•Stereo Sanctity•

PopMatters Feature: ReFramed No. 18 - Robert Culp's Hickey & Boggs

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:44:00 +0000

This time out, our discerning duo take on one of the last great LA noirs, directed by one of the '60s/'70s most recognizable TV stars.

Calum Marsh: Whether you want to call it the last great contemporary film noir or the first great buddy action film, Robert Culp’s Hickey & Boggs deserves far more recognition than the paltry sum it’s accumulated over the last forty years. It should come as no real surprise that the cultural high guard has ignored a film of this kind altogether—unless they come conveniently prepackaged with Point Blank-style arthouse frills, action flicks rarely find their way into the canon—but I’m genuinely surprised that a movie as fun and exciting as this hasn’t found at least some sort of niche audience to embrace it after all these years.

You’d think Hickey & Boggs would be an easy sell on pedigree alone: though clearly the passion project of director and co-star Robert Culp, the film has the distinction of being the very first screenplay written by Walter Hill, who went on to create The Warriors and, most famously, the Alien series. And it co-stars Bill Cosby, which should be reason enough to make this thing more widely known. As it stands, it languishes in seemingly permanent obscurity, going largely unseen and totally undiscussed. Honestly, why isn’t this thing a cult classic?

Jordan Cronk: Well, unfortunately, as is the case with a great deal of the films we cover in ReFramed, availability in the home video market has left Hickey & Boggs languishing in obscurity for quite a while. Only recently did the film receive a DVD release—or, rather, a DVD-R release, available through the Warner Archive series, which is an online made-on-demand service that isn’t really all that well known to anyone other than hardcore fans of noir, which is what the series specializes in.

This is also another one of those films that I feel would gather a rather devoted following if simply granted proper release. Besides Bill Cosby and the related I Spy angle, there’s also, as you point out Calum, the Walter Hill connection, who’s 1972 film The Driver has been referenced in many an article recently in conjunction with Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, a homage to Hill’s feature and films of a similar nature. Which is all to say that, yes, there’s no aesthetic reason that Hickey & Boggs isn’t more well known—it’s certainly one of the more entertaining films of its kind that I’ve seen. But I personally wasn’t even aware of the film until a couple of years ago when it played as part of a retrospective series at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Needless to say it left an immediate and indelible impression, becoming not only one of my favorite crime films from the era, but also one of my own definitive L.A. films, joining such richly detailed and geographically intimate works as Alex Cox’s Repo Man and John Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz. It’s also one of the films profiled in Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, which we’ve effusively covered in these pages in the past. However, now seems as good a time as ever for the film to find a long-overdue audience.

Marsh: That Los Angeles connection seems rather significant, too—and not only because the film’s many notable set pieces are established in and around recognizable city landmarks. I’m not an L.A. resident, of course, but even with my limited familiarity with the city I can tell that this is an uncommonly authentic document of the look and feel of the place. And the look and feel of the city as it was in 1972, then, becomes the look and feel of the film as a whole: as with the classic ‘50s noir Kiss Me Deadly, which Thom Andersen described as a “literalist film” for how closely it nailed the details of its setting, Hickey & Boggs begins in L.A. but is ultimately about it in some sense.

Of course, Hickey & Boggs is now four decades old, so much of what it transcribes about Los Angeles has unwittingly become a historical document, and I’m sure you’re in a better position than I am to appreciate the nuances of difference between the L.A. of 1972 and the L.A. of 2012. I mean, I’d like to believe that you can still order four dirt-cheap chili dogs at a food counter in the middle of a city block, but I suspect that kind of thing is as lost to history as Cosby’s deep green suit.

Cronk: I’m sure the prices are slightly different, but there are certainly still curbside eateries just like that in the Los Angeles area. In fact, the one they go to in the film is called Pink’s, and it’s still around and one of the most famous and popular places in Hollywood (on a culinary side note, there’s a similar scene in Minnie & Moskowitz where Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel visit Pink’s—it’s appeared in quite a number of films, most out of convenience and not with nearly as much pride as these two films).

It is true, though, that Culp—who we haven’t mentioned not only stars in the film but also directs (in fact, it’s the only feature film he ever directed)—turns the city into a character unto itself. Perhaps the film’s most memorable scene, and certainly its greatest set piece, is a lengthy shootout in the L.A. Coliseum, where the NFL franchise the Ram’s once played. The film thus carries with it an unmistakable air of nostalgia—the locations are recognizable only as those of Los Angeles, but this is the Los Angeles of a bygone era, one once associated with a grittier type of character-based crime film. Only a few filmmakers such as Michael Mann and the aforementioned Refn have really been able to accurately capture subsequent eras of the city’s expanse. You know who this film reminds me of more than anyone, though? Robert Altman.

Hickey & Boggs would make a hell of a triple feature with California Split and The Long Goodbye, each made one subsequent year from the next. Needless to say this was a fertile time for films such as these. Altman may have even picked up on some of the buddy-film aspects of Hickey & Boggs—and if not necessarily him, certainly dozens of others have, nearly all to lesser effect.

Marsh: You know, I was actually going to ask you about Minnie & Moskowitz—I just assumed it was a similar eatery rather than the exact same one. In any case, that kind of location specificity is clearly what Culp is going for, and it is, I think, one of the film’s most salient features. And you’re dead-on to bring up Robert Altman, because his best films share exactly that sensibility; Short Cuts, The Player and The Long Goodbye, in particular, are quintessential Los Angeles pictures, the city so much more than a backdrop.

And beyond that, The Long Goodbye shares with Hickey & Boggs an approach to film noir that’s both playful and subversive, a kind of postmodern take on a genre declared dead decades earlier. I don’t know if Hickey & Boggs could be said to be a conscious influence on Altman or any of the crime-film stylists that followed—it’s hard to gauge the reach of a film so few have seen—but that’s part of what makes it such a revelation to rediscover now.

It’s easy to see it as a blueprint for the wave of buddy action films through the ‘80s and ‘90s, particularly given that more than a decade after this film dropped Walter Hill went on to pen 48 Hours, a similar picture that’s widely misperceived as the first of its kind. What distinguishes it from its followers, however, is its intensely bleak perspective; where most buddy cop movies are marked by their levity and irreverence, Hickey & Boggs is dark, treating the profession of its protagonists as grueling and thankless.

It’s a thoroughly enjoyable film, to be sure, but the fun and humor is of the gallows variety, the jokes made mostly amidst misery and despair. Hickey and Boggs are on the verge of bankruptcy, torn between paying the bill for their phone or their answering service, and Culp plays up the amusing irony: without the answering service they can’t take calls from new clients, but without the phone they can’t return them. And a recurring gag finds the duo sticking a homemade “out of order” sign on whatever parking meter they pull up to—it’s funny, yeah, but it speaks volumes about the rut they’re in.

Cronk: And the Culp character is also an alcoholic, eventually jeopardizing their case with his bouts with the bottle. A lot of the film’s most memorable dialogue takes place in bars or over a drink, and it’s in these scenes where these characters’ personal lives are exposed and their inner demons are revealed to the audience. Each has their own funny quirks, of course, but there’s an undercurrent of weariness beneath even the film’s more outwardly light-hearted moments. The plot itself is extremely dense too.

I feel like it’s so rare for an American crime film to weave an intricate plot nowadays. The genre the world over isn’t much better, but when as film like, say, the recent British hit Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy comes along, it’s refreshing in the faith its filmmakers put in its audience. And yes, it seems more of a similar case of early-‘70s, independently minded aesthetics that brings together this film and the concurrent work of Altman. Peter Yate’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle and the films of William Friedkin also approach the genre in similar manner, and taken together one could argue this as one of the most fruitful periods in American cinema. These are all rather bleak films, and the third act of Hickey & Boggs in particular is extremely sad, with a certain peripheral but important character being killed in retaliation for our duo’s sometimes selfish pursuits.

The ending even carries with it that quintessentially mournful ‘60s/ ‘70s vibe, one more realistic than most films which have followed have dared construct. To me, though, these qualities are what keep films like these so rich with character insight and lasting entertainment value. I’m not sure why these idiosyncratic little crime films seemingly died out, but sometimes after the mid-’80s things seemed to take a turn toward the comedic, leaving behind the bleaker human elements which so distinguish these films. I suppose that’s why we cherish them and why we’re still discovering and discussing films like Hickey & Boggs today, though.

Marsh: Not to generalize too broadly, but I think sometime during the ‘80s these kinds of thematically bleak, narratively complex action films came to be supplanted by more lighthearted, simple-minded spectacles, and gradually action filmmaking become associated exclusively with fantasy wish-fulfillment. I think in a way it’s harder now for audiences to accept genre films as anything other than simplistic exercises in escapism, because the divide between ostensibly “serious” arthouse films and lighter blockbusters is practically unbridgeable—it seems that for a genre film to veer into seriousness or complexity, it has to adopt the attitude of an arthouse film, which is what Refn’s Drive did last year. Hickey & Boggs, like several of the other films you mentioned, wears its cynicism right on its sleeve, but it doesn’t try to shield itself with arthouse tropes or trimmings; it’s still thoroughly a neo-noir, an action film for multiplexes. That’s pretty exceptional

Cronk: Yeah, I’d be inclined to agree. After all, the late ‘70s brought Jaws and Star Wars, unknowingly creating the blockbuster in the process. And by the ‘80s, the new template for mass entertainment was written. The ‘80s did end up producing other films that feel somewhat like spiritual successors to this ‘70s movement such as Midnight Run. But even that is first and foremost a comedy. But like we’ve said, these similarities are what make the obscurity of a gem like Hickey & Boggs that much more unfortunate. I’ve seen little glimpses of evidence that the film could be gaining some curiosity, and with the film now available in at least some kind of digital format, I’m thinking we won’t be the last converts.

It’s discoveries like these that continue to intrigue me and ultimately make me wonder just how many other wonderful films from this era are lurking just beyond the frame of pre-blockbuster American cinema. Hickey & Boggs is a film I would and could recommend to just about anybody, and I get the feeling they’d react in a similar manner. These characters, coupled with the Los Angeles locales and all these humorous and humanistic little details, will hopefully one day elevate the film to at least a cult-like status appropriate for such a satisfying film. I think I can speak for both of us when I say we’d be proud to be at the ground floor if such an occurrence ever transpires. [PM]

PopMatters Features: The Best DVDs of 2011 & The 40 Best Films of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:15:00 +0000

The last couple weeks has seen PopMatters roll out various film-related best of 2011 lists. I contributed to two of them, the Best DVDs of 2011 and the 40 Best Films of 2011. For the former, I provided some contextual thoughts on both my favorite DVD set and my favorite Blu-Ray of the year: Eureka/Masters of Cinema's 8-disc 'Late Mizoguchi' box set and Sony Music Group's import-only (but region free) debut of Edward Yang's 1986 masterpiece The Terrorizers (#16 and #9, respectively). For the latter, I once again wrote about my favorite film of the year, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which came in at #14. And that's gonna do it for my year-end coverage, which was frankly exhausting. I hope you've enjoyed. New film and record reviews should be popping up around these parts within the week.

Record Review: Sunn O))) - ØØ Void / Sunn O))) Meets Nurse With Wound - The Iron Soul of Nothing

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:21:00 +0000

For a band who’s never moved at anything above a lumbering lurch and never played more than a few, nearly-indistinguishable chords per album, Sunn O))) have covered an impressive amount of ground over the last thirteen years. Their origins as an Earth tribute band has been so thoroughly circumvented, inverted, and reanimated that they’ve arguably eclipsed the legacy of their forebears by simply obliterating the trajectory from influence to experimentation to evolution. In this sense, it’s not so much disorienting as it is illuminating to revisit ØØ Void, Sunn O)))’s second release from 2000, recently reissued by Southern Lord. After all, it sounds exactly as you remember—or exactly as you’d imagine—which is to say: glacial-slow riffs, suffocating drones, mind-numbing minimalism. But despite the seeming familiarity, the chasm between ØØ Void and, say, Monoliths & Dimensions (2009), is vast, miles of sustain, canyons of bass reverberation, a vortex of strings, horns, and ghastly vox left in the wake of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson’s titanic expansion of the parameters and ideology of drone metal.

Listening back, the range of frequencies seems tighter, the space between chords less perceptible. Sunn O))) were already the biggest, baddest crew on the block, relying on sheer force and volume to put forth their ideas, yet then as now, it’s the details that elevate this music beyond mere concept or provocation. The dialogue between the few contrasting notes in opener “Richard” facilitates collateral (almost subliminal) noise, the waves of sustain approximating at various moments the creaking of a rusty gate, the shill of detuned string instruments, and industrial machinery left to short-circuit after nuclear fallout. “NN O)))” features the early appearance of vocals on a Sunn O))) record, with Scream’s Pete Stahl haunting the outskirts of the mix with a combination of low moans and exasperated howls, a spectrum of tones applied instrumentally in closer “Ra at Dusk,” which surveys similar landscapes but finds no trace of human life.

The key track, however, is “Rabbit’s Revenge,” essentially a cover of a live Melvins track which some have posited as the basis for “Hung Bunny” from 1992s Lysol. Sunn O))) sample the performance a little less than halfway through, livening up a purposefully asphyxiated record while paying tribute—just as they did with “Dylan Carlson” on The Grimmrobe Demos (1999)—to one of their primary inspirations. It points directly to the outside influences—black metal, ambient, avant-garde jazz—which would stimulate so much of the bands later, more ambitious work.

In 2008, one of the band’s spiritual ancestors got the opportunity to repay the favor. Packaged together with the reissue of ØØ Void is The Iron Soul of Nothing, a “remix” of the sessions by British avant-garde and industrial noise legends Nurse With Wound, who unsurprisingly gut the mixes for spare parts and erect in its place a proper drone record, one that stands as both compliment and separate entity to the original album. The nineteen-minute “Dysnystaxis {...A Chance Meeting With Somnus}” stands in sharp contrast to the enveloping ØØ Void and predicts the more contemplative (if no less chilling) mood of this remix collection, splaying bits and pieces of Sunn O)))’s peripheral commotion across a mournful, softly sighing ambient wasteland. Twin tracks “Ra at Dawn Part I {Rapture, At Last}” and “Ra at Dawn Part II {Numbed By Her Light}” carry a similarly bleak sense of abandon but add a sinister undertone which Nurse leader Steven Stapleton kneads out of blankets of industrialized noise, static, and samples.

These are all intimidating, rewarding tracks in their own right, but just as ØØ Void’s centerpiece eclipses its surroundings, so too does “Ash on the Trees {The Sudden Ebb of a Diatribe},” Nurse With Wound’s terrifying reinterpretation of “NN O))).” Fore-fronting Pete Stahl’s previously obfuscated vocals, Stapleton lays bare these chilling incantations (“Life has no meaning,” Stahl demonically intones, accurately summing up the general sentiment) over dynamic spikes in buzz-saw noise and wind-swept drone. The bottom falls out around the 6:30 mark, leaving a thin, piercing tone to crest alongside slowly accumulating growls, the original track’s guttural riff, and shards of broken glass. In its own nightmarish way, it feels like the most perfectly unholy marriage of these two towering experimental icons one could possibly imagine. But it speaks most interestingly to Sunn O)))’s aesthetic potential towards and, indeed, eventual realization of such liberal convergences. It may appear incremental to passing consideration, but even at this point Sunn O))) were beginning to disappear just beyond the horizon of genre. [CMG]

PopMatters Feature: ReFramed No. 17 - Chantal Akerman's Les Rendez-vous d'Anna

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:09:00 +0000

For their first foray into 2012, our team takes on an arthouse visionary from the '70s whose still incredibly vital today.

Jordan Cronk: Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman occupies a similar position to that of a few other directors we’ve touched on in the pages of ReFramed over the months—Thom Andersen, Aki Kaurismäki, Mark Rappaport—whose entire careers need to, in a sense, be reframed. These are all important filmmakers for various reasons, but Akerman represents arguably the most vital of all under-recognized directors. She’s still consistently working and producing at a remarkable level—her newest film, Almayer’s Folly, may be her best work in nearly two decades—but her brief arthouse star seems to have dimmed since her most visible and acclaimed period in the mid-1970s.

And unfortunately, even among cinephiles, her career seems to hinge solely on her groundbreaking 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. That film is a remarkable achievement on many levels and by any standard, bringing as it did a formal rigor and the observational tack of the avant-garde into a narrative framework, but it’s just one piece of a much larger career that encompasses shorts, documentaries, and even musicals. We’re not going to dive into her extreme experimental phase today, but the film we’ve chosen to discuss, 1978s Les rendez-vous d’Anna, is perhaps equally unique in her oeuvre, standing as it does on the precipice of her first wave, more narrative-ly inclined works and her successive hybridizations and experiments with documentary and self-reflexive forms of cinema.

It’s also a kind of sister film to Jeanne Dielman, touching on similar themes of alienation and emotional detachment, marking it as a curiously under-seen and underappreciated work. In fact, the film wasn’t well received at all: Akerman, representing for many arthouse patrons a uniquely feminine alternative to a male dominated industry, chose to, with this film, rebuild her previously all-female crew with a combination of both sexes, prompting many to write off the merits of the film on principle alone.. Which is all very ironic, as Les rendez-vous d’Anna is arguably the most incisive, penetrating, and downright mournful examination of the female psyche in Akerman’s catalogue. What are your thoughts on this period of Akerman’s career, Calum? And where do you think Les rendez-vous d’Anna stands in relation to Jeanne Dielman or other works in the cross-over arthouse scene of the ‘70s?

Calum Marsh: Well, it may not have been particularly well-received, but Les Rendez-vous d’Anna has been called Akerman’s most accessible film, or at least the most accessible she’d made to date, and that’s a telling response—I think it might say more about critical perceptions of her career than it does about how watchable the film itself is. Akerman has always had a reputation for difficulty, and her most widely acclaimed film, Jeanne Dielman, is of one the cinema’s most notoriously imposing classics—an over three-hour study of the daily routine of a housewife and part-time prostitute, it’s a radical reconception of the possibilities of narrative filmmaking that pushes the limits of the form.

Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna isn’t nearly as monumental, and at a comparatively slender two hours it has fewer buzz-worthy talking points working to keep it relevant. Thus, as usual, it’s almost entirely neglected. Thanks to the Criterion Collection, it is widely available in pristine condition on DVD in North America, but not as a mainline title—it’s been relegated to a less prominent position in one of their feature-less “Eclipse”-series box sets called “Chantal Akerman In The Seventies”. So it goes.

