It Might Get Loud

With It Might Get Loud Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, The First Year) has made his best documentary film yet, a skilfully edited biographical triptych which brings together the stories, insights, and musical talents of guitar legends Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), The Edge (U2), and Jack White (The White Stripes). The film is a searching and intelligent exploration of the artistic process as it has unfolded for each of these very different personalities. There is no mindless genuflection before their talents, only real analysis of their development in the context of their times, circumstances, and dispositions. Nor is there any of the gratuitous exposure of emotional extremes and/or scandalous episodes we normally encounter with this genre. Psychological revelation remains riveted to the point; every aspect of life, from early influences through periods of self-doubt to moments of sudden illumination remain entirely within the orbit of the artistic goal, which brings a sort of literary unity to the project as a whole. The three meet, discuss influences and approaches, swap anecdotes and jam together, but the real genius of the film is in its careful blend of each man's separate story, told in his own words and shot with great attention to the aesthetic elements that accompany any artistic trajectory. The camera is sensitive to atmosphere, to aspects of longing and nostalgia, to the seductive beauty of the instrument itself. From the opening shot of Jack White constructing a home-made guitar out of a bit of wood, some wire, and a coke bottle on the porch of a Tennessee farmhouse, to the improvised performance of In My Time of Dying towards the end, the film delivers scene after scene of fascinating and sometimes (for music lovers) ecstatic material - Jack composing and performing an original song on camera, or leaving smears of blood on his guitar; The Edge describing artistic revelation in terms of trees, of the importance of jumping off into the unknown; Jimmy being interviewed on British television as a boy interested in biological research, playing air guitar to Link Wray; fantastic clips of Zeppelin, of Top of the Pops in the sixties, of U2 in a sea of thousands. Each is located in his early environment - Jimmy as an art student in 60's London, The Edge as a schoolboy in depressed 70's Dublin, and Jack haunting broken-down rock-averted hip-hop Detroit; each describes his growing addiction to music, the seizing upon new sounds, the development of a personal aesthetic rooted in cultural conditions, and the near fetishizing of the object of the guitar, conceived so differently by all three. It is the sheer range of approach covered by these artists that becomes more and more apparent; Jimmy's attitude is frankly erotic, joyful, totally living at every point; The Edge pursues a more redemptive angle - he speaks of searching and belief, of trying to make sense of a senseless environment; Jack is the embodiment of a sort of seething punk-energy, a defiance, and a refusal: when you become satisfied, he says, you just die. Statements like this one are rendered more definitive by their contrasts, so that we really see the stylistic development of each artist in a kind of relief, distinct, and yet complementary, resonant with a sense of shared passion. It's an illuminating film, elegant and coherent, with as much to say about artistic commitment generally as about its famous subjects in particular. And the music is just - sublime.

Excerpt from a poem by Philip Larkin

"If I were called
To construct a religion
I should make use of water"

from Water

Land's End 2

SFJFF 29: Defamation

Defamation is a brilliant and irreverent documentary film which should receive a lot of critical attention and distribution - but probably won't. Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir's fifth documentary focuses on the politically radioactive issue of anti-semitism and how it is understood today by Jews in Israel, Europe and the US. His seemingly unlimited access to ADL director Abe Foxman alone is worth the price of admission, but his enquiry ranges from New York to Auschwitz to Jerusalem to Moscow, as he interviews controversial heavyweights from both sides of the debate, including veteran Israeli peace-activist Uri Avnery, recently defrocked scholar Norman Finkelstein, anti-AIPAC crusaders Walt and Mearsheimer, Israeli Minister in Charge of Anti-Semitic Affairs Isaac Herzog, and British professor David Hirsch as well as rabbis in Moscow and Kiev, Israeli high school kids on their first trip outside Israel - to Auschwitz, and his grandmother in Jerusalem, whose comical opinions about non-Israeli Jews are the most stereotypically anti-semitic of the entire film. What is so extraordinary about all these interviews is the accomplished way in which Shamir draws his subjects out; with his combination of compassion, friendly irreverence, and a willingness to listen, knowing when to speak and when to shut up, he completely disarms everybody he meets, which for the armed personnel of this issue may prove discomfiting. Even background music, which is the sort of carefree jingle we associate with America's Funniest Videos or March of the Penguins works effortlessly behind the scenes to puncture every doom-laden thought bubble before it can get off the ground, and for this subject, taking in as it does centuries of persecution, the horrors of Auschwitz and Birkenau, sixty years of traumatized recollection and the grim determination to never forget, that is no mean feat. What Shamir manages to do is to insert a grain of yeast into the unleavened bread which is his ethnic legacy - not to belittle his people's suffering, but to question its continuing sinister effects on the Jewish psyche and body politic.

