CinderFella

...or "Jerry Lewis Versus the Menendez Brothers." — "The Son Can't Help It." — "Versailles for the Roi du Crazy."

This 1960 film is the third work by Frank Tashlin to feature Jerry Lewis somnambulantly broadcasting the treasures of his dreams; therefore, it's Tashlin's most psychoanalytic film to date. Oh yes, to quote the movie's Fairy Godfather (portrayed by Ed Wynn godfathering Tinkle from 'The Legend of Zelda'), Tashlin's "up on all this Oedipus nonsense, you know" — as well he should be, with Jerry Lewis as collaborator — initiator, even — of the project. As for 'CinderFella' itself, one can talk about (to paraphrase Private Joker) all those Freudian things, which seem to me to possess an unembarrassing urgency only in the cinema (the dream-medium) and in no other art-form. There's transposition (a goldfish becomes a chauffeur, and a bike becomes a Cadillac), the incomplete (someone gave up on the hallway paint-job as they neared Jerry's room), living-up-to-the-father (Dad's tux hangs off Junior like a laundry-sack), wish-fulfillment (goofus Fella becomes gallant Prince Charming — and assumes the appearance of his father), and combinations thereof which throw sex into the mix (Jerry starts his mornings on a way-king-sized bedframe that accommodates a mattress like a tiny island; Jerry's horrified scream, induced by witnessing Wicked Stepbrother #1 kiss Princess Charming, induces then merges with Stepmother's shriek and faint; Jerry yanks a tree-limb and a gush of money issues from a dark hole in the trunk, and knocks out Wicked Stepbrother #2). Whether Tashlin and Lewis sat down and "consciously" sketched out this structure I have no idea, and couldn't care less.

François Truffaut once wrote: "...Tashlin is so effective that an unhappy ending to one of his films would probably cause suicides." Case in point: the closing scene in which Jerry pronounces his soul to the princess, played by Anna Maria Alberghetti —

"You can't love me. ... It's not good. You're a person — and I'm a people. ... I'm a people, you're a person, and it won't mix." A sentiment straight out of life. And then —



— As you like it, ladies and gentlemen.*



CinderFella by Frank Tashlin, 1960:














(P.S. — Strange how Tashlin transforms the Long Island of 'Artists and Models' into the Bel-Air of 'CinderFella'... some Viennese quality in the air must drift on over...)

Artists and Models by Frank Tashlin, 1955:


CinderFella by Frank Tashlin, 1960:


Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick, 1999:



* "And one man in his time plays many parts, ... "

The Sopranos

It wasn't the type of sit-down one might have expected the Soprano clan to share, given the domestic-front turbulence of the six seasons that preceded this final scene of the series. — Tony, Carm, A.J. gather at Holsten's in Bloomfield for the kind of off-the-cuff gathering that might resonate for one of these characters in a moment of honest sentimentality some future day. Meadow's running late from picking up a new birth-control prescription, and as the other three wait for their food, she grapples with parallel-parking her uncompact car in a spot just outside the diner. After two tries (only last year Toyota brought the auto-park car to select markets), she guides the vehicle in flush and rushes through the front door of Holsten's, where the three others sit mid-nosh around a bowl of onion rings.

So mundane it's tricky... but we're seeing an unusual confluence play out with every shot, every cut. In fact, the point of convergence is also the overarching oddity: the locale of the diner, notable with regard to its position inside the culture (more than the public-house, the lunch-counter described social interaction for one-and-a-half American centuries, from demotic fraternity to lonely individualism — see Hopper or Rockwell or Siodmak) and in a way particular to this scene (all of Jersey seems to have convened here on this one night). But I don't want to talk more about this until I say something about the glide-into from the previous scene, glissando by a cut on motion (Tony striding through the diner door) that links those two aforementioned ideas, solitude (last glimpse of the state facility) and demotism (opening glimpse of the restaurant), and proceeds into the final combining-flourish upon the arrival of the rest of the family. This resulting equation of the two scenes exposes the lie of demographics, and announces, through Tony's presiding point-of-view, "We are alone together."

The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, 1942 (here's where we discover the origin of the "arbitrary" 1.85:1 cinema ratio) :


The Runaway by Norman Rockwell, 1958 (on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post) :


The Killers by Robert Siodmak, 1946:



Taking it from the top: David Chase gives us Uncle Junior in a mental ward (one of the great elegiac scenes of the show), all light weak in ebbed blue and beige, the nephew's resentment bearing down on the old man with every utterance — and then Tony realizes Junior's senses have shuttled — and he reflexively attempts to build the old gangster back up (Junior his would-be assassin, his contra-conspirator) by reminding him, "You used to run all of North Jersey." Junior responds with a smile, before a return to total non-register. Tony's disgust as he stamps out of the hospital is more confused, more shuffled (we could never quite charge Tony Soprano with "ambivalence") than when he entered. He encountered unexpected things — for maybe the thousandth time. From here, the cut to Tony entering the diner.

