My favorite 25 films, redrafted 12/31/11. In chronological order, identified by country of origin rather than director because of my growing ambivalence toward the "auteur theory." (It should be noted, however, that Ozu Yasujiro directed two of the films on this list, while no other director has more than one film on this list.)
Sherlock, Jr. (USA, 1924)
M (Germany, 1931)
Duck Soup (USA, 1933)
The Grapes of Wrath (USA, 1940)
The Oxbow Incident (USA, 1942)
The Third Man (England, 1949)
Tōkyō monogatari (Japan, 1953)
Sanshō daiyū (Japan, 1954)
Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (France, 1956)
12 Angry Men (USA, 1957)
Ningen no jōken [trilogy] (Japan, 1959-1961)
Sanma no aji (Japan, 1962)
Suna no onna (Japan, 1964)
Andrei Rublev (Russia, 1966)
Play Time (France, 1967)
Killer of Sheep (USA, 1977)
Days of Heaven (USA, 1978)
Ran (Japan, 1985)
Koker trilogy: Where Is the Friend’s Home?/And Life Goes On/Through the Olive Trees (Iran, 1987-1994)
Mononoke-hime (Japan, 1997)
After Life (Japan, 1998)
Werckmeister harmóniák (Hungary, 2000)
The Man without a Past (Finland, 2002)
Café Lumière (Taiwan/Japan, 2003)
The World (China, 2004)
Films in common with 2010 list: 12
Japan: 8.5
USA: 7
France: 2
December 31, 2011
December 20, 2011
Listening to 2011: Top 20 albums
My top 20 albums of 2011, ordered roughly according to preference. This list is, of course, subject to change and fluctuation depending on my mood, and, I can only hope, will shift following my discovery of whatever great 2011 albums that lie waiting to be discovered.
1. Colin Stetson: New History Warfare Volume 2: Judges. Stetson’s second solo album is a complex, visionary work made up of hypnotic, haunting parts. More than an accomplished aesthetic achievement, this album offers a powerful re-contextualization of “jazz” for our (rightly) category-cautious age. Listen to this alongside Ernst Reijseger and Mola Sylla’s Requiem for a Dying Planet and try to imagine it as the soundtrack of a Werner Herzog film.
2. Bill Callahan: Apocalypse. Six great long songs that deal with freedom indirectly and one slight Zen ditty that deals with freedom (too) directly. Because, as he announces in his bizarre ode to America, “Everyone’s allowed a past they don’t care to mention.” His, I take it, is the unfortunate series of pointlessly noisy anti-folk bedroom recordings with which he opened his career. He’s been getting steadily better ever since he learned the difference between subjectivity and introspection and chose the former in favor of the latter.
3. James Blake: James Blake. Blake’s distinctive anti-soul croon, pushed and pulled uncomfortably back and forth, inhabits an eroding musical world of minimalist post-dubstep beats that click-clack under sawtooth-y keys and manipulated self-samples. Eschewing conventional structure and any sense of narrative progression, Blake reduces each song to a moment, which he then turns over and over, studying it as it crumbles and slips through his fingers. Blake's full length debut is some kind of minimalist masterpiece.
4. Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What. He’s 69 and he’s still got it—if not more so than ever before. In what is easily his best album since Graceland, possibly his self-titled solo debut, Simon sings about God and angels and making gumbo and (gasp!) Christmas sans nostalgia or sentimentality (well, maybe a little sentimentality); the accompanying music is a perfectly assembled, unfussy complement. One hopes to grow old as gracefully and wear one’s age with this much comfort and contentment.
5. tUnE-yArDs: w h o k i l l. Leftist feminist politics collide with Beefheart-ian instrumental digressions and a powerful, agile voice. I interpret the album title as a question and the songs as further elaborations on the question. The answers don’t come easy.
6. Shabazz Palaces: Black Up. The irony is that an explicitly pro-black hip hop group, whose name is a reference to Nation of Islam mythology, decided to become the first black group (I think) to sign to the Seattle-based indie label Sub Pop, a strategic move that effectively cemented their reputation in the notoriously white circles of indie snobbery who first acclaimed them. The not-irony is that this album is great. P.S. They’re smart enough to recognize the irony and play it to their advantage (note the album’s title).
7. TOKiMONSTA: Creature Dreams / Side 2 of L.A. Series 8. By cleaning up the blurry post-hip-hop sound into distinct and discrete layers, TOKiMONSTA foregrounds the genre’s unconventional, Monk-ish sense of rhythm. The mini-LP and her half of L.A. Series 8 work as a nice complement to Matthewdavid’s ultra-textural Outmind in the sense that the two are excellent distillations of two things members of the Brainfeeder collective do well.
8. Jens Lekman: An Argument with Myself. Five ace songs that emphasize how much we need another full-length from this deplorably adorable Swede who seems to effortlessly cough up great melodies and wry, rhyming stories.
9. St. Vincent: Strange Mercy. St. Vincent’s greatest work (so far) is also her most discreet—even the noisiest and fussiest arrangements here convey broodiness rather than rambunctiousness. Yet the threat of violence keeps surfacing from the album’s dark eroticism like a shark’s fin in the ocean.
10. Tom Waits: Bad as Me. As expected, Waits’ latest retreads familiar ground, which is to say it revels in the perverse and seedy side streets and back alleys (not to mention family homes) that make possible the collective imagination of America(na). If his turns of phrase are beginning to sound familiar and routine, though, at least Bad as Me is musically engaging, with Tom turning out some of the best blues of his whole weird and wicked career.
11. Thurston Moore: Demolished Thoughts. Don’t be shocked that Moore has crafted such a beautiful album; Sonic Youth’s squealing feedback jams have always been beautiful. Rather, be shocked that Moore is able to reach such heights without those gnarly feedback jams at all.
12. The Caretaker: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. A collection of repurposed 78s, muted with the dust in their grooves, lightly edited into a series of jarring tonal shifts. “The Caretaker” creates an auditory world that (and here’s the important thing) openly disputes its own existence, provoking important questions about intellectual property and the uneasy distinction between being and not-being. 45 minutes of total texture-porn from a master of the form.
13. Battles: Gloss Drop. An eccentric, mostly instrumental sophomore album that improves on 2007’s Mirrored (this time, even the short texture pieces are worth repeated listening). The subversive soundtrack to global capitalism that anticipates its eventual collapse with bated breath.
14. Serengeti: Family and Friends. Not for nothing is the first word of this album “Dark.” Family and Friends is a stark and challenging effort from this talented and underrated MC, executed with at times brutal honesty. Serengeti’s sensitivity to socio-economic conditions (already well documented in 2006’s Noticeably Negro) helps tremendously, while the MC’s story telling abilities (already well documented in 2008’s Dennehy: Lights, Camera, Action) allow him to express more in these mostly 3 minute songs than most of his contemporaries manage in whole bloated albums. His characters are complex, conflicted, and believable individuals whose frustrations come from their inability to live up to an overarching ideology of impossible success, and whose hope, an important undercurrent throughout the album, comes from their ability to begin to question that ideology.
15. Gary Clark, Jr.: Bright Lights. Y’see, “the blues” is not a genre in the sense that it can be resurrected or reconstituted. The blues, like horror or love, is a state of being that one inhabits and expresses through a carefully constructed grammar. So be wary of critics who position Clark as the savior or redeemer of a lost, dead, or somehow dissolved genre. He’s not that. He is, however, exceptionally talented, if this 4-track EP is to be believed.
16. Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx: We’re New Here. A post-dubstep reimagining of the late Scott-Heron’s 2010 swan song, I’m New Here, with a couple of selected older cuts. There are plenty of obvious ways to go about a project like this, and be thankful that young Jamie xx pretty much systematically avoids them all. Also be thankful he retained the pace and reflexive flavor of the original by remixing the under 30 second interludes as well.
17. Burial: Street Halo. Since Untrue remains one of the few straight electronica albums that I can stand to listen to all the way through without getting either sleepy or fidgety, it goes without saying that this EP can’t quite compare. And yet comparisons are inescapable, since these songs sound so bloody similar to the ones on Untrue, which, it now occurs to me, is actually a pretty good compliment.
18. Matthewdavid: Outmind. One of two excellent Brainfeeder-related releases this year (the other being TOKiMONSTA’s sadly overlooked Creature Dreams). With beats properly submerged in an abstract haze, Matthewdavid dreams up auditory texture that verges on tactile.
19. Atlas Sound: Parallax. In general, I’ve found Bradford Cox’s solo output less interesting (well, less brilliant, anyway) than his work with Deerhunter—working with a band sharpens his writing, and even the collage experiments and stoned flights of fancy somehow work in the context of an album. Yet Parallax, true to its title, offers something more than just Deerhunter in miniature—the lovely melodies and singing, the songs and sounds, all are arranged to evoke a feeling of displacement. It’s just that the object being displaced is not the music or Cox himself—it’s you, the listener.
20. AraabMuzik: Electronic Dream. “And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the scarlet stepped pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.” (William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 52)
1. Colin Stetson: New History Warfare Volume 2: Judges. Stetson’s second solo album is a complex, visionary work made up of hypnotic, haunting parts. More than an accomplished aesthetic achievement, this album offers a powerful re-contextualization of “jazz” for our (rightly) category-cautious age. Listen to this alongside Ernst Reijseger and Mola Sylla’s Requiem for a Dying Planet and try to imagine it as the soundtrack of a Werner Herzog film.
2. Bill Callahan: Apocalypse. Six great long songs that deal with freedom indirectly and one slight Zen ditty that deals with freedom (too) directly. Because, as he announces in his bizarre ode to America, “Everyone’s allowed a past they don’t care to mention.” His, I take it, is the unfortunate series of pointlessly noisy anti-folk bedroom recordings with which he opened his career. He’s been getting steadily better ever since he learned the difference between subjectivity and introspection and chose the former in favor of the latter.
3. James Blake: James Blake. Blake’s distinctive anti-soul croon, pushed and pulled uncomfortably back and forth, inhabits an eroding musical world of minimalist post-dubstep beats that click-clack under sawtooth-y keys and manipulated self-samples. Eschewing conventional structure and any sense of narrative progression, Blake reduces each song to a moment, which he then turns over and over, studying it as it crumbles and slips through his fingers. Blake's full length debut is some kind of minimalist masterpiece.
4. Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What. He’s 69 and he’s still got it—if not more so than ever before. In what is easily his best album since Graceland, possibly his self-titled solo debut, Simon sings about God and angels and making gumbo and (gasp!) Christmas sans nostalgia or sentimentality (well, maybe a little sentimentality); the accompanying music is a perfectly assembled, unfussy complement. One hopes to grow old as gracefully and wear one’s age with this much comfort and contentment.
5. tUnE-yArDs: w h o k i l l. Leftist feminist politics collide with Beefheart-ian instrumental digressions and a powerful, agile voice. I interpret the album title as a question and the songs as further elaborations on the question. The answers don’t come easy.
6. Shabazz Palaces: Black Up. The irony is that an explicitly pro-black hip hop group, whose name is a reference to Nation of Islam mythology, decided to become the first black group (I think) to sign to the Seattle-based indie label Sub Pop, a strategic move that effectively cemented their reputation in the notoriously white circles of indie snobbery who first acclaimed them. The not-irony is that this album is great. P.S. They’re smart enough to recognize the irony and play it to their advantage (note the album’s title).
7. TOKiMONSTA: Creature Dreams / Side 2 of L.A. Series 8. By cleaning up the blurry post-hip-hop sound into distinct and discrete layers, TOKiMONSTA foregrounds the genre’s unconventional, Monk-ish sense of rhythm. The mini-LP and her half of L.A. Series 8 work as a nice complement to Matthewdavid’s ultra-textural Outmind in the sense that the two are excellent distillations of two things members of the Brainfeeder collective do well.
8. Jens Lekman: An Argument with Myself. Five ace songs that emphasize how much we need another full-length from this deplorably adorable Swede who seems to effortlessly cough up great melodies and wry, rhyming stories.
9. St. Vincent: Strange Mercy. St. Vincent’s greatest work (so far) is also her most discreet—even the noisiest and fussiest arrangements here convey broodiness rather than rambunctiousness. Yet the threat of violence keeps surfacing from the album’s dark eroticism like a shark’s fin in the ocean.
10. Tom Waits: Bad as Me. As expected, Waits’ latest retreads familiar ground, which is to say it revels in the perverse and seedy side streets and back alleys (not to mention family homes) that make possible the collective imagination of America(na). If his turns of phrase are beginning to sound familiar and routine, though, at least Bad as Me is musically engaging, with Tom turning out some of the best blues of his whole weird and wicked career.
11. Thurston Moore: Demolished Thoughts. Don’t be shocked that Moore has crafted such a beautiful album; Sonic Youth’s squealing feedback jams have always been beautiful. Rather, be shocked that Moore is able to reach such heights without those gnarly feedback jams at all.
12. The Caretaker: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. A collection of repurposed 78s, muted with the dust in their grooves, lightly edited into a series of jarring tonal shifts. “The Caretaker” creates an auditory world that (and here’s the important thing) openly disputes its own existence, provoking important questions about intellectual property and the uneasy distinction between being and not-being. 45 minutes of total texture-porn from a master of the form.
13. Battles: Gloss Drop. An eccentric, mostly instrumental sophomore album that improves on 2007’s Mirrored (this time, even the short texture pieces are worth repeated listening). The subversive soundtrack to global capitalism that anticipates its eventual collapse with bated breath.
14. Serengeti: Family and Friends. Not for nothing is the first word of this album “Dark.” Family and Friends is a stark and challenging effort from this talented and underrated MC, executed with at times brutal honesty. Serengeti’s sensitivity to socio-economic conditions (already well documented in 2006’s Noticeably Negro) helps tremendously, while the MC’s story telling abilities (already well documented in 2008’s Dennehy: Lights, Camera, Action) allow him to express more in these mostly 3 minute songs than most of his contemporaries manage in whole bloated albums. His characters are complex, conflicted, and believable individuals whose frustrations come from their inability to live up to an overarching ideology of impossible success, and whose hope, an important undercurrent throughout the album, comes from their ability to begin to question that ideology.
15. Gary Clark, Jr.: Bright Lights. Y’see, “the blues” is not a genre in the sense that it can be resurrected or reconstituted. The blues, like horror or love, is a state of being that one inhabits and expresses through a carefully constructed grammar. So be wary of critics who position Clark as the savior or redeemer of a lost, dead, or somehow dissolved genre. He’s not that. He is, however, exceptionally talented, if this 4-track EP is to be believed.
16. Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx: We’re New Here. A post-dubstep reimagining of the late Scott-Heron’s 2010 swan song, I’m New Here, with a couple of selected older cuts. There are plenty of obvious ways to go about a project like this, and be thankful that young Jamie xx pretty much systematically avoids them all. Also be thankful he retained the pace and reflexive flavor of the original by remixing the under 30 second interludes as well.
17. Burial: Street Halo. Since Untrue remains one of the few straight electronica albums that I can stand to listen to all the way through without getting either sleepy or fidgety, it goes without saying that this EP can’t quite compare. And yet comparisons are inescapable, since these songs sound so bloody similar to the ones on Untrue, which, it now occurs to me, is actually a pretty good compliment.
