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Lois Weber

Agnes Varda
News

Old News: April 1, 2019

by rick
written by rick

1. Local news

Local to me, anyway.

Free Angela and All Political Prisoners2. Women’s History Month 
March may be over, and with it “Women’s History Month”. But it’s always a good time to focus on contributions and perspectives from those excluded from the dude-canon. (How’s your #52FilmsByWomen going, by the way?)

In 1928, she wrote of the rapidly declining fortunes of female directors in Hollywood (of whom she was only one of many), saying, ‘Women entering the field now find it practically closed. Frequently a male writer is given a directorial chance on the supposition that he ought to know better than anyone else how his story should be presented on the screen. But you do not hear of a woman writer being so favored.’ Moreover, she wrote, ‘Men bosses are also less tolerant of failure or mediocrity in a woman director than in a man.’ The sexist culture on sets and in offices also posed a problem. ‘Men also like men’s talk in a business which may or may not always be attuned to the ears of women,’ she wrote.

The more things change …

3. Archives

  • Archives are an instrument of cultural memory, but as that term implies, the specifics of their use are fraught with political implications. Patrick Gathara argues that they, rather than museums, can assist in a process of colonial reckoning, but only if the objects on which colonialism is inscribed are returned to those who were oppressed, making them “curators of their own history.” Meanwhile, Chelcie Juliet Rowell and Taryn Cooksey argue for an ethic of care in confronting, and preserving, ugly histories, so that efforts to retain and make available hateful cultural products do not make us accomplices in their present-day promulgation.
  • Digitizing historical footage in Connecticut: “Thanks to that grant for about $24,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the society was able to loan approximately 75 films to a company called George Blood LP, which specializes in digitizing audiovisual media. CHS has about 50 more films in its collection but will have to apply for another grant to complete the digitizing project. The grant, received in September 2017, also allowed them to digitize thousands of photos and negatives as well as maps, architectural drawings, lithographs and posters.”
  • The odyssey of Scarecrow Video: “As for Scarecrow, it survived bankruptcy, the threat of closing and the death of its charismatic founder. In 2014, it became a nonprofit. And now, after 30 years, with more than 132,000 titles — many on VHS, laser disc and DVD — it is as much a cultural warehouse as anything else.”

Shackleton discovery4. Exhibition, Streaming, Unearthing

  • The Guardian has a look at the dynamic between cinema exhibition, video clubs, cell phones, and the use of public space across Africa: “Meanwhile not all the old cinema buildings house shops. ‘Every 15 kilometres in Ghana, they used to have a cinema,’ said Cooke. ‘They’ve all closed down. They’ve turned them into churches.’
  • A fascinating account of more celluloid documents beneath our feet: “For the past 100 years, a box of never-before-seen negatives has been preserved in a block of ice in Antarctica. Recently, Conservators of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust came across the 22 exposed, but unprocessed, cellulose nitrate negatives during an attempt to restore an old exploration hut.”
  • Terry Collins argues that “the death of the physical medium has been greatly exaggerated”: “So, I’m grateful to home video for this kind of preservation, and I know I’m not alone. Yes, some folks might be dumping their DVD collections, but an equal number are getting some amazing deals in the online classified ads or at stores who specialize in used media. These same collectors are also purchasing new movies on Blu-ray – the prices of which have fallen substantially on thousands of catalog titles and can be found in Dollar General chain stories discounted for as little as $2.99 each.”
  • Which sounds great. Unfortunately, Samsung, the market titan in Blu-ray players, also announced it’s abandoning their production.
  • In the streaming realm, Ovid.TV is live: Wang Bing, Chris Marker, Mila Turajlić, and Jean Rouch among the offerings. Criterion’s streaming service officially launches on the 8th, after a steady, predictably stellar roll-out of weekly movies-of-the-week like Mikey and Nicky, Wanda, and To Sleep With Anger.
  • Video Psychosis digs into low-budget horror, cult esoterica, and other miscellaneous vaults of disrepute. Episode 3 — “Killer turkey men, bad acid trips, Egyptian sacrifices, human flamethrowers & MORE” — here.

Agnes Varda on beach5. RIP

When I thought to include an in memorium section in this inaugural round-up, I didn’t anticipate how emotional it would be. I expect, as we mark anniversaries of cinema’s first century and a quarter, we’ll have to get used to this.

  • It seems impossible — intolerable — that Agnès Varda is gone. Despite living 90 years, and with diary films frequently fixated on death and impermanence, she always seemed too curious to rest. There are many tributes, and many more to come. This Bright Wall/Dark Room interview is essential (“I am in time. I’m old. I’ve been crossing time for years. I love the idea that even with a bad memory I can pick something which is years ago or someone I met years ago and I am here, and I enjoy it.”). So is this one in The Guardian (“’The grandmother of the New Wave!’ I found it funny, because I was 30 years old!”) I took a break from reading the obits and then came across this deliciously confrontational 1977 discussion, and missed her all over again (“If women must independently find their images, what of feminist-friendly men? ‘If men want to join, leave the door open. They can listen,’ Varda says.”) Elsewhere, she told an interviewer: “Finding fun where sometimes it’s just a bore; finding fun when it’s a burden. You can always make something look different.” When I think of Agnès Varda, I think of possibility, and light, and lightness, and the world seems heavier without her.
  • We also lost another irrepressible auteur in Larry Cohen. Subject of the recent Shudder doc King Cohen, he’s often summarily inserted under the heading “cult director” — true enough, but it doesn’t come close to encapsulating his long, weird career and singular visions. Film School Rejects has a “Larry Cohen starter kit”. Will Harris’ oral history of Q: The Winged Serpent for The Dissolve remains a hilariously insightful tribute.
  • Enigmatic, fiercely beloved pop chameleon Scott Walker died at 76.  Many of his incarnations are intertwined with cinema, from the films he scored (Carax’s Pola X, notably, and Vox Lux just last year among them) to the ones he programmed as part of the Meltdown Festival.
  • Hollywood Reporter: “John Carl Buechler, whose Hollywood horror makeup and special effects made movies like Hatchet, Deep Freeze and the Michael Moriarty-starrer Troll into classic frightfests, has died. He was 66.”
  • Pioneering performance artist, avant-garde filmmaker, and general creative force Carolee Schneeman passed on at 79. Maggie Nelson’s piece in The New Yorker, on Schneeman’s “re-enchantment,” is astute and affecting: “Carolee’s long-standing devotion to pleasure and atrocity, ecstasy and rage, protest and preservation has provided and will continue to provide a lavish example of what it might mean to meditate on these two crucial questions in the course of a life.”

 

 

 

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Emma Roberts in Nerve
CommentaryFilm

Nerve, Ingrid Goes West, and All These Goddamn Phones

by rick
written by rick

It’s a platitude to say that emerging technologies inform our fiction. How couldn’t they? The raw material of everyday experience – our buildings, schools, livelihoods, family structures, routines, modes of communication – has always weaseled its way into cultural production, realist or speculative. The very ways we capture and represent our experience shift with each new development, and so do the content and form of the stories we tell and consume. It will surprise no one reading this on a phone that phones themselves are having something of an inevitable moment. 2016’s millennial action narrative Nerve and last year’s prickly Ingrid Goes West indicate some of the reasons why.

Triple image on phones in Lois Weber's SuspenseThe emphasis, in itself, is nothing new. High art or low, schlock or masterpiece, we’ve been fed a steady cinematic diet of people on the phone. (Lois Weber’s tri-furcated Suspense (1913) generates most of its, well, suspense from a woman on the phone and a threatening man at the door. We will see this more than a few times in the following 105 years.)

The ubiquity of various telecom devices – and their resulting paranoias, alienations, or possibilities for escape/subterfuge – is a sci-fi trope, of course; Star Wars or Trek or Blade Runner or 2001, the pervasive screens of Videodrome, Jack Palance‘s uncomfortably close videographic mouth in Cyborg 2, the comically large phone deployed by a comically large Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Kamikaze ’89. Hand-held space-age devices, glimmering screens that allow for proto-FaceTime interactions, telepathic James Woods and Debbie Harry on phones in Videodromecommunication, AI … these are all familiar background elements, the sometimes literal wallpaper of the past’s dreams of the future, which, as Nick Pinkerton wrote about Kamikaze, “tells us more about the moment it was made than the future it imagines.”

In less speculative contexts, the devices themselves are enlisted for symbolic reasons, giving us a sense of the characters and their relations – Gordon Gecko’s monstrosity in Wall Street, for instance, is funny now, but it’s clearly meant to give a sense of who he is, how his identity is constructed and how he functions in the narrative world we’re encountering.

Michael Douglas' ridiculously big phone in Wall StreetNerve and Ingrid Goes West mark a fairly radical shift from that construction, though. In Wall Street, the phone is an accoutrement, a capitalist signifier of Gecko’s own power and ubiquity, and those of people like him. In these newer films, the relation is reversed. Our protagonists are creatures of the phone in a way completely alien to a creation like Gecko; the worlds we encounter in Nerve and Ingrid Goes West, the interesting parts of those worlds anyway, largely do not exist outside of the phone. It’s not that the world are fake, as in the “gnostic movies” of 1998/1999 films that Liz has been tackling; it’s that the characters only matter in relation to their technologies, which give shape to the narrative and images.

Emma Roberts considering a dare in NerveNerve tells the story of a sort of Dark Web interactive game, in which users sign on as “players” or “watchers”. The watchers suggest outlandish dares, ranging from Jackass-style cringe-comedy to life-threatening stunts, and the players seek to outdo each other for the anonymous approval of strangers (and also prize money). Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, and cinematographer Michael Simmonds, give Nerve an appropriately videogame pastiche aesthetic, with overlaid text flickering against a garish vision of the world-as-casino; even the diners look like you’re somewhere off-Strip in a YA-friendly Vegas. A once-shy Emma Roberts and a suspiciously casual Dave Franco traverse city streets doing wacky shit, but their real home in the story is somewhere more amorphous and crowd-sourced.

Aubrey Plaza checks her phone in Ingrid Goes WestMeanwhile, Ingrid Goes West takes place mostly in a sun-dappled L.A., where Aubrey Plaza’s protagonist, an Aubrey Plaza type, has fled after an unfortunate stint in the mental hospital. She, too, is more an accessory to her phone than the other way around. Consistently refusing to realize that, as David Ehrlich puts it, “No one is as happy as they seem on Instagram, as depressed as they seem on Twitter, or as insufferable as they seem on Facebook,” Plaza’s character constructs her identity through the always-almost obtainable desires of social media. The film’s title, which doubles as her username, hints at a journey of self-discovery and conquest, but in practice it amounts to stalking an Instagram celebrity and remaking herself in that digital image. (Think The King of Comedy by way of The Bling Ring.) Ingrid’s madness is indistinguishable from the technologies that inform it, and the formal trappings that director Matt Spicer rolls out – voiceovers filled with hashtags and awkwardly enunciated emoji descriptions, animated hearts popping out of the image – make sure that no one can fail to notice.

The resolution of these narratives is less interesting than the very fact that they exist. (For the record, Nerve cheats a bit, veering sharply into well-trod conspiratorial vagueness and didactic uplift; Ingrid Goes West has the “courage” of its cynical convictions, and ends on a distinctively unpleasant note.) In both films, the technologies have specific relational functions – Roberts takes these dares to prove herself more adventurous than her friends imagine her; Plaza is presented as a vessel hollowed out by her phone’s expectations but ultimately legitimized in her “realness” by the approbation of strangers. Both are forms of social madness.

There’s something distasteful about all of that, particularly in Ingrid, but something undeniably felt. It’s not simply a question of being alone in a crowd, or falling behind in the aspirational rat-races of presentation, or that our attempts to connect can distance us instead; as in Personal Shopper, where the madness and confusion of grief manifests most acutely in a back-and-forth text exchange, identity itself often hinges on these devices in our cinema right now. The paranoia isn’t really about who is on the other end of the line, or if the call is coming from inside the house. The point is that the house is inside the call.

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CommentaryFilm

Suspense shows horror has always been in the borrowing business

by rick
written by rick

One of the fascinating revelations gleaned from the Silent Era is the degree to which there really is nothing new under the sun. As Martin Scorsese told Roger Ebert, “Each film is interlocked with so many other films. You can’t get away. Whatever you do now that you think is new was already done in 1913.” Suspense, co-directed by Lois Weber and her then-husband Philips Smalley and not coincidentally appearing in that same year, is a case in point.

Suspense traffics in tropes that are immediately recognizable for modern audiences — an isolated potential victim, a menacing figure outside the home, possible help from a third character (in this case, the husband) who is some distance away, a clipped phone cable shutting down contact to the outside world.

suspense2

Weber and Smalley might’ve called their film Suspense, but it just as easily could’ve been titled “Horror”, were that word not so associated with monsters and the macabre at the time. Weber herself is a fascinating figure, the leading female filmmaker in early Hollywood and, for a time, its highest paid. A dedicated suffragist who often deployed the camera for political purposes, making controversial, moralistic pictures about capital punishment, drug abuse, and contraception.

