No Country for Old Men

There will be spoilers.

Plot Synopsis

Adapted from an early novel by Cormac McCarthy ("Blood Meridian") which I haven't read, Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men is about a Texas man, Llewelyn Moss/Josh Brolin, who stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad while hunting in the desert, and steals a briefcase containing two million dollars in cash. After returning to the crime scene to give a jug of water to a dying man/Eduardo Antonio Garcia, he finds himself pursued by Anton Chigurh/Javier Berdem, a sociopath whose weapon of choice is an abattoir air gun. Pursuing Anton are the local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell/Tommy Lee Jones and a professional bounty hunter, Carson Wells/Woody Harrelson. In exchange for the money, Anton offers not to kill Llewelyn's wife, Carla Jean/Kelly Macdonald, but Llewelyn refuses and Anton kills them both. Unable to catch Anton, Ed decides to retire from police work.

"We believe in nothing"

This is one of the most pessimistic films I can recall seeing; although the desert setting makes it seem like a western, it's actually closer to film noir (in an early scene in Llewelyn and Carla Jean's trailer, a 1940's noir is even playing on the television). Then again, I'd be hard-pressed to find a film noir with so much evil and so little good. Leaving the theater, we overheard a woman say to her companion "Too much killing for me," which is both perfectly understandable and adorable. The film's message is that some people are just plain evil, bad things happen to good people and everything's a matter of chance. At one point, Ed mentions to Carla Jean an item he read in the newspaper about a couple in California that murdered old people in order to cash their social security checks. "They tortured them first. Maybe the TV was broken." Ed reflects the failure of law enforcement to prevent murders like that from happening in the first place.

This is a limited conceit as it precludes interrogating where evil comes from, instead treating it as a pure, metaphysical state--one might argue its position is exactly opposite that of Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu (1939), in which Octave/Renoir says at one point "Everyone has their reasons." The motif of the coin is first introduced in a sequence in which Anton walks into a gas station and decides to spare the attendant/Gene Jones' life based on the result of a coin toss. It recurs again in a climatic scene where Ed stands outside a motel room which Anton has broken into, using his air gun to break the lock. To enter would mean certain death for Ed (see next paragraph), but when he opens the door, Anton has mysteriously vanished. On the floor, Ed finds a coin like the one in the gas station. In the next scene, in which Anton just as mysterious appears in Carla Jean's home, he denies responsibility for his actions when she tells him "You don't have to do this" by responding: "I got here the same way the coin did," recalling the moment in the gas station when he tells the attendant that the coin, which was minted in 1958, had taken twenty-two years to make it to this spot. As he's leaving, he instructs the attendant to put the coin anywhere but his pocket, where it'll get mixed in with other coins and become just another quarter--"which it is."

Anton's Big Cock

From the first sequence, in which Anton strangles a deputy sheriff/Zach Hopkins with his handcuffs, the film views him with a kind of mythic awe. Without backstory or motivation, he's endowed with such supernatural ability (Ed compares him at one point to a ghost) that the film threatens to feel over-determined: Anton is so obviously stronger than Llewelyn that the ending is almost inevitable. As in Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957), where the hero/Max von Sydow plays a game of chess with Death/Bengt Ekerot, the ending is a foregone conclusion. By the time Anton follows Llewelyn to a motel where the latter has cleverly stashed the loot in an air vent so the tracking device hidden in the case points Anton to the wrong room, it already feels like Llewelyn is being chased by the devil. The one time he's able to wound Anton physically, it's using his own weapon, which in this context comes to represent a kind of fetish object and phallic symbol--the source of Anton's magical powers. There's even an example of The Denzel Washington Shot in which Anton walks towards the camera in the foreground while a car explodes in the background.

