The Mission

'There is a pain so utter': a poem by Emily Dickinson

There is a pain - so utter -
It swallows substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance -
So Memory can step
Around - across - upon it -
As one within a Swoon -
Goes safely - where an open eye -
Would drop Him - Bone by Bone.

Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle 1 - 5

Whatever you may think of Matthew Barney's curious post-industrial aesthetic, his predilection for artificiality, deformity, grandeur, and fabulous shoes, his Cremaster Cycle (of five films) is an extraordinary cinematic experiment which must be viewed on the big screen to be appreciated, certainly, but also to be seen at all, since none of the films are available on DVD. With this in mind, note dates and times of The Roxie's upcoming screenings of all five films plus Barney's latest De Lama Lamina, a mechanical-erotic-carnivalesque piece referencing the crisis of deforestation in Brazil, Afro-Brazilian deities and our own local hero Julia Butterfly Hill, and featuring the music of Arto Lindsay playing live at the Carnivale de Salvador in Bahia. I have only seen Cremaster 1 and Cremaster 5; the whole cycle is said to develop in much greater depth and symbolic complexity the themes sketched in these two films, themes which have mostly to do with differentiation of the sexes, or an imagined blissful state before differentiation takes place; the struggle to return to this state of bliss before the testes of the male are fully descended (something effected by the cremaster muscle - hence the title), which drama is enacted in a variety of rituals including sports-themed contests, operas, enactments of Celtic myth, Busby-Berkeley style musicals and beauty pageants, with Manx giants, queens, magicians, air-hostesses, Mormons, Masons, opera singers, murderers, satyrs, and water nymphs, not to mention Norman Mailer (as Harry Houdini), Richard Serra (as architect of Solomon's Temple and the Chrysler Building), and Ursula Andress (as the original 'Queen of Chain'); the delirious and bizarre array of surreally-linked objects, costumes and gestures featured therein are so out-of-this-world, so unusual and delightful to contemplate it is tempting to just fill pages with lists of them, which would be easier than writing a serious analysis and something most reviewers of Cremaster tend to do. It's inevitable - the sheer proliferation of symbolic images in these films just knocks you out - but Barney has clearly meditated at great length on the meaning of his narrative segments and their symbolic manifestations, as evidenced by his emphasis on shapes that recur throughout, on themes of ascension and descension which are continuously and variously developed, themes of biological and sexual necessity, of struggle, and circularity, and return ... what we see unfolding before us is essentially the imaginal, metaphoric dreamworld of an artist contemplating his own - and I mean this in a nice way - navel, which is to say, the real ground zero in his struggle with biological imperative as fate. Cremaster 1, shortest film in the cycle at 41 minutes, establishes the gender-differentiation theme with its evocation of pre-differentiated balance or wholeness, envisioned as a state of bliss choreographed by an indolent blonde goddess who exists simultaneously in two airships which float above the Bronco stadium in Boise, Idaho, Barney's hometown; her arrangements and rearrangements of grapes correspond to the movements of a huge synchronised chorus of girls on the blue astroturf below. It's a light, bright, musical piece with only the slightest hint of danger at the edges, easily grasped, despite its trademark peculiarities, because the central metaphor has not yet undergone the intense diversification that marks the rest of the cycle. Cremaster 5 is darker, grander, and more romantic, a fascinating contemplation of descent into duality as a form of transcendence itself, a visual and aural feast filmed in the twilit city of Budapest, in the Hungarian State Opera House, and in the Gellert Baths, starring Ursula Andress as the black-clad Queen of Chain, a sort of operatic diva whose tortured memory of her lost lover, played by Barney in various guises, re-enacts his ritual suicide and symbolic descent. Scenes of great beauty and startling originality which are frankly astonishing to behold, accompanied by a full operatic libretto (in Magyar) and score from the brilliant Jonathon Bepler, whose original music accompanies the entire series, make this one of the most unusual and memorable things I've ever seen onscreen. More than one critic has compared the cycle to Wagner's Ring, and Barney's manipulation of grand themes, magisterial landscapes of the mind and bold, heavy, myth-inflected images which develop in some sort of absolute time, aeons or possibly eternity itself, are almost Wagnerian in scope. To be able to achieve such a thing and to root it firmly in our own age, which he does primarily through his modern, weird aesthetic, is quite a feat - if I had not seen Cremaster 5, I wouldn't have believed such a thing possible without it collapsing into a bombastic mess. The ironies implied in staging full mythic themes (complete with gods and heroes) in contemporary terms are acknowledged as visual and musical refrains which gird the films against ridicule, but the irony is delicate and goes nowhere near cynicism - quite the opposite - Cremaster is unapologetically grand and passionate stuff. It really has to be seen to be believed. Series starts Friday, July 30 at the Roxie. Here's the trailer -

SFJFF 30: 'Arab Labor' and 'Sayed Kashua - Running Scared'

