Spring Breakers (2013) A Film by Harmony Korine

At various junctures in American history, since the inception of the national phenomenon around the late 18th century, the so-called "American Dream" has meant radically different things to different generations. Here's a cursory timeline: originating as a concept associated with frontier life, westward expansion, and Manifest Destiny, the catch phrase then took on a new dimension with the coming of a societal infrastructure. At that point, the dream had something to do with the possibility of being free, of living one's own life. For immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, this meant a chance at a steady job in an urban center. For slave laborers, the dream rested entirely on the hope of some future sense of equality. As the building blocks of capitalism took hold at the dawn of the 20th century and led to the full scale blossoming of a competitive market economy, the concept of upward mobility came to prominence. All of a sudden, freedom was taken for granted; the possibility of ascending a social hierarchy held even greater value. The American Dream, evidently, is a liquid concept, always vulnerable to the vagaries of history, politics, economy, geography, etc.

Flashing forward to Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, we see the national nomenclature bandied about in a way that would leave Abraham Lincoln reeling in confusion. In the film's kaleidoscopic reverie of 21st century debauchery, the elasticity of the American Dream is manipulated according to the perversions of a popular culture hungry to distort the ethos as a way to justify its own pursuits. Before launching into an ecstatic lecture about his abundance of meaningless material goods, a corn-rowed, vice-loving money-maker known as Alien (James Franco) posits that "This is the fuckin' American dream." Translation: freshly sexualized skinny girls in neon bikinis, automatic weapons, pricy body spray, and blue Kool-Aid are the American Dream. Fair enough, insofar as these factors belong to this particular individual's definition of upward mobility. Without hesitation, however, he mutters his next statement, which is of even greater significance: "This is my fuckin' dream, y'all." The flippancy with which he equates a historically loaded concept with an individual interpretation of it is indicative of the larger solipsism that defines the twentysomething way of life sketched out, engaged with, and abstracted in Korine's latest, and it's also the lens through which the film chooses to evaluate this generational alcove, for better or worse.

At its core, Spring Breakers has a relatively formulaic plot: four naïve college girls – Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachel Korine) – want nothing more than to attend Spring Break in Tampa Bay, so they rob a diner to muscle up the funds. When they arrive at this assumed oasis their idealized expectations are simultaneously met and complicated. It's a coming of age story, in a nutshell. Korine's interests, however, have less to do with storytelling than with generational anthropology, a penchant that becomes increasingly clear whenever one of the girls – first Faith, then Cotty – grows disillusioned with the vacation and Korine elects not to follow them back home but rather to remain submerged in the beachfront festivities. The film identifies Tampa Bay as a locus of contemporary pop culture's hopes and dreams, and thus the girls who remain there by the conclusion of the plot are representative of the film's idea of individuals who most fully embrace their own willfully alternate version of the American Dream.



On the surface, Spring Breakers' version of Tampa Bay has a slick, weird sort of beauty. This is one aspect of the film that Korine has been arrogantly vocal about, but while his repeated efforts to align his film's aesthetic with Miami Vice (2006) come off as more than a little puffed-up, he is accurate in some regards. Neon lights, casually captured skylines of murky pastels, and figures dwarfed by minimalist panoramas are all cosmetic parallels with Mann's crime-ridden beach world, but in all other respects the film's primary visual reference point is the modern hip hop music video consumed by the same sort of alcohol-and-marijuana-fueled adolescents who once valued MTV's comprehensive coverage of Spring Break locales as the full expression of the zeitgeist. Vibrant colors, endless partying without a clear sense of the occasion, gratuitous Genital Angles, cheap beer cans, and anonymous body-grinding – all committed to high-definition video with a ridiculously high frame rate and paper-thin depth of field – constitute the film's frenzied look. Korine assimilates this familiar style and subject matter to get on the same wavelength as the pop culture he's representing, only to then infiltrate the underlying misogyny, racism, and soullessness of such imagery.

The girls' uncontrollable desire to go on spring break emerges out of a lifetime of being exposed to this eye-catching frivolity. For them, the American Dream means being able to attend this 24-hour party every year, to "find [themselves]" and "never leave." Of course, the onus to recognize the absurdity of this ideal is on them, but the film nonetheless formulates their integration into this milieu as that of a victimizer/victimized relationship. In one of Korine's more heavy-handed gestures, repeated shots of the girls huddling together as if piglets gravitating towards their mother's teet – as well as the intermittent motif of emotionally detached phone calls to mothers and grandmothers – creates an aura of innocence and purity around these characters. The presence of girly-girl regalia (hot pink bikinis, hair dye, and nail polish), too, not to mention the proliferation of Britney Spears on the soundtrack, suggests a hyperextension of premature adolescence, a specter of 1990's/early 2000's cultural furnishing dangling over into the present.

Korine contrasts this sense of childishness with a looming danger never fully grasped for its deadliness. Especially when Franco's character enters the plot, the film brims with cocaine, marijuana, binge drinking, near-rapes, and a plethora of assault weapons. (The sound of a machine gun being cocked reverberates at nearly every scene transition in the film's second half.) Spring Breakers' best sequence features Alien serenading the girls with Spears' "Everytime" on his pearl white, open-air grand piano, an awkwardly touching moment that Korine intercuts with shots of the main characters flailing around machine guns at an afternoon rager as if party streamers. The film continues to deal in similar dialectical maneuvers throughout, but never with quite such provocative gusto.



