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8001
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 6:07pm
Subject: Re: Lola Montez Literature
I meant the cutdown of the Ophuls initially released here. I was
sure it was "Loves of..." Oh well, must have been the Ouzo.
8002
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 6:11pm
Subject: Re: Welles Screenings in NY/Tati
I believe the priest gag is in Vacances 2 - ie the first release
version, cut down from the festival version by lopping off the
beginning and end - but not in Vacances 3, the re-edit he did in
'62. But I couldn't swear it.
I think a clamor should go up across the land for Stefan's Tati
show to be presented publicly. Fascinating.
8003
From: Fred Camper
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 6:30pm
Subject: Re: LOLA MONTEZ literature, & Brakhage and Hitchcok, falling into the image
David E:
".... Lola and everything around her is in constant motion...."
David, thanks for the excellent insights. They also brought to mind one
of my favorite film teaching stories
In the fall of 1975, I taught one one-semester introductory film history
course at the William Paterson College of New Jersey, filling in for
Gregory Battcock. The seriousness with which the school took this course
is indicated by the fact that it met for two and a half hours a week,
including the movie. It had the reputation of being an easy course, a
"gut," and had 300 students. I realized early on that most of them would
never have seen a subtitled film, so for the first of the three
"foreign" subtitled films I showed, I gave a short talk on the language
problem, and the three way's of dealing it: Anthology's (no titles, just
a written plot synopsis), dubbing, and subtitles, and explained why I
was showing subtitled prints and what the problems were of watching a
film with subtitles.
The second of the three foreign films I showed was Lola Montes, in a
16mm print -- I'm trying to remember if it was anamorphic (which I think
it was) or masked (which in 16mm wasn't a much worse solution than
anamorphic). That one student obviously missed the previous week's talk
on subtitles was evident from her paper. The assignment was to choose a
technique in a film and relate it to the plot or theme: "the high angle
shots express the main character's dread," that sort of thing. She wrote
something like this: "The technique I want to choose in Lola Montes was
the printed titles at the bottom of the screen. Trying to follow the
movie and look at the images and read the subtitles was very confusing,
just like Lola was confused; she never could decide between all of those
men she went with."
This might have been appropriate were the film Yvonne Rainer's
autobiographical "Film About a Woman Who..."
About falling into the image as a death metaphor, this has a great
realization in Brakhage's one-minute meditation on suicide, "Cannot
Exist," which uses optical zooms. Some of the same effect can be seen in
"Black Ice," which is on the DVD, and was inspired by and depicts
metaphorically a fall Brakhage took on some black ice. But "Vertigo,"
too (which Brakhage hated) sets up instabilities in each image; the
actual fall is much more interesting when connected with the space of
the whole film than as an image alone.
- Fred
8004
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 6:44pm
Subject: Re: Re: Lola Montez Literature
I've seen it to. It was my first exposure to the film
-- on late night TV. It's part of the reason why
finally seeing a full version in '63 was such a shock.
--- hotlove666 wrote:
> Am I the only person who has seen The Loves of Lola
> Montes
> here? I was in the habit of sitting up late in my
> college's tv room
> with a guy named Ted George, drinking Ouzo, and up
> it came -
> chronological, panned and scanned, and frighteningly
> brief >
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8005
From: Jess Amortell
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 7:07pm
Subject: Re: Lola Montez Literature
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote: > > NYers of
> that era: Was there anything about it in ON FILM? THE
> THOUSAND EYES?
Indeed, there's an extremely insightful article in ON FILM, by Gerald A. Joss.
I'd never realized that the "Sins of (or against) Lola Montez" apparently included being shown in b&w -- according to the Tag Gallagher article.
8006
From: L C
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 7:11pm
Subject: Re: LOLA MONTEZ literature
In french Claude Beylie wrote a book on " Max Ophuls " Lherminier, Paris 1984. He also published in jan 1969 in "Avant-scène cinéma" of which he was the editor a complete "découpage" and there might be many articles in Positif about Ophuls's masterpiece.
Link between Tavernier, Ophuls and Le Chanois : Jean- Paul Dreyfus who was Prinzip in Ophuls' "De Mayerling à Sarajevo" became known as Jean- Paul Le Chanois during the war and part of his bio is fictionnalized in Tavernier's "Laissez passer"
Luc Chaput
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8007
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 7:31pm
Subject: Lola Montez fun facts
New Yorkers may or may not know that they can visit Lola's grave in
Brooklyn. She was living in Hell's Kitchen at the time of her death.
Apparently there is some difficulty determining the real story of Lola
Montez, partly because she wrote a fairly imaginative memoir that
provided her historians with lots of falsehoods to promulgate. There
are many accounts of her life on the Internet, and many of the incidents
in the film seem to be taken from Lola's real life or from the legends
about her. But I didn't run across a single mention of the circus in
any of these accounts. I wonder if the circus was created for the film?
There are scholarly biographies in print that could probably answer
that question. - Dan
8008
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 7:55pm
Subject: Re: Lola Montez fun facts
The circus was created for the film. It's a complete
Ophulsian invention.
The real Lola Montez did hit the lecture tour circuit
-- selling beauty products and telling women how to be
more alluring. But not a circus.
--- Dan Sallitt wrote:
> New Yorkers may or may not know that they can visit
> Lola's grave in
> Brooklyn. She was living in Hell's Kitchen at the
> time of her death.
>
> Apparently there is some difficulty determining the
> real story of Lola
> Montez, partly because she wrote a fairly
> imaginative memoir that
> provided her historians with lots of falsehoods to
> promulgate. There
> are many accounts of her life on the Internet, and
> many of the incidents
> in the film seem to be taken from Lola's real life
> or from the legends
> about her. But I didn't run across a single mention
> of the circus in
> any of these accounts. I wonder if the circus was
> created for the film?
> There are scholarly biographies in print that
> could probably answer
> that question. - Dan
>
>
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8009
From: Craig Keller
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 8:02pm
Subject: Re: Lola Montez fun facts
> New Yorkers may or may not know that they can visit Lola's grave in
> Brooklyn. She was living in Hell's Kitchen at the time of her death.
Whereabouts in Brooklyn?
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
8010
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 8:12pm
Subject: The Story of the Weeping Camel
OT (i.e. not on Lola Montes) - anyone catch this one at Toronto?
8011
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 9:07pm
Subject: Re: Lola Montez fun facts
>>New Yorkers may or may not know that they can visit Lola's grave in
>>Brooklyn. She was living in Hell's Kitchen at the time of her death.
>
> Whereabouts in Brooklyn?
Green-Wood Cemetery, 500 25th Street, Brooklyn - section 8, lot 12730.
It's a little south of Prospect Park - I think the neighborhood would be
called Sunset Park. - Dan
8012
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 9:09pm
Subject: Re: The Story of the Weeping Camel
> OT (i.e. not on Lola Montes) - anyone catch this one at Toronto?
No. It had fairly good word of mouth, though. It's about to play in
NYC at New Directors. - Dan
8013
From: Jess Amortell
Date: Wed Mar 3, 2004 9:41pm
Subject: Re: Falling POV
The Ophuls Centenary issue of CineAction, no. 59 (2002), has an article (which I haven't read), "Falling Women and Fallible Narrators," by Douglas Pye, centering on this parallel in Le Plaisir and Lola M.
8014
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Thu Mar 4, 2004 2:22am
Subject: The Story of the Weeping Camel
TSotWC was shown at the Palm Springs International FF in January
and was shown on the last day as an "audience favorite" also.
TSotWC is remarkable for "catching" the difficult birth of an albino
camel who is subsequently 'rejected' by the mother camel. The
filmmakers could not have scripted a more interesting natural event.
There are also some family interactions and 'city folk' events.
It is interesting but having studied 'animal behavior' in the past, I
would have no need to see it again. Others might.
The really remarkable thing is the difficult birth / maternal rejection
being caught on film. On second thought, I might want to 'study'
how the director integrates the stories.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > OT (i.e. not on Lola Montes) - anyone catch this one at Toronto?
>
> No. It had fairly good word of mouth, though. It's about to play in
> NYC at New Directors. - Dan
8015
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu Mar 4, 2004 2:51am
Subject: Re: The Story of the Weeping Camel
Just got a screening invite for this here in L.A.
Sounds fascinating. Thanks!
--- Elizabeth Anne Nolan wrote:
> TSotWC was shown at the Palm Springs International
> FF in January
> and was shown on the last day as an "audience
> favorite" also.
>
> TSotWC is remarkable for "catching" the difficult
> birth of an albino
> camel who is subsequently 'rejected' by the mother
> camel. The
> filmmakers could not have scripted a more
> interesting natural event.
>
> There are also some family interactions and 'city
> folk' events.
>
> It is interesting but having studied 'animal
> behavior' in the past, I
> would have no need to see it again. Others might.
>
> The really remarkable thing is the difficult birth /
> maternal rejection
> being caught on film. On second thought, I might
> want to 'study'
> how the director integrates the stories.
>
>
>
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt
> wrote:
> > > OT (i.e. not on Lola Montes) - anyone catch this
> one at Toronto?
> >
> > No. It had fairly good word of mouth, though.
> It's about to play in
> > NYC at New Directors. - Dan
>
>
__________________________________
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Yahoo! Search - Find what you’re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com
8016
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Thu Mar 4, 2004 4:31pm
Subject: CORRIGAN's SHORT GUIDE TO WRITING ABOUT FILM
If anyone on this list recommended Corrigan's A SHORT GUIDE...
thanks. I think it will help me organize my thoughts on film.
Any one familiar with the book? Comments?
Any similar recommendations?
8017
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Thu Mar 4, 2004 4:36pm
Subject: NIGHT and FOG (regarding The Passion)
Last night I re-saw NIGHT and FOG and listened to Resnais' comments
for the first time (a CRITERION COLLECTION release).
Resnais said some thought the 30 minutes was too long because of
"too much violence." I think the 30 minutes was just the right
length and that the documentary shows tremendous restraint. A
perfect sort of visual narrative. I think I will next watch it
without sound, someday.
Resnais also said that one of the stills showed a French police
officerguarding deportees in a French city. He said he did not
notice the signature French cap (which I noted immediately and
wondered the where / what of). The French Commission demanded
a change which Resnais complied with by altering a wooden beam
so it would hid the police officer's cap in order to keep the 30
minute length, otherwisethe film would have been cut to 20 minutes.
(Apparently, the CC release is of the original showing the signature
French police cap.)
Too much violence and censorship have been around before.
8018
From: L C
Date: Thu Mar 4, 2004 5:00pm
Subject: Re: "The Story of the Weeping Camel".
I saw the movie at the "New Cinema and New Medias Festival" in Montréal in october where it won a mention by the Critics's jury http://www.fcmm.com/data/2003/?s=accueil&sub=palmares&l=en. I agree with Elizabeth Nolan's asessment. I suppose it was in Palm Springs as part of the Foreign Film Oscar section. There is a good article on it at http://www.fcmm.com/data/2003/?s=accueil&sub=palmares&l=en.http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=6909
Luc Chaput
From: "Elizabeth Anne Nolan"
Subject: The Story of the Weeping Camel
TSotWC was shown at the Palm Springs International FF in January
and was shown on the last day as an "audience favorite" also.
TSotWC is remarkable for "catching" the difficult birth of an albino
camel who is subsequently 'rejected' by the mother camel. The
filmmakers could not have scripted a more interesting natural event.
There are also some family interactions and 'city folk' events.
It is interesting but having studied 'animal behavior' in the past, I
would have no need to see it again. Others might.
The really remarkable thing is the difficult birth / maternal rejection
being caught on film. On second thought, I might want to 'study'
how the director integrates the stories.
---------------------------------
Yahoo! Mail : votre e-mail personnel et gratuit qui vous suit partout !
Créez votre Yahoo! Mail
Dialoguez en direct avec vos amis grâce à Yahoo! Messenger !
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
8019
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu Mar 4, 2004 5:05pm
Subject: Re: NIGHT and FOG (regarding The Passion)
I think the film "Shoah" constitutes a pretty eloquent argument against
ever using footage of concentration camps and corpses, or so I try to
argue at http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Lanzmann.html By constructing a
nine and a half hour documentary about something that's never shown,
Lanazmann represents the true meaning of the Shoah not as bodies (which
really don't have much to do with the living people that once inhabited
them) but as an absence. It seems to me an almost immutable principle of
cinema that the viewer tends to identify, in a positive sense, with the
things seen -- rooting for the bad guy being the common phenomenon. So
while Resnais's corpse footage certainly causes revulsion at the
inhumanity of it all, at the same time the viewer of corpses is put in
the position of the Nazi murderers who created them, and who are their
only true owners. The film was certainly appropriate for a time when
people wanted to forget all this, and his montage serves as an intrusive
reminder, but the power of intrusive Shoah footage is I think more
profoundly evoked in the great Nuremberg movie-watching scene in
Fuller's "Verboten," in the cutting between the images and the boy's
face which represents as only Fuller can a clash of conscoiusnessess,
the way violence represents an impingement on identity.
- Fred
8020
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Mar 4, 2004 6:07pm
Subject: Re: NIGHT AND FOG (Regarding "The Passion")
Fred, I'd say this is a matter of personal taste. There have been
many good films about the Shoah, not just one, and there are many
ways of showing or not showing certain things, not just one. As far
as I can see, the only person who wants to "own" the Shoah is Claude
Lanzmann, whose claims in that regard, like much else about the man -
not the film - are megalomaniacal. To quote a friend, if the belief
that he is the only one who has a right to address the subject is
what it took for him to make the film, so be it: bad or mad people
make good films all the time, and the badness or madness seems to
help sometimes. What did you think of Sobibor?
8021
From: Jess Amortell
Date: Thu Mar 4, 2004 6:27pm
Subject: Feingold on "Johnny Guitar"
Consider this comic relief, I guess ... but ... as a reminder of the continuing gulf between auteurists and the rest of the cultured world, here's the esteemed Michael Feingold's Village Voice "Short List" blurb for that new JOHNNY GUITAR musical (and I probably wouldn't have given this a second thought if it had appeared in, say, the New Yorker):
"Among Hollywood's most perfect pieces of unintentional camp, Nicholas Ray's hilariously lamebrained 1954 western, about a woman saloon-keeper and her cattle rancher nemesis, has accrued a giant cult following. Will this new Off-Broadway musical version be able to recapture the stifled laughter and goggle-eyed amazement that greet screenings of the original? The show's lead producers go by the name of Definite Maybe Productions, which tells you what they think."
I mean, whatever you think of JOHNNY GUITAR, is there anything in it, including the camp, that isn't intentional?
8022
From: George Robinson
Date: Thu Mar 4, 2004 9:39pm
Subject: Re: Feingold on "Johnny Guitar"
If this is from the Spring preview, the notes are not by Feingold -- he has
too much taste for this -- but are credited to someone else whose name I
didn't recognize.
g
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jess Amortell"
To:
Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2004 1:27 PM
Subject: [a_film_by] Feingold on "Johnny Guitar"
> Consider this comic relief, I guess ... but ... as a reminder of the
continuing gulf between auteurists and the rest of the cultured world,
here's the esteemed Michael Feingold's Village Voice "Short List" blurb for
that new JOHNNY GUITAR musical (and I probably wouldn't have given this a
second thought if it had appeared in, say, the New Yorker):
>
> "Among Hollywood's most perfect pieces of unintentional camp, Nicholas
Ray's hilariously lamebrained 1954 western, about a woman saloon-keeper and
her cattle rancher nemesis, has accrued a giant cult following. Will this
new Off-Broadway musical version be able to recapture the stifled laughter
and goggle-eyed amazement that greet screenings of the original? The show's
lead producers go by the name of Definite Maybe Productions, which tells you
what they think."
