One-Way Street

Vertiginous Heights and Flesheating Bloodthirsty Bunnies

Here's a follow up on some topics I've already considered in this space, and where I'll be looking next.

The Royal Society of British Architects reports that a fifth of all architects are unemployed, about another fifth are underemployed, but when they find work, UK architects can expect a 7% salary increase.

The Twitter Revolution may be here after all: Yesterday's protests were organized almost entirely online and succeeded in rattling the authorities, despite government attempts to restrict Internet access--and a sandstorm. 

Colm Tóibín hates writing. You know what? It shows.

I don't think this is a comprehensive list--there are no East Asian cities--but here are the ten oldest continually-inhabited cities in the world. Oldest city? Damascus.

The presentations from last month's 17th annual Congress for the New Urbanism aren't online yet, but there's a feature on an urban infill project in Denver's old Stapleton airport.

Tonight's viewing in Chicago: "flesheating bloodthirsty bunnies" in Andrea Eve and Mark Gavin's Vamphoppers, which will make its world premiere tonight at the Portage Theater as part of the Bang-a-Thon festival. Stick around for the Q&A session with the film's directors and a Britney Spears Toxic Karaoke competition. 

On Monday I will be downtown to take a look at Ben van Berkel's pavilion for the Burnham Plan centennial. Alas, Zaha Hadid's pavilion, also located in Millennium Park, won't be completed until August 1. And, if I have enough time, I'll stand on the Sears Tower ledge and look 1,353 feet straight down.

“A little old lady, pleasantly plump”

That's how Agnes Varda describes herself. Once she even went to an art exhibit dressed as a potato. Her new “subjective documentary” The Beaches of Agnès came and went already in Chicago and I missed it, but it's now playing at the Film Forum in New York, among other places.

Varda has been regarded as the grand-mère of the Modernist French cinema since before she was thirty years old, and her dowdy image and impish smile seems to be designed to make us forget what an exemplary filmmaker she is: restlessly innovative, always pushing the medium to its limits. Too many young American filmmakers have made a reputation for independence and artistic integrity by relying on a set of recognizable tropes that say "indie film": ingénue lead actress, hand-held camera, pervasive mumbling. Varda could have made a comfortable career repeating Cléo de 5 à 7 over and over again, but like the heroine of that film, Varda made her statement and moved on.

Ten Little Films, One Big Award

Poor Hugh Jackman. Assuming he's asked to host next year's Oscars awards, he'll have to sing and dance his way through 10 films nominated for best picture. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the number of nominees for best picture will be expanded from five to 10 films. The Academy noticed that ratings went up when the ceremony producers paid more attention to films that weren't nominated for best picture but were popular with filmgoers.

As Michael Cieply points out, between 1931 and 1943 the Academy generally nominated 10 films for best picture. There's nothing magical about five nominees. Five seemed about the right number when Hollywood's output fell below 100 films a year during the 1970s. Production levels are now around 300 per year. 

The Oscars will now be like the NBA playoffs, which were expanded so that more cities had a rooting interest in the playoffs. The worry is that that the larger number of nominees will dilute the value of a best picture nomination, which has been in decline recently. The Academy argues that a wider variety of films will be nominated--films like Wall-E and The Dark Knight and, who knows, maybe a Judd Apatow comedy.

How this expanded shortlist of best pictures will work out is anyone's guess. One clue may be the best foreign language film category. Here five nominees seem like too many considering the small number of people who have actually seen the films. Most years only one or two foreign films make any impact on the broader American consciousness. Consequently, this category is generally considered to be the hardest to predict. No one predicted Departures would win in 2009, primarily because no one in the US had seen it. Surprises can be good sometimes, especially if they bring attention to worthwhile films--like Departures. Generally, though, surprises are not good. Remember when Crash won over Brokeback Mountain?

The problem with the best picture category isn't that too few films are nominated. Instead, the problem is that the same kind of film is nominated. Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Reader were all well-crafted, generally (The Reader aside) noble films--and artistically timid affairs. They seemed made to be nominated rather than to be enjoyed. Only Slumdog Millionaire had any verve and daring. Slumdog's triumph aside, in the past variety has only revealed the narrowness of the Academy.

