DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

dagNotes: On Micheal Haneke’s early work & Le Temps du Loup

• The Seventh Continent (1989)
• Benny’s Video (1992)
• Funny Games (1997)

These three films are often discussed apart (and the first two rarely at all,) but I like to think of them as a collective attempt at exploring certain themes and techniques. They belong together. They inform each other, I think, and represent a honing of not only a kind of critique of families, of observing violence, of ritual and pleasure, of families and their relationship to society and others, but of style (camera-work, editing, sound and image, writing for the screen). I think the capstone for this work on violence and style ends with Le Temps du Loup (The Time of the Wolf, 2003,) often completely ignored when discussing much of his earlier work. I do believe it’s an important rest in the composition, his body of work, that led to Caché in 2005.

Actually, watching Funny Games, Le Temps Du Loup, and Caché together is immensely rewarding and the middle film absolutely calls for a discussion of the first and the last together. It’s such an important work for him.

I’m re-watching Haneke’s films, beginning with Le Temps du Loup, with Praise. I was worried she wouldn’t like it. She loved it, as disturbing as it is, and was gobsmacked with the beautiful epiphany at the film’s end, something that is missing from his three earlier works.* I refer to the end of the film as an epiphany because, I think, we are presented with a striking solution to the problems the four films explore with the image of Ben, naked, collapsed, exhausted, in the stranger’s arms (this man is a racist nationalist who wanted to murder “the dirty Polack” immigrant in an earlier scene and so scared the shit out of Ben, and everyone else,) being cradled and reassured that he is brave in spite of his failure to sacrifice himself, to self-immolate, to bring about a crazy prophecy of salvation and end not only his pains, but his family’s suffering. There’s a parallel story with Eva, Ben’s sister, and a lone and family-less boy thief, but Ben gets the final scene with the stranger. The two in front of the fire, the camera dollying silently backwards over the rails. The final image of the film is an incredible symbol, arisen from the ashes, so to speak, of the three films I mention above, that end, simply and just as silently with nothing but the debris of death and destruction without epiphany. It’s a warm ending. It’s important to note that these endings are openings and reject closure, as violent as they are. In Le Temps du Loup, Haneke offers us a bit of closure, even if only thematic. For the narrative itself doesn’t provide anything we could think of as closure. After all, Ben is in the arms of a murderous thug who, though acting as a caring proxy-father, is capable of anything and has earlier proven to be rather self-serving and uncaring. It’s an unstable image, a radical image, potentially, violently, harmful, like the fire, both useful and harmful, like the family. Like society. We move away from it before anything else happens. Again, a rejection of closure.

Maybe it’s not a satisfying image: that we endure despite our failed attempts to maintain and to civilize; that we endure our violence, our rituals, our corrupt and unexamined roles in families and communities. At least it’s an image. And after this striking image, something much clearer comes out with his newer films: Caché, The White Ribbon, and Amour. You can tell he studied philosophy and drama. His films are terrifyingly rigorous, self-aware, quiet, composed. One of my all-time favorite directors. I can watch his films over and over.

*I realized that I’ve left out 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) and Code Unknown (2000), but those two films seem to work together on a kind of narrative experiment that is distinct from the others.  I’m not trying to say something definitive about Haneke’s oeuvre, just recognizing something many critics don’t see in their boring debate about cruelty and camera-work in his films.

The Powers of Horror (Kristeva 1980)

dagseoul:

My personal favorite Kristeva. Great work on Lacan’s objet petit a, the object of desire. Whereas the object permits the creation of a symbolic order, the abject (death, shit, sewage, skin, vomit, et al.) is “radically excluded” and brings us to a place where meaning collapses, where the distinction between subject and object or between self and other breaks down.

I’ve always wanted to take this reading and the subsequent work done with it, say Kristeva through Zizek and other later Lacanians, and apply it to poetics, and to mix traditions. It seems the Germans, via Holderlin, have an answer to this via poetry and poetics, in a way the French don’t. I don’t know how to put it because I’ve never spent time with it more than to quickly ponder it.

