Film School Rejects » Culture Warrior

Culture Warrior: The Paradoxical Importance of Film Festivals

Dr. Cole Abaius — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:35:41 +0000

Since our resident genius Landon Palmer is out on the town this week at South By Southwest, I am foolishly filling in to talk about subjects that are far over my head. For the usual insightful commentary, head back here next week. Unless I destroy the entire column’s credibility in one fell swoop. Which is my goal.

For the next few minutes, I’d like you to consider two facts. The first is that there have been film festivals almost since there has been film. The first Academy Awards was held in 1929 – back before color, back before sound – and the Venice Film Festival first took place for the first time three years later. That festival, the first in the world, was founded by fascist politico and fascist film fan Giuseppe Volpi and continues to hand out Golden Lions today.

The second fact is that these film festivals exist:

The Marfa Film Festival – a festival born completely from being the filming location of There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men that has grown into a respectable regional fest.
The Bicycle Film Festival – a film festival featuring films about bikes.
The 9/11 Film Festival – a fest focused on movies about 9/11 celebrated mostly by the conspiracy theorists of the 9/11 Truth Movement.

I don’t list these festivals for any other reason but to point out just how specialized film festivals have become. They have grown out of their shells mostly by the proliferation of the internet – allowing thousands if not millions to become aware of film festivals that celebrate the things they are already interested in. Love bikes? Love movies about bikes? There’s a fest for that.

Keep these facts in mind: festivals are old, and they are everywhere.

One of the first things I ever did for Film School Rejects was cover the 2006 Austin Film Festival, and there, in a black box theater that usually plays host to local improvisational troupes and open mic nights, I saw a movie called The Quietest Sound. It’s an experimental film featuring a single, 70-minute steady shot of a woman in a police station, and it’s gripping beyond what most can do if given the chance to move the camera. You’ve never heard of it, because it’s never played anywhere.

Last night, after finding myself running up a sweaty street at South by Southwest alongside the organized horde waiting to get into the marquee screening of Elektra Luxx, I started thinking about that experimental movie and its place in our culture. For the most part, it is a tree falling in the forest, but a handful of people in this world had the chance to see it. The Quietest Sound may have not crashed with thunder in the woods, but at least it wasn’t silent.

These random thoughts came together with an innocently ugly question prompted by some anonymous man during Elektra Luxx director Sebastian Gutierrez’s Q and A (a staple of the festival experience). The voice from the crowd asked:

How did you get to make a sequel if no one really even saw the first film?

It’s not the nicest thing to lay in front of a filmmaker, but it also displays in a few words the chasm that exists between understanding film as a product to be sold and film as an art form to be enjoyed. This chasm lies at the heart of the paradoxical value of film festivals. On the one hand, festivals are expensive exercises in futility where filmmakers come to be disappointed at turn outs and fans wade through dull movies. On the other, festivals are pure celebrations of film where fans and filmmakers collide to share visions, opinions, and to catch the eye of a distributor who takes great work to the masses.

Both of these viewpoints are true.

The reason for this is because there are at least five groups with differing viewpoints as to what a festival should achieve: filmmakers, film fans, film critics, distribution companies, and the outside film world awaiting news and buzz. Those group all have very different goals, and they are all multiplied by the goal of another incredibly important group – the festival programmers.

Festivals aren’t dead. They aren’t evolving. Despite the waves of editorials that arrive like clockwork every year extolling the doom, demise, revolution and rebirth of festivals, none of those take into consideration that the term “film festival” is a many-headed beast that doesn’t sit down or roll over for anyone. Most of the time, it’s serving different masters.

In his 2008 article “Do Festivals Matter?” Christian Gaines makes the level-headed claim (amongst the usual rabble) that the diversity of interests and goals in the festival world makes the idea of success a slippery one with each player focused on a separate rubric for what winning means. On any given day, on any given corner of the street here at SxSW, a filmmaker could be celebrating with friends after over 50 people showed up to his screening while another might be shaking her head in frustration that she only garnered 200. A programmer might cringe as a line starts to violate a fire code while another smiles at how many badges have been sold. A distributor could be shuffling through theaters and still not finding anything to buy. A fan might be starry-eyed at famously long legs strolling down a local block. An actor might rant that the press isn’t interested in talking to him.

Amongst that chaos, all of those people have one thing in common that is central to a question that never seems to be asks when examining the importance of film festivals.

All of those people are at the festival.

That might be a simple, obvious statement, but consider one of the major groups I mentioned earlier – the outside film world. As I write this, film websites and journals are plastered with coverage from the festival, drawing every bit of news, quickly posting reviews, and flip-camming interviews with abandon. Festivals are reporting record attendance with each passing year.

Yet, still, hundreds of millions of people (in this country alone) don’t attend them. Here is where my first two facts come into play. Keeping in mind that festivals are almost as old as film itself, and that they are pervasive, diverse and so prevalent now that there is one going on every week of the year somewhere in the world, what does the world actually get out of them?

It’s clear what directors, die hard fans with flexibility and funds, producers, press, and programmers get out of it, but is the outside world really served by having film news taken over 6 weeks out of the year (by Sundance, Cannes, Comic Con, SxSW, Telluride, and Toronto) by a host of movies that will never see the light of your local cinema? Why do we lavish so much attention on the events if they only produce a few titles that the public ever has a chance to embrace?

As someone who has been on both sides of the fence – sitting at home in my youth crawling through Comic-Con logo-ed blog posts and spending my slightly older youth wrapping a press pass around my neck – I see a strong dichotomy there. The excitement of a festival is stirring, and simply just the shot for a filmmaker to rise above the pack is thrilling, but it’s also a frustrating experience for those who aren’t on the ground in Park City or the beaches of France or the sweaty streets of Austin. A few years ago, I wrote a loving review about The Quietest Sound, but the overwhelming majority of people that read it had to respond to my enthusiasm with a shrug at an empty multiplex marquee.

Hopefully, this rambling path leads us finally to the paradoxical importance of film festivals. They have become events that shine into the eyes and awareness of millions beyond their reach, but all of that is noise if that group doesn’t also gain some value from how loud the press and publicity machines are shouting. This year at SxSW, just like others, will see larger films swim through on their way to the box office, a handful of smaller films get picked up for NY/LA weekend trips, and a huge swath that are championed into the void. It seems then, we’ve outwardly broadcast an importance that only really matters to those on the inside, those who are standing on city blocks waiting to get into a screening or waiting backstage to introduce something they’ve worked on for years.

I don’t have firm answers to the questions I posed earlier. Not any more anyway. I remember apathetically scanning over news and reviews of movies I’d never heard (and would never get a chance to see) when I was younger, but I was never the kind of film fan that went insane whenever there was a hint of a whisper of a casting rumor. Granted, there is inherent worth in discussions with filmmakers about craft that work there way out into the world, and there are certainly audiences out there that can’t make it to festivals but luxuriate in news about upcoming projects and scripts in development.

But when you see a website littered with a festival’s logo, does it excite you? Frustrate you? Leave you yawning? Make you want to be there?

With film festivals being as important and ubiquitous as they are, do you even care about them if you’re not there?

They are as old as the art form and right around the corner everyday, but there’s a strong argument that they only serve to give already famous films more fame, generate news from people who could get a platform elsewhere, and hold intrinsic value for the lucky few who get into the darkness of the theater for the ride.

There’s also an argument to say that all this reporting is classic journalism – to give someone who can’t be there the chance to experience what it’s like.

It’s something I’ll be thinking about while wading through all the SxSW-related stories.

Or when I finally get around to checking out that Bicycle Film Fest.

Don’t worry. Landon returns next week, and you can wash the bad taste of this out of your mouth by checking out his Culture Warrior archive.

Culture Warrior: Kathryn Bigelow’s Next Move

Landon Palmer — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:00:17 +0000

For an industry that is viewed reductively by much of middle America as being politically left-leaning to the point of being out-of-touch with the rest of the country, Hollywood has shown a stagnant lack of progress in terms of gender equality. Actresses’ careers are in jeopardy as soon as they hit 35, it always seems like there’s a dearth of good roles for women, and much of the business behind the camera is dominated by a boys’ club. Particularly striking are the lack of female directors. There could be many determining reasons for a lack of female representation in one of the industry’s most coveted titles – a history of sexism, a self-canceling cycle of young female filmmakers who lack interest in such positions because of the existing dearth of women, etc. – but the truth is undeniable. One struggles not only to think of female directors, but especially of female auteurs. For the few women that have made a career directing, too small a fraction of them have had visibly great careers. From Sally Potter to Mary Harron to Catherine Breillat, even the greatest of these have had to ensure giant obstacles and in the end few actually paid attention to their work.

While the Oscars are indeed a largely meaningless affair whose accuracy in picking the most resonant films of any given year are more often than not contradicted by the test of time, Kathryn Bigelow’s win for Best Director on Sunday night is not without its own significance. Yes, the Oscars are a popularity contest in which we watch the wealthiest and most overexposed in Hollywood pat each other on the backs and drink in their own honor, but lucky for us it is exactly this audience (not, by contrast, the viewers at home) that needed most to see Bigelow win.

While male filmmakers – anybody from James Cameron to Pedro Almodovar – have consistently made movies with women at the center with varying degrees of success, the output of successful female filmmakers have largely been relegated to movies for women. With the occasional exception of films like Bigelow’s Point Break or Harron’s American Psycho (or the more introspective femininity-themed arthouse fare of Potter or Breillat), successful female directors are characterized far more visibly by the likes of Nora Ephron or Nancy Meyers. I am in no way am blanketly criticizing these films, for they are tailor-made for a specific audience and do indeed achieve a connection with that audience, and are often far better than the competing He’s Just Not That Into You school of romantic comedy, but they do exemplify the limitations for successful female directors. Ephron and Meyers have achieved continued, unparalleled success in their niche filmmaking, while movies that have a more critical engagement with femininity fall into obscurity (Harron’s Notorious Bettie Page) or are even potentially harmful to advancement in femme-centric filmmaking thus far (Jane Campion’s In the Cut).

Unlike most of her peers, Bigelow has made a career or making films with male leads, or working in what are typically considered male genres, so in terms of her filmography, The Hurt Locker was hardly something new or revolutionary. But the fact that she was recognized for this particular film, and the fact that it is this particular film by this unique director that marked the first Academy Award for a female in that position, hopefully signals to those who wield Hollywood might the most obvious of messages: women are capable of making literally all types of films. In the best-case scenario, Bigelow’s win will enable the possibility of varied, creative female voices to make themselves known behind the camera, and it is the responsibility of women filmmakers – both fresh and seasoned – to take advantage of this opportunity while the door remains open.

But there is another, far more cynical and largely unaddressed possibility that must be taken into consideration. That Bigelow won for making what is essentially a masculine film in a masculine genre could manifest itself as a negative, even possibly a greater limitation, one that dictates that successful, celebrated female filmmaking is more readily manifested when the film at hand is largely male-centric. In other words, we could find ourselves in a situation where women filmmakers could be more readily recognized if they make films primarily for men and about men.

In answer to the question, “What should Kathryn Bigelow do next?” the answer is obviously whatever the hell she wants. She’s won the award, she’s got the clout, and she should continue to tell the stories that inspire her and those that utilize best her obvious talent (and chances are she’ll continue to make the types of films she’s known for making). All female filmmakers, of course, should do whatever it is that inspires them, not overtly considering what will advance their gender in the industry, for continued opportunity will realize itself if women simply tell the stories they are compelled to put on screen, no matter the gender of the protagonist or which genre they are working within.

While I’ve found that the taste of the true cinephile is hardly gender specific, on the broader cinemagoing scale film genres are explicitly gender-specific and it is for this reason that the relation of the gender of the filmmaker and the perceived gender of the genre will always be an integral factor in advancing opportunities for burgeoning women filmmakers. So while Bigelow should do whatever she wants without the potential interference and pressure of considering her next project in the face of what she has thus far achieved, the flip side to this coin is, “What can Bigelow do next to advance the opportunities and visibility of women filmmakers? What can she do to continue this respect for female directing talent?”

The answer lies not only in making evident the versatility of women filmmakers in approaching any given subject or genre, but how the individual woman filmmaker can make this versatility evident within the span of her own career. While I know it likely won’t happen, I’d love to see Bigelow make good on this clout by taking a fresh approach to the genre where many a female filmmaker has found herself stuck or limited, the romantic comedy.

The romantic comedy genre has been the catalyst for some of the greatest films in early Hollywood history. From The Awful Truth to the films of Ernst Lubitsch, the romantic comedy represented the seemingly unlimited potential of Hollywood films to be both highly entertaining and bring with them a profoundly emotional and enlightening experience, and the genre was hardly as gender-specific in its perceived audience as it is today. But in recent years the romantic comedy has become one of the most repetitive, stagnant, predictable, and unappealing genres whose logic has no connection with lived reality. From the same film made time and again graced by the likes of Matthew McConaughey to Hugh Grant to Sarah Jessica Parker to Kate Hudson to the abominations released this year alone – Valentine’s Day, When In Rome, Leap Year – today’s Hollywood romantic comedy is lazy, humorless, in no way sincerely romantic, and regressive in its social politics and constant portrayal of women as fragile people stuck in the 1950s whose total range of happiness rests on the potential acquisition of a man. The reason the chick flick is such a pejorative term is because the entire system behind today’s romantic comedy is in of itself so offensive, articulated through its backwards-peering portrayal of female characters and the audiences these films are fed to in the assumption that women will watch the same movie time and again.

