Author: Ryan Swen

In Defense of Lists

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moses und aron

I wish to preface this by saying that I bear no ill will toward Dr. Elena Gorfinkel, Another Gaze, or indeed anyone especially opposed to the practice of list-making with regards to cinema. Such a pastime is, of course, not for everyone, and a certain temperament is required in order to sit in front of a computer for hours on end, entering the same title over and over into a website in order to constantly keep certain lists updated. But I found Gorfinkel’s piece, and indeed the largely positive reaction to it, to be more than a little worrying, considering the openly antagonistic tone to a pursuit that, like many in film culture, contains far more facets than one might assume from the commercialized and rigid co-opting by the innumerable mass of film websites (with some worthy exceptions). So I wanted to write this rebuttal, not only as a means of defending a practice that I find to be immensely rewarding, but also in order to properly engage with this piece, and perhaps to in the process form a politique des listes, if you will.

The aim is to examine the essay line-by-line, or at the very least point-by-point, though given the manifesto tone of it some statements are difficult to expand upon. The statements from the original piece will be written in bold, with my thoughts on them directly below; these are intended to be as open-minded and in good faith as possible, but given my biases I apologize for anything too overtly polemical. For reading convenience, they are numbered; I realize that by doing so I’m transforming Gorfinkel’s piece into its own list, which adds a nice irony.

1. Lists of films will not save you.

This opening line immediately sets the stage both for Gorfinkel’s incendiary approach and my pronounced distaste, and demands a personal preface. I originally got into films because of my long-held obsession with lists: first the AFI top 100 list (as limited as it is) when I discovered it in 2010 and then They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They’s aggregate top 1000 in 2015. Obviously, both have their limitations, and possess no shortage of consensus concessions, but they provided me an entryway into the medium that, to indulge in just a little bit of hyperbole, provided me an earthly salvation. So yes, lists of films saved me.

2. Lists of films will not save films.

This, more than anything, begs the question of what exactly we mean by “saving” a film. Is it in the processes of restoration and preservation? This idea is brought up a few statements later, so it might be assumed that Gorfinkel means it in a broader sense, in the evolution and decay of the medium as a whole. In that case, it’s nigh impossible to ascribe the task of saving cinema to any single pursuit, even one as possibly pervasive as the act of listmaking. Saving film requires a more cohesive and holistic defense.

3. Lists of films will not reorganise how films gain and lose value.

I’d argue this is exactly what lists do, or at the very least should strive to do. With the ever-increasing glut of film lists, especially at the end of this decade, it is natural that consensus favors the well-known or the acknowledged masterpieces, but this only constitutes the general, not the particular placing of certain works; any reader should strive to consider the films they have not seen, and use the list as a guideline. Even the reevaluative nature of some lists, like a publication issuing a Best of the 1990s list a decade apart, inherently reorganizes the value of certain films, based on what have risen and fallen.

4. Lists will not preserve all those thousands and thousands of films decomposing in alleys, basements, storage lockers: films lost, unseen, and unpreserved.

I could be pedantic and name the National Film Registry as a list that does precisely that, but it’s even more worth pointing out that almost everything related to film culture (including film writing) doesn’t accomplish this either. Unless one fancies themselves a film archaeologist, climbing into abandoned movie theaters and trying to trace the paper trails leading back to Bill Gunn’s Stop or something along those lines, nothing they do can preserve those films.

5. Lists of films will not write new film histories.

As with point 3, this is exactly what lists of films can and should do; what is a history of film if not a list of films and their makers? Context is key, so many other sociopolitical and cultural histories must be brought in, but they are nothing without the actual works that have been made.

6. Lists are not neutral or innocent or purely subjective.

Gorfinkel seems to contradict herself between the former two and the latter descriptors, in a way that I find difficult to parse, but each of them feels faulty. Claiming the neutrality or objectivity of a list is inherently false, of course, but doing so seems much more at the hands of film publications or enormous polls; to any discerning reader, the list indicates “the X greatest films in [insert category] as chosen by an aggregate of X contributors,” not the end-all be-all truth. Even more importantly, lists should not be innocent, at least in my conception of the term, which signals naiveté and lack of an even slightly expanded knowledge of the world of film. Innocence is for those without visual literacy or film history. As for “purely subjective,” what is Gorfinkel striving to convey? That lists and viewing should come one’s pure id, uninflected by valuable learned information? These structures are necessary for establishing one’s foundational vantage point on film, so their inclusion in lists should be no surprise.

7. Lists do not enshrine your hallowed taste, they only dilute it.

It’s hard for me to understand this statement, simply because I feel that the former is a strong argument that can be made against my list obsession. But calcification (a process which I hope my lists escape) is a different process than dilution, and Gorfinkel seems to be arguing that it encourages the listmaker to stick to their established lists and nothing else, which goes entirely against my idea of lists as forever in flux, dynamically responding to each film I watch and reevaluate.