Naturally, once Alien is introduced as an exotic Other and a representation of the kind of absolute pleasure-seeking carelessness these girls aspire to, Faith, a religious believer who refuses to participate in the robbery that sets off the narrative, bails, while Candy soaks his macho bullshit up. (There's a not-too-subtle trend here that has to do with character naming...) At this point in the film, the remaining girls willingly and uncritically submit to borderline violent masculine domination, but it's also the point at which the film drifts increasingly from an ostensible reality, using more and more cues (a layering of interior monologue and exterior sound, the growing melodrama of the plot, absurdist set pieces, even more menacing neon) to imply the fracturing of the real. As Korine portrays a surreal version of the present moment, he also keeps an eye ahead, conjuring up a nightmare of the sadder future that may await these girls if this way of life persists. In this framework, the film's final scene – introduced by a surround-sound Franco prescriptively intoning "it's all a dream, y'all" – is the harrowing net result of this descent, a garish massacre echoing at once the racial division of the Civil War and the bloodbath climax of Alien's beloved Scarface (1983). If Korine's fanciful omen winds up being at all accurate, the American Dream will have undergone a near-complete reversal of its initial promises. Uses of freedom can be dangerous. Deadly lines can be drawn between people in the name of social climbing.

Spring Breakers’ most ingenious ploy is its use of Disney starlets, products of the same pop cultural machine that Korine lays bare for all its soul-crushing vapidity. The double-edged irony here – of plummeting towards empty exploitation both diegetically and non-diegetically – is never off the film’s mind. In premonitory fashion, Hudgens has embraced her character's bad girl persona offscreen since working on the film, while Gomez is supposedly emphatically "NOT Trying to Shed Her Disney Image" (pardon the source), and to the extent that these particular post-release reports foretell the paths these young actresses will take in the grander scheme of things, Korine's film comes across as almost supernaturally tapped-in to the zeitgeist. Indeed, Spring Breakers may find its place in the canon less as an especially great film (though it is a defiantly good and unusual film, at least in the context of other current multiplex titles) than as a strangely fascinating cultural phenomenon, a movie that – like last year's Magic Mike – hijacks a hot topic not for cynical cash-grabbing but rather for genuine curiosity. Korine has succeeded in making a film that mirrors the flashy surfaces of his subject while arousing little of the vicarious pleasure associated with such an approach.

Fantasies of Restoring Order: On China Gate and The Ugly American

In the context of Hollywood Vietnam War films, Samuel Fuller’s China Gate (1957) and George Englund’s The Ugly American (1963) represent two distinct poles: the former is a B-movie less concerned with social and political statements than with melodrama and spectacle while the latter purports to be an important, liberal-minded Big Statement movie about the political involvement of the United States in Southeast Asian affairs. Unsurprisingly, given Hollywood’s historical patterns for representing foreign Others, both films, though superficially dissimilar, spring from the same mindset and ultimately function in nearly identical ways. Erecting simple-minded dichotomies of good vs. evil (literalized as Not Communist vs. Communist) and moral behavior vs. barbaric indifference (diplomacy vs. War), they effectively trivialize the realities of the American involvement in Vietnam, reducing the particular experiences of Vietnamese people to broad melodramatic strokes while opportunistically distorting American political and militaristic action. By virtue of their different stylistic and narrative approaches, however, they take different paths to produce this problematic effect.

***


China Gate opens with a quasi-documentary montage parroting an American newsreel that hastily summarizes the French involvement in Indochina around the time US troops began infiltrating the region. Strikingly contradictory in tone to the rest of the film (though the movie as a whole is no stranger to tonal inconsistency, as the musical interludes will attest), this expository prologue is ostensibly designed to lay a foundation of verisimilitude to the forthcoming narrative, as if to indicate that the ensuing events will be located within a very real historical milieu. Of course, this quickly reveals itself as a patently absurd concept. As the montage settles into staged footage of a young Vietnamese boy and his dog being pursued by a bloodthirsty Communist and the narrator remarks upon the dangerous divide among the Vietnamese people, the speed with which the gulf between the supposedly authentic and the melodramatic is leaped is extraordinary. Fuller’s attempt to inject pathos atop journalistic authenticity is clumsy to say the least, and it momentarily, if not permanently, derails the film’s contrived sense of authority on its subject matter.

Shortly thereafter, China Gate attempts to extinguish the ludicrousness of its opening minutes by applying a sense of “grittiness that is generally absent from polished Hollywood high-budget films [of the 50’s]” and introducing its subject: Sgt. Brock (Gene Barry), an American mercenary in a multinational group recruited to destroy a Communist arms depot near the Chinese border (Gordon 3). Having abandoned the Asian son he had with a Eurasian ally named Lucky Legs (Angie Dickinson), Brock is identified as a racist early on and thus the spectator’s alignment with him is challenged. This raises the central narrative question of the film: will Brock overcome his racism or will he be defined by it? It goes without saying that, because Brock is an American and because the film is “less about Cold War politics per se than about the American culture of which they were a reflex,” either outcome will be reflective of national identity (Berg and James). Therefore, in order to stabilize the spectator’s moral alignment with the subject, the film will have to present Brock righting his wrongs.

Because racism is raised as a narrative problem, tolerance is formulated as a virtuous quality, making Lucky Legs the film’s core embodiment of the good and moral. Communism, meanwhile, is presented as a kind of accepted evil; its sympathizers are either barbaric (eating dogs, or, worse, little children), scheming (luring the soldiers into deadly traps), or prone to base impulses. In this light, although Lucky Legs lives up to her name as a woman capable of using her sexuality as a tool for manipulation (one prurient image that scans the length of her body is presumably designed to illustrate the visceral effect she has on those she manipulates), the fact that she is doing so in the service of tolerance and anti-Communism allows her to retain an essential goodness. Such a characterization is what leads to an impression of China Gate as “violent anti-communist propaganda" (Rev. of China Gate).



