Shane Carruth only needed $7,000 and a few years to give us the headache-inducing Primer; perhaps the process gave him a headache as well, because he hasn't given us another film since. Of course, things take time when you are the writer, director, producer, cinematographer, and editor, not to mention lead actor, and composer to boot, for the project.
The film's aesthetic is as spare and minimalist as the budget implies. Nearly every frame of film shot was used. Sets include a cheap apartment's kitchen and garage, a motel, and a storage facility. The palate is gray and taupe. Even the dialogue is delivered as if there was a surcharge for any complete sentences delivered audibly, so instead, the script is filled with vague technical mutterings. The camera nonchalantly observes, more like a security device than an auteur's intentioned frame.
All of this minimalism makes room for an impressively baroque timeline of events. Primer is a film about time-travel, with some of the same concerns as Back to the Future, like risking encountering your double, but none of the sweeping historical gestures. The box (not so flashy, compared to the DeLorean) can only take you as far back as the number of hours you're willing to spend stretching out inside, sipping from an oxygen tank: you turn it on, say, Friday at 8 AM, go do whatever you want all day, come back at 6 PM, and crawl inside. You lay there for ten hours, and when you get out, it's 8 AM again on Friday. There's not much you can do in this window of time, except trade stocks based on stats from the evening paper, which is what Abe and Aaron, accidental inventors of the box, do. But things are strange and confusing. Sometimes Aaron, listening to a radio with one earphone, dictates what Abe is about to say. But then sometimes, Abe says something different. One day, Aaron's ear begins bleeding. Later, Abe's ear begins bleeding. There might be two Aarons, and one of them may have drugged the other one and kept him hidden in the attic; these doubles remind us of the nefarious ghosts in the new Solaris, posing as the "real" selves, whether or not those selves are made of any stuff more real than the double selves.
My understanding is that Primer takes a good three or four viewings to even get a basic handle on the timeline of events, and I don't know that it aesthetically could sustain my attention through that number of viewings. But it is an interesting puzzle, and I prefer it to other deconstructionist timeline films (e.g. Memento). For $7,000, it is an extremely accomplished headache.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Movies: Batman Begins and The Dark Knight
When The Dark Knight came out and everyone was talking about it, I refused to see it. It was a sequel, and I hadn't seen the first movie. In fact, I had never seen a Batman movie, or any comic book movie at all, for that matter. I had no context by which to judge it, so I recused myself.
But I was recently coerced to watch both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight on a living room couch on a big flat screen television (something I'm not so familiar with, having neither a couch nor a tv). For all of their expense, the films struck me (Begins more so, but DK as well), as having been filmed by a couple of eight-year-olds for two dollars. This is an exaggeration. But there is something about the digital video, the depth of field, and its affect on the camera's quick pan during action scenes, that gave me vertigo. If I wanted to describe this effect in a positive light, I would say that it captured the flattened, stylized cartoons of a comic book, but I don't want to be positive. For reasons incredibly shallow and profoundly deep, I feel that they failed their audience.
Let's be shallow. Katie Holmes, Rachel in Begins, is hot. Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rachel in DK, is not. How am I supposed to accept that Katie, ripe-of-lip-and-breast, with her wet eyes and luminous skin, suddenly has become the dried-up, burnt-out, smoker's-skin Maggie? Maggie has her own kind of indie sex appeal in, say, the Agent Provacateur catalogue, but has no business here, in this pulpy fantasy of urban decay.
Let's be deep. A number of the Joker's monologues are deeply troubling. I watched this movie with two boys: one twelve and one seventeen. They are normal American boys, if a bit precocious, subjected to demonstrations of meaningless violence through video games, movies like this, and the suppressed rage in arguments between their divorced parents. And yet, the Joker's discussion of his father holding a knife to his face, asking "why so serious" before slashing a false and permanent smile onto it, is too much. There is pain of that depth in the world, but I don't want my little brothers inducted into it—particularly in this way, where it is not discussed, contextualized, or countered. What is the Joker, but the uncontrollable force of chaos? He is driven by untreated pain, which becomes rage. Batman is intended to be an inspiration, fighting entropy's evil, but the Joker (as we see) cannot be contained or killed; he must be held, accepted, loved. Batman, still struggling to accept himself, is the wrong hero for this task.
I know that I'm risking sounding like a mother, psychologist, or radical Christian in saying this, but it's clear as we watch Joker poison Harvey Dent in his hospital bed, taking advantage of this moment of pain and isolation to turn an idealist into an evil-doer. Harvey can be saved by love, but instead is condemned by unsupported anguish. I wasn't one of Ledger's many mourners, but I think nevertheless that his death was the culmination of the same unsupported anguish, turned inward like Harvey's rather than out like Joker's.
I am not proposing that Christopher Nolan should have inserted Gandhi as Batman's sidekick (or given him vedic training in Begins); plots are problematized and often driven by the hero's own weaknesses and subconscious sympathies with his enemy. But I worry that audiences, skipping along the surface of entertainment without penetrating critically into its depths, are being wounded, unawares. Chaos is by definition uncontrollable; I worry that the Joker's potency seeps out of the film, and that Batman does not protect us. I worry that we are allowing our hearts to crumble like Gotham.