Foxman comes over as something of a buffoon, but he is not demolished, and there is no malice in the portrait; similarly with his various accolites and affiliates, like ADL members Harvey and Suzanne Prince, who are at worst presented as somewhat misguided but well-meaning aunts and uncles. There are revealing interviews with other members on a trip to the Babi Yar memorial site in Russia, who speak of Israel as their insurance policy. Without Israel, one woman opines, there isn't a safe Jew in the world. Such fears seem exaggerated in light of earlier scenes in which Shamir has combed ADL records for evidence of recent anti-semitic acts in the US and come up with nothing more alarming than a handful of complaints about insensitivity to Jewish holidays on the part of employers.

More poignant is the coverage of the high school students on their trip to Auschwitz, youngsters who feel guilty for not having any feelings about the site; who lay stranded in their hotel rooms after dinner because they have been instructed by secret service agents in attendance on the dangers awaiting Jews in the streets of Warsaw - in 2008. In one revealing episode, a teacher wonders if the death industry that is Jewish education in the horrors of its past has gone too far: we perpetuate death, he says, and that's why we will never become a normal people - we live too much in it. At which serendipitous juncture, a guide interrupts the interview to deliver a short reprimand about sitting on a memorial where 20 people died. By the time the children experience their first feelings of shock and horror, we wonder with Shamir what is served by this education in hate and how far the students have been manipulated. One girl spoke of a desire to kill. Perhaps it is a legitimate response - but what purpose does it serve?

The film veers into the political rapids with its coverage of Finkelstein, the de Paul University professor whose career has been derailed by determined opponents. Finkelstein's views run counter to the ADL position and are sharply critical of Israel; his book The Holocaust Industry is a blistering indictment of Israel's cynical misuse of the holocaust to further its own ends which, as the son of holocaust survivors himself, he bitterly condemns. He is thus positioned as Foxman's opposite number, and the terms of the debate are defined. Either charges of anti-semitism are cynically deployed against legitimate criticism of the Israeli state (Finkelstein), or criticism of Israel is a cover for the new anti-semitism (Foxman). Scholars Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who have been accused of anti-semitism since the publication of their book The Israel Lobby, enter the fray at an oblique angle, claiming that the efforts of the lobby in Washington to steer policy decisions are ultimately harmful to Israel, which is becoming an armed camp hysterical with issues of security, as well as harmful to Americans. David Hirsch is the only speaker at the ADL annual conference to mention the occupation of Palestine, the longest illegal occupation in history at 40+ years and counting, for which he is roundly condemned by all present, and compared to a battered woman, and, finally, Uri Avnery weighs in with his view that fears of anti-semitism are bullshit, that American Jews are scared of their own shadows, poking around like Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass, looking for anti-semites behind every tree.

This is pretty bracing stuff, and it is clear where Shamir's sympathies lie - which is to say, they are with his people, but not with those who wish his people to be forever conditioned by the horrors of the past. That he manages to communicate this with humor and compassion is a small miracle. His delightful personality brings with it much needed light and air to dark and forbidding territory, and if there are ears to hear it, his message is one of hope, for normalcy, for a future Jewish identity unconditioned by the legacy of exceptionalism, vigilance, and fear. It will be interesting to see how this film fares in our cutthroat world of media-control and special interests.

