Double Exposure: Spring 2014 by Double Exposure

FROM THE EDITORS* 3,186 314 11% 89% 2 3,764 0 mms. 53 300 58 97 25 1,822 0 10,134 38 186 5.5” x 8.5” 643 1,022 10 27,658**

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* with apologies to Dan Graham ** values may not be accurate

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF David Beal Max Nelson

BLOG EDITORS Nick Lieberman Maya Rosmarin

MANAGING EDITOR Will Noah

MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Bernhard Fasenfest

PUBLICITY DIRECTOR Julia Selinger

COPY EDITOR James Boudreau

FILMMAKER PORTRAITS by EMMA MERKLING COVER by DAVID BEAL (from a design by GEORGE MACIUNAS) SPECIAL THANKS to KATY NELSON

VOYAGE TO ITALY (1954)

contents 4

INVITATION TO A VOYAGE

FAKING IT

THE BIG FISH

THE CREATURE WITHIN

THE ACT OF KILLING

THEMES AND VARIATIONS

THE PARTY LINE

BORDER CROSSINGS

FAR FROM WORDS

THIS UNWORTHY SCAFFOLD

michael blair

a travel essay

alexander tsebelis

on françois ozon’s young & beautiful

maya rosmarin

david lynch’s cinematic silencio

alex robertson

three films that make the stone stoney

eric ingram

censored

will noah

hong sang-soo’s moral tales

thuto durkac somo

the virtual club-scape of last nights party

max nelson

the films of mati diop

olivia domba

the medium-bending career of laure prouvost

jackson arn

realism, special effects and the cinema

INVITATION TO A VOYAGE a travel essay

I. New Excavations by m i c h a e l b l a i r

illustrations by Zoë Flood-Tardino

ear the close of Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 film Voyage to Italy, a man and woman—husband and wife—huddle together at the edge of an excavation site in Pompeii. While they look on, unknown hands brush away dirt from half-buried plaster casts. The white mold begins to take shape, and the plaster bodies regard the humans with curiosity and dread. “All these are new excavations,” says a guide. “The plaster fills out the hollow space left in the ground by the body which has disintegrated. The shapes of bodies or objects buried for over two thousand years are reconstructed this way.” Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) stiffens up, as if a crusted plaster hand might claw out towards her at any moment. Something about this uncomfortable mingling of the living and the dead, how the plaster bodies are slowly flowing into place, is enough to bring her close to tears. Soon, the diggers uncover two bodies, a man and a woman. “Maybe they were husband and wife,” one says. At this point in the film, Katherine is at her most vulnerable. Her marriage to Alex (George Sanders) is in ruins, and Italy has more or less petrified their bodies into postures of postures of dry and airless contempt. The plan is for a divorce. When I first saw this scene last summer, I was alone and soaking wet in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Out on an afternoon walk, I’d been slammed by a surprise hail storm

and ran several blocks before ducking into a theater. I was amazed by the strange trespassing of the living on the dead, and by how beautiful Ingrid Bergman looked with the wind blowing through her hair. The sight of Ingrid Bergman, without backlight and makeup, amongst all that digging and dusting, was both distracting and sublime. It stung me with the sense that I was unfairly trespassing on Bergman herself: her parted lips; her round cheeks; her short, curly blond hair; her strange, singular beauty. Voyage to Italy can’t exactly be called a work of neorealism, the term most often associated with Rossellini’s movies. Instead, the effect is both documentary and literary. Jean Luc-Godard would make a similar leap nine years later with his film Contempt, which also frames the specific, intimate details of the destruction of a marriage with a voyage back to the classical world. Rossellini’s influence is clear, but Godard’s conceits are grander and more self-reflexive. In the very first scene, Godard bathes Brigitte Bardot’s naked body in phasing green and red lights, and Raoul Coutard’s camera spins around and looks at the audience. In Voyage To Italy, on the other hand, the grand conceits are buried beneath the surface, left to weave between the contours of Bergman’s leopard fur coat and Sanders’ stiff upper lip. Godard’s film aims to be a modern adaptation of The Odyssey—it is a film about the making of a film adaptation of The Odyssey—and reaches the same kind of polyphonic beauty of James Joyce’s adaptation, Ulysses. Voyage To Italy is an act of translation rather than adaptation. The beauty and tragedy live in subtle phrasings, in “new excavations.” Rossellini wants to show how, when traveling in a foreign land, the couple have never been

closer to each other and have never felt more alone. Though the family house the couple travel to visit was once owned by “Uncle Homer,” Rossellini is most interested in showing us which room of the house Homer liked best to sit in. He is fascinated by the way the dead continue to move through the imaginations of the living. This fluidity, and the strange confusion it brews, recalls Joyce’s story “The Dead” more than Ulysses. How fitting, then, that Bergman’s character’s name is Katherine Joyce. Big deal, you say—but it’s a measured move to mix a famous literary name with Bergman’s, just as it’s a measured move to mix Bergman’s stardom with the intimate and lonely specifics of a British wife. Here, the name Joyce means just as much as the name Bergman. The story Katherine tells her husband as they lie in the warm sun is an almost word-for-word translation of the story Gretta Conroy tells her husband Gabriel in a cold Dublin hotel in “The Dead.” Gretta’s first love, a boy named Michael Furey, visits her despite his sickness before she leaves Galway. Katherine’s old friend, a frail poet named Charles Lewington, also visits her the night before she leaves her hometown, and, like Michael Furey, throws pebbles up against her window and braves the rain to see her. But while the words that Gretta and Katherine speak are alike, somehow in the translation—in the voyaging—their meanings have shifted. Gretta’s story of Michael Furey’s love is delivered near the end of the tale, and is enough to send her weeping into a pillow for the remainder of the story. Katherine performs her version cooly and matter-of-factly; or, you might say, in British English rather than Irish. She’s so very to the point that they’ve barely had their first plate of spaghetti before she asks Mr. Joyce if he remembers

poor young Charles Lewington. In “The Dead,” Gabriel wants to “overmaster” Gretta, but to do so he must keep asking her what she is thinking about. Mr. Joyce would rather say nothing, would rather be out of Italy and back at work. “This country poisons you with laziness,” he tells her. And so Katherine must toss the story out the first chance she gets; her husband is so blind and ironic that he’d never think to ask what was wrong. If Katherine’s tale fails to stir Mr. Joyce in the way Gretta’s stirs Gabriel, it’s also true that perhaps Katherine never loved Charles Lewington they way Gretta loved Michael Furey. A performance of “The Lass of Aughrim” at a Christmas dinner sparks in Gretta the memory of Michael Furey’s “great voice,” and begins her weeping. But Katherine thinks that Charles Lewington’s poems about Italian sculptures—“temples of the spirit, no longer bodies but mere aesthetic images”—completely miss the

point. “It is as if Nero or Caracalla, Tiberius or Caesar would suddenly tell you how they felt,” she says after visiting a museum of Roman and Italian sculptures. Not temples of the spirit, she thinks: these are living human bodies who go on flexing and posing, permanently springing outward. For Gabriel, “the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.” But for Katherine the dead are sculpted into the solid world, and the life she sees in the statues casts her own body into stone. Gabriel imagines the snow falling on Michael Furey’s gravestone in Galway, but in Italy Katherine witnesses the hollow ground beneath her feet transform itself into a new excavation. Because her husband remains so oblivious and unfeeling, the only one to really mark this change is the camera itself—it shifts points-of-view at the excavation site, listens to Katherine’s mono-

logues about her husband’s brutishness while she drives her car, and watches her play cards alone on her couch and then turn off the lights and fake sleeping when her husband comes home. The moments of the highest emotional pitch are not arguments with her husband (like the long apartment sequence of Contempt) but rather the moments when Katherine is totally alone, when she is framed like a portrait or a sculpture and we are left to regard and read into her loneliness. It might be tempting to read all of this as a product of Rossellini’s ill-fated love for Bergman. He does, after all, save the most beautiful moments for himself and his camera. But the film is so concerned with the living remnants of the past, with the way the living translate the past into their own lives, that it leaves its viewers with the task of making new excavations—especially now that Bergman and Rossellini are long dead. In “The Dead,” Gabriel is a kind of audience who translates and reimagines the love between Gretta and Michael Furey into his own need to voyage westward back to Galway. “He had never felt like that himself toward any woman,” we’re told, “but he knew such a feeling must be love.” Sanders’ character is so blind to the depth of his wife’s loneliness and suffering that unless she’s seen in theaters by soaked and lonely boys like me, she’ll never be reconstructed or understood. This is a strange proposition. When Katherine stares down at the white, molding plaster and screams out, maybe she or Ingrid or some strange combination of the two has recognized the terrible intimacy of this bargain with the audience. We trespass on Katherine’s private life, we visit her at her most vulnerable and most lonely, and all the time judge Bergman’s looks and acting. But maybe while the

film plays we not only watch and judge. Perhaps we also visit her private loneliness and make it beautiful. All bodies in dark theaters are like seething plaster, caught for a second between hollowness and hardness. I feel foolish for continuing to look at Ingrid (instead of Katherine) as if she were some kind of aesthetic object, for thinking it’s Bergman’s beauty I love, and for longing, like Gabriel, to possess her sorrow. I might have been prepared to brave death for her like Michael Furey, if I had known that in the theater I was really visiting, forming, and translating rather than simply watching—if I had come to the movie to stand out in the rain rather than seek shelter from it. II. Voyage to Galway

wo weeks before I saw Voyage To Italy, I left Paris with my old friend Nick to visit another friend from our high school days, Conor, who was living in Galway for the summer. I hadn’t kept up with Conor since I’d seen him last Christmas in St. Louis, but I’d seen a lot of Nick in Paris. That same winter break, we’d noticed that Nick’s college accepted credit at Columbia’s Paris campus and we hatched a plan to spend the summer together. In some ways, the month we’d spent so far in Paris had been too good to be true. We’d visit museums together in the morning and hobnob around the streets until lunchtime. We’d sit down—often at a great café off the Canal Saint-Martin that we called “our place”—and avail ourselves of a prix fixe French lunch. Paris made sense for both of us as a kind of self-indulgent refuge from a summer in St. Louis. We’d have each other, but not our parents, our household chores or our old jobs (Nick shelved books at the public library; I caddied at country clubs). Paris meant we

could free ourselves of the burden of being our old selves, without having to face the “new selves” who ought to have been interning and planning for post-graduate deployment. This was a huge relief for me. Since I started school in New York, I felt like there had been a shift in the way my old St. Louis buddies regarded me when we’d swap stories at Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’m sure most of it wasn’t really there, but I often found myself withholding information and stories about that great show at the Met, or that my professor was also this famous person, or that I’d been delving deeply into industrial noise music from the 1980s. It wasn’t just that my friends might find me pretentious (I think they always had). I feared that they would think I’d been changed beyond my clothes or the way I talked, that I had transformed in some unalterable way—that New York had taken control of me. It’s been a fear

since before I even walked out the door. The winter I was accepted to Columbia, my mom’s boss sent her an unprompted email advising her to tell me to steer clear of those “brainwashing liberal professors.” Even my grandma—a Democrat since Kennedy—whispered drunkenly into my ear at my graduation party that summer not to come back a different soul. “When people go to New York, they sometimes come back arrogant,” she said to me. “Please don’t do that.” I could feel the words clasping back at me as I shook my parents’ friends hands and walked into my backyard where my uncle had spent all day stringing up bouquets of flowers and stacking wood beside the firepit. Nick is sturdily built, has friendly brown eyes, and walks in a wide flowing shuffle that keeps his weight set dead center. A high school English teacher of mine once claimed that St. Louis is “a Northern city

with Southern charm,” and I suppose you could say something similar about Nick. He speaks with easy economy, he is both freewheeling and relentlessly practical, sometimes sentimental and other times cynical, both laid back and squarely ambitious. He wears either a red Cardinals cap with t-shirt and jeans, or a tailored sport coat with knit tie and European shoes. My two most vivid memories of Nick in high school are of the time he grunted out a loud “Yes!” in 10th grade geometry class after he got his test back and, later that same year, when he challenged some Latin American students to a dance off at an anti-military protest in Georgia. When I walk down his driveway and up the steps to his kitchen door, I often see him drinking root beer with his sister, or quietly reading an old hardcover book. When I knock on the door, the dog barks and looks at me through the window with an expression of heavy mournfulness.

Like St. Louis, Nick is an old soul who would have you believe that his best years were sometime long ago, sometime before you knew him. Nick was an all-star pitcher in his childhood, and one summer his dad took him on a road trip across the country to visit all the old famous ballparks. Most summers, though, he worked the mound in the hundred degree heat on an old ripped up diamond off Highway 40, and in the fall his dad sent him to the indoor batting cages every weekday afternoon. I never saw Nick pitch; a year after I met him he gave it up. He was 15 I think. Another high school English teacher once said to me, “Man, Nick is a good looking, well-dressed kid but I think he’d only appeal to a 28-year-old medical student or something.” Nick goes to Harvard now, and this semester he’s the managing editor of the Crimson. We’re the only two of our high school buddies to make it

anywhere east of the Mississippi, and I suspect that the fear of unalterable change circles around him even more than me. “I always knew you’d end up in New York,” a family friend told me one winter break at home. Nick’s family never thought he’d leave. I think of Nick outside of St. Louis in Cambridge—a place with a past more burdensome than comforting—and imagine him donning his old plaid suit at a preppy social club. His shoes are polished. His Southern charm is losing out to Northern ambition. The 16-year-old who wore suits and wrote letters on a typewriter is now most concerned about creating state-of-the-art graphics for online content. In his small dorm room closet he may only have room for suits and ties, and who knows if he might actually start dating a 28-year-old. In Paris, we don’t mention any of this. We sit at “our place” and talk about Clement Greenberg or Robert Rauschenberg, or the quiche you can get way up the hill on the Rue Des Martyrs. I see the other Nick pop out one night during Fête de la Musique when a killer brass band plays on the street and he begins to dance, bopping around in his from-the-hips style that was once a spectacle at our proms. The Parisian boulevards, when walked by two St. Louisans, are constantly suggesting new plans. Streets carve back down to the river, or slope towards the Saint-Germain. It’s always easy to find our way back home. The warm yellowish stones of the apartment buildings have a lightness and flexibility that heavy St. Louis redbrick lacks. It often rains and sometimes we visit old cemeteries or the metro smells funky or Nick is too busy with homework to go out and I am left to walk around

and eat alone at night. But mostly it is nice to live with an old friend in a new place. After Conor called Nick, we immediately booked tickets and flew out of Beauvais for Dublin on a warm Thursday night in early July. Dublin was cold and dark and almost vacant—though on the short walk from the O’Connell Street bus stop to our bed and breakfast, I did spot two or three people pissing behind cars on side streets. Inside, at the check-in desk, the attendant asked a drunk boy climbing up the stairs— who looked much younger than us—if he wanted his cell phone back. The question puzzled me. Why would the attendant be keeping the phone of one of the lodgers? It sounded like we had entered a kind of juvenile detention facility. Nick and I slept side by side on a lumped bed stained with all sorts of unknowable spots, and listened to a loud, squawking group of seabirds stepping upon the roof of the building. Immediately the next morning, we started yelling at each other. We couldn’t agree on where to go for a traditional Irish breakfast and, after touring Trinity College for around 15 minutes, we weren’t sure what to do next. I wished Nick would go with the flow; Nick wanted a plan. After some dead-end exploring and a quick cut through the loud tourist crowd on Grafton Street, we sat down at a deserted burger place on a small neighborhood street. I peeled the t-shirt off of my shoulder where my backpack had caked it in with sweat. The back of Nick’s shirt was completely soaked. We ordered cokes and Irish burgers and Nick asked me a question he hadn’t yet that summer. “Did you have any girlfriends or anything last year?” “Sort of,” I said and stopped. I think this was Nick’s first way of approaching

