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."

2:37 aka Lisa Gerrard: still affecting

Dead Can Dance: Tristan - Sanvean from Toward the Within

Never forgot this song transition, though i have not seen this since a midnight Toward the Within screening at Ansmellika Film Center in 1994.
Lisa Gerrard: still affecting.

roughly: best of what i saw in 2010

please note Ne Change Rien and Everyone Else were films on LAST YEAR's LIST. cheers.

1 Wild Grass

2 127 Hours

3 Bluebeard

4 A Prophet

5 You Won't Miss Me/ I'm Still Here

6 Trash Humpers

7 Film Socialisme / Ruhr

8 Essential Killing/The Social Network

9 The Ghost Writer/ Daddy Long Legs

10 Mysteres de Lisbon/Shutter island

11 Certified Copy

12 Boxing Gym

13 Un Lac

14 Carlos

15 Our Beloved Month of August

honorary mentions; too flawed to place:
Please Give
Enter the Void
Black Swan


best REP:
special award for rocking my world goes to william lustig's ace curatorial skillz at AFA incl
white line fever
the burglars
fear over the city
the mercenaries aka dark of the sun
defiance

also great in rep this yr:
Bill Gunn series @ BAM, esp. the amazing PERSONAL PROBLEMS

tweet's ladies of pasadena @ AFA

the mutations @ WR

pierre clementi series @ AFA

Anthony Mann series @ FF (especially God's Little Acre)

last straub-huillet and latest straubs @ migrated forms

jean pierre gorin series @ migrated forms

Best Film I saw for the first time on DVD or my computer:

Lav Diaz' MELANCHOLIA (2008)

WORST FILM OF THE YEAR, HANDS DOWN : TINY FURNITURE

DONT SEE IT.

that's it for now; i've likely already forgotten half of what i saw.

I have a right to change my mind

I like re watching Le Mepris.

'If you're happy , so am I.' -camille (Brigitte Bardot in Le Mepris)

I like re-watching Le Mepris because it is a film about things not working.

Motion is impeded, relationships disrupted, both in the film and outside of it.

Such things not working include Artists and Producers in a bad relationship...Palance confused by the ideas in the film he is financing, Lang being misunderstood in the other direction. His art film is not working because people don't communicate with him as a man and as an artist, only as a God. Everyone is concerned with preservation of beauty: both artistic and romantic. But the classical ruins of our environs forecasts the trajectory. Paul is hired to perform a job on this film, and it is one that he will necessarily fail. He is to communicate another artist's vision of another artist's vision. Lang's Odyssey via Homer. Paul (Piccoli)'s failures are intangible yet real. And he can not begin to comprehend why he has earned the scorn and lost the affection of Bardot's Camille.

As Piccoli says in the screening room , quoting Dante, with evident malaise as he watches the couple frolicing onscreen in the Mediterranean, as Delerue plays: "night then saw all the stars. we were filled with gladness, which soon turned to tears until the sea closed in upon us.'

Surrounded by ruins, the film is weighed down in misunderstandings and mis-married artistic visions. The blinding blueness of the landlocked Mediterranean sea, tainted by the surrounding rot of classical ruins...beautiful yet far from prisine. The cliffs that encroach upon it serving as abstract geographic spaces for Camille and Paul to fill to act out their psychological and romantic distance. Camille languishes on a path by the sea, Paul chasing her...Her scorn is as untranslatable as his motives and role on Lang's film. Godard makes certain points: Camille and Paul love each other. The primary red blue and golden yellow tints in the film's opening erotic scene is all we spy of love. The romance of the Sea is crystallized in a beaming blue as Paul gazes at the clip in the screening. We've come into this world with a last glance of what's dying. A romantic bond, the Cinecitta studios now papered with faded posters, the muddled film in the Sea. Subsequent use of primary colors is delegated to material objects; synthetic fabrics of clothing, painted metal and thick makeup on faces. Geographic and chromatic weight is given to the ripping apart of their romantic bond.

