Unedited Classmate Critiques on Video Art Project 2

The piece may be seen here

The following are notes that I jotted down as my teacher and classmates critiqued the piece.  Each empty line marks somebody else commenting.

Teacher comments:

Many genres – 70’s movies in lighting and color, many genres specific to art.

Similar to artists: Bruce Nauman, Douglas Norman(? Gordon?)

Wall cutout becomes strangely significant in frame – why?

Evokes thoughts of people going crazy – Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb, end of Apocalypse Now –smiling at end – crazy but funny at the same time.

Where does the piece lie?

Discomfort – frightening feelings, feelings of getting cut.  Visceral experience, bodily experience.

Sound element – bigger picture – filmed within urban environment, police helicopters in background.  Greater world feeding into what he’s doing.

Goes all these places, cringing while watching it.

Was concerned about cigarette and glasses during planning, but “it had to be this way.”

Questions – Why smoker?  Era of clothing?  Why is he not in a bathroom?

Reminded of Monty Python animation – Terry Gilliam shaving animation

Elements of drag – everything becomes costume, everything becomes performance.  Male to male drag, female to female drag, gradients of gender and absurdity.  This man is performing a male character type that is difficult to articulate – absurd, exaggerated, all-out.  Nighttime scene, garish colors, lighting.

Costume perfect – did you remove the blades?

Questioned authenticity of razor.

Good casting – seems mostly fake with hair and glasses.  Every aspect seems unreal in a good way.

Absurdity of scene is pretty intelligent – art can be selfish in its demands to be interpreted or held to a specific theme.  In focusing on aesthetics, didn’t go this way.  Art can be about personal reasons.  Piece mocks art in a good way.

Polanski and Polanski's Films

[This was written for my Criticism class, and is intended to simulate a post on an established blog, considering the relevancy of Roman Polanski's legal issues in assessing his films.]

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            Neither Pawel Edelman, Didier Lavergne, nor Wolfram Krabiell are Roman Polanski.  Neither are Christian Ehlert, Jean-Marie Blondel, or Patrick Kuttner.  They and dozens of others worked, presumably quite hard, to make “The Ghost Writer,” which Roman Polanski recently directed.  None of them, presumably, raped a thirteen year old girl and lived out the life of a high profile international exile, nor is the film a story of a controversial director that did just that. 

But apparently none of that is of any consequence, because for all the chatter, Polanski might as well have been cryogenically frozen since fleeing to France; “The Piano” came out a long time ago, and the talk surrounding his recent arrest in Switzerland gives little room for any subject taking place since his relocation.  Have we become so drunk with celebrity culture that we need an individual authorship to affix to every movie we see?  The idea that the director carries to term the conception and birth of a film single-handedly is romantic, but then you couldn’t really call the job “directing.” While there’s an auteurist case to be made for a unifying vision, I don’t see how a decades old act of sexual violation, as thoroughly repulsive as it is, has anything to do with Polanski’s directorial attitudes towards a political thriller, or any of the movies he’s made in exile, for that matter.  I think that somebody could make the case that an interest in a real life act of monstrosity is more important than Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan looking compellingly serious, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it isn’t relevant in considering his most recent film.

In the Middle Ages, artistic inspiration was considered a blessing of God in a very real and direct way.  The idea that creativity was a human achievement was unheard of, and artists would create their works anonymously, so as not to distract from the glory of God.  They considered themselves artisans, skilled craftsmen, and when cinema came into being directors were regarded in the same capacity until the Auteur Theory inseminated the zeitgeist of the art.  The implications of that moment are far too numerous to really tackle here, but it must be said that the inclusion of directors to the celebrity culture and the star system that helped spawn it are amongst them.

Perhaps the Internet is to blame.  Films feel more self contained in a theater, bathed in shadows and light and walled off from the harsh brightness just outside, but now that we’ve taken to streaming our brains out, the film going culture has changed in ways that won’t truly be understood until a generation or two grows up.  At the very least, those changes involve pausing, portability, and the ability to open up an Internet tab and look up whatever, about whomever.  We’ve enshrined user autonomy at the cost of the “experience” of a film.  How can we be drawn into a world that freezes with the flick of a finger or the whiff of a whim?  Surely it must break down the diegesis that breathes life into the imagined realities of the screen.  It brings films closer to the real world and narrows the distance required to think of the personal scandals of a picture’s makers.

But even all of that is beside the point.  Film shouldn’t be an authoritative experience, and people should interact with the medium as they choose.  But critical assessors of a film lack that luxury, and to evaluate a film on anything other than its own content is to do a disservice to the small army of hardworking individuals that make it with their sweat and blood, and didn’t rape any children along the way.