the unsayable things, of attempting to really reckon with the new place I lived in. I told him there was one girl who I really liked a lot but the timing of it was strange and, after Christmas, her old boyfriend came back from abroad and that was that. When I returned the question to Nick, he looked down and shook his head. Nope. We didn’t say much for the rest of lunch. I held up my coke bottle to my cheek, and Nick was in the bathroom for a while. Somehow this attempt at honesty and closeness had pushed us away from each other. We had little to comment on when it came to the raw details of ourselves. College life had moved so fast that I wasn’t even sure if I could say if my heart was broken or not. Either way, I had no real stories to tell. The encounter cast a lonely pall on the afternoon and, when Conor finally arrived in Dublin, we all sat quiet-

ly near a pond in St. Stephen’s Green, swapping cordial questions about the academic highlights of the last semester of school. After some fish and chips and a couple of beers, I watched Nick and Conor fall asleep on the night bus from Dublin to Galway. The next day, on another bus from Galway to the Cliffs of Moher, I noticed Conor grit his teeth, bow his body and stick his head up against the back of the seat in front of him. “Are you alright?” I asked him. “Fine,” he mumbled. We drove up along the flatland inland waters, before cutting up along a wide rocky plateau called The Burren, where small spits of grass appear to grow out of the grey stone. Like Gabriel’s resolution in “The Dead,” we have voyaged to the very western tip of Ireland. A small village called Oughterard, where Michael Furey’s people

are from, is a twenty minute drive in the other direction. Conor continued to bow and wince, as the bus whipped around the rocky plain. Since we met in Dublin, Conor had been a little quiet, and I’m not sure he’d been enjoying his time in Ireland. He looked a bit thin. His roommates were fraternity types who drank a lot of beer and were bad about cleaning the kitchen. His dorm sat on the outskirts of Galway proper, so he had to cross over several canals and then walk a few miles of highway and strip malls to get into town. Nick is Conor’s closer friend—the two edited the high school newspaper together and write letters back and forth in college. Conor, like most of our friends, stayed in Missouri for college. Nick let it slip to me one night in Paris that Conor’s last letters had been rather harsh. He thought Nick really had changed on the East Coast, that he’d become priggish, arrogant, and lost his friendly St. Louis way. I was astonished to hear such a thing from Conor, who is un-

failingly earnest, good-natured and kind. I had no idea he harbored such judgments, and if he thought as much of Nick there’s no telling what he really thought of me. More often than ever, I’d found myself playing the sardonic asshole role when reunited with the old gang at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was a kind of automatic reflex against what I feared most—telling everyone how much I really did love living in New York. The bus finally pushed all the way to the coast, and the cliffs cut out to the north. Conor still sat with his head down and his eyes closed. Nick napped behind us. Out on the cliffs, we walked south towards what looked like an old destroyed castle. Small barbed wire fences with signs that read “Danger! Fall to Death!” lined the edge of the cliffs. Cows grazed on the other side of us. We followed a small rocky path towards the castle and played a couple rounds of the movie game to pass the time. Sudden-

ly, Conor asked us to stop and then sat down on top of a boulder. He didn’t want to go any further, was not feeling so great. Nick and I said we really wanted to get to that castle, that we’d made it nearly there and had to complete the task. Conor said he was sick to his stomach, and I suggested he wait there on the boulder while Nick and I walked to the ruined castle. I wonder if Conor felt like Nick and I were trying to move beyond him again. We were always moving slightly east of him— first to Boston and New York, then to Paris. And now we were walking past him on the path on our way to the castle. I wonder if he thought that we ought to have cared more about the health of our friend than the voyage onward. Tucked in mist, I looked out onto the sea and wondered how far east my new home, New York, really was. Even farther was St. Louis, the only place the three of us had ever been together before now. Meeting here at these lonesome and cragged rocks at the edge of Europe seemed like a cruel thing to do to ourselves as friends. We had no past to draw on here, and each gust of wind seemed to savagely recast the terms of our communication. It occurred to me that as time passed I would continue to know less and less about my friends. I would have no idea if we had really been unalterably changed by the east coast. How could I really tell? I wished I could go back to the burger joint in Dublin and tell Nick in flat honesty that I kissed a girl with blonde hair in late November, that I smiled and closed my eyes and then it had all ended before I opened them. A low hum in my stomach told me that he’d probably understand, that the same thing had probably happened sometime to him in Cambridge. But I couldn’t be sure that I could explain what it really felt like to be there.

Nick and I had no choice but to keep walking—we had to train our eyes on something, we had to at least get someplace together right then. He moved his feet with his wide flowing shuffle, his weight set dead center. We talked about the upcoming fall semester, what classes to take and how trips to Cambridge and New York were in order. When we arrived we took a few photos of ourselves beside the crumbled grey watchtower. Then we stood silent for a minute, and turned back to walk with Conor to the bus. He’d made a nice sketch of the view of the cliffs and sea from his boulder, and would later add some color to it. III. Eyes Eyes

fter I left the theater, the rain had let up. Crossing over the Pont Saint-Michel and staring down into the river, I thought about Nick, Conor and myself out on the cliffs. We are none of us married, we have never stood under a tree and braved death for a lover, and the weight of the sculpted dead hasn’t yet molded us into stone. But in new places we have dug into the ground, and once or twice pulled up some living roots. The wider the distance between us, the more we speak in translation to each other. On the bus back to Galway, all three of us took window seats and watched the green meadows move by. Halfway through the journey, I turned to put on my headphones and watched Conor and Nick staring out their windows. I looked at them both for a few seconds while my music played and the darkening hills moved in front of them. For a few moments, I watched my friends watching. I am still possessed by Ingrid Bergman’s beauty. I see in her black-and-white eyes memories of girls I’ve kissed.

FAKING IT under the skin of françois ozon’s young & beautiful

by a l e x a n d e r t s e b e l i s

n a recent Twitter conversation with Whit Stillman, Richard Brody called François Ozon “more of an impresario” than a great director. I thought about Swimming Pool and last year’s excellent In The House, both tightly wound contraptions about the worlds writers create and what happens when those worlds become too vivid, their creators too attached. It seemed I disagreed with Brody’s claim. The first rule of film criticism today, though, ought to be: never contradict Brody. You will learn that he is relegated to the New Yorker’s blog because they know he’s too smart for the magazine. Naturally, the next time I saw an Ozon film I would have to eat my words. Young & Beautiful, his latest, opens with Isabelle (Marine Vacth) relaxing on a pebbled Mediterranean beach. Ozon is almost a medium for Rohmer’s spirit here, but he wryly refocuses the opening of La Collectioneuse through a pair of binoculars, literalizing the implied male gaze in Rohmer’s immobile camera. In a move that Laura Mulvey would appreciate, the girl later borrows this voyeuristic apparatus to scrutinize a boy a little older than her. Shortly after, when she loses her virginity to the boy on the beach (the camera gracefully and obtrusively slides over her knee; Le Genou de Claire), Isabelle looks off to her side and sees a shadow, an astral projection, of herself watching the act with tears in her eyes. Her family packs and leaves the summer house (à la Pauline à la Plage) as Françoise Hardy sings that she’s not the little girl you once knew in the background, and we wonder what was broken off, what she left behind.

When we return to Isabelle it is autumn—seasonality is also a kind of Rohmerian posturing, though beyond this point resemblances to that director’s films cease—and she is calling herself Lea, entering a hotel wearing her mother’s silk blouse. Her client is older than he had claimed and she is younger, but, he says, “everyone lies about their age.” She gets paid between three and five hundred euros a session, and by the size of the reserves cachéd in her closet, has been working quite a bit. The second time she sees Georges, the john, he grabs her on her way out and asks if she has many other clients. It seems he would care if she did. The film slips into montage; Françoise Hardy asks, “How would it help/ Living alone, all alone,” and, for a moment, a May-December romance seems to be in bloom. It’s a cliché, and, very quickly, turns out to be a joke as well. The montage continues and of course she has other clients; lots. We wonder what Ozon’s choice of music suggests she might love. It could be having a secret. When Georges dies while they make love (right, le petit mort), Ozon may be doing what he does best, pushing the material of everyday life until it becomes the material of a thriller—the furtive glances, the suggestive views through cracked doors where you might not have seen what you think you’ve seen. But instead he does the opposite. The elements of a thriller—vice, death, surreptitious meetings—are here posed as the stuff of everyday life. The police tell her mother everything—there is no mystery—and we learn that Isabelle doesn’t love the secret; a certain crystalline fire only lights in her dead eyes after the family finds out. In this moment especially Vacth demonstrates her adroitness on camera. Her career-making work defines nearly every frame of the film. She’s almost a

Jasper Johns in her non-expression, her simplicity, her boldness. Her performance has been described as “subtle,” implying the kind of unobtrusive, restrained acting normally seen in the type of foreign cinema that automatically earns the art-house designation when imported. It will also be identified as “blank,” which is closer to the mark, but both descriptions still sell her achievement far short. Sasha Grey played a similar role in Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience blankly, as a vacuum capable of containing her client’s projections, and the audience’s. But what Vacth has done here is to empty herself out so completely that she has become a black hole. She can’t hold anything at all. Kenneth Lonergan’s magnificent bildungsroman-cum-city-symphony Margaret suggests that the origins of a similarly manipulative protagonist’s bad behavior lie in her urge to narrativize, to shape and control the immensity and power and pain of her myopic internal life. Both Isabelle and Margaret’s Lisa try to avoid going to the theater with their family, but Lisa does so because her own life feels so much more operatic than the actual opera. Isabelle doesn’t have an internal world, and she doesn’t seem to like stories much at all. She reads disinterestedly; for her a novel is always a prop, not a pastime. The fastidious, methodical writing of Charlotte Rampling’s Sarah Morton in Swimming Pool both creates and organizes the perfectly-pitched tension of that film’s narrative. The same is true of a student’s short stories in In The House, which intensify at the same rate as their truth unravels. Ozon intentionally undercuts and underlines storytelling’s inherent falseness, but ultimately his characters’ invented realities prevail simply because they are so bewitching. The two films succeed insofar as they deconstruct our hunger for narrative even

while demonstrating it. In the same fashion, Young & Beautiful takes its cues from Isabelle’s internal ordering of events, the places where she ascribes meaning. But she doesn’t see meaning anywhere, and she doesn’t even want to. When the police ask Isabelle to illuminate her actions, she simply states that she liked arranging rendezvous; to her there is nothing beyond “meet me at 3 o’clock, room 6095.” So the film is a series of moments: moments with family, clients, or classmates, moments on the beach, the train, at home. If the film felt less controlled, less cold, the structure might be described as “loose” (which is a feeling more than anything else; Margaret’s messy candor conceals a densely and beautifully constructed plot). But Young & Beautiful can only be arbitrary, each moment discreet. A long list—after all, it is the oldest profession in the world—of films (many French) on the subject demonstrate that the shared experiences of a prostitute and her client may briefly suggest greater feeling or imitate real intimacy. But ultimately when money changes hands it reveals those brief moments as entirely false. Ozon’s film mimics this, too, at times suggesting or moving towards emotion, towards love or hate or pain, before it reveals that the whole thing was a cheap trick (or, like Isabelle’s, a fairly expensive one). It is suggested that Isabelle isn’t even particularly good at her job; she doesn’t see much importance in pretending to be anything other than empty and uninterested, doesn’t even see how to give enough to allow someone to fill up that emptiness in their own mind. Ozon is a much better faker, and his manipulations here are crueler. He presents theories, hints at emotion, and traces the shape of narrative; but the way he destabilizes those suggestions is derisive rather than subversive.

The possibility that Isabelle turns tricks for the sake of the money is eliminated when we notice that she doesn’t need it, as is the theory that she’s seeking danger, because she doesn’t even realize that her actions are dangerous. A therapist’s questions about her father gesture at obvious Freudian motivations, and Ozon suggests that you’re an asshole for even letting such a thought cross your mind. Isabelle and her classmates read Rimbaud, whose poem “Novel” says that “no one’s serious at seventeen,” and Ozon and Isabelle share an inside joke because she is so serious. After she kisses a boy her age on a bridge at dawn, the camera slides down to reveal padlocks affixed to the railing, which symbolize—or really attempt to summon, to mythologize—everlasting love (a minute, real human attempt to fashion an enduring narrative). But Ozon knows you won’t find that in this film, and Isabelle coolly breaks up with the boy a few scenes later, after a breakfast with her smiling family in the Parisian afternoon sun where their happiness seems so overplayed, so false, that I can’t help envisioning the director cracking up on set. He’s the asshole: cruel to his audience and to his characters because he makes them all suffer pointlessly, rejecting any chance to make their suffering signify anything, even suffering. Except for Isabelle, whom he watches like a magnificent shimmering beetle in a glass jar, completely unaware of her own predicament, practically not even sentient. But not letting her feel, not even to let her suffer, might be his cruelest trick of all. As an aesthete, Ozon operates with impeccable taste. The film is gorgeous in both its excesses and its restraint, as is Marine Vacth. At 20 she replaced Kate Moss as the face of Yves Saint Laurent perfume; she earns the film’s title and then some.

YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL (2013)

The exquisite pop-art-Rohmer opening sets a high stylistic watermark from which the film almost never dips. When Isabelle floats through a classmate’s party to M83’s “Midnight City,” laser lights glinting across her impenetrable visage, it almost makes me want to cry. The montage of Isabelle’s meetings with all her clients set to Françoise Hardy’s “A Quoi Ça Sert” is so fixated on its own delicate detail as to cease to be titillating; it is so much less. The film’s distributor is billing it as a “portrait of a 17 year-old girl, in 4 seasons and 4 songs.” All four tunes are sappy, beautiful Françoise Hardy, and all four are pure Ozon and pure, bitter irony—scornfully suggesting insights they never provide. As Hardy sings, “à quoi ça sert” (which roughly translates to “why even try”). Watching Young & Beautiful is like going up to one of John McCracken’s planks only to find it rigged to fall on you. Ozon has managed to make a film as mockingly arbitrary, as impenetrable and manipulatively destructive, and as false and inexplicable as his protagonist. In order to bring the movie to a close, he

brings in a guest. Charlotte Rampling, as Georges’ widow, meets Isabelle in the hotel where he died and gives her 300 euros to lay with her in the hotel room, chaste. I remember when she was young and beautiful and hard-edged, in The Night Porter, and when she was aged and scared and soft in Swimming Pool. Here she is cool as ice, and suggests the type of life, and the type of love, someone like Isabelle might eventually find. When Isabelle wakes up and the widow is gone, she looks across at her reflection, and whatever part of her split off that night on the beach returns. The film closes with her whole again, but Ozon can’t see past the “hole” in “whole.” He needed Rampling and Vacth to get to this point. With no material, no character, and no story, Ozon used two great beauties, great actresses, because he knew his only chance at redeeming his miserable, vapid naught would be in watching them fight for it. That’s an impresario. But something tells me that Brody’s comment would light up the same crystalline fire in Ozon’s eyes that we see in Isabelle’s when her mother calls her a whore.

THE BIG FISH d a v i d l y n c h ’s c i n e m a t i c silencio

by MAYA ROSMARIN

e has been recognizable as a cultural and lifestyle icon for about as long as he has been a major filmmaker. The highly-publicized life he has constructed for himself among the filmmaking elite of Hollywood—where each of his films is as much a part of the cultural iconography as, for instance, his teased-up hairstyle (which he has, by the way, kept relatively consistent since about the time of his first real commercial success)—has become so thoroughly entrenched in the American alternative cultural consciousness that it has become a sort of art form in itself. So although he is most widely known as David Lynch The Filmmaker, it’s not hugely surprising that he has become David Lynch The Entrepreneur, and still sees himself as filling the role of David Lynch

The Artist. For the past eight years, since the release of his latest full-length feature, Inland Empire, Lynch has suspended his work in filmmaking to instead pursue a number of eccentric commercial projects. In the meantime, he has recorded two studio albums which were met with a lukewarm critical response, released a short film/long advertisement for Dior that has very little to do with Dior, and collaborated with Whole Foods to vend his new organic fair trade coffee blend. Though he has abandoned—at least temporarily—his career in filmmaking, he carries a similar spirit through all of his entrepreneurial work. That spirit is deeply entangled with his activity in Transcendental Meditation, a practice that he sees as a great liberator of his artistic thought.

