One-Way Street

Where's China?

The Summer 2008 issue of Film Quarterly is out with several interesting articles, including Leo Braudy on No Country for Old Men and Joshua Clover on Chinese cinema. I'm about to leave for vacation, so I can only point to these articles for now. When I return I want to say something about the "motiveless malignancy" of the Coen Brothers' film. Clover asks a question about the films of Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien: "Where's China?"

This is a huge question and one worth exploring more if I didn't have to pack right now. A short, privisional answer: How much does it matter? Outside of the so-called Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Feng Xiaogang, with their nationalist epics, Chinese directors outside the PRC have largely avoided questions of national identity. Edward Wang was famous for his lack of concern about a Taiwanese identity. Even his great theme, the problem of urbanization, rarely explored the impact of Westernization in any direct fashion.

Now that it's lost its colonial status, Hong Kong has become a kind of national empty space--not quite Chinese, but inextricable from it. Lacking the epic landscapes of mainland China, Hong Kong is a hive of people and praxis. Wong's and Hou's films explore new ways of being in the world; national and ethnic identities are just part of the mix, and not terribly important ones at that. An emblematic instance of this tendency is Juliette Binoche's blong wig in Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon, at once stressing her Western sexuality and rendering it inoperative. When you see a French actress wearing a Marilyn Monroe wig in a Taiwanese director's film, one is forcing to rethink what kinds of questions one should be asking.

Rethinking the Chick Flick

The wild success of Sex and the City and the imminent release of American Girl have raised hopes that Hollywood finally understands the box office power of women. Sex and the City and American Girl create worlds at once contrived and heart-felt. Other than that, though, they have little in common, and two films don't make a general trend. Nevertheless, appearing at the elegiac close of the first serious presidential campaign by a woman, these films remind us that woman are to Hollywood what African-Americans are to the Democratic Party: its most loyal constituency, and its most taken for granted.

And yet, the complaints about Hollywood's gender bias, while justified, are often oversimplified, even naïve.  Take, for instance, this broadside by LA Times reporter Rachel Abramowitz, related in the breathless style of a gossip columnist. The attack is scattershot, rehashing a number of old grievances. I'll take up a few of the most provocative ones, voiced either by Abramowitz or one of her sources:

"I hope ['Sex and the City'] will at least bring about more of a trend toward films made specifically for adult female women": So none are made now? Really? People are always saying that Hollywood doesn't make enough films for women, but they never have any number to back up their claims. What's the ratio of films made for men versus the films made for women? At least one major genre, the romantic comedy, is aimed primarily (although not exclusively) at women.   Hollywood is skewed more toward youth than toward gender. If you're over 34 years of age of either gender, the pickings are pretty slim. And what, exactly, are the defining qualities of a specifically for adult female women--and them only? Which brings me to my next point.

"We want to see ourselves on screen the way we actually are, not some bad Xerox versions of ourselves": Fair enough, but how do you define, let alone depict, the way women really are? I don't think anybody would seriously claim that the four main characters in Sex and the City represent the true face of American womanhood. They may speak to the desires of a portion of middle-class white women in this country, but that's not the same thing. You could argue that the desires are real because they inform the activities of real-life women, but even here questions remain. To what degree is a woman's life governed by a wish to possess Carrie Bradshaw's shoes? The weirdness of her outfits, I would argue, externalize the lack of comfort and authenticity many women feel when they wear runway fashions. I've always wondered how truly deep the affinities ran between SATC and its audience. Our desires aren't necessarily our own. We get them from the movies, among other places. In any case, early feminist film scholars struggled with these same questions in the 1970s before finally giving up. That's why Women's Studies is now generally called Gender Studies.

"[Women] made such Judd Apatow films as 'Knocked Up' and 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall,' whose protagonists might be oafy guys but whose audiences, according to Universal, were 57% female": This figure isn't as shocking as it might appear. It's possible for a woman to derive pleasure from a text even when it's oriented toward men. I've already told the story of a commitment feminist intellectual with a passion for Led Zeppelin, the avatars of male adolescent desire. I've known female professors of film studies--women who probably read The Second Sex by the third grade--who genuinely enjoyed Spider-Man and The Terminator series. To claim that women can only enjoy films narrowly focused on them--or will automatically enjoy those that are--is to underestimate the sophistication of American films and the women who watch them.

 

Where I Would Go, What I Would Read

Where I would go if I lived in New York City and had a viable babysitting option: the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema festival at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. From the (admittedly) limited selection of Italian films I've seen over the past few years, it's been my impression that the Italian cinema is in something of a creative slump; Gianni Amelio's L'America was the last great Italian film I saw. But GreenCine's James Van Maanen has an enthusiastic dispatch from the Open Roads festival.

Where I will be if I can manage to stay up past 10:00 on a weekday, which doesn't happen much lately: The DVD release party for David Kraus's film Musician on June 11 at the Hideout. Details at right, in the "Keep in Mind" section.

What I would not be reading even if I read German, and won't read when it gets translated into English: Charlotte Roche's novel Feuchtgebiete (Wetlands). The debate in Germany about the novel says more about the uneven political development of that country that the topic ostensibly examined by the novel: women's sexual empowerment as a feminist practice.  These discussions invariably go nowhere--remember when Madonna tried to do something with the topic back in the Nineties, only to come across as annoying and self-serving? Or the embarrassing academic debate about Annie Sprinkle around the same time?

Where I would go if I still lived in Philadelphia: The newly opened Center for Architecture, created by the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Tourists go to Philly for the colonial-era landmarks, but it's really a nineteenth-century city. Modern architecture is a mixed bag, to say the least, mostly because Philadelphians don't really like it. They're lustily booing the recently-built Kimmel Center, which doesn't deserve all the abuse it's been getting. (Local architects, including Robert Venturi, produced lame designs for the new music hall, so out-out-town architects had to be brought in.) If you discount the twentieth century, though, the city's architecture is beautiful.

Where I would go if I had money to burn on a plane ticket to San Jose: No, not the WWDC08, although that would be cool, too. The 01SJ digital arts festival. The promoters are trying to create an American version of the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria.

What's coming to me whether I like it or not: NeoCon! I can hear the rumble of a hundred thousand Manolos already.

What I'm going to buy when I walk to Borders on my lunch hour because it's (finally) nice out: Not really sure yet.  Update, 12:32 PM: Aborted! It started to rain as soon as I stepped out of the building. I knew two consecutive hours of nice weather was too much to ask. I was going to look up a copy of Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New, based on Bud Parr's review in Chekhov's Mistress.   

A Shriek of Woe

I took the day off from work today, so I'm at home in the suburbs where, ironically, it's easier to get a "genuine" Chicago hot dog than it is in downtown Chicago. I walked to Irving's, a masculine space with the aura of a baseball dugout. The lunchtime crowd is mostly construction workers taking a break from building McMansions. ESPN was on the television--Irving's seems to have a cable package that includes only ESPN--and a SportsCenter-like show was concluding with an announcer giving a quick rundown of the weekend's sporting events. He worked his way down the list to until he reached the American Hockey League finals. He then drew a deep breath and added, darkly, "This is the opening weekend of the Sex and the City movie."

