The Face Knife

Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 begins with a shot of colorfully-dressed five person theatre troupe facing away from the camera with their asses in the air and their heads tucked under their shoulders. These quite limber actors right themselves and begin stretching their bodies as if they were prepping for some sadistic Tae-Bo-esque workout. It’s a very funny scene and it prepares the audience mentally for the upending of cinema conventions about to ensue, not to mention the pre-occupation with the body and the forces that have power over it that is one of the sub-texts of the film. Unfortunately, at this point the film does not pause for a corresponding calisthenics intermission, as it sure would behoove the audience to make sure that their bodies are warmed-up so as to endure with as little soreness or fidgeting as possible the grueling, 8 episode, 12+ hour marathon (split over two days) that awaits. Particularly the first two episodes. For those I could have used a full-body massage as an overture.

Out 1 is one of the most famous films maudit of all time - the head curator of the Museum of the Moving Image here in Astoria, New York, said that this weekend (Dec. 9-10) was only the sixth public screening of the film, and there was only one print in existence*. Naturally, I had been greatly anticipating checking this one off my list. Of course, I was also hoping for much more than a big ?ol notch in my New Wave belt. I was hoping for some revelatory experience, a moment of transcendence, the out of body experience that the best movies can give us. Out 1, like most movies, failed to live up to that promise. Perhaps it was just a function of my expectations (or a function of my chair), but I would have to number Out 1, to use a supercilious expression of the sharply drawn douchebag from this film, ?minor Rivette. ?

In a way, all of Rivette?s films are ?minor,? and in the same way, Out 1 contains all of Rivette yet exceeds none of it. It is a small, centerless film blown out of all proportion, an experiment in theatrical staging, a clash of acting methods, a study in free-floating paranoia and a series of interlocking games and puzzles where the purpose is not to ?win.? An attempt to sum up or ?solve? Out 1 would similarly miss the point, and I?m not going to attempt it, particularly because there are several other of Rivette?s films that interest me more and I would rather be defeated by (Duelle, Le pont du nord and the incredibly opaque and Kabuki-esque Noroit, of the ones I?ve seen. Even the similarly flawed L?Amour Fou has some indelible moments).

I’m going to try to make a few small notes about the film and what interests me in it. In the notes MoMI distributed at the showing (from Jonathan Rosenbaum’s out-of-print Rivette collection) is a quite dense Rivette interview I haven’t yet properly digested - although, unfortunately that alimentation may not prove possible as he refers to several films I have not seen and don’t think I’ll get the chance to any time soon. Besides, I’m probably only writing this piece for the aforementioned public belt-notching. N.B. You may not want to read below if you plan on attending one of the upcoming screenings or if you’re already disgusted with the way I’m treating this film. And this piece will end arbitrarily, kind of like the film.

I’m having a hard time starting this sentence without using the words “plot”, “structure”, “organized” or “story”, all of which would be misleading for reasons mentioned above, so I will say that the film is centered around a few separate groups and individual characters**.
(1)The aforementioned upside-down theatre group, led by red-head Lili, (Michele Moretti) is rehearsing a humorously noisy version of Aeschylus’s “Seven Against Thebes.”
(2) Another theatre group, planning a version of Aeschylus’s “Prometheus,” using rehearsal methods that could double as CIA torture techniques. This group is led by Thomas (Michael Lonsdale), who proves to be intimately involved with nearly every other character in the film.
(3) Colin (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a (faux) deaf-mute who plays the harmonica and receives bizarre messages which he deduces to reveal the existence of a secret society. He’s pretty greasy looking.
(4) Frederique, (Juliet Berto) a marginal street kid who likes to pickpocket, swindle, etc.
(5) Pauline/Emilie, (Bulle Ogier) owner of hippie hang-out. One of several characters with multiple names.
(6) There are two other “characters” in this film who are prime movers of the story as such but who never actually appear (to my knowledge - it may be possible that Pierre appears in one of the first two episodes, unremarked upon, as one of Colin’s “victims” - this is a completely unfounded theory, but I like it). As I am becoming a seasoned moviegoer and I am well aware of some of the stock though nonetheless moving pleasures of the form, I thought that Pierre-this or Igor-that would lead up to a Harry Lime or Ringo Kid-esque appearance in the 7th or 8th episode, but alas, they remain unearthly powers. At least Juan in Paris Belongs To Us has the decency to be definitively dead, if still the topic of every fucking conversation.

