Warning: spoilers abound below.

Rather by accident, no, entirely by accident, I found myself watching what I take to be the most profound film meditation on the meaning of marriage I’ve ever seen, 51 Birch Street, directed by Doug Block on the subject of his parents & their relationship. Like a lot of indie documentarians, Block is one of these guys who wanders around filming everything, so when he starts shooting footage of Mike & Mina & the rest of his family around his parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary, hardly anyone thinks twice about it. As one of his sisters puts it on a “response” film included on the DVD, even when Doug tells them this is going to be a film, their reaction is “this is a really expensive home movie.” At that point in his career, he’s directed just two other films that got to release, neither of them a serious hit, even by documentary standards. One senses that Doug’s father is a little perplexed at this non-career his son seems to have chosen, tho this is underscored by the fact that Doug & his father barely know how to talk to one another. Doug’s real emotional connection is to his mother, Mina, an intense, beautiful woman even as she pushes into her eighties, while his mechanical engineer dad seems almost a stereotype of the distant, aloof parent.

Then three things occur that completely change this not-very-promising drama. First, Mina dies rather suddenly, after a three-week bout of pneumonia. We quickly realize that both Doug and his two older sisters had simply assumed that it would be Mike who went first. They’re not at all sure what this will portend for their father.

He, on the other hand, doesn’t miss a step. Mike takes a trip from his suburban home in Port Washington, NY, to Florida, where, just three months after Mina’s death, he calls the kids to announce that he’s connected up with his old secretary of 40 years ago and that they are now planning to get married.

The kids are completely aghast. Has dad been cheating on their mother? Has he been doing so for 40 years? They’re nowhere through their own grieving processes & suddenly Mike shows up with “Kitty or Carol or whatever her name is,” they go through a wedding at the temple that features a 12-second on-screen kiss – “eleven seconds longer than I’d ever seen him kiss my mother” – and begin to pack up the house in Port Washington, which they’re selling in order to return permanently to Florida. The children are completely stunned.

It’s during the moving process that Mike decides to hand over Mina’s diaries to his son Doug, having already agreed that Doug can “help” with the move by filming and interviewing him as they pack – the largest single part of the motion picture consists of these conversations. The diaries take up three file-drawer sized cartons, and consist over both handwritten and typed diaries going back 40 years. It’s a massive writing project, thousands of pages.

Does Doug really want to read them? Would you? He sticks his nose in them just far enough to realize that they’re loaded with commentary about the marriage itself – it’s Mina’s primary subject as a suburban stay-at-home housewife – and that she is none too glowing in her descriptions of Mike and the marriage. Doug, who (also in the vein of indie documentarians) supports himself by doing wedding videos, asks the rabbi of one of the services if he can come talk to him. Should he read these deeply personal documents? He also talks with Mina’s best friend, Natasha, who tells him emphatically that he should. The rabbi agrees.

Reading them is a revelation. The happy marriage of his parents turns out not to have been happy at all. Mina is angry & often bitter in her descriptions of it. She goes into therapy and has a deep transference with her therapist, whom she literally begs (to no avail) to sleep with her. She has an affair with one of Mike’s friends, but takes care that there is no evidence in the diary to indicate which friend that might have been. (We later meet some of them at a farewell party for Mike at the temple & wonder if maybe one of these octogenarians could have been Mina’s secret lover.) Mike & Mina discuss divorce, but never act on it. Mina even writes about Kitty, decades ago, wondering if her relationship with Mike is sexual, deciding that that is irrelevant, but concluding that “nice, pliable little Kitty” is the kind of woman Mike would or should have married if he had known what kind of an adult he was going to be. Coming, as he did, out of the service right at the end of World War 2 and marrying quickly, he and Mina never have dealt with the fact that they have different psychic & emotional needs.

Discovering his mother’s affair is at least as big a shock as his father’s quick second marriage. Natasha reminds him that their generation – now in its eighties – went through the sixties just like everyone else and discusses spouse-swapping parties, three-ways and drug use very matter of factly, tho it’s not clear whether Mike & Mina ever flirted with sex, drugs or rock-n-roll in quite the same way.

Mike tells Doug that Mina never really new how to love him. Her highest compliment ever was “You’re sort of okay, you’re better than most of the men I know.” And he knows about what he calls her fantasy sex life, her emotional identification with actors or politicians, her intense feelings for her therapist, etc. Mike admits that he doesn’t miss her, tho you can see the toll that recognition has on him.

Doug finally asks his father the question. Had he ever cheated on Mina? There is a long, awkward silence that could be interpreted any number of different ways, followed by Mike’s saying no, he never had, he’d had opportunities, but had never acted on them.

So the narrative frame of seeing their father as the cheater and Mina as the cheated-upon turns out to be exactly the opposite of what you end with in the film. Doug is still reeling from seeing his father suddenly full of life, looking to the future in his mid-80s, and obviously happy as this film draws to a close. But the process has allowed him – and his two sisters – to come to accept Kitty for the very warm, solid person she is. And it’s enabled Doug to really communicate with his father. They literally end up, at film’s end, holding hands.

I don’t think this film could have been done as fiction – so much of it depends on Mina’s diaries – Doug quotes them at length, tho you only see key phrases highlighted on the screen. It would look just too convenient a narrative in a “made-up” story – but as a documentary you get a sense of both Mina & Mike as good, warm people of great depth, who clearly had different needs and never were able to address that gap in their lives. Was Mina clinically depressed? She certainly seems so, and yet her story is not a diagnosis, any more than Mike was the automaton of an engineer his son appears to have feared going into the film. If they weren’t the picture-book happy marriage envisioned by the anniversary party at the start of the movie, they certainly chose to hold together, so that their regrets – both had plenty – don’t appear to include the decision to stay a couple even as they realized their differences.