If Bigelow were to make a truly progressive, original, and entertaining romantic comedy, this would do wonders to further close the gender gap in Hollywood filmmaking, providing opportunities for more varied roles for actresses and giving female directors the power to have the opportunity to tackle a variety of subjects and not be relegated to female genres lest they vanish into obscurity.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: The Coens’ Uncertainty Principle

Landon Palmer — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:47:32 +0000

“The Uncertainty Principle: It proves we can’t ever really know what’s going on.”

As illustrated by this scene in the Coens’ latest Best Picture nominee A Serious Man, certainty – as stated in so many words by Sy Abelman – is subtle, clever, but ultimately unconvincing in an overwhelmingly uncertain world. The uncertainty principle, as articulated in this film, is evidence that even in the realm of mathematics – that discipline where logic, evidence, and patterns of order reign supreme – contains its degrees of the unknown, the indefinite, even the ambiguous. Even in disciplines that rely solely on what is known, the unknown elements of everyday life still permeate, for mathematics (and, inferentially, science), is the art of the possible, as Sy states, rather than the art of the real. According to the recent work by the Coen brothers, cinema is, in so many ways, the art of the real.

The last three films by the Coen brothers – No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, and A Serious Man – represent something of a trilogy of work exploring uncertainty and meaninglessness in varied forms. These are not films that exist, in and of themselves, in intentional meaninglessness like some sort of Dada/Coen hybrid, but films that explore profoundly the ways in which meaninglessness operates, not necessarily as a direct reflection of reality (as the Coens’ films are more a reflection of cinema than an attempt at realism), but an exploration of meaninglessness operating in a medium in which meaning is typically intent through form as well as constantly sought and dissected. We look for meaning in most films, but the Coens provide no easy access to such a destination.

With No Country for Old Men, the Cormac McCarthy/Coen collaboration brings uncertainty to one of the filmic landscape’s most distinct arenas employing specifically certain rules, expectations, and outcomes: the western genre. For Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the clear delineation between crime and law/order becomes challenged as he encounters horrifying acts with no motive – pure, unadulterated chaos. The meaninglessness, incomprehensibility, and inconsequence of chaos brings confusion to the western’s previously clear distinctions between good guys and bad as the supposed “bad guy” operates on just as rigid of an ethos characterized by unbreakable principles as the inferred “good,” but the ethos is of personal value rather than a universal standard of ethics. The impenetrable nature of chaos is ultimately, inevitably escapable for the “old man” (Bell) who can’t adapt to a new landscape that challenges the distinctions of his past which gave his life meaning and order up to this point.

The ending is reflective but ambiguous, no closure is attained, and the closest thing the movie has to the Western hero (Llewelyn Moss) dies unheroically and off-screen. For Bell and for the film’s audience, this is never how such narratives are supposed to play out, but as the films of the Coen brothers are more reflective of cinema history than of daily human life (in their constant games with genre and homage to cinema’s past), Bell’s vision of a clearly understandable past leading to a progressively worse future in terms of human behavior is suggested to have no grounding in reality as his perception of an ideal perpetuated by the Western myth of honor and civility in the face of the (defeatable) uncivilized enemy which has no grounding in the frequent incidents of injustice he faces daily.

Burn After Reading provides an interesting counterpoint to No Country. Where No Country was thematically dense, Burn After Reading revels in the cosmic insignificance not only of the events within the film, but the film itself. Seeming to be intently minor-Coen entry as sandwiched between the thematic juggernauts of No Country and A Serious Man, Burn After Reading delights in a narrative that deliberately features no message at all. Like all three films, nothing is resolved and seemingly nothing is learned for its characters, but only in Burn After Reading does the meaninglessness reflect on the film itself to an almost, yes, Dadaist degree. Unlike the sudden, shocking drop-off-the map endings of their films before and after, Burn After Reading is framed stylistically by a CIA meeting featuring the same characters – a narrative device which would normally suggest a progress of story up to a point of closure – but when we the audience reach the point the started with, we’ve gone in a circle rather than to a comprehensible, natural linear endpoint. By the time we reach the end, signaled by J. K. Simmons’ literal closing of the book, the entire turn of events are framed as comically insignificant both for the audience and the characters involved.

Great consequences are undertaken. Characters unexpectedly die horrible deaths, while others unwittingly become murderers in a grand scheme which is only imagined, but these signs of consequence, narrative progress, and significance are rooted in characters’ fundamental misunderstandings of current politics (it’s a post-Cold War Cold War comedy, a postmodern Dr. Strangelove that satirizes nothing) and the illusion of conflict where it doesn’t really exist in a desperate attempt to break the infinite, deadening cycle of their lives (as symbols, events, and character encounters repeat themselves with only slight differences) – and these cycles reflect the circular, futile illusion of progress within the narrative itself as literalized by the film’s framing device.

“…But even though you can’t figure anything out, you will be responsible for it on the midterm.”

Instead of pursuing a theme of meaninglessness in alterations of meaning-intent Hollywood genres like the Western or the Cold War satire/screwball comedy, A Serious Man delves into one of society’s most potent sources of extracting deep meaning: religion. What encapsulates the thematic spectrum of this film is the fascinating Guy’s Tooth sequence where protag Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) comes to Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner) to search for the answers to the many simultaneous troubled cards his life has been dealt (in a story argued to be reminiscent of the Biblical fable of Job), and is received with a cryptic tale regarding a Goy’s tooth that clarifies nothing in Gopnik’s life except for what lies constantly right in front of him: that the futile search for the meaning of suffering will only manifest more suffering and endure more meaninglessness. Gopnik has familiarized himself with the rituals and rhetoric of Judiasm, jumping to the most available Hebrew term here and there whenever he encounters one of life’s great enigmas rather than acknowledging life’s impossible mysteries head on. For the Coen brothers, religion – Judiasm or otherwise – is never a shortcut to answer life’s greatest questions, rather it bestows even greater questions in the intimidating shadow of what often feels like cosmic insignificance. It yields more questions than answers, and more troubling realities of the universe than sources of comfort (for Gopnik and for us, an unquestioning reminder of the truly illustrious nature of a seemingly insignificant parking lot is farcical and impossible).

Thus, it makes perfect sense that Gopnik approaches religion the same way he approaches physics, as exemplified in the dream sequence that features this post’s two quotes. For Gopnik, mathematics is understandable to him because it’s convincing (although the imagined Sy states otherwise, preferring the ‘art of the possible’) – convincing like the Hebrew words he implements without bothering to truly understand, and convincing like the parables of the Torah that he believes should prepare him to tackle life’s every moment. Yet, as the film’s last shot illustrates, a search for meaning in some circumstances itself becomes meaningless as even more troubling circumstances arrive. Like (for him) the physics parable of the dead cat and (for us) the fabricated Yiddish parable of the film’s narratively unconnected prologue, the religious parables in which Gopnik searches for meaning elude true understanding.

Funny that this all makes the marginal character of Clive’s father the greatest source of advice when viewing the Coens’ latest work: “Please. Accept the mystery.”

Culture Warrior: Twists, Tricks, and Surprises

Landon Palmer — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:25:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: This article may contain hints, tips and clues about the ending of Shutter Island. We don’t think they’re spoilers, but we know that some of you are sensitive about these things. If that’s the case, go see the movie first. If not, enjoy this excellent article.

The twist ending is a difficult thing to perfect. Attempting such an ending runs many risks. For one, if the twist occurs with the natural trajectory of the story, the impact of the twist can be lessened for the spectator if they accurately guess it along the way. Perhaps more commonly, twist endings simply don’t work most of the time – more often than not, they come across as cheap, insincere attempts at making the spectator think they have experienced a more intelligent film than they actually have. Such endings act as buffers disguising a lack of depth within the rest of the film. But in the rare instance that a twist does work – when it makes sense, is thoughtfully executed, and doesn’t come out of left field – it has the potential to manifest one of the most powerful types of cinematic gut-punching impacts. The successful, smart twist ending is so effective because it embodies what cinema does best, in that films (intentionally or not) always deliver a selective amount of information from a particular point-of-view (whether that perspective be from a character or the filmmaker), so the effective twist ending shows the skilled filmmaker operating in full awareness of their potential to control everything and anything the audience knows and sees. But what exactly is a twist ending, and does it differ – semantically and in its employment and effectiveness – from a trick ending or a surprise ending? The differences between these terms are vague and overlapping, but an attempted distinction between them can potentially explain why some of these endings work and others don’t.

I’m discussing this subject, of course, in part because of Martin Scorsese’s new film. Shutter Island is certainly no masterpiece, but it’s a strong genre exercise by a director well-versed in cinema technique and well-read on the history of suspense thrillers. With this film there’s been a lot of discussion of its ‘twist ending’ and how predictable it was for many of its viewers. While the mystery structured within Shutter Island may suggest, on the surface, that the ending intended to come across as a head-spinning twist, I’m not sure if this ending is consistent with prevailing definitions of what a twist ending is and what it intends to achieve. Scorsese’s film, and many strong genre pieces like it, fit more readily into a combination of categories.

In the surprise ending, no trick comes out of left field, and no twist makes us rethink the entire film. With the surprise ending, the film concludes at its most natural point. It’s an ending that is explicitly expected in that throughout the film we feel something conclusive will happen – we’re just not sure what – while the trajectory of the film maps out a direct line to such a conclusion, with minimal detours along the way. Despite this clear linear trajectory, the surprise ending remains surprising because of the shock value of the conclusion itself. What the conclusion reveals does not change the entire meaning of the film – rather, it answers the question we were asking the whole time, but perhaps not in the exact way we envisioned it or speculated it taking place. Here is the key to what distinguishes a surprise ending from other endings: the entire film poses a central question, and the surprise ending answers that exact question in a shocking, effective, startling, or revealing way. A good example of a surprise ending is The Vanishing. That film’s end features nothing that puts a twist on or changes the meaning of everything seen up to that point, it merely answers the film’s repeated central question effectively. The Vanishing cannot be categorized as containing a twist ending because it is the most natural, linear way for that film to naturally end.

So what, then, is a twist ending, and how does it differ from the surprise ending? Perhaps it’d be best the approach the twist ending – the most elusive yet all-encompassing of these semantic categories – by negation, distinguishing how it is neither a surprise nor a trick ending.

As hard as I’ve tried to come up with a positive example of the trick ending, I simply can’t. The trick ending is the most cynical manifestation of what is typically referred to as ‘the twist,’ those stamped-on-at-the-last-second uninspired marauders posing as a genuine change in plot and meaning, when in reality such endings simply occupy a slot disguising the emptiness and thinness of the plot thus far. Trick endings suppose that audiences will unquestioningly take in a seachange in meaning at the last second, not bothering to go back and figure out whether or not it makes any sense. The trick ending often poses as a source for deeper meaning, but actually potentially negates and deflates all that came before it. Identity is a good example of a trick ending at play, using one of the most exhausted clichés in the book in a reveal that proves only that everything which has been revealed thus far is of no circumstance to the characters involved or the audience involved with them – a vapid, unimaginative thud of an end to what was otherwise an effective dramatic buildup. A trick ending is called so precisely because of what it does: it tricks the audience into thinking that there’s something more layered and intriguing going on.

So that leaves us with the twist ending, the definition of which was appropriately articulated by Cole Abaius on Sunday’s Reject Radio when he defined it as something along the lines of using the misperception of an initially minor detail to change the meaning of almost everything that has come beforehand. If, by my definition, the surprise ending is one that answers a central question in a startling manner, the twist ending is one that answers a question the audience did not know was being asked, or a question that the audience didn’t know was the most important. With The Sixth Sense, for example, the film’s central question upon first viewing operates with regard to how or why this boy sees dead people and whether or not it can be cured. What goes on in Bruce Willis’s personal life is a secondary question, but becomes the primary question upon the reveal of the twist and its conflation with what we thought the primary question to be up to that point. The twist ending is one of the most impossible to execute effectively, as even the most celebrated of twist endings –from The Sixth Sense to The Unusual Suspects to Fight Club – can be argued to possess their inconsistencies and jumps in selective logic and reason to achieve their ending point. But the effective twist is sought after because it is potentially one of the most satisfying of film experiences.

Following these definitions, my general rule for the employment of the twist is that if the movie is good, it’s good with or without the twist and whether or not the twist can be guessed. Shutter Island’s twist – if you can call it that, and locate exactly which element(s) of the film’s many changes in meaning you’re talking about – is predictable for some, yes, but that’s because it operates within a story containing a strict set of rules that allow such a resolution to exist in its most natural manner. It’s an ending padded by reason and thought, not something desperately tacked on (as trick endings, by contrast, are often unpredictable because they make no goddamn sense). Because of its natural, inevitable execution, Shutter Island’s ending falls more evenly in line with the surprise ending category.

