rather have the blues

©2013 James Clark

While working on a probe of Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man, my attention would sometimes drift over to the Steve McQueen film which I had puzzled over for a long time, namely Le Mans (1971). There was about the dignified isolation of the protagonists of both films, as introduced by a brand of cinematography vastly out of step with movie commerce, the oddest and thereby most compelling of kinships. McQueen, sometimes referred to as, “the King of Cool,” was in fact as much an athlete as an entertainer; and, as we know, Rodriguez in his prime did a lot more digging than being digged. McQueen’s sporting efforts were in the area of car and motorcycle racing, a far more spectacular and homage-attracting dynamic than that of cleaning out basements.

Read More

© 2013 by James Clark

We all like to maintain that rock and roll can and does lift us into a corridor of joyous action. We’ve all been carried, by instances of its musical dynamics, into dance—yes—but something more. Embrace it or not, we’ve all been touched by way of that “music industry,” by a glimpse of what has never been cogently accounted for in the guiding features of our lives.

In fact, there is, in the musical tradition preceding rock and roll, a chronicling (rather than direct delivery) of the same mystery, though palmed off as a physiological and sociological stage, to be outgrown. In Albert Hague and Arnold Horwitt’s song, “Young and Foolish” (for the 1954 Broadway musical, Plain and Fancy), we are met with,

“Young and foolish

Why is it wrong to be?

Young and foolish

We haven’t long to be

Soon enough the carefree days

The sunlit days go by.

Soon enough the bluebird has to fly.

We were foolish

One day we fell in love.

Now we wonder,

What were we thinking of?

Smiling in the sunlight,

Laughing in the rain,

I wish that we were young and foolish again.”

Read More

© 2013 by James Clark

The partnership of filmmaker, Robert Bresson, and artist-at-large, Jean Cocteau, on behalf of bringing to light (in 1944, during the darkness of the German Occupation of France) a scenario loosely based upon a novelistic reflection about intentional freedom and material determinism, by the eighteenth-century philosopher, Denis Diderot (an exponent of the Heraclitean notion of dynamics as the essence of matter), has often been noted as somehow significant. But it tends to be eclipsed by citing how different from one another these artists were (only, apparently, seeing fit to tolerate each other for the sake of subtly sticking it to the Nazis). The austerity of Bresson’s work subsequent to the offering in question, namely, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), seems to settle it, in most minds, that this would be a chic aberration (with Cocteau’s screenplay the culprit), a cracking good melodrama, but bereft of the profundity of our auteur’s serious output. My response to this film wants to point out that, on the contrary, this honey of a performance design carries as deep and painful a sting as any of the more famous, iconic Bressonian marvels.

Read More

(c) 2013 by James Clark

My initial motive in turning—from a series of films suffused with Bressonian concerns, about misplaced or over-the-top mojo—to Michelangelo Antonioni’s, La Notte, was to bring into play a more intimate, close-up range of the phenomenon. Bressonian elicitations tend to spotlight chronic malignancy with slight countervailing rallies (or no rallies, but rallies being implied by egregious debilitation [a specialty of Michael Haneke]). After several months of investigation in that vein, I thought it was time to make clear that another major filmmaker had staked out a significantly different approach to overdrive and underdrive. The films most characteristic of Antonioni magnify the substructures of intent in such a way as to reveal a perpetual oscillation between peaks and valleys. Thus La Notte begins with a bedridden, terminal cancer patient (locked into disfigurement), while in the room next to him there is a young girl who amorously embraces passers-by. The first patient has two visitors, who don’t comprehend how lucky they are to be in the swim, and not like The Paperboy’s Charlotte,

Read More

© 2013 by James Clark

This past year has brought a rich array of films that tackle from various angles the challenge of doing justice to one’s sensibility. In paying homage to these works, I would often recall that past master of presenting the transcendent glow of finite intent, namely, Michelangelo Antonioni. It’s time, I think, to reacquaint ourselves with this consummate, deluxe designer of haunting cinematic anticipation. With so many and varied practitioners in the field now, the brave and virtually solitary researches Antonioni dared to put into play can function as a welcome—even necessary—draft of extremely quiet, extremely direct traction for a métier surging into Surrealist extravaganza (often provoked by Antonioni’s contemporary, the sombre and formidably equipped Dadaist, Robert Bresson.)

Read More

© 2013 by James Clark

The Hunger Games is a lavishly and subtly eccentric film. It bursts into view for us in the course of setting in relief the function of the work of Robert Bresson. As recently embraced here, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs also speaks to the urgency of dialogue with Bresson. It goes to cataclysmic lengths to get some blood moving in Bresson’s cadaverous discoveries about resentment and bathos as ravaging world history.

