ADFF 2014 Articles (or, I really should write things here rather than just linking to the ADFF site, but....)

I was asked once again to contribute to the website for the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (taking place October 23 to November 1), and this year wrote four articles discussing five films.

Margaret Brown, one of my favourite filmmakers (and my buddy since her beautiful debut Be Here to Love Me screened at TIFF a million years ago) has her utterly brilliant documentary The Great Invisible at ADFF. The film also opens in NYC and LA this Friday -- you should see it if you can. My ADFF review here may give you some arguments why. (Like how I did that?!) Or, if I can't persuade you, here's the trailer.

I also contributed articles on:
- Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes, a film that joins Margaret's in being, in essence, about the American soul and which was my top pick at TIFF this year;
- Theeb, the first ever "Bedouin Western" and another film that also really dazzled me at TIFF;
- and the aesthetic choices fueling two disparate documentaries, The Wanted 18 and Iraqi Odyssey. The former uses stop-motion animation (of cows, no less) and the latter 3D.

It's always a pleasure to write for ADFF as their programming team tends to select many of my top picks that I've seen at Hot Docs or TIFF and they really let me write whatever I want in my reviews of the films; to whit, my review of The Great Invisible has pretty pointed things to say about the oil industry and did I mention that the festival is in Abu Dhabi...? Anyhow, if you are interested in my latest published musings on films, the links above will take you there.

Jim Jarmusch and the End of the World (article for ADFF site)

Jarmusch's ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE was one of my two favourite films at this year's TIFF. I could sit down and write an entire book on it (if I had the time, clearly) but for now I've at least penned a small review article for the Abu Dhabi festival site, if you are interested. And see the film whenever and wherever you can: it's bloody great.

Journal Article Published: Spectacular Paris

Hello loyal readers (reader?)! This is becoming (so sadly), the only thing I post on this blog, but I wanted to mention that a journal article loooong in fruition* has recently seen the publication light of day.

(*Especially so, if you consider that it grew out of a paper I wrote for a graduate architecture seminar in 2003.)

The article is ponderously titled "Spectacular Paris: Representations of Nostalgia and Desire," and it appears in the journal Paroles Gelées (vol. 26 no. 1), available online here. It's kind of a favourite piece of mine: a mobilization of theories including Guy Debord's work in Society of the Spectacle to interrogate the (near)coincident opening of the Paris Las Vegas resort and casino and the release of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie, all in short succession around the turn of the millennium. Lots of meaty discussion of illusion, false vacations and, naturally, the spectacle. Both films discussed play a big role in chapter 5 of my diss, so it's nice to see some of my ongoing analysis in this vein see the light of day. Sort of a preview of things to come. Soon.

[Image from Moulin Rouge, dir Baz Luhrmann, 2001]

Overdue Mention...

Back in the summer, a chapter of mine - first ever to be published - finally saw the light of day after a many-year wait and valiant efforts by the editors to see the project to completion. The anthology is called Moving Pictures/Stopping Places: Hotels and Motels on Film, and was published in July of last year by Lexington Books.


My chapter, written concurrently with the formative stages of my dissertation work, is ponderously titled "Just an Anonymous Room: Cinematic Hotels and Motels as Mnemonic Purgatories." (Honestly... what was I thinking?) The approach is reflective of my (then less-developed) fascination with the intersection of space/spatialization and narrative in filmmaking, analyzing such spaces as "paradigmatic zones of transit and homelessness." I look at Leaving Las Vegas, Memento, The Business of Strangers, Tape, Century Hotel, Chelsea Walls, The Tesseract, Dirty Pretty Things and 2046 and deconstruct the functions of the hotel/motel space in support of the narratives' creation of purgatorial spaces.

Mercifully, I think the chapter held up over the years and the anthology overall contains some great, vigorous analytical writing.

The book is available on Amazon and other online sellers, and hopefully at many local and campus libraries.