18. Matthewdavid: Outmind. One of two excellent Brainfeeder-related releases this year (the other being TOKiMONSTA’s sadly overlooked Creature Dreams). With beats properly submerged in an abstract haze, Matthewdavid dreams up auditory texture that verges on tactile.
19. Atlas Sound: Parallax. In general, I’ve found Bradford Cox’s solo output less interesting (well, less brilliant, anyway) than his work with Deerhunter—working with a band sharpens his writing, and even the collage experiments and stoned flights of fancy somehow work in the context of an album. Yet Parallax, true to its title, offers something more than just Deerhunter in miniature—the lovely melodies and singing, the songs and sounds, all are arranged to evoke a feeling of displacement. It’s just that the object being displaced is not the music or Cox himself—it’s you, the listener.
20. AraabMuzik: Electronic Dream. “And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the scarlet stepped pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.” (William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 52)
December 19, 2011
Listening to 2011: Honorable mention
20 solid albums that stand up fairly well to repeated listening and closer scrutiny. Tomorrow, I will post my top 20 albums of the year.
The Antlers: Burst Apart. Though less ambitious, Burst Apart is a greater work than the band’s debut. The singer’s voice is still tremulous but no longer sounds like he is struggling to be heard—or craving to be listened to—over the sound of his crippling Neutral Milk Hotel-induced inferiority complex.
Julianna Barwick: The Magic Place. Ethereal. According to Wikipedia, Barwick claims she learned to sing like this from going to a rural church in Louisiana, though I’m guessing her record collection has more Cocteau Twins than sacred harp music.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Wolfroy Goes to Town. Though Will Oldham doesn’t come across as particularly disciplined, he has his craft down to a science. This means that telling his songs or even albums apart at this point is pretty much out of the question—the differences are so subtle, I wonder if even Oldham is capable of doing so. Yet his albums all inhabit particular emotional moments. This one, like last year’s Wondershow of the World, is stark, dark, open.
BRAIDS: Native Speakers. So out of touch am I with the hype-manufacturing apparatus of indie-rock crit, I had to hear about this one through Pierro Scaruffi’s website, which is good because I might not have enjoyed it so thoroughly otherwise. Though not quite as original as some people seem to think it is, Native Speakers is an engaging debut with more than a few surprising moments.
Cults: Cults. A friendly male-female indie-pop duo with a solid sense of melody. Excellent use of the glockenspiel.
Das Racist: Relax. Though I suspect last year’s pair of mixtapes contain most of the music they’ll be remembered for, their official debut offers more of the same, with more hooks and less goofiness. I miss the goofiness but appreciate the conceptual angle and sonic consistency they develop here. And at least the album isn’t so mercilessly frontloaded and inconsistent like the mixtapes.
Girls: Father, Son, Holy Ghost. No, this isn’t a Christian rock album, though it does, like the first two Girls releases, convey a redemptive arc (and, ahem, nostalgia). Clearly inventiveness is not this band’s strong suit, but then the genre we call rock ‘n’ roll has always been marked by its capacity for heteropoeisis. And we can all appreciate the fact that they decided to call the album’s gorgeous centerpiece, a delicate song about lovesickness, “Vomit.”
Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
Vijay Iyer, Prasanna, and Nitin Mitta: Tirtha. A vast improvement on virtually every jazz-meets-raga set ever because it’s not soiled by the shameless novelty of the thing (that means you, Shakti), nor is it a perfunctory excursion that simply reflects without questioning the globalization of aesthetic (not to mention capital) that makes such fusions possible. Iyer continues to be the best jazz pianist working today (yup, I said it), and his collaborators (on tabla and electric guitar) know their theory, too. One only wishes for more fully-formed compositions than the nine offered here.
Nicolas Jaar: Space Is Only Noise. L'hiver tortures mon esprit. Où est mon chapeau? Je ne sais pas qui je suis.
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks: Mirror Traffic. No new ground broken here, not that there’s much left to break. Yet treading and retreading over the same nonsensical lyrics, the same messy sounds, the same offhandedly brilliant guitar lines, Malkmus still taps into something, I won’t say a feeling, no, but it’s worth further investigation, whatever it is, or was, or turns out to be.
The Mountain Goats: All Eternals Deck. I guess since his last album took its song titles from the Bible, this time he’s gone all spiritualist on us and is taking his cue from a deck of Tarot cards. Interesting, though, that the Tarot cards should provoke the same questions about mortality, fate, and loss.
Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica. Layers and layers and layers and layers and
The Roots: undun. It’s only natural that the greatest hip hop band ever (the most consistently engaging in any case) would want to consolidate the success of their incredible string of three albums from 2006-2010 with a concept album. Really, I understand. It’s just that the musical ideas and occasionally brilliant lyrics are bogged down by the album’s attempt at relating a narrative. This encapsulates, of course, the great error of so many concept albums: the need to be thinking about the next song when you haven’t yet left this one.
SBTRKT: SBTRKT. Intricate drum patterns offset by just the right amount of mid-range wobbling and throaty (non-treated) vocals. An excellent contribution to the musical discourse on “dubstep,” which is turning out to be so much better than dubstep itself.
Teebs: Collections 01. An excellent 30-minute companion piece to last year’s Ardour, Collections 01 (hopefully the inaugural volume of a series) makes great use of the same aesthetic. Rebekah Raff also pops in with her graceful harp playing, live on one track and sampled on others.
Thee Oh Sees: Carrion Crawler/The Dream. An intense-to-the-point-of-being-wearying sort of psych-rock record; the kind of album that must be the mimetic product of years of intensive study.
Thundercat: The Golden Age of the Apocalypse. FlyLo co-produced this, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from an unguided listen—‘cept, of course, for some of the space-age flourishes here and there. Sounds good beside TV on the Radio’s album this year, though I’m not sure to which album that innocuous comment is a compliment—likely both.
TV on the Radio: Nine Types of Light. Smooth—almost too smooth. Simpler than their previous albums, too—almost too simple. This one is more on the “Stork and Owl” side of things than the “Red Dress” side of things, but I can live with that. “New Cannonball Blues” is the standout for me, go figure.
Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring for My Halo. A laid-back set of pretty guitar-based songs, over which Vile (great rock ‘n’ roll name, by the way), with a drawl wearier than it is iconic, delivers lyrics that don’t make much sense or add up to any recognizable narrative. But, then, no one said anything has to make sense in 2011, much less add up to a narrative.
December 14, 2011
Winter break reading list
Kobo Abe, The Ruined Map
Kobo Abe, The Box Man
Kobo Abe, Secret Rendezvous
Kobo Abe, The Ark Sakura
Kobo Abe, Kangaroo Notebook
Christopher Bolton, The Scientific Fiction and Fictional Science of Kobo Abe
Albert Camus, The Plague
Albert Camus, The Fall
Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom
William Gibson, Virtual Light
William Gibson, Idoru
William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties
Kojin Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor
Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx
Kojin Karatani, History and Repetition
Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine
Asja Szafraniec, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature
Kobo Abe, The Box Man
Kobo Abe, Secret Rendezvous
Kobo Abe, The Ark Sakura
Kobo Abe, Kangaroo Notebook
Christopher Bolton, The Scientific Fiction and Fictional Science of Kobo Abe
Albert Camus, The Plague
Albert Camus, The Fall
Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom
William Gibson, Virtual Light
William Gibson, Idoru
William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties
Kojin Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor
Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx
Kojin Karatani, History and Repetition
Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine
Asja Szafraniec, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature
December 2, 2011
08 Details
What is certain?
That the eye, whether struggling to remain open
or struggling to close finally,
is struggling.
A struggle is necessary.
December 1, 2011
07
Vertigo accompanies the unfinished inscription,
as if memory, too, were only a ledge to fall from.
November 29, 2011
06
We struggle to remain
there
between the architecture of thought
and condition, its architect,
as we chart the boundaries of space and time
that move through us
and carry us into our own cartographies.
November 26, 2011
05
She remembers the dining room, reduced in her memory to its most brutal machinery:
a table,
two chairs,
a collection of flowers in a vase...
the silence that suggests she has come to the end of something.
November 22, 2011
04
Breath searches the glass like unfurling tendrils.
Now fingers trace some familiar shape as the breath contracts.
Looking at the glass
or looking through the glass,
you see the same things.
November 19, 2011
November 17, 2011
02
What she finds in the eye is not that for which she searched the eye.
With greater intensity, she searches the eye for "the eye,"
but she finds only her own gaze in it, now returned with greater clarity.
November 16, 2011
Details 01
A knot of trees, twisting into strange, horselike figures;
a dark coagulation of charging shapes in the distance.
October 1, 2011
Cloud Cataract
I made this up at home, August-September 2011; released 01 October 2011
1. Produced and mixed by Harrison, who also played the guitar and keyboards.
2. Some other people appear on this, including musicians and speakers from the Voyager Golden Record, some poets reading their work, and a Cambodian psychedelic band. These works have been extracted from their original contexts and repurposed to fit into the context of this work. The EP generally serves as discursive space wherein disparate sound elements with obscured referents are brought into a carefully facilitated dialogue with one another. Thus, their utilization constitutes commentary (on prevalent contemporary social and political issues) and critique (of the original works and my own work).
3. Also my dad is in this. He says the words "Heart of Texas" and contributes to the discourse on the Western category "Song" in the first track.
4. The cover is a detail from a photograph taken by Becky Yi.
5. Adorno said it was like a fog.
September 12, 2011
Toward a Genealogy of Iranian Cinema (Part 4)
Reading the Films of Kiarostami with the Help of Persian Paintings
I chose Abbas Kiarostami for the analysis that follows because his international reputation puts him at the forefront of Iranian cinema (at least as it is represented in Western academia). As to whether or not this is because the auteur-making machine of Western academia chose Kiarostami to fill a particular niche as the elected representative of Iran’s particular brand of Iranian cinema, as Cheshire has suggested,[1] I have no interest in taking a definite stance on this issue. Suffice it to say, Western scholars have taken a greater interest in Kiarostami than his contemporaries, and more research exists on Kiarostami than for any other single Iranian filmmaker. I freely admit the disingenuousness, though, of separating Kiarostami from his context within Iranian cinema, but I only do so with the goal of positioning Iranian cinema as a whole as the inheritor of traditional Persian art; I do this by positioning Kiarostami as the inheritor of one such art—Persian painting.
In this section, I will examine four aspects of Kiarostami’s cinema: elements of his films often cited as examples of postmodernism, his portrayal of human figures, his use of location and physical space, and his use of symbol. At each turn, I find major links between Persian painting and the films of Kiarostami.
Authors like Dabshi have noted themes in Kiarostami’s films that are typically identified with postmodernism, including dialectical intertextuality, defamiliarization and “resignification” of the world, dehumanization, using “instruments of de-sedimentation without constituting a metaphysics,” and so on.[2] But I would be cautious to ascribe too much power of influence to postmodernism in this case, for as other authors have realized, Persian painting contains many of the same themes. For instance, in the closing chapter of his fascinating biographical/critical portrait of the filmmaker, Alberto Elena argues that trends toward intertextuality can be located within the Persian miniature tradition,[3] while Mir-Ahmad-e Mir-Ehsan goes so far as to say, “Kiarostami is the inheritor of an eastern art tradition which foregrounds deconstruction and multiple narration…This magical terrain is the real source of his fascination with non-linearity and multi-spatial narration…”[4] Similarly, I would add that trends toward “defamiliarization” and “dehumanization” can be taken as an extension of the tendency toward abstraction characteristic of Persian miniatures. This analysis is central to dislodging Western art as the cultural touchstone of Iranian cinema and repositions Persian art as the locus of Kiarostami’s influence.
If Western assumptions about the way art should be read are thus found unreliable, an exploration of the uses of the human figure and physical space in Persian paintings would be helpful. Grabar and Natif note that in Persian paintings, figural representations can be neatly separated into three distinct classes: first are the “active agents…involved in some concrete and discrete action,” who are to be recognized as such by key physical identifiers (such as, Grabar and Natif suggest, specific gestures or certain personal effects); second are the “attendants,” who serve to draw focus to the active agent(s) and sometimes serve some instrumental narrative purpose; finally, there are the “witnesses,” who are simply observers of the action and serve no narrative purpose other than focusing the viewer’s attention on key parts of the scene.[5]
A key point that I see here is that human beings cannot be considered isolable in Persian paintings, for human beings are understood through the relationships the artist establishes in the world of the painting. In Kiarostami’s films, then, characters should not be considered apart from their interactions with other people but must be contemplated through their interactions on screen.
Another way human beings are understood in Persian art as well as in Kiarostami’s films is through their relationship to the physical space surrounding them. On the use of location in Kiarostami’s films, Elena writes that the films exhibit an “aversion to interiors that is so characteristic of Persian art”;[6] though interior spaces are not entirely excised from Kiarostami’s films (nor are they, for that matter, entirely excised in Persian paintings), human beings are usually expressed in public, social contexts. Similarly, film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum notes of Kiarostami’s masterful film Taste of Cherry, “[T]he fact that the film is set exclusively in exteriors…inflects our sense of solitude with an equally strong and unbroken sense of being in the world…[The film] perceives life itself almost exclusively in terms of public and social space.”[7] Both authors here suggest that the relationships between human beings and their location become crucial components to a holistic reading of Persian paintings and Kiarostami’s films.
Kiarostami’s use of location as a reflection or even extension of his characters must lead to a discussion of his use of symbol. It is important to note here that “symbol” as an artistic concept is not sui generis but is differently defined and constructed in various cultural contexts. Therefore, Cheshire contrasts the Western notion of symbolism, which he argues is now heavily influenced by modernist assumptions about the function of symbols in art (that is, each symbol corresponds to a discrete meaning, and thus works of art are meant to be decoded), with a Persian cultural notion of symbolism, which stresses the importance of the interrelationship of a network of symbols that operate on multiple levels of meaning simultaneously; as such, Cheshire points out, “The author doesn’t so much create these meanings as arrange the spaces and conditions for them.”[8] In other words, the reason Kiarostami’s films can be difficult for many Western filmgoers to understand is because Western filmgoers, especially those with little or no background in art criticism, have normative expectations about how works of art are to be read. But I would argue that it is not so much a question of cultural conflict as it is an issue of nuance, of approach.
One way to untangle this profusion of cultural knots is to hearken again to Persian painting. Grabar and Natif note that through the collection and coalescence of both “completed compositional units” and “the smallest visually perceived units of meaning” (which the authors refer to with appetizing semiotics jargon “syntagm” and “morpheme” respectively), we can gather the intention of the painters: “The placement, articulation, and relationship to each other of these two types of components organize the image and create visual statements.”[9] Thus, in “reading” Kiarostami’s films, I argue that the best approach would be to first identify the “completed compositional units” and their isolated building blocks and observe their interaction. Only then, after understanding the complex interrelationships of “syntagms” and “morphemes,” is the question of “meaning” approachable.
