Author: sshaviro

Last Life in the Universe

Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe was the last film I managed to see at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival. And I’m really glad I caught it: it was one of those rare films that, like the early works of Godard, or certain works by Wong Kar-Wai, made me excited about the potentialities of cinema. Or, to put the point a bit less pompously: not only was it a good film, but it renewed my sense of film in general, by making me feel that all sorts of things are possible, that the form has not exhausted itself, that cinema still needs to be invented, and still can be.
(There’s a link to Wong Kar Wai, in that his frequent cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, also did the camerawork for this film. But Ratanaruang’s sensibility is very different from Wong’s).
The plot, in itself, isn’t particularly original or surprising: a nerd meets a voluptuous woman who renews him sexually, and expands his enjoyment of life. But this familiar set-up is barely more than a pretext.
For one thing, the characters are weirdly quirky. The nerd, Kenji (Tadanobu Asano) is a Japanese man living in Bangkok and working as a librarian for the Japan Society. He is obsessively neat and tidy, and he is always trying to commit suicide, but never succeeding, because the doorbell rings or the phone rings or people come by and stop him. The woman, Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak) is Thai, works as a “hostess” (i.e a prostitute) and is the opposite of neat: her house is a virtual pigsty, with unwashed dishes, stuff all over the floor, etc. They are brought together when siblings of both are killed: Kenji’s brother by the yakuza, and Noi’s sister in a car accident after they have quarreled.
For another thing, Ratanaruang is more concerned with cinematic action and grace than with naturalistic plausibility in terms of plot. He moves effortlessly between comedy and melodrama, dwelling on instants when nothing dramatic is happening beyond the revelation of the characters, and moving the plot through absurdist twists and turns.
But what makes Last Life in the Universe great goes beyond the quirkiness of the characters and the plot twists; it has to do with the style of the film. Nearly every set-up is surprising and unexpected, in terms of camera placement, framing, or colors. The result is a strange kind of distancing: not any sort of alienation-effect, but an effort to take us outside the characters, so that we can view them, and their world, from an angle we’ve never experienced before. (Can an “angle” be “experienced”? I may be writing clumsily here, but the film actually convinced me that such a thing is possible). Rather than “identifying” with the characters, we are led to feel affectionately about them from a distance, as if we were friendly visitors from another planet (or as if, I am tempted to say, we were cinema spectators).
Also, continuity is frequently violated, because Ratanaruang is more concerned with emotional expression than with literal narrative coherence. When Noi falls asleep with her head in Kenji’s lap, for instance, the clothes she is wearing change from one shot to the next; including one series of shots where she is wearing the clothes her sister had on when she died (a death that Kenji witnessed; and it was this now-dead sister upon whom Kenji had first had a crush).
Other times, the film just takes off into the stratosphere. When Kenji, with his obsessive neatness and cleanliness fetish, insists on cleaning up Noi’s house, all of a sudden there’s a scene where we don’t actually see him cleaning; instead, we see the books and papers and other objects scattered all over the floor magically flying back, en masse, to their places in the cabinets and shelves. Noi first looks startled and uneasy that this is happening; but then she starts dancing, gracefully, in the midst of the flurry. Books and papers flit and twirl around her, as if in a gentle whirlpool. The camera observes, coolly, from a middle distance.
It’s unclear whether Noi and Kenji ever actually get it on; it’s implied that they do, once, but the camera does not show it. And the end of the film makes it undecidable how much of what we have seen has actually happened, and how much is fantasy (Kenji’s probably, but perhaps Noi’s as well).
Last Life in the Universe doesn’t exhibit either the exhilaration of early Godard, nor the melancholy romanticism of Wong; but it has an affect of its own that is as moving and impressive as either of these. It’s a kind of pleasurable coolness and lightness, sometimes flickering with quicksilver rapidity, other times mellowly dwelling on minute details (more for the sheer enjoyment of them than for any further significance they might have). Call it a sort of playful aestheticism, detached enough not to be momentous or anything, but adhesive enough to make you feel glad you are alive.

Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe was the last film I managed to see at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival. And I’m really glad I caught it: it was one of those rare films that, like the early works of Godard, or certain works by Wong Kar-Wai, made me excited about the potentialities of cinema. Or, to put the point a bit less pompously: not only was it a good film, but it renewed my sense of film in general, by making me feel that all sorts of things are possible, that the form has not exhausted itself, that cinema still needs to be invented, and still can be.
(There’s a link to Wong Kar Wai, in that his frequent cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, also did the camerawork for this film. But Ratanaruang’s sensibility is very different from Wong’s).
The plot, in itself, isn’t particularly original or surprising: a nerd meets a voluptuous woman who renews him sexually, and expands his enjoyment of life. But this familiar set-up is barely more than a pretext.
For one thing, the characters are weirdly quirky. The nerd, Kenji (Tadanobu Asano) is a Japanese man living in Bangkok and working as a librarian for the Japan Society. He is obsessively neat and tidy, and he is always trying to commit suicide, but never succeeding, because the doorbell rings or the phone rings or people come by and stop him. The woman, Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak) is Thai, works as a “hostess” (i.e a prostitute) and is the opposite of neat: her house is a virtual pigsty, with unwashed dishes, stuff all over the floor, etc. They are brought together when siblings of both are killed: Kenji’s brother by the yakuza, and Noi’s sister in a car accident after they have quarreled.
For another thing, Ratanaruang is more concerned with cinematic action and grace than with naturalistic plausibility in terms of plot. He moves effortlessly between comedy and melodrama, dwelling on instants when nothing dramatic is happening beyond the revelation of the characters, and moving the plot through absurdist twists and turns.
But what makes Last Life in the Universe great goes beyond the quirkiness of the characters and the plot twists; it has to do with the style of the film. Nearly every set-up is surprising and unexpected, in terms of camera placement, framing, or colors. The result is a strange kind of distancing: not any sort of alienation-effect, but an effort to take us outside the characters, so that we can view them, and their world, from an angle we’ve never experienced before. (Can an “angle” be “experienced”? I may be writing clumsily here, but the film actually convinced me that such a thing is possible). Rather than “identifying” with the characters, we are led to feel affectionately about them from a distance, as if we were friendly visitors from another planet (or as if, I am tempted to say, we were cinema spectators).
Also, continuity is frequently violated, because Ratanaruang is more concerned with emotional expression than with literal narrative coherence. When Noi falls asleep with her head in Kenji’s lap, for instance, the clothes she is wearing change from one shot to the next; including one series of shots where she is wearing the clothes her sister had on when she died (a death that Kenji witnessed; and it was this now-dead sister upon whom Kenji had first had a crush).
Other times, the film just takes off into the stratosphere. When Kenji, with his obsessive neatness and cleanliness fetish, insists on cleaning up Noi’s house, all of a sudden there’s a scene where we don’t actually see him cleaning; instead, we see the books and papers and other objects scattered all over the floor magically flying back, en masse, to their places in the cabinets and shelves. Noi first looks startled and uneasy that this is happening; but then she starts dancing, gracefully, in the midst of the flurry. Books and papers flit and twirl around her, as if in a gentle whirlpool. The camera observes, coolly, from a middle distance.
It’s unclear whether Noi and Kenji ever actually get it on; it’s implied that they do, once, but the camera does not show it. And the end of the film makes it undecidable how much of what we have seen has actually happened, and how much is fantasy (Kenji’s probably, but perhaps Noi’s as well).
Last Life in the Universe doesn’t exhibit either the exhilaration of early Godard, nor the melancholy romanticism of Wong; but it has an affect of its own that is as moving and impressive as either of these. It’s a kind of pleasurable coolness and lightness, sometimes flickering with quicksilver rapidity, other times mellowly dwelling on minute details (more for the sheer enjoyment of them than for any further significance they might have). Call it a sort of playful aestheticism, detached enough not to be momentous or anything, but adhesive enough to make you feel glad you are alive.

