March 22, 2004
Shorts, 3/22.
So rarefied is Pistol Opera that watching it feels like landing on the very summit of a mountain, without benefit of the context gained from ascending the lower slopes. Can the director's earlier works reveal his embedded themes, encrypted meanings, or even a consistent use of symbols? Can the critical pickaxe chip away at solid themes of politics and gender?
Writing in 24fps, Robert Keser heads to the base camp and starts back up again as a guide to the career of Seijun Suzuki: "The unrealistic, highly stylized colors, the hyper aesthetic depiction of life, the experimentation with different cinematic styles, all these are the theater of existence, culminating in the radical theatricality of Pistol Opera."
For Film-Philosophy, Michael Abecassis reviews Martin O'Shaughnessy's book, Jean Renoir, and just as interesting is the author's reply: "I'm increasingly fascinated - predictably probably - by the Renoir films of the Popular Front era; about how they still seem to speak to us with tremendous political urgency, and also about how the key films - the breathtakingly great, astonishingly intelligent ones (Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, La Grande Illusion, La Regle du jeu) - are still ill-served by depoliticising humanist readings, formalist accounts, or tired but indefatigable auteurism." Extracts from the book addressing the Popular Front years are posted at the Online Jean Renoir Resouce Center.
In an engaging conversation found via Metaphilm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and Philip Pullman discuss, well, religion, of course, but also religion in film, a tangent that leads, naturally enough, to The Passion of the Christ. And don't miss Brian Flemming's perceptive take, nor Gary Wills's in the New York Review of Books: "My wife and I had to stop glancing furtively at each other for fear we would burst out laughing. It had gone beyond sadism into the comic surreal, like an apocalyptic version of Swinburne's The Whipping Papers."
Back to the Telegraph (free res req'd):
Savage Island
Ongoing, through Thursday: Another Hole in the Head: Seven Nights of Unrelenting Terror at the AMC Kabuki in San Francisco. The sites for these films are a nice break from the usual sites for studio fare. Dead and Breakfast, The Visage or The Ghosts of Edendale, for example.
"It didn't work for you - I get it." With modest humor, Kevin Smith tolerates Newsweek David Ansen's criticisms of Jersey Girl. Smith is a bit more jocular in the New York Times when Bryan Curtis asks him about the Jesus movie:
I'm like, "What controversy?" The dude made a movie about Jesus in a country that's largely Christian - a very traditional movie - and it's made over $200 million in two weeks. There ain't no controversy, people. That's a hit. They took one or two Jewish leaders in the beginning and said, "This may be construed as anti-Semitic," and then spun it into a must-see movie for hard-core Christians. You've got to go see it if you love Jesus. I wish to God I had thought to do that when I was making Dogma.
Also in the NYT:
Posted by dwhudson at March 22, 2004 8:20 AM
I had a real problem with the AO Scott article, as I mention on my site.
I still can't decipher the crux of his argument. Would it really be impossible for an American to create a Dogville?
Posted by: Filmbrain at March 23, 2004 1:52 PMI'm not sure it's a matter of degree, i.e., how severely any American or non-American would criticize the country (but more on that in a moment), but rather, the shape, tone or thrust of that criticism.
The line you quote at your site is, "Lars von Trier's ruthlessly deconstructed take on small-town life is a fantasy of America no American would ever dream up."
He's not saying a Michael Moore or a Ralph Nader or a Noam Chomsky couldn't or wouldn't be just as harsh; it's that the whole of the film is something that wouldn't spring from an American mind. It's a broad, blanket statement that's wide open to being proven wrong in a country of 280 million or so, that's true. But I think he's onto something.
One thing about Von Trier that he brings up but ultimately skirts is how consciously and almost certainly purposely Von Trier gets America, the actual place, the actual nation wrong. Factually, that is. To me, these are more flags planted in the essential concept of films like Dancer in the Dark, a musical, and Dogville, with its (for lack of a better term at the moment) Brechtian staging, that wave out loud: The setting here is not actually that vast landscape between the Brooklyn and Golden Gate Bridges - it is, to pick up Scott's term again, a fantasy land.
I would guess Von Trier is more concerned with what I think of as Americanism than America itself. "Americanism" is actually, IMHO, a term that could come in pretty handy for just about everyone - journalists, economists, artists, everyone. Like art, the term would be hard to define and always open to debate, but you'd know it when you see it.
Germany, for example, is faced with gargantuan deficits. It would be helpful to be able to say, "The Americanist response would be such-n-such. Now, is this really what we want to do?" As opposed to, say, a social democratic response, the natural alternative, considering that the ruling party is, in fact, the Social Democratic Party. It would be handy because, in fact, the chancellor and finance minister's response for years now has been "Americanist." It isn't simply "late capitalist" to frantically cut spending and taxes at the first sign of a slump; it's a reaction that's also very conscious of an American model, the American example.
And you could ask what Americanist responses would be to any number of issues: regulating the media or other industries, domestic cultural clashes, running a political campaign. Again, and particularly for those living outside the US, having a label for a particular sort of response that's immediately recognizable as such in the first place would at least serve as convenient shorthand.
That's one aspect of "Americanism" that I think Von Trier is addressing rather that the United States itself; another is the omnipresence of American culture which is the carrier of "Americanism," a rampant carrier particularly in Europe, which Von Trier has addressed in other interviews, saying something to the effect that he practically lives in America anyway, there's little point in actually going. Or that there are aspects of America, in this case, the actual place, that he feels at times he knows more about than he does about particular aspects of Denmark. Most of them, naturally, though not all of them intangible.
These are areas, and IMHO, very interesting areas Von Trier is opening up and exploring, which is why, in the face of works as conceptually complex, challenging and engaging as Dark and Dogville, I find it very odd when some - not Scott, of course - dismiss these films, or, as is more usually the case, Von Trier himself as "anti-American." It's a personal accusation probably because it's a reaction to having taken personal offense - which, again IMHO, is a complete misreading of Von Trier's provocations.
Posted by: David Hudson at March 26, 2004 1:54 PM
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