The movie dominates the arts pages across the United States today. Many articles center around someone trying to get their mind around the fashion displays the film promises to deliver. There's also, predictably, a counter-reaction of male writers who regard the movie as a filmic Abu Ghraib. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass recently published what he called a "shriek of woe" entitled "Because no man should feel the agony of this film," that begins, "I can still hear the terrified cries of men from across the sea, from England, men scared stiff by the new 'Sex and the City' movie premiere, and such cries are cries of warning to men in America, where this evil film will debut in a few weeks."

I haven't heard any terrified cries, although the guy making my hot dog at Irving's was so distracted by the mention of Sex and the City that he added hot peppers when I specifically asked him not to.  I've seen several episodes of the series--it's hard to avoid--and I've always been of two minds about it. It's always been my impression that the show's signature fashion ensembles weren't the real point of the series. I saw it as the story of four women from the provinces trying to make their way in the city--a distinctly nineteenth-century story. I suspect that that's level at which the series really connected with its female audience. It's also why the SportsCenter crowd's horror is so misplaced and hysterical.

Just once, though, I wish there were a character who looked the four women straight in the eyes and said, "Come the revolution, you're going to be the first to be shot." The real shriek of woe is that we've passed the historical moment when someone could say something like that.

Changing Gears for Summer

For a while I've been thinking about making some adjustments to the form of this blog, and the summer is a good time to do it. I'm still enough of an academic to feel the pull of its seasonal rhythms, and the summer is when I used to search for new material about which to read and write. I would also explore new ways of presenting that material. Finally, the summer is when I would really get down to work on longer-term writing projects--or at least I vow to. I have a couple of those to finish, too, so I need to divert some time and energy to those projects.

So first I'd like to swipe an idea from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution and present a "What I'm Reading" list, expanded to include what I'm listening to as well.

Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev. Reading Unforgiving Years has inspired me to read more from this neglected modernist. 

Charles Lloyd Quintet, Rabo de Nube. A live recording of one of the masters of avant-garde jazz. The quintet features Jason Moran, a personal favorite, on piano.

D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film. A look at the digital future of the cinema from a major voice in film studies.

Rem Koolhaas, S M L XL. Actually, I'm re-reading this for an essay on the generic city. For the same project I'm also looking at Mutations.

How British Was It?

It's often been said that Britain would have a thriving national cinema if everyone in the United States spoke Spanish. The British director Terence Davies reiterated that point recently at Cannes, where he's showing his latest film, Of Time and the City. "If we are going to have a national cinema we have got to make stories which arise from our islands," he told the Independent. "What we do most of the time is make sub-American nonsense. The American template is very often lousy – why do we want to imitate it?" He goes on to denounce native talent he considers "third rate," singling out Ricky Gervais, one of the most widely imitated British comics in the US.

I haven't seen a Davies film since he spoke after a screening of The Long Day Closes at a film festival in Philadelphia in 1992. I remember that film, as well as Distant Voices, Still Lives (still above) as having a distinctly un-American stillness to them. They are quiet films so confident in their formal integrity, so enamored with the past and with their own Britishness, that one overlooks the boggy ground of nostalgia upon which they are based. I remember leaving the screening of Distant Voices impressed by Davies and his film, both of which radiated integrity, but at the time I thought there were other British directors doing much more exciting and innovative work, all without imitating in any conspicuous way American-style filmmaking. This was the time when Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, and Peter Greenaway were still working at the top of their game. Alan Clarke had only recently died. Middle-aged white guys didn't have a monopoly on provocative filmmaking in a very specifically British context. One film that attracted a lot of attention during that time was Pratibha Parmar's documentary Sari Red, about a young Indian woman killed in a 1985 racist attack in England. Davies, by contrast, seemed timid, out of touch, and closer to the venerable if stuffy tradition of the heritage film.

With the exception of Greenaway, British filmmakers of the late Thatcher period were interested in exploring contemporary post-colonial British life. Davies' own filmmaking practice suggests that making stories that arise from the British islands means retreating into a mythic past during which Britain was inhabited solely by white people who loved music halls. Davies is hardly a National Front filmmaker, but his vision of Britain and British filmmaking is narrow and retrograde. Of Time and the City, which is set in 1940s Liverpool, is another admirable film from this unprolific filmmaker, but it's hardly an exemplary study of what Raymond Williams would have called the structures of feeling in post-Blair British life.

Gloom on the French Riviera

Everyone at this year's Cannes Film Festival will be looking back at the days when art house cinema tried to change the world, and looking ahead to a tightening market for Cannes films. This year's festival will screen some of the films that were canceled during the famous 1968 Cannes Film Festival, in which Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Louis Malle and other directors disrupted screenings to show solidarity with rioting students and workers. The 61st edition of the festival is a strictly commercial affair, however, and times are not especially good for specialty films. On the eve of the festival Warner Brothers announced they were shutting down two of their specialty divisions, while others, like New Line Cinema, have much smaller acquisition budgets.

The American film industry is still paying the price for last fall's bumper crop of well-made films. People are still going out to see specialty films. A mediocre film like Smart People has earned $9 million domestically. Juno, a vastly overrated film, has done very well. The problem is that except for films featuring plucky young women with amusing body image problems (Little Miss Sunshine is another), the audience for specialty films has remained more or less fixed in size.

It's hard to place the gloom on the French Riviera in historical context. Over the past few years worldwide box office grosses have been up and down, mostly down. Music has been in the dumps for a while now, but the art market continues to do well. Even the perpetual sick man of the major media, the book business, is up this year.  Selling foreign-language and American independent films has never quite fit into the business model of Hollywood. The earliest American distributors of European cinematic modernism were the same people who produced and distributed 1950s science fiction films--a business created because early television didn't have much programming for kids. Today every major studio has a specialty division or two. The current trend is to split the specialty market into two tiers: Oscar-bait films with budgets over $10 million and  national distribution deals, and films with budgets below $10 million that will have limited releases and shoestring budget marketing.

The first set of films compete for screens and eyeballs with the popcorn films, while the second set relies on the kindness of strangers. With the culling of the ranks of professional film critics, small-budget films rely more than ever on bloggers to spread the word. Unless somebody takes the care to explain why a Nuri Bilge Ceylan or a Lucrecia Martel film is worth seeing (and they are, by the way--take my word for it), even a well-intentioned movie goer has little to go on when choosing a film from a list of enigmatic titles. (Three sample titles from Ceylan: Distant, Climates, and Three Monkeys, the last of which is showing at Cannes this year.) Plus, you have to convince somebody else to go: Honey, let's spend $80 on a babysitter and go see an Argentinian film called The Headless Woman. When you go to see a Spider-Man film or a Judd Apatow comedy, you know exactly how you're going to feel during it. Sure, you earn a lot more cultural capital when you go see a foreign film, but only if you can pronounce the director's name.

