DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder, 1944)

I am currently teaching a course on American cinema here at the Korea National University of Art. It is a history of American film from the sound era up to the New Hollywood, relying heavily on the ideological reading offered by Robert Ray combined with more historical scholarship. The essay for the course is to analyze a film in relation to the course material. I decided to write a sample essay as a model and thought I would post it here in case it is of potential interest to anyone.

According to Robert Ray, most popular American films from the classical era followed both a formal and thematic paradigm. Formally, all techniques were meant to the “invisible” in order to conceal the choices necessary to tell the story. Thematically, incompatible values (such as individual-community) were felt to be reconcilable. These two tendencies in Hollywood cinema worked together to create a powerful ideological tool that reinforced the myth of America. But not all films shared this optimistic vision. During World War II, at the height of American optimism, there emerged a number of films that would later be dubbed “film noir”. The most popular of this group of films was Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Rather than offering an optimistic view typical of Hollywood, Double Indemnity challenged both the formal and thematic tendencies of American cinema.

Formally, Double Indemnity differs in two ways. First, there is both a voiceover narration and a flashback structure that breaks with the “invisibility” demanded of classical storytelling. Instead of unfolding objectively from an omniscient point of view, Double Indemnity is a subjective story told from the perspective of the character Walter Neff. The opening scene tells the viewer who committed the murder. The rest of the story consists of the murderer telling us how it happened and why he did. This interest in the subjective character psychology of a murderer differentiates Double Indemnity from American films of the time. Second, Wilder uses expressionist lighting in many scenes. Usually American films make all stylistic decisions relate to the story. The lighting in Double Indemnity instead makes the character and the story less clear and more difficult to comprehend. The intent is to create a dark, pessimistic mood rather than simply advancing the story forward quickly.

Thematically, Double Indemnity is an even greater departure from the Hollywood paradigm. The film makes it clear that although Walter may be killing his lover’s husband for money and lust, he is also interested in the adventure of the crime. Walter is an insurance man, hardly an adventurous occupation. But the fact that Walter is thirty-five and unmarried (as we are told in the first scene) indicates a reluctance on his part to not be a domesticated family man. Instead, he wants the myth of adventure that is no longer possible in the modern world. He wants to prove his manhood. But why does he have to do this? The answer is in the traditional mythology that idolizes the outlaw hero adventurer as being the “ideal man”. Hollywood may confirm the ideology of marriage, but it also sees the domesticated male as emasculated and boring, not a romantic, mythical figure. Walter falls victim to this myth, and has to be punished for his transgression of the law. Walter is the outlaw hero/adventurer, but in film noir, this character cannot be redeemed. He is both a murderer and a disturber of the capitalist status quo. He not only murders his lover’s husband but he also attempts to rip off the insurance company he works for. The film punishes him for his misdeeds, but Walter is also a sympathetic figure for the audience simply because he is our identification figure. The film focuses on Walter’s psychology and asks us to identify with his desires. The audience knows, because of the conventions of the Production Code, that Walter is a doomed figure. But this only adds to his appeal. The phrase “straight down the line” keeps getting repeated in order to emphasize Walter’s inability to escape the assembly line of industrial production. Because the viewer is in a similar place in this same society, Walter cannot be simply dismissed as an “evil” character. Rather, he falls victim to the incompatible values that most American films try to reconcile.

A key scene in illustrating the thematic of the film occurs in Walter’s office (42:22). Walter is sitting on his desk when Keyes enters from the back of the frame. Wilder decides to shoot their extended dialogue exchange in a single long take lasting approximately 130 seconds, signaling its importance by breaking with the shot/ reverse shot convention that sutures the viewer into the cinematic story world. The content of the sequence consists of Keyes trying to convince Walter to become his assistant. Keyes argues that unlike Walter’s current salesman position, being a claims investigator is exciting, adventurous work. But before he finishes his argument to Walter, the phone rings. It is Phyllis telling Walter that their murder plan can now go ahead as planned. The next eleven shots alternate between Walter and Phyllis, with Keyes lingering in the background of Walter’s shots. Tellingly, the phrase “straight-down-the-line” gets used here again. After this dialogue finishes, Wilder shoots Walter and Keyes in another extended take as Keyes exits from the door in the back of the frame. Keyes asks Walter why he has never married and then tells the story of his own unwillingness to become domesticated (he could not stop investigating the woman). Walter decides not to take Keyes’s offer of adventure. Keyes exits by telling Walter that he isn’t smarter than the rest of the office workers, only a little taller. Of course, what Keyes does not know is that Walter is planning to prove him wrong. He does not want Keyes’s desk job because he recognizes that the adventure is purely in Keyes’s mind, not in reality. He wants the real adventure that Phyllis offers. Also, he does not want to be Keyes’s assistant. He wants to prove he is better than Keyes, that he can outsmart him. Committing a murder and stealing money from the insurance company is Walter’s way of accomplishing this goal.

In many ways, Double Indemnity is the dark mirror of classical films. It exposes rather than denies the contradictions inherent in the social structure. For example, compare Double Indemnity with the most famous Hollywood film, Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Ideologically, a film like Casablanca works at reconciliation. Rick is the outlaw hero/adventurer who works for the good of the community and is capable of love (potential husband). Laszlo is the domesticated male (husband) but is also a resistance leader (adventure). Ilsa is believed by Rick to be a sexually adventurous woman but is revealed at the end to be a domesticated wife/mother. Double Indemnity, on the other hand, reveals these contradictions. Walter is the outlaw hero/adventurer, but in film noir, this character cannot be redeemed. Similarly, the femme fatale in film noir cannot be saved by love. Both the outlaw hero and the femme fatale must die for their trangressions. The film can offer no happy ending to deny the contradictions inherent in the culture. Casablanca finally reconciles its lovers in a key scene of romantic embrace (1:19:20). Double Indemnity replays the scene, but instead of a reunion, the two lovers shoot each other (1:34:24).

As much as Double Indemnity differs from classical films, it is still a product of Hollywood. Despite its unusual storytelling devices and expressionist techniques, it still mostly conforms to the invisible style. Thematically, it forms a “good couple” at the conclusion (Lola and Zachetti) to try to provide some sense of optimism. Also, the Production Code would not permit the execution of Walter in the gas chamber that would have completed the “straight-down-the-line” motif. But the fact that the Production Code would not allow Walter to be executed is telling. In 1932, it was demanded that the lead character of Howard Hawks’ Scarface be hanged in order to provide the proper punishment and avoid a glamorous death scene. With Double Indemnity, however, the audience is attached to Walter psychologically and emotionally in a way not possible with the classic gangster film. This is the really subversive aspect of the film. Double Indemnity challenges the formal and thematic paradigms and shows that Walter is ultimately a victim of the very mythology Americans are taught to believe in.

Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985): 25-69.

BODY OF LIES (Ridley Scott, 2008)

Since returning in September, there hasn't been a film I wanted to see in the multiplexes. So yesterday I decided to see Ridley Scott's Body of Lies, a political thriller about the middle east. Not a great film by any means, but interesting enough for the most part.