We’ve also got theater and the novel as primary examples where protagonists experience the loss of meaning when confronted with the abject. It’s a predominant mode in high modern works of drama and fiction. It becomes a method to experience the difference between subject and object, or to call forth that experience in viewers and readers. It certainly works in cinema. Poetry on the other hand demarcates such difference qua poetry without the need to worry about a collapse between distinctions and the loss of meaning, and poetry dwells in its demarcations, that liminal space, the margins, so to speak.

what I’m actually working on, P.

The Powers of Horror (Kristeva 1980)

My personal favorite Kristeva. Great work on Lacan’s objet petit a, the object of desire. Whereas the object permits the creation of a symbolic order, the abject (death, shit, sewage, skin, vomit, et al.) is “radically excluded” and brings us to a place where meaning collapses, where the distinction between subject and object or between self and other breaks down.

I’ve always wanted to take this reading and the subsequent work done with it, say Kristeva through Zizek and other later Lacanians, and apply it to poetics, and to mix traditions. It seems the Germans, via Holderlin, have an answer to this via poetry and poetics, in a way the French don’t. I don’t know how to put it because I’ve never spent time with it more than to quickly ponder it.

We’ve also got theater and the novel as primary examples where protagonists experience the loss of meaning when confronted with the abject. It’s a predominant mode in high modern works of drama and fiction. It becomes a method to experience the difference between subject and object, or to call forth that experience in viewers and readers. It certainly works in cinema. Poetry on the other hand demarcates such difference qua poetry without the need to worry about a collapse between distinctions and the loss of meaning, and poetry dwells in its demarcations, that liminal space, the margins, so to speak.

trashbuff:

Emmanuelle Riva -> Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) vs Amour (2012)

(via isitanart)

Tarantino Unchained: For His Pleasure

Argue all you want about Tarantino’s newest exploitation film. Who gives a shit whether it’s good or not? It will make a profit. He will make more shiny turds for his fans to polish.

Fact is, we have to ask ourselves why all the bother defending him? There’s nothing at stake in all this for Tarantino but his pleasure, and that should be what we’re all talking about.

CLOUD ATLAS

(Source: dagseoul)

dagNotes: thoughts on the american “the girl with the dragon tattoo”

Here’s my unpopular opinion. The American version is better. And I’m no Fincher fanatic. Hate the shit out of Fight Club, for example.

To be honest, I like Mara’s portrayal of Lisabeth more than Rapace’s portrayal. Praise liked Lisabeth in the newer film more than in the Swedish films. We talked at great length about it. We were expecting far less after listening to so much criticism. The American film is in no way a remake of the Swedish film and does exist very much as a different interpretation of the novel. The Swedish films insists on de-feminizing Lisabeth in a stupid way (all the focus on muscle and working out, for example, to prove she is strong) that is used, in my opinion, to forgive the overt scopophilia present in and necessary for the scenes of abuse, particularly the rapes. Misogyny is present in both films, but is not forgiven in the second, which I prefer. In the first film, misogyny exists as a demand that requires vengeance. In other words, the film forgives itself for the presence of such violent hatred towards women, absolves itself, as it justifies a violent response. In the second, it’s a simple result of sexist culture. (Whether such graphic representation of rape is necessary to tell Lisabeth’s story is another issue—an important one.) To be honest, I find such justification to be pointless and shortsighted and a result of what it implies: that women must be victimized before they can righteously respond to misogyny. It’s a problem with sexist culture that the second film admits. From the opening credits, Fincher’s film implicates us all in the sexism. This makes is present but not necessary. The first film cops out as it makes it consumably moral. In other words, misogyny becomes a necessary evil that justifies female vengeance. I find such a definition of vengeance and femininity that defends itself to be supremely sexist. I didn’t have that response to the Fincher film, to the direction, to the portrayal of Lisabeth.

workandentropy:

peak-society:

i can’t decide if i want to be rooney mara or if i just want to be inside rooney mara. 


i don’t make a very good film critic.  

Have you seen the Swedish ones? I thought the Swedish trilogy was pretty good, and that its indictment of rape culture and its political critique of fascism, patriarchy/misogyny/sexism, the juridico-medical apparatus, and how those relate and their relation to the State were really intriguing…  but I’ve heard the Fincher version is basically the Swedish one - rape-politics-sensitive handling of those scenes and - subtitles and - Noomi Rapace and + extra sensationalism and eroticism during those scenes…

Which wouldn’t surprise me because David Finchers sucks and his gender politics are pretty much always fucked.