Read More

© 2013 by James Clark

Sitting in a young man’s car, parked at the Florida prison where the man she wants to marry but has not as yet met resides on Death Row, Charlotte Bless (her last name perhaps a drawled distortion of Bliss) asks him, “Why aren’t you in college?” He informs her, “I was… I was a swimmer…” She’s delighted with this, and exclaims, “I’s a swimmer! Swim like a mermaid!” This, what some might call, lack of due perspective upon rational training, seems all of a piece with her having told the boy, Jack, earlier in the little vigil, “Everyone who comes into the area beyond normal relationships has these powers… telepathic powers… Hillary and I have that kind of connection.” (Earlier that day he had told her, “I do write…” [she looking for his Pulitzer Prize winning older brother, Ward, who had agreed to do some muck raking on behalf of having the conviction overturned], and she had, as she did later, piped up, “So do I…I write letters [petitioning on behalf of Hillary]… I’m pretty good…” [But not as good with rational folks [and their “normal relationships”] as with the likes of pen-pal and alligator hunter, Hillary; on the other hand, she could ring bells with a fellow-showboat like Ward].) A bit later, shooed away by a prison guard, she puts out the story, “This boy’s daddy’s in there, and we want to send him good vibrations…” (It’s 1963, and canny Ward has already made a killing doing Civil Rights promotions in a Miami newspaper, far from the uncanny alligator swamps that lubricate Moat County—that term evoking a palace where, for an array of beauties and beasts, it’s always Showtime.)

Read More

© 2013 by James Clark

A film calling itself “Love,” (Amour) can disarm, simply by that trope, any comprehensive notice of shortfall in its protagonists. If the latter are a cute old couple in distress, played by much revered actors, any critical edge tends to melt away completely. A foreground that seems to convey incontestable soundness, while actually concealing the film’s truth, is a compositional standby of the films of Robert Bresson, whose work our auteur, Michael Haneke, cherishes. So it is, when the husband, Georges, listening in their salon to his invalid wife, Anne, exuding long-suffering irony in reading from the unlearned domain of her horoscope for that day—“Shake off the rust…Get your mojo back…”—curls his lecture-fluent lip and complicitly pronounces, “Nonsense!” we must constrain confirming upon his liberal-humanist contempt for mojo that conquest over emotive carnality he and his ilk have celebrated again and again.

Read More

© 2013 by James Clark

For a filmmaker whom virtually no one knows nowadays, nor cares to know, Robert Bresson elicits remarkable agitation in print. His elegant cinematography does, of course, gain the respect of those for whom such elegance matters; but that cannot account for the worshipful tributes sent his way. As with Heidegger, the welter of theological cues emanating from his work assures an ardent and erudite quorum sensing that work’s importance in general but slipping over the matter of the specifics of the accomplishment. Moreover, though Bresson produced very few films, those that did surface unfailingly brought into play protagonists fascinating (albeit sometimes creepily) in the dire straits to which they were exposed. With the exception of Balthazar and Mouchette (representing a period of reflection upon innocents in a world of vicious corruption), the figures to the fore exhibit self-imposed enslavement to, if not unviable, alarmingly unbalanced courses of action. Hosannas, therefore, directed toward the eponymous hero of A Man Escaped (1956)—accounting for a goodly percentage of the raptures brought forth to burnish an obscure career—have to be unplugged in any appreciation of that truly magnificent (but far from simplistic) film, very much, as it happens, in the vein of fathoming protagonistic imbalance.

Read More

© 2013 by James Clark

    We can always count on Quentin Tarantino to challenge us with a daring film. Hitherto the dare concerned digesting heavy odds weighing upon integrity massively at odds with those solaces and supports which have served for thousands of years. Lurking within a foreground of conflict so fulsome as to convey an Armageddon of deliverance against adversaries failing to attain to human stature, the films prior to Django Unchained (2012) have eked out a substratum of intimations of expansiveness soundly crushed by inertia of one’s own sensibility as augmented by thus twisted billions violently cleaving to mores conjured from out of disinclination to get real. Tarantino’s restless vision has, with the movie up for grabs these days, proceeded to invoke a whole new territory of daring, apropos of managing not to be crushed by the juggernaut of world history. This he accomplishes in rendering for our consideration an adjunct of cancerous tradition, namely, the institution of slavery, specifically in its form of Black slavery in the early years of America.

Read More