directed by Fritz Lang
written by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang

Criterion #30. Hey, 30!

30. The commentary is annoying. It’s two academics, one of whom continually babbles the very worst sort of aca-double-talk, and the other of whom basically says “ibid.” It just so happens that I took a distribution requirement course from this very same double-talker back at Large University — my only official dip into Film Studies. I’ve said this about other commentaries but of course this time it was especially true: the bullshit brought me back. This stuff serves an important role in preventing me from judging my past self harshly. Why couldn’t I have been more engaged, retained more, taken school more seriously? I’ll tell you why: because they talked like this.

29. When did it become standard for insecure academic bullshit artists to tart up their circuities and truisms with meaningless, weak-blooded wordplay? A la “in this dialectic, to interrogate is to derogate, so to say.” (Or “Dis/course is stupid, I wish I hadn’t taken it.” Joke.) By the time of my graze with the Academy, this sort of thing seemed well entrenched, at least on the “Theory” side of things. I (we) always rolled our eyes at it as though it were a new sort of inane fad but I now wonder if it wasn’t already decades old. Someone somewhere was originally responsible for this, and someone nearby was responsible for endorsing it. I am disgusted with them both. (But in this dialectic, is not disgust a disguise, so to say?)

28. Anyway, the guy does a bit of that, and he certainly did it back in the day. But mostly what he does is say dull things (or semi-things) of dubious validity in an evasively longwinded way. Beth said the commentary lowered her opinion of Large University. Well then, that needed to happen.

27. Fritz Lang’s immortal film M has no musical score whatsoever, which throws a mini-wrench in my mini-works. How am I supposed to come up with a track for my megamix? Well, I did what I could, see below. But first let me address the issue of the no music. This is Lang’s first sound film. He apparently strongly resisted sound for a year and a half, and then wrapped his head around it and made this. The use of sound here is aggressive and purposeful. Off-screen sound effects are used very overtly to create a sense of space, or to create a sense of a modern city where e.g. car horns punctuate conversations. Harsh screeches and whistles are used to jar us in moments when the characters feel jarred. Peter Lorre as the killer is marked by his whistling, off-screen and on. And most notably, several sequences play in absolute silence. This is a very peculiar and stark effect that feels almost unique to this movie. The only other “completely silent” scene I can think of is the mirror sequence from Duck Soup. Anyone else?

28. But: one of the many extras on the disc is a gallery of still images, among which is something called “original German program” from the UFA-Palast am Zoo, the theater where the film premiered. Above the cast list it announces: “Vorspiel zu dem Film: ‘M’ / An der Wurlitzer Orgel: Billy Barnes”. Then follows the credits of the film (which incidentally do not appear in the film itself.) What this makes clear is that Billy Barnes (an American, oddly enough) played an organ prelude before the movie, as was common in the days of the silents. What it leaves ambiguous is whether or not he continued playing during the movie, which was, of course, also common it the days of the silents. It seems entirely plausible to me that in the earliest days of sound, a filmmaker might have assumed that music would always be performed live, and that the synchronized soundtrack was just for dialogue and diegetic effects. This, I thought, would certainly make sense of the silent sequences in M, which are generally scenes of suspense or of scale, both of which are occasions where films tend to lean more heavily on music. This train of speculation appealed to me.

27. However, after some Google-research I can’t find any mention of the notion of an accompanied M at all. A moderately strong case against my speculation about an organ score is the fact that M has been shown with no music for many decades, during which time Fritz Lang and others (e.g. the editor Paul Falkenberg, who is heard on the disc making commentary during a screening in the 70s) had plenty of opportunity to protest, to remind the world that musical accompaniment had been assumed. Seeing as they seem never to have done this, I guess it’s unlikely. On the other hand, the excellent through-composed original score for Metropolis simply disappeared from use for many decades even though its existence was no great secret, and Lang seems not to have protested that either. So I have to wonder whether this simply was a matter where nobody cared enough, and whether Lang, a notorious self-revisionist, didn’t mind getting credit for the very bold effect the silence happens to produce in the absence of music.

26. All I’m saying is, next time you watch M, try imagining that it is designed to accommodate live music, and tell me whether not it seems feasible to you. It does to me.

25. What then are we going to put on our all-Criterion soundtrack album? I’m afraid it has to be this, obviously the “theme” of M if there is one: Track 30. Trivia from the disc: Lorre couldn’t whistle, so this is the writer (Lang’s wife and collaborator) Thea von Harbou dubbing him. The disc also shows that later re-edited reissues of the movie with credits added accompanied them with an orchestral version of “Hall of the Mountain King.” It’s not at all appropriate for the film as a whole but it’s nonetheless the only real choice.

24. Having reached 30 tracks and (by my calculations) 70 minutes of music, I’m declaring disc 1 of this soundtrack mix complete. Time to burn it and get ready for disc 2.

23. I know, there are no discs anymore, but these gargantuan playlists you can buy online now with many hundreds of tracks give me a little bit of an agoraphobic feeling. It’s good for things to be bounded.

22. For your convenience, and to encourage actual relistening:

My top marks so far would go to:

4. Amarcord
5. The 400 Blows
10. Walkabout
20. Sid and Nancy
21. Dead Ringers
25. Alphaville
26. The Long Good Friday

And maybe a few more. Movie music is fun.

22. This was my first in my Criterion project that I watched on Blu-ray. Yes, high definition is definitely better than not. But here’s something I’ve only just now learned: getting a screenshot of a DVD menu is no problem, but getting a screenshot of a Blu-ray menu is a pain in the ass. Blu-ray menus are programmed in some kind of Java variant and are not currently fully implemented in any free software. When you play the disc you just see the background video loop with no visible menus. And the commercial software players never want to let you take screenshots. I struggled for a while and then just ended up grabbing the above menu image from dvdbeaver, who seem to have figured out how to do it. I assure you it looked exactly like that on my copy too.

21. Pretty interesting, right?

20. Apart from the commentary criticized above, the supplemental features are great. The jewel is William Friedkin’s filmed 1974 interview with Lang. There’s also the aforementioned Paul Falkenberg audio, recorded at the New School in the mid-70s, which is genuinely interesting — part of the pleasure being hearing the New Yorky voices of the students and imagining the whole milieu. Then there’s a sort of “sweding” of M by Claude Chabrol for TV in the 80s, followed by an interview in which he talks about the experience and about Lang’s technique. While not much to watch, this “remake” turned out to be really helpful to me in seeing the film as others have seen it, in all its iconic splendor. In picking the shots he wanted to remake, and inevitably exaggerating some aspects and disregarding others, Chabrol showed me what M is, not in itself, but in the culture and in people’s impressions, which is ultimately maybe of more interest. Or at least of separate and equal interest. It was almost as good as seeing a bit of it parodied in Looney Tunes or on The Simpsons.

19. There’s also a featurette about the “physical history” of the film, the ways it was recut, remade, lost, misused, and then misrestored. Leading, it is implied, up to this newly ideal version, from 2004.

