#13 third series Silent House (Athena Grand)

Silent House starts as a story about another hard to sell house in our times. It turns out that the real estate difficulty comes not so much from the burst housing bubble or the ongoing financial crisis as from #daddy’scock. We find Elizabeth Olsen  on the verge of typecasting as the post-girl who almost manages, at the expense of her sanity, to reveal that the normative nuclear family was never anything but a rape camp.  Silent House captures Olsen in a palpably faked single take meandering through intervalometer shakey hand and other tropes borrowed from “French extreme.” The narrative movement from frustrated flipping to psychosis born of fatherly sex games passes through a supernatural moment, but we find out without the least surprise that the house is haunted by Olsen’s character herself in the sense that she’s out for revenge. The fact that Slavoj Zizek has written about syuzhets that make social fabula seem supernatural until the last enigma is resolved doesn’t make Silent House seem less belabored. The film has the virtue  to reveal the problem with Steven Shaviro’s “post-cinematic affect:” the supposedly new forms in movies produce the same old horror of incest as ever. At most the new affect transforms cinema’s valorization of the bourgeois family into a nostalgic longing for it.

(out of series) Il Decameron (321 Lindley, Film Authors: Pier Paolo Pasolini)

Il Trilogia della vita  begins with a scene of a debt collector (Franco Citti) beating someone to death. One might have thought that this should enough of a cue to make Pasolini’s Marxist critics of the 1970s realize that the trilogy doesn’t dream of an authentic undifferentiated world free of class conflict. Il Trilogia doesn’t celebrate life as a humanist value, it depicts life at a time before neoliberalism attempted to insert human bodies directly into chains of valuation. Pasolini analyzed the growing sexual permissiveness of neoliberal Italy as an attempt to turn all bodies into commodities, thereby mutating them into sources of profit for capital. Like the other films in the trilogy, Il Decameron carefully attends to various historical forms of economic circulation and depicts the sexualities that develop around them or beside them. Although in some of the tales center around advantageous marriage, feature prostitution, or narrate other intersections between sex and money, fucking is never promoted as a direct source of revenue for the dominant classes. Analogous to the wife who pretends she is selling her lover an urn to prevent her husband from realizing that he is being cuckolded, the characters often disguise their sexual acts with some bit of business involving the circulation of a good other than their bodies. When prostitution occurs, the prostitute keeps the profit for himself.  The utopian aspect of Il Decameron and the rest of ll trilogia, cannot be found in a supposed depiction of a regressive world of infantile fusion, but from the potentials released by depicting dangerous sex acts which are not subsumed in economic circulation. The fucking that most interests the trilogy runs parallel to circulation. It happens before the era of the assembly line and industrialization that, according to Pasolini, caused an “anthropological mutation” by investing in Italian genitals. As a bonus, Il trilogia favors fucking that avoids procreation and the founding of the bourgeois family.

A Marixist critic might validly take Pasolini to task for not focusing on production, but in the 1970s the semiological fools of early film studies couldn’t do anything but interpret the trilogy as if they were blind and deaf because they were busy  pulling out of their asses a “Marxist aesthetics” without any philological base. Perhaps the relatively sympathetic Geoffrey Noel-Smith most vexingly incarnates this tendency, since as an editor and translator of Gramsci, he should have been able to figure some of this shit out. The bewildering ideology of left academic film critics of the 70s wasn’t grounded in post-structuralism, but in a version of structuralism itself which made them think they had to invent an “aesthetics” with no relation to previous Marxist attempts to do so. One can only blame capitalist universities and publication venues, which disfigured thinkers then just as they do now. Their mission is to foreclose any relevant critique of capitalism.

(out of series) Il racconti di Canterbury (321 Lindley Hall, Film Authors, Pier Paolo Pasolini)

Pasolini’s adaptation of The Canterbury Tales includes harsh institutional judgments of sexual behavior.  The ecclesiastical punishment of homosexuality in the films modified version of  “The Summoner’s Tale” providing the harshest of these. The cameras and microphones however, never take the side of the judges. The film portrays various pre-capitalist systems of judgment without turning itself into a system of judgment. Normally, in industrial cinema, the narrative apparatus enforces norms by forcing characters and the audience to see in the same way as the judges in the films see. In fact, the camera’s and microphones of industrial cinema most often take up the position of a kind of supreme moral court punishing those they construe as guilty both through the incidents of the plot and by means of stylistic choices in presentation. Such films frame those they would punish in such a way that they can only be perceived as guilty. Il racconti di Canterbury uses distant, crowded framings containing mise-en-scene elements from Bruegel and Bosch both as traces of institutional expression from the pre-capitalist period when the bourgeoisie was just emerging. Those shots also portray pleasures taken from below and in spite of juridical repression. Such schemata allow the film’s portrait of sexuality to differentiate itself from neoliberal permissiveness, in which power enjoins one to enjoy, and at the same time produce period sexualities as potentials connected to the modern world by casting.

