don't make an Event out of It

People make events out of the strangest notions.

 

I'm struggling to compose  notes on TRAIN OF SHADOWS, a Jose Luis Guerin film that purports to be many things that it isn't, which is just one of the  reasons i am so fond of it.
 TRAIN takes the form of an examination into the disappearance of filmmaker Gerard Fleury, who vanished while working on a film in 1930.
Guerin explores the place that this happened by way of both new and old footage.  The old footage turns out to be shot by Guerin himself, though it is shaped and cloaked as if it were found footage made by Fleury.

Hoping to cleanse my palate, I turn on tonight's Rock Center with Brian Williams, an event built around an expose of the president's war /situation room, which , in turn, was built around the anniversary of Bin Laden's death/capture.

It is funny to pretend that the exciting war room narrative, constructed for tonight's newsmagazine episode, is anything but smart political manifestation.  I don't believe a word of it.
Loyal Liberal i'll remain; voting straight DNC down my ballot while laughing at the Michael Bay show they all must perform.

Both the TV Show and the movie make the decision to highlight certain angles and convergences that have occurred as " events " and 'Important moments."  Both use narrative  and performance built on the mystique of the real  that we will never know.   Only Guerin's film is in on the joke.

Even the program's title, Rock Center , seems to make brevity (it's referring to the benign location of the stage it's shot in, Rockefeller Center) an exciting and mysterious locale.

i wonder if this story merited the same import before it became altered by  an anniversary.  It doesn't matter.

plain shirt, plain set, "glitters cold and grand.."

Jacques Demy's student film, LES HORIZONS MORTS (1951): involving 2 glasses, 2 spaces ( one is a room, inside, and the other is a field or park, outside.) There are also shirts, worn shirts, worn by the nameless lead, who is also Jacques Demy. One watches this movie, and if the viewer remains active and aware, he is likely to become obsessed by the dulled white shirt . It is a contradiction of plainness and busyness, the busyness expressed in the web of lines and creases that map it's life.

The sound design of the film is all edges and abruptness. Sounds and shadows occur,often simultaneously, but there is no song. For all it's distinctive style, LES HORIZONS MORTS remains a circling maze of pencil marks that we watch an artist draw over and again.
At one point there is even a mirror that his character/Demy himself, smashes. It smashes as his hand extends, yet never making physical contact. The notion is more psychic than real. The moment is strained and self involved.
The UBU site's description tells me this film highlights point of view in Film. There is little description in his threadbare sets, there is only the placement of the shirt and it's jacket in the center of my field of vision.
All the expression is left to this ugly map of evasions. Little paths that don't lead me to anywhere. Finding my eyes glued to the woven tracks on his back, I've located my source of pleasure in the film.
I'm currently reading William T Vollmann's vol 1 in his SEVEN DREAMS anthology. It's called THE ICE-SHIRT. It is a book of North American Landscapes. in THE ICE-SHIRT, landscapes of ancient north america are physically worn (both taken on and off) by Nordic/Icelandic sounding ancient characters. These characters' sagas and affairs make up the forests and beaches we know today. When a lover is feeling alone, he goes to a beach which cliffs that look like a skull ( an empty person.) Everything is inside and out, and drawn out like maps, but worn on the body.
"Never did Gudrid suspect that the beautiful leaf which she fingered day and night was BOLVERKR's. Oh, just as the Bear-Shirt made men see red-leaf forests through a hot rainy haze of blood; just as the Blue-Shirt made the wearer's world glitter cold and grand and beautiful in a thousand twinkling mirrors, so the Gold-Shirt glared and shone like the sun's eye, so hot and bright that only an unseeing rose like Gudrid could open herself to it trustingly and lovingly and feed upon it and grow from it; she was warm and happy; she was thrilled with the gold she longed to feed on...So she drew on the Gold-Shirt; she smiled and kissed her baby; she lashed him to her back and set out in the forest...and her hair was golden, so she hooded herself in gold..."(p 242)
There may be a larger notion at display here, in Demy's student film, one that is Christian, or spiritual, in it's concern.
If that is the case, then i now understand why it has eluded me. I'm left with my own self satisfying perspective, that of the creases on the shirt and the wrinkled collar on the jacket he once wears over it.
I wonder how many years it's lasted, and i wonder what color it should be. How has it covered or blocked things? What and who does it cover?

