On this tip, check out an incredible post from David Bordwell concerning the development of continuity editing in the 1910s. Basically, at some point between 1913 and 1920, the average shot length decreased from over 10 seconds to between 4-6 seconds, which is more or less comparable to today’s average shot lengths. Bordwell tries to find out what happened in that time period.
It will be an improvement over Batman Begins, mainly because BB was overlong, overdark, and, in its action scenes, unintelligible, with a terribly uninteresting villain. I couldn’t have cared less about “The Scarecrow.” Also, ”origin” stories inherently contain an uphill battle to win my interest.
I know, I know: ”It’s necessary to align yourself with the mythos of the story and to appreciate the scale of the created world.” Fair enough, but if extratextual material is necessary for, rather than a contribution to, the enjoyment of a film, that created world better be pretty damn interesting. To this extent, how interesting can a superhero movie really be?
I know, I know: “A superhero film both reflects and distends the emotions and situations that one encounters in daily life, thereby creating a useful prism through which to view our toils.” Fair enough, but superhero films aren’t born in a nurturing creative environment. They all have been, first and foremost, product designed to appeal to the target audience and sell soft drinks. Pop can matter, but this is another uphill battle.
I still have high hopes for The Dark Knight, but I doubt it will be the masterpiece that some are claiming it to be. Is The Dark Knight really the best cinema has to offer, a statement of who we are, what we can do, and where we’re going? To this end, two very useful reviews that hit on this feeling:
I’m not a guy—or for that matter a critic—who believes or has ever believed in genre hierarchies, but I don’t know, maybe my aesthetic arteries are hardening—entertaining arguments about the value/meaning of the likes of Hancock is increasingly making me (metaphorically) throw up my hands and say, “For feck’s sake, guys, this isn’t Stalker or The Red and the White or Kanal or Satantango or Muriel or what ever we’re talking about here, it’s a commitedly vulgar frickin’ superhero movie that’s been cut to shreds the better to flatter/insult its target audience.” Come on. Can we at least pretend we’re adults for 20 minutes or so? Apparently not, is what I’m thinking much of the past few weeks, entertaining dark thoughts about how if what 1968 embodied was a cultural explosion, what 2008 is building up to is an implosion into a state of permanent cultural adolescence.
Aaron Eckhart’s cop role in The Black Dahlia humanized the complexity of crime and morality. But as Harvey Dent, sorrow transforms him into the vengeful Two-Face, another Armageddon freak in Nolan’s sideshow. The idea is that Dent proves heroism is improbable or unlikely in this life. Dent says, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” What kind of crap is that to teach our children, or swallow ourselves? Such illogic sums up hipster nihilism, just like Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. Putting that crap in a Batman movie panders to the naiveté of those who have not outgrown the moral simplifications of old comics but relish cynicism as smartness. That’s the point of The Joker telling Batman, “You complete me.” Tim Burton might have ridiculed that Jerry Maguire canard, but Nolan means it—his hero is as sick as his villain.
Man’s struggle to be good isn’t news. The difficulty only scares children.
There’s been much discussion as of late about Jean-Luc, mostly due to the publication of a new biography by New Yorker contributor Richard Brody. I haven’t read the book yet, but have been following the internet noise over the past month or so. The New York Times got around to reviewing the book this past weekend, which has occasioned some thoughts.
In the review, Stephanie Zacharek writes:
As Brody, a film critic and editor at The New Yorker, makes clear in the preface, he still believes in Godard’s relevance, claiming that the resolutely not-retired filmmaker, who has lived in Rolle, Switzerland, for the past 30 years, continues to work “at an extraordinarily high level of artistic achievement.”
That’s a lovely, optimistic sentiment, but one that much of Godard’s post-1967 output doesn’t deserve: Empty shadowboxes like “First Name: Carmen” (1983) or “Notre Musique” (2004) seem designed to alienate viewers rather than draw them closer, which is what happens when any artist begins to live entirely inside his or her own head.