Goodbye Dragon Inn

Goodbye Dragon Inn is Tsai Ming-liang’s most minimalist film. All of Tsai’s films chart heartrending emotional disconnections with beautiful, motionless or slow-moving long takes. But Goodbye Dragon Inn pushes this to something of an extreme, as if Tsai were trying to see how much could be said, and felt, out of how little.
The movie chronicles the last screening in a decrepit, soon-to-be-torn-down old-style (big) movie theater. The film being shown is Dragon Inn, a classic King Hu martial arts film from the 1960s.
It’s raining hard outside, and part of the theater is flooded: a motif that is repeated in most of Tsai’s films.
There are very few patrons, and most of them aren’t paying attention to the film. Men cruise one another, moving from seat to seat, or pissing in adjacent stalls in the bathroom, or passing one another in narrow corridors somewhere in the theater’s innards. But nobody ever connects, nobody picks anybody else up; there just doesn’t seem to be any sexual spark.
Other patrons lounge in the seats, feet up on the seats in front of them, loudly chewing nuts or other snacks.
The ticket-taker, who who has a club foot, cooks her dinner in an electric pot, walks through the theater, picks up trash, cleans up the bathrooms, and goes to visit the projectionist, who is absent from his booth. (We presume that she likes him, but that the feeling isn’t reciprocated).
There are no more than six or ten lines of dialogue in the entire 81 minutes of the film (aside from the dialogue and narration of Dragon Inn itself, which we hear in snatches). In the absence of talk, there’s an extraordinary concentration upon duration, and upon bodies.
Duration: Goodbye Dragon Inn makes us feel the passage of time, the density and weight of its moments, one added to another, while nothing happens, or what happens happens with extreme slowness. There’s one shot where the ticket-taker comes to the projection booth, and sits there waiting for him to return (which does not happen). She is motionless, and the shot is also motionless. Lots of cigarettes are heaped in an ashtray, and another cigarette, on the edge of the table, is still burning, the only sign of life. So we know that the projectionist is around somewhere, even though we don’t see him. Finally the ticket-taker gets up and leaves, and finally there’s a cut to the next shot.
There’s also the moment when Dragon Inn ends; the lights in the theater go up, and the few remaining patrons leave, except for (what looks like) one old man who remains in his seat. (I say “looks like” because it’s an extreme long shot, showing the whole theater from the stage, and it’s hard really to tell). The camera holds on this scene of near-emptiness, the movie theater emptied of cinema, for what seems like a long time, until Tsai finally cuts to some final shots of the ticket-taker and the projectionist separately cleaning up and going home.
These shots are fascinating — and not in the least boring — they are filled with a kind of tension, precisely because there is so little to see. Drained of activity and of change, the shots solicit our gaze. Instead of looking at action sequences, such as those that fill Dragon Inn, we find ourselves looking at something that is normally invisible, normally hidden by the very facts of action and movement: the passage of time itself.
But what’s truly mesmerizing and intense about Goodbye Dragon Inn is the bodies present in the theater. The men pass each other in an arrested dance, scarcely exchanging a word, making gestures that are withdrawn as soon as they have been sketched out. The club-footed ticket-taker painfully limps her way down corridors and up and down stairs; even when we cannot see her, we hear the clip-clop of her slow passage. These people scarcely seem to have any more life within them than do the celluloid figures in the film they are not watching; their only substantiality comes from the way Tsai’s camera dwells on them, projects them in turn to us. (Indeed, two old men, who seem to be the only audience members actually watching the movie, are the very actors who starred in Dragon Inn some forty-odd years previously). Tsai points up both the ghostliness of cinema, and the way that cinema nonetheless substantializes, and physicalizes, what it projects as two-dimensional shadows.
Goodbye Dragon Inn is not without humor (which comes from the incongruity of its characters’ non-connections), but mostly it expresses a discreet and poetic melancholy. Film is commonly said to preserve what otherwise dies and vanishes; but film in the classic sense is itself now in decline, as it is increasingly displaced by the new multimedia, as well as by new forms of consumption (multiplexes of small theaters instead of the old movie palaces, not to mention videos and DVDs viewed at home). Tsai seeks to memorialize this decline itself, as if what film most beautifully preserved were its own slow process of decay.

Goodbye Dragon Inn is Tsai Ming-liang’s most minimalist film. All of Tsai’s films chart heartrending emotional disconnections with beautiful, motionless or slow-moving long takes. But Goodbye Dragon Inn pushes this to something of an extreme, as if Tsai were trying to see how much could be said, and felt, out of how little.
The movie chronicles the last screening in a decrepit, soon-to-be-torn-down old-style (big) movie theater. The film being shown is Dragon Inn, a classic King Hu martial arts film from the 1960s.
It’s raining hard outside, and part of the theater is flooded: a motif that is repeated in most of Tsai’s films.
There are very few patrons, and most of them aren’t paying attention to the film. Men cruise one another, moving from seat to seat, or pissing in adjacent stalls in the bathroom, or passing one another in narrow corridors somewhere in the theater’s innards. But nobody ever connects, nobody picks anybody else up; there just doesn’t seem to be any sexual spark.
Other patrons lounge in the seats, feet up on the seats in front of them, loudly chewing nuts or other snacks.
The ticket-taker, who who has a club foot, cooks her dinner in an electric pot, walks through the theater, picks up trash, cleans up the bathrooms, and goes to visit the projectionist, who is absent from his booth. (We presume that she likes him, but that the feeling isn’t reciprocated).
There are no more than six or ten lines of dialogue in the entire 81 minutes of the film (aside from the dialogue and narration of Dragon Inn itself, which we hear in snatches). In the absence of talk, there’s an extraordinary concentration upon duration, and upon bodies.
Duration: Goodbye Dragon Inn makes us feel the passage of time, the density and weight of its moments, one added to another, while nothing happens, or what happens happens with extreme slowness. There’s one shot where the ticket-taker comes to the projection booth, and sits there waiting for him to return (which does not happen). She is motionless, and the shot is also motionless. Lots of cigarettes are heaped in an ashtray, and another cigarette, on the edge of the table, is still burning, the only sign of life. So we know that the projectionist is around somewhere, even though we don’t see him. Finally the ticket-taker gets up and leaves, and finally there’s a cut to the next shot.
There’s also the moment when Dragon Inn ends; the lights in the theater go up, and the few remaining patrons leave, except for (what looks like) one old man who remains in his seat. (I say “looks like” because it’s an extreme long shot, showing the whole theater from the stage, and it’s hard really to tell). The camera holds on this scene of near-emptiness, the movie theater emptied of cinema, for what seems like a long time, until Tsai finally cuts to some final shots of the ticket-taker and the projectionist separately cleaning up and going home.
These shots are fascinating — and not in the least boring — they are filled with a kind of tension, precisely because there is so little to see. Drained of activity and of change, the shots solicit our gaze. Instead of looking at action sequences, such as those that fill Dragon Inn, we find ourselves looking at something that is normally invisible, normally hidden by the very facts of action and movement: the passage of time itself.
But what’s truly mesmerizing and intense about Goodbye Dragon Inn is the bodies present in the theater. The men pass each other in an arrested dance, scarcely exchanging a word, making gestures that are withdrawn as soon as they have been sketched out. The club-footed ticket-taker painfully limps her way down corridors and up and down stairs; even when we cannot see her, we hear the clip-clop of her slow passage. These people scarcely seem to have any more life within them than do the celluloid figures in the film they are not watching; their only substantiality comes from the way Tsai’s camera dwells on them, projects them in turn to us. (Indeed, two old men, who seem to be the only audience members actually watching the movie, are the very actors who starred in Dragon Inn some forty-odd years previously). Tsai points up both the ghostliness of cinema, and the way that cinema nonetheless substantializes, and physicalizes, what it projects as two-dimensional shadows.
Goodbye Dragon Inn is not without humor (which comes from the incongruity of its characters’ non-connections), but mostly it expresses a discreet and poetic melancholy. Film is commonly said to preserve what otherwise dies and vanishes; but film in the classic sense is itself now in decline, as it is increasingly displaced by the new multimedia, as well as by new forms of consumption (multiplexes of small theaters instead of the old movie palaces, not to mention videos and DVDs viewed at home). Tsai seeks to memorialize this decline itself, as if what film most beautifully preserved were its own slow process of decay.

Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004

No American political figure of the entire twentieth century had a more baleful effect upon America itself than Ronald Reagan. (Though there are others who can contend with him for the dubious honor of having created the most misery for the world in general). Something like 90% of the American people are far worse off economically than they would have been had Reagan not been elected, and economic policy followed some other, less right-wing-extremist course. But worse than that, perhaps, is the fact that Reagan created an ugly social and cultural climate in America, one that is still with us today: a climate of cynicism, greed, selfishness, bigotry, frat-boy self-congratulatory boorishness, and blame-the-victim disdain for “losers” and the weak, all buttressed by a willfully ignorant, proudly vapid, feel-good-at-all-costs Pollyanna-ism. Hearing all the nauseating encomia for Reagan that are filling the airwaves tonight, it is important to remember that Ronald Reagan, more than any other human being, was the face of evil of the late twentieth century. I only hope that I live long enough to see his foul legacy effaced, as all legacies must be sooner or later.

No American political figure of the entire twentieth century had a more baleful effect upon America itself than Ronald Reagan. (Though there are others who can contend with him for the dubious honor of having created the most misery for the world in general). Something like 90% of the American people are far worse off economically than they would have been had Reagan not been elected, and economic policy followed some other, less right-wing-extremist course. But worse than that, perhaps, is the fact that Reagan created an ugly social and cultural climate in America, one that is still with us today: a climate of cynicism, greed, selfishness, bigotry, frat-boy self-congratulatory boorishness, and blame-the-victim disdain for “losers” and the weak, all buttressed by a willfully ignorant, proudly vapid, feel-good-at-all-costs Pollyanna-ism. Hearing all the nauseating encomia for Reagan that are filling the airwaves tonight, it is important to remember that Ronald Reagan, more than any other human being, was the face of evil of the late twentieth century. I only hope that I live long enough to see his foul legacy effaced, as all legacies must be sooner or later.

The Forest

The Forest (literal translation of French title: The Silence of the Forest), directed by Didier Ouenangare and Bassek ba Kobhio, is supposedly the first-ever feature film from the Central African Republic. (Bassek ba Kobhio is Camerounian, and made several films there, including an excellent deconstruction of the myth of Albert Schweitzer, Le grand blanc de Lambarene). It’s a powerful, but strangely divided movie.
The first half of The Forest works as political satire. Gonaba, the protagonist (played by Eric Ebouaney) has idealistically returned to the CAR after getting an excellent French education, because he wants to help improve his country. But what he has found instead is corruption, stagnation, empty concern with pomp and ceremony, and all the other political ailments of so much of contemporary Africa. He’s concerned with injustice — opposing the racist contempt in which the majority of the CAR regard the Biaka people (the so-called “Pigmies”) — but also pompous, condescending, and colonialist-minded (his girlfriend tells him she likes him because he has “the body of a black man and the mind of a white man”).
All this changes in the second half of the film, when Gonaba flees into the jungle and joins a Biaka community. He arrives thinking he will teach them to read and write French, thus raising them up to equality with the rest of the country. But instead of teaching them, he learns from them: he “goes native,” joining their group, being initiated into their ways, and marrying (and having a child with) a Biaka woman. In this portion of the film, the satirical knowingness of the first part totally dissolves. Instead we get a Rousseauian vision of “noble savages.” All the Biaka roles are played by Biaka people who are not professional actors, and much of this section of the film displays, in almost an “ethnographic film” manner, their customs and rituals.
Eventually, Gonaba is forced to leave and return to “civilization”: but we are meant to feel that he learned a more honest and authentic way of life from the Biaka.
The trouble with this is, of course, that the idealized vision of “noble savages” is itself a European racist and colonialist point of view: it’s just the flip side of the dismissal of “savages” as primitive, ignorant, and not-quite-human. The “noble savage” view, just as much as the flat-out racist view, effaces the social and individual reality of the people thus characterized. And usually, as in this film, it uses the vision of “noble primitives” merely as an enabler for the “civilized” person’s self-discovery.
So it’s strange, and more than a little distressing, to see an African film that, after critiquing the Euro-colonialist mindset, ends up adopting that mindset itself. I wish I could convince myself that the filmmakers were self-conscious about this irony; but I can find no evidence that this is the case.

The Forest (literal translation of French title: The Silence of the Forest), directed by Didier Ouenangare and Bassek ba Kobhio, is supposedly the first-ever feature film from the Central African Republic. (Bassek ba Kobhio is Camerounian, and made several films there, including an excellent deconstruction of the myth of Albert Schweitzer, Le grand blanc de Lambarene). It’s a powerful, but strangely divided movie.
The first half of The Forest works as political satire. Gonaba, the protagonist (played by Eric Ebouaney) has idealistically returned to the CAR after getting an excellent French education, because he wants to help improve his country. But what he has found instead is corruption, stagnation, empty concern with pomp and ceremony, and all the other political ailments of so much of contemporary Africa. He’s concerned with injustice — opposing the racist contempt in which the majority of the CAR regard the Biaka people (the so-called “Pigmies”) — but also pompous, condescending, and colonialist-minded (his girlfriend tells him she likes him because he has “the body of a black man and the mind of a white man”).
All this changes in the second half of the film, when Gonaba flees into the jungle and joins a Biaka community. He arrives thinking he will teach them to read and write French, thus raising them up to equality with the rest of the country. But instead of teaching them, he learns from them: he “goes native,” joining their group, being initiated into their ways, and marrying (and having a child with) a Biaka woman. In this portion of the film, the satirical knowingness of the first part totally dissolves. Instead we get a Rousseauian vision of “noble savages.” All the Biaka roles are played by Biaka people who are not professional actors, and much of this section of the film displays, in almost an “ethnographic film” manner, their customs and rituals.
Eventually, Gonaba is forced to leave and return to “civilization”: but we are meant to feel that he learned a more honest and authentic way of life from the Biaka.
The trouble with this is, of course, that the idealized vision of “noble savages” is itself a European racist and colonialist point of view: it’s just the flip side of the dismissal of “savages” as primitive, ignorant, and not-quite-human. The “noble savage” view, just as much as the flat-out racist view, effaces the social and individual reality of the people thus characterized. And usually, as in this film, it uses the vision of “noble primitives” merely as an enabler for the “civilized” person’s self-discovery.
So it’s strange, and more than a little distressing, to see an African film that, after critiquing the Euro-colonialist mindset, ends up adopting that mindset itself. I wish I could convince myself that the filmmakers were self-conscious about this irony; but I can find no evidence that this is the case.

The Last Train

The Last Train, by Alexei German Jr. (the son of the Alexi German who directed the utterly brilliant and nearly incomprehensible Khroustaliev, My Car), is a sublime film. It takes place during World War II, among German soldiers on the Russian front. The protagonist, a German doctor, arrives at the front in the bitterness of winter, as a blizzard is starting up, and just as the German troops are withdrawing. He is a man without family or friends, and a personality that is massively uningratiating; he is essentially alone. As the German withdrawal proceeds, he’s simply forgotten about and left behind. The film has almost no plot, aside from that. It’s shot gorgeously, in black and white Cinemascope: sometimes in deep focus, sometimes not, and sometimes with wide-angle or telephoto lenses. Most of the film takes place in the snow, with different shades of white predominating; sometimes snowfall or fog nearly blanks out the picture. Sometimes shots ring out, and people fall down dead. Other times the doctor and other characters engage in grotesque, absurdist dialogues or monologues. In any case, people move slowly in the snow and in the cold. The soundtrack is dominated by nearly ubiquitous coughing: it would seem that all the characters have colds, or incipient pneumonia, or worse (if there is such a thing as worse). Everyone is doomed. There is no redemption or salvation at the end. Sitting in the theater, chilled by what I saw and heard, I entirely forgot that outside it was sunny and 80 degrees.

