April 15, 2008
W.J.T. Mitchell on Errol Morris's new film
In its May issue, Harper's has published a long and thoughtful review by W.J.T. Mitchell of Errol Morris's new film, Standard Operating Procedure (the link is to the Sony Classics site for the film). An excerpt:
The unauthorized, illegal, and unsuccessfully suppressed amateur photos taken by G.I.'s in Abu Ghraib prison are what remain as the icons of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
This fact cannot be explained by forensic methods, a shortfall made clear by Morris's own research into the mystery of the Hooded Man, misidentified by the New York Times as Ali Shalal Qaissi—called "Clawman" by the G.I.'s—on March 11, 2006. Morris used his New York Times blog post, "Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up," of August 15, 2007, to clarify matters. In preparing to film Standard Operating Procedure, Morris had discovered (along with many other researchers) that the Hooded Man was actually Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, nicknamed "Gilligan." Morris derives a lesson about photography from this; namely, "the central role that photography itself played in the mistaken identification, and the way that photography lends itself to those errors and may even engender them." It is as if photographs, by virtue of the authority we grant them, compounded with our own prejudices and preconceptions, "attract false beliefs—as fly-paper attracts flies."
Morris's skeptical deconstruction drew seventy-four responses, most of them sympathetic. Dozens of hypotheses were tried out and debated by the puzzle-loving insomniac readers of the Times website over the next few weeks. As the discussion proceeded, however, this kind of search for the "deep truth" behind the photographs began to run into a wall of resistance. Respondents pointed out that the whole search for the truth behind the photograph was missing a much larger point: that the actual identity of the Hooded Man is irrelevant to the power of the image. In fact, one might put it even more strongly and insist that it is precisely the anonymity of the Hooded Man that is the key to the power of the image.
The referent of a photograph, the real object or event "captured" by it, is not the same as the meaning it my acquire as a cultural icon. This meaning can be understood only by looking carefully at the photograph as a formal and iconographic entity, and by tracing its reception among viewers. If the sole photograph of the Hooded Man were the one taken from the side by [Sabrina] Harman, it would not be one of the most famous images in the world today. It is the frontal perspective and the symmetry of the figure that provide the formal conditions for its power. The question, then, is not "Who is the Hooded Man?" but (to paraphrase James Agee on Walker Evans) Who are you who will study this photograph, and what is your responsibility for it, and what will you do about it?
Mitchell goes on to assert that "Morris's reconstruction of [the conditions that surrounded the production of the images] will ... launch a whole new set of more deeply informed reflections on the meaning of Abu Ghraib...." To read the whole article, click here (you may need to be a subscriber for full access).
UPDATE, 4/17: More on the film from Variety deputy editor Anne Thompson.
UPDATE, 4/21: A bevy of links to discussion of the film has been posted to GreenCine Daily.
Posted in Film, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 3, 2008
Herzog & Morris
The March/April issue of The Believer contains the transcription of a conversation between filmmakers Werner Herzog and Errol Morris conducted last autumn at Brandeis University. Click here to read it.
Posted in Film, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
September 21, 2007
The new Barney Rosset documentary, Obscene
The prolific film blog GreenCine Daily has all the information you’d ever want about Obscene: How Barney Rosset Published Dirty Books for Fun and Profit, a new documentary from directors Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor. The title is somewhat misleading, of course, as the “dirty books” it refers to are not your average Hustler fare. Rosset instead published, through his Grove Press and through the Evergreen Review, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and the first US edition of The Story of O.
GreenCine’s post excerpts reviews from two other sites:
"You may not know Barney Rosset but the world we live in would be radically different without him," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "Rosset is a fascinating subject, still possessed of a remarkably nimble mind well into his 80s, and gives refreshingly frank interviews. Better yet, he's also a bit of a pack rat and has maintained a sizeable archive of family movies, radio interviews, television appearances and the like, all of which have been made available to the filmmakers."
"Visually, however, the film never treads into the territory of he innovation and modernism that embody Rosset's life's work, instead limiting the story to an orthodox, chronological summary of what happened," adds Tom Hall. "I liked this movie a lot, especially because I believe so strongly in Rosset's principled stance that adults should be able to make up heir own minds about what books they read and images they care to take in... but I felt it could use an extra 'oomph' that more concern about the visual strategy (and the better integration of some of the film's talking heads in to the movie's storyline) might have delivered."