In conclusion, I want to stress again the central importance of constructing an internally coherent and externally functional methodology for discussing and understanding Iranian cinema. I have attempted to construct such a methodology by using traditional Persian art as a conceptual frame. In divergence from scholars who have focused their discourse erroneously on the influence of world cinema, I have shown that Iranian cinema has social and artistic functions that are distinct from those in the West; in divergence from scholars who focus their discourse on the political and social context of contemporary Iran, I have argued that Iranian cinema can also be understood through its aesthetic and thematic precedents in Persian art. Though limitations on length have not permitted me to apply this methodology in any systematic fashion to Kiarostami’s films or other contemporary Iranian films, I hope the methodology I have constructed will be of use in future research on Kiarostami on the one hand and will positively influence scholarship on contemporary Iranian cinema on the other.
NOTES
[1] 8.
[2] Dabashi, 49-51.
[3] The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, translated by Belinda Coombes (London: Saqi, 2005), 186.
[4] “Dark Light,” in Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 113.
[5] Grabar and Natif, 173. In Kiarostami’s films, the same classification can hold, but with one important asterisk: while the first and second groups are retained, the third category, that of the “witnesses,” is mostly replaced by the (external) audience of the film.
[6] Elena, 160.
[7] “Abbas Kiarostami,” in Abbas Kiarostami, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 31-32.
[8] Chesire, 12 (emphasis original).
[9] Grabar and Natif, 180.
I chose Abbas Kiarostami for the analysis that follows because his international reputation puts him at the forefront of Iranian cinema (at least as it is represented in Western academia). As to whether or not this is because the auteur-making machine of Western academia chose Kiarostami to fill a particular niche as the elected representative of Iran’s particular brand of Iranian cinema, as Cheshire has suggested,[1] I have no interest in taking a definite stance on this issue. Suffice it to say, Western scholars have taken a greater interest in Kiarostami than his contemporaries, and more research exists on Kiarostami than for any other single Iranian filmmaker. I freely admit the disingenuousness, though, of separating Kiarostami from his context within Iranian cinema, but I only do so with the goal of positioning Iranian cinema as a whole as the inheritor of traditional Persian art; I do this by positioning Kiarostami as the inheritor of one such art—Persian painting.
In this section, I will examine four aspects of Kiarostami’s cinema: elements of his films often cited as examples of postmodernism, his portrayal of human figures, his use of location and physical space, and his use of symbol. At each turn, I find major links between Persian painting and the films of Kiarostami.
Authors like Dabshi have noted themes in Kiarostami’s films that are typically identified with postmodernism, including dialectical intertextuality, defamiliarization and “resignification” of the world, dehumanization, using “instruments of de-sedimentation without constituting a metaphysics,” and so on.[2] But I would be cautious to ascribe too much power of influence to postmodernism in this case, for as other authors have realized, Persian painting contains many of the same themes. For instance, in the closing chapter of his fascinating biographical/critical portrait of the filmmaker, Alberto Elena argues that trends toward intertextuality can be located within the Persian miniature tradition,[3] while Mir-Ahmad-e Mir-Ehsan goes so far as to say, “Kiarostami is the inheritor of an eastern art tradition which foregrounds deconstruction and multiple narration…This magical terrain is the real source of his fascination with non-linearity and multi-spatial narration…”[4] Similarly, I would add that trends toward “defamiliarization” and “dehumanization” can be taken as an extension of the tendency toward abstraction characteristic of Persian miniatures. This analysis is central to dislodging Western art as the cultural touchstone of Iranian cinema and repositions Persian art as the locus of Kiarostami’s influence.
If Western assumptions about the way art should be read are thus found unreliable, an exploration of the uses of the human figure and physical space in Persian paintings would be helpful. Grabar and Natif note that in Persian paintings, figural representations can be neatly separated into three distinct classes: first are the “active agents…involved in some concrete and discrete action,” who are to be recognized as such by key physical identifiers (such as, Grabar and Natif suggest, specific gestures or certain personal effects); second are the “attendants,” who serve to draw focus to the active agent(s) and sometimes serve some instrumental narrative purpose; finally, there are the “witnesses,” who are simply observers of the action and serve no narrative purpose other than focusing the viewer’s attention on key parts of the scene.[5]
A key point that I see here is that human beings cannot be considered isolable in Persian paintings, for human beings are understood through the relationships the artist establishes in the world of the painting. In Kiarostami’s films, then, characters should not be considered apart from their interactions with other people but must be contemplated through their interactions on screen.
Another way human beings are understood in Persian art as well as in Kiarostami’s films is through their relationship to the physical space surrounding them. On the use of location in Kiarostami’s films, Elena writes that the films exhibit an “aversion to interiors that is so characteristic of Persian art”;[6] though interior spaces are not entirely excised from Kiarostami’s films (nor are they, for that matter, entirely excised in Persian paintings), human beings are usually expressed in public, social contexts. Similarly, film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum notes of Kiarostami’s masterful film Taste of Cherry, “[T]he fact that the film is set exclusively in exteriors…inflects our sense of solitude with an equally strong and unbroken sense of being in the world…[The film] perceives life itself almost exclusively in terms of public and social space.”[7] Both authors here suggest that the relationships between human beings and their location become crucial components to a holistic reading of Persian paintings and Kiarostami’s films.
Kiarostami’s use of location as a reflection or even extension of his characters must lead to a discussion of his use of symbol. It is important to note here that “symbol” as an artistic concept is not sui generis but is differently defined and constructed in various cultural contexts. Therefore, Cheshire contrasts the Western notion of symbolism, which he argues is now heavily influenced by modernist assumptions about the function of symbols in art (that is, each symbol corresponds to a discrete meaning, and thus works of art are meant to be decoded), with a Persian cultural notion of symbolism, which stresses the importance of the interrelationship of a network of symbols that operate on multiple levels of meaning simultaneously; as such, Cheshire points out, “The author doesn’t so much create these meanings as arrange the spaces and conditions for them.”[8] In other words, the reason Kiarostami’s films can be difficult for many Western filmgoers to understand is because Western filmgoers, especially those with little or no background in art criticism, have normative expectations about how works of art are to be read. But I would argue that it is not so much a question of cultural conflict as it is an issue of nuance, of approach.
One way to untangle this profusion of cultural knots is to hearken again to Persian painting. Grabar and Natif note that through the collection and coalescence of both “completed compositional units” and “the smallest visually perceived units of meaning” (which the authors refer to with appetizing semiotics jargon “syntagm” and “morpheme” respectively), we can gather the intention of the painters: “The placement, articulation, and relationship to each other of these two types of components organize the image and create visual statements.”[9] Thus, in “reading” Kiarostami’s films, I argue that the best approach would be to first identify the “completed compositional units” and their isolated building blocks and observe their interaction. Only then, after understanding the complex interrelationships of “syntagms” and “morphemes,” is the question of “meaning” approachable.
In conclusion, I want to stress again the central importance of constructing an internally coherent and externally functional methodology for discussing and understanding Iranian cinema. I have attempted to construct such a methodology by using traditional Persian art as a conceptual frame. In divergence from scholars who have focused their discourse erroneously on the influence of world cinema, I have shown that Iranian cinema has social and artistic functions that are distinct from those in the West; in divergence from scholars who focus their discourse on the political and social context of contemporary Iran, I have argued that Iranian cinema can also be understood through its aesthetic and thematic precedents in Persian art. Though limitations on length have not permitted me to apply this methodology in any systematic fashion to Kiarostami’s films or other contemporary Iranian films, I hope the methodology I have constructed will be of use in future research on Kiarostami on the one hand and will positively influence scholarship on contemporary Iranian cinema on the other.
NOTES
[1] 8.
[2] Dabashi, 49-51.
[3] The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, translated by Belinda Coombes (London: Saqi, 2005), 186.
[4] “Dark Light,” in Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 113.
[5] Grabar and Natif, 173. In Kiarostami’s films, the same classification can hold, but with one important asterisk: while the first and second groups are retained, the third category, that of the “witnesses,” is mostly replaced by the (external) audience of the film.
[6] Elena, 160.
[7] “Abbas Kiarostami,” in Abbas Kiarostami, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 31-32.
[8] Chesire, 12 (emphasis original).
[9] Grabar and Natif, 180.
September 5, 2011
Toward a Genealogy of Iranian Cinema (Part 3)
Despite the close relationship Dabashi establishes between classical and contemporary art, Dabashi also argues that there is a fundamental tension that makes Iranian cinema signal a clear break from classical Persian arts. Dabashi argues, in terms clearly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”[1] that cinema marks the first time in Iranian art when human beings were portrayed as “historical” beings “as opposed to the eternal Qur’anic man” that characterizes traditional Persian art (especially painting); cinema, Dabashi argues, liberates itself from these requirements and therefore should be read as a primarily political medium.[2]
However, I think Dabashi’s analysis is inspired by a misapplication of Benjamin’s theory. For while Benjamin certainly argues, in unequivocal terms, that film destroys the potential for “aura,” filtering Iranian cinema through Benjamin’s Marxist ideological lens has some limitations since “art” in classical Persian culture did not necessarily fulfill the same social function(s) as it did in Europe.[3] A careful look at Benjamin’s vocabulary establishes its limited utility: Benjamin identifies “aura” principally with the sense of “distance” between the piece of art and its viewer, as well as the perceived value of a work of art’s “uniqueness.”[4] My research, however, has revealed that Benjamin’s notions of “distance” and “uniqueness” are not even essential aspects of Persian art, especially not in Persian painting.
Benjamin explains what he means by “distance” in a helpful footnote: “The essentially distant object is the unapproachable one. Unapproachability is indeed a major quality of the cult image…The closeness which one may gain from its subject matter does not impair the distance which it retains in its appearance.”[5] For Benjamin, mediums such as painting force the spectator into a subordinate role since she must always be aware of her removal, her otherness, from the complete, self-contained work of art; however, the most obvious tension between Benjamin’s “distance” and Persian painting is that a Persian painting is rarely seen as a complete, self-contained work.
Typically, each painting functions as part of a narrative series and thus depends upon the text (the narration in poetry or prose), the context (the position of this image as one in a series), and the reader’s interpretation of the gestures and actions of the figures and the landscape in which the painting is set.[6] Persian painting, in most of its forms, does not subordinate the viewer but rather brings the viewer into critical interaction with the painting. As for “uniqueness,” it is important to note that the discourse surrounding artistic representations of the created world in Islamic societies is distinct from that in Christian (and post-Christian) Europe. In Priscilla Soucek’s enlightening essay on the place of portraiture in Persian culture, she argues that the “subordinate status” of human-made images (“when compared to the larger framework of God’s creation”) had to be established within intellectual circles to give artists the ability to produce painted portraits.[7] In that sense, it was the very lack of “uniqueness” in Persian painting—coupled with the necessary creative limitations of the artist—that ensures its place in society.[8]
If “distance” and “uniqueness” are not essential aspects of Persian art, and indeed they do not seem to be, then Benjamin’s theory (and by extension Dabashi’s analysis) of cinema as a globalized instrument of political provocation is problematic. Instead, I again find a more nuanced perspective in Godfrey Cheshire’s essay: “Where Westerners tend to view cinema as a fullness, an art-in-itself composed of and historically supplanting previous forms…much about the Iranian stance seems to posit it as an emptiness, a place where the older forms temporarily intersect and display the possibilities of their combination.”[9] In other words, while authors like Benjamin and Dabashi see the advent of cinema as a potentially devastating blow to the ability of art to distance itself from its viewer and confront its viewer with a tyrannical, ineluctable sense of its own uniqueness, Iranian culture has utilized cinema with a different conception of the uses and purposes of art—and, therefore, with markedly different thoughts about the possibilities of cinema.
I locate some of those possibilities in the films of Abbas Kiarostami. In the following section, I will briefly provide an interpretive framework of Kiarostami’s films by arguing that Persian painting, with its already noted lack of “distance” and “unique” understanding of “uniqueness,” has had a considerable influence on Kiarostami’s work, and that Kiarostami may have acquired many of his thematic concerns and aesthetic sensibilities from exposure to Persian art and the cultural discourse surrounding it. As such, his work (along with Iranian cinema) needs to be reassessed by mainstream Western academia to ensure an accurate understanding of the source of those themes and aesthetics.
NOTES
[1] Translated by Harry Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217-252.
[2] Dabashi, 15.
[3] Furthermore, Benjamin seems to imply that it is not some essential quality of film itself that makes it disjunctive from classical art, but it is the possible social function of film—its utilization as an instrument of political discourse is what signals a break from classical art (231). A closer reading of Benjamin, however, shows that he has doubts about the ability of film to successfully transform itself into a thoroughly politicized medium despite its revolutionary potential: “So long as the movie-makers' capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today's film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art” (231). It is also necessary to remember that Benjamin’s essay, though a powerful piece of art criticism, is a reaction to and critical reinterpretation of what he saw as “the doctrine of l’art pour l’art’”—art for art’s sake, the “theology of art” (224).
[4] Ibid., 223.
[5] Ibid., 243, n5.
[6] Oleg Grabar and Mika Natif, “Two Safavid Paintings: An Essay in Interpretation,” Muqarnas 18 (2001), 176.
[7] “The Theory and Practice of Portraiture in the Persian Tradition,” Muqarnas 17 (2000), 107.
[8] To prevent myself from being misread, I do not mean to suggest here that Persian painting is not powerful and evocative, for it certainly is. I only suggest, in disagreement with Dabashi and Benjamin, that painting and classical arts as a whole do not need to fill this kind of hegemonic role; the social phenomena we call “art” have various functions, which are differently defined in various cultural milieus and periods.
[9] Cheshire, 10 (emphases original).
However, I think Dabashi’s analysis is inspired by a misapplication of Benjamin’s theory. For while Benjamin certainly argues, in unequivocal terms, that film destroys the potential for “aura,” filtering Iranian cinema through Benjamin’s Marxist ideological lens has some limitations since “art” in classical Persian culture did not necessarily fulfill the same social function(s) as it did in Europe.[3] A careful look at Benjamin’s vocabulary establishes its limited utility: Benjamin identifies “aura” principally with the sense of “distance” between the piece of art and its viewer, as well as the perceived value of a work of art’s “uniqueness.”[4] My research, however, has revealed that Benjamin’s notions of “distance” and “uniqueness” are not even essential aspects of Persian art, especially not in Persian painting.
Benjamin explains what he means by “distance” in a helpful footnote: “The essentially distant object is the unapproachable one. Unapproachability is indeed a major quality of the cult image…The closeness which one may gain from its subject matter does not impair the distance which it retains in its appearance.”[5] For Benjamin, mediums such as painting force the spectator into a subordinate role since she must always be aware of her removal, her otherness, from the complete, self-contained work of art; however, the most obvious tension between Benjamin’s “distance” and Persian painting is that a Persian painting is rarely seen as a complete, self-contained work.
