I was introducing the films of Robert Bresson, the greatest master of form and rhythm the cinema has ever known, to Wendall who mostly paints houses and sells used records, for which he has a genuine knack. He got me my copy of Ornette Coleman'a Science Fiction. I made a very funny joke, I thought: I told him that because Bresson's art is both austere and clinically severe it is expected of all true adherents and acolytes alike that when pausing the movie to get snacks or go to the toilet we only do so when one or another of the characters in whichever film we're watching is in the process of passing through a doorway. After we finished watching Procès de Jeanne d'Arc from '62, Wendall immediately commented with big, wide eyes that there sure were a lot of doors and boy did they clank and such. Wendell added that the film was a "stone-cold death trip" and wondered what caused me to pick that one in particular in order to introduce him to Monsieur Bresson. I told him I just got the BFI Blu-ray and hadn't watched it yet but also it's the optimal place to begin because it is the most spare, rigorous, and precise of the director's early black and white films. You have established camp in the higher altitudes; tomorrow we reach for the summit, L'argent, Bresson's final film once and for all but also the last of those sublime colour ventures, often Dostoevsky-minded, though L'argent adapts a Tolstoystory. The rhythm and tone have been finessed to a point of peerless vision and control and in L'argent there are no longer relics or revenants of European cinema or commercial cinema, there is only the handsome ace formalist Bobby Bresson, down for whatever as long as it's classy, and when his art is in his own hands rather than those of some chump front office clerk, he uses it to say that it's a hell of a lot worse out there than anybody's telling you now but it's buttered fucking scones compared to what's incoming. Anyway, if we wanted to be really severe we could easily argue that L'argent is the only true Bresson film.
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
You are the music
Don't let no one tell you
That you got a job to do
Can't you hear it?
- Royal Trux, "Call Out the Lions"
Secret défense (Jacques Rivette, 1998)
1. When I defended my master’s thesis way back in 2004, I recall that the professor Mark Langer, who was not my advisor but was on my defence committee—and who I knew well and had studied with—asked, before the interrogation proper could commence, in affable M. Langer fashion, if I had seen anything good recently, so I raved enthusiastically and at length about Jacques Rivette’s 1998 slow-burn/unheimlich crime & conspiracy caper Secret défense, which I had just watched with my girlfriend on DVD, our having rented it from Canadian Netflix- equivalent mail rental service Zip.ca. My verdict that day, overheard by my entire defence committee, was that Secret défense had one of the most mind-blowing sequences I had ever seen, involving travel between multiple train stations in a semi-randomized fashion, and that Rivette has gone some length to make the viewer recollect and meditate upon both Hitchcock's Vertigo and Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity.I for one accept the challenge in the best of humours. You can't really be a film scholar I don't think if you gush so unabashedly over all the movies.
L'amour fou (Jacques Rivette, 1969)
2. In her book on Rivette for University of Illinois Press, Mary M. Wiles assesses the two main things that are bound to characterize most any Rivette film one might encounter in its natural habitat: “it becomes evident that Rivette’s authorial signature is not merely discernible in the way in which theatricality inflects his films, but also in the manner in which women’s lives are portrayed.” Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), the director's most widely beloved film, couldn't exist in anything like the form it takes if Rivette had neglected to get his actresses to help him write it. Wiles avers that the fact Rivette preferred the credit “mise-en-scène” instead of “director” to designate his role in the lived execution of his cinema reflects “his deeply held conviction that film is a collective, rather than a solitary, endeavour.” The aesthetic of early films like Paris nous appartient (1961) and L'amour fou (1969) has things positioned just so such that we can see how Rivette and his collaborators have in uncomplicated and endlessly exciting ways turned documentary cinema methodology on their own acts of experimental theatre. More than any other directors who we'd consider his contemporaries, with the possible exception of Polish pop-saturated theatre of cruelty monger Andrzej Żuławski, Rivette believed with the blazing intensity of the devout in performance as a polyvalent subject in and of itself.
Out 1 (Jacques Rivette, 1971)
3. Things Rivette said terrified him: “the State, Money, the Police, the Party…” The emancipatory [praxis] is collaborative and expressive, it disrupts productively and is characterized by rituals in which women attain self-possession through the ongoing pursuit of destabilizing performative rapture and of the ecstatic loss at the heart of creation. Female agency and female solidarity are celebrated precisely for their power to subvert presiding heteronormative/patriarchal constraints. Literature, theatre, music, painting, and sculpture are the stuff of which sharing and caring are made.
4. Rivette: “The work is always much more interesting to show than the result. I can watch a coppersmith in a Roquier film for three hours. A caldron, even if it is the most beautiful in the world, I will have viewed from all angles in three minutes.”
