saturday night feature

the title of bergman's "sawdust and tinsel" lends much to its overarching and tawdry undertwisting themes. we might add to the list: mirrors, humiliation, clowns, leering onlookers, the circus of unhappy marriage, hypnotism, and other high wire acts. when the movie was first released it was met with a cool and critical reception, called "bergman's vomit" by one critic that he quotes in an interview that is also included on the criterion dvd. but though bergman's is a pessimistic view emphasizing the inherent cruelty in human sexual relationships, the film sparkles and sizzles at every turn.





how can you not love this kind of talk between the equestrian and the sadistic, opportunistic thespian who seduces her : she: "i can ride great geldings bareback at a full gallop holding on with only my thighs."

he: "you smell of stables, cheap perfume and sweat, but i'll lick you clean like a dog."

at one point they arm wrestle to settle who's the stronger.






and the scene that takes place in the tiny trailer between the heavily inebriated frost the clown, the equally intoxicated albert the cuckholded ringmaster, and his gun is amazing. the tragic and grotesque expressions that pass across frost the clown's face are maybe the most unforgettable part.

"All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl." ~jean luc godard

criterion dvd release date: february 19th, 2008.
thanks chris for the heads up.

"the tour is not a study of buildings, dates, and statistics. it is a study of ourselves." ~timothy "speed" levitch

timothy speed levitch is my newest hero. i watched bennett miller's (now almost ten-year-old) documentary "the cruise" about levitch when he was living in manhattan and guiding tours of the city with the most quirky and celebratory candor and i was instantly smitten. his take on the significance of the landmarks of a city is in stark contrast to the spectacle of tourism as we know it, and reminded me of guy debord's definition of tourism as being "the act of going to see what has already become banal." the glazed-over expressions of many of his passengers do not change a whit all the while that he is saying the funniest and most brilliant of things (though in this particular still of the film, the general blankness of the tourists is not apparent). at times his mannerisms bring to mind other free-spirited characters: willy wonka, charlie chaplin, and his unruly hair brought my affections for georges perec and einstein also into the influence he had on me. though his voice bears a similar peculiarity to woody allen's, i think he is more the antithesis of woody allen than anything else. proof in point:
levitch: "you are better than any party you've ever been to."
allen: "i wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member."

and now, in the last twenty-four hours, i have managed to finish reading levitch's book "speedology: speed on new york on speed." published in 2002, i'd say it was time another edition was released, because it is a very hard [read expensive] book to get into one's hot little hands. the observations of levitch have some of that jouissance of whitman's poems combined with just enough humor, ironic distance and purely interesting factual information, so that reading him bears some resemblance to having someone play really good pinball with your brain. a couple of sentences scoring high:

"Common sense is the department store of the mind."

"the feeling of arrival, that feeling of being grand and central simultaneously, is the sensation of an adventure coming just as you in turn become the adventure's discovery."

"if you're a woman you can consider your whole body a jet engine."

"i completely identify with [magellan]. the major decision of his life was whether to go with or against the wind."

perfume: the story of a murderer

i cannot shake the riotous perfume of this movie. the chords it played in me are still ringing high and low. it is the most beautiful movie about a serial killer as i think there could ever be. it makes me think of a line from another movie, one from the thirties or forties but i can't remember its name, in which someone says "crime is just a left handed form of human endeavor."

the main character's single-minded desire to preserve scent is really only his quest to capture the fleetingness of beauty in life. born into a loveless existence of squalor, his sense of smell is the only part of him that seems capable of developing to maturity. in other aspects he remains stunted; his movements and expressions take on a feral quality. scent for him is the only form of higher beauty to which he can aspire, as it is given without any exchange of consent. in all other ways he is locked out of the world of exchange between human beings. his uncanny ability to identify and orchestrate scents into inebriating harmonies is precluded by the fact that he has no identifying smell of his own, no sense of a familiar origin. the source of his primary strength lies in his most profound lack, which his strength cannot correct.

isn't it within this tension, between what we have and what we are missing, that all of us must make our alchemy?

compelling and sensuous

'The Double Life of Veronique' cast a deep spell on me. The world of that film is a world like the one i would live in if i could choose a world.

i was also fascinated by the supplemental documentary of the making of the film, in which kieslowski discusses the impetus behind the making of it. i found myself hanging onto his every word. i was specifically taken by what he said regarding documentary as a genre. apparently he started out wanting to make documentaries. but then he realized there were too many areas of life that a documentary couldn't, and shouldn't, cover about human intimacy and the way things are. he said: "you can't take the camera into people's bedrooms while they're making love, because to make love they have to be alone without the camera... to film people's innermost thoughts and emotions that they show to no one, to film that i need an actor, glycerin tears, and a fake death. everything has to be fake to look real onscreen. thanks to all these fake things i can breathe life into my story. it's more interesting in real life but you should never film those things in real life. that's why i don't make documentaries anymore."

i have had that feeling of wanting to photograph someone, freeze the moment of them being in the moment, standing a certain way against the light, holding a certain gesture, portraying some compelling emotion, and then shying away from actually taking the picture because it seemed as if i would be intruding upon the intimacy of that moment that was his or hers, and not mine. kieslowski addresses this in his film and in his explanations about the film's meaning for him. we have to live "carefully and attentively," he says, because we never know how our slightest action may affect the lives of others. this is a sense i have also had, of the minutest ripples that could send me off my axis if they converged in some specific way, of the havoc i obliviously wreak, the chain reactions of which i am a domino. how many strangers' memories am i in? how many people's vacation pictures feature the back of my head? this movie will make you think about these things, and make you wonder if you don't also have your own double, living a parallel life to yours, providing you with a vague and elusive sense of equilibrium that, if you tried to articulate, would come out sounding clunky and trivial.