But I was recently coerced to watch both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight on a living room couch on a big flat screen television (something I'm not so familiar with, having neither a couch nor a tv). For all of their expense, the films struck me (Begins more so, but DK as well), as having been filmed by a couple of eight-year-olds for two dollars. This is an exaggeration. But there is something about the digital video, the depth of field, and its affect on the camera's quick pan during action scenes, that gave me vertigo. If I wanted to describe this effect in a positive light, I would say that it captured the flattened, stylized cartoons of a comic book, but I don't want to be positive. For reasons incredibly shallow and profoundly deep, I feel that they failed their audience.
Let's be shallow. Katie Holmes, Rachel in Begins, is hot. Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rachel in DK, is not. How am I supposed to accept that Katie, ripe-of-lip-and-breast, with her wet eyes and luminous skin, suddenly has become the dried-up, burnt-out, smoker's-skin Maggie? Maggie has her own kind of indie sex appeal in, say, the Agent Provacateur catalogue, but has no business here, in this pulpy fantasy of urban decay.
Let's be deep. A number of the Joker's monologues are deeply troubling. I watched this movie with two boys: one twelve and one seventeen. They are normal American boys, if a bit precocious, subjected to demonstrations of meaningless violence through video games, movies like this, and the suppressed rage in arguments between their divorced parents. And yet, the Joker's discussion of his father holding a knife to his face, asking "why so serious" before slashing a false and permanent smile onto it, is too much. There is pain of that depth in the world, but I don't want my little brothers inducted into it—particularly in this way, where it is not discussed, contextualized, or countered. What is the Joker, but the uncontrollable force of chaos? He is driven by untreated pain, which becomes rage. Batman is intended to be an inspiration, fighting entropy's evil, but the Joker (as we see) cannot be contained or killed; he must be held, accepted, loved. Batman, still struggling to accept himself, is the wrong hero for this task.
I know that I'm risking sounding like a mother, psychologist, or radical Christian in saying this, but it's clear as we watch Joker poison Harvey Dent in his hospital bed, taking advantage of this moment of pain and isolation to turn an idealist into an evil-doer. Harvey can be saved by love, but instead is condemned by unsupported anguish. I wasn't one of Ledger's many mourners, but I think nevertheless that his death was the culmination of the same unsupported anguish, turned inward like Harvey's rather than out like Joker's.
I am not proposing that Christopher Nolan should have inserted Gandhi as Batman's sidekick (or given him vedic training in Begins); plots are problematized and often driven by the hero's own weaknesses and subconscious sympathies with his enemy. But I worry that audiences, skipping along the surface of entertainment without penetrating critically into its depths, are being wounded, unawares. Chaos is by definition uncontrollable; I worry that the Joker's potency seeps out of the film, and that Batman does not protect us. I worry that we are allowing our hearts to crumble like Gotham.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Books: In Search of Lost Time Volume Four: Cities of the Plain, by Marcel Proust
I was expecting, since the more recent Modern Library version of this volume is entitled Sodom & Gomorrah rather than the innocuous Cities of the Plain, that this would be the book in which Marcel comes out. It's not. It is, however, the volume in which Marcel's eyes open to the existence of homosexuality, chiefly as expressed by the behavior of Baron de Charlus, my favorite Proustian character to date. Wide-eyed Marcel, in a lengthy passage about bees pollinating flowers that I would argue rivals the famed madeleine pages, witnesses through a key-hole of sorts, the Baron flirting and then copulating (I think—Proust is very subtle) with Marcel's lower-class neighbor Jupien. The remainder of the volume, following the Baron in his wooing of the working-class, devil-may-care violinist Charles Morel, elucidates Charlus' strange treatment of Marcel in the previous volume: his possessiveness, his tenderness, his raging midnight invective; for before desiring Morel, the Baron desired Marcel.
But our young Proust is busy with Albertine, chasing the vivacious brunette but pretending not to care, loving her so long as she appears out of his reach, tiring of hers when he has her full attention. The middle section of the book drags a bit, as the author returns to his tedious habits of the previous volume, cataloging conversations at parties, most of these now at the Verdurin's "Wednesdays," dinner salons with many of the same "faithful" that witnessed Swann wooing Odette so many volumes ago. Charlus, by way of Morel, somehow becomes one of the faithful, despite his disdain for this set, whose members aren't aware of his pedigree and fraternal relationship to the Gueremantes.
