In the morning the search for the dead body continued...

I bet if I gave you three guesses as to which book about a famous director this line is from you would probably get it right fairly quickly. It is, of course, Werner Herzog, and I finally got around to reading his "Conquest of the Useless," his diary of the making of Film Folly Fitzcarraldo.   Even if you are a fan of Fitz and of Les Blank's doc Burden of Dreams (about the making of Fitz), this brings altogether new insights told in Herzog's distinctive nihilist/humanist/poetic style. Most fascinating is he spends more time ruminating on the mysteries of the animals and insects he encounters in the Amazon than on the trials and tribulations of film making.

Under the Skin

Under the Skin

Saw Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin at the Harvard Exit Sunday. Great film but a weird crowd. As much as I still love the communal experience of movie going, sometimes patience can be tested.  Not less than 10 customers at one point or another got up and blasted the theater with light from the open Exit door. 

Now the fact that all these wandering customers were male and the fact the movie is highly disturbing and, I reckon, particularly for males(I certainly was disturbed) might make sense if they high tailing it out of there, but each and every one of these customers eventually returned.  What, they couldn't have taken care of business before the movie?

There also seemed to be an inordinate amount of commentary from this particular crowd, of the "tsk" and "oh please" variety. Hey, I get it, the film is deliberately divisive, obtuse, borderline incoherent, and if one does not allow oneself into Glazer's world I could see some of the elements of the plot (such as there is one) might strain credulity.  But, again, not sure why these folks seem to feel it is necessary to register their verdict so audibly.

By coincidence I stumbled upon an article by the great Kent Jones in the latest Film Comment online.  Jones' article, which has his own always insightful thoughts and copiously quotes from three critical legends, deals with the changing state of the auteur theory and film criticism in general, but the first paragraph, included here, says some fascinating things about experiencing movies objectively and without ego, allowing yourself into it's world.  I thought of the Harvard Exit customers, and Under the Skin for certain, while reading this.

• Just about 10 years ago, Manny Farber and I were taking one last walk through a retrospective show of his paintings. He stopped to scrutinize a large board called Ingenious Zeus—vegetables, branches, and open art books splayed across a field of deep blue in an unsettled composition suggesting the eye of a hurricane. “I try to get myself out of it as much as possible so that the object takes on a kind of religious awe,” he remarked. I remember thinking that Farber could just as well have been thumbing through a collection of his writings, and reflecting on the force field that binds the work of art to the one driven to describe it. Or, as Andrew Sarris explained it, the one compelled to enter into its enchanted aura: “What it really is, is first you see something, and you like it, and then it’s a mystery, and you go into the mystery.” To strive for a strictly objective account, as André Bazin warned, is to turn down a blind alley: the artwork cordoned off from the probing sensual intelligence of its entranced audience is as uninteresting as an output of zeroes and ones. To pursue a purely impressionistic direction is to let the work slip away by other means: the reader is left with nothing but a blurred, smudged and roughly approximate copy, a Xerox of a tintype of an etching after a painting. Approaching the artwork with humility, as Farber and Sarris suggested (as opposed to arrogance or unctuous subservience), being precise about one’s place in relation to it (as opposed to drifting from rapt respondent to rival creator to impartial observer to public advocate, and then back again), and understanding oneself as a transmitter rather than a final arbiter or an entertainer, is to move toward fulfilling the task of criticism as defined by Bazin: “To prolong as much as possible in the intelligence and sensibility of those who read it the original shock of the work of art.” It seems to me that this is only possible if one preserves and builds upon the memory of the very first shock, recalled by Whitman: “There was a child went forth every day/And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became…”

Welcome, All!

This will be a place for members and users of cinema downlow to share their thoughts on films they have seen (through cinema downlow in addition to elsewhere) or suggestions for cinema down low's future screenings.  We are always interested in hearing from the cinephile community!!

RQ

Brand New Blog!

Firing this baby up!!