Midnight in Paris (USA, 2011, Woody Allen)

Thus Spake Ben Livant:

I am pleased with the timing on this.   I had the opportunity to see this picture prior to visiting Paris this summer.  To my credit, I declined the inviation of Monica and Audrey to go with them to the movie theatre.  I am so glad I did.  Before actually being there this year, my image of Paris given by cinema was b/w, a 60s take provided by 400 Blows, Band of Outsiders.  Midnight in Paris is nothing if not a tourist postcard from today - and good thing it is this, otherwise it really would be close to nothing - so I'm grateful I didn't get the card before walking down the Champ-Elysees on my own two feet.

Woody Allen was reactionary about New York back when he was at the peak of his auteur power and fame.  Already in the 70s his cultural frame of reference was the 40s.  It is oddly fascinating to see him in his senior years transpose his Brooklyn idolotry about Manhatten onto the capitals of Europe.   London, Barcelona, Paris.  It's as if he perceives the decline of the American empire and is taking flight accordingly.  But to what?  Doesn't he listen when one of his assistants reads him the newspaper?  The European project is not exactly on top of the world at this point in history.

But Woody prefers not to be at this point in history.  That's the whole point.  The little moral lesson in Midnight in Paris about living in the present notwithstanding.  Watching the movie is like listening to McCartney sing that silly love song about silly love songs.   Whatever realistic insight there is in the film about the need to reject nostalgia is just a cover for being nostalgic.  Surely it is possible to feel the power of the past in a positive way without falling into invidious comparison with the present, succumbing to wistful regret about having missed out on yesterday.

Or should I take exception with Allen's escapism from the opposite point of view?  Honestly,Midnight in Paris is a harmless exercise in fantasy with a lovely patina of romance and a few good jokes besides.  But come on, if you're going to go back and talk to Picasso, have a damn good conversation!  Time travel provides an opportunity that should not be squandered.    Did the movie have to be so intellectually lite?  But here I go forgetting what generally passes for intellectual these days.  (Don't mind me.  I happen to be putting myself through a reading course in Nietzsche.)  So I'll just appreciate another bit of good timing for me; i.e., my rewatching of The Exterminating Angel just last week.  Really enjoyed the gag with Bunuel.

Hey, I really enjoyed the entire movie.  Owen Wilson and his bent nose are charming.  He does a pretty good goyische version of Allen's own loveable neurotic.  What's not to like, seriously?  OK, it's fluff.  Take the line about the Belle Epoque maybe not being the best period ever, what with there being no antibiotics then - funny, fine, good enough.  On the other hand, the one seriously substantive line in the film is when the wanna-be-novelist reckons out loud that literature or painting or any other work of art can not compete with the power of  architecture and the statement it makes in the city as a totality.  Right or wrong, this is no trivial notion with which to contend.

And I do have to corroborate the sensation.  Paris blew me away on many levels but if I had to identify the strongest force of the place that was consistently in my face, it would have to be that of Haussmann's modernization of a medieval city.  Not to wave a Whiggish flag about progress.  Rather to prefer a dialectical understanding of historical development instead of nostalgia.  Failing to choose between these two options leaves Paris - and the rest of the world - prey to ahistorical commodification.  Such makes it satisfying to see the Eiffel Tower in Vegas.  (Not a personal shot.)

And Dan:

The problems I had with the film you have covered capably.  Despite the substantial intellectual context  of the film's playground (1920s Paris),it is almost completely insubstantial. Interestingly, in Woody's latest film (To Rome With Love) he has a wizened Alec Baldwin critique a young ingenue for knowing just barely enough about a wide range of artists (one line of an Ezra Pound poem, a quote from Yeats) to appear far more intelligent that she really is.  He could, of coure, be talking about himself, as the historical figures we meet in Midnight in Paris are not much more than caricatures sketched out of widely available information. I doubt that Allen frequents Wikipedia, but it would sufficiently prepare any neophyte to his treatment of this period.

That said, I found Midnight in Paris to be wonderfully crafted, artfully rendered, and fitfully hilarious ("Dali!") It is nostalgic fluff (for all its faux rejection thereof), but it's my brand of fluff. Consider me sold.

Voici le trailer

Pina (Germany, 2010, Wim Wenders)
Then Ben:

This is a very cool film.  It's a remarkable creation considering the star of the show died before Wenders could get her to co-create it with him.  Clearly, that original project had to be scrapped and the film became a tribute that draws on her creativity the best it can.  This circumstance reminds me of the album Mingus, by Joni Mitchell.

