Streaming Cosmos
Billions and billions… of pageviews. Yes, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, in all its Trooper Roman glory, is up on Hulu and free for the watching (thx, Jonathan).
Movement and Ideology in North by Northwest & The Limey
One of my top five favorite films, The Limey, turned ten this year, and independently of that started popping up on the pop-culture radar again in a few different places. First in January on Elvis Mitchell’s wonderful podcast The Treatment, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh described his newest film, The Girlfriend Experience, as his most “Limey-like” film since the original. It’s about an elite call girl working in the pre-election hubbub of October 2008 and stars real-life porn star Sasha Grey. Then recently on The Onion’s awesome “New Cult Canon” series (which last week canonized another favorite of mine, Eyes Wide Shut), critic Scott Tobias added not just The Limey but also the film’s DVD Commentary track to its stellar lineup of films.
It was watching The Limey’s DVD commentary several times that spurred me to begin thinking about it in relation to another film I love, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. In 2001 I was taking a course on Hitchcock and proposed an extended comparative essay about the two films as my final project. Most of the introduction is dry and overly academic, but the following paragraph cuts to the core of my interest in making the comparison:
Some of the most heated debates of the ’60s/New Wave were Marxist-Capitalist debates, but in these two films Hitchcock and Soderbergh actually visualize these opposing ideologies by consistently placing them in formal opposition to one another and moving their characters between them. North by Northwest, made in 1959, came at a cusp point of the Atomic Age amidst the post-WWII prosperity in America, and its finale, in which both Communism is thwarted (though it’s not said outright) and a marrage is made, wreckons with these twin late-’50s predicaments. The Limey, made in 1999, came after the end of the Cold War and amidst a wave dot-com prosperity in America. That the Marxist is a villan in one and a hero in the other speaks volumes about these thrillers. That both films are thrillers helps determine exactly how. Again and again, Soderbergh and Hitchcock use the idea of exchange over time, and, more importantly, over space to discuss Marxist and Capitalist ideologies. By coupling movement—which is concerned with the formal kinetics of the characters, camera, and shots—with ideology—which is concerned with the social implications of the films’ content—both directors formulate a relationship between the way things move on screen and what they ideologically represent.
The finest parts of the essay, however, are not these broader theoretical constructions but the two sections that work hardest to closely observe how these films move, how their directors work with the camera, and how their editing schemes organize the scenes and story. This is done first on a formal level and then on a more narrative level, as the each of the films’ characters and settings are aligned with different types of transactions, both political and economic. The essay’s methodological cousin is Frederic Jameson’s worthwhile high-wire analysis of Hitchcock’s film, “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest,” available in its entirety on Google Books here. —RG
A boy who loves a girl so much
More Valentine’s Day fodder, this time on the topic of love stories, or, rather, a particular love story between a teenage girl and her vampire crush.
I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t really get the whole Twilight bonanza when the film came out last year. But then I read this amazing review of the original book by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic. It’s not just about Twlight, it’s also about the Young Adult genre in general and it’s laser-sharp. Here are two of Flanagan’s choice insights.
One:
Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof.
Two:
Twilight is a 498-page novel about teenagers in which a cell phone appears only toward the very end, and as a minor plot contrivance. The kids don’t have iPods; they don’t text-message each other; they don’t have MySpace pages or Facebook accounts. Bella does have a computer on which she dutifully e-mails her mother now and then, but the thing is so slow and dial-up that she almost never uses it, other than on the morning that she decides to punch the word vampire into her wood-burning search engine to learn a thing or two about her squeeze.
Charming, trippy, beautiful
I don’t remember when or where I saw this 1974 animated short called “Hunger” by Hungarian filmmaker Peter Foldes, but I always find myself watching and rewatching it. File under: charming, trippy, beautiful.
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A Road Not Taken is a forthcoming documentary about the solar panels Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House roof in 1979 and what happend to them after Ronald Reagan took them down in 1986. They are now on the roof of the cafeteria at Unity College, Maine. The film’s description continues: “Swiss artists Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller travel back in time and, following the route the solar panels took, interview those involved in the decisions regarding these panels as well as those involved in the oil crisis of the time.” Trailer here (via The Official Google Blog).
