A Conjunction of Quotations #12

— edited by Ryland Walker Knight

— Hugo Alexander
1.
She seemed divided about herself and her image right from the beginning. She claimed she never knew she was to do nude scenes in “Ecstasy,” though people on the set said otherwise. On the breast issue, she researched the possibility of glandular augmentation, but later insisted she would never do anything about them. (Hers were perfectly fine except by the increasingly grandiose mammary standards of Hollywood.) She never mentioned her Jewish background, but assisted in the war effort and in later life congregated with fellow European exiles. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about changing your name or your breasts or your hairline or your voice or your accent, or with suppressing your ethnicity and background, but with Lamarr the process involved whittling away parts of an identity without quite finding a new one to inhabit.
— Molly Haskell

2.
Capitalism is a male construct.
— Tilda Swinton

3.
There is no why for my making films. I just liked the twitters of the machine, and since it was an extension of painting for me, I tried it and loved it. In painting I never liked the staid and static, always looked for what would change the source of light and stance, using glitters, glass beads, luminous paint, so the camera was a natural for me to try—but how expensive!
— Marie Menken

4.
My, and I suspect Nathaniel's, basic concern is with the frame-rate and whether a DVD is capable of emulating his 18fps rate. And of course in electronic modes there is no black out between frames, which is really the fundamental difference between video generated images which are constant and traditional filmic projection in which half the time the screen is black.
— Jon Jost

5.
We’ve had a loss of the sense of the frontier. We have to reclaim that.
— Peter Thiel

6.
I'm not so fond of Foucault, it's because he's always saying, "During this period, people thought 'A,B,C,'; but, after such and such a precise date, it was thought, rather, that '1,2,3'." Fine but can you really be so sure? That's precisely why we're trying to make movies so that future Foucaults won't be able to make such assertions with quite such assurance. Sartre can't escape this reproach, either.
— JLG

7.
J-R-SMITH! WE JUST SAW A MAN FLY!
— Kevin Harlan

8.
Like sittin' on pins and needles
Things fall apart, it's scientific
— Talking Heads

9.
But architecture couldn’t hold him either. Philosophy, he was forced to realize, was his supreme gift, yet when he returned to philosophy in 1929, his mind never settled there. Still, much as he hated Cambridge, he instinctively knew that college life, and the relative freedom it afforded him, was more conductive to his work than a life spent on the Russian steppes, tending an endless line of human misery. But because he couldn’t settle on anything, the young men around him couldn’t really settle, either. And so this, too, was his legacy: to leave them and, later, philosophy deluged with his huge half-conscious will, which, like a sweeping flame, sucked up all the oxygen.
— Bruce Duffy º

10.
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
— T.S. Eliot

11.
It must be done with mirrors
my head that rests on nothing in mid-air.

Where is my body
where oh where?

I can see the stones
hidden in the hands.

O bring back my body to me, to me,
O miracle bring it back
before the mirrors break.
— Maya Deren

12.
The perfect page, the page in which no word can be altered without harm, is the most precarious of all. Changes in language erase shades of meaning, and the “perfect” page is precisely the one that consists of those delicate fringes that are so easily worn away. On the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process. One cannot with impunity alter any line fabricated by Góngora (according to those who restore his texts), but Don Quixote wins posthumous battles against his translators and survives each and every careless version.
— Borges º

13.
What is a wedding? Webster's Dictionary defines a wedding as "The process of removing weeds from one's garden."
— Homer Simpson

14.
I feel like Gene Wilder is my Marlon Brando or something. He just presents you with an array of emotions and leaves it up to you to decide. You know, when he played Willy Wonka [in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, 1971], there was always something slightly terrifying and angry and sadistic about that character, all of which you would imagine might take away from the magic of it. But there was something about how he played it that let you see how this guy living alone in this place, as Wonka was, could have been affected by all of that, how it would have affected his emotional state.
— Ryan Gosling

15.
He's the engine that stirs the drink.
— Charles Barkley, on Rajon Rondo

A conjunction of quotations #10

— edited by Ryland Walker Knight

— Jacob Langvad
1.
The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.
— Willem de Kooning

2.
Nature's above art in that respect. There's your press money. That fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper. Draw me a clothier's yard. Look, look, a mouse! Peace, peace, this piece of toasted cheese will do't. There's my gauntlet. I'll prove it on a giant. Bring up the brown bills. O, well flown, bird; i' th' clout, i' th' clout — whew! Give the word.
...
They flattered me like a dog, and told me I had the white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. To say "ay" and "no" to everything that I said "ay" and "no" to was no good divinity. When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter, when the thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found 'em, there I smelt 'em out. Go to, they are not men o' their words. They told me I was everything; 'this a lie, I am not ague-proof.
— Lear

3.
The divide between Heaven and Hell isn't a gulf of intellect but of sensibility. Detractors balk at the obstacles to comprehension; defenders prize the challenge and excitement of this same intractability. With the recent passing of Stan Brakhage, no other living film maker has so ceaselessly lived up to Pound's great battle cry: Make it new! That's the simple secret to the passion of those of us who love him.
— Nathan Lee

4.
    Fix. Colloquial in America for arrange, prepare, mend. The usage is well established. But bear in mind that this verb is from figere: "to make firm," "to place definitely." These are the preferred meanings of the word.
— Strunk & White