Because Lynch thinks of creative liberty in terms of physical mobility, he likes to discuss spiritual wellness by way of the external, visualizing it as bodily, and consequently artistic, flexibility. So the image he chooses, in his 2006 book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, to signify his creative stuntedness is a ‘Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity,’ something that stifles from without. It might have been the vision of this suffocating, smelly rubber clown suit that paved the way for one of his latest artistic ventures, a record of dreamy, ambient electro-pop, appropriately called Crazy Clown Time. Soon after, he released another similarly toned record, in which he opened up further by featuring more of his own oneiric vocals and less digital manipulation thereof. At the very least, his newfound creative boundlessness allowed him the space to release the pentup anxieties that had been haunting him since his childhood. When asked if he was frightened by many things as a child, he responded, “Many things. But troubled, more than living in fear. Really troubled… It was a suspicion on my part, but almost a knowing.” Almost a knowing—anxiety and pervading paranoia are central concerns in his film work, and they occupy a similarly prominent role in his spiritual wellness. In recent years, his creative energies have been gradually diverted away from abstraction, towards a more literal and more vulnerable type of realism. Lynch claims that the mantra that jump-started his career in Transcendental Meditation was “happiness comes from within,” so it is fitting that his painting and films have always worked with an expressionist aesthetic, allowing emotional interiority to seep into external physical landscapes. Since his first foray into meditation in 1973, he has conceived

and directed a network television show, ten feature films, and numerous shorts, each of which gets better with age. And more recently, he has launched several entrepreneurial ventures, including his David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee company; Silencio, his Parisian members-only nightclub inspired by the venue in Mulholland Drive; and his crudely-animated and crudely-conceived series of shorts, called DumbLand, solitarily developed and executed from the basement of his LA home. What’s perhaps most interesting about his most recent, highly commercial—and maybe even superficial?— business pursuits is that he seems to have traded the grim cynicism he harbored in the Blue Velvet era for a more audienceand consumer-friendly public image. The old Lynch’s anti-sentimentality for 1950s Americana kitsch stems from his perfectly ideal and perfectly typical Missoula, Montana (then Sandpoint, Idaho; then Spokane, Washington; then Durham, North Carolina; then Boise, Idaho; then Alexandria, Virginia) upbringing. He says that a “home is like a nest – it’s only useful for so long.” And so, as with his artistic media of choice, he and his family jumped from place to place, often lingering only long enough to get a taste for each location. But again, because “happiness comes from within,” such a shallowly-rooted childhood didn’t cultivate disdain for any one particular place, but for such places in general. He learned, rather than to depend on consistency of physical location for emotional stability, to look within himself for a source of constancy. Now he prefers to think of his spirituality in terms of water, rather than land—which is fitting, as his cross-media experimentation (film, music, visual art, business etc.) maintains consistent thematic volume, but has been shown to take on hugely varying shapes.

Or better yet, creative inspiration is a fish. In Catching the Big Fish, he writes that “if you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper…there are all kinds of fish swimming down there. There are fish for business, fish for sports. There are fish for everything.” Apparently fish even for David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee: a “100% organic, fairly traded, always fresh” cup of coffee so damn good that, in a short promotional video he made back in 2011, he goes so far as to endorse it: “Yeah, it’s really good.” Although he’s made a habit of jumping from project to project and medium to medium over the last thirty years, he’s been consistent in one major practice: Transcendental Meditation. Catching the Big Fish is steeped in the influence of the Bhagavad-Gita, Buddhist meditation practices, and of course the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who has been practicing and teaching Transcendental Meditation in India since he first developed it in the mid-1950s. Lynch has been so devoted to Transcendental Meditation that he launched a foundation to promote it; his David Lynch Foundation raises money for school-age children around the country to gain access to Transcendental Meditation (which he often shortens to TM, ironic because the phrase itself is trademarked). This funding goes toward the $1,500 down payment for an introduction to TM, which the Maharishi says “provides a lifetime of benefits.” But for those not satisfied with such delayed gratification, it also buys you a mantra and six meetings with a trained and licensed Transcendental Meditation Teacher.

Lynch’s book is largely an offshoot of his beliefs and experiences with TM, a ritual which he sees as hugely responsible for his creative productivity in the past several decades. While the whole project, and Lynch’s endorsement of it, is kind of gimmicky—stamping a name brand onto a brand of spiritual enlightenment—he credits it as the key that has unlocked his “pure, vibrant consciousness.” TM has been endorsed by countless big names—including Bono (though you might be hard-pressed to find something spiritual which he hasn’t endorsed), and Paul McCartney (who started practicing in his Magical Mystery Tour days). For the more skeptically inclined, it has also been adopted by the cynical likes of Charles Bukowski and Kurt Vonnegut. And when you are able to “transcend,” Lynch says, “you dive down into that ocean of pure consciousness. You splash into it. And it’s bliss. You can vibrate with this bliss. Experiencing pure consciousness enlivens it, expands it. It starts to unfold and grow.” That said, it’s still hard to see the Transcendental Meditation movement as much more than another star-studded, momentarily vogue spiritual fad—given its for-profit celebrity endorsements, as well as its extreme protectiveness of each member’s secret personal mantra. Lynch’s TM promotional work has turned into a kind of missionary work. But this sort of commercial turn in spiritual practice could be driven by the same impulses that drove him to make some of the best films of the second half of the 20th century. Lynch started it all as a painter. Animating his paintings did not come until he was well into art school in Philadelphia—first for its own sake, and then on the commission of a wealthy

patron, as an installation for a personal home collection. His more mature and commercially successful filmmaking began with Eraserhead in 1977, and continued through to Inland Empire in 2006. The transition from film to the radical digital aesthetic of Inland Empire marks an important shift in the trajectory of his career. Around the same time, he began marketing and distributing short films and business projects on the Internet, fully realizing the potential reach of the web, the surface of which he had only just scratched with the online release of his two webseries DumbLand and Rabbits in 2002. Inland Empire itself was not even completely developed before shooting began; he claims that at the beginning of each day of shooting he would hand his actors scripts he had written only the night before. This sort of unplanned risk-taking was prime preparation, and maybe even the trigger for, the business enterprises that followed. In the eight years since Inland Empire, Lynch has realized many of the paranoid delusional fears that abound in his artwork, allowing elements of his films to infiltrate his real life. The most literal translation is Silencio, cut directly out of Mulholland Drive and pasted onto rue de Montmartre. Of the club, Lynch has said, “I have the feeling that I have coaxed out some of the atmosphere and the characters from my films, and even from my music.” He blurs the lines between fiction and reality, drawing out the tension and otherworldliness of his later films, and reconstructing them in what he describes on Silencio’s website as “a series of intimate rooms, each dedicated to a certain purpose or atmosphere, including a live stage with a reflective

dance floor, an intimate art library, a cocooned sitting lounge, a spacious 24seat cinema, a smoke room, the 1SQM Gallery, the Blackroom, and many more.” It is the sort of place where one would not be surprised to see either Isabella Rossellini as herself, or Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy Vallens. 2006 marked the completion of Lynch’s last-released feature film to date. It was also the year that he published Catching the Big Fish, and that the David Lynch Foundation exploded in popularity following its founding the previous year. The pursuit of these new creative avenues was not delayed in the past for lack of money or dearth of commercial opportunity—in 1981, for instance, George Lucas offered him the chance to direct Return of the Jedi, but Lynch refused so he could direct Dune, which was a massive box-office flop. But it seems that Lynch has lately realized that the sense of happiness that he derives from Transcendental Meditation—“not a goofball happiness, but a thick beauty”—applies just as conveniently to real life as to the world of his cinema. In Catching the Big Fish, he writes, “cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And so you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. It’s a magical medium…it’s a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn’t exist before.” But can the same not be said for the outside world? Since that pivotal year, he has stepped out from behind the camera to accept a more conventionally public and entrepreneurial role. Among his most

recent projects has been the development of his coffee company, which has involved a collaboration with Whole Foods Market. Upon the release of the first round of products in the summer of 2013, he released a statement to his Whole Foods Market Shoppers reading, “I am very happy to tell you that David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee will now be available at Whole Foods Markets!!! It’s fairly traded, organic and tastes great. Give it a try—and remember there’s an idea in every bag. Thanks and all the best to you.” In July, he hosted a coffee-bag/record-signing to celebrate the completion and release of his second studio album, The Big Dream. For both of these projects, despite his plea to his Twitter followers—whom he addresses at the beginning of every tweet as “Dear Twitter Friends,”—that “the album The Big Dream goes diamond platinum,” he has relied almost exclusively on word of mouth for its publicity. As for the coffee, he produced an extremely low-budget, four-minute, single-take commercial in which he converses lovingly with a Barbie doll head, also voiced by himself. Like he says, “happiness comes from within,” even if that happiness assumes the shape of a toy doll. It’s tempting to break his career into two main eras—feature-filmmaking era David Lynch and post-feature-filmmaking era David Lynch. But there may be less of a divide between these two periods than it first appears. When he speaks about music, for instance, he describes his records with the same vocabulary with which he describes his movies. It could be that David Lynch has more to give us than just movies, or it could be that he never entirely identified himself with a single medium. Leaving behind film feels

natural, because Lynch has always been as much an artistic, creative brand as he has been a movie director. When he made the switch from film to digital, he started making films that were not made out of film; now, he is making films out of music, nightclubs, and coffee. Each of these creative ventures is stamped with the same hokey, kitschy, unmistakable brandedness that Lynch infused into all of his earliest artwork, but they all tap into a different kind of sensory awareness. Drinking coffee is, arguably, just as much of a sensory experience as looking at a painting. And by working predominantly in film, the artistic medium with perhaps the greatest dimensionality—of time, space, sound, light, etc.—Lynch has always granted himself the freedom to experiment with privileging unusual kinds of sensations. Think of the heavy, ambient soundscapes of Eraserhead, compared with the totally unadorned DumbLand. Lynch describes the path of his career so far as “going down a road, and then you veer off. It’s kind of familiar where you are, but it’s frightening.” Again, he comments on his work through the lens of travel—each of his experiments combine into some kind of composite transmedia storytelling, exploring similar themes through different avenues. Music, film, business, painting, and meditation all permeate one another, together composing a faintly familiar fish that surfaces every time in a different form. Each installation of his collected works conjures a vague recollection, an “almost knowing” of its artistic predecessors. It’s this strange continuity that makes David Lynch not just a movie director, but a lifestyle auteur.

above: DAVID LYNCH SIGNATURE CUP COFFEE COMMERCIAL (2013) below: detail from MAN EATING (2010)

THE CREATURE WITHIN how goodbye dragon inn, i can’t sleep, and manila in the claws of light make the stone stoney

by a l e x r o b e r t s o n

hen I think about the films of Tsai Ming-liang, I often find myself thinking not about the frenzied psychosexual energies they give off, nor about their director’s astonishing formal discipline, but only about how they made me feel physically. It would, I admit, be reductive to entirely separate a film’s affective capacities from its formal techniques; still, what I remember best about, say, 1998’s The Hole is the gnawing sensation it left in my stomach. Since then, I’ve pored over the structure and composition of Tsai’s movies, but not as some dispassionate academic pursuit—more, I think, as one might visit the doctor. Why have Tsai’s films made me feel deeply sick and uncomfortable at some times, and jittery and ecstatic at others? One obvious answer is his unusual, frequently disconcerting fixation on the body: its capabilities; its limits; its contortions; its excretions. Tsai’s characters writhe, curl, piss and brush their teeth; they are always dealing with the dilemma of having a body. At his best, Tsai zeroes in on his heroes’ material circumstances with a vividness that borders on the oppressive before he finds—as he always does—aesthetic liftoff. In The River, Lee Kang-sheng’s protagonist suffers from severe neck pains, convulsing in agony for much of the movie’s duration; I remember feeling by the end of the film as if my neck, too, was aching terribly. I want to focus in particular on one of Tsai’s movies—his 2006 feature Goodbye, Dragon Inn—and its points of contact with two other films: Claire Denis’ delicate and thoughtful I Can’t Sleep (1994) and Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light (1975), a classic of Filipi-

no cinema I caught during its six-day run at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this year. What brings these films together is not so much their “physical” nature—by virtue of which a movie like Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain could be included—as the special attention they accord to bodies, the spaces these bodies move around in, and the objects with which they interact. This last subject—the interaction between objects and bodies—is a particularly compelling reference point for I Can’t Sleep, a work of deep and precise beauty that nonetheless remains one of its director’s least-watched. The film depicts the experiences of three immigrants in Paris. Daiga (Katerina Golubeva), a Lithuanian actress, has come to stay with her greataunt; Théo (Alex Descas) works as a carpenter, saving up money to return to his home country of Martinique and to keep his wayward brother, Camille (Richard Courcet), out of trouble as best he can. Aside from its vaguely ominous pre-credit intro—two pilots we never see again, flying a helicopter over a highway outside Paris, inexplicably laughing their heads off—the film sketches out these characters and their meanderings with unusual delicacy. For much of its running time, I Can’t Sleep appears almost entirely devoid of conflict. Disagreements and emotional ruptures, if they crop up, are almost immediately smothered by the film’s overriding aesthetic of quiet contemplation. In an early scene, Théo and his apprehensive girlfriend, Mina (Irina Grjebina), discuss their troubled relationship on the roof of their apartment building. “You don’t love me the way I love you,” insists Mina, to which Théo replies: “I love you the way I love you.” These lines are delivered—in whispers, not shouts—as the audience looks out onto the rooftops of Paris. Smoke silently spills out of a building in

the distance. The first birds of the early morning twitter amongst themselves. A moment of acute emotional intensity, in other words, unfolds as if it were a softly sung lullaby. Much of this tonal heavylifting is given to static objects: wine bottles, framed photographs, flowers, vases, teacups, ashtrays. These objects are not the film’s focus of attention in any typical way; usually, their role is restricted to sitting on a table or ledge, watching silently as characters engage in conversation. It could be said that these objects serve basically the same function as those aforementioned rooftops, birds, and whispers: to pretty things up. Indeed, pause any single frame of I Can’t Sleep and you’re bound to come away impressed with how meticulous and tender it all looks and feels. But I also suspect these objects aren’t there merely for decoration. In his 1925 essay “Art as Technique,” Viktor Shklovsky says that the purpose of poetry, art, film, and so forth is to “make the stone stony”—to allow the world to express itself more vividly, to strip away the various meanings we assign to that world’s objects, simply letting them be. What we see in I Can’t Sleep doesn’t align perfectly with this theory, but it does have a kind of Shklovskian spirit nevertheless. An example comes early in the film, when Daiga opens a blue door and enters the apartment of her great aunt Ira. Denis does not draw narrative attention to the door, which serves its function in the movie quite modestly by opening and closing and then disappearing from the film for good. But as part of the film’s environment it resonates loudly: its deep, oceanic blue bouncing off that of Ira’s hat, its golden knob placed with meticulous oddness right in the middle of the frame. A similar effect is achieved when we later

