LLSB (Long on Looks, Short on Brains) #3

We have a 1946 edition printed in New York and Cleveland of Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley. The reason why I singled this out while rummaging through the £1 section of our bookshop is that Howard Hawks made a film early in his career (1929) based on this novel. As I mentioned in my piece on the London Hawks retrospective, the film suffered because it was shot as his first all-talking picture then was forced back into being shot as a silent. A legal screw-up over sound rights killed its commercial promise and bungled its aesthetic composition. Well, at least we've got the book here, and it makes no bones about where that bullet is headed. On the spine of the cover (of which I don't have a photo for the blog at the moment), the bullet is firmly lodged in the centre of this man's head. A bullet mid-fire has never looked so static, and yet irrationally I love the design.

Die Freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street), silent, 1925.

People watch film for many different reasons. One of the reasons I watch film, though by no means the earliest or the most underlying of reasons, is to understand cinematographic decisions and (i) their philosophical implications for the film itself and for various categories to which the film may arguably belong, and (ii) their emotional impact upon the viewer. The close relationship, the synergy, of these elements, as well as the treatment of some of my most favored themes, in German Expressionist film and the American film noir it influenced constitutes one of the main reasons why I am so enamoured of these two film genres. Upon watching Die Freudlose Gasse for the first time (in its original cut of 150 minutes), I have to say that I was not left with much of an emotional impact but was still suitably impressed with the film, directed by another favorite of mine, G.W. Pabst, who brought the great Louise Brooks to the screen for one of her most searing performances in Die Büchse der Pandora.

The love for sideline characters that I mentioned in my New Year's post about Frank Capra is seen in a darker version in Die Freudlose Gasse: take the most amusing cameos in a Capra film and twist them ugly ... a withered old peg-leg navigating a filthy alley instead of a black man energetically selling hot dogs. One of many beautiful aspects of this cinematic style is that it allows these characters to wear their moral disfigurement on their sleeve with exuberance, as evidenced in Werner Krauss’ butcher Josef Geiringer, and Valeska Gert’s Madame Greifer, both of whom are thoroughly delighted with themselves as they orchestrate heinous acts in a Vienna that is a straight vision of corruption. Asta Nielsen as Maria is most impressive as a single performance, moreso even than Greta Garbo who looks sexily tranquilized throughout the film and achieves in her own right an ironic perfection in this role. Maria, whose every curve manages to be masculine, commits murder with a face blanched by jealousy. It is sublime. Incidentally, this film is part of a Weimar cinéma vérité series at the Edinburgh Filmhouse, meaning that the film is to be interpreted within the broader context of the Neue Sachlichkeit in which Expressionist poetic devices are shed in favor of a realist exposé of the darker truths of society that in this particular instance led to the film being cut to the point of inefficacy or completely censored in countries outside of Germany. While I am not certain enough to say that it should not be characterized as cinéma vérité, I think this film has strong expressionist elements.

I look for windows and mirrors in this sort of film. There are two scenes that made a deep impression on first viewing. The first scene – I say first although I believe it takes place later in the chronology of the film – involves Greta Garbo’s character Greta Rumfort and her exposure as a prostitute, as in the film-still to the left. Her dress is a scandalous piece of glitter, but you don’t see her in the dress at first. The exposure is done in the tri-panel mirror.

The second scene: the butcher Josef, as played by Werner Krauss, is a man who abuses his power without a second thought as all good sadists do. He loves the women who crawl to him for a pound of meat to feed their starving children. They come to him as surely as Lana Turner will collapse in your arms, as he waits and lasciviously assesses their figures (from the ankles up) through his basement window. He does not treat them with reverence, to say the least, bringing a slab of raw meat into the room where the women are waiting and hacking off a piece in front of them, blood flying as he goes through the bone with an axe that is as faithful a companion to him as his dog, who is pacing in the corner with anticipation of a leftover hunk of meat. As to be expected from a brute, Josef does not wrap up the meat and politely hand it to the women, but takes it in its raw and bloody state and slaps it into their desperate hands. This vicious and disgusting man is given his medicine at the end of the film, very quickly I might add, in a flash of a scene. On Melchior Street an angry crowd gathers under the Merkel Hotel and begins to throw rocks through the hotel window. The partiers scatter and flee from the building. A starved mob gathers outside of Josef’s butcher shop. A woman breaks into the shop after being denied meat for the last time and kills Josef. You can see him through the basement window, his face, that slaughtered look in his eyes, disappearing into his own fate.