Unlike a book, which one person buys, movie tickets are sold in pairs. That means a less adventuresome audience. But we never choose movies innocently, and that's especially true for films you see with the important people in your life. If you go to too many boring, predicable movies full of lots of noise but not much substance, you should start to ask yourself if you're watching your own relationship replayed over and over again on a multiplex screen. That's why Le Silence de Lorna, the latest feature from the kings of European miserablism, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, can be uplifting. But only if it finds an American distributor at Cannes.

Vote for Iron Man

As of last night Hilary Clinton's candidacy has run out of momentum, money, and plausibility. Just two weeks ago she'd swept the deer hunting counties in Pennsylvania and she seemed like she was going to elbow her way into the White House after all. Then, suddenly, Iron Man was released to rave reviews and blockbuster box office, and the zeitgeist either tilted away from her, or righted itself, depending on how you look at it.

Iron Man is witty and fun, which Clinton is not. It's also hypermasculine in the Hollywood summer blockbuster way, with a few twists. The film is one part comic book extravaganza, one part ED ad, and one part testimonial to the redemptive power of good public relations. The film stars Robert Downey, Jr., who has been welcomed back not only to the executive office suites of the major studios, but also to the good graces of insurance underwriters. He plays a character that dates back to the Quiet American period of the Vietnam War, when it was still possible for men of conscience to believe they were doing something worthwhile for their country while drinking excellent martinis in exotic settings. For the film the character has been updated to the Afghan War during its own Quiet American phase, when a man could sip scotch on the battlefield, secure in the knowledge that the Taliban were scurrying back to their caves.

Tony Stark is a defense contractor, but a good one. (This is fiction, remember.) His rusty, damaged heart has been  fortified with a metal cylinder and his aging body revived by the loyal presence of Gwyneth Paltrow. Villains and other nuisances are thrown at him, but he keeps his good cheer. Unlike some other armor in another, much less cheerful war, the Iron Man's guts of steel serve him well. He's a figure of early middle-aged American masculinity ready for action but freed of the phony machismo and vainglorious dreams of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld crowd. The film also firmly rejects the callow abstinence of George Bush, who had his own rough patch with alcohol. Iron Man is about the triumph of geniality and a bon vivant approach to solving world problems. This doesn't describe any of the current presidential candidates, not even Ralph Nader. But if the film's box office receipts are any indication, the American electorate is looking for something more diverting this summer than a gas tax holiday.

Where Have You Gone, Jean-Luc Godard?

From now through June 5 the Film Forum in New York will be screening Jean-Luc Godard's films from the 1960s.  The series coincides with the fortieth anniversary of the famous 1968 Cannes Film Festival, in which Godard, François Truffaut, Louis Malle and other directors interrupted screenings in order to show their sympathy with rioting students and workers. In view of the revival of interest in Godard's films, it's worth considering, yet again, the parallels between that time and our own: an unpopular president persecuting an unpopular war, a deepening generational divide, a wobbly economy, and a widespread call for change.

So where is the Jean-Luc Godard of today? The most plausible candidate I can think of, besides the still very much alive and productive Godard himself, is Michael Moore. For all his faults, which are legion, no other filmmaker today has anything resembling Godard's a sense of political commitment, distinctive film style, and popular following. Errol Morris is an éminence grise and a much more polished filmmaker than Moore, but his films don't insert themselves, or insinuate themselves, into public sphere discourse the way Moore's films do now, and Godard's films did in the 1960s.

If Moore seems like a faint echo of Godard, it should be noted that Godard had some significant advantages over Moore and other political filmmakers working today. First of all, there was the highly photogenic Paris protests of May 1968, when society was briefly out ahead of Godard. He had to do some of his most inventive work just to catch up. American filmmakers of the 2000s have no such singular event around which they could galvanize cinematic practice. In place of young people shooting slogans on the boulevards, political opposition is now voiced in a million editorials and gradual shifts in opinion polls. In fact, there is no shortage of films addressing the enormous problems confronting our society, including an array of Iraq War films that nobody watched. However, the only two political films that have done any kind of respectable box office are An Inconvenient Truth, made by an ex-vice president, and Sicko, about the health care crisis, perhaps the most insolvable of the issues dominating the 2008 election. They are well-meaning and effective films, but hardy dynamite at 24 frames per second.

Another advantage Godard and his cohort had was (relative) novelty and not much competition from the mainstream cinema. When films like The Sound of Music and Around the World in 80 Days were among the most honored Hollywood films of the decade, you could make a radical film just by having Jean-Paul Belmondo mugging for the camera. A.O. Scott asserts that "a strong case can be made that [Godard] was the era's single most influential artist in any medium." This could well be true, but for all of the romantic radicalism of 1960s cinema, it's possible to overstate its actual cultural impact. Popular music was much of a cultural catalyst than the cinema, if for no other reason than the films of La Nouvelle vague, Das Neue Kino, and other ground-breaking national cinemas were largely inaccessible to most Americans in the pre-VCR era. This isn't to say that widespread exposure necessarily means profound influence. The Velvet Underground, long considered one of the most influence rock bands ever, wasn't exact hit parade material. Rather, the synergies around music of the time penetrated far deeper into the culture than film ever did. Bob Dylan spawned thousands of imitators, but name one filmmaker working today who acknowledges Godard as a primary influence.

By rights Godard should be making American Express ads by now, but he's still making challenging, important films. His moment has passed--it was really quite short, just ten years--but that isn't his fault.  What's changed today isn't filmmakers so much as film audiences: they are so much more diffuse than in the 1960s, too well-versed in auteurist principles to be so easily impressed, as audiences were in 1976 watching Alain Tanner's Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. We are the children of Jean-Luc Godard, but with one important difference: instead of looking for a cinema that breaks down the barriers between art and life, we're looking for a cinema trying to avoid becoming just another profit center in an entertainment conglomerate.

Valkyrie and the Eye Patch

The film bomb is almost a genre in itself. To qualify, a film doesn't have to be an actual box office bust. It merely has to create a swirl of rumors and bad press during production. A premise ripe for disaster also helps: a $300 million movie about one of the greatest disasters in the history of technology, a film plot derived entirely from the lyrics of Beatle songs, Mel Gibson recreating the pre-Columbian Americas, Tom Cruise playing a vampire, Tom Cruise playing a Nazi.

Genuine box office disasters--big-budget, high-profile films that fail spectacularly in theatrical release--are actually relatively rare. Heaven's Gate, Ishtar, Bonfire of the Vanities, Show Girls, and Waterworld are the most famous examples, and the last one actually made money overseas. Despite widespread snark before their releases, Titanic, Interview with the Vampire, Apocalypto, and Across the Universe were successful to some degree or another--the first two spectacularly so.

One could argue that these near miss disasters are the result of a rumor mill made all the more febrile by the Internet. This is certainly true, but films also get bad pre-release publicity because of something deeper in the way Hollywood works as a industry. Take the example of Valkyrie, a Tom Cruise vehicle being produced by the storied United Artists studio. Much of the Valkyrie est mort talk is just industry gossip about a project not going smoothly. Bloggers have noted that several scenes have yet to be shot, but that's not as big of a deal as it might appear; it's certainly not as bad as scenes that have to be re-shot.

