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Scratch

Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse demonstrates, again, that Hooper is an intelligent filmmaker who knows how to play with convention and precedent (e.g., the eroticized suspense that turns into sibling comedy in the film's opening riff on Psycho), how to layer moods (e.g., the weirdness of Sylvia Miles as fortune teller while Elizabeth Berridge is trying to figure out what the proper response is as her stoned friends laugh their heads off in the background), and how to produce a phantasmagoria of Americana carnivalesque (double meanings intended). He's not a 'deep' artist except insofar as he is really gifted at channeling aspects of a zeitgeist. * Stumbled upon Kenneth Patchen Reads His Poetry with the Chamber Jazz Sextet (1957) - link here - which captivated me. On one hand, it appears almost quaintly passé, the kind of art jazz fusion mess that was already ripe for parody in Donen's Funny Face (which came out in '57 as well). On the other hand, its moment-to-moment progression is lively, full of charm, the timbre of Patchen's voice has a really pleasant authority. The result, over a half-century later, feels a bit like a half-forgotten mid-century children's cartoon soundtrack repurposed back into Art.

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Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

I’ve seen a few pieces of junk and a few mediocrities this month, but somehow I’ve managed to fit in some really interesting viewing into a schedule that doesn’t always allow for much of that. Think of this as a ‘column,’ for my own edification if no one elses, where I can talk about some things that inspire or please or enrich me - largely if not exclusively from cinema and video, and probably more in terms of some of what I like and love rather than a summary or synopsis of all I’ve seen. It’s not a consumption journal, more like a digestion aid. The French have Positif. My cine-zine, here, can be Digestif.

Jon Jost’s Frameup (1993) is further evidence that he’s one of the great geographical filmmakers of the age, not just in his formidable sense for landscapes, flora, or altitudes, but also for his sense of human rootedness. Movies like Sure Fire and The Bed You Sleep In (this era in Jost’s filmography is roughly my favorite) have a keen sense of locale. That’s expressed also through the characters, who are always granted the freedom to be nowhere and nothing: they are significant despite, maybe because, they are rarely eloquent or imaginative. Jost is mapping them and us, all of us, in a sharp sketch of a particular time and place’s cosmos. In this case, the Palouse and its thereabouts, where Ricky Lee hails from Walla Walla, Washington and the dry rolling hills and roadside gas stations feel like they’ve been there forever but could blow down in a gust tomorrow. 

And then characters use phrases like “I seen” and “I been,” and they’re reminders of some of my own family in that part of the country, and maybe one of the reasons why I like Jost’s Northwestern United States films is because they seem steeped in a world where other filmmakers are just well-meaning tourists.

There’s some quiet desperation for you in Frameup, which is sad and grand and relentlessly, defiantly, proudly provincial, whose political gestures do not amount to slogans.

Similarly, the political thrust of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal (1982) might have a certain blunt force but it’s refracted by the strategies of genius director Alan Clarke, whose career (like Jost’s) is marked by experimentation and ferocious political probity. Also, like Frameup, Baal features some split screens used to impressive effect, although in the Jost I think the effects are playing with aspects of time, and in the Clarke the impressions are largely building on visual and textural elements.

Plus David Bowie, with thin facial hair and gray teeth, is remarkably well cast here. His insolence and insouciance never bury the sense that he has some kind of drive, and a similarly destructive impulse born from the rot of an unjust world.

The best new film I have seen recently, and maybe the best film of 2018 that I saw, was If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018), which is simultaneously presents a handful of scenes or moments that capture the feeling of romantic optimism as well as anything I’ve seen, that can move seamlessly from domestic comedy to social commentary to stylized melodrama, and that also solves the puzzle of forceful political art by knowing how to arrange the elements so that the things left unspoken, or only barely said, become overwhelming.

And sometimes the unspoken elements can be too pointedly unspoken, or can represent a timidity, but not here. The assured way the material is handled represents another step forward for Jenkins, who is developing as a filmmaker, but not necessarily because he’s getting better so much as he is growing and churning through different kinds of material. I think Medicine for Melancholy and Moonlight are both excellent; I also like his short film for Future States, Remigration, which I recommend if you haven’t seen it.

The colors in If Beale Street Could Talk are quite beautiful, too, and that reminds me that one of the unexpected pleasures of two Charles B. Pierce films I watched recently was the color work. I’d seen The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) before, but only on a pan-and-scan VHS, and I’d never seen The Evictors (1979) until recently. The docudrama structure of the former and the true crime, magazine-flashback sensationalism of the latter are intriguing in their own right, but the subtle ways the production design popped have stuck with me. The shadows of fan blades in the sheriff’s office in Sundown--unremarked upon, “unstylized”--are exactly the sort of touch that mark a film as hopelessly low-budget or as wholeheartedly invested in detail. Either way, it works. The primary colors alongside the dusty tones of earth and police uniform show how much can be missed, when films too bound to attention-grabbing genre markers dictate a limited color palette.

Finally: word is coming in for the new Joanna Hogg film, and I look forward to it, especially as I continue to work (slowly) on a piece on her brilliant film Exhibition (2013), one of my favorites of the past decade. More to follow.