One-Way Street

The Bad Faith of Frances Ha

Noah Baumbach is shaping up to be the Alice Munro of American cinema: artfully telling the same story about the same people over and over again. Baumbach and Munro return obsessively to early adulthood as the first point at which a person begins to sense that some options have already been closed off. It's as if we have only one shot at  becoming truly ourselves and we always blow it.

Jason Bailey argues that in Baumbach's latest film Frances Ha the director offers a "quietly radical" solution to the familiar problems posed by the romantic comedy genre. Bailey calls the film "a rebuke to the entirety of female-centric mainstream film." The title character is too smart, and too self-conscious, to make the obvious choices.

Frances is kind of a mess, and she knows it as well as anyone. "I'm so embarrassed," she says at one point, as part of an apology, "I'm not a real person yet." She should be—she's 27 years old. But she can't disengage from her romantic notions of what her life should be. She works as an apprentice for a modern dance company, where she hangs on to the slimmest thread of hope that she'll work her way in. As long as she's clinging to that dream, the idea of getting a "real" (read: day) job is anathema. But you need a real job to make money, and when [her roommate] Sophie bails, Frances finds herself descending through a series of less-than-perfect living situations.

via www.theatlantic.com

However, like Sartre's waiter who is too "waiter-esque," Frances constantly calls attention to herself as an unresolved mess, but there's something phony about her transparency. In her mind her "real" self is a dancer; she's just play-acting at working as an apprentice and being in a heterosexual relationship. Her awareness of her own inauthenticity is a kind of self-deception. She denies her own freedom to choose some other mode of being. She could, for example, become a dancer if she sacrificed enough.

Like Munro, Baumbach's subject is the anguish of existential choice at one particular point in one's life abstracted out all of the other choices one must make in the course of their lives. Frances remains youthful and attractive while denying to herself that she's an object in the world buffeted by other people's desires. 

Screening Gatsby

A film adaptation of a famous American novel is bound to provoke some backlash. Kathryn Schulz offers a contrarian view of the novel.

Indeed, The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable. They function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent: OLD MONEY, THE AMERICAN DREAM, ORGANIZED CRIME. It is possible, of course, to deny your readers access to the inner lives of your characters and still write a psychologically potent book: I give you Blood Meridian. But to do that, you yourself must understand your characters and conceive of them as human.

via www.vulture.com

Schulz offers the old no-likable-characters critique. I don't know about you, but I never find these arguments very persuasive, nor do I ever remember putting down a novel because I couldn't relate to the characters. 

David Denby likes the book, but not the movie, yet I think he understands the novel better than Schulz, who can't seem to allow herself to.

[Director Baz] Luhrmann whips Fitzgerald’s sordid debauch into a saturnalia—garish and violent, with tangled blasts of music, not all of it redolent of the Jazz Age.  [ . . .] The picture is filled with an indiscriminate swirling motion, a thrashing impress of “style” (Art Deco turned to digitized glitz), thrown at us with whooshing camera sweeps and surges and rapid changes of perspective exaggerated by 3-D. [ . . . ] Gatsby’s excess—his house, his clothes, his celebrity guests—is designed to win over his beloved Daisy. Luhrmann’s vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he’s less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.

Schulz is troubled by the surfaces of Fitzgerald's novel, while Denby is troubled by the surfaces of Luhrmann's film adaptation. The story Jay Gatsby is a story about surfaces--not so much the surfaces people present to others, but the surfaces upon which people project their own desires. 

Gatsby's West Egg life is essentially a movie he's created for Daisy, who, in turn, is a surface upon which Gatsby has projected his own desires. Unfortunately for him, Daisy is also a screen upon which her husband projects his desires. Her sole act of volition is to choose her husband's projections over her lover's, in the process killing her husband's lover as if she were a spectre in a movie.

Perhaps Luhrmann’s vulgarity is somehow appropriate to the material, which is inherently cinematic. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I doubt it will look that way. Luhrmann is Nick, the point of view through which we watch the movie Gatsby has created for Daisy. This may be why Luhrmann transitions so awkwardly from Nick's narrative voice to the action of the story. Some ethical mooring is lost when Nick's point of view is lost. 

As Schulz notes, Fitzgerald knew Daisy was poorly drawn and her relationship with Gatsby was opaque. However, he didn't do anything about it despite his designs on a popular reading public. Her complaint about the coldness of the characters is not only poor literary criticism. It also misses the point of the novel, which is all about the dangers of projection, not its pleasures.