The weaknesses are typical of many Hollywood films today: over-edited and over-long. The action scenes do not work at all, partly because of digital special effects used for simple chase scenes. There has often been a comparison lately between Hollywood action scenes and video games, but this may be the first film in which video game graphics are more realistic. In this case, a comparison to video games would actually be an insult to video games. The narrative structure is also far too loose. A tighter focus would have made the thematic clearer. However, as a Hollywood political film, this may not have been possible. The length and confusion is needed to make sure the politics are sufficiently blurred.

Despite this, Body of Lies does manage to make a point, albeit a very accepted one at this time: America is out of touch with how to deal with the "war on terrorism", especially when you get beyond the ground level and into the management class. To do this, the screenplay plays on the old American mythology in an intriguing way. Both opposing protagonists work for the state and are thus "official" heroes. With America involved in a global war, this makes sense. The autonomous outlaw hero of the past mythology would seem out of place in this story. However, the film's quite effective conclusion turns the lead character (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in another solid performance) into an outlaw of sorts, rejecting the war and government he has been fighting for and staying in the "frontier" of the middle east. And despite his allegiance to a woman, the ending is ambiguous over whether he can join her. Increasingly, American culture seems to want a return to the old autonomy and to disengage with being the "world police". Body of Lies is one example of Hollywood hoping to express and capitalize on this feeling.

Final note: both Body of Lies and The Departed were written by William Monahan, and they feel very similar. I would argue that they have more in common with each other than each respective films have in common with other films by their famous auteur directors Scott and Scorsese. Perhaps making films in the big budget Hollywood arena with its standardized style is making directorial self-expression more difficult.

A TALE OF CINEMA (Hong Sang-soo, 2005)

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"Hong Sang-su's films feature too many elements of postmodernism to be classified as existentialist; too much rage and sincerity for postmodernist; too much cynicism for romanticist; and, perhaps most importantly, too much passion for nihilism." Kyung Hyun Kim (2004) (p. 228)

Returning to Canada this summer, I was able to track down some scholarship written on Hong Sang-soo, whose films have increasingly fascinated me over the course of the last year. The best work written on Hong thus far is by the scholar Kyung Hyun Kim. This includes a chapter on Hong's first three films in his book The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema as well as an essay on Hong's fourth film, Turning Gate. I look forward to revisiting Hong's earlier films after reading Kim's analysis.

I was also able to finally track down the only Hong film I hadn't yet seen, A Tale of Cinema. It is with this film that Hong returns, but with a slight variation, to the split narratives of his first three films. Hong's two features before A Tale of Cinema avoided the direct repetitons of the earlier films and were increasingly pared down stylistically, especially in the use of editing. This is especially true of Woman is the Future of Man (2004), with an ASL of 98 seconds, by far the most sparsely edited film Hong has made. A Tale of Cinema is a very different film, returning to an ASL (63 seconds) closer to Turning Gate (58 seconds) and also adding the use of a zoom lens that functions, as Michael Sicinski has noted, very much like conventional editing. Of course, there is a big difference, since the whole point of conventional continuity, in addition to providing shot variety and audience manipulation, is to be invisible. Hong's zooms are nothing if not noticeable.

Hong was asked about his use of the zoom by Huh Moonyung:

HUH: The distinct use of zoom-in and zoom-out would have surprised the audience who are familiar with your movies. What principle did you apply in using the zoom?
HONG: Emphasis, intimacy, making of a rhythm within a shot, a sense of alienation, compression, economical way to handle a scene, etc... (p. 76)

The contradictory nature of this response (intimacy and alienation) indicates a lack of consistent use of the technique. Nevertheless, the amateurish way in which it is used seems to coincide with the first half of the film and its film-within-a film status. We learn that the first 40 minutes was a student film and was being watched by the director's former classmate. This immediately explains the awkwardness of both the form as well as the acting. But once "Hong's" film begins the zoom does not disappear. Indeed, it will not disappear in his next two films either. Nevertheless, the rest of the film still feels more like a Hong film than the opening. The takes are longer and the use of the zoom less frequent and more controlled. Take the two sequences from the first half that are repeated. The first meeting between Sang-won and Yeong-sil (Figures 1-2) is restaged with Dong-su and Yeongsil, only this time there is no zoom (Figure 8). The shot of Sang-won and Yeong-sil having a drink (which starts as a typical Hong composition) is less than two minutes and features 4 zooms (Figures 3-7), but the repetition of the scene between Dong-su and Yeongsil is over twice as long and features only 2 zooms (Figures 9-11). The penultimate scene, although highly melodramatic, is filmed without a zoom (Figure 12). In his next two films, Hong's use of the zoom will follow the pattern of A Tale of Cinema's second half.

In addition to the zoom, there is a use of voiceover through the student film section. This is dropped once the second half of the narrative begins, but Hong brings it back at the conclusion. It is tempting to read all of this as Hong wanting to return to his own student filmmaking roots in order to rediscover filmmaking, especially since the film's title is usually translated in French (Conte de Cinema). Like the New Wave directors, Hong sees the need to rediscover the cinema after becoming more and more simple in his technique. This seems like a necessary step, even if A Tale of Cinema may be Hong's least successful film. Part of what marks the greatness of Hong is the quote above from Kim on the difficulty of labelling his work. In this regard, A Tale of Cinema is too obviously "postmodern", unlike Hong's other films. But at the same time Hong needed a new start, having pushed his style as far as it could go. I disagree with Michael Sicinsky that A Tale of Cinema is Hong's best film (although Hong's oeuvre, as I've argued in previous posts, is very difficult to rank); it is actually my least favorite. But without this experiment, perhaps Woman on the Beach and his most recent Night and Day (which may be his best film) would not have been possible.

For a plot synopsis as well as a very intelligent discussion of the film, check out Michael Sicinski's CinemaScope review here.

Kyung Hyun Kim, "Too Early/ Too Late: Temporality and Repetition in Hong Sang-su's films," in The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004): 203-230.

Kyung Hyun Kim, "The Awkward Traveller in Turning Gate," in New Korean Cinema (ed. Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer) (New York: NYU Press, 2005): 170-179.

Huh Moonyung, Hong Sang-soo (Seoul: Korean Film Archive, 2007)

UPCOMING: Nouveau Roman, Nouveau Cinema Special

From October 14th to November 9th, the Seoul Cinematheque will be presenting a massive retrospective on the French New Novel/ New Cinema. Information on the screening schedule and subtitles haven't been announced, but the list of films is very impressive:

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (Alain Resnais, 1959)
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (Alain Resnais, 1961)
MURIEL (Alain Resnais, 1963)
L'IMMORTELLE (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1963) (short)
TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1966)
L'HOMME QUI MENT (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1968)
DETRUIRE, DIT-ELLE (Marguerite Duras, 1969)
L'EDEN ET APRES (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1970)
NATHALIE GRANGER (Marguerite Duras, 1972)
STAVISKY (Alain Resnais, 1974)
INDIA SONG (Marguerite Duras, 1975)
SON NOM DE VENISE DANS CALCUTTA DESERT (Marguerite Duras, 1976)
LE CAMION (Marguerite Duras, 1977)
BAXTER, VERA BAXTER (Marguerite Duras, 1977)
CESAREE (Marguerite Duras, 1978)
AURELIA STEINER (MELBOURNE) (Marguerite Duras, 1979) (short)
AURELIA STEINER (VANCOUVER) (Marguerite Duras, 1979) (short)
L'HOMME ATLANTIQUE (Marguerite Duras, 1981)
AGATHA ET LES LECTURES ILLIMITEES (Marguerite Duras, 1981)
LA VIE EST UN ROMAN (Alain Resnais, 1983)
MELO (Alain Resnais, 1986)
SMOKING (Alain Resnais, 1993)
NO SMOKING (Alain Resnais, 1993)
ON CONNAIT LA CHANSON (Alain Resnais, 1997)

All the films are directed by either New Novelists Robbe-Grillet and Duras or from their early collaborator Alain Resnais. But despite the famous names, there are many relatively unknown films here, especially the films by Robbe-Grillet and Duras (with the possible exception of Duras's India Song). And having missed Last Year at Marienbad at the Ontario Cinematheque this summer (it was sold out), I'm looking forward to finally seeing a print. Hopefully this is the same collection of prints that was circulating in North America earlier in the year.