Both groups of theatre folk are in a constant state of transition- nothing is ever finished or settled upon. The rehearsal scenes of Out 1 are not as satisfying as those in Rivette’s previous filmL’Amour Fou, which uses a similar schemata. In L’Amour Fou the text of the source play (Racine’s Andromache) becomes doubled or tripled or quadrupled in meaning while the words stay exactly the same, through repetition (to the point that the audience themselves is rehearsed for the scene) who is delivering the lines and where they are delivering them. I prefer that type of “play” with the text to what Rivette does in Out 1, where both troupes more or less jettison their texts right away (The Thebes group plans to have a character appear onstage who never appears in the play (sort of the opposite of Out 1’s Pierre), and the Prometheus group actually starts with multiple texts in multiple languages (but by the end of the film Thomas is saying that Prometheus is entirely missing from the play)) and approach the problem of interpretation from a much more abstract and even mythical angles.

The two troupes have entirely different philosophies, however, but it’s easy to differentiate between them, even though they both center around the movement and position of the body. The Thebes group approaches Aeschylus through autonomous actors moving against each other with dynamic forces. They are also taking a disturbing though humorous choral approach to the play, using un-musical screeching as counterpoint to the action. When one of the actresses tells the music director that she cannot perform a difficult musical run without taking a breath, the music director tells her not to worry because everyone else will be making noise. The group in this case functions to maintain the individual. When one of the actors wins the lottery and announces that he will share the windfall with the group, the collectivism of this sentiment is too much to take - one of the other actors runs off with the money, selfishly, thereby maintaining the individual boundaries. Lili, it is revealed, has a sideline of providing fake “papers” to people of nebulous origin - and while the slant of her business was unclear to me, it is possible to read the service she provides as being aligned with the individual against the state - providing free passage and open borders in defiance of the restrictions placed on travel and residency.

In contrast, Thomas’s group is all about the submission of the body to the collective. You can picture his acting workshops by imagining the 60s bohemian version of the “trust-fall” at corporate retreats. The notorious first appearance of this Promethean group consists of a 45 minute scene of the actors rolling in the primordial muck, babbling, biting each other and constructing and destroying a red idol made out of a dress-maker’s dummy. Another rehearsal scene involves a young woman laying absolutely still and expressionless on the stage while the other members of the troupe do things like slam a chair next to her face.

Thomas, himself, though, is inviolate. One of the most interesting scenes of rehearsal involves Thomas as a wounded Prometheus, where the sometimes-used subtitle of the film “Noli Me Tangere” in invoked (though in French “ne [me] touchez pas”) where the actors coming in supplication to Prometheus are barred from touching him. Thomas seems to be allowed to paw anyone he wants to at any time, and indeed, his function as a connector in the film is primarily erotic (he has past or present relationships with 4 of the women in the film, and even convinces two of them to engage in a menage a trois with him). Apparently, in the four hour Spectre version of the film Thomas is even more important, but even in this version I think he is one of the more sharply drawn characters, a hierophantic troll who nonetheless radiates a powerful magnetism on those in his orbit.

The actions of Thomas, as an eventually revealed member of the Thirteen, gives an inkling as to what “The Companions of Duty” are about. I’m not going to delve to deeply into Conspiracy Theory theory here, as I’m bored with that and trust my readers are familiar with the Eco or Pynchon or whom have you’s versions, but the corollary to the (very reductive and almost banal idea) that “everything is connected and nothing is connected” there’s the more practical question of Power and the threat of power. Secret forces can exert power by whisking you away in the night, or maneuvering behind the scenes to prevent your expose from being published or merely the idea that these things could happen cause those not a member of elite to give up power, whether it is power over their bodies and how they can use them or power over what is permissible or not permissible to think or imagine. The struggle against the people making use of these forces is anti-Fascism.

As the one member of the cast who eventually engages in an armed struggle against the forces of evil (though, perhaps she does so as the result of a pun - “Les Compagnon de Devoir
(the Companions of Duty)” for “Les Compagnon de D?vorer” (the Companions of Devouring))- Juliet Berto gives an embryonic version of her immensely entertaining performance in Celine and Julie Go Boating, but that’s exactly what is - an embryonic version of that performance. The physical cues that make up the later character are all but absent here. The failure of her character to play any game properly be it chess or (and incidentally, if I see another movie where a metaphor about playing chess with yourself is thrown up onscreen, I just want it to be a joke about ‘polishing the bishop,’ knowwhatmsayin’?) blackmail or conspiracy is the result of the actress’s failure to create a convincing character - and thus she simply has to die.

Jean-Pierre Leaud fares a little better, as he is responsible for the one transcendent cinematic moment of the film, where he chants verse from Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” while a handheld camera is in his face, walking down a street. His Colin is a marginal figure, refusing to work, instead haunting the cafes running penny-ante scams (more or less annoying people - for cash!).