 

The staging of the performances in the various locations is tremendously engaging.  The cinematography is subtly brilliant, simultaneously providing basic documentary coverage in keeping with the techniques of a sports broadcast and active participation in the choreography to achieve a genuinely cinematic mis-en-scene.  Even more than the effective editing, it's the camera movement along with the dancers' movement that truly allows the film to do justice to its subject matter.

 

I also found it to be emotionally effective not to present talking-head interview respondents.  Departing from this standard, heartless presentation, Wenders allows individuals to read a composed statement as a voice-over while showing them just sitting there; not dancing, not moving, not performing.  This non-performance shows the company as a kind of family sincerely contemplating the passing of their matriarch.

 

All of this would be for naught if their grande dame didn't have the goods - but Jesus did she have the goods!  That Tanztheatre is too much!  Modern modern dance.  Can you dig it?  And hello, German enough for ya?  I know they said that she was always so upbeat and encouraging and full of humour, but that's some seriously who-angst-you? twist she's twisting.  I can't imagine what it must be like to see it live.   That Rite of Spring (1975) done in the dirt.  Oh man, Cafe Muller (1978) with all those chairs.  Devastatingly good.  Monica Googled clips and we saw a two-hander set on an interior floor covered with leaves, through which the man repeatedly dragged the woman. Scenes From a Marriage as performed by a fantastically physically fit couple.  Modern modern dance.  Can you dig it?

 

I was personally touched to learn from Wiki after seeing the film that Bausch studied with Jose Limon and Paul Taylor in the States before picking up again with Jooss in Germany.  My mom took some classes with Limon's company and also worked with one of Taylor's principle dancers, Danny Grossman, after he started his own company.

 

And Dan:

 

I love this film. Knowing absolutely zilch about Bausch or her ouevre going in, I became an immediate acolyte. This is dance of the first degree, intelligent, provocative and sexy. What's not to like?

 

The creative marriage of two real artists, Pina and Wim, turns out better than even a Dale Carnegie bred optimist could hope for. The dances are extraordinarily cool, a perfect wedding of sensuality and innovation, while Wenders clearly gets the themes in play, staging the dances in engaging sets or fascinating locales that dovetail perfectly with the material.

 

Embedding is not being favourably received by blogger, so click here to see the trailer

 

 

The Exterminating Angel (Spain, 1962, Luis Bunuel)

Then Ben:

Hitchcock gave a name to what was little more than the biggest plot device, but does not this film boast the biggest thematic McGuffin you have ever seen in cinema?   Not that the "force" "forcing" them to stay in that room isn't the premise of the plot.  But this premise is not a mere device.  It is a totalizing condition.  Or, better to say that the plot in its entirety is one big honkin' device for the delivery of a massive metaphor or pronounced parable about what Marxism traditionally has termed false consciousness.

 

There is an exterminating angel in The Exterminating Angel.  Contra what The X- Filesused to insist ever week, however, it is not "out there."  It's in here.  It is so utterly in here, so completely entrenched in the mind, the body becomes literally entrapped, physically restrained by the confines of custom; right down to the unconscious acceptence of these social conventions that supposedly keep civilized society civilized.

 

Indeed, it is at the level of the unconscious that the film most actively tweaks its characters and its audience too.  It is in the first place and after all a work of surrealism. The Exterminating Angel draws on irrational indeterminacy in order to challenge preconceptions that are now taken for granted as logical or even natural necessities.   Not your Soviet-style attack, that's for sure, bourgeois mores are nevertheless directly condemned as bad ideology, misleading mysticism for the working-class.  On this last point, the character of the head butler is the last word.  All the other servants escape.  Only their over-seeing foreman gets caught.  He has internalized the worldview of his boss and suffers the remains of the day accordingly.

 

At the same time, the last act of the film rings the bell loudly that vulgar class analysis cannot adequately account for the angel's hegemonic hold on the society as a whole.  Certainly, there is the point-blank blast at the Christian church as ultra-analogous to the superstitious predilections of particular characters; those dabbling in the Kabbalah, giving Masonic secret signs, hanging on to lucky chicken's feet - all trumped by the cult of Jesus before the final curtain.

 

Yet, to reduce the debunking attitude of the film to this standard irreligious position is to miss the deeper challenge to what William Blake called "mind-forged manacles."  What keeps those high-society dinner guests in that room are mental bars made of metal even more primary than the iron of Christ's cross.  Hence, Bunuel is coming down on base-metal reification as such, i.e., the fetishistic projection of power onto an external entitiy that does not posesses such power, an external entitity that may not even exist and in this case surely does not. 

