“There’s something missing…”: TERRENCE MALICK’S TO THE WONDER

© 2013 by James Clark

It’s been a long time since Terrence Malick strove, as an academic researcher, to bring focus to the bewildering cacophony of Heideggerian phenomenological insights and oversights. That is not to say, however, that he has turned his back on this endeavor, now that his métier is movies instead of monographs. The phenomenological imperative has for him taken the form of accelerating sluggish sensibilities (by way of surging visuals and sounds, as evoking voice-over narration) to pry open their innermost alarms. Alarm has always been the watchword for Malick’s investigative films, and the magnitude and delicacy of its filmed procession (its filmed phenomenality) need involve no apologies for being repeated from various angles through a number of decades.

But the very emergence of such threatening dismissal entails that world of alarm that can never really be passé. Someone somewhere has chided Malick about (supposedly) losing sight, in his most recent film, To the Wonder (2012), of the supposed axiom, “Beauty is not enough…” The assumption in this rather smug rejoinder is that prettification fails to speak to full-bodied discovery. Heaven forbid that the extraordinary enhancement of the action by cinematographic intensities should lead to wondering what challenges the “beautiful” panoramic and intimate rushes should pose.

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“It could snap at any moment”: ABBAS KIAROSTAMI’S LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE

© 2013 by James Clark

 With regard to Searching for Sugar Man, quixotic and heart-warming factors tend to divert attention from a significant area of its production. Though a resident and citizen of Sweden, director Malik Bendjelloul has Algerian roots, which, in his case, is to say, heightened sensitivity about reactionary imposition. Though a rock and roll TV journalist at the time of landing his big story, he would find in the subtext of apartheid something speaking to him very loud and clear. There the homing device was that primally raw, hard-edged confinement, acting as a catalyst to an upshot of peculiar affinities with an instance of going-for-broke.

    Accordingly, we’ll resist addressing the work of Abbas Kiarostami along lines of Bressonian and Surrealist endeavors, though no doubt he has been most attentive to issues emanating from such predecessors. With respect to his recent film, Like Someone in Love (2012), set in Japan, it is the weight of Japanese patriarchal tradition that rings bells for his production. And so, in tracing the informing source of this film’s great lucidity and power to possess us long after seeing it, we give its due to his Iranian compatriots and the fact that his work is outlawed in Iran. We find ourselves, as with Bendjelloul’s big surprise, thrilled by the investigative motif of atavistic dispensations unwittingly cultivating extraordinarily acute and resolute opposition to their fondest hopes. However, this rather sociological, documentary orientation must not (we’re about to fully comprehend) be pressed as science would have it; and that gets us right into Like Someone in Love.

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“When people risk their lives, shouldn’t it be for something important?”: STEVE McQUEEN AND LEE KATZIN’S LE MANS

©2013 James Clark

 

While working on a probe of Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man, my attention would sometimes drift over to the Steve McQueen film which I had puzzled over for a long time, namely Le Mans (1971). There was about the dignified isolation of the protagonists of both films, as introduced by a brand of cinematography vastly out of step with movie commerce, the oddest and thereby most compelling of kinships. McQueen, sometimes referred to as, “the King of Cool,” was in fact as much an athlete as an entertainer; and, as we know, Rodriguez in his prime did a lot more digging than being digged. McQueen’s sporting efforts were in the area of car and motorcycle racing, a far more spectacular and homage-attracting dynamic than that of cleaning out basements.

