Careful!

"But you had music playing during the hippopotamus hunt!" 

I said "Yes." 

I felt a bit guilty.

Just like in a good old western I'd wanted to shore up the dramatic moments with music.

But at least I'd used traditional hunting music.

They said, "That's true but a hippo has very good ears. Music would scare it off."

(Jean Rouch on the reactions of the people of Ayoru to Bataille sur le grand fleuve [Hippopotamus Hunt], his film of 1951.)

Digital Video:

"Green is almost uniformly spread over the plants, the wind follows the birds, no one risks seeing the stones die."

("The result is not a broken-in animal but an animal trainer.")

-Eluard/Breton Force of Habit

FOR MUBARAK.......

"We were there in '68 (they were?), and we can tell you it was stupid; there's no point doing it again." This is all they have to sell: the bitterness of '68. In this sense, then, they are a perfect fit for the current electoral grid, whatever their political orientations. Everything is filtered through this grid: Marxism, Maoism, Socialism, etc., and not because actual struggles have revealed new enemies, new problems, or new solutions. It is simply because THE revolution must be declared impossible - everywhere, and for all time. This explains why those concepts which were beginning to function in a very differentiated way (powers, resistances, desires, even 'the plebe') are once again globalised, amassed in the insipid unity of Power, THE Law, the State, etc.. This also explains why the thinking subject has made a comeback: the only possibility for revolution, as far as the New Philosophers are concerned, is the pure act of the thinker who thinks revolution is impossible.

"What I find really disgusting is that the New Philosophers are writing a martyrology: the Gulag and the victims of history. They live off corpses. They have discovered the witness-function, which perfectly compliments the author -and thinker-function....But there never would have been any victims if the victims had thought or spoken like our New Philosophers. The victims had to live and think in a totally different way to provide the material that so moves the New Philosophers, who weep in their name, think in their name, and give us moral lessons in their name. Those who risk their life most often think in terms of life, not death, not bitterness, and not morbid vanity. Resistance fighters are usually in love with life. No one was ever put in prison for powerlessness and pessimism - on the contrary! From the perspective of the New Philosophers, the victims were dupes, because they didn't grasp what the New Philosophers have grasped. If I belonged to an association, I would bring a complaint against the New Philosophers: they show just a little too much contempt for the inmates of the Gulag."

(Deleuze)

The Secret Radiation of Denise Bellon

"...amusing to imagine BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN aboard this vehicle..."

(the feet of Henri Langlois and Mary Meerson, and the resistance vessel that saved innumerable films from Nazi confiscation/destruction. Photo: Denise Bellon)

Le Souvenir d'un avenir a.k.a. REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME by Yannick Bellon and Chris Marker is one of the most extraordinary of all movies about, and almost entirely made out of, photography ("...to sustain the gaze of others..."). This is done with the tool of video and it is one of Marker's finest in that medium. The photographs under consideration are those of Denise Bellon who lived almost every year of the 20th century (1902-1999), just like Marker's other beloved subject, Alexandr Medvedkin, THE LAST BOLSHEVIK.

To have been 27 years old at the time of the Second Manifesto of Surrealism...
To have been 18 years old during the Russian Revolution...
To have been middle-aged during the fight against Fascism...

Filming the images that others have made, speaking through and with them, respecting and transforming them -- this is Marker's solidity (whereas for many other filmmakers, it is their anemia). Simple devices -- dissolves and cuts from photo to photo -- are movements from strata to strata. When he's using images he himself has shot, it's an image within the image: commentary. Marker is known for his beautiful voice over commentaries -- exact and digressive, personal and worldly, a totality of rhetoric -- and REMEMBRANCE's commentary track is no exception.

