On Christopher Lee

Over at Press Play, I have a brief text essay about and a video tribute to Christopher Lee, who died on June 7 at the age of 93. Here's the opening of the essay:

Christopher Lee was the definitive working actor. His career was long, and he appeared in more films than any major performer in the English-speaking world — over 250. What distinguishes him, though, and should make him a role model for anyone seeking a life on stage or screen, is not that he worked so much but that he worked so well. He took that work seriously as both job and art, even in the lightest or most ridiculous roles, and he gave far better, more committed performances than many, if not most, of his films deserved.

Read and view more at Press Play.

Could It Be ... SATAN?!

Press Play recently posted a new video essay I created on Satan in cinema along with a brief text essay.

Here's the beginning of the text essay, should you need some enticement...

The character of Satan seems far more appealing to filmmakers than the character of God. This may be for reasons of propriety: one should not, perhaps, make too many images of God. But since when has Hollywood cared about anything other than money and stardom? God isn’t any good for either. Omnipotence is just too boring.

There are devils in most films, because most films are melodramas of one sort of another, and no melodrama works very well without some embodiment of evil. But Satan himself (or herself or theirself or anyself — Satan, like every angel, fallen or not, is any gender and every gender) is a less common figure. One of the most powerful Satanic representations in film history wasn’t even technically of Satan: it was Mephistopheles in Murnau’s Faust, still one of the most visually interesting portrayals of satanic power. 

The problem with portraying Satan is that it is difficult to capture the full horror he is supposed to be capable of.

(Continue reading and viewing at Press Play.)

Terry Gilliam: The Triumph of Fantasy

Press Play has now posted my latest video essay, "Terry Gilliam: The Triumph of Fantasy". It also has a short text essay to accompany it. Here's how that one begins:

In a 1988 interview with David Morgan for Sight and Sound, Terry Gilliam proposed that the most common theme of his movies had been fantasy vs. reality, and that, after the not-entirely-happy endings of Time Bandits and Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen offered the happiness previously denied, a happiness made possible by “the triumph of fantasy”.

That triumph is not, though, inherently happy. Gilliam’s occasional happy endings are not so much triumphs of fantasy as they are triumphs of a certain tone. They are the endings that fit the style and subject matter of those particular films. More often than not, his endings are more ambiguous, but fantasy still triumphs. Even poor Sam Lowry in Brazil gets to fly away into permanent delusion. Fantasy is sometimes a torment for Gilliam’s characters, but it is a torment only in that it is haunted by reality, and reality in Gilliam is a land of pain, injustice, and, perhaps worst of all, ordinariness.

Read and view more...

Video Essay: "What Is Composition?"

My latest video essay is now available at Press Play. It's the first in a new series by various hands on cinematic terminology. My term was "composition", and so I made an essay creatively titled, "What Is Composition?"

Snowpiercer: Total Cinema

 

Press Play has now posted my new video essay with a brief accompanying text essay about the great new science fiction action movie political parable satire call to revolution Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon-Ho, a filmmaker I am especially enamored of. (Memories of Murder is easily among my favorite movies of the last 15 years, and back in 2010 I defended Bong's previous film, Mother, from the criticisms of Richard Brody at the New Yorker.)

As a little bit of extra, below the fold here I'll put some thoughts on elements of the remarkable ending of the film...

A Video Essay on Jim Jarmusch: "Dead Men & Ghosts, Limited"

As the silence around here indicates, I've been tremendously busy the past few weeks. One project I managed to complete was a new video essay, this one about Jim Jarmusch's films Dead Man, Ghost Dog, and The Limits of Control. It's now available at Press Play, along with a brief introduction.

Rob Zombie and the Cinema of Cruelty

I have a new video essay and accompanying text essay up at Press Play. This one, in honor of Halloween, is about the work of one of my favorite living directors, Rob Zombie. In it, I relate some writings by Antonin Artaud to some of what it seems to me Zombie is up to in his work.

One thing that struck me as I rewatched all of Zombie's movies over the space of just a couple days to create the essays was how very David Lynchian his last two films have become — Halloween II and The Lords of Salem both remind me of nothing so much as Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

First Fassbinder

Over at Press Play, I have a video essay and accompanying text essay on the first films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the best of which were recently released in the US by Criterion as part of the Eclipse series.

