(no subject)

[proximoception]

2. Shoot the Piano Player
3. A Zed and Two Noughts

I'd forgotten almost everything about the first one - everything except there was a gunfight in the snow. Made me think of the Kierkegaard comment about walking away from any relationship the second you fall in love. It also had me thinking of Calvino's lightness essay, as did the fact I'd forgotten so much of it. He turned the knob up on the French bluffness of his actors to make everything seem okay, until even death in the snow is strangely light. Playing drama like comedy, that was big in the early New Wave films, now I think about it, I guess as an antidote to '50s segregation of seriousness and escapism or perhaps some rediscovery of the otherworldliness of cinema. The effect is strange now - I wonder how it was taken back then? I could watch any Truffaut movie any number of times but doubt this one's aged very well, aside from some of its surface entertainments - some of the things he's trying here he does better at the other end of the '60s in Mississippi Mermaid.

The Greenaway was baffling, not in what it was trying to do but that anyone would try to do it. I think in the end I may only like Belly of an Architect, of his, watchable as some of the others have been. Especially annoying was the dialogue, which relentlessly treated itself as clever and witty despite producing no laughter or admiration. Perhaps he was attempting light too but comparatively sucking at it? He seemed to mean a lot to people in the late '80s, early '90s, and did let you see many things you didn't elsewhere in movies. Maybe that's become cheapened by how much of everything we see all the time now. I'm not saying he's a narcissist, or even diagnosably OCD, but it feels like he gets something out of making these movies that's not very closely related to what a viewer does. I got his point - all there is for us here in the end is to flee from or study our own decay, and both enterprises finally fail because our decay doesn't. I just don't really care, as presented.

Maybe in both cases the filmmakers leave off from talking to audiences and just talk to their obsessions and I merely happen to share all of Truffaut's, very few of Greenaway's.

Comments

[dominika-kretek.livejournal.com]

It'd be hard for me to explain what A Zed and Two Noughts means to me, but it's still and probably always will be one of my "life films." That is, one of the films that has nourished and shaped me. Greenaway's plenitude, at his best, is so comforting and thrilling that I can put aside his weird psychological undercurrents (like his misogyny).

A means of classifying Greenaway films: the good ones have the compelling women characters: Georgina, de Milo, the Cissys, Nagiko. Although I suppose we have to make an exception for Prospero's Books.

But: his films don't work on the level of character or psychology. Thus the films are emotionally remote in a certain way. There's no way to understand why Alba gives in to Van Meegeren, for example, or why Cissy 2 and especially Cissy 3 follow Cissy 1's example, or why Nagiko rejects Jerome at the crucial moment. The larger structure, not to say narrative structure, demands it. That's all. It's much more like time-lapse painting than it is your typical narrative form. Or that's how I experience it.

Really, it comes down to that there's a part of my brain that only Greenaway can tickle: visual beauty, weird science, wry braininess, iconic characters, whirling systems astronomical in scope. Maybe not only Greenaway. I get similar things out of Koyaanisqatsi, Synecdoche, New York, Inland Empire, Brakhage, Matthew Barney, even Celestial Clockwork. Ben Marcus at his best does it too. Borges, I guess, is the literary exemplar. Anne Carson. Cloud Atlas. Laurie Anderson's United States. Einstein on the Beach. The Codex Serafinianus. &c.

Huh. The whirling system aesthetic. It's a thing, isn't it? It's not just about scope, although scope is necessary. It's about closing the loop, forging the ring, and being able to grasp all the parts in motion. A lot of long narratives feel like tapestries read from left to right, ox-bow lakes from the stream of life, emerging and then returning, no matter how comprehensive they may be. And others are full systems, exquisitely structured, but static. It's not bad, only different. But there's this other thing that I love but can't explain. The motion of stars.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'm not an artist so I have a poor grasp of what escapes direct restatement. I do want the ramshackle cosmos crammed into my favorite things, but falling into place around people I deeply recognize. Watts et al. provide that center in Mulholland Drive, Dennehy in Belly.