Iron Man 9/11

 

“Iron Man 3” is conspicuously meant to be escapist entertainment (a pathetic conceit given what it says movie people think about real life — or rather the real lives of their customers). But [director Shane] Black and his colleagues, like other filmmakers who use the iconography of Sept. 11 and its aftershocks, want to have it both ways. They want to tap into the powerful reactions those events induced, while dodging the complex issues and especially the political arguments that might turn off ticket buyers. The result is that in some movies Sept. 11 — along with Afghanistan, Iraq, terrorism, the war on terror and torture — register as just devices, at once inherently political and empty, in a filmmaker’s tool kit.

via movies.nytimes.com

Manohla Dargis says Iron Man 3 and other Marvel movies exploit 9/11 without addressing any of their audiences' true feeling about the event.

This sort of complaint has been lodged before about mainstream Hollywood movies. I would argue, without having yet seen Iron Man 3, that at some level the movie offers some sort of symbolic resolution of the collective experience of 9/11. The resolution may be as crude as chaos giving way to order in a process at once excessively obvious and magical. (All superheroes have been touched by magic, or divine favor.)

First Bread, Then Morality: Walter Benjamin and Art in a Time of Crisis

Guardian columnist Peter Thompson visits Walter Benjamin in his "How to Believe" series and, bless him, doesn't dumb Benjamin's views on the role of history, politics art in belief. 

Thompson starts with a quote from Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" that distinguishes between material and spiritual struggle, summed in Brecht's dictum, "first bread, then morality." The struggle for material goods is always won by the most powerful, but Benjamin dismisses them as "mere booty." More important are the spiritual qualities "confidence, as courage, as humour, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and they reach far back into the mists of time."

Thompson links, over-hastily, this last clause to Benjamin's wish image, which is a repository of grievances from the past contained in a single image. It's one of Benjamin's dicier ideas, but it's hard to escape when reading his ruminations on art and politics.

Technologically advanced art crack open, as it were, the seamless flow of history by revealing what gets left behind when one era gives way to another. The Baroque Trauerspiel (or mourning-play) flourished just when Germans were starting to realize that no heaven on earth, or anything much like it, was coming. The emergence of film, Thompson points out, came at another critical moment.

art had to take on a political role in increasing the awareness of what was at long last the real human potential for the realisation of the old dreams. It could go either way though; down the Adornian route from the slingshot to the megaton bomb or onwards and upwards to the sunlit uplands of social liberation. Art and technology therefore become interlinked and politicised, predominantly in film. The "aura" of traditional art may have been destroyed by modernity but the future "aura" of liberated humanity as a living work of art had to take its place. If fascism represented the aestheticisation of politics then the fight against fascism had to involve the politicisation of aesthetics and the active creation of the aura of potential.

The cinema is already more that a century old. What about now? Technology and art could be moving in one of two directions: either they are re-enforcing the perpetual sense of phony crisis ("the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule," writes Benjamin), or they could reveal, or bring about, a real crisis that could change everything for the better.

CIMMfest Chicago

The Chicago International Movies & Music Festival runs through Sunday, April 21 at theaters scattered throughout the north side. The key films are playing tonight.

 

Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, a documentary about the Memphis rock band Big Star. Their only album, release in 1972, was an unusually adventurous example of post-Beatles rock. Critics loved their music, but their record company, the great soul label Stax, never figured out how to transfer rock critics' praise into an effective marketing and distribution plan, and the band went defunct after their first album. Big Star has become a cult band, but one of its key members died in a car crash in 1978--he was working in a fast food restaurant at the time--and the film asks the question: Was their brief moment of fame worth it?

 

A similar tale is told in Sacrificial Youth, about a band of skateboard punks who attract the interest of a major label, much to their chagrin. The band embraces a number of low-fi genres, none of which you will recognize. The director Joe Losurdo has only a vague notion himself, but his camera sorts through the sub-subcultures for memorable images, if not narrative coherence.

Post-Colonialism in Film Today

Post-colonialism has changed, but movies haven't kept up with the changes, at least until now. Phil Hoad asks,

So how does colonialism fit in terms of the European story today? Treatments zeroing in approvingly on the independence movements, such as, say, Gandhi, feel more like historical records, not corresponding directly to the blurred national borders and overlapped cultural interactions of the 21st-century. How can you aspire to be British, or French, or Belgian, or Italian, or German without brushing against the violence once committed in their name?