In the September/October/November 2006 issue of Bookforum, the writer Mike Topp visited Rosset at his Fourth Avenue apartment:
At eighty-four, Rosset is a startlingly lively man with pale skin, piercing blue eyes, and an encyclopedic recall. It was hard to believe that this was indeed the radical left-wing publisher who had been investigated numerous times by the CIA. Rosset extended his hand and seated himself, sipping a rum and Coke.
”This is a duplicate library. Many parts of my collection have been sold to Boston College, Boston University, the University of Texas, and the University of North Caroline. As a publisher, you pick up an incredible number of books.” His low-pitched cadence seemed more befitting an old-school gentleman publisher than today’s crop of bottom-line watchers.
Posted in Books, Film. Found always via this permanent link.
August 30, 2007
Hitchcock and Truffaut
I'm unsure of the original source of this conversation excerpt, or if it ever took place. That's one of the charms of Dot Dot Dot, the design journal in which I found it. The fourteenth issue is out now.
Hitchcock: Have you ever seen an assembly line?Truffaut: No, I never have.
Hitchcock: They're absolutely fantastic. I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foremen. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece, Finally, the car they've seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, 'Isn't it wonderful?' Then they open the door to the car and out drops a corpse!
Truffaut: That's a great idea!
Hitchcock: Where has the body come from? Not from the car, obviously, since they've seen it start at zero! The corpse falls out of nowhere, you see! And the body might be that of the foreman the two fellows have been discussing.
Truffaut: That's a perfect example of absolute nothingness! Why did you drop the idea? Is it because it would have made the scene too long?
Hitchcock: It wasn't a question of time. The real problem was that we couldn't integrate the idea into the story. Even a gratuitous scene must have some justification for being there, you know!
I love Hitchcock's evident enthusiasm. This dialogue is inserted without explanation on page twenty-nine of the magazine.
Posted in Film, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link. | TrackBack (0)
September 11, 2006
Iain Sinclair on Primitive London
Iain Sinclair, a favorite writer-psychogeographer, in the Guardian:
Reporters don't come more detached than that salaried sleepwalker, Marcello Mastroianni, in La Dolce Vita. Fellini's 1960 portrait of Rome—loving tribute masquerading as exposé—was unpunctuated, informal. But the melancholy Italian matinee idol didn't translate into London, looking - when brought to Notting Hill for John Boorman's Leo the Last in 1969—jet-lagged, traumatised. Absent. Like the shabby stucco of the alien territory he was visiting. A performance phoned in from another country.Rome was old, queeny, a museum insulted by traffic. The Paris of Jean-Luc Godard was a newsreel, with accidental poetry, captured by that dynamic camera-sniper, the Indo-China veteran Raoul Coutard. Los Angeles showed its underbelly, its toxic spread, in a mix of documentary and polemic fiction known as The Savage Eye, shot by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick in 1959.
But film in London was always a difficulty . . .
Posted in Film, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
September 1, 2006
September in Artforum
Selected articles from the September issue of Artforum are now online. (Take that, Greg.) One that you'll have to find the magazine to read is "Keeping Distance: On the Art of Marine Hugonnier," by my friend and colleague Martin Herbert. Hugonnier's film Ariana was a highlight of the 2003 Venice Biennale, an oasis of calm amid the chaos of the Arsenale's eleven simultaneous exhibitions. Here's what Herbert, eloquent as ever, has to say about that work:
In 2002 . . . Hugonnier went to Afghanistan to shoot Ariana. An avid researcher, she'd become fascinated by the Panjshir Valley in the north of the country, a lush landscape (described in ancient Persian poetry as a "paradise garden") protectively encircled by a nameless mountain range, and a stronghold of resistance during twenty-three years of war with the Soviets and then the Taliban. Hugonnier wanted to see for herself—and, if possible, record on film—how landscape determines history. As it turned out, that wasn't possible. Deploying a musing epistolary voice-over and documentary images in a manner reminiscent of Chris Marker's 1983 masterpiece Sans soleil, the eighteen-minute film tracks her camera crew's attempts to reach a mountaintop from which to shoot the valley and its rocky sentinels. They are stymied; the authorities say landslides have blocked the way. Since, however, the spot the crew is trying to get to is located at a militarily strategic point, Hugonnier suspects an ulterior motive.Finally, however, the Ministry of Culture helps them gain access to a location that affords the aerial perspective they need to complete their visual travelogue—a promontory the locals call "Television Hill," overlooking settlements and battlefields. "The spectacle made us euphoric," Hugonnier recalls in voice-over. But now, having arrived at the critical moment of her project, she refuses to set the camera rolling. Panoramas, she realizes, connote power—the controlling gaze. (No accident, surely, that they attained popularity as a form of mass entertainment in the nineteenth century, at the height of European colonial adventure.) By denying her audience this panoptic vision, Hugonnier broaches the issue of the inherent morality of specific vantages. The film suggests that imagemaking may not only reflect attitudes toward otherness but may also perpetuate or even establish them.