8. Lists are attentional real estate for the fatigued, enervated, click-hungry.

It’s somewhat difficult to argue with this with regards to websites, but more than anything it feeds into the desire to get one’s own ideas and thoughts about film into a evermore public space. Indeed, such a charge could be made of this very article (not to mention my own), and lists merely ease the process along. And individual lists are just as often furtive, secretive acts, made for personal uses and deliberately designed to not be seen by others.

9. Lists aggregate the already known and consolidate power.

See point 3.

10. Lists count and account and ceaselessly weigh and measure ‘genius’ and ‘greatness’ as if they are empirical substances.

This varies from list to list, but part of what excites me is the quicksilver nature of listing, of comparing such vastly different works to each other. It is as evaluative as assigning a rating to a film, and allows for a certain dialogue and unforeseen resonances to emerge. In this conception, genius and greatness are by nature undefinable and intangible: it is the job of the writer or listmaker to express them in some slightly more graspable way, that shifts each time either looks at their piece, their list, or the film.

11. Lists convert numerical appearance into that seeming empiricism of the prodigious.

See point 3, with the added note that individuals’ lists by no means always aspire to be empirical or definitive.

12. And who in the longue durée has been bestowed those plaudits?

Without going into exact details, I don’t exactly fit the standard hetero cis old white man image of a listmaker; the times they are a’changin’, and denying the potential of budding cinephiles to create lists is foolish at best.

13. Lists won’t create new canons – especially not of lost women, queer, trans, Black, Latinx, global south, decolonial and anti-colonial filmmakers.

What is a canon but a form of listing? The onus, as always, should be on the viewer to seek these out, and lists can and sometimes (if not often) do so.

14. Who will ask Barbara Hammer, Kathleen Collins, Kira Muratova, and Sara Gómez for their lists?

This deliberately polemical statement especially rankles, largely because it uses the demise of these filmmakers as a cudgel. Leaving aside the notion that listmaking isn’t for everyone, or that plenty of non-European female filmmakers have been asked for their lists, what difference does it make for those who wish to make their own lists?

15. Lists pretend to make a claim about the present and the past, but are anti-historical, obsessed with their own moment, with the narrow horizon and tyranny of contemporaneity. They consolidate and reaffirm the hidebound tastes of the already heard.

I don’t think it’s impossible or even difficult to embody both history and a present obsession with the contemporary. Both lists and tastes are formed outside of a vacuum, influenced by factors as seemingly insignificant as the time since one has seen a film or their viewing environment, or something as significant as the restoration of a long-lost film. Creating a list can be as much an act of history, reassessing and reevaluating one’s conception of what came before, as of a contemporary mindset, one which will always continue to evolve. As for the hidebound tastes, listmakers can and should strive to expand their tastes, and are just as often unheard as “already heard,” though even the latter can provide new discoveries.

16. Lists colonise the mind and impoverish the imagination.

The idea of lists affecting the mind is absolutely true, particularly in my case, but the specific use of “colonize” especially bristles, especially when it brings up global history in a manner that feels inappropriate at best. At their best, lists expand the imagination, asking the reader to consciously construct a profile of the listmaker’s taste or otherwise to decipher their precise process in choosing these particular films at the exclusion of others.

17. Lists will always disappoint, even as they promise an inexhaustible world, an infinite plenum.

As opposed to films, which invariably provide unbelievable amounts of pleasure? Lists rarely, if ever, promise infinity, especially considering the proliferation of lists set in specific categories or with strict parameters, so only the most sweeping or authoritative can disappoint (which yes, can include lists like the recent BBC films-directed-by-women list).

18. Lists bludgeon the dispossessed with a metric of popularity, as if it is a universal value.

As mentioned in points 3 and 6, lists cannot and should not be seen as universally applicable or as solely describing the popular, and, if read with a proper mindset, should be interrogated but not totally discounted.

19. Lists assert property, mastery, possession.

Possession feels apropos in a certain regard, though it all depends on one’s mindset; at least for most, films are not merely names on a piece of paper or on a website, but codified and yet mysterious objects, which shift and change; this idea of the listmaker as lepidopterist only fitfully applies, and ignores the desire to explore the film just below the surface.

20. Lists are an anti-film politics.

Herein lies the central point of disagreement: Gorfinkel sees lists as existing against film, whereas I see them as uplifting and supporting film. Obviously, exclusions have to be made, but this applies in every film pursuit, when one chooses to write about one film instead of another. In many ways, lists are precisely worthwhile because they illuminate what the listmaker values most, which is inevitable and desirable when choosing to value film as an artform.

21. Lists are metrics.

See point 8.