With the well-handled surprise ending, a level of predictability can even be a benefit. Take Seven, for instance, a film in which the answer to what’s in the box can be accurately guessed a few moments before, only to allow the audience to be further horrified with the reveal that what is in the box is exactly what they think it is. The horror of the imagination is tied to the surprising horror when what was imagined becomes what is real. Likewise, Shutter Island’s gradual, detailed, deliberate reveal of the reality of the characters’ situation is so thoroughly realized that the ensuing flashback revealing what’s really going on is hardly a gut-punch, but an emotionally draining scene about family. This isn’t the work of somebody who is trying to trick us or woo us, but to immerse us in the very best way such a story can be told, which should always be the first priority when it comes to these endings. Sometimes the effect of the surprise owes itself to just how shockingly unsurprising the ending can be.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Please, Don’t Call ‘The Hurt Locker’ an Arthouse Film

Landon Palmer — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:01:39 +0000

Try as I might, I can’t quite get over the fact that The Hurt Locker only made $12.6 million in its theatrical run. I’ve never judged a movie’s quality by its popularity, and I realize that the particular tastes and moviegoing practices of my colleagues and I don’t necessarily correspond with the majority of America’s filmgoing habits, but it does give me pause when I realize that more people saw The Box, I Love You Beth Cooper, New in Town, and Imagine That in theaters last year than Kathryn Bigelow’s 9-time Oscar nominated masterpiece. With ex-Hollywood power couple James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow both nominated for Best Director and having their respective films nominated for Best Picture, next month’s awards battle between Avatar and The Hurt Locker is being presented by some critics and journalists (like on the February 2^nd episode of Slate’s Culture Gabfest) in terms of the Hollywood mega-blockbuster vs. the humbled, smaller-scale indie or arthouse film.

This year in which the Best Picture category was problematically expanded to include ten nominated entries rather than five, allowing for typical awards contenders (Up in the Air, Precious) to compete with crowd-pleasers (Avatar, Up, The Blind Side), fan favorites (District 9, Inglourious Basterds) and arthouse picks (A Serious Man, An Education). Where the typical five available slots in recent years have alienated both your typical American audience as well as those of us who frequent the art house (The Reader, for instance, seemed tailor-made for Academy voters and few others), the Academy’s decision to expand it to ten allows for various audiences to feel that their taste in movies are actually reflected in the Kodak theater, but in the meantime illuminates more clearly than any divisive year the extensive differences in types of American moviegoing, quality assessment, and, most importantly, the mostly-arbitrary process distinguishing the perceived differences between the arthouse and the multiplex.

I take issue when The Hurt Locker is lumped along with A Serious Man and An Education as an arthouse flick, for it seems that this designation is arrived at purely because of the film’s disappointing financial intake, and not regarding the film’s style or potential for pleasing audiences. As much as I loved it, A Serious Man clearly has little appeal beyond metropolitan audiences and Coen fans, while a modest film like An Education simply can’t hope competing in a landscape of sexy teenage vampires and giant blue cat-people. But The Hurt Locker is a film that contained potential mass appeal that simply wasn’t realized. Here are the reasons why The Hurt Locker is not an arthouse flick:

1) The distributor: While independently produced, The Hurt Locker was distributed by Summit Entertainment, an indie studio that grew toward major competition (a la Lionsgate) with forgettable genre work (P2, Sorority Row, Sex Drive, Next Day Air), a couple of “bigger” competitors (Knowing, Push) and one major franchise featuring the aforementioned sexy vampires. So even if they aren’t carrying something with Twilight in the title, they now how to send a film through mass release. This isn’t a studio that seems like they can’t afford to make more prints.

2) Movie stars: One could say that The Hurt Locker didn’t possess a larger appeal to mass audiences because of its lack of recognizable stars (if one ignores the Guy Pearce and Ralph Feinnes cameos), but star appeal can’t be attributed as a factor to many of the highest-grossing movies of 2009, from Avatar to The Hangover (and, as I wrote last year, the movie star is an increasingly irrelevant factor in why audiences choose to see certain movies), as it was some other appealing factor that drew hordes of audiences into these movies. And that potential appeal for The Hurt Locker was…

3) Explosions!: Critics and journalists have posited the Avatar/Hurt Locker dichotomy in terms that suggest The Hurt Locker to be an alienating art film in the vein of something like The White Ribbon rather than what it really is: a very good action movie. Bigelow employs the type of exciting, in-the-moment camerawork used in the Greengrass entries of the Bourne movies. The camera (and story) moves, it’s not subtitled, and it’s not in black and white. In other words, it’s not exactly Bergman. And it’s a movie about explosions, the most clichéd identifying characteristic of big-budget Hollywood filmmaking. All the immediate descriptive traits of this film would suggest appeal as popular entertainment, not arthouse ghettoization.

4) It’s a movie about the War on Terror: True, and such subjects have proven to contain limited mass-audience appeal, but Lions for Lambs, Syriana, Body of Lies, Traitor, and The Men Who Stare at Goats all made more money than the far superior and far more entertaining The Hurt Locker.

The issue here is hardly with the film itself, but with the nature and recent practices of limited-run distribution. Limited release films typically work three ways: 1) to keep the release especially limited because the film in question possesses little mass appeal and/or the small distributor can’t afford to roll the film out in many cities simultaneously (The White Ribbon, A Town Called Panic), 2) to test the appeal of a film that may or may not strike a chord with mass audiences based on buzz and reactions emanating from its limited release (Slumdog Millionaire), or 3) to actively build buzz for a highly anticipated film by keeping it from mass audiences in its first few weeks of release (Brokeback Mountain, The Princess and the Frog).

The idea behind such a distribution practice is simple, one inspired by the core ideas behind free market capitalism and, in turn, simple formulas of supply and demand: if American audiences exhibit the desire to see a film, it will be provided. This idea seems to make perfect sense on paper and in selective (albeit extraordinary) examples like the online campaign to expand Paranormal Activity (though whether or not this actually would have changed Paramount’s rollout is up for debate). In reality, and in most cases, the distance between film and audience/consumer desire is not so straight – it’s inundated with twists and turns. The demand for a certain movie isn’t a given, it’s something that must be manufactured through marketing and buzz. More important than good buzz or an effective marketing strategy, however, is simple awareness of a film. If an audience isn’t aware of a film, how do they possess the freedom of choice to demand it? With stronger numerical delineations in theater count between limited and mass theatrical runs and the disappointing box office of potentially appealing movies from The Hurt Locker to Moon to Gentlemen Broncos (not a good movie, but easily one that could’ve made more money if handled differently), it seems that distributors are deciding the fates of such films long before audiences even have a chance to demand it.

I’m not saying it would be a smart idea to ever give something like The White Ribbon a wide release because of some idealized fantasy I have that the average moviegoer is more discerning than distributors and marketers make them out to be, but we’re in trouble when an action movie like The Hurt Locker or an original sci-fi flick like Moon are relegated to the arthouse with little chance of competing elsewhere. Did either of these films ever have the slightest chance to financially compete with Avatar or The Blind Side? Hardly, but creative, original genre movies like these certainly had the potential to reach and affect audiences far outside your metropolitan movie theater in the same way that the hardly-conventional Inglourious Basterds and District 9 actually did reach such an audience last year.

To label any unique but still accessible genre work as ‘arthouse’ does two harmful things to the rest of the cinematic landscape: 1) it relegates ‘mainstream cinema’ and multiplex fare to purely big-budget, high-profile filmmaking (so only what is often the most repetitive and predictable type of filmmaking can be considered mainstream), and 2) it leaves no real place for true arthouse fare, uncommercial films that truly challenge conventions. Journalists, critics, and various members of the Academy can consider The Hurt Locker and A Serious Man “arthouse” in a way that prevents serious awards consideration for true arthouse filmmaking like Hunger or Antichrist, both of which feature Oscar-nomination-worthy performances at their center. They’re rendered invisible by an ongoing confusion of the small with the arthouse. Finally, the labeling of a film like The Hurt Locker as arthouse furthers the cycle of problems with limited distribution, thereby preventing further unique-but-accessible films to ever be seen as marketable and potentially competitive through an initial wide release. This limits choice for the average moviegoer, limits awareness of the options and freedoms typically thought of as necessary for supply and demand to work, and limits the potential for studios – big and small, independent and incorporated – to dare to test a ‘smaller’ film’s performance against other wide, big-budget releases, further narrowing the variety at your local multiplex. I guess that’s really why it’s called a limited release.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: On Hollywood and Cheating

Landon Palmer — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:01:11 +0000

Editor’s Note: The following article features possible spoilers on Dear John, 2012, Amelia, and The Lovely Bones. You’ve been warned.

I typically save the boiling points for Robert Fure, aiming instead to frame my column as an observation of media rather than a critique, analyzing trends and their meaning in the context of film and television as an intersecting object of commerce and art. But there is something that has been getting under my skin in some films released in the past several months, and it’s the way that Hollywood deals with the subject infidelity. Repeatedly in recent mainstream films, Hollywood shirks away from the potential complexity or diminishing empathetic audience identification that could occur if they portray any of their protagonists cheating. Instead, they either avoid the subject entirely or embrace the clichéd convenience of a supporting character’s death so that a reunion with the potentially cheating couple can occur guilt-free. I find these alternatives to cheating protagonists more bothersome than if they actually allowed a central character to cheat in the first place, and it represents a level of cowardice on behalf filmic storytellers afraid to explore flawed, multidimensional, human characters to such a degree.

Two weeks ago I saw and reviewed Dear John (I think I’m the only Reject who’s seen it, or at least the only one who admits to having seen it). The third act of the film finds the eponymous John (Channing Tatum) returning home from fighting abroad to bury his father, and he encounters his lost, long-distance love Savannah (Amanda Seyfried). Savannah has married since (or rather, resulting in) their long-distance, longhand breakup, and one of the film’s big reveals is that Savannah has not married the bothersome douchebag college friend who flirted with her repeatedly right in front of John’s eyes, but Savannah’s older, much more sympathetic family friend Tim (the underappreciated Henry Thomas) who is now—in typical Nicholas Sparks fashion—hospitalized with terminal cancer.

So the supposed insurmountable obstacle that a couple must go through in every Hollywood romantic comedy or drama – being pulled apart and then thrust back together for little more than the dramatic effect of a third act tied into the idea of distance/separation making the heart grow fonder – is rather easily surmounted by the fact that the man in the way of the couple’s reunion is set to die at any minute. What should be a mountain of conflicting desire – staying loyal to one’s spouse versus reuniting with a true love – is rendered almost irrelevantly insignificant by the easy out of killing the character off. We as an audience are put into this situation for the necessity of drama, but for the sake of simplicity, narrative closure, and fear of creating an unsympathetic (albeit layered) character, Dear John – and many films like it – reduce a mountain into a molehill.

Narrative cheats like this are in no way rare, and numerous examples can be excavated just from films released in the last few months. 2012, for instance, featured amongst its overflowing global and interpersonal conflicts a broken home at its center that must, like the fate of humanity, be restored by the end of the film. But instead of having Amanda Peet confront the fact that she, in the face of death, has realized she must make the difficult decision of allowing herself to fall back in love with her ex-husband, in the process breaking the heart of current husband/boyfriend (?) Tom McCarthy – all of which would make a compelling character moment regarding the wholly different decisions made when faced with extinction (as opposed to everyday life decisions) in what is otherwise a bloated mess of a movie – 2012 instead does what is easiest and most cowardly by killing off McCarthy’s character and having Peet and John Cusack completely forget about him in their embrace five minutes later.

What writers, producers, studio execs, etc. think they have achieved when they make such decisions is to do what is necessary to give the audience what they want (the reunion of the central couple, the affirmation of the nuclear family) and what the story purportedly needs without making its central characters seem like bad people. But what happens in movies like Dear John and (especially) 2012 is that, if such a thing occurred outside the emotionally enraptured, subjectivity-directing world of the film, these characters would come across as opportunistic, heartless bastards. In a way, what Peet and Cusack do in 2012 is in many ways worse than if she simply cheated on McCarthy or left him for Cusack, as it renders the entire existence of McCarthy’s character a meaningless obstacle in way of Peet and Cusack’s inevitable reunion.

In the world of such films, supporting character actors like Henry Thomas and Tom McCarthy have no autonomously important purpose of their own. They turn into cogs in a giant wheel who exist as both the obstacle and the means for the more important central characters to reunite. I left both films feeling far sorrier for these supporting characters than I was happy for the protagonists’ reunion, for what was probably the love of one’s life for the marriages and relationships of these periphery characters is morphed into merely a forgettable, barely significant speed bump for the lives of the main characters.

Even when a Hollywood movie does deal with infidelity, it’s often dealt with kids’ gloves. In last fall’s failed Oscar grab Amelia, Earheart’s cheating is approached with a simplistic three-scene revelation-conflict-reconciliation process that concludes with the married couple holding hands on a beach as if nothing’s happened. We get it, their marriage survived all sorts of conflict, but what is the purpose of introducing infidelity into the narrative if it’s portrayed as having no lasting changes in their marriage? Are we really supposed to believe that everything went back to being the same, with no enduring tensions? Wouldn’t it be more dramatic and interesting if Amelia disappeared during a bumpy patch in their relationship? The film I discussed last week, The Lovely Bones, entirely dismisses an infidelity subplot involving Susie’s mother and the detective that was featured in the book, instead pushing that character out of the narrative and underutilizing the great acting chops of Rachael Weisz. Was Peter Jackson actually afraid of portraying somebody whose teenage daughter has just died as somebody who could afterward make irrational decisions? Instead of giving us a potentially complex and possibly even unlikeable character, Jackson gave us no character at all.

