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.
———
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.
———
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.
———


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.

________________________________

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.

Nothing's better than this, and it never ends.

by Ryland Walker Knight

—We just recycle is all
We all carry a list, some even write lists down, to remember what to watch or to read or to eat or to buy or to accomplish. But, come on, let's face it: lists are easy. And, at this moment, do you really need another list? To answer, sort of, Danny and I decided to chuck the list, mostly, to try to winnow this year's year-end wrap up in The Notebook. Today starts this new cycle in this Part I post. As we wrote over there, we switched styles and asked contributors to pair a new film (theatrical, festival, whatever barometer) with an old film (rep house, disc, you pick) seen this year. I felt mine was pretty obvious, but, nonetheless, it's easily a dream double bill I'd love to sit with in a theatre: 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (Jacques Rivette, 2009) + The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, 1953). I say more in the post, which you'll have to read over there, and I even propose a few other pairings. But I wrote that copy a little while ago. And, per the rules, my minimal commentary for my secondary double bills couldn't be used. So I decided not only to propose another, sixth double bill in this dedicated link-thru but also give you my complete list of double bills complete with the themes (jokes) I see emerging from those pairs:

• 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (Jacques Rivette, 2009) + The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, 1953) — Wear your smile not your hurt
  
• The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, USA) + Ordet (Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1955) — Telling stories to ourselves
  
• Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, USA) + Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1953) — Run a ring around the egos
  
• La frontiere de l'aube (Philippe Garrel, France) + Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958) — Ghosts
  
• 35 rhums (Claire Denis, France) + Le garçu (Maurice Pialat, 1995) — Dads
  
• Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, USA) + A Canterbury Tale (Powell & Pressburger, 1944) — There's a war on?
  
• Inglourious Basterds + Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, 2006) — Pulp fiction [see below]

———


Last week I finally saw Paul Verhoeven's 2006 feature, Black Book, and it quickly catapulted up my favorites list. In fact, I watched it twice—and the second time I made my own double bill, pairing it with Inglourious Basterds. This is another slightly obvious double bill, but the films are such different modes, and actually such different postures, that, seen back-to-back with plenty of snacks, the pairing was rather illuminating beyond the World War II "settings" we're given.

Verhoeven's less a formal master than Tarantino (whose stylistic evolution since 1994 is significant, though also almost subtle in that its tied to his editing patterns, which is inextricable from his obsession with talk), but the Dane's film is no less stylistic or dashing or conceptual. Indeed, Black Book is arguably freer, and more dashing, though it is also the more circumscribed, the more "factual" and "representational"—even, I'd say, more narrative—film. The power of Black Book is precisely that it fuses into both a conceptually stimulating and a plain entertaining master work. Verhoeven's film throws up action scenes galore, yes, and a compelling revenge yarn, to say nothing of its bald prurience (yet), and hosts one of the best performances of the decade, easy, from Carice Van Houten. In short, though it's got some bitter pill stuff, it's a fun flick.

The real rub remains that both these films are pulp objects, mash-ups maybe, of infinite sources. Tarantino makes it more obvious, of course, with direct visual quotes and a few more names dropped, but the movies motivate Verhoeven in equal measure. However, Verhoeven's not a metabolic function the way Tarantino is: Verhoeven simply uses the movies, and nods at symbols while making his own; Taratino, on the other hand, shows his hand constantly. For instance, Black Book cat calls Mata Hari in a tossed off line of dialogue, to remind us of another reason both culturally specific at the time and cinephilliacly tickling now why this Jew went blonde, while Basterds punctuates its first major scene with as big a "quote" as possible, lifting Ford's doorway from The Searchers (and others) to plant it in a southern France pastoral of 1941. In fact, nearly everything in Basterds is a quote or in quotes—especially the actors—unlike Black Book, always a cynical horrorshow, which aims to eschew all trickery just as soon as the world allows.

Which is to say that, since Tarantino the American is obsessed with charisma and Verhoeven the Euro is obsessed with sex, one film is built on rep and one film is built on bait (respectively). In fact, everybody in Basterds is obsessed with their rep, forever asking "What have you heard of me?" while all of Black Book is premised on Carice's undeniable appeal, her nudity not a tease so much as a fact of the world—men go dumb and forsake themselves for such a small cost/price.