And so the status of Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, as well as just about every other Akerman film other than Jeanne Dielman, should be pretty familiar to readers of this column: because one of her films has been universally accepted as canonical, the rest are shrugged off as unimportant, and most languish in undeserved obscurity. You’ll find very little ink spilled over this film and many more like it, which, unsurprisingly, is a real shame; beyond its relative “accessibility” (a dubious claim besides), Les Rendez-vous d’Anna is an audacious, intensely moving character study, one both deeply personal and ambitiously universal.

Cronk: It’s funny, I had written in my introduction that the film was accessible and relatively welcoming compared to some of Akerman’s other work but decided against it at the last moment, as it may paint a somewhat false picture of the film. It’s true that this would be the first film I would recommend to those unfamiliar with her work, but at the same time, many of its best moments are reinforced and enhanced through recognition of Akerman’s slowly expanding aesthetic palette in the ‘70s. Meaning, it’s a beautiful piece of work, but also a bleak portrait of a seemingly traumatized soul.

Of course, her stylistic inclinations—mostly static set-ups or hypnotic horizontal tracking shots—reflect her protagonist’s (in this case Anna, but also Jeanne Dielman and Julie, played by Akerman herself, in her early narrative Je tu il elle) lonely plights in unforgiving environments, together elevating these works to equal levels of thematic and aesthetic interest. But considering her rigid formality and the emotional stasis of her characters, Akerman’s films feel very much to me like works of movement and advancement. The first shot of Les rendez-vous d’Anna is, after all, of a train entering a station, and a key scene in the middle of the film takes place on a train, while the narrative as whole concerns Anna’s promotional tour of Europe behind her latest film (it should go without saying that Anna’s occupation aligns her with her creator in a fascinating manner).

Even Akerman’s non-narrative work—say, News From Home or D’est—are preternaturally concerned with momentum, travel, and displacement. For Akerman, loneliness and yearning manifest naturally, whether one is restless or grounded, successful or struggling. It’s not an encouraging message, but it’s an honest and emotionally pure approach to communication. You get the sense watching these films that Akerman is speaking directly through these characters, and it’s not hard to identify with at least some aspect of each.

Marsh: Very well-said.. You know, Anna is not unlike another film we’ve discussed at length in these pages before, Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray—like this, Rohmer’s film is about a despondent young woman meeting, and largely failing to connect to, other lost souls through Europe. But where Rohmer’s film is lithe and sun-kissed, ending on a note of hope and romance, Akerman’s is in a way quite a dark and moody thing, and in the end it feels more despairing. Though I agree that the film is one of an almost symphonic movement, unfurling slowly but with a precise rhythm, the film also has a sense of a deepening isolation, a loneliness calcifying and a sadness renewed.

Anna, Akerman’s surrogate, never finds happiness (with the exception of a monologue in which she recounts a pleasant but unexpected lesbian affair to her mother, which she recalls with genuine fondness, Anna remains distant and morose throughout), and Akerman offers no promise of redemption or emotional “completion”. That makes Anna sort of a bleak portrait, but also one which feels authentic and true. And because Akerman’s formal rigor is so uncompromising, the film never dips into self-pity or sentimentality of any kind.

Cronk: That conversation with her mother reminds me of something that I noticed as I re-watched the film recently: Anna barely speaks in this film. There is, however, a lot of dialogue—probably the most in any Akerman film from the era—almost all spoken by the various people Anna comes in contact with throughout her tour. She meets various men who talk and talk but don’t really say anything all that interesting—or, at least, nothing she finds terribly interesting. The train scene I referenced earlier is almost entirely made up of a long monologue delivered by a stranger. Only when Anna meets up with an ex-lover who falls unexpectedly ill does she open up enough for the audience to learn a little more about her—and this is at the very end of the film. It makes one ever curious as to how Anna ended up in the state she’s in and which she remains as the film closes on a—as you say—despondent note. Which is to say this is incredibly mature storytelling, particularly for a woman who was only 28 years old when this film was released.

It’s interesting to note that the characters she was drawing in the mid-‘70s were all women in their forties. I can’t think of many comparable constructions in modern cinema. Her perspective was keen even at an early age and the divide adds a kind of retrospective resonance as Akerman was soon to leave behind traditional narrative, focusing less on character and more on landscape and the tactile qualities of environment. This has lent her subsequent returns to narrative with La captive and Almayer’s Folly a greater sense of possibility, and the emotion present in each feels like a now older filmmaker reconciling her various preoccupations, expanding her once flat-lined outlook in the process.

Marsh: Yes, and even in this film, where the protagonist is pretty obviously Akerman’s analog (“Anne” is Akerman’s middle name, by the way), the subject is approached in such a nuanced and deeply considered manner that it’s hard to believe it was the product of someone so young. Precocious young filmmakers aren’t unheard of across cinematic history, of course, but the early films of people Akerman’s age tend to be quite different in sensibility and style even if they’re alike in calibre—most of the prominent examples, from Orson Welles and Citizen Kane to Jean-Luc Godard and Breathless, and even right up to someone like Paul Thomas Anderson and Boogie Nights, are marked by an obvious youthfulness and vitality, which might account for why their films still feel so fresh and kinetic today.

Akerman’s early films, on the other hand, are exceptional for their formal and thematic sophistication, and in general for being the kind of serious, audacious experiments of someone significantly older and more experienced. Making an important or even just “great” film at such a young age is an achievement worth celebrating, yes, but producing difficult, challenging works of art like Jeanne Dielman and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna in your mid-20s is frankly astounding.

Which, as you’ve mentioned, is especially interesting in light of her recent work. Akerman is still only a little over 60 years old, and it looks like she’s now entering a new creative phase—like one of her most important inspirations, Jean-Luc Godard, she’s producing work that’s just as interesting in her late period as she ever did in her early ones, and I hope she’s got another decade or more of masterworks.

Cronk: I think she’s stayed interesting for the same reason that someone like Godard has stayed interesting: she’s continued to grow and develop her craft even as it debuted in such seemingly perfect form. Like we’ve said, Akerman has gone onto make a quasi-musical, documentaries, and most recently, literary adaptations, but just like those filmmakers you mentioned, there’s no mistaking her work for anyone else. The ‘70s was certainly her most consistently fruitful period—in fact, she may be the key filmmaker of that era—and as such, Les rendez-vous d’Anna stands as an important reconciliation of all her experimentation up to that point. You can see traces of this style in everyone from Jim Jarmusch to Carlos Reygadas to Pedro Costa, and it’s worth arguing for Akerman as one of the most influential filmmakers to ever come out of Europe, leaving her mark on everything from the New York underground to the European arthouse. And yes, there’s no reason to believe this conversation is anywhere near completion, as she continues to cover new ground with each successive outing.

Marsh: I think you’re right that Akerman’s a major figure and an important influence on many, but few people would adhere to the aesthetic framework she established throughout the 70s as rigidly as these films did. Les Rendez-vous d’Anna pushes boundaries exactly because Akerman pushes the film so far in one direction: she holds takes much longer than a less confident filmmaker might have, allows characters to speak for extended periods, and frames everything in the same measured, strikingly minimal way. The basic style of this film is the standard arthouse practice today, which you can see just by looking at recent festival highlights—Julia Leigh’s debut Sleeping Beauty comes to mind, but even something like Ceylan’s Once Upon A Time In Anatolia contains noticable traces of this spareness and asceticism—but in 1978 it was unheard of to approach a narrative feature with this kind of rigid, experimental formalism.

Akerman was taking cues from artists like Michael Snow, whose film experiments she’d become acquainted with while living in New York, and was marrying those techniques to the emotional and thematic core of a routine character study—which, along with the experiments Godard was working on with video during the same period, helped contribute to a new kind of experimental narrative cinema that would eventually dominate the arthouse landscape. Akerman really is one of the most major artistic figures in recent cinematic history, and I hope the canon remembers that. [PM]

Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 02:35:00 +0000

Note: I wrote this brief description of Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie for the Cinefamily repertory theater, who are screening the film alongside Godard's latest work, Film Socialisme, on Monday January 23, 2012. Below is the unedited copy.

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 masterpiece Vivre sa vie (aka My Life to Live) was the fourth film the French New Wave icon shot in only two years. In the wake of the breakout financial and critical success of Breathless, Godard would initially turn inward with a strident work of cinematic political activism (La Petit soldat) before flowering flamboyantly with a day-glo tribute to the American musical-comedy (A Woman is a Woman). The stylistic extremity of these films would eventually streamline as Godard’s relationship with his new star of choice, Anna Karina, began to blossom in the early ‘60s, so much so that by the time of Vivre sa vie, Godard’s defiant aesthetic could be utilized as a microscope under which his emotions and skepticism toward Karina could be examined via his own formal constructions (note the use of the twelve descriptive tableaux as well as Godard’s preoccupation with framing Karina in close-up, but from behind her head).

One of Godard’s saddest, most influential works, Vivre sa vie eaves-drops the viewer into the vicinity of Karina’s bob-coifed Nana, a young, beautiful Parisian who dreams of becoming an actress only to fall into casual prostitution to makes ends meet. Though this was Godard’s first examination of prostitution and the sexual alienation of women—one of his longest-running thematic concerns and one that would reach its initial apex with 1967s Two or Three Things I Know About Her—many of Vivre sa vie's most memorable moments occur in brief narrative asides: Nana’s late night, tear-stained spiritual with Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (the film’s most devastating, iconic sequence), her existential café debate with philosopher Brice Parain, her seductive jukebox-accompanied stride around a smoky pool-hall, or even the unexpectedly tragic finale, which even Raoul Coutard’s camera diverts from, crystallizing Nana as both pariah and object of unattainable desire. [Cinefamily]

Podcast: End of Radio #39 - The Best Albums of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 01:07:00 +0000

"Tying a bow on their third year in business, your End of Radio co-hosts Jordan Cronk and Brian Webster countdown the fifteen best albums of 2011, discussing the importance of perception in an era of nostalgia as they debate the merits of certain genres—drone, minimal techno, R&B—which traffic in the effects of memory and the comfort of the familiar."

Playlist:

0:00 – 05:57
Intro / Discussion
05:57 – 18:40
#15. Humcrush with Sidsel Endresen – “Ha! 4”
#14. Burial – “Stolen Dog”
18:40 – 28:04
Discussion
28:04 – 39:22
#13. Braids – “Lemonade”
#12. Julianna Barwick – “White Flag”
39:22 – 48:27
Discussion
48:27 – 55:43
#11. Destroyer – Poor in Love”
#10. Blackout Beach – “Hornet’s Fury into the Bandit’s Mouth”
55:43 – 1:06:13
Discussion
1:06:13 – 1:15:00
#09. St. Vincent – “Northern Lights
#08. Gang Gang Dance – “Chinese High”
1:15:00 – 1:23:33
Discussion
1:23:33 – 1:31:45
#07. Tim Hecker – “Analog Paralysis, 1978”
#06. Robag Wruhme – “Tulpa Ovi”
1:31:45 – 1:44:04
Discussion
1:44:04 – 1:50:22
#05. Oneohtrix Point Never – “Power of Persuasion”
#04. Colin Stetson – “Red Horse (Judges II)”
1:50:22 – 1:59:22
Discussion
1:59:22 – 2:08:00
#03. Shabazz Palaces – “Are you... Can you... Were you_ (Felt)”
#02. James Blake – “To Care (Like You)”
2:08:00– 2:19:55
Discussion / Outro
2:19:55– 2:26:36
#01. Jenny Hval – “Portrait of the Young Girl as an Artist”

InRO Feature: Home Movies - Top DVD & Blu-Ray Releases of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:52:00 +0000

Note: For archiving purposes, I've included my personal contributions to this column below. Please follow the link provided in the introduction to read the entire feature.

"Cataloguing and keeping up with the world’s DVD and Blu-ray releases is an overwhelming and obsessive job that both Jordan Cronk and I relish with a hoarder's delight. The internet may be changing the face of home distribution, but, for my money (literally), nothing comes close to replacing the DVD or Blu-ray on my shelf for instant and flawless home viewing. And when a film is restored halfway around the world, with little chance of an accessible theatrical screening, the resulting release is nothing short of priceless. Jordan and I have chosen ten such releases, including three imports, for this outstanding year. Although it might seem that we are fairly biased for Japanese films—which lock-up half this list—I would argue that we're entering an era where these films, many ignored or dismissed in the realm of English-language friendly releases, are finally getting their due, and our eight-disc number one pick is a perfect example. If you're looking to start a collection, start here, start now." Kathie Smith [InRO]

08. Histoire(s) di Cinema [Criterion; Region A]

Never covered in the pages of Home Movies as it was released just this month, Olive Films’ long-overdue Region 1 debut of Jean-Luc Godard’s mammoth, eight-part video essay “Historie(s) du Cinema” fills a major gap in the digital landscape, representing what one can only hope will be the first of many such unveilings of Godard’s major post-1968 works. Conceived as early as the mid-‘70s and stitched together in segments across a ten year period from 1988 to 1998, 'Historie(s)' embodies its title to an almost dizzying degree, overlaying dense visual montage with Godard’s verbal and textual explications on the role(s) of the cinema in various political and societal spheres. The feature is a supplement itself, to nearly everything cineastes continue to hold as true in regards to the medium of moving pictures.

06. Blue, White, Red: Three Colors [Criterion; Region A]

Physical copies of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s highly influential ‘Three Colors’ trilogy have remained out-of-print for some time now. The wait would prove worthwhile, however, as Criterion ultimately offered up all three films to the glories of 1080p this Fall. Coming off the back-to-back landmarks of “The Decalogue” and “The Double Life of Veronique,” Kieślowski dedicated what would prove to be his final artistic flourish before his untimely death to three aesthetically delineated yet thematically unified films about such broad subjects as love, death, revenge, and sacrifice, keying in on tangibly articulated emotions which he heightened via consistently ambitious stylistic gestures. Criterion’s appropriately stacked Blu-ray set amends hours of bonus material, solidifying these films’ stature for generations to come.

04. A Man Vanishes [Eureka / Masters of Cinema; Region Free]

Continuing to give Criterion a run for that cinephile money, the UK-based Masters of Cinema had an impressive twelve months, capped by the release of Home Movies favorite Shohei Imamura’s 1967 docu-fiction rarity “A Man Vanishes.” Conceived as a documentary on the missing persons phenomenon in mid-‘60s Japan, “A Man Vanishes” eventually took shape as a prescient kind of procedural, wherein Imamura probed the ambiguities of one man’s disappearance via evidence, interviews, and slyly captured confessions. Available for the first time in any sort of English-friendly format, Imamura’s subversive cinema verité experiment, which prefigured an entire movement of hybridized narrative, argued for the continued relevance and more cost effective production of standard DVD.

03. Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse [Criterion/Eclipse; Region A]

This year’s most unexpected digital release is also the most historically and cinematically vital. The five Mikio Naruse silents collected in Criterion’s 26th Eclipse set were made between 1931 and 1934, and together ably outline the Japanese master’s quickly solidifying thematic and stylistic inclinations. Establishing straight away his spry visual sense and already working expertly with montage, Naruse would focus almost immediately on what would turn out to be his greatest theme, the role of the working-class female in an ever-modernizing Japan. In such devastating works as “Every-Night Dreams” and “Street Without End” one can bear witness to the flowering talents of an artist whose stature only continues to grow as more of his work becomes available.

02. The Terrorizers [Sony Music Group; Region Free]

Seemingly flying just beyond the view of even the most watchful digital connoisseur, Sony Music Group’s roll-out of six key Taiwanese New Wave classics nevertheless proved to be the most essential Blu-ray enterprise of the year. Anchoring the series is Edward Yang’s complexly structured thriller “The Terrorizers,” which stands apart from much of the late master’s work in style and narrative schematics. Yang’s films streamlined their narratives in the year's following this one, yet he ultimately would find unique ways of drawing new dimensions from emotionally dependent characterizations. Sony’s import-only Blu-ray is graciously region-free, and includes a short documentary on Yang, but it's commendable first and foremost for bringing this film into the digital realm for the first time anywhere.

Yearbook (Film): 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:21:00 +0000

• 2010 - 2019 •
• 2010 • 2011 • 2012 • 2013 • 2014 •
• 2015 • 2016 • 2017 • 2018 • 2019 •

• Aurora / Cristi Puiu
• The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu / Andrei Ujică
• Certified Copy / Abbas Kiarostami
• Film Socialisme / Jean-Luc Godard
• Le Havre / Aki Kaurismäki
• House of Pleasures / Bertrand Bonello
• Meek’s Cutoff / Kelly Reichardt
• Mysteries of Lisbon / Raoúl Ruiz
• Poetry / Lee Chang-dong
• Le quattro volte / Michelangelo Frammartino
• El sicario: Room 164 / Gianfranco Rosi
• To Die Like a Man / João Pedro Rodrigues
• The Tree of Life / Terrence Malick
• Tuesday, After Christmas / Radu Muntean
• Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives / Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Yearbook (Music): 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:04:00 +0000

• 2010 - 2019 •
• 2010 • 2011 • 2012 • 2013 • 2014 •
• 2015 • 2016 • 2017 • 2018 • 2019 •

• Julianna Barwick / The Magic Place
• Blackout Beach / Fuck Death
• James Blake / James Blake
• Braids / Native Speaker
• Burial / Street Halo
• Destroyer / Kaputt
• Gang Gang Dance / Eye Contact
• Tim Hecker / Ravedeath, 1972
• Humcrush with Sidsel Endresen / Ha!
• Jenny Hval / Viscera
• Oneohtrix Point Never / Replica
• Shabazz Palaces / Black Up
• St. Vincent / Strange Mercy
• Colin Stetson / New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
• Robag Wruhme / Thora Vukk

Note: In the interest of fairness, I’ve excluded all compilations, DJ mixes and reissues from these "Yearbook" pages. As a result, Demdike Stare's Tryptych and Ngunzungunzu's The Perfect Lullaby are ineligible for this year 2011 list.