It becomes clear that in order to stabilize the spectator’s alignment with the subject in the context of this starkly delineated moral universe, Brock must assume the positive qualities of Lucky Legs. As is typical of Hollywood melodrama, the film’s narrative problem is coded into a heterosexual romance. As such, Brock and Lucky Legs’ near-constant bickering about vaguely outlined romantic woes and their controversial offspring through the first two acts of the film clarifies that the narrative problem is unresolved; conversely, when Brock climactically apologizes to Lucky Legs for his behavior – a move that kick starts the spectacular action of the film’s final act – all order is restored. As Marsha Gordon puts it, “interrogation and violence almost inevitably climax in an acting out of desire between men and women” (Gordon 6). No matter that Brock’s apology seems fueled as much by erotic lust as by self-realization; the lasting impression, in a narrative sense, is that he has accepted the errors of his ways in the first two acts of the movie. Through the convenient wonders of plot contrivance, he is now tolerant of his Asian son. He has successfully moved “between the spheres of the hyper-masculine and the heterosexual/domestic,” a trait that defines Fuller’s combat films of the 1950's (Gordon 1).

Despite this seemingly uplifting reversal, however, the resolution of China Gate also must offer a casualty. The death of Lucky Legs at the Communist arms depot where the film spends its final half-hour is a way of cementing the evils of Communism and punishing the subject for his wrongdoings while simultaneously reaffirming a sense of American patriarchal virtue, and by extension stabilizing the spectator’s moral alignment with the protagonist. Brock’s escape from the Communists in an airplane is a literalization of the higher realm of understanding to which he has ascended, and the concluding shot of him walking away from the Vietnamese rubble clutching the hand of his Asian son is – notwithstanding the decrepit scenery and the somber Nat King Cole score – an emblem of victory against Communist evil, racism, and wrongheaded attitudes in general, as well as the culmination of “the making of a ‘real’ man and a ‘real’ father from the scraps of a war-torn soldier“ (Gordon 13).

***


Like China Gate, The Ugly American – based loosely off of a novel by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer – also immediately compromises its bid to be taken seriously, this time by cloaking South Vietnam as the fictional “Sarkhan.” The presence of Marlon Brando, the proliferation of political dialogue, the integration of drawn-out, “frighteningly realistic” Vietnamese riot scenes, and the very fact that the film is adapted from a distinguished novel are all indicative of director George Englund’s aspirations to seriousness. However, this odd re-titling of a geographical region comes across as a critical red flag in assessing the film’s mark of authenticity (Rev. of The Ugly American). Looked at another way, this slight dodging of reality may in fact be an even more elevated stab by Englund to assign sociopolitical importance to his movie, as if subscribing to the idea that by sidestepping specificity the material gains additional, universal relevance.

Driving the film's talky, didactic drama is Ambassador Harrison Carter MacWhite (Brando), a mustachioed scholar whose smartly articulated stance of racial and political tolerance in an early courtroom scene suggests a liberal compassion that is complicated once he is sent to Southeast Asia as a diplomat to assist in the building of a “Freedom Road” to Sarkhan’s northern border. There, he is confronted with a complexity amongst the Sarkhanese citizenry that not even he expected, and it is this profusion of viewpoints and allegiances that ultimately forces him to fall back on knee-jerk hostility and ignorance. In a more daring move than the A-B character trajectory in China Gate, The Ugly American begins by presenting a protagonist who appears sophisticated, morally exceptional, and kindhearted only to show him descending into unflattering qualities when his intellectual authority is challenged in new surroundings.

J. Hoberman summarizes the film’s title as an American who, upon entering a foreign country, either “exaggerate[s] the mindless conformism and conspicuous consumption that presumably characterized life at home—or else they ‘isolate themselves,’ take refuge, as a turtle retreats into a shell.” MacWhite falls into the first category of this definition. As his “sublime ignorance of local realities” reveals itself, he dons increasingly prim and well-tailored suits, gets escorted in limos around Sarkhan, and returns to his hotel to spit objectifying one-liners at his wife. When a rioting Vietnamese populace storms MacWhite’s limo at the airport in the latter half of the film, it acts as the most crushing blow to the character at this low point in his progression. It’s also, given the scene’s documentary veneer (hand-held cameras, diegetic sound), a moment of recognition of such an obvious manifestation of mounting local anger that it steers MacWhite towards a desire to uncover the truth, to more comprehensively understand the Vietnamese political situation.



Of course, the film assumes that this desire alone is enough for the spectator to begin feeling sympathetic again towards the protagonist. MacWhite uses a far less hostile and more inquisitive tone in his second extended conversation with Deong (Eiji Okada), an old Sarkhanese friend who is now fighting for national independence from Imperialist efforts (a position that MacWhite conflates with Communist sympathies). He also spends the final act of the film marked by an expression of puppy-dog innocence, a face that screams apologetic compassion. These surface characteristics simplistically pry the audience’s sympathy back towards MacWhite even as his founding dramatic question (is Deong a Communist or not?) and his defining narrative goal (to build a “freedom road”) crystallize his narrow-minded approach to diplomacy throughout the film.

Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, the progressive authors of the novel, sought out George Englund according to the understanding that he was a director who was “dedicated, skilled and who knew something of the world outside of Southern California,” but The Ugly American’s final stab at a critique of American ignorance is only a small gesture towards the hope for a deeper domestic understanding of foreign affairs, not exactly the parting gift of an educated, critical activist. The authors also briefly describe the finished product as “a colorful and very forceful movie,” and their euphemistic one-line review gets at the core of The Ugly American’s offenses: it forces a statement upon the viewer about global awareness and tolerance (which MacWhite ultimately embodies by the film’s conclusion) without sufficiently thinking these positions through (Burdick and Lederer).

WORKS CITED

-Berg, Rick and James, David E. “College course file: Representing the Vietnam War.” Journal of Film and Video. Volume 41. Issue 4 (Winter 1989): 60-74. Print.
-Burdick, Eugene and Lederer, William. “The Ugly American Revisited.” Saturday Evening Post 4 May 1963: Vol. 236. Issue 17. P. 78-81. Print.
-Gordon, Marsha. ““What Makes a Girl Who Looks Like That Get Mixed Up in Science?” Gender in Sam Fuller’s Films of the 1950s.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Volume 17. Issue 1 (2000): 1-17. Print.
-Hoberman, J. “Believe It or Not: J. Hoberman on the Ugly American.” Artforum April 1991: 27-28. Print.
-Horton, Robert. “Sam’s Place.” Film Comment. Volume 32. Issue 3 (May-June 1996): 4, 7-9. Print.
-Rev. of China Gate, by Samuel Fuller. Monthly Film Bulletin. Volume 24. Issue 276 (1957): p. 87. Print.
-Rev. of The Ugly American, by George Englund. Variety Movie Reviews. Issue 1 (1963): p. 101. Print.

Like Someone in Love (2012) A Film by Abbas Kiarostami

Not unlike Abbas Kiarostami's previous film, Certified Copy, the director's latest, Like Someone in Love, hinges on one character's casual misunderstanding of the identity of another. But where Certified Copy uses this slip-up as a way to plunge into an extended play of artifice, all the while moving deeper and deeper into a realm outside the "real," Like Someone in Love allows the repercussions of this act to percolate into an everyday setting. In this film's version of Tokyo, role-playing (conscious or unconscious) is part of the texture of life, not an elaborate self-reflexive game imposed upon the setting by the filmmaker. Yet while the two films are ostensibly after different things on the surface, they're flip sides of the same coin: the interrogation into the concept of representation in life and art teased out by Certified Copy lays the groundwork for Like Someone in Love's drama of subtly shifting characters forging increasingly melodramatic scenarios within their own quotidian routines.

To a large degree the film's thematic concerns and off-kilter mood are crystallized in its first shot, already a subject of repeat fascination for critics. What at first glance resembles a merely functional establishing shot of an upscale bar in Tokyo gradually reveals, through the shot's lengthy duration, its destabilizing geometry and startling absence of a specific human subject. There are plenty of people in the shot but close inspection proves that none of them are responsible for the intimately recorded female voice heard on the soundtrack, exclaiming of some partially revealed backstory of romantic frustration. The assumption, then, must be that this is a shot from the girl's perspective, but when a woman who has previously been jabbering on the right-hand side of the composition suddenly nudges her way into the foreground of the frame looking slightly to the right of the camera's gaze to start talking to this off-screen character, suspicions of POV are extinguished. The scene eventually settles into a relatively standard shot-reverse-shot setup, but this uncanny reordering of information throws us immediately off balance. Confusion over the source of our perception and the subject of our gaze, as well as over the very contours of the physical space, is a fitting foundation for this study of lives tossed askew by false impressions and vague resemblances.

The source of the mysterious offscreen voice is Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a female escort called upon by an anonymous member of her agency to keep a lonely retired professor named Takashi (Tadashi Okuno) company on this particular evening. Because her grandmother is temporarily in the city, Akiko tries her best to dodge the gig, but her boss shows little sympathy, arguing that an abbreviated visit would be worse than no visit at all. Akiko is frustrated by her boss's pushiness, and in a significant editorial gesture, Kiarostami holds on a reaction shot as her shouted rebuttal – heard rather than seen – stirs bar patrons from their conversations; order has momentarily been disrupted due to a breach of social cool. By showing only the roomful of people, Kiarostami emphasizes that the response to Akiko's fleeting breakdown of self-control holds more weight than the act itself. Throughout Like Someone in Love, such a seemingly minuscule violation of the uninterrupted flow of life is exactly what the characters try desperately to avoid. Revelations of truth, displays of vulnerability, and honest expressions of emotion are to be brushed under the rug.



Feeling embarrassed about raising her voice, Akiko then gives in to the agency's callous exploitation. Thus, the drama ventures out of the bar and into a taxi – a familiar social arrangement in Kiarostami's world – where the film's most damning suppression of feeling takes place. In the process of listening back to progressively less hopeful voicemails scattered throughout the day from her grandmother, Akiko spots her waiting patiently beneath a public statue by the train station, the camera's angle just outside the window exposing the narrow but impervious barrier separating the two by no more than 50 yards. Akiko begins crying. She asks her driver to circle the block a second time. She looks away. The car continues on. It's a devastating moment that permeates the remainder of the film with a sharp feeling of loss, coming about as close to outright melodrama as Kiarostami will go.

The fluid choreography between public and private personas established by this dense opening act is taken a step further by the subsequent progressions of the narrative. When Akiko arrives at her destination after a nap, a long shot from her client's window shows her sandwiched between satin shades emerging from her taxi exhausted and distraught, fixing her hair and gathering her things for her upcoming job. Moments later, she is invited into the man's room with a smile on her face, looking dazzling and alert. She has shifted from a private to a public self, and one wonders to what extent her role-play is conscious or merely an unconscious routine underwent for the sake of professionalism. Regardless, the moment before registers as a brief emergence of Akiko's authentic self compromised by the fact that, unbeknownst to her, she was being watched. Like Someone in Love presents an urban space of constant social surveillance where any disruption to a given façade is bound to be noticed.