 

#12 (third series) Safe House (The Athena Grand)

Current events, the missing action sequences from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; the ending from Ghost Protocol takes another step in erasing the difference between media workers and spies and the erasure of love-lives by labor;  but mostly the continuing subsumption of Danzel’s charms by a series of mechanized ticks.

#11 (third series) Shame (The Athena)

Brandon (Michael Fassbender,) a horny executive at a vague media firm acts mean to his visiting sister, conveniently name Sissy (Carey Mulligan,) until she tries to kill herself for at least second time in her life. The audience knows she must be an attempted suicide girl becuase Brandon’s boss (James Badge Dale) notices the scars on her wrist early on in the film, telegraphing the tragic ending. Everything proceeds as if Dr Dru had consulted with The Iron Lady’s Abi Morgan on the script: Michael can only  inhabit his sex drive as an addiction, we have to endure awkward scenes of Brandon failing at a normative sexual relationship complete with sincere affects, a fleeting reference to being from a bad place turns the principals into victims, and therapeutic incest doesn’t seem to be an option. McQueen tones down his references to gallery photography somewhat, but retains his pointless diagnostic closeups which he stupidly likes to use to heighten identification by cutting from one emotional state to a more intense version of the same. This counter-Eisensteinian technique is even more annoying than the Actor’s Studio™’s instance on fluid transitions in onscreen-space. The close ups batter the audience over the head in the amaturishly parallel scenes of Lucy Walters, from small parts in Gossip Girl and Army Wives, overacting on the subway. The low point of stylistic banality comes at Sissy’s singing gig, which one would like to say is a version of similar scenes in New Rose Hotel  or La vie nouvelle, except it’s just a sincere-ified version of Isabella Rossellini’s song from Blue Velvet. The sexual politics are odious. Brandon’s “bad place” takes the edge off his palpable misogyny in a way that American Psycho would never stoop to; he has to get beaten up outside a bar and be denied entry into a hetero club before he can let himself get his cock sucked by a man; no woman in the narrativegets anything like real sexual agency; McQueen displays the sex Brandon is so ashamed of in the most ordinarily titillating way; and the tired city of New York gets whored out yet again with out a trace of urbanist analysis. I’m sure this would be a more interesting review if, as Joshua Clover does so well, I posited Shame as a film about the financial crisis, but I don’t want to write interestingly about Shame, so I’ll just note that it makes The Girl Friend Experience seem like a staggering achievement.

(out of seires) Porcile (321 Lindley, Film Authors: Pier Paolo Pasolini)

How might Pasolini articulate the connection between the connection between the emergence of discourses on “life” and the biopolitical with the real subsumption of labor? Glad you asked! in Porcile, a film that devotes much time to depicting “zöe,” he has Her Klotz tell Her Herdhitze that by late 1960s the scientific had become the technical, meaning that science had been completely integrated into capital, which implies the creation of a class of technicians, who Klotz and Herdhitze refer to, with deliberate irony, as peasants. More importantly, it implies the degradation of proletarian working conditions so they become indistinguishable from sub-proletarian life, which is what gets played out in the film’s Mount Etna footage.

#10 (Third Series) A Dangerous Method (The Athena)

For a few seconds near the beginning of A Dangerous Method, it seems as if Cronenberg’s Grand Guignol mockery of movies as we know them might be back. The 1970s pan-European art house style seems like a pleasant enough trashing of Visconti’s Death In Venice, and casting Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, Jung’s hysteric, then forcing her to act out full arch hysteria from Characot photographs using only her chin seems like near genius. The latter might have been even more amusing if Julia Roberts had been cast as originally planned. As the film grinds on, one realizes Cronenberg doesn’t mean any of this to be funny. He means to show us that he’s really done his psychoanalytic homework like a good schoolboy — that homework seems to have consisted mostly of consulting the films rather bland source texts: A play called The Talking Cure and a long, boring semi novelization of freud’s relationship with Jung called A Most Dangerous Method: the story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. Cronenberg even has Vigo Vigo Morgenstern Jew it up and do a passable job of bringing out Freud’s bourgeois character, something that’s been done by, roughly, everyone whose through about Freud since 1970. He ends up handing in a dull, unimaginative, yet pretentious assignment.

