BANG BANG: Ryland Walker Knight

[BANG BANG is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]

My, How Impermanent by Ryland Walker Knight

Earlier this week my Indiewire ballot appeared. I still stand by it, I suppose, but even just a week after publication I itch to change things. In fact, the whole enterprise gives me hives to a certain degree. The whole idea of absolutes in general, in any context. If you take a look at that list, you'll see a collection of films, I'd wager, premised on contingency, or some form of mystery or mess or exuberance. Even the more "straight" narratives (Cronenberg's & Jacobs' portrait-films) exhibit an interest in how things do not fit, or ever fix into reliable—much less accepted, normal—forms. Perhaps the best term I can reduce this idea to is a favorite on this blog: navigation. Life's not a maze, but there are hurdles every day, including waking up, not to mention the unexpected tidal wave every so often. We're so used to the narratives we're given or that we give ourselves that eluding the unwanted can wreck a day, a month, a year. (Lucky me: my year saw hiccups and headaches but nothing got wrecked. Truth is, I had a fantastic year. And I'm grateful.) Naturally, I'm attracted to films about finding ways through life.
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Finding a way to make movie-going more a part of my movie-watching has been difficult this year, the past couple years. Granted, I got to attend Cannes. But the pleasures of that were certainly "extracurricular" as much as within the salles and theaters. The dinners, the new friends, the jokes over whiskey and rosé with Danny and Adrian after long days. But I still cherish movie-going.

Early last week, in fact, I had the supreme pleasure to take in one of the best double bills in recent memory at the Roxie Theatre (with Brian, yes): the early show was Borzage's Moonrise followed by Renoir's first H'wood venture, the insanely under-seen and apparently under-recognized Swamp Water. Two films about the south made by not-southerners that understand the south and southerners in ways you rarely see anymore. (Of course, I'm not a southerner; I'm a Californian. My Okie roots are roots and my relationship to GA/SC is tertiary at best.) But aside from any obtuse anthropological/ethnological reading I can offer, the films exist and excel simply as films. Borzage's at his Murnau best and Renoir is at his dollies-everywhere (and "people as people") best. And they spoke to one another in delicious ways the way a double bill is supposed to work. Steve Seid usually knows what he's doing but this was a special program. The swamp has different narrative functions in the films, but in both the swamp is a hunting ground, a space of violence, something untamable that few can master or at least negotiate (or inhabit!). Again, this speaks to how I see the world at large. Life takes skills we never anticipate requiring, but nonetheless accrue. True to this optimism I harbor—inside an unavoidable but I hope healthy cynicism w/r/t life's obstacles, including people (above all people?)—both protagonists of these films find ways to join the world by their stories' ends.

Then again, not every path is a success. The film I felt worst about leaving off my "official" top ten was Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day. That movie's all about the disconnect we're forced to confront as we grow through adolescence. It's about a lot more, too, including light, but there's a violence in adolescence that it understands (something Haz and I talk about as he is a teacher). This is true of all the Yang pictures I've seen, but this one is obviously special. Its length affords its narrative the space for us to observe characters rationalize their way through choices good and bad alike (though mostly bad) all the way. This is what critics mean when they call a film novelistic: time affording space for character. Granted, that's a limited view of what "the novel" is or can be, but this film in particular, as with many likewise classified films, is after a Dickensian kind of scope forever grounded in place and details. This, too, is how best to think of something like Breaking Bad, which Jen talked about yesterday.

Television, after all, is serialized much how the early money-making novels were; both are strategized as much as constructed with plot doled out in delimited chunks. But, as Jen noted, one of the pleasures of BB is just how digressive it is, how much air time is given to behavior and go-nowhere episodes of bickering. And it's not like this show's hopeful. It's got a pretty grim take on human desire and nature and intelligence. As I've said before, these characters are idiots. Walter White seems to have figured out a few things watching Gus operate, like the cost of survival in such a dangerous game as the drug racket, but he's still a bald, selfish, myopic stranger to himself and his oh-so-beloved family by the end of this last season. And the person he's closest to has every reason in the world to want to slit his throat.
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I've been using my tumblr more than this home base throughout the year. Part of it is simply ease of use. Another is desire. The last is time. I like the scrapbook/notebook feel of the microblog. It feels like a repository of reminders. And it usually takes very little effort. Writing here is more work. (Writing anything is work!) Not sure what the new year will bring, but I'm not quite ready to quit my baby. But I quit making zines to make this blog and I may wind up quitting this blog to wind up making more films. Even if they're just little goofs about the sounds of seagulls or odd poems about light and memory. The future has more answers than me.
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One thing I know for sure: though I've made some great friends via emails (cf. this week), there's a lot I'm proud of from this past year outside the walls and tubes of the internet. Thank you to everybody who helped make those realities real. You know who you are.

