Her Majesty, Love (William Dieterle, 1931)
Her Majesty, Love (William Dieterle, 1931)
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Bénédictine
Her Majesty, Love (William Dieterle, 1931)
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The Promised Land
Hot Blood (Nicholas Ray, 1956)
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Family Matters
Fists in the Pocket (Marco Bellocchio, 1965)
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Double Lives
Guilty of Romance (Sion Sono, 2011)
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Saved
The Rapture (Michael Tolkin, 1994)
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Formalism
David Bordwell has recently written:
In English, of course, the word has so many meanings that it should probably be retired. Sometimes it means studying “form” and neglecting “content”; that was part of what the Stalinist hacks meant when they insisted that Shklovsky & Co. weren’t advancing the class struggle by emphasizing ideology. Today, to use “formalism” as a slam is often to suggest something similar—that a formalist ignores “content” like race, class, gender, and nation. But the Formalists didn’t neglect content. What others considered content they treated as material that is shaped by the literary work.
In many ways I agree with Bordwell that attention to aesthetic form or style is often lacking in cultural criticism and scholarship, and this in turn blinds us to ways in which cultural objects mean ... which cuts us off from considering the richness of texts. (And as far as I am concerned that, in turn, is a way of ultimately disavowing social richness and difference.) I do think that Bordwell has mischaracterized some of the critique of formalism here, though. I am not so sure that critics of formalism view race, class, gender, and nation as "content" (meaning "the important stuff") exactly. Instead we could look to how Bordwell and many other formalists tend to describe style. It is almost always explicable in terms of narrative construction. (Or, in the absence or elision of narrative motivations, then some other kind of quasi-intentional coherence.) But does the whole domain of formal motivation boil down to a matter of logistics for an authorial or generic agency? I'm not convinced this is the case.
Another way to put this: what is structuring the structures? What forms the form? If the motivation of the plot is to put the blissful wedding last (for example), what motivates the motivation to code a marriage as "happily ever after"? We could even say that these dreaded ideology-seekers of Cultural Studies & Co. are the deeper proponents of the study of form. This leads back to the domain of one of my own pet theories, which is that so much of how we make sense of art and mediation is a matter of figure/ground distinctions.
The formalist might feel a temptation to respond, "Who has time to attend to all these points of overdetermination, though? We've got to focus on film itself and leave other stuff to other disciplines." Something close to this is suggested by Nicole Brenez in a recent interview:
First, there are the disciplines that are using cinema just as a material, like History, Sociology. There are very superficial ways of considering films. Usually they only see the surface, or the stories. Most of them are considering films as symptoms, but they never reach the illness, if I can say that. That part is very interesting, but not specific and not deep enough. Then there are the methodologies that are working in the cinema studies themselves: semiology, psychoanalysis, narratology etc. For me all these methods are interesting and valid, but in a way they are also not in the heart of what a film is. Any kind of attempt to go to the core of the film – the visual and the acoustic proposal of the film – is important and necessary, but they are very, very rare. In the very precise methodological field of film analysis – not theory or history – I don’t see a lot of good work being made, at least not in France. Maybe there are many things abroad.
Brenez is not someone who could be accused of brushing aside the sociopolitical dimensions of cinema, and furthermore, regular readers will know the high esteem I have for her work. So she, too, suggests that discussion of "the visual and the acoustic" properties of a film, its formal elements, bear a special and necessary place in the analysis of cinema. But Brenez's call is something different from - I believe - what many formalists or aesthetes would support. She goes on:
But formalist, in the true sense of this adjective, the Russian term, like Chklovski or Balász, that in a way is now integrated in the introduction of cinematic studies, when you learn to study parameter by parameter, component by component. But it’s like when a doctor is learning anatomy, but not learning how to bring life again. When you do only this, when you are formalist in the didactical sense of the term, not in the inventing sense of formalism at the 1920′s, of course, you are just dissecting, you are just mutating the film into a corpse. But then what is interesting is: how is it breathing? How is it alive? For me you have to invent an ad hoc analysis for each film. If you are taking seriously the formalist analysis, each film or each body of work requires a singular analysis. It was like an intuition forever, and then progressively I discovered that the most beautiful accomplishment of such principle is – well, it’s always him, but… – Walter Benjamin, when he analyses, for example, the work of Baudelaire, and everything is invention. He takes a text and then submit it to many different questions – philosophical, sociological, iconographical etc. It’s not that you can read it and then apply it, of course, but I would say it’s a structural model. You can’t reproduce it, but you can reproduce the principle: each film is a laboratory, if you want to be faithful to it. You’re not obliged, you can take a superficial look, there are many things to do. But the most beautiful way to be formalist is to be benjaminian.
In other words, the activity of true formal analysis is never divorced from ideology, it doesn't actually ever leave the intertwined overdeterminacy of these other disciplines, nor is it ultimately a matter of storytelling logistics, but instead is something like the aorta in the beating heart of our social world.
In English, of course, the word has so many meanings that it should probably be retired. Sometimes it means studying “form” and neglecting “content”; that was part of what the Stalinist hacks meant when they insisted that Shklovsky & Co. weren’t advancing the class struggle by emphasizing ideology. Today, to use “formalism” as a slam is often to suggest something similar—that a formalist ignores “content” like race, class, gender, and nation. But the Formalists didn’t neglect content. What others considered content they treated as material that is shaped by the literary work.
In many ways I agree with Bordwell that attention to aesthetic form or style is often lacking in cultural criticism and scholarship, and this in turn blinds us to ways in which cultural objects mean ... which cuts us off from considering the richness of texts. (And as far as I am concerned that, in turn, is a way of ultimately disavowing social richness and difference.) I do think that Bordwell has mischaracterized some of the critique of formalism here, though. I am not so sure that critics of formalism view race, class, gender, and nation as "content" (meaning "the important stuff") exactly. Instead we could look to how Bordwell and many other formalists tend to describe style. It is almost always explicable in terms of narrative construction. (Or, in the absence or elision of narrative motivations, then some other kind of quasi-intentional coherence.) But does the whole domain of formal motivation boil down to a matter of logistics for an authorial or generic agency? I'm not convinced this is the case.
Another way to put this: what is structuring the structures? What forms the form? If the motivation of the plot is to put the blissful wedding last (for example), what motivates the motivation to code a marriage as "happily ever after"? We could even say that these dreaded ideology-seekers of Cultural Studies & Co. are the deeper proponents of the study of form. This leads back to the domain of one of my own pet theories, which is that so much of how we make sense of art and mediation is a matter of figure/ground distinctions.
The formalist might feel a temptation to respond, "Who has time to attend to all these points of overdetermination, though? We've got to focus on film itself and leave other stuff to other disciplines." Something close to this is suggested by Nicole Brenez in a recent interview:
First, there are the disciplines that are using cinema just as a material, like History, Sociology. There are very superficial ways of considering films. Usually they only see the surface, or the stories. Most of them are considering films as symptoms, but they never reach the illness, if I can say that. That part is very interesting, but not specific and not deep enough. Then there are the methodologies that are working in the cinema studies themselves: semiology, psychoanalysis, narratology etc. For me all these methods are interesting and valid, but in a way they are also not in the heart of what a film is. Any kind of attempt to go to the core of the film – the visual and the acoustic proposal of the film – is important and necessary, but they are very, very rare. In the very precise methodological field of film analysis – not theory or history – I don’t see a lot of good work being made, at least not in France. Maybe there are many things abroad.
Brenez is not someone who could be accused of brushing aside the sociopolitical dimensions of cinema, and furthermore, regular readers will know the high esteem I have for her work. So she, too, suggests that discussion of "the visual and the acoustic" properties of a film, its formal elements, bear a special and necessary place in the analysis of cinema. But Brenez's call is something different from - I believe - what many formalists or aesthetes would support. She goes on:
But formalist, in the true sense of this adjective, the Russian term, like Chklovski or Balász, that in a way is now integrated in the introduction of cinematic studies, when you learn to study parameter by parameter, component by component. But it’s like when a doctor is learning anatomy, but not learning how to bring life again. When you do only this, when you are formalist in the didactical sense of the term, not in the inventing sense of formalism at the 1920′s, of course, you are just dissecting, you are just mutating the film into a corpse. But then what is interesting is: how is it breathing? How is it alive? For me you have to invent an ad hoc analysis for each film. If you are taking seriously the formalist analysis, each film or each body of work requires a singular analysis. It was like an intuition forever, and then progressively I discovered that the most beautiful accomplishment of such principle is – well, it’s always him, but… – Walter Benjamin, when he analyses, for example, the work of Baudelaire, and everything is invention. He takes a text and then submit it to many different questions – philosophical, sociological, iconographical etc. It’s not that you can read it and then apply it, of course, but I would say it’s a structural model. You can’t reproduce it, but you can reproduce the principle: each film is a laboratory, if you want to be faithful to it. You’re not obliged, you can take a superficial look, there are many things to do. But the most beautiful way to be formalist is to be benjaminian.
For me, the next step in my thinking about methodology and film analysis would be to try to propose something a bit systematic about how to analyze les présupposés, the postulates of a film. How a film postulates what is it about? Not only the way it treats, for example, an animal, or a woman, or a garden, any motive, but what it postulates? Not what is in the film, but what a film has to think to exist? I’m not sure if I’m being clear. The présupposé is what you are thinking and considering before you make something. It’s the place of ideology, in a way. Everything that you are not explicitly saying, but what you think, what you believe before considering a phenomenon. Every film, radical or – of course – ideological, has its présupposés: the things that it doesn’t say, but that are working in the film. For example: what does a film postulate to represent a woman? What do you postulate about what is a war to represent a war? It’s amazing. It’s an enormous field of thinking. And it’s exactly where all the obviousness relies, and there is no obviousness in the world. Everything is a construction. But that’s something you can’t do if you haven’t made a true deep formal and structural analysis before of what is really in the film and what the film really is about. And only a deep analysis can decide that, understand that.
In other words, the activity of true formal analysis is never divorced from ideology, it doesn't actually ever leave the intertwined overdeterminacy of these other disciplines, nor is it ultimately a matter of storytelling logistics, but instead is something like the aorta in the beating heart of our social world.
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Landscape Suicide
Drum Beat (Delmer Daves, 1954) - Bertrand Tavernier said the film "has a breathtaking visual splendor that paradoxically underscores the meditative, melancholy quality of the best scenes and compensates for the weakness of the initial premise and the performances."I don't think I agree that the imagery completely makes up for an otherwise weak film; instead this seems to be a case of staccato bursts of gripping pictorial compositions stuck in a work that (overall) doesn't deserve them, like bits of food in aspic. But it is true that there seem to be many beautiful shots here. Best I can tell from my own imperfect digital copy, anyway. Some of these screengrabs hardly do the images justice, I'm sure.
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Gone
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Back
The nerves twitch, the muscle contracts, and a brief electricity fills the air ...
Almost nobody reads blogs anymore, and almost nobody will read this. I experimented for a few years with Tumblr. That mostly evolved, or devolved, into screencaps anyway, and not even in an inventive or constructive way. No need to continue there. It wasn't a place of community (for me). The film blogosphere was once a place of community, but not much now, either. However, Elusive Lucidity was always meant as a public notebook, and there is nothing preventing it from being that. I'm reopening this notebook as an experiment ... maybe it will last for a few posts. Maybe not even that. We'll see how it fits into my life.
Speaking of my life, what's left for movies in it? I work, I commute, I do household chores, I run errands, I have 'extracurricular' activities and commitments, I try to be a good partner, I try to write. I don't always have much time to watch movies in this season of my life, particularly on the big screen, even though that is an important activity for me.
I'm not trying to make this into a New Year's resolution, but I wonder if I can at least rekindle some of the energies that propelled me to write and send that writing out into the world when I was younger and, if I'm honest, my world was simpler. If I can do this, if I can produce writing and (one step more) polish it and disseminate it, I suspect I will be better off.
This is the old scratchpad. I don't know how many pages it has left. That's a statement of possibility, not closure.
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Close to the Skin
More often than before, perhaps, I look for secrets in movies. I look for the places where the film suggests in some way an entire world contained within it, a world into which we might step because we see that this corresponds to the hidden interiors within ourselves. We project so much.
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Body Electric
It's easy to wear things lightly, but we can be habituated to forms of completism and notions of integrity that inhibit thinking. It's not always about checking everything off the list.
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In The Souvenir, the horrors of keeping things hidden and the wellspring of simple human emotions are almost too unbearable. I watched it on my laptop after losing (again) to sleep maintenance insomnia and I was wrecked. Devastated. Ugly cries can be cathartic but sometimes that's not really the right word; these reactions can draw things out or sometimes it feels like there's something there, new, more, right beside you. These emotions are prosthetic. It's about sketching out spaces to fill in gaps.
Joanna Hogg's mastery of narrative elision is gobsmacking.
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I've never been a smoker but if I was born a generation or two earlier, certainly I would have been a chain smoker.
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I understand these early notes are cryptic. I'm testing things out for myself. More content will come, here or elsewhere, and things will, I hope, be clearer.
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In The Souvenir, the horrors of keeping things hidden and the wellspring of simple human emotions are almost too unbearable. I watched it on my laptop after losing (again) to sleep maintenance insomnia and I was wrecked. Devastated. Ugly cries can be cathartic but sometimes that's not really the right word; these reactions can draw things out or sometimes it feels like there's something there, new, more, right beside you. These emotions are prosthetic. It's about sketching out spaces to fill in gaps.
Joanna Hogg's mastery of narrative elision is gobsmacking.
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I've never been a smoker but if I was born a generation or two earlier, certainly I would have been a chain smoker.
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I understand these early notes are cryptic. I'm testing things out for myself. More content will come, here or elsewhere, and things will, I hope, be clearer.
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Over
In James Salter's story "Platinum," the narration deftly passes from one affair-world to another, a few times, as if a faint echo of La Ronde, and it's heartbreaking but in an almost cool, detached, world-weary way. This kind of thing just keeps happening. Some people tend to get the upper hand more often than others. On the one hand, these rich and sophisticated characters (barely sketched out) seem accustomed to having their dreams come true, at least for a while. At the same time, we see that one of them hurts that much more for the dissolution of the dream.
"Her stunning naked back. The most sacred hours, he realized, of his life." That past tense, he realized, is what hurts!
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"Her stunning naked back. The most sacred hours, he realized, of his life." That past tense, he realized, is what hurts!
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Reading Material
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Throwaway Thought
I'll say this, too: the blogger design doesn't seem to be as amenable to clean images and lines as it used to be. That's OK. From a visual standpoint, a lot of the blogs I liked the best were either finely tuned and very much of a single aesthetic piece, or they were heterodox, syncretic, and messy (and only over time established their own 'signature' through the mess).
Zombie Elusive Lucidity will be messy for whatever afterlife it enjoys.
Zombie Elusive Lucidity will be messy for whatever afterlife it enjoys.
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Colossus
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No Receipts for the Sender
In her classic essay “Banality in Cultural Studies,” Meaghan Morris recounts an anecdote about how the news from Sydney was that there was no news. The point of the anecdote is that there is a media event which is, in fact, equally a non-media event and a media non-event.
I think I’ve loved this anecdote for a long time because it clarifies something so often at stake in media culture. Like Guy Debord said, in the society of the spectacle, that which is good appears and that which appears is good.
Roughly the same time that Morris published “Banality in Cultural Studies,” several films ventured to map the mediascape of its present and future apocalypses and dystopias by means of communication media. In other words, word trickled out through mass media, and then there were no words, and the pathos of this non-communication underwrite the depressive bewilderment of these stories in which there is no more oversight, no final account, and no receipt for a sender’s message.
A break in communication, or more to the point, the break in communicability via apparatuses like broadcasting and journalistic publishing, formed a rhetorical trope in imaginations of dystopian and apocalyptic narrative cinema in the mid-to-late 20th century. In my mind, this stretches from Chantal Akerman's News from Home (1977), even, into Death Watch (Bertrand Tavernier, 1980) or Sleeping Dogs (Roger Donaldson, 1977), as well as Romero's second and third Dead films.
I think I’ve loved this anecdote for a long time because it clarifies something so often at stake in media culture. Like Guy Debord said, in the society of the spectacle, that which is good appears and that which appears is good.
Roughly the same time that Morris published “Banality in Cultural Studies,” several films ventured to map the mediascape of its present and future apocalypses and dystopias by means of communication media. In other words, word trickled out through mass media, and then there were no words, and the pathos of this non-communication underwrite the depressive bewilderment of these stories in which there is no more oversight, no final account, and no receipt for a sender’s message.
A break in communication, or more to the point, the break in communicability via apparatuses like broadcasting and journalistic publishing, formed a rhetorical trope in imaginations of dystopian and apocalyptic narrative cinema in the mid-to-late 20th century. In my mind, this stretches from Chantal Akerman's News from Home (1977), even, into Death Watch (Bertrand Tavernier, 1980) or Sleeping Dogs (Roger Donaldson, 1977), as well as Romero's second and third Dead films.
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Collage
Tonight I revisited Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948), which of course is a great film maudit, a piecemeal kind of thing, cobbling together forms and techniques. I think a little, or a lot, these days about collage as a way to reorient towards unity or coherence through renewal of materials and means. In broken and diffuse lives, we find the methods we can to cope. I also recently had an idea for a short film I could even make, and maybe it would resemble Patrick Keiller's films.
(Downs Are Feminine, Lewis Klahr, 1993)
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Reading Matter
Books finished, January
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A Few Little Notes on GB
What if Bataille, in thinking about continuity, is in fact speaking of God, but does not know it, or can not name it, because for him the expressions available to label something 'God' or 'religion' are too steeped in anti-clericalism? He did, after all, consider priesthood before abandoning it.
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"Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution is the logical conclusion of the feminine attitude. In so far as she is attractive, woman is prey to men's desire." - Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood, p. 131.
I can imagine Bataille being reclaimed from a position inflected by contemporary gender theory--i.e., 'the feminine attitude' as a performative register to which certain gendered subjects are variously assigned, compelled, and volunteer. But I don't think I'm convinced that this is the spirit in which he means his comments on prostitution, or more broadly, on gender or sexuality or eroticism.
"Beauty that denies the animal and awakes desire finishes up by exasperating desire and exalting the animal parts." - Erotism, p. 144
Bataille seems to me to be banking on the rhetorical power of certain conventions to be his counterweight, or his canvas, from which he works as in relief. But what if 'beauty' doesn't deny the animal? What if it isn't the problem he presumes? I understand what he's saying; at least I think I do. The "animalistic" suggestion of genitalia is the thing disavowed by beauty, which sparks desire, but in trying to reach that object of desire, the "animal" is what ultimately counts. I'm uneasy about this, however ... I think Bataille gets so many things right, he is a thinker in some ways so close to me (or I feel close to him), and yet I suspect he's in the negative.
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"Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution is the logical conclusion of the feminine attitude. In so far as she is attractive, woman is prey to men's desire." - Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood, p. 131.
I can imagine Bataille being reclaimed from a position inflected by contemporary gender theory--i.e., 'the feminine attitude' as a performative register to which certain gendered subjects are variously assigned, compelled, and volunteer. But I don't think I'm convinced that this is the spirit in which he means his comments on prostitution, or more broadly, on gender or sexuality or eroticism.
"Beauty that denies the animal and awakes desire finishes up by exasperating desire and exalting the animal parts." - Erotism, p. 144
Bataille seems to me to be banking on the rhetorical power of certain conventions to be his counterweight, or his canvas, from which he works as in relief. But what if 'beauty' doesn't deny the animal? What if it isn't the problem he presumes? I understand what he's saying; at least I think I do. The "animalistic" suggestion of genitalia is the thing disavowed by beauty, which sparks desire, but in trying to reach that object of desire, the "animal" is what ultimately counts. I'm uneasy about this, however ... I think Bataille gets so many things right, he is a thinker in some ways so close to me (or I feel close to him), and yet I suspect he's in the negative.
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Ephemera
Have youth and a foggy idea labelled "relevance," effectively, become the new transcendentals--taking the place of truth, goodness, and beauty, and like the three traditional transcendentals standing in (at times) for sloppy conventional thinking?
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