It is because of this partly paranoid, partly hereditary understanding that the film's characters engage in the experience of fantasy. Akiko and Takashi's sojourn together can be understood as such; in a contrived relationship that variably resembles that of a grandfather and granddaughter, a father and daughter, a husband and wife, and a prostitute and her client, the two sit down for amiable small talk, Takashi offers a special meal, and Akiko tucks herself into bed for the night, doling out half-hearted erotic permissions from beneath the covers. During Takashi's overzealous build-up to dinner, he throws on the titular Ella Fitzgerald song, whose lethargic rhythms and romantic melodies manage the rare blocking out of the outdoor traffic noises that otherwise insistently govern the film's soundtrack as a reminder of an external world both threatening and unavoidable. In this instance, both characters have fundamentally succumb to fantasy, to the artificial realm arguably occupied by Juliette Binoche and William Shimell for the majority of Certified Copy's back end.



Atop this already awkward relationship a third character is added: Noriaki (Ryo Kase), Akiko's anxious, suspicious fiancé, the man bitterly referred to in the offscreen phone call that opens the film. Noriaki's first appearance onscreen, forming an imposing road block on Akiko's path to her sociology class, does little to correct the negative impression already collected around him, but soon he approaches Takashi, practically invites himself into the car, and exposes a gentler side. Assuming Takashi is the husband to Akiko's visiting grandmother, Noriaki pleads for the grandfather's informal marriage vows and Takashi complies with the role, if not the request. When Akiko returns, she is silently caught off guard but the convenient role-play continues; all of a sudden the three of them resemble a lopsided family. Still, this newfound unity is marked by superficiality. In the car, Noriaki (Ryo Kase) shows Akiko a crumpled postcard advertising another young call girl he thinks looks like her, echoing an earlier moment when Takashi claims a likeness between Akiko and the subject of an oil painting on his wall. (Both instances speak humorously to the considerable differences in each man's toolbox of cultural reference points.) These reductions of the particular to the general, of the personal to the iconic, emerge as ways to avoid facing up to reality. They are part of the larger social deceit that these characters perpetuate.

Like Someone in Love marks Kiarostami's second fictional filmmaking venture outside his native Iran, and the film's Japanese setting makes his characteristically withholding, unobtrusive tactics look especially Ozu-like. But there's a deeper reasoning as well behind the director's choice of Tokyo. For a study of fractured social identities, Kiarostami has picked a culture that is steeped in formalities and standardized behavior. Every time Takashi enters his apartment, the film’s fluid rhythm is momentarily stalled for the small quotidian gesture of taking off his shoes and donning slippers. At one point, Takashi relates to Akiko by asking about her hometown, noting upon hearing her answer that it explains some of her mannerisms. In this film, characters must act in accordance with these inherited identities or else risk ruffling the orderly surface of society. Ironically, however, these acts of fitting into an expected model of behavior pile up until Akiko and Takashi no longer emanate individual cores of identity and become mere wisps of narrative abstraction. On the contrary, Noriaki, allowing a barely concealed jealousy to balloon into impassioned anger by the end of the film, becomes increasingly and disconcertingly palpable.

As is typical of Kiarostami's wise approach, the film neither bemoans the ontological issues it raises nor celebrates the anarchic polar opposite, which of course is embodied by the maniacal Noriaki. Instead, it expresses a profound solitude for the state of social affairs, a viewpoint manifested by a strange non-sequitur in the film's final act. When Akiko is waiting on Takashi's steps for the old man to return, yet another offscreen female voice emerges, this time speaking according to a distinctly different, more expressive acting style. At the end of the woman's speech, which lucidly tells of fond memories, unforgettable experiences, and hitherto suppressed feelings, Kiarostami finally reveals the source of the voice: an elderly woman speaking from within the space of a tiny window framed outside by a larger doorway. In this urban environment, a genuine display of emotion such as this – or such as Noriaki's startling last-minute expression of rage – is equated with either isolating oneself from the world peacefully or existing within it and causing chaos.

The Deathmaker

I've written a piece for Mubi.com on the 1995 German film The Deathmaker, which dives into the extensive single-room interrogation of Fritz Haarmann, the serial killer first dramatized in 1931 by Fritz Lang with M. The film's directed by Romuald Karmakar, a filmmaker that too few cinephiles are familiar with. Head on over to The Notebook to hear about why I find this spatially limited film so damn compelling.

DIY Dystopia

Balagan Films of Cambridge, Massachusetts represents what is currently the heroic norm in avant-garde cinema curation and exhibition: a not-for-profit operation scouring the world for distinctive aesthetic experiences while relying on crowdsourcing to scrape enough funds together to just barely survive. At Balagan’s latest program – their first after an abnormal hiatus of several months – the staff’s repeated plugging (self-consciously described by head curator Jeff Silva as “beating a dead horse”) of their soon-to-expire Kickstarter came across less as cash-happy beggary than as an unfortunate necessity, an earnest plea for assistance better to get out of the way up front and move on to what really matters: the moving images.