For all the mastery and invention of essay form in Marker that has been talked about on a literary bon mot basis, what's as important or perhaps more important is how these commentaries relate to the images, i.e. the cinematic basis: Marker manages to leave the image open while transforming it. In spite of the density of Marker's commentaries, his images are not smothered as images. Still, we must consider Marker's images of images as his (and his collaborators) own, because though Marker is recording the images of others  -- recording photographs -- it's his methods of cropping, emphasis with masking, duration, and angle that contribute (I would say entirely) to his particular kind of memorial and material rhetoric. Here in REMEMBRANCE, and especially in THE LAST BOLSHEVIK, we have extremely refined work with photographs. It's shocking how entrenched the conventions of filming documents and photographs in standard documentary productions have become; Marker doesn't use those conventions, even when he does. A little camera movement over a photo, a crop understood as a crop; Marker's commentaries would be merely lovely without the cinematic device. The ideas between the images, materials, authors -- all these generations -- are brutal and unmistakable in REMEMBRANCE; combat and testimony to history. Twentieth century anachronisms here don't crash into our century's back from the past; they come round and face us, and gently lap onto own epoch's feet. The photos recede as much as they return.

A big idea in the movie: Bellon's pictures somehow registered the moments when "post-war (World War I) became pre-war (World War II)." How?

Victorious steel turned to rubbish.

The body liberated, then mutilated, then appropriated by fascism.

Adverts for alcohol and socialism.

Then, about Duchamp the film says: "He'll be used to vindicate the art of vanity." Bellon took pictures of him as if he knew this.

Bellon took the only pictures of Langlois's cradle of all cinematheques, his bathtub filled with films.

Over Bellon's photos of suicidal Europe, the film later says "...it seems that nations on the verge of war make a point of parading their wealth, like misers who in their final death throes want to recount their treasures."

Bellon reported to L'Afrique occidentale française: "....even on the Left nobody thinks of independence..." In this sense she was a great human spy...as is, and always was, Chris Marker.

I have said very little about Bellon... that is what the film is for! See it here. . .

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME was once available on Youtube, and I embedded all the parts below so that it could be seen -- but no longer. Here are the carcasses of that fact:

part one



part two



part three




part four



part five

"Also, the idea was to bring filmmaking into the community and demystify it, to encourage kids that, look, if you can turn a HiFi on, you can turn a Nagra on and do sound. Just watch the button and keep it level. And they would do it. Five year old, six year old kids. The kids you see running around, they'd drag the lights, do the slate. The only thing they didn't do was change the magazine and load the camera, but everything else they had their hands on. "

-- Charles Burnett (interview from "Drifting" here)

BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION

Now each day is fair and balmy
Everywhere you look: the army.

--Ustad Daman (Punjabi poet, 1958, from an anecdote by Tariq Ali, here.)

I thought the tanned teens of this film's trailer looked suspiciously anonymous, now we know why: it's that slick anonymity of the army recruitment ad:

Ian Bryce, one of the producers of TRANSFORMERS : “Once you get Pentagon approval, you’ve created a win-win situation. We want to cooperate with the Pentagon to show them off in the most positive light, and the Pentagon likewise wants to give us the resources to be able to do that."

The film was shot on a military base with Servicemembers acting as "extras". No doubt it's a showcase of military product and power (director Michael Bay had similar pacts with the Pentagon for 'Pearl Harbor' and 'Armageddon'). One Army Lt. Col advising on the film said "The Army has never fought giant robots, but if we did, this is probably how we’d do it.”

For those who are inclined to verify such films for professional or academic purposes, there remain enough reasons to refrain in this case. It wouldn't occur to me to see this film but anyway we ought to boycott TRANSFORMERS. Not in objection to filmmakers cooperating with the military per se, look at the films of John Ford and Sam Fuller, but certainly in objection to the super-production and the super-product.

CIVIL WAR, John Ford's contribution to the omnibus super-production HOW THE WEST WAS WON, is not a super-product but a film. For all its super-form proportions (3-filmstrip Cinerama) what matters in the film is some pink water in a creek that the spectator doesn't even see. The creek has been tinted by the blood of the North and South. (Recalling this reminds me of its opposite -- of how disgusting an act it was for Spielberg to use "movie magic" at precisely the wrong moment in SCHINDLER'S LIST: tinting the little girl's frock "red".) What also matters in CIVIL WAR are the sudden graves we see, as massive in Ford's Cinerama as they are in Ford's 1.33:1.