18. Except! I actually saw M in the theater just a week before sitting down with the Criterion disc, because it’s now in distribution in a new and improved restoration that apparently is 7 minutes longer, reincorporating material not seen since 1931, etc. etc. I racked my brains on watching the Criterion disc to try to remember what else had been in the new version but couldn’t. I think maybe there was a little more to the scene where people on the street harass an innocent old man, but that’s all I can come up with. However I did have the impression of the image having been even cleaner and more stable in the new restoration. A tough thing to hold in the memory accurately and compare.

17. Seeing it with a live audience was interesting, though. All the tenser and stranger when it would go dead silent.

16. I like this countdown thing I’m doing, because it shows me when I’m going to be done.

15. But 30 was clearly too many.

14. Am I right, folks?

13. So, M.

12. Stephen Dedalus thinking back on his adolescent ambitions: “Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? Yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W.”

11. You’d think Sesame Street would have jumped at this one. (Except for the pedophile/murderer thing.) But come on, this movie really is brought to you by the letter M! I guess they never did The Scarlet Letter either. (Or The Story of O.) So many missed opportunities.

10. This is a very peculiar movie. As Chabrol’s riff made clear, its great impact was visual and atmospheric; it’s basically the founding document of film noir. Trench-coated underworlders slinking down shadowy streets! But looking back at it from our post-Raymond Chandler perspective, what stands out is just how little it actually conforms to those expectations. It’s just not really one of those movies. It’s actually a free improvisation on an “issue” movie, the issue being, well, serial child murder. (And more generally, child safety.) There had been several well-publicized murder sprees in Germany in the late 20s, so this was a highly topical sort of luridness. From this theme Lang basically spins off a meandering, ambivalent portrait of society and the ways it flails about trying to rid itself of a madman.

9. The thing that makes it so peculiar is that nearly every character in the society except for the murderer is depicted with a certain degree of playful cynicism. (As for example the hilarious shot of the head detective’s bulging crotch as he slouches sweatily in his chair.) But Peter Lorre’s character is, apparently, too troubled and weird and compelling to require any such commentary from the camera. The upshot is that the murderer comes off as being handled with greater sympathy than the world around him, even as it’s clear that his crimes are absolutely evil. This gives the strange impression that overlaid on this story about a society trying to cure its ills is another kind of story, the kind that’s usually about an artist, an outsider who lives in a way that is spiritually beyond those around him.

8. The uneasy juxtaposition of these two molds for the “outsider” story is essentially what Lolita plays on: the full, sensitive soul who feels misunderstood by a vapid world might well be a really horrible creep. Hans Beckert, the murderer here, is hardly a “full sensitive soul,” but his emotions are deeper and his psychology more layered than anyone else in this movie. The scene where he sadly makes a monster face at himself in the mirror establishes him as self-aware in a way nobody else in this world is. And his shrieking monologue at the end is chilling in part simply because it’s about psychology, and who would have thought anyone would dare “go there” in this sort of movie?

7. The philosophical effect at the end is excellent — you get drawn into the debate (“How do you solve a problem like M?”), become convinced that it is indeed an ugly and difficult subject with no satisfying answer, and feel temporarily relieved when it gets turned over to THE LAW. And just as that relief wears off, seconds later (“Wait, what is the law going to say?”), the movie swerves away and leaves you stuck there with an accusing finger pointed at you: you shall get no relief. There is no ultimate relief and no ultimate authority in this business of being a society. You have to live by what you believe, all the time.

6. And yet there are also long passages of the movie that don’t have much to do with the big message, with noir, with anything. It just gets caught up in its own goofy plotting. Why does the scene where the criminals are discussing plans have to go on and on? What are we supposed to make of the extent and duration of the sequence where the entire criminal underworld trashes an office building in search of the murderer?

5. As with some other very early sound films, the versions for foreign distribution actually involved some reshoots. The disc contains “the English version,” only recently rediscovered, which is very shoddily done and which I’ll admit I didn’t watch all the way through. It’s mostly just a cloddish dub, with a few replacement shots of printed text and a few dialogue scenes of the police redone with terrible actors. The only real reason anyone would want to watch it is that it features Peter Lorre himself doing his monologue at the end in English. But it’s clear that he’s in a completely different frame of mind on a different day, that Lang isn’t present, and that he’s just phoning it in, if not downright sabotaging it. He also did it in French, which you can watch in one of the extras. Similarly low-energy.

4. Four left, huh?

3. For all that I’m saying it’s an unusual movie and I don’t entirely know what to make of it, it’s very clear why it’s a renowned classic. It has force. You feel Lang’s complete control and cinematic sense of purpose in every shot. That a movie shot this way is eccentric in substance just makes it all the richer for rewatching. This is the stuff Film Studies are made of.

2. I’m not necessarily endorsing that. I also like films that do one thing, excellently. In fact I think I prefer them. Who needs a rich text when you can go to the movies?

1. But I did enjoy this.

0. Done.

directed by Peter Weir
screenplay by Cliff Green
from the novel by Joan Lindsay (1967)

Criterion #29.

(I needed to take some time to really separate the names “Peter Weir” and “Nicholas Roeg.” These guys have absolutely nothing to do with each other other than that each has an unusual four-letter last name and each has made at least one spooky movie about Australia, but that seems to be enough for my brain to mix them up. Key points: Nicholas Roeg is not himself Australian; Peter Weir is. Nicholas Roeg’s career since the 70s has been almost entirely eccentric whereas Peter Weir became increasingly commercial. Nicholas Roeg: Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth, The Witches. Peter Weir: The Last Wave, Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, Master and Commander. These guys have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

I’ve now taken the time. This will not be a problem again.)

I bet you’re reading this because you want to know what happened to those girls who mysteriously disappeared at Hanging Rock! Sorry, guys, I don’t know.

Oh fine, I’ll tell you. They passed out of objective time and into dreamtime, transcending the logic of narrative just as the trance of the sensual transcends the rational mind. (Whew! Case closed! What a relief to wrap that one up.)

Thing is, if you’ve seen the movie you already knew that. And yet you still probably felt like there was a mystery here. That’s the point. The point is that just as the irrational can never be reconciled to the rational, a movie can shout and shout “This movie is about the irrational!” and people still won’t be able to stop themselves from writing that this film, ahem, “raises more questions than it answers.”

That’s not true in the most important sense; the movie makes its intentions very clear. It rather belabors the point, in fact. The first 30 minutes are something special and lovely indeed but after that it does tend to go on. (Not that I particularly minded — possibly because I had been so soothed already. Which suggests a good rule of thumb for filmmakers: if you start your movie with a hypnotic induction, the audience will be very forgiving of the rest.)

I picture a sign in a hotel lobby: “WELCOME QUESTIONS WITH NO ANSWERS CONFERENCE!” I did not find this movie mysterious as a movie; it was well marked. It was about mystery. It basks in it and then shows us characters struggling to come to terms with it one way or another, which is of course what cannot be done. They resist it at their peril. But there is no “it.” Non-being.

The idea of a horror movie about calm pleasantness, about the cosmic menace implicit in all experience, thrills me and whispers very close to my heart. This is only partially that, but when it was, it felt precious to me. The first section is sort of like Vermeer as horror. Or more on the nose would be Pre-Raphaelite stuff, which often seems to be deliberately cultivating those undertones. (A reproduction of this one is shown briefly in the movie.)