5.
Since the Photograph is pure contingency and can be nothing else (it is always something that is represented)—contrary to the text which, by the sudden action of a single word, can shift a sentence from description to reflection—it immediately yields up those "details" which constitute the very raw material of ethnological knowledge. When William Klein photographs "Mayday, 1959" in Moscow, he teaches me how Russians dress (which after all I don't know): I note a boy's big cloth cap, another's necktie, an old woman's scarf around her head, a youth's haircut, etc. I can enter still further into such details, observing that many of the men photographed by Nadar have long fingernails: an ethnographical question: how long were nails worn in a certain period? Photography can tell me this much better than painted portraits. It allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this "me" which likes knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features "biographemes"; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.
— Roland Barthes

6.
I may not cook the best tripe and onions in England, but whoever gets me won't have to worry about his plumbing.
— Cluny Brown

7.
And yet the fact remains that in the broad cultural mainstream of millennial America, men do not wear skirts. If you, the reader, are a US male, and even if you share my personal objections to pants and ream as I do of a cool and genitally unsquishy American Tomorrow, the odds are still 99.9 percent that in 100 percent of public situations you wear pants/slacks/shorts/trunks. More to the point, if you are a US male and also have a US male child, and if that child might happen to come to you one evening and announce his desire/intention to wear a skirt rather than pants to school the next day, I am 100 percent confident that you are going to discourage him from doing so. Strongly discourage him. You could be a Molotov-tossing anti-pants radical or a kilt manufacturer or Dr. Steven Pinker himself—you're going to stand over your kid and be prescriptive about an arbitrary, archaic, uncomfortable, and inconsequentially decorative piece of clothing. Why? Well, because in modern America any little bot who comes to school in a skirt (even, say, a modest all-season midi) is going to get stared at and shunned and beaten up and called a total geekoid by a whole lot of people whose approval and acceptance are important to him.* In our present culture, in other words, a boy who wears a skirt is "making a statement" that is going to have all kinds of gruesome social and emotional consequences for him.
____
* In the case of little Steve Pinker Jr., these people are the boy's peers and teachers and crossing guards. In the case of adult cross-dressers and drag queens who have jobs in the straight world and wear pants to those jobs, it's bosses and coworkers and customers and people on the subway. For the die-hard slob who nevertheless wears a coat and tie to work, it's mostly his boss, who doesn't want his employees' clothes to send clients "the wrong message." But it's all basically the same thing.
— David Foster Wallace

8.
Most women I know are reluctant to say, 'I am better than her, and her, and her - OK, I'll keep going.' And most men I know rely, when necessary, on some formulation of exactly that. Plus women have not only each other to compete against (in devious and exhausting ways, requiring much track-covering and nice-making as they go) but men to envy; because it's still the case that women writers are compared to each other, and the big (as opposed to, say, lyrical) literary novel persists as an essentially male category. Women's books are still not talked about in the same way men's books are, and women are still sensitive to that.
— Kathryn Chetkovich

9.
Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie,
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.
— Ezra Pound

10.
In short, representation may well become infinite; it nevertheless does not acquire the power to affirm either divergence or decentering. It requires a convergent and monocentric world: a world in which one is only apparently intoxicated, in which reason acts the drunkard and sings a Dionysian tune while none the less remaining 'pure' reason. The ground or sufficient reason is nothing but a means of allowing the identical to rule over infinity itself, and allowing the continuity of resemblance, the relation of analogy and the opposition of predicates to invade infinity. This is the originality of sufficient reason: better to ensure the subjection of difference to the quadripartite yoke. The damage is done not only by the requirement of finite representation, which consists of fixing a propitious moment for difference, neither too large nor too small, in between excess and default; but also by the apparently contrary requirement of infinite representation, which purports to integrate the infinitely large and the infinitely small of difference, excess and default themselves. The entire alternative between finite and infinite applies very badly to difference, because it constitutes only an antinomy of representation.
— Gilles Deleuze

11.
It was rather an opposite frame of mind in which Parmenides found his doctrine of being. On a certain day and in a certain frame of mind he tested his two interactive contradictories, whose mutual desire and hatred constitute the world and all coming-to-be. He tested the existent and the nonexistent, the positive and the negative properties-and suddenly he found that he could not get past the concept of a negative duality, the concept of non-existence. Can some-thing which is not be a quality? Or, more basically, can something which is not, be? For the only single form of knowledge which we trust immediately and absolutely and to deny which amounts to insanity is the tautology A = A. But just this tautological insight proclaims inexorably: What is not, is not. What is, is. And suddently Parmenides felt a monstrous logical sin burdening his whole previous life. Had he not light-heartedly always assumed that there are such things as negative qualities, nonexistent entities, that, in other words, A is not A? But only total perversity of thinking could have done so. To be sure, he reflected, the great mass of people had always made the same perverse judgment; he had merely participated in a universal crime against logic. But the same moment that shows him his crime illuminates him with a glorious discovery. He has found a principle, the key to the cosmic secret, remote from all human illusion. Now, grasping the firm and awful hand of tautological truth about being, he can climb down, into the abyss of all things.
— Nietzsche

12.
To read is to dream, guided by someone else's hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound.
— Pessoa

13.
As the above examples demonstrate, Muriel is cluttered with emblems of itself and its operations. In fact, absolutely everything in the film comes to stand as potential emblem, and Muriel forever runs the risk of seeming utterly overdetermined, an airless and rather literary conceit in which themes and images are forever reflecting back to a central premise. What saves the film from this and sets up its unique tension is its parallel urge to dispersal and expansion—an apparently insatiable and obviously impossible desire to include more and more detail, to record every nook and vantage of the city and to represent the full continuum of the lives of its characters through seemingly random selection, including a fair proportion of the apparently unmarked and "in-between" moments of daily life.
— B. Kite

14.
And I been 'fessing double fast
Addressing questions nobody asked
I'll get this joy off of my chest at last
And I will love you 'til the noise has long since passed

And I did not mean to shout, just drive
Just get us out, dead or alive
A road too long to mention, lord, it's something to see!
Laid down by the good intentions paving company

All the way to the thing we've been playing at, darlin'
I can see that you're wearing your staying hat, darlin'
For the time being all is well
Won't you love me a spell?

