What was I thinking when I let go of you?

Lately I find myself thinking about what you might have looked like in Paris, in Winter, sitting at a café on the sidewalk under the gas-fired heaters, you stirring your coffee three times before drinking it like you always do, the sky the same color as that coat you always wear, your black hair contrasting your pale skin like a perfectly exposed photograph, your red scarf a discordant note of color in an otherwise monochrome composition, and how your face could silently speak to me more clearly than anyone who I've ever heard open their mouth.

Between you & me, I could honestly say that things can only get better

Landed in New York City on a grey, cloudy afternoon, under the same sky that I thought I had left behind in Detroit. One important difference between New York and Detroit; the ratio of people I don't know to people I know is much, much higher. I take a certain strange comfort in the anonymity of being in the biggest city in the country.
The shuttle ride from LGA to midtown was almost empty. There was myself, the driver and just one other passenger in a 15 seat van. The radio was on, set to a volume that would just register as a murmur in the ear. Loud enough to cover up the silence in the van but not so loud as to have any concern to what was playing. We were all doing a good job of keeping to ourselves, 3 people whose paths would probably never cross again, when Elton John's "I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues" came on the radio. I'm not the biggest fan on Elton John, least of all his latter-day work, but there's something about that song that really resonates with me. I was on the verge of shattering everyone's little bubble and asking the driver to turn the radio up, when he reached over and did just that. He looked back slightly and we briefly made eye contact and silently exchanged a brief nod. That one instant communicated more than 20 minutes of idle chatter about the weather and where I was from / what I was doing in town could have possibly conveyed. That was a visceral connection through some maudlin piece of pop music. We both Got It and didn't need to ruin it with any words. I would like to have known the course of events in his past that led him to connect with it, but there's only so many miles between LaGuardia and Midtown. Life's more fun with some mystery anyway.

you struck me dumb like radium

I take back everything bad I've ever said about PT Anderson's "Magnolia". I hated it the first time around, but I've watched it twice in the past three nights. A lot has changed in the past 11 years. A third of my life essentially. Back then I couldn't really relate to the lives of quiet desperation and a deep yearning for Something Else that all the characters were living. And what a knock-out cast assembled to tell those intertwining vignettes. While I can't say I'm quite thrilled about the past 6 months or so, I'm grateful to have finally come around and be able to appreciate a stunning work of art that I completely missed out on the first time around. The final shot of the film, the slow zoom on Melora Walters' face while John C. Reilly's back is to the camera while Aimee Mann's "Save Me" is right up there along side the door shutting on Diane Keaton in the Godfather and the freeze frame on Jean-Pierre Léaud in Les Quatre-Cent Coups as my favorite final shots of all time. That weary, sad smile (the first time in the whole film you don't see her in a coked-up frenzy) is the perfect image to end on, especially timing it right at the peak of Aimee Mann's "Save Me". I think Anderson's ultimate triumph is that he is able to convey an all-consuming desire for love in all the characters without resorting to schmaltz and most importantly not ignoring the uglier, darker things that are part and parcel of such a complex emotion as love, which makes the catharsis/redemption that much more believable, especially the scene when Tom Cruise finally meets face to face with his dying father, masterfully played by Jason Robards. It's nice to be reminded that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel.

did you get yr disconnection notice?

I've found out what my new favorite album to listen to after eating a huge Colombian bandeja paisa dinner and laying around your sweltering tiny apartment with a cold wet cloth on your head while the liquid gold infused twilight creeps in the windows is: Sonic Youth's "Murray Street". Everything else feels like it's falling apart but the sheer degree of perfection of this exact moment is making my chest want to cave in. I know it will shatter once "Karen, Revisited" ends and I have to get up to flip the record but the past 20 minutes or so have been the best 20 minutes of the past month. Thanks Thurston, Kim, Steve, Lee & Jim. You have to latch on to moments like this and crack their bones and savor every last bit of marrow from them or else the darkness can swallow you entirely.

Tragedy or Farce?

I'm not a very complicated man. As per usual, my life can be summed via the media/hubris I have accumulated from years working at record stores. Here is my current situation: I have approximately 1100 CDs and exactly 0 working CD players. That speaks volumes about me right now. I'm going to listen to some Townes Van Zandt and have it all figured out by the morning. Which morning though, I can't rightly say.

xo

Anton

Hey Joni now I've put it all behind me too

I just bought and put on a Joni Mitchell record for the express purpose of listening to it for the first time in my life. I thought I should make a note of it. It is the Court & Spark LP. It's not that I had anything against Joni Mitchell ever. I just decided today would be the day to listen to her. It's not bad. Perhaps a little better than I expected it to be. Good soundtrack for a nap with late afternoon winter sunlight filtering in through my dirty windows.

au revoir

"so goodbye, hallelujah
if I don't cry, don't let it fool ya"

summer is over in approximately 14 and a half hours or so. I always seem to take stock at this time more so than New Year's Eve, since I'm just about settling into my Seasonal Affective Disorder depression around then, and that is a pretty horrible time to take stock of yourself. I haven't written nearly as much as I would have liked to. In fact I've done a whole more of fuck-all than I would have liked to. I have damn near nothing to show for this summer. Didn't leave the state, let alone hardly leave town. I could blame it on lack of funds, but perhaps the truth is I've gone soft. 10 years ago I was broke and managed to have one hell of an adventure in the summer of 1999. Saw both oceans and a lot of other shit in between, got turned on to some amazing music and met some amazing people with nothing but a backpack and a few dollars. Truth be told, the 21 year old me would be pretty disappointed with the 31 year old me. I refuse to blame it on "being old", because I'm not. Saying you're too old to be doing something is essentially resigning yourself to an early death. If you're too old for adventures you might as well sit down on the couch and turn on the TV and wait to die. There's a lot more I want to write but I have to go study for an exam that I put off all weekend doing (you guessed it), nothing. Well, at least nothing of note. I read something somewhere along the lines of "at some point, winter will ask what you did all summer". I can't even look that question in the eye without feeling guilty so I hope its not asked of me this year. Anyway I hate to end anything on a bummer note so I'm posting something I found in a journal I haven't looked at in almost 2 years. This was from an entry dated October 3rd, 2007 (before Biden was VP of course, maybe even before he was in the running for VP??) and is basically just a re-telling of a weird dream I had.