Don’t come telling me this movie is an allegory about sexual awakening. I am so sick of that shit and I will fight you. I pity the people for whom sex is the only form of mystery they are willing to acknowledge, and even then only as a kind of conspiracy to be unmasked. But pity shades pretty readily into resentment because these sorts of people will never stop trying to get you to see what they see and “admit it! admit it!” They should take note that there is a bad guy in this movie, but it’s not some Moby-Dick of the universe gobbling up unsuspecting girls; it’s petty headmistress Ahab who suppresses her awareness of the numinous and ruins lives. Don’t be like her! Don’t come springing your shit on me.

Also, the movie tells us several times over that the girls who returned from the rock were QUITE INTACT. The smug hypocrites with their “duh it’s about rape” T-shirts (pulled over their straw bodies, yes) probably think that this only confirms the centrality of sex to the meaning of the movie. If anything, it works the other way — the girls’ virginity is only one of many metaphors to access the essential. The girls are QUITE INTACT compared to these provincial doctors who needlessly clinicalize the cosmic. This movie is in fact a rebuttal to all the “duh it’s about rape” that goes on out there. I’m all for it. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who wants to stand up for Lewis Carroll and poor Alice; I feel like this movie was on my side. For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

I can’t help but see this movie in terms of a right brain/left brain model (lame as that is). The left brain wants to know the right brain but it cannot, it can only make way for it or stifle it. Sex is just one of the things that cannot ever be dragged out into the light; the more you theorize it and politicize it and write film criticism about it, the more you are actually writing about something else. Sex and love are threads in the movie because they are very much mysterious and sensual and unnameable in essence, just as is seeing a bird, smelling a flower, worrying about a weird rock, feeling flattened by the depths of time, and spacing way way way out. Maybe so far out that you disappear forever, as you one day will. If you insist on calling that “the budding sexuality of young girls living under Victorian repression,” I can’t stop you, but I wish I could.

Having railed like this I hope I’m making clear: the movie most certainly is about the budding sexuality of young girls living under Victorian repression. It’s just about many other things equally and equivalently, so I distrust anyone whose impulse is to headline that one, since that’s the one that has been most begrimed by overuse and bad faith. It’s mental kitsch.

I enjoyed the movie.

There’s nothing else on the disc other than the trailer, which was silly.

As with Alphaville I feel a little dirty about having mucked with the music. But I had to. I have a lot of criteria for the sample track I pick – it needs to be original to the movie, musically self-contained, and essentially unsullied by dialogue or sound effects — and though opening or closing credits will usually fit the bill, it’s not a sure thing. Picnic‘s opening is set to panflute music that 1) has dialogue over it and 2) on investigation I learn is actually a licensed track rather than original (apparently because Zamfir refused to record anything new for the movie. Yet he still managed to get better billing than the film’s actual composer. We see “FLÙTE DE PAN Played by GHEORGHE ZAMFIR,” which stays on screen while a second credit fades in lamely below it: “Additional Original music Composed by BRUCE SMEATON.” Kudos to Zamfir’s lawyers. Smeaton’s credit is unfair and misleading since it suggests that Zamfir’s contribution is also original, which it is not. Yes, there’s not a ton of Smeaton’s music but that still shouldn’t make the word “additional” necessary.)

Meanwhile Picnic‘s end credits are the Emperor Concerto. Used very effectively, as is the other classical music that appears on the soundtrack. But to put it here would betray the spirit of this exercise in scrapbooking.

So that leaves us with Smeaton’s original score, of which there’s really only one cue of any musical significance. It’s used twice in its entirety (and elsewhere in part) but both times there are sound effects, which I’ve permitted here in the past, and dialogue, which I haven’t. So after much handwringing I decided to just do some crossfades between the two to eliminate the dialogue, similar to what I did for Alphaville. This is apparently called “The Ascent Music.” It plays first during the pivotal scene, as the girls are working their way up the rock, and mostly that’s the one you’re hearing. Here it is, your track 29.

This music is somewhat ahead of its time, it seems to me. Or maybe just transitional, pointing from the Michel Legrand vein of 60s moodiness toward the new-age/sentimental-minimalist washes of the 80s and 90s.

written and directed by Paul Morrissey

Criterion #28.

I just read this weekend’s New York Times profile of Anne Carson and I step away from it with a strong feeling of envy. The privilege of being gnomic and still listened to! I have known a few people who hold to that path, artists to the bone — or should I say to the skin — whose every utterance is riddlesome. Who probably aren’t really being understood by anyone but who seize their leisure at its height anyway. They pluck from the root because the fruit is lovelier whole, nevermind that the husk may be impenetrable. I envy the Anne Carsons of the world their impractical dignity.

So why not just (re)claim it? [I wrote some other stuff here but it’s gone now because I can’t actually convince myself that there’s any more to it than this:] Fear of being isolated by incomprehension. I fear that the admirers of the impenetrable are in it for the wrong reasons. The people I tend to enjoy — and thus would most like to reach — are the people who tend not to indulge such stuff. That is a bind. (Perhaps the problem is tied up in “and thus would most like to reach”; perhaps it’s the ideal of symmetry that is stopping me up.) But I am trying to face this fear.

Of course, isolation is the extreme case; less extreme is mere elitism. I think I fear that too. Some things that are incomprehensible to others are comprehensible to me. Over the weekend we saw Roman Polanski’s The Tenant in a theater. When I first saw it a few years ago, I took to be sort of intuitive and fanciful, dreamy, irrational, not to be comprehended fully. This time I found (to my horror) that I understood everything in it quite vividly, like someone was speaking directly to me in a clear voice. Based on their quizzical murmurings I don’t think the other people in the theater experienced it that way. I tend to feel sorry for the movie that it has so few true friends, and likewise for myself. But perhaps that ought to be behind me as well. This is my truth and here’s someone speaking it to me. Isn’t that good enough? If you gotta ask, you ain’t got it, so why fret about those who gotta ask?

I agonize a lot, too much, about where to draw the line in writing on this site. I would love to erase the line entirely, but that’s a big step up for my little legs, and while I’m waiting to get there, a lot of things seem like strong evidence for the prosecution and shake me.

This entry is, in form, my effort to stick to my dignity no matter how far off the menu it orders; and in substance is about that, because that is, not coincidentally, what it is ordering. (It is also what The Tenant is a cautionary tale about, and why I understood it.)

My Flesh for Frankenstein entry read (and wrote) like one of my late-night term papers, the sort I still have to write in my nightmares. It was self-indulgent but only by principle. Here in Blood for Dracula I am hoping to err on the side of actual indulgence.

This is of course all an exercise.

(It’s no shock for that to appear here, on this site, because you all already know it, but it might be an interesting thing to find in the middle of a novel.)

So the substance of the substance, which in my mind ties this all together: these two movies (Flesh and Blood) are themselves both inscrutable utterances, easy to misunderstand and probably impossible to understand, and more than ever I believe them to be that way because Paul Morrissey is an artist of integrity. Which as suggested above has nothing whatsoever to do with quality. Here it is quite at odds with it.

“All bad poetry is sincere,” but most bad movies are not. Movies tend to be bad because they are oblivious, lazy, cynical, evil. Not these. These movies are bad because an artist followed his gut and made them that way. They are folk art, a one-man culture in themselves.