The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:



What other recent American creation in cinema/television have we been invited to judge as frequently as Tony Soprano? Always there were lapses and gaps and blanks or contradictions in his outward behavior, and always Chase et al framed the action as though to solicit the viewer to "do the thinking for Tony" when it seemed Papa Soprano could not operate with — let's not say morality — clarity of purpose. But what good did it ever do, these "Tony, can't you see you're being unreasonable!"s — nada, the same net-effect of suspense-film pleas that the sexy blonde "don't go through that door — !" Thus the super-rosa ascent that results in the diner-scene truly surprises, due in one part to the amount of metaphor aggregated here with such economy, in other part because Tony's point-of-view has become the initiatory agent. In recent cinema — from A History of Violence by Cronenberg to A Prairie Home Companion by Altman — we have been asked to consider a place of "repast" as a space of assessment. But a meal around a table is only a narrative (cosmetic) means of filtering other considerations — and a convenient one, because visually and aurally the filmmaker can place four people in a shot at one time, arranged more or less in a circular pattern (determined by the type of table), and this might activate a nexus, a concentration of concerns. Passing from Cro-Magnon man through space-station man, we bring on the food and we get down to business. The only remaining question is whether to charge the company account.

The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


A History of Violence by David Cronenberg, 2005:


A Prairie Home Companion by Robert Altman, 2006:


A Prairie Home Companion by Robert Altman, 2006:


2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, 1968:


2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, 1968:


2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, 1968:


2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, 1968:



David Chase, on the other hand, took advantage of the Holsten's setting as a means to take account of his company — the Sopranos, America, and the viewing public. This climactic scene — probably the best of the series — entered, if only for two or three minutes, a prism-realm not unlike Bergman's Fanny and Alexander or Renoir's Eléna and the Men, two works assembled by their creators from shards of the respective oeuvres, collating the concerns of the previous work and shifting their contexts from the exterior world to the interior. In each instance, the preoccupation of the final gesture: synthesis. So even as The Sopranos established a cartography of America's supposed divisions — by race, class, sexuality, politics — the closing scene provides a bird's-eye-view of the interconnections, absent the borders and meridians. [So maybe Tony became an angel after all, and floating up to heaven, over all he surveys, he — — — ] America is in Bloomfield is in America; paranoia and serenity make conjugal visits to the last outpost of the American myth; myth is personal freedom, but "threat" of "miscegenation" is a myth; capitalism fosters personal success and community riches, but self-usurps too at which point capitalism, a myth, redefines the-American-myth; civics (Boy Scouts) and soldierhood (Iraq) interchange; USA-patriotism lurches toward pride-of-place-über-alles... until face-to-face sit-downs are had. One might also say that the prismatic diner-scene represents a mirror that reflects the staid-umpteenth-iteration dinner-party attended by Doctors Bracco and Bogdanovich in the penultimate episode, wherein the notion of demographics acquires a clinical taxonomy, and definition, diagnosis, plays out like a struggle in the same structure of shot-countershot as described Dr. Melfi's sessions with Tony...

Fanny och Alexander [Fanny and Alexander] by Ingmar Bergman, 1982:


Eléna et les hommes [Eléna and the Men] by Jean Renoir, 1956:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:



...who, positioned for maximum anonymity (like the eyed toy inside the mechanical-arm game one finds near the entrances of diners) and centered like a bullseye, imbues Holsten's by his mere presence with the atmosphere of a witness-protection "locality." No? So then who's that man in the Members Only jacket, and what does it mean? What's Members-Only's modus operandum? For all these glances Members Only casts, Tony, casting glances throughout the entire scene, the entire scene in effect created by his cast glances, nonetheless seems not to worry, seems not even to notice M.O.'s shifts of the eyes, to tell the truth — Tony, the spinner of fictions, the unconscious/metaconscious re-enactor of the fictions he's digested through a lifetime of movies and television — Tony, the digester of paranoia (many spun fictions and a couple documentaries) with serenity, that is, Tony, the great psychiatric case and narcissist and assassination-fantasist and supreme sublimator —

— "Members Only": mob warning, inside job, division drawn, "you're with us or you're against us" — "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists" —

— until...