These postures, too, help define the films' attitudes towards history. Tarantino's out to earn the right to write it as he sees fit, as if by sheer force of talent he gets that honor. Verhoeven's out to simply write a story, to given face to a certain strand, to show you how history is, in fact, written not by the winners but rather by the survivors. Further, Tarantino closes his own film off, burns it to the ground and seals it in its own skin-tomb, while Verhoeven leaves his open to scramble, its final tableau a design of perpetual defense. You get the sense that Black Book, though it's putatively inspired by true events, is a fiction invented to talk about a moment in history rather than a document, of sorts, about how some Jews fought their cultural legacy. It's that fantastic. On the flip side, it's easy to see Basterds as a-political, a complete reverie of light and dark, blood and guts, everything celluloid can capture. The trick to the double bill, if you want to have a really good time, is obvious: you save the fantasy for second. You still won't get out alive, but you might smile more while trying.


———



I should also say, watch the Metro Classics blog for a quick top five comedies of the decade from yours truly. I only played along because I miss those dudes, and I thought that'd be a fun way to participate. Otherwise, I have no time for that kind of thing. Plus, I like to advocate for comedy. A great comedy is rarer these daze, but, believe me, although it might appear different from an "objective" angle on the films I often laud, a great comedy will most often trump a great tragedy in my book.

What might get this list into trouble with some of you, as it has with the friends I've shared it with, is how I define "comedy." For me, it's still a structural classification as much as "did it make me laugh?" If it ends well, with a marriage or something like one, then it's probably a comedy. However, there are black comedies, too, which flip that necessity around past tragedy. The Coens are great at this: their brand of comedy is often of the "what else can we do?" variety. You either laugh or you die. Actually, you'll die either way, but at least you can die laughing. It's nihilism, yes, but not everybody can be Wes Anderson or Arnaud Desplechin. And nobody, I mean it, nobody's Jean Renoir.


———



—Laugh a little.

A conjunction of quotations #8

— edited by Ryland Walker Knight

— Tod Seelie
1.
Nobody could have predicted that Copenhagen would collapse when the truth is that rich nations fully expect to flourish in a Greenhouse future behind high walls and hard-hearted armies and think that the same billions of humans will die from climate change whose deaths from starvation, unclean water, and cheaply treatable diseases they are cheerfully indifferent to here and now. Nobody could have predicted that Lieberman would betray the Democrats yet again when they have never made him face a real consequence for his serial betrayals in the past. Nobody could have predicted that neoliberals would think unemployment is a secondary consideration to billionaires staying billionaires as a measure of whether or not the economy is in recovery. Nobody could have predicted that California held hostage to an obstructionist Republican minority would rather turn into Somalia than make anybody pay taxes for indispensable services, or that a US Senate held hostage to an obstructionist Republican minority and a handful of Conservadems would destroy any chance for healthcare reform to help millions of their suffering citizens or to address world-destroying climate change or halt the re-emergence via the fraudulent financialization of the economy of a death-dealing immiserating feudal society. Nobody could have predicted that bailed out banksters would hoover up billions in cash to save their skins after squandering trillions in ponzi schemes and then refuse to change their behavior one bit. Nobody could have predicted that sociopaths will actually behave like sociopaths and that a system that celebrates sociopaths would not be a magical paradise.
— Dale Carrico

2.
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
— Chuck Dederich

3.
There is no "rest of your life."
— Allison Ahlert

4.
Storm the Reality Studio and retake the universe - The
plan shifted and reformed as reports came in from his
electric patrols sniffing quivering down the streets of the
earth - The reality film giving and buckling like a bulkhead
under pressure - Burned metal smell of interplanetary
war in the raw noon streets swept by screaming
glass blizzards of enemy flak.
— William S. Burroughs

