The Movie that I've Seen the Most...

Slate recently ran a feature asking a number of esteemed film people which motion picture they've seen the most. When initially I read the piece, many of the responses struck me as improbable: for instance, does Phillip Lopate (one of my favorite critics, mind you) really expect us to believe that he's seen Mikio Naruse's Flowing more than any other film, given particularly that it is and has always been unavailable on any format in the United States? Or how about Judd Apatow and Bottle Rocket? Come on Judd, you and I both know that a sensibility like yours could have only been forged through serial viewings of Meatballs.

Speaking of which, it speaks well to the parenting skills of Lawrence Kasdan that his son Jake has seen Ghostbusters more ofter than the more ignominious, aforementioned Reitman. Given my own age and upbringing, it would seem likely that I too should cite a film similar to the junior Mr. Kasdan's -- if not Ghostbusters, then perhaps Return of the Jedi (my favorite movie when I was five, before I ever saw it), The Goonies or Back to the Future. Then again, I was never a serial movie-viewer as a child, meaning that even with these early favorites, one could count the number of times that I actually saw them on one hand. Likewise, I am not one to catch The Wizard of Oz or It's a Wonderful Life, every time it airs, though I do have that tendency when it comes to Dumb & Dumber (good thing I don't make a habit of watching TBS). No, my obsessive streak manifested itself only after I began to seriously engage with individual films as works of art. As a result, excluding those films that I've viewed in a professional capacity, a few come to mind as genuine contenders: Max Ophüls' Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Eric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's (1969), Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959) and the likely winner, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (1953).

The first time I saw Ugetsu followed shortly after my discovery of the Sight and Sound polls of the 'ten best films of all-time,' in the back of a Roger Ebert tome, the title of which I no longer remember. At the time, I remember my fascination with the idea that there might just exist films that I had never heard of, but which were nonetheless objectively among the greatest films ever made. I supposed that Ugetsu, like the equally mysterious La Règle du jeu/The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939) was one of these films. I was right, but I certainly didn't get it at first -- to me, Ugetsu was an interesting, if a somewhat dull ghost story, just like La Règle du jeu was some kind of impenetrable hunting film. I was wrong... and so very stupid.

My second time with Ugetsu marked my first appreciation of the film as a masterpiece, having since discovered the director's Sanshô Dayû (1954) and Street of Shame (1956) -- and in the process, the manner in which his mise en scène served to guide his spectators' attention. Three, four, five and six (viewed over four consecutive nights in the sad comforts of my childhood bedroom, well after childhood) established my current opinion of the film: that it is that rarest of all breads, the perfect work of art. (The only other film that I have ever viewed in multiple consecutive days was Letter from an Unknown Woman -- another manifestly perfect film --which I additionally screened back-to-back one night; this distinction for me, interestingly enough, it shares exclusively with another Ophüls' film, Lola Montès [1955].) By my count, then, this latest viewing of Mizoguchi's masterpiece was my seventh, if I'm not forgetting a time or two. And as with each of my previous viewings, Ugetsu once again showed itself to possess a richness that transforms and deepens upon every viewing.

On this occasion, seeing it for the first time on Criterion's pristine DVD transfer from late last year, I was struck most (counter-intuitively, perhaps) by the narrative's management of physical reality, metaphysical reality and dream/reality. To be more precise, Mizoguchi invests these three ontological categories with the same hyper-realistic verisimilitude so that none is distinguishable by its visual treatment, not that there isn't embellishment. For example, when the protagonist Genjurô (Masayuki Mori) examines a set of kimonos for his wife, Miyagi (Mizoguchi axiom and one of the most talented actresses in the history of cinema, Kinuyo Tanaka), the latter appears through a rear doorway, accompanied by a sudden, light lilt in the film's soundtrack. Indeed, a similarly sentimental theme procures the same effect in the celebrated scene wherein Genjurô crosses through his abandoned residence before re-entering to find his deceased wife waiting for him. Of course, Mizoguchi famously films this sequence in a single, unbroken take, seemingly disclosing Miyagi's entrenched presence in the same place through which Genjurô had walked only moments before (seemingly as Mizo pulls his camera back slightly, at one point, to reveal a new trajectory). In so doing, Mizoguchi produces a narrative logic where the external world and the spiritual realm cohabit the same space. In fact, the metaphysical imbues Mizoguchi's story, from the disembodied, acousmatic voice of Lady Wakasa's (Machiko Kyô) deceased father to her own posthumous population of the terrestrial realm.

At the same time, these incursions of spiritual figures into the physical universe are on multiple occasions referred to as dreamt, providing another potential source for their presence in the narratives, as projections of character subjectivity. If there is thus slippage in Mizoguchi's narrative, Ugetsu continues to portend the logic of a narrative completely under the control of its creator. Ugetsu is the way it is because its art; it possesses no necessity to distinguish between fact and fiction, dream and (metaphysical) reality. All inhabit the reality of a work that is ultimately distinguished by its determination to convey the tragic consequences -- and fatal ones for the women of the narrative -- that result from the quest for glory, be it materially or in terms of reputation. Truly, Ugetsu is a confirmation of those Buddhist axioms (from the 'Four Noble Truths') that state that all is suffering and that suffering comes from desire; Ugetsu is, in other words, a Buddhist fable that promotes the modest values of home and hearth, contentment.

It is also a meditation on the place of art and of the trappings of success: Genjurô's dissent begins when he is flattered by Lady Wakasa's appreciation of his art. Had only he been satisfied to make his pottery side-by-side with his wife, rather than thursting for wealth and later fame, the tragic consequences of his desire would have never come to fruition. Parenthetically, both of these themes can be said to represent the director's autobiography, and can therefore bestow Ugetsu with the title of "personal art": his sister was sold as a geisha to pay for his education as a painter.

Speaking of his background, my companion in this viewing, Lisa Broad, pointed out that Mizoguchi's palette effectively registers every gradiation of black, white and gray in his unequalled mastery of visual technique. To this, let me add that Ugetsu's compositional grace is a product both of this painting in light and shadow, and also in a compositional manipulation that relies heavily upon diagonal framing that seems to bespeak an internal harmony: a spare tree in a courtyard or meadow frames a seated protagonist; jutting, perpendicular beams parallel the head-lines of conversing characters; etc. Often, it is worth mentioning, Mizo utilizes overhead angles to forge these undeniably painterly spaces.

The point is that this is an artist who is in complete control of his medium, manipulating form according to the dictates of his subject. Another telling example of his free use of the art form is the well-known sequence where Mizoguchi's camera follows a small stream of water out of a hot spring, over stones, and to a field which, by virtue of a lap dissolve becomes a grassy meadow where the ritualistic infidelity between Lady Wakasa and Genjurô. Here, the mise en scène is no longer dictated by a spatial-temporal unity of time and place, but by the emotional cause-and-effect inherent in the hot springs' passion and the devotional, nay obsessive love that Genjurô succumbs to in the field.

Ultimately, the fabulist nature of his narrative makes all things permissible. At the same, his mature style, and particular the visual grace of his mise en scène make for a work that seems to harken back to the promise of early sound cinema, as my partner also stated. Or, as I would add, were we to discover some day that cinema can not progress aesthetically beyond the 20th century, this will be the pinnacle of the art form. A cinema of infinite beauty and of deceptive complexity in its conflation of ontological categories. To echo Luc Moullet upon its French commercial release, Ugetsu is the simplest and most complex film in the world.

Hold Back the Dawn: Well Worth Seeing Even if it Means Sitting Next to That Guy with the Backpack Eating Soup

As Film Forum's well-timed summer swashbuckler series draws nigh, the merits of the concluding Billy Wilder retrospective are easy to miss -- after all, is there a director this side of the "master of suspense" who is less in need of revival than Mr. Wilder? Besides, I can think of no theatre that I find less pleasant -- save perhaps Brooklyn's Pavilion with its nacho cheese-encrusted upholstery -- than the Film Forum, which somehow manages to attract the single most ill-mannered bevy of unlikable losers that one has ever witnessed, in any one place. If you want to know what happened to that guy in your class who combined a 105 i.q., know-it-all attitude and a serious misanthropic streak, he's wearing his backpack to $5 movies (with his $50 membership) at the Film Forum where he eats soup and curses at the couple behind him for daring to whisper during the coming attractions of movies he's already seen 15 times. But heaven knows he loves to see movies on the big screen... in part because his cable was turned off in 1995 after his checking account finally ran dry without the infusion of bi-annual Stafford Loans. Plus, who likes to spend time in an unfurnished, Stuyvesant Town high-rise without air conditioning and only pickles and miracle whip in the fridge? God knows that an ump-teenth screening of Sunset Boulevard sure beats the alternative; and if you have to shout at that pretty-enough undergrad Spanish major from Northern New Jersey seated two rows back, then so be it -- she shouldn't be there anyway if she just wants to talk to her date about that chemically-unbalanced roommate of her's.

