Link Round Up: "Painless and Perfect"

Another near the end of year massive link round-up, covering everything I wrote (sans the book) since September.

I made my debut in Sight & Sound Magazine in November with a piece on Steven Soderbergh's TV series The Knick, which may not be the best series to grace the non-theatrical medium, but damn it—Soderbergh proves all my stray observations about how just because it's television doesn't mean aesthetics should come second. 

In lieu of New York Film Festival, Los Angeles provides us with the bigger, perhaps a bit more eclectic AFI Festival. Since most of the major titles were already at Cannes, I wrote about Joel Potrykus's recession-bro comedy Buzzard, the modestly quirky coming-of-age meanderer Tu Dors Nicole, the latest WTF from Takashi Miike Over Your Dead Body, and JP Snaidecki's The Iron Ministry. Plus I spoke about Lav Diaz's From What Is Before on a recent podcast.

Another recent film festival visit—New Orleans! I graciously served as a juror for the Louisiana Shorts section of the 25th Annual New Orleans Film Festival, and also wrote about the wonderful experience at RogerEbert.Com. 

Wrote about some movie called Interstellar. You may have heard of it. And also this other thing called Gone Girl.

Also wrote about two other new movies of relative merit: Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip (which is of great proportion) and Damien Chazelle's Whiplash (which deserves at least some consideration).

In the canonical masterpiece territory, on John Ford's My Darling Clementine, and finding a postwar poet of cinema.

And on The Cinephiliacs, New Orleans local Angela Catalano on starring a popup cinema and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, director Alex Ross Perry on his idiosyncratic approach to independent cinema and Husbands and Wives, and Kim Morgan on Marilyn Monroe and Something Wild. 

And on Letterboxd...
Hitchcock: Suspicion, Foreign Correspondent, Vertigo
Expressive Esoterica: Dark Passage (Daves), Cure (K. Kurosawa), The Blue Gardenia (Lang), Chicago Calling (Reinhardt), Notes on the Circus (Mekas), Whirlpool (Preminger)
Far Side of Paradise: Papillon (Schafner), The Country Girl (Seaton), Baby Doll (Kazan)
Contemporary Stuff: Abuse of Weakness (Brelliat)
Marxism: Class Relations (Straub/Huillet)

April Screening Log

Color coded via Dan Sallitt's method (Current or upcoming releases not included).  Link included when discussed at some length.

1. How Green Was My Valley (Ford, USA, 1941) (Letterboxd)
2. Seconds (Frankenheimer, USA, 1966) (Letterboxd)
3. Fury (Lang, USA, 1936)
4. Safe (Haynes, USA, 1995) (Letterboxd)
5. Clando (Téno, Cameroon, 1996) (Letterboxd)
6. Cold Water (Assayas, France, 1994) (Letterboxd)
7. 24 City (Jia, China, 2008)
8. Black Girl (Senembe, Senegal, 1966)
9. Voyage to Italy (Rossellini, Italy, 1954)
10. To Be Or Not To Be (Lubistch, USA, 1942) (Letterboxd)

Also Notable: Borom Sarret (Senembe, Sengel, 1963), Keita (Kouyaté, Burkina Faso, 1995), Magnificent Obsession (Sirk, USA, 1954) (Letterboxd), Yo Yo (Etaix, France, 1965) (Letterboxd), Adanggaman (M’Bala, Burkina Faso, 2000) (Letterboxd), Un Flic (Melville, France, 1972) (Letterboxd), Waiting for Happiness (Sissako, Mauritania, 2002) (Letterboxd)

Revisited List (Aka The "/s")

1. Le Cercle Rouge (Melville, France, 1970)
2. The Man With A Movie Camera (Vertov, USSR, 1929) (Letterboxd)
3. The New World (Malick, USA, 2005) (Letterboxd)
4. Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, USA, 1998) (Blog Post)
5. Crank: High Voltage (Neveldine/Talor, USA, 2009)

GradSkool: Lang's M as Proto-Noir

One thing I hope to do with this blog is address the alarming lack of content that has been a pervasive problem since I started graduate school last semester. To make up for it, over the next week, I'm going to be giving excerpts from papers I wrote while in graduate school last semester. Please note that these are going to be sometimes dense, often boring, and most likely not very good, but I'm sure someone out there is going to enjoy them. The first here is a paper I wrote on Fritz Lang's M as a work of proto-noir. Please note that I refer through the paper to a chapter Chris Fujiwara wrote on Out of the Past, which can be found in his book on Jacques Tourneur. 

