by ·Comments Off on “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974, Michael Snow)

An avant-garde sketch comedy omnibus, eyewash color field flashes between segments. My dream is to make a new version of this that isn’t annoying to watch, divide the four hours into eight episodes, and sell it to Criterion Channel as an original series.

Snow has called it a musical comedy, a true “talking picture” in 25 episodes. Most attempts at describing it quote his press notes: “Via the eyes and ears it is a composition aimed at exciting the two halves of the brain into recognition.”

Rosenbaum:

In parts, I find it intriguing; in toto, indigestible. Encyclopedias are useful things to have around, but who wants to plough through from A to Z in a single sitting?

The Episodes (incomplete):

1. guy (Snow) making bird sounds from three angles

Out-of-focus FOCUS card that seems designed to get audiences mad at the projectionist, woman speaks about Rameau on soundtrack.

Credits are read aloud – hey, Chantal is in this. So many credits, some of them fake.

6: Office ventriloquism – these are Jonas Mekas, Marlene Arvan, Harry Gant, and the voice of Tony Janneti.

7: Conversation(?) on an airplane with the camera turned sideways and gradually rotating, cutting after each line, Abbott and Costello academia. This goes on eternally but at least it’s constantly mutating, and the chapter headings (different numbers, usually with a voice announcing “four”) make me chuckle. Gradually pulls out revealing more of its artifice, the lighting, then the director’s script prompts.

8: someone’s hands (Snow’s) play a kitchen sink like a drum (with sink/synch sound), filling it with water to hear the pitch change.

9: A guy reads nonsense words into camera, the picture glitching on each syllable. I think it’s messing with us by dropping in some real words. He takes questions at the end.

10: Four-person table read among cacophony from different playback devices, primarily piano music by Rameau. They start talking in sync with their previously-filmed selves, sometimes their voices cut out, sometimes you have to turn down the TV volume because the cacophony gets too intense. This was Deborah Dobski, Carol Friedlander, Barry Gerson, Babette Mangolte. I didn’t skip ahead during this part, I think I might be immune to annoyance.

11: short one, visual of people riding a bus while voiceover talks about our man-machine future.

12: a group converses in a possibly made-up language while one of them films us watching… aha it was reverse-speak since the scene then plays backwards and flipped L-R with the sound reversed, but due to the sound quality I still can’t tell if they’re speaking English words. One of the two segments with professional actors, the other being #20.

13: A four-person sync-sound mockery in front of a museum diorama… on the soundtrack they’re reading each line all together, while on the visual one of them fake-lip-flaps a repeated pattern, until the film devolves into a stuttering flicker-horror. This one gets so loopy that it’s hard to tell if we’ve reached the between-scenes eyewash or if the scene has reached the limits of pure love and light.

14: Nude couple pissing into mic’d-up buckets, short segment.

15: Long one with a group in a fancy room, first making mouth sounds when a spotlight passes their face, then making sounds collaboratively, trying to emulate a Bob Dylan song heard on tape, lipsyncing “O Canada,” telling jokes, listening to the wall, all in the familiar stop-and-start style from the airplane segment. These are Nam June Paik, Annette Michelson, Bob Cowan, Helene Kaplan, Yoko Orimoto.

16: Hands are manipulating each item on a desk full of objects and a voice is breathlessly narrating the hands’ actions. It seems the voice is seeing what we see and trying to keep up, but then the voice catches up and gets ahead, so it seems the hands are following the voice’s instructions. The voice falls way behind again, with jumpcuts and blackouts in the image.

Short one, a family watches TV, hysterical laughter is heard, a mic faces an empty chair.

18: Girl looks out cabin window and we hear rain but don’t see any, then a rain-streaked glass is added in the foreground to complete the picture, other elements (including the girl) pop on and off. This is Joyce Wieland.

Three people sit awkwardly in a basement while a British comedy routine about religion plays on soundtrack, the picture cutting to a new lighting and pose when the radio show changes lead speaker.

20: People take turns reading lines, quick fades at end of lines to black or a color field or a strumming guitar. More setups and activity here than usual, I feel like the movie has been creating an alphabet Zorns Lemma-style and I haven’t been learning it. Settles into a one shot-per-spoken syllable rhythm, then mutates again, and again – this one has so many variations it’s like the full film in miniature.

Colored gels waved in front of a woman in bed. “Seeing is believing,” or is it? Double-exposure, a skit where some people conjure a bed (with an editing trick), then destroy a table (with a hammer). The only segment to include a hardcore sex scene, whose sound we only hear later as hands play a piano.

