Tonight, at the Little Theater, I saw two reels of Andy Warhol “Screen Tests” from the mid-1960s. Each reel had ten Screen Tests; the subjects included Lou Reed, Mama Cass, Baby Jane Holzer, Salvador Dali, Susan Sontag, and Nico, as well as many people I hadn’t heard of.
The idea behind the screen tests was simple. Everyone who visited Warhol’s factory was asked to sit still in front of a silent, black and white film camera for three minutes, the time of a single reel. (The reels were then supposed to be screened at silent speed, 18fps instead of 24fps; unfortunately they were unable to do this tonight).
It’s hard to sit still for three minutes, doing nothing. Some of the subjects try their best to sit still (though they fail). Others make faces, or otherwise mug for the camera. Baby Jane brushes her teeth. Dali is suspended upside down. Nico is subjected to flash cuts and unmotivated zooms (such as one finds in Warhol movies of 1966 or so, such as Chelsea Girls, which she was also in); whereas for everyone else, the camera is stationary, one continuous shot.
Watching the screen tests is a strange experience. It’s hard to watch a face for three minutes, in silence, without any action taking place on the screen. No matter how hard you concentrate, your attention wanders (unless, I suppose, you have trained yourself through Buddhist meditation to avoid this wandering). It’s almost like, the more rapt your attention, the more you catch yourself drifting away. The faces on screen invite such rapt attention, because they promise everything, but give so little away. What do outsides tell us about insides? These “portraits” never show us enough. We keep on thinking that we will penetrate to the essence of the person on screen, but all we get is vacancy: an emptiness that is equivalent to the emptiness of the subjective experience of sitting in front of a camera for three minutes, doing nothing, expressing nothing. Everyone is the same, in a certain sense: there’s a lot of self-conscious, self-reflexive posing in awareness of the camera, and this is oddly impersonal, identical from one person to the next. What’s different from one person to the next, on the contrary, is unconscious, or perhaps absent altogether. All of the subjects of these Screen Tests are empty, but everyone’s emptiness is unique. Your emptiness, not your positive identity, is what makes you singular in the world. An identity isn’t singular; everybody has one. But modes of absence cannot be replicated from one person to the next, or even in the same person from one moment to the next.
Tonight, at the Little Theater, I saw two reels of Andy Warhol “Screen Tests” from the mid-1960s. Each reel had ten Screen Tests; the subjects included Lou Reed, Mama Cass, Baby Jane Holzer, Salvador Dali, Susan Sontag, and Nico, as well as many people I hadn’t heard of.
The idea behind the screen tests was simple. Everyone who visited Warhol’s factory was asked to sit still in front of a silent, black and white film camera for three minutes, the time of a single reel. (The reels were then supposed to be screened at silent speed, 18fps instead of 24fps; unfortunately they were unable to do this tonight).
It’s hard to sit still for three minutes, doing nothing. Some of the subjects try their best to sit still (though they fail). Others make faces, or otherwise mug for the camera. Baby Jane brushes her teeth. Dali is suspended upside down. Nico is subjected to flash cuts and unmotivated zooms (such as one finds in Warhol movies of 1966 or so, such as Chelsea Girls, which she was also in); whereas for everyone else, the camera is stationary, one continuous shot.
Watching the screen tests is a strange experience. It’s hard to watch a face for three minutes, in silence, without any action taking place on the screen. No matter how hard you concentrate, your attention wanders (unless, I suppose, you have trained yourself through Buddhist meditation to avoid this wandering). It’s almost like, the more rapt your attention, the more you catch yourself drifting away. The faces on screen invite such rapt attention, because they promise everything, but give so little away. What do outsides tell us about insides? These “portraits” never show us enough. We keep on thinking that we will penetrate to the essence of the person on screen, but all we get is vacancy: an emptiness that is equivalent to the emptiness of the subjective experience of sitting in front of a camera for three minutes, doing nothing, expressing nothing. Everyone is the same, in a certain sense: there’s a lot of self-conscious, self-reflexive posing in awareness of the camera, and this is oddly impersonal, identical from one person to the next. What’s different from one person to the next, on the contrary, is unconscious, or perhaps absent altogether. All of the subjects of these Screen Tests are empty, but everyone’s emptiness is unique. Your emptiness, not your positive identity, is what makes you singular in the world. An identity isn’t singular; everybody has one. But modes of absence cannot be replicated from one person to the next, or even in the same person from one moment to the next.
Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a dreamy, drifting film, as befits the state of mind of its protagonists. The characters played by Bill Murray (in what I am tempted to call his best performance ever, building on but transcending his role in Rushmore) and Scarlett Johanson are far apart in age, but they are both Americans adrift in Tokyo, not understanding the language or many aspects of the culture, insomniac from jet lag, semi-estranged from their spouses, not having much to do, and essentially alone, even in the midst of company. My friend Billy writes aptly in his blog of the movie’s “strange and lucid and indifferent spell” (actually, I am not sure if he means the spell of the movie, the spell of jet lag and insomnia, or the spell of sublimated sexual desire; but I suppose all three are accurate). The movie has no real direction, it doesn’t really build to anything like a climax: Murray and Johansen meet, spend time together, are tender with one another, don’t have sex, and then separate again. Indeed, the movie suggests – as William Gibson does in a very different way in Pattern Recognition – that jet lag is the quintessential postmodern condition, and it makes a strange and beautiful poetry of the consequent dislocation of its protagonists. Lost in Translation is lyrical without being sappy; and it conveys a sense of the alienness (from an American point of view) of Japan, without turning this into the usual essentializing, orientalizing portrait of the Mysterious Other (something of which even Gibson is perhaps guilty). For there is no exoticism here. Exoticism requires a grounding sense of familiarity and being-at-home in order to emphasize the difference of the Other; but here that reference to being-at-home is precisely what gets dissolved. The Situationists celebrated urban drift, or what they called derive, as a form of exploration, as a radical reconfiguration of the real by means of defamiliarization. But Lost in Translation presents a blank, neutral, oddly impersonal form of derive, in comparison to which the Situationist project seems merely a wishful idealization. When I say blank and neutral, I don’t mean anomie or alienation, but an ontologically primary condition, deeper than either grounding or estrangement. And I don’t mean affectlessness, but rather a kind of impersonal intensity, in which things are distant, and yet that very distance is powerfully present and powerfully affecting (I think this is part of what Billy means by “lucid”). Lost in Translation is both funny and sad, at times, but its lyricism is too precise, and too wryly observant, to be characterized as either nostalgic or wistful. The film has the force of a revelation, even though (or maybe precisely because) it is telling us that there is nothing to be revealed.
Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a dreamy, drifting film, as befits the state of mind of its protagonists. The characters played by Bill Murray (in what I am tempted to call his best performance ever, building on but transcending his role in Rushmore) and Scarlett Johanson are far apart in age, but they are both Americans adrift in Tokyo, not understanding the language or many aspects of the culture, insomniac from jet lag, semi-estranged from their spouses, not having much to do, and essentially alone, even in the midst of company. My friend Billy writes aptly in his blog of the movie’s “strange and lucid and indifferent spell” (actually, I am not sure if he means the spell of the movie, the spell of jet lag and insomnia, or the spell of sublimated sexual desire; but I suppose all three are accurate). The movie has no real direction, it doesn’t really build to anything like a climax: Murray and Johansen meet, spend time together, are tender with one another, don’t have sex, and then separate again. Indeed, the movie suggests – as William Gibson does in a very different way in Pattern Recognition – that jet lag is the quintessential postmodern condition, and it makes a strange and beautiful poetry of the consequent dislocation of its protagonists. Lost in Translation is lyrical without being sappy; and it conveys a sense of the alienness (from an American point of view) of Japan, without turning this into the usual essentializing, orientalizing portrait of the Mysterious Other (something of which even Gibson is perhaps guilty). For there is no exoticism here. Exoticism requires a grounding sense of familiarity and being-at-home in order to emphasize the difference of the Other; but here that reference to being-at-home is precisely what gets dissolved. The Situationists celebrated urban drift, or what they called derive, as a form of exploration, as a radical reconfiguration of the real by means of defamiliarization. But Lost in Translation presents a blank, neutral, oddly impersonal form of derive, in comparison to which the Situationist project seems merely a wishful idealization. When I say blank and neutral, I don’t mean anomie or alienation, but an ontologically primary condition, deeper than either grounding or estrangement. And I don’t mean affectlessness, but rather a kind of impersonal intensity, in which things are distant, and yet that very distance is powerfully present and powerfully affecting (I think this is part of what Billy means by “lucid”). Lost in Translation is both funny and sad, at times, but its lyricism is too precise, and too wryly observant, to be characterized as either nostalgic or wistful. The film has the force of a revelation, even though (or maybe precisely because) it is telling us that there is nothing to be revealed.
