Represent Repertory #2: Silent sight magnified colors, wipes

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Get in line
Though the Resnais series at the PFA is ending shortly, with tomorrow night's program of shorts and next Tuesday's screening of La guerre est finie, there are still some things on the horizon to get excited about. There's a few more oh-nine sights across the bay, but more importantly, maybe (because, lucky me, I live across the Bay these daze), are some things at the Castro.

First, this Saturday, the 12th, there's the all-day winter event put on by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Though there are breaks, it's a full 12-hour block of films, complete with live accompaniment, and I hope to attend each screening since I've only seen one of the featured films before (the Keaton), and that only on a television set. There really is no comparison for seeing these films in an auditorium like the Castro, as was proved to me a couple summers ago (read more here and here), even if I'd often prefer way less live accompaniment and kitschy anachronisms/laugh tracks. Not only because it's on film, and the flicker matters, but because of the size. It's a real palace in there. Further, they're showing some really cool sounding pictures that all highlight the cinema's capacity to document:

• 11:30 AM, Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness [Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1927] A film shot entirely on location in Thailand, it's a precursor to King Kong without the stop-animation.
  
• 2:00 PM, J'accuse [Abel Gance, 1919] The epic, 162-minute pacifist picture of The Great War has long been unseen in its original construction here in the U.S. so this is quite a rare opportunity to see this (equally epic) restoration.
  
• 7:00 PM, Sherlock Jr. [Buster Keaton, 1924] That brisk comedy about the comedy of interpretation, and its frequent failure through projection, should shine bright. Further, it'll be introduced by Keaton's granddaughter, and there will be live foley, too, which might prove its own set of jokes both good and bad.
  
• 8:00 PM, or so The Goat [Buster Keaton and Malcolm St. Clair, 1921] I've never seen this short, though it's available on YouTube, but apparently it's another identity comedy (this one of the mistaken variety), and that can only lead to good gags, and chase scenes.
  
• 9:15 PM, West of Zanzibar [Tod Browning, 1928] Another Lon Chaney vehicle sure to get under everybody's skin since, right off the bat, his character is paralyzed fighting with his rival, Lionel Barrymore, and thereafter goes by "Dead Legs" as he plots his revenge for 18 years.

Hopefully I can add a few more cogent thoughts post-festival about what stung and what tickled from the day. You can probably bet on some of the same from my buddy Brian Darr, who not only writes Hell On Frisco Bay (and tweets up a storm @HellOnFriscoBay) but also serves as one of the festival's researchers and writers. —Inside, furtive, teasing tip: next summer's festival should be even more spectacular than previous years. —Further reading: the Silent Fest's blog, with notes from Brian and others.


What else? Oh, nothing but a bunch of Hitchcock. The real highlight for me and my boy Danny will be seeing Marnie on 35mm on the 17th since we both missed it during The Late Films. But there's also Vertigo the next day, and more than too many to choose from the other days, though I'll be prioritizing Preminger on the 19th for Skidoo and Bonjour Tristesse back over for what will probably be my final trip to Berkeley for the calendar year. If you happen to see me/us around town at one of these screenings, don't be afraid to say, "Hello." Even if I'm reading, chances are I'm paying more attention to other people talk around me than to the words entering my eyes.

Alain à la recherche #6: Mélo

by Ryland Walker Knight

[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

Now the shots, like true heartbreak, feel as though they will last forever. The film never drags, so to speak, but it sure is a drag: if it weren't so sad, it would be hilarious, a true and pitch-perfect parody of The Mélodrama, all its cogs of coincidence front-loaded and all its machinations timed, factory-like, to precise ends. People unravel, not their stories. And yet, people can never tell their own stories: words weigh too much. (Look at this blog!) So Alain makes the word weigh a ton, and his endless master shots foreground how these lummox-light fools talk around each other and never with one another. The most direct form of communication is a somersault, a joke. Not even music can tell a story like a body can, though a sonata may prove a haven or a gauze. And time can fly, as ever, in the fade from one scene to another: whole lives can be rearranged, and are, by, simply, the movie calling curtains on one of its idiots. Lit and timed like Gertrud—with spotlights highlighting the artifice but duration making the people deliberate material—this chic, art deco world—all of it tiles and squares and boxes, all of its lines of style—is one big columbarium. Every stage feels a coffin, the whole thing bound by rigors of time one block of misdirection and perjured, masking tape'd crate at a time.

Convergence for those truant, cow eyes (12/8/09)

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Don't look back.

Vinyl is heavy and Vitti is forever #19

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Quick, before we think.