From what I could tell, there was some sort of conflict. It was most likely some sort of subconscious amalgamation of all the zombie flicks I've seen where a small group of survivors hole up together in a "safe" location, only the other side was definitely human and not zombies. My brother was there somehow, but Susan wasn't, and I had some girl with me who I didn't know and while she wasn't my girlfriend there was that weird sexual tension there that I guess would be going on when you're two reasonably attractive people who have undergone some sort of extraordinary, potentially life ending trial. We were holed up in a suburb, but it had a creepy, pre-fab feeling like the Others compound on Lost. The armed contingent there were assholes, much like the security guards in the Dawn Of The Dead remake. They didn't let any of the "survivors" carry weapons and took away the guns my brother and I had upon entering. Like I said I have no idea what brought on the armed conflict, but it was spectacular. There were all sorts of terrific explosions, and secret super-fortified underground platforms being raised up to engage the enemy, who was launching over the fenced-in compound with some sort of propulsion device, silhouetted in mid-air by the flames behind them. All this was viewed over my shoulder while running in the dark between houses, searching for shelter from the fighting. I finally got through to my Mom's house on a cell phone and the outgoing message on her answering machine was really bizarre. It was a message to Senator Joe Biden saying she had left the state for somewhere safer (we live in Michigan, whats Joe Biden got to do with us??) and that Joe Biden had better take good care of her sons or else he would have hell to pay. My pseudo-girlfriend and I found a deserted house and there was a victrola and a huge stack of pre-war blues 78s. I remember playing the St. Louis Blues by Bessie Smith while she asked me if I could find her a toaster, but I didn't think it was a good idea because we shouldn't use any electricity. Then there was some unpleasantness when the armed security forces came in and found us in the house. They took my pistol, even though I had no ammo and one of them was trying to put the moves on the girl and I was getting super pissed, and then I woke up and now it's 5 am and I most likely wont get back to sleep.

Something happens that I'm head over heels

I've fallen pretty hard for Wong Kar-Wai's In The Mood For Love. That film is so gorgeous and subtle in its desperation and longing and basically achieves perfection in use of both musical score and pop music and its really gotten under skin in the past couple days. In my sleep deprived state I cranked out a mediocre essay on it for class that I want to polish up a bit and post here eventually. I'll also be posting my top 10 film characters in a week or so, if I make it through this next week intact. For now its back to the pit of despair to soldier on through the long, dark night, aided only with a French coffee press, a half packet of stale cigarettes, and my fraying wits. Pray for me, friends.

Feed yr head

I had a piece published in Detour, an online Detroit mag about a performance called Wonderland, a retelling of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".

I swung my fiery sword, I vent my spleen at the lord

Just a quick entry to vent the general malaise I've been feeling all day. As per usual, the proverbial back breaking straw is musically related. But anyway, upon opening a stack of mail from various record labels at my desk this afternoon (I'm the music director at a little radio station for those who are just joining) I got a CD compilation of Michigan artists from a label that had the letters DIY prominently figuring in its name. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, only that the label is based in California. Having someone else print up artwork and distribute your music sort of seems to be contrary to the DIY spirit, dont'cha think? Not to be some kind of pedantic Ian MacKaye type prick about it, but is nothing sacred? It's just a bit disconcerning to see a concept as anti-corporate as DIY just turned into another marketing buzzword attempting to capitalize on the "underground", but that's not really a new thing either. It happened when Nirvana got huge and look at the current state of rap/hip-hop which has devolved from visceral DIY form of art to a commercial for athletic gear and expensive vodka. Maybe I've just been reading too much Naomi Klein lately.

