men cheating on women: the difference is not the 20th century

The last third of the film Match Point is one of the only good things Woody Allen has ever done.
I tend to fall in the Rosenbaum school on the Woody weigh ins: that he is good only at copying other ideas and at amassing groups of talented collaborators.
Here is the first point in the film when i felt any measure of pathos. A verifiable tennis match has commenced. It is one based more on sound than on image. To get rid of sound, one attacks the opponent and achieves silence. A pregnant noise, one that intimates an image that will also have to be hidden, but has not yet grown visible. Yes, Johansson's 'Lola' is hysterical, mocked and morally judged for her sexuality.
That said, she, and Allen's portrayal of her, is honest. She is louder and more forward because she has been injured, and "she" includes more than herself. Rhys-Myers' character may regret his transgression, but Johansson's owns hers and is now morally committed to living for two. Rhys -Myers and Allen's solution is to commit to erase what is in the process of loudly becoming unignorable. What is a man to with such a loud problem?
Smash that noisemaker until it breaks.
I've also just watched Manon 70, a film where Jean -Claude Brialy 's character comments, to Sami Frey's character, about a room of beautiful women, that "They've all been cheated on. They all have been...and they'll all continue to be. Unless they die. They've all been cheated on. So unless you live on another planet, everybody gets cheated on. That's the 20th century for you. But you, the difference between you and them, is that you haven't been cheated on." The issue of betrayal seems less notable for its temporal and planetary occurence and more striking as a crime that men are still free to commit against women. Gendered tennis ... Men: score. Women: love.

Linda Ronstadt-1977-07-Poor Poor Pitiful Me

Having just rewatched what i view as Maren Ade's masterpiece, Forest for the Trees ( Der Wald vorlauter baumen), I'm reflecting on the thin line a filmmaker must walk in depicting self harming protagonists. Is it situational or inescapable psychological pain that continually brings these figures into situations worthy of private shame and our shared, spied pity?
As viewers are we invited to pass judgment? Do we, as witnesses, become the tape that seals up these lost memories that made these characters blind to the path of love and pride?
I'm reading John Ward's 1968 book Alain Resnais or the theme of time, and in describing Seyrig in Muriel, Ward writes of the gaps in time that painful memories wall us into. "She has no durational sense and in fact, is not free....she does not live as she would in conformity with a continuous view of her past and present... As Bergson says: 'We are free when our acts spring from our whole personality...'" (p. 74)
Ade's film, surprisingly akin to Resnais', denies analysis yet engrosses us with a pitiful female protag through it's provocative sense of duration, memory denied, and of one's personally turbulent experience of time.
Forest for the Trees provides no psychological causality. Our focus is what we sense as immediate, we are denied access to Melanie's past. The pity the viewer feels for Melanie has separated us from her, preceding her own shame. Following her blind descent down a rabbit hole, our sense of Melanie is an isolated series of incidents, with increasingly awkward moments and Melanie's escalating reactions. A singular path cleared in the forest; excluding anything but the general trajectory that pummels Melanie towards disaster's way.
But in this movement towards intensification, the film has now gained the shape of a circle, inviting a clear figure with which to witness which point is the birth and which point is the death.

"I'm not a person. I'm a fucking construction."

-ellen burstyn 's character in Alain Resnais' Providence

d(r)ive into the water

I've just left Walter Reade at Lincoln Center, and for the time i was there, a pin perfect sound system exploded the room with an incessant yet backgrounded guttural throb. I felt the seats vibrate the entire 86 minutes of the film, much like the surge of energy that coincides with the ignition of a motor at the start of a road trip. I've come from a screening of Ange Leccia's Nuit Bleue, billed as a view from the current avant garde French Cinema, in a special experimental section (curated by the unparalleled Nicole Brenez) of Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual "Rendez Vous with French Cinema" series.

