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October 31, 2005

Fifteen in Fifteen

In honor of its 15th anniversary, IMDB has asked its editors to list their top fifteen movies over the last 15 years. Darren and Girish compiled their lists the other day, and as promised, here's my Top 15 list. Like Darren and Girish, I'm breaking the rules a bit in naming more than 15 films. I did try to list a few films that other folks didn't mention. So here's my list, in no particular order (unlike Darren and Girish, I'm too lazy to alphebetize by director or film title).

I also considered a few others: Dark City, Primer (I need to see it again first), Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Bottle Rocket, Short Cuts, Wonder Boys (a potential guilty pleasure film), Lovely & Amazing, Safe and Far From Heaven, Code 46 (which I also need to see again), Three Kings, and Until the End of the World. Comments? Observations?

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October 29, 2005

Lazy Saturday Morning Links

Via Mark Crispin Miller's News From Unerground, I've just learned that Florida State Representative Arthenia Joyner (Tampa) has filed the ERA Ratificiation Bill (HCR 8005), which would guarantee equal rights for men and women. Here's more information on the bill from the Florida House of Representatives webpage, including the full text of the bill, which is also available from News From Underground.

Miller also calls attention to the recent Senate vote that denied additional spending for the federal home heating program (here's the Associated Press report). With home heating costs scheduled to increase by an average of over $300 this year, many families are going to be facing some difficult financial decisions this winter.

More later, maybe, when I've had a second cup of coffee.

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October 27, 2005

Reader Maps

Time for me to join the reader map party. Go add yourself to mine (thanks for the tip, KF).

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My Week in Six or Seven Bullet Points

Here, in no particular order, are a few of the things I've been thinking about this week.

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October 26, 2005

Interrogating Guantánamo

In a comment to my previous entry, Ryan mentioned that DC's Studio Theatre will be staging a production of the critically-acclaimed play, Guantanamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom', which was originally produced by the Tricycle Theatre in London, and uses "spoken evidence" to explore the treatment of Guantanamo detainees. With Vice President Dick Cheney "proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans," it would seem that this play is still very timely.

Guantanamo runs from November 2 through December 11, 2005, at The Studio Theatre, 1501 14th Street, NW.

Note: It also played in New York's 45 Bleecker Street Theater last year (New York Times review and Village Voice review).

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Documenting Guantanamo

My allergies are going nuts tonight (I think it's because the steam heat in my apartment just came on), so I haven't been able to get any real work done. Instead, I've been following Darren's IMDB-inspired example of trying to list my top 15 films of the last 15 years. My list isn't done yet, but while I was surfing IMDB, I came across news that Michael Winterbottom, who directed Code 64 (which made the long list), is currently working on The Road to Guantánamo, a TV movie about the Tipton Three, a trio of British Muslims who were held in Guantanamo Bay for two years until they were released without charge.

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October 24, 2005

Coming Soon to a Living Room Near You

This John Anderson article in the New York Times is basically a 1,300 word advertisement for IndieFlix, a new online resource for distributing independent films, but it still looks like a pretty cool service. Short version: Scilla Andreen and Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi's IndieFlix post independent films on their website, where customers can buy the film, which IndieFlix will burn onto a DVD for $9.95.

It's not a bad deal for indie directors who might be looking for an audience for their films, with directors retaining all the rights to their films while being assured of gaining some visibility. In the article, Anderson comments that the major worry is visibility, with one commenter asking how film fans will learn about IndieFlix. A New York Times article can't really hurt, I suppose.

I'd imagine the more difficult problem, also mentioned in the article, will involve the the cultivation of audiences based on shared interests. The most successful online distribution projects, measured by sales at least, involve the grassroots political films produced by people like Robert Greenwald. I'm wondering, for example, if this method of distribution, which will entail watching the film on a smaller screen, will be as effective for "narrative," rather than documentary, projects. Sill, it'll be worth watching to see where IndieFlix goes.

Update: David at GreenCine offers some other reasons to be skeptical about the Anderson article. Most crucially, Anderson misrepresents the service (i.e., it's not really skipping "direct-to-video"). And it ignores several other similar services that came first, including the CustomFlix service rcently purchased by Amazon and Green Cine's own video-on-demand service.

David raises these points in the context of Sujewa Ekanayake's questions about his self-distribution of Date Number One, which looks like an interesting film.

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Small World

This probably won't mean much to anyone besides me, but I thought it was pretty cool. I had one of those "small world" moments this weekend while I was hanging out in the Gallery Place-Chinatown Starbucks waiting to see a movie, when I ran into a student of mine from a film course I taught at the University of Ilinois, Urbana-Champaign.

When the former student--I'll respect his anonymity--walked past, there was a vague flicker of recognition. He looked somewhat familiar, but I couldn't remember where I'd seen him. After a minute or so, he returned to my table and asked if I had ever taught film classes at UIUC. Once we made the connection, the student--now working in New York, but visiting DC for the weekend--told me that my course had been one of the more exciting he'd had while in college, which was really a nice compliment. Now, given that I haven't taught at UIUC since May 2002, I'm impressed that he remembered me, but at the very least, the conversation reminded me--however fleetingly--that the work of teaching can have effects far beyond the four walls of the classroom.

Of course, if he knew what movie I was waiting to see, his good impression of me might have been tarnished forever.

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Frank Lloyd and Chris Marker's Time Machines

Via GreenCine Daily: Harlan D. Whatley's of Catherine Lupton's biography of one of my favorite filmmakers, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future. In fact, long-time readers may know that I once published an essay on Marker's Sans Soleil back in the day. David also points to the silverthreaded website, where you can find lots of cool stuff on Marker, including this Andrei Tarkovsky comment about cinema and time travel.

Speaking of time travel, I finally had a chance to watch Berkeley Square, the 1933 time-travel film I've been mentioning. I can see why Andre Breton, among others, admired it so much. The story eventually inspired the film Somewhere in Time, and the two stories are fairly similar. In Berkeley Square, the main character, Peter Standish (Leslie Howard), longs to travel to what he believes will be the far more civilized 18th century, confining himself into an old 18th century mansion in order to send himself back in time. He wakes up in the 18th century, where he violates many of the principles of time travel (don't change anything, etc). Peter's modern mannerisms offend all of his 18th century ancestors, except Helen, who has an intuitive understanding of Peter's ability to travel in time.

In one scene, in fact, Helen has a "vision" of the future, with images of rushing automobiles, the brightly-lit streets of Broadway, and the mechanical warfare of World War I superimposed on her face in what is essentially a flashforward to the present. It's a weird little scene, one that I'll be revisiting frequently when I start revising my chapter on early time-travel films.

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D.C. Meetup

G Zombie will be here in Washington D.C. next week for a conference and has suggested a D.C. blogger meetup at Teaism in Dupont Circle on Sunday, October 30.

I'm guessing that if you read me, you probably read G Zombie, too (and if you don't read his blog, you should), but I figured I'd help spread the word. Feel free to email me (chutry[AT]msn[DOT]com) or G Zombie if you'd like to join us.

Posted by chuck at 11:20 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 23, 2005

The War Within

I caught Joseph Castelo's fascinating DV feature, The War Within (IMDB), on Friday night but haven't been able to develop a satisfying interpretation of it. At the very least, the film is compelling because of its "sympathetic" treatment of someone who would normally be dismissed as a terrorist. Through this sympathetic treatment, Castelo attempts to understand how someone could be driven to this kind of violence (note that I'm treading carefully here in my use of terminology because I cannot write this review without thinking about the thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq who have been killed due to the war on terror).

War focuses on Hassan (played by co-screenwriter Ayad Akhtar), a mild-mannered engineering student wrongfully arrested in Paris under suspicion of terrorism. He is hauled off to Pakistan, where he is imprisoned, tortured, and interrogated. Notably, these shots are filmed in almost total darkness, somewhat underplaying the violence by making it difficult to see. But after one particlarly violent beating, a fellow priosner gives Hassan a weathered copy of the Qur'an, and by the time that he leaves prison, Hassan is radicalized. Some reviewers have commented that we are offered insufficent motivation for Hassan's radicalization, but these elliptical images generally worked, although they also have the effect of making Hassan's motivation purely, or at least primarily, subjective, which works against his outrage at the broader effects of the war on terror.

After his release, Hassan enters the US with plans to meet up with a terrorist cell based in suburban New York. Specifically, Hassan plans to blow up Grand Central Terminal as a suicide bomber. His plans are complicated by his decision to live with childhood friend, Sayeed (Firdous Bamji), now a successful middle-class doctor, and Sayeed's family. In particular, Hassan becomes drawn to Sayeed's sister (Nandana Sen), who has become almost completely Westernized, to the point that she dates American men, at least at the beginning of the film. Sayeed's middle-class complacency is simultaneously attractive and repulsive to Hassan, thus setting off "the war within" of the film's title (Teresa Wiltz's Washington Post review gets at these complications nicely).

I won't go into specifics about how Hassan resolves his personal dilemma, but I will say that the film uses the conventions of the thriller in an effective, thoughtful way. The film did have a tendency to rely on cliched characterizations of various positions on terrorism, and Hassan's relationship with Duri had the potential to simplify Hassan's crisis of conscience a bit too much. Worth noting: Lisa Rinzler's DV cinematography generally served the narrative well. Hassan's flashbacks to the Pakistani prison contrasted effectively with the brightly-lit suburban streets of Sayeed's affluent New Jersey neighborhood. More importantly, the footage of Hassan as he walks through Times Square, with its brightly lit symbols of global capitalism and shallow entertainment, seemed to capture his subjectivity very effectively. During many of these scenes, in which a solitary Hassan quietly wanders the streets of New York City--and later Grand Central Station itself--the faces of other pedestrians went out of focus. During these sequences, I was reminded of Don DeLillo's fascinating essay, "In the Ruins of the Future," in which DeLillo argues that the advantage of the terrorist is his ability not to see these faces ("this is his edge, that he does not see her"). I'm not sure that I agree with DeLillo anymore, and for reasons I can't describe precisely without giving away the film, I believe The War Within complicates DeLillo's arguments. The film is certainly worth seeing. As I mentioned earlier, I'm not quite sure how to respond to the film, so if anyone else has seen it, I'd love to know your response to it.

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Domino

I went to see Domino (IMDB) last night primarily out of curiosity to see what Donnie Darko writer-director Richard Kelly had done with the screenplay. And Tony Scott's hyperkinetic direction can sometimes be fun. But as I was watching, I felt like I'd seen this film at least twice before, first when it was called Natural Born Killers and later when it was called True Romance.

Kelly's script, very loosely based on the story of Domino Harvey, the daughter of actor Laurence Harvey who became a bounty hunter, had some potential, especially as a satire of the culture industry's production of celebrity. This notion of celebrity and fantasy is perhaps best explored through the COPS-style reality TV series that follows the three lead bounty hunters on their quests. The reality series is hosted by former Beverly Hills 90210 stars Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green, both playing themselves, and Tom Waits' cameo late in the film also contributes to this notion of celebrity (the real Domino Harvey, who died of a drug overdose while the film was in production also cameos). The muddled, Tarantinoesque timelines actually fit the character's somewhat addled mental state. So there are some interesting elements here, and I'll be interested to see how it fits within Kelly's future work.

However, I found Scott's direction a bit too heavy-handed, especially in the choppy editing. I barely remember a single shot lasting more than 3 seconds, and the fact that I was bored enough to start counting shot lengths gives you some indication of how exciting I found this film (I wasn't the only audience member who was bored--at least 4-5 other people actually left before the film was over).

Posted by chuck at 10:36 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 22, 2005

The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till

The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (IMDB) revisits the murder of African-American Chicago teenager Emmett Till and the travesty of a trial that acquitted Roy Bryant and his half brother J.W. Milam, who later confessed to the murder in Look magazine, of all charges. While director Keith Beauchamp relies primarily on talking-heads interviews with family members and friends of Till, inlucing his mother who passed away just before the film was completed, he also makes extensive use of news footage and photographs from the weeks immediately after the murder. At the same time, Beauchamp uses Till's story, including some powerful interview footage with Al Sharpton, to reflect on the terrible effects of the Jim Crow laws.

Certainly the most effective interveiws were those conducted with Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who graphically describes her experience of first seeing her son's body and describing the degree to which his face had been mutilated. Roger Ebert explains the power of this scene rather well. Till-Mobley also explains her decision to display her son's body in an open casket during the funeral, forcing the public to confront the racism that contributed to her son's murder. As many reviewers have noted, her decision, which must not have been an easy one, clearly contributed to a growing civil rights movement here in the United States.

While Untold Story may seem like a relatively standard historical documentary, its most important purpose is that it serves as a reminder about this part of America's past. The preservation of important voices like Mamie Till-Mobley's is an important task, especially as many of the important contributors to the Civil Rights movement and many of the poeple who remember the Jim Crow era begin to age and pass away. The film has also contributed to a renewed effort to see several of those involved in the murder and cover-up prosecuted for their crimes (the Voice review has some more information on this case and offers a useful explanation for the "choppiness" in the final third of the film).

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October 21, 2005

Deconstructing Kansas

This is probably old news, but I just came across Larry Bartels' essay,"What's the Matter with What's The Matter With Kansas," (PDF) via Eric Alterman's "Corrupt, Incompetent, and Off-Center", (Alterman's blog). I haven't had a chance to read the Bartels essay (it's my afternoon Metro read), but hopefully I'll have some comments later tonight or tomorrow.

In other news, I'm planning to catch The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till and maybe The War Within this weekend.

Posted by chuck at 4:24 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 20, 2005

Video Aura

A few days ago, I mentioned that I'd finally tracked down a copy of Berkeley Square, a 1933 time-travel film starring Leslie Howard and Heather Angel and directed by Frank Lloyd for Fox, and my copy of the film arrived in the mail yesterday afternoon.

Berkeley Square is one of the earliest time-travel films made by a major studio (I'd argue that some of Edison's shorts might qualify as "time travel"), whihc makes it important to my book project, but I'd been led to believe that the film could not be viewed, that it was among the hundreds of films from the early history of cinema that had not been preserved. The film is also of interest because Andre Breton once commented on how it realized some of the principles of Surrealism (an observation that was somewht more significant to my dissertation than it likely will be to my book). So, yeah, I'm incredibly excited to have the film in my hands, but I've now found myself resisting the idea of sitting down and watching it. It's not that I'm not interested or that I'm bored with my book project. Quite the opposite, in fact. And I don't think that my resistance comes from any sense that the film will "disappoint" me. I've read enough about the film that I have some sense of what to expect.

Instead, I think I've always enjoyed the idea that a "lost" film might provide the framework for a project about cinema and time. This attraction to lost objects may also explain why I found Bill Morrison's Decasia, which consists of a montage of decaying film footage set to the symphonic music of Michael Gordon, so appealing. Now that I know the film exists, if only on video (another medium that is prone to decay), I fear that some of the film's magic, or aura in Walter Benjamin's sense of the term, will be lost.

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October 19, 2005

The Digital Humanities

Via the MITH list-serv: Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has some interesting reading this month.

In "Here's Looking at Casablanca," my former colleague at Georgia Tech, Janet Murray, writes about a collaboration between the American Film Institute and Georgia Tech on a digital critical edition of Casablanca. Her essay raises some interesting questions regarding the role of digital technologies in teaching and studying film. On my old blog, I briefly reflected on the role of DVDs in reshaping film studies (primarily in the comments section), but I haven't thought about this issue nearly as much as I should have, especially given my interest in the intersections between film and digital media. The project sounds really enticing and much more flexible than a standard DVD. To name one example, using this critical edition, one could search for all uses of the song "As Time Goes By" over the course of the film. In a sense, it's treating Casablanca as a kind of database that might support certain kinds of scholarly projects. At the same time, the critical edition is a prototype for dealing with the strict copyright regulations that limit how films (or even short segments of films) can be re-used.

Of course, Murray's passing refence to the experience of watching Casablanca at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge makes me wonder what is being lost in the transition to digitization. The cinetrix has been talking about the Brattle's struggles to stay afloat financially when fewer people are going out to the movies (here's Ty Burr on the Brattle and the cult of Casablanca). Burr's article and the cinetrix's comments also convey the degree to which the Brattle and othe repertory movie theaters function as a community or subculture (as the Brattle clearly does in Boston). I realize that the intent of a digital critical edition is to democratize access, but my inner cinephile doesn't want to see the disappearance of these repertory houses and the communities they support.

In "Democratizing Knowledge," Martha Nell Smith discusses the Dickinson Electronic Archive as an example of democratizing access to primary materials, in this case the manuscripts of poems by Dickinson, Blake, Whitman, and others. I've known about the Dickinson Archives for some time (as will many of the Wordherders), but Smith makes a great case for the ways in which digital technologies can enhance a humanities course (she also cites blogs, wikis, and other course management tools).

Also worth noting: Gregory Crane's "Reading in the Age of Google," whihc discusses the "active reading" driven by search engines such as Google.

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October 18, 2005

Popcorn Economy

This is primarily a bookmarking post to Edward Jay Epstein's Slate article on what he calls the "popcorn economy," in which he explains the role of marketing and publicity in shaping the distinctions between indie and Hollywood.

While I think he overstates the distinction between major indies and Hollywood, specifically when major indies can rely on marketing support unavailable to truly independent filmmakers, the distinctions he makes are valuable. To name just one example, studios are now spending an average of $34 million to promote studio films, often offering "teasers" for their films several months in advance. Not much else to add here, but since I've been thinking about the concept of independent cinema lately, I wanted to have Epstein's article nearby.

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October 17, 2005

Re-Mixing Politics

This may be old news on the Web, but I just came across the video for the remix, "George Bush Don't Like Black People," on iFilm. The video features music by the Legendary K.O. and was directed by Franklin Lopez (thanks to the folks at submedia for the tip).

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October 16, 2005

Good Night, and Good Luck

Good Night, and Good Luck (IMDB), George Clooney's film about the conflict between CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joeseph McCarthy opens with Murrow accepting an award from the Radio Television News Directors Association on October 25, 1958, just a few short years after the McCarthy's HUAC hearings. Gorgeously shot in black-and-white, with Murrow's figure set starkly against a black background, Murrow (David Strathairn) warns against the dangers of television becoming a tool for entertainment at the expense of its potential use for disseminating news and contributing to a vibrant public sphere (the actual text of Murrow's speech is available here. Murrow warns,

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.
It's hardly necessary to point out that Murrow's comments are meant to resonate with the current moment, but Murrow's warning is a powerful one. As Alex notes, at the very least, the film is an excellent piece of "propaganda." It's gorgeously shot and powerfully acted as well. In fact the use of stark, sometimes expressionistic black-and-white cinematography reminded me of another film about a newsman. The use of black-and-white is motivated in part by the decision to use actual footage of McCarthy rather than casting an actor to play him. We see McCarthy in his own words, his own gestures, and because he is always isolated on the screen, McCarthy seems to be part of another world, almost an alien figure. While Clooney's film is far more modest, both filmmakers are interested in the role of the media (TV, newsreels, newspapers) in constructing national identity.

The film has been criticized in some circles for not telling the full story. Stephen Hunter, of the Washington Post (I almost missed this film because of Hunter's sledgehammer review), faults Good Night for failing to acknowledge that there were Commie infiltrators in our midst, but Clooney's film never claims that there were no Communist spies in the U.S. It is, as Murrow's introductory comments imply, a film about the "watchdog" role of TV news. Oddly, Hunter also faults the film for making Murrow seem too one-dimensional, that he takes himself too seriously, rhetorically asking, "Did the guy drink, joke, pinch bottoms, get angry, root for a ball team, love his kids, read the funnies?" Hunter must have missed the bottles of scotch readily available in the office and the ever-present cigarettes that allowed Murrow to keep his cool when he realizes that his career might be in jeopardy due to his tangles with the Wisconsin Senator. Here, Alex's questions about the role of the history film are quite relevant, as are his critiques of "objective" reporting: "Reporting cannot be unbiased, and as Murrow argues in the film, not all stories can or should be balanced. The balance, instead, is in how much you are able to use the facts to tell your story."

Michael Atkinson's Village Voice review offers a much more nuanced take on the film than Hunter's, particularly when it comes to the film's media critique (see also J. Hoberman's interview with Clooney). But while Atkinson finds the scenes in the newsrrom too claustrophobic, I found these scenes to be fascinating, especially in the multiplication of screens that refract and multiply Murrow's and McCarthy's faces, with the use of rack focus often directing our attention.

It seems clear that Good Night is a powerfully relevant film, not only because of its critique of TV news journalism in the build-up to the Iraq War but also because of the attempt to recuperate McCarthy, most visibly in Ann Coulter's Treason.

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October 15, 2005

A History of Violence

I didn't intend to see David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (IMDB) until I read Girish's favorable comments about the film (I think the film was poorly marketed, but that's a rant for another day), and like him, I think it's a smart film that uses genre conventions in innovative ways to reflect on concepts such as America's myth of self-renewal and on the American Dream in general, as well as complicated questions about human identity (k-punk's treatment of genre is good here).

The film opens with a couple of criminals travelling through the heartland to avoid criminal prosecution. The more sympathetic of the two criminals, younger and more handsome commits a cold-blooded act of violence, and the film cuts to a young girl screaming in bed after a nightmare about monsters. Her father, Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), comes in to comfort her, and soon, her brother and mother (Maria Bello) join them. It could be a scene out of any domestic sitcom, down to the cliched words of comfort the family provides if not for the violent opening sequence In this regard, I think Jonathan Rosenbaum's favorable comment that almost any shot in the film could be regarded as a "cliche" is absolutely right). Later, the same criminals enter Tom's smalltown, midwestern diner, seeking to rob him and threatening the life of the diner's waitress. Tom responds with a shocking brutality, made all the more shocking by Cronenberg's paradoxically close-up but clinical treatment of his violent repsonse (note: Girish's comments on the portrayal of violence are worth reading). Because of his swift response in rescuing his employees, Tom quickly becomes a "hero," with the waitress and his chef both emphatically stating, "he saved us." Here Cronenberg subtly treats the media's role in promoting this form of heroism without overdoing it. Rather than the mobs of reporters typical of many Hollywood films, only one enterprising reporter awaits him at home to cover the story. As Girish notes, to some extent, the film's positioning of Tom as a hero makes us complicit. After all, he's the good guy.

[Note: There are probably some serious spoilers in the next few paragraphs] Tom's passive acceptance of his newfound status as hero only deepens the viewer's sense that something isn't quite right (k-punk's use of the descriptive term "uncanny" seems to fit here, and Andrew O'Hehir's description of Cronenberg's "dislocation effect" also works). Juxtaposed against Tom's newfound popularity in the community, we see images of his family life. His son is an outsider, bullied by other students. Tom and his wife work to keep their marriage exciting. During an early sex scene, Edie dresses up in a cheerleader's costume to re-create the teen years they never had together, aperformance that, as k-punk reminds us, calls attention to the fact that cheerleading itself is already a "performance." But this concept of domestic tranquility is gradually challenged. A local police officer is mystified at Tom's quick response. A mysterious car stalks the family home. Soon a tough guy named Fogerty (Ed Harris) shows up at Tom's restaurant, identifying him as a gangster from Philadelphia. Tom denies that he's the guy, but it becomes increasingly clear that he has a past life that he's trying to bury.

Primarily in Tom's attempts to bury this past, I regarded A History of Violence as critiquing the American Dream narrative of self-reinvention. As cronenberg himself notes in teh Salon interview, "It really is about America's mythology of itself rather than attempting to be a slice of life as it's lived in America now, which is quite a different thing." Once "Tom" admits that he's "Joey," the Philly gangster, Tom consistently reiterates that he "buried" Joey or that Joey is dead, but it's clear that he's unable to entirely shake this part of his past. At the same time, the film can be read, as Cronenberg ofers, as a meditation on America's ambivalence with violence (the cowboy myth that animates a certain version of foreign policy), and the film consistently places the viewer in a position of complicity with that violence, especially as Tom works to return to his wife and restore the "normal life" that has been shattered by the return of his (repressed) past.

I've already written far more about this film than I intended, which is testament to how deeply Cronenberg (and Mortesen, whom Cronenberg cites as a close collaborator) has engaged with some prominent myths about vioelnce and national identity. I think Violence is a film that will reward multiple viewings.

Posted by chuck at 6:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 14, 2005

Sounds, Words, Images

In the multiplex:
David Cronenberg's fascinating genre-twisting, identity-bending, American Dream-allegorizing A History of Violence. Many thanks to Girish for pushing this film so enthusiastically. I came thisclose to skipping it.

In the DVD player:
The New Outer Limits: The 1990s version, which includes one volume consisting entirely of time-travel episodes. I got this DVD by accident from Netflix, but one or two of the episodes are quite good, particularly "A Stitch in Time," in which Amanda Plummer plays a physicist who travels back in time to kill serial murderers before they can commit any crimes. Many of the New Outer Limits episodes are pastiches of prior time-travel films and TV shows, which doesn't make them any less interesting.

Next up: Hal Hartley's The Girl From Monday (thanks to Shaviro for the tip).

On KEXP:
The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers, the Mother of Love Emulates the Shapes of Cynthia.

The Postal Service, "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight," Give Up.

In the bookbag:
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.

Update:
On my compter: The folks at JibJab take on outsourcing and a certain Big Box retailer (via DailyKos).

Posted by chuck at 11:21 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Teaching Times

This Teaching Carnival entry is about some of my current experiences teaching a senior-level seminar for the first time. Both G Zombie and Another Damned Medievalist, in their discussions of grading, and Anbruch, in his discussion of teaching a seminar, have addressed some questions I'd like to discuss. Also, as I'll suggest below, because this is my first 3-hour seminar, I'm still learning how to pace class discussion, a process that I'm describing under the concept of "teaching times" in honor of my interest in media and time.

The senior seminar is the culmination of the media studies degree and requires that students write a major research paper on a course theme selected by the instructor. In my case, I've chosen "Media Times" as the theme, which has allowed me to draw from research for my current book project, something I've really enjoyed doing. Rereading some of the important work on media and time (Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes; Television by Raymond Williams, and The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 by Stephen Kern, among other readings) has allowed me to see my own research anew and to recognize a little more clearly what I'd like to contribute with my book.

But teaching the seminar also has been a learning experience in terms of teaching an advanced course. I think Anbruch's advice makes a lot of sense, and I intuitively incorporated some of his pointers into my senior seminar. Like Anbruch, I've generally tried to frontload the reading, with the knowledge that my students will be working hard on their projects at the end of the semester. I've also created a situation in which students do some of the work of leading class discussion. This also allows me to gauge how students are responding to some fairly difficult reading assignments. So far, so good. Discussion has been enthusiastic, and students have been eagerly re-reading theoretical concepts, such as Raymond Williams' notion of "planned flow" through the contemporary situation of a society saturated with countless cable television channels, advertisements embedded within other TV shows, and other contemporary phenomena. I've also been pleasantly surprised at how quickly a three-hour seminar can sail past, at least from the perspective of the instructor. The first couple of weeks, I had to remind myself to take breaks because I'd get so caught up in the discussion, and because I know from recent experience that three hours from a student's perspective is a lot longer than it is from an instructor's. In one of my undergraduate courses, I even learned how to read a clock backwards in its reflection in a window. This clock-watching was not necessarily due to boredom or lack of interest but was instead due to a combination of exhaustion and a lack of control over the "narrative" of the class, and I'm still learning to account for the different level of concentration required in a senior-level class.

Also, as I've suggested, I'm still learning here, and this learning process includes developing strategies for managing senior-level research projects rather than shorter assignments. Unlike Anbruch, I'm not planning to cancel any classes this semester (my conference schedule is busier in the spring), but I will meet with my students individually to ensure that they are making sufficient progress on their papers. Because I have a relatively small number of students (12 or so in my senior seminar), for the first time in several years, it's actually feasible to conduct conferences and to make them more meaningful. I'm also planning to have students "present" their paper projects to the class next Friday, an activity I picked up from one of my professors at Purdue. Not only will this require students to be prepared to talk about their projects to a classroom full of peers, but also it will allow them to cultivate networks and share resources as they conduct their research. It will also establish the seminar paper as a process rather than a punctual, last-minute activity.

But, as my discussion of the seminar paper implies, this will have the effect of backloading the work of grading for me. I've been careful to require occasional written assignments--a proposal, a dilation, a write-up of their presentation--so that there are no surprises at semester's end, but I'm a little concerned about the time crunch in November and December when I'll be prepping for MLA. G Zombie's questions are similar to my own. How do you learn to comment judiciously on seminar papers? I know that I won't be grading seminar papers like I do freshman composition papers, but I'm still trying to gigure out how I'll be positioning myself as a reader (beyond the already-established position as teacher). Here, I think ADM's comments about establishing grading rubrics and clearly defined goals for the assignemnt are really useful. If there's a context in advance, it makes it easier to use comments more efficiently and hopefully to grade more quickly.

Finally, there's the more obvious refrence implied by "teaching times," with teachers fighting to secure morning or afternoon schedules based on their preferences. I'm not a "morning person," so picking up a morning schedule has itself been a learning process. I didn't plan for this entry to focus on "teaching times." It just happened to take that direction, but given my focus on time in some of my research, it seemed like an interesting way to frame some of these questions.

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October 13, 2005

Frontline on Abu Ghraib

I just happened to catch a commercial for an upcoming Frontline documentary on Abu Ghraib, The Torture Question. The episode will be airing Oct. 18, 2005 at 9pm, though obviously local times may vary.

A press release on the PBS website offers more information about the challenges of filming in Iraq and especially in Abu Ghraib.

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Supreme Desires

Just a quick note on Ruth Marcus's Washington Post column, "A Supreme Moment of Ambiguity," which reads reaction to Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court through the new TV series, Commander in Chief, which features Geena Davis as the first female President of the United States. Marcus argues that, "the two events capture the uncertain position of women in public life today," and I think she's generally right about this uncertainty, but I'm not quite willing to share her argument that Miers was nominated primarily because of her gender, although her gender obviously played some role in that decision.

Like Marcus, I'd found the commercials for the show somewhat "off-putting," especially given that the show seems to rely on the improbabilty of a female president. In fact, Davis's character is thrust into office only when the President dies (Air Force One and The Contender, with their female VPs, mine similar territory). As Marcus observes, the series sometimes trades in the gender role reversals (the "First Man," etc), but she quickly adds that because of Davis's "matter-of-fact" performance as the POTUS, the series "is growing on her."

While I haven't seen the series (just the commercials) and can't comment on its treatment of the idea of a female President, I can't help but think of a third image that Marcus fails to mention: the political-pundit fantasy of a presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Condi Rice that many pundits have been imagining (or fearing). I've found it difficult not to think about these rumors every time I see an advertisement for Commander in Chief, and CiC seems to be tapping into those fears as well. Can a female President lead the military in a time of war? Here, it's notable that both candidates are relatively hawkish. How will other nations react to a female leader? Of course the answer to the latter question will probably be yet another question: What took you so long?

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Starbucks Challenge: Gallery Place-Chinatown

G Zombie's enthusiasm for The Starbucks Challenge is contagious. As G Zombie notes, Fair Trade coffee is a pretty cool thing, ensuring that coffee farmers and harvesters get fair working conditions and a fair price for their coffee. According to green LA girl, Starbucks policy is to make Fair Trade coffee for you if you request it, and this week, one of Starbucks' featured coffees is the fair-trade certified Cafe Estima. I had some grading to do this afternoon, so I took the Metro down to the Gallery Place-Chinatown Starbucks, located at 800 7th Street, NW, here in Washington, DC (it was in the early afternoon, around 12:30 PM), to see if they could pass The Starbucks Challenge, reported G Zombie style:

Barista: Hi, may I help you?
Me: Hi, could I get a cup of Fair Trade certified coffee?
Barista: [Complete look of confusion]
Me: If I understand correctly, your Cafe Estima is Fair Trade coffee. I'll have a venti cup of that.
Barista: [Still confused] I don't think we have that. These are our available coffees.
Me: [Spotting the Cafe Estima, labelled only as "Estima"] I'll have that, the Estima.
Barista corrects my pronunciation [mine sounded like "estimate," hers more like "esteem;" anyone know which is correct?] and serves me a cup.
So, basically the trip was successful in that I got Fair Trade coffee, but she seemed a little unclear on the Fair Trade concept.

I happened to enter this particular Starbucks during a lull in customers, so I would have been prepared to request that they French-press a cup, but luckily they had some already brewed.

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October 12, 2005

Documenting Katrina

While digging around on Technorati tags, I came across the news that Spike Lee is planning a documentary, When the Levee Broke, aobout the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for HBO (via Breitbart and The Thinklings). Here's an announcement from Variety confirming the planned documentary.

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Housekeeping

I've recently received several great tips about some interesting film and documentary projects, so thought I'd pass the news along:

First, the promising-looking political documentary, This Divided State (IMDB), which follows Michael Moore's controversial decision to speak at Utah Valley State College. The trailer is pretty powerful, and their website features some valuable supplemental material.

Also, a quick pointer to the caveh experiment (no relation to my blog), dedicated to the work of filmmaker Caveh Zahedi.

Finally, I've been meaning to call attention to The Journal of Short Film, a quarterly DVD journal containing 90-120 minutes of independent short film per volume. And, according to the website, JSF will soon be accompanied by The Journal of Political Film.

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Post Blogging

Last night, I caught Henry Farrell's thoughtful discussion of how blogging is changing politics. Henry noted that although individual blogs have significantly smaller readerships than most major news sources (such as The New York Times or Washington Post), they have attracted a significant amount of attention in the media and even in political dialogue. Today, a Washington Post article, "Cyber-Catharsis: Bloggers Use Web Sites as Therapy," explores the potentially therapeutic role blogs can have. While the article acknowledges the personal and professional risks of "therapy blogging," it also cites Matt Kirschenbaum and others who note that blog relationships can become "very real" (these "risks" are not unrelated to the Tribblist cautionary tales about academic blogging). Henry's talk and the Post article do bring up some interesting questions about why blogging has recieved so much ambivalent attention from "older" media.

In terms of political dialogue, as Henry noted in his talk, during Senator Cornyn's questions for John Roberts, he apparently cited reaction to Roberts' nomination in the blogosphere. Negative reactions in the blogosphere to Harriet Miers' nomination, especially among conservative bloggers, have also received a lot of attention, even if relatively few people are reading a vast majority of blogs that are out there (including my own). However, as Henry notes, many of the people who are attentive to blogs, including journalists and political actors, can have a major, if indirect, effect on politics.

In this context, I've been interested in the responses to bloging by the two major national newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Most bloggers know by now that the Times has now walled off its op-ed content, requiring that readers pay a somewhat significant annual subscription fee. The result has been a decrease in the influence of New York Times columnists, at least within the blogosphere (which is only a small corner of the world, of course). By contrast, the Washington Post has used blogging to encourage readership, not only by using Technorati to highlight blogs that are linking to Post content, but also by citing bloggers in their Media Notes Extra section, to which I'm quickly becoming addicted. I probably don't need to develop this line of argument any further, but I have been intrigued by the Post's careful cultivation of an audience of bloggers.

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October 11, 2005

Smurf Bombs

I have to teach in about five minutes, so a quick link for now: According to The Age, UNICEF is using a short animated sequence of the Smurf Village being bombed to teach schoolchildren about the war. The film was made with the approval of the family of the Smurfs' creator, with the stipulation that it not air before 9 PM. Needless to say, reactions to the bombing of Smurf village are mixed.

Metafilter has a link to the video. More later, if I get a chance.

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October 10, 2005

Night and Day

For now a bookmarking post: Peter Baldwin, "Mapping Time: Night and day in the nineteenth-century city," Commonplace, 6.1 (October 2005). Thanks to Anne for the link.

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Giving

After yet another natural disaster, more of our fellow citizens are suffering, this time in Southeast Asia (Amardeep provides links to some of the eyewitness testimony available on the BBC website). As Caleb, AKMA and many others remind us, it is our duty now to give what we can and mourn with the grieving. One place where you can give is the Oxfam Global Emergencies Fund. You can also donate to the Red Cross.

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Lost Films Found

I've been reading Sylvaine Agacinski's fascinating book, Time Passing, today. TP touches on many of the questions that I'll be addressing in my time-travel cinema book, particularly the relationship between mechanical reproduction (photography and cinema) and memory. In one particular passage, Agacinski writes about the way in which a photograph creates an "illusion of contemporaneity" between the observer and the photographed object, which results in "confusing their respective times" (92). She uses metaphors of ghosts and haunting, which inevitably reminded me of my media horror essay (currently under revision). But more importantly, her comments recalled for me one of the first known time-travel films, Berkeley Square (Frank Lloyd, 1933), a film that has haunted my project since it was a dissertation. I'd been led to believe that there were no copies of the film available, but thanks to an IMDB reviewer, I've discovered that isn't the case (and if everything goes as planned I'll have a copy in a few days).

Arne Andersen, the IMDB reviewer, also has a website worth checking out, the Lost Film Files, where Andersen lists lost films from the years 1925-1929 in the hopes of assisting researches in knwoing what's available and what has been lost. It's a useful resource, especially given the questions of archivability that always seem to haunt the cinematic medium.

Hoping to have more to say about Time Passing later this week. ...

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What is Independent Cinema?

As I mentioned, I've been thinking about the concept of independent cinema this weekend. This question informs the paper I'll be delivering at the MLA conference in December. In my paper, which starts from The Jacket director John Maybury's critical comments about the Hollywood film industry. Maybury, who wasn't shy about criticizing powerful industry figures, describes The Jacket both in terms of the European art cinema and in terms of its "subtextual" treatment of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. In the paper, I'll be exploring the film's allusions to and reliance upon this "European art cinema" tradition, but I want to argue as well that the film's ostensible status as an "indpendent" also needs to be explored (the film was produced by Warner Independents).

So, here's my question: What constitutes an independent film? I've been reading Chris Holmlund and Justin Wyatt's fine collection of essays, Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream, and I'm still not convinced that there is an easy answer here. The most pessimistic answer is that "indie" is a mere marketing label cynically deployed by the major studios to attract hip, usually urban, audiences. In this regard, stylistic flourishes--handheld camera, intimate character studies, references to international art cinema, or films featuring indie auteurs (Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, or stars such as Parker Posey)--might make an idnie aesthetic recognizable. In this context, institutions such as IFP's "Independent Spirit Awards," which reward films for following a "spirit" of independence allow relatively major films, such as Alexander Payne's Election to qualify as "independent."

Such a definition, however, would render the term virtually useless as a critical tool, other than to read indie as ideological. To be sure, this isn't an unimportant task, but given the cultural relevance associated with "indie" as a concept, the cynical reading isn't entirely satisfying.

The "industrial" definition of independent is crucial in my reading, but that is now fairly clouded. Holmlund argues in her introduction to her book (see also Chuck Kleinhans), that independent cinema is a "relational term," by which she means that indies range from no-budget (under $100,000) through to "tweeners" ($10-30 million) and beyond. If "independent" is taken to imply films that were not financed by a major studio, then many big budget films--arguably including Gangs of New York and Chicago--qualify. With many (or all) of the major studios now operating "independent" houses, the term again loses its flavor. I'd add here that "independent" in this ocntext is complicated along production and distribution axes as well (a film might be made "indepedently" but distributed by a studio).

It's tempting to reclaim "independent," either as a politically opposiional term (as Patricia Zimmermann does in States of Emergency) or as a filmmaking practice completely divorced from the media congolmerates (many political docs distributed online--from the right and left--might qualify here). But film promotional and trade materials have made such a reclamation difficult to imagine. While the documentary genre is as vibrant as ever, the indie label doesn't fit comfortably over some of the more oppositional films, at least in my reading.

I could write at greater length about some of the questions I'm still trying to sort out, but I just realized that it's almost 2 AM (I do have Monday off, so I won't be a total zombie tomorrow). I'll conclude for now that I don't mean to sound as if I'm disparaging the "indie" concept here. As Robert Eberwein argues in "Channeling Independence" (one of the essays in Holmlund and Wyatt), many independent films and filmmakers are doing important, progressive political work, and channels such as IFC and the Sundance Channel (I'd add HBO here) often support films that might otherwise never find an audience.

I'd love to hear from both filmmakers and film scholars (and anyone else, for that matter) who read my blog. What do you think of when you talk about "independent cinema?"

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October 9, 2005

War Feels Like War

The POV documentary War Feels Like War (IMDB) follows a group of independent journalists during the first few weeks of the Iraq War, with the film concluding soon after the coalition forces had taken Baghdad. Even at these very early stages, the journalists and US military have some vague premonitions of a developing resistance, powerfully illustrated by what appeared to be an anti-occupation rally in the streets of Baghdad. Like many POV docs, the film relies primarily on a verite-lite style (POV-verite?), with a fly-on-the-wall camera, no voice-over, and little explicit editorial comment, and while the film isn't overtly pedantic about the role of independent journalists, it does demonstrate the risks and challenges these journalists are willing to face in order to get a good story. At the same time, War complicates this narrative by noting the degree to which journalists (embedded or independent) can invade the privacy of Iraqi citizens, many of whom are in mourning, who never asked to be filmed.

Perhaps teh most compelling figure in the documentary was Stephanie Sinclair, an award-winning photojournalist based out of Chicago when the film was made (her affiliation has changed several times since, and according to this POV follow-up, she is now living in Beirut). Sinclair's photographs from the war are rather powerful, and the film itself is among the more powerful when it comes to showing the incredible violence of war. Several scenes depict civilian casualties, and one sequence depicts US soldiers treating a group of Iraqis rather roughly. In any case, the film is also highly effective in its portrayal of the seductiveness of covering war, the degree to which it provides many of the jouranlists with a sense of purpose, reminding me in many ways of Chris Hedges' amazing book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.

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Three Things

Thing One: Washington Cube is tackling what sounds like a daunting task, leaving at least one comment in every blog listed in the DC Blogs blogroll. "Cube" notes that the biggest challenge is not finding something to say to hundreds of different bloggers, but navigating the security measures that many blogs have had to enforce due to blogspam. I think Cube's gesture is a really cool one, a productive way of starting conversations with dozens of bloggers throughout the city.

Thing Two: I keep trying to get out, but they pull me back in. The Braves have let me (well not only me) down yet again in the playoffs. Given their recent history, I can't say that I'm suprised, but they seem to find annoying new ways of losing every year. This year's version: an 18-inning marathon that consumed most of my day.

Thing Three: As I mentioned earlier, I've been thinking about the category of the "independent film" today for my paper for MLA, specifically because the film I'll be discussing is an "indepedent," produced by Warner Indepedent Features. Long story short, while digging on IMDB this afternon (I wasn't just watching the game), I came across one of Warner's planned productions, Joshua Marston's follow-up to Maria Full of Grace, The Iraqi Convoy Project, a feature film about "the lives of American truckers who, because of hard times at home, commit to transporting goods for U.S. contractors through the Iraqi war zone." Could be an intriguing film.

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Midnight Madness

I've been thinking about the concept of independent cinema at some length this weekend (more on that later), and with those questions in mind, I went to a midnight screening of Russ Meyer's wonderfully trashy cult classic, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (BVD from now on), at the Landmark last night. I'd forgotten that 20th Century Fox produced the film, but Russ Meyer's status as an "independent" director shaped my curiosity about the film (plus I thought it'd be fun to see it on the big screen).

I'm not sure I'd be able to say anything about BVD that hasn't already been said, but as Roger Ebert, who co-wrote the film, notes, BVD is certainly a product of its era, one in which the studios were struggling financially and in which an X-rating was not necessarily seen as box office poison (as the NC-17 is often characterized today). It's fascinating also as a satire of the late '60s culture and the Hollywood conventions that had grown stale. Ebert's comments also reminded me that the film appeared relatively soon after the Sharon Tate murders. But there's also a degree to which Ebert's comments (he describes it at one point as "an essay on our generic expectations") seem motivated to clean up the film, to deny its trashy fun.

The midnight screening at the Landmark was a pretty groovy event, though, and I'd say that even if I didn't win a free copy of Oldboy (now I can finally see it). In addition to a few freebies, the guys behind Heavy Metal Parking Lot (which will soon be released on DVD) introduced the film and screened one of their short films. I also learned that the E Street Cinema (Landmark) is applying for a liquor license, which will make the art house experience that much more enjoyable.

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October 7, 2005

Don't Call it a Comeback, or Return of the (Ruxpin) Repressed

Sometimes the blogging gods smile upon you, my friends. I'd come to terms with the fact that today would be a slow blog day, and then I learned from The Reeler that the lovably creepy (or is that creepily lovable) talking bear from the 1980s, Teddy Ruxpin, is making his return to toy store shelves. That's right, Teddy Ruxpin is back, and now he's Wired for the Digital Age, with his old cassette tapes replaced by MP3s.

Ruxpin's return from the far-off Land of Grundo will be accompanied by the DVD release of all 65 episodes of the Teddy Ruxpin TV show (I had no idea there was a TV show) due to the "unimaginable popularity" of this talking bear. As The Reeler points out, this "unimaginable popularity" derives from a petition containing a grand total of 650 signatures. I think that part of what creeps me out about this whole thing is that Teddy Ruxpin was one of the first toys that I clearly recognized as a cynical marketing gimmick when I was a kid, and the nostalgic return to the 1980s collectibles, and more crucially their digitization, conveys that cycle of obsolescence and recycling of past fashions far too vividly.

The Reeler's news follows on the heels of an article I noticed yesterday but failed to blog. It seems that after the relative box office success of the Dukes of Hazzard film, 1980s TV shows and collectibles are fair game for summer nostalgia films, with Miami Vice, Dallas, and The Transformers among the planned adaptations. Can a Diff'rent Strokes or Facts of Life movie be far behind?

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October 6, 2005

The Constant Gardener

Based on a John Le Carré thriller, The Constant Gardener (IMDB) begins with the murder in Kenya of Tessa Quayle, wife of a mild-mannered British bureaucrat, Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes, who always seems incapable of romance, unless it's in flashback). Like many Le Carré novels, Gardener traces the outlines of a vast conspiracy, this one involving the globalized pharmaceutical industry, with the British government presumably complicit. It's an interesting Hollywood debut for the director of City of God, and while I liked City better, both films engage with power and economic inequality in interesting ways without being overwhelmingly pedantic.

After we learn of Tessa's death, the film flashes back to Justin and Tessa's first meeting, when the reticent Justin delivers a lecture for one of his colleagues. The passionate Tessa disrupts the question and answer session, criticizing the British government for its participation in the war in Iraq. Defeated and mildly embarassed by her passion, Tessa collpases in tears, with Justin staying to console her. Without giving too much of the film away, much of the film--and our perception of Tessa--hinges on this scene. Is Tessa simply a passionate woman who falls for the gentle Justin? Or does she have ulterior motives in marrying him? Justin's faith in their relationship wavers when it's implied that she may be having an affair with an African doctor, Arnold, with whom she seems to be spending a lot of time.

I won't reveal the specifics of the conspiracy, other than to say that in places I found the conspiracy perhaps a little too narrow and too contained by the end of the film, although Le Carre's novel (and the film itself) are certainly critical of the practice of big pharmaceuticals in testing drugs they know to be dangerous, usually on the poor. While I'm not quite ready to follow Ebert's lead and say that it's one of the best films I've seen this year, it's certainly critical, almost to the point of cynicism, of the pharmaceutical industry's exploitation of poverty in Africa.

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I'm Mad as Hell...

...and I'm gonna remake a 1970s movie. The Washington Post report that George Clooney is remaking the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet satire of sensationaized TV news, Network, has been making the rounds this week.

Andrew Cline at Rhetorica asks who'll play Howard Beale. My first suggestion is Philip Baker Hall, who could pull off the weathered journalist/anchorman role pretty nicely. But the more important question in my opinion: Who gets the Faye Dunaway role?

Cline also points to the Jck Shafer Slate review of Clooney's latest film, Good Night and Good Luck, which is about the "battle" between Edward R. Murrow and Joeseph McCarthy. I saw a trailer last night before a screening of The Constant Gardener, and the film looks gorgeous with its black and white cinematography and smoke-filled newsrooms. Shafer faults the film for being too generous to Murrow, but given McChris's defense of the "golden age" in the comments to this entry, I'm willing to use that fictionalizing if it will serve as an effective critique of contemporary media practice.

Clooney's first directorial efort, the Charlie Kaufman scripted Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, also turns its eye towards questions about media and celebrity. I'm starting to detect a theme here....

Update: I almost forgot the most important part. Clooney's planning on doing his remake of Network on CBS--live.

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October 5, 2005

Wednesday Night Linkfest

Just a few late night (early morning?) links to help you procastinate right along with me:

Our tour of the Internet begins with a Boing Boing offering of a Vietnam-era anti-war ad with Jon Voight providing the voice-over (via Cinemocracy, who also notices that Miers supporters--or opponents--have been practicing their photoshop skills).

Next, it turns out Edward Jay Epstein was right (not that I ever doubted him). Hollywood is over. America's Finest News Source has the scoop (thanks to Green Cine).

I'm not sure where I heard this story, but word on the street (by street, I mean the Internet Movie Database) is that Roberto Benigni is doing an Iraq War comedy about a "love-struck Italian poet [who] is stuck in Iraq at the onset of an American invasion." The good news? Tom Waits is rumored to be participating in the film. The bad news? Roberto Benigni is particpating in the film. Maybe I'm being unfair, but this project sounds awfully crass to me.

This news probably deserves a separate entry, but it's worth noting that poet laureate Ted Kooser will be giving a reading of his work on October 13 here in DC. The event is free and open to the public.

In other news, I'm teaching Mary Ann Doane's The Emergence of Cinematic Time in my senior seminar, which means I've been finding all sorts of fun ways to procrastinate on the Library of Congress American Memory project pages. I recommend the Edison films and sound recordings as well as the rest of the American Memory Collection.

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Blog Lecture at GWU

Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber will be giving a lecture on blogs, “Welcome to the Blogosphere: How Blogs are Changing Politics,” next Tuesday (October 11), from 6pm-8pm. The venue is GWU’s Elliott School, Suite 602, 1957 E St. NW, Washington DC.

He adds that "There’ll be a reception afterwards. No RSVPs are necessary; CT readers are especially welcome."

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Sadie Benning Pixelvision Films

Just a quick link to an online collection of Sadie Benning Pixelvision videos to show my students (via Video Data Bank). More later, maybe.

Update: The O'Reilly essay cited above provides a good overview for the technical specs of the Fisher Price Pixelvision camera Benning used for her short films.

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October 4, 2005

Passing Time/Time Passing

Here's what I've been doing over the last few days when I haven't been watching films at the DC Underground Film Festival.

First, I mentioned in passing last week that I would be leading a discussion in a graduate seminar at the University of Maryland on 1950s juvenile delinquency films, specifically Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. It's the first time I've been invited to speak in a graduate seminar, so the invitation itself was very flattering, and I very much enjoyed the experience. Because of my love-hate relationship with movies about teachers, I found Blackboard Jungle particularly fun to discuss. If you haven't seen the film in a while, it's worth watching again, especially for the homoerotic subtext between the teacher (played by Glenn Ford) and Miller, one of the class leaders (Sidney Poitier). The film's hysteria regarding delinquency may appear quaint now, particularly when Ford directly addresses the camera to warn his audience (fellow teachers? adult spectators? the teenage spectators who embraced the film?) about the perils of delinquency.

Yesterday, I came across the Internet Archive, a resource that brings together several amazing collections of films, videos, and other moving images. I knew about the Prelinger Archives, but many of these collections are new to me (via Atrios). Not sure I have much to add here. In a sense, this link is a self-reminder for me as I set up my next assignment in my junior seminar, which requires students to do "historical research" on a media artifact from before 1985. When my students write their research papers later this semester, it'll be worth pointing them to these archives to provide them with some other materials that might help them to find and develop an interesting topic.

Finally, Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas is speaking here at CUA this afternoon. I've been rethinking some of Frank's ideas after hearing a paper that name-dropped Frank at Visible Evidence, so I'm very much looking forward to the talk (and hopefully that will translate into yet another blog entry).

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October 2, 2005

Chain

Empty parking lots, hotel lobbies lit by skylights, shopping mall food courts, rundown and sometimes abandoned strip malls. These are the spaces inhabited and navigated by the two protagonists of Jem Cohen's sublime new film, Chain. As this Cinema Scope interview notes, Chain is dominated by establishing shots of malls, shopping centers, hotel, airports, and other homogeneous public spaces we encounter on a daily basis:

Chain is a movie in establishing shots. Except that these shots serve the opposite purpose: obscuring and disorienting— dis-establishing, if you will.
In fact, at the end of the film, we learn that Chain was filmed in eleven states and five countries, making the film a commentary on the effect of globalization on human experience. However, like the Benjamin of the Arcades Project, Cohen avoids "looking down" on the stripmalling of the planet and instead remains content to observe, to witness how people inhabit this world, how they make their way through these spaces. These two protagonists, Tamiko (Miho Nikaido), a Japanese businesswoman representing her corporation in the US, and Amanda (Mira Billotte), a runaway drifting between endless, often under-the-table McJobs. Their stories interweave and often comment on each other in surprising ways.

I mention Benjamin here in part because Cohen cites The Arcades Project in the closing credits. He also mentions Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, and more pertinent to my interests, he dedicates the film to Chris Marker (yeah, I mentioned this detail a few months ago). And the film very much reminded me of Marker's Sans Soleil (perhaps my all-time favorite film if I was ever asked such a question), both in its narrative style and its treatment of the commodifcation of public space.

Like Sans Soleil, Chain proceeds largely through voice-over narration as the two solitary characters, Tamiko and Amanda, live in these spaces. Tamiko hs come to the US to propose converting an old steel mill into an amusement park (something oddly similar has recently happened in Atlanta), and she now awaits further guidance from the corporation. Meanwhile, the runaway Amanda drifts from job to job, living in derelict spaces and eating the remainders of lunches people carelessly leave behind in a mall food court. Later in the film, she finds a video camera, which she uses to create video letters to her half-sister. Of course, Amanda knows that she probably won't send these "letters," but she continues making them. Amanda's video letters are just one of the nods to Marker's film, which is entirely constructed of letters from a filmmaker read by an unseen narrator.

I found the filming of the video letters to be one of the film's most beautiful and memorable motifs. Cast in the camera's night-vision lighting (Amanda worries about being spotted and forced to move from her hiding place), Amanda develops a ghostly presence, one that is echoed by her lack of interaction with other people she watches in the mall. Amanda's struggles to get by also recall Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" experiment in working-class living.

I'm not sure that I'm ready to make any larger claims about the film at this point, other than to say that I know many of the film's images will haunt me for some time. Chain is an amazing achievement and deserves a much wider audience (for my DC readers, this means you should attend the screening of Chain which will take place on November 10 at the Hirshhorn Musuem).

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Shining

Check out this re-mixed preview for Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

Via KF and Dylan.

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Zombie Business

In the same DCUFF program that featured Burn to Shine, I also caught Zombie Business, one of the funnier and smarter short films I've seen in a long time. Zombie Business, as its plot summary suggests, "is unleashed as the "invisible hand" of "voodoo economics" produces disposible people. Shot in Super 8, the film evokes the silent era, while also mixing B-movie horror, experimental cinema and political satire."

The film opens with a nod to one of Karl Marx's best lines: "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." From there we are introduced to a teenager reading headlines about Reagan's "voodoo economics," but the teen grows up to become a businessman who rides a train between his McMansion and a skyscraper in the city. The fleeting camera shots of advertisements for Dawn of the Dead and other 1980s zombie movies were probably unnecessary, but they do set the tone for Zombie Business's playful satire.

Of course, beyond this political satire I also enjoyed the film's wonderful use of silent film and B-movie horror conventions, including the silent film organ and the "gestural" camerawork often used in silent film, often used to communicate ideas when recording dialogue was impossible. These conventions are turned on their head late in the film when we get color footage of an anti-globalization protest (the specific protest is mentioned, but I forgot to write this information down).

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Burn to Shine

Burn to Shine is a film series produced by Fugazi's Brendan Canty and directed by film maker Christoph Green. The films feature a group of local rock bands performing one song each in a house facing imminent destruction. The second film in the series, filmed in Chicago, which happened to be playing last night at the DC Underground Film Festival, features bands including Wilco, Shellac, Tortoise, The Ponys, and many others. During the Q&A afterwards, one of the filmmakers mentioned future Burn to Shine films set for Portland, Iceland, and Louisville, so it looks like the series should thrive for some time.

Aside from the pleasure of watching several great bands perform, I really enjoyed the atmosphere set up by the film of a slice of time, conveyed in part by the changing amounts of sunlight coming through the windows, in this old, soon to be destroyed house. In voice-over at the beginning of the film, we learn a little about the history of the house and the reasons it will soon be torn down. The filmmakers made effective use of the house's colors and textures and how those spaces might tell us something about the history of that space. The Chicago film culminates in the actual destruction of the house during a gray, wet midwestern day, the yellow of the bulldozer sharply contrasting with the rest of the scene.

The Burn to Shine concept is a cool one, and I'm hoping to go back and see the first film in the series, set in DC and featuring personal faves, Ted Leo and Bob Mould (blog).

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October 1, 2005

War Docs and the Interactive Database Narrative

KF has a fascinating post about a planned lecture on the "blog as narrative archive," one which has helped me to connect some theoretical questions I've been trying to address. Like KF, I've thought about blogging narratives in terms of their diachronic, often diaristic, structure, and like her, I believe that the media focus on "serious" or political blogs often obscures the value of diaristic blogs that tend to focus on the private sphere. While I probably err on the side of the serious around here, I have a great appreciation of the anonymous academic bloggers who frequently address "private-sphere" issues. As KF argues, there is "a relationship to be posited between the dismissal of such private-sphere blogs and the historical dismissal of feminine modes of writing."

In her discussion of this aspect of blogging, KF talks about teh overlap between this dichronic organization and the database model that is often associated with most forms of web-based or hypertextual writing. Here, KF's argument is worth quoting in detail:

the blog might require some interweaving of theories of hypertext and theories of time-based media, such as film, in order to be fully explored as a narrative form. And in thinking through the private sphere blog in particular, the ways in which it constructs the self both as an ongoing narrative and as a historical archive, demands a hybrid mode of reading that brings together the literary, the cinematic, and the digital.
I really like this reading of blogging because it very much describes my blog writing and reading practice, especially when I'm able to go back and revisit my initial reaction to a film and to see how my thinking may have evolved over several weeks or months.

But KF's comments are also helping me to reframe my recent consideration of both autobiographical and Iraq War documentaries (the two categories are not mutually exclusive by any means), a documentary style I tried to understand under therather clunky phrase, "the living room aesthetic." Specifically I'm interested in the ways in which both of the prominent grunt's-eye documentaries (Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland) have been characterized in terms of tedium or repetition. And, in some sense, I think this aesthetic might be linked to Marsha Kinder's discussion of the "interactive database narrative" KF discusses. I'm still wrpping my head around this concept (and any suggestions could help), but my impulse is to link the narrative structure of these films to the role of the database, first on the technological and material level of construction, with editing technologies such as Final Cut Pro treating recorded (filmed? not necessarily) images as objects in a potentially vast database. But I'm also interested in the ideological level of this relationship between database and narrative. One might point to the "tedium" (or better the alternation between tedium and chaos) of the war documentary narrative.

This next point is somewhat unrelated to war documentaries, but I think Kinder's discussion of Bunuel as a database filmmaker might also provide a productive avenue through which I can revise some of my claims about time-travel cinema. In particular, she cites a Bunuel reference to cinema as a time machine. It's not uncommon for filmmakers or film theorists to refer to cinema as a time machine (D.W. Griffith certainly imagined cinema as a time machine), but Kinder's argument may help me to frame some of these issues more carefully, particularly when it comes to alternate-reality films such as Sliding Doors, Me Myself I, and Run Lola Run (the ultimate database film). This is just a very rough sketch of some ideas that I'm currently trying to (re)shape, so any suggestions or feedback (or requests for clarification) would be much appreciated.

Note: KF also points out Kinder's involvement in the Labyrinth Project, which might also be relevant to some of the ideas I'd like to unpack here.

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BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge

Like Occupation: Dreamland, Stephen Marshall's BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge (IMDB) seeks to present the war in Iraq from a perspective that goes beyond what we see in the nightly news. BattleGround, which played last night at the DC Underground Film Festival and will soon be available on DVD, attempts something a bit different (I won't say "more ambitious" because all of these films are ambitious) in that it presents multiple competing narratives about the effects of the war in Iraq, particularly on the lives of Iraqi citizens.

On the one hand, we are introduced to a young man who joined the 1991 resistance and was forced to flee Iraq. As the film opens, he is returning to Iraq, where he will see his family for the first time in over a decade. In one of the most emotionally powerful scenes I can recall seeing this year, the man is reuinted with a beloved uncle, their speeding heartbeats captured by the microphone attached to the youner man's shirt. The son later reunites with his mother in a similar scene, and it becomes difficult to question their optomism about a new Iraq.

On the other hand, other interviewees tell a different story. Former Al Jazeera worker May Ying Welsh describes the toll taken on Baghdad by the bombs that hit the city during the "Shock and Awe" phase of the war. Later, Raed Jarrar, of the blog Raed in the Middle, describes the dangers of scavenging for scrap in a local "tank graveyard" due to the depleted uranium that was used to coat many of the tank-busting weapons used by the US during the war. We also hear from a well-read US soldier who explains that the war is a product of globalization and US economic interests.

Marshall's film carefully avoids consulting "experts," at least in the traditional sense of the term, and I think that's an advantage of the film. We are provided with several thoughtful, intelligent people who are trying ot make sense of the war, as the filmmakers seek to "highlight the humanity of all sides of the conflict." As the indieWire reviewer (cited on the BattleGround homepage) notes, one of teh strengths of the film is the lack of awareness of the Iraqi perspective, especially as Iraq people faced the lack of electricty and water immediately after the first phase of the war (and rationing for a long time afterwards).

Because I watched the film almost immediately after Occupation: Dreamland, I feel like I need to see BattleGround a second time before I fully understand it, but it's another example of great documentary work coming out of the war in Iraq. BattleGround 's director, Stephen Marshall, is part of the Gureilla News Network, which looks like a fantastic alternative news source for thinking about the war and other issues.

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Occupation: Dreamland

During one memorable sequence in Ian Olds and Garrett Scott's grunt's-eye documentary, Occupation: Dreamland (IMDB), one of the soldiers glances at the camera and asks if the camera crew will be going with them on the mission. The moment reminds us that the lightweight documentary camera has become a crucial participant in the ongoing production of the war in Iraq, and throughout the film, Olds and Scott's camera not only captures the soldiers in conflict but it also becomes a magnet for both soldiers and Iraqi citizens to reflect, to complain, and to air grievances. These candid comments--from both American soldiers and Iraqi civilians--gave Occupation: Dreamland a startling, raw power that I felt even more deeply as I reflected that over a year later, conditions in Iraq seem to have changed very little.

Occupation: Dreamland followed the sodliers of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division over the course of several weeks early in 2004 in Falluja, just as the city was beginning to destabilize (the New York Times review offers a helpful chronology), and we can see the relationship between soldiers and civilians deteriorating over the course of the film. In particular, the Iraqis complain bitterly about the soldiers having taken a local woman into custody. In other sequences a soldier candidly admits that he doesn't blame the locals for their response to the soldiers, noting that "I'm sure it scares the shit out of these people." Such comments are intercut with shots of street patrols and night raids, many of which were shot with infrared lighting to add to the "surreal" effect. At the same time, we get a sense of thetedium that the soldiers often confront, with one soldier confiding, "I kind of enjoy getting shot at." At least, he notes, it gets the blood pumping. Washington Post reviewer Stephen Hunter views this sense of tedium (or "boredom," as he puts it) as a weakness, but as with Gunner Palace, I find that the tedium, the lack of any clear narrative progression, actually reflects and implicitly comments on the "lousy narrative" of the war itself, to use Thomas Doherty's descriptive phrase about Vietnam films (Village Voice reviewer Joshua Land also notes that bordeom is "primary mode" of the film).

The film has inevitably drawn comparison to Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's Gunner Palace (my review), which came out several months earlier but documents a similar moment in the war. As The Nation film critic, Stuart Klawans notes, Gunner Palace comes across as the "more entertaining" film, at least to the degree that soldiers are willing to play to the camera using freestyle raps. The surreal experience of living in Uday Hussein's pleasure palace also gives the film an absurd edge. Occupation: Dreamland's soldiers tend to be more somber and subdued, and the differences in the style of the interviews make the films nice companion pieces. More crucially, Tucker's voice-over in Gunner Palace codes the film as a subjective experience, a journey of sorts, while Occupation: Dreamland eschews voice-over and a clear framing narrative. Instead, we get six weeks in the life of one squad. This lack of context frustrated Klawans, who faulted the film for being too stingy with these details. I tentatively agree with Klawans (the wartime cliche about truth being the first casualty of war faintly echoes), but the film's effectiveness, in my reading, grows out of the fact that it isn't overly pedantic.

Instead, the film allows the soldiers to offer their own critiques. Few of the soldiers defend the Bush or Rumsfeld line on the war, while others explicitly question their mission in Falluja (one soldier notes drily at one point that "we're not securing Falluja; we're securing ourselves"). In more subtle ways, the film also investigates questions of masculinity and social class as they inform the military. Many soldiers mention that they joined because they had "nothing better to do" or because they needed the money for college. In several sequences, one soldier flexes his Rambo-esque muscles in front of a mirror (and of course the camera itself), while Playboy-style pinups appear in the background in other shots in the barracks. The film doesn't work through these questions in quite enough detail, but Dreamland was even more strikingly masculine than Gunner Palace. It would be easy here to fall into Stephen Hunter's condescending "anthropological" reading of the film (he digresses for an entire paragraph on the soldiers' use of dip), and I think the film carefully avoids that kind of treatment of the soldiers.

But what makes Occupation: Dreamland an indispensible wartime doc, in my reading, is the fact that it allows the Iraqi people to speak. These scenes never cease to fascinate me, as the people who do speak clearly appeal to the camera and believe in its ability to transmit their complaints against unjust actions (whether by Saddam or by the soldiers). I didn't mean to write at such great length on this film, but it clearly affected me more deeply than I realized, and while I sometimes found the lack of context a little frustrating, Ocupation: Dreamland demonstrates why documentary filmmaking remains such an important, vibrant practice.

Note: If you're in the DC area, Occupation: dreamland is playing this week at the Warehouse Theater, not too far from the Gallery Place Metro station.

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