The Iraq War is a super-production: limitless ad-space for its super-form-weaponry on TV (showcases on networks owned by both Turner [CNN] and Murdoch [Fox]) and in print (at the New York Times and those that follow suit). Had the Iraq war been a small production, a Wenders film, then "filming" would've been stopped a long time ago. "We can't get these shots, they don't want us to film here, they don't want to be in the film. It's over." But no, the super-producers "film" incessantly. Yet it seems that nary a grave -- sudden or stately, Iraqi or U.S./Allied Forces -- has been shown.

If there was a super-film that reflected the U.S. population's aversion to the Iraq war in a small way, I think it was HULK, by Ang Lee (et al.). It failed at the box office because it showed carpet bombing by the U.S. military from the point of view of the victim on the ground (in a desert setting, no less). It was simply too much for guilty citizens in the summer of 2003. Or perhaps they just stayed home (CNN, FOX), which is another story.

Below, another film made under the tutelage of the US military, AGUINALDO'S NAVY, from the year 1900 (American Mutoscope, Biograph). The use of cinema in this place (the Philippines) at this time (so early in film history) would have necessarily made this film a kind of super-production; for cinema to be under the tutelage of anyone at this time meant "advising" the very purpose of cinema itself. The sparseness of content in the film in relation to the title, the very lack of military forces is the film's mocking propaganda in the service of Theodore Roosevelt's brutal occupation of the Philippines just after the Spanish/American war. Here, the title AGUINALDO'S NAVY is rendered: "Aguinaldo's?" "Navy"? -- in other words it is an ironic, ridiculing film, and a base, imperialist point of view. Here we are seeing two infacies: that of the cinema and that of U.S. imperialism. Then again, take a look, what do we really see?:

(Apologies: the below video is no longer available, but AGUINALDO'S NAVY can be seen here)

This clip apparently ends Filipino filmmaker Raya Martin's latest film AUTOHYSTORIA (read Robert Koehler on the film here ), a film I haven't seen because it is unavailable in the U.S.

For fascinating information on what the US and Filipino independence leader Aguinaldo were doing to that country, read here:

It follows that the native landlords and capitalists are incapable of leading a struggle to overthrow foreign imperialist domination. The history of the Philippines demonstrates this especially clearly. In spite of the myths it has propagated to prettify its history, the real traditions of the Filipino
"national bourgeoisie" are utterly wretched and servile. The "ilustrados" considered themselves Spaniards. Even the saint of bourgeois nationalism Jose Rizal chose "exile over revolution" and died a passive hostage, a sterile martyr immortalised in his poems and novels. The revolution of 1896 exposed the true attitude of the ilustrados. It took the initiative of the insurrection of the Katipunan, party of the nascent Manila proletariat led by the worker Andres Bonifacio, to galvanise them into any activity. Then they moved with haste and implacable malice to hijack the movement. They sneered at Bonifacio and his worker comrades as godless, ignorant ruffians. When Bonifacio denounced them and attempted to establish an independent revolutionary council, he and his brother were abducted, tried and executed, by the ilustrados' military leader Aguinaldo.

Thus the first act of the "national bourgeoisie" was the murder of the workers who had led the revolution. Having crushed the original cadres of the revolution, Aguinaldo's second act was to accept a bribe of P400,000 from the Spanish and sail away into exile in Hong Kong. Popular resistance continued despite Aguinaldo's appeals to the masses to lay down their arms. If it had not been for the accident of the Spanish/American war, and the cynical exploitation of Aguinaldo by American imperialism, that would have been the end of Aguinaldo's historical claims. The mass struggle continued in his absence and the Spanish were expelled. Only then, having established communications with the Americans in Hong Kong, did Aguinaldo return to proclaim independence "under the protection of the mighty and humane North American nation." The Americans brutally and systematically occupied the islands following their victory over
the Spanish, and cynically made war against the infant republic. Aguinaldo again and again whimpered for a peace with the Americans, but they were determined to crush the revolution. After a brief and unequal war Aguinaldo again capitulated and called on the masses to end their struggle. Once again however, ferocious resistance continued up to 1916, by which time up to 600,000 Filipinos had laid down their lives in the struggle for national liberation.