Sergio Leone Retrospective (Sept. 30-Oct.12)

Starting on Tuesday, four Sergio Leone films will be screening for the next two weeks at the Cinematheque: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, A Fistful of Dynamite, and Once Upon a Time in America.

I attended a screening of Once Upon a Time in the West back in July, and the print was excellent. Hopefully the prints of the other films are of similar quality.

LIES (Jang Sun-woo, 1999)

Truth, Lies, Cinema and Pornography

Even before his 1999 film Lies, Jang Sun-woo had a reputation as the enfant terrible of Korean cinema, often reminiscent of and compared to earlier figures like Jean-Luc Godard. Lies, however, was controversial even by Jang's standards, having been censored twice before finally being released in a version with four minutes missing. The Chungmuro film festival screened the original version this year for the first time in Korea. Most know Lies because of its notoriety, but it deserves to be compared with the very best of Korean cinema.

Lies uses the subject of sex to ask fundamental questions about the cinema itself and its relation to the social structure. The film details a primarily sexual relationship between an 18 year-old high school girl (Y) and a 38 year-old married sculptor (J) . From almost the very beginning their relationship is not ony sexual, but sadomasochistic (a physical metaphor for the emotional S&M of all relationships, perhaps). Initially, J plays the role of master, but eventually he wishes to switch roles and be beaten himself. The plot details the couple's relationship over a couple of years up until its conclusion. This includes the disapproval of everyone around them, including his wife, her brother and Korean society generally.

The main theme of the film is established in its title as well as the self-reflexive style of its first act. Jang begins with an interview with the lead actor, who offers his interpretation of the story (based on a Korean novel, Lie to Me, that likewise was labelled as pornography and censored). He describes the film as a fantasy for the erotic imagination of the audience (in other words, a fiction, or a lie). The rest of the opening act maintains this distancing Brechtian approach. The first sex scene provides a good example. Jang intercuts the scene with three intertitles, "the first hole", "the second hole" and "the third hole", as the sequence proceeds with vaginal, oral and then anal sex in almost a parody of pornography and its procession of standardized sex acts. The Godardian influence here is most pronounced.

But paradoxically, the very Brechtian direct address techniques allign Lies with pornography, which now frequently exposes its very nature as film in order to give the sexual situations greater authenticity. Thus the interview with the actress about her nervousness about the sex scenes is half-Bergman, half-verite porn. As Linda Williams argued almost two decades ago in her classic study Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (1989), hard-core pornography has always had closer associations to documentary than any other genre. One of Williams other major arguments in this book is that pornography has a very strong utopian element. Both of these concepts of authenticity and utopia are central to the meaning of Jang's text.

As Lies proceeds through its storyline, the more overt self-reflexivity of the opening lessens significantly, with the direct address and acknowledgment of the camera replaced by the occasional slow motion technique, the use of voice-over narration, and the very extremity of the sexual situations (which not surprisingly provoked nervous laughter at the screening I attended). Jang goes to great lengths to establish the constructed nature of the film ("lies 24 times a second") but then invests his sympathy in the reality of the central sexual relationship. Part of this is the utopian nature of their affair, which contrasts with the hypocrisy of the society around them. The most resonant scenes in the film are not the sex scenes, but the sequences following them in which the characters whisper about their exploits within the social spaces of the subway.

This utopianism does not last. As an audience we should guess this, because Lies sets itself up as an art film, not pornography. It thus cannot be naive enough to believe in its utopia. Eventually, Y moves on, to Brazil with her sister, and J narrates that he never sees her again. He is left in Paris, in an unsatisying marriage. Earlier in the film, Y tattooes that J is hers on his thigh. J's final narration states that when his wife asks him about the tattoo, he lied. This contrasts with the opening of the film, in which the actor (not the character) expresses that the film is fantasy. Jang's ending seems to imply the opposite: that the sexual relationship was the only real thing in his life. His entire social identity is the real lie.

Nabokov's Lolita was described by Vanity Fair as the "only convincing love story of this century"; Lies is likewise one of the few love stories of the recent cinema that holds any real persuasion.

Homage to You Young-Gil

From September 16th-28th, the Seoul Cinematheque will screen a 14 film tribute to the cinematographer You Young-gil, who worked with many of the top Korean directors before his death in 1998. The films showing with English subtitles are:

Gagman (Lee Myung-Se, 1988)
My Love, My Bride (Lee Myung-Se, 1990)
North Korean Partisan in South Korea (Chung Ji-young, 1990)
Black Republic (Park Kwang-su, 1990)
The Road to the Race-track (Jang Sun-woo, 1991)
White Badge (Chung Ji-young, 1992)
To the Starry Island (Park Kwang-su, 1993)
First Love (Lee Myung-se, 1993)
Green Fish (Lee Chang-dong, 1996)

All totaled, nine films from the first Korean New Wave (1988-1996), and a rare opportunity to see them in a theatre with subtitles. In fact, many of these films are difficult to track down even on DVD.

Chungmuro Film Festival Screenings

The 2nd Chungmuro Film Festival finishes tomorrow. I was only get to see four films this year due to a currently busy schedule: Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984), Lola Montes (Max Ophuls, 1955), Mad Detective (Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai, 2007), and Lies (Jang Sun Woo, 1999).

The newest film, and one in competition, was Mad Detective. I've heard positive things about Johnnie To so I was interested in seeing one of his films. However, the film left me underwhelmed. It seemed simply derivative rather than a fresh take on the crime/detective/buddy cop genre. It begins fine and with enough energy to propel it, but cannot sustain its momentum because I do not believe I has anything new to say about the figure of the eccentric, method-inspired detective. The movies the film borrows from (Manhunter, Memento, and Frailty) are all significantly better than this reworking.

Paris, Texas and Lola Montes are both films I saw for the first time roughly a decade ago. Viewing them again was practically like a new experience, especially with the Ophuls film. Lola Montes was shown in a recently restored print conducted by the French Cinematheque. It is Ophuls last film and his first in color and widescreen, and it is a much bigger film in terms of spectacle and artifice than anything else he had made. It is probably his most distancing film as a result, a film very much distilling many of the ideas of his other melodramas but, for me, lacking in the emotional resonance of a film like Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948). Even the technical virtousity does not match his earlier Madame de ... (1953), partly because of the pure size of the production. Certainly the film is worth watching, but does not match his greatest work.

