The Pinocchio Theory

Kill Bill is gorgeous and ice-cold. Pure formalism. Where Tarantino’s earlier films were filled with humanity, with unforgettable characters and genius dialog, Kill Bill reduces these to an absolute minimum. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the pure kinetic beauty of the fight scenes. That is to say, Kill Bill is to Pulp Fiction as Kubrick is to Howard Hawks. In fairness, Kill Bill never feels anal or constipated the way all of Kubrick’s films do. Nor is Tarantino doggedly repetitive, the way Kubrick insists on being.
All the set-ups, all the elements of cinematic form in Kill Bill are fantastic: the decors, the camera angles, the editing of the fight scenes are so brilliant that they reveal in comparison how lame and unimaginative nearly all other English-language action cinema is. Even Lord of the Rings, powerful and lyrical as it is in bringing to life its (admittedly) dubious source material, can’t hold a candle to Kill Bill in terms of sheer visual inventiveness.
As for the citations and allusions: I got the sense that nearly everything in the film was sampled from one or another obscure samurai or martial arts film that I don’t remember or (more likely) haven’t seen. The effect was like the best hip hop: the film is rich in its web of references, and this works even if you don’t know what the references are to.
But Kill Bill‘s formal mastery and meta-cinematic referentiality comes at a price. Near the very start of the film we read the title: “Revenge is always best served cold” (which Tarantino, with characteristic cinephile in-joke wit, tags as an “old Klingon proverb”). And this story of Uma Thurman’s revenge is indeed served cold. The film is so utterly devoid of emotion it feels reptilian. (Perhaps I am slandering reptiles?). The fight scenes are awe-inspiring, but they have absolutely none of the sense of fun that makes Tarantino’s models, the Hong Kong fight scenes, so exhilarating. Nor is there any of the sense of fatality that imbues Leone’s (and others’) spaghetti Westerns, another obvious source of Tarantino’s iconography.
Even Tarantino’s racial obsessions are cut to the bare minimum. Uma Thurman gets the people of color out of the way in Volume One, killing Vivica Fox and Lucy Liu; in Volume 2, to be released next year, she will get to go after the white villains, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, and David Carradine (unless Carradine is a fake Asian, as he was in the frequently-Tarantino-referenced Kung Fu).
So Tarantino has proved that he is as brilliant a visual director as he is a writer/director; but at what cost?

Aki Kaurismaki‘s most recent film to date, The Man Without A Past (2002), is as good as anything he’s done. I’ve gradually come to realize that Kaurismaki’s films are inverted melodramas. That is to say, they are just as stylized and anti-naturalistic, just as reliant on music and decor, and just as socially critical as the melodramas of Douglas Sirk or anybody else; only Kaurismaki’s films are stylized by restraint, where traditional melodramas are stylized by excess. Kaurismaki’s deadpan minimalism – the way the characters are stoic and restrained, and do not indulge in any emotional displays; but also the way the scenes are framed, and the way the camera lingers on desolate details, or pauses while a melancholy song is being sung, but elides determinate action almost completely – all this formal restraint is almost Bressonian, although Kaurismaki is a humanist, and has none of Bresson’s spiritual severity.
The Man Without A Past is about a man (Markku Peltola) who suffers amnesia after he is attacked, and beaten severely on the head, by a trio of punks. He slowly and patiently rebuilds his life, although he has nothing. That’s just about it. As in more conventional melodrama, the characters are crushed and betrayed by social forces beyond their control — here, as usual in Kaurismaki, by the bureaucratic uncaringness of the state, and the ruthlessness of big Capital. But in this film, as in Floating Clouds and a very few others, Kaurismaki even allows himself a bit of hope at the end, which would be sentimental were it not so wry and understated. (Well, in a sense it is sentimental — this is a sort of melodrama, as I said, rather than Bressonian tragedy — but it is an entirely justified, “earned” sentimentality).
The film is devoid of the gorgeous youth you see in Hollywood movies. The female lead and love interest, as so often in Kaurismaki’s films, is played by the utterly sublime Kati Outinen, who has never looked so worn and haggard. (She’s older now – a decade older than she was in Match Factory Girl – and it shows).
Great soundtrack: the music is a mixture of 50s-ish rock (Finnish imitations) and more traditional melodies; usually a song is introduced diegetically, and then continues non-diegetically, which was neat.

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.