This is blindness beyond all conceiving
Well, behind us the road is leaving, yeah, leaving
And falling back
Like a rope gone slack

Well, I saw straight away that the lay was steep
But I fell for you, honey, as easy as falling asleep
And that right there is the course I keep...
— Joanna Newsom

15.
Love has got to stop somewhere short of suicide.
— Sam Dodsworth

A conjunction of quotations #9

— edited by Ryland Walker Knight

— William Gale Gedney

1.
I believe in me. I’m a little screwed up but I’m beautiful.
— Steve McQueen

2.
As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back with the poignancy of vanished things. Watching Mattie whirl down the floor from hand to hand he wondered how he could ever have thought his dull talk interested her. To him, who was never gay but in her presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference. The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.
— Edith Wharton

3.
[Hats] can be great fun. And it is true that they can put a woman in a good mood. Anyone who laughs at this fact just knows nothing about the finer points of woman’s capacity for survival.
— Marlene Dietrich

4.
In the quotation that both slaves and chastises, language proves the matrix of justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin. It appears, now with rhyme and reason, sonorously, congruously in the structure of a new text. As rhyme it gathers the similar into its aura; as name it stands alone and expressionless. In quotation the two realms—of origin and destruction—justify themselves before language. And conversely, only where they interpenetrate—in quotation—is language consummated.
— Walter Benjamin

5.
Remember Barbara
It was raining nonstop in Brest that day
and you walked smiling
artless delighted dripping wet
in the rain
Remember Barbara
It was raining nonstop in Brest
and I saw you on rue de Siam
You were smiling
and I smiled too
Remember Barbara
You whom I did not know
You who did not know me
Remember
Remember that day all the same
Don't forget
A man was sheltering under a porch
and he called your name
Barbara
and you ran toward him in the rain
Dripping water delighted artless
and you threw yourself in his arms
Remember that Barbara
and don't be angry if I talk to you
I talk to all those I love
even if I've seen them only once
I talk to all those who love
even if I don't know them
Remember Barbara
Don't forget
that wise happy rain
on your happy face
in that happy town
That rain on the sea
on the arsenal
on the boat from Ouessant
Oh Barbara
What an idiot war
What has happened to you now
In this rain of iron
of fire of steel of blood
and the one who held you tight in his arms
lovingly
is he dead vanished or maybe still alive
Oh Barbara
It is raining nonstop in Brest
as it rained before
But it's not the same and everything is ruined
It's a rain of mourning terrible and desolate
It's not even a storm any more
of iron of steel of blood
Just simply clouds
that die like dogs
Dogs that disappear
along the water in Brest
and are going to rot far away
far far away from Brest
where there is nothing left.
— Jacques Prevert

6.
The basic things you've learned stay the same. The world is right there in front of you in more or less dreamlike incarnations: moving water; tall buildings; ridiculous pain; voices singing; people to love. Your job is to imagine yourself in it. When it rains, You rain. When the birds fly, they fly inside of You.
— Ben Polk

7.
It looks like high time baby
to stop our lovin' nickel dime
We're in the high times baby
Where words are lost and tempest tossed in lemon lime.
When times and places effervesce
In words of wonder from down under
I'm no less. I'm fine. It's my time.
— Van Dyke Parks

8
No. [I don't feel like audiences are ever really in danger watching a film.] That's the problem with movies, and that's the problem with watching too many of them. It's not ultimately a suitable substitute for life. You can get a lot out of it—I've spent a lot of time with movies, and I love it. But I think it can warp your perception a little bit.
— Andrew Bujalski

9.
Because when you do a film, it's generally five, six or seven weeks at the most. We had the ambition to do it for a year and a half, and that changes a lot of things and we were not in the same state of mind... When you spend a year and half with the film, you are just there and life is much more together. You have lots of other things. You have people who are born, people who die and seasons change. So the film becomes, really, almost organic. You don't really think about the film. Or you think about the film and life at the same time. So it's good. It's because it brings down the importance of cinema. The balance is more correct, I think. In what you live, that a film should not be the main thing in your life. Perhaps it's one of the things. It's your work. It's like the guy in the office, or the guy who makes food, or the guy who makes shoes. They do it everyday, from 9-7. It should be the same thing... It's like the idea of trying to make it all your life, because I like it, it's what I chose, and make it day to day, everyday... And with this small budget crew and in this place where people are very generous.
— Pedro Costa

10.
Anything that gives us room and allows us to do something gives us a possibility, that is, it gives what enables us. "Possibility" so understood, as what enables, means something else and something more than mere opportunity.
— Martin Heidegger

11.
But I don't wish that I was dead
A very old friend of mine once said
That either way you look at it you have your fits
I have my fits but feeling is good
Confusions not a kiddney stone in my brain
But if we're miscommunicating do we feel the same?
Then either way you look at it you have your fits
I have my fits but feeling is good
— Animal Collective

12.
I go down to the river
Filled with regret
I go down and I wonder
If there was any reason left
I left just before my lungs could get wet
I'm lonely, but I ain't that lonely yet
— The White Stripes

13.
There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits—every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It’s your body that dies, after all.