The Last Train, by Alexei German Jr. (the son of the Alexi German who directed the utterly brilliant and nearly incomprehensible Khroustaliev, My Car), is a sublime film. It takes place during World War II, among German soldiers on the Russian front. The protagonist, a German doctor, arrives at the front in the bitterness of winter, as a blizzard is starting up, and just as the German troops are withdrawing. He is a man without family or friends, and a personality that is massively uningratiating; he is essentially alone. As the German withdrawal proceeds, he’s simply forgotten about and left behind. The film has almost no plot, aside from that. It’s shot gorgeously, in black and white Cinemascope: sometimes in deep focus, sometimes not, and sometimes with wide-angle or telephoto lenses. Most of the film takes place in the snow, with different shades of white predominating; sometimes snowfall or fog nearly blanks out the picture. Sometimes shots ring out, and people fall down dead. Other times the doctor and other characters engage in grotesque, absurdist dialogues or monologues. In any case, people move slowly in the snow and in the cold. The soundtrack is dominated by nearly ubiquitous coughing: it would seem that all the characters have colds, or incipient pneumonia, or worse (if there is such a thing as worse). Everyone is doomed. There is no redemption or salvation at the end. Sitting in the theater, chilled by what I saw and heard, I entirely forgot that outside it was sunny and 80 degrees.

Running on Karma

Running on Karma is the latest Johnny To film I’ve seen, thanks to SIFF. Like the other To films I’ve seen, it twists genre in intriguing and unexpected ways.
Here’s the premise. A female cop (Cecilia Cheung) encounters a muscleman with supernatural powers (Andy Lau, prosthetically enhanced with a Mr Universe-esque torso) who helps her catch brutal serial killers. A relationship develops between them…
Only what I just wrote doesn’t really tell you anything about the film. It takes too many unexpected turns. What starts out as a martial-arts action film turns into something else entirely.
Before I go on, I’d like to praise the film’s visuals. Instead of the gunplay in the other To films I’ve seen, here we have cartoonish special effects for the action sequences. Everything is bigger than life, and lively in ways that recent American superhero films (Spiderman or the Batman franchise, for instance — I haven’t seen Hellboy — are utterly unable to match). But To doesn’t dwell on the special effects, or make them the spectacular center of the film — they are just there, alongside the usual naturalistic views of Hong Kong streets and Buddhist monasteries, and (towards the end of the film) the mountains of Shanxi. As in other To films, there’s an obliqueness of presentation, a fragmenting of the visual field, and a temporal scrambling due to a fluid use of flashbacks. I’m tempted to say that, while this is an extravagant film, the extravagance is understated. And this is a large part of the affective pull of the film, the way it sublimates both melodrama/tragedy and behaviorist comedy into its cool but unironic mood.
Lau’s character is a former martial arts monk, who left the monastery after facing personal trauma. Now he mostly performs in male strip clubs and at bodybuilding competitions (when he isn’t dodging the Hong Kong police, who keep on deporting him back to the mainland as an illegal immigrant). But besides his skills of strength, he has a gift which is also a curse: he is able to see other people’s karma. When he looks at them he sees images of their past lives, which appear as transparent flickers on the movie screen. He knows when they are going to suffer or die as payback for past sins. The initial reason he helps Cheung’s cop is because she is so obviously a good person, yet she is threatened with imminent death because in a past life she was a murderous (male) Japanese soldier.
The romantic relationship between these characters is never fully expressed. She adores him, but he refuses all her advances. He feels for her, too, but he’s unwilling to let the feeling out. So they never do more in the course of the film than hold hands for a minute. This unfulfilled desire creates a tension: not a swooning, over-the-top melodramatic one, but more like a muted vibration, an unease that is distantly felt, or a distance that itself turns into the film’s subject.
The major serial killer is caught halfway through the film. After that, the linear plot more or less dissolves. Instead we have just the characters’ relationship, something which cannot “develop” dramatically. A deadlock, which the film expresses and expands by forgoing action for long stretches, in favor of inconclusive meetings between the protagonists.
Cheung’s cop ultimately sacrifices herself for Lau’s redemption — after he has been saving her for most of the film. Her death is disturbing, and is repeated several times in the course of the film’s final sequence: but always obliquely, through distance and odd angles, through grainy video footage, as well as through flashbacks that explain what led up to it. To at one point uses what might be called the inverse of a shock cut, as he cuts from a brief image of her impaled head to the pastoral images of one of these flashbacks.
The result is that the cartoony action flick has metamorphosed into a poetic meditation on life, death, and karma. I don’t know enough about Buddhism or Chinese culture to know if the sentiments expressed are anything more than cliche — Yomi says they are total crap — but the concluding sequences worked affectively for me. Whatever sense of peace Lau’s character comes to, this sense remains haunted by Cheung’s absence. Is this just the old story of the woman being sacrificed in order to redeem the man? If so, then it’s one in which the cost of that sacrifice is insistently dwelt upon, instead of being relegated to the background. The entire film is haunted by a sense of missed encounters, as well as by the determination not to accept what nevertheless cannot be averted. So the film is anti-fatalistic in mood (it expresses a determination) at the same time that it depicts a fate which will have its way regardless. How strange and beautiful for this sort of paralysis, this deadlock of will and understanding, to become the overriding mood of an action film.

Running on Karma is the latest Johnny To film I’ve seen, thanks to SIFF. Like the other To films I’ve seen, it twists genre in intriguing and unexpected ways.
Here’s the premise. A female cop (Cecilia Cheung) encounters a muscleman with supernatural powers (Andy Lau, prosthetically enhanced with a Mr Universe-esque torso) who helps her catch brutal serial killers. A relationship develops between them…
Only what I just wrote doesn’t really tell you anything about the film. It takes too many unexpected turns. What starts out as a martial-arts action film turns into something else entirely.
Before I go on, I’d like to praise the film’s visuals. Instead of the gunplay in the other To films I’ve seen, here we have cartoonish special effects for the action sequences. Everything is bigger than life, and lively in ways that recent American superhero films (Spiderman or the Batman franchise, for instance — I haven’t seen Hellboy — are utterly unable to match). But To doesn’t dwell on the special effects, or make them the spectacular center of the film — they are just there, alongside the usual naturalistic views of Hong Kong streets and Buddhist monasteries, and (towards the end of the film) the mountains of Shanxi. As in other To films, there’s an obliqueness of presentation, a fragmenting of the visual field, and a temporal scrambling due to a fluid use of flashbacks. I’m tempted to say that, while this is an extravagant film, the extravagance is understated. And this is a large part of the affective pull of the film, the way it sublimates both melodrama/tragedy and behaviorist comedy into its cool but unironic mood.
Lau’s character is a former martial arts monk, who left the monastery after facing personal trauma. Now he mostly performs in male strip clubs and at bodybuilding competitions (when he isn’t dodging the Hong Kong police, who keep on deporting him back to the mainland as an illegal immigrant). But besides his skills of strength, he has a gift which is also a curse: he is able to see other people’s karma. When he looks at them he sees images of their past lives, which appear as transparent flickers on the movie screen. He knows when they are going to suffer or die as payback for past sins. The initial reason he helps Cheung’s cop is because she is so obviously a good person, yet she is threatened with imminent death because in a past life she was a murderous (male) Japanese soldier.
The romantic relationship between these characters is never fully expressed. She adores him, but he refuses all her advances. He feels for her, too, but he’s unwilling to let the feeling out. So they never do more in the course of the film than hold hands for a minute. This unfulfilled desire creates a tension: not a swooning, over-the-top melodramatic one, but more like a muted vibration, an unease that is distantly felt, or a distance that itself turns into the film’s subject.
The major serial killer is caught halfway through the film. After that, the linear plot more or less dissolves. Instead we have just the characters’ relationship, something which cannot “develop” dramatically. A deadlock, which the film expresses and expands by forgoing action for long stretches, in favor of inconclusive meetings between the protagonists.
Cheung’s cop ultimately sacrifices herself for Lau’s redemption — after he has been saving her for most of the film. Her death is disturbing, and is repeated several times in the course of the film’s final sequence: but always obliquely, through distance and odd angles, through grainy video footage, as well as through flashbacks that explain what led up to it. To at one point uses what might be called the inverse of a shock cut, as he cuts from a brief image of her impaled head to the pastoral images of one of these flashbacks.
The result is that the cartoony action flick has metamorphosed into a poetic meditation on life, death, and karma. I don’t know enough about Buddhism or Chinese culture to know if the sentiments expressed are anything more than cliche — Yomi says they are total crap — but the concluding sequences worked affectively for me. Whatever sense of peace Lau’s character comes to, this sense remains haunted by Cheung’s absence. Is this just the old story of the woman being sacrificed in order to redeem the man? If so, then it’s one in which the cost of that sacrifice is insistently dwelt upon, instead of being relegated to the background. The entire film is haunted by a sense of missed encounters, as well as by the determination not to accept what nevertheless cannot be averted. So the film is anti-fatalistic in mood (it expresses a determination) at the same time that it depicts a fate which will have its way regardless. How strange and beautiful for this sort of paralysis, this deadlock of will and understanding, to become the overriding mood of an action film.

