BANG BANG: Akiva Gottlieb

[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.]

by Akiva Gottlieb

The movie I most wanted to evangelize for all year—at least before Margaret started kicking down doors—was usually synopsized in embarrassing fashion. Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, in prose courtesy of IMDb: “A sixty-something woman, faced with the discovery of a heinous family crime and in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, finds strength and purpose when she enrolls in a poetry class.” Yes, every word of this heartwarming short story is technically accurate, but the implied causality is almost willfully misleading. In actuality, her discovery of the heinous crime is sublimated, her awareness of her Alzheimer’s is either denied or forgotten, and if she finds strength and purpose when enrolling in a poetry class, it’s not the result of anything she learns there.

The perverse irony of this unpredictable, quietly devastating film is Lee’s framing of his protagonist’s terminal illness as less of an impediment than an enabler—it causes her to forget, but just as crucially gives her license to walk away from trauma. Poetry’s most resonant mysteries pivot upon the impossibility of knowing the difference between a selective memory and a faulty one.

Lee’s film is an object lesson in everyday escapism, and if he never indicts the movies as our favorite emotional management tool, he probably expects we’d repress that knowledge anyway. Poetry draws a precise visual map of those other places we hide from what we don’t want to know—behind locked doors, under the covers, in the shower, in a karaoke bar, in a poem—and the negotiations we’re willing to make with ourselves and others to keep an ugly truth from coming to light. This is not a chronicle of disease and triumph, or finding one’s voice, but a testimonial to compartments and evasions. Poetry’s poetry lessons allegorize the process of emotional disengagement as a method of scaling back, limiting one’s scope, concentrating. To repress one memory might just be way of focusing more intensely on another. A debilitating illness is a tragedy, but Poetry discovers a state of grace—or at least a deferral of inevitabilities—in being lost for words.


________________________________

Akiva Gottlieb writes about film for The Nation, but does not write poetry. He lives in Michigan.

We cover ourselves, our cities

by Ryland Walker Knight

I.



Ready for distribution


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Eight pages


III.






IV.


See the site, too/again, of course

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A conjunction of quotations #11

— edited by Ryland Walker Knight

1.
Taking joy in living is a woman’s best cosmetic.
— Rosalind Russell

2.
I don't want to be a silly temptress. I cannot see any sense in getting dressed up and doing nothing but tempting men in pictures.
— Greta Garbo

3.
Elegance has therefore disappeared as the TV spectator's eye expected something else from tennis. The diabolical Connors and the amazing MacEnroe became loved for their bad manners, because these manners were more interesting than the starchy class of the last stylists (from Clerc to Gomez). All this, a very human phenomenon by the way, deepened the scenography of tennis with a new dimension: that of the close up after the rally, of the disarticulated replay, of the stroboscopic ordinariness of the slow motion, of the microphone at court level. The number of events per second inflated with all the affects, tics, drives and silent rages that a body is capable of.
— Serge Daney

4.
Far from the trite expression it usually is, “I don’t know what to say” actually seemed to be an honest and surprisingly accurate description of the problem. When women who have abortions are more closeted than gay people and the absence of abortion leaves a gaping hole in most T.V. and movie narratives, it’s no wonder even solidly pro-choice people are left floundering for a way to talk about it—free of euphemisms—as a real and unique experience instead of a flattened and shameful cliché.
— Maya Dusenbery

5.
Once something must have happened here,
before you were always quoting yourself to sleep,
needing to remember. Gunpowder
boomed in the birch forests,
redcoats flashed like flowers.
The city was narcotic with gold,
derricks stiffened beside wounded ships.
Women wept for the diving bells of dead.
Flames rose along the river, longing—

All that is green must turn to red.
Listen: the dynamite cracks
in the concrete forest.
That echo is the sound of borrowed grace. Believe it,
ask memory to be your burning stake.
— Meghan O'Rourke

6.
When I work together with actors and we try to create brash, obnoxious, strange, brutal, larger characters, it seems to me that the key is not that they are better or bigger than us. What I can see in Jean Renoir’s movies and some of that in François Truffaut and perhaps in a lot of French films which would be French at the end, is the fact that I don’t wake up as a human being and I’m not sure that I am one. Being human I have to work to look like a human being. You know, I have to pretend that I am this or that, even with political issues et cetera. In Renoir’s La regle du jeu (1939) I have to play the part that I’m rich or poor or a worker or angry or a woman, I have to play these feelings. In Renoir they don’t believe in nature, there is only culture. And the thing which is so human is that they are trying to look like a proper human being, a being they dream to be. I try to catch that in a character, this effort of showing off.
— Arnaud Desplechin