Response To Random Dude's Remark About David O. Russell and Uncharted

I wrote this spontaneously on my iPad, fairly irritated at this guy for being the final straw for me in an unending stream of the sort of comments I go on to criticize.

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Have you ever even SEEN one Russell's movies? He's one of the few directors nowadays who has managed to make waves while retaining his independence for his ENTIRE career. He ABSOLUTELY deserves to categorize himself along with Arronofsky as a highly distinctive auterist director that is branching from a passionate niche to more mainstream material.

Just because a filmmaker dares show something more than absolute modesty by expressing interest in the fact that he's creatively engaged with the source material and bound to put an original spin on it rather than duty bound to make some derivative piece of fan service crap, that doesn't make him pretentious. In fact, it makes me way more interested in this project.

Have you SEEN Three Kings? That question goes to EVERYBODY that thinks Russell is in any way a Hollywood hack. Seriously. Have you seen it?

The games are perfectly good in their own right. Why would you want to go see something that could never be greater than its source material because of an overly slavish adaptation of an already cinematic game? Russell is one of the few remaining American auteurs. I'm more interested in what he comes with with having been inspired by the game.

The movie is gonna be happening, and nobody has seen the script, because there ISN'T ONE. Yeah, it's gonna deviate from the source material. God forbid something that surprises somebody, instead of neatly conforming with the lockstep filmmaking opinions of a demographic of pissed off gamers. But the fact that the source material is going to be reshaped for the film doesn't mean a thing about its quality. It just means that it is going to be different. The question is..

Do you have faith in David O. Russell? Most people attacking him don't have any real experience of him except as the director of the Fighter, and even then many of those people haven't seen the film. Many haven't seen a single film of his, and couldn't name more than one or two extemporaneously. But the strongest opinions about his worth of a filmmaker are being set by an entire population of people that know nothing of his filmmaking. The key is that he's expressing a creative opinion that veers sharply away from gamer hegemony, which has an extremely rigid view of what an Uncharted film should be, because it is so "obvious." And, you all don't like Mark Wahlberg, who is the director's favorite actor and another sign that Russell actually DOES give a shit about this film, even if it isn't the film that you expected or think you want.

But there's some serious potential to be had here if you'll get off your preconceived notions for five minutes and appreciate the idea that you might just possibly be surprised. All these people moaning that he shouldn't call it "Uncharted" are acting like the property's rights holders didn't corroborate with if not outright determine the hiring of Russell and his authority and intentions to change things.

He's the person they put their faith in. That doesn't mean that you should now. But acting like David O. Russell is some enemy to video game kind and deciding outright not to see the film, and to badmouth it, and him, at every turn, despite the script not even being completed yet, is incredibly childish.

If the movie is a piece of shit, then you'll at least have a reason to bitch and hate. But his track record is too good for that. Give it a chance.

Discussion - "The Last Picture Show"

[Note - For this assignment, we were to write as though writing a post for a regularly read personal blog discussing how well the film holds up today.]

The Last Picture Show

Decades after its release, “The Last Picture Show” continues to crackle electric.  There’s a stark and naked honesty to the picture that feels authentic and relevant in ways all the more remarkable for the fact that it came out decades ago, and that this saga of decay and deterioration is set decades before that.  But maybe it isn’t so surprising that lost souls, naked and vulnerable and seeking love and desire and warmth in the harmonies and dissonances of simmering, molten sexual yearning, should seem so immediate to the contemporary day and age. 

I graduated from High School four years ago in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, named Garland.  It certainly wasn’t Anarene, but it was close enough to places like it that the authenticity of the picture really resonates with me.  The restlessness, the boredom, the search for something bigger and better, the groping sexualities commingling from multiple points along the generational spectrum, the frustrations of adolescent libido and conquest and romantic manipulation all rung true for me in a way that bore all the hallmarks of my home.

Sonny and Duane are teenagers going on their twenties in a world in which the cultural foundations are crumbling without any conceivable replacement.  The things my parents, and their parents especially, grew up knowing as the cornerstones of life as a human being, as a citizen of the United States or Texas specifically, are not things that I could ascribe nearly so much importance to by simple merit of the unforgiving pace of a cultural divide arising from the wholesale destruction of once rigid cultural norms.  When the dust settles and the picture show closes down, the only thing that the people of Anarene have is the people that stayed, not the people that left.  They, and we, must struggle to live in a world in transition.

