Noira-Blanchè-Rougi

The Computational child

2011-10-30T16:26:00.000-05:00

Many parents like me have experienced intense frustration towards the behavior of their children. Taking care of a child is NEVER an easy task, a simple allocating of time and observing of routines. Taking care of a child means negotiating with her, contesting her will with our own. And often times they seem to be too strong for us to bend. Other times they change out of reasons completely opaque to us.

The idea to consider the child’s behavior the result of computation has recently dawned on me. And it sounds a little perverse or blasphemous to me at first.

But if indeed an adult’s intellectual life is too far from the capacity of our current generation of computers, an infant is much less so, many of whose behavior are purely instinctive—obviously pre-programmed. Although I acknowledge that at this stage thoughts of higher order may exist to a certain extent, thanks to the rather recent development in infant psychology, what matters most to an infant is not complicated at all.

Let us take the case of an infant’s rejection of milk bottle. An infant’s preference to breast over bottle is an indication that an infant presumes a wrong causality, the same kind that makes a seagull chick pecks at the red dot on her mother’s beak. As Tinbergen showed us, what matters is not that there is a bird/mother/food behind the beak. Tinbergen’s improved model—a thin, elongated paper cutout with painted high contrast lines—becomes the uberbeak that works even better than the real one.

I very much regret that scientists have not performed experiments on the nipple that resemble those by Tinbergen’s in the 1940s. If so they may discover that the currently widely used nipple is far from efficient—the proof is that infant can tell immediately. The best nipple an infant is looking for—this is in my opinion the real message in Tinbergen’s experiments—is not necessarily that of the mother!

Tinbergen’s discovery is brilliant. Yet it has limited applicability—a well isolated control parameter such as this is hard to come by—and the method is really one of trial-and-error. This is unfortunately how far all experimental psychology can go. It stops right where we want more.

But a behaviorist account can help to reveal the underlying computational mechanism. I think it would be easy to write a program of visual perception that simulates the seagull’s pecking preference. A mathematical model may even be suggested, from which we can calculate the optimal value.

Unfortunately most of nature’s problems are not this simple. The pecking routine is simple because it has no exception handling. But what runs in a human infant is much more flexible. The infant is programmed to NOT to accept any other form of feeding than the breast. This will provide a supply consistency. But it has the following exception handling.

A child will resist an alternative form up to 24 hours (my daughter gave up on 10). This time frame is well set. It delimitates the upper limit of not having food without damaging health in any permanent way. It also allows for unintended interruption of feeding. In primitive ages, where these habits were formed, it might be common that the feeder be absent for this period of time. Anytime longer, however, the infant must look for alternative solutions.

Hunger almost invariably triggers crying, which exhausts the infant and quickly induces her to sleep. The triggering of crying routine is no doubt there for the need to prevent any negligence on the part of care giver. But the intervention of the sleep routine is there to prevent extensive running of the crying (dead loop). When an infant is asleep, the energy consumption also lowers.

The way distinct program/routines work together and intervene with each other is the basic design of human being. Nowhere than in an infant do we see this reality in such a simple yet completely brilliant fashion. Marvin Minksy describes something similar in his The Society of Mind, which according to Sherry Turkle was inspired by none other than the original Tron (1982). The basic mechanism he imagines is this: a routine (for instance, builder) calls for other routines (see, grasp, move, release etc.) This is perfectly implementable in computer language. But things get tricky when parallel computing is involved, where two routines conflict in interest compete for control. The subtlety in this mechanism is there for us to witness in every child. It is hard to quantify and manipulate in any precision, but there behind is the work of a mechanism none the less.

Once upon a time in China

2011-05-09T21:20:00.001-05:00

I dedicate this post to all who grew up in China in the early 1980s.

The film is called “英俊少年”, its actually title is Heintje: Once the Sun Will Be Shining Again (1970)

Zwei Kleine Sterne: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rtr_ftqVtaw

Original lyric

Literal translation

Es war Abend, als am Fenster

ich einst Dich leis' gefragt:

Wirst Du immer bei mir bleiben?

Ach, mein Kind, hast Du gesagt.

Zwei kleine Sterne steh'n

am großen Himmelszelt.

Sie werden mit Dir geh'n

wohl in die weite, weite Welt.

Zwei kleine Sterne sind

mein allerletzter Gruß.

Oh, denk' an mich, wenn ich fortgeh'n muß!

It was night, at the window

I asked you softly,

Will you always stay by me?

Ah, my child, you said,

There are two little stars

In the big sky

They will go with you

well into the wide, wide world.

These two little stars are

my very last goodbye.

Oh, think of me when I have to go away!

Kleine Kinder Kleine Sorgen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP4y8NpLmQY

Original lyric

Literal translation

Chinese (not mine)

Kleine Kinder,kleine Sorgen,

und ein Haus voll Sonnenschein.

Kleine Kinder, kleine Sorgen,

koennt'es so für immer sein?

Doch so schnell vergehen die Jahre,

gross wird bald dein kleines Kind,

und die kleinen lieben Sorgen,

wo die dann geblieben sind.

Kleine Kinder, kleine Sorgen,

und ein bisschen Kummer bloss.

Aber einmal kommt ein Morgen,

und da sind sie beide gross.

little children, little worries,

and a house full of sunshine.

Little children, little worries,

Can it be so forever?

But go by so fast the years,

your little child will soon be big,

and love the little worries,

that are left behind.

little children, little worries,

and a bit of grief only.

But there comes a morning,

and since both (boy and worry) are big.

小小少年,很少烦恼,

眼望四周阳光照.

小小少年,很少烦恼,

但愿永远这样好.

一年一年时间飞跑,

小小少年在长高.

随着岁月由小变大,

他的烦恼增加了.

小小少年,很少烦恼,

无忧无虑乐陶陶.

但有一天,风波突起,

忧虑烦恼都到了.

Letzte Rose un unserm Garten: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04AwI4tQ2oY

Original lyric

Literal translation

Letzte Rose in unserm Garten

Die verborgen im Laub ich fand

Willst noch immer auf Sonne warten

Doch der Herbstwind weht übers Land

Längst verwelkt sind alle Blumen

All ihr Glanz ging längst dahin

Letzte Rose in unserm Garten

So alleine musst du verblühn

Längst verwelkt sind alle Blumen

All ihr Glanz ging längst dahin

Letzte Rose in unserm Garten

So alleine musst du verblühn

Last rose in our garden

I found hidden among the leaves

Still want to wait for the sun

But the autumn wind blows over the land

Long since faded have all flowers

All its glory long past

Last Rose in our garden

So alone you have to wither

Long since faded, all flowers

All its glory long past

Last Rose in our garden

So alone you have to wither

Compare this with the original Irish version written by Thomas Moore:

'Tis the last rose of summer

Left blooming alone;

All her lovely companions

Are faded and gone;

No flower of her kindred,

No rosebud is nigh,

To reflect back her blushes,

To give sigh for sigh.

I'll not leave thee, thou lone one!

To pine on the stem;

Since the lovely are sleeping,

Go, sleep thou with them.

Thus kindly I scatter,

Thy leaves o'er the bed,

Where thy mates of the garden

Lie scentless and dead.

So soon may I follow,

When friendships decay,

From Love's shining circle

The gems drop away.

When true hearts lie withered

And fond ones are flown,

Oh! who would inhabit,

This bleak world alone?

Another song that is more of an extra-diegetic thing:

Deine Liebe, Deine Treue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQP_UEWg68Y

Axial cut

2009-11-29T13:39:00.001-06:00

In a recent post Bordwell provides some nice examples of what he calls the axial cut. This reminds me of a section of my camera movement paper which I paste it below.

On the surface camera movement and editing present two mutually exclusive options for the filmmaker in a given situation. From an establishing shot we can either track in to a tighter composition, or we can simply cut to it. Camera movement decisions come in the profilmic scenario, whereas montage decisions exist in the postfilmic. This means there is a limit to which the editing room can deal with camera movement. Montage, with all its power, cannot change a shot with fixed framing to a shot with mobile framing. It can divide a shot with camera movement into pieces, but it cannot construct a camera movement out of shots that have no camera movement in them (except for an illusion of it). Yet from the perspective of filmic experience these two do have an interesting overlapping, which we shall discuss in the following.

Perhaps it would be instructive to start from a term: plan-séquence. The term was coined by French postwar critics, including notably Andre Bazin. Whereas the idea of shot (plan) initially refers strictly to a field of view, that is, a spatial construction, the notion of sequence adds a temporal dimension to it. For this very reason Jean Mitry believes it is a monstrous terminology because the two are incompatible[1]. But what Mitry takes as the reason of this apparent incompatibility is exactly its path of reconciliation. What is important here is not that the term implies a camera movement, but rather, it designates the camera movement as a sequence of successive shots, where the principle of montage takes effect. In other words, if we define a sequence as an assemblage of shots, then the sequence shot could be regarded as an in-camera assemblage.

To regard camera movement as a form of montage is far from my whimsical invention. Many have recognized Rope as a practice of implicit editing, with unfavorable results. Bazin, for example, sarcastically remarks that “each time we are struck by his [Hitchcock] effectiveness, it is because he has managed, at the cost of a thousand hardships, to create the impression of shot and reverse shot or a close-up where it would have been easy to use a single take like everyone else.”[2] Reisz and Millar, too, criticize that “the camera movement does not contribute to the [dramatic] effect, it merely delays it by a meaningless—and psychologically inappropriate—device.”[3]

Conversely, the result achieved from montage to motion continuity often yields commendation. To everyone’s praise Eisenstein uses three successive shots of stone lions for an illusion of motion continuity. An example of montage as a form of camera movement can be found in The Birds (1963). When Lydia Brenner comes into a room pillaged by intruding birds, the discovery of the body of this unfortunate farmer is presented as three shots in rapid succession, one closer than the other, riveting our attention to his empty eye sockets. Now imagine the alternatives: a camera movement, a track in. The impact, the sense of violence would be considerably weaker (A quick zoom sits in between the two). Nevertheless it can be argued that these three shots are taken out from a camera movement and in our perception of this montage we mentally reconstruct such a movement (recall our discussion of Serene Velocity). The shock, therefore, comes from a violent suppression of the intermediary images.

And another small passage:

Serene Velocity (1970) essentially shows the same sensation. Only here the sense of movement is achieved by zooming, or to be precise, by the discrete use of a zooming lens, for what is involved here is rather an illusion of zooming. The case exemplifies an extreme of what we have been discussing here—camera movement as the continuous change of perception. One might object with good reason that this movement is not continuous at all. In fact, as the film proceeds, the distance between the two focal lengths increases, so that this discontinuousness is made more and more salient. Nevertheless if we still perceive this movement as a “compression” of space (instead of two distinct spaces), then its unfolding is still continuous in a sense. Our knowledge of its discreteness is therefore counter-perceptual. Also, what this case shows us is that there is no clear boundary between camera movement as a spatial trajectory and as sensation. If in Serene Velocity the discontinuousness creates sensation, the sensation in its turn dilates this discontinuousness by perceptually gluing two incongruent poles together and builds in our mind an imaginary trajectory between them—a process no different from the essential one of cinema to render 24 still frames into movement. Wavelength, on the other hand, dilates the continuousness and by doing so transforms camera movement as a spatial perception into a temporal perception.

[1] Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, 64.

[2] Bazin, The Cinema of Cruelty, 114.

[3] Reisz and Millar, The Technique of Film Editing, 234.

On Film Music: Stravinsky vs. Raksin

2009-11-21T14:11:00.001-06:00

This article is from Film Music Society (including the picture above), I so love it that I decide to copy it in its entirety. For the original see

http://www.filmmusicsociety.org/news_events/features/2003/102403.html

Igor Stravinsky on Film Music
What is the function of music in moving pictures? What, you ask, are the particular problems involved in music for the screen? I can answer both questions briefly. And I must answer them bluntly. There are no musical problems in the film. And there is only one real function of film music – namely, to feed the composer! In all frankness I find it impossible to talk to film people about music because we have no common meeting ground; their primitive and childish concept of music is not my concept. They have the mistaken notion that music, in "helping" and "explaining" the cinematic shadow-play, could be regarded under artistic considerations. It cannot be.
Do not misunderstand me. I realize that music is an indispensable adjunct to the sound film. It has got to bridge holes; it has got to fill the emptiness of the screen and supply the loudspeakers with more or less pleasant sounds. The film could not get along without it, just as I myself could not get along without having the empty spaces of my living-room walls covered with wall paper. But you would not ask me, would you, to regard my wall paper as I would regard painting, or apply aesthetic standards to it?
Misconceptions arise at the very outset of such a discussion when it is asserted that music will help the drama by underlining and describing the characters and the action. Well, that is precisely the same fallacy which has so disastrously affected the true opera through the "Musikdrama." Music explains nothing; music underlines nothing. When it attempts to explain, to narrate, or to underline something, the effect is both embarrassing and harmful.
What, for example, is "sad" music? There is no sad music, there are only conventions to which part of the western world has unthinkingly become accustomed through repeated associations. These conventions tell us that Allegro stands for rushing action, Adagio for tragedy, suspension harmonies for sentimental feeling, etc. I do not like to base premises on wrong deductions, and these conventions are far removed from the essential core of music.
And – to ask a question myself – why take film music seriously? The film people admit themselves that at its most satisfactory it should not be heard as such. Here I agree. I believe that it should not hinder or hurt the action and that it should fill its wallpaper function by having the same relationship to the drama that restaurant music has to the conversation at the individual restaurant table. Or that somebody's piano playing in my living-room has to the book I am reading.
The orchestral sounds in films, then, would be like a perfume which is indefinable there. But let it be clearly understood that such perfume "explains" nothing; and, moreover, I can not accept it as music. Mozart once said: "Music is there to delight us, that is its calling." In other words, music is too high an art to be a servant to other arts; it is too high to be absorbed only by the subconscious mind of the spectator, if it still wants to be considered as music.
Furthermore, the fact that some good composers have composed for the screen does not alter these basic considerations. Decent composers will offer the films decent pages of background score; they will supply more "listenable" sounds than other composers; but even they are subject to the basic rules of the film which, of course, are primarily commercial. The film makers know that they need music, but they prefer music which is not very new. When, for commercial reasons, they employ a composer of repute they want him to write this kind of "not very new" music – which, of course, results in nothing but musical disaster.

I have been asked whether my own music, written for the ballet and the stage, would not be comparable in its dramatic connotation to music in the films. It cannot be compared at all. The days of Petrouchka are long past, and whatever few elements of realistic description can be found in its pages fail to be representative of my thinking now. My music expresses nothing of realistic character, and neither does the dance. The ballet consists of movements which have their own aesthetic and logic, and if one of those movements should happen to be a visualization of the words "I Love You," then this reference to the external world would play the same role in the dance (and in my music) that a guitar in a Picasso still-life would play: something of the world is caught as pretext or clothing for the inherent abstraction. Dancers have nothing to narrate and neither has my music. Even in older ballets like Giselle, descriptiveness has been removed – by virtue of its naiveté, its unpretentious traditionalism and its simplicity – to a level of objectivity and pure art-play.
My music for the stage, then, never tries to "explain" the action, but rather it lives side by side with the visual movement, happily married to it, as one individual to another. In Scènes de Ballet the dramatic action was given by an evolution of plastic problems, and both dance and music had to be constructed on the architectural feeling for contrast and similarity.
The danger in the visualization of music on the screen – and a very real danger it is – is that the film has always tried to "describe" the music. That is absurd. When Balanchine did a choreography to my Danses Concertantes (originally written as a piece of concert music) he approached the problem architecturally and not descriptively. And his success was extraordinary for one great reason: he went to the roots of the musical form, of the jeu musical, and recreated it in forms of movements. Only if the films should ever adopt an attitude of this kind is it possible that a satisfying and interesting art form would result.
The dramatic impact of my Histoire du Soldat has been cited by various critics. There, too, the result was achieved, not by trying to write music which, in the background, tried to explain the dramatic action, or to carry the action forward descriptively, the procedure followed in the cinema. Rather was it the simultaneity of stage, narration, and music which was the object, resulting in the dramatic power of the whole. Put music and drama together as individual entities, put them together and let them alone, without compelling one to try to "explain" and to react to the other. To borrow a term from chemistry: my ideal is the chemical reaction, where a new entity, a third body, results from uniting two different but equally important elements, music and drama; it is not the chemical mixture where, as in the films, to the preordained whole just the ingredient of music is added, resulting in nothing either new or creative. The entire working methods of dramatic film exemplify this.
All these reflections are not to be taken as a point-blank refusal on my part ever to work for the film. I do not work for money, but I need it, as everybody does. Chesterton tells about Charles Dickens' visit to America. The people who had invited him to lecture here were astonished, it seems, about his interest in fees and contracts. "Money is not a shocking thing to an artist," Dickens insisted. Likewise there will be nothing shocking to me in offering my professional capacities to a film studio for remuneration.
If I am asked whether the dissemination of good concert music in the cinema will help to create a more understanding mass audience, I can only answer that here again we must beware of dangerous misconceptions. My first premise is that good music must be heard by and for itself, and not with the crutch of any visual medium. If you start to explain the "meaning" of music you are on the wrong path. Such absurd "meanings" will invariably be established by the image, if only through automatic association. That is an extreme disservice to music. Listeners will never be able to hear music by and for itself, but only for what it represents under the given circumstances and given instructions. Music can be useful, I repeat, only when it is taken for itself. It has to play its own role if it is to be understood at all. And for music to be useful to the individual we must above all teach the self-sufficiency of music, and you will agree that the cinema is a poor place for that! Even under the best conditions it is impossible for the human brain to follow the ear and the eye at the same time.
And even listening is itself not enough, granted that it be understood in its best sense; the training of the ear. To listen only is too passive and it creates a taste and judgment which are too general, too indiscriminate. Only in limited degree can music be helped through increased listening; much more important is the making of music. The playing of an instrument, actual production of some kind or another, will make music accessible and helpful to the individual, not the passive consumption in the darkness of a neighborhood theatre.
And it is the individual that matters, never the mass. The "mass," in relationship to art, is a quantitative term which has never once entered into my consideration. When Disney used Sacre du Printemps for Fantasia he told me: "Think of the number of people who will thus be able to hear your music!" Well, the number of people who will consume music is doubtless of interest to somebody like [impresario] Mr. [Sol] Hurok, but it is of no interest to me. The broad mass adds nothing to the art, it cannot raise the level, and the artist who aims consciously at "mass-appeal" can do so only by lowering his own level. The soul of each individual who listens to my music is important to me, and not the mass feeling of a group. Music cannot be helped through an increase in quantity of listeners, be this increase effected by the films or any other medium, but only through an increase in the quality of listening, the quality of the individual soul.
In my autobiography I described the dangers of mechanical music distribution; and I still believe, as I then did, that "for the majority of listeners there is every reason to fear that, far from developing a love and understanding of music, the modern methods of dissemination will . . . produce indifference, inability to understand, to appreciate, or to undergo any worthy reaction. In addition, there is the musical deception arising from the substitution for the actual playing of a reproduction, whether on record or film or by wireless transmission. It is the same difference as that between the synthetic and the authentic. The danger lied in the fact that there is always a far greater consumption of the synthetic which, it must always be remembered, is far from being identical with its mode. The continuous habit of listening to changed and sometimes distorted timbres dulls and degrades the ear, so that it gradually loses all capacity for enjoying natural musical sounds."
In summary, then, my ideas on music and the moving pictures are brief and definite:
The current cinematic concept of music is foreign to me; I express myself in a different way. What common language can one have with the films? They have recourse to music for reasons of sentiment. They use it like remembrances, like odors, like perfumes which evoke remembrances. As for myself, I need music for hygienic purposes, for the health of my soul. Without music in its best sense there is chaos. For my part, music is a force which gives reason to things, a force which creates organization, which attunes things. Music probably attended the creation of the universe. LOGOS.

Raksin’s response Jan 1948 The Musical Digest

I live in a land where deference towards one's elders is scarcely the rule; young people grow up to think in terms of a man's essential worth rather than his seniority. "Essential worth" is, of course, a fancy generalization. It is a variable, a term that permits too many subjective responses. Nevertheless, the essential worth of a man like Igor Stravinsky is hardly disputable – when he is writing music. In the role of critic, however, his greatness is questionable. His recent pronouncements make this abundantly clear.
In writing of a man who was composing Le Sacre du Printemps the year I was born, I must first make clear my great admiration for his genius and for the music he has created. It is not with this that I would quarrel, but with his opinions on artistic matters that appear to be quite beyond his understanding.
In his interview with Ingolf Dahl, which appeared in the Musical Digest of September 1946, Mr. Stravinsky contends that "there is only one real function of film music – namely to feed the composer." Aside from the fact that I have found this function a consistently useful one, there are other less personal reasons for holding it in respect.

Mr. Stravinsky's music may indeed be more expressive than he himself suspects. For even when he sets out to say nothing he succeeds in saying much about himself.

One wishes, as he reads the oftentimes sad history of music, that it might have operated on behalf of Mozart and Schubert. The world has so often neglected its great men that one looks with pleasure at the composer who eats regularly as a result of the indulgence of a wealthy patron or of an organization (sometimes called commission), or by composing or orchestrating for the ballet. In a world where man does not live by double-fugues alone, perhaps the composer who works in films is most fortunate of all. At least he works as a composer and does not wear himself out teaching dolts, concertizing or kowtowing to concert-managers, dilettantes and other musical parasites.
While he may sometimes work with people whose intelligence is somewhat below that of Leonardo da Vinci, this is in no way different from the "Classic" position of the composer, who has always had to cope with employers or patrons who were fundamentally unmusical, from the Archbishop of Salzburg to Louis B. Mayer. The whole struggle of the new generation of American composers has been just this: that they should be able to live from their work as composers. If film music makes this possible, so much the better.
Mr. Stravinsky is absolutely horrified at the esthetics of film music. "I find it impossible to talk to film people about music," he says, "because we have no common meeting ground; their primitive and childish concept of music is not my concept." So long as he assumes the position of godhead in esthetic matters, there are, of course, no grounds for argument. What is primitive and childish is often open to question. Mr. Stravinsky appears to be using against film music the same arguments that were directed against his own ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps, when it first appeared. And if complexity and maturity be the opposites of the qualities that Mr. Stravinsky so despises, he will have great difficulty in convincing all critics that these are the typical qualities of his own music.
A popular, non-technical magazine is hardly the place to be quoting musical examples; otherwise it would be easy to set Mr. Stravinsky's words against his music. For now, it must be sufficient to wonder aloud how the second movement of his Symphony in Three Movements and parts of Scènes de Ballet fit in with his dicta. It has always been interesting to see how often an artist's stated principles are contradicted by his art.
It is an inevitable corollary of Mr. Stravinsky's esthetics that film music, as he sees it, cannot "be regarded under artistic considerations." He said no; I say yes. Impasse. But it is an impasse arising out of a dogmatic assumption with which he could trap the unwary. Evidently Mr. Stravinsky's definition of art is a restrictive one, and if he can maintain it, he has indeed succeeded where philosophers have been frustrated for centuries. He, of all people, should beware of such restrictive definitions. A genuine orthodoxy, sanctioned by theories and accomplishments of generations of great artists before his own time, might conceivably exclude most of his own art. Mr. Stravinsky's definitions must perforce be broad ones, lest he find himself a pariah among those to whom he would appear as a god. Neither Mr. Stravinsky nor I will decide these matters. They will be decided through the same process of selection that constantly refines and revitalizes our musical heritage. Such selective processes have a way of disregarding respectability, theories and venerable age, and of deferring only to essential worth.
The doctrine of essential worth, if I may presume so to dignify the idea, is not one that requires definition. It is quite satisfied with illustration. If one cannot say what it is, one can at least say what it does. It has freed artists from oppressive esthetic standards of both the past and present. It has repeatedly sent the status quo crashing into ruins. It has broken the charmed circle and destroyed the exclusiveness of the daisy chain. It has assured universality and immortality to any piece of music that is good, whether it be a symphony, a popular song or a sequence in a film score. More than that, it has made room in the contemporary musical scene for Mr. Stravinsky.
It is true, of course, that a sequence of film music may not measure up as a musical entity – that is, it may not satisfy the logic of "pure" music. But it may, nevertheless, remain a good piece of film music; and as such, it may be as worthy of artistic consideration as other music for, say, the opera, or the ballet or the dramatic stage. If one were to quibble with Mr. Stravinsky's music as he quibbles with Hollywood's, it would be fair to ask just what "pure" logic is satisfied by the final bars of Petrouchka. By themselves they are hard to justify, but in the context of the ballet they are inevitable. So with film music: many a sequence derives its meaning from the context of the film and the rest of the music. The "wall-paper" theory of film music which Mr. Stravinsky so glibly expounds may help him to maintain the defensive position of a neo-classicist who does not wish his preconceived attitudes to be affected in any way by facts. But it cannot be other than ridiculous to the film-goer, to whom the function of film music is an actuality which he does not need to be convinced of, since he experiences it.

Does the man who grew up in the land of Tchaikovsky and Moussorgsky really ask what is sad music? Ask the artist who painted Guernica what is horror, the author of the Twenty-ninth Psalm what is exaltation.

"Put music and drama together as individual entities," says Mr. Stravinsky, "put them together and let them alone, without compelling one to try to 'explain' and to react to the other." Then, contradicting himself, he explains that his ideal is "the chemical reaction where a new entity . . . results." Aside from the fact that Mr. Stravinsky thus rules out almost all of the operas the world has learned to love in favor of his own esoteric preferences, it seems sheer presumption to say arbitrarily that this reaction never occurs in film music. Anyone who has ever seen the silent footage of a film in its rough cut and then the final scored version can testify to the transformation. The expressiveness of film music has frequently been derided; too often it overstates the case. But to deny its eloquence requires an extreme degree of insensitivity.
Here one runs into another of Mr. Stravinsky's dogmas, the statement that "music explains nothing, music underlines nothing." This may be for Mr. Stravinsky a satisfactory defense of his own aversion to expressiveness. But it hardly conforms to the facts. Mr. Stravinsky's music may indeed be more expressive than he himself suspects. For even when he sets out to say nothing he succeeds in saying much about himself. And this is why he has come to be recognized as one of the great masters of our day. What we revere in his music is precisely what he has explained and underlined about himself, not what he has hidden from us.
Pursuing his idea, Mr. Stravinsky goes on to ask, "What is 'sad' music?" I confess that I find this question narrow, contemptuous, disillusioned, insensitive, precious – and deaf. Does the man who grew up in the land of Tchaikovsky and Moussorgsky really ask what is sad music? Ask the artist who painted Guernica what is horror, the author of the Twenty-ninth Psalm what is exaltation. Mr. Stravinsky seems hardly the one to pause for an answer to such questions, for his esoteric point of view excludes the simple, direct and accessible aspects of art.
I do not hold to the extreme opposite of insisting that every note of music must have some "significance" – social or otherwise – in order to justify it. This approach to art is as intolerable as it is dull. But somehow it seems closer to the realities of life than a philosophy of detachment and scorn.
No one can quarrel with Mr. Stravinsky's prerogatives as an artist, or with his analyses of his own music. They are interesting but not final. Just as Mr. Stravinsky has searched deeply for the intrinsic quality of the music of Pergolesi in Pulcinella, so do we who listen to Stravinsky's music search for the meaning that it has for us. These meanings, I suspect, are far greater than Mr. Stravinsky prefers to acknowledge. Consider, for a moment, the Introduction to the second part of Le Sacre, or Jocasta's aria, Oracula, Oracula, from Oedipus Rex. Examples fall over themselves to be heard, but if I may hark back to an earlier paragraph of this article, let us forget the author of the Twenty-ninth Psalm, and ask the composer of the last movement of the Symphony of Psalms, with its Hallelujahs, what is exaltation?
That Mr. Stravinsky is not unaware of the significance of his music is demonstrated by his acceptance of Ingolf Dahl's program notes for the Symphony in C Major, which included the following sentence: "One day it will be universally recognized that the white house in the Hollywood hills, in which the Symphony was written and which was regarded by some as an ivory tower, was just as close to the core of the world at war as the place where Picasso painted Guernica." Many of us were greatly surprised when Mr. Stravinsky approved this passage; some questioned its validity, which now seems to this writer more apparent than it was at first. The important thing is that Mr. Stravinsky, by his approval, admits to this significance.
The difference between the meanings that a composer intends and the meanings that an audience infers constitutes the very richness of art. Speaking of his Scènes de Ballet, Mr. Stravinsky says, "the dramatic action was given by an evolution of plastic problems." This is undoubtedly true – although one notes that he uses the word "dramatic" in describing the action. But it is not the whole truth. For not all of the problems of today's composers are plastic problems. Many of them are dynamic problems presented by events of the composer's inner and outer life. Expressive music does not have to dig very hard into the history of musical art to find examples in abundance. One can find them even in Mr. Stravinsky's music – in the opening of the Symphony in Three Movements, for instance, in the outer movements of the Symphony of Psalms, in the Pas de Deux of Scènes de Ballet, with its sentimental trumpet solo. These may have been plastic problems to Mr. Stravinsky; but the finished product, as we hear it, is packed with feeling and emotion.
On the basis of his music, Mr. Stravinsky, who has fathered the latest cult of inexpressiveness (an earlier one was sired by Nero), seems himself not quite able to fulfill the membership qualifications. This may come as a great blow to him, but the gulf between his own music and that of the films is neither so wide nor so impassable as he would like to imagine. A man who writes such pretty thirds and sixths, whose music from the ballet, Firebird, is soon to be the subject of a tap dance in a film, and whose new ballad, Summer Moon, may soon be a contender for Hit Parade honors, is hardly in the best possible position to espouse austerity.
I must now point out again that I admire and respect Mr. Stravinsky as a great composer. But as a critic of music in films he leaves much to be desired. Any Hollywood composer can tell him what is really wrong with film music. Mr. Stravinsky himself has pointed out none of the real defects. He has succeeded only in expressing an esoteric and snobbish attitude.
"Music," says Mr. Stravinsky, "probably attended the creation of the universe." Certainly. It was background music.

