Link Round-Up: Sunny Pastures

A brief summary of recent work...and as noted before, I am now located in Los Angeles! If you are here too and would like to meet up, shoot me an email sometime!

The Toronto Film Festival is well underway, and I am sadly not there. Luckily I was at Cannes, so my coverage of that covers many of the major titles. I did write about two Locarno premiers, however: Matias Pineiro's The Princess of France, a beguilingly wonderful chapter in his continuing Shakespeare series (I wrote about Pineiro's other films here). And Songs From The North, an interesting if limited essay film from Soon-Mi Yoo examining life in North Korea.

Approaching The End, my first book, is now available for pre-order. BUY BUY BUY! (You can also buy off Amazon, but it'll ship slower and for what its worth, the giant corporation inhales over half the profits. I note this not for my own royalties, which don't change, but the press is blooming and could use your help!)

For its new Criterion Blu-Ray, I wrote about Bresson's Pickpocket and its more technical aspects, attempting to put it in conversation with Warners Gangster films and less with ideas of "transcendent" cinema.

Three more episodes of The Cinephiliacs, and all fantastic ones: Former Chicago Reader critic and MoMA curator Dave Kehr on Columbia crime films and The Whistler series, critic and Double Play director Gabe Klinger on Raoul Walsh's The Bowery, and Village Voice critic Stephanie Zacherek on The Dave Clark Five in John Boorman's Having A Wild Weekend.

New Letterboxd Updates:, 
The Contemporary Cinema: Boyhood (Linklater), Lucy (Besson), Ida (Pawlikowski), Venus In Fur (Polanski), 22 Jump Street (Lord/Miller), Policeman (Lapid)
The Canonical Cinema: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick), The Abyss (Cameron)
The Silent Cinema: Why Be Good?, The Eternal Grind, Travelin' On, Lilac Time
Orson Welles!: Too Much Johnson
Auteurist Cinema: Our Man In Havana (Reed), Eva (Losey), Nothing Sacred (Wellman), Escape in the Fog (Boetticher), Panelstory (Chytilová), Niagara (Hathaway), Crooklyn (Lee), Tale of Cinema (Hong)

Suspicious Paintings and Wind in the Trees: An Image/Text Approach to Narrative Excess

I have a lot of issues with the idea of narrative excess. What does excess exactly mean? Isn't the point of cinema to see "excess"? Anyways, this paper was written in my seminar on contemporary film theory last semester. It's too sprawling to really have it published somewhere, but it does get to some of my core beliefs about the possibilities of cinema, cinephilia, post-60s film theory, digital indexicality, and more. Please note this is not for casual readers.

I. Wind in the Trees

A man climbs a ladder on the side of a building. He and another cop follow a criminal across the rooftops of San Francisco. The criminal aptly jumps from one building to the next. The cop follows and barely balances himself. The man attempts to do the same but slips, grabbing onto the ledge. The cop comes to help him back up, telling him, “Give me your hand!” but falls himself.  The man can only look down in horror.

Any person who knows the scene I have described from the opening to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) will immediately recognize this description as insufficient. What about the mood of the scene, with its stunning dark hues? How about the tense score created by Bernard Hermann? What about the presence given to Scottie by Jimmy Stewart, and all that seems indescribable in his piercing eyes? This all leads to the real question: is this a failure of my description or a case of narrative excess?

The concept of narrative excess—films that create something that exceeds the necessity of the story they are attempting to tell—has been frustratingly limited in recent discussions in contemporary film theory. It is often relegated to certain films and filmmakers: it exists in action films and musicals during their elongated sequences that “do nothing to push the narrative forward.” Art-house films, with their long tracking shots and characters without affect, are declared to have narrative excess. And one cannot forget experimental cinema, which has no narrative and must only be excess.

The Filmic Discoveries of 2012 (Part II)

This is the second part of my list of films I watched for the first time in 2012. Read an explanation and the first 25 choices here.

25. Duck, You Sucker!, Directed by Sergio Leone (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; June 19^th) 

An explosive film that lives up to the amount of dynamite it delivers, Duck, You Sucker! seen completely cold. But since you’re hear reading this capsule, just know that it’s both Leone’s most fun film (the closest to a screwball comedy he ever made) and his most political. The fact the film “accidentally” switches genres and stakes forty-five minutes into the film is a complete Coup d'état of Leone, leading to the brilliant sequence where Rod Stieger leads a daring heist but instead becomes a revolutionary leader. It’s a bitter film to swallow, suggesting the lack of agency of any individual in a political battle, but it’s also pure visual pleasure, and now my favorite Leone. 

24. Show People, Directed by King Vidor (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; January 23^rd) 

The good people at Film Forum could not have chosen a better time to show this great silent comedy than the height of last year’s Oscar season, as Show People is essentially The Artist made by the people The Artist was portraying. It’s also 1000 times better (fact). Instead of the divide between sound and silents, Vidor’s film shows the movements of a young Marion Davies from slapstick comedian to serious drama actor, while her love interest William Haines remains at the bottom. Vidor captures with authenticity the difference between stars and actors with a jibing sensibility, and peppers his film with plenty of cameos that make for a number of gags that rival the best of the screwballs. Vidor’s work with actors makes this a timeless classic about the importance of termite art.

Screening Log: Good Scientist Edition

            Heavy screening log this week, folks. Some very interesting and great movies out there for New Yorkers to check out. Film Forum has Celine & Julie Go Boating (seeing this afternoon), IFC Center has The Connection (seeing Wednesday), and Film Society continues its retrospective of Turkish cinema. In news that is wholly awesome, Roger Ebert liked and linked my latest video essay to his Facebook and Twitter followers. Validation! I will also say on my continuing rants about digital projection, that I was not a big fan of the new 4K scan of Bonjour Tristesse at Film Forum. This is another Sony DCP, and like Dr. Strangelove, they tried to recreate film grain. It’s less distracting than it is in Kubrick’s film, but it’s another missed opportunity.

-Shakes the Clown, 1992. Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait. 35mm projection at 92^nd Y Tribeca.

-Bonjour Tristesse, 1958. Directed by Otto Preminger. Digital 2K projection at Film Forum.

-Four Nights a Dreamer, 1971. Directed by Robert Bresson. 35mm projection at Brooklyn Academy of Music.

-Elegy, 1971. Directed by Yılmaz Güney. 35mm projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

-Yol, 1982. Directed by Serif Gören and Yılmaz Güney. 35mm projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

-Gojira, 1954. Directed by Ishirô Honda. 35mm projection at Japan Society. 

Screening Log: Action Scene Aesthetics Edition

            Sorry for missing last week’s screening log folks, but as you know, things can get quite crazy. My one note of interest is that I refuse to write anything on Girls because pretty much every other person on the Internet has done so. I will say that I thought the first two episodes episode are fantastic, and everything you need to know about the show’s relation to its characters is said in that first shot, and that during Hannah’s AIDS monologue all we can see is her face. This is a girl who is clearly unaware of her surroundings, not a prophet.

                                                       

-Police Story, 1985. Directed by Jackie Chan. 35mm projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

-Bird, 1988. Directed by Clint Eastwood. 35mm projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

-Frenzy, 1972. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 35mm projection at IFC Center.

-Mouchette, 1967. Directed by Robert Bresson. 35mm projection at Brooklyn Academy of Music.

-Numéro Zéro, 1971. Directed by Jean Estuche. 35mm projection at private screening.