I admire his dignity but not his art.

Or — should I say that I do admire his art, because it and his dignity are one and the same thing? (I did after all kind of enjoy the movie.) Or does it mean that I do not admire his dignity, because it led him astray? (I did after all enjoy the movie only from within the knowledge that it was terrible.) Or does it work another way entirely? These are rapids for me.

Blood for Dracula is a lot better than Flesh for Frankenstein. Understand that I use the word “better” only because it is the closest word in your Earth language for describing a direction in the fourth dimension of taste where these movies live. This one has no spilled intestines, no facelift ladies, and is all filmed on lovely location rather than in a studio set that looks like a toilet. That alone would make it better. It also has a gonzo melancholy atmosphere that makes it almost soothing. Unlike Flesh for Frankenstein its crappiness is immediate and warm. In this respect, it comes closer to satisfying the standard expectations of camp viewing: garbage as comfort food. Like Little Debbie, Blood for Dracula approaches junk edibility, while still remaining fundamentally alien.

Okay, okay … fine, I’ll just do the slightly grudging thing I usually do, since I’ve already typed up most of it. (Maybe the next entry will be more consistently kooky. I always think that.) Here goes.

Generous synopsis: Dracula (Udo Kier again!) is sort of a sad sensitive type. He is dying because he can only drink the blood of virgins and there aren’t enough virgins left in this debauched modern world (= vaguely the 1920s). He goes searching for one good woman whose blood he can safely suck but finds only hypocrisy and amorality, which are poisonous to him. At the last minute he finally identifies a good old-fashioned girl and makes her his blood bride, but then he is staked dead by the angry young laborer (Joe Dallesandro again!), who makes revolutionary talk and hates Dracula because he typifies the old aristocracy, living off the blood of the people. The newly vampired girl, heartbroken, throws herself on the stake (!) and dies with him.

But a summary is misleading. The effect of the movie stands apart. So here are a couple more tidbits instead.

* This movie was made immediately after Frankenstein. They started it one day in the afternoon after they finished Frankenstein in the morning.

* This one has a good deal more sex, graphically (if unconvincingly) simulated. The extremely dubious sexual politics are ripe for analysis, but why should I? It would all come back to speculation about Paul Morrissey again. See previous entry.

* Udo and his sidekick mostly say “wirgins” instead of “virgins.” This comes up not infrequently.

* Like Goldilocks, before Dracula gets to the wirgin who is just right, he first tries the blood of two of her less virtuous sisters. In both cases, when he realizes that he has been deceived about their wirginity, there follows an extensive sequence of him vomiting up blood. On and on, all over everything, making wretching sounds. This is pretty much the only “horror” effect in the movie, most of which has almost no atmosphere of horror at all.

* Except at the end when all four of his limbs are chopped off one by one in the course of a quick ridiculous chase scene. Spoiler alert.

* Vittorio de Sica — you know, the distinguished director of Bicycle Thieves — plays the father of the girls, and gives some extremely strange speeches about the linguistic splendor of the name ‘Dracula.’ Morrissey says that de Sica wrote most of his own dialogue. Having been hired for only three days, he departs suddenly in the middle of the movie, saying that unfortunately his affairs must take him to London… but “not to worry my dear: I didn’t want to tell you but I’m getting the analysis of Count Dracula’s urine made by Professor Benson. The result will be positive, I am sure — more than positive!”

Just in case you still don’t understand what kind of movie this is, let me make clear that this is the first and only reference to urine. Or to Professor Benson. Morrissey, on the commentary, says that he loves this line because he finds it so utterly bizarre and has no idea where it came from. Don’t ask the writer/director, he just works here.

* Hey, speaking of Roman Polanski: Roman Polanski suddenly turns up for a cameo! He proceeds to oversee a little business clearly of his own devising, and such is his charisma that for a moment it seems we might be in a Polanski movie. This is not coincidentally the best scene. Here it is. I assure you this has nothing to do with anything that comes before or after it.

* I was wrong about composer Claudio Gizzi, last time, when I said he didn’t compose for any other movies. He also composed the score for What?, the movie Roman Polanski was making nearby at the time (which is why he was around to make a cameo). I was also wrong about his talent. Blood for Dracula confirms the impression that he is not practiced in film scoring and is making it up as he goes, and also that he is a clumsy composer; but this time some of the things he does clumsily are sort of tender and sweet and give the movie a good deal of its strange sympathy. Here is the main title. Compositionally it’s amateurish, an awkward attempt at sentimentality that isn’t properly worked out. And yet juxtaposed against a movie that is the same, it becomes sort of affecting. The emotions we have no good reason to feel sometimes have a special power, because they are born free.

* What is the real one degree of separation between this movie and The Tenant? They were both produced by Andrew Braunsberg. He’s the guy at the end of the table in the Polanski cameo scene you just watched.

* Criterionity: First of all, let me note with some satisfaction that I am now finally really out of these woods at the beginning of the Criterion list, both in terms of availability and of quality. Of the next 20 movies, only one is out of print and only one is Armageddon.

Blood for Dracula was unavailable from any legitimate source so again I watched a rip (so again no menu image above) and I missed some kind of gallery feature. But I did hear the commentary track, with the same dramatis personae as last time.

The commentary on this one was for me a particular pleasure. Here are Paul Morrissey’s final thoughts at the very end. Imagine a lot of ambivalent pauses and nose-sighing:

Whatever it is, it’s some sort of a vampire movie. And I think it raises more questions than it answers, But horror movies are not really in the business of answering questions. They’re just sort of strange little fables, that are supposed to have certain resonances, perhaps, outside of their own immediate narrative. I think that’s what Blood for Dracula actually is: a kind of strange trip into a horror-movie mentality. And a little bit horrible. In some parts. In other parts, enjoyable. And never exactly one simple thing.

But it’s Udo and his accent that are the real star of the commentary, as of the movie, so I’ll let him have the last word. He sums it all up: click here.

written and directed by Paul Morrissey

Criterion #27.

Good lord.

In her classic essay on “camp,” Susan Sontag differentiates between two types, “naïve and deliberate,” and says that only naïve camp is satisfying. I agree.

The formulation “so bad it’s good” should properly denote cultural artifacts that are genuine failures but that intrigue because their failure happens to take a spectacular form. They are “bad” judged by their own intra-cultural terms; “good” judged from a broad, curious perspective that doesn’t subscribe to any particular narrow culture (or at least purports not to).

Generally, what makes campy failures compelling is that unlike garden variety failures, they are internally coherent; they have a delectable dream logic. In most cases this coherence is not just a lucky coincidence; it arises from the artist’s actual philosophical outlook and creative priorities. And skewed as these might seem, they’re almost always part of a real culture, even if one shared by only a few people. The artist had to come from somewhere. The supposed “failure on its own terms” is actually a failure on the terms of the beholder’s culture, not the creator’s. Camp is really a form of culture clash.

So the responsible question about any specimen of camp becomes: what kind of legitimacy should we afford the “absurd” culture? The slightly uncomfortable thing about a mass-consumed bit of “camp” like the Double Dream Hands video is that it actually emanates from a robust, well-populated sub-culture. So when we all laugh at it for being campy, we are not really aligning ourselves with some kind of broad and curious anthropological perspective; we are just aligning ourselves with the dominant culture and ridiculing with impunity. Not all that different from ethnic humor, etc.

