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LIVES IN PICTURES
A film series celebrating milestones in the personal histories of film lovers.

CHAPTER 1: The Childhood Inkling
Early entries in the discovery of movies as fascinations, escapes, and mirrors.

RIO BRAVO
1959, Directed by Howard Hawks
Starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, & Angie Dickinson

There are few moments I treasure more in my relatively short, 23-year space of memory than that of dressing up, at 7 or 8, in felt and pleather cowboy costumes with my younger brother Brandt – red-safety-capped plastic firearms and popcorn in hand, in the basement of our grandparents’ Rocky Mountain home – to enjoy, with alternating bouts of rambunctious play-action and rapt glee, this wonderful Technicolor Western. 

 As I know now, RIO BRAVO is a real marvel of 1950s Hollywood.  It’s perhaps Hawks’ very best contribution to the Western genre– one in which his boyish earnestness and delicate stylistic thrift flourished.  But, to us then, it was such a simple joy!  I recall my enjoyment of it in childhood mostly as mess of slick action – executed both by the lawmen and outlaws on screen and those tumbling around on the cushions in front of it. 

A filter of years and a couple of more recent viewings reveal that there was much more at play in the experience.  I was certainly fascinated with the wry baritonal presence of John Wayne, probably my first movie star recognized as such; there were piques of queer fervor for the firebrand Angie Dickinson and her histrionic scarlet gowns; but, of course, I know now that the brightest spot in my memory of the film’s charm was my unconscious but hopeless romance with Ricky Nelson and his nicely rounded ass– confused to no end by the brilliant palpability of this film’s homoerotic tensions.   There was something about the vague recognition that this film was ‘old’ that really intrigued me, as well.  I think this played a large part in my eventual quest to delve more eccentrically into movies than the jumbo-cased VHS collection of Disney movies I owned would allow.

RIO BRAVO is in many ways a rather perfect entry in the Hollywood genre canon, and an introduction to the possibilities of movies that I am very grateful for.  A dexterously choreographed exploration the Western’s obsession with masculine identity (often queerly-tinged), justice, duty, and the wide open spaces that accommodate any combination of these themes.

I will curate.

Today I realized that it is not entirely outside of the realm of possibility that I could instigate a small-time ‘movie night’-ish bar-room/back-yard film series of my own design. 

I’m going to make this happen. 

Consider this the first entry in the story of how I do it.  Said tale will likely be a tragicomedy.

summer things

blog friends, please suggest fun things to do in the sunlight? this list needs to grow.

• May 1-2nd – City Opera’s VOX!!1 (free!)
• May 2nd – Brooklyn Museum’s FIRST SATURDAY: Pee Wee’s Big Adventure…! Dance Party!
• May 2-3rd – Brooklyn Botanic Gardens Cherry Blossom festival!

Jalsaghar (The Music Room), 1958

Satyajit Ray’s THE MUSIC ROOM was thoroughly rewarding, like every other work by this deeply humanist filmmaker I’ve been lucky enough to see.  I think the thing I love most about Ray is the affection he communicates in every frame towards the subjects he displays – display definitely being the term for his art.  He connects with me personally like few other filmmakers have– I think most importantly because his style is utterly simple, hopeful, and indicative of concern more for generosity towards his audience than soliciting awareness of himself as an artist.  (A trait that I see sometimes as the greatest flaw of filmmakers in the soon-following 60s.)

I was enraptured my last semester of college by a class that discussed Eastern vs. Western aesthetics, and although I am most certainly ignorant of the expert details that would be involved in an actual discussion of these tings, I’m fascinated by one bit that stuck with me regarding Ray’s work.  I was extremely fortunate to be steered by my professor in that class towards some writing on the ‘nine rasas’ of Indian artistic tradition.  (If I remember right, these wikis are good places to start for a basic outline: Abhinavagupta,  the Nātyaśāstra, and Bharata Muni).  Don’t quote me on this! But:  A theory developed specifically as a way to understand the affect of art as removed from Western narrative tradition and the Poetics, the Natyasastra basically states that there are nine colors (or flavors, or moods) evoked in art that encompass every reaction elicited from the body or spirit by a thing of beauty. 

Ray’s first film PATHER PANCHALI was essentially a thesis on this theory.  Although apparently all of his work is viewable through this lense, that film is an especially clear sequence of distinctly different moods.  These colors or tones essentially make an emotional narrative where, under a certian Western lense, there is none.  We’re urged to feel exposition in the fluid movement through joyfulness, grief, wonder, and outrage that Ray’s story evokes. 

THE MUSIC ROOM toys with this conciet in a refreshing way.  The film is definitely eccentric when compared to the naturalist observation of the Apu Trilogy.  I really enjoyed its slightly more ‘consumable’ bits of craziness.  However, the climax of the film is a pure excercise in the power of a film to sieze a viewer’s whole being with displayed movement and energy.  The music in the movie is gorgeous, but when the dancer at the end starts her frienzied performance one can’t help but be grateful for some sort of kinetic gift that the film has imparted.