Typically, each painting functions as part of a narrative series and thus depends upon the text (the narration in poetry or prose), the context (the position of this image as one in a series), and the reader’s interpretation of the gestures and actions of the figures and the landscape in which the painting is set.[6] Persian painting, in most of its forms, does not subordinate the viewer but rather brings the viewer into critical interaction with the painting. As for “uniqueness,” it is important to note that the discourse surrounding artistic representations of the created world in Islamic societies is distinct from that in Christian (and post-Christian) Europe. In Priscilla Soucek’s enlightening essay on the place of portraiture in Persian culture, she argues that the “subordinate status” of human-made images (“when compared to the larger framework of God’s creation”) had to be established within intellectual circles to give artists the ability to produce painted portraits.[7] In that sense, it was the very lack of “uniqueness” in Persian painting—coupled with the necessary creative limitations of the artist—that ensures its place in society.[8]
If “distance” and “uniqueness” are not essential aspects of Persian art, and indeed they do not seem to be, then Benjamin’s theory (and by extension Dabashi’s analysis) of cinema as a globalized instrument of political provocation is problematic. Instead, I again find a more nuanced perspective in Godfrey Cheshire’s essay: “Where Westerners tend to view cinema as a fullness, an art-in-itself composed of and historically supplanting previous forms…much about the Iranian stance seems to posit it as an emptiness, a place where the older forms temporarily intersect and display the possibilities of their combination.”[9] In other words, while authors like Benjamin and Dabashi see the advent of cinema as a potentially devastating blow to the ability of art to distance itself from its viewer and confront its viewer with a tyrannical, ineluctable sense of its own uniqueness, Iranian culture has utilized cinema with a different conception of the uses and purposes of art—and, therefore, with markedly different thoughts about the possibilities of cinema.
I locate some of those possibilities in the films of Abbas Kiarostami. In the following section, I will briefly provide an interpretive framework of Kiarostami’s films by arguing that Persian painting, with its already noted lack of “distance” and “unique” understanding of “uniqueness,” has had a considerable influence on Kiarostami’s work, and that Kiarostami may have acquired many of his thematic concerns and aesthetic sensibilities from exposure to Persian art and the cultural discourse surrounding it. As such, his work (along with Iranian cinema) needs to be reassessed by mainstream Western academia to ensure an accurate understanding of the source of those themes and aesthetics.
NOTES
[1] Translated by Harry Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217-252.
[2] Dabashi, 15.
[3] Furthermore, Benjamin seems to imply that it is not some essential quality of film itself that makes it disjunctive from classical art, but it is the possible social function of film—its utilization as an instrument of political discourse is what signals a break from classical art (231). A closer reading of Benjamin, however, shows that he has doubts about the ability of film to successfully transform itself into a thoroughly politicized medium despite its revolutionary potential: “So long as the movie-makers' capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today's film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art” (231). It is also necessary to remember that Benjamin’s essay, though a powerful piece of art criticism, is a reaction to and critical reinterpretation of what he saw as “the doctrine of l’art pour l’art’”—art for art’s sake, the “theology of art” (224).
[4] Ibid., 223.
[5] Ibid., 243, n5.
[6] Oleg Grabar and Mika Natif, “Two Safavid Paintings: An Essay in Interpretation,” Muqarnas 18 (2001), 176.
[7] “The Theory and Practice of Portraiture in the Persian Tradition,” Muqarnas 17 (2000), 107.
[8] To prevent myself from being misread, I do not mean to suggest here that Persian painting is not powerful and evocative, for it certainly is. I only suggest, in disagreement with Dabashi and Benjamin, that painting and classical arts as a whole do not need to fill this kind of hegemonic role; the social phenomena we call “art” have various functions, which are differently defined in various cultural milieus and periods.
[9] Cheshire, 10 (emphases original).
September 2, 2011
Toward a Genealogy of Iranian Cinema (Part 2)
Contextualizing Iranian Cinema (Part 1)
When discussing Iranian cinema, most scholars make much of the fact that Iran originally acquired the medium from Europe and therefore focus on the supposed influence Western cinema holds over contemporary Iranian filmmakers. Godfrey Cheshire is a scholar who takes a different approach: in an excellent essay on the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, he attacks the shortsightedness and superficiality of the comparisons many scholars make while arguing for an alternate approach that emphasizes “Iranian context” before the context of world cinema.[1] Western scholars are probably more comfortable assuming a Euro-American source of Iranian cinematic vocabulary, which goes some way toward explaining why so few professional film critics are willing to entertain the notion that the cultural context of these films might have more influence in shaping the outlook of Iranian filmmakers than the art house classics many filmmakers from Iran have likely never even seen.
Perhaps in response to Cheshire’s call, recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in the study of Iranian political and social issues for their relation to contemporary cinema,[2] but this seems to me to be a similarly shortsighted approach, since it deemphasizes the importance of history and the possible influence of forms of art specific to Iran—namely, Persian painting. To Cheshire’s concerns, then, I would add the limitations of focusing only on current events to explain all of the themes and aesthetics of contemporary Iranian cinema. In what follows, I want to sketch a rough genealogy of cinema in Iran that will uncover some of the cultural and artistic roots of its contemporary expressions in Iran today.
Hamid Dabashi, expatriate scholar of Iranian studies, has authored several books devoted to Iranian cinema—its historical development as a distinct medium and, just as importantly, its genealogy. In Close Up, a key text in Iranian film studies, Dabashi notes key similarities that relate Iranian cinema and its visual vocabulary to Iranian still photography of the late nineteenth century forward; he writes, “The historical antecedent of these pictorial representations of frozen realities was Persian court painting, and the narrative miniatures that illustrated the classics of Persian prose and poetry…”[3] But cinema, Dabashi also notes, is a medium open and accessible to a mass audience, so it also finds commonalities with coffee house narrative paintings and other forms of illustrated public storytelling.[4] Ultimately, though cinema is a transnational medium and therefore subject to cross-cultural, comparative analysis, it has been incorporated in a distinct way into an already-existing set of artistic mediums with a complementary set of guiding aesthetic assumptions.
The relationship between classical Persian art and cinema today that Dabashi proposes finds a reasonable explanation in what the French social anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus (though Dabashi himself never uses this term). In this case, I would suggest that there exists a set of acquired aesthetic sensibilities and tastes common in Persian culture, which is reflected in its art; certain commonalities, thematic and aesthetic, link contemporary Iranian film to photography in Iran and further back to its court paintings and coffee house illustrations and so on.[5] Dabashi’s argument, once modified this way, allows a new appraisal of Iranian cinema as a whole—not merely as the product of (or response to) Western globalization and cultural imperialism, but as a form of art that is (though borrowed from the West) re-conceptualized and re-contextualized by Iranian artists even as it is assimilated into the interrelated network of Iranian art. We should not be surprised, therefore, when motifs in classical Persian art are echoed in contemporary cinema—for example, when the subjects of Persian miniatures are reflected by filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami—for what else would Iranian films reflect first but Iran?
NOTES
[1] “How to Read Kiarostami,” Cineaste 25.4 (2000), 9.
[2] See, for instance, Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation, and Identity (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002).
[3] Dabashi, 15.
[4] Ibid., 15
[5] For Bourdieu’s most eloquent explication and application of habitus, see Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1977). The discussion on pages 72-95 (“Structures and the Habitus”) is particularly useful. Bourdieu, of course, sees habitus as being applicable to much more than only art, but for the purposes of my essay, which is a work of art history rather than social anthropology, I prefer to use a more limited definition of habitus than Bourdieu’s and define it rather simply as a set of embodied aesthetic sensibilities and tastes.
When discussing Iranian cinema, most scholars make much of the fact that Iran originally acquired the medium from Europe and therefore focus on the supposed influence Western cinema holds over contemporary Iranian filmmakers. Godfrey Cheshire is a scholar who takes a different approach: in an excellent essay on the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, he attacks the shortsightedness and superficiality of the comparisons many scholars make while arguing for an alternate approach that emphasizes “Iranian context” before the context of world cinema.[1] Western scholars are probably more comfortable assuming a Euro-American source of Iranian cinematic vocabulary, which goes some way toward explaining why so few professional film critics are willing to entertain the notion that the cultural context of these films might have more influence in shaping the outlook of Iranian filmmakers than the art house classics many filmmakers from Iran have likely never even seen.
Perhaps in response to Cheshire’s call, recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in the study of Iranian political and social issues for their relation to contemporary cinema,[2] but this seems to me to be a similarly shortsighted approach, since it deemphasizes the importance of history and the possible influence of forms of art specific to Iran—namely, Persian painting. To Cheshire’s concerns, then, I would add the limitations of focusing only on current events to explain all of the themes and aesthetics of contemporary Iranian cinema. In what follows, I want to sketch a rough genealogy of cinema in Iran that will uncover some of the cultural and artistic roots of its contemporary expressions in Iran today.
Hamid Dabashi, expatriate scholar of Iranian studies, has authored several books devoted to Iranian cinema—its historical development as a distinct medium and, just as importantly, its genealogy. In Close Up, a key text in Iranian film studies, Dabashi notes key similarities that relate Iranian cinema and its visual vocabulary to Iranian still photography of the late nineteenth century forward; he writes, “The historical antecedent of these pictorial representations of frozen realities was Persian court painting, and the narrative miniatures that illustrated the classics of Persian prose and poetry…”[3] But cinema, Dabashi also notes, is a medium open and accessible to a mass audience, so it also finds commonalities with coffee house narrative paintings and other forms of illustrated public storytelling.[4] Ultimately, though cinema is a transnational medium and therefore subject to cross-cultural, comparative analysis, it has been incorporated in a distinct way into an already-existing set of artistic mediums with a complementary set of guiding aesthetic assumptions.
The relationship between classical Persian art and cinema today that Dabashi proposes finds a reasonable explanation in what the French social anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus (though Dabashi himself never uses this term). In this case, I would suggest that there exists a set of acquired aesthetic sensibilities and tastes common in Persian culture, which is reflected in its art; certain commonalities, thematic and aesthetic, link contemporary Iranian film to photography in Iran and further back to its court paintings and coffee house illustrations and so on.[5] Dabashi’s argument, once modified this way, allows a new appraisal of Iranian cinema as a whole—not merely as the product of (or response to) Western globalization and cultural imperialism, but as a form of art that is (though borrowed from the West) re-conceptualized and re-contextualized by Iranian artists even as it is assimilated into the interrelated network of Iranian art. We should not be surprised, therefore, when motifs in classical Persian art are echoed in contemporary cinema—for example, when the subjects of Persian miniatures are reflected by filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami—for what else would Iranian films reflect first but Iran?
NOTES
[1] “How to Read Kiarostami,” Cineaste 25.4 (2000), 9.
[2] See, for instance, Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation, and Identity (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002).
[3] Dabashi, 15.
[4] Ibid., 15
[5] For Bourdieu’s most eloquent explication and application of habitus, see Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1977). The discussion on pages 72-95 (“Structures and the Habitus”) is particularly useful. Bourdieu, of course, sees habitus as being applicable to much more than only art, but for the purposes of my essay, which is a work of art history rather than social anthropology, I prefer to use a more limited definition of habitus than Bourdieu’s and define it rather simply as a set of embodied aesthetic sensibilities and tastes.
August 31, 2011
Toward a Genealogy of Iranian Cinema (Part 1)
In a 1992 essay called “The Status of Islamic Art in the Twentieth Century,” Wijdan Ali makes the familiar argument that industrialization has caused traditional arts in the Islamic world to decline (in the quantitative and qualitative senses of the word) as they were replaced by Western forms.[1] Though I have reservations about Ali’s somewhat nostalgic tone that seems to romanticize the past even as she looks to the future, I agree with her that contemporary artists of the Islamic world do not adopt Western forms so much as they adapt them, changing the content of these forms and re-contextualizing them to reflect their culture.[2] Cinema, for instance, has become a powerful artistic tool in many Islamic countries that not only expresses cultural values but has also been used to pose themes inherited from traditional arts in a new medium. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the thriving film culture of Iran, whose relation to classical Persian art is the subject of this essay.
The general argument of my essay is that Iranian cinema must be examined in the context of classical Persian arts, an orientation that will guarantee a more nuanced understanding of Iranian film culture as the inheritor of various artistic precedents. More specifically, my essay locates thematic and aesthetic influences of Persian painting in the works of writer and director Abbas Kiarostami with the hope that the interpretive framework established in this essay will provide a theoretical and methodological template for future research.
The structure of my essay is simple. First, I analyze the scholarly discourse surrounding Iranian cinema. In this section, I argue that Western scholars often unfairly minimize the Persian cultural and artistic context of Iranian cinema either to emphasize Iranian cinema’s indebtedness to Western cinema or to emphasize the socio-political context of the films. Both courses of inquiry have successfully framed often enlightening discussions, but they are both limited: the former rejects Persian cultural and artistic explanations for central thematic and aesthetic choices and unduly favors the predominance of European and American culture, while the latter is too often exploited as a platform for polemical arguments that distract the reader from the ostensible subject of the discourse. Ultimately, neither course of inquiry is able to adequately elucidate the major thematic and aesthetic concerns of the films. Thus, this section seeks to reorient scholarly discourse by presenting compelling parallels that deserve further examination.
In the second section, I take as a case example the films of Abbas Kiarostami, a renowned filmmaker often credited with introducing Iranian cinema to the global film scene as well as initiating many of the major thematic and aesthetic trends in contemporary Iranian cinema.[3] I build upon the argument established in the first section by demonstrating how studying Persian painting can provide a practical entry point into interpreting Kiarostami’s films, which are sometimes seen as impenetrable or deliberately ambiguous to many filmgoers.
NOTES
[1] Muqarnas 9 (1992), 187.
[2] Ibid., 187-188.
[3] Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present, and Future (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 11.
The general argument of my essay is that Iranian cinema must be examined in the context of classical Persian arts, an orientation that will guarantee a more nuanced understanding of Iranian film culture as the inheritor of various artistic precedents. More specifically, my essay locates thematic and aesthetic influences of Persian painting in the works of writer and director Abbas Kiarostami with the hope that the interpretive framework established in this essay will provide a theoretical and methodological template for future research.
The structure of my essay is simple. First, I analyze the scholarly discourse surrounding Iranian cinema. In this section, I argue that Western scholars often unfairly minimize the Persian cultural and artistic context of Iranian cinema either to emphasize Iranian cinema’s indebtedness to Western cinema or to emphasize the socio-political context of the films. Both courses of inquiry have successfully framed often enlightening discussions, but they are both limited: the former rejects Persian cultural and artistic explanations for central thematic and aesthetic choices and unduly favors the predominance of European and American culture, while the latter is too often exploited as a platform for polemical arguments that distract the reader from the ostensible subject of the discourse. Ultimately, neither course of inquiry is able to adequately elucidate the major thematic and aesthetic concerns of the films. Thus, this section seeks to reorient scholarly discourse by presenting compelling parallels that deserve further examination.
In the second section, I take as a case example the films of Abbas Kiarostami, a renowned filmmaker often credited with introducing Iranian cinema to the global film scene as well as initiating many of the major thematic and aesthetic trends in contemporary Iranian cinema.[3] I build upon the argument established in the first section by demonstrating how studying Persian painting can provide a practical entry point into interpreting Kiarostami’s films, which are sometimes seen as impenetrable or deliberately ambiguous to many filmgoers.
NOTES
[1] Muqarnas 9 (1992), 187.
[2] Ibid., 187-188.
[3] Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present, and Future (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 11.
August 26, 2011
August 24, 2011
Kobo Abe
From Inter Ice Age 4 (1959):
“The real future, I think, manifests itself like a ‘thing,’ beyond the abyss that separates it from the present. For example, if a man from the fifteenth century could return to life today, would he consider the present hell or paradise? Whatever he thought, one thing is quite clear and that is that he would no longer have the competency to judge. It’s the present, not him, that judges and decides.