I would counter that there’s a difference between offering an “optimistic sentiment” and taking a generous approach. Brody may be overreaching, and Notre Musique is undoubtedly a seriously flawed film, but to proclaim it an “empty shadowbox” is hyperbolic and shows a lack of generous attenuation to Godard’s political/aesthetic reckonings. Zacharek continues:
The second half of “Everything Is Cinema” covers the films Godard made after 1967, and it’s a very long half. Brody tries to energize us for this interminable home stretch.
So, the last, oh, forty years of an artist’s career have been “an interminable home stretch” to an admittedly dazzling first ten? Later:
Throughout his career, Godard’s political ideology has often amounted to little more than slogans, attention-grabbing sound bites…Although Brody repeatedly challenges Godard’s limited ideology, he does buy a little too readily into the notion that a work of art informed by political ideas is inherently more meaningful or more interesting than one with, say, a great deal of aesthetic inventiveness or emotional depth.
[...]
Godard’s political ideas have never been the strongest elements of his movies. Unfortunately, after 1968, they often became their focal point.
So, since Godard’s politics were facile, it was unfortunate that he decided to focus on them.
I think Zacharek hasn’t bothered to distinguish the medium from the message. From Gilbert Adair’s review of the book:
As for the cinema proper, it was Godard who first conceived of editing as the art of disconti nuity rather than continuity. Godard who paid retrospective homage to the neglected icons of popular culture. Godard who proposed that the filmic image had to be flattened out for the sake of its own autonomy. And Godard who foresaw that that image was ultimately destined to dethrone the word as the irreducible unit of communication. Marshall McLuhan, another major theorist of such a revolutionary semantic displacement, continued to have recourse to words to describe the end of the word, whereas Godard used images and, if words, then words as images.
Assume that Godard’s output is intended to be politically revolutionary (a notion that Zacharek implicitly seems to find fault with (as if real change would be as palatable as Breathless)), rather than a personal expression. If words are less powerful than images, how does one begin to communicate complicated ideas, let alone complicated revolutionary ideas? Words (sound-bites)-as-images was Godard’s chosen path, and his breakthough was to reconcile and communicate words-as-image/film-as-image into a text. Word – image – film = text.
Two problems: how to get beyond the surface level of the sound-bite (which Zacharek refuses to do), and how to make the sound-bite emotionally appealing. I’d argue that the near-impossibility of the former grants the latter. Godard may have thought that editing (a.k.a. the language of film) could be the thrust, but his revolution failed: techniques and ideas were co-opted and neutered with no punch-back from the revolutionaries. As such, the bulk of Godard’s post-60’s work has been a lament. In this light, look at this clip from Notre Musique, which Zacharek called an “empty shadowbox”:
I think Godard refuses to answer the question at the end because it misses the point. The question is not whether digital can save cinema, but whether cinema can ever be saved, or rather, if cinema itself can save. There’s a wealth of sadness in this clip. One might say it has ”emotional depth.”
Sad news indeed.
I gravitate towards those avant-garde artists that let the strength of the concept (and all “avant-garde” art is necessarily conceptual once understood as such - different and startling forms of expression are only properly received when understood in context, a property that, although arguably more important to the receiver, undoubtedly effects the creation) propel the work, rather than any sort of brutish desire to “change the world” or to “change perceptions.” These are not mutually exclusive needs, but an artist’s true faith in the former will be his or her primary source of longevity; everything else should be bottled in a time capsule and buried for the aliens to find.
Bruce Conner understood this divide, and his best work exemplifies the thrill of art’s “it-ness” – the ecstatic Frankenstein monster of the creative product, seperate from the artist and set loose in the world. His films may be more obscure in their politics than a Godard, but this is obviously a willing sacrifice: if anything, Conner is more concerned with the interplay between text and image, thus the political thrust is subjugated to Conner’s extratextual fascinations. The films are dead serious, yet lighter than air.