So yes, the prospect of another Wilder retro. in light of these specifics didn't exactly set my heart a flutter -- that is, until I saw two words under a couple of the titles: Mitchell Leisen. To those who are not in the know, Mr. Leisen remains one of the least appreciated directors of Hollywood's golden age, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his collaborations with such acclaimed screenwriters as Preston Sturges and the team of Wilder and Charles Brackett, which of course accounts for its inclusion in the series. While of course it must be admitted that Leisen's career cannot approach Wilder's five decades of relevance in particular, there can and should be no disputing his aesthetic inventiveness and the protean engagement of generic categories that the works showcase. Leisen is no mere placeholder for his more famous screenwriters, as they learned the directorial trade. Rather he is a classical artist, whose peak deserves to be remembered among the glories of Hollywood's greatest age.

That peak, spanning approximately five years between 1937 and 1942, includes both of the films featured in the FF program, 1939's Midnight and 1941's Hold Back the Dawn, which despite being the recipient of six Academy award nominations including best actress (Olivia de Havilland), best screenplay and even best picture, remains unavailable on home video and as a consequence, largely forgotten. Even Midnight lacks the following it deserves as one of the finest romantic comedies of that form's superlative moment; suffice it to say that it is not yet available on DVD, even if one could reasonably argue that it is superior to Wilder and Brackett's other great collaboration of 1939, Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka. (That these two films are both exceedingly funny makes their oversight even more inexplicable.)

Thankfully then there are art houses that cater to the permanently unemployable, as were it not for the Film Fourm Wilder series, I may not have had the manifest pleasure of seeing my third Leisen film Tuesday night, the aforesaid Hold Back the Dawn. For starters let me concur with that year's Academy voters in their nominations of Leisen's film in the acting, writing and best picture categories: all were undoubtedly deserved, starting with Ms. de Havilland's vivid portrayal of semi-dowdy school mistress Emmy Brown, who is seduced by Charles Boyer's Georges Iscovescu during a 4th of July elementary school trip to a Mexican border town which she chaperones. Miss Brown proves easy work for the Continental, who only hours before had learned of a loophole in getting the American visa that he and so many others had coveted: marrying a Yankee. Former mistress Anita Dixon (Paulette Goddard) supplies him not only with the strategy, but with the ring as well.

With the holiday over and the bus fixed -- Brown and her school children are forced to spend the night in Iscovescu's hotel lobby after one of the parts mysteriously goes missing -- the new Mrs. Iscovescu crosses back over the border, anticipating a reunion with her gentleman husband in the allotted four weeks. Parenthetically, the misbehavior of the students against a disgruntled mechanic who sadistically desires one young man's punishment, even offering to do it himself, provides the film with some of its grimmest humor -- one suspects that there is far more Wilder/Brackett here than the film's romantic helmer. In the meantime, Iscovescu recommences his affair with the vampish Dixon before being interrupted first by a border official that seems to make the border community his home away from home, and then by the unexpected, early return of his new bride.

Without giving up too much of the film's wildly uncoiling plot, it almost doesn't need to be mentioned that Iscovescu will have something of change of heart concerning the new Mrs. Iscovescu. Yet, it bares mentioning in the context of the film's analysis, at this moment at least, for the style that Leisen brings to sequences wherein the couple are forced together in the nation's less accessible hinterlands. There is, for instance, something virtually Eisensteinian in the director's compositions of both cactus-framed dirt roads, and more spectacularly, a Mexican church that is filled with hundreds of lit candles for a sacramental affirmation of marriage. (Eisensteinian in that it almost prefigures that director's depiction of Ivan the Terrible's coronation in the film by that same name.)

Then there is the subsequent scene in which Mr. Iscovescu, partially succumbing to a sudden, uncharacteristic guilt, decides that it is better if he doesn't consummate their marriage. After faking a shoulder injury, we see him spying on the de Havilland character sleeping in the back seat of the caravan. Gazing at her through the rearview window, Leisen distills the gentleman's desire into her rising and falling bosom. It is indeed in brief moments and relatively understated gestures like this that Mr. Leisen shows himself to be a director with startling visual flamboyance.

Not that there is anything small about Leisen's visual imagination. Take, for instance, the car chase that Iscovescu provokes near the end of the picture. Here, in radiant black-and-white photography, Leisen not only summons the visceral excitement of the sequence, which he does quite effectively, but he moreover explicates the process by which, against all odds, Iscovescu escapes from his police/immigration pursuers. We see how he turns off his lights, slips behind billboards, etc. to get to his love. Similarly, in the earlier sleeping scene, Iscovescu not only fakes his injury, or tells the Mrs. of his pretend infirmity, but we see him stage the feigned accident, again offering a case for a believable outcome to an improbable scenario.

By this juncture, Leisen has fully succeeded in involving his spectators in a picture where ultimately much is at stake -- at least in my case, I was hoping that Iscovescu and his wife would live happily ever after, however cruel and undeserving the former might be. Without saying too much more about the film's plot trajectory, suffice it to say that happiness seems quite unlikely by the time the narrative devolves into said car chase.

As to the ending, anyone knowledgeable of Leisen's ouevre may suspect a happy ending (ala Midnight and Remember the Night) whereas the same conclusion in Wilder's body of work (think Double Indemnity, 1944) is far less certain. Significantly, then, it should be noted that Hold Back the Dawn manipulates a structuring device wherein Iscovescu recounts the tale to a director whom he once met during his days as a continental socialite. That the director is played by Leisen is of no minor importance, as is the fact that he is directing Veroica Lake and Brian Donlevy, whom he actually made I Wanted Wings with that same year (1941). In effect, the film proper could almost be said to have two endings, a Wilder/Brackett and Leisen one, were one to judge their competing temperaments. Regardless, the Wilder and Brackett penned flashback structure (which of course the former employed to famous effect in Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard [1950]) can at least be said to represent a way around classical Hollywood codes of the time.

More Than Meets the Eyes

Given my recent move from an increasingly sketchy block in the Bowery -- think of that -- to the outer-reaches of brownstone Park Slope, a switch of allegiances was in order from Central Park's Summer Stage to Prospect Park's equivalent, Celebrate Brooklyn. Good thing the former decided to go in a strangely anachronistic first-wave Lilith Fair direction this summer, while Celebrate Brooklyn's highlights centered upon a more palatable series of silent movie screenings, accompanied by big-name instrumental outfits, such as last night's teaming of indie demiurges Yo La Tengo and the underwater films of French auteur de science Jean Painlevé.

With Yo La Tengo being for me the more known quantity (though I will admit that my interest in them is relatively minor) Painlevé would be the true wild card in the evening's entertainment. Suffice it to say that sea creatures delivered swimmingly though the three-piece looked like they had found their born vocation: scoring crustacean films. Before I speak further to the source of the films' relative quality, let me say of the performance that Yo La Tengo recommended themselves both for their admirable dexterity in inventing scores that seemed perfectly attuned to the animal life depicted in each of the unique shorts as well as for the compositions' success in propelling the loose narratives, and also for their execution of the individual pieces, which never once impeded upon the patient biological poems. Yo La Tengo weren't the stars here, as much as they deserved to be.

No, the sea horses, the baby jellyfish and octopi took center stage last night, showing that Painlevé's shorts have lost little fascination since they were first screened nearly eighty years ago. Ultimately, the same factor that made them extraordinary then still make them extraordinary today: they show us a real world that we wouldn't otherwise see. Indeed, it is here that one might imagine these films as exemplars of an Epsteinian view of cinema's vocation -- they improve our perception of the real world. Not only, in fact, does Painlevé greatly magnify his often invisible to the naked eye subjects, but he slows down the stock to lay bare their mechanics. In this way, one can see cinema's potential for artistry, not in transforming reality into something different or even in showcasing it unmodified, but rather in dissecting it through the tools at the filmmaker's disposal. Again, Painlevé's corpus allows us to see what we could not ordinarily see. They stand as an ontological definition of the cinema in their own right, now decades behind its time theoretically, but still with the power to awe in their capacity to capture the invisible beauty of the real world.

Which leads me to another recent screening which now strikes me for its similar purpose: Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. Like the Painlevé corpus, A Scanner Darkly proceeds according to a desire to improve upon optical limitations -- in this case, the external world versus an internal one. From the opening sequence, Linklater highlights an interest in representing the drug-addled subjectivity of his characters. Using roto-scope technology, which effectively translates live-action filmmaking into animation (which he famously introduced in 2001's Waking Life) Linklater externalizes the drug-fueled hallucinations -- the archetypal crawling insects -- that open the narrative. From here, the selected technology, which of course possesses a ready-made link to its subjective content, is best utilized in visualizing Dick's own extra-realistic creations -- as with the suits that continually remake their form, selecting from millions of separate details of bodily appearance.

As far as its capacity to illuminate, however, Linklater's film remains subject to the limitations of his and source author Philip K. Dick's perspectives on the topic. If A Scanner Darkly is supposed to be a critique of the drug wars as some critics have suggested, the paranoia of the film's narrative would seem to unhinge any reasonable negative criticism of said policy. If, as seems more narratively justified, A Scanner Darkly is a memoriam to those friends of the creators' who suffered the unjust rewards of addiction, then one wonders what function A Scanner Darkly ultimately serves: what does the film help us to understand; what makes it persuasive of anything, other than the dangers brought about by drug use, which we are nevertheless reminded are somehow unfair? Of course, one could rejoined that the Painlevé films offer little more purpose than to see, which is about what A Scanner Darkly does as well. Then again, what the shorts provide is a glimpse at something true, and more than that, something beautiful; they are sustained, asetheticized conveyances of a reality that our eyes do not allow us to see.