Editor's final note: According to Raksin, Stravinsky was dismayed at the rebuttal, exclaiming "What's with Raksin? Why does he attack me?" – although the two ultimately remained friends. Recently recalling their public squabble, Raksin commented, "You know, he said music doesn't express anything. I do not agree with that. But the point is, he's Stravinsky and I'm not."

Hollywood mentality

2009-11-21T11:46:00.001-06:00

I have always defended Hollywood cinema. This is not to say I am blind to its vices. When more and more French films are starting to have a Hollywood mentality, things become hard for me to swallow. Recently I saw a film called Ne te Retourne Pas. No, I have to report that I was unable to finish the film. And this is because I was constantly disturbed by this mediocre, unimaginative and clichéd understanding of human value. First there is this setting of a bourgeois nuclear familiar with its stereotyped family gatherings and career encounters. Then there is the husband’s deeply assuring baritone voice and his anxious looks, as if he would help if he knows where to put his feet in. But as usual, when it comes to tell the story of a woman on the verge of nervous breakdown, the husband is mentally thousands of miles away, curiously disabled and peripheral to the emotive experience of our heroine. In this film the way one experiences emotion is so fake (comparable to another film that I just saw, Coppola’s Tetro) that I soon lose interest in wherever the story can potentially go.

No, this is not Hollywood; this is contemporary French cinema.

I am not suggesting that filmmakers should always go for absolutely unusual stories. In the good old days, different mentalities can be found behind the same story. Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet is the exact example. Whereas a Hollywood counterpart, Lost Weekend, focuses on how the guy does the job, with the help of all the caring people around him, naturally—what a splendidly humane place is America!—a genuinely French film on the subject depicts a b&w gritty world of antagonism where not a weekend but a life is lost. It is not that our hero has no friends—he does have, some of them rich, some sincere, some female—what more can you ask? Yes, he does ask for more. And he is paralyzed by having to wait for the future to come. A friend says in the film “I wallow in her warmth like pig in a trough”. This is adulthood, and he doesn’t want to be part of it. He doesn’t want to go to New York.

There are some interesting things to say about Ne te Retourne Pas though. It has little to do with the film, but mainly with Sophie Marceau. I have always regretted the fact this generation of French filmmakers have a different taste for actresses. They have little use for a beautiful face such as the one possessed by Marceau. Her films—and I have seen a lot—are mostly mediocre, despite that some of them are well made (Firelight,Fanfan), some interesting in a special sense (all by Zulawski). Compare her to Moreau I find Moreau is too overtly sensual—pay attention to her lips. Yet Moreau was able to secure many roles that have an intellectual identity. Sophie is far less lucky. Now I see an alternative solution for her: she really becomes more and more like Joan Fontaine.

Desire in noir

2009-11-20T02:13:00.001-06:00

In a noir film the narrator’s identity largely decides the path that the rest of the film will take. The major options are cop (C) and private eye (P), which are concurrent to this day. There is no reason one should entirely replace another since they have respective contexts of operation. Of course these two categories are vulnerable to subversions. Essentially, the C represents law, or at least justice; the P operates on a code that he knows instinctively. If both of them can be regarded as aggressive male individual out there, the degree in which they repress their sexual desire is different. Bounded by his official identity, just like the sheriff in Western, the cop detective is prevented from an ultimate fulfillment of his sexual desire. The P detective, conversely, is luckier. Whenever he returns to his office, unlike his cop counterpart, who has nothing but the typewriter waiting there, there is always a mysterious woman waiting for our private investigator. In this sense, the office that he needs to return so frequently becomes an erotic rendezvous, a convenient locus for tryst. Our private eye does not fare far from a gangster: in both genres desire is regulated by moral code. Yet in the case of the gangster, the ultimate goal is to possess, or to destroy, whereas the private detective always survives.

Laura achieves a maximum externalization of a cop’s desire; it also achieves its maximum repression. The fact that McPherson lingers in Laura’s apartment day and night, probing into her diary and personal correspondence, staring at her portrait (I guess Vertigo picks this bit up), pouring drinks from her cabinet—I am sure he uses her bathroom after all those drinks, but that verges on obscenity—is most unusual for a Detective Lieutenant. His burning desire is ruthlessly pointed out by Waldo, who made it clear that he needs to kill Laura because he cannot tolerate a dirty cop kissing her. On the other hand, Carpenter, such a vulgar figure, represents virtually no threat for him. One wonders why McPherson is such a threat to Waldo—we know he and Laura are unlikely to get together; Carpenter, in contrast, is engaged to Laura—and why McPherson, on his part, takes rather Carpenter as his enemy. But when he finally kisses her on the lip I understand the difference: Waldo competes for the intensity of desire whereas McPherson is concerned with physical possession.

As a genre Noir develops from the gangster and the detective genre. But in regards to the role women play it mostly inherits from the latter. Whereas in gangster movies woman are mostly feminine decorations, trophies of a masculine aggressiveness, in detective genre the woman’s role is constantly under transformation—the desire itself keeps changing forms. It is hard to say which comes first, whether the role change triggers the form of desire, or vice versa. Our male protagonist is not infallible, in fact he is doomed to fall, to get involved, and to become a part of the mess he is investigating. But he will survive because he know when to detach himself, to relinquish his desire, which is obscure from the very beginning, in contrast to the gangster’s explicit one. In Maltese Falcon Bogart says, I won’t because all of me want it and you count on it. Thus the detective exemplifies an ordinary man who resists his own wishes, and refuses to be manipulated.

In Kiss Me Deadly Mike takes as his responsibility to rescue young women, not because he needs to gather intelligence from them, but also because that is part of his perception of the world. The film indulges us with this Fellinistic perception, but it does give us glimpses of an alternative, which is promptly named “feline perception”. Think about Christina, her hysterical laugh; and when she calms down, what does she do? She swallows a locker key in the toilet of a gas station and writes a letter to our protagonist which reads, “Remember me”. This note creates initially a confusion—although Mike quickly figures it out, to my amazement—because what we usually associate with remembrance is not physiological but psychological qualities. It is as if Christina was talking about remembrance in the Egyptian’s sense—embodied by a mummy. Moreover, when she talks about body, she does not mean the surface of her body, but the interior, the bowels. Note in cases of male fantasy, a female’s aura is focused on the surface of her body—nobody would fall in love with the inside of a woman, albeit ironically the ultimate purpose is to attain this inside.

Therefore, what is striking about the male fantasy depicted in this film is that not only it shows a male-centered world where women either work for him or want to seduce him, but also an anxiety that underlines this male complacency. Kiss Me Deadly is a sublime instance of castration anxiety visualized. This anxiety turns true when the Lily Carver character transforms into Gabrielle—a Pandora figure, as Dr. Soberin kindly reminds an obtuse audience—under the auspices of curiosity and greed; she becomes an empowered monster who is momentarily invincible, but as the Hollywood myth has it, sprints to its total destruction; monsters never rule happily thereafter.

The decline of the oval mask.

2009-11-14T15:34:00.001-06:00

The abundant use of mask in early cinema is one of the formal devices that have disappeared completely through the course of stylistic evolution. It is not so much because the intention to manipulate, to direct the audience’s attention has been regarded as inappropriate, or too explicit, but that it runs against the nature of our pictorial perception. It is therefore rather surprising to see that in Gance’s La Roue, mask has an almost abusive usage. There is one shot with Norma’s face in the center of the screen where the mask follows the contour of her face, leaving everything else out. This, I assume, is to intensify our attention to the face by eliminating the rest. But first, it can be done by simply putting her face in a background that is not lit or out of focus, and thus creating the contrast. Plenty such shots in the film show that Gance is not ignorant of the method. Yet however it seems that he believes an accentuation through lighting, through composition is simply not enough. Naturally the shape of anything round can be said to have a structural significance since it is the shape of wheel. But ultimately what is intriguing is that the oval frame, by no means natural to our vision, is an established convention to evoke a certain mode of visual perception, namely, that of portrait. The curve and decorative frame seems to be able to soften the figure presented and to implant it into a sensuous past.

We say now that since our attention is naturally directed to the center of the frame and the human expression, any attempt to reinforce this tendency is perceived only as a digression that calls too much attention to itself. But the use of mask in La Roue to a certain extent suggests that this has not always been the case. The dominant pictorial perception of the previous century, as well as centuries before it, insists on a “framed” perception.

It is perhaps in this spirit that the use of the mask in La Roue is not limited to landscape/portrait. When Machefer comes to visit Sisif, all shots of him and his point of view (even in flashback) are in oval mask. In this case the oval mask seems to convey a sense of comedy, or an apologetic gesture of being digressive. It is in fact an alien mood given the tragedy that immediately precedes it and therefore has to be bracketed somehow.

Liebelei

2009-11-14T14:55:00.001-06:00

It was last year that Laura Mulvey came here and gave a lecture titled

“Desire and Death in Three Films by Max Ophuls".

Mulvey identifies two types of man in Ophuls’s films: the womanizer and the military man. The latter is the guardian of the linearity of the narrative as well that of the symbolic order; the former brings sexual liberation to the woman and therefore is obliged to confront the military man. This results in the final duel where the womanizer is killed and order (both social and narrative) restored. Mulvey further abstracts these two nicely into the pair of desire/death and finds its prototype in Mozart’s Don Juan.

Much of this actually makes sense, although its oversimplification is obvious. It is those who desire that feel the death most. Desperately, lovers want to verbalize their wish to escape death. And that is why in Ophuls the couple in love keeps bringing up the notion of eternity.

Another direction leads to the birth. If we can suggest something even bolder than Mulvey we might say that Fritz also wants to go to a state of pre-birth, or infancy. In the new DVD released in UK there is a scene where Fritz complains about the furtiveness of their rendezvous and the baroness almost sympathetically agrees that she will come to him if he gives her the key. The 35mm print we saw, as well as the lousy VHS doesn’t have this. Also significant is that at one moment Fritz buries his face in her blossom, like a child and his mother.

In Liebelie, the same Waltz is used in the scene where Fritz and Christine dance and the immediately following scene where Fritz dances with the baroness. Although the music is produced differently—in the former case by a mechanical organ and in the latter by live musicians, the fact that the same music is used in such a proximity seems to indicate that these two loves, despite their apparent different reception intended for the audience—one to pursue, one to avoid; one true, one false; one good, one evil—are in fact two versions of the same story. The mechanicalness of the love between Fritz and Christine is such that it has to be maintained by feeding the love machine a coin (a token of love) every three minutes.

In the film there is no mentioning of Fritz not in love with the baroness any more. Instead it tells us that he cannot stand the cold gaze of the husband and his brother (a colleague of his). In other words, the illusion of love fades because of an inconvenience. On the other hand, the illusion of love between Fritz and Christine flourishes for a while given the absence of obstacle. Nevertheless it still needs to be nourished by making reference to “eternity”, a most effective and costless commodity between lovers. Fritz in vain tries to locate an object where his illusion can be objectified, fetishized in Christine’s humble apartment. But her father couldn’t help him there.

If one suspect that this sarcasm toward love is a misreading, in another film, also adapted from Schnitzler, the attitude is made clear. Indeed, as Alan Williams quotes La Rochefoucauld, our virtues are disguised vices—love is but a disguised perversion.

A small detail in Liebelie: the military binocular is not an opera glass, which is a usually feminine prop. What we have in the film is instead a tool of investigation, an emblem of authority, a power to look. The two shop girls, for this reason, cannot hold it; the binocular is doomed to fall—and onto nothing but a military man’s cap. Is this a futile attempt of appropriation, of attacking the enemy by their own weapon? This may be ambiguous. But what is striking to me is that the presence of this monstrous binocular can be appropriated, absorbed by a seemingly realistic/romantic context.

Music in 2046

2009-11-10T13:39:00.001-06:00

hitherto the best performance of Zhang ZiYi

The contemporary approach to film music is very different from the classical score model. The most radical of the differences is that music is no longer used to achieve a structural unity. A contemporary OST is extremely diversified in terms of musical genres and the film shows no intention to unite them together. There is no longer a dominant musical idiom like the symphonic form where the confident host of romanticism is able to accommodate a certain amount of exotic instrumentations. Nevertheless what is marvelous is that somehow the audience does not feel the least disturbance accepting such a fragmented potpourri.

Take 2046 as an example. Basically music in this film is used in only two ways.

The first possibility is what I call the music nostalgia. This includes Nat King Cole’s Christmas Song, because the narrative needs some mood support, and NKC was popular in the 1960s. Such a double dimension is exactly the way NKC is used in Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes. Invariably this brings in a sense of nostalgia because it refers not to a time of the year that recycles itself, but is irretrievably lost in time. The Connie Francis version of Siboney is under the same category. FYI, Connie Francis must be something then, because Edward Yang’s GuLingJie also mentions it.

Dear Martin’s Sway, however, is just illustrative, although it could have the same epoch marking function. This is a staple of contemporary pop score. The gist is that you need to pay attention to the lyric.

This kind of music can also be intertextual. When Perfidia comes up, one instantly recognizes it as coming from Days of being Wild.

The other category is I what I call music psychologia. This includes George Delerue piece, CastaDiva and Secret Garden. What this category differs from the first is that here the music is not diegetically justifiable in any way—it does not belong to that time. It is arbitrarily selected by the director, who believes it conveys an emotional charge that is appropriate to the scene. This is getting close to theme tune. In fact, CastaDiva is the theme tune of Faye Wang and Secret Garden is used to denote 2046, the place of eternal immobility. But while the knowledge of what CastaDiva is can help to appreciate its functioning here, the other two pieces can simply be listened to as it is—a really easy listening. In fact, the knowledge of their origin will spoil their effect in the scene.

I also put in this category film music from Fassbinder and Kielowski, although this normally calls for the label of intertextuality. As in above, such knowledge is not required—I doubt anyone can recognize it at all—and the text they refer to make little sense here.

There remains the original music composed by Shigeru Umebayashi. My subjective experience is that whether these are original or not matters little—it sounds just like Secret Garden or the Delerue piece, with a touch of grandiosity through percussion.

The use of sound in Kiss Me Deadly

2009-11-09T15:32:00.001-06:00

I was wrong in assuming, after Pascal Bonitzer, that the voice of Dr. Soberin is a disembodied voice. It is in fact anchored to a body; to be more specific, to a pair of shoes, and to a lesser extent, to a pair of tweed pants. The term “shoe fetishism” almost cries out loud in those scenes where the face of this prophetic figure is withheld from us. But this withholding is only justified in the killing of Nick, whereas in other instances is rather unmotivated. The revealing shoes and pants also appear in Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, where our protagonist detective is able to identify the murderer, Yusa, only by his muddy pants and shoes; his face, on the other hand, is perfectly insignificant. Similarly, the face of Dr. Soberin is entirely unsuited to exemplify an oracle.

Blue suede or black moccasin?

So I was angry with Bonitzer for his making a big fuss out of a small deal—which proves his superior writing skill. What makes me first notice the peculiar quality of sound in this film is a scene where our protagonist-investigator is talking to Lily/Gabrielle in her apartment whose windows open to the street. During the course of the conversation we hear constantly the street noise which constitutes a minor interference to the dialogue. When she stands up and moves closer to the window—we see it is open because the curtain flies—the background sound, especially that of the street car, becomes even stronger and competes for our aural attention. This is not something we used to find in Hollywood—something made famous by Godard’s pinball machine. When he leaves and she is alone again it is literally deafening—and definitely too long for a street car (sounds more like a freight train is going beneath her window). Like tide wave, it reclaims its victim in her most helpless cubicle.

Put the gun where it belongs!

What is also striking about this sequence is the fact that the dialogue sounds have a peculiar echo in it. It is far from a recording one gets from sound-proofed studio where the clarity of voices is not tempered, christen. But I am not suggesting that it is a synchronized recording, a documentary style. Besides, who would expect to see cinema-verite in a noir film? Aren’t they antitheses to each other? But here the voices are indeed raw; one can almost smell the room and feel the heat of it.

Kiss Me Deadly makes extensive diegetic use of recording devices. Unlike Double Indemnity, which reminds us of the pre-magnetic tape age—I recently saw the dictaphone again in Revolutionary Road. Here the wonderful technical achievement of tape recorder in celebrated. Several times, Mike listens to his telephone message. We see this rather giant machine that is wall-mounted (makes it an inseparable part of his apartment), in front of which our protagonist communicates with those disembodied voices. In fact, Mike relies so much on this recorder that he never answers his calls before he discovers what might be the caller’s intention. The film goes all the length to distinguish sound according to their sources, a sonic realism that is hard to come by in a B class noir. For example, the recording on the tape, the welcome message is different from what we hear when somebody is speaking from the recorder’s speakerphone. And this in turn in put in sharp contrast with the sound when Mike picks up the phone.

Mike’s a gadget guy

The mixture of recorded and live voice also finds its way into the scene where Mike visits Trivago, the amateur tenor, where he is, as well as we are instructed to “follow your ear”. This episode is entirely pointless, i.e., without narrative significance. We realize later that Trivago does not really know anything. Rather, the whole episode is a pretext to tell us a few facts about Raymondo: he is an engineer scientist, he is very sad because the way the world is; and he is a man of contradictions. Now how can such a sad scientist befriend a cuckold opera lover is totally beyond me. But ultimately what makes this scene interesting is its colorful details: Caruso’s Pagliacci and Flotow’s Martha; and that the guy’s first name is Carmen.

The film uses a variety of musical pieces, from pop to classical. We know that in the early 1930s, immediately following the conversion of sound, Hollywood experienced a brief period of taboo on the use of nondiegetic music. The ways in which a musical presence is to be justified sometimes amount to the level of ridiculousness. Therefore I am rather surprised to see that in this film made in the mid-50s, Aldrich still tries to justify the music as diegetic whenever possible.

The credit sequence (Star War style twenty years before) is accompanied by Nat King Cole’s I’d rather have the blues. It is understood as coming from the radio, therefore it has an ambient effect, which tells you this is not extradiegetic. But in the same time we hear an unrealistically amplified panting of Christina. One possible interpretation, then, is this is a subjective POA of Christina.

Many internal scenes use a classical piece. When Mike first enters Christina/Lily’s apartment, the first thing he does is to turn on the radio (yet another celebration of sound-producing equipment). We have to wait a while before we actually hear the piece—is it just the way these things work? Nevertheless when it does begin—the allegro moderato of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony—it does not start from the middle of somewhere, as it should be if it is indeed coming from the radio. We hear a rather complete version of it. This is more like he is using Pandora!

When Mike enters his own apartment again the first thing to do is to turn on the radio (is this a RKO production?). The music permeates the room and does not diminish when the telephone rings. But when the welcome message is played the music lowers down. When the recording actually begins, Mike walks closer to the recorder and we are shown a close-up of him occupying the whole frame. We as audience are also listening attentively. As a result the music is further lowered down. Now this is standard practice.

The next scene is in the sexy assistant’s apartment (her name being Velda Wakeman)—and she is doing a pole dance! Here the music is again diegetic—in order to make it perfectly clear there is a close-up of the phonograph, which Mike momentarily lifts the stylus—the music stops and resumes. Btw, is a Waltz really a good music choice to do ballet workout with?

whats the pole doing there?

But this film has more funky music choice for us. In William Mist’s gallery, when the poor is asleep, Mike almost compulsively turns the radio on. What do we hear this time? Chopin’s “Revolutionary Étude”!

It is not like there is no unjustified nondiegetic music, but when it does happen, it has a curious flavor that goes beyond the Hollywood norm. For instance, a jazz piece bridges the transition between the porter’s informing Mike (we have the music starting from the moment he whispers into Mike’s ear) of Lily’s whereabouts and Mike’s visit to her. But this music is soon inundated in the ambient noise that I described earlier. One gets the illusion (if one does not notice it earlier) that some tenant in that crappy building is actually playing this music! More conventional underscoring can be found in Evello house, when Charlie the goon is ordered to get Mike. Here the music is intense and highly illustrative. The sequence is actually very stylistic in the mood of Orson Welles. I suspect Aldrich is paying his homage here, not simply because of Paul Stewart. A similar tense underscore is found in the beach fight where Mike is captured. Notice the long shot of the sea, though.

Does it remind you of Antonioni

Inside the beach house we have a radio broadcasting a boxing where all actions are framed. These goons, just like Mike, can never do without a radio. Earlier in the Evello house, we have an even more complicated sonic layering of telephone, radio and live conversation. It starts with a woman’s naked back while she is moving away from the camera. What accompanies this on the soundtrack is a bugle! Then a voice announces a horse race; the camera pulls back to reveal the source of voice—a radio on the table! We realize that Charlie is talking on the phone. At this moment, Friday/Tuesday comes to the table and talks to Sugar. These speeches naturally overlap a lot, which reminds us again of the Wellesian deep sonic space (look for Altman’s excellent article on this).

Evello, Charlie, Sugar, and the days of the week

TBC

The rise of machines

2009-11-08T11:38:00.001-06:00

One thing that is shared by French Impressionism, Italian Futurists and Russian Montagists is this notion of metal brain, this fascination of the machine world. Although the above three only exist for a short period of time, this notion is probably not entirely lost. One unexpected descendant is Jacques Tati.

In Tati’s world, the machine is heard with an unprecedented clarity and distinctive emphasis. In Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, who is making the most noise? Not Mr. Hulot himself, nor anybody else, but his car. One finds numerous examples in Play Time, where the sounds of inanimate objects dominate. In Trafic, the point is made even clearer—it is about autos, not humans. In Tati human utterance is always subjected to quiet derision, to desperate distortion. One thinks of the opening of Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, where the broadcast is mechanically deformed to eliminate all legibility; one also thinks of Mr. Hulot the protagonist, whose speech never goes beyond simple and absolutely necessary clarifications. Most of the time, Hulot avoids verbalizing and opts for gesticulating—perhaps this is exactly why one easily finds him so lovable. And this is true, in a perverse way, for the public relation girl in Trafic, who speaks ridiculous French—she is very much a sympathetic figure in the movie, where a potential romance is alluded to, because she, as Hulot, cannot speak the language.

A constructivism concept, the faktura, calls our attention to the materiality of objects, the surface. I believe that it is a concept that has been echoed a lot in the last century. Robbe-Grillet, as we know, fetishizes one aspect of this surface—the geometry of and between objects. Tati, for his part, focuses on sound. It is not so much about how these sounds function for us as human beings. On the contrary—and this is also true for Robbe-Grillet—it is about how these sounds ignore our humanistic existence.

Pillow shot and others

2009-11-07T20:30:00.001-06:00

The Only Son (1936), according to Noel Burch, is a “supreme achievement”. The reason he gives—as far as I can gather—is that this is not only a film that has pillow shots, but also a “pillow structure”.

The longest pillow shot Burch has described in length in his To the Distant Observer, p 179. A few details first. The scroll on the wall is not some “good-luck” roll; it is an apotropaic image to prevent the baby from crying during the night. Also, the frames on page 177 are all on the wrong side—one frame has actually text on it.

The shot lasts fifty seconds and it is very long, radical. The lighting change is most noticeable towards the end. My fellow viewer makes the strange remark that it is unjustified. What strikes me is rather the one with the closed door of the classroom—the son has left his students and gone borrowing money from his colleagues.

Due to several reasons, I think the use of sound in this first talkie of Ozu is quite good. Here is what he says,

Ingrained ways of making silents cannot be changed overnight, so glitches were inevitable. Even though I was well aware that talkies were a totally different ballgame, I couldn't help slipping back into style of silents. I was worried that after being four or five years behind others, I would never be able to catch up. However, now I realize how useful my persistence in making silents was to my future development.

Ozu’s use of signs is intriguing. He never even tried to be subtle. Okay, Joan Crawford is photogenic. But what is Lover Divine doing there?

Does the opera need to be unsettled?

2009-11-07T20:23:00.001-06:00

I wish every time my hungry eyes glide over the unattractive quick meal they could bump into a passage like this,

Once upon a time, the principle responsibility of the director of an operatic production was to make sure that the singers didn’t bump into one another or the scenery on stage. Then, came the idea of the “concept” director where a novel idea—whether inspired or not, whether logical or not—ruled the day. It became increasingly commonplace for stage directors to add operas to their resumes, even if said director was not particularly musical and even if the staging had nothing whatsoever to do with the music. Oh well, at least the drama of the piece would be served, or so it was reasoned. Very, very rarely, you end up with operatic direction that somehow misses the point of both the music and the drama, no small feat, given the odds of some aspect of one or the other working out even with a clueless director. Such is the case with Lyric Opera’s new production of Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio”. (Dennis Polkow, Chicago Weekly)

It spices up my meal considerably—although I cannot say I agree with this critic, I find myself almost perversely enjoying the sarcasm, which is of course the revenge taken for an obligatory writing after a bad experience. Critics are hard to please these days. They base their judgment on highly subjective reasons, and overtly so. That makes it hard to understand why we need their opinion—isn’t it that when we look for advice we prefer some rational thoughts instead of mere complains? After reflecting on this important issue for over a minute I suddenly realize that is not the case. In fact we read these reviews not as a guide as how to approach the work, but as—what would I feel if I were there, and stayed where I were?

Therefore not surprisingly the critic’s opinion coalesces with that of an average audience. Here is what I find under Amazon’s customer review of Le Nozze di Figaro,

What a missed opportunity! Great performers, great orchestra, in a perverse, misguided direction! An extra character has been introduced who goes around grimacing, juggling, tossing oranges and apples around the set during the action, or caressing or making teasing actions at the characters distracting from the action. And talk about sparse; Susanna sings her opening aria about her hat without wearing or holding one! Most of action takes place on a bare set with no furniture. This is a travesty and a disappointment….

Again, if the bareness of the stage constitutes a failure, then we must concede that the art of opera demands a visual spectacle. But even the most kitsch production (MET) of the most visually abundant works (Wagner) can fail to satisfy a contemporary audience’s eyes, spoiled by seeing dinosaurs in IMAX theaters.

I have always felt that if an average psychoanalytic interpretation of film could be like what Zizek’s does, it would make cultural studies less a subject of aversion to me and to a few others; and if Zizek does not always begin his brilliant statements with “as my spiritual father once said”, he would be indeed as great as Oscar Wilde.

Letter revisited

2009-11-07T20:06:00.001-06:00

There was a beautiful theory, or rather a myth, that one remembers everything one experiences, down to the smallest detail. Everything is stored somewhere in the brain; it is just a question of whether or not we are able to retrieve them. Normally we can’t, since it is deeply buried in our consciousness. But in special moments, thanks to unexpected clues—such as the taste of Madeleine biscuit mingled with tea on your upper lip—a whole passage of our past live emerges. I was obsessed with this idea for a long time, partly because it supports Proust. But the fallacy of this theory is that the more we know how memory works, the more we realize that one only remembers that which has significance. In other words, memory is selective and constructive from the very beginning. And even before that, human senses (visual, aural, in particular) all work in a selective and constructive manner.

Fail to remember, therefore, signifies a failure to assign significance. Why is that I don’t remember much from my childhood? Simply because it lacks significance, even for myself. This in turn means I was indifferent to them. But my childhood is not the issue here. Recently I got to read several articles on Letter from an Unknown Woman that are not covered by last year’s Ophuls course. In Letter, there is this myth that Lisa remembers everything. Lisa does remember more of the story we are being told, and shown. This is because it is exactly she who, from the outset, has grasped its thematic coherency. Therefore, Hunt makes the following observation,

The sort of recounting she must give—in which a series of events is described in such a way as to exhibit them as being related to one another in ways (by cause and effect, for instance) that can be perceived as meaningful—is precisely what a narrative is. To create narrative art is, in a way, exactly what Lisa does. Her letter is such a creation.

In other words, it is not so much that Lisa remembers more than Stefan, but rather, we opt for her memory instead of Stefan’s, the latter Hunt describes as “his way of life splits experience into an unordered array of self-contained moments”. In a sense, what we witness as the film progresses is that Lisa imposes her story/memory upon Stefan, and he finally accepts it as his own. Insomuch as we as spectator do the same, it can be said that we are aligned to Stefan—we have to take her story as the official story, simply because it makes sense, and we are always looking forward to making sense of our life, as Stefan does. If this is true, then there is an important distinction to be made here. It is generally agreed upon that the point of identification of this film is Lisa. But as I would argue here, we do not identify with Lisa; we admire her. Her action is too heroic/crazy that we cannot follow but only admire from a distance; it offers an ideal (pure Eros) that we are willing to be absorbed into and never can. Conversely, we align to Stefan’s position in every possible way. Our life lacks coherence; we are ignorant of The story until being told and read. This is why it has to be her voice, whose persuasive power leads our imagination.

Hunt also makes the observation that Lisa knows Stefan without knowing herself, whereas Stefan knows himself but not Lisa. Lisa’s knowing of Stefan, however, is only partial. She sees in him as much as she is willing to see, that is, an ideal image. Robin wood makes the point clear by saying

Romantic love is never love for a person but for an ideal, and this ideal can only originate within the psyche of the lover. The ideal (related to Freud's 'ideal ego') is projected on to the chosen love object, and the lover then believes that the love object is the ideal. On whatever level of psychoanalytical awareness the filmmakers consciously worked, Letter is very clear and precise about this: Lisa falls in love with Stefan before she even knows what he looks like. (It is of course fortunate for the continuation and development of the fantasy that he looks like Louis Jourdan, but physical attraction is not its origin.) Her desire is to construct him as her ideal self, the 'self' that is denied expression by the conditions of her society.

