Who Says Textbooks Can't Be Funny?

As I work frantically on an essay due in an hour and twenty minutes, I take the luxury of pausing to highlight a phrase that caught my attention that seems pertinent to any frustrated bloggers out there in need of a good laugh:

"...but who believed that fire, not water or air, is the chief stuff of the world. In that view, his style was seen as an incidental idiosyncracy, to be explained by a pathological mental condition or (more plausibly) by his contemptuous desire to make it very difficult for stupid humanity to understand him."

-- Merrill Ring on the philosopher Heraclitus

Audience, Meet Screen; Screen, Meet Audience...

Prologue

The title of this post notwithstanding, the subject I'm about to broach has more to do with real life than cinema. It seems that we are at a crossroads of sorts on the blogosphere. A lot of debate and vacillation has been taking place on the act of film criticism and what it means to people, why we do it and how we can do it better. And if you happen to be Andy Horbal, then the days that film reviews excited you as a cool, new way of getting to know a medium may have been relegated to the past as somewhat flat and ersatz-whether this is temporary or not remains to be seen. In a couple of startlingly similar veins, local filmmaker Lucas McNelly not long ago expressed interest in the audience/screen relationship that turned out to be one of his biggest challenges in life by his own admission in a blogathan that he launched to sort of explore why it is that men and women have such a difficult time understanding each other; and, perhaps almost as importantly, why that seems to be the gist of so many gems from male filmmakers from Truffaut to Linklater. What startled me most about this was that I had been looking at the same thing. After looking at this from several different angles, a very simple but solid fact revealed itself through blogathan discussions: We spend so much time wishing our love lives were like movies that we end up using the art form itself to try and figure out why they are not.

So what? This is news? Please, you say, picking up the tea kettle. I learn more in an average morning from my cat.

The discussion started a long time ago, though, at the Unspoken Cinema blog, where many gathered to discuss what HarryTuttle has dubbed contemplative cinema and lots of subjects effervesced to the surface, among which the relationship between the audience and the screen impressed me the most. Cineboy raised the question first: why is it that we watch contemplative cinema in the first place? But I would like to take this a step further and pose what seems to me to be the larger question and, currently, a slightly more salient one (if for no other reason, then for the sake of all those feeling disenchanted with writing about film) which is: why do we engage in deconstruction of film through criticism in the first place? The act of critique is arguably a contemplative act in and of itself. Yet the undercurrent suggests that this is not enough. When Harry first described our scope he cautioned us that simple capsule reviews would not suffice and that we should reconfigure our minds toward something more comprehensive and engaging, an open forum to make Jurgen Habermas weep for delight. That sort of atmosphere seems to have led to unrest in several quarters; or, at least, that's certainly not impossible.

Qui en sait? Having tasted honey, saccharine often simply will not do.

Why I Watch Films
(Mes Raisons Pour Regardant Le Cinema)

I really don't know. Vraiment. That might sound like a polite or trite refusal to dig deeply into my psyche, but let's face it-if I had procured a fancy but accessible reason, I think we both know that I would be lying. If there's anything I've learned from Socrates, it's that knowing myself is as likely a thing as my own common sense. Sometimes on a specific night, I know that I'm avoiding or resisting something that I should be attending to, and I may tell myself that I'll write about the film afterward, as if that really salves my conscience or improves my self-control...and let's do be clear: It's not like this is work, per se. I've never been paid to write about a film, only asked. I received a complementary copy of a film that I was asked to review in exchange last August. I was thanked as I was contacted-via email-for being "thorough and thoughtful" and haven't heard back since. That may have been my fifteen minutes, and you know what? I'm okay with that.

I know also that I enjoy several things about film that I've identified with over the years-learning about other cultures, grasping insights about complex familial and romantic relationships-but suddenly and without any really clear and relayable indicators as to why, I feel bereft of a lot of the reasons I thought I once had clearly defined and could consider not only a part of who I am as a person, but my ethos as a budding film critic and a partial scholar. Where once I felt safe and secure in the knowledge that I was learning about life from film while also taking notes on the medium itself, I now feel uncertain that I've ever really believed that and, oddly enough, that perhaps the only practical use for film and film critique is as a method of de-bugging. This infatuation, after all, began while I was still a child. I was a two-year-old in a basket at Star Wars and a walking, talking four-year-old who watched the ice skaters in Rockefeller Center after a large screen showing of Cinderella in an old 5th Avenue theatre that probably no longer exists. I was essentially kidnapped by film and held for ransom by my own consciousness, which was too young, nascent and unequipped to deal with all of the many texts that film shares with all of us so freely, so innocently. So heartbreakingly.