SFJFF 29: I am Von Hofler, Variation on Werther

In 1983, Hungarian media artist Peter Forgacs established the Private Photo and Film Archive Foundation in Budapest, from which he has created 15 documentary films in a series called Private Hungary. Each film assembles old photographs and home movie footage and combines them with Forgacs' own video segments and interviews in a loosely woven montage which chronicles a life. I am Von Hofler is the story of Tibor Von Hofler, dilettante, chemist, amateur filmmaker, and spoiled son and heir to the estate of well-known industrialist Jakob Von Hofler. Video interviews with the 103 year-old Tibor and segments of his 9.5mm home-movie footage are curiously combined with bits of a 1975 film about Werther, Goethe's famous sorrowful literary character, who was supposedly modelled on Tibor's great-great grandfather. The whole is accompanied by translated narrative, much of it in the form of letters between family members, lovers, and friends. It is a peculiar, original, and subjective approach to history, which speaks via aural/visual disconnects and surrealistic combinations and overlays to aspects of life and character not usually found in historical documentary. The catalogue blurb mentions scenes of Tibor jauntily playing piano as the mother of his only son is heard pleading for money, of erotic photos combined with stern letters from his mother, and of Tibor and friends enjoying holiday time on a lake while his aunt describes conditions in the ghetto. I would add to this the even more remarkable spectacle of young Werther trying to drown himself in a plastic bag full of water edited together with ancient movie footage of a lady being spanked (hard, with a stick) in the garden, as Tibor's abandoned fiancee (he left her three days before the wedding) heaps scorn upon his head.

There is footage of public events, of private funerals, of the dead bodies of his parents, of his infant son playing in a meadow of tall grass, of swimming and climbing and dancing and eating and taking showers: Von Hofler was, among other things, an assiduous chronicler of his own life long before Forgacs came along. But the picture that floats to the surface of this streaming, impressionistic facade is of a strangely disconnected, selfish, frivolous man who cared little for his family and even less for our opinion. The film is compelling anyway, for its air of nonconformity, its strangeness, and perhaps also for the voyeuristic sense of pleasure we experience when people we don't necessarily admire continue to show us who they are.

SFJFF 29: The Wedding Song

In The Wedding Song Karin Albou casts a lingering, sensual eye on the Sephardic roots she glossed in her first feature, La Petite Jerusalem. Her second film is a story of friendship between two teenaged girls whose families live side by side in Tunis during World War II. Nour is Moslem and Myriam Jewish, but they inhabit a harmonized cultural landscape where Jews and Moslems move through one another's lives with ease, sharing space in the hammam, in the market, at the wells and in the courtyards of their crumbling but still beautiful dwellings. The rituals of domestic life are lovingly filmed and saturated with authentic color and detail; there is a pronounced emphasis on the feminine, including frank exploration of budding sexuality and of ordinary physical intimacy, but the film ultimately fails to deliver much more than a loose collection of stereotypes, as each character proceeds to conform to the simplified cultural paradigms we are already familiar with. Myriam is educated, Nour is illiterate and credulous, her fiance Khaled is a narrow-minded Islamist whose head is filled with unsophisticated bigotries; both girls are fabulously innocent, completely subject to the wills of their parents and (soon enough) their husbands. No doubt there are truths to be found in these conventional forms, but the story which is their logical outcome is too predictable and even sentimental, which is a pity for a film that is in other respects quite bold.

Briefly stated, the story hinges on the fissure that opens in the girls' idealized relationship when the Nazis enter Tunis in 1942 and foment racial hatred there. There are flickers of the complex historical situation which precedes this period, the legacy of French colonial rule in North Africa and the ways in which it impacted Jews and Arabs differently, but such themes are quickly dropped. The seismic world events which are the story's immediate context are so dimly imagined it is as if they are cardboard fixtures at the back of the stage in what feels like the school play. The overall impression is of a culturally sensitive but politically unsophisticated thinker at work, whose sensibilities and talents would be better showcased in less dramatic and - for world history - less critical contexts.

