SCREEN MACHINE | ISSUE 2 | ABSENCE by Screen Machine

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2012

ISSUE 2

“ABSENCE”

SEP/OCT 2012

ABOUT THIS ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS on p.1 CORRESPONDENCE on p.2 FROM THE EDITOR on p.3

ESSAYS AFTER THE FILM by Brad Nguyen On nostalgia in “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Tropical Malady.” p.5 DESIRE: NOTES AND SKETCHES by Phil Coldiron How great movies derive their power by leaving spaces for our thoughts and desires. p.11

GHOSTLY PRESENCE by Elliott Logan A look at the haunting use of archival footage in “Senna.” p.18 THE DEATH OF THE CRITIC by Huw Walmsley-Evans A recount of the author’s meeting with the critic Andrew Sarris. p.25

REVIEWS Whitney Monaghan on MOSQUITA Y MARI on p.32 Daniel Fairfax on TABU and FAUST on p.34 Andrew Gilbert on THE AVENGERS on p.40 Stephanie Van Schilt on ALMAYER’S FOLLY on p.43 Aaron Cutler on BERNIE on p.47

CONTRIBUTORS Badra Aji is a Melbourne-based artist. Phil Coldiron is a writer and programmer living in Brooklyn. He is the Film & Electronic Art editor at Idiom Magazine, and his work has appeared in Cinema Scope, Moving Image Source, and LA Weekly. Aaron Cutler lives in SĂŁo Paulo with his wife and collaborator, artist Mariana Shellard. He keeps a site, The Moviegoer, at aaroncutler.tumblr.com. Daniel Fairfax is a doctoral candidate in Film Studies and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Andrew Gilbert studied film at Columbia College and is currently based in Chicago, working on his Masters in Gender Studies. He writes a film blog at kinodrome.blogspot.com. Elliott Logan is a Masters student at the University of Queensland. Whitney Monaghan is Melbourne-based critic currently working on her PhD in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. Her research examines the figure of the queer girl in contemporary screen culture. Brad Nguyen is the editor of Screen Machine and an Honours student at Monash University. His writing has appeared in Senses of Cinema, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and Overland, and he can be found at @bradnguyen. Stephanie Van Schilt is a writer, editor and Kill Your Darlings Online Assistant. Huw Walmsley-Evans is a film critic and doctoral candidate in Film, Media and Cultural Studies based in Brisbane. His research examines film criticism as a cultural institution at the beginning of the 21st century and he can be found at @hWalmsleyEvans. This issue of Screen Machine was commissioned with funds from Copyright Agency Limited.

CORRESPONDENCE DEAR SCREEN MACHINE: In “Ontologies of Australian Cinema”, from the previous issue, Daniel Fairfax makes the claim that the great cinematic auteurs welcome the stochastic elements of reality into their filmmaking, rather than attempting to force reality to conform to their texts. True enough in itself for some filmmakers such as Herzog, Lynch and Scorsese, and this is, of course, the key to understanding the purpose of the Dogme 95 manifesto. I think, however, it is worth uncovering the truth in what Fairfax asserts somewhat further in its opposition: simply think to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), which finds its disconcerting atmosphere from the emotional exhaustion of the actors, achieved not through the imposition of a particular style, but by the aggressive and potent process of stripping bare the social conditioning of the actors through numerous retakes. This continues until, finally, the actors shuffle leaden-faced and zombie-like through their lines, leaving the audience with a tripartite sense of alienation between the characters onscreen, as well as between themselves and the characters, and as a result, the film as a whole. I suspect this triple alienation is part of the key to why Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis (2012) has been poorly received, as it achieves its bestial exclusion of empathy not through exhaustion, but simply through a disinterested set of egos talking without listening. Perhaps this is the same for Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty, which I haven’t seen, but perhaps not and Fairfax is right to call it “sterile, aseptic”. Sincerely, ROBBIE FORDYCE School of Culture and Communication, Melbourne University

FROM THE EDITOR

creen Machine continues into this second issue with another thought experiment, the idea being to push ourselves to go against the grain of accepted wisdom and to critically re-evaluate how we relate to cinema. In the previous issue, the writers were asked to discuss “realism” as it relates to cinema, endowing the term with a positive value, fully aware that the conventional practice amongst film critics is to regard discourses of realism with suspicion. Since the publication of the first issue, the conventional condemnation of

realism was notably reinforced in Richard Brody’s recent article “The Problem With the Liberal Cinema,”1 which doggedly grouped together films as intellectually and aesthetically disparate as Olivier Assayas’ Carlos and Andrew Haigh’s Weekend under the umbrella of "realist cinema" without offering anything in the way of close analysis and without acknow-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Richard Brody, “The Problem With the Liberal Cinema,” The New Yorker, 2012.

ledging that there are in cinema many different realisms that do a great many different things. We will therefore take Brody's article as a verification that the first issue was an exercise worth undertaking. For this issue, our essayists were asked to discuss cinema in terms of “absence.” Again, the theme around which this issue is organised is designed intentionally to challenge us in our writing; film criticism as a practice is generally tied up with descriptions of a film’s positive content rather than discussions of what is not there. So how does absence figure into cinema? We might recall the importance of “structuring absences” in film criticism, particularly that of Cahiers du Cinema in the 1970s. This is the idea that what is left unsaid by a film performs a necessary role in forming the ideological content of a film. As rich as this idea is, none of our writers have gone in this direction: Huw Walmsley-Evans has written a moving personal essay inspired by the absence in the critical landscape left by the American film critic Andrew Sarris who passed away earlier this year; Elliott Logan approaches the idea of death via another route in his discussion of Senna and the power of film to render what is irretrievably absent as a presence; Phil Coldiron, by way of Stanley Cavell, discusses how images produce desire by showing what is absent to the viewer and how

this structures the melancholic and redemptive qualities of cinephilia; and I reflect on the difficulty of remembering images after our initial encounter with them through a discussion of Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady. As diverse as our writings are, what perhaps unites them is the idea that film’s significance lies in its relationship with something beyond (or absent from) cinema, be it a film critic, a sporting hero, movie stars or lovers. To be a cinephile, then, is not about escaping the world. For us, movies are our way into the world. This issue also includes five intriguing reviews of contemporary cinema: Daniel Fairfax discusses the relationship between literature and film in Miguel Gomes’ Tabu and Aleksandr Sokurov’s Faust; Andrew Gilbert interrogates the ideological implications of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers; Stephanie van Schilt reflects on the poetry of Chantal Akerman’s Almayer’s Folly; Whitney Monaghan takes notes on the cinema of the unspoken in Aurora Guerrero’s lesbian drama Mosquita y Mari and Aaron Cutler reviews the latest comedy from Richard Linklater, Bernie. The evocative illustrations for this issue are by Badra Aji for whose special contribution we are very grateful. —Brad Nguyen, Editor

Brad Nguyen

AFTER THE FILM Both “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Tropical Malady” are films about how nostalgia fails when deprived of images.

’m sure many of you will relate to this situation. When I was a kid, I would obsessively watch and re-watch this particular film that I owned on VHS. It doesn’t matter what the film was or whether it was any good (for the record, it was the Disney film Aladdin); what matters is that the film made me happy and that, whatever it is that the movie made me feel, I felt compelled to experience it again and again, at least once a week over the course of my tenth year. I don’t relate to that kid so much anymore. As someone who attempts to play the

part of a “cinephile”, discussing and writing about film on a regular basis, to return to films I already know well purely out of pleasure seems like a luxury and inimicable to the relentless process of knowledge acquisition that somehow seems mandatory to me. The adult me now often feels compelled to “justify” repeat viewings of films as research: Did I remember that detail correctly? Have I fully grasped the formal features that made that scene work? But perhaps, in a way, I relate more to that kid than I realise.

What was my act of re-watching that film but a way to deal with the separation anxiety that comes after watching something that you’ve fallen in love with? And though there are many reasons to write about film, perhaps one of the central motivations is the desire to nostalgically recreate that moment of encounter. In the past there was only that one film that I watched religiously each week; now I have many lovers and instead of re-watching them, I write about them. I’m reminded of a great moment in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Clementine/Kate Winslet and Joel/Jim Carrey are in a bookshop where he is trying to convince her to start a relationship with him. She is wearily trying to dissuade him she’s been idealised by men before and she doesn’t want it happening again. But her efforts have the opposite effect to what is intended: her apparent vivacity and intellect make Joel desire Clementine all the more. They are at the start of an epic romance though they don’t know it yet. But this is not really the start of their relationship that we are witnessing, but the memory of the start of their relationship! Suddenly, and incredibly, bits of the mise-en-scene start disappearing from frame—the printed text on signs, whole books—until the entire scene disappears. What a wonderful way to visualise the fragility of memory. Okay, memory fades sure, this is a banal statement to

make but we don’t often speak of how we remember film when we talk or write about the experience of cinema. We’re more likely to talk about the "sensual experience" of film, recounting concrete details: music, camera movements, lines of dialogue, actor’s gestures. In essence, what we are doing is trying our best to evoke the present-ness of the film in the immediacy of our encounter with it. What we forget, though, is that an image has its ultimate impact after the encounter, when we no longer have concrete access to it, when it is absent to us. The ultimate fate of an image is determined not in the cinema or in the living room or on the train with your smart phone; it is determined in the murky terrain of memory.

film that strikes me as pertinent to the discussion thus far is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy’s 1964 French musical about a doomed romance. It’s an unusual musical in that with the sound turned off and the subtitles turned on, you might have no idea that you are even watching a musical — there is no spontaneous breaking out into song and dance; the actors are blocked in a naturalistic style; and the dialogue, similarly, makes no attempt at rhyme or rhythm and is delivered in a recitative manner. The film is only a musical at the level of sound – the lines of dialogue become lyrics simply by virtue of being sung to Michel

The excitement of this first act is cut short when Guy is drafted into the army, marking the beginning of the second act, titled “The Absence”. In this extraordinary section of the film, Geneviève finds herself caught between the anxiety of being pregnant by a man she loves but who may never return and the romantic advances of a rich diamond “Why is absence so heavy to bear?” dealer. She bravely holds onto the memory of Guy but finds this Legrand’s sublime score that harder to do than expected. shifts between big band “Absence is a funny thing,” sings brashness and sweeping Geneviève only months after romanticism. This tension Guy’s departure. “It feels as if between the fantastical utopia of Guy left years ago. I look at this the musical and the more realistic picture, and I forget what he style of the visuals and dialogue is really looks like. And when I think duplicated in the doomed of him, it’s this picture that I see. romance narrative, which sets the It’s all I have left of him… Why is idealism of love against the absence so heavy to bear? Why is disappointing pragmatism of Guy fading away from me? I reality: the first act (“The would have died for him. Why Departure”) sets up an ecstatic aren’t I dead?” The brilliance of affair between this second act is that Demy Geneviève/Catherine Deneuve, doesn’t cut to Guy in Algeria the bourgeois daughter of a shop pining for Geneviève; the owner, and Guy/Nino audience thus shares her doubts. Castelnuovo, a working class If the film did indeed cut to Guy mechanic. But it also sets up the and his tribulations in Algeria it socioeconomic situation that would lose this sense of anxiety exerts pressure on the couple that comes when one only has a through Geneviève’s mother who memory to hold onto. Instead, the finds herself on the verge of film only directly gives us images financial ruin and the Algerian of Geneviève and nothing more War that looms in the these are what you might call background. images in the past tense. Let me

explain what I mean by this: The tendency of film to draw its significance from what is optically or sonically verifiable in the frame or soundtrack is what I call the present tense - what matters is what is now. Even the narrative device of a flashback functions in the present tense: what a flashback does is render some past event as a present experience. What’s notable about the images in the second act is that their significance is not derived primarily from their positive content but from a relationship to images that we (and Geneviève) have experienced but no longer have direct access to and this is felt in the audience as a terrible sense of loss.

Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) and the elliptic Blissfully Yours (2002). Of course, there are clues in the film that give the impression of things not being as they seem. For example, at several moments the camera spontaneously moves forward on a banal image (similar to how Lynch zooms in on a coffee cup in Twin Peaks or the radiator in Eraserhead); or actors will hold a smile too long as if they are literally being frozen in time. The effect of these details, like the music in Umbrellas of Cherbourg, is to invest the film with a dreamlike, infectious vitality. Of course, this is the unreality that belongs to love; what the Surrealists called amour fou; love as a crazy, irrational impulse that does not follow the carefully regulated boundaries of society. Indeed, like so many love stories, the lovers in these films are compelled to cross a social divide for their passion (the divide between bourgeois/working class in Umbrellas of Cherbourg or city/country in Tropical Malady). But the image of love is brutally taken away. Like Guy, Keng is pulled away from the city by his military duties and the love story makes its transition into memory. The image that most eloquently expresses this transition comes at the moment where Keng and Tong’s relationship reaches a strange, erotic peak: stopping on the side of a dark road to take a leak, Keng takes Tong’s hands and kisses them. Tong reciprocates by

n a strange way, I can see a strong resonance between Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004). This claim might seem like a stretch - What could the avantegarde modernism of the latter have in common with the direct pleasures of the former? The answer is precisely this quality of past-tenseness. Tropical Malady begins as a more-or-less straightforward love story between Keng/Banlop Lomnoi, a soldier, and Tong/Sakda Kaewbuadee, a boy from the country. The simplicity of this section is quite unusual for Weerasethakul who had already bemused audiences with the exquisite-corpse deviations of

You so want to return to the immediacy of the love story but all you have is the darkness of the jungle.

provocatively licking Keng's hands in return. He stops, smiles and walks away. It is this shot of Tong walking away into the night, the darkness slowly engulfing him, that brought me back to that scene in Umbrellas of Cherbourg where Geneviève struggles to remember her lover. This shot encapsulates the anxious shift from the moment of intimacy to the lonely void of the night in which everything is doubt. I became acutely aware of not being able to see Tong’s face and the inadequacy of the memory in recalling it. The film’s second half has baffled many people. After we have invested our emotions in Keng and Tong and the trajectory of their romance, suddenly Weerasethakul pulls the rug out from under us. The story ends and

another story begins - a folk story, complete with its own title sequence, about a soldier in the jungle who is pursued by an evil spirit. There are ambiguous clues hinting at some relationship between this story and the film’s first half—the actors playing Keng and Tong reappear here and there are references in the first half to a monster that might be the spirit pursuing the soldier—but mostly, it is as if we are watching a completely different film. It’s a completely disjunctive experience, like being thrown out of a dream. While some have argued that the second half of Tropical Malady is a “retelling” of its first half, I don’t think this is supported by the text. If there were more signs that the second half was a repetition of the first half, this would be, in a way,

something of a comfort, like rewatching a film you love. Instead, the radical difference of the second half puts you in the emotional state of the dreamer who, upon waking, desperately tries in vain to return to sleep even as the dream’s images dissolve from memory. In other words, the film's second half looks back on the first half in the past tense; you so want to return to the immediacy of the love story but all you have is the darkness of the jungle. In this way, Tropical Malady evokes the experience of memory in all its despair and futility. One of the alarming ideas of these films is that love does not conquer all. There are more powerful forces in the world capable of crushing it. Although the third act of Umbrellas of Cherbourg is titled “The Return”, we learn that Guy returns too late to reignite his love with Geneviève who has already married her older, richer suitor. In Tropical Malady, Keng dies in the jungle giving to the monster his “spirit, flesh and memories”. Love can be destroyed; memory is no guarantee for its endurance. The terrible sense of loss felt in the absence of images has never been felt more keenly than in the current era of social media and information networks which deludes us into thinking that we have access to endless images when all we really have is a bunch of useless memories. An image proper must have some kind of real effect; it must be able to

inspire, disturb or move us. After we have experienced an image, we are no longer the same. A memory is precisely the opposite of an image; it is an image that no longer functions. The era we find ourselves in is one we know to be devoid of images because our culture no longer believes in the possibility of alternatives. The Occupy movement in Melbourne, to give but one example, could not for all its virtues overcome the ability of left-leaning people to cynically distance themselves from political projects. I do feel that at some level we crave images - the nostalgia for the sixties (for example in the excellent new Studio Ghibli animation From Up on Poppy Hill) should be understood as nostalgia for a time when images existed, when radical social change was possible. Is this nostalgia just another form of useless memorialising? Perhaps not. Nostalgia, properly used, is not about basking in the glow of a memory but about extracting from history some energy or emotion that can be put to some positive purpose in the present. Perhaps this is also a good way to describe my ideal of what film criticism is: After the film, when its images are absent, the critic attempts to draw from their memory of it an image.

Phil Coldiron

DESIRE: NOTES AND SKETCHES A reflection on how great movies derive their power by leaving spaces for our thoughts and desires.

1. A BRIEF HISTORY OF

scope—the big, fuzzy cultural first-person plural—there are a lot of conceivable answers, as much a function of the ambiguity of the question as it is the variety of our viewing habits. Here’s one possibility with a conveniently inbuilt dual meaning: For a long time, until at least the 1970s, we paid to be in the dark, literally and figuratively. The shift in the former is no problem to pin down

here, when we watch a movie today, are we?1 Just sticking to this

I’d originally written “when we go to the movies” but given our evershifting consumption patterns that phrase seems more than a little creaky in context.

— the choice to flick a light switch on or off is a much easier one for a living room viewer to make than for the average cinema-goer, who would presumably have to commit at least a low-level misdemeanor if they decided they’d rather watch the movie with the lights on. It’s the latter sense, the one that tips into phenomenology and ontology and probably all sorts of other ologies, that’s at the heart of what’s changed over cinema’s century. And it’s in the reckoning with this move toward the light where cinema’s cold war will be fought. Perhaps it already is. In Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed, probably the best book written on what it was like watching movies back in the dark days, he notes, “In viewing a movie my helplessness is mechanically assured: I am present not at something happening, which I must confirm, but at something that has happened, which I absorb (like a memory).”2 The neat little twist by which absence becomes presence is the root of Cavell’s approach to movies, an art founded on a fundamental schism in time and place, the world offered on view to eyes absent at its occurring. And so the world becomes not present but presence, an apparition, a projection that’s there as only it

can be; it’s the world, but as we could never know it otherwise.3 This mingling of presence and absence was, in its way, an acknowledgment of a world outside ourselves, and a desire to know it.4 By the time Star Wars arrived in 1977 and solidified the shift to the new corporate era of movie making, there was no more absence, because there was no more world, only movies. No more stars,5 only characters.6

3 Cavell’s ontology of the film star— naturally, using Bogart as his example—is one of the most beautiful passages of writing I know: “After The Maltese Falcon we know a new star, only distantly a person. ‘Bogart’ means ‘the figure created in a given set of films.’ His presence in those films is who he is, not merely in the sense in which a photograph of an event is that event; but in the sense that if those films did not exist, Bogart would not exist, the name ‘Bogart’ would not mean what it does. The figure it names is not only in our presence, we are in his, in the only sense we could ever be. That is all the 'presence' he has.” 4 For a lot more on this perspective see Pedro Costa’s Tokyo Film School lecture, printed in issue no. 10 of Rouge: “A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing.” 5 It’s impossible for me to look at Harrison Ford’s Hans Solo and see anything other than a man desperately wishing he’d been born 40 years earlier, so he might have been “Ford” instead of just so many memorable characters. 6 Another way of looking at this is the shift from presence (Bogart, Bacall) to

Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1979.

There was no more absence and no more desire, only the confirmation of a spectacle as it happened before us; the fact of our being present registered in receipts with eight, even nine, zeroes. Actually, saying there’s no more desire might not be entirely accurate. There is still desire, it’s just that it’s been reverse engineered to flow paradoxically from an already given fulfillment. That’s as close to a working definition of contemporary Hollywood cinema as I can figure: the gratification of desires we don’t even have.7 Forty years ago, Cavell could write that “[t]he camera has been praised for extending the senses; it may, as the world goes, deserve more praise for confining them, leaving room for thought.” Today it’s just the opposite: Hollywood’s ideal film is a massive slab of information, both sensual and narrative, that lodges itself in your brain, crowding out any thought of your own. It shines there, illuminated by hundreds of millions of corporate dollars, and it’s almost impossibly knowable, the antithesis of mystery. When Avatar left teens around the world suicidal because they couldn’t live on Pandora perpetually, was it because it had

shown them the world anew and then taken it away? Was it just a simple case of the (digital) grass being greener – or bluer, as it were? Maybe, but I’ll propose what I find a more rational alternative: to watch Avatar is to be present at a world that is perfect and strange and new, which is something I hope it’s not hard to imagine the appeal of, assuming you can get past those garish colors. The trouble then is that in its terrible wholeness it leaves no room for exploration, for knowing its world beyond what it offers. This is, of course, profoundly distressing for those who love it; it has built a desire in them that it structurally refuses to fulfill beyond those moments when one is in its presence. And so they had to come back, again and again, like junkies, everything beautiful in the light for three 3-D-CG hours and everything so much worse afterwards. That movie made nearly three billion dollars.8 2. DESIRE

realize it might sound like a contradiction, given the bit up there in the margin from Cavell about “Bogart” only

And re. the being driven to the brink of suicide thing, it seems certain that Avatar, as just the most monumental example, is more of a last straw than a sole cause, the final rupture in a life spent living perpetually in this feedback loop of desires built to beget consumption, rather than living.

narrative (say, Tom Cruise, or Snookie). 7 Shades of Inception, which is maybe a great film if taken as a metaphor for the process of getting tens of millions of people to love such a bloated, inert blob.

existing in our presence, to find fault with Hollywood’s erasure of reality. Isn’t this the way things have always worked, perfected the way that only the whole machine of late capital can perfect things? The difference, I think, lies in a simple fact: that where once we knew—or perhaps, more likely, didn’t know but sensed—that something banal was being transformed, today there is only the shimmering effect; nothing’s been overcome. What was up on the screen was bigger than your life, but not bigger than all life. “Bogart” as we could know him was an ineffable thing, impossible to do any real justice to with words, but he was also a man, fleshy and real and carrying a life with him. Could Humphrey DeForest Bogart have ever become “Bogart” without those jowls, or the bags under his eyes, or that forward slouch that always makes it look like he’s had one too many and gravity’s starting to win? Perhaps it’s all this cruddy corporeality that let him be a star in the first place.9 Now, in our cinema without stars, he’d just be a schlub. To watch the great films of those dark years is to look out from the solitary little place of

one’s own being and see stars— and I’ll extend this starry quality beyond people to places and things—and realize that life might be infinitely rich, overflowing with feeling, with love, with sadness, with grace, with joy, with anger, and that the world as it’s projected is tied by a thin string of mechanics back to that world where you sit and watch and that, when you really get down to it, is only a matter of how you look. (This is, and I know from personal experience, the great appeal of cinephilia for those who are fundamentally lonely or sad or just generally disenfranchised in whatever way.10 People call it escapism, but I don’t think that’s right; escapism has always seemed a more literary quality to me. The reason that lonely or sad or generally disenfranchised people chronically go to the movies11 is that it allows them to see a world full of excitement and beauty and love that’s only a tiny remove away from their own. Cinephilia as such is both symptom and cure, an expression of discontent with one’s world and a desire to find a way back to really living in it.) One possible direction forward toward a clarification of our current cinema could proceed from J. Hoberman’s assertion in

It’s fitting that his perfect double was Lauren Bacall, who was, and is, too gorgeous to have come from this world: for her the presence of projection was where she could finally find equals.