PS: soundtrack music to die for, by Kevin Shields (!!!)
Bangkok Dangerous, by the Pang Brothers, is a superb gangster film about a deaf-mute hitman. The story is resolutely lowbrow and generic: violent, sentimental, and sententious. The narrative drifts for about half the movie, and then powerfully coalesces into a revenge plot. The music is pounding, unsubtle, and relentless. Much of the story is conveyed without dialog, and the visuals are amazing, filled with jerkily moving handheld camera, extreme closeups, jump cuts, deliberately mismatched shots, affective montages, abstract use of (grimy and murky) color, scenes shrouded in darkness, and unexpected shifts of perspective (one of my favorites was a shot from the POV of a gecko standing upside down on the ceiling). The Pangs’ stylization is as extreme as John Woo’s, but going in totally the opposite direction: where Woo is gorgeously poetic, with precisely articulated violence and an elegant sense of melancholy, the Pangs are like down ‘n’ dirty grunge rockers, mixing emotional rawness with an unexpected (but still raw) tenderness and vulnerability.
Bangkok Dangerous, by the Pang Brothers, is a superb gangster film about a deaf-mute hitman. The story is resolutely lowbrow and generic: violent, sentimental, and sententious. The narrative drifts for about half the movie, and then powerfully coalesces into a revenge plot. The music is pounding, unsubtle, and relentless. Much of the story is conveyed without dialog, and the visuals are amazing, filled with jerkily moving handheld camera, extreme closeups, jump cuts, deliberately mismatched shots, affective montages, abstract use of (grimy and murky) color, scenes shrouded in darkness, and unexpected shifts of perspective (one of my favorites was a shot from the POV of a gecko standing upside down on the ceiling). The Pangs’ stylization is as extreme as John Woo’s, but going in totally the opposite direction: where Woo is gorgeously poetic, with precisely articulated violence and an elegant sense of melancholy, the Pangs are like down ‘n’ dirty grunge rockers, mixing emotional rawness with an unexpected (but still raw) tenderness and vulnerability.
Chen Kuo-Fu’s Double Vision, a Taiwanese/American co-production, mixes genres to brilliant effect: it’s a combination of serial killer/police thriller, supernatural horror, and family melodrama, with a bit of cross-cultural-misunderstanding comedy thrown in for good measure. A Taipei cop with a traumatic past, whose life and career are a mess (veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung) tries to solve a series of murders with both high-tech and mystical Taoist overtones, with the help of an American FBI man (David Morse). The cinematography is fluid and elegant, and the plot is genuinely shocking as well as creepy, as it continually shifts its ground (and the genre expectations it arouses), moving from police procedural to splatterfest to subdued melancholy to an absolutely hallucinatory and delirious conclusion. The overall affective tone of the film is pessimistic and anguished, though it also manages to project a balance between spiritual yearning and extreme skepticism in a way that I’ve neve felt or seen before. (This is tied in as well with the film’s theme of inevitable misunderstandings between American and Chinese culture; my own cultural preconceptions obviously limit my understanding of the film, but this is something that the film explicitly addresses with Morse’s character). All in all, this is a rather grim film that nonetheless gives a great deal of pleasure through its continual inventiveness and surprise. It fuses art and pulp to provide continual astonishment. Double Vision is sufficiently original that I have trouble describing it any less abstractly that I have here. All I can say, really, is that it provides both intensity and wonder; what more could I ever ask from a film?