Godard's jump cuts move me because they are last glimpses. Desperately they catch moments; the erotically charged sort that equally fuel obsessions and love. Seconds to make out the image: echoing the cruel games of memory the mind plays as a love affair implodes. The colors are exaggerated Primaries and the movements of the edits are equally affected jolts. Fetishistic shots of Bardot's sulking suspending the progress of both the film and the relationship.

friends: notes on the beginning

The Social Network is a film lit in three parts, each part dividing one's experience and entry into a privileged diegetic world. An early montage features a set of real experiences and people and places that are, for the spectator, glimpsed. For the character whose imagination stimulates the montage, they are conjured. There are a bus full of attractive young students partying. The light is low and fixed to illuminate only small spaces, intimate groups of students. The setting is evening time and clusters of space and people are lit by campus street lights. The images are detailed as if computerized -- a crisp, dusky, hi def feel.

There is something so realistic, so simple in terms of narrative content, yet simultaneously so outrageously unreal and fantastic about The Social Network. The narrative thread first unspools from a point like the innermost dot in a spiral circle that draws outward, progressively more ex-centric, and, ironically, not unlike the boredom inspired, overly-detailed pencil maze an elementary aged nerd might draw. Interior, invisible experience (the privileged ivy league-rs and their prettiest and popular 'Final Clubs) fuels these initial scenes. Paralleling similar territory as the less expositional sequences in films like Se7en, Fight Club and Panic Room, these are real places transformed by simulated social fantasies. They are just the fleshed out versions of what Fincher has done in these previous films: series of shots of the insides of pipes, circuits in a computer or the shots that guide us through walls. While these are quite literally impossible views--what is filmed is never usually seen by the naked eye, at least not in real time, there is just as abstract an idea applied to the socially fabricated community of friends that fools isolated computer trollers into accepting the reality of Facebook. Fincher draws us into spaces where symptom and effect are equally confused and concurrent. That most private fantasy, that of a real world that becomes imagined when one invokes oneself into it....this is also the starting point in a film about exponential growth. Growth that is both actual (financial, fame) and illusory (popularity, likability.) The measure of acceleration parallel to the increase in simulated output: shared qualitites of the trajectory of a FB profile, the trajectory of the explosion of wealth and drama in The Social Network, and the trajectory of the reception of a film. The pencil sketch starting with the dot and ending a maze filled page later. Beginning as a series of dreamed events, The Social Network (the film/ the site) grows more external and more actual (and thereby validated) upon being noticed by large numbers of other people.

our collective scheme

In 2001 interviews with Charles Tesson and Jacques Ranciere, Jean-Luc Godard speaks of the auto factory as a fortress to it's workers.

In Anthony Mann's God's Little Acre (1958), the closed down cotton mill is a fortress that has locked it's workers out. The site in which its captives were once both held and protected remains frozen...set up for the machinery of imprisonment... yet just slightly outside of time.
Especially attracted to this beacon of comfort, of the pain that is familiar, is Will (Aldo Ray), the ex worker turned to addiction. Addicted to alcohol, he, along with the other ex workers who hang just outside their prison, long for regimen and for the lubricant of daily Labor.
Their cotton machine lacks the breath of life. It just needs a trigger, and Will is fingering a pistol.

The Walden family are like beavers, digging in the ground. They exist to work. They work to compulsively dig. They dig to seek security.
The Walden's are led by Ty Ty (Robert Ryan) whose obsession with a story has led him to invest faith in the myth that gold is hidden underground.
Beavers build dams by digging in groups, called colonies. These colonies succeed because of the shared need for protection and natural resources.

The Walden's exchange of faith for gold reflects the gilded shell of the Church's promised Afterlife. God is dug and rooted out to find the true gift: material wealth.
Each of the earthy Waldens bawdily embrace their secular passions.
The family suffers for following Ty Ty's obsessive need to dig. They share the pain from one another's transgressions. Alcoholism, depression, extra marital sex and lewd aggression taint each member with the dirt Ty Ty directs them to dig.
But the shared myth of gold has become the trigger for the group's function, both in the world and as a family unit.
They burrow , they dig up their very own roots, like the beavers whose digging and flooding may cause interference with the world around them.

The abducted remembers there is a comfort in losing power. Life is smaller , containable, when one depends on the abductor. The god that owns this acre is not unlike the god that owns the cotton mill. The family, the workers, the congregation; all sickly dependent, needing the expropriation of some benevolent instigator to finger the trigger.