The "excitement" in the volume comes toward the very end: the juxtaposition between the final sentence of the third chapter—"The idea of marrying Albertine appeared to me to be madness." and the final sentence of the fourth, and of the volume: "I absolutely must—and let's settle the matter at once, because I'm quite clear about it now, because I won't change my mind again, because I couldn't live without it—I absolutely must marry Albertine." This sudden change of heart is inspired by Marcel's "discovery" that his earlier suspicions about Albertine's lesbianic tendencies are valid, this "fact" confirmed by Albertine's mentioning that one of her dearest friends, who was like a sister, like a mother to the orphan, is the very same girl that was the fragrant lesbian lover of the composer Vinteuil's daughter. Marcel, that masochist, tells us, "I who until then had never awakened without a smile at the humblest things, the bowl of coffee, the sound of the rain, the roar of the wind, felt that the day which in a moment was about to dawn, and all the days to come, would no longer bring me the hope of an unknown happiness, but only the prolongation of my agony. I still clung to life; but I knew that I had nothing now but bitterness to expect from it" (1155). Oh, Marcel—you do it to yourself.
But our young Proust is busy with Albertine, chasing the vivacious brunette but pretending not to care, loving her so long as she appears out of his reach, tiring of hers when he has her full attention. The middle section of the book drags a bit, as the author returns to his tedious habits of the previous volume, cataloging conversations at parties, most of these now at the Verdurin's "Wednesdays," dinner salons with many of the same "faithful" that witnessed Swann wooing Odette so many volumes ago. Charlus, by way of Morel, somehow becomes one of the faithful, despite his disdain for this set, whose members aren't aware of his pedigree and fraternal relationship to the Gueremantes.
The "excitement" in the volume comes toward the very end: the juxtaposition between the final sentence of the third chapter—"The idea of marrying Albertine appeared to me to be madness." and the final sentence of the fourth, and of the volume: "I absolutely must—and let's settle the matter at once, because I'm quite clear about it now, because I won't change my mind again, because I couldn't live without it—I absolutely must marry Albertine." This sudden change of heart is inspired by Marcel's "discovery" that his earlier suspicions about Albertine's lesbianic tendencies are valid, this "fact" confirmed by Albertine's mentioning that one of her dearest friends, who was like a sister, like a mother to the orphan, is the very same girl that was the fragrant lesbian lover of the composer Vinteuil's daughter. Marcel, that masochist, tells us, "I who until then had never awakened without a smile at the humblest things, the bowl of coffee, the sound of the rain, the roar of the wind, felt that the day which in a moment was about to dawn, and all the days to come, would no longer bring me the hope of an unknown happiness, but only the prolongation of my agony. I still clung to life; but I knew that I had nothing now but bitterness to expect from it" (1155). Oh, Marcel—you do it to yourself.
Dance: Voices and Dance within the Americas, at the Guggenheim's Works and Process
This night, the Guggenheim presented three short pieces by three different choreographers: one American (though his biography describes Jonah Bokaer as "an international choreographer") and two Cubans, Judith Sanchez Ruiz and Maray Gutierrez.
Gutierrez could not make it to speak on the panel, and Eduardo Vilaro, Ballet Hispanico's new Artistic Director, took her place, though he didn't have much of interest to say. The real star of the night was Ruiz, who danced in her piece before joining the panel. With energy as buoyant and vibrant as her barely-controlled curly mop top, Ruiz described, in a charming foreigner's English, her interest in the Cuban American feminist performance artist Ana Mendieta. I know Mendieta's work, though I had never thought much of it, and was fascinated by Ruiz's ability to do what I thought Mendieta, like many politically-inclined artists of the '60s and '70s, was never able to do: make work successful on interconnected aesthetic, physical, and emotional levels, in addition to and in support of the intellectual-political intention.
Ruiz collaborates with Korean-born, New York-based artist Sun Kwak for this piece, which starts with Kwak's "signature expression." Kwak, shoeless, small, and dressed in black, armed with a massive roll of wide, black tape, attaches the free end to the center of the stage front, and pulls the tape across the stage, choosing a line, bending one leg to reach down and smooth and flatten the line she has created, tearing the tape when the line is complete, and beginning again. Her work is rhythmic and repetitive, with minor variations and subtle flourishes. After she works for some time, two dancers (one of them Ruiz), step out, and begin to dramatize Kwak's patterns, playing with the artist's gestures, mimicry, variation, improvisation. This builds until Kwak completes her "drawing," and leaves the stage; another dancer eventually enters.
Ruiz's piece is distinctly feminine, even if her intention is feminist—she described during the panel discussion her interest in Medieta's meditations on "women's work," which is rather refreshing after the somewhat indulgent images of liminal masculinity presented by Bokaer in his Filter, also inspired by the work of an artist: Cuban-American photographer Anthony Goicolea, who takes a place on stage as a dancer. Goicolea's multiple-self portraits are beautiful and haunting, some of the most impressive staged photography I've seen, but I thought Bokaer's piece failed to capture the full promise/threat of the artist's photographs. The stage was dotted with gold-leafed, bare-branched miniature trees (Goicolea's creations) and offered a see-sawing platform at its center, allowing the look-alike dancers to play gently with weight and gravity as the "floor" moved. But the dance, perhaps too faithful to the photographs, relies too heavily on tableau, and felt stilted rather than silent, oppressed rather than suppressed. The rich underchurnings of Goicolea's photographs, strange to say in this movement-art, are missing. It's Ruiz instead who conveys the pre-eruption of bottled emotion with her trembling bodies.