In Suspense, nothing is high-minded (though Charlie Keil argues that the film “shows us how the social- patriotic drive to celebrate women as icons of domesticity unravels”). Weber plays the female lead, a mother tending to an infant at home. Her servant walks off the job for reasons left mostly unexplained: her note simply indicates she can not work in “so lonesome a place,” an interesting touch of foreboding to the proceedings.

Meanwhile, her husband is off in the city at his office, and a menacing tramp is lurking about the grounds. Weber’s character, isolated in the empty home, is in danger. Her panicked phone call to the husband ends abruptly as the Tramp cuts the line; the husband, frantic, steals a car and races home to her rescue, even as he’s chased by the police and the car’s owner, who don’t understand the peril and urgency. This is all the stuff of horror movies, right down to the uncomprehending authority figures who are placed in a position, through their ignorance or disbelief or arrogance, of standing in rescue’s way.

Weber and Smalley introduce a number of technical innovations to this familiar tale. Bordwell recounts them. There are menacing close-ups as the Tramp climbs the stairs directly to the stationary camera, which watches his approach with mounting dread rather than following him laterally. There’s an incredible shot — “near-Hitchcockian” — that views the Tramp from above, taking the wife’s POV from an upstairs window as he looks up.

suspense3

Another shot frames him in the corner of the window while she’s on the phone; instead of cutting between them, they occupy the same space, in ways familiar to anyone who ever got a jolt from a jump-scare. Suspense, indeed.

suspense1

And then there are the split-screens. The most famous shows the wife making the call, the husband receiving it, and the Tramp breaking into the house. Bordwell notes that this serves to:

substitute for crosscutting: instead of giving us three shots, we get one, showing the plot advancing along different lines of action. These splintered frames function much like Brian De Palma’s multiple-frame imagery in Sisters, Blow-Out, and other films.

Later, as the stolen car barrels down the road, we catch a glimpse of his pursuers in the side-mirror, once again exploiting POV (in this case, the frantic husband’s) to both call up identification and to rather ingeniously keep the action moving in a way that propels us forward through the narrative and frame, rather breaking it up with cuts between subjects.

suspense-mirror

These formal techniques, now commonplace or even cliche (see the De Palma reference above, for instance), still seem startlingly original for 1913. But the narrative itself was anything but. Bordwell again:

If the plot sounds familiar, it’s probably because you know that one of D. W. Griffith’s most famous films, The Lonely Villa (1909) tells the same basic tale.There are still earlier versions, including one, The Physician of the Castle (Le Médécin du chateau, 1908), which may have inspired Griffith. The ultimate source seems to be a 1902 play by André de Lord, Au téléphone.

From cinema’s beginnings, working and reworkings of narrative are more the rule than the exception. Perhaps that’s even more true for genre pieces like Suspense and the horror / thriller / action entries to follow over the next century.

In a recent piece titled “America has a horror movie problem”, Greg Cwik bemoans what he perceives as a lack of originality in the current crop of genre offerings. He makes several valid points — and briefly goes to bat for the often and unfairly derided Unfriended, my favorite found-footage-inspired movie in a long while and a fun treatment of that same split-screen technique, made recognizable for a new generation — but there’s a still a sense throughout the piece that the trend he assails dates back a full 100 years.

unfriended

The well-received Don’t Breathe is, Cwik writes, “by no means bad, and has certain admirable qualities … but we’ve seen — and heard — this before.” Indeed we have. But I’m not convinced this is a negative, or even avoidable. The re-routeing and re-consideration of genre tropes are acts that lie at the heart of these kinds of creations; I’m not even sure they’re avoidable, without ceasing to be genre pictures.

In fairness, Cwik raises up two films — The Witch (which I’ve seen) and The Love Witch (which I haven’t) — as exceptions. Rather than simple retreads of formal and narrative tropes, pastiche and homage trafficking in things audiences have been mercilessly trained to recognize and appreciate in and of themselves, each of these films “uses its influences to say something. That’s what homage should do.”

Fair enough, but a look at something like Suspense also indicates that formal innovation and narrative re-purposing go hand in hand. Weber didn’t set out to tell a new story, but rather to use the camera to tell an old story in a way that felt new.
Cwik could, and I assume would, respond that this is the point: the films he feels fall short do so for precisely this reason, their failure to feel new.

That’s subjective, of course, but it’s a familiar enough sense. But even in 1913, filmmakers were poaching stories from a decade prior for their treatments. In the case of Suspense, there were layers still to uncover. It seems likely this will always be the case.

You can watch Suspense below on YouTube:

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