The Pillow Book

As you may have noticed, in our last few entries we've departed from the more measured, "objective" approach I took in my essays on Arrested Development (2003-07) and Artists and Models (1955) in favor of immediate, opinionated commentary. Partly it was because of the film festival and because Heather has a completely different writing style from mine (it's not a competition!), but I would argue that the internet, by its very nature, lends itself better to reviews than criticism. CineAction, which comes out with a new issue only three times a year, has no presence on the internet at all, and while I still depend on Cinema-Scope to keep me informed, their website is merely a supplement to the print edition: it's updated quarterly, like the magazine, rather than weekly. (1)

To use a crude metaphor, the difference between a blog and a journal like CineAction is the difference between video and film. Like film, which has to be sent to a lab to be developed, print media is slow and cumbersome; but with a blog, I just had to hit 'Publish Post' and now any one with an internet connection can read this. If cinema is a long shot (Angelopoulos, Mizoguchi, Tarr), the essence of video is narcissism. (2) In other words, while an academic like David Bordwell or Robin Wood views things from a distance, reviewers are generally too caught up in the now to maintain any historical perspective, which no doubt accounts for the hysterical over-praise of certain films: I'm sure Sideways (2004) looks pretty good next to whatever else was playing at the multiplex that week, but next to an Albert Brooks or Buster Keaton, its timidity and mediocrity are inescapable.

Peter Greenaway began experimenting with video editing in the 80's with A TV Dante: The Inferno - Cantos I-VIII (1989), a ninety-minute video piece for British television co-directed by Tom Phillips, but it wasn't until a few years later that the technology developed allowing Greenaway to utilize the same techniques in film. A TV Dante is a major work, but his subsequent feature, Prospero's Books (1991), while often stunning, is so over-loaded that it never really engaged me either time I saw it: we get one striking image, then another and then another, and I couldn't remember any of them seven seconds later. Forget Memento (2000) (3), this is what it must be like to have short-term memory loss. (Heather, who's seen it four times--for school, not for fun--said it started to grow on her, but you'd have to ask her about that.)

The Pillow Book (1996) represents his most sophisticated application of the editing techniques he developed in the earlier films, once again layering multiple images on top of one another (unlike most filmmakers, who only edit horizontally, Greenaway edits vertically as well), but this time, a picture in a picture--one of the techniques Greenaway uses most often--serves to connect the characters with their past. When Jerome/Ewan McGregor paints his name on Nagiko/Vivian Wu, contained within the present moment is Nagiko's past: a birthday ritual in which her father/Ken Ogata would paint his name on the back of her neck. Later, when Jerome commits suicide, a guesture he's about to make is anticipated in a smaller frame at the bottom of the screen (needless to say, we instinctively read the larger image as more important), which reflects his feeling of disorientation.

The film was made the year before England returned Hong Kong to China, and while this is never mentioned in the film, I'd be very surprised if Greenaway didn't have this historic milestone in mind while making it: apart from the opening and closing sequences in Japan, almost the entire film takes place in Hong Kong, and even more than costume dramas like The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) and The Baby of Mâcon (1993), this is a film about history. The narrative moves between three different time frames and three different writers: tenth century Japan, when Sei Shonagon wrote her Pillow Book; post-war Japan, where Nagiko discovers her father is being blackmailed by his publisher/Yoshi Oida; and Hong Kong in the 90's, when Nagiko writes her own pillow book and plots revenge against the publisher.

In contrast with the other two periods, the scenes of Nagiko's childhood are photographed in black-and-white, which underlines the characters' connection to their past, and by extention, a dysfunctional patriarchy. (Although most of Japan was firebombed during the war, the decor and costuming in these scenes are deliberately old school.) The father's agreement with the publisher--namely, sex in exchange for publication--means that the entire family is dependent on his whims. He chooses for Nagiko a husband/Ken Mitsuichi whose passion for archery has obvious phallic associations. The husband is deeply threatened by Nagiko's interest in reading, much in the same way Spica/Michael Gambon was threatened by Michael/Alan Howard in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). When the husband burns her books in a rage, it's both destructive, severing Nagiko from her past and from history, but also liberating. She runs away to Hong Kong and supports herself with a number of odd jobs before she's discovered as a runway model.

Nagiko's career as a model is worth commenting on because the relationship between the model and a piece of clothing is much the same as the relationship between a piece of paper and what's written on it. It's a natural profession for some one whose fetish is having a man write on her skin. Her search for the perfect caligrapher-lover is a search to find a substitute for her father (early on, we see Nagiko attempt to perform the birthday ritual on herself using a Chinese typewriter and some lotion). Jerome's bisexuality is significant as he constructs himself as both the object and the subject, confounding binary gender roles. He writes on Nagiko and pushes her to write on him, later suggesting she try to have her poetry published. However, the only way for her to get into publication is to offer the publisher Jerome as a barter item; in more ways than one, the publishing world simply isn't interested in female writers.

