The Face Knife

Although I object to his utterances on women, Jews, blacks and just about everything else, I do feel a certain amount of empathy for Borat. It’s not because I have an arsenal of annoying, widely imitated catchphrases or that I can grow a mustache* with enough volume to qualify for a job as an assistant janitor, but because, I too, have embarked upon several crash-courses in self-improvement in order to conquer my ignorance, and I too, have made a mess of every single opportunity. Including college. Especially college. The fact that Borat is way funnier than any of my tales of dumbassery is testament to the fact that nothing is so hilarious as ignorance. Except when it’s morally and/or physically terrifying. But even then. Still funny.

I have omitted the sub-title of the film from my heading as it is certain to mess up my fragile style sheets, but (as you probably know) it’s “Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” or something to that affect. My attempts at acquiring ‘learnings’ have never served a patriotic purpose but I’ve been guilty of pidgin in about as many languages as I have fingers on my non-wiping hand. As my unwieldy and largely unread (but still impressive) library can attest, my quest for Knowledge have ranged quixotically across branches of the Tree that I have no business crawling out on, given the limited dexterity of my brain. I should stick to the low-hanging fruit, like television or psychology.

Borat’s mission in the film is a little narrower, as the venue is not political or industrial or scientific or artistic, but social in nature. The “Cultural Learnings” of the titles are really the values of the citizens of the U.S. that enable the country to be the world leader in areas other than the export of Potassium, which is all that Kazakhstan is good for.

Of course, I mean the “Kazakhstan” of the film, which famously is a debased, medieval culture nothing like that country in reality. The main joke of the film is that the U.S. turns out to have just as disgusting values when you throw a mirror up to it. But let me return circle back to that point later, as in order to get to a discussion of values it is necessary to relate how they are transmitted, and the demonically clever way Borat parodies the learning process.

Despite the best efforts of trainers in formal seminars on such subjects as What is Funny, What is Feminism, What are Good Social Manners, and How to Talk Like a Black Person, Borat misses the point on every occasion, managing in nearly every case to spectacularly offend the person trying to educate him. “Missing the point” means that Borat has been unable to grasp the intention behind an utterance, even if he thinks he has a grasp of the form.

The best and funniest example of this is when Borat is talking with former Republican presidential case and noted nutbag (also a “real chocolate face”) Alan Keyes. Borat was describes the previous scene, which was the very fun time he had with some guys he met at a festive parade, whom he took back to his hotel for a scene that very prominently featured a rubber fist. Keyes tells Borat that his new friends were homosexuals, and Borat becomes first confused then enraged, even though there had been a prominent scene of intramural basket-cupping and implied more strenuous activity. That sequence is like The History of Sexuality combusting before our eyes. Borat’s actions are completely divorced of the codes he has available to describe them, and thus his values are totally dissonant and ridiculous.

The only time he gets the actions-codes-values equation right is when, towards the end of the film, as a penniless tramp, he “stumbles” on a Christian Revival meeting and manages to Speak in Tongues properly, reducing the babble of the film to its ultimate zero point, where empty values meet empty form meet empty intentions in the body of a diabolic imposter.

I can’t deny that it’s fun to watch the codes of ignorance and hypocrisy detonate like TNT in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, but playing with loaded signifiers (e.g. the aforementioned “chocolate face” and numerous other less ludicrous locutions) in order to entertain a mass audience is a questionable choice, particularly because a huge part of the audience is the people you’re parodying in the first place. Maybe this questioning of values will fuck people’s Reality Tunnels so that they’re loose like a wizard’s sleeve, but is the fun he makes of people - real people with real lives - justified morally or ethically?

In a recent interview, Adam McKay, who directed Borat in this summer’s Talladega Nights, mentions that a favorite movie among this coterie of comics is Luis Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty. The Phantom of Liberty is not one of my favorite Bunuels, precisely because I think the premise is childish compared to other Bunuel films, and that premise is pretty much the same thing as Borat’s - values and the rituals we use to sustain them are arbitrary and oh hey here’s some short-circuited vignettes like people pooping around a table. The main difference is that Bunuel, in my opinion, was at his core a humanist, in that he loves humanity in all its flawed glory, whereas Borat, despite the “happy” ending with the prostitute (who is a figure of fun, not of any real respect) does not. There is no sense in Borat that humanity has any capacity for anything greater than what it is, or that it should even bother trying, and even the crappy Talladega Nights, which tackles the same crass culture as Borat, has that. Borat’s inability to learn and Borat’s suggestion that ignorance make it impossible to take any larger political points about the U.S. as seriously as they could be taken.

*Without a doubt, “Best Facial Hair” is going to be the most competitive category at this year’s Knifies Biennial .

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.