22. Metrics are our enemy, and the enemy of art and of political struggle. Every list is by necessity impossible, and must remain unwritten, a private reckoning. The unwritten list tarries with the inevitable vortex of unknowability into which all films will certainly fall, unless we can defend and describe them better, making space for their work as live and active forms.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the first sentence, which does contain a certain truth about the state of media economy in which we live. However, the act of listmaking is first and foremost a private reckoning, asking the listmaker to evaluate certain films, and thus their own conception of their aesthetic taste. Likewise, listmaking acts as an invaluable step in defending and describing the films, especially when justification is demanded and provided for certain choices.

23. Burn the list to free your ass.

I half-admire the outright polemicism of this statement, which exists so much in the manifesto format that I can’t really dispute it — save for the perception of freedom that I perceive in my dynamic conception of listmaking.

24. The impulse to list is allied with collection, a desire to record, to archive, to remember, to preserve experience and the aesthetic feeling of films one might not otherwise recall. These are meaningful, important and historically enshrined activities, on their own terms. But in this hyper-mediated moment, the recirculated compulsory form of the list – list as desiderata of consumption, a grocery receipt of your watching – has become an instrument of commodity fetishism, of algorithmic capture, of priapic, indulgent self-exposure. Look closely. Who exactly produces this flurry of lists?

Here, Gorfinkel gets at something potentially more truthful and in good faith, before reverting to the far too general castigation of her manifesto. Ideally, lists are by no means compulsory, except if readers expect them. Following this idea, fetishizing taste and self-exposure is much more a tendency of film culture, as seen in point 8; also, as far as I’m aware, my lists aren’t being used as part of any algorithm. And what exactly is wrong with keeping track of what one has watched? Memory already fulfills at least some of that tendency, and relying on the written word instead of the ravages of the mind seems to be an entirely reasonable and worthy endeavor.

25. How many lists must we read to know that their makers have captured the essential existence of these works in a graspable net? Ceaselessly writing, reading and consuming this polluted ocean of lists, we enter into the rotten mercantilism of the cinephilic soul. Perhaps more pernicious practices aggrieve film culture, but even so, lists are as banal and telling a symptom as any of this spoiled, melting world.

This point largely speaks out against the state of film culture, which can frequently be as harmful as Gorfinkel says it is. But, as in points 10 and 19, the lists by no means harness or contain the essential nature of these works, other than the fact that they exist and that they are valued according to the parameters of this list. Furthermore, dynamic lists are by definition ever-expansive and mutable, which is a far cry from the tyrannical, graspable net.

26. Torch your list. If you must count, write as many words about any film not on your list.
Read as many words about a woman filmmaker or filmmaker from the global south.
Or convert those words and characters into units of time, watching a film never on your list.

The sentiments expressed here are slightly admirable, but it begs the question of whether all time should be solely dedicated to the watching of films. Even with such an activity, decompression and space is needed; speaking for myself, listmaking is frequently a therapeutic and relaxing activity, far more (temporarily) concrete than the daily goings-on. And putting a film on a list can do as much to spotlight a film as writing about it.

27. A potlatch of lists: redistribution of resources redirected from the collective energy of list-making.

See point 26.

28. Claiming aesthetic supremacy begins with the list. Would that we had other ways to create spheres of value or to abolish the shallow terms of value altogether, and along with them the capricious and impoverished arbitration of what counts as cinematic art, art worth watching and worth fighting for. The list consolidates as if self-evidence, reasserting in all that it doesn’t list, all that its lister failed to learn, to see, to know.

This contains a central contradiction, insofar as spotlighting and writing about a film inherently categorizes it as “worth fighting for,” whether one puts it on a list or not. The simple fact is that not all art is equal in the eye of any single beholder, which is not to say that not all art should be preserved. But in thinking about film, in discussing it, at least some structure of valuation is necessary to direct one’s energy and focus. As for the last sentence, no person nor group of people has seen every film, and as such their blindspots are inevitably revealed, whether in list or in writing.

29. Lists are for laundry, not for film.

See point 23.

30. If we wash out our eyes and ears and minds, we will find that what clings to us, after the suds clear, are the tendrils of another cinematic world, of images, spaces, voices, passages, struggles, and time: time recovered from its theft by narcissistic cinephilia’s allegiance with capital.

Many lists bear little to no allegiance with capital, and many pieces of writing do, and most importantly practically all possess a certain narcissism. The very nature of the term cinephilia implies a personal relationship and passion with the medium, and discounting that reeks of hypocrisy. And suggesting that individual aspects of a film can’t be evoked by the list is absurd: just seeing the title of a film carries with it such associations for the person who has watched it, and lists offer a way to put them into dialogue.

Ultimately, I don’t wish to discount the importance of writing and research in fostering a sense of cinephilia whatsoever. But for me, lists provide a unique and compact way of expanding the reader’s ideas about film, of giving them the chance to explore more and become exposed to new works and reframing their ideas on those they have already become familiar with. Lists are by no means superior to the films, but provide a structure for them, allowing them to wait for the next person to uncover them and discover the pleasures that await within.

