Going to Tokyo?

If you live in Toronto and are interested in Japanese cinema make sure to check out the Shinsedai Cinema Festival, which is programmed by Chris Magee and Jasper Sharp. The festival will take place some time in July 2012 at the Revue Cinema. - D.D.

Title: World Film Locations: Tokyo
Editor: Chris Magee
Publisher: Intellect Ltd.
Pages: 128
Price: 18$
More a tour guide then pure film criticism, Intellect Books' new series World Film Locations - with ones on London, New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo - are a welcome introduction through the movies to the famous buildings and neighborhoods of these various cities. The books are divided into six separate sections dedicated to the different districts. All of them being preceded by a map of the city with numbered indicators locating where the scenes took place. Each entry includes a description of, and pictures from the scene. As well a current picture of the location that allows you to compare how it is presented in the film with how it looks now.

Chris Magee who edited the boook also writes a nice introduction and pieces on Tokyo March (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1929), a rare pre-war portrait of Tokyo; Pom Poko (Isao Takahata, 1994), Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano 1999), Fear and Trembling (Alain Corneau, 2003), Confessions of a Dog (Gen Takahashi, 2006), and Retribution (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2006). I would also recommend Marc Saint-Cyr's piece on The Yakuza (Sydney Pollack, 1974). A lot of the contributors to the book also contributed to the other Intellect book Directory of World Cinema: Japan.

The essays in the book help contextualize the films within Tokyo's cultural and political history, within the genres of Japanese cinema, the restrictions of filming in the post-WWII era, the director Yasojiro Ozu, and anime. The essay's include Jon Jung's Tokyo: City of The Imagination, Eric Evans' Worst of Times/Best of Times: Post-War Tokyo in Film, Samuel Jamier's Tokyo Must Burn! The End of The World Through Anime Eyes, John Berra's Tokyo Stories: The Humanistic Cityscape of Yasujiro Ozu, Roberta Novielli's Strangers Among Us: A Cinematic View of Immigrants in Tokyo, Steven Sarrazin's Shinjuku: Dawn is West, and Reiko Tahara's Edo: Old Tokyo resurrected on film.The two page long entries are well researched and well written. While the choices of films are interesting as they include political works and documentaries. While also including some unexpected Tokyo films like those made by foreign directors to the city like Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo (1955), Wim Wenders' Tokyo-Ga (1985), Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003), and Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void (2009).

The entries try to do justice to all of Central Tokyo's twenty-three wards, and beyond. But it just so happens that some of the wards are more cinematic then the others ; so they get more attention. And the contributions by locals and people that have visited the city give the book an insider-like quality. As if you are walking the backstreets of the city with your own personal guide. There are recommendations of where you can go for a drink or a meal (the famous La Jetée), what hotel to stay at, where to shop, and information about the subway stations. I would recommend World Film Locations: Tokyo, and all of the titles in the series, to any cinephile that will be traveling to these cities. - David Davidson

Igor Drljača's Sarajevo Memories

This is the first of three reviews on new Canadian short films. – D. D.

Igor Drljača was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1983. He left the country on May 1st 1992 on a military plane due to the violence of the Bosnian war, like so many other families. He recalls the flight out of the country in a military plane that “was not a cool looking MIG I had imagined,” where everyone had to sit on the floor. He arrived in Canada in 1993 where he has since completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s in Film Production from York University. His short films include Rana (05), The Battery-Powered Duckling (06), Mobilni Snovi (08), On a Lonely Drive (09), Woman in Purple (10), The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar (11), and he is currently in post-production on another short film and his first feature-length film (hopefully completed by next year) which will be “about a man that’s now in Toronto but was involved in the Bosnian civil war so it deals with themes of immigration, themes of isolation, themes of trauma, war trauma especially. Sort of these universal elements that a lot of people in Toronto can relate to, a lot of refugees.” Much of the subject of Drljača work blends the personal with the political, mixing a child-like pleasantness with serious subjects and his approach to filmmaking blends the traditional with the avant-garde and documentary.

An exposition shot of a crater-ridden apartment complex in today’s post-war Sarajevo opens Woman in Purple. A young boy Mirza (a sorrowful Haris Begic) lives with his grandmother, who asks him a few questions as he is on his way out: Did you eat yet? How will you buy food later? Remember to visit your mother later. When will you be back home? One thing that sticks out in this scene is the long and heavy silences, as if these questions have been asked hundreds of times before. They also recall the trauma of the war when such things were of grave concern. During these moments of silence the only thing you can hear is the television that is turned on in the background.

Mirza goes to the park to watch some older boys play basketball. He is bored. There is nothing really for him to do. A local drug dealer approaches Mirza asking him to do a few rounds for him. The addresses that Mirza will need to go to are on a note that the dealer gives him. What Mirza will have to do consists of receiving cash and dropping off the packaged drugs (Marijuana? Cocaine?). Mirza goes with it, as he has done before, but this time he makes sure to get paid first. The day goes by smoothly - one of the clients even buys him a wrap - but similarly to the beginning of Cristian Mungiu’ 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) the suspicion that something might go awry has a looming presence. At the end of the day Mirza meets up with the dealer at the basketball courts where he makes a significant decision in regards to his future, he chooses not to continue doing jobs for the dealer. He does this by hitting the basketball that is in the dealers hand and starts playing all by himself on the opposite side of the court. The hitting of the ball is an act of social protest and an intense moment of everyday heroism worthy of the films of Mike Leigh. The film’s score which was full of natural street noises so far breaks out into a storm. The films end with Mirza sitting in a grassy cemetery, surrounded by the Sarajevo hills and mountains, watching a plane fly out of the city. In an astonishing reverse-shot you see that he is sitting beside his mother Hasanovic Sanela tombstone. She died in 1996.

The script of Woman in Purple is by Drljača and Hrvoje Župarić. Drljača in Woman in Purple uses a wide frame (2.35:1) and shoots in long shots as he follows Mirza walking in hand-held shots from behind the head. Mirza’s silence emphasizes the films visual storytelling qualities. The Sarajevo City Film Grant helped financed the film. A short note, the fact that Drljača is a Toronto resident and films in a different country has led some commenter’s to place him within the context of First Generation directors alongside Nicolás Pereda and Chris Chong Chan Fui. As Kazik Radwanski describes these First Generation filmmakers, “These temporary-residents play a role in Canadian cinema: their films maintain a connection to Toronto, while defining their own territories and landscapes.”
***** To contextualize Drljača’s short films within contemporary Sarejevo culture I am going to bring up the Serbian-American poet Charles Simić, from his recent article The Bright Side of the Balkans (The New York Review of Books Aug. 18th, 2011). In the articles Simić describes his experiences going to Sarajevo to attend an international poetry festival. He describes many things from his visit there. Like the recent arrest and trial of the general Ratko Mladić, who with Radovan Karadžić led the siege by the Serbian forces that caused extraordinary suffering, which lasted from April 1992 to February 1996. Simić describes the city,

“Since a great deal of what had been blown up has been re-built, the city appeared to be thriving, and given the warm and sunny weather during my visit and the sight of many people strolling in the streets or sitting in cafes chatting amiably, everything that occurred here fifteen years ago seemed inconceivable.”

On the themes of their contemporary poetry, Simić notes that much of Bosnian poetry is about the war unlike the poetry of the Serbs and Croats. On the residing emotional and intellectual impact of the war, Simić notes,

“Two survivors of the Sarajevo siege described in a calm, matter-of-fact way what life was like without water and electricity and with constant fear that members of their family might die as they stepped into the streets.”

And in regards to the younger generation Simić writes,

“Still, two out of three of them [the young men and women], according to a poll I saw in the papers when I was there, want to leave because there will be nothing for them to do when they finish school. They no longer need visas to travel to other parts of Europe, but since neither they nor their parents have enough money, fleeing the country, as thousands of others had done in the past, is no longer a realistic option.”

***** The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar is a personal documentary on the ravages of the war that blends home video with achieves footage from Drljača nineties boyhood in Sarajevo. The film separates the footage and progresses the chronology through black inter-titles with the location, city and date. “It’s like an homage sort-of to my childhood,” which took about three years to make says Drljača. The Fuse recalls the found-footage documentary by Andrei Ujică, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010). And Andrew Parker in the Toronto Now writes about The Fuse, “Powerful first-person footage and youthful exuberance add up to a short that’s far better than the program [2 in Short Cuts Canada] it’s in.”

