Weekly Reel, March 1
Ukraine, Modern Films on Class, Disney-Themed Communities, Village Roadshow v. Warner Bros., and Paramount Global
[Note: I’ll be saving film reviews for an Oscars special edition Weekly Reel and instead provide news regarding Ukrainian media, then after provide a regular essay commentary and news stories.]
Ukrainian Film and TV groups are asking the world to boycott Russian media because of its dissemination of propaganda. The EU and other big groups/companies have banned RT and Sputnik.
The Ukrainian Film Academy called for an international boycott of Russian cinema. In particular they are encouraging bans on international co-productions, Russian films in film festivals, production agreements and IP use, and the ex-communication of European producers who publicly support Russia’s aggression. They created a change.org petition.
Here is a list of five recent Ukrainian films that help explain Russian aggression and provide a human face to the events currently unfolding.
The Russian Formula One race was canceled and the sole Russian driver, Nikita Mazepin, might be kicked off the Haas team because his sponsorship funder, Uralkali, was dropped by the team. FIFA banned Russian flags and anthems from matches and no further international matches will take place in Russia. The UEFA moved the Champions League final in May from Russia to Paris.
YouTube is banning ad-revenue collections by Russian channels. YT as well as Facebook and Twitter blocked Russian state media from running ads on their platforms. Russians on OnlyFans are now allowed back on the site after being cut off from their funds for a couple days.
Sean Penn is in Kyiv shooting a documentary on the invasion. He arrived earlier in the week and is seemingly staying put.
In Olivier Assayas’s long “State of Cinema” essay from 2020, he proposed a formulation to address the critical question on the failure of modern-day cinephilia. From the Nouvelle Vague to the New Hollywood, filmmakers began going to school and formalized the procedures of film theory from its practical application. But ever since this moment, Assayas claims that cinephilia has become too rigid because of its adoption by institutions. In other words, as soon as formal rules and literature were established by cinephiles, films became less dependent on improvisation and technological exploration. As Assayas glumly asserts: “What I am getting at is the point when living theory becomes dead ideology.”
One aspect Assayas briefly mentions is that complex sociological and political topics require more than just a two hour fictional story. One would do better to explain these through long documentaries and series. In particular, it was the determination to link film’s morality to Leftist ideology in the nineteen-sixties that reduced the “living theory” of the exciting early advancements of the Nouvelle Vague to the “dead ideology” of political schlock that Dziga-Vertov and others were guilty of making. In Assayas’s words: “The combination of these two issues [values and ethics] served as theory for a generation of filmmakers…who were looking for a moral code which the ruins of classical cinephilia, already critically wounded by leftism, were unable to provide.”
Luis Buñuel began making avant-garde surrealist films in the nineteen-twenties. His early directorial debut that he co-wrote with uni-dorm-buddy Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou (1929), is a classic example of the genre that all film students (must) sit through. It’s subliminal/body horror (supposedly) continues to shock audiences today. Buñuel was a committed anti-clerical Leftist throughout his life, which caused problems when Franco came to power in his home country. Mexico provided a place for Buñuel to work, which in the early nineteen-sixties was under Mexican actor-producer Gustavo Alatriste, who didn’t hold back Buñuel’s experimental/non-commercial efforts. If anyone could qualify for Assayas’s definition of true cinephilia, it was Buñuel for his ability at never allowing his politics to turn his products into “dead ideology.”
