29 November 2014

#WTW: Medium Cool

(#WhatThomWatched, take two)

#WTW Medium Cool: Shooting


Medium Cool 

(Haskell Wexler, 1969; Criterion spine 658)

Understand up front — the ending of Medium Cool is its least interesting, underwritten, most amateurish moment (the narrative ending, not the famous final trick shot featuring the director). But by then the callous cameraman played by Robert Forster has lost your sympathy anyway. Everything leading up to that ending is fascinating, including alternating gorgeous and squalid images of late-sixties Chicago (and, for a while, Washington D.C.); endless visual puns and games (when Forster’s sound man tells him that “For every man in D.C. there are four-and-a-half women!” Wexler smash-cuts rapidly to four random walking women, and then to a pair of legs); and rooms full of details, most often photographs and pictures crammed onto walls, seen in slow 360° pans, and once as Forster chases his naked girlfriend from room to room with the camera running along behind them.



#WTW Medium Cool: Forster
There are many many times in Medium Cool when the camera is addressed or otherwise acts as a stand-in for us as viewers (and we viewers as a stand-in for turbulently charged 1968 America): representing a news photographer’s POV, becoming a gym punching bag, and so on; when a group of militant blacks are haranguing Forster-as-camera-as-us-as-Society, a young man’s finger-gun is matched with grim housewives shooting real guns at a suburban range (these images grabbed me during my viewing and only later did I realize that Criterion chose the exact same scenes to lead off their own booklet essay). But what stood out the most was a tiny moment, easy to miss, when Forster has come to the news director’s office at his television station to demand “film and lab” to shoot the upcoming Democratic National Convention; as the man bemoans the demands placed on him (for what is presumably increasingly unusable footage covering unpalatable politics in a dividing country), he glares directly into Wexler’s camera for a head-on closeup to growl: “They got film and lab!” — they, the filmmakers of the movie we’re watching, the counterculture empowered. In 1968, the angry and the crazed get the cameras, the “film and lab” funding, and access to shoot from inside the riot — from the center of America’s storm — even as the cameraman extends his own arm over the top of the camera into the frame to flip off the police.


#WTW Medium Cool: Shooting again...


#WTW Medium Cool: ...and again


Reminds me of:
I also own David Holzman’s Diary, Jim McBride’s shaggy-dog “documentary” from 1967, which I am guessing influenced Wexler, but I was surprised at the polish and slickness of Medium Cool in comparison; I’d always linked the two in my mind and was expecting more of Diary’s film-school-experiment, avant-garde feel (for example, McBride’s pretentious filmmaker subject, the imaginary Holzman played by writer L. M. Kit Carson, puts a time-lapse camera on a night of typical American mid-sixties network television). Instead, Medium Cool has what seem to be meticulously designed and staged sets and carefully controlled camera movements which invite visual connections between innumerable elements and references — Forster’s character’s apartment alone is loaded: in one shot he’s compared (or more likely compares himself in his own mind) to Jean-Paul Belmondo, star of Breathless and other iconic Godard films, while half of the famous “Execution of a Viet Cong Guerilla” can be seen (taken just that same year by the AP’s Eddie Adams); among them counterculture hero Tiny Tim preens in a literal spotlight:


#WTW Medium Cool: Icons


But also — the guilt!
Ive never actually read any of the Marshall McLuhan media analysis which underlies the ideas played with here and in many other works that I love: it’s specifically his 1964 book Understanding Media and its assertion that television is a “cool medium” (and the corresponding labeling of film as a “hot” medium) that gives this film its title and presumably its thematic thesis. As a long-standing Woody Allen fan, who chuckles every time Allen brings out McLuhan to end an argument in Annie Hall, I should be ashamed. (“I think my insights into Marshall McLuhan have a great deal of validity!” “Oh, do ya? Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here.” And then McLuhan himself: “I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work!”)

Pitch:
The weakness of the narrative plot does not take anything away from Verna Bloom’s heartbreaking country-mouse widow transplant from the South, wandering into the heart of a (real) riot in search of her (imaginary) lost son, the only bright yellow dress in a solid sea of actual tanks, actual soldiers, actual tangles of fencing, actual protesters, actual blood. 

It is the actual document of that moment in America, disguised as fiction, and it is more than cool: it is chilling.


#WTW Medium Cool: Chicago

#WTW Medium Cool: Find Verna

#WTW Medium Cool: Look out --

#WTW Medium Cool: -- it's real!

22 November 2014

#WTW: Judex

(deep breath — it's the inaugural #WhatThomWatched  . . . .)


#WTW Judex: White...#WTW Judex: ...and black.

Judex 

(Georges Franju, 1963; Criterion spine 710)


If a person already loves silent film, and is used to the damaged black-and-white frames and the sometimes mistimed playback speeds, maybe even has built up the patience to watch six- or ten-hour serials from the 1910's, then seeing Judex — Franju’s modern homage to famous French crime serials — is like watching that tiny flickering square expand to life-size: wide compositions, sharp contrasts, and of course full sound, and yet still with those period details: early-era clothes, cars, and drawing rooms, pulp-fiction guns, knives and subterranean cells, and the most obvious-seeming light and dark used symbolically for good and evil. 


#WTW Judex: Black...
#WTW Judex: ...and white.
But trying to suss out those light/dark beats shows surprising intricacies. Two women, both introduced on a sun-swept lawn, begin to circle each other with their blacks and whites: while the dutiful daughter is dressed in black to mourn the father she thinks is dead, his faithless lover is conspiring with her real partner in their modern street clothes; as night falls, the partners don black catsuits to sneak back into the man’s mansion, only to encounter the daughter in her white nightgown . . . . By the end the villain has disguised herself in a nun’s habit to kidnap the incapacitated daughter, whose unlikely champion — a circus acrobat in a white leotard — will fight hand-to-hand with the villain on a roof; they are abstracted in one shot to just their legs, two black, two white, struggling to keep a purchase on the sloping rooftop.

#WTW Judex: Nun
   


Reminds me of:

The five-film Fantômas serial, of course; the master criminal there has a thousand times more personality but can’t touch the 1960’s Judex for sheer style . . . . The relentless pileup of events is a kind of link between those serials, some of the earliest examples of popular film that we still watch, and the current need for thrillers to one-up themselves scene after scene, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility — yet the anachronistic camera irises and intertitles here invoke a kind of gentility . . . . And: Could Wes Anderson have possibly been thinking of Judex when he shot the meeting between Sam and Suzy in Moonrise Kingdom? It’s easy to imagine that he was. “No — I said, what kind of bird are you?”


#WTW Judex: Iris

But also — the guilt!

For years I’ve been too squeamish to watch Franju’s Eyes Without a Face — reviews always seem to use the word “grue” — but I need to grow up; the included short documentary Franju le visionnaire convinces me that I should see it. I also need to catch the original Feuillade serial from 1916; both it and Les vampires have been reissued in affordable DVD sets by Kino.


Pitch:

For those who adore a particular kind of surrealistic whammy, the scene where Judex is first revealed (from the feet up) is thirty seconds of perfection.


#WhatThomWatched: An Introduction


So: I'm not a social media person. Which is why I'm here on good ol' G+, and that only occasionally. In the last 10 - 20 years, I've come to want to hear from myself less and less, which is why the number of "I"'s and "my"'s in this post is going to make me highly uncomfortable. 99% of my life these days is wrapped up in my kids, and working (which is primarily for the kids), and, occasionally, when there is a moment that she is not wrapped up in the kids, for +Rosie Verratti -- a good life for someone who doesn't want to hear from himself.

But that remaining 1% of my life is -- and has been for years -- movies.

I don't really care about social media, and yet: Recently I have been inspired by my brother +matt verratti 's ongoing series of G+ posts discussing the record albums he is listening to. And years ago -- he may have forgotten -- my old friend +Wally Weaksauce told me that I should write about the movies I'm watching. Instead of taking his advice, I've just been watching -- and accumulating, hundreds and hundreds of movies and television shows. And, generally, falling in love with so much of what I watch. Maybe I'm an emotional pushover, but I've found that when I start with a work of art -- something, usually, that a critic much wiser than I has recommended -- I almost always find something in it that moves me. Or teaches me, or amuses me, or scares me -- something that makes me grateful that I took the plunge and experienced it.

As a challenge to myself, I am going to start documenting what I watch. I don't want to write a summary or hook up with commercial sites and carry their advertising -- and I don't want to try and review anything. Instead, I'm going to focus on a few things: one idea or image or theme or concept that really struck me in the viewing, in a short essay; any connections to other movies that I own or have seen which jumped out at me; and (to counter that) the guilt-list of movies I've not seen which this movie makes me want to explore.

I've got one ready to start. I'll post with the hashtag #WhatThomWatched, and will try to post every time I get to see something -- probably a couple times a month. Sometimes it'll be a theatrical showing or a rental but more often it'll be something out of my own collection; as I circle back and re-watch old favorites I'll post about those. I welcome comments and discussion but I won't mind a bit if there's no one else who wants to join in -- really, this is a journal; I'd do it privately, but it's one of the few times that I've wanted to do something which might be of limited interest to someone -- so, the posting. Yeah, on G+. I know, it's silly. (It's like what I used to say about form poetry and "little literary" journals -- you might as well "publish" your stuff by writing it on the flyleaf of a library book and sticking it back on the shelf.) I'll hold onto a copy of it all in case someone has a better tech suggestion (are blogs still a thing?*), but know ahead of time: I won't do Facebook, and Twitter would explode if it saw even one of my "short" posts.

Thanks for reading! I'll add a link to one of those "wise critics" I mentioned above -- Glenn Erickson has turned me on to more movies and more unforgettable experiences over the years than anyone, with his fantastic critical writing. If you want full-service reviews and not my scattered impressions, his DVD Savant is the place.


DVD Savant, Glenn Erickson's Review Column at DVD Talk - dvdsavant.com

*As of updated version, published in Blogger a week later: Apparently so.

(-) (-) (-) Judex >>