CINCO DE VINYL!

In honor of none other than yours truly's birthday on this holiest of holy drunken days here on the Gold Coast, we thought we'd offer a series of essays about Mexican filmmaking. What with the recent aint-it-cute trend to name Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu the Three Amigos, I, along with other colleagues, have thought to ask, what about the rest of the Mexican filmmakers that have made or are making seminal works?

My personal investment centers around a film I saw not too long ago, Battle in Heaven, and its director, Carlos Reygadas, who I'd like to argue trumps all Three Amigos. His cinema owes a lot to his admitted hero (and, yes, mine too), Andrei Tarkovsky as well as the hyper-aestheticized quotidian of Bresson's films: (1) the long take is preferred; (2) time in space is foregrounded, situating the film and the viewer inside the film's world; (3) all the actors are non-actors as to retain a level of realism -- and to deny viewers any pre-conceived notions of the actors, and by consequence, the characters, the film; (4) there's a religious aspect, of course, as the title alludes to; (5) there's a transcendence through both sex and violence, which links Reygadas to another Bresson acolyte, Paul Schrader; (6) sex is something of pageant but never exploitative, it happens as would anything else; (7) things just happen. But there's more of that below. For now, I'd like to cede the space to my fellow writers who will explain a bit of their approach to this project, this day, this neighbor of ours.
[Ryland Walker Knight]

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I cannot claim to be an expert on anything related to Mexican cinema. I know that I have enjoyed everything else Mexican that I've experienced so far, including cuisine, music, and literature. Sure, I've seen some of the more modern, mainstream stuff like Y Tu Mama Tambien and Amores Perros. And I am not ashamed to have liked the hell out of those. So, after hearing such good stuff about Carlos Reygadas from RWK, I knew that the time was right to check out something that kinda flew under the radar screen for most of my fellow countrymen. I chose Reygadas' first feature length, Japón, which was released a few years back in 2002. My mind was blown, in the good way. I'll try to show how, below. Viva La Raza!
[Leile One]

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Our first guest column, by Jennifer Stewart, speaks for itself. Her first paragraph:
I've tried to begin Pan's Labyrinth's apologia where the sting of your charge leaves it: namely, that its gory violence is voyeuristic, useless, and empty. This attack is a complicated one, I think. Without a principled objection to onscreen face pulverizing, then you must say what it is about the aesthetic and stylistic terms P'sL gives itself, such that its onscreen violence can't be justified (whereas it could, perhaps, in another film). Having said that, if you think such onscreen gore is never justified, then that's a moral highground which only ends the discussion. Instead, I assume that if I can provide an account of what the onscreen destruction of the rabbit hunter's face is doing, I'll have at least succeeded in providing what your indictment assumes is its lack of structural and thematic content. [What this kind of reading means for the status of a film being "good" or "bad" is - I find - a paralyzing question, but I'd welcome discussion from you less ataxic film buffs.]

* * *

Luis Buñuel ties with Shohei Imamura as my favorite cinema cynic, so, naturally, he's my favorite Mexican director -- even though he was born, raised and educated in upper class Spain. In Mexico, Buñuel was no mere artistic tourist. Some see his years of making cheap Mexican comedies and melodramas as a colorful detour; for me, El, Susana, Illusion Travels by Streetcar, Nazarin, and Los Olvidados represent the director's greatest, most personal work (the Spanish masterpiece Viridiana notwithstanding). His later European provocations may have shown a little more freakish surrealism (and, of course, a lot more leg) but Mexico is where Buñuel really got his groove on -- and left his heart, I dare say. Let me persuade you with some pix and text.
[Steven Boone]

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Easy access:

• Negotiating Battle in Heaven [Ryland Walker Knight]
• Everything is Everything: Beauty, Ugliness, and Universality in Reygadas' Japón [Leile One]
• Pan's Labyrinth's Apologia [Jennifer Stewart]
• Buñuel's Travelling Illusions [Steven Boone]