We get it. A cheater does not typically make for a very attractive character. But we need to get over the idea, first of all, that we need likeable characters at the center of every mainstream movie (look at the unrelenting villainy in There Will Be Blood or the magnetic narcissism of Capote). Showing a character making questionable decisions makes them more human, and internal moral dilemmas and moral ambiguity is always more interesting. Nobody can relate to a saint. If the issue of cheating is even alluded to, it should be dealt with consideration of all the complexity and scars involved, not forgotten about, skirted over, or problematically resolved in a simplistic manner. Secondly, filmmakers should understand that sympathy operates differently than empathy. We don’t always have to be supportive of a central character’s decisions, just understand the reasoning behind them. A protagonist can do something absolutely reprehensible in a film, but we will still follow them if we’re given a reason to be invested in them and understand them. We need this character depth not only regarding the specific subject of infidelity; rather the implementation of these practices would make stronger characterization in movies all around. When it comes to narrative shortcuts and quick, simple resolutions, Hollywood needs to get its act together and stop cheating.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Dressing Up the Twentieth Century

Landon Palmer — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:03:13 +0000

It’s easy to suspend disbelief with a costume drama. To watch films about European aristocrats of previous centuries gussied up in elegant dresses, suits, and wigs provides a feast for the filmgoing eye. The camera is naturally drawn to this spectacle of fashion, whether in the illustrious photographic scene-painting of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon or the latest Jane Austen adaptation. More importantly, only the knowlegeble historian will be able to point out any inconsistencies or anachronisms in period dress. The rest of us go into such films with the assumption that the clothes worn are contemporaneous to the time depicted.

Yet costume drama is a misleading of a generic term if there was one, as most decent films, no matter where in time and space they take place, require intricate and thoughtful costuming. The assumption, however, is that the costumes of costume dramas are front-and-center, an attention-grabbing and self-aware centerpiece of the film itself, while costuming in other films remain invisible in the sense that we as audiences are meant to focus on the story being told, not the clothes it is told within.

But this process doesn’t always work the way it intends to. Some costumes are hard to make invisible. Of particular difficulty is portraying accurately through period dress recent decades in the twentieth century, decades that some audiences have lived through and whose accuracy in depiction can be evidentially weighed based on watching actual films made in that era.

Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, amongst its other shortcomings, suffers in part by its depiction of 1973. Everything, from cars to costumes to haircuts to architecture to wallpaper to specific emblems of popular culture, screams at its loudest decibel a reminder that the film we are watching takes place in that particular year. Despite not greeting this blue planet until the mid-1980s, I couldn’t help but think while watching the film that 1973 was never this 1973 in the respect that if I walked on the suburban streetcorners on which this film takes place, I wouldn’t see every square inch of the neighborhood littered with reminders that I was in 1973. I wouldn’t walk into one of these houses and see Nixon on the television announcing a peace accord with Vietnam while The Dark Side of the Moon plays on a nearby record player and a newspaper on the table announces the death of LBJ and the Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade next to a half-read copy of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (thank you, Wikipedia). What I would see on any given American street in 1973 are emblems of previous years and decades interacting with contemporaneous ones. I would see cars and haircuts from the 1960s, or older people wearing clothes they’d possessed since the 50s.

Yet, via costume, the only impression I get through Jackson’s vision of 1973 in The Lovely Bones is that 1973 was, wholly and homogenously, 1973. The costumes that the Salmon family wear are illustrious, beautifully colorful, and immediately achieve a tenable iconography of their own (as the 70s yellow of Susie Salmon’s clothes become, like every last detail in the film, a saturated if overused symbol), but they come across as unbelievable and artificial because of the very fact that Jackson tries so hard to illustrate an era.

In some ways, though, there are insurmountable obstacles in making a film that takes place in a recent time period, like the actors themselves. It’s sometimes difficult to watch a movie with the likes of Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, who remain so apparent in our present-day, and trick ourselves into thinking that they are adults occupying a world thirty-seven years’ past. It’s much easier to convince ourselves of this when we watch period pieces featuring relative unknowns. Think back to when Mad Men first started, before John Hamm was a household name, and how easy it was for us to believe that these actors occupied only the world of the 1960s Manhattan and all its well-tailored suits and pointy brassieres. For me it was shocking to later see real-life red carpet publicity photos of Pete Campbell with facial hair or Don Draper with his hair combed forward instead of back.

But a television show taking place in the recent past has the luxury of establishing and reinforcing the intricacies of its time period over many episodes (and the minds behind Mad Men are indeed sticklers for the varieties of period detail—look at Peggy’s dated, 1950s demeanor versus Joan’s hip and up-to-fashion appearance in the first two seasons), while a film must establish its interpretation of the past immediately, or risk emanating a lack of authenticity.

One of the most successful and fascinating ways films do this through combining the past and present through costume. In his debut as director, Tom Ford, not surprisingly, translates his eye for fashion onto the silver screen for A Single Man in a manner that—pun indulgently intended—reveals layers beyond the fabric of his characters. Following the tradition in films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Great Gatsby of refashioning the fashion of the past to reflect contemporary tastes (which, in turn, renders fashion of the past newly fashionable in a discursive, anachronistic way, and clouds our vision/nostalgia of that past), A Single Man, in its first layer, manufactures the old into something new and hip. In one of the film’s more talked-about scenes, Colin Firth’s suicidal English professor comes in contact with an attractive Spanish gigolo. The gigolo possesses the fabric iconography of James Dean—the small white t-shirt, denim jeans, and unmistakable coif—but at the same time possesses the ultra-thin hipster frame now expected from the metrosexual male, one that has little equivalent regarding the male ideal in 1950s or early 1960s American culture. So this character possesses fashionable qualities exclusive to neither the film’s setting of neither 1962 nor 2009, but a magnetic combination of both.

Additionally, the second layer reveals A Single Man to be a movie that approaches costuming with such an intensity of detail to the point that it makes the character, enabling the immersive extent of Firth’s impressive performance. Ford allegedly inscribed a 1957 label from a London tailor inside the jacket Firth wore for the film—not something witnessed by audiences, but something that informed Firth’s character and performance. Ford understands that garmets of one era carry over to another and still remain fashionable—one does not need to possess the dress of the exact year of the film’s setting to exist contemporaneously with it. Thirdly, as A Single Man seems to take place on an alternate plane of reality where only pretty people exist, especially at the college in which Firth’s character is employed. Yet this doesn’t come across as typical cinematic promotion of the unattainable ideal of the movie star. Instead, Ford uses appearances thematically, showing how apparel become not just a means for attractive presentation, but a shield of armor one uses to not reveal their true, vulnerable self. With the context of waning 1950s conformism and Firth’s character having to ‘play straight’ for mainstream society, clothes operating dually as a protective suit of armor—a grotesque costume if there ever was one—unlike the insistence of Jackson over the significance of Susie Salmon’s hat, hardly exists as a symbol or a cinematic metaphor, but resonates profoundly, acting as a revelation of how we continue to costume ourselves every day, no matter the decade.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: What is Cinephilia?

Landon Palmer — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:00:49 +0000

The answer to this question, taken literally, is “the love of cinema.” But, of course, nothing (at least, nothing in this column) is ever so simple. The nature and practice of cinephilia has changed greatly over the years, as have the requirements to achieve the status of cinephile. Last September I posted a CW article on the three different cities in the US I’ve lived in and compared their distinct and wildly different cultures of cinephilia, which can be evidenced by their famous movie theaters. The epicenter of Austin’s cinema culture is, of course, the famous Alamo Drafthouse, which I believe reflects and emboldens not only the city’s tenable love for genre cinema, but the desire of its movie-viewing public (or, at least, those that frequent the theater most) to expose themselves to films far outside the accepted canon.

A friend of mine took me to task on this assertion, eloquently questioning the cinephilic value of a theater that contains the potential distractions of meal and beverage and the promotion of regular events that (albeit in a controlled and calculated manner) encourage audience participation. My friend was not questioning the overall legitimacy and worth of such an experience (he and I both consider the Drafthouse one of the best movie theaters in the nation, and I think the Alamo’s programming is unparalleled), his argument instead involved the idea that, if the moving image on screen does not take on a central, almost sacred authority amongst its surroundings, can it really permit a local culture of cinephilia?

On one hand, the local movie theater may have little to with cinephilia. To be a cinephile can be seen as a personal choice – a choice that can be determined or influenced by one’s environment, but never dictated by it. So what the individual seeks is what makes them a cinephile or not. And while cinephile literally means a love for cinema, the suffix –phile in American English has developed a connotation with obsessive practice to a potentially unhealthy degree. Basically, a cinephile can now be seen as one who fetishizes cinema rather than simply possessing an affection for it, one who has an unquenchable compulsion to see as many movies as possible in their lifetime. Taken to the extreme, you have the subjects like those featured in the documentary Cinemania (2002), people for whom a preoccupation with cinema has become an addiction that wipes all other notional aspects of a “normal life” away. For the more common definition of the cinephile, the distinction can be made with this example: the casual spectator who appreciates cinema will make sure they have seen Vertigo and Rear Window, yet the cinephile will make sure they have viewed, out of necessity, Hitchcock’s entire filmography including the less notable works like Topaz or Torn Curtain.

But in terms of the history of cinephilia, the movie theater has played an essential role in the cultivation of serious interest in moviegoing. The cinema culture of post-WWII Paris is often cited as the birthplace of organized cinephilia. An influx of previously withheld films from other countries and a new importance placed upon archiving (probably due to the number of films lost during the war) at locations like the Cinémathèque Française allowed for a fresh passion for movies to develop within young French intellectual culture. Parisians were probably the first to have such access to so many films from so many countries and historical eras. This factor combined with the numerous critical and academic publications on the subject of cinema made through these organizations allowed the classical, accepted conception of early-mid twentieth century cinema history to be formed and laid the ground for auteur theory (which elevated classical Hollywood to an art form and the director as the primary artist) as well as steps toward made toward modern practices in film theory like Marxist readings of film as an industry. This time in Parisian history changed how we view movies in a way that still resonates today, and even added to the canon itself as the film critics in turn became the filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer), which necessitated a new term for a special type of cinephile: the cineaste, or the cinephile who makes films.

Though there is certainly a documented history of movies being taken seriously before organized cinephilia in France, it makes sense that such a profound culture of cinephilia had not developed in America at this time as a result of the nature of the theatrical spectatorship experience. Early cinema was marked by numerous distractions within the typical movie theater, from the projector running loudly in the middle of the room to fellow patrons throwing popcorn and socializing loudly. In classical moviegoing (even in the more elite movie theaters), the movies themselves were hardly ever viewed as a homogenous object of authority as the feature in question was always accompanied with cartoons, news reels, and shorts. Audiences were allowed to come and go as they pleased, sometimes arriving the middle of the film and sitting through other programming until the movie started over and got back to their original point-of-entry. This tune-in tune-out multiprogramming approach to filmgoing (which could be seen as analogous to how most people watch television today) lasted until Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) cemented a regular practice of attending a film from its very beginning. But by 1960, the French had already made this a normal practice. Our first generation of cineastes, by contrast, didn’t arrive until the mid-late 1960s.

Giving weight to my friend’s argument, there is indeed an evidential relationship between cinephilia and the practices of movie theaters in history. But these circumstances, of course, existed before the rise of home video technology. Mid-century cinephilia fostered, in part, because of the exclusivity and rareness of seeing an old film, simply because of limits in technology and distribution. Thus, seeing an older film or a foreign film in a movie theater was an event so rare and special that its fetishization by the cinephile was warranted if not inevitable. Now, with the availability of multi-region DVD players and online distribution, the cinephile’s exposure to film knowledge is no longer subject to the devices of the cinematheque programmer, but the particular interests of the individual.

Amongst all the postmodern distractions of online moving image media, these democratically accessible distribution outlets have made possible an unprecedented exposure to films of all types available for every type of cinephile. From art and foreign cinema obtainable in its entirety on everything from YouTube to The Auteurs to UBUWeb, one no longer needs to live in a metropolis or be part of a collective to become a cinephile. Perhaps more importantly, digital technology gives the cinephile the ability to manipulate and change the work of art they venerate, allowing multiple personal interpretations of the moving image and removing the authority from the artist and assigning it to the consumer.

In the past 50 years, the process of pursuing cinephilia has been removed from the intents of the organized group to the desires and pursuits of the individual. In this new landscape of cinephilia, the classic, holy veneration of the filmic text which characterized 1950s French cinephilia no longer stands – not because it isn’t relevant, but because there can no longer be one authoritative definition of cinephilia. With the rise of the individual cinephile, cinephilia has now become what we make of it.

So to revisit my first paragraph, to say that a theater which offers food, drink, and participatory programming is anti-cinephilic ascribes to an outdated definition of cinephilia. The classic conception of cinephilia isn’t irrelevant, but it is met with convincing competition. There is no doubt that a theater like this – with its strict age and talking policies, even in participatory programming – gives a great amount of authority to the moving image. But the difference and the importance here is that the movie theater, in order to differentiate itself from the individual cinephilic pursuit, can no longer serve one ideal function, but must enable a unique and separate form of obsessive cinemagoing that reflects the current variety of the moviegoing experience.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: 8 Great Directors You Should Know More About

Landon Palmer — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:23:48 +0000

There’s been a bit of consistent coverage the past week on this site regarding the death of French filmmaker Éric Rohmer, not because the writers at FSR were longtime fans of the man’s work, but because we regretted not being familiar with his films before he died. Rohmer was hardly venerated by American filmgoers as an iconic French filmmaking equivalent to, say, Jean Renoir or Francois Truffaut, but that doesn’t make his filmmaking any less great or his personal style any less fascinating. The history books of film are inevitably constructed with some filmmakers positioned in the foreground and others in the back, and the death of Rohmer was as good an opportunity as any to get to know better a great filmmaker not previously well-known to us, a timely remedy to examine an overlooked artist.

It was in this context that Cole Abaius took me to task on Sunday’s Reject Radio, asking me to talk about other directors that may not be the first names that the history books point to, but are great nonetheless. For whatever reason, the filmmakers discussed are either underappreciated, underrated, or simply aren’t the first names referenced when looking at films from a certain country during a certain era, but an appreciation of artists that lie between the margins can often be a surprisingly enlightening experience for the casual filmgoer or the all-out cinephile. This week’s Culture Warrior expands on that list of filmmakers I discussed Sunday, starting with Rohmer, for a total of eight filmmakers you should know more about.

Éric Rohmer

Rohmer is an auteur in the purest sense. He revisits parallel themes, narratives, and iconic characters, all with slight variations on a tangible personal style. His Six Moral Tales revisit strikingly similar moral quandaries regarding the psychological battles in male-female relationships, yet – as Neil so eloquently put – each revisitation of this theme feels unique. Rohmer’s protagonist are characters of complex moral layers, and the director’s simple but informed visual style allows us to get in the mind of his protagonists to the point of understanding even the worst of their bad decisions. For Rohmer, simple objective framing isn’t separate from attaining subjective character depth.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about Rohmer’s work is his ability to let us know what a character is thinking even as they speak, because what Rohmer’s characters say and what they mean are often two very different things. Even in narration, that method towards understanding character subjectivity that one would think would be the most honest and straightforward access to intention and motivation, Rohmer still allows us to discern what meaning really lies in between the lines. Rather than display the artifice of cinema and force one out of the narrative like his New Wave contemporaries, Rohmer uses the best tools cinema has to offer to immerse the viewer in his engrossing moral tales.

Essential Films: My Night at Maud’s (1969), Claire’s Knee (1970), Love in the Afternoon (1972)

Alain Resnais

Like Rohmer, Resnais’ style is only tangentially related to French New Wave, but he certainly maintains a unique aesthetic all his own. Resnais’ repeated thematic occupation is memory, and how it influences and changes the ways we think of the past and perceive the present. His half-hour documentary Night and Fog (probably the first film ever made about Auschwitz) framed how we perceive the banality of evil embodied in the Third Reich by juxtaposing horrific stock footage of the concentration camp to the static, perhaps more shocking quietude of the camp’s postwar state. Resnais continues his exploration of World War II and memory in Hiroshima mon amour, a film which makes a convincing argument that time never exists in a linear fashion, that we as people always allow shadows of the past to determine our decisions in the present. Finally, his Last Year at Marienbad features two characters who have completely different recollections of the past, blurring reality and fantasy like no other film before it. Resnais truly makes films as art, using the medium to manifest senses of mood and time that would be impossible in any other art form.

Essential films: Night and Fog (1955), Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

Mervyn LeRoy

When looking at the strict censorship and rigid industrial practices of early Hollywood history, we often posit the studio in direct opposition to the artist, as if institutions have an automatic propensity to squelching artistic vision. But sometimes the restraints of industry and the needs of commerce can foster and discipline an artistic sensibility, enabling a personal style to bear fruit that may not have been as apparent otherwise. Such is the case for Mervyn LeRoy, a filmmaker defined by a gritty aesthetic enabled by the speed of his productions and whose work of the 1930s had an incomparable cultural resonance to audiences seeking both escapism and consolation for their woes. LeRoy’s Little Ceasar basically gave birth to the gangster film genre, and his Gold Diggers of 1933 is the go-to example for Depression-era musicals. But it is his I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang that remians his greatest achievement of that decade, a remarkable film examining the will of the human spirit in face of the possible death of the American Dream, and probably one of Hollywood’s earliest examples of how a film can incite positive social change.

Essential Films: Little Ceasar (1930), I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

Lina Wertmüller

The first woman to ever be nominated for a Best Director Oscar, Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmüller makes films of endless contradictions. Often employing misogynist protagonists, her films engage in a discourse on feminism that never features a clear delineation between good and evil, right and wrong, oppressor and oppressed. In her films, there are no demons or saints. This repeated trope of her work is brilliantly articulated in Seven Beauties, a film whose screwball-comedy first half is shockingly countered with the bleak second half taking place in a concentration camp. But in Wertmüller’s world, comedy and horror are rarely exclusive. Rather, they are one in the same as she uses the absurdity of screwball comedy to inform the most heinously absurd moment in 20^th century history. Wertmüller understands that it is often through contradiction and iconoclasm, rather than a forced pedagogy of predetermined conclusions, which help us understand the confounding and oppressive nature of the world around us.

Essential films: Swept Away (1974), Seven Beauties (1975)

Ken Russell

Perhaps best-known for helming The Who’s Tommy (1975), UK filmmaker Russell’s other work often engages with the most challenging and disturbing extents of human behavior. His career is defined by constant battles with the censors, and his penchant for challenging content in terms of both social acceptability – as in Women in Love – and the transcendent power of cinema when tied to a vivid, limitless imagination – as in Altered States - cemented him as a unique, and hardly classifiable, artistic voice. These two definitive aspects of his work came together perfectly in his masterpiece, The Devils. Challenging his audience with what looks like exploitation but turns out to be a polished, well-informed, layered work of art, The Devils is, like Russell’s best work, never an easy film to watch but a unique and unforgettable experience that takes us out of any preconception of what we think a film can and should be. Almost forty years after its release, The Devils retains its full ability to shock and challenge the viewer. You will never find a more fascinating history of a battle between censorship and artistic vision than this film. You’ll also never see another art film with half a dozen nuns raping a giant crucifix.

Essential films: Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971), Altered States (1980)

William Klein

An American expatriate who relocated to France and artistically reinvented himself, photographer William Klein’s brief foray into fiction filmmaking remains one of the oddest and most underappreciated careers of its time. His Who Are You, Polly Magoo? is a dense satirical critique of the fashion industry from the inside out that, the French 60s equivalent to Zoolander or Bruno, while his later film The Model Couple takes some punches at the commodification of human relationships. But it is his hilarious, esoteric superhero parody Mr. Freedom that remains his most iconic work. On the surface Mr. Freedom seems like a skin-deep criticism of American cultural imperialism, but it becomes a study of how words can be manipulated to adopt an opposite meaning when used with intention. As an expatriate, Klein’s work was never quite American and never quite French, but blended the cultural and artistic sensibilities of both countries into films simultaneously embodying scathing criticism, oddball humor, and a postmodern pop-art aesthetic palette.

Essential films: Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966), Mr. Freedom (1969), The Model Couple (1977)

Larisa Shepitko

The Soviet Union has a great history of visionary filmmakers, but that history primarily consists of men. Larisa Shepitko was the exception, and her all-too-brief career offers a rare glimpse into Soviet cinema, values, and daily life from a female perspective. Her film Wings, about a female fighter pilot who settles into an unfulfilling life as a school principal, remains a daring and important work of feminist filmmaking. Shepitko, like Rohmer, used subtle storytelling techniques and a straightforward visual style that resulted in restrained, yet delicately beautiful filmmaking. Her final film, The Ascent, is a quiet meditation on will, brotherhood, and spirituality, employing a meditative eye on Russia’s snowy landscapes. This film cemented Shepitko as an artist whose work may have rivaled anybody from Eisenstein to Tarkovsky had her life not been tragically cut short in a car accident. Thankfully, her astounding, profound work has survived her.

Essential films: Wings (1966), The Ascent (1977)

Nicolas Roeg

English filmmaker Nicolas Roeg made work that couldn’t have been created in any other time. His 1970s films are so particular to that era (sometimes to the point of inaccessibility), yet something about each of them remains universal and affecting. With a great eye for visuals and an even better ear for music, Roeg’s films are marked by striking images and engrossing, often disjointed sound design. His love for music is evident in his casting, as Roeg elicited great lead performances from the likes of Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Art Garfunkel. After looking at Roeg’s incomparable framing of rural Australia in Walkabout, the next best journey to take with this visionary filmmaker is his totally singular sci-fi vision in the Bowie-starring The Man Who Fell to Earth, a trip if there ever was one. But Roeg’s best and most experimental work was likely Bad Timing, a film about a torrid, toxic relationship that liberally jumps back and forth in time. It alienated audiences upon its initial release, but Bad Timing now reveals itself thirty years later for what it truly is: a film far ahead of its time.

Essential films: Walkabout (1971), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Bad Timing (1980)

Culture Warrior: The 3rd Golden Age of Television

Landon Palmer — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:00:46 +0000

The Golden Age of Television: The late 50s-early 60s, with groundbreaking live teleplays by Rod Serling (Patterns) and Paddy Chayefsky (Marty), as well as landmark shows like I Love Lucy and The Twilight Zone

The Second Golden Age of Television: Envelope-pushing network fare of the late 60s-early 70s: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Mike Douglas Show, All in the Family, African-American shows like Good Times, The Jeffersons

The Third Golden Age of Television: right now.

In May 2007, The Sims and Spore creator Will Wright spoke at my college graduation ceremony. Wright detailed the progressively complex evolution of television narratives by illustrating the vast differences in two famous shows that basically utilize the same core narrative conceit: Gilligan’s Island and Lost. The comparison of these two shows—which both utilize the same basic concept of characters stranded on an island—illustrates the vast changes that have happened in the ways in which television shows are structured and the methods within which we are expected to watch them.

In the last ten years, for better or for worse, practices of storytelling and spectatorship in television have changed drastically, and, most likely, for good. With the establishment of HBO in the late nineties as a source of unique and original television content, the notion of quality television was rendered no longer inherently contradictory to popular television (yes, HBO had good shows before The Sopranos, but that show really solidified both the network’s status and what would happen to TV the following ten years). With its lack of commercials, lack of network pressure to churn out a yearly number of episodes, freedom from normal practices of censorship, and limited per-season quantity of episodes (like the UK shows we imitate or remake so often), original content on HBO allowed for an exploratory, often cinematically uninterrupted experience of television content free from the industrial and sometimes creativity-stultifying industrial practices of network television shows.

Cut to the Lost pilot four years later. With the launch of that show’s final season in the next few weeks, its inevitable bowing out stands as evidence of the changed televisual landscape surrounding that show which occurred in equal degrees inspired by it and contemporaneously with it.

Lost is an example of a storytelling trend called database narratives, or stories that do not exist autonomously within themselves, but whose success and comprehension is dependent upon and ongoing conversation outside of the story occurring across media. In film, the database narrative has hardly met success because of the limits of that medium’s running time, the restraints of this narrative approach, and the intimidating requirements it bestows upon its viewership. Watchmen, Southland Tales, and the Matrix sequels—all requiring research and deliberate action outside the film taken by their viewers—are examples of the limitations of this approach for film. But the television format allows for a sprawling narrative structure that can encapsulate all the complexities necessary to immerse oneself in the database narrative.

Television in its classical sense was constructed to be watched passively, allowing the home viewer to come in and out of focal attention to the screen as they please without becoming confused as to what’s going on, enabled by constant repetition in story structures, situations, and dialogue. Traditional comedy and drama shows were designed to be mostly interchangeable; they could be watched in any order without confusion. What Lost and shows like it (like, say, BSG) represent is a dramatic shift in the reverse. In an information era where our ability to multitask and consume info from multiple media sources simultaneously is enabled by a culture of shortening attention spans and a desperate need for stimulus, it’s refreshing and surprising that a method of TV storytelling has arisen in which we’re required to pay fucking attention to every little detail (while at the same time utilizing our multimedia literacy as the major locale of discourse for understanding these shows exists on the Internet on sites like Lostpedia).

Complex narrative structures don’t automatically bring with them good television, as Lost imitators like FlashForward haven’t met success, and Lost itself is certainly not without its share of distinct flaws. But Lost represents—especially in its shift to shorter seasons (which hugely improved the show) and announcement of its finale in 2010—a transition to a mode of television storytelling structured not in the typical 24-episode year industry churnout, but within means that serves the story best (rather than television’s given structure), up to and including a predetermined end point for the story (giving a breath of fresh air to frustrated Lostphiles like myself who, around Season 3, began to suspect the show of essentially being a rabbit hole without a rabbit). The significance lies in the fact that this method of storytelling no longer exists solely on cable, but on network television as well.

There are network predecessors to shows like Lost. Twin Peaks comes to mind as an appropriate example, as it required a devoted, attentive week-to-week method of spectatorship, had a fruitful afterlife on home video, and developed a cult that dissected every moment. But watching Twin Peaks now makes that show feel like it debuted a decade too early, a show ahead of its time to its own detriment as it should’ve ended (with predetermined foresight, like Lost’s planned ending) with the revelation of Laura Palmer’s killer. Shows like Twin Peaks represent database narratives that had to wait for technology and changing means of watching television to catch up with them.

That alternative resources for network profit for these shows have come about in TV on DVD, iTunes, Hulu (and the like) have assisted this new structuring of story. Shows like Lost and Arrested Development came about shortly before the popularization of TV on DVD, but watching them now it seems they were always meant for this format. And this is where the limitations of the database narrative for network television come into play. I recently took a sabbatical from Lost, refusing to watch the fifth season when it aired and instead waited for it to come out on DVD because I find the show more rewarding when its episodes are watched in quick sequence rather than week-to-week. This practice of forgoing the consumption of these shows in the traditional, commercial-infused format has happened on a larger scale, as Lost’s ratings have dropped consistently each season, and alternative discursive media resources for understanding the show (like Lostpedia and the pop-up-video style catch-up method of reminding viewers of the show’s details in its reruns and recaps) have become requirements for understanding rather than supplements for enjoying these shows (especially with the year gap in between the start of each season). That comedy shows like Arrested Development and 30 Rock contain thread narratives and subtle in-jokes that reward multiple viewings suggests a fundamental incompatibility of such narratives with any traditional TV format (evidenced by their low ratings in opposition to their cult success on DVD).

Quality television of this past decade occupies two categories: the database narratives that require careful attention, discussion, and reminder (Lost, BSG, Dexter, Heroes, 24, The Wire, etc.) and more cinematic shows occupying (and changing) the format, pacing, and expectations of televised storytelling (The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Mad Men). Yet this is not a comprehensive shift into better television. On the other end of the spectrum is the bottom barrel of what television has to offer with reality shows on the no-longer-music-affiliated VH1 and MTV (Jersey Shore being the most recent offender) which capitalize on the most shameless and exploitable of human behavior, manufacture staged “reality” into a forced narrative, and further a parasitic culture that regards celebrity as something that should be a given rather than a status earned. Such shows will continue to exist as long as they are cheap to make and there remains an audience to watch them, but they represent the other side of the pendulum of this decade’s landmark shifts in quality television.

When Lost’s final episode airs this summer, it will have cemented a game-changing means of storytelling and spectatorship that will survive within other shows, regardless of other competing content in the wide spectrum of television.

Culture Warrior: A Look Back at the Cinema of 1999

Landon Palmer — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:36:47 +0000

Ten years ago Entertainment Weekly published a headlining article called, “1999: The Year that Changed Movies.” This article was published over a month before that year was even over, on November 26, 1999. In that article Jeff Gordinier outlines not an onslaught of repeated themes or shared characteristics between the films released in 1999 that could stand as evidence for the sea-change in filmmaking practice that the article’s title suggests, but instead rather excitedly rattles off a list of the many good-or-simply-unique movies released that year.

Upon first glance it seems that the only thing this article proves is that there were quite a few interesting movies released that year, without necessarily containing a convincing case that these films occurred as a result of changing cultural sensibilities or a new collective breed of creative filmmaker like New Hollywood films of the early-to-mid 1970s were so clearly subject to. But an onslaught of good films are not always the result of a unified artistic movement, and instead often seem to be the result of simple coincidental timing, only later seen as something more with the benefit of time. The oft-cited year of comparison, 1939—which saw the release of major gamechangers like The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, and more—is often considered the greatest year in American cinema, but rarely has anybody made the case of there being a larger determination of why so many good films were released in the same year, leaving serendipity to be the only explanation.

Now that more than a decade has past since its publication, we can safely say whether or not the arguments made within Gordinier’s article contain any weight, as “changing cinema” can only be proven or disproven by seeing how it affected what came afterward. Granted, it wasn’t only Gardinier’s article that made such a bold claim. Critics, fans, and filmmakers alike have pointed back to 1999 as a year which released a curious number of groundbreaking movies. Maybe it has more to do with the fact that several years since 1999 have been seen as bad-to-mediocre years for movies, or maybe 1999 really was everything it’s hyped up to be.

But at issue here is what “changing cinema” really means, and it’s a question I don’t think gets asked enough. It seems that movies which are truly original often get confused with major gamechangers. Take Memento for instance. To say that film was a landmark of innovative storytelling is a safe, accurate, and maybe even a bit of an understated claim. To say that Memento altered the way in which cinema as a storytelling medium is narrativized and experienced would also be an easy case to make. But to say that Memento changed cinema implies a direct influence to later filmmaking, which is something far harder to evidence as that film still seems—to this day—a singularly unique case in effective experimental storytelling.

When it comes to technology, however, it’s far easier to make the case that a film or group of films have changed the face of cinema. Such discussions have taken place ad nauseam with regard to Avatar—and while that film’s story may be composed (for better or worse) largely through archetype, it’s hard to deny that the technology employed within is a harbinger of cinematic achievement yet to come. So it is from a technological standpoint that The Matrix easily stands out as one of 1999’s most important films. While bullet-time special effects work quickly became a tired and oft-parodied example of pseudo-evidence of The Matrix’s technological influence, its marriage with original, engaging storytelling and the justification for its use of special effects through the story’s real world/fake world delineation and themes of transcendence altogether made for a potent combination that morphed the film into a huge cultural event, a piece of original sci-fi that almost overshadowed the not-so-triumphant return of George Lucas several months later.

However, the real extent of The Matrix’s technological influence on later filmmaking can be seen outside the film itself, on the Internet where a collective community of people from all around the world were allowed to speculate and build theories on ideas behind and outside of The Matrix. This practice, of course, is par for the course these days, but in the era of Web 1.0 it was a pretty revolutionary means of consuming movies. (However, with the case of The Matrix, the many discursive theories exchanged within its fanbase proved to be far more complex and interesting than the end of the franchise as the filmmakers realized it).

The same practice can be said to have allowed for the success and similar cultural event that was The Blair Witch Project, alleged to be the first film whose buzz was successfully made through Internet word-of-mouth. Despite that the film itself has hardly sustained staying power within the cultural zeitgeist, Blair Witch heralded a new means for DIY independent filmmakers to create buzz for their films and later distribute them in the digital age (oddly enough, enabled through a film manifested exclusively through analog filmmaking technology). Blair Witch also predicated the many more found footage films released these last few years.

However, any connections made between the other notable films of 1999 are less apparent. In one sense, and as Gordinier argues, 1999 could be seen as the old regime making way for a new group of filmmakers. 1999 was, after all, the year that George Lucas disappointed and Stanley Kubrick, well, died (and neither of their films released that year were received with universal praise). 1999 did see many (comparatively) young talents releasing unique films, including—but not limited to—David O. Russell’s Three Kings, Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, David Fincher’s Fight Club, P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia, and the US distribution of Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run.

With the exceptions of the astonishing feature debuts of Mendes and Jonze, these were not the first films by any of these filmmakers, and several of them had already made their name before this honored year. I could go on forever in responding to how each of these films stack up with ten years of hindsight, but I don’t think it’s the individual films of 1999 themselves that matter as much as the promise they brought with the filmmakers’ helming of them. While the Wachowski brothers and Blair Witch filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick fell by the wayside this past decade, all the filmmakers listed in the above paragraph have continued to make interesting and notable work since 1999. Their ambitious work since has disappointed, confused, polarized, and sometimes exceeded expectations, but a conversation still occurs each time one of their names show up attached to a project.

1999 was not a year where a heap of individual films changed filmmaking in some irreparable or drastic fashion. In fact, in many ways the opposite occurred. A surprising amount of films listed here were financed by studio dollars, and were released in a brief sliver of time before studios devoted themselves almost exclusively to franchise materials. The lack of box office success of some of these films ensured that fewer financial risks would happen over edgy material in the future, as a major regime change happened at 20^th Century Fox over the huge financial loss incurred in the theatrical distribution of Fight Club. 1999 was a special year not as much for the films made, but more convincingly because of the filmmakers behind them. They weren’t a collective movement like the filmmakers of early 90s independent cinema, New Hollywood of the 60s and 70s, or unified cinematic fronts like France’s New Wave, but they were a group of individuals who cemented their name in the minds of cinephiles that year and gave us work to look forward to throughout this past decade.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: The Gesamtkuntswerk

Landon Palmer — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 01:58:09 +0000

The gesamtkunstwerk is an idea popularized (though not originated) by German composer Richard Wagner. The term roughly means “total artwork,” or an art form that is able to utilize and contain within itself all other forms of art. Wagner employed this idea in his magnum opus, the epic opera The Ring Cycle (1876). But if we were to identify what art form comes closest to achieving the idea of the gesamtkuntswerk—that is, the fusion of all arts—in a post-Wagner era, it’d have to be cinema. While in the nascent years of the 21^st century the Internet proves time and again to not only be the source of all art, but of all information, it is the cinema is undoubtedly the 20^th century’s gesamtkuntswerk.

But what does this mean exactly? And how do we see the gesamtkunstwerk operate in cinema on a regular basis? From a pragmatic standpoint, the basic modes of production require cinema to utilize virtually all forms of art (which is what gives cinema the nickname “the seventh art”). With the use of actors and screenwriters, set designers and film composers, cinema employs the arts of performance, writing, painting/design, and music. One could go even further, arguing that practices unique to cinema like film editing are analogous to other specialized forms of art like sculpting, chipping away at a formless object until it resembles what the artist is trying to achieve.

But what Wagner meant when he implemented the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk into his opera was not the union of all art forms within modes of production behind the scenes, where they often remain invisible, but the coexistence of all other art forms apparent in the finished work itself—in other words, other art forms integrated (sometimes simultaneously) either as thematic device or directly within the narrative.

It’s interesting that Wagner popularized an idea so applicable to cinema because his compositions have arguably been used more often—or, at least, in a more iconic and memorable fashion—than any other pre-20th century composer, like Coppola’s infamous use of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (from The Ring Cycle) for Apocalypse Now (1979). And this brings us to one of the most apparent, repeated, and interesting implementations of this intersection of various art forms: the use of existing classical music, rather than original scores, for feature films.

Take this example from one of the highest-praised films of the year, Up. This brilliant sequence juxtaposes the mundane nature of everyday reality for an elderly man with the “Habanera” theme from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875, as interpreted by Up’s composer Michael Giacchino). Following a heartbreaking, mostly dialogue-free sequence showing a decade-spanning relationship ending in the death of the old man’s wife, viewing the protagonist in such continued solidarity could have come across as even more heartbreaking. But such potential heartbreak is alleviated by the effectively comic audio-visual juxtaposition of elegant, graceful music with boring, ordinary routine.

While this sequence appropriates Bizet’s music inventively, this is where the perceived advantages of a gesamtkunstwerk-like exercise comes into conflict when utilized within cinematic practice. While Up without doubt uses the sounds of Bizet, these sounds are severed from the context in which they were originally intended to be received: that is, the entirety of opera itself, not only in terms of the remaining compositions, but the narrative, performances, and visuals that go with opera. Up and Carmen are incredible pieces of art in their own disparate ways. But when the material of one medium is used for the other, one can’t say—in the Wagnerian sense, at least—that it actually contains or is integrated within the other, because one form of art has to lose something in order to be part of another. While the sounds of “Habanera” are used for Up, the film does not contain Carmen, at least not in its scope or intended context/mode of audience reception. Elements of “Habanera” exist in this sequence but not the “Habanera,” not Bizet’s “Habanera.”

A more direct illustration of a film attempting the Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk is Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, a film the features within the narrative (if you can even call it that) a classical guitar performance, a flamenco performance, the music of Schubert, and many works of modern art. This film very explicitly contains many other forms of art within one art form, an exercise appropriate for the film’s theme of accepting the subjective experience of reality as reality itself (a process endorsed by postmodern art). But like I argued last May in my CW post on that film, The Limits of Control fails in integrating various forms of art into a cohesive, authoritative cinematic form of its own. It’s an empty, proudly meaningless walk through a museum. It collects densely meaningful, expressive, beautiful art together into a collage that, when combined, becomes far less than the sum of its parts. The collection of these many art forms under the umbrella of one art form ends up, in this case, cancelling out all potential meaning within these intersections.

So is the attempt at a cinematic gesamtkunstwerk too ambitious? Is it futile to force several, sometimes conflicting art forms into one? Is the perception that cinema potentially uses all other forms of art simply wrong, and is cinema (deceptively) just not “big” enough to contain all others? Is even attempting the gesamtkunstwerk going directly against the natural, unique artistic characteristics particular to cinema?

I think the cinematic gesamtkunstwerk is rare, but real nonetheless. It takes a skilled filmmaker and the right material, but sometimes a film comes along that integrates many other works of art into a single film in a way that doesn’t go directly against it being also strongly cinematic, instead employing this ambitious practice seamlessly into what the film at large is trying to achieve. When it happens, the result can be spectacular.

My case in point here is Sally Potter’s 1992 film Orlando, based on the Virginia Woolf novel (of the same name) about a woman inexplicably traversing through time and era. Below are the film’s final eight minutes (including its end credits). (Note: If you haven’t yet seen the film, this still doesn’t really ruin anything for you. It’s an art film and the ending hardly makes coherent narrative sense even in the context of the larger film itself. But ultimately, it’s your choice).

In the final moments of Orlando, we see many forms of art featured within a few short minutes, at first combining the beauty of architecture with Elizabethan paintings in a museum. Naturally matching the film’s star Tilda Swinton’s unique Renaissance-style beauty with the film’s story, the Elizabethan painting allows the time-traveling Orlando to look at her past self, aestheticized and rendered immortal through art in a way analogous to her existence through history. The gesamtkunstwerk continues here with the integration of Jimmy Somerville’s soaring music, personified in his rather random appearance as an angel. And the last shot—that exquisite last shot—combines Swinton’s unblinking statuesque physique with the moving image and—in its almost shocking, 4^th wall-invading stillness—marries the moving image with the effect of the photograph. It is so much art wrapped together, yet still uniquely one art, the seventh art.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Was 2009 a Banner Year in Animation?

Landon Palmer — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:14:06 +0000

There’s been a bunch of hubbub about 2009 turning out to be a disappointing year in cinema. And, when comparing films released this year to other years within the decade, this sentiment is just about right. Many an end-of-the-year release that was supposed to be the saving grace to a lackluster twelve months either turned out to be mightily disappointing (Invictus, Amelia) or contained minor problems that prevented them from quite living up to their massive expectations or full potential (The Lovely Bones, The Road, Precious). But what’s been overlooked is the fact that it’s been largely live-action features that have met the brunt of disappointed reactions, while animated films meanwhile have shined in 2009 in a way they haven’t in any other year.

Last month Variety released a list of twenty films eligible for the five slots in the Best Animated Feature category at this year’s Academy Awards. First of all, I never knew that there were five slots available, because in most recent years there have been only three films nominated in this category. The only year so far in which five features have filled out the nomination category was 2002, the year that Spirited Away won. In many years, the category seems to have been padded out with films that weren’t innovative in terms of their approach to animation nor were they great pieces of storytelling—films like Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001) or Surf’s Up (2007)—while the already-obvious winner took home the prize.

But this year seems to be the first time where the Academy would have to carefully narrow down the nominees to five, as there were more outstanding and original pieces of feature animation this year than in years’ past—rather ironic given that this is a year in which the Best Picture category is being expanded to ten nominees while critics’ struggle to stretch out a best-of-the-year list of ten great films.

First of all, there’s the obvious pick: Up. Every Pixar film released since this award was created has been nominated in this category, and four have taken home the trophy. That’s out of only eight times the award has been given! Up seems a shoe-in for this award, which would give Pixar over a 50% ownership of the entire history of this category. I don’t see this as a product of intra-industry favoritism (if the uncharacteristically weak Cars won in 2006, I would probably see it as such), as Pixar has shown superior (and, amazingly enough, improving) character-driven storytelling techniques that casts a giant shadow over other studio-made animated features every year. They are to animated filmmaking what MGM was to the machine that was Classical Hollywood—it seems redundant, obvious, and even problematic to award the same studio time and again, but when they churn out top notch filmmaking and deliver with film after film, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

But we expect Pixar to make great movies each year. What’s unusual about 2009 is how much the competing animated films challenge Pixar’s ever-present shadow. Coraline, whose February release has made it almost forgotten by now, was a masterful, refreshingly Tim Burton-free, limitless journey into the impressive, inimitable imagination of Henry Selick. Based on the Neil Gaiman book, Coraline is impressive on multiple levels, being both astounding in artistic vision and containing thorough storytelling while also employing painstaking stop-motion animation in the way only Selick can do it, shot in 3-D no less!

Then there was Fantastic Mr. Fox, which gave us a more fun time at the movies than Wes Anderson has cared to give us in quite some time, and animation proved to be a far less distracting and more natural means to contain the director’s quirky aesthetic sensibilities. In an industry dominated by innovation in CGI, this film and several others represented a necessary look back at animation formats of decades’ past, proving that groundbreaking technology is not always the best means for solid storytelling, and that a technique doesn’t have to be new to be freshly innovative. The return of the 2-D Disney Princess was greeted with a warm welcome by audiences nationwide as the company returned to a form not seen or attempted since the 90s in The Princess and the Frog. This was a welcome return because of the very fact that it isn’t revolutionary or groundbreaking in the same way that many CG-animated features of CGI-heavy live-action films allege themselves to be. Its modest box office success is something of a relief to those of us that feared 2-D animation was dead in the water. Between the CG, stop-motion, and 2-D animated features, 2009 has proven itself a year in which audiences need variety in their animated cinemagoing.

If the Oscars are good for one thing (and they aren’t good for much), it’s introducing American audiences to strong foreign-language films that they may otherwise not have been aware of. The animated category has proven itself a rich category for raising the awareness of international animated filmmaking, from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) to Persepolis (2007). My vote for the long-shot nominee this year is the hilarious Belgium-born A Town Called Panic, an amazing romp of a film whose deliberately primitive means of stop-motion animation are essential to its incredible comic effect. If this was a year that didn’t already contain several impressive stop-motion animated films, A Town called Panic would probably stand out to the degree that it wouldn’t exist as such a dark horse, but it’d be in good faith if the Academy gave this little gem some much-needed exposure. Though the fact that Miyazaki’s Ponyo hasn’t even been mentioned until this late in this article is indicative of not only how potentially competitive the typically unavailable slot for a foreign animated feature nominee is, but how competitive this category is this year in general. In other years Miyazaki would be a shoe-in.

The Best Short-Form Animated Film category usually contains a breadth of innovative approaches to animation, while the Best Animated Feature category usually contains three-studio produced CG features (of course, a short operates quite differently from a feature, as the visionary Academy-Award winning short 9 did not successfully translate into a strong feature equivalent this year). This year I’d prefer not to see Monsters v. Aliens, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs to be nominated by default while Up inevitably takes home the prize, as the sheer variety of animated features this year necessitates serious Academy attention.

But seeing the history of the Best Animated Feature category, this may not happen. Created quite recently in 2001 (the first award went to Shrek), the category is argued by many to be a reaction to Beauty and the Beast’s Best Picture nomination a decade before, thus preventing animated films from serious competition with their live-action counterparts. So while this category allowed, in the era of Pixar, a timely means of honoring excellent animated feature filmmaking, at the same time it ghettoizes the animated feature. This stigma and threat is largely due to a perception that animated features are inherently meant for children and are thus somehow childish, unworthy of competition with “serious,” “realistic” live action Best Picture nominees like, say, Crash. (For the record, many other countries don’t view animation this way. Look at the animation industry in Japan, or Czech stop-motion animator Jan Švankmajer’s subversive filmmaking.) So it makes sense that if a committee sees a medium as childish, they will recognize those features seen as most explicitly geared towards children (as evidence, keep in mind that Happy Feet once took home this prize).

Critics seem more courageous and outspoken when it comes to great animated filmmaking than the Academy seems to be, and it’s hard to find a top ten list without Up on it. But it seems the animated feature category was created for competition in the big category to not take place; so while it may be one of the strongest films of the year, Up may be shut-out of a live-action only category of Best Picture nominees, even in a year of ten slots (as further evidence, the Academy has had an odd recent history of avoiding overlapping best-of categories, like when Persepolis was eligible for Best Animated Feature but not Best Foreign Language Film, while the exact opposite incurred with Waltz with Bashir the following year). However, in many ways (as I argued in a post this summer), animated filmmaking, in its seemingly endless potential for manifesting the far reaches of imagination, can often embody all that is purely cinematic in a far more effective way than live-action.

In arguing against the ghettoization of feature animated filmmaking, especially in a year where many an animated feature shined brightly above their live-action competitors, it’s hard to argue that the medium is inherently child-aimed when so many films this year—even the studio-backed ones—seemed to shut out children altogether. Kids found Up confusing and boring, were too scared of Coraline, and seemed to not show up at all for Fantastic Mr. Fox. Animated films in 2009 proved to be the medium for strong adult storytelling—and, as the brilliant first ten minutes of Up illustrated, can bring with them unexpectedly devastating adult themes and profoundly beautiful cinematic moments.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: The Culturally Significant Films of the Decade

Landon Palmer — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:00:47 +0000

Throughout this next month you’ll see, all over the Internet, numerous lists of films summing up the decade’s best and worst products of popular culture. But in the interest of this column, I thought it’d be appropriate not to outline the year’s best films, but the ones that are the most culturally significant.

Cultural significance is difficult to define when it comes to films, yet this is something still aspired to by many critics, scholars, and other organizations. The National Film Preservation Board, for instance, decides on 25 films each year to be preserved at the Library of Congress for meeting a level of “cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance,” a criteria which is as specific as it is vague, but one delineating the importance of certain films to the extent that they are mandated to be preserved for infinity.

Cultural significance with regards to a film does not directly coincide with a film’s merit. There are mediocre and bad films which are culturally significant because of an active, influential, or determining role they may play within society at large. This list then, should not be confused as a best-of list.

My criteria for choosing these films are simple, yet very flexible. I have chosen between one and three films from each year (or sometimes just a subject header when their similarities are so apparent) that represent a larger trend or take a larger cultural role outside cinema manifested place within the decade. Similar to the NFPB, my list consists of films that a) represent a resonant shift in methodologies filmic storytelling, whether in aesthetic or narrative terms; b) are reflective of a larger discourse going on within culture outside of film—whether with politics, other forms of art, etc.—or films that incite such a discourse, and c) films that, with the benefit of hindsight in the future, I believe will come to represent these specific years of the decade within film history.

My model for this list is the way in which we have looked back at American films of the late 60s and 70s as a mutually influential dialogue taking place between movie theaters and other aspects of culture. I believe such a dialogue has continued since and has taken place throughout film history, even if not in such overt forms as it did in the 70s. Also, while there are some foreign films on this list, I’ve only chosen films that—foreign or domestic, studio or independent—specifically took a profound role for the American moviegoer, for it would be impossible for me to assess the entire global cultural significance of cinema within this decade.

All that being said, here are Culture Warrior’s Culturally Significant Films of the Decade:

2000

The Mosaic Narrative – Amores Perros, Traffic, Memento

1999 is considered by many to be a banner year in recent cinema history, a year that released an unbelievable amount of great, now-iconic movies. 2000, however, couldn’t stand in any starker contrast, as the year of Eli Gonzales and hanging chads had within it a studio system that took very few risks and seemed to be running dangerously low on inspiration. But a few films stood out from the pack, and made popular an innovative narrative approach. Amores Perros and Traffic didn’t invent or perfect the multi-character mosaic narrative (that’d be Jean Renoir and Robert Altman), but they did jump-start a storytelling tool that later characterized much of the decade’s most polarizing films. Where later in the decade the mosaic narrative morphed into a staple of contrived, self-serious “socially conscious” filmmaking, Iñárritu’s Amores Perros and Soderbergh’s Traffic displayed in full force the potential of such an approach, integrating fascinating interlocking stories which contained a multitude of fully realized characters.

One could read a lot into the cultural significance of the mosaic narrative; for example, that these films reflect the futility of a Rashomon-esque search for objective truth, a particularly relevant message considering the major distractions from reliable information that took place in many facets of American life throughout the decade. But these films more immediately display how a rarely used, very difficult approach to narrative broached the mainstream. One of the more groundbreaking examples of this disruption of linear filmmaking is Memento (which was not a mosaic in quite the same fashion as the other two, but was uniquely significant in its own right), which introduced Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker to be reckoned with throughout the following seven years and introduced a complex narrative structure that has since been imitated (Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002)), but never matched. Memento was, without doubt, one of the major game-changers of the decade.

2001

The Mega-Franchise – Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

It potentially sounds tired and cliché to analyze the beginning of this decade in term of pre- and post-9/11 moviegoing, but its importance in determining the course of everything throughout the rest of these important years is both impossible to avoid and essential to its shape. Though the adaptations of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter books were planned far in advance of the decade’s most defining day, they played a cathartic role for American moviegoers. Movies of critical political relevance would show up years later, but in the early years of the ‘aughts, audiences craved the wonderful escapism movies could offer, and these films set the course for Hollywood’s penchant for playing it ridiculously safe and making what seemed like franchises and little else, building up pre-sold material and negating the necessity for a movie star to sell a product. 2001 and 2002 showed a sometimes panicked fear of releasing a film containing anything even closely resembling 9/11—from marketers fearing the plane crash subplot of Donnie Darko and botching its release to the last-second digital altering of a NYC skyline in Zoolander to delaying the release of terrorist-plotted films Collateral, Damage, and Big Trouble—Hollywood, and audiences, seemed far more comfortable embracing material that could not, at least on the surface, even come close to political relevance.

So the mega-franchise made sense from both a production and moviegoing standpoint.

Sorcerer’s Stone and The Fellowship of the Ring weren’t regarded as the strongest entries in their series, but they were promising starts to what ultimately (arguably) became the two most widely beloved franchises of the decade. The essential ingredient to these films was a universal appeal enabled by the timeless, deliberately non-allegorical quality of their storytelling. The beginning of the decade showed evidence that Hollywood’s gravitation towards exclusively commandeering franchises wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter have since shown the best qualities of big Hollywood, entertainment-only filmmaking—a type of filmmaking where art and mass appeal are not contradictory to solid, artful storytelling and strong characterization, allowing Hollywood to hint at a unique strength unseen since the Cinerama epics of the 50s. It’s a formula tried time and again throughout these recent years, and to wildly different results, but this defining Hollywood trend gave good reason, at least initially, for its audiences to show up to the theater time and again in these past nine years.

2002

Super, Hero: Spider-Man, The Bourne Identity, The Pianist

Whether or not he was intended to be, there’s no denying that Spider-Man was cinema’s first post-9/11 superhero, his blissful swinging between the skyscrapers of Manhattan signaling a calculated return to control over urban America’s most iconic cityscape. Spider-Man, both within the diegesis of the film and for the typical filmgoer seeking escapism, provided a warm antidote to a culture of fear and uncertainty. Raimi’s filmmaking is classically simple and straightforward, and the themes of duty and goodness are immediately apparent in a fashion so explicitly subtlety-free yet so refreshingly profound as to make Spider-Man the closest thing this decade has come to Capra-esque filmmaking.

And yes, X-Men may have been the first to display the huge box office potential of the superhero film, but it was Spider-Man’s enormous popularity that showed the true extent of American audiences’ fascination with these extraordinary characters. Superman still seems more like a product of WWII, with little to say to more recent generations, and Batman’s story is full of shame and darkness, which makes Spider-Man by both merit and default America’s most patriotic cinematic superhero (supported by the fact that, unlike the other two, he doesn’t live in a fictional city), a characteristic appropriately punctuated with him sitting atop a building next to the American flag at the film’s end. Cinema’s superheroes and comic book adaptations would take darker turns in years to come while the Spider-Man franchise would reduce itself to silliness, but in 2002 there’s no denying that Spider-Man was a character for a place and a time.

Months before the debacle that was Die Another Day, the summer of 2002 also told us that we would be getting a new type of spy hero, a more relevant James Bond in the form of XXX. Vin Diesel’s failed manifestation of potential movie stardom is indicative of the decade’s broad rejection of the typical masculine movie star, and XXX did not become the 21^st century’s answer to James Bond. But Jason Bourne did.

Bourne is truly a 21^st century global spy, played by Matt Damon as an ordinary-looking man containing unassuming yet extraordinary skills and possessing a broadband and DIY-style of globe-hopping as an update to Bond’s luxurious jet set. While the revamped Daniel Craig-starring Bond films had an amazing Bourne-modeled start that came to a quick overstylized sputter with its second entry, the Bourne trilogy remains the decade’s defining work of global intrigue, also addressing themes of solidarity, paranoid confusion, and loneliness within the confines of a global community (and the issue of constant surveillance’s devastating affect on our lives was addressed in both Bourne and 2002’s Minority Report).

Finally, Polanski’s The Pianist, in its own odd way, belongs directly alongside these two films, a far-better-than-most-Holocaust-Oscar-grab tale of an individual’s innovative means of survival like in the Bourne films, and a display of extraordinary super heroism not unlike Spider-Man.

2003

Independent Filmmaking, Interrupted – Lost in Translation, Elephant, 28 Days Later

The 90s were undoubtedly the breakthrough decade for American independent film, which then created several forks in the road for indies to go from there. And in different directions it did indeed go. Many independent filmmakers welcomed the warm embrace of Hollywood, while others made their films more deliberately avant-garde in order to separate themselves from the pack, while even more experimented with the utilities offered through digital technology and worked in various institutional capacities of filmmaking. These three films released in 2003 are emblematic of all these trends.

Lost in Translation was one of the first of the trendy-indies, the preamble of an Oscar-baiting style accompanied with hip “indie” music, quirky humor, and understated performances. It gave hints that Focus Features could become what Miramax was in the 90s in terms of award-grabbing power, and was a forerunner later adopted and utilized time and again by the quirk factory that Fox Searchlight became. Along with the falling out of indie-only distributors like Artisan and the selling out of other indies like Lionsgate to safe franchise material rather than the edgy filmmaking that made their name, independent film in 2003 cleared the way for independent filmmaking to become more of a stylistic label than an actual practice, stratified by well-known actors and big studio backing.

Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, stylistic pretentiousness aside, showed how only in truly divisive, completely uncommercial independent filmmaking can anything new, fresh, risky, and discomfitingly reflective of the cultural dialogue be broached. And, finally, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later exhibited how the great artists of previous decades can skillfully adapt new technologies to inspired ends, and that independent filmmaking contains the capability to blur the boundaries of genre and nation.

2004

Red State vs. Blue State – Fahrenheit 9/11, The Passion of the Christ

2004 was a hotly debated year of politics, yet at the same time it seemed like a year where everybody was afraid to get into a political discussion. Conservatives and liberals both congregated safely on their respective sides of the fence, conversing and agreeing with like minds but never truly engaging with the opposition. There were a few films released that year that had a political surface, like the Manchurian Candidate remake, but under that surface existed an empty wasted opportunity. But two very political, very controversial, and heavily discussed films were released that year that aptly reflected America’s election-fever cultural schism.

Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 seemed at first like a saving grace for many left-leaning-voters whose major policy impetus was simply that Bush not be reelected, no matter who replaced him. Fahrenheit 9/11 proposed to open the veil on the Bush administration’s most egregious abuses of power. It seemed at the time like the most actively influential documentary ever made, but in retrospect we see that it just preached to the choir, inviting qualitative criticism through Moore’s often questionable and distracting formal strategies, but more importantly never having the access to convert Bush-supporters because the toxicity of Moore’s persona through the eyes of the right.

Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ, meanwhile, played to the ideological perspective of the religious right, a vocal faction of the American populace whose influence was reflected in much of Bush’s rhetoric and policy decisions. An aesthetically fascinating film that threw its message at the audience through an induction of fear rather than adopting a subtle, inviting hand, The Passion now adorns prescience and analogy to Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-style politicking, bombarding the audience in a way that allowed little room for alternative perspective, even from fellow Christians.

Has there ever been such a theatrical experience in recent memory that was transformed into an institutional duty for much of its spectatorship? These were two films that, upon their release, had already been embraced by its supporters and dismissed by their detractors, reintegrating groups of like-minded people to sit in a movie theater together and nod at each other in agreement.

Click Here to move on to 2005 thru 2009…

Culture Warrior: Liberal Guilt

Landon Palmer — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:38:43 +0000

Warning: This article contains major spoilers on the film Precious.

On a recent episode of Slate’s Culture Gabfest (direct link), the hosts of the podcast addressed the much-debated over issues surrounding the Sundance sleeper-hit/potential awards contender Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire as poverty porn. While I’m getting tired of any film or group of films accused as being exploitative dismissed with a newly manufactured “-porn” suffix (the more neutral made-up term “povertysploitation” might be more accurate for the argument they’re trying to achieve), there is some weight to the arguments made behind the term.

There are several components to this argument, which goes something like this: 1) Although the (fictionalized) nature of Precious’s impoverished life might be, by all counts, accurately loyal to its setting, the details of her poverty may come across as extreme, over-the-top, ham-fisted, and, arguably, exploitative through the creative choices of Lee Daniels; 2) If Precious does achieve its ends through exploitative means (in both style and content), Daniels quite potentially pulls a catch-and-release trick with the audience with his formal decisions, photographing Precious’s body (wide-angle lenses) and eating habits (frying pigs’ feet—this argument has been extended to accusing the film of affirming harmful racial stereotypes like when Precious steals a bucket of fried chicken (punctuating this scene, in the film’s penchant for showing everything, with Precious vomiting soon after)) in such a way that forces the audience to be comparably as disgusted with Precious as her abusive mother so explicitly is, except with an ultimate reward for the audience as they pat themselves on the back for having “endured” the film and thus becoming more “enlightened” about black poverty in America.

The central problem here is the potential for audiences to sympathize for Precious rather than empathize with her. There is hardly an objective conclusion to come from this, as one’s experience of Precious is determined largely by their own particular life experiences. But if the film is exploitative and over-the-top, then we as audiences are bestowed a stylistic and narrative partition preventing us from seeing the world through Precious’s eyes. Instead we simply observe her within her overbearing landscape, feeling more and more sorry for her as she is dealt each and every blow to her life. At a point it feels like Daniels, Sapphire, and co. have pulled out every trick in the book to do so. For me Precious became not so much an autonomous, multidimensional character as she did a stand-in symbolizing all possible factors of Harlem poverty: sexually and physically abused, illiterate, HIV-stricken incest victim, morbidly obese mother of two children, one of which has Down syndrome. The end result has an audience uttering, “oh, poor girl” rather than coming out of the film with new revelatory insight into conditions and circumstances poverty in America from a first-person point-of-view. This approach patronizes rather than enlightens an audience.

Daniels has stated that the film (unlike, say, the films of his executive producer Tyler Perry) is largely not intended for black audiences (rather inferentially intended for the more well-to-do audiences living in the metropolitan areas where Precious first opened in limited release). He stated on NPR recently that black audiences are already aware of cycles of abuse within American culture, and making the film for them would be like preaching to the choir. Rather, Precious is intended for those who have no previous knowledge of black poverty in America. But I come from the school of thought that dictates just because a filmic incident contains truth doesn’t mean it comes off convincingly on film. Daniels shoots the rape scene(s), for instance, in slow-motion in a way that emphasizes each violent thrust as Precious mentally travels to a happier place. On one hand, such stylization makes sense as this formal intervention is supposed to illuminate for us Precious’s subjective experience, her practices of escape necessary to survive in the face of such adversity. On the other, Daniels’s formal emphasis of such violent behavior makes it seem like he doesn’t trust his audience to be discerning enough to find the act abhorrent on its own terms, his style slapping us over the head in a way akin to Precious’s mother’s frying pan (and turning his back on a style of realism needed throughout such a film rather than employed only intermittently). Instead of a lasting social awareness about the film’s subject which could have potentially resulted in proactive measures taken by a now-enlightened audience usually not exposed to such “realities,” the movie becomes, like so many “socially aware” awards season films, a substitute rather than an inspiration for social action.

Films like these play to an audience’s liberal guilt regarding issues of race and poverty, but in the end Precious illuminates little, even potentially doing harm by affirming stereotypes in the process. The more mainstream and family-friendly The Blind Side can be read as a discursive reverberation of Precious intended for a far different filmgoer, centralizing issues of race and poverty into another largely symbolic African-American character in a way that allows (white) audiences to come away from the film feeling, in a very different way than Precious, better about themselves. Though The Blind Side plays explicitly to identifying characteristics of 21^st century neo-conservatism—religious ideology (unproblematically) justifying and permeating everything, sports as analogy for life, and even an allusion to the right’s peculiar Obama-era theory of a contemporary America where racism is dead—it also plays to neoliberal white guilt regarding race and poverty in American culture that it attempts to exorcise through the tired Hollywood narrative of the white character assisting a black character in a way that renders the black character little more than a one-dimensional means to ultimately help the white character (made explicit by Sandra Bullock’s cringe-worthy line featured in the trailer, “I’m not helping him, he’s helping me” (or something like that) and previously established in films like The Green Mile (1999), The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), and the Birth of a Nation of the new millennium, Bringing Down the House (2003)–this recurring character is often known as “the Magical Negro”).

Told often from the perspectives of white characters, my problem with many sports movies where the game is used as a microcosm for race relations (i.e., Remember the Titans) is that they usually take place historically before or during the progress of Civil Rights, and thus the triumph over adversity is framed as a triumph over racism itself, rendering such issues a product of the past. The Blind Side, while being, like many of these films, an “inspirational true story” (is there any other kind?), refreshingly takes place in the recent past and, at least on the surface, fleetingly addresses issues of white guilt or (in the film’s ultimately arbitrary narrative framing device) the possibility of the central family exploiting an impoverished boy’s talent for their own personal ends. But the film dismisses these possibilities as soon as they are brought up, favoring simplicity over complexity and even the (far more interesting) possibility of selfishness in otherwise well-meaning white upper-class generosity.

Unlike Precious, The Blind Side has the defense of being directly inspired by reality, but this doesn’t mean that its sentimentalities don’t come across any less false, unconvincing, or problematic. In affirming its conservative demographic’s belief in American upward social mobility, The Blind Side shows how one can move from rags to riches—but posits such opportunities as only possible through a wealthy white family and depicts the range of possibility for impoverished African Americans to lie exclusively on either side of a pendulum between drug dealing and professional athletics, with little room in between. Also, if upward social mobility is such a treasured and essential American institution, then why are stories like the one portrayed in The Blind Side so extraordinarily rare as to be made into a movie? Precious may be exploitative and play off the conservative nightmare of the lazy worst of the welfare state, but not since Taxi Driver has a film made so explicit how much of a myth the myth of upward social mobility really is.

Of course, problematic social politics within a film do not always deter the merit of the filmmaking or storytelling itself. I hate uplifting sports dramas, but I found The Blind Side to be one of the oh-so-redundant genre’s strongest and most entertaining entries, coming off nowhere near as bad as its trailer made it look. And Precious, to its credit, contains some truly amazing performances, never manufactures an easy answer to the complex problems it introduces, and contains a refreshingly cliché-free “inspiring teacher” story.

Race relations operate in our culture in a much more subtle way than they used to. But in the medium of film, overt depictions of race problems, explicit narratives of racism, or the depiction of a post-race society is far easier than addressing the complexity of how race really operates in contemporary society. Precious and The Blind Side both fail in my book in this regard. I argue for a third option, Medicine for Melancholy, Barry Jenkins’s mumblecore-esque indie about the day after a one-night stand that has already been discussed by Anthony Kaufman of IFC.com as a necessary counterpoint to Precious. The film features two central African-American characters that couldn’t be more different from each other, and subtly addresses relevant issues of race without using either character as a preachy sounding board for the director’s own point-of-view. It’s also just a really good little gem of a movie. Here’s the trailer:

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

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