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Ryland Walker Knight is a writer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He has three names, which you can read above, at left, and all over this blog.

BANG BANG: Eric Freeman

[BANG BANG is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]

Some Things I Found Interesting in Some Things I Saw This Year by Eric Freeman

A Brighter Summer Day (dir. Edward Yang): I saw this in January at a mostly empty screening with no intermission in Berkeley, and it’s still probably the best thing I’ve seen all year, old or new. Read Rosenbaum's longer piece if you want more comprehensive breakdown. I’ll just note that what strikes me about ABSD (and Yi Yi, as well) is that the epic scope follows not from stunning natural vistas or loud pronouncements of import, as we’ve come to expect from the medium, but finding an interesting situation and treating the context and its characters with complete respect and as much depth as necessary. It’s an epic because it’s so true to the way people relate to one another.

World on a Wire (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder): If ABSD is the best movie I saw this year, then this one has proven to have fascinated me the most. It was my first Fassbinder, and since then I’ve steadily run through a good chunk of his career. One thing I love about this one, apart from the “what if we shot through four panes of glass?” aesthetic, is how RWF sets up shots where a pan finishes in a hilariously overdetermined setup. It’s the movie in microcosm: things may appear free-flowing, but everything has been decided already.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (dir. Sean Durkin): A disappointment even as I enjoyed it, if only because it’s so easy to see how it could be better. While the structure is indeed very clever, many of the match cuts fall flat because it’s immediately when and where the scenes take place. As the last shot proves, Durkin wants the audience to identify with Martha’s displacement, yet continually keeps her at remove. Which is all a way of saying that the film needs more moments of actual ambiguity, like the several shots of Martha walking through a dark hall, when it’s unclear where she is until she ends up in a room she herself might not have expected to enter.

Certified Copy (dir. Abbas Kiarostami): Ryland thinks this film is fundamentally a work of criticism, and I mostly agree with that statement. But I also think it comes across as more dismissive than it should, because in this case the criticism gets at important points about how relationships change over time, the value of authenticity in everything from art to interactions, and all sorts of other deep philosophical questions that we tend not to consider on a daily basis. So, yes, it’s criticism, but also proof that criticism isn’t really about the thing it directly addresses, but deeper conceptions and feelings about how people relate to the world around them.

Mildred Pierce (dir. Todd Haynes): It’s no surprise that a director who regularly gets great performances from actresses does so well with Kate Winslet, who plays this role as a mix of her usual technical strength and the rare looseness usually lacking in her most awarded work. What’s less expected is that Evan Rachel Wood acquits herself so well. Veda can easily come off as a monster, but Wood instills her with enough relatable pride to seem human. Her best moment (and also the one that will make me seem particularly pervy for noting) comes when, directly after Mildred finds out about the affair with Monty, Veda gets out of bed fully naked, struts over to her vanity, and regards herself in the mirror, all as a sort of victory celebration after embarrassing her mother. It’s a triumphant moment for the character, the point at which she believes to have finally proven herself as a dominant woman. For different reasons, the scene makes the same case for the actress.

Drive (dir. Nicholas Winding Refn): I’m of the camp that takes this movie as a massive spastic fuckup, mostly because NWR has no idea what he was trying to do and not for some difficulty in melding tones and styles. But there are some delightful moments of clarity, especially the opening set-piece and the various music videos (not like music videos) that distill the latent emotions of the piece into perfect pairings of image and sound. For all the talk of Drive as an arthouse action movie, the best parts are almost always the most overtly commercial.

Rango (dir. Gore Verbinski): It’s become standard in some circles to say that the home-viewing experience is almost as good as the theater these days, but Rango is the first movie that ever made me think it could be true. I loved the movie in March, mostly for its gag-a-minute pace, but I don’t think I fully appreciate the visual dazzle until I saw it on the very excellent Blu-Ray transfer on a reasonably-sized TV. Multiplex projection standards are so poor that, for a detail-driven, wide-audience movie like this one, it’s almost preferable to watch it on a couch.