It has been mooted that the failure of the groups and ideas of Out 1 to cohere are a metaphor for the death of the 60s following May ‘68, but the political content of this film is much less overt than it is in other Rivette’s (and even, for example, in Paris nous appartient and Le Pont du nord, where it is still more alluded to than actually made manifest). All the tuckered-out, jam-loving hippies in the world aren’t enough to make that point, and the French cinema would have to wait a few more years for a film that shares some of the same cast as Out 1, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, for an autopsy of that generation. As you will have to wait for my essay on that film. It’s been in progress for quite some time. Wait for it.

Related and Elsewhere:
Aaron Hillis at The Reeler
Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door
At Critical Culture, links to all 8 episodes of Out 1 (no subtitles, apparently)
Reverse Shot
Screengrab

If anyone else posts a review to a blog, I’d love to read it.

*There will be another screening March 3-4. Tickets are available via the link above. I believe there may be a showing in the offing in LA, as well
**and if I had half a brain, it would have occurred to be PRIOR TO THE FOURTH FUCKING EPISODE to make a flow chart of these relationships. Maybe that will be what March is for. Maybe.

When last we left Paris, in Godard’s Two or Three Things…, she was undergoing a process of destruction and rebirth, assisted by various strange and powerful apparatuses and totems. Over a dozen years later, in Jacques Rivette’s Pont du nord, the process continues - Paris is always the same in her mutability. The same red cranes piercethe sky like crucifixes and the same cement-mixers jiggle their swollen, primary-colored bellies while the same constant din of vibrating engines and falling concrete sets you on the edge of paranoia.

Into this crucible is tossed Marie (Rivette mainstay Bulle Ogier), recently released from prison, where she was incarcerated due to various politically motivated criminal acts. Dressed in an alchemical wardrobe of black and red (like the Juliet Berto moon goddess character in Duelle, Marie attempts to reconnect with an old lover/comrade in arms, who immediately involves her in a nebulous game involving cryptic maps of Paris and a number of “Maxes,” clandestine operatives of the forces of Fascism, or some other conspiracy.

Marie acquires a protector early on, in the form of Baptiste (played by Bulle Ogier’s daughter Pascale) , a street punk with a penchant for motorcyle racing, karate and compulsively defacing advertising posters (by using a knife to gouge out their eyes). Pascale Ogier, like Juliet Berto in Rivette’s Celine and Julie… is impossible to take your eyes off of. Rivette apparently once said that EVERYTHING an actor is doing should be interesting, and the stylized, full-body performances given by his actresses are the fruit of that belief.

Marie and Baptiste wander Paris aimlessly until they acquire a portentous map from the black and red briefcase they are asked to safeguard. The map divides the city up into 63 areas. Immediately they liken the layout to a boardgame, and mark up the squares on the map with the traditional Traps, like the Well, The Inn of the Golden Apples, and the Bridge, which is guarded by a Dragon which Baptiste defeats in a brilliant battle.

Unfortunately, battles that end in such clear-cut victory are usually imaginary, as the climax of the film proves. Hope is provided, however, as the main “Max,” whose allegiances are not so clear cut (he speaks German a bit in the film to Marie), spars with Pascale, teaching her just what the kata forms of Karate are meant for - to visualize past and future battles as if they were happening NOW.

He goes on to explicitly point out that what they are doing is not a dance, but come on - everyone knows that all the best movies end in dancing, and while Pont du nord might not be among the all time cinema classics, the ending is superb. More importantly, it’s a much more hopeful ending that Two or Three Things…, pointing a way out of the system, even if it is invisible and all-around, through a drift and defamiliarization. *

* Does anyone know if Rivette was influenced by the Situationists? Because the occult metaphors mixed with economic critique seem very akin to them.

Paris may not belong to us, but Paris* owns your ass (even when she’s in the midst of a crane-assisted makeover), and it’s this alienation between human beings and the things they create that Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things… explores. The modern city creates unnatural “needs” for its inhabitants because of class structure, the distribution of wealth, urban planning, and the omnipresence of advertising.

Our inverted relationships to our environment and the commodities we produce may be a piece of our death, but they’ve never looked so good as photographed by Raoul Coutard in Two or Three Things…. It’s like Rodchenko photographing a world where Jack Kirby was an instructor at the Bauhaus. Eye-popping color like something out of a Tashlin comedy (another genre where objects sometimes do not behave quite as expected or desired) made me salivate over the prospect of owning this in the sure-to-be-forthcoming deluxe DVD edition, to be played on that widescreen HDTV I’ve been hurting for for so long.