InRO Feature: Year in Review: Editor's List - Jordan Cronk's Top Films of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:50:00 +0000

When I consider the hand-wringing that usually goes into these lists, it’s interesting that in 2011—the single best year for cinema in at least a half-decade—it would prove so decidedly easy to carve out a top ten. I greatly admire a few dozen films that opened in the U.S. over the last twelve months, some just now seeing the light of day after years in distribution limbo (“United Red Army,” “Go Go Tales,” “Love Exposure,” even “Margaret,” which is as inspired as it is messy), others arriving on a wave of festival hype and meeting those expectations (“Of Gods and Men,” “Poetry,” “A Separation”). But when I think of the handful of films in direct threat to my top ten (“Le Quattro Volte,” “El Sicario: Room 164,” “To Die Like a Man”) none would feel right dislodging any of my favorites. And this was, above all, a year where feeling really coursed through the best of cinema, a fact I find difficult to reconcile with the general acclaim meeting a certain subset of the year’s films (“Melancholia,” “Shame,” “We Need to Talk About Kevin”) which were utterly vacant and devoid of any tangible emotion or insight. What follows, then, are ten works of genuine passion and consistently enveloping formal ingenuity, nearly all worthy of anchoring their own respective year as opposed to sharing space with nine equally impressive films.

10. Le Havre / Aki Kaurismäki

This Deadpan Finnish master's career-long concern with the lives of the disenfranchised finds its most humanistic manifestation yet in his latest, unassuming fable “Le Havre.” With the eponymous French port town reflecting the larger burdens of modern Europe, Kaurismäki blithely yet pointedly traces an odd-couple relationship between an immigrant African adolescent and an aging shoeshiner who perhaps recognizes a bit of his younger self in the boy’s plight. A series of protracted gestures and a color coordinated visual palette once again undergird Kaurismäki’s tight narrative mechanics, his Bresson-like discretion facilitating a dialogue between thematic topicality and intergenerational camaraderie in a manner reminiscent of Jean Renoir or Marcel Carné. Another entry in his politically—and, just as importantly, cinematically—conscious proletariat series as well as a worthy spiritual successor to his 1996 masterwork “Drifting Clouds,” “Le Havre” instantly rises to the top tier of Kaurismäki’s oeuvre.

09. Tuesday, After Christmas / Radu Muntean

Shortsighted critics proclaiming the end of the Romanian New Wave were proven woefully wrong this year, as the country gave us three superb works: Andrei Ujică’s epic found footage doc “The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu,” one elliptical anti-procedural we’ll get to further on down this list, and this shattering marital drama. Retaining the movement’s signature longtakes and formally dynamic compositions, Muntean expands thematically with his fourth feature, staging a tense love-triangle narrative that breaks free of the internalized singularity of many of his compatriot’s most celebrated works. Muntean’s carefully plotted film moves in a roundabout manner, introducing and redefining characters almost scene by scene. And by allowing these people the space (within the frame) and time (within the narrative) they need to reveal their secrets and motivations, he adds to the complexity and the quietly engaging nature of his film, one of the year’s most emotionally devastating.

08. Film Socialisme / Jean-Luc Godard

This French-Swiss iconoclast's first all-digital feature is in many ways his most cinematically and politically engaged since 1998's “Historie(s) du Cinema.” A three-part symphonic essay on life during wartime and the decline of the European Empire, "Film Socialisme" examines political responsibility via aesthetic reconciliation, as an array of sound editing and montage techniques piece together the greater narrative of Godard’s place within the maelstrom. As a filmmaker equipped only with what current technology has to offer—and in a self-imposed race towards the realization of a cinematic reconfiguration of the form’s responsibility and potential for change—Godard continues to argue for a complete rebirth of a classic aesthetic model. Equal parts prismatic cruise around Godard’s stylistic harbor, landlocked travelogue across greater war-torn Europe, and cinematic reconstruction of humanity’s cyclical atrocities, “Film Socialisme” spins something beautiful, provocative, and confounding from the mess we’ve wrought.

07. Aurora / Cristi Puiu

A nightmare serial-killer narrative with almost zero disclosure offered across its vast, three hour expanse, Puiu’s provocatively minimalist “Aurora” observes mundane human activity through a succession of alternately claustrophobic and expansive compositions. Casting himself as the blank-faced subject of his own saga, Puiu provokes a brave dialectic between audience and director, further implicating himself in the methodical exposition of his elliptical anti-procedural. The banal becomes loaded, motivation becomes a means unto itself; and the aesthetic has already proven influential, with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s masterful “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” bearing traces of a similarly guarded, richly ambiguous approach to narrative. Together, these filmmakers are rewriting the rules of film grammar, and as the ripples continue to be felt, it stands to reason that “Aurora” could be seen as a watershed, the work that heroically pushed things that much further toward the unknown.

06. Meek's Cutoff / Kelly Reichardt

Reichardt’s most ambitious and precisely drawn work to date is a genre film by classification only, stripped of ornamentation and extraneous expositional conceits. It’s also, paradoxically, her most aesthetically impressive and engaging work, an observational, revisionist western with stronger ties to Italian neo-realism than to the John Ford school of classical filmmaking. The sun-bleached vistas, crystal blue horizons, and primary-hued dresses of the female-anchored wagon train—captured indelibly by Chris Blauvelt’s Academy ratio lensing—inject emotion into a threadbare narrative, which grows evermore intangible even as events and motivations seem to come into focus. An unexpected, extremely impressive stylistic leap beyond the director’s previously intimate, small-scale work, “Meek’s Cutoff” retains Reichardt’s acute dedication to character while subtly expanding her narrative purview, dissolving the planes of cinematic construction that would traditionally mark this as product instead of the mytho-poetic portrait it truly is.

05. The Tree of Life / Terrence Malick

Appropriately enough for the year’s most ambitious statement, Malick’s messianic epic attempts to encompass everything messy, beautiful, intimate, and overwhelming about life. Few working directors, let alone one toiling within the Hollywood system, would undertake such a project, which literally moves us from the inception of the universe to the afterlife in under 150 minutes. But for Malick, our most deeply spiritual and consistently visionary filmmaker, ‘Tree’ feels like a logical end point, a summation of everything grand, transcendent, and occasionally frustrating about his process projected into a single, staggering work of intense commitment. In juxtaposing a thought-to-be autobiographical ‘50s family narrative with the maneuverings of the cosmos, Malick strikes a unique chord most anyone can identify with. Anyone who’s ever felt overwhelmed by their place in the grand scheme of existence will surely see themselves reflected somewhere within the film’s shimmering surfaces or its yearning familial dynamic.

04. House of Pleasures / Bertrand Bonello

In transposing some of the key thematic and aesthetic preoccupations of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Flowers of Shanghai” from 19th century China to the sex trade in a fin-de-siècle brothel in Paris, Bonello both spiritually enriches and subverts the artifice of the traditional period piece. A boldly sensual, near psychedelic awakening to a more shrouded corner of Parisian high society, “House of Pleasures” hypnotizes via languorous pace, poetic dialogue, and left-field soundtrack accompaniment (the Moody Blues have found an unexpectedly apt posthumous venue), tilling the succulent vein of a cloistered existence wherein each personality is devoured by a society it gives so much of itself to. “If we don’t burn, how will the night be lit?” one prescient young lady ponders during the film’s most searing sequence, and Bonello, now working at heights equal to any other European filmmaker, answers sympathetically, allowing these transient souls an opportunity to ignite the possibilities of a chamber-based cinema.

03. Certified Copy / Abbas Kiarostami

Bravely exporting his singular method, Iran’s most influential and important filmmaker has found renewed passion in the potential of narrative, thereby embarking on what promises to be a fascinating new act in a career marked by repetition, authenticity, and variations on very specific themes. In this sense, “Certified Copy” is a reconciliatory work for Kiarostami, though a sumptuous visual palette and a distinctly European sense of narrative elision moves the film into uncharted aesthetic territory. The director’s increasingly cerebral, sometimes playful, always evolving dramatization of a pair of ambiguously defined verbal sparring partners takes on contrasting meanings and proposes fresh implications when approached from different perspectives, inviting the viewer in while privileging individual interpretation in uncommonly gracious terms. Through an inversion of his fundamental text, Kiarostami has constructed a key work in the grand tradition of the European art film.

02. Mysteries of Lisbon / Raoúl Ruiz

Before passing away this past August, Chilean filmmaker Raoúl Ruiz left us with what could be seen as the defining work of his nearly five decades-long career. This breathtakingly grandiose, epically staged 19th century drama bears witness to a changing of the guard, an end of an era, the collateral effect of one man’s existence on the lives of a privileged generation. In attempting to encompass all the many facets of an antiquated European society, Ruiz has constructed a frighteningly detailed, ravishingly dramatic tale of thwarted love, festering jealously, simmering anger, and vitriolic contempt. Working at a height only sporadically tapped since his mid-‘80s apex, Ruiz fashions a visual novel from the most intrinsic of human emotions, invigorating staid period practices with an aesthetic flair both reverent and valiant. As a standalone statement, “Mysteries of Lisbon” is a landmark achievement; as a capstone to one of the greatest careers in modern cinema, it’s both lament and testimony.

01. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives / Apichatpong Weerasethakul

There’s no shortage nowadays of strange films leaning on gimmicks or genre trappings to compensate for a lack of truly unique thinking. Rare is the movie that not only crossbreeds its various thematic and visual strains but circumvents its obtuseness to the point where every film in its vicinity appears skewed and unnatural by comparison. Apichatpong’s dazzlingly original, riveting modern masterpiece “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” enriches, embodies, and erodes all such classifications, teeming with insight and vivid clarity into the soul of a man not necessarily nostalgic for but enlivened by the capacity of the human spirit. Apichatpong’s first largely linear narrative dives headfirst into premonition, apparition, and reincarnation with a Buddhist’s serenity, emboldening the director’s themes as he subtly galvanizes his aesthetic. Ominous, playful, and consistently riveting, ‘Uncle Boonmee’ stands as the most transcendent work yet from the world’s most vital young filmmaker. [InRO]

InRO Feature: Year in Review: Editor's List - Jordan Cronk's Top Albums of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:37:00 +0000

Access and availability being what they are today, it’s become increasingly difficult to define any given year in music by applying overarching trends or identifying specific movements or scenes. It’s almost as if each micro-genre now has its own yearly story to tell, most not beholden to anything else going on in music, period—let alone in conjunction with blanket classifications such as independent, mainstream, or otherwise. It’s not enough anymore to say that R&B or underground hip-hop had a great year (although both did); rather, it’s more important to note that literally dozens of sub-genres produce consistently interesting and worthwhile material, so much so that any single writer’s opinion is inevitably marked by blind spots. In my estimation, then, what ultimately united 2011—reflected in the following list of my ten favorite albums of the year—was a general air of earnestness that permeated even the most outwardly niche offering or potentially hazardous pastiche. All the best records I heard this year felt not only natural but honest in their artistic expression, whether that was via free-improvisation, carefully chiseled drone, or re-appropriated genre signifiers. It was a beautifully strange year for music, and there’s more—much more—to it than the small sampling listed below.

10. Blackout Beach / Fuck Death

It’s not all that surprising that after the unhinged exhortations and swarming six-string lacerations of Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph—one of 2010’s best indie rock records—Frog Eyes leader Carey Mercer would want to retreat inward. Few, however, could have predicted the pitch-black aesthetic burial of Mercer’s third and best solo album. A sprawl of sputtering synths and disquieting drones, Fuck Death, named after a Leon Golub painting, alternates emotional lashings with ambitious invocations of wartime atrocity and political strife. The record is Mercer’s attempt, in his words, “to make something about Beauty and War,” two of the most broad, subjective topics imaginable. That this harrowing narrative is weaved into one of the year’s most opaque, impressionistic sonic tapestries suggests Mercer may not have just made something about beauty and war, but perhaps tapped into an essential expression of both.

09. St. Vincent / Strange Mercy

I admire both of Annie Clark’s previous albums, but each felt conflicted over the persona Clark wanted to establish: There was the fire-breathing guitar hero and experimentalist rearing her head in a live setting, and the chamber pop chanteuse that up until now seemed to flourish in the studio. Clark’s third record synthesizes these extremes into a whole far greater than the sum of its parts, representing a huge artistic step forward for this ever-maturing songwriter. Previously reigned in and curiously polite on record, Clark’s guitar explodes across Strange Mercy’s ten tracks, each subtly frayed edge revealing new depths of complexity within these tightly structured, visceral arrangements. In the last year, Clark has been doing everything from discussing the influence of Nick Cave to covering Big Black in concert, and with Strange Mercy, her art-rock lineage has finally emerged from its nascent form, searing and inspired.

08. Gang Gang Dance / Eye Contact

Every time I presume to have the answer to Gang Gang Dance, they up and change the question. Noise, industrial, aboriginal electro, dancehall—they’ve adopted and dropped each subgenre in quick succession yet remained loyal to their restless artistic id, establishing themselves as a genre unto themselves. With that said, they’ve reached a new plateau here, a bold expansion of their aesthetic model, rounding off the more jagged corners of their sound and bolstering their melodic sensibilities to the point where things occasionally resemble that of a pop band—that is, a pop band who drops an 11-minute disco-prog track as an album-opening salvo. From track two on, Gang Gang Dance embark on a panoramic trip through their past and on into the future, cutting confidently against the grain while refining their strengths. It may be their fifth album, but Eye Contact is the work of a slippery musical entity still hungry for greatness.

07. Tim Hecker / Ravedeath, 1972

In October 2011, Tim Hecker released Dropped Pianos, a modest EP of minimalist piano sketches. These stark ivory meditations would eventually be expounded upon via pipe organ, as Hecker laid the melodic foundation for the full-length record in an Icelandic cathedral before relocating to his studio to digitally devour those compositions. What emerged is arguably his most intriguing work to date, a brooding, disquieting lament for the transient nature of sound and the cyclical reanimations of recorded music. Another in Hecker’s long line of thematically unified albums, Ravedeath paints a grave portrait of an art form in decay (“Hatred of Music,” “Analog Paralysis,” “Studio Suicide”), blankets of noise and drone systematically snuffing out heaving organ notes as nostalgia tears gravely through the mix—our only hope, Hecker seems to be whispering, amidst a landscape with little else left to offer.

06. Robag Wruhme / Thora Vukk

With bass music staking out a pronounced foothold in mainstream pop this year, it’s been interesting to watch minimalist techno wend its way back into the fold (the genre seemed to reach its most visible point a few years back). Of course, this music isn’t necessarily for the masses, so in a sense it’s back where it belongs. Even within the scene, however, Wruhme’s Thora Vukk seems under-heard. What Wruhme has done here, though, is set a new benchmark for minimalism, sculpting from his roomy productions a welcoming, placid atmosphere wherein skipping rhythms can float airily alongside celestial piano and shuttering samples. It’s evocative without leaning on nostalgia, heartbreaking without turning melodramatic; but best of all it’s the most memorable record of its kind since Pantha du Prince’s shadow-casting This Bliss. Give it time—we’ll be hearing variations on Thora Vukk for years to come.

05. Oneohtrix Point Never / Replica

It’s been a while since I’ve heard an aesthetic concept record so seamlessly constructed that its technique becomes secondary to the visceral response it provokes, but Daniel Lopatin’s latest stands as an example of just that. Sourced from vintage instructional videos and ‘80s television commercials, it reads on paper as a potentially kitschy exercise in recycled pop culture ephemera. But in the hands of Lopatin, these fragments find new life, re-appropriated and reconfigured as a dialogue between artist and raw material. Lopatin’s enveloping drones now build not only skyward but sideways, across fresh and unexplored terrain, mutating outward through stray bouts of percussion, chamber piano, and left-field vocal edits. Lopatin sculpts melody from the everyday, severs connotation from experience, and conflates nostalgia with evolution. Without a modicum of disclosure, he offers an oasis at once familiar and foreign, a New Jerusalem bred on technology yet imbued with generations of humanity.

04. Colin Stetson / New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges

Depending on your religious beliefs, this is either the soundtrack to the apocalypse or the aural accompaniment to the rapture—either way, shit just got real. What doesn’t seem real, or the least bit human, is the extraordinary technique Stetson displays in his solo saxophone work, which approximates the sound of a stampeding cavalry in the throes of bullet-induced hysteria. The scorching, blast-furnace improvisations which comprise Stetson’s second album are at once invective and gauntlet, ornery exhortations pitting humanity against itself in a battle of righteous indignation. Circular breathing, close-mic’d keys, whatever—this thing will fucking crush you before you realize dude played on an Arcade Fire record. And while there are voices within the maelstrom—Laurie Andersen heralding end times like an apparition, Shara Worden conjuring the very soul of our discontent—the prophecy seems clear: no one gets out alive.

03. Shabazz Palaces / Black Up

With both underground (808s & Dark Grapes II) and mainstream (Watch the Throne) hip-hop enjoying a mostly solid year, it was the duo of ex-Digable Planets’ Ishmael Butler and second generation multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire who redrew the blueprint for avant-rap. Shabazz Palaces wrangle industrial IDM, downtempo electronica, and angular bass music as foundation for Butler’s severe, interlocking exegeses on the state of hip-hop. This criticism, bred from years of operating just beyond widespread recognition, conjoined with an uncompromising, gravitational instinct for infectious beats, spawned a simultaneously long-winded (check those song titles) and blunt (each beat feels carved from marble) reprimand to artists operating at both extremes. Never once playing the martyr, Shabazz consolidate their strengths into the year’s best production, emerging with a tough, lucid document of perseverance.

02. James Blake / James Blake

In two short years, Blake has changed direction so many times that the adjectives I once used to describe him—abstract, elusive, austere—are almost the exact inverse of how I’d characterize his debut LP. Still nominally tied to the post-dubstep diaspora, James Blake is, in actuality, a fairly straightforward singer-songwriter effort from a preternaturally talented beat scientist. In that sense, the self-titled designation is less an encapsulation of aesthetic proclivities than a platform for personal disclosure. There’s more of James Blake in these eleven tracks than in any of the obtuse soundscapes he previously constructed; family life (“I Never Learnt to Share”), interpersonal relationships (“Why Don’t You Call Me”), and reconciliations with death (“Measurements”) are all presented in equally stark, hollowed productions. With his debut, Blake has beautifully, if briefly, blurred the line between intimate and universal.

