(A Paraphrased) Quote for the Week

Earlier this week I went to see Peter Kubelka presenting his Monument Film (more on which soon). During his talk he said something that I thought was worth making my Quote for the Week – but unfortunately I only wrote it down in my notebook in a paraphrased fashion. Still, hopefully I've captured the point he was trying to make…

 

Making and projecting films digitally is the equivalent of hanging prints (rather than paintings) in the National Galley. Film projectionists are like pianists giving a concert.

A Kink in the Chain of Influence

(As all the films I've watched this week have been research for a new project, there will be no Films This Week, for the reasons explained here. So I thought I'd write this post instead). 

A recent conversation with a friend of mine got me thinking once more about Argo, which I praised here, writing: 'look, [Argo is] saying, how good mainstream films were in the 1970s – let's go back to making films like that'. In other words, as both my post and my conversation with my friend made clear, the joy of Argo seems to be the fact that it harks back to the past, to a time when the movie brats were coming of age and mainstream films were borrowing liberally from European art-house cinema. 

This era (1970s Hollywood), is sometimes seen as something of a 'Golden' era, a time when auteurs ran rampant before their gate of heaven collapsed. So glorious were the achievements of the filmmakers of this period, they spawned a new generation of offspring: directors who aspired to be like their heroes, and who would reference and steal from them in the same way that the movie brats were borrowing from the art-houses.

And now, from talking to several classes of students on my Life Just Is University tour, it would seem there is another generation on the rise: one influenced by the sons of the movie brats, who have no interest in art-house, and for whom mainstream cinema rules all. 

This is not a problem in and of itself, and yet… I don't wish to make so bold a claim as saying that mainstream cinema is declining in quality. There are plenty of genuinely good, big budget, commercial films still being made. And yet… Surely the fact that Argo has been so popular proves that we still have something to learn from the movie brats. Or, more precisely, from their influences… 

What made the films of the 70s so fresh, so exciting, so powerful, was that they were borrowing from the great art filmmakers, and in doing so were creating commercial work with artistic appeal. By dropping this influence, and seemingly only wishing to borrow from the mainstream filmmakers who have gone before them, it seems like the new generation is destined to end in erosion, with all the art slowly dissolving away. Simply put, I fear mainstream cinema will eat itself. 

Let's hope I'm wrong. 

(On a tangential note: film may eat itself in another way too. I'm amazed by the amount of young filmmakers who think it's okay to pirate films because they're poor aspiring filmmakers – and who fail to see the irony of this. So, to sum up: if any young filmmakers happen to be reading this: stop pirating films, and go and buy a Bergman boxset).

Films This Week

(Click here to read my general introduction to the 'Films This Week' series of posts.)

 

Just one this week…!

 

26/03/13

Went to see Spring Breakers this evening. It's a neon drug-fuelled haze of a movie. In some respects, it achieves a perfect synthesis of form and content (the highest form of filmmaking), but in this case it means that the film often seems as obnoxious, unpleasant and leering as its characters (there's little in the way of critique of them or their actions – perhaps the most telling sign is the reference to watching Scarface on repeat, as if Tony Montana was someone to look up to). It also means that watching the film sometimes feels like being the only sober person at a piss-up (=boring), though there were just enough interesting directorial flourishes to keep my attention (and the crime spree in the middle is one of the best uses of slow motion I can remember). The use of editing and structure kind of reminded me of The Limey (always a good thing), though the endless repetition got a little grating. The sound design was superb. Very effective. If the film had gone somewhere I think I might have really responded to it but, as it was, it all just felt a little pointless and gratuitous.

Films This Week

(Click here to read my general introduction to the 'Films This Week' series of posts.)

 

Machete

 

21/03/13

Watched Punisher: War Zone. I couldn't put my finger on why, but somehow the tone of it didn't quite work for me. It seems closer to something like Dick Tracy than The Dark Knight, and yet at the same time it seems to be striving for some kind of...grittiness. Maybe it simply doesn't pull off the tough balancing act of comedy and violence. Or maybe I do just like different things on the page than I do on the screen. It's not without effect, though, and it has a few genuinely memorable moments. The Jigsaw makeup and design were particularly well done, I thought.