The Fuse opens with Igor as a little boy in his childhood apartment introducing himself and his family to the camera. It proceeds to footage of children standing around the Simon Bolivar bust in his school and then to shots of the students singing and dancing until the camera eventually finds itself on Igor pixilated in the middle of a crowd. Through a voice-over Drljača starts to recollect that week’s art assignment “to paint the arrival of spring,” but when he was painting “that large tree next to his cottage, that always blooms first” he ran out of pink-paint and it didn’t look right. He remembers this experience vividly,

“During our lunch break, Aco, who sits in the first row, said that he saw the teacher marking our paintings. He said that I received a C. But I had never received a C in art. I still hadn’t seen my mark, but I was getting more and more nervous. That night, I thought: Dear God, I’ve never asked for anything before. I am not sure whether to believe in you. Mom and Dad say that you don’t exist. Both of my grandmas say that you do exist. And if by chance you do exist, I’d like to ask you for one big favor. I don’t want to go back to school; I don’t want to see my grade. So if you are able to help me out in any way. I’d be forever grateful.”

Cut to a shot of a teacher on television reading off a message: “All schools in region: Sarajevo, Mostar, Doboj, Tuzla… are on strike.” And then the military trucks and tanks start to roam through the streets of Sarajevo. His family is watching the news of the outbreak of the Croatian War, March 3rd, 1992. The city is no longer safe and his family is no longer leaving their appartment. Footage of bullets going by close to his apartment window is especially frightening. It’s a strange feeling watching the unfolding of a war from the perspective of the residents and how they see it happening on television. There is one especially wrenching shot of a hurt little black dog with his limbs twitching. But still life goes on, the family celebrates Igor’s brothers Dado’s birthday. And also the kids find ways to have fun, “Along with the other children, I excitedly collected shrapnel and shell casings.”

Igor leaves Sarajevo with his mother and brother on May 1st 1992 on a military plane. The last shot of The Fuse is footage of a building burning (is it the school?) in bright red fire and dark black smoke. This is the last footage his father would have filmed and brought with him when he joined the rest of his family in Canada. “After we were able to reach him on the phone. He told me that a few days earlier, my school, Simon Bolivar, had burned down. At that moment I realized that I no longer had to worry about my mark in art,” Drljača says in voice-over narration. This child-like optimism and ability to move forward after trauma gives Drljača’s work an enduring quality. Drljača cinema is one of perseverance and that of being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. - David Davidson

On Donigan Cumming’s Karaoke (1998)

In anticipation for the Pleasure Dome projection and book launch of Splitting the Choir; The Moving Images of Donigan Cumming, which includes Toronto's premiere of Too Many Things, on Saturday November 5th at 7PM at the CineCycle (129 Spadina Ave) ; here is a guest contribution by Canadian Film Institute programmer Scott Birdwise. – D.D.

EXCERPTED FROM
LIFE SUPPORT: THE DOCUMENTARY MEANS WITHOUT END OF DONIGAN CUMMING
In an introduction to a public screening of Karaoke in Toronto in 2008, experimental filmmaker and writer Mike Hoolboom posed a question to Donigan Cumming, “Why conjure this universe of a body, this landscape of flesh.”¹ To my understanding, Hoolboom’s question, perhaps inadvertently, cuts to the very heart of the matter of the documentary example. A description of the video will help set up my explanation.

Karaoke opens with an extreme close-up study of an elderly man’s face: with his eyes closed, the man licks his lips; the camera jostles slightly, suggesting it is handheld; the image is almost imperceptibly in slow-motion. Given the man’s apparent age, his reclined posture suggesting infirmary, and the emphasis on his fragile bodily-being (his labored swallowing), it seems, for all intents and purposes, that he is quite sick and unconscious – perhaps even near death. Is this, as Cumming puts it, a “deathwatch?”

The oral component of the video is somewhat distorted: the audio track hisses, faint sounds, clicking and clacking in general proximity, are heard – is this the diegetic room sound recorded by Cumming’s camera’s built-in microphone? Perhaps. But while the sound first seems to correspond to the elderly man’s action, his lip-licking and swallowing possibly the source of the audio, it quickly becomes evident that the sound we hear is not necessarily coming from him, or even from the room, at all. The audio and the visual do not seem to be in synch; they may be from different temporalities, perhaps even different spaces entirely. It really is difficult to tell.²

While the handheld camera lingers over the elderly man’s face with a kind of special emphasis given to his oral region (his mouth), moving slightly back and forth and continually reframing as handheld shots do (a trope of observational cinema), a song emerges from the off-camera audio: a strange combination of Christian pop music and Inuktitut singing.³ The off-camera voices of two women, presumably of Inuit origin, join in with the music, singing along to the lyrics praising Christ, declaring his love and how they are blessed for partaking in it – as one line exclaims (with English subtitles) “How the message will be understood!” At one point early in the song, the recorded music cuts out: it is here, via this aural cue, that the viewer recognizes that the Inuit women’s voices heard are not part of the music recording; they seem, in fact, to belong to the same space as the old man (who, importantly, it seemed at first was singing but in fact was merely breathing). The women are singing along to the tape beside the old man in a kind of impromptu karaoke performance.

About half way through the three minute duration of Karaoke, the camera begins to deliberately and purposively scan its way over the horizontal plane of the old man’s body, arriving at his feet. As it turns out, the elderly man seems to indeed be listening to the karaoke performance with some measure of interest: he is tapping his foot in time with the song. This is the “punch-line” of the video, the moment of truth revealing that the opening half of the video is a kind of set-up, the necessary opening of the gag. As Cumming puts it, “In Karaoke, the horror of a deathwatch is pure illusion. The transgression is a set-up, which turns on the spectator when the camera gets down to the feet. Nelson [the elderly man] is not dead! He is tapping his toes!”⁴

From here, again in an almost imperceptible gesture, the tape in fact begins to repeat itself backwards, audio included. This switchover almost passes unnoticed – in fact, I would argue first-time viewers often miss it – as the camera lingers over the tapping foot only to return to the “grizzled face” of the elderly man, licking his lips and breathing, in slow motion. With this, the tape ends.⁵

If we consider Karaoke a kind of documentary, exhibiting its means without end, then we are forced to take seriously Hoolboom’s inquiry. Hoolboom again: “[Karaoke] is shot very close up, refusing the surroundings, the room, the context. Why conjure this universe of a body, this landscape of flesh? Who is this man…?”⁶ Hoolboom’s query points to the foundational problematic of the documentary logic of example, which Karaoke exposes via my Agambenian reading of its strategies. The central problem: how is “a landscape of flesh,” that is, bare life, produced, and how is it overturned; or, rather, how is a form of life founded that does not fall back into the trappings of the citizen?

The elderly man framed by the extreme close-up of Cumming’s camera is presented to the viewer in a kind of extreme biological proximity at the expense of knowing who and where he, the would-be subject, is. The epistemological grounds of knowledge related to context and the like are refused for the ontological priority of the body: here he, or perhaps it, is. The elderly man is first and foremost an object of display and his being is reduced to maintaining his very existence: he breathes, he licks his lips – his life is stripped of context, it is bare life. As such, his position relative to the documentary logic of example is analogous to what Agamben considers the foundational gesture of Western politics and metaphysics: the inclusive exclusion of bare life. In this case, Cumming refuses the elderly man’s life-world by way of the close-up, framing and including him as bare life by excluding his environment. The elderly man is the environment, a “landscape of flesh.”

The elderly man’s existence, his existence as such, that Karaoke establishes at the outset and which seems to teeter on the brink between mere being (life) and non-being (death), or, even more to the point, the human (a speaking-being with subjectivity, desire, and history) and the inhuman (a mere “landscape of flesh”), finds an instructive parallel in what Agamben identifies as one of the paradigmatic figures of the twentieth century: the Musselmann. The Musselmann, for Agamben, is the exemplary figure of the concentration camp, whose total degradation and malnutrition has wasted away the speaking subject to the limit-figure of life and language at the brink of death and speechlessness.⁷ A kind of living dead – who/which is the site of confusion between the categories of life/death and human/inhuman as figured in the extreme biopolitical decisionism of the Nazi regime – the Musselmann is part of the administered process of the killing machine of the concentration camp, wherein the prisoner passes into the threshold of the Musselmann and thus does not die as a Jew or human being, but as mere biological existence, bare life. The Musselmann, then, is a (non)subject without context, history, personality, or desire; it is biology, possible motor skills, and the barest minimum of needs. This seems to be the transgressive status of that withered face in Karaoke: it is the death scene-and death seen, what Cumming calls “the horror of a deathwatch.” Or is it?