In the film this idea is supported by the ways in which the main theme, Liszt’s un sospiro, is used. First it is established by having him playing it twice. The first time he made a mistake and left. Note that she hears the music before she actually gets to know who he is. The second time, already, the music is presented acoustimatically. From then on the music is transferred from a sign of “him” to a sign of “love” and it is often rendered in his absence. The third time one hears it in the rug-beating day. When Lisa sneaks into the room we are offered an orchestra setting, with the tune rendered only on strings. The music stops as the sheets fall. The fourth time one hears the music in Lisa’s last night before she goes to Linz. This time we have, for a few phrases, the full orchestra on the tune, before she knocks at the door. And then, when she wanders in the empty rooms, we have a piano version of it with much echo. The acoustic quality signifies that it is a music “remembered”. For a long stretch of time we do not hear it again. Not even when she finally meets him as an adult woman and successfully dates him: the whole time they spend on the street, in the café, restaurant, carriage, amusement park, the train and finally the dancing hall, we do not hear it. But this doesn’t mean we do not have music all this “romantic” time—we have mostly folk music and cheap Waltzes. He plays it when the woman military band leaves and this waltz even carries on inside the apartment, up to the moment when they kiss and ‘consummate” this love. Or do they? I believe that Ophuls is making a rather sarcastic comment here. The next time we do hear it is, obviously, in Lisa’s last visit of the apartment. In a summarizing way, not only do we have the orchestra version of this music before she enters the building (it starts when she exits the cafe) and after she leaves in disillusion (she bumps into John on the staircase), we also have it inside the apartment, first a touch of harp and celesta, and when he appears, on string.

It might be that this signifies that Lisa has a faint hope of rekindling their love. But honestly I believe the composer should be better off leaving here an absence. This way one can argue that this Liszt piece is not associated with Brand, but rather, her ideal image of him. It is his physical presence (an old womanizer in his habitual course of ordering the “usual things”) that presents this image to emerge. She has to leave the room immediately, although she confesses that she has much to tell him. She has to leave because if she stays she risks losing this image that she has been cultivating with her life for so many years—it is to lose one’s meaning of life.

One last time we hear the music from Lisa’s perspective: her face is blocked from our view, writing her last words.

I love you now as I’ve always loved you. My life can be measured by the moments I’ve had with you and our child.

Now we are back to the present tense. Stefan has been converted. He now remembers the images. To climate this conversion, John offers him the name. At this moment, the music emerges again, from the dead. Only now it turns into his music. And it has even acquired a heroic touch when he decides to carry on with the duel.

In fact, for this particular film one could say the subjective mode of Lisa, characterized by the use of extradiegetic music, symbolizes the very notion of the romantic love, or as Hunt put it, pure Eros. It is for this reason that it is brought up so many times (one gets the impression that music permeates the whole film) because it is her story. On the other hand, the occasions where the music is silenced, replaced by diegetic sounds invariably suggest a disillusion, or at least the danger of it. In the sequence where Lisa returns before she parts for Linz, the whole time her rambling of the empty rooms and corridors are suffused with music; the moment she realizes that Brandt has come back with a woman the music suddenly stops, leaving us the usual things: good morning Mr. Brandt, footsteps, Stephan’s whispering, the woman’s giggling, etc. The sequence in which Lisa and Stefan finally have physical love, we also do not hear this music. This I take to mean that the physical love is in a sense an antithesis of the kind of love Lisa maintains. She is consummated by it and for a moment becomes aimless—although one cannot say this is definitely what she wants.

A brighter summer day in Chicago

2009-05-29T17:11:00.001-05:00

I want to commend Doc Films programmers for their monumental achievement for bringing two monumental films to Chicago this month: A Brighter Summer Day by Edward Yang and City of Sadness by Hou Hsiao Hsien. I have never seen the former on big screen (costs them 2000$, I heard). Therefore I feel obliged to write a few words, if only to mark the occasion.

The print has dual subtitles (and that’s what you get in the present circulating VHS). The English does a good job, but I am not sure it is as significant as the Chinese. I have a claim, or merely a feeling, that I may work on later, that the sense of authenticity of a narrative fiction relies much on its dialogue. Brighter is exemplary in this aspect. Compared to Edward Yang’s trilogy before it, the quality of the dialogue reaches new height. Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun has the same effect, presumably to Wang Shuo’s credit, although Jiang’s later two films show less spontaneity in their dialogues.

Perhaps I need not to point out that kids speak differently than adults. But kids never got to make a film or write a novel. So it is always up to the adults to put words into their mouths. Not every such attempt has been successful. Otherwise The Catcher in the Rye wouldn’t be a classic. Wang Shuo as an adult novelist can be successful in doing this, not because he is extremely talented, but because he is an example of paidomorphosis. At one point of his childhood he simply stops growing (Salinger too?). But I feel this is not the case for Yang. Yes, for this reason he does have to fake evidence, and therefore get heavy-handed at times. Nevertheless it is clear that Brighter is less so than his two previous urban films. The reason, again, is the way these teenagers talk. The film relies much on dialogue, with the notable exception of the rain night killing scene. I am particularly amused by the vivid retelling of Pierre’s survival in Napoleon’s taking over of Moscow. “A dude goes to assassinate Napoleon but eventually caught by the police.” If this was what I heard, I would not have been so impressed by it. But perhaps there is no way to translate it without losing its flavor. The story, of course, has its own strength, which you can convey by a synopsis, even an academic one. But if that’s how the film is made, how good would it be?

Don’t get me wrong. I see things, much of which can be articulated in analytical precision that builds up to a coherent system. What I am saying here is that we have yet to find a way to articulate what we hear.

In a I-hope-soon-to-revise paper I deal with something that is found in both films: the dialectal speech. In Brighter it is first a formal gap, as there are many others, between these teenagers and the adults. The younger generation’s language is strikingly homogeneous. In comparison, the adults are man/woman with heterogeneous accents. Many of them speak only dialect (almost all school teachers); some speak with noticeable accent; others switch between several languages. The parents of Zhang Zhen, for example, speak Shanghai dialect, Cantonese and mandarin. These languages evoke respectively their own temporality and in general layer their simultaneous onscreen presence. Cantonese is the past where the father is from (and perhaps the mother too). In this particular case it is a rural past, “tu”, as the mother emphasizes several times.[1] Inside the mosquito net the father’s burst of anger “you women know nothing between us men” and his brief comment to his son “trouble with everything with a hole in the middle” confirm this language as being a vestige of patriarchal society. Shanghai dialect, however, signifies a civilized state of this “educated” man (his education apparently brings no conflict to his misogynist heritage). Unlike Wanggou, however, this is a state that doesn’t appear to him as entirely becoming. He never speaks the language unless being spoken to. And when he does he keeps his voice slow and indistinct. Contrary to Wanggou’s 120 percent identification with this language, the father’s using of the language shows signs of reluctance and discretion. Mandarin is the language of the present. And it will be that of the future since it is the language used by those teenagers. But even there multiple layers of sub-dialectal differences exist—I see no point not treating mandarin as a dialect. Between a broad category recognized as a dialect and the individual Saussurian parole, these differences help to delimitate a group of speakers from another, each having an idiosyncratic vocabulary of its own. The teenagers in Brighter use a vocabulary that is not only different from adults (age group), but also from teenagers from mainland china (geographical group) by the same time, and finally, from the teenagers of today in Taipei (generational group). The authenticity I perceive in such utterances does not entail my identification (I do not belong to such a group); nor do I recognize its authenticity through my linguistic knowledge (I do not have such knowledge). The authenticity perceived is an artistic sensation of its richness of expressivity, its coherent usage and its nuanced applicability to different life situations that members of such linguistic capacity will likely to encounter.

In Yang’s later films the spoken language also plays a prominent role. The impression one gets from A Confucian Confusion (1994), and especially Mahjong (1996) is that the characters establish their individual onscreen personality by the way they talk. Nobody can forget Red Fish’s characteristic way of saying “nopoben”—the very word that nicely summarizes all his problems, or indeed all the social problems embodied in him.

Recent I read somewhere that Olivier Assayas claims that he is basically a Taiwanese filmmaker working in France. Watching his recent Summer Hours I wonder what he had learnt from these masters. Being of a similar origin with Hou’s Flight of the Red Balloon, which gives me the reason for a comparison, the distance between the two is all the more visible. Assayas’s new work does not rescue his declining reputation handsomely, although one could argue it is much better than the previous disaster.

[1] What she gives for this single word is a triple meaning. First she claims her school girls are “westernized”, and she mentions Wangou shows him the “real world”, thus establishing a western world/China, developed/developing, metropolitan/rural contrast; then she uses the word in conjunction with “qiong”, the poverty; finally she uses the word again, this time refers to him being ignorant of love experience.

Memory takes us where we want to go—Waltz with Bashir

2009-03-26T12:59:00.001-05:00

These days, a “humanist” quest is what it takes, in most cases, to collect awards in various international film festivals. I gather that is because the audience is so much in need of proofs that show they are after all human beings despite the atrocities committed.

We know that cinema has a power that can alter, construct meaning, a power that was much envied by Joseph Goebbels when he saw Potemkin. A less subtle way of doing this is called identification.

Waltz with Bashir is such a case.

In wars people get killed; in wars people suffer. So if we say all right, both sides suffer, does that mean they are even? Is having nightmares as bad as being killed?

Some people want to say yes, and that it is even worse.

The formula I see is this: in order to elicit the sympathy you need for your causes, you show your protagonists under fear, under anguish, pain and last but not least, under confusion and ignorance. In other words, they were scared; they didn’t know anything; they didn’t do it.

Of course they didn’t. The Pharisees/ Phalangists did it.

And what is the purpose of this journey? To sleep better.

To settle your conscience, to be pardoned.

And that is easy. Because the soldiers are human beings. They all have names, faces. Two decades later, they all become harmless and hardworking[1] middle aged fellows. They become respectable family heads.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, are anonymous; They live anonymously; they die anonymously.

How could you sympathize a creature that has no name, that you don’t feel for?

“Sympathy” is by definition “feel the same thing”.

The end of the film does present a brief footage of Palestinian women screaming.

What they said is not subtitled.

The version I watch has Chinese subtitle and it says “the Arabs did it.”

How ridiculous! Was this translator just ignorant or has he another nationality?

I checked it online and according to another review (http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10322.shtml):

She shouts "my son, my son" in Arabic. She repeats again and again in Arabic "take photos, take photos," "where are the Arabs, where are the Arabs."

Now people might object that I don’t know anything about the Palestine/Israel conflict. That is true. I don’t.

Being a Chinese, I don’t know anything about the massacre in Nanjing either.

When I check the estimated number of victims in Sabra and Shatila —it says 2000—I feel myself noticeably relieved.

If 300000 died in Nanjing doesn’t mean anything, how can you make a big fuss on 2000?

I can perfectly imagine a Japanese film telling the story of a veteran (respectable family head, no doubt) trying to rediscover what he did in 1937—and he just “lit the flares.”

How convenient! If only the Nazis and the Japanese could find a way not to do the dirty work by themselves!

There are other places where the film reminds me of a possible Japanese remake. For example, in Waltz the Israeli soldiers report that “they're shooting at us from all directions,” “we are attacked, we retaliate.”

A Japanese soldier actually said, we did what we did in Nanjing because they resisted.

Resisted what? As the Japanese never wants to say they invaded China—they entered China; or these hapless fellows just found themselves there in media res—in the film there is a clear avoidance of saying that Israel invaded Lebanon.

I am aware of the fact that by saying all this I become in some ways a “nationalist”. These days being a nationalist means being narrow, being uneducated—two exceptions can be made: one for Jewish people, one for American, they are good—I don’t want to be like that. And I knew too well from my thirty years in the country that Chinese are no saint. I wish I could afford being a humanist.

[1] One episode tells us the protagonist’s visit to his friend in Holland. This guy made his fortune (he is now a ten-acres landowner) after three years of selling falafel, which happens to be “both healthy and middle eastern”.

On national cinema or, all you want to know about India, but are afraid to ask the tourist bureau

2009-03-11T13:13:00.001-05:00

Any nation can have a national cinema, even those without a national film industry. But what makes the study of a national cinema valuable is its contribution to cinema as a global phenomenon, whether economically, technologically or stylistically. We study the classical Hollywood cinema because it initiates and perfects a series of conventions that prevail the last century; we study Italian Neorealism since it constitutes a radical yet valid revision of the Hollywood convention, both in form and content. But we are less interested in pre-war Italian cinema from Quo Vadis to La Corona di ferro, since it is, as Bazin said, “a poor taste for sets, idealization of the principal actors, childish emphasis on acting, atrophy of mise-en-scene, the dragging in of the traditional paraphernalia of bel canto and opera, conventional scripts influenced by the theater, the romantic melodrama and the chanson de geste reduced to an adventure story.” (II, 18) (see note 1)

I image similar things, mutatis mutandis, can be found for Indian cinema. But these days such an observation seems obsolete, if not only politically incorrect. Now the study of national cinemas mainly serves to question, and ultimately to assert, I imagine, the national identity. And along this line one has sub-national (Basque), pan-national (China, Hongkong and Taiwan) cinema and trans-national cinema (anything starts with trans is good). What divides or unites here is the issue of identity and cultural heritage. Simply put, such groupings no longer maintain much interest in the issue of style.

Is Satyajit Ray representative of Indian cinema? Of course not. But the reason we appreciate him in a film history course is not because he serves as a spokesman for Bollywood. Bollywood has its value and raison d’être, but it has not yet find its way into a general survey of aesthetics of cinema. The issue, obviously, is that we mistakenly believe that we are studying national cinemas while we are actually looking at auteurs whose position is not defined by the culture, the nation, but rather the stylistics. The textbook has not been clear on this.

My theory is that a film can have three dimensions; on the plane it shows its cultural and political coordinates, but only in the third dimension, one upward, you see how much the film qualifies as art. Today much of the film studies sticks to the plane and ignore this third dimension. I guess this is a karma for that we have been ignoring the film as cultural artifact in the past and it is taking its revenge.

Now for a film that is set in India, with all India cast, but not Indian cinema. I remember someone says La Roue is a film that is stylistically innovative, but the story is somewhat maudlin (she is not happy that the story is not like Anna Karina). But that is perfectly all right for one occasion—the Oscar. One important note though: Slumdog Millionaire is not stylistically innovative. This is nothing new for Danny Boyle. He happens to be the kind of director who “seems to think that we need to see even the simplest action from every conceivable angle.”

Whenever there is a choice, it is hard to decide which of the following,“what presentation” or “who presents”, is a more important question. A British director and writer use British and American money to make a film about Mumbai life, and go on to win the Oscar, isn’t that perverse? If what Boyle says can be true to Indian life, Indian culture, Indian cinema—of which I know practically nothing, would that put him on the same level of Salaam Bombay?

1. It is quite understandable Bazin fails to see anything of artistic value of this period--for someone who is so overwhelmed by neorealism. It is meant to be a generalization, which is never entirely true. Among white telephone films there are la Signora di tutti; Fabrizi's dialect comedies look forward to neorealism; and last but not least, Blasetti.

Griffith's Legacy

2009-03-09T17:29:00.001-05:00

A few days ago we had in the film studies center a program called “pictures and sounds”. What they do is to provide a sound for a silent picture in any way but conventional. They did The Adventures of Dollie (1908) with Kouji, which basically means a man supplies everything you hear by his mouth. This film is our great Griffith’s directorial debut. Incidentally the gypsy who is selling his baskets immediately reminds me of Thoreau (whose basket nobody wants to buy). But this little short that I have never seen before again brings back this American provinciality that Eisenstein talks about.

Eisenstein, because he is not an American, sees this eternal return of the father a Victorian morality. In fact, Griffith films are so charged with morality that one wonders what could be the cause? After all, is not the audience of this nickelodeon era seeking entertainment? But what Eisenstein accuses Griffith is not this laughable morality—which is rendered clownish by our vocal artist, exactly what it deserves—but his sensibility. And for Eisenstein this sensibility directly leads to—montage. Griffith began to cut not only between scenes, but also in the midst of actions. This sort of frame cut eventually leads to that the patterning of cutting overrides the profilmic integrity. On this basis Bordwell says that Hollywood cinema is a cinema of cutting. Obviously, for Eisenstein, the Hollywood type of cutting is only a Dickens type of sensibility which is maybe appropriate to his time, but not in the age of modernism. Isn’t it obvious that in a modern Hollywood we have much faster cutting rate?

Intolerance boasts “12500 men and women, 7500 horses, and endless spectacle”. Now people believe that it is precisely because the film made particular mistakes: excess of spectacle over narrative, theme over character, sentiment over motivation, that is was doomed as a “magnificent failure”. But come to think of it, the fact that the film was advertised as a spectacle, as opposed to say, having a strong story, is a significant fact. It means the main marketing virtue of this film is the spectacle, that the narration, albeit has a strong presence in this film, is probably not more than a pretext as the string supporting all those shiny laundries under the sun. It is important to understand that this kind of “logic of spectacle” is not patently American; there is nothing vulgar in it—unless you believe Fellini is vulgar. The notion of “cinema of attraction” is powerful because it is not only a “primitive” stage of cinema (history), but also a mode of presentation that persists today (psychology).

Spectacle is not a problem. But what is fatal of Intolerance is that not only the central theme does not make much sense to American audience, the stories themselves cannot be said to have exemplified the very notion. The modern story is that of persecution resulted from excessive morality; the story of Jesus is one of religious persecution, this is not a matter of intolerance; the stories of Babylon and France are heavily tainted with political power struggle. In fact, none of the four stories qualify for this abstract theme that is intolerance.

The urge to depict Jesus and ancient life is totally justifiable; the idea of narrating in alternation is all the more ingenuous; yet the central idea which is supposed to unite all the fragments is not working. To illustrate this point, let us do compare it to one of its knockoffs, Leaves from Satan's book (1921), by Dreyer. Although the rip off misses what is most important in Griffith's work, the alternating narration, and instead just tells one story after another, it does manage to unite the four stories under a same character (Satan) and a similar logic of procession: evil doing is always evoked by men's declined lust for beautiful woman—what a revelation! The only exception being the Jesus story (one day maybe someone will make a film about Judas betraying Jesus because he was madly in love with Magdalene).

At least from the surface, Michael Haneke's films share a similar theme to some of Griffith's biograph films, made well known for their critical role in making the transition from attraction to narrative. This theme is the intrusion to a bourgeois nuclear family. In both The Londale Operator and The Lonely Villa, we have a series of actions that represents a same routine between the male and the female: from the initial unison, to male's departure, female's danger, female sends the message to male, male comes to rescue of female, and their final reunion. Haneke's revision to this code is that,

a) The early disability of the male, both in The Hour of Wolf and Funny Games.

b) The intention of the intruder or the nature of this intrusion is never made clear.

c) The delay or complete dismissal of reunion.

One can definitely say that Haneke is not promoting the Victorian or bourgeois morality. In fact he appears to hate it so much that in The Seventh Continent, a perfectly respectable nuclei family has to commit suicide and before that, to literally chop their household items to pieces. Much of the shocks produced are based on the audience’s identification with this morality. The money in to the toilette is an example. One feels when watching this endless sequence that if one hates something so bad that usually means one loves it. Destroying is the other side of possessing. What the bourgeoisie is about is not to keep things in good shape, but to know what is ours, what is not—and to respect that distinction. Therefore this family only destroys everything that belongs to them. They do not go out to burn other people’s house. And they sell the car because they don’t want to leave it to the others. It is amazing to see how Haneke is so true to bourgeoisie’s attitude toward material possessions. Griffith, on the other hand, naively plays down this aspect, leaves it to programs such as “how to become a millionaire”.

Ashes of Time Redux, again and forever

2009-03-08T21:08:00.001-05:00

Recently I got a chance to see the 35mm again. If I had known the Doc would screen it, I would have bothered to go all the way up to music box. Considering the fact that I saw the print (older version of course) only last year (he rented, the professor proudly announced, the best copy of it in North America), this makes three times on print, which is rare to me, especially when I am not a fan!

The most radical change that Wong made in the redux version (in Chinese it becomes “ultimate”) is not its narrative structure—though he does eliminate some fight scenes (Bordwell made a fuss on this) and organize the events into four slots, guided by those titles that traditionally associated with the agriculture but now we see more and more in contemporary Chinese cinema. What he did is a sort of standard practice these days—color grading. People still have qualms about this procedure, as if it damaged the authenticity of the film, as if it were cheating. But the visual quality of this film already varies constantly in its original status, partly due to the fact that shooting of different days look differently, partly due to that some of the footage are rescued (see below Wong’s own account of the situation that he discovers those prints in the basements of Chinatown theaters), whose quality is deteriorating. Digital processing is powerful; it changes the overall visual impression of the film (which is what he intended), but there is a limit of what you do can here. It is fairly obvious that some sequences that are crystal clear; and there are sequences that look like they suffer from heavy post-processing, like the result you get from insufficient exposure and remedy by digital means. And there is quality grades dispersed on the whole spectrum. This by itself is an interesting expressivity. But I doubt that its deployment in this film bears any narrative significance. Of course if you wish, you can make an interpretation. For example, flashbacks of women, especially of Taohua and the horse, are extremely sharp. Exterior scenes, especially those of the desert, the fight, those of Leslie standing there looking at the desert, are extremely grainy. What can you make of that?

I went to the film initially because of the so-called “newly composed” soundtrack. It did not give me any surprise in general, pleasant or unpleasant. And I did not discover much new material either (of course I could be wrong). Some synthesizer pieces are replaced by orchestra and Yoyo Ma’s interpretation brings in a classical feel. But I don’t necessarily think it fares better than what it already had. It also appears to me that new stuff was only used toward the end, when Lichun (spring) comes.

(Curiously, I don't remember seeing this.)

The more I see this film, the more I understand what it is about. People would say of course. But what I mean by this is that, like many Chinese who know the book & characters by heart, I take the novel as a point of departure for the film. Therefore I used to think Wang revises the genre. Wang’s statement curiously confirms this. And this is what we normally do when an adaptation is concerned. But actually the film is better understood with no previous knowledge of the martial arts tradition at all; it is effectively the same kind of film Wang made in Hong Kong, where his loosely connected stories take place. The film originates from a perversely amorphous form of desire which generates, by coupling with its own reflection, a multitude of gestures. Then we have the characters that would actualize these gestures. Then we have the time and space, along with every bit of its concrete detail, where these characters emerge. Seriously, these stories take place at nowhere. If we divide what we see in cinema by the skin of people: the internal and the external. It should go from inside to outside. And I see Wang truly accomplishes this idea; he frees his ideas from any concrete setting. What he borrows from the martial art tradition is only what he sees fit: the costume, the always heroic presentation, the stage. But the kernel remains his. I wonder what would Bazin said to this—oh where is my piece of humanist reality?

Wang’s own words:

As we launched into the work, we discovered that the original negatives and sound materials were in danger: the laboratory in Hong Kong where they were stored was suddenly shut down, without warning. We retrieved as much as we could, but the negatives were in pieces. As if we were searching for a long-lost family, we began looking for duplicate materials from various distributors and even the storage vaults of overseas Chinatown cinemas. As this went on, we came to realize that there are hundreds of prints locked up in Chinatown warehouses in those cities which used to show Hong Kong movies. Looking through all this material felt like uncovering the saga of the ups and downs of Hong Kong cinema in the last few decades. And this history, of course, included ASHES OF TIME.

P.S. the fact that Bridgett Lin speaks mandarin and all the others speak Cantonese seem to have bothered no one. This shows that, as I have seen many times in Chinese cinema, spontaneity overrides linguistic authenticity. On the other hand, Hongqi's wife, the only non-star in the cast, does speak dialect.

Watch it again, Sam

2009-03-01T18:55:00.001-06:00

This is a follow-up of my last post, in which I question the necessity of going to concerts. Well, I just came back from one which shed new light on the issue for me.

Today’s chamber concert is a mixture of European (Brahms, Ysaye, Bartok) and American (Ives), romanticism and modernism (Ives is alone again). It is mostly violin solo but sometimes accompanied by piano (I hate those parts). The violinist’s name is Hilary Hahn. What her performance strikes me is the way she moves. Of course all violinists move. But I don’t remember seeing anybody move with such an elegance, as if she was dancing with the music. I believe most of her movements are of practical needs, that is, to balance the sometime rather vehement and sometime delicate exertion on the upper body. But it is hard to tell to which extent they are practical and to which extent they become independently expressive. It is as if the practical needs themselves constitute the expressivity, as in architecture. The correspondences are not entirely predictable, as in Disney’s Silly Symphonies; nevertheless it is always anticipated, therefore I venture to propose it is a true case of audio-visual counterpoint. Also it rhythms with our natural motor reaction to music—finger movements, for example. It does this through our perception of the music, naturally, but also through our visual perception of her interpretive movements. Watching her playing I guess I am 75% aural and 25% visual, contrary to our normal mode of perception. And this 25% of visual soon fades into reveries where my attention follows her figure but somehow manages to blur the rest of the stage as if they were out of focus. And I do this partly because I find the piano’s bulky presence awkward and disturbing—and the girl who is there just to turn the pages! This emotional judgment comes first from the visual, and then tries to find support in the realm of the aural.

Here is how great she looks (Google yourself, there are plenty):

So much for how fantastic is Miss Hahn. I really should have waited in line for her to sign my copy of her recent DG recording. But I was in a hurry. Today classical music performers are also stars. Open CSO’s offering for this season you see how they promote their product. It is faces, faces. One gets to know only a tiny bit of the music itself but takes a huge amount of biographical information home. Such a strong desire to know who is that that is performing tonight! And where he/she went to high school! I wonder how many percentage of the audience is equipped with a connoisseurship to tell the difference—I mean, whether a piece sounds great because it is composed so or played so. But that doesn’t matter. We go to concert to see real people, instead of the abstract music. Human being naturally attributes anything artistic to his likes. So the presence of performer/artists has an assuring effect that is purely psychological. The presence of human figures is an ideal place to project one’s emotional investment. This happens in cinema, where we often recall a movie by who plays in it. I wonder if in the future we would recall a symphony by who conducts it—well I do remember the Bayreuth Ring circle in the way Boulez conducts it. And I am sure many would remember a piece of piano by the way Lang lang plays it.

Watching music

2009-02-28T16:09:00.001-06:00

Before any sound recording technology is made available, music is watched as much as listened to. This masks the fact that music is a pure acoustical form that demands the right to be attended to alone in its own sensorial realm. Goethe says in his Wilhelm Meister, that “True music is for the ear alone. I want to see anyone I am talking to. On the other hand, who sings to me must sing unseen; his form must neither attract nor distract me.” Does this mean that Mr. Goethe would be glad to collect CDs without bothering going to any concert?

Arnheim talks about this “most fundamental contradiction between visual and aural phenomena.” When we watch a music performance, we are watching the process in which music—a specific form of sound—is produced; but we are not necessarily watching a visual correspondence of what we hear. “Our eye shows us an arrangement of the musicians on the platform that is only occasionally characteristic of the music performed (since the violins who sit in front have by no means always the lead). The musicians are always seen, even when they have rests. This gives an impression of comfortable inactivity alternating with playing.” A more detailed description is copied as follows, for I really love his style of writing.

No disparity between fifty waiting men, from the violins in front to the kettledrums at the back, and the one modest flute which perhaps has to start the piece all alone. The flute, now sounds really as tremulously little and lost in nothingness, as was the composer's intention when he wrote the beginning as a solo. The flute plays, and no longer sounds like the isolated part of some nice man 'in the act of playing' whose appearance never changes; in some very exciting way, everything static has vanished from the performance. Time passes most perceptibly; nothing of what has just been is left the next moment; only the course of the single line of melody exists; all the action is pure movement. The flute is quite alone and suddenly the oboe joins in, likewise merging from nothingness, unexpected and coming to life only at the moment the composer brings it in, not previously present as 'counting bars'. And so the work is gradually built up. Whoever has nothing to play vanishes completely out of the picture, simply does not exist. If the piece is adagio, then the whole world is adagio; if it is allegro then nothing exists but the rushing course of the rapid motion-no men sitting waiting or suddenly stopping in the middle of the situation. (RAS 145)

This argument makes sense. When I open my eyes in concerts big and round—there are people with eyes closed as if they were in a state of trance—I do find the movement of musicians misleading. These movements are only relevant if one wants to associate peculiar visual information, that is, a specific musical instrument, as well as a specific way that it is played, with a specific sound (the timber). But strictly speaking to appreciate the music such knowledge is not required. And the more one is unable to grasp music in its aural form the more one is inclined to register its source of production—as if the knowledge, that is, the visual depiction of it can be somewhat helpful. Often, when I notice that a member of the orchestra picks up his instrument in order to be ready to play his part, I have an anticipation of the coming sound. Such anticipation is entirely non-musical. If the musical procession prescribes it, you cheat by knowing the answer beforehand; if it doesn’t, you ruin the surprise. Likewise, many would agree that in order to appreciate the beauty of opera one does not have to understand the language it is sang—it is a fact anyway.

But somehow I find such knowledge desirable. One has the expectation—speaking for myself here—that such knowledge would render the experience more complete, that it would give it more depth. This expectation, again to quote from my own experience, is deceptive. Understanding Italian does not make your Puccini more delicious; it does the contrary, since now you agonize over the extreme vulgarity of the libretto.