>
> I mean, whatever you think of JOHNNY GUITAR, is there anything in it,
including the camp, that isn't intentional?
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
8023
From: Jess Amortell
Date: Thu Mar 4, 2004 10:54pm
Subject: Re: Feingold on "Johnny Guitar"
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "George Robinson" wrote:
> If this is from the Spring preview, the notes are not by Feingold -- he has
> too much taste for this -- but are credited to someone else whose name I
> didn't recognize.
No alas, it is from the Short List on p. 63 in the print edition and is signed: FEINGOLD
(long URL which probably won't work: http://www.villagevoice.com/choices/evening.php?eventID=46004&slcategory=theater&sldate=2004-03-04 )
8024
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Thu Mar 4, 2004 11:59pm
Subject: SHOAH PAPER CLIPS
I know of but have not seen SHOAH. Interesting sentence, befitting the
topic of discussion.
I can agree with your sentiments. I once commented on a lithograph of
patients on an children's orthopedic ward in past times for a medical
history journal. Conspicuously absent among all the immobilzing
slings and contraptions was the ubiquitous crutch, and the freedom
it offers. Absence is often more apparent than something blaring on the
screen
'Identification with things seen' seems much too strong. As a
medical student I was easily impressed that all the specimens I
saw in the pathology lab and autopsy rooms come from people...
something I think we sometimes forget.
Have you seen PAPER CLIPS?
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
> I think the film "Shoah" constitutes a pretty eloquent argument against
> ever using footage of concentration camps and corpses, or so I try to
> argue at http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Lanzmann.html By constructing a
> nine and a half hour documentary about something that's never shown,
> Lanazmann represents the true meaning of the Shoah not as bodies (which
> really don't have much to do with the living people that once inhabited
> them) but as an absence. It seems to me an almost immutable principle of
> cinema that the viewer tends to identify, in a positive sense, with the
> things seen -- rooting for the bad guy being the common phenomenon. So
> while Resnais's corpse footage certainly causes revulsion at the
> inhumanity of it all, at the same time the viewer of corpses is put in
> the position of the Nazi murderers who created them, and who are their
> only true owners. The film was certainly appropriate for a time when
> people wanted to forget all this, and his montage serves as an intrusive
> reminder, but the power of intrusive Shoah footage is I think more
> profoundly evoked in the great Nuremberg movie-watching scene in
> Fuller's "Verboten," in the cutting between the images and the boy's
> face which represents as only Fuller can a clash of conscoiusnessess,
> the way violence represents an impingement on identity.
>
> - Fred
8025
From: Richard Modiano
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 2:29am
Subject: Re: SHOAH PAPER CLIPS
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Elizabeth Anne Nolan"
wrote:
"Absence is often more apparent than something blaring on the
screen."
As I recall, the victims are never explicitly identified as Jews in
NIGHT AND FOG.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
"... the power of intrusive Shoah footage is I think more profoundly
evoked in the great Nuremberg movie-watching scene in
Fuller's "Verboten," in the cutting between the images and the boy's
face which represents as only Fuller can a clash of conscoiusnessess,
the way violence represents an impingement on identity."
In an informal question and answer session at the American
Cinematheque (when it was still using the Chaplin screening room at
the Raliegh Studio) Fuller said that he shot that Shoah footage
himself; it was the first film he ever shot. He also shot the
Remagen bridge footage too.
Richard
8026
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 3:09am
Subject: totally and unforgivably OT: global warming
Apologies around the list for waving the enviromental flag. I'm not
an environmentalist and I've got my fair share of ecologically unsound
habits, but recent news has shook me up a little.
Anybody scared shitless of the Pentagon's recent predictions that, if
man-made global warming doesn't cease and desist pretty soon, we're
pretty fucked? (Greenland ice sheet melts + other things that are
already in progress = Cessation of Gulf Stream = new ice age?)
It's so '80s, I know, I was there, I went from scared shitless to
eye-rolling dismissal (especially after the way CFC arisol cans
magically vanished from store shelves), but...
Frankly, it all seems new again. It's enough to make you go
eco-extremist.
-Jaime
p.s. This can be movie-related if we consider the upcoming Roland
Emmerich film, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.
8027
From: Frederick M. Veith
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 1:55am
Subject: Claude Lanzmann [was: Re: NIGHT AND FOG (Regarding "The Passion")]
I'm not sure I'd call it personal taste, but the point is well taken,
especially vis-a-vis Lanzmann's megalomania. I do think Shoah is quite a
remarkable achievement (and like Fred's essay on it), but have been
troubled by A Visitor from the Living and Tsahal (which is remarkable in a
way, but deeply disturbing and ambiguous in a way I've been unable to
fully make sense of on a single viewing). The more I look into it, the
less savory Lanzmann himself seems to be. I'm especially curious about
Pourquoi Israel which seems almost to have been suppressed (or at least
forgotten). I've never met anyone who's seen it. Written accounts are
scant and not especially informative. Has anyone here seen it? Care to
comment?
I have yet to catch up with Sobibor. What did you make of it Bill? And
what are some of the other good films about the Shoah you have in mind?
I'm with you in principle, but in practice much of what I've seen
(relatively limited) has been somewhat less than satisfactory.
Fred "not Camper" Veith
On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, hotlove666 wrote:
> Fred, I'd say this is a matter of personal taste. There have been
> many good films about the Shoah, not just one, and there are many
> ways of showing or not showing certain things, not just one. As far
> as I can see, the only person who wants to "own" the Shoah is Claude
> Lanzmann, whose claims in that regard, like much else about the man -
> not the film - are megalomaniacal. To quote a friend, if the belief
> that he is the only one who has a right to address the subject is
> what it took for him to make the film, so be it: bad or mad people
> make good films all the time, and the badness or madness seems to
> help sometimes. What did you think of Sobibor?
8028
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 5:00am
Subject: Re: totally and unforgivably OT: global warming
Well since The Bomb "Bombed" we've got to have
something new to be frightened of.
Time for a chorus of "Doomed Doomed Doomed" from "The
Golden Apple" by John LaTouche and Jerome Moross.
--- "Jaime N. Christley"
wrote:
> Apologies around the list for waving the
> enviromental flag. I'm not
> an environmentalist and I've got my fair share of
> ecologically unsound
> habits, but recent news has shook me up a little.
>
> Anybody scared shitless of the Pentagon's recent
> predictions that, if
> man-made global warming doesn't cease and desist
> pretty soon, we're
> pretty fucked? (Greenland ice sheet melts + other
> things that are
> already in progress = Cessation of Gulf Stream = new
> ice age?)
>
> It's so '80s, I know, I was there, I went from
> scared shitless to
> eye-rolling dismissal (especially after the way CFC
> arisol cans
> magically vanished from store shelves), but...
>
> Frankly, it all seems new again. It's enough to
> make you go
> eco-extremist.
>
> -Jaime
>
> p.s. This can be movie-related if we consider the
> upcoming Roland
> Emmerich film, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.
>
>
__________________________________
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Yahoo! Search - Find what you’re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com
8029
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 5:14am
Subject: Re: Claude Lanzmann [was: Re: NIGHT AND FOG (Regarding "The Passion")]
I haven't seen "Sobibor." I liked "A Visitor From the Living" OK but not
particularly as "art." That Lanzmann might be meglomaniacal should not
affect any assessment of his work, since we know that many great artists
are, or were, meglomaniacs. And to retreat to my base theoretical
position, I agree that anything can be good, or great, including a
tasteless Holocaust melodrama that misrepresents everything, though I've
not seen any examples of same. But I used to joke that it would take
something really awful both aesthetically and morally to get me to write
a negative review of an art exhibit by an unknown, and my example was
often "holocaust porn," though I didn't have a clear idea what that
might be. Then I saw some collaged photos by Boris Laurie that included
concentration camp images and naked women, and thought that in a
horrible way they were actually really good. I supposed it helped me in
announcing that opinion that he wasn't some art school punk but a Jewish
survivor of more than one Nazi camp. But still, anything can be good.
That said, I *do* think there is an important issue around the nature of
film imagery, and its psychological effect on the viewer, that "Shoah"
articulates beautifully and movingly. This is something that I've been
thinking about for years, and that goes back as well to the fact that
the alleged first film shows the filmmakers' employees leaving his
factory at the time of his choosing. The standard range of possessive
relationships between filmmaker and image, and between viewer and image,
is questioned rather profoundly in "Shoah."
- Fred
8030
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 7:07am
Subject: Re: SHOAH PAPER CLIPS
The stills show victims with the Star of David, as well as others, including
common criminals, those with deformities, and other defectives.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Modiano"
> wrote:
> As I recall, the victims are never explicitly identified as Jews in
> NIGHT AND FOG.
8032
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 7:28am
Subject: Claude Lanzmann [was: Re: NIGHT AND FOG (Regarding "The Passion")]
Some interesting comments Sacha Martinetti-Lévy recently made
on fr.cinema.discussion:
L'hypothèse de la singularité chez Lanzmann est de nature
politique. Je dirais même que ses arguments sont ceux de la
plus pure real politik. Il faut dire que l'Histoire juive
et la nécessité de sécuriser un territoire infiniment
complexe né d'ailleurs des pogromes et légitimé par la Shoah, ne
laisse pas beaucoup de marge de manoeuvre aux israéliens.
Lanzmann est un des piliers de la communication identitaire
juive. C'est ce qui rend entre autre si difficile le travail
des intellectuels et artisans de la paix. C'est un mythe
vivant. Mais un mythe qui n'est pas toujours à la
hauteur de la sagesse qu'on lui prête. Il dénoncera, lors
de la mort de l'enfant palestinien dans les bras de son
père à la frontière, télévisée mondialement, la manipulation
palestinienne. Il refusera l'amalgame des morts tziganes,
d'homosexuels et de francs-maçons. A ses yeux, seule la
spécificité du Peuple Juif peut engendrer la spécificité
de la Shoah. La seconde est la preuve de la première.
La vision est donc non humaniste, en spécifiant des
comportements, des intensités, des rôles. Comme si le
territoire hébreu répondait métaphoriquement dans les
menaces extérieures au territoire intérieur juif,
son âme en quelque sorte, en en dessinant les ennemis
métaphysiques, passés à la moulinette identitaire et
donc devenus religieux, le Bien contre le Mal.
Et c'est donc bien le Mal Absolu que cherche à rendre
au réel Lanzmann dans la transsubstantiation du témoignage.
Une sorte de messe inversée. Bâti sur un supplice comme la
catholique, mais un supplice collectif encore plus
insoutenable que la croix. Il convoque le Diable pour montrer
au plus près l'horreur de la Shoah, avec comme dit Todorov
la plus grande intensité dramatique. Mais aussi pour
convaincre de la réalité métaphysique qui crée
cette spécificité.
C'est pourquoi je disais que cela compliquait terriblement
le travail des artisans juifs à une paix improbable. Mais
je ne connais personnellement personne qui soit au fait
des enjeux stratégiques israéliens, et donc aucun
moyen de savoir pour de bon si cette real politik est justifiée au
niveau de la Raison d'état la plus urgente. La moindre
négociation politique, même au plan cantonal, érode en quelques
heures la naïveté la plus dense. Quant au secret des dieux...
The article "Juste des images" in the Feb. 2004 Cahiers is fairly
interesting. It quotes Lanzmann stating that if he found film
of Jews being killed at Auschwitz, he would destroy it -- which
seems at best a descent into mysticism -- and it quotes
Didi-Huberman's response, "L'image n'est ni rien ni tout...
N'étant rien d'absolu, elle n'en est pas moins cette impureté
nécessaire au savoir, à la mémoire et même a la pensée en général."
8033
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 9:57am
Subject: Re: NIGHT AND FOG
Fred, when I said "a matter of taste" I wasn't denigrating what
yours - you have GOOD taste. I was disagreeing, through you, with
Claude Lanzmann's well-known claims for his film, which I also like.
The issue is esthetics, rules for film artists, which, as you are
always the first to point out, are different from taste.
Let's take an example from Goya's Disasters of War: Engraving Number
37, "This Is Worse," which shows the corpse of a man whose arms have
been cut off, anally impaled on a tree branch whose sharp tip can be
seen poking up between his shoulders. His face is turned toward us.
Until people like Cheney and bin Laden stop declaring wars for profit
and political advantage, I think that "This Is Worse" needs to be
reproduced and seen as widely as possible.* It doesn't make me want
war - just the opposite. Same thing for racism: Night and Fog, with
its images of the corpses, needs to be shown regularly until racism
is extinguished in all its forms - including, I'm sorry to say, the
racism of Claude Lanzmann, described in the quote Paul reproduced,
which I wish was in English.
I still remember when I saw the corpse footage the first time as a
child: Judgement at Nuremberg broadcast live on Playhouse 90 - thanks
to Abby Mann, basically (the writer, and great forgotten Jewish tv
radical: Skag, King etc.). I didn't feel I owned the bodies - I felt
horror and pity. I didn't identify with the killers - I averted my
eyes.
Hitchcock made a documentary to be shown to the Germans after the war
called Memory of the Camps. It was never shown, and the last reel was
suppressed - maybe destroyed - because it referred to the fact that
Auschwitz was built for I. G. Farben. Godard, whom I'm quoting when I
say Night and Fog needs to be shown once a year everywhere, shows
footage of the camps in Histoire(s) du cinema. He spoke highly of
Marvin Chomsky's miniseries Holocaust in 1978 when it aired on French
tv; Sylvie Pierre recently told me she still likes it - I'm less of a
fan, but I like Schindler's List, until it goes dumb at the end. Sam
Fuller made Verboten, but he also filmed Falkanau with a camera his
mother sent him and allowed the images to be reproduced in a
documentary made before his death.
Memories of the Shoah riddle cinematic culture, from Night and Fog to
the occasional silly old Twilight Zone episode on the subject. All
hopefully do their bit in preventing another one - Lanzmann is wrong
to claim a monopoly for his film. And when he tries to claim
uniqueness for what happened to the Jews in Germany, he contributes
his mite to people's blindness to genocide happening now: the cover
of the new Cahiers is a grim sub-Goya painting of the Killing Fields
of Cambodia, I'm happy to say.
This doesn't mean I like Seven Beauties or The Night Porter.
*Goya apparently modelled his engraving on sketches he had made of
the Belvedere Apollo in Rome. The message: To hell with esthetics -
this really happened!
8034
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 3:30pm
Subject: Claude Nougaro est Mort
http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=183645
I saw him perform live in Paris in '88, but I wasn't
aware of his connection to the nouvelle vague.