Bridesmaids (dir. Paul Feig): As the thinkpieces all said, an important step forward for the status of women in Hollywood comedies. Unfortunately, the movie itself is a sad commentary on exactly what those Hollywood comedies entail. Almost all the best parts are moments of emotional discord between Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph or throwaway lines from the amazing Melissa McCarthy -- the worst are the zany, insert-setpiece-here laugh-generators that could have been ported in from any Apatowville (or, worse yet, Farrelly Bros) creation. Turn this into a movie about adult friendship with regular laughs, and it might have felt a little more true to its characters. Instead, it’s all too familiar.

Enlightened (created by Mike White and Laura Dern): This HBO series isn’t especially cinematic, but it deserves mention on this list for Laura Dern’s performance as Amy Jellicoe, in my opinion the best acting work of the year. It’s easy to caricature Amy—the pilot arguably does it too often—as a hypocritical woman who believes herself to have found inner peace when she falls victim to the same sort of jealousies and grudges she did before getting a few weeks of new-age counseling. In Dern’s hands, however, Amy is fascinatingly complicated, oblivious enough to peacock a new friend in front of past confidants but introspective enough to acknowledge that pettiness a few hours later. In a TV landscape heavy on melodrama, Enlightened stands out as a series about the everyday difficulties of trying to be a better person in a world that tends to incentivize the opposite behavior. It’s about self-awareness and emotional processes, and those battles register on Dern’s face as often as they manifest in an external conflict.


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Eric Freeman writes regularly about sports at The Classical and Ball Don’t Lie, and intermittently elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @freemaneric.

Viewing Log #55: September highlights

by Ryland Walker Knight

• demonlover [Olivier Assayas, 2002] Look at this twitpic, and then read Glenn's thing maybe. Here, again, I risk the wrath of GK, and Kent Jones: it's a hoot, and largely fascinating, but also the owner of a rather empty punchline.
  
• The Social Network [David Fincher, 2010] A problematic, thoroughly entertaining film I hope I never have to talk to anybody about ever again.
  
• The Thin Red Line [Terrence Malick, 1998] # Here's some gushing and here's some mush-mouth. It's important to me.
  
• The Last Picture Show [Peter Bogdonavich, 1971] As formal as it gets and so, so apt to anybody with an ear for confusion. You know, everybody.
  
• A Brighter Summer Day [Edward Yang, 1991] Worth every minute. Loved how much of it's specifically about light, and shining lights (on things) and not seeing because of the lack of light, and how all the big acts of violence happen at night, in low light. If I see it again (and hopefully in a theatre again), I'll take real notes and maybe write a real poem about it.
  
• Pretty much every single episode of Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job [T+E, 2007-2010] # Cuz I had to. And cuz I love it. Cuz they're the best. (Sure, it gets/got tiresome; but who gives a turd ya dingus?)
  
• The Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job Crimbus Special and Tour Promo [T+E, 2010] The best thing in the world. Everything.
  
• Enter The Void [Gaspar Noé, 2009] I tried to be positive at this joint and largely failed.
  
• The first half of Season Three of The Sopranos [David Chase?, 2001] #, which is absolutely brutal and absolutely fantastic and rather often absolutely hilarious.
  
• Danny Perez's visuals at the Panda Bear show; especially the wave and its square spots at the end.
  
• Oedipus Wrecks [Woody Allen, 1989] A lot of fun, in part because it's "on the nose."
  
• Life Lessons [Martin Scorsese, 1989] Rituals, process, it's all a lie to try to cover your patterns.
  
• Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? [Frank Tashlin, 1957] At the Castro, with Brian. The opening is my favorite part.

Happy to live in Berkeley this spring. -Some belated Out 1 notes. -Pedro Costa at PFA Announcement. -The New PFA calendar is dope.

by Ryland Walker Knight

On Sunday, February 17, before that week's Wire, I saw Jacques Rivette's Out 1: Spectre. I'd planned on writing up a post to be titled, simply, "Out 1" (comparing this four-hour version to the twelve-hour Noli me tangere version) but then I heard their new calendar was days away and figured, with the concurrent excitement, I might fold the two projects into one. And, well, shit. I've gotten so giddy about all the offerings on this new calendar I've almost forgotten about the Rivette pictures: the Pedro Costa series (starting Saturday March 1st with Costa's newest film, the much-blogged-about Colossal Youth) even comes with an endorsement from Rivette himself: "I think that Costa is genuinely great." But let me not forget myself (do not think I'm silent out of pride?) and skip over what Dennis Lim once called "the cinephile's holy grail." It's taken me long enough to get to this messy, lovely picture.