Paris, Texas, however, may be Wenders' greatest film, even surpassing his work in Germany. What was most striking to me was how, as an outsider to America, Wenders nevertheless fit his film within the dominant paradigms of American cinema. This may be the influence of the screenwriter, Sam Shepard, but is nevertheless not that surprising that Wenders would be interested in making a paradigmatic American story given all of his previous meditations on America and its cinema in his German period.

The story begins with a man walking through the desert. After he collapses, the doctor calls his brother and we learn some things about him. His name is Travis, he has a son, and he disappeared over four years earlier. The rest of the narrative involves his reconnecting with his young son and eventually reuniting him with his mother. The ending is thus typical of the western (which itself is the most typical of American genres) in which the hero restores civilization but also has to retreat from this civilization himself. That said, the distinction of the film is its simultaneous reinforcing and questioning of this quintessential American type. The film begins with Travis as a mute, a parody of the stoic Westerner, but gradually he talks more and more, culminating in a extended conversation with his ex-wife in a peep show booth. This psychologizing of this figure reveals the essential neurosis that is, Shepard and Wenders suggest, at the heart of America itself: the desire for civilization (Paris) and the wilderness (Texas). At the same time, this is not really a deconstruction of the genre. Travis remains a sympathetic figure, and the film's ending, in which his wife and son reunite and twirl around together, is one of the more satisfying conclusions I can recall.

I'll discuss Lies fully in my next post.

2nd Chungmuro Film Festival

The 2nd Chungmuro Film Festival begins next Wednesday, September 3, and continues until Thursday, September 11. Some of the highlights:

-a Douglas Trumbull tribute, along with a master class with Trumbull. Films include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner, and Brainstorm.

-new print of Lola Montes

-David Lean retrospective

-tribute to Deborah Kerr

-a history of German cinema, including over 20 films from the silent era to the present

-a Kon Ichikawa retrospective, featuring nine films

-Memories of Korean Cinema

-a celebration of the Cannes director's fortnight, featuring over 20 films

-a retrospective of Korean auteur Jang Sun-woo

Once again, the line-up is impressive and it will be impossible to see even a fraction of what I would like, especially with work and moving considerations. I'm going to make a special effort to see a couple of Jang films, since I'm unfamiliar with his work thus far.

UPCOMING: Bunuel's Mexican Films

Coming to the cinematheque from August 22-31 are six Luis Bunuel films from his time in Mexico in the 1950s: Los Olvidados (1950), Mexican Bus Ride (1952), El: This Strange Passion (1952), Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1953), The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), and Nazarin (1958). No word yet on English subtitles.

Also, no news yet available on the Chungmuro film festival, scheduled to start on September 3rd.

I'm returning to Seoul next week and will begin writing and providing updates on screenings again over the next year.

Away for the Summer

I will be away from Korea for about six weeks as of tomorrow, so I won't be writing any reports from screenings here. I may make an occasional post of any movies I see while in Canada. I will be back for the 2nd Chungmuro festival in early September.

I went to see Once Upon a Time in the West on the opening night of the Summer Vacation festival at the Cinematheque, and the print was first-rate. I highly recommend checking it out when it screens again throughout the summer. It is a very different experience seeing the film in the theatre. I have watched what I consider Leone's best film many times on video, and although I love it, I did agree with the comments that it is slow. On the big screen, however, it never ceases to be riveting. In fact, I got a much better sense of how Leone reworks classical style. The scenes and narrative structure are almost identical (indeed, the plot is lifted from Nicolas Ray's 1953 western Johnny Guitar), it is only that Leone extends the individual scenes much longer than would normally be the case. The result is the unique blend that makes Leone so distinct. The influence on someone like Quentin Tarantino was also made more vivid by the screening.

TURNING GATE (Hong Sang-soo, 2002)

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After much effort, I tracked down one of the two Hong Sang-soo films I haven't seen, Turning Gate (thanks to Roujin from the filmspotting message board). Like all of Hong's films, I find it difficult to evaluate. Having seen seven of his eight features, it would be almost impossible for me to order them in terms of preference. Seeing Turning Gate in isolation would almost certainly detract from its effectiveness. At the same time, seeing it after looking at three of his previous and three of his subsequent works, it cannot help but be thought of as a transitional text. As such, it was less satisfying than his other films, although at the time it was released and even since then I have read reviews claiming it as Hong's masterpiece.

In terms of narrative, Hong avoids repeating scenes as he did in his first three films, most notably in the almost experimental structure of Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors. The narrative does split here, but the lead male character, Gyeong-su (an actor), simply moves from one woman to another. With Hong, as usual, there are still parallels drawn, most explicitly with the two goodbye notes each woman writes. Even the ending is based on a story told early in the film, and a truly odd scene of Gyeong-su lighting a man's cigarette is eventually given significance later in the film (although we may not remember it). But generally, the two stories here do not seem as obviously connected as in his other stories made both before and after Turning Gate. More than in his other work, the main male character is focused on to a great extent, and it may be Hong's most psychologically driven narrative. Unfortunately, that psychology turns out, eventually, to be rather limited and simplistically focused around ideas of purity. Hong's ending certainly critiques this, but does not seem to be able to go beyond it as he will in later works.

Stylistically, there are a few sequences in the first half that seem more expressionistic than Hong ordinarily presents. There is a scene filtered in red as Gyeong-su and his friend meet with two prostitutes (Figure 1), and a dance performed by Myeong-suk with an elaborate use of mirrors (Figure 2). But as the film progresses, the shots become more simple (Figures 3 and 4). Hong's editing rate is close to his previous film, but the pared down nature of the shots over the second half seem to point to his next film, Woman is the Future of Man, in which Hong will reduce his editing and shot set-ups even further.

Hong's handling of sexuality also pivots with this film. Hong's first three films were sexually frank, and all of his films deal with this topic, but Turning Gate is his most sexually explicit. In fact, the scenes are so graphic that an audience may question if they are simulated or not. However, by the end of the film, Gyeong-su cannot get an erection. He states that he is tired of sex and wishes he can "live clean like this and die". From this point on in his work, Hong will eventually reduce the explicitness of his depictions. I would link this to Hong's decreased interest in the whole notion of idealized conceptions of sexuality.

Seon-yeong, the second woman in the story, eventually leaves Gyeong-su at the conclusion. As the intertitle informs us, this reminds Gyeong-su of a story he told earlier of a snake falling in love with a princess but then being left by her at a gate. The final shot shows Gyeong-su come to the gate, and then turn and leave the frame (Figures 5 and 6). The shot remains empty and the film ends (Figure 7). This is both a downbeat, contemplative ending as well as a wry and satirical one. The viewer at once observes the connection with the previous stories (both of the turning gate and the fortune teller Gyeong-su and Seon-yeong have just visited) but nevertheless questions them as yet another romantic myth of the protagonist. Gyeong-su is not a snake and is not destined for a grim future. Seon-yeong is not a princess and destined for greatness. Rather, they are both acting out and performing roles and self-fulfilling prophesies.

But this is coming from a rationalist point of view. The narrative can be taken straight, and Hong includes a number of coincidences that give the film, like all of his work, a certain irrational, dream-like power. The last shot is emblematic. It is a rather simple shot of the rain falling on a gate. But it is also iconic, and has connotations beyond a simple description of its content. As with all of Hong, there is a materialist, rationalist discourse competing with a kind of illogical primitivism. As much as the film is a turning point, Turning Gate still acts as another chapter in the single work Hong seems to be making.