City Symphony: Joris Ivens's Rain

In my dissertation's introductory chapter, I devote some space to discussing the historical backdrop of city symphonies, those glorious early avant-garde works of cinematic documentation and manipulation that forever tied city and cinema together in our imagination. The best-known among them include Manhatta (Strand, 1921), Twenty-Four Dollar Island (Flaherty, 1926), Berlin, Symphony of a City (Ruttmann, 1927), Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929) and Berlin - Alexanderplatz (Jutzi, 1931), all of which are mainstays of film studies coursework, variably discussed in classes on European, documentary or avant-garde cinema. The term city symphony, borrowed from the subtitle of Walter Ruttman’s abovementioned film about Berlin, has been “applied to numerous films within which practices of visual kinaesthesia constructed a 'symphony' based on the diurnal cycle of life in the modern metropolis, while simultaneously infusing avant-gardist perspectives with a historically and politically cognizant form of social criticism.” (Keith Beattie, see here.) Visual strategies are developed to capture both the image of the modern-era city, and the rhythm and changing phenomena that define it.

Recently, I watched one of the slighter "symphonies" for the first time, Joris Ivens's Rain (1929). In a brisk twelve minutes, the short film captures the scene in Amsterdam during some inclement weather, producing "a poetic meditation on the transformation of a city by rain." (Internet Archive).

You can download the film from the (truly amazing resource that is the) Internet Archive here. (Downloading is better than streaming, fyi, but the quality is admittedly somewhat wanting in either case.)

Ivens’s film adds a weather-related overlay to several of the usual city symphony tropes: a fascination with the changing spaces of the city, crowds of people, public transit (trolleys being the primary mode of the era), the structures that define the landscape and the unusual ways in which the eye may catch them at play. Oblique or ingenious compositions are employed, silently establishing the key difference between the cinematic view of urban life and that available to the citizen on the street: Rain, like the other city symphonies listed, seeks to rise above, peep at from below, run beside, dissect and even re-mix the visual components of early twentieth-century city scenes to capture their kaleidoscopic vigour and frequent social ironies in startling new ways.


In the image above, Ivens films the raindrops on the surface of the canals as the downpour – which arrives a few minutes into the film, after the city scene is established – grows in intensity. The shot is followed by a sequence of images of pedestrians in a square who are, almost to a soggy one, covered with black umbrellas.


The effect is a visual echo, underscoring the manners in which the urban masses are (well?) equipped to respond to their environment. There is something faintly cosmopolitan, one feels, about the crowd's readiness. City life in 1929 is dynamic but orderly.

In the diss, I make the argument that sound film and the dominance of narrative cinema over the avant-gardist project led to a concentration of urban representations in narrative filmmaking and its familiar genres. While there are always exceptions to be found (particularly in the realm of documentary and, perhaps, increasingly so), the city symphony may be considered a form largely confined to the 1920s (predominantly in Europe) through 1940s and early 50s (more so in the United States and New York in particular). I am hoping to organize a screening programme of some sort to return to these earliest films about the city, to facilitate discussion of the optical and cinematic languages that inform more contemporary city films. How, for instance, might one compare the rain-soaked crowds in Rain with those in the polyglot marketplace of Blade Runner, with their futuristic illuminated umbrellas? What characterizes the city spaces of (a vaguely identified) Shanghai (which actually also comprised images of London, Hong Kong and Dubai) in Code 46 versus those of Man With a Movie Camera or Berlin, Symphony of a City? (My preliminary hunch on this latter question is that the sense of an excessively well-maintained master plan is shared among the films while Code 46 is unique more so for what I elsewhere term “the stamp of corporation” than for the visible advancement of its technology.)

In any event, this is primarily a reminder for any who might be interested in the Internet Archive’s amazing depth as a research treasure trove for mid-afternoon curiosity excursions such as this one. Many of the classic city films mentioned above are available there.