In case you were worried for my happiness, this is a thing of the past. 11 And here I do think this is the right phrase, the being in the dark is very much part of the whole process.

Film After Film12 that cinema is henceforth a history of animation,13 and that this clean break from celluloid’s indexical relationship with reality—as true for him with HD photography (and its nearly infinite mutability) as it is with proper animation of both the analog and digital varieties— is the new fact of the movies. Taken here, that would be: cinema can’t transform a banal, fleshy reality because it has absolutely nothing to do with it. This isn’t necessarily as disparaging as it sounds. It’s more a question of finding new affective registers, ones that I feel confident will someday prove at least as moving and profound as Bogart’s face. But I’m not sure that’s sufficient to cover things for the purposes of this little essay. I say this mainly because I fundamentally disagree with Hoberman’s stance on the relationship between a digital camera and the world, and what’s more, because I’d rather not turn this into another referendum on film vs. digital. Picking back up the Avatar

thread, it’s not a big jump from there to a shot-on-film product like The Dark Knight Rises, a massive object that in its impenetrable wholeness is an even better example than Avatar of what Zach Campbell has helpfully dubbed the reversible film (“blockbuster cinema that seeks to accommodate politicized readings by accommodating even contradictory ideologies”), the ideal mode of contemporary corporate cinema. The film give the impression, with its respirations from 35mm to IMAX and back,14 of being an organic whole, its eye trained squarely on its audience to the point of obsession, while its mess of conflicted messages, each equally (un)appealing and tenable, ensures that no thought can outflank it – everything that can be thrown at it is worked back into the system. You either embrace it, or you see it again in the foolish hope that some new angle might appear. As the distance between our lives and all the images around us grows smaller every day, we all become cineastes; this isn’t just a question of cinephilia. The

J. Hoberman, Film after Film Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?, London: Verso Books 2012. 13 Take a look at the top ten highest grossing films of the year to date and it’s hard to argue with him. Only The Dark Knight Rises (which Christopher Nolan very desperately wants, no needs, you to know that he shot on film, both 35mm and IMAX) and The Hunger Games seem less animated than not.

14 One of the quintessential Deluezian movements (the breathing that moves from situation to action to situation, the “large form” of Hawks or Ford which “brings things together in a whole of organic representation and contracts or expands depending on the circumstances") clumsily literalized, and left with none of its narrative or affective resonance.

necessary response then, for those of us wishing to keep alive the cinema of desire, the one that lives in the dark and projects for

(the recently departed Tony Scott had a tremendous gift for this, sending out all those many, many cameras out for coverage so that he might one day capture everything, he desired it all16) to the smallest films, the handmade work of Ben Rivers or Nicolas Rey. Offering up the most mundane spaces of Los Angeles as radiant, It’s in the literally glowing with the intensity of the world viewed from films of David this perfect angle. Cronenberg, particularly the last couple, us an open world, is to seek out where the world is flattened out the films that have no interest in (Cosmopolis) or played with like colonizing our brains and souls, in putty (A Dangerous Method) to feeding us fabricated desires better allow for the expression of rather than offering us a space to ideas via that most human learn to express our own love (or conduit, speech; to hear voices in hate, which in certain directions these films is to experience a new can be its own love15), and to sing way of communicating, a sort of the praises of these films as loudly frightful clarity. The rearas we damn well can. These can projected New York that floats be found just about anywhere, outside of Cosmopolis’ dead silent from huge Hollywood products limousine is an elegant metaphor for a most Cavellian cinema: certain senses carefully suppressed, leaving all the room 15 A possibility: desire in the cinema is one could ever want for thinking. necessarily a function of both love— It’s in Punch-Drunk Love, There the force that pulls us toward the Will Be Blood and The Master, world—and hate, which refuses to acknowledge the unjust, leaving it to be felt as an absence, festering. When Nicole Brenez says that we have not yet see the most important films of the 20th century, the films of the death camps, I wonder whether their absence isn’t just the proper expression of our shared hatred of these events.

16 Naturally, Scott was a hack to most because, unlike Nolan or Cameron (or, yes, his own brother Ridley), he never showed any guile; his messes were truly, beautifully messy, captured the way that only a real artist can.

radical expressionist experiments in conflating the distance between actor and character and world. Rarely before has the texture, both visual and aural, of a film so perfectly matched its central character, and its central character so perfectly matched the body and being of its star,17 as in Punch-Drunk Love. And in this harmony, there is love: a body in the world and the world in a body, this unity offering up the most mundane spaces of Los Angeles—an apartment, a warehouse, a supermarket—as radiant, literally glowing with the intensity of the world viewed from this perfect angle. Perhaps the colors—the deep blues and reds and pinks and purples, even the dark of a shadow or the white of a fluorescent light—won’t ever show themselves to me quite so perfectly, but I can feel their warmth every time I look at the girl who I love so much. There are thousands of other examples I could offer, from the door at the end of The Awful Truth to the ladies of L’Apollonide, but I’ll leave those for you to sing. These lessons of desire, the beautiful new perspective(s) to be found in an absent world projected and explored anew, are only worth something if you take them back out into life, back to the being of every moment. And

then, absent the screen, life might be a little richer; maybe even like a movie. Maybe just like life. For Thea

And yes, I think here and in Funny People we might really consider Adam Sandler a star, in the sense that Cavell means it.

Elliott Logan

GHOSTLY PRESENCE Through its use of archival footage, the documentary “Senna” reminds us of how films are haunted by the absence of what they show.

A painting may be more vividly described and more accurately detailed, but the photographic image affects us as a peculiarly believable icon because we know it to be an imprint received directly from life. Not having been fashioned by human hands, the photograph is supposedly unencumbered by human subjectivity. ‘All the arts are based on the presence of man,’ Bazin wrote, ‘only photography derives a benefit from his absence.’

—Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost1

rucial to the profound achievement of the documentary Senna is its extraordinary shaping of Formula 1’s enormous archive of footage, which turns these once-live images from inert historical

1 Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP 1998.

document to immediately unfolding drama. Formula 1 races, including qualification and competition, are broadcast on television across entire weekends. In addition to giving their attention to the racing track, cameras roam the pit lanes, team garages, and on one unprecedented occasion shown in Senna, the driver’s meeting. The cameras roam these spaces hoping to sate, in periods of relative inaction on the track, what Robert Warshow called “the camera’s infinite appetite for the material”. In Senna, the replaying of this material seems to bring to life racing car driver Ayrton Senna’s mortally dangerous and politically sensitive rivalry with competitor and teammate Alain Prost, as well as the final weekend of Senna’s life at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. I say it is brought to life because even upon repeat viewings the movie has an extraordinary capacity to present its events as if they are unfolding for the first time. I feel Senna’s life revitalised through the apparent shift moving images make possible, from the past tense of Senna’s historical record, to the present tense of its drama in this movie. It is as if the past-ness of Senna’s being, of the people and places and words and gestures that made him who he uniquely was, is in some way overcome. This sense of vital immediacy is able to be particularly compelling because the sheer volume of visual material from the Formula 1

archive allows the filmmakers to craft key moments using the dramatic conventions of narrative film. A crucial instance is when the Austrian driver Roland Ratzenberger crashes during qualification that fatal weekend at San Marino. The effort of the television crews to document for the live television audience every moment of the Grand Prix allows the makers of Senna to do more than present the moment of the crash. The television crews’ footage provides enough material so that the filmmakers can deploy the grammar of reaction shots native to fictional filmmaking. Their use here of this grammar allows the movie to go beyond a mere presentation of the fact of the crash: it enmeshes us in the immediate experience of the present unfolding of the onlookers’ fear, hope, and then grief when we see it announced to the cameras, watching live, that Ratzenberger has died of his injuries. Our sense of that weekend’s present tense reaches its greatest height of tragic intensity when the cockpit footage of Senna’s final laps is replayed, uninterrupted. We watch and wait as he makes his way around the track. With each turn the suspense intensifies along with my wish for the already dead Ayrton to please live this time. Senna’s images struggle valiantly, and in moments triumph against, the tendency of what George Toles calls “secondviewing light.” For Toles, “the very light of a movie that is

repeating for us seem to be more weighed down, less transparent, acquiring something like the sepia tinge so often employed in film to mark images as belonging to the past and to memory.”2 We are seeing a history of Senna’s life for the second, third, sixth time since it was first and irretrievably lived. Senna does not embalm this life in the “sepia tinge” of the past but brings it moving into the present. The film image gives a moving imprint of light that once emanated from Senna’s body. This struggle of Senna’s images resonates in an interesting way with what the movie presents as the quest of Senna’s racing career: a quest for a sense of transcendence, or even for a strengthened contact with his belief in its possibility. After crashing out at the Monaco Grand Prix in 1988 despite some of the most superb driving of his life, Senna said, “I felt His presence, I saw God; He remains a part of me.” Just as the quest for transcendence is a quest to overcome the limits of the material world and body, so Senna uses film as a medium in which Ayrton Senna’s presence is not limited to his material body in the world, a medium in which artists might seek to transcend the material absence that is the body’s death.

So the immediacy and vitality of our renewed contact with Senna’s life is haunted by what it cannot overcome: the ultimate and universal absence of death. As Gilberto Perez writes in his essay “The Documentary Image”: An imprint gives evidence of what has been; an image gives presence to what it depicts. A photograph gives evidence of what it depicts and gives presence to what has been. … Documentary is what has been, and yet it is often the more documentary movies that seem to give a stronger impression of the present. The newsreel immediacy of Roberto Rossellini’s movies in the pioneer years of neorealism won praise from James Agee for ‘giving the illusion of the present tense.’ … But the urgency of a newsreel is the urgency of the right then and there, not the right here and now: the camera may speak in the present tense, but it is a present now past when we watch it on the screen. The poignancy of such a scene—even if it is not a death scene it is always the poignancy of death—is the poignancy of what reaches us from the past with the urgency of the present.