I CAN’T SLEEP (1994)

see Camille, nude, lying on a hotel bed covered in soft purple blankets and pillows, looking at some jewelry and folded-up dollar bills. It is in these moments of narrative suspension that the movie reveals the immanent power of its objects, which, as Franz Wright once wrote, act like “shining words, busy silently saying themselves,” constantly asserting their very “being-ness”—and, it could be said, only that being-ness—without having to carry any symbolic or narrative baggage. Anton Chekhov once wrote in a letter to A.S. Gruzinsky that “one must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off.” I Can’t Sleep is, by contrast, chock full of flowers never meant to be smelled and bottles of water

never meant to be consumed. As the film proceeds, these apparently useless objects accumulate more and more power. Turn to any of its most gripping scenes and you will always notice a white phone on a desk, or a plastic fruit, or a bright red poster on the wall, each of them crucial to maintaining the quiet intensity of the film. (Take, for example, the way Denis models the aforementioned colors of Camille’s hotel room after the paintings of Francis Bacon—which, sounding very much like Tsai, she has called “raw, fleshy pictures”—or visually highlights the ring on the finger of Raphaël, Camille’s lover, as they make love.) Like the blunt physicality of Tsai’s films, however, this practice of “objectification” is best described

GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (2006)

not as a particular methodology or ethos but as a feeling. Under Denis’ gaze, kitchens and hotel lobbies and bowls of fruit and blue doors all purr with the potential of the uncanny. Despite his preferential treatment of human bodies, Tsai masterfully takes up this approach to the filmed object in a number of his movies. One thinks of the plastic-wrapped Doraemon plush doll under Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng)’s bed in What Time Is It There? (2001), or the bright and humming arcade machines that line Tsai’s debut, 1992’s Rebels of the Neon God. Although they’re often more distinct as cultural reference points than Denis’ flowers and wine bottles (in addition to Hsiao-kang’s Doraemon,

there’s the McDonalds given prominence in a scene from The River), Tsai’s objects radiate with the same physical specificity. Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai’s sixth and most formally daring film, takes place entirely in a Taipei movie theater pushing through a final screening of King Hu’s Dragon Inn (1967) before closing permanently. It’s Tsai’s most emotionally direct film, expressing a love for the cinema with a sincerity that would feel out of place in earlier, more despairing oddities like The River and The Hole. (The most striking shot of the film, in which Chen Shiang-chyi’s crippled ticket collector, standing behind the theater’s screen, looks up wide-eyed as its celluloid dots project on her face, betrays this sense of wonder and

nostalgia.) Like I Can’t Sleep, it operates with the quiet and contemplative logic of a dream. Where Denis’ audience is invited to ponder the beauty of a Paris skyline or a hotel lobby, Tsai’s can spend some bonding time with an empty hallway or a dark bathroom stall, with no pressing need to figure out what will happen next or how it will all end. But both movies continually draw from an oasis of profound aesthetic energy: not their characters, who, like figures in a dream, lack clear motivations, personalities, and even names, but rather their objects. In one of his fabulously uncomfortable set pieces, Tsai shoots three moviegoers peeing in their respective urinals—all right next to each other, of course. At its core, the scene is absurd: the characters pee, continually, for nearly three minutes, and we get to hear, if not quite see, every second of it. 30 seconds of peeing is uncomfortable, a minute bordering on implausible; three minutes almost insistently unreal. But there, on top of the tiled ledge connecting the urinals, lies a yellow carton of cigarettes, tying it all down to earth. Scenes like this one from Goodbye, Dragon Inn lose nothing of their distinctly make-believe core on account of Tsai’s visual specificity. They are still, in a word, impossibilities. However, as Aristotle put it, they are convincing impossibilities, feeding us events and interactions that could never happen with such grace and care that it feels as if we’ve seen them before. This, in turn, invests the slow goings-on of the film with a sense of profundity, a sense that whatever is happening (which, in case you haven’t caught it, is not very much at all) really matters. Tsai’s weaker films—among them the eye-rollingly languorous Vive L’Amour (1994)—can’t quite maintain this balance; the characters’ various absurd behaviors and movements

spiral out of control, unable to maintain contact with any referent staked in the world in which we live. Goodbye, Dragon Inn, in contrast, might be an even odder film than Vive L’Amour, but its oddness always seems visually and narratively tied to perfectly human impulses. The most profound revelations of these movies are not, however, always found in the idle object. Sometimes, it’s the act of putting bodies in motion and forcing them to interact with other bodies that brings the film to a new level of political and visual depth. This emerges forcefully in a scene from Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light that also casts light on an aspect of all three films I’ve neglected to mention until now: their depiction of, and participation in, queerness. Tsai and Brocka’s films often deal directly with homosexual identity, and whereas Denis like to keep quiet about this stuff, I Can’t Sleep has as its attention-getting antihero, you’ll remember, a gay Martiniquais immigrant who divides time between drag performances and serial murder. But what interests me about Manila and Goodbye, Dragon Inn in particular is not only their inclusion of queer tropes, but also their conceptualizing of what Jean-Ulrick Désert has termed “queer space.” For Désert, queer space “crosses, engages, and transgresses social, spiritual, and aesthetic locations.” To Dianne Chisholm, the notion is simpler: “queer space designates an appropriation of space for bodily, especially sexual, pleasure.” On the surface, Manila in the Claws of Light doesn’t seem to speak much to this concept. The film revolves around the iron-willed (and heterosexual) country boy Julio Madiaga (Bembol Roco) and his persistent search for his girlfriend, Ligaya (Hilda Koronel), who had been coerced into the titular city by the prom-

ise of better opportunities before being sold into prostitution. The tell comes something like halfway through the film, when Julio finds himself in a park at night surrounded by blaring neon signs and, as soon becomes apparent, the gay citizens of Manila, all of whom talk and dress a little differently than he does. Even as he sticks close to the movements of his naïve hero, Brocka skillfully sets up the park as a space for cruising—we see established groups of friends talking amongst each other, but also stray walkers and wandering couples, all ultimately searching for contact with other human beings. Eventually, Julio gets picked up and recruited by a male prostitute named Bobby (Jojo Abella), who also professes to be straight. The scene in the park and Julio’s subsequent venture into prostitution are both shot, like Tsai’s dramas, with a vested interest in the physical properties of the body—it is hard to ignore Julio’s bare, strained shoulders as he forces himself through a trick. When these bodies are put into the space of the park, the results are dangerous and exciting; the perilous unknown exists in harmony with a constant sense of discovery. Risk is present (and it should be, if we’re talking about prostitution), but it’s mostly communicated by Bobby, who informs Julio that police presence—rather than criminal activity—could make the park a dangerous space for wandering. Manila takes up a range of broader political issues—including the systematized abuse of migrant workers and the relationship between the Philippines and China—but the city’s institutional mechanisms are, for the most part, only glimpsed through their effects, never fully revealed. Police brutality and oppression of gay citizens isn’t witnessed; it simply hangs like a specter over the men’s pro-

ceedings, their contact, and their spaces. I am reminded of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel R. Delany’s elegiac account of the redevelopment of Times Square, in which he describes how “a field of viable socioeconomic diversity and its attendant wealth of contact, exchange, and enlightenment” (i.e., old, pre-gentrification, “queer” Times Square) was razed to the ground in favor of “pristine office towers and shopping malls” (the new, redeveloped Times Square). Manila rarely opts for Delany’s polemical route. There’s no shortage of political contentions in Brocka’s film, but they reveal themselves primarily as feelings, as movements, and as interpersonal connections between characters—or, in the case of the park, as a space. Like the fully objectified objects of Tsai and Denis’ film worlds, the park emits a power all its own, simply as a place in which events unfold and people walk around with a sense of freedom not offered to them elsewhere. But instead of rendering the film apolitical, this move is itself a political act. It renders in flesh and light and gravel the momentary emancipation of Manila’s queer residents—as well as the danger always attending to that emancipation. In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, we find an even more direct parallel to Delany’s mournful evocation of the old Times Square. The film is often interpreted as a straightforward eulogy for the movies “as they used to be.” One of its most famous scenes—and one of its few pieces of dialogue—finds the two elderly stars of Dragon Inn sighing that “No one goes to the movies anymore, and no one remembers us anymore.” To call this exchange a red herring would be disingenuous; Tsai often betrays his love for the movies and for the simple act of watching them (I think here especially of a famous scene

MANILA IN THE CLAWS OF LIGHT (1975)

in What Time is it There? in which Lee Kang-sheng’s protagonist sits transfixed watching The 400 Blows, one of Tsai’s personal favorites), and Goodbye, Dragon Inn is no exception. But a lot of what unfolds within the theater has nothing to do with watching movies, and this too is properly eulogized. Early in the film, a Japanese tourist played by Mitamura Kiyonobu leaves the screening of Dragon Inn and chooses to wander the theater, seeking romantic or sexual contact with other men. (In Times Square Red, Delaney cites the city’s shabby porn theaters as prime sites of human contact and cultural exchange.) As a generalized paean to the movies, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is touching but perhaps a bit arbitrary, as well as undermined by Tsai’s prankster-ish tendencies—what do the wanderings of an insatiate young tourist have to do with “the movies”? Why do all the audience members seem to care so little about the happenings onscreen? However, as a goodbye to the sort of space the old cinema represents—what Chisholm would call a “queer space”—the film’s various sympathies converge a little more cleanly. Seedy though it may be, the theater provides an environment in which rich interpersonal and sexual relations can be shaped. Movies will always have places in which they can unfold their wonders, but these spaces are no longer equipped to play this double role for those who have been pushed to the margins of society. Movies, in other words, are no longer spaces of contact and exchange. Denis, too, has her eye on such spaces: take, for example, the club in which Camille performs in drag. The liberation he finds in his performance—liberation from traditional gender roles, from monetary concerns, from his fraught relationship with his family—is palpable in his

swaying movements, but one cannot help sensing that this liberation is entirely transitory, contingent on where he is and who he’s surrounded by. Toward the end of the film, we see Camille traverse a family party, and though he’s playing along genially with the festivities, he looks utterly lost. Perhaps the most cogent example comes when Daiga, to escape a stalker pursuing her on a city street late at night, chooses a particularly telling space of escape: a porn theater. Reading film criticism can often feel like an exercise in wandering itself, through a movie theater crowded with Siegfried Kracaeurs and Viktor Shklovskies telling you that film can make the stone stony, can make the unreal realer than the real, and so forth. But it is one thing to read about this phenomenon and another to experience it, wholly and profoundly, in your heart and bones. In this sense, I have to give the final word to Virginia Woolf, whose “On Being Ill” suggests that her creative process wasn’t far from those of Denis, Tsai, and Brocka: “The creature within [the body] can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness.” Goodbye, Dragon Inn, I Can’t Sleep, and Manila in the Claws of Light all frame this experience—the experience of bodily life—as challenging, unpredictable, and yet ultimately liberating. When I watch these movies, this, perhaps, is all I seek: the transcendence of a phone on the wall, the salvation of walking in the park, the pure grace of a stomachache.

THE ACT OF KILLING CENSORED by ERIC INGRAM

Anwar doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know why he has nightmares. He strangles thousands of people on a rooftop where, 50 years later, he dances the cha-cha. He spends his teenage years working in a small Indonesian cinema and within two hours (ten years?) makes it to IFC Center and Hulu/Netflix. In his 20s (in the 60s) he is a political actor, killing, and in his 70s stars in our favorite film of 2013. History plays out as tragedy and represents itself as farce. Lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s problems arise in translating between languages. He actually says he was a good dancer because he was trying to forget what happened on that rooftop.

“Vio le ents— nce,” of abstr and yet all noun s, a i ing o ctions. W t still pla has the c ur b e most es th k no o who mak dies is h w that ev at referen specific e a wort e o h tw it for us unted by ry article t in a un f refer.As o hu i o v t f h erse clo e h man lives irt in the suffering thing to of If An u in th w e Sou hand of of the pe chwe k ar does an A o n’t k th Pa now meri ple n how cific. can i to w ow why s rite a h bout e has ni ghtm The A ar ct of Killi es, how ng? can

Joshua Op pe victims of nheimer’s original p roject was th to project fail e 1965-66 Indone sian Anti-C document the fam ed. The fa ilie milies wou ommunis we told ev ldn t Purge. Th s of the eryone the Communis ’t speak. The autho e original People sho rities wou ts were bru uld know. ld. In the tal. Really 60s we were th e brutal o These acto n es. rs use lang ua them. Th e word fo ge not only to descri r gangster, be their na from a wo the rra rd for free man. Com y remind us, unfail tives, but to produc When con e m in u gly fronted w nists try to ith reverse his , comes originally punished tory, the k for hers. Th their past crimes, the illers claim is is a prob . lem for his killers ask why Am erica is no tory. t

36 The Act of Killing is a command to recover the imagination and dig deep into the spaces where histories are being erased and papered over. It is a very political film. (Almost distractingly so.) The killers, inhumane, Machiavelli’s offspring, become storytellers, human beings, actors, speakers privileged with language. It’s tempting to say The Act of Killing is a brilliant and difficult film not because of what it might inform us about a topic too little discussed, but because it tells us what we know to be true. But with each noun we speak—these words included—we breathe life into the act of killing; each verb makes it into a metaphor. Though we hold it close, it remains and will remain exactly twenty feet away from the spotlight, so long as we choose to sit in the middle row of the theater. I’m king of New York.

Th rem ere i the ove s an tim kille d fro act o his es d rs, a m its f kil wi hee ream s for perp ling wh th a b ls tog s. Fo us, f etra that the ite p udd ethe r us ar aw tors is on ind foo ants. y on r on they ay. F and i ly p t i r ect age o We s came the r are m or th ts vic ossib ly, ra, oo ov e k tim le f a ee D m o edi reen all le then ftop— ing i illers s. T in a wo es ci ate ac vel w m ma , th oda tim d mo uld n nem by tmen s at o atche erri ges. ey a y, th e an vie eve a m tic t o nc s t ly r An re m e k d s. r e k h e ave rely t p f the e: a d he ru eena war C em illed a spa ric oc she cts th rep on ori are ce e ki e l o u l , u c ght resen riti ings. men s. I sh his st go— s, som for ca ta ou ra to t t ta E e l u e se w he ki ste ven t ry of ldn’t ngula pping em he ha ti a ir lle r e , . an film judg ve w ons We s, or d W co m orn go do e t e ma es it rne mes nt o ny r H to f pr i d e rzo us eas oduc g. fro e t h m Ho em? W l l y wo e od

37 advances , Terrence Thornton of The Act of Killing rs’. “History In a lengthy critique the lines of the acto e and history along r ratha theory of languag guage is history. O lan lence,” he says, “and The two is the history of vio tructed, prehistory.” elf linguistically cons and verbs; er, since history is its r violence are nouns m vit often responsible fo parts of speech mos liberate ourselves fro To s. l ones, conjunction the only truly radica as we can. mit as many of these olence we must com m (Com dissertation on the fil Terrence Thornton’s IT press The point is made in s Actors of Killing; M emory: Oppenheimer’ al methods mitting Violence to M s inventive rhetoric the work he employ nt in this 2012). Throughout many ways to recou he describes; in too the disto demonstrate what leting all nouns from t dramatically, by de o long, and short piece, but, mos sulting to some, to , like the film, is in sertation. The work fan of Elvis. certainly not for the

THEMES AND VA R I AT I O N S the soju-soaked moral tales of hong sang-soo by WILL NOAH

ne need only see two or three of Hong Sang-soo’s movies to figure out most of the Korean director’s pet subjects and motifs: filmmakers, academics, travel, weather, embarrassment, romantic disappointment, and, above all, drinking. His films are comedies of manners governed by formally strict but practically unenforced rules of social propriety that no one really seems to understand, least of all his protagonists. Many of his plots are set up in more or less the same way: a (filmmaker/artist/professor/ student) (arrives in/returns from) a (foreign country/rural vacation spot) and runs into an (acquaintance/ex-lover) and proceeds to go out for drinks with them. Often the narrative will be partitioned into two or three sections that mirror and

comment on one another. A signature shot has come to dominate his films, especially his latest, Our Sunhi: characters (often two, but ranging anywhere from one to a dozen) seated across from each other at a table littered with green soju bottles. This Korean liquor is the fuel that Hong’s movies run on, and its effects are as repetitive as the ritual of its consumption. Hong’s filmography is a drunk stumbling in circles: a long, arduous quest that aims forward, but always ends up returning to the same landmarks. Hong poses certain problems for the auteurist-minded among us, accustomed as we are to the pastime of spotting visual rhymes and stylistic tics across a director’s career. Auteur theory has changed over the years with the crumbling of the stu-

dio system and the rise of independent filmmaking, but we still find it hard to evaluate the career of, say, a Fassbinder or a Kiarostami without trying to connect the dots between their different projects. There’s a reason cinematic auteurism gained acceptance in the same decade that the literary mort d’auteur was declared: the idea that one person can claim authorial ownership for a body of work is as implausible in film as it is self-evident in writing. All one needs to do to become an author is to write something down; the term is value-neutral. Auteur status must be earned, and it must be earned through consistency. Auteurism is the practice of identifying that consistency. So what happens when consistency refuses to be coy and announces itself upfront? Confronted with this problem, the intrepid auteurist has no choice but to invert her usual line of questioning. Instead of spotting similarities, she must be attentive to differences. Hong repeats himself constantly, but never completely. Take Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, where two trips to a mountain park use some of the same camera setups, but the sky is sunny one day and overcast the other. That Hong is able to wring so much sadness out of such simple conceits is one of the great mysteries of his work. By threading variation through his repetitions, Hong teaches the auteurist to think more dynamically. She learns to trace a pattern of development, rather than pinpointing a static convergence. In following Hong through his two-steps-forward-one-step-back path of attempted self-improvement, she comes to understand the overwhelming sense of failure that motivates his films. Hong’s failures are a thrill to watch because they’re not romanticized or mythologized. They’re not beautiful, and they’re too prosaic to qualify as existential.