It may sound like I am, but I’m not enjoying my symptoms.

Being something of a feminist, I squirm in my seat when Godard resorts to metaphors of prostitution (embodied always in HOT, foreign born Parisiennes) to illustrate the soul-killing effects of the cycle of work, but the matter-of-fact way in which the encounters take place in this film are drained of titillation and approach black comedy around their irregular margins.

But all the flashy Pop commodities in the world, from spicy dresses to toy machine guns to candy-apple red automobiles can’t point to a way out. The film is littered with posters for air travel to destinations where liberation struggles are going on (you know, I’ll have to watch it again to make sure that that is the case), and maybe that’s the only way out of the struggle. Or you can just sit at a table and stare into a coffee cup.

*or, you know, New York, as the case may be.

Please refer to my exhaustive lab report on Jackass Number Two at The Movie Binge

On the margins/in revisions/where we both first made our livings/in an alcove/full of sawdust/there a new light shone upon us
Although many prominent film critics (and Face Knife favorites) such as David Thomson and Jonathan Rosenbaum count Jacques Rivette among the “masters” of cinema, Rivette’s films, particularly those of the 60s and 70s, are difficult to see, being barely if at all available on video, and that’s not even touching the quasi-mythic Out One: Noli Me Tangere, which was perhaps the most famous film maudit before its recent resurrection. Rosenbaum, in the review linked above, compares Rivette’s ouerve to that of Thomas Pynchon in terms of shared themes and pre-occupations, but while I was watching Paris the author I repeatedly flashed back to was William Gaddis, and his debut novel The Recognitions. In all likelihood it was the bohemian party that launches the protagonist (if one could call her that - she’s more of a dogged stumbler) on the “quest” that passes for the plot that reminded me of a similar, hilarious though sometimes harrowing scene in Gaddis, but I think the resonances go even deeper.

Girish posted today about Manny Farber’s infamous “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” , and although in Negative Space there is no extended treatment of Rivette he is often name-checked and praised in the highest terms as someone who is creating “termite” art. Even more so than the dudes mentioned above, I hold Manny Farber in high esteem not only because I think he’s a rad stylist but also because the dude’s a pretty excellent painter (there was a great Franklin Bruno article about him in The Believer a few years back, before I even started writing about film or even really watching it), like the two main things on my self-actualization wishlist.

It’s sort of odd to think of Rivette or Gaddis as being on the termite side of the line, as both have almost exclusively created work where duration is the key word. Somewhere along the line, duration or length has come to signify “masterpiece art,” where as I would say that Rivette and Gaddis (and I have not near exhausted either’s body of work) are not producers of masterpieces. Each of their works is a chunk of a larger work, or a probe launched at related concerns, and it certainly not a hermeticly sealed universe unto itself.

Termite art is all about the porousness of certain boundaries (to crib from another influence), and although Paris Nous Appartient is nearly claustrophobic (made more so because the bootleg DVD I watched resembled an over-inked screenprint) in its evocation of a system of connections that exists right below our every day lives the narrative is constantly offering other ways to opt out, even though the pull of oppressive order is almost inexorable. The orphans, atheists and nomads who create and populate Termite art may end up fucked-up and doomed, but at least they end up there because they have explicitly rejected the burden of changing art or changing the world. It can make for a frustrating viewing experience and I’d imagine a sore back and not a few worn welcomes, but when the quotidien feels like a trap it’s good to be reminded that there are options if you only know where to look.

But let’s hope there will still be places to look in the future. The final paragraph of Gaddis’s novel, and epitaph of sorts for one of his fictional alter-egos, a composer who perishes in an organ-driven church collapse, could equally apply to Rivette: “…most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoke of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.”

the Museum of the Moving Image will allegedly hold a Rivette retrospective in November, with a screening of Out One: Noli Me Tangere. Anthology Film Archives just concluded a mini-retro, of which I was unlucky enough to catch only one, Noro?t.

The “title” for this entry is a lyric from The Mendoza Line’s “Catch a Collapsing Star”

During the last half of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, I must have fallen asleep at least a dozen times during the three sessions in which I tried to finish watching the movie. Each time, I started from the fracture point again, where the narrative spins out into the jungle and into some essential dream-time. I don’t think that Weerasethakul would be insulted if he heard about the sopoforic effect his film had on me, and I certainly don’t mean it as an insult. In fact, perhaps this could be by design - perhaps one is intended to watch the film while slipping in and out of hypnagogic reveries. Maybe that’s how the shaman/beast devours you… I’m reminded of a book a friend of mine lent me a few years ago, The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin. That book, which is much more interesting than the title may seem to indicate, concerns a malady that either causes you to fall into an eternal, horrific dream-sleep, or maybe it causes you to believe that you have contracted a malady that causes you to fall into an eternal, horrific dream-sleep, or maybe there’s no such thing as the malady. It’s a maddening puzzle of a book, and it’s hard to keep the layers of “reality” in order when you’re reading it, and when I first started reading it, I kept drifting off into disturbed sleep.

I think Tropical Malady may be a film about memory, and what memory means in terms of love but that’s sort of an idee fixe for me so I may well be far off base. The first part of the film, which reminds me a lot of a Jia Zhangke film in the way it’s shot, the youth of the protagonists and the use of pop music and references, concerns the friendship and then romantic relationship between two Thais, one a soldier and the other a young man struggling to find his place. As the soldier is recalled to his unit in the jungle, things change greatly. A tiger, the spirit of a long-dead shaman, is bound to the woods and haunts and perhaps kills intruders. The soldier and the tiger begin a hunt, though it is often unclear who is the hunter and who is the hunted. The soldier receives clarification from a Hanuman-y monkey, who tells him that he must either kill the Tiger and release him from the spirit world, or be devoured by him and join him in that world.

The hunt of the Tiger - the nearly hour long sequence in which I hit the aforementioned sack a dozen or so times - is a tour de force of under used techniques. The soundtrack is entirely bare of music, so that the sounds that do emerge - a shot in the dark, static from a radio, the chirp of the monkey are all that more effective. Much of the hunt takes place at night, with the soldier’s flashlight illuminating jungle vines inches at a time. It’s gorgeous and I don’t think I’ve ever seen “night” done quite like this in a film. The blacks are not the jagged shards of coal from a noir; they’re more like the the blacks of a goya painting, rich and warm and enveloping. It’s a cozy feeling, sort of, until you snap back awake to realize that the face of a tiger now fills the screen, watching you with patient eyes.

I’m hoping Weerasethakul’s other feature, 2002’s Blissfully Yours is released on DVD here soon. There’s also apparently a hybrid documentary called Mysteries Object at Noon, based loosely on an exquisite corpse premise (and you know, all things based on the avant garde excite me), and a film, unscreened in the US so far, called “The Adventure of Iron Pussy,” which Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek describes as “a heartfelt adventure-musical about a transvestite action hero.” Given the way the awards season is shaping up, perhaps some distributer will snap that one up as some Oscar bait. Here’s hoping.

Gus Van Sant’s Last Days is best understood as a period piece. As when watching a film set during the French Revolution, the Great Depression or the Roman Occupation of Jerusalem, it helps for the viewer to have some prior knowledge about the milieu in which the action is taking place. Society in the early 90s had a number of endearing yet annoying quirks. For instance, it was once considered very proper for the very wealthy not to flaunt their largesse in the form of conspicuous consumption. Likewise, the superiority of older technology, like the LP record, was taken for granted. Sharing your feelings with even your most intimate friends was gauche. It was even quite appropriate to eat highly sugared breakfast cereal for every meal. And that’s not even getting into the headgear.

Like most period pieces, Last Days is three things simultaneously: It’s a comedy of manners, a commentary on class relations, and a lens to look at, as the Grey Lady would say, ‘how we live now.’

Michael Pitt (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) plays Blake, or, as he will be known for the remainder of this review, FakeCobain (or FC), a rock star living in remote, decaying house whose peeling paint and general squalor make it the sister-school to Fight Club University. Various hangers-on float through the house and environs, but the master has strangely absented himself, preferring solitude.

The period piece lives and dies by the level of care taken in evoking the past, and from our first glimpse of old-timey grungewear you can almost smell the 90s. The raggedy sweaters, the pajama bottoms, the undershirts, the hospital bracelet that FakeCobain wears look like the spitting image of the clothes Real Cobain wore in various publicity shots, and if you were a teen during the early 90s like me, at least part of your brain is ticking off the Cobains that pass through the movie - ‘Oh, that’s “Sliver” Cobain,’ ‘That was from SPIN’, etc. The cigarette burns in FakeCobain’s t-shirt were obviously applied by a master technician, and someone probably rolled around in real, live dirt to get his clothes so filthy.

This is a problem, and it’s an ironic problem insofarasmuch as it’s directly related to the problem that led Real Cobain to his death. No, I’m not saying that the costumers on the film were all bipolar junkies. It’s the problem of Authenticity and what it means to be authentic. Part of the Cobain Problem is feeling like a phony, and being pulled into a world that wouldn’t know if you were indeed a phony from a world that is arguably more ‘real.’