The films in this latest program, which was entitled “DIY Dystopia” and ran approximately an hour and a half, are associated by their shared concerns over the state of the natural world in an increasingly jeopardized industrial landscape. An additional charge of immediacy is attached to this theme when considering that all of the filmmakers involved – Douglas Urbank, Jennifer Reeves, Christina Battle, Dan Baker, and Ben Rivers – are currently based in cities; an intensely “artificial” environment, as one Balagan curator noted. (Dante’s Quartet (1987), a film by the late Stan Brakhage, was also featured in the lineup, and he too spent a great deal of his life in an urban center.) Incorporating a blend of traditional shooting, hand-painting, optical printing, found footage manipulation, and other esoteric uses of celluloid, the films not only seek unpredictable methods for representing the contemporary environmental crisis but also tie this lament into the decay of material cinema as a larger practice and as a way of seeing.

Boston local Douglas Urbank’s in-progress found footage film WWII kicked off the evening accompanied by a live score from acoustic improv trio Duck That, a hissing, squelching, howling exercise in sustained tension that eerily matched the images of dead soldiers being carted to and fro in wheelbarrows and Nazi officials gathering in chunks. In fact, the otherworldly rattle emanating from Duck That’s shadowy corner beneath the screen – blown through woodwinds, gargled through loudspeakers, and punctuated by the sounds of unidentifiable trinkets – threatened to divert the attention away from Urbank’s somewhat dryly repurposed imagery, in which the only conspicuous marks of deconstruction are animated shifting tear lines and rows of circular negative space, implemented as if to suggest the footage crumbling and splitting apart.


The next film, Jennifer Reeves’ Landfill 16 (2011), offered a far more dense and mysterious visual surface. Presumably a tattered amalgamation of direct painting/scratching and less controlled manners of celluloid handling (i.e. burying in the dirt), the resulting visual chaos alternately evokes bubbling magma, eroded rust, and scorched Earth. The film’s weather-beaten color palette – resembling that of late-period Tony Scott – mutates as frequently as the textured surface, pulsating inward and outward in a mess of scratches, blotches, and Petri dish patterns. Towards the latter half of the film, barely legible images of wildlife begin emerging beneath this layered visual noise, marking the first instance of a rather didactic gesture that repeats throughout these films: the posing of a contrast between technology/human waste and seemingly untainted nature. (Landfill 16’s ambient soundtrack, which pits together distant industrial noises and ghostly field recordings, forges the same dialectic.)

Christina Battle’s Buffalo Lifts (2004) packs similarly hypnotizing imagery into its concise three-minute running time: an extended shot of a buffalo herd moving, significantly, from right to left that is nearly overwhelmed by the calculated destruction of the film’s surface. Here, a particularly punchy metaphor is raised regarding the simultaneous degradation of the natural world and physical cinema. As the buffalo charge insistently across the frame – their mere directionality subliminally invoking degeneration – they rush towards extinction, just as the celluloid they have been captured with is combusting around them, reducing them to strokes of pure movement. The film’s silence underscores its power; no frivolous elements are needed for such a harmonious matching of form and content.


Battle is also responsible for Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road and 97th Street (2002), a work of similar brevity and potency. The film’s focal point is an image of a silhouetted oil derrick bobbing slowly in and out of the ground, but it’s by no means a very descriptive shot. Instead, the methodical motion of the drill is reduced to a graphic cadence in the frame around which the detritus of burnt, dirty film stock gathers. Through rephotographing techniques, Battle shows the image being knocked out of alignment with the projector, a sudden boundary obstruction that echoes the derrick’s disruption of the line between land and sky. As in Buffalo Lifts, neither the Earth nor celluloid can survive such exploitation of the natural world.

Dan Baker finds a lovely image for this inherent doom of nature in the face of man-made extravagance in Transaension (2006), which the filmmaker claims is about fossil fuel extraction: a human figure, burning like the sun in the bottom right corner of the frame, dwarfed by a fog of fiery abstraction, stacked up like layers of compromised geological crusts above him. It’s a fleeting image, but it’s undeniably the most resonant of the show. Baker pushes past some of the simple-minded dichotomies permeating the rest of the films to arrive at a crystallization of human resilience against its own self-destructive tendencies. The rest of the sex-minute film is spent building up a hellish miasma of red and orange blotches and spiderweb scratches suggesting cracked rock, all set to a menacing low-frequency drone; this is human progress as an inescapable nightmare, not something to be pondered or lightly questioned.

Alongside these relatively low-profile works, Balagan curators thought it fitting to conclude the program with films by Stan Brakhage and Ben Rivers, two artists already somewhat well known for their expressions of a pastoral ideal. Dante’s Quartet, a hand-painted assault structured around Dante’s four stages of afterlife, and Ah, Liberty! (2008), another of Rivers’ monochrome, cinemascope explorations of human communion with nature, provided a rather serene ending to the dystopia presented by the other films. Two Years at Sea, Rivers' first feature-length work, was one of my key discoveries in 2011 and remains one of my favorite films of the decade so far, and this short, Rivers' very first release according to IMDB, works in a similar vein. Naturally lit black-and-white images of wildlife mix with a score comprised mostly of diegetic sounds, but here Rivers brushes up against narrative and genre elements. The film's premise is simple: a seemingly pure landscape becomes host to a series of increasingly bizarre human interferences culminating in a pair of hooded toddlers beating and swatting mindlessly at the wreckage left by an earlier brush fire. These odd staged bits rest somewhere between horror and absurdism, but the overall tone lands on the lighter side largely because of Rivers' inspired use of the spacious 2:35:1 format, which creates an inherently freeing composition; even in an ostensible close-up, there's a great deal of image for the eye to explore.