Hong’s characters are always struggling with varieties of impotence: romantic, professional, social, artistic, ethical. Sexual impotence is there too—soju takes care of that—but sex is also something that Hong’s characters use to distract themselves from other kinds of impotence. Take Kim Seong-nam (Kim Yeong-ho), the protagonist of Night and Day. A painter who flees to Paris after facing arrest for smoking marijuana, Seong-nam lacks the agency to set his goals, let alone go about fulfilling them. He goes to museums, but doesn’t paint. He reconnects with an ex, only to refuse to sleep with her once they’ve booked a motel room. He gets into a political argument with a North Korean ex-pat and attempts to settle it by arm-wrestling. The only object he can set his sights on is Yoo-jeong (Park Eun-hye), an attractive but bratty art student who he eventually coerces into bed. When he finally returns to Korea, it’s through no choice of his own, but because of his wife’s faked pregnancy, a manipulation that he accepts good-naturedly. This last section of the film offers a neat visual metaphor for Seong-nam’s behavior in the form of a pig butting its head against the window of a bathhouse, trying to get a better glimpse of the nude women inside. In his constant attempts to justify and rationalize his own actions, Seongnam could have been the hero of one of Eric Rohmer’s Moral Tales. Like Rohmer, Hong extends his inquiry into the moral worth of his protagonist beyond the mere categories of good and bad; both filmmakers are as much interested in the ways we do (and don’t) make decisions as in the content of those decisions themselves. Seong-nam vacillates between efforts to contain and fulfill his sexual desires, but both poles of his behavior end up harming others: the ex whom he spurns com-

mits suicide shortly thereafter; and in his hasty return to Korea he leaves behind a possibly pregnant Yoo-jeong. Hong tends to exaggerate the weakness of his protagonists even more than Rohmer did. In his earlier films, like Woman on the Beach, this makes them all the more contemptible, but in his more comic later works it makes their failings more understandable, if not entirely forgivable. ong is more inteested in storytelling than he is in stories. He often describes his films as having patterns rather than plots. Through the use of metafictional conceits, chapter-introducing title cards, and alienating camerawork, his films persistently refer back to the mediating presence of the storyteller. At its most ambitious, this attitude has produced ingenious structural conceits that rival the intricacy of similar experiments by Alain Resnais and Atom Egoyan. Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors depicts the aggressive courtship of Soo-jung (Lee Eun-ju), a young TV writer, by Jae-hoon (Jeong Bo-seok), a wealthy gallery owner, only to repeat it in a series of scenes that overlaps with the first. Some of these episodes merely expand our knowledge of the narrative by showing us moments of action that we missed the first time around. Others seem to completely contradict the first half of the film. In one scene, Jae-hoon meets Soo-jung in a park and asks if the gloves she is holding are the ones that he lost earlier. When this scene comes around a second time, it’s Soo-jung who asks if the gloves she has found belong to Jae-hoon. The incongruities that arise between the film’s two halves reflect the lovers’ tangled emotions and the essential disjunction between their perspectives. Hong’s structural experiments are less obtrusive in his more recent films. Doubling and tripling of characters, motifs, and

events are still common, but they tend to be contained within linear narratives. One exception is 2010’s Hahaha, which synthesizes the gentler tone of his later work with the demanding intricacy of Virgin. Jo Moon-kyung (Kim Sang-kyung) and Bang Joong-sik (Yoo Jun-sang) meet up to drink and swap stories about recent trips they each took to a town called Tongyeong. The stories they tell make up the bulk of the film; Hong only shows us their actual meeting – a mammoth binge, judging by the way that each transition from story to story ends with another round – in the form of a voice-over narration laid over black and white photographs. We quickly realize what the two increasingly intoxicated friends don’t: that they were in Tongyeong at the same time and met all the same people. Hong weaves the two men’s stories into increasingly convoluted patterns, incorporating a much larger cast of characters along the way. Yet while the basic structural disjunction of Virgin remains—these two characters don’t recognize the nature of their connection to each other—Hahaha is more optimistic about the configurations of the social world. Its various romantic subplots conclude in incomplete fulfillment, fragile reconciliation, and bittersweet disappointment, but every small victory in these characters’ emotional lives contributes to a rich social tapestry that we can see even if they can’t. Hong’s formal developments have reflected this desire to both adopt and move beyond his characters’ limited perspectives. Beginning with Tale of Cinema in 2005, Hong began to introduce conspicuous zooms into his technical vocabulary. These days Hong likes to film scenes in lengthy master shots in which zooms do the work of traditional shot-reverse-shot coverage, shifting the viewer’s attention in ways that mirror the subjective concerns

of the characters. What this does is divorce subjectivity from vision, and allow Hong to get inside his characters’ heads while at the same time maintaining his distance from them. Most film school textbooks will tell you that the way to show what a character is thinking is to treat the camera as their visual perspective, so that we see what they see. Hong almost never does this. Take the paradigmatic example of the soju table scene: the camera always shoots down, never across, the table. The characters are looking across the table at each other, but we see them in profile; it’s only by changing the size of the frame through zooms that Hong directs our attention to what they are thinking. Hong wants us to understand and empathize with them, but he also knows that their confused perspective is totally insufficient as a guide to the complexities of the situations in which they find themselves. If his films are going to go beyond failure, they need to incorporate subjectivity without completely succumbing to it. On a more visceral level, Hong’s zooms are simply alienating. Nothing draws attention to the physical apparatus of the camera like an undisguised zoom. The zoom belongs completely to cinema: nothing that the human eye does feels remotely like it, and it has no analogue in the motionless visual fields of painting and still photography. The Hong zoom made its first appearance in the first half of Tale of Cinema, a film-within-the-film that may be based on the experiences of the second half ’s protagonist Tongsu (Kim Sang-kyung). The technique could therefore hypothetically be explained as the awkward gesture of a student filmmaker, if it weren’t for the fact that the zooms carry over into the movie’s second half. Art and life are blended in an uneasy interdependence in Hong’s world,

with features of each popping up unaccountably in the other. Hong’s protagonists can never be sure whether their status as filmmakers gives them power over reality or estranges them from it.

n the first of many soju-drinking scenes in Our Sunhi, the title character’s ex-boyfriend Munsu (Lee Sun-kyun) tells her that she’s the central topic of his filmmaking career. “Why am I a topic?” she responds. Even as Hong’s men lust after their female counterparts, they treat them as cinematic abstractions. In Tale of Cinema, Tongsu becomes obsessed with Yeong-shil (Uhm Ji-won), the star of the film-within-the-film, following her until she finally consents to sleep with him. Tongsu barely seems to hear her when she protests, “There’s nothing special about actresses.” Hong rarely shows his filmmaker characters doing anything directly related to the making of a film, but these people seem to see reality as if through a lens, especially when their gaze is fixed on women. From early in his career, Hong has tried to show what it’s like to be on both ends of that gaze. In an early scene in On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate, Myungsook (Ye Ji-won) makes an impression on Gyung-soo (Kim Sang-kyung) by dancing for him and a friend in her studio. Hong shoots her routine not from the men’s perspective, but from behind her; thanks to the studio’s mirrored walls, we see both front and back sides of the shapely dancer, as well as the two appreciative males kneeling before her. Once again, Hong uses optical mediation (this is before he discovered the zoom, but the mirror serves his purposes here) to estrange our per-

VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS (2000)

spective from the literal point of view of any one character, while giving us a more complete understanding of the scene. We share in the desirous gaze of the men, in some ways even surpassing it, while at the same time facing them, receiving along with Myung-sook the tribute of their kneeling posture. Hong’s treatment of women has always been thoughtful, but recently he’s made a concerted effort to give them a more central place in his work. Each of his latest three films, In Another Country, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, and Our Sunhi, presents a fully formed female protagonist. Of these women, Haewon (Jung Eun-chae) approximates earlier Hong women most closely. An object of abundant male attention, as well as an aspiring actress, Haewon recalls the lusted-after performers of Turning Gate and Tale of Cinema. Nobody’s Daughter flips the gender perspective

of those films, but it also relishes the chance – especially in its early scenes – to turn away from men altogether. The sequence in which Haewon spends an afternoon with her mother on the eve of the latter’s emigration to Canada is genuinely unprecedented in Hong’s filmography: prickly but tender mother-daughter dynamics are not a commonplace in his soju-soaked world. Sunhi (Jeong Yu-mi) is, by design, a harder character to pin down. The three men (a film director, a film professor, and a film student, of course) who attempt to court her all project their desires onto her, to the point that even she can’t parse her true identity. This is most evident in the recommendation letters that her film professor writes her, which become more enthusiastic only after she expresses romantic interest in him. Finally there’s Anne (Isabelle Huppert), the protagonist, or rather, protag-

onists, of In Another Country. With the help of Isabelle Huppert, Hong uses Anne as a means of collapsing into a single figure the various notions of femininity that jostle for priority in his films. The film is framed as three screenplays written by a female film student stranded at the seaside town Mahong. In each version of the story, Anne arrives in Mahong, stumbles her way through conversation in halting English with the Korean locals, and meets a zealously friendly lifeguard (Yoo Junsang). In the first version, she’s a film director; in the second, an adulteress meeting with her Korean lover; in the third, a recent divorcée travelling with a professor friend. With this structure, Hong seems to be attempting to write his way out of the traps of masculinity. He attributes the narrative to a female author, and assigns the actress within it the role of a film director. In a country where she can’t speak the language, though, Anne isn’t calling the shots, and each segment of the film finds her flailing more desperately to find some emotional purchase on her foreign surroundings. This culminates in a soju binge to rival that of any of Hong’s men, as well as a consummation of the flirtation between her and the lifeguard that runs hot and cold across the triptych. In trying to understand women better, Hong is venturing into another country himself, so it’s not much of a surprise that he needs to translate their experience into familiar male-pattern failure in order to comprehend it. Does Hong ever really succeed in upsetting the male-leaning balance of his world? In Another Country certainly tries, but its metafictional conceit keeps its thoughts from solidifying into judgments. There’s no shortage of emotional truth, but it’s fleeting, like the weather; much of the movie’s sad-

ness and warmth evaporates on contact with reality. Our Sunhi is less evanescent, but perhaps more clear-eyed. As the title indicates, Hong no longer thinks he can understand women or men by looking at them in isolation. Sunhi belongs to her suitors, but they belong equally to her. Hong’s women will always be, in some sense, defined by him; this would be cause for alarm if it weren’t so clear how thoroughly he is defined by them. His characters struggle with the most basic of ethical commitments because they have a hard time understanding what he understands: that they are nothing more than their ties to others. There are no epiphanies in Hong’s cinema, only redoubled commitments. At the end of Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Jae-hoon makes a promise to Soo-jung: “I will correct all the faults I have. I swear on my life that I will.” This promise echoes in a weary refrain spoken several times in Turning Gate: “Even though it’s difficult to be a human being, let’s not turn into monsters.” Tale of Cinema ends with this type of resolution at its most threadbare: “I need to think now. Thinking is necessary. With thought, I can sort everything out. And even stop smoking. I have to think. To get out of all this. To live a long time.” Even the fact of consciousness isn’t something given in Hong’s cinema; it needs to be willed into existence. In light of these vows of self-improvement, Hong’s prolificacy looks like an attempt to maintain some kind of ethical awareness that’s always threatening to slip away from him. He may not be able to solve the problems that exist between men and women, but by keeping his camera rolling, he can keep us mindful of that vicious comedy, our heap of failures.

THE PARTY LINE all dressed up and nowhere to go: the virtual club-scape of last nights party

by t h u to d u r k ac s o m o

ow nice, to always be invited. Or, to never know that you’re not. The emotion of any party can be measured by the level of intimacy between guests; the material formalities all serve to reinforce a collective identity. Last Nights Party (I haven’t seen it spelled with a possessive apostrophe) presents the props, drinks, music, rooms and girls that cement these makeshift communities. Truly, the website thrives on the last two; all it takes for a Night is a beautiful girl, a camera, and some privacy. LNP’s search for the universal syntax of parties leads to a minimal relation, sustained by technology: the party between the camera and its subject. As far as the site lets on, there is one cameraman, one view and one voice to guide the spectators who didn’t get an invitation. The project of LNP is not entirely mysterious. Go straight to the LNP Soundcloud page and you’ll find songs posted by Merlin Bronques. Bronques put out several records in the 1990s of what might be called industrial rap; the music conjures the image of a rapper who’s not afraid to tie a flannel around his waist. Bronques launched Last Nights Party in 2004, concentrating primarily on photos and videos. The images traverse metropolitan parties from around the world. The success of the site seems to be measured by viewer support in the form of reblogs or tweets; that is, until you begin to recognize the presence of celebrity actors, musicians and high-circulation magazines. Ten years’

worth of photographs are divided into four categories, each with enough material to get you lost in your screen for a whole night: URBAN PINUP, DRIVE-BY, KISSLAND FANS, and MINIATURES. “Kissland Fans” is a well of media dedicated to the Canadian band The Weeknd, whose songs could be described as erotically somber party ballads. “Miniatures” features snapshots from the site’s Tumblr. Click on one photo and you can move through an endless cycle of posts. The occasional captions are filled with self-serious, declarative statements that relish cultural clichés. “Cocovan is going to be a pop star. She’s one of those French girl singers that talks with a French accent but sings without one. I think one of her songs is called Drama Queen, and she lives up to the name. She ‘kills her inspirations, and sings about the grief.’” This is the language of gossip. “Drive-By” is described as “the photos that I take in between parties.” This generally translates to photos of the cool kids, but taken in daylight. Below the image for a series titled “Vacation (Not)” is the following text: “Click on her gold bracelet to see money, a lot of seafood, a peace tattoo, a snow storm, the beach, Nicole’s birthday cupcakes, Patron shots, cheap-ass steak, the cutest dog, oyster shooters, the girl I love, It-Girl Shay DaKiss and her clan, Emily wearing clothes, the M&Ms that I’m allergic to, 60’s Cafe burger and someone’s broken glass of wine.” The itemization of food and cities stands in for the missing costs of indefinite consumption. LNP’s subjects smoke cigarettes, travel, drink and throw up, but these acts are only witnessed in passing. The