La bête humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938)
Jaguar (Jean Rouch, 1967)
5. Rivette first became passionate about the idea of making films because of the influence of Jean Cocteau and especially after having read the diaries Cocteau kept detailing the making of 1946’s La Belle et la Bête. Rivette came in short order to be inspired by Jean Renoir and Jean Rouch in both of whom he saw profound evidence that “realism” springs from “chance” and excels when it can make use of it. Rivette changed course after interviewing Renoir for Jean Renoir la patron in 1966. Through Renoir and his work, Rivette saw unveiled, feat of majestic prestidigitation, “a cinema which does not impose anything, where one tries to suggest things, to let them happen, where it is mainly a dialogue at every level, with the actors, with the situation, with the people you meet, where the act of filming is part of the film itself.”
Histoire de Marie et Julien (Jacques Rivette, 2003)
6. In Duelle (1976) and Noroît (1976), the first two parts of an aborted trilogy on Celtic myth and ritual transplanted to Paris and Brittany respectively, Jacques Rivette wades way perilously out into the dodgy depths of magical rites, duels, “phantom goddesses” (of Sun and Moon), and the festival inter-realm interval of the quarantaine [annual period where phantom goddesses freely walk the earth and interact with mortals]. The 2003 masterpiece Histoire de Marie et Julien actually had its original genesis as a component of the mid-seventies quarantaine cycle, but Rivette, hospitalized for nervous exhaustion, had to abort pre-production for the third one and rest up per doctor's orders. That the film that finally emerged in 2003 deals with a revenante [spirit doomed to return] played by Emmanuelle Béart, who recites the geis, a magical incantation derived from druidism, and performs the geste interdit [gesture of prohibition], may cause one to muse that sinister occult forces may have interceded somewhere along the line and that this wily Jacques Rivette gentleman may well be truly malign. A truly Rivettian supposition, at any rate!
7. Paris is the eternal face of the supine Sphinx. I think she needs a lice treatment. Sadness is appeased and serenity restored.
I had yielded to the dramatizing suggestion of the park. It was sensation in its pure state. No, it was sensation apprehended as abyss. I was plunging into it. Once more I was lost, for I could see no way of getting out. I was hypnotized by persecution, but without ever bothering to find out by whom. I am rather lazy.
- Henri Micheaux, Miserable Miracle
He lived on a barge moored near a big town and his name was Cidrolin. He was served a not very fresh crayfish with glaucous mayonnaise.
- Raymond Queneau, The Blue Flowers
The House by the Cemetery (Lucio Fulci, 1981)
Blue Rita (Jess Franco, 1977)
Nearly a year ago now I moved from an increasingly claustrophobic, uninhabitable, and terminally gentrified condominium complex in Calgary's central Mission neighbourhood into a little, blue, and very wonderful house one neighbourhood to the east in Erlton, right at the other end of Lindsay Park, which is just about as accessible on foot from here as it was from the old haunt, though my feet now are much worse feet than they once were on account of necrotic tissue pain. It was my mother and my mother alone who made the move happen and I am at my best no more than an adequately humble beneficiary. The principal point of distinction of my little blue house on the prairie in Erlton—especially if you were pitching it to some fetching kawaii goth lady with a Hello Kitty on her Italian leather jacket—is that it is absolutely surrounded by cemeteries. Truly. You've probably never seen anything quite like it 'cause I know I sure hadn't. There are five substantial, noteworthy cemeteries in Erlton and all of them, the Chinese and Jewish cemeteries included, were established in the late 19th / early 20th centuries...though I guess you can't really call it living history...
Aselefech Ashine and Getenesh Kebret with Army Band
In the both widely and deeply loved 1974 film Alice in the Cities, a modestly-scaled black and white transnational classic with big heart, star Rüdiger Vogler plays author, journalist, and grifter-sleuth Philip Winter for the first but not the last time in a film by Wim Wenders, Vogler’s collaborator and buddy. The film commences with the stumblebum German factotum lost on some vague and probably vaporized assignment in the United States, playing around with his then-brand-new, highly-novel—and most of all affordable—commercial grade Polaroid camera, but mostly really just slouching and registering checked-out, nary a sense of the direction in which to point his toes. About ten minutes into Alice in the Cities, Philip Winter falls asleep in an anonymous hotel bed, appearing almost as though to drift peacefully and passively in and out of consciousness as the sounds of the hotel cathode-ray television tube transmit scenes from John Ford’s 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln, including one in which Henry Fonda, starring as young Illinois lawyer Abe Lincoln, plays a more than serviceable mouth harp. The scene does a sublime job of capturing the nebulous zone you enter when you fall asleep while watching a movie or playing a record. We might also pause to consider this nocturnal television event later, two years later, when Vogler, playing Bruno Winter in Kings of the Road, declares: “The Yanks have colonized our Unconscious.” Insofar as concerns the scene in the hotel room and the benevolent appropriation of the John Ford material, one might assume that material was selected in advance so as to be a basic precondition of the scene and its requirements. Wenders is a big outspoken fan of Ford and of Young Mr. Lincoln in particular. Writer Peter Handke, another regular Wenders collaborator and brother in jukeboxes / movie houses, wrote a novel called Short Letter, Long Farewell, published two years before Alice in the Cities came out, in which John Ford and Young Mr. Lincoln both figure prominently. Well, not so fast, hold your horses. On the commentary track for Alice in Cities contained on the Criterion Blu-ray, Wenders says the scene was shot in New Jersey and that he looked in the TV Guide earlier that day to see what was playing later, because there were always lots of movies running on American TV,and Young Mr. Lincoln merely presented itself as the most appropriate of the available options.