Viewing Log #23: Hit by a truck [11/30/09 - 12/6/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

[Spent a lot of last week running around town, and working on a non-cinematic (ahem, paid) writing project, so movies took a necessary back seat. I read instead. And, yeah, with this work and the basketball options in high definition (not to mention a visit to Oracle Saturday night), I just couldn't bring myself to watch any number of films.]

• Va Savoir [Jacques Rivette, 2001] # Started over a little late. Too late, as it happens, to finish before my lids got too heavy. But this time I got a good hour into the picture, and find a developing idea: as much as I love La Belle Noiseuse, Rivette's '00s work is way more interesting, to say more mysterious, than his '90s work. Any takers?
  
  
• Mélo [Alain Resnais, 1986] Everything's a front, and a bad one. These idiots just can't get anything right, except for a somersault. More in another recherche shortly. [link]
  
  
• Fantastic Mr. Fox [Wes Anderson, 2009] # Still delightful, ebullient. A true celebration of difference and singularity set to a great score, at a great pace, and overflowing with detail. Not sure if it rivals Playtime, as Brody writes, but that artistic generosity Wes brings his pictures constantly yields affective registers—both subtle and bombastic, always joyful—rarely paralleled in current cinema. No other film this year had my eyes ricocheting across the frame as much or as often. More in The Notebook, shortly.
  
  
• A Christmas Tale [Arnaud Desplechin, 2008] # For my piece in The Notebook, coming shortly.

Alain à la recherche #5: Mon oncle d'Amérique

by Ryland Walker Knight

[The Resnais series playing at the PFA this November and December is part of a broader, traveling retrospective with a concurrent run in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center and a proposed stop at the newly renovated Museum of the Moving Image in early 2010.]

Parts of this film get me so giddy, marveling not just at the beautiful photography but also at the beautiful Nicole Garcia (above, on knee) and the silly-smart braiding, that I just don't believe it. Other parts are terrifically moving (i.e., sad). Most parts are didactic; as if its narrative strategy were a form of pedagogy engineered around constant recapitulation; as if Alain's saying, almost like he does throughout Marienbad, that if we say something specific enough times in enough voices then it's bound to burrow in there and register.

Everybody's got a story, and everybody's got dreams. Everybody's got a fantasy, an uncle from America. Except, of course, these people are decidedly French. In fact, we get a full from-birth history for each of our three leads—Garcia, Gerard Depardieu, Roger Pierre—each told a few times over. The film begins more a mosaic than Je t'aime, je t'aime rather literally as our eyes follow a spotlight searching a collage of stills we will know in motion later in the film. Then it's choral, too, our ears parsing these three—no, four—voices recounting their births and their birthplaces and their trajectories all at once all on top of one another—except for some omniscient voice telling us that a being's only purpose is being and/or something else tautological. Shortly, we're given faces to go with the voices, and names, and portraits of their childhood narrated by them. Then the net is cast over this trio: Resnais introduces Henri Laborit (a real-life physician, writer and philosopher) with the same kind of narration, but with "current" footage of Laborit walking around some lab, smiling and scowling. Laborit is a kind of guide, a sage, for the film. Not that the film exactly proves Laborit's theories—a version of evolutionary psychology intent on Explaining It All—but these asides help provide, say, an anatomy for the film to hang stories off of, like limbs.

The film is split, or splintered, or it splits a few times, or it's segmented, though it also finds conjunctions and convergences. In one (dim) light, it's simply didactic and over determined. Resnais never reduces, though, and the repetitions are never played the same—not from the same angle, often it's not even the same exact action but another performance altogether. Even more than the memory game of Marienbad, Mon oncle aims at redetermining events: how new information colors an old event, or a current one, and can influence understanding of putatively unrelated events. Put otherwise, the film is quite clearly about intentionality, and how we think about things, and where we come from when we come to things-people-places. No doubt, there's plenty of Ricoeur's traces in this project, even if it's based in Laborit's mouse traps. It's Resnais' cinematic gusto that frees the film from its unilateral "expertise" echoes and lets time move both—nigh, all—ways at once. Though Alain maps the mice onto the men and one woman we follow, it's not proof; it's a joke. It's a gas that it's a possibility, even a plausibility, in this world. —Jokes can scold!

Though agency seems crushed, to an extent, in this little network of forces, we never feel like life's not open. Rather, life's prone to fantasies, which can, plausibly and paradoxically, be a form of paralysis, an inhibition that blinds us to how we move ourselves (and must) and give each present purpose its purpose. Or, that becomes possible only if (we hope "when") we find a way to gather ourselves, to hold our histories at hand as some ciceroni, and not simply as stained glass. We remember: we tell ourselves stories in order to live.