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8035
From: Frederick M. Veith
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 3:34pm
Subject: Re: Claude Lanzmann
I didn't mean to imply anything so crude as to suggest that megalomania
leads to bad art (or even diminishes good art). I think Bill's post
handled this nicely insofar as he suggested that in the case of Shoah, it
may even have been salutary. In any event, I like plenty of art by
unsavory artists and, while megalomania seems a cogent charge, I only ever
took it as shorthand in the first place. My own concerns are ultimately as
much formal and ideological. I don't however think his personality is
entirely irrelevant to either of these, not least because of his presence
in his films. In A Visitor from the Living, lacking the mediating
structure of Shoah, I had the overwhelming sense that I thought the
material was more interesting and nuanced than Lanzmann himself, i.e., I
think his personality as interviewer impinged negatively on the material.
This impression only deepened with his remarks about the film.
Tsahal is a whole 'nother kettle of fish, where he seemed to be applying
the same sort of methodology he deployed in Shoah to subject matter which
was less amenable to the approach (indeed which seemed to suggest a
horrifying equivalancy), i.e., the Israeli army and its many wars. I think
what I took from the film (which again, I think is quite impressive in a
way) at the time was quite possibly precisely contrary to Lanzmann's
intended effect, which I would suggest may even be reprehensible,
although, on a single viewing at least, this was far from clear to me. On
the other hand, the more I read of Lanzmann's remarks, the less ambiguous
it seems.
I'm relatively certain that Lanzmann and I part ways on his position
vis-a-vis Israel. I don't think it's disingenuous to link this to his
broader politic of representation, as he seems so eager to do so himself.
Lacking a precise view of the matter, I tend to identify his position
here with that of Les Temps modernes. (Perhaps this has changed under
Lanzmann, but on this position as articulated under Sartre, see Edward
Said's "My Encounter with Sartre", London Review of Books, 1 June 2000.)
That two of his first three films (before he started recycling Shoah), one
of which seems to have disappeared into a black hole, deal explicitly with
this question seems to me to bear on his assessment as an artist. If
I'm reading Paul's helpful post correctly (I've only just skimmed it
and my French is shoddy), it speaks to some of these concerns and
connects them back to the broader question of representation.
So I'm still very much interested in whether anyone has seen Pourquoi
Israel and what's going on in Sobibor, as well as the quite distinct
question of other praiseworthy representations of the Shoah.
Fred.
8036
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 4:46pm
Subject: Re: Claude Lanzmann
I think that the point I take from Lanzmann, against showing certain
things, needn't depend on his politics. I don't agree with his politics.
I also don't like the fact that you would never learn from "Shoah" that
in addition to Jews, hundreds of thousands of Romany, many disabled
people, and thousands of homosexuals were murdered by the Germans, and
I've always regretted that my critique didn't include this complaint.
(But soon I will link my Web version of my critique to this discussion!)
I cannot support a state that has twice elected a mass murderer (see:
Saba and Shatila) as its leader any more than I can support anti-Israel
terrorism. And because "Shoah" is against showing certain things, that
doesn't mean other artists might not make great -- and morally valid --
art that shows the things "Shoah" excludes, in the same sense that
Bresson's opposition to using trained actors is a laudable and
fascinating theoretical argument that illuminates his films and other
films as well, but does not exclude the possibility that Jayne
Mansfield's performance is an important and successful part of "Will
Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (I explicitly mean to include the delightful
little squeal she emits on hearing the words "titular head of the
company") or that Dorothy Malone is key in "Written on the Wind" (I'm
choosing extreme "acting" cases, obviously). The line of thinking that
"Shoah" is a part of goes back to the Old Testament's prohibition
against graven images, as J. Hoberman pointed out when the film was
first released, and to Adorno's famous "After Auschwitz, it is
impossible to write poetry" dictum (which he recanted years later on the
grounds that good poetry had been written) and also informs the art of
Christian Boltanski. I wouldn't apply this line of thinking to Goya's
prints, but I guess I do think it applies to "Night and Fog," in the
sense that that film's use of the corpse imagery seems crude to me, and
the intercutting with fields over-obvious. Which doesn't mean that I
don't think it should not be shown where it's needed and helpful.
It's worth pointing out that Lanzmann includes some of his own
obnoxiousness, and as I say in my article his own lies, within the body
of "Shoah" itself. If someone would like to post a translation of the
French that Paul posted, that would be great, but it makes sense to me
that Lanzmann would claim some kind of exclusivity, for his film argues
that there *is* only one correct way of treating this subject. That
doesn't mean that there *is* only one correct way, any more than
Bresson's films "mean" that you can't use actors.
I haven't seen "Tsahal," though a friend who loved "Shoah" echoed Fred
V.'s objections to it, nor "Paper Clips." I don't defend the blowing up
of homes or other activities of the Israeli army either, though it's
also worth reflecting on where the Palestinians would be today if in
every terrorist attack, beginning with the horrendous and revolting
murder of Israel's Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972, the terrorists
had killed only themselves. It seems to me that they would have long
since had their own state.
I admire Bill's purity of response to corpses. I think that was my own
first response, actually, or at least, that's what I thought it was --
pure and distanced revulsion. Only later did I realize that looking at
images of corpses also made me feel like their owner and creator. I
suspect that many do have similar reactions, however subconscious.
- Fred C.
8037
From: Doug Cummings
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 4:58pm
Subject: Re: Sobibor/Nat Turner
I saw "Sobibor" and, if you didn't already know, it's a necessarily
gruesome film about the only successful armed revolt in a
concentration camp--the prisoners carefully arranged to execute the
German guards with hatchets, and succeeded.
I believe it was constructed through footage Lanzmann obtained whle
making "Shoah," so its form is exactly the same--abandoned, overgrown
ruins juxtaposed with then-contemporary interviews. No bloody
reenactments or stock footage.
One of the interesting things about the film for me is that I also
recently saw Charles Burnett's documentary on Nat Turner. I work at
the California Institute of Technology and Burnett came to a class
here a few months ago, screened his film, and did a Q/A afterward,
which turned out to be pretty frustrating for all concerned. Turner
was the leader of a violent black slave revolt who killed something
like 50 white plantation people in their homes before being caught
and executed. The post-screening discussion was noticably tense as
many of the (white) students tried to critique Turner's actions and
his role as a contemporary black folk hero, which Burnett's film
emphasizes to some degree (although not as much as he would've
liked--he claimed the target distributor, PBS, wouldn't air a
pro-revolutionary film). "Maybe you only agree with what Turner
stood for, but not what he did?" the students kept asking Burnett in
various ways as he, astonished, reminded them of the realities of
living in constant oppression. The dynamics amazed even me, and I
tend to be somewhat pessimistic when it comes to believing in the
social awareness of people today.
In an effort to convey a helpful analogy, I suggested "Sobibor," and
although no one had seen the film, it was much easier for the
students to accept the murder of Nazis rather than white plantation
families. It was a disturbing discussion for me.
Doug
8038
From: Frederick M. Veith
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 5:02pm
Subject: Re: Re: NIGHT AND FOG
Actually, I was the Fred that objected to the characterization of the
issues of representation as "a matter of taste" (although I'd like to
think that I have good taste as well, I'm fairly sure you're praising
his). For the record, I didn't think you were maligning Fred [Camper]'s
taste. I was attempting to suggest that there are important underlying
issues of representation that I want to think involve more substantial
claims than 'taste' would suggest. But I think you're making the same
point here as well.
Thanks for the elaboration about what other filmic representations you had
in mind. I have to admit that while I more or less agree with you about
"Schindler's List, until it goes dumb at the end" (don't all Spielbergs?)
I'm still bothered (among other things) by his justification for shooting
the film in black and white: that all the Holocaust films he'd seen were
also in black and white. It's this kind of stupidly simplistic reasoning
which *always* seems to undermine his otherwise obvious talent. [I see
this as kin to his bragging that he spent $1 million digitally removing
Osment's blinks from A.I., as if any society technically advanced enough
to make a facsimile child wouldn't be able to program it to blink. It's
the same sort of gimmicky and ultimately empty show-off move. Worse, both
instances are predicated on his own prestige and spending power: even if
no one else can put a black and white film into wide distribution in 1993,
Steven Spielberg can! Why make intelligent aesthetic decisions when you
can use your prestige to make people think you have?]
Miriam Hansen wrote a very good essay on Schindler's List, entitled
"Schindler's List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism,
and Public Memory" (Critical Inquiry, Winter 1996). In addition to
defending the film on formal grounds (use of sound, narrative structure,
construction of subjectivity), she takes up the question of Bilderverbot,
both as invoked by Lanzmann in his attack on the film and in broader
context. To be crude, her argument (on this point) is that Lanzmann's
claim not to represent is disningenuous, involving as it does an
illegitimate modernist privileging of the visual over the other senses.
That representation cannot be reduced to visual representation.
Fred "still not Camper" Veith
P.S. There's a scan of the Goya etching at:
http://www.buddhadust.org/images/Goya_37.htm
On Fri, 5 Mar 2004, hotlove666 wrote:
8039
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 5:04pm
Subject: Bicycle Thieves
Insightful comments from NIGHT and FOG, SHOAH thread.
There are a few films about bicycle thieves (THE BICYCLE THIEF,
BEIJING BICYCLE, CYCLO) which all revolve around the consequences
of a bicycle stolen from the main character, a working man.
In light of the "show / don't show" and tell of the earlier thread,
the bicycle thieves films are very clear in terms of crime, perpetrator,
victim, on a topic that is probably much closer to the daily lives of
most.
Obviously, the annihilation films can border on exploitation, as can
any film about murder, rape, abuse. Still, many films, as the
bicycle thieves films show, are not exploitation films, yet many have
a closer experience with thievery than with murder, rape, etc.
It dawns on me that the current job situation in the USA might
provoke a USA 'bicycle thief' film...but here, it would be the loss of
a car via repossession (which probably has been done already).
8040
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 5:06pm
Subject: Re: Nat Turner
Where where where where where can I see Charles Burnett's Nat Turner
film???????
8041
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 5:08pm
Subject: Re: Bicycle Thievs
A girl from my office hid a guy riding his bike home from work
yesterday. He spoke no English - he was scraped up a bit - his only
concern was "mi bike"! It worked out - but Elizabeth's observation
came to mind.
8042
From: Frederick M. Veith
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 5:14pm
Subject: Re: Re: Nat Turner
On Fri, 5 Mar 2004, hotlove666 wrote:
> Where where where where where can I see Charles Burnett's Nat Turner
> film???????
http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0150
F.
8043
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 5:44pm
Subject: CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY (Z. Korda, 1951)
Here's a pretty unusual film - if we're to take it as self-evident, as
I suppose some of us do as a matter of course, that any white
director's movie about the oppression of blacks (in this case: South
Africa) is going to be informed either by an overt or covert tone of
condescension (borne of some dormant or active colonialist impulse)
toward the black characters, while the white characters are cast
either as Benevolent and Understanding or Just Plain Evil...
SPOILERS for the CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY...
Well, this movie probably won't seem terribly different to you. But
it's great, really great. What happens when you watch CRY, THE
BELOVED COUNTRY is that you're given the basic outline of the kind of
movie I've just mentioned, stripped of all self-importance, arrogance,
and greasy Stanley Kramer-ish phoniness. What remains is an almost
unbearable exploration of anguish, where each shot has less to do with
moving the story along (although the film is, objectively, an
efficiently-made, old-school British drama) than with capturing the
hell that its characters are put through, in varying degrees. The way
that this "hell" is central to the movie also describes the
recent 21 GRAMS, which also pivots on an "accidental" death and which
also covers the way that the death has far-reaching emotional
implications. (Actually, I hated 21 GRAMS for reasons that aren't
entirely clear to me, so I don't want to take the comparison too far.)
And there is a great, astonishing sequence of "not showing": when the
mother is told that her son has been murdered, first in the field, "I
don't want to help you up [the father has sat down in shock, after
hearing the news first], your wife's watching," and again in the
house, when the police constable has to clap his ears onto the phone
receiver and shout into it, so that the mother's cries, in the next
room, may be muffled out.
There were some significant problems with CRY, mostly having to do
with my not being able to understand some of the dialogue in the
beginning and the end of the film (Canada Lee, Charles Carson, Sidney
Poitier and others are clearly professional actors, but some of the
less-experienced actors were occasionally given to
deer-in-the-headlights line readings), and it was disappointing to me
that I couldn't understand the final scene between Stephen Kumalo
(Lee) and James Jarvis (Carson). But on the whole, this is a great,
moving piece of work.
-Jaime
8044
From: Doug Cummings
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 6:16pm
Subject: Re: Nat Turner
>Where where where where where can I see Charles Burnett's Nat Turner
>film???????
Interestingly enough, as I suggested in my previous comments, Burnett
was almost as critical of his film as anyone else in the room (for
different reasons). He had originally conceived of it as a two-hour
feature but the funding eventually dictated a PBS-friendly 57
minutes, a toning down of the film's pro-revolutionary ideology, and
emphasis on William Styron and his Pultizer-winning novel. I think
it's still a notable film, which takes a rashomon-like approach by
depicting Turner from a variety of perspectives/interpretations, but
Burnett seemed to have mixed feelings about it. Actually, I
appreciated his honesty--a lot of filmmakers would probably never
admit to having personal ambivalence.
Doug
8045
From: Frederick M. Veith
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 6:23pm
Subject: Re: Claude Lanzmann
On Fri, 5 Mar 2004, Fred Camper wrote:
> choosing extreme "acting" cases, obviously). The line of thinking that
> "Shoah" is a part of goes back to the Old Testament's prohibition
> against graven images, as J. Hoberman pointed out when the film was
> first released, and to Adorno's famous "After Auschwitz, it is
> impossible to write poetry" dictum (which he recanted years later on the
> grounds that good poetry had been written) and also informs the art of
> Christian Boltanski. I wouldn't apply this line of thinking to Goya's
> prints, but I guess I do think it applies to "Night and Fog," in the
> sense that that film's use of the corpse imagery seems crude to me, and
> the intercutting with fields over-obvious. Which doesn't mean that I
> don't think it should not be shown where it's needed and helpful.
I think it worth quoting from Adorno's 'recant' at length:
"But since, in a world whose law is universal individual profit, the
individual has nothing but this self that has become indifferent, the
performance of the old familiar tendency is at the same time the most
dreadful of things. There is no getting out of this, no more than out of
the electrified barbed wire around the camps. Perennial suffering has as
much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may
have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write
poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether
after Auschwitz you can go on living--especially whether one who escaped
by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living.
His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois
subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is
the drastic guilt of him who was spared."
Of course this is near the end of a 400 page book (Negative Dialectics)
which Adorno would undoubtedly have considered indivisible from this
paragraph.
I wish someone would translate the Adorno/Celan correspondence which would
be illuminating in this context. It was at least partly in reaction to
Celan's poem Todesfuge that the earlier remark was made.
> I haven't seen "Tsahal," though a friend who loved "Shoah" echoed Fred
> V.'s objections to it, nor "Paper Clips." I don't defend the blowing up
> of homes or other activities of the Israeli army either, though it's
> also worth reflecting on where the Palestinians would be today if in
> every terrorist attack, beginning with the horrendous and revolting
> murder of Israel's Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972, the terrorists
> had killed only themselves. It seems to me that they would have long
> since had their own state.