It is the unique and vitalising presence of Ayrton Senna’s humanity as he realised it through his gestures and words that reaches us from the past through the moving imprint of his life given profound shape in Senna. However, as Perez notes of all moving images, the compelling poignancy of Senna is the poignancy of life shadowed,

George Toles, "Trying to Remember Clementine", in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Ed. Christopher Gau, London: Routledge 2009.

The poignancy of Senna is the poignancy of life shadowed, perhaps even overshadowed, by death. perhaps even overshadowed, by death. Ayrton Senna’s presence in the movie is a ghostly one, haunted by the particular kind of absence we will all experience if we love, and outlive, someone else. It is an absence we feel most keenly through our memories of them. Senna’s capacity to tap into this poignancy at the heart of its medium is exemplified by its opening and closing sequences. These realise one way that beginnings and endings may be shaped by and on film to resonate with memory as a particularly human effort to confront death. A detailed description of the sequences is necessary to an appreciation of their achievement. The movie is bookended by linked passages of grainy, amateur, 16mm footage of the teenaged Ayrton Senna competing at the Karting World

Championship in Europe in the late 1970s. These passages first set up beginnings—Ayrton’s beginnings, Senna’s beginning— and then look back upon those from the standpoint of endings— of his life, of the movie’s document of it. The beginning sequence starts with an image of the ever-young Senna standing proudly in his racing gear, backgrounded only by blue sky. This first sequence consists of colour shots of the Go-Kart racing interspersed with more abstract, black and white glimpses of Formula 1 racing overlaid with titles and credits. The simplicity of Senna’s pre-Formula 1 world is seen in the sequence’s home movie quality, its visible efforts to capture the spontaneity of events. This quality, which somewhat distinguishes it from the professional television coverage of Senna’s later Formula 1 racing,

come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

is crystallised in the sequence’s final shot. The camera comes across Senna, exhausted by his racing, sitting on the trackside grass alongside, equalised with, his fellow competitors. The sequence is given voiceover narration by Senna himself, looking back to this distant time made present to us by these images, these moving imprints of his past life. “I came to Europe for the first time to compete outside of Brazil,” he recalls. “It was pure driving, pure racing. There wasn’t any politics . . . No money involved, either. It was real racing.” His voice speaks in the past tense about historical events we watch unfold before us. What is absent to the man Senna is made present to us by the moving images of his documentary. The ending sequence follows two important images, recorded as part of news coverage. The first is of Senna’s flag-draped coffin as amidst the hundreds of thousands of mourners who lined the streets of São Paulo in his honour it is carried to his resting place. The second is of the gravestone that marks the end of that last journey his body would make. A subtitle translates into English the Portugese inscription: “Nothing can separate me from the love of God.” These words paraphrase a passage of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, a passage that speaks to transcendence:

Now the image of the grave stops still, its movement cut off suddenly, as if to remind us of its fixed location in the past, and against this stasis comes a voice. And with a cut Senna is alive before us again, captured in the clarity of a Formula-1 post-race interview. The offscreen voice asks Senna to reflect on the driver he has gained the most satisfaction racing against, “past or present?” Senna consults his memory. “I would have to go back,” he eventually says, “to ’78 and ’79, when I was Go-Kart driving.” The picture of Senna speaking in interview cuts to the movie’s opening images of his younger self. It is as if his effort of remembering the past conjures it before us. Now we see his younger self stand against blue sky as the older Senna speaks again the movie’s opening words which move us towards its closing ones: “I came to Europe for the first time . . .” Approaching the ending, we look back at the beginning. But we see it now with a sense of loss—more strongly available when things end—in place of the opening sense of promise, which is most easy to grasp when things are beginning. I think this sense of loss comes most strongly when the image cuts back to the interview. This allows us not to hear Senna’s words as retrospective

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to

commentary but to see him speak them as an act of mourning memory: “And it was pure driving, pure racing. Because there was no politics then, right? No money involved, either. It was real racing.” Quietly moved by his inner recollection of this irrecoverable past, so distant from the demands and disappointments and triumphs of Formula 1, he says, “I have that as a very good memory.” These are the final words we see him speak. The movie’s last image follows. It shows the teenaged Senna, forever young on film, taking a break at the Karting World Championship, eating a meal balanced without bother on his knees. As the camera operator zooms in to a tight close-up, it’s as if our intimacy with the young man alerts him to our presence, and so he looks up to the lens, to the person behind the camera, to us. A brilliant, warm, welcoming smile spreads across his face and then both it and him are gone as the image plunges into black. This complete blackness erases the sense of movement and passing time that are our measures of life. Words on the screen read: “Ayrton Senna died aged 34.” Senna draws the peculiarly compelling pathos of these mournful passages of memory from its sensitivity to the way the conditions of the moving image resonate with the loss we feel when confronted with death.

Victor Perkins, in his monograph on The Magnificent Ambersons3 (a piece of writing that is painfully aware of the unimaginable loss of that movie’s tragic incompletion), claims Welles’s movie “is one of a group of great films that have built the pathos of the photographic into their textures and made it part of their thematic material.” Perkins moves to a more specific evocation of the pathos of the photographic when he describes The Magnificent Ambersons as “[a] movie about loss. A movie that works on, thinks about, film’s production of an image haunted by the places and beings from which it derives.” An image haunted by the absence of that which it makes present: haunted by its ghostly presence. We experience loss through memory, but memory also provides us with a salve against its pain, a way of coming to terms with what it is we’ve lost. Senna shows this in its depiction of the racing driver’s death on the track at San Marino. Aerial images of the wreckage, and of his body’s removal from the scene by helicopter, are framed by the recollection of Senna’s doctor and close friend, Professor Sid Watkins. Earlier in the San Marino sequence Watkins recounted his attempt, following Ratzenberger’s death and amidst the agitated mood that fell in its wake, to

V.F. Perkins, The Magnificent Ambersons, London: BFI 1999.

convince Senna to quit racing, to devote his remaining time to leisurely companionship and the appreciative enjoyment of nature. Senna told his friend he could not stop. Recounting his witness to Senna’s death, Watkins now tells us that he saw “neurological signs” that Senna’s injuries would be fatal. “And then he sighed,” Watkins says, “and his body relaxed. And that was the moment—and I’m not religious— that I thought his spirit had departed.” Following images of trackside dejection, the movie figures Senna’s transcendence, and invites us to feel the belief in it that Watkins pronounces in his recollection, by showing Senna depart to the sky in a helicopter and allowing, as he finally passes from the screen, a ghostly round of applause to fade in and then away. The moment enacts Watkins’s discovery, in remembering his friend’s death as a transcendent event, of comfort against the pain of his loss. The late sequences of Senna are in some way about how having a sense of mortality requires us to accumulate and hold on to memories. Positive memories are able to retrieve moments of our past that we value, and so can ease the loss we experience in our continual passage towards the ends of our lives. They are an attempt to overcome that loss in some small way. In this they resemble film. “Memory is the most faithful of films,” wrote André Bazin, “the

only one that can register at any height, and right up to the very moment of death. But who can fail to see the difference between memory and the objective image that gives it eternal substance?”4 Senna shows how film, and the movies made of it, can put us in renewed contact with a ghostly presence that gives a painful kind of comfort in the face of an otherwise overwhelming and ultimate absence.

4 André Bazin, "Cinema and Exploration", in What Is Cinema?, Berkeley: University of California Press 1967. Thanks to Jason Jacobs for making me aware of Bazin’s writing in relation to Senna.

Huw Walmsley-Evans

THE DEATH OF THE CRITIC A recount of the author’s meeting with the critic Andrew Sarris.

few months ago I was on the bus heading in for another day of work on my doctoral research; an examination of crisis and continuity in the contemporary institution of film criticism. I idly checked my Facebook and found a link posted by one of my advisors. It was a link to Andrew Sarris's obituary in the Times.1 To this my advisor had appended the

words “Now it is truly over”. He meant this ironically; it was a reference to the crisis discourse which has lately characterised discussion of film criticism, and which is rhetorically reliant upon nostalgic, “Golden Age” thinking about the late-mid 20th century era of film criticism with which Sarris is synonymous. Problematising the mythic status of the critics and criticism of that time has been at the heart of my work over the past four years, and here was another dread milestone for doomsayers to gather around. But it was only partly ironic: my advisor knew what Sarris meant to

Michael Powell, “Andrew Sarris, Village Voice Film Critic, Dies at 83” (obituary), The New York Times, 20 June 2012.

film criticism, and what he meant to me. Irony and sincerity intermingled in that line. Indeed my reading of it, in that moment, was completely sincere. For a moment it seemed it was over, whatever “it” had been. It had been four years previous, when I was a 22-yearold naïf who aspired to a career in it that I had last been spooked by film criticism's prospects. In the late '00s you could barely move for talk of “crisis” in film criticism. Weekend newspaper arts supplements, cinema magazine editorials, film festival discussion panels, and “The Blogosphere” were clamouring over each other to take film criticism's pulse, and the prognosis tended to be grim. I decided to separate the reality from the rhetoric. I started local with my research, interviewing a friend who had been one of my first film teachers, stalwart Brisbane critic Tim Milfull. He encouraged me to make the most of the project. Once the dictaphone was switched off I told him that next year, in 2010, I planned to go on tour, first domestically and then overseas, on a sort of film critic safari. This would be ethnographic research into film criticism. I'd do what they do, go where they go, and eat what they eat, like a Louis Theroux documentary that no reasonable person would ever want to tune in to. “You should try and interview Sarris,” said Milfull. “He's still around.” Not only was he still around, he was still writing

reviews for The New York Observer at that stage. “He'd talk to you,” Milfull added, noting my incredulity. This was a name out of books, a name from history. By importing the “auteur theory” to America, and reshaping the canon with his book The American Cinema, Sarris became the sort of name that belonged with other names, like Kael, Kauffmann, Mekas and Farber; and Agee, Ferguson, and Greene before them. Although my thesis hinged on the idea that contemporary film criticism was better understood in terms of its historical continuities rather than its contemporary transformations (or perhaps because of it), it was hard not to be reverent. These were people on shelves and in documentaries, not people to solicit for interviews. “Really? Andrew Sarris?” It seemed an absurd proposition, but it made me tingle. “Why not?” Milfull replied. I received some promising responses from the New York film critics I cold emailed before I set off, but my invitation to Sarris and his wife, Molly Haskell—herself a towering figure in film criticism, the author of From Rape to Reverence: The Treatment of Women in the Movies—to meet with me and discuss “film criticism's institutional formations” went unanswered. I was surprised when I received any responses, so I didn't take this personally. Once installed in the apartment I sub-let in Chelsea, though, I decided to make the e-