And the realism of Van Sant’s film comes not from purely cinematic sources like camera placement and moving (which is actually pretty expressionist, or against what passes for realism these days) but from the meticulous recreation of setting. It’s like the still photos of the era, up to and including the infamous Chuck-Taylors-on-the-floor-of-the-greenhouse shot, have come to life. You can tell great care was taken in choosing locations and wardrobe. Too much care. This kind of ostentatious realism, like filming a movie in Aramaic and Latin, is a cheap special effect. It’s a child’s conception of what it means to be authentic and faithful to a source. It’s a poseur’s conception. There’s this conversation in the film between a private detective and a grunge hanger-on about replicas of Stonehenge and London Bridge and it’s so fucking ironic because that’s what this movie is: It’s fake Stonehenge. Maybe Van Sant knows it; I don’t think he does.

The only ‘real’ moments in the film come from the no doubt improvised dialogue of the supporting actors, which injects some humor and surrealism into the low mumble of the film. Harmony Korine talking about how Jerry Garcia is a great Dungeon Master, now THAT’s evoking a time and place. The strength in the film comes in these accidental moments - FakeCobain dropping the sauce packet in the boiling water while making Mac and Cheese, watching Boys II Men on the TV. It’s no coincidence that these moments are also funny. There’s a lot of humor in the Cobain Problem if you know where to look for it.

Unfortunately, despite the Van Sant’s avowed naturalism, he loads up the film, especially at the beginning, with fatuous metaphorical moments - FakeCobain pissing the river, FakeCobain trying to figure out which path to take in the woods, FakeCobain not taking the stairs down the steep incline and tumbling instead, FakeCobain tripping over the exact same spot twice*, cutting between the Mormon’s talking about Jesus and FakeCobain. Etc. And the truly atrocious scene where the spirit of NakedFakeCobain climbs out of real Cobain’s corpse had most of the audience giggling.

There are things to be said for the film - for one, there’s a lot to talk about, and I’ve barely touched on class issues or the difference between interpersonal relationships 90s-style and those of today (see Me and You and Everyone We Know) . The camera work is exceptional and a lot is done with what would be considered “bad” shots - blown-out windows, reflections in glass - to make me admire the DP. There’s a great woodland tracking shot that while not coming close to the one in Week-End made me think about it and sort of put the FakeCobain character in the same dead-end position as these self-cannibalizing outlaw revolutionaries, which is a pretty appropriate metaphor for the failure of 90s alternative culture.

The film could have been a lot worse - and while I think it’s sort of pussy to say that I really wanted to like it and then slag it off, I really did want to like it. I do have one thing to be greatful for in this too sacred handling of one of my own personal sacred cows: At least Cameron Crowe didn’t make it.

*Though, there a few other repeated moments in this film that sort of evoke Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel. Maybe Cobain was caught in a trap of grunge mannerisms and couldn’t get out….I like that idea. Maybe I’ll make that film. Combined with the doorbell that keeps ringing and inviting disruptive guests (mormons, yellow page salesman, kim gordon…)

As a self-appointed critic, it is my duty to drain the fun out of everything and attempt to provide a reason why what you’re enjoying is not simply amusement but a more important and altogether cogent statement about Art and Life.

Then I’m confronted by something like Princess Racoon, which is altogether impossible to exhaust. 82 year old Japanese director Seijan Suzuki has taken a simple fairy tale story of a love that should not be and collaged it with a grab bag of visual and audio source materials, creating a mix of formalisms that would be annoying if it weren’t so exhilarating.

The forbidden love is between a “Tanuki” Princess, a mischievous forest demon who can assume bat, racoon-esque, and human form, and your standard young fairy-tale human prince, who has been banished by his father, master of Castle Grace, for threatening to usurp his place as “the fairest of them all.”

So far, this sounds like it could be the plot for a standard Hollywood CGI special effects blockbuster, but instead of using the latest cinematic technology to create a “realistic” version of what a fantastic world should be like, Suzuki uses what are more less ancient methods derived from theater to create the cinematic space. The horizon is delimited by backdrops that are reminiscent of wood-block prints, or simple composite shots. For instance, Castle Grace is a bare stage set with a large Gate, a crater, a baroque-looking oil painting, a purple sky background, and, lest I forget, human beings as candelabras and other furniture (the Master’s favorite way of torturing those who have disobeyed him - including his parents).