I am still uncertain why these two scenes (and I have seen plenty of scenes of that ilk before) were so effective, in the sense that I find it strange and natural that an indirect viewing of either the exposure of or the instantiation of something taboo should be so – if not luridly – exciting.

Certainly loads have been said on this topic and its cousin “voyeurism”, but I have not systematically read up on it, so I have some extra reading cut out for me in the weeks ahead. I wonder about this even as I admit my bias in believing this to be more often than not an aesthetically superior choice compared to a direct move on the director’s and cinematographer’s part. (It is in part a bias because I arrived at this belief about the indirect generally being aesthetically superior before I could articulate my reasons for why the impact of the indirect should be so exciting for the viewer. That is not the correct order of things, and still many a worthy aesthetic judgment can probably be formed this way. Another cause for pondering for another time.) An example of a direct move that I believe to be successful would be the extreme high-angle shots, often termed “god shots”, as used by Alfred Hitchcock’s director of photography Robert Burks in Marnie. These shots still have me baffled because they strike me as a direct manifestation of the psychosis, cinematographically speaking, and I cannot figure out how it is the case except through these shots that the psychosis itself should be driving the film, as opposed to the character – who is nothing compared to the force of the actual psychosis, which seems to have chosen to land itself upon the cursed Marnie and would have had a life of its own without her blonde virgin body and mind to torture. Why are those shots so Hitchcock, so powerfully disturbing? Perhaps this is nothing at all to think about and simply reveals my most scattershot intuitions. But getting back to the “indirect” choice: there is something about seeing these violent and debasingly erotic revelations take place through or in glass. The fascination cannot be as extreme (or as extremely modernist, I would like to say) as in Marnie – definitionally, I think. The sort of fascination that occurs in the two scenes I have highlighted in Die Freudlose Gasse requires that slender bit of distance, which is explicitly rejected in Marnie. Maybe it has a softer implication, that there is a choice on the viewer’s part to fixate on what is being shown through or in the glass, whereas in Hitchcock you are thrust into the centre of the fixation – all the same, the viewer will fixate, however indirectly the invitation was sent. Does the fact that it was done indirectly make the viewer feel a heightened excitement because of having been given access to something that would otherwise be a private occasion, which sounds very much related to voyeurism (though voyeurism is tethered to an unwarranted access to the forbidden and we have yet to determine whether the access given here is actually unwarranted), or is there some other reason? Why should the abstraction – if indeed this is abstraction – of visceral things be so alluring? I end with these questions as I do not yet have the answers, but the fact that these are the questions I am raising, regarding how optical abstraction should result in a particular psychological effect, shows that there are expressionist leanings in Die Freudlose Gasse that should not be overlooked due to the overall cinéma vérité schematic. It may be structurally cinéma vérité, but it is procedurally not insensitive to expressionist technique.

The butcher says hi.

My Name Is Joe: A very skillful film, no matter at all that it is plain-looking in its cinematography and plainly transparent in its goals. For people who watch films especially to look into and live for a moment through a character, this is very much a character film and, to me, seems less of a film about "working-class life" than as is usually portrayed, although there are the gritty shots that you want if that is what you are looking for (e.g., Sabine’s shaking junky leg with heroin blood craters in them – as Lou Reed would sing, “It was very nice”[1]). Peter Mullan is a phenomenon as always. The range and authenticity of emotion that he brings to the screen exceeds the highest standard. It is not merely a delivery of feeling; it does not feel like a performance. It actually feels as though he is providing elements of the human experience that cinema has rarely had the opportunity to see. On the other hand, it feels at times as though Peter Mullan is too dominant an actor, moving too quickly and decisively through scenes – perhaps this is the powerhouse director in Peter Mullan rather than the actor that we are seeing. This is not a criticism but an observation of Peter Mullan’s gifts, still my way of making the point that he is not an ordinarily gifted actor, which is exciting for an American cinema lover to experience even if Mullan is a household name for Brits. As per the trend I am seeing in myself these days, I have scathing feelings towards the woman in the film, Sarah, because her empathy and willingness to soothe (Peter Mullan’s character) Joe is made of weak and unconvincing stuff, if not of completely dubious origin. And when Sarah proves to be uncompromising about what she won’t tolerate, she condemns him on the wrong grounds, only exhibiting the fear that comes from her blindingly sheltered nature (which is not eradicated by whatever harrowing experiences she thinks she has been through), as opposed to an assessment of the fragile combination of strengths and failings of the man before her. I would allow Sarah to be uncompromising so long as she wasn't the worst version of herself while doing so, but in applying a defunct set of standards to Joe, she has misunderstood his battle and is not prepared to help him see it through. Joe is caught between worlds, of course, and his abandonment at the end of the film raises the question of whether any of us can be caught between worlds and somehow learn to make one more important than the other when no one seems capable of truly assisting. Love cannot persist when you only see the worst in the person, nor is it located in the opposite extreme of having the sort of unthinking faith born of rock-bottom self-esteem that perpetuates your own constant abuse at the hands of the person you love – there will have to be a departure from the two pathologies in order for a woman to negotiate an appropriate response within herself to a deeply flawed but not fundamentally abusive man. In the end, I think individuals, not the universe, are very much at fault for abandonments committed in the style that specifically disgraces the optimism that love is founded upon, that twists itself into the unbearable irony of two people who can’t ever be free. It is Peter Mullan’s Joe that is the soul of the film.