Chen Kuo-Fu’s Double Vision, a Taiwanese/American co-production, mixes genres to brilliant effect: it’s a combination of serial killer/police thriller, supernatural horror, and family melodrama, with a bit of cross-cultural-misunderstanding comedy thrown in for good measure. A Taipei cop with a traumatic past, whose life and career are a mess (veteran Hong Kong actor Tony Leung) tries to solve a series of murders with both high-tech and mystical Taoist overtones, with the help of an American FBI man (David Morse). The cinematography is fluid and elegant, and the plot is genuinely shocking as well as creepy, as it continually shifts its ground (and the genre expectations it arouses), moving from police procedural to splatterfest to subdued melancholy to an absolutely hallucinatory and delirious conclusion. The overall affective tone of the film is pessimistic and anguished, though it also manages to project a balance between spiritual yearning and extreme skepticism in a way that I’ve neve felt or seen before. (This is tied in as well with the film’s theme of inevitable misunderstandings between American and Chinese culture; my own cultural preconceptions obviously limit my understanding of the film, but this is something that the film explicitly addresses with Morse’s character). All in all, this is a rather grim film that nonetheless gives a great deal of pleasure through its continual inventiveness and surprise. It fuses art and pulp to provide continual astonishment. Double Vision is sufficiently original that I have trouble describing it any less abstractly that I have here. All I can say, really, is that it provides both intensity and wonder; what more could I ever ask from a film?
Hideo Nakata’s Ringu is an effectively creepy horror film, which well deserves its cult reputation. The power of the film comes from its minimalism and restraint, as well as the fact that we the viewers get to see the (strange, disjunctive, and oddly haunting) video that kills anyone who watches it. The film’s double ending – an apparent resolution, followed by a twist in which the danger is still active – is in itself a genre cliche, but both “endings” are emotionally resonant. The corpse’s emergence from the well is quite beautiful. The overall theme of electronic media as vectors of contamination is also poetically apt (and it seems to be in the air right now: a similar scenario, of a video that kills whoever watches it, can be found in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest; the same theme, only with a song instead of a video, is the basis of Chuck Palahnuik’s Lullaby. But the particular twist of Ringu, which I won’t mention here in order not to ruin the experience for anyone reading this who hasn’t seen it yet, has a special resonance).
Hideo Nakata’s Ringu is an effectively creepy horror film, which well deserves its cult reputation. The power of the film comes from its minimalism and restraint, as well as the fact that we the viewers get to see the (strange, disjunctive, and oddly haunting) video that kills anyone who watches it. The film’s double ending – an apparent resolution, followed by a twist in which the danger is still active – is in itself a genre cliche, but both “endings” are emotionally resonant. The corpse’s emergence from the well is quite beautiful. The overall theme of electronic media as vectors of contamination is also poetically apt (and it seems to be in the air right now: a similar scenario, of a video that kills whoever watches it, can be found in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest; the same theme, only with a song instead of a video, is the basis of Chuck Palahnuik’s Lullaby. But the particular twist of Ringu, which I won’t mention here in order not to ruin the experience for anyone reading this who hasn’t seen it yet, has a special resonance).
