(no subject)

[proximoception]

People were easy. Nobody knew anything about them. If it sounded good they took your word for it. They took Joyce’s word for it.

From "On Writing," an outtake from one of the "Big Two-Hearted River" drafts.

Came into my head while trying to figure out enthusiasm for Anderson's trademark cringe-inducingly longheld false notes in The Master. These pretty much are his style, so I find esteem for him even harder to understand than Homeland love (apparently everyone's upset because season 2 was "terrible" (!)).

I think it boils down to this false syllogism: People are awkward and random, The Master is awkward and random, The Master is people. So an update on Hemingway: if it sounds sufficiently awful they take your word for it.

How you even make a boring movie about Scientology is beyond me though. It's also always instructive how little it matters that a movie is beautifully, ingeniously shot. Or acted: Phoenix, who has never impressed me before, salvages a lot of the first hour.

Holy Motors is at many points extremely awkward too but a) seems to know it, and b) takes pains to amount to something. And maybe most importantly c) is awkward within normal earthly bounds of awkwardness. Maybe that explains appreciation of Anderson, that he's so audaciously off-the-charts awkward that you (not you, not me) become afraid this might be some new sort of genius. But that I've written about before, that kind of arrogant artistic terrorism: Bergman is sure of himself and says things I don't understand, Anderson is sure of himself etc., Anderson is Bergman.

Comments

[fingersweep.livejournal.com]

I'm mixed about There Will Be Blood, after the third viewing. There are a few really great scenes in that film -- the scene with the derrick explosion deafening the son is wonderful. I want to think more about the obscurities in the film (usually confusing rather than compelling) and the awkwardness. But Anderson's obscurities are not mine--and perhaps no one's. The film becomes less comprehensible each time I watch it.

Several things I feel sure about: Paul Dano was poorly casted, Daniel Day-Lewis would make a great Squeers or Mr. Jingle, and the Brahms at the end works as a kind of shell game to shift attention from the drunken silence after the murder. Before the blood's even dusted over, you have that brassy fanfare in the violin: it makes no musical or cinematic sense to me.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Be bold but not too stupid.

[fingersweep.livejournal.com]

Herzog makes a comment somewhere about how it's his job to 'articulate other people's dreams' as a film-maker. It was charmingly egotistic (or egotistically charming) in that way of his. I was going to say something about Bergman -- the logic of art's obscurities, rather than obscure logic -- but didn't want to stray any further than I had from the OP.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

The reason I avoid the word "pretentious" is that trying to be important or like those considered excellent isn't the problem. It's the corner cutting or bluffing or smokescreening that some resort to when those goals prove too difficult. Pretentious has become a nasty little shank word, freely misapplied to things challengingly subtle or new or sincere. Whereas the specific means by which people pretent need to have names we all learn.

I'm not an Hour of the Wolf or Inland Empire partisan - I think the most interesting thing about Herzog's remark isn't the sense of election but the knowledge that dreams can in fact be made intelligible. Suggests one way art can fail is to access dream without clarifying it.

[fingersweep.livejournal.com]

I wanted to call the Brahms trick a smokescreen, but it felt more like an appeal (or an 'attack'). Something similar happens at the beginning of Branagh's Magic Flute: the sun comes out, and then the camera pans down to a big flowery field, which (at the end of the overture, which one can scarcely hear over the sounds of cannons firing and soldiers screaming in bright blue suits) will be covered with dead bodies.

It's the kind of criminality that, once you understand what's going on and why, leaves you with a bit of contempt for the criminal. What those tools of persuasion are, and how they're misused -- how you define the misuse of film topoi -- this is really interesting. I know almost nothing about how films are made, but can sometimes pick things out here and there, as I happen to catch them.

I think I agree with you about what Herzog means (here's the clip), but disagree with you about the intelligibility of that Bergman film. Anyway, the film that opened me up to Bergman was Through a Glass Darkly, and then Winter Light. After that I watched Persona and Wild Strawberries again (in 2007 I hated them), and found it strange: how much clearer the films were the second time.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I can't remember whether I felt I understood Hour. Which is reason enough to rewatch it one of these days. Main reason I was bringing it up was to distinguish honorable from dishonorable forms of pretension: failing your vision rather than failing to have one.

How does one hate Wild Strawberries? Hating Persona I can halfway see.

[fingersweep.livejournal.com]

My diary states that I watched Persona in May in the dorm lounge at around 4 AM, immediately after Polanski's Repulsion.

[tdaschel.livejournal.com]

not sure how much The Master is "about" Scientology. does a decent job of mocking up the Hubbard personality as represented in Messiah or Madman? (co.authored by his son). but during the, eh, time period treated, banality was the point. there had been Hubbard's more "exotic" period with the O.T.O. and ripping off Korzybski, but when he returned to earth, he knew he had to present something as harmless - and lucrative - as a Dale Carnegie course. on this level, the film succeeds.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Remember that great movie where we learned how banal you have to suddenly be to adjust your crazy space alien fantasies into something normal-sounding enough to make money? I wouldn't have thought that could ever be captured on film. I'm so glad it was.

[tdaschel.livejournal.com]

i think about this all the time .. cult.making, filmmaking, etc .. as with so.much else it is a crapshoot.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

The connection between the joachim phoenix and philip seymour hoffman characters was interesting. Interesting in that I don't think anyone ever understood what the connection between paul dano and daniel day-lewis was. So The Master knew slightly more what it was about in that regard. Just... not altogether great. Maybe he's learning. No, he probably isn't.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Was even that relationship coherent?