The way things
work! Leftists and Luddites and bleeding hearts of all stripes have taught us about the dire parts of the story, but in light of things like this film, it’s impossible to
deny that there’s more to industrialization and technology than futurist excess
or expressionist despair. Those are
conceptual or theoretical responses anyway.
It would take a narcissistic, defiantly unhandy or straight-out clueless
aesthete to exclusively think otherwise. Beyond his valid but severely pinched interpretations are all this rich invention
and application, beautiful and useful in equal measure. Were Ruskin and Morris wrong after all, or at
least in part? (As in: http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1884/useful.htm. [Except they weren't much wrong, were they?]) The social relations of industrialization may be, often are iniquitous, but the machines themselves are absolutely exquisite.
Steiner's film suggests that science, or in this
case applied mechanical engineering, lies exactly and ideally between art and
nature. It contains the inspiringly
ingenious contrivance of the one, and the gloriously ordered functioning of the
other. This amazing parade of engaging
gears testifies to God’s glory and man’s nobility as surely as the lily of the
field. It probably helps that we don’t pull
back to reveal the cops breaking the heads of the union men. But let's not be angry all the time. How about this reverse tracking shot? Pull back to reveal the actual manufacturing or functioning in which these gears and gizmos are involved, or the cool things
that get made and the fun use we can put them to. The clueless aesthetes still lose.
You can find this film, together with a ton of other tremendous non or anti-commercial movies, in this spectacular compilation:
You can see this film here:
Last Year at Marienbad
France, 1961
Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Photographed by Sacha Vierny
Directed by Alain Resnais
Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Photographed by Sacha Vierny
Directed by Alain Resnais
It turns out that this notoriously opaque/empty provocation is is not remotely a naked emperor, nor is it empty. As for its opaqueness, that is intentional, strategical, and extremely useful. The film is actually great in all sorts of ways, and all of those ways are quite clear. Clear at least to a person who has had the good fortune to sit in on and hear and learn all sorts of interesting interpretive strategies and intertextual stuff. If I were in 1961, or an alternatively hard working non-film type, or in high school, I might feel differently.
First—beautiful! Technical credits, every single cinematic thing is beyond reproach, gleaming, exact, stupendous. It’s a hard beauty, mind you, but there are thematic or philosophical or plain formal reasons, and beautiful is beautiful. It’s a film about objects in a space, or about objects, or about space. It’s a study in movement and stasis, and vice versa. It behaves like a critique or exposé of the bourgeoisie, what with everyone dressed so stunningly and standing about in that enervated, desanguinated, sated way. Conversations are aggressively and artfully empty—like Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, reset. Aggressive, but not amusing: in the early, anti-establishing scenes, and especially at that terrifically terrifying play we find ourselves among vampires much more menacing than Bergman/Polanski, 1967. (i.e. “M.”) It’s like Visconti’s The Damned, but way better.
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| Hey! Why do the people throw shadows when the trees don't? |
Shades of Citizen Kane: two participants, never any agreement about what happened between them. Note, for instance, the radical shifts in setting and décor. You’d think this world was objective, and measurable, with all of its sharp images, exact compositions and precise movements. Alas, no. A love story. Or the ennui and the satedness are a result of sensual excess, or sensual emptiness. X is trying to remember or replicate or generate something, but it isn’t and can’t be possible. So, it’s a critique of heartlessness. Or of heartless women.
Or, and this gets more convincing, it’s a rape story. Back to those radical shifts of setting and décor—it’s a violation that led to a psychic break, and to an expressionist nightmare, which envisions this woman’s shattered world. Repulsion! Before Repulsion. And then there are those threatening games of Nim. Look at all those options. This kind of multiplication might, usually, mean a failed film. But not if the ultimate, deepest narrative here is the narrative of our perceptual processes, collectively and in each one of us. All of these uncertainties and ambiguities turn semiotic certainty and the simplicities of entertainment into a dialogic funhouse. Not what they say, but what you get out of it. Forward to 2001, maybe, and so much more. I might have made it sound easier than it is, and this kind of thing has led to lots of nonsense. And am I that big of a Tarkovsky fan? But when it works, and it sure does here, what a challenge, what a hoot, and what a favour.
Here's what the vendor has to say: http://www.criterion.com/films/1517-last-year-at-marienbad
60 Cycles
Canada, 1965
Directed by Claude Labreque
Really great. Godard graphics at the beginning, followed by
a practical anthology of photographic techniques. A two minute first shot, shot with a long lens, with the
whole cohort approaching, arriving, passing.
A two minute lateral track, a study in planes, and in the constant ebb
and flow of cycling. I notice for the
first time how soccer-like this sport is.
Victory is very much of interest, but with an undertaking this vast,
it’s only and paradoxically through attending to the miniscule that you get
it. Cycling is a matter of little surges
and strategies, repeated infinitely.