Arimpara

Murali Nair’s Arimpara, which I saw last night at the Seattle International Film Festival, is a strangely beautiful and unsettling film. It takes the form of a fable, about a man — a rural landowner in the south Indian state of Kerala — who one day discovers a mole, or wart, on his chin. In the course of the film, the wart grows and grows, until it becomes a gross, purulent excrescence with a demented cackle and a will of its own.
Arimpara is a mysterious film because of the way it resists simple categorization. Much of the film is naturalistic in style: we see the landowner’s daily life with his wife and his son, his religious observances and enjoyment of nature, and of course his servants, and the peasants who toil for him in the fields. The film conveys a sense of ordinariness, of tradition, of quotidian repetition, and of hierarchical class relations that go unquestioned by the people enmeshed in them.
But the narrative of the growth of the landowner’s wart disrupts this naturalism. At first, the wart is small, and its presence seems only to be a reflection of the protagonist’s narcissism: he spends much time looking at it in the mirror, but he resists suggestions that it should be removed through medical treatment. He prefers to use traditional herbal remedies, which he prepares himself, just as he prefers the traditional way of farming, and refuses to buy a tractor to work his land according to modern methods.
As the wart grows, though, and the landowner’s life falls apart — he’s abandoned by his wife and child, and by most of the servants — the stylistic naturalism of the film gives way to grotesquerie. Finally, in the last twenty minutes or so, the tone becomes one of chintzy horror, with the very low-tech prosthetic effect of the wart rupturing any illusion of naturalism, and the plot careening into body disgust at the verge of the absurd. One is torn between revulsion (at the visceral excess, reminiscent of early Cronenberg, of the wart) and laughter (at the way the film flirts with campy excess, or at least sardonic black humor).
Nair’s visual style of elegant minimalism — his careful frame compositions and his use of shadows — remains beautiful throughout; but by the end of the film, this elegance of presentation has come into total conflict what what is actually depicted within the frame. This dissonance is what drives the film: the horror story seems to be allegorical, while the setting and background work in social realist terms. The film at once moves us by absorbing us into the social setting, and alienates and distances us with its tackiness and artificiality.
I’m not sure I have the cultural context to flesh out the film’s allegorical meanings: the growth of the wart seems to have something to do with the landowner’s traditionalism, his superstitious reverence for the past and unwillingness to embrace the new; and it also seems to have something to do with the class privilege that he takes for granted, and that he has inherited from his much more violent ancestors (we are told several times about a knife, with which his grandfather — I think — both shaved off body hair that displeased his mistresses, and killed peasants who dared to challenge him). But beyond that, I don’t really know (there’s a final metamorphosis, which I will not describe here, but which raises still more questions about the entire allegorical import of the film).

Murali Nair’s Arimpara, which I saw last night at the Seattle International Film Festival, is a strangely beautiful and unsettling film. It takes the form of a fable, about a man — a rural landowner in the south Indian state of Kerala — who one day discovers a mole, or wart, on his chin. In the course of the film, the wart grows and grows, until it becomes a gross, purulent excrescence with a demented cackle and a will of its own.
Arimpara is a mysterious film because of the way it resists simple categorization. Much of the film is naturalistic in style: we see the landowner’s daily life with his wife and his son, his religious observances and enjoyment of nature, and of course his servants, and the peasants who toil for him in the fields. The film conveys a sense of ordinariness, of tradition, of quotidian repetition, and of hierarchical class relations that go unquestioned by the people enmeshed in them.
But the narrative of the growth of the landowner’s wart disrupts this naturalism. At first, the wart is small, and its presence seems only to be a reflection of the protagonist’s narcissism: he spends much time looking at it in the mirror, but he resists suggestions that it should be removed through medical treatment. He prefers to use traditional herbal remedies, which he prepares himself, just as he prefers the traditional way of farming, and refuses to buy a tractor to work his land according to modern methods.
As the wart grows, though, and the landowner’s life falls apart — he’s abandoned by his wife and child, and by most of the servants — the stylistic naturalism of the film gives way to grotesquerie. Finally, in the last twenty minutes or so, the tone becomes one of chintzy horror, with the very low-tech prosthetic effect of the wart rupturing any illusion of naturalism, and the plot careening into body disgust at the verge of the absurd. One is torn between revulsion (at the visceral excess, reminiscent of early Cronenberg, of the wart) and laughter (at the way the film flirts with campy excess, or at least sardonic black humor).
Nair’s visual style of elegant minimalism — his careful frame compositions and his use of shadows — remains beautiful throughout; but by the end of the film, this elegance of presentation has come into total conflict what what is actually depicted within the frame. This dissonance is what drives the film: the horror story seems to be allegorical, while the setting and background work in social realist terms. The film at once moves us by absorbing us into the social setting, and alienates and distances us with its tackiness and artificiality. This conflict short-circuits any obvious responses to the film, and forces us into a sort of fascinated emotional turmoil.
I’m not sure I have the cultural context to flesh out the film’s allegorical meanings: the growth of the wart seems to have something to do with the landowner’s traditionalism, his superstitious reverence for the past and unwillingness to embrace the new; and it also seems to have something to do with the class privilege that he takes for granted, and that he has inherited from his much more violent ancestors (we are told several times about a knife, with which his grandfather — I think — both shaved off body hair that displeased his mistresses, and killed peasants who dared to challenge him). But beyond that, I don’t really know (there’s a final metamorphosis, which I will not describe here, but which raises still more questions about the entire allegorical import of the film).