Mother & Son

Aleksander Sokurov's Mother & Son (1997) seems to take place in a space that falls somewhere between the conscious and unconscious. It is the story of an ailing mother tended to by her son that takes place in a small house in a very rural area of Russia. The mother seems to be on her death bed and even when she is awake it seems that she is never far from slipping back into sleep. The film begins with the mother recounting a dream she just had, which we find out was the same dream that her son had. This establishes a subconscious or metaphysical link between the mother and son, suggesting they inhabit not only the same physical space, but also the same space beyond conscious perception, which is extraordinary for something as personal as a dream. The landscape itself is also very dream-like. Much of it is filmed in soft focus with clouds and mist in the mise-en-scène, giving the film a hazy, ethereal quality. I think perhaps the most important subliminal aspect of the film is the sound. Most of what is heard on the soundtrack is not seen on the screen, so it is ambiguous as to whether the sounds are being created in the offscreen diegetic space of the film or if it is coming from an extra-diegetic source like the characters' imaginations. The film begins with a black screen and the faint sounds of waves breaking on a shore. One would expect then, that the first images on screen would be of the sea. Instead we see the mother laying in bed with her son behind her, gazing into a space off screen. Perhaps the sea is just outside the house and the son is looking at the waves through the window, but we have no idea, since the first few minutes are essentially a tableau, a static shot of the mother and son laying down. The only visual connection we have to the sounds of the waves is the rhythmic rising and falling of the mother's chest as she breathes. In later scenes we learn that the house is not adjacent to the sea, but is surrounded by rolling hills. The house itself is filled with sounds whose immediate source is not apparent. The sounds of a crackling fire are foregrounded in the soundtrack but we don't see the fire, except in a later shot. Even then the fire is relegated to an insignificant corner of the frame, almost inversely proportionate to the importance placed on its sound in the earlier scene. There is also a scene within the house where the buzzing of a fly is extremely loud and prominent within the soundtrack, yet the fly is nowhere to be seen. Outside of the house, the unseen sounds are also the dominant aspect of the soundtrack. There are natural unseen phenomena like wind, which while heard can not itself be seen, but is visually manifested in the images of bent trees and the undulating ripples in the wheat fields. There is also the sound of thunder accompanying the images of low hanging grey clouds. Man made sounds factor in as well. In one scene we hear the whistle of a train and see a plume of white smoke, but the train itself is obscured by a ridge in the landscape. There is also the faint barking of dogs, and the only other sonic evidence of humans is very faint and comes in the form of laughter and song. Since there appear to be no other dwellings nearby, it is unclear whether these sounds are sourced from within the film or within the psyches of the characters.
Mother & Son seems to almost be an antithesis to the early work of Sokorov's countrymen like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov. Where these directors worked in opposing dialectical images in fast paced rhythmic cuts in the Soviet montage style, Sokorov uses almost exclusively long take photography. That's not to say there is no dialectic tension between the images. Here they are presented within one image on the screen, instead of a series of images like the montage directors. This is a style not unlike Jean-Luc Godard employed in films like Le Week-end and One Plus One which Brian Henderson wrote about in his essay "Towards A Non-Bourgeois Camera Style". He writes that the long takes still require the active participation of the viewer, but not in the way that André Bazin suggests the viewer selects what is important within the space of the frame during the long take. Instead Henderson suggests that "the viewer is not drawn into the image, nor does he make choices within it; he stands outside the image and judges it as a whole". I believe this theory can be applied to the scene in which the train finally makes an appearance in the frame while the son is out walking. He is by himself for once, not having to care for his mother, and the train enters the frame from the right and exits the left side while we watch him from behind as he watches the train. The train is a symbol of modernity, a contrast to the primitive dwelling that the son shares with his mother that lacks running water or electricity. Since the train also requires other people to operate it and would either be full of passengers or goods that would need to be unloaded by other people when it reaches its destination, the train can also be seen as a symbol of life. The son almost seems to be yearning to be on the train, to have it bear him away from his present surroundings. This is also the case in the scene where the mother is carried outside and is laid down on a bench by her son. She is surrounded by verdant plants with a vibrant, saturated green color, the very picture of life, that provide a contrast to her deathly pallor. The shot leading up to this scene also suggests a non-bourgeois camera style, when we see the son carrying his mother from the house to the bench in a long, deep space shot that tracks very slowly to the left. The camera doesn't expressly follow the son, and seems to be almost an impartial observer and if the son happens to walk into the frame, then so be it. The narrative (or what narrative structure there is) also unfolds at an extremely languid pace, almost as if it is taking place through the eyes of a dying person trying to observe every minute detail of this world before moving on to the next.
Another visual aspect of the film that I believe is worth noting that it is quintessentially Russian (rolling green hills, birch trees, rippling fields of wheat) but seems to be in contrast with the Soviet-era communist films with the subject of the mother and son. This pairing seems to be representational of the iconic Madonna and child paintings that were a trademark of the Russian Orthodox churches dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries. In this case however, the context is inverted and shows the son grown up and taking care of the mother, who is rendered as helpless as a baby by whatever disease is afflicting her. This is evidenced in the scene where the son actually gives the mother a bottle to suck from, suggesting she is too feeble to even drink from a glass and has reverted to a state of infancy.


notes

Henderson, Brian. "Towards a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style". Film
Theory & Criticism. ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 6th
edition. Oxford University Press. New York & Oxford, 2006. p. 56.

film journals - My Take On Cassavetes

I'm just posting a few of my better essays from my Film History 1960 - present class.

This was my first time seeing The Killing of a Chinese Bookie(John Cassavetes, 1976), and the first thought that popped into my head after seeing the opening shot of Ben Gazzara as Cosmo Vitelli was that he looked exactly like another character I've seen him play. In his white leisure suit with the top few buttons of his shirt undone, he was the spitting image of Jackie Treehorn, the porn movie producer he played in the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski. As the film progressed, it was clear that the Coen brothers appropriated his character traits as well. In The Big Lebowski when The Dude asks Jackie how the smut business is going, he replies, "I wouldn't know, I'm in the entertainment industry." Likewise, Cosmo essentially lives either a life of make believe or self-deception, however you'd like to look at it. He runs a club that he fancies as a cabaret act, but which in reality is little more than a tawdry strip club masquerading as a cabaret. He takes great care in putting on a show with singing and dancing, and even has one of his dancers open the night's entertainment by reciting poetry (Edward Lear's "The Owl & The Pussycat") with the words changed to include the club's name.. However, the patrons of the club seem to be interesting in the entertainer's other assets. Frequent shouts of "Take it off!" are heard from the crowd, and the occasional bared breast or ass elicits cheers far louder than the song or dance routines.
The club has a Master of Ceremonies called Mr. Sophistication (played by Meade Roberts) who is anything but sophisticated. It seems he is the butt of a joke but is completely clueless to that fact. He has also constructed an alternate reality in his mind that he fully buys into, since he is of the opinion that he is more of a draw for the club than the girls are, but as I've already mentioned the biggest crowd response are from bared flesh. He also attempts to add a sheen of glamour to the surroundings. "Let's transform ourselves into Paris" he implores of the patrons at the club, attempting to recreate the ambience of a cabaret show in "la ville lumière" during la belle epoque. However, the mundane reality of a late 1970s Los Angeles strip club is never quite transformed to turn of the century Parisian fantasy. It's hard to be coaxed into a flight of fancy by someone whose mustache is comically penciled in. Despite all this, Mr. Sophistication still has an undeniable underdog's charm that only someone so fully and sincerely committed to a cause against daunting odds can affect. Mr. Sophistication also seems to function as a Greek chorus somewhat, since his song towards the end of the film comments on the unifying theme of escapism and pretenses with its lyrics " imagination is funny / makes the cloudy days sunny / imagination is crazy / your perspective gets hazy".
The aforementioned Cosmo is also a dreamer, desperately trying to rise above his current station in life with no success. Towards the beginning of the film he is shown paying off a debt to a gangster type who he discredits as a lowlife with no class. Cosmo is hardly the picture of class himself though, driving around in beat up cars, drinking in dive bars, and running a strip club. He attempts to portray himself as a dapper playboy type of character in the vein of Bob le Flambeur. We see him riding around in a chaffeur driven Cadillac picking up girls who work at his club to accompany him at an all-night gambling party, to give him the air of a sophisticated gambler. However, he can not even manage to pin the corsage on his "dates" and has to enlist the help of his chauffeur pin the flowers on the ladies' gowns. There is a harsh juxtaposition between his fantasy world and reality the next morning when his Cadillac drops the girls off at their homes. His tuxedo and the ladies evening gowns, more suited to the milieu of a downtown nightclub, look somewhat ridiculous in the harsh light of morning on the manicured postage stamp lawns of the suburbs.

