Colonial Glaucoma

Calcutta: Malle, 1969

Scratching at the Limits of Control

Jarmusch, 2008

Rabioso Sol, Rabioso Cielo

Hernández, 2008

Festival de Cine Latino en San Diego, Marzo del 2009

No miento al afirmar que más del 90% del público se salió de la función.

Da la sensación de que el director grabó la misma escena muchísimas veces, con leves variantes, y las incluyó todas. No es transgresor que dure 190 minutos, ni tampoco el mostrar el sexo entre homosexuales, mostrar un pene o varios, mostrar un culo, ni mucho menos mostrarlos tantas veces. ¡Si al final de cuentas todos los personajes están guapísimos, con cuerpos de gimnasio! No se puede exagerar lo exagerada que es ésta película. Lo que le falto fue substancia, la capacidad de transformar una obsesión personal en una obra de arte universal, evitando estancarse en una indulgencia cómoda y enajenada.

Es incómodo pensar que en un México con tantos problemas, se hagan obras tan absurdamente lejanas de la realidad. Y no es que haga falta que el cine sea explícitamente social o político, pero tiene que estar despierto, sobre todo fuera de los circuitos multi-millonarios. De ahí que hable de esquemas de producción. Es un grave problema que los impuestos mexicanos se gasten en una obra como esta. No lo digo por algún impulso autoritario ni mucho menos. No se trata, obviamente, de repetir fórmulas de mercado, pero si que deberían entregarse los fondos del país con un enfoque a encontrar un público, a cultivar un público nuevo para un cine nuevo y de calidad. No es justo que el artista use los fondos públicos para perderse en el narcisismo monumental de esta película.

Y sin embargo, a pesar de que se olvida casi por completo del público, acaba de ser premiada en Berlín. Pero gran parte del público en la muestra era homosexual y sin embargo se fue. Quizás eran demasiado ignorantes, o quizás ser gay no da suficientes fuerzas para aguantar este suplicio. Está claro que no basta con compartir la ideología de un premio para de verdad ser una obra de arte.

Viriditas

Viridiana: Buñuel, 1961

So many things have been said about this film, must have been said, that I am at a loss of what to say that could be worth reading.

I guess what fascinates me is the idea of people living such unique, idiosyncratic lives and the poetry of their struggle to survive in the real world. I can already sense that this article will feel fragmented. The beauty of this film is that  Viridiana is so innocently absurd in a world that is terribly absurd. The difference is that she is on the other side of the fence of modernity. I guess you could call it a film from the fringes of modern society, from those few places where modernity is resisted and rejected by an entirely different world view. This is not a time for poets or for saints. The poets of today must be born from drug addicts, thieves and consumers, not at all hermits or saints.

Without going into detail, this is in the same spirit as Justine, but here the rape and abuse is not graphic, only implied. I mean violence to her moral self, to her soul, not to her body, violence to the way she interprets the world, to her interpretation of life and meaning. Ultimately, modernity is just as violent and empty as the Middle Ages. Society is hilariously insane because it pretends that human nature can fit in without breaking its bones. Watching this film as a triumph over conservative Spain is foolish.

I wonder how many people pretend to really understand art, pretend for their entire lives, as critics, as creators. How many won’t admit they don’t really understand and would rather indulge in a guilty pleasure. Maybe that is why this and all his films should be burnt. Does it sound like a surreal pose? I agree. But Buñuel said it towards the end of his life. Was it a joke? Does it matter? Better to be hungry, better to find the new, ancient revolutions. They are still there. Why waste time idealizing an artist? Do museums really make a difference? Burn them to the ground and start over. The heart of an artist must not be afraid to be a funeral pyre. Grab what you can from the ashes and start over.

Edipo Re

Pasolini , 1967

Creo que el ver cine es un ejercicio en vivir la memoria. Reviso estas paginas y voy recuperando y re-encontrando una experiencia pasada, que como buena memoria, se rehace en un presente que duda hacia el futuro, antes de redoblarse al pasado instantáneo. Es decir, el cine es como un sueño que se interpone en la vida y se ancla en la experiencia humana, abarcando todo su espacio, si quiere, y tambien su tiempo, el de toda su existencia.