 

Of central importance to any interpretation of the film is the fact that they do eventually escape from the room.  Granted, they do so only to become captured again, as sheep return to the corral.  And this time they are accompanied by the population at large, the masses apparently disintegrating into panic-striken flight to the very "sanctuary" that is but prision.  This granted, it remains that the upper-class twits do bust free of the retiring chamber under the leadership of an individual who is able to... do what, exactly?

 

In her mostly excellent Criterion essay, (http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1012-the-exterminating-angel-exterminating-civilization), Marsha Kinder observes that the surrealist construction of the film is informed by the Freudian suspicion that linear narrative is a kind of self-censorship and combats this by imposing unintelligible repetitions on the viewer. Eventually, however, repetition becomes intelligible to one character whom Bunuel "empowers" with enough "attentiveness to sensory perceptions" to be able to "propose an ingenious way of escaping the trap."  However, Kinder quickly calls the credibility of this into question in order to draw from its incredibility the following conclusion : 

 

Like the guests, we long for a rational explanation that will free us from the anxiety aroused by such disturbing behavior. This cognitive struggle is dramatized in the plot as one of the guests (nicknamed “the Valkyrie” and “the Virgin”) commands everyone to stand still, for she “perceives” they are all positioned in precisely the same spot as when this strange condition first emerged. But how could they all be in the same place when some of them have already died? Nevertheless, through a communal “faith” in this absurd narrative premise, the guests are miraculously released from the living room, only to have the same kind of entrapment reimposed in another setting. Just as the guests have been trained by their culture to pursue ritual and narrative coherence, we spectators have been trained by earlier sequences that repetition is the key. As in Las hurdes, though the insiders at first seem to be the only ones who are trapped, the film eventually reveals that the trap extends outward to encompass outsiders (including us spectators), who are all caught in the same network of bourgeois corruption, but on a much larger scale.

I agree with Kinder that both the character's power of perception and the group's communal faith in it arrive miraculously in the narrative and along with everything else are being subjected to absurdist ridicule on behalf of extended critique of stupid magic.  The final act of the film makes this an unavoidable conclusion. Yet I find Kinder too confident in her explanation that the film's surrealist deconstruction of linear narrative is most fundamentally behind Bunuel's critical exposure of false consciousness.  That she recognizes the latter as "bourgeois corrruption" and treats some other features of the film to class analytical insights does not make up for this.

 

Plainly put, Kinder wants to eat her post-modernist celebration of the film's formal incoherence and eat her old-school commie content too.  But the latter requires not a surrealist rejection of any and all linear rationality.  Rather, it demands a very definite realist approach to narrative grounded in common-sense perception and practical memory.  This is not to suggest that the single character's special ability to think the party out of it's predicament is not far-fetched.  It is nonetheless to propose that it is not just far-fetched.

 

Even if the character does have a distorted view of the immediate placement of each person, she is correct to retrace everyone's steps in order to figure out how they can move forward.  She is right to remember the past in order to deal with the present situation on behalf of a different future.  This positive aspect pertaining to linear narrative - this nod to historical consciousness for engaged praxis - is completely unobserved by Kinder.  For her, the escape as a whole is merely a sucker-punch set-up for the knock-down punch-line that follows.  I see, alternatively, that there is in the film a genuine moment of hope. 

 

The Exterminating Angel is hardly an optimistic revolutionary document.  But it is not the atemporal nightmare of seriality that is Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad.  Nor is it the cynical news flash on the nihilist collapse of capitalist civilization that is Goddard'sWeekend.  Bunuel is sticking it to us hard, to be sure.  The comedy is as black as an 8 Ball.  But just as there is a white spot on an 8 Ball, there is for an instant in the film the signal that people can actually overcome mystification, take control of their lives and direct their own destinites.  Collectively, no less. 

 

What is more, this is not about some absolute transcendence of human error.  Kinder is quite right that the character can only be wrong about the precise position of each and every one of them when the incapacitating angel initially settled among them.  I maintain that this is all the more argument that action can be taken against the angel, even on the basis of partial knowledge.  Some things have changed, admittedly; a few who were once alive on this chair are now dead under that table.  But enough of them are exactly where they were before, all of them agree.  And with that, they find the key to a lock in a door that isn't even there.

 

Meek's Cutoff  (USA, 2010, Kelly Reichart)

And So It Goes, with Ben Livant:

You know that Depression-era cowboy tune about a guy talking to his horse - "Dan" happens to be the critter's name - while the two of them stagger on in the desert, dying of thirst?   No, no, not the hit from the early 70s by the band, America; although that song too and the band name as well are certainly suitable enough for the subject matter of Meek's Cutoff.  But no.  THAT horse had no name, Dan.  This one's called "Dan."  Like I already tol' ya, Dan.  This song - "Cool Water" it's called - was made popular in the 40s, by a group named, The Sons of the Pioneers; more than suitable enough for the subject matter of Meek's Cutoff.  Well, anyway here's my tagline:

"Cool Water" as scored by Philp Glass and performed by Ani DiFranco unplugged.

