“Yesterday had been summer in the city, the end of summer stale and jaded, with a dejection in the air that dragged like an old skirt in the gutter.” So begins one of my favorite works of fantasy fiction, 1927’s “The Dark Chamber” by Leonard Cline, one of those wonderful American pulp-aesthetes of the Coolidge era, before the utilitarian crash that caused such literary ormolu to be melted down and pawned.*
The passage describes perfectly the stifling, choked atmosphere of New York City at summer’s close—or at least that’s my recollection, being a vocational film critic who dwells in darkness more than your average subway booth attendant (while earning significantly less). As at the end of every summer since time immemorial, I find myself regretting that I did not spend more time during the summer noticing that it was, in fact, summer. Very often the lyric “Spending warm summer days indoors/ Writing frightening verse to a bucktoothed girl in Luxembourg” flitters through my head; Morrissey is referring to fellow Mancunian Ian Curtis, and we all know how that turned out.
To what degree are movies inimical to life? To what degree is art? It’s a question I posed in one of this column’s earlier outings, when it traveled under another name, dated September 15th of 2011—which makes me believe that this crisis of faith is a yearly event, roughly synchronized with Labor Day. This has been exacerbated by reading Kenneth Peacock Tynan again—this time a 1975 collection of the author’s enthusiasms called “The Sound of Two Hands Clapping,” produced some time after Mr. Tynan had retired from both regular theater reviewing and from his appointment at the National Theatre Company. Among its contents is an unpublished Playboy interview of 1970, done shortly after Oh! Calcutta!, the “erotic revue” that Tynan assembled, edited, and produced, which made a conspicuous splash (or gush). With an unusually perspicacious and probing interviewer, Tynan discusses, among other things, the “befouled word” art:
“…I feel that an unhealthy amount of attention is paid, an undesirable intensity of reverence is shown, to what are often visions and precepts and ideologies that arise out of a failure to live a fulfilled private life. Much of the art consists merely of messages transmitted from the lonely to the lonely. There is too much veneration accorded to the imaginative visions of failed human beings.”
If there has been a finer definition of the cult of the Japanese director Mikio Naruse, of which I consider myself a member in good standing, than “messages transmitted from the lonely to the lonely,” I confess that I do not know it.
Aside from Tynan, I have been busying myself with the latest missive from J. Hoberman, “Film After Film (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema),” purchased after watching the author introduce a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2001 In Praise of Love, a movie that I find it difficult to praise or love. In “Film After Film,” from New Left Books imprint Verso, the Tacitus of celluloid returns to the “timeline” structure of chronicles “The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties” and “Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War.” This go-around, however, Hoberman’s trademark present tense was literally written in the present tense, for “Film After Film” repurposes weekly Village Voice reportage on the state of the medium—starting from the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (including a 9/12 screening of Godard’s film at the Toronto International Film Festival) through the first fumbling steps of the young millennia—so as to descry the direction in which the Seventh Art is headed.
One essential matter, identified in the opening chapters, is the switch-over from the “indexical” truth of the photography-based movies and the Bazinian ideal of “Total Cinema” to the contemporary triumph of the digital, with the ubiquity of Photoshop/ CGI turning “live-action” filmmaking into an offset of animation. Hoberman identifies several fin-de-siècle tipping points for the shift, including 1999’s The Matrix, whose “bullet time” sequence seems destined to be the Al Jolson “You ain’t seen nothing yet” of the digital revolution. Hoberman quotes David Edelstein on the effect of Lana and Andy Wachowski’s hit, which was to “cut us loose from the laws of physics in ways that no live-action film had ever done, exploding our ideas of time and space on screen.”
The subject—that is, the slow disappearance of what-goes-up-must-come-down cause and effect and even the most rudimentary spatial relationships from contemporary cinema—is one of enduring interest. I’ve used this space to write on it in the past (**) and, in a particularly fecund summer of unemployment and genteel alcoholism, I produced the following for Reverse Shot, identifying Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron as a harbinger:
“Impact trumps information, as different calibers of artillery rumble in basso continuo; the spatial relationships between combatants or the geography of their melees ranges from muddled to indecipherable, depending on the scale of the fight. The result creates a degree of ambivalence in the viewer: who knows who to cheer on when you don’t know who’s doing what to whom? The film’s centerpiece battle moves with such a stirring flicker that it’s difficult to notice how garbled its terrain is; in it, a German platoon led by James Coburn’s upright, harassed Sgt. Steiner, uninformed of a full retreat by a snide superior (Maximilian Schell), are submerged by a surging Russian army on counter-offensive. The Germans fall back into a dilapidated factory, into a dingy tunnel and, suddenly… out onto a hillside, somehow safe from the battle? Did they flank the Russians? Teleport?