The final piece of the evening, Puntos Suspensivos, further carried this perhaps unintended theme of suppressed and exploding emotions, but only one of the six dancers honestly embodied the piece's intention. Toward the end, the dancers slowly stepped forward, stretched across the stage in a horizontal line. Cued by the music, one at a time and apparently at random, a body would recoil as if shot and fall to the ground, then get up and walk forward again. The soloist's body moved in clear response to this invisible trauma, but every other dancer anticipated her moment, acting instead of reacting, dropping instead of falling.
Gutierrez could not make it to speak on the panel, and Eduardo Vilaro, Ballet Hispanico's new Artistic Director, took her place, though he didn't have much of interest to say. The real star of the night was Ruiz, who danced in her piece before joining the panel. With energy as buoyant and vibrant as her barely-controlled curly mop top, Ruiz described, in a charming foreigner's English, her interest in the Cuban American feminist performance artist Ana Mendieta. I know Mendieta's work, though I had never thought much of it, and was fascinated by Ruiz's ability to do what I thought Mendieta, like many politically-inclined artists of the '60s and '70s, was never able to do: make work successful on interconnected aesthetic, physical, and emotional levels, in addition to and in support of the intellectual-political intention.
Ruiz collaborates with Korean-born, New York-based artist Sun Kwak for this piece, which starts with Kwak's "signature expression." Kwak, shoeless, small, and dressed in black, armed with a massive roll of wide, black tape, attaches the free end to the center of the stage front, and pulls the tape across the stage, choosing a line, bending one leg to reach down and smooth and flatten the line she has created, tearing the tape when the line is complete, and beginning again. Her work is rhythmic and repetitive, with minor variations and subtle flourishes. After she works for some time, two dancers (one of them Ruiz), step out, and begin to dramatize Kwak's patterns, playing with the artist's gestures, mimicry, variation, improvisation. This builds until Kwak completes her "drawing," and leaves the stage; another dancer eventually enters.
Ruiz's piece is distinctly feminine, even if her intention is feminist—she described during the panel discussion her interest in Medieta's meditations on "women's work," which is rather refreshing after the somewhat indulgent images of liminal masculinity presented by Bokaer in his Filter, also inspired by the work of an artist: Cuban-American photographer Anthony Goicolea, who takes a place on stage as a dancer. Goicolea's multiple-self portraits are beautiful and haunting, some of the most impressive staged photography I've seen, but I thought Bokaer's piece failed to capture the full promise/threat of the artist's photographs. The stage was dotted with gold-leafed, bare-branched miniature trees (Goicolea's creations) and offered a see-sawing platform at its center, allowing the look-alike dancers to play gently with weight and gravity as the "floor" moved. But the dance, perhaps too faithful to the photographs, relies too heavily on tableau, and felt stilted rather than silent, oppressed rather than suppressed. The rich underchurnings of Goicolea's photographs, strange to say in this movement-art, are missing. It's Ruiz instead who conveys the pre-eruption of bottled emotion with her trembling bodies.
The final piece of the evening, Puntos Suspensivos, further carried this perhaps unintended theme of suppressed and exploding emotions, but only one of the six dancers honestly embodied the piece's intention. Toward the end, the dancers slowly stepped forward, stretched across the stage in a horizontal line. Cued by the music, one at a time and apparently at random, a body would recoil as if shot and fall to the ground, then get up and walk forward again. The soloist's body moved in clear response to this invisible trauma, but every other dancer anticipated her moment, acting instead of reacting, dropping instead of falling.
Movies: Howl
I have the greatest respect for the intention and ensuing construction of this film: the elucidation of Ginsberg's poem Howl through biography and history, but multiple complaints about its execution.
My foremost accusation is against the animators, a Thai outfit led by Eric Drooker, in a style is too techno-age to suit Ginsberg's time and tone, which nevertheless comes off as dated. This is animation that might have been considered super-edgy in 1995, but would never have been considered—at least by me—as appealing. Nor is it unappealing in the way some of Ginsberg's lines call for: "yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars;" it's not rich enough to demonstrate half of that.
The animated sequences accompany Franco's reading of pieces of the poem (not in entirety, and not straight through, but in jumbled sequences, which I don't mind). His reading is a bit over-studied at times; there is something distinctly schoolboyish in Franco's voice as he reads or recites. But his physical performance as young Ginsberg is more natural, less hiccuping—or maybe still hiccuping, but in a way that jives with young Ginsberg's own uncertainty.
Much of Howl reminds me of Milk—is it just that we again have Franco, in hippy-hipster San Francisco, sorting out being gay? Both films use the dictated monologue-incited flashback structure (which I lamented in Milk), and so it was little surprise to see, when the credits rolled, that Gus Van Sant (Milk's director) served as Producer here. It's hard for me to squelch the gossipy girl in me who wonders if Van Sant has a gay crush on Franco (who is supposedly not gay, but. . . really?), if not more.
I loved Howl from my first reading (in a Catholic high school English class—that's how far we have come from the 1957 obscenity trial), but despite this film's many frustrations, it nevertheless deepened my affection for the work, explaining to me just who Carl is, and what Rockland was, and why that matters. It could have been so much better, but the movie is still good.