“I too, therefore, believe that I must understand the future not as something to be judged but something rather that sits in judgment on the present. Thus, such a future is neither utopia nor hell and cannot become an object of curiosity. In short, it is nothing more or less than future society. And even if this society is developed to a far higher degree than the present one, it only occasions suffering in the eyes of those entombed in their microscopic sense of a continuing, predictable present.
“The future gives a verdict of guilty to this usual continuity of daily life.”
August 16, 2011
Upon spontaneous reconsideration
An updated list of my favorite albums from 2010.
1. Joanna Newsom: Have One on Me
2. Deerhunter: Halcyon Digest
3. Flying Lotus: Cosmogramma
4. Janelle Monae: The ArchAndroid
5-6. The Tallest Man on Earth: The Wild Hunt / Sometimes the Blues is Just a Passing Bird EP
7. Gonjasufi: A Sufi and a Killer
8-9. Madlib: Slave Riot / Madlib Medicine Show #6: The Brain-Wreck Show
10. The Roots: How I Got Over
11. Vampire Weekend: Contra
12. No Age: Everything in Between
13. Johnny Cash: Ain’t No Grave
14-15. James Blake: CMYK EP / Klavierwerke EP
16-17. Das Racist: Shut Up, Dude / Sit Down, Man
18. TOKiMONSTA: Midnight Menu
19. Shugo Tokumaru: Port Entropy
20. LCD Soundsystem: This Is Happening
Also, here are my favorite albums from 2009:
1. Bill Callahan: Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
2. The Mountain Goats: The Life of the World to Come
3. Leonard Cohen: Live in London
4. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
5. Tune-Yards: Bird Brains
6-7. Shabazz Palaces: Of Light EP / Shabazz Palaces EP
8. DOOM: Born Like This
9. Mos Def: The Ecstatic
10-11. Andrew Bird: Noble Beast / Useless Creatures
12. Nosaj Thing: Drift
13. Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca
14. Dan Deacon: Bromst
15. The xx: xx
16-17. Serengeti and Polyphonic: Terradactyl / Serengeti: Conversations with Kenny/Legacy of Lee
18. No Age: Losing Feeling EP
19. Ras_G & the Afrikan Space Program: Brotha from Anotha Planet
20. The Flaming Lips: Embryonic
May 29, 2011
Top 75 Dylan Songs
In honor of Bob Dylan’s entrance into septuagenarianism, Rolling Stone recently published their list of Dylan’s best 70 songs. I found their list decent but unnecessarily weighted toward his early career, so I decided to make my own list in response. Of course, almost half of the songs on my list come from his 1962-1967 stretch (including some that Rolling Stone stupidly overlooked and ignoring some that Rolling Stone stupidly included and plenty of overlap), but at least a third come from 1979 forward.
I went through his massive discography and put in every song I thought was indispensable, and this was as far as I was willing to cut it down. So my list has 75 songs on it, which presented me with the following three options:
1. Wait five years for Dylan to turn 75.
2. Whittle it down further to 70.
3. Convince myself that I don’t care that Dylan is 70 and my list has 75 songs.
I opted for number three. And “Lay Lady Lay” is nowhere to be found on my list. You’re welcome. It is arranged in chronological order because arranging them in the order of preference would be a silly, silly thing to do.
My 75 Favorite Dylan Songs
Talkin’ New York (1962)
Song to Woody (1962)
Tomorrow is a Long Time (1963)
Let Me Die in My Footsteps (1963)
Girl from the North Country (1963)
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (1963)
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright (1963)
One Too Many Mornings (1964)
Only a Pawn in Their Game (1964)
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (1964)
Percy’s Song (1964)
Lay Down Your Weary Tune (1964)
Chimes of Freedom (1964)
My Back Pages (1964)
Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965)
She Belongs to Me (1965)
Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965)
Mr. Tambourine Man (1965)
It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) (1965)
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (1965)
Positively Fourth Street (1965)
I’ll Keep It with Mine (1965)
Like a Rolling Stone (1965)
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry (1965)
Ballad of a Thin Man (1965)
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (1965)
Desolation Row (1965)
Visions of Johanna (1966)
One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) (1966)
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (1966)
Just Like a Woman (1966)
4th Time Around (1966)
Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (1966)
Tell Me, Mama (1966)
I Shall Be Released (1967)
You Ain’t Going Nowhere (1967)
Nothing Was Delivered (1967)
Crash on the Levy (Down in the Flood) (1967)
Clothes Line Saga (1967)
I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine (1967)
All Along the Watchtower (1967)
Drifter’s Escape (1967)
I Pity the Poor Immigrant (1967)
Day of the Locusts (1970)
Up To Me (1974)
Tangled Up in Blue (1975)
Simple Twist of Fate (1975)
Idiot Wind (1975)
Shelter from the Storm (1975)
Isis (1976)
Sara (1976)
Gotta Serve Somebody (1979)
I Believe in You (1979)
What Can I Do for You? (1980)
The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar (1981)
Every Grain of Sand (1981)
Jokerman (1983)
Blind Willie McTell (1983)
Caribbean Wind (1985)
Brownsville Girl (1987)
Series of Dreams (1991)
Dirt Road Blues (1997)
Standing in the Doorway (1997)
Not Dark Yet (1997)
Red River Shore (1997)
Things Have Changed (2000)
Mississippi (2001)
Summer Days (2001)
High Water (for Charley Patton) (2001)
Po’ Boy (2001)
Sugar Baby (2001)
Thunder on the Mountain (2006)
Spirit on the Water (2006)
When the Deal Goes Down (2006)
Ain’t Talkin’ (2006)
I went through his massive discography and put in every song I thought was indispensable, and this was as far as I was willing to cut it down. So my list has 75 songs on it, which presented me with the following three options:
1. Wait five years for Dylan to turn 75.
2. Whittle it down further to 70.
3. Convince myself that I don’t care that Dylan is 70 and my list has 75 songs.
I opted for number three. And “Lay Lady Lay” is nowhere to be found on my list. You’re welcome. It is arranged in chronological order because arranging them in the order of preference would be a silly, silly thing to do.
My 75 Favorite Dylan Songs
Talkin’ New York (1962)
Song to Woody (1962)
Tomorrow is a Long Time (1963)
Let Me Die in My Footsteps (1963)
Girl from the North Country (1963)
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (1963)
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright (1963)
One Too Many Mornings (1964)
Only a Pawn in Their Game (1964)
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (1964)
Percy’s Song (1964)
Lay Down Your Weary Tune (1964)
Chimes of Freedom (1964)
My Back Pages (1964)
Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965)
She Belongs to Me (1965)
Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965)
Mr. Tambourine Man (1965)
It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) (1965)
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (1965)
Positively Fourth Street (1965)
I’ll Keep It with Mine (1965)
Like a Rolling Stone (1965)
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry (1965)
Ballad of a Thin Man (1965)
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (1965)
Desolation Row (1965)
Visions of Johanna (1966)
One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) (1966)
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again (1966)
Just Like a Woman (1966)
4th Time Around (1966)
Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (1966)
Tell Me, Mama (1966)
I Shall Be Released (1967)
You Ain’t Going Nowhere (1967)
Nothing Was Delivered (1967)
Crash on the Levy (Down in the Flood) (1967)
Clothes Line Saga (1967)
I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine (1967)
All Along the Watchtower (1967)
Drifter’s Escape (1967)
I Pity the Poor Immigrant (1967)
Day of the Locusts (1970)
Up To Me (1974)
Tangled Up in Blue (1975)
Simple Twist of Fate (1975)
Idiot Wind (1975)
Shelter from the Storm (1975)
Isis (1976)
Sara (1976)
Gotta Serve Somebody (1979)
I Believe in You (1979)
What Can I Do for You? (1980)
The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar (1981)
Every Grain of Sand (1981)
Jokerman (1983)
Blind Willie McTell (1983)
Caribbean Wind (1985)
Brownsville Girl (1987)
Series of Dreams (1991)
Dirt Road Blues (1997)
Standing in the Doorway (1997)
Not Dark Yet (1997)
Red River Shore (1997)
Things Have Changed (2000)
Mississippi (2001)
Summer Days (2001)
High Water (for Charley Patton) (2001)
Po’ Boy (2001)
Sugar Baby (2001)
Thunder on the Mountain (2006)
Spirit on the Water (2006)
When the Deal Goes Down (2006)
Ain’t Talkin’ (2006)
May 22, 2011
Problems in Categorizing the Panthay and Tungan Rebellions
[Another essay from the course on modern China.]
When discussing the Panthay Rebellion (1856-1873) and the Tungan Rebellion (1862-1873), commonly referred to together as “the Muslim rebellions,” a cluster of critical questions immediately present themselves for thorough deliberation: Were the Muslim rebellions principally the result of a fundamental ideological conflict between the Han majority and Muslim minority groups, or did the social, political, and economic conditions of the time simply exacerbate the latent differences in ethnicity and religious worldview? Is it possible to identify distinctly Islamic traits in the so-called Muslim rebellions? To what degree can these rebellions be categorized as “religious”? In what follows, I do not expect to arrive at definite answers to these questions, for that task seems patently absurd, even quixotic; however, that these questions so readily present themselves yet so easily resist simple, reductive answers, implies that perhaps it is the questions themselves that deserve closer inspection. This essay will argue that the Panthay and Tungan rebellions are misrepresented in Western scholarship because of the continued use of misleading categories and unreflective application of Western terminology.
The first major categorical problem facing scholars is the extent to which the rebellions can be characterized as religious, or as so many scholars awkwardly insist, “Muslim.” The characterization of these rebellions as Islamic is particularly problematic, since it appears to serve foremost as a way of emphasizing difference rather than a way to denote the essential character of the rebellions. When examining the way the events unfolded, this hasty categorization is challenged by two key facts. First, Liu and Smith note that the Muslims living in Kansu specifically had “comparatively easy” access to the Islamic world, a point that seems well evidenced given widespread international trade and the dynamic spread of new religious doctrines and practices into China (214). If these rebellions were indeed an Islamic project, why then did the greater Islamic world utterly ignore the Chinese Muslims during the course of the rebellions? Neither Smith and Liu nor any other source I have consulted makes any mention of monetary or moral support provided by an Islamic state, nor is there mention of the Chinese Muslims in rebellion utilizing their contacts in attempt to secure such assistance. Mario Poceski, scholar of Eastern religious history, provides another fact that complicates the generalizing of some scholars. Poceski notes that some non-Muslim ranks fought alongside Muslim rebels in the Panthay and Tungan rebellions, while some Muslims covertly “collaborated with the Qing armies, joining them in the military campaigns against ‘disloyal’ and seditious Muslims” (233-234). In what sense, then, can these rebellions be considered “Muslim”?
I suspect that part of the reason for this misrepresentation has to do with the way many Western scholars misunderstand Islam and tend to make mistaken assumptions about Muslims. To what degree are the differences between Chinese Muslims and the larger realm of Chinese culture intrinsic, and to what degree are they unduly emphasized and essentialized by Western scholars? Poceski, for instance, argues that Chinese Muslims experience a kind of discomforting liminality as they attempt to negotiate their identities as Muslims living in China: “Muslims had their own ceremonies, narratives, religious observances, dietary proscriptions, and dwelling arrangements,” which “led to the creation of exclusive boundaries” and “fostered a sense of…distinctiveness”; therefore, many Chinese Muslims would have “felt greater affinities with others of the same faith…than with the Han Chinese” (232). However, since Poceski does not provide any primary sources to verify this argument with an actual human voice articulating his or her own concerns, there is no reason not to assume that this is entirely speculative. As a historian, Poceski is incapable of knowing how human beings from another time felt about their religious, ethnic, cultural, or national identity. Instead, Poceski is much more accurate when he affirms, “We can hardly speak of a common identity that is universally shared by all Chinese Muslims, even though they are often stereotyped as a unified group with shared characteristics” (234). Nevertheless, the Western construction of a monolithic, rigidly exclusivist Islam has had profound effects on scholarship.
The misuse of the word jihad in Liu and Smith’s article demonstrates the lack of nuance symptomatic of this misunderstanding of Islam. Liu and Smith write, “Ch’ing administration there [in Sinkiang] had many weaknesses, and until 1860 the dynasty was barely able to maintain order in Altishahr against the periodic jihad (holy war) of the Afaqi khojas and their Turkic-speaking followers” (221). Here, Liu and Smith use the term jihad with what strikes me as an undue air of familiarity and simplicity, translating it haphazardly (and parenthetically) as “holy war” without any further comment, adding before it the adjective “periodic” to further provide the reader with a fabricated sense of familiarity, while also cleverly defining “holy war” as a kind of routine, unspectacular aspect of everyday Muslim life. It should also be noted that Liu and Smith do not (or cannot) present a single primary source to verify that these rebellions were considered jihad by any of the Muslims in revolt or their religious leaders. Instead, their cavalier use of the term jihad represents the misconceptions many scholars harbor about Islam. Alternatively, the anthropologist Talal Asad provides a brief but vastly more nuanced discussion of the term and the way it has been used historically in his book On Suicide Bombing. Asad argues that jihad, far from being a central aspect of Islamic thought or practice, is in actuality an extremely controversial issue among Islamic jurists, and there is not, nor has there ever been, a consensus on either the actions that qualify as jihad or the social and political conditions that necessitate Muslims taking up jihad. Furthermore, the translation of jihad as “holy war” is also an invention of the West: “Because there has never been a centralized theological authority in the Islamic world, there was never a consensus about the virtue of religious warfare” (11-12). Asad, a vastly more attentive scholar, demonstrates the need for nuance when approaching subjects like this, while also uncovering a latent Western bias against Islam.
Now I want to turn from the problems Islam in particular poses to Western scholarship and focus on more general problems in the unreflective projection of Western categories onto non-Western history. The particularly problematic category I want to deal with in this section is religion, along with all the terminology (often theological rather than historical in nature) that comes with it. To define these rebellions as religious in nature implies that there is a behavior or motivation that is intrinsically and objectively “religious.” But what does it mean for behavior to be religious? How is religious behavior different from other modes of human expression? I should note here that there is, obviously, no scholarly consensus on the definition of the words religion or religious or even their very usefulness and applicability in non-Western contexts; still, the most erroneous possible viewpoint is that religion, which is clearly a Western category constructed by Western scholars, has an essential, irreducible core that allows its universal applicability, regardless of social and historical context. I do not mean to discount completely the role worldview played in the specific language of these rebellions, for that would be as erroneous as presupposing the preponderance of religious ideology in this history. What I do suggest, though, is that not only did religion influence the way the rebellions unfolded, but issues specific to the time and place likewise influenced the way religion was practiced in the area. In short, historians need to develop a way of talking about the religious identity of those in revolt without dwelling on it. If religion is to be a useful category in non-Western history, it must be unburdened of the cultural assumptions and semi-theological appeals that seek to grant some of its historically specific functions a transhistorical status.