Summer Vacation at the Cinematheque

The Cinematheque has announced its "summer vacation" program, running from July 11-August 17. It includes:

-a Sergio Leone retrospective, with the Dollars trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Once Upon a Time in America (full version).

-a Hal Hartley retrospective

-a screening of one of my favorite films, The Third Man, as well as Rififi, Walkabout, Woman on the Dunes, and others

-plus, this Saturday, a three film marathon of Hong Sang-soo films: Woman on the Beach, Night and Day, and A Tale of Cinema. Apparently Hong will be in attendance for the screening of Night and Day. No word on subtitles, but hopefully.

I will miss most of the program because I will be away, but I should get a chance to see Once Upon a Time in the West and the Hong Sang-soo films before I leave.

David Bordwell and French Theory

"(Grand Theory is) a trend that dodges the task to which we thought academics had pledged their professional lives: producing knowledge that is reliable and approximately true." (Bordwell, 3)

"(The task of academics) is to continually analyze, reconsider, and mistrust the question at hand." (Cusset, 157)


The selection of film books in the English language sections of the large chains here is fairly limited, but one advantage of this is that you tend to buy the few books that do stand out. Also, I've gravitated back to more philosophical and theoretical texts that I normally don't have time for (lots of time on the subway helps as well). As a result, I have recently bought and read two fairly large and extremely divergent studies: David Bordwell's Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008) and Francois Cusset's French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Translated by Jeff Fort) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Poetics of Cinema (an homage to Russian formalism) is a collection of essays, many published previously, including the 1979 piece "Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice" (which includes a new Afterword). There are fifteen pieces in all, divided into three sections: I Questions of Theory (two essays) ; II Studies in Narrative (5 essays); III Studies in Style (eight essays). It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows Bordwell that the studies in narrative and style heavily outweigh any kind of theoretical discussion. It should also be no shock that the first section is burdened by the usual anti-theory Bordwellian axe-grinding. Even so, the rhetoric on display here is more heavy-handed than usual.

Two examples:

"Attorneys, legal researchers, and forensic scientists have used DNA evidence to free unjustly imprisoned people. Warnings about global change come from the united efforts of biologists, geographers, geologists, and other experts. Medical professionals struggle to eradicate HIV and cancer, and some risk their lives to inoculate children in the inferno of war. It's shameful for comfortable academics to believe that these heroes labor under a flawed epistemology." (5)

"If we invited today's postmodern academics to come up with reliable ways to represent airplane maneuvers, I shudder to think what casualties would result. But maybe not, at least once the researchers got off the ground. If there are no atheists in foxholes, then perhaps there are no culturalists in cockpits." (82)

These two statements reveal, despite his previous objections, the conservative nature of Bordwell's thinking. The very metaphors he chooses are telling. The first quote has the form of "support our troops" logic, and the "no atheists in foxholes" quote is pure religious nonsense that Bordwell accepts as a truism to make his own equally ridiculous "common sense" homily. That such absurd straw man arguments are marshaled out is telling of the type of scholar Bordwell has become. As strong as some of his work is (and most of the essays in this collection are well worth reading, despite the lack of real critical insight), there are other contextual factors for explaining his academic stardom. Someone like Roger Ebert admires Bordwell not only for his scholarship but because of his anti-theory diatribes. For Ebert, "film theory has nothing to do with film" and as a result views Bordwell as the savior of a Film Studies discipline that have distorted the ordinary pleasures of movie-going. And of course, Bordwell returns the favour and quotes in praise of Ebert, despite the utterly pedestrian criticism Ebert dispenses.

In addition to the above quotations, Bordwell includes more subtle argumentation. He talks about "mature" disciplines (22) (which theory dominated Film Studies is not), the "egos" of filmmakers contradicting the reflectionist view of culture (31) (a la Michael Medved), and the "natural" form of inquiry that his method represents. Furthermore, Bordwell contrasts his approach with the theorists' goal of simply "getting a buzz". Embedded in the very language of Bordwell is a deeply conservative idea of what culture and scholarship should be. As a result, he does not mind throwing red meat like the quotes above for the deeply anti-academic press to enjoy. He is one "comfortable academic" who knows his place, and is even more "comfortable" than most because of it.

Francois Cusset's French Theory (first published in French in 2003) offers a far more balanced view. But the book is much more. It is an incredibly detailed and relatively succinct intellectual history of American academia over the past few decades. Cusset explains the goal of his study as follows:

"To explore the political and intellectual genealogy, and the effects, even for us and up to today, of a creative misunderstanding between French texts and American readers, a properly structural misunderstanding -- in the sense that it does not refer simply to a misinterpretation, but to differences of internal organization between the French and American intellectual spheres." (5)

Maybe the only similarity between Poetics of Cinema and French Theory is the organization. Cusset divides his text into fourteen chapters (plus an introduction and conclusion) and organizes these chapters into three sections: "Part I. The Invention of a Corpus"; "Part II. The Uses of Theory"; and "Part III. There and Back". One of Cusset's main points, and one that has not been sufficiently explored, is how French Theory became as widespread within American universities, especially when the same authors were so out of favour in their own country. Drawing quite frequently on Pierre Bourdieu, Cusset grounds such figures as Foucault and Derrida in the particular fields of knowledge of the American context.

Although Cusset does not provide the type of critique that would be popular with the mainstream press, his perspective is critical of the type of excesses that have plagued the theory-centered humanities (for example, his introduction addresses the infamous "Sokal affair"). But more importantly, it is also deeply knowledgeable. When Bordwell dismisses "SLAB theory," anyone familiar with the writers cited will realize how superficial Bordwell's understanding really is (of course, it could be, and probably is, a willful misunderstanding). Cusset, however, has a vast and nuanced grasp of a very wide range of theorists, as well as a comprehension of many artist and art practices. Indeed, it would take a very well-read individual to not learn something from this prodigious example of scholarship.

In many ways, French Theory is all about connections, which is something I have a personal affinity for. Although I have read many of the major figures he discusses, I knew less about the history of these careers and the way in which they interceded with the culture at large. Chapter 7, "The Ideological Backlash," is perhaps my favorite in this regard, if the most known to me personally. Here, Cusset links the rise of neo-conservatism with the rise in French theory in the humanities, because neo-con intellectuals were able to caricature cultural relativists and have the public view them as a threat (not unlike Bordwell's anti-culturalist diatribe). This material was known to me primarily through my viewing of the documentary work of British filmmaker Adam Curtis (whose programs I highly recommend). Reading about Leo Strauss and the Committee for Social Thought at University of Chicago, I kept saying the words in my head with a British accent.

I cannot recommend Cusset's book highly enough. If you have knowledge of the intellectual field it will be a richer text, but even if you are not well-versed, it will still provide a fascinating read if you are interested in the subject. I think it will join Martin Jay's Downcast Eyes as essential reading for anyone studying cultural theory. And one need not be a post-structuralist convert to appreciate Cusset's take. Anyone wanting to truly challenge and critique French theory will find more genuine information here than in the mountainous piles of glib anti-theory dismissals like the ones provided by Bordwell. Of course, this may depend on which definition of an academic you find more appealing: someone who produces knowledge that is reliable and true, or someone who analyzes, reconsiders, and mistrusts the evidence at hand.