My foremost accusation is against the animators, a Thai outfit led by Eric Drooker, in a style is too techno-age to suit Ginsberg's time and tone, which nevertheless comes off as dated. This is animation that might have been considered super-edgy in 1995, but would never have been considered—at least by me—as appealing. Nor is it unappealing in the way some of Ginsberg's lines call for: "yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars;" it's not rich enough to demonstrate half of that.
The animated sequences accompany Franco's reading of pieces of the poem (not in entirety, and not straight through, but in jumbled sequences, which I don't mind). His reading is a bit over-studied at times; there is something distinctly schoolboyish in Franco's voice as he reads or recites. But his physical performance as young Ginsberg is more natural, less hiccuping—or maybe still hiccuping, but in a way that jives with young Ginsberg's own uncertainty.
Much of Howl reminds me of Milk—is it just that we again have Franco, in hippy-hipster San Francisco, sorting out being gay? Both films use the dictated monologue-incited flashback structure (which I lamented in Milk), and so it was little surprise to see, when the credits rolled, that Gus Van Sant (Milk's director) served as Producer here. It's hard for me to squelch the gossipy girl in me who wonders if Van Sant has a gay crush on Franco (who is supposedly not gay, but. . . really?), if not more.
I loved Howl from my first reading (in a Catholic high school English class—that's how far we have come from the 1957 obscenity trial), but despite this film's many frustrations, it nevertheless deepened my affection for the work, explaining to me just who Carl is, and what Rockland was, and why that matters. It could have been so much better, but the movie is still good.
Dance: The Music of David Lang Interpreted at the Guggenheim's Works and Process
I saw this show six weeks ago, but haven't yet forgotten my surprise that two pieces of music by the same composer—the so-called laws of nature and forced march by David Lang—could be so different. The aim of the program was rather to demonstrate how differently two choreographers might interpret this music, offering first Jessica Lang's (no relation) interpretation, then Pontus Lidberg's, displayed on the bodies of the same dancers from Morphoses. And yet, while there was certainly a difference to be seen in the choreographer's linear tone, it was far more subtle than the overt difference in the two musical selections each were given to work with.
Lang composed the so-called laws of nature for a percussion ensemble, providing in the score instructions for creating the "instruments" with which to make the sounds. The resonant eastern chimes are actually the vibrations of teacups, which plink and tinkle with the organic delicacy of rain on a wind-free lake. While Jessica Lang ties her dancers to the staccato rhythm of these sounds and Pontus Linberg to the length of their reverberations, both choreographers work in a modern, sensorialist vocabulary. To find a parallel in painting, Lang uses the bolder lines of the Expressionists, and Lindberg the softer insinuations of the Impressionists, but the intention is shared, and the styles are only separated by a decade, and a taste of hardship.
The audience's hardship is in being assaulted not just once, but twice, by the interminable forced march, a meandering piece for virtuoso electric guitar which Lang gleefully admitted was an experiment in extending a phrase, forced into a march's time signature (and enforced by a loathsome snare), for as long as possible. The choreographers were given freedom in ordering the musical selections, and Lang chose to begin with the so-called laws and conclude with forced march. Our respite was only for the short duration of conversation between the choreographers and composers before we were again subjected to forced march, for Lidberg chose to use it first, perhaps in hopes of getting it out of the way, and then assuaging us with the softer patterns of the so-called laws. Unfortunately, after sitting through forced march twice, our nerves were raw and frazzled, and no balm could do them any good—even the magical, color-changing costumes that echoed for Lidberg the mid-night blooming of a flower that only shows itself every hundred years, and which showed itself to him while he was choreographing the piece.
Lang composed the so-called laws of nature for a percussion ensemble, providing in the score instructions for creating the "instruments" with which to make the sounds. The resonant eastern chimes are actually the vibrations of teacups, which plink and tinkle with the organic delicacy of rain on a wind-free lake. While Jessica Lang ties her dancers to the staccato rhythm of these sounds and Pontus Linberg to the length of their reverberations, both choreographers work in a modern, sensorialist vocabulary. To find a parallel in painting, Lang uses the bolder lines of the Expressionists, and Lindberg the softer insinuations of the Impressionists, but the intention is shared, and the styles are only separated by a decade, and a taste of hardship.
The audience's hardship is in being assaulted not just once, but twice, by the interminable forced march, a meandering piece for virtuoso electric guitar which Lang gleefully admitted was an experiment in extending a phrase, forced into a march's time signature (and enforced by a loathsome snare), for as long as possible. The choreographers were given freedom in ordering the musical selections, and Lang chose to begin with the so-called laws and conclude with forced march. Our respite was only for the short duration of conversation between the choreographers and composers before we were again subjected to forced march, for Lidberg chose to use it first, perhaps in hopes of getting it out of the way, and then assuaging us with the softer patterns of the so-called laws. Unfortunately, after sitting through forced march twice, our nerves were raw and frazzled, and no balm could do them any good—even the magical, color-changing costumes that echoed for Lidberg the mid-night blooming of a flower that only shows itself every hundred years, and which showed itself to him while he was choreographing the piece.