The act of going to concerts must be explained otherwise. Undoubtedly, in the presence of human agents—and the ritual itself: expensive subscription, dress code, entering into a sacred locus, etc.—we are more assured of the music’s artistic quality. This is what Benjamin calls the aura. It has to be here-and-now and it is not technically reproducible. But does it pertain to what music really is? The simple answer will be no. Otherwise, we would be only pretending that we like Mozart, since there is no chance we can actually meet him. But an art is never simply an art; it is always associated with certain modes of consumption. What is important is that although these modes of consumption are historical, therefore contingent, their presence at any given historical moment is strong. It is impossible to approach music without any mode of consumption. Go to concert, as well as listen to Pandora, is just one of them.

There is no denying that popular music caters to the need of the mass; it makes itself accessible ad infinitum by adapting to a common denominator of its audience. But that is not to say the classical music (I hate this word) never wants to appeal to the mass, or cultivates its own cult. On the contrary, I believe composing for our contemporary musicians has become a task characterized by a constant negotiation between musical heritage, individual talent and intended reception.

The profound originality of being a good for nothing

2009-02-24T14:43:00.001-06:00

I Vitelloni is, according to Bazin, a film that has a “profound originality”—that doesn’t mean much, since Bazin uses the term to a lot of films he chooses to write on. But it is indeed an important film that marks, along with several others, this transition of the first phase of Neorealism aesthetics to another, one more diversified and of individual paths.

It is quite refreshing yet absolutely futile talking about where does the Neorealism ends. Umberto D is often the official answer. But that puts the first two films of Rossellini’s religious trilogy into an awkward position. And isn’t Umberto D. an example par excellence of Zavattini’s openly claimed neorealist aesthetics? Let us rather not to demarcate a clear line and instead focus on what differs this neo-aftermath from its predecessors. But even here we hear different voices. Bazin argues,

Is not Neorealism primarily a kind of humanism and only secondarily a style of filmmaking? Then as to the style itself, is it not essentially a form of self-effacement before reality? (I 29)

This apparently makes sense, and even eloquently so. But I would argue it is very misleading, and contradicts to Bazin’s own writing.

Realism, let me repeat, is to be defined not in terms of ends but of means, and Neorealism by a specific kind of relationship of means to ends. What De Dica has in common with Rossellini and Fellini is…the pride of place they all give to the representation of reality at the expense of dramatic structures. This is a “phenomenological” realism which never “adjusts” reality to meet the needs imposed by psychology or drama. The relation between meaning and appearance having been in a sense inverted, appearance is always presented as a unique discovery, an almost documentary revelation that retains its full force of vividness and detail. Whence the director’s art lies in the skill with which he compels the event to reveal its meaning—or at least the meaning he lends it—without removing any of its ambiguity. (II 87)

I will not go to great length about this. Let me simply say, I agree with the neoformalists that this “form of self-effacement” is just another form in disguise, and it acquires its realist value largely because it is perceived as something formally new. In other words, as Yuri Tsivian put it in such clarity, “Realism is an effect created in one's mind, not a property inherent in the real world or its image.” The fact that Italian people soon get tired of them is a proof of the novelty dimension of this aesthetic. Besides, whenever Bazin makes his analysis, it is clear that what concerns him is the style, before anything else. As for humanism, isn’t a local breed in the 1930s, by Renoir, Carne, Duvivier good enough? What is so exciting about an Italian version?

It is again in style that neorealists eventually split and go their respective paths. I think Bazin wouldn’t disagree that both Fellini and Rossellini are still interested in depicting humanism. In fact he says, “I tend to view Fellini as the director who goes the farthest of any to date in this neorealist aesthetic, who goes even so far that he goes all the way through it and finds himself on the other side.” (87) But again what is the common denominator of this new stage is a discernable effort to negate storytelling and character development. Now that is something really unheard of. And it is exactly here the talent of the filmmaker is put to maximum test—how to express anything at all without the formula? How to gratify an emotional and sometimes intellectual involvement of the audience? It is indeed a complicated situation. Compared to early neorealist works this distinction becomes clear: it doesn’t come at the most superficial level. The protagonists of Vitelloni and Ladri are both bounded by their social surroundings, reduced to a state of immobility, to which they struggle for a denouement, in vain. They are both personal stories of lost and found, and a bit sentimental at times. What is the real difference? First I will still quote Bazin,

Events do not “happen” in Fellini’s world; they “befall” its inhabitants; that is to say, they occur as an effect of “vertical” gravity, not in conformity to the laws of “horizontal” causality. As for the characters themselves, they exist and change only in reference to a purely internal kind of time. (II 84-5)

This, of course, refers to films other than La Strada (1954) or Nights of Cabiria (1957). These are masterweepies in a different way. It shows that Fellini, unlike some filmmakers, can tell a coherent story, and even too perfect (Bazin says) to be anything exciting to write about. But it is the way Fellini handles a non-coherent story that ultimately eliminates any doubt of his artistic intention and manipulation. Bazin says, in his usual perceptive way, that the characters in Vitelloni do not evolve; they mature. He also makes the observation that it is through the most trivial activities that they “reveal themselves to us in their innermost essence.” Take for instance, the meeting of Franco with the railway boy. It could be argued that narrative-wise it leads to Franco’s final departure by train. But there are some arrangements that make the episode unique and strangely touching. The first of these is that they meet at 3:00 am. It’s not only because they like to show deserted streets that they never let their characters go to bed. In L’Avventura, Sandro actually confessed that they never want to go to sleep—they will do anything except sleeping. When the boy says he always get up at three his eyes shine like night stars. That’s a sacred moment for me and I don’t quite understand why. Franco asks what kind of work he does for the railway, he simply answers “lavoro” and for a moment Franco loses his thoughts contemplating this world of jobs that remains a mystery to him. Is this situation banal? Yes, the way I describe it. In order to describe it correctly I would have to suggest you to read works such as Jude the Obscure, etc. What Fellini succeeds here is really the essence of literature, without all the boring techniques. It lifts the veil of a contemplative mood, of a world that is strangely non-consequential for us to cast a glimpse there; and it disappears again momentarily.

And the second fact is the boy. Symbolism is at best with certain casualness. Only seven years ago we saw Franco Interlenghi in Shoe Shine (1946), where he was a boy himself. That film, which one could argue shows Neorealism in its adolescence, has all the charm of boyish innocence. It would be interesting just to look at what roles Franco played to see how this movement evolved and diversified. How different the same Franco looked in Antonioni’s I Vinti! What an anguished body compared to those shining eyes of two boys on a white horse!

The story of Fausto is indeed a classical moral tale. But what is incongruent with his image of an incorrigible womanizer is his feeling for Sandra. Does he care about her? From the fact that he was ready to take off when he learned she is pregnant, one would be tempted to say no—and he never shows any affection for the baby. Nevertheless when he sees Sandra in distress he sobs (in the garden). He seems to feel genuinely for her. Not only is he capable of sympathy (Kundera’s Thomas is a most appropriate reference here), he is of a disposition that feels more than average. The power of this characterization comes from this apparent dichotomy, for it is absurd in the eyes of a conventional psychology, which applies to minds that stopped development in the age of 25. Am I exaggerating? Bazin puts it this way, “such anti-psychological cinema goes further and deeper than psychology; it goes to the protagonist’s soul.”

The case of Alberto is in a different category. He is an energetic and hilarious clown, not the first for Fellini, and certainly not the last. He is an incredibly sad Pagliacci. His development can be seen in Lattuada’s Mafioso (1962), where he becomes Antonio Badalamenti, and establishes himself as a model technician in an automobile factory in Milan, where he has got a lovely wife and two daughters with beautiful names. But when he returns to his hometown—Sicily that is—he finds, not to his surprise, his fellow vitelloni are still strolling the beach, talking about “alienation” (not seriously) and the shape of woman’s tits (seriously).

The connection is amusing; it is at once casual and deliberate. Of course Lattuada and Fellini collaborate in Variety Lights. And almost in any national cinema commercial films share a same pool of available actors with art films—Mastroianni is not only a symbol for Antonioni, Visconti, but also for Pietro Germi, for Mario Monicelli. But what is peculiar in Italy, or at least at this period, is that these commercial films make ample references to the so-called artistically successful films—that is, they have international critical claim—which are singled out of a national cinema.

Fellini’s taste for woman is definitive. It is perhaps what we know the most of him as a person. Fellini casts women as typage. He does admire angle faces—Claudia in Otto e mezzo; but he is also attracted to horribly voluptuous figures with thick eyebrow and vicious smiles. These are woman from the beach, the physical dimension, the flesh of his life. And they form a contrast with the light footed, gentle, ephemeral figures that descent from heaven. In between we also have the always victimized, sobbing and golden-heart woman on earth. From what I understand, he didn’t use Massina here because he finds her too happy, a bit confusing but nevertheless optimistic. This is the image of Massina in Europa 51—she has yet to acquire that sad look in La Strada.

For Fellini cinema is not a craft, but a personal expression. His talent consists of this magical transformation from the former to the latter. Many take this as fantasies, isn’t this characterization itself a proof our mental poverty? Bazin writes, “without our noticing the world has moved from meaning to analogy, then from analogy to identification with the supernatural.” (II 88)

A few words on Vachel Lindsay

2009-01-28T13:28:00.001-06:00

A caveat: if my arguments here at times verge on the side of eccentricity, please take it as my homage to Vachel Lindsay.

If you have never heard of Vachel Lindsay, no need to worry (if you do very likely you study American poetry). He is just one of many in the early days of cinema who wrote a book on a subject that he didn’t know much. His The Art of The Moving Pictures is still read today partly because it is arguably the first American effort to theoretical formulation of the cinematic phenomenon.

Lindsay’s taxonomy of film genres (or his numerology) consists of three categories: Action, Intimacy and Splendor. To use his familiar terms of pictorial and plastic art, he identifies the essence of these genres as Sculpture in motion, Painting in motion and Architecture in motion. His characterization of the action genre is actually quite accurate, as it is the case where “the outpouring of physical force of high speed is the main source of the drama.” Furthermore, “in the action picture there is no adequate means for the development of any full grown personal passion. The distinguished character study that makes genuine, the personal emotions in the legitimate drama, has no chance. People are but types, swiftly moved chessmen.” If one were to elaborate these claims in a modern perspective, one would cite the agility of dancers and martial arts heroes, whose body movements best endorse the beauty of sculpture in motion. Bordwell, in his analysis of the kinesis of Chinese martial art films—and this comes from Chinese opera—proposes that they offer a “pause-burst-pause” structure, which, interestingly, corroborates Lindsay’s point: the pause is necessary since it truly supplies a sculpture in all its stillness, which is then put in contrast with its motion. Furthermore, in contrast to painting, which is but a flat surface where different perspectives do not exist, sculpture is all about perspectives. This again echoes the aesthetic of action film (i.e., in Hong Kong) that the depiction of action is implemented in a fashion that none of the angles shall repeat itself; all these shots that are spatially dispersed somewhat whimsically exist to construct vantage points where this sculpture-in-motion can be best observed. But go back to Lindsay’s eccentric terminology,

I desire in the moving pictures, not the stillness but the majesty of sculpture. I do not advocate for the photoplay the mood of the Venus of Milo. But let us turn to that sister of hers, the great Victory of Samothrace, the spreads her wings at the head of the steps of the Louvre. (96)

But stillness is nevertheless desired, in that,

Even in a simple chase-picture, the speed must not destroy the chance to enjoy the modeling…Let any one section of the film, if it be stopped and studied, be grounded in the same bronze conceptions. (88)

The difference between Venus and her sisters is not that the former is still and the latter not—for they are both still—but that the former does not indicate any immediate and inevitable action. Samothrace, on the other hand, contains a kinetic tension that needs to be released before it enters into stasis. But what is majesty? Does it by any chance signify a rather masculine quality?

The so-called the mood of the Venus of Milo can be amply observed in cinema’s primitive age. What distinguishes the motion from stillness, however, is not the movement of characters on screen, which are seldom found still; it is rather the movement of perspectives—camera positions, angles and editing combined—that contributes to the essence of motion picture way of constructing a three dimensional world and the sense of real motion in it. This is where the psychology comes from and where it differs from stage—a point Balazs cannot stress enough. Think of video game, especially the first person shooter genre; what makes it inferior to the motion picture experience is that the action is always experienced from a single perspective, the POV of protagonist—now imagine an action film be shot in the mode of Lady in the Lake!

A slight digression: Watching The Thief of Bagdad, I come to realize what so impressed Lindsay that drives him to a theoretical formulation. The sculpture in motion is two things: the male body and the perfect control of it. I was not fully aware of the significance of having a direct visual contact with the source of the action. Modern martial art films do not always show this combination, Bruce Lee being the notable exception. Even Fairbanks doesn’t always get half naked; In The Mask of Zorro he didn’t. Although the action itself is equally impressive, somehow an aura is lost. In The Thief, when he is dressed, it is as if all of sudden he had turned into a suspicious merchant, not worth admiring anymore. It is perhaps for the same reason professional boxers are only wearing shorts, thus offering an unobstructed view of the body. This pleasure is not entirely voyeuristic.

The intimate photoplay, according to Lindsay’s definition, has its “photographic basis” in the “very small ground plan and the coziest of enclosing walls”. One wonders if he is talking about sitcom. And it is true, compared to action film, in these indoor dramas everyone is “half relaxed or gently restrained”, not in a hurry to go anywhere—except Kramer, which is exactly why he is funny—an action hero in an intimate photoplay, who does not want to be relaxed and tries to break up the “hearth mood”.

If in Lindsay’s day most of the pictures are in the action genre, where does he get the idea that intimacy can be a major case of photoplay? Mary Pickford. If Balazs were the one to conjure this up, the name will then be Asta Nielson. In both cases, is it a coincidence that they are so impressed by the facial expression of a female? I personally believe that best defines the intimacy genre. However, Lindsay seems to enjoy contradicting himself saying “the motion picture is shallow in showing private passion but it is powerful in conveying the passions of masses of man.” I gather Lindsay as an artist-wanna-be is aware that shallow is not the right word about private passions; yet he feels compelled to promote publicly a patriotic kind of passion, one that is geared toward the masses. If I venture to go further down the Lindsayian road, recalling a minute ago action implies majesty, I would be glad saying that the private passion is yin, the public, yang.

As for the splendor/architecture pair, Lindsay is so supernaturally inspired that he further divides them into four categories: fairy, crowd, patriotic and religious. The first corresponds probably to our fantasy genre, although I must say it seems the witch-power behind it is not the camera, but the computer. Fairy is the anthropomorphication of Nature. Camera has only a limited power in this respect, which I call selective manifestation; computer, however, is capable of total transformation.

As for the second, it is true, in cinema, the crowd is unmistakably present. In the first Lumière program, we already have it several times (Workers Leaving the Factory, Disembarkment of the Congress of Photographers in Lyon, Cordeliers Square in Lyon). Street scenes are fine; but when “the passions of masses of men” is touted this way, does it not often become a dangerous and inhuman thing? I imagine Lindsay would be impressed to see Chairman Mao on the Tianmen square, waving to a sea of mob below. This leads to the third and fourth category, which honestly I do not see how they differ from the second.

One important aspect of Lindsay’s thinking is hieroglyphics or the moving picture Esperanto. For Lindsay, hieroglyphics can be taken as a way of conceiving the world, a way of externalizing one’s innermost thoughts. Many a poets, or filmmakers, have expressed the idea that their poems, or scenarios, come from a picture that lingers in their mind (or before the mind’s eyes). It is definitely a symbol with all its symbolic dimensions, but it is not a symbol in its usual sense—contrary to a universal sign of abstract feelings it is a unique, highly individual happening.

Although these ideas are very dear to Lindsay, he does not in any way make them clear. A friend in a letter remarks

His mind was filled with a complete world of symbols. They were personal but very real to him. When he said one of those mystifying things, it was a part of this very clear world of fantasy….he had his own special pantheism, actively inhabited by symbol figures. He disdained translating these. (Wolfe 131)

Now that we have begun to think, let every thought be as well carried as a rose petal, and as able to be pictured. Let us evolve a spiritual hieroglyphic, a heavenly sign language. Let the fiber of every dreaming picture be thought, thought, thought; let meaningless beauty be driven from the earth. (Wolfe 133)

In the lengthy description Lindsay gives on The Thief of Bagdad, we see that a symbolic or hieroglyphic object is often an inanimate object that is made to carry psychological status. The object of course is first shown in its natural size; and through the use of close-up, it is magnified, “and just as the spectator might hold it to his own eye till it filled the whole horizon, likewise it seems to fill the whole life of this thief.” (Wolfe 138)

Lindsay’s understanding of symbolism has nothing to do with the French cult—I would be genuinely surprised if he had never heard of Mallarmé; his interpretation of symbol, for example his reading of the Egyptian alphabet[1], is more literal than Freud, Jung (he sees furniture and says “furniture”, not “meuble”, nor “female sex”) or even a fortune teller. As is often the case with him, he compensates his provinciality and logical deficiency by an almost evangelic assertion of future employment. “I would not be surprised if, in twenty years, we have our definite twenty-six or thirty established hieroglyphics in the motion picture field.”

Finally, a few words about the writing style, which is a curious mixture of florid imagination and gossips that are almost embarrassing to read. His approach, which he claims to be “philosophical”, is actually eccentric; his rhetoric, which he believes to be “poetic”, is often irrelevant. No wonder one gets the impression of a “lesser Whitman” who dedicates his poems to many a movie star. It is not that Lindsay is ill-educated, but he is indeed ill-informed; his mode of expression simply does not conform to a standard that we nowadays acknowledge. It is a Pensée Sauvage, conceived by a Bricoleur but not an Engineer. If you ask a barber (a typical example of gossipy bricoleur) to write a book of film theory, convincing him that he is THE authority of this matter, I will not be surprised that he would come up with even more indigenous classifications of the cinematic phenomenon.

Works cited

Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: Macmillan, 1915.

Glenn Joseph Wolfe, Vachel Lindsay: The Poet as Film Theorist. New York: Arno Press, 1973.

[1] According to researchers, although Lindsay’s interest in Egyptology is long lasting, his actual knowledge of it is rather sketchy.

无题

2009-01-28T13:02:00.001-06:00

晚上睡不着， google一些失散已久的老相识的名字，一无所获，遂输入自己的名字，居然得到一首宋词。

一场春梦，待从头说与，傍人听着。罨画溪山红锦幛，舞燕歌莺台阁。碧海倾春，黄金买夜，犹道看承薄。雕香剪玉，今生今世盟约。

须信欢乐过情，闲嗔冷妒，一阵东风恶。韵白娇红消瘦尽，江北江南零落。骨朽心存，恩深缘浅，忍把罗衣着。蓬莱何处？云涛天际冥漠。

亡国之音，多听无益，只有“骨朽心存，恩深缘浅，蓬莱何处？”几个字，心里默默又念了几遍。

The visual sacrifice

2008-11-22T16:10:00.001-06:00

Last night I went to the court theater for this show called Radio Macbeth. It was a disappointing experience. I was going to write something about it until I discovered a newspaper that had been on my table for weeks. In it I found a review of this play which I very much agree. I so like the review that I decide to quote it in length. Words in parentheses are mine.

“The real tragedy of this unconvincing production lies in the painfully obvious contrast between the overwhelming talent of the SITI company and what ends up being an underbaked adaptation of the Scottish play that isn’t quite “Macbeth” but firmly prevents itself from being anything else.”

(You can forget about the “talent” part, it is meant to be a nice compliment not supported by any evidence)

““Radio Macbeth” is literally a staged, painfully (yeah, we all feel the pain) condensed reading where actors play…actors, but the meta-theater immediately feels like a cheap trick: there are hints of relationships between characters, but nothing that holds attention for long, and there are almost no lines that aren’t Shakespeare’s. The show purports to be an actor’s rehearsal of “Macbeth” taking place in a late-night abandoned building, and focusing on the soundscape of the show—the strongest elements of the show are the striking sound effects created by a variety of microphones and the actors’ obvious mastery of their voices as they deftly plow through lines. It’s not clear, then, why the actors spend all their time during this rehearsal rearranging endless chairs for no apparent reason, putting on clothes, taking off clothes and circling each other in stilted, choreographed ways. (I guess there are some reasons for all this, but whatever they are, they fail to communicate) The visual element ends up being another tragic sacrifice…”

I would not go all the length to claim that theatrical art is a visual art, a narrative art (a risky business), but when these aspects fall short, the consequence is obvious; the insufficiency of the artwork becomes so intolerable. We normally don’t have much experience on this side, since averagely speaking a theatrical work does not show such a degree of lacking visual and narrative coherence. Therefore the error of Radio Macbeth is revealing. The show was inspired by a radio version recorded by Orson Welles but never broadcasted. The reviewer (Monica Westin) may not be aware of this connection. But nonetheless she notices immediately that the only place you can use the word “striking” in the present adaptation is the soundscape. It remains a radio play while it claims to be a “real” play. Being the latter we are obliged to watch where we are unfortunately distracted by the actors’ confusing stage activities. It would be nicer if these two have absolutely nothing to do with each other at all—for example, how about a couple feeding a baby? The reviewer mentions that the play is condensed in order to fit into the ninety minutes slot. And this condensation creates difficulty for the comprehension of the plot. But apparently neither Polanski nor Kurosawa has this sort of problem. The issue is not the condensation itself, which I believe is not done enough, but how to treat the original work, the lines of Shakespeare. If we want to create a distance where the original and the adapted can engage in a formal play, then we need a language that is in contrast with Shakespeare’s. Similarly, the power of a cinema of dialect comes not from simply using a dialect, but contrasting it with the language of the political unconsciousness.

Now a few words about Lulu, the opera. Despite the apparent irrelevance, I think opera generally suffers from the same problem of visual and narrative inadequacy. In order to compensate for this, they are often staged in exotic settings, lush costumes, and the singers are asked to “act”, instead of just singing. David Levin in his Unsettling Opera, makes the case that the staging is a significant aspect of our understanding of the work. Radio Macbeth is thus a poor staging which obliterates all the brilliance of Shakespeare. Instead of what the play is known for, the graphic violence, we see chairs and a Japanese girl running about (what personal perversion is this). We expect a banquet a la Greenaway, but we are served with unsalted potatoes in paper bags. Same problem for Chicago lyric opera’s production of Lulu. Although the use of a transparent/reflexive screen to cover/uncover the stage is a clever one, there is just not enough to look at. (in another entry, I hope I will show what is there to look at, even a movie!) I know some would claim an opera is not meant to be watched. These people can just stay at home and listen to their CDs—we are not talking about the same thing. In the same vein of argument, those who are intoxicated by the Bard’s lines and how an actor delivers them can just read the book or listen to recordings—we are not talking about the same thing. I talk to those who believe the staging is a major vehicle for opera. But unfortunately here in North America people are rather conventional in their taste. If you compare Met’s version of The Ring with European versions—the Bayreuth/Chereau version or the Kirchner version, the Audi version—it becomes clear that North American audience has a child-like fascination for surface realism, meaning, in a fable a monster has to look like a monster, not an old gentleman, and a dragon has to be a dragon. Proof? Lyric Opera’s eight productions of this season.

Sounds in Chicago - I

2008-11-17T21:04:00.001-06:00

I just can’t help it. I love any unconventional way of doing things. Whenever possible, I try to go by new route, even if it is an old destination.
So we have heard about the 20th century modern music. So we have heard they are quite different from the 19th century master pieces. These days I got more chances to go to modern performances and I start to realize something is missing there. The Instrument. Yes, despite the very unconventional musical language, the instruments via which this language is spoken, externalized, remain largely the same. Or maybe I should not exaggerate. Have I forgotten Russolo, Antheil and Varèse? Did not Thereminvox and Ondes Martenot play strong roles even in Hollywood compositions? There does exist a corner that stubbornly refuses any change. That is how traditional instruments are meant to be played. And now it came to my knowledge that indeed innovations exist even here.
Last night I attended a performance by this Chicago-born, Europe-residing cellist Frances-Marie Uitti. As a newspaper article says, "for starters, she plays with two bows." This, I understand, is her invention. During the performance, she demonstrated twice how this technique can be used. The first time is a composition by Jonathan Harvey (who sent her this little “gem” a whole year after seeing her performance) and the second time her own. The polyphony, especially in the second piece, is quite striking, despite the fact that I definitely lack the proper terminology to describe it. I know absolutely nothing about string instruments. But I would imagine this kind of effect is not duplicable on two cellos—hence contrary to some reviews, this technique is not aiming at a one-woman-quartet. It is rather aimed at—something she said herself—“the need for explicit rather than implied harmony”.

The solo performance last night was also meant to showcase her new invention—an electronic cello with no strings. But we were told this piece of magic prop is still in Berkley. It was snowing when I came out the Bond Chapel.

Here is more info on her (you can read a poem by Paul Griffith)

http://www.uitti.org/

Eisenstein, Griffith and the film class today

2008-11-08T02:44:00.001-06:00

In the essay “Dickens, Griffith and the film today”, Eisenstein’s conception of montage can be resumed as follows:

First, the montage is the “expansion of intra-shot conflict” (236). When a filmmaker juxtaposes two montage cells, he is concerned with the intensity of the conflict.

Second, a montage gathers its cells to form a new “organic unity”, a “qualitative fusion”, which is not merely a “contrast between the haves and the have-nots”. (234)

Third, a montage should liberates itself from the “limits of situation” in order to arrive at an “ideological conception.” (239)

It is especially upon the third point that Eisenstein believes that Intolerance signifies a heroic yet failed attempt on the part of Griffith. Incontestably, there is in Intolerance, “a desire to get away from the limits of story towards the region of generalization and metaphorical allegory” (241). The reason of this failure, Eisenstein believes, lies in Griffith’s misunderstanding of an essential principle that “the region of metaphorical and imagist writing appears in the sphere of montage juxtaposition, not of representational montage pieces.” (241) To evaluate Eisenstein’s critique on Griffith, I will first take the example Eisenstein gives, Lilian Gish rocking a cradle, which is probably the most important shot of the film. This shot, which appears in manner of refrain throughout the film, shows that Griffith tries to establish an abstract idea from an “isolated” image (if isolate means non-diegetic). According to Eisenstein, this is impossible because without montage, a catalyzing effect, an isolated image remains a lifelike representation. What Eisenstein means by “lifelike”? It seems to me that Eisenstein’s montage can be regarded, at least at this stage, as an effort to analogize a maximum cinema to language, to make image work like word. In order to do so, he needs to narrativize the image, and reduces it to abstraction, which is a condensation of its possible meanings. What is important is that, Eisenstein’s montage trope, when it works in a way like a sentence does—it is intended to work this way, as Eisenstein purposefully selects a rhetoric term to illustrate its effect—tries to eliminate as much as possible the inherent multiplicity of the image. In this sense an Eisensteinian montage is closer to prose than poetic writing. Eisenstein’s criticism of The Earth is such a case. He argues that instead of showing the peasant woman in a long shot, a human being in all his natural surroundings, we should use a close-up of her body, where the notion of “life” can spring up effortlessly, juxtaposing with that of the “death”. In a similar line of argument, Eisenstein would believe, it seems to me, that Griffith’s image of woman-rocking-the-cradle is wrong because not only it has no conceptual opposition, but also it uses a long shot where a close up is more desirable. But would a close up of the baby, the cradle, or the face of Gish be better off? It will, to a certain extent, reduce the multiplicity of the original image (Maternity? Innocence? Vulnerability?). But it will probably never arrive at a univocal quality that Eisenstein had wanted. In this sense, such an image will remain ineffective to its audience.

While this criticism points to ways in which Eisenstein would have moved in order to make Intolerance work, I do believe there is a little misunderstanding. Griffith, after all, could not have subscribed to Eisenstein’s idea of montage. This is not only a chronological impossibility, but also implies that there are other ways to conceive montage than Eisenstein. In Eisenstein’s mind, montage shapes the images that constitute it. But do these images have to be arranged in a consecutive order? Is there any reason to believe that images won’t affect each other if they are not in an immediate proximity? And besides being transformed by its adjacent element, could an image be transformed by our understanding of the plot, of the character, or anything else in the filmic world? If the image of rocking cradle appears only once, we may say, with full confidence, that it is indeed an isolated image. But when it is repeated as in Intolerance, many times, punctuating the narrative, it is hardly isolated at all. I concede that this image is problematic: it does not do what it should do. But what is problematic is rather the way this image is composed of: in order to weave the parallel narratives together, this image ought to have some sort of associations with them. There should be recognizable echoes in this image, so to speak, for all the stories unfolded. This image, then, will become THE image of the film, and establishes a “region of generalization and metaphorical allegory.” In other words, while Eisenstein argues that this image is too complex, or “lifelike” to be effective, I would say it is too simple, or too “conceptual” to be effective. The situation demands that I produce an example, and here it is. In an early paragraph of the very same article, Eisenstein passionately describes his memory of “Griffith’s inimitable bit-characters who seem to have run straight from life onto the screen.” He writes,

I can’t recall who speaks with whom in one of the street scenes of the modern story of Intolerance. But I shall never forget the mask of the passer-by with nose pointed forward between spectacles and straggly beard, walking with hands behind his back as if he were manacled. As he passes he interrupts the most pathetic moment in the conversation of the suffering boy and girl. I can remember next to nothing of the couple, but this passer-by, who is visible in the shot for only a flashing of glimpse, stands alive before me now—and I haven’t seen the film for twenty years! (Eisenstein 199)

Here “life” does not appear to have a derogative sense. Inadvertently contradicting himself (we know Eisenstein’s preference of typage), this paragraph has a definite Bazinian smell. If we concede that what makes this image so memorable is not montage, let us at least acknowledge that montage is not the only way to make an image memorable. I agree with Eisenstein when he believes that an image has to be simple to read in order to have an immediate impact. But I cannot agree with Eisenstein the cine-agitor who believes that an image has to amount to an ideological highland in order to be effective. In fact, in Eisenstein’s own practice, whenever he tries to convey a simple expression such as “wonder” or “joy” (e.g., the “cream separator sequence” in The General Line ), he is perfectly legible; but whenever it comes to an abstract notion as vague as intolerance (the “god and country” sequence in October ), Eisenstein has not done better than Griffith. According to Eisenstein, the sequence is meant to discredit the idea of God and to demonstrate the futility of the concept. How does he do it? By showing successively a Baroque Christ, ancient Greek Gods, Hindu, Mexican, African etc. he argued,

While idea and image appear to accord completely in the first statue shown, the two elements move further from each other with each successive image. Maintaining the denotation of ‘God’, the image increasingly disagrees with our concept of God, inevitably leading to individual conclusions about the true nature of all deities.