This is not to say that A Scanner Darkly is absent of any merit: particularly of note is Robert Downey Jr.'s appropriately "animated" performance. Even Keanu Reeves seems to have found his ideal performative venue -- the cartoon junkie everyman. Yet the film's self-indulgent lamenting, to mention nothing of the supremely uninteresting quality of its characters and their lives, makes A Scanner Darkly far from a pleasant affair. Unfortunately it offers neither depth of insight or beauty to mitigate against that first strike.

Steamboat 'Round the Bend: John Ford's Classic (Rediscovered) Mid-Western

As the story goes, in 1950, during a heated debate of the Director's Guild of America, John Ford stood up and introduced himself in the following manner: "My name is John Ford, I direct Westerns." Ever since, this avatar of the Western genre has born the epitaph in the same way that Hitchcock has the title of "master of suspense" -- as a slightly derisive, although not entirely incorrect signifier of their primary contribution as a film artist. Of course, Ford did work outside of the Western genre on occasion, producing works that rivaled, when they didn't equal the best films he made in his signature genre (such confirmed classics as The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man all come to mind). Still, Ford has and undoubtedly will remain the leading formulator of the American national myth in the genre best-suited to the subject.

Indeed, it is significant that Ford's subject was largely consubstantial with the Western genre itself when one considers his legacy outside the immediate contours of this famed category. There are, for instance, the three films he made with legendary Oklahoma-born humorist Will Rogers in the mid-1930s -- Doctor Bull (1933), Judge Priest (1934) and Steamboat 'Round the Bend (1935) -- each of which showcases the pair's overlapping interest in Americana, though again from a position outside the Western genre (though, for the sake of full disclosure, let me add that I have yet to see the first of these three and am relying upon secondary sources). In part, the difference between these films and those of his western corpus are their settings: New England, the rural South of the late 19th century and the Mississippi Delta respectively. Nevertheless, as is evinced by the third of these films, Steamboat 'Round the Bend, which will be released on DVD July 25th as part of the Will Rogers Collection, Vol. 1, even the director's non-western subjects allow Ford the space to parse the myth that he was instrumental in creating -- the foundation of an American civilization.

To be sure, Steamboat 'Round the Bend represents a near complete grafting of the Fordian western onto the setting of the Mississippi delta; liberally, the mid-west. First, there is the mega-theme of the creation and persistence of civilization in a hostile environment, which has since been ascribed the generalization of the garden-desert dichotomy. Here, Ford opposes the riverboat people, exemplified by Will Rogers' Doctor John and his nephew Duke (John McGuire), and the so-called "Swamp Trash," one of whom Duke slays in response to their mistreatment of a young beauty from their ranks, a Fleety Belle (Anne Shirley). While it is agreed that Duke acted with justification, Dr. John nonetheless prevails upon him to turn himself in, thereby upholding the rule of law in the midst of the lawlessness of the swamps. That Dr. John and Duke conclude in this fashion demonstrates their deep faith in the institutions of civilization, even as it might mean that the latter will be hung due to the absence of the killing's one witness, and the one man who might exonerate Duke -- the New Moses, one of the River's self-styled new prophets.

Meanwhile, the Swamp Trash, looking for Fleety Belle, arrive determined to exercise their mob rule against the girl and her supposed corrupter. At this point, Dr. John intervenes, claiming that the pair are married and are therefore above their recriminations. While initially this isn't the case, Duke and Fleety Belle do eventually tie the knot in a courthouse ceremony, which Ford invests with a sacramental significance -- the large group of mostly fugitive witnesses turn away from the newly married couple, respecting the intimacy of their marital union as they hold each other in their make-shift prison chapel. It is, in the parlance of Andrew Sarris, a moment of pure chivalry, prefiguring that wonderful moment in The Searchers (1956) where the Reverend diverts his gaze as Ethan Edwards' sister-in-law studies her relation's military uniform. In gestures like these, Ford's worldview seems to become unassailably virtuous.

This is not to say, however, that Steamboat 'Round the Bend is without humor. It is, as a matter of fact, a film whose comedy touches on the grotesque, particularly when a mobile wax museum becomes kiln for Dr. John's racing steamship, and subsequently when Duke is granted his last request of seeing the completion of the steamboat race which, unbenounced to him, his uncle has entered in order to reach the governor before the hanging can take place. Once the steamboat rounds the bend, the hangman rushes to get the job done with a perversely good natured-efficiency and conviviality.

Buffeting these events, particularly on the boat, are the alternately manic and committed performances of Stepin Fetchit and Berton Churchill -- New Moses in the flesh -- respectively, to say nothing of the more mild-mannered witticisms of Rogers. (As to Fetchit's performance specifically, suffice it to say that it hardly holds up to the scrutiny of contemporary political-correctness, which of course says less about the quality of the film that it does the mores of the past and the present.) As with many Hollywood films of this moment, it is sustained by its brilliant supporting players -- Irvin S. Cobb as Captain Eli is another notable. Similarly, Steamboat 'Round the Bend also features a series of well-lit interiors, especially on the steamship, that remind us once again that Gregg Toland did not invent depth-of-field. Moreover, in the more global, early sound cinema sense, Ford's film demonstrates a fascination with curios, whether it is the traveling wax museum that Dr. John & co. manipulate to impress a rather close-minded community of Confederates -- before tossing it in the fire -- the saw that Duke plays in jail (here's your singing cowboy) or the revivals that take place up and down the Mighty Mississippi.

Speaking of religion, Steamboat 'Round the Bend also manifests a specifically Fordian view on the subject that is not always so clear in the director's work. Taking the director's final film, 7 Women (1966) as a template -- assuming that he has sympathy at least for Anne Bancroft's irreligious doctor -- one might surmise that while the director is not himself religious in his orientation, he does allow that there are some with this view who nevertheless can be considered good -- yes there is something vaguely ridiculous and mocking to figures like the New Moses, who Ford compares expressly to the spirits' peddling Dr. John, who medicates the people with an elixir he calls Pocahontas in a manner comparable to the New Moses and his old-time religion; Ford opens the film, importantly, with these two salesmen. However, when called upon, New Moses does come through, and with a certain gusto that succeeds in making him sympathetic, if not endearing. If anything, Ford's view on the matter might be characterized as at once agnostic and also respectful of its function in producing the civilization that counteracts the lawless mentality of the desert… and the swamp.

Returning, indeed, to this over-arching division, if the swamp is in fact a place for anarchy, the river is a space where civilization counteracts this less ignoble tendency -- it is the settlement of Tombstone or the Edwards' homestead to the surrounding wilds. Here, a sort of para-civilization rules, exemplified by not only Dr. John's steamboat -- which importantly is piloted by the young Fleety Belle who has exchanged a tablecloth for an antebellum dress -- but also by the religious services, the communities that hug the thoroughfare, and even in the steamboat race that concludes the film: rivalries are resolved not through vigilante justice but in carefully-regulated contests that of course feature just as much cheating as a film of Steamboat 'Round the Bend's light comic tone allows.

New Film: Linda Linda Linda & TCM's The Edge of Outside

Nobuhiro Yamashita's Linda Linda Linda may be the first major post-1990s film by an under-30 Japanese filmmaker; at the very least it is the first to screen in the United States. Unfortunately for most, it still lacks American distribution, making it the sole purview, for now, of those lucky few within range of a festival intelligent enough to screen this thoroughly-winning work of pop film art (thank you to Grady Hendrix and the New York Asian Film Festival here in NYC). Certainly there are only a handful of films from the past year, at best, that can approach the visceral appeal of Yamashita's high school musical comedy.

Linda Linda Linda takes its name from Japanese post-punk outfit The Blue Hearts' signature single of the same name. In Yamashita's film, four high school girls prepare their version of the song for a high school festival (re: talent show) following a less than acrimonious split between the band's guitarist and one of its earlier members. Appropriately, Yamashita withholds the ultimate causes of the rift -- to the measure that causality isn't always clearest when one is considering teenage psychology -- thereby establishing a tone which might be best described as observational. In fact, his camera on occasion remains at a considerable distance from the girls, characteristically utilizing long takes that together connote a refusal to intervene in the film's subject matter.

Rather, Linda Linda Linda saves its manipulations for its spectators. Particularly, beyond the film's exceptional plying of audience involvement in the fate of the girls' performance, and to a lesser extent in their PG-rated love lives, Yamashita targets the film's adult viewership by reflexively counting their visceral stake in the film as confirmation of the picture's opening thesis: that one doesn't lose that aspect of personality which makes one a kid (or a teenager) when one grows up. In the film's concluding scene, Yamashita, in a bravura display of artistry, shows a series of locations at the school that had heretofore served as the film's principle location (a sort of Fast Times at Ridgemont High meets L'Eclisse ending, if you will). These locales, depicted in a sudden rain, along with the performance of a second Blue Hearts song, effectively communicate a once populated space that has since been deserted -- a visual description of all of our long past high school years'. Indeed, Linda Linda Linda draws us into this world, accordingly proving its thesis in the most lyrical of fashions.

