Same Vogel chapter as The Spanish Earth, “Left and Revolutionary Cinema: the West.” Useful to note that Vogel is never posting lists of his favorite movies, but the ones that illustrate a particular quality or movement – he spends half this chapter complaining about early 1970s Godard.

Unfortunately, the resultant films – from British Sounds to Tout Va Bien – prove that to “will” political cinema into being without the mediation of art is self-defeating. Despite brilliant sequences (reminiscent of the “old” Godard), these works are visually sterile, intellectually shallow, and, in terms of their overbearing, insistent soundtracks didactic, pedantic, dogmatic.


The Cry of Jazz (1959, Edward Bland)

“Rock and roll is not jazz.” Argument within a college(?) jazz club about whether only Black people could have created jazz, the white boys arguing that there are plenty of white players so race has nothing to do with it. Narrator Alex explains how music works (repeating chorus, changes/harmonies) and how jazz has evolved, culminating in the hottest group of today, the Sun Ra Arkestra. While the kids are stuck arguing in their musicless bland room, our camera hits the streets and the clubs seeking examples for Alex’s explanations. After a savage scene comparing Black life (pool game) to white life (poodle getting a haircut), eventually there’s a short debate over whether Americans have souls, concluding ambivalently: “America’s soul is an empty void.” For a half-hour movie that begins looking like a MST3K educational short, this sure takes some wild turns.

The two restraining elements in jazz are the form and the changes. They are restraining because of their endless repetition, in much the same way that the Negro experiences the endless daily humiliation of American life, which bequeaths him a futureless future. In conflict with America’s gift of a futureless future is the Negro’s image of himself. Through glorifying the inherent joy and freedom in each present moment of life, the Negro transforms America’s image of him into a transport of joy. Denied a future, the joyous celebration of the present is the Negro’s answer to America’s ceaseless attempts to obliterate him. Jazz is a musical expression of the Negro’s eternal recreation of the present. The Negro’s freeing worship of the present in jazz occurs through the constant creation of new ideas in jazz. These new ideas are born by improvising through the restraints of the form and the changes. Jazz reflects the improvised life thrust upon the Negro. Now, melody is one element which can be used in improvisation. The soloist creates this melody through elaborating on various details of the changes. The manner in which each change shall be elaborated upon is a problem of the eternal present. As Negro life admits of many individual solutions, so does the way in which a change can be elaborated upon. Of course the Negro, as man and/or jazzman, must be constantly creative, for that is how he remains free. Otherwise, the dehumanizing portrait America has drawn of him will triumph.

Editor Howard Alk worked on Dylan movies, and one of the jazz club girls grew up to be Magnolia‘s Rose Gator. Bland went on to arrange for Sun Ra in New York and compose orchestral works. From his NY Times obituary:

The British critic Kenneth Tynan, in a column for The London Observer, wrote that it “does not really belong to the history of cinematic art, but it assuredly belongs to history” as “the first film in which the American Negro has issued a direct challenge to the white.”


I’m a Man (1969, Peter Rosen)

“Police are always frightened.” John walks through a Connecticut town carrying a spear in order to provoke white people, then calls his wife to say he’s about to be arrested. The doc(?) interviews people from John’s court case: the whites think he’s incompetent, the blacks realize he’s an intellectual. John sees himself as a militant, says he expects to die poor and hated, but aims to increase freedom for his kids.


Wholly Communion (1966, Peter Whitehead)

Something completely different: document of a post-beatnik pre-hippie poetry reading in June 1965 at Royal Albert Hall. “This evening is an experiment” – with minor crowd disturbance or drama or movement, it’s mostly just guys reading poetry with better-than-decent sound recording.

Ginsberg listens and waits his turn:

Rewatched for the first time since theaters.

I’ve been reading the Adam Nayman book on the Coens:

Nothing in the film is “original” except for the reconfiguration of elements, which is why the opening citation is more honest than it seems and, in its way, a signifier not of smarminess but of humility. The nod to The Odyssey admits that any artist in the Western tradition owes some currency of debt to Homer, and that to mount any story about homecoming is to reconnect with the roots of storytelling itself – to return to the primal scene.