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[1] No candlelight and Dubonnet on ice in this scene, though, I’m afraid.

Spring cleaning 0.1

How should we treat art?

This is a bit of a vent and aesthetics spring-cleaning before I start writing about the continuity in avant-garde cinema, or anything too specific like "Dial M for Murder", as was briefly mentioned in a previous blog post. About the vent: my targets are not so much individuals as the attitudes I have seen over and over again, attitudes which make for an interesting spectrum and which I will have to take the time in the near future to respond properly to, in a more structured manner. I mostly address one side of the spectrum in this post. I have been thinking about some very basic things lately that I might as well broadcast here before I have taken to formalizing them. I have been thinking about the nature of aesthetic taste and discussion. I am often disappointed by what people do with both. I am always attempting to broaden and deepen my own taste on aesthetic matters, and it is important to do this with both the mind and a visceral sense of passion, as thoroughly as possible, until the art becomes something that one interacts with very personally, yet not too possessively, for those who would know what is meant by such a cautionary comment. What happens when this personalization process occurs, however, is that one is often less willing to discuss this work of art with other people because it is no longer viewed from the outside: the outside being a place of competition, ego, relief from boredom, a plea to keep a conversation running along with someone, straight-shooting and potentially narrow logic, or any other motivation that you can think of when you have been asked 'So, what films have you seen recently?' (Though to be fair this question can be asked innocuously and, among aesthetic peers, it is a pleasure to kick off a conversation with this.) How about those people who want to be perceived as refined and "cultured", in touch with the finer things, clever enough to keep tabs on some of the more obscure things within the realm of the finer things, too (though they go about their research in all the generic, if not precisely commercialized, ways)? How do you like them, as though art had something to do with your breeding. What the fuck are these people doing? They are probably worse than the people who have no relationship with art. They are as bad as the artists who think they are too special for commonalities  and want to possess the art they love, as though no one apart from them could develop a valid relationship with it or express a humble curiosity in it; who condescend, or apologize for condescending without actually reforming their need to be dismissive.

The "outside" is uninteresting. The art has become part of you, and what other people have to say about it is rendered useless, as it is not a conversation topic, or at the very least, you find yourself failing to engage in the types of reasons that these conversations tend to seek out. They are reasons that more often than not fragment the work of art, as well as the mind that has taken this work of art into its inner realms. This may sound strange and quasi-spiritual coming from a PhD student in philosophy, who would never resist a chance to reason and joust, as well it should, and while I think it is extremely important to eventually articulate this space of "reasons" (this being a most unfortunate word for the phenomenon at hand) to oneself and to others, it is virtually impossible to do the articulation any justice or personal satisfaction in a conversational context. Arguing about art with people who are not especially invested in it can become a cerebral exercise that does not allow one to get any closer to understanding what I have recently taken to calling the frameworks through which individuals filter their experience of an artwork, which are good to know about even if the person to whom you are speaking is not an aesthetic peer (and the discovery of which, it could be argued, constitutes the most sexily cerebral layer of all, so that means most of the discussion along these lines is a cerebral exercise that is missing the point of what said cerebral exercise can do, or the best of what it can offer). Well: An artwork should not be treated merely as a theoretically-oriented interest. Many of the arguments that are applied successfully to such subjects fall flat when discussing art; they sound tawdry and ill-conceived, hasty, pathetic. When I say that an artwork should not be treated merely as a theoretically-oriented interest, I suppose I am saying that I have seen this done in both a naively clumsy and a sophisticated way. The naively clumsy way could be a dull reporting of how great a film or a director is without knowing, for example, that there were many superior precedents to film/director X. The sophisticated way could be an overly sharp cutting down of a director's work, delivered by someone who has absorbed and excessively intellectualized a great volume of art to a point of no return, having lost contact with what it's like to be very simply blown away by something. Or it could be an overly sharp cutting down of a director's work by someone who is normally quite sophisticated of aesthetic judgment and knowledgeable about everything that goes into an artwork (and therefore all the angles that an artwork must be considered from) who has decided to see a director's work through a lens that does not take enough factors into account. Yet what I am calling for the moment a theoretically-oriented treatment of an artwork, whether naively clumsy or sophisticated, reduces to a foundation of nonsense either way. I wish to say that emotional responses to art are key, but what is so often ignored is that an emotional response should run deep without necessarily confusing depth with an instantaneous quality. What is first felt must be developed, tested, and the end result of this projectile curve is the arrival at a multi-faceted, sustained emotion, or more precisely, a phenomenon for which I have no name but would rather call a multi-faceted, sustained emotion than a reason. And naturally I want to know why I am doing this, why I am choosing to go for this kind of statement at all, and if there is any value in it, since I have trouble neglecting the "meta" - initial forays into a serious inquiry, however, cannot take place on the meta-level, therefore that further analysis must take place later in the chronology of things. I am not necessarily trying to apply some variation of reflective equilibrium to the aesthetic arena; rather, if there is any bullet point to be found in this ramble, I am stating that art and emotion have a vital relationship to each other without emotion entailing obvious, quick reactions.*