There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously—it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies (“I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!” etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important—they make up for a lot.
— David Foster Wallace

14.
After all, a girl is…well, a girl. It’s nice to be told you’re successful at it.
— Rita Hayworth

15.
Under that sky find a spread of strange when
you look down on our ochre'd earth holding
the splay in the eye, yielding at my
golden main. Sit, please, on the lip to name
a fawn or see hosts scorch a gorge brown, full
of flowers curled to dirt. A storm of her
decomposing trees is just soot at rest.

The whole whorl wave of blue thunder goads mothers
behind screens. Dads, though, can't fight it, can't save
cellmates from walls: walls and tall trees, poles, beams—
—bars, at bottom, only proxies hacksaw.

—Hard to say, he says, when the clouds light up!
—Heard her playing, she says, over that hill.
—Grass. He shook his head, letting a fistful
fall on her knees. Who knew? Who knew, Blue? You?
She just laughed. They fell facing their faces,
their teeth telling yellow on the green's twill
mat getting matted more matted. Then the
girl, with a bounce, crested a new, left lawn.
— Ryland Walker Knight

Top teats. Whoops, tweets.

by Claire Twisselman

[Ed's note: Though part of her charm on twitter (already!) is her lack of punctuation and/or grammar rules, I asked Claire to clean up those lists she came up with for our little blog party here.]

I gave in, I joined twitter. And what does Knight do? Asks me to then go back and blog about it? What a goofus. In any event, here's the lists I came up with for the year and for the decade. I'm not going to go back and change them, though, to add Antichrist, like I remembered just a minute ago, but, whatever, you know? These were the movies that taught me some things this year, this decade. I still don't know much! Also, I haven't seen everything, so some things might get pushed around when I see, oh I don't know, Police, Adj. So let me know what you think! Am I cool enough to play in this boys club from time to time? In any event, happy new year. Can't wait to grow up some more in this new decade.


2009

1. Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino — Yes, I'm a Jew.
2. Summer Hours, Olivier Assayas — Remember, readers, vinyl is heavy. And don't listen to anybody who tells you this isn't lovely, and smart; it's subtle in ways, say, Arnaud Desplechin never could be.
3. Julia, Eric Zonca — Tilda Swinton is my hero.
4. The Headless Woman, Lucretia Martel — Except for the Coens' movie and Wes Anderson's fox, nothing else is this dedicated. Demanding but rewarding. And terrifying.
5. Two Lovers, James Gray — Joaquin Phoenix is too, too good at being so, so bad at life.
6. The Girlfriend Experience + The Informant!, Steven Soderbergh — What Karina Longworth said. Something about the economy.
7. In the Loop, Armando Iannucci — Lubricated horse cock indeed! Sure, Malcolm's a horse (the movie rides on him, his shoulders), but Gandolfini kills it. I've watched it about five times.
8. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, Werner Herzog — How come nobody talks about how bad an actress, and how boring a sex symbol, Eva Mendes is? Why does she get a pass? Oh, right, Nic Cage. Derr.
9. A Serious Man, Coens + Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson — Two polar opposite readings of Nietzsche: one's neutered, the other's fertile. This is what I'd propose for that fantasy double bill thing they've got at The Notebook.
10. Duplicity, Tony Gilroy — There needs to be more banter in movies, and more split screens. Their confessions of their mutual love was shockingly moving for this lil lady.
11. The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke — Dreadful, from frame one on. Yes: full of dread.
12. Broken Embraces, Pedro Almodovar — Penelope Cruz is the sexiest, duh, and Pedro seems to know almost everything about making movies. Great movie for tit lovers.
13. 35 Rhums, Claire Denis — "Marvin... you were this friend of mine..."
14. Drag Me To Hell, Sam Raimi — C'mon, man, go back to "real movies" more often!
15. Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola — All of it's in that scene with the cigarette.

The Decade

1. There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson, '07 — I see the worst in people.
2. Dogville, Lars Von Trier, '03 — Big time. Really taught me some things: about myself, about being a lady, about James Caan. Caan! He's, big surprise, the secret.
3. Esther Kahn, Arnaud Desplechin, '00 — Don't get Ry started! Don't get me started either! Any woman who wants to brush her face after her teeth is a-ok with me.
4. In The Cut, Jane Campion, '03 — Sexy and scary and everything I hate/love about NYC (and being a lady in NYC).
5. Yi Yi, Edward Yang, '00 — Fucks me up. In a delicate way. Like getting a soul massage, kinda.
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry, '04 — Fucks me up.
7. The World, Jia Zhang-ke, '04 — Everybody keeps saying Platform is Jia's movie of the decade, but this one is better, or more important, and digital, and it's got a way less happy ending.
8. Kill Bill + Death Proof + Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino, '03/'04 + '07 + '09 — The best movie movie movie run of the decade, but, hmn, who cares, huh?
9. Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel, '05 — Black and white and red all over. This dude sure does make seem suicide seem painful (eep, not painless).
10. Flight of the Red Balloon, Hou Hsiao-hsien, '07 — If this is what being a mom is like, I could maybe be game. Except for all that deadbeat dad shit, this is what life should look like, I think.
11. The New World, Terrence Malick, '05 — Amazing, no doubt, but it's not anything that's not in The Thin Red Line.
12. Femme Fatale, Brian De Palma, '02 — I kinda dig how sleezy this flick is since, like a lot of this guy's movies, it's big hot air balloon full of prurience. And he's got some idea about movies being a dirty act he's always pushing. But here it's also about Paris and France. Also, De Palma gets Banderas.
13. Mulholland Dr., David Lynch, '01 — Taught me to see with my ears. Why are so many critics picking this one over INLAND EMPIRE? Because this one has lesbians! Nude! Imagine that!
14. The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson, '07 — I know Ry's got a hard on for The Life Aquatic, but this one hurts more, is tighter.
15. Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt, '08 — Best dog movie I've seen and a great train idea or 8, too.
16. The Man Who Wasn't There, Coens, '01 — Obviously their best movie. It's got some hope.

