Reflective Breath __UN SECOND SOUFFLE

Careful, don't get winded.


Notices to watch the breath and check the pulse were commonly heard on the aerobics tapes of the 1970s + 80s.  "Don't forget to breathe!" "Are you above your target heart rate? If so: SLOW DOWN. If not, let's work HARDER!"
 In writer-director Gerard Blain's elegiac UN SECOND SOUFFLE (1978), the breath and wind is slowed and riffed on.  A momentary pause opens wide onto a scene of emotional stillness; no matter if the subject is mid-run, mid-record spinning or mid-drawing room.
The portrait of divorcee Francois' (Robert Stack) wealthy, worldly late in life bachelorhood is sober and stately.  Like a regal animal, near extinction, he is chronicled National Geographic style in the frame as he accomplishes his forest jogs.
A second wind is also a return to breath; an end to the inhalation of inner stasis.  Blain lays out a story of pluralism.  This film is not a chronicle of "one" second wind, but a series of inner reflections and distanced resignations. These inward movements are interspersed with suddenly expelled emotion. Distended sequences of exercise build a wave like crescendo of the regret that only comes with age.  The zen-like runs are countered with scenes of frenetic interaction.  When he is portrayed engaging with others it is always competitive (side by side or front to back in the frame) or flung into an overly filled mise en scene, confused in its decor and emotions.
Francois is emotionally and physically distanced from his family in early scenes, and he lives in a post - marriage, post - family constructed haven.  His emotions guarded; his looks toward familiars feature scant suspicion and a weighty regret.  His gazes at his competitors in dating (all vastly younger and virile), track a haughty disdain.  His eyes never quite hunger, yet he persists in competitive pursuits and tracksuits.

queuing his song to queue emotional deep connections 

savoring his "favorite movement" which promotes in him, literal stasis; total reflection

Shots of Stack's protag are dominated by the room in which he lives; be it the room of his conspicuously mod bachelor den or the unmarked trees of the woods.   Other times his camera moves in close to Stack's expressively resigned eyes; imagining, feeling, what we are not quite sure.  

His character competes in a progressively accelerating dating game with a young man he matter of factly learns (in the most sober post or pre coital interview) is sleeping with his much younger live in girlfriend.  The young man is at least 20 years junior, rides a motorcycle, and is regaled in bright primary colors. All of these attributes (including the bike, leading to minor injury, another sequence pregnant with the viewer's worst imagined futures) are co-opted by Stack's sullen man. He is virile, he is competitive, and he now bikes in the city streets and works out in the public sphere of the pre-fab  gym, as contrapuntal as can be to the shades of green in the natural world of his earlier runs.
In one shot, the two men playing this game (though maybe only the elder knowingly) encounter each other in the gym shower; Stack literally peaking in at the competition's natural goods.
The second wind is, at times, the viewer waiting to exhale.  Holding one's breath in a pregnant wait for an emotional release; scenes are directed surrounded by a heaviness that is  insinuated yet denied.
Then there are the moments, often brief, when the pain or the reality of a dynamic is expressed most directly, even with humor such as in this scene, or sans humor early on when Francois bursts out to his daughter that she must have an abortion.  Here the second wind is the culmination of introverted breath; shooting out with surprise, brevity, and honesty.

Emotion is very simple.  Very true.

Back to the gym.. Some 14 years earlier the fear of sexual desire and virility of men was drawn in primary saturated hues of the material world, in Alfred Hitchcock's MARNIE(1964).  A screaming recall of that yellow purse is repeated in a shot (against white synthetically colored /tiled gym + shower walls) in UN SECOND SOUFFLE as an orange Adidas bag calls out a similar signification.  The denatured orange in the anesthesia of the constructed gym is stifling and alarming.

MARNIE and her Yellow Purse

Every moment we die a little more.  One's second wind is never promised; a sentiment that is the singular recurring musical and visual thread of Blain's picture. Each run is heavy with the viewers' imagination; pregnant with collapse. Gerard Blain's films stand as a recognition; a nod to this sober, unwavering fact.
As in the very title of one of his last films,  AINSI SOIT-IL (2000)
 "SO BE IT."

"Time is not on your side, on your side, on your side."

ASH WEDNESDAY's Phoenix

Her makeup and soft smile dissuade you for the moment; do not look closer.

Her sadness lies in swollen sacs below her eyes.
Her glimmer has been on a dimmer, one guesses for a decade now, or even two.

Seeing herself being seen: effort to sit alone in a restaurant.

