Army of Shadows: Betraying One Name Only

Jean Moulin found his way onto a 2 Franc coin in the 1990s for giving his life to  the French Resistance during World War II. Jean-Pierre Melville borrowed legendary moments from his life to create the character of Luc Jardie in the partially biographical, partially autobiographical Army of  Shadows. Jardie is the boss of the underground. Before the war he was a man of science, a gourmand, and a musician. But  war time necessity turned him into a noble-yet-hardened mob boss figure.

Moulin, before the war, was also a bit of a bohemian. He hung around with poets and drew political cartoon for a newspaper. He began a career in government as the was was beginning, but when the Vichy took over, he was uncooperative and was forced to go underground. His legend was born out of the heroism displayed when the Gestapo caught up to him in 1943. Despite being brutally tortured, he did not cave in to reveal any secret information. Melville recounts the tale of heroism:

…Jean Moulin died under torture after betraying one name: his own. Since he was no longer able to speak, one of the Gestapo chiefs, Klaus Barbie, handed him a piece of paper on which he had written “Are you Jean Moulins?” Jean Moulin’s only reply was to take the pencil from Colonel Barbie and cross out the “s.” (via)

ARMY OF SHADOWS: The Wind, The Wind is Blowing

To open our week on Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, we present an unofficial anthem of the French Resistance, as performed by Mr. Leonard Cohen on French TV, fittingly in the same year as the film’s release.

Unmoving Images: Greek Life

This month, Kait Ziskin and photographer Lissa Rivera sneak us into some of the most exclusive clubs in the Greater Boston Area.

180 degrees from Groucho Marx; I’ve always wanted to be a member of all the clubs that wouldn’t have me. Somewhere around teenager-dom I pre-empted rejection by deciding I didn’t want to be included in all the exclusivity anyway. Since then, I’ve been perfectly happy as an outsider. But just in case I ever get the urge to belong, there are Lissa Rivera’s photographs.

Alumni Room, Beta Gamma Epsilon, Northeastern

Plenty of artists and writers and sociologists have expounded on the influence of physicality of space on the inner workings of the mind. Polanski explored the terrifying effects places and living spaces can have on its inhabitants and how these deteriorating minds often re-examine their places. Lissa Rivera’s photographs of Greek housing, empty of their living members, highlights the tokens, totems, banners, and feng shui of these long-standing organizations.

Lured by the fiction of photographing some possible super secret clubby thing, her clever sleuthing and some guerrilla tactics afforded Rivera entrance to some pretty exclusive Fraternities in and around the Boston area. (Though, by her own admittance, she never did get into Harvard.) Lissa Rivera’s photographs of Greek-Life interiors invite questions of the environmental impact on our identities, how we shape our spaces and how those spaces and the history of those places shape us. As an archaeologist might piece together a culture by way of dusting for ancient artifacts, drawing hypotheses on ways of life and social values, Rivera’s photographs, detailed, full colored, and devoid of people, allow us to create similar fictions.

…I tried to keep my camera at a similar level throughout the project, as if it was there were a stage floor at the bottom and scenery in the top portion of the frame. My visual inspiration mainly comes from cinema, especially films where an architectural space has a great influence on the characters, such as Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, and Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, as well as Kubrick’s films, especially The Shining and Barry Lyndon. Cinema and theatre can be outlets to experience what is normally inaccessible.

If the rooms we inhabit are a stage, we each play roles. In the doctor’s office, we sit up straight, we listen, we ask questions- we play the patient as much as we are one. In Rivera’s photographs, we can imagine the roles of these room’s inhabitants. “There are rooms that contain certain signifiers; group portraits of alumni, entire libraries of books, collections of notes from past members, portraits of donors, grand staircases. These physical elements project a certain level of responsibility to maintain the legacy of the institution.”  In some sense, this is the best of environmental effect on one’s identity. If you live in a beautiful place with a history of success, the pressure to perform might be high. But your statistical chances of living up to that pressure are pretty high, too. Even if you’re kind of an ass.