I feel like I should write about something.

Quick recap of what I've been consuming as of late:

Let The Right One In - Strikes a balance between the first stirrings of romantic love and expressing the sentiments expressed by Moz so many years ago ("I want the one I can't have / and it's driving me mad") along with some top-notch gore to satisfy your sweet tooth, if your sweet tooth craves human blood. Also a great snapshot of the alienation that a sensitive "outsider" type (Oskar) feels in a small town inhabited by small minds who drink the winter away.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad - A powerful story that you can enjoy even if you hate heavy metal. Follows Acrassicauda (the Latin term for a black scorpion) as they literally have to cross a warzone to get to their practice space (which was later obliterated in a missile attack) in a town where wearing a Slayer shirt and having long hair is akin to painting a bullseye on your chest. As much as I love Norwegian black metal, Acrassicauda really amplifies their camp/theatricality since those guys are actually LIVED in a war zone and had to carry guns while those Scandinavians just paint their faces and wear fake blood. Sorta makes every other metal band look pretty lame by comparison. It also puts a human face on the war unlike any other media outlet has been able to. You can hear about suicide bombs killing 10 people in a market place from some anchor, but when you actually see the aftermath it's an entirely different ballgame. When you see these guys in tears after watching the footage shot in Baghdad after they had relocated to Syria, it really made me appreciate the freedom I enjoy and take for granted on a daily basis. I bitch about being broke and living in a shitty apartment and all, but my life is fucking cake compared to what they've gone through, largely due to my tax dollars.

Laura Gibson "Beast of Seasons" - Gorgeous folky tunes in the vein of Joanna Newsom and White Magic, sounds like a daydream under the golden boughs of Lothlorien.

Animal Collective "Merriweather Post Pavilion" - I don't want to verbally fellate these guys like every other nerd with a blog because that gets pretty embarrassing after awhile but I will say that this played for about 4 days straight because I can't get enough of what I imagine the music that the Druids would've made if they had electricity and laptops.

I went to see the movies up for Best Picture the other day and this year's crop isn't as strong as last year's I don't think but it was a good day regardless.
Slumdog Millionaire - Can't really objectively critique this since I'm kind of a Danny Boyle fanboy. Nowhere near his best offering (that belongs to Sunshine in my opinion, easily his most interesting film) but nonetheless an interesting concept that was well executed.
The Reader - Had the potential for greatness but there was far too much exposition and I didn't really give a damn about the characters until about halfway through the film, and while the story was compelling at that point, it felt like too little too late.
Frost/Nixon - Probably my favorite of the bunch, interesting study on the media and its relation to politics, and how our adversaries are more often than not more similar to ourselves than we think.
Milk - Came in a close second to Frost/Nixon. Sean Penn puts in a killer performance as the first openly gay man to be an elected official in a major U.S. city. As much as it kind of irks me to give credit to Q.T., it's nice to see Josh Brolin be pulled from relative obscurity to play roles in the last 2 year's Best Picture noms.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - Didn't actually stay for Benny Buttons. Was feeling ill and had enough theater popcorn to last me a month so I went home. The general consensus from my pals the next day was that while it was O.K. for what it was, it didn't deserve a Best Pic or Best Actor nod. C'est la vie.

More later I guess but who know when?

Cheers,
Anton

The New Wave breaks on American shores

Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde marked a turning point in American cinema. Not only was it influenced by the French new wave cinema in that it explored camera angles and editing techniques that deviated from the classical Hollywood method of filmmaking, but it was also a barometer for the shift in popular culture and American society in general. As was mentioned in class, some film critics ended up being fired from their jobs for writing bad reviews of the film, since they weren't "with it" enough to understand the new generation of film makers. It was released in 1967, a time when the country was greatly polarized on issues such as the Vietnam war and and civil rights. There was a strong anti-authoritarian counter culture movement, which was embodied in the Barrow gang of the film. In the scene when Clyde (Warren Beatty) first robbed a grocery store with Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) he mentioned how she was different than the rest of the girls, that she wanted different things. This could be read as a symbol of the changing attitudes on domesticity, and the role of the woman in society. Bonnie wasn't a girl who wanted to get married and be a housewife in an apron and a pearl necklace, taking care of the kids and having dinner ready when her husband got home from work. Clyde rejects the hard work ethic that was central to the WWII generation as well. In order to get out of the work detail he was part of while in prison, he cut off his toes with an axe. He also robs banks instead of holding down an honest job, and lures others away from their jobs (C.W., the gas station attendant who steals money from the register of his shop and joins the Barrow gang). The public heralds them as folk heroes instead of reviling them as criminals, and in one scene Clyde shoots up a house with the man who has just been evicted from it by his bank. Another instance of the film tapping into the anti-authority sentiment of the late 60s is when a Texas ranger tries to arrest the gang, they turn the tables on him and place him in handcuffs and force him to pose for photos with them.
Bonnie & Clyde employed many techniques to disorient the viewer and defamiliarize the narrative as in the tradition of the French new wave. It begins with an extreme close up shot of Faye Dunaway applying lipstick and then pulls back to reveal the rest of the room (and reveal that she is naked as well) instead of following the establishing shot / medium shot / close up formula. Another instance which would have seemed at home in a Godard film is when Clyde goes in to rob the bank that has no money. He forces the teller outside to explain to Bonnie that there was no money to be had. Instead of the camera following them outside to the waiting car it stays inside the bank and photographs the scene through the window. We see the lips moving and Bonnie tilting her head back in laughter, but we can't hear any dialogue, just the running engine of the car. A similar technique with sound was used in the scene when the police were involved in a car chase with the Barrow gang. The chase scene, as with all the scenes when the Barrow gang had just done a robbery, was set to the Flatt & Scruggs "Foggy Mountain Breakdown". But the music would cut out abruptly as the scene was intercut with police interviews of witnesses to the robbery.
Also present in Bonnie & Clyde was the cinephilia of the French new wave films. There are several instances of this. The first is when Clyde makes a crack to Bonnie to the effect of "I bet you're a movie star". Later in the film, when we first meet Buck and his wife, she is reading a movie magazine in the car. C.W. gets excited and asks if there are any pictures of Myrna Loy, a pretty, popular actress in both the silent and sound eras. The gang also hides in a movie theater after killing someone robbing a bank, à la Patricia and Michel from Breathless. Like in Breathless, the movie they are watching comments on the action within the narrative. The movie they are watching is The Gold Diggers of 1933, a film that was in the backstage musical genre designed to take people's minds off the depression, which feature the famous "We're In The Money" song. The Barrow gang was flush with cash from their most recent robbery, and was living their life outside the law to escape the the poverty of the depression.
An interesting side note is how this film, which was greatly inspired by the French new wave, was an inspiration for one of the great French icons of the time, Serge Gainsbourg. He recorded a song called "Bonnie & Clyde" with Brigitte Bardot about the film, and the video had Bardot sporting a look almost identical to Faye Dunaway from the film. Here's a link in case anyone wants to see it:
Serge & Brigitte - Bonnie & Clyde

