Too Unfulfilled

I made a film.  [Hold for applause and/or wanking motion]  It is difficult to pinpoint a specific motivation beyond simply wanting to, an admittedly broad enough class in the taxonomy of desires to cover genera from “Iono” all the way to “why not.”  Making the film was the means to an end which was making a film.  Which is all really just to say:  I didn’t have any grand designs re what to do once/if the film was completed.  And so it remains.  The problem with putting things off until the times come is that ultimately the time will come:  

Notwithstanding a long, sad list of mistakes and regrets over limitations in equipment, time, experience, ability, and most everything else save perhaps moxie, and aided by enough distance to reflect on what was done properly and enough alcohol to forget the rest, I am fairly happy with the result.  A masterpiece it is not, but there’s a lot on screen that I’m really proud of (blah blah blah), and it’s a pride dwarfed by (blah) the amount of fun (blah) I had in making it (blah).  Banal clichés aside, once the smile of smug self-satisfaction relaxed into its usual scowl and the memories of laughs dimmed to vague recollections of something happening to someone somewhere, what was I left with?  Seventeen minutes of playful whimsy viewed by no more than a few dozen friends (none of whom are my otherwise amazing and supportive and, apparently, extremely busy wife), a handful of festival rejections (another one happily came in while writing this!), and a lingering niggle of chagrin seem to be the more notable contents of my Me and I gift bag.   The unfulfilled wish for the film to reach a wider, praise-lavishing, acolyte-turning audience not only sits as an embarrassingly vain disappointment unto itself but also compromises what I hoped would and should be a singularly satisfying accomplishment.  My thoughts regarding the experience of making the film, of real achievement, are now intertwined with unpleasant feelings of unrequited longing, unfulfilled promise, and, weirdly, paradise lost.  I have cast a pall on myself.

Assuming the drive to create was as pure as I want to believe, why must it now be sullied by a demand for attention often seen in your garden-variety mental patient?  Part of it is functional in that some form of positive feedback would have facilitated or at least made making another film more likely, if not via wheel greasing of future cast and crew then by validating the push to carry on, to avoid filmmaking being added to the list of creative larks that shriveled malnourished and unattended to on the vine of my aesthetic life (see, e.g., my discarded standup career).  But there’s another part of it that reeks of pure egoism.  It’s probably normal, but I’m not sure it’s helpful.  I did something I think is pretty great.  Why can’t that be enough?  And will it ever be?  Will the drive to create lead me to do something even better, or will the fear and expectation of recognitional failure prevent me from even trying?  These are important questions, and the answers are elusive.  

Apocalypse Kollum

The Turin Horse: A March Through Life's Pain, Struggle, and Futility

“The Turin Horse,” a slow and solemn black-and-white film set in a 19th-century wilderness and inspired by an anecdote involving Friedrich Nietzsche, displays Mr. Tarr’s uncompromising, atavistic commitment to darkness, difficulty and lapidary pictorial sublimity. The movie may also dispel any skepticism about the finality of his decision to abandon his vocation, since it is hard to imagine a more thorough and systematic statement of intellectual despair. Bela Tarr may be the happiest man in the universe, but the universe as he depicts it is a harsh and cruel place, indifferent if not actively hostile to the striving of human beings and other dumb animals.

- A.O. Scott

I'm not going to bother reviewing Bela Tarr's masterpiece The Turin Horse since A.O. Scott does so nearly perfectly. But I will just add a few brief thoughts.

One of the stylistic hallmarks of the film, and of Tarr's work generally, is the long take. FN1 I am, to put it mildly, a fan of the long take. Two recent American works, Meek's Cutoff, which received a fair amount of critical press and was featured on many year-end best-of lists, and The Lonliest Planet, FN2 which is being released theatrically this spring, concern travelings across long distances and use long, wide shots to depict the beauty of the landscapes and the difficulty of the journeys. I liked both films, but their use of long takes merely scratches the tip of the precipice of the surface of Turin, which being composed of roughly 30 different shots over 2-and-a-half hours, is accordingly made up of shots that vary in length between long and interminable. What sets apart Turin's long takes, however, is not length or quantity, nor is it that they are mostly shot in tight as the actors move purposefully, albeit glacially, within the cramped house in which nearly all the "action" occurs, but rather it's the cumulative effect of showing the monotony, rituality, and resulting realism of the pain and struggle of being alive.