M is in very much about the city—the structures allow for the anonymity of Beckert to walks the streets without suspicion, which also addresses Fujiwara’s third point related to cities. As Gunning explains, “Berlin is a city hungry for and inundated by information. But the way this flow of information interrelates essentially alienated is attested to by Beckert’s letter, his desire to communicate…yet remain anonymous.”^[1] M demonstrates both textually and visually how urban landscapes and technology are essentially responsible for letting Beckert get away with his murders. Berlin is a city of strangers, so during an early sequence, a number of strangers are accused of being the murderer for no particularly reason in striking point-of-view shots, which also implicate the spectator and further suggest the anonymity of the murderer as it extends beyond the screen space. Later, the iconic thumbprint towers over the investigator, as technology emphasizes and empowers the myth of the monster. Most essential however is the approach of the police to capture Beckert in comparison to the gangs and how they fail. The police use their archival documents and topographical view of the city (as noted by the many maps Lang highlights in scenes with them) to search for Beckert, leaving them with a name and an address but no man. Instead, it is the criminals who find the man in bodily form (his name remains anonymous). Thus, like the classic noirs, M suggests a world in which the institutions that create and signify progress are also the ones where exploitation is most likely to occur, and here it is the rise of the interconnected institution of the city.

The Cinephiliac Moment: M

           The Cinephiliac Moment is a weekly series in which I choose a moment in a film where cinema reaches transcendence. This moment may be inspired by anything – the composition of the frame, the score, the edit, the narrative – but it is a moment in which cinema becomes something more than entertainment and possibly more than art. Read about the original inspiration for the project here.

Who is the protagonist of Fritz Lang’s M? Certainly not Beckert, the child murderer so wondrously encapsulated by Peter Lorre. He’s on screen for less than a third of the film. One could argue it’s Lohmann, the detective responsible for solving the case, or it could be Safecracker, the de  facto leader of the gangs that organize to hunt down Beckert. But neither alone can be said to be the protagonist. Instead M is the story of a city, a city that is responsible for allowing the anonymity of Beckert to lead to the children’s deaths. So how does one stop them?  M doesn’t propose that the cops and authority are completely inefficient– As Tom Gunning explains on his book of Lang, they nail the identity of Beckert and sit waiting at his home. But man remain anonymous in this city, and only the anonymous can capture him.

There is a wondrous edit, perhaps one of the greats, that beautifully encapsulates why perhaps the criminals are the one for this job. The five gang leaders meet with Safecracker, who proposes that they must be the ones to hunt down this child murderer. During one of his impassioned speeches, he begins a question, which is then finished instead by Lohmann. Not only is the sentence finished by the detective, but the gesture of the arm Safrecracker uses is finished by Lohmann. When I recently rewatched M, it took me a second to realize we were in a completely different space, with different characters. The structural similarities between the cops and the gangs at this moment—the circular tables, the stern faces, the cigarette smoke—is brutally striking. But that is what Lang suggests, and it’s something he will continue to suggest, is the inefficiency of authority to create real change (We’ll talk about that final line in The Big Heat in this column at some point). We may look down at criminals as brutish and awful, but that is not why we must fear them. We must fear them because they are just as efficient, organized, and intelligent as those we lay our trust in. 

Watch the clip here.

Screening Log: Inorganic Transcendence Edition

            Hey look, the content on this site has already dramatically dropped! Hooray #GradSkool! But seriously folks, I am already knee deep in research, but it is my solemn duty to bring you something every week, even if it is short and incoherent and written after midnight (as tonight’s quite incomprehensible entry surely is). Again, as every two weeks, there is a new Cinephiliacs out there. This one has Bilge Ebiri talking quite intelligently about Bertolucci, Malick, Nolan, and especially Kubrick as we dive into Barry Lyndon. So check that out. Also, look for stuff related to the New York Film Festival soon! Press screenings begin Monday, and I’m going to have some exciting announcements soon related to it.

