Weekly Reel, April 2
Rome, Open City, The Big Lebowski, Adam Curtis interview, and Dean Kissick on arts and memes
This is the first (experimental) newsletter that will serve as either a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly diary-like supplement to my regular essays/posts. Here I take a more broad approach by giving my random thoughts on different topics, from summarizing and recommending recently viewed films or books read, to retro-reviewing films from the near and far past to see how well they’ve aged, or articles I find interesting and want to quote in length.
So if you haven’t already done so, drop off your email below so that these newsletters are delivered directly to you (or possibly your spam folder).
Rome, Open City (1945, Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
As part of the Criterion Challenge, I watched Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta) for week 12: any Criterion film from the 1940s. This is one of the early films of the Italian Neorealist movement, which lasted roughly the first decade of postwar Italy. Its basic characteristics include sad/struggling characters, sad/struggling cities, and sad/struggling living conditions. The situation in postwar Italy was bleak, which was then translated well into their films. Film equipment and studios were left with scraps, which necessitated the use of their crumbling surroundings. Much of the time, the production of these films are just as interesting to discuss as the film itself.
The story for Rome, Open City was initially developed in Rome under its nine month Nazi occupation. Then only a couple months after the Allies swept through, Rossellini, Sergio Amidei, and Federico Fellini officially wrote the script while the country sans Rome was still under occupation. In it, they dramatized the events they had seen around them: a city under foreign rule, institutions and human rights abused, and underground resistance carrying on, however doomed to fail. They shot the film under heightened financial and technical difficulties while the War was still going on in the winter of 1945, and because of this closeness in Italy’s time and memory, the story feels fresh and personal.
The story is about resistance and basic survival, with the plot focusing on an underground communist resistance leader and his friends/family trying to evade the Nazis and their Italian fascist supporters. Also important to the story is a local Catholic priest, one of only a few portrayed quite sympathetically in a film, that assists the underground in facilitating their contact network. Without wanting to give much away, their plans become thwarted and drama unravels.
The film’s impact helped define and usher in the Italian Neorealist movement. Rossellini went on to direct two other films after that, Paisan in 1946 and Germany, Year Zero in 1948, which now make up his Neorealist trilogy that are essential viewings for their genuinely brutal realism that importantly don’t resign themselves to utter hopelessness. Although the country is destroyed and the underground resistance is met by an even greater occupied resistance, there still remains a hope for a life beyond their struggles and something worth fighting for, which confirms the humanity of not just the characters or their real-life situations, but also for the viewer.
Rome, Open City is available to watch on the Criterion Channel.
Retro-Review: The Big Lebowski (1998, Joel and Ethan Coen, USA)
Although it was almost a month ago, it’s still appropriate for one to celebrate The Dude any day they can if it isn’t March 6. This film has certainly aged better than most films that year (though still pretty stacked with Saving Private Ryan, Mulan, American History X, Shakespeare in Love, A Bug’s Life, The Horse Whisperer, Pi, Pleasantville, The Truman Show, and of course everyone’s favorite, Armageddon) in terms of its perennial viewings and white russian drink-alongs. While many other films of the end-of-the-Millenium-era were rather gloomy and nihilist in their apocalyptic visions or confrontations with one’s own identity (think The Matrix in 1999 and Memento the year after that), The Big Lebowski served its role as a court jester mocking nihilists and the paradox of a confused identity.
The film opened to mixed reviews but only gained traction through a cult following years later among college guys continuously rewatching the VHS. By now it is more of a cultural attraction and filmic high-point rather than a stoner comedy thanks to its intelligent writing and confronting, but not overt parody, of genre tropes.
Other writers of written books and lengthy articles discussing the film, it’s meanings, reception, production, etc., including a recent one from Graham Daseler at Bright Lights Film Journal. Attempting to describe its genre, he writes:
Part of the problem, as anyone who has seen the film knows, is that it’s devilishly hard to classify, wriggling free of any single category you try to tuck it into. On the one hand, it’s a buddy comedy, like a Laurel and Hardy routine, about an odd couple friendship; on the other, it’s a sports film, eulogizing the underappreciated pleasures of team bowling. It’s a social satire as well as a comedy of errors. It has the elements of a mystery, a western, a musical, and a stoner comedy all wrapped into one. The trick of the movie is that it doesn’t get bogged down in any single one of these genres but dances over them lightly, borrowing the best elements from each.