Ne me tirez pasi, suis seulement le pianiste

Truffaut's Shoot The Piano Player begins using the stylistic components of the film noir genre. We are introduced to Chico being chased through dark, almost pitch black city streets, with occasional puddles of light cast from street lamps. But even from the very beginning, Truffaut is letting us know that this won't be your typical noir b-grade gangster thriller. We never see those giving Chico chase, they are in a car, but instead they shine a flashlight at him, and it almost seems like he is being chased by the light instead of the crooks. Furthermore, the moving camera, subject, and light source all make for a very kinetic mise-en-scene. However, while borrowing stylistically from the noir genre, the content of the film begins to tweak the gangster genre, and conventional cinema in general, from the very beginning. Instead of the chase ending in some grand fashion like a car crash or the quarry being caught and dragged away to a secret hideout for interrogation, the chase ends when Charlie hits his head on a lamp post and falls to the ground. This gives more of a slapstick/Three Stooges ambiance to the film, and most noirs are deadly serious. Other deviations from the noir norm come in the form of Charlie's voice overs that are filled with self doubt, a departure from the hard boiled private detective voice overs, and the almost anti-climactic shoot out at Charlie's parent's house in the country. Where a noir may have used close ups of guns being fired, blood soaked, bullet ridden clothing, and close ups of pained faces, the shootout is filmed in a long shot where the characters are visually overpowered by the house and surrounding forest.
Another way Truffaut defamiliarizes a traditional film narrative is how he introduces characters. Since Chico is the character we first see on screen, and much of the action is centered around him for the first 5 minutes or so, you begin to think he will be the main character of the film. Even when Charlie is first introduced, you get the feeling he will be a minor character instead of the lead. There are a handful of other characters who appear onscreen that seem to be a distraction of sorts from the main narrative. The first is the man who Chico is talking to after he runs into the streetlight. During their conversation the man says to Chico "I will probably never see you again," and true enough he never comes back into the picture. The same is true of Boby Lapointe, the singer in the club who gets a scene all to himself with his "Framboise" song. The scene certainly could have been cut, since it doesn't do anything to further the narrative. In fact producer Pierre Braunberger wanted it removed since he couldn't understand him, which is why Truffaut used subtitles. In an interview with Cinéaste, Truffaut reveals that his inspiration for the subtitles comes from the Canadian films of Norman McLaren where the audience sings along by following the bouncing ball over the lyrics on screen, and says that the "printed word reinforces and makes things funnier,". I particularly enjoy the third instance where Truffaut follows a character with nothing to do with the narrative, the woman leaving the music impresario's office when Charlie/Eduoard is entering. As she is walking down the hall the camera is moving with her, and when the music starts she stops to listen to but the camera still moves, leaving her behind. The next shot is the same woman walking outside, only the piano playing is still on the soundtrack. She is clearly not in the space where the music would be a diegetic element of the soundtrack, so it seems that Truffaut is suggesting that Charlie was such a great piano player that she still had the music in her head while she was walking down the street.
One of my favorite scenes is when Charlie and Lena are picked up by the crooks after his brother. As they drive in the car, the two crooks are spouting misogynist drivel, pausing every now and then to offer Lena an insincere apology if they're offending her. Charlie pipes up with a phrase his father used to say, something to the effect of "If you've had one woman, you've had them all" but his delivery seems forced, like he doesn't really believe what he is saying, and is just trying to fit in with the "cool" gangsters. We've already seen Charlie act shy around women, and as further evidence that he is no "smooth operator", with the ladies. He tries unsuccessfully to take Lena's hand while walking her home and desperately thinks of ways to make her laugh, and in a later sequence he chides himself in his inner monologue for looking at her legs while him and Lena are on the steps to her apartment. The gangsters themselves are a far cry from their counterparts in the noir films that influenced Truffaut. They bicker over their driving skills in the car like an old married couple, and are generally inept as criminals as we learn that Chico has fleeced them out of their share of a heist. In the same interview in Cinéaste, Truffaut explains that he portrays the crooks as comical due to his childhood in the Pigalle neighborhood of Paris where he witnessed thugs like that firsthand. Truffaut does not like the romanticization of the gangster archetype in film, he says that it is "snobbism on the part of artists to like gangsters. There is no reason to like them, they are bad guys...[t]hat is why I made them comical,".
One of the more innovative sequences of the film occurs in Lena's apartment. She and Charlie are shown lying in bed together after having sex, and we see images of Lena talking to Charlie intercut with images of the two of them just lying together silently. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this. I think that maybe it could have been showing what was really happening juxtaposed with what Charlie wanted to happen. Recalling the scene in the car with the gangsters, one of them says how he hates that women always want to talk after sex. So, are the scenes with Lena talking what actually happens after they have sex, and the scenes of them lying silent some sort of male fantasy world that Charlie slips off to where the woman, having pleasured him, says no more? Again, it's hard to tell if this is how Truffaut really feels about women, or if he is taking the piss out of the misogynist stereotypes using a bit of post-modern irony. It would also seem that Truffaut is poking fun at the notions of how women are perceived and should behave. Early on in the film we learn that the bar owner has a "thing" for Lena, but tells Charlie that he is too ugly for her, and that Charlie has a much better chance with her. Much later in the film, Charlie and Lena go in to quit their jobs at the bar. Lena uses some rather colorful language while telling off the boss and he throws a fit. He says he no longer is attracted to Lena since Charlie has "defiled" her, and that he is turned off by her swearing since ladies shouldn't swear. The notion that a woman is defiled after having slept with a man she isn't married to is essentially an antiquated notion in most parts of the western world today. Subsequently the bar owner is punished for holding these antiquated views, and is stabbed to death during his fight with Charlie. If Shoot The Piano Player is in part a response to some of the criticisms of Breathless, one of which was that Godard's film was misogynistic, it would seem that Truffaut lays it on the misogynism extra thick, but with a knowing wink, since he makes the characters who foster those ideas (the gangsters, the bar owner) look like buffoons.

