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House!
The one that’s not a TV show about medical-specific Sherlock Holmes.
Coming soon from the Criterion Collection. Huzzah.
And while we’re at it… How badly do you want your TV to be more like this?
Psycho Killer
Peter Baker reviewing Psycho for Films and Filming. September 1960.
Via chained and perfumed.
Iguana Time
“The iguanas are the best thing in the movie. And I must have five minutes of iguana time! And if I don’t have my full five minutes of iguana time, I will never make another movie again!”
—Werner Herzog
Stereo by Cronenberg
I’m amazed by how imagistic directors like Cronenberg and Lynch develop a very strong sense of cinematography and tone in their early short films and then don’t bother to bring in plot until later. It seems like movie conventions are afterthoughts to their ideas rather than the other way around.
Via @caketrainpress.
Armando Ianucci Interview
There’s a man named Armando Ianucci who makes brilliant TV shows. Now he’s done a great film called In the Loop, which is as close as I’ll get to an advertisement seeing as how this website is soaked in anti-Corporatism. The AV Club just did an interview with him which serves as a good introduction to the ideas in his work if you’re into that sort of thing.
Can Films Be Fascist?
From a contemplative article on Leni Riefenstahl:
As Brian Winston put it on the BBC program, “I don’t think you can make a moral judgment about Riefenstahl’s work on the basis that it embodies fascist aesthetics, because I don’t think there’s any such thing. I think she stands in the mainstream of Western aesthetics, and I think that Western aesthetics can be, on occasion, fascist. That’s the problem with the whole phenomenon of fascism — that we want somehow to treat it as a virus. It isn’t; it’s part of us. It’s the dark side of the European tradition, and she represents that dark side perfectly.”
It goes on…
The reasons for such myopia, I would argue, don’t really have much to do with Riefenstahl’s international standing as an artist. Rather, they have to do with a glaring contradiction in our notions about art and politics — a contradiction that Riefenstahl’s career throws into sharp relief. To put the matter crudely, we tend to celebrate artists who have absolute, dictatorial freedom and control over their resources, and condemn politicians who pursue or achieve the same aim.
New WALNUTS from Salvatore the Intern
I love Salvatore the Intern, it has that great lo-fi Jon Waters atmosphere and some fantastically bizarre pauses. This one’s not as good as my favorite, the essential, The Alien That Came From Hell, but seeing as how it’s election time, how about some more WALNUTS.
I’m saddened by the fact I beat Wonkette to the punch on this.
EDIT: I Work at Blockbuster is also pretty cool.
The Prestige and Kierkegaard
Recently I was at an Indian potluck and Christopher Nolan came up as a topic of conversation. Probably something related to The Dark Knight. Anyhow, the conversation eventually moved to The Prestige and I remembered a thought I had had on the film, but had forgotten about until that afternoon.
One potential way of reading the film would be through a Kierkegaardian lens, which I think shines some light on the trinity used within the film. Hence, we can think of Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialist trinity of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious as roughly equivalent to the pledge, the turn, and the prestige.
The aesthetic and the pledge are essentially the same: it involves something of a pact, but crucially adorned in a baroque manner (the importance of masks, titles, and theatrics in the film and magic itself). Think of any magic show you have ever seen as well: there is always something of a glam theatric that surrounds the entire performance. We might also parallel it to Lacan’s imaginary order, the order of ego adornment and spectral identification.
The ethical, then, is roughly equivalent to the turn: in it, the object disappears from our sight, as if by magic. But the “as if” here is crucial, because in our heart of hearts we must unconsciously believe that the trick is merely an illusion, even if we consciously wish it to be something more: if we were to fully accept it as something truly mystical, our entire…
Control: The Fate of Joy Division
Kevin Martinez of the WSWS has an interesting review of Control, a documentary film directed by Anton Corbijn about the band Joy Division, as well as some other interesting historical and biographical details surrounding Ian Curtis.
“The Dark Knight” Has It Both Ways
The Socialist Worker rectifies Joe Allen’s previous negative review of The Dark Knight, which exhibited left-wing contrarianism at its worst. This one by Scott Johnson is much more nuanced.
If The Dark Knight is a parable of the “war on terrorism,” it is also a parable about its dangers. Having said that, it should not be pigeonholed as simply a “progressive” or “reactionary” film—but neither does it transcend these labels. It wants to have things both ways, as when Batman builds an incredibly invasive eavesdropping device, uses it, then has it destroyed because it is too powerful.
UPDATE: On the further subject of the politicization of The Dark Knight, here’s a great write up by k-punk.
Cary Grant’s Suit
Granta:
North by Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit.
I guess I never thought about it like that before. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
The Big Parallax
I recently watched Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty as the dogged reporter Joe Frady who begins to unravel a conspiracy surrounding the deaths of several people who, like himself, had witnessed the assassination of a popular RFK-esque politician three years prior. His inquiry takes him far down the rabbit’s hole, so to speak, where he finds the nebulous, but no doubt sinister, deeds of the Parallax Corporation, a corporation ostensibly designed to seek out and hire maladjusted individuals whose psychological profiles earn them the unique privilege of carrying out high-profile assassinations.
The film is undoubtedly steeped in the post-Watergate zeitgeist of conspiracy, scandal, and suspicion, comparable in many ways to Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, although I prefer Parallax for a number of reasons. But it would be wrong to not give due weight to the tumultuous events of the 1960s as well, which indelibly leave their mark on the film in the form of retrospection, subtly cued by the time-jump employed by the director. Thus, rather than immersing the viewer in the chaos of assassination, the film creates a “temporal parallax” by re-reading, as it were, the milieu of the 1960s from the frame of the 1970s: the “parallax gap,” produced by the minimal difference between the event as it was experienced and as it appears in retrospect, creates the effect of a stain, that of an unsolved crime, left upon the lap of hapless Joe.
What drew me to the film…
Do Communists Have Better Sex?
I just came across this amazing looking film by André Meier, which is a comparative analysis of the sex lives of people living in East and West Germany. I’m currently downloading a copy, so I haven’t watched it yet, but here’s a great line from the documentary’s website:
Is dictatorship plus a planned economy the sure-fire formula for a natural aphrodisiac? At least in bed, according to the statistics, the communists were victorious.