Meek's, and to a much lesser extent Lonliest, uses its long takes to elaborate on and stylize a very specific segment of the experience; e.g. long, drawn-out traveling shots cut to a set-up campsite with people milling about in unspoken despair over the precariousness of their situation. The actual work that goes into the camp set-up is completely ignored. La Ritual de lo habitual no existen. The film's emotion is created largely by the uncertainty in the story, will they make it to water or won't they, and the characters' responses to it. Tarr, far less sexily and through sheer force of will, creates feeling through the mundane drudgery of the routine but painstaking actions needed to simply stay alive: the daughter systematically undressing and dressing her father, the cooking and eating of boiled potatoes, the retrieving of water each morning, the shots of palinka to start the day. FN3 All of it is done without speech, emotion, or much consideration by the actors, but not only is each absolutely necessary for survival, they are inescapably, as the human condition is wont to be, brimming with a panoply of tenderness, bitterness, numbness, and acceptance. Everything but joy. The simple acts that Tarr shoots even more simply yet so convincingly (and repeatedly) convey more about the characters and their lives than any Sorkinian soliloquy about self-awareness, -hatred, or -congratulation ever could.

It is a painful, brutal film. Everyone should see it.

FN1 - I'm using "long" to mean "temporally long," and not in some fancy, technical photographical way.

FN2 - See The Lonliest Planet if you can; it is good. My friends claim I missed the whole point of the film. I claim it was all a set up by internal affairs. And that Gael Garcia Bernal is dreamy.

FN3 - My one real complaint is that there are no scenes depicting the characters relieving themselves. They get up in the morning and go straight to their tasks (she: dress, get water from well, dress dad, palinka, stable; he: look confused, get dressed by daughter, palinka, stable). You see them do basically everything it is that they do, but never once do you see them piss or shit. I know they were hard, but no one's that hard.

The Limits of Control and the Limits of Film Review Aggregation

The little-known 2009 film The Limits of Control, Jim Jarmusch's most recent directorial work, is mostly just a collection of beautifully shot, slow-moving landscapes and silent portraits through the stylish cities and pastoral countryside of Spain. Visually, the film is nearly inarguably gorgeous. Even more inarguable, it received a "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the popular film review aggregation site. The site essentially collects, evaluates, and aggregates large quantities of movie reviews to arrive at a single, final rating. The Limits of Control received a 42%. That is not good.

The negative reviews, which safely outnumber the positive ones, are fairly unanimous in their criticisms: the film is "tedious," "pretentious," and lacks a "coherent story." Rather than taking issue with the accuracy of those assessments -- I think the "pretentious" and no "coherent story" complaints are fair, while "tedious" is a subjective valuation that depends on the importance placed by the viewer on the more objective features of the film, such as tone (pretentious) or plot (none) -- I think they fundamentally miss the point. The film is pretentious in that it's not even a remotely honest or true depiction of things that people do; in fact, it's mostly just scenes of protagonist Isaach de Bankol sitting around cafes, sipping two espressos ("my, what a cute affectation, it must mean something!"), and waiting for strangers to approach him and engage in very cryptic, one-sided, pseudo-philosophical conversations before exchanging matchbooks, with each new one containing the location of his next rendezvous. Of course a movie based around that is going to be necessarily if not tautologically over-loaded with pretension. And there is no coherent story, insofar as the "story" is a series of these rendezvous, interspersed lightly with Paz de la Huerta alternately wearing nothing or a transparent raincoat, all of it inevitably leading to a penultimate scene involving a wig-coiffed and bespectacled Bill Murray inside a heavily fortified compound somewhere in the desert. Of course. Needless to say, the importance if not existence of a story in The Limits of Control is minimal. Jarmusch seems to have learned a valuable lesson from his previous work in Ghost Dog, an otherwise effective film that was completely ruined by its slavery to the plot and the comically terrible ending it required. Critical observations regarding The Limits of Control's tone and story seem akin to disparaging films that display 24 frames per second, or that criticisms Buster Keaton's early work was silent; that is, they are obvious features of the subject work, and evaluation based on those features alone is narrow-minded and practically useless.

What The Limits of Control does actually attempt to do (rather than be honest or tell a story), and what it does really well, is provide an varied mix of beautifully composed shots, center those shots around the mysterious voyage of a compelling figure (de Bankol gives a wonderfully subdued performance), layer the droning sound of experimental Japanese rock band Boris over the landscapes, which gives the slow movement an even more laborious and ominous feel, and sprinkle in some interesting performances from well-regarded actors (John Hurt and Gael Garcia Bernal are particularly good). It does this while keeping the momentum and arc going forward. It is a successful and enjoyable film, even if it does border closely on tedium before the dilemma of how will this will all end surfaces.

