Just as charming as people are saying it is. I still don’t like Glen Powell enough to watch his Twister sequel. The girl was in the Irma Vep remake, and the cop who Glen replaces as a fake hit man also starred with him in Everybody Wants Some. I love the ending so much, the movie letting them get away with murder then saying ha ha, it’s just a movie.
Turns out it’s a 4th of July movie (which I watched on the 6th).
Months after a senator is shot by waiters at a Space Needle party, a reporter at the scene tells colleague Warren Beatty that witnesses are being killed. Warren goes rogue, raises hell with a small-town sheriff’s department and comes away with some papers from an organization that recruits assassins. He goes undercover calling himself Harry Nilsson, gets a crazy guy to fill out the admission forms for him, and convinces the parallax group he’s crazy enough to kill for them. I didn’t follow all the twists when he saved a flight full of people from a bombing, but the company is onto him afterwards, sending his editor a heart attack sandwich then framing Warren for the climactic assassination.
Alan “The Count” Pakula was the 70’s conspiracy thriller guy, making this between Klute and All the President’s Men. The screenwriters also did Three Days of the Condor (sure) and The Money Pit (what) with uncredited work by the late Robert Towne. They got a Taking of Pelham hijacker in this, a Stepford wife, and a Hitchcock actor.
Proof that it’s a 1970s movie:
If I hadn’t known who Terayama was, by the end of this movie I’d say “ohh, he comes from the experimental theater scene doesn’t he?”
Shin-chan is a whitefaced boy whose family’s clock is ringing constantly but they won’t take it off the wall to get repaired. After forty minutes, when the kid is running away with the married neighbor he’s crushing on, the film-in-a-film ends and its director says he’s having creative problems finishing it. Now in the present day, talking about dreams and fiction (Borges comes up) and time travel paradoxes, he re-remembers his childhood more realistically, including a flashback-in-a-flashback of the neighbor’s childhood.
“I’ve been betrayed by my own self from 20 years ago. Now I’ll have to kill mother on my own”
“My mother and I are merely characters that I’ve invented – because it’s only a film.”
Monster follow-cam, like if Ben Russell made a horror movie. Maybe this was an experiment in distancing and de-emphasis – like, what if a crazed zombie stalking and slaughtering a group of sexy young people was just one of many things occurring in the life of the forest. Looking for his stolen locket, our zombie monster starts by killing the wrong guy, an asshole trapper. Strange to see this kind of thing with no music score. Maybe they didn’t know or couldn’t afford anyone who could pull off groovy stalker-tension music. They didn’t manage to write or deliver any good dialogue so maybe they should’ve done without that too. This movie’s major outcome was getting me to immediately rewatch The Cabin in the Woods, and it’d been too long since I’d last seen that, so, thank you.
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.”
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.”
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.
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:
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.
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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