Safe to say Out 1 is monumental, right? Or, if not monumental, simply big — in either incarnation (12- or 4-hours). I thought I’d tested myself with Satantango’s all-day adventure in the muck (was that really more than a year ago?), but last summer’s two-day adventure in the theatre of life (was that nearly a year ago? really?) was, quite manifestly, a longer (bigger) undertaking. And, I must say, length and “sloppiness” and lack of subtitles notwithstanding, I find Rivette’s film much more joyful, sexy, funny and endearing — I’ll even hazard “better” — than Tarr’s film. For starters, Rivette’s film is about plays, about playing. And, with the twelve-hour Noli me tangere, you get three breaks, including a night to sleep halfway through; the four-hour Spectre has no intermissions. And my French is way better than my (nonexistent) Hungarian. And, of course, Out 1 has Juliet Berto.

How Berto’s Frédérique fits into Rivette’s two versions of film — what role she’s given to play, what end she meets (or doesn’t) — may help begin to characterize their differences. The simplest distinction is Frédérique's curtailed involvement in the shorter version, Spectre: she is denied not only her blood-marriage to Renaud but also her rooftop death scene. She leaves Spectre by turning her back to the audience, putting her face against a wall, denying us her countenance — and with that she’s never seen again. In Noli me tangere, Frederique’s death punctuates her story with more finality, of course, and it means more given the rest of the plot that Spectre elides. Nevertheless, in both versions, her end resembles and speaks to the ends Jean-Pierre Leaud’s Colin finds, just as both Frédérique's and Colin’s respective endings within the different films speak to one another. Frédérique ends both films laying down, turned away from the world, unsuccessful in her final game(s); Colin ends both films giving up on his pursuits to find an underground society (in Spectre he has the last line of dialogue: “It didn’t work…”).

Both incarnations of Out 1 are concerned with negotiating the vagaries and demands of living in and existing with this odd Paris Rivette sees as a network of people and of stages — of opportunities for play — but where Noli me tangere is a cinema of duration (testing its characters’ patience and will as much as its audience), Spectre is a cinema of interruptions (better to scatter the narrative, to defamiliarize the audience). Still, each version pushes to disassemble itself, one just takes longer than the other: the lengthier Noli me tangere multiplies events and identities and characters through mirrors and structural rhymes; the shorter Spectre shows only traces of those mirrored trajectories. Things are always connected and always disconnected in Rivette’s Paris. Think of the “accidental” title: what is out and what is one? Is one out as much as out one? The subtitles hold more meaning, but Noli me tangere (Latin for “touch me not”) is more ironic than Spectre (clearly: everybody is a ghost — to everybody else, to themselves) since the longer edit foregrounds how certain relationships exist primarily in the tactile sense, even in absentia.

Of course, this is also an argument about filmic and theatrical performance as ghostly — about films themselves as trace memories, evaporating ephemera. So fitting that I cannot remember more of these monumental myths. I wish I took better notes, or wrote this immediately after seeing the picture, because it’s pretty hard to remember everything — from a week ago and from a year ago.

Which makes me think: Maybe I should start to keep a film journal. Perhaps I should use blogging as a way to jot down ideas quick and rough. That’s what most people do, I think. Basically: it’s hard to sustain any journalistic level of production when in school full time, especially while writing a thesis. Not that I’ve been seeing a great deal of films this semester anyways. (I’ve been sticking to Michael Mann and Terrence Malick and Alred Hitchcock at home, for the most part; Juliet of the Spirits sits unwatched on my desk, a month after Netflix delivered the disc.) But that will change, at least during the first two weeks of March, during this upcoming Pedro Costa miniseries presented by the Pacific Film Archive, “Still Lives.” I plan on seeing each of the seven features (one of which is a Straub/Huillet picture) and the three shorts the PFA has scheduled and writing them up for a corresponding series of posts on The House Next Door. Having never seen a Pedro Costa film before, this will be quite the experiment, with ample opportunity to go wrong. (Like, what if the flicks suck balls? Doubtful, I know.) But I kind of gave myself the assignment as a personal challenge so I don’t want to fail (myself). Besides, it could be fun. Also cool: Costa will be in attendance for all the events, including a Regents’ Lecture on the final day of the series, March 9th, so I may be able to schedule an interview. (Will get back to you on that.) Many thanks to Shelley Diekman and my friend Meredith for the gracious aid on the tickets front. The series is scheduled as follows.