Found Facts. August 2008.

by Ryland Walker Knight

I really had to work to make this fit. The final edit I was set on at first was 11:30, which is too long for YouTube, apparently, so I went in and played with stuff. I think it still works, just different. And, twice as long as the previous installment means twice as many jokes. That means the quality suffers again, unfortunately, and this one really does look better on my HD as it has more "natural" spaces and light. Still a series of naive love letters, this one is elevated from pure nostalgia, I hope/trust, by all the goofy stuff thrown in -- like all those rocks.

SITES SEEN =CZ, Berkeley =The Trappist, Oakland =Cuy's car, Berkeley =Cam+Mego's pad, San Francisco =Berkeley streets =Yuba River, 20 minutes west of Nevada City =Rach's dad's backyard, Sonoma =all thrown together

Found Facts. June 2008.

by Ryland Walker Knight

[I could probably make this a higher quality file but it's such an abject little thing as it is that, hell, it doesn't need any modicum of sheen. That might be dishonest. So, this is offered with humility and a little embarrassment on behalf of everybody. Although, to be fair, we all know who the star is...]

Brief Thoughts on France, the French, and the Rest of Us.

by Mark Haslam

[Part of VINYL IS HEAVY's Bastille Day celebration. Click here to see our index. Click here to view all the entries at once. Ed's note: Mark is a friend from school, another cinephile I like to talk and sometimes disagree with (re: Haneke). I'm happy to have him on VINYL: he's a smart, kind guy with a discerning eye and good taste — for the most part. Look for more from him in the months to come.]

France (read: Paris) is the place film dreams of, the place where films can dream. The limitless possibilities that Hollywood’s Golden Age represented to the world in the Thirties and Forties migrated in the Sixties and Seventies to France—at least, to France as depicted in the cinema. I remember, as a young cinephile-to-be, sitting down with Godard and Melville and Cocteau and Renoir and Truffaut, and thinking, “This is where film is.” Okay, maybe I’m giving young Mark too much intellectual cred…but still, there was something in their work that made film real, made it seem as though it came from this place—that Les Quatre Cents Coups, for example, wasn’t simply made in Paris, but that it had already existed in Paris, had already been lived and was still being lived each and every day by each and every Parisian.

And this, I think, is the draw of France and its movies for those of us that aren’t French: the draw of a place where film, simply, happens. So, in thinking about French cinema, I found myself thinking about it as it is in the hands of non-French directors. Buñuel was always brilliant, but not until he left the oppression of Franco-run Spain did he make something as perfect as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (only one of the several masterpieces he made in France). More recently was Michael Haneke, whose Caché represents, for me, the possibilities of cinema in France, while his English language remake of Funny Games represents the ability of a Hollywood aesthetic to ruin a film (a film I’ve long admired). There plenty of filmmakers to think of here, but it was Krzysztof Kieslowski that ultimately occupied my mind. Kieslowski didn’t make any films in France until the Trois Coleurs trilogy at the very end of his career; yet those three films to me seem so involved in the idea of “France” and the idea of cinema that the two seem to lose any distinction.

The colors of the French flag (blue, white, red) compose the visual landscape of the trilogy (Bleu, Blanc, Rouge). Yet never does it seem that the colors are inserted into these films—they are not done up or painted onto the settings. Rather they are brought out of their locations: the blue of a window’s reflection, the red of a car’s brake-light. Here are the colors as they always are, Kieslowski’s camera just makes them apparent to us (I spy with my little eye something with the color…). The colors begin with definition (blue = liberty, white = equality, red = fraternity), yet the moment the films begin they gradually work toward abstraction. Red seems more like a warning of division, or a kind of divisive passion, not a sign of fraternity. And the supposed liberty of Bleu is more of a hollowness—each instance of the color a reminder to Julie (Juliette Binoche) of what she no longer has: a husband, a child, both of whom died in a car accident she survived.

Julie tries to forget her past (as her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother has), leaving behind or destroying what remains of her husband and child. But her attempts to carve out a private niche fail. The world, in fact, who awaited her husband’s composition celebrating the unification of Europe, will not let her. And neither will the film, which also strives for a sort of “unity” in its color scheme.

So the pool, where Julie finds a sort of freedom, betrays her.

She is discovered, and then invaded.

What sort of liberty is this? Julie is at the whim and will of her environment, and blue becomes the question of liberty, rather than its affirmation. Can liberty exist for her? What form would it take? Liberty is a only a possibility, always present as blue, but, like color itself, never fully graspable. Similarly, Bleu’s languid pace opens the possibility of something to happen—the freedom of any occurrence at any moment—but doesn’t allow the possibility to become a reality. When, finally, something begins to happen (a relationship between Julie and Olivier, the completion of Julie’s husband’s composition) these things shatter in the final five minute sequence: images, barely moving portraits of all the characters we’ve encountered, fold over and dissolve into one another. But each image is also a depiction of constraint or captivity: Julie pressed against glass; the necklace a noose for the young man; Julie’s mother in the retirement home losing her memory; the unborn child in the womb; the stripper in shadows; a painted figure in an eye; and finally Julie, again behind glass, with the slowly encroaching reflection of blue.