The film opens with a shot framed just above a small island off Corsica. It looks like a giant green hill stuck smack dab into an endless blue sea. An almost eerily organic image, except the island has one major road going straight down the middle, another one off to the right-hand side. A car drives down the road in the center, and then there is a major explosion.

Cut to Paris, France. We follow a beautiful female tour guide in the Louvre. The onscreen action intimates she's received upsetting news of a loved one, and then she is off to this island, one we seem to encounter from her travels and her perspective, but this is actually untrue. We experience the filmmaker's closely controlled idea of her perspective, an exteriorized view of emotional impressions and visions, and this is the duality that is the greatest sense the film has left me with. (For better and for worse.) It seems that this protagonist of ours is not just journeying, but also returning, as we later see her reunited with island people who know her. I came across a clear sense of both being foreign and familiar, and the uncanniness of this position.

There is a major aural component to Nuit Bleue, a film which illustrates romance, mourning, familial identity and nationalist politics by way of clear yet elusive visuals and a restless, complicated soundtrack. The film is both agricultural and post industrial, like "the plant of a factory" it is supported by metal; an industrialized score completes the core structure and sonic layering; in explosive moments actual songs come out of its pipe-- their range covers the following: ethnic dirges, an erotic video set to a sexy dancey pop song and the retro romance of Serge Gainsbourg (a la his Anna Karina duet- Ne Dis Rien, "Don't Say a Word"...)


This experience of SENSE, a major part of what it is to sit and watch and hear Nuit Bleue, is unique in its distraction as both the strength and weakness of Leccia's film. It can account for the most singularly experienced moments; political or cereberally aesthetic in idea, yet physically emotional in their reception. There is a sequence in the film, almost romantic in its visual economy and silent poetry, where our female protagonist is traveling, on a ship, out to the island. The sequence is made up of carefully framed shots of the sea and its waves, a painstaking color palette that showcases every type of blue in the water and any bit of orange and yellow in the woman's hair as it's lit by the sun off the sea. Shortly after these scenes, another wordless sequence follows her as she explores onland, slow and ethereal, her progress is suddenly impeded by a bomb exploding. The force of it's fire suddenly thrusting her down off a hill, returning closer to the water. This is the film at its best.
At its worst, a single frame or a single sequence goes for the overlay of images or ideas with the painstakingly planned approach of Late Career Godard, but without the rich well of cinema history that Godard is able to draw from.
There are moments of intense material beauty; stemming from elegantly controlled images and a soundscape to accompany it. Our gaze is most often focused on images of faces, the sea and the natural terrain of the Island. There is little to no dialogue spoken by or between the characters. There are moments that allude to a direct history between these characters, but they are bookended by moments of these characters observing or being caught off guard by (a la the handful of missile/bombed explosions we witness) other narratives-- those of soccer games watched on old computers, classical Italian b+ w romantic films on the t.v., and by footage of the silhouette of a sexy female, in what is likely online porn. These disruptions of plot are stories that split off before they follow any straight line, broken branches that will never continue to grow, yet still hanging on the tree. The way they zigzag through the film is not unlike the way the cliffs and shrubs create the uneven terrain of the island, nor unlike the undulations in the sea that surrounds it. Tensions abound and this is the physical, emotional and wordless story of this island, one held in awkward limbo between pre modern tradition and contemporary revolt. The charged nature of the songs complement our sense of the film much like how all of the missiles drive our view, and the characters, off of the land and into the water.

wipe out

"The faces have changed. They've floated away. The faces were gone a long time ago. But they were definitely there, if only for a few minutes. Nog too has lined up, his face smashed up against the window. But it doesn't work with him. He rushes up too fast, throws himself down, forgets himself and then, when you least expect it, he's gone. I don't know what to do about him. I've obviously goofed. But I'm stuck. ...."

