STRAITS OF LOVE AND HATE

~the first three shots of Aien Kyo (Mizoguchi, 1937) without sound~

FOR RICK THOMPSON.

YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED

More mammoth and dutiful work on Straub and Huillet (!): the above is from the Vienna and Munich Filmmuseum's DVD Edition of Klassenverhältnisse (Straub/Huillet, 1984). The details of this edition are astonishing: full production documents, a transcription of the press conference, three documentaries on the film and Straub/Huillet, 44 production stills, an entire book by Wolfram Schuette
 -- read all the details here .

-- See many of the production documents here .

-- Read the press conference in German here .

A true labor of love and, by all indications, the finest edition of a Straub/Huillet film possible on video -- and suddenly existing. More about the disc once I have it in my hand...

The good acquaintances at Terminal Beach also heralded it and included a link to an amazing piece of writing on Huillet/Straub by Giulio Bursi (in Italian), who has worked with the them for years and made a film of the shooting of QUEI LORO INCONTRI called J'ECOUTE!. You should also see what else Terminal Beach is heralding lately...

Thank you Klaus Volkmer!

Tag Gallagher has re-written his monumental book JOHN FORD: THE MAN AND HIS MOVIES (dialectical cinema)

As if this wasn't massive enough, he has made the entire book available for download in pdf form, here: http://rapidshare.com/files/61830908/ford_tag3.pdf.zip .

Tag estimates it is roughly 40% new material, large and small changes, and all the frame enlargements are new. The latter detail is saying quite a lot considering Gallagher is an artist with still frames and their placement.

I was going to write a little something about how much Tag's book has taught me over the past 7 years but this is such a process in motion (as you see!) that it would just be flowery and ill-judged at that.

Grazie Tag

DARK PAGE

"I'm not a man...I'm fifty-five years old, have four human children, six human grandchildren, weigh about one hundred and forty pounds; I eat, sleep, scratch myself and hate lice; but I am not a man.

"...I'm the black sheep of Gotham's flock, the whiskey breath of Stephen Foster, the oldest street in the United States, the tea-water pump. I am the Henry Astor of the Fly Market, Priest of the Parish, Murderer's Alley, the Dead Rabbits. I am exaggerated humor, intense filth. I am an accomplished linguist, can hold my tongue in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Hungarian, Yiddish. I am the rise of the gangs. I am also a mystery. I am Bowery."...

"You're full of hop," said Lance.

--Sam Fuller 1944

(thanks to Bill!)

LIAISONS

by Tag Gallagher



The filmmakers I admire most today are the Straubs, Abel Ferrara and Eric Rohmer.

Rohmer I met once nineteen years ago. I was in Paris researching Rossellini. I called him from a pay phone and then ran halfway across Paris when he said, "Can you be here in twenty minutes?" I found him sitting in a bare empty office writing dialogue in a student bluebook, without pause or hesitation. He was kind and solicitous and "gave" me Jean Gruault. This incident epitomizes Paris for me.

Rohmer's Spartan simplicity seems somehow connected to an Athenian richness in the human and the cinema, as does the simplicity of the Straubs in even barer quarters. And if Rohmer is Paris, where time is measured, the Straubs are Alsace-in-Rome -- the Rome of thirty years ago, not of today -- where the light is more intense, and makes infinity more attractive than time, in order to get inside the awe of things in Frankish fashion.

This was evident even in New York, when Jean-Marie and Daniele came in 1974 to show MOSES UND ARON and afterwards sat on the floor of our apartment watching 16mm prints of DONOVAN'S REEF and PILGRIMAGE. A good quarter century passed before I saw more of them, and not just them but their films too, which are impossible to see in America, even on video. But in 2001 in Turnin where their work was reprised at the Festival, we resumed the same debates as years before without any sense of interval between sentences.

Eventually I asked, "Have you seen any Abel Ferrara?" They had not. But they knew who he was, even knew that in Paris there are people who say there are only the Straubs and Ferrara. "Well, he says he likes your films," I said, hoping to inspire noblesse oblige. Immediately I was challenged: "Prove it? What did he say?" I panicked.

In fact I had met Ferrara a few days before. I had thought I would have to take a weary bus from the Milano airport to Turin, but had checked yet again with the Festival office on the morning of my flight. Came the reply: "Yes, you can ride with Ferrara whose plane arrives ten minutes after yours."

He lay stretched out in the back of the van for two hours. Another sort of simplicity, equally intense but low key and indirect. Here was New York, or more precisely, Union Square. And, thank goodness, I suddenly remembered that he had actually said some thing about the Straubs. I'd asked him what he liked about them and he'd said --
"What's there not to like?!"


Around us, everyone translated. "Write it down", said Jean-Marie, well satisfied. I wrote it down, feeling like a character in MOSES UND ARON. "Now sign it. And date it." I did. He took the page, folded it into his wallet. That was in November 2001.



Last week I got an e-mail from WinterKlaus in Munchen. He wrote:

"I have just his evening returned from Paris. Monday was the avant-premiere of UMILIATI at the Cinematheque...Jean-Marie announced before the screening, that he wouldn't like to talk about the film afterwards -- only one thing before -- 'You know Abel Ferrara?' Common agreement in the public... 'Well, a mutual friend, Tag Gallagher, once told me that he had talked to him about our films, and Ferrara had said to him' -- then he took the piece of paper out of his pocket that you gave to him during that dinner in Turin -- 'What's there not to like' Then he translated this AF quote, admitted never to have seen an AF film and left. Then he came back and added -- 'At this momnet, as this tartuffe, ce tartuffe de Chirac, allows the American bombers to fly over France for Iraq, I prefer to keep silent. I'm in mourning. Iraq is the cradle of our culture, and this is being destroyed now.'"

-2003

WORK, DOUGH, DYNAMITE!

"Work was one of several Chaplin comedies scheduled to be shown at the New-York Historical Society in September of 2001. In the wake of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, however, this film and one other, Dough and Dynamite, were pulled from the program, because each one ends with Charlie emerging from the rubble of a destroyed building."

No he did not emerge from the rubble of a destroyed building and then walk into a Burger King or retailer of jeans. Chaplin fades out.

None of the films were pulled for showing what is still with us even on September mornings: poverty, squalor, exploitation, the barbarous relations between people it brings, unemployment, a face on a barroom floor...

Last image of A KING IN NEW YORK (1957). Chaplin fades out.

After the Chaplin films were pulled in September 2001, an exhibition on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the Cold War began in October at the same New-York Historical Society. There, again, A KING IN NEW YORK could have been shown, or censored. Neither was done.

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