Then there's the eye patch. It may prove to be a visual that gets permanently stuck in the image repertoire that is Tom Cruise, alongside clips of him leaping on Oprah's couch. I don't think Cruise is a closet fascist, but he's susceptible to totalitarian belief systems. Furthermore, in Valkyrie the real threatens to intrude onto the illusion upon which film, like any other entertainment medium, is built upon. The eye patch is Hollywood's publicity machine gone haywire. Its whole language has suddenly broken down, revealing something unintended. The language of the pitch, intended to convey sure-fire success, sometimes contains its own undoing. The pitch for Titanic was like this, or so it seemed in the months before its release; so is the pitch for Valkyrie: "Tom Cruise plays a Nazi who tries to kill Hitler!" Cruise has long been known in Hollywood as a weirdo; wrapping an eye patch around his head and stuffing him into a Nazi uniform underlines his essential oddness, as well as Hollywood's tolerance of it. The role itself is strange. It would take an actor with a more highly-developed sense of self-consciousness to play it properly, someone along the lines of Ralph Fiennes. Then again, who would have thought Cruise would make a credible vampire?

France’s National Anti-Depressant

André Bazin is rolling over in his grave.

The most popular French film of all time is now Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, a feel-good comedy about a postal worker who is cured of his malaise by a visit to a small town in Brittany, a region of chilly rains and strange cheese. State television, fulfilling its mission to issue grand, oversimplified statements about the nation, calls the film "the national anti-depressant."  Le Monde, in an even more telling comment, called the film reality "without its venom." One out of every four people in France have seen the film, which means you can randomly pick any four Frenchmen--say Nicolas Sarkozy, Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Houellebecq, and Zahane Zadine--and one of them has seen it.

First of all, what on earth do the French have to be depressed about? They elected a jerk for president, but that can happen to the best of countries. The French are in debt up to their ears, but relative terms no more than Americans are, and the French economy is growing faster than the German one. Sure, unemployment is around 7% (21% for people under 25), but at least their houses aren't bleeding value. Besides, as the easygoing Britons in the film demonstrate, a long lunch is a fundamental right whether one is employed or not.

We've come to expect films maudits from the French, not hick parables.  French film should be as acerbic as a drag on a Gitanes Brunes.But Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis reminds us that the French have their crowd-pleasing cinéma de sam'di soir. Their film industry may have more in common with Hollywood than the Criterion Collection might suggest.  One of the most celebrated and quintessentially French films of recent memory is Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which was a remake of James Toback's psychodrama Fingers.

Ch'tis and the earlier discussion in this space about Kenji Mizoguchi has taught me that what I think of as a national cinema is really a commercial construct. The French films screened in this country are export products--more specifically, they're luxury goods like Burgundy wines and Louis Vuitton. To a certain extent the entire country is a luxury good for foreign consumption.

This isn't to take anything away from the French cinema. André Bazin, the great French film critic, virtually single-handedly raised film to an art form by showing Americans what was great about our own mass market films. Nor does  Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis represent the "real" French cinema--merely one part of it. When I watch a French film like Amalie or The Dinner Game I always imagine that I'm somehow looking over the shoulder of the French watching themselves. I realize now that it's important to keep in mind that, sometimes, chic foreign films can represent a sort of national presentation of self: the cinema a country wishes it wanted, rather than the one it really wants. Certainly the same thing happens in the US.

The Disappearing Film Critic

My first reaction to the news that film critic David Ansen was among the 111 staff members laid off at Newsweek was a shrug. Newsweek is the third major periodical to cut its reporting staff in the past few months. Chicago's CBS affiliate laid off some of its veteran reporters yesterday, too.  Today David Carr reports that film critics are getting the ax all across the country, victims of declining ad revenues and loss of readership to the Internet. Film critics like the Village Voice's Nathan Lee can now line up for unemployment benefits behind all the book critics laid off last year.

Your own view of these developments depends, I guess, on how you view critics working for mainstream media: Are they impartial arbitrators of cultural values, or cultural mandarins consolidating power and wealth for a corporatized cultural elite? If you want to see a vivid example of this debate, see Michael Billington's blog entry at the Guardian, in which he takes the BBC to task for championing the theatrical work of a few impresarios while ignoring genuinely creative theatre.

From what I've observed, we all have people we trust in cultural matters. It no longer matters where their writing appears. I read Dave Kehr and A.O. Scott and Jonathan Rosenbaum, who just retired from the Chicago Reader. And I read GreenCine and the Guardian film blog, along with more academically-oriented bloggers like Girish Shambu. I turn to each for a different view on the movies. (If anyone knows any film studies grad students or professors with good blogs, by all means let me know.)  The cinema is too diverse, too rich to be contained within the pages of a local paper's entertainment section, but no blogger (yet, anyway) has the clout to champion a small film to the multiplex masses, nor does any blogger I know of have the expense account to attend festivals in Berlin, Toronto, or Buenos Aires, where the best foreign films make their debuts. The Romanian cinema, which is now really hot, was first championed by print media critics.

The disappearing professional film critic is symptomatic of a larger trend in mainstream media, especially print media. If print is being killed off by bloggers, it's not yet clear how long bloggers can carry the load of informing the public. Nobody's figured out how to pay for the wisdom of the crowd. If you take it seriously, blogging is hard work, and doing it for free is a tough long-term proposition. I feel like I'm still learning how to do it. But if no one values discourse on film or literature or architecture or art to support it financially, then the producers of these cultural products will suffer as well. Historically, the independent artist arose with the cultural critic; neither is possible without the other. The idea of public taste being shaped by a group of dedicated amateurs is very appealing. However, history also shows that capital has a tendency to concentrate in the hands of a few. One day we may depend on a small group of professional bloggers with even less accountability than the cultural mandarins.

That Nathan Lee lost his job is bad news for everyone who cares about the cinema. If the blogosphere has any role in the future, it should act as a bridge between different groups of cinephiles: professional reviewers, university students and teachers, avid filmgoers. Blogs are fulfilling this role already, but there's room for improvement. Also,  somebody is going to have to figure out how to spread some money around.

The Other Mizoguchi

When Kenji Mizoguchi died in 1956, Akira Kurosawa remarked, "Now that Mizoguchi is gone, there are very few directors left who can see the past clearly and realistically." Mizoguchi is best known both in Japan and around the world as the chronicler of female suffering throughout the ages, especially under Japan's feudal system. In the six years between the end of the American occupation and his death, Mizoguchi churned out four films, all set in Japan's distant past. (His last film, Red Light District, is set in contemporary Tokyo.) The best known of the period films are The Life of Oharu, about a miserable seventeenth-century prostitute, and Ugetsu, about two sixteenth-century adventurers who make their wives miserable. Because of his melancholy geishas and painterly technique, Mizoguchi has often been called the most Japanese of all directors, even though he studied Western painting as a young man and his visual style, with its long takes and composition pushing the eye beyond the frame, owes a considerable debt to Jean Renoir.