Perhaps the answers are audible in Portuguese. A pair of recent Lusophone films – appropriately for the language with the longest colonial history – have forged ahead in finding new routes for cinema to explore the subject. They deal with colonialism not by paving over it with the atonement story of multiculturalism, or with the kind of stern rebuke Michael Haneke delivered to that ideology in Hidden; but quietly and intimately – as an invisible pressure that weighs from deep inside on present-day society, culture and, ultimately, our inner selves.

via www.guardian.co.uk

The films Hoad points to are Tabu (Portugal, 2012) and Neighbouring Sounds (Brazil, 2013; still at top). All of the binaries of post-colonialism (imperial center and colonial margin, emigre and native soil) from 1960 until 2000 have blurred so much that it's reasonable to ask if post-colonial is still a useful critical concept. These two films seem to suggest that, at the very least, the way we talk about the relations between former colony and former colonizer have gotten much more complicated than before. 

We Are Beating the Shit Out of These Cameras

Steven Soderbergh on being Peter Andrews shooting Steven Soderbergh movies.

 

2013 SXSW Film Festival: The Usual Outsiders

The music side of SXSW is becoming increasingly corporate, but the film side clings stubbornly to its myths of heroic outsiderdom seen through an ironic lens. Eric Kohn at IndieWire reports,

AJ Schnack and David Wilson's "We Always Lie to Strangers" finds an oddly compelling poetry in the irreverent rituals of singing families in Branson, Missouri. Though at first perceived as the cheesy vessels of the city's massive tourist industry, the subjects of Schnack and Wilson's portrait take on a soulful dimension by routinely explaining the values driving their multigenerational traditions; as with the bikers in "12 O'Clock Boys," who wax poetic about their gravity-defying talents, the singers in "We Always Lie to Strangers" make attractive arguments for committing to behavior perceived as foolish or impractical by the rest of the world.

via www.indiewire.com

The key movies in this vein is Katie Graham and Andrew Matthews' Zero Charisma (above), about a sad-sack obsessive trying to market a Dungeons and Dragons-style game of his own invention, and Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, which you've probably already heard about. Taken together, these films, while they may be fine movies in themselves, are more about SXSW's increasingly tenuous claims to coolness or even relevance than they are about any larger trends in American culture.

Fun Friday: 70mm Edition

For this week's edition of Fun Friday, only two entries. One I've already visited and one I will be attending.

A couple of Saturdays ago I visited the Jeanne Gang exihibit at the Art Institute, followed by lunch at the Gage. It was a nice way to spend an afternoon. However, this weekend is the last for the Studio Gang exhibit. The materials were richer and more varied than I've seen in other architectural exhibits. You get a good feel for what the Studio Gang offices are like: lots of models and drawings all over the place. The exhibit is a snapshot of how architects put together ideas. Gang's penchant for low-cost yet elegant solutions comes through in the rope partitions, the best solution I've seen to dividing up the rather awkward architecture gallery in the Modern Wing. If you go, be sure to see the section on the Kaohsiung Maritime Cultural and Popular Music Center project in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

For me the biggest surprise of the Oscars was the snub of Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master. There was a lot of handshaking with Academy members on the film's behalf, but no best picture or best director nominations came its way. Meanwhile, the film came and went in Chicago and I missed it. Luckily for me and other Chicago-area movie fans the Music Box has come to our rescue. Tomorrow night I will be attending a screening of The Master, which is screened as part of the Music Box's 70mm Festival, which features, as you might imagine, films shot in 70mm, the analogue cinema's richest visual experience. The Master screening tomorrow night is 7:30. Also highly recommended is Jacques Tati's Playtime, a series of quietly humorous vignettes about American tourists looking for the "real" Paris only to find a modernist city of glass and steel.

Palestinian Filmmaker Detained on His Way to Oscars

This may just be a paperwork issue rather than some huge miscarriage of justice, but Emad Burnat, the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary 5 Broken Cameras, was detained at LAX as he arrived with his wife and children. U.S. immigration officials threatened to send the Burnat family back to Palestine. Filmmaker Michael Moore and Academy lawyers intervened and vouched for the authenticity of Burnat's invitation to the Oscar ceremonies. Burnat and his family were allowed to enter the country.

The original source for the whole incident was Moore's Twitter feed, collected by the Atlantic's David Wagner. No one else that I know of has reported on it, so coverage isn't exactly complete. While you're waiting for TMZ to send a reporter, you can watch the trailer for Burnat's film.