One final aside: Rain is a silent film to which – in the version I watched – a grating soundtrack has been added. I’d recommend watching with the sound off or, if you are amenable to a little re-mixing of one’s own, adding a soundtrack. On a first pass, I went with, in order, DeVotchKa’s “The Winner Is” (from the Little Miss Sunshine soundtrack), a brief interlude in the form of Eels’ “Theme for a Pretty Girl that Makes You Believe God Exists” and Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight.” The effect was somewhat more downtempo than the symphonic/rhythmic emphasis discussed above, but it was gorgeous. My second attempt was even more successful: a perennial favourite, Saint-Saëns’s “Aquarium” from Le Carnaval des Animaux, followed by Carly Commando’s “Everyday” and Mark Mothersbaugh’s “Sparkplug Minuet” (from the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack). It pretty much edited itself.

Man on Wire ... coming soon

This is cheating. I am a dirty, despicable, cheater of a blogger... This is not the post on the documentary Man on Wire -- about tightrope walking urban interventionist Philippe Petit -- that I have been meaning to write for a few weeks. Rather, this is a placeholder... a slight glimmer of hope that this humble blog is not entirely dead in the water.

The film was fantastic. The feat that inspired it even more so. I will write about them soon.

Reasons I Wish I Was Teaching...

... an undergraduate class on Ideological Hollywood:

(It's only one reason, actually...)

Drillbit Taylor.

It amazes me that this film was released. (Why did I go see it, you ask? I was both desperate for something fluffily non-dissertation-related and wrongly sympathetic to the plight of poor, charming Owen Wilson. I figured that if his movie tanks, he might try to do himself injury again. Little did I realize that this movie has to have been why he tried to do himself injury in the first place.)

Drillbit Taylor...
... glorifies high-school violence and resolution of said violence through front-yard ultimate-fighting showdowns in which the morally just will no doubt prevail.
... makes a mockery of a very really problem of security in America's schools.
... allegorizes (in the least subtle way imaginable) a lovely, humble, nature-loving and fundamentally sweet American soldiery that is unwilling to commit or witness any violence whatsoever... until someone it loves gets hurt. Then it (Drillbit, natch) will destroy you with lethal force and the commendations of all, all while blithely laughing off the loss of a little finger. (In non-allegorical terms here, we are no doubt reckoning with the equation that reasonable losses are to be expected if peace and security are to be ensured.)

Have you seen this movie? Probably not. It's a disaster. Badly made, ideologically Frankensteinian and offensive to: teenagers, adults, twins, rappers, the homeless, Canadians, Americans, Asians (I could go on at length about the sub-plot regarding how the homicidal high-school bully is portrayed as a grossly affluent "emancipated minor" whose indifferent parents have shipped him to LA from Hong Kong), Owen Wilson, you, me and Dupree.

The Monkey on Your Back Is the Latest Trend

So, since last posting, my quest for floors has been totally unsuccessful, I've had exactly one meltdown, exactly one dose of bad news about my dissertation (just when you think the deadlines can't get any tighter, someone finds a way to insist on getting the finished product sooner), gone to San Francisco, got caught in the rain, watched groceries roll down a steep, steep San Francisco hill, been hurt (no joke) attempting to do this class with my sister, said goodbye to a beloved coworker and thought of two dozen more ways to make myself feel badly about my doctoral qualifications.

I did, however, get some writing done today, and it is not yet midnight.

And, rather than waste time on the emptily yet overly emotional spectacle that is the Superbowl, I opted instead to finally go see the almost overly emotional mini-spectacle that is Juno. Not only did it play at TIFF, where I am happily employed (well, most of the time... more on that later), but it seems everyone on the planet has seen it. Parents of a three month old have seen it. My parents have each seen it... not even jointly. The person sitting beside you as you read this, or someone who will sit beside you a little later... they'll have seen it. So I felt immensely derelict in my film-going duties for having managed to miss (NOT avoid, just miss) it thus far. And, by now, I feared the hype. I feared the inevitable disappointment that befalls me when all the world has seen and loved something and convinced me that I have missed the veritable second coming of entertainment itself. I typically despise the thing that everyone else adores. (Case in point: that Sarah Silverman anniversary video for Jimmy Kimmel... wow that was dull.)