The discrepancy between his intention and the actual effect (it is fair to say that few would be able to decipher this message upon first viewing) lies on the fact that in spite of Eisenstein’s belief that an image of God (no matter which) is singular in its meaning, and thus can be manipulated as such, it is in fact highly ambiguous. As a matter of fact, an image of Christ on the cross does not invoke the general notion of God, but instead, calls for various digressive notions such as suffering, redemption, personal guilt, or even sexuality. As for pagan gods, I wonder if for a western viewer these deities are immediately recognizable at all, let alone to calculate a conceptual distance there. The sequence is more likely to be perceived as a showcase of statuettes contained in a diegetic space or in an imaginary museum.

Eisenstein’s essay echoes a prevailing notion that Intolerance is a “magnificent failure”. Yet it would be wrong to assume that the film totally fails in its montage. In fact, some are of the opinion that it is otherwise. Miriam Hansen describes the end of the film as “a visionary epilogue of about twenty shots presenting images of warfare and oppression that dissolve into images of harmony, bliss, and millennial peace.” (Hansen 134) Christian Metz also remarks that “the rapid unfolding of the four images gives one the feeling of an almost physical interpenetration among the four different historical epochs, and the acceleration in the periodicity of the visual breaks slowly exalts this interpenetration to the point of conferring upon it the affective status of a fusion,[…]” (Metz 107-8) From these two descriptions, one can sense that Griffith almost successfully created the effect that Eisenstein had envisioned: isn’t “physical interpenetration” or ‘fusion” an ideal transformation of montage cells? Isn’t “oppression”, “harmony” or “millennial peace” in the “region of generalization and metaphorical allegory”?

Eisenstein made further effort in the latter part of the essay not only in explaining what is a better definition/usage of montage, on which point he constantly improvises and improves himself, but also, why the great Griffith failed to see it. It could be said that Dickens, who inspired Griffith, ultimately restrained Griffith to a Victorian sensibility that is not suitable to our modern age. But maybe provinciality is not the best word to describe this fatal weakness in both Dickens and Griffith. According to Eisenstein’s understanding of historical materialism, Griffith has such a naïve and “dualistic picture of the world, running in two parallel lines of poor and rich towards some hypothetical ‘reconciliation’ where the parallel lines would cross, that is, in that infinity, just as inaccessible as that ‘reconciliation’”. (235) In other words, Griffith’s view of the society, as well as that of Dickens, stays unfortunately in a rather primitive stage before the advent of Marxism, which happens to be a rather scientific knowledge, or proposition, of the social evolution. Dickens and Griffith believe in, perhaps because they want to, a class reconciliation. Griffith’s type of montage, therefore, forever oscillates between a de facto duality and its final, imaginary reconciliation. Similarly, Pudovkin conceives montage as a sort of linkage. Eisenstein, on the other hand, always values conflict more. If Eisenstein’s method of tracing Griffith’s aesthetics back to his ideological stance is a plausible practice, then probably we can do the same to him. Is the montage of conflict a result of Eisenstein’s total subscription to class struggle theory?

Works Cited

Eisenstein, S. (1949). Film Form. New York: Harcourt.

Hansen, M. (1991). Babel and Babylon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Metz, C. (1974). Language and Cinema. The Hague: Mouton.

My blue ray nite

2008-11-06T17:09:00.001-06:00

Earlier this week, in professor Gunning’s class, we missed an opportunity to see how Technicolor fares in a blue-ray transfer—Hawks’ Rio Bravo. It turns out that the Film Studies Center, somehow proudly presented as a sacred place for us cinerats, does not yet feel the need to add to its admirable facilities a blue-ray player. Yes, of course, it is not a matter of rushing into a Sony store and purchasing one. What are the titles available at the moment?

We have heard the story of Godfather and I personally own a 2001. But today I learnt that BFI had begun a series of blue-ray transfers that means business—vigorous and meticulous digital transfer, essays written by specialists, lavish booklets, extras, etc. The first two released are Salo and Red Desert. A review of the latter can be found here: http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/movies.php?id=1727&show=review.

According to an announcement, criterion collection is already taking steps towards embracing the new medium. The first batch of available titles are:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte (the above already listed in the coming soon section)
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

In fact, if we take blue-ray as just a medium that can accommodate a MPEG4-AVC encoding of 1080p images and 5.1 LPCM soundtracks in the same time, the criterion collection does not have to make a giant effort to re-release some of its existing titles. I presume that when they did the transfer, that is, telecine, they stored the digitized film in a sort of uncompressed format—not sure which one. So there is no need to repeat the most money-time-consuming process of negative cleaning, image stabilization and color correction. They of course can throw in more featurettes, which will be all the more reason to upgrade.

Now what are the titles that can benefit the most from this new technology? Looking at the cc list I have to say, it is definitely going to be sound films, and most probably color films, although we do have three B&W titles—they belong to what I call international best-selling B&W.

Finally, let us not forget the shitty issue of region code. As of writing I am not aware of any official multi-region blue-ray player. For standalone the only option is to have it modded, which means added cost and potential instability. As for PS3, better forget it. For BD drive owners, though, the problem is much easier in nature and practically solved.

Bordwell's little secrets

2008-11-01T20:25:00.001-05:00

Even if you don’t agree with David Bordwell, or you simply hate him, for obvious or unspeakable reasons, one thing we must admit is, his academic output is well above the average, and it is this, more than anything else, gives him the indestructible status of being one of the major figures of film studies. How did he do this? There must be, I mean, highly probable, something we need to learn about his method. The following article, which I only discovered lately, can be useful to this purpose. What is also of interest to grad students is what to read, what not to read, although I guess we cannot fully follow his example, not right now. All underlines mine.

The full article, which is an interview by cinemascope, can be accessed through:

http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs26/int_stephens_bordwell.htm

(I hope nobody will sue me for quoting it)

Scope: Though the “publish or perish” imperative still holds sway over academic careers everywhere, the extremely prolific nature of your own publishing—some 15 full-length volumes (both as author and co-author) on a wide range of film-related topics, along with countless articles in books and periodicals the planet over—goes well beyond that of the average academic. How have you managed, especially when you where still teaching on a full-time basis, to produce so many books?

Bordwell: I wanted to be a writer when I was in high school and wrote several stories and a lame, unfinished novel. (Some of my critics think I’ve been writing fiction ever since.) I’ve been lucky to have an energetic temperament, and teaching never really interfered with my writing. I would come home from a day in the classroom or in meetings and still want to write something. I worked weekends and vacations too, as all my colleagues do. As I published more, I did get some time off teaching through grants, although even during leaves I tried to stay involved with my department.

Scope: Can you give us a little insight into your writing habits? From start to finish, how long does it typically take you to complete a new book?

Bordwell: Sometimes I’m writing an article and that will seem to need more fleshing out. The idea of On the History of Film Style came out of an article I wrote on the historiography of film style for a journal. It seemed obvious to expand that piece to three chapters, to add an introduction and an update, and then a case study. That case study, on the history of depth staging, in turn led me to do articles on two directors who have distinctive depth strategies, Feuillade and Angelopoulos. Once I had those articles, I realized I could make a book by exploring other directors, and Mizoguchi and Hou seemed like natural examples. That was how Figures Traced in Light came about. But more often I think in book-sized chunks, mapping the whole thing out beforehand, as with the collaborative project Classical Hollywood Cinema and the book I wrote at about the same time as that, Narration in the Fiction Film.

As for time: there’s time writing and time researching. Most of the books have been written over about two-three years, but that doesn’t count the research time, which adds another two-three years. I wrote The Way Hollywood Tells It in about four months, but it drew on research I’d been doing over about ten years. Often I’m researching a couple of books at the same time, or some of the same research will yield two books.

Scope: How, generally, do you begin each new book-length project? Do you have a broad of sense of things that you feel need to be more carefully thought and written about—certain areas/topics that you’re certain could reward a more sustained and systematic focus? Is new book an attempt to fill some gap that you’ve identified and have become determined to ameliorate? How organic is the process?

Bordwell: I think of a book as a cluster of questions or problems I want to illuminate, and usually those are ones I think have been neglected by other scholars. Fortunately or unfortunately, not many people are interested in most of the topics I write about, so I always have fresh material. Even subjects that people have written a lot about, like Eisenstein or Hou or Hong Kong cinema, haven’t been studied from the angle I favour, so I always seem to have a lot to study. For example, in The Way Hollywood Tells It, I try to talk about script structure and visual style in ways congruent with the way the creative people seem to handle those matters, even if I also try to maintain some critical distance on their conceptions of their craft. This is something that most academics just aren’t interested in. Same thing with the CinemaScope talk you heard; there’s been a lot written about Scope, but academics haven’t much tried to figure out the various approaches directors and crews took toward Scope composition.

One way to frame this more broadly is to say that most film scholars aren’t interested in film as a creative art. I know it sounds odd to say that, but I think it’s true. Most scholars are interested in film as an expression of cultural trends, interests, processes, etc. or of political moods, tendencies, etc. More specifically, those who are interested in film as an art seldom try to find out the craft traditions—the work processes, the technologies, etc.—that give artists the menus they work with. The approach I try to develop is commonplace in art history and the history of music, but not very developed in film studies.

Scope: I first began to develop an awareness of your writing as grad student in the Cinema Studies department at NYU, where your Film Art: An Introduction (co-authored by your longtime partner, Kristin Thompson) was the basic text in all Intro to Film Studies courses. At the time, I shared (quite prematurely) with the undergrads I was instructing the feeling that your approach to film (from a writer’s perspective) was an extremely dry one—though I’ve come to feel entirely differently about your writing today. The strange thing is, I’m not really sure if my changed impression is mainly a result of changes in your writing, or changes in my reading of it. How would you plot the evolution of your style as a writer—perhaps taking Film Art, your book on Ozu, your book on Hong Kong cinema, and your newest book, The Way Hollywood Sees It, as the major milestones?

Bordwell: Film Art presented unique writing problems. We envisioned it as a comprehensive look at the expressive possibilities of the film medium, and I do think we largely got that right. It was the first wide-ranging aesthetic survey of what film could do. But we were aware that most of the previous surveys, even by very great thinkers like Rudolf Arnheim, were biased by the preferences and value judgments of the theorist. Bazin, for instance, opened up a huge area of inquiry into how directors could use the long take, but his account was somewhat one-sided, not really exploring the possibilities that montage offered. I think that some of the dryness of our survey came from our suspending our judgments about what the best uses of film techniques were, or what the essence of cinema was. We’ve tried to make Film Art more lively in successive editions, but I think that some of the dryness you note comes from the textbook genre, and some from our decision not to be very evaluative.

As for other books, I try to find a style for each project. I write an academic style at bottom—I don’t think I could write any other way—but I’ve try to vary the tone sometimes. I suppose Planet Hong Kong and The Way Hollywood Tells It have the jauntiest tone, and the others are less so. Across time, I’ve also tried to loosen up my style, though I’m so averse to glibness and the offhand cuteness of post-structuralism that I probably will never develop a really conversational voice.

Scope: Was Planet Hong Kong a conscious effort on your part to expand your readership, and to publish what seems to be the closest you’ve ever come to a mainstream work of film history? How did your interest in HK cinema develop—and why HK, rather than, say, India or Indonesia ?

Bordwell: To take the second part: I loved HK film when I first saw the early ‘70s imports to America , and I watched what films I could in the ‘70s and ‘80s. When we got 35mm equipment in my department, I began booking films like The Killer (1989) and some Jackie Chan titles, and students found them enjoyable, and so I started to read and watch more. I went to the HK Film Festival in spring of 1995 when I was on leave, and seeing more films and meeting some filmmakers made me realize that one could study this filmmaking community as similar to and different from Hollywood. So it was a combination of personal taste and opportunity.

Scope: One of the signature components across so much of your work—which is, in general, nothing if not extremely methodical, painstaking, and carefully organized on all levels—is the concept of the ASL, or “average shot length,” of feature films. How did you come to rely on this unit of measure, and why? Did you “invent” this methodology? And how do you obtain it—by watching films with stopwatch and calculator in hand? On the face of it, such a methodology suggests an extremely chilly approach to what so many recognize as one our most emotion-charged art forms, and yet the specificities and historical consistencies your insistence on keeping ASLs in mind have revealed have challenged, and toppled, a number of intuitive and erroneous assumptions about, among other things, the so-called hyper-acceleration of the medium in the post-MTV age.

Bordwell: The ASL as a measure was devised by a British film historian, Barry Salt, in the ‘70s. Like him, I count the shots (I use a hand-clicker) and then divide that total into the total running time of the film. Yuri Tsivian has set up a website about these matters, including a piece of software that helps us to count ASLs: www.cinemetrics.lv. I think ASL is a useful instrument, if sometimes a fairly blunt one. I do think that it has to be supplemented by other, more qualitative dimensions, such as elements of narrative construction, etc. For instance, if films are being cut fast before the advent of MTV, we’re left with the question of why that speedy cutting went largely unnoticed by viewers and critics. I have a hunch it’s because MTV-style cutting isn’t just fast but it’s also quite discontinuous, emphasizing graphic contrasts and sudden spatial breakups. A more ordinary shot/reverse-shot handling of a conversation can be edited very fast, but we don’t notice it so much because it’s quite standardized. Most of the films with short ASLs achieve their rapid rate by accelerating the pace of fairly standard editing. So the ASL measure has to be supplemented by matters of context, the sort of other techniques the filmmakers use, etc.

(my comment: so the quantitative approach does not account for yet another big thing: the spatial orientation)

Scope: Correct me if I’m mistaken in this, but weren’t you at some point involved in challenging copyright laws regarding the use of frame enlargements from films in your publications? Historically, the use of studio production stills from films has been zealously guarded by those studios, making the use of illustrations in film studies books a costly and complicated matter. You eventually found a way around this, by using the “fair use” exceptions in copyright laws to “quote” from films by grabbing frames and enlarging them, rather than by using production stills and the like. Could you briefly you discuss this issue, the history of this battle, and the various vagaries involved?

Bordwell: Kristin was the leader in this. A committee of our professional organization inquired into the legality of frame enlargements and, aided by a Washington copyright attorney, concluded that academic use of them constituted fair use. Kristin wrote the committee’s report. Most academic publishers have accepted the committee’s findings. There hasn’t been, so far as I’m aware, any effort on the part of the film industry to contest such usage, so there hasn’t really been any battle.

Scope: Which of your books do you personally value the most, and why? Are there books that you began but never finished?

Bordwell: I’ve never started a book that I didn’t finish. It’s hard for me to appraise my work, because I very seldom reread the books, and when I do I’m struck mostly by gaucheries, missed opportunities, and things I no longer agree with. I think that the book on which I thought longest and hardest is Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema; it’s also my tribute to my favourite filmmaker. If I’d done no other book but this, I’d feel satisfied. Though it’s now out of print, I hope to bring it back to life on the web.

Scope: The book that most changed my perception of your work, and to which I’ve returned most often, is Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, in which you take a hard look at the state of film criticism (in the broadest sense of the term), and argued for a new “meta-poetics” of film interpretation in both popular and specialist discourses. Could you briefly explain what such a “meta-poetical” film criticism might consist of—and do you think, some 15 years after that book was published, we’re any closer to seeing it at work in film criticism today?

Bordwell: This book is an orphan, meant to challenge the way my profession conducts business as usual. It met with, by and large, silence. I think it tried to do too much—offer a brief history of academic film criticism, show how a cognitive perspective could explain why critics reason as they do, and polemicize for a different kind of criticism. I do think that what it pointed toward, a “poetics” of film, has emerged as a distinct, if minority, research tradition in film studies.

Maybe this is the place to say something about the research program I work within. Basically, I want to know how films work and work upon audiences. I focus on film form (mostly narrative form) and style (mostly visual style). So the point of departure is critical analysis of features of narrative form and visual style that characterize the movie. Then I try to reconstruct, as best I can, the place of a film or group of films in their historical tradition—what proximate factors shaped the movies’ form and style. These factors include not only the director, who is quite important as a shaping force, but also the institutional context that the filmmaker works in—the technology available, the mode of film production in force, the state of play in the filmmaking community, the place of cinema in relation to the other arts.

I’m also interested in how movies are “engineered” to have effects on audiences. Filmmakers are first of all film viewers, and they often have an intuitive idea of how others will react to what they’ve done. So I’m interested in how films are designed in ways that try to affect audiences. That also leads me to think about what skills audiences have that enable them to understand and respond to films. I tackle this most explicitly in Narration in the Fiction Film.

This amounts, I think, to a poetics of film—a systematic study of the principles by which films are made and experienced. It sounds very abstract and theoretical, but I think that it can shed light on particular films and filmmakers if we bring the categories down to earth. Going back to the 1910s, how did Feuillade and his contemporaries seem to think of staging, and what craft practices sustained the tradition they developed? How does Mizoguchi innovate within the Japanese cinema’s rich array of stylistic options? How does someone who comes late to a tradition, like Angelopoulos, synthesize staging strategies available to him? What are Hou Hsiao-hsien’s characteristic staging strategies, and how can we explain them in the light of the traditions he inherits—or rediscovers? These are the sorts of questions I try to answer in Figures Traced in Light. But we can study traditions, craft practices, the role of technology, and so on in contemporary US feature filmmaking too; that’s what The Way Hollywood Tells It is up to.

Scope: Which writers, if any—academic or otherwise—do you currently enjoy reading on film?

Bordwell: It may sound odd, but I don’t really read film essays or books regularly. For film subjects I’m studying, I read relevant articles and books, both academic and non-academic, but if I have free time I’m unlikely to pick up a film book. For general edification, I mostly read nonfiction on current affairs, the history of the arts, and debates in the sciences (Darwinian biology, psychology, social science). The film books I read for pleasure tend to be biographies, especially of moguls or stars (e.g., the new bio of Peter Lorre, or McBride’s book on Ford).

Of the film essayists, I read anything by Tony Rayns and Donald Richie. Of the daily and weekly critics, I enjoy Ebert, Hoberman, David Chute, Manohla Dargis, and a few others. Probably the writer I read most regularly is Todd McCarthy. In fact, although I’ve dropped my subscriptions to virtually all academic and quasi-academic journals, I read weekly Variety cover to cover. I find Variety’s critics sensitive and subtle writers.

Scope: After a long and extremely distinguished career in academia, you’ve recently retired from your teaching position at Madison . Could you comment generally on what you see as the state of Film Studies today, specifically in relation to the state of Film Studies when you began your teaching career? And more broadly, how would you characterize the evolution of Film Studies over the last 25 years generally? Did you leave the discipline (to the extent that you have) healthier than you found it? Or is it currently beset by challenges on all sides, or in a state of atrophy—or somewhere in between?

Bordwell: I think that Film Studies has made progress on many fronts toward becoming a mature academic discipline. I think particularly of the work of film historians, working in all periods and on many national cinemas. We are much better informed now about the shape of world cinema history than we have been. Early cinema has been a triumph of historical research, as is shown by first-rate reference books like Richard Abel’s Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. I’m less impressed by most of the research in cultural studies, which seems to me rather weak theoretically, and I worry—as usual—that film as an art form gets short shrift. Nevertheless, on the whole Film Studies is in much better shape than it was in the ‘70s.

Scope: At the beginning of this interview, I asked, not entirely without ulterior motive, if perhaps you had studied film production at any stage in your early education, since while your books contain a wide range of engagements with, and resistances to, the “deep academics” of classical and post-classical Film Theory, there is also an expressly practical and practicable aspect to many of them. Even in as academically inclined and formally elegant a book as your recent Figures Traced In Light, you asserted that a part of your aim in writing it was “to coax young filmmakers into exploring” modes of cinematic staging outside those typically utilized by the vast majority of today’s young American filmmaking professionals. Two related follow-up questions: (1) Do you really think, or perhaps hope, that young film production students will pay sufficient attention to Film Studies volumes such yours as to alter their future aesthetic decisions? (2) Do you, or did you, ever think of yourself—regardless of the slur typically implicit in such an appellation—as a wanna-be filmmaker? Indeed, have you ever made films yourself?

Bordwell: (2) I made amateur films in high school and college, then shot a little 16mm in grad school, but my work was uniformly terrible. I have no filmmaking talent. Once I realized that, I’ve never had an urge to be a filmmaker. (1) I think that academic film study is too divorced from the realities of production, and that’s why we begin our book Film Art by introducing students to the mechanics and production processes of filmmaking—just as we might study the tools and techniques of painting or music-making. The idea of film poetics, as I conceive it, tries to find out the practices that create films and to discover a tacit logic in those practices, so I do want to make explicit the kinds of practical choices that filmmakers face. While it’s unlikely that many young filmmakers will stumble over my books, a few have; I get emails occasionally from production students all over the world who have gotten ideas from my writing, and some of our Wisconsin students have been influenced by ideas I’ve discussed with them.

Scope: What can we expect from the post-retirement David Bordwell? Even more books, at an even greater rate of production? Personally speaking, I can only hope you’ve got more in-depth studies of specific filmmakers waiting in the wings—and in particular, knowing your particular enthusiasm for his work, a neo-post-formalist account of the aesthetics of Dragnet creator Jack Webb. What’s next?

Bordwell: I might do more work on particular filmmakers, perhaps another book on Hong Kong directors. I’d like to write more on Lau Kar-leong, Tsui Hark, and Johnnie To. Right now I’m working on a collection of essays, some revised from their publication format, others—like one on CinemaScope—that will be new. After that, my immediate hope is to spruce up my website and start a blog. I’m considering publishing my next book, whatever the subject, on the web directly. The prospect of having lots of pictures, free access, and readers all over the world is very tempting, and it’s not like you make so much money from a university press book. Probably most academic books should be published on the web, with print on-demand copies available for a small fee.

As for Jack Webb, a director we share an admiration for, I think he could be considered in relation to Fuller (The D.I. [1957] is distinctly Fullerian, and -30- [1959] would be interesting to compare with Park Row). Both are aggressive, nearly self-parodying stylists, carried by their laconic conviction. But I think you’re the man for that job!

Issues of automatic shot analysis

2008-10-31T19:10:00.001-05:00

Haven’t blogged for a long time…but, as they say, forgive him, since he knows not what he is doing.

Last time I visited cinemetrics (two years ago), it was not impressive. Through the diligent promotion of Yuri Tsivian, however, the site is now showing some prosperity (as Yuri puts it, “a crop of good news”). I see a lot of familiar names there. Although some faculty members I talked to express some reservations (they are basically mine too), it seems that the database is steadily growing and these human efforts will eventually amount to something.

A very important issue, as I used to believe, is to have a software that can scan the video file and turn out data. For this purpose we are glad to learn there is already several. But so far the problem has been one of accuracy.

Here I want to take another look of the problem, namely, the legitimacy of the object of examination.

First, the shot structure. It is somehow believed that a film is constructed by elementary units such as shots. The shot is not an imaginary thing. It is determined and therefore justified by the nature of mechanical reproduction through an optical device. A shot is taken before any critical intervention. A shot took shape before we can even look at it. In this sense a shot has an integrity we are powerless to deny. However let us do not forget a shot is also broken in the editing process. If a shot is broken into three pieces and intertwined with another three pieces of another shot, do we say there are two shots, or six? Talking about the ontology, two; but in shot analysis, we say six. Therefore, the ontological justification doesn’t hold.

Second, the most important feature of a shot, as it is understood today, is its scale. How do we define it? The shot scale is determined by the closeness of its object to the camera. But if a shot has no human in it, how do we get a sense of its scale? We may say, it is determined by the real depth of the shot, that is, how far does the light go from the camera to run into its object? So the term scale is after all, a misunderstanding. What we are looking at is actually a distance. This, again, goes back to the European and American way of defining shot. Close up means closer. Long shot means the distance is long.

The problem of shot scale is two: first, and this is the reason why it cannot be accurately determined at the moment by a software, because the software does not know what is the depth of the camera’s object. And the problem is not only for the machine, but also for human. For in a deep space staging one would not know what object is the object of the camera, i.e., whether to qualify it as a cu or a ls. Any such knowledge would be an interpretation, running the danger of losing objectivity.

Second, shot scale used to consist of only three, close up, medium shot and long shot. The cinemetric system refines it by adding another five: bcu, mcu, mls, fs and other. Here the problem arises: if we can easily choose between ls and cu, the difference between ms and fs is sometimes not very clear, not to mention if one does not have the time to determine it immediately in viewing the sequence. Moreover, wouldn’t we say in order to achieve maximum accuracy it would be more desirable to have the actual distance instead of these confusing approximations?

Third, when it comes to the analysis of style, I am no longer sure that shot is the most useful term that contributes to our understanding of it. What is more interesting, from what I see it, is to understand how the visual information changes. The visual information changes; that is what distinguishes cinema from a still painting. I see there are four kinds of change: shot change (montage), camera movement, object movement inside a fixed frame, special effects (including lighting and other effects). All these contribute to a visual change, yet only the shot change is acknowledged.

If we are interested in quantifying film style, can we really expect to achieve any interesting result by not accounting for three fourth of the visual changes? Naturally, although these are functionally equivalent as visual changes, they manifest different kinds of stylistic choice. Whether a moving camera or a cut, this is something that a filmmaker has to resolve in his every day experience. Without this difference, we wouldn’t be able to talk about stylistics. Yet in another level, I would suggest that these are indeed secondary. I say secondary in terms of the degree of variation. We have to say that a complete stasis is most different from a rapid movement of camera or a rapid cut. The difference between the latter two, in this sense, is secondary comparatively speaking. One might immediately suggest, is this system capable of handling subtleties which make a master a master? I say definitely, yes. But yes in the sense that this subtlety is reflected, and even in a most accurate way, in the statistics. But of course, statistics is a study of a group of samples, and it is only meaningful if it remains this way. A master’s statistics can have little quantitative difference with an amateur’s, but alas, we know already that statistics is not useful to tell masters from amateurs.

Next time I will try to say more about how do I conceive this system of visual variations.

Love: from myth to science

2008-07-24T14:12:00.001-05:00

Schopenhauer is perhaps the first to seriously tackle the problem of love as a weird phenomenon with its natural causes. The Greek praised love and warned its consequences. But curiously enough, all those great thinkers of the time, especially a man as systematic as Aristotle, did not try to find out what is behind it, although he dealt with virtually every other subject in the universe. Also, as we all know, the love they talk about is a certain kind of love, which Schopenhauer calls pederasty.

If Plato is happy with surrounding love with myths, fables, and jokes, how did the other philosophers score? According to Schopenhauer, the adorable Rousseau, the great Kant, and the admirable Spinoza all did poorly on this subject. Therefore, he has “no predecessors either to make use of or to refute”. As for how his approach might differ from what an elegant discussion of the topic should constitute, Schopenhauer warns,

Moreover, least of all can I hope for approval from those who are themselves ruled by this same passion, and who accordingly try to express the excess of their feelings in the most sublime and ethereal figures of speech. To them my view will appear too physical, too material, however metaphysical, indeed transcendent, it may be at bottom. (533)

Indeed, what Schopenhauer proposes here, as we will see, is nothing but a science of love. And if a science is too physical, too material and too bottom as it appears to its reader, there is nothing we can do about it. Schopenhauer’s idea about love should be examined from a scientific perspective, instead of from a metaphysic one, since it is there it belongs and it is there it shall be properly evaluated. But is what Schopenhauer proposes good enough to stand for science in today’s standard?

It is not impossible to summarize Schopenhauer’s “discovery” in one sentence. This is: love is a manifestation of the species for which an ideal set of characteristics (most of them physical) are sought in the child thus begotten. What the individuals involved in this business call love, then, is nothing but an illusion, an imperative of the higher order, which demands his/her total sacrifice and persuades them somehow to take this will as theirs. Here is how he argues:

The true end of the whole love-story, though the parties concerned are unaware of it, is that this particular child may be begotten; the method and manner by which this end is attained is of secondary importance.

The essential thing is not perhaps mutual affection, but possession, in other words, physical enjoyment. The certainty of the former, therefore, cannot in any way console us for the want of the latter; on the contrary, in such a situation many a man has shot himself.