The treatment of Islam is more nuanced, and falls in with Albou's general observations about Moslem-Jewish co-operation; it is Nour's encounter with one of the many pro-Judaic verses in the Qu'ran which prompts her final reconciliation with her friend. But such an ending can really only satisfy the sentimentalists among us. When Albou wakes up to some of life's more intriguing complexities, and does not look to cataclysmic world events to provide her dramatic openings, but trusts in her aesthetics, she could make something really interesting.

Quote: Gaston Bachelard

"To love an image is always to illustrate a love"
from Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, 1942

Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher

Translated by Baudelaire and Mallarme, celebrated by Gaston Bachelard, and interpreted by filmmaker and critic Jean Epstein, Edgar Allan Poe has always been more esteemed, more beloved, in France than in his native land. The SF Film Society's last-minute decision to screen Epstein's La Chute de la Maison Usher alongside Watson and Webber's short American version gave us an inspired lesson in contrasts. Both films are avant-garde interpretations made in 1928, but Watson and Webber's film, with its sharp angles and effects, clashing slices of blacks and whites, multiple exposures, heavily made-up actors and art-deco sets couldn't have been further from the essence of Poe's haunted and dreamlike meditations. Epstein's beautiful film, on the other hand, seemed to offer itself as the medium through which Poe's spirit might speak - and what could be more apropos of its subject than that?

Poe was never very interested in the nuts and bolts of life. His territory was always Death, not the fact of it, but the ongoing experience of it, which influence kept him magnetized to movements of his unconscious, to the ambiguous figures of his imagination, to the symbolic, the dialectic, and, ultimately, to the static, melancholic vision of unity in which his love was forever dissolved. For Poe, such a vision was Beauty itself, Beauty as the sign of Death in the soul of the dreamer, or the artist. Like the anima, she was always feminine, and like the mother who died when he was still a boy, she was forever young, unchanging (despite the various characters in which he reincarnates her soul) and unattainable. Epstein's film conforms to this oneiric sensibility with its haunted, windswept, cavernous interiors, its vast curtains of billowing silk, calligraphic winter trees, pale, dripping wax, wide spirals of dusty stairs, mist, smoke, and water. The filmmaker combines as many as seven of Poe's stories, and his Roderick Usher is compelled to finish an Oval Portrait of his wife Madeline despite her succumbing to a wasting illness that advances with each brushstroke. This Orphic hymn to art's fascination with death is Poe's love letter to his lost mother, developed by Epstein with tailored sensitivity, as he weaves about the dead-undead Madeline a gorgeous visual spell, a gown of diaphanous white tulle which streams from her head and floats behind her coffin on the lake. And just as the film's conjuring effect is uncannily synchronous with Poe's themes, so the silence of this silent film is curiously well suited to its subject, achieving a positive formal status entirely unlike the technological limitation with which we normally associate it. Limitation - like loss - achieves in this film its opposite pole under the influence of artistic compression. Death reaches its far shore and becomes, magically, positively charged, a reversal typical again of Poe himself, that water-gazer.

Roderick's sensitivity to sound extends the application of the silent motif; his ears are tuned to the heartbeat in the coffin in the crypt across the lake; grosser sounds begin to snap his nerves like the strings of the abandoned guitar which break one by one as Madeline stirs. When the suit of armor comes crashing to the floor and the smoke from the enormous hearth replaces the mist of the lake we know we are in a possible-impossible realm of inversion, where fire and water, living and dead are approaching some sort of supernatural betrothal, and the husk of human limitation is cast aside. It sounds so out of all proportion now that I write it, but this exquisite elegy defies reality, giving us not images of Poe's ideas, but perfect correspondences.

