Pasolini’s Salò is a film about Fascism through sex; Bertolucci’s Il Conformista (or The Conformist, in English) is a film about Fascism through architecture. All politics is distilled into the structures people live in, or more to the point the way we fit into those structures via the camera. Continue reading “The Better Angles of Our Nature: Bertolucci’s ‘Il Conformista’”
Author: Eleven Groothuis
Eleven is the founder and editor-in-chief of Unstrung Nerves. She's a neurodivergent, trans weirdo who obsesses over David Cronenberg and will occasionally change up their pronouns, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. They've written for places like Autostraddle, Bitch, and TransAdvocate in the past. She's sometimes on Twitter @13minus2.
Film is the engine of paranoia.
In the 1970’s director Alan J. Pakula created what has been called his “Paranoia Trilogy”: Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976). These three films, taken together, do in fact tell us a lot about the cinematic nature of that strange mixture of belief, doubt, and fear that we call paranoia but also something about the ways that cinema can (and can’t) interact with such a vibrant, textural emotional register. Continue reading “The Relative Visual Position of Objects in Space (The Paranoia Trilogy)”
Sigh. I really wanted to spend the night writing pseudo-intellectual nonsense about authorship tied to the HBO Max release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League cut.
Instead, as I write this, I am in the unenviable position of defending a book called When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. I’d comment on the content of the book, but, per The Wall Street Journal, it’s no longer available on Amazon, which is the point. Amazon won’t sell it, or any books which, in WSJ‘s awkward wording, “frame transgender and other sexual identities as mental illnesses.” Continue reading “Lepidoptery”
[This piece was accidentally posted in incomplete form earlier. Sorry about that.]
Derek Jarman ought to be around to film the end of the world. In Edward II, in War Requiem, in Caravaggio, Jarman filmed very queer apocalypses, sensual destructions that rent the world as we understand it asunder. For Jarman, everything was a process of constant transformation and rebirth. Continue reading “Jubilee”
TV: it’s considered an archaic term for an evolving form. Recently Lauren Boebert tried (and somehow failed) to say the word “transvestites”, after which Robyn Pennacchia over at Wonkette wrote that “transvestite … is an outdated term” that doesn’t actually have anything to do with a person’s lived gender, etc, etc. I imagine that many writers covering Boebert’s bizarre claim made similar politically correct fact checks. Personally I’ve always enjoyed the word transvestite, even though I’m not one*, and if it’s outdated, it really should be because aren’t we over the idea that clothes are gendered?
*I mean, okay, I’m a trans woman, not a male transvestite, but I also wear almost exclusively masculine clothing, so what does that make me? The point is that labels are only useful up to a point, after which they become harmfully restrictive and essentially uselessly inaccurate.
But wait, this was supposed to be an article about television and I got sidetracked.
What does television even mean anymore? Like the other TV word, I’m not clear on what television is anymore. And maybe that’s okay. I’ve always differentiated myself as a cinephile, a film critic, and while I touch on television sometimes, I see television as something more ancillary.
Furthermore, I don’t think it’s a surprise that many of my favorite series are either limited in scope (Fishing with John) or have episodes that read like standalone entries (South Park). Television as a medium, to me, is defined not by its content so much as they way we are expected to engage with that content.
Television is a medium of obligation, particularly of late. You’re obligated to tune in next week, to press play on the next episode, to find out what happens next. I don’t think it’s a surprise that many of my favorite films are not driven by plot but by imagery, ambiance, character, and association between these elements (Playtime, Koyaanisqatsi, Raging Bull). Raiders of the Lost Ark is a counter-example, the televisionism of movies, a huge influence on mainstream cinema storytelling as a series of calamitous encounters, each with clear delineations.
But then, Raiders, as an example of the kind of cinema storytelling that has made film more television-like, actually owes to a pre-television serialized filmmaking. So what, if anything, does anything mean?
I think the answer is not to try to gather more flexible definitions but to be, in and of oneself, more flexible in using them. Or don’t use them at all. It really doesn’t matter. Rigidity, whether discussing gender or art forms, won’t arrive anywhere but a kind of logic impasse. The world is more fluid than the words we use to define it. The critic in me knows I need words to mean things to get my points across; the poet in me knows better than to expect stability in my language.
