A favorite scene from a fine film—
A favorite scene from a favorite movie—
The AV Club interviews Werner Herzog. Sample—
AVC: In 20,000 years, could it be our culture that’s discovered in a cave somewhere?
WH: In 20,000 years, there will be significant things in the environment that will be preserved, like certain dams. Like Vajont Dam near Longarone [Italy], where there was this catastrophic event almost 50 years ago now. An incredibly massive landslide came down into the lake. The entire lake, over 50 billion cubic meters, shot up into the air in a tsunami of 700 feet that came down in this gorge and wiped out the town of Longarone. I have studied the place over and over. I do my pilgrimages to the place. At its base, [the dam] is something like a hundred feet thick. The steel-reinforced concrete. The whole thing is about 180 meters at its highest, and it withstood the landslide coming into it. It’s still intact, and most of it will be intact hundreds of thousands of years from now. So in the future, when people are looking for the Neanderthals of the 21st century, they will see our traces standing in open air. They will see the sarcophagus of Chernobyl, which is going to be built over it now. It will be there in 20,000 years. They won’t have to search in a cave.
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Director Paul Verhoeven explains why his film RoboCop is a Christ allegory, and suggests what the American Jesus might be like—
The point of RoboCop, of course, it is a Christ story. It is about a guy who gets crucified in the first 50 minutes, and then is resurrected in the next 50 minutes, and then is like the supercop of the world, but is also a Jesus figure as he walks over water at the end. Walking over water was in the steel factory in Pittsburgh, and there was water there, and I put something just underneath the water so he could walk over the water and say that wonderful line, “I am not arresting you anymore.” Meaning, I’m going to shoot you. And that is of course the American Jesus.
Werner Herzog on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Herzog discusses his new documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. (Thanks to Bblklpt reader Josh for forwarding us the link).
Charlie Chaplin’s 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux is rarely mentioned alongside his early classics like The Great Dictator, Modern Times, or City Lights, which is a shame, because it’s easily one of his funniest. Perhaps that’s because it’s one of his rare speaking roles, although that’s hard to believe—Chaplin is just as funny when he opens his mouth as when he’s cutting physical capers. I suspect that the movie is just too dark for some folks. It is, after all, a black comic take on the Bluebeard story, and I guess the story of a man who marries and then murders his wives as a form of careerism might not hold a general appeal. In any case, it’s hilarious. Here’s a compilation of clips that show off Verdoux’s seduction technique; these are some of the funnier moments in the film—
Monsieur Verdoux is hardly a romantic comedy though. Observed closely, it works as an allegorical commentary on the moral response to the horrors of WWII. These observations are made plain at the end of the film, as Verdoux, put on trial, must first account for his crimes—and then pay for them. Here is the extraordinary final scene of the movie, which contains spoilers, although I believe that one can still watch the ending out of context and later enjoy the film—
We see here the major hallmarks of Chaplin’s greatest films: not just comedy, but also genuine pathos and social commentary, all delivered with acerbic bite that nevertheless reveals a real love for humanity. Highly recommended.
In his new book, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, Simon Critchley talks about death in Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line (you can read Critchley’s earlier essay “Calm — On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line” here)—
So, the hero of The Thin Red Line is this character Witt. And we meet him for the first time on the beach meditating about his mother’s death, imagining that he could meet death with the same calm that his mother seemed to meet it. We then get this romantic flashback: it’s somewhere in the Midwest; he’s touching his mother’s hand; then the hand is pulled away and she’s gone. That’s the fantasy of the authentic death. And Witt, according to Malick, fulfills the fantasy: approaching death with calm — this is Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza. Interestingly, when I was looking at the sources — he’s very faithful to Jim Jones’s novel The Thin Red Line — he inserts the word ‘calm’ into the passage, it’ s not there in the novel. It might or might not be an allusion to Heidegger, where Heidegger, where Heidegger talks about anxiety as an anxiety towards death as an experience of calm, or peace: the German is Ruhe. This is a Romantic ideas of death. For Heidegger, if human beings are authentic they’re heading towards death; if they’re inauthentic they experience demise, which means that we just pass out of existence. But only animals and plants perish, and that just seems to be ridiculous. Human beings perish all the time, can perish, and there are examples like in Kafka’s Trial where one dies like a dog. Human beings die in all sorts of ways, in a permanent vegetative state or whatever.
Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry is a 1976 documentary by directors Donald Brittain and John Kramer. Featuring Richard Burton reading from Lowry’s work. (Via).