Land's End

Joseph Cornell's Dreams

For 20 years Exact Change have been publishing interesting works by surrealists, avant-garde writers and artists, expressionists, cubists, dada poets and others. The covers alone (30 of which are collected on the back page of this summer's issue of Bookforum) are a tantalizing selection of early 20th-century painting, collage, photography and illustration; titles range from Unica Zurn, Denton Welch and Kurt Schwitters to 'first surrealist' Lautreamont, Fernando Pessoa, Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud and Gerard de Nerval and include the written works of Pablo Picasso, Leonora Carrington, Georgio de Chirico, Morton Feldman, and John Cage, to name a few. Joseph Cornell's Dreams is the fruit of editor Catherine Corman's extensive reading in Cornell's diaries, currently housed in the Smithsonian Archive. The title is precise - 116 pages of this 145-page volume are directly transcribed dreams, dating from 1944 through 1972; some are just two or three lines long, so it is a quick read. There is very little in the way of editorial interpretation, which is probably a blessing, just a modest guide to themes, and some very interesting appendices detailing the influence of Pascal and Descartes on Cornell's 'philosophy of dreaming'. The dreams themselves are a bit of a mixed bag, though read together they are completely disarming, and if you love Cornell's work you will want to read them. Some are enchanting, and the seeds of his work are plainly visible in all; many feature just one or two arrested or nearly motionless images; there are lots of windows and doors, or rooms or boxes, antiques or old-fashioned objects, books of old photographs, birds, toys and dolls. Here's a selection of some of the best;

5/11/47 - window for icebox + seeing in basement of neighbors house 2 pet cockatoos in cage dimly illuminated (house dark)

9/28/51 - visit to museum where curator showed me a large carved wooden horse the cover of which came off to reveal inside a porcelain set of spice jars ...

9/13/52 - an old-fashioned wagon from which a middle-aged woman in a blue and black printed blouse was in the act of tumbling from the frame of the door into the sea after a pair of scissors ...

10/31/61 - pulling into a station + noting the interior of a large old-fashioned school - large glass case with stuffed birds or animals - old-fashioned desks - no people ... by the shore of a body of water - strangely wonderful (or vice versa) atmosphere - a group of older girls + some baby lambs - something about the girls picking up the baby lambs ...

11/18/62 - cooking custard with skin - dropping it - retrieved by a young man from the floor ... in the dream girls were in their stone uniforms

12/18/65 - dreaming out of windows ...

3/28/68 - elderly, revered woman poet being entertained in her home ... juggling rubber balls

5/14/68 - "CAPRICE" in large black letters on a board in a kind of impromptu open-air booth for checking wraps, etc ...

11/17/68 - river or large body water fishes trapped pointing straight up ...

1/21/71 - 2 old rocks one most curious shape 2 tiny ceramic animals came tumbling out as though the ages had hewn them out a shelter ...

2/29/72 - digging (with hands) into white sands to unearth a bunch of rusty fish-hooks ...

Muni depot b/w 22nd and 23rd

Nuri Bilge Ceylan: 'Three Monkeys'

When Robert Lowell said a poem is an event, not the record of an event, he was referring to a sort of self-sufficiency that can belong to a work in any medium - provided that work really flies, and is not simply an exercise in form. When a film achieves this state, it doesn't need to be 'about' anybody or anything, though it might possess that dimension - it is a phenomenon in its own right. Turkish photographer-turned-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan achieves this sort of phenomenal effect with his latest feature Three Monkeys. The film is a masterpiece, winning for Ceylan Best Director at Cannes in 2008. His earlier films are beautiful to watch, and they scatter before us some lovely and mysterious visual portents of what is to come, but Three Monkeys just transcends expectations altogether. Every element of the film is flawlessly synchronized - sound, light, color, scene, character and narrative all reinforce one another in variation, reprise and counterpoint. There are just four characters, woven together in a tightly braided ring which closes in infinitesimal degrees of action and reaction toward a conclusion which has in retrospect a strong whiff of the inevitable, of having proceeded from its postulates, as literary critic Lawrence Powell would say, in the same way a Shakespearean tragedy proceeds. When aspiring politician Servet is involved in a hit-and-run accident on the eve of the election, he asks his driver Eyup to take the rap in exchange for an unspecified sum. Eyup's wife Hacer and teenaged son Ismail are left exposed and vulnerable by his detention for a nine-month spell in prison, and when Hacer begins a short affair with Eyup's old boss, the characters are realigned according to their fate in a slow, deliberate uncoiling which is quietly devastating to watch. These are people doomed to struggle inside the malignant course which is their destiny, a spiralling shape like the unbroken peel of an orange that not only swerves through acts of adultery, deception and murder, but even hints at a sort of eternal return that extends to people generally. It is a shape that is coaxed out of darkness into light, and its final bend into eternity doesn't arrive until the penultimate scene, in which a twist of the original set-up is inflicted upon a character as peripheral to Eyup's life as Eyup is to Servet.