What this film does better than any I can remember – the closest “cinematic” equivalent I can think of is perhaps Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage – is give you a sense of the depth and complexity of these two people, and of the incredible difficulty posed by the task of somehow joining two such complicated beings into a single unit. Is their marriage “a failure”? I don’t think that Doug would say yes to that. One of his sisters, on the response film, comes very close tho and breaks down at the thought that Mina might have “found happiness” had she left the marriage a quarter century earlier. My own sense is that this film does a much better job suggesting just how responsible each one of is for his or her own happiness – it’s not so much something you find as it is something you build. Mina doesn’t seem likely to have built hers anywhere else, even if being with the “wrong” man all those years couldn’t have been easy. Mike on the other hand seems to have suffered in silence – Kitty makes a point of noting that he’s a good listener and that this is his primary attraction – but he has far less difficulty in moving on, taking precisely that responsibility. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this film is that Mike, Mina & Kitty all end up presented as complex, admirable people – Doug Block avoids all the narrative pitfalls that would have pitted one against another. Instead, you get a sense of what 50-plus years actually means for two individuals not magically suited one to the other. That’s an enormous amount to convey in just 90 minutes.

3:10 to Yuma has gotten some rave reviews – four stars from Roger Ebert for example – and there is no doubt that it’s a good movie with what may be the best acting Russell Crowe has ever done. But just as that latter detail isn’t necessarily great praise in itself, much of the positive reaction this film has garnered to date (this morning, viewers were ranking it among the 150 best films ever made over at IMDB) has, I fear, been tainted somewhat by its context as the first sorta serious “big” film to arrive in theaters after a particularly barren summer. Once the kiddy action blockbuster flicks that kick off each summer season were out, there was frankly not much to watch. Often the later weeks of the summer are filled with “problematic” movies, jinxed Hollywood projects that the marketing department can’t figure out how to pitch properly, like The Brothers Grimm, or Hellboy or The Illusionist, which often turn out to be among the most enjoyable films of the year. This year it was The Simpson Movie or bust. So Christian Bale without a mask & Russell Crowe quoting from The Bible as he shoots his way around Arizona seems like quite a relief. I sympathize completely.

But 3:10 to Yuma has some gaping howlers in it that left me as a viewer gasping at just how much disbelief was I was being asked to suspend. The first of these comes when Peter Fonda, playing a wizened old bounty hunter in the employ of the Pinkerton Agency, is shot in the stomach & has the bullet removed by the local vet in an operation that looks up close – and this is the sort of film that likes to show you the up-close stuff – more like a disemboweling, but is riding blithely away the very next day with the guard that is taking outlaw Ben Wade (Crowe) off to be put on the mail car of the train to Yuma, since that car has a jail cell conveniently situated therein for the transport of felons.

It’s been too many decades since I saw the original version of this film, with Glenn Ford of all people in the Russell Crowe role and Van Heflin as the crippled civil war vet who is desperate enough to agree to take this murderer to the train that is supposed to send him off to his trial & subsequent hanging. The late Halsted Welles, who adapted Elmore Leonard’s short story for the 1957 film, is listed here as a screenwriter as well and surely some of the dialogue that is too corny for words, such as the son’s speech to his dad in the final scene, must have carried over from 1957’s idea of positive family values. These are lines that would have made more sense in The Simpson Movie, where Bart’s contentious relationship with his father would given such silliness an ironic edge. Here it’s like watching a sound crane loom suddenly at the top of the screen – an element of the film-making intruding into the narrative, but without any of the flair of a Brechtian gesture. There is an almost identical moment earlier in the film in which the father addresses Doc after the veterinarian saves them by causing a railroad tunnel to cave in. It makes you wonder just what the hell director James Mangold (Walk the Line; Girl, Interrupted) could have been thinking.

We have a ritual in our family whenever such nonsense appears on screen. When they were younger, my kids would want to know why this Pinkerton, who should have died from blood loss before he ever got to the vet, or from septic shock once he got there, is sassing Ben Wade as they ride through the postcard perfect desert landscape. “How did he live, Pa?” they would ask. “Narrative,” would be my response. “With narrative anything is possible.” For example, a one-legged man might outrun bullets while running, jumping & all but somersaulting over rooftops even as he returns gunfire. You bet.

It’s one thing for such “miracles” to occur in a film involving wizardry & muggles, quite another in a historical drama. When I was a lad of about ten, my favorite TV show was Rin Tin Tin, about a German shepherd in the old west, an odd enough choice for a boy terrified of dogs. Set in a fort somewhere in the last half of the 19^th century, each show involved some problem with Indians or rustlers that the dog invariably solved. Rinty, as everyone called him, was more than just the “run and get help” type pup that made Lassie seem ever so wimpy – he could go into K-9 force mode and knock baddies off their horses. But it was disconcerting to watch the action while, in the background, a jetliner clearly traversed the 19^th century sky, which happened more than once.

Almost Brechtian in its own challenge to the viewer, Roy Rogers, another one of my childhood TV favorites, set half of its episodes in the 19^th century, and half in the present. Sometimes the only way you could tell was that Roy’s sidekick Pat Brady had his jeep. At least both versions ended with the patented harmony of Roy & his wife Dale Evans singing “Happy Trails to You,” a song that can still make me melt.

3:10 to Yuma doesn’t have any airliners or jeeps that I discerned, but it does use language that comes across as distinctly present day – “I’ll go check us in” says the railroad man to the rest of the posse, referring to the hotel where they plan to hole up until the train gets to town. Similarly, Ben Wade is smarter, more literate & thoughtful than any of the other characters in the film. Between drawing sketches of everything he likes – birds, a naked lady, his primary captor – and citing the good book chapter & verse, he sometimes seems like Peter Falk in the film Wings of Desire. Except that Wade kills maybe 30 people over the course of the film.