In his review of the film, Jonathan Rosenbaum speculates that the film is hitting such a nerve with audiences partly because of its timing; linking it to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which was released during the first Gulf war, he argues that Americans who feel uneasy about the war might find something reassuring about Anton's ability to kill a lot of innocent people without one shred of remorse. While I don't totally agree, he's definitely on to something in terms of our over-identification with Anton. In her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey argues that Hollywood cinema gives us identification figures stronger and more perfect than we possibly could be; one might apply a Nitzchean reading to the film, in which Anton is the ultimate übermensch who exists outside conventional morality--at one point, Carson even says that Anton operates by a moral code of his own. Complicating matters (or at least clouding them) is the fact that we're meant to identify equally with the three leads.

"I'm still out a shirt"

As gripping as it is as a piece of storytelling, the film falls flat on its face when it attempts any kind of social analysis. Although the story is set in 1980, the Coens make no attempt to tie the story to anything happening at the time; both Llewelyn and Carson are Vietnam vets, but this bit of backstory exists merely to set-up a later sequence in which an American border guard/Brandon Smith decides to let Llewelyn back into the United States only after he learns that he's a vetern. Even worse is the film's reliance on Mexican stereotypes: when Llewelyn first crosses the border, there's a shot of a sleeping Mexican border guard (by comparison, the American border guard is a total hard-ass); after Llewelyn passes out on the street, he's woken up by a Mariachi band; and although we're invited to feel superior to Carla Jean's mother, Agnes/Beth Grant, when she says "It's so rare to see a Mexican in a suit," (a) he's a drug dealer, and (b) his tacky suit and pencil mustache don't exactly look professional. There are two amusing sequences involving different groups of young boys who negotiate the price of a shirt with Llewelyn and Anton on separate occasions that illustrate the corrupting power of money, but even these scenes are pretty broad--both times, there's literally blood on the money.

Rhyme Effects

The repetition of a line of dialogue or certain composition serves to underline the similarities between the three leads. The most obvious example of this happens fairly early and is so obvious it effectively bares the device: the film cuts from Anton telling a hapless man/Chip Love to stand still, so he can kill him with his air gun, to Llewelyn hunting animals in the desert; while eying his target through the scope of his rifle, he tells the animal to stay still for a second. Later, Ed goes to Llewelyn's trailer just after Anton has left (he discerns this from the fact that the milk bottle is still sweating); calmly, Ed sits in the same spot where Anton sat, pours himself a glass of milk and stares into the TV screen which neither man thinks to turn on. And at the motel, both Llewelyn and Anton request a map. The implication is that all three are, at various stages of the film, the hunter and the hunted. In the last two examples, both Ed and Anton are actively trying to put themselves in the shoes of the other man.

Auteurism

With the exception of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), The Lady Killers (2004), which I haven't seen, and this film, all of the Coens' previous films are original screenplays; however, given the range of genre and tones, their debt to classical Hollywood (especially Preston Sturges--the title of O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a reference to Sullivan's Travels [1942]) and the unevenness of their work, one hesitates to call them auteurs. At best, they seem like clever stylists with an encyclopedic (if Amerocentric) knowledge of film history and a gift for appropriating everything in sight. While less reference happy than, say, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), No Country for Old Men contains references to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)--a high-angle shot of Carson ascending a flight of stairs in a hotel that tells us he's about to be killed even before Anton appears behind him--and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), which was released during the Vietnam war and regards a milk-drinking sociopath with an almost equal level of Nitzchean awe. More abundant, however, are references to the Coens' own films: the Texas setting, Ed's opening narration and the long stretches of silence recall Blood Simple (1984); Anton's super-human strength reminds one of the bounty hunter/Randall Cobb in Raising Arizona (1987); and the low-angle shots racing down the highway at night, illuminated by a car's headlights, are straight out of Fargo (1996). The ability to take some one else's material and make it your own is a sign of an auteur, but here, the similarities are pretty superficial. At best, they add up to a game of reference spotting, in which one tries to find allusions to all of the Coens' previous work.