Having said this, the appeal of Yamashita's film depends primarily upon its successful emulation of the pop music formula. Like the titular song, the film's payoff isn't immediate: in the case of the former, a lower tempo verse precedes the screeching chorus of "Linda Linda, Linda Linda Linda," whereas in the case of the film, Yamashita sustains a rather deliberate pace prior to the concluding festival performance. It's as if Yamashita manages to achieve the same effect in his filmmaking that The Blue Hearts succeeded in producing in the delayed gratification of their songwriting. (My companion in viewing the film, Lisa Broad, observed that the film is constructed in a popular manner which could be said to be opposed to avant pop, where expectations are expressly thwarted; here, the filmmakers give the viewers what they want, coming in for what amounts to be one epic, final repetition of the chorus -- the performance -- at the film's end. Or, to be a bit more profane, Linda Linda Linda's structure, like that of all rock-and-roll music, acts as a metaphor for the sexual act.)

However, Linda Linda Linda's merits are far from confined to the successful climax of the film's denouement. First, there is the film's pitch-perfect capture of life in high school, which in many ways seems to be more similar to its counterpart experience in the US than it is different. For instance, there is the film's knowing reproduction of the single-minded pursuit of extra-curricular's that in many ways over-shadows a majority of high schooler's experience of that time; there is the accompanying lack of sleep -- or sleep during school time -- that results from this added time strain; there are not only the cliched cliques, but also the members of cliques who have been orphaned in their final years, following the graduation of their fellow group members; etc.

And then there are the characters created by Yamashita and the film's fellow screenwriters, and brought to vivid life by the film's fine young Japanese and Korean actresses. Du-na Bae, who plays Korean exchange student Song, and who happens to be impulsively recruited to serve as the outfit's lead singer in spite of her less-than-expert handle on the Japanese language, particularly contributes to the film's immense appeal through a performance that seems to convey the physical nature of speech, and the locus of the struggle of assimulation in attempting to find and articulate the right words at the right time, whether in singing "Linda Linda Linda's" indelible verses or in communicating with her band mates or would-be suitors. Suffice it to say that in addition to everything else, Linda Linda Linda is a very funny film, which in no small part is to the credit of Bae's wonderful performance.

In closing, let me add that while Linda Linda Linda currently lacks distribution, there is a good possibility that this won't continue to be the case: if you've ever looked at my bio, you'll see that I work for a film distribution company, which just happens to release films like this one. Hopefully, my unnamed employers or some other like-minded independent/art house distributor will recognize the film's appeal and will, minimally, release it direct-to-video. (Let me just say that I've done my part at my place of employment.) Until that time, however, let me refer you here, where my recently-hitched pal Mike Lyon has an exceptional list of Asian cult websites where you might perhaps find Linda Linda Linda.

In the realm of the eminently seeable, Turner Classic Movies' is premiering its original documentary The Edge of Outside this evening at 8pm ET and will be re-running it at 11:30. While The Edge of Outside is itself mostly the same old, same old when it comes to offering insight into the careers of the maverick directors it profiles -- Peter Bogdanovich is one of the talking heads... enough said -- the accompanying film series more than makes up for whatever this original may wont. (Then again if you aren't familiar with the names Cassavetes, Fuller and Nick Ray, you may want to consider viewing the program.) I, for one, plan on catching Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground (1952) which my friend R. Emmet Sweeney of Termite Art recently named the best film at this year's Film Forum B-Noir series -- placing it in the "sublime" category -- that I somehow managed to neglect entirely. For those readers who plan on tuning in this evening, TCM, between screenings of the doc, will be showing a couple Cassavetes masterpieces, Faces (1968) and A Woman Under the Influence (1974) that easily rate among the finest examples of "outsider" cinema that the US has ever produced.

Footnoting Goodbye, Dragon Inn & Cars

Last night, I had the opportunity to view Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) for a third time. Although I am ashamed to admit it, the first time I saw Tsai's film, I found it to be visually beautiful, however slight -- that is, lacking a substantial connection between its form and content -- as well as quite boring. My second viewing led me to dramatically revise my opinion: let me just say that I now feel that it is the best film of its year, which remains my judgment having now seen it for a third time. While I would change little of my formal analysis other than to say that the first lines of dialogue occur closer to 45:00 than to 1:00:00, an intervening viewing of Tsai's most recent film, 2005's epic misfire The Wayward Cloud, afforded me a new perspective on the subject of the earlier film's elegy: not only is it the movie palace that is memorialized in its final, depopulated throws, but so is it the end of the communal period of the arts that such public spaces represent: namely, modernism. Indeed, Tsai is himself noteworthy for coming to prominence with works that are unmistakably high modernist in both their ethos and also in their subject matter: Vive l'amour (1994) is the ultimate oriental Antonioni, whereas What Time is it There? (2001) wears its Truffaut debt -- right down to its Leaud cameo -- on both sleeves.

The Wayward Cloud, on the other hand, crosses over from the dead-pan of Tati to an anarchic nihilism hiding beneath the surface of a soft-core musical fantasy -- it is, in a word, postmodern. If ever there was a path leading back toward a common cinephilic culture, The Wayward Cloud is nowhere near it; it is the ultimate marginal art film. Goodbye, Dragon Inn, oppositely, revisits the aesthetic of the high European art film at the peak of its mid-60s celebrity. As an advocate of that movement, particularly when its positioned against its more recent counterpart, I have to hope that Tsai doesn't forever intend to work outside the aegis of modernism and that any apparent turning point will someday prove to be nothing more than an anomaly. Or maybe Tsai will show us a way forward.

While browsing one of my favorite industry blogs the other day, Anne Thompson's Risky Biz Blog, I noticed that my site was listed under her Hollywood blog roll (as opposed to the "Indiewood" sites, where I would assume that it might be a better fit). Never mind the strange categorization, I was just happy to see that Tativille was listed on a site with far more traffic than I could ever dream of. So I suppose it was with this newfound (and uninvited) commitment to Hollywood that I decided to see John Lasseter's Cars -- that, and my bandwagon support for Pixar's preeminence among studios, at least since I saw Brad Bird's superlative The Incredibles (2004) two winters ago. Suffice it to say that Cars fits squarely within Pixar's discursive project, with the same nostalgic emphasis as Lasseter's earlier work: think of Cars as a Nascar Toy Story from Buzz Lightyear's perspective. The Incredibles, to be sure, also trades on the idea that things used to be better, though in its case, Bird laments our self-esteem-obsessed and litigation-happy society's war on exceptionalism; for Cars, its the quainter view (not to use that word pejoratively) that something has been lost with the bi-passing of America's small towns along with the construction of the interstate system. It is communalist in the classically American sense of simple people and small town values.

Because of Cars' preference for Route 66 America, it does seem somewhat counterintuitive that it would be the bearer of the latest in animation technology: were it to have ambitions to equal the Goodbye, Dragon Inn's of the world, one can imagine the filmmakers' switching from computer-based to hand-drawn animation to match Lightning McQueen's integration into this earlier way of life. Then again, Pixar -- and Lasseter in particular -- seem intent on co-opting the values of the past for its new technology. Nevertheless, Cars should be regarded for what it is, not what it isn't... and what it is is a film that soars in its best moments (even if it also languishes for a large portion of Lightning's sojourn in Radiator Springs). In particular, Lasseter demonstrates his exceptional action direction in the racing sequences, where his positioning of the spectator in the middle of the speeding automobiles adeptly draws on the picture's animated form. Likewise, Lasseter, co-director Joe Ranft, and their animators deserve particular credit for bringing the inorganic to life, while maintaining a sense for their material nature. Also, has there been another so thoroughly Dixie feature-length cartoon from Disney since Song of the South (1946)?

New Film: A Prairie Home Companion

To the distant observer, the fact that I never once listened to "A Prairie Home Companion" in the nearly quarter century that I lived in the North Star State may come as something of a shock. Then again, I suppose your average Venetian might not be so inclined to tune in to a program populated by crooning gondoliers and waxed mustachioed pizza chefs named Luigi with a penchant for "cheesy" jokes. (I of course would listen to that broadcast religiously, provided that there were the offensive accents to match.) No, I've never possessed even a modicum of curiosity has to what was going on over there at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, in part because I am more than passingly familiar with concepts such as pot lucks and Lutherans. And to tell you the truth, I've never been a real big fan of either. Besides which, as any true Minnesotan would know, we get our facile populism from WCCO, where at least one has the chance to hear a Twins or Wild game every now and again.