(Reader A’s preferred example of this sort of thing is JonBenét Ramsey. Here’s another one for you.)

Lest this sound prickly and political, let me clarify that I do think that Double Dream Hands is absurd, and that responding to absurdity with amusement isn’t necessarily a cruel, bigoted response; it can also be a warm, human, admirable one. It can indeed be broad-minded and curious and joyful. But as to what qualifies as absurd, I tend to take a more Camusian attitude: nearly everything about every culture is absurd! The truly open-hearted attitude Sontag describes (“Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature”) should be so all-encompassing as not to need naming. It is a kind of lightness. That’s an attitude to which I aspire.

But that’s not what is generally meant by “camp,” and certainly not by “so bad it’s good.” These encourage us to subscribe to a culturally-validated notion of what is campy (i.e. Double Dream Hands and child beauty pageants but not Facebook or, say, the White House), which converts camp into just another arbitrary cultural charade, no less absurd than what it mocks.

Which is why what Sontag calls “deliberate Camp” always strikes me as sad, or worse. Deliberate camp is the attempt to bring about the pleasures of camp by intentionally trafficking in culturally-validated “campy things.” At its most innocent there is something foolishly fetishistic about it: it’s like a primitive ritual to gain the favor of some god by dressing up like it and dancing around. At its most offensive it is a complete inversion of the significance of the camp attitude. “Oh god campy things are amazing and we love them so of course we want to put on our own show that’s just as amazing as all the truly campy things that we love.” This, far from being a broad-minded and curious, is actually a deeply hypocritical cultural conformity, embodying none of the values it claims to cherish.

Okay, okay, I know what you’re wondering: “Which is he going to say Flesh For Frankenstein is, already?”

Have I got a surprise for you!

I have no idea what this movie is. I really couldn’t tell you what we’re dealing with here. I have watched it twice now, once straight and once with commentary, and I am just befuddled. My gut tells me that despite the obvious it may not be any kind of camp at all. I feel disoriented.

Flesh for Frankenstein has many of the standard camp trappings: very bad acting, very bad writing, constant “exploitative” nudity, sex, gore, etc. If I thought its intention was to be a traditionally effective movie, I would consider it true camp. Alternately, if I thought this movie’s being a dense nexus of outrageous trashola was clearly no accident, I would assume it to be a rather on-the-nose case of deliberate camp (bearing as it does a passing resemblance to The Rocky Horror Picture Show of two years later, all-time standard bearer for deliberate camp).

But I genuinely don’t know what it is.

The strange impression I get is that much of its monumental garbageosity — not all! — is in fact intentional… but that the intentions are not those of deliberate camp; they are far more eccentric. And less hypocritical. Which means I am stymied: it’s not naïve camp because they knew what they were doing, sort of; it’s not deliberate camp because the thing they knew themselves to be doing wasn’t “being campy.” There’s sort of an idiot-savant quality about it. Or maybe I mean savant-idiot.

Let’s watch that clip again.

In the commentary — which is by writer/director Paul Morrissey, star Udo Kier, and an obligatory academic, in this case a guy named Maurice Yacowar — Morrissey and Kier (and maybe Yacowar too; I mostly tuned him out because he was ridiculous) both talk about the movie in terms of “comedy” and “humor.” I would be tempted to accuse them of “outsider” opportunism (“yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket, it was supposed to be funny!”) except the specific things they mention as “jokes” — particularly absurd gore, particularly absurd lines — do indeed seem to be intentional. And yet the overwhelming inadequacy of the movie still requires explanation. Is there anything more confusing than crazy people trying to be funny?

Then there’s the strange issue of sex. The movie goes through standard inane porno scenarios in very slow motion (the sex-obsessed baroness scolds the sullen strapping peasant lad and tells him to report to her bedchamber, which he does, she tells him that he’s to be her private servant, etc. etc.) but then when they eventually take off their clothes, the movie seems immediately bored and disgusted. We get all the idiocy of the buildup with no actual erotic payoff. In fact the ultimate “sex scene” between the baroness and the peasant lad is intentionally made ridiculous and gross: she buries her face in his armpit while we hear outlandish slurping noises.

At one point Baron Frankenstein makes a speech about how disgusted he is by ordinary sex, by “overdeveloped women” with their “filthy movements.” This is part of the portrayal of the Baron as a hopeless pervert, an evil mad scientist obsessed with eugenics, who is only turned on by corpses and internal organs… and yet, oddly, the movie seems to sympathize with his disgust. From the speech, we cut away directly to a dumpy whore rather ridiculously washing her pendulous breasts. The message, essentially, is that the Baron was right, sex is indeed ugly and stupid! I was reminded of the scene from “The Singing Detective” when the psychiatrist reads the writer a sex-phobic passage from one of his books and points out that such a passage sticks out as psychologically revealing because it “doesn’t belong in a detective story.” Here one is similarly caught off guard by the inappropriateness. Believe it or not, you are watching a sexploitation movie made by someone who hates sex.

Here’s what Morrissey says about it on the commentary:

There’s always a sexual element in these stories, I think because I think that sex has become such an absurd thing in modern life that it lends itself to all sorts of comical interpretations or versions… Whatever people’s sexuality is in a story in a movie I make, it’s usually an absurd sexuality; it’s not sincere, it’s not really important. It might drive their lives but it almost is as inconsequential as the breakfast cereal they might have. It’s all reduced in my movies, very intentionally, to something that in effect has no real meaning.

Now, you could write a whole awful thesis on the homosexual “subtext” of this movie (in fact the movie seems to exist solely to provide material for such a thesis) but I’m only going to touch on it briefly. The movie screams “queer!” in a hundred ways (do I really have to defend this impression? don’t make me), and yet oddly enough, for all its tiresome “transgressiveness” (sibling incest; the creepy children of sibling incest voyeuristically watching their parents’ sex lives; evisceration rape, for crying out loud), homosexuality still dare not speak its name. It isn’t mentioned or depicted in the script and it doesn’t play any explicit part in the plot. But here’s the core of the story: there is a beautiful sad-eyed young man who wants to become a monk and isn’t interested in sex with women. Once or twice we see him glance expressionlessly at his friend the strapping farm lad. His head gets cut off and gets put on one of Frankenstein’s monsters, but disappoints the Baron and the Baroness because they each want the monster for sex — the Baron wants it to mate with his female monster; the Baroness wants to have sex with it herself — and he has no sex drive (the Baron got the wrong guy’s head; he really wanted the head of the horny friend). In the end, the boy, in his new monster form, kills the Baron and has a chance to return to the world. But the tragic ending is that he says no: he can’t explain why, but he must die here. Then he tears his own guts open and dies. The only real moral I can take away: even in this incredibly debauched world of absurd garbage, there is still no place for a homosexual, and no place for the sex-positive feelings that the strangely repressed homosexual filmmaker has had to hide far away.

I say strangely repressed because surely in Andy Warhol’s coterie (see below) there was no stigma whatever attached to being gay, and you’d think that being drawn to such a world would be a sign of readiness to open things up a bit. I mean, these are the people who took a walk on the wild side! (Flesh‘s strapping lad is in fact the Little Joe of the song, and Paul Morrissey “discovered and signed The Velvet Underground.”)