However loudly those persons of a lofty and sentimental soul, especially those in love, may raise an outcry over the gross realism of my view, they are nevertheless mistaken. For is not the precise determination of the individualities of the next generation a much higher and worthier aim than those exuberant feelings and immaterial soap-bubbles of theirs? Indeed, of earthly aims can there by one that is more important and greater? It alone corresponds to the depth with which we feel passionate love, to the seriousness with which it appears, and to the importance attached by it even to the trifling details of its sphere and occasion. (535)

If a highly advanced asexual civilization were to conduct a scientific research on human behavior on earth, they might be able to adopt a strictly objective view on things since they are totally immune to them. A human researcher on this subject, on the other hand, is easily biased, even in the case of a misogynist such is Schopenhauer, since he is vulnerable to the same disease.

But where Schopenhauer has faulted most is not on the general principle of things, but on details, where he advances assertions without any scientific substantiation. For example, for the new individual, he postulates,

This individual will have the will or character from the father, the intellect from the mother, and the corporization from both. But the form will depend more on the father, the size more on the mother, in accordance with the law which comes to light in the breeding of hybrids among animals, and rests mainly on the fact that the size of the fetus must conform to that of the uterus. (536)

Alas, it is good to know that, before Science was divided into more and more highly specialized branches, a person with good self-education can feel confident to talk about anything without the fear of being accused of dilettantism!

At times, Schopenhauer is most brilliant:

Through a thousand physical accidents and moral misfortunes there arises a very great variety of deteriorations of the human form; yet its true type in all its parts is always reestablished. This takes place under the guidance of that sense of beauty which generally directs the sexual impulse, and without which this impulse sinks to the level of a disgusting need. Accordingly, in the first place, everyone will decidedly prefer and ardently desire the most beautiful individuals; in other words, those in whom the character of the species is most purely and strongly marked. But in the second place he will specially desire in the other individual those perfections that he himself lacks. (539)

The last sentence is instructive as it plausibly explains why the so-called sense of humor always appeals to woman since it belongs to their perennial lacks, such as bravery, seriousness, strength and so on. Man, at least the bulk of them, lacks tenderness, sweetness, patience and tolerance. Human vocabulary encapsulates these qualities as womanly and manly, respectively. And I often heard that a woman will love an ugly man, but not a unmanly man.

Although Schopenhauer went all the length to discourse on the force driven from species to individual, he cannot come up with a better idea than that of delusion to account for the mechanism. But how does the species exert any force on an individual since the idea of species means nothing but an abstract group of relatively closely related individuals? An imperative that can work on an individual of free will must work from inside of him, not from any outside source, let alone an idea.

Fortunately science does furnish a pair of ideas that amply deals with this phenomenon. These are Phenotype/Genotype, first brought to my knowledge by Richard Dawkins. In essence phenotype is the outward, physical manifestation of the organism; and genotype is the internal and inheritable coding information that instructs such a manifestation, and is carried by all living species. Phenotype/Genotype are not Dawkins’ invention and they were coined before DNA came to our knowledge. But his creative usage of the pair is that he maintains evolution is centered around the genotype—hence selfish gene. Granted, there are things cannot be explained by gene-centered view of evolution. But so are other major theories of evolutionary mechanisms. Dawkins is often criticized as practicing a sort of Darwinian fundamentalism or strict/teleological adaptationism. I personally don’t see anything wrong with that.

The question remains, however, that, what about a love not aiming at procreation? What about a sexual selection that bears no fruit of inheritable characteristics? I am not only referring to the full range of LGBT activities, but also the heterosexual love that is meant to be savored without actual cohabitation. The European tradition of knightly love is certainly a good example, although Cervantes has made it as ridiculous as possible.

For Schopenhauer the answer is that these men and women are led astray by the sense of beauty, which in his system of explanation, immediately guides the sexual impulse. He also observes that animals don’t have a similar problem (its not regarded as a problem these days) since animals have lesser preponderance of the brain and therefore more instincts. But even instinct can be misleading.

The complexity of the ritual and its potential impact on human behavior is hard to underestimate. If a science can only be applied to mindless peasants, then it probably needs some revision. But of course I don’t expect, as yet, such a science would be able to produce satisfactory results interpreting a Proustian love—that will be the day!

I propose that a scientific study of the human behavior of love should be guided by this: this behavior, like many others, is primarily based on various facts in the animal kingdom: human being as mammal, as primate; and also based on the fact that human being as species has been shaped by the very society it built up.

In this light, Schopenhauer’s theory limits itself in the first category. It is therefore strikingly universal, but sometimes painfully deviant. The parts in which his description becomes inaccurate is exactly the parts where love as a social behavior has surpassed love as an animal behavior.

Video Game Narrative

2008-07-23T10:22:00.001-05:00

Last semester a classmate made a presentation about the narrative strategy in video games. He did a good job (Videogaming 101). Yet I find his enterprise suspicious in a fundamental way. The reason is simple: narrative is the last thing that I would care when I play video games. [1] Of course they exist, but it is fairly obvious that they exist as a pretext to carry the gist—the action & interaction. In this sense, I believe the narrative in video games has a similar status in pornography—extremely amateurish and limited. People would say my claim does not prevent video games to create very interesting characters. But I would argue that these characters are established mainly by our playing their roles and our incorrigible habit of making sense of our game experience. A similar identification process exists in cinema, but is understandably much weaker. When we try to remember a film, we do recall events, places, characters, etc. But when we try to see what has left in the memory for a video game, what do we have? Not the same thing. I played the whole series of Tomb Raider from episode one to eight, together with numerous custom levels. The thousands of hours I spent on this series do they enable me to understand better who is Lara Croft? When I try to remember this experience, all I can recall is running, jumping, climbing, shooting and yes, dying, which are abstract gestures in regards to the story. What really evolves in the series, as obvious to any fan, is not the story, but the graphics. This said, human beings are incorrigibly addicted to narratives. To take advantage of this weakness game developers wrap their offerings in a package that can be understood as a story, as about a British woman who is attractively asexual. But really, what the Tomb Raider series offers is not a story about this woman, but rather about a particular setting (adventure around the world) and a particular mode of playing (problem solving, wandering alone in a vast area with occasional enemy). It is the unique combination of these gaming elements that has made the series appeal to a wide range of players, who enjoy being in exotic places, shooting from time to time, and taking a break to appreciate the texture work.

Other games of the same genre offer slightly different combinations of the same elements to establish their uniqueness. Prince of Persia, for example, is similar in both the exoticness of the setting and the fighting, lonely acrobat aspect. The narrative is however strengthened by a purpose: to save, to revenge for one’s beloved ones, to prevent a disaster, to search for one’s own identity, etc. God of War, another highly popular adventure game, is as childish as Tomb raider when it comes to problem solving. And there is practically not much acrobatics. But what is unique about this game is the prevailing, God-defying anger. I was again and again amazed by the amount of hatred weaved into the narrative: what there is to love is lost forever, all that remains is to kill. In Prince of Persia, what I see from the emotional side is the perennial fear for the beast. Compared to these two, the narrative in Tomb Raider is the blandest. There is little character development, no romance (for a young woman!), and absolutely no cause to keep herself that busy!

If I made some observations on game design, I am sure you will find them also applicable to many Hollywood blockbusters—in fact they cross-breed constantly these days. Take the newest installment of Indiana Jones series. Crystal skull or chalice, this imperialist curiosity-greed for all treasure of the world is the same. One needs an excuse to go after something fancy that one doesn’t already have; one overcomes his enemies—Russians, for Jones—and one eventually comes to possession of the treasure—the world. But instead of the factual routine of bringing it back to British Museum—morally unacceptable these days—one leaves it there; but naturally it has to be destroyed onsite, irretrievably buried, so that nobody else can get it.

[1] If I had ventilated my reservations to my classmate’s proposition (I didn’t say a word), I imagine he would have argued that he talks exclusively about RPG games, from Dungeon & Dragons, Diablo to The World of Warcraft. And his arguments could be partly valid in this particular genre, although we do have to redefine what narrativity is in this circumstance.

KÀ

2008-07-23T09:32:00.001-05:00

I have never seen any Cirque du Soleil show—despite that I have lived in Montreal for five years. Circus is never my cup of tea and I ignored the 2004 Midnight Sun for the Jazz festival—I dislike any orgy on the street since I have to stand and watch. But I heard that their major resident shows are quite different: the only inconvenience—they are in Las Vegas. And the reason is simple: they all need special designed theater and a devoted show-going audience to cover the huge production cost.

There are five shows by Cirque du Soleil in Vegas. They are O, KÀ, Mystère, Zumanity and Love[1], of which I need to choose one (budget reason). So KÀ. This is because this show is designed by Robert Lepage, one of the best Canadian filmmakers. Lepage is well known in Quebec cinema, but his major area of work is still theater, in which he is an accomplished international celebrity (better than Bergman). And I have not been able to catch a glimpse of his theater work either. So this would be a double opportunity for me to fill in the blanks of being a Montrealer.

I am not sure to which extent Lepage is responsible for the show. But he certainly helps to transform the traditional style of a circus show into a different animal. There are still vestiges of this traditional style, that is to say, the circus elements. But overall it carries a distinctive flavor of a mixture of oriental fantasy[2], innovative stage design and multimedia incorporation—all Lepage’s repertoire. It also tells a story better: conflict, dualism, etc.

Upon arrival, guests are showed in by gatekeepers, which are just your average usher dressed in fancy costumes—they come in handy when you need a souvenir photo. When one first enters the theater, one notices that on two sides there are gigantic metal works—platforms, stairs—that extends the stage far into the audience area. We expect it to produce astonishing effects during the show, which is not exactly the case—it might be a potential that can be fully exploited in future revisions.

The way KÀ demonstrates how there is to be no flash photography or cell phone usage is exemplary. Several minutes before the show starts, the counselor and his son (both bad guys, mind you) invite someone from the first row. While they are engaged in some harmless talking, we hear phone rings from this unfortunate guy’s pocket. He is immediately thrown into a bottomless pit that is the stage—with a harrowing scream.

What is most noteworthy of the KÀ show is definitely its floating stage, 25 x 50 feet and weighing 50 tons. It creates unprecedented visual variation to traditional stage art in that this platform can rotate to any imaginable degree of tilt. At one scene, it emulates a steep mountain where the princess and her escorts try to evade and fight their relentless pursuers. Here the platform is seen virtually vertical, with protruded shafts—assumed arrows—on various spots. The performers climb up and down the platform with the help of these shafts with a truly acrobatic agility. Note that the shafts are individually controlled and their appearance and disappearance are carefully choreographed with the action. Therefore I assume the route by which those acrobats maneuver the platform is far from random. Towards the end of the scene, the savage pursuers fall one by one; the last of them hangs by the shaft and then lets go, falling into the pit. Thus we are suddenly made aware that those shafts have all been withdrawn.

Such is undoubtedly the forte of Cirque du Soleil production. But what I find especially touching is another scene where the twin brother is taught the art of shadow play by the protective court jester. Again the platform is seen vertical, with its smooth surface reflecting shadows from a powerful lamp installed just in front of the two performers. The positioning is such that the shadow of their hands are magnified so that all audience can have a clear view. Now I imagine we all more or less played the same game when we were young—often when there is a blackout—but it is truly amazing to see that such a simple trick can become so vivid, so poignant. The whole experience is beyond description and amounts to, at least for me, an overwhelming nostalgia of the lost childhood.

It also has to be said that the show makes extensive usage of the versatility of the platform’s surface. As mentioned it serves the backdrop of a masterful shadow play. It is also used in the final confrontation of the two armies, to have video sequences projected on it, where the platform is again vertical. The effect is that whenever a soldier steps onto the platform (they are all airborne), it produces a small whirlpool as if he is tapping on the water. If this video sequence is prerecorded, then each performer must hit exactly the right spot on the right time—which is definitely too difficult. Otherwise there must be a technology, motion detectors or touch sensors for example, that can evoke computer generated whirlpool graphics whenever a performer touches the surface.

In another scene the platform emulates a sea shore—hence it is entirely covered with yellow sand (actually made of granular cork imported from Portugal). We have some cartoonish characters here: silly turtle, mischievous starfish (urchin), crab and even a potato bug—all human performers disguised. Later when the scene ends the platform just tilts up to get rid of all the sand.

You may get the impression that the platform is a perennial presence on the stage. Well it is not. In several scenes the stage space is penetrated up and down—it breaks the bottom of the stage, one might say. Because human vision is essentially horizontal, stage entrances are normally left and right, seldom up and down. But this show frequently uses these other two sides to make entrance and exit. There is especially a unforgettable scene in which the stage emulates the twin brother plumping into the ocean bottom. With the help of lighting, and bubbles—no idea how this is done—the visual effect is mesmerizing. Then the jester swims heads-down to retrieve the boy and they both emerge upwards.

Yet another scene features a gliding bird which hovers above the audience before descending into the pit/abyss. But the itinerary of the flight is pre-defined and lacks much suspense.

Other less impressive scenes include the first, where the imperial court celebrates with a sequence unmistakably borrowed from Beijing opera. Staffs and spears are flying in the air with performers bouncing them constantly and exchanging positions. Palatable to most of the audience, I imagine, but a bit tedious for a Chinese. It is said that this sequence also borrows from the Brazilian Capoeira dance. Both resemble martial arts yet are distinctively different.

I think a complete transformation of the circus show is to let the acrobatic acts serve a narrative or stylistic purpose. In other words, acrobat for acrobat’s sake damages the show. Some of the above instances manifest a good example of this transformation while some other scenes are too conspicuously circus style. After the Chief Archer's daughter sets the twin brother free, she had some time of her own to play a solo with a flute. Haven’t we seen enough rhythmic gymnastics? If she can do a hundred clubs at once I might even applaud. But she got only two. Later, in the slave cage scene, two acrobats walk the spinning wheel, clockwise, or counterclockwise. What’s the point? As if all of a sudden the plot gives way to some nonsensical and low grade entertainment. The beach scene, too, reminds me of this type of interlude that shows up in virtually all vaudeville. It never fails to entertain its audience, for sure. But it weakens the plot.

Overall I feel that this show is at times brilliant, at times insipid. If this is already the better of Cirque du Soleil shows, I am afraid the others wont be able to meet my standards. A show has a long way to go to match the kind of narrativity cinema or traditional theater can furnish. But come to think of it, I believe most of the audience are there looking for visual impressiveness as the main ingredient. This is why although some of the acrobatic acts fail to function in the narrative, they are still wholeheartedly welcomed. I am sure Lepage is aware of this, but for the same reason, he cannot afford to not to include them.

[1] The new one, Criss Angel BELIEVE (Luxor) will premier shortly.

[2] The language these characters use sounds most like Japanese, but naturally it is not.

A Note on Pieter Bruegel the Elder

2008-05-07T19:55:00.001-05:00

Michelangelo once explained to a Portuguese artist Francesca da Hollanda, in a contemptuous tone, why Flemish landscape is not a medium of artistic expression as good as his human bodies:

They paint in Flanders only to deceive the external eye, things that gladden you and of which you cannot speak ill. Their painting is of stuffs, bricks and mortar, the grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, the bridges and rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and there. And all this, though it may appear good to some eyes, is in truth done without reason, without symmetry or proportion, without care in selecting or rejecting.’ And he concluded that these ‘landscapes’, like the panoramas of Patinir, are only suitable for ‘young women, monks and nuns, or certain noble persons who have no ear for true harmony. (qtd. In Clark 26)

Michelangelo was probably right in the sense that he failed to see the platonic ‘artistic ideal’ being represented in those paintings. Because of his tremendous influence, together with the gigantic achievements of Italian High Renaissance, the northern art, which until 16^th century had enjoyed much popularity, was degenerated by terms since as ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’.

Today this distorted evaluation which lasted almost for three centuries seems no longer perceivable. In art history textbooks there is always this special chapter reserved for ‘northern renaissance’ masters: Jan Van Eyck, Roger van der Weyden, Joachim Patinir, Pieter Bruegel and a half dozen others. A man of vision once wrote, not without irony, ‘At the present moment, it is true, we have achieved an unprecedentedly tolerant eclecticism. We are able, if we are up-to-date, to enjoy everything, from Negro sculpture to Luca della Robbia and from Magnasco to Byzantine mosaics.’ (Huxley 10)

It might seem to some undiscriminating eyes that Flemish artists are all proudly contributing to their own splendid era. This is of course only a misunderstanding. As we know, it is the Italianism which were constantly in demand by Spanish commissioners and many northern painters enjoying high fame at the time were busy producing them. It was impossible for Bruegel to not to notice these influences and some scholars made observations that he indeed learnt from Italian mannerism and, instead of creating superficial imitations, had assimilated those elements into his own artistic expressions after his visit to the south. But this is not always the case. Take the example of Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (1565), the contrapposto of the woman is definitely an Italian one which reminds us of Botticelli’s Venus. Instead of seeking protection under Jesus’ feet out of fear, she proudly stands amongst the Apostles and the Pharisees, looking down on Jesus with such an indifferent smile as if she was a goddess being sent down to reconcile a human discord. The explicit mannerism not only stands out of the overall harmony of the work but also imposes an unnecessary sacrifice of realism for a twisted feminine beauty. Another less obvious example is the holy women group in The Calvary, as I will mention later. It appears to me, then, while regarding Peter without any hesitation as an peasant like the others, the artist still had some reserved respect for ‘our lady’ and insisted on depicting her in the Italian way.

Nevertheless Bruegel’s work evokes feelings that are totally different from those of Italian high renaissance. The Italian masterpieces exude an ideal form that does not exist except in artists’ perception. Bruegel, on the other hand, imparts to us a perfectly visible and intimate range of phenomena. We need not to be purified by, or surrender to its superiority. The Flemings and their ways of living amuse us and remind us, with utmost sobriety, what we really are.

In this sense, Bruegel’s view of the world have some similarities with that of an Asian artist. In fact, it could be said that he is as far away from the tradition of Bacchus-Dionysus-Apollo as a Chinese painter is. He never painted a nude or a portrait, like a Chinese painter. Chinese do have nude pictures. But they are pornography, not body art. Some of the figures of early Bruegel are nude too, like those in Allegory of Pride (1557), but they are not body art either. It is obvious that both Bruegel and Chinese painters had given up human body as an ideal representation of virtue or beauty. And it is not difficult to notice that the Chinese way of depicting figures in a landscape resembles Bruegel’s considerably—they are all paper-thin silhouettes moving awkwardly in their cumbersome outfits. The landscape itself, especially the rocks, bear striking resemblance to their Chinese counterpart. As Huxley puts it, ‘they are intensely poetical, yet sober and not excessively picturesque or romantic.’ (Huxley 19) Conversely, the landscape tradition of western art which, according to Kenneth Clark, dates back to Giorgione and Titian, perfected in the hands of Poussin, Lorraine and their northern counterpart Constable, Gainsborough, means nothing but ‘pastoral’, ‘Acadian’, a Greek ideal of soothing, retreated harmony. Those half naked semi-deities stretch themselves here and there with typical stately Mediterranean poses, which is a major theme of western landscape up to 20^th century, have nothing in common with Bruegel’s pot-bellied, downright grotesque figures. Thus it is understandable that, failed to see anything poetic there, Clark didn't have any choice but to put Bruegel into a category of “the landscape of fantasy.” (Clark 27)

How did Bruegel come to conceive the landscape in this way then? Although Joachim Patinir is the first recognized landscape painter in the sense that he turned landscapes into an independent subject of the painting, his landscapes are still tinted with religionary or mythical figures situated in the centre of composition. In various versions of St. Jerome the rocks are almost as good as ideal rocks, but they are still one step from being called poetic (with the notable exception of Landscape with Charon’s Boat, 1616). The landscape series of Bruegel, on the other hand, were completely human scenes. It is less imaginary than religious paintings (who ever saw St. Jerome sitting in the midst of a desert or Mary resting in her flight to Egypt?) but still higher than our daily perception of the world. This series of paintings, commissioned in 1565 by his friend Jonghelinck, is first of all a direct inheritance of a Flemish tradition of decorating calendars in prayer books with miniature scene of outdoor work and play, as seen in The Money Changer and His Wife (1514) by Quentin Messys. I am glad to note here that this is also a tradition practised in China. Although Catholic saints and Greek deities are almost extraterrestrial beings to our happy Chinese ancestors, they managed to fill the pages with ancient aphorisms and useful agriculture knowledge, which proved to be as enjoyable as a Book of Hours. However, Bruegel surpassed successfully any calendar art ever existed before by bequeathing the theme with timeless art forms and full-fledged poetic imagination.

In Tarkovsky’ s film The Mirror, in which the director tried to reconstruct his personal yet universal memory of childhood during World War II, there is such a scene of shooting range which could be definitely called Bruegelian in that it gave us the same kind of frustrated nostalgia in front of Hunters in the Snow (1565). The same with The Return of the Herd (1565), The Harvesters (1565), The Haymaking (1565) and Gloomy Day (1565), everyone of which showed not only a perfectly balanced landscape, but also an emotion connected to the scene, which are readily aroused in audience of different cultural backgrounds. Some other paintings of Bruegel, such as The Fall of Icarus (1555-8), Conversion of Saul (1567), Parable of the Sower (1557), Magpie on the Gallows (1568), although dealing with mythical, religious and proverbial subjects respectively, also incorporate a superb rendering of landscapes.

One category of Bruegel’s painting is the so-called anthropological studies of folk life. These include the famous Peasant Dance (or Kermis, 1567-8), Peasant Wedding (1567-8), Children’s Game (1560), The Battle between Carnival and Lent (1559) and The Blue Cloark (or Netherlandish Proverbs 1559). These paintings shocked us with an unprecedented realism and earned him the name of ‘Peasant Bruegel’. Jean Videpoche describes,

Frozen into grimaces by the cold, seared with squint lines by the summer sun, they make painful contrast with the festival backgrounds which they find themselves…force their work-shackled muscles to caper in unaccustomed dances. But their faces never lose the dull, brutal cast that their work has set upon them. (Huxley 51)

The rollicking figures incite less moral lessons or religious feelings compared to the others, but they nevertheless initiated a great tradition started by Bruegel and carried on by Millet, Van Gogh.

Another category of his works is maybe best titled as ‘being an observer of this miserable world that is ours’. By incorporating his fellow country men into Biblical events, Bruegel creatively decoded the significance of those events in his contemporary world. This includes The Tower Babel (1563), Census at Bethlehem (1566), Massacre of the Innocents (1566). There are a few others, though not of biblical content, served the same purpose here. This includes: The Blind leading blind (1568), The Cripples (1568). The best of them, The Carrying of the Cross (sometimes called Calvary, 1564) turned Golgotha into a typical Flemish village. We are shifted from the role of passionate Christians to unsuspected peasants who are ready to enjoy just another free show of public execution. The suffering of Jesus, together with the significance of it, is no longer the main subject of the composition. The people, our people, becomes something that unexpectedly attracts our attention. Perhaps the similarity of persecution and fest is more significant than the death of Jesus Christ? It is worth noting that in the Carrying of the Cross (c. 1505) by Hieronymus Bosch, the man Bruegel was indebted to in his ‘comedy & proverb’ phase, Jesus was shown with a sleeping tranquility amongst various terrifying devil-like faces. Although it is an ‘unflinching exposure of the bestiality of man toward man … the insane lust for violence characteristic of a vindictive mob in his day or our own,’ (Foote 58) those extravagant faces externalize this eccentric pleasure of enjoying human disfigurements. Another Bosch’s painting, The Crowning with Thorns (1508), bears less devilish faces but still vicious eyes. The Bruegelian crowd, on the other hand, are consisting of just ordinary people with a jolly indifference. Such are the different levels of artistic expression.

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understand

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just

walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the

torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

Musée des Beaux Arts

W.H. AUDEN

Works cited

Barnouw, Adriaan J. The fantasy of Pieter Brueghel New York: Lear, 1947.

Clark, Kenneth. Landscape into Art. New York : Charles Scribner’s sons, 1950.

Delevoy, Robert L. Bruegel : historical and critical study. Geneva : Skira, 1959.

Foote, Timothy. The world of Bruegel. New York : Time-life Books, 1968.

Gibson, Walter S. Bruegel. London : Thames and Houdson, 1977.

Grossmann, F. Bruegel: the paintings, complete edition. London, Phaidon P., 1966.

Hollanda, Francisco de. Dialoghi romani con Michelangelo. Milano : Rizzoli Editore, 1964.

Huxley, Aldous. The elder Peter Bruegel. New York : Willey Book Co., 1938.

Koch, Robert A. Joachim Patinir. Princeton : Princeton UP, 1968.

Mander, Carel van. Dutch and Flemish painters. New York : Arno Press, 1969.

Snow, Edward. Inside Bruegel: the play of images in Children’s games. New York : North Point, 1997.

Looking back

2008-05-01T13:31:00.001-05:00

Looking back at one’s own writing, especially those of long time ago, it is hard not to feel a definite degree of embarrassment mingled with an indefinite and secretive degree of narcissistic affection. Rudolf Arnheim, when he has to translate stuff he wrote 25 years ago and put it into a volume now known as “film as art”, writes,

I found myself dealing with my writings as though with the work of a favorite student: pleased to have engendered a kindred mind, a little worried perhaps at his precocious possession of thoughts I cherished as my own, more ruthless in condemnation and correction than when less involved, and yet as meticulous as affection demands.

Recently I discovered some of my stuff written 5, 10 or 15 years ago. Upon a casual reading, I found myself lamenting on always brash and sometimes untenable assertions, loose reasoning and discursive gap, lack of structure and research, and finally the ridiculously abortive nature of every project. Meanwhile, what strikes me as meaningful is that while I learn to cope with this hopeless world and myself, how little have I gained and how much have I lost! A friend describes my present style as “careless and sarcastic”. Not that it matters, but I was NOT like that before.

An easy conclusion would be to say that the world has squeezed “the precious body fluid” (to quote Kubrick) out of me. Or, I squeeze it myself everyday, willingly or wailingly.

Writing a blog, or anything else except your paper, is like talking to an imaginary interlocutor. Who is this person you are talking to? Instead of saying I have changed, I would rather say that my interlocutor has changed. He is no longer enthusiastic about virtually everything in the universe and he is often tired. Therefore I have become cautious whenever I try to bring up any subject that may potentially interest him. I have to prepare for his dismissive tone, his ruthless scrutiny of my method; he knows where my material is most porous and he thumbs down when I present other people’s idea instead of my own. Most importantly, he doesn’t believe me anymore, at least not as much as he used to.

Therefore I hide myself behind a mask of indifference, a heavy cuirass of irony. It is not that I am disillusioned, my heart turns dark, as late Luxun did. At least he got published and his thoughts shared by millions. Good for him. Not that it matters.

In writing, or thinking, one asserts his existence. Why this existence has to be asserted? This is something I did not question in my youth. And this is the very thing I have become highly suspicious of in my thirties.

Now I realize, sadly, that this is perhaps the only thing that gives you power. One struggles not to question oneself; one writes out of pure inertia.

A skillful writer is one who is obliged to constantly add more strokes to a perennial dissolving painting that is his image in front of the others.

But if we are all doomed to perish, how can we expect that our writings are not?

Somehow, this naïve insistence is all we need, all we need to believe.

孤独的片刻

2008-04-30T15:35:00.001-05:00

找到几首03年译的勒维尔迪，算是交差，那时初来乍到，时间又多，做了一些事，后来居然自己都不记得了。

孤独的片刻-116

西方没有一丝风

词语走的更远

直到那些死去的人中间

在远方

就在这个时刻

所有那些哭泣的人

他们的话语像风吹过

注视前方

却一无所见

空气也变黑了

再没有什么可以照亮天空

除了这样的火焰

和你的目光

灯火和晚会

人们迟迟不肯熄灭

气息的阴影-260

也许

在前进时

你会在门背后

发现夜晚

我停留虽不愿意知道

她的名字

这光已经足够

杀死黑夜

和业已死亡的阴影

而在深处

太阳照亮他的地方

必须是黑的

人们可以再度隐藏绝望

并笑着

但当灯光燃起

如果你出现在一堵白墙之前

就可以看到一切

听到一切

没有时间去理解

这叹息从何而来

那些人为何等待良久才能入睡

未名的眼睛-261

等待着

在我所坐的椅子上

夜晚

天空降临

朝向我所思考的一切

我愿意回到最初的时日

回到童年

再回来

从另一边死去

为了再度离开

雨滴落

窗玻璃哭泣

人们孤独

时间死去

闯入的风说明了一切

四目相对

却互不相识

这是我们从未看见过的某人

一生之中也只有一次

死亡的固定时间-262

太阳逃走

蛛网破碎

风从翅膀下穿过

只为传达

气流中的低语

树林如此美好是为了看

道路为了听

蜘蛛在天上走

白昼摔落在地平线上

而夜晚就是人们看到所有死去的星宿

被蛛网捕获

星星

和催之入眠的月亮

那些等待的人-28

秋天又要到来

我们去歌唱

可除了我

再没有别人

我是最后一个

也许这并不如此悲伤

像他们所说的

这个苍白的季节

有点忧郁

为了让你更加清醒

散发的烟味儿的质询

是你还是他

将会在第一场霜冻之前

完成颂歌

而我等待

夜里升起的最后一丝光亮

但大地下沉

一切都没有结束

在所有这些时候

是翅膀支撑着我

和你一起我会走到尽头

如果风太大

就重新关上门

回忆-30

我看见了你

我看见了你在墙的深处

我看见了你的影子在墙上留下的洞

沙子再度出现

还有光着的脚

你无休止移动的脚所留下的足迹

我怎么又认出了你

天空如此深远浩大

下面是一块闪着阳光的土地

还有一点空间

和大海

星星从水里出来

一名泳者从下面飞过

一只鸟

从地平线上吹来的风

浪花笑着死去

一切都在继续

人们不知道如何打发这时间

和夜晚

一切都被风掩去

唱另外的歌

以另外一种语调说话

我又认出了那炯炯有神的双眼

和房间里鸣响的挂钟

慢了一个小时

绿色的清晨来到而人们还没有入睡

欢快的溪流清澈

门前一个消失的身影

光中的面孔

在所有这些活着和苏醒的事物中间

在我的耳中

同一个声音，唯一的声音坚持着

变幻的表情-281

四点钟左右我一定会在那儿

一定会有什么人经过

那么我就打开门

门像一只眼睛自己开了

我看着里面

太害怕而不敢进去

也不知道该说什么

向上的梯级

一直延伸到晦暗的平台

那里也许有房间

也许什么也没有

也许是一堵墙

黄昏时我会在那儿

我会等待

等待一辆车的经过

带走我的绝望

然后是下一站

我跟着你我们会走的更远

直到从街对面的房子

人们笑着看我

黑舟-290

在同一艘船上

是眼睛在游水

燃烧的地平线从前面经过

海更高些

鱼

鸟

在天水之间

这两个海交织着

忧愁的前额上

思绪老去

一只空中的手抓住了丝带

发出尖利的哭喊

而遗失的旗帜随风而散

门自动关上

这时节不好

在蹲伏着的桥梁上

暴风雨滑行

舰船的风帆

野兽的翅膀

Mad Detective

2008-04-13T18:26:00.001-05:00

What I intend here, and you, my reader, could not have guessed, is to do a post à la Bordwell, a) about a film I recently watched, and with b) around 2000 words and c) 10+ snapshots.