This essay has demonstrated that the categorization of the Panthay and Tungan Rebellions as “Muslim rebellions” is inaccurate and bears the marks of biased scholarship. Even if Muslims were the principal actors in this episode of history, the rebellions cannot be lumped together by this single commonality since the Muslim communities in rebellion were both distinct from one another and internally diverse. In addition, I questioned the assumption of a universalistic definition of the word “religion” and its application to this history. The task now facing scholars is the development of more accurate categories and a careful revision of the categories already in common use.
References
Asad, Talal. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Liu, Kwang-Ching and Richard Smith. “The Military Challenge.” In The Cambridge History of China, 211-225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Poceski, Mario. Introducing Chinese Religions. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.
Schoppa, R. Keith. Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History. Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011.
When discussing the Panthay Rebellion (1856-1873) and the Tungan Rebellion (1862-1873), commonly referred to together as “the Muslim rebellions,” a cluster of critical questions immediately present themselves for thorough deliberation: Were the Muslim rebellions principally the result of a fundamental ideological conflict between the Han majority and Muslim minority groups, or did the social, political, and economic conditions of the time simply exacerbate the latent differences in ethnicity and religious worldview? Is it possible to identify distinctly Islamic traits in the so-called Muslim rebellions? To what degree can these rebellions be categorized as “religious”? In what follows, I do not expect to arrive at definite answers to these questions, for that task seems patently absurd, even quixotic; however, that these questions so readily present themselves yet so easily resist simple, reductive answers, implies that perhaps it is the questions themselves that deserve closer inspection. This essay will argue that the Panthay and Tungan rebellions are misrepresented in Western scholarship because of the continued use of misleading categories and unreflective application of Western terminology.
The first major categorical problem facing scholars is the extent to which the rebellions can be characterized as religious, or as so many scholars awkwardly insist, “Muslim.” The characterization of these rebellions as Islamic is particularly problematic, since it appears to serve foremost as a way of emphasizing difference rather than a way to denote the essential character of the rebellions. When examining the way the events unfolded, this hasty categorization is challenged by two key facts. First, Liu and Smith note that the Muslims living in Kansu specifically had “comparatively easy” access to the Islamic world, a point that seems well evidenced given widespread international trade and the dynamic spread of new religious doctrines and practices into China (214). If these rebellions were indeed an Islamic project, why then did the greater Islamic world utterly ignore the Chinese Muslims during the course of the rebellions? Neither Smith and Liu nor any other source I have consulted makes any mention of monetary or moral support provided by an Islamic state, nor is there mention of the Chinese Muslims in rebellion utilizing their contacts in attempt to secure such assistance. Mario Poceski, scholar of Eastern religious history, provides another fact that complicates the generalizing of some scholars. Poceski notes that some non-Muslim ranks fought alongside Muslim rebels in the Panthay and Tungan rebellions, while some Muslims covertly “collaborated with the Qing armies, joining them in the military campaigns against ‘disloyal’ and seditious Muslims” (233-234). In what sense, then, can these rebellions be considered “Muslim”?
I suspect that part of the reason for this misrepresentation has to do with the way many Western scholars misunderstand Islam and tend to make mistaken assumptions about Muslims. To what degree are the differences between Chinese Muslims and the larger realm of Chinese culture intrinsic, and to what degree are they unduly emphasized and essentialized by Western scholars? Poceski, for instance, argues that Chinese Muslims experience a kind of discomforting liminality as they attempt to negotiate their identities as Muslims living in China: “Muslims had their own ceremonies, narratives, religious observances, dietary proscriptions, and dwelling arrangements,” which “led to the creation of exclusive boundaries” and “fostered a sense of…distinctiveness”; therefore, many Chinese Muslims would have “felt greater affinities with others of the same faith…than with the Han Chinese” (232). However, since Poceski does not provide any primary sources to verify this argument with an actual human voice articulating his or her own concerns, there is no reason not to assume that this is entirely speculative. As a historian, Poceski is incapable of knowing how human beings from another time felt about their religious, ethnic, cultural, or national identity. Instead, Poceski is much more accurate when he affirms, “We can hardly speak of a common identity that is universally shared by all Chinese Muslims, even though they are often stereotyped as a unified group with shared characteristics” (234). Nevertheless, the Western construction of a monolithic, rigidly exclusivist Islam has had profound effects on scholarship.
The misuse of the word jihad in Liu and Smith’s article demonstrates the lack of nuance symptomatic of this misunderstanding of Islam. Liu and Smith write, “Ch’ing administration there [in Sinkiang] had many weaknesses, and until 1860 the dynasty was barely able to maintain order in Altishahr against the periodic jihad (holy war) of the Afaqi khojas and their Turkic-speaking followers” (221). Here, Liu and Smith use the term jihad with what strikes me as an undue air of familiarity and simplicity, translating it haphazardly (and parenthetically) as “holy war” without any further comment, adding before it the adjective “periodic” to further provide the reader with a fabricated sense of familiarity, while also cleverly defining “holy war” as a kind of routine, unspectacular aspect of everyday Muslim life. It should also be noted that Liu and Smith do not (or cannot) present a single primary source to verify that these rebellions were considered jihad by any of the Muslims in revolt or their religious leaders. Instead, their cavalier use of the term jihad represents the misconceptions many scholars harbor about Islam. Alternatively, the anthropologist Talal Asad provides a brief but vastly more nuanced discussion of the term and the way it has been used historically in his book On Suicide Bombing. Asad argues that jihad, far from being a central aspect of Islamic thought or practice, is in actuality an extremely controversial issue among Islamic jurists, and there is not, nor has there ever been, a consensus on either the actions that qualify as jihad or the social and political conditions that necessitate Muslims taking up jihad. Furthermore, the translation of jihad as “holy war” is also an invention of the West: “Because there has never been a centralized theological authority in the Islamic world, there was never a consensus about the virtue of religious warfare” (11-12). Asad, a vastly more attentive scholar, demonstrates the need for nuance when approaching subjects like this, while also uncovering a latent Western bias against Islam.
Now I want to turn from the problems Islam in particular poses to Western scholarship and focus on more general problems in the unreflective projection of Western categories onto non-Western history. The particularly problematic category I want to deal with in this section is religion, along with all the terminology (often theological rather than historical in nature) that comes with it. To define these rebellions as religious in nature implies that there is a behavior or motivation that is intrinsically and objectively “religious.” But what does it mean for behavior to be religious? How is religious behavior different from other modes of human expression? I should note here that there is, obviously, no scholarly consensus on the definition of the words religion or religious or even their very usefulness and applicability in non-Western contexts; still, the most erroneous possible viewpoint is that religion, which is clearly a Western category constructed by Western scholars, has an essential, irreducible core that allows its universal applicability, regardless of social and historical context. I do not mean to discount completely the role worldview played in the specific language of these rebellions, for that would be as erroneous as presupposing the preponderance of religious ideology in this history. What I do suggest, though, is that not only did religion influence the way the rebellions unfolded, but issues specific to the time and place likewise influenced the way religion was practiced in the area. In short, historians need to develop a way of talking about the religious identity of those in revolt without dwelling on it. If religion is to be a useful category in non-Western history, it must be unburdened of the cultural assumptions and semi-theological appeals that seek to grant some of its historically specific functions a transhistorical status.
This essay has demonstrated that the categorization of the Panthay and Tungan Rebellions as “Muslim rebellions” is inaccurate and bears the marks of biased scholarship. Even if Muslims were the principal actors in this episode of history, the rebellions cannot be lumped together by this single commonality since the Muslim communities in rebellion were both distinct from one another and internally diverse. In addition, I questioned the assumption of a universalistic definition of the word “religion” and its application to this history. The task now facing scholars is the development of more accurate categories and a careful revision of the categories already in common use.
References
Asad, Talal. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Liu, Kwang-Ching and Richard Smith. “The Military Challenge.” In The Cambridge History of China, 211-225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Poceski, Mario. Introducing Chinese Religions. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.
Schoppa, R. Keith. Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History. Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011.
May 21, 2011
The Ideology of Identity: Toward a New Understanding of Qing Dynasty Power Relations
[A short essay for a class on modern China.]
The discourse on Manchu and Han relations during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) tends to focus erroneously on the issue of identity. Historians like Ho Ping-ti accept the conventional thesis that the Qing Dynasty’s success was borne of the Manchu government’s capacity to adopt Han cultural norms, while historians like Evelyn Rawski argue for a reappraisal of history that instead focuses on the ability of the Manchu rulers to establish bonds and build bridges with non-Han ethnic minorities (Rawski 831). However, both Ho and Rawski assume, albeit in contrasting fashion, the preeminence of cultural identity in their history, an assumption that calls their conclusions into question. This essay, on the other hand, will argue that an entirely different understanding of Manchu rule will be necessary to appreciate this history, an understanding that deemphasizes the role of identity and ethnicity to instead stress the effects of ideology in constructing identity and creating history.
First, I want to reexamine the debate of sinicization with this guiding hermeneutic, using texts by Rawski and R. Keith Schoppa to show the limitations in the current orientation of scholarly discourse. In rehearsing the traditional analysis of the Qing Dynasty, Rawski quotes Ho: “The key to its [Qing] success was the adoption by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization” (831). In other words, it is necessary that Manchu identity be replaced, at least at the political level, by Han identity, for otherwise the political achievements of the Qing rulers would be impossible for contemporary scholars to explain. However, this argument, seemingly borne not out of necessity but in fact only out of a poor imagination, leads to absurd questions: how “Han” do Manchus have to act before they could be considered thoroughly sinicized? What made the Manchu’s sinicization “systematic”? Was the sinicization process a gradual shift in identity or a sudden, epiphanic moment of Han-realization? Rawski and Schoppa naturally try to distance themselves from the intellectual poverty of Ho’s sinicization thesis, and they develop a new way to think about identity: Schoppa argues that identity is constructed through historical processes, and as such identity is constantly shifting (4-6), while Rawski concludes with an exhortation for scholars to delve into the very heart of Chinese identity to discover the influences of non-Han culture (842). Therefore, Han identity and Manchu identity, far from being sui generis, can be (and, according to Rawski, must be) deconstructed by historians. But in the process of deconstruction, a crucial distinction needs to be made: what social or political behavior could be intrinsically attached to Han identity as opposed to Han ideology?
It is tempting to consider identity and ideology as synonymous, but a clear distinction must be drawn between the two. Indeed, Rawski and Schoppa both seem to have a modicum of confusion about the two terms. Rawski writes about ideology, but only briefly, for she argues, “The ideologies created by the Manchu leaders drew on Han and non-Han sources” (834). However, Rawski then quickly returns to her discourse on ethnic identity, almost as if to suggest that the terms “identity” and “ideology” could be used interchangeably, even though they are two markedly different categories that deserve a more careful differentiation than Rawski is willing to provide. While describing the lengths to which the Manchu rulers went to preserve their identity, Schoppa commits an equally disconcerting juxtaposition, in one paragraph writing, “A key to upholding Manchu martial identity was to maintain the banner forces, the vehicles of their military success,” while in the very next paragraph writing, “Yet another strategy for maintaining martial values was to set aside Manchuria as a permanent Manchu homeland” (28; emphasis mine). To vary his word choice, Schoppa sacrifices both clarity and precision. What, then, is the distinction between identity on the one hand and ideology and values on the other? Identity is a person or group’s self-image; values or ideologies constitute a person or group’s vision of (and for) reality. Why does identity, which is internalized and difficult to articulate, find its way to the center of this discussion, when ideology is the force that enacts dominance and shapes history and even creates a shared sense of identity? Ideology is the more compelling explanation for the Manchu’s successful rule during the Qing Dynasty.
What practical applications does this alternative view offer to the current debate? To answer this question, I want to review two of the concluding points Rawski leaves her readers with at the end of her essay to show how a focus on ideology could allow scholars fresh ways to answer her questions while pursuing a deeper inquiry into history. First, Rawski points out, “Only a definition of the nation that transcends Han identity can thus legitimately lay claim to the peripheral regions inhabited by non-Han peoples…” (841). More than that, since a person or group’s identity is authored by the same ideologies that construct the nation, a good definition of the nation must transcend the concept of identity at all. If we define “nation” as an ideological construct, this would also allow scholars to “reevaluate the historical contributions of the many peoples who have resided in and sometimes ruled over what is today Chinese territory” (842), for scholars could then deconstruct the biases in the way “China” is customarily defined. Second and connected to this, Rawski suggests in her conclusion that Han nationalism, a construct of the twentieth century, has played a large role in the interpretation of Chinese history (842). Focusing on ideology would allow scholars to deconstruct such erroneous interpretations of history and more accurately trace the developments of this particular kind of modern myth making.
Recognizing the artificial nature of identity must be coupled with a shift away from the focus on ethnic and cultural difference. Identity, since it is largely conditioned by the historical processes that are themselves intricately connected to ideology, should not be seen as the driving force of history; rather, a careful cartography of Manchu political and social ideology has the capacity to explain the efficacy of Manchu rule during the Qing Dynasty. Therefore, the task now facing researchers is a thorough inquiry into the structures of power that authorize identity as well as the particular notions of history that have come into debate; concomitantly, identity must be thought of as the product of those relations of power.
References
Rawski, Evelyn. “Presidential Address: Reenvisioning the Qing: The Significance of the Qing Period in Chinese History.” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no.4 (November 1996): 829-850.
Schoppa, R. Keith. Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History. Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011.
The discourse on Manchu and Han relations during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) tends to focus erroneously on the issue of identity. Historians like Ho Ping-ti accept the conventional thesis that the Qing Dynasty’s success was borne of the Manchu government’s capacity to adopt Han cultural norms, while historians like Evelyn Rawski argue for a reappraisal of history that instead focuses on the ability of the Manchu rulers to establish bonds and build bridges with non-Han ethnic minorities (Rawski 831). However, both Ho and Rawski assume, albeit in contrasting fashion, the preeminence of cultural identity in their history, an assumption that calls their conclusions into question. This essay, on the other hand, will argue that an entirely different understanding of Manchu rule will be necessary to appreciate this history, an understanding that deemphasizes the role of identity and ethnicity to instead stress the effects of ideology in constructing identity and creating history.
First, I want to reexamine the debate of sinicization with this guiding hermeneutic, using texts by Rawski and R. Keith Schoppa to show the limitations in the current orientation of scholarly discourse. In rehearsing the traditional analysis of the Qing Dynasty, Rawski quotes Ho: “The key to its [Qing] success was the adoption by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization” (831). In other words, it is necessary that Manchu identity be replaced, at least at the political level, by Han identity, for otherwise the political achievements of the Qing rulers would be impossible for contemporary scholars to explain. However, this argument, seemingly borne not out of necessity but in fact only out of a poor imagination, leads to absurd questions: how “Han” do Manchus have to act before they could be considered thoroughly sinicized? What made the Manchu’s sinicization “systematic”? Was the sinicization process a gradual shift in identity or a sudden, epiphanic moment of Han-realization? Rawski and Schoppa naturally try to distance themselves from the intellectual poverty of Ho’s sinicization thesis, and they develop a new way to think about identity: Schoppa argues that identity is constructed through historical processes, and as such identity is constantly shifting (4-6), while Rawski concludes with an exhortation for scholars to delve into the very heart of Chinese identity to discover the influences of non-Han culture (842). Therefore, Han identity and Manchu identity, far from being sui generis, can be (and, according to Rawski, must be) deconstructed by historians. But in the process of deconstruction, a crucial distinction needs to be made: what social or political behavior could be intrinsically attached to Han identity as opposed to Han ideology?