So I was so pleased to love Juno, to love it enough, in fact, to giggle and then get all weepy eyed and shelve all analytical distance. Ok, in truth, I've spent quite a bit of time since the film -- and even a bit during -- muddling over how insufficient traditional auteur theory is when confronted with a film such as Juno that is so clearly signed by its mercilessly clever screenwriter (the improbably but delightfully named Diablo Cody) and by the defiantly excellent performance of Ellen Page as much as by the decisions of skilled director Jason Reitman and his wiz of an editor, Dana Glauberman. But I struggled to keep it in check (I still am as I write this) since going to see it was supposed to be a nice cathartic break from all things film-theoristy.

And, given the abovementioned tears, it was clearly cathartic. Of course, I've been getting weepy-eyed a great deal lately. I may have welled up at one of the trailers that preceded the film. I may have sobbed my way through the final five minutes of Rescue Dawn, Werner Hertzog's truly wonderful remake of his 1997 documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly. The latter might not seem so odd to many who've seen it -- it takes a fantastically simple narrative device and tells an incredibly lasting tale of human perseverance and is given heft by a ludicrously good and criminally overlooked performance by Christian Bale -- but I watched it on a plane, on one of those little choose-your-own adventure type screens that are about two inches by five inches in size. It was the kind of screen that ought to flatten landscapes, deflate epics and belittle (sorry for my literalism) performances, no matter how strong. But Rescue Dawn still managed to be excellent, and not just as a way to kill time between YYZ and SFO. Its politics seem somewhat transparent and, to me anyway, also completely appealing: why retell Dieter Dengler's story now, in a trenchant, viewer-ensnaring narrative form, if not to hammer in the point in every screening, everywhere, that troops, abandoned in North Vietnam then or in the Middle East now need to come home?


So, yes, I have been having some heightened emotional responses to film lately, but the monkey on my back that answers to the name of diss is getting both fatter and meaner and that probably has a lot to do with it. (It hurts to walk on bare concrete... all the more so with monkeys on ones' backs.) And, truthfully, I wouldn't be in this racket in the first place if I didn't prize the power of films to unlock and unleash emotions that are inconvenient, often unpredictable, even unwieldy.

In other news, I've been meaning to post about the dream I had in which I was hanging out with Paul Virilio, except it was Virilio as embodied by some younger dude who may have been Viggo Mortensen. Virilio, Viggo... I guess I do not need to go too far to figure that one out. We were talking about fear and his (Virilio's, not Viggo's) theory of dromology. (How much would I enjoy it if Viggo had his own theory of dromology?) It made perfect sense at the time and I woke up laughing, which is a plus.

Next week, my dream about my fireside chat with Baudrillard as embodied by Michael Cera.

Published: Article on Continental, un film sans fusil

A speedy update to announce that a brief article of mine has been published in Cinema Scope's Winter 2008 Issue #33. Unfortunately the text isn't available online, but you can check out a copy of the magazine at your local bookstore or Film Reference Library.

Here's the article's intro:

"Cinema is as much about disappearance as it is about presence; after all, “persistence of vision”—the mind’s subconscious determination to bridge the image that has just vanished to the one that is arriving—is as much about that which has departed as that which remains. On a broader scale, Stéphane Lafleur’s Continental, un film sans fusil is inspired by that process, by how we bridge the gap that comes after loss. Its loosely knotted narrative is initiated by a single, specific and yet baffling disappearance: a businessman who dozes off on public transit wakes to find himself alone on the bus on a deserted roadside. He steps off, peers into the near-absolute darkness of the adjacent woods, then walks—purposefully? timidly?—into the trees and is gone.

"While the man’s vanishing is the ostensible glue between Continental’s four protagonists, it is merely the analogue of their deeper commonalities: loss, disappearance and emptiness. It is a film of myriad absences, proceeding from the second half of its title (“a film without guns”). Watching Continental is like spying on the Quebecois cousins of the grey-faced, typically despondent protagonists of Swedish iconoclast Roy Andersson’s films. Like Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (played TIFF 2007), Continental focuses upon modern dissociation and disconnect."