Without wanting to get into a protracted discussion on the point (and
being Quaker, having a longstanding preference for non-violence) I think
that this ignores the imbrication of the Palestinian plight in a multitude
of geopolitical forces, not the least of which was the Cold War, which
were and are formidable obstacles to a Palestinian state quite apart from
any bad behavior on the part of Palestinians. It also ignores the legacy
of deliberate Israeli provocation of violent response, a fact that many
officials in the government (Sharon among them) are quite open about.
Israeli government figures show that new settlement in the occupied
territories rose by 35% in 2003. New home construction inside Israel over
the same period declined 8%.
Fred.
8046
From: J. Mabe
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 6:27pm
Subject: Re: Re: Nat Turner
I saw Burnett at a screening of Killer of Sheep at my
school a few years ago. Most of the questions he
received were about Killer of Sheep, but when asked
about his TV work, he seemed ambivalent about all of
it. He especially seemed to hold a some sort of a
grudge against Oprah for the film The Wedding. Mr.
Rosenbaum was the host that evening, and they also
showed the amazing When it Rains, which I deeply
recommend.
Josh Mabe
--- Doug Cummings wrote:
> >Where where where where where can I see Charles
> Burnett's Nat Turner
> >film???????
>
> Interestingly enough, as I suggested in my previous
> comments, Burnett
> was almost as critical of his film as anyone else in
> the room (for
> different reasons). He had originally conceived of
> it as a two-hour
> feature but the funding eventually dictated a
> PBS-friendly 57
> minutes, a toning down of the film's
> pro-revolutionary ideology, and
> emphasis on William Styron and his Pultizer-winning
> novel. I think
> it's still a notable film, which takes a
> rashomon-like approach by
> depicting Turner from a variety of
> perspectives/interpretations, but
> Burnett seemed to have mixed feelings about it.
> Actually, I
> appreciated his honesty--a lot of filmmakers would
> probably never
> admit to having personal ambivalence.
>
> Doug
>
>
>
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8047
From: Doug Cummings
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 6:34pm
Subject: Re: Re: Burnett
>I saw Burnett at a screening of Killer of Sheep at my
>school a few years ago. Most of the questions he
>received were about Killer of Sheep, but when asked
>about his TV work, he seemed ambivalent about all of
>it. He especially seemed to hold a some sort of a
>grudge against Oprah for the film The Wedding. Mr.
>Rosenbaum was the host that evening, and they also
>showed the amazing When it Rains, which I deeply
>recommend.
FWIW, I spoke to Burnett after the discussion at Caltech and he
confirmed that Milestone is prepping a boxset of his films for DVD,
including "When it Rains." They've been planning a theatrical
rerelease of "Killer of Sheep" for some time, but they've apparently
been stymied by music rights issues.
Doug
8048
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 6:39pm
Subject: Re: Claude Lanzmann
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
> It's worth pointing out that Lanzmann includes some of his own
> obnoxiousness, and as I say in my article his own lies, within the body
> of "Shoah" itself. If someone would like to post a translation of the
> French that Paul posted, that would be great, but it makes sense to me
> that Lanzmann would claim some kind of exclusivity, for his film argues
> that there *is* only one correct way of treating this subject.
I should emphasize that the long quote was by Sacha Martinetti,
criticizing Lanzmann's construction of Jewish identity.
Here's a translation of Lanzmann's comments on Schindler's
List from the March 3, 1994 Le Monde, which were quoted in the
Feb. 2004 Cahiers: "There's not a second of archival footage in
Shoah, because that's not my way of working or of thinking, and
also because it doesn't exist. The question can be posed like
this: in order to testify, do you invent a new form or do you
reconstruct? I think I have created a new form. Spielberg has
chosen to reconstruct. If I had found an existing film -- a
secret film because that was highly forbidden -- shot by an SS-man,
showing how 3000 Jews, men, women, children, died together,
asphyxiated in a gas chamber at Crematorium 2 at Auschwitz,
if I had found that, then not only would I not have shown it,
but I would have destroyed it. I am not able to say why. It
speaks for itself."
My impression was that such "secret films" do exist and in fact
were shown on PBS a few years ago -- does anybody else remember
this?
Paul
8049
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 7:32pm
Subject: Translation of French comments on Lanzmann
If it can help the on-going discussion, and at Fred [Camper]'s
suggestion, here is a hasty translation of Martinetti-Levy's text
posted by Paul Gallagher:
Lanzmann's hypothesis of singularity is political in nature.
Indeed I would even say that his arguments are those of the purest of
real politik. It must be said that Jewish History and the necessity
to protect the security of an immensely complex territory -- born,
incidentally, of pogroms and legitimized by the Shoah -- doesn't
leave much space for the Israelis to manoeuver.
Lanzmann is one of the pillars of Jewish "identity" communication.
This among other things is what makes the work of intellectuals and
peace activists so difficult. He is a living myth. A myth, however,
is not always worthy of the wisdom it is credited for. When the
Palestinian child dies in his father's arms at the border -- an image
televised world-wide -- he [Lanzmann] will denounce Palestinian
manipulation. [Yet] he will reject the inclusion of the death of
Tsiganes, homosexuals and free masons [in the Shoah]. In his view,
only the specificity of the Jewish people can engender the
specificity of the Shoah. The latter is the proof of the former.
The vision is thus non-humanistic, as it specifies behaviors,
intensities, roles. As though the Hebrew territory metaphorically
answered, with its external threats, the internal Jewish territory,
its soul, so to speak. By stereotyping its metaphysical enemies into
religious ones it creates a conflict between Good and Evil
[Translator's note: this paragraph was murky and its syntax weird in
French; I rearranged it a bit].
And it is indeed Absolute Evil that Lanzmann attempts to return
to the real in the transsubstanciation of testimony. A kind of
inverted mass. Built on a torture like the Catholic mass, but
collective torture even more unbearable than the cross. It summons
the Devil to show the horror of the Shoah at the closest, with, as
Todorov puts it, the greatest dramatic intensity. But also in order
to convince of the metaphysical reality that creates this specificity.
This is why I said that this terribly complicates the work of
Jewish activists for a reasonable peace. But I personally know no one
who is privy to Israeli strategies, and there is therefore no way of
actually knowing whether this real politik is justified at the level
of the most urgent Reason of State. The tiniest political
negotiation, even at the local level, destroys in a few hours the
thickest naivete. As to the secret of the gods...
Didi-Huberman's response to Lanzmann's quote in Feb 2004
Cahiers: "The image is neither nothing nor everything. ... Not being
anything absolute, it is nonetheless this impurity necessary to
knowledge, to memory, and even to thought in general."
8050
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 8:51pm
Subject: Re: Translation of French comments on Lanzmann
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jpcoursodon" wrote:
> If it can help the on-going discussion, and at Fred [Camper]'s
> suggestion, here is a hasty translation of Martinetti-Levy's text
> posted by Paul Gallagher:
>
Thank you for the translation!
Paul
8051
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 9:43pm
Subject: Re: NIGHT AND FOG
Fred, I don't hold NandF to be above criticism. When I discussed
it with Straub, he said he thought it over-estheticized, and I can
see what he means. But he was talking about the present-day
tracking shots in the abandoned camps.
Here's an interpretation of that by J-P Oudart, in a review of Son
nom de venie dans Calcutta desert, which I finally saw thanks to
a meber of this group three days ago:
In Night and Fog, Resnais' detachment consisted in neutralizing
(by the lateral tracking shots) all the connotation-effects which
might be attached to the act of filming a concentration camp. The
sequence of images had no sense, but its systematic
non-sense was intended to signify, meatphorically, the absurdity
of the camps. - it connoted it, heavily. And from this insistence
the spectre of a cause (why the camps? no answer) was
activated; as in Marienbad, a ghost of a narrative animated the
puzzle of its sequences.
The neutrality of the voiceover in NandF [this is BK speaking
again] rather reminds me of the voiceover of Las Hurdes, where
the combination of a certain imagery with a voiceover that denies
it meaning by its content, but above all by its intonation, creates
an effect that is reminiscent, for me, of Goya's "black paintings,"
the amazing murals he painted at the end of his life in the House
of the Deaf Man outside Toledo. Malraux thought those murals
marked the beginning of modern painting; Las Hurdes, being a
very early sound film, may mark the beginning of the modernity
that plays voiceover against image, as in Resnais or Duras.
8052
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Mar 5, 2004 9:57pm
Subject: Re: Claude Lanzmann
> I admire Bill's purity of response to corpses. I think that was my own
> first response, actually, or at least, that's what I thought it was --
> pure and distanced revulsion. Only later did I realize that looking at
> images of corpses also made me feel like their owner and creator. I
> suspect that many do have similar reactions, however subconscious.
I think this message I sent yesterday might have gotten lost, so I'm
reposting:
------------
This is an interesting topic. (Haven't seen SHOAH.) I think Lanzmann
has a point (if he's the one that made it) about showing things causing
identification. It's probably true that showing a corpse probably
appeals to the part of us that wants to make corpses. But isn't there
something slightly puritanical about the conclusion that therefore
corpses shouldn't be shown? You could argue that the thrill of atavism
is a necessary component in the process of repressing that atavism -
that the thrill often engenders fear of the thrilling impulse, and that
the fear then motivates the repression. Certainly we are complex enough
beings that a hint of Nazi identification doesn't necessarily propel us
in the direction of Nazism.
One notes a theme in Truffaut's criticism (which I believe the Movie
critics later picked up on) that cinema is meant to show things, and
that there is something bad about not showing the thing that you are
making the film about. I wish I could cite a Truffaut article to this
effect, but I've seen the idea pop up more than once. So, in my mind,
this emphasis on showing things is bound up with the earliest
expressions of auteurism. Part of me resisted Truffaut's idea as
needless rulemaking, but over the years I've sometimes found myself
thinking this way.
- Dan
8053
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 9:26am
Subject: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
I went to see it with Marvin tonight, and there was no scourging at
all in it. What kind of movie is that?
Still, I liked it, even though I don't think it captured the feeling
of being young and living as if one was in a New Wave film all that
well - Bogdanovich did it better in The Thing Called Love. Compare
the line dancing scene in TTCL (a cousin to the Madison scene in
Bande a part) to the Louvre montage in The Dreamers - which one is
exhilarating? The Louvre montage is something else.
Spoilers coming - Marvin pointed out that these kids are not
brilliant film buffs. Being a cinephile for them is a form of Trivial
Pursuit: naming scenes in (very famous) movies. Or the movies are
images they can model themselves on, like the characters in Mon Oncle
d'Amerique and On Connait la chanson - which is actually what people
did in the 60s. (Cf. J. Hoberman's The Dream Life.) Godard bbasically
gave everyone permission to do that when he showed Belmondo imitating
Bogart in Breathless.
The one intelligent thing said by anyone about a movie is Theo's
defense of Chaplin, when he says, speaking of the last shot of City
Lights: "Here is Charlie Chaplin, the most famous man in the world,
and he's telling us that we are really seeing himn for the first time
through the eyes of this girl." This perhaps indicates a certain
sneaking favoritism re: Theo on Bertolucci's part - it's a comment he
might have made himself - but it is mainly a character point: Theo
wants his sister (sorry, I forgot the other names), whom he loves but
can't penetrate (the incest taboo), to lose her virginity to the
guest, so that he can have her by proxy (while feigning indifference).
Having recently spent a month thinking about the symbolism of Siamese
twins, I was surprised to discover that The Dreamers, like Dead
Ringers, is a metaphorical Siamese twin movie, because of the co-
dependence relationship between Theo and his sister, which the guest
tries to break, only to be kicked out at the end. When the guest and
the sister go on their Tashlin date, Theo brings a girl home,
freaking his sister out, then almost seduces the guest on the same
bed. This leads to a new regression, under the tent, which almost
becomes terminal when the sister realizes her parents have seen her
in bed with Theo and the guest and tries to "do a Mouchette" (a cruel
but not utterly false reading of the role Bresson played and still
plays in the imaginations of the alienated middle class people who
are his audience). Saved by the Revolution (the paving stone through
the window), they go out to meet it, and Theo carries his sister off
with him in a new joint fantasy, engagement.
So their engagement can't be seen as a completely positive thing,
because we've been rooting for the sister and Theo to be separated,
which would be a real revolution. The story is told from the guest's
point of view, in any case, but it's clear by the end that he has
become the father (with whom he sympathizes) in the eyes of the
incestuous siblings. At the same time, "Je ne regrette rien" as an
epitaph for May 68 and its aftermath, when many kids in France and in
the US and elsewhere did follow a path of militant action for the
next few years, is emotionally right. And maybe when they've lived
through that, if they live through it, tTheo and his sister will
eventually manage to separate.
I don't think that Bertolucci really identifies with the guest, who
is a voyeur and, at heart, a gentle hippy. He probably identifies
emotionally with Theo, but again, Theo's path (never letting the
other shoe of his bisexuality drop, for one thing) isn't
Bertolucci's. Bertolucci was never able to sublimate his desires into
revolutionary action, so he can diagnose everyone in the film, which
is appropriate in the kind of Marxist-Freudian allegory Bertolucci
the storyteller has always favored.
I have always found that kind of story limited (because it's
allegory) but effective (because it's Marxist-Freudian), and I think
that since The Spider's Strategem Bertolucci has made great stridesas
an artist: The Dreamers is at least an enigmatic allegory, and
therefore a step closer to the genuinely novelistic cinema BB has
always promised, but never delivered.
And the mise-en-scene? Superb, like everything he's done since Luna.
8054
From: Andy Rector
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 0:01pm
Subject: Re: NIGHT AND FOG/meaning
Oudart's review seems lazy. To insert a statement like "the absurdity
of the camps" is to misremember the lesson of the film. It is more
important to understand crime than simply to condemn it (see Monsieur
Verdoux dvd material). In 1955 the condemnation was a given, films
today behave as though the condemnation must be worked up to (films
made with the same efficiency and senselessness in technique as the
camps)
Inexplicability is certainly a trait of the film as indeed one has
trouble comprehending a giant pile of hair, an uncertain term in
prison, but more often is it not out of respect for the victims, out
of honesty, not to presume how it was at Auschwitz (not a rhetorical
question) ?? Something the film makes explicable is Siemens,
pharmaceutical companies, war and genocide as a steady and meticulous
business, people dominated in throngs, and that the historical
situation that gave rise to this particular genocide is not unique,
that the conditions for it's possibility are the same if not worse,
if not repeating itself right under our noses (it is difficult not to
blend 1955 with the present at this point). I've thought the entire
film works toward the final accusation/call to action over the last
shot of rubble. If I am mistaken I think the film would be useless.
The film's ennumeration of hoarding, documenting, building,
torturing, etc., the working out of large scale barbarism and
exploitation, then murder, is mainly cautionary, not bathed in
despair and helplessness, "non-sense". A concentration camp is not a
mystical place. I thought the tracking shots were logical in relation
to the other images, necessary as mediations to the documentary
footage of Auschwitz. The overgrown and dormant aspect in the 1955
tracking shots seems above all there to sharpen the dialectic,
past/present Auschwitz--past/future barbarism. The tracking shots are
needed to make it a lesson, otherwise we just have a manipulated
newsreel, a bunch of pictures. In 1955 (to the present) pictures did
not speak for themselves, it was too late for that. Oudart is right,
something had to be done to neutralize "filming a concentration
camp", but to sober it, not to re-intoxicate it with incomprehension
(I must see Elephant).