The filmmaker Hollis Frampton, in his essay “For a Metahistory of Film”, writes that “Cinema is the Last Machine”, later suggesting that
“the sum of all film, all projectors and all cameras in the world constitutes one machine, which is by far the largest and most ambitious single artifact yet conceived and made by man (with the exception of the human species itself). The machine grows by many millions of feet of raw stock every day. It is not surprising that something so large could utterly engulf and digest the whole substance of the Age of Machines (machines and all), and finally supplant the entirety with its illusory flesh. Having devoured all else, the film machine is the lone survivor.”
Dziga Vertov is perhaps the most famous theorist of film’s more machine-like tendencies: he envisioned a completely automated cinema guided by an imaginary automated man. Film, and humanity, and society, were in Vertov’s mind best represented as a kind of clockwork that was strict, regulated, and precise. One result of this philosophy is Vertov’s iconic 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, a slice of Soviet life that unfolds wordlessly throughout a day or so of mundane, humdrum activities filmed through the lens of Vertov’s obsession with mechanical precision. It’s both a beautiful film and a horrifying one for its representation of life as a kind of ever-spinning cog wheel.
Fast-forward 50 or so years to Godfrey Reggio’s feature-length film poem, Koyaanisqatsi. Deeply indebted to the techniques used by Vertov, Reggio — alongside composer Philip Glass and cinematographer Ron Fricke — nonetheless envisions a counternarrative: film as an extension of nature, into which humankind has ruthlessly intruded. Human beings in Koyaanisqatsi are living, as the film’s title is translated, “life out of balance”, thanks in part to the dehumanizing machine-like nature of day-to-day life.
The vision of Reggio’s Qatsi films contrasts with Frampton’s idea of cinema as a kind of ur-machine. For Reggio, film seems to be less a massive mechanism than an organic compound waiting to be shaped. Beyond semantics, the competing visions of the medium reflect the stark contrast between not just artistic motives but broader ones: cinema as a capitalist engine (in that sense, driving the true ur-machine of human society) vs. cinema as an engine of humanity (able to produce truly radical works that serve the people). I’d like to believe one over the other, but this is not a space for wishful thinking; Frampton is more correct than he ought to be.
Watching modern pop cinema, from Marvel to Tenet and back again, it’s hard not to agree with Frampton that cinema is one massive machine, one that serves the agenda of another. At least Tenet had the guts to be a little confusing ; most films, driven by economic imperative, are as clear-cut as possible. Films that divert from the machines’ true purpose are ornate filigree, distracting from the people crushed under the economic machine that film helps propel forward. Can a capitalist system produce truly anti-capitalist cinema, or is it all a cycle by which pressure is built up and then vented from the machine, preventing its own destruction?
I see no starker contrast than Parasite‘s wins, including Best Picture, at the 2020 Academy Awards. The film’s aggressively radical critique of stratified class relationships seems out of place at the lush, ostentatious ceremony dominated by wealthy people wearing clothes that probably cost more than I pay in rent each month. In giving Parasite the top award, the film was drained of its radical potential and absorbed into the machine. It’s a different sort of tokenism.
Another key Bong Joon Ho film, Snowpiercer, dramatizes this machine much more literally as a giant train divided into upper and lower classes in the front and rear. Snowpiercer may well prove to be the more important of the two films; where Parasite‘s class-centric critique can be ignored in favor of the film’s justifiably lauded artistic achievement, Snowpiercer plays out as an exploitation film: raw, exposed, and overstated. It’s much more difficult to assimilate a film like Snowpiercer into the ideological machine that made it. The train is doomed to fail.
Snowpiercer, of course, dramatizes that very process by which radical ideas are assimilated and drained of their transformative power. When Curtis reaches the front of the train, the rebellion is revealed as an elaborate, pressure-relieving hoax, and Curtis is offered to take charge of the train.
Lately, the thing I’ve been putting on to fall asleep is Mythbusters, a silly but fun diversion into a world of elaborate, pointless experiments and overly alliterative narration. I enjoy the show, but I’m always troubled by their attitude towards film, specifically whenever they deal with a “myth” that comes from a movie. For the Mythbusters, every frame of a film is a claim or an assertion, as if film were an act of declaration of fact. To the Mythbusters, storytelling is only as good as it is factual, and film is a machine to be taken apart and put back together again. Stories are just engineering challenges in potentia.