01. Jenny Hval / Viscera

On paper, Viscera reads like an internalized narrative about external phenomenon, a song cycle riddled with images of vaginal dentata, sexual secretion, and, yes, decaying viscera. It’s appropriate, then, that so much of its power resides just below the surface, in the details. And what details: Hval’s expert fusion of avant-folk, industrial grind, and free-improv noise manifests itself like a thousand mental synapses reacting off the body’s intrinsic tensions in a single outward heave of physicality. Even amidst canyons of negative space—kneaded, textured, and burnished by Supersilent producer Deathprod—the music maintains a palpable carnality, like those moments just before an animalistic encounter when things have the potential to go either exceedingly right or horribly wrong. And yet, as we reach climax right with Hval—most viscerally on “Portrait of the Young Girl as an Artist”—the horribly wrong instead feels exceedingly pure, an addictive sensation as galvanizing as it is inspired. [InRO]

CokeMachineGlow Feature: Top 50 Albums 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 02:04:00 +0000

In case you were hibernating in the run up to Christmas, all last week we rolled out our list of the Top 50 Albums of 2011 over at CMG. It's a typically eclectic list, collecting everything from modern classical to noise rock to minimal techno to mainstream and underground rap; it's also the best music list you'll find on the internet this holiday season, and I say that as humbly as possible, this being is my first full year writing for the site. In addition to casting my vote, I also contributed capsules reviews for 13 & God's Own Your Ghost (#42) and Robag Wruhme's Thora Vukk (#21). Individual staff lists, including my personal top 30, were posted late last week as well-- you can fine those here. As is tradition, it's a dense, very in-depth look at fifty records we love, so take your time and read through as time presents itself-- this is some of the best music writing you'll find nowadays and each of these albums are worthwhile in their own way. A lot of time and effort went into this list; we hope you enjoy.

InRO Feature: Home Movies - Fall Review

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 01:07:00 +0000

Note: For archiving purposes, I've included my personal contributions to this column below. Please follow the link provided in the introduction to read the entire feature.

"While most people reading this feature might struggle with only visions of sugarplum dragon tattoos dancing in their heads, there's plenty else deserving of your attention in the realm of movies at present. With a great puff of hot air, Jordan Cronk and I attempt to pin-down the fall’s best DVD and Blu-ray releases, and just in time for your wish/shopping list. As a matter of fact, the twelve releases below may just suffice as replacement for the ol’ partridge, turtle doves, French hens and colly birds." Kathie Smith [InRO]

Le beau Serge / Les cousins [Criterion; Region A]

Time clouds history. In the world of the arts in particular, it’s easy to streamline events into convenient narratives. The nouvelle vague movement has experienced many a revisionist history lesson, its inception and concluding dates blurred between films, directors, and political incidents. Nowadays, it’s François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” that’s generally considered the new wave’s first dispatch. But going by the school of thought that birthed the movement, and which was taught in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, the first two films by critic Claude Chabrol more accurately mark the new wave’s official demarcation point. Released in 1958, a year prior to Truffaut’s coming-of-age classic, Chabrol’s debut, “Le beau Serge,” finds maturity itself stunted in its title character’s (Gérard Blain) adolescent misconceptions about adult responsibility. When Serge’s lifelong friend, foil and attempted savior, François (Jean-Claude Brialy), arrives home after a prolonged absence, a series of intimate considerations and interventions are staged by Chabrol in soberingly direct fashion. Chabrol had yet to abandon optimism, however, and the look of exhausted hope on Serge’s face as the film closes reflects the sense of progress the new wave was hoping to instill on a stagnant French film industry.

1959's “Les cousins” again posits Blain and Brialy as mirror images of each other; however, in a clever bit of role reversal, Brialy plays the troubled bohemian to Blain’s visiting innocent. The titular duo are staged by Chabrol engaging in verbose debates similar to those in “Le beau Serge,” though the closed confines of much of “Les cousins” bespeaks Chabrol’s increasingly conscious attention to composition and detailed mise-en-scène. Further, the sanctity which eventually marks the characters of “Le beau Serge” is stripped bare in “Le cousins,” Chabrol’s much more severe outlook manifesting in a series of misgivings which lead to tragic consequences for all involved. These bleaker tendencies would eventually find their greatest compatibility in Chabrol’s ultimate genre of choice, the thriller, but restricted to the chic modern interiors of “Les cousins,” they instead give rise to one of Chabrol’s most pointed character studies.

Criterion recently debuted both these early nouvelle vague gems in pristine Blu-ray transfers, enhancing the natural exteriors and countryside sprawl of “Le beau Serge” while highlighting Chabrol’s intricate use of interiors in “Les cousins” with appropriately precise clarity and contrast. And while both discs feature worthwhile extras, “Le beau Serge” is the more robust package. Supplements include a lengthy making-of documentary entitled “Claude Chabrol: Mon premier film,” featuring interviews with Chabrol and Brialy; a vintage 1969 television program that finds Chabrol visiting his hometown of Sardent, where “Le beau Serge” was shot on location; and a wonderful audio commentary track by Guy Austin detailing the history and significance of Chabrol’s debut feature. The “Les cousins” disc features a commentary track of its own by Adrian Martin, but misses out on any further interview or documentary materials (which is unfortunate since this is the better of the two films in my view). Both releases also feature informative and handsomely designed booklets with critical essays and A/V specs. Each package is sold separately but if ever two films felt thematically and historically conjoined, it’s “Le beau Serge” and “Le cousins,” two works that gave realization to the dreams of a new generation of French film theorists.

Kuroneko [Criterion; Region A]

The Samurai class has been so romanticized in 20th century Western art and culture that it can frequently paint an inaccurate portrait of Japan’s top-tier warrior demographic. The cinema has helped propagate broad opinion concerning this nominally noble, militarized sect of pre-industrial Japan, and while the bushidō code certainly tied loyalties close to the regime at hand, there were those—just as in every successive strata of nobility the world over—who used their status as a means for personal or political gain. Born into a farming family, Japanese journeyman director Kaneto Shindo frequently parlayed his adolescent experiences with rebel Samurai into opportunities for less than flattering cinematic portrayals of the East’s most lasting cultural coterie. Shindo’s 1968 J horror-anticipating “Kuroneko” treads similar ground to that of his 1964 masterpiece “Onibaba,” both of which pit two women against an evil strain of wandering Samurai. However, only "Kuroneko" accentuates its supernatural and spiritual elements, elevating the narrative into the realm of fable. After a mother and daughter are left for dead by a troupe of rouge Samurai, a mysterious black feline (the film's title literally translates to “black cat”) tends to their wounds as the deceased spirits of the women make after-life plans to enact punishment on their abusers. Commingling the characteristics of both apparition and bakeneko, the women execute a series of comeuppance rituals on anonymous Samurai before coming face-to-face with their long-absent son/brother—now a Samurai himself—inevitably pitting new-found instincts against memory. Through an innovative use of wire choreography and immaculate stage lightning and cinematography, Shindo orchestrates a series of thrilling ariel dance showdowns against eerily shadowed backdrops. But it’s his expert balance of the humane, the spiritual, and the metaphysical which ultimately provide the necessary dimensions—both cerebral and visceral—to canonize this masterful work.

After rolling out a theatrical restoration of “Kuroneko” in 2010, in association with Janus Films, the Criterion Collection debuts this jewel of the kaidan genre in an equally impressive 1080p transfer. Together with a new, uncompressed soundtrack, the aural and visual flourishes of Shindo, cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda, and composer Hikaru Hayashi translate in the highest possible regard. Extras are slim but informative: an hour-long interview with Shindo conducted in the late ‘80s highlights the set, and though it doesn’t touch on “Kuroneko” at any great length, there’s enough contextual and biographical information that is touched on to make it a very worthwhile inclusion here. A second interview rounds out the video supplements, this time with critic Tadao Sato, and running about ten minutes in length. Included in the requisite booklet is a historically detailed essay on the film by Maitland McDonagh, as well as an excerpt from Joan Mellen’s 1972 interview with Shindo, which first appeared in the book “Voices from the Japanese Cinema.” Criterion have always done an admirable job representing Japanese film in the collection, but “Kuroneko” is one of their best recent acquisitions and their presentation of the film is both aesthetically pleasing and satisfying for its many annotations.

Aki Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys [Criterion; Region A]

You could label everything Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki has done as deadpan comedy. But it pays to differentiate: great works such as “Ariel” and “Drifting Clouds” are downright melodramatic as compared to the Leningrad Cowboys series, which took as its subject the ongoing exploits of the titular collective, an outlandishly coiffed troupe of rock ‘n’ roll-bred optimists who travel halfway across the world looking for Stateside success, only to find fleeting fame in Mexico and eventually fall prey to the temptations of the bottle. The whole thing plays like “Spinal Tap” for the arthouse set: like everyone’s favorite classic-rock parodists, the Leningrad Cowboys achieved their own real-world success, touring throughout the ‘90s and on through to today with a repertoire consisting of stadium rock fixtures and cliché-riddled originals.

The three films and five music videos included in Criterion’s new Eclipse set, “Aki Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys,” represent the complete works the band created in collaboration with Kaurismäki. The collaboration's 1989 debut, “Leningrad Cowboys Go America,” remains the most indelible: traveling cross-country to Mexico, frozen guitarist in tow, stopping off for comic vignettes with Jim Jarmusch, and unsuccessfully avoiding run-ins with the law. The more thematically ambitious follow-up, “Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses,” turns their estranged manager into a prophet, who, upon reconciliation, exoduses them from the purgatory of Mexico. With the CIA now tailing the group, they head north on a tip for Coney Island before deciding to seek spiritual enlightenment in the Promised Land of Siberia.

Together the films form a circular sort of narrative and can easily stand alone as the fictionalized account of these earnestly elfin entertainers. Fiction meets reality in “Total Balalaika Show,” Kaurismäki’s concert film documenting the Cowboys’ 1993 homecoming in front of 70,000 (!) fans. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds, but as both time capsule and victory lap, also kind of charming in its way. As per usual, this Eclipse set has virtually no supplements—only the five original Cowboys' music videos (most of which play like short films), made between 1986 and 1993, and one-page liner notes by Michael Koresky on the inner case sleeve of each keep-case. It’s a modest set, one more for Kaurismäki completists or Leningrad Cowboys super-fans (there are at least 70,000 of you out there, apparently) than those unfamiliar with Finnish black comedy. But it's an oddity of such consistent delight that an Eclipse set of this sort seems like the perfect vehicle to bring the films to those who crave them.

Identification of a Woman [Criterion; Region A]

As Michelangelo Antonioni grew older, his release schedule became ever more methodical, reflecting his films’ patient narratives, while instilling even more weight on each subsequent image he deemed worthy of immortalization. Seven years passed between “The Passenger” and 1982’s “Identification of a Woman,” and it would mark not only a homecoming after 25 years of filmmaking in other parts of the world, but a final, completely solo effort for the Italian modernist. (His true final film, 1995's “Beyond the Clouds,” was facilitated by the efforts of Win Wenders, who shot and helped edit portions of it as Antonioni’s health waned.) In terms of precedence, “Identification of a Woman” can be seen as something of a sister film to “L’Avventura,” concerning as it does the disappearance of a leading female character and our male protagonist’s subsequent search and growing relationship with another, emotionally antithetical woman. 'Identification' bears all the hallmarks of late-period Antonioni: hypnotizing longtakes, powerfully evocation compositions, beautiful imagery, and risqué sequences of passionate sexuality. Always less a narrative filmmaker, more a purveyor of themes, these tools service three of Antonioni’s most memorable standalone moments: an extended sequence along a fog-enshrouded highway, an emotionally purging exchange set on a horizon-swallowing lagoon, and a climatic vision with sci-fi implications which stands as probably the loopiest, most left-field ending in Antonioni’s oeuvre (which is saying something).

Criterion’s new Blu-ray upgrades a blown-out, previously available import DVD of the film whose region-free capability was just about its only positive attribute. But beyond the darker, sharper hues exported by the 1080p transfer and the upgraded PCM audio track, there isn’t much else to mark this as a definitive release of the sadly underrated work. Unfortunately, there are no supplements included on the disc—a rarity for a debuting Criterion release in 2011—and only an essay by critic John Powers and a concurrent interview with Antonioni are included in the accompanying booklet (which is typically well-designed). It’s certainly great to see the film finally looking so fantastic for the home video market—and it’s certainly worthy of inclusion in the Collection—but it’s slightly disheartening that a film such as this, which could really use a serious critical reexamination, has been left so blankly staring back at the viewer when the resources that are presumably available for some sort of contextual supplements.

Hickey & Boggs [MGM Limited Collection; Region A]

The 1970s gave us enough high profile crime films for a near-lifetime of enjoyment, but there are just as many overlooked—or in some cases, flat-out forgotten—genre efforts from the era that deserve critical reassessment. Peter Yates’s “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” for example, is a recently rediscovered classic from this fertile period of morally ambiguous crime thrillers. A curio on a similar level but unfortunately without the digital distribution of a company like Criterion, MGM’s unexpected made-on-demand DVD-R of Robert Culp’s 1972 detective saga “Hickey & Boggs” grants this under-seen work its first legitimate digital home video release. As the titular, odd couple detective duo, Bill Cosby and director/actor Robert Culp make for a surprisingly compatible comedic and dramatic team, ricocheting off screenwriter Walter Hill’s realistically urban-centric dialogue. The intimate chemistry between the actors alone is enough reason to seek out the film, but from the director’s chair is where Culp does even more impressive work, staging a number of action set-pieces to rival anything your Freidkins or your Lumets were doing concurrently. (The centerpiece shootout at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, in particular, seems to have made at least a peripheral impact on filmmakers such as Michael Mann.)

This being a made-on-demand disc, no extras have been appended—nor were any expected. Here’s a film good enough to warrant a legitimate release but apparently without sufficient interest to make manufacturing and distribution of the title financially feasible. That’s why these M-O-D discs can prove worthwhile, as the simple availability of a film such as “Hickey & Boggs” is endorsement enough for the trend to continue. For those curious, this is the only game in town; and seeing how the film's been treated the last forty years, this could be it for the foreseeable future. Plenty of films deserve the digital red carpet treatment; most receive nothing of the sort. Perhaps we should be glad “Hickey & Boggs” has arrived to us in even this form, as availability is the first step toward remembrance and reconsideration.

PopMatters Feature: ReFramed No. 16 - Kenji Mizoguchi's The Crucified Lovers

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:22:00 +0000

Another great Japanese auteur gets one of his lesser known 'gems' reconsidered in this installment's cinematic back and forth.

Jordan Cronk: Thus far, we’ve been fortunate enough with ReFramed to kind of focus on some of our favorite films that for one reason or another don’t get the attention they deserve from either audiences or critics. This has resulted in a lot of talk about individual directors’ best works—say, Love Streams, Stalker, The Green Ray, A Brighter Summer Day, etc. I’m sure we’ll soon venture back toward canonical works like these in the near future, but outside of our Hitchcock two-fer (Frenzy and Family Plot), we haven’t taken a whole lot of time to push for less visible works from major directors that haven’t crossed that invisible barrier between curiosity and classic. The Japanese film industry is especially ripe for such discoveries, as many great works remain unavailable or simply buried amidst the plethora of releases from the golden age of East-Asian cinema.

Kenji Mizoguchi, arguably the greatest of all Japanese filmmakers, has a dense and knotty oeuvre, and one that remains sadly under-represented on the home video front (at least in Region 1 format). Two of his best films, 1953s Ugetsu and 1954s Sansho the Bailiff, are solidly ensconced in the canon, but outside of those two peak-era works, other fine Mizoguchi films languish just left of widespread regard. His other great 1954 film, The Crucified Lovers, is one film that I feel undoubtedly deserves to be reconsidered, at the very least, alongside Mizoguchi’s greatest works.

Objectionably speaking, I wouldn’t put it quite on the same level as those other two masterworks, or earlier triumphs such as Story of the Last Chrysanthemums or The Straights of Love and Hate, but with a filmography so vast and so underseen, it begs to suggest that his entire catalogue is slightly mis-weighed. With all the attention paid to two admittedly magnificent works, it leaves outliers such as The Crucified Lovers dangling with no discourse to contextually place the film within his broader catalogue.

Further—and this is why I’ve been pushing to talk about this film in particular for so long—the criticism that is currently available ranges from proper recognition—Jonathan Rosenbaum and Donald Richie are both outspoken proponents—to curiously discouraging takes—otherwise reverential Japanese film historian Tony Rayns spends a majority of his R2 DVD introduction to the film disclosing how Mizoguchi’s heart wasn’t into realizing this particular story, thus slighting the film in light of his concurrent works. Akira Kurosawa was also a fan, considering it Mizoguchi finest achievement.

In any case, I’ve been encouraging you to get your hands on a bootleg copy of the film for a while now, and I’m really curious as to how you perceive the film, Calum? Do you see the artistry at work here, or am I simply banging a drum for a film that sits appropriately within Mizoguchi lesser known films?

Calum Marsh: Well, Jordan, I’ll start by admitting that I don’t think I’m as intimately familiar with Mizoguchi’s filmography as you obviously are, and that I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to focusing almost exclusively on those already considered canonical classics. I’ve been meaning to delve deeper into his work for a long while, though, and this seemed like a good opportunity to begin to do so. I believe you’re right that The Crucified Lovers isn’t quite the unqualified masterpiece that Ugetsu is, but I think it’s actually a more interesting film, both formally and thematically, and as a result it’s the one I’d rather discuss critically.

Visually, The Crucified Lovers is mostly what film scholars will have come to expect from Mizoguchi: his much-discussed “scroll shots”—long takes which pan slowly from one side of a composition to the other, intended to resemble the style of a traditional Japanese scroll painting—figure into its aesthetic prominently, and one of the film’s most significant sequences repeats the haunting, chiaroscuro night-fog set up so crucial to the look of Ugetsu. I don’t want to undersell the quality of his aesthetic, of course—this is a stunning film to look at, even in the fairly beat-up form in which prints of it survive—but if you’re even marginally familiar with the Mizoguchi canon, nothing here will feel revelatory.