During this sequence, the Unification of Europe piece plays, but whose version is it? Julie’s? Her husband’s? Olivier’s? The loss of definition—precisely what Julie seems to have felt throughout the film—becomes perhaps the liberty of expression. As we watch her compose music, the visual field blurs.

The Colors Trilogy presents not the clarity of expression, but the movement toward clarity, which is inevitably unclear. I guess, then, Kieslowski both complicates and confirms the idea of France as a place for cinema to happen: these are films that portray the potential of occurrence and of creation, both of which exist and are denied in France and in cinema.

Fireworks. Pierrot le fou.

by Claire Twisselman

[Part of VINYL IS HEAVY's Bastille Day celebration. Click here to see our index. Click here to view all the entries at once. Click here to see Claire's accompanying image essay.]

Seeing Pierrot le fou in a big, dark theatre was a turning point for me with movies. I don't think my story is particularly out of the ordinary (see here). Godard is an often-traveled road into more serious film interest. His films are fun, playful, smart, rigorous, sometimes boring, hip, sexy, gorgeous and contradictory candy. And I eat it up. I've read -- and heard others say -- that Godard is a young person's filmmaker; that he's more important to young people than older people. I don't know if this is true, but I do know that his exuberance in the 1960s (like most young people, I haven't yet seen much past Week End) is pretty infectious. His movies are giddy for movies. I've since grown to like Masculin-Feminin more than Pierrot, but Pierrot will always remain dear for kick starting my fascination with a lot of French cinema. Or, at least, what the Criterion Collection has made available.

Originally, I told Master Knight that I wanted to write this when Pierrot was released by Criterion. But, as can be the case, I put school first, hanging out with friends second, reading the internet third and writing about movies for the internet a quite distant fourth. (Something I hope to "correct" in the coming year.) Part of my interest has been that the Criterion Collection has played a big part in my burgeoning cinephilia -- along with the ever-expanding blogosphere, Netflix, certain friends' eager recommendations and the rep scene I'm starting to pay attention to. The other reason I wanted to write about Pierrot is because the first time I saw it was in Berkeley, at the Pacific Film Archive, while visiting a friend who insisted we go (1) because the film was rare and is hilarious and (2) because film historian David Thomson introduced the film. Ryland has since told me that he was at the same screening.

All I knew going in was it was going to be a cool French New Wave film with jump cuts and widescreen images and a doomed love story. That's what my friend told me at least. What I didn't expect was how funny the film is. There's a lot of sight gags but my favorite may be up front when Jean-Paul Belmondo's Ferdinand, so mad at the banal "party" his wife has dragged him to, winds up throwing cake at her.

That is, until the final moment with cartoon dynamite and Ferdinand's last second realization that he doesn't want to go up in smoke. Of course, he's too late. If love affairs are all about timing, and this film is certainly about love (that is, an idea or myth of love), then Ferdinand is at once a brilliant, terrible, hopeless and athletic romantic-comic. Or maybe that's just Jean-Paul Belmondo. Who, of course, is Godard's stand-in (his ideal or mythic alter ego), who Godard kills with tongue planted firmly in (blue painted) cheek.




It's certainly easy to think of this movie as Godard killing his already-ended marriage to Anna Karina. It's no doubt a turning point for the director, an awakening to new dimensions of cinema's duty to its audience: which is to say to the world. But, of course, part of what makes Godard interesting is how unsubtle his films shift. Things abut, they don't bleed. He's no Eisenstein but his movies rely on juxtapositions so that it's easy to ignore the in-camera mise-en-scene. Think of the central relationship of Pierrot, a cute flake and her hapless devotee. They're doomed from the beginning. They are their own fireworks. Everywhere they go they leave wreckage. They are ill at ease. In one light, they are Godard's cinema, his bi-polar desires for politically and philosophically aware films over against a B-movie impulse for guns and cars and pure sensation. In another light, the couple is simply an argument about what love does to people, how its impulses sway and push and pull and distort and blow up the world.

But they, that perfectly not perfect couple, brim with possibilities. And that's the appeal of the cinema, too. Furthermore: like Godard's cinema, they take and take and take: they steal their way south. Everything they do is commented on as from some place else, be it a movie or a country or a book or a song. Pierrot le fou is a great argument for recycling! How vomiting up your psyche can be sexy! How theft can turn into production! How (not) to fall in love. And how to look good doing it (or not doing it). The bottom line: keep moving. My favorite Godard movies are the ones that insist on pushing forwards. Although kind of brilliant, La Chinoise is like a stuck-in-a-rutt headache, its Leaud analog, Masculin-Feminin, runs all over the place, even if it spends a lot of time indoors. Also fitting that after his Technicolor adventure here with Pierrot he went back to cheap black and white (with Willy Kurant instead of Raoul Coutard lensing) for a more "documentary" approach. In a lot of ways it seems Pierrot le fou, and not Week End, is the real turning point for Godard's career. The last ditch effort to purge the romance from his system before he could concentrate on more rigorously formal, um, "exercises" -- not fun like the old days, the received wisdom tells me. But I seem to miss or refuse to hear those things. I'm certain that as I continue to look beyond the Criterion Collection and the distinctly New Wave period films I'll find yet more rich material from Godard. Except, I'll have to forge ahead knowing he left a lot of that goofy giveaway pop sensibility behind when he traded in Karina for Wiazemsky. In any event, there's bound to be fireworks in my future, just a different style.