7.
A writer must preserve a balance between sensitivity and vitality. Highbrow writers are sensitive but not vital. Commercial writers are vital but not sensitive. Trying to keep this balance is always hard. It is the whole job of living.
— Gertrude Stein

8.
People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.
— Bertolt Brecht

9.
Originally, there were many varieties of birds on earth. Some have become extinct: the great hawk, the passenger pigeon and the famous dodo bird have all disappeared. —Actually, they didn't exactly disappear. They were simply killed off. But of course [he shrugs] this is nature's way. Man merely hurries the process along whenever he can be of help.
— Alfred Hitchcock

10.
Yes, it is obvious that people now—they trust in the economy. Well, maybe after this week a little less, but still I don’t think it will change much. Economy is presented as some kind of “revealed truth,” it is just like religion for me. There is no logic to what happens in the economy, and still you have politicians, people keep telling you “this is good for the economy, this is how it should be done” because “that’s how the economy works” and so on and so forth, as if it were some kind of truth. And people just swallow it. It’s this kind of logic that there is something bigger than us that is “the economy” that creates a world that is going in a direction no one has any control on, because the economy is some kind of living organism that is taking over people’s lives or the values that are at work within the world where we live our adult lives. What I’m trying to say, or what Frédéric thinks {laughs}, and it’s not very optimistic, is that he reminds that economy is not fact, it is ideology. And as much as you have to respect facts, you are allowed to discuss ideologies; you should be allowed to have your say, because ultimately whatever truth you stand for is as good as whatever truth economy stands for. Ultimately we should be conscious that theoretically we have some space to decide what we want and what we don’t want, we should not be intimidated by economy.
— Olivier Assayas

11.
She broke down and let me in
Made me see where I've been

Been down one time
Been down two times
Never going back again

You don't know what it means to win
Come down and see me again

Been down one time
Been down two times
Never going back again
— Fleetwood Mac

12.
Having a home, husband, and child ought to be enough for any woman’s life. I mean, that’s what we are meant for, isn’t it? But still I think every day [without my work] is a lost day. As if only half of me is alive. The other half is pressed down in a bag and suffocated.
— Ingrid Bergman

13.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
— Oscar Wilde

14.
On verra. On verra si je le fais à la fin.*
— Gabriel Deshayes

15.
Let's go get lost among the ether seekers squinting in despair as people from the 18th century hang brightly in the air dissecting bits of cloud (they're only waiting for a cue from Newton to begin their vague descent). If you could take the square root of this mass that we inhabit you would find a fully fledged motet caught in the shadow of the memories the centrifuge once ravaged as though honoring the dead with a chilled and useless flourish. "It waxeth wet," she says, concealing Vesta's fires in the folds of her new love (she has a passion for Racine). But Crazy Jane just shrugs and love begins to melt away. "Divide the air from air. Divide the castles from the clouds. Divide the light from light, but if you dare sequester my inertia in your tragedy I'll clasp the weary hand of god and let him drag me in a straight line to the back of your cathedral where pentangles are smashed to fit inside the roving spheres the invalids ingest on their way back from the sea." Despite their prayers, it wouldn't part. But if you listened very closely, you could hear the feeble march revive inside their chests. They had wanted to see flames but they could only see a single molecule, a bit deranged and accidentally inspiring the smell of violets from the surrounding air. And still they lurched and dragged their rickety old model up the mountain where they leapt off into the huge distance waving feathers pulled from caps that had dropped below the treeline. Another great wave shook the night, moving flagrantly through nothing, dulling bullets in their flight.
— Elizabeth Marie Young

* = We'll see. We'll see if I make it to the end.

&Review no.3, Ghosts: Plumule

by Ryland Walker Knight

—courtesy the one and only Matthew Flanagan
The third issue of &Review is live online and on its way out into the world as a free newsprint publication. As with No.2, I have another poem in this issue (or an excerpt of a poem). All I'd like to say, here, is that it's better than the other one, though it's got similar tropes and preoccupations that should be transparent to anybody I know and anybody who knows me. Though, I don't know, maybe some people who don't know me will know something about me. (The word "meme" is funny, right?) In any case, it's a little stanza and its title is a word I happened to learn by accident but now adore. From wikitionary:

1. (botany) The first bud, or gemmule, of a young plant; the bud, or growing point, of the embryo, above the cotyledons.
2. (zoology) A down feather.
3. (zoology) The aftershaft of a feather.
4. (zoology) One of the featherlike scales of certain male butterflies.