El ángel exterminador (“The Exterminating Angel”) was one such Buñuel-Alatriste product that was both highly critical of class and experimental in the form in which the story was told. The plot is quite simple: a group of wealthy guests find themselves unable to leave the room of their dinner party for some unknown reason. (Some of you may remember the short tag in Midnight in Paris when Owen Wilson gives Buñuel the idea.) As from the quote above by Wilson, the dinner party eventually descends into madness and chaos once the formalities of civilization (or more accurately, class) are stripped away. One way in which Buñuel achieves this is through matching the film’s form and content, meaning that the absurdity of class must be filmed absurdly. Douglas Laman argues that this Buñuelian technique can teach present-day films a thing or two about how to tackle class in fictional films. Although there exists talented filmmakers handling these class issues (Bong Joon-ho being the most successful example), most of these films bomb and rely too heavily on convention:
Modern projects like Joker that poke and prod at the topic of economic inequality root their stories in gritty realism to make them seem rooted in everyday reality. Unfortunately, they end up muting their stories and the actions of the wealthy to an extreme degree. Thus, these movies seem out of step from a reality where billionaires engage in competitions to get to space while millions of people have no money to buy food. In contrast, Buñuel’s surreal story that offers no concrete explanations for what’s going on matches not only the inexplicable behavior of the rich. It also offers a mirror for how often in reality the lower-class are suddenly adversely impacted by the wealthiest members of society for no real reason. Now the rich are stuck in the same state of confusion as the everyday folks they hurt.
This may seem like an over-simplistic argument, but can you remember watching a fictional film recently that made you feel upset about economic inequality?
Buñuel uses his surrealist tendencies to find a way into class critique. A discontinuity editing style makes the upper-class appear abnormal, which is an example of form accentuating content. Meanwhile the house servants and lower-class onlookers that aren’t trapped are film with normal editing and shots:
By providing a clear division between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in terms of camerawork and editing, Buñuel is subliminally suggesting to the viewer what populations they should consider “normal” and which they should consider “aberrations”. Such multifaceted approaches that utilize the tiniest details of filmmaking to accentuate an attitude towards the wealthy is dearly missing in many modern films about economic inequality that leave all their commentary on the surface.
This facet of The Exterminating Angel goes hand-in-hand with how the movie views the behavior of the rich. Certain 21st-century pop culture properties, like Arrested Development, filter the detached nature of the wealthy through an aloof demeanor. That can be fun to watch in certain contexts, but the widespread use of this tactic defangs pop culture depictions of the wealthy and their abhorrent behavior. Meanwhile, The Exterminating Angel doesn’t hold back in depicting the wealthy as immediately cracking under the first sign of pressure and resorting to turning on one another.
Even before they were all trapped in a room together, Buñuel’s screenplay goes through great pains to depict the individual party guests as talking badly about one another behind each other’s backs and having only their own self-interests at heart. This is especially apparent when compared to the behavior of the servants, who look out for one another and have a deeper sense of camaraderie. Once everyone gets trapped in a room, Buñuel doesn’t depict them transforming into monstrous people detached from their earlier personas. What was barely contained under the surface has just now taken over. There is real teeth in Buñuel’s depiction of the wealthy as they become as animalistic as the gaggle of sheep and bear cub they tried to control early on in their party.
Buñuel includes a playful teaser at the end of The Exterminating Angel showing a congregation unable to leave their local church. No groups of power are safe from this invisible power!
News:
Disney is planning Disney-themed communities ran by Disney-trained employees designed by Disney Imagineers (and supplied by Disney-owned utility companies), the purpose being to provide an even more magical form of living to a like-minded community (and be able to politically control a swath of land they own). I guess we can now upgrade the expression to the plural: the Houses of Mouse.
Village Roadshow is suing Warner Bros. for sabotaging the box office return from The Matrix Resurrections by simultaneously putting it on HBO Max, similar to the Johansson-Disney suit from last year. And like the latter, Village Roadshow and Warner Bros. will settle quickly and without too much more publicity.
ViacomCBS is changing their name to Paramount Global in order to pay respects to the legendary film studio they own but more importantly to make it less confusing when promoting their Paramount + streamer as it enters the streaming wars, and to further piggyback on Disney’s streaming-first strategy of franchise IP reboots, remakes, etc.
Thank you for once again checking out my Substack. Please like it and use the share button to share it. And don’t forget to subscribe to it.