Does she look like herself.  That is a question she asks.  Her face tells us she no longer identifies with what she sees as "me/I.”  Her gaze refuses to recognize the change and experience physicalized on her face and body.  The role she has played; trophy wife, beautiful object, beloved princess, is now utterly unplayable.  We can feel as she starts to realize, and to wonder, did others notice she could no longer play the role before she herself did?

The primary question the film examines is not "WHO?" is he now being romantic with, but "WHY?" Why are We no longer ?
Why some other woman? Are they younger, is their light still shining brighter? Are they thinner?
Time is foregrounded.  Each momentary glance at her face and or figure is something we learn takes her not just hours, but months to prepare for.
Because of Time's very infallibility, her endeavors will take increasing effort and increasing amounts of time; yet still they may be in vain. Every circumstance where she is dolled up, she inserts herself as a still figure looking for a moving target; immobile in the frame.
Most often a thinner and younger comparable figure of female desirability is featured in the same frame; vital and spry.

Henry Fonda , who she longs for and long waits for, is finally standing beside her in the frame. It is about or over  halfway into the picture.  He scans her face; he is pleased, but she does not please him. Her age is inescapable and time can be momentarily erased; never disregarded.

The melancholy in the picture is based around the wasted time and effort of a woman outside of time; counting for survival on the skills of the young; oblivious to her strained out of fashion looks she struggles to create. 

It is unfortunate when life outlives you.

Inside Out: LEAN ON PETE as Crystal- Image Personified

projected reflection:  anthropomorphism

Charley= figurative Reflection of violence // literal reflection of garish police light glare

Charley runs from us; into himself.

The escape that Haigh's LEAN ON PETE chronicles is action at its most explicit; emotion transformed into a perfectly reflecting physicalization.

The ride across Washington morphs into the seemingly endless miles walking through Wyoming.    The pivot from car to large scale walking is the concretized shift of direct psychological inquiry to an abstracted emotional experience.

Duration of film scenes align with the narrative course of what Charley experiences regarding hunger and loss of connection to the world. Both the forces of Starvation and loss of familial /human and ultimately even animal connection bring about a loss of self.  These forces are tracked through the passage of time and a simultaneous large-scale  geographical move across the country.
The time-movement image of this process is graphed with increasing visual abstraction: starting with projections (Charley's lack of self resulting in projecting relations upon newly met strangers (Buscemi, Sevigny),  reflections,  refractions and ultimately obscuration of the original image.

moving towards Abstraction: Impoverished Charley eyes his mirror reflection  as he vomits from filling mouth with gasoline to fuel truck to drive him and the horse to safety

further Abstraction: the loss of visual specificity in the image of the self
through time, through movement...hunger is reflected in this crystal-image

Unrecognizable: loss of visual self-recognition

Other filmic shifts felt within the course of the picture correspond to the heightening of the stakes that  perpetuate departures and escapes (movement-image) and patience (duration of time; the time-image).

Nothing is free of consequence. The evidence of every action is measured in increments of weight lost as hunger becomes starvation.  Measured in off handedly caught glimpses of Charley's haggard face reflected.  Subtle degrees of gauntness are increased in these second hand visual relics throughout the course of his journey.

The threat:   The "Specialness" of being a loser in life is fetishized by the movie.
How is that threat averted:  Charley is not compelling for the reason of his losses, though emotions do intensify as they accumulate.  Charley is kept at a distance from us; we only see virtual reflections of him projected...onto the humanized conversations with a horse who is not Human, and in the
actual reflections of him as he physically takes up less and less space.
His role as image/blank screen is foregrounded in this way.
We are denied the idea that Charley is knowable as a person.

Filtered Waters: First Few thoughts (on INGRID GOES WEST)

             Ride or Die Bitches are dead in the digital age.
              Good riddance Real Deal, rest in peace fake friends.

Fake Friends:  Mace in your Face

Take a trip along the sea.  Sailing through INGRID GOES WEST is smooth and steady, which is a good way in, though  not wholly appropriate condition to view a foray into the lifestyle of interpersonal fixation.

I speak of a fixation so overpowering and single-minded as to dictate the course of a young person's life. Nevermind (or maybe because) her mother just died, never mind (or maybe because) she just got released from an insane asylum and has barely any money and no job; she will spend anything and go anywhere to follow the friend crush.

     Apart from the insightful chronicle of fixation/compulsion, (endemic to media age isolations/social sites regardless) there is the exploration of the death of depth.  New relationships in the instagram age make people more shallow and lacking having your back IRL.
All that is left:  an occasional real reaction.
We see a lack of reason necessary to follow each of these decisions that Ingrid makes with abandon.