Quite a beautiful, multivalent idea to live up to! But if I don't do it justice in this sample perhaps I will elsewhere. Failing that, you can revert to the alternate title "I never meant to make a fist." Also, of course, there's a whole boatload of other words and images, some by some other friends of mine, that Mia and Rachel have curated into a typically handsome package. You can download a pdf of the print version by clicking here or you can peruse the online edition by clicking here. You will also be able to find it in a few spots around Portland, and I imagine New York, and maybe even San Francisco with the right push. You can find out specifics here.

SATURDAY UPDATE: It came to my attention last night, while working on a crossword at the bar with this joker, that this issue's publication has hit a stall. Mia informs me there was an editing gaffe that necessitates some more work. As I learn more, I'll say more. But, hey, you can still look at the pdf and the images assembled.

&Review no.2, Islands: "Winter is over if you want it"*

by Ryland Walker Knight

Mia Nolting is both my Close Personal Friend and—bias aside, promise—a talented artist. Her artwork has been featured in a number of make'm-proud outlets (including The New York Times Magazine) and she illustrated the young adult novel, Hold Still, written by her friend Nina LaCour. Mia's newest endeavor, among a perpetuity of creative output, is a print-and-online publication called &Review, which Mia started with her friend Rachel Pedderson, which just published its second issue, in which you can find a poem I wrote. I actually didn't write it to fit the theme of the issue, Islands, but I can see how it works in there. (What's funny, though, is how I've already rewritten the poem from the form in which it was published**. Not drastically, mind, but the third stanza's maybe denser now and not as jumpy; this offers a problem of the rhythm getting jammed but I trust the edit enough to say, here, that if you want to see it, drop me a line. Maybe I'll plop it in the comments below.) And, as befits anything bearing Mia's name, the design of the always-free better-than-a-zine is beautiful—and I'm pleased to see my poem next to an image of water, the image below. You can see the print version of Issue 2 in the pdf M+R have made available here (right click to download). Or, if you live in Portland, you will be able to grab a copy for your own two hands and two eyes this week (find out where here). We hope you do. There's other good stuff in there besides my start-n-stop efforts. If anything, make sure to look at the images Mia and Rachel curated on the site, which anybody in any city can see, which, just for you, I'll link to again right here.

* an alternate title for the poem (published as "No Answers") that attempts a more positive angle on the image of hurt I tried to get across in those lines.

** cf., the alternate title

SFIFF53 #1: Waiting for the lights

by Ryland Walker Knight

Next week, as I'm sure you know by now, the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival commences. There will be a big Opening Night at the Castro, where Jean-Pierre Jeunet's latest, Micmacs, will play and probably delight a lot of the audience. It's fine, it's cute, it's what you expect from the guy behind Amélie: it's absurdly "sweet" despite its revenge hijinks. Even I walked out of it smiling, surprised at least in part by its delicious final shot, which felt like the most natural thing in the picture, a literal bit of animation that signals exactly what this director should be doing: making real cartoons, not just a bunch of goofy faces. But, hey, the grey hairs will love it. You know the type, the kind who think "French cinema" is a genre.

In any case, there's a slew of other French flicks on hand (as soon as the next day, even) at the festival this year to prove that, as one of the three great national cinemas, those frogs contain multitudes, too. And, of course, the two films I'm most excited to see on a big screen—on film!—are French: Jacques Rivette's 36 vues du Pic St. Loup (or Around a Small Mountain), which is sublime and deft and smart, and Alain Resnais' Wild Grass, which I've been waiting to see, despite certain avenues open to me, since Danny wrote that bit of rapture from Cannes last year. Since SFIFF is basically the end of the line in terms of festival tours, many words have already been spilt on this pair, but I'm going to go for it all over again, so keep an eye out for that. Then there's other Frenchies to watch out for, including: a new Claire Denis (always anticipated over here) starring Huppert, some young lady's movie about some dad, that rescue job about a failed swan song, a Bruno Dumont, a Eugene Green (he counts, right?), a Sylvie Testud, a Gainsbourg biopic. Yet, stamp be damned, there's other countries making movies to attend. It's an international festival after all.