All this contributes to the idea that films are simply machines made up of physical interactions between moving parts. Even looking at something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which obviously doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny, the Mythbusters philosophy can be applied. There’s nothing lurking under the surface, no meaning to the relentless assault of colorful moving pictures. Just bodies in space colliding, and endless series of myths to be busted.
Philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, perhaps best remembered as a prop for Woody Allen’s inner fantasy life in Annie Hall, famously wrote that “the medium is the message”. For McLuhan, “it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action”. McLuhan describes “the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form.”
Let’s put things another way. In an Atlantic piece called “The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun”, Evan Selinger details the ways in which we are shaped by the technology we encounter, and how in turn that technology is shaped by us. Drawing on Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, Selinger points out the ways in which relationships between humans and technologies affect both parties in a way that defies easy assignations of agency. Writing in the context of guns, for Selinger this means that the NRA’s aphorism that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a misunderstanding of the way that firearms influence who we are when we wield them.
In the context of media, film specifically, we might note the ways in which film is different because we watch it and we are are different because we watch a particular film. It is a mutually constitutive relationship. We are an extension of film, and to McLuhan’s point film is an extension of us: film is an alteration of humanity, one that (like all media) makes us, in one way or another, post-human. If film is a machine, then we become machine-like as we engage it; but if we are human, then film becomes a living entity as it engages us.
This is an idea that is ignored by the proliferation of film as content. I voiced my frustration recently over this philosophy ; content is a willful ignorance of the phenomena of media. Content is merely the operation of the machine. Film, the medium, is an extension of the viewer. But viewers are encouraged to maintain an artificial distance.
If you want to bear witness to the ways in which human and machine mix, give Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man a view. This particular masterstroke of body horror involves a man transmuted into metal. Owing to sources like Akira and David Cronenberg, Tetsuo is the ultimate mixture of man and machine, a film in which (like Cronenberg’s seminal Videodrome) the act of viewing is intertwined with the act of becoming.
To quote visual theorist John Berger, in Ways of Seeing: “The invention of the camera changed the way men saw. The visible came to mean something different to them.” Having previously quoted Dziga Vertov — or “I, the machine”, as Vertov calls himself in the quote — Berger writes that “Every drawing or painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world. The camera — and more particularly the movie camera — demonstrated that there was no center.” Where Vertov had claimed that “I explain in a new way the world unknown to you”, Berger suggests that this quality of cinema — one Vertov attributes to being machine-like — that was its very destabilizing element.
But at time wound on and cinema progressed, cinema has incorporated that destabilization into its mode of operation. Cinema became a well-oiled machine.
I sometimes doubt that film can ever embody anything other than unbridled capitalism, oppressive surveillance, and violent control. I sometimes see in film a heavy leaning on non-traditional traditions, a mechanized process prioritized over the end result, and an unwillingness to deviate from corporate guidance.
I begin to doubt that film could ever be radical or progressive.
Consider this video.
This is a nice encapsulation of all these things. I’m not saying it’s everything, but it should haunt its star forever.
The thing is, it’s pretty clear she did this because she wanted people to see it, wanted it to be memorable. I have a minor conspiracy theory that she voted this way, made sure this would become a video of a senator casting an appalling vote in an insulting way, so that when that vote was criticized she could claim that criticism of the heinous vote and the slap-in-the-face way it was cast is SEXIST, because in case you hadn’t heard, she is in fact a woman.
Films can rock us to our core, they can shake our foundations, or they can just reinforce what we already know. The trouble with the video above is that images, even images combined with sound, don’t tell the truth, and they don’t lie either. We read into them what we read into them. Just as I interpret the film one way, someone else sees something else. We are inclined to read art as a mirror.
That’s why film might never be radical, might fall perpetually into a reactive, regressive space. I fear that film will always be little more than an instrument of the powerful, at best simply reinforcing what people already think, at worst dragging people like a gravitational field towards the hegemonic norms that live in our psyches whether we like it or not.
