Johnny Ray Huston
Noise Pop: Basking in their luster
Oh me, oh my, love that country pie, and oh me, oh my, the influence of Devendra Banhart and Will Oldham is now as long and thick as their beards. Actually, Brightblack Morning Light’s Nathan Shineywater and Rachael Hughes were opening for Oldham when Banhart was making the leap from homemade cassette to Young God. But in the autumn of 2006, around when they landed a primo spot opening for Os Mutantes at the Fillmore and then walked onto the cover of Arthur like it was a throne lying in wait for them, the applause for and catcalls about their group really began to fly back and forth. Spiritualized acolytes old enough to have gone high-igh-igh with Spacemen 3 the first time around praised Brightblack’s "heroin-gospel" sound, while other older folks who’d seen one too many white people claim an American Indian great-grandmother cried foul. Younger fans espoused nature love as their more cynical peers held their noses — that is, with whichever hand wasn’t masturbating an iPod with carpal tunnel–ridden thumbs. At the end of last year, as rock critics assembled top 10 lists, there were many rivers to cross — some leading to the Walkmen’s cover of Harry Nilsson’s Pussycats — and yet just about all roads led to the Rhodes-dominated sound of Brightblack Morning Light (Matador). This show should offer some hints about the follow-up. (Johnny Ray Huston)
BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT
With Women and Children, Mariee Sioux, and Karl Blau
March 3, 8 p.m., $14
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750
Sagacious and audacious: Kiyoshi Kurosawa talks about Letters From Iwo Jima
The Academy Awards lumber toward us, and Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima is up for some big ones. In this week’s Guardian, Taro Goto, Assistant Director of the fast approaching San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, writes about the reactions to Eastwood’s film in Japan. Goto also recently interviewed the director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure; the Japanese version of Pulse; Bright Future) about Eastwood. While Kurosawa’s love of the films of Don Siegel is well-known, fewer movie maniacs might be aware that he’s also a great admirer of Siegel student (and star) Eastwood. When I interviewed Kurosawa around the time of Bright Future‘s release, he cited Mystic River as the most fascinating film he’d seen in some time, and confessed he’d only glimpsed Eastwood from “a ten-meter distance” when both directors had films premiering in the Official Section at Cannes, because he’d “been a fan of his for such a long time” that he “didn’t feel like changing that.”
In this written exchange, translated into English by Goto, both he and Kurosawa and Goto make some great points about cinema and how it relates to the world.
Underworld meets underground
› johnny@sfbg.com
A freeway is viewed from a distance in pitch-black night as oncoming white dots (the fronts of cars) and retreating red dots (their backs) hop like tiny Lite-Brites from one spot to another. It’s a cinematic atmosphere as potent as a dream; this first shot from William E. Jones’s Film Montages (for Peter Roehr) isn’t the kind of image one might associate with porn. In fact, highly poetic urban documentary was commonplace in ’70s and early ’80s gay porn. Directors such as Fred Halsted, Christopher Rage, and Peter Berlin used film to creatively explore and express sexual identity before urban gay life was attacked by AIDS and vampirized by mainstream consumerism. For Jones, the works of these underworld auteurs contain an endless array of sidelines to rediscover and uncover. Instead of excavating the era’s graphic, condom-free sex, he spotlights the erotically charged spaces around it.
With a feature doc about Latino Smiths fans (2004’s Is It Really So Strange?) on his résumé, Jones knows about hidden subcultural histories, his own included. He might be considered the unsung talent associated with the new queer cinema of the early ’90s. A few of the era’s bigger names (Todd Haynes, Gregg Araki) have since moved deeper into Hollywood, while others (Jennie Livingston, Tom Kalin) seem trapped in creative lockdown. Jones’s semiautobiographical 1991 feature, Massillon, was, along with Haynes’s Superstar, the most experimental and exciting formal work when the movement was cresting; since then his output has been infrequent and varied. Whereas Massillon (a huge influence on Jenni Olson’s recent San Francisco–set The Joy of Life) was shot, with oft-gorgeous results, on film, subsequent Jones works such as 1997’s unconventional biography Finished and the self-explanatory 1998 short The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (which would make for a perfect mini–double bill with Phil Collins’s 1999 How to Make a Refugee) primarily reframe preexistent video footage for new narrative purposes.