Mexico's Alamar is quite nice, and quiet, and a real pleasure. It's about three generations fishing together, primarily, and I don't want to say much more about it other than you'll get a better familial vibe in this one than Micmacs, but that's not saying much either. And the picture that Roger Ebert's highlighting at his event, Julia, takes place in part in Mexico, despite starring that British wonder woman, Tilda Swinton, as an American. There's borderlines of all kinds in that film, which I love, and am tempted to see again on film instead of on Netflix Watch Instantly. More exciting, though, is the screening of I Am Love, which boasts one of the best trailers I've seen in recent years, which I've watched approximately fifteen times. If you haven't watched it (if I haven't forced it on you yet), I'm embedding it below.

[You can also watch it in even higher quality over here.]
I love this thing for a few reasons. First of all, I love Tilda Swinton. Next, I like a lot of the images, with all those colors and all those hesitations, but I also like the words chosen to let through, like "fabbrica" and that little speech Waris Ahluwalia gives to close the spot. The close, too—and the clothes—that rush of multiple zooms—is a thrill—and scored so well, as is the whole spot. I also like stories about temptation, and lust's complication of love, as much as I love stories simply about love. And a Vertigo shout out? Sure hope the movie lives up to my anticipation. To say the least.

Moving along, but sticking with the editing theme, the one Live & Onstage event that really has me excited is the Walter Murch "State of Cinema" afternoon. Murch is a smart man and I've never seen him talk, though I hear he's been talking around the Bay a lot of late, so I may stop by that to hear what this once-pioneer sees in a "prehistory" of cinema of his own design/imagination. Maybe he'll have some things to say about the current festival, too, and where he sees good form. Hell, maybe he's seen the Rivette and he can say something about what it's like to whittle things. Which is what I'm going to do to this preview post right now.

The point is the festival is practically upon me and us and it should be fun, full of great films I'm happy to finally see after skimming so many articles and closely reading a few others. If anything, it'll be worth it for those New Wavers and their wacky attacks on what's cinema. Is is all a show? Does it need an audience? Is it the neon haze from the marquee carried inside and glossed onto the screen? Is it clownish? Is it creepy? Can I see it all?

—Hang time
Last year, my pal Mark Haslam was still living and teaching in California and he covered SFIFF52. You can click here to read what he wrote. This year, now that I'm back home after a wild ride around the country in 2009, I'm happy to have my credentials and my sanity (or some) and enough free time (or some) to follow suit. Like Mark, I'll use a catalog-count as I write my way through the festival. Unlike Mark, though, you might see some of my coverage at places other than VINYL IS HEAVY; that is, in addition to the words I write here; but more on that later. If you see some goof who looks like this walking around the festival, don't hesitate to say, "Hi," and compare notes over some coffee.

Masks keep shrinking.

by Ryland Walker Knight

I got some advice from my friend Justin: he said, in much more elaborate terms, to go ahead and join twitter. He made such a good (persistent) argument that I followed suit. You can "follow" me, if you like, by clicking right here. I'm wary as all get out, of course, but branding is what it is: a tool. Just like this "Something like a CV" post I threw up semi-covertly. Oh, and, I'm still waiting for my page to look like I want it to look. So, you know, be patient with me. Jacque and his mask will soon enough be something of a patron mascot. Finally, I've added the widget over on the sidebar for those skeptical, smart few who just don't want to play this new 2.0 game. [fN!]

Saturday School: The Class Structure, or, Procedures of Breaking Down.

by Mark Haslam

It's strange—yet strangely on—to call Laurence Cantet's Entre les murs (The Class) a procedural. Strange mostly because it envisions teaching as improvisation, as precisely those moments when structure and procudure break down. Here, at communication's end, communication can (it hopes) begin.
...
We enter the class through its teacher, François Marin (played by François Bégaudeau, who lived and wrote the book on which the film is based). The camera follows him into the school, maneuvering the halls, picking up movement as profs set up their classrooms: one body bumps into another, darts through a doorway; a table is hoisted up and out of a room. It's exciting, excited, and anticipatory. Of course, much of this has to do with the fact that the kids've yet to arrive.

With the ringing of the first bell, movement/expectation shifts—to the students, yes, but, more importantly (and we can also say, as a result)—to language. The film is constructed around language and its potential to be played. So it's only fitting that the class we attend is a French class. Here, as in our English classes in America, kids are tought to deal with 'proper' language 'properly'. This, as an initial situation, results in tension—a tension immanent to power structures, where the idea of there being a way comes up against multiple, other ways. In The Class, in any class, really, the struggle which emerges from this tension is linguistic. (When Cantet, in an interview with Phillipe Mangeot, refers to a particular “scene where [François] answers that the difference between written and spoken language is a question of intuition,” we should perhaps hear the final word also as institution.) When M. Marin first introduces himself to the class, for example, the students instantly set to punning off of his name, beginning the language game that propells the film.