rounds one more time. To some interviewees I seemed to become a less abstract concept when I had a cell phone number and an address a few blocks away. I sent a final email to say that I was in the City, and reiterated just how much it would mean to the project, and to me personally, to meet with them. Several days later Molly Haskell's bolded name appeared in my inbox. She welcomed me to New York and said that while she was out of the City a lot, “Andrew” (Andrew!) was at home, convalescing: “he had a very bad fall in May — on the street, bleeding in the brain, but he's coming along remarkably well.” I felt awful. Why hadn't anyone told me? Why wasn't this all over the news? I certainly wouldn't have bothered these nice people with my film criticism “crisis” had I known that they were dealing with a proper crisis. I was already drafting an appropriately apologetic response in my head as I read the following lines:

have me over. Sarris greeted me at the door in a button down blue shirt, loafers, and too high grey slacks. He was stooped and grandfatherly. His clothes hung a little loose on him. His unmistakable St. Bernard face broke into a wide smile. “Huullooo! Come in, come in.” he said, beckoning me inside. He shuffled deliberately back to let me through. I thanked him profusely for inviting me over. “Sure!” he said, guiding me over to the living room. I commented on the beautiful view, it was hard not to. I could see vast expanses of the Park, and it took me a second to realise that the roof of the odd circular structure bellow me belonged to the Guggenheim. Sarris remarked that the view was even better before a couple of towers went up right on the edge of the Park. He told me he had protested them, claiming that “no one wanted some phallic towers spoiling that beautiful gynaecological landscape”. He seemed undiminished to me. Sarris had been slowed—but not dimmed—by his accident. He was less dexterous than he had been, and it bothered him. He told me he always considered himself a talker more than a writer. He recalled his weekly radio show where he could ad-lib the whole half hour effortlessly: “The writing came very slowly but the talking I had”. So we moved more deliberately than usual. I was happy to get whatever he had to give, and

his once phenomenal memory is sadly diminished, but he is struggling, hoping to resume teaching in September. I think he'd be very happy to talk to you, and it would do him good. I'll tell him about your e-mail — he doesn't have a computer (!). Just call him...

And so Molly proceeded to give me a phone number and home address where I could reach Andrew Sarris, who was not only happy to talk to me, but to

what he had to give turned out to be both voluminous and substantial. He talked about becoming a film critic: growing up in Queens, moving to Manhattan to study and having his academic career “ruined” by the ready availability of cinema. He talked about being all ready to embark on a career as a high-school English teacher in outer Queens before being drafted for Korea, about going back to school and being waylaid again by film, and finally meeting Jonas Mekas and getting his early breaks in criticism. It was an origin story so like those of contemporary critics: one marked by a “falling in to”, and characterised by struggle and underemployment. While they have since become even rarer and worse paying, positions at alternative weeklies always remunerated in prestige and freedom of expression more than money, and Sarris lived with his mother for a long time while he was getting established. It was his teaching at Columbia and elsewhere that paid the bills, and his home, while well positioned, was comfortable rather than flashy. I had been told by her friends that his best-selling “rival” Pauline Kael had owed money on her $35,000 house in the Berkshires at the time of her passing, and her illness had only been made tolerable because Conde Naste (who never paid her very well) had kept her health insurance going in to her retirement. If there were ever fat

times for thoughtful film critics, Sarris and Kael didn't live through them. Speaking of Kael, Sarris was only too happy to talk about her. Being at such temporal and geographic remove from the “Circles and Squares” controversy,2 it was surprising for me how alive that debate was for contemporary New York critics. I asked if he was surprised that people continued to play it out and put store in it. He said he considered it a draw: “She has her adherents and I have mine”. But rather than retreading their fruitless argument, (which has always been a maddening miscommunication rather than a vital debate to my eyes) Sarris preferred to think of their relationship in personal terms: as a great, combative, unconsummated love affair. “She wrote in a very sexy way. She probably had a great influence on making film criticism much sexier than it had been.” I would be reminded of how Sarris remembered his feud with Kael when I read another recent obituary: Gore Vidal's.3 He had recalled his verbal and legal war with William F. Buckley when accepting a lifetime achievement

Kael's 1963 article in Film Quarterly “Circles and Squares: Joys and Sarris” was a polemical salvo against auteurism, and against Sarris. 3 Charles McGrath, “Gore Vidal Dies at 86; Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer” (obituary), The New York Times, 1 August 2012

award in 2009: “such fun, such fun”. A year later and at the same time in life I think Sarris felt the same way about his own feud. But this is unsurprising. Sarris was too moderate and reflexive to hold a grudge or leave a position unrevised. This shone through as we discussed auteur theory, excessive and dogmatic application of which he abhorred. While feeling vindicated by the fact that the notion of the auteur had become so pervasive, it bothered him that everybody's an Auteur now: “In [film] school they're calling themselves Auteurs. It's gotten a little bit too much, because I never said the direction was everything.” He seemed to have moved on to new business: “Now I'm fascinated by producers. Producers are exotic creatures to me.” Theory, academic theory, wasn't his domain: “whenever someone uses a term from semiotics I feel the way people used to feel when we'd talk about Auteurs.” Sarris situated himself in the tradition of critics like James Agee and Otis Ferguson, who weren't beholden to an overarching schema, but were interested in “why films were successful and why they weren't.” I asked if his criticism, then, was evaluative, and aesthetic: “yeah, whether it's watchable. If it has a kind of originality or power or force” the answer came. I have an hour of recorded interview with Sarris, but I was probably there the better part of an hour longer than that, setting

up and winding down. There was a break in the middle, too, where the phone rang. It was a nurse confirming his physical therapy appointment later in the week. At one point Sarris raised himself off the couch to grab a book from the shelf. He was planning for the new semester at Columbia. The first film he planned to teach was Hiroshima Mon Amour and he wanted to clarify who were the Left Bank directors and who were the Right Bank. He was, for the first time, unsure how he would manage speaking at length to a large group, and wondered whether he would hear the questions from the back of the auditorium. “Just tell them to move forward when they come in!” I exclaimed. It bothered me to imagine sullen, entitled teenagers expecting Andrew Sarris to meet them on their terms. I hoped the kids who had him on their doorstep appreciated him as much as I did. Sarris didn't share my indignation though. In a way he was more of a true believer in my thesis than I was. My argument was that film criticism had not declined, its crisis was constant, a perpetual element of its being. What seemed like crisis was actually a failure of institutional memory. For Sarris film criticism was as good as it had ever been, and in many respects much better. Young people were open to a range of ways of seeing cinema, and were more conversant with film history than any previous generation. His

addressed to much smaller audiences, and they are not the ones who can fill theatres (if anyone can). There are critics, such as Susan Sontag, Manny Farber... who almost never write reviews, and all their committed intelligence has no box-office influence at all.5

interactions with young people left him upbeat. It is so tempting to think of Sarris's sixties and seventies heyday as the time “When Film Criticism Mattered”, to borrow Gerald Peary's seductive phrase,4 but what we recall is a selective history. We imagine it, I think, as a time when Kael, Sarris, Kaufman, Simon, and Farber were household names; a time when film critics were guests on television talk shows seated between actors and novelists. Whether this image holds depends very much on the household, and the talk show. Those households that subscribed to high-end magazines and periodicals like The New Yorker and The New Republic, or who (even rarer) picked up alternative weeklies like the Village Voice or art criticism journals like Artforum are households after all, but probably not the ones we mean. In a 1970 piece on the contemporary film criticism scene for Saturday Review, Stephen Koch wrote:

Meanwhile, reading Clive James on Dick Cavett in his collection of essays Cultural Amnesia reminds us that Cavett's talk show—what we have in mind when we recall the erudition of the genre at that time—was in fact an aberration. Dick Cavett's show was a reflection of Dick Cavett's peculiar intellectual range and sensitivity rather than a sign of the times. It rated poorly towards the end of its run and its combination of levity and heft—more a salon than a tonight show—was seen as a failed experiment, never to be replicated. The exceptional endures in the cultural memory, and the great bulk of normal cultural life falls away. Doubtless our own time will be considered a golden age when Martin, Rosenbaum, Kehr, and Zacharek were household names, and only we who were there to recall the great mass of tepid, talentless reviewers who constituted most people's point of contact with discourse on the cinema will know better. When critics die, we can no longer consult them about

There are, of course, writers who try with varying success to speak less as reviewers than true critics—e.g., Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic, Andrew Sarris in New York City's Village Voice, and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker—but their more carefully reasoned judgements are

5 Stephen Koch, "The Cruel, Cruel Critics", Saturday Review, 26 December 1970.

From his 2009 documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism.

our time, or their own. Something that was apparent in all of my conversations with New York film critics was the sense of lineage that comes from having had relationships with "Golden Age" film critics. Stephanie Zacharek and David Edelstein both spoke to me about their relationship with Pauline Kael, while Armond White invoked Simon, Kael, and Sarris. And while all of these critics would deny that they gained any material benefit from their relationship with these figures ("there weren't any perks" said Zacharek) there is a sense of legitimacy, community, and tradition that is palpable in their recollections. In an institution as loosely formulated as film criticism, it is important to have this professional ancestry. How else do we know we are film critics other than being considered peers by people who are verifiably, undeniably, film critics? There was something very affecting about the way they talked about these people. Edelstein cared for Kael in her declining years, and Zacharek told me, “There are times when I wish she was around so I could tell her some weird thing... I loved her, and I miss her.” Having spent time with Sarris (and he'll always be Mr. Sarris to me) I felt an inkling of that same affection. He was interested in my life and where I was from and what I would do next. I got to tell him about new movies that were out. David Michôd's excellent

Animal Kingdom had just been released there and was getting very strong reviews. I told him about it and we talked about the unevenness of Australian cinema. He told me he wasn’t getting out to the cinema anymore but people would send him DVDs to watch, and I said I would ask the distributors to send him a copy, that he might find it interesting. I never did. I suppose I didn't because I thought it would be too familiar, too much of an imposition. I wish I had. He might have typed me a note with his thoughts about it, a piece of criticism that I could keep for myself and share with you now. What I do have is that visit, and that line in Molly's email, where she said she thought it “would do him good” to talk to me. I hope it did. I know it did me good.