Hablemos de esta pelicula. Se confunde con su poesia la poesia de la tragedia. Se encuentra en lo increible, lo abrumador en el misterio. No entiendo, pero gozo, porque a pesar de entender o no entender, las imagenes conmueven el alma y la rascan. Para que entrar en la autopsia, la biopsia de sus simbolismos. Que Edipo intenta huir del destino implacable, que su colera se reduce a un espacio circular de vida mas alla de la tragedia, que el final es increible y va mas alla del cuento, que la historia es simple y tenaz, que el tiempo se rompe, que todo parece un error, que mis palabras no alcanzan a tapar la luz tremendamente naranja y las sombras que suspiran purpura y azul, que senti como un milagro tremendo, que ya me canze de escribir esta inutil letania de torpezas.

El cine de verdad, en verdad, es abstracto, es misterio.

Y ahora la nota critica, es decir, vanidosa. Pasolini no me impresiono con el Decameron ni con sus Cuentos de Cantenbury, pero ahora si. Como una gran rueda tallada, me recubrio con la inscripcion de su alma, de su caracter de artista tremendo.

Young Mr. Lincoln

Ford, 1939

The energy that explodes through this film is amazing. What faith! What hope! In all that is good in America! What desire to dream the Dream!

The speed of the dialogue, the confidence and the strength of the scenes. How the film doesn’t waste time, how it is always spreading out over the frame the canvas of a simple and honest ideology. Homely and direct. Sensational!

What disturbs me though, is the readiness with which I accepted such a simplistic view of history. Imagine watching it in pre-war America, folk America, WASP America, optimistic America. There is a sense of the naivete of imperialism–so wonderfully simple, so tremendously in place. It was well made.

Now John Ford was one of those one take guys, stick to the fucking script. I respect almost everything about them–they operated within the studios, suffering and struggling–and they fought it out, they taught themselves, they left their mark. They were not complicated by theory, they focused instead on craft and work. I guess their work ethic was informed by some sort of notion that the artist, in the end, is privileged.

This movie demonstrates the power of art to imprint memory on the viewer. Traces of emotions, thoughts and ideas. I can see an entire generation through this film. The aspirations of an entire generation. I had never experienced the joy of patriotism, its true emotional ring, until this film. Above all, the American patriot is overwhelmingly optimistic.

And as I close these words I try to find some way to acknowledge all the terrible realities of 1939, and I know that in reality it was a cruel and ugly time for many, but the thing is that this film was able to hide all this without being dishonest. The film believed in itself.

And I guess the magic of this film is a certain feeling of nostalgia for a time and a mood which are no longer here.

The Tower of Babel

Babel: Gonzalez Iñárritu, 2006

From January 5th

What a dissappointment. It’s a failure both in form and content. Desperate and well-known consequences of a cruel and harsh world, predictable devices and style without substance.

A film must be idiosyncratic, it must set up its own goals and follow them. Critics must acknowledge and recognize this if they wish to formulate an effective critique. This is my perspective when I say this film has failed. It undercuts its dramatic weight by making fickle decisions based on the assumption of its own greatness. In other words, the filmmaker felt his message was so very important that he never really addressed it, instead, he delivered a humanism that is melodramatic and stale. Stale. And incredibily pretentious.

What is meant by “Babel”? In the Biblical story, humans were brought down by their arrogance, not by merciless chance and aleatory suffering. Humanity suffered the wrath of God as a consequence of its own decisions. But this film does not address the human capacity for moral choice, rather, it resorts to victimization and simplification. All of the protagonists are likeable people who make mistakes in a moment of weakness or innocence, but they are really good people at heart. At most the film celebrates the ideas that bad things happen to good people and that we are all interconnected. Its strategy is to show this on the most universal scale it can find, by literally linking the world through a plethora of coincidences in its characters. It is a statement that is so thoroughly shallow that the film ends up becoming very distant and even rather absurd, like an elaborate quid pro quo.

In contrast, in Amores Perros, Iñárritu’s first film, the characters were truly three-dimensional. They were flawed characters capable of good and evil, and they lived in a mixture of free-will and chance. They had to live with both and their connections did not seem so arbirtrary and didactic.

Babel is a film that attempts to address the nature of our age. It tries to position itself at the juncture of current events, being shot on three continents and four countries, in their original languages, with both famous and non professional actors, etc. It wants to be the globalization film, one that captures the human emotion and drama at the heart of the global paradox. But ironically such lofty goal gives way to precisely the kind of gratutious melodrama that is empty of real social analysis. It fails under the weight of its own sense of self-importance, and despite its documentary-style aesthetic its effect is actually similar to that of a Hollywood blockbuster–rather than entertaining with action without substance, it entertains with empty emotions and the excitement of exotic cultures it never really understood.