The teacher, however, plays the game with a disadvantage. He's isolated: spatially, for one—which allows, here, an occassional note to be passed, there, a stifled snicker, whisper, etc.—and second, bound by institution, socially—the constant evolution of language results in “lacunae,” as Bégaudeau calls them, ever opening between student and teacher. Yet François does not take the institution's approach to the emergence of these lacunae. He neither quells nor ignores them as threats to system, but recognizes, pursues, and actively engages their emergence.

Teaching is a navigation of the lacunae and the two bordering spaces. The pursuit of gaps in light of system's failure.
...
A scene's inception: a lesson plan, a question.

Follow the gazes: they cross, but don't ever really meet; they branch (but from where?). There's something chaotic about their pattern, as lines in a Bunimovich Stadium. “[A] school is sometimes very chaotic,” Cantet notes, “useless to cover its face, there are moments of discouragement but also moments of grace, immense happiness. And from this great chaos, a lot of intelligence can be born.” Existing between the walls, a bounce and redirection occurs over and again. The lesson plan proposes a direction. Its desire is to impart direction itself. Each gaze, in turn, proposes its own direction, or rather, holds the potential for a shift. With a question, the potential is realized; chaos emerges in/as language.

Cantet's process mirrors these gazes: “...what we planned to do would require three cameras: a first, always on the teacher; a second, on the student at the center of the scene, and a third prepared for digressions....”

Each camera, which together compose The Camera, entail both a structure and its unraveling. One eye trained on matters at hand; the other, rolling and wandering as if of glass. Entre les murs builds itself out of its own disregard. Through these cameras, seeing becomes a component of chaos, but also forms chaos into a pattern. When François pursues the students tangents and diversions, it's to make them no longer tangents and diversions. It's to make chaos the thing. He acknowledges a certain flow and flux within (the, this, any) class: the moments before the Big Bang, approaching phase transition, before a something emerged. The scenes that result from transitions aren't a part of any narrative, rather they're (linguistic) events. Parts composing a whole—individual acts of creation and resistance. Random, no doubt—like the appearance of language itself from sound and tone. But taken together they form, even in breaking from system, their own structure. The structure of a game, but nobody wins out. Nobody can, but nobody needs to.
...
So, yeah, structure must be set aside. Teaching must fail in order to continue. Okay. But Entre les murs isn't Dead Poets Society. Nor is it Half Nelson or Finding Forester or whatever. It doesn't want anything to do with life lessons and breaking from tradition and inspiring those poor, underpriveledged kids. Every moment of success is followed by a moment of failure: As soon as the class's official troublemaker, Souleyman, displays a moment of brilliance, or at least a moment of hope...a different incident leads to expulsion proceedings. Teaching's limits frame each image—are, in fact, often conflated with its successes. The film doesn't demystify the profession; it just approaches it without illusions. It documents, in other words. Here, finally, we see it as a procedural. A real desire to show everything about teaching emerges at the center. And though words like “real” or “accurate” may cause some cheeks to blush, I want to use them.

But, then, the reality of a school is performance. To be a teacher, to be a student (in middle-school, no less, where masks are the most colorful and the most varied) is to act. So, really, it's not hard to believe that the teachers and students in the film aren't actors, but are teachers and students—mostly because, well, they're so believable. Improvisation is what their stations already require of them. The film's desire to document, to unfold procedures, reveals this theater. School, sure, but more: “a sounding board, a microcosm of the world...”
...
The film ends with images of the empty classroom. Sounds from outside, where life continues to an impossible order, sift through the windows. Desks remain, but disarrayed—remnants of chaos in pieces of institution. And the cameras which documented the students? The year's procedures and performances having ended, they're just rolling. Or are they waiting? Is this perhaps not a winding down, but a gearing up again? The shouts and screams coming in from beyond are language before language, and so the potential remains between the walls—a space neither in nor out, but within the gaps that emerge between here and there, where chaos, which is seeing, becomes the lesson.

This is where learning happens.

[The Class opened at The Smith Rafael yesterday after limited runs in New York and Los Angeles. Sony plans to roll out the film further as it has been nominated for Best Foreign Film in this year's Oscars. Check your local listings. Learn something.]