It's a great shame that most of Fassbinder's films are not easily available on DVD in the US anymore. Criterion has done great work bringing some of them to us, though they've also had some go out of print. Many are available for streaming at Hulu Plus, thankfully. I'm holding out a bit of optimistic hope for a companion Eclipse set: Late Fassbinder, which could include Lili Marleen and Querelle. Or maybe for a release of Eight Hours Are Not a Day. Or ... well, a boy can dream...

Watching the Dark: Zero Dark Thirty

Some notes for the above video essay:

1.
My viewing of Zero Dark Thirty and my ideas about it were and are influenced by ideas I first encountered in writings by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Glenn Kenny, Steven Shaviro, and Nicholas Rombes. Their interpretations are not mine, and they should not be blamed for my failures, but I certainly owe them gratitude for whatever insights I have benefited from.

2.
I worked on this video over a period of months, trying simply to gather a few of the motifs and visual patterns in the film (monitors, windows, surfaces, light/dark). It evolved to be something more impressionistic than that, but that was the initial concept.

The Ends of Violence

I have a new video essay and a new text essay up at Press Play looking at Clint Eastwood's movies, called "The Ends of Violence: The Conclusions of Clint Eastwood". The text essay also contains links to two previous video essays I made on Eastwood, "Outlaw: Josey Wales" and "Vigilante Man: Eastwood and Gran Torino".

1975: A Video Essay

Until recently, I hadn't given much thought to how many interesting movies were released in (or around) the year I was born, 1975. The 1970s were a particularly good decade for cinematic innovation, so I expect you could pick just about any year and find similar quality and resonances, but I'm going to continue to pretend that 1975 was especially special. Because for me it was where it all began.

The Mystery of Werner Herzog

Over at Press Play, there's a new video essay by Nelson Carvajal accompanied by a new text essay by me, all about Werner Herzog, under the general title "The Mystery of Werner Herzog".

Painter with a Movie Camera: A Tribute to Tony Scott

I suppose that comparing the late Tony Scott to Dziga Vertov will seem ridiculous to many (most!) people, as will proclaiming Domino a masterwork. So be it. Here's a tribute to Tony Scott in which I do both of those things:

Painter with a Movie Camera: A Tribute to Tony Scott from Matthew Cheney on Vimeo.

And here are the tributes I mention in the video:

Manohla Dargis, "A Director Who Excelled in Excess"
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, "Smearing the Senses: Tony Scott, Action Painter"

A Train Between Worlds: The Darjeeling Limited

I wrote up a draft of what was going to be a blog post about Wes Anderson's 2007 movie The Darjeeling Limited, but then decided it might be fun to turn it into a video essay instead. And so "A Train Between Worlds: The Darjeeling Limited" was born. Because the narration was originally going to be a blog post, the video is a bit text-heavy — it clearly didn't need to be a video per se, but I think it's more enjoyable in that form, especially because I could include various songs from the film's soundtrack (many of which were taken from other movies' soundtracks). For reference, the entire narration is available on the video's Vimeo page, and I'll paste it below the cut here.

The Darjeeling Limited has been one of Anderson's least popular and least critically lauded movies, but up until this year's Moonrise Kingdom, I thought it was his most accomplished and satisfying. I like all his movies a lot, but my taste is weird — where most people seem to find Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox the most satisfying, I'd rank Darjeeling Limited and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou higher, much as I enjoy the others. Later this summer, I'll probably try to create a companion video about The Life Aquatic to explore some of its intricacies.

Meanwhile, a new online film journal has just appeared, Screen Machine, and the first issue includes an excellent essay by Huw Walmsley-Evans that looks at Wes Anderson and the question of realism.

And if you haven't yet seen Moonrise Kingdom, seek it out. Even people whose taste isn't as questionable as mine seem to like it.

Seeing War

I was futzing around trying to create a video essay showing links between Cornel Wilde's 1967 war movie Beach Red and Terrence Malick's Thin Red Line, not really getting anywhere, when I watched Kevin B. Lee's video essay "War Movies for People Who Don't Like War Movies". Most of the video offers his take on two films, Marwencol and La France (films well deserving more attention), but as someone who has seen a lot of war movies, and who would put a few on any list of top movies of all time, I struggled with the opening of his essay, even though he quotes my beloved Francois Truffaut:

There’s no such thing as a truly anti-war film, Francois Truffaut once said. By depicting the adventure and thrill of combat, war movies can’t help but glorify their subject, fueling fantasies of spectacular, heroic violence. It’s a case where the sensational beauty of cinema works against our humanist impulses rather than for them.