Movies: Back to the Future, I & II
When I was a kid, I videotaped Back to the Future II off HBO and watched it again and again and again. I had only seen the original movie once, and even then probably missed the opening sequence, because when I watched it on DVD last month, it was completely unfamiliar. What surprised me most was the quality—or lack of quality—of the film. Accustomed to the texture of classic as much as contemporary films, this thing looked like it was shot on VHS by a group of fifth graders on a ten-dollar budget. This is not to detract from its brilliance; I was totally captivated.
Plenty of websites are dedicated to the analysis of the technical possibilities and impossibilities of the film, but as much of a nerd as I am, my attraction to these movies has little to do with time travel (despite the fact that one of the other few movies I obsessively watched on VHS as a child was also structured by time travel: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure). Though I am fascinated by the presentation of various “presents” and futures based on seemingly minor edits of the past, I’m more interested in the characters’ emotional development. These aren’t “deep” movies dedicated to character development, but they manage to convey something essential in their sweeping way: our emotional health and stability is derived from our parents’ emotional health and stability.
I could be critical, and insist on deconstructing the movies’ typological characters—Biff of the 1950s is the same bully as Biff of the 1980s, who is the same bully as Biff of the 21st century—he never grows, changes, learns to do anything other than beat Marty McFly over the head for stolen homework. But Biff is a mere personification of everything in the world that is base, lazy, complacent, gross in appetites and behavior. Marty, the plucky hero, the uncertain dreamer, he who knows what is right, though he is often in deeper than he would like, is the counter force, everything in our would that has potential. So long as that shoot is protected and cultivated, the future is promising.
Analysis aside, everything about these movies is simply so fun and imaginative that I spent the four hours watching them yelping in glee. I felt the same way watching ET. There is a quality of wonder and creativity particular to movies of the 80s, and I don’t think this is subjective (I was born in 1982). Culturally, we are so savvy today, so postmodern, so ironic. Nothing ruffles us. We are so cool, we’re cold. We’re dead. Our films are filled with fast cuts and flashy effects and explosions and noises and slick, shining bodies; even our arthouse flicks are cool, over-experienced, jaded. Before the 80s, movies were stuck—grotesquely over-produced in Hollywood, emotionally flaccid in the arthouse. I’m making sweeping generalizations here, and I’m not saying that brilliant movies weren’t made before and after the 80s (obviously—I do enjoy grotesque over-production and slick bodies and emotional impotence, I swear!). I suppose I’m saying that for a moment in the 1980s, movies were as plucky as 1980s Marty McFly, with the potential do amazing things, though still lacking a bit in tools with which to do them. I’m just afraid that, cinematographically at least, we are living in the alternate future of Biff-world.
Plenty of websites are dedicated to the analysis of the technical possibilities and impossibilities of the film, but as much of a nerd as I am, my attraction to these movies has little to do with time travel (despite the fact that one of the other few movies I obsessively watched on VHS as a child was also structured by time travel: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure). Though I am fascinated by the presentation of various “presents” and futures based on seemingly minor edits of the past, I’m more interested in the characters’ emotional development. These aren’t “deep” movies dedicated to character development, but they manage to convey something essential in their sweeping way: our emotional health and stability is derived from our parents’ emotional health and stability.
I could be critical, and insist on deconstructing the movies’ typological characters—Biff of the 1950s is the same bully as Biff of the 1980s, who is the same bully as Biff of the 21st century—he never grows, changes, learns to do anything other than beat Marty McFly over the head for stolen homework. But Biff is a mere personification of everything in the world that is base, lazy, complacent, gross in appetites and behavior. Marty, the plucky hero, the uncertain dreamer, he who knows what is right, though he is often in deeper than he would like, is the counter force, everything in our would that has potential. So long as that shoot is protected and cultivated, the future is promising.
Analysis aside, everything about these movies is simply so fun and imaginative that I spent the four hours watching them yelping in glee. I felt the same way watching ET. There is a quality of wonder and creativity particular to movies of the 80s, and I don’t think this is subjective (I was born in 1982). Culturally, we are so savvy today, so postmodern, so ironic. Nothing ruffles us. We are so cool, we’re cold. We’re dead. Our films are filled with fast cuts and flashy effects and explosions and noises and slick, shining bodies; even our arthouse flicks are cool, over-experienced, jaded. Before the 80s, movies were stuck—grotesquely over-produced in Hollywood, emotionally flaccid in the arthouse. I’m making sweeping generalizations here, and I’m not saying that brilliant movies weren’t made before and after the 80s (obviously—I do enjoy grotesque over-production and slick bodies and emotional impotence, I swear!). I suppose I’m saying that for a moment in the 1980s, movies were as plucky as 1980s Marty McFly, with the potential do amazing things, though still lacking a bit in tools with which to do them. I’m just afraid that, cinematographically at least, we are living in the alternate future of Biff-world.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Books: In Search of Lost Time Volume Three: The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust
Apparently, readers are itchy because I haven't posted on Proust for more than a month. Blame Marcel for writing such a dreadfully dull third volume, in which nothing of consequence ever happens, other than the attendance of chatter-filled dinner parties and "at-homes" in which the characters gossip about who is a Dreyfusard and who is an anti-.
