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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: film (page 10 of 13)

Aleksandr Sokurov: The Sun

12 October 2005 / / 0 Comments

I am not a great fan of Sokurov’s movies. Unlike his loose predecessors Tarkovsky (his sometimes mentor) and Sergei Paradjanov, both of whom I love, Sokurov’s emphasis on aesthetics-above-all gives his films a decadent quality lacking in his predecessors. Russian Ark was a staggering technical achievement that takes too oblique a view of Russian history. Father and Son pulls out one visual trick after another, but fails to take its premise (a near-sexual bond between father and son) anywhere. The Sun, about the day Hirohito announced he was not a god, is much more coherent, but Sokurov’s expressed avoidance of the political is at times myopic.

But there is one area in which I cannot think of a rival for Sokurov, and that is in sound design. I cannot think of another director who orchestrates the sound of his movies with such meticulous depth and attention to minute detail. The detail is so great that there were points in The Sun where I wished the actors would be quiet so I could take in the layers of sound behind them. The “score” of the first half of The Sun is a disorienting mixture of birdsong, faint but shrill electronic tones (recalling Artimiev’s scores for Tarkovsky), and brief strains of decontextualized classical music. I don’t do it justice by describing it; Sokurov and his sound crew–composer Sergei Yevtushenko and soundpeople Sergei Moshkov and Vladimir Persov–construct scores that rank with the most experimental and successful of the modern electro-acoustic movement.

In The Sun especially, the score is crucial to the success of the first half of the movie. Hirohito’s ancient position in the very modern world is portrayed uncomfortably with the electronic intrusions insinuating themselves into his relentlessly formal and regimented life. Seen in a theater, it’s an enveloping, unnatural sonic environment that marks this uneasiness. Much has been made of Sokurov’s increasing difficulties seeing, and whether or not the grayness of the first part of The Sun is an allusion to this, the richness of the audible aspect of the film is an implicit answer to the dilemma Alexander Kluge proposed in The Blind Director.

Update: It looks like Mr. Wheeler has beat me to the punch, as Androgynous Turtle waxed rhapsodic on Sokurov and sound over a year ago. I must say that I found Beau Travail to be a much more successful film than Sokurov’s Father and Son, but I was happy to find Mr. Wheeler’s comments. Please come back!

Alain Resnais: Night and Fog

21 August 2005 / / 0 Comments

I don’t have a lot to say about Resnais’s 1955 Holocaust documentary, but 50 years later, these are the things–next to the horror–that stood out to me.

Jews are mentioned exactly once during the thirty minutes of the film. Writer Jean Cayrol, the author of the voiceover narration, gives three examples of people being deported to the camps, one named by occupation, one by nationality, and one by religion. Jews are not mentioned when Cayrol describes the “arbitrary hierarchy” of the camps;he only names resistance members and foreigners. Cayrol was himself a resistance member who was brought to the camps; I know little else about him. The yellow triangles, however, are much more prominent in the images than any of the other indicia.

I don’t have the background to know the particular reasons for this: this was 1955, before, as Peter Novick observed, the Holocaust had come to be defined as it is commonly thought of today. But I find James Leahy’s explanation unconvincing at best:

Like Robin Wood, Roger Michael rejects the generality of the film’s message:

If Night and Fog can work in French Resistance fighters and Spanish Republicans unjustly deported from France and cruelly murdered at Mauthausen, why can it not identify the special and prime targets of the Nazis–the Jews, who died their deaths not in the hundreds or in the thousands, but in the millions?

Knowledge and memory change with time (coincidentally, this is one of Resnais’ thematic concerns, here and elsewhere). When the film was made, a decade after the end of the war and the discovery of the camps, nobody needed to be reminded who had been “the special and prime targets of the Nazis,” even if, perhaps guiltily, officialdom was reluctant to talk about all that had happened.

I think not; people’s memories can be very, very short. This is not to find Resnais and the other historic figures who worked on the film–Chris Marker, Sacha Vierny, Hanns Eisler–complicit, but there is an untold story here that nagged at me.

One story that is told is that the French authorities censored one bit of the film:

Night and Fog, cited by Roberto Rossellini as the most important film of the post-war years, ran into trouble with the French censors. They forced us to mask the cap of a French policeman who was supervising the deportation of the Jews who had been herded into the Vel-d’Hiv’. The cap–the unmistakable characteristic of the French police–was proof of institutional collaboration in the Holocaust.