The very worst The Crucified Lovers could be, then, is a slight iteration of a style Mizoguchi had perfected elsewhere, and there wouldn’t be anything inherently disagreeable about that. But what really interests me about this film, and what I hadn’t been anticipating at all, is its incredible passion on behalf of a clear social cause. The Crucified Lovers is about how well-intentioned social gestures inadvertently cause a tragic misunderstanding, but, beneath the particulars of its narrative (which gets very involved), it is a film about social injustice and the oppression of women—and though it’s set in 17th Century Japan, it clearly has its sights set on a modern condition as much as much as a classical one. The Crucified Lovers is in many ways a feminist film, and I think the case could be made that Mizoguchi is one of the earliest feminist filmmakers.

Cronk: Yes, Mizoguchi’s major theme over the years was indeed women: mainly their place and role in society, their plight against the tide of a male dominated culture. Mizoguchi, of course, is one of the great jidaigeki (period film) directors, and here he and screenwriter Yoda Yoshikata adapt two classic Japanese fables, one a puppet play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon and the other a novel by Ihara Saikaku called Koshoku Gonin Onna, which they actually sourced as the basis for The Life of Oharu a couple years prior.

It’s interesting to me that for the most part Mizoguchi’s pre-war films were contemporary-set stories, and only when the war years approached and the government began to strictly censor art did Mizoguchi grudgingly begin to look back to find parallels with his modern sociological concerns. Because, as we know, after the war, over half his films were period pieces, and the stretch he made here in the early ‘50s are perhaps his most bitingly political.

I’m also interested in your assertion that this is a feminist film—and by extension most of Mizoguchi’s films can be read as feminist—because unlike some of his other work, wherein female protagonists are held down by a combination of societal strictures and lifestyle choices of their own design, the lead female in The Crucified Lovers is doomed, as the title promises, to die almost by coincidence.

When Osan, the wife of a well-known stationary entrepreneur, attempts to monetarily help her brother, she unwittingly puts herself in a position where a platonic/business relationship with one of her husband’s clerks is construed as something more risqué. And when forced to confront the accusations, the two decide to flee, only later admitting that love is indeed blossoming and that their fates have in a sense been written. Like you say, it’s a rather involved scenario, but it’s universally romantic in a way that stands out in Mizoguchi’s filmography

Marsh: Indeed. It’s heavy stuff, and at times it seems almost Shakespearian in scope. But unlike the classical tragic heroes, the leads of The Crucified Lovers aren’t doomed by their hubris or some other fatal flaw of personality, but by honor—in fact nearly every action in the film, from beginning to end, is motivated by this profound reverence for personal honor, which makes the whole thing very culturally specific. “Shame” is framed by the characters as worse than death, and the protagonists doom themselves by straining so hard to avoid it.

That can make the film somewhat difficult to relate to on a personal level—the social structure depicted in the film seems completely remote from what we’re familiar with—but it makes it easier to approach as a parable. The political dimension of The Crucified Lovers makes it much more than a simple period piece, and I think it probably better reflects Mizoguchi’s personal feelings toward Japan in the 1950s than it does Japan in the 17th Century. It’s not uncommon for social and political frustrations to manifest themselves in genre pictures, particularly during periods of repression and censorship; the history of the Japanese cinema is littered with examples of exactly that sort of subversive filmmaking, and The Crucified Lovers stands right there along with them.

Cronk: Yeah, the cultural specificity can make the film (and a lot of films from the East, at least the one’s staged in a period setting) difficult to relate to on a personal level in some ways, but the romanticism—despite being nearly, as you say, Shakespearean in scope—is intimate and universal. There’s a great scene right in the middle of the film which you alluded to earlier where our nascent lovers travel across Lake Biwa with intentions of suicide.

This speaks, among others things, to the honor you mention that defines these characters. Suicide, and double suicides even, are the subject of a great many Japanese films, from Nagisa Oshima’s Japanese Summer: Double Suicide and Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide to other Samurai-related films such as Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri and Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism. But with the exception of maybe only Patriotism, The Crucified Lovers is unique in its emotionalism. Mizogchi’s style is in most cases thought of in formalist terms, but this sells short his way with characterization. Particularly in his later films, as his more flamboyant pre-war stylistic gestures settled into a more outwardly conventional but still-unique one-shot, one-cut technique, when character took precedence over aesthetic, the audience—perhaps with an eye toward Western audiences, even, as Japan began a more consistent export schedule in the wake of Kurosawa’s Rashomon—is really encouraged to relate to his characters, even as they navigate terrain unique to Japan.

Mizoguchi’s spends a good 40 minutes setting up the intricacies of the relationships and the social obligations intrinsic to this story before opening up the film considerably in its second half, where a series of set pieces to rival anything in his catalogue are constructed and contrasted with the intimacy of this mostly two-person narrative. And it all works toward making the inevitable finale that much more gutting.

Marsh: And it’s very gutting—inevitable, perhaps, but brutal just the same. But I think you’re right that despite its culturally specific circumstances, it’s easy to feel strongly for these characters, and because it spends so much time establishing its own rules, we can completely appreciate the nuances of how it plays out. And there’s something about the Mizoguchi’s particular rhythm—he feels less rigid, formally, than somebody like Ozu, and the tone of the film is much softer than anything by Kurosawa—that’s very seductive and engaging, making it even easier to invest yourself emotionally in the story and in the characters.

What’s interesting, then, is that The Crucified Lovers works so well on both levels: on the one hand it’s a dynamic parable about modern Japan, a feminist tract that rails against oppression, but on the other hand, it’s a very moving story about star-crossed lovers meeting a tragic fate. [PM]

PopMatters Feature: The 75 Best Albums of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:52:00 +0000

Year-end music proceedings come to an end this week at PopMatters with our list of the 75 best albums of 2011. I don't have a whole lot to say about the results; things look about how I expected. PopMatters has a huge staff, and when democratically voting for lists like this, it's only natural that the more generally agreeable records make their way to the top. Thus, the bottom half of the list contains, from my vantage, the more interesting selections. Records from Battles, the Field, and Colin Stetson can be found lurking around these parts, in addition to our #71 pick, Gang Gang Dance's extraordinary Eye Contact, for which I provide the capsule. But if you're looking for slightly more idiosyncratic picks, stay tuned for the CokeMachineGlow top 50, which is dropping early next week. It's wall-to-wall fantastic albums I assure you-- a good majority of which probably came nowhere near this PM list. But perspective is key when assessing lists like these. And just to note, I'll also be contributing to PopMatters' best film lists in the coming weeks, so look out for that as well (that roll-out begins the first week of January). Lots to explore here though, so enjoy yet another take on the year in music. [PM]

Podcast: End of Radio #38 - Before and Again (Folk IV: 2000 - 2009)

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:31:00 +0000

"Wrapping up their epic four-part series on the history of folk music, your End of Radio co-hosts Jordan Cronk and Brian Webster survey the modern freak-folk scene while attempting to connect the contemporary Americana landscape with the trailblazers who first laid the blueprint for one of the oldest forms of recorded music."

Playlist:

0:00 – 04:00
Intro / Discussion

04:00 – 14:43
Gillian Welch – “Revelator”
Sam Amidon – “Little Johnny Brown”

14:43 – 19:07
Discussion

19:07 – 26:33
Nina Nastasia – “One Old Woman”
Bowerbirds – “Dark Horse”

26:33 – 32:20
Discussion

32:20 – 42:56
Espers – “Riding”
Jana Hunter – “Sleep”
Akron/Family – “I’ll Be On the Water”

42:56 – 50:43
Discussion

50:53 – 1:03:41
Phosphorescent – “Wolves”
Tower Recordings – “Atrocity Jukebox”

1:03:01 – 1:10:41
Discussion

1:10:41 – 1:22:05
Castanets – “No Light to Be Found (Fare Thee Faith, the Path Is Yours)”
Frank Fairfield – “John Hardy”

1:22:05 – 1:27:31
Discussion / Outro

1:27:31 – 1:34:12
Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice – “Dread Effigy”

Record Review: Pete Swanson - I Don't Rock At All / Man With Potential

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:55:00 +0000

Yellow Swans announced their break-up in 2008, but as they slowly tied up the loose ends of the project with a few last small-run releases and a towering final album (Going Places [2010]), it had been rather easy to take for granted their place in the underground. Yellow Swans are now officially all said and done, and the reverberations of their dissolution are just now beginning to be felt across the landscape of experimental music. Pete Swanson, one half of Yellow Swans and the more visible of the band’s two members, has so far kept a concurrent solo career afloat on the back of a built-in audience, but 2011 marks his introduction as a full-time solo figure. He certainly hasn’t lost his restless, prolific spirit in the transition: I Don’t Rock At All and Man With Potential—released just a few months apart and on different labels—document Swanson’s initial forays away from collaboration, and they couldn’t be more different.

The records’ aesthetic opposition is interesting to note as both were actually recorded in the same creative stint while Swanson holed up in a cabin earlier this year in Northwest Oregon. Best not to go in expecting any intimate one-man ruminations, though, as I Don’t Rock At All and Man With Potential are typically swarming displays of drone, power electronics, and disfigured beats. Swanson’s decision to compartmentalize these tendencies, thereby relegating these extremes to separate corners of his persona, lends each record its own unique vibe, but nevertheless there’s a certain strain of modesty that seems to unite the two in unlikely fashion. Again, this isn’t a modesty or restraint in sound—nary a moment passes when the sound channels aren’t bursting at the seams with incidental noise—but more in focus, the resultant structures of each piece and their parent album consciously self-contained. The six songs on Man With Potential, the more fascinating of the two records, average just about the same in duration, while the three longer pieces comprising I Don’t Rock At All only last a total of 27 minutes. Among other things, this attention to economy marks these records as two of Swanson’s most digestible and re-playable releases to date.

I Don’t Rock At All, which found its way out initially as a bonus disc in Three Lobed’s Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them anniversary compilation, will be the more familiar sounding to those only acquainted with recent Yellow Swans material. Made up entirely of shimmering, elongated guitar drones, it’s one of most beautiful and outwardly emotional works Swanson has yet constructed, belying some of the cheekier surface elements of the release such as album art and song title selection. “Know When to Say Wha?” is ten minutes of dramatically cascading tones, slowly cresting to a full-bodied peak. It’s as ambiguous as its title suggests, but it’s dripping with palpable sensation. “Cocktail Champion” is even better, and as the second track works both as the centerpiece and beating heart of this brief record. Music of this sort is by its very nature relinquished to listener interpretation, but the sense of yearning emanating from each slow-roiling note of “Cocktail Champion” feels unmistakably passionate, an affecting glimpse at a mostly untapped vein in Swanson’s customary drone cycles. “Stuff It” closes the record with a similarly unfulfilled sense of ache, each chord stretched to the point of intangibility, nearly losing form as each lapping drone fades toward the horizon.

If I Don’t Rock At All revels in the comfort of Swanson’s instincts, then Man With Potential sees him pushing himself into brave new territory. Many have already labeled this Swanson’s techno record, as he does screw around with beat formations, occasionally locking into something at least resembling 4/4 time. It’s a little too diffuse, however, and a even more than little obtuse to seriously be mistaken for the work of a traditional techno producer, but it certainly does bump and stutter in ways much of Yellow Swans’ material only occasionally hinted at. There are definitely hints of early Yellow Swans here, and there’s even a passing resemblance to the short-circuiting gadgetry of At All Ends (2007), but mostly this feels like Swanson independently swinging for newly imposed fences. “Misery Beat” is a careening anti-dance number, stray tones buzzing insect-like around its hollowed-out, cyclical beat. “Remote View” and “AxOx0” drape industrial drone over subliminal downtempo foundations, bridging the gap between Coil and Boards of Canada. “Far Out” even begins like spacier take on Beaches & Canyons (2002)-era Black Dice before a restlessly tripping beat aligns it more closely with something off Broken Ear Record (2005).

Which is to say that what Swanson’s doing here isn’t exactly unprecedented—a more accurate comparison for the whole endeavor may simply be Mouthus—but as one of the initial steps away from his time in Yellow Swans, it’s both promising and satisfying. Perhaps more importantly, when taken together these two albums go a long way toward establishing a unique personality for Swanson away from his other projects, and as he continues to perfect his career-long aesthetic concerns while simultaneously pushing himself into new territory, it’s fair to assume that these prudent first steps will flower onto larger, even more ambitious canvasses in the very near future. [CMG]

PopMatters Feature: The 75 Best Songs of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:54:00 +0000

Year-end honors continue this week at PopMatters, highlighted by our list of the 75 best songs of 2011. It's a pretty straight forward process: you vote for your five favorites and see where they place. Voting for songs is a particularly personal practice in my view, as I often gravitate to standalone songs that affect me rather than weighing them in relation to the albums they come from. Which is why only two of my song picks come from albums that are on my list of the 30 best of the year. This also probably accounts for why there are such a diverse crop of tracks represented on the final list, as I imagine others employ similar methods. Even still, I'm not gonna pretend I like all of these-- in fact, there are a handful I flat-out despise. But hey, democracy reigns when involved in projects like these. And if it gave me the opportunity to write about my two favorite songs of the year-- which it did; our #52 and #38 picks, respectively, top my own personal list-- then something good has come of it. Anyway, head on over and judge for yourself. And finally, my list of the five best songs of the year: 1) The Weeknd - "The Zone"; 2) Shabazz Palaces - "Recollections of the Wraith"; 3) Jenny Hval - "Portrait of the Young Girl as an Artist"; 4) Pure X - "Stuck Livin'"; 5) EMA - "The Grey Ship".

PopMatters Feature: The 25 Best Reissues of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:19:00 +0000

Year-end festivities kicked off this week at PopMatters, and as I have for the last four (!) years now, I've contributed a handful of capsules to the various best of 2011 music lists that they'll be rolling out over the next few weeks (I'm also in on the film lists, which will begin in January). First up is our list of the 25 best reissues of the year, always a personal category for me. Overall I'm pleased with the outcome; this has been a spectacular year for reissues, and although only three of my picks made it on the final list, nearly everything here is worthy of attention. The disparity between my list and the official 25 comes down to how one appraises an actual reissue. I personally favor records that are either out-of-print or extremely rare. Thus, you'll never see a record by Pink Floyd or the Rolling Stones on my lists, no matter the merits of the actual album. There's no right way to go about these kinds of things I suppose, so it's best to use lists like these as a jumping off point rather than as definitive canonizations.

Anyway, there's plenty to explore and/or rediscover, so head over here to check it out in full. For my part, I contributed some thoughts on our #4 selection, Disco Inferno's The Five EPs (and can I just say how awesome it is that a top five which includes records by U2, the Beach Boys, and Marvin Gaye also found room for a document of left-field sound experiments by a rather obscure English trio). But for those curious about my full list, it stacked up something like this: 1) Disco Inferno - The Five EPs; 2) The Beach Boys - The SMiLE Sessions; 3) Mark Hollis - Mark Hollis; 4) Martin Newell - Songs for a Fallow Land; 5) Bruce Gilbert - The Shivering Man; 6) Harold Grosskopf - Synthesis; 7) Bobb Trimble - The Crippled Dog Band; 8) Jürgen Müller - Science of the Sea; 9) Roberto Cacciapaglia - The Ann Steel Album; 10) The Reatards - Teenage Hate/Fuck the Reatards. And in case you're looking for even more contextual info, I wrote a little bit about both the Martin Newell reissue and the legacy of Jay Reatard earlier this year.

PopMatters Feature: ReFramed No. 15 - Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:47:00 +0000

This week, the ReFramed crew attempts to redeem Paul Verhoeven’s universally misunderstood cult classic, Showgirls.

Jordan Cronk: Well, Calum, this was inevitable. But you know what? I can’t think of a more appropriate title to feature in the pages of ReFramed than Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas’s subversive 1995 cult classic Showgirls. In many ways this film embodies exactly what we’re trying to accomplish with this column, and that’s to encourage reexaminations of misunderstood and unfairly neglected cinema. And in that sense, Showgirls is the quintessential misunderstood film of our time.

Let’s begin with a bit of contextual information, though, as it is all but mandatory when discussing this great piece of earnest, satirical filmmaking. Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has had a storied and unique career in the Hollywood these past 25 years, but it’s important to note the series of early films he made in the Netherlands throughout the 1970s. While none of these are probably standalone masterpieces, they do document a vivacious, committed visual stylist and a unique strain of sexual provocation that would reach its, um, climax, in the early-to-mid-‘90s with Basic Instinct and Showgirls, a pair of thematically rich, bold, and uncompromising works he made at the peak of his Hollywood visibility.

Both have reputations they’ve had to and failed to live down, but it’s interesting to note the legacies of each film and the level of acceptance general audiences have with works of this nature. When satire is couched in a homoerotic, highly stylized thriller or, more commonly in Verhoeven’s work, in the trappings of the sci-fi genre (see Robocop; Total Recall; Starship Troopers), viewers can easily interpret political and sexual texts from a remove, allowing them the opportunity to guiltily enjoy the surface pleasures of each story without ever needing to engage the subtext, all under the guise of traditional Hollywood entertainment wherein women are either mothers, martyrs, psychotics, or whores—easy caricatures to hoist expectations and wish-fulfillment narratives onto.

I’m obviously already aware that you also greatly admire Showgirls, but I’m wondering about your history with the film, Calum. If it’s anything like mine—which is to say, teenage-curiosity-turned-critical-fascination—then this film has become something of a line in the sand when outlining the modern Hollywood narrative. In short, there was before Showgirls and there was after Showgirls, and say what you will about the movie, but no filmmakers have gotten away with so much under the watchful eye of big budget studio filmmaking in the sixteen years since.

Calum Marsh: Oh, I agree. And let me just begin by saying that I’m really pleased we’ve found our way to Verhoeven and to Showgirls in particular, because I think it’s just as important to seriously reevaluate popular Hollywood films as it is to highlight completely obscure ones—and there are few popular films more in need of reevaluation than this one. As far as my personal history with it goes, I’m in the same boat you are: as with most of Verhoeven’s American films, its scandalous exterior made Showgirls extremely attractive to me as a teenager, and seeking it out seemed to me a kind of taboo but unavoidable adolescent rite of passage.

Of course, now it’s obvious to me that their appealing vulgarity is just a front, and that why their surfaces are appealing is central to the meaning of each of Verhoeven’s films. It just takes a bit of critical distance to discern that, and the ease with which you can ignore it is the reason for his overwhelming popularity with American audiences—they don’t notice that their tastes are being attacked rather than validated.