Writing in the latest issue of Sight and Sound, Alexander Jacoby takes issue with this view of Mizoguchi. More broadly, Jacoby shows us how a national cinema comes to be defined. He points to the films Mizoguchi made before his last four-film trip through the feudal past and argues that a different Mizoguchi emerges, one that is more clear-eyed and leftist than the yamato-e films for which he's best known outside Japan.  For instance, My Love Has Been Burning (1949) looks at the exploitation of textile workers.  Burning covers Mizoguchi usual themes, but it's shot in a recognizably post-war neo-realist style. Socially-conscious films like Burning and Five Women around Utamaro (1946) were rarely distributed outside Japan, Jacoby explains, because Tokyo film executives "often assumed that patterns of Japanese family life would be incomprehensible to westerners." Jacoby continues, "It is a paradox that at a time when the most critically esteemed western films were neorealist in style, the Japanese barely exported their supremely realistic home dramas or presented examples of a then-thriving tradition of left- leaning, socially conscious films."

The more directly Mizoguchi looked at the Japan of his time, the less Japanese he seemed. When the New German Cinema directors of the 1960s rejected the mannered visual style of the time, they were considered more authentic, more German. No other cinema that I can think of--other than perhaps the Indian cinema--is so closely associated with a specific visual style and narrative treatment of the past. In order to see another side of Japanese cinema, it turns out, we need to look more closely at the director most closely associated with that tradition.

Fitna

Get ready for more mob violence in the Middle East.  Geert Wilders, a right-wing member of the Dutch Parliament, will soon have the world premier of his film Fitna, and tempers are rising in anticipation. Wilders' film is short but incendiary, a paranoid broadside again Islam and everything associated with it. After filmmaker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death by a militant Islamist and mobs across Islamic world went berserk over some Danish cartoons, the Dutch government is frantically trying to contain the potential damage. The government persuaded Dutch television not to broadcast the film, but some Internet site will post it. From there, no doubt, it will go viral in the right wing-nut margins of the Internet. Otherwise, the domestic front looks ready; Dutch Muslim groups have been cooperating by urging Muslims not to let Wilders get under their skin. A loner jihadist may do something rash, but that's a more or less constant risk anyway.

Beyond the Netherlands the situation isn't so secure. Last month the Cairo International Film Festival for Children held the Dutch animated short Where Is Winky's Horse? hostage until the Dutch government apologized and did some symbolic slapping around of a certain right-wing parliamentarian. But l'affair de Winky may not be the last word from the Islamic World. Protests have already started in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where, you would think, they would have more important things to worry about. Judging from the Danish cartoon episode, the current penalty for graven images of the Prophet created in a small European country seems to be 50 deaths, and that has a lot of people concerned.

Fitna may be a waste of bandwidth, but you can insert your standard defense of freedom of speech here. The film's release is yet another example of the mutual misunderstanding between Islam and the West. No one believes Wilders' film will be the last provocative episode, but one can hope that the reaction will be relatively subdued, and Wilders' hateful bluster will end up little more than a 20-second segment on the BBC World News.  After all, the long tail of sectarian hysteria has to start diminishing some time, right?

The Three Dimensional Future

Worried about losing audience share to television, Hollywood decides to invest millions of dollars in upgrading  theaters to enhance its one technological advantage over its rival medium: the vast size of its images.  New projectors and sound systems are installed in theaters all over the country, including systems capable of projecting 3-D images.  Hollywood in 1954?  No.  Hollywood in 2008.

Beginning in 1949, film audiences began to shrink in direct proportion to the number of television sets in use, so that by the early 1950s more than half of US movie houses had closed their doors. The film industry responded by rapidly increasing the number of releases made in color (50% of all American movies in 1954), and it experimented with a variety of widescreen technologies.  Most famously, it experimented with 3-D movies. Between 1953 and 1954 Hollywood released 69 features in 3-D.  They were a huge hit at first, but audiences quickly grew tired of the eye strain and headaches caused by the 3-D glasses, and once the novelty wore off, it became obvious that the films were routine genre pictures, mostly Westerns, science-fiction films, and horror films. Despite the sudden crash and burn, Hollywood didn't entirely give up on the 3-D process, occasionally testing the waters with a sci-fi release or a porn film.

Hollywood is dusting off its most eccentric technology once again with the recent success of several 3-D films, including Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour. Seeing piles of cash in three dimensions, the studios currently have 10 new 3-D features in production. This time, however, the threat from television is only part of the story.  For one thing, the infrastructure of American movie houses has long been overdue for an upgrade.  Nearly half of all American movie theaters are quipped with 1970s-era projectors and sound systems. The arrival of digital film is inevitable because it saves distribution costs and, well, everybody else is doing it.

But the historical analogy between 1954 and 2008 only goes so far. Television isn't the only enemy this time; the studios' long dependence on big-budget blockbusters is also a threat. In some ways, the rollout of 3-D and other digital technologies is more like the arrival of sound in the late 1920s, when audiences were growing tired of the limitations of silent film.  Outfitting American theaters for sound represented a massive infrastructure investment comparable to the digitization of multiplexes today.  In both cases, Hollywood put off the upgrades as long as they could.  It wasn't until the blockbusters no longer worked at the studios got desperate enough to make the investment. 

Already the summer 2009 release schedule is overcrowded with 3-D movies.  James Cameron, who is at his best working with very large inanimate objects, will release his 3-D action film Avatar.   Also coming out in the summer of 2009 are films starring guinea pigs and piranhas spectacularly rendered in three dimensions. In the meantime, digital films will really come out in force.  Perhaps the most anticipated digital film is Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which will cost about a dollar a pixel. The latest installment in the Indiana Jones franchise is sure to make wheel barrels full of cash, but the studios better be careful: The spiffy new digital film and ultrahigh fidelity sound will make it more likely we'll hear Harrison Ford's bones creak as he drags itself through an eye-catching postcolonial landscape.

Bollywood and the Marketing of Dubious Virtue

The Guardian's Michael Hann sees the "beginning of the end" of Bollywood in Actor Prepares, an acting school for aspiring Bollywood stars, located in Ealing, England. The school is a sign of the increasing globalization of the Bollywood brand, a process, Hann argues, that will destroy everything that is unique and appealing about the Bollywood cinema, at least for its British fans. Hann writes, "If Bollywood becomes self-conscious about its various cinematic formulae - including hammy acting, songs and extravagant scores - it risks losing its own appealing, if bizarre, cultural flavour."

For Hann, the Actor Prepares academy is indicative of this development because it will lend an air of legitimacy to film acting for Indian women. "Its long and illustrious history is peopled with gifted individuals who nonetheless suffered the stigma of a supposedly sleazy profession," Hann says. "Bollywood actresses, much like their counterparts on the English Victorian stage, have been looked down upon as women of dubious virtue."