Humanity of the author can center things, too, even when characters are left sketchy: I actually appreciated 8 1/2 Women for the same reason I appreciated Vineland - the guys were being rather idiotic but for once the masks were off, something human was happening. Not enough to make me revisit either, but a relief to see. Borges and Carson are both voices I love, and I wonder how well I'd tolerate their works if they weren't - not that they could have made those works without being thus-voiced people.

I think I best like the kind of work that seems like it emerges, returns, reemerges in lakes, but when you look behind you as you move the moving stars shine up from them. Painting and story reach that plenitude beyond either only when wonderful as both story and painting, for me. This is unhelpfully exacting but it's kind of my drug, and you know when your drug's been diluted.

[dominika-kretek.livejournal.com]

I really like de Milo as a character, but yeah, that's not what matters in the film, at least moment to moment. It's more like mythology or the Lives of the Saints or something. Or a philosophical treatise.

One thing I'm remembering now: Greenaway has a shot at something more emotionally immediate, more human, but he kind of fumbles it away. The starting point of the movie is the deaths of the wives, and the motivation Oscar's and Oswald's grief. It's about obsessional grief, trying to master or understand death, and failing, the heartbreak of that. But when Alba says so, accusing them of "obsessional grief," it sounds completely out of left field. He does it intentionally, but I don't see why that opportunity has to be passed up. Synecdoche manages it. Maybe he's just not into it. Or maybe it's a principled disavowal of identification.

Maybe I just love those extra-slow Greenaway tracking shots.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Greenaway is hit or miss, for me, but the hits are striking. I think dominika_kretek is right (DK, I think you're right) that the big turns are weirdly unmotivated. But even more weirdly, there are aspects of experience and psychology that he gets right, that almost no-one else looks at.

I was sitting at a party with a friend who was about to get divorced, about to start the process. She said she'd been so stressed, recently, she started noticing herself revert into a habit she'd had as a kid, taking a person's spoken sentence and reorganizing all the words in it alphabetically. She knew it was a stress response.

When I was selling the house, I had a quitclaim deed in hand, but it seemed for a minute that the buyers would want a redo of it, something more formal, which would have meant contacting my parents. Then they retracted. For the afternoon that this was in play, I was extremely agitated. I found myself in a fog - like other people might hear a song, I guess - of tracts of The Draughtman's Contract. All that cold precision, all that, "I'm merely telling you what you agreed to. It's just a list." And the wife screaming, as the lead tore her clothes. And the sounds of the cloth ripping.

There are aspects of that movie that map very tightly to sections of my worst experiences. Both of what they were like on the outside - rules, it's always rules, that's why you get to ignore the person screaming, because this is all just what the rules say to do - and on the inside, where in my own mind I retreated to these fancifully detailed systems of ordering.

One of the leitmotifs in his movies is that someone is screaming for help and no-one comes, or it's too late b/c the whole "narrative" is aftermath anyway (The Falls). When it doesn't relate to one's own experience, this can seem like cheap grasping after an excuse to make a movie. When it does, the effect is kind of hypnotic. Shocker, because in the aftermath, hypnotized is often kind of how one feels. Not to be cute, but, in the aftermath, sometimes what you have is exactly "narrative." Not a story. A list.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen The Falls or Contract, unfortunately. In the ones I have seen he's not getting obsessive ordering-reordering right so much as exhibiting it so extensively it's hard to miss. Which I guess can also be helpful? At a lab party thrown by Julie's new supervisors, a married couple, the wife one asked the step-counters to raise their hands. Three people did. She then said the rest of us wouldn't even know what she was talking about, which was true in my case. It's a kind of person to be, and the rest of us simply don't know. They were all overjoyed to be talking about it at last, discussed their methods and quirks for quite a while.

[dominika-kretek.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Mid-career Greenaway definitely made me feel less alone, probably because of the strange psychological tactics that aren't shown elsewhere. Maybe ZOO is my favorite because it's about the derangement of pain that highlights the deranged absurdity of the universe. "Is a zebra a black horse with white stripes, or a white horse with black stripes? It's a stupid question, but it seems that it should have an answer. And it doesn't have an answer. What kind of a stupid, heartless universe do we live in, anyway?" &c. Something I'm familiar with. I think.