 

23/03/13

Watched Winchester '73. The film's narrative POV is a little inconsistent, but it's exciting and enjoyable all the same, with some beautiful photography – though I'm not sure I picked up on much in the way of subtext. I then watched Machete, which manages to get away by with being silly and over the top simply by being postmodern and having its tongue firmly in its cheek. In some ways it's a worrying call for fanatical vigilantism (if the law doesn't work, you have to rise up and kill people), but it feels like a more successful blend of violence and humour than Punisher: War Zone (though I'm not sure if you could call it gritty either – despite all the shocking events that happen it doesn't seem to take them, or itself, seriously enough for that). Although I perhaps didn't enjoy Machete as much as some of Rodriguez's other work, I still think he's a very good director of action films. But I think it might also be that I'm starting to question my enjoyment of watching this type of film a little more than I did when I was younger. Rodriguez very skilfully turns violence into an entertaining aesthetic and pulls genuine laughs from the proceedings, but I think I'm growing a little tired and troubled by this kind of cinema. After that, I watched Whales' The Invisible Man, which holds up very well despite its age – the special effects are still both special and effective! I think I'm yet to see one of the old Universal monster films that I haven't enjoyed.

 

The Invisible Man

 

Quote for the Week

'Just as travellers are beguiled by conversation or reading or some profound meditation, and find they have arrived at their destination before they knew they were approaching it; so it is with this unceasing and extremely fast-moving journey of life, which waking or sleeping we make at the same pace – the preoccupied become aware of it only when it is over' p14, Penguin Great Ideas edition of Seneca's On the Shortness of Life

Films This Week

(Click here to read my general introduction to the 'Films This Week' series of posts.)

 

Rachel Weisz as Hypatia of Alexandria in Agora

 

12/03/13

Watched Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Despite my initial scepticism, I really liked it. Some of the early scenes felt a little pretentious, but a little pretension never really hurt anybody…and as the film progressed it built in some really interesting, borderline transcendental moments (such as when the daughter gives out the drinks). At times it feels a little bleak (it seems to say that people shouldn't have children, because they'll pay for the sins of their fathers, and because the world's such a shit place people shouldn't bring others into it), but more often it plays like an absurdist, minimalist comedy (I hadn't expected it to be so funny). Most of all, though, I admired the gravitas beneath the humour, and the density of ideas it explores (it feels crammed with themes, thoughts on life and death – perhaps even too many). There were odd moments that didn't work for me (like when the son throws the stone), but overall it totally won me over.

 

15/03/13

This morning I rewatched Agora. I still think it's great: beautifully crafted, brilliantly acted, stunningly shot, entertaining, involving, intelligent, philosophically rich yet very human, very tragic, and (despite its fictional elements) a story of historical importance. It's pretty much everything you'd want from a film. It seems to be criminally overlooked and underappreciated. Hopefully time will rectify that. This evening I went to see Je, Tu, Il, Elle. I was kind of transfixed by the minimalism of the first section, and I liked the pacing and the use of voiceover (and monologue) throughout, but overall it left me a little cold – though perhaps that's all too appropriate for a film about alienation and estrangement (and perhaps the intended reaction). There were also some strong compositional elements in the final section (there's something sculptural about their naked bodies, like a work by Giambologna).

 

16/03/13

Went to the BFI to see La Captive, which was excellent. Ackerman's minimalism feels more opulent this time round (the camera moves!), and she's built an effective thriller from the mysteries of love, sex, desire and jealousy, and the inscrutability of the opposite sex (or is it the inscrutability of all other people?). 'Thriller' may be pushing it, perhaps, but that's how it felt to me; how involved I was, how tense I was – the flirtation with genre tropes seems much more complete and cohesive here than it does in Jeanne Dielman. The spectre of Bresson was present once more, and I was also reminded of In the City of Sylvia (I wonder if La Captive was an influence?). The work of Haneke came to my mind, too – though perhaps that's because his works share the Bressonean feel. Afterwards I saw Salome which was, fittingly, another film about the mystery of love and desire. Despite the fact that the score went from extremely effective to extremely distracting, and the film looked like it was being projected from a poorly transferred NTSC DVD, it still proved to be a visually and dramatically powerful experience. There's something extremely exciting about films this stylised, and the sets and costumes were a beauty to behold.

 

The Beardsley inspired Salome (1923)

 

Quote for the Week

'I continue to gaze into the valley bottom of the memory. And my fear now is that as soon as a memory forms it immediately takes on the wrong light, mannered, sentimental as war and youth always are, becomes a piece of narrative written in the style of the time, which can't tell us how things really were but only how we thought we saw them, thought we said them. I don't know if I am destroying the past or saving it' - Italo Calvino in Memories of a Battle, found in The Road to San Giovanni (the quote is from page 58 of the Penguin Modern Classics edition).