VINYL IS PODCAST #6: A waltz is a fault; like, falling.

by Ryland Walker Knight and Mark Haslam and Jennifer Stewart

[Podomatic stream]
[Direct audio download]
[iTunes subscription available]
[Simple syndication subscription]
Today we saw Waltz With Bashir at the Landmark Embarcadero as the final film in the 3rd Annual SF International Animation Festival. It took us even longer to get home this time but, after some food, we talked on digital tape again. Last week's podcast saw us working through a very common reaction to Kaufman's film. This week we were more hesitant and disparate, largely because of Waltz With Bashir's traumatic ending. Juxtaposed with stunning animation, we struggled to account for the shock of its ultimate loss. Or at least, some of us did.... Ry's earlier thoughts can be read by clicking here, and we would also recommend the ever-astute Michael Koresky as well. Thanks for listening! Here's some songs; go buy them, too.

The Books - There Is No There (zshare)
Squarepusher - Massif (Stay Strong) (zshare)

Dump like no other.

by Ryland Walker Knight

The last bit of fiction I wrote, from March 2006, can be found over at blogging buddy Jürgen Fauth's new website, Fictionaut. My "Author's Note" reads: "I wrote this during my first whirl through a year in New York. Evidently I felt crowded by trash." Click here to read the story.* Unlike the novel that inspired the name of this blog, this story is not really "about" me, which, I think, makes this little thing a whole helluva lot better, if equally a reminder of how much I feel I've grown as a writer-thinker-person. Jürgen invited me to join the site a couple months ago but I hadn't really played with it until today. I updated the profile with some words you might want to read (as well); and, to save you the trouble of clicking this link, I'll go ahead and post them here, too.

My name denies ethnicity at every six-letter stop but I still feel my white skin a needless arbiter, a lie and a limit. I like words, liquids and films -- not necessarily in that reverse-alphabetical order. Rivers are a favorite space, even a lifestyle, as much as a favorite metaphor; and I wish I was in them more and more. For so long I wanted to sing of myself, and I still do, but, as I am plagued by respect for the smartees who came before, I find myself sitting in front of blank pages far too often, dreaming of ways to excise elements of me from my words. Still, I persist. It just takes me a while, a little while longer. The process is the adventure, too. The toughness is to keep words from dying, inert, black on white and staid. The goal is to keep the picture alive and dancing. Thus, a certain navigation of abnegation and disclosure is necessary; this movement between avoidance and acknowledgment. I am more you here than me where I am but untethered letters. Especially in a flux like the internet, this Spinozian series of tubes linking disparate zones and voices and images and hearts and fingers and eyes and organs. My job, such as it is (or may be), is to fold all this into some kind of sense, a meaning made through concretion and flight, through attention, through realization of difference and separation and multitudes bursting past the banister (or, simply, the keyboard). Also, I like to laugh.

* Jürgen reminds me: "Fictionaut isn't public yet, so unless your readers have invites, they won't be able to click through... We're gearing up to change that soon." We look forward to it. If any of you silent readers out there are dying to read these hidden words, let me know: an arrangement can be agreed upon while we wait for the beta phase to end.

Brief and Preliminary Thoughts on Complications in Synecdoche, New York (and Myself?)

by Mark Haslam

[Note: I guess we were wrong on our podcast: Synecdoche, New York opens in limited release in NY/LA October 24th, with a roll out schedule to follow, thanks to Sony Picture Classics. Still, Mark has successfully avoided spoilers.]

Synecdoche, New York had always seemed to me a great title. Not because of the claims it may make about film or image as inherently synecdochic or metonymic, which does seem just a bit easy, if not facile; rather, I liked it because of the simple play it makes on Schenectady, one that had never occurred to me. (Not like I sit around thinking up every pun possible, but while I'm at it, here's one I kinda dig on: 'fiancee' and 'faience'.) In light of the title, we have to think, in part, of place as a part of its inhabitant, as a part of a person's whole. Here, a place is not made up of humans, or not just, but a human is made up of, among other things, place. The film solidifies this in its presentation of the title, which appears subtilely at the bottom of the screen, as though a mere identification of setting. So 'Synecdoche' is not just a joke about 'Schenectady': synecdoche is the location: the location is representation. It makes sense, then, that Caden Cotard (Phillip Semore Hoffman), the film's protagonist, would spend a majority of his time in (re)building his surroundings as a means of creating something “personal,” a massive self-portrait. The act itself—of building and constructing; of acting in the first place, of performing—is fundamental to the creation of self. However it's also alienating and exclusionary: all relations that aren't Myself and My City are diverted away ('fiancee'/'faience'?). Caden can't commit and can't keep his women from slipping away, obscuring, then dying.