On Jeff Bridges as The Dude:
The genius of Bridges’ performance is that in a movie buzzing with action (kidnapping, ransom, Busby Berkleyesque dance sequences, magic carpet rides), the actor creates a kind of poetry out of inaction. Perhaps never before, at least in the frenetic world of Hollywood, has sloth been so sweetly celebrated. The Dude ambles rather than walks, mumbles rather than talks, and slouches in any chair he can find, invariably tossing a leg over the arm rest.
And his answer to the question on why the film is so popular:
The protagonist’s frequent ingestion of weed and White Russians is no doubt part of the appeal, particularly for college students. One imagines, too, that the young are attracted to the Dude because he rejects society’s expectations of a normative adult, a quality that makes him both a bit of an overgrown college student himself (messy, jobless, and frequently high) and also a bit of an antihero. In this sense he is a legitimate heir to Humphrey Bogart, who was, after all, Hollywood’s original antihero. Part of the film’s appeal, however, must also lie in its inherent sweetness. The Los Angeles of The Big Lebowski is no more an authentic place than is the Paris of Rene Clair’s imagination. The Coen brothers have rarely shown much of an interest in strict realism as such. Yet, like Clair’s Paris, there’s something undeniably appealing about the forgery, something strangely enchanting that makes the fiction more desirable than the reality. Observe how tenderly, for instance, the details of the bowling alley are rendered: the porcine bellies, the two-toned shoes, the half-smoked cigarettes, the balletic arc of a pin as it completes a seven-ten split. Bowling never looked more romantic. Like Dziga Vertov, the great Soviet director, the Coens find beauty in the simple motion of objects, letting their camera wander behind the walls to observe the pins lifting into place or sending it zipping behind the bowling balls as they glide down the lanes. The soundtrack, likewise, despite being comprised almost entirely of ’70a rock, is surprisingly laid-back, gentle even, as though it were tuned to the wavelength of the Dude’s own brain. When the Coens choose to play a Bob Dylan song, they skip over his more famous politicized folk and pick “The Man in Me,” a sweet romantic ballad that, appropriately, seems almost to have been composed in a dream.
The Big Lebowski is only 23 years old, which isn’t much for a classic, so it’ll be interesting to see how well the film ages in the next few decades as the identity of Los Angeles changes as The Dude is more and more replaced by his millionaire counterparts.
Article: “Culture is a smokescreen: Adam Curtis on why art has lost its way”
Adam Curtis is a British documentary filmmaker for the BBC that just released his giant six part documentary, Can't Get You Out of My Head : An Emotional History of the Modern World for the BBC iPlayer, which is also available on Curtis’ Youtube channel. In the series, he takes a detour through the lives of controversial historical figures to help explain how the 20th century Quadrumvirate of the Soviet Union, China, USA, and Britain lost the ability to mobilize their countries around a unifying story as the rise of Individualism steamrolled its way across their societies. Told through his typical use of visual BBC-archival montages alongside music ranging from Trent Reznor to David Bowie, it’s difficult to classify his work as documentary because of its mixed cinematic qualities with Curtis’ didactic voiceover. As he explains in the Sight & Sound article, he is a journalist instead of a filmmaker:
You can have both ambiguity in the characters, as you say, and have me as another character in the film, telling you what I think. Because my real job is not to make movies, my job – what the BBC asked me to do – is to try and provoke people to look again, pull back and think again about the time they’ve lived through.
So much of our journalism is having to do it day by day, whereas I get the time to go back and look at the stories that have led to now. What I’m trying to do [in Can’t Get You out of My Head], because I’ve got the length and time, and because of the subject matter as well, is put ambiguity in. But I don’t see why I can’t say what I think. I don’t make cinema, I’m not even a documentary maker; I’m a journalist, and I go out and find and tell stories and draw conclusions from them and tell you. If people then say, ‘He’s not like modern cinema,’ I just think they have tried to put me in a category that I never really wanted to be in in the first place.