It's easy to wonder whether the Brakhage short was included merely for the sake of contrasting a current, politically charged approach to handmade film with an older, more metaphysical one. Otherwise, Brakhage's short seems out of place in the context of all these self-consciously environmentally-minded works. At the very least, its existence within such a contemporary program exposes how prevalent and unavoidable this issue is in our present world; recognizing the eerie parallels between the decline of celluloid and the decline of the natural world, these filmmakers seem to have arrived at their finished material out of a sense of obvious ethical responsibility. The urgency shows. Only a measly portion of contemporary cinema bothers to creatively engage with the unignorable fate of our industrial over-reliance, and Balagan has managed to tactfully unify the noble few.

The Deer Hunter (1978) A Film by Michael Cimino

Particularly during a time of our continued military entanglements with foreign nations, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter comes across less as an honest grappling with the American involvement in Vietnam than as a deeply myopic stroking of American machismo. Opening with a wedding and ending with a funeral, the film announces itself as a vital statement on the transformative effects of the war on our national consciousness, positing with its very structure that the war presented a threat to our sanity, well-being, and, most of all, our moral exceptionalism. Trouble is, the only perspective it bothers to represent is that of the working-class male, and thus the film’s every development is filtered through masculine ethos, which, by extension, is equated with American national identity. Inevitably, this leaves out the possibility of hearing from women, and, most egregiously, the Vietnamese people, all of whom, historically, should be owed a say in these pivotal events.

The film divides its three dramatic acts quite transparently: pre-Vietnam, Vietnam, and post-Vietnam (these acts refer not to the actual timeline of the war but rather to the involvement of the main characters in the war). In the first act, Cimino laboriously establishes the drab Pennsylvania industrial milieu in which these characters live and work. Michael (Robert DeNiro), Stan (John Cazale), Nick (Christopher Walken), Steven (John Savage), and John (George Dzundra) are all factory laborers who spend their free time hunting deer in the mountains nearby. The sheer amount of time spent on this preamble to combat is designed to outline the core American values embedded within the milieu that will be compromised by the experiences in Vietnam: material modesty, work ethic, commitment to community, and self-reliance.



For the sake of plot convenience, the second act presents the inverses of these values, naturally displacing these negative attributes on the Vietnamese without ever realizing the floating irony that Vietnam’s history of imperialist manipulation mirrors some of our own early struggles to become an autonomous nation. Without deviation, our “enemies” are presented as barbaric, impulsive, and careless with regards to the life or death of their peers. Russian roulette, which eventually factors heavily into the plot, is formulated as the harrowing site of all these qualities, and the violence-plagued pleasure districts that Michael and Nick find themselves charting perilously into represent the opposition to the modesty and faithfulness that mark the film’s notion of American domesticity. These high-stakes events and settings are incorporated by the film exclusively for the purpose of challenging the characters' inner strength, and thus the narrative demands that they be pitched at the level of hyperbolic extremity. The result is an undifferentiated mass of hollering Vietnamese hooligans (portrayed, largely, by Thai actors) whose lives are apparently consumed by pointing handguns at anonymous heads and shouting deadly instructions, or unleashing cries of thoughtless thrill at the sight of blood gushing freely from someone's skull.

Anyone with even the smallest margin of empathy and understanding for that which is unknown to them should be able to spot such ludicrousness as a grotesque distortion of an Other. Perhaps this shortsightedness would be less offensive if Cimino didn't relay his fear-mongering exaggerations through a veneer of authenticity. The Deer Hunter as a whole is production-designed with exquisite attention to filth and squalor, and it saves its grimiest effects for Vietnam; the back-alley roulette room where Nick finds his sanity slipping away is a madhouse billowing with smoke, illuminated by a single unflattering overhead source, and otherwise shrouded in murky shadows where one can only assume the walls are caked in dried blood or Stalin portraits. While this filth is disorienting, seemingly a black hole of darkness capable of destroying one's sense of space and time, the lesser circumstances on the home front feel comparatively inviting. The only dangers presented by the Pennsylvania environment are metaphorical rather than actual; thanks largely to snatches of mystical a cappella drenched in church reverb, the mountains emanate mythical overtones throughout, and it is here that the central metaphorical challenge of the film is posed: will the men be able to kill the deer in one shot, thus affirming their strength and certitude, or will they need two shots, thus descending to the misogynistic level of “pussy”? Cimino applies the ill-fitting logic behind this masculine code of honor across the film.



The talents of Meryl Streep, Rutanya Alda, and Amy Wright, meanwhile, who constitute the pining feminine cluster back home, go to waste against the brute force of all this macho grandeur. As Linda, the conflicted love interest of both Michael and Nick, Streep is allowed the most screen time by a long shot, but even then her potentially complex character is reduced to a stick figure of grief, indecision, and longing, the collision of which Streep does her best to muscle out in numerous close-ups. Especially in the film’s final third, she is always on cue to be acted upon according to the needs of the script. She is less a character than a cipher onto which the male characters’ romantic desires and frustrations can be projected, and thus is physically oriented as such; when Michael finally returns home, she is merely sitting there in the middle of the room doing nothing when the door is knocked, her motionless pose of ennui not only a comically overwrought actor’s gesture but also a crystallization of her blatant passivity throughout the film.