But this only tells half of the story. Yes, in the early years of the Indian cinema actresses were stigmatized by their work on screen. In the 1920s, even prostitutes refused film roles, and the first major female star was an Australian named Mary Evans, who performed as Fearless Nadia in the 1930s and '40s (interestingly, as an action hero). But after Independence the Indian cinema reflected the larger cultural divide between traditional Indian values and modernization. For Indian actresses this sometimes meant a wild discrepancy between their screen personas and their private lives, which were the subject of fervid tabloid interest. But even in their private lives female stars enjoyed far more latitude in their behavior than ordinary Indian woman. Nargis Dutt starred in the iconic nationalist film Mother India (1957) while conducting an open affair with her married producer. When that relationship collapsed, she married the actor who played her son in Mother India and, throughout the melodramas of her romantic life, maintained her sainted status as the filmic mother of India. Similarly, Smita Patil, the It Girl of the 1970s New Indian Cinema, was a heroine to India's poor even as she slept with a variety of married men. Dubious virtue, then, was associated with modernization and the throwing off of the constraints of traditional culture.

However, as Bollywood changes to reflect a globalized Indian economy, it's left behind, to a certain degree, the older cultural dichotomy. Aishwarya Bachchan represents the chaste new breed of polished, export-ready Indian actresses, but even she's had problems creating a crossover market. A few international stars aside, the globalization of Bollywood faces some structural problems beyond cleaning up its image overseas. It's worth noting, in view of Hann's fears about Bollywood losing its tawdry soul, that when Hollywood globalized in the 1980s, it became more like itself, not less. The Indian cinema developed its cinematic formulae to market itself to a polyglot, multi-cultural nation almost as diverse as the global market itself. Besides, as Hollywood proves with every new issue of People and Us, dubious virtue sells.

Caligari and German Expressionism

Because I manage projects with teams in Central Standard Time and India Standard Time, when crises occur, they unfold over 24 hours rather than eight. This week I'm dealing with a really major, round-the-clock crisis, so posts are going to be very irregular this week and, in the worst case scenario, into next week.

This week Dave Kehr features Kino International's DVD package of German Expressionist films from the 1920s, including Robert Wiene's great The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The film is cutting edge as an artwork, but rather primitive as a movie, even for 1919, when it was made. The German film market was cut off from innovative American and French films during World War I, so when film production resumed after the war, German directors were several years behind in terms of filmic technique. It didn't take them long to catch up.

Despite its static camera work and crude editing, Caligari is a tour de force. As Kehr points out, even though film Expressionism ran its course fairly quickly, its visual motifs lived on in film noir. Kehr also summarizes Siegfried  Kracauer's famous analysis of Caligari and other Weimar films. Kehr makes the interesting observation that the figure of Caligari now seems much less sinister than he did in 1920, although to be fair to Kracauer, he was relying on the memory of seeing Caligari 25 years earlier.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is an Intro to Film Studies chestnut, but it's an amazing movie. It still inspires fascination. I haven't seen any of the other films in the Kino collection, but German Expressionism was a film movement unlike anything before it. It's a very important chapter in film history.

Watching the Oscars before the Storm

To prepare for last night's Oscars telecast I read the A.O. Scott/David Carr debate about the ceremony. Scott argued that the publicity bloat of the Oscars obscures genuinely good American filmmaking. Carr championed the Oscars as one of our few remaining shared cultural experiences. Before the show, I was on Carr's side, feeling that the Oscars accurately reflected Hollywood as an industry. But after watching the show, I came to sympathize with Scott's position that, by closing the door on a very good film year while ignoring many excellent films, the Academy Awards did more harm than good.

I always forget that the ceremony doesn't start on the hour. First there's the red carpet to endure.  The doughy-faced girl who plays Hannah Montana was everywhere, acting very chipper for someone so irrelevant. The cameras were also fixated on Carrie Russell, whoever that is. A nice-looking woman, but kind of a generic starlet. The cut quickly to the dress procedure of the red carpet interview was startlingly abrupt. You get the sense that if Osama bin Laden came down the red carpet, there would be a perfunctory question or two about the whole terrorism thing before the conversation would switch to his elegant, flowing white robes.

So the actresses are led into the hall by their dresses, while the men look like they just remembered the Golden Globes is the ceremony with the drinking, not the Oscars. Then the promos kick in for ABC shows I won't watch in this lifetime, nor in my next. Finally, Jon Stewart bounds on to the stage, armed with a set of jokes that had a first draft feel about them.

The rest of the night is kind of a blur. Carrie Russell appears a couple of more times and I still can't figure out who she is. The Hannah Montana girl, the show's most prominent product placement, appears again to do something completely inconsequential, and yet she manages to use the adjective "awesome" to describe it. Jon Stewart seems to be acting out the writers' residual bitterness with his clench-jaw delivery. He looks visibly relieved to have the chance to ad lib when they let Marketa Irglova back out to give her speech.

There were a few other moments of actual feeling, when someone gets caught up in their passion for making movies, or the enormity of their good fortune finally hits them. One such moment was Diablo Cody, in her Betty Rubble dress and stevedore tattoo, accepting her award for her fellow writers. But overall the ceremony had a perfunctory and joyless air about it. I don't know if it was the snowstorm that's about to hit Chicago—our fourth or fifth major storm of this interminable and dreary winter—or just the tail end of a long weekend with a variety of job crises facing me on Monday morning. Maybe you saw something else. I haven't had the chance to read anyone else's reaction. Even the Coen Brothers' studied New York cool struck a discordant note. Ordinarily I like them, although I'm still mildly surprised that No Country for Old Men won the Best Picture Oscar. I haven't seen the film yet, primarily because I read the Cormac McCarthy novel, a post-Western grotesquery I wasn't eager to re-experience in CinemaScope. The story just seemed too remorselessly bloody, too emotionally hollowed out to serve as the standard-barer for the American film industry.

I thought the key moment in the broadcast was Jon Stewart's iPhone joke. There was some big-screen montage and when it was over, Stewart was watching it on an iPhone. The joke was a sly reminder that the Academy Awards are always two to five years behind the cultural zeitgeist. All that screen-chewing acting and those luscious long takes are lost in the microscreens of the digitized cinema. Finally, the iPhone joke was the writers' way of reminding the actors that they're up next in the bitter war over the three-inch screen.

The Super Sexy High Masala Art

It's long been assumed that Hollywood and Bollywood will someday merge. The huge popularity of certain Bollywood stars, which attract followings in size and intensity to rival a religious sect, make their migration to LA seem inevitable. Aishwarya Bachchan and Hrithik Roshan, the stars of the Bollywood blockbuster Jodhaa Akbar, are the latest Indian celebrities being wooed by Hollywood.

According to Anupama Chopra, no Bollywood actor has starred in a major Hollywood film for logistical and ego reasons, telling us, "Schedules and expectations are difficult to match. Bollywood superstars are generally unwilling to play supporting roles in American movies, and there just aren't many movies coming out of Los Angeles that feature Indians as leads." But are those the only reasons why the world's two largest film industries remain almost completely separate?

Some non-Indian studios have made inroads into the Indian film market, Sony and Disney being the most prominent. The more worldly tastes of the Indian diaspora audiences have nudged Bollywood films closer to Hollywood models. But generally speaking, Bollywood and Hollywood remain parallel but distinct worlds. It's hard to imagine mainstream American film audiences lining up to watch a three-hour masala film with classical Indian dance numbers and an arranged marriage plot. American audiences' tastes in excess tend to run toward the technological rather than the melodramatic.

But there are other, less obvious reasons why the American and Indian film industries have never worked together. (By the way, I know Bollywood and the Indian film industry aren't the same thing; it's just easier in a short piece to referred to them as if they were.) The Mumbai-based film industry is notoriously clannish. If Hollywood has the social structure of a high school, Bollywood is a small family business. Outsiders, even from India, have a tough time breaking into the business. Furthermore, Hollywood executives may want to stuff bulletproof vests under their power suits if they really want to do business in Mumbai. Because of funding restrictions on Indian films, one significant source of funding is organized crime. A few years ago Roshan's father took a few bullets from some mobsters unhappy about his refusal to accept their creative input. Bollywood is plagued by petty crime as well. Piracy of Indian films around the world is rampant. Even paying customers aren't exactly gold mines. Worldwide Bollywood sells a billion more tickets a year than Hollywood, but total grosses are a tenth of the American film industry.

Finally, despite its global profile, Bollywood remains rooted in the particulars of Indian culture. What Salman Rushdie once called the "Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art" is designed to dazzle both the illiterate lumpenprolitariat and information-age workers. Bollywood films exert a powerful mythological tug for audiences caught between traditional values rooted in village life and the materialism of the gleaming data centers. This is why marriage plots are so important. The blockbuster Jodhaa Akbar is about a 16th-century arranged marriage. As Henry Fielding knew in the 18th century, the tension between an arranged marriage and a romance is central to a middle class person's struggle for self-definition in the early stages of capitalism. Hollywood, of course, is equally obsessed with the marriage plot, but at the other end of the same historical process. Hollywood is more concerned with the threat to romance posed by late capitalism.

In any case, perhaps if Brad Pitt lived with his parents, like Hrithik Roshan does, then maybe American audiences, and Hollywood producers, will be ready for the Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art. In the meantime, Hollywood will continue to try to find a role or two for a dewy-eyed beauty like Aishwarya Bachchan before returning her home to Mumbai, where she lives with her husband's parents.

The Revival of the Argentine Film Industry

A general rule of thumb is that a country needs a population of at least 50 million to support a domestic film industry. So what do you do when you only have 40 million people and you're really good at making movies?

That's the dilemma faced by Argentina. Despite a run of international commercial successes in the 1990s, the nation's film industry continues to struggle to wean itself from government subsidies. Argentine studios are caught between the Hollywood goliath and smaller, grittier nations like Romania, which is currently beating Argentina on the international film festival circuit. Argentine filmmakers have vowed to make such viewer-friendly films they're practically going to hand deliver popcorn to every theater-goer in the country. For instance, Pablo Fendrik, writer and director of El asaltante (The Mugger), promises "to start thinking more about the spectator in every scene, every act and every paragraph of the script. What will the spectator think here, how will they react, what will they want?" Presumably the first step is stop making films about muggers in a country with a serious crime problem.

Another way to increase domestic gate receipts and make their films easier to export is to throw nearly everything they have into genre films, especially horror films. Argentina is built for Westerns, but horror films are low-cost, high-return propositions. Unlike the notoriously finicky sci-fi crowd, horror fans will watch pretty much anything. Plus, screams don't need subtitles. However, exporting horror isn't without risks: as the J-horror producers discovered, become too successful and Hollywood will poach your best talent. Argentine studios are also going to try to beat Hollywood at its own game by investing in some high concept films. One project in development is an animated film about lab rats. Get ready to take your children to a film about a lovable rat named Leukemia. 

But Argentina isn't going to abandon altogether the artistic high end of the domestic and international film markets. Even in quick-peso Argentina it's easier to get funding for auteurist films than for genre films. Because Argentina already has an international reputation for intelligent, creative films, it's developed more bankable directors than bankable actors.  Argentina has traditionally been the best film industry in South America, so it's reassuring to know that producers aren't giving up on what made industrial-level filmmaking in Argentina possible in the first place.

J-Horror

It's January, so our screens are now inhabited by monsters and ghosts. The number one film in the country right now is Cloverfield, in which a monster demolishes Manhattan with a few swipes of his tail. The horror film One Missed Call has recently departed the theaters, but this past weekend another morbid thriller arrived in the form of David Moreau and Xavier Palud's The Eye, a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film by Danny and Oxide Pang.

The Eye, starring the geek princess Jessica Alba, differs from recent buckets o' blood films like Hostel and Saw in that it's a ghost story that relies on implication more than evisceration. Like One Missed Call, The Eye is part of the relatively new sub-genre known as the J-horror (or Japanese horror) film. These films are actually English-language remakes of a Japanese and South Korean genre that isn't very old itself.  J-horror films, according to Terrance Rafferty, are

quiet, slow-paced, utterly solemn ghost stories in which young women (or schoolgirls) are repeatedly menaced by some malevolent supernatural entity, usually the spirit of a pale, longhaired woman who's extremely annoyed about having expired. 

J-horror films have become popular here just as the genre is dying out in Japan and South Korea. Its last gasps can be seen in two recent films by the few remaining directors who haven't already moved on to Hollywood. In Sion Sono's Exte young women are attacked by their own hair. The young heroine of Park Chanwook's I'm a Cyborg but That's O.K. is such a loser that no ghost will bother to haunt her, so she's left to talk to vending machines.

The more indirect and suspenseful horror of the J-horror genre isn't exclusively Asian, of course. Late last year Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphange was released in the US. The film was produced  by Guillermo del Toro, whose high-end horror film Pan's Labyrinth was nominated for an Oscar.

But what distinguishes J-horror films from the Spanish-language variety and the whole non-slasher horror tradition of films like The Innocents (1961), The Haunting (1963) and The Others (2001) is the J-horror's particular twist on the genre's standard tension between the human and the non-human. Horror films are famous for their charged sexuality and violent repressions, but in their invocations of innocence and youth, J-horror films are dark morality tales about young women who surrender their virginity too early. The ghosts who haunt the young female victims are themselves merely the first victims of their own sexual desire. Conversing with the ghost means looking into the truth of the forbidden and seeing one's disembodied desires stuck in the netherworld between body and spirit, or between Hello Kitty and marriage. The J-horror film doesn't need to resort to cutting up bodies because the worst horror has already happened.

Oscar Nominations

When the Oscar nominations were announced yesterday, my first thought was, at least there's no Braveheart this year.  Actually, this year the field seems to be a pretty good one, although I was a little dismayed to see that Juno had been nominated for best picture. Come to thinks of it, Juno has more in common with Braveheart than a title character who wears a skirt. Juno may be low budget and quirky where Mel Gibson's film was big budget and pompous, but like Braveheart, people seem to like Juno for the wrong reasons.

Despite some major letdowns over the years -- I'm still steamed that Crash won Best Picture in 2004 -- I retain an avid interest in the Oscars. I'm not one of those spoilsports who point out that the Oscar Best Picture isn't really the best film made that year.  Who wants that responsibility, anyway? Anyone who dares to pick one film as the best film made on the planet in a given calendar year is just as asking for trouble. Far and away my least favorite question I get asked my opinion of the best film of all time. For some reason, when speaking to a PhD in film studies, people go for broke and ask for the best film ever made. No one ever asks me for the best film of the year.

It's just as well that we give the job of picking one film, one actress, one sound editor as the best in a single year to an anonymous group of know-nothings. Only the Nobel committee is more secretive, unpredictable, and indifferent to generally accepted standards of excellence than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Academy Awards are everyone's experience with a teacher who grades unfairly, the one who gives the best grades to the teacher's pet. The coolest kid never gets the A. The coolest kid this year is Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, which, to everyone's mild surprise, has been nominated for best picture, along with the teacher's pet film, Atonement. The smart immigrant kid, Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, flunked out on the first pop quiz. Judging from all of the fuss made about the film -- it doesn't appear in Chicago until next month -- I would've thought that this film would have been a shoo-in for a best foreign film nomination.

I know that we're invited to contemplate the best films Hollywood has produced at the precise moment when Hollywood puts its worst films on the screen. Like the Super Bowl, that other late winter extravaganza, the Oscars are timed to wrest the maximum amount of publicity out of the media. Still, it's kind of fun to play along, despite the excesses.  This year's ceremony, however, carries with it the threat of an interesting ethical dilemma.  If the writers strike is still going on, I probably shouldn't watch the ceremony.  Boycotting the broadcast is about as pointless a political statement as I could make, even more effectual than my continual refusal to shop at Wal-Mart, but I worry that it will have to be made anyway.  Luckily, most of the accounts I've read say that the strike will most likely be settled in time.

My big Oscar prediction: Ratatouille will win best animated film. I know I'm going against the tide on this one, but I have a gut feeling.

Varda and the Time-Image

I've always thought that Dave Kehr had one of the most interesting jobs in film criticism.  In his current job, writing the weekly new DVDs column for the New York Times (I remember when he was a regular film critic for the Chicago Reader), Kehr gets to regularly revisit film history.  He works under certain constraints, such as he can't review a film if it is already been reviewed in the Times, but otherwise it's a dream job for somebody who is really interested in film history. I wonder if he gets to keep all of those boxed sets.

In any case, this week he returns to perhaps the most famous periods in recent film history:  the French New Wave. Criterion has just released a boxed set, 4 by Agnès Varda. The best known of the four is Cléo From 5 to 7 (1961). (The others are La Pointe Courte (1954/1956), Le Bonheur (1964) and Vagabond (1985).) Filmed in real time, Cléo tells the story of 90 minutes in the life of a young pop singer who was waiting for lab report that will tell or whether or not she has cancer.

Although La Pointe Courte made her reputation as a cinéaste to be watched, Cléo was the means by which Varda began to rethink what it meant to be a female director. The plot of the film has a great deal of potential for melodrama, but rather than waiting for the news from the lab, we're distracted by the film's treatment of time.  Gilles Deleuze, the quirkiest and hardest to categorize of all the recent French philosophers, wrote two gnomic books on the cinema, Cinema 1: Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image.  In these books Deleuze argued that the cinema reflected a new way of understanding time.  In pre-modern times people used machines like clocks to measure the movement of time. In modernity, on the other hand, our sense of time comes out of the machines themselves. Because it is a machine that creates a temporal experience, the cinema is, for Deleuze, a philosophical instrument. Through its manipulation of story time, cinematic is a means by which we can better understand how we experience time in the modern world.  Specifically, it shows how our experience of time -- indeed, our experience of reality itself -- is mediated by technology.

During a rehearsal scene Varda plays directly with our perceptions of the differences between the world we call the real and the world created by the cinema. We watch as Cléo tries out some new songs. We hear her voice in diegetic space--that is, as if we were actually sitting in the room with her. Then an orchestra appears out of nowhere, literally, and Cléo's voice itself begins to sound recorded, even as it's coming from her mouth. This transition from the diegetic to the non-diegetic is a staple of the musical, but it's weirdly out of place from a hyperrealistic film. Just as were getting used to film as a passive recording device, the film eludes our primary identification and starts to take a life of its own.

We're left to ask, who's really in charge of this whole production?  Suddenly auteurist mastery runs smack into filmic cliché. We can imagine a cigar-chomping male studio head demanding that Cléo's rather thin pop voice get some support from a lush orchestra--aesthetic designs of the film be damned. This is about as good as an allegory of female filmmaking in the late studio era as we are likely to see.

Memory and Marienbad

In David Lodge's novel Nice Work there is a scene in which a group of academics play a game in which they named a canonical book they have not read.  If I had to name one canonical film that I have not seen it would be Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad, which begins a two-week run at the Film Forum on Friday.

The whole idea of a canon isn't as prominent in film as it is in literature, but if there's a film canon, it would be Sight & Sound's Top Ten list. Every ten years, starting in 1952, hundreds of prominent critics and directors are asked to list their 10 favorite films of all time. Last Year at Marienbad doesn't appear on the latest list, published in 2002, but it's an important film if only because it functions as sort of a litmus test for cinephiles: did Renais add "a new dimension of the filmmaker's art — the process of actually portraying the drama that takes place within the human mind" (the 1962 New York Times review) or  was the film "a stone in the cemeteries of the dead"  (the 1962 Village Voice review)? Does the film represent a Bergsonian attempt to re-create the process of memory or is it merely an exercise in visual abstraction?

We're no longer in Susan Sontag's "feverish age of moviegoing," when we're afraid to miss a movie or we'll be excluded from furious cocktail party discussion or seminar room debate.  Marienbad was an important film in the early 1960s not just because it was a tantalizing collaboration between two major figures in the French avant-garde (Renais and the screenwriter, novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet), but because the film addressed problems with which society grappled. Renais's Hiroshima Mon Amour was, arguably, a more successful treatment of the issue of time, memory, and history. The year Marienbad was released, 1962, was also the year of the pivotal Oberhausen Film Festival in which twenty-six German writers and filmmakers established the junger detuscher film, or as it became known later in the decade, das neue kino. The young German filmmakers of the time launched their furious assault on the unbewältige Vergangenheit ("unassimilated past") of post-war West Germany.   In a year in which saw the greatest level of violence in Iraq since 2003, yet nine of the top ten grossing films in the United States were science fiction, fantasy or animation films. Clearly, we're having trouble linking up our personal memories and the recent unassimilated past. Hardly anyone went to see In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, or Redacted, so it's unlikely that a 45-year-old film with lovers named X and A will be a hit. Yet Marienbad 's theme of unresolved memory and sleek surfaces may be an oblique allegorical comment on the present.  Otherwise, going to see the film will be an exercise in obligatory tribute to the film canon.