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Musician, writer, and filmmaker Paul Festa contacted me a few months ago to point out that I’d used a still of Harold Bloom from his film Apparition of the Eternal Church without crediting him. It was the nicest possible email in the world, and after a few pleasant exchanges, he sent me a copy of Apparition along with his new film, The Glitter Emergency. Both films are marked by humor, pathos, and a deep love for music. Paul was kind enough to talk with me about his work over a series of emails. For more info, check out his website.
Biblioklept: Your new film The Glitter Emergency is about a girl with a peg leg who dreams about being a ballerina. There’s a humor in the film that highlights some of the dramatic absurdity to the premise, but there’s also a lot of pathos there. How did the idea for the film come about?
Paul Festa: The germ of the plot itself came from an act Matthew Simmons had me accompany on violin many years ago, when his drag persona Peggy L’Eggs came out onstage as a one-legged ballerina on a rollerskate. But what precipitated the making of the film last year was a profound career crisis that came between the death of an extremely important and beloved mentor and my 40th birthday. I’d worked seriously – feverishly – to become a violinist, but a repetitive strain injury curtailed my musical career. Then I put all that energy and commitment into becoming a writer, but I didn’t achieve any success until almost by accident I became a filmmaker with my experimental documentary Apparition of the Eternal Church, a no-budget personal project that went on to screen throughout the US and Europe and win prizes and get very well reviewed. So at the age of 39 I found my energies and time divided between music, fiction and film, and none of the above had coalesced into a sustainable career and I still didn’t know, squarely into my middle age, what I was going to be when I grew up.
I spent December of 2009 and much of January lying awake through the night listening to my heart beat and it was in that period of grief for my mentor, and panic about my life, that I came up with the idea for this film that would be a comedic metaphor for my experience as an injured artist who finds his way back to his art through supernatural intervention. In the peg-leg ballerina’s case, it’s the vial of Enchanted Glitter; in my own case, it’s film, which enabled me to resume my life as a professional musician. And in both cases, it’s an enchantment much like Dumbo’s feather, a suspension of our self-doubt more than any external magical agent that permits us to do extraordinary things with our lives.
Biblioklept: The Glitter Emergency — at least most of it — is stylized as an early silent film: black and white, placards for dialog and titles, even the jumpiness of an old reel-to-reel machine is replicated. Was this form always part of the project? What prompted your decision to shoot the film this way?
PF: The silent-film aesthetic was there from the get-go, and for several reasons. First of all, the whole project is a star vehicle for Peggy L’Eggs, and as a film presence she was born sixty years too late — she’s Clara Bow and Lillian Gish and Stan Laurel all rolled into one. Second, the convention of silent film, with dialogue represented in intertitles, works perfectly with what I do at the intersection of music and film. In the usual relationship, music is there to serve film, to color it emotionally as soundtrack. What I do is the other way around – I’m using film to illuminate or dramatize music. And so the music has to play uninterrupted, and intertitles work perfectly. When you think of it, it happens in both my films – the last third of Apparition of the Eternal Church consists of silent images of the interview subjects, and text titles, and organ music accompanying.
I don’t have any formal education in film, but when I was a kid my father used to take me to the Avenue Theater out on San Bruno Avenue in San Francisco, where every Friday night they would show a silent film and an early talkie, the silent accompanied on the theater’s Wurlitzer by an old guy named Bob Vaughn who had accompanied these films when they first came out in the 20s. So the look and feel are second nature for me, as they are for my co-director Kevin Clarke, who came up with a lot of the signature silent-film flourishes in Glitter.
Biblioklept: You bring up your first film, Apparition of the Eternal Church, which again is obviously very much about music. The film begins by having a number of people listening to the music of Messiaen on headphones and reacting to it, discussing it, emoting to it, puzzling over it — but the music is withheld from the audience for quite some time. I found it very, very frustrating! Was this by design? What’s the story behind Apparition?
PF: I would never intentionally frustrate an audience, though I might withhold satisfaction for a half hour as Apparition does. The reason for the structure of that film is again to serve the music, to preserve our ability to hear it whole and to some extent on its own terms. I had filmmakers advise me that the film could only work if I dosed out the music in parcels, letting the audience hear it piece by piece, fading it in and out throughout the interviews. I never seriously considered this option – as the playwright Karen Hartman observes early in the film, you don’t talk over Messiaen! It’s not background music. So that is an experience – a trial – I reserved for the interview subjects and spared the audience. And I spared the music from being chopped up and presented piecemeal, which would have rendered it meaningless for the following reason: the piece is composed of two sonic pyramids, one short and preliminary, the next reaching up to what Messiaen understands to be God. If you present a pyramid in pieces, you have a pile of stones and they don’t do anything, much less ascend to heaven.