 After her mother passed, Ingrid is  metaphorically abandoned.  The  subsequent abandonment by her best friend signifies the propriety of the female post adolescent friendship as the strongest bond of a woman's life.  Or at least that 's how it used to be. 

        Ingrid's solution is to recreate through doubling.  Achieving a mirror screen of the one person she elects to screen is a pseudo symbiotic identical twin in the purely digital sense.
She improvises her way to a new family unit.

Making it up as one goes along is no novel narrative. America is the ground zero for evolution by way of improvisation; the path of the New.

Making up false stories is the newer America story; from 8chan to mainstream media.

       
Filters erasing all signs of  suffering as smoothly as a botox job, Ingrid self directs.  To screen Ingrid the person as a movie is an acceptance that our screens now proliferate; they invade our watches, glasses, phones and televisions.  We screen her whenever we elect to tune in via tuning out.

female frienship as TWINNING. Creating close familial bonds post mother/post adolescence

      What is kept clouded is the ultimate end game.  Illumination is black listed.  Do not look too closely for any real deal. Is a lack or a rot at the center of the hole? Everytime an interested party (there are not many) choose to dig, Ingrid shows up, blowing lines or blowing cash on distracting threads, to brush the dirt back over the spots in the earth.

No Measure for Projection

reposting from 2011 ..keeping Toback alive.

I could not tell you how often one gets inspired by watching an episode of Intervention.   Regardless, I recently  had this happen to me. The episode seemed like 2 to 3 chapters out of an awesome Vollmann I'd only half read, losing track of it three months ago. And both the television show and the book were now causing me to make further connections with 2 of my most recent movie revisitations.

The episode was titled " Latisha ', and getting inside her world for 60 minutes broke my heart. Her crack addiction kept her worldview obscured by a cheery veil, elevating her self image to 'Queen of the streets' in the fabulous ghetto of her diseased existence. The episode broke the mold of A + E 'reality' drama. The producers and director actually filmed with two lenses; one a lens of clarity, the moments of intoxication and cocaine psychosis embarrassingly clear. The second lens used was that of Latisha's own self protective or rather self projective denial. A sort of denial that is, mostly by the nature of both the disease of addiction and the nature of crack cocaine, narcissisticly destructive; self perpetuating by delusions of self importance.
This projection colored my sense of Latisha's experience of her world. It allowed me the escapism of her highly stimulated thought process and the momentary joy of her imaginary relationships.


I'd recently been chipping away at William T. Vollmann's :" The Royal Family", a sprawling dissection of genealogy and stratum of San Francisco pimps , whores, and the Unicorn of this particular zoo, the elusive "Queen of the Whores", aka "Africa."
Vollmann's male protag is haunted and degenerate. He is a noirish detective by way of a Proustian sad sack, dropped into a transgressive, insular world of fucked up folk. He is one half romantically haunted by a dead lover and one half digging progressively deeper into the mud of the royal whoredom; eventually projecting his obsessions on a whore who Judy Bartons herself into his deceased love.

How did anything strike beyond the obvious remembrance of the cool novel I'd failed in finishing?
What this television episode and this post modern novel share is a quality that also appears in films, though usually sweatier and involving pacing or the cover up of something like a heist or a murder.
This distorted self projection and fucked up self will is something of a germ. Infecting the host it leads to secondary diseases, such as compulsive behavior and addiction, be it gambling, alcohol, drugs, what have you. In films, lucky for us, it also results in projecting a world of their own diseased thinking's creation, one that is entertaining while illuminating, as well as insane, colorful and full of constant heart pounding danger.
I'm thinking of the sweat on Nomi Malone's face in SHOWGIRLS. She is three different things and they are also one and the same: victim or pursuant of Capitalism, a dancer who is a wannabee star, and an Addict. Not a surprise when in the film's fourth quarter she is revealed as an ex junkie, and we see her come alive when she does blow.
Her sweaty forehead and bugged out 'star' eyes are demonic and bothered, a distinct image yet mere mutation on the aloof vacancy in James Caan's eyes in THE GAMBLER. Any interiority ironically revealed through voiceover and the occasional sound bridge.
Both figures drawn here are playing the losing card. How can Nomi ever gain status and respect without stealing them? And how can a human being, as Ivy League as he may be, ever beat the Numbers?
In a classroom scene, Caan's collegiate professor speaks in a Psych or Philosophy class about intangibles such as Desire and Will. Things that , for Caan's alter ego of nighttime degenerate gambler find reflected only the simplest materialist games. The only expressions of emotive power and psychology in the film are those of people in Caan's world..those gangsters affected by the hustler's life and the family members distraught by Caan's risk and loss. Caan, meanwhile, remains a blank mirrored screen, and antithetical to a Nomi Malone, his own wild inner process is laid bare only by the measure of how others respond to his madness.
The film illuminates his disease by showing him as leading almost two entirely different lives. His battle is built around shame and a destructive belief of self grandeur, each fueling the other.
These filmed losers are lovers and their hatred of self and desperation to be loved is made visible in neon gemmed manicures, headdresses, coke nails, maternal robberies, and Atlantic City betting benders.