But here’s a quote from Andy Warhol that I just found: “The running question was, did he [Paul Morrissey] have a sex life or not? Everyone who’d ever known him insisted that he did absolutely nothing, and all his hours seemed accounted for, but still Paul was an attractive guy, so people constantly asked, ‘What does he do? He must do something…”

So I think I got it right and this movie is a sad document of repression far weirder than the norm. Let’s move on.

Yeah, so if you didn’t know, there is an Andy Warhol connection here. The movie was originally released as “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein” because he had some small amount of money in it and consented to the use of his name for promotion. But that’s about it for his involvement. Morrissey had been ghost director for Warhol’s various experimental films, and then was in charge of film production for “The Factory,” Warhol’s half-baked all-purpose culture operation -slash- poser party. This movie, made in Europe, marks the start of Morrissey’s complete artistic independence from Warhol.

Naturally it’s tempting to explain the movie’s disorienting is-it-camp-or-not tone as an extension of Warhol’s brand of faux-naif faux-art, but this turns out not to lead us anywhere because in the commentary Morrissey claims full responsibility for the Warhol films:

I borrowed from those early experiments, that’s for sure, but that aesthetic, it’s just something peculiar to me. There was no other person involved in the making of the films. The producer, Andy, certainly was involved in the sense that he wanted an undirected film, which I would be gradually evolving away from, but certainly for a year or more I did something like an undirected film. But his ideas were so simple that they didn’t have… you had to try to analyze them yourself and figure what they might be. But if you knew Andy, you knew that he didn’t have many ideas.

Here’s what he says about acting:

My objection to so many American movies [is] this dreadful idea that an actor is a good actor if he’s incredibly sincere in front of a camera, if he really lives the part, means the part… all this garbage idea about acting which is really the worst kind of acting. I think the most important thing in acting is it look natural and it be the evidence of a very distinctive personality who is getting the chance to be in front of a movie camera.

This while we’re watching some undeniably distinctive personalities undeniably getting the chance to be in front of a movie camera. To the degree that we are enjoying them – and it’s hard not to enjoy them a little bit – we are basically in agreement with him.

Our stars are Udo Kier, who is terrifically photogenic, has a hilarious cartoon German accent, the acting instincts of a 7-year-old, and a great deal of enthusiasm. All of which is, admittedly, magnetic. (Go watch the clips again and tell me you don’t agree.) As his sister and bride we have a lumpy society facelift named Monique van Vooren, vamping like a pro and exposing her breasts despite looking creepily like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Her accent is also a doozy. And finally we have Joe Dallesandro, who never gave it away, lumping around with dead eyes like a guy in a porno here to fix the TV ma’am. His utter and hopeless New York accent is perhaps the best of all, flopping into every scene like a huge hamburger that crushes everything in sight. He is exactly like one of the cutouts from Our Lady of the Flowers.

Kier’s commentary is just as cheerful, guileless and cartoonish as his performance: “I sink Joe is a very natural actor. Like Andy Warhol told me once — we were talking about acting and Andy said ‘There’s two kind of actors, there’s natural actors like Joe and there’s dramatic actors like you.’ So Joe is Joe. And he’s very good in bofe of the films, I sink he is totally fulfilling the personality he’s playing. But I’m I sink more the dramatic kind.”

Here’s what we said during the movie and this is still about the best I can do to describe its effect: The movie feels like one of those willfully inscrutable high fashion shoots that go beyond deliberate camp into genuine intentionlessness, into an apotheosis of hypocrisy — a transcendent hypocrisy that creates a taste smokescreen behind which the transcendently needy can curl up and hide. Which isn’t a bad description of Andy Warhol’s M.O.

But perhaps it’s just the opposite. Perhaps was made in Sontag’s spirit of true camp appreciation, which is to say with a heart so big it doesn’t fit into any culture. Udo Kier has the ditzy purity of someone who grew up as a sex object, and he seems to have loved working on the movie in a very sincere way that was not unduly concerned with whether the movie was serious or campy or comic or what. He just loved working on it. His passion shows, and that passion is watchable.

And heck, maybe the admirers of this movie — they exist — admire it exactly in that spirit. Who am I to say? It is a true cult movie. If you can hear its voice clearly enough to comfortably understand what you are hearing, it is for you. It is definitely not for me, because it confused me. All I’m saying is that I heard it clearly enough to know that if you think you get this movie because it’s “so bad it’s good,” you’re wrong. Or at least not entirely right.

So that’s that for my attempt at insight. For everyone else: this movie is a huge heap of garbage. There’s a companion movie, exactly like it, that I have to watch next. So that’s more than enough for now.

(The Criterion Edition is out of print, not held at libraries, and used copies are unacceptably expensive. All I could find was a “rip” of the movie and commentary, which is why there’s no menu image above. I apparently also missed out on a “gallery of stills” feature. I’m not concerned.)

Oh right the music. Here’s the main title, your track 27. (If you insist on knowing what those sound effects are, it’s the creepy kids cutting open a doll and then guillotining it. You didn’t need to know that.) This is by Claudio Gizzi, an arranger that Morrissey encountered at Cinecittà who hadn’t scored any other movies and didn’t go on to score any other movies (except for Criterion #28, coming up). Apparently he was intimidated by the assignment (or didn’t know how to get away from a temp track), because he immediately resorted to plagiarism. I seem to be the only person in all of Google to know what this is a rip-off of! Now you all know too. He rips off the third movement later in the movie. And he uses Tannhäuser for every scene having to do with the Baron’s eugenic fantasies. Lame.

Oh and also I forgot to mention: this movie was originally released in 3D. Guts needlessly come right at the camera several times. I would have preferred to see it that way, of course. But now that I’ve settled for flat Frankenstein, I’m done here. This is not my cult.

written by Barrie Keeffe
directed by John Mackenzie

Criterion #26.

This isn’t a movie I’ve heard much talked about. But it’s a winner. And you can stream it on Netflix.

There were a number of moments when I thought, “Well! I’ll be sure not to forget about that when it comes time to write it up!” (Which is a needless, distracting thought that I wish I would never have.) But now that the write-up has arrived, I realize that pretty much every one of those things I wanted to mention would be spoilage of one sort or another, and why would I do that to you? Describing things that surprised or entertained me is just a way of stealing them from you, or at least diminishing your pleasure by interposing myself. And I’m skeptical of my motivations — I think at some level I’d be trying to get credit for the things by being the one who saw them first. That’s no way to be. If I’m going to get people to love and admire me for a blog entry on The Long Good Friday, I’m going to need to do it all on my own, and not e.g. by mentioning that OMG you guys this movie has a kind-of-amazing scene where ____ (you know, ____ from ____) and a very young ____ look like they’re about to ____ in a ____. But then ____ ____ ____ instead. (Do you love me yet?)

Here are a few things I can say without getting in your way:

* The music is awesome, and I use the word advisedly. Not literally, of course, but advisedly. Click and be enlightened: the Main Title. (Being your Criterion mixtape track 26, naturally.)