Iran Under Western Eyes

“Everybody try to film as much as poss today on mobiles - v\imptnt - these are eyes of world,” the Twitter feed persiankiwi declared today. This dramatic call for video and still photographic footage of the events unfolding in Tehran after the disputed June 12 national election is, on one level, a challenge to the government’s control of the media. On another level, though, the call is a challenge to the entire aesthetic regime of the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, in particular, the government program to enforce the “commandments for looking” (ahkam-i nigah kardan).

According to Negar Mottahedeh’s terrific Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema, after the dust settled from the 1979 revolution, the government initiated a program to “purify” its citizens’ senses after years of steady poisoning by Western media during the Shah’s reign. The most noticeable effect of the government’s attempt to purify the national sensorium was to create a cinema of the veil based upon a “modest and averted gaze.” By imposing a strict Shiite prohibition against the desiring gaze, Mottahedeh says, the government hoped to bind the nation to the “imaginal world of the Shiite imams” (emphasis in original). In other words, a purified cinema would transmit meaning not through a direct depiction of events, or through seamless special effects, but through what was not visible on screen.

As a result, post-revolutionary Iranian cinema assumed the clerics’ preoccupation with otherworldliness, whether it took the form of the ninth-century Imam Husayn’s escape to the land of no-where (Na-koja-Adbad) or the famous 1978 telephone call from the Ayatollah Kafi of Mashhad to the same Imam Husayn, urging him to leave Karbala after 1,100 years and take up the cause against the Shah in Iran. This phone conversation was recorded on cassette tape and distributed to Iranians across the globe.

The director Bahram Bayza’i works squarely within this otherworldly strain of Iranian cultural practice. His 1992 film The Travelers opens with a woman directly addressing her audience, informing them that she is about to travel by car to her home by the Caspian Sea. She calmly adds, “We shall all die.” And sure enough, later in the film the family is wiped out. Shot in a documentary-style talking head shot, the opening scene is a voice from the dead.

Otherworldliness of a more perplexing kind pervades the work of Abbas Kiarostami. His films usually feature a Kiarostami surrogate figure, a Tehranian sophisticate bearing witness to another’s struggles with quotidian Iranian life. In both Life and Nothing More and The Wind Will Carry Us this figure travels to the countryside to a place from which he signals, implicitly or explicitly, his existential distance. A darling of Western critics and film festivals, Kiarostami has been denounced by film critics in his own country as an “identity dealer” trafficking in images of rustic Iranians for hard currency. In this view Kiarostami’s outsiders offer a voyeuristic glimpse into the post-revolutionary real, acting as a camera obscura for the polluting Western gaze.

Kiarostami’s critics—they’re not all government lackeys—object to the way he looks at Iranian life. If post-revolutionary Iranian cinema examines the country with an explicitly mediated gaze, Kiarostami interposes an otherworldliness that doesn’t conform to Shiite orthodoxy. Kiarostami’s otherworldliness is the same as the students and protesters in the streets of Tehran with their mobile phones. It is the otherworldliness of Cannes and YouTube and Twitter. Mir Hussein Moussavi’s supporters are taking out their cellphones, not to place a call to a medieval imam, but to present an unaverted gaze on political unrest for the world outside Iran.

Cannes Dispatch: Less Is More

Here are the headlines from Cannes 2009:

• The crowds are smaller and glummer--even smaller and glummer than last year--but movie producers are telling themselves that's a good thing.
• Jane Campion has a new movie about John Keats called Bright Star. This is good news.
• Cristian Mungiu does not have a new movie ready, which is bad news. He's there anyway.
• Pedro Almodóvar has a new movie, Broken Embraces, starring Penelope Cruz. This isn't news at all, given his prolific output lately, but it's something to look forward to.
• Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds continues its slow march to American theaters, which may or may not be a good thing--or both at the same time.
• Francis Ford Coppola has a new movie, called Tetro in case you care, and it promises to be just as mediocre as his last half-dozen films. 
• Lou Ye's latest film Spring Fever demonstrates, yet again, that China is determined to produce beautiful films even as it stinks up the skies. 