CINCO DE VINYL: Pan's Labyrinth's Apologia

[Our first guest column! The ever-erudite Jennifer Stewart instructs us on how to read Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. Ms Stewart is a graduate student in the Rhetoric department at UC Berkeley. Recently, she was plain shocked by my flippant and hate-filled dismissal of the film and offered to write a defense for its virtues. Apparently this is the first written film analysis she has performed but she's a good reader, a good Rhetor, so, naturally, this is an excellent and generous reading. I still retain my stance against the film in spirit but cannot delve into it again without sounding off all ire and limbs flown. SO! If you're curious what the hell a Rhetoric major does, this is it: this is the real deal. Enjoy! (-RWK)]

I've tried to begin Pan's Labyrinth's apologia where the sting of your charge leaves it: namely, that its gory violence is voyeuristic, useless, and empty. This attack is a complicated one, I think. Without a principled objection to onscreen face pulverizing, then you must say what it is about the aesthetic and stylistic terms P'sL gives itself, such that its onscreen violence can't be justified (whereas it could, perhaps, in another film). Having said that, if you think such onscreen gore is never justified, then that's a moral highground which only ends the discussion. Instead, I assume that if I can provide an account of what the onscreen destruction of the rabbit hunter's face is doing, I'll have at least succeeded in providing what your indictment assumes is its lack of structural and thematic content. [What this kind of reading means for the status of a film being "good" or "bad" is - I find - a paralyzing question, but I'd welcome discussion from you less ataxic film buffs.]

What's interesting about this scene of horrific destruction is that although it is explicitly a spectacle (the characters in the scene are watching, too), the camera shows the pulverizing blows rather than reactions from the troops or the son's father (who let us not forget is also forced to see). Everyone is watching, but the camera is not interested in this pathos. The Captain delivers the first blow after the son declares, "If my father says he was hunting rabbits, then he was hunting rabbits." The camera initially shows us the calm, cool face of the Captain as he delivers the first couple blows, then the darkening face of the son as his nose and cheekbones yield to the force of the Captain's blunt will. What provokes the Captain is precisely the son's hubris, not at talking back to him, but at declaring his father's power to nominally shape the world: if he says he's a rabbit hunter, then he's a rabbit hunter. What the Captain won't tolerate is this tautological claim from a competing will. The whole film can be read as showing us character foils operating in a fundamentally mutable world - a world that does bend and yield to a shaping will, and the Captain knows this.

What's perverse is that the Captain is trying to impose the kind of will which hordes that shaping power for itself. When asked by the doctor how he can be sure his bride's unborn child is a son, the Captain replies "don't fuck with me." When his supper guests countenance his "need" to confront what remains of the rebellion, he corrects them by declaring he is there not by need but by choice, since:

The war is over and we won. If we need to kill every one of these vermin to settle it, then we'll kill them all and that's that.

Technical military victory is insufficient to impose a Totalitarian order, so he must eradicate all those who do not act accordingly. The Captain is less a figure standing for the tyranny of uncritical obedience, so much as a figure who recognizes that the world can accommodate multiple interpretive claims, but attempts to collapse this by imposing a Totalitarian order. In other words, he is the figure who says, it doesn't matter what people believe, I will intervene and establish whatever order I want, imposing and sustaining it by sheer repetition: by insisting on rigid obedience to the mundane; a beaurocratized distribution of resources (Franco's daily bread, etc.), a hierarchy of manners (precise dress and punctuality; declaring his wife's caravan 15 minutes late on a multiple hour journey, and so on). Everything about the Captain involves absent repetition of routine (he rises, shaves, and dresses the same way every day, threatens his prisoners with the same speech, tortures them with the same instruments in the same order, etc.).