We are too politically correct in the US to tolerate a sitcom on primetime like Sayed Kashua's Arab Labor, but it's a pity, because laughing this hard at our thorniest, nastiest race-related problems would probably do us all a lot of good and - more's to the point - foster greater understanding across racial divides. Kashua is this year's recipient of the SFJFF's Freedom of Expression Award, and as an Arab-Israeli writer who gets non-stop flak in his country while at the same time creating one of the funniest, most controversial and yet widely loved television shows on Israeli television, a show which dives straight into the sticky heart of Arab-Israeli relations, he more than deserves it. When you watch the sitcom, which is flat-out hilarious, fearlessly probing the hypocrisies and prejudices that define Arab-Israeli relations at the mainstream level, and then see the documentary Sayed Kashua - Forever Scared by Dorit Zimbalist which follows Kashua's trials in Israeli society over a period of 7 years, it is an astonishing, devastating experience, an incredible double-bill which runs the emotional gamut from hilarity and farce through irony, absurdity, hatred, misunderstanding, recognition, enlightenment, confusion, exasperation and defiance all the way to outright fear: that Forever Scared tag is no joke. Sayed Kashua is positioned between communities that, at their (easily visible) extremes threaten him with collaboration on the one hand and transfer on the other. Reviews in Ha'aretz (for which he writes a weekly column himself) have variously decried him as "a traitor and a bad writer" "an affront to the Arab image" and "a rotting corpse"; the Arabic weekly Fasl Al Maqal has publicly demanded the termination of the series; Kashua has been forced to leave his hometown in nothern Israel after the publication of his second novel which was harshly critical of Arabs, only to move to a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem in which he feels extremely cautious and out of place ... the reality of life for this brilliant, fearless writer, who continues to stick his neck out despite being racked by anxiety about his own and his family's tenuous position in Israeli society is beyond 'tense' in the way we understand race relations to be in this country. The guy deserves a medal. His consistently controversial books, statements, columns, speeches, etc. are the work of a man who is outraged to his core, who longs for normalcy in a society which rejects him for not taking clear sides and can only embrace him abstractly through book sales and TV ratings; it is a sort of modern tragedy, a double-bind which comes to us as a painful illustration of what life can be like for people who are prepared to break conventional molds. This is no 'pet Arab' in Israeli life; Kashua's criticism of the occupation is relentless, his use of irony as a weapon against Israeli platitudes quite startling - see the quote below - and yet he has clearly suffered at the hands of his own community as well, a suffering which seems rooted in his relationship with his father, though the documentary only hints at this dimension. His novels, the 2002 Dancing Arabs, which catapulted him to fame, and 2004's Let it Be Morning, both written in Hebrew, are probably more forthcoming than the documentary on this score. Both are available in English. The latter is not available in Arabic.

Below is a quote from the film, presumably an extract from one of his columns. The tone of arch cynicism could not be further from the delightful, outrageously funny repartee of Arab Labor, except in one crucial respect - its fearlessness. It's ironic, given the level of fear he is living with perpetually - but Kashua is a master of irony. See the SFJFF site for showtimes and more details. Sayed Kashua - Running Scared plays with one episode of last season's Arab Labor, just to get you in the picture, and Arab Labor: Season 2 gives us three episodes of the current season's shows straight from the editing room. Don't miss them - Arab-Israeli sitcoms are not exactly mainstream entertainment in these parts.


"You the Israeli people are fucking us, killing us, slaughtering us, hating, abusing, conquering, and raising countless new suicide bombers. And still, I love you, I'm crazy about you, can't do without you. If only the Palestinians watched movies about the holocaust, if only they could understand what a ghetto is, what it means to be without freedom ... But the Palestinians are an obtuse people, who refuse to understand. I know them personally, and I can tell you they refuse to understand us, understand that the settlements, the occupation, and denying them their human rights are an essential part of preserving the life of the Jewish people. Stubborn people who refuse to understand that the tanks, checkpoints, mortars and soldiers are part of the most moral army in human history. Fact - there are no gas chambers. They should say thank you and shut up, thank God they weren't Nazi victims, and be thankful they didn't suffer the holocaust"

Sayed Kashua (translated from Hebrew)

SFJFF 30: 'Budrus'

The international documentary team of Julia Bacha and Ronit Avni are back (after 2006's Encounter Point) with another compassionate film about ordinary people dealing with extraordinary conditions - Budrus - a film which has already won prizes in San Francisco and Berlin, and special mentions at the Tribeca and Madrid festivals. When the Israeli state began bulldozing olive orchards on Palestinian land around the village of Budrus in the West Bank in preparation for construction of another section of the 'security fence', local residents organized in non-violent resistance against troops in an attempt to save their village, their land, and their way of life. Local organizer Ayed Morrar brought together Fatah and Hamas affiliates in a style of resistance that has proved one of the most effective in the struggle against state misuse of power everywhere, and when Budrus villagers' daily struggle attracted the attention of Israeli peacemakers as well, activists from both sides of the border joined forces to create a wall of joint resistance it is an inspiration to see. Cameras capture the entire story from inception through crisis to resolution, and this footage is edited together with interviews with Morrar and his family (his 15 year-old daughter organized the women), Hamas organizer Ahmed Awwad, Israeli activists, internationals, troops and border police, as well as clips of Israeli news shows covering the situation with talking heads and opinions reflecting the state position. But its impossible not to cheer for the ordinary people in this struggle. Compliments to the Jewish Film Festival for, once again, screening films which challenge the dominant trend in thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially after last year's fracas over the Rachel Corrie film. If you want to support their doing so, and need to hear some good news from the Middle East, news about people and not ideals, positions, statements, rebuttals, etc. - or worse still, violence and casualties - go to see this wonderful film and see for yourself what people who have no political power can do when they organize. Here's the trailer:

SFJFF 30: 'You Won't Miss Me'

I haven't seen New York writer-director Ry Russo Young's award-winning short Marion and first feature Orphans, but her second feature You Won't Miss Me (showing at the Castro in next week's Jewish Film Festival) is such a jewel I can't wait to see everything else she's done. The film stars Stella Schnabel (daughter of artist Julian) as the troubled, complex, provocative Shelly Brown, adrift in contemporary New York, lurching between one-night-stands, failed indie-film and theatre auditions, seedy parties, local gigs and a disastrous weekend in Atlantic City, after a spell in the local mental health facility, where she was taken by her (terminally absent) mother after a violent outburst. It's familiar territory, but Russo Young's perspective is brilliantly original, intimate, and contemporary, with taped voiceovers looping between scenes shot variously in HD, Super 8, DV, or 16mm which correspond to Shelly's different states of mind; the style ranges from romantic, grainy, slow-motion footage which conjures an imaginal realm she struggles (and fails) to realize, to hand-held video scenes (of coke sniffing, or arguing in a hotel room, or drunken conversation with dull, disheveled boys) which look like something you might see on YouTube. Schnabel's improvisational acting techniques dovetail elegantly with this approach, as do themes of interiority, personal identity expanding and contracting according to inconsistent dreams, moods, drug-states, etc. Schnabel and Russo Young together have achieved something which is stylistically gritty and immediate and thematically quite sophisticated, something to do with fantasy and reality and their intersection, the way in which we all conspire to act, stage, or otherwise create a reality we can live with, a kind of home movie in which we are, finally, seen and heard and fully expressed. Shelly Brown's home movie is a mash-up derby of fights and dreams of normal love and tawdry collisions with reality - she is so sensitized to failure that her rage pre-empts all her opportunities - but she is consistently real and interesting, and I think this has a lot to do with the way in which she was created and imagined by women. In an exchange last year with Interview's Lena Dunham, the 27 year-old Russo Young described the genesis of the character as a collaboration between her and co-writer Schnabel; together they wrote a biography of Shelly and then proceeded to explore her character in a series of taped interviews in which Schnabel would improvise responses to questions about self-expression, love, ambition, drug-use, identity, etc. These tapes are then used as a foundation for the film itself, and are heard intermittently throughout, a plaintive, flawed, wistful, defiant monologue which echoes in a personal register the interviews between Shelly and her psychiatric advisor, scenes which open and close the film and attempt to define the character from without, or from the system or society's perspective, which we could paraphrase as not belonging. Shelly both accepts and rejects this definition, and she is severely conflicted in other ways as well, but we cleave to her perspective as real, despite its mistakes, its deflections and inflations - perhaps because of them.

It's so exciting to contemplate female characters from this angle, from within. After watching Amber Sealey's brilliant A+D earlier this year, and Andrea Arnold's stunning film Fish Tank, it feels like a new generation of female actors and directors is about to change the way we experience women on screen altogether. It's revolutionary. You Won't Miss Me plays just once in this festival: 7/24 at The Castro. See SFJFF for details. Here's the trailer;

Limantour

Quote: James Hillman

" ... ideas are inseparable from practical actions, and ... theory itself is practice; there is nothing more practical than forming ideas and becoming aware of them in their psychological effects. Every theory we hold practices upon us in one way or another, so that ideas are always in practice and do not need to be put there."

from Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975

Loch Lomond

'Weariness of Men', a poem by Frank Stanford

My grandmother said when she was young
The grass was so wild and high
You couldn't see a man on horseback.

In the fields she made out
Three barns,
Dark and blown down from the weather
Like her husbands.

She remembers them in the dark
Cursing the beasts,
And how they would leave the bed
In the morning,
The dead grass of their eyes
Stacked against her.

from 'YOU' Poems by Frank Stanford

Quote: W.H. Auden

"We are lived by Powers we pretend to understand"