(p. 120, nog by Rudolph Wurlitzer . 1968, Two Dollar Radio Movement.)

nog : my recent reading of this 1968 existentialist riff on detachment and the mystery of "Self" informed my recent revisit of JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME. The novel, like the film, came out in 1968. Both are counter culturally rich yet primarily centered in a first person interior journey (though both play out as physical journeys as well: nog through space, JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME through time) into the destruction and confusion of memory, invention and the SELF. Resnais ' film is even more straight forwardly melancholic, focusing on romance and an individual recollection and subsequent decimation of it.

Watching JE T'AIME JE T'AIME, I feel both involved and purposefully separate, journeying through time with Claude, but also stuck against the window, going nowhere fast. Aligned with our protagonist, we both journey and remain trapped, falling against the window, mired in pace as if wearing the webbed footgear he has for his scuba dive; stuck in a Past that increasingly is infecting and becoming our Present; keeping us all from any hope of a Future.

There's a framing device in Resnais' sci fi treatment of romantic loss and introspection.
Both at the end and beginning of our journey we are given: Scientists, clear exposition, and a trajectory for our protagonist, the lovelorn and recently suicide failing Claude Ridder (Claude Rich.) In between, chronology collides against itself. Moments of romance may have meant to begin at the beginning, but the very act of journeying in the past and trying to make sense of it seems to cause multiplied beginnings, stymied discoveries, disorder and confusion. As the film progresses and Claude's self directed search accelerates, the very romance and figure of his attachment seems to implode and erase before our very eyes.

Bearing witness to the past is a different idea then trying to relive and explore a beginning or an end to a romantic attachment. Just as in nog, the search for meaning begins internally with the subject, but then radiates outward, causality and order becoming less attached to logic. Claude interrogates himself for culpability. At first, Je T'Aime, je t'aime seems like a beautiful love story that ran it's course. As the film progresses, time and storyline grow in complexity. It appears Claude is exploring his responsbility in a greater crime--the suicide or possible murder of his love interest, Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot.) Or was the actual crime (or death) merely that the relationship ended?
Is there much of a difference ? Claude's suicide, real or imagined..is he not already dead during the course of this film?
The framing adds a sense of logic to a film that folds back on itself endlessly, perfect in its dubiousness as real or imagined.
Claude's entire exploration into the affair plays more like a poetic dream then a real sci fi journey. Seeming to last 91 minutes, as in actual dreams, it lasts only one minute but feels distended, haunting, cathartic and unclear. Logic and action is motivated by fear, guilt, attachment, and perhaps even love.
This is one half of a love story revisited. A ghost story, a dream, a journey back in time. The potential readings are endless and yet are all the same: Claude is doomed from the start, but of course we have not even heard from Catrine.

acousmetre: political voice of KINGS SPEECH

a great song in honor of KINGS SPEECH, a film which sucked. In Kings Speech- the King's afraid of the power (world power/personal power)connoted from his own voice; once conquered + reconciled to it, Imperialism is rendered less threatening. A Colonial Power as docile and cozy; a warm blanket that makes you feel familiar , protected, secure. If the King is depicted no different than any middle aged schlub with an analyst, he's made as human as any other non - Fascist. Conveniently revising history to finish off this post 90s Everyman, The King/Bertie (his soft, susceptible identity actually given a separate name) finally finds a voice to execute his speech against Hitler, commented upon in the film as the most skillful orator, and as the apex of moral depravity. So does the strong voice connote moral corruption? The film fails to remember how the real King of England, daddy issues or no daddy issues (and also FDR in the U.S.) actually tightened emigration laws for people of assumed Jewish descent AFTER learning about the Holocaust. KINGS SPEECH allows us this intoxicating warm glass of milk , lulling us into an old guard patriarchy nostalgia; wiping out the grime of real history, where the King of England 's government policies made him an accomplice to Hitler; helping him to throw millions of European Jews to their deaths.

