No Country for Miller's Crossing, Pt. 2

This is the second post on my weekend viewing of Miller's Crossing and No Country for Old Men.

Fast-forward to Sunday afternoon, I still had an itch to watch a decent film and I vaguely remembered Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead was playing at the Brea Edwards. So I show I up, but BTDKYD wasn’t playing. In its stead was No Country for Old Men. Should I take the risk? As the old adage goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Shame on me.

I invited my buddy Brandon to come along and together we saw the trailer for Michael Haneke’s remake of his own film Funny Games. The trailer made Haneke out to be the next Kubrick with its parallels to the trailer for A Clockwork Orange. You can judge for yourself by watching this and this.

So the film begins with shots of the vast, barren West Texan landscape. In a voice-over, Tommy Lee Jones muses about the good old days when being a sheriff afforded more opportunities to be a hero and wonders what the sheriffs back then would do in the face of crime these days (the film takes place in the early 1980s).

I forgot to mention that the visuals also follow the process of the rising of the sun. The sun isn’t captured per se, but more light enters the landscape with each succeeding shot. The presence of a visual metaphor, especially one as poetic as this, in a Coen brother’s film is surprising to say the least. I think I’m in for a treat.

And I was.

"No Country for Old Men has done for the Coen brothers what Eastern Promises did for Dave Cronenberg, it heralded their claim to fame as legitimate filmmakers. With both filmmakers, there was a certain fetishizing of details that marred their previous works. As if they fell into the trap of not so much the joy of making a film, but instead the self-indulgence of it.

All that’s changed. Their attention to detail has now been appropriated for the sole purpose of telling the Truth. Not to say that these films are flawless, but that in a sense, they have become more pure in intent. I for one am looking forward to their next films, but a part of me still wonders if these recent successes were more products of good writing than directorial skill. Cormac McCarthy did win the Pulitzer Prize after all, but then again I need only think of the job Billy Bob Thornton did with All the Pretty Horses to lavish praise on the Coens.

TO READ THE FULL POST WITH COMMENTS, CLICK HERE

No Country for Miller's Crossing, Pt. 1

This will be the first of two posts on my weekend viewing of the Coen brother's Miller's Crossing and No Country for Old Men.

In anticipation of the Coen brother’s newest offering, No Country For Old Men, I Netflixed their 1990 violent equivalent, Miller’s Crossing, last week. Maybe it was the image of a hat lying in the middle of a road that intrigued me most, but having already seen Fargo, MC seemed like the perfect precursor to NCFOM.

Boy was my mouth open. You got me Coen brothers, you got me. I forgot I didn’t like you. Here I was sitting down on a cloudy Saturday afternoon, ready for a thought-provoking genre piece, (something along the lines of The Killers or Touchez Pas Au Grisbi) but instead got this immature posturing heap of rubbish.

Now I remember why I don’t like the Coen brothers. They don’t know what they’re talking (er, filming) about. Theirs is a cinema of appearance, providing an illusion of the truth, but not the T-r-u-t-h itself. Sure they’ll put in certain idiosyncratic details, but to no end. To them a film is a checklist. They have no understanding of simple narrative causality.

Case in point, the film’s opening scene begins with a slow pull out from a close up of a glass being filled with ice and whiskey. The sound of the ice cracking was a nice touch; I’m ready for some hat in the road. Uh oh, what’s this? The camera pulls out to a cut? No new information? Why even pull out? What?

So there’s this fat, bald guy saying something about having ethics when fixing a fight, the camera's zooming in. You can assert that the whiskey shot wasn’t his perspective, yet why the zoom in? Okay, fine, so maybe we’re watching someone else’s perspective of this fat bald guy, maybe it’s even the same perspective that the whiskey shot belongs to. Spoke too soon, it’s yet another non sequitur.

This time it’s an old man calmly listening to the fat man’s tirade. Here comes the owner of the whiskey shot walking into the background. There’s this heated exchange about so-and-so not letting so-and-so get bigger than he wants, yadda-yadda-yadda. The fat bald man leaves. So I ask, what was the purpose of that scene?

Given the opening whiskey shot, I am to presume that the film will be told from the guy pouring the drink’s perspective, which is the henchman to the calm old man. What relevance did the scene have to the henchman or the henchman to the scene? None. The Coen brothers didn’t even bother to shoot his reaction to what was going on. Why put that scene in the film?

As if to save the scene or probably just to connect it to the next, there’s this exchange between the calm old man and our protagonist where a gambling debt is alluded to and the old man offers to pay it off. Our hero declines, an obvious attempt by the Coens to instill some sort of nobility in him, but without any context who’s to say?