Last year, however, Jones experienced a renaissance in terms of output. Three of at least five works he completed during 2006 will be screened at the Pacific Film Archive this week; alas, Mansfield 1962, one of the best and a hot document of legally sanctioned homophobia, isn’t among them. Its title notwithstanding, Film Montages is the one that favors sensory pleasure over discursive pursuits. A tribute to the editing of the late German experimental filmmaker Roehr, it magnifies the visual and sonic textures of pre-AIDS gay porn through a series of short shots, initially presented in times-four repetitions. Wonderfully chunky bass lines and sinister-cold keyboard stabs, images of hands grazing against each other and over black leather, close-ups of tape recorders with Maxell C-90 tapes, campy Germanic voice-overs discussing men "who shyly moved about without ehhhvvver exchanging a word" — they all go through four-step paces, establishing a rhythmic musicality. Then Jones’s montage lands on an orgiastic still of four entwined male bodies, and he further emphasizes its languor — a quality now nonexistent, as Daniel Harris has noted, due to current porn’s bored god–playing–with–hairless dolls couplings — by increasing the repetition. From there the masculine noise of boots scuffling on a floor and snippets of threatening dirty talk about making "a real man’s man" lead to an ending that teases around the edges of climax with fetishistic fervor and skill.
In comparison, More British Sounds possesses an overtly argumentative politicism. There Jones matches images from the 1986 gay porn movie The British Are Coming with a soundtrack of uncannily current posh snob remarks from the Jean-Luc Godard–directed Dziga Vertov Group’s 1969 movie See You at Mao, a.k.a. British Sounds. Class warfare and sexual cannibalism are stripped bare, teased with a whip, tattooed, suckled, and showered in a mere eight minutes. To paraphrase Jones, More British Sounds counters the complete lack of homosexuality in Godard’s films, rephrasing the French auteur’s famous remark that all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun — in this case all you need are some boys and a locker room.
The contents of the 59-minute v.o. aren’t so clearly delineated, and the frisson they produce might not be as intense — though for some viewers, that might be due to a familiarity with the source material, whether it be Halsted’s 1972 L.A. Plays Itself or tape recordings of Jean Genet and Rosa von Prauheim spouting off presciently about homosexual fatalism and conservatism. Not so much a mashup as a metamaze odyssey through the subways, nighttime ghetto alleys, and other spaces of pre-AIDS and pre-Internet gay cruising, v.o. doesn’t take its title from voice-over — even if the abbreviation does suggest that facet, which is dominant in many Jones films — so much as version originale, a French term used for films presented in their original language with subtitles. Subtitles over a bare bottom doesn’t make art, but in this case it makes for ripe nostalgia. Moving from a record needle into the dark hole of a Victrola like some dirty, dude-loving cousin of Inland Empire, v.o. might not end up anywhere in particular, but it finds a hell of a lot — Colonel Sanders’s face, gay-power graffiti, Halsted’s red Ranchero, a Peter Berlin S-M romp in the underground recesses of the SF Art Institute — along the way. *
V.O.
Tues/20, 7:30 p.m., $4–$8
Pacific Film Archive
2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.
(510) 642-0808
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
For an extensive interview with Jones, go to our Pixel Vision blog at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
A q&a about v.o.: talking tearooms, movies, Morrissey, and melancholy with filmmaker William E. Jones
Parts of Peter Berlin’s and Fred Halsted’s bodies of work are now a part of William E. Jones’s body of work, thanks to the recent 59-minute video quasi-mashup v.o.
Still from v.o.
But the bodies in gay porn pioneers Berlin’s and Fred Halsted’s movies aren’t what interests Jones. More than bodies, he scouts cities — through the eyes of those directors and others (and the voices of countless other filmed and taped sources) v.o. cruises spaces now gone or under surveillance, often doing so with a prophetic sense of doom. It’s one of many Jones works which reveal that the most fascinating aspects of movies, and of life, often dwell on the outer edges.