 “There is often rebellion against the pressure of these spaces. In many of the images, graffiti, dirty laundry, beer bottles, etc, seem like possible statements against these expectations. Perhaps they might also be violent displays of elitism, showing that they can abuse such privileged spaces and still maintain power.” If you’re comfortable enough to use these spaces, you must belong. The clubhouse’s décor will change over time from boarding house to party space, from gentleman’s club to pool hall. But all that history lives on in the houses, reminding it’s members of what they’ve bought into and what is expected of them. “After you graduate you are expected to maintain this trajectory, which will be passed on to your children. Anything less would be a step backwards in lifestyle. Of course there are always exceptions to the rules”

Basement, Theta Chi, Tufts University

But, what roles do we have in these clubhouses where we don’t belong? One might play out their own fantasies of privilege and promise on these photographic stages. For me, the empty rooms make me feel as if I arrived late. The tokens whose meanings I’m unfamiliar with, I’m unsure how to engage in this place, I haven’t learned how to behave yet. Many of the rooms seem old and solid, untouchable and expensive. Rivera’s long-exposure, color saturated photographs bring to mind a dollhouse where I can play and create imaginative historical fictions. But, they also makes me feel left out. I’ve missed the party. I don’t get the joke. Which is half the point of a club, anyway. And the clubhouse is just a place other people can’t go to.

Fraternities & Sororities is part of a larger portfolio of work dealing with the contrasts between private and public schools: Places of Education

Full interview and more photos after the jump.

Big Shot: We Can’t Go Home Again

In 1968 Nicholas Ray attended the democratic national convention in Chicago to see what the Festival of Life was all about. The violence of the Chicago police riots that he encountered shocked him. He was roughed up and his camera crushed. We Can’t Go Home Again opens with a collage of footage representing the unrest in late 1960s America. In voice over, Ray wonders “Where is everybody?”

This old man – a national treasure, a filmmaking legend, but also a recovering drunk, a little lost and out of touch – wakes up and sees his country as the young people do. He is disillusioned and unsure how to proceed. Like many young people, the best option seems to be academia. So Nicholas Ray accepts an offer to teach filmmaking at SUNY Purchase.

The first part of the film is presented as the story of how he got there, how this movie was made. Documentary-style footage of student life and major news-making events are interspersed with staged scenes conceived and enacted by the students. This is often accompanied by a voice over from Ray as he tells the story and inserts bits of his own observations. He gives the impression of of a man detached and self-conscious. As portrayed in the candid-seeming footage and the staged pieces, the college kids around him don’t seem to notice and are constantly spilling their guts, looking to him to be a mentor and a leader. As he becomes more entrenched in university life, it becomes clear that Ray can’t be what the students need him to be. His mind is elsewhere, he is insensitive.

A girl tells stories of her promiscuity and he films it, and her classmates throw tomatoes at her. In the top corner of the screen, video footage of atomic bomb explosions and lovers in harlequin masks provide a counterpoint to the primary image. The fragmented screen is a map, creating a geography for the various elements. Most of the time a larger image tells the story while smaller scenes play out, lending context and subtext. The dormitory dramas play out to a backdrop of larger global events. Couples make out, a boy comes to terms with his intolerant father, a girl admits she enjoys doing sexual acts for money. All the while their fearless leader is preoccupied. Frustrated, a student finally gets angry, challenging Ray’s authority he says, “You think you know it all just cause you made movies and you’re old?” It’s a good question.

In a pivotal moment Ray, playing the professorial role – wiry, gesturing – takes a walk with a student. The student fidgets and prods Nick as he obviously tries to communicate something important. He tells one of his favorite stories. A  man seeking advice from the Sphinx, who after some prodding and pleading receives these words of wisdom: “Don’t expect too much. Don’t expect too much from a teacher.”

The final section of the film  turns around. The students find the old man prowling around outside in the cold one night. He is drunk and depressed. The split screen is gone. It’s just Ray fumbling around in a dark barn carrying a length of rope. In a particularly sad and honest moment, he mutters to himself,  “I’ve made ten goddamn westerns and I can’t even tie a noose.” This resigned and self-deprecating sense of humor is present throughout, an unexpectedly charming result of his sense of impotence. At this point, it seems Ray has hit rock bottom. His students save him from himself. They talk him down and bring him inside. In the end, the only words of wisdom Ray can offer his eager disciples are “Take care of each other.”

