Undercurrent. 4.

"In his analysis, [Robin] Wood compared Cruising to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and Richard Brooks's Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977), and this corpus was founded on a gnawing ambiguity: was the incoherence of these texts, their dynamic contradictions, voluntary or involuntary, crafted or merely symptomatic?" Adrian Martin in the new issue of Undercurrent: "The cinema of William Friedkin presents, in fact, a richly ambiguous borderline case within contemporary American cinema. Rather than evoking Scorsese and Brooks, one might place Friedkin's work within a certain cinema of hysteria that includes auteurs like Oliver Stone, Mike Figgis, Adrian Lyne, Tony Scott and Zalman King - or, further back, Ken Russell."

By the time Manny Farber died, he "had become a writer no one didn't like, a figure of American culture like Johnny Cash or Philip Guston who all thinking people agreed was excellent, unmatched, etc." Now that a summer of mourning has turned to a new season, AS Hamrah argues that we might do well to look at some of Farber's "quirks." For example, "He loves the extra adjective: 'Every Hitchcock-style director should study this picture if he wants to see really stealthy, queer-looking, odd-acting, foreboding people.' And as for his great distinction between dreaded 'white elephant art' and admirable 'termite art,' has anyone noticed how close his definition of white elephant art is to his definition of a 'minimal underground classic'?" Even so, "Despite his assessment of it, he speaks to us from a great period in film history, roughly the Raoul-Walsh-and-Wavelength era, a time he captured like no one else. He stopped writing about two seconds before Star Wars came out, a real shame but understandable. Only his students know what he thought of films made the last 30 years."

Spur der Filme: Zeitzeugen über die DEFA "offers extracts from some 400 hours of interviews conducted with the most prominent personalities of the East German cinema world, and, in healthy contrast, also with those who did not reach East German movie prominence or lost this status because they fell into political disgrace," writes Oskar Holl. "The book is therefore a perfect almanac for anyone who wants to look behind the scenes of the unique art and politics of filmmaking in the GDR. Spur der Filme (Traces of Films) is exemplary in the manner in which it points out how closely linked the realms of culture and politics were, and continue to be, in this part of the world."

"Time in [Peter] Watkins's films is like the time that Walter Benjamin, in the 14th of his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History,' qualified as 'not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.'" Chris Fujiwara: " In Section XVI of the same essay, Benjamin argues for the necessity of 'the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.' A perfect description of Watkins's procedure in La Commune, and a perfect description of the goals of the members of the Union des femmes shown in the film, who seek to break their identification with their work and liberate time for themselves. In Edvard Munch, The 70s People and Evening Land, time explodes... he ambiguity that Watkins cultivates from his earliest films achieves its fullest form in The Freethinker and La Commune."

Also: "Is The Dark Knight, as it might appear, a right-wing film in favor of unbridled State power, or does it view the issues it raises more ambivalently?"

"To my mind, much of Warhol's art is as daring and beautiful as it is witty and, yes, original," writes David Sterritt. "But one of its most appealing strengths is its capacity to open up thought and debate on an enormous variety of fronts, from the merits of particular works to the theoretical import of terms like 'style' and 'content' and 'originality' itself. Warhol's best achievements, from the early Coke bottles to the stunning self-portraits and monumental Mao pictures of his late career, are forever oscillating among multiple levels of meaning and interest, rewarding both the casual gaze in the gallery and the deeper ideas prompted after you leave. As an art dealer interviewed in [Ric] Burns's [Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film] says of the 'simple' soup cans, 'They're complicated in their implications.'"

Fergus Daly on Nicole Brenez's Abel Ferrara: "Fundamentally for Brenez, it is the twin forces of anger and love that drive Ferrara's films. They are 'symbolic bombs that dynamite the shadows in an effort to hollow out a space for love.' In short, anyone looking for an answer to the question "how are we to understand the present?" might well find they are more moved by this book than by any other in a very long time."

Adrian Martin finds it "a pleasure to read and re-read this relatively short (114 page) book about acting in cinema. Published in Wallflower's admirable 'Short Cuts' series, [Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation] lives up to the aims of the list: it provides a clear, economical introduction to an aspect of cinema which, in this case, is everywhere evident (and, indeed, celebrated), but so rarely discussed in rigorous, analytical terms. But Andrew Klevan, a gifted writer, does still more than this: although fairly quiet on the polemical front, his book offers itself as an example of a new kind of criticism, descriptively rich and poetically suggestive."

In response, Klevan takes "the opportunity to reflect upon the age-old matters of text/context - and related matters of intention - as I have experienced them in my own work, and to explain the reasoning behind a form of philosophical criticism."

Posted by dwhudson at October 24, 2008 10:32 AM