Born in Ohio and now residing in L.A., Jones currently has two handsome websites, one devoted to his films, and the other, Shiftless Body, focusing on his photographs. In conjunction with an upcoming screening and a feature in this week’s paper, I recently interviewed him via email:
Heaven strikes the Miramax thief: A talk with the director behind Tears of the Black Tiger
What can I say about the movies of Wisit Sasanatieng that could do justice to the images in the movies themselves? Really, to persuade you to see Tears of the Black Tiger this weekend, all I should do is show you a bunch of outrageously gorgeous stills from the film. So, that’s what I will do. I’ll intersperse questions by me and answers from him, in case you care a jot about what one or both of us has to say.
Space disco disks
BLACK DEVIL DISCO CLUB, 28 AFTER (LO)
Imagine Klaus Nomi’s more butch and less robotic brother riding the peaks and valleys of a Giorgio Moroder blip roller coaster, and you have a glimpse of the personality of this EP by Bernard Fevre, who sure looks cute in the (circa late ’70s?) photo foldout within its shiny black jewel box. Was all of 28 After recorded 28 years ago, when Fevre was influencing what would become acid house, or was it spruced up recently? Whatever the answer, its six tracks are a treat. "I regret the flower power," the Parisian Fevre claims in the chorus of one song, but he shouldn’t regret the disco in its wake.
SALLY SHAPIRO, DISCO ROMANCE (DISKOKAINE)
Even though it has one of the tag’s two words in its title, I’m not sure this shy singer’s gorgeous album qualifies as space disco. It could just as easily be deemed classic synth pop, with an emphasis on classic — which means something, considering how synthy and poppy it is from start to finish. Fans of St. Etienne and Annie should run out and buy it before they’ve finished reading this sentence. Everyone else should give one listen to writer-producer Johan Agebjörn’s "I Know" and see if it’s possible to resist the song’s charms, which are as immense as Shapiro’s voice is petite. Early contender for album of the year.
SKATEBARD, MIDNITE MAGIC (DIGITALO)
Gotta love the floating toothy black-lipsticked mouths on the high-gloss cover of this album by Annie’s roommate, Baard Lødemel. The title of "Holidays on Ice in Space" shows the Bergen, Norway, producer has a sense of camp humor, while the hovering sound of "Caravan" suggests that he’s Aphex Twin’s glitter ball–loving other half. Another highlight is "Boyvox," on which the vox in question is breathy. A word (via the liner notes) from the man himself: "This record is best experienced on a portable music player, or an evening walk in your nearest forest or park."
VARIOUS ARTISTS, CONFUZED DISCO: A RETROSPECTIVE OF ITALIAN RECORDS (MANTRA-VIBES)
Italo disco is space disco’s illegitimate, polysexual parent. Disc one of this two-disc tribute to a top label largely showcases drag-ready originals such as N.O.I.A.’s "True Love" and Fawzia’s "Please Don’t Be Sad," though Radio Slave makes an excellent, shuddering cameo. The overall peak has to be Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas’s rock-powered remix of Answering Service’s "Call Me Mr. Telephone" on disc two. It adds a new bass line, guitar hook, and keyboard phrasing that rise in tension John Carpenter–style. It also condenses and enhances the best bits from the track’s female vocal, which plays like some modern Italian misunderstanding of "Please Mr. Postman." Viva Italo disco.
SEE ALSO
Metro Area, Kelley Polar Quartet. (Huston)
2007: a disco odyssey
› johnny@sfbg.com
What is space disco? Well, it’s a term some people have thrown around when the music of Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is written about or discussed. What does the man from Oslo, Norway, think of the two-word catchphrase? "I guess the good thing is that some people are telling me, ‘Hey, man, you invented a genre,’ " he says, speaking from Oslo and capping the remark with a characteristic quiet, slightly jittery laugh. "If people think about it that way, it’s fine for me, because I get mentioned. But I think it’s limiting in terms of my music. In my opinion, disco with space elements, lots of laser beams — " he laughs again " — is not a wide genre."