Nayman:

“If it’s not new and it never grows old, it’s a folk song,” quips the hero of Inside Llewyn Davis, which is O Brother, Where Art Thou?‘s spiritual sequel. Taken together, the two films clarify the Coens’ relationship to a musical genre founded on familiarity. For filmmakers perpetually interested in circles and circularity, the cyclical proliferation and popularity of folk and bluegrass standards – songs largely without cited authors, passed down and performed by different singers through the generations – serves as a potent analogue to their thematic preoccupations.

Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma (2021, Topaz Jones & Rubberband)

Alphabet of sketches, like The ABCs of Death, but of Black culture in Montclair NJ. Each letter-sketch is a different approach, from wordless avant one-shots to interviews about reframing slavery, food apartheid, code switching, therapy or owning your own work, with home movies and music videos in between letter segments.


The Driver Is Red (2017, Randall Christopher)

Animated thriller about spy stuff in 1960 Argentina, self-drawing sketches upon papery background with unstable color, covered in faux film grain. Our narrator/hero has tracked and identified Adolf Eichmann, then takes the time to explain some details of the holocaust, in case we haven’t heard. Back to 1960, he calls in his mates and they successfully abduct the guy and bring him to trial, back when Isr**l had a sense of proportion.


A Short Story (2022, Bi Gan)

This whimsical fantasy AFX-composited sci-fi short incongruously proves that the director of An Elephant Sitting Still had a shot of helming a marvel movie. I guess a cat dresses as a scarecrow and visits three “weirdo” beings who might have some precious thing he can give a girl for her birthday.


The Rifleman (2021, Sierra Pettengill)

The guy who shot Ramon Casiano later became head of the NRA, mutating the group’s mission from hobbyist sports towards political lobbying. The Drive-By Truckers song is better than this movie (archival footage with strange music), but both are enlightening.


Rubber Coated Steel (2016, Lawrence Abu Hamdan)

An Isr**li bodyguard killed two kids in the W*st B*nk, and a forensic audio analyst (the director himself, if I didn’t misunderstand the credits) explains in court how it was done. Visual is a long take, roving around a shooting range, the mechanical target holders bringing forth pictoral representations of bullet sounds. For a movie about sound, the audio track is pretty useless – words from the trial are subtitled, including lines stricken from the official record, then the end credits are spoken.


Goodbye Jerome! (2022, Farr/Selnet/Sillard)

Jerome goes to heaven to find his true love, she breaks up with him, so he suicides and is rebuilt by ants. Really nice animation.

Brigitte Mira (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) plays the most naive German woman ever, who hasn’t heard about racism. She wanders into a bar full of foreigners to get out of the rain, doesn’t know how bars work, and Moroccan mechanic Ali is coerced into dancing with her. He starts coming over, and she blurts out that they’re married as a cover story to the landlord, so they really do get married, and her kids (incl. Irm Hermann and the director) disown her. The grocer bans her, coworkers stop speaking to her, only the landlord doesn’t seem to mind, weird to make a landlord the sympathetic one. When the happy couple returns from vacation everyone warms up to them, realizing they each need something from Brigitte. Marital woes – he is after all 20 years younger and she refuses to make couscous, then strange ending, he’s hospitalized for a stress ulcer after they’ve made up. Movie lives up to its high reputation, looks beautifully Kaurismakian, people standing very still when it’s not their turn to speak.

Flowers Blooming in Our Throats (2020, Eva Giolo)

Nice sound design in an a/g short, how rare. Sync sound effects, professionally blended between shots. Focus on hands and arms… slapping and clutching, spinning tops, clipping flowers, with and without a red filter. I take the film as an ASMR parody, with its hair-brushing and rubberband-snapping, edited too quickly to evoke whatever trance state the youtubers seek.


Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You (2019, Brandon Cronenberg)

“Eventually I realize I’m in a kind of hell.” Deragh is a brain-implant patient describing the dream states the device puts her in. Three dreams under different color filters, then a good ol’ glitching-video-signal nude freakout before the Twilight Zone ending.


Tomb of Kafka (2022, Jean-Claude Rousseau)

Prague. A small room. The desk has a hat on it. One of the windows is green. Usually there’s a white-haired man without anything compelling to do. His activities have equal weight as the quick fadeouts or fidgets of the camera refocusing. Sometimes a cutaway to a forest or a dead bug. We watch the man read for a minute or two. Hey, I could be reading. Didn’t I get a new Laszlo Krasznahorkai book? I could’ve been reading that.


Dear Chantal (2021, Nicolas Pereda)

Chantal is renting a place from the narrator’s sister, a painter. He’s an Akermaniac so asks to be in charge of communication, which we hear as flatly-narrated letters. Nice shot of brushing leaves from a skylight. Opens and closes with the quote: “Letters never written nonetheless exist.”


Blank Narcissus (2022, Peter Strickland)

A “rediscovered” Midsummer Night’s Gay Porno with audio commentary by a director mourning his long-lost relationship with the star. Maybe Strickland isn’t as great as I’d been assuming.


Open Sky, Open Sea, Open Ground (2022, Baus & Gills)

Ecuador… Grainy film with a wrecked water/shuffle soundtrack of people running across a beach from boat to truck, delivering containers of fish while besieged by pelicans and gulls. I was rooting for the pelicans.


Emergence Collapse (2021, Rainer Kohlberger & Jung An Tagen)

Liquid cityscapes! Best guess is it’s nighttime photography turned into pure digital moosh with the color dial turned to eleven. Some of the most tripped-out shit I’ve ever seen. Loses a point for the nightmarish music, sort of a generative-autechre.


Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021, Sky Hopinka)

Wow, a convincing and succinct blend of earth, sky and water. Images upside-rightside overlapping, the sky masked by a person-walking silhouette, desert and plants blurred into blasted lines as if viewed out a rocket-car window.


Mélodie de brumes à Paris (1985, Julius-Amédé Laou)

The only short I watched from the free offerings of Prismatic Ground, which was like most film festivals in not having very clear communication about its streaming program.

Opens on a dubbed guy having a breakdown out the window of an artificial-looking apartment, yelling at neighbors and passers-by to blow up the buildings of the oppressors (start with the bars, banks and pay toilets). He mutters himself to sleep on the can, the synth soundtrack alternating with a pop song repeating the film’s title. In the morning he walks through the fog to a bar, his thoughts still on bombs, is the only customer but still can’t get served (because of racism, not because they heard him advocating for the violent destruction of all bars). He finds his dead father and confesses to being a merciless killing machine during the Algerian war. That night he’s being harassed by a drug dealer when a white doorman starts being racist, the director yells cut but the doorman doesn’t stop, and the cast and crew start fighting with the white locals.

Good looking movie with nice fourth-wall-breaking and synth music. I do think a few of the voiceover lines were clunky (guy is haunted by the past, we know because he says “the past, the past”). Star Greg Germain also appeared in the similarly themed Soleil O and popped up in everything from Chabrol movies to Emmanuelle sequels.


Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916, Roscoe Arbuckle)

Farmhand Roscoe marries Mabel and they move into a cottage her parents buy when a shady realtor’s car breaks down outside their house. R&M sleep as far apart as possible inside, while outside his romantic rival the Hated Milk Machine conspires with some random thugs to … push their house into the ocean? Or it happens to slide away during a storm while HMM and the thugs are attempting to break in. Either way, they don’t become adrift until the last 7 minutes. The cops and parents somehow save them, meanwhile HMM and the thugs gamble all night, argue over the wad of cash, then all die in an accidental explosion. I know that watching silents while listening to Zorn is a cliche with me, but Cleric playing Bagatelles vol. 12 was perfect for this.