To tell you the truth, I slept through the rest of the film. I’m sure maybe there was some mild foreshadowing going on, that the fat bald guy was to have some role in the plot and I think I stayed awake long enough to see that our hero was sleeping with the boss’s lady, but that still doesn’t say much.

A film is not a checklist. You cannot drop plot details like you’re scattering seed, just hoping something will stick and grow in the minds of the audience. People can tell when you don’t know what you’re doing. Maybe you can fool the philistines with your appearance of a film with all its genre conventions wrapped neatly in a bow, but anyone who knows knows that film is medium of emotion, not a game of guess what the film’s doing.

TO READ THE FULL POST WITH COMMENTS, CLICK HERE

JP at Vienna 2007

"There are no genres in cinema, only multiple polarities (fiction, documentary, diary, experimental, essay) between which every film finds its own balance and invents its own machine." 

Retrospective & Lecture Notes from Vienna 2007

Curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin

A cooperation with the Austrian Filmmuseum, from October 1 to 31.

The film essay as a thought

The film essay is a strange beast. To simply define it as this form that foregrounds a voice and sketches a persona falls short. The essay is rumination in Nietzsche's sense of the word, the meandering of an intelligence that tries to multiply the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or has been elected by). It is surplus, drifts, ruptures, ellipses, and double-backs. It is, in a word, thought, but because it is film it is thought that turns to emotion and back to thought. The strange thing is that as such it flirts with genres (documentary; pamphlet; fiction; diary…you name them) but never attaches itself to one. It flirts with a range of aesthetics but attaches itself to none.

"Termite Art" /vs/ "White Elephant Art"
It is both in form and content, unruliness itself, "termite art" and not "white Elephant art". I am, of course, borrowing from Manny Farber, and borrowing wholesale. Listen to Farber, and forget he might just be speaking about Laurel and Hardy, the words stick even tighter to the film essayists: "They seem to have no ambitions toward gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything...The most inclusive description of [their] art is that, termite-like it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement."

The origins of cinema
The film essay might well be cinema's last irreducible. You find it, arguably, at the origins of cinema with A Corner in Wheat (1909), but a few years later Griffith laments the fact that cinema has turned away from filming "the rustle of the wind in the branches of the trees". Twenty years and ten days that shook the world pass, and you see it triumphant in Vertov's Chelovek s kinoapparatom (1929) but a few trials later you feel the Stalinist boot heavier by the day on its neck in Entuziazm - Simfoniya Donbassa 1931) and Tri pesni o Lenine (1934). You think it is done and over with when the oppressiveness of commercial cinema rules, but it reappears under the guise of Straub, Huillet's Trop tôt, trop tard (1981), Marker's Sans soleil (1983) or Godard's Puissance de la parole (1988). As soon as you wonder if it is after all just an ubër western mode, it becomes Asian with Oshima's Tokyo senso sengo hiwa (1970), Tahimik's Mababangong bangungot (1977) or Weerasethakul's Dogfar nai mae marn (2000). And when you want to keep it there it bounces back to the Middle East or South America…

The essay is haunting cinema
This is, of course, a fairy tale hurriedly told to infuriate academics and critics alike, and they'll accuse me, once again, of confusing everything. One fact remains though: however dire the circumstance, the essay remains alive in the margins, an Id that haunts cinema. It is never more alive than when the times are more repressive and the dominant aesthetics occupy more squarely the middle of the road. In short, it might just be a perfect time to think about it.
(Jean-Pierre Gorin)

Here are some notes on a lecture he gave:
1. There are no genres in cinema, only multiple polarities (fiction, documentary, diary, experimental, essay) between which every film finds its own balance and invents its own machine.

2. Any film worthy of the name is a machine, with its functions, its dysfunctions, its own operations. The interest of a film does not lie in its message or in its story in the literary sense, but in the operations it executes, in the articulations it keeps making and unmaking between form and meaning.

3. What sets the essay apart is its ability to unveil its own operation and articulations, more so than its subject or contents. Thus way, the image attains a special status in the essay: "it doesn't pass but it revisits itself, resisting its own temporal nature, its own passing," as Gorin writes in the catalogue that accompanies the retrospective. He also states that the essay is a form of energy, the energy of the termite, of an insect always busy digging and breaking through barriers, "an energy that constantly redefines the practice of framing, editing, mixing, freeing these from their habitual allegiance to genres."

4. Based on the kinds of operations they execute, films can be divided into two broad categories: those that tend toward unity (of message, of form) and those that try to divide, to propagate division and a dialectic - of the image, of ideas, procedures, and operations.

TO READ THE FULL POST WITH COMMENTS, CLICK HERE

A one and a two...

This is how the perfect human dances...

TO READ THE FULL POST WITH COMMENTS, CLICK HERE

Is this the kula?

TO READ THE FULL POST WITH COMMENTS, CLICK HERE