And it’s not hard for me to imagine that Marcel Ophuls heard this story and that it only added fuel to the fire when he was making The Sorrow and the Pity.

K. Dream

10 August 2005 / / 0 Comments

I’m watching a new film version of Kafka’s The Castle in a quiet, empty theater. The film is in black and white, and it’s rather grainy, but intentionally so, though possibly from a felicitous combination of low budget and artistic intent. The editing, however, is poor: abrupt cuts between long, static shots.

It’s a loose adaptation. K. is on a beach. In the first scene, he is buried under the sand near the water, only the top half of his head visible above the sand. He raises himself like a seal, throwing an inch of wet sand aside, and drags his detritus-laden body away from the water. We cut to the next scene, where he is now under a large mound of sand, now with only the top of his head visible, poking through the side of the mound. K. is farther away from the water, and in the distance I can see the disarrayed sand from the first scene, near the water. His head shakes and he pushes his head through the mound, and he manages to pull himself through and out of the mound, all the while grimacing and clenching his teeth from the effort. Covered in wet and dry sand, he stumbles away from the collapsed mound. Cut to the next scene, where he is still on the beach, even further away from the water, now lying underneath a large boulder. The stone is vaguely obelisk-shaped, much taller–at least eight feet–than it is wide, and stands straight on one end. Now K. is having a good deal more trouble; his entire head is out of the sand, but his body is trapped under the rock, and he’s making no progress at extricating himself, despite the obvious struggle. I have to feel for him.

In the theater, I think that while this film shares a certain high-contrast visual style with Orson Welles’s film of The Trial, it’s a much more faithful adaptation than Welles’s version. True in spirit, at least. I think that Welles did a masterful job of capturing the claustrophobic, interior spaces of The Trial, but he did not grasp the true depths of the book. I think that the case is the opposite with this film of The Castle: it has no evocative visuals, but it feels more faithful.

(Please see The Dream Factory for more inspired offerings.)

Thoughts on Genre: Hitsville, Dullsville

13 June 2005 / / 0 Comments

So, we have two rough categories for placing tight genre product: first, exemplary genres, where the best work represents the ideal summation of what all the genre product aims at, and second, exceptional genres, where the best work stands out because of its departure from the genre’s standards. Ray Davis suggests that the ideals of 1930s comedy are simply better ideals: what’s not to like about them? I agree in part, but I don’t think this explains the disproportionate amount of good product relative to nearly every other era of filmed comedy.

One correlation to be drawn is that in the exemplary case, the best work does not emerge from particular talents but across the board, while in the exceptional case, it is the peculiarities of individual creators that give the best work its shape and form. Indeed, it’s the issues of shape and form themselves that seem to determine whether genres can succeed on their own merits, or whether they require the intervention of a particular individual to bring their own idiosyncrasies to mediocre requirements.

So then, some genres I can think of on either side of the fence. Predictably, I was able to think of far more exceptional cases than exemplary ones. One thing I’m fairly confident of is that as with many mass phenomena, exemplary genres only roll around rarely, through chance.

Grub St. Writers: Exceptional. The sheer hackwork being done by most of these novelists rivals any commercial genre extant today. The few giants of the era tower over their competitors beyond belief.

90s Techno/House/Gabba/etc. Music: Exemplary. The sheer homogeneity of the genre and the rate at which evolutions in beat percolated throughout the communities made individual authorship subservient to all sorts of emergent properties. I’m no Simon Reynolds, so I can’t give the details, but here’s one case in which no one particular artist has ever jumped out at me as being especially ahead of the pack. Meanwhile, the big names have never especially impressed me, seeming to be commercially watered-down rather than especially personality-laden. I do love DJ Scud, but admittedly he’s less interested in working within the genre than eviscerating it.

Chivalric Novels: Exceptional. If the works quoted in Don Quixote are any measure, it took masters like Cervantes and Ariosto to prove that this genre wasn’t completely unredeemable.