Lovely stuff.  Try to catch more of the Ray festival here.

The Road

Recently finished this.  Took it up out of a sort of pop obligation, and of course an inability to resist any post-apocalyptic narrative.  

It was a pleasantly substantial bit of heavy-chested romanticism squeezed into a tiny, writhing space of storytelling.  I admired something in McCarthey’s blasted-out landscape that I will presume to call a discussion with history, or human cycles, or maybe just basic hopefulness.  He hides in his story little protests to something he obviously feels on some level is an unavoidable human fate of  obliteration.  This sentiment peeks through the deadness in cracks.  Outside of his “frame”, if you will-and-make-the-usual-comments-about-me-knowing-nothing-of-other-media, is an immaculate, hopeful stretch of historical, emotional, and spiritual space.  We see it when the boy plays his flute, and in the vague future possibility of the “south”.  In the food, and the fire, and even the tortured flashbacks, we see the possibility of a cycle of recovery.  The Earth is dead, long live the Earth.  All is not lost though we fade away in misery. 

He should have written the BSG finale, is what I’m basically trying to say.

Wish the ending had been a little better developed, but I may have to dig further into this guys stoof.

My favorite love songs.

..because I remembered that it was Valentine’s Day last week.

10. ‘I Am Trying to Break Your Heart’ – Wilco / Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; 2001

9. I’m Still Your Fag’ – Broken Social Scene / You Forgot It in People; 2003

8. ‘Stay With Me’ - Faces / A Nod is as Good as a Wink… to a Blind Horse; 1971

7. ‘Thirteen’ – Big Star / #1 Record / 1972

6. ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’ – Chet Baker / Chet Baker Sings; 1956

5. ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ – Prince / Sign O’ the Times; 1987

4. ‘Girl From the North Country’ – Bob Dylan / The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan; 1963

 3. ‘Ain’t No Way’ – Aretha Franklin / Lady Soul; 1968

2. ‘It Makes No Difference’ – The Band / The Last Waltz; 1978

1. ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’ – The Replacements / Pleased To Meet Me; 1987

Ponette

Jacques Doillon, 1996 - France

More from the Alliance’s Doillon series… This one was pretty amazing.  The performance of that little girl absolutely baffles me, she is stunning.  I enjoy the meandering tone of the film as well.  I will gladly add it to my shelf of favorite films about the experience of children.

This song is by Buzzi-Peccia, not Tosti.

Refreshing challenges in Jacques Doillon

Family Life / La vie de famille – Jacques Doillon, 1985

I caught this film at the first installment of the Alliance Francaise’s series on the all but forgotten French director, and was quite greatful.  Sadly I’ve missed the second film already, but I was very taken with this work and hope to catch as much as I can of the rest of the series.  My first impression of Doillon was extremely complicated.  His command of mise-en-scene is truly one of the most exciting I’ve ever scene.  He tracks through spaces in ways that lend the movements of his characters a drastic rhythm and sway.  He alsodisplays a Cassavettes-calibur understanding of directing his actors… but what a maddening emotional sensibility!  This is the first film in a while that has captured me in such a complicated manner.  It pissed me off so distinctly for the first hour or so, but then I felt the work itself was tryign to turn against its master.

The documentary they showed on Doillon before this feature was incredibly annoying, but it was worth sitting through it and the accompanying disgust I felt for a director who seemed to sweat solipsism and misogyny in his interviews. 

Doillon certainly follows through on what he claimed was a complete disregard for creating likeable main characters.  The protagonist of FAMILY, ‘Emmanuel’, is a frank emotional sadist surrounded by caricatures of women- weeping, shrieking bags of jealousy that cling to him in spite of his disputable good looks and complete lack of tenderness.  His daughter, introduced in the story  just as I was about to throw up my hands in protest of the film’s malicious tone,  is perhaps the exception.  Played with astonishing maturity by Mara Goyet, ‘Elise’ begins in the film as a sort of greek chorus to her father’s self-obsessed monologues.  She enters a cast of women characters that seem to be only projected aspects of the sole male character’s whims.  The world of the film is practically irrelavent compared to his embattled psyche, every bit of dialogue seems to be orchestrated by his ego to feed itself in one way or another.  But Elise grows steadily apart from him – even as the film brings them together to the forefront of its spinning narrative.

The daughter is developed to be something like a seceding aspect of Emmanuel’s character.  She embodies youth, naivete, and hopefulness- all things that he despises.  As the film’s narrative wanders further and further from the adult women in Emmanuel’s world, he begins to lose ground to this passionate young thing.  She argues against his cruel tenencies,  goads him to admit that there is in fact some pique of positivity to be found in the world around him, and in turn the very style of the film absorbs some of her spirit. 

Doillon convinced me by the end that he is something of a blend between these characters.  As a man constantly trashing the women in his films without a spec of irony, he’s a bastard.  But as an artist who lets his work battle the worst parts of himself, to show spots of aesthetic romanticism or at least a stylistic debate between detachment and warmness, he’s something of a genius.

Granted I’ve only seen one film so far.. but I’m hopeful!