REVIEWS THE PLEASURES OF THE UNSPOKEN Review of “Mosquita y Mari” by Whitney Monaghan

concern of this film — namely, an emphasis on the unspoken. The things we “never told anyone” are our unspoken truths, our own little secrets. They might be small or insignificant details; delightful anecdotes that pepper our life stories. But they might also be the things we are ashamed of, the things we actively hide from others. Further still, they might be censored thoughts and silenced words; that is, things we wanted to say but never could. Regardless of their content, to tell someone these things is to trust them completely. Taken up within Mosquita y Mari on both a narrative and stylistic level, the unspoken comes to characterise the relationship between Yolanda and Mari, two Chicana schoolgirls growing up in a predominantly Mexican immigrant neighbourhood in Los Angeles. Yolanda and Mari are initially characterised as polar opposites. A quiet and dedicated student, Yolanda appears uneasy in the teen girl worlds of parties, fashion and boys. She works diligently at school so that she may eventually help her family out of their difficult financial circumstances. This finds expression in the unique combination of responsibility and pride that flashes across Yolanda’s face as she prominently displays her high-scoring tests in the living

n the back seat of a dusty wreck of a car abandoned in an empty garage, one teenage girl asks a simple yet important request of her friend. Softly, in almost breathless whisper, the following words form: “Tell me something, something you never told anyone.” This single line of dialogue in Aurora Guerrero’s debut feature film Mosquita y Mari performs a dual function, both establishing the intimacy of the relationship between these two characters and drawing attention to the central

are brought into play.”1 Within such narratives, dialogue occupies a privileged position as the verbal expression of (homo)sexual desire occurs at the climax of the film. Accordingly, as Davis writes, a tension is constructed “between language as a tool used to reveal an essential pre- or super-linguistic truth, and speech acts as the very creator of truth, repetitively producing … factuality”. But what happens to our understandings of this truth when, as in films such as Mosquita y Mari, the sexual desires of the queer teenage character remain central to the narrative but are left unspoken? Further, in deemphasising both dialogue and language in this manner, what does the film accentuate in their place? In Mosquita y Mari’s press kit Guerrero writes:

areas of her home. Mari, on the other hand, enters the narrative as a typical bad girl. Through Yolanda’s eyes, she’s first glimpsed from across the street as she rides her bicycle home, throws it to the ground and runs indoors. In a following scene, Yolanda’s gaze again captures this rebellious nature of Mari as she enters the class room, headphones in her ears. And later, this becomes more explicit when she is caught smoking in the toilets. Mari’s unique style and free-flowing hair is a subtle contrast to Yolanda’s plainness, emphasised in her neat ponytail, simple clothing and more overtly in her circle of friends who, comically, have identical fashion and mannerisms. The film follows the development of a friendship between these two contrasting characters from its inception shrouded by conflict in the confines of the classroom toward something much more intimate. In doing so, it captures something of a first love that dares not speak its name. But what is particularly interesting about this film is the manner in which this relationship is depicted in a way that eschews common tropes associated with queer teenage characters. The most common narrative for queer teenage characters is undoubtedly the coming out narrative through which, Glyn Davis argues, “[a] range of different models of homosexuality

Initially, when I decided I wanted to write a feature-length script I kept coming back to a series of complex, same-sex friendships I had while growing up. When looking back, long before I identified a queer, I realised my first love was one of my best friends. It was the type of friendship that was really tender and sweet but also sexually charged. Despite the fact that we had the makings of a beautiful

1 Glyn Davis, “Saying it Out Loud: Revealing Television’s Queer Teens”, in Teen TV: genre, consumption, identity, Eds. Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson, London: British Film Institute 2004.

teen romance we never crossed that line. The beginnings of Mosquita y Mari was reflecting back on that time and asking myself the questions, why didn’t we cross that line and what kept us in “our place”? I didn’t grow up in a household where my parents forewarned me that if I turned out to be gay they would disown me. They didn’t wave the Bible in my face saying it was wrong. Instead the message was subtle. It was hidden in the silences around sex and desire; it was implied by society’s expectations, you know, like you only experience those feelings of love and desire with the opposite sex.

that beautiful distractedness of first love, Guerrero’s camera kind of abandons her narrative and lingers on strands of hair blowing in the wind, awkward fingers fiddling with things, dust particles floating in the sunlight. GHOSTS OF MURNAU Review of “Tabu” and “Faust” by Daniel Fairfax

Through this film, Guerrero visualises those silences of sex and desire, opening these up as ambiguous spaces for expression without tying them down via dialogue. In doing so, this film is underscored with the pleasures of the unspoken and it consequently captures something of the electricity of first love — that combination of excitement, anticipation and doubt that makes the hair on your arms stand on end. Many queer films feel somewhat contrived because of clunky phrasing, made all the worse in their privileging of dialogue over aesthetic. This film, with its central relationship that is almost entirely unspoken, shifts the focus to small gestures, emphasising the intensity of certain moments and the dullness of others. In these moments, the film captures a rhythm of adolescence that feels so very true. And sometimes, replicating

n the last issue of Screen Machine, amidst my excoriations of Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty, I made the comment that, in “evincing contempt for any notion of a world existing independently of her film,” the Australian novelist-cumfilmmaker has “in truth, still not made the transition to the cinema; with Sleeping Beauty, she is still creating literature.” The reader of these lines may

have detected an undertow of antipathy towards literature from their author. Do I really bear such ill-will towards the written word, artistic rival of the moving image? Am I akin to the young Truffaut, an aesthetic monogamist, so staunch in his devotion to the cinema that even a night at the theatre smacks of infidelity? And do I see the literary word as a contagion, from which the cinema, art of the image, must be guarded, lest it be bastardised? Am I fearful, like the old Godard, of an infection irretrievably corrupting what was once an innocent, virginal artform? Nothing could be further from my actual attitude! Far from being a source of debasement, I firmly believe that literature can be of immeasurable value in vivifying the cinema. It is at this point that the hardy (and never truly verified) statistic that 50% of films are literary adaptations is generally wheeled out as evidence for the incontrovertible imbrication of literature and cinema – a relationship whose ardour, alas, seems to be largely one-sided (name me the great novels based on films!). The sheer number of adaptations, however, is no proof of their aesthetic merit. How often, indeed, does the filming of a literary text act as a guise for the staid complacency of middlebrow cinema, with the cultural prestige of the original producing a deadening effect on the artistic possibilities of its adaptation? At times, “filmed literature” seems to be a virtual guarantor of the

“filmed cinema” against which a middle-aged Daney so vigorously railed. At other times, however, literature can be used in the cinema to imaginative, invigorating ends, and this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival offered two notable examples of such a favourable enmeshing of art forms. Both films, as chance would have it, would share a further trait in common. They both bore titles linking them to works in the œuvre of the silent master F.W. Murnau. Neither work could be described as a remake of their mute forebears: in the case of Miguel Gomes’ Tabu, the narrative takes only the colonial setting and diptych structure of its 1931 namesake,¹ while Sokurov’s Faust shares a common literary provenance with Murnau’s earlier work—Goethe’s rendering of the Faust-myth—without specifically alluding to its cinematic predecessor. Murnau nonetheless seems to haunt both films, albeit in less overt, more indiscernible ways. Despite the endless profusion of spoken words which stamps the soundtracks of the two films, they both seem, somehow, to hark back to the pre-talkie era, an era when the image retained an autonomous, enigmatic power – which no director was able to harness to quite the same degree of majesty as Friedrich Wilhelm. Far from being detrimental then, the literary qualities of Tabu and Faust profoundly bolster the

visual prowess of the films. Gomes’ work could well have suffered from the critical hype afforded to it upon its premiere at the Berlinale: an outlier in an otherwise conservative competition line-up, it quickly become the cause du jour for a clutch of vociferous critics jaded by the rest of the festival’s fare, who were thereupon all the more incensed when Mike Leigh’s jury awarded the Golden Bear to the Taviani brothers’ uninspiring Caesar Must Die.² But, for once, the acclaim was eminently justified: for me, Tabu is far and away the best film of the year so far. In the film’s first part, set in wintry Lisbon in the present day and filmed in rich, black and white, Academy-ratio 35mm, the middle-aged spinster Pilar becomes involved in the life of her gambling-addicted octogenarian neighbour Aurora, who is tended to by a Cape Verdean nurse (and suspected witch-doctor) named Santa. As the elderly woman succumbs to debilitating illness, she cries out for a man named Gianluca Ventura, and Pilar embarks on a mission to track him down. Her sleuthing eventually leads to an encounter in the faux-tropical atrium of a shopping mall, where the aged Ventura relates his passionate affair with Aurora several decades earlier. Gomes opens the second half of the film with a supreme act of montage: a close-up of Ventura in the present-day is succeeded by

a corresponding shot of Aurora, still in the prime of her youth. A run-of-the-mill shot-reverse shot procedure is thus transformed into a vast temporal and geographical leap, crossing continents and historical epochs, as the terse title “Paradise” appears on the screen. The jolt is emphasised by an abrupt shift in cinematic style, as the film-stock switches to the granular textures of 16mm. Even more noticeably, the entire last half of the film dispenses with dialogue – with the soundtrack filled only by background noises and the velvety voiceover of the impassive Ventura. Aurora, he recounts, is trapped in paradise: married to an insipid colonialist, she whiles away her days on a remote plantation in an unnamed African dependency, under the shadow of the fictional Mount Tabu. When the debonair, motorbike-riding outsider Ventura arrives on the scene, she is swept off her feet – but their desire for one another only serves to trigger the tale’s tragic trajectory. This entire segment has a dream-like quality to it, where authentic experience and the embellishments of an aging memory can not be separated from one another. The measured, almost somnambulist pace with which the action unfolds is primarily governed by the prolix disquisitions of the mesmeric voiceover, with its proliferation of obtuse digressions, focussing on secondary details or offering

clung to her as she descended to the earth. “As far as you may run, as long as you may yearn, you will never escape your heart.” “Then I shall die.” “You sad and poor soul!”

contextual commentary on the events. The evident model, here, is the similar technique used by Oliveira in Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl, an adaptation of the Eça de Quieroz short story of the same name, which brazenly lays bare its origins in literature, and which, in my opinion, is the closest thing to a perfect film the present century has thus far yielded. Taken by itself, the voiceover of Tabu could be considered a literary masterpiece, and, like Oliveira, Gomes seems to revel in, rather than seek refuge from, the belletristic origins of the film’s prose. Examples of this exultation abound throughout the film, whether in the voiceover of the second half of the film or the deadpan dialogues between Pilar, Augusta and Santa in the first half. It is, however, in a brief prelude to the main story (reciting the legend of an intrepid 19th-century African explorer who, spurred on by the appearance of his beloved’s ghost, elects to plunge into a river and become one with the crocodiles which lurk within) that the film reaches a zenith of poetic elegance. I give here a brief excerpt from this episode, accompanied by the tinkling piano strains of Joana Sá’s “Variações pindéricas sobre a insensatez”:

As sumptuously lyrical as these lines are, there is no textual source for them. Every word spoken on the film’s soundtrack was penned by the director himself, in collaboration with Mariana Ricardo. Contrary to all appearances, Tabu is not a literary adaptation of a preexisting text – or, better, it is a literary adaptation of a text which does not exist. In this sense, Faust could hardly be more opposed to Gomes’ film. Its literary source is not only indisputably in existence, it is one of the great canonical works of the modern era. The very intention of adapting to the screen a play which, even in its own time, was considered unstageable, immediately piques one’s interest. That Sokurov’s name should be attached as director, and that he should bill the film as the conclusion to his “tetralogy of power” (following on from Moloch, Taurus and The Sun) only enhances the cinephile’s arousal. Faust, however, is a very different film to the preceding three works – not least due to the fact that whereas they all focussed on titans of political history (Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito, respectively), the new film centres on an ageold mythical figure – such that the

And by mysteries unknown, he is visited, coming from distant places, by the one for whom his heart supplicates, wearing—oh, morbid detail!—the dress which

invocation of a tetralogy can appear as a cynical, attentiongrabbing ploy. Faust’s festival debut was met, like Tabu, with critical controversy – but here the dissension was whether Sokurov truly merited the Golden Lion which the Venice jury bestowed upon the film, with the US$11 million pumped into the film’s budget by Putin’s government a further point of contention. Derived mostly from Part I of Goethe’s work (particularly Faust’s encounter with his paramour Gretchen), with some elements of Part II thrown in (an interlude with Wagner’s homunculus, for example), Sokurov’s take on Faust is deeply flawed in parts. The CGI openingsequence, for instance, wherein a gilded mirror flies through the clouds as the “camera” swoops down to the town below, is laughably crude, and would be more in place in a Pixar-animation than the serious meditation on the nature of power which Sokurov imputes his film to be. As for its status as a literary adaptation, Faust is at its worst when Sokurov resorts to directly lifting passages from Goethe’s text. Take the opening octosyllables of Act I of Goethe’s work, which I provide here in an expeditious English translation:

In the film, they are shifted to later in the narrative action, and delivered in voiceover by Faust as he maunders through the medieval burg’s squalid streets – but Goethe’s taut metre is obliterated (through omission of the words “ach!” and “leider” which punctuate the German original) and replaced with a prosified text whose muttered enunciation is so stilted as to recall the vain efforts we have all made, at one time or another, to recite song lyrics without breaking out into a tune. The same effect recurs later, when Faust laments his inability to adequately translate the biblical Greek term λογος: ‘In the beginning,’ ‘tis written, ‘was the word!’ Already I falter! Whose help will be proffered? The word? So highly may it not be rated, It must be otherwise translated.

