Procrastination is the Name of the Game

So, I am procrastinating! I have a paper due on thursday, and then one on the ninth, and one on the tenth. On the bright side, I only have two finals.

So I bought even more films, really randomly, at a strange little store in my hometown. It was ostensibly a music store (instruments) but there were only a handful of cheap guitars, some percussion instruments and the rock band video game. In addition there was a tub of movies (quite a mixed bag) selling for three dollars a film. I went for the Dreamers, Gangs of New York, Dogville, Ghost World, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The Gondry/Kauffman collab was quite good, much better than I remembered it when I saw it in 2004. I think it may be Kauffman's best film, and it really whetted my appetite for Synecdoche, New York, which I've been putting off.

I've also been putting off my comp-lit paper. Really, it should be quite simple, 3 pages on the book of Job, 3 on Moby Dick and two pages of summing up. I haven't written a compare/contrast sice middle school. And what can I do- talk about how Biblical narrative is wonderfully compact and Melville is wonderfully discursive. Of course! The book of Job is mighty heavy on the lonnnnnng monologue poems (indeed there was an awfully pretentious Portuguese film I saw that staged it as such) likewise Moby Dick has similar long Shakespearean goings ons.

So perhaps I should write on the spoken words of the character taking precidence over the omniscient narrative voice. (Forgive my spelling but this computer has no spell check.) Of course, Melville's work throws the whole concept of a stable narrator into question, with Ishmael transforming himself from a jocular young intellectual cum semen (sorry, my spellcheck you know) into a philosopher, cetologist, and into other characters. (Oh my, I just put on a forty minute version of Terry Riley's "In C" I'm so excited,) Similarly the book of Job strains the limits of narrative voice by giving its god an extended monologue. Indeed, both works are focused upon a synthesis of the poetic with psychology of an individual. In both texts the individual is subsumed by the awesome and absurd might of reality and nature, in Job it is merely through description, and in Moby Dick it is through the course of the narrative. So there we go- both glorify and elevate the individual voice through poetry, and both quash this elevation by bringing in the stark and unfathomable terror of the world. I would then pursue how this gets done, how they manage to exalt, and then humble.

Forgive the diversity of these mental perambulations, you were warned by the magnificently apt and correct title.

My Favorite Directors

A Dekalog of my favorite auteurs along with the films that did it for me

1. Jean-Luc Godard
A Woman is a Woman, Vivre Sa Vie, Bande A Parte, Pierrot Le Fou, Week End

2. Wes Anderson
Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited

3. Woody Allen
Bananas, Love and Death, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig, Vicky Christina Barcelona

4. Jean Renoir
Bohdu Saved from Drowning, The Rules of the Game

5. Federico Fellini
La Strada, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2

6. Orson Welles,
Citizen Kane, The Magnficent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight, F for Fake

7. Luis Bunuel
Viridiana, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie,

8. Billy Wilder,
Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot, The Apartment,

9. Alfred Hitchcock
Notorious, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Vertigo

10. Howard Hawkes
Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday

Honorable mentions: Martin Scorsese, Ranier Werner Fassbinder, Robert Altman, Max Ophuls, Francois Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, Jim Jarmusch, Stanley Kubrick, Alfonso Cuaron, Bernardo Bertolucci

A surprisingly easy list to create, I struggled with Hitchcock, almost replacing him with Scorsese and Fassbinder, rest assured that if the other Ophuls films I see are as good as Lola Montes he'll be on the next list like this.

A Drizzle is Never Insignificant

Currently, my leg sits on my other leg (crossed), my headphones on my head, I on a leather chair, and the chair in the Oakland Airport. I'm early, as always with these sort of things- the product of a hereditary neurosis at least three generations old. Unlike the last time I found myself in this position, Oakland now presents free, albeit heavily corporate sponsored, internet.

I am worried: for the last three days, I've been tracking a package and prostrating myself before the mail goddesses in an act of supplication, an attempt to safeguard my five films purchased at an amazing forty (40) percent (%) off from Criterion. If they don't appear soon, before twelve when my last housemate leaves, they may be left 'pon my stoop!!!!! Criterion's new website is fantastic and fellow cinemaphiles should visit, unfortunately the amazing sale which allowed me to purchase five regularly pricey DVDs for 95 dollars is over. For the curious the films are:

Amarcord (Two discs)
Juliet of the Spirits (Fellini)
La Bete Humaine (Jean Renoir)
Cries and Whispers (Bergman)
The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Bunuel)

Yes, I could have done without Cries and Whispers, but it was the only Bergman film left in stock. It looks like Amarcord will be playing at the Pacific Film Archive (one of my workplaces) in January. Other delights include two (2) nights of unfinished Orson Welles work, a member's only showing with Clint Eastwood, and an evening with JP Gorin, one of Godard's most frequent collaborators.

Two Women Under the Influence

So this week I saw two magnificent, very different films, however a few things tied them together. Both are about formerly self-possessed women, now controlled and harangued by groups of men, both played at the Castro theater, and I'd disliked both of them when I watched them on DVD during High school.

The first was Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc which I actually did see at the Castro complete with a live Oratorio. It seemed a little wrong to so flagrantly betray Dreyer who urged that his film be viewed in complete silence, but the Voices of Light (or so it was called) contributed so much the wealth of emotion that it now seems difficult to imaging watching the film without it. It is a stark film, and a relatively simple one: the last day of Joan of Arc's life, the day the English tried, found guilty, and burned her on a stick. Out of this, and using the actual trial record (the first shot authenticates or at least legitimizes the claim, showing a modern hand opening the ancient bound book) Dreyer creates a harrowing, emotional, and technically astounding film. For true devotees of film, this is one of the greatest, and along with The General and Sunrise one of the greatest silent films, for you cinematic dilletantes who know little more of silent film than The Gold Rush and nothing of foreign film but Amelie (which I actually haven't seen, but hopefully will tonight) should really see this. If there are any Berkeley people reading this go to the second showing at Hertz Hall on Campus tonight!