The faces of these tormented souls are microscopically observed; this is a story told in beads of sweat, in buds of day-old stubble and quickened crows-feet, in narrowed eyes and expressions of suspicion, regret, alarm, surprise, appeal, resignation, nausea and shame ... it is a literary treatment of the suffering human animal, an exercise in observation reminiscent of great Russian novels. For cinematic antecedents, Tarkovsky comes immediately to mind, especially the interiors of Stalker, though Ceylan cites the Japanese Ozu as his favorite director. The film makes use of super-high contrasts bled of color and reinfused with one or two color patches close on the spectrum; a typical scene would have an otherworldly hue altogether, of softened blacks and creams, with a touch of pale blue and perhaps some green in the waves, or of dense shadows with flares of silver which bend and pool up around hard edges. In an interview with The Guardian, Ceylan speaks of his preponderance of reds, but I suppose like a poem the film is open to different readings, because it was the blues and greens and even occasional hints of yellow I noticed and loved. This use of color and light says something important which is nevertheless difficult to articulate. It arouses a response, a recognition which originates just below the rational, as color in paintings does; it references meanings which have to do with our silent experience of life, our felt experience, of sadness, or stasis, or danger. Sometimes light is used in very purposeful ways - there is a remarkable scene in which Ismail's long-dead brother re-emerges from light into form, as if death is a landscape of light so dazzling it renders the dead invisible by over-exposure. But its deployment is more often a matter of suggestion, of oblique understandings which take place on levels of instinct and emotion.

Ceylan uses sound in similar ways, inserting isolated aural signals into deep chasms of intimate silence. The effect of this minimalist approach is to delineate a psychological angle relative to the moment, such as the way in which memories are formed, or the way in which time distorts experience and vice versa. When Hacer is driving home with Servet for the first time, the words he speaks during one part of the journey are superimposed over a scene of the two of them sitting in silence some moments earlier. This slight aural disconnect illustrates in the most understated way imaginable how we can experience one another in the moment and in memory, and how understanding of events can be delayed. Sound effects in this dreamlike narrative are never arbitrary or incidental. They are divided between the intimate (squeaking doors, rustling fabric, running water) and the universal, atmospheric, or extensive (locomotive wheels, wind in grass, rain, thunder) with very little in between, a variation on the extremes of black and white we see in the visual register.

Such contrasts serve again to locate this small knot of characters within a sort of grand neo-mythic frame. They are highlighted, amplified, isolated, picked out against a stark elemental backdrop like figures in a Greek play. The film's final scene makes this explicit, as Eyup stands in tiny silhouetted human form against a gorgeous moving panorama of waves, thunderclouds, light-spokes and rain. There is a static quality to this image which refers back to the filmmaker's origins as photographer, and it is precisely in these origins that I think the film as a whole derives its genetic force, because photographic and visual art contain the qualities of self-sufficiency, of finality, and of the absolute that are distinguishing features of this film. Three Monkeys is definitely an event, an experience both voluptuous (in its surfaces) and austere (in its tone), and because it exercises the microcosmic and macrocosmic imagination simultaneously, we might spend a lifetime tracing its mythic themes in one of its grains of sand.

Quote: Osip Mandelstam

"The word is a bundle and meaning sticks out of it in various directions"

Ocean Beach