12th Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival

In less than three weeks the Puchon film festival begins, running from July 18th to 27th. The festival focuses on genre films, and there are a number of exciting programs, including a section of the Nikkatsu studio of Japan as well as a Gregg Araki retrospective. The schedule of films can be viewed here. Unfortunately, I will be back in Canada in a couple of weeks and will miss the festival, so I won't be able to give any reports.

THE TERRORIZERS (Edward Yang, 1986)

The Taiwan Film Festival finished today, and I was able to see another early Edward Yang film, The Terrorizers (1986). Last week I saw Yang's Taipei Story (1985), and although it was quite different from Yang's later Yi Yi (2000), there were enough similarities to suggest a cohesion. The Terrorizers, on the other hand, has almost nothing in common with later Yang, and only connects with Taipei Story through the milieu.

The Terrorizers tells a story connecting numerous characters and how their lives intersect. Like many such narratives, the last half is much more compelling, especially on first viewing, because of the difficulty of establishing so many characters and their various interrelationships. Even by the conclusion, there are a number of aspects that I still find puzzling and unexplainable. However, this does not take away from the power of the plot's unfolding. There is not just one but two artist characters in the film: a male photographer and a female novelist. As a result, the unfolding of the character's lives is presented in a very self-reflexive manner, in which art does have a profound influence on lives, even if this impact is mostly on the personal level. In addition to the two artist figures, Yang also includes a character, nicknamed "the white chick" (she is actually Eurasian), who is blatantly symbolic. Despite these distancing devices, the film never loses its sense of lived reality in modern Taipei. That said, it lacks the social zeitgeist quality of Taipei Story.

The influence of the European art cinema is very present here, probably more than Taipei Story. I found the often noted resemblance to Antonioni more prevalent here, as well as a continued affinity with Wim Wenders. But the film that I was reminded of most while watching The Terrorizers was not from the past but rather a work made a decade later, the Korean film The Day a Pig Fell in the Well (Hong Sang-soo, 1996). The rather drab look of both films, along with their multi-character narratives, are initially oft-putting but become gradually more effective as they progress. The figure of the artist is prominent, as is common with both Yang and Hong. The two works also share an interest in surrealism, as evident in the presence of sudden outbursts of sexualized violence as well as unmarked dream sequences towards their respective conclusions.

I doubt if the influence on Hong was direct. But it is interesting to note that both Yang and Hong, early in their respective careers, made similar films that merged European cinematic styles within their own emerging national cinemas. As it turned out, Hong would be more consistent in his output than Yang, although Hong's first film remains the most unlike the rest of his remarkably consistent output. As for Yang, I'm anxious to track down his 90s work to see how he moved from these early studies of modern and post-modern Taipei to the very different Yi Yi in 2000.

GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2003)

They are very few movies that I come across anymore that I find wholly unique and difficult to classify, but Goodbye, Dragon Inn is one of them. No doubt this says something about myself and where my tastes lie. Anyone with a strong background and interest in experimental cinema, as opposed to art cinema, would find Tsai's film less distinct. My previous exposure to Tsai was several years ago with Vive L'Amour (1994), and there are some connections to that previous work here, such as the sparse amount of dialogue, the obsession with water, themes of alienation and emptiness, etc. But Vive L'Amour can be compartmentalized as part of Asian minimalism. Goodbye, Dragon Inn, however, pushes heavily towards the non-narrative avant-garde.

Coincidentally, the film I thought of most when viewing Goodbye, Dragon Inn is Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), which is playing next week at the cinematheque as part of the Jarman retrospective. This is not to suggest that the two are similar in any way. In fact, as experimental cinema goes, they are at the opposite ends of the spectrum. Blue consists of nothing but a blue screen and puts the primacy on the audio track. Goodbye, Dragon Inn has only two scenes of dialogue, not counting the film within a film, King Hu's Dragon Inn (1966). Also, while I strongly disliked Blue (but admittedly, this was almost 10 years ago), I loved Tsai's experiment. Nevertheless, both films share in common the characteristic of almost, if not quite completely, abandoning narrative altogether.

What I rebelled against in Blue was that Jarman, for me, not only abandoned narrative but left behind cinema itself. Goodbye, Dragon Inn on the other hand exists just about purely as film. The images Tsai composes are so rich that narrative would get in the way. What Tsai gives in the place of story is a reflective consideration of cinema itself, what it was, what it currently is, where it may be going. No other scene best reflects this than when the cinema itself empties and we as an audience are looking back at our mirrors, the empty seats that we too will shortly leave. The shot is held so long that it becomes a near Cage-ian experiment in what the audience will do when confronted with this emptiness. It is part of the provocative and perverse nature of the film that Tsai is commenting on the death of cinema as represented by the closing theatre with a work that absolutely relies on being seen in such a theatrical setting.

Taiwan Film Festival Extended (3 days)

The Taiwan Film Festival at the cinematheque, which was originally supposed to end today (June 22nd) has been extended to Thursday (June 26th). The screenings with English subtitles are as follows:

Tuesday (24th): City of Sadness (3:00pm), Taipei Story (8:30)

Thursday (26th): Eat Drink Man Woman (6:00pm), The Terrorizers (8:30)

The addition of the two Yang films is especially good news, since they only had a single screening each.

The Derek Jarman retrospective starts on Friday.

SUMMER AT GRANDPA'S (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1984)

Art cinema is similar to popular film in being fond of trilogies. Long before Star Wars, there was Ingmar Bergman's "Silence of God" trilogy, and ever since critics have been prone to dividing director's outputs in sets of threes. The difference is that the films are often not linked by a continuation of story, as in popular film, but rather by a continuation of theme. Hou Hsaio-Hsien has (at least) two separate trilogies in his output: the "Coming of Age" films Summer at Grandpa's (1984), A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985), and Dust in the Wind (1986) and the "Taiwanese history" films City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1994), and Good Men, Good Women (1995). The historical films are generally considered the greater achievements, but if the first of the coming of age films is any indication, they are fine achievements that should not overlooked.

Summer at Grandpa's is based on the childhood memoir of co-writer Chu Tien-Wen. The story focuses on a pre-adolescent boy and his younger sister, who at the beginning of the film are sent from Taipei to a small town in the country when their mother falls ill. Not surprisingly, the story concludes when they return to the city. There is thus a very standard feel to the coming-of-age story presented. Even the idiosyncratic nature of Hou's style blends very naturally with the material. This is partly because Hou's approach here is less rigorous than in the later films. There are many of the Hou signatures on display: the use of long takes, long lenses, and shots of frames within the frame. The difference is that their deployment is less systematic than in a film like City of Sadness, especially in the outdoor scenes in nature, and as a result the film feels less distanced and more immediate, relatively speaking of course.

However, it is important not to take this familiarity for granted and ignore the subtlety on display here. The vague outline of the plot would suggest a tale in which the young city boy learns from the wisdom of the older patriarchal figure of the grandfather. Hou and his screenwriter handle the material more complexly. The key to this is the younger sister and her attachment to a outcast, mentally challenged woman in the village. The way in which this subplot plays out calls into question the authority of the grandfather, who is also a dominant presence as the village doctor. None of this is the least bit heavy-handed, but still refreshingly challenges the kind of gender norms we expect to find. And even though the boy's farewell to his friends is the last scene we see, the goodbye I remember most is the young girl's unanswered call to the woman who effectively became her substitute mother.