The Rotten Tomatoes reviews of The Limits of Control are particularly divisive; there was a bifurcation of the audience into those that really enjoyed the film and those that hated it. Splitting the difference to arrive at a single rating tells the potential viewer nothing about which group she will fall into. As is the case with advanced hockey statistics, the broader context of the data is key. Another problem with Rotten Tomatoes is that it does not differentiate between reviewers or the reviews themselves. Reviews are given only a binary metric - positive or negative. Each reviewer is treated equally - a glowing review from A. O. Scott counts just the same as a lukewarm review from a hack in the Palookaville Post. While there's an argument to be made that differentiating between reviewers introduces a problematic subjective element to the endeavor, it would seem that treating them the same imposes a similar value judgment on the analysis.

Slumdog Weekend

An equal parts long and relaxing as not-long-enough and too hectic Thanksgiving weekend wrapped up with a very rainy, very sleepy Sunday (three distinct naps went down) over in these parts. Four days of mostly eating and drinking and movie watching and dog walking, and even a bit of hockey playing, came to its inevitably melancholic and depressingly necessary end. We celebrated the occasion by watching Danny Boyle’s new one, the much talked about and Oscar-buzz gathering Slumdog Millionaire. Though Trainspotting remains an all-time favorite, I can’t say I’ve seen anything he’s done since The Beach, and I can say that I absolutely abhorred that silly stupid movie. Nonetheless, an onion interview and a couple internet convos later, and I was pretty looking forward to seeing this one.

Big mistake. This shit was disappointing. First off, I find it somewhat perverse for an Englishman to make a movie that uses very broad strokes to essentially show how fucked up India is. It’s kind of like what I imagine an American movie proselytizing about how horrible a post-Arbenz Guatamala, or modern day Iraq for that matter, is. Luckily, Hollywood has not been so brazen, yet. That said, that’s not what does this film in. It’s the never-ending dramatization of nearly every single event in nearly every single scene, ultimately giving the movie a caricatured part-fairy-tale, part-horror movie after-school-special feel, and depriving what I imagine are its real characters in what is certainly a real setting from the meaningful impact it deserves, that is Boyle’s biggest crime. Though I am admittedly a bit squeamish, I’ve seen enough of cruelty and gruesomeness on film when used appropriately and not heavy-handedly (think Ken Loach’s Carla’s Song), to not be averse to it, per se. But while seeing teenagers tortured and kids having their eyes gouged out is not particularly enjoyable on its own, it becomes even more deflating because the characters are so one-dimensional and the entire film is clumsily framed by a hopelessly naïve and immature love story that is never given real substance to make the audience believe in it. Nothing ever really happens on screen, especially in light of everything else that does happen, that makes the protoganist’s destinal quest for love anything but hard to believe and wildly unjustified, and yet how it will play out becomes so obviously predictable. Think of a Bollywood film where the dancing and costumes are replaced by suffering and filth.

An obvious comparison point is Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay, a very gritty look at a similar if not the same slum in Bombay. The difference in the films is striking, however. Nair worked mainly with street children and rather than use a series of catastrophically tragic events to push the narrative along and frame the story of the childrens’ lives, she takes a much less dramatized approach and simply offers a wider-lensed (both technically and metaphorically) look at the struggle, pain, joy, and hope that fills the daily existence of the participants. The film is just as depressing and fucked-up as Slumdog, if not as visually jarring, but it does not have the same cartoonish feel; one never gets the feeling that the directors are using time-tested tricks to pull at your emotions as in Slumdog. There doesn’t appear to be anything contrived in Salaam; Slumdog, on the other hand, in part from its structure as a re-telling, appears at times to be nothing more than contrivance. Nair showed her street children turned actors Truffaut’s The 400 Blows before they began filming. If Boyle were to engage in a similar preparation, one gets the feeling he would have chosen something along the lines of The Notebook.

All that said, it’s not a terrible movie. One thing it does really well is show how terrible a place India still is, notwithstanding rapid industrialization and the emergence of a class of luxury product consumers. Though I suppose that’s shooting fish in a barrel. So on a weekend of giving thanks, I suppose I’m obligated to say I’m thankful for the English and Dutch and other Europeans involved in fucking up the country of my ancestors so bad that my parents were forced to emigrate half-way around the world to raise their family and live their lives. So that I could spend a weekend slumdogging it from the confines of my Park Avenue apartment. Thanks.