Conclusion

Reading back on what I've written, I realize it might come across like I didn't enjoy the film very much, and while I don't think it's quite the masterpiece it's being touted as, I did enjoy it a fair bit (or else I wouldn't even be writing about it). As a film about serial killers and a piece of social analysis, it's limited when compared to Fritz Lang's M (1931), in which the killer/Peter Lorre is given more humanity (by treating Anton simply as a monster, the filmmakers are in effect providing him with an alibi: he's not responsible because he doesn't have a choice) and the social analysis cuts a lot deeper (ultimately, Lang's film tells us nothing about what produces a serial killer either, but uses the killer as a device to reveal the hypocrisies of German society in the early 1930's). However, purely as a thriller, this is one of the Coens' most entertaining movies, along with Blood Simple (still their most interesting film), Barton Fink (1991), The Big Lebowski (1998) and The Man Who Wasn't There (2001). The performances are uniformly excellent, the elaborate cat-and-mouse game between Llewelyn and Anton is genuinely suspenseful, and the sound of Anton's air gun shooting open a lock almost gave me a heart attack. Whatever quibbles I might have, I wasn't bored.

The Passing

The Passing (1991) is a video by Bill Viola that juxtaposes various kinds of footage--nocturnal desert landscapes, slow motion shots of bodies underwater, an elderly woman dying in a hospital bed (and more)--with shots of the artist himself in bed, unable to sleep because of a neighbor's barking dog, which invites the interpretation that everything else in the video is being dreamt of by Viola. At 54 minutes, it manages to do a number of things at the same time: it's a travelogue of the American southwest, a home movie about Viola's family, and a religious allegory for birth and death.

I first encountered Viola's work in my foundation year at NSCAD, and at the time, I found him boring and pretentious. The former complaint, of course, turned out to be pure nonsense once I developed better reflexes, and my initial reaction against Ancient of Days (1979-81) and Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat) (1979) mirrored my response to a trio of commercial narrative features I first encountered at about the same time: Alain Resnais' L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979)--all three highly meditative works where the exploration of a particular space (an hotel in eastern Europe in Resnais', various industrial wastelands in the United States and Russia in Lynch's and Tarkovsky's), and the eerie moods conjured up by the sounds and images, count for more than incident or character. And while I admire all three a great deal now, I still have some lingering doubts. As many times as I've seen it, I still can't make heads or tails of Resnais' film, but I can't stop thinking about it either; like its hero/Giorgio Albertazzi, who can never win the game with the matches, I find myself drawn back to the film again and again only to be frustrated once more. And while Lynch's and Tarkovsky's would both be in my top 100, I have to admit they're pretty sexist. The former strikes me as too implicated in the protagonist/Jack Nance's disgusted attraction to the opposite sex to comment on it in any meaningful way. That his idealized fantasy woman/Laurel Near is a wholesome, Doris Day-like figure who's completely asexual (unlike his bitchy girlfriend/Charlotte Stewart and his promiscuous neighbor/Judith Anna Roberts) suggests a conservative reading of the film--and Blue Velvet (1986)--as reflecting a desire to return to life as it was before the sexual revolution; one may counter that Lynch's version of small town innocence in the latter is highly ironic, but he doesn't make the alternatives seem very appealing.

Viola may not be a raging misogynist like Tarkovsky, whose view of motherhood as a woman's highest and only calling was informed by his religious beliefs (this attitude is even more apparent in his anti-feminist Nostalghia [1983]; it's only evident in Stalker when the Stalker's wife/Alisa Frejndlikh delivers a pathetic monologue to the camera towards the end of the film), but like Tarkovsky, Viola seems to view his art as a kind of spiritual calling.

Paramount to the notion of the image as sacred object is the icon, a form found in both oriental and occidental tradition... An icon can be any image that has acquired power through its use as an object of worship. In fact, the status of icon was the goal and even the measure of success of the majority of visual artworks created in the great traditions of ancient Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The presence of art critics was not required as devotees instantly knew, at first glance, whether or not the work in question qualified. The artists created their works for God, not for the art world... [Icons] are necessarily functional objects, their function fufilling a most basic primary and private need within the individual. (1)

This quote is taken from a collection of Viola's writings about his work, but it could just as easily be a quote by Tarkovsky. Central to many of Tarkovsky's films is a belief in the transformative power of faith or ritual; in the final episode of Andrei Rublev (1966), which takes as its subject the titular icon painter/Anatoli Solonitsyn, a young man/Nikolai Burlyavev claims his father passed on the secret of bell casting before he died and commands a large crew with unshakable confidence; later, when the bell has been cast, the boy confesses that he knows nothing and his father took the secret to his grave. On the British National Gallery's website for their exhibition of Viola's The Passions (2000-02) (2) I found this statement:

Viola describes a kind of awakening when he saw a woman in the Suntory Museum of Art in Tokyo looking at a statue of Kannon, the embodiment of compassion--an image that Viola had been conditioned to consider merely a work of art. He watched her slowly bow and begin praying to it--putting it to use. Viola intends his art not for decoration or diversion or education but for transformation.

As a non-believer, I find this pretty dubious. And while I've yet to hear of anyone slowly bowing and beginning to pray in front of one of Viola's installations, I'm reminded of the split reaction to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004), which Christian viewers--or at least a good many of them--found to be deeply moving, while secular types like me--or at least a good many of us--found it to be not only religious kitsch but bad religious kitsch. Still, regardless of the negative reviews, devotees instantly knew, at first glance, that the work in question qualified. I remember the day Gibson's film opened, I was on the bus going home when a group of women got on and started discussing the film loudly; one said it made her feel as though she was there, which ties into a point Viola makes in the article quoted above:

Icons are timeless images, and even though in the West they often depict temporal events (the Annunciation, the Flight out of Egypt, ect.), the mythic or religious existence of those events (i.e., their present tense) is far more important. Icons maintain their currency by being continually updated to the present, by sustaining a constant relevance to Now. (3)

Given the abudance of slow motion shots in Gibson's film and the lack of any kind of narrative progression, one wonders whether he was consciously influenced by Viola's The Passions. (Gibson's production company is named Icon Productions.) The emphasis on Christ/Jim Caviezel's physical suffering in Gibson's film reminds me of the Hindu ceremony that concludes Viola's I Do Not Know What it Is I Am Like (1986), in which the participants pierce their bodies with long needles and walk across hot coals. Because we're not given a word of context about the ceremony, Viola seems out of his depth--a kind of spiritual tourist whose fascination with Hindu beliefs begins and ends with his amazement at its Otherness; that my father, who's a practicing Hindu, thinks the people who do that sort of thing are nuts indicates how far removed the ceremony is from mainstream Hinduism which doesn't seem to interest Viola in the slightest.

The religious themes in The Passing are more palatable because of Viola's personal investment in the material (the piece is dedicated to the memory of his deceased mother) and because it's possible to appreciate it on a more modest level: while the piece hasn't transformed me, it has given me a great deal of pleasure. Viola's spiritual side is most evident in the opposition of birth and death in the piece; at one point he seemlessly transitions from a flowing white sheet in one of the video's underwater sequences (in this context, suggesting the womb) to a similar white sheet being placed over a dead body. Elsewhere we see a mother holding her child only moments after giving birth, and a panning shot around a living room combined with a wipe to another shot panning around the inside of a hospital room where an elderly man sits by his dying wife, suggesting a continuity between the two spaces. In Viola's work, death is always paired with a sense of renewal; one of his best videos, The Reflecting Pool (1977-79), begins with the artist emerging from the wilderness in the background and approaching a reflecting pool which occupies the foreground. Standing between the two, he jumps into the air but, rather than cannonballing into the water, his image freezes while in the fetal position (the water continues to ripple as a series of dissolves compresses a period of a day into just a few minutes). Slowly Viola's image begins to disintegrate, and at the end of the video, he emerges from the water, naked, suggesting a kind of rebirth. Here, Viola's mother is paired with his young son, first seen running on the beach (the next to last shot shows him attending his grandmother's funeral).

At times the highfalutin symbolism can be a bit much, but what I enjoy most about The Passing is resolutely material: the desert landscapes, comtemplative pacing, the ambient soundtrack (mostly Viola's heavy breathing), and some particularly dreamlike underwater shots. One recurring image is a desk and chair in what at first appears to be an abstract, theatrical space with one intense studio light illuminating it from above. Our second glimpse of it, however, is rather distorted, indictating that it's actually underwater, though I couldn't quite believe it until a bit later when the table is suddenly turned over and some of the objects on it float away. The one thing this multifaceted video can't be said to do is tell a story, which I mean as an observation and not a criticism. Watching Arrested Development (2003-06) on my new HD TV, one of the things that's striking how much faster the editing seems on a larger screen; no shot is held longer than absolutely necessary for it to establish a point. In the episode "Not Without My Daughter," when Michael Bluth/Justin Bateman is interrogated by the police, the camera zooms out to reveal that Detective Fellows/Jonathan Penner is sitting beside his young daughter, who's occupying herself with a coloring book; seemingly the moment the camera stops zooming out, there's a cut to Detective Streudler/Kevin McDonald, who turns around to reveal that he's holding an infant. Additionally, the long zoom lens flattens the space of the image and reduces the depth of field, resulting in a greater emphasis on the information that each shot presents--which makes sense given the time restriction placed on a half-hour television program, and is largely what makes the show so funny. In The Passing, and particularly the desert sequences, Viola is giving us the time to really contemplate a space; if shows like Arrested Development assume a reactive viewer (the desired reaction to the sequence described above being surprise and laughter), Viola's work calls for a much more active form of spectatorship.

Whatever my doubts about the spiritual themes in Viola's work, he's a major figure in the field of video art and The Passing is a exciting, multifaceted work that I don't feel I've fully exhausted even after three viewings. It's a video that takes elements which themselves are extremely familiar--the landscape of the desert, home movies, birth and death--and, through the dreamlike images in black-and-white and the austere soundtrack, makes these things seem strange and unfamiliar. As an artistic stratedgy, this implies not only a more active approach to viewing media but, by making us look at things we take for granted as if seeing them for the first time--as Viola's son is--it implies taking a more active approach to looking at the world.

Footnotes:
1. Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994 (Boston: MIT Press, 1994), page 199.
2. The image on the right is of Viola's The Quintet of the Admonished (2000).
3. Ibid, p. 199

Free Radical: The Films of Len Lye

Screened twice last week at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD, as the kids call it), this 67-minute program consisted of fifteen experimental shorts by the New Zealand animator Len Lye, made over a period of half a century (1929-79). The crowd I saw it with greeted many of the shorts with derisive laughter, which seemd to me entirely appropriate. The program guide helpfully explains, for instance, that A Colour Box (1935), the second film in the program, "was funded and distributed by John Grierson's GPO film unit on the condition that Lye include some postal messages at the end," which simply means that about three and a half minutes into this four-minute abstract film, in which Lye provides "colour accompaniment" to a piece of Cuban dance music, tacky advertising slogans for the British post office suddenly flash on the screen, at which point everyone at the screening started giggling. "In Venice, the Facists disrupted screenings because they saw it as 'degenerate' modern art," but a more accurate way of describing it would be sublime kitsch.

The program is divided in two parts by a short reel change, and apart from the unfortunate Musical Poster #1 (1940), which I talk about below, the later films are more successful--if that's the word for it--at adapting Lye's talents to commercial ends. In Colour Flight (1938), the triangular shapes that move across the screen suggest paper airplanes, so it almost seems logical that the piece would end with a plug for an airline, with the musical choices--"Honolulu Blues" by Red Nichols and a rumba piece by the Lecuona Cuban Boys--evoking an exotic destination. This seems to me a vast improvement on the film preceeding it, N. or N.W. (1937), a stilted and, in its odd film grammar, highly mannerist live-action narrative, in which a relationship is saved by a friendly postman. The program describes the ending as "a very tongue-in-cheek treatment of the sponsor's message," though the irony was lost on me. The only other live-action piece in the program, Rhythm (1957), which edits black-and-white footage of a Chrysler assembly line to African drumb beats, is at best kitsch Dziga Vertov.

The use of African music in Rhythm, Cuban rumba music in A Colour Box, Kaleidoscope (1935) and Colour Flight, and a blues track by Sonny Terry in Colour Cry (1952-53), which Lye "imagined to be the anguished cry of a runaway slave" (begging the inevitable question: why a runaway slave?), all point to an unacknowledged colonial subtext running throughout his work. His first film, Tusalava (1929), in which the shapes on the screen move between abstraction--suggesting here a world before language--and primitive representation, was inspired by an Australian Aboriginal creation myth with a string of circles on a white background, reminding one of a tapeworm, evolving into a lizard-like creature that competes with early humans (deliberately rendered in the style of a cave drawing on a black background). In The Birth of the Robot (1936), a puppet animation piece comissioned by Shell Oil, a white colonalist drives his convertible over the pyramids. After dying in the dessert, he's resurrected as a steel man; then comes the punchline: "A modern world needs modern lubricants." This dichotomy between the primitive and the modern reaches its most distilled form in the aforementioned Rhythm, where Lye presents industrial labour as a primitive expression of masculine vitality (incidentally, Chrysler hated the film).

Tusalava was originally accompanied by a live piano score by Jack Ellit, which has since been lost, so it's impossible to know how this would've changed the tone of the piece, which in its present form inspires a certain thoughtfulness in the viewer; it was virtually the only piece no one laughed at. Recently, Michael Sicinski argued that Jim Henson improved on his hero, Norman McLaren (a filmmaker inspired by Lye), by making films explicitly for children, and that criticism could just as easily apply to Lye. I learn from the program that he "was adamant that wartime films did not have to be gloomy," and Musical Poster #1 begins as pure abstraction to draw the viewer in before hitting us with a series of paranoid slogans to the effect that "the enemy" is listening to everything you say (one title reads "Don't tell him where you go," and the word 'go' is shivering with fear).

Avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage are often credited with influencing the style of commercials and music videos, either as an indication of their signifigance (1) or in order to illustrate how oppositional art becomes assimilated by the mainstream, so it's amusing to discover how the avant-garde was influenced by advertising. The man who curated the screening, Roger Horrocks, was of course at pains to present Lye as a neglected artist who really had no choice but to whore himself out, and indeed there was a period in the 1960's where he abandoned film to pursue sculpture (a body of work of which I know nothing), though if it were true that every filmmaker had to sell-out just to get ther films made in the first place, I probably would've outgrown my interest in cinema a long time ago. (2) Even in Free Radicals (1958), a black-and-white abstract piece where Lye's scratchings on the emulsion suggest lightning and rain (to my tastes, his greatest work), which doesn't advertise anything, I can't say I felt very challenged by it. How then to explain the enthusiasm of P. Sitney Adams, Brakhage and Jonas Mekas for his work (all three are quoted in the program)? As a classmate of mine put it, the films were probably good for their time.

Footnotes:
1. I haven't seen Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2006), Mary Jordan's feature-length documentary about the maker of Flaming Creatures (1963), though according to the reviews, it credits Smith with being a major influence on mainstream figures like Fellini, John Waters and Andy Warhol.
2. Pauline Kael was an expert at rationalizing the artistic compromises inherent in big-budget Hollywood filmmaking. Of Hud (1963), she argued that the conflict between the desire of the filmmakers to make a noble, liberal-minded message picture and the masses' hunger for a nihlistic western was integral to the film's "Americanness."

Brand Upon the Brain!

Guy Maddin's career has two distinct phases. I've never been a huge fan of his first three features, Tales From the Gimli Hospital (1988), Archangel (1990) and Careful (1992), and I haven't seen his fourth, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), though by reputation it's his worst film and was followed by a three-year hiatus where his future as a filmmaker was uncertain. The turning point in his career was The Heart of the World (2000), a six-minute short commissioned by the Toronto Film Festival that catapulted Maddin from cult figure to international auteur.

All of Maddin's films are pastiches of silent and early sound cinema. Careful, a "pro-repression" Mountain epic set in a village where the characters have to whisper in order to prevent an avalanche, appears to have been inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light (1932), complete with a blond, blue-eyed cast of characters with names like "Johann" and "Sigleinde." Admittedly, this film looks a lot better on second and third viewing (one nice touch: when the characters throw a party, they put sheep skin over the triangle-shaped windows to dampen the noise), though it wasn't until The Heart of the World that Maddin developed a restless, stuttering style of montage to match the delirium of his stories.

It's worth noting that, with the exception of The Saddest Music in the World (2003), none of Maddin's major films have gone through the usual funding channels for Canadian cinema. Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary (2002), his film of a Winnipeg ballet company's adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel, was commissioned for television; Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) was originally a gallery installation where viewers could observe the piece through one of three peep holes; and My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005), Isabella Rossellini's tribute to her father, Roberto Rossellini, was made for the Documentary Channel. Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) was produced by The Film Company, a Seattle-based organization that provides support for filmmakers (as opposed to Telefilm, which merely produces scripts), meaning that Maddin had the green-light even before he had a concept, rather than having to struggle through a long pre-production period as he no doubt would on a Telefilm production. Since 2000, Maddin has worked consistently at a time when the careers of other Canadian filmmakers have either floundered (Denis Villeneuve) or gone of the tracks (David Cronenberg) (1), and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to make a connection between his vigorous productivity and the sustained vitality of his recent films.

I've only seen Brand Upon the Brain! once, so it's too soon to say whether this is Maddin's best work to-date, although such giddy hyperbole seems perfectly appropriate given the spirit of the film. Still, I feel obliged to qualify my following remarks as a preliminary stab at interpretation. Also, this essay contains spoilers, so if you haven't seen the film yet, stop reading here.

In terms of narrative and form, Brand Upon the Brain! feels like a companion piece with Cowards Bend the Knee: both have anatomically-themed titles, heroes named Guy Maddin and, apart from the off-screen narration by Isabella Rossellini in Brand Upon the Brain!, both are non-verbal though far from silent. When Mother/Gretchen Krich wants to call Guy/Sullivan Brown and Sis/Maya Lawson for dinner using her aerophone (a device invented by Father/Todd Moore that allows two people who love each-other to communicate over vast distances), the noise it makes is scratchy to the point of being unintelligable, reminding one of the teachers on the Charlie Brown TV show.

The title of the film refers to the strange puncture marks on the children at the orphanage run by Mother out of a lighthouse. World famous teen detective Wendy Hale/Katherine Scharhon arrives on the island to investiage, arrousing the desires of both Guy and Sis. Finally it's revealed that Father has developed a technique for extracting nectarine from the cerebral cortex in children, a youth potion that acts to reverse the aging process in Mother. A creepy sequence where Father extracts Sis' nectarine suggests an incestuous relationship; deciding she's had enough, Sis murders Father with a butcher knife and later banishes Mother from the island (the story is told in flashbacks with an older Guy/Erik Maahs repainting the lighthouse in anticipation of Mother's return).

Although Heather enjoyed the film overall, she objected to the treatment of women as either nectarine-slurping psychos or sex-crazed hoochies, and while this seems to me a perfectly valid response, I think the central conflict between Mother and Sis is meant to represent the struggle between repression and animal lust with Guy caught in the middle (a not unsimilar mother-daughter-younger brother dynamic can be found in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous from 2000). Mother's need for "nectarine at any cost" is linked with a desire to return to an infantile, sexually undifferentiated state, while Sis' attraction to Wendy (who, in the interest of the case, assumes the identity of her brother, Chance) is seen in terms of personal autonomy. In addition to the aerophone, Mother uses the lighthouse as a means of keeping tabs on her children, and after she's banished from the island, Sis establishes a "reign of terror" (the connection to the French revolution is so obvious it's barely worth mentioning). Wendy, in pretending to be Chance, constructs herself as the subject in her lesbian flirtation with Sis. In order to prevent Sis from discovering her true gender, Wendy agrees to kiss her only while wearing her Kissing Gloves, but Sis turns the tables on her when she gets ahold of Wendy's undressing gloves ("Those gloves could lead me to paradise... Or cast me into hell!").

Maddin's decision to name the protagonists of this film and Cowards Bend the Knee after himself lends both a self-mythologizing quality. (While I haven't seen his latest film, which premiered at the Toronto film festival last month, the title--My Winnipeg (2007)--seems to say it all.) In the earlier film, Guy Maddin/Darcy Fehr was a hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons who abandoned his pregnant girlfriend for another woman, and while the younger Guy in Brand Upon the Brain! is often adorable ("Once again, this was too much for Guy" a title card explains after one of his periodic fainting spells), self-critique creeps into the film through the bookending sequences, in which Guy is no less eager to please Mother as an adult than he was a child, and in both films, self-deprecation expands into a larger critique of over-masculinity (Cowards Bend the Knee) and repression (this film).

Although he's routinely praised for his atmospheric lighting and furious montage, Maddin is less often recognized for his work with sound--perhaps because his hommages to silent cinema discourage viewers from listening too closely to his sound mix, and I'm as guilty of this as anyone. It was only after the screening that Heather pointed out to me that the splooshing sound Guy makes while painting is remarkably similar to the sucking noise of Father extracting the necatrine from Sis and the crunching sound Mother makes when eating Neddie/Kellan Larson, the most adorable of the orphans--an aural leitmotif linking all three activities. And I've already alluded to the role sounds plays in Careful, where the whole film is about the danger of speaking too loudly.

Brand Upon the Brain! is the first Guy Maddin film shot outside Winnipeg, and it seems somehow appropriate that the best Canadian film I've seen in ages (with the possible exceptions of Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee, The Saddest Music in the World and My Dad Is 100 Years Old) was actually shot in Washington state. I enjoyed Atom Egoyan's British-Canadian co-production Where the Truth Lies (2005) for the novelty of seeing a thirty-million dollar Egoyan film and for one of Kevin Bacon's slimiest performances, but on second viewing I find it far less impressive, and in general, I tend to prefer Egoyan's original screenplays--Next of Kin (1984), Speaking Parts (1989), Exotica (1994) and Ararat (2002) being my personal favorites--to his more expensive literary adaptations. Given the current climate, which I addressed in an earlier blog, what little talent Canada has to begin with will surely go elsewhere, and I'm glad there are alternative avenues for personal filmmakers like Maddin (2) (Orson Welles did some of his best work in exile). When Hollywood makes terrible films, one can say "No one's forcing you to see it," but in Canada there's always the issue of the public money that's being squandered. I think once we give up this stupid notion that there is such a thing as Canadian culture, we can see our domestic cinema for what it is: a government charity that exists merely to prop up various unions.

Footnotes:
1. I admired Cronenberg's American-made A History of Violence (2005), which--unlike The Departed (2006)--wanted to be funny, but seeing him direct a perfectly conventional script about the Russian mob with a straight face, as he does in Eastern Promises (2007), makes one wonder why he wanted to make this film in the first place. I'll concede that it's flawlessly executed, like a child colouring inside the lines, but from the director of Videodrome (1983) and Crash (1996), I expect more.
2. The screening of Brand Upon the Brain! was preceeded by a series of shorts from the Winnipeg Film Group that leave one with the impression that Maddin is the only person in Manitoba with any talent at all. If I have to sit through another humorless experimental short of some one's old Super 8 home movies, using the same scratch and dye techniques that Norman McLaren developed in the 1940's, I'm gonna go postal. The guy who curated the shorts didn't even have the balls to show up, they were that fucking bad.

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.