photographs hide how many funds are required to maintain this lifestyle. Activities must be tallied. LNP is an expense report without figures. “Urban Pinup” contains sexy profiles, usually of one individual. The locations in this series are significantly mundane: car garages, hotel beds, showers, sidewalks, bodegas. The backgrounds are rough around the edges, but the subjects pose like models. These tableaux are falsely democratic. On the surface is the pretense that the images have a politics beyond seductive bodies, that parties create a space continuous with every social stratum. LNP’s crude photographer-poet is given a personality in the site’s party videos, which capture the seductive language that goes into producing his diary of photos. The site’s Vimeo channel currently has 23 episodes, dating back to 2010. Each episode tentatively follows individuals caught up in the whirl of partying, posing candid events as narrative and vice versa. The camera is handheld and the audio is rough, but street conversations sound rehearsed, and the soundtrack is filled with club hits. This blurring of the rehearsed and the candid is not acknowledged by the photographer. “EP01” is set in New York City. The most jarring moment is when the camera is denied access to a club by two girls who come stumbling out, one of whom fails to hold in the contents of a night of drinking. The texture of the image resembles that of a fiction film—an impression supported by the brief introductory narration—but the vomit looks real. Why don’t the girls ask the camera to get out of their face when it lingers on them sprawled in the gutter? Was the camera ever going

to enter the club? The last character in the episode is a social roommate who is leaving for a party, trying to convince her friend to join. “Last Nights Party will be there!” she cries as justification. Later episodes will feature new aesthetic developments, but the self-perpetuating perform-and-document method of LNP remains constant from the start. “EP04” makes use of some techniques that are prominent throughout the series. Girls give confessions in cars (“Nothing lasts anymore. Parties don’t last, friendships don’t last.”); cities are characterized as events in themselves (“This is my first birthday in New York and you’re gonna miss it?”). These moments of rhetoric are broken up by eclectic activities. two girls walk side-by-side drinking milk and eating Count Chocula, while, in another part of town, an accented debutante lies in bed smoking Benson & Hedges and reading Arletty. The subjects reference art icons from past

eras and everyone dresses fashionably. Life seems to extend beyond the walls of the nightclub, but only so that it can generate enough substance to keep feeding the party machine. Partying is elevated to an abstract authority that mediates all relationships and attempts at self-satisfaction. Like Bronques’ camera, this authority subjects everything it encounters to the logic of its own desire, which means that it scrutinizes women most of all. Once LNP introduces famous faces, its subjects are no longer anonymous pedestrians: everyone the camera captures is a potential celebrity you haven’t heard of. The episodes begin to feature narration; Last Nights Party begins to speak, and the camera takes on the subjective view of a photographer named Larry Mannequin: “Everybody has a schtick now, and even photographers are posing for pictures.” LNP finds its schtick through the appropriation of cinematic techniques. Dialogue is subtitled and candid conversations are sometimes

dubbed. These enhancements are unnecessary for any communicative function; most of the subjects speak English and the dialogue is audible. Instead, the semiotic function of the subtitles is another method of transforming objective recording into performance, elevating conversation to the status of dialogue. The videos are a pastiche of the website’s photo galleries: icons come to life. In a 2011 interview, Bronques referenced Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries as an influence on LNP’s aesthetic, but his camera’s love for the grotesque and attractive undercuts any of his possible attempts at institutional portraiture. Bronques does not float above the community he observes, and his eye is drawn less to its institutional structure than to its erotic texture. The workers whose labor is necessary for LNP’s perpetual nightlife to take place—guards, bartenders, maids—appear only in passing. The videos identify with the partygoers, not the system that makes large-scale debauchery pos-

sible. The Party, after all, is determined by who shows up. Perhaps the series is best understood in terms of semiotics rather than ethnography. Mannequin offers a brief, self-righteous credo on the politics of LNP: “Party photography is a collection of lies. Every single photograph that you will take is a lie. But when you sit down to edit it later, that’s when you have the chance to make it the truth again.” The photographer is less concerned with the event as it occurs, and more with what can be communicated by the image in its reproduction. A major conceit of LNP is that images replace experience. One of Bronques’ female subjects addresses the camera to profess this view of culture: “If you want to understand the real Paris watch ‘Inland Empire’ by David Lynch in French.” Later, another woman explains that she moved to France for the literature: “[I] thought it would be romantic to sit where Walter Benjamin wrote or...I don’t know...go visit Voltaire’s residence...”

The episode titled “Fashion Therapy,” appropriately reflects the psychological effects of a lifestyle dependent on a network of beautiful friends. The episode opens with a woman going out to New York Fashion Week. But Mannequin quickly directs us away, back to her apartment to “bask in the glow of my own depression.” (That is, his own depression.) “Just as long as you use your pain to create something beautiful,” replies the subject. But just as quickly, the home is rejected as too boring, too quiet. As long as there are after parties spilling onto the street, the photographer must stay up. Towards the end of the episode—which involves footage of an Odd Future concert as well as an Iceland fashion festival—the photographer begins to fall in love, “Maybe it was her outfit, that hat, that shirt, that top, that necklace. Whatever it was, I’m back.” The camera has arrived at a love, not for any distinct figure, but for the materials attached to a body. Bronques could easily transform LNP into a series of advertisements for venues, hotels, or designers. Occasionally specific destinations are mentioned, but the cities appear mostly as stereotypes, embodying the myths accessible to any cursory knowledge of art and pop culture. Cinema itself becomes a fetish object. The series of episodes made up by “Mannequin Skywalker,” “Fashion Therapy” and “OCCUPY MIAMI” make use of an animation originally produced for the National Film Board of Canada. The title lends the videos a cinematic authority, suggesting that they are sanctioned by an industry that financially sponsors fiction. Bronques’ drive to latch onto high-culture signifiers goes beyond mere stylistic tics, appropriating

even the symbols that aren’t considered part of the artist’s work. Still, LNP fails to reproduces the impact of the films whose techniques it cribs from. In movies like Opening Night and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, John Cassavetes—a major LNP influence—used a faux-documentary aesthetic to engage his viewers in the performance of producing a film, and, ultimately, to grapple in a visceral way with the identity-warping experience of artistic creation. Bronques, for all his leering interest, is too hesitant to get inside his subjects by challenging the culture they participate in. This means that his characters remain thin. Bronques’ claims about making truth begin to look more and more far-fetched the more episodes one watches. Where are we supposed to find truth in intertitles that are variations on both The Exterminating Angel and Godard’s signature title lettering? Or where can we find sincerity in women who blend together quotes from Theodor Adorno, Arthur Miller, Douglas Morrey, and Wings of Desire? The women in LNP are not preserving any cultural ethic, but reciting a litany of trivia knowledge. Bronques has created a composite personality of aimless youth lacking in most of the things that traditionally make up an individual. To watch sequential episodes of LNP is to witness the condensation of a catalogue of women down to one collective figure, whose defining trait is privilege. Some of the more recent videos have been subtitled, “A DOCUMENTARY OF NOW.” Now may or may not be a moment worthy of celebration, but the language of LNP seems to lack the ability to communicate anything beyond the present. Bronques’ now is

a rather sobering look at a politically ambivalent generation, seduced into using the camera as a confessional. Their networks leave them no room to confront that which is new and radically different in the global society, only the empty satisfaction of seeing themselves reflected in the screen. Jean-Luc Godard also chronicled the contemporary landscape of a young generation who relied on the quotes of iconoclasts. Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) rehearses many of Mannequin’s concerns in Godard’s Masculin Féminin (1966). Here we find a youth society that is educated in art history and the leftist ideology of the times, indoctrinated by both pop culture and a college education. Godard titles Paul’s interview with a model identified as Miss 19 “DIALOGUE WITH A CONSUMER PRODUCT.” Paul quizzes her about birth control and socialism. The topics make her uncomfortable, but Godard is just as critical of the haughtiness of the questions as he is the ignorance of the interviewee. He pokes as much fun at Paul for what he thinks he knows about the foreign wars and famines lurking in the background of contemporary French life as he does at Miss 19 for what she doesn’t know. Paul’s questions are clearly motivated by his desire to satisfy preexisting judgments, rather than to hear what his peers have to say. When Mannequin restages this type of interview for a new generation, he no longer has the journalist’s pretense of objectivity; he’s actively participating in the very lifestyle being interrogated. What LNP has proven is that the contemporary, idealized generation is conscious of its place in cultural history. Bronques’ most important lesson is that any further research about youth

should take as its object the ways in which they document their own existence (LNP is present on almost every major social media site). How can the entitlement that comes along with going to the party be justified as a broad study of the now? “To understand first and then to change and then formulate a theory” is the resolution Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky) makes in Godard’s La Chinoise in order to overcome the tension between her bourgeois background and her commitment to worker solidarity. Veronique intends to start a revolution, but is romantically isolated from her suffering peers. A long conversation with the French philosopher Francis Jeanson reveals that Veronique views herself as the descendent of a long tradition of French radicals. She’s absorbed orthodox Communist theory by rote, and she fails when she has to form a theory of her own post-revolution society. Theory, Godard suggests, is the passive sacrifice of the entitled. Bronques, who certainly understands how a generation can identify itself, has perfected a transatlantic language of the Party. The latest LNP episode, titled “Documentary Of A Party Girl,” depicts a group of young, white females in Los Angeles dancing to the songs of Beyonce. (I’m still waiting for the progressive theory on this event.) Bronques’ love for the erotic character of Society would make him a worthy subject for one of Godard’s Sixties films. Watch enough LNP and you’ll acquire the language of parties—not a network of individuals to get you an invitation, but a false memory of what the party might have been like. This language promises to produce a worldly-wise community, but all it can describe is a contemporary hedonism.

BORDER CROSSINGS a drift through the films of mati diop

by MAX NELSON

hances are, if you’ve had a first glimpse of the incredibly talented thirty-one-year-old French filmmaker Mati Diop, it was in a Parisian subway car at rush hour. That’s where she first appeared onscreen, five minutes into Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum (2009): wide browed, deep eyed, hair undone, surrounded by fellow travelers but miles away in thought, her eyes fixed far beyond the upper lefthand corner of the frame. As an actress, Diop moves with graceful self-possession and disarming ease, but even when she commands the screen—as she does, magnificently, in 35 Shots’ central dance scene—she often seems to be holding part of herself in reserve, keeping something hidden, or reflecting on something

faint and far away. (In her other major role to date, as a put-upon prostitute in Antonio Campos’ Simon Killer, she was miles better than the film.) The same tension between absence and presence runs through Diop’s work as a director: five shorts totaling slightly under two and a half hours. (I haven’t managed to see the first of these, Last Night, which she made at age 22. In a recent interview, she glossed over the film succinctly: “I had no idea what I was doing.”) Diop’s films, both in their curious, uninhibited treatment of the body and their resourceful use of lowgrade video formats, work on the senses almost as directly and seductively as Denis’, but they nearly always orbit around something missing, elided or unknown: lost stretches of time, absent lovers or would-be

lovers, far-away homelands half-forgotten and vividly remembered. Her characters are all displaced, either geographically (the young African men of Atlantiques; the French-Vietnamese filmmaker in Big in Vietnam), temporally (the teenage heroine of Snow Canyon, dreamily estranged from the present), or—in the case of the subjects of her latest film Mille soleils—both. Diop was born in 1982 to the Senegalese musician Wasis Diop, a veteran film composer who became a crossover solo success in the early Nineties after writing a hit single for the Tunisian singer Amina. Wasis’ first solo record, released in 1992, was the soundtrack to the film Hyènes, directed by his brother Djibril Diop Mambéty—and it was Mambéty, a legendary figure in Senegalese cinema, who would end up casting the longest shadow over the career of his brother’s daughter. (Mille soleils is an elegiac meditation on the legacy of the director’s 1973 lovers-on-the-run classic Touki Bouki.) Mati Diop grew up in Paris and went to film school at Le Fresnoy-studio national d’arts contemporains, where, when she was 26, she met Denis and landed the lead in 35 Shots of Rum. At the time, she was also working on her first mature short, Atlantiques (2009), a fictional portrait of a small group of African migrant workers gathered around a campfire on the shores of Dakar. The characters have a murky, fuzzily defined physical presence that contrasts sharply with the practical—and, above all, material—demands that shape their lives. Of the group, the most vocal is a young man not yet out of his teens, reflecting on a recent transatlantic journey he made on a rickety pirogue to bring money home to his mother and sister—who, in a jarring insert, are shown mourning at his grave years before the film takes place. Even before that reveal, there’s something ghostly about these

men, most of them unnamed; their silhouettes are constantly being illuminated by the fire’s intermittent sparks, then blurred again with the surrounding darkness. In Diop’s films, identity tends to be malleable, narratives are always branching or multiplying, and alternate possibilities—ways the movie could have been, or other movies it might still become—are always being suggested without being fully fleshed out. Snow Canon (2011) is the director’s most narratively straightforward film to date—a teenage girl left alone in her family’s isolated mansion in the French Alps falls into a tentative seduction routine with her new American babysitter—but it’s also something of a tease, an erotic daydream that keeps inching shyly away from consummation. Big in Vietnam, released one year later, opens with the collapse of a film shoot: after one of the lead actors in an adaptation of Les Liasons dangereuses disappears without a trace, the film’s exasperated French-Vietnamese director storms offset. Wandering through Marseilles, she stumbles on a Vietnamese bar, stands outside the window, makes prolonged eye contact with the man singing karaoke on the other side of the glass, and steps inside. It’s a stretched-out moment of exposed desire that echoes several passages in Snow Canon—the young heroine studying her au pair’s body as the latter cleans a window, or running a sponge along the older woman’s back as she sits in a hot tub post-breakup—and culminates, like those scenes in the earlier film, with a change in the movie’s trajectory. The two start singing a duet, which soon becomes the soundtrack to the long-delayed filming of a love scene in Les Liasons dangereuses. As shooting proceeds on Les Liasons dangereuses, Diop’s movie, which began in a wandering, discursive mode, narrows its focus and finalizes its itinerary. The hero-

ine leaves the bar with her karaoke partner, they wander across a beach, and he remembers how he came to France. He traveled, he tells her, in a cramped ship’s quarters from Vietnam to the Philippines. On the way, his wife gave birth; upon arriving, they lived for months in a refugee camp. When he finishes his story, the two expatriates are left—like the young girl in Snow Canon—stuck in a space whose limits and borders are still vaguely defined, as if the movie they’re acting out is still partly in the making. Mille soleils (2013) is something new both for Diop, and, I think, for nonfiction cinema. The documentary-fiction hybrid has, for the past decade or so, occupied a strange place in the film festival circuit: ubiquitous enough to be a kind of genre unto itself, but still too varied in its forms and expressions to bear any generalizations well. Diop’s new movie is a specific kind of hybrid, a fiction centered on the real-life subject of a previous fiction film. This model is, in itself, nothing new. It found one of its fullest expressions in Abbas Kiarostami’s Life and Nothing More, a travelogue set in the region where, five years earlier, Kiarostami had shot his breakout feature—and which had been devastated in the interim by a severe earthquake. In Life, which followed a thinly fictionalized director in search of the earlier movie’s two young stars, Kiarostami was consumed with the problem of establishing a morally productive relationship with his subjects even in the moment of their suffering and loss. Mille soleils, which returns to Magaye Niang, the aging star of Mambéty’s Touki Bouki, on the cusp of that film’s fortieth anniversary, focuses instead on the way the subjects of movies use the films in which they’ve appeared: as time capsules, fantasies, and indirect, flawed ways of connecting with others. In a pivotal scene midway

through Mille soleils, Niang arrives at an outdoor public screening of Touki Bouki. “Where I’m going,” he’s told his wife, “I’m a celebrity.” But the young kids in attendance refuse to believe that he was once the devil-may-care young romantic onscreen, and seeing the movie again ends up opening old wounds. At the end of Touki Bouki, Niang’s character reaches a Paris-bound boat alongside the young woman with whom he’s just risked his future to flee Dakar, then, at the last minute, leaves her on the ship and flees back to his old life. This was roughly the same fate that actually befell the film’s two stars: Mareme Niang, the female lead, left Dakar shortly after the film was released; Magaye stayed. All of this is revealed throughout the film in fits and spurts. Mille soleils opens on Magaye herding cattle to the slaughter, backed, in one of the film’s rare intrusions of non-diegetic music, by Tex Ritter’s melancholic theme for High Noon (“Do not forsake me, oh my darling, on this our wedding day…”). His face is a tough, striking surface, still handsome, topped by a shock of white hair. Diop is at her most self-assured while filming him in moments of introspection: staring absently out of a taxicab window, squinting into empty space while driving his herd across the street, or fixating on Mareme’s forty-year old image onscreen until the present seems to dissolve around him. “I was really in love with Anta,” he tells a friend after the screening in an emptied-out nightclub. “Why didn’t you follow her?” the friend asks. “I don’t know.” We hear the exchange, but see only a woman sweeping up debris from the dance floor—a nod on Diop’s part to a similar device used throughout Touki Bouki. (Early in that film, Mambéty layers the sound of the couple’s lovemaking over footage of the sea nearby.)