Frankly, I find the Dreyfus Affair rather dull. As an undergraduate, I constantly heard it referenced, so I finally looked it up. It made so shallow an impression that, coming across it again in The Guermantes Way, I had to again look it up. As it turns out, the case is quite a bit more interesting than Proust makes it out to be. Still, Volume III now represents to me, in a particular way (i.e., not the way Marcel intended) lost time.
If I thought the volume warranted more discussion, I would offer it, but so far it seems that it is only worth reading to fill in the logical lacuna generated by reading only Volumes II and IV (the former filled with the titillations of heterosexual desire, the latter promising the titillations of homosexual pursuits (or so it seems; I've only read the first few pages)).
Frankly, I find the Dreyfus Affair rather dull. As an undergraduate, I constantly heard it referenced, so I finally looked it up. It made so shallow an impression that, coming across it again in The Guermantes Way, I had to again look it up. As it turns out, the case is quite a bit more interesting than Proust makes it out to be. Still, Volume III now represents to me, in a particular way (i.e., not the way Marcel intended) lost time.
If I thought the volume warranted more discussion, I would offer it, but so far it seems that it is only worth reading to fill in the logical lacuna generated by reading only Volumes II and IV (the former filled with the titillations of heterosexual desire, the latter promising the titillations of homosexual pursuits (or so it seems; I've only read the first few pages)).
Music: Gotham Chamber Opera—El Gato con Botas
To file this post under "music" is a bit deceptive, but not any more deceptive than the Guggenheim promising "El Gato con Botas" and presenting "Puss in Boots." The Gotham Chamber Opera will be offering the Spaniard Montsalvatge's opera both in the original Spanish as well as English translation performances, but I was rather disappointed that the Works and Process preview gave us the lesser of those two choices.
I was equally disappointed that, promised "puppets" in plural form, we were only shown one puppet (though it was a puppet comprised of plural pieces, and quite an astonishing puppet at that), for this production at the New Victory Theater is a puppet production, inspired by Artistic Director Neal Goren's admitted discomfort with the idea of live people playing animal characters. No self-respecting opera star is willing to dress up in a cat costume, it seems—save that trash for Broadway.
The excessively caffeinated Goren practically stole the podium from moderator Anotoni Pizà, whose greatest moment was cutting off the conductor's effusive stream to ask him whether or not he keeps a pet cat. But the more intriguing character was Mark Down, the Artistic Director of Blind Summit Theater, the collaborators responsible for the puppets. For these are not Sifl & Olly sock puppets. The one puppet we saw tonight—the ogre—requires seven sweating puppeteers, never mind the opera singer who stands alongside them, sweating and heaving himself.
I found nothing particularly interesting in Montsalvatge's music (I'm by no means an opera fan, but I still think I can recognize whether a particular work has any value), but the puppet—oh the puppet! What a creation of astonishing artistic and physical genius. Never have I seen such an enormous living, breathing thing made of seven sculpted hunks of foam mounted on poles, operated by the nerdiest subcategory of theater nerds: professional puppeteers. What stars they are, these puppet-wielders, brutishly, nimbly, willfully dancing this other being into life.
I say, more puppets, less singing.
I was equally disappointed that, promised "puppets" in plural form, we were only shown one puppet (though it was a puppet comprised of plural pieces, and quite an astonishing puppet at that), for this production at the New Victory Theater is a puppet production, inspired by Artistic Director Neal Goren's admitted discomfort with the idea of live people playing animal characters. No self-respecting opera star is willing to dress up in a cat costume, it seems—save that trash for Broadway.
The excessively caffeinated Goren practically stole the podium from moderator Anotoni Pizà, whose greatest moment was cutting off the conductor's effusive stream to ask him whether or not he keeps a pet cat. But the more intriguing character was Mark Down, the Artistic Director of Blind Summit Theater, the collaborators responsible for the puppets. For these are not Sifl & Olly sock puppets. The one puppet we saw tonight—the ogre—requires seven sweating puppeteers, never mind the opera singer who stands alongside them, sweating and heaving himself.
I found nothing particularly interesting in Montsalvatge's music (I'm by no means an opera fan, but I still think I can recognize whether a particular work has any value), but the puppet—oh the puppet! What a creation of astonishing artistic and physical genius. Never have I seen such an enormous living, breathing thing made of seven sculpted hunks of foam mounted on poles, operated by the nerdiest subcategory of theater nerds: professional puppeteers. What stars they are, these puppet-wielders, brutishly, nimbly, willfully dancing this other being into life.
I say, more puppets, less singing.
