Alain à la recherche #7: SHORTS

by Ryland Walker Knight

—The halls have eyes
[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.]

Though I arrived halfway into Le chant de styrène, it still tickled me into the goofiest posture possible all teeth, every limb under another, as if pushing into the chair hard enough would help release the giddy brio building up in my bones. Put otherwise, Queneau's puns (oh to be actually fluent!) and Alain's balletic geometry pretzel'd me up into a great mood. Then Toute la mémoire du monde grumbled onscreen out of focus and an odd English voice started escorting me around the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, trying its damnedest to not "do a Borges," to just present a topographical index, we can suppose. However, Alain's image-making inflects this portrait—everything's a tracking shot—with both pride and unnerved anxiety, a weird fear of the calculation of this repository. Each structure our Alain encounters seems to strike him as a possible tomb, and every system a trap, however useful it may be, for any system can ossify. Next: Guernica's a dirge. Solemn though fiery and sometimes mannered, its idea of barbarism will be further fleshed with "real" documentary work in the opening salvo (anti-salve) of Hiroshima, mon amour (still some of the hardest images for me to watch; the sexy sand-shower just prior must play a role, of course, in that reaction). Then the treasure of the night, the very rare (and neglected) Statues Also Die, whose title sounds so much more elegant in French, Les statues meurent aussi, with that "aussi" dangling, like a tsk. Talk about angry: as Rosenbaum already lined out, the final reel of this bad boy is one of the most direct anti-imperialist/anti-racist screeds in cinema—and in 1953! It's a text by Chris Marker, which is another level of cool (and smarts), which is another reason to root with it, which is (of course) really easy. It's also a fine object lesson outside of the polemic, though the political is unavoidable (I must remind myself), as we see just how loaded every thing is in these so-called aboriginal cultures; how histories are most often mythologies; how tradition cannot be ignored; how, ultimately, revolution is a dream and hardly a reality; that is, how little we fight these worlds we're locked into every day. Another way at this idea is right up front in Night and Fog: that, yes, weeds grow but scars and train tracks remain reminders, and nothing's been razed. I quickly realized I was too tired to let that movie work me over (as it always does), and I tipped out in the dark to a misty rain outside.

The hand that we have been dealt.

by Ryland Walker Knight

After some hummus and half a cucumber sliced, but before any beer, I found my way on the eve of another move (via twitter, of course) to a thread on The Auteurs about a topic I'm particularly, well, obsessed with—in fact, that I have been obsessed with for some time: cinema's shift to digital. So I gave it some more words, jotted rather quickly, which I quote below. It should be noted that this is not so much a full argument as a volley, an invitation to more, as ever.

For this record, while I'm here, as if it needed repeating on this interweb: I find INLAND EMPIRE to be truly beautiful. I love the smear. Likewise, Mann knows what's up. The paradoxical mechanics of aperture and shutter speeds makes Mann's argument that much more interesting, too, since a lot of what seems to have motivated his shift is his interest in the speed (and the ramping up of the speed) of story and of action to the point where it gets hardly representational. I think this impatience operates differently in Soderbergh, though both men are interested in working and how one works and how much one works. It's never a question of why one works. One simply works. That is, if they do not work, then they die. What's cool about Mann is how much he's after a vividness of the world over against the remove of Soderbergh; both are fascinating, but the world Mann makes is the world I want to live in; or, at least, the world I want to see every day. Then again, one might say that those are the same (though different, of course).

I'm sure my friend Danny would love it if you kept the conversation to the thread you can find by clicking those words above, but I would love it even more if you continued a conversation with me here! Expect more Michael Mann stuff soon, when that new movie opens.

I feel compelled to say that this conversation, by necessity, ignores both the broader history of digital trends in cinema and the particular efforts of some genius frogs who have been playing with grain and mauling light like this for some time: Godard and, more importantly, Chris Marker. (To say nothing of Costa and Jia and their projects.) But I don't have time for that right now. Now is the time to hunt for that beer, to fly off a little ways into a brighter dumber haze.