That's the culture we live in, breathe in and move in. If you're not tapped into some kind of medium-be it film, video games, music or books-you're probably not interacting with many people. And if, for some reason, you're only sticking to one of those-books, say-then you may be dangerous or rather anti-social. A writer, perhaps; but, just as possibly the next Ted Kazinsky. On the same page, but coming from a different angle, if you are so steeped in technology and the media that it facilitates, you may be considered to be somehow malnourished culturally. That's what local filmmaker and communications preofessor Allen Larson tells me upon return from the Academy of Motion Picture Television Arts & Sciences. They're tired of receiving intern applicants who aren't literate, who don't even know the basics about literature and art history. Youngsters today seem to know a lot about various filmmaking technology without having the faintest grasp of content and theory.

When he tells me this, my ego's momentarily bolstered that I don't suffer from that acute disorder, but after a moment I shrug. I'm not really convinced, although I don't mention it, that knowing about literature and art history and the like has ever done very much for me as a person. Somehow discovering so late in the game that I can profit from it monetarily is anti-climactic. It may take a couple months' lateness on the rent for me to see the true value in that one.

Why I Will Continue to Watch and Learn
(Mes Raisons Pour Continuant avec la Critique du Cinema)

An old writing colleague of mine going back to my freshman year of college used to describe the reasons for incompatibility between the sexes in a very Machiavellian way. "There's a poison that's been handed down to us by our fathers," Jeremy would start, and everybody would look at his hunched shoulders and protruding eyeballs and back away a few steps. He meant well, but he often didn't make it very far into his theory. If I may be so bold, I think that what he was trying desperately to talk about applies more to culture and its artifacts than anything or anyone else-but, specifically to the aritifacts of human communication. Basically, what we have here is a chicken and an egg, but to stay true a moment to a fine writer who is today a father of three, let's think of it as the poison and the apothecary. It's practically impossible for me to define myself outside of my own culture without studying every last moment in my life-most of which can not be recaptured-and yet, I am captive to all of those images and words. Perhaps you can relate. Born without immunity to all of the forces that shape us, we are the products of every interaction that we have ever had. It's a little bit freaky and exciting if you think about it from a backwards gazing perspective on your own character and what has brought you to this precise moment in time. Or, as a girlfriend of mine put it after she had her first child: "I can't believe how much influence I have over this person's life. It's really scary." In a way, it seems that in order to gain any immunity to the poison, we must drink up. The hair of the dog as it were, day by day.

We have all of these images impacting us in ways that we don't understand and won't necessarily ever understand, and we don't even have to go out of our way to consume them. Between ambient sound and light, it's nearly impossible to get away from media. You'd almost have to shut yourself in a log cabin in northern Montana; but, even Ted had to leave the hut to mail things. So as I sit and wonder why it is that life often feels so disappointing, I am led back to my original co-conspirator, Theodor Adorno, who is no longer with the living, but whose thoughts have come back to haunt many over the last twenty to thirty years. Reading the collection of essays bound into The Culture Industry conveys the sense of helplessness in our subjection to media, that we are promised things that are an illusion that can never possibly become reality. And how does the media get away with it? Why, because we let them. Stomp the Yard made the money that it did because people spent money to see it without first deconstructing the publicity campaign or the motives behind neither the film itself nor the rap culture it portrays and co-feeds. Perhaps these consumers thought that they were investing in stock?

That's not to say that the "democratized" sphere of film writers should be held responsible; probably, an education factor and an understanding of basic logic concerning how money flows should be the larger reasoning for divining why it is that people gravitate toward complementary copy, as Gloria Steinem might say. Or, as J.M. Bernstein put it, paraphrasing Adorno, "The culture industry is the societal realization of the defeat of reflection; it is the realization of subsumptive reason, the unification of the many under the one." What an onus Adorno has bequeathed the modern writer! It's easy to see how someone might feel the pressure of the ages bearing down upon his vertebrae, overwhelmed with and confused by the various tugs-of success at the writing profession, whether it pays well or not; of acceptance into some strata of peership; of personal responsibility and its seeming eternal interplay with larger societal obligations. Are we or are we not always seeking to fuse the two, to make our responsibilities those of our community and government and social setting at large?