Wade’s character is crucial to the story, which calls on him to make some surprising choices, more in line with Inspector Renault at the airport in Casablanca. Crowe, as I said, does a generally credible job – he’s far more appropriate to the role than either Glenn Ford, who played Wade in ’57, or Tom Cruise, who was originally signed for the part this time around – breaking character only once when singing in a manner that suddenly reminds you that this is the lead singer for 30 Odd Foot of Grunts gone into folk ballad mode, sounding more like Ian Tyson than Gabby Hayes. Crowe must have stayed in character for the whole shebang since the closing credits list several people as Ben Wade’s Stand-In, Ben Wade’s Driver, Ben Wade’s Personal Assistant. Hey, at least he doesn’t have the Australian accent.

Is there any dynamic in the construction of meaning more powerful than the parsimony principle? The principle, which is derived from the linguistics work of Paul Kay, states that the reader, viewer, listener, consumer will – or perhaps should – incorporate the fewest extraneous details needed for the creation of coherence. It does this by presuming, to use the formula I first employed in a discussion of Joe Ceravolo & Rae Armantrout in my book The New Sentence, that

whenever it is possible to integrate two separate schema into a single larger frame-structure by imagining them as sharing a common participant the reader will do so. (ital. in the original)

The example I give in that book is of a section of Armantrout’s poem “Grace”:

a spring there
where his entry must be made

signals him on

Whenever I’ve asked students to “tell me what this means,” whether at San Francisco State in 1981 or at Naropa as recently as last summer, I’ve been offered a variety of narratives – I mention three in the book that were given at SF State, two of which I’ve come across repeatedly over the years, one being the idea of a diver in that instant leaving the board before the arc & splash of the event, the other that of the “step into character” that comes over an actor or actress as they make their entrance from backstage. Never in 26 years has a student offered the narrative Armantrout herself gave me when asked, that of vaginal lubrication.

But this doesn’t make any of these narrative scaffolds wrong. All three, in fact, line up the key terms in this passage into roughly the same configuration, tho Armantrout’s own version is the most intimate. New Criticism, wild child of 1930s academia, insisted on something akin to a Lou Dobbs approach to the parsimony principle – Brooks, Wellek, Warren, Tate, Ransom, Jarrell et al hoped to build a border wall around the text that would keep all of those migrant nuances on the far side. They had about as much success as Dobbs is going to have with his wall against undocumented Latin American workers.

Thus by the 1950s poets were already playing with the possibilities of just this dimension of reading: Creeley’s famous “I Know a Man” derives much of its power from precisely the fact that the reader situates the key verb, drive, into two possible contexts, one in which the word belongs to the narrator, the other in which the word belongs to John “which was not his / name.” Creeley himself said that the former was his original intent, but even he had to acknowledge that readers everywhere could hear both. The ambiguity in the term drive ties right back into the two narrative figures of compulsivity – “because I am / always talking” and this journey through the dark, which somehow is not now occurring in the necessary “goddamn big car” – rendering this a text about primal need in an existential universe, one hell of a lot to get into just 12 lines.

I saw a really interesting use of the parsimony principle while I was vacationing in a recent film by Jim Jarmusch, Broken Flowers. In the narrative, retired computer exec Don Johnston (played by Bill Murray doing his best Buster Keaton impression) has his live-in girlfriend (Julie Delpy) walk out on him just as he receives an unsigned letter from a prior one informing him that he has a teenage son who may be on a road trip trying to find him. Thanks to the machinations of his next door neighbor (Jeffrey Wright), an amateur sleuth, Murray heads off to check on the five women with whom he was involved during that general time frame, searching for clues as to which one wrote the note, typed on pink stationery. The movie thus turns into a Don Juan’s meditation on the meaning of relationships. The first (Sharon Stone) is the widow of a racing driver with an oversexed teenage daughter named Lolita, the second (Frances Conroy, the mother Ruth Fisher from Six Feet Under) the wife and partner of a real estate developer, the third (Jessica Lange) an animal communicator who may be romantically involved with her secretary (Chloë Sevigny), and the fourth (Tilda Swinton) living rurally on a farm with what appears to be a biker gang. All make conspicuous use of pink – Swinton has a pink typewriter, no less, lying in the grass – as does departing current girlfriend Delpy (who also seems to know more about the note than she ought). None ever admits to being the author of the note – in part because Murray never asks directly – or to being the mother of his child, but in each case the language used is exceptionally legalistic. The real estate developer says that she didn’t think she could have been a good mother to her husband’s children, but never says whether she ever had any other children.

That Jarmusch knows he is doing this, and wants you to pay attention as well, is underscored by the use of names in the film. Everyone Don Johnston meets thinks it’s funny that he has the same name as the star of Nash Bridges and Miami Vice. Except, of course, he doesn’t – his surname has a t, as he continually points out. Similarly, neither Sharon Stone nor her daughter (played by Alexis Dziena) have ever read Nabokov & think nothing of the fact that the daughter is named Lolita, even as the 16-year-old parades in the buff in front of Johnston, talking on two cell phones simultaneously. There are two characters in the film named Winston & a florist who patches up Bill Murray’s black eye is named Sun Green (Murray’s character comments that her name is “perfect”).

The scene on the biker farm is where the use of the parsimony principle reared up for me. Murray asks Swinton, who is the least pleased of the four to see him, if she had borne his child. She responds with the F word & runs inside the farm house, while two of her compadres rush over to grab Murray. One runs inside to see what is wrong, then returns to tell Murray that he was being exceptionally rude, punctuating the manners lesson with a blow to the eye. What is the meaning of this scene? Why did Swinton turn & run? There is no answer to this that I can see other than what a viewer brings to the scene (e.g., Swinton had wanted a child but had had an abortion because Murray made her do so, and has been bitter about this ever since). There’s no evidence for any interpretation whatsoever, but the viewer who wants (needs?) to interpret feels compelled to look for a rationale.