Consequently, the simple fact that there was going to be a Prairie Home Companion movie scripted by Garrison Keillor was nowhere near sufficient inducement to get me to see the film, even if it was to be shot entirely in the Twin Cities -- so was Jingle All the Way, and heaven knows I love me my Christmas. However, the "Directed by Robert Altman" credit, shall we say, changes things. Not that I am that big a fan of Altman myself: at best, I remain on the fence regarding the merits of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) -- I'm not exactly a fan of unrelenting vulgarity and the aesthetics of the zoom lens -- to say nothing of the abject hatred I possess for the borderline pernicious MASH (1970) and the profoundly unlikable Cookie's Fortune (1999). (As Matt Singer astutely summed it up over at Termite Art awhile back, "Has there ever been a great director who has made as many bad movies as Robert Altman?"; let me add that I haven't even seen any of the films Singer disparages, though I should also mention that he regards the first two films that I note quite highly.) Having said that, I would not hesitate to call Robert Altman a major American director, with at least one masterpiece, The Long Goodbye (1974), to his credit, as well as a couple of other works that deserve to be mentioned in that conversation, namely the uber-zeitgeisty Nashville (1975) and the admirably Renoiresque Gosford Park (2001). So while the film's pedigree portended anything but a sure thing in this writer's opinion, even the possibility of major new Altman was enough to get me in the theatre.

And as circumstances would have it, the film's opening coincided with what has become my bi-annual pilgrimage to the land of my father: was this serendipity, to be shared with about fifteen others at a $5.25 Monday matinee in one of the state's reddest corners? Or was I about to see my first Popeye-sized flaming disaster? It almost goes without saying that the truth was to be found somewhere in the middle.

First to those with a similarly prejudiced opinion of Keillor going in, A Prairie Home Companion will do little to endear you to GK (in spite of the Gophers hockey sweatshirt he wears in the film's final scene): he has, after all deigned to memorialize himself; one could even say he has even has eulogized his own death. Unless, I suppose, you possess a heretofore untapped penchant for homespun Upper Midwestern existentialism tempered with more than its fair share of bad jokes and a glibly reductionist view of rural life. Through all this, Keillor plays a Joel Gray-mould master of ceremonies, with a yen for collaborating with each of his schematized performers. Yet, for all the star-power that graces his stage, A Prairie Home Companion remains Keillor's show -- right down to the intimations of an affair that his GK supposedly once had with Maryl Streep's Johnson Sister (with the latter seeming to maintain romantic and bad feelings for Garrison in equal measure).

Of course, being an Altman film as well, A Prairie Home Companion is in no short supply of highly memorable, nuanced supporting performances: including Streep, her low-grade Carter imitation sister Lily Tomlin, daughter Lindsay Lohan, singing cowboys Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly (whose "Bad Jokes" number registers as a best of show), pregnant stage manager Maya Rudolph, Virgina Madsen's metaphysical femme fatale, and especially Kevin Kline as Guy Noir, who gets the pic's best joke, which anyone familiar with the trailer will already know -- that Rudolph, well into her third trimester, should lay off junk food and "sex with men."

Importantly, Kline (the perfunctory narrator), Madsen and Tommy Lee Jones's Texas magnate each operate on a level beyond that of the fictional final performance at the Fitzgerald Theater: they are what might be termed fictional-fictional characters; that is, they seem to function on a meta-narrational level, fulfilling formal concerns while at times bypassing their material existence within the space and time of the story. Moreover, where Kline's character at least is a hold-over from the radio program, he and Madsen, along with the singing cowboys, instantiate types of a now-disappeared filmic past that Altman has remade over the course of five decade career. In his handling of the metaphysical status of Madsen's Veronica Lake-type in particular, there is a narratological freedom to counter-balance the director's tight directorial control.

As to this control, A Prairie Home Companion showcases the continually moving camera of Gosford Park, along with a graceful, if not masterly lighting schema that principally features warm, golden light, which if anything seems to amplify the film's highly elegiac tone (perhaps by virtue of proximity to candle light). In fact, Altman's utilization of these warmer tones, along with the film's funereal implications -- both for the program itself and also for the fates of certain characters -- closely matches the final (and greatest) film of another American director with a similar ethos, John Huston's The Dead (1987). While I would pause before saying that it fulfills a similar purpose to that which The Rules of the Game does for Gosford Park, namely in acting as a prototype for not only the film's narrative, but further for Altman's multi-character structures, there is some in wisdom in viewing Altman as a combination of Renoir's humanism and Huston's high-key pessimism.

Yet, there is nothing so mournful about A Prairie Home Companion, which is ultimately just about the most visually graceful concert film ever made. Simultaneously, Altman's film retains the disaffectedness of the director's youth, even if it is masked by Keillor's Norsk mannerism(s). Jones, who has come to close down the radio show, conveniently is a Texan, and even more importantly, is a man of religious conviction. The world that Altman and Keillor create on-stage and off, though very much suggestive of small town values, is a secularist's world that is perhaps best represented in another characterization: the "Lunch Lady" (Marylouise Burke), who we discover is the long-time lover of performer Chuck Akers (L. Q. Jones). In his translation from radio to screen, Keillor has opted to uncover the vestiges of the sexual revolution beneath the surface of Lake Woebegone. Perhaps it is not simply "A Prairie Home Companion" that Keillor and Altman are eulogizing, but the remaining parcels of blue, middle America that are themselves disappearing, as the Texans move in. Unfortunately for the Jones character, however, and red-staters everywhere, Altman and Keillor still hold the narrative strings. In other words, A Prairie Home Companion is a summation of America's internal power structure, circa 2006. And its’ got some real nice music too.

All Things Spanish & American: The Hispanic Society of America & Whit Stillman's Barcelona

I.

Little-known even among New York's cultural cognoscenti, The Hispanic Society of America, located on Broadway between 155 and 156 Streets in Manhattan's Morningside Heights neighborhood -- hence its lack of notoriety -- houses one of the city's finest collections of Golden Age and Impressionist-era Spanish art, which given in particular the breadth of the Metropolitan Museum's collection in the former area, is no small accomplishment. Chief among its treasures, and indeed among all the works that contribute to New York's glorious panoply of aesthetic riches, is Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes' Duchess of Alba (1797), a work that almost single-handedly (literally, as it happens) points the way to the modern period of which Goya is thought to be the ancestor. Specifically, Goya's Duchess points with her lowered arm to the painter's signature traced in the sand; that her toe is also pointing further directs our attention, while suggesting that she might be the author of this message. In this way, Goya prefigures a movement whose principle earmark is its positioning of the artist as the center of the work -- just as the Renaissance's distinction can be said to consist of, once again, making man the measure of all things. Not only does the artist paint his signature, but he makes it the focus of the viewer's attention. This definition of modernism, to be sure, includes romanticism, which again the "Duchess of Alba" signals in its move away from neoclassicism and toward a more modern conceptualization of artist as genius. Yet, this is not the definition of modernism that another of New York's epochal canvases signifies -- Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), which reinterprets space to dispose of Renaissance perspective in exchange for a multiplanar space-time that is closer to a set of syntagmas than it is to any traditional definition of the objective world -- though it does share its predilection for reflexivity, giving shape to what might be called art's mirror phase.

Beyond its abundant art historical significance, this portrait of the lady in traditional dress showcases Goya's debt to fellow Iberian master Diego Velázquez in its painterly treatment of the woman's garment -- that is, Goya's brushstrokes are often visible, especially in his representation of her gold-lattice sleeves; her lips are pulled tight into a pucker, commensurate with his simplification of means down to the level where his depiction of this feature and this feature alone succeeds in communicating personality; and indeed, in his facility with the color black itself: this final characteristic is determinate of his abstract "black paintings" phase, and is also something, parenthetically, that I noticed of the best Manet's (particularly his 1873 Masked Ball at the Opera) in my recent, first-ever visit to the National Gallery in Washington, DC. To the last of these, the point is that he produces a texture in his utilization of black that is noticeable for its near singularity in visual art. That a work of this stature should appear to be propped up on a table top, leaning against an abutting wall -- fear not it is tied up with thin wires -- perfectly condenses this work's (and the Hispanic Society in general)'s neglect.

What makes this all the more unfortunate is the alluded to largess of the museum's permanent collection. Aside from Goya -- there are other substantial works by the master including his "Brigadier General Alberto Foraster" (1804) with its Moorish-patterned metallurgy and its eyes worthy of Rembrandt -- the Hispanic Society has no shortage of Spain's consensus pre-modern masters, including the aforementioned Velázquez. In his case, the Society possesses (among other works) the beautiful small-canvas Portrait of a Young Girl (c.1642-43), which confirms Velázquez's complete mastery of texture in a very immediate and exacting fashion: the girl's soft brown hair, done up in something of a bob, precisely registers its weight and tactility, while its beautiful auburn color, along with the girl's like-colored eyes, smallish chin and soft, thin lips collectively encapsulate the girl's ideal, pre-pubescent beauty. It may be worth mentioning that the girl is thought to have been one of the painter's grandchildren.