November 2019 Capsules

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Jojo Rabbit
Let’s leave aside the extravagant vanity and stupidity of this, a project that seems as much an excuse for Waititi to clown around in Führer cosplay as to indulge his worst and most juvenile tendencies: the twee coming-of-age story, the playful mocking that ultimately coalesces into love. Let’s even excuse the utterly incoherent at best, downright fascistic approach to Nazism, which doesn’t so much dismantle the very real and very dangerous ideology as it presents it baldly and plainly, hoping that the viewer will find these hideous statements and behaviors from cuddly and/or blasé puppets hilarious. Jojo Rabbit would be utterly irredeemable if it just stuck to its proudly “anti-hate satire” formulations and its virtually nonexistent comedy, but it somehow manages to sink lower, into simpering, sappy romance.

Much of Jojo Rabbit is almost literally cloistered, as at least half of the film takes place solely within the eponymous character’s home, where he co-habits with both his vaguely antifascist mother and a teenage Jewish girl. Like with everything in this, Waititi’s approach comes off as maddeningly incoherent, going as far to employ a terribly overextended use of every horror movie trick in the book to accompany her first scene. But slowly, gradually, the true intent is revealed: despite her experiences fleeing the rot of fascist power, she is as flat and childlike as everyone, the object of affection — laid out oh-so-helpfully with paper-animated butterflies — and just another figure for Jojo to latch onto. In doing so, her inherent identity, which has caused the gassing of her parents and her present fearful existence, is all but erased, seemingly replaced uncomfortably with the role of both mother and lover. And in a film that refuses to reckon whatsoever with the horrors of fascism, that lies about the nature of ideologies, that closes itself off from any interesting or subversive view of the modern world, such a grievous conflation is just left there, as abject as anything in this monstrosity of a film.

Martin Eden
It’s crucial that, for all of the political rabble-rousing Martin does in writing and speech over the course of this film, his prose writing, which appears to be a true cornerstone of his success, is relegated in small snatches, only fitfully represented. As shown in his previous work, especially Lost and Beautiful, Marcello’s sensibility is never settled but always restless, and paradoxically the seeming strictures of a narrative format only amplify his tendencies. In this particular case, his penchant for archival footage is weaponized for a specific intent, taking on the immense task of capturing the undeniable power of Martin’s writing. By juxtaposing the bits of writing with longer, more abstruse moments of perhaps-found, perhaps-created shots of mundane life, Marcello both creates an emotional and an intellectual bond, reaching across class and time to conjure up an ever more complicated, beautiful feeling.

2019 Festival Dispatch #3 Show Notes

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Listen to the podcast here.
Subscribe to the podcast here.

Description
The third 2019 festival dispatch of the Catalyst and Witness podcast, devoted to exploring the films and format of the New York Film Festival, hosted by Ryan Swen. This covers the second half of the 2019 New York Film Festival, and features guests Graham L. Carter, Beatrice Loayza, and Dan Schindel.

0:00-26:36 – Part One
26:37-48:14 – Part Two

[A discussion of the New York Shorts program was deleted.]

Housekeeping

  • Hosted by Ryan Swen
  • Conceived and Edited by Ryan Swen
  • Guests: Graham L. Carter, Beatrice Loayza, Dan Schindel
  • Recorded in Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington D.C. on Zoom H4N and Behringer Microphones and MacBook GarageBand and Audacity and iPhone, Edited in GarageBand
  • Podcast photograph from Yi Yi, Logo designed by Dan Molloy
  • Recorded October 13, 2019
  • Released November 3, 2019
  • Music (in order of appearance):
    • In Vanda’s Room
    • Seventh Code
    • Belmonte

2019 Festival Dispatch #2 Show Notes

Ryan Swen Catalyst and Witness Leave a comment

Listen to the podcast here.
Subscribe to the podcast here.

Description
The second 2019 festival dispatch of the Catalyst and Witness podcast, devoted to exploring the films and format of the New York Film Festival, hosted by Ryan Swen. This covers the first half of the 2019 New York Film Festival, and features guests Forrest Cardamenis, Lena Houst, Jake Pitre, and Etan Weisfogel.

0:00-57:26 – Part One
57:27-1:49:38 – Part Two

[Two phrases in the Bacurau discussion were redacted to avoid substantial spoilers.]

Housekeeping

  • Hosted by Ryan Swen
  • Conceived and Edited by Ryan Swen
  • Guests: Forrest Cardamenis, Lena Houst, Jake Pitre, Etan Weisfogel
  • Recorded in Los Angeles, New York City, and Montreal on Zoom H4N and Behringer Microphones and MacBook GarageBand and Audacity and iPhone, Edited in Audacity
  • Podcast photograph from Yi Yi, Logo designed by Dan Molloy
  • Recorded October 4, 2019
  • Released October 12, 2019
  • Music (in order of appearance):
    • GoodFellas
    • Old Joy
    • Nocturama

October 2019 Capsules

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Mahjong
“In ten years, this place will be the center of the world. The future of Western civilization lies right here. And do you know what the odd thing is? We used to study history, the 19th century with the glorious age of imperialism right? Just wait ’till you see the 21st century.”