So my options were to play the music first, before the interviews, to play it after, or not to play it at all. I tend to think the option I chose results in the least frustration – but everyone experiences the film, and the music, differently.
Biblioklept: For the record, I don’t think the frustration is negative at all — the withholding primes anticipation to a level that passes, I don’t know, an itch, I suppose. I wanted to hear what your subjects were hearing. Speaking of the subjects, how did you get people involved in the film? There’s such a wide range of interviewees there, from Harold Bloom to Squeaky Blonde. How long did it all come together?
PF: The subject of frustration in Messiaen is interesting, because some people – including much more sophisticated musicians than I – find a disturbing lack of direction or resolution in his music. It’s static to them – it floats, an object in space that gets bigger or smaller as its relation to you changes, but beyond the change in that spatial relationship it’s not doing anything and it drives you bonkers. And I think that frustration is a species of the torture that eternity threatens, the emptiness of life without end. For theological reasons Messiaen can’t intend that dark gloss on eternal life, and it’s pretty far from my experience of the music, but plenty of people experience it. Hence John Rogers’s observation that despite what the composer intends to portray, “this is what hell is like.”
I interviewed 115 people for Apparition, and 31 are in the film — some of them for just one or two clips. The first interview was with the harpsichord virtuoso and early music guru Albert Fuller, who had taught me chamber music when I was a student at Juilliard in the early 90s, and who taught me in large part by putting on music and talking through it, describing what he heard in “the theater of his imagination,” as he called it. Albert’s interview was so great — so wide ranging ad surprising, starting in laughter and ending in tears — that I felt I needed to keep going. I interviewed pretty much everyone I could get to put on the headphones and sign a release – anyone who walked into my apartment. Several of my English mentors are in the film – I took Bloom’s Shakespeare seminar at Yale, and Rogers’s Milton and Spencer courses, and several classes with Wayne Koestenbaum. Michael Warner, who now heads the Yale English department, I met along with several other cast members in the woods of Tennessee at a gathering of the Radical Faeries. I spent most of three years collecting the interviews, a pace I recommend to anyone doing a project like this.
Biblioklept: You’ll be presenting both movies later this month (in Santa Cruz) with live musical accompaniment. Have you done that before? What can audiences hope to see and hear?
PF: Both Apparition of the Eternal Church and The Glitter Emergency are blessed with having had numerous screenings with live musical accompaniment. Apparition has screened accompanied by some great church organs in the US and Europe, including St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York and Grace Cathedral here in San Francisco. I’ve accompanied Glitter on violin at every public screening since we premiered the rough cut in May of last year. And while the two films have screened before as a double bill, this is the first time both will screen together with live music. In addition to the films and music, the audience should expect a robust discussion afterward. The screening is sponsored by UCSC, where both films screened last year to a terrific film history class where I got some of the most intelligent questions and commentary of any post-screening Q&A.
Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?
PF: I’ve stolen a lot of books, most significantly Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Thomas di Cantimpre’s Life of Christina Mirabilis. I’ve been boiling them down with some Bible and Franzen and a pinch of Milton and dimly remembered Steinbeck and any year now am expecting it to yield my first novel, Heaven Descending, a sort of bildungsroman amid a world of Hollywood lowlives and Radical Faerie medical marijuana farmers that sparkles with magical realism and catastrophic drug busts. In the fall I had seven weeks at Yaddo in which I laid the foundation for the fourth draft but work on two new films has prevented me from making any progress since New Year’s. Next year is a big year for the project; it turns 10.
The Glitter Emergency will have its Midwest premiere at the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival on Thursday, April 14, at 7:30 p.m., at the Wicker Park Art Center, launching a program that features Kenneth Anger’s two masterpieces, Lucifer Rising and Scorpio Rising – all with live musical accompaniment.
Will Self‘s recent hatchet job on the Coen brothers for The Guardian is the kind of calculated contrarianism that poses for meaningful criticism far too often on the internet. Let me offer his smarmy lede–
Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions – on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets – simply aren’t up to scratch. It’s a dirty, thankless task, but someone has to do it; someone has to point out that, no, Inception wasn’t the last word in sci-fi meta-sophistication, but rather a stupid person’s idea of what an intelligent film is like. And by the same token, as the Coen brothers’ True Grit comes galloping into our multiplexes surrounded by dust clouds of Stateside approbation, someone has to take a bead on the whole sweep of their careers, squint, and then if not exactly shoot them down, at any rate cold-cock the notion that the Coens are the great American auteurs of their generation, when, sadly, they are only a moderately clever person’s idea of what great American auteurs might be like.