But I haven’t seen it yet, so I dunno….

Any comparative thoughts if you’ve seen both versions?

(p.s. Noomi Rapace was AwEsOmE in the Swedish ones!)

(via workandentropy-deactivated20120)

I saw this film at a small theater in Orlando, Fl, in 1989. By the time it was over, the auditorium was almost empty. And I left a Greenaway fan. I like this and ZOO a lot. Maybe ZOO a little more. If you’re going to watch The Falls, be prepared for something different. It’s not going to have the lush art direction and long left to right camera movements. It’s an entirely different experience.

workandentropy:

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, Peter Greenaway (1989).

Rating: ****1/2

I enjoyed this film even more than The Belly of an Architect. Like that film, the technical production of the The Cook was fantastically well-executed. Whereas the former drew on neoclassical aesthetics, however, the traces of expressionist style found in the lighting, etc., of that film become fully manifest in this one. Expressionist approaches to symbolism abound. Each shot of The Cook is so visually replete with detail that the effect is overwhelming, and this effect is consistently augmented by Greenaway’s use of color and light (the style is so distinct, it makes me wonder how much Italian cinema—later Fellini, like Satyricon, but especially the films of Dario Argento and Mario Bava—influenced this ). A really beautifully shot film.

Thematically I found this film just as complex and interesting as Belly. Between the two films I noticed a thematic similarity (apart from the most obvious one, sex): a recurring focus on food, consumption, and digestion. I’ll be interested to see if this persists in Greenaway’s films when I watch Nightwatch, once I’m off work on Saturday.

I was also struck by—I don’t know how else to describe it—how Greek this film was. The characters, narrative, and climax are strikingly reminiscent of Greek tragedy The symbolic dichotomy between “The Thief” and “The Lover,” one a visceral character marked by his consumption of food, the other an intellectual marked by his consumption of books, also add to this sense of “Greekness.”

Overall, I’d highly recommend this film.

(via workandentropy-deactivated20120)

i really liked this film. i haven’t watched it in ages. going to have to find it. i love The Falls.

workandentropy:

The Belly of an Architect, Peter Greenaway (1987).

Rating: ****

This was pretty awesome, a fascinating film. Brian Dennehy did a great job. An extremely visual film (though not because it lacks in great dialogue or characters or thematic depth), this film shines, to me, particularly for its brilliance of technical execution. The cinematography was fantastic, and Greenaway’s sense of perspective and scene composition—his utilization of architecture in Italy in constructing his shots, for example—illustrates the kind of directorial vision that renders almost every shot itself a work of visual art (consider the three screenshots). It’s not surprising that Greenaway’s formal training was as a visual artist, it shows. In many ways, the architecture itself permeates the narrative as a character, and though thoroughly postmodern, the film’s use of neoclassical aesthetics in developing this presence creates an intriguing dialogue between the films formal aspects, its plot, and its thematic explorations.  

Also, this bore a lot of similarities to Julian Barnes’ novel, Flaubert’s Parrot. I’d recommend that book to anyway who enjoyed this film, or vice versa.

(via workandentropy-deactivated20120)

Hunger (Mcqueen 2008)

I love this film and for this scene. The movie wonderfully puts aside the ideological debate for a look at people. Behavior. Acts and Responses.

An incredibly long scene. A conversation: Bobby and The Priest. Incredible. Would have loved to be with the actors rehearsing this for lord knows how long. Amazing imagined conversation.

The conversation with the priest and Bobby Sands begins at 4.43 of the first part below, following the IRA’s assassination of a particularly troubled and sadistic British prison guard.

dagScreen: Editing

I’m always complaining about editing when watching film. This guy has posted two parts of a three part series on editing action scenes.

Worth watching.

In the Cut, Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight) from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

In the Cut, Part II: A Dash of Salt from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

Reminds me of my film theory classes back in 2000-2002 while I was working on my MA.

beetleinabox:

Extract from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, 1929 (soundtrack by Cinematic Orchestra).

Walter Benjamin writes:

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Womb (Benedek Fliegauf, 2010)

Anyone seen this documentary (& with English subtitles)?