These words, said in English by an arrogant British industrialist in voiceover towards the close of Mahjong, of course shouldn’t be taken strictly at face value; Yang’s own Yi Yi four years later acts in many ways as a repudiation of a great number of the statements made in this and A Confucian Confusion, effectively the sister film to this. But it acts as a key signifier for Yang’s own intentions: in every work of his save perhaps A Brighter Summer Day, Yang sees the future of Taipei as its past and present, continually reflecting on the former as directly affecting and molding the latter. This is reflected most obviously in the familial relationships, which dominate practically all his films and especially this one, but it reveals itself in so many other ways: the scattered rock memorabilia (especially the Beatles), the past entanglements of multiple characters, and most importantly in language. Here, too, Yang gestures towards the future: Hokkien is phased further out, and English shares center stage with Mandarin. The effect is like a less overtly reflexive version of Mountains May Depart‘s third act: slightly uncanny, immensely focused on the minutiae involved in translation (skewed or otherwise), and eventually incredibly moving. It’s no accident that the two final definitive acts almost eschew language all together: Yang’s cinema is nothing if not at turns impossibly alienated and unbearably intimate, and Mahjong contains both of these impulses at their fullest force.

A City of Sadness
Even besides the obvious narrative and thematic implications that come with language and communication in A City of Sadness, its imprint on reinforcing Hou’s style feels paramount. Taking place at a much more contemplative pace than the naturalistic conversations found elsewhere (especially in scenes with co-writer Wu Nien-jen), the viewer is forced to consider not only what Tony Leung and Xin Shufen write to one another, but how they communicate by other means: the little glances, the manner in which they pass the pen and pad of paper back and forth. It feels so indicative that the words are not shown in inserts of the paper, but in intertitles: even their most inconsequential words are imbued with an additional, almost transcendent power. And the one exception, the message given by Leung to the widow, the words of a man who he never heard or spoke to, accrues its power from the materiality of his final statement, from the imprint of the ink.

Stray Dogs
The Taipei that Hsiao-kang grew up in has almost vanished. Gone are the motorcycle rides that acted as a reprieve from daily existence, the skywalks, the flooded apartments, the street stands. They’ve been supplanted by the high-end condos like Vive L’Amour‘s, only that the erotic potential is gone; even the streets feel sterile now. So Hsiao-kang can only go almost literally underground, with offspring in tow; they wander the construction sites and gleaming supermarkets, eating from plastic takeout trays and fitfully drawing mosquito nets around their meager living conditions. It’s not much, but it’s the home he knows, and the only home he can imagine.

September 2019 Capsules

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Days of Being Wild (rewatch)
Wong’s characters’ obsession with time, which reaches its early peak here, fits so deeply into his overall aesthetic concerns because it’s at once concrete and yet subjective. Unlike a pair of earrings, a car, or a lighter, time isn’t something that can be contained, even by the numerous watches or clocks scattered around the relative ghost town of 1960 Hong Kong. Instead, it floats between them, suffusing the characters and their perceptions. For the male characters, it’s more concrete: Leslie Cheung means it when he says he’ll remember his minute with Maggie Cheung, even if he forgets everything else; Andy Lau’s existence is defined by being on the clock, first in vocation and then in tentative infatuation. For the female characters, it’s something more slippery: a state of constant reverie and remembrance, wondering exactly when their relationships went wrong. But no one can escape their own subjectivity, their own flawed commitments: even Tony Leung’s hustler has to glance at his watch before he brings the lights down.

August 2019 Capsules

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Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2
Pushes its insistent rhymings with the first film past any reasonable limit: this is no mere referentiality, but conscious inversion and recontextualization from the opening moments, a class-flipped take on the predecessor’s opening scene. That this transpires with the two new main characters, Yeung Yeung and Paul, lends a further unpredictable charge, and a few scenes pass before the original tripartite dynamic is even partially restored — Qi Hong, not coincidentally the most (relatively) stable and committed character of the madcap ensemble, only makes sporadic appearances, which only begin more than twenty minutes in. Instead, the love triangle takes place between the volatile Shen Ran and the two newcomers, yet parallels crop up: Paul spends much of the second half in a soused state heavily reminiscent of Qi Hong in his original state, complete with a penchant for Johnnie Walker; Shen Ran takes Yeung Yeung to the same restaurant where he botched his initial engagement, directly mentioning this fact and prolonging the inevitable conversation until after dessert; Paul cooks seafood for Yeung Yeung in his own relatively humble quarters. “I must have met you before” is said by the new characters multiple times, and in a sense it’s true; by the time the opening is reinvoked once more with Chi Yan sitting on the bus in tears and Shen Ran driving by her in a sports car, the viewer would be forgiven for a strong case of déjà vu.