This time, the lines are retained in the film’s diegesis, but transposed to a dialogue between Faust and his hapless assistant Wagner, and once again transformed into a lifeless, torpid prose eructed by the actors. Paradoxically, Sokurov achieves a much more successful transaesthetic equivalent of the original when he strikes out at the opposite extreme, and, rather than misguidedly attempting to impart Goethe’s German in extenso, simply conveys the thrust of entire passages of text

Now I’ve studied, so thoroughly, Philosophy, law and medicine, And even, woe!, theology With a deeply burning passion. Yet here I stand, a wretched bore! No wiser than I was before.³

with volleys of monosyllabic grunts or streams of vulgar abuse. Whereas the loquacious Tabu achieved a remarkable fidelity to a non-existent work of literature, Faust is most faithful to Goethe’s (eminently extant) masterpiece precisely when it is most distant from the refinement of the original text, when the dialogue is at its most primitive and inarticulate. Perhaps it would be more accurate to characterise Faust as an adaptation, not of a literary work, but of a series of paintings. The Flemish masters Vermeer, Bruegel and Bosch loom large over the film’s visual palette, digitally crafted by Sokurov in collaboration with DOP Bruno

transforming a simple shotreverse shot exchange into a supreme act of montage. Not only does this cut transport us from the murky environs of the glaucous professor to the porcelain features of the luminously backlit ingénue, but the shots themselves have an arresting power: the camera is positioned too close to the characters, their faces fill the screen, as they look too directly into the lens. The close-up, so tamed and codified in the governing syntax of the mainstream cinema, here recovers the primal, disturbing, fissiparous nature it possessed in the days of Griffith, Gance and Murnau. As Murnau’s œuvre amply demonstrated, and as the recent renditions of Tabu and Faust verified, no matter how literary, no matter how painterly, a film may strive to be, the cinema will always be the cinema.

Delbonnel,⁴ and a dossier in issue #679 of Cahiers du cinéma documents the painstaking work done on the film’s colour-grading, with the director furnishing an array of watercolours to hone the desired pictorial tonality of each sequence.⁵ Often this leads to sharp jolts in luminosity, hue and contrast from one shot to the next, a discordant method which is, at times, bolstered by the stretching and squeezing effects to which the image is often subjected (a technique reprised from 1997’s Mother and Son). This effect is no more evident than in a brief sequence, late in the film, in which Faust and Gretchen trade glances with one another. Sokurov cuts from one close-up to another, but in doing so, matches Gomes in

THE EMPEROR’S NEW DRONES Review of “The Avengers” by Andrew Gilbert

the war of the future is clean and precise. This illusion is embodied by The Avengers, but the relationship goes deeper than a few happenstance similarities. While The Avengers is entertainment, its embroidery is culled from the media noise surrounding War on Terror discourse and like all superhero films its jingoistic elements are magnified by their existence in a vacuum — not only do they signify the War on Terror; their images have supplanted an aborted wartime cinema. Without a viable counter culture that directly scrutinizes these fantasy simulations we are left with dreamlike interpretations that are heavily informed by the official discourse of those waging these wars.2 The French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard argued that this phenomenon is the byproduct of a world conflict where humanity is at war with itself—like an

Because it’s not just strength but images of strength that matter in the 21st century war. — Graydon Carter

2 Consider film critic Andrew Sarris on the erasure of Vietnam in Politics and Cinema: “When one looks back on the cinema of the sixties one is startled by the infrequency with which Vietnam was mentioned. Yet this infrequency is in itself significant in that it reflects a society emotionally detached from that particular war. I suppose that there is an active and passive way to interpret this information. The active way is to scold the film industry for not making more movies about Vietnam. The passive way is to report the reluctance of the studios as a symptom of the public’s lack of interest in the war.”

he subtext of The Avengers bares a curious resemblance to the rhetoric of drone warfare. The US defense of drones is simple: American soldiers don’t die, they go anywhere, they only kill bad guys. The Avengers features a government superhero team that is invincible, goes anywhere, and only kills bad guys — no friendly fire or civilian casualties. The point isn’t that some bystanders are unfortunately murdered (a lot, actually) but that there are none;

autoimmune disorder—and refuses to see the complex web of connections that links Western dominance with terrorism, that is, terrorism as a total rejection of Western dominance. For him this conflict is entirely symbolic; our engagement is with a cultural soup of disconnected images.3 These scripted delusions seek to hammer out an order of good versus evil, often recalling the US mythology of World War II, and attempts to synthesize the discombobulated images associated with the War on Terror: collapsing towers, Seal Team Six™, secret prisons, surveillance. For Baudrillard these phantoms are essential to maintain the official nationalist illusion by banishing certain facts that may force one to confront the macabre realities of war. This is hardly news as Hollywood has rarely contended with the dehumanization that occurs in wartime, but at the very least actual historic moments were investigated. The War on Terror film pretends to be anything but, showboating as nostalgic kitsch while smuggling in the bill of goods that keeps imperial wars ragging. The Avengers comes to embody this emerging form of the super/terror narrative as part of

an official discourse: Whedon has moved beyond the Death Wishvigilantism of the genre and into co-opted, techno-savvy war porn blended with Saturday morning cartoons (already boiling under the surface of the genre). Baudrillard has argued that neither side of this conflict has any capacity for victory; it is an endless cycle of humiliating the Other’s image, be it via flag burning or nameless drone targets. Iron Man and the Hulk provide the perfect screen for this ritual: rather than risking a disingenuous portrayal of good soldiers and noble warfare (a modern Green Berets) they remove all literal references to the conflict. In this way, there’s no risk of ignoring war crimes and brutality; the scenarios aren’t phony because it’s just a movie. Avengers creator Stan Lee betrayed this reality when he said, “I think it would be too corny and … in bad taste to have a cartoon figure punching a Muslim and saying, ‘We’ll get you.’ No, that wouldn’t work today.”4 Dress that Muslim up as an alien and it works fine. The appetite for this stuff is insatiable. Whedon recasts generalized images of Arab-Islamic boogeymen as generic robotaliens, led by the effeminate tyrant Loki. Beneath the surface of this

See "This is the Fourth World War: The Der Spiegel Interview With Jean Baudrillard", International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2004; and Jean Baudrillard, "War Porn", Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2006.

4 In the documentary Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked (Steve Kroopnick, 2003).

Wagnerian ode to American might is a schizophrenic relationship to power and freedom. When robot-aliens invade Manhattan, Captain America emerges as a symbol of order, towering high above the people. When his orders to the police are questioned (“Why should we listen to you?”) his superhuman display of physical power answers back. From here on out he is the benevolent dictator of Manhattan. And just like the illusion of exceptionality that comes with expanded executive and military powers, Captain America relinquishes his authority once the conflict is over. But in reality this conflict has no endpoint, for either Baudrillard or the vague parameters of its legal definitions. The wartime powers that Captain America embodies are being sewn into the fabric of Western democracies: extralegal assassinations, drone strikes, NDAA, SOPA, and the fierce and brutal crackdown on political dissent, especially whistleblowers. And while The Avengers is not official propaganda, it does work to normalize and underplay this reality. We are meant to understand this as Freedom, the ultimate definition of Good, which is employed to justify everything. In a curious moment whose irony is lost on Whedon, Loki forces a crowd to kneel before him (in Germany, no less) claiming humans “crave subjugation.” Yet this is meant to be the wrong way. Captain America gets it right with

his inverted totalitarianism: his subjects choose to be dominated for their own good, for security ensured by a friendly fellow who believes in God and Country. The Avengers is ultimately about security from realities of trauma. The kinds that are so terrifying that they inspire any amount of horror to prevent them, whether it’s the distant rumors of drone massacres or the reassurance of disingenuous superhero cinema, even as suicide becomes the primary cause of soldier’s deaths. The details of these horrors are rarely understood or even acknowledged. They become absent referents, unpleasant realities obscured through euphemistic symbols that erase the process of death and destruction: aliens instead of humans, personal struggle instead of remote air strikes, streets full of rubble instead of streets full of corpses, and soldiers that never fall prey to the barbarism of warfare: posing with Nazi flags, gang raping teenagers, head-hunting civilians, or shooting up temples. These visions of annihilation are transformed into common sense, obliterating any process that seeks to comprehend the scope of this global state of affairs. It is enough to believe that pure evil comes from distant lands to destroy our freedoms, which presupposes preemptive assault as the only option. And if innocent lives are destroyed in the process, well then, better safe

than sorry. The Avengers is sleek, colorful, and often funny, but this veils a deliberate allegiance to an ideology that not only devalues non-American life, it can’t even bring itself to show combat death. It’s as far removed from reality as the nameless casualties of US drone strikes are from our field of vision.

mood and docile tone. Utilising her trademark techniques— extended takes, jarring monologues, strategic framing and intensely drawn-out closeups—Akerman has created a haunting film that is purposefully and intensely dreamlike. Continuing her uncanny ability to present textured and considered representations of women, Almayer’s Folly demands contemplative, emotional reactions from the audience by establishing a subtle yet prevalent friction between the mundane and momentous. Three set pieces that furnish the beginning, middle and end of the film exemplify Akerman’s style and success as a transgressive filmmaker investigating power structures. The opening sequence sees an uncertain, unsettling man wander along a dark strip that is artificially lit by neon and inhabited by partygoers. He drifts into a bar while the comforting crooning of Dean Martin’s "Sway" sounds. Deathly action transpires; intrigue is mustered. A voice whispers, "Nina," the name heard again and again until she takes full frame. With a face at once angelic and hardened, before a man-made sunset, Nina (Aurora Marion) begins to sing a Mozart aria directly to us. Her presence is sorrowful, earnest, disturbing; she conjures a sense of displacement, grief and disillusionment. Here we intuitively enter Akerman’s filmic universe; the