My own review in the issue, of Berlin-based artist Thomas Zipp's New York solo debut at Harris Lieberman, is now online at BrianSholis.com.
I also wrote a brief preview of "Wunderground: Providence 1995 to the Present," opening September 15 at the RISD Museum:
Founded in 1995 by artists Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale, Fort Thunder was a decrepit, junk-filled warehouse in Providence that became home to an ever-shifting group of artists and musicians. It was also, for a particular breed of pilgrim, a holy site—mecca for a hyperpsychedelic art of visual and aural excess. Forcefield, the art collective, and Lightning Bolt, the band, were both forged in this creative cauldron; the latter's performances there approached a hallucinatory, sweaty sublime. But the party had to end: Developers razed the building in 2002. This exhibition, conceived by Brinkman, Chippendale, and six other artists who got their start in the Providence underground, aims to capture the scene's manic energy with approximately two thousand screenprinted posters for art and music shows, as well as sound recordings and a new, site-specific, collaborative installation.
I hope to make it up to Providence to attend the opening and visit my friend Lauren, who will begin studying at the school this autumn. And I hope that the rest of you pick up this issue of Artforum—which you can read more about here and is as replete with smart essays as ever.
Posted in Art, Film, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
May 17, 2006
Wes Anderson, My Life, My Card
After reading this piece on Slate.com about Wes Anderson's new, immensely enjoyable two-minute film—a commercial for American Express—I waited for a second article to appear so that I would have an excuse to link to it. Well, Slate.com itself answered my wishes, publishing this piece on Monday evening:
Wes Anderson's new film is a lustrous widescreen ode to moviemaking. It's an ultimate movie-movie, a cinephile's wet dream that is, actually, a spoof of François Truffaut's 1973 movie about movies, Day for Night. In fact, Anderson's film is better than Day for Night: It's more complex because it doesn't just fetishize movies the way that Truffaut did. Plus, it's shorter.
It's titled, "Dear Wes Anderson, Why does it take you so long to make a movie?" and goes on to analyze the (relative) slowness of the "American Eccentrics" (Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Sofia Coppola, etc.), who only make a new movie every few years. Make what you will of the author's argument, but be sure to enjoy the short film.
Posted in Around the web, Film. Found always via this permanent link.
April 18, 2006
The Life Aquatic with Matthew Barney / MP3 of the moment #3
Still from Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9.
There is little new to be said about Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9, which was released a few weeks ago and is now screening at the IFC Center in the West Village. There were, of course, reviews in all of the major media outlets—the New York Times and the Village Voice, among many others—as well as numerous posts on blogs. (Girish's comments were among the earliest and remain among the most well thought out.) As is to be expected, there is little impartial commentary; like all extremely ambitious artists, Matthew Barney seems only to draw fulsome praise or withering criticism, and the film, loaded with visual cues referencing the Cremaster series with which he made his name, will convert few critics and dissuade few fans. Overwrought pageantry and meticulously observed ritual, a fetishist's appreciation of elaborate costuming, and all manner of viscous semiliquid materials figure prominently.
I enjoyed the film. A few brief comments:
- I agree with those who criticize Barney's editing skills, as the film seems like an endless succession of eight- to ten-second takes; were it not for the Björk's evocative soundtrack, there would be even less narrative thrust than can now be discerned. The film's action hovers somewhere between nonnarrative and narrative states, and it suffers some for it.