On summarizing his work and the world it’s confronting:
One was a series of stories of people I was just rather fascinated by, because they were complicated. A lot of journalism these days divides people, characters, into goodies and baddies; they’re either innocents being bullied by dictators and horrible bankers or they are dictators and horrible bankers. I just think people aren’t like that, and I’ve always rather liked ambiguous characters. So here we have Jiang Qing, whose anger and frustration you sort of sympathise with: she was an ambitious person who’d been scorned and put down by the men in the Shanghai studios and then in the revolutionary camp, but when she got power it came out in a vengeful way. That’s really interesting, because it’s exactly what we’ve been talking about: how ideas go into someone’s head, get mixed up with ghosts from their own pasts – in Britain, the deference, the snobbery, the class anger, the dreams of and melancholy about the empire – and come out in strange, malformed ways. It tells you how difficult it is to change the world and if you do want to, you’ve got to understand the complexity of having to do it with people who feel and think and have their own histories. One of the fundamental mistakes people made in the age of the individual was to think that you could simply change things without taking into account what is inside people’s heads. That’s what progressive movements will have to do in the future.
On what happened to contemporary art and culture:
I think we’re living through a very interesting moment, because the other thing, which I didn’t really do in the films, because I’d get into such trouble if I say it, is that maybe the whole idea that culture can be radical just isn’t true; that actually it’s not only a retreat, it’s a smokescreen to disguise the fact that you don’t really have an alternative political vision of the world and how to tackle entrenched power.
Those who retreat into culture haven’t got the answer. They dance to the radical music and say the radical things and go and see the radical films – but maybe the power is moving away from them. It’s a very difficult thing to face up to; people wrote great big novels in the 19th century, Buddenbrooks [Thomas Mann’s 1901 multi-generational chronicle of Hanseatic merchants] and things like that about a class beginning to decline.
Likewise the art of the last Gilded Age, the late 19th century in America: “What art did then was dramatise that extraordinary wealth and power so people could see it,” he argues. “What art is brilliant at, because it’s so close to money – the artists are allowed into the inner sanctums of money in a way that people like you and I are not – is to tell us what power is like in a dramatic way, so we understand it. But I do think that art lost its way through self-expression.”
And on our present cultural non-ideology:
I think I make it pretty clear that there is a great desire to change the world. Let’s look back at why past attempts to do that failed. One of the fundamental reasons is that the mistake people made in the age of the individual was to think that you could change things without taking account of what is inside people’s heads – the old ideas they’ve inherited from the corrupt world that you’re trying to change, yes? I don’t think they’re pessimistic, I think they are trying to confront these issues which the left and the progressive movement have shied away from, and retreated into an individualism, because they couldn’t think of the answer to it.
Culture is suffused with that pessimism. It’s one of the great agents of this ‘Shit happens’ mood – it’s not even an ideology. It’s part of ‘Oh Dearism,’ that ‘it always goes wrong’. The dominant mood of our time, amongst lots of the very well-heeled and very clever, and especially amongst those who are big in culture, is of an inevitability, that there’s nothing we can do to change anything, it’s just going to happen.
I heard a wonderful phrase, ‘bourgeois eschatology’, which I had to look up. It’s that religious idea that the world is about to end, and [the bourgeois variant] is that sense that, in a narcissistic age, when problems happen, you project your anxiety on to the world. ‘It’s not me that’s going to die, it’s the world.’ And I’m saying if you do want to change the world, you’ve got to face up to these facts, but you can change the world. I have chosen stories where things went wrong to try and learn from them. It’s true that lots of the attempts to change the world in the 20th century left horror, but to confront where things go wrong is not pessimism: in a funny way it’s optimistic. I’m saying it doesn’t have to be like this.
If you want to read more follow the link to the interview, otherwise watching his documentaries is the best way to experience the historico-socioeconomic ideological anthropology he’s attempting to explain, which are mostly available on his Youtube channel. Beyond being just traditional image and voiceover documentaries, their montages create a filmic digestion closer to that of a video essay, which gives the content a more visual (or cinematic) dimension than most other documentaries. For example, I think the first few minutes of his 2015 documentary on Afghanistan, Bitter Lake, reaches into an emotional and aesthetic depth further than didacticism allows.