5.
That night a driving icy rain came up and lying in her bed, awake at midnight, Mrs. Flood, the landlady, began to weep. She wanted to run out into the rain and cold and hunt him and find him huddled in some half-sheltered place and bring him back and say, Mr. Motes, Mr. Motes, you can stay here forever, or the two of us will go where you're going, the two of us will go. She had had a hard life, without pain and without pleasure, and she thought that now that she was coming to the last part of it, she deserved a friend. If she was going to be blind when she was dead, who better to guide her than a blind man? Who better to lead the blind than the blind, who knew what it was like?
— Flannery O'Connor

6.
The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.
— Albert Einstein

7.
Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
— Ernest Hemingway

8.
The words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon being, because they more closely convey the life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin. Hence it is a question whether philosophy as reconquest of brute or wild being can be accomplished by the resources of eloquent language, or whether it would not be necessary for philosophy to use language in a way that takes from it its power of immediate or direct signification in order to equal it with what it wishes all the same to say.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

9.
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
—and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living.
Is all this close to the wolverines' howled signals,
that modulated cantata of the wild?
or, when away from you I try to create you in words,
am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing of the worst thing of all—
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
— Adrienne Rich

10.
But if stars shouldn't shine
By the very first time
Then dear it's fine, so fine by me
Cuz we give it time
So much time
With me
— The xx

11.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
— Norman Maclean

12.
The greatness of The River—and the same can be said of the three major films Renoir made after it, The Golden Coach (1953), French Cancan (1955), and The Elusive Corporal (1962)—is inseparable from its modesty, its humility, its consent to limitation. It places itself not above but below politics, at the level of everyday life. The Golden Coach and French Cancan are celebrations of art that cherish its pleasure without pretending they will fix our troubles or transcend our sorrows, without aggrandizing them into anything more than a good time. (Christopher Faulkner thinks the films of Renoir's late period espouse art for art's sake, what he calls an "ideology of aesthetics." This seems to me in error. Renoir's late films remain socially aware even if they no longer contest the social order.They don't elevate art above society, they see it as working within the conditions of society: they are unassuming about the art they celebrate. Faulkner is an Althusserian and his ideology rules out an art that can make its peace with a social situation it neither endorses nor presumes to transcend.)
— Gilberto Perez

13.
As she entered the car, her first impression was that she was not on the train at all. It was merely an oblong area, crowded to bursting with men in dun-colored burnouses, squatting, sleeping, reclining, standing, and moving about through a welter of amorphous bundles. She stood still an instant taking in the sight; for the first time she felt she was in a strange land. Someone was pushing her from behind, obliging her to go on into the car. She resisted, seeing no place to move to, and fell against a man with a white beard, who stared at her sternly. Under his gaze, she felt like a badly behaved child. "Pardon, monsieur," she said, trying to bend out of the way in order to avoid the growing pressure from behind. It was useless; she was impelled forward in spite of all her efforts, and staggering over the prostrate forms and the piles of objects, she moved into the middle of the car. The train lurched into motion. She glanced around a little fearfully. The idea occurred to her that these were Moslems, and that the odor of alcohol on her breath would scandalize them almost as much as if she were suddenly to remove all her clothing. Stumbling over the crouched figures, she worked her way to one side of the windowless wall and leaned against it while she took out a small bottle of perfume from her bag and rubbed it over her face and neck, hoping it would counteract, or at least blend with, whatever alcoholic odor there might be about her. As she rubbed, her fingers struck a small, soft object on the nape of her neck. She looked: it was a yellow louse. She had partly crushed it. With disgust she wiped her finger against the wall. Men were looking at her, but with neither sympathy nor antipathy. Nor even with curiosity, she thought. They had the absorbed and vacant expression of the man who looks into his handkerchief after blowing his nose. She shut her eyes for a moment. To her surprise she felt hungry. She took the sandwich out and ate it, breaking off the bread in small pieces and chewing them violently. The man leaning against the wall beside her was also eating—small dark objects which he kept taking out of the hood of his garment and crunching noisily. With a faint shudder she saw that they were red locusts with the legs and heads removed. The babble of voices which had been constant suddenly ceased; people appeared to be listening. Above the rumbling of the train and the rhythmical steady sound of rain on the tin roof of the car. The men were nodding their heads;conversation started up again. She determined to fight her way back to the door in order to be able to get down at the next stop. Holding her head slightly lowered in front of her, she began to burrow wildly though the crowd. There were groans from below as she stepped on sleepers, there were exclamations of indignation as her elbows came in contact with faces. At each step she cried: "Pardon! Pardon!" She had got herself wedged into a corner at the end of the car. Now all she needed was to get to the door. Barring her way was a wild-faced man holding a severed sheep's head, its eyes like agate marbles staring from their sockets. "Oh!" she moaned. The man looked at her stolidly, making no movement to let her by. Using all her strength, she fought her way around him, rubbing her skirt against the bloody neck as she squeezed past. With relief she saw that the door onto the platform was open; she would have only to get by those who filled the entrance. She began her cries of "Pardon!" once more, and charged though. The platform itself was less crowded because the cold rain was sweeping across it. Those sitting there had their heads covered with the hoods of their burnouses. Turning her back to the rain she gripped the iron railing and looked directly into the most hideous human face she had ever seen. The tall man wore cast-off European clothes, and a burlap bag over his head like a haïk. But where his nose should have been was a dark triangular abyss, and the strange flat lips were white. For no reason at all she thought of a lion's muzzle; she could not take her eyes away from it. The man seemed neither to see her nor to feel the rain; he merely stood there. As she stared she found herself wondering why it was that a diseased face, which basically means nothing, should be so much more horrible to look at than a face whose tissues are healthy but whose expression reveals an interior corruption. Port would say that in a non-materialistic age it would not be thus. And he probably would be right.
— Paul Bowles