I admire all of Verhoeven’s American pictures, but Showgirls has always struck me as the most interesting of the bunch, if only because it’s the most vehemently disliked by critics. It seems quite strange to me that while many mainstream critics were discerning enough to glean the satirical bent of both Robocop and Starship Troopers, practically nobody would accept Showgirls as anything other than a half-baked, totally amateur erotic drama. Even audiences refused to approach it as straight-forward entertainment, assuming its comedic aspects to be unintentional and therefore necessarily bad. It swept the Razzie awards (and apparently found it odd that Verhoeven himself appeared to accept the award for Worst Director), was brutally panned by just about every major critic in the world (Metacritic lists it as 16/100), and to this day, despite having developed a widespread cult following, it holds a dismal 4.2 rating on the IMDB. Seemingly everyone hates Showgirls, and if they don’t it’s probably only because they find it campy and amusing.

Which reminds me: I strongly dislike that this film has become a cult classic on the grounds that it’s unintentionally funny. Though I hesitate to be some kind of spoil sport for those who find it hilarious, I just don’t think redeeming its “badness” as kitsch is fair—and in fact not only do I think it’s a misreading, I think it undermines better, more serious readings. Of course, it’s incredibly trendy to like bad movies ironically, and demanding that things be taken seriously is about as uncool a sensibility as one can adopt. But I genuinely think that Showgirls has value in a way that was entirely deliberate, and I think it’s possible to redeem it as an authentically great film without sinking to the level of ironic re-appropriation, which bores the hell out of me. It’s easy to watch the movie and just laugh a little, I guess, and I’m not advocating it as a masterpiece for its treatment of traditional drama. But there’s just way too much going on in this film to allow irony to overtake it entirely.

So, Jordan, I really hope you weren’t about to say that you only like it ironically.

Cronk: Oh, absolutely not. I think it’s a great film, period—full stop. I mean, it’s certainly one of those films where it’s easy to see why it has the reputation it does, but in relation to Verhoeven’s filmography it makes perfect sense. I honestly do think it has something to do with the genres Verhoeven plays around with, because by and large a film like Starship Troopers is just as ridiculous and unbelievable as Showgirls. This is a fable, a morality tale, a Hollywood satire, not an exposé on the backstage environments littering the seedier ends of the Vegas strip. This much seems clear to me from the outset.

When Nomi Malone (played with a scary sort of dedication by Elizabeth Berkley, whose performance I’m sure we will touch on shortly) is picked up hitchhiking on the outskirts of Vegas, the dialogue between her and her driver is so arch, so bluntly stupid that it can be disorienting. Nomi speaks of her dreams and ambitions, puts her trust in the first guy she meets, and soon suffers the first of her many setbacks on the way to the top of the showgirl pyramid. It’s the classic rise to fame narrative that audiences so blindly accept when the edges are sanded off and the actors mime their way through, hitting every last performance note.

The film moves at a furious clip, one farcical visual gag, melodramatic breakdown, and churlish sex joke after another—all things that critics of the film lay at the feet of Eszterhas, who truth be told, establishes patterns and subconscious connections within the narrative so subtly that it’s easy to simply get caught up in the forward momentum and gaudy exterior of the film and ignore the thematic implications being explored. That tempting exterior I speak of is all courtesy of Verhoeven, of course, who, not to be too crass or anything, absolutely directs the shit of this movie.

This is muscular, brutal filmmaking. Compositionally it has few peers from the era, and the way Verhoeven reflects his heroine’s motivations, desires, and emotions in her surroundings is extraordinary. There should be classes taught on the stylistic intricacies and brute force trauma of many of this film’s best sequences. I find it hard to believe that a film so masterfully shot, edited, and designed could be so negligent with the actual narrative, which is one of the main reasons I’ve never bought this as the disasterpeice many claim it as. Furthermore, nothing in Verhoeven’s oeuvre would lead me to believe that he could make a one-off piece of garbage like so many would have us believe. I suppose it comes down to Verhoeven’s predilections and desires for each individual film.

When he goes completely serious he un-coincidentally ends up with unqualified masterpieces like Black Book, but when he—unfortunately for his critical standing, more often than not—assimilates genres and attempts to deconstruct archetypes, people resist the advances. Maybe I’m a cinematic masochist, but I enjoy these bludgeoning, infectiously entertaining fables that Verhoeven has built his Hollywood career on. And I think deep down most critics do to, but it can be difficult when confronted so earnestly.

Marsh: It’s a relief that you agree—I can get pretty vindictive when defending this film’s intentions. I think essentially there are two simplistic ways of approaching Showgirls, both of which are misguided: on the one hand, there are those who see it as a straight-forward failure, a big-budget Hollywood spectacle as poorly executed as it was devised; others, though, see it as kitschy, unintentionally hilarious B-movie, a guilty pleasure in the tradition of cult favorites like Plan 9 From Outer Space. Neither approach really works, though the latter at least knows to laugh a little. Because of course so much of Showgirls is indeed funny, just not in the accidental, so-bad-it’s-good way its midnight audience believes.

If you spend some time looking up user reviews and message board discussions of this film, you’ll find some opinions as bizarre as any of its professional notices, 99% of which oscillate between earnest contempt and ironic celebration—in almost every case, it’s called either a genuine failure or an unintentional success. I think you’re right that it’s easy to see why people reach either of these conclusions; it’s just a shame that more people don’t. Because I think once Showgirls clicks as the complex satire it is, it’s a much more enjoyable experience overall.

Reading reviews of the film from the time of its release is pretty amusing, by the way. Time Magazine blasted it for a “gross negligence of the viewer’s intelligence”, the Los Angeles Times decreed it to be “dehumanizing”, and the Washington Post, best of all, called it “a coarser, dumber, smuttier remake” of Flashdance. You’ll notice a recurring motif in these articles: there’s an insistence that the film itself is stupid, and egregiously so. It’s amusing that a film this subversive would be lambasted for stupidity, of all things, but I suppose that’s the risk when you attempt to bury high-minded satire in outwardly “trashy” genre fare—people will almost inevitably fail to see past the surface.

Not that it doesn’t have its defenders, mind you. The Nouvelle Vague master Jacques Rivette wrote effusively of Showgirls, arguing that it’s “the best and most personal of Verhoeven’s American films”, describing it as a film “about surviving in a world populated by human garbage”. This is much closer to how I feel about the film, and I think it’s a much more fair and accurate description of a film that’s been laughed off for more than a decade and a half now. Do you think it’s possible, Jordan, for the film to be properly redeemed, or has its ironic, midnight-movie revival doomed it to a legacy of badness?

Cronk: Unfortunately I don’t think it can ever be fully redeemed in the eyes of mainstream audiences, though thankfully a few critics and thoughtful defenders have attempted to come to its rescue over the years (in 2003, Film Quarterly actually dedicated a panel discussion to the film). I just feel there are too many retroactive hurdles the film would have to jump to get back into widespread good graces at this point. Beyond the obvious characteristics in storytelling we’ve described, there’s the fact that Elizabeth Berkley was never really able to seriously work again after the film, which as far as I’m concerned is a travesty—rarely have I seen such a dedicated, full-body performance from a young actress.

People seem to get that Gina Gershon and Kyle MacLauchlan are having fun with these portrayals, but few if any people give Berkley the credit she deserves for throwing herself so un-ironically into this role. You can see the gradations and intricacies of her performances as the film moves along, as she goes from naive, star-struck stripper to arrogant, vindictive showgirl to vicious has-been celebrity out for blood. I doubt there are many actors that would be willing to take on such a taxing role, and even fewer who could pull it off. Do you have any thoughts on the various acting styles put forth in the film?

Marsh: Well, I’ve seen another, nastier theory posited about Berkley’s performance in the film: Verhoeven was putting her on, tricking her into thinking that Showgirls was the film debut opportunity of a lifetime when he knew full-well that she wouldn’t be taken seriously for it. The idea, I think, is that Berkley would embody the repugnant corruption and moral bankruptcy of late capitalism so wholly and seriously that she’d be destroyed as a performer in the process—which, even if it wasn’t the intention of those involved, was still the end result for her career. Which makes Berkley herself a tragic figure, in a way, and makes her performance exceptionally brave, if not formally perfect. But for a film that’s interested in deconstructing this quintessentially American mythology of success, presenting its lead actress as a kind of ideal manifestation of that mythology seems like a clever way for the film to criticize its own machinations.

I think that all of Verhoeven’s films are to some degree about the way cinema functions as both a reflection of and contributor to national and commercial ideologies, and Showgirls is no exception: it provokes visceral and emotional reactions in its audience that it subsequently seeks to underscore or undermine, and if the result is a sense of discomfort or embarrassment in the viewer it’s because the movie makes us aware of what it’s doing. If it’s excessively crass and vulgar, it’s because it wants us to examine our own impulsive desires to relish crass and vulgar experiences; it provides us with the trash we want and then encourages to think about why we want it (or don’t, as the case may be).

The really crucial element for me, here, and what I think is the most obvious sign that Showgirls shouldn’t be taken as merely ironic and funny, is the surprisingly intense rape sequence near the end of the film: most viewers, regardless of whether they find the film so-bad-it’s-good or just plain bad, find the scene out of place and objectionable, and in a way that differs drastically from the more frothy and good-natured objectionable content which precedes it.

But that’s exactly the point: the scene is so jarring and direct that it forces the audience to confront its desire for the on-screen sex, and to realize (hopefully) that the eroticism throughout the film is itself insidiously misogynistic and oppressive, if less brutally so. It’s almost as if Verhoeven is responding to an audience’s demand for sex with an uglier, more outwardly horrifying version of the same, which is a bold and contentious thing to do.

Cronk: Indeed. The whole third act of the film really turns the experience on its head. The rape scene is brutal and another example, I believe, of the film’s serious intentions, even when taking this solely as a satire. It’s even more cruelly ironic on the part of Verhoeven—who, just to respond, I have heard tricked Berkley into thinking the role would be something other than what is has turned out to be, though no one’s letting on about this little theory, so I guess we’ll never truly know; in any case, it works—to on the one hand give the audience what they want (i.e. sex) so forcibly only to eventually set Nomi back on the very same course of self-destruction that brought her to this point. Showgirls is circular, literally ending how it began, and is not very optimistic as a result.

Is it sad that Nomi has learned nothing through her whirlwind journey to fame, or is it depressing that audiences want her to fail again, if only to re-experience the sensual delights of her rise, neglecting the hard truths of rape, victimization, and betrayal in the process? In this sense, the character of Nomi is a symbol—which works further in legitimizing Berkley’s performance; anything too self-conscious would really have not worked—both of our romantic views of stardom and as manifestation of a typical audiences guilt for encouraging this behavior for sheer entertainment value. It’s when one really digs into these complexities that, like you say, Showgirls really begins to reveal other dimensions and becomes a more honestly enjoyable experience while still remaining the surface level pleasure product that it can also works as, for obvious reasons.

Marsh: I think it has a lot more depth if you’re willing to approach it that way, in the very least. And because of the complex relationship the audience is forced to have with the tone of the film—which shifts jarringly from campy and fun to brutal and serious—its satire is ultimately more nuanced than other, less complex works of this kind tend to be. It’s also more straight-forwardly entertaining as a result, because it allows its surfaces to be both ridiculous and the subject of its own piercing ridicule—which is to say that we’re encouraged to take pleasure in what it depicts, so long as we’re willing to take a sobering look at the implications of that pleasure.

Of course, serious conversations about films as ostensibly low-brow as Showgirls are themselves rarely taken as seriously as they should be, or are else shrugged off as needlessly pretentious—I bet there are people reading this who’ll accuse us of reading into it too much. You know, we’re either elevating authentic trash to the level or art or reducing an unintentional camp masterpiece to something requiring analysis; either way, not everybody will agree with us that Showgirls deserves critical redemption. But I hope that we can encourage a few people, at least, to take another look at what Verhoeven’s wrought, and to think about what he might be saying with this. I’d like to think there’s more to it than corny lines and lap dances. [PM]

Track Review: Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - "Witchhunt Suite for WWIII"

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 22:14:00 +0000

With the career of one Ariel Rosenberg now firmly in stride down its second artistic stretch, it’s tempting to want to reconsider his early work through a lens of the newly focused, almost flamboyantly glammed approach to last year’s breakthrough, Before Today. This is a fair reaction; despite the cult classic status amended to The Doldums (2004) over the last couple years, it’s only natural to imagine what Rosenberg’s newest, most nimble iteration of the Haunted Graffiti yet could do with this material now that studio production is no longer a pipe dream and full-band interplay no longer takes a back seat to his random lo-fi reanimations. So while his work as Ariel Pink has blossomed into something once only hinted at, it’s logical that he might find new inspiration in old tunes.

Written just after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and only sold briefly as a 2006 12-inch and 2007 tour CD-R, early Ariel Pink collage “Witchhunt Suite for WWIII” now finds a new lease on life as a freshly recorded digital single for 4AD. As such, the single sixteen minute piece plays as a sort of bridge between Pink’s early, tape strangled anti-pop and his newly hi-glossed, disco-leaning new wave. It’s just nominally qualified and low stakes enough not to be unfairly judged as the follow-up to one of recent indie rock’s most unexpected watersheds, but oddly zany, topically steadfast, and catchy enough to appeal to both Pink diehards and recent converts alike. Furthermore, it once and for all confirms Pink’s career-long songwriting acumen, which, despite remaining shrouded for most of the last decade, was in fact always there, lurking beneath a murky surface of his own self-stifling creation.

Lyrics being what they were in the formative years of the Haunted Graffiti (basically an aesthetic tool utilized to accentuate what little contrast the tunes could muster within a degrading analogue setup), it wasn’t always easy to parse specific thematic concerns in Pink’s music. It always seemed to me, however—whether because of his almost confrontational approach to sonics or just a general DIY spirit permeating the entire project’s visualization—that this music was archly political. The title and inspiration for “Witchhunt Suite for WWIII” makes this much clear, but in case there’s any doubt about Pink’s targets here he wastes no time piping in fear-mongering samples of terrorism-steeped news broadcasts and post-9/11 George W. invectives.

This is all a prelude however, to the track proper, which launches at about 1:15 on the back of a weightless synth motif and skipping, rawly rendered drum kicks. Still sporting (and perhaps even over-emphasizing for effect) his trademark faux-British accent, Pink spins off one alliterative, almost free associative political barb after another. “Sky sky cam what’s seen before you / Contrived tracking systems live / Last name Laden is soaked in Sodom / We tried our best now test these organs,” he begins before a digitally manipulative vocal drops the subliminally low-toned clincher, “Bomb the building / Bang Bin Laden / Building the bombs / Bam bomb building.” Musically this is all presented in such an offhand manner, and with Pink’s marble-mouthed delivery deflecting most if not all of his initial critique, that it can be easy to overlook the grave critique beneath the sunny veneer of this first (and best) verse.

As it does across its entire runtime, the piece quickly moves into another, almost unrelated movement, this time at a half-time tempo emphasizing Pink’s disenchantment. “The human race is an invention of the West / Foreign every other land / The swine walk around as man and the sheep can’t know that they sleep,” Pink gravely intones before the track picks up again for a cheesy chase-scene solo instrumental. At the nine minute mark the bottom drops out of the track and multi-lingual vocal samples come to the forefront. When the actual music returns it’s more touch-in-cheek than ever, with a pogo-ing hook featuring a ten times repeated refrain of “Gotta get ‘em / We got ‘em / We gotta,” a kind of playground call-to-arms that will inspire absolutely no one.

It’s all stupidly infectious enough to forgive a few of the track’s dry patches, particularly with the closing few minutes alternating between chipmunk vocal intrusions by unnamed members of the Haunted Graffiti and Pink’s continued cries of burning bras, U.S. domination, and fighting fire with fire. It remains to be seen if Before Today was a one-off lark or a bellwether for a new, semi-coherent Ariel Pink, but the various incarnations of “Witchhunt Suite for WWIII” certainly evidence a concern on the part of Rosenberg to grow (let’s not say “mature” quite yet) while effectively utilizing the tools currently at his disposal. Then again, I wouldn’t put it past him to drop the whole glitter shtick and hole-up in his bedroom with a four-tack just to fuck with people next time out, so it’s probably best to take it all in stride and simply savor this brief, satisfying reconciliation. [CMG]

PopMatters Feature: ReFramed No. 14 - Mark Rappaport & the Video Essay

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:04:00 +0000

The subversive documentary, and one of its most devious proponents, is the subject of this week's contemplative overview.

Calum Marsh: Mark Rappaport is perhaps the least well-known filmmaker we’ve discussed in the ReFramed series to date, but I’d argue he’s one of the most important—and certainly one of the most deserving of critical rediscovery. Rappaport has produced more than a dozen experimental shorts and features since the beginning of the ‘70s, all of which deserve recognition and reevaluation, but today we’re focusing on the two essential video essays he made in the mid-‘90s: first there’s Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, from 1992, an hour-long look at the homosexual undertones permeating infamously closeted Hollywood icon Rock Hudson’s filmography; and then there’s the feature-length opus From the Journals Of Jean Seberg, a kind of philosophical and spiritual exegesis of the career of the mostly forgotten American actress, who committed suicide in 1979.

Like many of the films we’ve highlighted throughout this series, both Rock Hudson and Jean Seberg are largely neglected by contemporary critics, and neither are widely available on DVD (the latter is long-since out of print, while the former is exclusively available through an independent distribution company specializing in gay-themed independent videos). And, as usual, the neglect is a real shame: despite being nearly twenty years old, Rappaport’s radical approach to the documentary form seems every bit as forward-thinking and progressive as it no doubt did when they made a brief splash in the arthouse world in the early ‘90s, when Rappaport was on the very forefront of experimental video-making.

It’s true that the novelty of the materials he’s working with here—he’s culled an extensive selection of clips together from a variety of classic films, splicing them together (and grafting new footage atop them) in a fashion made possible only by the advent of video technology—is less impressive in and of itself in 2011 than it must have been in 1992, but it’s a testament to Rappaport’s genius that neither film feels dated in the slightest.

Jordan Cronk: Not only they are they not dated, they are both arguably more spry and vivid than a majority of the non-fiction films being made today. These films are unlike almost anything I’ve seen—unique masterpieces that carry no air of pretension or condescension but are instead effortlessly entertaining, informative and thought-provoking discourses on a variety of subjects shot through a prism of two fascinating, misunderstood celebrities. I guess one reason that Rappaport doesn’t carry the reputation of some of his contemporaries is his status as a kind of bridge between many other, more well-known filmmakers.