It is tempting to consider identity and ideology as synonymous, but a clear distinction must be drawn between the two. Indeed, Rawski and Schoppa both seem to have a modicum of confusion about the two terms. Rawski writes about ideology, but only briefly, for she argues, “The ideologies created by the Manchu leaders drew on Han and non-Han sources” (834). However, Rawski then quickly returns to her discourse on ethnic identity, almost as if to suggest that the terms “identity” and “ideology” could be used interchangeably, even though they are two markedly different categories that deserve a more careful differentiation than Rawski is willing to provide. While describing the lengths to which the Manchu rulers went to preserve their identity, Schoppa commits an equally disconcerting juxtaposition, in one paragraph writing, “A key to upholding Manchu martial identity was to maintain the banner forces, the vehicles of their military success,” while in the very next paragraph writing, “Yet another strategy for maintaining martial values was to set aside Manchuria as a permanent Manchu homeland” (28; emphasis mine). To vary his word choice, Schoppa sacrifices both clarity and precision. What, then, is the distinction between identity on the one hand and ideology and values on the other? Identity is a person or group’s self-image; values or ideologies constitute a person or group’s vision of (and for) reality. Why does identity, which is internalized and difficult to articulate, find its way to the center of this discussion, when ideology is the force that enacts dominance and shapes history and even creates a shared sense of identity? Ideology is the more compelling explanation for the Manchu’s successful rule during the Qing Dynasty.
What practical applications does this alternative view offer to the current debate? To answer this question, I want to review two of the concluding points Rawski leaves her readers with at the end of her essay to show how a focus on ideology could allow scholars fresh ways to answer her questions while pursuing a deeper inquiry into history. First, Rawski points out, “Only a definition of the nation that transcends Han identity can thus legitimately lay claim to the peripheral regions inhabited by non-Han peoples…” (841). More than that, since a person or group’s identity is authored by the same ideologies that construct the nation, a good definition of the nation must transcend the concept of identity at all. If we define “nation” as an ideological construct, this would also allow scholars to “reevaluate the historical contributions of the many peoples who have resided in and sometimes ruled over what is today Chinese territory” (842), for scholars could then deconstruct the biases in the way “China” is customarily defined. Second and connected to this, Rawski suggests in her conclusion that Han nationalism, a construct of the twentieth century, has played a large role in the interpretation of Chinese history (842). Focusing on ideology would allow scholars to deconstruct such erroneous interpretations of history and more accurately trace the developments of this particular kind of modern myth making.
Recognizing the artificial nature of identity must be coupled with a shift away from the focus on ethnic and cultural difference. Identity, since it is largely conditioned by the historical processes that are themselves intricately connected to ideology, should not be seen as the driving force of history; rather, a careful cartography of Manchu political and social ideology has the capacity to explain the efficacy of Manchu rule during the Qing Dynasty. Therefore, the task now facing researchers is a thorough inquiry into the structures of power that authorize identity as well as the particular notions of history that have come into debate; concomitantly, identity must be thought of as the product of those relations of power.
References
Rawski, Evelyn. “Presidential Address: Reenvisioning the Qing: The Significance of the Qing Period in Chinese History.” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no.4 (November 1996): 829-850.
Schoppa, R. Keith. Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History. Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011.
May 4, 2011
Film review: The Illusionist
The Illusionist (dir. Sylvain Chomet, 2010). Chomet's second feature film, animated in a dazzling ligne claire style, uses an unproduced script from the great filmmaker Jacques Tati as its starting point to meditate on the intersection of art and life. The heartbreaking slowness of the narrative and the likewise ponderous movement of the accompanying musical score plunge the viewer into nostalgia for an innocence and simplicity that never existed. Though undoubtedly much more sentimental than Tati would have made it, ending up more like Chaplin than Keaton, The Illusionist nevertheless evokes the painful ache of loss and regret that only art can articulate and make sense of, even if art, like magic, is incapable of curing it. A
April 20, 2011
Jesus films
It's almost Easter. It makes sense, then, to watch a Jesus film or two—preferably one that is not Passion of the Christ. Also, I included some films that are vaguely inspired by Jesus but aren't necessarily Jesus films.
Nazarin (dir. Luis Bunuel, 1958)--see my review
The Gospel According to Matthew (dir. Pier Paulo Pasolini, 1964)
Life of Brian (dir. Terry Jones, 1979)
The Last Temptation of Christ (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1988)--the book is better
Jesus of Montreal (dir. Denys Arkand, 1989)
Son of Man (dir. Mark Dornford May, 2005)
One I haven't seen yet but would be greatly interested in seeing is The Messiah (dir. Nader Talibsadeh, 2008), an Iranian film that narrates his life from the Islamic perspective.
Nazarin (dir. Luis Bunuel, 1958)--see my review
The Gospel According to Matthew (dir. Pier Paulo Pasolini, 1964)
Life of Brian (dir. Terry Jones, 1979)
The Last Temptation of Christ (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1988)--the book is better
Jesus of Montreal (dir. Denys Arkand, 1989)
Son of Man (dir. Mark Dornford May, 2005)
One I haven't seen yet but would be greatly interested in seeing is The Messiah (dir. Nader Talibsadeh, 2008), an Iranian film that narrates his life from the Islamic perspective.
April 15, 2011
April 12, 2011
Film review: Nazarin
Nazarin (dir. Luis Bunuel, 1958). Bunuel's best film, like most of Bunuel's films, is a skillful and satirical examination of religion and relationships of power. In Nazarin, a virtuous priest is subjected to a series of torments obviously meant to mirror the life of Christ. But for Bunuel the atheist, the most unbelievable miracle in the Gospel narratives is that people actually listened and were changed by the words and deeds of Christ. His film imagines a world where the petty squabbles and self-absorption of human beings wholly prevent an authentic spiritual epiphany, and where Jesus' last moments—wracked by doubt and anxiety—take on a subverted but still profound significance for contemporary human experience. The narrative is oddly choppy in places, but Bunuel successfully communicates his critique. A
April 7, 2011
After the Thin Man: A Play
After the Thin Man
Characters in the Play
A
B
SCENE: A and B are seated at a couch. The TV is on and A is flipping channels. The play opens with them in mid conversation.
A: Ian McKellan isn't that funny either.
B: He's entertaining. You would invite him to a dinner party.
A: Yeah, but he might bring one of his “friends” with him. [A attempts to do air quotes, but this is difficult since one hand is already engaged in flipping channels.] It's hard to do air quotes with just one free hand.
B [ignoring A's homophobia, which probably masks a wide array of neuroses]: So use both hands then.
A: After the Thin Man is on. [He settles on this channel and sets down the remote.]
B: You'll do air quotes with both hands after The Thin Man is over?
A: What?
B: You said you'd do air quotes after The Thin Man is on.
A: After the Thin Man, the sequel.
B: They're playing the sequel to The Thin Man after they play The Thin Man? Like a double feature? What's the sequel called?
A: After the Thin Man IS the sequel.
B: You just said that. But what's the sequel called?
A: The sequel to After the Thin Man is Another Thin Man.
B: I know it's another Thin Man movie, but what's it called?
A: What?
B: So you'll do air quotes after the sequel to The Thin Man is on...?
[Beat.]
A: What?
CURTAIN
Characters in the Play
A
B
SCENE: A and B are seated at a couch. The TV is on and A is flipping channels. The play opens with them in mid conversation.
A: Ian McKellan isn't that funny either.
B: He's entertaining. You would invite him to a dinner party.
A: Yeah, but he might bring one of his “friends” with him. [A attempts to do air quotes, but this is difficult since one hand is already engaged in flipping channels.] It's hard to do air quotes with just one free hand.
B [ignoring A's homophobia, which probably masks a wide array of neuroses]: So use both hands then.
A: After the Thin Man is on. [He settles on this channel and sets down the remote.]
B: You'll do air quotes with both hands after The Thin Man is over?
A: What?
B: You said you'd do air quotes after The Thin Man is on.
A: After the Thin Man, the sequel.
B: They're playing the sequel to The Thin Man after they play The Thin Man? Like a double feature? What's the sequel called?
A: After the Thin Man IS the sequel.
B: You just said that. But what's the sequel called?
A: The sequel to After the Thin Man is Another Thin Man.
B: I know it's another Thin Man movie, but what's it called?
A: What?
B: So you'll do air quotes after the sequel to The Thin Man is on...?
[Beat.]
A: What?
CURTAIN
April 4, 2011
Film review: The Circus
The Circus (dir. Charles Chaplin, 1928). In what is possibly Chaplin's most pleasant feature film, the Tramp accidentally becomes the main attraction of a floundering circus (though for most of the film he is not cognizant of this); sight gags, sentimentality, and spider monkeys ensue. Though Chaplin's films lack the imagination and intelligence of the work of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, he remains more popular than them both because of his willingness to submerge his films in pathos. He attempts to emphasize every frustrated expression, every kind gesture, every longing glance as if it were the focal point of the film, and in doing so, he uses his films as tools to draw his audience into a shared emotional experience—they establish an immutable empathic bond between reel and real life. This bond became problematic in his later films, where Chaplin's use of pathos in social commentary slips sometimes into emotional fascism (social commentary should appeal foremost to the intellect rather than preying upon the emotions; see The Great Dictator), but The Circus works because of its much more modest goals. A
March 30, 2011
Film review: Killer of Sheep
Killer of Sheep (dir. Charles Burnett, 1977). Killer of Sheep offers a non-narrative approach that allows Burnett to express a community's internal dialectic and their complicated relationship to the external world—two processes that define the individual and collective experience of the community. As an historical document, it relates essential details of black life in 20th century America as cuttingly precise and intense as the work of masters like Ralph Ellison and Ishmael Reed; as a work of cinematic art, it is a frightening portrait of conditioning with currents of hope. Originally filmed as Burnett's film school dissertation in 1977, it remained sadly unseen but heavily mythologized until some boring soundtrack-related legal considerations were worked out about 30 years later. A
March 18, 2011
Caroline/Coraline: A Play
Cast of Characters:
Nondescript Guy
Indistinctive Fellow
Scene: A featureless room at an indeterminate time.
Guy: Is Caroline that good?
Fellow: CO-raline.
Guy: Hah?
Fellow: It's pronounced “Coraline,” not “Caroline.” “Caroline” would be like the Neil Diamond song.
Guy: As opposed to a stop motion movie by Henry Selick.
Fellow: Based on a children's book written by Neil Gaiman.
Guy: OK.
[Rest.]
Fellow [epiphanic]: Ooh! Coraline/Caroline / Diamond/Gaiman. There's definitely the opportunity for a double joke in there.
Guy: Yeah, but that kind of homophonic humor seems really difficult to set up.
Fellow [calming]: Yeah. It's so situational that someone not involved in this conversation could never understand.
Guy: It could end with someone just saying “I said 'Neil Gaiman'.”
Fellow: Maybe the joke should be two people talking about how to set up the joke.
Guy: You should write it into a play, like you did with the Pythagoras thing.
Fellow: Yeah...
Guy: One guy would just become obsessed with the line “I said 'Neil Gaiman'” while the other guy kept trying to piece together the joke. And then the stage would fade to black--
Fellow: And from the darkness, a voice would say--
Guy: “I said 'Neil Gaiman'.”
Fellow: It could work.
[Rest.]
Guy [remembering]: So is Coraline any good?
Fellow: It's pretty good. Best animated film of...2009?
Guy: I should watch it then.
Fellow: Yes, you should.
[The lights fade to black.]
Guy: I said “Neil Gaiman.”
END
[NOTE: Imagine my disappointment later when I found out that Neil Gaiman's name is pronounced “Geigh-man” instead of “Guy-man.” So close...]
Nondescript Guy
Indistinctive Fellow
Scene: A featureless room at an indeterminate time.
Guy: Is Caroline that good?
Fellow: CO-raline.
Guy: Hah?
Fellow: It's pronounced “Coraline,” not “Caroline.” “Caroline” would be like the Neil Diamond song.
Guy: As opposed to a stop motion movie by Henry Selick.
Fellow: Based on a children's book written by Neil Gaiman.
Guy: OK.
[Rest.]
Fellow [epiphanic]: Ooh! Coraline/Caroline / Diamond/Gaiman. There's definitely the opportunity for a double joke in there.
Guy: Yeah, but that kind of homophonic humor seems really difficult to set up.
Fellow [calming]: Yeah. It's so situational that someone not involved in this conversation could never understand.
Guy: It could end with someone just saying “I said 'Neil Gaiman'.”
Fellow: Maybe the joke should be two people talking about how to set up the joke.
Guy: You should write it into a play, like you did with the Pythagoras thing.
Fellow: Yeah...
Guy: One guy would just become obsessed with the line “I said 'Neil Gaiman'” while the other guy kept trying to piece together the joke. And then the stage would fade to black--
Fellow: And from the darkness, a voice would say--
Guy: “I said 'Neil Gaiman'.”
Fellow: It could work.
[Rest.]
Guy [remembering]: So is Coraline any good?
Fellow: It's pretty good. Best animated film of...2009?
Guy: I should watch it then.
Fellow: Yes, you should.
[The lights fade to black.]
Guy: I said “Neil Gaiman.”
END
[NOTE: Imagine my disappointment later when I found out that Neil Gaiman's name is pronounced “Geigh-man” instead of “Guy-man.” So close...]
March 16, 2011
Just a thought...
If they ever make a biopic of Flannery O'Connor, I think they should get Steve Buscemi to play her.
March 14, 2011
Film reviews: The horror!
In the interest of broadening my horizons or some such nonsense, I have recently been exposed to three horror films.
House (dir. Obayashi Nobuhiko, 1977). Like Dario Argento's Suspiria, House is an intellectually lightweight film with impressive if overbearing visuals, incomprehensible characters, absurd situations, and a ridiculous non-resolution. It's hard not to be affected by Nobuhiko's obvious passion for what he's committing to celluloid, but this is clearly not the forgotten post-modern horror masterpiece its re-discoverers wanted it to be. By the way, the DVD cover art looks like an evil Totoro from hell. C-
Dawn of the Dead (dir. George A. Romero, 1978). Can a zombie movie effectively frame thoughtful social commentary? With this film, Romero's assertive answer is Yes. Unfortunately, though, Romero lacks the technique and discipline to make the film he would like to make, and Dawn of the Dead merely entertains (if it does that) when it wants to provoke discussion. Between the painfully obvious satirical digs at consumerism and the tiring scourge of flesh eating zombies, I'll take neither—though the soundtrack, I must admit, is rather cute. C-
Halloween (dir. John Carpenter, 1978). More troubling than the sheer number of terrible movies this film has inspired is Carpenter's disturbing insistence on super-naturalizing, mythologizing, objectifying, and personifying Evil as the masked figure Michael Myers, presumably because deconstructing evil is too cumbersome a task. Cinematically, Carpenter's much-touted mastery of suspense falls as flat as his characterizations and the embarrassing line readings of his actors (sic). F
House (dir. Obayashi Nobuhiko, 1977). Like Dario Argento's Suspiria, House is an intellectually lightweight film with impressive if overbearing visuals, incomprehensible characters, absurd situations, and a ridiculous non-resolution. It's hard not to be affected by Nobuhiko's obvious passion for what he's committing to celluloid, but this is clearly not the forgotten post-modern horror masterpiece its re-discoverers wanted it to be. By the way, the DVD cover art looks like an evil Totoro from hell. C-
Dawn of the Dead (dir. George A. Romero, 1978). Can a zombie movie effectively frame thoughtful social commentary? With this film, Romero's assertive answer is Yes. Unfortunately, though, Romero lacks the technique and discipline to make the film he would like to make, and Dawn of the Dead merely entertains (if it does that) when it wants to provoke discussion. Between the painfully obvious satirical digs at consumerism and the tiring scourge of flesh eating zombies, I'll take neither—though the soundtrack, I must admit, is rather cute. C-
Halloween (dir. John Carpenter, 1978). More troubling than the sheer number of terrible movies this film has inspired is Carpenter's disturbing insistence on super-naturalizing, mythologizing, objectifying, and personifying Evil as the masked figure Michael Myers, presumably because deconstructing evil is too cumbersome a task. Cinematically, Carpenter's much-touted mastery of suspense falls as flat as his characterizations and the embarrassing line readings of his actors (sic). F
March 2, 2011
Bonobo Orgies: A Comedy of Manners
Characters in the Play:
WOMAN 1: a middle-aged, non-traditional student
WOMAN 2: a young student, about 19 years old
SCENE: An emptying anthropology class. WOMAN 1 and WOMAN 2 are gathering their belongings, getting prepared to leave.
WOMAN 2: I wonder if bonobos inbreed.
WOMAN 1: Of course they inbreed; they have orgies!
[Beat.]
WOMAN 2: Well, that doesn't mean they inbreed.
WOMAN 1: Oh come on! We're talking about orgies here! There's no way to tell whose son is whose in an orgy!
WOMAN 2: But--
WOMAN 1: I mean, just think about it. Use your logic. They don't know who each other's father is.
[This takes a moment to register.]
WOMAN 2: I just can't believe it.
WOMAN 1: Of course not; that's because you're a human, not a bonobo.
[The two leave the classroom, leaving the future contours of their discourse on bonobo morality unknown.]
CURTAIN
WOMAN 1: a middle-aged, non-traditional student
WOMAN 2: a young student, about 19 years old
SCENE: An emptying anthropology class. WOMAN 1 and WOMAN 2 are gathering their belongings, getting prepared to leave.
WOMAN 2: I wonder if bonobos inbreed.
WOMAN 1: Of course they inbreed; they have orgies!
[Beat.]
WOMAN 2: Well, that doesn't mean they inbreed.
WOMAN 1: Oh come on! We're talking about orgies here! There's no way to tell whose son is whose in an orgy!
WOMAN 2: But--
WOMAN 1: I mean, just think about it. Use your logic. They don't know who each other's father is.
[This takes a moment to register.]
WOMAN 2: I just can't believe it.
WOMAN 1: Of course not; that's because you're a human, not a bonobo.
[The two leave the classroom, leaving the future contours of their discourse on bonobo morality unknown.]
CURTAIN
February 28, 2011
Film reviews: Black & White
Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2010). Black Swan, the negative image of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes, is anchored by Portman's brilliant performance as a ballerina with a tenuous grip on reality. Director Aronofsky's abrasive visual scheme, full of jarring tonal shifts and disturbing imagery, offers unflinching insight into a fractured mind's inward gyre as it struggles to assume another identity and swirls in a sea of doubles, both real and imagined. And floating above all this is Clint Mansell's harrowing soundtrack, which itself is the double to Aronofsky's otherwise image-heavy film. The best American film of 2010. A-
The White Ribbon (dir. Michael Haneke, 2009). In this blessedly unromanticized recreation of Europe on the precipice of WWI, a series of increasingly disturbing events slowly unravels an idealistic German village. But what begins as a tentative contrast—in equally unsympathetic terms—between the lives of menial laborers and the bourgeoisie quickly shifts into a contrast between the sordid reality below the surface and the artifices people construct to obscure it (thus continuing themes Haneke has also dealt with in previous films, most notably Caché). The villagers' religion—so successful at binding them psychologically—seems wholly incapable of binding the community socially or morally. The White Ribbon is filmed in beautiful black and white by Christian Berger, whose work here is the equal of Nykvist's work with Bergman. A
The White Ribbon (dir. Michael Haneke, 2009). In this blessedly unromanticized recreation of Europe on the precipice of WWI, a series of increasingly disturbing events slowly unravels an idealistic German village. But what begins as a tentative contrast—in equally unsympathetic terms—between the lives of menial laborers and the bourgeoisie quickly shifts into a contrast between the sordid reality below the surface and the artifices people construct to obscure it (thus continuing themes Haneke has also dealt with in previous films, most notably Caché). The villagers' religion—so successful at binding them psychologically—seems wholly incapable of binding the community socially or morally. The White Ribbon is filmed in beautiful black and white by Christian Berger, whose work here is the equal of Nykvist's work with Bergman. A
February 25, 2011
Basho haiku 8
静けさや岩に滲み入る蝉の声
Stillness
penetrating the rock
sound of cicada
[Yes, this is the poem from which I stole my blog's name.]
Stillness
penetrating the rock
sound of cicada
[Yes, this is the poem from which I stole my blog's name.]
February 24, 2011
Film review: Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde (dir. Arthur Penn, 1967). Taking its cue from the stylish individualism of the French nouvelle vague, when Bonnie and Clyde was released in 1967, it looked like no other American film released before it. Despite its importance to film history, however, Bonnie and Clyde has also become one of the most overrated American films, burdened as it is now by the excessive mythologizing of overly nostalgic film critics. The gleeful violence and sexuality with which Penn intended to shock audiences is tame by today's standards, thus making Penn's cavalier use of both seem dated instead of subversive. Because style so uniformly usurps substance, Penn only hints at deeper connections a more profound filmmaker could have fleshed out. C
February 23, 2011
February 22, 2011
Basho haiku 6
蛤のふたみにわかれ行秋ぞ
Leaving for Futami
like a clam pulled apart
fall fades
[Still not sure about this one; I've tried to leave intact what I think is a play on the word "Futami" by adding a few words and messing with the line arrangement, which sadly compromises the conciseness of Basho's Japanese.]
Leaving for Futami
like a clam pulled apart
fall fades
[Still not sure about this one; I've tried to leave intact what I think is a play on the word "Futami" by adding a few words and messing with the line arrangement, which sadly compromises the conciseness of Basho's Japanese.]
February 18, 2011
February 17, 2011
February 16, 2011
February 15, 2011
February 14, 2011
Basho haiku 1
This week, I’ll post translations of the haiku master Matsuo Basho I did last fall under the guidance of my sensei.
年暮れぬ笠きて草鞋はきながら
Another year has passed
still wearing
traveling hat and sandals
年暮れぬ笠きて草鞋はきながら
Another year has passed
still wearing
traveling hat and sandals
February 11, 2011
A short review of Vance Randolph's Ozark Magic and Folklore
[Adapted and expanded from an in-class writing assignment.]
With this book, originally published under the less politically correct (but probably more telling) title Ozark Superstitions in 1947, Randolph characterizes the Ozarks as a terminally unprogressive region full of backward people. To do so, he selectively includes a series of deliberately silly-sounding folk traditions and adages from a handful of people in a handful of areas. How, then, does this represent the Ozarks? The short answer is that it doesn't. This is not scholarly work; it's kids' stuff. But the text is not entirely useless, for though it is utterly useless as a tool to understand the Ozarks, it tells us quite a bit about Randolph.
Trained at a major American university in the early 20th Century, Randolph would have been exposed to the Great Modernization Narrative, the one-size-fits-all myth of a single possible direction of progress from the darkness of superstition to the light of modern, secular science. This seems to have had a two-fold effect on Randolph:
1. Randolph seems to have bought in to the modernization myth. The Ozarks becomes a tool that allows him to measure his progress toward the goals of modern, secular, Western society. By presenting the Ozarks in a static, often laughably backward manner, he wants to confirm his very identity—he wants to confirm the truth of the modernization narrative.
2. Yet Randolph also presents himself as a romanticist, a nostalgic imperialist of archaic culture, who desires more than anything to preserve the perceived purity of a vanishing primitive society. In this model, the Ozarks becomes a victim of modernization. After all, how is it possible to be “pure” when modernity (in the form of technology and science) is slowly but irrevocably encroaching, threatening a foundational change in the way lives are lived? Randolph's obsession with purity borders on the pathological. I am convinced that a psychological reading of his life and work would be revealing, but I unfortunately do not have the adequate training or time to commit to an exhaustive approach.
Even if we could overlook the inaccuracies of Randolph's scholarship and his obvious biases, Randolph's writing is not particularly good. He essentially offers a mind-numbingly repetitive catalog of smugly written anecdotes and possibly made up traditions with few attempts at structure, transitions, or coherence. The chapters are roughly arranged by topic or theme, but they never read like more than a random series of loosely-linked recollections. It doesn't matter from what page the reader starts, because the book, quite simply, doesn't go anywhere. Is this Randolph's attempt at mimicking the Ozarks' ostensibly static culture? Or is it merely more evidence of Randolph's inadequacy as a writer, thinker, and scholar?
Since the academic value of this work is dubious at best, Randolph's work has been roundly criticized by contemporary scholars. Among them is Brooks Blevins, the leading scholar in Ozarks studies today, who in his book Hill Folks presents a more nuanced view of a region and people attuned to their own patterns of change; he shows that the Ozarks has constructed a unique identity through both its internal dialectic and its external relations with other regions. Finally, Blevins demonstrates quite convincingly the biases of pseudo-scholars like Randolph who use the Ozarks as a mirror to reflect their own modernist concerns about progress and purity.
With this book, originally published under the less politically correct (but probably more telling) title Ozark Superstitions in 1947, Randolph characterizes the Ozarks as a terminally unprogressive region full of backward people. To do so, he selectively includes a series of deliberately silly-sounding folk traditions and adages from a handful of people in a handful of areas. How, then, does this represent the Ozarks? The short answer is that it doesn't. This is not scholarly work; it's kids' stuff. But the text is not entirely useless, for though it is utterly useless as a tool to understand the Ozarks, it tells us quite a bit about Randolph.
Trained at a major American university in the early 20th Century, Randolph would have been exposed to the Great Modernization Narrative, the one-size-fits-all myth of a single possible direction of progress from the darkness of superstition to the light of modern, secular science. This seems to have had a two-fold effect on Randolph:
1. Randolph seems to have bought in to the modernization myth. The Ozarks becomes a tool that allows him to measure his progress toward the goals of modern, secular, Western society. By presenting the Ozarks in a static, often laughably backward manner, he wants to confirm his very identity—he wants to confirm the truth of the modernization narrative.
2. Yet Randolph also presents himself as a romanticist, a nostalgic imperialist of archaic culture, who desires more than anything to preserve the perceived purity of a vanishing primitive society. In this model, the Ozarks becomes a victim of modernization. After all, how is it possible to be “pure” when modernity (in the form of technology and science) is slowly but irrevocably encroaching, threatening a foundational change in the way lives are lived? Randolph's obsession with purity borders on the pathological. I am convinced that a psychological reading of his life and work would be revealing, but I unfortunately do not have the adequate training or time to commit to an exhaustive approach.
Even if we could overlook the inaccuracies of Randolph's scholarship and his obvious biases, Randolph's writing is not particularly good. He essentially offers a mind-numbingly repetitive catalog of smugly written anecdotes and possibly made up traditions with few attempts at structure, transitions, or coherence. The chapters are roughly arranged by topic or theme, but they never read like more than a random series of loosely-linked recollections. It doesn't matter from what page the reader starts, because the book, quite simply, doesn't go anywhere. Is this Randolph's attempt at mimicking the Ozarks' ostensibly static culture? Or is it merely more evidence of Randolph's inadequacy as a writer, thinker, and scholar?
Since the academic value of this work is dubious at best, Randolph's work has been roundly criticized by contemporary scholars. Among them is Brooks Blevins, the leading scholar in Ozarks studies today, who in his book Hill Folks presents a more nuanced view of a region and people attuned to their own patterns of change; he shows that the Ozarks has constructed a unique identity through both its internal dialectic and its external relations with other regions. Finally, Blevins demonstrates quite convincingly the biases of pseudo-scholars like Randolph who use the Ozarks as a mirror to reflect their own modernist concerns about progress and purity.
February 10, 2011
Film reviews: Animated
The Secret of Kells (dir. Tomm More and Nora Twomey, 2009). A delightfully imaginative film, The Secret of Kells is a fictionalized account of the legendary illuminated manuscript from the 9th Century that remains Ireland's greatest national treasure. With its inventive and creative use of animation, perspective, and color, More and Twomey have created a great animated film in the tradition of Miyazaki, Norshteyn, and Ocelot with an impressive visual scheme and well nuanced storytelling to complement it, though the conclusion is regretfully a little rushed. The characters, with the understandable exception of the viking invaders, are refreshingly complex and engaging. A-.
Kirikou and the Sorceress (dir. Michel Ocelot, 1998). Kirikou and the Sorceress, Michel Ocelot's feature film debut, is a brilliant animated film that manages to capture the narrative pacing and lyrical cadence of West African oral tradition, rendered with a sophisticated and captivating use of perspective, color, and character design. Ocelot fills the film with charming details, like the jerky, robotic movement of the sorceress' fetishes, and moments of endearing tenderness, including the scene between Kirikou and his grandfather. The film's moral center, which stresses individual responsibility to the group, intelligence, and forgiveness, is (instructional) icing on the (aesthetic) cake. A.
Kirikou and the Sorceress (dir. Michel Ocelot, 1998). Kirikou and the Sorceress, Michel Ocelot's feature film debut, is a brilliant animated film that manages to capture the narrative pacing and lyrical cadence of West African oral tradition, rendered with a sophisticated and captivating use of perspective, color, and character design. Ocelot fills the film with charming details, like the jerky, robotic movement of the sorceress' fetishes, and moments of endearing tenderness, including the scene between Kirikou and his grandfather. The film's moral center, which stresses individual responsibility to the group, intelligence, and forgiveness, is (instructional) icing on the (aesthetic) cake. A.
February 9, 2011
Film review: The White Balloon
The White Balloon (dir. Jafar Panahi, 1995). Abbas Kiarostami wrote Panahi's feature film debut, which tells a charming, unembellished story of an adorable (but incredibly stubborn) seven year old girl and her quest to buy a chubby white and red goldfish whose fins flutter like it's dancing (hopefully for 100 tomans). Panahi allows the film to unfold naturally in real time, imbuing even his minor characters with a sense of humanity and complexity. Panahi's careful consciousness of economic issues, along with his penetrating insight into human beings, reveals a vital voice in contemporary cinema and in documenting Iranian history, which makes his unjust imprisonment in Iran all the more unbearable. [And like so many great Iranian films, it is nearly impossible to find without the assistance of internet databases of questionable legality.] A.
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