One of the more interesting or, and I hesitate to use this word but here goes, risky elements of Synecdoche is a burning house that nobody seems to recognize as having anything particularly wrong with it. In fact, it's inhabited by Caden's secretary and on-again/off-again lover, Hazel (Samantha Morton). It's the sort of thing that's funny-ish in concept, but (here's why I used it) risks becoming nothing more than Signifier. A house on fire, in this case, could only have meaning. But then Kauffman returns to the burning house, pursues it, prolongs our experience of it—it isn't just a gag, it reappears several times, always in a modified context—almost to the extent that whatever meaning we gave it is emptied out, so that what we see is the inhabitation of a Signifier, much like the process enacted by the title.

Yet Kauffman only “almost” does this. I mean, he does it, but it gets obscured by everything else he does. (Which doesn't even raise the question, If he hadn't done it, would it be there anyway simply because of the nature of film?) For as much as the film is about building and/as solipsism, it's about time, which like relationships keep slipping away, and death, whose approach never falters. Both are portrayed in a particularly Kauffmanesque structuration, which can jump decades without a flinch. But where this technique was successful in Eternal Sunshine, it's not so much here, because we rely on overt cues to tell us we've performed this temopal leap—things like, “It's been sixteen years.” The structure itself doesn't really communicate the idea of time, and so we feel lost. And it's not a good kind of lost.

Especially given that structures and their construction are such a major part of the film, it's hard to not see this as at best a missed opportunity, at worst as evidence of Synecdoche's ultimate failure: that it doesn't utilize form. No doubt, it's got some great ideas, ideas about space and time which seem natural to film; but they're not put together in any cohesive way. Things are jumbled, uneven. Leaving the theater, I couldn't escape the thought of what would've been if Kauffman had given things more time, allowed the form to unfold itself, gradually over time, so that we feel time slipping away from us as it slips away from Caden, so that the approach of the film's end really is that gradual approach of Death.

A conjunction of quotations #2

— edited by Ryland Walker Knight

1.
The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film. Godard said, about Bande à parte: 'These are people who are real and it's the world that is a breakaway group. It is the world that is making cinema for itself. It is the world that is out of synch; they are right, they are true, they represent life. They live a simple story; it is the world around them which is living a bad script.' The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith. Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. the cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link. The nature of the cinematographic illusion has often been considered. Restoring our belief in the world -- this is the power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad). Whether we are Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world.
— Gilles Deleuze

2.
You have to be a fake first.
— Jonathan Lethem

3.
All films are about the theatre, there is no other subject.
— Jacques Rivette

4.
Run to the lights of the city.
These moments passing will be there.
Run to the lights of the city.
This dance will last us forever. Forever.
— Cut Copy

5.
Now, too, the rising sun came in at the window, touching the red-edged curtain, and began to bring out circles and lines. Now in the growing light its whiteness settled in the plate; the blade condensed its gleam. Chairs and cupboards loomed behind so that though each was separate they seemed inextricably involved. The looking-glass whitened its pool upon the wall. The real flower on the window-sill was attended by a phantom flower. Yet the phantom was part of the flower, for when a bud broke free the paler flower in the glass opened a bud too.
— Virginia Woolf

6.
The color is yet a variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up form its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attract it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

7.
And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone.
— John Shade

8.
This girl she didn't know where she was goin' or what she was gonna do. She didn't have no money or nothin'. Maybe she'd meet up with a character. I was hoping things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.
— Linda

9.
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly away any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
— Ernest Hemingway

10.
I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me—and I think for all of us—not only our own hope, but America's everlasting, living dream. I think the life which we have fashioned in America, and which has fashioned us—the forms we made, the cells that grew, the honeycomb that was created—was self-destructive in its nature, and must be destroyed. I think these forms are dying, and must die, just as I know that America and the people in it are deathless, undiscovered, and immortal, and must live.

I think the true discovery of America is before us. I think the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land, is yet to come. I think the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us. And I think that all these things are certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon. I think I speak for most men living when I say that our America is Here, is Now, and beckons on before us, and that this glorious assurance is not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished.