Most of the action itself takes place in similarly minimalist ways - combat consists of ritual exchanges of blows (and Suzuki takes this formalism to the last degree, culminating a duel to the death in a rock, paper, scissors contest, the most arch indication of the method to Suzuki’s madness).

I cannot help but think of Sergei Eisenstein’s thoughts on Kabuki theater in Film Form. Granted, I wouldn’t know Kabuki from Tanuki, and I have no idea if Eisenstein’s thoughts were actually correct, but his description of the conventions of Kabuki in the forms of gestures, costume, background and sound, and how they are all treated equally as units of theater, were instrumental in constructing his program for the Sound Film. In one example Eisenstein gives, long-distance travel is indicated on stage first through a movement toward the front of the stage, then a change in a folding screen backdrop to denote perspective, a clothe obscuring that screen to denote that the starting place had vanished, and finally, samisen music of a certain rhythm.

However, to me, rather than the montage techniques for which Eisenstein was justly famous, this type of formalism has the opposite effect of the time and space distorting effects of montage. Montage is discontinuous - in Princess Racoon, even though the scene may change, it’s still linked to the same (magical) world. Tanuki Palace opens it’s doors to several different parts of the world, all at once. It is a nexus of cinematic continuity - the camera can track out of Tanuki palace and onto the beach, into the forest, up to the forbidden mountain.

Going back to the fight scenes again, these are also examples of a preference for all-overness rather than montage. In the fights (as well as the many dance sequences) , there is a prescribed area that the actors move through - their motions render depth of field visible to the viewer, and seem all that more exciting and ‘real’ for it - even though they’re so formalized. Contrast to the standard “fight scene” of contemporary film - the constant cuts, the close ups of hand and claw in a dizzying spectacle that disorients but doesn’t excite. The editing used in those scenes I would say is completely uncinematic, which is sad because human combat is such a great subject for film, to show off the way the lens captures reality. In the only other Suzuki film I’ve seen, Youth of the Beast, he uses depth photography very effectively, in static compositions as well as action.

This is not to say that Princess Racoon is a dry exercise in experimental cinema. In fact, it’s uproarious, fun, and silly, with a magic bowl of eggnog, a Ninja named Ostrich and many, many songs in many, many styles. It’s not necessary to think about technique and what it might mean when viewing the film, but it gives me a little to talk about.

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Filmbrain, where I was tipped off to the existence of this film, has a great review today, much better than mine at getting across the fun of the film.

Anyone have any ideas for illustrations? I’m sort of at a loss…. Frog of Paradise?

Okay, what’s the deal with the explicit Christianity of the denizens of Castle Grace? Ideas?
I’m going to continue to edit this today, and maybe add a cartoon.

Imagine a polyphonic ringtone, stomping on a human face - forever.

Not to be too alarmist, but - mobile phones, work of the devil, right? In addition to ruining more classic plot devices than any invention besides DNA testing*, this illusion of being constantly plugged into a communications grid - is this wise? I mean, what kind of person wants to be available all the time? Not the kind of person I want calling me, that’s for sure.

Mobile phones might wreck some suspense plots but as a trope they’ve been sorely underutilized in film fiction. Until that high school text-messaging sex comedy starring Hillary Duff that we’ve all been waiting for comes out, we’ve got to settle with Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang Ke’s The World.

The World is a narrative about the deforming effects the availability and control of technology have on the younger generation of Chinese**,told in the setting of an amusement park outside of Beijing that reproduces famous world-wide landmarks at reduced scale. You can see the skyline of New York (still complete with the Twin Towers about the height of two Yao Mings standing on each other’s shoulders),- The Eiffel Tower at 1/3 scale, and a miniature Taj Mahal.

While no Baudrillard has been (or will be) harmed in the making of this essay, I’d like to bring up his closest North American analogue, familiar to you all from his guest spot in Annie Hall, Marshall McLuhan. In McLuhan’s terms, a “media” is an ‘extension of man’ - anything that extends our senses or capabilities. In simplest terms, radio is an extension of our hearing, and automobiles (also a media according to McLuhan) extend our sense of touch/ability to act in the world. Media deform our perception of the world, like a lens. The procession of different media create different ruling narratives for each age. What happens, then, when a media is theoretically available but in practice unavailable to over a billion people? Have these people not had a pretty literal limb amputated?

The characters in The World, led by Tao (the charming Tao Zhao, the provincial pop star of Jia’s Unknown Pleasures) and her boyfriend Taisheng (Taisheng Chen) are constantly consulting their cellphones, riding in tiny cars or staring wistfully at airplanes flying overhead. The cellphone is used as an instrument of paternal control in romantic relationships. One character even considers buying a new Motorola with a GPS chip to keep track of his girlfriend, who keeps switching her phone off. Cellphones are a fifth column in your pocket, constantly betraying your actions either actively (storing your incriminating text messages for someone else to read) or passively (not being on). They’re the informers for the forces arrayed against Freedom.