IN CHICAGO

"The hand of Julius Caesar fancy would paint as robust, grand, and noble; something that is elevated and commanding, typical of the warrior and statesman. But the statue gives a countenance of a business-like cast that the present practical age would regard as a good representation of the President of New York and Erie Railroad, or any other magnificent corporation."

-- Herman Melville, Statues in Rome, 1857-58

"I wanted to show that it was crucial not to continue with spectacle, not to go on filming the barricades because doing so was a way of playing the government's game by making films so that people could get off on the images. I simply wanted to show, in an abstract way, an analysis of what is going on (...) and to completely avoid showing the barricades just as one would avoid showing a naked girl."

-- Philippe Garrel, 

around the time of his cine-tract, 

Actualités Révolutionnaires, 1968

some Straub/Huillet carte blanche selections...

___________________________
____Torino Film Festival, 2001____

Greed (1924, Stroheim)

Monsieur Verdoux (1947, Chaplin)

Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (1956, Bresson)

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Hawks)

A Corner in Wheat (1909, Griffith)

L'Espoir (1945, Malraux)

Vredens dag (1943, Dreyer)

Gion no shimai (Sisters of Gion, 1936, Mizoguchi)

A King in New York (1957, Chaplin)

You and Me (1938, Lang)

This Land is Mine (1943, Renoir)

L'Argent (1983, Bresson)

Aleksandr Nevskiy (1938, Eisenstein)

Ici et Ailleurs (1976, Miéville, Godard, Gorin)

Shestaya chast mira (One-Sixth of the World, 1926, Vertov)

_________________________________________
____Film at the Public Retrospective, New York, 1982__

Antonio das Mortes (1969, Rocha)

Vreden Dag (1943, Dreyer)

A King in New York (1957, Chaplin)

A Corner in Wheat (1909, Griffith)

Las Hurdes (1932, Bunuel)

Civil War (1962, John Ford)

Aleksandr Nevskiy (1938, Eisenstein)

Blind Husbands (1918, Stroheim)

This Land is Mine (1943, Renoir)

Zangiku Monogatari (Story of the Late Chrysanthemums, 1939, Mizoguchi)

Une Aventure de Billy le Kid (A Girl is a Gun, 1970, Moullet)

selected but not screened:

Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951, Bresson)

The Big Sky (1952, Hawks)

Der Tiger von Eschnapur + Das indische Grabmal (1959, Lang)

alternate choices:

Cloak and Dagger (1946, Lang)

Oyû-sama (Miss Oyu, 1951, Mizoguchi)

Akasen chitai (Street of Shame, 1956, Mizoguchi)

Les Contrabandieres (The Smugglers, 1967, Moullet)

In the program, J. Rosenbaum notes that in the same year, in Paris, their selections went:

City Lights (1931, Chaplin)

Captaine Fracasse (1943, Gance)

Sansho Dayu (1954, Mizoguchi)

Partie de campagne (1936, Renoir)

Boudu, sauve des eaux (1932, Renoir)

Charlie Chaplin (in Vevey) to Lion Feuchtwanger (in Los Angeles) :
"...glad to hear from you in that distant, remote country of California. It is so wonderful to be away from that creepy cancer of hate where one speaks in whispers, and to abide in a political temperature where everything is normal contrasted to that torrid, dried-up prune-souled desert ofa country you live in. Even at its best, with its vast arid stretches, its bleached sun-kissed hills, its bleak sun-lit Pacific Ocean, its bleak acres of oil derricks and its bleak thriving prosperity, it makes me shudder to think that I spent 40 years of my life in it."