Last night I saw Lola Montes a film which fell flat on a small television but which utterly astounded on the big screen. Andrew Sarris, America's premier auteurist critic, claimed that it was the greatest film ever made. Unfortunately, its director, Max Ophuls didn't live to see the sixties, the Golden age of the art house, and he never achieved the divine status of Fellini, Bergman, or Godard. Hopefully this pristine new print and the release of the three films which preceeded Lola Montes on Critierion will resurrect Ophuls.

The film takes place in a garish circus where Lola Montes (a real life figure) is forced to relive her scandalous past for the pleasure of the audience (both us and the people in the crowd.) The film switches back and forth between snippets of Lola's life, and the absurdist circus where Lola's health suffers, and where she is fastidiously controlled by the American ringleader (Peter Ustinov).

If you ever want to discuss mis-en-scene, Ophuls is the man to bring up. His composition is so dense, complex and beautiful, both nuanced and overwhelming. His shots are almost always in deep focus which allows for many different layers (objects and screens dangle in front of actors who are trapped before the garishly ornate sets) that continually recontextualize when the camera moves, an event that occurs quite frequently- rolling along tracks or flying by aid of a crane, sometimes even floating through walls, and once taking a cliamactic nose dive.

Martine Carol plays Lola Montes as a blank slate, a cipher like Ryan O'Neil in Barry Lyndon, who is thrown from scene to scene. The aptest metaphor in the film (which has as many layers of narrative and visual metaphor as it does layers of focus) shows Lola in the circus being thrown from acrobat to acrobat, moving ever higher and higher up a chain of lovers. She makes choices, yes, and she acts up, but what Lola is best at is being what the public wants- a beautiful scandal. Joan's a scandal too, but in not quite the same way of course.

Really, the two films could not be more dissimilar, Lola Montes spans time and space, uniting two continents and thirty years, Joan of Arc is almost in real time. Ophuls uses supremely colorful and cluttered backdrops to thematize the high artifice of European culture and the block between individuals, Dreyer presents almost nothing but faces, some looking like mountain ranges, oddly placed before a white backdrop. However, both films are technically astounding! Both play fast and loose with the conventions of editing and composition (montage and mis-en-scene), both directors love the dutch tilt (turning the camera so as to decentralise the horizonline and put the viewer generally ill at ease) and both are about women turned automatons by widely different social constraints.

Two in the morning

I have fears that my pen will not glean my teeming brain because the internet sucks so badly.

I would like to make a film about the petty political machinations behind either high school or low level collegiate faculty. The vying for power, the biting and stabbing of the back, the whispers. The protagonist is a befuddled young assistant professor, who, despite a good amount of painful self consciousness, does not, and cannot realize how much he is despised, until he is used as a puppet. Over the course of a school years he rises to prominence with the aid of a shadowy older professor. Tragically our sad little professor reaches the top and, like the characters in the plays he teaches, he can only spiral down. Finally, in a fit of wild jealousy prompted by the old professor's sexual acquisition of his favorite student, he murders the old man and himself. Or, more likely he fails to do so and is shamed out of his community.

I love the quaintness of the mountain folk, with their crystal cold water and their wax lips.

The old professor booted from power for his too openly Machieavelian scheming enlists our protagonist, too painfully self-conscious to be hated, and just a little too pompous to be loved, as his puppet plucking him from the deep end of mediocrity and erecting him, over the course of the year, to the status of president. Dizzied and befuddled the professor cannot realize that the presidency of his small liberal arts college means nothing.

I love the quietness of the moulding fold, with its corn cob chronicles and its wax lisps.

Our little professor holds sway over the aesthetically enchanting little college, autumnal in autumn, vernal in venery, but it does not afford him any knowledge of himself. A comedy, is when the dignity of the tragedy has been- short story to follow soon, scratch out that nonsense about killing though, that's too dignified for my characters. We must all wallow in our own splendid silliness.

The Sacred and the Profane

This was a real conversation heard on a Berkeley bus. I discreetly waited for the two very old women to exit the bus before quickly scribbling down the scene in my notebook.

The two old women did not know each other and began their conversation by discussing which stops they were getting off at. I have created names for them.

Eudora Greybeard: You know, it's getting so you can't go to the store and get a month's worth of toothpaste, shampoo, you know basic needs, you can't get them from the store because there isn't enough for food.

Maxine Spiritus: I live day by day with the help of sweet, sweet Jesus.

Eudora: Oh, you have a boyfriend?

Maxine: Yes, but he's in the Netherlands.

Eudora: It must be hard to live with him then.

Maxine: Yes, I live day by day with the aid of sweet, sweet Jesus. He's there when I wake up in the morning, and I go to sleep at his feet every night.

Eudora: I'm an author, you know, and I had to give up having a boyfriend because I have to have complete solitude. You're very lucky.

Maxine: I guess you could say Jesus is my boyfriend.

Eudora: Oh, well, that's very poetic!

Maxine here begins discussing, in a very, very confused timeline, the events of her California adventures, and the current residences of her children. Meanwhile the bus has reached their shared destination and Maxine scream out

Maxine: DRIVER! TWO LADIES NEED OUT!!!

Eudora gives a start.

Maxine: I'm sorry I had to yell.

Eudora (exiting the bus): Goodbye, Driver, have a good Easter, ur, Thanksgiving, whatever Holiday it is.

Maxine: Everyday's a holy day.