We previously celebrated Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself in these pages, and that’s certainly the greatest descendant of this particular kind of film-as-criticism hybrid that Rappaport and someone like Chris Marker helped spearhead in the ‘90s. In fact, you can form a continuum of sorts between Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, Marker’s The Last Bolshevik from 1993, From the Journals of Jean Seberg, and Los Angeles Plays Itself—all unique creations that take the documentary/essay formula and use it as a jumping-off point to explore and refract the practice of filmmaking itself.

It’s not enough to say these films are biographies of their respective personalities—in fact, most of what’s explored here is open to factual interpretation—when an equal amount of time is spent dissecting aesthetic, technique, and outlying and intersecting narratives from the era. Safe to say the many topics broached in these two films could and have spawned entire films and books of their own. But it’s to Rappaport’s credit that he condenses it all into satisfying, at times provocative, but also consistently funny critiques of the Hollywood machine.

Marsh: Certainly. I suppose it would benefit our readers if we explained exactly what these two films are about (and, perhaps more importantly, how they’re about what they’re about): they’re what you might describe as “fictional documentaries”—which we should stress is not at all the same thing as what are now referred to as “mockumentaries”, like the comedies of Christopher Guest—framed as autobiographical accounts of their respective eponymous subjects, both of whom were long-since deceased at the time of each video’s production.

Both are narrated in the first-person by actors who physically resemble their real-life counterparts, and both are comprised largely of footage from the films in which their subjects starred. And though they offer lucid, detailed accounts of the thoughts and feelings of their subjects (told, in a sense, by their subjects), neither film qualifies as true autobiography, and ultimately the subjects as presented exist as self-contained texts unto themselves. We’re not listening to Rock Hudson or Jean Seberg, nor even particularly faithful approximations of them; what we’re given instead are characters, though remarkably rich and compelling ones, that tap into the truth of the people on which they’re based more potently than any more “authentic” documentary representations could have.

In that sense, these projects are more accurately described as essays rather than as documentaries, since they’re more about what Mark Rappaport has to say about his subjects than what the subjects have to say about themselves. And Rappaport, of course, has quite a lot to say: Rock Hudson’s Home Movies probes the seemingly limitless possibilities of cinematic subtext, suggesting that what a film means has much more to do with one’s informed reading than an author’s intentions; and From the Journals Of Jean Seberg, much broader in scope than Hudson, interrogates everything from the tyranny of cinematic sexism to the lasting impact of the Hollywood blacklist, all seen through the lens of a lifetime of movie-watching.

In a way, Rappaport is the quintessential cinematic poststructuralist, and, barring perhaps Abbas Kiarostami’s masterful Close-Up, no other films do so much to problematize what we assume to know about the documentary form and about the nature of the cinema as a whole. This is dense, heady stuff, but as you’ve also pointed out, these films are compulsively watchable, too.

Cronk: And they’re funny! Like, really funny. Rock Hudson’s Home Movies in particular is just a briskly entertaining, hilarious look at subtextual homosexual content in ‘50s Hollywood comedies and melodramas while still managing to register as a tragic portrait of a man who was forcibly kept in the closet throughout his career. From the Journals of Jean Seberg, while less outwardly funny, is equally tragic and as you say, broader in scope. I’d never considered the Kiarostami comparison, but Close-Up would certainly stand as a precedent for this kind of thing.

What Rappaport does is take subjects that are approachable on the surface as texts to subvert the form, comment on the eras in question, and critique the circumstances that led both Rock Hudson and Jean Seberg into shrouded, controversial existences. Both of these films, for all their freewheeling energy and brisk gait, end as mournful meditations on two lives that were left unfulfilled in many different, conflicting ways. In that sense these films offer portraits of their subjects that are arguably truer and more authentically human than what one could probably glean from a traditional documentary. It feels almost like meeting the personalities in question directly while being led on a guided tour through their lives. While most documentarians approach their subjects from a respectful distance, Rappaport confronts them head-on and delivers their personas to the viewer through the fewest degrees of remove possible. It’s really a unique approach, and one that hasn’t really been built upon since.

Marsh: I think “respect” is a key word there, because in the documentary practice respect usually manifests itself as a kind of forced distance from a given subject. The idea is that you should allow somebody to speak for themselves, particularly if the story is about them, and the implication is that it is somehow unethical to interfere creatively. Rappaport avoids these problems entirely because he doesn’t even engage with his subject in the usual way—he speaks through them and for them, and in doing so deconstructs their privileged status as subjects. Those who knew the real Jean Seberg attest that she was nowhere near as eloquent and considered as Rappaport’s simulacral Seberg, who speaks about her life and her films with the insight of a film critic and philsopher. It’s less “authentic”, in a superficial sense, but Rappaport is interested in something more substantial than simple verisimilitude; he instead creates a Seberg who feels realer than the real thing, replacing the ultimate inaccessibility of the person with the deep, immediate legibility of the text.

This is a clever approach, because it suggests that when it comes to the truth of the cinematic image, we can know nothing and everything: we can “know” that Rock Hudson is gay based on his performances so long as we know that he was gay outside of his films—as he says in the film, “it’s all there on screen”—but we could never “know” Rock Hudson the man, how he felt and what he was thinking, without that insight. The truth of the man is both obvious and totally obscure, conspicuously hinted but consistently deflected; the point is that it’s us, what we choose to see and what we choose to ignore, that determines the reality of what’s on screen. Rappaport presents compelling arguments in favor of this idea, but he never seems pretentious or pedagogical about it. And, yeah, you’re right: these films are really, really funny. I don’t think I’ll ever watch a seemingly benign 50s rom-com the same way again.

Cronk: Beyond the insights into each subject themselves, what I find interesting about these films is the way they also function as film criticism. There is a masterful sequence in From the Journals of Jean Seberg where Rappaport discusses the editing techniques employed by Lev Kuleshov in the early 1920s. Basically, he shot a close-up of the actor Ivan Mozhukin and intercut three disparate images (a bowl of soup, a dead woman in a coffin, and a young girl playing) in close succession, each one presumably altering the audience’s interpretation of Mozhukin’s intentions, despite his expression never changing.

Rappaport conducts the experiment himself later in the film, splicing similar footage from Ordet and M into a single close-up of Seberg while Mary Beth Hurt (as Seberg) narrates the effective change in her motivation as a character on screen. It’s a vital display of editing repercussions—of which we as an audience are in a sense being exposed to and manipulated by in a similar way throughout these films—while evidencing the breadth of motivation behind these essayist portraits. Do any particular sequences stick out to you in a similar fashion, whether filmic or political or even humorous, in either film, Calum?

Marsh: That one is definitely important—the Kuleshov experiment is a classic first-year Film Studies lesson, but it’s far more compelling when expressed visually, and in such a dynamic context. And it’s given considerably more depth when Rappaport links the experiment to Seberg personally, suggesting that the experiment’s actor, Ivan Mozhukin, was the father of Seberg’s former husband. Like Godard, whose Histoire(s) du Cinema shares many formal similarities with these films, Rappaport is interested in connecting the cinema to the historical and the personal, as a moment like this illustrates beautifully.

The themes of Rappaport’s that most interest me personally relate to gender and sexuality, and I think he shows an uncommonly nuanced perspective on their representation in the cinema. Rock Hudson’s Home Movies deals with homosexuality very explicitly, and Rappaport is necessarily limited to the suffocating artifice of Hollywood cinema as a result of his subject’s star status. But what’s interesting about From the Journals Of Jean Seberg is that its criticisms of artifice and allegations of misogyny are focused principally on the arthouse and foreign cinemas rather than Hollywood. That a Hollywood film from the 1950s could propagate an atmosphere of deception and repression hardly comes as a surprise; that’s the style of the place and the era.

But foreign films rarely come under attack on those grounds, so Rappaport’s arguments in Seberg are more contentious and, I think, more rewarding. There’s a great sequence late in the film in which Mary Beth Hurt compares her own “Sphinx-like” stare at the end of Breathless to Clint Eastwood’s more “manly” and intimidating gaze in any number of his Westerns. She complains that while critics describe her as “mysterious” and somehow abstract or ethereal, Eastwood is regarded as intense and purposeful, a man of power. Rappaport makes a very compelling case for the implicit sexism in the common readings of what are in fact nearly identical facial expressions, and by extension serves a blow to the entire critical canon. Like you said, this is nothing short of film as film criticism, and it’s exceptional film criticism, too.

Cronk: But none of this plays as overly academic or studied. Like we’ve mentioned, these are entertaining films first and foremost. Unlike Histoire(s) du Cinema, which, let’s be honest, is a difficult sit no matter it’s considerable artistic merit, Rappaport’s essay films are works that I will continue to return to as both subtle studies of technique, juxtaposition, and reconstruction, as well as satisfying entertainments with plenty of intrinsic suggestions for further exploration of each subjects filmography. You in no way need to be familiar with either Rock Hudson or Jean Seberg to enjoy, or be informed, or eventually be moved by these films. They work as everything from time capsules to narrative exercises to political and social considerations to straight-up entertainments, and together they total just about two–and-half-hours.

With any luck, with the documentary being at such a high level of respectability and cultural exposure right now—and with films like Clio Barnard’s The Arbor exposing new audiences to similar experiments in docu-fiction narrative—perhaps audiences will naturally look toward and properly acknowledge the pioneers in this particular field, amongst which Rappaport should certainly be considered and ensconced, just as his subjects have found a life after death via his probing, restless experiments. [PM]

PopMatters Feature: ReFramed No. 13 - Yasujirō Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:18:00 +0000

Across a 50-plus film career, Yasujiro Ozu managed a singularity of vision that is unmatched in the history of the medium. His thematic inclination coupled with perhaps the most effortlessly formalist visual aesthetic ever conceived marks his catalogue as one of a unified, personal vision.

Jordan Cronk: Critics often speak of the “big three” of the Japanese film industry: Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu. A problem presents itself, however, when ensconcing these very different filmmakers into a single stratum of excellence: a canon of titles begins to take shape before eventually becoming identified with each director’s collected filmography. In the case of Ozu this is a particularly easy bit of critical shorthand to fall prey to. Across a 50-plus film career, Ozu managed a singularity of vision that is unmatched in the history of the medium. His thematic inclination—the plight of the middle class Japanese family unit—coupled with perhaps the most effortlessly formalist visual aesthetic ever conceived—static, low-angle camera setups; sharp cutting; “pillow” shot inserts; and very little else—not to mention the closely related, seasonal stamps given many of his films, marks his catalogue as one of a unified, personal vision. Thus his most widely-seen films tend to represent the whole of a career that in fact spun variations on a theme as fruitfully and as diversely as any other, more genre-restless filmmaker you could name.

So we have Tokyo Story, then, the film which introduced Ozu to the West, and just as Seven Samurai is to Kurosawa and Ugetsu is to Mizoguchi, it’s become widely representative of the man’s achievements, often times at the expense of equally rich and rewarding efforts made throughout his almost forty-year career. And that’s no mark against the quality of Tokyo Story, by any standards one of the greatest films ever made, but more of an indictment of critical group-think that frequently propagates convenient notions of narrative and longevity with unfair disregard to budding bouts genius or refined displays of maturation. The latter’s perhaps the easiest to ignore, which makes the sublime tranquility of Ozu’s final film, 1962’s An Autumn Afternoon, that much easier to overlook. As a crowning work it’s arguably one of the most perfect encapsulations of one filmmaker’s myriad tendencies and inarguably a capstone to a career which in many ways thrived on understatement.

Like any number of Ozu films, An Autumn Afternoon reads on paper like a simplistic portrayal of everyday people dealing with life’s inevitabilities, but as he did through dozens of his best films, Ozu imbues such sentiments with an achingly emotional, humanist dimension that renders these trials as epic tragedy. We spoke of a similar tendency in the work Aki Kaurismaki—one of Ozu’s most accomplished aesthetic descendants—a couple of weeks ago, but as the years go by I find myself continually drawn to the subtle, contemplative tone of Ozu’s work, which seems to exist just outside of reality as it does nothing so much as document day-to-day life. I have little doubt that you can find the whole of the world in the work of Ozu—no mean feat for a filmmaker many naysayers accuse of lacking range and ambition. One grows and matures alongside Ozu’s films, which leads me to suggest the distinct possibility that An Autumn Afternoon may be the man’s supreme artistic achievement.

Calum Marsh: I think I’d agree—it’s really something special. We should probably be quick to point out, though, that despite our emerging predilection for the neglected final films of canonical directors, An Autumn Afternoon isn’t exactly what you’d fairly call “underrated”. While Ozu was largely unknown to Western critics for the entirety of his career (as the studio for which he consistently worked speculated that he’d be too esoteric for any international market), he’s been celebrated widely since his eventual “discovery” in the 1970s, and An Autumn Afternoon is one of his most beloved pictures.

But you’re certainly right about the widespread over-emphasis on his mid-career opus Tokyo Story: it’s been championed as the definitive Ozu for so long that it’s hard to remember to pay attention to anything else. And you’re right, too, that Ozu’s conspicuous stylistic consistency lends itself to easy and unfortunate pigeon-holing, a real shame considering the emotional range of his filmography as a hole. I wouldn’t necessarily object if the old guard unanimously declared Tokyo Story Ozu’s unqualified masterpiece, but to champion it at the expense of championing anything else the man made—to act like it can somehow stand in for any other Ozu film—is just plain reductive.

Oh, and about your quick comparison to Kaurismaki—I think that’s an overlooked comparison, but a very interesting one. The formal similarities are somewhat easy to pick up on, of course; both favour exaggerated compositions, symmetrical framing, static cameras, and, when Ozu was shooting in colour (which he did less than a half-dozen times across his career, but which he does marvellously here), a bold and spectacular palette. But what might be a little less obvious are the tonal and thematic similarities: as we discussed in detail last week, Kaurismaki is a master of sardonic melancholy, a kind of dry, black humour that’s shot through with sadness. I think Ozu had a similar feel for the comic undertones of tragedy (and vice versa), but that’s a quality of his work which is rarely discussed. I mean, I agree with you that An Autumn Afternoon is “achingly emotional”—it nearly brought me to tears, in fact—but at the same time I find it very amusing. Am I totally misreading this thing, or do you get what I mean there?

Cronk: Oh, I completely get it. I just re-watched the film in preparation for this discussion and the humor really stood out to me. The three elder male characters—each concerned in one way or another with the marriage of their daughter or each other’s daughters—have multiple discussions that are very funny. There are bits about pills for sexual performance, jokes about death at the expense of a waitress at a restaurant they frequent, and many alcohol-related psychical gags that are humorous. Like Drifting Clouds, An Autumn Afternoon seems to strike the perfect balance between humor and pathos. Ozu would touch on both extremes more directly—I’m thinking of Good Morning on the humorous side and, say, Late Spring on the emotional—but there seems to be just the right amount of both on display here.

And you’re right to point out that this and many of Ozu’s films are currently and consistently held in high regard. But more than most—and this goes back to his stylistic singularity—Ozu seems to be painted as a one-note artist, leading to Tokyo Story’s stand-in status as the de-facto Ozu. He has so many films we could have chosen for this column, all which seem to exist just off of the pinnacle that many decided long ago that he had reached by the early ‘50s. Which is a perfectly logical and perhaps accurate assumption; it just worries me that many of Ozu’s outlying works don’t often get treated as the stand alone statements that they are obviously meant to be.

Marsh: That’s yet another problem with pre-established, uncontested film canons: sometimes you wind up neglecting more than you highlight. We talk a lot about this idea of late or final films which somehow summarize or encapsulate the career-long tendencies of a given filmmaker, and although we risk being reductive ourselves in speaking in those terms, it’s an attractive idea when dealing with a filmmakers as distinctive (and distinctively well-regarded) as Ozu. And An Autumn Afternoon does indeed feel totalizing in its own way, bringing together many of the themes and styles which recurred through Ozu’s filmography in a way which feels mature and deeply considered. Which isn’t to say that An Autumn Afternoon is any kind of epic—it’s far too lithe and vibrant to fit that description. It’s just that if you’re looking at Ozu’s filmography as a whole, this is the film which most wholly encompasses his strongest qualities as a filmmaker, and such it’s sort of the perfect way to end his career. It’s dynamic and hilarious, as we’ve already mentioned, but it’s also deeply moving and, one can sense, intensely personal.

I hesitate to speculate too much about the connections between the film’s lonely, aging protagonist and Ozu himself, who never came close to marrying and who lived with his mother for more than 60 years, but it’s difficult to ignore the parallels: most of Ozu’s films deal with the responsibilities of family life in one way or another, and many more deal with the social pressures surrounding marriage in Japanese life. An Autumn Afternoon feels like the final chapter on the subject: in it, Hirayama (played beautifully by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu), a middle-aged widower and father of three, slowly reconciles himself to the idea that he must encourage his sole daughter, Michiko, to marry before it’s too late, even though she practically runs his life for him and he would be lost, both emotionally and functionally, without her.

As is the case with most Ozu films, An Autumn Afternoon tells a relatively simple story, but the emotional depth is tremendous. Ozu knows that the relationship between Hirayama and his daughter is far more complex than it initially appears, and though neither are provided with an opportunity to explicate their feelings on either their initial dependency or their eventual separation, what they don’t say still says volumes—every minor look or exchange between the two, however slight or seemingly insignificant, is loaded with meaning. I know we have something of an obsession with memorable final shots in this column, Jordan, but I hope you’ll agree when I say that An Autumn Afternoon’s high point comes a little earlier, as Hirayama visits Michiko in her room as she’s preparing to wed—little more than a glance passes between them, but the moment is devastating.

Cronk: And what’s interesting and what perhaps lends that moment so much weight is what Ozu elides in the narrative. Michiko’s eventual husband is mentioned frequently as a potential suitor but what Ozu consistently frames is solely father and daughter. This film concerns itself with these two people, and though the extended family have sub-plots and are contrasted in fascinating ways with that of its main characters, An Autumn Afternoon is a study of a paternal bond that neither essentially wants to break but which the father knows is best for all involved.