Straub's objection to over-estheticization is interesting. Is it the
very fact of tracking, of mixing the two past and present, of the
lighting (which on the pile of hair I would understand, assusmnig
Resnais made that shot), of Resnais subsuming his subject with his
penchant for tracking shots? Did Straub mean that this over-
estheticisation nullified the film's importance or was it just a
passing criticism? It is a little difficult to refute Straub on this,
Straub/Huillet who succeeded in completely de-estheticising their
materials for their film which most resembles N&F, Introduction to
Arnold Schoenberg's "Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene"
(Schoenberg's music, his letter, Brecht's speech, Vietnam footage,
Paris Commune photograph). The political utility of these two films
is similar and that said I'd disagree with Straub's objection. Both
are great constructions.
Does the commentary deny meaning or does it create a new one? N&F
creates a new one, I think. Perhaps Las Hurdes is an early suspension
of meaning, to go along with Barthes on Bunuel? I will consult the
Goya, thank you Bill! Thanks too for the comparison,
Bunuel/Duras/Resnais... I'll be thinking of it. Can I add Tashlin or
Lewis to the disjunction?
Best,
andy
8055
From: Andy Rector
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 0:33pm
Subject: Re: Nat Turner
I also saw it with an audience (mostly black) at the Pan African film
festival in Feb. 2003. A two hour discussion followed the screening.
It was exciting in that it engaged everyone, and these weren't a
bunch of Burnett fans. Many questioned why Burnett did not make a
more heroic portrait of Nat Turner, they wanted a film to show their
children, they said. Burnett stood by the film as it is and defended
his attempt to show multiple representations. Styron and the like
were highly criticized, justly so, over and over, and Burnett
repeatedly emphasized that just because Styron's version was shown
didn't mean he agreed with it or it was correct. Then the discussion
revolved around how Nat Turner could be best (and worst) represented
for black liberation. By the end of the two hours the theater was
still full and an understanding seemed to be reached. I wish Burnett
would have brought up his original intentions there, though perhaps
the discussion wouldn't have been as rich with revolutionary ideals
and questions of representation. I wish I could go into it further
but I couldn't possibly reproduce the multitude of expressions about
the film and the meaning of Turner's revolutionary act.
bill- NAT TURNER was shown on PBS a few weeks ago. I was not able to
tape it, though someone must have! I believe it was in a shortened
form from the one I saw at the festival. I say this because I don't
remember seeing in the version on television my favorite shot: just
when there are some fissures in the representations of Nat, an actor
portrays a man giving an oral history, he says a few lines about
Turner on a porch while somebody records his voice. A representation
of an oral history, being recorded, that's great!
best,
andy
8056
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 3:19pm
Subject: Re: Re: NIGHT AND FOG/meaning
--- Andy Rector wrote:
> (I must see Elephant).
>
> Straub's objection to over-estheticization is
> interesting. Is it the
> very fact of tracking, of mixing the two past and
> present, of the
> lighting (which on the pile of hair I would
> understand, assusmnig
> Resnais made that shot), of Resnais subsuming his
> subject with his
> penchant for tracking shots? Did Straub mean that
> this over-
> estheticisation nullified the film's importance or
> was it just a
> passing criticism? It is a little difficult to
> refute Straub on this,
> Straub/Huillet who succeeded in completely
> de-estheticising their
> materials for their film which most resembles N&F,
> Introduction to
> Arnold Schoenberg's "Accompaniment to a
> Cinematographic Scene"
> (Schoenberg's music, his letter, Brecht's speech,
> Vietnam footage,
> Paris Commune photograph).
Yes you must see "Elelphant." And Straub is a fine one
to talk about tracking shot esthetics (or
over-esthetics) in light of "History Lessons, " "Moses
and Aaron," and most especially "Les Yeux Ne Veulent
pas en Tour Temps se Fermer ou peut-Etre Qu'Un Jour
Rome se Permettra de Choisir a Son Tour."
This takes us right back to "Kapo" whose tracking shot
so upset Rivette. And then there's Resnais -- whose
tracking shots in "Night and Fog" and "Hiroshima Mon
Amour" are the most masterful in post-Ophuslian cinema
until. . . ."Elephant."
It's not the tracking shot as a device in itself
that's problematic. It's the way it's used that so
disturbs or anesthetizes.
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8057
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 3:25pm
Subject: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
--- hotlove666 wrote:
He
> probably identifies
> emotionally with Theo, but again, Theo's path (never
> letting the
> other shoe of his bisexuality drop, for one thing)
> isn't
> Bertolucci's.
No it's Gilbert's. Gilbert (very noisily) decalred
that he as no longer "homosexual" about three years
ago. But like cinderalla's sisters, the shoe didn't
fit. Bertoilucci's far saner acceptance of bisexuality
makes the movie work -- despite the lack of a
full-press Pitt/Garrel love scene.
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8058
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 4:27pm
Subject: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
> Having recently spent a month thinking about the symbolism of Siamese
> twins, I was surprised to discover that The Dreamers, like Dead
> Ringers, is a metaphorical Siamese twin movie
Somewhere between metephor and actuality: the siblings assert that they
are Siamese. And doesn't Bertolucci show the scars on their upper arms
to support the idea that they were separated?
I liked the film, though it sometimes seems to shade from being
childlike to being childish. I was surprised, though, that Bertolucci
shied away from exploring some of the sexual aspects of the story, like
the pansexual nature of the menage. - Dan
8059
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 5:10pm
Subject: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
--- Dan Sallitt wrote:
>
> I liked the film, though it sometimes seems to shade
> from being
> childlike to being childish. I was surprised,
> though, that Bertolucci
> shied away from exploring some of the sexual aspects
> of the story, like
> the pansexual nature of the menage. - Dan
>
>
And I wasn't. Bertolucci always goes right up to the
edge of bisexuality-- and never crosses the
threshhold.
Was anyone in the group present at the New York Film
Festival in 1970 when "The Conformsit" was first
screened? If so you doubtless remember the "Ball of
the Blind" sequence which was cut for later release
but recently restored for a "complete/director's cut"
version of the film.
What WASN'T restored was a brief but crucial shot at
the very end of the film where a male hustler very
provocatively climbs into his bed an beckons
Trintignant to join him -- thus making Trintignant's
acceptance of his latent gay desires explicit.
If you were lucky enough to see that version, that is.
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8060
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 5:23pm
Subject: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
Thanks, Dan, I missed the separation scars. Realistically, however,
they can't have been born conjoined: there's no such thing as
conjoined male/female twins. Of course, there's no such thing as non-
identical conjoined brothers, and that didn't stop the Farrellys from
making a whole movie about the subject!
Re: pansexuality, the trio is more perverse than that - Theo uses the
guest as a surrogate to make love to his sister, and his sister as a
surrogate to make love to the guest. The siblings' (metaphorically)
separated twinship adds an extra layer of symbolism: conjoined twins
can be used to symbolize co-dependency relationships. The Polish
brothers said that their conjoined twins film, Twin Falls Idaho, for
example, was a metaphor for marriage.
But conjoined twins have a long history as a political symbol, too.
The original "Siamese Twins," Chang and Eng Bunker, were used during
the Civil War as symbols of the North and South indivisibly joined,
and Foucault has speculated that the fascination with ct's in the
Renaissance was as a symbol of the Body of Christ divided/conjoined
by the Catholic/Protestant split. The Iranian twin sisters who died
on the operating table in Singapore recently, on the other hand,
became a symbol of revolutionary courage to Iran's Generation X, and
I think Bertolucci is using his siblings' inability to separate as a
metaphor for why the 1968 rebellion failed.
David, who is Gilbert?
8061
From: Robert Keser
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 5:28pm
Subject: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
There was an interview with Michael Pitt where he said that he and
Garrel were slated for a direct sex scene, it had been discussed,
but on the appointed day Bertolucci told them the plans had changed
and they would shoot a different scene. So, the original intention
was there.
--Robert Keser
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
> >
> And I wasn't. Bertolucci always goes right up to the
> edge of bisexuality-- and never crosses the
> threshhold.
>
8062
From: Robert Keser
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 5:33pm
Subject: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
Another recent and more accurate conjoined twin representation was
in Tim Burton's Big Fish, which featured Ping and Jing, glamorous
entertainers who sang for Maoist troops in China, sort of like a
conjoined Andrews sister.
--Robert Keser
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
> Thanks, Dan, I missed the separation scars. Realistically,
however,
> they can't have been born conjoined: there's no such thing as
> conjoined male/female twins.
8063
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 5:36pm
Subject: Re: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
--- hotlove666 wrote:
.
>
> David, who is Gilbert?
>
>
Gilbert Adair -- an ex-friend of mine who wrote the
book on which the film is based AND the screenplay.
Gilbert also wrote "Love and Death on Long Island" and
dedicated it to Meredith Brody -- one ofmy very best
friends and now also an ex-friend of Gilbert's.
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8064
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 5:39pm
Subject: Re: Nat Turner/Get on the Bus
Andy, thanks for your comments on Resnais and the Burnett screening
both - I really wish I had been there for the latter.
I rediscovered Spike Lee when Marco Muller and I went to a radio-
promoted screening of Get on the Bus where we were the only white
people in the audience. The spectators' audible reactions to every
nuance of humor and political analysis made it one of the best movie
experiences of my life. Later, when I read Jean-Marc Lalanne's
capsule slam of Get on the Bus in CdC as a film which showed how
Lee's cinema had dead-ended, I couldn't believe my eyes. Ironically
it was published in the same issue as the Ferreri-Toubiana interview
declaring "the end of ideology," when Lee's film was a carnivalesque
celebration of the richness of the ideological debates going on in
the African American community at the time of the Million Man March.
Making the March the meaning of the film, as all reviewers did, is
like making Lordsburg the meaning of Stagecoach!
8065
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 5:44pm
Subject: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
Ping and Ming in Big Fish, I assume, represent Maoism, while their
separation after the Finney character gets them out pf China is
either a symbol for democratic individualism...or proof that the
Finney character was again gilding the lily.
There's a BOOK of The Dreamers?
8066
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 6:17pm
Subject: The Conformist (Bertolucci)
> What WASN'T restored was a brief but crucial shot at
> the very end of the film where a male hustler very
> provocatively climbs into his bed an beckons
> Trintignant to join him -- thus making Trintignant's
> acceptance of his latent gay desires explicit.
>
> If you were lucky enough to see that version, that is.
The version that just showed at AMMI included (I think) this ending, as
well as the sequence in the home for the blind. I was more than a
little vague on what was going on at the ending - the scene is shot in
shadows - but in the version that was just projected, J-L T looks at the
man but doesn't move toward him. The suggestion is that his
homosexuality is forcing itself on his consciousness, but not exactly
that he accepts it.
Part of why I couldn't scan that ending properly is that I didn't find
it satisfying from a dramaturgical point of view. Is the ending I saw
the complete one? If so, what did the edited ending show? - Dan
8067
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 6:31pm
Subject: Re: The Conformist (Bertolucci)
--- Dan Sallitt wrote:
> The version that just showed at AMMI included (I
> think) this ending, as
> well as the sequence in the home for the blind. I
> was more than a
> little vague on what was going on at the ending -
> the scene is shot in
> shadows - but in the version that was just
> projected, J-L T looks at the
> man but doesn't move toward him.
Then you didn't see the ending as was shown in 1970.
There's nothing vague about it.
The suggestion is
> that his
> homosexuality is forcing itself on his
> consciousness, but not exactly
> that he accepts it.
>
Well there is acceptance at a kind of primordinal
level in that the scene -- in its complete form --
shows him comprehending that that's what he WANTS.
> Part of why I couldn't scan that ending properly is
> that I didn't find
> it satisfying from a dramaturgical point of view.
> Is the ending I saw
> the complete one? If so, what did the edited ending
> show? - Dan
>
It shows him start to get up.
>
__________________________________
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8068
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 7:54pm
Subject: Re: Re: NIGHT AND FOG/meaning
Replying to a bunch of different points in this thread. This is probably
longer than most want to read, but I'm replying to various posts in the
order they were made, so scroll down for "your" reply if you don't want
to read the whole thing.
Bill and Fred V., I didn't think anyone was maligning my taste either,
but it wouldn't have been so awful if someone were to do so. On our
no-flame board the correct way to say that is "I don't agree with your
taste at all," rather than "You have bad taste," but there isn't a whole
lot of difference between those two statements. I got in trouble once,
as I should have, in another group (famous for its flames, and with no
prohibition against them) for saying something like, "Anyone who likes
Matthew Barney doesn't understand cinema," which I should have stated as
"Most of the time when someone likes Matthew Barney it seems to predict
that they don't share my taste in cinema," but I think a lot of us *do*
normalize at least some aspects of our tastes into "good cinema."
As I've said already, I don't think the lesson of "Shoah" is that one
cannot show footage of corpses, or holocaust corpses, in film, but only
that it's worth questioning the decision to do so, to see if the terms
in which "Shoah" poses the argument might apply. But the "argument" of
"Shoah" is specifically against representing certain things, not any
thing; it could not oppose all representation, since the film consists
of nine and a half hours of scenes and interviews from the more recent
present.
Fred V., thanks for the Adorno quote, but I'm sure I've read his
"recantation" in a different context, though I have no idea where,
because what I read gave as the reason for the recantation that he's
read good or great poetry since the Holocaust itself constituted
evidence that it was possible to write poetry. And again, without
getting into a length OT debate, Israel's violation of the UN
resolutions calling for withdrawal for almost 40 years is
unconscionable, and every new settlement even more so, but also keep in
mind that for its first decades Israel lived surrounded by states that
refused to recognize it as a state and also talked about making war on
it and pushing all the Jews into the sea. There's plenty of blame to go
around on both sides, and one could go back at least to the Arab
mass-murders of Jews in Palestine in 1929. I'm not an expert on this,
and perhaps some ur-Sharon provoked those too, though from what I know
it was provoked by Arab lies about destroyed mosques, and at least some
of the Zionists were buying land from Palestinians rather than stealing
it. And one could go back into Jewish history to say that when Jews are
murdered, the surviving Jews have good reason to be extra-fearful, an
"effect" that became rather heightened after 1945, and with good reason.
About Lanzmann, I'm in general never in favor of destroying footage. And
about wondering what "secret" footage survives, the sicko in me has
always wondered about the presumably ur-Warhol-in-"style" movie that was
supposedly made for Hitler of the 1944 coup plotters being tortured to
death, hung on wire nooses that killed slowly, which he is said to have
seen and liked. I don't want to see it, though, and I don't think I want
it to be shown (or released on VHS and DVD!) if it exists, but I'd be
curious to hear it described. It certainly would be an early and true
example of the "snuff" film.
Thanks to JPC for the translation. Insofar as I could understand the
text, I agree with it. I know I've seen Lanzmann quoted in outrage at
the attempts to understand Hitler psychologically, to understand Hitler
as anything other than pure evil. I reject this notion. Hitler was human
just like the rest of us: that's the really horrible thing about him,
that he reveals not some inhuman other but what we humans are actually
capable of. I *want* to understand the things that helped form Hitler,
insofar as that is possible.