Another familial connection featured at the museum links the slightly earlier, though no less well-renowned El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) and his son Jorge Manuel Theotosopuli, whose derivative (of his father that is) "Supper at the House of Simon" is displayed in the gallery space. The former, moreover, maintains one of the biggest presences at the Hispanic Society, with his striking middle-period The Holy Family (c. 1585) standing out among the lot. "The Holy Family" features an exceedingly beautiful and feminine Mary breast-feeding the Christ child, who tightly clasps two of his mother's fingers in his tiny little hand. Rarely has Christ's pre-Age of Consent humanity, Mary's graceful sensuality and their biological mother-son bond been show with this same level of exactitude. If this work, along with an earlier "Pieta" (c. 1570-75) show El Greco to be a son of the late Renaissance, his later, masterful "Penitent St. Jerome" (c. 1600) offers evidence of the maestro's late-period invention of a highly mannerist technique with his figure's very small head, elongated torso and gray beard, the ecstasy written across his face and picked up in the surrounding storm clouds, and the mauve form (a city perhaps) hovering in the upper left corner of the canvas. Given the evolution of his aesthetic on display at the Hispanic Society, it is difficult to support the sentiment (which I have heard voiced, and may have echoed myself) that El Greco is something akin to the last of the Medievals. Furthermore, an aesthetic such as his does provide art historians with a bridge from that earlier age to a modernity that owes much to Domenikos Theotokopoulos' internal way of seeing.

Beyond the big three of pre-Picasso Spanish painting, the artist to figure largest at the museum is Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, who in fact preceded Pablo by a mere generation. The grandest of his featured pieces, and certainly the most monumental work at the museum, is his fourteen panel Visions of Spain (1913-19), which encircle a gallery space flanking the main exhibition hall, for which they were commissioned directly. Arranged in an order to reflect each region's location within the greater Iberian Peninsula, these large pastel panels impress more for their scope -- which to be sure is quite remarkable -- than for their level of craftsmanship, not that they are in any way lacking in this respect. At least they can be easily examined by the museum patron, unlike much of the work that adorns the narrow corridor walls of this turn-of-the-century palace.

Outside of the medium of painting, The Hispanic Society's decorative objects span the greater portion of the Peninsula's history, from Imperial Roman rule (a personal favorite of mine was the museum's collection of tweezers -- not typical art gallery stuff), Moorish control (a 10th century ivory box made by Halaf at Córdoba; a 15th century Mudejar door) and Catholic Spain (a Toledo baptismal font from 1400 and a pair of intact 16th century tombs, replete with larger-than-life marble effigies of the dead). Indeed, I might have even concluded that The Hispanic Society's greatest riches were to be found in these countless artifacts, had I not been greeted by one of New York's greatest art treasures (seemingly) balancing on a card table.

II.

Not content with my brief visit to the museum, I supplemented my taste for all things Spanish later that same day with a very belated first viewing of Whit Stillman's Barcelona (1994). The funny thing about seeing it now is that it has become a very current film. Stillman's second feature is the story of an American salesman and his Navy officer cousin as they attempt to navigate Catalunya's very liberal and often openly anti-American society during the "last decade of the Cold War." The film opens with Fred's (Stillman axiom Chris Eigeman, who is exceptionally well-suited to this form of comedy) surprise arrival at Ted's (Taylor Nichols) apartment. Ostensibly there to prepare for a broader military visit, Fred doesn't hesitate to show his disdain when faced with hostility: as he points out, "it's well-known that anti-Americanism has its roots in sexual impotence. Then again, when one character does concede that Fred is intelligent for an American, he responds dryly, "no, I am not."

Like his marvelous debut Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona is a erudite, conversation-heavy comedy of manners -- a post-modern Eric Rohmer with an Upper Manhattan sensibility -- that, like his later The Last Days of Disco (1998), focuses upon a historical moment that has already passed (which could similarly said of Metropolitan and its description of New York's debutante scene). Here, in his treatment of European anti-American sentiment during the final years of the Cold War, Stillman surrenders nothing to his European betters, who continually speak of the AFL-CIA with knowing hauteur. His American characters, on the other hand, have problems of their own -- not the least of which is Ted's Bible-dancing -- but there is something to be said for a good hamburger, and we're not talking that crap that they have over there. Stillman is a very American director, but of a type that we have been led to believe doesn't exist (or at least not anymore): the refined, urban moralist -- dare we even say conservative, though not necessary right-wing -- for whom manners are everything. Barcelona is made current for its resistance to anti-Americanism, which in Stillman's version is largely supported by a mythic evil; if the recourse to inventing bogeymen bares any similarity to the anti-Americanism of today, it is, as they say, purely coincidental.

New Film: Le Filmeur (Filmman)

Seventy-four year-old French festival-circuit auteur Alain Cavalier, best known in the U.S. for his exquisite, highly Bressonian Thérèse (1986), is the latest Gallic director (of that generation) to synthesize his or her own ideas of craft within the autobiographical essay genre. Whereas Jean-Luc Godard's masterful JLG/JLG (1995) offers a romantic's faith in beauty through a typically indirect means of exposition and Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I proposes that the latter's work can be understood in the terms set forth in the film's title, 2005's Le Filmeur (Filmman) finds its genesis in Cavalier's admitted inability to see "touching" things disappear, following his similar confession that he wrote everything down prior to turning to video.

Indeed, what has preceded this qualification is a series of poignant passages and moments that are largely lacking in sentimentality, even though they depict such occasions as his father's death, his mother's 99th birthday -- okay, so there is some here -- and his bout with skin cancer, which periodically disfigures the director's face. Yet even more than these larger events, Cavalier composes his portrait as an accumulation of interstical moments, from his birdbath's ornithological visitors to a series of motel rooms where the director lives during one of his tours of the French festival circuit. The implicit poetry in this approach -- emphasized in the director's magnified reproductions of natural phenomenon -- certainly serves his profoundly elegiac perspective well, which is itself expertly summarized in the succeeding images of his ancient mother's birthday, the tiny rips in a still green leaf (portending the coming autumn, as is made clear in the accompanying voice-over) and the film's final fade to black.

Note: Le Filmeur does not have U.S. distribution, and is unlikely to receive anything other than some form of direct-to-video release, at best.

New Film: Whisky

Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll's Whisky, a 2004 Uruguayan film that was recently released on DVD in the US in lieu of a wider theatrical run, further confirms the vitality of Latin American art cinema, while introducing a new nation and its under-35 talent(s) to global audiences. Allying themselves with Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki -- and displaying the director's same droll treatment of the banalities of working class life, which is to say the Kaurismäki touch -- Rebella and Stoll bring their poker-faced humor to a retrograde sock factory, where its proprietor prepares for the visit of his estranged brother (who happens to own a flashier sock factory in Brazil, replete with the latest in Italian technology). Without providing any verbal justification or even explanation, the Uruguayan factory head Jacobo asks one of his older employees, Marta, to stay with him during his brother's visit. Marta seems to understand implicitly that she is to pretend to be his wife, to which she agrees without protest.

When Herman arrives, ostensibly for some fete celebrating their mother, the former quickly ingratiates himself with Marta, demonstrating a far sunnier disposition than his über-dour sibling. Parenthetically, it should be said that this is a film of exceptional preformances, particularly that of Mirella Pascual as Marta. Much to their credit, the directors successfully showcase her understated, aged, everyday beauty in a manner that belies her plain appearance.

So, returning to the narrative, when Herman suggests that the three travel to a seaside resort and casino, Marta hastily consents, even as Jacobo refuses. Suffice it to say that they go.

Once at the resort, the three occupy themselves with such world-wide pass times as air hockey (more movies need air hockey in this writer's opinion), karaoke (Uruguay's chances of producing the next Shakira seem bleak indeed), and gambling (the film's single greatest moment of suspense surrounds Jacobo's all-in wager on a single number in roulette).

Yet, it is not simply this one moment which Rebella and Stoll imbue with suspense, but indeed they succeed in producing one of the most dramatic narratives in the past few years from a single tension: will Jacobo and Marta stay together after the play acting has concluded? The seemingly happily-married father of two Herman is little more than a McGuffin with respect to his own potential for interference. Ultimately, the Jacobo and Marta union represents a life that could have been, maybe -- after all, we cannot say with any certainty that Marta is single. The spectacle of Whisky is in seeing a life the way it perhaps should be, with persons filling roles that they certainly seem adept in filling. Why can't life just be this way: two lonely people coming together, ordering each other's lives (with her tidying of his flat, for instance, Marta breathes a certain life back into Jacobo's formerly dingy living space) and spending their free days playing at a resort?

But of course, when the vacation ends, its back to the dreary industrial city, back to the sock factory, where one day passes like another. Though it is clearly subsumed in a plausible-enough narrative structure, the contingent quality of the plot offers an instantiation or at least a congruence with the character's feelings -- and more importantly, the spectators', from a position of limited psychological insight -- that suggests possibility rather than actuality. Though the film is doggedly observant, its structure almost effervescently signals a narrative of fantasy rather than reality.