I’ve never really liked the movies of the Coen Brothers. All their films are formally exquisite, but way too snide and condescending, in an annoyingly facile and self-congratulatory way. Fargo is probably their best film; I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, and they maintained a better balance between suspense and sarcasm than they usually do. But it still feels slick and empty afterwards. Maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon about Joel and Ethan Coen; everyone else seems to love them.But something just doesn’t connect for me; it’s not that I object to cynicism, necessarily, but it annoys me how they are too cynical to even own up to their own cynicism.
I’ve never really liked the movies of the Coen Brothers. All their films are formally exquisite, but way too snide and condescending, in an annoyingly facile and self-congratulatory way. Fargo is probably their best film; I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, and they maintained a better balance between suspense and sarcasm than they usually do. But it still feels slick and empty afterwards. Maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon about Joel and Ethan Coen; everyone else seems to love them. But something just doesn’t connect for me; it’s not that I object to cynicism, necessarily, but it annoys me how the Coens are too cynical to even own up to the consequences of their own cynicism.
Seeing that Alex Cox film the other day reminded me of other recent films which, from my point of view, OUGHT to be recognized as great cult films but which unaccountably aren’t. Here’s a short list (undoubtably, I am leaving things out, but here are some that come to mind immediately, in addition to Cox’s Revengers Tragedy):
These are all astonishing films which almost nobody has seen, and which have yet to get anything like the recognition they deserve; not even the underground following of, say, Donnie Darko.
Seeing that Alex Cox film the other day reminded me of other recent films which, from my point of view, OUGHT to be recognized as great cult films but which unaccountably aren’t. Here’s a short list (undoubtably, I am leaving things out, but here are some that come to mind immediately, in addition to Cox’s Revengers Tragedy). These are all astonishing films which almost nobody has seen, and which have yet to get anything like the recognition they deserve; not even the underground following of, say, Richard Kelly’s brilliant Donnie Darko.
Alex Cox is mostly known for just one film, his first, Repo Man. But in fact, he has been making superb, innovative films for two decades now, mostly outside Hollywood, and without access to Hollywood funding. Many of his films are not well distributed and hard to see, but among the ones I’ve seen, I certainly think that Sid and Nancy, Walker, and El Patrullero, at the very least, are major works. To their number can now be added Cox’s latest work, Revengers Tragedy. This film is a contemporary staging – set in grimy Liverpool – of the Jacobean play of that name by Thomas Middleton. Murder, rape, incest, fratricide, revenge, venality, corruption, and grotesquerie (poisoned skulls!) are the order of the day; Middleton’s vision translates well to a contemporary world of grimy slums and fashionable clubs. Cox’s direction is always visually inventive, with fluid camera movement, odd framings, and unexpected cuts and inserts. The soundtrack is mostly pounding dance music, together with a wide variety of modes of speech, from Middleton’s blank verse to British working-class slang to the formal, standardized language of media and political pronouncements. The film as a whole is both kaleidoscopic and subtle, and it really does manage to convey the tone of the play, at once grimly nihilistic and absurd.
Alex Cox is mostly known for just one film, his first, Repo Man. But in fact, he has been making superb, innovative films for two decades now, mostly outside Hollywood, and without access to Hollywood funding. Many of his films are not well distributed and hard to see, but among the ones I’ve seen, I certainly think that Sid and Nancy, Walker, and El Patrullero, at the very least, are major works. To their number can now be added Cox’s latest work, Revengers Tragedy. This film is a contemporary (or rather, near-future) staging – set in a postapocalyptic, grimy Liverpool – of the Jacobean play of that name by Thomas Middleton. Murder, rape, incest, fratricide, suicide, revenge, venality, corruption, and grotesquerie (poisoned skulls!) are the order of the day; Middleton’s vision translates well to a contemporary world of grimy slums and fashionable clubs. Cox’s direction is always visually inventive, with fluid camera movement, odd framings, and unexpected cuts and inserts. The soundtrack is mostly pounding dance music, together with a wide variety of modes of speech, from Middleton’s blank verse to British working-class slang to the formal, standardized language of media and political pronouncements. The film as a whole is both kaleidoscopic and subtle, and it really does manage to convey the tone of the play, at once grimly nihilistic and absurd.