While I wouldn’t call him a provocateur or experimental filmmaker, as some do, he’s certainly a mix between journalist, documentary filmmaker, and video essayist. Regardless of which, it’s important to have a kind of journalist with an eye for visuals that can convey the information in a unique way. Each frame therefore becomes important to the story, which is more rare in journalism. And although he makes a lot of sweeping statements about history and society, he need not become a scholar in his argument when he’s using audiovisual montages to confirm the mood of his journalistic insights. One also need not agree with everything he’s claiming, but one should look at certain things in a new light after watching his films, which is what a blend between journalism and filmmaking at minimum be able to offer.
Article: “THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: POPULAR THINGS”
In Dean Kissick’s latest Downward Spiral article for Spike Art Magazine, he explains the recent NFT fad in relation to the (mostly digital) arts world and memes. His writing is as interesting as the topics he describes:
Five stylishly dressed teenage boys stroll down Prince Street extolling the US dollar’s hold over the Swiss economy. A whole other economy based on trolling, memes and network effects is appearing. Now everyone’s a day trader, everyone’s a drug dealer, everyone’s an art director for a weed delivery service, everyone might be the next top model, everywhere’s a secret coke loft, now everything can be traded or shared online; money printer, bad figurative painter, subreddit, museum gift shop, NFT minter go brrrr; it’s the first day of spring; it’s Beeplemania; images and capital have become the same thing; welcome to the total financialisation of reality!
He further explains the changing scene taking place from a hyper-accelerated blend of the rise of cryptocurrencies + Covid lockdowns pushing more things online. On today’s art world attempting to express cultural memes:
So much of today’s culture is a poor-quality remake of something better and more compelling…There are two paths for the golden-age American cartoon star: to be withdrawn, like the lascivious skunk Pepé le Pew, or, worse, to be reimagined as bad art, as childish and nostalgic art for those that don’t like ideas, or beauty.
Lately artworks have begun to look more like memes, while memes have begun to look more like artworks. The memes look nicer, and offer more hope.
And this is due to the fact that there are too many varieties of everything nowadays, using the example that there have been 65 different flavors of oreos in the last eight years, which at some crossed over into the contemporary art scene:
When there’s too much of everything however, at some point the original is lost, the memory is lost, and all that remains are faded, flat, hollowed-out derivatives.
And to explain how NFTs fit into this scene:
The most popular series of NFT collectibles are algorithmically generated. And what they reveal, compared to the rest of culture, is a broader and more prevalent trend of art and entertainment that has the uncanny feeling of having been made by algorithm, even though it wasn’t. A painter and performance artist once told me, in the brutalist basement of the old Met Breuer, that Future had destroyed the future. Trap music has taken over the world, and it all sounds more or less the same now. It might be amazing, but it sounds the same. It’s supposed to sound the same. That’s the idea, what makes it so powerful. A talented producer can make a song in ten minutes on a live stream. A talented producer can make a song in less time than it takes to listen to. It’s never been quicker to write a song than now. Songs keep getting shorter and shorter. Records keep getting shorter and shorter. It’s a numbers game. I can write these columns pretty quickly now. This is an age of great speed and competition. We’re all looking for more popularity, new ways to find an edge; and yet, all this competition only seems to lead to blandness and mediocrity, rather than breakthroughs. Nor does it lead to collapse; even accelerationism doesn’t work. We want too much content, too fast, and it just leads to this endless algorithmic churning, this paint-by-numbers effect. You see it in art. In Netflix documentaries. Spotify playlists. Op-ed pages. The news. The latest manufactured outrage. Well-reviewed first-person novels about nothing. All so dreadfully banal and repetitive. This is what results when everything is forged in economies of dollars, of ether, of attention. Most culture now has the feeling of having been made by algorithm; and the reason for this, is that humans have begun to act like algorithms.
It’s a very entertaining read and worth the effort in trying to understand the convergence of NFTs, algorithms, art, culture, etc. His articles for Spike come out online monthly and are must-reads.