That tune has been running in my head near-continuously since I watched the movie. The score is by Francis Monkman, who has almost no other film credits, which seems to me a real shame. Because while this may just sound like typical cop-show syntherie to you, it is actually very carefully calibrated and serves the movie memorably well. I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say that the relationship of what the music is selling (drive, glamour and grit, cynicism, knowingness) to the characters and the action is not fixed; it serves in different ways over the course of the movie. It’s really a top-notch score, given the style. By the end you will think so too.

Or not. I just saw someone on Netflix singling out the score as distracting and saying that it ruined the movie. Well, not for me.

* Admittedly, there is one sequence where creepy, icy music seems to denote the ominous underworld of HOMOSEXUALS. Though, well, maybe that’s not what the music turns out to mean after all. But it certainly is meant to play off the viability of that association. The scene would certainly be scored differently today. (Obviously the entire movie would be scored differently today, as the sample above should make clear.)

* The whole thing looks like a liquor ad from a 70s magazine: cold white highlights on warm dark wood, the luxury of everything tending to black. This is a basic appeal, not to be underestimated.

* Criterion Coincidence: Oddly enough, Alphaville star Eddie Constantine is in this one too! He’s not so great.

* The movie is far from perfect by present-day standards. But its imperfections were very comfortable for me. There have been major shifts in filmmaking priorities since 1979. The aspects of writing, directing, acting (yes, and music) that today seem corny or sloppy or unrefined about this movie just don’t seem important to me. Whereas it has a kind of calm purposeful quality, taken for granted in 1979 and now strangely rare, which is to me incredibly valuable. I enjoyed watching this movie because I can benefit from the things that era took for granted. That’s the basest, most indiscriminate form of nostalgia, I know (“I’m totally obsessed with the 19th century”) but who’s to say that isn’t one the primary functions of the cinema? It’s genuinely useful to be exposed to other ways of feeling and being, artifacts of times and places when those ways of being were unconscious and uncontroversial; the better to assume them, if one chooses, in a time when they need be conscious and potentially controversial.

* Not that I want to be like anyone in this movie. But I’d like to walk at the same pace they do; I’d like the shadows in my life to be as black as theirs were. When they pick up a glass to have a drink, I’d like to pick up a glass that way.

* The only extras on the (out of print) DVD were previews. There is however a recent “documentary” on YouTube, perhaps from a more recent DVD edition, and I watched that. It’s not all that great. In it Bob Hoskins confirms what one suspects, watching his performance — that he’s really just playing himself. Except as a crime boss. This is basically why the movie works and why it catapulted him to, well, a Bob Hoskins level of fame: even his exaggeratedly pop-eyed, clench-jawed reactions are watchably natural. This gives him freedom to do some very subtle things as well.

* Helen Mirren’s presence is as (similarly) reassuring and easy as ever, but her performance per se is a little inconsistent, which surprised me. Luckily in this movie’s world it doesn’t matter. Maybe I imagined it. She’s fine. Who doesn’t like Helen Mirren? Maybe I take it back.

* There’s a tiny bit of unpleasant violence. Reader B, there is a scene with exactly the thing you hate the most, but it doesn’t last very long. However the movie does sneak up on you and become surprisingly intense despite how casual it all seems. That’s praise. I’m just giving a parental warning.

* The story is fairly standard gangster fare on the largest structural level and the smallest (i.e. in individual scenes) but at the intervening levels are some interesting ideas that set this movie slightly apart thematically and tonally. I don’t think I’ve seen many other British crime movies so I don’t know how unique it really is, but word on the internet is that this one is at the top of the British heap. The script is from the golden age of sturdy screenwriting and has many nice little touches.

* The movie starts with 6 minutes of stuff that you don’t fully understand and won’t until much later. What’s that money for? Who’s the guy? Where’s he taking it? Who are those guys? What’s going on? This is a once-standard device for movie intrigue, to draw you in and turn on your brain (though not frequently used anymore, it seems to me). It needs to be handled with care, and I think it is, here; it offers just enough thread to follow that we don’t mind not knowing what it’s tied to or what direction we’re following it. But it struck me that while it’s customary for the action in such an opening sequence to be inherently intrigue-worthy (i.e. a briefcase full of money, murder, a coffin, etc.), the technique would work just as well with anything. A man is carrying a carton of milk. Where’s he going with it? What’s the milk for? If you drag that out for six minutes it would feel like you’re watching a fascinating mystery. And then when you suddenly cut away elsewhere to the main action of the movie, it would give just as much spice to what followed. Why did we see that at all? When are we going to find out what the milk was for? Highly intriguing. You could probably make a whole movie consisting only of different sorts of mundane nothing, and create a strong sense of suspense just through editing. If one of you can name an existing such movie please do.

* You’ll just have to accept that you can’t understand all the Cockney. “Grass” means informer. (Grass, grasshopper, copper.)

* I know this is an awfully pedestrian entry but that’s what you get for not wanting spoilers.

* Hey, if you do watch it, come on down to the comments.

written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Criterion #25. End of the first page of the listing! (26 pages to go. Having spent 1665 days on the first page, I calculate that getting to the end will take about 119 years. Though of course they’ll probably have released some more movies by then.)

My first actual Godard. But his style is of course familiar from parody. Which it lives up to.

Alphaville is intellectualist through and through. It privileges concepts over things, both in technique and in content. It is, shall we say, not obvious.

In approaching such a work there are two modes of critique: the naive and the like-minded. The negative naive response is “meaningless drivel.” The positive naive response is “stylish dream.” The negative like-minded response is “sophomoric symbolism.” The positive like-minded response is “brilliant allegory.”

(There is actually a hybrid third category: the naive response that believes itself to be like-minded. e.g. the feminist who, of any sufficiently obscure work, readily sees that it is about feminism.)

To attain to a genuinely like-minded response, one either lucks out and finds that one happens to be like-minded, or else one makes an effort to decode. My cynical impression is that lucky sympathy is rare, and most comprehension of high symbolism is not organic but deliberate. That’s not to say that it is false; only that it requires a kind of effort on the part of the audience that it did not require on the part of the creator, who generally arrives at his obscurities by a pleasant flower-gathering in his own personal garden of associations.

You will hear it clucked by admirers of things high that naive responses are not just naive but irresponsible: incurious, philistine, lazy. In this moral system, failure to make the effort to decode is failure to give intellect its due. (These sorts of people are usually frustrated by how little respect their own intellects have been accorded and thus are compelled to act out the values they found lacking in the world: tireless devotion to intellect, disdain for those unwilling to be so devoted. (, he psychoanalyzed sweepingly.))

However not all obscure works are equally obscure, and the community trying to put moral pressure on the world to make the interpretive effort varies in its size from work to work. If you could find the ratio of naive to like-minded responses for a given work (some whiz at Google Ngrams can probably rig that up, right?), and then listed works by ratio, I imagine that a broad spectrum of obscurity would be completely represented, all the way from very obvious children’s books that nobody (of writing or speaking age) has ever thought to blame for causing their incomprehension, to Finnegans Wake, which can be decoded but about which even most professors of literature — professional decoders — will say the effort is a waste of time. Beyond that, a broad swath of amateur poetry and the like, stuff that nobody apart from the author will ever take the time comprehend fully; and then, further beyond, surrealism and other work intended only to be comprehensible naively. And at the far end, random or otherwise depersonalized work.