All of this, I should clarify, takes place in the disjointed world of the film. What it staged and what is ‘real’ is never clear. When Ray and his student walk together, the audio is offered in voice over, replacing whatever was actually said. This technique is used again and again, obscuring the real in favor of a larger message. Ray in particular, but the students as well, construct their own onscreen personae in service to the film. Whatever truly happened behind the scenes is a mystery. It is possible that the footage of them working (one student at one point insists “there are no rehearsals here”) is documentary, but it seems more likely that the whole thing is staged, that the film’s creators (the opening credits read “by US”) are in on something the viewer isn’t.

We Can’t Go Home Again  arose out of a sort of filmmakers’ commune. Ray and his students bunked up together, giving everything they had to the film – emotionally, financially, temporally. Everyone participated, everyone had a voice. Additionally, the cut widely available today through the 2012 Oscilloscope release is just one version of many. It was completed by Ray’s wife Susan and should not be considered definitive. The film was shot in 1971 and Ray continued to work on it, editing it and re-editing it until his death in 1979. As a result, the film lacks a coherent single perspective, instead offering an impression of a time and a place. With so many authors, the film begs for multiple readings. At times it’s an old man’s impression of a world different from the one he knows. In other ways it’s an exercise in progressive film education (give the students a camera, see what they can do). The story that comes through strongest is that of a living legend close to the end, struggling to figure out what he has to offer future generations. We Can’t Go Home Again is special in its brave refusal to settle on any one answer to the tough questions, both topical and personal. Instead it tackles these with a focus on experimentation, offering a unique opportunity to experience the creative process alongside one of the greats.

We Can’t Go Home Again: Fragments

We Can’t Go Home Again was Nicholas Ray’s last film. Despite working on the project for years and years, until his death in 1979, it remains unfinished. At this point in his life, Ray was going experiencing what some have speculated to be a nervous breakdown. He was struggling with alcoholism and existential crises. He was tortured and anxious about getting old. Perhaps the film took so long to finish because, as David Cairns points out over at MUBI Notebook, “on one level, We Can’t Go Home Again can be seen as a gigantic exercise in keeping options open.”

We Can’t Go Home Again includes an early and ambitious attempt at split screen projection. One channel is Ray sitting in front of the camera, shot in 16mm. Another is Super 8 footage of hippies at a protest. The image, at points is made up of up to sic different images collaging themselves on the single screen. This technique was difficult without computers. Ray projected each channel onto a screen and filmed that projection. Then, using overlay techniques, he fused that footage to create one fragmented image.

But this was not the only way Ray was pushing the envelope and moving into more experimental territory. Look closely and you’ll see that one of the channels in his split screen is work done with a video synthesizer donated to the project by the one and only Nam June Paik. In early 1970s Nicholas Ray was dabbling in video art.

We Can’t Go Home Again: The College Years

“We did not watch experimental films. We learned to watch films experimentally.”

–Richard Herskowitz

In 1969, when film studies was barely a thing, Larry Gottheim and Ken Jacobs founded the film department at SUNY Binghmaton. This department became a hotbed for some of the best experimental filmmaking ever made in this country. Gottheim and Jacobs enlisted many  friends and heroes to come upstate and help him teach a curriculum of Dziga Vertov, Jack Smith, and Ed Wood to the young film students.  Ernie Gehr, Peter Kubelka, and most notably, Nicholas Ray himself found the hallways of Binghamton and the students that occupied them to be unlimited resources for inspiration.  Ray made We Can’t Go Home Again while living in student housing in a ‘film commune’ and many of Larry Gottheim‘s and Ernie Gehr’s best-known works were shot on campus. The professors weren’t the only ones benefiting. The SUNY Binghamton Cinema Department in the 1970s was a special place, and produced some incredible alumni, including many of our own heroes: Jim Hoberman, Bill T. Jones, Alan Berliner, and Art Spiegelman to name a few.

 

 

Unfortunately For Me…The Master

Kiddos and Kiddoskis, we welcome you to a new column on this here blog; Henny Brindle‘s Unfortunately For Me. We’ve admired Henny’s work for a long time, and we’ve no doubt he would not say the same, but we’re honored to have him nonetheless. Streaming live for your late-nite creepin’ or your straight-time commute, depending on the time zone. Any time, any place – there’s always something that’s just too bad, isn’t there? — BSMC

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Seems to me like a lot of people I once considered smart, can’t help but shower Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master in undue praise. Sure, it was visually astounding in parts, providing breathtaking landscapes in 70mm a la Lawrence Of Arabia, but the actual content of the film was little more than an affectation of psychological insight. In fact, I was surprised Dave Eggers didn’t have a hand in the writing process, as the shitty script certainly had the whiff of his overtures. Before we get to the meat of my gripe though, let me say one thing on the cinematography.