Film Discussion - "Mildred Pierce" and Melodrama

[Note - For this piece, we were assigned to take an essay format (i.e. thesis driven) and discuss the viability of melodrama in the 21st century.  As such, it is less of a review of the film and more of a discussion using the film as a basepoint.]

Eating It

Poor Mildred simply can’t catch a decent enough break, and as she is repeatedly undermined, manipulated, and betrayed by those that she loves and provides for, her saga of suffering seems practically Jobian in scale, but it is very much the product of a passé culture with passé norms, which naturally begs the question of how well it, and by extension melodrama as a concept, reads in the contemporary cinemascape.  The film is practically anthropological; such films, and such naked and stylized bursts of emotion and anguish, are relics no longer indigenous to our collective appetites.  In the time since “Mildred Pierce” was released in 1945, the melodrama has been diluted into countless other genres, becoming less its own brand of story and more an increasingly present accessory to the more comparatively overwrought emotional style of contemporary film, and in this way melodrama as a concept, as an adjective, is alive and well.  The melodrama as a genre, however, no longer has a place in this century; modern audiences only know its watered down elements, and the pure product is simply too much for for the palate.

            “Mildred Pierce’s” increasingly convoluted, emotionally precarious intrigues of sex and betrayal may rightly be compared to those of the soap opera genre, the closest practitioner of melodrama today.  Both relish their naked emotion and heightened realities, and in purely formal terms their mechanisms are nearly identical. The two genres are divided along philosophical lines, though, as melodrama has always focused upon inspiring honest empathy in its audience through a careful presentation of externalized emotion, exaggerated situations, and expressive use of mise en scene elements including lighting, costuming, and set design.  Soap opera is a ten cent bastardization that holds empathy less as an artistic endeavor and more as a Pavlovian response to maintain a consistent viewership.  Character psychology is central to melodrama, but the very notion of soap opera psychology is a joke, as a character’s entire identity is fair game for renovation in order to maintain a grasp on viewers’ attention spans for another story arc or two. That worthless psychology, and its resulting lack of characterization with integrity, strips away the need for expressive mise en scene, and the sort of imposing architecture or brilliant, otherworldly shadows of “Mildred Pierce” are thus omitted entirely from the soap opera form.  Though such cheap television serials are the closest contemporary embodiment of melodrama, they are certainly not an extension of the same genre.

            Where melodrama does live on is in fragments and echoes, an extinct dinosaur that has long since evolved feathers and taken to other generic climates.  When melodrama was a genre of film, the typical motion picture lacked a heightened reality or an expressive mise en scene, or characters with such extroverted emotional states.  Now, almost any mainstream horror or action or romantic comedy film features all three.  The human needs and concerns that melodrama once served are thus alive and well and very much on our minds, but we have grown in a direction that is simultaneously more cynical and skeptical towards the excesses of the genre while embracing it with a more thorough slice of the yearly filmography than ever.  But the melodramatic trappings of contemporary films are just spare parts, scuttled from a ship that sank long ago.

Film Review - "Pleasantville"

[Note - For this, we were given the specific prompt of considering the piece in the context of Jonathan Rosenbaum's discussion of independent film, and Manny Farber's notions of white elephant art and termite art.]

Color in Grayscale

Critics Manny Farber and Jonathan Rosenbaum each articulated a different set of distinctions.  For Farber, “termite art” is art that breaks boundaries and creates something new and more or less unprecedented, contrasting with the formulaic, self conscious, and hackneyed “white elephant art.” For Rosenbaum, “independent film” was contrasted with both mainstream films and mainstream films pretending to be “independent” through affectations. 

“Pleasantville” is a mainstream white elephant film with independent fashionings, a pleasant enough romp, but what does it bring to the table?  There is nothing novel about replacing the failings of a false ideal with an equally Manichean opposite.  On the surface, the film seems to urge us to be ourselves, but the quest for color is more straightforward.  Colorization is a clever and novel metaphor for personal growth, but the film’s Hollywood emphasis on causality transforms development and individual redemption into an easter egg hunt in pursuit of the one perfect action that is the key to the lock of repression and internal stagnation.  It’s the same tired trope whose tunes we’ve been twirling to for decades in mainstream cinema, in which happiness is reduced to some sort of MacGuffin of character development as a shorthand for a honest growth. 

There are things to celebrate in the free expression of sexuality as an ideal, but what of the complications that arise as a direct result, of pregnancy, or disease?  What of the influences of jealousy, boredom, lust, manipulation, and selfishness? “Pleasantville” thinks it lacks room for the sort of exploration, experimentation, or discovery that are the hallmarks of genuine termite works, or independent cinema as the town thought it lacked room for “unpleasant” things.  Its adherence to conventionality are is elephant, a self-congratulatory exercise with the motivation of  delivering the tired Hollywood tropes of “be yourself and it will all work out”  and providing the audience with a straw man justification for feeling more progressive than our recent ancestors.