14.
I once claimed that the only audience of philosophy is one performing it.
— Stanley Cavell

15.
Comedy is the summit of logic.
— Jacques Tati

Viewing Log #16: Flight, he says, from a box [10/12/09 - 10/18/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—We all find the flux different, we bloom
As I noted before, things will be changing around VINYL IS HEAVY while we close out the calendar. I'll still try to keep these viewing log posts popping up on the regular along with the Vitti posts, and there will be a few link-thru posts to stuff written for other places (read: Danny), but otherwise I'll be focusing my energy outside the internet and this site in particular. I'm hoping it won't slow down all that much, and that I'll simply be able to integrate it into my life a little better, but I also have the desire—as I rejoin a certain fray—to shuck the whole thing for a while; to unplug as much as possible. We'll see. So, without further ado, here's what I watched as I packed bags and wrote many an e-mail and made phone calls galore this week.

• A Canterbury Tale [Powell & Pressburger, 1944] Talk about a cathedral. Built around a gee-whiz G.I., there's a host of ideas—about patriotism, about duty, about beauty, about childhood, about faith, about the movies (and their worth in all that)—all working together in cheeky harmony. It's buoyant; it's a fantasy; it's Real Cinema. But I haven't sussed everything: that will require more thought and more viewings and, preferably, I'll meet this rich picture again on a huge silver screen.
  
  
• Meet Me In St. Louis [Vincente Minnelli, 1944] This DVD looks fabulous, like new. What's great is that, in a musical, it plays with that expansion form, and the power of "the voice" and "voicing," so much: it's all about society's will to keep things tacit, that is quiet, until eruption—often into song, as if plain language can't cut or contain it. Also, it's about valuing the home, which is nice. One of those rare pictures that makes me hope I have more than one kid when the time is right.
  
  
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [Julian Schnabel, 2007] I liked the first reel from inside his head. Then I started to fall asleep again and again, thinking, Why are they speaking English? Why does he spell one word in English, one word in French? Make up your mind, Schnabel. Sicinski nails it. [Insert quip about the babes.]
  
  
• His Girl Friday [Howard Hawks, 1940] # Sometimes you just gotta watch the best movie ever when you settle in for the night and don't want to "think" too hard.
  
• The River [Jean Renoir, 1951] # Don't know what kept me from fully embracing this the first time I watched it, but, boy, this sure is a loveably lazy movie; that is, it's patient and seemingly aleatory; that is, it flows irregardless of forces; that is, it goes, onward, always, like life.