A Christmas Tale. A house is an outfit. [part three]

by Ryland Walker Knight

Today you can go out and buy one of my favorite movies not only of last year but of all time: Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale. I'll have more to say over in The Auteurs Notebook shortly, but for here, for now, know now that it's worth every finger-lickin cent you have to spare. Not only is the single-platter transfer beautiful (I'm sure the Blu-Ray disc looks great, too, as looking at the standard DVD on a BR player with HDMI-upconverting made it all the more crisp and lovely), but the second disc offers up Desplechin's short, L'aimée, which he made a couple years prior, and after Kings and Queen, about the sale of his family home in Roubaix. It offers a nice companion angle on the sense of home a home can give somebody—here, Arnaud's dad as he tells his history, his story riddled with familial lacunae—despite the inevitable hurt we accrue in families (in life). It's a terrifically sad picture. Yet, as with all of Arnaud's movies, its collaging impetus broadens the world; his focus somehow enlarges his scope; his world, forever cinematic, is maximal. In fact, you might say he's greedy for life. And, you might say I am, too, which might explain my ardor for his films.

I will never shy from the fact that I see myself in his art, and that this recognition—instead of devaluing—enriches these experiences. It's a form of flattery, sure, where I can pat myself on the back a bit, but it's also a challenge; his movies forever push me back, make me ask myself questions. Understanding is never one-way. My Sex Life... makes me question my formative relationships and long-delayed undergraduate degree; La Sentinelle makes me question my isolation, and my occasional impulse towards solipsism; Kings and Queen makes me throw up my hands and love my mom; A Christmas Tale makes me cry, and shows that, yes, life is hard, but it's just life—that you don't get to wallow, that you have to keep going, and will, despite your selfishness—that the world, and life, will accommodate a lot more than you ever expect. Also, there's a lot of formal fun, and the rush of it is exhilarating: life can fly by and still be rich every second. If you're lucky, you'll get some help (some love) along the way, and giving it back will only make things better. Take the gift and relish it now.

Vinyl is heavy and Vitti is forever #18

by Ryland Walker Knight

— Gorgoneion aegis

Viewing Log #22: Everybody in the world [11/23/09 - 11/29/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—No exit

• Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip [Joe Layton, 1982] # So dark, so perfect, so hilarious. So hard to be good at standup. You can watch it online over here, but we watched it on cable. We all fell over a lot.
  
  
• Mon oncle d'Amérique [Alain Resnais, 1980] Didactic, sure, but most of it's a joke. Resnais lets Henri Laborit play "sage" but the score, and the choral arrangement of images—talk about convergences—undercut even that know-it-all stance. More to come, I promise, on this one.
  
• Stromboli [Roberto Rossellini, 1950] Ingrid shines alone, victim of her ego, and that house is a kind of brain, but the fascinating thing—right off the bat—is just how jagged the film unfolds. It resists any structure, though there is a rhythm, and themes emerge. But, at bottom, it's a basic story made more basic, nigh elemental, with its refusal of systems. Everything's aimed at "natural" even though these humans keep forcing things to disastrous effect.
  
  
• L'aimée [Arnaud Desplechin, 2007] Not quite a scrapbook, but surely a collage. That is, the aim is expressive-affective, not documentary, despite the overflow of facts and, say, reportage. Above all Arnaud marvels at his history, at the luck to have such a history (to have a history) to recount. That's his gift: to enrich the world about him, to swirl stories full of color, of warmth; to say, render a wide world full of life. After all, ghost stories should brim, or point you all over the place.
  
  
• In Bruges [Martin McDonagh, 2008] Fell asleep about an hour in, then finished the next morning. McDonagh sure isn't much of a filmmaker, and I'm not entirely sold on his brand of violence as a story backbone, but I laughed enough, and that girl from Harry Potter 4 is delicious.
  
• Fantastic Mr. Fox [Wes Anderson, 2009] Perhaps the most pleasurable film in, like, forever. I know I loved The Informant! a whole bunch, but, well, this one's even more fun, and touching (though maybe not as "smart"?). In any case, I plan on seeing it as often as possible on a big screen.
  
  
• Where The Wild Things Are [Spike Jonze, 2009] No fun. Wasn't a big part of the book that that recklessness is fun? Isn't that the fun of being a kid? If all we're doing here is heralding youthful verve, how come all the movie's a dreadful downer? I, for one, did not have any fun. So there. I can get petulant, too.

—Well, don't fuck up the suit...

Convergence for your Thanksgivings [ii] (11/26/09)

by Ryland Walker Knight

Light fire with fight
Axe at it til you see sky
Graze a highway wail