In addition to sports insight, there’s lots here about technology and culture, and how they used to do things. No helmets! (No drugs?!) Bike seats are consistently too low. This is a lot like Helicopter Canada, but localized. Plenty of the picturesque, except that the portraits are too specific or indelible to be merely that. There’s that Green Onion music again. It’s derivative—maybe even plagiaristic—but it works quite nicely. There’s an amazing series of shots at the end, with a long lens again, and bikers streaking laterally through the static camera set-ups like Norman McLaren abstractions.
This series of images resolves into the last of the film's several bike mishaps. This is sport, sensation and spectacle, the kind of thing that so often appeals to our prurient, rubbernecking impulses. But here the sequence of the crash and its aftermath come off as poignant, empathetic. That's the whole film, in a moment, splitting the difference between chronicle and lyric, representation and abstraction. You get the sense of the event itself, but also its poetry and humanity. Pure motion and velocity, with personalities registering glancingly but indelibly (the smiling boy who cries at the end).
In French. You'll understand it: http://www.nfb.ca/film/60_cycles/
Want a really good biking book? http://www.cyclingtips.com.au/2010/11/the-rider/
Humain, Trop Humain
In addition to sports insight, there’s lots here about technology and culture, and how they used to do things. No helmets! (No drugs?!) Bike seats are consistently too low. This is a lot like Helicopter Canada, but localized. Plenty of the picturesque, except that the portraits are too specific or indelible to be merely that. There’s that Green Onion music again. It’s derivative—maybe even plagiaristic—but it works quite nicely. There’s an amazing series of shots at the end, with a long lens again, and bikers streaking laterally through the static camera set-ups like Norman McLaren abstractions.
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| McLaren, Lambart, 1949 |
This series of images resolves into the last of the film's several bike mishaps. This is sport, sensation and spectacle, the kind of thing that so often appeals to our prurient, rubbernecking impulses. But here the sequence of the crash and its aftermath come off as poignant, empathetic. That's the whole film, in a moment, splitting the difference between chronicle and lyric, representation and abstraction. You get the sense of the event itself, but also its poetry and humanity. Pure motion and velocity, with personalities registering glancingly but indelibly (the smiling boy who cries at the end).
In French. You'll understand it: http://www.nfb.ca/film/60_cycles/
Want a really good biking book? http://www.cyclingtips.com.au/2010/11/the-rider/
Humain, Trop Humain
France, 1974
Directed by Louis Malle
Directed by Louis Malle
They start and they end
with dreariness and drudgery, but this is actually a very subtle, substantial
take on a subject that is too often taken for granted. Marx and his minions bemoan the
standardization and diminution and alienation of industrial process. We take that for granted because it’s
true. But it’s not only, or absolutely
true. As is so often the case, a closer
look really complicates things. The fact
is that though the workers do not see the thing through from beginning to end,
many of them actually make contributions that are much more than just
mindless. Malle and his contributors
spend considerable stretches detailing the very skilled, and possibly very
satisfying work of a number of craftsmen (the silver welder, the young man
tamping that trunk into place, the long-haired kid having at the doors).
Furthermore, the
discourse of the more wild-eyed activists and socialists can distract us from a
very basic engineering fact. Though
mindlessness and occasional terrible accidents may result, it is also true that
industrialism is kind of amazing, an expansive, practically endlessly variable
record and product of human ingenuity.
Orson Welles (1942) and the end-of-year statistics prove that cars have ruined
the world, but they’ve also shrunk it to our partial and certain benefit.
So, Malle’s politics
will suggest that this is basically a critique, and the film’s extended (and
interestingly early) digression/extension into the trade show confirms the
fact. And yet, for all of the satirical
substance of this section, the aforementioned complexity stands. Yes, it’s all materialistic and faintly
frivolous. Yes, there is hoodwinking,
and strong evidence that the apparatuses of commerce are absurd. (This section actually ends up being a very
close, doubtless inadvertent companion piece to Tati’s Trafic.) But on the other
hand, this apparatus not only contributes to the GDP and the horrible Corporation’s
bottom line, it also benefits small investors, and provides regular people with
jobs!
As for the product, that
is real and not necessarily corrupt pleasure that these consumers, buyers and
gawkers both, are experiencing. And,
since this is France, you hear evidence of considerable subtlety and
sophistication, of real intelligence and substance as people talk about these
cars, their various merits, and their place in the society. You want to be careful about parotting the
propaganda of the fascists, but it’s not always propaganda. Industrial society and the booming markets it
creates may indicate and add to people’s prosperity and happiness.
And, Marx. They start and end with dreariness and
drudgery. Also, this is a terrific
record of clothes and hair which, though 70’s, actually look fine—people can
generally make the craziest ensembles work, in one way or another.