And yet it feels all so new, or at least cyclical in a way that feels genuine. The economic aspect sets the tone: where the global crash acted as a plot catalyst in the predecessor, here the sudden downturns and upturns feel ultimately immaterial, as of little consequence to the viewer as to the characters, wrapped up as they are in their love affairs. And as lovely as Gao Yuanyuan is once more, and as hard Louis Koo pushes himself (to great and perfectly absurd effect), Miriam Yeung absolutely defines this film. The dichotomy between her severe “queen of the stocks” status and the devil-may-care attitude with which she throws herself into love couldn’t be clearer, and her acceptance of Shen Ran’s proposal halfway through somehow feels both so wrong and so right.

That paradoxical feeling resonates throughout this, a disquietude that intermingles with the euphoria emanating from To’s visual confidence and his ensemble cast’s overflowing charisma. In a sense, this is to be expected: both Chi Yan and Genie, the octopus acting as a feebler but still wonderful stand-in for Froggy, display a consistent sense of “reverse thinking,” predicting the exact wrong thing, which proves great for sports and stocks betting but only muddles the waters further in the games of love. The continual sense of things being not quite right maps onto the sense of entrapment or limbo here, as characters enact the same scenarios over and over. But at the same time there’s such joy, such genuine astonishment on display; the last shot suggests at once infinite heartbreak, bitter defeat, and a feeling that the war is not yet over, and may never be over. In that sense, it’s a perfect sequel, in the sense that it consciously expands the original, inverting and altering it to enrich both parts. It feels so carefully considered, yet so inventive and energetic in the undertaking, that it exists both separately and apart, inextricable and yet fully, gloriously alive.

Asako I & II
Obviously have much, much more to say about this heartstopping masterpiece, but one of the most important aspects seems to be the sudden intrusion of the March 2011 earthquake, only hinted at by iOS designs amid the almost timeless/fantastical quality of the romances. Rather than grounding its surprising, almost radical approach to this odd love triangle, Asako I & II restrains itself to bounding and locating it, all the better to bring forth the flights of fancy. In a film filled to the brim with little details, feelings, and gestures, this act registers as one of the most quietly powerful.

A Confucian Confusion
The pleasures and interests in A Confucian Confusion are perhaps best expressed in two contradictory, yet not necessarily mutually exclusive, statements made less than five minutes apart: the categorization of Taipei as a small town and as a big place. Coupled with the opening statements the unusually direct intertitle (which in itself is counterposed with the elusive, mysterious dialogue snippet intertitles interspersed throughout) calling Taipei one of the wealthiest cities in the world, the impression is one of a space in total flux, befitting a milieu in which everything, no matter how seemingly settled and predestined the existing structures are. As always in Yang, the mercurial and unpredictable flights of human emotion clash with the glass windows and steel buildings: a theater director makes a swerve from postmodern abstraction to comedy, people fall in and out of love with almost alarming regularity, and people decide to seek other forms of employment. Yang, incongruously but perfectly, plays this roundelay of absurdity as farce, but there is a surfeit of scenes pitched at his usual, startling emotional level; if this doesn’t quite aim for a comedy of remarriage, the implications of its overall narrative feel deeply in kinship with his past work, with the comedy tradition, with the state of the modern world.

2019 Festival Dispatch #1 Show Notes

Ryan Swen Catalyst and Witness Leave a comment

Listen to the podcast here.
Subscribe to the podcast here.

Description
The first 2019 festival dispatch of the Catalyst and Witness podcast, devoted to exploring the films format of the New York Film Festival, hosted by Ryan Swen. This covers the announcement of the 2019 main slate.

0:00-1:02:25 – Part One

Housekeeping

  • Hosted by Ryan Swen
  • Conceived and Edited by Ryan Swen
  • Recorded in Los Angeles on Zoom H4N and Behringer Microphones, Edited in Audacity
  • Podcast photograph from Yi Yi, Logo designed by Dan Molloy
  • Recorded August 6, 2019
  • Released August 6, 2019
  • Music (in order of appearance):
    • Lost and Beautiful
    • Mistress America

July 2019 Capsules

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The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
The genius of Lang lies in his ability to make even the most abstract, most incomprehensible moments totally concrete, representing the total paranoia of a man pursued in a tilt down matched to an oscillating soundscape. Arguably the reveal of the metallic silhouette behind the curtain is already redundant; Mabuse and the figures he possesses have already transcended the normal form, and yet they retain a distinctly material existence: etched scribblings onto paper, a rigged record player, neatly typewritten memoranda. The feeling is of total entrapment, of narrowly escaping one room only to become confined within another; even the thrill of a car chase in the night is subsumed by the rear projection.