The motivation behind this is simple: I am starting to realize that there is a limit on what people can read serious material online.

A brief history

Milkyway Image was founded in 1996. In the following years, despite the general collapsing trend of Hong Kong cinema, Johnny To, Patrick Yau and Wai kafai cooperated in a series of films that manage to boast artistic value, or box office success, and sometimes both.

David Bordwell, in his introduction to Milkyway Image, Beyond Imagination, selected ten films that he believes to be the best of the nine years. These films include Too Many Ways to be No.1 (1997), Expect the Unexpected (1998), Dark Flowers (aka The Longest Nite, 1998), A Hero Never Dies (1998), Running Out of Time (aka Hidden War, 1999), The Mission (1999), PTU (2003), Running on Karma (2003), Throw Down (2004), Election (2005).

Now it is year 2008. And we seem to be in a better position to do the job. So to Bordwell’s list I would add The Odd One Dies (1997), Exiled (2006), Mad Detective (2007), to replace the last three.

In many ways, this last film, Mad Detective, can be regarded as summarizing the ten years of achievements of Milkyway. The tragic and yet often ridiculous fate of the individual seems to recall the first four; the narrative tension between police/criminal, Expect, Dark, Running, PTU. The formal arrangement of the final confrontation, Mission, Election, Exiled.

I have no doubt a psychoanalysis reading is highly applicable here. The visible multiple personalities, the ear cut off (Van Gogh?), the shattered mirror, etc., all point to a classical case of schizophrenia. Yet the English title does not do full justice in that the word “shen” in the original title can mean a lot of things. As a noun it can be “god” or “spirit”; as an adjective both “legendary, miraculous” or “boundless” or “out of mind”. In fact, when it refers to madness, it is only a little inhabitualness or weirdness of the behaviour, but never a case for pathology. “Mad Detective”, therefore, vulgarizes the original intention.

Repetition

So far the most interesting review I came across suggests this film to be read as a Nouveau Roman à la Robbe-Grillet. The proof: repetition. The way our detective solves a case is nothing but to reenact the experience. Therefore he needs to put himself into a suitcase, to bury himself alive, to eat the same meal ten times, to perform a robbery without a gun, etc. And to this may I add: everything comes back in full circle (a Robbe-Grillet signature). When the film ends, the same kind of woman ghost Ko has comes onto Ho and dictates his action. It is Ho who has lost his gun and shot inspector Bun, but he is going to fabricate a story and blame it on someone else—exactly the same thing Ko did.

And the author even cites Jean Ricardo, saying, “a novel should not be the narration of an adventure, but the adventure of narration,” which makes me thinking seriously, for a moment, of the possibility of adapting Djinn to the big screen.

In another level of repetition (generally called intertexuality though), the film reenacts a classical moment of the history of cinema, that is, the denouement of Lady from Shanghai. Comparing these two sequences, it is easy to see how Johnny To pay homage to Welles while still manage to provide enough challenge for the task.

ghostly procession:

shattered glasses:

ghosts in the mirror:

overhead shots:

deep space composition:

Narration

What interests us most in this film, however, is the clever way it is narrated. I notice in Bordwell's interview with the editor, Tina Baz, he is informed (again) another golden rule of HK filmmaking:

a key piece of information should be presented three times, preferably in different ways. Once for the smart people, once for the average people, and once for slow Joe in the back row.

This is great, I said to myself, maybe Bordwell can give us another book, called "The way Milkyway tells it", which will be fun to read. I also painfully realize that I am not in the smart category--I didnt realize it the first moment I saw it. This first moment, as Bordwell puts in the footnote, is the scene where Bun chastise the "two girls" in the convenient store. Bordwell claims, "given the way in which that story action is presented, we can’t say that that his powers are established there." What is the way the action is presented, then?

Let me describe. At first, you hear offscreen voice of a girl enticing someone to steal a lipstick.

Then, cut to the source of sound.

Followed by two reversed shots of Bun, who notices what is going on and steps ahead and reprimands them. Then, cut back to the two girls, startled.

The girl in red hair looks around, as if she is not sure if Bun is addressing her. But she starts to step back. In the meanwhile, the other girl in school uniform looks puzzled.

Cut back to Bun, closer. Cut to the red hair girl, this time singled out, therefore making it clear that Bun is addressing her.

Finally, the red hair girl fled. We have an insert from a different angle, as Bun flings something at her.

The school girl calmly put the Dior lipstick back.

In this sequence, there are many clues indicating that Bun is addressing a character that is invisible to the other diegetic characters. Subtle as they may be, a real "smart" spectator can readily pick them up. These clues are:

First, if Bun can hear the voice, which explicitly solicits shoplifting, why characters closer to these two girls cannot hear it? The shop owner, for example, is just right to the frame and closer than Bun in his initial position. The other customer who is getting stuff from the fridge is even closer. She is capable of hearing whispers between these two girls, if that is a possible explanation, although the volume of the voice is not exactly that low.

Second, the look on the school girl's face is most revealing. She is slightly puzzled, but remains calm, as if Bun is addressing thin air. She did not react to Bun's rant, nor did she react to the red hair girl's reaction of it. She did not follow her out of the store, as she probably would if they are friends. She did not even LOOK at the direction she fled. Come to think of it, I can almost be sure than To's instruction onsite would be something like "just imagine you are there alone."

This, of course, is subtle. But just imagine there are really two girls. Her performance as such would be unnatural. Again, what is natural or unnatural is in the eye of the beholder and can be ambiguous at a given moment. A spectator tends to suspend judgement, until further evidence is revealed. In a film such as Marienbad, this wish is never granted. In Mad Detective, it is, and in a clear way, so that even slow Joe in the back row can get it, as Bordwell demonstrates in his post. What I would not agree with Bordwell, though, is what is "established" in this scene. In my mind either Bun's power is in fact established, albeit on the margin of our consciousness, or I would say nothing is ever established in film, since what we take as established might prove to be mistaken, as in The Six Sense, Abre los ojos, or The Other.

Another lesson we learn from this scene is the extent to which we trust the film to explain itself. First, we are all casual viewers. We do not stare at everything on the screen. Even if we wanted to, we cannot figure everything out. All we can get are the salient features. The case for voice, as I note above, will slip for most people. And even if we get suspicious at a certain point, we do not distrust the film (the film can certainly be nonsensical), but rather our own comprehension of it. This trust, nevertheless, has a limit. The amount of trust we can give a film is determined by how much it appeals to us in ways other than its narrative strategy (I hope I can explain this in detail later).

There is something else that is also intriguing in the narration of Mad Detective. This is the ghost of Bun's former wife. At first, we start by believing it is a case of Ghost (1990). Then there comes a twist. When Ho breaks into Bun's apartment, he is attacked and handcuffed by a woman who claims to be Bun's former wife.

Now, the way she speaks and moves is far from the sentimentality we experienced in previous scenes. If she was a gentle and lovable ghost before, now she turns into a harsh and self-righteous person. This sudden change of personality prompts a reevaluation of our comprehension. So she is not dead. But there is more. A new ambiguity arises, that is, is Bun imagining her lovable wife (he is mad), or is he really seeing her (he is empowered), as is the case with other persons? Obviously, the film is all about this, the double and mutually compatible meaning of "shen". Interestingly, in the next scene, Ho shouts, "you don't have a wife at all. The wife you see doesn't exist at all." These two lines end up in the subtitle as "Your wife is no longer with you. You are seeing an illusion."

This subtle difference may pass unnoticed elsewhere. But here unfortunately it is all that matters. What really exists? We can at least answer this question from three different perspective. From the character's mind, from the diegesis, and from the spectator's view. Every image exists. Therefore what is depicted in that image exists since it has to exist first and then be filmed (let us forget about CGI and animation for now). When cinema presents us with an omnipresent view, more things exist for us than for any character in the film. What is intriguing, however, is to get into the diegesis. In other words, we are not to see what we see, but to see what they see.

In the scene that follows, Bun confronts the "ugly side" of his wife. Here, it becomes clear that what really is diegetically present is the ugly woman. Notice how Lin xilei first enters the car and sits in the front seat. And then the ugly woman enters and sits on the same seat. Lin appears in the next shot, shoved to the back seat. Here we follow an implicit rule set by the film so far: a "personality" figure needs to be justified by coalescing onto its real world presence.

But Bun refuses to understand the difference. Pretending not to recognize the ugly woman, he asks, "who is she?", to Lin on the back seat. Of course he knows her, but he does not recognize her. Eventually we are led to the narrative main line and its climax. The wife episode just phases out, without being completely resolved.

So far I have exceeded the 2000 words limit set by myself. I do have more to say, but to keep a casual look of the post, I have to stop here.

Lulu

2008-03-11T12:50:00.001-05:00

Last night I have been reading about Alban Berg’s Lulu, its posthumous status and TWP (The Widow Problem), one that is not uncommon at all.

The moral of the story is that the reader is able to question the extent to which the interpreter has been following the authorial intention. This is in fact a phenomenon characteristic of music performance. Musical performance is almost always mediated: the reader interacts with the author through interpretive agents, even in the case when the composer deliver the performance himself. We normally don’t study the score and we wait for someone to study it and explain it to us. To use an analogy not too irrelevant, we music illiterates cannot read, therefore have to rely on the church to explain what the Scripture means. In literature and cinema, we do have exegesis. However, you can choose to agree or disagree with what the criticism is saying, and you can always go back to the work, alone. In this sense, we say that a literary or cinematic text is easily unmediated, whereas a music text isn’t.

For someone who has studied the score and someone who merely attends the performance, it is very different aspects of the work they pay attention to. According to Douglas Jarman, most of the contemporary production of Lulu fail to respect Berg’s stage direction and his precise coordination of musical expression to stage characters. The Boulez/Chereau production in Paris, the post-war premiere of Lulu (1979) in its three act entirety, sets up a bad example for those to follow. To respond to this line of criticism, Boulez rants,

What a load of codswallop it all is, in fact—this obsession with the time and place of the action and this minute following of stage directions. What contempt it shows for the real meaning of the work. What a pharisaical literal-mindedness! What a failure to understand the autonomous existence of the work itself in relation to its creator…

To this Jarman remains absolutely unconvinced. I am sure Jarman would not like Eco’s Opera Aperta, pun intended.

One of the critics, referring to the fact that Chereau brings extra characters to the stage who have no musical cues in the original work, claims, “they are not merely superfluous, they negate.”

But to negate is not a big deal in modern art, as if the critic hadn’t been to an exhibition of Duchamp? If we take that Berg’s authorial intention is to achieve an unprecedented correspondence between musical expression and stage action, between the aural and the visual, a connection that is historically loose in the art of opera, for good reason, does a contemporary production has the right to disrespect it? In other words, can a meaning (such as negation) be injected into a work that is not meant to negate? Duchamp seems to say yes. And there are a lot others.

Again we are facing the same issue of interpretive framework. An artwork cannot be understood without its proper interpretive framework set up in advance. Yet when we go to art, we do not necessarily always have the right one. In such occasions, we experience a clash of our interpretive habits and the interpretive framework obstinately demanded by the work. This clash can lead to two directions: either we are willing to adjust and learn this new framework, through various cues (reading what the artist has to say, or critics), so as to eliminate our confusion; or we can just dismiss the work as not making sense. It is not a matter of intelligence but of commitment. The latter happens often to dilettante whose motivation in front of art is suspicious in the first place. In music the case is even more complicated, as shown in the reception of Lulu. The critics are actually using the authorial intention to disqualify the production’s interpretation. We have to say that unfortunately (or fortunately) in the realm of music things are kept in the way they were five hundreds years ago, except musicians become international stars.

(Making) Senses of Walden

2008-02-19T22:27:00.001-06:00

A recent reading of Stanley Cavell’s The Senses of Walden brings back to me all those delightful yet painstaking days of translating Thoreau. But after the initial nostalgia phases out, what is left in front of me is nothing but an interpretation that I find unfortunately incompatible with mine. As a translator, I have to go through the words one by one and make perfect sense of them, and often in a deeper level than they literally say. And these small pieces of making senses ultimately add up to what Schleiermacher calls the “inner trajectory”. Or should I say, using Gadamer’s terminology, the process of translating a text fuses my own horizon[1] with the horizon of Walden. It is on this base I claim, for I do, and sincerely, that I understand this book.

But I say incompatible, does it mean that I am having an interpretation of Walden as well? Indeed, even if I am proud to believe that I have attained this “inner trajectory”, even if I assume it is the authorial intention faithfully recovered from the text, why should it be something more coherent than what Cavell can make out of the same text, why should it be privileged?

Reading can be two different things. It can be comprehension-oriented, trying hard to find out what the author means—what he is trying to say even if he does not say— because we, as Cavell famously remarks, do not often mean what we say, and Thoreau is a prime example of this. Or it can be performance-oriented: what do I think, what can I say of this text? Although both will inevitably make sense of the text to various extent, there is a huge difference in the degrees by which the reader treat the authorial intention. I am not talking about intentionality as the final evaluation of interpretations, nor am I talking about how much intentionality is reproduced, or respected in a particular interpretation, but rather, how do we orient ourselves in the act of reading, while meaning is still in the process of being generated and thus, indeterminate.

For someone like Cavell, this intentionality is still acknowledged[2]. Yet obviously (for anyone familiar with Cavell), it is not this very intentionality he is transcribing or even addressing. It serves as a mere departure point, from which Cavell will produce his own writing. The task of those seminars from which the book originates is not to tell people what Thoreau means, for they can just read the book and find out by themselves, but to tell, what does he (Cavell) make of Walden. It is the “senses of Walden”, not “making senses of Walden”.

Translating is very different. In translating the performative options are limited. And when I perform, I feel guilty unless I am absolutely certain. This, of course, does not apply to all kinds of translations. The difficulty of any particular translation can be simply determined by this: try to feed the text to a machine (a translation software) and see how much you can gather from the result—how readable is the result? For a case like Thoreau, I think it would be less than five percent.

Translating a text such as Walden is totally a sacrifice. Come to think of it, I have problem understanding why I did it. It would be infinitely better if I had done something similar to what Cavell did, even if as a result, I can claim I understand the book better. Interestingly, when Thoreau claims that we should read those “heroic” or ancient books, he does not mean that we should try to understand them—we may not understand the nature of a certain light beam that is shed upon us, but it is still a glory to comprehend the consequences of being illuminated by this beam of light.

These photos were taken in a trip to MT where Concord is found densely populated (cars bustling like ants) and Walden turned into a public bathhouse.

[1] Horizon is defined here as "the totality of all that can be realized or thought about by a person at a given time in history and in a particular culture."

[2] As a strong performative reader, I have to say Cavell was already being generous to Thoreau, for he did ask many times “why does the author say this or that”.

从辣手神探到赶尽杀绝—漫谈动作片

2008-02-15T12:46:00.001-06:00

很多人都可以是动作片专家，我不是。我的专门领域是枯燥片—法国电影。

但是生在中国，长在中国，和很多人一样，我也经受了八十年代动作片泛滥的洗礼。这个动作片，专门指的是港片。

很多年前，有一种叫做录像厅的地方，在这种地方，几张长凳，一台电视，地上的瓜子壳，墙角的扫把，汗水和烟臭因为夜晚的作用凝聚，在空气中弥漫着，经久不散。就是在这样一个环境里，我看了很多香港电影。Bordwell在他香港电影的专著中提到，不不不，我不是香港电影专家，我只不过看了xxx部港片。这个xxx，是个很精确的数字，好像是介于三百和四百之间。看了这段话，我有点浑身发痒，好像又闻到那个味道—我究竟看了多少港片？

显然，我和他的区别，首先就是，港片对我而言，不是一个数字，一个学术的目标，不是一个可以审视的对象，而首先是一个味道，一种记忆，一道青春逝去留下的残酷空白。

我要从吴宇森说起，最后还要回到吴宇森，因为我觉得在香港电影人中，他最有力地表达了八十年代。英雄本色，喋血双雄，纵横四海，这些，给我留下无比深刻的印象。为什么？相对于胡金铨的纯动作美，有些人说这是暴力美学，或者说美化暴力，我觉得不是。吴宇森影片中血袋满天飞，不是宣扬暴力，而是宣扬一种快意恩仇的精神，一种世俗化的，弥漫着强烈香港地域特色的个人主义。

开枪杀人很简单，但英雄人物之所以成为英雄人物，是因为他们开枪有一个很个人的原因。枪，是个人力量对抗生命无边黑暗的体现。然而，在吴宇森后期的影片中，因为模式化的缘故，这个宗旨被不断减弱了。在吴宇森离开香港前最后的一部作品《辣手神探》中，开场大战茶楼，依然是典型的喋血双雄模式，最后大战明心医院一场，显露出吴宇森走向好莱坞式大场面的的必然，在这里个人力量被接连不断的爆炸声淹没，开枪，终于成为一个游戏。

由于开枪杀人只不过是一个游戏，所以理所当然地，可以被改编为一个游戏。去年冬天上市的第一人称射击游戏Stranglehold中，周润发作为主角的形象被保留为游戏的化身。而子弹时间（在F.E.A.R.中已经出现），也就成为这个游戏最大的特色。这个游戏的故事脱胎於《辣手神探》。也同样是受这部电影的启发，有了今天的《赶尽杀绝》[1]，一个赤裸裸开枪杀人的游戏。

这两部电影的共同点，首先是一个形象：一个男人，一手执枪，一手抱着一个婴儿，在走廊上左冲右突，杀出一条血路。他们的共同点，还在于对枪这样一个金属物件的极度执迷。这个执迷，用精神分析的话说，就是fetish，恋物癖。这个癖好所针对的，不仅是枪作为个人存在的最终证明，同时也是对shoot，射，这个动作的绝对认同。婴儿，对于一个女人，是生产的结果，是爱的对象。而对于一个男人，是“射”的结果，是占有的证据（见下两图，双腿之间的枪）。

然而一个杀手，尽管射的本领超群，但却没有办法实现任何占有，因为他射的行为本身就是一个金钱交易的结果，如同妓女之被射。正因为如此，在文学和电影中，杀手和妓女总是成对出现，他们确系一个镜子的两面，都是从事“世界上最古老的职业” （古龙）。《赶尽杀绝》里的女主角，如同我们可以预期的那样，是一个妓女。作为一名“职业女性”，她接受她的命运—否认自己爱的能力、生产的本质，而接受任何男人射的需求—但当她成为一个母亲的梦想（移情化为一排排彩色的瓶子）被上门追杀的黑社会老大无情粉碎时，她也忍无可忍地反抗了。

忍无可忍，其实也就是路见不平的另一种表达方式，或者其女性对应物。一个妓女，或者一个杀手，他们作为人的本质被自己的职业异化了，因此，唯一剩下确认这个本质的机会，就是对枪的使用。古往今来，开枪杀人的影片也不知道有多少，但《赶尽杀绝》基本上是空前（不知道是不是能绝后）—这部电影中的每一个镜头都有枪，每一秒钟都在开枪！显然，如果说电影影响了游戏，现在，则是游戏影响了电影：在每一个第一人称射击游戏中，枪确实始终出现在屏幕上，而所谓游戏，自始至终都是一个开枪的过程。

有意思的是，在《辣手神探》中，明心医院表面上是妇产科，地下室里却是军火库。军火和婴儿、毁灭和生产、男性和女性、表和里、公开和隐藏、形成一系列对照。男警察下到地下室，从事摧毁的工作，女警察就要留在上面，留在产房里，延续生命。最后周润发扮演的脚色抱着最后一个婴儿从天而降，可以说象征着这一系列对立的最终调和。

在《赶尽杀绝》中，婴儿和男人的关系则是一种绝对的偶然。影片一开场，昏黄的灯光下，Clive Owen坐在街边，吃着他的胡萝卜，一副完全被人类社会遗弃的模样。一个孕妇跌跌撞撞地走过，呻吟着；特写，Owen的脸，“怎么回事？”；特写，孕妇的肚子；紧接着，是一个男人飞车而来，一副猎物在手，气焰嚣张的样子，叫嚷着“You are dead, bitch”，打开车门，一堆垃圾倾泻而出，潜台词，“what a piece of junk”；最后，也是最重要的，他挑衅般的掏出了象征他霸道的权杖—枪。

也许《赶尽杀绝》和《辣手神探》最大的不同，在于这是一部后《300[2]》电影—在高饱和度图像大行其道的今天，《辣手神探》这种电影看起来就像黑白一样—你愿意去玩一个黑白游戏么？

当然，一部电影可以贯彻FPS的哲学（Gus Van Sant, 大象），也可以部分贯彻，如同这两部。电影毕竟是一个被动的观看过程，不同于游戏，需要实实在在的参与。在FPS里，你不开枪，游戏就没有任何进展。所以，FPS是绝对基于动作的。但是为什么被动的观看会比主动参与有更强的代入感呢？或者说，为什么坐在副驾驶位置上的人反而比开车的人更能领略到动作之美呢？这就要说道一部好的动作电影的三大要素。

首先，动作的可读性。也就是说，动作不能是只能意会，不可言传，而一定要清清楚楚地呈现在银幕上。这方面有一个现成的反例：The Bourne Ultimatum。这个片子里动作很多，但几乎没有一个是清楚地呈现了的。你所能看到的，是身体的各个部分从各个方向穿过银幕，既不知道这是谁的身体，也不知道他们从哪儿来、到哪儿去。香港动作片的不同，就在于他从来都让你把动作看得一清二楚。并为了达到这个目的，演化出一个特殊的“静止—激发—静止”的结构。这个结构，或者韵律，据说是从京剧中来的。早期动作片的演员大多是京剧科班出身，因此这个韵律对他们绝不是陌生的。而慢动作的使用，特别是在吴宇森，其实也是促进了动作的可读性。

其次，动作的表现力。理想情况下，动作不仅是动作，还要能揭示出谁，哪里，什么时候，为什么。成龙的动作设计部分贯彻这个原则，就是和场景的紧密配合。但是成龙的问题，则是动作的情绪含量无比单薄。

最后，一部电影呈现动作的方式，不是让你自始至终坐在副驾驶席上，而是从成千个不同角度来呈现这个动作。这个方式，就是Bordwell所说的“constructive editing”。比如说，两个人在一个房间里打斗，你可以把摄影机挂在天花板上，一个镜头到底，也可以分而治之。长镜头也有人用，比如黑泽明的用心棒。但香港电影主要是用分镜头。不仅每个分镜都有自己独特的位置，角度，还要做到，每个分镜都恰好捕捉到要反映的东西，一点也不多，一点也不少。这个说起来容易，做起来难，要对动作的本质有深入理解，对动作的分解有丰富的经验。好莱坞财大气粗，但这个本事，始终学不到，因此一到动作片，还要找袁和平。

这三个要素，其实也不光是适用于动作片，而是可上升为“电影运动感”（cinematic kinesis）的一般要领。Gerald Mast在film/cinema/movie中谈到：

Although the kinetic arts begin by stimulating the senses, they do not necessarily remain an exclusively sensual experience—like the breath-taking ride on a roller coaster or the gentle relaxation of a massage. The massage of a kinetic art can go from the senses, through the nerves, to the brain, which can translate it into another, more abstract kind of human experience. (53)

之所以要引入电影中的“运动感”，原因有三：

首先，运动感有别于暴力。很多电影混用两者，但这不意味着他们是一回事。暴力是个心理问题，而纯动作是个生理问题。前者有造成道德困扰的潜在可能，而后者是中性的。没有好的动作，坏的动作（从道德的层面），只有描绘的好，或者不好的动作。不过很多对暴力着迷的导演也善于描绘动作（Scorsese 从 Raging Bull到 Gangs of NY，Tarantino更不用说），在加拿大，我们有Cronenberg。去年上了他的A History of Violence，颇有刮目相看之感。今年的Eastern Promises沿袭同一路线，但是浴室里的那场搏斗并没有超越他去年的水准。

其次，运动感表现在一些和暴力完全无关的影片中，如Leni Rienfenstahl的Olympia。这部电影完全是关于如何视觉化动作，看着那些在空中飞行的身体，不能不为赞叹其可读性和表现力。在最为人称道的那个马拉松场景，摄影机角度，主体距离和取景成功地传达了运动员的情绪状态，疲劳、晕眩感、意志的强力行使。

最后，所谓的运动感，乃是和静止感（stasis）相对。后者在电影中也是一个基本的美学原则，这里不尽详述。

为什么动作片长盛不衰，特别是在年轻人中间？回想七十年代，电视台大播武侠连续剧的时候，不是经常能看到小孩（男）在街上比划着飞腿，出拳，嘴里还呵呵有声？就连Bordwell这种大男孩也承认他“leave these films not only tired but jubilant.” 因为这些电影给他提供“the illusion of mastering the action…the kinetics have stamped the action’s rhythm onto our senses…the very cogency of the presentation has invited us to feel something of what supreme physical control might be like.” (244)

为何描绘运动的图像能够刺激感官，并进而由大脑转译为某种更为抽象的体验？我的理论是，观看这种行为，从来不不仅仅是单纯的、被动的观看，而是涉及到一系列内在的、不可见的生理活动：荷尔蒙的分泌，血液的流通、肌肉的收缩与扩张。人类的情感，不仅一定伴随这些生理活动，并基本上是由这些生理活动所定义[3]。所以说，如果一部电影不能让我们感受到喜怒哀乐，或者兴奋，或者启示，那么我们没有办法认同这部电影，因为我们对这部电影的体验为零。从这个角度看，看电影，和吃饭、睡觉一样，也属于一种生理活动，并对大多数人而言，纯粹就是一种生理活动[4]。进一步而言，能够感受到更深层次的讯息（比如你看2001觉得津津有味）并不意味着你已经不能体验最基本的、最原始的感官刺激，甚至不能保证他们已被有效地纳入理性思考的轨道。前一段时间，Rambo重出江湖，我也去捧了场。这个片子血腥暴力的程度是典型的21世纪手法：肆无忌惮。中间有这么一段，几个缅甸军人残忍之极地虐待百姓，雇佣军一忍再忍，忽然一支箭闪电般飞来，把坏蛋钉在地上，兰博出手了，刷刷几下弓弦响过，眨眼的功夫，坏蛋纷纷载倒，最后一个直接掉在水稻田里，踏到地雷，一声轰然巨响。巨响尚在我耳畔缭绕之际，周围便响起一阵急骤的掌声，原来此刻观众们已经按捺不住，大声叫好。诧异之际，我忽然领悟到，一部电影能够有这样的时刻，绝对应该是好的，为什么一定要说大道理，还要说的深刻？这个从忍耐到释放的过程是如此强烈，如此普遍适用，如此地电影化！

[1]这部电影不声不响地过去了，没有引起什么喧嚣，就好比早些时候，同是Clive Owen担纲的Children of Men。但是在我看来，这部电影的重要性迟早要显露出来，和300一起，指向一个新的方向—作为游戏的电影。

[2] 300 这部电影确实让我想到一个 PS2游戏, God of War。这个游戏里的过场动画基本是跟300一个线路。其实，电影和游戏的消费群，真是有好大的重合。在Famous Player每月的刊物上，常常有最新游戏的广告，有意思的是，我就是在这上面第一次看到God of War续集的广告。

[3]不仅如此，特定的情绪，往往集中于特定的器官，中华医学讲“喜伤心、怒伤肝”，应该是有他的依据。

[4] 北美观众看电影时一定要吃（爆米花），喝（可乐），提示了这个行为的本质。

码字进行时

2008-02-07T13:11:00.001-06:00

以下内容来自一本叫做"独自成蛹"的书。作者原来是个诗人，我就不点名了，也不难查到。朦胧诗大行其道的时候，他也风光过几天，最后因为我们可以想到的种种原因（最主要的一条，不懂得及时闪人），被“沉淀”到生活的底层去了。