The film is ultimately counter-productive to its moral ambitions, not only because it misses the point entirely, but also because it takes up so much media space and attention that could actually be used by more meaningful and coherent work about the changing nature of our world society.

Art With an Audience

January 24th.

I just finished talking with an italian Ph.D. student in spanish lilterature. He talked about the necessity for art that deals with human issues, for art to “do something.” I didn’t try to engage his point of view during the conversation, but it did bring me to an interesting question: to what extent can art change its audience? Is it possible to determine this? Can an artist really control the impact of his work? And if an artist wishes to change the ideas and beliefs of his audience, what technique works best? What are the thematic and aesthetic decisions that must be made?

It seems that most answers will oscillate between two possibilites. On the one hand, this artist can choose to make very popular art where “the message” is carried along, with an agreeable presentation of its subject matter and an aesthetic that is accessible and easy to interact with. The essence of this strategy would be that it approaches its audience from pleasure first rather than intellect. This work aims to be enjoyable as entertainment and hopes to communicate its message subtly rather than directly.

The other possibility is to make very confrontational work that puts the message at the head of all its artistics decisions. Thus both the presentation of its subject matter and its aesthetic choices are measured according to the message, and the result is often controversial and intense. This strategy approaches the audience through the intellect first and pleasure last. It often has a strong sense of morality that gives it a feeling of authority and confrontation. This work does not aim to be enjoyed as entertainment but rather wishes to communicate what it considers to be an urgent message.

The first strategy can quickly gain a broad fan base while it risks the loss of its message or substance to the sensuality of its popular attributes. Often enough the audience does not connect beyond the surface, missing entirely the real objectives of the artist. An example of this is Coppola’s first two Godfather films, wherein the second was made with the intention to clarify and push the moral message of the story–precisely because he felt that the audience had stayed at the surface of the first film, engaging with the wonderful story and technique and bypassing its moral content.

On the otherhand, the second strategy risks alienating most audience members while gaining in decency and self-respect because it refuses to compromise its subject matter for the sake of easier entertainment. Work of this nature often takes the most aesthetic risks because, since it measures its decisions on the criteria of the presumed importance of its message, the artist often feels that the more popular aesthetics are outdated or useless for its intentions.

And yet both cases have a high risk of preaching to the choir, of reducing the artisitic experience to whatever it was, aesthetically or ideologically, that excited the viewer before he met up with the work. In other words, that the artwork will not really communicate anything, let alone change anything, since it is giving the audience something that it is already comfortable with in the first place. Thus there is the possibility of a lack of real engagement into a critical thought process.

Where Has All the Love Gone?

La Notte: Antonioni, 1961

From January 29th

I remember thinking–”I wonder how the script looked?” –I mean, it’s all actions with little dialogue. Atrocious camera movements. Beautiful. A bleak landscape. Bleak gray. The photography narrates to a level that is astounding. Agressive, voracious, indifferent, sharp and merciless. All with a light and constant rhytm. Excellent.

I became very impressed by the fact that I actually enjoyed the film. It was slow, years ago I wouldve fallen asleep. Or perhaps I wouldve recognized its greatness despite being bored and without really liking it. But it hit me. I felt it touch a nerve of truth that was terribly clear and true.

You could feel emptiness pouring empty all over the screen. A clinical, unflinching meditation on decadence, the decadence of love. It reminds me of a Francis Bacon painting. Still rhythm. Still pacing. Everything at a distance. No explanations. No opportunity to get close. Take it or leave it. For example, there were few close-ups. No empathy. No identification. A rather observational hint in the viewpoint, a harsh and solid distance. The film never presumes to judge its subject matter. It is atrocious and sterile from the beginning to the end. And the fact that this film is a love story makes it even more incredible to look at. It captures a terrible feeling: Love lost. Desolation. Love for God’s sake. Love stepped on and beat. Love desolate, love oblitterated, love emptied.

Tarkovsky, speaking about The Mirror, said that a work of art is organic, that it’s rules are organic and come only from its own self. This film is a bleak and singular animal that does just this. You can feel a certain pride and resolution from beginning to end. Form follows function.

One

“…and the passions must be held in reverence; they must not–they cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry comendations, of mankind.” Edgar Allan Poe in The Poetic Principle.