As argued above, the Musselmann comes into existence by way of the concentration camp. Agamben is quick to argue, however, that while the Nazi concentration camp is a historically specific phenomenon, it is nonetheless the hypostatized manifestation of a much more general logic. Agamben:

The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen […] If the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the consequent creation of a space for naked life as such, we will then have to admit to be facing a camp virtually every time that such a structure is created, regardless of the nature of the crimes committed in it and regardless of the denomination and specific topography it might have […] From this perspective, the birth of the camp in our time appears to be an event that marks in a decisive way the political space itself of modernity.⁸

The camp can appear and manifest an otherwise latent state of exception anywhere, isolating bare life, zoe, from the qualified life of the citizen-subject, bios. The camp is mobile and can temporarily install itself in such spaces as airports, shopping centres, soccer fields, and even living rooms – it is the potential for a kind of sovereign violence that confounds the distinction between the oikos (the home) and the polis (the city, public space) where all public citizens are potentially private prisoners. In this way, the camp is what Agamben calls a “dislocating localization” that scrambles the co-ordinates of a seemingly determinate topos – a space and place – in order to suspend law and order and institute the “inscription of life” into the paradoxical order of sovereign violence.⁹

In Karaoke, Cumming’s camera, his frame, imposes a kind “dislocating localization” upon the profilmic space: the frame excludes “the surroundings, the room, the context,” rendering the elderly man as “this landscape of flesh,” bare life on the brink of death. As an object/subject held up by the documentary as an example, what Karaoke seems to present is the fact of the elderly man as such. However, is the man merely a “moving still,” that is, a being (moving) on the brink of death (still)? As we shall see, and as was suggested above, the “fact” of the elderly man – the “deathwatch” of bare life – is problematized by the same “violence” and power of the frame which presented it. Indeed, the frame, the logic of the camp as dislocating localization, becomes the very means by which Cumming repotentializes the world: the camp becomes the “constructed situation,” as the presence of fact gives way to the mediality of potentiality; as action falters the gesture appears. This is the gag of/in Karaoke.

The gag of Karaoke, of course, is that the seemingly unconscious subject-object, the ailing man as bare life, is revealed to be engaged with his milieu, tapping his foot as he enjoys the off-camera music. The movement of the frame thus establishes a kind of newly invigorated ontological context for the world in which the video takes place. The significance of the gesture of foot tapping is not that it has the priority of being the new fundamental reality or fact to which the video bears witness, but that, in Agamben’s words, it “defines a life – human life – in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power.”¹⁰

If the camp is a mobile space of exception that organizes its own form of disorganization (a zone of indistinction between citizenship and the natural body), that realizes the nihilistic potential for sovereign violence at the heart of everyday law and order (a pure political violence), and that isolates bare life in the ruthless alienation of the human being from its form (by way of transforming experience into spectacle), the “constructed situation” takes this alienation and violence and turns it on its head in a liberatory gesture. It is the constructed situation which can take “this biopolitical body that is bare life” and transform it into “the site for the constitution and instalment of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe.”¹¹

Following Debord and the Situationists, Agamben defines the constructed situation in the following way:

The situation is neither the becoming-art of life nor the becoming-life of art. We can comprehend its true nature only if we locate it historically in its proper place: that is, after the end and self-destruction of art, and after the passage of life through the trial of nihilism… [at] a point of indifference between life and art, where both undergo a decisive metamorphosis simultaneously. This point of indifference constitutes a politics that is finally adequate to its tasks. The Situationists counteract capitalism [and I would add the state of exception, the logic of the camp] – which “concretely and deliberately” organizes environments and events in order to depotentiate life – with a concrete, although opposite, project.¹²

The constructed situation mobilizes the “dislocating localization” of the frame and its intrusiveness, its manifestly interruptive nature in a given milieu (breaking the supposed unity of the moment for aesthetic reasons [a nice picture]), and makes of it an opportunity for experimentation in the zone of indistinction it opens between art and life. In this way, the constructed situation transforms life at the level of experience rather than representation or contemplation: life and theatre intersect to mutually transform and repotentiate one another. To put it another way, if the generalized state of exception and spectacle in which we live has already falsified experience and inclusively excluded life, then the constructed situation uses an apparent falsity – its constructedness – to highlight this very spectacle and fragmentation, and thereby put it to an alternative use, albeit one not directed toward a specific end.
Central to Agamben’s conception of the constructed situation is the gesture. Indeed, in explaining the constructed situation, Agamben argues that

Gesture is the name of this intersection between life and art, act and power, general and particular, text and execution. It is a moment of life subtracted from the context of individual biography as well as a moment of art subtracted from the neutrality of aesthetics: it is pure praxis.¹³

Just as the constructed situation emerges from a “dislocating localization,” the gesture exhibits itself as a kind of action that, in exhibiting itself, suspends its commonplace function as a means to an end and becomes a means without end. For Agamben, as I outlined toward the end of the previous chapter, this is the very promise of cinema – the paradigm of (a potential) situation-constructing apparatus (and not necessarily a storytelling medium at all) – itself: to exhibit the very movement of humankind in a state of suspension freed from immediate ends, that is, to show in an immediate way the fundamental mediality of humanity. As Stephen Crocker states in his article “Noises and Exceptions: Pure Mediality in Serres and Agamben,”

What the late nineteenth century interest in gesture seems to promise, and what, Agamben argues, remains the promise of cinema since, is some understanding of the world’s movement exempted from all-purpose and displaying nothing more or less than the taking place of life in a ratio of time and movement. As such, cinema gives us the world in the form of a gesture. Cinema brackets out the significance of the event so that the pure act of its enunciation can come forward.¹⁴

The constructed situation as, with, and by the gesture does not operate on a representational so much as a kind of para-phenomenological level: whatever “understanding” it generates is not something one possesses, as a collection of facts to be decided on in sovereign fashion, but is rather something one does: it is an orientation, an attitude, of the political body opening to the world.

Cumming’s Karaoke is exemplary in its exhibition of the very gesture that Agamben identifies with the constructed situation. First, the video brackets out the context in its suspension of typical documentary markers of place, “refusing the surroundings, the room, the context.” What transpires is not a narrative or argument in any conventional sense; rather, a situation develops. The viewer is confronted with what seems to be the exhausted figure of bare life, of mere life, struggling to simply be. Is this the barest expression of an existential dilemma? Perhaps, but then, as the camera tracks to his tapping foot, the elderly man’s gesture opens up the question of the political. Neither a fact nor reducible to individual expression (as Hoolboom asks, “Who is this man?”), and not the expression of an autonomous, modernist aesthetic (the “aesthetic dimension” of dance), the gesture exhibits the mediality of the elderly man and the ultimate inseparability of his life (zoe: his breathing, his bare existence) from his being a singularity.¹⁵ “It is a moment of life subtracted from the context of individual biography as well as a moment of art subtracted from the neutrality of aesthetics.” ¹⁶

The gesture of tapping his foot to the music is an expression, an exhibition, of the elderly man’s “form-of-life.” This is crucial in understanding how Karaoke moves from the fact of a “landscape of flesh” to the potentiality of a subject and the inseparability of his being from his body: “this being that is only its bare existence and…this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it.”¹⁷ In this sense, it is the degree to which the subject of Karaoke evades being knowable “factually” or as a citizen-subject that he exists as a “form-of-life;” his life is connected to possibility: the elderly man’s political existence depends on his irreducibility to factual existence. The “horror of a deathwatch” as fact gives way to the “gag” of the gesture; bare life opens to what Agamben calls the “absolute and complete gesturality of human beings.”¹⁸ In the gag, the elderly man, Nelson Coombs, is thus not the documentary example of a victim, bare life, but an exception. He is an exception precisely because, in the apparently closed-in world of the frame, he is epistemically undetermined; a weak symbol in his potentiality; a “whatever-being” occupying the zone of indistinction between the example and the exception.

Furthermore, the reverse playback of the video deconstructs any pretences of non-mediated presence. Cumming makes Karaoke, the video, gesture itself, undoing its “action” by reversing it back to the beginning. Effectively, Karaoke splits itself in its doubling: it makes itself an example, a paradigm, beside itself. The reverse playback is another example of the ongoing and endless deferrals in the video, challenging any sovereign decision which would ground the political in a limited, instrumentalist frame. In this cinematic gesture of a means without end, Cumming makes the mediality of Karaoke immediate.¹⁹

Karaoke suspends the instrumental use of documentary: it never arrives at a definite conclusion, a clear cut end. In the video, being and appearance continually shift, as the “deathwatch” gives way to the punch-line of the gesture of the tapping foot, which in turn moves into an exhibition of the medial nature of the video as it plays back in reverse. The extreme close-up on the elderly man’s face which, while “violently” refusing context, would seem to privilege a kind of epistemology of proximity, yields no such thing. Rather, as the camera tracks, the video exhibits the “gag”: a gesture not circumscribed by the clichés of bare life and citizenship so naturalized by the documentary form. The close-up of Karaoke does not establish the presence of a citizen-subject but exhibits a “form-of-life” that is “not the sphere of an end in itself but rather the sphere of a pure and endless mediality.”²⁰ As a means without end, Karaoke and its exhibited example are held up for free use, never exhausting their potentiality in appearing. In contrast to a specific meaning, mediality is the message: Karaoke redeems as the true vocation of both humanity and the documentary project the endless, repetitive and seemingly futile Sisyphean execution of a task without proper completion: an inoperative operability, a non-work: means without end.