-The World, 2004. Directed by Jia Zhangkie. 35mm projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

-Silent Light, 2007. Directed by Carlos Reygadas. 35mm projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

-/M/, 1931. Directed by Fritz Lang. Blu-Ray.

-Cooley High, 1975. Directed by Michael Schultz. 35mm projection at 92Y Tribeca.

-After Life, 1998. Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. DVD.

-The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes, 2005. Directed by Stephen and Timothy Quay. 35mm projection at Museum of Modern Art. 

Screening Log: France Was Right Edition

            Small note of fun this week. As part of my Masters program, I’ll be digging through a lot of archival materials, and one of the best parts of Columbia is their Oral History archives, which are not available online. Here’s a quote I pulled from Fritz Lang, that I think explains a lot of the nihilism in his noir films: “Today, I’m convinced that mythical fate doesn’t exist. That you never make fate for yourself.” I wish I had more time with it, because Lang also talks a lot of who slept with who stuff.

-Hollywood or Bust, 1956. Directed by Frank Tashlain. 35mm projection at Brooklyn Academy of Music.

-Artists and Models, 1955. Directed by Frank Tashalin. 35mm projection at Brooklyn Academy of Music.

-/Barry Lyndon/, 1975. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. DVD.

-New Guy, 2003. Directed by Bilge Ebiri, Streaming via Fandor. 

Screening Log: Post-Hiatus Catch Up

              Well that was longer than expected. I’ve come to the point where not writing about movies is worse than me than doing nothing, as films easily populate space in my mind instead of things I’d rather never have to think about. And during my long hiatus, I took in quite a few films (I hope to have reviews of Elena, Men in Black 3, and The Color Wheel up soon). I’m breaking up my usual style this time around, as I’ve annotated most of the films I’ve watched, though in much briefer notes. I also have a call for comments and discussion about thoughts on a few of these, so please respond below!

-The Tiger of Eschhnapur, 1959. Directed by Fritz Lang. 35mm projection at Anthology Film Archives.

-The Indian Tomb, 1959. Directed by Fritz Lang. 35mm projection at Anthology Film Archives.

-The Grand Illusion, 1937. Directed by Jean Renoir. 35mm projection at Film Forum.

-On Top of the Whale, 1982. Directed by Raúl Ruiz. 35mm projection at Anthology Film Archives.

-Mulholland Dr., 2001. Directed by David Lynch. DVD.

            Perhaps the closest that a “mainstream” American film has come to the avant-garde moment. What makes Lynch so accessible compared to other artists working in the same sort of vein is that Lynch’s starting points—glamor of Hollywood, film noir—are so familiar and accessible to cinephiles. Lynch relishes in these classic tropes and drowns us in their illusion. The other big thing I noted is that while the narrative is much more disjointed, I felt a much more tonal and thematic balance in this film when compared to Blue Velvet, that felt a bit unfocused when I last watched it (mainly in the latter Frank sequences). There’s more control and the feel of an assured director in Mulholland, so when it heads into the bizarre, I never flinch, but instead let it suck me into the world. “Silencio” becomes the ultimate metaphor for the film—the most beautiful performance you’ve ever seen with disturbing emotion, though it is of course, all an illusion.

Experiment This! A Preview of Migrating Forms 2012

           For those in New York, tonight begins one of the city’s smaller film festivals, but also one of its best, full of cinematic delights. Now in its fourth year, the Migrating Forms festival is broad in scope, grabbing from all over the globe and often choosing the most unique works of experimental cinema one can think of. It also has some really amazing and extremely rare retrospective screenings as well. It runs ten days, from tonight and next Sunday, down at Anthology Film Archives. Tickets are $10 for individual screenings, but they offer a number of deals (three films for $20). Here are five must sees for those planning to attend:

1. Fritz Lang’s Indian Epics

People either remember Fritz Lang for his amazing silent and early sound films (Metropolis, M) or his intense American noirs (The Big Heat, Scarlett Street), but near the end of his career, Lang went on to make two epic scale films about the clash between East and West. The Tiger of Eschanpur and The Indian Tomb play in 35mm, making this one of the few chances you’ll be able to see these in their perfect form. (Sunday, May 13^th at 7pm and 9pm).