THE CYNEPHILE

While I am not a M.M. fetishist, I find this image remarkably unsettling for the way it seems to prophesy her death. During her legendary final photo shoot with Bert Stern, Monroe crossed out the negatives that she didn’t want to published with a magic marker. (She just had a gall-bladder operation, and was ashamed of the scar on her midriff). The red gash on her ghostly body produces an uncanny memento mori — a quality that, according to Roland Barthes, lies at the crux of all photography.

Of course, Marilyn-as-muse is a popular trope in all mediums. Here’s Dalí’s take on the icon, which is obviously a nod (or a jab) in Warhol’s direction. (Duly noted: Monroe’s beauty mark takes precedence over Mao’s mole.)

Salvador Dalí, After Marilyn Monroe [1967]

Pasolini, La Rabbia [Rage, 1963]

Restored for the NYFF this year, Pasolini’s La Rabbia interprets Monroe’s death as the killing of all that is innocent and beautiful in the world. My shoddy translation of the last line, spoken over footage of a mushroom cloud: “You’re the first in the world beyond the gates abandoned to death’s fate.”

James Gray’s Two Lovers is among other things, an austerely beautiful portrait of NYC-neighborhood that doesn’t get much screen-time: Brighton Beach. Gray manages to capture the distinctive look and feel of this largely residential Russian enclave, which also resonates with the Dostoevsky-inspired plot of the film. When asked what attracts him to the location, Gray responded:

“It has the surface texture of urban life. The layers of Brooklyn are fabulous. You can sense the history of the community. Brighton Beach is so ugly that it’s beautiful. History is an accumulation of detail, and I want to make a film with a sense of it.”

These beautifully ugly true-to-life details — these are what we risk losing when New York succumbs to hyper-gentrification, and the unique flavor of different neighborhoods evaporates into thin air. I can’t think of a film from the recent past that records these surface details of the city so well. Could this be because fewer films are being shot on location in New York or because these details are being eradicated all together? I think we all know the answer to that one.

Gwyneth Paltrow and the dark, smoky patina of a subway platform

Joaquin Phoenix in front of Cafe Volna and Tatiana, two mainstays along the boardwalk

Brighton Cleaners, where Joaquin Phoenix’s character Leonard works, is a real-life business. The facade bears the mark of grime, soot and weather.

Téchiné’s latest film, loosely based on a real-life story in which a woman fakes an anti-Semitic attack, ultimately disappoints because it stops short at addressing political issues in favor of an all-too vague character sketch, producing nothing more than a hazy portrait of a traumatized young woman. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if the character was as intense and sensitive as say, Maïté [Élodie Bouchez] from his earlier film Wild Reeds, but Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne, who also played the title character in Rosetta) is dazed and disconnected and she rollerblades effortlessly through the banlieues of Paris, headphones firmly planted upon an abundance of flowing curls.

Émilie Dequenne: Dazed, Confused, Online Dating

The film is divided into two parts: Circumstances and Consequences. The circumstances that lead up to the event just as shocking as the staging of the event itself; it’s the aftermath that is resolved all too easily. After the alleged assault, Jeanne and her mother name (played by Catherine Deneuve) visit friends in the country to escape the media scrutiny and to reflect on what happened. Now maybe I am jealous that I can’t be en congé all the time, but I have seen too many French films lately in which a trip to the seaside or mountain resort cures all, and it’s starting to rake on my nerves. (Staring moodily at the paysage doesn’t always put things in perspective for me.) Besides indulging in this well-worn cliché, the film also includes two Highly Symbolic Sequences (a Bar Mitzvah, a dangerous boat ride in the rain) that detract from Téchiné’s free-flowing, anti-determinist style.

Summer hours pass by quickly in La Fille du RER

It’s worth noting that we had a similar occurrence in the U.S. recently, when a McCain voter carved a “B” into her face, claiming that she had been attacked to stir up ire before the election. She was almost immediately discredited and the media rightfully downplayed her story, and her stunt did not have its intended effect of tarnishing Barack Obama or his supporters. While these two fabricated hate crimes are obviously very different, I think they’re both interesting because they reveal society’s prejudices: who we readily believe, the burden of proof that justice requires, and the media’s role in the frenzy that inevitably follows. La Fille du RER barely touches on all of these issues, and therefore is more evasive than eye-opening.