I’ll set aside for a moment puzzling out whether Self sees himself as a serious cultural critic or a critic of serious culture (whatever that means) — there are too many inaccuracies, unsupported judgments, and logical fallacies in his essay to waste time with this detail for the moment. Let’s start with his premise that the Coens “are only a moderately clever person’s idea of what great American auteurs might be like.” Self links this premise to Inception for some reason, perhaps, I imagine, to trot out his zinger that Nolan’s blockbuster is “a stupid person’s idea of what an intelligent film is like.” This is a clever bit of sophistry that ultimately means nothing, an argument rooted in arrogance alone. Imagine a stupid person. Now, ask this imaginary stupid person what his or her idea of “great literature” is. He or she may reply “Stephen King” or he or she may just as easily reply “Shakespeare.” The perceived intelligence of the person has absolutely nothing to do with the aesthetic merit of the literary work he or she ultimately names. I might just as easily suggest that Will Self is a self-satisfied snob’s idea of a clever critic. But what would that actually say about Self’s brand of criticism? Nothing. Self’s claim about the Coens here (and Inception) is simply an ad hominem attack that relies on a perceived (yet never justified) superiority of aesthetic sensibility over the middlebrow masses.
Self tries to take on the Coens’ oeuvre, yet couldn’t even stay awake during Fargo—
Fargo, I’ve always fallen asleep in – all that snow, and Frances McDormand’s mien of winsome determination, why, it’s enough to make anyone nod-off. But now I realise that my failure to stay awake during a film many consider to be among the Coens’ finest, was probably telling me something.
So the film fails the critic, who cannot bother to account for it (Self never even mentions Miller’s Crossing, for the record). Must be all that snow. Even worse, the film doesn’t do what Self wishes for it to do–
Fargo is a film that seems to be a genre noir picture, while never quite committing itself. This capacity the Coens have had to flirt with genre rather than ever wholly embracing it is something that – until someone like me comes along to tell you otherwise – people find particularly engaging.
The arrogance of this line is stunning. Who does Self think “someone like me” might be? Does he seriously see himself as some kind of aesthetic revelator? Self ends by writing that,
the Coens’ central problem [is] their reflexivity as directors, making films of films rather than films tout court. Still, in our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for.
I still don’t really understand Self’s argument. He seems to think that the Coens make decent Hollywood films, but they don’t make art. He’s upset because he thinks people are falling for two guys who are merely ironizing classic Hollywood structures. And yet he utterly fails to engage those structures, to actually analyze the Coens’ films in any meaningful way. Here’s a sample of Self’s facile criticism–
With O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) you even get another overlay: this isn’t just a retro-style depression-era chain-gang jailbreak movie, but a retelling of the Odyssey to boot. It’s James Joyce with a catchy country soundtrack instead of all that brain-ache wordplay.
How fucking glib is that? O Brother is a musical where every single song intrinsically connects to the particular scene in which it appears. It’s not merely a retelling of the Odyssey, but also an allusive reworking of much of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. At its core, it’s a film about the rise of modernism and the changing cultural scope of the South. And, for what it’s worth, it’s full of brainy wordplay.
O Brother also reworks a 1941 Preston Sturges film called Sullivan’s Travels. This film is a film about a film-maker — this is exactly the kind of ironic self-reflexivity that bothers Self for reasons he fails to account for beyond the notion that such self-reflexivity leads to the dangers of people who think that they are smart but who are really not smart believing that they are seeing a smart film — hang on, that was a long clause, sorry; okay, Sullivan’s Travels is a film about a film-maker who wants to make a film of social commentary, a film of meaningful art, a film he will call O Brother, Where Art Thou? As the director makes his way through the mean mean world, he comes to realize that the average person — the middlebrow viewers that Self holds so much contempt for — would really rather have their pains relieved in some way than experience them again through an art film.
But I get the feeling that Self has little capacity for an emotional response to film — he’s likely far too concerned that the film is trying to like, trick him or something. (It is. That’s the job of all storytelling). And yes, I haven’t bothered to say why the Coens’ films are great, are marvelous, are fantastic films, but this rant has already grown too long, and besides, I think that all one has to do is watch them. (And if you don’t like them, that’s fine. Doesn’t make you “stupid” or “middlebrow”). Finally — and this is just pure meanness — Will Self’s novel Great Apes was so singularly gross, gnarly, and devoid of meaningful insight that it ensured I would never read another word of his literature. His essay on the Coens ensures that I’ll ignore his criticism as well.
(See also.)
Biblioklept 