 

(out of series) Porcile (my tv)

In Porcile the functioning of incompossible chrontopes reaches a baroque stage of differentiation. Pasolini proliferates non-relations between images (Wirtschaftswunder Germany and another red desert) and within images (Wirtschaftswunder Germany and the Italy of the il miracolo economico — a non-relation effected by casting and the use of bourgeois Italian talk.) Perhaps the most differentiated gap between images comes within the volcanic red desert which splits itself into Rossellini’s Stromboli Terra Di Dio (1949.) Both involve a figure’s absolute rupture with the social order figured by the violence of Mount Etna. Stomboli floats above Pasolini’s image which reveals what is at stake in Bergman’s breakdown but which Rossellini could not bare.

(out of series) Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (my tv)

As if enacting a lesson in colonial awkwardness from Fanon, Pasolini plans a black Orestes in Africa after asking as group of African students in Rome to critique his project. The planned film continues the work on incompossible chronoptopes Pasolini initiated in 1966 with Uccellacci e uccellini, Pasolini chooses a play that cannot be brought into the same time and space as Africa in the 1970s. The students tell him he would have to set his film in the 1950s or 60s and he seems to agree. One cam imagine that Pasolini had dared himself to make a film in a “dominant language” and could not inhabit that position.

(out of series) Hunger (my tv)

Steve McQueen’s Hunger works well enough as apiece of fluffy art pop. It fills the screen with a fair number of beautifully composed but gently hard to look at images and leaves the doctorate-holding liberal viewer feeling on the side of the good and the just, yet able to site the film’s ambiguity as an alibi. Hunger isn’t a film that doesn’t manipulate it’s audience, or one that sets up real contradictions, it’s a film that, like the contemporary bourgeoisie, makes a religion of not knowing what to feel. The movie works more less the same way the work of Andres Serrano or or Damien Hirst pictures does. Unfortunately, the film and McQueen want you to take them seriously, which reveals that they are empty as Schindler’s List and Steven Spielberg.

In order not to confront the fact that he has merely added another entry to the filmography of post-gospel typology, McQueen tells professional film salespeople like Denis Lim  that his movie scrapes relevance off Guantanamo Bay and the contemporary climate of terror. He even claims that the belabored citations of Christian iconography were “unavoidable” in a film about “a naked skinny guy dying.” McQueen, it must be said seems as stupid and disingenuous as anyone in Hollywood or the galley world and probably uses “reference” as a verb. His film has to do related to Camp X-Ray and contemporary terrorism only at the most deluded level of abstraction.

His hysterical love for ending shots in the overly dramatic but well-balanced compositions typical of a certain school of large format art photography structures the camera work form start to finish. The problem with that tick isn’t so much that the compositions aestheticize the image, but that McQueen’s aesthetics are an ongoing project rather than a mode of historical analysis. Everything from a guard shot in the head while visiting his mother at a nursing home to shit prisoners smeared on the walls of Maze prison is presented from the same monocular point of view.  That point of view contains violence in the image within a decorum of the image. Formally the film enacts a huge step backwards for the cinema, so much so that I can hear the decomposed Derek Jarman.

The film tells you very little about the no-wash strike, but does generate a lot of eroticism. Its Sadistic investments come to an enjoyable climax in the second half of the film, which is nothing other than an analysis-free hagiography of Bobby Sands as an individual. No mater how many clichés about having “nothing but one’s body” as a weapon McQueen spouts about or how many poorly digested sound-bites about bio/ thanatopoltics his supporters invoke, the second half of the film is even more of a mess than the first half. It uses out of focus shots as means of focalizing the narrative around the starving Sands and cuts to saccharine shots of Sands’ youth right before he dies, further toning down the films mild and over rated horror.

The one almost successful part of the film the first part, about the no-wash strike, with the second part, about Sands. In that sequence, Sands argues with a priest about the merits of a hunger strike unto death. It plays a bit as if McQueen had read the cliff notes to the fabluation chapter in Gilles Deleuze For Dummies and mixed it with some vague ideas about Irish bards, but at least it gives a sense of antagonisms within the Republican movement and doesn’t spend itself in giving us images to look at. Even here, McQueen can’t get away from art world clichés — sands tells a story that turns out to be about that gallery favorite, a dead faun. The aforementioned shots of Sand’s youth in the second half refer to this story, retrospectively diminishing the scene even further when we realize that it was nothing but a mildly sentimental set up for big time bathos. The fact that many critics fell for McQueen’s bullshit and claim the film is rigorous (it’s anything but) while celebrating the supposed fact that he read a couple of books about Sands and Maze Prison before shooting the film (one would hope so,) is almost laughable. McQueen’s Hunger  is hunger for success success  success.