I finally got to see The Wicker Man, a British cult film from 1973 with a checkered release history, which was quite difficult to see until it was finally released (in cut form) on video and DVD in 2001. It’s a clever and effective ultra-low-budget horror thriller about a Scottish island where the inhabitants observe the old pagan customs, up to and including human sacrifice to propitiate the gods after a poor harvest. The protagonist is an uptight cop from the mainland, a devout Christian, who comes to investigate the alleged disappearance of a young girl, and is shocked and scandalized by the islanders’ sinful ways. The mood could be described as low-key delirious, with scenes ranging from hilariously kitschy (especially Biritt Eklund’s nude dance scene!) to genuinely creepy, to…. I’m not quite sure what to call Christopher Lee’s amazingly weird performance as Laird of the island and leader of the pagan cult: it’s sort of low-key demented and blandly cheerful at once. There are lots of other eccentric performances, and though the culminating Mayday pagan ceremony is a bit lethargic, the final plot twist is well staged and delightfully perverse. All in all, I was glad to finally see this film.
I finally got to see The Wicker Man, a British cult film from 1973 with a checkered release history, which was quite difficult to see until it was finally released (in cut form) on video and DVD in 2001. It’s a clever and effective ultra-low-budget horror thriller about a Scottish island where the inhabitants observe the old pagan customs, up to and including human sacrifice to propitiate the gods after a poor harvest. The protagonist is an uptight cop from the mainland, a devout Christian, who comes to investigate the alleged disappearance of a young girl, and is shocked and scandalized by the islanders’ sinful ways. The mood could be described as low-key delirious, with scenes ranging from hilariously kitschy (especially Biritt Eklund’s nude dance scene!) to genuinely creepy, to…. I’m not quite sure what to call Christopher Lee’s amazingly weird performance as Laird of the island and leader of the pagan cult: it’s sort of low-key demented and blandly cheerful at once. There are lots of other eccentric performances, and though the culminating Mayday pagan ceremony is a bit lethargic, the final plot twist is well staged and delightfully perverse. All in all, I was glad to finally see this film.
Bruiser is the only film that the great George Romero has been able to make in the last ten years. It’s about a man who lets everyone use him as a doormat, until one day he wakes up and finds himself without a face – there’s nothing but a blank mask. He goes on a revenge spree, killing his bitchy wife, his alleged best buddy who has ripped him off, and everyone else who has betrayed him, ending with his evil, sexist, exploitative, self-aggrandizing boss. The film is psychologically tense and intense, and especially delicious in its sarcastic portrayal of corporate culture; though it doesn’t quite have the allegorical richness and resonance of Romero’s best films (among which I would include, besides the Living Dead trilogy, Martin and Monkey Shines). But even this lesser effort shows what a brilliant director Romero is. It is sad, and a telling symptom of the general rottenness of the film industry today, that he has gotten so few opportunities to direct films under his own control in the last decade and a half.
Bruiser is the only film that the great George Romero has been able to make in the last ten years. It’s about a man who lets everyone use him as a doormat, until one day he wakes up and finds himself without a face – there’s nothing but a blank mask. He goes on a revenge spree, killing his bitchy wife, his alleged best buddy who has ripped him off, and everyone else who has betrayed him, ending with his evil, sexist, exploitative, self-aggrandizing boss. The film is visually striking (in a nicely overwrought sort of way), psychologically tense and intense, and especially delicious in its sarcastic portrayal of corporate culture. All in all, though, it doesn’t quite have the allegorical richness and resonance of Romero’s best films (among which I would include, besides the Living Dead trilogy, Martin and Monkey Shines). But even this lesser effort shows what a brilliant director Romero is. It is sad, and a telling symptom of the general rottenness of the film industry today, that he has gotten so few opportunities to direct films under his own control in the last decade and a half.