At the time of "Shoah's" release it was my impression that the Shoah
still had not received proper attention in our culture. Now it's if
anything received too much attention. It's easy to feel that this the
Holocaust was a very evil thing, but it's gotten to the point where
doing so has become a kind of feel-good exercise which makes "us" feel
morally superior. And I'm not sure it does us any good. It may even do
harm, in for instance justifying Israeli's own immoral actions. And back
when I watched television, in the early 90s, I saw a news report at the
time of the first revelations of Serbian-run concentration camps in
Bosnia. We saw horrifyingly emaciated Bosnian prisoners behind barbed
wire as the reporter intoned, "We have seen these pictures before." But
at the time when it would have helped, Europe did nothing and the U.S.
did nothing, proving that, as Ernie Gehr said to me in great anger at
the outbreak of Gulf War I, "We have learned *nothing*." Too bad for the
Bosnians they didn't have any oil.
I don't think any of this argues against my original point, though; it
does expand the discussion of "Shoah."
To Bill, thanks for the Oudart. And yeah, the point of the "Night and
Fog" cutting is I think the absurdity, the unexplainability, of the
Shoah, and the disjunctive cutting does work to that end. About the
beginning of modernity in film sound, don't forget Vertov's "Enthusiasm"
-- or, for that matter, "L'Age d'Or."
To Dan, I think part of the effect of "Shoah," which I don't think can
fairly be called mystifying, is to argue that the real significance of
the event is not the corpses, which are no longer the people killed, but
rather the absence of the lives and communities and future that the
Germans annihilated. This seems a pretty self-evident point. But how do
you show an absence? By creating an imagined void at the center of your
film, by making one of the longest documentaries ever with no images of
its ostensible subject. Resnais's film concentrates on the
inexplicability of the event, treating it as a rupture to our calm
present; Lanzmann's deals with the event's implications. I suppose we
await the biopic "Hitler's Childhood" (or has it already been made?) to
tell us about causes (sarcasm intended).
To Andy, I didn't get what you did from "Night and Fog," but it's been
ages since I've seen it, and your comments made me realize I should see
it again. I'll put my comments on "Elephant" into a separate post.
- Fred
8069
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 7:54pm
Subject: Elephant
About "Elephant," raised in the "Night and Fog" thread re its tracking
shots, coincidentally, I saw it last night. They were all set to project
it in 1.85:1 when I informed the student who I took to be Doc Films's
"show manager" that it was 1.33, he ran off to his computer and soon
told me that he had "looked it up on google" and I was right, so they
showed it in the correct aspect ratio, perhaps for the first timer in
Chicago. I mention this because Doc is showing it once more on Sunday at
2 PM (see http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/calendar.html and
http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/calendar.html#weekend), though I would
advise any interested Chicagoans to arrive early and once again ask
about the aspect ratio they're planning to show it in and if it's 1.85
be prepared to tell them this whole story and to fix it.
I have no "Shoah"-like objections to "Elephant," though "Shoah" does
suggest the interesting thought experiment of imagining what the film
would have been like had van Sant always cut away just before a gunshot,
as he does early on. But the violence of the killings seems relatively
understated, actually.
After seeing it, I searched for reviews and in addition to reading
Jonathan Rosenbaum's excellent Reader piece, found two additional
intrusting reviews by members of our group that were all originally in
print publications and are all. Given that I don't find the writing of
most film critics useful, I'm impressed, especially since I didn't do
that exhaustive a search. The other two are by Phil Fileri at
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/10/24/3f98dac6235fd?in_archive=1
and Sam Adams at http://citypaper.net/articles/2003-11-20/movies.shtml
I guess Jonathan's response was closest to my own (and his review can be
found at http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/2003/1103/031107.html)
The sense of incompleteness seems key to the film. Thus I don't
completely agree with Phil's angry objection to the hints of "causes"
(Nazism, video games, gun culture, etc.) because I didn't think the film
was telling me those *were* the causes so much as disparaging the media
theory of them as causes (every one of them had been mentioned in press
accounts), though one of the film's many rough edges is that van Sant
doesn't indicate all that precisely that he is disparaging these as
causes either.
I liked the film more than I expected to, though I don't think it meets
my most stringent tests for great film art. What I particularly liked is
the way the tracking shots seemed to imprison each kid, or group of
kids, in their own subjectivity, a point I didn't see mentioned
elsewhere. We follow a boy from behind as he walks through the school,
and we are trapped in his world, and feel how he is trapped in his
world, how everyone else flits by him like unknowns, and how everyone
is, denying community and accounting for how no one understands anyone
else. If I didn't miss-see the film, on the third repletion of John and
Eli's hallway meeting we see the shy girl who's afraid to wear shorts
passing them, but we hadn't seen her at all in their previous two
encounters. Is that true? If so, van Sant has even blocked his scenes
subjectively, suggesting how the two "dudes" meeting up as pals don't
even see her, since the first two presentations are from their points of
view.
The three girls who barf together are admittedly stereotypes, but the
footage of them contributes to this point, as with the boy-girl couple
who walk together and eventually hide in a cooler, as with the
photographer. The film interested me as being about the way the trap of
the self creates an the absence of community. Thus John is stuck in his
life with his drunken father and the principal makes no attempt to
understand that at all, and thus his crying scene becomes important, as
does the girl who tries to help but who has to go anyway when he won't
let her in. Long takes with camera movements often place characters in
broader contexts, as in for example Mizoguchi; here they are about the
characters' self traps, a phenomenon that (so I have heard: current or
recent high school students are welcome to contribute here) accurately
describes current American high schools. But it does not describe my own
-- which was admittedly an unusual one: the Bronx High School of
Science, a high school only founded in the late 1930s, already counts
five physics Nobel laureates among its alumni, making it de facto
unusual. Sorry for the school pride here, but what I experienced was a
bunch of 60s kids (my years there were '61-'64) fascinated by the world
more than by themselves, passionate not only about mathematics but also
about history and politics and art. Not that there aren't kids like that
today, because I have known and do know some, and not that there weren't
ridiculously self-absorbed kids at Bronx Science, of course, but the
"paradigm" seems to have shifted.
So at any rate I see these cinematically-depicted self-absorptions as
the "explanation" the film offers for the shooters: one boy is "into"
photography, an unseen kid is into tormenting his classmate with gobs of
goo, and two others (including the tormented one) are "into" guns and
killing. This is not to say the film is perfect, and in a lot of ways I
find it troubling, but it's certainly very good.
- Fred C.
8070
From: Paul Fileri
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 8:42pm
Subject: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
Bill wrote:
> Having recently spent a month thinking about the symbolism of Siamese
> twins, I was surprised to discover that The Dreamers, like Dead
> Ringers, is a metaphorical Siamese twin movie
Just as an aside, I would be intrigued to see a film that gives twins a
prominent position but doesn't choose to treat them as some sort of
structuring metaphor or as an overwhelmingly loaded element, whether it
be thematic or formal (repetition/mirroing in the narrative). I can't
think of any examples off-hand.
- Paul
8071
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 9:08pm
Subject: Re: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci) (Twin movies)
Paul Fileri wrote:
>Just as an aside, I would be intrigued to see a film that ....
>
Filmmakes, and artists in other fields, give diverse reasons for making
work, but one fairly common one goes something like, "I would never have
started making films if someone else had made the films I wanted to see."
- Fred C.
8072
From: Andy Rector
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 9:31pm
Subject: Re: NIGHT AND FOG/meaning
My point and objection was only this: ascribing a suffocating and
crushing lack of meaning, or non-sense to the camps in general and to
Resnais' film on them is misleading. Resnais film, as well as
Straub's Schoenberg film, have taught me precisely NOT to proceed in
this manner of discourse on the holocaust. To do so, I believe, helps
perpetuate similar war crimes (and I think this was Resnais point
too) that have become daily occurence in Israel against the
Palestinians. Sharon would hate N&F if he saw it, it is fundamentally
against his fascist tendency.
Fred, I think you "got" this and responded to it in your N&F post by
emphatically agreeing with Oudart's "non-sense" remark. We disagree.
I brought up Elephant because in reading a VanSant interview he
seemed to want to compose "non-sense" or absurdity as well. Thanks
for bringing up Enthusiasm, I'd forgotten, what a film!
David, Of course tracking shots in themselves aren't morally suspect
off the bat, I'm positive that's not what Straub meant. The moment of
tracking in Straub/Huillet films is obviously different from Resnais
or Ophuls or Fuller. But how amazing it is that nearly every S/H
tracking shot denies emotion in the facile sense, that they are
purely spatial moves, space exploding moves (I'm thinking of Othon,
Bridegroom...). History Lessons doesn't have a tracking shot, it has
a trucking shot (with the man in the car), similar to From the Cloud
to the Resistance.
Bill, I'm still wondering about what exactly Straub said about N&F,
the temperature of it, the context.
Yours,
andy
8073
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 11:18pm
Subject: CRANES ARE FLYING / ANDREI RUBLEV
The tracking shots in THE CRANES ARE FLYING are tremendous, but
the best tracking shot I know is in ANDREI RUBLEV when the enemy
attacks a village, soldiers pillage and rape a woman on roof tops
while others take the long path below the roof tops (BUT all the time
you heard the horses and soldiers in the back ground) to arrive at
a church full of villagers. The camera has continued from the
arrival at the village, over the roof tops, and back to the village
church where more pillaging goes on...all in sequence with the
sounds of the horse hoofs in the background.
8074
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Sat Mar 6, 2004 11:20pm
Subject: ELEPHANT / THE CRANES ARE FLYING
I was glad to see mention of ELEPHANT in the Night and Fog posts.
I wanted to say something about Elephant but I could not remember
the exact images but it seems like much of the shooting
was 'left out' except for the black and white videos of fleeing
students in the various class rooms
I thought the directorial choices in Elephant quite good given the
difficult subject matter and the penchant for some to
're-enact' sordid event.
I watched for the first time THE CRANES ARE FLYING yesterday and
the story could have been told with no war scenes, possibly making
the effect of war even more powerful by just including the departing
trains, hospital, and returning train scenes along with all the 'at
home' scenes. It would emphasize the tremendous uncertainty all feel
when awaiting for loved ones to return, as well as what soldiers feel
when going off to war.
8075
From: Frederick M. Veith
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 2:12am
Subject: Re: Re: NIGHT AND FOG/meaning
On Sat, 6 Mar 2004, Fred Camper wrote:
> Fred V., thanks for the Adorno quote, but I'm sure I've read his
> "recantation" in a different context, though I have no idea where,
> because what I read gave as the reason for the recantation that he's
> read good or great poetry since the Holocaust itself constituted
> evidence that it was possible to write poetry.
For the moment at least, I'm going to confine my comments to this point.
First, because my copy of Prisms wasn't so near at hand as Negative
Dialectics, I left out something important in my reply to your earlier
post. You gave Adorno's 'dictum' as "After Auschwitz, it is impossible to
write poetry". This is a very common misquotation. The passsage in
question appears in the essay "Cultural Criticism and Society". The common
English translation of the remark (the essay is collected in Prisms) is:
"Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the
dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become
impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed
intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb
the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge
as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation."
But even this is a distortion (from otherwise fine translators) of the
German, where the phrase in question is not a sentence itself, but part of
a longer one, which the above translation breaks into three:
"Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und
Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist
barbarisch, und das frisst auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum
es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben"
Or (approximately) in English:
"The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the
dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is
barbaric, and it also corrodes the knowledge which expresses why it has
become impossible to write poetry today."
I wonder if what you read wasn't a commentary on Adorno? So far as I'm
aware, he returns to this passage only three times. There's the previously
quoted passage from Negative Dialectics. There's this passage from "Is Art
Lighthearted?" (in Notes to Literature):
"Art, which is no longer possible if it is not reflective, must renounce
lightheartedness of its own accord. It is forced to do so above all by
what has recently happened. The statement that it is not possible to write
poetry after Auschwitz does not hold absolutely, but it is certain that
after Auschwitz, because Auschwitz was possible and remains possible for
the foreseeable future, lighthearted art is no longer conceivable.
Objectively it degenerates into cynicism, no matter how much it relies on
kindness and understanding."
There's another passage in Ohne Leitbild, which unfortunately hasn't been
translated into English. I'd try to translate it, but the syntax is a bit
thorny and I'm feeling lazy. It follows a similar pattern in that it too
abstains from the declaration that poetry itself constitutes evidence to
the contrary. Which is not to say that this wasn't (approximately) the
reason Adorno modified the earlier statement, but that it would be a
mistake to think that his 'recantation' had in mind the exoneration of
poetry in general so much as (certain poems of) Paul Celan in particular.
Which brings me to a mea culpa regarding my earlier post. Though oft
repeated, Celan's biographer John Felstiner claims that the alleged
relationship between Celan's 'Todesfuge' and Adorno's first remark is
apocryphal and almost certainly spurious, that Adorno had quite other
poetry in mind.
But the concern is still there (and here returns more directly to the
discussion at hand).
From: http://www.gazette.de/Archiv/Gazette-Oktober2001/Thirwell.html
"Adorno glossed his apophthegm in 1961: 'Through the aesthetic principle
of stylisation... an unimaginable fate still seems as if it had some
meaning: it becomes transfigured, something of the horror is removed.'
According to Adorno, form transfigures, it stylises the horror - it
sentimentalises. Adorno's use in 1961 of the word 'transfigured' may
allude to Celan - who, in a 1958 interview, said: 'In my first book I was
still transfiguring things - I'll never do that again!' In a questionnaire
the same year, Celan wrote that his new poetry 'does not transfigure, does
not 'poeticise', it names and posits...'"
It was this poetry (i.e., Sprachgitter, which postdates 'Todesfuge' by 13
years) which Adorno planned on writing about. Unfortunately he died before
writing the planned essay.
Fred.
PS Anyone who hasn't heard the recording of Celan reading 'Todesfuge'
should go to:
http://www.nortonpoets.com/ex/celanp.htm
Even if you can't follow the German, this is one of the greatest
recordings of a poet reading his own work.
Caveat: Felstiner's translation bizarrely leaves increasingly long
fragments of repeated text in the original German. This produces an
peculiar effect which is absent in the German text.
8076
From: Raymond P.
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 6:02am
Subject: Hong Kong International Film Festival 2004
Once again, the utter madness of the HKIFF is upon me. They manage
to fit 300 films into 15 days, making it nigh impossible to catch
all of the great features within that period.