Like most people in the COVID era, I think a lot about space. Not outer space, like the wealthy elites preparing to flee the climate change they’ve brought on the world, but physical space, the kind we inhabit every day.
Perhaps more than any other film genre, it’s common to think of the western in those terms: space, interior vs exterior, closed vs open. For example, an article in The Atlantic advised viewers to “Escape From Quarantine With a Western Movie”, with author David Sims claiming he had been looking for “the least claustrophobic movie possible” and had found it in the western genre at large. Sims primarily cites Hawks’ Red River, but also mentions Ford’s Stagecoach, a film I’ve been obsessing over for the last several weeks. Today I want to combine these two threads and talk about space in the works of John Ford.
One of the biggest triumphs of The Social Network is that is actually captures the anxiety of social networking. Less a glowing portrait than a grim dissection of the mythology of Mark Zuckerberg, played with vicious solipsism by Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network is that rare biopic that is truly as much about the reason for its subject’s fame than the subject itself, if only symbolically. Zuckerberg is Facebook, for the purposes of The Social Network, and in that sense the film was prophesy. But none of that matters. Continue reading “The Founder”
King of Movies: The Leonard Maltin Game
Witty banter is the soul of this Mondo game that ultimately has little to do with movies and more to do with imagination. Come for the idea of cinephilia, stay for realizing that being a cinephile has nothing to do with winning this game.
That’s my Maltin-esque summation of King of Movies: The Leonard Maltin Game. As a tabletop gamer who really loved Mondo’s earlier post-apocalyptic VHS battle game Video Vortex, and as a film critic who has a fondness for the work of Leonard Maltin, I was ready for King of Movies from the minute I heard about it. Neither game necessitates an encyclopedic or even enthusiastic knowledge of movies, although certainly both benefit from a love of cinema.
The unifying thread of these games is the hidden undercurrent of cinema. In Video Vortex — which shares a name with with Mondo parent company Alamo Drafthouse’s series of “ultra-obscure, ultra-bizarre movies from the fringes of the universe” — players battle in a wasteland battleground of what I’ll call cinema-punk, that particular school of cinephilia which values, well, the “ultra-obscure and ultra-bizarre” and in which VHS and all things low-res are king. In King of Movies, viewers play the role of both Maltin, reviewing the otherwise lost and forgettable corners of cinema, and readers perusing Maltin’s legendary movie guides. In each case, players engage less with cinema itself than with the processes by which film cultures develop and thrive.
An essay by Zack Carlson in the game’s accompanying booklet calls Leonard Maltin “the physical incarnation of the unbridled joy of movies.” This is exceptionally true; unlike critics known for highbrow caustic takedowns or dense theoretical ramblings, Maltin, the Bob Ross of cinema, celebrates movies for movies’ sake. Just watch. Carlson also compares Maltin, again very aptly, to Mr. Rogers: “There’s an innocence and sincerity and intelligence in him that humans respond to, that we love”. Fittingly, compared to movie trivia games, King of Movies rewards engagement, passion, and creativity, not memorization.
I played King of Movies earlier tonight on the back porch with my roommate and a third friend (large-scale game nights, like large-scale movie nights, are not exactly a thing during COVID), neither of whom are particularly cinephiles. The fun of the game is such that it didn’t seem to matter. Like most bluffing games, King of Movies is an excuse to combine words and ideas in unique ways, and like most party games, the fun is in the act, not the end result. If Card Against Humanity was nothing but hand-written cards responding to computer-generated phrases, it might approach something like King of Movies.
Movies ranging from Jaws to Die Hard to Back to the Future have board game adaptations now (I did acquire the incredibly gorgeous Mondo game Infection at Outpost 13, based on The Thing, but with COVID raging I have yet to muster the required number of people to play it). It’s a bit silly, if you ask me. But Mondo, in its infinite wisdom, chose to adapt Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, and I’m so very glad they did. Movies are for everyone, not just ivory tower academics or encyclopedic hipster cinephiles, and this game, like Maltin himself, understands that.
Given the specificity of its theme and subject, I doubt this game will find a home on many non-cinephile shelves, but that’s okay. King of Movies will, I’m sure, have many a welcome home next to Danny Peary’s Cult Movies, David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film, or, yes, Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide.