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April 30, 2006

United 93

In reviews of Paul Greengrass' United 93 (IMDB), there is a tendency to begin the review by invoking the politics of representing 9/11. Writing in the Village Voice, Dennis Lim explains that the film has been discussed "almost as if it were itself some kind of terror attack." Meanwhile Manhola Dargis comments in The New York Times that United 93 is "persuasively narrated [and] scrupulously tasteful," implicitly seeking to assure audiences that the film is not exploiting the tragedy. As Dana Stevens points out, these reviews and others like them illustrate "the discomfort that we still feel about representations of that dreadful day." And United 93 and its reception clearly points to the degree to which these questions are unresolved and will likely remain unresolved for some time. When I've discussed United 93, I've argued that these questions have less to do with "readiness" and more to do with "appropriateness," about how the story gets told.

Greengrass approaches the material with what can best be described as a docu-thriller style. Using handheld cameras and other verite techniques, United 93 positions itself as presently history as it really happened. While Greengrass is careful to emphasize that we don't know with any certainty exactly what happened on the plane, the film positions itself as offering an authentic historical narrative, one that in Greengrass' terms depicts "the DNA of our times." But as Paul Farhi of The Washington Post points out, United 93 does go far beyond what we know about the attacks, and it's worth asking how the film's "plausible truth" will contribute to the national narrative of September 11, a debate that is most explicitly felt around the decision to change the title card at the conclusion of the film. As Lim points out, the title card originally read "America's war on terror had begun," suggesting a Bush-style memorialization of the war, but the new title card ("Dedicated to the memory of all those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.") recasts the story slightly, suggesting a more somber memorialization.

At the same time, the film deploys many of the techniques of an action thriller, cutting quickly between the various scenes of action: the cockpit and the passenger area, but also the air traffic control centers in New York and Boston, as well as the NORAD defense center. The establishing sequences, designed to suggest that September 11 began as "just another day," set up the passengers as everyday people with normal lives who are just trying to get home to their families (that the passengers are always characterized in terms of family and not other forms of identity also seems significant). However, the film underplays the action elements. Todd Beamer's famous line, "Let's roll," was underplayed, spoken almost as an aside rather than the "rally the troops" moment it became in subsequent representations of 9/11. In addition, unlike most thrillers, we already know what happens, which for me only increased the tension of watching as I anticipated the inevitable events that were about to unfold. My response to this mixture was one of cognitive and emotional dissonance, which may be part of the point. The experience of watching the film was utterly grueling, the tension provoked by the film still palpable the following morning. This tension was reinforced by the use of the shaky camera and the use of an approximately real-time narrative.

It's worth noting that discussions of the film have provoked conversations about the social and political "role" of the cinema in representing history. The question asking whether audiences are "ready" for a film about 9/11 is a complicated one, and given that I saw the film in a half-empty theater, it may be the case that many people are still resistant to revisiting these tragic events, and if the Box Office Mojo numbers are any indication ($3.8 million on Friday), it appears that the film isn't finding a terribly wide audience. United 93 is a difficult film to watch, as my review indicates. Last night, I would have emphatically recommended not seeing it, but this morning, my response is a little more tempered. I think the film should be commended for avoiding easy answers, but I remain uncertain about what, if anything, the film has added to our national conversation about September 11.

Posted by chuck at 11:13 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

April 29, 2006

The Notorious Bettie Page

In a Washington Post interview, Mary Harron, director of The Notorious Bettie Page (IMDB), comments in passing that female directors are more likely to be interested in "demystifying sex" than their male counterparts, and it is this impulse that seemed to guide Harron's approach to the Bettie Page story, showing the pin-up queen less as a sexual icon than as a fully human character. At the same time, Gretchel Mol's playful performance calls attention to the performance aspects of Page's sexual posing, both in terms of her classic pin-ups and her bondage films and photographs.

The Notorious Bettie Page, filmed primarily in nostalgic black-and-white, is framed by the 1950s morality scandals, opening with an undercover police officer setting up a raid on a store selling pornographic magazines and Super-8 "stag" films. The raid sets up a sequence featuring the hearings on juvenille delinquency headed by Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver (played by David Strathairn), with Bettie waiting nervously outside the Senate chamber where she is scheduled to testify. While these scenes emphasize the cultural conservatism associated with the 1950s, especially the taboos related to sex, Harron wisely underplays the Kefauver hearings, focusing instead on Page's relatively brief career as a pin-up queen.

After a brief sequence depicting Page's strict religious youth and her first marriage, the film then focuses on Page's unsuccessful attempts to become an actress and her gradual transition into the world of modeling. The film suggests that Page takes quickly to her new career, happily posing in a bikini for a group of amateur photographers before eventually removing the bikini and posing nude, rationalizing that "it's just a little piece of fabric." Throughout these scenes, Bettie seems to remain relatively naive, accepting the assurances that the customers for her photographs are "respectable" men with slightly unusual tastes. In this regard, I found the "posing" sequences to be utterly fascinating, with Bettie "acting" to the directions of the photographers much like she attempts to emulate the directions from her "legitimate" acting teachers. In both cases, performance is central, and the apparently natural or realistic performances of method acting are no more natural than Bettie's playful winking to the camera as a model. When Bunny Yeager comments about Page that "When she's nude, she doesn't seem naked," I read the comment as highlighting Page's ability to perform to the camera. Page's performances are not without consequences of course. Her relationship with a young actor sours, in part because of her status as a pin-up queen, and more dramatically, Harron sympathetically depicts the testimony of a father whose son hung himself, likely while engaged in an act of auto erotica. Still, the film is able to dodge many of the questions about the effects of pornography by focusing almost excusively on the producers and not on the consumers of this material.

As Page's career evolves, Harron introduces more and more color into the film, particularly during some of Page's bondage films, but also during the later stages of Page's career when she posed for Yeager (including the famous Playboy cover). As most poular culture junkies will know, Page eventually returned to Christianity and left behind her modelling career. The film seems to imply that Page left her past behind with few regrets, but Harron wisely emphasizes the fact that after her career, Page was able to return to a relatively "normal," if necessarily private, life after she ended her career as a model, rather than taking what Harron describes as a "punitive attitude" towards Page or suggesting that women who do sex work will necessarily meet some horrible fate. It's a complicated film politically, and I haven't quite resolved my reaction to it. I think Harron manages to "demystify" Bettie Page in this film but does so without resorting to the puritanical denials of visual pleasure identified with the Kefauver hearings, which were in many ways a media panic rather than a moral panic.

By the way, while you're in the neighborhood, check out Bettie Page's MySpace page.

Posted by chuck at 1:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

PGTV

The Washington Post is reporting that Prince George's County and even the city of Hyattsville where I live were prominently featured in an episode of Commander in Chief last week. It turns out that according to ABC, Hyattsville is a dangerous place, overrun by crime and violence. Yikes, and to think I've spent a year of my life too busy (working? watching Commander in Chief?) to notice all the bullets speeding past me. Making matters worse, the show seemed to cater to some fairly negative racial stereotypes as well. As County Executive Jack B. Johnson points out, "When the president of the show gets out of a car and is in front of a restaurant that advertises chitlins and pork chops in today's America, what any right-thinking American knows is we are harking back to an age-old inability of this country to celebrate the leadership and achievement of African Americans and other diverse people in this country."

While I recognize that an episode of Commander in Chief will likely be little more than a blip on most people's popular culture radars, I'm intrigued by the angry response to the program, in part because I have lived in Hyattsville for the last few months and find it to be a friendly and ethnically diverse community with nice restaurants and lots of parks and green space, as well as being in the most affluent majority-black county in the nation. But Prince George's (PG) County has historically been depicted as unsafe, leading to misplaced fears about living and spending time here.

I do think some of the comments about the episode might be overly sensitive. One commenter faults the show for referring to Prince George's as "PG County," implying that the abbreviation is "meant as a put-down," but I don't see the use of "PG county" as always functioning in that way. In fact, the phrase can be reclaimed as a form of identity, a connection to Prince George's County as a community with a distinct personality. At any rate, I probably wouldn't have even noticed this controversy if it weren't about my neighborhood, but it's interesting to see how the episode has provoked such a strong response.

Posted by chuck at 12:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 28, 2006

School's Out

I've been so busy and distracted this week that I lost track of the fact that Monday was my last day of regular class meetings this semester. I'll see many of my students one last time at their final exams, but the semester is basically done. As my scattered posts recently might suggest, I've been working (somewhat frantically) on a writing project that I'm pretty excited about. But that's not all that is happening:

More later, but I'm getting a late start this morning. I've very quickly fallen into my summer schedule (waking up around 11 AM, staying up until 3 AM) and I still haven't had my first cup of coffee. Oh, and now that the semester is ending, I need to set up my semi-annual screening of Dazed and Confused, just to celebrate the beginning of summer, you know [entry updated to correct some details].

Update: I'll use this entry as a reminder that Sujewa's Date Number One will be premiering on Saturday, May 13, at the Goeth Institut.

Posted by chuck at 11:46 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 27, 2006

Friday Afternoon Time Sink

Lingua Franca lives, sort of. Via Eric Alterman a link to a mirror website of the once must-read academic magazine. Memorable gems: Jeet Heer's "Marxist Literary Critics Are Following Me! How Philip K. Dick betrayed his academic admirers to the FBI."

Posted by chuck at 12:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 26, 2006

DC and Seattle: Rally to Stop Genocide

Just noticed that David mentioned Darfest, a rally in Seattle to raise awareness about the situation in Darfur. The Seattle rally is scheduled for Thursday evening and as David explains, Darfest promises not only to explain what is happening in Darfur through lectures but will also convey the culture of Darfur through music, dance, and visual arts.

There will be a similar event in Washington, DC, on the National Mall on Saturday, April 30 from 2-4:30 PM. Speakers for the DC program include Representative Nancy Pelosi, George Clooney, Elie Wiesel, Paul Rusesabagina, whose story provided the subject of last year's Hotel Rwanda, and Russell Simmons, among many others.

If you're in the DC area, it looks like a good opportunity to learn more about the situation in Darfur and to petition President Bush to take further steps to end the genocide that is taking place there.

Posted by chuck at 12:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2006

Rethinking Mobility

A few months ago, I contributed a short essay to a roundtable on the new video iPod, and I'm now reworking some of those ideas on "video mobility" for another writing project (one with a relatively immediate deadline). But while I was doing some last-minute reading to refresh my memory on some of the concepts I want to address, I came across Clive Thompson's "Remote Possibilities," an essay on cell phone use originally published in the New York Times, but now (freely) available on his blog, collision detection, which is also well worth checking out.

Also notable: via Risky Biz, Rob Pegoraro's review of Intel's Viiv (he was disappointed) and a New York Times article arguing that consumers are less than enthusiastic about mobile video thus far.

Posted by chuck at 5:22 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Iraq in Fragments

James Longley's Iraq in Fragments (IMDB) is one of the more compelling documentaries to focus on post-invasion Iraq that I've seen. Beautifully shot over the course of two years, Longley's documentary focuses on three stories coveringwhat might be regarded as the three major perspectives that could be divided into Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish points of view, a structure that seems to suggest the country's ongoing fragmentation, but the most remarkable quality of Iraq in Fragments is its attention to the intimate details of everyday life, its ability to capture the fears and frustrations of post-invasion Iraq.

The first and strongest section of the film focuses on Mohammed, an eleven-year old living in Baghdad and working for an auto mechanic who alternately dotes on and abuses the young boy whose father is absent. Muhammed's voice-over narration has a kind of lyrical quality that is reinforced visually by Longley's "almost poetic" (to use David Ansen's phrase) footage of Baghdad. The boy speaks wistfully about the material effects of the bombings ("Baghdad used to be beautiful") and the developing insurgency ("the world is so scary now"). At the same time, Muhammed finds himself in and out of school, with his boss hounding him to return to school and then berating the boy when he is unable to write his father's name before demanding that he leave school again or risk losing his job.

As Chris Knipp points out in his review (scroll down), Muhammed's boss becomes a kind of mini-tyrant, while we begin to see the tension and frustration mounting in Baghdad through Muhammed's eyes and ears, with Mohammed listening while the men in the repair shop complain that conditions were better under Saddam. Muhammed tells us that he dreams of becoming a pilot so that he can see someplace better than Baghdad, but his section offers little hope of escape.

The second section offers the least focused story, in part because it does not focus on a personal story but on the political movement being led by Muqtada al-Sadr to empowermembers of the Shiite population. This section features a far more frenetic camera with jump cuts and rapid camera movement that suggest mounting tension. In one scene, Sadr's men harrass and beat a group of merchants who are accused of selling alcohol (Longley reported in the Q&A that the men were soon released). At the same time, we see wounded men directly addressing the camera and asking "Is this democracy?" Because of the frenetic camera work and quick cutting, we never get a coherent sense of al-Sadr's followers or the politics associated with his movement, but that seems to be Longley's point. All we are left with is what Knipp calls a "chaos of images" that reflect the mounting danger and tension of that time.

From there, Longley takes us to Koretan, a town in the Kurdish section of Iraq, introducing us to Suleiman, a serious young boy who tells us he wishes to become a doctor, although because he is forced to work to support his aging father, we are left with little room for optimism. The smaller story represents a major departure from the broader picture of al-Sadr's movement, but it also prvides us with a glimpse of another boy with little hope for the future.

Put together, the three stories offer a compelling account of a fragmented nation in a state of turmoil immediately after the invasion. However, because the three-part structure typically remains on the level of the personal (and because the stories are isoalted from each other) we don't get a clear picture of the past and present relationship between these three groups or any real synthesis of their perspectives, although it can certainly be argued that the film's structure represents the difficulties of achieving any kind of synthesis. It's also notable that the film features very few images of US soldiers (although the Sadr section does feature a brief conflict between members of his group and some Spanish soldiers) and almost no images of women. The latter can be attributed to the suspicion that many male documentarians face when attempting to document the lives of Iraqi women, but I think it's a testament to Longley's patience as a filmmaker that he was able to capture much of the footage he presented in the film (he reports that he has 2-300 hours worth of footage, some of which will hopefully find its way to the DVD), and his presentation of the everyday experiences of a small number of Iraqi people is a valuable contribution to our collection of documentary images of Iraq.

Posted by chuck at 1:16 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

April 23, 2006

Letter to the President

I caught Thomas Gibson's Letter to the President (Amazon) last night at Filmfest DC as part of their Hip Hop 4 Reel series. Letter offers an overview of the political and social history of hip hop from its formation in the Reagan era through the 2004 election (the film was completed before Hurricane Katrina), specifically focusing on the socially conscious hip hop artists and their response to various forms of social injustice, including police brutality, the Iran-Contra affair (and its relationship to the crack epidemic), censorship, racial profiling (driving while black), and the prison-for-profit programs that essentially use prisoners as free labor. The film also explores a Miami Herald article that exposed the practice of several police forces of monitoring hip hop artists. At the same time, the film doesn't shy away from some of hip hop's excesses, including the misogyny of some aspects of hip hop culture. Gibson and his producer, Trinh Banh, have also assembled a welth of interviews with prominent hip hop artists, politicians, and academics, including KRS-One, Common, 50 Cent, Chuck D, Maxine Waters, Amiri Baraka, and Michael Eric Dyson (among many others). But the film and the discussion afterwards with the producer Banh raised a number of interesting--and sometimes unresolved--questions.

In particular, I found that the film didn't have a clear narrative voice. While Snoop Dogg's voice-over gave the documentary flavor and the filmmaker clearly seemed invested in the project, the film itself seemed a little unfocused, with the film moving too quickly across this 25-30 year history. In particular, further exploration of the socially-conscious rap of the late 1980s-early 1990s would have been valuable, especially in its connection to police brutality, as would some connections between rap and other forms of popular culture. Further exploration of P. Diddy's Vote or Die campaign might also have been helpful. There was an interesting montage in which many of his fans discuss their plans to vote, almost exclusively for John Kerry, and while the film does address the disillusionment of many voters when the Democratic candidate lost, even more exploration of the difficulties of sustaining political activism would have been valuable. As always, documentaries such as Letter are valuable simply because they assemble archival materials that might otherwise be lost or forgotten (in that sense, I'm looking forward to seeing the Smithsonian hip hop collection)

That being said, the film does an effective job of exploring many of these questions. Wyclef Jean, in particuar, was attentive to the fact that a heavy work burden often makes it difficult to sustain the energy to work for a candidate or a specific political cause. Add to that long voting lines, often far longer than in predominantly white, suburban precincts. But the strength of the film is its collaborative tone, the contributions of the interviewers who not only describe the history of hip hop but also theorize its social significance and attempt to imagine where it will go in the future. Here, Snop Dogg's narration seems most fitting as he speaks personally about hip hop and the contributions it can make without the professional veneer of a voice-of-god narration. At the same time, the film subtly theorized the economics of hip hop, the question of whether hip hop artists can be politically transgressive when they are signed to major labels and do not own the means of production. While this issue could have been explored further, it provoked an interesting discussion after the film. In that sense, perhaps Letter's greatest strength is that it raised a number of valuable questions, even if many of them emerged afterwards in discussion and dialogue afterwards.

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April 22, 2006

Saturday Afternoon Media Links

Just a couple of links I don't want to lose: first, via Steven Berlin Johnson, Dan Hill's fascinating blog post arguing that Lost is genuinely new media. I've been thinking about, writing about, and theorizing new media a lot this week and Dan's post about Lost and the fan cultures it has inspired cut through many of the poblems I've been trying to address. In particular, I've been thinking about Fredric Jameson's discussion of what he calls the "volatilization of the individual work of art or text" in "Symptoms of/for Theory" (Jameson's notion of volatilization is not unlike what Nick refers to as "incompleteness"). Jaemson proceeds to argue that "it is now the cultural production process (and its relation to our peculiar social formation) that is the object of study and no longer the individual masterpiece. This shifts our methodological practice (or rather the most nteresting theoretical problems we have to raise) from an individual textual analysis to what I will call mode-of-production analysis" (408).* The approach imagined by Jameson is certainly consistent with what I regard to be the most productive work in media studies that focus on artistic and cultural production rather than the individual work, and Lost, with its multiple layers of cultural production (individual episodes, the show's official website, as well as "unofficial" productions such as blog analyses), provides but one interesting case study. I'm deep in the middle of some last-minute writing, not to mention grading and final exam prep, or I'd have more to say about this topic.

Also via Green Cine, this interesting contest sponsored by security expert Bruce Schneier calling for readers to "submit the most unlikely, yet still plausible, terrorist attack scenarios they can come up with." As Schneier points out, audiences are fascinated by "movie-plot threats," although homeland security experts might be advised to focus their energies on intelligence and investigation rather than preparing for the next movie-plot terrorist threat.

Finally, I caught Taiwanese filmmaker Hsiao-hsien Hou's Three Times at Filmfest DC and deeply enjoyed it, although I'm not prepared to write a full review. The basics: the film tells three love stories, one set in 1966, one in 1911, and a third in 2005, with two actors playing the main characters in all three stories. James Berardinelli's review of the film is quite good, so I'll defer to him for now.

Update: The blog world comes full circle. Via a commenter on Pharyngula, an article about the guy who created the George Bush Imagine video I mentioned the other day.

Update 2: Elbert Ventura's review of Three Times captures much of what I liked about the film. If I have time, I may write something longer in response to his comments. In particular, I like his reading of the film's use of "silent film" techniques during the film's second section, which was set in 1911, and the failures of communication (suggested by unreturned phone calls and incomplete text messages) in the contemporary segment. He also mentions the good news that Three Times will receive all well-deserved US release.

* Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004) 403-08.

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Time is on Our Side

Via Jason J: A link to the International Society for the Study of Time. Given my current book project, I should really know more about these folks.

Update: Speaking of time, Boing Boing points to some "upcoming numerically cool dates."

Posted by chuck at 11:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 21, 2006

Friday Film Notes: DC and NY

First in New York, Boing Boing mentions that Don Cheadle's documentary short, Journey into Sunset is set to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC on April 26. The film documents the stories of "night commuters," the Ugandan "children who have to flee their homes every night and hide in urban camps to avoid being forced to fight in the rebel Lords Resistance Army." The film's website reports that more than 30,000 children have disappeared over the last twenty years.

In DC we have the 20th Annual Washington DC International Film Festival. Recommended viewing: James Longley's Iraq in Fragments, which I've heard is an amazing documentary. The Saturday screening is sold out, but as of last night, Sunday's screening still has tickets available. The director will attend both screenings. Playing tonight: Hsiao-hsien Hou's Three Times and Matt Mochary and Jeff Zimbalist's Favela Rising, among many other cool-looking films. Bettie Page may have to wait.

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April 20, 2006

Valuing Slowness

Jean at creativity/machine has some intriguing entries about her PhD research on new media. In particular, I'm interested in her criticism of a certain brand of new media scholarship that is "too busy trying to find the cutting edge," adding that she "was gobsmacked to find that it said there was not enough emphasis on the future" [an aside: I need to figure out a way to work "gobsmaked" into my everyday vocabulary]. Jean then offers some "manifestoey statements" the need for slowness when it comes to evaluating new media, calling for more attention, in particular to slowness and boredom because they might, in fact, have a lot to tell us about the celebration of all things accelerated.

She's also talking about online video sharing sites, such as Youtube and JumpCut, a topic I've been thinking about quite a bit lately [worth noting: Jason McElwain, the autistic high school student who gained some brief web fame when a video of him sinking six three-point baskets hit the web now has a movie deal with Columbia Pictures. Magic Johnson is set to executive produce.].

Update: Odd timing. As soon as I posted this entry about Jean's discussion of "slowness," I found Michael Joyce's treatment of the same concept in "Forms of Future," anthologized in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Joyce writes that "in our technologies, our cultures, our entertainments and, increasinbgly, the way we constitute our communities and families we live in an anticipatory state of constant nextness" (227), later adding that "I hope I do not disappoint you with my slowness" (228). More later as I work through this concept.

Update 2: I forgot to mention that I found this entry at Purse Lip Square Jaw. While I'm in the neighborhood, I also want to point to Anne's entry on Rick Poynor's essay, "The Death of the Critic."

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Lazy Thursday Links

I've fallen behind on blog reading and, as a result, missed or lost track of a few things. David at Green Cine has a number of links worth noting. First, I'm very disappointed that I missed the PBS doc, The Armenian Genocide, which aired on April 17, but will hopefully catch it later (check the NY Times and the PBS ombudsman comment on the doc, as does the History News Network).

Via Movie City Indie, reports that McDonalds is gearing up a "war room" of sorts to prepare for the launch of Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation. Linklater's film is set to play at Cannes Film Festival. Also scheduled for Cannes, Richard Kelly's Southland Tales his follow up to Donnie Darko.

Also worth noting: Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth continues to get good buzz, this time in The New Yorker Will be interesting to see how Gore's film compares to Gregory Greene's The End of Suburbia. Meanwhile Lance Mannion makes the case that we should re-elect Al Gore, "the best President we might never have." Like Lance, I think Gore made some mistakes in his campaign (we both dislike the choice of a certain Senator from Connecticut as a running-mate), but Lance is probably also right in pointing out that Gore would still face an uphill battle if he ran again, not least a So-Called Liberal Media (see Alterman) that clearly didn't like him.

Finally, for my readers in the midwest, Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival is ready to roll. I spent two years teaching at the University of Ilinois, and Ebert's annual festival in his hometown of Champaign, IL, was always an enjoyable event, even if it was usually inconveniently scheduled during finals week when I had multiple grading marathons looming.

Posted by chuck at 11:33 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 18, 2006

Date Number One Premiere

Just wanted to briefly mention that Sujewa has scheduled the world premiere of his film, Date Number One, a comedy about several first dates. The premiere is scheduled for Saturday May 13, with 2 shows (7 PM & 9 PM) at the Goethe-Institut.

I'm sure that Sujewa will keep us posted on the film's progress and its upcoming premiere.

Posted by chuck at 11:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

My Tuesday Procrastination Reading

Whenever I write on new media, i find myself getting easily sidetracked. For example, I'll go to Robert Greewald's blog to refresh my memory on the excellent political work done through his unique documentary distribution strategies and will find myself redirected to Don Hazen's Alternet article on progressive politics and new media. I don't have time to discuss Hazen's article in detail, but he makes a strong case for explaining how new media technologies should be used to promote progressive politics. Hazen also points to important projects such as New American Media, which focuses on sustaining and developing journalism for "51 million ethnic Americans, 150 languages, and 2,000 ethnic media outlets."

I've also been planning to link to A. Horbal's "Alt-Weekly TV" for several days now, and because TV Turn-Off Week is fast approaching, now seems to be as good a time as any. In particular, I found David Edelstein's call for good TV critics to be rather compelling. Of course there is already some outstanding TV criticism being done at Flow and Pop Matters, but I think he's right that we need to think about TV more carefully, (I remain unconvinced that activties like TV Turn-Off Week are the best way to engage with TV), but perhaps more to the point, I'm not sure that TV criticism works best when engaging with TV at the level of an indvidual show or episode (and Edelstein is right to note that in some contexts, TV can be a "genuinely liberating force").

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April 17, 2006

Sounds, Images, and Smells

Here's some of what I've been reading today instead of working on an article with a relatively imminent deadline:

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Temporary Memory Lapse

I'm trying to remember the title of a movie that came out recently, but it's completely escaping me. It's a British or American independent historical film about the introduction of cinema to China in the late 19th or early 20th century. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the director or the lead actor right now. If you have any idea what I'm talking about, please leave a comment or email me (chutry [at] msn [dot] com). I've been trying several different IMDB keyword searches but haven't been able to find the film.

Update: Okay, I finally remembered. It's the 2000 film, Shadow Magic, directed by Ann Hu, and it starred Jared Harris as Raymond Wallace, one of the first promoters of cinema in China. The film is particularly interesting in that it raises the question of whether film will "preserve tradition" even in the face of technological change and fit neatly with such films as Photographing Fairies and The Govenress that explored the transformative role of photography and cinema just as digital photography and cinema were emerging on the scene.

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George Bush's "Imagine"

Via MyDD: Someone remixed several Bush speeches to the words of John Lennon's "Imagine," overlaying that with video footage of the war in Iraq as well as several other familiar and more calculated Bush photo ops. There's also a nice montage at the end showing media graphics ("Target: America") that no doubt fed American fears of terrorism. Fascinating, powerful stuff.

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April 16, 2006

Low-Budget Moviemaking and the Death of Film

Just a quick pointer to part two of Jeremiah Kipp's interview with Godfrey Cheshire (here's part one). The second half of the interview focuses primarily on Cheshire's documentary about his family plantation, which sounds really facinating. Because I grew up in Atlanta and have family scattered all over the south, including sections of North Carolina not too far from Cheshire's family plantation, I'll be curious to see what Cheshire does with this story (his speculation that D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation may been based on his ancestors makes the story sound doubly interesting).

But Cheshire's comments about the effects of low-budget video on the decline of European auteurs are also worth noting. Specifically he notes that fewer people are going to independent theaters for forign films to the point that the foreign film market has "dried up." It's an interesting argument, and I think it's relatively clear that audeinces are more commonly seeing foreign (non-US) films on DVD, if at all. Cheshire argues that

We’re still in a stage where we have art film distributors, for example, that go to the foreign festivals and still put out some foreign films, but I’m afraid that’s on its last legs. It’s been in such decline since I wrote that article in 1999 that it wouldn’t be surprising if a few years from now you could only see foreign films on DVD. Maybe some would open in New York or Los Angeles just to get the advertising, but we really aren’t far away from that.
The whole interview is well worth reading, and I would have more to say about it, but I really should be working on other things.

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Remediating Baseball

Via Jeff Passan's Yahoo article, I just learned about the fascinating viral video, "RBI Game Six," available on You Tube. It appears that I'm a little late to the party on this video. According to Passan, "RBI Game Six" has received over 200,000 views, and Conor Lastowska's blog, San Diego Serenade, has developed a significant following, in part due to the video's popularity. It's a playful and entertaining use of the video game to revisit one of the most famous (or infamous) and widely replayed World Series in recent history.

The video, created by Lastowka, depicts the ninth inning of the 1986 World Series, in which the Red Sox, just one out away from winning the World series, saw their Series hopes dashed on Bill Buckner's tenth inning error. Lastowka, fascinated by "Game Six," was also a fan of Nintendo's RBI Baseball game, which first appeared in 1988. RBI baseball featured the four playoff teams from 1986 and 1987 plus all-star teams for both leagues. The players looked identical, other than a nod to whether the player bats right-handed or left-handed.

Lastowka ran through the first 9.5 innings of the game, setting up the correct score and number of hits before saving the tenth inning on a video game emulator. From here, Lastowka had to emulate the details of the inning prefectly, often replaying the same pitch as many as 200 times in order to set up a fly ball to center field, for example. RBI baseball graphics also add an interesting twist when showing Bill Buckner's infamous error. Instead of showing Buckner's error as it happened, with the ball dribbling behind first base, in RBI, "the player stands frozen for a second with what look like tears spouting from his head." Lastowka supplemented the late-80s video game graphics with Curt Gowdy's game six broadcast, bringing Gowdy's classic, colorful delivery to the revised visuals of the game.

It's a creative use of the video game emulator software, especially in the nostalgic evocations of both the RBI Baseball game and baseball itself. The experience of making the video also made clear to Lastowka just how "improbable" the outcome of Game Six actually was (this might be a general effect of producing videos on a game emulator--having to go back and replay a pivotal moment until you "get it right.").

Update: Lastowka writes about his experience making RBI Game Six on his blog. Like him, I think Bill Buckner should receive far less blame for the Game Six loss. His error was just the culmination of the Red Sox's collapse (a version of the video is also available here).

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April 15, 2006

Sunday Morning Links

Via the cinetrix and Peter, this great parody trailer for a Michael Bay version of March of the Penguins from the folks at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

Interesting Washington Post interview with Nicole Holofcener, who directed Friedns With Money, and Mary Harron, who directed The Notorious Bettie Page, both of which will be playing DC starting this Friday, April 21. Among other issues, Ann Hornaday asks them about the opportunities available for women filmmakers today, but they also have an interesting conversation about sex scenes in Hollywood films (both Harron and Holofcener speculate that female directors may be more likely to "demystify sex" than male directors). It's a solid interview, especially when Holofcener and Harron play off of each other and discuss their shared experiences as independent filmmakers.

Finally, I just learned about this interesting little project called The 1 Second Film, a 70mm non-profit collaborative film, where for a one-dollar donation, anyone can buy a producer's credit. The film features one second (24 frames) of animation and an estimated ninety minutes of credits, which will also include a making-of documentary. All profits from the film will go to the Global Fund for Women.

Posted by chuck at 5:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

LA Times on United 93

Regular readers will notice that I've been following the controversy surrounding the promotional trailer and upcoming release of Universal's United 93, which depicts the hijacking and eventual crash of United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and Jason Apuzzo of the conservative film blog, Libertas, has posted an LA Times article asking whether or not the United States is "ready" for a film about 9/11. Apuzzo argues,

Of course, the Main Stream Media is now scratching its head, wondering whether America is properly ‘ready’ for movies about 9/11. Again, it’s odd that this debate didn’t accompany Michael Moore’s film, or the recent V For Vendetta (as obvious a War on Terror metaphor as we’ve seen), but now that realistic depictions of the War on Terror are being presented, suddenly some people are very worried about the public’s ability to ‘handle’ (i.e., absorb on their own) what’s coming at them.
Apuzzo then goes on to criticize "left-leaning 'intellectuals' [talking] about what ‘complex,’ ’sophisticated’ wartime films should look like." To be fair, like Apuzzo, I think the Times article is asking the wrong question by focusing on whether or not America is "ready" for a film such as United 93. Given the ratings success of A&E's TV movie version of this story, it's clear that many people want to revisit these events, whether as a means of working through their grief, making sense of what happened, or out of some other motive altogether. Instead, I think the more crucial question--the one we ought to be asking--is how these films will present this history. I have been concerne about the discussions of the film as "realistic," often with the implication that this realism is a guarantee of an objective representation of what happened, which is a rather dubious claim. More crucially, focusing entirly on the flight itself may in fact obscure crucial elements of the historical narrative about 9/11.

But I also want to address Apuzzo's dismissal of "left-leaning 'intellectuals,'" in part because he misreads the comments of the film scholars who were interviewed for the article and in part because this misreading plays into Apuzzo's absurdly simplistic binary between "patriotic movies" and what he calls "movies in which America loses." It's worth noting that Apuzzo conveniently omits film historian Robert Sklar's comments about the Office of War Information and the films produced by directors such as Frank Capra and John Ford, which were made to rally US support for the war, with Sklar implying that with past tragedies such as Pearl Habor, audiences were almost immediately "ready" for films that depicted the attack by the Japanese military. USC film professors Richard Jewell and Howard Rodman do call for more subtle and nuanced depictions of the events of 9/11, but the article offers little evidence of their specific politics. In fact, Jewell, despite Apuzzo's characterization, actually suggests that we might have been better off if studios could have "miraculously gotten this film out in the first three months."

The focus on major studio film representations of 9/11 also overlooks the number of independent and documentary films that have already dealt with the topic in a variety of ways, but more crucially, the article ignores the fact that television shows, such as 24 and The West Wing have been dealing with the events of 9/11 for some time. I still think that the trailers promoting United 93 could have been handled more gracefully, but I don't think the question is whether audiences are "ready" to revisit the events of 9/11; instead we should be more concerned with how those stories will be told.

Posted by chuck at 4:05 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Bunker Busters

I think it's safe to say that I am opposed to any kind of military strike against Iran, including so-called precision bombing. Even so-called "surgical strike" precision bombing results in too many civilian casualties and would very likely lead to a military response from Iran that would only result in even more deaths. But as Diane Feinstein points out in the LA Times, reports have suggested that some people in the administration may be considering the use of "tactical, battlefield nuclear weapons" against Iran. This animation by the Union of Concerned Scientists shows why this is a bad idea (via Crooks and Liars).

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April 14, 2006

Rethinking "Incompleteness"

Nick's concept of "Incompleteness" overlaps nicely with a recent discussion of the DVD version of Lodge Kerrigan's haunting film, Keane, which includes a "director's cut" or re-mix of the film not by Lodge Kerrigan but by friend and colleague Steven Soderbergh (for more see the Washington Post). Sodebergh's reworking of Kerrigan's narrative would seem to illustrate perfectly Nick's principle of "incompleteness," the idea that "there is no properly finished product any longer; nothing is complete." Nick's right to add that no film or work of art or text was ever truly complete, and I'm curious to explore the implications of this notion of incompleteness even further.

Such a principle is clearly present in the deleted scenes that are now included on many DVDs, often with actor and director's commentary tracks expressing regret that a scene could not be included in the theatrical release of the film. Often, DVDs will even include alternate endings (one significant example is The Butterfly Effect, which with its time-travel plot, adds a new wrinkle to the question of alternate endings). Even director's commentary tracks themselves can explode the idea of a final version of the film, but just as often the commentary track might also serve to reinforce the cult of authorship with the director's vision as, in some sense, final.

But Nick's discussion of "incompleteness" with regards to the digital archive also has implications for art that is archved digitally on the Web. Nick points to the constantly-updated art isntallations available on a site such as Rhizome.org, noting the "sheer abundance" of art projects, many of which are concerned with "a sort of madness of indexing, a madness of database." Even blogs, of course, might participate in this "madness of indexing," especially entries that detail, sometimes quite painstakingly, the everyday experiences of their authors (or their results on countless personality tests or their weekly iPod shuffles). And I think that Nick's right to suggest that the incompleteness can allow for a perpetual recontextualization or rethinking of what is already there. Again, blogs offer a useful model here: the constant updates recontextualize what comes before.

An even more interesting example might be Day-to-Day Data, an art exhibition that "exhibits the work artists who seek inspiration from insignificant details in their own or the publics’ everyday lives," with Adele Prince's Trolley Spotting, for example, taking an interest in abandoned trolleys (or shopping carts). Miranda July shows a similar interest in the quotidian in her on-going web project, Learning to Love You More, which invites others to contribute to her site by responding to certain "assignments."

But while blogs offer one useful model, I think Nick is right to point towards wikis, most famously Wikipedia, as a more useful model for illustrating this notion of incompleteness. As he points out, wikipedia entries change rapidly, especially when the definition of a term or concept is under intense scrutiny or deliberation (see, for example, this discussion of the September 11 wiki). This incompleteness, the instability of a site such as Wikipedia, certainly introduces a number of questions about the degree to which these terms are constantly being contested and the difficulty of achieving consensus on the meaning or significance of certain terms.

I do have some reserveations about the historical novelty of this notion of "incompleteness." Nick notes that Lev Manovich has argued that "Historically, the artist made a unique work within a particular medium. Therefore the interface and the work were the same; in other words, the level of an interface did not exist" (Database as a Genre of New Media). IManovich's comments echo Benjamin's discussion of the aura, and while the institution of art certainly valorized unique works of art, I think it worth noting that there is a parallel history of incompleteness. One might make the case, for example, that scribal culture fostered a version of incompleteness, with scribes often making imprecise copies of prior versions, whether out of boredom, exhaustion, or out of some other motivation. Even marginalia could be seen as a form of "revising" what comes before. Hollywood studios often had multiple versions of the film they made, with scenes cut (or deleted) either appease local censors or, later, to remain in compliance with the Hays Code. I certainly agree that digital media offer a new way of thinking about incompleteness, a concept that Nick's blog entry unpacks quite effectively.

Posted by chuck at 11:53 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 12, 2006

Cinema After Film

Over at The House Next Door, Matt has posted an interview between film citic and journalist Jeremiah Kipp and Godfrey Cheshire, author of "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema," one of the more notorious and thought-provoking essays on the end of cinema. Cheshire focused on the transition from celluloid to digital projection technologies within theaters, and theorizing that audiences might respond differently to digital projection, discussed the implications of that transition. I've gone back to Cheshire's essay several times and continue to find Cheshire's essay thought-provoking, even if he couldn't have anticipated many of the changes we've witnessed since he published the essay in 1999.

I'm still taken by the idea of the "death of film," a concept that has only gained currency with the ongoing technological changes that continue to redefine cinema as we know it. As Cheshire is careful to note, when he first wrote the essay, the first demonstrations of digital cinema were taking place, with Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace being one of the first major motion pictures exhibited using digital technology. While the digital changeover has not happened as quickly as Cheshire anticipated (in part due to debates about technical specificiactions), that transition seems imminent, and it's still quite tempting to imagine what cinema will look like after film's "death."

I'm still convinced that it will be diffiult to predict how digital exhibition will alter cinema culturesor our perception of film as a medium (as opposed to the movies themselves). Film as a technological artifact may take on a rarefied status, consigned to museums and repertory theaters, but I think our relationship to movies (which Cheshire defines as "motion pictures as entertainment") and cinema (Cheshire defines this as "motion pictures as art," but I would define as the "institution" of moviemaking) will be far less predictable, but it's certainly possible that digital exhibition will contribute to rendering movies and cinema itself as more banal, everyday, or to use Kipp and Cheshire's own observations, more "televisual." As Kipp notes, "One could argue that television created many of the habits we incorporate into our lives that go way beyond the simple act of watching television, and that it creates a kind of attention deficit disorder." Echoing these comments, Cheshire adds, "The success of films like 'Crash' and 'Syriana' represent the creeping erosion of cinematic values by television values."

Implicit in both Kipp and Cheshire's claims is a characterization of television as a bad object, against which the cinema is defined, with TV "eroding" the purity of cinema and damaging cinematic ways of seeing. Although I'd be one of the last people to offer a defense of Crash (I'll happily defend Syriana, a film whose critique of Big Oil could not have been sustained without its expansive storylines), I also think such claims about television need to be unpacked somewhat more carefully, especially regarding the effects of television on human attention span. Movies may be becoming more banal or even more " televisual," but television, in its very banality, can explore political and philosophical limits in surprisingly complicated ways.

But Cheshire's comments on the emerging film cultures formed by the DVD format and by the energetic film blogging communities seem about right. These cultures have "changed the perception of movies and the way people relate to movies and understand them in enormous ways." As Cheshire notes, many of his students at UNC Chapel Hill reported that they get their news about film via the Internet rather than through the local or community film critics, something that Cheshire seems to experience as a significant loss. At the same time, film bloggers and online reviewers can create new audiences for directors, films, or genres that might have been ignored by local critics.

Finally, I found Cheshire's discussion of cinema after 9/11 to be well worth reading. As he notes, many current movies are seeking to make sense of the world after September 11. Like Cheshire, I'm not confident that the films he mentions (Good Night, and Good Luck, Syriana, Jarhead, The Constant Gardener, and Crash) have "succeeded," but I think the attempts at sense-making may be more important than the conclusions or explanations themselves. I will hopefully return to his discussion of these post-9/11films a little later when I have a little more time, but that's certainly another topic that has occupied my attention for a while now.

As Matt points out, Cheshire continues to review films for The North Carolina weekly, The Independent, and is wrapping production on a first-person documentary about his family and their Southern plantation (sounds like it would pair nicely with Ross McElwee's Bright Leaves). As someone who comes from that part of the country--and may be spending a chunk of time there in the near future--I'm really looking forward to Cheshire's film.

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April 11, 2006

Immigration Rallies

David Silver has some photographs of last week's march in Dallas, which attracted over half a million people, and follows the march in Los Angeles that also drew 500,000 people marching for human rights. David mentions a sign carried by one participant that said "Today we act. Tomorrow we vote." There are hundreds of other photographs on Flickr that show a social movement coming into visibility (I love the creative signs), and he's right to say that "this is what a social movement looks like." But I think it's important to point out that it's a social movement that has been building for some time, fostered by Spanish-language DJs who have been promoting the rallies for weeks, as well as religious and human rights groups, as reported in the LA Times. I'm not sure I have much to add right now, but David's discussion of the rallies and his students' enthusiasm for talking about them, as well as his planned course on Digital Democracy, has me thinking ahead to the classes I'll be teaching next fall (more details on that a little later).

Posted by chuck at 10:18 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Herders at the Ballet Mecanique

Jason has a few photos taken at the Ballet mecanique performance a few weeks ago at the National Gallery of Art. In case you were wondering, I'm the guy in the middle in this photograph.

I caught the Ballet mecanique a second time when my parents were visiting last week and I'm still astonished by it, although I think my mother just found it sort of strange. You can catch what critics are calling "a happy riot" twice a day (at 1 PM and 4PM) through May 7.

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April 10, 2006

Redirected

David Lowery mentioned a Washington Post article which reports that the DVD version of Lodge Kerrigan's Keane will come with an alternate cut of the film edited by Steven Soderbergh, who had a different take on how the narrative should be shaped. In the Post, Micheal O'Sullivan describes Keane as a sort of psychological drama focusing on a father looking for his six-year old daughter. The film deploys the handheld camera and cinema-verite style favored by Soderbergh is his independent projects such as Bubble. According to Soderbergh:

"While I was away on location, Lodge sent me a copy of 'Keane' to look at before he locked picture. I loved the film and told him so, but I also sent him this version to look at, in case it jogged anything (it didn't). In any case, we agreed it was an interesting (to us) example of how editing affects intent. Or something."
O'Sullivan's Post article offers further details about the different versions, but I'm waiting until I see both versions before I comment further (and that may take awhile). As Soderbergh notes, the experiement can say a lot about the role of editing in shaping a film, but I think it can also point to the ways in which no film is completely final, an approach that often guides Soderbergh's approach to filmmaking. I like the idea of imagining films with "version 2.0, recut, rescored," and while recutting or reshaping a film is nothing new, it's intriguing to think about how certain films might be re-imagined. I'm especially intrigued by the idea of one auteur, Soderbergh. reworking a film by another director, Kerrigan. More later when I've had more caffiene or, better, more sleep.

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April 9, 2006

Weird Science

This week's Wednesday night DC Drinking Liberally event will feature author Chris Mooney, in what looks like an interesting event. Mooney is the author of The Republican War on Science, which argues that "the Republican Party has not only ignored science, but has used bad science to justify its political agenda." Mooney also writes for Seed Magazine and The American Prospect, and his blog, The Intersection, is a useful resource for global warming and other important political issues.

Crooked Timber has an interesting discussion of Mooney's book with a response from the author.

The Wednesday DC Drinking Liberally meets from 6:30-8:30 PM at Mark and Orlando's, a short walk from the Dupont Circle Metro station. There are drink specials and even some free (and delicious) appetizers.

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April 8, 2006

The End of Television as We Know It

Film theorists have often discussed the idea that cinema "as we know it" is dead, transformed completely by digital production and distribution. In fact, I've discussed this idea once or twice myself. But I'm now wondering how to interpret the ways in which digital technologies have changed our experience of television. In particular, Sam Anderson's Slate article, discussing his preference for watching HBO programs on DVD has sparked my interest. I tend to share this preference, although in my specific case, I think it has as much to do with a kind of "repetition compulsion," a desire to repeat pleasurable experiences as much as anything else.

Because I didn't have television reception for something like five years during graduate school, the only times I watched live TV would be in friends' apartments or public places (bars, airports, waiting rooms). But as I was finishing my dissertation, I discovered the joys of watching TV on DVD, first through Buffy and later through HBO programs such as The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm. When I was finishing my dissertation, I would often work until 1 AM or later and then watch two or three Buffy episodes before falling asleep. Part of the pleasure for me was watching multiple episodes in sequence, even to the point that I would play through the opening and closing credits sequences for every episode I watched. The only drawback to this approach was waiting for a new season to appear on DVD, what Anderson refers to as "living in the gap," the interstice between an episode's premiere and its appearance on DVD. In part, this drawback is connected to a loss of cultural capital, being "out of touch" with the latest TV buzz.

But as Anderson argues, audiences are encoutering the end of simultaneity (or what some TV critics have described as "liveness"). To some extent, I think that Anderson overstates the end of "liveness." Reality TV, in particular, is predictaed on its status as live, both in terms of the pressure for competitors to perform and in terms of the audience's ability to participate in voting for their favorite competitors. And while sports fans will TiVo sporting events, I'd imagine there is still a strong preference to watch those events live. Still, I think it's probably fair to say that TV is less commonly experienced "simultaneously" now than in even the recent past, and audiences are far more likely to discover shows on DVD or get caught up on zeitgeist shows, such as Lost, between seasons. Certainly the VCR enabled this kind of time-shifting by the early 1980s (my parents bought our VCR in 1984-5, just in time to videotape The Karate Kid when it aired on network TV), but DVD represents a significant intensification of this process.

Posted by chuck at 3:10 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Saturday Morning Coffee Links

While waking up this morning, I caught an interesting segment on KEXP's broadcast of a Progressive Radio show featuring an interview with Allison Hantschel, one of the bloggers at First Draft and author of the new book, Special Plans: The Blogs on Douglas Feith & the Faulty Intelligence That Led to War. The interview spent some time addressing the role of blogs in the media field and the position of neoconservatives in the build-up to the war in Iraq.

The cinetrix is reporting from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival down in Durham. Her Durham Dispatches, published on Green Cine, provide a great overview of many of the excellent documentaries that are seeking, and likely deserve, a wider audience. The cinetrix notes that tmany of this year's docs take a close look at Hurricane Katrina and the city of New Orleans (more from the Independent Weekly).

Also from Green Cine, a link to a fun little read: the Writers Guild of America's 101 Greatest Screenplays. I was a little surprised to see Casablanca get the top spot but can't really argue with many of their choices. They offer a nice mix of relatively contemporary films (Pulp Fiction and Memento) with some earlier films (I love the selections of North by Northwest, Network and Groundhog Day, among others). Like Andy, I think that Groundhog Day may be one of the more underrated films in the last fifteen or so years.

Also, IFC links to an article discussing Basic Instict 2's lousy box office and the implications for the erotic thriller, a genre that reached its peak in the Reagan-Bush I era (Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, etc) and now seems virtually endangered. I started an entry on this topic the other day but didn't like the direction it was taking. Long story short: I don't think we can blame the decline the erotic thriller on Bush-style conservatism. First, LA Fishbowl points out that the pornography industry is still thriving. But my point would be that many of these erotic thrillers--Fatal Attraction in particular--extramarital sex is punished. While audiences are able to enjoy the prurient pleasures of the affairs, the film's narrative punishes these moral lapses often quite violently. Bear in mind that the Reagan era is also the moment when we first began learning about AIDS as a sexually-transmitted disease and, in fact, there was a great deal of conservatism around discussions of sex in the 1980s. But I also don't think this is a pure "reflection" issue. If there has been a move towards cinematic conservatism, it can be attributed to the rise in the megaplex, the giant, "family-friendly" theaters that often reuse to show NC-17 movies.

Posted by chuck at 11:01 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 7, 2006

Rethinking "Against Insight"

Peter alerted me to David Bordwell's "Against Insight," a short CineScope essay, in which Bordwell argues that contemporary film criticism is failing. Bordwell is equally critical of academic film criticism and the film writing that appears in film magazines and free city weeklies, suggesting that the former is wedded to a jargon-heavy approach which "grinds Movie X through Theory Y" and that the latter formats "promote that self-assured nonconformity which prizes jaunty wordplay and throwaway judgments." As Filmbrain notes, "it's not quite a polemic for a new criticism," but Bordwell leaves little doubt that he is troubled by the state of contemporary film criticism. My response to Bordwell's comments is almost certainly mediated by my theoretcial disagreements with Bordwell's academic criticism, but I'll admit that I'm intrigued by Bordwell's emphasis on the role that good film criticism can play in the public sphere.

I'll admit that I have some serious reservations about Bordwell's sweeping generalizations about academic film criticism. As someone who frequently reads and writes for academic film journals, I'm not sure his argument about theory holds up. Bordwell argues that

Actually, prestigious academic film talk is drenched in opinions. Theory is a matter of taste: you say Virilio, I say Deleuze. Most film academics don’t critically examine the doctrines they applaud. Many dismiss requests for evidence as signs of “empiricism,” and when they cite evidence it’s likely to be tenuous or tendentious.
No doubt Bordwell could offer examples of this kind of writing if he chose, but such examples could be dismissed as "cherry-picking." Bordwell's suggestion that "Theory is driven by fashion" also makes it easy to dismiss the insights that careful engagements with film and media theory can provide and probably says more about Bordwell's distaste for certain kinds of theory. I do think that theoretically-informed arguments can provide insight into the mechanics of spectatorship (apparatus theory and its legacy in feminist film theory), to name one example.

Like Filmbrain, I also found myself disappointed by Bordwell's surprisingly brief account of what it means to turn "insights" into nuanced "clear-cut ideas" and why he believes that film critics are failing this obligation (he does cite Dwight MacDonald for writing some of the "zestiest" film crit around, but doesn't explain this appraisal). Again, I'd like more evidence explaining why MacDonald's criticism is more satisfying than other critics who are working today or why film theory ought to aspire to the scientific rigor or attention to technique that he associates with Charles Rosen, Jacques Barzun, and Robert Hughes. Perhaps I'm simply finding myself defending a profession, a role that I often find myself assuming, but these sweeping comments often overlook some of the more insightful attempts to understand the social, political, and material effects of cinema in our daily lives. If Bordwell is right that academic film writing (I won't speak about writing for film magazines for now), then that may be a commentary on the publication demands imposed by a tenure system that often imposes an institutional pressure to publish too quickly (and if I'm not mistaken, he has raised this critique elsewhere).

I'm still thinking about my position on what Bordwell refers to as "journalistic critics." I'm still tempted to attribute the shifting grounds of journalistic film criticism to a decentralization of cinema culture, both in terms of vuenues for film crit and in terms of the object of study. Film production itself would seem to be far less centralized, but like Bordwell (and Filmbrain), I think film criticism in general can do better, that it has a viable and important contribution to make to the public sphere. Peter cites an entry I wrote the other day in which I seek to deconstruct the idea of a "golden age" of film criticism, in part by pointing to some of the film writing taking place in the blogosphere and in other online venues. I still think there's some good work being done by film bloggers (Peter has a great list), but some second thoughts have cropped up. First, I have thought for a long time that good blogs can aspire to the essayistic writing that Bordwell imagines. Blogs are often recursive, doubling back on old ideas, allowing the writer to rethink old assumptions. Like the best essays, they can be deeply personal, building from the experiences and observations of the essayist (Girish does this as well as anyone) while providing deeper insight into cinema. Is there a lot of bad criticism filled with vacuous observations and hollow word-play? Most certainly. But like Filmbrain, I think film bloggers are producing some excellent film writing and that it's worth emphasizing these voices.

Posted by chuck at 3:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Remembering United 93

Slate's discussion of the United 93 trailer raises some interesting points. I've already discussed the trailer at some length, but their discussion clarifies some questions I still want to think about, specifically in terms of what it means to produce a fictionalization of one major aspect of 9/11.

To frame the discussion, Meghan O'Rourke asks, "Should the trailer come with a short, typed notice announcing what it is, so people can look away (and plug their ears if they like)? Or is it really that a plurality of Americans simply aren't ready for a fictionalization of 9/11?" I think the latter question is probably the hardest to answer, in part because I'm not sure whether it's an issue of being "ready" as much as it is a question of a conflict over how the day's events should be narrated or remembered. 9/11 still has an uneasy place in our cultural memory, and turning it into a story about "the day we faced fear," to quote the trailer, may have the effect of limiting how the day's events are remembered. In this sense, I think I'm relatively close to the position expressed by Michael Agger, who questions the film's "faux authenticity," the use of "technical prowess" to re-create history. And while I didn't address this point in my previous entry, it does seem significant, as O'Rourke points out, that the first two fictionalizations have focused on United flight 93, including the A&E movie I mentioned earlier.

Like the Slate critics, I certainly don't want to judge the film until I've seen it, but the trailer itself raises a number of significant questions about what it means to promote a film about a recent national trauma, particularly one that continues to elude incorporation into larger historical narratives.

Posted by chuck at 12:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

DC Benefit Concert

While listening to Seattle radio station KEXP this morning, I learned about a cool benefit concert here in Washington, DC. Dischord bands Antelope, The Evens (feat Ian MacKaye), and Joe Lally will be playing an all ages benefit concert for Momie's TLC.

The concert takes place at All Souls Church/Pierce Hall, which is located at 16th and Harvard Sts NW. Door open at 7 PM.

Update: I forgot to mention that the concert is scheduled for Saturday, April 15. Next time I'll drink more coffee before posting.

Posted by chuck at 10:14 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 6, 2006

Promoting United 93

During my afternoon Media and History course yetserday, one of my students asked me my response to the controversy over the promotion of United 93, which depicts in real time the 9/11 hijacking of United flight 93, the plane that eventually crashed in Pennsylvania. The student's question clearly tapped into some concerns shared by his classmates, with the question provoking a discussion that lasted for nearly half the class. So far, Universal has refused to pull the trailer for the film, despite protests over the trailer's graphic depiction of the hijacking. I don't know that I have a specific answer to the student's question about the "appropriateness" of the trailer, but among other questions, the controversy points to the still unresolved place that 9/11 will have in our cultural memory and about what political purpose the 9/11 films might serve. At the same time, the debate about the trailer remins us of the public nature of movie theaters, and I think this public status is crucial here (TV commercials advertising the film would likely be less controversial, I'd imagine).

While I'm actually not sure if I've seen the actual trailer, I caught a short infotainment segment about United 93 shown before the trailers for both Inside Man and . The short clips did little to reassure me that the film would go beyond exploiting the hijacking, and many of my students who have seen the trailer expressed similar fears (one or two students in particular criticized Universal for giving only 10% of the film's profits to charity, a detail mentioned in this Newsweek article). Significantly, the informational segment that I saw places emphasis on the relationship that director Paul Greengrass cultivated with many of the victims' family members, with their interviews structuring the short segment in order to emphasize the film's emotional credibility. In fact, the same Newsweek article stipulates that Greengrass received unanimous support from the families of the survivors, some of whom hope the film will raise public awareness on airport and port security.

At the same time, the trailer emphasizes the director's stated purpose of showing the events as they "actually happened," suggesting both a documentary impulse and an immersion into the event itself. In attempting to represent the flight as "realistically" as possible, Greengrass has gone to great effort to track down details about the passengers, even inquiring about what people were wearing, and it's clear that Greengrass has won the trust of these family members. However, these claims about the film's authenticity have the potential to lead to the imposition of a singular interpretation of what happened, essentially simplifying the morning's events. I have some concerns about the real-time narrative as well, especially in that it will reinforce the idea of the hijacking as a punctual event and not one that has a past and future.

I'm curious enough about film and politics that I will likely see this film soon after it opens, even with my serious reservations about it. But I do have to wonder about the motivations for the film and its place in contemporary political discourse, particulalry the claim that Americans have "forgotten" the events of September 11. At least one conservative blogger has been trumpeting the film, commenting that "too many people, including conservatives, have forgotten the events of 9-11 and how United 93 was the first battle in the war on a brutal enemy bent on the destruction of the US." As if any of us could forget 9/11. Perhaps instead we should consider the ways in which the actions of a group of brutal terorists have been used to justify a global "war on teror" that has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people.

Posted by chuck at 9:58 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

April 2, 2006

Thank You for Smoking

On one of the Sunday morning gabfests, Linda Chavez observed that one of the reasons that interest in lobbying reform had faded is that a cynical public "already" thinks that everyone in Washington is corrupt and that the recent scandals involving Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed confirm that. Of course, the idea that everyone is corrupt implies that any real reform is due to fail. This cynicism seems to be general spirit of Jason Reitman's entertaining but hollow Thank You for Smoking (IMDB), an adaptation of Christopher Buckley's satirical novel (which I haven't read). Reitman's film focuses on uber-charmer, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), a spokesperson for Big Tobbaco.

Smoking opens with Naylor appearing on an episode of Joan Lunden's TV show alongside of a 15-year old who developed lung cancer from cigarette smoking and various anti-smoking lobbyists. But Naylor manages to charm the audience, pledging money to "research" the effects of tobacco and even manages to turn anti-smoking lobbyists into villains: "It's in our best interests to keep Robin alive and smoking. The anti-smoking people want Robin to die." Nick's audacity, his ability to BS the audience without appearing to condescend to them, makes him an engaging figure, and he uses these skills to charm his son's class on career day, turning the students' suspicions around by playing to their antiauthoritarian impulses. In short, for Nick, everything is an argument, and nobody can argue or persuade quite like Nick. As Nick himself puts it, "Michael Jordan plays ball. Charlie Manson kills people. I talk."

Nick's success on TV wins the interest of "The Captain" (Robert Duvall), a North Carolina tobacco executive who pushes Nick to work on a pet project: getting cigarettes back into Hollywood movies (recalling, for me, Richard Klein's Cigarettes are Sublime). Knowing that audiences will not accept cigarettes in contemporary films, Nick and a slimy Hollywood superagent (Rob Lowe) imagine a futuristic space adventure in which cigarette smoking is no longer harmful and Brad Pitt blows smoke rings around Catherine Zeta-Jones' nude body.And again, we find ourselves enjoying Nick's skill in marketing cigarettes. Ultimately Nick's career falters halfway through the film. First he gives an ill-advised interview to a seductive journalist (Katie Holmes), where he admits to things that would be best left off the record. Second he also finds himself confronted by a grandstanding Vermont Senator (William H. Macy) who wants to put a "poison" label, complete with skull and crossbones (becuse some people can't read), on all cigarettes. He also endangers the reputation of his fellow "MOD Squad" ("Mercahnts of Death") lobbyists from the tobacco and alcohol industries.

I won't reveal any more about the plot, but Reitman's film seems to take for granted that we already know these guys are corrupt and that it would be too easy to simply condemn them for their actions. Instead, Nick especially, is treated gently and we see him mots often struggling to be a father and dealing with his ex-wife's disapproval over his work (The Austin Chronicle addresses Reitman's interest in the father-son relationship, which draws from Jason's relationship with his father, Ivan Reitman, director of Ghostbusters). I'll admit that I enjoyed Nick's ability to convince even the most skeptical audience of the benefits of Big Tobacco (it might even be fun to teach this film in a freshman composition course focused on argument), but the film's cynicism about lobbying actually seems to disable critique rather than making one. And after spending some time in a smoky bar in the Charlotte airport (where smoking is apparently still legal), I'm not entirely sure that "everybody knows" the harmful effects of smoking. Nick also espouses a rhetoric of "personal responsibility" that could have come from Christopher Buckley's father, William F. Buckley, which is all well and good, but calling for "personal responsibility" is often a means for allowing corporations and other institutions to avoid their responsibilities.

Posted by chuck at 11:27 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

April 1, 2006

Moore's American Vendetta

In my review of V for Vendetta, I had originally planned to mention that Alan Moore, author of the comic book series on which the film is based, has distanced himself from the Wachowski Brothers' film. Moore's comments point to some of the interesting complications that develop in adapting a relatively contemporary text to a significantly different political context. In an interview with MTV.com, he faults the Wachowskis for disregarding the original intentions of the comic book, which was to comment on fascism and anarchy in Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain. Moore notes that

Those words, "fascism" and "anarchy," occur nowhere in the film. It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you've got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they're bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It's a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what "V for Vendetta" was about.
While I certainly understand Moore's frustration, it's worth noting that his comments are based on a reading of the sreenplay, not on a screening of the film. The film's visuals explicitly invoke fascism through the iconogpahy associated with the Chancellor (played by John Hurt), and the "V" graffiti painted over the fascist posters that promote the city clearly recall the anarchy symbol and identify V's politics, however inconsistent they may be, with aspects of anarchism.

Moore also regards the film as politically cautious because it is set outside the United States, implying that the Wachowskis' political commentary could have been "more direct" had the story been set in the United States. Here, I think Moore again misreads the film (or, again, the screenplay). Many of the key characters are clearly modelled on prominent figures in the US (a pill-popping conservative talk show host?!), and the political allegory uses Moore's narrative to show the limits of the restrictions on rights justified by the "war on terror." Depicting characters as being punished for homosexuality or for owning a copy of the Koran seems clear enough. That being said, I think I agree with Moore that the film is too cautious politically and that it lacks some of the self-reflection that made Moore's Vendetta a more thoughtful text.

Posted by chuck at 2:09 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

V for Vendetta

While most film critics, shaped by auteurist impulses, have compared V for Vendetta (IMDB) to the Wachowski Brothers' cyberthriller, The Matrix, I found myself reminded more of David Fincher's politically ambivalent treatment of anti-globaliztion in Fight Club. Like Fight Club's Tyler Durden, V becomes a charismatic, if ambiguous, figure who attempts to overturn a repressive (or totalitarian) society. But while Durden's tactics fuse Naomi Klein-style anti-corporate critiques and an Adbusters aesthetic with a 1990s-style masculinity crisis and a subversive violence, V for Vendetta depicts V as a freedom fighter railing against a post-9/11 totalitarian state who is equally inspired by British anti-hero Guy Fawkes and Shakespeare, though his motives for attacking the British government are also more deeply personal. In my article on Fight Club, I ultimately argue that Tyler's anarchist impulses are contained by the narrative twist and romantic subplot, and V for Vendetta seems to reach similar limits in its dramatic conclusion. In fact, as J. Hoberman suggests, if The Matrix recalls Baudrillard's concepts of simulation, V for Venetta might be read alongside Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's Empire.

V for Vendetta opens with a brief pre-credits sequence featuring the famous British anti-hero Guy Fawkes who sought to blow up Parliament in 1605. Fawkes' actions allowed the British government an excuse to crack down on Catholicism, and V (played by Hugo Weaving) takes Fawkes' heroism as an inverted badge of honor when on the anniversary of Fawkes' arrest, he blows up the Old Bailey, promising to destroy Parliament the follow year. V, who is always seen wearing a creepy Fawkes mask, with its rosy cheeks, strking mustache, and ambiguous smile, ultimately befriends and wins the grudging support of Evie (Natalie Portman), an employee of the national British television station that broadcasts government propaganda and misinformation, first when he rescues her from a group of police thugs who corner her in an alley, and later when he "educates" her regarding the more intrusive effects of the police state.

Like Stephanie Zacharek, I'm ambivalent about Alan Moore and David Lloyd's 1982 anti-Thatcherite, anti-Big Brother comic series, in part becuase V's status as an "ambiguous" hero seems to forgive the monstrous mind games he plays with Evey, and the Wachowski Brothers' screenplay (directed by James McTeigue, an assitant director for The Matrix) did little to complicate the problematic gender politics, with Evey becoming a kind of British Joan of Arc-style ingenue and protege for V's anarchist tendencies. V's mindgames are oddly set against a flashback narrative, in which a confined Evey discovers a story scribbled on toilet paper by "Valerie," a lesbian who had been imprisoned in the same jail cell, with Valerie's story serving as an explicit critique of attempts to use the power of the state to discriminate against homosexuals, but for me, the gender politics undercut the film's good intentions in celebrating tolerance.

But the real target of the Wachowskis' V for Vendetta is fascism, specifically of the post-9/11 variety. While Newsbusters' Tim Graham seeks to distance V for Vendetta by emphasizing its British setting, it's clear that the film's critique is directed at the use of fear-mongering and intimidation to garner support for the war on terror. As V eventually reveals, he was radicalized against the state because of his treatment in a concentartion camp-like prison that recalls Guantanamo and other secret prisons (information about the prison conveniently disappers inside bureacrtic black holes). The state-run TV stations consistently pump out misinformation, even stating that the explosion at the Old Bailey was "intentional" in order to avoid admitting that there might be opposition to the state's policies, and a TV talk-show personality who might fit in on Fox News uses rage and fear-mongering to cultivate suport for the country's Chancellor (John Hurt).

[Major spoiler follows] V ultimately succeeds in blowing up Parliament in the visually audacious final scene in which thousands of people congregate in the streets of London, all wearing the Fawkes masks in an act of defiance against the state. Just as Tyler Durden's explosion of the glass-and-steel credit card company skyscrapers represent a symbolic act against global capital, V's anti-fascist act is framed by its staging. While Tyler and Marla watch the symblic collapse of the credit card industry from the safety of a nearby building as if they are watching a movie, the explosion of Parliament plays similarly to the massive audience on the streets. But while I enjoyed the scene's audacity, I still found the film's politics to be somewhat constrained, and its inability to imagine an alternative to the futuristic police state was striking.

I'm still sorting through my response to V for Vendetta's politics. To suggest that the film is an "ode to Al Zarqawi," as this Townhall.com review does, misses the point of V's symbolic act and the film's suggestion that torture only reproduces the violence it seeks to prevent. But I tend to agree with Cynthia Fuchs' observation that the film 's lack of faith in its audience and its lack of reflectiveness on its own use of violence undercut its politics. As she points out, "Yes, imperialism is really bad, and yes, Nazi-ish iconography is a sure sign of a regime's need for change. What's less clear, and could use some reflection, is how V's own violence will or will not produce more victims and vigilantes." Ultimately, I think it's this lack of self-consciousness that left me disappointed in, or at least indifferent, to the film.

Posted by chuck at 11:25 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack