stole it!'
" 'I did what? Stole what?'
" 'From what my Aunt Lottie told your cousin Essie that she told to your mother that she told to you. About me. About my past.'
"Oh, was it time to go!
"The light was red. Would it never be green again when he needed it? With no further criticism to make or instruction to give, Zuckerman turned to leave.
" 'Newark!' Pepler, behind him, delivered the word straight to the eardrum. 'What do you know about Newark, Mama's Boy! I read that fucking book! To you it's Sunday chop suey downtown at the Chink's! To you it's being Leni-Lenape Indians at school in the play! To you it's Uncle Max in his undershirt, watering the radishes at night! And Nick Etten at first for the Bears! Nick Etten! Moron! Moron! Newark is a nigger with a knife! Newark is a whore with the syph! Newark is junkies shitting in your hallway and everything burned to the ground! Newark is dago vigilantes hunting jigs with tire irons! Newark is bankruptcy! Newark is ashes! Newark is rubble and filth! Own a car in Newark and then you'll find out what Newark's all about! Then you can write ten books about Newark! They slit your throat for your radial tires! They cut off both balls for a Bulova watch! And your dick for the fun of it, if it's white!'
"The light went green. Zuckerman made for the mounted policeman. 'You! Whining about Mama back in Newark and how she wouldn't wipe your ass for you three times a day! Newark is finished, idiot! Newark is barbarian hordes and the Fall of Rome! But what the hell would you know up on the hoity-toity East Side of Manhattan? You fuck up Newark and you steal my life—' "
Previous posts on Philip Roth at Cinemasparagus:
2006 and 2007 Interviews
See also some of the Chaplin entries.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Titicut Follies
Late cross-posting this here, but two weeks ago my first essay in a series called 300 Million Milliseconds covering every one of Frederick Wiseman's forty films from 1967 to present, and beyond, in chronological order of release, went up at The MUBI Notebook here, on Wiseman's earth-shaking debut, Titicut Follies.
Next in the series is 1968's High School, which will be posted shortly.
Endless Pavement
This film, Kagirinaki hodô, is known now, because of the Eclipse set, has been known, as Street Without End; a better translation might be Endless Pavement...
Refrain of the streetlights, of the bulbs of building interiors, in the opening act... A constant, constant music...
Sugiko is hit by a car (third accident of this sort in the first five extant Naruse films) — sickbed — any injury in the Japanese cinema of this period tends to plunge the victim into a coma...
Comedy and melodrama, two pairs of suitors, two pairs of rich men offering Sugiko a leg-up, two mothers who object to their sons' desire to marry the girl, two girls (co-workers and friends), Sugiko and Kesako, are offered jobs from the same studio as movie actresses...
They go to the movies to watch Lubitsch's The Smiling Lieutenant...
The surface is barely scratched here. A great film, one of Naruse's greatest. Too much to say. But less talk for now. Autumn approaches at last...
Previous pieces on Naruse at Cinemasparagus:
No Blood Relation [1932]
Apart from You [1933]
Every-Night Dreams [1933]
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
ADIEU AU LANGAGE / Jean-Luc Godard / 5 x 45-Minute Interview This Week
on His New Feature Adieu au langage, et caetera
From Monday, September 12th, 2011 till Friday, September 16th, 2011, Jean-Luc Godard discusses his forthcoming feature Adieu au langage [Farewell to Language] with Laure Adler on her radio program Hors-Champs on France Culture.
Either listen by streaming on France Culture's site;
— go to the iTunes Store and search for "Hors-Champs" and subscribe for free, for the program as podcast instant-downloads. Monday's episode runs 45 minutes;
— or, best still, to go directly to the iTunes Store podcast download/subscription page, click here.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Every-Night Dreams
The home is a home-base for the narrative, the recurring center both within this film and from one entry to the next in Naruse's filmography.
Every young filmmaker should put internal vision on hold for one outing and try to make a film in the style of Naruse.
There's a cozy, lovely ambiance to the dwelling of Omitsu (a woman who entertains docked sailors, she's played by Sumiko Kurishima), the room she shares with the couple that babysits her son Fumio (Teruko Kojima) — wood-paneled and papered walls... Mizuhara (Tatsuo Saitô, the stork in Ozu films and others at Shochiku) returns one day to his family so that he might see his son. He convinces Omitsu to reconcile. He takes his boy out to play (in the Shochiku-'backlot'-barrows), during this period of unemployment.
Fumio, out playing one day, gets hit by a car (cf. Flunky, Work Hard, where a train delivered the blow). Following the accident, Mizuhara commits a robbery, ostensibly to send the boy to a good hospital (still unemployed, he tells Omitsu he's borrowing money from old friends), — an alarm is triggered, and a frenzied pursuit occurs through the night streets of the town: canted angles; the effect of limitless motorcycle cops emerging from around building corners...
There's lots of play with mirrors in interior moments: they exist for the characters to confront themselves, to 'reflect' — before evading themselves once again...
We learn that, the morning after Mizuhara hands Omitsu the stolen money and departs, he has drowned himself: a powerful cut to an upside-down shot of water. Omitsu is disgusted by an act she sees as the pinnacle of his cowardice. "Where's Daddy?" — successive tracks-into.
The film ends on a montage of life around the port. In the beginning of Every-Night Dreams, Omitsu comes back from 'away' — Mizuhara comes back from 'away'. Away: the America of No Blood Relation, the countryside village of Apart from You... Mikio Naruse had a way with away...
Previous pieces on Naruse at Cinemasparagus:
No Blood Relation [1932]
Apart from You [1933]
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