— "Members Only" is exposed as a reverberation of another movie watched and reminisced — Coppola's The Godfather, of course, when Al Pacino goes to a restaurant's men's room for the purpose of retrieving a planted pistol. And to underscore the fact that this man's murderous purpose maybe isn't "all there" (and he might not be, either), Chase deflates all the paranoia, all the diviseness of fictions, by enveloping this tensest of moments... in a dick joke. Men's room — members only, indeed.

The back-of-the-mind's really all toilet-muck anyway.

So "don't stop believing," the soundtrack urges (and cautions) us (and Tony). Embrace the totality of existence, hurtle toward potential. And make the most of our fictions — a "cut to black" in the middle of a shot isn't Tony's assassination so much as the reverse-shot taken from some dizzy aerie onto the abyss of Tony's fantasies — and a deference to our own. At its base, a "cut to black" is a cinematic device that precludes closure: "life" and "show" are one, and both simply must go on. We are alone together, yes, but this might be what makes things good.

The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Sopranos: Episode 86 by David Chase, 2007:


The Golden Coach by Jean Renoir, 1953:

Das fidele Gefaengnis

All husbands and wives have their origin — where they grew up, went to school, took their first jobs; how they met, fell in love, or came to the conclusion they should marry. This is another beginning for all that comes after: the exchange of nuptials, resignation to gruesome habits (he can't stand the smell of the gum she chews, and she's appalled by the reaction he gives to the woman in the café who notes the amalgam of smudges on his laptop screen and offers a disposable wipe), the solace of routine, time as eternal return, — the adoption of couplehood as assimilation into a lifestyle genre, determinedly — which is also to say freely — classicist in method.

Ernst Lubitsch built a body of work around the analysis of the married couple, and his first period — the stretch of astonishing silent films he made between 1914 in Berlin and 1929 in Hollywood — lays the groundwork for the two periods that would follow in the era of talking pictures. Even one of the aberrative films of this early period (the aberrations alone constituting a period within a period: "historical meditations / fairy-book fantasias"), 'Anna Boleyn' (1920), locates the primary anxiety of the marriage vows in a certain man's-perspective — what happens if, married, I'm thunderstruck by new love? — and fashions its drama, along with its undercurrent of deadly-wry humor, out of a few totally angular hypotheticals: Well, what if I were, like, also a king? (because that would probably make issuing decrees a little easier), and also, I mean, king or not, you know, might not marriage in some cases pronounce a couple "love-figureheads" enacted, really, by one sole lust in an (infinite?) series of passing lusts...? But, and more broadly, "Fidelity, or infidelity?" is the question — no, are the conditions — that obsessed Lubitsch from the beginning to the end; Lubitsch who understood so well the "revolutions" inherent to love, rooted specially at the core of long-lasting love, the departures and returns and resultingly strengthened affirmations of that love; Lubitsch who titled his first great Hollywood silent 'The Marriage Circle' (1924).

— And well before 'The Marriage Circle' — Lubitsch who, in 1917, made 'Das fidele Gefängnis.' It would be easier of course, less pretentious-looking too, to employ the title by which the film is most commonly known in English, literal translation of its German: 'The Merry Jail.' This title, however, glosses over that (more-than-a) suggestion embedded in the German original: note the second word "fidele," neuter-nominative of "fidel" — modifying "Gefängnis," "jail." Freedom and its bounds are depicted by Lubitsch's film — deep-focus backgrounds inside the married couple's house, yes, but all an illusion of distance running far into depth, curtailed by a wall abruptly, suddenly (you sense movement in those vectors of composition, "still" shot or not — in fact all these rooms at once "deep" and "closed off" are paralleled in the film by the vectors at play in the close-up shots taken over the hood of the speeding autos). As such, the spaces inside the home also suggest a theatrical stage; also indicate a prison. (One barely cognates Lubitschian mise-en-scène; apprehension happens faster than you can incant "cathexis-anti-cathexsis!!!") Marriage-as-jailterm would, of course, be a cheap enough joke, except the 'Fidele Gefängnis' couple goes farther in their allowances than most; if the "institution" of marriage is, well, just that, an "institution," Harry Liedtke and Kitty Dewall appear to have considered, then instituted, some serious reforms. A marriage-against-marriage, one might say, in which both participants (or combatants, though their fight is directed outward) seem determined to make "marriage" mean something freer than social tradition has generally led us to expect; use the compact as a "ground" over which new variations of moral procedure, cause-and-effect, ruse-and-reveal might be tested out, as though marriage might be considered as passacaglia, and played through might resemble the kind of daily celestial ordination that churches like to promise, and might exemplify, after all, life in its fullest. In other words, classicism at its most modern and eternal.