Ghostface, The Pretty Toney Album

Though I’ve never been a big devotee of the Wu, I’ve fallen in love with Ghostface‘s latest, The Pretty Toney Album.
Judging from what I’ve read on fan websites and bulletin boards, the true Ghostface Killah fans don’t like this one as much as his earlier solo work, Ironman and Supreme Clientele. This seems to be because, in dropping the “Killah” from his name, Ghostface has changed the ratio between hard-headed thug narratives and squishy love songs, having less of the former and more of the latter. But for my part, this is precisely why I like Pretty Toney more than anything else Ghostface has ever done.
There are some great gangsta narratives on the album, particularly “Run” (produced by Wu mastermind RZA) with its urgency, speed and off-the-beat rhymes. But they are outweighed by songs like “It’s Over” (a eulogy for the thug life, which Ghostface has now outgrown) and “Save Me Dear” (redemption through a good woman’s love — corny and a bit patriarchal, but moving all the same) and the Missy Elliott collaboration “Tush” (a spunky, upbeat sex song, that many of the fans have denounced as lightweight and commercial, but whose beat I really like, not to mention Missy’s “if you ain’t slurpin’, then you better off jerkin’ “).
And, though I usually hate the “skits” that populate recent hip hop albums for some reason, the ones here work for me, in a slice-of-life meets comedic-exaggeration way).
What really makes the album work are the soul music samples that dominate most of its tracks. They aren’t sped up and chopped up as is often the case (in Ghostface’s earlier stuff and elsewhere) with soul samples in hip hop. Instead, we get them relatively intact. In at least one case — “Holla” — we get the sampling (if it can still be called that) of a complete song, the Delfonics’ “La La Means I Love You” ; Ghostface raps over the verses, and joins in on the chorus, with “la la means I love you” etc changed to “holla holla holla if you want to, I love you.”
Ghostface has done soulful songs, backed by soul samples, in the past, of course: think of “All That I Got Is You” (on Ironman) or “Never Be The Same Again” (on Bulletproof Wallets). But on Pretty Toney he moves it to a whole new level.
Let me explain. Using an old song for emotional impact is an old trick in hip hop (and in other genres of music as well, of course). The most egregious example I can think of is Puff Daddy’s eulogy for Biggie, “I’ll Be Missing You,” which basically just added a few new lyrics to Sting’s “Every Breath You Take.” The emotion seems unearned, gotten through a knee-jerk reaction to the original song, and therefore phony. I’m always saying that sampling is creativity: that imagination works by taking a prior work, and reworking and recontextualizing it, and hybridizing it with other prior works. But “I’ll Be Missing You” is the lame degree zero of that.
But on The Pretty Toney Album, a very different dynamic is at work. Ghostface isn’t just using soul music to get an emotional reaction. Rather, he is working with the fact that soul music signifies or connotes emotionality. It stands for passion: for longing, desperation, and blocked desire, on the one hand, and warmth, fulfillment, drawn-out erotic bliss on the other. In this way it stands at an opposite pole from the ethos of the Shaolin warrior (the big theme in Wu Tang mythology), or from the pimp/thug/gangsta/Iceberg Slim/Donald Goines lineage of so much rap in the last decade or so. Soul is about emotional outpouring, while hardcore rap is about maintaining a reserve of cool, never letting yourself go (withholding is the best way to manipulate others, while letting go imperils your survival).
These can be seen as the two sides of black music, and can further be seen (stereotypically) as “feminine” and “masculine” modes. Soul includes men singing to women as well as women singing for women; hardcore rap is addressed by men to other men, and is filled with masculine bravado. Of course, these are both extreme reductions — what’s really going on in black music is far more multifarious — but they express the dichotomy that Ghostface is working with.
So, Ghostface doesn’t just use his soul music samples for cheap emotional impact: he plays off his vocals against the music. His voice adapts itself to the rhythm and flow of the samples, while at the same time his tone — sometimes desperate, more often dry and deadpan, at times comedically mock-hysterical — cuts against it. The result is complex and conflicted. Sometimes the disjunction is played out narratively, as the song tells a story that moves from anger, nihilism, or boasting to acceptance and opening up. This is the case in “Holla”, for instance: Ghostface’s lines seem initially to totally contradict the Delfonics’ lovey-dovey mood, but by the end he has moved on from “pimp talk” to almost-preaching about education and keeping the peace. Other times, tension is maintained throughout the song. “It’s Over” expresses regret for the thug life he’s left behind, at the same time that it reminds us that “what goes around comes around”: soul nostalgia and hard-edged aggression interpenetrate and almost seem to change places.
My favorite song on the album is “Tooken Back”, a duet with the raunchy Jacki-O. It’s a battle of the sexes that turns into the hope of reconciliation. In the first verse, Ghostface is telling his woman that he was right to dump her, and that even though she’s taken him onto Jerry Springer to beg for forgiveness she won’t get it. The second verse is Jacki-O’s rejoinder, cajoling and pleading with him, but also subtly keeping her distance from desperation (“your sex wasn’t wild… but I dealt with it”). The third verse flips the situation, with Ghostface begging the woman to come back. Throughout, a soul sample pleading “take me back” loops in the background, and swells up to the foreground during the chorus. (If anybody knows the source of this sample, please email me and let me know what it is). The intonations of both rappers pass through a number of affective states, from derision to desperation to love. The soul sample makes the emotion over the top and larger than life, while the voices’ nuances introduce subtlety and qualification, and eventually a kind of warmth. Both speakers are calculating in everything they say, yet the soul sample drags them into a warmth, and an erotic pull, that are beyond calculation. The sample loops and loops with the stirrings of desire, while the raps rationalize and then give way, giving a narrative shape to that underlying pulse. The song manages to be heartfelt rather than ironic, even as it shows a fully ironic, self-conscious awareness of what’s going on.

Though I’ve never been a big devotee of the Wu, I’ve fallen in love with Ghostface‘s latest, The Pretty Toney Album.
Judging from what I’ve read on fan websites and bulletin boards, the true Ghostface Killah fans don’t like this one as much as his earlier solo work, Ironman and Supreme Clientele. This seems to be because, in dropping the “Killah” from his name, Ghostface has changed the ratio between hard-headed thug narratives and squishy love songs, having less of the former and more of the latter. But for my part, this is precisely why I like Pretty Toney more than anything else Ghostface has ever done.
There are some great gangsta narratives on the album, particularly “Run” (produced by Wu mastermind RZA) with its urgency, speed and off-the-beat rhymes. But they are outweighed by songs like “It’s Over” (a eulogy for the thug life, which Ghostface has now outgrown) and “Save Me Dear” (redemption through a good woman’s love — corny and a bit patriarchal, but moving all the same) and the Missy Elliott collaboration “Tush” (a spunky, upbeat sex song, that many of the fans have denounced as lightweight and commercial, but whose beat I really like, not to mention Missy’s “if you ain’t slurpin’, then you better off jerkin’ “).
And, though I usually hate the “skits” that populate recent hip hop albums for some reason, the ones here work for me, in a slice-of-life meets comedic-exaggeration way).
What really makes the album work are the soul music samples that dominate most of its tracks. They aren’t sped up and chopped up as is often the case (in Ghostface’s earlier stuff and elsewhere) with soul samples in hip hop. Instead, we get them relatively intact. In at least one case — “Holla” — we get the sampling (if it can still be called that) of a complete song, the Delfonics’ “La La Means I Love You” ; Ghostface raps over the verses, and joins in on the chorus, with “la la means I love you” etc changed to “holla holla holla if you want to, I love you.”
Ghostface has done soulful songs, backed by soul samples, in the past, of course: think of “All That I Got Is You” (on Ironman) or “Never Be The Same Again” (on Bulletproof Wallets). But on Pretty Toney he moves it to a whole new level.
Let me explain. Using an old song for emotional impact is an old trick in hip hop (and in other genres of music as well, of course). The most egregious example I can think of is Puff Daddy’s eulogy for Biggie, “I’ll Be Missing You,” which basically just added a few new lyrics to Sting’s “Every Breath You Take.” The emotion seems unearned, gotten through a knee-jerk reaction to the original song, and therefore phony. I’m always saying that sampling is creativity: that imagination works by taking a prior work, and reworking and recontextualizing it, and hybridizing it with other prior works. But “I’ll Be Missing You” is the lame degree zero of that.
But on The Pretty Toney Album, a very different dynamic is at work. Ghostface isn’t just using soul music to get an emotional reaction. Rather, he is working with the fact that soul music signifies or connotes emotionality. It stands for passion: for longing, desperation, and blocked desire, on the one hand, and warmth, fulfillment, drawn-out erotic bliss on the other. In this way it stands at an opposite pole from the ethos of the Shaolin warrior (the big theme in Wu Tang mythology), or from the pimp/thug/gangsta/Iceberg Slim/Donald Goines lineage of so much rap in the last decade or so. Soul is about emotional outpouring, while hardcore rap is about maintaining a reserve of cool, never letting yourself go (withholding is the best way to manipulate others, while letting go imperils your survival).
These can be seen as the two sides of black music, and can further be seen (stereotypically) as “feminine” and “masculine” modes. Soul includes men singing to women as well as women singing for women; hardcore rap is addressed by men to other men, and is filled with masculine bravado. Of course, these are both extreme reductions — what’s really going on in black music is far more multifarious — but they express the dichotomy that Ghostface is working with.
So, Ghostface doesn’t just use his soul music samples for cheap emotional impact: he plays off his vocals against the music. His voice adapts itself to the rhythm and flow of the samples, while at the same time his tone — sometimes desperate, more often dry and deadpan, at times comedically mock-hysterical — cuts against it. The result is complex and conflicted. Sometimes the disjunction is played out narratively, as the song tells a story that moves from anger, nihilism, or boasting to acceptance and opening up. This is the case in “Holla”, for instance: Ghostface’s lines seem initially to totally contradict the Delfonics’ lovey-dovey mood, but by the end he has moved on from “pimp talk” to almost-preaching about education and keeping the peace. Other times, tension is maintained throughout the song. “It’s Over” expresses regret for the thug life he’s left behind, at the same time that it reminds us that “what goes around comes around”: soul nostalgia and hard-edged aggression interpenetrate and almost seem to change places.
My favorite song on the album is “Tooken Back”, a duet with the raunchy Jacki-O. It’s a battle of the sexes that turns into the hope of reconciliation. In the first verse, Ghostface is telling his woman that he was right to dump her, and that even though she’s taken him onto Jerry Springer to beg for forgiveness she won’t get it. The second verse is Jacki-O’s rejoinder, cajoling and pleading with him, but also subtly keeping her distance from desperation (“your sex wasn’t wild… but I dealt with it”). The third verse flips the situation, with Ghostface begging the woman to come back. Throughout, a soul sample pleading “take me back” — from a song of that name by The Emotions — loops in the background, and swells up to the foreground during the chorus. The intonations of both rappers pass through a number of affective states, from derision to desperation to love. The soul sample makes the emotion over the top and larger than life, while the voices’ nuances introduce subtlety and qualification, and eventually a kind of warmth. Both speakers are calculating in everything they say, yet the soul sample drags them into a warmth, and an erotic pull, that are beyond calculation. The sample loops and loops with the stirrings of desire, while the raps rationalize and then give way, giving a narrative shape to that underlying pulse. The song manages to be heartfelt rather than ironic, even as it shows a fully ironic, self-conscious awareness of what’s going on.