Chaplin (Switzerland) to James Agee (New York) :

"Firstly, I am so glad to be out of that stink-pot of a country of yours. I should have done it in 1930 when I was over here the last time. I never really wanted to come back then, but the fates knew best because I would never have met Oona and our five children! To be over here, away from that torrid atmosphere, is like stepping out of the death house into the free sunlight. occasionally, some sends us a New York Tribune -- its dark news makes me shudder. It's nothing but Dulles'* vomit all over the front page. And the belly-aching about the charity they are giving to the world. Oh, what a stink-pot country! As the negro says about living in Paris: 'Colored folks is quality here,' so I say about Europe: 'Charlie's the tops'."

*John Foster Dulles (February 25, 1888 – May 24, 1959) was an American statesman who served as Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959. He was a significant figure in the early Cold War era, advocating an aggressive stance against communism around the world, particularly in the Middle East. He advocated support of the French in their war against the Viet Minh in Indochina and famously refused to shake the hand of Zhou Enlai at the Geneva Conference in 1954.

good work

Artavazd Peleshian is "working on the final variant of the scenario" for his new film Homo Sapiens which should begin shooting in late 2007, reports Armenian newspaper Noyan Tapan. Peleshian has had a project by this name planned since 1987 ( an overview of his work can be read here , and a better one in French here ). Above, Peleshian at the Yerevan International Film Festival in November 2006, there to accept a Paradjanov Lifetime Achievement Award.

Adrian Martin also informs me that Hermine Karagheuz (see below post) will be doing performance-readings of texts and poems by Paradjanov at the Magic Cinema Paradjanov retrospective in Bobigny, France this month. Four of Peleshian's film will also be part of the retrospective. Anyone wondering what a retrospective of a filmmaker should consist of should take a look at the program here (open the pdf): all of Paradjanov's films, fourteen documentaries, eight films by filmmakers with "elective affinities" (Dovzhenko, Fellini, Pasolini, Tarkovsky), eight "Armenian Friends", five "Russian and Georgian disciples", and four Paradjanov-influenced films from Iran.

Two Notes — Hermine, Nevermore, Lip- and Lap- kina

Wildly different climates when....

....in 1977, Jonathan Rosenbaum is moved to say:

"I can only hazard the personal conviction that, with the passage of time, both films (Duelle and Noroît) will be recognised as significant extensions of (and advances in) Rivette's explorations - even if, from the present standpoint, the former seems to hark back to some of the illusionist premises of Rivette's earliest work..." (Introduction to Rivette: Texts and Interviews, now thankfully available here )

...and in 2003 Jonathan Takagi is moved to report:

"The moods (of Histoire de Marie et Julien) range from troubling and disturbing to lighthearted, especially in Julien’s interaction with his cat, Nevermore. Originally the cat was to have a speaking part. Some have reproached the film for the scenes in which the cat obviously makes some “mistakes” such as watching the boom microphone or scrambling back from the approaching camera." (from Jonathan T.'s wonderfully lively Paris Journal on Film Journey )

The twists and turns of fate in the life of anti-illusionism since Duelle are too much for me, though it does seem right absent in Rivette after the unheralded frame lines of the final showdown/lesson in Le Pont du Nord (1982). One thing is for certain: anti-illusionism in general has been utterly co-opted since the era of Duelle to aggrandize the power of advertising, cynicism, reveling in the "lie" of it all, but telegraphing loud and clear nonetheless (this is probably the relief that's felt in seeing home and cell-phone video on YouTube, they're "saying nothing", seeing/hearing everything).

Duelle itself has aged magnificently (my copy thanks to Travis Miles): a story of sun and moon goddesses, seers, and one girl-detective (only in flashes, like Jerry Lewis in It$ Only Money [Tashlin]) played Hermine Karagheuz, with a face, and some gestures, straight from the silent period. There's second-rate magic/illusion by way of tonic lighting changes, and anti-illusionistic but pro-hypnotic richness in the variations of music and body (musical improvisations blatantly played onscreen by Jean Weiner who is consistently surprising when he appears), radical shifts in acting, posture, and costume (Berto's extremely diverse donning  is such a shock each time, that this alone has the odd effect of strengthening the fiction on the one hand, and blaring it's artificiality on the other). Every move of the body and trembling of the fiction threaten to tear the screen to ribbons (one of Karagheuz's screams out of nowhere nearly does). In any case, Rosenbaum seems excited (at least I was) in his footnote on the film and what came after:

"While Duelle might be described, from a strictly commercial standpoint, as a film 'aimed' at a particular kind of audience which no longer exists, the more ambitious and radical procedures of Noroît suggest both an acceptance of the fact of this 'lost audience' and a subsequent liberation from this frame of reference -- thereby marking a return to the sort of experimentation and 'pure research' largely abandoned by Rivette after Spectre."