Bearded guy (Sitney) talking in profile, explaining that the onscreen numbers have been counting appearances of the word four/for in the movie, but the man splits into alternate versions of himself and jumbles the count.

Short scenes: empty tin/bell ring/snowy car, then credits/corrections/addenda.

from Snow’s notes:

Control of WAVES OF “COHERENCE” necessary. Rhythm continues but certain elements become more sequential then become more varied again … The entire film an “example” of the difficulty (impossibility) of the essentializing-symbolizing reduction involved in the (Platonic) nature of words in relation to experience (object) etc. discussed. The difference between the reduction absolutely necessary to discuss or even describe the experience and the experience. Each is “real” but each is different.

Regina Cornwell in Snow Seen:

Unlike the descriptive, literal, sometimes punning titles of many of Snow’s works which point to themselves, the title “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen appears to function differently. Denis Diderot, philosopher, editor of the Encyclopédie, art critic, theorist of drama as well as author of several plays and other fiction, was a major intellectual figure of the eighteenth century in France. Dennis Young receives thanks because he gave Snow the copy of Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot. Young was at that time a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Wilma Schoen is a pseudonym: schoen the German word for beautiful, Wilma Schoen an anagram for Michael Snow. Jean Philippe Rameau was a contemporary of Bach and Handel who contributed important theoretical writings on harmony, wrote harpsicord music, operas and opera ballets. He was for a time admired by the French intellectual circle which included Diderot, Rousseau and d’Alembert. And he did have a nephew, a would-be musician and somewhat of a ne’er-do-well named Jean-François Rameau.

Sitney, who’s in the movie, calls it “the most comprehensive, and the most impressive, of the serial films of the seventies … The whole rambling film seems organized around a dizzying nexus of polarities which include picture/sound, script/performance, direction/acting, writing/speaking, and above all word/thing. The film opens with an image of the film-maker whistling into a microphone and ends with a brief shot of a snowdrift, so that the work is bracketed by a rebus for Mike … Snow.”

by ·Comments Off on Shadow of Fire (2023, Shinya Tsukamoto)

Restaurateur turned post-WWII desperate prostitute Shuri calls a kid “stray dog” right after I’d been thinking of the movie Stray Dogs because of the condition of her apartment walls. She takes in wannabe-customer Hiroki Kono and our lead kid – three fuckups acting like a makeshift family – though I didn’t realize the kid was the lead until the adults blew up at each other and the kid left to survive elsewhere.

Next he falls in with Mirai Moriyama, inheritor of Shin Kamen Rider‘s legacy. Mirai is excited that the kid has a pistol and enlists him in a sketchy revenge plot against his ex-superior officer. As with Kitano I’m catching Tsukamoto’s latest after missing his last two – one of which was also a late-WWII desperation drama. Unlike Kitano, it seems he’s settled down into prestige-drama mode, with only subtle hints of the handheld hopped-up maniac who made his early films.

by ·Comments Off on The Devil’s Bath (2024, Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz)

Woman throws a baby down a waterfall. Later, Agnes (star of The Dreamed Ones) marries Wolf, and I don’t approve of their traditional wedding game of chicken-whacking. As an outsider from a neighboring town with apparently very different customs, Agnes is the most awkward of the local girls. Lot of slooow pans and slooow pulls into frame, and scenes always cut right after something curious happens. Wolf won’t have sex with her, and his mom (a regular of this film’s producer Ulrich Seidl) keeps bossing Agnes around – she becomes depressed so the “doctors” put leeches on her and poke her with pins. The neighbor killed himself so they toss him on the bone pile – Agnes avoids his fate by killing a random boy. If people in Olden Times didn’t desire to continue living, the best route to heaven was to kill some kid, confess to a priest, then be executed in town square. This is explained by an intertitle before the end credits, alas too late, since we just watched a boring two-hour movie illustrating the same thing.

Unhappy couple:

Lenz in the boneyard:

by ·Comments Off on A Film About a Woman Who… (1974, Yvonne Rainer)

A decade after seeing the doc about her, I’ve finally watched a full Rainer feature. “Dry” is still the word I’d use, though it’s structurally busy and playful.

Four people on a couch are reading slides of the same essay Yvonne is reading us on the soundtrack. The slides also have photographs, and we’ll see silent motion film of some of those photos being posed.