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Kevin recommends Steven Hill’s Movie Title Screens archive, which could distract me for hours. Just look at Citizen Kane.
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Kevin recommends watching this Vampire Weekend video and comparing it to this Wes Anderson commercial. Separated at birth?
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A clip from the cult classic They Live, mentioned during Michael Rock’s presentation for AIGA/NY last fall. OBEY.
On “A Date With Robbe-Grillet”
Above: A still from Alain Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad. The screenplay was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
I’ve talked about pantoums before, but we get the form (and word) from Malaysia, where it is an ancient type of verse, though it was not introduced to English until 1812. In a pantoum, the second and fourth lines of the first stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the following stanza until the final stanza, when two new lines are introduced but not repeated. So writing one is not so much a challenge of rhythm or rhyme but of sequence. The poem has only half as many original lines as it appears to have, but, when these lines reflect or repeat, they can become like a hall of mirrors.
One of my favorite pantoums is Elaine Equi’s masterful “A Date with Robbe-Grillet.”
A Date with Robbe-Grillet
What I remember didn’t happen.
Birds stuttering.
Torches huddled together.
The café empty, with no place to sit.
Birds stuttering.
On our ride in the country
the café empty, with no place to sit.
Your hair was like a doll’s.
On our ride in the country
it was winter.
Your hair was like a doll’s
and when we met it was as children.
It was winter
when it rained
and when we met it was as children.
You, for example, made a lovely girl.
When it rained
the sky turned the color of Pernod.
You, for example, made a lovely girl.
Birds strutted.
The sky turned the color of Pernod.
Within the forest
birds strutted
and we came upon a second forest
within the forest
identical to the first.
And we came upon a second forest
where I was alone
identical to the first
only smaller and without music
where I was alone
where I alone could tell the story.
— Elaine Equi
Alain Robbe-Grillet is, of course, the perfect subject to portray with the pantoum’s looping form: the plots of his novels, and, most famously, his screenplay for Alain Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad, all cycle and refract in the most surreal and dreamlike of ways.
Equi’s poem willfully acknowledges the repetition at the core of its own construction. She writes, “and we came upon a second forest / identical to the first.” Each of the lines in this pantoum is a short but mobile declarative statement whose meaning shifts according to whatever statements may adjoin or accompany it. The phrases “It was winter,” “When it rained,” “within the forest,” contain only the simplest bits if information, but in context they begin to have a hypnotizing effect, as the weight of an image shifts from one line to the next. They frame and reframe, nesting one action recursively into another.
These phrases’ dependency, however, is put in conflict by the poem’s conclusion: “… I alone could tell the story.” A dream is a rearrangement of fragments from reality, but it lives inside a single locked subconscious. What is the story here? What is the meaning of this dream? It’s wedded firmly to the structure of Equi’s pantoum itself.
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“I always quote a guy called Lewis Hyde who wrote about primitive cultures where there’s an exchange of gifts that cannot be kept but have to be passed on. And the passing on of gifts is a device to prevent people from killing one another, because they all become part of a single experience. And [Hyde’s] leap of imagination occurs when he says this is what artists do. Artists provide that gift to the culture, so that people have something in common. And I think that all of us who identify with the role of artists in history want our work to serve that purpose. Certainly as much as we want to work to sell product. (Although not everybody feels the same way.)” Milton Glaser, from this wonderful short film by Hillman Curtis from a few years ago. I never knew Glaser had read Hyde when I compared his thinking on design ethics to Hyde’s book in my essay “Form-giving,” but of course now it makes perfect sense why the two are so beautifully in sync. Perhaps an even bigger coincidence is that I just happened to stop by Glaser’s office the day Hillman Curtis was shooting there, and you see me for a moment in the film as I shake Glaser’s hand just after he finishes saying this quote.