Three Crowns of the Sailor: A Resurfaced Masterpiece from Cinema's Forgotten Decade

As I have noted before, one reason for the persistently low opinion of the 1980s as a decade for film art is that such a large number of its greatest works remain unavailable to audiences in this country. Supreme achievements by directors of Hou Hsiao-hsien's (A City of Sadness, 1989), Edward Yang's (Taipei Story, 1985) and Alain Resnais' (Mélo, 1986) stature exist only in foreign-region DVDs or bootleg videocassette versions at best, while those of other masters, such as Manoel de Oliveira (Francisca, 1981) and Jacques Demy (A Room in Town, 1982), continue to be even more obscure.

Recently making the jump from the latter category to the former -- thanks to Blaq Out's invaluable three-film Raoul Ruiz box set, released in France this past March, and also containing the director's Suspended Vocation (1977) and his somewhat better known Hypothesis of a Stolen Painting (1979) -- is Ruiz's Three Crowns of the Sailor (Les Trois couronnes du matelot, 1983), a work that surely rates among the decade's dozen or so best films, no matter what clandestine masterworks may be revealed to us next.

Based on the Chiloé Island myth of the 'Ship of the Dead' (Ruiz, it is worth noting, is from the nearby southern Chilean city of Puerto Montt, even if most of his nearly 100 films, including the film in question, were made while in exile in France) Three Crowns of the Sailor tells the story of a man who seeks passage on a ship, after committing murder in the film's opening sequence. Actually, the initial set of shots, prior to this opening scene, depict a man writing, which, as it will become clear, is the primary preoccupation of the film.

But back to the plot. The man with whom he seeks safety requests two things: first, that he listen to his life story, and second, that he gives him three Dutch crowns. The younger gentleman reluctantly agrees, and the sailor begins to describe his passage as the only living member of the ship. What ensues is an episodic narrative, dictated less by any plausible formulation of spatial or temporal unity than it is the exigencies of narrative invention. In other words, the world of the film is constructed out of the unfolding of the plot, rather than existing prior to and apart from a plot that more characteristically would proceed while preserving its integrity (as if it were itself a reality incapable of logical contradiction).

This pretence of realism, however, does not hold in Three Crowns of the Sailor, wherein it is possible for a character to be both alive and dead, in two places at once, etc. As analytic philosopher cum film scholar Lisa K. Broad puts it of her fellow former analytic philosopher Ruiz's work, we often see things through the sailor's eyes while seeing him in the space of the frame; in this contradiction we see the essence of a narrative art that expects us to accept this logical incongruity.

And of course, this is very much the point of a film structured on the basis of a continual flow of stories and storytellers; Three Crowns of the Sailor is a narrational Chinese box where new characters are always ready to tell their tales. Explicitly positioning himself within the Latin American literary tradition of 'magical realism' (both in this text and in subsequent interviews), narrative becomes the primary tell of cinematic form: no longer is it the photographic basis of the medium alone that lends it its ontological shape, but instead it is the presence and contours of storytelling (along with that photographic basis, providing a quality of the uncanny, as Broad also points out) that dictates the internal logic of Ruiz's picture. Moreover, not only is it a work aware of its own form -- insistently recalled in the choruses of "I have a story to tell" -- but it is conscious of its creator as well, which Ruiz slips into one of the closing lines of dialogue, "there always must be one living person on the ship:" Le matelot est Ruiz; he is the living one in this ship of the dead, cinema.

At this point, it may be worth cautioning that all this talk of narrative (and in effect time) does little to address the other essential elements of its form: namely, space and light, which is to say its visual style. While perhaps less integral to the form of Three Crowns of the Sailor than are concerns of narrative and plot, Ruiz nevertheless showcases a visual flamboyance, style to burn, in this work. For one, there is Sacha Vierny's (Last Year in Marienbad, etc.) cinematography, varying between black-and-white and color -- the former for the present-tense of the sailor's narration, and the often shifting palette of the latter for the stories that shape the narrative. As to his black-and-white, Vierny's lensing alternately evokes (quite literally, in fact) the baroque hall-of-mirrors aesthetic of the aforementioned Marienbad (1961).

Yet, it is less the occasional opulence of its mise en scène than it is the compositional embellishment between extreme foreground and the deep recesses of background that distinguishes Ruiz's (and Vierny's) protean style in Three Crowns of the Sailor: Ruiz and Vierny utilize extreme close-ups to frame distant action, whether it is a character's arm or an empty glass near the camera. While there may be space to interpret Ruiz's utilization of space with relational to the picture's narrative content, it would seem more accurate to say that the visual style of Three Crowns of the Sailor represents an incidence of style for its own sake, a means of description that is more interested in the visual elegance and extravagence of what it shows rather than in finding spatial corrollaries to express the film's themes. Perhaps this apparent absence of rigor is not a want at all, but rather further conformation of the film's key ethos: that the point is in the telling, not in what is being told.

New Exhibition: Day for Night

To anyone unfamiliar with the critical reception surrounding this year's Whitney Biennial, suffice it say that it has been predominantly negative. That Day for Night (1973), François Truffaut's facile abandonment of the ethos of the nouvelle vague, was selected to brand the exhibition should call into question its facility in representing contemporary art's genuine vanguard -- and particularly, anything even resembling interesting audio-visual art. Or perhaps the mainstream of America's art world today is as shallow as was Truffaut's paean to the joys of creation.

Either way, the inclusion of Francesco Vezzoli's Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula (2005) speaks to the aesthetic paucity of the Biennial endeavor.
First there is the trailer's credited writer and its namesake, Gore Vidal: before his participation in such unremittingly trashy exercises as Myra Breckinridge (novel) and the aforementioned Caligula (screenplay), Vidal was responsible for some of the greatest dross ever to grace the silver screen -- he penned Suddenly, Last Summer and Ben-Hur in a single inglorious year (1959). Second, there is the fact that a trailer, an advertisement for a film -- albeit for a non-existent remake -- is somehow supposed to constitute noteworthy art. The best trailers either a) tell us what a film is about and/or b) convey the film's mood or a feeling for the film that will c) encourage the spectator to want to see the film. This is their function. A fictitious trailer will continue to do a) and/or b), producing irony when thoughts of c) are broached. Are we really being told that this experience is as important to us as are our traditional inquiries into who we are, where we come from and where we are going, or at least to questions concerning the ontological status of the art -- and no, a flaccid critique of "capitalism" or "media" or what have you does not an engagement of these questions make -- or is it that no one is willing to ask these questions any more? Whichever way you look at, Vezzoli and Vidal's inclusion in the Biennial is troubling.

Fortunately, not all the video art in Day for Night was nearly this inelegant and insubstantial. This year's best in show, regardless of medium (and by a large margin at that), was Pierre Huyghe's A Journey That Wasn't (2005), "a travelogue/ fairy tale/ performance of immense beauty and mystery," as it has been described by its Termite Art advocate, R. Emmet Sweeney. A Journey That Wasn't alternates super 16 and HD footage of Antarctica and Central Park's Wollman Rink, where Huyghe staged a performance of his voyage in October 2005, backed by a 42-piece orchestra. The expedition itself centers upon the attempted discovery of a rare albino penguin, which Huyghe's film captures in the closing minutes. I mention this lest any of its spectators missed the penguin's appearance, which I should also mention matters neither to one's assessment of the work's quality nor even to the viewer's experience of the work. The fact is that as a film intended for gallery rather than theatrical exhibition, The Journey That Wasn't is to be (and most certainly will be) viewed in segments that often commence after the film has begun and conclude before the film is over -- in other words as its spectators walk into and out of its exhibition space.


Corresponding to this variation in form, The Journey That Wasn't articulates its content through a frequent repetition of leitmotifs, rather than via a more conventional story arc. Specifically, it is the documentary facts of each, both the topographical details of the spaces and also the spectacle of human -- and animal -- presence. Resulting is a work that both emphasizes the Biennial's stated preoccupation with reflexivity, and more subtly, the texture and tactile cold of the environs. Whereas Huyghe captures the placid black surfaces, floating snow-packed isles and brutal cold of a liquid that barely surpasses 32º F, with a conscienciousness rivaling Flaherty or the recent landscape documentaries of James Benning (13 Lakes and Ten Skies, both 2004), an indeterminacy surrounds his mist-shrouded Central Park reproductions: is it a crisp autumn evening or is it more unseasonnal; and does the water have any discernable cooling effect of its own? In short, the artifical setting lacks the tactile precision of the natural locale. All of this is to say that The Journey That Wasn't utilizes its form to stimulate the sensorial memory of its spectator (in responding to the work's tactility) while asking he or she to consider their experience of viewing the film, which is simulated in the Central Park reproduction; the Whitney spectator, like the Wollman rink participant, views an aesthetic interpretation of an Antarctic expedition.

Apart from the moving image, another of the more compelling reconfigurations of form belonged to Urs Fisher, who attached burning candles to a pair of swinging pendulums, thereby charting its invisible path on the floor beneath. (Fisher's sculpture fills a space confined by cut-out walls that similarly annunciate the otherwise unseen.) Likewise, Elaine Sturtevant's reproduction of Marcel

Duchamp's epochal display of "found" objects translates a discrete space through a specific aesthetic idea -- that her feeling for these pieces constitutes as much of an artistic expression as did his -- which nevertheless succumbs to the same cynicism of the original, even if it avoids the joking quality of both Duchamp's instillation and most of the other work contained in Day for Night.

If there is an overarching weakness displayed in this year's biennial, it is that same pestering rash that has inflicted the Western art world since the end of the modernist age: irony. Everything has to have a punch-line. The artist is forever superior to his or her subject. Humility does not exist in postmodern art. Whatever this portends, western art has not been able to find its way since modernism first began to lose its momentum. If nothing else, the Whitney Biennial offers us a glimpse into contemporary art's most celebrated placeholders.

New Film: United 93

"Let's roll!" Well, actually, "Are you guys ready? Let's roll... come on, let's go!" Herein lies the difference between the film that many people were either dreading or hoping for, and the film that English-born director Paul Greengrass ultimately produced. United 93 is in this way a marvel of understatement, opting whenever possible to downplay the subject's more incendiary facets, while maintaining a plausible correspondence to that day's grave events. Consequently, United 93 more closely resembles a memorial than it does a political tract -- Greengrass commemorates their heroism to the measure that the flight's braver passengers acted beyond their mere survival instincts, in order to prevent their plane from becoming the weapon that 9/11's earlier flights had become. That this might stimulate in the film's audience (myself included) the hope that they might act like these valiant men, should they ever find themselves in a similar situation, does not connote anything resembling propaganda; rather, what is in evidence is an art that elevates the spectator with the awareness of the capacities of human nature. Uplift has always been a part of great art (not to say that Greengrass' film is exactly this). To demand its suppression for fear of its political consequences is to participate in a cause made dubious by its dependence upon withholding facts or encouraging that thoughts and emotions of a certain moment to be forgotten.

Of course, the story of United 93 is by no means obscure to most American viewers. Then again, Greengrass attempts to reproduce the events of that day from an epistemological position that none of us shared. Simply put, United 93 puts us inside the plane and air traffic control centers as the events of 9/11 unfold in a facsimile of real-time. This is to say that Greengrass is interested in recreating the experiences of that day, not simply in telling a story, which he further conveys through his hand-held, interventionist camera work that places the spectator in a position inside the action. Greengrass' point in making United 93 is therefore quite clear: to give the viewer a sense of what it might have been like to participate more intimately in the incidences surrounding the hijacking of United flight 93.

What results is a narrative of great fascination that at once communicates the banality of that early Tuesday morning -- the flight 93 travelers on their cell phones holding their stiff coffees, the air traffic controllers nonchalantly preparing for an ordinary, problem-free day (after all the weather, the only x-factor, was perfect) -- as well as the extreme pressures that result once the situation has become clear. For the terrorists, with whom Greengrass begins his film, this exists from the outset; that the director has made this storytelling choice allows even these men to retain a modicum of humanity as they prepare for their inhumane violence. Again, this is a mark of realism, not of propaganda -- in spite of the murder that these men will commit, they must have experienced some nervousness, some doubt (not in their cause, perhaps, but in their ability to complete their mission) before they commenced with the hijacking. Greengrass shows that there is no need to exaggerate either the heroism of the passengers or the villainy of the terrorists; his narrative superbly honors the victims without succumbing to what might be an understandable tendency.

Once more, let us to return to one of the chief objections leveled against United 93: "why now?" After all, the Bush administration is finally being excoriated on the war and his administration's foreign policy in the way that many of his detractors feel is due. Why tempt fate with a film like United 93 if not to serve their interests? Again the response should be abundantly clear: even assuming that position, September, 11, 2001 was one of the most important days in our history, whose impact and memory provides us a key to understanding the world we live in today. And of course, those persons who indeed gave their lives that day -- to his credit, Greengrass allows them to first demonstrate a willingness to overcome their fears and do whatever necessary for the good of their country, before they seem to grasp for their survival in developing a contingent strategy for landing the plane -- deserve our continued remembrances and admiration. September 11th deserves not one but any number of films, given its centrality to American life in this new century, as well as for its verification of both humanity's capacity for evil and for bravery and heroism. Should this spate of movies ever arrive as one would expect it will, United 93 will undoubtedly remain one of their very best.

New Film: Water

Warning: the second and third paragraphs contain partial spoilers.

Deepa Mehta's Water (2005), a Canadian-Indian co-production that concludes the director's 'elemental trilogy,' is foremost an object of social protest against the continued practice of child marriage in India, and particularly, the Hindu prohibitions against remarriage placed on widows of any age. Mehta's film, situated during the reform-minded late 1930s, tells the story of Chuyia, a seven-year old widow who is sent off to spend the remainder of her days in a monastery that we later discover is financed by the prostitution of another of its inhabitants, the radiant Kalyani (Lisa Ray). Like the much younger Chuyia, Kalyani never did meet her husband, but has been nonetheless conscribed to an existence best described as a sort of living death -- the only other options that these women have, we are told, would have been to burn themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres or to marry their brothers-in-law.

The rambunctious pre-pubescent quickly befriends the twenty-something Kalyani, as well as an ancient woman she calls "Auntie," but runs afoul of the shrill mistress Madhumati, whose only companion seems to be Gulabi, the transvestite "eunuch" and pimp who whores out Kalyani. When Madhumati learns of Kalyani's plan to marry the liberal-minded law graduate, Narayan (John Abraham), she chops off the younger woman's hair -- until now, she is the only one who has been allowed to grow her hair long, owning to certain economic imperatives -- and locks her in her room. After being freed by the religiously-conflicted Shakuntala (Seema Biswas), another of Chuyia's early antagonists who will later become one of little girl's chief advocates, Kalyani joins Narayan in preparation for their union. Kalyani's fellow widows celebrate by flinging vibrantly-colored powders (including an incandescent shade of fuchsia) on one another, as the tragedy of their existence seems to have been mitigated by the social reforms championed by progressive political paragon, Mahatma Ghandi.

Yet, the logic of Mehta's social critique does not allow for such a happy resolution. After Kalyani inquires as to whom Narayan's father is, she abruptly ends their engagement. Without providing further spoilers, suffice it to say that Chuyia will be subjected to the same ruinous experience that assured the former's tragic end. The point is that the restoration of the familial structure, long an axiom of the popular Indian cinema, is here denied its currency; such conservatism is disavowed by Mehta's progressive platform.

Rhetorically, Water belongs to a tradition whose origins can be traced back to Satyajit Ray's epochal Pather Panchali (1955), which itself challenged India's dominant popular mode by bringing neo-realist social description to a cinema that similarly excluded the use of diegetic song picturization and epic temporal structures. (For instance, Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin [1953] likewise invested its content with a neorealist style, though it maintained Bollywood's musical and epic conventions.) In the case of Water, however, Bollywood-styled music is still utilized, though not in the typical diegetic manner -- this is to stay that the characters don't themselves sing, though the narrative placement of the numbers and the choices of the singers' voices effectively dictate their emotions. As such, a perfunctory realism is maintained, while the conventions of Bollywood cinema are referenced (and revised).

Likewise present are a variety of Indian character types, which find rather direct correspondences in Ray's corpus. There is the Bengali archetype of the urbane, well-educated, liberal-minded son who returns to the countryside (cf. The World of Apu, 1959); his friend, the lazy descendent of aristocracy who embraces Western mores (cf. The Chess Player, 1977); the rascally, toothless old woman (Auntie) who befriends Chuyia (cf. Pather Panchali); and of course, there is the head-strong, if somewhat mischievous child protagonist, whose perspective guides the narrative -- all the way down to the camera's insistence eye-level framing (again cf. Pather Panchali, and particularly Apu's sister).

In fact, Mehta's connection to Ray's feature debut is made even more explicit by the opening compositions of a lily pad-covered marsh, which while imitating the master's indelible black-and-white photography of the corporeal world, nonetheless incorporate an extreme over-saturation of color that is all her own. Moreover, if Ray's exposition of natural beauty serves to underscore the director's ideas concerning human transience, his latter-day counterpart's co-option of this schema indicates nothing so much as an aesthetic preference and an awareness of its position within the history of Indian counter-cinema. Nevertheless, the visual grace of Water nearly matches the Ray: consider for instance the images depicting the couple beneath the giant hardwood on the banks of the river, with its powerful bleached white light pouring through the tree's tangled branches.

Indeed, Mehta's is a work unapologetically grounded in the concerns and the immediacy of this life. In this manner, the film's greatest provocation is its challenge to the wisdom of a religion that could countenance such a deplorable tradition. While, the evils of child marriage remain a distant -- and obvious -- transgression for any Western audience member, the film's inversion of the equation "God is truth" to read "Truth is god" could be counted as a rebuke to any theistic faith. In this way, the hyperbole of the melodrama -- make no mistake, Water is propaganda -- and its apparent distance from Western practices, becomes less safe than it would at once appear. Still, this is a film whose potency remains twined to one's feelings concerning the evils of child marriage and the Hindu religion's traditional prohibitions on remarriage. That Water is therfore the ultimate middle-brow art house spectacle -- one can feel bad about what is presented on-screen without ever being accused of complicity -- should not mitigate its very real power.