A male narrator takes over but the words are still from a female POV, now with pauses representing missing words, “is it possible that I have really ___, that I will never make ___?” Other times the narration will cut off mid-sentence. Much more eventful than the Akerman movie I watched the night before, but harder to sit through.

“For some reason she is embarrassed about her reverie.” Relationship psychology… starts telling a story of a bad(?) date with brief scenes and numbered intertitles, establishes a rhythm, then one title sticks for a long time and we hear an opera song and the story sidetracks to something new. Things like this keep the movie from ever getting tedious.

Studiously avoids sync sound until halfway through the movie: a woman at a surreal dinner scene gives an entire sync monologue like it’s no big deal, then before we can get used to this she is rudely interrupted by an intertitle and the film goes completely silent. These sorts of ruptures are the rule here. The great DP Babette Mangolte also shot Jeanne Dielman and Hotel Monterey (but not the Akerman I watched this week), and Rameau’s Nephew, which I’d love to add to this thread of 1974 movies if I can find the time, but maybe its four hour play with sound synchronization would be too much coming after this (edit: it was).

It incorporates retakes and loops, silences and blackouts, and the slowest-motion stripping you’ve ever seen. Ends on piano music and dance poses, then a brief cycle of violence via intertitles at the beach but I never figured out its structure or momentum, it could’ve ended on anything.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 11: Stephen Dwoskin and Structuralism

Color Film (1971, Standish Lawder)

A reminder that experimental film is actually fun to watch. We re-read the chapter on minimalist/structuralist film in the Vogel, then watch “a fine example of pure minimal cinema,” expecting the camera to just be facing a wall or something, and instead I get a blast of color and movement set to a raucous Zappa song.

–
Eisenbahn (1967, Lutz Mommartz)

Not fun but surely hypnotic, facing square out a train window. Occasional edits, and light obstructions when we can clearly see the cameraperson’s reflection, but I’m not dedicated enough to get a still frame of those.

–
Naissant (1964, Stephen Dwoskin)

The same length as the train movie, both of them bringing to mind Vogel’s comment “there is no aesthetic reason for the film to last nine minutes instead of ninety” Funny to watch this the day after Je Tu Il Elle, as it’s a long wordless focus on a seemingly troubled dark-haired girl sitting in bed. No bag of sugar or letter writing, and this movie stays closer to her face and cuts far more often. The girl is Beverly Grant, a major underground actress who was in Flaming Creatures the year before.

Vogel also points to Kiss and Sleep by Warhol, but instead let’s watch more Dwoskin (I’ve only previously seen his Dirty).

–
Soliloquy (1969, Stephen Dwoskin)

Almost a remake of Naissant but this time we see mostly her hands, and we hear her thoughts in voiceover. She’s divorced, depressed. “I wish I were pretty.”

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Moment (1968, Stephen Dwoskin)

Close-up with no editing this time. Another dark-haired girl, smoking and masturbating. Who needs Warhol, anyway? The soundtrack is some kind of horrible industrial howl.

by ·Comments Off on Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974, Chantal Akerman)

Chantal/Elle spends a month alone in a plain apartment eating spoonfuls of sugar out of the bag. Voiceover narrates the action, but not exactly, and not in sync with what we’re seeing (messing with sound sync was all the rage in 1974). The first sync dialogue comes after an hour, when she’s left the house and is riding around with a trucker. I would not have guessed it’d end in an extended sex scene, probably with the ex she was mourning while eating all that sugar. Feels far more electric than the depopulated Hotel Monterey.

Trucker Niels Arestrup was also in Stavisky this year, went on to collect awards for playing in Audiard movies (lead prison gangster in A Prophet), and the girl at the end, Claire Wauthion, was in La Mémoire Courte.

by ·Comments Off on Peter Hutton shorts

New York Near Sleep for Saskia (1972)

Not the kind of work that holds up great on SD video, but I’ve come across Hutton’s name enough times and want to know what he’s about. Everything I’ve got is silent, so I’m playing the Sean Ono Lennon Asterisms album, and the first track synced up just right with this film, which was extracted from a Screening Room episode. It’s all about light, apparently, light coming through holes and forming patterns, mostly indoors with a couple outdoor portraits of unnamed people, leading to its most complicated and beautiful setup, a chair on a raft.

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Florence (1975)

Yes, light is going to be the main thing. Unmoving camera, quick fades between shots, makes you wonder why he didn’t go into still photography instead, then there’s just enough motion in the images (water, clouds) and light shifts to answer that question.