I'm not sure that categorizing war films into either a pro-war or anti-war box is the most helpful view of them, but the question of the spectacle of war in the spectacle of cinema is certainly worth thinking about. Lee says he's a "not a fan of war movies as a general matter of principle", but his set-up doesn't do anything to distinguish the violence of war movies from the violence of westerns or crime films or whatever — what makes the subject of war more likely to inescapably "glorify their subject, fueling fantasies of spectacular, heroic violence"? By that logic, Lee must not be a fan of any violent movies. That's a nice principle, and I might believe it from somebody who didn't much like movies in general, but Lee clearly likes movies. (Perhaps the problem is really the word "fan".)

It seems to me that while yes, we can point to specific techniques that glorify war and embody fantasies of glorious violence, we can't necessarily predict how those techniques will affect all audiences. For instance, I loathe Saving Private Ryan. Every frame of it. Yet I also realize my loathing is pretty personal, and that plenty of people have found that film, particularly its first 25 minutes, a deeply powerful conduit toward understanding some of the horrors of war. Alternately, being a Malickoholic, I love The Thin Red Line, but I'm not entirely unsympathetic to criticisms that it aestheticizes war in a way that is not so much glorifying as it is perhaps trivializing or fetishizing or something. (I don't agree, obviously, but I do think it's necessary to think through the beauty of the film's images.)

So anyway, with all that in mind, as well as a recent re-viewing of one of the most affecting and disturbing war movies I know, Come and See, I broadened the scope of my Beach Red / Thin Red Line essay and turned it into an essay on war movies and spectacle:

Zero de Doom

Here's a new video essay I created, mixing elements of Jean Vigo's Zero de Conduit (1933) with Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation (1995), plus some words from Robin Wood and an anonymous reviewer of Vigo.

Please note that the theatrical version of Doom Generation was rated R for "strong vicious violence, graphic sexuality, pervasive strong language and some drug use", and I used the unrated version, so if you have a weak stomach for graphic representations of violence, are aghast at the sight of naked bodies, and/or don't like the English language at its most crude and vulgar, you really, really, really shouldn't watch this.

Touch of Psycho

An exploration of echoes and variations — a few moments from Touch of Evil and Psycho reimagined through each other:




(The two films shared a number of personnel: actors Janet Leigh and Mort Mills, art director Robert Clatworthy, and John L. Russell, who worked as a camera operator on Touch of Evil and director of photography on Psycho.)

Chaos Cinema, Revisited

In the chaos of the internet, I missed Matthias Stork's response to critics of his video essay on Chaos Cinema, posted at Press Play back in December as "Chaos Cinema, Part III" (with the other two helpfully embedded on the same page). I watched it today after reading Steven Shaviro's text from a talk, "Post-Continuity".

I was interested in Stork's response, because I had had a fairly strong initial reaction to his essays, and I've continued to think about it all, especially after using Gamer in a class last term. My own viewing of such movies has been deeply influenced more by Shaviro's approach than others, but I also like to show students the first two "Chaos Cinema" essays as well as Jim Emerson's video essay on a scene from The Dark Knight.

Watching the third "Chaos Cinema" essay, I discovered that Stork responded specifically to one of my criticisms. It's a very fair and, I think, accurate response to a point I raised about the video game aesthetic — he elaborated on that in a comment at the post, and I responded there that on reflection I basically agreed with him. The convergence of video game and action movie aesthetics is a topic that deserves study, but I don't have the background in gaming to do so, and my interests in the scholarship on action movies is primarily focused on the '80s and early '90s.

My differences with Stork's approach remain pretty much what they were in my original post — I'm averse to seeing techniques in absolute or moral terms — but he has done excellent, thoughtful work on showing how cinema, particularly action cinema, is changing. I fully agree with what he says at the end of Part III: "In his essay 'Chaos Cinema and the Rise of the Avid', Ambrose Heron blames non-linear editing systems for the emergence of chaos techniques. This is how we should discuss chaos cinema, as an aesthetic and industrial phenomenon."

Faces: Garbo & Van Damme

A new video essay, this one about my two favorite faces in the movies: Greta Garbo and Jean-Claude van Damme:

The Good Extra: A Movie Memoir

In the winter of 1993, I had the chance to be an extra in the movie The Good Son, starring Macauley Culkin and Elijah Wood. This is a video essay looking back on that experience.