Via GreenCineDaily, Ray Pride’s entry on Conner is a great place to check out clips of his work. Unfortunately, I can’t locate any copies of Report online, which might help one make sense of my above ramble, but Breakaway, from 1966, is a more-than-adequate substitute. Few serious (as opposed to ironic or satirical) artists are this much fun:
Video removed due to comment by some lawyer-dude who said that he was representing Jean Conner, Bruce’s widow, and that they were both adamantly opposed to online presentations of Bruce’s work. I get it. Go see his films in a theatre.
Earlier this week, Matt Zoller Seitz announced that he’s leaving behind print journalism and his staff position at The New York Times to focus on his filmmaking. I first discovered Matt when he wrote for the New York Press some years back, and he instantly became one of my “go to” critics – one of those people whose byline brings both comfort and excitement, which made it all the more thrilling when he published two pieces of mine last year on his blog and actually took the time to edit and discuss what worked and needed shoring up. He’s a genuinely nice guy, and I wish him the best.
Discussion of the issue has raised a memory that I had forgotten about: for awhile in the late nineties, the New York Press film staff was comprised of Matt, Armond White, and Godfrey Cheshire – three astoundingly intelligent critics, each with their own approach to the medium and their own fascinating ideological leanings. I’d pick up a paper to read any one of them, and the idea of all three of them being in the same place (or, for that matter, J. Hoberman, Michael Atkinson, and Dennis Lim under the same umbrella) really underscores the state of the business only a few years later.
Diving head-first into the canon of a revered filmmaker can be an intimidating experience, especially if the first encounter is with a work outside the artist’s formative years. This isn’t to say that the later work is necessarily more inaccessible, but that, at that point, stylistic and thematic devices have most likely been honed into a singular voice, and what may have previously been interpreted as broad homage can later be employed as artistic shorthand. It’s not impossible to negotiate without a frame of reference, but it certainly places the viewer outside of their comfort zone.
I remember my first explorations into the films of Robert Bresson. I went to the video store clerk and asked for both Pickpocket and L’argent. When it was revealed that I hadn’t yet seen a Bresson film, the clerk suggested that I rent an earlier film before grappling with L’argent. I took his advice, left with Pickpocket and Diary of a Country Priest, and, several films later, realized how much my viewing of L’argent was informed by two decades of Bresson’s ascetic moralizing. L’argent is an old man’s film, and to have seen it first would have been to jump in at the end of the journey.
This begs the question: would watching L’argent first have resulted in a less powerful experience? I’m inclined to say yes, but I can’t say for sure. Whenever the latest work from an acknowledged master screens in New York, I’m usually either fortunate enough to have seen some of his or her prior films or am able to bone up before the screening. Today, though, I took the plunge and saw Hou Hsiao-hsien’s latest, Flight of the Red Balloon, without seeing any of Hou’s prior work. I don’t have any excuses, as most of his films are readily available on DVD, and his last few have received stateside theatrical distribution.
I guess this puts me in a position similar to both Hou and on-screen proxy, Song (Fang Song). Observant outsiders removed from their natural context, the film highlights the only position that such an observer can comfortably take: humane resignation coupled with an individual drive towards small-scale satisfactions as filtered through the familiar in the foreign. Hou and Song may not be from Paris, but they are both familiar, as I was, with Albert Lamorisse’s classic The Red Balloon, which provides their and my window to communication and understanding. 
Hou takes the main thrust of The Red Balloon, the idea that the perpetual search for and impossibility of complete happiness can be crystallized through an abstract childish quest that refuses to indulge in pessimistic half-measures and compromises, and treats it with mannered realism rather than whimsy. Complaints that the film’s thesis is the muddled statement “Grown-ups are complicated” miss the point. The film is far more generous and optimistic, offering the above-mentioned informed window as a means of negotiating with the fact that “Grown-ups are complicated.”
There’s plenty more to say about how the film accomplishes this on a purely formal level, but for now, I’ll just say that I lucked out – my first encounter with Hou was with a film that understands we are all outsiders, in some form or another.
Marc B
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