Scott Birdwise

Endnotes
1. “We're going to watch a three minute movie you made ten years ago called Karaoke. It's shot very close up, refusing the surroundings, the room, the context. Why conjure this universe of a body, this landscape of flesh? Who is this man, and why is the tape called Karaoke, (after all, he never utters a word, nor do you)?” http://www.mikehoolboom.com/writing/Books/Practical%20Dreamers%20launch.htm
2. Cumming interview with Hoolboom: “The tape starts with the cassette being loaded and a tight shot of Nelson’s head, as he licks his lips. The movement of his tongue is slightly accentuated in the edit with some slow motion.” (10) http://www.donigancumming.com/dcpdf/DCe-2006_Hoolboom.pdf
3. Cumming informs us that the singing is in Inuktitut in the Hoolboom interview. This opens up thinking about a provocative ethnographic intertext to read with Karaoke, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922). For starters, both films partake in a kind of cross-cultural encounter; furthermore, music – and the apparatuses for playing recorded music – figures strongly in both. Also, in both films there is the problematic relationship of staging and re-enactment. Pursuing the specifics of this interesting comparison is, however, beyond the scope of this thesis.
4. Hoolboom interview, 10.
5. It should be noted that Karaoke, as part of the “Moving Stills” series, was originally shown in an art gallery context, in a room alongside the other videos in the series. Each video, projected at a large size, ran in a continuous loop, alternating between their respective soundtracks. This presentation format reinforces the formal repetition of the work that is arguably lost in a single channel, non-looped, screening.
6. Hoolboom interview, 10.
7. For his most sustained discussion of the Musselmann see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, chapter II, The Mussleman.
8. Giorgio Agamben, “What is a Camp?” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 41-42.
9. Ibid., 45.
10. Agamben, “Form-of-Life” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 4.
11. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 188.
12. Agamben, “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 78-79.
13. Ibid., 80.
14. Stephen Crocker, “Noises and Exceptions: Pure Mediality in Serres and Agamben,” 12 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=574
15. Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 58.
16. Agamben, “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 80.
17. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 188.
18. Ibid.,60.
19. Indeed, as Cumming makes clear in the interview with Hoolboom, the encounter itself was staged for his camera; that is, the performers in Karaoke had already listened to the song, sang, and tapped along. Cumming asked them to do it again, this time with his camera running. Thus, the repetition in/of the video replicates the founding repetition of the performance.
20. Ibid., 59.

Nick Ray at Cahiers du Cinema (circa 1950s)

The TIFF Bell Lightbox is currently running a Nicholas Ray retrospective The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray as part of its Hollywood Classics series. The series is programmed by James Quandt, scheduled over two seasons and is centered on the recent restoration of We Can't Go Home Again*, which will be playing on Sunday October 30th at 4PM and will be introduced by Susan Ray. "Poetic, pessimistic, high-strung and humanist, Ray's films are set in a lonely place and on dangerous ground - the wounded psyches of often solitary nomads, strangers who keep looking for a home in a world to which they "have not been properly introduced,"" Quandt writes in the 180°. These screenings will offer Torontonians a glimpse into Ray's mesmerizing work. We Can't Go Home Again, which has recently been restored, and Susan's own Don't Expect Too Much, a companion-piece documentary on We Can't Go Home Again are the kind of films by Ray that Bill Krohn compares to flying saucers, "you catch glimpses of them or hear about them from people who've seen one." The rare prints and the fact that they are only shown once or twice give these Cinematheque screenings an aura-like quality.

Since the Godard line that "The Cinema is Nicholas Ray" is quoted ad nauseam (The Dreamers, the bulk of journalistic reviews) I thought that I would take the occasion to look at what else the Young Turks had to say about the auteur with whom most of them fell in love with when they first discovered They Live By Night at the Rendez-Vous de Biarritz in 1950. A great resource for their writing** is the anthology edited by Jim Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema - The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (1985)***. In the book's section on American Cinema there is a dossier on Nicholas Ray which includes reviews by Jacques Rivette on The Lusty Men, Francois Truffaut on Johnny Guitar, Eric Rohmer on Rebel Without a Cause, Jean-Luc Godard on Hot Blood and Bitter Victory, and an interview from November 1958 between Charles Bitsch and Ray (one of the first American directors to be interviewed in the magazines, as the editorial staff had no real contact with the foreign trade press). Within these pages - beautifully translated and with foot-notes by Liz Heron and Tom Milne - you can find what made the French film critics at Cahiers du Cinema so exciting to read at the time - and I believe more importantly - retrospectively and currently.

So what were the films that Ray made in the '50s? There is Born to Be Bad and In a Lonely Place ('50); On Dangerous Ground, Flying Leathernecks and The Racket ('51); Macao and The Lusty Men ('52); Androcles and the Lion ('53); Johnny Guitar and a teleplay High Green Wall ('54); Run for Cover and Rebel Without a Cause ('55); Hot Blood and Bigger Than Life ('56); The True Story of Jesse James and Bitter Victory ('57); Wind Across the Everglades and Party Girl ('58). In terms of his contemporaries, Jacques Rivette in The State of the American Cinema (Cahiers N.54) writes, "At present the undoubted spearheads (...) of the age of the auteurs are Nicholas Ray, Richard Brooks, Anthony Mann and Robert Aldrich," while Truffaut places him in the "Wise, Dassin and Losey generation." Even more so then these other directors, Ray stood at the fore-front of this new generation of Hollywood film-makers that came on the scene after the war. He stood as a harbinger for the modernity that was to be felt in the world of cinema.

From De l'invention (Cahiers N.27), Rivette reflects the magazine's generosity in discussing Ray,

"Without any doubt, the most constant privilege of the masters is that of seeing everything, including the most simple mistakes, turn out to their advantage rather than diminishing their stature. If you are now surprised to see me give the benefit of this law to Nicholas Ray's latest film it means you are ill-prepared to appreciate a work which is disconcerting and asks for, not indulgence, but a little love."

From L'Amirable Certitude (Cahiers N.46), Truffaut writes,

"Nicholas Raymond Kienzle is somewhat, in fact very much, the passionate discovery of the 'young critics'. Nick Ray is an auteur in our sense of the word. All his films tell the same story, the story of a violent man who wants to stop being violent, and his relationship with a woman who has more moral strength than himself. For Ray's hero is invariably a man lashing out, weak, a child-man when he is not simply a child."****

And here is Truffaut at his more aggressive,

"You can refute Hawks in the name of Ray (or vice versa), or admit them both, but to anyone who would reject them both I make so bold as to say this: Stop going to the cinema, don't watch anymore films, for you will never know the meaning of inspiration, of a view-finder, of poetic intuition, a frame, a shot, an idea, a good film, the cinema. An insufferable pretension? No: a wonderful certainty."

In Ajax ou le Cid? (Cahiers N.59), first off Eric Rohmer discusess (see: deplores) the translation of Rebel Without a Cause into French La Fureur de Vivre [The Rage to Live], as well he reads Ray's "masterpiece" as "a genuine drama in five acts," which is a surprising look at the film and an ambitious one. Rohmer, who has always been more conservative than his peers (in terms of both taste and filming approaches), proves to be just as insightful and adventurous in his prose as the other writers,

"It is impossible to attach any convenient label to his [Ray's] position, as one can with John Huston. It isn't problems that interest him, in the manner of Brooks, but human beings. There is not a trace of the psychological complexities so dear to Mankiewicz. None of those instantly dazzling flashes of lyricism, as in Aldrich. His tempo is slow, his melody usually monochord, but its delineation is so precise, its progress so compulsive, that we cannot allow our attention to stray for a moment."

Jean-Luc will be Godard (where at this point in time, he thinks, that D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpant is "the most important novel of the twentieth century"), which means wildly ambitious. Here he is from Rien que le Cinema (Cahiers N.68),

"After seeing Johnny Guitar or Rebel Without a Cause, one cannot but feel that there is something which exists, only in the cinema, which would be nothing in a novel, the stage or anything else, but which becomes fantastically beautiful on the screen."

Though disappointed about Hot Blood he can still find some merits,

"In short, [Hot Blood] is a semi-successful film to the extent that Ray was semi-uninterested in it."

And on Bitter Victory from Au dela des etoiles (Cahiers N.79),

"It is no longer a question of either reality or fiction, or of one transcending the other. It is a question of something quite different. What? The stars, maybe, and the men who like to look at them and dream."

And on the acting,

"Bitter Victory is exceptionally well acted by Curt Jurgens and Richard Burton. With Et Dieu... Crea la Femme, this makes twice one can believe in a character created by Jurgens. As for Richard Burton, who has acquitted himself well enough in all his previous films, good or bad, when directed by Nicholas Ray he is absolutely sensational."*****

To conclude, here is Truffaut from the 1973 documentary I'm a Stranger Here Myself where he further explains this Cahiers obsession towards Ray,

"What attracted us was that there was something European about this man from Hollywood. European in what way? Perhaps in the frailty, vulnerability of his leading characters. His male characters weren't 'macho'. There was this great sensitivity, especially in dealing with affairs of the heart, which lent a sense of great reality. At a time when Hollywood movies were rarely personal or autobiographical, you always had the feeling that the love stories in Nicholas Ray's films were true stories."