Pickpocket

Robert Bresson preferred to think of his actors more like models. I wonder if this was a decision based on Kulyeshov's experiments. Kulyeshov, of course, was the Russian theorist who juxtaposed a close up shot of an expressionless man with random objects like a bowl of soup and a child at play. When shown the combined images, audiences marveled at how the actor conveyed hunger while looking at the bowl of soup, or how tenderly and affectionately he looked at his young daughter while she was playing. Perhaps Bresson similarly used actors with emotionless faces in order for us as spectators to project whatever emotion we could extrapolate from the situations at hand. The situations in Pickpocket lead to a more complex reading than what Kulyeshov was aiming for. There is no one way to interpret how Bresson thought we should feel towards Michel. Instead of manipulating the audience to feel sympathy or disgust as a reaction to what Michel does, Bresson lets us make up our own mind. For example, even though Michel's face remains as blank as ever when he is confronted by the man whose wallet he just lifted on the metro, Bresson holds the shots on the faces for so long that we can't help feeling uncomfortable, as if we're experiencing the feelings that Michel must surely be feeling at having been caught. The interesting thing about this though, is where one person may be feeling shame for having stolen someone else's property, another may feel anger at having been caught in the act. Even though Michel ends up in jail, Bresson doesn't outright say whether he is a "bad" or "good" person. It's up to the audience to decide. My own personal interpretation was that Michel wasn't a criminal, just a lazy bum. Instead of putting forth the effort to find a job, he starts to pick pockets on the train just for kicks. He likes the rush he gets from it, and gets to make a little money as well, thus filling up the hours of the day in a way that doesn't involve reading in his squalid rented room. This concept of Michel's life of crime as a leisure activity is reinforced by the venues he chooses to "work" in as well as his "training". He steals at places like the race track or the amusement park, and sharpens the hand-eye coordination skills needed to pick pockets by playing pinball. He also divvies up the stolen money with his partner by playing cards in the café, to make it less conspicuous that money is changing hands.
To complement the relative emotional passivity of the actors, Bresson avoids any sort of peaks and valleys from the flatlined emotional state of the film by suggesting the action in ellipses. In the scene where Michel is at the amusement park with Jeanne and his friend, he is shown looking at the watch on a man's wrist at the table next to him. The next scene cuts to Michel walking up to his room with his jacket dirty and the knees of his pants torn to show bloody skin underneath. We aren't sure what happened until he pulls the watch out of his pocket, then we realize that he stole it and a chase ensued but he ultimately escaped. Showing the theft of the watch and the ensuing chase would've no doubt been a very kinetic scene that would have disrupted the generally static overall feel of the film.
One element I especially liked was the sound/framework device that Bresson used to suggest the story was a flashback being recounted in a diary entry or a letter being written, almost as a confessional. The film begins with a close up of Michel writing, accompanied by a piece of orchestral string music. Throughout the film we return to these shots of a hand writing with Michel's voice over narration, and the same musical accompaniment. This suggests the narrative is being told to us by Michel as a flashback, but since we never see where Michel is sitting as he is writing, we don't know if he is writing from jail or if it is many years later after his release.

Le Bonheur

While I didn't enjoy Le Bonheur as much as Cleo From 5 to 7 or some of the other films we've seen in class, there were definitely enough interesting elements to the film that made it a worthwhile viewing. I know that some of the new wave directors were influenced by Camus' writing, and I couldn't help but wondering if there were some elements of the protagonist in "The Stranger" that Varda gave to the male lead in Le Bonheur. He didn't seem to be too broken up by the death of his wife, much like the character in The Stranger who was unmoved after the death of his mother. Likewise, he didn't seem to show any emotion on the opposite side of the spectrum as well. He never looked to be joyful or content, even after having sex, with two different women no less. The only time he registered much emotion was in the scene when he is sitting with his family after the wife's funeral. But even then, it doesn't seem so much like sorrow as it does a kind of dull shock, as if he was lamenting the break up of his stable routine more than anything else. Which is why it seems it is with relative ease that Émilie steps in to fill the void left by Therese. It seems kind of odd, both on François and Émilie's part, that they would both be willing to jump into a relationship after the sudden death of Therese.
We see an equalization of the gaze in Le Bonheur. In only one film we've seen so far has the male been the object of the female gaze, and only then it was briefly, when Jean Seberg looked at Jean-Paul Belmondo through her rolled up poster in Breathless. Most likely due to the fact that Varda is the lone female in what is essentially a boy's club, we see the gaze returned to the male just as often as it is given. We see François looking with desire at Émilie at the post office when he first meets her. At their first meeting, the gaze isn't returned to François, but in a later scene when the two of them are in a café having a drink, it is evident that there is an intense attraction between the two of them. Through uses of the close up, Varda makes it clear that Émilie is deriving just as much pleasure looking at François as he is as at her.
One element of the film I rather enjoyed was the use of color. I don't know if Varda's choice of colors was motivated by any kind of symbolism, but the color palates were very pleasing to the eye. The colors of the clothing that the actors wore seemed to mimic the backgrounds in the outdoor scenes and correspond to the natural color palates found in the different seasons.
I loved the editing in the beginning sequence, when it showed Fraçois and his family walking, intercut with a close up on the face of the sunflower. It seemed that the sunflower was serving as a stand-in for Émilie, a lone outsider looking at a family. Flowers are a recurring motif throughout the film as well. Flowers show up in vases in the apartments where François and his family live, and also in Émilie's apartment. This may be a stretch, but Varda could've used the flowers as a symbol of the transitive beauty and fragility of romantic relationships.