I go on to explore the film in relation to my theorization of networked narratives. It was a short article, but one that I really enjoyed writing, in part because the film itself is so lovely. (It was declared one of Canada's Top Ten by TIFFG for 2007.)

You should check it out.

Freaking Out Over Freakonomics (and National Treasure Mini-Review)

I finally read the Freakonomics Quorum on "How We Should Be Thinking About Urbanization."

As others have noted, there's a strange aspect to the thinkers/writers represented... some of their points are completely contradictory, yet still manage to sit side-by-side with head-scratching plausibility. Does this mean that the near-term future of cities is really beyond the predictions of even the savviest thinkers in the realms of urban studies? Are we reduced from projects of reasoned argument/prediction to something of a deleterious crap shoot? I'd prefer to hope not, but when one of the most persuasive statements in the batch is the following -- from a celebrated urban planner no less -- it is worrisome:

"No one knows what the next chapter of urban history will bring, but if there is any lesson to draw from what has happened to date, it is that abstract ideas about the proper form of settlement, whether urban or rural or hybrids we can’t yet imagine, tend to lag far behind the reality on the ground." - Robert Bruegmann, professor of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago

I guess in the end it is here that I like to imagine film serves its social and cultural purpose... When city films are born from a perspective other than that of theory, planning or realism-driven reaction to the state of present cities, but, rather from that of imagining future ones, the cinema may in fact be seen as going where thought with a capital T cannot. I read the varied perspectives in the Quorum, which run, in the words of moderator Stephen J. Dubner, from the apocalyptic to the appreciative, and cannot help but think of the impossible contrasts of Invisible Cities, of that desire to catalog possible futures that can never all sit side-by-each in the unspooling of reality. In Calvino's work, as in the more formidable of the films featured in my study, at least we have a sprawling effort to envision possibilities, diversely wonderful and innumerably horrible. That is the cinema that I love.

In other news, National Treasure: Book of Secrets was precisely what I should have expected: nerve-wracking, cliffhanger after cliffhanger, with occasional dabs of simply lamentable dialogue that has to have been accidentally captured audio of some of the craft-services team making fun of the action: "It's a dead end, we HAVE to go back." Really? Truly? Moments of (I thought) symbolically anti-right-wing plot twists failed to materialize (dumb Kate... it's a Disney movie) and in the end the bad guy (a war profiteer, doncha know) still manages to be redeemed while the President of the USA reveals himself to be a lovable scamp who is game to throw open the history of the White House to some playful historiographic hijinks that will, in the third installment in the franchise, no doubt involve Nicholas Cage and crew unstitching the museum-housed antique petticoats of some former Washington mistress to tease yet another tawdry but lucrative secret out of the American past. There are so many ways in which a film like this could be -- dare I say it? -- smarter, but when kick-ass action sequences and special effects fill seats, well, you know, why bother? Cue the closing sequence fireworks over the compromised silhouette of Mount Rushmore, pass me my copy of The Society of the Spectacle and call it a night, shall we?

Blog without beginning, dissertation without end?

Today is about chapter three:

"Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form." – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities: 76.

A chapter about films that many have discussed, but putting them in an urban context. More than that, actually: arguing that the urban context is the reason for the films' proliferation. Titles: Last Night, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, Amores Perros, Songs from the Second Floor, Crash, Breaking and Entering, This Beautiful City... and on and on.

"Entangling the lives of their multiple characters and exposing the surprising nature of those connections, these networked narrative films – and in particular the many that ultimately do propose city/narrative centers amid car crashes – create a new center, if often one coded by fatality and trauma, around the incident that causes lives to intersect." -- from my dissertation, draft date January 6, 2008. All rights protected.

Heavy stuff. Later, I will go and see National Treasure: Book of Secrets with my mom.