Looking at, for and with desire in Contempt.

by Jennifer Stewart

[Part of VINYL IS HEAVY's Bastille Day celebration. Click here to see our index. Click here to view all the entries at once. Ed's note: Jen plans a few revisions which she hopes to finish sooner rather than later but in the spirit of this enterprise, I thought I'd offer her initial thoughts for now since they're a good starting point and valued contribution to our little project here.]

Le cinéma substitue à notre regard un monde qui s'accorde à nos desires. Le Meprise est l’histoire de ce monde.

As Contempt’s camera turns on us, its narrator ends the prologue with this claim about cinema and what awaits us on the other end of the lens. Since seeing this stunning-looking film at the Castro Theatre, on a rare hot evening in San Francisco a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about its self-proclamation. What follows are my current thoughts – still developing, not quite a reading, but some thoughtful rumination on film and desire. If cinema substitutes for our gaze a world according to our desires, one immediate question should be: how does film know what we desire?

The usual answer is that film does this manifestly. Here, we’d say film presents bodies and dynamics we want to see played out because these confirm stories that offer to stabilize desire into objects and roles we can imagine ourselves in. But it doesn’t take much to see how unsatisfying such an answer quickly becomes, especially for a film like Contempt. If anything, Contempt stages conflicts and problems of desire, collateral with problems and conflicts of film-making. We look at Brigitte, to be sure, and we see her as the kind of beautiful thing film can present. But her presentation is exactly the key, for she (and everyone else in the film) is not a character (to be “identified” with or not) so much as a portrait of the consequences of exchanging (or, failing to exchange) the looks that confirm an understanding of loving and/or desiring, and of being loved and/or desired. What happens between Paul and Camille, arguably, is a breakdown in their ability to return a sustained world between them where desire and love is signaled and consummated. In that moment where Paul blithely hands Camille over to Prokosch, sending her alone with him to his villa, Camille shuts off. The camera shows us the whole silent exchange; a watershed moment between this couple, the precipitating consequences thereof which the rest of the film unfolds. What’s beautiful about Contempt is that this visual language of desire is told as embedded in a world saturated with cinema. It presents the texture and reference of cinema everywhere, as living or naturalized mythology on the walls and in the livelihood of its characters. Contempt enriches the idea of a world in which desire occurs, by showing its fragility.

So why not say, film stages not a manifest but a latent constitution of desire. I mean, it is the emblematic form of cinema itself - a camera 'seeing' in a frame - which has effected the substitution, because it provides a world in which our gaze is directed. The substitution then is simply a world exchanged for a framed world: a world scoped out for us. A world showing us where and how to look. Put that way, pornography is cinema’s logical extension, because it leads and places the eye exclusively (in sex acts made graphic on the screen) – you have no where else to look.

Contempt plays with this. Camille makes a game of asking Paul to look at pieces of her in the mirror – her ankle, her knee, he thighs, her breasts, her face – and asks of each how he likes them. They look into a mirror out of shot while the camera roves along Camille’s naked body. In both senses a body is framed before we look upon it as presented for desire. If pornography is one end of this scale of directing the eye, cinema more usually arouses through affective implication: through shots whose vantage points are themselves part of the suspension of a film’s (if you like) meaning. By suspension, I mean an affective pregnancy, of the fact that the experience of watching will quite literally move through our bodies; provoking, stimulating, arousing, paralyzing, dulling. This is to some extent because watching will simultaneously be an active process of conscious and unconscious connections, as we draw out resources with which to track the film. Most of these will be fleeting and flashed, multifarious and peripheral. And, different occasions of viewing a film can triage a different stream of this fluid. My point is that suspension nicely captures how unqualified watching can be. Its affective power lies in this suspension, for it is this affect we resolve or try to tell, when we try to speak (coherently) about a film.

Contempt is a sequence of suspended desire. The film within it trying to be made (The Odyssey) collapses, and the consummation of desire and love between Paul and Camille collapses, but Contempt looks on.

Sketches on Hoberman, Sylvia, looking and difference. [Part 2]

From: Jennifer Stewart
To: Ryland Walker Knight, Kevin B Lee
Subject: RE: hoberman, sylvia

Kevin and Ryland,

I have just a few comments all inspired by our pre/post film analysis and your fetching essay, Ry. Unfortunately my thoughts are more responsive and fragmented than yours are coherently developed. But I'll let you blogbarians take it from here.

Kevin, while on BART Ry and I spoke more about this phenomenology idea. I think your essay shows, Ry, that the film is more a phenomenology of spectatorship than a phenomenology of thought. What El was doing in the cafe as he looked and sketched, is not what I'd call tantamount to thinking but rather, to fixing a view; really, tantamount to intentionality: he's trying to settle what object his thought is bent on. And his efforts are subject to the interference of occlusion (other heads/objects get in the way), the limits/possibilities of two-dimensional collapse (the 'flat' surface of his sketching page), and the uncanny moment when these objects return his gaze, catch his eye. All goes well with his pursuit of "Sylvia," after all, until she looks back; until they reach the moment when he must account for pursuing her as a cypher for his desire. A moment he calls a disaster never really recovers from.

Two things I don't understand and think analysis of the film should explain:

• what's significant about El sleeping with that beautiful but weird spaced out/drunk/bad dancer girl?
  
• in the last few minutes, through the 'screen' of the train, we see a girl in sunglasses. The entire left side of her face is scared or burned. A few cuts later we see her again, removing her sunglasses to revealno eye (!) on that side. It was pretty gruesome. Kevin, you saw that, right? Ry somehow missed it so please confirm I'm not making this up.
  