If there’s one thing The Deer Hunter fully understands it’s masculine stubbornness and the absurd lengths to which a man will go to affirm his bravery and self-sufficiency, or, to put it more fittingly in the terms of the film, to prove that he’s not a pussy. The issue with the film, however, is not the degree to which it represents this quality of virility, but the astounding arrogance it takes to conflate this position with national identity. Nick's final, and ultimately fatal, dismissal of Michael's plea to come home is particularly wrenching because it fully invests in this warped mindset at the expense of an uplifting outcome. But in the end it's Michael who the film equates most squarely with the persevering virtues of the American Man because he finds a less senseless outlet for this stubbornness, overcoming the tempting madness of the "enemy" to re-focus his attentions on his local community. Yet in doing so, he remains stubborn; his unwillingness to recognize the root of the issue – his country's flippant refusal to try to understand the victims of their attacks – muddies his supposed self-actualization, even as the film celebrates his behavior as headstrong leadership. It's possible to praise the film's downcast ending as an admirably ambivalent take on patriotism, but even its manufactured ambiguity is flimsy: the "wounds" of the war may weigh heavily over these characters, but the lasting impression is of a questionable moral victory for those surviving.

A Tangle of Notes, Impressions, and Questions on Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma

(Note: This piece assumes that you've seen the film. If you haven't, I strongly encourage you to do so before navigating my jumbled thoughts. The film is part of The Criterion Collection's characteristically revelatory edition, "A Hollis Frampton Odyssey.")


- Opening in darkness, Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma (1970) asks its viewer to clear his/her perceptual slate and approach the film with fresh eyes and ears. Then, for its ensuing hour, it asks if this is even possible.

- Pulling its title from a mathematical theory proposed by Max Zorn in 1935 concerning algebraic sets and limits and featuring readings from a primitive grammar textbook, Zorn's Lemma sets itself up against man-made systems for comprehending the world and then creates some of its own corresponding yet distinctly cinematic systems. One of these is the film's structure, divided into three sections and progressing, broadly, from darkness to light, from sound to silence to sound, from visual absence to visual assault to mechanical recording, and through various attempts at rule-bound objectivity.


- In the film's extensive, unfurling middle section, the question of intentionality vs. spontaneity is repeatedly frustrated. Frampton's self-imposed A-Z structure, for the most part, dictates itself, but there are continually slippages of rationality when it seems as if the mathematical ordering of images and words has been deliberately obstructed. Assuming the one-second shots were arranged chronologically according to the order in which Frampton filmed them, I can't help but wonder whether a sly pairing such as "limp member" might not be quite so aleatoric. And if it's indeed something Frampton slipped in deliberately, why? This middle section is a puzzle of images without a clear solution, and in such cases I get the sense that the lack of clarity is carefully modulated, that Frampton might be fudging with his own rules as a way of positing the impossibility of objectively making sense of the world.


- I interpret Zorn's Lemma as a film about the limits of constructed knowledge systems (i.e. language, symbolism, time, cinema), so in one sense my desire as a viewer is to witness Frampton crafting a set of principles that he pedantically follows, only to watch as that system naturally crumbles, forcing a secondary system to emerge. In the context of Zorn's Lemma, that first system is language, broken into letters and their accompanying words, and the secondary system is images, which begin to emerge as Frampton runs out of the filmed words he collected. One way of looking at the second part of the film is through the assumption that words are unambiguous and closed-off while images are alive to the interpretive powers of the viewer, but then there are Frampton's additional tricks that complicate this reading. First, there is the fact that the words too are images, and secondly, there is the fact that the images too are a construction of the man behind the camera, framing the world according to his existing set of principles. These paradoxes and complexities are crystallized by the seemingly arbitrarily recurring motif of optically-printed text on top of an image, a calculated effect that simultaneously makes plain and simple the word/image double standards and also seems to violate Frampton's rules.


- Meanwhile, the images themselves are complicated. They are too diverse to be pinned to a shallow, undifferentiated reading as "images," posed dialectically against "words." There are shots that are temporally-bound (a jar filling up with beans, a cropped view of hands assembling a tinker toy, a man painting a wall) and others that are infinite. The time-based shots are defined by the fact that the actions contained within them are finite; they will end, and, presumably, so will the shot. On the other hand, the ocean or a single leafless tree on a hill will continue existing indefinitely. Only the representation of it through the camera will end. Frampton is calling attention to the inherent discontinuity between material reality and the human need to compartmentalize it, to give it shape and meaning through representation. Is there any other way to interpret the special effects shots in the film (two halves of a woman's head unsettlingly misaligned or three identical figures bouncing a volleyball in the same frame) than as flagrant expressions of this urge?


- The film's final section, then, is the (attempted) inverse to this manipulation: people performing an action seemingly of their own accord (walking across a snowy field into the forest) and a static camera recording that process in three uninterrupted takes, each the length of an 100-foot 16mm roll. On the surface, the approach might seem God-like, or at least that's how I see it. These figures appear to be unaware of the camera and their resulting representation therein. However, as a cinematic spectator it's obvious that this is a constructed scenario merely aiming for the illusion of truth. In service of its reprisal of age-old debates about photographic objectivity, this section decidedly inverts Frampton's editing system in the second section; here, cuts (which resemble dissolves in this case, complete with the defects inevitably accompanying the tail end of the film roll) are dictated by the limits of the cinematographic apparatus, not any editorial consciousness. But when a sudden squall of snow fills the frame, momentarily flooding the film with natural beauty despite seeming to arrive with unnatural haste, can we still trust this to be the case, or has Frampton's (and, by extension, man's) desire for aesthetic surprise and fulfillment intruded?

-On the soundtrack, loopy words spoken by two women at the pace of a nagging metronome dissolve into sonic mush. Again, the possibility of a subjectivity (the women's voices) is raised within a rule-bound system (the metronome) and the latter overwhelms the former. The subjective is reduced by the limits within which it is contained. Zorn's Lemma demonstrates that everything inside of it is a product of human interference, and any attempt to dissect its contents can only be as rewarding as its viewer (and its viewer's accompanying systems for understanding the world) will allow it to be.