Yet his mistake is thinking an order can be established and maintained simply by instituted repetition. The problem is that this leaves too much room within those strict rules of daily life for free thought. You can run his household or stand in line for Franco's daily bread without obeying in your thoughts. Indeed, you can be dreaming about being a princess in an underworld. The Captain errs because he doesn't recognize what's undermining about this level of disobedience (he misses why it might matter that Mercedes ostensibly obeys him but is not loyal). It doesn't even matter to him, in the end, that he will die, as long as his son "knows what time his father died" - as long as his totalitarian influence remains as repetition (at the same time of day, etc) continually observed. Like all totalitarians, he errs precisely by not caring what people think, only that they obey.

The film fetishizes resistance to such a Totalitarian will, because revolution is what can be planned all the while looking like you are obeying. Mercedes and Ofelia represent this disobedient will because they share the ability to see and move through the "cracks" such a scopic regime leaves room for. Mercedes keeps the letters of the Revolutionary's correspondence in a hiding place purloined in the outlines of the floor tile, just as Ofelia reveals doorways by drawing their outlines with chalk.

More specifically, Ofelia can see through the outlines of this world, into the world described in her treasured books. Her second scene features the fragmented piece of stone statue she finds on the road and intuitively replaces - an act which in turn summons the flying stick-bug that Ofelia tells Mercedes is "a fairy." Of course later, this creature morphs itself when prompted to do so by Ofelia pointing to a profile in her book and declaring "this is a fairy." Unlike the Captain, Ofelia shapes the world by recognizing its ability to take on other forms. In short, Ofelia is the celebration of vision disobedient to the pretensions of one regime, and Pan (the Faun) is there to test her: although he ostensibly prescribes strict orders, the point is always to solicit a certain disobediance: What Ofelia's prophecy (to restore her spirit to the underworld kingdom) actually requires as its condition of fulfillment is resistance (it's Alice In Wonderland as Sophocles might have penned it). Pan's "Labyrinth" is precisely the bewildering complexity it would be to trying to satisfy conditions of fulfillment purloined in strict orders.

That said, the film de-centers Ofelia's fairytale story, for she and her unborn brother are really the parables of Mercedes and her adult brother leading the guerrilla force hiding in the forest. It is not her brother but Mercedes, after all, that the film positions as the true political revolutionary, since it is thanks to her guise of obedience that a revolution can be strategized and carried out in the first place. Just as Ofelia is comfortable occupying a world where one scopic regime can be penetrated by another (fairies and fawns appear, chalk can draw functioning doors, text appears in blank books), Mercedes is, too: by "finding" doors in the floor and she enables essential communication (not to mention medical supplies and other provisions) thanks to which the revolution continues to be possible. Mercedes is capable of the improvisation which takes place in the cracks and spaces opened up by an imposed rigid order (that of running the Captain's household just so). Ofelia's story is the mythic dramatization of how one learns, when one is gifted with the right visibility, to use those cracks and spaces (now it's Alice in Wonderland as Michel de Certeau might have penned it). Mercedes is the grown counterpart of this disobedient will.

In the end, Ofelia's blood is the triumph of the Captain's own conceit undoing him: he takes his son from her at the center of the Labyrinth, and shoots her in cold blood, right after Pan (once again) tests her ability to know when to disobey: she refuses to let Pan draw her infant brother's blood in the ritual which restores her as princess of the underworld by first sacrificing the blood "of the innocent." Ofelia instinctively refuses ("my brother stays with me"), and in apparently refusing to satisfy the conditions of prophecy, precisely meets them. The world is too mutable to insist on the strict interpretation of her brother's (an infant's) blood, since her innocent blood (thanks to the Captain) will do just fine. Except it is here, of course, that the film fetishizes disobedience, all echoed in the eulogy of Ofelia's mother: don't mistake the divine for its ostensible laws. What matters is the spirit who knows how to improvise an interpretation befitting the spaces and cracks. Precisely through the absence of strict law can innocence - an uncorrupted will - seek to act in a mutable world.

In conclusion, what happens when a corrupted, totalitarian will tries to act in this world? He must collapse it, and what better way to portray this than to show the Captain literally disfiguring a resisting countenance. The face - in some way the very metaphor of mutability - that declares the same power he wants to claim only for himself, is ruthlessly destroyed, and what matters in this scene is precisely to show the horrific violence it is (or so the film wants to say) to collapse mutability itself.

[Illustration by Arthur Rackham, from Wikipedia]

Late Night e-mail/s for the Day: Pan's Labyrinth and the uselessness of empty, cruel violence onscreen.

[This is the Pale Man, he's so stupid he can't fuck you up.]

[It's been said before but goddamn if I can't help but contribute this, however hateful, to the discussion of why Pan's Labyrinth blows. When Travis Mackenzie Hoover called it "thoroughly mediocre" his generosity may have been more on point but I feel like this movie epitomizes what I don't like in movies, along with Sin City. There's no joy and there's no real "honesty" or "truth" illuminated, as people seem to think. So, without any editing, here's my diatribe, followed by a reply from my friend and brilliant colleague, Steve Boone, with his permission. If you think either of us is full of shit, let us know -- but be smart about it and prepared to stake your claim with some sure footing. Rag on me all you want about falling asleep but shit, this movie is not only horrific -- it's bullshit boring and, worst, banal when shooting for profound.]

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From: Ryland Walker Knight
To: more than a few people
Subject: pan's labyrinth

shitty. so much shitty shit -- and pointless gore. a fucking lazy bore to boot. how can a movie with that much 'action' be so stultifying? i fell asleep and woke up at one point and i totally didn't miss a beat. seriously. i'm starting to think violence isn't cool in general -- but especially not like that, when it's all cruelty, kinda like with 'sin city'. the reason the violence works in tarantino movies (and 'death proof' especially) is cuz there's a weight to it and it's motivated by SOMETHING from a brain (well, a lot of things, and the way he makes movies helps load the images a lot).

this movie thinks it's got a brain for profundity when all it's got is an eye for comic book compositions and annoying editing. i get it already. i'd watch 'planet terror' five times before seeing this POS again. all those pretty ladies and the cute little girl (and even sergi lopez) are wasted cuz the movie just doesn't have any kind of wit or gravity. when it's got that voice over saying you learn about life through its cruelties or some bullshit i was way beyond checked out but jesus christ, give me a break. i can learn about life when i'm fucking laughing, too. i wish i'd brought 'life aquatic' with me, or '8 1/2'. maybe i'll go grab 'inside man' or something to make me smile.

gimme 'spirited away' any day. there was another movie i thought of, another alice in wonderland type, that did this whole mess a lot better, but i can't remember right now. whatever.

Grade: D minus

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From: Steven Boone
To: Ryland Walker Knight
Suject: Re: pan's labyrinth

sight unseen, I have to say Amen. I've been formulating my own theories about screen violence, and they run counter to Tarantino's ethic. But I think QT's actual filmmaking runs counter to his theory that gratuitous violence is cinematic. He's the guy that dollied away from the ear-slicing in Reservoir Dogs and made us feel the victim's misery.

Audiences don't know why they love QT either. All my thug homeboys who worshipped Pulp Fiction (and Goodfellas) when I was coming out of film school thought they adored it for the flippant brutality, but it's really beloved for its vitality. In Kill Bill, when Vivica Fox has Uma Thurman in a choke hold in vibrant, hot-lit anamorphic widescreen, its an ecstatically alive moment. They could have been doing anything at that moment-- baking cookies or fucking (even BETTER)-- so long as there's intense motivation, which as you said, is what QT tends to provide in spades.

Meanwhile, you've got elaborately production designed-to-death arthouse "grownup fables" like Pan's Labyrinth that, yep, use grisly imagery to convey some bullshit sense of unblinking "honesty."

Don't get me started. Long and short of it, there are filmmakers and there are image makers. A lot of the eye candy movies in recent years were made by directors who really need to be commercial photographers. Or crime scene photogs.

Can you tell I just saw 300? ugh