If the number of works at each ratio were graphed, I suspect you’d see a huge peak at the low end, where most works live (or perhaps just above the low end, since absolute explicitness isn’t actually prized and is probably not possible), and then a downward slope as the works got more obscure. At the far end, where the surrealists et al. live, there would probably be a smaller peak, of works broadly understood to be basically intuitive and abstract.

It’s the middle of the graph that I’d be interested to see, because I’m not entirely sure what it would look like. Does the graph of obscurity taper steadily, or is there a point beyond which adding further obscurity to a work means that the audience willing to make the effort suddenly becomes exponentially smaller? Are there local maxima, customary degrees of obscurity around which works cluster? I really don’t know.

What’s important is that if there did happen to be such bumps and tipping points in the graph, they would reflect demographics, not aesthetics. Or, to put all of this another way, obscurity is in the eye of the beholder, so the only possible objective standard of obscurity is a census of beholders, regardless of whether the distribution is smooth or lumpy.

This needs pointing out because we (I) need an antidote to the shaming of the cluckers, as well as my own internal clucker. When I hear people saying that Moby-Dick is stupid and boring, or that black and white movies are stupid and boring, and that anybody who claims to like them is just posturing, or whatever, I can’t help but think “come on! grow up.” When I hear people saying that I should come on! and grow up! for thinking that, say, Godard is stupid and boring, I can’t help but think, “well, you’re just posturing.”

But because I am capable of self-awareness, then I immediately feel wary. Wait a minute, what am I saying? I don’t want to be caught being a Philistine! That’s not me! Don’t I want to give the intellect its due? Am I really so lazy and self-satisfied that I can’t put in a little extra muscle and figure out what Godard is doing? Come on! Grow up! You might learn something, jerk! Okay, fine. And so I do, priding myself on the effort.

But this is what needs an antidote. It is wrong to look at the graph of obscurity and say that the objective is to encompass it all in like-mindedness, because that is dishonest and impossible. And it is wrong to take the opinions of others as your compass because there will always be voices from just above you saying “come on! grow up! typical American! civilization down the tubes!” Whether or not they are posturing or authentic is beside the point. (Most likely they are not posturing per se, but they have exerted great and strenuous effort to get where they are, an effort that they would rather not acknowledge because it was motivated by having been shamed themselves, he psychoanalyzed sweepingly again.)

The point is this: everyone draws his own line of demarcation somewhere on that graph; everyone has his own ratio and clucks from where he stands. It seems right to me personally that my ratio should privilege like-mindedness and empathy over stubborn incomprehension, but only slightly. I think the golden section would be a good guideline here. So: I deem it morally incumbent upon me to make the effort to decode and comprehend works that are 61.8% obscure or less, and no more. My retort to the cluckers in the regions beyond will be that they have been driven by shame into a life out of balance, beyond the golden mean. As I myself was for a long time.

Alphaville is, I would say, about 70% obscure. Temptingly close to the line, close enough that I can hear it murmuring: come on, kid, you only need to think a little harder to get your gold star!

Well, for the first time in a while, I am braced to shout “Screw you, pusher-man! You don’t know me! PRETENTIOUS DRIVEL! STYLISH DREAM!” This is a moral victory. I am, accordingly, not going to say anything about what this movie is about about.

(Though, ironically, what it’s about is the supremacy of feeling over “logic,” and is thus applicable to this discussion. Seems to me Godard gets it all wrong by being blatantly stuck in a self-regarding intellectual mode himself, not recognizing that as far as art is concerned, his attitude isn’t so far from being in cahoots with his “logical” computer supervillain. Oops, I talked about it. Well, that’s just my hazy view from 9% away, and that’s how it’s going to stay. My toes didn’t go over the line. And I kept this in parentheses!)

Is it a stylish dream, though? Yeah, kinda. It’s “stylish” in the cavalier mode of the Nouvelle Vague, which overlaps significantly with amateurish sloppiness. Is it possible that it is actually just amateur and sloppy? Yeah, kinda. Does this general sloppiness add to or detract from the charm of the more refined compositions that crop up here and there? It depends on your mood. My mood fluctuated.

Here’s what I enjoyed: the feeling of slinking arbitrarily around the bland modern lobbies and corridors of Paris circa 1965, in nocturnal black and white. And I enjoyed that overlaid on that meandering was an easygoing intention to riff on pulp conventions. My favorite part was envying Godard the luxury of actually carrying out his half-baked project, which felt relaxed. It put me in mind of high school days, when some whim and a vague sense of adventure would give rise to long, mysterious nights of pointless driving around. Like American Graffiti. Or Nighthawks. You’re not going to figure out what it means by thinking about it or talking about it.

Which is why this movie didn’t work for me. If you’re going to have that kind of fun with no name, Monsieur Godard, shut up already. Nobody cares about your asinine evil computer story or your speechifying, least of all you, so stop pretending. It’s very clear, as you surely knew it would be, that this movie is really just an framework for a variety of indulgences, not least of which is spending some quality camera-worship time with your ex-wife. You could have had the decency to just follow through on that instead of making it purport to be some kind of well-formed movie with something important to say.

Accordingly the best part of the movie by far is the first 10 minutes, in which a ridiculous succession of noir tropes is strung together deadpan and we don’t yet realize that we’re supposed to take it at all seriously: the trench-coated protagonist drives into town, grimly checks into a hotel, a pretty girl shows him to his room, takes off her clothes, a bad guy emerges from the bathroom and the hero fights him, the hero photographs the girl while she poses for him, the hero shows off his marksmanship by using a magazine centerfold as target and firing two bullets through the breasts without looking, while reading a copy of “The Big Sleep.” All of this to wonderfully overcooked noir-in-quotes music by Paul Misraki. I was delighted. I thought I was going to be delighted by the rest. But the rules aren’t what I thought. One is expected to follow along and care. Nope.

To the degree that the movie is fun, it’s because the music shows us how. Here comes your sample. For the first time I’ve done a bit of editing. Reluctantly, but I had to. Godard, not content to let any of his borrowed tropes run for too long without aggressive conceptual interference, edits the music with raw, amateurish stop-and-go cuts, and there’s not a single major cue in the whole movie that he uses in its entirety without overlay of dialogue. However, the same piece of music is used over and over. So what I’m offering here is a splicing together of the uninterrupted bits of music from the first 2 minutes of the movie to form a continuous excerpt that constitutes more or less the main material of the score. The two splices, which hopefully are unobtrusive, correspond exactly to reuse of the same section of composition, so I haven’t done anything invasive to the music itself – this is really how it goes, and it’s all audio from the movie. That’s the disclaimer. Do listen, because this is good stuff: Track 25.

The casual, no-budget visuals juxtaposed with this outsize orchestral sturm und drang reminded me of my absurdist adolescent video projects, which would set undistinguished Video8 footage of my friends strolling around the suburbs to intense movie music. Which always struck me as hilarious, because it almost starts to work! and then your brain suddenly gives up because it’s just too stupid. There’s some kind of joy in that exhaustion, renewing and intensifying one’s awareness of silliness. Those charms are almost the charms of Alphaville, and how fond I was when I found them there! Alas, too seldom.