After this point, Mille soleils becomes much more difficult to place. Diop orchestrates a phone conversation between Mareme—now working, she says, as a security guard on an Alaskan oil rig—and Magaye, their first contact in decades. Crossing the street after leaving the phone booth, Magaye catches the eye of a young motorcyclist decked out as his character in Touki Bouki. They have an impromptu stare-down, the young man drives off, and Magaye, all of a sudden, is wandering through the Alaskan wilderness. A nude woman his age walks through a grotto, over a hill and out of sight; it’s unclear whether these shots take place in settings continuous with Magaye, or far away. Reunited on the soundtrack, if not in space, the two of them have an off-screen conversation against footage of the frozen hills, just like their counterparts in Mambéty’s film made pillow talk against another, much warmer setting. He quotes James Baldwin: “You don’t have a home until you leave. And once you’re gone, you can’t come back.” A drumbeat fades in. “I think I’ve heard this song before,” she murmurs. “Sure. And you will hear it again. There will always be somewhere to sing you this song.” Cue a rousing live reprise of “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling,” which returns us to a close-up of Magaye standing where we left him on the streets of Dakar. It’s an overwhelming passage, and much of its power depends on the way Diop frustrates our attempts to follow the spatial logic of the scene. From Magaye’s lengthy, weary trek through the wilderness, she cuts to a close-up of his face flitting through snow-covered trees, then to the object of his desire passing behind a waterfall that resembles neither previous setting. When the characters finally address one another, it’s in voice-over; their bodies, one senses, never meet, because the spaces in

which they’re moving never synch up. Like the campsite in Atlantiques, or the forest where much of Big in Vietnam’s film-within-a-film takes place, or the far-off island lit by fireworks in Diop’s 2006 artist video Ile artificielle-Expédition, the Alaskan landscape of Mille soleils’ final quarter is more mental than physical: a space constructed piecemeal by a consciousness deprived of any fixed, stable orientation to the rest of the world. Magaye’s estrangement from his home—in contrast to that of the director in Big at Vietnam, the babysitter in Snow Canon, or the young man in Atlantiques—results, if anything, from a refusal to leave it. His mind keeps reaching out to shadowy lands and unknown countries, and we sense that his mental space is disjointed and fractured precisely because his thoughts are fixed on places he’s never known. His condition—that of being left spiritually homeless by his decision not to leave home—suggests that Diop’s other heroes are suffering from something on top of their removal from hearth, family and country. Like the singers of certain old American gospel songs, or, for that matter, solitary Western heroes like Gary Cooper in High Noon, they simply don’t feel at home in the world anymore. The effect of the Touki Bouki screening midway through Mille soleils—in which Diop cuts back and forth from the admiring faces of the audience and the fuzzily-projected ocean onscreen—is to suggest that cinema, for the painfully exiled as well as the existentially unmoored, can be a kind of temporary resting place, if not a permanent residence. “With those lights,” the director in Big in Vietnam remarks to her companion as they sit on a hill looking down at Marseilles, “I feel like we’re in Vietnam.” “You’ve been there?” “No,” she replies. “But I’ve seen pictures.”

FA R F R O M WORDS the medium-bending career of laure prouvost

by OLIVIA DOMBA

“T

his is a very important statement and demands all you [sic] attention,” reads a handwritten page in The Artist’s Book, a print collection of images and quasi-autobiographical writings by the French artist Laure Prouvost. “This page is so happy you are looking at it” is scrawled in a small box in the center of another page, its only contents. “This page is so slimy,” reads one page; “This text slaps you to keep you awake,” reads another. “Ideally on this page would be the most beautiful image.” The first image that confronts the audience of For Forgetting, Prouvost’s first solo exhibition in the United States, further confirms her fondness for conceptual text components. A floor-to-ceiling sign composed of crisp, white Arial type on a black background,

it dominates the lobby of the Bowery’s New Museum: “IDEALLY THIS SIGN WOULD REMEMBER YOU.” Prouvost heavily incorporates text into her video and film pieces, and her latest, How to Make Money Religiously (2014), a major component of For Forgetting, is no exception. “Just hold on the images,” reads one intertitle in her intentionally imprecise English. “Even reading this will make you richer,” promises another, echoing Prouvost’s initial suggestion that following the film’s steps exactly will lead its viewers down the same path. An old television monitor in the first portion of the installation delivers yet another assurance. “This film is here just for you,” it states, syllable by syllable. “I am here just for you.”

Born in Lille, France, Laure Prouvost moved to London in her early twenties to study film at Central Saint Martins. In the ten years between her time at Saint Martins and the brief stint she spent studying at Goldsmiths, Prouvost worked as an assistant to the conceptual artist John Latham, whom she has described as being “more like my grandfather than my ‘real’ one” and who functions as the real-life basis for the conceptual “Grandad” featured in her work. One of Prouvost’s chief recurring fictions, the character was first introduced in a 2011 performance appropriately titled Grandad, in which she claimed that he was stuck in a tunnel. The narrative of Prouvost’s Grandad culminates in Wantee, a video installation commissioned for an extensive Tate Britain exhibition on the artist Kurt Schwitters. (To the surprise of critics, bookies, and herself, Prouvost won the 2013 Turner Prize for Wantee in a race that heavily favored the “constructed situation” artist Tino Seghal.) Titled after Schwitters’ nickname for his much younger partner, who was known for perpetually offering their guests tea, the piece imagines a close friendship between Schwitters and Prouvost’s Grandad—both a concept and, in her account, a conceptual artist. “I was invited to do the project because it was known that my grandfather had work by Schwitters!” Prouvost claims in the Schwitters in London exhibition catalog. Set in the muddy, dank living room shared by her Grandad and grandmother, Wantee expands her Grandad’s mythology. “MY GRAND DAD LAST CONCEPT WAS TO DIGG A TUNNEL TO AFRICA WITH OUT BEING NOTICED BY THE AUTHORITY,” another page in The Artist’s Book, gains a new dimension when, in Wantee, Prouvost opens a wooden hatch in the floor of her grandparents’

living room to show her audience the tunnel he constructed and, if Prouvost is to be believed, got stuck down. The room itself is filled with the detritus of her grandparents’ existence—the video’s most explicit nod to Schwitters and his Merz Barn, a barn in the Lake District that Schwitters had renovated by incorporating sculptural elements into the space’s furniture and walls. Recreated in the exhibition space, the dining room table is cluttered with garish and somewhat kitschy ceramics, allegedly the work of Prouvost’s grandmother: teapots shaped like bottoms (her Grandad, we learn, was a bit obsessed with bottoms) and teacups shaped like mouths with spouts for handles. Schwitters’ influence is felt less in the space’s conceptual underpinnings than in its material form; quick cuts from sanitary exhibition-style photographs of Schwitters’ sculptures to objects in the room point to the way Schwitters appropriated chair legs and other functional objects as art. The kitsch, bottoms, dirt, empty potato chip bags, and poorly drawn window on the wall (directly adjacent to an actual window) are all catalogued in Prouvost’s voiceover, which explains the meaning and uses of each object in the room. “What interests me is how the artist can control so little the way his work will be perceived, how the work will change with time and place,” Prouvost has said. “I have also been thinking about the idea of displacement and how the past gets reinvented constantly. For example, the fact that the Merz Barn was ‘saved’ has reinvented Schwitters’ work, because it is now exhibited completely out of context.” While Prouvost constructs obsessively specific environments in which her work is presented, her mythological grandfather was clearly unable to foresee the ways in

which his work would be explained and interpreted—even if that work begins and ends with Prouvost. Prouvost is fascinated by the way that capturing an object as an image can bend or distort the object’s original meaning, a problem closely tied to one of her other central concerns: the limitations and potentials of translation. Her first video, which she originally narrated in French and then had mistranslated into English, was of objects found in a flea market. Farfromwords: car mirrors eat raspberries when swimming through the sun, to swallow sweet smells (2013), a video installation piece that Prouvost based on her experiences in Italy after winning the Max Mara Prize for Women in 2011, found the artist making a similar attempt to break down the barriers between high art and everyday life—to close the gap between image and object. Like For Forgetting and Wantee, Farfromwords consists of both film and installation components. The film, Swallow, plays on a monitor in the center wall of a keyshaped and heavily collaged structure in the middle of a gallery space dotted with readymade-like sculptures, accompanied by Prouvost’s signature signage and raspberries perched on small shelves for the audience to eat. With its shots of sunny skies, flowers, naked women swimming under a waterfall, and, of course, piles upon piles of raspberries, all set to the pulse of someone breathing deeply in a hazy close-up, Swallow whisperingly integrates its audience into its own images. “You are in the middle there,” Prouvost says in the film, “in the middle of these women, in the image.” It, Hit, Heat (2010) was conceived as a “3D film without using 3D.” Like Swallow, it’s intended as a kind of immersive sensory experience; in this case, Prouvost’s

self-imposed challenge was to make a film that smells. Driven by an aggressive drum beat, chopped up by jarringly quick cuts, and featuring Prouvost’s trademark intertitles, the film was designed to be projected on a full wall at the Tate Britain with extremely loud surround sound. Tranquil images, like a frog swimming in a pond and snow falling on a street, are juxtaposed with footage of a tree being cut down, falling down “in the middle of the room…just here” and just missing your head. “It smells red,” whispers Prouvost over an image of burning embers. Atmosphere and space are an integral element of Prouvost’s work. Most of her films are designed for highly specific environments that actively play on the themes and content of the action onscreen. At a recent screening of her work in conjunction with the opening of For Forgetting, Prouvost made a point of carefully explaining the conditions in which each film was shown. Deeper (2010), which consists of single shot of Prouvost framed from waist to shoulder, continuously pushing her hands closer to the camera and repeating that she wishes that “this video was deeper,” was displayed on a monitor fixed to the floor. Vegetable Video involves Prouvost telling a story about vegetables that “fell on her bed” in the middle of the night through vegetable-shaped holes in her ceiling. While Swallow simply used props in the gallery space to expand the sensory parameters of the piece, Vegetable Video constantly references the relic-like vegetables sitting on a pedestal underneath the screen. Swallow could theoretically exist and function without its raspberries, but Vegetable Video wouldn’t be the same without its relics. Prouvost attempted to downplay the relationship between her own work and that of Schwitters by introducing

her mythological Grandad, but it’s hard to miss the fundamental similarities between her own artistic aims and those of Schwitters’ application of his Merz collage style to physical environments. Merz was a means of giving found fragments and objects the status of art through collage, an attempt “to create connections, preferably between everything in this world.” The Merz Barn emerged from an even more elaborate constellation of connections: Schwitters was at once making art from the materials of his environment and making his environment out of art. Since its creation, it’s come to represent a certain way of integrating art into everyday life, and ultimately of shattering the distinction between the two. Schwitters’s environments weren’t necessarily practical or designed for replication and consumption, but they were a means of deconstructing the parameters of l’art pour l’art. In the same way, Prouvost’s choice to pair actual raspberries with Swallow breaks down the assumed limitations of film spectatorship. She forces us to participate in the film, not just passively consume it. She invites you into the film, but she also has a habit of extending her presence beyond the limits of the frame. In Vegetable Video, she gestured to the bottom right of the frame, under which the actual vegetables were piled. In Monolog (2009), she set up an extended interaction between herself and the audience. “I’m going to point things out,” she says before gesturing and talking to people in the crowd. She instructs us to imagine that her head is somewhere above the frame, on the ceiling; she wanted to get a bigger screen, but that just wasn’t in the cards. Monolog is an extended experiment in Prouvost’s ability to meddle from the screen with the

world beyond it. Her constant questions and concerns focus on the quality and condition of the space in which the audience exists with the film. Are we cold? She provides us with an animated image of a log fire burning to warm us. Do we need some light to see the person sitting next to us? Prouvost turns on a light in the film and the screen goes white. How to Make Money Religiously presents another image of reality heavily skewed towards the demands and expectations of its audience. Whereas, in Monolog, Prouvost manufactured her audience’s problems, How to Make Money Religiously initially presents itself as an overly simplistic answer to our pre-existing problems. We want money (or so we’re told), and the film is here to show us how to satisfy that need. How to Make Money Religiously is an exercise in extracting money from wealth. It never promises to give us money or show us how to make money; it promises to make us rich. Prouvost juxtaposes images that recall the bizarre and sensual pleasure of Swallow (wet sand crumbling between fingers, a stick of butter running along a tabletop) with banal and trite stock images of falling coins and a close-up of armpit hair blowing in the summer breeze. We may not enjoy all of these images, but they’re here to make us richer, and they do just that. Unlike the spam emails on which Prouvost is constantly riffing, How to Make Money never leads us to sense that its promises are too good to be true. The complexity of those promises, the type of pleasure she can provide, and the ways in which we go about understanding that pleasure are at the heart of Prouvost’s work. She cultivates skepticism, celebrates it, and, most importantly, places it into conversation with faith.