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New York Portrait chapter 1 (1979)

Some incredible skies, great rainy streets, making constellations from asphalt sparkling under streetlights (most of this was shot at night). A murmuration or two – in this house we give bonus points when your movie focuses on birds. It’s not Hutton’s fault that the Lennon title track is less to my tastes than the first three songs. Since I’m already being offensive to avant-garde purists by playing music, I’ll also say that these films feel kinda ambient, like they’d be good to project on the wall behind the cinema-themed bar I’m gonna open when I retire.

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New York Portrait chapter 2 (1981)

This one’s on the Wendy & Lucy DVD, where Kelly(?) calls them “thoroughly observational documents … Hutton transforms the act of looking into a cause for silent meditation.” More flooded streets, an insane street drain, a great shot with a blimp moving between two silhouette buildings, what looks like a jet fleet leaving behind a morse code pattern. Seems less explicitly light-focused than the others, or perhaps I’m getting used to his particular photographic style, or I’m distracted since I ran out of Lennon tunes and it started playing Titan to Tachyons.

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New York Portrait chapter 3 (1990)

All of these are from different sources, and this source is the worst – why are there no blu-ray companies focused on fringe silent shorts collections? I appreciate the fireworks in this one since I’m watching on the 4th of July, even thought Hutton hasn’t solved the problem that seeing fireworks in a movie is never especially cool. A rare bit of human drama towards the end as he films a medical emergency from straight overhead. Return of the murmuration in the final seconds, beautifully done.

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Boston Fire (1979)

The easiest one to remember its images from the title – something in Boston is on fire, and Hutton is fortunately here to film the smoky light with the dark stream of firehose water cutting across the image. My favorite of the bunch, possibly influenced by my recently reading Ten Skies.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

A nearly perfect distillation of Hutton’s aesthetic, Boston Fire also harks back to the earliest days of cinema. It is an actualité, an observational eight-minute record of a dramatic human event. And, in terms of Hutton’s mature films about the Hudson River [1996 and later], Boston Fire serves as a kind of inversion. Instead of humans struggling to move across a placid natural surface, here it is nature that is the (destructive) agent, with humans desperately trying to beat it back.

by ·Comments Off on Kubi (2023, Takeshi Kitano)

I skipped the last couple Kitano movies – rude behavior to the great man after he gave us the commercial self-destruction trilogy – and am now delighted to discover that he’s still got it. This is an epic 1500’s warlord power-struggle story with about fifty characters, and he nearly keeps it to two hours without making the plot confusing (it really helps that they introduce and re-introduce everyone with onscreen titles). Plus it’s great-looking, fun, and full of beheadings and other gruesome stuff, and gleefully anachronistic – even not knowing any Japanese I can tell they’re conversing more like yakuza than samurai. But I didn’t realize until the name Hattori Hanzo came up that it’s based on real history – all these characters have wikipedia pages.

Kubi means “neck”:

Kitano plays Monkey, the most degraded of the warlords until his plans and alliances come together at the end. He’s scheming with bald Hidetoshi Nishijima (Drive My Car guy, Creepy cop), who’s having a secret affair with rebel-in-hiding Kenichi Endo (a major Miike guy). They’re working under/scheming against the current ruler Ryo Kase (an Outrage lead). It’d take all day to name the rest of them but I’ll note that both leads of Ichi the Killer are in here somewhere (psycho Tadanobu Asano plays a Kitano ally).

by ·Comments Off on Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022, Ethan Coen)

This predates Drive-Away Dykes but was withheld for a couple years until Jerry was safely dead, then slipped onto streaming to mostly poor reviews. As a doc it’s little better than a slickly-edited youtube mix of TV appearances. Some 80% of the runtime is music, and almost all the interviews are with Jerry himself, who’s particularly unenlightening about his own life and career, and absolutely full of himself. So, pretty poor by cinematic standards, but really excellent as a rock-doc (wall-to-wall music, mostly live versions, duets with Mickey Gilley, Tom Jones, Little Richard, and no celebrity talking heads). As a follow-up I spent July 4th the ideal way (reconstructing original Jerry Lee Lewis album tracklists by studying Bear Family CD box set liner notes).

In Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov calls it “as unambitiously amiable a timekiller as you might expect from Live Nation Productions” and says the doc “proceeds, in no particular thematic or chronological order I can discern, through the life and career of Lewis, as important a musician as he is appalling a human.”