Zatoichi

Takeshi Kitano’s latest film, Zatoichi, is a delightful neo/post/self-reflexive/whatever samurai epic. The character of Zatoichi has appeared in well over twenty films, none of which I have seen. He’s a blind swordsman with superhuman powers (apparently he can locate his opponents, and cut them with precision, by hearing alone). Kitano doesn’t spoof or ironize the series, though he has a great deal of fun with it. (He plays the main character, as well as writing and directing the film). Like all of Kitano’s films, Zatoichi is deadpan, dry, and understated. There is relatively little dialogue. There’s no gross-out dwelling on the violence, though Kitano does display a fondness for ridiculous spurts of blood. Also, as in all of Kitano’s films, there are lots of sight gags (and also, if I can use the phrase, sound gags) based on the manipulation of the formal properties of film (cunning tricks of framing, camera movement, and sound/image synchronization, and the like).
There’s little to say about the film, really, since Kitano’s touch is so light; he remakes the samurai/sword genre in his own image, but doesn’t undermine it or put a revisionist spin on it, or pretend that it’s something more profound than it is. The blind swordsman comes to town disguised as a wandering masseur, wins money at gambling (he can tell by the sound of the falling dice whether the total is odd or even), and almost casually helps to right wrongs, cleanse the town of all its rival gangs, and give justice (or exact revenge) on behalf of a brother and sister who are looking for the killers of their family. (Oh, I almost forgot — the brother is a cross-dresser, and the two siblings disguise themselves as geisha as they search for revenge — but, as with everything else in the film, this is all done casually and without pretension or special emphasis).
Kitano can be compared to Quentin Tarantino; they are both brilliant filmmakers who evidently love and unironically resuscitate/update old trash/violent genres. But Kitano is less grandiose than Tarantino; that is to say, Kitano never gives you that Tarantinoesque sense that he is sitting you down and insistently showing you his entire video collection of cool oldies and rarities.

Takeshi Kitano’s latest film, Zatoichi, is a delightful neo/post/self-reflexive/whatever samurai epic. The character of Zatoichi has appeared in well over twenty films, none of which I have seen. He’s a blind swordsman with superhuman powers (apparently he can locate his opponents, and cut them with precision, by hearing alone). Kitano doesn’t spoof or ironize the series, though he has a great deal of fun with it. (He plays the main character, as well as writing and directing the film). Like all of Kitano’s films, Zatoichi is deadpan, dry, and understated. There is relatively little dialogue. There’s no gross-out dwelling on the violence, though Kitano does display a fondness for ridiculous spurts of blood. Also, as in all of Kitano’s films, there are lots of sight gags (and also, if I can use the phrase, sound gags) based on the manipulation of the formal properties of film (cunning tricks of framing, camera movement, and sound/image synchronization, and the like).
There’s little to say about the film, really, since Kitano’s touch is so light; he remakes the samurai/sword genre in his own image, but doesn’t undermine it or put a revisionist spin on it, or pretend that it’s something more profound than it is. The blind swordsman comes to town disguised as a wandering masseur, wins money at gambling (he can tell by the sound of the falling dice whether the total is odd or even), and almost casually helps to right wrongs, cleanse the town of all its rival gangs, and give justice (or exact revenge) on behalf of a brother and sister who are looking for the killers of their family. (Oh, I almost forgot — the brother is a cross-dresser, and the two siblings disguise themselves as geisha as they search for revenge — but, as with everything else in the film, this is all done casually and without pretension or special emphasis).
Kitano can be compared to Quentin Tarantino; they are both brilliant filmmakers who evidently love and unironically resuscitate/update old trash/violent genres. But Kitano is less grandiose than Tarantino; that is to say, Kitano never gives you that Tarantinoesque sense that he is sitting you down and insistently showing you his entire video collection of cool oldies and rarities.