A note about the first item: After last summer’s purge of specialty divisions (Warner Independent Pictures, New Line Cinema and Paramount Vantage were shut down by their parent companies, and New Yorker Films was sold to pay its parent's debts), followed by the worldwide recession, the hedge fund money has dried up, and so has funding for the art-house projects that used to clog up screens each fall. Producers overestimated the audiences for these films and ignored the limited number of screens available to them. Consequently, it took huge investments in marketing just for a film to get noticed. Thus the films that do make it to the screen, the thinking now goes, have a better chance of succeeding: with reduced marketing costs and less competition for their exclusive audiences, they can recover their costs more quickly.

The Antonioni of the Bowery

I remember the first time I ever heard of Jim Jarmusch. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were chortling in wonder over Stranger than Paradise. The film was like nothing else I’d seen in a recent American film—and, apparently, like nothing else Ebert and Siskel had seen for a long time, either. Jarmusch was the Antonioni of the Bowery, combining European filmic modernism, New York minimalism, and highly adventurous tastes in music. He quickly became the archetype of New York cool, even though he’s actually from Akron, Ohio and only two of his films are set entirely in the city, Permanent Vacation and Ghost Dog. 

So it’s fitting that Jarmusch is the invited guest of Film Comment Selects and the Young Friends of Film. On April 30 at 7 PM at the Walter Reade Theater there will be a screening of his latest film, The Limits of Control. After the screening Jarmusch will speak with Film Comment editor Gavin Smith.

But if Jarmusch has always been the epitome of New York cool, he’s not always enjoyed critical or popular favor in his adopted hometown. As early as Mystery Train (1989) critics were detecting some strain in Jarmusch’s hipster poses. After Night On Earth (1992) Jonathan Rosenbaum, an early and enthusiastic supporter, turned on Jarmusch, accusing him of repeating himself. His critical favor bottomed out with Dead Man (1995). Jarmusch tiptoed a bit toward conventional film structure with Broken Flowers (2005), but The Limits of Control represents a return to Jarmusch’s 1980s continental style, but this time with Tilda Swinton and Bill Murray returning from Broken Flowers for good luck. (That's Swinton in the Tarantino get-up in the photo above, with Isaach De Bankolé, who plays the lead in Limits.)

The Limits of Control goes into general US release on Friday, May 1.

In the Loop in the Theaters

Armando Iannucci's In the Loop, which will appear Monday, April 27 at the Tribeca Film Festival, went into general release in Britain last weekend. The blistering political satire, based on a BBC series, didn't do as well as I Love You, Man or Crank 2: High Voltage among British film viewers, but it held its own, grossing £467,000 on its opening weekend. (By comparison, I Love You, Man grossed £1.12m the same weekend.) The commercial success of In the Loop is a good sign not only for the film's prospects in the US, but also for British satire, which has had its ups and downs lately.

On both sides of the Atlantic In the Loop garnered a lot of positive publicity while in production. In the US the film attracted attention because it stars James Gandolfini as a leeringly oafish American general. Meanwhile, in the UK the publicity centered around the television show, which had a cult following--meaning, in TV terms, that most people saw it once and never switched it on again.

In the Loop is smart and funny, but it may have peaked too early. Its premise--that the Anglo-American alliance is run by venal idiots--is very 2005. It's cinéma vérité style is too immediate for events that happened in the receding past. For American audiences there's also the language barrier posed by foul-tempered Scots ranting in impenetrable burrs. For filmgoers, Iannucci's overly active camera is more suitable for television than multiplex widescreens. And finally, James Gandolfini looked more comfortable in New Jersey silks than in chest medals.

Nevertheless, we haven't yet had a really sharp satire about the Bush-capades, and In the Loop is our best bet yet.