Day For Night

Truffaut's foray into the cinephilic self-reflexivity of making a movie about making a movie was in 1973 already a path well worn by Godard and sadly doesn't fare too well against a film like Contempt. This film lacks the verve and originality of his earlier films like 400 Blows and Shoot The Piano Player. The parallel that Truffaut draws between a film crew working together while a symphony plays in the non-diegetic soundtrack seems cheap and clichéd, especially considering what we know he is capable of from his past films. It isn't much of a stretch to have himself playing the director of the fictional Je Vous Présente Pamela. While I can appreciate the whole idea of blurring the lines between documentary and reality, the goings on behind the scenes of a film isn't the most exciting fodder for filmmaking without a compelling story to go with it. Having worked on a few sets over the years, I can honestly say it is one of the most boring jobs I have ever had, and I've even worked some pretty dull jobs like the toll booth of a parking structure for a few months. It is in an interminably boring process to set up lights and the camera and block the actors and hear the same lines spoken over and over again until the director decides he has the shot he needs, then tear it all down and set it back up from a different angle and repeat the same process. Most of the time is spent standing around smoking between the shots, talking about movies (in my experience at least). The problem with Day For Night is that the behind the scenes narrative is about as dull as the movie-making process, and is presented in a rather straight ahead manner with none of the deviations from the norm that characterized the work of the new wave directors. As I said earlier, Godard's Contempt was an excellent film about moviemaking, partly because it had a great story to go with it. Werner Herzog, member of the New German Cinema group who were highly influenced by the French new wave, made a film called Fitzcarraldo that was a metaphor for the film making process, but disguised in a story about obsession and colonialism, among other themes. It's also made more entertaining by having a raving lunatic as the star. The documentary American Movie is about the movie making process and is hilarious and infinitely more entertaining than Day For Night, and a "true" story to boot. Truffaut tries to inject some humor into the proceedings by portraying the leading lady as a drunkard on the edge of a breakdown who mistakenly opens the wrong door and ruins the end of the scene, but after seeing it about 5 times in a row it just made me cringe instead of laugh. Jean-Pierre Léaud's character seems to be what would've happened had the Cahiers du Cinéma bunch turned into actors instead of directors. He is essentially the embodiment of every cinephile/fanboy's (what's the difference when you really get down to it?) dream to act in films. In a bizarre twist on the tendencies of the cinephile to watch the same film over and over again and recite the lines their favorite characters are speaking, he sits in the screening room watching the dailies and mouths the words he sees himself speaking on screen. Then after working on a film set all day, he still wants to go out and see a movie. And like most fanboys he develops a crush on the leading lady, played by Jacqueline Bisset, but again unlike all the other fanboys he actually gets to sleep with her.

Alain Resnais - Comme l'amour, comme la guerre

Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a rather brilliant depiction of the transitory nature of memory and human relationships. The beginning of the film shows "Nevers", the French woman and "Hiroshima", the Japanese man visiting a museum. A major part of our memory is tied to the information that we receive from our eyes, and I wonder if Resnais was inferring a connection between museums and film. Both are primarily visual spectacles, though film has the added element of sound (well, at least since the late 20s). Both attempt to preserve time in order for spectators to revisit it again, with the obvious difference being that the images in a museum space are usually static and within the filmic space they're moving. Perhaps more importantly is the fact that both films and museums have directors. There is someone choosing what goes and what stays for spectators to see. Therefore Resnais is suggesting that memory itself is malleable and transitory. Both museums and films have a transitory nature to them as well. Museums usually have a permanent collection which holds art that visitors can see every time they go, and then a section reserved for traveling exhibitions that change every few months, so if enough time elapses between trips to the museum, it is never the same place twice. While not so much the case in Resnais' time, now with the advent of DVD the filmic narrative is subject to change as well. For example, there are now 5 different cuts of Blade Runner available to the public, and who can forget the internet nerd outrage over the defilement of the sanctity of Star Wars: A New Hope when a new cut was released showing Greedo taking a shot at Han Solo before Han shoots him. On another, perhaps more metaphysical level, film and memory are both fragile media for preserving history. While nitrate film was much more susceptible to the ravages of time even celluloid film degrades, as any viewing of an 20 year old print will display. Much like memory, which is clear and sharp to begin with, but after a few decades becomes fuzzy.
Perhaps even more important than memory in relation to the image is the context of not just the images themselves, but of the viewer of the images. What I mean is that depending on where you are standing, two people can look at the same image and see two different things. For example, to a Christian the cross is a symbol of salvation, but indigenous tribes of the Americas could see it as a symbol of genocide and the destruction of their culture. This idea is echoed in Hiroshima, Mon Amour when Nevers and Hiroshima are laying in bed and Never is talking about what she saw at the museum. Hiroshima says over and over "You didn't see anything". This could mean that as a French citizen who never saw the effects of the atomic fallout firsthand like a Japanese citizen who lived through the aftermath, she could not fully fathom what had happened. And her perhaps Resnais is suggesting that true memory is comprised of all the senses instead of just what you can see in a museum, or see and hear in a film. Nevers never heard the screams of bombing survivors, nor smelled the smoke from the burning wreckage, nor felt her skin blistering from the heat of the explosion like Hiroshima had, hence his stance that she "saw nothing".
Their relationship is transitory as well. Nevers is in Japan to work on a film, and while Hiroshima wants to see her again, she is less than enthusiastic about a future meeting. Their trysts often take place in hotels as well, spaces where people stay for a few days or weeks at most, but then move on to somewhere else. These similar themes of memory and relationships are also explored in Resnais' film Last Year At Marienbad. It is set in a posh, ultra chic hotel resort where X tries to convince A that they had met the year before at another similar resort hotel at Marienbad. However, minor details keep changing every time he recalls the scenarios, like what she was wearing or where certain events took place. Even the location of Marienbad is unclear to X though, who admits that it could have been any number of other resorts he has been to. Again, the memory is fleeting, linked to a space where people stay for a short period of time. He claims that they fell in love and that she was to leave M, her husband, in a year and run away with X. This is where there is a major difference between the characters of Hiroshima, Mon Amour. While in both films they have names that suggest they are less singular human entities rather than a representation of a larger more abstract idea, Hiroshima and Nevers are names of places where people live and there is a feeling of genuine attraction between the two of them whereas X, A, and M exist in a sterile, cold, emotionless void. The substitution of there names is similar to the variables of an algebraic equation. There is an air of great formality, not only from the tuxedos and evening gowns that the guests of the resort wear, but also in the language. The more formal "vous" form of the French verb conjugations is used instead of the "tu" which is used between people who know each other well. Husbands and wives would not address each other with the "vous" form, and neither would two lovers. This suggests and emotional distance between all of the characters. __ repeatedly says "laissez-moi", wishing to be left alone, which could mean that the affair actually did happen and she wants to forget about it the passion that may have ignited it, or that the affair never happened at all nor would she want to be a party to something like that. Another difference between the characters of the two films is their class. While the characters in Hiroshima, Mon Amour were certainly well off, at least enough to be able to travel between Japan and France, the travel was for part of their employment. The characters in Marienbad belong to the "idle rich" class. There is no mention of what anyone does for work, they all seem to do nothing but take vacations to elaborate resorts play games, watch plays, or go to balls.