Both these Sylvia dopplegangers (in some sense all the women in the film are) could be read as casualties of El's pursuit. The crevices, lines, and shadows of the scarred woman's disfigurement bears a resemblance to the dark, resistant etchings in El's sketchpad; the consequences of his agenda coming into relief. So we see your point, Ry, about El's fixation on the (absent) avatar of "Sylvia" and his rejection of the (present) abundance of difference. And here I think we add Bunuel's Obscur objet du désir to Kevin's Vertigo reading.

I'm tempted to read the whole film as a cautionary tale about one allegory of film spectatorship: the rich risks of film as fixing its/our gaze on a (lost) object of desire which can never be incarnated. So then we could read Ciudad de Sylvia as loosening this grip (hence my suggestion that it updates the Laura Mulvey thesis) since it refuses to offer an unambiguous object upon which to fix our desiring gaze. Indeed, it offers alternative figures of moving image itself (metaphors of dynamic celluloid frames) and the aesthetic acceptance of occlusion and the uncanny.

One last thing: Kevin, have you read If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino? En la ciudad de Sylvia could easily be read as a brilliant adaptation of it.
~j

[Note No. 1: You can read my "Part 1" missive by clicking here.]

[Note No. 2: Because the trailer to Bunuel's film and the clip from Hitchcock's were too good to simply link to I'll go ahead and embed them down here. They add to this reading, I think, tremendously.]



[Note No. 3: Kevin's reply can be found by clicking here to his blog. --RWK]

Catching up with 2007.

by Ryland Walker Knight

It is a characteristic criticism of Emerson to say that he lacks a sense of tragedy; for otherwise how can he seem so persistently to preach cheerfulness? But suppose that what Emerson perceives, when he speaks of his fellow citizens as existing in a state of secret melancholy, is that in a democracy, which depends upon a state of willingness to act for the common good, despair is a political emotion, discouraging both participation and patience. So when Emerson asks of the American Scholar that he and she raise and cheer us, he is asking for a step of political encouragement, one that assures us that we are not alone in our sense of compromise with justice, that our sense of an unattained self is not an escape from, it is rather an index of, our commitment to the unattained city, one within the one we sustain, one we know there is no good reason we perpetually fail to attain.
-- Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life

Go to The House to read a kinda-lengthy wrap up of what tickled me in 2007. While it's got pretty much the same format as what I used last year, this time I actually made a list at the end. Still can't rank anything, though, so it's an alphabetical list. I figure that most of the year-end lists and awards are redundant and silly to start with so why not throw my lot in with them? I guess the impetus to not make a list is because it's the same tired grammar most of film criticism continues to use. Not that I think a Better-Than List is worth much; it's still a posture. Not that my awards aren't a posture; my argument is with overbearing seriousness. (For example: I think it's awesome that my buddy Keith lists the Aqua Teen movie-film alongside The Horse.) Not that I'm not serious, but I like some levity; I like to laugh. Every film on my list, even the Reygadas, gave me a chuckle. But there's more of this over there so click this link if you didn't click that link at the beginning.

Also worth reading is Brian Darr's terrific Bay Area rep round up at Hell On Frisco Bay. It helps me to realize that as cool as New York City is (and it's definitely cool), San Francisco and the greater Bay Area have a lot to brag about. It helps to have a blogging buddy like Brian, too, with his calendar-scouring acumen pointing at things I don't always think to check up on. However, during this, my final, semester, I will probably only find time to attend screenings at the PFA. Thankfully, though, their newest calendar is pure dope: on Friday I got to go see Andrei Rublev on a big screen for the first time and during the afternoon of February the 17th I will see Out 1: Spectre, the shorter version (240 minutes) of the best film I saw and hardly wrote a thing about in 2007, Out 1: Noli me tangre (773 minutes). Plus: La Chinoise on my mom's birthday and a mini Terrence Davies retrospective (with the auteur in person at almost every screening, including a shot-by-shot discussion of Distant Voices, Still Lives). On to more merry movie watching and illuminating film writing in 2008.

Shameless Plug

Hey Duff. How's it going?


Yeah, I know.


I feel the same way. I mean summer so far has been, well, such a bummer. There hasn't been much to do. I have already read Middlesex so there goes Oprah's Book Club. Oh well. Did you watch Oprah last week?


Yeah. I needed a box of tissues too. Well, we should get together sometime soon. It's been ages. I mean with you being in the Velvet Underground and me spending all my time dreaming up conversations between myself and celebrities, it's been tough. Hey maybe we can catch a movie sometime...


You're right, Spidey did suck. Maybe we could go see something a little more...I don't know...good?


I don't know Mr. Smarty Pants! Did you ever see:


How about:


Yeah those movies are great! We should get together sometime and watch them. Maybe at your place on your plasma flat screen jumbotron. I'll bring the 8-Ball.


Well I agree, it would be great to see them in the theatre where they were meant to be shown. Hey I know, let's party line G-Money and see if he can do something about this. Hang on. Yo G-Money, what up?


Chillin'.


No shit. Hey me and Duff were talking about hooking up next week and we were wondering if you were down.


Well we were talking about watching some old movies and maybe working on the Patriot Quilt for the 4th of July festivities. Hey, you know what I haven't seen in ages:


And what about:


You think we can come over G and scope these joints?


What?


You're shitting me. Really? In Seattle? They're also playing:


And:


Holy fuck:

All starting Wednesday, June 27th?

Where?