The Ultimate Trip [LA FLOR]

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“But in that case, the entire magical, mysterious world in which I move would be shattered in a moment. And that’s not possible.”
– Colin, Out 1

“And who is this kind of Sultan who appears to have devoted his life to them?”
– Gatto, La Flor

At first glance, La Flor, Mariano Llinás’ magnum opus created in collaboration with the actresses Pilar Gamboa, Elisa Carricajo, Laura Paredes, and Valeria Correa, lacks the unity —structurally, tonally — that typifies so many of the greatest films of all time. An unashamed anthology film in every way aside from its conception by a single director, it spans no less than six genres/modes of filmmaking across its six episodes; counting the seven fifteen-minute intermissions and a luxurious forty-minute end-credit sequence, it runs 868 minutes (over 14 and a half hours), and takes as its very aim the exploration and co-opting of these disparate forms. Each part has its own flavor — a mummy B-movie, a musical “with a touch of mystery,” a spy movie (which itself spans multiple genres across five hours), an unclassifiable hybrid that piles something like four metafictions upon one another, a reimagining of Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country, and a obscured visualization of an apocryphal text about 19th-century women held captive by Native Americans, respectively – starring the four actresses in all but the fifth episode in wildly varying roles. As might be expected, the process of making this film took ten years, shot episode-by-episode and piecemeal amid other films and across multiple continents. As part of the concept, the first four episodes tell stories that have no endings, the fifth tells a complete story fashioned from a famously unfinished film, and the sixth has an ending but no beginning.

Understandably, a project like this has never been made before, and in many ways it stands alone amongst other films; even something as sprawling as Jacques Rivette’s 13-hour Out 1, one of the films most commonly invoked in connection with this work — which in many (but not all) ways feels like its true spiritual successor — was shot in just six weeks. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a less outwardly focused all-timer: Out 1, for all its extended theatrical rehearsals and narrative digressions, emanates an overwhelming dread and fear in post-’68 Paris; the famously bifurcated shoot of Mulholland Dr. only enhanced the strange seductive pull of that dream factory known as Hollywood. So what makes La Flor the overwhelming, all-encompassing, electrifying masterpiece that it is?

Of course, one must start with the experience — I saw it in the largely de rigeur formulation of three parts, over the weekend that comprised the Locarno in Los Angeles 2019 festival — as with most films past a certain runtime. In a sense, La Flor both initially precludes but eventually invites a sense of complete and total discovery: the genres are laid out in Llinás’s introduction at the start of the film, giving the viewer a general road-map of the destination, complete with the diagram that gives the film its name. However, as with many of the best, most fascinating films, the journey is considerably stranger than initial appearances would suggest. Part of this is due to the slightly outmoded or schlocky nature of the first three genres in the film, especially in the context of world arthouse cinema, which consequently leads to a certain adjustment in expectations regarding rhythm — this is a far cry from slow cinema in every way except temporal duration — and how narratively “conventional” Llinás’s film might end up actually being. As might be expected, however, Llinás’s sensibility, while deeply committed to the intentions of genre in a way that proves vital for the film’s mastery, is too protean to play it all entirely like the films of each genre’s heyday, something which only becomes clearer in the later episodes: the Lewtonian mummy movie is inflected with a Cat People-esque subplot, the mystery mentioned in connection with the musical turns out to be a scientific cabal obsessed with using scorpion venom as a possible elixir for eternal youth, and so on. This approach, of course, is in keeping with Llinás’s previous film from 2008, the great four-hour Historias extraordinarias, which used its starting narratives as a jumping-off point to delve into a whole wealth of perspectives and stories.

What sets La Flor apart, however, is its recognition of the infinite possibilities that come with what might appear to be the rigid framework of genre. For all the invention of Historias extraordinarias — whose general sensibility is reprised multiple times throughout this film, most notably in the second half of episode 4 — it was bound more-or-less to the “real world,” and its concerns were strictly with the recognizable. No such compulsion is present here, and unexpected divergences arise, not just in the macro premise but in the micro: the sudden emergence of a character to the forefront of a narrative, a transformation of a certain group of characters that takes place with little prior warning. More importantly, this conception of a film world as something that is designed to be disrupted accomplishes the rare feat of pairing two distinctly contrasting things — continually upending the viewer’s conception of the world even as they recognize it is a world in which such things can (and logically should happen) — which are both fully thrilling in their own right, but produce an even greater frisson when placed in concert.