Having exhaled a mention of "cause-and-effect" somewhere in the wheeze above, I might clarify that Lubitsch's film upends the underlying daily causalities, the just-so's and expectations, of the connubial two-step by cutting between the two story threads [pertaining to the jailed husband, and the tickled wife] in such a way that rather than connoting a unity between the distant actions, a randomness or chaos seems implied instead. The phrase "delusional cause-and-effect" popped into my head during this most recent viewing, and I think the method feels more conducive to the film's argument for a "more natural" natural order than the usual "convergence" induced by typical cross-cutting/parallel-strand procedure. In this way the structure strikes me as more "modernist" than even, say, Lang's 'Der müde Tod' from 1921 — and I must point out the pentacle that hangs like a ward over the prison door in 'Das fidele Gefängnis,' near the crude caricatures of women, in mystic anticipation of Lang's 'Metropolis.' For that matter, that mysterious mark on the wall also, and more secretly still, predicts the "X"s that recur through Hawks's 'Scarface,' which turn up again — within the same body of work — in the inexplicable, essentially non-diegetic "X" shadows cast upon the wall above the brontosaurus skeleton in the last scene of 'Bringing Up Baby.'

But Kitty Dewall, all Zelda Fitzgeraldian or not, harnesses some powerfully reconstitutive forces distinctly outside and above that death-drive at the heart of Katharine Hepburn's role in Hawks's film. Not her near-Irish name alone has me returning again to Yeats as happens so bittersweetly/unwillingly in '07; I watch her throw back her head, erupt with the carefree raucous abandon that indicates: "And she'd had lucky eyes and a high heart, / And wisdom that caught fire like the dried flax, / At need, and made her beautiful and fierce, / Sudden and laughing."

Still, she's probably more like an Irishwoman out of Joyce. And, anyway, doesn't she look like a "Molly"?

The Drift

Cinema, it seems to me, is here too. Like Nina Hagen's 'Nunsexmonkrock,' Einstürzende Neubauten's 'Tabula Rasa,' or, christ, even The Beatles' White Album, Scott Walker's 'The Drift' is an opus LP that uses music, sound, and language to explore the manifestation of space inside of time. Naturally enough, an image track is absent, but one nevertheless "feels" the coloration, the force of the "cuts" (in both the Motown and the montage sense), the edges of a fiction that lies plowed-over, waiting to be archaeologized and reconfigured by the devoted listener-spectator. For me, at this still-early stage of what I hope will be a long, lovely acquaintance with the record, 'The Drift''s most stunning aesthetic feat comes when the duck-call heard near the end of the second track, "Clara," ends up summoning, seven songs later at the close of "The Escape," a voice (Walker's?) giving full throat to an unintelligible anguish — while assuming the "disguise" of Donald Duck. With a modern pop-climate wherein Pitchfork Media's insipid rating-system can add, or chop off, several thousand sales in the initial months of an indie-label release (and which David Cross has deemed "2.shit"), it stands to reason that Walker's groundbreaking 'The Drift' (Pitchfork rating: 9.0) will influence more future "Best New Music" picks, and Rating: 6.5 savagings (a "65" meant a "D" where I went to school), than any other record from 2006. I say: Bring it, — from either direction.

Other music-related favorites, of varying cinematic capacities, included records from Joanna Newsom, Sparks, The Knife, Cat Power, Liars, Camera Obscura, and Morrissey — who on 'Ringleader of the Tormentors' managed to invoke Pasolini, Visconti, Magnani, and Claude Brasseur. I was hypnotized by the short-films for I'm from Barcelona's "We're from Barcelona" (directed by Andreas Nilsson, who is also responsible for The Knife's beautiful "Like a Pen" clip) and The Klaxons' "Atlantis to Interzone" (directed by Oliver Evans), both screening now on YouTube. My favorite single track this year, which was ridiculed by critics but which I find to be a listening experience of stupendous power on every level (production, texture, structure, technique, lyric), was "Ize of the World" by The Strokes. Finally, this was the year that I was able at last to hear an ever-growing collection of podcasted episodes from the long-running radio series by the great American genius Joe Frank. 'The Killing of a Chinese Bookie' to 'This American Life''s 'American Beauty,' Frank's program — in all of its incarnations — expands the possibilities of the "audio-program" form with the same zeal exhibited by Welles's Mercury Theatre On the Air in the late '30s. There's no doubt in my mind the name Joe Frank (who, praise be, is still kicking after a long illness in '05 and '06) belongs in that same pantheon of mavericks that includes our Orson, Cassavetes, Kubrick. He's the master of the audio seriocomico-psychodramedy.