EC Comics: Exemplary, sort of. The confluence of talent in
EC is hard to explain, but the randomness that besets the quality of
individual creators’ work, and the ability of the writers and artists to cancel out each others’ flaws (and sometimes their strengths) is one of the few cases in comics where a huddle-room mentality worked. Still, I have to admit that people like Wally Wood certainly have their own stamp, and because the genre never overtook individual quirks, this is a conditional judgment.

Disney/Marvel/DC Comics: Exceptional. I could add many other genres here from the Golden and Silver ages, to say nothing of newspaper comics. Barks, Kirby, Cole, Eisner: without the handful of great names in these genres and their commitment to very personal visions, comic books would truly have the shameful, worthless history that many assume of it.

Stax/Volt/Motown Records: Exemplary. There’s a reason why punters focus on the multi-artist greatest hits discs.

60s Beat Groups: Exceptional. Despite the attempts at a Hitsville USA type factory approach, very little of quality came out of endless beat groups covering a narrow repertoire of house songs, until the best of them gave up and started writing for themselves. Interesting how early some of them (Hollies, Beau Brummels) started to do that.

Dub/reggae: Exemplary. Despite the persistence of some huge names, gems pop up all over the place from people who are never heard from again. Massive amounts of appropriation, plagiarism, and retooling also make picking out individuals extremely difficult to begin with.

Baroque Kantatenwerk: Exceptional. Bach’s sheer weirdness and inspiration blew away whatever qualities his competition had.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Anonymous apotheoses versus individual quirkiness. The first conclusion to draw from these examples is that by banking talent together and forcing tons of cross-pollenation, a bottom-up approach emerges whose impact is only seen in retrospect. In comparison, the top-down dictates of a publisher or a church official make for a more static environment in which it is easier for individuals to insidiously invest themselves in their work.

And that brings me to my next question: whither blogs?

To be continued…

Thoughts on Genre: The Secret of Comedy (circa 1935)

1 June 2005 / / 0 Comments

After sitting through the weak screwball comedy True Confession this weekend, a proto-I Love Lucy piece with Carole Lombard doing her best to enliven the story of a pathological liar who confesses to a murder she didn’t commit to help make her lawyer husband (an enervated Fred MacMurray) famous (along with a sad, decaying John Barrymore in a thankless part as a drunk), I decided to follow Miranda’s lead and make a list of my favorite comedies of the thirties and forties. I am not the expert that Ray Davis, who has written extensively on the subject, is, but since I realized I’d seen more films of this genre than any other since I was obsessed with the French nouvelle vague, I wondered if there was a connection. Leaving aside the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, who represent their own genre, here was my list, screwball and otherwise:

  1. The Palm Beach Story
  2. Twentieth Century
  3. Bombshell
  4. Nothing Sacred
  5. The Good Fairy
  6. Theodora Goes Wild
  7. Unfaithfully Yours
  8. Thirty Day Princess
  9. Sullivan’s Travels
  10. The Lady Eve

That wasn’t especially enlightening, so I made a list of the top ten acclaimed comedies of the period that I didn’t especially like.

  1. His Girl Friday
  2. Bringing Up Baby
  3. My Man Godfrey
  4. Adam’s Rib
  5. It Happened One Night
  6. The Awful Truth
  7. Dinner at Eight
  8. Easy Living
  9. Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
  10. Ball of Fire

This was more interesting. Several directors (Howard Hawks), actors (Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne), and screenwriters (Ben Hecht) appeared in both lists. Unlike the nouvelle vague, where rough rules like “Louis Malle has never made a good movie” and “Truffaut’s films tend to be more recidivist than most” provided heuristics for predicting my reaction to a film, the heterogeneity of any individual’s output in American comedy was stronger than I can recall it being anywhere else, even though the output was far more similar.

I don’t believe this is purely due to the ineffable nature of comedy. With the exception of “Ball of Fire,” which is pretty hard to take, all of the films on the second list are good pieces of work that have their moments. Rather, I think that there is ultimately a homogeneity of style and content that transcends the differences of these movies to place them all firmly within a genre, a genre larger than “screwball” but clearly isolatable to a time and place. What’s amazing is that there are so many that are estimable: I cannot think of any other film genre that has so many high-quality films with such similar content and formulae. (Some have suggested Bollywood musicals, but I wouldn’t know.)

to be continued…

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