i dont sleep til it's light

another brilliant skewering from anthony lane in last week's new yorker, this time serving up the documentary, "shine a light." one may argue it's not fair to beat up on the elderly, and possibly senile, but it's worthwhile for amusingly criticizing both the rolling stones and martin scorsese, from which we can synthesize a critique of the mainstream entertainment culture. here's a hint, it's about a lack of subtlety and an overabundance of close-ups and camera changes. i'd rather watch 100 year old turtles mate, eat and sleep, and i'd have to see fewer wrinkles.

the wave-particle-like duality of art

I’ve always thought of art as a fundamentally subjective experience. The objective physical creation of the artist is only given relevance, value, and even meaning in the various personal minds of the audience. The heart wants what it wants applies not merely to matters of the heart but nearly all matters of non-functional preference. As much as art can be intellectualized and rationalized, explained and deconstructed, it is the immediate and visceral reaction of the experiencer that incubates any subsequent thoughts or reflections on the piece. That’s all fine and good and not much new there, but it’s not the complete picture. Pieces of art can, and to a certain extent must, be considered not merely in the idiosyncratic vacuum of each person's brain, but in the broader context of other influenced and influencing, or related, works. What’s great about art is the unique and unrelatable experience it provides, but what gives this experience shape and meaning is the analysis, even if purely on subjective grounds, of that piece of art vis-à-vis other similar works. An illustration: yes, Van Gogh’s works are awesome by themselves and that’s all that really matters, but don’t we have to at least agree that the fact they are so much, and inarguably, better than Gauguin’s counts for something?

Is it inconsistent to assert that the internalization of art is a subjective experience, while nevertheless admitting that there must be a set of objective criteria with which to evaluate it? Another illustration: the following pictures were both taken at Angkor Wat, the first by myself and the second by someone else.

I think it would be difficult to argue that my picture is not objectively worse than the second. Though the pictures are from opposite ends of the same structure, the intentions of each basically line up: awesome ruins, reflection in moat splits the frame, solemnly blue sky interrupted by a divine-like break of the clouds centered above the structure, etc. Going against my version is a lesser quality resolution and damper colors (my wimpy zoom and amateur digital camera is no match for whatever pro-digital-slr-whatever the other photog got to use). Also, the other shot is perfectly and evenly framed, whereas I would have loved to cut off mine on the right just after the tall structures in the background and before the appearance of the branches on the left. And of course my beautiful photo is sullied by the presence of ugly, ugly tourists walking the bridge and climbing the steps. The off-angle view in my work is actually, I think, more interesting and provides a depth you don’t get in the professional, straight on approach. But nevertheless, I think it’s too little, too late, mine is probably inferior. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yes, but doesn’t intellectual honesty require that we declare a winner when there is one?

Another more salient example comes from the recent Academy Awards. Now, yes everyone knows, award shows are stupid, and the Oscars are particularly dumb, but awarding Best Picture to the Cohen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men over P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is especially egregious and cannot be justified on any objective grounds for evaluating art. The latter is clearly the more ambitious project, both thematically, as an allegory for this country’s dual strains of unbridled capitalism and fanatical religiousness, and how adherence to either will lead you to ruin, as well as cinematically, as Anderson uses a variety of long, drawn out shots, steady cams, moving cams, an insane score by Johnny Greenwood, and coaxes performances from Daniel Lewis and Paul Dano that each range from frightening brutality to pathetic vulnerability and everywhere in between. No Country is a great little picture, but it does not profess or try to be anything nearly as magnificent. It’s a nice little thriller, chase/stalker flick with a likeable protagonist you root for and a psychopathic weirdo you are terrified of, with meandering and barely sufferable interludes featuring a retiring old-timer cop who pontificates on what it all means. Good stuff. But there is no wild range of emotion, no novel shots of people scurrying towards and then away from an exploding oil derrick, no interesting score, no descent into the abyss, and no social commentary. There is much too much happening in Blood to digest and appreciate on one viewing, one needs to watch it again to get the subtleties, the interplay with the music, the information contained in the numerous dialogue-less shots. I can’t imagine anyone needing to see No County again; once you know what happens, what else is there? It was almost surely its social commentary that sealed Blood's fate. It brings to mind Julie Christie’s remark on the Oscar winning German film, The Lives of Others: “I’m not sure I can bear to see a film they gave the Oscar to, that tells you what awful people Communists are.” Amen, sister.

So how can art be at the same time a subjective experience that cannot be evaluated on anything more than a personal basis, yet also a creation that exists in the context of many other creations who all succeed and fail to varying degrees on the basis of objective criteria? In much the same way that light acts simultaneously as a wave and a particle, no one knows.

What we’ve learned:

1) Producing art is fun. Talking about art, less so.

2) I need a better digital camera.

3) There Will Be Blood is very good.

4) Julie Christie is awesome.