Hiroshima mon amour

Other Things Doin' - 3

It's the debut feature of Alain Resnais, from 1959, and its title translates to 'Hiroshima My Love.' The director is one of the world's greatest filmmakers, the scenario is by Marguerite Duras, and that fact and a couple more once caused Jean-Luc Godard to utter the immortal words: "Then let's say it's literature."

Because I like to use this space to write only about films I admire (it's all for fun, you know), I will note that the first half of Resnais's (not Duras's) seemingly deathless totem is beautiful, the past and present and future of that "19th-century invention" cinema in 2007 just as it was in 1959. Why, then, do those final 45 minutes exist? Of course, this being Resnais, "it's all theater" — but this being Japan, it's noh, and kabuki, and whatever else paved the way for the hyperbolic "Tokyo-ga," that method of presenting actors on-screen devised by Kurosawa and mass-produced by the Art Theater Guild sawmill. There are no mistakes in Resnais, no arbitraries, but there's also no pleasure to be possibly extracted, at least for me, from this particular intellectual gambit. "Why does Emmanuelle Riva bang her fists so, while Eiji Okada, sitting at this table or that, three times presumably takes a shit in his pants? Because they're zombies inbetween worlds, residing somewhere in the interstices of the movies and literature, past and present, memory and desire." But so what. What was fresh here in '59 is, in the '00s, just another night on Hokkaido's Cinema Road, and if Emmanuelle Riva chanced to slip face first in a snow-drift, an ashy impression indeed would result from the mascara — the lipstick — the chemical smear. No foundation for a golden-classic.













Qianxi mambo / Millennium Mambo by Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001



Qianxi mambo / Millennium Mambo by Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001



Qianxi mambo / Millennium Mambo by Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001



Qianxi mambo / Millennium Mambo by Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001

To Catch a Thief

Others Things Doin' - 2

I'm gonna hit this quick — there's other things doin'.

A tourist vision of France, "movie France," because 'To Catch a Thief' (1955) is what it looks like when Alfred Hitchcock goes on vacation. After all, shooting in Europe, you get to "write off" your expenses.

If this is taking a break, then once upon a time Monsieur Hulot really did tear the cosmos in two.

One page of the account-book reads: John Robie (Cary Grant): "former cat burglar of Paris before the war" > The New York Herald Tribune = Art ("And I'm Dead") Buchwald <= Gina Lollobrigida.

"Parles anglais!" (barks the dubbed Charles Vanel) —

Danielle (Brigitte Auber) works for her father. Her rival, "Frances" (aren't they all! / Grace Kelly) works for her mother, as a sexual proxy. She screams to Cary Grant (shortly after the fireworks burst in one of Hitch's best scenes) — "You stole mother's jewels!" For Grant, Kelly's sex is a mystery (see the shadow-cowl'd face while the ice around her neck glistens); he is the Celibate, the Thief who steals the jewels for no effective gain, generative or psychosexual. He is "apart," alone. He takes to the roofs (so adeptly), he squats in the chimney-crannies, this American who moved to France, who became a thief, who became a Resistance fighter (for the sake of his own freedom, consequently, as much as the country's), who became a vintner and a flower-harvester... all while playing the bon français with such sartorial panache.

"Slap!" — To watch the funeral scene is to peer into the core of the 'To Catch a Thief'-mechanism: a Hitch-wound* biography of the man who went by "Cary Grant."

* 'Rear Window' (1954) — See A.H. at the mantle in the composer's apartment.









Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock, 1954:

Woman in the Moon

Other Things Doin' - 1

Lang's 1929 film 'Woman in the Moon' ('Frau im Mond') explores how fiction — the act of dreaming — influences concrete progress and, in the best cases, science. One only needs to glance at the comic books stashed by the rocketship's stowaway boy: "Mingo," "Nick Carter," (see also, Pynchon-people, Kit Carson, The Chums of Chance, und so weiter?)... (How else to account for the bizarre title of the picture...)

All of '20s Lang is a warning signal anticipating the Nazi rise. The dream of escape (which is the underlying dream of all space-travel sci-fi) = casting for survival. The Alps have become the barren moonscape — der Bergfilm's (un)natural conclusion.

Fritz Lang and Jean-Luc Godard are the eminent graphic-designers in the cinema. Their respective aesthetics operate above "design as style"; they serve to relay the respective world-view, to communicate it above and beyond mere art-design, art-direction. Just as in the best print design.