I once made the mistake of believing that visuals can carry a whole film, it is after all the moving pictures. However, also at that time, I was heavily smoking marijuana, interested in phenomenology, and every morning I played out a one-man symphony in the key of solipsism deep in the recesses of my mind. Only later, it became clear that movies are special if they communicate atmosphere, emotion, and intellect.

Now you may say, “Oh, Henny, the moody visuals do create the atmosphere you love so much.” Well, no. Framing, lighting, set dressing, and wardrobe do help set the mood, but it is the actual psycho-emotional projection of the characters that inflects these aesthetic components with something of worth. So, when you have a movie with mostly preposterously shallow characters, you are left with a beautiful, hollow shell, like a dead fashion model – though now that I say that, a well-dressed corpse is actually more interesting than The Master by nature of it being “dead,” which would indicate that it was at one point alive.

Though The Master was alive at one point, too. Joaquin Phoenix’s drunken ex-sailor character is quite good, no thanks to the writing, mind you. This is precisely what makes the first 40 minutes captivating – the film is myopically focused on Phoenix. Of course, these are also the most visually interesting parts of the film.[1] The dichotomy, while obvious, of a mongoloid who flourished in the primate-like bacchanalia of maritime warfare, who now must somehow find his way in the straight life of post-war society is sharp and affecting. The fact that alcohol is his umbilical cord to the past, where he fucked mermaids made of sand, works on every level and is truly believable. At about 30 to 40 minutes in, we, the audience, now wonder, who will be his foil?

Well of course his foil must be logos incarnate, a man who has suppressed all id and moves about life impressing his invented rationale on everything in his path. This is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s L. Ron character.

The beautiful inner tension within Phoenix’s character is his abandonment of social graces and morality in favor of instinctual, destructive behavior – the good old id vs. superego thing. However, with Hoffman’s “idea man” character, we never get the sense that he ever sublimated much to arrive at his persona in the film, which is something along the lines of a man who thinks he is smarter than everyone.

Now, even your anti-Freudian will tell you that if you don’t come to grips with a few of your basic urges in some manner, they will bubble up. What exciting material for a filmmaker to work from! Sadly, Anderson goes the path most traveled of employing the collegiate tropes of nude infernal visions and insanity. Oddly, he only employs this in one scene, further obfuscating the inner landscape of the Hoffman/L. Ron character. In another scene, Hoffman’s wife jerks him off, which doesn’t seem to make much sense at all, besides some loose symbolism that he too has urges like Phoenix’s sex-crazed sailor. The tone of the handjob scene is dark and disturbing, but what Anderson doesn’t explain is, what’s wrong with a little old-fashioned in the bathroom after a tough day converting people to your fledging cult?

So what you are left with is one good character (Phoenix) put up against half a shell of another character (Hoffman). So there’s not any real conflict besides the abortion of a script that feels as if the director thought that telegraphing really basic philosophical ideas was going to make him look deep in the eyes of his audience.

Other writers in this online publication called “The Big Shot Movie Club” claim this is a real American film. The review reads, “The American is ingenious, resilient, independent, persistent. The American doesn’t take a hint, no matter how strong. The American is kind of a cockroach. And everyone in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 sprawling film is very American.” Well can a film really possess American characters if they are not created by one? Anderson is technically American, but what really makes your noble savage American is their menefreghista approach to life, i.e. they don’t give a fuck.

Anderson is so precious that the implicit authenticity of people going about their business is lost both on a macro-scale and in his individual characters. So unfortunately, the film is much like the burgeoning urban sprawl of Williamsburg/Greenpoint/Bushwick, full of aspirational young Americans who unfortunately would rather imagine themselves as being “real” people instead of attempting to live their lives in the basic manner that most “real” Americans do. Ironically these “real” Americans are the very same cause for their escape to Brooklyn from the suburbs.

In conclusion, I say we gather up a crowd and run this charlatan Anderson out of Hollywood. I want a real American film. Unfortunately for me… I seem to be the only one who feels this way.

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[1] Please refer to the preceding paragraph.