That much said, in lining up a case for seeing these disparate figures as teammates, we should draw up logo designs for each, consisting of paths that, in being reverse-images, amount to equivalency. We have, on one hand, a characteristically American embodiment of kinetics in public display, in sharp contrast to the European predilection for letting rip the warp and woof of mobility in private endeavors. (Though operating at the home of renowned motor racing extravaganzas, major European filmmakers—not to be confused with those behind the dreadful soap, A Man and a Woman—had no time for such souped-up events.) While set in Europe, Le Mans, concerning the 24-hour car race in the French town of that name, is a very American film, in its adopting the priorities of its Hollywood star, who was also, with indeterminate input from others, the general producer, director and writer. Thus we have McQueen covered by camerawork at the Le Mans site, heavily immersed in explosive speed, seamlessly dovetailing with actual footage of the 1970 Grand Prix splash, and thereby launching avant-garde proportions and problems under cover of the misleading bluntness of kick-ass prize-winning. Sugar Man, on the other hand, though largely set in America, has been seen (by me) to be a Euro-centric revelation, an avant-garde exposure of fantastic creative intimacy under cover of the misleading overtures involved in recovery of a stolen career. Whereas Le Mans was a commercial disaster, bankrupting its guiding light, and the beginning of the end of McQueen’s shot at bringing to the world something special, Sugar Man was, though also a sort of swansong (for the protagonist), an amazing popular success and the launch of a new auteur of exciting potential.

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“I think of you….:” MALIK BENDJELLOUL’S ‘SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN’

© 2013 by James Clark

We all like to maintain that rock and roll can and does lift us into a corridor of joyous action. We’ve all been carried, by instances of its musical dynamics, into dance—yes—but something more. Embrace it or not, we’ve all been touched by way of that “music industry,” by a glimpse of what has never been cogently accounted for in the guiding features of our lives.

In fact, there is, in the musical tradition preceding rock and roll, a chronicling (rather than direct delivery) of the same mystery, though palmed off as a physiological and sociological stage, to be outgrown. In Albert Hague and Arnold Horwitt’s song, “Young and Foolish” (for the 1954 Broadway musical, Plain and Fancy), we are met with,

“Young and foolish

Why is it wrong to be?

Young and foolish

We haven’t long to be

Soon enough the carefree days

The sunlit days go by.

Soon enough the bluebird has to fly.

We were foolish

One day we fell in love.

Now we wonder,

What were we thinking of?

Smiling in the sunlight,

Laughing in the rain,

I wish that we were young and foolish again.”

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“I want what’s happening to be clear”….Robert Bresson’s ‘Les Dames Du Bois De Boulogne’

© 2013 by James Clark

 The partnership of filmmaker, Robert Bresson, and artist-at-large, Jean Cocteau, on behalf of bringing to light (in 1944, during the darkness of the German Occupation of France) a scenario loosely based upon a novelistic reflection about intentional freedom and material determinism, by the eighteenth-century philosopher, Denis Diderot (an exponent of the Heraclitean notion of dynamics as the essence of matter), has often been noted as somehow significant. But it tends to be eclipsed by citing how different from one another these artists were (only, apparently, seeing fit to tolerate each other for the sake of subtly sticking it to the Nazis). The austerity of Bresson’s work subsequent to the offering in question, namely, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), seems to settle it, in most minds, that this would be a chic aberration (with Cocteau’s screenplay the culprit), a cracking good melodrama, but bereft of the profundity of our auteur’s serious output. My response to this film wants to point out that, on the contrary, this honey of a performance design carries as deep and painful a sting as any of the more famous, iconic Bressonian marvels.

    The first point to be dealt with is the misconception that in some way Cocteau was a kind of flippant gadfly unworthy to be linked to such an unassuming, noble and devout artisan as Bresson. Though definitely not as prone to sackcloth and sacred music as Bresson, Cocteau’s productions were in line with the deadly métier he pursued as an enlisted soldier in World War I, namely, that of a stretcher-bearer. The zest of the full extent of his artistry would entail horrific catastrophe and danger every bit as sharp as that of Bresson.

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“What the fuck are we supposed to do?”: QUENTIN TARANTINO’S INGLORIOUS BASTERDS

(c) 2013 by James Clark

My initial motive in turning—from a series of films suffused with Bressonian concerns, about misplaced or over-the-top mojo—to Michelangelo Antonioni’s, La Notte, was to bring into play a more intimate, close-up range of the phenomenon. Bressonian elicitations tend to spotlight chronic malignancy with slight countervailing rallies (or no rallies, but rallies being implied by egregious debilitation [a specialty of Michael Haneke]). After several months of investigation in that vein, I thought it was time to make clear that another major filmmaker had staked out a significantly different approach to overdrive and underdrive. The films most characteristic of Antonioni magnify the substructures of intent in such a way as to reveal a perpetual oscillation between peaks and valleys. Thus La Notte begins with a bedridden, terminal cancer patient (locked into disfigurement), while in the room next to him there is a young girl who amorously embraces passers-by. The first patient has two visitors, who don’t comprehend how lucky they are to be in the swim, and not like The Paperboy’s Charlotte,