But you knew this. You saw Adam and Eve in the stranded scouts, just as did I. Willy Fritsch, the ultimate Langian-hero; and his moon-goddess, that woman with two nostrils like ice-pick holes in the snow.

A Joe Swanberg Overture

Kissing on the Mouth by Joe Swanberg, 2005:



This afternoon I wrote the following in the comments thread attached to Glenn Kenny's essay "The Cinema of Contingency: Notes on Swanberg", over at Glenn's blog, Some Came Running. My comments come on the heels (easy now!) of a pack of buffs basically retreading the same tired arguments contra Joe Swanberg's cinema, now bringing especially to the forefront, as I wrote today in a private email to Glenn, "success-jealousy, certain unsettling class-biases, and an unexamined and hypocritical chauvinism/misogyny." Particularly that twinning at the end, which I outline in the broadside below.

(Note for further reflection: How does phallocentrism operate within the realm of the collective? Can we still call those "prisoners" who have commandeered the panopticon?!?!)

Now, let me emphasize here that I enjoyed GK's essay quite a bit, and assert that, in my opinion, and despite Kenny's ultimate dismissal of JS's oeuvre, he raises a number of interesting questions about Swanberg's cinema greater than any I've encountered in even the laudatory pieces that have come my way. That spleen of mine that surrounds the matter, reproduced below, does not take Kenny as its target, then, but those who continually respond to new and provocative artworks with a few arch, pseudo-ironic dribblings that serve no purpose greater, ultimately, than reaffirming their own anti-transgressive emotional stases. In other words, it's up to Glenn to go through the trouble of airing his own biases, examining the films at length against the relief of his own tastes and ideas, and finally drawing a (not impermeable) conclusion — before: cue downpour of trolls' two-cents (as in "two-penny goddamn," as in, "what one does not give, in relation to the airing on the Internet, just because it is possible, of your opinion" [which opinions, by the way, as my father so frequently and eloquently puts it in contexts decidedly extra-'Net, and to the degree that everyone has one, "are like assholes"] ). Given all this, an evisceration sometimes simply must be in order. Pardon me, madame — snark will contribute more to the raze of this civilization than the sternly-worded rebuke.

Before I forget, let me also make clear that my mockery of received-ideas around what the term "mise-en-scène" refers to isn't aimed at GK, despite my indication of "flower arrangements" in the vicinity, as it turned out, of a palate-cleansing post by Kenny featuring a frame from Visconti's great The Leopard [Il gattopardo, 1963] that contains exactly that. — I admit the flowers were in my mind, but in Visconti they're obviously no mere window-dressing (and another note before I forget: a treatment of the Italian master's late 1974 chef-d'oeuvre Conversation Piece is long overdue, at least on one of our parts), and Glenn has always been on more than People-You-May-Know-terms with the masters of mise-en-scène and the mysteries they do manufacture (cf. his examination of Borzage's Liliom [1930] vs. Lang's Liliom [1934] at The Auteurs' Notebook, as one recent example). Rather, and unglossed in the text below, I had in mind a conversation once engaged in with Dan Sallitt about the visual arbitraries at play in the work of certain masters, and the primacy they exerted over the defenses mounted on their respective behalves by certain hoarier denizens of the old a_film_by listserv. I recall the use of a flower-vase on the café table to illustrate the point. As such the flowers are a piece of personal vocabulary: something of a touchstone. (For any readers who might be interested in a few other conclusions drawn around the same matter — and on matters of "pragmatism" — see my piece written about Ingmar Bergman shortly after his death, here.)

So: an overdue dialogue — and one conducted on the eve of the premiere of his latest film, Alexander the Last — about the cinema of Joe Swanberg. For my part, and in addition to the hellion-clarion underneath, I'll be posting some thoughts about each of JS's works to date over the course of the next week or two. Not exactly a defense — in World 2.0 the once imperiled material of film-works becomes intangible and more or less ineradicable — but an appreciation, 'couched' in analysis. That is, "cinematherapy", reappropriated. Vive Swanberg.

"However, the fate of art that tries to do without criticism is instructive. The attempt to reach the public directly through 'popular' art assumes that criticism is artificial and public taste natural. Behind this is a further assumption about natural taste which goes back through Tolstoy to Romantic theories of a spontaneously creative 'folk.' These theories have had a fair trial; they have not stood up very well to the facts of literary history and experience, and it is perhaps time to move beyond them. An extreme reaction against the primitive view, at one time associated with the 'art for art's sake' catchword, thinks of art in precisely the opposite terms, as a mystery, an initiation into an esoterically civilized community. Here criticism is restricted to ritual masonic gestures, to raised eyebrows and cryptic comments and other signs of an understanding too occult for syntax. The fallacy common to both attitudes is that of a rough correlation between the merit of art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation assumed is direct in one case and inverse in the other.

