Chris Stroffolino saw The Dreamers, then responded to my two blogs thereon.

 

Ron –

 

I just saw this movie last night. I don't keep up with a lot of contemporary movies that much as of late, but this was recommended by many I respect so thought I'd check it out. So, it was good to read your timely blog comments, which were very helpful to me in terms of my own. There's some things I'm thinking about that you didn't emphasize as much, or that I might have a different take on. For instance, the whole "political backdrop" kind of movie. It's definitely a sub-genre. So, the French 1968 situation lends "color" and "intrigue" and "romance" perhaps to this movie, but what is B's point with it? (aside from the fact, that some of the songs in the soundtrack were not released until after April of 68). I think part of my discomfort with the movie was that it seemed to imply that Matthew, the Leonardo DiCaprio American, was the "normal" narrative filter American through whose eyes we see the "transgressive" French (you speak of this at length so I won't), with that kind of naive fascination (he's no American "hippie" but a mama's boy with an exotic fascination in France largely because of its movies, and perhaps to its politics) that eventually becomes a kind of disgust. Of course, much of this is "strictly personal" – and certainly Isabelle and Theo are not really down with the protests, as they "drop-out" to investigate the triangular personal relationship. Theo's called a "loser" for not being out on the streets enough, and even Matthew comes to criticize Theo, not so much for not being out on the streets, but for the discrepancy between his words and actions. It doesn't seem that Matthew, whose politics are certainly presented as at least as unthought-out as Theo's, is really interested in getting Theo to "put his money where his mouth is" and join the revolution as much as he, like his dad the poet (who Theo, in anger, compares Matt to), is trying to get him to "grow up" and get away from the "transgressive" incestuous relationship (of course, his own largely normative hetero attraction to Isabelle, which started the whole plot anyway, probably plays a factor in this. It does seem to me that there's more homoerotic attraction on Theo's part than on Matthew's but as you say it's never explored much). Of course, the specter of the parents certainly haunts Isabelle, who seems to want, and NEED, to continue the relationship with Theo more than vice versa (Theo does seem troubled by his buddies' calling him a "loser" as well as by Matt calling him a "freak"). She says she'll commit suicide if the parents find out, and of course when the parents find out, they seem rather NON-PLUSSED, and ever so permissively FRENCH, and leave a sum of money (I think it was a check). Yet she decides to to kill herself anyway. Of course, it's at this point where HISTROY intervenes, and knocks on the door, and allows THEO to die his great romantic death (and saves her from the "suicide") for the CAUSE. He's certainly presented as not necessarily noble in this action, but what is Matt's alternative? – TO KISS HIM and say something like "we're about love but not about war." But is that convincing? Not to me – it seems like a platitude and contrasts with his calling Matt and Isabelle "freaks" earlier. So here is Theo (who is either erring on one side – too domestically involved in their black hole version of a "sexual revolution" – or the other side, breaking through the police line and setting off the police brutality) and here is Matt (a kind of tepid embodiment of an Aristotelian mean, but the one we're SUPPOSSED TO identify with). All in all, I find it hard to identify with any of these characters. But what is the moral/political points that B is trying to make? That the folly of the student protests is one with the folly of the relationship of the 3 protagonists? Because of the way the movie ends, it's hard to escape that conclusion. He insufficiently analyzes both the psychological complexities and the political issues of this potentially great scenario. It seems to reduce much of the passion of the 1960s to a few half-baked cliché ridden ill-thought discussions and scenarios (by precocious glamour-seeking kids locked in a fantasy world of movie quotes) the better to dismiss it (in a way this movie trivializes the "sexual revolution" "the personal is the political" and "Paris 1968" almost as much as, say "that 70s show" or remakes of "starsky and hutch" etc do the 70s), as Matt, no doubt, returns to his normal AMERICAN world of being a spectator rather than a spectacle (he probably becomes an accountant). I'm sure I'll have more thought out thoughts later, but I needed to get this off my chest.

 

Chris

 

I concur with a lot of Stroffolino’s points here – he’s totally on target in seeing Michael Pitt’s Matthew as a Leonardo DiCaprio impression & about the trivialization of the sixties, etc.

 

When I used to live in San Francisco in the 1970s, there used to be a cheapo movie theater in Chinatown called The Times that used to show two or three movies per day for just 99 cents. Its genius, tho, depended on how well it paired the movies. I’d love to see The Dreamers paired not with any of the French or American films referenced in it, nor with Last Tango in Paris or Ai No Corrida, the two films of sexual obsession it has so often been compared to, but with a movie that was being filmed in Chicago in 1968 – Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool.

 

Known as one of Hollywood’s great cinemaphotographers (Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, for which he won an Oscar, Bound for Glory, for which he won a second, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Thomas Crown Affair, No Nukes, Studs Lonigan, several of John Sayles’ pictures) and one of film’s most committed political progressives, Wexler had this idea of filming a movie about a television news cameraman initiating a relationship with one of his “subjects” while in Chicago to film the Democratic Convention. The idea was to set the fictional story into the otherwise documentary framework of events. But the convention itself turned into one long police riot & the Democratic Party, already frayed by the abdication of Lyndon Johnson, the anti-war campaign of Eugene McCarthy & the assassination of Robert Kennedy, simply unraveled. So rather than having a simple framing mechanism, Wexler records a movie in which events overwhelm the tale. I haven’t seen Medium Cool since it came out in 1969, but it is available on DVD. I don’t remember the film well enough to say clearly how it contrasts with the project of The Dreamers, but the premise seems so aligned (if inverted, say), it would be fascinating to find out.

Last Thursday we wanted to express solidarity with our neighbors to the north stuck in the blackout, so we decided also to spend the evening in the dark & thus went to the movies. Dirty Pretty Things is an interesting, if imperfect, film, because it’s built around three primary narrative frames. On one hand, this portrait of a Nigerian cabbie who also works the graveyard shift at the desk in a second-tier hotel is a neorealist account of the lives of illegal & quasi-legal immigrants in London. On a second level, the film is a noir thriller that gets off to a running start with an homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation as the hotel clerk discovers what’s plugging up the toilet in room 510. On a third level, one that doesn’t become fully apparent until the final 20 minutes of the picture, Dirty Pretty Things is also a fairy tale.

 

One could argue, I suppose, that there is a fourth one as well, a romance, particularly as the film’s marketing has paid so much attention to the presence of Audrey Tautou, the current It Girl of French cinema following her breakthrough title role in the comedy Amélie. But it’s really Chiwetel Ejiofor who is at the heart of this actor-centered film, a London-raised performer with Nigerian parents best known in the U.S. for the modest role of Ensign Covey in Spielberg’s Amistad. All of these different structures have to integrate themselves & make sense in Ejiofor’s face, with eyes & mouth every bit as expressive as Tautou’s (which is saying something – she’s getting the roles that a generation ago would have been given to Giulietta Masina).

 

This is rather a lot to expect from a film whose writer is best known for having created Who Wants to be a Millionaire? And it’s risky, in that someone who is attracted to neorealism or noir is not necessarily the obvious audience for a fairy tale. Some of the reviews have faulted the film for stepping back from the horrific conclusion toward which the thriller appears to be headed. Yet anyone who remembers director Stephen Frears’ early films, My Beautiful Laundrette or Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, will realize that it is the fairy tale that Frears set out tell in the first place.

 

Narrative cinema is interesting not because Hollywood’s imperialism has denuded the film industries of numerous countries, beginning with our own, but because, when done well, cinema is so efficient with the deployment of narrative devices. The relationship between ensembles of these devices to genre forms is often fascinating to watch – genre is all about expectation – and film’s ability to link these has removed many, tho not all, of the social contexts once reserved for the novel.

 

I think of Zukofsky’s dictum that love is to reason as eyes are to the mind and wonder how that fits into this equation. “Eyes” is in fact the privileged term in Zukofsky’s long critical work Bottom: On Shakespeare, so much so that the index of the Ark Press edition* lists it thus:

 

eye(s), passim, 9-443

 

And Zukofsky, it should be remembered, also published a suite of shorter poems under the title I’s (pronounced eyes). If I follow Zukofsky here, sight plays a unique role among the senses, an odd assertion for the poet who did more than anyone in the 20^th century to reassert the role of sound in verse to be making. It’s as if the three dimensions of the poem were not those of the physical realm but rather time, figured (literally!) through sound, thought articulated through words &, most mysterious of all, sight through which imagination transforms language into action, character, color, the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Bottom is being reissued as volumes III & IV of the Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky, although vol. IV is Celia Zukofsky’s musical arrangement of Shakespeare’s Pericles. The first two volumes are A Useful Art & Le Style Apollinaire.

My blog on film & poetry last Wednesday provoked a lot of thoughtful email. Murat Nemet-Nejat picks up the Godard thread:

Dear Ron,

Your connecting writing with Godard in the cinema is very acute. Godard analyzes (more than visually describes) the nature of writing, writing process itself in some of his movies. The movie which particularly comes to my mind is Les Carabiniers. It starts, I think, with quotes from The Communist Manifesto and is interspersed throughout with letters from the soldiers to their wives, all embodying a dialectics of war. The end of the movie reverses the process into a series of postcards from all over the world, the "fruits" of war as image.

More than any other director, I think, Godard deals with the relationship between words (language) and image, creating a synthesis – the movie essay. Though part of this fusion is Brechtian, it goes beyond that; creates a poetry of the word (as detached text)/the eye. What one experiences in Godard is a visual writing process.

As a poet I am very interested in this Godardian process, from the reversed angle: how to make poetry cinematic (something you believe poetry is not). My poem, "Steps," which will appear in the next issue of Mirage, focuses very much on this impossibility. Green Integers published three weeks ago my long essay, The Peripheral Space of Photography*, which also struggles with the same issues.

In the movie Frida Frida Kahlo comes out, in my opinion, as a bad painter**, exactly for the reason you suggested. In one place it focuses on one of her paintings where two bodies are joined by a heart or arteries or something like that, pointing to her painting "what is in the heart." The movie lives for me when it creates its own images, maybe as parallel images, for example, Frida burning in her bed or the amazing streetcar accident sequence.

My best,

Murat

* The book is Green Integer no. 76, but is not yet listed on the web site. An official announcement should be made this week.

** I don’t think that Murat is suggesting that Kahlo is a bad painter, only that the film presents her as one –consistent with my own earlier theme of misrepresentation. But, before I am flooded with email on this point, I want to be clear that I think Kahlo is one of the dozen or so great masters of the 20^th century. As was her husband, the painter who has probably had the greatest impact on my own poetry.

The representation of art as a process in cinema is a perpetually vexing situation. I was reminded of this as I was watching Frida the other night, an excellent biopic that makes great use of Frida Kahlo’s paintings as primary visual elements in the structure of the film, somewhat reminiscent of the way Kurosawa used Van Gogh’s paintings in Dreams. Yet at the same time, no one in the movie ever seriously discusses painting – the one point at which the film approaches the question is the one cringe-making moment in the script, Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) telling Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek) that “I only paint what I see – you paint what’s in here,” tapping her on the chest.

This in turn recalled the scene in Finding Forrester in which Sean Connery reads the “wonderful” prose of his protégé at the climactic moment & the volume of the musical score rises up to literally drown out the words – this is how we know just how wonderful the prose really is.* From Barfly – think of that title as an adverb – to Naked Lunch, Hollywood has generally done a dreadful job figuring the process of writing. The sanctification of Pablo Neruda in Il Postino is not an improvement, really. Indeed, the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a process that even remotely reminds me of how a poet works is the way in which notebooks are used in some Jean-Luc Godard films from the 1960s.**

The crux of the problem, of course, is that writing is not an inherently “cinematic” activity. Usually it’s solitary and often it’s conducted in utter silence. The writer’s furrowed brow as he/she crosses out a word to insert another is about as “dramatic” as it gets, unless, say, one is involved in something unusual, such as Ginsberg dictating Wichita Vortex Sutra into a tape recorder while tooling around with Orlovsky & Co. in a VW minivan in the American heartland.

In theory, the visual arts should be easier to represent because – hey! – they’re visual. And, in fact, some of the best films about artists have been about painting, such as Basquiat – a film by a painter as well as about one – or Pollock. But, from Dr. Zhivago to The Basketball Diaries, films about poets tend to be about everything but the writing.

There are of course decent documentaries about individual poets, such as the Richard Lerner-Lewis MacAdams production of What Happened to Kerouac? as well as films by poets, from Abigail Child at one end of the spectrum to Paul Auster & Sherman Alexie at the other. At that latter end of the spectrum, at least, any poetic background, post-avant or otherwise, appears to be almost entirely coincidental.

If poetry has become largely “unrepresentable” – or perhaps only “misrepresentable” – from the perspective of at least commercial cinema, it is by no means the only occupation so afflicted. Yet the implications for a practice that has been culturally defined as “significant” & even “romantic” but which can only be indirectly figured cinematically are significant in terms of poetry’s ongoing attempts to create a stable social space for its own activity.

* This in a film with Charles Bernstein as Dr. Simon.

** Godard also pioneered the music-drowns-out-the-dialog technique in Week End, although with a far more Brechtian purpose in mind.