HOLY DOLLAR

installment # 1


Twin peaks


Currency watches us, we don't watch it. Its eye holds court on its back side.  Standing tall, it stares back as we cast it out into the world.
If the Pyramid on the dollar can be imitated,  then value is in moral question. Who is a fraud and what is real? Nothing material, neither paper money or gold,  holds the weight of moral fiber. So if we try to see money, here is a wilted bill, a single, foreign eye staring at US, refusing our focus, and multiplying constantly.

Toward Enlightenment; Holy Third Eye

 

And so it is.
One pyramid, one (third) eye, one dollar: , two pyramids =  two dollars, two Sherriff Trumans, two or more Agent Coopers,  =  TWIN PEAKS.

Empty symbols proliferate in the symbolic world of TWIN PEAKS.  The earth beneath it is the solid soil; Northwest America.  Lying in between the symbolic and the ground is the dreamlike construction of creative thought, a story told through an inner search.

Lynchian narratives turn that eye inward, rebuking the materialism of wealth and the holy dollar. Like the zenith of the dollar's pyramid, the third eye is as much a point and as much a foreign singular. It is uncanny in that it is like the others (the other two eyes), yet it is also wholly alien.
This is the eye that surfs the waves of inner reflection, sometimes rolling us along minute ripples for tens of minutes or episodes on end.  Other times a cascade of storming water explodes emotionally or literally (as in an exploding head or corpus.)


"REPRIEVE FROM PAIN."  Move "BEYOND THINKING."  These are two benefits claimed by the official TM (Transcendental Meditation) website. 

Center Eye is The Third Eye

The ecstatic emotion that thundered throughout the original TWIN PEAKS series also defined the film TWIN PEAKS:  FIRE WALK WITH ME.
The lightening storm of connectivity and impetus that is experienced in creative thought comes amidst a long, often otherwise quiet creative journey.
The narrative experience of David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS:  THE RETURN  follows that same course.


"The time has come for you to seek The Path.  Your  soul has set you Face to Face with a Clear Light, and you are now about to experience it in its Reality, wherein all things are like the Void and Cloudless Sky."  -- Agent Cooper, TWIN PEAKS. Original Series, Season 2.

Third Eye Blind

David Lynch's narratives  primarily trace the reactions to things that happen.
The reasons and causality are poetically tracked, abstract elements of sound and and of sight coexist with threads of sitcom normality.  My experience of TWIN PEAKS the series , TWIN PEAKS:  FIRE WALK WITH ME the film, and TWIN PEAKS:  THE RETURN series , is melodrama meeting the meditative mind.
In TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME we track Laura's increasingly desperate search for reprieve from the pain that is occurring in her life.

The psychic pain of her father raping her instigates a road of building ecstasy:  the ecstasy of seeking sexual partners, the ecstasy of ego (being the beautiful girl on campus), the ecstasy of cocaine ingestion, and the ecstasy of sobbing in sudden sober moments when something is scary and threatening you.

Cinema of Pure Capitalism- Making Everyone into a Winner or Loser

In Pure Capitalism there can only be losers and winners. The Cinema of 2016 encapsulated this extremism.  The powerful or adored win, the others lose. Losers in the Cinema of 2016 fought hard and scrappily against their oppression/demons (CHRISTINE, I, DANIEL BLAKE, WHITE GIRL) but to little or zero avail.

CHRISTINE
(loser)

       

WHITE GIRL
(loser)

I, DANIEL BLAKE
(loser)

ELLE
(winner)

Some films featured both winning and losing protagonists, highlighting the power or success one envied in the other.

DIVINES
(loser-winner-loser)

DIVINES

LA LA LAND
Stone's character starts out as the loser, but by the end her fame eclipses the brief level of success of Ryan Gosling, and  her love for him wanes.

LA LA LAND
Gosling's character does not seek fame, but money as a means to an end. The $ Machine mocks his goals, and he is ultimately punished for his love of another person and his love of music over money.

NERVE
(winner)

NERVE
(loser)