Cleo From 5 to 7

Cleo From 5 to 7 is different from any of the films we've seen so far. First of all it's directed by Agnes Varda, the lone female director in the boy's club of the nouvelle vague. It comes as little surprise then that the protagonist of the film is also a woman. Ironically though she appears on the surface to be just as vapid and flaky as the women in the other films we've seen. It's hard to tell at first whether Varda wants us to sympathize with Cleo or not. Most of her behavior in the film is pretty much unlikeable from the very beginning. In the beginning of the film, we see her getting her tarot cards read. The fortune teller sees an illness in her future, and Cleo goes to pieces. She breaks down crying, fearing that she is going to die. But then as she leaves the fortune teller's apartment, she looks at herself in the mirror and says that she has her beauty, and as long as she is beautiful she is alive. Further living up to the stereotype of a vapid, materialistic blonde, she goes shopping and buys a new hat to cheer herself up. In the cab ride home from shopping with her assistant the radio broadcast reports on the latest casualties in the Algerian war while she prattles on about herself. She also has contempt for the cabdriver, perhaps feeling a sense of entitlement as a diva-esque pop singer over a lowly, working class woman. The cab driver isn't the only person she condescends to. There is a subtle division between her and her assistant as well. Her assistant always addresses Cleo in the formal "vous" form whereas Cleo addresses her with the informal "tu" form. Children usually address adults in the "vous" form and vice versa, so this subtle difference in language suggests Cleo is above (or, at least fancies herself above) her assistant. She also acts like a diva when her songwriters show up for a rehearsal. She complains that the songs are too difficult to learn, and how nobody loves her and just wants to exploit her for her voice. However, I think that Cleo is ultimately redeemed through her meeting with Antoine, the soldier on leave from the Algerian war that she meets in the park. Before meeting him she is at a café and she seems to start to have an existential crisis. I'm sure it's not by coincidence that the café she goes to is Le Dôme, a café frequented by Sartre and other existential intellectuals. She plays one of her records on the jukebox and gauges the reaction of the crowd, which keeps going about their business like they were before her record started. Cleo begins to realize that the world does not revolve around her like she imagines it does, that she is just another person like anyone else. When she goes to the park and meets Antoine, she becomes even more human. At first she dismisses him and wants to be left alone, but his persistence eventually finds a chink in her armor and she becomes more vulnerable and human. We learn that her real name isn't Cleo but Florence. Through Antoine, we (or at least I) are able to feel empathy for her as a fellow human who is suffering through a disease and fears for her life.

Varda shows some amazing innovation in this film that rightly places her in the canon of the nouvelle vague along such names as Godard and Truffaut. There is one of my favorite long takes ever in the scene where Cleo is learning a new song with her lyric and music writers that signifies the isolation that Cleo feels. The camera travels slowly across the room in an arc, showing first all three characters but then slowly zooming in on just Cleo, who is standing in front of a black curtain. The camera moves in so that all we see is a medium close up of Cleo with the black curtain behind her. Cleo looks right into the camera while singing a song about dying of loneliness after being without her lover. While the song starts out with just the diegetic accompaniment of the piano, it is eventually replaced by a dynamic, orchestral string arrangement. As the music swells Cleo seems to be lost in the song. The effect is mesmerizing and is so great that the viewer gets caught up in the moment as well, and forgets (like Cleo seems to) that she is in her apartment. It instead seems like she is giving a performance in a concert hall, but then the song ends and the camera abruptly pulls back and thrusts the viewer (and Cleo) back into reality, showing us that she is indeed just in her apartment singing to an audience of three instead of a full house at a grand concert hall. There is also an incredible use of non-continuous editing in the scene where she leaves the rehearsal in her apartment and goes to the café. As she walks down the street and looks at the people looking back at her in a series of reverse shots, there are a series of shots inserted of people not on the street. We see her assistant sitting in her apartment, the songwriter sitting at his piano, patrons from the café she just left, and the man swallowing frogs on the street that walked past earlier. By showing these people in a completely different space than the one Cleo is presently occupying, it gives us an insight to her existential crisis where she is realizing that these people in fact have lives outside of the relationship to her.