It seems that we are. It seems that we should. The question remains, though, how much of ourselves do we have to give in order to feel that we're making a difference, and not just passing the time?



This article will continue in a second segment regarding the fun of film and audience expectations. Date TBD.

Love & Loss, Jane Campion-Style

Disclaimer: This post contains material of a mature nature. While it does not get graphic, it requires an open mind and an adult approach to thinking about sex and violence.

Recently, a Pittsburgh blogger and filmmaker named Lucas McNelly, a man I worship from afar, concocted an idea for a blogathan. These expositions of bloggers' works are a revolving part of the film and film criticism blogosphere, and a lot of us who depend upon online resources to have someone to talk to about "boring art film" or foreign films would be lost without them. The theme for this particular blogathan was the eternal misunderstanding between the sexes and a couple dozen of us got together and came up with several different aproaches to adding in our two cents'-worth.

Mine follows:

While airing the old gray matter, trying to recall good love stories written and directed by women for the Lovesick Blogathan, I came across many that could have made for a post rivaling Yonge Street and the Nile in length. Rather than digress upon all of these terrific films, which included Randa Haines' Children of a Lesser God (1986), Sally Potter's Yes (2005) and even unheard-of Canadian director Holly Dale's little-known Blood & Donuts (1995), it seems the smarter idea to tap the one recurring theme that nearly all of these films had, especially the better ones, and try and talk about that instead. Understanding that conflict is vital to almost all writing involving human interaction, it feels a natural course to discover that some major dynamic hurdle exists in these writings on love. Sacrifice, pain and loss seem to be the staples of the humble pie that often accompanies affairs of the heart. Whether at the beginning or at the end or somewhere along the way, it's almost necessary to the real fulfillment of love to experience a loss of some kind. Sometimes that loss prepares Cupid's pathetic victim for what might be the best thing that ever happened to her or him...and sometimes, it sends us to a quieter stage to lie in wait for the next.

Jane Campion seems to understand a lot about love and its partnership with loss and she has a special talent for really peeling away the layers of familial relations to augment the rawness and scariness, the abject loneliness, that can surround and even overwhelm two people who are trying to make a go of it. She did that jarringly, but wonderfully in Sweetie (1989), about (among other things) a woman afraid of trees who co-plants an alder sapling with her new sweetheart as a metaphor for their relationship, and then promptly steals the tree, hides it and pretends to know nothing about the event whatsoever despite the angst it causes her lover . In 1992's more celebrated work The Piano, she takes the idea of loss and gives it a new path that practically begs for close inspection. The technical challenge alone of writing for a heroine who speaks only through a musical instrument -- and by choice -- comes off at first not like a loss, but a study in stubborness, the brand of which can certainly be found among the women embracing the shores of a former penal colony, if it can be found anywhere. That underlying sense of pioneering background colors this work perhaps most of all, imbuing the main character with real spark, but also perhaps alienating some who simply wish to find the love story between Ada (Hunter) and George Baines (Harvey Keitel) tender, romantic and passionate.

Campion uses the film's New Zealand setting well. By opening and ending on the beach upon which Ada's piano is deposited and left to soak in ocean spray, she hinges the entire story upon a place where change is constant, where give and take simply exist. Within the first few minutes, underscored by surf, we are invited to understand the depth of Ada's inner struggle. Her father has sold her in marriage to the Reverend Alisdair Stewart; her very entrance is a glum and unflattering sacrifice. She raises a daughter from a previous marriage, a constant and lonely reminder of her past. When her new husband won't allow the piano to weigh down their caravan, small notepad and sign language between Ada and Flora aside, she loses her voice. Physically, she could speak, yes, but as she tells us right from the start, she has not since she was six or seven and even she does not know why. In a world of films which seem to lean upon the convention of men figuring women out, the admission that a woman can be a perplexing mystery to herself is more than just a departure from the norm. That tiny detail allows us to explore Ada's love affair with life through her piano as true seers, not knowing any more or less than she does at any given moment. We hear only the piano notes and this very fleeting voice that sounds like writing in a journal.