Mabel’s parents with villain Al St. John as the HMM:

The Onions opened, incongruously to the film, three goofy white guys playing bright pop songs. Movie starts with a way-zoomed-in cellphone video of a woman disrobing before a Mandela statue. Director’s family is from South Africa, grandma disparages Mandela for ending apartheid. Then we get educational segments on history of the black-only Transkei district, featuring excessively unedited news archives interviewing relentlessly optimistic Black kids and their parents on the eve of integration. Movie goes off the rails with two (not just one!) extended conversations between the filmmaker and her white friends about privilege and prejudice revealed by some minor personal interactions, the visual in these sections just subtitles over an annoyingly dark-grey screen with a couple lines visible on the edges.

Okay, I messed up… I had a couple of Frankenstein movies, one by Corman, so I thought I’d hold a weekend SHOCKtober triple-feature along with his William Shatner Esperanto demon movie. But I was thinking of Incubus (not by Corman), while Intruder is a social issues drama with Shatner as a rabble-rousing outsider trying to convince a Southern town to reject racial integration in schools.

Filmed in Missouri… where’d Corman find all these extras?

When Shatner arrives, he’s very pleasant to the locals, except for frequent, casual use of the n-word. Frank Maxwell (of the more seasonally appropriate The Haunted Palace) is the Only Good White Man, breaking up mobs with peaceful logic, while Shatner runs around making out with Frank’s teenage daughter and sleeping with the salesman’s wife next door. Accusations, setbacks, bombing and murder. I guess it all seems realistic until the townsfolk discover their sense of decency. Most interesting to me was that Shatner claims to represent “The Patrick Henry Society” since I’m staying in Patrick’s old neighborhood.

Embracing neighbor / church-burning:

A nice shock for Trek fans if this ever played on TV in the late 60’s:

Salesman next door was Leo Gordon of Riot in Cell Block 11, his wife from The Boston Strangler, the teenage daughter was in The Crawling Hand, and the rich guy who supports our intruder is from It’s Alive. Written by a Twilight Zone regular who also worked on Corman’s great Masque of the Red Death.

Voilà l’enchaînement (2014)

Alex Descas and Norah Krief (a Shakespeare actress) are a mixed-race couple, and not incidentally. She calls him a stud, asks him to tattoo her name on his body, he says both remind him of slavery/ownership. Time passes, she’s paranoid, reports him to the cops for domestic violence and he’s arrested. His prison monologue about “the trap” and his ponderings on racism afterwards feels too much like reciting the moral at the end of an educational film, though I like the rhythm of his speech.


Duo (1995)

Very short, the camera cruising around a painting (of another mixed-race couple) while Descas smokes outside the frame.


Towards Mathilde (2005)

This played at Big Ears, but we were too busy seeing live music. A rehearsal/process movie, prepping for a show that uses squirky noises and elastic materials, working out to PJ Harvey songs. One of my arms has been stiff lately and I’ve kept a small weight by the bed and the desk so I can grab it anytime and stretch out. I’m not usually inspired to do this during movies, but with this doc focusing so much on arm movements, I got a real workout. The day I watched this the new Denis hadn’t screened at Cannes yet, but the Cronenberg had, and I happened to read a Kristen Stewart interview right after watching this:

The most simple answer comes from a place of wisdom. You don’t have to complicate certain ideas. Like, “The body is reality.” At first, I was really trying to shove that concept in my head: What does it mean to me and the world and on every level? But he was like, “I shoot people.” That’s it! It’s a body. All of that is surprising. These are really lofty concepts, but also they’re not at all.

Gullah culture, netmaking and baskets. “I wanted to weave with images.” Too sleepy and abstract for me post-lunch, a a hodgepodge of media and ideas, though it came together in the second half. Kind of an American The Territory as the whites terrorize and murder then grab land. The director’s dad had been a minister who survived a mass shooting at his Charleston church – it gets around to this gradually across its abstractly-named chapters. Susan Alcorn opened on pedal steel.