—Off I go!

Convergence for shame's abatement (10/5/09)

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Always a belle epoch, always belles around

Cosmic calls in on us, again.

by Ryland Walker Knight

I'd planned on letting that last widget post lapse past the page, but, well, this early AM I got excited about some more recommendations from my daily dials. The coding on the widget is a little wonky, but, still, I'm updating it. Here goes. Most immediate would be that I just finished watching Criterion's Renoir box set of films from the 1950s, Stage and Spectacle, and I cannot sing its praises enough. Not only are the films all delightful, and typically excellent, but spread across the three discs is the interview Jacques Rivette conducted with le maitre, called "Jean Renoir parle de son art," which has as many lessons about cinema (and art in general) as you'll get in a full semester of study. Essential viewing. Likewise, Bill Callahan's Woke on a Whaleheart has been getting a bunch of spins around these parts. I'm going to have to return my library copy of Infinite Jest this week and hope to pick up another copy at my next local, but you can certainly buy one because it's worth it; I'd just rather spend that $12 on some food right now. Or, I could put it towards a copy of that new Farber on Film behemoth (which Glenn wrote a few words about over here). Finally, in my haze yesterday, browsing around (somewhere, anywhere), I learned that the Blu Ray release of 2001: A Space Odyssey is currently being sold at a staggering discount, which is another disc I'd love to own along with the requisite player. Can't beat 70mm at the Castro, but it's better than standard def on a tube. Some day soon, we can hope!

— There's sap in the trees if you tap'm
10.06.09: Added five more things to give the lil box two pages of fun stuff. Quickly: (1) Nabokov: Novels 1955-1962: Lolita / Pnin / Pale Fire for the greatest 20th Century novelist's most recognizably seminal works; (2) That FatCat reissue of Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished + Danse Manitee for how those wacky Bmore guises got started; (3) The Cary Grant Box Set (Holiday / Only Angels Have Wings / The Talk of the Town / His Girl Friday / The Awful Truth) for the best Hollywood actor of all time in some of the best Hollywood pictures of all time; (4) A Christmas Tale for being the best picture of what I feel about families, and mine (with more words soon upon this DVD's release); and (5) the game of Scattergories for all the fun it's brought me through the years.

Viewing Log #14: Holy haunts are private [9/28/09 - 10/4/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

— Where do you heal? Where could he be?

• Elena and her men [Jean Renoir, 1956] It's Ingrid's show, no doubt, but I was more taken by the sly Mel Ferrer and his lanky-limber rogue. That said, it's a fine metaphor for the star system, and Ingrid's go-anywhere constitution; she's great at aloof twined with cunning. Renoir says he had to improvise the whole thing, for the most part, interpreting history into a comedy, and, I think, it works thanks largely to his cast and his cousin Claude behind the camera. Still, the weakest of this set, I'd wager.
  
• French Cancan [Jean Renoir, 1954] Vibrant, generous paean to a world of fun, to the joyful life we'd all like to lead rich with love and dancing and art and sex and (did I say?) fun. Gabin beams.
  
  
• Partie de campagne [Jean Renoir, 1936] # Wanted to see the transition, again, and the river recede from me.
  
• Loulou [Maurice Pialat, 1980] A wreck, stumbling on a wall (or laying in a bed, ahem). However: very exciting to see an earlier, softer Huppert still arriving at her powers to command a camera's attention. Her performance stings especially in this little man because she's able to unmask and mask so many multivalent, contradictory motivations-impulses-emotions in such close proximity, as can often be the case in life's mess. But what's intriguing about Pialat's interest in actors, and images, isn't any allegiance to "the document" (despite many long takes and the realist weight of a sudden slap) but to selection and contiguity, how one thing follows another—often in rhymes—while "hiding" his timing since, though the editing can pop and the ellipses alarm, you forget about the camera.
  
  
• Ne Touchez Pas La Hache [Jacques Rivette, 2007] # Games fail like words and we brand each other's souls—we maze traps like Waco, Texas! Balibar's a wraith and Depardieu's a blood-pumping prosthetic: each barely attached to their own life. The walls are curtains, or wrought iron; the limits ceaselessly solecistic. After all, it is but a poem.
  
  
• Bad Lieutenant [Abel Ferrara, 1992] # Guess I didn't wait so long again after all! But I only watched a few things, to get the feel and a few images. Really: maybe the best movie ever. "Where! Were! YOU?!" —Steve, via text: "Captures the fast-fading old new york with stunning fidelity. many great scenes caught in available light, ambient sound. jesus is in the details."
  
• The Brothers Bloom [Rian Johnson, 2008] It's all about Ruffalo, despite the allure of Brody and Weisz. The film says so, after all, giving him the director's chair (or Fellini hat) and, it seems, unlimited means to stage events in the world. It's a goof of a movie (a little simple and didactic, maybe), but it is winning. And Ruffalo, master wincer, sells every turn. His spot-lit farewell says it all: satisfied, resigned, and understanding his worth. A good actor is a miracle.
  
• Tall Enough [Barry Jenkins, 2009] Watch it here. I could make a crack about advertising really easily, but that'd undersell Barry's fine-line achievement. This is about as charming a short as I could imagine from a project such as this, and it proves, as ever, Barry knows what he's doing with a camera. G'head, get your Denis on, man: it looks great.
  
  
• Partie de campagne [Jean Renoir, 1936] Just amazing. Even in pieces, le maitre makes a whole natural world swing-swim into view, into action, falling away in time as our petty obligations web us into roles we don't want. Best? Jokes abound!
  
• Dogville [Lars Von Trier, 2003] # The first half. Started this because somebody I adore (and respect) loves this movie and I want to understand why; because back in 2003 it made me pretty mad in (I'm learning) pretty dumb ways. That said, I fell asleep.
  
  
• Bad Lieutenant [Abel Ferrara, 1992] # Cuz I'm an idiot masochist, apparently. Also, it'd been a few years. Maybe never can go long enough between viewings. But, hell, this is a fucking movie. Even more than Unforgiven, this is the H.W.-headache movie. Also, truly Catholic.

—Answer yourself

Viewing Log #13: Slobber somehow [9/21/09 - 9/27/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Money talks

• Ashes of Time Redux [WKW, 1994/2008] Started this a couple nights prior but was gladly interrupted by two fun-loving phone calls. Started over, fitting WKW, and felt the slow-mo, loss-hardened fronts enough; the fights were fun flurries of blur and I dig the literal adventure of perception with "the good" Tony Leung, but I get why, um, certain friends tossed out the "snoozer" label; further, it's not made for laptop viewing, nor even a 32-inch tube television. It desires size.
  
  
• La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento [Jacques Rivette, 1991] As with Spectre, Rivette adopts the interruption, practicing a kind of cinematic enjambment, that distills and skews the original with a brisker rhetoric. And it becomes even less about painting. But it's still about objects, and forms, and the nowhere/anywhere zone of the artist. Birkin is forever fab.
  
• The Golden Coach [Jean Renoir, 1953] Flabbergastingly abstract, oddly enough, despite its head-on and up-front theatricality. A few scant lines of dialogue pitch the project a tad more pointed than necessary, but, as ever with le maitre, it can't fully (truly? ever?) go wrong. Anna Magnani demands her space, and owns it. There's about five books of theory waiting to be unpacked in this phaeton of ornaments and luster. Good grief this is fantastic.
  
  
• Go Go Tales [Abel Ferrara, 2007] Whirligig desperation and lots of flesh—always on the go—paint an increasingly cramped space with affective (and endearing) verve for expression and for dreams and for our fight for passion in the face of commerce-capitalism. Dogs, too, get crucial roles.
  
• Home from the Hill [Vincente Minnelli, 1960] Watched with Annie, DVR'd off TCM, because she names it as her favorite movie, tied with Tender Mercies, and, shucks: it's pretty good. Broad, maybe, and now-a-days hokey, but more complicated than it lets on. Nothing to rival the final reel of Some Came Running, but certain shots linger, like the black kids in the shadows watching the decadent bar-b-q; or the sulphur valley of yellow kept at bay, but only so; or the way Peppard ambles through the grocery store, juggling. Mitchum, too, of course, is strong as ever: some tower of pride fighting the world and its image of him.
  
  
• Sunrise [F.W. Murnau, 1927] # For an image essay at The Auteurs about the beautiful new Masters Of Cinema double disc I was lucky enough to get gaga over.
  
• Le Coup de Berger [Jacques Rivette, 1956] What a fun, sad little film. All those movements up, the camera as vertical as horizontal, only to pin these people down—to lock our lady in her place. It would be devastating were it not for the clockwork pacing and cut'm-loose attitude. Chess, they say, is a game for adults.
  
  
• The Southerner [Jean Renoir, 1945] Terrible DVD, great film. Zachary Scott's something of a liability, though he's pretty, but the same warmth shines through all of le maitre's images. Way more southern, and true, than many American-directed "versions" (like, say, Gone With The Wind) of the south, no doubt. For one, it's about people, not ideas. For another, when the going gets tough, it doesn't look like set dressing: it looks like the world.
  
  
• Entre les murs [Laurent Cantet, 2008] An especially fun film for a language nut like me. It's typical, maybe, but I loved it. The formal structure is seamless, despite its crowded frames, and the film/Cantet/Bégaudeau understands pedagogy as a blur of navigation and negotiation—as a chaos, even, as Mark wrote earlier in the year—spurred by language's promiscuity. It's not romantic, nor dry: Cantet complicates the image's desire for the real, as characters-students-teachers-forms never ossify like the walls that surround them, and life bullies forward. Also, time flies.

Viewing Log #11: I will drive us into the woods [9/7/09 - 9/13/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

• Code 46 [Michael Winterbottom, 2003] # Samantha Morton is my wife. Or, she's just perfect at this bruised thing. The most poignant sex scene in movies?
  
• Suspiria [Dario Argento, 1977] Couldn't finish it, or start over, when I realized my eyes weren't lying last night: the DVD Netflix sent me is some half-assed non-mastered bullshit that looks like VHS. Will have to wait for the next time it screens theatrically since all I'm getting from this thing right now is color and The Goblins—and if half of that is blanched and degraded, no thanks.
  
  
• In The Cut [Jane Campion, 2003] # A revelation. A totally different, more complex movie than the one I saw in 2003. (Or, you know, I'm different.) Now I see plenty about being othered and threats of skepticism—and, um, gendered trust issues—that were beyond me before. Also, I had a couple of pretty awesome, in-depth talks about it before (enticing) and after (enriching) this second viewing. And, yes, it's sexy. Maybe, though, the wrong thing to watch before bedtime.
  
• Suspiria [Dario Argento, 1977] Started this and fell asleep shortly after the maggots, somehow, despite all that wailing.
  
• The Rainmaker [Francis Ford Coppola, 1997] # More rainy day do-nothing cable vision. But this one was better, tho equally dated and moderately maudlin, because of FFC's patience and crisp image-making. Quite a corporate movie, in any case, which seems fitting. Damon's got terrible hair and this is prime Jon Voight scene-gobbling.
  
• 12 Monkeys [Terry Gilliam, 1995] # So 1995 it's wild, and, really, just not as smart as it wants to be. I tweeted about this to some displeasure.
  
  
• La Religieuse [Jacques Rivette, 1966] Finished this. Wow: liberty is falling out of the world? Tough stuff. And, as ever, a perfectly "closed" and "pure" mise-en-scene that keeps things conceptual, no matter the brute and stark (physical) soul-pillaging unfolding in the frame. Karina is amazing, devoted.
  
  
• Gloria [John Cassavetes, 1980] # As I noted, I fell asleep shortly into the watch instantly viewing. Gena is kind of my hero, too, and I'm a boy.
  
• La Religieuse [Jacques Rivette, 1966] The first twenty minutes or so. Crazy theatrical. Quick take: want to see how it plays off Ne Touchez Pas La Hache and its irony, its repression.
  
• La Bête Humaine [Jean Renoir, 1938] Hastily, drowzily: more noire than bête, it's a fittingly anxious downer that begins in a furnace and plows nose-first into the grave, sooty future. It's best in wordless process, documenting the grime of the job, which becomes any job—plain labor's crud—turning me around a query: perhaps its narrative drive (its locomotion) is too psychological? The score, always operatic, undercuts that, though.
  
  
• Le Crime de M. Lange [Jean Renoir, 1936] Since I don't know much about history's specifics (most especially a timeline), I don't want to take the obvious allegorical/political reading too far. Better to trumpet the fluid camera, the charm of each character, the celebratory dinner that ambles out into the crime, the document of a banding bonding. Another "best movie ever."
  
• L'avventura [Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960] # For Mike, for this. Watching it again makes me feel like I've grown up a lot since the last time (somewhere in early 2006). We men may be evil, but I'd say the circuit of complicity fits. Still, after all that horseplay, I'd never expect a caress like that.

—Let's see how good a kissers we are

Convergence for his patsy hands (9/9/09)

by Ryland Walker Knight

—can't get the stink off

Viewing Log #10: Tally up the alley cat aggression [8/31/09 - 9/6/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Enter the void.

• Nickelodeon [Peter Bogdanovich, 1976] Before I fell asleep I was enjoying this goofy run-on sentence of an homage. It's got the right tone, even if, Barry Lyndon aside, I often feel Ryan O'Neal is a rather tone-deaf performer. I probably won't make an extreme effort to see the second hour.
  
• Le Pont du Nord [Jacques Rivette, 1981] I've been watching this in pieces, just as I've been reading Don Quixote kind of slowly. This picture is more grim, though it has its laughs. And it has plenty to marvel at, like the spiderweb gun or the eye-slashing bit with Pascale attacking posters.
  
  
• Little Murders [Alan Arkin, 1971] Motherfucker this movie is dark. And hilarious. And smart. Gould has to be one of the greatest, coolest actors ever. Arkin's cameo is insane, a gut buster. Thought of Charlie Kaufman a lot, and I almost want to watch Synecdoche again, somehow.
  
• Boudu Saved From Drowning [Jean Renoir, 1932] Watched it twice, and it's kind of perfect, a film teeming with contradictions, with activity abutting stability. But I don't think it's as simple as freedom is the disregard for appearance. I think it's bigger, it's a process and a river; freedom is to not ignore the bank along your float.
  
  
• The Princess Bride [Rob Reiner, 1987] # I guffawed twice, and generally smiled. Andre The Giant is great, maybe perfect; Faulk can do no wrong. It's so easy.
  
• The Lower Depths [Jean Renoir, 1936] It fits: if Gabin is a pauper king, Jouvet is a royal bum. Despite the perpetually open world, there's always something dropping out from beneath people in a Renoir film. Further, the fairy tale of these worlds (still "realist") only opens one happy ending and its invariably clouded, however ebullient. Maybe the weakest I've seen, but it holds life all the same. Lots of mobility.
  
  
• The Story of Marie and Julien [Jacques Rivette, 2003] Watched it twice in two days. Wanted to pay better attention to that cat, and how the clocks were used. Also, Béart is really great on top of really great looking. Not sure if it can equal Duelle or Noroit, though it has a delicious ending.
  
  
• Grand Illusion [Jean Renoir, 1937] # Made me want to just watch Renoir films for a little while. Talk about timing, and teams, and a screen teeming. Still, I get the feeling he's better than this elsewhere (besides Rules).

I work on what I love, I work the service on my vertince
And I work till this here little flat line closes the curtains

Generosity for the day

But as to commitment in a general sense ... You know, I can't believe in the general ideas, really I can't believe in them at all. I try too hard to respect human personality not to feel that, at bottom, there must be a grain of truth in every idea. I can even believe that all the ideas are true in themselves, and that it's the application of them which gives them value or not in particular circumstances. ... No, I don't believe there are such things as absolute truths, but I do believe in absolute human qualities — generosity for instance. [Jean Renoir]