What I had not anticipated was how extreme a level of audacity Antonioni had brought to his film about “the night.” Over and above the key passage of a long, eventful party, proceeding from dusk till dawn, and over and above the depressed benightedness of the protagonists, Lidia and Giovanni, (and also the largely spoiled-rotten partygoers, having to endure a power failure), there is a far less obvious (and yet gripping) lack of discernment coming our way courtesy of Valentina (as it happens, far from a sanguine cupid). She attends the party (at her home, after all); but only partially—in being by herself or with Giovanni nearly the entire episode. Her quiet declamations (from out of fabulous wealth), as to tolerating only solitude and silence (a situation enacted by Lidia, but without follow-through to the consistency marshalled by Valentina), gradually bring us around to realizing that The Night we’re plunged into here is the entirety of world history to date.

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“You’ve exhausted me, the two of you…”: MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI’S LA NOTTE (THE NIGHT)

© 2013 by James Clark

This past year has brought a rich array of films that tackle from various angles the challenge of doing justice to one’s sensibility. In paying homage to these works, I would often recall that past master of presenting the transcendent glow of finite intent, namely, Michelangelo Antonioni. It’s time, I think, to reacquaint ourselves with this consummate, deluxe designer of haunting cinematic anticipation. With so many and varied practitioners in the field now, the brave and virtually solitary researches Antonioni dared to put into play can function as a welcome—even necessary—draft of extremely quiet, extremely direct traction for a métier surging into Surrealist extravaganza (often provoked by Antonioni’s contemporary, the sombre and formidably equipped Dadaist, Robert Bresson.)

I’ve become fascinated in gradually realizing that almost the full complement of this indie—yes—but also guerrilla art has, apparently, been produced by casts and crews expending a remarkable devotedness to the projects, matching that of the often troubled and troubling auteur. Antonioni’s accomplishment, for instance, is inconceivable without the presence of his muse, lover and heaven-sent physiognomy, Monica Vitti. So it was something of a jolt to learn that the film on tap here, La Notte (1961)—where she plays a somewhat minor role—hinged upon two great performers (and specialists, to boot, concerning problematic incident), namely, Marcelo Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, who hated this assignment and did not take seriously the roles they were to sustain. Mastroianni, in particular, already a star due to his memorable work in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, spent quite a bit of time on the set quarrelling with one of the writers of the piece, Tonino Guerra. And that rancor, with its behind-the-scenes clutter, cues our special concern here, regarding the precise nature of Antonioni’s pristine disclosures within complex and even Byzantine involvement by associates, though contrarian with regard to conventional filmmaking, unlikely to have absorbed the unique physicality of his inspiration.

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“It’s mercy, compassion and forgiveness I lack”: QUENTIN TARANTINO’S KILL BILL

© 2013 by James Clark

The Hunger Games is a lavishly and subtly eccentric film. It bursts into view for us in the course of setting in relief the function of the work of Robert Bresson. As recently embraced here, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs also speaks to the urgency of dialogue with Bresson. It goes to cataclysmic lengths to get some blood moving in Bresson’s cadaverous discoveries about resentment and bathos as ravaging world history.

With The Hunger Games, director Gary Ross brings off a cinematic coup that could keep us busy fathoming for a long time. Gaining entry to a conventional novelistic template for eliciting the vaguely subversive longings of school children, Ross reconfigures the premise to bring to bear an interpersonal climate approaching perpetual, absolute zero, and, thereby, Bresson comes to Hollywood. Bresson does come to Hollywood by means of Tarantino as well; and the compelling differences of these transmissions can, I think, be vigorously explored by means of that mountain of malice, titled, Kill Bill (2003, 2004).

Whereas Ross is entirely at home with the gritty and gentle drift of his protagonist, and thereby conveys a remarkably rounded phenomenon of fully-challenged physiological and social equilibrium, Tarantino devises a juvenile scenario he purports to love to death while sketchily overseeing the matter of maturity. Kill Bill sees its marketing edge in elegant and innovative martial dynamics as sending forth topspins that could (but seldom would) come to bear upon an agenda of sub-human sufficing in revenge. Its protagonist, the Bride (only very late in the saga acquiring the name, Beatrix [a tricky Beauty indeed]), fills its four hours with hardly believable feats on behalf of survival and dominance, ripping out torrents of incredulity to match the attendant rivers of blood. But, in having repulsed and precluded most of the market for incisively recognizing the heroine’s gaping deficiencies, Tarantino provides the spectacle of being, in his own inimitable way, almost as incomprehensible a stiff as Bresson.

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“It’s a different world now…”: LEE DANIELS’ THE PAPERBOY

© 2013 by James Clark

Sitting in a young man’s car, parked at the Florida prison where the man she wants to marry but has not as yet met resides on Death Row, Charlotte Bless (her last name perhaps a drawled distortion of Bliss) asks him, “Why aren’t you in college?” He informs her, “I was… I was a swimmer…” She’s delighted with this, and exclaims, “I’s a swimmer! Swim like a mermaid!” This, what some might call, lack of due perspective upon rational training, seems all of a piece with her having told the boy, Jack, earlier in the little vigil, “Everyone who comes into the area beyond normal relationships has these powers… telepathic powers… Hillary and I have that kind of connection.” (Earlier that day he had told her, “I do write…” [she looking for his Pulitzer Prize winning older brother, Ward, who had agreed to do some muck raking on behalf of having the conviction overturned], and she had, as she did later, piped up, “So do I…I write letters [petitioning on behalf of Hillary]… I’m pretty good…” [But not as good with rational folks [and their “normal relationships”] as with the likes of pen-pal and alligator hunter, Hillary; on the other hand, she could ring bells with a fellow-showboat like Ward].) A bit later, shooed away by a prison guard, she puts out the story, “This boy’s daddy’s in there, and we want to send him good vibrations…” (It’s 1963, and canny Ward has already made a killing doing Civil Rights promotions in a Miami newspaper, far from the uncanny alligator swamps that lubricate Moat County—that term evoking a palace where, for an array of beauties and beasts, it’s always Showtime.)

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“We’ve always coped…”: MICHAEL HANEKE’S AMOUR

© 2013 by James Clark

A film calling itself “Love,” (Amour) can disarm, simply by that trope, any comprehensive notice of shortfall in its protagonists. If the latter are a cute old couple in distress, played by much revered actors, any critical edge tends to melt away completely. A foreground that seems to convey incontestable soundness, while actually concealing the film’s truth, is a compositional standby of the films of Robert Bresson, whose work our auteur, Michael Haneke, cherishes. So it is, when the husband, Georges, listening in their salon to his invalid wife, Anne, exuding long-suffering irony in reading from the unlearned domain of her horoscope for that day—“Shake off the rust…Get your mojo back…”—curls his lecture-fluent lip and complicitly pronounces, “Nonsense!” we must constrain confirming upon his liberal-humanist contempt for mojo that conquest over emotive carnality he and his ilk have celebrated again and again.

Anyone who has with his wits about him come to grips with Bresson will know that figures resorting to canny cleverness and ascetic pursuits tend to become the makings of road kill once his cameras and scenarios begin to roll. Haneke is far from the only filmmaker to become possessed by the monumental trompe l’oeil of world history. David Lynch struggled long and hard to produce a debut film, Eraserhead, whereby a chronic Grad Student and his guardian angel range themselves against a donkey fetus. At the opposite pole from Haneke’s multiply-honored and presently in question film, there is another entry from 2012, paying homage to Lynch and serving up a cast of characters not nearly as respectable as Georges and Anne, namely, Lee Daniel’s much maligned pisser, The Paperboy.

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