German character on display in Maren Ade's FOREST FOR THE TREES

Melanie...like Germany itself, is brimming with optimism until she acknowledges she is hard -wired for failure.

FOREST FOR THE TREES.
Also, see earlier post at http://hersuzanne76.blogspot.com/2011/03/linda-ronstadt-1977-07-poor-poor.html

FANTASIES in Film . Part 2: Telling your Dreams

Conclusions? Ending nowhere.

KABOOM! A film made up of dreams as distinct yet connected as any free floating thought or impression. So do they add up?
Do they collide and intersect as we want them to ?
Both dreams and our subconscious consistently elude us, refusing to add or to move us to anywhere resembling a location or solution. If fantasy is behind our dreams, then as the movie continues, we begin to ask what drives the fantasy. And where is it taking us to? can it move us? Or is all we can hope for a visible rendering of the acceleration of deep thought?

FANTASIES in Film. Part 1: Dreaming in the Bathroom

Sexual desire may appear as unreal as a reflection in a broken mirror.
It is no coincidence that this KABOOM! sequence about a gay man desiring a Hetero woman starts out with sickness , moving straight to erotic attraction, by way of no causation other than color and fantasy. Araki's film gains intricacy over the early teen films in his ouevre due to the textural density and creative form in his latest film. Seeming simple is easy when the only politics in your film are based on Cinema and it's complicated/complicating power to convey dreams.

ChitChat

Meaningless chitchat tempers the crime around which the 2.5-3 hrs of ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA pivots towards and away from.
The search for grisly evidence is detailed in a whisper of wind sounds and quiet glances. There is also endless chattering on, about quotidian bullshit, by the people who search.
I cant guess the point, I can't even pinpoint the affect, borrowed and diluted as it is.
So there you are, familiar formalism, but farewell new light. All the light here is borrowed and blue, cornered and careful. The tone is gentle and it alleviates any real emotion behind whatever real crime (that would be murder) has given us this chance to gather together.

Ceylan's film is, for me, at the least a great attempt to illustrate distraction. People chatter away and it is to run in the forest and forget how circular, small and meaningless their role is. And this is what happens here in ANATOLIA's world.
Watching the film i imagined a song like poem was occurring, uniting the nighttime calls of grass, trees and an occasional owl that were singled out by Ceylan.
I heard them morph into something more polished and personal and pop. Here . Lana Del Ray's song is an apt example of what I sang to myself. And the man was not only dying...he was dead.

fractured action: romantic rules in HAYWIRE

how HAYWIRE, Steven Soderbergh's new female protag -fronted action film, chronicles complications of heterosexual romance.

she loves her Dad, and he loves her back.
That pure and strong familial connection lets us know that she is the healthy one. it is only the men she gets involved with who let her down. THEY have the issues.
she gets a lot of action.
she has to get away from all these men in her life.
the relationships are not mutually beneficial.

to survive her relationship, she must make decisions quickly...never doubt herself. make a choice; commit to it, execute. she must always think three steps ahead to make sure she is protected...to see what her options will be in any situation that could arise in the next 3 minutes.
she would never be so foolish as to trust a male partner to protect her--she is her own responsibility.

Her status in the world is unstable. She gains security only when she can know, with certainty, when and where she can expect to engage with her man. he may call, but it is up to her to answer.


It is so hard to get out of a toxic relationship that she has to continually try to escape. Failing to extract herself, she must keep trying to finally attain her freedom from these clingy lovers. they just won't let go.

relationships always end over issues of loyalty and money.