Forces that also keep strict control over travel. An old friend gets a passport and arranges to travel to Ulan Bator, of all places, and Tao can barely comprehend it. One of the characters is tangentially involved in passport fraud, a crime that surely carries a severe (but unspoken) penalty. Even the Russian guest performers at the amusement park have their passports confiscated by their minder. Russia, now supposedly free, still exerts control over its citizens’ movement, and the only way out is through deceit and prostitution to the wealthy class.

Often, we see Tao riding a slow monorail - always alone or nearly so - a reminder of the other technologies that were supposed to liberate but have ended up merely moving us around in circles. Still, The World is a travel narrative, even if the characters never leave Beijing. There’s a destination you can reach from anywhere…

*and therefore exacerbating the already over-the-top narrative contortions of the contemporary thriller

**though, it seems to me in my non-expert way that ‘Chinese’ is a pretty poor blanket term to describe the different cultural, social and racial types that make up the 1+billion inhabitants of the PRC (not to mention Hong Kong or Taiwan)

The World opens July 1 at Cinema Village in NYC, and throughout the summer in other major cities. Check the Zeitgeist Films website for dates and locations

The Face Knife* believes that the optimal ending sequence for a film should include either an extended dance number, or a death, or both (though I haven’t seen this done). There’s nothing that will leave an audience in a better, more invigorated mood that seeing someone dance their cares away. Exemplary final dance sequences include Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, Russian Ark, and the film I’d like to discuss, Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert.

Inspired by the story of St. Simeon Stylites, a 4th century saint who retreated to the desert to live atop a column in order to avoid sin. Buñuel’s film opens with the droll humor of Simon being awarded a taller, more ornate column by the monks of his order and the surrounding townspeople. Through the power of prayer, he manages to restore the hands of a thief who had them amputated**, who proceeds to use them to smack his kids. The townspeople are really not that impressed with the miracle - it’s sort of anticlimactic. Simon is not that impressed by the townspeople either - he certainly doesn’t love them at all. There’s a midget who proudly displays his goat’s full udders to a slightly disgusted Simon (mirroring the cow-milking scene in Viridiana), and a beautiful woman whom he reflexively calls a “cross-eyed hag.”

Maybe he has a good reason to be afraid of her, besides body-terror, because it’s Silvia Pinel as the Devil, to come and tempt him off his column. She enjoins him with such aphorisms as “What you have lost, consider as totally lost” and “indulge yourself until pleasure sickens you” (as she kicks a lamb). Simon, though tormented, resists all her temptations until the final one, where she brings him on an Jumbo Jet across time and space to a “black mass,” which turns out to be a rock concert. I think
Pope Benedict XVI can explain the connection better than I can:

… Rock music seeks release through liberation from the personality and its responsibility … [it is] among the anarchic ideas of freedom which today [1985] predominate more openly in the West than in the East. But that is precisely why rock music is so completely antithetical to the Christian concept of redemption and freedom, indeed its exact opposite.

Simon watches the dancers raptly, and asks Satan what the name of the dance they’re doing is. She replies that it’s the latest - and last - dance, “Radioactive Flesh.” Simon wishes to leave the club, but he can’t he’s stuck there til the end, and just as in Viridiana, the night is long and you’ve got to find something to do…

It’s a beautiful little film. The features of the monks in the desert remind me of El Greco, all elongated faces and tapered fingers. Run time is less than an hour, because the producer ran out of money. In his autobiography, Buñuel states that many sequences ended up “literally on the cutting room floor”, so perhaps that footage exists and can be used in an eventual criterion style DVD package.

As such, it’s currently not available on DVD, but if you want to check out the 3 minute 31 second version, click here for Canadian power-pop demigods The New Pornographer’s video for their song The Laws Have Changed, which is about the fact that there’s no better place to throw a party than a decaying empire.*** Buñuel was Joycore before his time.

* Don’t really like this convention, but…what else can I do?
**No wonder this is a Face Knife favorite.
***Another song on the same record (Electric Version), Chump Change, written by Destroyer main dude Dan Bejar, fits in more with the Simon of the Desert treatment, featuring lines about how “The saints in the desert use their hands”, the carnal/spiritual opposition of “there is you/and then there is your body” and a wittgensteinian injunction that “the world is that which is the case.”