In fact, there are a number of retrospectives I'll be missing, most
notably Fred Camper's own Stan Brakhage programme. :( I still hope
to catch a program or a talk, however. Plus, I do already have the
Criterion ;)
I've just booked the tickets, and here's the films I'll be seeing:
The Kite
Bright Future
Father and Son
Good Morning, Night
His Brother
Osama
Shara
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring
Twentynine Palms
Crimson Gold
Distant
At Five in the Afternoon
Fuse
Since Otar Left
The Adventures of Iron Pussy
Time of the Wolf
The Return
The Barbarian Invasions
The Missing
Peep TV Show
Vibrator
That Day
Elephant
Reconstruction
Tokyo Godfathers
The Tulse Luper Suitcases I: The Moab Story
Triple Agent
Akame 48 Waterfalls
Samaritan Girl
Goodbye Dragon Inn
Not on the Lips
Unfortunately missing these:
A Thousand Months
Come and Go
The Story of Marie and Julien
The Dreamers
Cremaster 3
A Talking Picture
Baober in Love
Jade Goddess of Mercy
The Five Obstructions
Abjad
Roads to Koktebel
Gozu
La Petite Lili
Bon Voyage
Travellers & Magicians
The Story of Weeping Camel
The Flower of Evil
Come and Go
Beautiful Boxer
Robot Stories
Deep Breath
8077
From: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 6:42am
Subject: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
For whatever it's worth: I haven't been in touch with Gilbert (who
used to be a very good friend) for years, but I've just recently
read his latest novel, Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires, and the big
surprise is that, despite Gilbert's unconvincing disavowal of being
gay a few years back, which no one to my knowledge believed, this
new book is by far his most gay and "out" novel--thematically,
erotically, and existentially. Which leads me to conclude that
Gilbert swings like a pendulum, so to speak. And who is this novel
dedicated to? "Bernardo and Claire." Raul Ruiz recently told me, in
fact, that Gilbert and BB hit it off so well--because Gilbert can
discuss subjects other than cinema with him--that they'll likely be
working together again.
I ordered the new novel, incidentally, from the U.K. branch of
Amazon, and gather that one can also order Gilbert's rewrite of The
Holy Innocents--now named The Dreamers like the film based on it.
Has anyone here read this rewrite?
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
>
> --- hotlove666 wrote:
> .
> >
> > David, who is Gilbert?
> >
> >
> Gilbert Adair -- an ex-friend of mine who wrote the
> book on which the film is based AND the screenplay.
>
> Gilbert also wrote "Love and Death on Long Island" and
> dedicated it to Meredith Brody -- one ofmy very best
> friends and now also an ex-friend of Gilbert's.
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Search - Find what you're looking for faster
> http://search.yahoo.com
8078
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 7:06am
Subject: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
Paul wrote: I would be intrigued to see a film that gives twins a
prominent position but doesn't choose to treat them as some sort of
structuring metaphor or as an overwhelmingly loaded element, whether
it be thematic or formal (repetition/mirroing in the narrative). I
can't think of any examples off-hand.
See Stuck on You when it comes out on video. My research on the
subject of conjoined twins was part of an essay about how all the
connotations, political and psychological, of conjoined twins were
neutralized, to use Oudart's term (see the Night and Fog thread), in
that film.
Incidentally, according to her imdb bio, Eva Green has a non-
identical twin sister. I have no idea what that means.
8079
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 7:36am
Subject: Re: Night and Fog (Meaning)
Andy: We were waiting for dinner, making conversation, mostly about
Ford, as usual (he was wondering what Ford would have thought of FDR
rigging our entry into WWII by provoking Pearl Harbor and letting it
happen), and Hitchcock, since I had just written the book. I told him
that Hitchcock had made a film about the camps using the opening of
Triumph of the Will as his opening, and that led to Night and Fog.
Straub rather hesitantly started to say something like "We've
rethought Night and Fog lately, and decided that it may be a little
too..." I said "...aestheticized?" He nodded grimly, and we were
called in to dinner. But I assume he didn't mean the wartime images.
Actually, when you bring up the Straubs' film inspired by
Schoenberg's Music for a Silent Film Scene, it is highly relevant to
what Oudart said, rightly or wrongly, about Night and Fog, because
(as I think Daney noted at the time), the Straubs gave careful
consideration to neutralizing exactly the kinds of associations Fred
C. is talking about when showing the photos of the dead Communards,
which were taken to display their defeat and the bourgeoisie's
victory, and to intimidate future revolutionaries from taking up arms.
Frederick V: There's a pretty good book about Derrida and the Shoah,
which made many Derrida works I still like a lot resonate differently
for me, notably "Feu la cendre."
Fred C: All judgements of aesthetic value are stated in objective
form. (Kant) But you have fought to distinguish that from "like/don't
like" as in "I don't like films with X in them," and Kant would
certainly agree with that distinction. I shouldn't have said that
your tentative objections to Night and Fog were a matter of taste; I
should have said that they were, IMO, a matter of personal taste,
because I didn't think that, on consideration, you would want to
state them in the form of an aesthetic judgement. Putting it tha tway
may sound even more pretentious, but at least it's what I meant.
Filming an absence is very French. There's a French militant film on
Palestinian refugees where, famously, a refugee who has returned to
the place in Israel where his village used to be points at a spot
where there is now nothing and says something like "Everyone used to
drink from that well." I haven't seen the film - just read the review.
For the record, I have great sympathy for Israel in the present
conflict and am suspicious of any overly emotional attacks on them
because of what Sharon is doing on the West Bank. They may be armed
to the teeth, but as has been proven countless times since he started
this thing in October of 2000 in order to take power, they are still
in danger - as much from their own far right (religious and
political) as anything. Every time I hear of radioactive materials
being stolen in Iraq after we invaded it I get the willies, and I
don't trust Bush any farther than I can throw him when it comes to
Israel: Midland produces anti-Semites like it produces oil, and being
a fan of "The Late Great Planet Earth" doesn't mean he'd weep if
Israel went sky-high, quite the contrary.
I am also suspicious of recent attempts to get rid of Sharon using
corruption charges just when he's ready to start clearing out
settlements - something he literally may be the only person able to
do. It smells like a legalistic version of what was done to Yitzakh
Rabin when he stood in the way of the fanatics.
8080
From: Andy Rector
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 9:00am
Subject: Re: Night and Fog (Meaning)
Thanks for the Straub anecdote. I get worried at swift denunciations
and Straub does dish them out. I would be disconcerted to go on
thinking N&F was dismissed by them, above all because I would probably
never find out why. That they'd deliberated on it makes it less
painful.
> Actually, when you bring up the Straubs' film inspired by
> Schoenberg's Music for a Silent Film Scene, it is highly relevant
to
> what Oudart said, rightly or wrongly, about Night and Fog, because
> (as I think Daney noted at the time), the Straubs gave careful
> consideration to neutralizing exactly the kinds of associations
Fred
> C. is talking about when showing the photos of the dead Communards,
> which were taken to display their defeat and the bourgeoisie's
> victory, and to intimidate future revolutionaries from taking up
arms.
I'm not sure I understand. And I see that I may have misinterpreted.
Is it that the Straubs neutralized THAT association (as intimidation)
with the picture of the communards, or all associations within the
images, of corpses? I thought I was seeing both, the photos original
use displayed for contemporary contemplation and an unencumbered image
(which must be carefully considered) of barbarism, uninflected by
bourgeois justifications.
> For the record, I have great sympathy for Israel in the present
> conflict and am suspicious of any overly emotional attacks on them
> because of what Sharon is doing on the West Bank. They may be armed
> to the teeth,
...by the US. Bush would ball if Israel was gone, just like Clinton or
Kerry, over lost dividends (Verdoux again). Though I agree that Bush
cares nothing for the people of Israel, just like Sharon (and not just
Sharon). All these guys need the fundamentalists to make their actions
seem reasonable. They are producing. Grizzly shit.
best,
andy
8081
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 0:38pm
Subject: Re: The Dreamers (Bertolucci)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
>
> Incidentally, according to her imdb bio, Eva Green has a non-
> identical twin sister. I have no idea what that means.
A non-identical twin is just a plain old fraternal twin. The
majority (maybe 80% in the US?) of twins are fraternal, conceived
from different ova during the same menstrual cycle, and no more
related genetically than any other two siblings. (You'll recall
Shakespeare's kids, Hamnet and Judith.) (There's a third alternative:
half-identical twins, in which a single egg splits and the two
identical ova are fertilized by different sperm.)
I might be misunderstanding you -- is it that you object to the
use of the word twins (which implies identity) for dissimilar
individuals merely born at the same birth?
Paul
8082
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 1:17pm
Subject: Re: NIGHT AND FOG/meaning
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Andy Rector" wrote:
> Oudart's review seems lazy.
I agree, and "lazy" seems to be the right word.
I'm rather interested in Godard's reflections on the
extermination camps and why they seem so unsatisfactory -- maybe
he (and Daney and others) use them as a lazy excuse to
despair. Placing any event, however terrible, either outside of
history (as with Lanzmann) or central to history (as with Godard)
is to abandon the rational analysis of history (and also of the
uses of history) for mystification.
I think an analysis along the lines of Dominique Lecourt's
"Mediocracy" might be useful in criticizing a lot of French
film criticism...
Paul
8083
From:
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 8:32am
Subject: The Dreamers and Doubles
There is a history and typology of doubles on my web site, at:
http://members.aol.com/MG4273/sensatio.htm#Doubles
This covers doubles and twins in prose fiction, film, TV and comics. It is a
mad dash from "Twelth Night" through "Dave" and "The Prince and the Surfer",
with stops along the way for Chamelon Boy and his pet Proty, Drury Lane, "The
Krays", "The Patty Duke Show" (They're cousins! Identical Cousins! Different in
every Way! - as the theme song used to go), Craig Rice's "My Kingdom for a
Hearse" and everything else one can think of. Popular culture is unbelievably
rich and imaginative. And the theme of doubles has caused many great creators'
imaginations to go into overdrive.
Some years ago read a long article on doubles in "The Encyclopedia of
Fantasy", if memory serves. The authors, far more knowledgable about fantastic
fiction than myself, had dozens of examples from little known fantasy and science
fiction novels.
On "The Dreamers": I loved the first third of this film, which dealt with
cinephiles. But found the later sections, dealing with the unhappy sex lives of
the characters, much harder to take. However, Bertolucci's rich visual style is
certainly fascinating in all parts.
On the first third: the scene where Theo reads from Sarris' "The American
Cinema", the article on Keaton, absolutely thrilled me! It was great to see
auteurism on screen.
Mike Grost
8084
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 5:01pm
Subject: Re: Hong Kong International Film Festival 2004
Raymond,
I've seen these at the Palm SPRINGS International FF; the **** I would
like to see again.
If you have a chance to see GREEN TEA or INFERNAL AFFAIRS, they
were two of my favorites. Have already seen INFERNAL AFFAIRS again.
OASIS, from last year, is also quite good.
Elizabeth
>
> The Kite ***
> Osama ****
> Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring ****
> Twentynine Palms (many did not like this, felt a waste of time)
> Crimson Gold ****
> Distant ****
> Since Otar Left ****
> The Return ****
> The Barbarian Invasions ** (too much philosophical dialogue
for a subtitled movie for me; I would be glad to see it dubbed, so
I could 'watch' the movie)
> That Day ***
> Elephant ****
> Tokyo Godfathers ***
> Goodbye Dragon Inn ****
>
> Unfortunately missing these:
>
> A Thousand Months ***
> The Story of Marie and Julien ****
> Roads to Koktebel ****
> Bon Voyage **
> The Story of Weeping Camel ****
8085
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 5:24pm
Subject: Re: Hong Kong International Film Festival 2004
> I've just booked the tickets, and here's the films I'll be seeing:
Looks like a good set of choices. SHARA is one of those rare modern
movies that I think is going to belong to the auteurists: for some
reason we seem to be the only ones responding heavily to it. I'd be
interested to hear your comments on VIBRATOR, which I was very sorry to
have missed at Toronto.
Among the films you couldn't fit, I definitely found THE FLOWER OF EVIL
worthy, though its dramaturgy was as unsatisfying to me as that of MERCI
POUR LE CHOCOLAT. I wonder whether Chabrol is a few steps ahead of me,
or whether he's simply getting careless with something that he is able
to do very well. - Dan
8086
From: Robert Keser
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 8:37pm
Subject: Re: Hong Kong International Film Festival 2004
Lots of good films! You might want to check my
Chicago International Film Festival report at
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/42/chifest2003.htm
which has reviews of the following:
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Raymond P." wrote:
films I'll be seeing:
> Father and Son
> Crimson Gold
> Distant
> Time of the Wolf
> Goodbye Dragon Inn
>
> A Thousand Months
> A Talking Picture
Personally, I endorse A Talking Picture as one of the year's best,
both fascinating and exhilarating.
--Robert Keser
8087
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 8:42pm
Subject:
Paul wrote:
history (as with Lanzmann) or central to history (as with Godard)
is to abandon the rational analysis of history (and also of the
uses of history) for mystification.>
Well, there's always this approach: 'In an interview
in the current Reader's Digest, Ms. Noonan asks Mr. Gibson:
"The Holocaust happened, right?" After saying that some of
his best friends "have numbers on their arms," he responds:
"Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The
Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of
them were Jews in concentration camps."'
8088
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 8:50pm
Subject:
Paul wrote:
history (as with Lanzmann) or central to history (as with Godard)
is to abandon the rational analysis of history (and also of the
uses of history) for mystification.>
Well, there's always this approach: 'In an interview
in the current Reader's Digest, Ms. Noonan asks Mr. Gibson:
"The Holocaust happened, right?" After saying that some of
his best friends "have numbers on their arms," he responds:
"Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The
Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of
them were Jews in concentration camps."'
8089
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 8:51pm
Subject:
Paul wrote:
history (as with Lanzmann) or central to history (as with Godard)
is to abandon the rational analysis of history (and also of the
uses of history) for mystification.>
Well, there's always this approach: 'In an interview
in the current Reader's Digest, Ms. Noonan asks Mr. Gibson:
"The Holocaust happened, right?" After saying that some of
his best friends "have numbers on their arms," he responds:
"Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The
Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of
them were Jews in concentration camps."'
8090
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 8:55pm
Subject: Re: (unknown)
Be sure to read Frank Rich in today's NYT about Mel
Gibson" "forgivness":
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/arts/07RICH.html
This is as rock solid as film criticism gets, IMO.
--- hotlove666 wrote:
> Paul wrote:
> either outside of
> history (as with Lanzmann) or central to history (as
> with Godard)
> is to abandon the rational analysis of history (and
> also of the
> uses of history) for mystification.>
>
> Well, there's always this approach: 'In an interview
> in the current Reader's Digest, Ms. Noonan asks Mr.
> Gibson:
> "The Holocaust happened, right?" After saying that
> some of
> his best friends "have numbers on their arms," he
> responds:
> "Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is
> horrible. The
> Second World War killed tens of millions of people.
> Some of
> them were Jews in concentration camps."'
>
>
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Search - Find what you’re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com
8091
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 9:03pm
Subject: Alexander the Great (Karlson, not Stone or Luhrman)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0326725/
Has any seen this? The cast list makes it sound like some bizarre
piece of camp: William Shatner AND Adam West!
Patrick
8092
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 9:29pm
Subject: Re: Night and Fog/Meaning
Pardon the multiple sends, which were Yahoo going nuts over that
Holocaust denial quote from Mel. I agree that we have to be rational
about the Shoah, but my point is: systematic genocide and war are two
different things.