Ghostface-- he comes connected, wielding his voice as a PART of himself; strong like a machete. His voice is a part of himself yet more than himself, an envelopping power both inclusive and expansive. Rap and hip hop is intrinsic liberation. Those once disenfranchised now assert themselves via an original voice; whilst re interpreting existing sounds for backing music. Those who were once dominated are responsible for our re assessment of them as exceptionally strong, beyond masculine...Ghostface or King/Bertie...who is more threatening to us? And what does this say about attitudes towards those in power who dominate versus those who have been institutionally dominated?

on being a LIGHT SLEEPER

or how Class Consciousness = awakening from the denial of Addiction

In 1992 Paul Schrader made a film that slyly equates drug addiction with Yuppie Materialsm. Our first contact in this world is the Dealer; initially we are lightly guided by Willem Dafoe's John LaTour, entering into a criminal world. And what makes LIGHT SLEEPER so rewarding is how the points of identification are fluid; they splinter, and then shift back and forth. The absurd and pathetic addicts we experience initally seem so contrapuntal to LaTour's seller...then as the film progresses, particularly when Marianne relapses, the cloud of our own dreamlike state is lifted and we see we are all like the buyers, who are also, actually, like the sellers...delusioned and sickened by our own attachments, whether it be to economic class or to drugs.


Our protagonist, John LaTour, has a gently disturbed energy. He deals drugs...at night. Though most of the people he sells to are also variations of light sleepers (most are fairly cracked out on uppers and /or blinded by addiction), Dafoe is the haunted voyeur among their strange land, and it seems to keep him up at night. Revisiting VERTIGO's Scottie Ferguson, LaTour is cued on pause on between a past failed love and the fear of destitution that the future may hold. As his profession mandates, we witness his evening drudgery; stuck on a restless loop of enabling and catering to the sick and suffering. He also runs circles on a parallel track; keeping his own past active addiction at bay and trying to save select others from the depths of addiction that imploded his old fling with love Marianne (Dana Delaney.)
LaTour is also a non psychotic urban everyman reworking of Travis Bickle , having achieved socially acceptable yuppie status via socially acceptable illegal drug sales to the Elite. John has made the vertical climb from user (consumer) to seller( producer) and so he treads lightly. He is easily disturbed, easily roused, and he is tiptoing around people (addicts and yuppies--both blind to their compulsive attachments and to the powerless moral descent it has caused.) LaTour tiptoes as to not awaken...how can a drug dealer maintain his purpose if the addicted get clean and recover?
The same question, a key aspect of the sort of brainwashing that occurs in a disease of the brain like addiction, can be translated over to a more Marxist sensibility. The meaning of the dispossessed can be extended to those who are trapped by the myths that kept yuppies on a hamster wheel of class escalation.
A perfect signification of this waking up from the light veil of sleep occurs in the scene when both LaTour and the viewer learns Marianne has relapsed.
In every previous scene, Marianne has appeared more dressed down, plain, and, well, less glamourous and clearly less wealthy than the other characters. She's been seen in a cafeteria, in a hospital, on the street in the rain. Several of LaTour's customers are caught on the way down; we see ragged and tweaked out characters wearing stained clothes in messy penthouses. They are caught in a moment in between classes: perched in sickness, perhaps about to lose all the shiny wealth they've attained. But when we see Marianne, coked up and wrecked at Tis' (Victor Garber) opulent pad, she is newly housed in a rich frame; housed in a rich apartment and associating with the uber rich elite, and dressed in a silver satin nightie. What makes Schrader's frame so powerful is how he conveys the overlay of images in a single frame; from the movement of LaTour's character to lightly sleeping accomplice to a damaged victim who awakens to the crime and harm around him at the very moment his own best efforts have destroyed all he loves. This overlay of representations of love (once innocent Marianne) with representations of sickness and immorality (active drug addiction; the controlling taint of economic greed.) is a subtle yet combustible formalist coup.
John LaTour, once quietly philosophizing and walking from penthouse to penthouse, set to a jazzy score, is now truly "Wandering around in the night...consumed by fire."