- While there are plenty of striking moments, there is no single image in Drawing Restraint 9 as beautiful as individual scenes in his Cremaster films. (I'm thinking specifically of the use of the Chrysler building as a maypole in Cremaster 3 or the scene in which Barney jumps off a bridge into the Danube in Cremaster 5.)
- The ending seems tacked on, as if Barney had extra visual material—the kabuki clown, the woman vomiting pearls into the sea, etc.—that he wanted to include but couldn't otherwise fit.
- Some commentators have glossed the reference to Douglas MacArthur in the beginning of the film, but I'm surprised that none yet have reached back to Matthew C. Perry, the original "Occidental Guest." I know that the coincidence of their first names is just that, but it is a suggestive one nonetheless.
Anyway, posting about the movie grants me the opportunity to update my "MP3 of the Moment," listed at the bottom of the middle column. I have uploaded "Gratitude," composed by Björk and performed by Will Oldham, Zeena Parkins, and a choir of Japanese children. From bjork.com: "In the film's moving opening sequence, we hear Will Oldham sing in English the text of a letter from a Japanese citizen to General MacArthur thanking him for lifting the U.S. moratorium on whaling off the nation's coasts; this text was adapted by Matthew Barney and set to music by Björk for harp, here played by Zeena Parkins. Its delicate delivery acknowledges the folk-culture roots of whaling, while it also subtly flags the barbed history and politics surrounding its source text." The song is not as powerful as "Storm," which, along with Funkstörung's remix of "All is Full of Love," hovers near the top of my all-time-favorite Björk song list, but it has its own charms—namely that adorable choir.
Posted in Art, Film, Music. Found always via this permanent link.
May 4, 2005
Odd questions
Do any film directors consistently work in a format akin to the novella? Is there anyone regularly producing 45-75 minute movies? Would releasing two such movies together ever work commercially? Or even on the art house/film festival circuit? (Question prompted by this post on Jean Eustache's lengthy The Mother and the Whore at Waggish.)
Posted in Film. Found always via this permanent link.
March 20, 2005
Ruttmann and Vertov
I signed up for a Netflix account to begin rectifying the fact that I know very little about film, and this morning watched two early documentaries. Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) are a natural pair: both explore urban life in late-‘20s metropolises, focusing largely on locomotion; both are non-narrative and accompanied by a musical score prepared especially for the film; both run about an hour. But Vertov’s work is in almost every way the superior film. Ruttmann’s film is hampered by its modest goal—to “present a more or less realistic picture of big city life from early morning to late at night,” according to Walter Laqueur—and has been critiqued frequently (and to my mind, somewhat rightly) for its uncommitted stance during what was an incredibly complex moment in modern Germany’s history. It need not have expressed the correct politics, of course, but any politics would have sufficed. Instead it is merely a pretty film, showing what we could have experienced had we been there, then. Vertov, on the other hand, starts out with a hubristic manifesto—Man with a Movie Camera is his expression of an “absolute language of cinema…based on its total separation from the language of literature and theater”—and follows through with what is, formally, a truly radical work. He consistently inserts images of cameramen and editors making the film we are watching; plays with shadows, split-screens, extreme angles (note the similarity between some of his shots and avant-garde photography produced in Paris around the same time), and the film’s speed; and is deliberately pointed in his juxtaposition of image of the upper class and the destitute. It is a near-dizzying whirlwind of imagery.
Can anyone recommend other films that might follow naturally from these two? (Here's looking at you, Greg.) Back on March 6th, at Ocularis, I watched Antonioni’s Nettezza Urbana (1948), a beautiful chiaroscuro portrait of Roman street sweepers, and Bambini in Citta (1946), a moving “testament to the innate joy, adaptability, and optimism of children” (to quote Sophie Fenwick, who put them on the same program). I would appreciate any recommendations of urban documentaries from the first half of the last century.
Posted in Film. Found always via this permanent link.
September 8, 2004
Andy Goldsworthy....Hero?
Did anyone else notice that Hero looks like the Andy Goldsworthy documentary Rivers and Tides with gravity-defying martial arts action? Take a look at the amped-up color in the natural background settings of some of these photos from Hero and then think back to your favorite scene from the documentary (mine might be the chained-together rainbow of leaves floating down the river). Maybe if Goldsworthy had included fight scenes wherein he takes on critics who won't approach his work seriously, his movie's box office take would have been much higher....