Enemies of Promise

Lindsay Waters is the humanities editor at Harvard University Press, and his new book Enemies of Promise is a jeremiad about troubles in the world of academia and academic publishing. Waters says that too many academic books are being published, books that sell poorly for the most part, and that this situation is not sustainable either economically or intellectually.
Waters’ polemic is rather scattershot, and sometimes over-the-top rhetorically, but he makes a number of important points.
A lot of academic books get written, and then published, because they are necessary for tenure. If tenure weren’t so closely tied to publication, then this situation wouldn’t exist. This makes a great deal of sense to me; it’s often a waste of time and effort for a newly minted PhD to turn her/his dissertation into a first book, instead of moving on to a new project. (I was lucky that I had the time — partly because I was in limbo several years between finishing my PhD and getting my first job, and partly because I got generous time off as a junior professor — to write something new as my tenure book, and let my dissertation slip into deserved oblivion).
The requirement of a book for tenure is something of a bottleneck. It leads people to inflate good articles into lots-of-wasted-space books, which sell almost no copies. And in any case this way of doing things is not likely to remain sustainable, as university presses get underfunded and forced to cut back.
Waters recommends that faculties and tenure committees exercise more critical judgment when deliberating on tenure, instead of (in effect) offloading the work onto the university presses’ review processes. While this is admirable in principle, I am dubious as to whether it could actually be made to work. Less reliance on publication records would most likely mean, not more critical judgment, but more arbitrariness and more personal spite on the part of departments and tenure committees. Having an “objective” requirement for tenure, lame as it often is, protects professors from getting denied tenure simply because they are offbeat in their sensibilities, or insufficiently “collegial.”
So this is still a problem for which there is no good solution.
In the second half of his book, Waters makes some crucial points about the current hyper-professionalization of humanities departments and humanities publications. Junior scholars face “increasingly rigid norms for publication” (82). “The modern university takes the present organization of knowledge into separate disciplines, all those gated communities, as inevitable and as natural as the categories of niche-marketing. The blinkered professional who has become the norm is not an intellectual who reads promiscuously in the hope he or she might come upon a book that will change his or her life” (72). Instead, scholars are encouraged to master a very narrow field of study in depth, to embed him/herself in minutiae of the field, and above all, not to stray to other realms or make outside connections. The result is a “crisis of the monograph” (78), the waste of energy upon trivialities in specialist books that rehearse, but do not dare to step beyond, the prevailing focus of the author’s sub-discipline. Waters rightly excoriates Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, among others, as senior scholars who are responsible for this closing down of any broader intellectual discourse.
Though the media often mock academic writing in the humanities for being abstruse to the point of utter incommunicability, they generally blame “theory” or “cultural studies” or an abandonment of close reading and the traditional canon as the culprit. Waters rightly points out that, contrary to this picture, over-professionalized academic writing today is anything but theoretical and anything but anti-canonical. It may use theory words, but it refuses to think theoretically. (Fish and Rorty condemn theoretical thinking tout court). And it may discuss horror films or romance novels instead of Shakespeare or Dickens, but it narrows its focus in the same way that the worst old-fashioned scholarship of the canon did. Academic norms today make it hard to say anything new or interesting about either Shakespeare or Herschell Gordon Lewis.
There are all sorts of policing mechanisms that promote this hyperprofessionalization: tenure committees, to be sure, but also — quite notably — outside reviewers for academic presses. I can’t tell you how many stories I have heard of people whose writing was rejected by presses or journals because outside reviewers didn’t find it disciplinarily normative enough. (I have never published with Harvard University Press, but from what I can tell, it is far less guilty of this under Waters than are most other presses I know about).
Most importantly, the way we train graduate students is the main culprit in creating this situation.
Waters hits the nail on the head as regards the problem with academic discourse today, but I am not sure he provides any sort of solution. (Which is not really a criticism; obviously I don’t have any solutions either). At the end of the book, Waters praises silence; “it is possible to be a great thinker and not publish anything” (78), he writes, citing the obvious example of Socrates. Water urges scholars and critics to hold back, to publish less, to give their ideas more breathing space to develop.
This is a beautiful idealization, but I am not sure it is anything more than that. We don’t have anything like the Athenian agora today — unless it is the Internet, a possibility that Waters rejects.
I’d make a counter-suggestion: that rather than valuing silence, today’s critics learn to value writing. Most academic writing today is execrably written: something that goes along with being hyperprofessionalized. I don’t mean, of course, that academic writing should become as “transparent” as, say, articles in Newsweek or The New York Times. Great style means Proust or Faulkner or Pynchon, as well as late Beckett or Dashiell Hammett or Hunter Thompson. But the convoluted sentences of most academic discourse, filled with hyperspecialized qualifications and subordinate clauses, bespeak a mentality that sees written language as merely instrumental, merely a tool for getting certain pre-existing facts or ideas across. It ignores the importance of style, voice, mode of expression, affect, etc, in all of culture, popular as well as “high.” It’s particularly ironic, of course, that literature professors would view writing this way. But until academics think about writing style as well as content, we will never break through the wall of hyperprofessionalization.

Lindsay Waters is the humanities editor at Harvard University Press, and his new book Enemies of Promise is a jeremiad about troubles in the world of academia and academic publishing. Waters says that too many academic books are being published, books that sell poorly for the most part, and that this situation is not sustainable either economically or intellectually.
Waters’ polemic is rather scattershot, and sometimes over-the-top rhetorically, but he makes a number of important points.
A lot of academic books get written, and then published, because they are necessary for tenure. If tenure weren’t so closely tied to publication, then this situation wouldn’t exist. This makes a great deal of sense to me; it’s often a waste of time and effort for a newly minted PhD to turn her/his dissertation into a first book, instead of moving on to a new project. (I was lucky that I had the time — partly because I was in limbo several years between finishing my PhD and getting my first job, and partly because I got generous time off as a junior professor — to write something new as my tenure book, and let my dissertation slip into deserved oblivion).
The requirement of a book for tenure is something of a bottleneck. It leads people to inflate good articles into lots-of-wasted-space books, which sell almost no copies. And in any case this way of doing things is not likely to remain sustainable, as university presses get underfunded and forced to cut back.
Waters recommends that faculties and tenure committees exercise more critical judgment when deliberating on tenure, instead of (in effect) offloading the work onto the university presses’ review processes. While this is admirable in principle, I am dubious as to whether it could actually be made to work. Less reliance on publication records would most likely mean, not more critical judgment, but more arbitrariness and more personal spite on the part of departments and tenure committees. Having an “objective” requirement for tenure, lame as it often is, protects professors from getting denied tenure simply because they are offbeat in their sensibilities, or insufficiently “collegial.”
So this is still a problem for which there is no good solution.
In the second half of his book, Waters makes some crucial points about the current hyper-professionalization of humanities departments and humanities publications. Junior scholars face “increasingly rigid norms for publication” (82). “The modern university takes the present organization of knowledge into separate disciplines, all those gated communities, as inevitable and as natural as the categories of niche-marketing. The blinkered professional who has become the norm is not an intellectual who reads promiscuously in the hope he or she might come upon a book that will change his or her life” (72). Instead, scholars are encouraged to master a very narrow field of study in depth, to embed him/herself in minutiae of the field, and above all, not to stray to other realms or make outside connections. The result is a “crisis of the monograph” (78), the waste of energy upon trivialities in specialist books that rehearse, but do not dare to step beyond, the prevailing focus of the author’s sub-discipline. Waters rightly excoriates Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, among others, as senior scholars who are responsible for this closing down of any broader intellectual discourse.
Though the media often mock academic writing in the humanities for being abstruse to the point of utter incommunicability, they generally blame “theory” or “cultural studies” or an abandonment of close reading and the traditional canon as the culprit. Waters rightly points out that, contrary to this picture, over-professionalized academic writing today is anything but theoretical and anything but anti-canonical. It may use theory words, but it refuses to think theoretically. (Fish and Rorty condemn theoretical thinking tout court). And it may discuss horror films or romance novels instead of Shakespeare or Dickens, but it narrows its focus in the same way that the worst old-fashioned scholarship of the canon did. Academic norms today make it hard to say anything new or interesting about either Shakespeare or Herschell Gordon Lewis.
There are all sorts of policing mechanisms that promote this hyperprofessionalization: tenure committees, to be sure, but also — quite notably — outside reviewers for academic presses. I can’t tell you how many stories I have heard of people whose writing was rejected by presses or journals because outside reviewers didn’t find it disciplinarily normative enough. (I have never published with Harvard University Press, but from what I can tell, it is far less guilty of this under Waters than are most other presses I know about).
Most importantly, the way we train graduate students is the main culprit in creating this situation.
Waters hits the nail on the head as regards the problem with academic discourse today, but I am not sure he provides any sort of solution. (Which is not really a criticism; obviously I don’t have any solutions either). At the end of the book, Waters praises silence; “it is possible to be a great thinker and not publish anything” (78), he writes, citing the obvious example of Socrates. Water urges scholars and critics to hold back, to publish less, to give their ideas more breathing space to develop.
This is a beautiful idealization, but I am not sure it is anything more than that. We don’t have anything like the Athenian agora today — unless it is the Internet, a possibility that Waters rejects.
I’d make a counter-suggestion: that rather than valuing silence, today’s critics learn to value writing. Most academic writing today is execrably written: something that goes along with being hyperprofessionalized. I don’t mean, of course, that academic writing should become as “transparent” as, say, articles in Newsweek or The New York Times. Great style means Proust or Faulkner or Pynchon, as well as late Beckett or Dashiell Hammett or Hunter Thompson. But the convoluted sentences of most academic discourse, filled with hyperspecialized qualifications and subordinate clauses, bespeak a mentality that sees written language as merely instrumental, merely a tool for getting certain pre-existing facts or ideas across. It ignores the importance of style, voice, mode of expression, affect, etc, in all of culture, popular as well as “high.” It’s particularly ironic, of course, that literature professors would view writing this way. But until academics think about writing style as well as content, we will never break through the wall of hyperprofessionalization.