I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think the enemy was born yesterday, or that he grew to manhood forty years ago, or that he suffered sickness and collapse in 1929, or that we began without the enemy, and that our vision faltered, that we lost the way, and suddenly were in his camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and evil as Hell, and that he has been here with us from the beginning. I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest treasures of our own possession, took our bread and left us with a crust, and, not content, for the nature of the enemy is insatiate—tried finally to take from us the crust.
— Thomas Wolfe

11.
By a paradox that is only apparent, the discourse that makes people believe is the one that takes away what it urges them to believe in, or never delivers what it promises. Far from expressing a void or describing a lack, it creates such. It makes room for a void. It that way, it opens up clearings; it "allows" a certain play within a system of defined places. It "authorizes" the production of an area of free play (Spielraum) on a checkerboard that analyzes and classifies identities. It makes places habitable.
— Michel de Certeau

12.
After all, one can only say something if one has learned to talk. Therefore in order to want to say something one must also have mastered a language; and yet it is clear that one can want to speak without speaking. Just as one can want to dance without dancing.
And when we think about this, we grasp at the image of dancing, speaking, etc.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

13.
Taking seriously.— In the great majority, the intellect is a clumsy, gloomy, creaking machine that is difficult to start. They call it "taking the matter seriously" when they want to work with this machine and think well. How burdensome they must find good thinking! The lovely human beast always seems to lose its good spirits when it thinks well; it becomes "serious." And "where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking does not amount to anything": that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all "gay science." —Well then, let us prove that this idea is a prejudice.
— Nietzsche

14.
This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of man. Here are the materials strewn along the ground.
— Emerson

15.
Wait!
All-right.
Give me every little thing.
And don't stop.
— The Juan Maclean

[Leading image: "What will be play now?"]

Poem for the month. "eddy" [+ some gulls and ghosts]

[Click to enlarge. Text retyped as approximate as possible.]

___ ___ ___

eddy- over a pivot, tumble: "ed´ë" n., v.
[alteration of Middle English ydy, from Old English
ed, turning + ea, water, or Old English ed, again,
Greek eti, yet, still, Sanskrit ati, beyond, very]
1. A. when from force coursing through volumes flumes
a counter; countering shove, the rent heavy in tumult and
tethering the broad curving flow so sweeps
back its outer edge drawn in while the inner
slips into a concave depth bending
around itself and down
a twisting axis
to a point
searching expense
in sway; or,
B. when from force coursing through volumes
flumes a counter; a countering shove,
the rent heavy in tumult, tethers
across the seam and drawing counter,
a chopping across, against its own tumble
plunging shallowly down and
backing out into a hung up,
softly lapping slack.
2. a cultural countering press
or static slack.

___ ___ ___

Daniel assigns his friend Lohren Green's book, Poetical Dictionary (click to buy off amazon), in his Rhetoric 10 class; that's where I read it. It's damned smart, especially the stuff around the entries. From the introduction: "A gesture, an envoy, a conceptual avatar; the law, an electron, votive incense, a dart; a glassy bubble or a star--these are only a few of the possibilities for what a word can be. Rather than strip words of their variety, this Poetical Dictionary flexibly structures their heterogeneity. Like a coral reef, it gives the living standard for a system of multifarious life, with individuals that wheel and flash before its calcified lattices, with currents tangling in spiky bulwarks, with mimicry, poaching, and smelt, with dark shelter for soft bodies that show only an unblinking ogle of an eye. Here words are not so much defined as they are depicted in a kind of informed portraiture, a conceptual calligraphy, a combination of lexicography and poetry--a lexetry that knows the style of information, the viscosity of concepts, the atmospherics of these sonic cum tropic logics that we call words. (Even the lexicographical purist will have to admit that purple denotes its own style of prose.)" Every move announces itself, comments in every direction. It's poems as spaces. (Duh.) It can get cute, and purple, yes, but its contortions make sense; I wouldn't have any word, any design, any empty page different in any way. Lohren wrote his dissertation on Nietzsche, which fits, since to talk of words is to talk of metaphors is to talk of the poetic ("this Poetical Dictionary").

Also, things keep bubbling up and pushing me. I'm banking on shucking those tethers, though, as the year flies by and I start packing boxes; there's another pool to wade in ahead.

___ ___ ___

Have you noticed how many bloggers have nodded towards Eloge de l'amour recently? There's something in that ether-net. I've kept my Netflix disc at home for over a month. I can't let go. Fitting. Here's some sites similar, but different, from a some thing (that I will mail tomorrow) about gulls and ghosts, presence and absence, making the flight of digital a tangible reality where all kinds of happenings tug and pummel one another, where the concave bends itself across the seam.