Perhaps because vocal communication can be such a frustratingly limited means of expressing ourselves and making ourselves understood and known to each other, the centrifugal force of Campion's story does most of the work for her. Her husband and his friend are each curious about her in different ways. The former, wishing his wife to like him, attempts to appease her; but George Baines -- the more relaxed man who spends more time among the Maoris than the whiter folks -- wishes her to love him. In an unlikely trade, Baines becomes the proprietor of the piano in order to receive "lessons" and before long is trading romantic gestures for Ada's increasingly clandestine visits. Love has become a negotiation.

(...a very intense and erotic negotiation performed by textured compositions and a terrific full-nude shot of Harvey Keitel that I've never been convinced didn't help Hunter win the Oscar*, despite her apparent talents.)

Yet despite all of this hardship and loss -- a basic disrespect for a property that means much to Ada, far beyond the value of its ebony and ivory -- Campion also seems to be saying that people who have no way of communicating and who may not even know about love from lack of experience can find true happiness under even the most grotesque or bizarre of circumstances. Witness when the good Reverend cuts off Ada's finger in a fit of jealous rage, an attempt to wound the part of her that makes love to his indifferent neighbor so effortlessly, using only a housing of wood and some string. It feels like he provides the fulfillment of Ada and George's love in many ways by severing her finger. That violent culmination of a life spent in silence doesn't force Ada to shout out like you might expect it to, but to gather herself in a new way with a fresh outlook.

Were I to discover that I had the love of a man like George Baines, I'd be willing to lose a finger to that end, too.




*Probably one of the best examples among Oscar moments regarding the magic of film and the suspension of disbelief. We all love Holly Hunter, even those who could do without most of her films, but when she spoke in that lovely cagey drawl of hers to accept the award, The Piano lost a bit of its charm.

El Laberinto del Fauno (2006)

Writ/Dir. Guillermo del Toro

w/ Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú

First thing's first with a movie like Pan's Labyrinth (2006): You have to see it to believe it, and if you haven't already seen it, you'll need to remedy that as soon as possible.

It's very hard to go wrong when Alfonso Cuaron is involved with a project, but Guillermo del Toro (who directed this particular project) goes the extra mile to ensure that from beginning to end it is a work of integrity worthy of the passions and innocence of youth, the foibles of tyranny and the eternal struggle to find something pure and safe and lasting.

In short, he has created a classic film.

Those familiar with the fantasy genre will recognize that this film lies somewhere outside of the standard categorization, both in content and in context: set up like a folk tale that could easily have been taken from For Whom the Bell Tolls, our young heroine must brave the tasks set for her by a faun of the underworld despite the brewing storm of Francisco Franco's Spain. Caught between a stepfather whose fanatic loyalty to Franco's dictatorship parallels his indifference to his new wife in everything but to produce a male heir, Ofelia must accomplish what Pan sets her to do or face the consequences of her own mortality. And when the daughter of the king of the underworld has been charged with duties to prove her identity, she must arise to the occasion.

The terrific thing about a film like this is its universal scope. At all levels, it registers with deep and hidden truths about childhood and growing up and the constancy of humanity to maintain a struggle between good and evil, despite ages of evidence arguing that we should give it up. The allegory of the labyrinth operates not in the mists, though, but in the reality of never knowing what's right around the bend. Like any good coming-of-age tale, that's the abiding rule.

Fans of the fantasy genre may need to adjust their expectations a bit. Legend, The Dark Crystal and The Lord of the Rings -- even The Chronicles of Narnia (although the PBS version of that story still carries the brass ring) -- each have their specific places in the movie-going consciousness. Even films with varying production values and themes, such as Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Krull and Clash of the Titans can say roughly the same thing. This film, imbued with life by incredible writing prowess and a childlike savvy, leaves the clichés and typicalities to the past, beating a new path for the international scene.

And while one well-made film's not enough to go on -- to get your hopes up that this will start a cultural revolution -- it's still some pretty exciting stuff.