Saturday, March 1, 2008
Colossal Youth at 6:30pm. [This is the film that sparked my interest as it saw a lot of blog pub last year. Kevin B Lee wrote about it for The House. Also: Girish’s “One-Stop” post got my eyebrows to raise.]

Sunday, March 2, 2008
The Blood at 3:00pm. [Costa’s debut is apparently quite indebted to film noir. Dig.]
Bones at 5:00pm, accompanied by the short film “Ne charge rien.” [Bones is the first film in Costa’s Fountaínhas trilogy (more Girish here); the short stars Jeanne Balibar, who can be seen in Rivette’s newest film, Ne Touchez Pas La Hache (Don’t Touch The Axe/The Duchess of Langeais).]

Thursday, March 6, 2008
Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? At 6:00pm. [A documentary about the editing practice of the legendary (?) avant-garde cinema practitioners Danièle Straub and Jean-Marie Huillet.]
Sicilia! At 8:45pm, accompanied by the short film “6 Bagatelas.” [Straub-Huillet’s adaptation of Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily; short is six unseen snippets from Smile.]

Saturday, March 8, 2008
In Vanda’s Room at 7:00pm. [The second Fountaínhas film is an epic 179 minutes.]

Sunday, March 9, 2008
Regents’ Lecture at 3:00pm.
Down To Earth at 5:00pm, accompanied by the short film “Tarrafal.” [Feature stars Claire Denis regular Isaach de Bankolé as a “comatose” Cape Verdean returning home; a 2007 travelogue on Costa’s return to Cape Verde—to look at an island political prison.]
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But wait, there’s more. The whole new calendar, which starts with tomorrow’s Colossal Youth screening, is, to put it mildly, fucking awesome.

• The Magnificent Orson Welles offers all the big hits and even some rarer titles, like the way cool Chimes at Midnight (Sunday, March 30, 2008, 2pm), which I'm dying to see on a big screen. Also: Cuyler tells me he's never seen Citizen Kane so I think we'll definitely give him a lesson in awesome on Friday, March 7, 2008, at 7pm (if we don't wind up going out on the town). Easier to make will be the next day's Magnificent Ambersons screening at 5pm.
  


• There's also a screening of Bunuel's Los Olvidados on Friday, March 7th, after Kane. But it's repeated the following Wednesday so we'll see how that plays out.
  


• The Clash of '68 is highlighted by Gillo Pontecorvo's Queimada!, starring Marlon Brando, and Peter Watkin's La Commune (Paris, 1871), which is another all-day affair, but the thing that really catches my eye is another three-hour film: Chris Marker's A Grin Without A Cat (Wednesday, April 2, 2008, 7pm), which sounds too hard to summarize all pithy here so follow the link. [Will run in conjunction with Protest in Paris: Photographs by Serge Hambourg in the BAM galleries.]
  


• The last thing I want to mention is the PFA's involvement in this year's San Francisco Asian American Film Festival. Specifically, two Edward Yang films will be shown: 1986's The Terrorizer (Friday, March 14, 2008), which I have yet to see, but will soon, and his final, lovely, probably-perfect Yi Yi (Thursday, March 20, 2008). I'm starting to really mourn the loss of this cine-giant. I'll have more to say on him soon thanks to a generous gift from one Zach Campbell.
  

There's yet more in store that I have not drawn attention to but I have to go get on with my day and cook up some breakfast. For all the movie-going (and book-reading and thesis-writing) I've got in store, there's a whole lot of basketball to play, and dance parties to throw, and libations to imbibe, and meals to digest and life to live out of doors, in the light as much as in the dark. I hope I can do it all and come out smiling. Life shouldn't be a chore, it should be a delight -- it should be light! -- a walk in the park or a jump into a pool -- a lot of activity. Let's go.

Back to school 20:08 screenshot for the day.

From the 20:08 minute:second mark in Edward Yang's last film, the probably-perfect Yi Yi. Really would like to see some more of his films. Berkeley has a VHS copy of That Day, on the Beach. Guess I'll have to cross my fingers for that Cinematheque retrospective to travel West so I can see A Brighter Summer Day. My classes begin at 9:30 AM. Better get to bed. --RWK