Dance: Maa: A Ballet by Kaija Saariaho, Choreography by Luca Veggetti at the Guggenheim's Works and Process
I was previously unfamiliar with both Kaija Saariaho and Luca Veggetti, but bought tickets (as I generally do) to all of this season's Works and Process shows involving dance. While I enjoyed the dancing, though, Kaija Saariaho's composition absorbed me more fully, the bodies onstage merely echoing faintly the deeper sensations the music inspired in me. The evening began with a piece for four dancers and a live harpist, but the vibrations that impregnated the air were and were not the sounds of a harp. The skittish rhythms and unsettling tone progressions were not those that flow mellifluously from a typical harp. The musician's visage expressed the screwed concentration of a violinist playing something by Steve Reich, rather than the beneficent glow that typifies the classical harpist. The music was intellectual, architectural, vast, and though without what one would call "melody," extremely beautiful. How surprising, then, when the composer revealed herself for discussion, an elderly, fragile thing with orange hair and a smear of red lipstick.
Saariaho explained that what we had heard was not merely harp, but harp processed through live electronics—the source of the sound's vast "-scape."* Maa was composed in 1991, as a ballet in seven parts for choreographer Carolyn Carlson. Saariaho described her artistic differences with Carlson with the generosity that comes, in part, from age—originally imagining the piece for seven dancers, Carlson ended up casting 24; agreeing with Saariaho that the piece would be abstract, she eventually inserted narrative drama. Veggetti, on the contrary, uses seven bodies with no narrative outside of the dialogue between the shapes of the music and the shapes of their bodies. . . perhaps to such an extreme it becomes a fault.
What Veggetti said of consequence during the interluding panel discussions was the importance of casting dancers with skill, aside from the artistic and emotional openness to try something new. Skilled indeed—sometimes restrained by that skill—are his dancers, the majority of which are Julliard students or graduates (as are the musicians—what a disturbingly talented lot of young people). Frances Chiaverini, a great**, tall dancer, combining somehow the sleek, heavy musculature and subtle force of a thoroughbred and a panther, nevertheless stands out amongst the group; to her, of course, goes the solo ...de la Terre.
Veggetti prizes ballet's long, high leg and proud, upright head. Never, not once, did a dancer drop her head into a movement, giving into the sensuous abandon I prize in the best practitioners of contact/release. That said, from modern dance he takes the liquid torso, the element of chance (his dancers danced not in shoes, and not barefoot, but in thin, slippery socks, in which they could run across the stage, sliding to a stop), and an interest in inter-body counterbalance. The more interesting moments of choreography are the architectural pauses, where one dancer uses two other bodies, firmly planted, to push herself slowly into a floating arabesque, or some other root-to-rise expression.
But after this evening, I won't look for Veggetti's work again; it is fine enough, but in a world of many dance-makers, not sufficiently compelling. Saariaho, contrarily, has completely captivated me, and I have already begun seeking recordings of her echoing, mysterious music, and wondering when I will be able to see her newest opera, Émilie (a monographic monodrama on the female mathematician and physicist Marquise Émilie du Châtelet, who also happened to be Voltaire's mistress).
*My description, not the composer's.
**as in "big"
Saariaho explained that what we had heard was not merely harp, but harp processed through live electronics—the source of the sound's vast "-scape."* Maa was composed in 1991, as a ballet in seven parts for choreographer Carolyn Carlson. Saariaho described her artistic differences with Carlson with the generosity that comes, in part, from age—originally imagining the piece for seven dancers, Carlson ended up casting 24; agreeing with Saariaho that the piece would be abstract, she eventually inserted narrative drama. Veggetti, on the contrary, uses seven bodies with no narrative outside of the dialogue between the shapes of the music and the shapes of their bodies. . . perhaps to such an extreme it becomes a fault.
What Veggetti said of consequence during the interluding panel discussions was the importance of casting dancers with skill, aside from the artistic and emotional openness to try something new. Skilled indeed—sometimes restrained by that skill—are his dancers, the majority of which are Julliard students or graduates (as are the musicians—what a disturbingly talented lot of young people). Frances Chiaverini, a great**, tall dancer, combining somehow the sleek, heavy musculature and subtle force of a thoroughbred and a panther, nevertheless stands out amongst the group; to her, of course, goes the solo ...de la Terre.
Veggetti prizes ballet's long, high leg and proud, upright head. Never, not once, did a dancer drop her head into a movement, giving into the sensuous abandon I prize in the best practitioners of contact/release. That said, from modern dance he takes the liquid torso, the element of chance (his dancers danced not in shoes, and not barefoot, but in thin, slippery socks, in which they could run across the stage, sliding to a stop), and an interest in inter-body counterbalance. The more interesting moments of choreography are the architectural pauses, where one dancer uses two other bodies, firmly planted, to push herself slowly into a floating arabesque, or some other root-to-rise expression.
But after this evening, I won't look for Veggetti's work again; it is fine enough, but in a world of many dance-makers, not sufficiently compelling. Saariaho, contrarily, has completely captivated me, and I have already begun seeking recordings of her echoing, mysterious music, and wondering when I will be able to see her newest opera, Émilie (a monographic monodrama on the female mathematician and physicist Marquise Émilie du Châtelet, who also happened to be Voltaire's mistress).
*My description, not the composer's.
**as in "big"
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