Hou has often expressed an admiration for the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, even making a whole film as a tribute, Cafe Lumiere (2003). This is the most Ozu-like of his films that I have seen, both in the greater classicism of the style and in the great doubled ending reminiscent of Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953). In his book Sexual Politics and Narrative Film (1998), Robin Wood has a great essay challenging the perceived conservatism of Ozu, arguing that he can also be read as a progressive or even radical filmmaker. I think a similar argument can be made for this film, an argument even more convincing given the overt political stance of Hou's later work.

TAIPEI STORY (Edward Yang, 1985)

Like many, my only exposure to the work of the late Edward Yang was thorough his final film, Yi Yi (2000). None of his other films are easily available on DVD. I was hoping the Taiwanese film festival would include Yang's 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day, often cited as his masterpiece and difficult to see in its complete version. The festival was missing this work, but did include Yang's previous two films, Taipei Story (1985) and The Terrorizers (1986). Both were playing here last night, unfortunately the only screening of each. Due to time constraints, I was only able to see the first of these.

Reading about Taipei Story before the screening, I was surprised to see the number of critics who compared Yang with Michelangelo Antonioni. The influence never crossed my mind in regards to Yi Yi, and I'm not sure it would have come immediately to mind with Taipei Story either. I would not argue against the modern existential characteristics of the work, but watching the film I thought of Timothy Corrigan's book A Cinema Without Walls (1991) which deals with the phenomenon of postmodernity and its influence on movie culture. What we generally conceive of as modernity and postmodernity collide in Taipei Story and give the film a real fascination and beauty. Unfortunately I do not have a DVD copy to provide stills, but many of Yang's most memorable images come from this collision. The scene that stays in my mind take place on a rooftop in front of a large neon Fuji sign, the two lovers dwarfed and in shadows while classical music plays on the soundtrack. The more Taiwanese cinema I watch, the more its influence on Wong Kar-Wai becomes apparent.

A curiosity about Taipei Story is that it stars Hou Hsiao-Hsien, who would become the major director of the Taiwanese New Wave. After viewing each director over the past week, there are actually few similarities between them. Yang is a much more conventional director. There are some uses of the long take, but there are plenty of sequences with more cutting and close-ups. Yang is interested in the spaces and objects of modernity (and/or postmodernity) and trying to relate the importance of these to the characters and their world. The West also plays a major symbolic role here, not surprising given Yang's background living in the U.S. The dream of California, represented both commercially by the lead character's brother and culturally through VCR tapes of American baseball, lingers over these people's lives as an illusion that oddly lacks any real utopianism. It is simply a retreat and escape.

In this way, Yang is certainly closer to European art cinema directors of the 60s and 70s, who in fact influenced Yang to become a director. After dropping out of USC film school feeling he lacked any talent, Yang re-engaged with the medium after watching art cinema classics, beginning with Werner Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972). And much more than Antonioni, it is the New German Cinema influence I see as prevalent in Taipei Story. The inspiration is not so much Herzog as Wim Wenders in Yang's attraction-repulsion to America and the later films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Yang's enclosed compositions combined with elements of classicism. Hou's performance here reminded me of Fassbinder's roles in many of his bleak urban dramas.

In a short review of Yi Yi written a few years ago, I commented: "Throughout the film, Yang uses a repeated visual motif to express his multi-character narrative in which each strand comments upon the other: the overlaying of reflecting images of windows that create dense, layered compositions. Early in the film, one character states: 'Is there anything real left?' These compositions seem to ask the same question." Taipei Story is a very different film, but it has some of these same characteristics. And although the overlapping image shot is not a visual motif here, the film does end with one of these compositions. Although the sense of connection is not as elaborate (some could say schematic) as it is in Yi Yi, Taipei Story offers up a similar tale of past, present and future colliding in modern Taiwan. The much more pronounced cynicism around the family in this early work also provides a clue to the more subtle pessimism of Yi Yi.

A couple of links to writing on Yang:

Rosenbaum's career overview

Senses of Cinema profile

CITY OF SADNESS (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1989)

When encountering a film as acclaimed as Hou's City of Sadness, the result is often respectful admiration rather than immediate emotional impact. This is especially true when the subject is historical material that you may not be familiar with. This was certainly the case when I watched my first Hou film, The Puppetmaster (1994), nearly a decade ago. However, City of Sadness, despite being difficult to fully comprehend and absorb on first viewing, has a rare affecting power to match its political and social insight.

Hou's patient style is crucial to this affect. The first hour of the film is the most difficult, as Hou is putting into play many of the characters and situations without the usual exposition that we expect from historical dramas. One reason for this is that Hou is clearly speaking directly to a Taiwanese audience that does not need this exposition. Made in 1989, shortly after the loosening of four decades of strict censorship and martial law, City of Sadness was one of the first films to deal with Taiwan's past (and was very successful commercially as a result). Although it has the feel of an epic of vast historical scope, the film actually takes place within a four year period. It begins with the end of World War II and Japanese rule in 1945 to the establishment of Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese nationalist government-in-exile in 1949 following the loss of mainland China to Communist forces. Hou concentrates on one family and how these historical events impact their lives. It reminded me of Tian Zhuang-Zhuang's The Blue Kite (1993), although usefully serving as a reminder that Chinese government oppression preceded the Communist rule.

The restraint Hou shows early in the film allows the last half of his work to have the force it does. The main event depicted, apparently for the first time in cinema history, is of the massacre of native Taiwanese committed by Kuomintang troops on February 28, 1947. But because of how Hou has quietly established the spaces of his characters, particularly the hallway of a hospital where two main characters work, he does not need to indulge in massive amounts of violent spectacle to have the desired visceral effect. Hou does not deviate from his long take, long shot approach, continuing to view the violence with the same perspective of the earlier scenes.

Adding to this distance is the lead character, played by Tony Leung, who is deaf and mute. All of his communication takes place through writing, which Hou renders through inter-titles, not unlike the style of silent films that he would later recreate more throughly in Three Times (2005). As many critics have noted, he becomes an audience surrogate, often forced to watch rather than influence events. It also brings a poignancy to his relationship with his leftist friend's sister, a romance that recalls the later work of Wong Kar-Wai. Leung's character is also a photographer, a chronicler of the personal histories, a role that extends to delivering news of the execution of fellow travelers to their loved ones. If he is an audience stand-in, he is also a representative of Hou himself.

When film critics and scholars discuss the most important artists of the last few decades, Hou and Abbas Kiarostami typically top the list, and despite their differecnes they both share an important quality. Like Kiarostami, Hou's distance does not result in alienation of feeling, but rather its intensification. Likewise, the small amount of actual violence shown does not mitigate the critique of oppression. Rather, it functions as an implicit statement against films that rely on gruesome extravagance. With City of Sadness, the result is an aesthetically beautiful film that uses its stylistic brilliance to convey its ideas about society and politics.