To underscore what a major film Young Mr. Lincoln was for that firebrand generation of militant cinephiles who formed the French Nouvelle Vague and its bustling rats-with-plastic-forks Arrière-garde, allow me to treat you to a scrumptious historical footnote, remembered at this point no doubt by none save perhaps academics with a specialization in the vicinity and yours truly, in ill health and in worse: 1972, two years before Alice in the Cities and the same year as Handke’s Short Letter, Long Farewell, the illustrious Cahiers du Cinéma, shortly to turn over to Serge Deny and actively swinging Maoist and Lacanian simultaneous-like, did an entire issue of the magazine on Ford’s 1939 legal beagle oater and its lanky lead, with every last faintly glimmering semiotic detail covered by at least three autonomous voices.
Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991)
Ohayô (Yasujirō Ozu, 1959)
I loved going to film history lectures in university because my mind would be blown thirty times before I was so much as properly seated and de-scarved. I mean it with total earnestness and extremely good recollection when I assert that one of the film history stories I first heard as an undergraduate that completely blew my mind is that of the great Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu who started making silent movies and worked constantly into the early 1960s and who additionally claimed that after he saw Victor Fleming’s 1939 Hollywood übersmash Gone with the Wind while stationed with the military in Singapore it became clear to him that the Americans were going to defeat the Japanese in the war due to the sheer superiority of their production capabilities. What a thing to sit with! The impact of Ozu’s work on the sensibility and taste of Wim Wenders is no mystery, and of course Wenders' intimate 1985 archive-artifact Tokyo-ga is explicitly about how the departed giant Ozu becomes threaded through Classical Japan and Speculative-Futurist Japan too. Had it not been for the fact that Ozu was championed by Wenders, I would not have bought a copy of the VHS tape of 1959’s Ohayô at the A&B Sound downtown when I was in high school. It’s a famously adorable comedy, on the light end of things for the director who conceals no part of life's variegated seasons, containing an awful lot of flatulence and essentially telling the story of two boys who attempt to pressure and cajole their father into providing them with a television set. If Michelangelo Antonioni pushed to the limits what he was capable of doing and capable of withstanding in forcing the colour systems of complete landscapes to bow to his regime in just one film, 1964’s Red Desert, judicious elder Yasujirō Ozu produces a sleeve-full of superior colour conjurings in each one of his final colour pictures (with special distinction due Ohayô and ’62’s An Autumn Afternoon), the whole while taking an occasional break here and there to dash off and star in a whisky advertisement on a yacht. Clearly the most fun part of building half a city block on a big empty lot is painting it all up. When people tell me that their favourite Ozu is one of the earlier black and white movies I’m almost a little confounded somehow, as though my personal value were in dispute, even should their choice happen to be ’49’s mercurial Late Spring, which is a note-perfect motion picture on every single level.
It’s impossible to predict the fate of my film; people go to the movies to forget about themselves, and a sunset leans exactly in the opposite direction, it’s the moment when, perhaps, we see ourselves a little more naked, that happens to me in any case, and it’s painful and useful; maybe others can make use of it too, you never know.
- Julio Cortázar, A Certain Lucas
Five Star Final (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931)
The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
Crime Wave (André De Toth, 1953)
Private Property (Leslie Stevens, 1960)
Fail Safe (Sidney Lumet, 1964)
In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967)
The Pick-Up (Lee Frost, 1968)
Shadows and Fog (Woody Allen, 1991)
Discount Family Bundle Pack
Tortoise, "Djed"
Baby Beluga
Dawn freshens. Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes,
A Fold-Up Sophia was the blockbuster supreme between June and July of 1983. To make use of the Sophia it is advised you back up fast like a horse to win perspective, letting dark clouds gather ominously over your intended, and then deflect or disperse the rebar coming at you, drunk on that damned Slivovitz and not sure what’s happening. Did we sign up for this? I don’t believe so. Or maybe it was a matter of legalistic jargon having been employed to hoodwink us. The Fold-Up Sophia in the billiard room heaves a great air pocket sigh and the floorboards groan like lecherous old crones. To the hacienda, Banquo! Do you have any more Percocets?! It’s said that when a Fold-Up Sophia goes berserk in your yard it’d be up to you to disperse the crowds and have Sophia removed before random sections of that crowd are mowed down. I tangle and shake my measuring tape in defiance of all unwanted ordinance and it can safely be said that I usually give an above average performance. Travesty is as vital to me as salt and, yes, that plainly is a sort of religious thinking. I kindly beg your pardon.
The Triple Echo (Michael Apted, 1972)
The Shout (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1978)
Vain but Not Shallow and Narcissus is Just a Greek Person