底层是什么意思，不是所有人都都有幸知道的，所以，没事的时候，看看也好。

这本书出版于几年前，但显然，其写作过程跨越相当长的历史时段。这里面说的大部分事情，可以说，虽然是关于当下的生活，但却被笼罩在过去的绝对阴影里。

这无可非议。事实上，我之所以认同这些文字，也正是因为处境的相似（但我还没风光过，一直都在底层）。

不论你怎么看他的遭遇，这些文字的出现，充分体现了写作的力量和局限，写作可以做什么，又不可以做什么。

现在很多人码字，越是成功的，越是要出书，暂时还没出的，都开了博客。

博客是个好东西，让大家都知道你昨天吃了什么，去了哪儿，见了谁。这些事很重要，没有他们，生活就不叫生活了。

但确实还有另一种生活，即所谓的精神生活。

从物质到精神，有一点天翻地覆的变化。虽然还能看出一点原来的样子，但基本上，他们绝不是一回事。

普鲁斯特，卡夫卡是谁，有很多人感兴趣，但恐怕你感兴趣的，不是他们昨天吃了什么，去了哪儿，见了谁。

这个作者，受才能所限，也许达不到那样的高度，但其写作的路线，是没有错的。

原文很长，我不准备把一整本书都贴在这儿，这里算是吊吊胃口吧。

命运

我要是再后退几步，踢那只足球就对了。当我这个过路人，把滚到自己脚下的球准备踢回球场时，因为没有后退几步，而把球踢到冬青树丛中去了。当时，我只好歉意地笑笑。

后退几步，然后再抬腿——这令人目眩的动作，像炽热的阳光照耀着我。我特意换了一双鞋，换了一双醒目的袜子。此时，那堪称人生搏斗的球赛已经消失了。球场上空空荡荡，我第二次路过球场又有何用。

我想再现那精彩的踢球动作时，脚下的球都滚到哪里去了。

界线

索尔仁尼琴谈到一个“界线”问题。集中营里的人在界线里面走动，哨兵有时从岗楼上扔出一支香烟，却故意扔到界线之外。如果某个界线内的人伸手去拿这支香烟，哨兵就会开枪。

界线是不是由铁丝网构成，或者是一条白色石灰线，这并不重要。界线有时在哨兵的头脑里。厚实的皮靴可以踏去地上的任何界线，铁丝网也可以搬走。但我并不认为，界线真的被踏灭了。界线现在换了一个地方，重新把人圈起来。

仅凭肉眼我们对此信以为真，我们看到了活着与死亡的界线，看到喧闹与寂静的界线。是的，被关押的人感受到铁丝网内外的区别，我还想到，有两个人在大风雪弥漫的时候，把除名通知书送到我手里。他们想把我从混饭吃的地方赶出去，我象一只羊那样被无限驱赶到栅栏的边缘。这个栅栏我永远无法接近，头永远没有办法偎依在上面。仅凭肉眼，他们认为在此处我已不存在了，但是，他们不知道，我存在与否，不是他们的创造。我爬上围墙后在想，他们使我颖悟到自己内心的精神疆域是那么开阔，就算他们能把我从围墙上揪下来，然后狠狠地抛出很远，但我落下来的地方，正是我的热爱所在。由此，我变得无边无际。

最幸福莫过于：你深夜下班回家，校园铁门已关了。你好不容易爬上了围墙，但你并不急着跳下去。我要在围墙的玻璃尖刺上蹲一会，休息一下，想一想问题。

地洞气息

我要在完全无人知晓的情况下，为自己挖个地洞。我被“深深掩埋”这个词所蕴藏的内容吸引。

挖地洞掘出来的泥土如何处理，如何不至于在黑夜里传出掘土的响声，地洞的出口处蒙着一块可以推开的草皮，草皮上最好做一个沉重的脚印。挖地洞的时间要细细盘算，在别人以为我睡着时，我却是醒着的，并且在干活。在外人面前，我还不能暴露出一丝一毫的疲倦之感。身上不得有任何泥土。因为长时间握锹把，手上如何才能不长硬茧,这也得考虑。

最关键的是,任何时候都不能在面部表情上显示出即将大功告成的喜悦,要时刻装成流行的压抑的样子。让自己不至于喜形于色,还比较容易做到,这到底还是浅层次的伪装。一个人的心灵要长久地沉浸在做一桩事的想法中，那么，我敷衍外界公事时，思想肯定要走神。所以，为防止万一走神,我还得找一个冠冕堂皇的理由为“走神”做注脚。

我深知，我现在是一个在偷偷摸摸挖地洞的人，这是我的精神氛围。我挖地洞，不能寄希望于他们碰巧都没有发现。而是要坚决认为，他们现在已经怀疑上我了。只是我看上去与常人一模一样，所以，他们暂时还不清楚，我究竟在干些什么。

现在，我在不断地挖掘中，渐渐体会到我为什么会被这一工程深深吸引的根本原因了。我不会因为我将最后从挖好的洞口处，推开草皮探出脑袋而激动。深深地吸引我的道理是：我们在“公开”挖地洞时，根本不会考虑的细节，都像美丽的倩影般一一呈现现在我面前。

每一个倩影，都表达一个应该注意的事项，都警告我必须虔诚对待它。每一个丢弃之物，在丢弃之前，我都要格外地看上一眼。例如说，使用过的手套不能乱扔，因为不能乱扔，我才注意到手套的背面也有窟窿。盖住洞口的那块草皮上必须有坚实的脚印，这只是为了有力说明，脚印下面并不存在什么空洞。人的双脚从来就是在坚硬之处。平时视而不见的道理，只有此时，我才有更为深切的体会。这样，可以概括地说，隐瞒呈现真实。据研究侦寻的人说，只要干见不得人的事，绝对不可能不留下痕迹。我挖地洞，虽说外人看不见任何动作的迹象，但肯定存在一个挖地洞人的气息。我知道我有气息。环境中的每一块石头，为了能够巧妙地绕过它，我还要阅读石头的规律。人的行为的一切创造，大概都与偷偷摸摸的行为有关联。我挖洞捎带出来的土，命运决定了不能随意抛在外面。所以，我必须挖空心思创造出很自然的样子。我必须模拟自然，我必须细心雕凿出那个非人工的脚印，以示脚印的天然和质朴。在这个意义上，我知道我有气息。我在迫近真实。

信仰

从房檐下穿过，冲进这扇门，我疾走冲刺，我想躲过那一串雨滴，但就像我在迎接这串雨水那样。我站到房檐下的瞬间，那一串雨水正好滴进我的脖子。竭尽全力地躲避就像竭尽全力地迎接。

维特根斯坦说：逗留在宗教领域。

轻盈

一个农民进城，不论走到哪里，总要背些什么。因为他不能让肩膀闲着，肩膀从来就是为了放置东西用的。假如我认为，他在遭受沉重的压迫，大概是我的错觉。

生活对于一个囚犯来说，也是轻盈的，假如能把脑袋凑到铁栅栏前吹吹夜间的风。

我对于自己生活的前景，将可能出现什么事情，是心中完全无数的。我牙痛的时候，就不抽烟，这时我联想不出烟的美味。后来我牙不痛了，我就继续抽下去。我在疼痛的时候所产生的“永远不抽烟”的世界观，假如非要影响到我疼痛消失之后，恐怕也是一种强迫。我，只知道我现在要做些什么。现在我在热爱着，我感觉着生活的清新，我的感受与回忆或是展望一点关系也没有。

逃避，使你的心灵觉得轻盈起来，这是需要头脑的。我认为，我害怕割麦子，我跑到树荫下，也就足以完成我人生的目的了。

感到饥饿

我生活在一个应该赶快去寻找食物的环境中。根据形而上学的定义，我房间的桌子，窗帘上的明亮，或是暗淡，沙发的柔软，都是为了我寻找食物特意安排的。但是实际上，环境是非逻辑的，我被迫让自己主动起来。我现在主要是感到饥饿，我要从沙发上起来，我要绕过桌子，放下香烟，我要寻找打开厨房的钥匙。这个时候，我是环境的主宰，我，简单讲，必须克服障碍。当我从沙发上坐起来时，我觉得沙发很柔软，于是我想多坐一会。我的这只脚这样放，很舒服，比我站起来，要用骨头支撑住自己的程序简单多了。于是，我服从了沙发对我的安排，或者说，服从了沙发对我的诱惑。

这充分说明，我所处的环境不是一个决定论的命题。

我把“现在时”的感觉放到了首要位置。我实际上终于反抗了一个由饥饿感所形成的去寻找食物的动机。

在我的行动游离中，无数触动你感官的硬的物体、或软的物体接踵而至。这个时候，那怕是柔软的沙发，也包含着双重含义。首先，它给我的感觉是柔软的。另外，我假如坚定地站起来，我几乎忘却了沙发还存在着柔软这个无意义的细节。沙发，从理论上讲，它应该是坚硬的，由此唤起我内心中一跃而起的坚强意志。在我寻找食物的过程中，我被周围的无数物件所包围，被光和影，被噪声和宁静所干扰。对于一个形而上学的饥饿者来说，环境的细节是不存在的，是的，有的时候，这个头脑怎么也回忆不起来，他是如何从沙发上起来，胜利地过渡到厨房去的。他，“整个头颅都伸在碗柜的黑暗里”。不，我恰恰不是这样的人。

恢复原形

我想恢复一种模样，恢复原形，象弹簧想恢复松弛前的模样，这全是梦想，我的梦想。我，被拉长之后，勉强扭动几下，放松，对我来说，已经没有什么用了。我已经不需要放松，什么叫做“放松”呢?

一个人晓得自己的变形多么不容易；晓得自己在世界的监控下生活多么不容易。所有自由的文学都面临相同的问题，任何自由的意识都得变形。一个人在故事开始时的想法，与故事结束时的想法必将不一样。

隐语

我的妻子是我生活的牧师，她在产后的床上说：“我要喝一碗鱼汤”。这似乎是发自远方的声音。我被唤醒了，受这句话的引导，我知道了菜场的位置，知道了判断鱼是否新鲜要看鱼鳃。在这个妻子要喝鱼汤的黄昏，在这个世界上，所有的鱼都不知去向。

如果你现在的菜篮子只有几根葱，你却离开了菜场，那么，我会猜测，一定有一条鱼在家中砧板上等着你。几根葱竟然也能推动我沉重的精神活动。

我家里没有鱼，但我也买几根葱放在空荡的菜篮子里，让别人去想象。

现在我终于坐在小板凳上开始抽一支烟，为了配合休息，我还一面摆弄着火钳。妻子在里屋听到响声问：“你在干什么？”我说：“我在抽烟。”“盆里的衣服洗完了吗?”我又回答：“洗完了。”

我要抽一支烟，妻子每逢看见我坐下来，就总认为我把家务事已经全部忙完了。我抽烟，成了一个象征符号，成为可以理解的一天劳顿结束后的隐语，成为深不可测深渊的最坚实的底层，就象浪花撞到礁石上，它的喧响也只是分明在说，过一会我要抽一支香烟。这就是说，我已经被读懂，被默认。我抽烟，妻子深知这隐语的含义，我结束了劳顿。但今天的情况却是这样：我抽烟，那盆衣服根本还没有洗。我并不处在境界之中。

优雅

我认为，那怕最质朴的人，也有着他们的优雅生活。收割时弯腰与伸展的自如，不紧不慢地挖土，把钉子巧妙钉到窗户的横木上，粗糙的手在上面抚摸。是的，人生，只要这个人的动作娴熟，心理娴熟，他自然不会认为人生就是受难。因为，对娴熟的人来说，一切都没有阻塞，这是一个流畅的人生。或者说，它散发着浓郁的生活气息。

那怕就是在地狱中，黑暗中，只要生活呈现出娴熟、流畅，我们仍然觉得他过着愉快的生活。一个人在黑暗中摸索，只要他的摸索准确，他就无所谓黑暗与否。流畅的生活，使他充满着生活气息，也可以认为，这就是生命的活力。但是，这里面我看不到人的灵魂。

优雅，这里还涉及到一种自生自灭的人生态度。人对他所面临的生命熄灭，已经完全想通了。优雅里暗示着安详的结论。任何流畅的心理活动，都无法与实际深入生活中，因做某一件事情流畅而带来的愉快相比。包括托尔斯泰在内，他也认为，缝皮鞋是件快乐的事，因为他进入一针一线的真实生活中去了。

一个故事中有他全部的过去

2008-02-06T12:16:00.001-06:00

新年到了，在这个时候，不写一点中文，实在是说不过去。但是问题是，因为长久以来不读中文，对这个语言的感觉已经是口语化了，不至于词不达意，但是写作所需要的词汇，好像已经被装在一个透明塑料袋里，是可望而不可及。

一个将就的办法，就是罗列一些别人的文字，因为这些文字也并不是已经广为流传了，所以我想，堆在这里，还有一点分享的价值。

先看诗歌。以前读了很多当代中文诗歌，可现在能记得的，还有多少？对诗歌的阅读，实际上只应证了一个道理：没有好的诗，坏的诗，只有你能看得懂的诗，和看不懂的诗。况且，读了，又能怎样？哪怕是五雷轰顶，又或是百感交集，都不表示你真正领会了他的精髓。一部电影也是如此，看了，仅仅是看了，始终是被动的。你能对他做些什么，这才是要问自己的问题。

下面两首都是来自多多，阿姆斯特丹的河流，上世纪八十年代。

一个故事中有他全部的过去

当他敞开遍身朝向大海的窗户
向一万把钢刀碰响的声音投去
一个故事中有他全部的过去
所有的舌头都向这个声音投去
并且衔回了碰响这个声音的一万把钢刀
于是，所有的日子都挤进一个日子
于是每一年都多了一天

最后一年就翻倒在大橡树下
他的记忆来自一处牛栏，上空有一柱不散的烟
一些着火的儿童正拉着手围着厨刀歌唱
火焰在未熄灭之前
一直都在树上滚动燃烧
火焰，竟残害了他的肺

而他的眼睛是两座敌对的城市的节日
鼻孔是两只巨大的烟斗仰望夜空
女人，在用爱情向他的脸疯狂射击
使他的嘴唇留有一个空隙：
一刻，一列与死亡对开的列车将要通过
使他伸直的双臂间留有一个早晨
正把太阳的头按下去
一管无声手枪宣布了这个早晨的来临
一个比空盆子扣在地上还要冷淡的早晨
门板上
一个故事中有他全部的过去
死亡，已成为一次多余的心跳

当星星向寻找毒蛇毒液的大地飞速降临
时间也在钟表的滴嗒声外腐烂
耗子在铜棺的(锈)斑上换牙
菌类在腐败的地衣上跺着脚
蟋蟀的儿子在他身上长久地做针钱
还有邪恶，在一面鼓上撕扯他的脸
他的体内已全部都是死亡的荣耀
全部都是，一个故事中有他全部的过去

一个故事中有他全部的过去
第一次太阳在很近的地方阅读他的双眼
更近的太阳坐到他膝上
一个瘦长的男子正坐在截下的树墩上休息
太阳正在他的指间冒烟
每夜我都手拿望远镜向那里瞄准
直至太阳熄灭的一刻
一个树墩在他坐过的地方休息

比五月的白菜畦还要寂静
他赶的马在清晨走过
死亡，已碎成一堆纯粹的玻璃
太阳已变成一个滚动在送葬人回家路上的雷
而孩子细嫩的脚丫正走上常绿的橄榄枝
而我的头肿大着，像千万只马蹄在击鼓：
与粗大的弯刀相比，死亡只是一粒沙子
所以一个故事中有他全部的过去
于是，一千年也扭过脸来——看

1983

居民

他们在天空深处喝啤酒时，我们才接吻
他们歌唱时，我们熄灯
我们入睡时，他们用镀银的脚指甲
走进我们的梦，我们等待梦醒时
他们早已组成了河流
在没有时间的睡眠里
他们刮脸，我们就听到提琴声
他们划桨，地球就停转
他们不划，他们不划
我们就没有醒来的可能
在没有睡眠的时间里
他们向我们招手，我们向孩子招手
孩子们向孩子们招手时
星星们从一所遥远的旅馆中醒来了
一切会痛苦的都醒来了
他们喝过的啤酒，早已流回大海
那些在海面上行走的孩子
全都受到他们的祝福：流动
流动，也只是河流的屈从
用偷偷流出的眼泪，我们组成了河流……

1989

最后再贴一首译诗，对我来说，长久以来，乃是一个译诗的标准（唯一让我有类似感受的，是张佩芳译迪伦马特），原文（希腊）看不懂，中译至少比英译强过甚多。

海伦

第一滴雨淹死了夏季，
那些诞生过星光的言语全被淋湿
所有那些以你为唯一对象的言语。
我们的手还伸向哪里，既然气候已不再
对我们重视？
我们的眼睛还瞧着哪里，既然阴云已遮住
遥远的天际？
既然你已闭眼不看我们的风景
而且－仿佛迷雾已浸透了我们－
我们被遗弃了，完全遗弃了，为你那死寂的
意象所围困？
我们把前额贴在窗玻璃上，提防着新的杀机
只要你还在，死亡就无法把我们打翻在地
只要别处还有风在充分欣赏你
从身边将你掩护，有如我们的希望从远方
当你的风衣
只要别处还存在一片绿原，越过你的笑声
直到太阳身边
悄悄地告诉太阳我们要再次相逢在一起
不，我们面对的不是死亡
而是秋天最小的雨滴
一个模糊的感觉
在相隔更远处我们那继续生长的灵魂中的
湿土气息。
而且如果你的手不是握在我们的手中
如果我们的血液不是在你梦的脉管中
流动，
洁净的碧空中的光明
和我们体内从未见过的音乐
仍然把我们这些悲哀的行旅者和世界捆紧
那是潮湿的风，秋天的时刻，分离，
肘部搁在记忆上的酸痛的支撑
它在黑夜开始把我们从光明割开时苏醒
在面对悲伤的方窗背后
什么也不泄露
因为它已经变成看不见的音乐，壁炉里
的火苗，
墙上巨钟的嘀嗒声
因为它已经变为
一首诗，一行接一行合拍地应和着雨滴、
泪珠和言语－
那不象别的而只象这些也有着唯一目的的
言语：你。

李野光译

颐和园

2008-01-30T22:47:00.001-06:00

娄烨的颐和园终于浮出水面，可喜可贺。

想起以前有人攻击王小波说，浑身痒就是不知道哪儿过敏（大意如此），套用这句话的结构，娄烨可谓“浑身热不知道哪儿着火了。”

这句话，首先声明，专指影片的前半段，以柏林墙的倒塌，邓小平南巡，香港回归等事件作为终结—80年代的终结。

对自己过于珍视的情感，由于缺乏审视的距离（单纯年岁的增长显然并不保证这种距离的产生），导致沟通障碍。这还是对经历过89的人，至于没有的，这种“当年情”恐怕教育效果好不到哪里去。现在的年轻人可能会想，“也难怪，当时的大学生是不是都疯了（至少是北清大学）？”

在某些大场面的调度上，我个人觉得，娄烨彻底缴械：一群人跑来跑去，这就是激情吗？

也许有人还要争辩，没错，当时的情况，就是一群人漫无目的地跑来跑去。对此，我只能说，我怎么不觉得！

电影中的性场面不少，这个，大家没看之前，就已经听说了，但是真正看了，觉得好像也不是很多。很明显，在娄烨的理解里，性是一件只能发生在暗处的事情。如果一定要白天做爱，那么拍摄的角度要确保逆光。不是说这个理解有什么问题，而是，如果要让做爱和燃烧生命挂钩，娄烨的处理方法没能达到这个效果。

不过娄烨作为导演的真正问题，还是在对演员的指导上。当红花旦都给你用过了，效果还是出不来，你说这是什么问题？床戏不够？

所以到现在，实在是没办法了，我只好说，苏州河之所以成功，那是因为抄袭了Vertigo。大家喜欢苏州河，以为这就是娄烨的故事，其实娄烨自己的故事不是这么讲的，娄烨的故事其实没有这么精致的结构。

这并是说娄烨自己的故事没有可取之处，不值得我们仰慕。从颐和园的后半段来看，我觉得回味之处还是很多的。

在我看来，娄烨的这个故事，成功地诠释了什么是“流浪”。流浪，在我看来，是生活的精髓，这个没有体验过的人是绝对不会明白的。歌德老早就教导我们（William Meister），要花十年时间读书，再花十年时间流浪（漫游），一个真正的人才可能成型, 成为Master。必得要谦卑，然后才可以布道。

在一个普通观众看来，余虹（郝蕾的角色）从图门，到北京，回到图门，又去深圳，武汉，重庆，后来又去抚宁，大话中国地图，这是无意义地稀释了叙述的张力。毛主席教导我们，叙述要浓缩生活，要修剪不必要的枝节人物。一个次要人物出现了，必须要起到推动剧情的作用。但是现代叙述的特色，就是对抗三一律的种种规定。奇遇也许不是始作俑者，但可以看作是这方面的典范。Claudia和Sandro跑到Noto（剧本里好像设定在Messina），不是因为他们必须到那里去见谁，而是因为这个城市，或者西西里，本身就是一个角色，就好比武汉，一个炎热而喧嚣的城市。

当然，在颐和园里，武汉是湿漉漉的，慢吞吞的，正像跟郝蕾纠缠过一段的那个男人，或者那个警察，又或者做年终工作总结的科长。还有，胭脂坪这个地方，其实离我家很近，但是这个名字，却不是大家所熟知的。然而，胭脂路倒有可能是由胭脂坪得名。

一个城市不是属于哪一个人的，王小帅，王超都对武汉有自己的诠释，看了以后我很受启发。

一个居住在柏林的人，看了这个片子之后，说不定也会觉得，哦，原来柏林也可以是这样。

至于深圳，在娄烨的故事里，是一样的重要。很有可能也拍了，但是在完成片里没有痕迹，这个我觉得也完全可以接受，仅仅体现为一种叙述的可能性，然后就有意无意地忘掉了。

至于郝蕾，这个演员我不清楚，但她在这个片子里的表演让我想起Yekaterina Golubeva。在Leos Carax, Bruno Dumont, Claire Denis等人的故事里，她扮演的，不也是一个要让男人“迅速了解她的善良”的角色？

一个被侮辱和被损害的人，如果是男的，多半就像P. T. Anderson的There will be Blood中Daniel的冒牌弟弟，如果是女的，多半就是余虹这样的。从“生存”到“生活得更强烈些”，我所看到的，是一片血淋淋的足迹。

写完这些字，觉得我是不是对娄烨太苛刻了，但如果说一个导演可以忠实於自己的情感，而不必太在意观众怎么想，那么一个观众也可以忠于自己的情感，不必在意导演怎么想。写文章难免讽刺挖苦，但完了之后，也有一点勉励。我对娄烨，态度也是这样。

最后，一句题外话，我这写的是什么？不折不扣的观后感嘛。现用中文的时候我总是认真不起来，到目前还没弄懂是为什么。

A Glimpse of Vallejo

2008-01-29T13:58:00.001-06:00

For a long time, Carlos Castaneda’s books intrigue me. They intrigue me in that they present a vision and a teaching that are beyond doubt; Yet the stories used to deliver this vision are so incredible that any rational mind has to doubt them. The reading, therefore, vacillates between overwhelming convictions and re-emerging suspicions. I was never able to resolve this, because I believe there is no ground for me to take an experience as incredible simply as it is far from my own—this is what I recognize in many Hollywood films (blame it on Hawks): anything, even the slightest irregularity in life, would be unanimously taken as incredible. And I want to avoid that.

Thus, so far the strongest doubt I can claim of those books are not the stories themselves. Ironically, it is the literary reference. Literature does not have a strong presence in these books, which only makes the few such references all the more salient. One of them is César Vallejo[1]. I still remember the day when I read these lines, struck by their paralyzing power:

Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca

Me moriré en Paris con aguacero,

un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo.

Me moriré en Paris—y no me corro—

talvez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.

Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso

estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto

A la mala y, jamás como hoy, me he vuelto,

Con todo mi camino, a verme solo.

César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban

todos sin que él les haga nada;

le daban duro con un palo y duro

También con una soga; son testigos

los días jueves y los huesos húmeros,

la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos…

To solve the problem of translation, I have three English translations here.

Clayton Eshleman’s Complete Posthumous Works

Robert Bly’s Selected Poems of Vallejo & Neruda

Castaneda’s Tales of Power

I will die in Paris with a sudden shower,

a day I can already remember,

I will die in Paris—and I don’t budge—

maybe a Thursday, like today is, in autumn.

Thursday it will be, because today, Thursday, when I prose

these poems, the humeri that I have put on

by force and, never like today, have I returned,

with all my road, to see myself alone.

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,

on some day I can already remember.

I will die in Paris--and I don't step aside--

perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down

these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on

wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself

with all the road ahead of me, alone.

I will die in Paris while it rains,

on a day which I already remember.

I will die in Paris- and I do not run away-

perhaps in the Autumn, on a Thursday, as it is today.

It will be a Thursday, because today,

the Thursday that I write these lines,

my bones feel the turn,

and never so much as today, in all my road,

have I seen myself alone.

In Castaneda’s book, only the first two stanzas are cited. Why? Plainly speaking, the second half reveals not only the author, but also his defeatist[2] nature. Don Juan instinctively selects the better part of the poem and endows it with a whole new meaning, one of enlightenment, led by the intimate recognition of death, forever lurking abreast. The solitude, the sadness, as characteristically in Castaneda’s books, are thus regarded as desirable moods where one has the power to catch a glimpse of the profound truth.

A passage in Eagle's Gift confirms this view. It runs like this:

I recounted for her the great predilection that he had for poetry, and how I used to read it to him when we had nothing else to do. He would listen to poems on the premise that only the first or sometimes the second stanza was worthwhile reading. The rest he found to be indulgence on the poet's part. There were very few poems, of the hundreds I must have read to him, that he listened to all the way through.

At first I read to him what I liked. My preference was for abstract, convoluted, cerebral poetry. Later he made me read over and over what he liked. In his opinion a poem had to be compact- preferably short- and it had to be made up of precise poignant images of great simplicity.

While this makes perfect sense to me, what immediately follows does not:

In the late afternoons, sitting on that bench in Oaxaca, a poem by Cesar Vallejo always seemed to sum up for him a special feeling of longing. I recited it to la Gorda from memory; not so much for her benefit as for mine.

I wonder what she is doing at this hour

my Andean and sweet Rita

of reeds and wild cherry trees.

Now that this weariness chokes me, and blood dozes off,

like lazy brandy inside me.

I wonder what she is doing with those hands

that in attitude of penitence

used to iron starchy whiteness,

in the afternoons.

Now that this rain is taking away my desire to go on.

I wonder what has become of her skirt with lace;

of her toils; of her walk;

of her scent of spring sugar cane from that place.

She must be at the door,

gazing at a fast moving cloud.

A wild bird on the tile roof will let out a call;

and shivering she will say at last, "Jesus, it's cold!"

And again, to follow my philological impulse, the original text and a more accurate translation:

IDILIO MUERTO[3]

Qué estará haciendo esta hora mi andina y dulce Rita
de junco y capulí;
ahora que me asfixia Bizancio, y que dormita
la sangre, como flojo cognac, dentro de mí.

Dónde estarán sus manos que en actitud contrita
planchaban en las tardes blancuras por venir;
ahora, en esta lluvia que me quita
las ganas de vivir.

Qué será de su falda de franela; de sus
afanes; de su andar;
de su sabor a cañas de mayo del lugar.

Ha de estarse a la puerta mirando algún celaje,
y al fin dirá temblando: «Qué frío hay… Jesús!»
y llorará en las tejas un pájaro salvaje.

DEAD IDYLL (Eshleman’s translation)

What would she be doing now, my sweet Andean Rita
of rush and tawny berry;
now when Byzantium asphyxiates me, and my blood
dozes, like thin cognac, inside of me.

Where would her hands, that showing contrition
ironed in the afternoon whitenesses yet to come,
be now, in this rain that deprives me of
my desire to live.

What has become of her flannel skirt; of her
toil, of her walk;
of her taste of homemade May rum.

She must be at the door watching some cloudscape,
and at length she’ll say, trembling: “Jesus…it’s so cold!”
And on the roof tiles a wild bird will cry.

This poem is one of the poet’s early works, collected in The Black Heralds, and published in 1919, while he was still enjoying some success in Lima, completely unaware of the harsh life that awaits him in Paris. My point is this: how could this poem has any power that a warrior would appreciate? Why this poem is not a self-indulgence on the poet’s part? Either it is Castaneda again who wrongly interprets the special longing of a warrior as a mundane experience, or it is author of the book fails to demarcate a fine line between beauty and lucidity. To serve as a comparison, I will quote yet another poem of Vallejo here:

Paris, October 1936

From all of this I am the only one who leaves.

From this bench I go away, from my pants,

from my great situation, from my actions,

from my number split side by side,

from all of this I am the only one who leaves.

From the Champs Elysées or as the strange

alley of the Moon makes a turn,

my death goes away, my cradle leaves,

and, surrounded by people, alone, cut loose,

my human resemblance turns around

and dispatches its shadows one by one.

And I move away from everything, since everything

Remains to create my alibi:

my shoe, its eyelet, as well as its mud

and even the bend in the elbow

of my own buttoned shirt.

While this poem may be less beautiful (personal taste) than the other two, its lucidity is exemplary. It describes well the detachment of not-doing and the rejection of human form and personal history that constitute Don Juan’s lessons. If this is not obvious, let me say this, a poem that a warrior would appreciate can appreciate must be about hic et nunc, not in illo tempore.

Granted, quote a poem, or not to, is a coincidental thing. Yet it is not completely arbitrary. The poem you like reflects who you really are.

[1] As a footnote, Vallejo is quoted by Roy Andersson in Songs from the Second Floor.

[2] Don’t get me wrong. I am, believe it or not, a defeatist myself.

[3] Here is a Duncanian interpretation of this poem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUxoEkR8sSI