It might be useful to invoke Out 1 once more here. While Rivette’s film, certainly has more of an explicitly political bent built into the characters’ (mostly) unspoken reckoning with the current sociopolitical state, it shares that same fundamental mode of exploration. Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Colin and Juliet Berto’s Frédérique are perhaps the most visible instigators, and their investigative presence is echoed at various points in La Flor, most notably with Casterman in episode 3 and Gatto in episode 4. But to suggest that the other characters involved aren’t attempting a similar form of exploration would be inaccurate; in many ways such exploration is the attempt to make sense of their world, whether in an intellectual, artistic, or other such pursuit. Thus, the extended theatrical exercises explore both in a literal sense for the viewer, testing — pleasurably for some including myself, negatively for many others — the bounds of duration and observation, and in a more ideological sense, with each motion conjuring its own strange reflection and inflection.

As it is for one masterpiece, so it is for the other. The creative relationship that eventually created La Flor stemmed from Llinás attending a play in 2006 put on by Gamboa, Carricajo, Paredes, and Correa as part of their theater troupe Piel de Lava (which is still operating today). Inspired by the quintet’s shared love for fiction in almost primoridial form, Llinás’s intention was, according to his Cinema Scope interview with Jordan Cronk, to “make pictures with them a genre in itself. So that’s when I had the idea to make one picture that would be all the pictures — every picture.”

Despite these origins, La Flor conspicuously eschews the overtly theatrical moments of Out 1 — which, among other things, is driven by a bevy of similarly transcendent performances, although they stem from multiple traditions including cinema (Léaud) and theater and involve a larger, more consistently characterized cast — or the Shakespeare-riffing oeuvre of Llinás’s compatriot Matías Piñeiro, who (along with nearly every figure in Argentine cinema) helped out on the film and whose films have featured Paredes and Carricajo. Instead, Llinás’s concerns appear to remain consistently cinematic; though certain other artistic traditions are invoked like the music industry in episode 2, and he himself describes a strong affinity with painting, such influences are inherently associated with the artifice that the cinematic apparatus provides.

This extends to Llinás’s visual schema, which favors extreme close-ups in shallow focus, frequently abstracting the background, both items and faces, into a textured blur. This approach, which remains more-or-less constant for at least the first three episodes, and opens up only slightly in the rest of the film, was adopted in large part due to the limited budget, offering the potential for suggesting things like killer cats, explosions, and the like. But it also feels truly indicative of the sense of exploration involved in the film; the rack focus is the most obvious element, holding on a solitary face in the very immediate foreground for an unconventionally long time before shifting to the background to allow the viewer, previously waiting in anticipation, to see the reaction. At every single juncture, the viewer is invited in to participate in this strange and long endeavor, to piece together both the moment-and-moment interplay and the larger connections that La Flor weaves.

This expansive view translates to the film, which both pushes boundaries and consciously returns to past “outdated” forms, exploring both the concrete past and ephemeral future of cinema. That the central actresses had little cinematic experience (Llinás: “most of them had not even shot one picture. So we had to make their career. This picture would be their career. You’ve seen their lives, and through these images you now understand their process.”) only furthers this sense of a past (invoked in the long-standing collaboration the actresses had) and future (the episodes that these women and Llinás will continue to make, and which the viewer knows are to come) existing simultaneously.

Even the actual text of the film bears this out: in episode 3, each of the four women’s characters gets her own “origin” story. Though they all end up as spies, their narratives leading up to the point when the viewer first meets them differ drastically in both narrative and generic treatment: Gamboa’s is a traditional spy plot, complete with double and triple-agents; Correa’s is a South American revolutionary legend; Paredes’ is one of doomed, unspoken attraction between two assassins, and incidentally one of the best love stories I’ve ever seen; and Carricajo’s is an arduous mole hunt through Siberia. Each of them is brought to embody the force of these genres, and in placing them as part of the same group synthesizes them into a heterogenous blend; as with the episodes, the individual stories fascinate and move, but their impact is exponential when placed together. One of the many unspoken arguments brought forth by La Flor, and one of the most moving, is that each of these modes, whether it be a B-movie or a remake of one of the most iconic films by one of the greatest directors, has its place and should be recognized for its genuine worth in the cinema.

For this reason, though it is certainly possible to do so, it seems unwise to watch any of these in total isolation. Their cumulative impact operates on an emotional level, whether it comes in the levity of the first scene in episode 4, where the actresses (playing a version of themselves) openly bemoan the French dialogue they had to speak in the previous episode (both in La Flor and in La Araña, the film within the film) or in the genuine appreciation of Llinás’s personal appearances, as he thanks the audience for their patience in watching his film. Perhaps most open-hearted of all is the final passage of episode 4, where the four actresses appear by themselves amid nature. Scored to the second movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, it is no simple portraiture: each of them are obscured in some way, whether it be by their distance from the camera, their facing away from it, or the foliage in the way. It is, like many of the greatest moments in the film, revealing, mysterious, slightly embarrassing, and transcendent all at once. This, perhaps, is the greatest achievement of La Flor: a 14-hour film that lacks any trace of insincerity, pompousness, or bloat, instead emerging in every single moment as a monument to a vision and to four immensely talented actresses. May it last forever.