"japanese girl-power rock movie"

it is as uplifting and catchy as the Blue Hearts' song that inspired its title. i felt so good after watching this movie night before last that i just finished watching it again. it is just as brilliant and resonant the second time, a rare quality for me, for whom life is just a little too short to watch most movies more than once.


if you want a review, i really like this one.

a remake worth seeing

tonight i gleefully watched david lee fisher's 2005 remake of "the cabinet of dr. caligari." fisher juxtaposes the exact sets from the 1919 original with his modern-day talking version of the story. very visually delicious and dramatic and odd and disorienting. i love the sinister way the somnambulist walks keeping his body in contact with the wall, and the way jane answers francis's proposal of marriage without turning around to look at him, just saying "yes" into her hair and moving on.

a short and surreal guy maddin movie for your viewing pleasure

"the heart of the world" was one of the three of maddin's films included in the collection dvd that i got my hot little hands on. (and you can see it all in its strange entirety here. i haven't watched "twilight of the ice nymphs" yet, but i also really enjoyed "archangel." it's strange and grainy the way all his films are, with lots of russian snow and deadpan humor. it was a nice way to spend the evening.






and do i ever wish i had a flying outfit like hers.

short and sweet II

"candy".
(the film just plays repeatedly on a loop, so you don't have to keep watching it.
unless you want to.)


via vvork.

something wonderful for your netflix queue

dziga vertov's "man with a movie camera" left me breathless. his silent avant-garde documentary of a day in moscow from dawn to dusk in 1929 made me only wish for one thing, and that was a larger television. nevertheless, i was swept away by this visionary celebration of motion and simultanaeity. it is imperative that everyone see it. (especially andrea).


in his film, vertov places a lot of emphasis on the grace and fluidity of machines, portraying them as fitting seamlessly in with human life. all the workers in the factories he films seem to revel in the repetition of their jobs, as if they are temporarily tuned in to the underlying and hypnotizing rhythm of the film, the teeming pulse of life when it's running full steam. the whole thing is just visually exhilarating, and the soundtrack only enhances it. (be sure you watch the kino version, for there are others out there with different soundtracks, as the original film is completely silent, so when it was played in theatres it could be accompanied by live music.



i have a link right here for you to watch the first ten or so minutes. the guy who added it to youtube calls vertov "a koyaaniskatsi of the silent era," but i'd say it was the other way around.

head over heels over mutual appreciation

when i say "this is a REALLY GOOD MOVIE" i'm never exaggerating. writer-director-actor andrew bujalski is brilliant at portraying a world that is realistic in the best possible awkward and honest way reality can be.
just go read some of the reviews on it over at rotten tomatoes: saying things like "frighteningly intuitive and alive in numerous layers, even when it looks like nothing's going on," and calling it "the dark side of waldorf education."

in addition, it turned me on to bishop allen, the band i was heretofore unfamiliar with and am now more than a little dopey over.

panning the labyrinth

despite all the glowing praise "pan's labyrinth" has been receiving, i must say for me it left something to be desired. yes it was visually stunning and at times so gruesome i could hardly watch. but it was precisely this contradiction, something about the disconnect between the magical half of the story and the extremely brutal half, that left me unsure about it as a whole.
it is not in the sense of symmetry gone awry where my discontent with the film lies. i just don't think it pulls off the fusing of these two disparate elements successfully. though it's entirely possible that this letting the ragged and missed stitches show is intentional to the "message" of the film, i didn't get the feeling that it was. on the one hand the audience is expected to follow a conventional and sometimes clichéd fairy tale, and on the other we are immersed in a brutal depiction of reality. the film seemed to be operating under the assumption that these two worlds could be and would be compatible if one willed them to be, no distilling required.
i suppose i disagreed.

( if you read this post before i changed it, let me just say that when i got home from work and reread it, it felt like it needed more finessing of its own. also, i'm not used to publically disagreeing. i never used to do it at all-- in fact i barely had an opinion for many years-- and now that i really do have one, and i really do disagree with many people, it's still difficult for me to deal with the aftermath of my disagreement. soon i begin doubting that my opinion is somehow flawed by blind spots. but rather than back out of my opinion altogether, i work to make my opinion not sound like a finished thing i'm ready to bronze; after all, bronzing an opinion is about as absurd as bronzing a raincloud-- )

why don't you dance

a short and charming clip from godard's 'band of outsiders.'
thanks to mav, and to jen who led me there.

the man who wished he was a horse

sadly, the little films from yesterday have become mysteriously inaccessible. none of the shortlists from depict!'s 2006 or 2005 site are working. so i found this one, from 2003. see it quick, before it disappears too.

a very short film about shoes

from the point of view of an autistic child.

watch it here


this one is also wonderful:





it is called 'monsieur ballon.'

thanks to helen for the link.