Another very emotional moment comes just before the scene you mentioned, and it in-turn is juxtaposed with a similar scene earlier on that Ozu plays for comic effect. At one point Hirayama goes to a local bar with an old cadet that he trained during the war years, and together they re-live the glory days as the bartender plays a military march on the hi-fi. It’s a goofy, fun scene that is re-imagined later on when Hirayama again visits the bar, this time solo. But as the music begins to take hold of Hirayama this time out, those halcyon days begin to fade and a deep sense of regret and longing take form in its place. This time Hirayama sits there stoic, eyes swelling over the decision he has just made concerning his daughter while coming to the realization that his life is about to take its final turn into the twilight years. The last 20 minutes of the film, in fact, are just one sustained, deeply devastating succession of thoughts, glances, statements, and feelings after another.

And, of course, the final shot is just gutting, lent retrospective gravitas in a manner similar to that of another film we’ve discussed in these pages, John Cassavetes’ Love Streams. That this would turn out to be Ozu’s final work is, as you suggest, appropriate for a film so concerned with offspring taking care of a parent, something Ozu spent a lifetime doing alongside his professional role as a filmmaker. Nothing about this suggests a film that is too “Japanese,” which is what held Ozu back from early worldwide distribution. If anything, the feelings conjured by his work are so universal that he could be said to be the cinema’s great humanist.

Marsh: Yes, absolutely. I think I understand where his distributors were coming from with the charges of cultural specificity, at least abstractly, but I don’t think its origins would impede anybody’s ability to relate to this or any other Ozu film. What’s fascinating about An Autumn Afternoon, in fact, is that while so much of its narrative is shaped by a very specifically Japanese social structure, none of the emotions elicited by the film are defined by that structure. Once Ozu has established that his protagonist feels it’s his duty to marry off his daughter despite his reliance on her around the house, we’re emotionally invested in the premise—whether that’s literally a foreign concept to us socially is irrelevant, because the emotional circumstances are never in the least bit remote.

We can accept the motivations of the characters because they make perfect emotional sense, even if the specific mores by which they’re guided seem antiquated by contemporary (and, I imagine, distinctly American) standards. That lack of friction, typically imposed by cultural or historical distance, is precisely what allows us to feel so emotionally invested in the film. That’s quite an accomplishment, and I think it’s a testament to the warmth and generosity of the film; Ozu makes it about these characters and their feelings, and even if the events belong resolutely to their time and place, Ozu’s empathy for people will always be universal. [PM]

Record Review: Various Artists - Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 23:55:00 +0000

It’s not quite the charity compilation, but the label anniversary comp is one of the banes of a music writer’s existence. Whether you’re ultra familiar with the imprint in question or not, compiling a strict greatest hits package is never preferred, while cover commissions are even more dubious. And then there are format limitations and restrictions, limited edition expansions and exclusive packages, and the fact that die-hard fans, being this particular products largest market demographic, are buying these things regardless of reviews or critical endorsement. Which brings us to Three Lobed Recordings’ Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them, nominally an anniversary collection celebrating the small North Carolina-based experimental label’s ten years of existence, but also a worthy example of how a commemoration of this nature can transcend inherent limitations, doling-out in equal measure rewards for both the curious and the well-collected supporter.

What Three Lobed and its founder Cory Rayborn have generously done here is offer over two-and-a-half hours of exclusive, unreleased material from some of the most important acts associated with the label, from indie godheads like Sonic Youth and Sun City Girls to lesser known but enticing fringe artists such as Steven Gunn and Eternal Tapestry. The contributions from each of the nine artists represented are almost uniformly worthwhile, but for once it’s not solely the content that intrigues, but also the structure and sequencing of the set, which separates Not the Spaces from the deluge of other perennially-stamped releases. Not the Spaces unfortunately can’t escape the functionality hurdle—four slabs of 140 gram dutch vinyl housed in a hefty, lidded box, complete with unique inner sleeves and liner notes insert (though there is a handy download card included)—but the decision to collate the collection into standalone sides wherein each artist contributes about twenty minutes of music is a well-considered move for a set of this nature.

Meaning, with nine artists contributing just sixteen tracks across eights sides of vinyl (Wooden Wand and D. Charles Speer, the two most song-oriented musicians included, share a side), these are some looong tracks, a handful of which occupy an entire side unto themselves. Among other things, the sequencing helps facilitate single-sit listening sessions, as it’s easier to digest the set on a per-band basis, instead of one overwhelming barrage of pan-ethnic folk improv, industrial noise meditations, and heady psych-rock odysseys. Three Lobed certainly have a healthy roster of past artists—many of which could’ve even increased the set’s visibility, including Six Organs of Admittance, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Matthew Valentine, and Yellow Swans—but the tightly curated track list speaks to the collection’s integrity and consistency of vision as a document of one label’s ten year artistic trajectory.

By definition, however, it’s the music that must endure, and Not the Spaces features essential rarities, illuminating discoveries, and a few handy compendiums for listeners curious about some of the more difficult artists represented. The collection kicks off with a three track excerpt from Sun City Girls’ last US gig, but even in their final act before the death of drummer Charles Gocher, Alan and Richard Bishop’s guitars entangle and combust in fascinatingly complex patterns, with “Wide World of Animals” and the extended “Caravan” piercing the cerebellum with an urgency arguably not seen since band’s early-‘90s peak. Meanwhile, I imagine Steven Gunn will be the discovery of the set for most listeners, his experimental folk odyssey “The Lurker Extended” wandering from carefully finger-picked acoustics though a cauldron of untethered noise before emerging a quarter hour later, melody and confidence intact. If this is a sign of things to come for Gunn and Three Lobed, consider my interest piqued.

At the other end of the Three Lobed timeline is Sonic Youth’s “Out & In,” recorded in 2000 (the year of the label’s inception), and “In & Out,” laid down last year by what could prove to be the final incarnation of the legendary NYC art-rock institution. The latter track is a droning, Kim Gordon sung dirge, at odds with the band’s more recent material, more like an oddity found on their Destroyed Room (2006) comp. It’s the earlier piece however, that highlights the entire collection. Beneath a vicious, three-guitar attack (featuring Jim O’Rourke, then the fifth member of the band), Steve Shelley propels the group ever-further up the intensity scale, hammering out an escalating, unrelenting beat over which Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and O’Rourke collide in a fiery display of the group’s latter day power. It’s probably premature to be writing the group’s obituary, but if this is indeed the end, this is how I want to remember Sonic Youth, all preternatural synchronicity and unhinged fury.

The middle of the set further highlights the range of the label’s output. Brian Sullivan and Nate Nelson’s uncompromising digital/industrial noise project Mouthus contribute two tracks, both in static, shallow churn mode, while Comets on Fire stitch together four years worthy of rehearsal tapes into a single, twenty-minute tapestry of corroded psychedelic blues riffing, serene retreats into the shadows, and searing bursts of improv. These performances may have originated from Comets’ most recent, traditionally structured period, but the piece harkens back the band’s pre-Field Recordings from the Sun (2002) days. Later, like an oasis amid a desert of extreme experimentation, lies Side F, featuring a concise, folk-leaning series of tracks by D. Charles Speer & the Helix and Wooden Wand, the former interpreting Jerry Foster and Bill Rice’s “Big, Big City” and Gene Clark’s “Shooting Star,” while Wooden Wand goes solo with an original three song set of a country laments. If this is my least favorite side of the comp, it’s not for lack of competence—the Shooting Star” cover and Wooden Wand’s “Hall of Blame” and “Black Nikes” are all strong tracks—but more due to predisposition. Nevertheless, this run provides a welcome relief and important contextual contrast.

Not the Spaces ends with two mammoth contributions from a similar spectrum of American stoner rock, with contemporary psych peddlers Eternal Tapestry folding jazzy sax bleating into an extended space-rock excursion. It plays almost like a tribute to their forebears in Bardo Pond, who end the set with a patiently gathering storm of molasses-slow riffs, Eastern-accented flute runs, and spookily deployed, incantatory vocals courtesy of Isobel Sollenberger. It’s an intimidating way to end the compilation, but an appropriate one considering the strides made by not only Three Lobed but by the whole of American experimental guitar rock over the last ten years. What’s sometimes lost in these commemorative packages, however, is something Not the Spaces has in abundance: a generosity of spirit that’s manifest not in the simple act of memorializing, but in the attention to detail extending from the appropriately representative but none-too-obvious track selection to the beautifully sketched artwork and sturdy packaging. The whole endeavor paints Three Lobed as one of the touchstones of contemporary American underground music, but crucially and against all notions of comprehensiveness, actually leaves one salivating at the prospect of further discovery. [CMG]

PopMatters Feature: ReFramed No. 12 - Aki Kaurismäki's Drifting Clouds

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:38:00 +0000

In this week's installment, the ReFramed team discusses the Finnish filmmaker who, more than any other foreign filmmaker, influenced the contemporary American comedy we see today.

Calum Marsh: Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki is hardly a household name in this country, but his influence on contemporary American cinema simply cannot be overstated: beloved by Hollywood’s best and brightest and borrowed from liberally by more auteurs than you can count, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to suggest that the comedy world has been to some extent defined by Kaurismäki’s contributions to it, even if sometimes indirectly. His authorial voice is so clearly defined (and consistently sustained) that it’s easy to spot imitators, though few have the gift for comic understatement that seems to come to him so naturally.

His most widely renowned disciple, the iconic indie legend Jim Jarmusch, practically built his career on copping Kaurismäki’s trademark deadpan, and as far as all that much-loved “sad and beautiful world” stuff goes, Jarmusch, to his credit, is probably the next best thing to his idol. But if you begin to account for the strong influence Jarmusch himself has had on lesser contemporaries—everything from Zach Braff’s entirely lame debut Garden State to the filmography of Jared Hess counts here, as far as I’m concerned—you get a pretty clear idea of just how deep Kaurismäki’s residual influence runs.

Our topic of discussion this week, the sad and beautiful Drifting Clouds, shows off just this distinctive sense of humor. But with an emotional range much broader than what you might find in his more straight-forward comedies like Leningrad Cowboys Go America, Drifting Clouds also speaks to Kaurismaki’s less-discussed skills as a dramatist. Steeped in melancholy and (almost) devoid of hope, this is a film that’s funny, yes, but also incredibly moving—disarmingly so, in fact, since the force of the thing is entirely unexpected. It’s really something else, as I imagine you’ll agree.

Jordan Cronk: What’s interesting about Drifting Clouds, and why I felt this should be our Kaurismäki selection when really any of his films deserve more exposure, is its current critical standing. His early films such as Ariel and particularly The Match Factory Girl tend to be the ones that most folks champion nowadays. In fact, from what I can tell, Drifting Clouds wasn’t all that well received by U.S. critics when it hit the festival circuit in 1996. Early supporters of Kaurismäki—those who exalted many of his prior works—must have felt burnt-out by his stylistic rigidity and dead-pan humor by this point (or by the proliferation of his influence, as you mention), and this only about halfway into his career (which continues this very week with the release of his newest film, Le Havre).

Which I find curious since Drifting Clouds plays to me—and eventually to a select group of others, as by the end of the decade the Cinémathèque Ontario had voted the film the third best of the 1990s, while Film Comment contributors ranked it as the fifth best unreleased foreign film of the decade—not only like the distillation and perfection of an aesthetic approach, but as you say, also as a three-dimensional, emotional tour-de-force in its own right. It’s certainly funny in a manner unique to Kaurismäki—a character in the film may sum it up best when he says “Supposed to be a comedy. I didn’t laugh once,” in reference to a film he just saw—but it’s so consistently imbued with an aching sense of melancholy that the humor becomes almost tragic. Importantly, the film isn’t entirely without hope, but it’s this sense of perseverance in the face of life’s inevitable hurdles that continues to stick with me.

Marsh: Yeah, that’s what sticks with me, too. In a sense this is a film about dealing with hardship, and most of its running time is dedicated to running its protagonists through the gauntlet of everyday life. Its well-meaning heroes, a working-class couple living in the middle of a pretty dour-looking Helsinki, are subjected to one iniquity after another—they lose their jobs, have their furniture repossessed, fall into heavy drinking, get ripped off, get beaten up, you name it—and for a while the whole thing seems almost oppressively bleak, particularly for a film billed as a comedy. These miniature tragedies seem comic close up, of course; making such trials and tribulations amusing is what Kaurismäki does best.

Yet real, palpable sadness hangs in the air, and a lingering sense of loss pervades the film (it’s probably worth mentioning that the actor for whom this film was written, a Kaurismäki regular and a good friend of the director, drank himself to death just before production started on the project). But I’d remiss to call Drifting Clouds a film without hope, which you’ve already noted is important—I don’t want to spoil anything for those who’ve not seen it, but the ending of this film is so immensely satisfying precisely because it’s so hopeful. Were you as bowled over by this ending as I was, Jordan? I swear my eyes got a little misty there for a moment.

Cronk: The very last shot of the film is great, certainly (this seems to be a prerequisite for our ReFramed selections lately), as it sort of redefines the film’s title in an interesting way. What for 90 minutes seems like a description of these characters’ plight becomes an optimistic metaphor for their future as a couple, which is all that they can count on throughout the narrative. It reminds me a bit of the end of Luis Buñuel’s final film, That Obscure Object of Desire. And while the film’s themselves don’t have much in common thematically, stylistically Buñuel seems like Kaurismäki’s most important precursor (there are also shades of Bresson here, of course, while Kaurismäki himself described the film as “a cross between Bicycle Thieves and It’s a Wonderful Life”).

What I like beyond the typically patient framing and compositional acumen in the film, however, is Kaurismäki’s deft use of color. He had shot in color a number of times prior to this, but by and large his black and white films (La vie de Boheme and Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana in particular) have proven to be my favorite visual experiences. Not that his color films weren’t expertly crafted, but Drifting Clouds really saw Kaurismäki upping the ante in this department. The primary color palette of the film really pops off the screen, and his masterful placement of bright tones is reminiscent of no one less than Ozu. Like The Match Factory Girl (which is in color but which I cite here for different aesthetic reasons), Drifting Clouds could easily play as a silent film, its tonal scheme so dramatically lit and contrasted, its mise-en-scène so stoic yet perfectly evocative.

Marsh: It has quite an interesting aesthetic, yes. To go back to what you were saying about his critical standing, one thing that’s always bothered me about how he’s been received by the critical institution is what’s said about him stylistically. I’ve no qualms with the acclaim directed his way, but the nature of that acclaim often strikes me as poorly conceived. Significantly, Kaurismäki has a reputation for being something of a minimalist, but that label is misleading—it’s true that he favors negative space over unnecessary action or dialogue, but his frames are packed with far too much detail to qualify as “minimal” in the traditional sense.

You could maybe even describe his visual style as extravagant, at least compared to the overtly “authentic” vérité look of so many other European filmmakers, and when his films do look genuinely spare it’s typically in order to more clearly underline some exaggerated detail. I suppose, like you mentioned, he’s not unlike Bresson in that regard, recognizing the consequence of simple gestures and framing them accordingly. And I agree that with Drifting Clouds in particular, his application of color is extraordinary, especially the way he employs all of those great, deep blues, which really set the tone of the film.

Cronk: I suppose when you utilize a mostly static cinematographic set-up, trim dialogue to a bare minimum, and keep humor so dry it’s inevitable that viewers will fall back on the minimalist description. One of Kaurismäki’s other major descendants, Wes Anderson, gets saddled with this description as well, despite cluttering the frame with almost too much detail. Kaurismäki isn’t quite so elaborate, but he is uncommonly intricate and cognizant of his framing devices.

You don’t need to look much further than a shot towards the middle of Drifting Clouds when Ilona, played by Kaurismäki’s longest running muse Kati Outinen, exits another defeating job inquiry face-on to the camera only for Kaurismäki to pull the shot back in rather dramatic fashion, revealing a passing tram which Ilona’s husband just minutes earlier had been relieved of his duties to commandeer. Kaurismäki consistently plays with these kinds of juxtapositions and sly visual gags, and it speaks again to his sense of composition that he can so subtly fill the frame with detail while still seeming to the untrained eye like a strict formalist.

Marsh: That subtly almost lends his films a sense of naturalism, too, even though, as we’ve already established, what winds up on screen is all very much deliberate. I think the important thing to take away from Kaurismaki’s work is that his style, however pronounced, is never privileged over the content of his films, even if that content is sometimes limited to light comedy. Some of Kaurismaki’s imitators make the mistake of leaning too heavily on that exaggerated formalism, which creates an impression of posturing that’s ultimately rather hollow. Drifting Clouds is sublime mainly because its characters are endearing and its themes are relatable, not because it looks and sounds a certain way—though there is much to like in those elements, too, of course. It’s a special sort of film in that way, much deeper than it seems at first glance. I’m not sure if it was ever received as such, though.

Cronk: And when one focuses too much on the stylistic confines of the style, it becomes even easier to overlook the humor and pathos inherent in the material. We’ve touched on the emotional aspect of the film already, but Drifting Clouds may also be the most outwardly funny film of Kaurismäki’s career (equal at least to The Man Without a Past in this regard). To be sure, these aren’t belly laughs, more like a series of grin-inducing ironies as these characters get ever-more buried in life’s everyday tribulations.

Ilona is told she’s too old to practice her profession (“head waitress”) on multiple occasions (once by a man even older than she, who responds that although he is over 50, he “wears contacts”), while her husband Lauri is laid-off his job literally through a game of chance. There’s also cinematic, familial, animal, and corporate humor touched upon throughout—all, as you say, deeper than at first may meet the eye. What you’re left with, then, are fully drawn characters, and in one of Kaurismäki’s longest films (a whopping 95 minutes), a fully conceived and presented world that seems to exist just outside of reality while still bearing characteristics of our basic human existence.

Marsh: Yeah, that’s the “tragicomic” angle—an ever so slight surreal worldview that borders on magic realism, but which is still totally grounded in something that feels real and relatable. And even though we’re encouraged to laugh at the nature of their misfortunes, which are exaggerated just enough to seem absurd, we’re not laughing at the blows so much as the precise way they’re dealt. It’s clear that Kaurismäki loves these characters, and if he puts them through the ringer it’s only to better celebrate their determination and resolve. That he allows them their eventual triumph, even if it’s maybe only fleeting, might have felt forced or incongruous at the end of a lesser film, but here it feels completely appropriate. You can’t help but believe that they’ve earned it, and that Kaurismäki ‘s earned the right to give it to them. [PM]