As I’ve expanded my film watching habits, I have frequently taken chances and moved outside of the kind of film that I might have expected to like (more on this when I put up my best of 2009 post!). Sometimes, the results were disastrous. Other times, I was nonplussed but looked into the director and found good things. But occasionally, I have been pleasantly surprised. I have gone into films expecting the worst and come out not only impressed me but also changed me. This is a list of those films.
Disappointments of the Year : 2009 Edition
While I have seen a lot of films this year, I have been relatively lucky as far as avoiding stinkers is concerned. Following disastrous trips to the cinema to see films like Jumper and Quantum of Solace on the grounds that I had a card that allowed me to get in for free, I have resisted seeing rubbish. The only exception being District 9, the film that effectively cured me of action films for good.
However, while I have avoided seeing terrible films, I have been lured to the cinema with high hopes only to see those hopes brutally crushed by terrible film-making. These are my five most disappointing films of the year.
2009 And All That
Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that, thus far, Ruthless Culture has been free of the blogosphere’s traditional end of year introspection. There have been no ‘best of the year’ posts, no plans for 2010, no resolutions, no learning from past mistakes… until now.
Syndromes and a Century (2006) – Repetition and Change
The role of a critic is a somewhat paradoxical one. At times of universal agreement over aesthetic principles, the critic serves as a guard dog. A martinet. Forever wielding his rhetorical staff to smack down those who refuse or fail to toe the line. Like Robert McKee we point solemnly to Aristotle’s Poetics and wearily (almost sadly) shake our heads. In order for criticism to escape the quicksands of qualification and relativism, there has to be a belief in universal principles. There have to be rules and there has to be an order to things. But what are these rules? Where do they come from? Are they, like the laws of physics, universal and embedded in the substance of the universe? If our universe contained no sentient life forms, would it still be the case that a character must suffer after a reversal of fortunes in order to realise where he has gone wrong and how to proceed?
I suspect that aesthetic sensibilities are the products of their owner’s culture. The values themselves are formed over time by generation upon generation of artists telling similar kinds of stories and yet gradually changing both the stories and the forms those stories take. This is why older texts can seem odd or unbalanced to modern readers. It is also why critics have to be alive to the possibility that sometimes, a failure to toe the line is not a failure but a great success. As John Crowley puts it in The Solitudes (1987), the first part of his Aegypt cycle :
“It seems to me that what grants meaning in folk tales and legendary narratives – We’re thinking now of something like the Niebelungdenlied or the Morte D’Arthur – is not logical development so much as thematic repetition. The same ideas, or events, or even the same objects recurring in different circumstances. Or different objects contained in similar circumstances. (…) A hero sets out (…) to find a treasure, or to free his beloved, or to capture a castle, or find a garden. Every incident, every adventure that befalls him as he searches, is the treasure or the beloved, the castle or the garden. Repeated in different forms like a set of nesting boxes. Each of them, however, just as large, or no smaller, than all the others. The interpolated stories he is made to listen to only tell him his own story in another form. The pattern continues until a kind of certainty arrises. A satisfaction that the story has been told often enough to seem, at last, to have been really told. Not uncommonly, an old romance’s story just breaks off then, or turns to other matters. Plot, logical development, conclusions prepared for by introductions or inherent in a story’s premises, logical completion as a vehicle of meaning… all that is later. Not necessarily later in time but belonging to a later, more sophisticated, kind of literature. There are some interesting half-way kind of works like The Fairy Queen, which set up for themselves a titanic plot , an almost mathematical symmetry of structure, and never finish it… never need to finish it. Because they are, at heart, works of the older kind. And the pattern has already arisen satisfyingly within them. The flavour is already there. So, is this any help to our thinking? Is meaning in history like the solution to an equation or like a repeated flavour? Is it to be sought for, or tasted?”
This passage raises two interesting ideas. Firstly, it raises the possibility of a time when different aesthetic principles were in force. The Arthurian myths and romances are not primitively written works with a questionable track record when it comes to coherence, but rather works that appealed to a different idea of what makes a good story. Not all stories need to take the same form or follow the same rules in order to be great. Not all conceptions of character have to fit in with our current folk-psychological models. Secondly, it hints at a model of aesthetic revolution. An almost Darwinian process through which stories are told, abandoned, revisited, rebooted, reinterpreted and retold. Crowley is speaking of stories within a certain mythical tradition or saga but might this not also be true of the telling of stories in general? Might this process not also explain how certain kinds of story-telling can evolve over time?
Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light (2007) has appeared on a number of ‘Best Films of the Decade’ -type lists. I consider it to be quite a dull film. My problem with Reygadas’ work is that it is a film that deals in themes and techniques that will be familiar to anyone who has seen a work of post-War cinema. It clings limpet-like to the existentialist tradition that was pioneered by the likes of Bergman and Antonioni and it explores these well-trodden themes using the same set of cinematic techniques that all art house directors have been using since the 60s. Silent Light contains long takes. Silent Light contains awkward silences. Silent Light contains ambiguous plotting. Silent Light contains a fantastical dream sequence. To watch Silent Light is to gag on the stench of intellectual decay. It is as though the post-War art house consensus has finally played itself out, its stories told and retold using the same old techniques. Just as the Cahiers du Cinema critics who would become the directors of the Nouvelle Vague once rejected the theatricality of French post-War cinema, do we stand at a point in time when the story-tellers have to move on? Must new tools and new stories be told for this and the next generation? One director who seems to instinctively answer this question with a resounding affirmative is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Thai director whose Tropical Malady I wrote about a short while ago. His Syndromes and a Century is not merely a good film, it is a film that makes a robustly compelling argument for Weerasethakul to be considered one of the greatest living film-makers.
Rage (2009) – The Future of Reality is Reality TV
Cinema tends to ask only a narrow spectrum of questions. Questions inspired mostly by writers who themselves are concerned only with asking a narrow spectrum of questions : Who are we? What is happiness? What is freedom? But comparatively few films seek to answer the question of how we (as a species, as a culture and/or as individuals) should deal with the future. Even works of cinematic science fiction tend to shy away from these kinds of questions.
One book that has attempted to answer this question only to produce an intriguingly ambiguous answer is Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular (2007). The book deals with humanity’s attempts to come to terms with not one but three separate Singularites. The Singularity that dominates the bulk of the text allows all humans to not only communicate with all other humans, but also to see what they see. For some, this has resulted in fame and fortune as their lives are interesting enough to result in corporate sponsorship and syndication. Rucker presents the technology as incredibly cool and almost spiritual in its capacity for breaking down the barriers between human consciousnesses. But this does not mean that he shies away from the down-side to this degree of interactivity and access. For example, when a couple are attempting to consumate the physical attraction that has been brewing between them, they suddenly find themselves aware of their friends watching them. This instantly places them on a different footing. They are not merely living their lives, they are performing for an audience. In Rucker’s world, everyone is potentially in the public eye and most people act accordingly. In effect, humanity is plunged into a state of what Sartre called Being-For-Others.
But this is all science fiction right? Couldn’t really happen.
Sally Potter’s Rage suggests that this is happening already.
Where The Wild Things Are (2009) – Lost in Translation… With Muppets
There is a tendency in art house cinema towards the pseudo-intellectual. It is a tendency not merely to tolerate witless navel-gazing, but to actively celebrate it. To elevate its whiny introspection above all other forms of human activity. To revel in its portentous self-indulgence. To confuse its bourgeois posturing with grand tragedy and genuine insight. This tendency is best summed up by the films of Sophia Coppola.
Coppola’s best known film remains the Oscar-winning Lost in Translation (2003). Lost in Translation is a sordid tale of two wealthy Americans coming together in a foreign land and forging a bond of some kind out of their shared alienation despite the differences in age and life-experience. It is not really a film about love. Nor is it a film about cross-cultural alienation. In fact, it is not really a film about very much at all but it does have lots and lots of footage of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson looking vaguely depressed in the middle distance. Coppola’s skill as a director lies not in her understanding of the human condition, but rather her mastery of techniques used in art house cinema to create an aura of depth and thoughtfulness regardless of whether any actual ideas or insights are present in the text of the film itself. Indeed, it is telling that two of Coppola’s other films deal with the emotional lives of people who are effectively children. In the case of Marie Antoinette (2006) we have a film ostensibly about the ennui and alienation felt by a child-like Queen of France and in The Virgin Suicides (1999) we have a film that purports to be about the ennui and alienation felt by actual children.
Behind much of modern American independent cinema is the adult equivalent of a temper tantrum. Grown-ups who throw themselves on the ground and roll around screaming because they do not know what to do with themselves. They do not like their jobs. They do not like their families. They do not like their towns. They do not like their children. But they do enjoy staring wistfully into the middle distance while some pleasingly arcane piece of rock or pop plays over the soundtrack.
In a way, it is surprising that it has taken until 2009 for American film makers to realise the degree of similarity between the existential dramas favoured by certain strains of art house cinema and the simple coming-of-age tales favoured by much of children’s fiction. Wes Anderson – one of the acknowledged kings of middle-brow malaise – capitalised on these similarities by transforming Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (1960) into a tale of mid-life crisis and existential alienation. Spike Jonze continues this trend with Where The Wild Things Are, his adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book of the same name.
BG 22 – The Future is the Past : Assassin’s Creed II
Futurismic have my 22nd Blasphemous Geometries Column entitled “The Future is the Past”.
It’s kind of a thematic overview of the game Assassin’s Creed II and how that game relates not only to history but also to the concept of Sacred History via the use of prophecies and apocalyptic symbolism. It was a lot of fun to write but not nearly as much fun as playing Assassin’s Creed II, which is easily one of my games of the year. Particularly impressive is the way that the game’s Renaissance Venice manages to capture the same duality as classic Horror film Don’t Look Back. Go one way and it’s towering churches and magnificent palazzos. Turn another and it’s sordid and cramped little streets.
The Girlfriend Experience (2009) – The Best Things In Life Aren’t Free
As anyone who has seen Adam Curtis’ Century of the Self (2002) documentary series will doubtless agree, one of the most important developments in 20th Century psychology was the creation, by Abraham Maslow, of the hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy of needs is one part pop psychology, one part classical philosophy and one part mysticism. It presents us with a series of levels to human flourishing. If you can sort out survival then you can work on security. If you become secure then you can work on your emotional health. Once you have healthy relationships you can work on esteem and after esteem comes Self Actualisation. The beauty of Maslow’s hierarchy as it is not only a model for the growth of the self, it is also a justification for a rigid class structure. Not only must the poor struggle to feed themselves but the fact that they are struggling to feed themselves suggests that they’re somehow less evolved as people than the rich people who never worry about skipping a meal. Indeed, Curtis suggests that Maslow’s hierarchy maps directly onto the advertising industry’s ABC model of class. When you market at rich, successful people, you are also marketing at Self Actualised individuals and you should treat them as such.
Obviously, Maslow’s hierarchy is deeply flawed. If you want an insight into how Self Actualised the poor can be then I urge you to go and see Martin Provost’s Seraphine (2008), a film about the creative life of Seraphine Louis who, until she found a patron, washed dirty linen and scrubbed floors in order to buy art supplies. However, Maslow’s hierarchy does demonstrate how easy it is to start talking about relationships in very capitalistic terms. This is an idea that is powerfully explored by Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience.
Marnie (1964) – The Abusive Nature of Therapy
One of my greatest bugbears in fiction is the concept of the “well-drawn character”. If we wants to talk about a film in terms of its mis-en-scene or its shot selection then we can read books and treatises about such matters. Books filled with Eisenstein’s montages and Welles’ long takes. Similarly, if we want to talk about a book in terms of its narrative structure or its subtext then one can read Aristotle’s Poetics or the countless introductory guides to literary theory that fill the book shelves of people who really should be reading the original source material. These elements of fiction are well understood. Their subtleties catalogued. Their aesthetics understood. But what about the aesthetics of character construction? What distinguished a well-drawn character from a tissue-thin one-dimensional empty suit?
Presumably this area of aesthetic achievement is comparatively less well-travelled because, as humans, it should be obvious to us which characters are believable and which are not. We humans deal with each other quite a lot and so we presumably have a firm enough grasp of human psychology that we should recognise a character who is ‘off’ and unbelievable. Perhaps they behave in an erratic manner, perhaps they do not speak in a voice of their own, perhaps their actions do not follow from what we know of their character. In effect, we our ability to detect poorly drawn characters flows from the same place as our ability to read and interpret other people’s emotional states, the catalogue of theories, intuitions and received opinions that philosophers call Folk Psychology. However, some philosophers question the validity of folk psychology. They argue that most of our understanding of human behaviour is based on absurdly simplistic theories that are little better than superstitions. I share this doubt. This is why every act of characterisation strikes me as explicitly theoretical. Underpinned by all kinds of beliefs about the way humans work which may, in fact, be profoundly flawed or ludicrously simplistic.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie is a film that wears its Folk Psychological assumptions on its sleeve. It is a work of drama where the character arc of the main character is sketched not in bland generalities but in explicitly Psychoanalytical terms. The result is not only a fascinating character study, but also a meditation upon the moral status of psychoanalysis as an activity.
10 Works of German Expressionism
Videovista have my (rather long) piece on German Expressionist film entitled Apocalyptic Adolescence.
The piece gives a list of eight particularly noteworthy works of Expressionist cinema and ends with two works which, though not Expressionistic, seem like logical reactions against the trend. One of the challenges of writing this piece was the slow realisation that the term “German Expressionism” is now effectively meaningless. So I attempted to keep track not only of how the term changed, but also to look at all of these films through a rather definite understanding of what it meant to be a part of the Expressionist movement.
The list includes : The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Student of Prague, The Golem, From Morn to Midnight, Genuine : A Tale of a Vampire, Waxworks, Nosferatu, Metropolis, The Last Laugh and Pandora’s Box.
Ruthless Culture 