Ten Most Anticipated Films of Summer 2009

Here they are. Coming to a multiplex near you: Transformers 2; the Star Trek reboot; a Woody Allen/Larry David collaboration; Judd Apatow in the director's chair directing the usual suspects; a Sam Raimi film not many people liked at SXSW last month; Up, the trailor for which my son has watched so many times I feel like I've already seen the movie; Quentin Tarantino in the director's chair with Brad Pitt in front of the camera (wrong guy, right film); and an update of the great Depression Era thriller The Public Enemy (1931), this time starring Johnny Depp rather than James Cagney. Should be an interesting summer (wrong guy, wrong film).

Star Trek Begins Again

The new Star Trek movie won't be released for another month, but Trekkies are already abuzz over the new film, based on one full screening in Austin and Internet publicity snippets. Ben Child, writing in the Guardian's film blog, casts a skeptical eye on the early reviews from Trekkies. Child digs up an old review by Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clone. Knowles was the first to see the film, and he praised the film as the best Star Wars film made to that date. Now the film is considered even by the Star Wars cult as one of the franchise's weakest installments.

Undeterred, Knowles published a 4,535-word review of the new Star Trek film, complete with gushing praise, much of it in all caps, and photos of his hand-painted model of the Starship Enterprise. Child's point is that fanboys can let their worship of certain cult films cloud their judgment, and that the rest of us should take the lavish praise for the new Star Trek film "with a rather large pinch of salt."

Sci fi film lovers are not the most faithful and least discriminating of genre fans. That title goes to horror film fans. In fact, sci fi fans have the reputation in Hollywood for being exasperatingly fickle and unpredictable. The "reboot" of the Star Trek franchise, directed by J.J. Abrams, represents a considerable gamble by Paramount, despite the early positive notices.

Loaded with special effects, sci fi films are expensive gambles. From what I've seen of the film, Star Trek XI, as it's known among Trekkies, hedges its bets by borrowing heavily from Star Wars, particularly its paternalistic, and highly Oedipal, themes. The film covers the period before the television series, giving the producers license to introduce some of the scruffy energy of the first Star Wars film.

Not only is the franchise reset with Abrams' Star Trek, but the characters are, too. Perhaps there is enough in the film to allow the re-mixing of identity along collective lines that distinguish cult films from merely popular movies. But for someone outside the cult, the film's familiar template of Oedipal struggles in outer space misses the appeal of the original TV series: the romance and utopian aspirations of the early American space program. The spit-and-polish formality of the series has been replaced by jaunty ruffians casually dropping onto remote planets with all the curiosity and wonder of UPS drivers making their rounds.  The new film presents the iconic characters as their younger selves, which, in the case of Abrams' film, means bland actors scrubbed clean of the character-filled faces of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and the rest of the original cast. The allure of a cult film is in the details, and, from what I've seen, the forthcoming installment doesn't get them right.

Of course, Trekkies may see things differently. A major appeal of cult films is their obsessive return to origins, to a purer state of being before something else--crass outsiders, the disappointments that come with experience--intervenes. So maybe returning to the days when James Kirk was an alienated youth will rejuvenate the Star Trek franchise and energize the Trekkie cult again. Or maybe Kirk's youth, like ours, is gone forever.

Video: The First Decade

Tonight Chris Hill of the Video Data Bank will host screenings from the VDB's collection of experimental and activist videos from the 1970s at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of its series Conversations at the Edge. Video from this period may seem crude compared to contemporary digital multimedia texts, but the decade was a critical point in the history of visual media. The dominant medium of the century was supposed to be visual technologies--first cinema, then television--but by the 1970s film and TV had neither penetrated the culture to the extent analysts thought they would, and both were in something of a creative funk. Modernism in film had run its course, and high production value television fattened corporate coffers while doing little to create anything genuinely new. The 1970s were also a period when philosophers and cultural theorists recognized that language--old-fashioned words--were at the center of everything.

This tension between a supposedly dominant media technologies floundering and the centrality of written and spoken language can be seen in Vito Acconci's The Red Tapes (1976). (Here is Part One. Part Two will screen tonight.) The video is boring and language-centric. It recreates the boredom of watching the whole flow of television by stripping out the mesmerizing images and leaving words just floating out there, as incantatory by themselves as television images.