"One can find examples which appear to support both these views; but it is clearly the simple truth that there is no real correlation either way between the merits of art and its public reception. Shakespeare was more popular than Webster, but not because he was a greater dramatist; Keats was less popular than Montgomery, but not because he was a better poet. Consequently there is no way of preventing the critic from being, for better or worse, the pioneer of education and the shaper of cultural tradition. Whatever popularity Shakespeare and Keats have now is equally the result of the publicity of criticism."

— from the "Polemical Introduction" to the Anatomy of Criticism (1957) by Northrop Frye. A passage, no more, no less.

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Let me diffuse a couple milligrams of unbridled contempt for the Commenters on this thread who would believe that a still frame-grab, divorced of context or, y'know, movement and sound, can settle the case once-and-for-all for bad mise-en-scène, or the demerits of a filmmaker.

One can capture frames from any film, even one by a revered studio-based master like Ozu, which look like shit — F.Y.fucking.I. Setsuko Hara with her eyes half-blinky, maybe; Chishû Ryû seemingly captured mid-seizure but actually on the cusp of pronouncing, "Kono thread de hihan-suru hitobito wa, Kurosawa no hakuchi da yo." I suppose the points-scoring rejoinder to this will be, "Heh-um, [snark-expulsion of air from nostrils, accompanied by half-smirk similar to that castigated by GK above], of course, it's one thing to pull out an ugly frame from a film with so many beautiful ones, but try finding a single beautiful one in a place where there ARE none." To which I would respond that they exist in the films of Swanberg — who, by the way, shouldn't be induced to formulate a body of work that only justifies its existence by its degree of proximity to Ozu, any more than should Hollis Frampton, or Bob Clark — and I'll be presenting the evidence when I write about each of the films over the next week or two at Cinemasparagus + the Indiepix blog. At that point, feel free to take the — not a defense, but an elucidation — or turn and walk away. Just know that your glib little crowing on Internet comment threads smacks about five times more envacuumed, implicitly-'superior', and self-conscious+totally-unaware than any of the persons/characters in the films under discussion.

Let me also register my disgust at the prevailing viewpoint, which clearly exists, no matter how much you people (yes, YOU people) deny it exists, that the aesthetic value of a film is directly proportional to its budget or — how I coat this term with such bile-relish as I pronounce it — "production values." The entrancing waft of Mammon creates the thrall to everything from short works being considered "supplements" (or: "bonus features"), to the U.S.'s most popular films being reported by way of ticket-grosses, rather than number-of-tickets-sold. (The tallying itself being, obviously, absurd to begin with.) Couple completely independent filmmaking, shot ON OCCASION in spaces with white walls and dumpy furniture, like the kind that wasn't at all art-designed (because it's fucking REAL) (I would love to see any of you "art-design" that office from the temp scenes in Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha and in thus attempting even get NEAR articulating both the warp-and-woof of the suburban world beyond New York City or metropolitan exurbs, AND a very particular and soul-crushing pathos of the American lower-middle-class) — with portrayals of sex, and the American public — those Pragmatic Purveyors of Proportion — really, REALLY get their dander up. The thought process, which might be titled "The American Anxiety Over a Perceived Discrepancy in Levels of Commitment to the Diegesis on the Part of the Filmmaker, or: The American Anxiety Over Perceived Way-More-Than-Any-of-Us-Had-Been-Expecting-Commitment to the Diegesis on the Part of the Filmmaker," goes something like this, as I see it:

-Look at Joe Swanberg's fuckin' FACE. With that fuckin' GOATEE. And his fuckin' MOUTH OPEN.

-Yeah. That dumb fuckin' MOUTH.

-I know. And he's getting written about (ugh, and by the way seriously I could do what he does and get written about, ugh it's so depressing), because there was like, this scene, where he came, right. And it was coming to other women.

-Other women who were IN the FILM? Oh my god. That's so phallocentric.

-I know. He must have had them hypnotized to agree to it. Didn't they realize they were being, essentially, RAPED?

-They were TOTALLY being raped! By proxy. Which is to say by the camera. Which is to say by what it filmed, which is what I was watching. Which is to say Joe Swanberg is making me feel like I've committed the raping.