Trying to fall back and reconstruct the logistics of what’s just happened is about as impossible as trying to draw Charles Bovary’s cap as it’s described on the second page of Madame Bovary (try it), and one can argue that Peckinpah was interested in telling a story about war as something that beggars articulation, just as Flaubert was interested in probing the limitations of the word (“Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity”)—for the passing of time reveals the man reductively referred to as “Bloody Sam” more-and-more as a poet. One less susceptible to the romance of artist-heroes might suggest that Sam’s reported on-set benders on 180-proof Slivovitz and powder hogging off the editing table may’ve been the deciding influence of this foggy war. And there is the fact that Peckinpah had far less arms and armor than expected to work with on-shoot, and no real air force, which required some tricky cutting for epic effect. Whatever the case, it’s one of those ripe ironies of film history that any aesthetic advance is an invitation and that, if he cannot be held directly responsible, we can still draw a pretty clean line between Peckinpah and the blizzards of nonsensical beauty from Tony Scott, Michael Bay, and the rest usually criticized with the less-than-descriptive catch-all pejorative “MTV-style editing.”
This is not to say that the only way to make movies is through slavish obedience to the laws of nature, gravity, and film grammar, but it seems to me that both the aesthetic conservative and the radical have an interest in seeing the classical unities preserved in some form. Re-viewing Major American Artist Richard Fleischer’s 1974 Mr. Majestyck, with Charles Bronson as one baaaaaad melon-farmer, for a recent Voice piece, I was struck by its unruffled composure and sublimation of artistic personality as by a Grecian urn, inspired to effuse, Keats-like, that: “this classical middle-range moviemaking is the very foundation of a healthy film culture, the solid baseboard that must be in place in order to spring into the unknown.”
Speaking of springing—the gravity-defiant, far-from-indexical Resident Evil: Retribution is closing out its opening week in theaters, proving that the CG revolution need not necessarily mean dispensing with time and space. I’ve recently spoken my piece about Paul W.S. Anderson while, not to be outdone, my fellow enthusiast R. Emmet Sweeney, in his delightfully catholic blog for TCM’s Movie Morlocks, convened a mini-summit on the pleasures of PWSA with The NY Times’ hardcore auteurist Dave Kehr, from which I extract the following exchange:
Kehr, unfavorably contrasting the choreography of action in Joss Whedon’s The Avengers: Every shot is just a guy shooting, with no sense of who he’s shooting at or chasing after. There’s just no relationship between this action and that action. It’s either complete in itself or it’s forgotten by the next shot. So it’s not about the logic of how you fight an army of 12 invincible zombies and get out alive, which has a certain amount of plausibility in the Anderson because the strategy is there, the athletic abilities are there, the ballet-like quality of moving through the air… It feels kind of serene in a way. It’s always so cool, she just knows how to execute it.
Sweeney: You can see people thinking in Resident Evil: Retribution…
DK: Yeah, she’s thinking down the line—look at this person, what’s he going to do, how am I going to react.
One of Retribution’s cool-in-both-meanings-of-the-word set pieces has Milla Jovovich’s Alice defending herself with a pistol and chain as she’s assaulted from both ends of a floodlit corridor by berserk undead. It’s an act that requires a maximum of concentration and spatial awareness, a premonition of where the whipping chain’s point of contact needs be dispatched six foes into the future, and a consciousness of the contents of the clip, and its execution is so no-sweat elegant as to seem like an endlessly drilled kata in some very particular martial art.
Watching such deliberation triumph over the blind ravening of mindless and unreasoning appetites—what is this if not the triumph of reason over passion? Precisely the subject of The Master, the other Paul Anderson, P.T.’s, latest, though it’s approached through very different means. It has proven impossible for many, including yours truly, to overlook the coincidence of the Andersons’ head-to-head openings as an opportunity to score polemical points, though let us hope for only more film art that chooses any path, be it that of elegant cause-and-effect (PWSA) or leap-of-faith visionary (PTA).
* Good news, everyone! Cline’s The God Head is finally back in print!
** Noting that I finished the above-linked column with a reference to former Cincinnati Bengals wideout Jerome Simpson’s distinctly Jovovichian forward flip over Daryl Washington of the Arizona Cardinals, and I would be remiss to file this column without reference to the passing of NFL Films’ resident genius, Steve Sabol, whose brilliant career was made of winnowing a seemingly indecipherable melee of gridiron activity into articulate units of decisive action, putting in place a system that consistently ensures exquisite slow-motion close-ups of spirals dropping into prayerfully outstretched fingers.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.