Upcoming

The information on the subtitles for the Taiwan film festival at the cinematheque has been announced. Unfortunately, only four of the films have subtitles. On the positive side, one of these is City of Sadness (1989), widely considered to be the masterpiece of one of the recognized giants of contemporary cinema, Hou Hsaio-hsien. Also subtitled is an early Hou film, Summer at Grandpa's (1984).

The cinematheque also announced a Derek Jarman retrospective featuring eleven of his feature films, beginning with Sebastiane (1979) and ending with Jarman's final film, the experimental Blue (1993). The retrospective will run from June 27-July 10, although the screening dates have still not been announced.

DEAD RECKONING (John Cromwell, 1947)

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

One of the many positive aspects of film culture here is the availability of very affordable DVDs of Classical Hollywood and art cinema releases. This allowed me to view a film noir I've always been interested in seeing, Dead Reckoning. I was familiar with the film from the last chapter of Frank Krutnik's great study of noir and masculinity, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (1991), "A Problem in 'Algebra': Dead Reckoning and the Regimentation of the Masculine". Krutnik's book is one of the better studies of noir, but, perhaps because I had not seen the film, I found the last chapter difficult to follow. I look forward to revisiting it.

Part of the difficulty may be with the film itself. Dead Reckoning is one of the oddest films I can remember seeing. Although made in 1947, it comes across almost as a pastiche of noir. It stars Humphrey Bogart as a returning veteran who investigates a pre-war murder case involving his war buddy. As in many noirs, this investigation focuses on a woman, his friend's former lover who Bogart quickly falls for as well. Bogart's character, however, does not trust women as easily as his duped friend. He gives a speech early in the narrative about wanting to shrink a woman down to pocket-size so he can control her, only having her become full-size when he wants (presumably, when he wants her physically, although the dialogue is only implicit about this). This is such a hyperbolic expression of the usual noir anxiety over female sexuality that it reminded me of R. Crumb's comics about the headless woman. It is so blatant and obvious that it feels like a postmodern noir reworking rather than a film made before the term itself had gained any widespread popularity.

The casting plays a role here too. Bogart seems to be referencing his former roles as a detective in films such as The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) and The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). There are actually lines taken almost directly from the former, in a manner reminiscent of a recent neo-noir like Brick (Rian Johnson, 2006). And Lizabeth Scott as the female lead bares an uncanny resemblance to Lauren Bacall, Bogart's co-star in the later. Also recalling The Big Sleep are aspects of the plot revolving around a gambling house and its boss. And the finale (Figure 3) recalls the more well-known Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), although it was released earlier in the same year. Thus what this seems to suggest is not so much a knowingness about all or maybe even any of these affinities but rather a confluence of elements now considered central to the definition of noir.

Another one of these characteristics is the use of the noir cityscape in what appears to be a small Southern city (Figure 1) and the use of the flashback structure. The presence of both of these ingredients feels odd, particularly the flashback, which is esoteric in the fact that it is not really needed. The film begins with Bogart telling his story in a church to a priest (Figure 2) (even though he isn't Catholic), but the flashback is only half of the story. Eventually it ends and the last part of the narrative is told linearly. The flashback seems to have no clear purpose, which is unusual for classical cinema. Even noirs like Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) and The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946) have a clear design for their use of the device. Here, we have to look at the device as purely ornamental and atmospheric, or use an art cinema reading strategy and search for possible thematic resonances. Or, it could be just an awkward and lazy way to give the audience narrative information and establish a closeness with the protagonist.

The final coda is also intriguing. Bogart, with arm broken, stands over the dying femme fatale (Figure 4). She is shown wrapped in white (Figure 5), saying how scared she is and how she wishes she could be in his pocket. Bogart then calls her "Mike" (his nickname for her) and tells her to (metaphorically) jump out of the plane just like he and his friend Johnny did during the war. The film ends with this image (Figure 6). The misogyny is blatant, but so is the homoeroticism (complete with the line that he loved Johnny more than her). And the film is made more incoherent by having the female character join the regime of masculinity. It is like a parody of a Howard Hawks film.

Ultimately, this is a classical film that, as a classical film, is a failure. It lacks the aesthetic distinction of a great auteurist and also fails as an entertainment. It is simply too stilted and too absurd for there to be any real emotional resonance. However, its intertextuality as an example of noir gives it an idiosyncratic appeal. That said, I'm more excited to read more about the film than to ever watch it again.

SEX AND THE CITY (Michael Patrick King, 2008)

For the first time in many months, I ventured to a multiplex for a new mainstream release, the film version of HBO's Sex and the City. I enjoyed the series well enough, although less so as it progressed (early on there was something liberating about the show's frankness). I didn't have great expectations heading in, but figured of all the major summer releases, I would probably find this one more interesting than the others. Here are some thoughts:

- I found the film mildly entertaining, although much less funny than the series, especially the earlier episodes. It is heavy on melodrama, some of which is effective because of the performances. The writing is much flatter than the series as well. I wasn't bored, and not actively annoyed either. Given my low expectations of contemporary Hollywood, not bad.

- Aesthetically, the transition to the big screen did not change the style much. There were moments of bombast, especially the opening and closing, but generally it was TV functional cutting of the intensified continuity variety. King's background as a TV director does not differentiate him positively or negatively, since the televisual style has taken over mainstream filmmaking over the past couple of decades. There was a New Year's Eve montage through the snow that I thought was well-handled because it wasn't overblown.

- Narratively, the first hour was quite cinematic in adhering to the 3 act structure: 1st act (1/4 of film) (set-up); 2nd Act (1/2 of film) (rising drama); 3rd Act (1/4) (denouement). There is a major turning point an hour in, which is typical of Hollywood narrative. But then the film does begin to feel like a television narrative and is very loose for its last near hour and a half. This isn't inherently a flaw, but it does seem like it is neither tight and economical nor relaxed and character-driven, since the episodes and drama are very rushed and forced. And the conclusion is very quick for such an epic length.

- Ideologically, there is not much to add that hasn't been discussed. Yes, it is a Hollywood consumer product, and yes, there is a sexist dimension to the backlash against this. Other contradictions can be listed. What struck me was the film's sexual explicitness was combined with a simplistic view of sexuality (the Miranda-Steve subplot is pretty embarrassing). Perhaps King could have consulted Dan Savage as co-writer.

- Finally, the success and debate around the film is the most intriguing and at the same time boring aspect. The film opened here on Thursday, and with the Friday holiday, will certainly have a huge opening weekend. It is playing at 4 screens at the Co-ex multiplex here and every screening today was sold out. There is also mass advertising on television. Does this really say anything about the current social zeitgeist? Maybe, and we'll surely have lots of writing, both popular and academic, to explain the phenomenon. It's a cultural marker, to be sure, and more significant than Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and most other blockbusters. But it's also depressing that this is what passes as mainstream feminist (or is it post-feminist?) discourse.

- There's a discussion of the film over at Slate that is worth checking out.

This Week

Opening this week at Cinecube is the 2005 film The King.
Starting Tuesday is the Taiwnese Film Festival at the Seoul Cinematheque, featuring films by Hou Hsaio-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee, Tasi Ming-Liang and others. The schedule is here. Nothing on the site yet about English subtitles.

There is the Seoul International Film Festival from June 5-11. The schedule and description of the films is here.

And the Seoul LGBT festival, whose website is here. Unfortunately, the English section of the site does not seem to have any information.