After she has her revenge on the publisher, Nagiko sets fire to her posessions. In a voice-over, she muses "The first fire took me out of Japan. The second brought me back"--and by extention, brought her back to the past. The closing sequences in Japan are again photographed in black and white, and again the decor is old school, but now Nagiko has achieved something like empowerment. We see her surrounded only by other women with Jerome's baby and tattooed all over. Last night I saw David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (2007) and in both films the symbolism is exactly the same: the tattoo, because it is permanent, represents the past, a secret code explaining a person's life story, and the child represents the future.

Superimposing a woman who lived at the beginning of the last millenium over one living at the end of it, The Pillow Book suggests something of a millennial statement, and as a film about what it means to be a woman at the end of the twentieth century, it's the closest thing in Greenaway's oeuvre to a feminist statement. It's also one of his most formally accomplished, using video editing techniques that often encourage amnesia (I would argue music vidoes and blogorrhea are at least equivilent if not inter-related) to underline the characters' connection to their past and to history. In other words, it's a movie that engages us both vertically and horizontally.

Footnotes:
1. After reading this, Heather said she felt slighted, as if she were dragging me down. That's not what I meant at all; I simply meant to say that the pace of the internet isn't well suited to the kind of criticism found in journals like CineAction. Besides, all of my previous posts are significantly shorter than an academic paper would be, and the shift I mentioned was already evident in my essay against French-Canadian cinema. More to the point, what I liked most about Heather's entry on Inland Empire is how personal and immediate it is, and I deliberately wrote this essay in the second person, rather than an objective third person, in imitation of her writing style.
2. Rosalind Krauss, "The Aesthetics of Narcissism," Video Culture (Gibbs Smith, 1987), p. 179-191.
3. Pun intended.

Inland Empire - It's Easier than Learning your ABC's

I felt I should comment on something that Michael mentioned about my last/first post here at Rancho Notorious. He disliked my implication that our co-blogging was somehow a competition, and I, the implied loser. This of course, was unconscious on my part, but there it is. So, for many reasons relating to this incident, I am going to talk today about Inland Empire, the latest David Lynch monster. Which I liked a whole lot. I won’t be looking at it in its almost three hour entirety, since I spent most of that time tensely upright in the theatre, and I definitely don’t remember all of it.

But the sections that affected me most, while seemingly having nothing to do with what I set out to discuss here, were surprisingly personal for me. These were the scenes involving the ‘white trash girl’ characters, who are later depicted blatantly as prostitutes. They affected me deeply almost every time they were onscreen, for different reasons each time, but created an overarching theme that I am still kind of lost in thinking about. I almost couldn’t believe that David Lynch was hitting on all of this.

Anyway, the first scene in which they appear out of the grimy darkness, they ask Laura Dern’s character if she will look at them, and tell them if she’s known them. This line is repeated throughout the film by different characters, but always female. This premise of the scene, as the girls go on to discuss a man they’ve all slept with (presumably the man Dern just cheated on her nutso husband with), reads kinda like a bad government health agency ad. (ie: you’re sleeping with everyone your partner has…) But the tone is so off (so Lynch, if I may, without knowing his whole body of work), and disconcerting.

The entire scene has the feeling of rape. It’s difficult to justify that statement, having no experience of rape. But we are brought uncomfortably close to these women’s sexual experience which is obviously submissive and objectified. All these women are is their sexuality. They have no dimension, and no desire to be anything more. So creepy. And definitely a comment on misogyny, and objectification, but more deeply a sensitive understanding of the master/slave mentality underpinning this experience.

The next scene of interest is probably my ‘favourite’ of the film, if such a statement can be made of such a tense, grotesque, uncomfortable experience. In this sequence, the same horde of ‘white trash,’ (and please pardon my light use of such offensive terms) create a formation in the dimly lit hotel-looking room and dance to Little Eva’s ‘Locomotion,’

It was funny, in an uncomfortable sort of way, but more so deeply upsetting for me. Of course haunted by that Lynch darkness and dirtiness, the scene had me re-evaluating my formative years, and the gross amount of television I consumed. This ‘innocent’ song choice lays bare the fact that long before Britney Spears, people were making a business of packaging dangerously ‘trashy’ ideologies beneath an innocent façade (that is so transparent it drives me crazy) and throwing it at sweet little girls who just like to dance. “You’ve got to swing your hips now.” “My little baby sister can do it with me.” I loved that song when I was a little girl. The scene ends abruptly at “Jump up,” leaving the audience jarred.

The last scene that really shook me was –well, really, all of these sequences of these girls as whores on the streets of LA. In particular, though, Laura Dern’s lines: “I’m a whore. I’m afraid. Where am I?” The first line delivered with a sobering pain, and the rest twisted into a mocking laughter. I was fighting tears. Full of empathy for the character, and full of pity for myself, and scared as hell for no good reason. Wow. Laura Dern is so great in this film. But I was also reeling from the fact that David Lynch, being both a man and a filmmaker (which is the most basic recipe for misogyny), could articulate something so complex and accurate about women, and their sexuality, and self-image. Especially after seeing Mulholland Drive, which I enjoyed, and it was interesting, but holy crap, why are we seeing those girls make out so damn much (slash at all)? (Michael, I await your retort)

I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days (Inland Empire). It bothered me profoundly that such a dark film had such a personal effect on me. It still does.

Helvetica & Hello

Well, I'm just one in a long tradition of girls to step into her boyfriends blog and take on co-ownership. I wont try to compete with Michael's perceptive and articulate comments on film, past or present, but hopefully my presence here will promote some kind of dialogue that might interest someone other than us!

On that note, I'll start by discussing a film I saw last night that was too low brow for Michael to accompany me to. It's called Helvetica, and it's about Helvetica. So if you are interested in typeface you'll be interested, otherwise you mightn't waste your time. There were some great interviews with some hilariously snobby people. (They were to typography what Michael is to film.) (Passionate, I meant.)

All in all, I couldn’t help but think that the film was a filmic embodiment of what Helvetica is itself, at least as one of the interviewees defined it. Basically a vessel, without its own inherent meaning, designed to carry content. So, I guess that works. But I have an issue with that, which is (a less vehement) parallel to the reason why Michael wouldn’t see the film in the first place. It was a fairly typical documentary, with (really great) interviews, and lots of footage of Helvetica in our lives and streets. But it did nothing creative with the topic, which is incredibly rich. It was exactly what you expected, and the content was great. But the filmmakers made their film in Helvetica font – it did nothing to colour our perception of the content, it simply displayed it for us.

Also, I was expecting some cool graphic stuff, for a film made by people who are presumably passionate about design.

The friend I saw Helvetica with is a designer, and her complaint is that the content was too commercial. I don’t have her background, so I cant fully appreciate her stance, but I would have to say that I liked that it was commercial-oriented. The film was about how the font has snuck insidiously into our cultural awareness. It’s just there. Like air, as one designer noted. You have to breathe, so you use Helvetica. And unfortunately, most of visual communication and design is sunk into marketing, so that’s the appropriate place for this film to have positioned itself, I thought. Although they did spend an awful lot of time in that American Apparel store.

Still, I’d have to say I liked the film a whole lot. It gave me lots of time to think about Helvetica, and typeface in general, and snotty, middle class European designers, and the best part is that it made me laugh at least half of the time. The designers they chose to interview probably were really huge designers, if you know anything about design (I don’t), but they were funny, and fun to watch. The openings credits were the best – an old printer setting the word Helvetica by hand, and grunting unconsciously as he does his work. It was not extremely original, but pretty, and interesting, and funny. Kind of sums up the film in general, so maybe just disregard everything else you just read.

27th Atlantic Film Festival

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

An Anglophone's Case Against Québécois Cinema

In the current issue of Cineaste, there's an article by Matthew Hays, titled "Bon Cop, Bad Cop [2006] and Canada's Two Solitudes," about the (relative) commercial success of Québécois cinema on its home turf, that while impressively researched and thoroughly readable, strikes one as myopic in its overall emphasis on box office returns (it's impossible not to think of Pauline Kael). Hays seems to dismiss Bon Cop, Bad Cop at the top of the article as "fromage," but nevertheless concludes by writing:

"Those behind Bon Cop, Bad Cop concede a sequel has been discussed. Perhaps next time around some of that elusive success can seep across the Québec border into the ROC [rest of Canada]. And all of Canada, not just one province, can enjoy the kind of robust, invigorating, popular cinema that Québec enjoys."

For the record, I found Bon Cop, Bad Cop unspeakably depressing--far from "invigorating"--but then I'm the guy looking for symbolism in Arrested Development re-runs, and thus have an innate resistance to the idea that any film, let alone one so nasty and unpleasant, "could be fun if you just make sure not to take any of it very seriously" (yes, this sentence was published in a magazine named Cineaste, which calls itself "America's leading magazine on the art and politics of the cinema"). And while I quite enjoyed Philippe Falardeau's Congorama (2006)--the best Canadain movie I saw last year overall (of nine) (1); Hays doesn't mention it--judging by the article, Québécois cinema is "robust" only insofar as people are going to see it, regardless of quality. As an example of the kind of good news the Québec film industry recieves on a near-weekly basis, Hays cites the box office success of Nitro (2007), a transparent knock-off of The Fast and the Furious (2000) (2), which in its opening weekend out-performed Hollywood blockbusters like Live Free or Die Hard and Ratatouille (both 2007).

While the article doesn't contain any information about Hays himself, including whether or not he's Québécois, his gloating over the moribund state of English-Canadian cinema (he makes the outrageous claim that Anglophone filmmakers are too wrapped up in self pity to appeal to broad national sentiments) seems indicative of an age-old rivalry between English and French Canada that does more to maintain the two solitudes than bring them together. What I find most dubious about the article is the underlying assumption that Canadian cinema should speak to a popular (provincial) Canadian audience rather than an international (cosmopolitan) auidence including Canadians. Peter Greenaway, the greatest of all British filmmakers (now based in Holland), likes to quote Gore Vidal's statement that only two hundred people in America read books: "You have to begin with that hard core of deeply engaged, deeply intrigued individuals." Not surprisingly, the best American directors, from Orson Welles to Nicholas Ray to Jim Jarmusch, tend to be more respected in Europe than at home; and while a friend of mine from China is just as crazy about the films of Jia Zhang-ke as I am, he's the exception rather than the rule (given Jia's long-take aesthetic, one imagines his work wouldn't fit comfortably in the mainstream anywhere on earth).

Among active Canadian directors, only five have international reputations, and while I wouldn't hesistate to say that David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan and Guy Maddin are all world class filmmakers (that is, on par with the best of world cinema: Assayas, Haneke, Hou et al), and the one film I've seen by Michael Snow--Wavelength (1967), naturally (3)--is a masterpiece, Denys Arcand (whose work I don't know especially well) strikes me as a competent but unremarkable middlebrow entertainer. His Les Invasions barbares (2003) made me cry when I first encountered it at the Altantic film festival, in a packed theater that errupted into applause the second the film ended, but seeing it again the following summer while in Toronto, in a small second-run theater with only a handful of other people, I found it far less impressive. Compared with the other films that premiered at Cannes that year--including The Brown Bunny, Crimson Gold, Distant, Dogville, Elephant, Le Temps du loup and Young Adam, which only grow in resonance on second and third viewing--Arcand's clearly doesn't measure up.

If I had to pick my favorite Québécois film, it'd be an easy choice: Jean-Claude Lauzon's Léolo (1992) is one of those great films like The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Woman in the Dunes (1964) that seem to come completely out of left field and frighten away imitators. If one can spot the influence of other filmmakers on Lauzon's masterpiece, they're international rather than domestic (critics have cited Federico Fellini and François Truffaut) and so thoroughly assimilated that the film feels like the work of a director making his tenth feature rather than his second. (4) Less impressive though still worthy of mention are the first two features by the vastly underrated Denis Villenueve, Un 32 août sur terre (1998) and Maelström (2000), both loopy and unpredictable narratives about young women dealing with pregnancy. Ideally, Villeneuve should've found an international following and directed three more features by now; instead, what happened? Apparently nothing, apart from a two-minute short made with a cell phone. The Québec film industry, so good at marketing schlock to a domestic audience, seems incapable of either recognizing a major talent when they have one or selling them to an audience outside Québec. I rest my case again Québec's robust, invigorating, popular cinema.


Footnotes:
1. The other seven were Monkey Warfare (which I might recommend for the performances by Don McKellar and Tracy Wright, even though the film falls apart completely in the final stretch), three I walked out on--Black Eyed Dog, Delivrez-moi, Tales of the Rat Fink--and three more I should've walked out on: The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, Snow Cake and Un dimanche à Kigali. After an acquaintance, to whom I recommended Congorama, reported back to me that it was just "arlight," I had to reconsider my enthusiasm for the film; I realized that I was probably overrating it because it was Canadian, and therefore went in with lowered expectations. I suspect if the film were made in France or Belgium, I wouldn't have been nearly as impressed.
2. I haven't seen Nitro, so I'm basing this statement on the advertising campaign.
3. Some critics have argued that if Snow had used a loft in Toronto or Montréal rather than New York, the film wouldn't have had nearly so large an impact.
4. Lauzon's first feature, Night Zoo (1987), while unsuccessful and far less interesting, is not an experience I'll ever forget--particularly, the film's final scene in which the hero and his father break into a Montréal zoo in the middle of the night to hunt elephants. After Léolo, Lauzon retired from filmmaking; he died five years later in a plane crash.