We are deep in Less-is-More Country according to feminist historiography.  Whether you find Meek's Cutoff boring and dubious or artful and compelling, I defy anyone to watch this movie and not press the pause button so as to hit the sink and drink.  I had to pour quite a few ladles down my throught to beat the drought so I could carry on.

As to where I fall in the dust of this minimalist and revisionist reworking of John Ford's mud, I'm basically for it.  However, I do have to point out that the aesthetic minimalism renders the revisonist ideological reworking anything but subtle.  It is because everything is stripped down to the bare bone essentials of story-telling, in an environment that is little more than an empty expanse, in a plot predicament that is literally life-and-death dehydration physics - well, a hiccup sounds like a cannon being fired.

The film is impressively a hard and pointy tack when it comes to the circumstances of all involved, but the characters are so thinly fleshed out (food is almost as scarce as water, heh heh), they take on a two-dimensional, blunt functionality for the Woman's Deconstruction of The Western.  As credible as it is that these people would have been on the taciturn side, Meek's Cutoff is Less-is-Less in the screenplay.  More and richer dialogue to create more complex and engaging characters is what's at stake, I reckon.  And speaking of speaking correctly, on the politically correct front, the film undermines the realistic respect it shows the native character by not providing sub-title translations of what he says.

I also have to wonder about the facts of the 1845 expedition.   A few years ago I saw a PBS documentary about it, or at least I think I did.  In that program, the expedition pursuing a short-cut for the Oregon Trail consisted of a couple hundred people, if I recall correctly, and there were many lives lost, 50 folks or thereabouts.  In Meek's Cutoff, it's a mere three-wagon company.  Maybe I've got historic incidents confused.  But if I don't, again we are confronted by a minimalist story-telling aesthetic imposing itself in a questionable stylised and symbolic manner.

But that should not be my last word on this film.  Like I said before, I'm basically for it.  I suppose it believes itself to be a tad more profound than it actually is, but even so, it is does have significant depth.  It is both evocative and provocative; atmospherically and conceptually, respectively.  Hey, it made me drink, and think.

City of Life and Death (China, 2009, Chuan Lu)

Then Ben:

By definition, it is impossible to watch the unwatchable.  So  it will sound nonesensical of me when I say that City of Life and Death is not as unwatchable as it should be.  But this is the only way I can express how I feel about the film.

I am not saying in the dry, authoritative manner of an expert historian that the fictionalization does not do justice to the facts.  I am hardly knowledgable about the details of the Nanking Massacre beyond what I have read in Wiki.  My reponse is that of an empathetic person in need of an emotional Archemedean hook on which to hitch my moral wagon.

If this is sending the message that I was actually overwhelmed by the horror depicted in City of Life and Death and am now intellectually compensating for this - as happend with my initial viewing of Come and See - let me be adamant that this is not the case in this instance.  Indeed, I guess my point is that the horror did not make itself viseral enough.

I say "I guess" because I am sincerely not sure why the film did not effect me more.  It should go without saying to you but just for the record in case anyone else ever reads this, it's not that I need more graphically gruesome images.  My tolerance for that sort of thing is comparatively low and I find that I can see the point quite quickly without having to also smell it, never mind taste it.  Plus, it's not as if there are no terrible depictions in City of Life and Death that are tough to stomach.

So what is it about the film that seems to me to be obstructing it's hellishness from occupying a solid spot in the realism section of my mind.?  Too many CGI backdrops?  Too much music?  Too much over-personalized drama for our main characters in a true story that demands facing the mass scale of the atrocities?  I suppose all of these are contributing factors and I also suppose there are more besides.  If you have seen the movie, I hope you can help me gain a better insight into what it is about City of Life and Death that makes me think it is Chinese Speilberg.

Granted, if the director of Shindler's List had made City of Life and Death, it would have be re-written to prioritize the noble acts of John Rabe, perhap's the nicest Nazi known.  So let us acknowledge that the schlock does not go over to such a degree of Western individualistic heroism.  But there, I said it, there is something schlocky running through the film.  For all of its otherwise high quality features - including strong performances, brilliant staging, considerable narrative power and more thematic restraint than Speilberg shows in his Blockbusters-are-best-so-dumb-it-down approach - City of Life and Death reminds me of exactly the sort of "important war movie" Hollywood makes.