I'm sure willing to hear arguments that it is a distinction without a
difference - especially if you're one of the dead - and clearly the
two categories of barbarism overlap all the time. But as Serge Daney
expressed it to me when I pointed out that there's relatively
harmless racism in early Walsh, the thing about Racism with a big R,
as practiced in Germany during the 30s and 40s, is precisely its
pretense of rationality, even of scientific truth. Growing up not
liking Italians because you're Irish and you have to share a
neighborhood with them is racism with a little "r," as we see in
wonderful films like Sailor's Luck and The Bowery (that shot of the
Chinese in the window of the burning building...), which I would hate
to see censored, just as I hate to see all those irresponsible Looney
Tunes censored, which they are these days. At least no one who
practices or portrays racism with a little "r" thinks it's rational -
being irrational is part of the fun. But Hitler's planned
extermination of an entire race was justified by eugenic theories.
This aspect of the Shoah is portrayed in Monsieur Klein, as I recall.
Nor am I insensitive to the other rational arguments against
sacralizing the Shoah, which is that there were many mass
exterminations in the last century - I cited Cambodia in one of my
original posts. But even the most dispassionate, lucid analysis of
those hundreds of millions of dead in one century has to give some
kind of special place of pride to the German extermination of the
Jews, which was a pseudo-scientific program of extermination carried
out for purposes of purifying the German race. Maybe the Killing
Fields and the Gulag and the Cultural Revolution killed more, with
other kinds of rational or scientific justifications, but there is a
difference, which it behooves us to understand, and not be too quick
to lump the Shoah together with several other forms of mass maurder,
whicgh probably also need to be distinguished among themselves, on
sheer grounds of arithmetic.
And again, even though I know this is a huge hot button issue for
many people, I don't think there is much similarity between what
Sharon is doing in the West Bank and what Hitler did to the Jews in
Germany. It's a crime against humanity, but the aim is not to
eliminate everyone with certain GENES from the face of the earth.
That may sound like a particularly egregious use of what New Critics
called "the intentional fallacy" on my part, and would no doubt feel
that way to me if I were one of the murdered children, but if we're
going to be rational about all this horror, we do have to begin by
making a few elemntary distinctions.
That said, I'm all for rational analysis of Nazism, as opposed to the
cheesy mystagogy (sp?) of films like The Night Porter. I think its
roots were economic, and that we can see some of the same economic
policies being enacted by our own government today for the same
reasons. And I think Hitler's madness was rooted in psychology that
deserves analysis, whether it turns out to be classical Freudian
paranoia based on repressed homosexuality, or being half-Jewish, or
something as simple as what my therapist taught me, that all the evil
in the world has been done by someone who thought he was the victim,
which appears to me to be truer every day that I live.
Or maybe, as Gurdjieff seems to have believcd, these are all
secondary causes for a global mechanism that produces some element
that is needed to feed the moon and permit it to evolve, which we
will continue to produce until enough of us become involved in daily
work on self-consciousness to feed the bastard without killing each
other. Nice metaphor, anyway, isn't it?
8093
From: Andy Rector
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 9:40pm
Subject:
> Well, there's always this approach: 'In an interview
> in the current Reader's Digest, Ms. Noonan asks Mr. Gibson:
> "The Holocaust happened, right?" After saying that some of
> his best friends "have numbers on their arms," he responds:
> "Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The
> Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of
> them were Jews in concentration camps."'
Yes, as long as it's taken lightly and promoted, there is always that
approach. Now what are we going to do about it?
I saw a infotainmentumentary on the making of PASSIOn on the TBN
yesterday. A "film critic" , Holly Mcclure -OC Register!, responding
to the "question" of anti-semitism said "WE've
shown it to thousands since last June and not one Jew has been
killed". The "interviewer" kept quoting scripture in relation to the
film and it's makers, superimposing text from the bible right over
himself and Holly. He said people are leaving the theater cured of
cancer.
.
8094
From: Maxime Renaudin
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 9:42pm
Subject: Re: Showing things
--- Dan Sallitt wrote:
> One notes a theme in Truffaut's criticism (which I believe the
Movie
> critics later picked up on) that cinema is meant to show things,
and
> that there is something bad about not showing the thing that you
are
> making the film about.
I guess it was a major issue for all Nouvelle Vague filmmakers.
Refuse all effects and film "things to the core". "To show the
depth of the sea, show it and not describe it, that's cinema", said
Bazin about "le Monde du Silence".
Godard, always chasing after Rossellini, is probably the one who
worked this issue the most, searching for this "documentaire" part.
A little off topic, I remember Godard, on a TV set I guess,
explaining [they were talking about paperless immigrants] that we
should put a camera in the registry office when the civil servant
says "No" to the citizenship applicant…
More on topic, I found deeply dishonest this shot in Reservoir dogs,
which starts on a little torture scene (knife and ear I guess), then
pans to the wall, leaving the blood spurting off-screen, scream in
the air.
The question, more than "what is to be shown?" is "why is this to be
shown?". To have a moral position toward what is shown.
Back to Kapo, Daney said that a filmmaker is somebody who says: "I
do not have the right to film that, or to film it this way". «The
filmmaker has to keep in mind that what he films does exist outside
the picture too; it is not only film material. »
8095
From:
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 4:57pm
Subject: Re: Alexander the Great (Karlson, not Stone or Luhrman)
I saw this as a kid in the 1960's, shown on TV as a pilot.
I was pre-autuerist, and couldn't tell a camera movement from a cut.
Memories: it was pretty cornball.
Shatner was always dallying with pretty slave girls, and oozing oily
seductive moves (No boyfriend in sight for Alexander the Great!).
Much of the film took place outdoors, against hilly fields (maybe Griffith
Park).
My mother hated it, and thought it was a travesty of history.
I thought it mildly interesting, an an attempt to bring Kultur to the TV
Masses.
As Shatner performances go, it seemed way below "The Andersonville Trial"
(George C. Scott, 1970), which was riveting. This is now on DVD, buty have not
revisted my Fond Memories of Youth.
Mike Grost
trying to cut the Gordian Knot...
8096
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 11:35pm
Subject: Re: Night and Fog/Meaning
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
> Pardon the multiple sends, which were Yahoo going nuts over that
> Holocaust denial quote from Mel. I agree that we have to be rational
> about the Shoah, but my point is: systematic genocide and war are two
> different things.
>
> I'm sure willing to hear arguments that it is a distinction without a
> difference - especially if you're one of the dead - and clearly the
> two categories of barbarism overlap all the time. But as Serge Daney
> expressed it to me when I pointed out that there's relatively
> harmless racism in early Walsh, the thing about Racism with a big R,
> as practiced in Germany during the 30s and 40s, is precisely its
> pretense of rationality, even of scientific truth. Growing up not
> liking Italians because you're Irish and you have to share a
> neighborhood with them is racism with a little "r," as we see in
> wonderful films like Sailor's Luck and The Bowery (that shot of the
> Chinese in the window of the burning building...), which I would hate
> to see censored, just as I hate to see all those irresponsible Looney
> Tunes censored, which they are these days. At least no one who
> practices or portrays racism with a little "r" thinks it's rational -
> being irrational is part of the fun. But Hitler's planned
> extermination of an entire race was justified by eugenic theories.
> This aspect of the Shoah is portrayed in Monsieur Klein, as I recall.
I'm loath to discuss politics, but I probably ought to explain
myself. I'm inclined to agree on the role of scientific racism
and eugenics, but of course that's a matter of
controversy, especially after Goldhagen's book argued for the
continuity between ordinary anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.
A good argument against Goldhagen comes from Norman Finkelstein --
who is worth consulting.
> Nor am I insensitive to the other rational arguments against
> sacralizing the Shoah, which is that there were many mass
> exterminations in the last century - I cited Cambodia in one of my
> original posts. But even the most dispassionate, lucid analysis of
> those hundreds of millions of dead in one century has to give some
> kind of special place of pride to the German extermination of the
> Jews, which was a pseudo-scientific program of extermination carried
> out for purposes of purifying the German race.
However, Godard doesn't examine this. The response should be
to analyze racism, to fight racism, including its scientific
forms -- not wallowing in tears.
Maybe the Killing
> Fields and the Gulag and the Cultural Revolution killed more,
Who thinks that? Mainly those scholars who want to justify
other crimes.
A better comparison, if one wanted to dispute the
uniqueness of the Holocaust, is with the violence of
colonialism, which had a similar racialist justification. The
extermination of the Americans in the 16th century is probably
greater in numbers dead than the Holocaust, but these dead
are truly invisible (when the genocide doesn't receive a response
in the manner of Christopher Hitchens: "deserving to be celebrated
with great vim and gusto".)
(Alexander was mentioned -- he introduced crucifixion to the
West, the campaigns in central Asia became genocidal,
yet it's all forgiven. In part it depends on who your victims
are; it helps to have Lysippos on your side.)
But that wasn't the point: instead it's that the response to the
Holocaust is "lazy," replacing the responsibility to think and
to act with metaphysics.
As I mentioned previously, I'd recommend Dominique Lecourt's
"Mediocracy" -- I think the essay was "Good, Evil, and Wisdom"
for a response to the position that claims a turn from politics
to ethics, reflected in Daney's words following the quote you
gave:
"More generally, morality becomes a living
question again because everyone has experienced the fact that
there exists no morality for someone who thinks in terms of power
(to be seized, held onto or dreamed of), and therefore no morality
on the left or in Marxism. Morality is something individual..."
I saw this article recently. It seems appropriate in discussing
how which victims are visible, and are wept for, "follows the flag."
In this respect Godard seems typical of the mass media, especially
with regard to Bosnia.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Terrorism/PolPotKissinger_Herman.html
> with
> other kinds of rational or scientific justifications, but there is a
> difference, which it behooves us to understand, and not be too quick
> to lump the Shoah together with several other forms of mass maurder,
> whicgh probably also need to be distinguished among themselves, on
> sheer grounds of arithmetic.
>
8097
From: Jess Amortell
Date: Mon Mar 8, 2004 0:28am
Subject: Re: Frank Rich
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein wrote:
> Be sure to read Frank Rich in today's NYT about Mel
> Gibson" "forgivness":
> This is as rock solid as film criticism gets, IMO.
Weren't you at all disturbed by the "pro-gay" Rich's readiness to use "homoerotic" as a slur against the gibbering gibson? As he writes: 'Of all the "Passion" critics, no one has nailed its artistic vision more precisely than the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who called it a homoerotic "exercise in lurid sadomasochism" for those who "like seeing handsome young men stripped and flayed alive over a long period of time."' (I suppose Rich only really approves of homoeroticism as long as it's not tainted by "sadomasochism," "lurid" or perhaps otherwise.)
8098
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Mon Mar 8, 2004 0:50am
Subject: Re: Re: Frank Rich
No.
And not even from Hitchens.
The film's pornographic nature MUST be faced head-on,
especially as it brings the inherent sado-masochism of
the Jesus cult into full view.
--- Jess Amortell wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
> wrote:
> > Be sure to read Frank Rich in today's NYT about
> Mel
> > Gibson" "forgivness":
> > This is as rock solid as film criticism gets,
> IMO.
>
>
> Weren't you at all disturbed by the "pro-gay" Rich's
> readiness to use "homoerotic" as a slur against the
> gibbering gibson? As he writes: 'Of all the
> "Passion" critics, no one has nailed its artistic
> vision more precisely than the journalist
> Christopher Hitchens, who called it a homoerotic
> "exercise in lurid sadomasochism" for those who
> "like seeing handsome young men stripped and flayed
> alive over a long period of time."' (I suppose
> Rich only really approves of homoeroticism as long
> as it's not tainted by "sadomasochism," "lurid" or
> perhaps otherwise.)
>
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Search - Find what you’re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com
8099
From:
Date: Sun Mar 7, 2004 9:06pm
Subject: Re: Hong Kong International Film Festival 2004
Just saw "Osama", which is playing here in Detroit at the art houses. It is a
gripping piece of storytelling, and one that leaves you much to think about.
Thanks to Elizabeth Anne Nolan for recommending this film! (Her good review
this morning caused me to go see it.)
Mike Grost
8100
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Mar 8, 2004 2:32am
Subject: Re: Night and Fog
I'll do my homework, Paul.
Re: the extermination of the Native Americans: Did Hitchens mean he
was in FAVOR of it????
That brings up another French viewpoint on showing/not showing vis a
vis historical memory: Jacques Ranciere. He once argued that American
cinema is able to produce what he calls geneaological fictions (like
Birth of a Nation or Milestones, the latter being hugely admired in
France) because H'wd was able to produce images - through the
western - of the extermination of the Native Americans; whereas "[il
est] impossible de vouloir unir les regards dans la fiction 'voila
d'ou nous venons' sans buter sur Juin 1848 ou la Commune, images de
la lutte de classes malaisees a representer, en fonction meme du
destin de cette lutte...depuis la Troisieme Republique....
"Si la bourgeoisie avait entierement annihile ou domestique la
resistance ouvriere, elle pourrait peut-etre...faire sauter en l'air
les communards avec autant d'allegresse qu'en mettent les plus
distingues fabricants de westerns a faire sauter en l'air les
Indiens....Aussi, le pouvoir ne donne-t-il guere chez nous a aimer
sous la forme de la loi, dans une fiction 'voila d'ou nous vient,' il
se donne a accepter/oublier dans une fiction du type 'on est comme
ca,' une representation en tableau de la diversite sociale, ou le
policier par exemple est moins le representant de la loi qu'un voyeur
qui se trouve aussi bien en haut qu'en bas, et un reformateur qui
reconnait les plaies sociales et invente les remedes."
That's from one of the great issues of CdC, 268-9 ("Images de
marques"), which is built around the question of how to represent
History in film. It also includes the now much-decried (but at least
remembered!) article by Oudart on Son nom de Venise..., Bergala on
atrocity photos, Daney on Salo etc.
I wonder if the French obsession with not letting the Shoah become a
black hole in the national memory doesn't have to do with the feeling
that such black holes inhibit the representational impulse, making a
French Milestones impossible, and condemning their cinema to
producing scale models of society that work like swiss toys suspended
in a void - Renoir's films, say.
A parallel here would be not Native Americans, but the
assassinations: the Zapruder footage did eventually become the seed
from which sprouted forty decades of cinema (chronicled in Jean-
Pierre Berthome's book 26 Seconds), BUT IT WAS SHOWN. I've always
wondered if the total cinematic repression of the RFK assassination,
an event which happened in Hollywood, hasn't had more muffled and
unhealthy consequences (e.g. Nashville...) Welles was preparing a
film on the subject at one point, I know, and Renny Harlin, of all
people, includes a very pointed reference to it in The Long Kiss
Goodnight (anybody spot it?), but that's secret code. (Hint: It's a
deliberate version of the presumably accidental JFK license plate
that turns up in Trois ponts sur la riviere.) Arguably other
Watergate era films, like Chinatown (as genealogical a fiction as one
can imagine: "here's where we got our water from"), are also coded
references to the elimination of RFK prior to the 1968 election.
My point: NOT showing can be a bad thing, too, if it means simple
repression, which is what seems to have happened to Mel G's poor
noggin. Maybe Duh Passion is the return of the repressed, who knows?
(Still haven't seen it.)
A second point, in response to Paul: All of Godard's pseudo-scientism
in interviews to the contrary notwithstanding, should we really
assume that art has a responsibility to be rational? Criticism,
maybe - but films?
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