            The film is problematic.  The “colored” people of Pleasantville, held up as some statement of free individuality against the hegemonic patriarchy of the establishment, spend most of the film doing and thinking what Tobey MacGuire’s David tells them to do or think, trading control for control.  Consider the marriage of Joan Allen’s Betty to William H. Macy’s George.  Betty spends most of the film drifting away from her husband and into an affair with Jeff Daniels’ Bill.  But in Hollywood fashion, the troubles of an ailing marriage are not explored; they are established, and then solved with a single, generica monologue saying…what, exactly? Love conquers all? Joan loves her husband after all, after most of the film pointing to the contrary?  It doesn’t say anything, really, and that’s the point.  It isn’t trying to.  It’s just one more loose end to be rubberstamped “Resolved” in pure white elephant nonindependent fashion.  Colorization begins as an interesting metaphor that completely devolves into a crutch facilitating the laziness of an audience that can point, with immediacy, to a character and say, “Look, redemption!”  So it is with the entire film.

Film Review - The Sweet Smell of Success

[Brief Note - I'm not very happy with this piece, and as it was my first work of criticism there's less organization, more awkardness, and less room for personal voice or actually interesting opinions.  The film, on the other hand, deserves the finest of words in accouterment, so I'll probably rewrite it eventually.]

“The Sweet Smell of Success”

             The New York of “The Sweet Smell of Success” is swollen ripe and fit to burst with seamy steamy sin, oozing corruption like a clammy flopsweat, pouring off the slick streets to bleed out of the celluloid itself.  The pulse of the city, and the film as a whole, is one of unremitting and unrepentant hunger and savagery, and the city streets teem with all of the repulsive, frenetic scrabbling of a cockroach nest.  The camera constantly glides and grinds and jives in jazz clubs and alleyways, hustling hotspots and shaking down the audience’s more idealistic angles before fading back into the night.  What a groove it is.  Like all great movies of vice, we are seduced by its sordid cinemascape.

The story is very much that of two men, both utterly unscrupulous.  There’s something refreshing the film’s unapologetic willingness to let Sidney Falco and J.J. Hunsecker be bad men at considerable length.  Falco is a dervish, desperate and opportunistic and scrabbling for a vague brass ring to usher him into vaguer green pastures.  He’s a slimy invertebrate, but how could a press agent possibly be honest in this world?  Even with every repulsive trick in his bag he just barely scrapes by, and as his immorality seems more necessary, more filth begins to soil the shining ideal of the American Dream itself, which is quite explicitly the impetus for Sidney’s sins.  Tony Curtis owns the role, and his charisma is the foundation of the entire film, which would collapse if the audience despised Falco so much as he deserves.

The alpha male whose scraps Falco so dutifully laps is J.J. Hunsecker, channeled with such organic intensity by Burt Lancaster that the force of his malevolent personality is a black hole of attention and focus.  He sucks in our gaze through a cold magnetism, and the force of his hypnotic countenance upon those around him must surely evoke the feelings of a mouse in the coils of a snake.  Falco is repulsive, but not evil.  J.J. is evil enough for the both of them, in the lonely way of a person so removed by his own intellect that almost every moment is excruciatingly boring and predictable, and other people seem like lesser beings.  Much of the film’s more outrageous dialogue spills from J.J.’s urbane grimace, and it is a testament that not even Hunsecker’s more colorful turns of phrase (“I’d hate to take a bite out of you, you’re a cookie full of arsenic.”) subvert the believability of his character, who must surely have refined such artificed expression as a means of amusing himself.

The overall plot is largely besides the point, and is established mere minutes into the picture.  Suffice it to say that the film is the story of an evil king and an amoral hyena joining arms to murder young love from the shadows.  The joy of the film, the mastery of the piece, is in watching the story deftly leap from point to point, in watching Falco’s continual efforts to reposition himself to the best advantage, conning and wheeling and dealing so quickly that his schemes can be irrelevant by the time they bear fruit.  The film is about the world that it so vividly creates, and deserves enshrinement in the same pantheon as the greatest works of film noir.  The film never sags, it never allows itself to become bogged down, and accomplishes a rare harmony of energy and complexity without ever stepping too far away or ahead of the audience.  Films like this come along too rarely to not take the time to see.