-Ugh. What a creep. And he keeps puppeting them into doing this again and again in his movies. And you know what, if they're not, okay, being puppeted, let me just go on record and say that, if that's NOT the case? then these women are just LOOSE, I'm sorry. It's like, anyway, I'll take my movie-sex simulated next time, thanks, where it exists to mechanistically keep the story moving. Proxy-rape is only for behind the door of my own bedroom.

-Seriously. And okay, I'm all for "more mise-en-scène than there is story," I mean, SOMETIMES, but it's gotta have some punch — y'know, 'cause mise-en-scène as I understand it is really just vividness of colors, epic'ness of scope, and busy-ness of the flower-arrangements in the frame. Gloss.

-I don't want the dull-matte-finish that Swanberg's selling.

-I know. I want something saleable. Something that makes me feel like I'm getting my money's worth — I want to see a car-chase or at least some fuckin' velvet curtains, y'know, so I have SOME evidence that the filmmakers respected my spending my money on the price of the ticket/rental — which car-chase or velvet curtains would evince their concern and that they did put forth some effort here by at least finding SOME funds. If not ideas.

-Exactly. At least have the courtesy to give us signifiers.

And so on and so on. Hey, Commenters, we can agree to disagree — one man's Gerwig-looking-away-to-avoid-looking-at-the-camera-is-an-amateur's-botched-take, is another man's Gerwig-looking-away-to-avoid-looking-at-the-camera-is-touching-human-and-real. It just comes down to two different ways of looking at movies, to two different ways of looking at the world. And, apparently, to a difference in opinion over whether such twains as movies and life, must ever, ever meet — whether there must ever, ever exist a Cinema of Contiguity.

Since his name was mentioned once in a (tangential) comparison Dan [Sallitt] made between the filmmaker and Swanberg, I'll shut off my vent's diffusion by reciting the words of Maurice Pialat: "Si vous ne m'aimez pas, je peux vous dire que je ne vous aime pas non plus."

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Shanghai Express

Inspired by recent viewings of Josef von Sternberg's 'Morocco' (1930) and 'Blonde Venus' (1932), I recycle here a few thoughts chicken-scratched about his masterpiece 'Shanghai Express' a couple years ago. —

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The Chinese Civil War serves as the backdrop for this 1932 von Sternberg agent-thriller, but it’s the titular express train bound for Shanghai that will represent the main stage; viewed from more than seventy years in the future, the parallax is still dizzying. A sensual and threatening interplay between light, shadow, and layer upon layer of gauze circumfixes as ever the great director’s gaze, the focal object of which is none other than the incomparable Marlene Dietrich. Here she plays Shanghai Lily, a notorious Euro-vamp whose past relations with fellow passenger Captain Harvey (Clive Brook) inform the love affair at the center of the film. Based on the reactions of the train’s global assemblage of men, it becomes apparent that Lily’s reputation has already traversed the span between the rail-line’s endpoints or wider, stranger zones, like a nocturnal phantasy stalking a host in Murnau, Feuillade, or early Lang. But the myth soon settles into flesh-and-blood reality as Lily’s traveling companions realize she has no intention of playing spittoon for crass ejaculation. Done up in raven-feather boa, a haze of tobacco smoke, and an exotic veil that transforms her face into a duotone Domino-mask, Lily puts all preconceptions at bay once she commandeers the negotiations to free Captain Harvey from the clutches of a seditious guerrilla squadron — even if the officer’s freedom comes at the cost of giving herself over to an undersexed rebel leader.

Commencing at the moment of Lily’s escape, the film’s third act bucks the dictates of conventional Hollywood structure as it shifts attention to the reunited lovers reconciling their feelings with the unwavering individuality presupposed by their respective hard-line personae. The delicacy of the emotions at play is illustrated by a striking sequence wherein von Sternberg cross-cuts repeatedly between close-ups of a uniformly lit Captain Harvey, pensive and biting his lip, and a rebuffed Shanghai Lily, face luminous as she trembles and smokes in an otherwise pitch dark train compartment.

Also notable for its refusal to adhere to the hyperbolic Asian stereotypes rampant at the time of release (the only “cauc-Asian” actor turns out in the film to be of mixed pedigree, while the rape of could-be dragon-lady Hui Fei [Anna May Wong] unleashes a real emotional agency, and spurs her to a kind of languorous vengeance), 'Shanghai Express' establishes the fascination with the Orient that von Sternberg would go on to pursue in 'The Shanghai Gesture' (1941), 'Macao' (finished off by Nicholas Ray in 1952), and his great final masterpiece 'The Saga of Anatahan' (1954).