*****

* Some new writing on We Can't Go Home Again appears in the latest issue of Cinema Scope (N.48), which includes a piece by Susan Ray, Out of the Box, (Susan also has a long autobiographical introduction in I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies), and Gabe Klinger, Nicholas Ray’s Film Maudit Restored. It's also worth highlighting here another overlooked Ray title, The Janitor (which is available on YouTube). Brad Stevens writes about the film,

"What fascinates me about this short is the way it clarifies the structure of Ray's last few films, which are full of clashes between superego and id figures (Walt and Cottonmouth in WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES, Tommy and Rico in PARTY GIRL, Inuk and the trooper in THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS, Leith and Brand in BITTER VICTORY, Christ and Barrabas in KING OF KINGS). Here, Ray plays both the id and the superego, suggesting just how personal this theme was to him."

** In addition to the selection of pieces in the book other Cahiers articles of note include Jacques Doniol-Valcroze on They Live By Night, Paul et Virginie se sont maries la nuit (Cahiers N.5), Truffaut on They Live By Night, Les Extremes me touchent (Cahiers N.21), Eric Rohmer on Bigger Than Life, Ou bien... ou bien (Cahiers N.69) and Venise 1957 (Cahiers N.75), Luc Moullet's Filmographie de Nicholas Ray (Cahiers N.89), Fereydoun Hoveyda on Party Girl (Cahiers N.107), Jean Douchet and Jacques Joly Nouvelle Entretien avec Nicholas Ray (Cahiers N.127), Bill Krohn on We Can't Go Home Again (Cahiers N.288), and part of Ray's late period script Mister, Mister with an introduction by Wim Wenders (Cahiers N.400).

*** Other good resources on Ray include Bernard Eisenschitz' peerless Nicholas Ray: An American Journey and Patrick McGilligan's new Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure Of An American Director.

**** This passage on hidden narratives is similarly brought up in the magazines contemporary writing, here Jean-Philippe Tesse from his review of J.J. Abrams' Super 8, Leve les yeux (Cahiers N.660),

"Abrams has been to able to reconcile his storyteller-recycler spirit all the while plunging into the childhood cinema experiences of reactivating it's magic. And, certainly, he does this by re-taking brilliantly the secret scenario of all of his films: the curring of the hero by the irruption of the supertural within his neighborhood."

***** Here is Stephane Delorme on contemporary actors from his review of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, Requiem pour un reve (Cahiers N.664),

"Like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, Natalie Portman plays in a sense her life: good comedian, appreciated, who never really craved the screen, child-star (Luc Besson's Leon) reduced to these roles of the princess in the Star Wars films without ever imposing herself (...) The troubling emotion comes from these effortless lost gazes and raised eyebrows of inquietude and concentration. As well we are on Natalie Portman's side, we want her to succeed. Aronofsky is the best American casting director."

On Content

A new guest contribution by Daniel Gallay. – D.D.

Content: A Brief Statement
(or: “You know nothing of my work! How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!”)
I’m convinced that there isn’t a word more accurate than “bankrupt” to describe certain experiences I’ve had in the cinema. There have been films I have seen that as I watched them, I felt a certain suspicion. Not only was I not able to ignore this suspicion, it became the central element of the experience. I felt, almost from the outset, that there was a hollowness to what I was seeing and that beyond the surface of the image lay nothing at all. The images, although imaginative and aesthetically sound, carried with them no substance or presence of any content. In one such film, this was the intent of the director, and there is a story to illustrate why. This director, as was fairly common during the period, experimented with LSD under the supervision of his psychoanalyst (Cary Grant did this also, and praised it as a tool of self-realization). The experience this director had was one where the definition of all things fell away and he was left in a hellish landscape where nothing held any meaning whatsoever. The experience led him to the conclusion that since the definition of any object is always provided and constantly renewed by the viewer of the object, objective meaning, by the very nature of perception, is impossible. He found that this then freed up his ability to create images since he wasn’t bound by having to attempt to instill objective meaning. “The fire and the rose,” he said, “became one.” This is problematic, if only because it is the perfect definition of solipsism, but it brings me to the point of my statement. My point is this: Is there not an element of an experience that is common to all those who experience it? Take this essay as an example. As you experience it, my consciousness (or perhaps, more so, the consciousness of the essay, which may or may not be my own) and your consciousness are present. There is the presence of each independent of the other, but there is also some point at which they touch and overlap. As each person reads the essay, each of their experiences will differ; these experiences will not be necessarily definable, but necessarily existent. That perhaps is a definition of content – the overlapping of one consciousness with another where a personal experience can take place. The infusion of an object with consciousness relies to a great extent on the intentionality of the creator – if the intent is shallow, the results will likely seem shallow; alternately, if the intent is joyous, the results will likely seem joyous. So, as in the story of this director, if there is no intent, there is also likely no content. If there is no content, then the object will be hollow, and the experience of it will be likewise. If nothing is returned for the viewers’ investment of consciousness, bankruptcy results. It’s perhaps the most unforgivable form of thievery – a thievery not just of time, but, more importantly, of spirit.

Daniel Gallay

Himizu Review

This is the first guest contribution by Oded Aronson. - D.D.

Himizu (Shion Sono, 2011)
**** (Masterpiece)
Ruins lie everywhere. Dust and smashed objects litter the atmosphere. A teenager stands in the middle holding a gun to his own head. The wind gradually becomes louder and dissolves into the sound of a million voices of the dead crying for mercy. The boy shoots himself. Blood streams out of his head, leaving a long red trail. He lies in the field, no longer remembering who he is. Then he wakes up.

The boy’s name is Yuichi Sumida, and his family has been left without any means of income because of a tsunami that has all but demolished his hometown. His family’s business is a boat rental company, which has not had any profits at all since the tsunami. Yuichi’s father is a nasty, abusive harpy who storms home at midnight most of the time and proceeds to beat him up then complain that he never wanted a child. Yuichi’s mother has run away from her husband with her lover due to years of frustration and blood, so Yuichi is left to fend for himself.

His financial situation is so poor that eventually he is forced to leave school so that he can work at the boathouse in the vain hope that someone will rent a boat. One of his classmates, Keiko Chizawa, has had a crush on him for as long as she can remember, and searches for him. Keiko’s family also has their own troubles; her parents want to kill her so that they can collect insurance money, and are in the process of building their own guillotine. Keiko is forced to pass the guillotine every day and notice its development.

For the first two thirds of the story, there is frequent juxtaposition of dark humour and straight faced drama. The attitudes of the two main characters play a role in that juxtaposition. Yuichi has become so emotionally inured due to the beatings he receives from his father that he has retreated into a dark, nearly silent shell. He is almost completely unwilling to open himself up to anyone or anything. On the other hand, Keiko’s lifelong preparation for her upcoming death at the hands of her parents has somehow opened up wells of emotion in her, and she feels as though she has to cheer people up for as long as she lives. Keiko goes far beyond optimism into the realm of desperation, which then becomes so pronounced that it feels like optimism again.

The two clash, but Keiko tries to become friends with Yuichi despite his protestations. Eventually, they end up sharing most of their scenes to the extent that everybody thinks of them as friends. Although Yuichi remains sullen, her presence does seem to have some kind of positive effect on the people other than Yuichi. Keiko tries to revamp the boat house. As a result, it finally begins to have some business. Yuichi’s father comes home for the last time one night and suddenly things become even more complicated than before.

The last part of the movie is emotionally brutal. Not all people will enjoy the descent into darkness, but it is appropriate for the material, and leads to a powerful climax that will be a source of joy for anyone who is in love with the movies. I strongly recommend Himizu, the best of the 25 movies I watched at this year’s TIFF. - Oded Aronson

Le drôle Woody Allen (and Film Comedy Scholarship)

For my parents Alysse Weinberg and Michael Davidson who first turned me towards film and who encouraged me to pursue it as an academic endeavor. – D.D.

Title: Comment Woody Allen peut change votre vie
Author: Éric Vartzbed
Publisher: Éditions du Seuil
Pages: 112
Price: 12 €
Title: Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy
Author: Saul Austerlitz
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Pages: 512
Price: $27.95
*****“Woody Allen’s comedy is art, as all good comedy is.” – Saul AusterlitzIntroduction
With over forty films to his name and a career that spans from 1965 to today, it is hard to pin down Woody Allen. He was born Allen Konigsberg in Brooklyn, 1935, a shabby New York Jew with too much intelligence, wit and neuroses. His career trajectory goes from writing wisecracks for NBC, then Sid Caesar, getting expelled from NYU, performing stand-up, writing screenplays, becoming a film-director, writing short-fiction - and he still finds time to play the clarinet! His current wife is Soon-Yi Previn.

In his films, Allen’s characters are burdened by the accompanying neuroses of their privileged position. In his world, the people who have a belief in some kind of faith seem better off then their atheist counterparts. His protagonists give a whole new meaning to the Hitchcockian character-type of the man who knew too much. And like one of Hitchcock’s wrong men they are born into a godless world where things eventually go awry. Everything and anything can happen, ranging from murder to finding love. And what is most emphasized is the role chance plays in our lives. The films are funny too.

As a filmmaker he has worked with some of Hollywood’s best actors and actresses like Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams, Anthony Hopkins and Naomi Watts, Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, just to name a few. Everybody wants to work with him. The cast of his upcoming Rome-set film The Bob Decameron includes Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Greta Gerwig and Allen himself (who will be returning in front of the camera). Allen is not the only talented one; he has worked with some of the best cinematographers out there such as Gordon Willis, Carlo Di Palma, Sven Nykvist, Vilmos Zsigmond and Darius Khondji. He writes his own screenplays too.

“But what made Bergman great – and there were guys who were working the same side of the street but who were not great – was that he was show business, he was an entertainer,” according to Allen*, who like Bergman, is one a master entertainer-philosophers that have blessed the seventh art. Allen seamlessly blends pathos and comedy to magical results. For example, in his latest film Midnight in Paris – one of his most profitable films (eighty million dollars worldwide) – this middle-aged screenwriter (played by Owen Wilson) who wants to start writing serious literature is visiting Paris with his wife and her parents. At night he decides to wander off and mysteriously finds himself traveling back in time to the the 1920s and then to the belle époque. The lightness of touch, the ease of the actors, the magical mood all leads me to believe this is the high point of his late European period.

Allen has many supporters: Jean-Luc Godard** made a wonderful little documentary Meetin’ WA (1986), an interview between the two directors that Godard interrupts with jazzy inter-titles and film stills. And he has also starred in films by Paul Mazursky and Martin Ritt. Some smart people have written about him such as Robert Benayoun (Woody Allen, au-delà du language), John Baxter, Raymond Durgnat, Foster Hirsch, Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Richard Brody, Jean-Michel Frodon and Richard Schickel ; while real life intellectuals like Marshal McLuhan and Susan Sontag have also appeared in his films. In regards to the man himself voicing his thoughts, there is the Stig Björkman and Eric Lax interview books.

Allen’s films begin like novels: there is always that black screen set to soothing jazz music, punctuated by the credits written in Allen’s signature Windsor font. The experience of watching the credits change is akin to flipping through the pages of a book***. This technique builds excitement for a new Allen adventure within the viewer. And then the film begins…

* Woody Allen by Kent Jones, which included an interview, in Film Comment (May/June 2011).

** Godard also cast Allen as King Lear in his Shakespeare adaptation. Though Allen, overall, is not really a Cahiers-filmmaker (see Olivier Assayas scathing remarks on Everyone says I love you or Jones on Celebrity). On the other hand, Allen seems to have found a home over at the more generous Positif with his two latest films making it onto their cover.

*** This literary analogy is only made stronger as Allen is the author of a vast collection of short stories that can be found in The New Yorker and collected in books like Mere Anarchy, The Insanity Defense and Getting Even. Allen also recently contributed to The Guardian a piece on his five favorite books (The Catcher in the Rye, Really the Blues, The World of SJ Perelman, Epitaph of a Small Winner, and Elia Kazan: A Biography), which show the influence books had on him as a person.

*****“One’s important encounters are the spice of life.” - Éric Vartzbed
How Can Woody Allen Change Your Life?
I first discovered Allen in my early university years. I was studying Psychology and Film Studies at the University of Ottawa. On my summer off, I stumbled upon Annie Hall where in it Allen represented what is commonly known as an auteur: he was the star, director, and screenwriter of the film and it was clear that this Alvy Singer character was loosely autobiographical. That month I watched Annie Hall maybe five or six times, making sure to scribble down on a little notepad all of the cultural references that I was not being taught in university. Over the summer I tried to see all of his films, which coincided with a blossoming interest in cinema, where I was also discovering the films of Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford. Since then I have gone to see all of Allen’s new films during their first-run releases, starting with Vickie Christina Barcelona (2008). I was also fortunate to go to Lyon, France that summer for some French language and culture classes. Where coincidently the Hangar Lumière (the birthplace of European cinema) was having an Allen retrospective. I didn’t need anything else…

The psychoanalyst Éric Vartzbed in his wonderful little French-language book Comment Woody Allen peut changer votre vie? talks about the way certain films seen at particular, and impressionable, times in ones life can influence someone personally, and that these small realizations and pleasures should be acknowledged and cherished. For Vartzbed, one of those occurrences happened to be when he saw Allen’s Another Woman*. Being a practitioner of psychology (at the Réseau Santé Valais) Vartzbed better understands the difficulty that Hope (Mia Farrow) is going through and the difficulty of confessing intimate and repressed thought. Allen in Another Woman and throughout his career proves to be a director of anxieties. Not only of presenting characters with anxieties but in how they can be debilitating in certain situations and what coping mechanism people come up with**. This is one of the subjects explored in the book, with particular characters from different films being used as case studies for the psychoanalyst to examine as he dissects the unconscious of Allen and his films through quoting other theorist like Sigmund Freud, Eric Fromm and Jacques Lacan.

Just as Allen has changed the lives of many people (Vartzbed’s, my own), Allen too was affected by the movies. The director? You’ve guessed it: Ingmar Bergman. Allen’s thoughts on Monika: “I came away reliving only the moment Harriet Andersson disrobed.” On The Naked Night, “Although the story was not totally focused, the work was directed with such immense talent that I sat forward for an hour and a half, my eyes bulging.” On Wild Strawberries, “I still recall my mouth dry and my heart pounding away from the first uncanny dream sequence to the last serene close-up.” On The Seventh Seal (“always my favorite”), “The flagellants, the burning of the witch (worthy of Carl Dreyer) and the finale, as Death dances off with all the doomed people to the nether lands is one of the most memorable shots in all movies.”***

* This first section of the book Comment Woody Allen a changé ma vie [How Woody Allen changed my life] is part self-analysis, while in the next section Comme Woody Allen peut changer votre vie [How Can Woody Allen change your life] Vartzbed tries to tease out life lessons and particular morals from the films themselves, and he is quite good at it.

** The role of the analyst in the films is also analyzed. Vartzbed sees complacency on their part where the session’s goal is no longer psychological progress but that of a routine, which would become a reoccurring gag for Allen. Like the wisecrack in Sleepers, “I haven’t seen my shrink for two-hundred years. If I had been going all of this time then I would almost be cured.”

*** From Woody Allen’s review of Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography The Magic Lantern.

*****On to the Book
Vartzbed prose is fun. It isn’t too academic, though it is smart and well written. Vartzbed knows how to translate cinematic gags and jokes onto the page; there are a lot of exclamation marks. The title of the book makes it seem like it is one of those goofy self-help books, which it isn’t. How Can Woody Allen change your life is a serious look at Allen’s films, who for Vartzbed, are in the same league as the work of the great European writers and philosophers like Marcel Proust, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Le Petit Prince), Molière and Emil Cioran.

Vartzbed quotes Allen from an interview with Robert Benayoun from Positif (which can be found in the Grand Interview issue) on Manhattan, “It isn’t New York that I am attacking, it’s the root of evil. It’s not a film that is happy to say: “Clean Central Park.” It is a film that is saying: “Clean up your emotional lives, or else you will never be able to clean Central Park.” Another insightful quote from the interview is, “My hero Isaac Davis prefers to think of the time past then the terrible things that are ruining the city today, he misses the time when New York looked like how you see it in the old sepia photographs, when it was as simple and romantic as Gershwin’s music.”

Vartzbed sees Allen humor as a defensive-mechanism - a way to make the people around him happy - while the sources of frustration is not coming from the exterior but the interior. For Allen, “desire and counter-desire is the same thing,” like the Julia Roberts character in Everyone Says I Love You who, “seems to prefer the dream of a potential happiness then the “closure” that comes with it’s realization.” This self-defeating impulse goes quite well with the famous Annie Hall* quip, “I would never be a part of a club that will have someone like me as a member.”

Vatzbed sees Zelig as Allen’s most political film, “Allen describes the mimetic passion that is central to in all the totalitarian phenomenon.” As well on Allen’s politics, “In the Allen universe, politics as they are are placed onto the second-plane ; the point of view is psychological and existential.”**

Allen shows the gap between what people say and what they mean, “with his style, he expresses the essence of the human life: our condition of the denatured animal, exiled in a landscape of signs, lost into language.” There is too much justification of bad behavior through a mise-en-mots, like the ‘natural’ and ‘happy’ divorce at the beginning of Husbands and Wives. And there seems to be an emphasis for Allen on capturing the complexity and contradiction of human feelings*** like when Isacc is running to meet Tracy at the end of Manhattan. One would want the two to get-back together but there are so many factors against that from happening. Even so we are still cheering Allen on.

* Annie Hall’s original title is Anhedonia, which means the inability to experience pleasure.

** Which makes Allen different then a more left-wing actor-director like Albert Brooks whose most recent film Looking for Humor in the Middle East (2005) is very critical of America’s foreign policy, which might have caused the films minor distribution and reception. Brooks also has a new fictional novel about a futuristic dystopian society 2030.

*** The subject of emotional validity is important to Allen which he highlights, as well as the disparities of critical reception, in the Eric Lax interview book:

"But the criticism that can be made of any film can be refuted from another point of view and, in the critical community, often is. So I'm not really interested in these analyses and discussions because I feel they're all rationalizations to justify an emotional response to the work. Two critics can see the same film and write opposite reviews and both are completely correct in their reasoning. So what do you have? Two conflicting intelligent points of view. So when I show my film to two or three friends in my screening room before I put it out, I'd like to hear their emotional response and not their cerebral analysis."

*****Career Periods:
What’s Up, Tiger Lily (1966) – Love and Death (1975) /
Annie Hall (1977) – Husbands and Wives (1992) /
Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) – Melinda and Melinda (2004) /
Match Point (2005) – Midnight in Paris (2011)

With over forty films to his credits it is hard to pin down Allen, but to make an attempt, one can see view his films in four distinct periods:
(1) The early funny ones: these films have a loose structure – the comparison to a stand-up sketch is frequently brought up - and include more physical comedic gags and non sequitur one-liners. This stage starts with What’s New Pussycat (1965 ; he wrote the original screenplay though didn’t direct the film) and What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966; a re-dubbing of a Japanese action film) and ends with Love and Death (1975). As Saul Auterlitz brings up in Another Fine Mess, “Nonethless, Allen’s yearning for gravity is hardly unfamiliar; we have already borne witness to similar ambitions from Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Lewis and numerous others. To penetrate deeper into comedy one must grow more serious.” This brings us to Allen’s second period.

(2) The films of the first period were made away from Allen’s beloved Manhattan. So when Allen finally returned to make a movie in Manhattan, the results were astounding [cf. Annie Hall (1977)]. Through the help of his cinematographer Gordon Willis, Allen learnt to be a more stylistic and resourceful director, as well he learnt more about narrative cohesion from his editor Ralph Rosenblum. But drama then began to take precedence. The attempted suicide in Interiors (1978) through carbon monoxide poisoning created one of the most haunting images in Allen’s cinema. Who can forget Eve (Geraldine Page) turning the oven on high and sealing the cracks in the door with masking tape? With such a bold shift in tone Allen was detaching himself from his early ‘funny’ films. He was not going to continue to conform to expectations and simply make comedies, which would be the subject of Stardust Memories (1980). On a whole, this period is marked more by its dramas even though there are moments of humor in them. But even though some of the films were fluffier the overall tone is more pessimistic, which seems ingrained in the design of the films black-and-white cinematography - which Allen used more in this period then any of the others - that gives off a darker atmosphere. The mood is one of social oppression that recalls the anxieties of the post-WWII crime thrillers (The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep). This period also coincides with Allen’s relationship with his wife Mia Farrow who they collaborated together in thirteen films. Starting with A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) and ended in January 1992 when she discovered sexually explicit photos of her adopted daughter Soon-Yi in Allen’s room. Their final film together is Husbands and Wives (1992). Farrow is now more concerned with humanitarian concerns, which was the subject of Alice.

(3) The end of the Farrow-Allen relationship brings us to Allen’s next period: “From comedic genius and New York icon to sleazeball and degenerate: Woody Allen’s fall was precipitous,” says Austerlitz. These post-Farrow films seem like a return to a more crowd-pleasing fare, even though they are pretty adventurous for Allen in terms of both content and form: starting with the noir Manhattan Murder Mysteries (1993), to a musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996) to the last film in this period the bifurcated Melinda and Melinda (2004). In these films Allen is exploring his interest in the writing of creative fiction as well as his ideas pertaining to chance and faith. There is also the European jazz tour documentary Wild Man Blues (1997) by Barbara Kopple, which is a striking project as it anticipates Allen’s next period.

(4) The final period, which brings us to today: the death of Allen’s longtime producer Jean Doumanian led him to take European financing. This move expanded the scope of the Allenian universe to Barcelona (Vicky Christina Barcelona), to London (Match Point) and to Paris (Midnight in Paris). The tennis metaphor in Match Point of a ball hitting a net relates to faith because one can never possibly know whether the ball will go over it or not. This indelible image of a round neon-yellow tennis ball hitting a net and spinning upwards as it almost floats in mid-air plays an important role in this latest period as the uncertainty of fate will lace all of Allen’s next films. Moving onward Allen shows himself to be more interested in open-endings and capturing people in indecisive moments. Though even amidst all this chaos and contradictions some people can still find meaning and happiness, which is a thought worth cherishing.
*****“It is a cliché that clowns cry; it has rarely been admitted that they might also think.” – Gerald Mast
Film Comedy Scholarship
Gerald Mast’s The Comic Mind (1979), for me, is the foundation of film comedy scholarship. It looks at the subject of film comedy beginning with the breed of clown that “translated comedy into cinematic terms” and tries to figure out what is the structure of film comedy in cinema, what are it’s roots, what is the goal of comedy, and who were the individuals that had the largest impact on it. While someone like Andrew Sarris was building upon James Agee’s The Golden Age of Comedy* (1949) when he compiled the comic section Make Way For The Clowns! in The American Cinema (1968), on the other hand, Mast’s pantheon is reserved for strictly comedians of the world that defined the seventh art in its formative years: Mack Sennet, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Ernst Lubitsch, René Clair and Jean Renoir.

One of Mast’s points is that, “There has been little attempt to draw comic films into this mainstream of twentieth-century artistic thought.” Mast places Film Comedy alongside New Comedy and Aristophanic Old Comedy as well with purely ‘cinematic’ forms by, for example, creating parallels between Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Charlie Chaplin (e.g. the bowler hat, the comic business) or by comparing Renoir to Shakespeare. Arguing with and against people like Wylie Sypher, Elder Olson and Henri Bergson, Mast’s argues for film comedy to be discussed seriously and lays the foundation scholarship in discussing it at the birth of film as medium by emphasizing silent-films and the works created at the transition to the talkie and afterwards. As well, Mast’s adds, “And so this book is evaluative, not just descriptive. It begins with the intention of revealing serious thought in the comic film form. And it assumes that the best comedies (even the funniest comedies) are those which achieve something that is more than simply funny.”

The eight comic film plots and basic structures, according to Mast, that are central to Film Comedy are as follows:

(1) The young lovers finally wed despite the obstacles to their union, and the amorous conclusion grows directly and exclusively from amorous complications.
(2) The film’s structure can be an intentional parody or burlesque of some other film or genre of films, the parodic plot is deliberately contrived and artificial.
(3) The reductio ad absurdum where a simple human mistake or social question is magnified, reducing the action to chaos and the social question to absurdity.
(4) An investigation of the workings of a particular society – usually through multileveled plots – comparing the responses of one social group or class with those of another, contrasting people’s different responses to the same stimuli and similar responses to different stimuli.
(5) A structure unified by a central figure (pícaro) of the film’s action, also known as the comedian comedy, which is built around the comedians persona.
(6) The “riffing” or “improvised and anomalous gaggery” plot that takes an initial situation, an object and then runs off with a series of gags that revolve around this central situation where pace and motion become unifying principles in themselves.
(7) The central character either chooses to perform or is forced to accept a difficult task, often risking his life in the process within a “comic climate” (built signs that let the audience know that he is watching a comedy).
(8) The story of the central figure who eventually discovers an error he has been committing in the course of his life, also within a “comic climate.”

To expand on Mast’s study on film comedy there is Professor Emeritus from Harvard University Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981) – or one can look towards James Harvey’s Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges** (1987) for a similar study of screwball comedies. Though my examination will focus on Cavell who in Pursuits of Happiness takes a long hard look at seven films or as he calls them “spiritual parables”: Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941), Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Adam’s Rib (1949), and Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937). These Hollywood talkies made between 1934 and 1949, for Cavell, constitute a particular genre: the comedy of remarriage - an inheritor of the Shakespearean romantic comedy (The Winter’s Tale). Cavell describes this group of films as, “the principal group of Hollywood comedies after the advent of sound and therewith one definitive achievement in the history of the art of film.”

Here is Cavell explaining what exactly is at heart of this comedy of remarriage genre:

“[T]he achievement of human happiness requires not the perennial and fuller satisfaction of our needs as they stand but the examination and transformation of those needs (…) [Which] applies only in contexts in which there is satisfaction enough, in which something like luxury and leisure, something beyond the bare necessities, is an issue (…) This is why our films must on the whole take settings of unmistakable wealth; the people in them have the leisure to talk about human happiness, hence the time to deprive themselves of it unnecessarily (…) It is as essential for the settings of our films to be such that we can expect the characters in them to take the time, and take the pains, to converse intelligently and playfully about themselves and about one another as it is essential for the settings and characters of classical tragedy to be such that we can expect high poetry from them (…) it will be a virtue of our heroes to be willing to suffer a certain indignity, as if what stands in the way of change, psychologically speaking, is a false dignity; or, socially speaking, as if the dignity of one part of society is the cause of the opposite part’s indignity, a sure sign of a disordered state of affairs (…) The conversations of what I call the genre of remarriage is, judging from the films I take to define it, of a sort that leads to acknowledgment; to the reconciliation of a genuine forgiveness; a reconciliation so profound as to require the metamorphosis of death and revival, the achievement of a new perspective on existence; a perspective that presents itself as a place, one removed from the city of confusion and divorce.”

Cavell focuses on the heroine and places them in their historical-cultural-social context. This woman is a continuation of the feminism that is rooted in the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and women gaining the right to vote back in 1920. As Cavell puts it,

“The genre it projected, on my interpretation, can be said to require the creation of a new woman, or the new creation of a woman, something I describe as a new creation of the human. If the genre is as definitive of sounds comedy as I take it to be, and if the feature of the creation of the woman is as definitive of the genre as I take it to be, then this phase of the history of cinema is bound up with a phase in the history of the consciousness of women (…) Our films may be understood as parables of a phase of the development of consciousness at which the struggle is for the reciprocity or equality of consciousness between a woman and a man, a study of the conditions under which this fight for recognition (as Hegel put it) or demand for acknowledgment (as I have put it) is a struggle for mutual freedom, especially of the views each holds of the other.”

In his textual analysis Cavell provides examples of possible interpretations for the motivations of the characters behavior as well as the directors intentions and then decides on the choice that appears the most rational. The important philosophers for Cavell that he references are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. And this radical juxtaposition of Immanuel Kant (philosophy) and Frank Capra (film) is part of Cavell’s uninhibited rejoice of Classical Hollywood films (à la Robert Warshow) mixed with his university context. Cavell articulates the reasons for why he writes*** and that, for him, “philosophy is to be understood, however else, aesthetically.” He provides other Depression-era fairy tale films that could have been examined as well he provides other contemporary ‘remarriage’ films like Starting Over, An Unmarried Woman and Kramer and Kramer. And to posit some more recent titles: Eyes Wide Shut, Hall Pass, and Certified Copy.

* The comedians highlighted by Sarris were W.C. Fields, Jerry Lewis, Harold Lloyd, The Marx Brothers and Mae West. Though as Gregg Rickman notes in the introduction to The Film Comedy Reader: “Agee also established a starring comedian’s talents and personality as the major factor by which to judge screen comedy,” and that there were “[s]ilent comedians dismissed by Agee, meanwhile, such as Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Charley Chase, have taken years to find new partisans.”

** On this period James Harvey writes, “Nineteen thirty-four was the turning point, the year when it first began to seem as if the Hollywood movie had invented the romantic comedy. Suddenly in The Thin Man and It Happened One Night and The Gay Divorcee, in actors like Dunne and Lombard and Grant, Powell and Loy and Astaire – all the familiar, borrowed elements came together in combinations so new and fresh, so eclectic, and so intrinsically movielike that familiarity became revelation.”

*** Cavell, “one learns that without this trust in one’s experience, expressed as a willingness to find words for it, without thus taking an interest in it, one is without authority in one’s own experience.” He also uses really ordinary language to describe complex ideas by renowned philosophers.

*****Twenty-First Century Jokers
What are the well-researched and well-written film-comedy books of our time? Which ones are the most up-to-date and insightful? And which ones are the most likely to teach you about a comic-director or -star that one is unfamiliar with? Or make you re-appraise a personality originally viewed as fluff?

If The Comic Mind and Pursuits of Happiness (and/or Romantic Comedy in Hollywood) lay the foundation of film comedy as a field of study in book-form, then it is in The Film Comedy Reader and Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy that the subject as a whole is brought into the twenty-first century*.

One thing that The Film Comedy Reader (2006) edited by Gregg Rickman is interested in is “how ideas develop over time,” as it anthologizes essays about film-comedy from the beginning to the present day. Some examples include: James Agee’s Comedy’s Greatest Era and Buster Keaton's What Are the Six Ages of Comedy moving forward with Raymond Durgnat on Vincente Minnelli's Bells Are Ringing and Robin Wood on Gays and '90s Comedy. Rickman points out differences in the writing about film-comedy, “Some further background on the different schools of film theory which inflect our readings of cinema follows. To briefly summarize, a divide exist between those who define the comic film in terms of its narrative pattern, and those who define it in terms of its goal, the physical act of laughter,” which is worth considering.

Rickman personal entries are on Some Like It Hot ("Wilder's characters more often than not are con artists, manipulators of other people's emotions, usually through their skilled use of language."), Bamboozled ["That Bamboozled indulges in a "rhetoric of blame" (Edward Said's phrase) cannot be doubted. Yet Spike Lee can be thought of as a critic of blackface minstrelsy in line with Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)."], The Producers [""Putting on a show" has been sufficient plot justification for many a great musical comedy and it may perhaps be in this particular subgenre (rather than as a satirist or performer) Brooks may ultimately best be remembered."] and Runaway Bride ("This reduction of a privileged moment in film history to a plot device, a gimmick, is just another reason It Happened One Night will still be debated a hundred years from now, while Runaway Bride will be little more than a footnote to its star's career.")

While Saul Austerlitz's book Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy (2010) is one of the broadest in scope and up-to-date books on the subject. For Austerlitz the important film is Preston Sturge’s Sullivan’s Travels. To make comedies or to make dramas? Now that is the question. In the book Austerlitz posits thirty pantheon personalities that have been important to film comedy. From Chaplin to Judd Apatow by way of Laurel & Hardy and Katharine Hepburn and Jerry Lewis**, Mel Brooks and Albert Brooks and Richard Pryor, Steven Martin and Eddie Murphy and Ben Stiller. As well there are one-hundred-and-five shorter entries on oddities, one-shots and newcomers: Nora Ephron, Jim Jarmusch, Robin Williams, the Farrelly’s, Whit Stillman, Paul Rudd, John Belushi, Jayne Mansfield, Mike Nichols, Tyler Perry et cetera.

What else does Austerlitz have to say on Allen (who receives a longer entry): Well that he sees Allen as a hybrid child between Bob Hope and Ingmar Bergman. On Allen’s early routines, “Allen was modeling himself after satirist Mort Sahl, but rather than Sahl’s didja-see-this-article shtick, Allen was punching above his intellectual weight, providing his own freewheeling annotations to Freud and Dostoyevsky.” And that with Annie Hall, “Allen created something entirely new: a somber comedy,” where “the humor, ultimately, is inseparable from the sentiment.”

Allen bridges the long-standing tradition of nonsense in film history that begins with the Marx Brothers (whose Duck Soup appears in a segment in Crimes and Misdemeanors) and passes through Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, Blake Edwards and Robert Altman. Allen’s oeuvre has variations of all of Mast’s eight comic plot structures and his best characters reach Cavell’s criteria of, “the achievement of a new perspective on existence.” With each new film – a reliable Woody every year - the connections and links between the works are getting denser. As Allen creates continuity between the films and different career periods there is also an evolution and maturation where he places different emphasis on certain behavior and ideas. Where his work was once more parody and slapstick, it has evolved going into light-hearted jest, drama and philosophical exploration. Geographically going from the micro to the macro. Allen is creating his own Infinite Jest, to use a David Foster Wallace expression. The somber comedy*** that Allen popularized with Annie Hall has been the mise en abyme of his carreer and its influence on contemporary auteur film comedy (Apatow, Solondz) might just be his legacy. - David Davidson

* Though I should bring up here Laurence Maslon and Michael Cantor’s Make ‘Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America (2008) whose focus is more multi-disciplinary as it looks at comedy from the position of stand-up, talk-shows, Saturday Night Live, comedians, television series, and film. And to include an eccentricity in film comedy scholarship, I am going to suggest, Jonathan Rosenbaum’s catalogue for a series he programmed for the Viennale, The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S. (2009), which includes a long introduction (where he explains his selection criteria), eleven re-published essays, and capsules for fifty-five films from Owen Land’s On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmmund Freud in Wit and its relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist be Whole (1979) to John Waters’ Hairspray (1988).

** There was a time, I believe, when the cinephilic debates were over Jerry Lewis or Woody Allen. Just as, I imagine, there was a time that you have had to prefer Chaplin or Keaton. Whil now the directors you have to align yourself with are Todd Philips, Judd Apatow or the Farrelly’s. My response: I just don’t know why some people can’t just get a long. From the above list, the only director that I have a serious problems with is Todd Philips whose Old School I liked but I thought the Hangover is abysmal with its two-dimensional characters, racism and homophobia - I could not be bothered to go watch the sequel.

*** And two unlikely directors have recently pronounced their appreciation of Allen’s films: Monte Hellman and Francis Coppola.