THIS UNWORTHY SCAFFOLD realism, special effects and the cinema

by j ac k s o n a r n

t may be too early to judge what place in the canon Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity will occupy, but I can already say what its legacy will be for me—it was the first 3D film I ever sat through without getting a headache. It might have been a lucky string of coincidences—a good night’s sleep, plenty of water—that kept me from suffering through those ninety-one minutes, plastic glasses sinking down my nose every thirty seconds, blood vessels pumping in my temples. But I prefer to thank the team of filmmakers. Perhaps that should be two teams: the first consisting of Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, playing astronauts trying to return to Earth; the other captained by Cuarón, who bombards the pair with endless chunks of outer-space shrapnel designed by Tim Webber and Framestorm, sculpted by Emmanuel Lubezki, and choreographed by Mark Sanger. Watching it all felt something like going to a lonely place and looking up at the stars. My usual aches and pains seemed so insignificant as to be almost indecent. Gravity deserves a highly overused cliché: it made me forget I was watching a movie. If convincing me to shut off my brain was a victory on the film’s part, it must be counted as one for its special effects, which are both extraordinary and perfectly convincing. Separating the real and the computer generated halves of the movie—that would have given me a headache. The heads of Sandra Bullock and George Clooney—I’d seen those before. But the rest of their bodies? The spaceships? The stars? And those little touches, that sad Marvin the Martian doll

floating through the empty room, for instance —could they have been the work of computers, too? Exhausted, my brain accepted Cuarón’s whole fictional universe as real without a further thought. Nothing makes members of my generation, raised on Goosebumps, Space Jam, and Saved By the Bell, feel older than re-watching a beloved childhood special effects flick. Unlike our parents, or our parents’ parents, we recall a time when, in our sweet ignorance, we couldn’t recognize those movies for the cheese that they were, and found no metaphysical difference between the spaceship on the television and the carpet below it. (Could it be that the true childhood rite of passage is realizing how godawful the exploding skyscraper in Independence Day was all along?) It was Gravity that finally converted me to the belief that CGI is the salvation of the cinema, not the millstone around its neck. All those second-raters (James Cameron, Ang Lee, Hitchcock) who had left my eyes worn out with 3D hadn’t fully understood their own tools. In their eagerness to tinker with the rules of cinema, they’d exhausted the gimmick of breaking the fourth wall. Only Cuarón was clever enough to discover the real frontier, the new concavity that 3D permitted. A tiger jumping off the screen looses its fright factor after a few roars, but an astronaut drifting away from us taps into something inexhaustibly mysterious: our longing, present since the birth of the cinema, to jump through the window and escape into make-believe. It’s easy to make believe with Gravity, because its every detail has the pores and the imperfections of real life—even when it’s blatantly unreal. Children who watch

it now will, I predict, never have a moment of disillusionment to rival mine with Independence Day. But it’s not enough to praise Gravity for the realism of its special effects. The concept of “realism” in fiction has been mangled to the point where it can be used to describe everything from Crime and Punishment to the Daniel Craig-fronted James Bond movies. This should come as no surprise; if one judges a work of art by its accuracy at imitating the real world, then it becomes nearly impossible to qualify this accuracy (is it visual? psychological? historical?). When the great Marxist critic George Lukács praised Thomas Mann for his realism, he meant that he had refused to indulge in style for its own sake— stream of consciousness, cubism, theater of the absurd—and instead focused on the rudiments of the story that had some basis in day-to-day human experience (its characters, for instance, or its plot). But Lukács’ definition seemed dated even in its own era, the era when Joyce, Picasso, and Stravinsky were busy jumping without explanation from one newfangled technique to another. Realism is a style, too, and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t tried his hand at making art. A century later, this is plainer than it’s ever been: the “effortless” realism of those outer space shots cost Cuarón and his team seven years and a couple hundred million. If we’re going to talk about realism in cinema, then, we’ll need to think about it not only as a style, but as the ultimate style: overpowering in its effect on the audience, engulfing plot, character, and all the other elements of fictional storytelling that Lukács unsuccessfully tried to keep dry. So far, I’ve been talking strictly about visual realism. Non-diegetic sound, superfluous action, and everything else the Dogma 95ers hated is beyond my scope,

at least for the moment. What I’m really talking about, then, is a cinematic style that prevents the audience from telling the difference between special effects and reality, between what has been programmed and what has been merely filmed. It would be hard to deny that dragons, tigers, and spaceships generated from millions of lines of binary code have come to seem as real, in my sense of the word, as reality itself. Some will say that I’m about a decade late on the uptake here, and some will protest that I’m a little too early. But even this latter group would admit that the uncanny valley is crossable. (There’s an easy way to test where you fall: watch Gravity, then ask yourself how much of what you’ve just seen is computer generated. If you’re like me, you’ll guess something in the neighborhood of fifty percent. The correct answer is eighty.) It’s a troubling byproduct of today’s hyperrealist cinema that audiences who grow overly accustomed to flawlessly accurate visual effects cease to be discerning. They become consumers, absorbing what they see without question, as I did, trembling through Gravity. If this sounds harsh, or non-exclusive to recent CGI films, it’s because these films assume a version of cinematic history in which realism and artistic virtue are near-synonyms. Like a photograph, a film is by default a perfectly realistic depiction of its subject. The effects that cloned Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr. or animated Rotwang’s robot in Metropolis wouldn’t arrive for decades after Edison and the Lumière brothers, and even then, they sought to approximate reality even as they manipulated it. Artists across all mediums rely on visual realism to create the sensation of wonder; it’s for this reason that many of the great surrealists of the 20th century

(Dalí, Magritte, Escher) were painstakingly devoted to it throughout their careers. If we accept all this, then there’s a clear hierarchy to all special effects: an impeccable CGI spaceship is more convincing, more extraordinary, and more successful in its purpose than a model on a string. A twenty million dollar spaceship is better than the five million dollar version. As digital ones and zeroes wipe out any distinction between fake and genuine, the story concludes, cinema returns to its roots in absolute visual realism, after a long pubescence of green screens and rubber masks. And yet—realism is only one style out of many, and a relatively recent one at that. For a far older, more pedigreed theory of aesthetics, we can look to the prologue to Henry V: … pardon, and gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that have dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object: can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million; And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder: Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance; Think when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth; For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings...

It’s easy to forget that these lines were inspired by crude necessity, not

poetic brilliance. The reason there are almost no set directions in Shakespeare’s plays is that there were almost no sets—the wooden swords and soapbox thrones at the Globe were high-end stuff in their day. We can blame lush period-piece movies, directed by the likes of Baz Luhrmann and Franco Zeffirelli, for making us forget that Shakespeare’s audience would have had to use its imagination, or risk going insane with boredom. One actor would have had to suffice for Kenneth Branagh’s army of extras; a splintered crown would have been all the company could find to complement the king’s soliloquies. But the Globe’s low budget didn’t destroy Henry V. Few theatergoers complained of boredom as Henry flirted with Katherine, or walked out in the middle of the Saint Crispin’s Day monologue. Even today, it’s possible to simulate the Elizabethans’ experience by sitting through a good film in an unfamiliar language; any frustration over having to read the subtitles is gone inside of ten minutes. Starker sets merely focused the attention on the beauty of Shakespeare poetry and the subtlety of his dialogue. A lot has been written about how the awkward requirement that male actors play female parts enhances the gender-bending themes of the comedies, and Harold Bloom makes an even stronger case for the tragedies: One of the most fascinating qualities of Shakespearean art is the elliptical, or leaving-out element. Why do we not see Antony and Cleopatra alone onstage together? Is the marriage of Othello and Desdemona consummated? What happens to Lear’s Fool? Why does Shakespeare have Macbeth slain offstage? […] Angus Fletcher, a

great literary critic of my generation, remarks that what matters most in Hamlet is what doesn’t happen. I would expand that observation to all of Shakespeare. Isn’t it probable that Shakespeare’s obsession with leaving-out, in the face of which the audience has no choice but to decorate the actors in its thoughts, arose from the limitations of the stage itself? A theater patron accustomed to filling in the gaps of the physical set wouldn’t have minded the massive, suggestive ellipses that help to make the plays fascinating; realism, at least as we now understand the term, was the bargain price he had to pay. Ellipses are rarer in commerical narrative cinema than in literature, because of the mistaken assumption, the bane of so many films’ third acts, that more information is always better (see, for example, Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, which insisted on providing a solution to the delicious mystery of whether Beatrice and Benedick had already been lovers before the start of the play). Again, it seems probable that the tendency to tell more arose from the temptation to show more, to dress up Shakespeare in a big budget and a cast of thousands. But this tendency forces realism and literality into a world that was never intended to sustain them. The role of the audience, whose mental participation once fueled the play from start to finish, dwindles to that of a mere spectator. The late Chris Marker sums it up nicely: “As a result of saying it can show anything, cinema has abandoned its power over the imagination.” There are Shakespeare films that challenge my generalizations: Lawrence Olivier’s WWII-era production of Henry V preserves the original prologue and

clockwise from top left: GRAVITY (2013), INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), SPACE JAM (1996),

HAMLET (1948), DOGVILLE (2003), SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY (1987)

begins and ends with a theater, acknowledging the artificiality of everything that happens in between. Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream goes even further and sets the action in a big white box, surely the closest a modern director has ever gotten to the realities of Shakespeare’s day. While these are the minority cases (for every Brook there are fifty Zeffirellis), they suggest a broader trend that, with apologies to Gravity, I consider more interesting than today’s brand of hyperrealism. Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville deserves a special place among representatives of this trend. Over the course of almost three hours, von Trier tells the “sad story” of Grace Mulligan, a runaway who tries to hide in the sleepy Colorado town of Dogville. She forms something like a romance with Tom Edison Jr., the people’s young, self-appointed leader, but finds herself being exploited in increasingly horrible ways by the townspeople in exchange for their silence. As befits a von Trier film, the “good, ordinary” people of Dogville, as the narrator ironically refers to them, are the most dangerous of all, claiming absolute moral uprightness even as they beat and rape their visitor. The catch (a gimmick, grumbled some critics) is that von Trier makes his cast act out his dark fable on a huge, shadowy soundstage, without any buildings or props. Houses are chalk outlines on the ground, their interiors visible to all. Roads are only a few feet wide. As a theatrical production, it’s unlikely that Dogville would have raised many eyebrows—an avant-garde production, yes, but still in the same order of magnitude as the tamest Broadway fare. (Quentin Tarantino speculated that if von Trier had written it as a play, he would have won the Pulitzer Prize.) But as a major

motion picture, starring Nicole Kidman and released at the time when the current wave of big-budget franchises and sequels was beginning, it seemed Neanderthal in its refusal to put cinema’s rapidly growing tool chest to use. More and more movies were being filmed in warehouses, then filled with digital phantasmagoria, but wasn’t abundantly clear why von Trier was keeping his warehouse empty. The gamble paid off handsomely. After ten bizarre minutes, one enjoys Dogville normally, but with a sense of active participation in its fakery. Before the audience’s x-ray vision, the townspeople stand naked, with no small-town nostalgia or gothic mystery to distract from their fundamental wretchedness; they’re like lab rats, more cruel than pathetic. In one half-comic, half-horrific scene toward the end of the film, they take turns raping Grace, hiding vainly behind invisible walls. By removing the houses from Dogville, von Trier humiliates his cast of characters, and forces us to stay aware of the differences between the haves and the have-nots (or, if you like, between those who get screwed and those who do the screwing). Rather than suggesting the absence of style, empty sets exemplify style par excellence, brilliantly mirroring the content of the film. Von Trier doesn’t want us to hallucinate buildings, any more than Shakespeare would have wanted us to hallucinate battles and coronations. We imagine a spectacle as we watch Henry V, but, like lucid dreamers, we’re still conscious of imagining it. Watching von Trier’s film is an act of introspection in the same mold: rather than see a house where there is none, we see the fundamental absurdity in the concept itself. A house is a symbol of love and comfort. Like any powerful symbol, it is effective because one rarely

stops to think about how powerful it is. Imagining the buildings on the streets of Dogville is easy, because most of us have spent our whole lives walking past buildings without really looking at them. The paradox is that once we’ve spent time in von Trier’s set-less town, we start to pay more attention to where our myths of love and comfort come from. Eventually, we realize that we suffer from the same disease as the townspeople: we ignore evil and sweep it under the rug of folksiness, peacefulness, and equality. Even in the Land of Opportunity, the rules of life are ugly and feudal: power, invisible but always present, comes from whether or not you own real estate. One rarely associates Dogville’s brand of postmodern, self-referential storytelling with sincere political messages, but von Trier pontificates so ferociously that he sometimes manages to convince us that he’s working in the only medium political activists have left. In the movie’s furiously literal ending—a photographic montage of the poor and homeless, counterpointed by David Bowie’s “Young Americans”—he discards his own metaphors (the town is clearly America and Grace the American immigrant) to condemn the hypocrisy of American exceptionalism. As if by some kind of executive order, all reviews of the film pounced on this “cheap shot,” and pointed out that von Trier had never actually been to the United States. Yet this politicized backlash marked a major victory for von Trier—on paper, it seemed impossible that his movie could have made a political point of any kind over the roar of its own formal experimentation. Instead, total set-lessness sharpens every aspect of Dogville: its starkly drawn characters, its bleak tone, and, counter-intuitively, its harsh message about the United States.

Slavoj Žižek may have been too optimistic when he said that all of contemporary cinema confronts the question of how to make a film. And yet there are hundreds of recent movies that find creative ways to interrogate the craft of moviemaking: in addition to Dogville, I think of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which reinvents the musical biopic genre with Barbie and Ken dolls, Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, about the impossibility of adapting Lawrence Sterne’s novel, and Adaptation, which conflates its own plot with the story of its production. The only thing these works have in common is a gambit: they admit their artificiality upfront and trust the viewer to respond however she likes. Then there are films that try to bury their own constructedness beneath impeccable (or sometimes embarrassingly bad) CGI. No matter which franchise we’re dealing with, the message to the audience is always the same: swallow what’s on the screen, don’t question it! The average Hollywood blockbuster now costs so much to make that it almost necessarily has to stick in this second camp, conforming to the same reliable “special effects plus melodrama” formula it perpetuates. It’s a strange paradox that movies like Dogville, on the other hand, cost so much less to make that Hollywood studios can barely afford to make them. Audiences prefer spectacle, even when the question of what goes into it, and what lies beneath it, is more intriguing than the spectacle can ever be. They’re so used to twenty million dollar spaceships that they’ll never embrace the charm of a model on a stick. Which brings me to the greatest special effects film ever made. If it’s too neat to say that The Wizard of Oz was a glorious accident, it’s certainly true that no one involved with its shooting had any

this page and following: THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

idea it would turn out to be a masterpiece. For the director, Victor Fleming, it was something to take his mind off of Gone with the Wind; for MGM, it was a savvy way to cash in on the success of another great fantasy film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The screenwriters’ words are silly, and for the most part the actors give stilted, dated performances. But masterpieces, like special effects, aren’t entirely defined by intrinsic perfection—just as much depends on the memories and poignant associations that the audience lends them. The first time I saw The Wizard of Oz, with my sister and my mother, I must have been about six years old. I learned all the songs by heart, fell in love with the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, and then forgot about it when I discovered Star Wars. When I returned to it, a decade or more later, the things I’d taken for granted as a child—security, love, con-

tentment—were getting harder to find. I realized then that The Wizard of Oz isn’t a children’s movie at all, but a movie about childhood, told by sad adults trying to travel back in time. As the painful pleasure of nostalgia hit me, I fell in love with the production design of Oz: special effects which may have been intended to be realistic in 1939, but now seemed like the awkward inventions of a child playing with toys. Every string is visible; every mountain is a canvas painting. When Dorothy and the gang gallop through the poppy fields, the camera has to cut away before they crash into the wall three feet in front of them. I wouldn’t have it any other way. To see the strings, to think about how easily they fooled me when I was six, to shudder at how cynical I’ve become, and then, in spite of myself, to be deeply entertained, is the purest cinematic experience and the most marvelous special effect I can think of.

Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion come to the Emerald City to ask the Wizard for gifts. They’re at their most joyful, skipping down the yellow brick road, when they think they’re about to receive them. But their hero turns out to be a humbug—a selfish, pyrotechnic bully. Was there a little of David O. Selznick in the Wizard? The tiniest bit of Fleming himself? No matter. I care more about Dorothy, that brave girl, who realizes that the power to travel anywhere in the world has been inside her all along. The epilogue in her bedroom always felt sad to me when I was younger, since it signaled a return to sepia, Kansas, and normality. But watching it again, I heard a glee in her voice that I’d never picked up on before. The excitement with which she exclaims, “And you—and you— and you—and you were there!” is the

same feeling the Elizabethans got seeing Henry V for the first time. It’s the thrill of dressing up reality in thought, transforming ordinary things into glorious illusions —the thrill of feeling your own mind at work. Moviegoers are easily bored. What dazzles today is passé tomorrow; children brought up on Gravity and Avatar might never find these films cheesy, but they may tire of them, anyway. If there’s a way to avoid the diminishing marginal returns of artificial realism, 3D, and CGI, it lies in the largely untapped resource of the audience. The lesson Oz taught us when we were children was always true: we have enough courage, brains, and heart inside ourselves to put any onscreen razzle-dazzle to shame. Cowering before the booming voices and floating heads can be great fun, but it’s always more rewarding to pay attention to that man behind the curtain.

from top: JULES AND JIM (1962), ANGEL FACE (1952)