Move over, Ryan Trecartin: Omer Fast is the current video artist taking over New York. His solo turn at the Whitney, combined with a show of recent work at Postmasters, reveal that he is eminently qualified and more than ready to undertake a feature film. Like the British video artist Steve McQueen, whose Hunger wowed the film world, Fast’s work deserves to be seen by a wider audience. His work is largely in the vein of simulated social documentary that exploits the surface effects of the Hollywood film, pushing the format to a well-tempered extreme to strengthen the irony and distance from that which it critiques. Fast doesn’t shirk from the big issues of today: the aftershocks of war and combat, refugees and displaced persons, racial stereotyping, and the tyranny of the modern police state. But the worlds that he creates are marked by reversals, distinctions, nuances and contradictions, and thus his work does not fall prey to the trap of the “issue” film. Technically accomplished, his films evoke more than they explain, in keeping with Fast’s multi-layerd approach to his subject matter. Formally Fast makes use of split screens, green screens, lush film stocks (most of his work is shot on Super-16) and exaggerated sound effects: this is film-as-artifice, all the way. Yet it is so much more than that: each film manages to probe its connections to mainstream media stereotypes, fictions of the self and nation-state, and constructions of a linear time unburdened by memory.

A still from Nostalgia, 2009. In a hypothetical role-reversed future, an English man is being interviewed for asylum in an unspecified African country.

Fast’s multi-channel pieces, taken together, are approaching feature-film length. I really do think we have the next important auteur on our hands here, and Fast’s quick ascent in the art world closely mirrors that of McQueen. Other potentially useful comparisons: he addresses social concerns similar to the Dardenne brothers. His hybrid approach resembles Isaac Julien’s melding of fiction and documentary. And he is skillful at invoking a self-reflexive critique of media discourse that adds another layer of interpretation to the narrative, like almost all the work of Amos Gitai. Omer Fast is too prodigiously talented to be confined to the white walls of the art world — let’s see his work up on the big screen.

From De Grote Boodschap [The Big Message, 2007]. A Belgium beat-boxer is a unnerving combination of both man and machine.

Holland Cotter’s review of Fast’s two shows, from The New York Times

An interview with Fast and a clip from The Casting, his tour-de force at the 2008 Whitney Biennial

This weekend is your last chance to catch MOMA’s Bauhaus exhibit, which is enlightening because it reveals that its practitioners (check out those cool cats below) were far from uniform in their approach to art, architecture and life. For me, the big discovery was Herbert Bayer’s design for a cinema [1924-25] and what he calls a “multimedia” trade fair stand to be used for advertising purposes [1924].

In da Bauhaus (actually they were on the roof. Herbert Bayer is fifth from the left.)

Bayer’s design for a cinema is notable for what it lacks: it dispenses with a marquee, which was designed to “embrace” the potential moviegoer on the street and funnel him into the theater. The revolving door is more characteristic of a department store. And I have no idea what those three primary colored zones are meant to indicate. But one can immediately see that this cinematheque is the exact opposite of the movie palaces of the 1920′s, which were derived from theater architecture and were intended to create an opulent and exotic experience.

Even more radical is this multimedia kiosk for a fictional brand of toothpaste, “Regina.” Presumably the booth would lure you in with the sound of her voice.

Bayer is most well known as a type designer. He was a proponent of the almost ubiquitous use of all lowercase letters, and he created the quintessential Bauhaus font Universal, which still looks fresh today. But he also wrote presciently about exhibition design in a way that anticipates future developments in digital media:

“Exhibition design has evolved as a new discipline, as an apex of all media and
powers of communication and of collective efforts and effects. The combined
means of visual communication constitutes a remarkable complexity: language
as visible printing or as sound, pictures as symbols, paintings, and photographs,
sculptural media, materials and surfaces, color, light, movement (of the display
as well as the visitor), films, diagrams, and charts. The total application of all
plastic and psychological means (more than anything else) makes exhibition
design an intensified and new language.”

Here, film is subsumed under a multimedia gesamtkunstwerk that attempts to alter all aspects of the user’s experience. It was already considered just one tool in the virtual reality shed as early as the 1920′s.

In September of last year, Barnes & Noble was having a sale: 50% off of Criterion DVDS. This would never happen again, I rationalized, so I carried home a nice haul of Antonioni, Godard, Oshima, Roeg and Pialat—films that I could watch over and over again. I paid about $18 to $30 per disc, and I thought I was getting a bargain.

A week later I went to Shanghai, where I *theoretically* purchased a complete Godard box set (52 DVDs in all!) for the equivalent of $30 USD.

I had heard stories that the DVD stores in China were full of such unknown pleasures, but I didn’t truly believe them until I was there. Most people assume that they primarily sell new releases, similar to the vendors who hawk their illegal wares from garbage bags in Chinatown and on the subway. Most people are also afraid that the the quality will be poor, and that the films won’t be subtitled. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Imagine going into Kim’s Video before the it closed, and then imagine that all the titles are for sale, for the equivalent of $2 USD. (When I was there, the going rate was 14 RMB, which works out to exactly $2.05). Then imagine being able to purchase regionless arthouse films that were never available in your country. And then imagine seeing films that haven’t even been released yet on the shelves.

There are some drawbacks: sometimes the subtitles are poorly translated, and sometimes you do end up with a screener. But for the most part, the packaging and the quality of the DVD is indistinguishable from its full-price counterpart. Along with the Godard box set, I picked up box sets of Almodóvar, Renoir, Wong Kar-Wai, Mizoguchi, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Francois Ozon.

(So I *might* have purchased so many DVDS that they gave me a VIP card.)

I was also able to find some truly rare films. But the holy grail was undoubtedly a disc that contained both Pasolini’s Appunti per un film sull’india (Notes for a Film Towards India, 1968) and Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (Notes for an African Orestes, 1970). I shrieked out loud when I saw this, because I had seen each of the “Appunti” films only once (If you’re curious, India was screened at a Yale conference on the cinema of ’68, and African Orestes was screened at Anthology). I would have given anything for a chance to see them again, in order to compare them side-by-side. However these titles are rarely shown (especially India) and the print I saw at Anthology was projected with powerpoint soft titles. Now I was holding a DVD of some of the most sublime cine-poetry ever created. (Sadly, the disc did not contain the final “Notes” film, which I have not seen: Appunti per un romanzo dell’immondezza [1970]. I would kiss the dirtiest New York sidewalk to see this, so if you know someone who knows someone, please do share.)

It’s interesting that in China, you can get some of the most insurrectionary and revolutionary cinema from the pirated DVD store, but the films in the movie theaters are censored by the government. Going to the movies costs more than buying a illegal DVD, and for students and laborers, it’s still considered a “fancy” thing to do. One of the reasons that Baidu (a Chinese search engine) has a larger market share than Google is that pirated material is available readily; Google puts restrictions on allowing blatantly copyrighted material to surface in search results (or at least they try to). The culture of piracy is so rampant and the government truly doesn’t give a damn that it’s actually hard to get a legal DVD in China. You probably couldn’t tell the difference anyway: some of the illegal DVDS are actually manufactured in the same factory as the legal ones; they are known as “third shift” goods and in that case, there is absolutely no difference between the original and the copy. I like to think of a budding director watching the best cinema the world has to offer, each purchased for less than a subway ride in NYC. Film School? Forget it. Just go to China.

An excellent analysis of the practice by Tom Doctoroff from The Huffington Post

Planning a trip to Shanghai? Dagu Lu is the place to go

piracy, simulacrum and forgery in china: a beautifully written and illustrated essay by Andrew Doro from sheepish dot org. (Bonus: It includes a reference to the piracy scene in Unknown Pleasures)

Fish Tank (which won the 2009 Jury Prize at Cannes) is a skillfully wrought and emotionally tense coming-of-age drama. Much fuss is being made over the acting debut of Kate Jarvis and deservedly so: her performance carries the entire film. Her real-life story is straight out of a fairy-tale; she was discovered having a fight with her boyfriend on train platform.

From time to time a film will remind us of the advantages of using non-professional actors; Fish Tank is such a film. Bazin writes of actors “who play on the screen the roles of their daily lives” and Kate Jarvis certainly comes from a similar background as her character Mia, an abrasive adolescent who dances to hip-hop music and dreams of escaping her impoverished milieu.

The expert Michael Fassbender (Hunger, Inglourious Basterds) plays her mother’s boyfriend Connor, who turns his eye toward Mia while simultaneously filling in for her absent father. In one provocative sequence, he offers an injured Mia a piggyback ride that can be viewed as a protective as well as an erotic gesture.

What most critics have overlooked is that the dynamic between Jarvis and Fassbender, between a non-professional and a professional, mimics the power dynamic in the film. This makes their interactions work on several levels: when Mia watches Connor, her gaze is tinged with curiosity, fascination and a longing to connect; when Jarvis watches Fassbender as an actor, she is studying him with that same curiosity, fascination and desire. Similarly when Conner challenges Mia to perform for him, the actor Fassbender can be viewed as asking Jarvis to demonstrate her acting chops—in effect, to bring everything she can to the table. Bazin would approve of this parallel to their real-life relationship: in fact, he didn’t advocate solely for the use of non-professional actors but for a “casual mixing of professionals and those who act just occasionally”—what he terms an amalgam of players. It is precisely this amalgam that generates an on-screen relationship worth watching.

Read an interview with Kate Jarvis here from Little White Lies

The work of O. Winston Link has only recently been recognized as significant in the history of photography. His documentation of steam locomotives in the U.S. is not only an important historical record but an undertaking of cinematic proportions.

When I first saw Hotshot, Eastbound I was floored by the remarkable coincidence of events: the train shoots its way like a missile across the background just as the airplane is captured on the movie screen. I was also amazed by the depth of the field and the richness of detail—this is a night photograph, after all. How on earth did he take such a picture?

The answer, of course, is that he directed it. He hired the two lovers in the foreground to sit in his car. He engineered an extensive arrangement of flashes that, at his command, would all fire at precisely the right moment. He became friendly with an army of train conductors whom he would call to check on train arrival times. And that oh-so-perfectly framed plane was added later in the darkroom. In short, this photograph was entirely premeditated, posed to an extreme degree, and “photoshopped” avant la lettre. Yet that doesn’t make it any less valid as an historical document, or any less important in the history of photography.

I think this image can also be instructive in thinking through the history of cinema. What this photograph manages to capture so brilliantly is the way in which modern technologies of transport—trains, planes, automobiles and yes, cinema—engender new modes of spectatorship. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out in his lucid book, The Railway Journey, the experience of railway travel brought about entirely different type of interaction with the landscape. The velocity and evanescence with which the railway traveller experienced the landscape can be thought of as a precursor to cinematic spectatorship: train travel in effect, “conditioned” the modern individual to embrace the rapid editing and the luminous screen of the cinema. The automobile and the airplane represent further permutations of this postwar industrial consciousness, and it is fascinating to see all three of these technological assemblages consolidated into this single, quintessentially American image. It’s no accident that the viewer shares the point of view of the lovebirds, enraptured by the otherworldy image of the plane while the train barrels out of frame.

O. Winston Link (the “O” stands for “Ogle” by the way—a Dickensian name if there ever was one) didn’t just take photographs; he also made sound recordings and a few hard-to-find films. Besides serving as testament to the fact that he was indeed thinking cinematically, the Link footage is an important historical document in its own right and should be more widely available so it can be celebrated and studied. (This website reports that his ex-wife may be holding some of these materials hostage.) I would die to see some of these films—ideally, on a double bill with James Benning’s RR, perhaps the most sublime minimalist tribute to trains on film. Cinema arrived via train, after all.

More links on Link (sorry, couldn’t resist):

An bio of the Brooklyn-born photographer from the O. Winston Link Museum in Virginia

An interactive graphic of the Hotshot Eastbound photograph from The New York Times