Alas, 30 years on, Rivette gets reproached when in Histoire de Marie et Julien (2004) he crystalizes some of his former narrative terror and anti-illusionism into one brief shot of a cat on a man's chest recoiling from the camera and the boom, the whole appartus bearing down on them in a tracking shot. A Bazinian anti-illusionism. Once the camera settles, the cat stares up at the boom mic. Perhaps the man (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) is "covering" for the cat when he looks up too and says "nosing around upstairs again? Don't lie, I can see it in your whiskers." This being a film by Rivette the line is sinister (what fiction/terror hovers overhead of our forward stare?), the scene tells a terrible truth on at least two levels, and Rivette once again revives the stakes of the tracking shot to a life or death situation.

______________________________________
__________________________

__________________________

______________________________________

On another note, I was recently struck by Ossos (1997, Pedro Costa), the films ineffable "lead" Mariya Lipkina, and the resemblence of her name to Marfa Lapkina, the "lead" of Eisenstein's The General Line. Mariya Lipkina was not one of the real-life inhabitants of Fountainhas, the district where Costa has been making films for 10 years; she had in fact acted in six Russian films prior to Ossos (quite a few considering her young age). What one wonders is why exactly her filmography stops at Ossos?

Marfa Lapkina, of The General Line, was cast according to the Soviet practice of "typage" (consider the difference in meaning between the word "types" in a capitalist society, and a society attempting communism). In Helen Grace's brilliant article "Hegel's Grave" she describes "typage" as: "a theory which gives a place in the history of the image to figures who are invisible to history."

"If however this face and this body (Marfa's) should disappear from cinema, then it would mean that all human bodies like it are doomed to disappearance not only from the space of representation but from life itself, all these bodies in the name of which an entire moral economy has been formed in the last century and a half. Yes, of course they will die, but I'm speaking more of the prospect of an impression that they never existed at all and that it is only the great men - the Eisensteins, the Hegels - who deserve to be remembered. It is also the concept of a particular ideal cinematic figure - the mass hero - whose future is at stake here."

A similar plea could be made for every face and body in Costa's cinema post-Ossos, namely those that inhabit No quarto da Vanda, Ou git votre sourire enfoui?, and Juventude em marcha. But where has that left Mariya Lipkina? I don't know. Costa obviously stays close those in his films; Thom Andersen reports that Alberto Barros, "Lento", had to explain one of Juventude em marcha's major plot points to Costa after the premiere at Cannes.

Marfa Lapkina did not see Eisenstein's film until fifty years after its making (apparently, in 1978, a film was made of Lapkina's first viewing).

the old and the new (click here for clip)

the Knorr cubes referred to earlier. the ones Carla went to jail for.

"It is unimaginable, at present, for a young person who wants to make a short film to go to a producer and say: 'alright sir, I don't know what to make, I don't know what cinema is but I want to make a film.' Any responsible filmmaker must say that, it is the truth. "

-- Pedro Costa

Zita, Zita...

Geny, Geny...

Nhurro, Pango, Yuran, Chumbito, Nhurro...

Climax, Climax...

Fly, Fly...

Blondie, Blondie...

Vanda, Vanda...

Paulo, Paulo...

da Luz, da Luz...

Nuna, Nuna...

Fatima, Fatima...

Lena, Lena...

Emilia, Emilia...

Lento, Lento...

Ventura, Ventura...

Yuran, Yuran...

Nando, Nando...

Carla, Carla (imprisoned for Knorr cubes!)...

.No quarto da Vanda.