I’m not going to tell you how Jarmusch resolves this conundrum, or even if he does, but one detail that I picked up during the DVD’s extras that fit right in – besides Jarmusch’s claim that he’s not responsible for the meaning of his films, that’s the audience’s job – is the fact that Jarmusch had each of his major women characters, in rehearsal, write the original pink note, in character, to Murray, and then combined elements from all of them in the final version. Which is to say that every key actress was led to believe that she was the mother & thus played her scenes with this back story somewhere in her head. Never were the silences between characters so pregnant.

A second film that I saw just last night at the local art house in Phoenixville – the same theater that appears in the cinema scene of The Blob – is John Carney’s Irish indie musical Once, starring Glen Hansard, the lead singer of The Flames, and Markéta Irglová. Personally, I abhor musicals & am not a big fan of the sweet little romance genre either, but this film is an almost perfect argument for what can be done with these. It won an award this year at Sundance & totally deserved it. While it doesn’t have any of the meta-narrative shenanigans that Jarmusch loves, Once does make superb use of the parsimony principle in how it lets out details about the girl’s life over the course of the film. Who she is and what is possible between the two main characters transforms dramatically over the length of this film (just 96 minutes) – if we knew everything we understand at the end at the very beginning, there would be almost no dramatic tension, so the elaboration of details about her is every bit as much the narrative of this story as is the tale of two kids, the busker & the maid, and how they got together & made a demo disk of their music.

If, as I wrote Monday, the formal advantage of cinema as a narrative art is that you can see the story, the obvious implicit challenge, the one that would occur to an ambitious filmmaker, would have to do with cinema’s ability (or inability) to speak of that which is not visible, not present, what cannot be directly seen. One obvious realm would be that of the psychological – dreamlife, memory, the repressed. In The Bourne Ultimatum, for example, you can tell which sequences – barely more than a second or two in length – are Matt Damon’s character’s memories surfacing, his identity coming back, by virtue of stylistically blurry film, letting in, as it were, too much light.

What then of a more complicated question of absence? How would your closest companions respond if you were suddenly to disappear? How calculate or project the arc of their despair? It’s the question of death seen in its most social light – how will the kids react? Will your spouse marry your worst enemy? This, in one sense, is the thought experiment that is the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, the first of his trilogy of films on the subject of eros (a quartet if you consider The Red Desert to be of the same set, which many reasonably do). Seven or eight of the idle rich head off for a cruise around the Aeolian islands, including Anna (portrayed by Lea Massari), her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) & Anna’s fiancé Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti). These islands are hardly idyllic – they’re basically volcanic rocks pushed up above sea level – a contrast Antonioni uses to good effect in this most painterly of black-&-white films.

Claudia doesn’t really know Sandro at the start of the picture. She & Anna head to where they’re supposed to meet ahead of the cruise & Anna makes Claudia cool her heals while she & Sandro have sex upstairs. But on the boat itself, Anna appears moody & quarrels with Sandro. When everyone is swimming, she screams that she sees a shark, which puts an end to that pleasure, but only after tells Claudia that she was lying. When they’re on a tiny island, Anna stalks off by herself. Up to this moment, every scene has been filmed as tho the movie were about Anna & Massari was the star.

Later when the boaters are ready to leave, however, Anna is nowhere to be found. Searching everywhere turns up nothing. Sandro, Claudia & Corrado – the oldest male in the group – stay behind on the island to keep looking while the others head off to the nearest inhabited island to call for the Coast Guard. It rains & they take shelter in a little shack owned by a hermit (who speaks English and claims to have spent 30 years in Australia, one of the stranger, more delightful twists in this deliberately spare tale). Soon boats and divers and helicopters are everywhere, looking for Anna.

Then the question is posed, what if she swam to another island – some are only a few hundred yards away – and the search spreads further. And then another question, what if she got a ride back to land? This eventually leads to stories in the media up & down the coast, trips to hostels and much casting about looking for Anna.

During all this, Sandro continues thinking – as he does from his first scene – with his penis, which now targets Claudia as the next most warm & inviting home. Before too terribly long, the search for Anna has given way to another love story, this time between Claudia & Sandro. A certain amount of guilt is involved, at least on Claudia’s part, but that just seems to give everything more flavor.

That Antonioni knows exactly what he is doing here is demonstrated best perhaps by a scene in one of the coastal towns in which a beautiful single woman – who may be married or may be a prostitute (or both), both alternatives are offered – causes a near riot just by walking down the street. Later in another scene, Claudia decides not to accompany Sandro into an interview with the police and soon finds herself surrounded by young single men in very much the same way. Antonioni uses men here exactly as Hitchcock does the birds in his films by that name, as tho it were a predatory supernatural force.

I saw this film initially when I was a teenager on the “big screen” of one of Pauline Kael’s Studio Guild theaters on Telegraph in Berkeley. This pair of tiny art-house theaters seated maybe 50 people each, and was later replaced by a rather small restaurant. The “big screen” was smaller than some of the projection systems you find today at Best Buy. I only saw the film again this past week, prompted by the hoopla surrounding Antonioni’s death.

It’s a somber, slow – I like slow, as I’ve noted before – visually stunning experience. You can see Antonioni paint his canvases with great care, even though the DVD that is available in America is (idiotically) not letterboxed. The scene above, the very last shot of the film, is not atypical in its use of composition. Envision it now as a square and that’s what you get with the Netflix version.

But this film also is a particularly tricky & complex narrative. I’m certain that I didn’t “get it” when I first viewed L’Avventura, probably because at 19 or thereabouts I didn’t have enough distance myself from Sandro’s own agenda. It’s also interesting to realize that Antonioni’s use of absence here is not unlike – may even be the reason for – the ways in which abstraction is used in other films made since then. An example would be Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty in which Liv Tyler’s virginity is treated by the other characters as so objectified it could have been given a line in the credits. Is Bertolucci conscious of that as an homage to his countryman? Seeing L’Avventura, I felt certain the answer was yes. But one of the aspects of this is that a film viewer today has been prepared to see this dimension of Antonioni’s film, not unlike the way a reader of books like The Color Purple will discover that the “difficult” works of Faulkner don’t seem difficult at all because we’ve all learned how to read those devices in the 78 years since The Sound and the Fury first was published. It’s impossible now to recreate the “innocence” of the viewer when Antonioni’s film was first released.

L’Avventura is also a surprisingly feminist film in its critique of gender, especially coming from Italy in 1960. Were it released today, I think it would primarily be seen in those terms, whereas originally this was only one of several interlocking layers. Sadly, the world the film portrays hasn’t changed all that much. Both Vitti and Massari had major careers that ended, whether they wanted them to end or not, around the age of 50. Ferzetti, who is roughly ten years older than the two women, is still acting today in his eighties.

The other day, I was saying, vis-à-vis some scenes in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni & Jean Eustache, that they “showed me how art, any temporal art, at its very greatest slows down time.” Which got me immediately into trouble with some close-readers out there, who noted that in both of the examples I was giving, time was being slowed down to something akin to “real time.” Which of course only points up that in narratives of almost any type, not just film, time is telescoped out of all proportion, anything akin to “accuracy” is thrown overboard almost instantly. If you go back to the dawn of the English novel, with Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the first thing you note is the problem of time, that the actual recounting of an ongoing life is perpetually being delayed by this or that digression. In some sense, the first trope of English prose is of the impossibility of its relationship to time.

Anyway, over the weekend, Krishna, Jesse & I (Colin’s at camp), decided to take in an argument for the other position, pro speed mas o menos, in seeing The Bourne Ultimatum at the local gigaplex. Ultimatum is Latin for “third film in the trilogy” I do believe. I’ve commented before that

in more formulaic Hollywood flicks, I sometimes think that there is a three-part structure:

·        Chaotic introduction of detail that gradually sorts into elements of plot, character, genre, etc.

·         Machinery moving the plot from point A to point B

·         A car chase or similar FX-heavy conclusion

which Ken James informs me is known in Hollywood as the three-act structure, a phenomenon he traces back to the publication of Syd Field’s book, The Screenplay. To quote James,

In any given 120-minute film, the first 30 minutes are devoted to the set-up of the situation and characters, the middle 60 minutes focus on complications of the situation, and the last 30 minutes focus on the resolution of those complications

The Bourne Ultimatum plays with this formula in that it’s all chase, from the opening moment of the show to the last. All other elements of the motion picture is tucked into small moments – one almost wants to call them breathers – in this single ongoing structure. With Bourne, sort of a James Bond with amnesia, the question of why is this happening is in fact the mystery of the film, so letting it out slowly, in dribs & drabs, makes some kind of sense. Because of this, however, the question of character becomes far more complex, because it entails so many different versions: who is Jason Bourne, who am I really, and what do I mean by really. In one scene, Bourne, played with remarkable understatement by Matt Damon, dispatches a CIA hitman with his bare hands – Krishna calls it the longest, bloodiest fist fight she’s ever seen in a film, tho she tends to avoid films known to have them – then afterwards stares at his swollen hands & bemoans the person he’s had to become. In another, he makes a small decision that seems to be against character, so much so that even the person who is trying to kill him has to ask about it. In a third, finding out who he “really is” turns out to be the non-event of the film – patently so – while the real event, the twist in the narrative, is learning why Bourne became Bourne. All of these details take up less than 11 minutes in this 111-minute film.

The rest of it is spent in one chase sequence after another. We have tracking chases, attempted assassination chases, running through third-world homes chases, running over roof top sequences, bad-ass car chase scenes, jumping off rooftop escapes, jumping into the East River escapes, bombs in backpacks, motorbikes-up-the-stairs chases, breaking-and-entering, multiple (at least three by my count) scenes where the local police get boggled up in the middle of a chase scene having to sort out which side is which. And lots more.

The interesting thing here is that these aren’t the sort of spectacular chase scene acrobatics that led off, say, the most recent version of the James Bond flick, Casino Royale, where hero & villain are choreographed leaping from crane to high rise to car-top like gazelles with guns. Nor are these the sort of heavily stylized slow-motion erotics of combat in the mode of Chinese cinema (imported into the west via The Matrix & Quentin Tarantino). These are scenes that are deliberately jump-cut, hand-held (with a twitchy, palsied hand at that), sped up to maximize your experience of the chase as out-of-control confusion. If you read the discussion boards at the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), you will note that this is the most controversial part of this film. Director Paul Greengrass (United 93, for which he received an Oscar nomination, The Bourne Supremacy – but not The Bourne Identity – Bloody Sunday among others) has deliberately made a motion picture in which you can’t fully follow 100 of the 111 minutes or so of film. How did that car get upside down at the bottom of that ramp? I felt constantly throughout the film that looking at a given scene two, three, four times was not going to answer questions like that. This is particularly true with the one long chase scene that takes place in Tangiers. The army of stunt men listed in the credits at the end is longer than any I’ve ever seen before for a motion picture, Lord of the Rings included.

This is so clearly a decision on Greengrass’ part that it’s interesting. It’s not that the action starts out confusing and gets more clear as you adapt to it during the course of the film. In fact, the one halfway intelligible chase involves Bourne, a reporter for the Guardian (best product placement in the movie), in Waterloo Station in London shortly after the film’s beginning, but even this becomes chaotic as the reporter panics & is “taken out” by the “asset,” which is how this film talks about a bullet in the forehead at 200 yards. Not staying “in control” in the midst of all this data overload has lethal consequences, yet this directorial style makes staying “in control” impossible. Greengrass’ approach has its pros & its cons. The main thing going for it is that it never “cleanses” the violence as violence throughout the movie. It looks & feels bad intentionally from start to finish. The down side is that you can half-hide a lot of sloppy film making through such ragged editing, deliberate or not. Think of all those chase scenes in old cop shows like Streets of San Francisco where the good guys roar up the Fillmore hill going south from Union, make a right turn and are descending toward China Basin & the South of Market from Potrero Hill, a geographically impossible sequence. I think, just going by the discussion board at IMDB, that a lot of viewers see this film as basically taking the style of Streets and amping it up a little with a handheld camera. In fact, I don’t think that’s happening, but I also don’t think it’s very easy to distinguish the two, precisely because increasing the speed of action carries it further away from real time, which means going faster than viewers can react. It’s the opposite strategy, say, of Red Desert. Is it psychologically “more accurate”? My own experience is that at some point the person has to “let go” and just react – I took my glasses off for the entire motion picture, which turned out to be a useful response.

But it’s not NASCAR, even if it sounds like it at times. And I won’t be surprised to see a deeper backlash against this film over time as those who go back for second or third viewings separate themselves out from other film goers who at some moment in the process simply disengage.

This has been a terrible week in the history of film. Even tho their great works were decades behind them, losing Bergman & Antonioni in such a short time is the film equivalent of losing, say, Ginsberg & Creeley in three days. Or Pound & Williams – pick your generational elders. Plus the death of cinemaphotographer László Kovács. With the deaths earlier this year of Robert Altman & Ousmane Sembène, 2007 is not going to be looked at as a good year for cinema. It’s rare, if not impossible, to have four great directors born in one year, so to lose that many leaves a deficit that goes beyond just numbers. Altman & Sembène were still active. I reviewed Sembène’s last film, Moolaadé, when he brought it to Philadelphia in late 2004. I missed Altman’s last film because I couldn’t get past my allergic reaction to the smugness that is Garrison Keillor, the Howard Stern of the chablis set. But Altman was a notably uneven director. Some of his films – Nashville; Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; The Player; Short Cuts – are as good as anything that has come from Hollywood, and there are a number that fall just short of those four. But I never cared for M*A*S*H, a big hit whose only redeeming feature may have been the title’s influence on the typography of Charles Bernstein, nor for McCabe & Mrs. Miller nor Popeye.

In my discussion awhile back concerning Barrett Watten’s list of influences (which he’s now revised, incidentally), I noted that Watten’s claim for Wojciech Has’ The Saragossa Manuscript, tho also one of my favorite films ever, as having “taught me that all art is a construction” isn’t one that I could make, simply because Antonioni had given me the same lesson somewhat earlier. For me, the magic movie is always going to be The Red Desert with its obsessively wonderful sense of color. Richard Harris & Monica Vitti bed down in a white room, the lights go out &, when they come back on, everything is the palest pink. There is one scene in which, in a small building on a pier, Harris looks out a window as a tanker passes by slowly, in real time. That scene for me is one of the two or three greatest moments in all of cinema, matched perhaps only by one in Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore when the pathetic weasel of an intellectual, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud (like Eustache, a protégé of both Truffaut & Godard), leaves his girlfriend, played by Bernadette Lafont, to dash off to his mistress on learning that she’s pregnant. Lefont puts on Edith Piaf’s "Les amants de Paris" – a 78 if I remember right – and listens to the entire song in real time with her head in her hands. It’s a devastating moment. Those two scenes showed me how art, any temporal art, at its very greatest slows down time.

I saw a cheesy movie about a catastrophic series of storms that begets a new ice age the other night on the telly, The Day After Tomorrow, written & directed by Roland Emmerich, a German-born director known for Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla & Mel Gibson’s The Patriot. In one scene, the last surviving people in Manhattan have taken up residence in the New York Public Library, where they’re burning books to stay warm (a conscious decision was made not to burn Guttenberg’s Bible, but everything else was toast), when an abandoned freighter literally floats up the street and comes to rest next to the library. The protagonists first see the freighter through a window – a straight steal from Antonioni, even to the direction in the frame, going right to left. In the midst of all this silliness (the arctic wolves on the freighter come a few scenes later), it was a breath-taking moment, simply because I knew what Emmerich was saying & doing with that shot, a level of communication I didn’t think this movie had the capacity to make.

Europeans routinely characterize Antonioni’s work as leading up to the “Eros Trilogy,” the three black-and-white films that immediately precede The Red Desert. From my perspective, that’s like saying Bach was pretty talented until he took up music. No one thought more thoroughly about the possibilities and meaning of color on the screen than did he – it’s true even in his less successful films like Zabriskie Point. Shooting some secondary scenes in the Bay Area, Antonioni put out a call for “college-age male extras” who needed to show up wearing brown tweed sport coats – something I did not own at the time. One of the local papers also noted that a scene that was being filmed out at a junior college campus in Contra Costa county took forever because the crew had to paste leaves onto the trees to get just the right effect for the director. Today this attention to detail seems reasonable – you could add the leaves through CGI even – but in the 1960s, this was the essence of European indulgence, or so the article suggested.

A piece in the New York Times notes the much of Antonioni’s work has never made it to DVD. It’s true that Antonioni only had one “hit” in America, the frenetic follow-up to The Red Desert, Blow-Up, loosely predicated upon a short story by Julio Cortázar. This film is about pacing and decidability as much as anything else – and the sense of timing is a telling commentary coming from someone capable of such lavish, languid shots. In typical western movie fashion, the revelation, which in Cortázar’s story is about homosexuality, is amped up into a murder. Even here, both in the studio sequences, in the choice of making the protagonist a fashion photographer, in the lush, layered greens of the park, Blow-Up is no less about color. It’s an active presence in the film.

I always found Bergman’s symbolism a little ham-fisted and corny. But any excuse to see Max von Sydow or Liv Ullman was good enough for me & Bergman’s films were something like the required reading of my generation. My first formal date with Krishna was to see Fanny and Alexander. Once, at UC Berkeley, when I was first getting to know David Bromige, he & I had repaired to the Rathskeller, a beer & burger place just west of the campus, where we attempted to talk poetics – this was ten years before Duncan’s famous allergic reaction to langpo, a moment when Bromige was not yet sure these new kids (Grenier, myself, David Melnick, George Ushanoff, etc.) were really aligned with his own take on the New American Poetry. We found talking poetics, as such, far too awkward, so had the longest discussion instead about Bergman & all his various films of that period, tho in fact neither of us was talking about Bergman at all. And we were not, as it happened, so very far apart. That was very much the kind of use one could make of his work – it literally was the coin of the realm.

Verushka & David Hemmings in Blow-Up, 1966


Michelangelo Antonioni

1912 – 2007

Ingmar Bergman

1918 – 2007

Peter Davis must be in the process of gathering together a second volume of his anthology, Poet’s Bookshelf, collecting the lists of a new set of writers as to the ten or so books that most were or are “most ‘essential’ to you, as a poet,” since Barrett Watten, not one of the 81 contributors in the first volume, has been asked to prepare a similar list. Barry has responded with great gusto & offers a list not just of ten books, but rather a 15 or 16 works in twelve different categories that proved “most formative” for him. Even the categories chosen deserve a look-see:

Modernists
Postmoderns
Proto-Language
Language Writing
Hybrid Texts
New York School
Word/Image
New Music/Jazz
Literary Theory
Cultural Theory
Film
Great Books

For each of these categories, Watten offers a half dozen or so key works, highlighting one or two in boldface that are the ones he would ultimately list – “had these works not existed, all would be otherwise,” he writes.¹

I certainly understand the impulse to expand beyond just a blank list of individual volumes of poetry. My own selection in volume one contained 12 items², just six of which were individual volumes of verse in any usual sense. One was a volume, Spring & All, that contains both poetry & critical writing – it is in fact Watten’s selection under Modernists. Another was the Allen anthology. A third was a “box” of poems, rather than a book, Robert Grenier’s Sentences. (Watten lists it as one of his alternates under “Proto Language.”) One was a novel – Kathy Acker’s The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (Watten lists a different Acker novel as an alternate under his “Hybrid Texts” category). One was a book of theory by a poet – Charles Olson’s Proprioception – and one a book of political theory – Henri Lefebvre’s Dialectical Materialism from the old Cape/Grossman series that included such classics as Olson’s Mayan Letters and Louis Zukofsky’s “A” 22 and 23 (one of my six “regular books” of poetry).

Watten carries this contextualizing impulse much further than I did. Where I listed one volume by Olson that could be called theory (Proprioception), another by Lefebvre, two of Watten’s twelve categories are theoretical, containing a total of 14 books, none of them by poets unless you count Roman Jakobson’s flirtation with the craft during his days as a student in Russia. I have to admit that Jakobson’s Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning as well as Victor Shklovsky’s Third Factory would be on any expanded list of literary theory texts I chose as well, tho I’m surprised, I guess, not to see Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, anything by Olson or Creeley’s A Quick Graph. In fact, my personal list might well include Watten’s own The Constructivist Moment, Bob Perelman’s anthology of talks that appeared as a double issue of Hills, Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry or Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, an instance of biography of critique that is one of the great books in its own right.

What Watten calls Cultural Theory I would be more inclined to characterize as social or even political theory. And while I like all of the books Watten lists, I don’t think any of them would be on my own personal roster – this is probably the one area where we have the least overlap (as in “none” tho I don’t actually believe that our thinking is that far apart). For one thing, I couldn’t imagine the category, at least as category, not only without Lefebvre, but without Marx, for whom I would have picked several items from among The Eighteenth Brumaire, The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto, the first volume of Capital and possibly even the Grundrisse. I certainly would have had Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, the book that made him a cult figure in the U.S., and Sartre’s What is Literature? (necessary for Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero) , perhaps even Search for a Method or Critique of Dialectical Reason. Would I have included Louis Althusser or Antonio Gramsci? I certainly would have entertained the idea. But I also would have stretched out in some other areas not covered by Watten’s list here – such as Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, or Claude Levi-Strauss’ magisterial memoir, Tristes Tropiques.

Another category that is interesting to think about is New Music/Jazz, for which Watten lists both recordings (Anthiel, Webern, Braxton, Cage, James Brown, Steve Reich, Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy) and books (by Clark Coolidge & Ted Pearson). Here we have some interesting overlap – I would almost certainly include Braxton’s For Alto and Steve Reich’s Drumming – Barry & I heard the West Coast premier of the work at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum together in 1974 (and it was formative enough for me that I began writing Ketjak within a fortnight). But I might include Reich’s earlier tape works as well, along with some work by the ROVA Saxophone Quartet (including the “unrecordable” performance piece The Hive), some different Lacy (Sidelines with Michael Smith on piano), and just maybe some folk and blues music, The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and The Band, Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde by Dylan, the recordings of Robert Johnson, Drum Hat Buddha by Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer and the jug band blues of Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachel & Hammie Nixon. There were also some live jam sessions at Pangaea on Bernal Heights in San Francisco involving members of ROVA, John Grundfest, Greg Goodman, Henry Kaiser & others that proved formative, for me at least (ensconced as I was on the bleacher seating there, writing rapidly into a notebook) tho nobody thought to have a tape running. Another obvious piece for me would be an item of ersatz world music, the Balinese oral piece called Ketjak, which was cobbled together by Colin McPhee for the sake of tourists from pre-existing Balinese sources.

Like music, film is a category where I would expect any writer to select on deeply personal grounds whatever works might be thought of as “most formative” in the creation of an aesthetic. I’m fascinated at the idea that Barry picks Wojcieck Has’s Saragossa Manuscript just because it also is one of my favorite films of all time as well, and I didn’t realize that we shared that opinion. It’s not the “most important” or “best” film ever made, but it had a powerful impact on me when it made the rounds – with some regularity – at the Cedar Alley Cinema in San Francisco. If I don’t make the same argument on behalf of the film as Watten, it’s only because I didn’t learn those particular lessons (that “all art is a construction”) there. From the perspective of my own personal history, that was Antonioni’s gift. Of the other films and/or filmmakers on his list, the ones I just might include in a similar list would be Godard’s Breathless and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The Godard films that actually had the greatest impact on me – Pierrot le fou, and Weekend – may have more to do with when I saw them than which films they were. Other films I would have to include in such a list would be Les Enfants du paradis, Juliet of the Spirits, Michael Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew, Vertigo, The Conversation, Chushingura and almost any film by Ousmane Sembene or Abigail Child, especially Pacific Far East Line. It’s worth noting that all of the women filmmakers who write and publish theory in English are named Abigail Child – her importance in the history of cinema cannot be overstated.

I’ll look more closely at Barry’s more purely literary choices next.

 

¹ Full disclosure: Ketjak and Tjanting are the works so chosen in boldface for language writing.

² Full disclosure (part 2): my selection included a volume of Watten’s: Plasma / Paralleles / “X”.

Given the rather mixed & muted reviews it’s received, I was surprised to discover that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (HP5) is the best motion picture in this series to date. It achieves this, one of my sons avers, by cutting back everything that doesn’t contribute to its primary narrative drive – the battle between Harry & Voldemort to see into and control one another’s mind. It’s an epic battle from the very first scene to the last. It may well be that there’s much more going on in the books than in the films – I’ve found the novels mostly unreadable, but I’m hardly the target audience – but as films the series has been, at best, uneven, going through four directors: Chris Columbus (numbers one & two), Mike Newell (HP3) & Y tu mamá también director Afonso Cuarón (HP4), before turning to veteran TV director David Yates for this film & the next. Steve Kloves, who wrote the script for the first four films took a break on this one in order to work on a separate project, a script for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, but has already signed on to write the next two. So HP5 will turn out to be the one film in the sequence written by Michael Goldenberg, who also penned the screenplays for Contact & Peter Pan. I remember after the completion of the second film that Columbus swore that the personal toll of doing two such complicated films back to back was beyond his capacity as a human, & I take him at his word. But this kind of shuffling of directors has a lot to do with the limits of these films, since the one controlling vision that remains constant throughout is that of J.K. Rowling, who is at two removes from the final product.

The other constant, of course, are the actors, particularly the kids – we are, after all, into our second Dumbledore. To a degree that has not been the case in any of the previous films, the younger thespians are a strength of HP5. Emma Watson remains the best of the three lead actors, tho her role in this film is more abbreviated than in any of the four previous ones¹, but Rupert Grint – a lock to play James Bond in another 25 years – and Daniel Radcliffe have likewise gone from being kids in a film to serious actors, as have several of the secondary child actors, most notably Matthew Lewis’ as Neville Longbottom, a key figure here, and James & Oliver Phelps as the Weasley twins.

One of the more interesting subtexts of this series has been watching these youngsters emerge as adults, still a work-in-progress. Radcliffe has gone from being a fresh-faced boy with a pretty typical, almost generic face into an adult with an interesting & somewhat unusual look. He’s visibly shorter than most of his peers, Lewis & the twins in particular, & almost certainly doesn’t look like what a casting director might have picked to play Harry Potter now. But the role is so completely his that it’s no problem & his divergence from “Hollywood good looks” is frankly a big advantage to the film. It renders Potter a far more believable & sympathetic character &, in anything so chock full of witches & wizards, believable is a serious plus.

This is the intersection between film & time, something that has fascinated both photographers & their critics almost since the dawn of daguerreotypes. We see a star, say, Judy Garland frozen at a particular moment in her adolescence in The Wizard of Oz, even knowing full well what a sodden mess she later made of her adult life, but in this scene, this film, she is for all purposes perfect. The intersection works other ways as well. Think of how many times in recent years you’ve seen some old film with a pre-Lord of the Rings Viggo Mortensen in it, playing some sleazy young thug. You may have seen the film, or parts of it, a half dozen times on the telly, never before paying attention to this secondary role whose actor seems to have been selected for his ability to convey sliminess. Or the next time you see To Kill a Mockingbird, note Robert Duvall as Boo Radley, or catch Harrison Ford as a young officer in the opening scenes of Apocalypse Now, or both Ford and Duvall in minor spots, Duvall technically uncredited even, in Francis Ford Coppola’s great detective drama, The Conversation.

It doesn’t need to be film, or cinema, to create these effects. Any photograph of Abraham Lincoln, for example, carries this effect, or any still of JFK & Jackie in the convertible in Dallas before that turn onto Elm Street. Or even a photo of the New York skyline with the twin towers still intact. Or maybe a sun-bleached Polaroid with your dead grandparents, or an uncle who died before you were born. There was a world once, all of these objects say to us, in which so much had not always already happened. In which the irrevocable, that irreversible flow chart, had not already occurred, with all the consequences that can never be undone.

HP5, as the critics have all noted, is a much darker film. Potter is, as he says, “angry all the time.” Ron Weasley has his own surly moments, as does Nigel Longbottom. It’s the dark night of the teen years, only in this fable the dysfunctionality of the family (fabulously figured by Sirius Black’s literal family tree, many of its faces burned or blackened by scandal & conflict, the worst yet to come) is weighted with the whole axis of good & evil. In the portraits that invariably decorate the walls of this film, old Hogwarts faculty, dead ancestors, even kittens move & blink & meow. So also in the aging of its cast, this curious & flawed film franchise manages to figure its most powerful message, that of time.

 

¹ Steve Kloves has described Hermione as the character he most enjoys “writing for,” suggesting that Watson will play larger roles again in the final two films.