My personal desire is to integrate thinking about art with making art. It keeps me honest when I make art (although in the past it has blocked me from making art, a silly thing to do to oneself), and conversely, when I think about art, I am speaking from a place of connection with, rather than latent callousness towards, the artist (e.g., having a knowledge of what is difficult to achieve versus what is an easy way out from the artist's vantage point is useful when sizing up the work of art, which somewhat defuses the switch-over to the overtly intellectual, not-actively-draughtsmanship-immersed perspective). I have not looked into aesthetics as a branch of philosophy until this past year. A lot has been said there about emotion. It is a "problem", of course, this being a branch of philosophy. It is more of a problem for the theoretician than the artist, but as I have just hinted at, some of the theoretician's concerns have to be addressed: something like burying and digging up the same corpse** until a decision is made. I believe the solution is to be both theoretician and draughtsman at once. I will tackle this "problem" in due course, so keep an eye out for my digressions if you are inclined towards pondering these sorts of difficulties. I may even try to spell out my notion of an aesthetic peer, and answer the question, "Is art necessary?", in my own little way.

DS.
 

*Should this be a cause for worry? How does aesthetic judgment really work? What are its cognitive underpinnings (a question I should have been bothered to ask a long time ago) and will my argument be supported or undermined according to the empirical evidence? In other domains, such as moral judgment, it is disconcerting (and I am putting together a dissertation on just how disconcerting that is) if reasoning is employed post hoc to support the emotion.
**"The Trouble With Harry", Alfred Hitchcock (1955).

A Critic's Quote

Too many thoughts at the moment to condense into a post just yet, what with Hungarian constructivist films, Dial M for Murder, so-called god-shots, and various filmmakers' attitudes towards "amateurism" all dancing about in my happily plagued head. So I leave you with an extract from an article by Molly Haskell instead. It is from her longer piece on "The Night of the Hunter," a film which I also wrote about a month ago in this very blog.

"In the movie's thrilling and almost unbearable climax, Rachel Cooper sits with her rifle at the ready while Mitchum's unseen Harry approaches. In a "coming together" that suggests the terrifying closeness of good and evil, how God and Satan are reverse mirror images of each other, they harmonize in song. "Leaning, leaning ...," sings Harry, repeating the hauntingly seductive spiritual he has sung throughout the film. The choice of song is ironic, yet not entirely so, as it captures the quality of the man, pantherlike yet passive, as if propelled by unseen forces. "Leaning, leaning in the everlasting arms of ...." The "Leaning, leaning," drawn out melodically and as sweet as the evening breeze, seems to come from nowhere and everywhere, as if the landscape had produced it, lilting, mournful, beautiful, a siren song as compelling as the one that drove Ulysses into a frenzy, a song that should make widows and children lash themselves to the mast for protection. But then, "Leaning, leaning, safe and secure ...," Rachel sings back, unafraid -- unseduced."

--Molly Haskell on "The Night of the Hunter"

Don't the desert look lonesome when that evening sun goes down.