THE POETRY OF THE EVERYDAY Review of “Almayer’s Folly” by Stephanie Van Schilt

lmayer’s Folly may be a literary adaptation, based on Joseph Conrad’s 1895 debut novel, but it is very much a Chantal Akerman film. Spanning a little over two hours, Almayer’s Folly fits perfectly within the Belgian filmmaker’s prolific oeuvre: the plot is secondary to the riverside setting, solemn

sadness seeping from Nina’s song and stunningly exotic features gripped my heart while revealing the film’s purposeful sense of delivery and intended pace. Tightly focusing on Nina for an extended period, utilising the “materiality of her performers,”5 Akerman makes it impossible to shy away and we are required to feel. It is here that Akerman, diverging from the original text, sources a thread more closely affiliated with her theoretical interests. Nina—a woman grieving, lost, displaced—is established as the narrative nucleus. This sequence haunts the rest of the film as Akerman places an emphasis on mood and the performative body—Nina’s gestures and movements—over plot or dialogue. This, the film’s start, is in fact the story’s end. Through the course of sensuous, spiralling flashbacks, we witness occidental merchant Kasper Almayer’s (Stanislas Merhar) downfall. From his loveless marriage of convenience to a local woman was born a daughter of mixedrace, Nina, who forms his sole purpose in life. His once grand aspirations of acquiring wealth and treasure have been overthrown; his subsequent, pitiful, obsessive attempts to hold onto his daughter are his lifelong

folly. In the lush surrounds of 1950s Malaysia (another alteration to the original text), rich memories unravel, depicting how young Nina was sent by Almayer’s colonialist father-in-law, Captain Lingard (Marc Barbé), to a convent boarding school amidst promises of a future harmonious life in Europe. After years of ridicule and humiliation during her education as a consequence of her mixed race, Nina returns a hardened shell of an adult human. Rather than neatly slotting into Almayer’s dreams of an optimistic familial reconciliation, Nina, appalled by everything her senseless father stands for, soon contemptuously flees his grasp with militant Daïn (Zac Andrianasolo). But this is not a traditional tale of star-crossed runaways. Nor is it merely a reconstruction of history, a retrospective retelling of colonialist failures. Even though the closing sequence is a tight close up of Almayer’s anguish, this film isn’t solely about male hubris. Complementing the opening scene, this final footage, extending beyond five minutes, once again demonstrates the power of the performative as well as Akerman’s penchant for visual symmetry. This final scene closes the circle between father and daughter, while together these intense close-ups bookend what was, for me, the most powerful and telling sequence of the film:

Ivone Marguiles, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, Durham: Duke University Press 1996.

Nina exits the gate of the school. She walks. For roughly ten minutes, we follow her, beside but apart. She smokes a cigarette. She lets her hair down. She urinates. She crosses roads, treads paths and wanders past, through the lives of the local people. She breathes. She is free and trapped, escaping and displaced, ensnared and unshackled. She strides through twilight into the light of the following day.

expelled from her boarding school. Like the beginning where we feel Nina’s melancholy through the fragility of her voice and the emotion of her exotic eyes, at this midway point, while she walks, we can inhale her honestly, openly, earnestly. Continuing Akerman’s dashing ode to the graceful gesture of walking, the camera slowly tracks with Nina as she aimlessly inhabits space while unconsciously hiding. Here Nina walks on the fringes of society, boundaries both self-created and imposed upon her. Without a place, she is the ultimate outsider; exiled and on the run—a nomad— she walks through the night into the day (echoing Toute une Nuit and Nuit et jour). This sequence demonstrates Akerman’s specific and deliberate ability to compose the dramatic and the quotidian evenly, what Ivone Marguiles calls the “hyperrealist everyday”. These in-between moments, presented minimally and monotonally, are central to Akerman’s work; the extended magic of the mundane ensures, and deserves, reflection. Andrew Klevan has noted that it is “rare to see a genuine concern with the everyday in film”, making an exception of the hyperreal work of Akerman who puts these motions front and centre where they heed

Given her acclaimed status, many interesting statements orbit around the criticism of Akerman’s films: her obsessive focus on the everyday, literal movements of women are a comment on feminism and make Akerman a feminist aesthete (however she rejects the totality limiting titles such as “feminist filmmaker”6); Ivone Marguiles has remarked on how her repetitive, minimal, meticulous and articulate style provokes writers to “reproduce her descriptiveness”; she has also been coined “cinema’s greatest poet of the act of walking.”7 All of these grand claims reverberate in the corners of this mundane yet powerful sequence. Punctuating the middle of the film is a lengthy walking scene that takes place after Nina’s benefactor dies and she is

Chantal Akerman in a BBC interview: "When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films." 7 Adrian Martin, "Chantal Akerman: Walking Woman", Unspoken Cinema, 1998.

attention.8 Accordingly, she is praised for her power to induce meaning through presenting nothing and everything. Procuring formal influence from the likes of Godard, Warhol and Snow, Akerman has made this form her own, particularly via her “hyperrealist” focus on the everyday movements of women, as demonstrated in her tour de force Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Likewise, in this hypnotising sequence, Akerman’s constant themes of alienation and emotional detachment are felt between paces. Here, walking, Nina is tied to no domestic space — she is de-sexualised yet feminine, isolated from a domestic space but silently dependent on it. While she is drawn back to the harrowing concept of "home"—a smothering patriarchal situation she flees—in this moment she is one with no one and everyone. Eventually, upon returning to her father, her few words confirm what this meandering, mundane and silent adventure has already told us: her “heart is dead.” In her statement of intent about Almayer’s Folly, Akerman noted: “I would like to treat this story with simplicity, a father, a mother, a girl, a young man in

love with her.”9 In her own way, where the minimal is never lacking and the simple never sparse, Akerman has succeeded. In Almayer’s Folly, she has created a lush, dreamlike work where the audience walk beside the characters and through their world. Boiling the plot down to a dramatically intense and stark story, without completely overthrowing the evocative, grand themes of existentialism and patriarchy, Akerman has remained faithful to the power of the everyday and her singular body of work.

Andrew Klevan, Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film, Trowbridge: Flick Books 2000.

9 Chantal Akerman, “Almayer’s Folly: Synopsis and Statement of Intent”, Lola, No. 2, 2012.

THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN Review of “Bernie” by Aaron Cutler

in interviews at their homes and workplaces to speak about him between scripted dramatic scenes. This film by Houston, Texas native Richard Linklater—a hybrid of fact and fiction based on a Texas Monthly magazine piece by Skip Hollandsworth—is told from their points of view, with professional actors stepping in not so much to reenact their stories about Bernie, nor to illustrate them, but more to join in a collective telling of them. Sometimes you don’t know whether the person you’re seeing and listening to is actually from Carthage, or a professional actor hired to play a resident. Confusion becomes communion, as over the course of the film they all and we all belong to it. Bernhard Tiede II, a local celebrity, also belongs. He wasn’t from Carthage originally, but became beloved after moving in. We see Bernie not from his own point of view, but from theirs. With its collective perspective the film actually gives us multiple individual ones, so that we come to know and love Bernie through many different pairs of real Carthaginian eyes. Just as they create their own character based off of a real man, so do we come to imagine a real Bernie based on the one played in the film by Jack Black. Black is a real-life rock star and a Hollywood actor whose star persona depends on speaking with an ironic edge, duping straight foils into believing in his sincerity while leaving us aware

veryone in the film Bernie is worthy of individual care and attention, even the dead. “After all, you wouldn’t want a mechanic to have the nails of a flight attendant, would you?” asks the film’s title character, an assistant funeral director addressing a group of university students in the small East Texas town of Carthage. The dead “want one last look at this miraculous world,” he says, before shutting his test corpse’s eyes. The small, potbellied Bernie then shifts the dead man’s head, so that it’s “neither star-gazing nor navelgazing, but turned ever so slightly to the right, in greeting.” That’s the way, we sense, that Bernie tried to approach each of Carthage’s 6,500 residents, several of whom appear onscreen

of his true intentions. In Bernie, his presence initially disconcerts because we already know the actor, and know he should be a faker. When Bernie convinces people to buy nicer caskets or even doves for funerals, Black’s presence provides for easy laughter. But the more he applies the high notes to songs like “Love Lifted Me” and eulogizes people on the radio, the more he leads the local church choir and town Christmas decoration committee, teaches Sunday school, arranges an art festival, leads local theater productions, and even helps people with their tax returns, the more the actor and character mix to give a sense of a genuine person. As more and more people testify to his lovingness, his sincerity grows hard to dismiss. The conservative Christian town forgives him and accepts him despite anything, including his possible homosexuality (“I heard that he was gay, but he was such a good Christian man”) and then even fully knowing that he is a murderer. Bernie befriended a rich old banker’s widow, Mrs. Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), a nasty monster to many who’d “turn a loan down just for a hobby”. At first he traveled the world with her, whether on European cruises or on trips to New York to see Broadway plays. Then one day he killed her with a shotgun and left her body in a freezer for nine months before it was discovered. He was tried for murder, convicted and given a

life sentence, which the real Bernie is still carrying out. But in the eyes of Carthage's residents, Bernie was innocent. Bernie's prosecutor requested that the judge move the trial from Carthage to nearby San Augustine. Most of the time when a legal trial is moved in the United States it is because it is impossible to find a jury in the original area that isn’t biased against the suspect; this was the only case that Bernie’s lawyer had ever encountered where a trial was moved because the suspect was too well-liked. The whole of Bernie is constructed in such a way so that each character and action is seen from at least one sympathetic point of view, encouraging the viewer to find sympathy but also, more importantly, challenging him or her to avoid easy judgements. As in several of Linklater’s previous films, people who might otherwise spend their lives in supporting roles—the theatrical bit players of Me and Orson Welles, the migrant factory workers of Fast Food Nation, the students in Black and Linklater’s previous collaboration School of Rock— become leads onscreen. Yet Bernie spotlights the margins even further than Linklater’s previous films do by having the real people tell their own stories, and bringing others in when they can’t. The result of this is that we feel sympathy and understanding for all of them as they see each other: Prosecutor Danny Buck Davidson believes in

punishing criminals, even when it’s unpopular; Mrs. Nugent had kindness in her that, for a time, Bernie helped to bring out; Bernie himself helped people, even the woman he killed. One Carthage woman visits jail to tell Bernie that she’s written a letter to the warden asking that he be let out of prison to sing at her funeral; another tells the camera that she knows he did wrong but that, “I will miss him. All of us will”. As Bernie walks towards his jail cell, we see a man from the back, waddling slightly, in a way distinctly self-invented; he’s someone we’ve come to recognize even when we can’t see his face. The actor and character have long since merged into one person. A few shots later, the real Bernie Tiede appears talking in close-up, and the camera pans over to show Jack Black listening. Each nod of Black’s head nods towards Bernie’s dream of being present to do right by everyone, beginning with hearing his or her story.