Space disco might not be a wide genre, but Lindstrøm, who’s released 12-inch singles under his last name since 2003 for his own Feedelity label, has provided many of its highlights, recently collected on the compilation It’s a Feedelity Affair. One example is "I Feel Space," a sonic floating shuttle with a title that seemingly plays off the epically orgasmic Giorgio Moroder–produced Donna Summer classic from 1977, "I Feel Love." Another is "Gentle as a Giant," a rhythmic percolator that goes so far as to incorporate the same signature opening trinitarian chords of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra that Stanley Kubrick utilized in the score of his 1968 cinematic astro classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. As to whether the latter is a joking response to the space disco tag, Lindstrøm pleads innocence. "I just really like [Strauss’s] theme," he says.
Space disco might not even be a genre. But assuming it exists, Lindstrøm has also stepped far outside it, as on a 2005 collaboration with a fellow Oslo musician, Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas (Eskimo Recordings). That album’s expansive leanings are pastoral rather than interstellar. Beginning with a seemingly endless hit from a bong, "Don O Van Budd" sends autumnal wordless harmonies across acoustic plains with an easygoing charm Yo La Tengo might envy.
Asked about music that has emerged from Norway in recent years, Lindstrøm divides it according to city, saying he’s met the Bergen-based Annie and her roommate Skatebard and regularly communicates with fellow Oslo residents such as Thomas and the much sought-after remixer Todd Terje. "He’s one of my biggest inspirations when it comes to contemporary music," Lindstrøm says of the latter. But it’s a mistake to view Lindstrøm’s music in strictly contemporary terms. He was raised on country and western. He shares a multi-instrumental, unconventional approach to disco with the late Arthur Russell, whose Dinosaur recordings he especially enjoys. Many tracks on It’s a Feedelity Affair lock into rock-ready and steady live drum beats and bass lines that wouldn’t be out of place on a record by Neu! or Can.
On Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas‘s "Turkish Delight," Lindstrøm unwinds a Holger Czukay–like lengthy guitar solo — one ingredient, safe to say, that qualifies as a rarity on club tracks. Around the time of the Thomas collaboration’s release, Lindstrøm wasn’t averse to name-checking folks such as Yngwie Malmsteen in an interview and was full of praise for the fuzzed-out solo in the Carpenters’ "Goodbye to Love." But he’s since entered a minimal phase. "I’ve been touring and traveling, playing my music for other people at clubs, and for many people some of the early stuff is too inaccessible," he says. "I’ve been trying to make my music more simple, hopefully without losing what’s important."
It’s around this time that I hear a child crying in the background on Lindstrøm’s end of the line. As he continues to describe his musical approach — "I really like the combination of organic sounds, such as guitar, with digital programming" — the cries grow louder and contort into shrieks.
"Just a minute — can I call you back?" he asks.
Half an hour and one call later, peace has been restored. "My son really wanted to talk to me," Lindstrøm explains, a bit of embarrassment and pride mixed up in the words. Our conversation soon wanders to the subject of his studio. "It’s not like a professional studio. I’ve just installed all my equipment — and I don’t have that much — in a room," he says. "As you know, since we had to interrupt our conversation because of my kid, sometimes I have to go somewhere else."
Like a personal space? Certainly, space is important — Lindstrøm knows this more than most musicians working today. Space disco may not be a wide genre, and it may not exist, but Lindstrøm’s best recordings engage with notions of space in a way that multiplies the word’s meanings. As he jokes, the term can conjure literal images of melodies played on laser beams, and indeed, some of his songs do exactly that. But if that’s what space disco is or can be, the form was probably invented by Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes in the Mos Eisley Cantina. Charting realms far from Star Wars kitsch, Lindstrøm uses a much more contemporary disco sound to manipulate notions of space. With — and even without — dub techniques, he expands the dimensions of a song’s sound so the melodies seem to travel into a neon and pitch-black eternity.
This approach is cinematic, really, as that 2001: A Space Odyssey link within "Gentle as a Giant" might suggest. "Hey, wait a minute," I think to myself as I hang up the phone. "Don’t the liner notes of A Feedelity Affair imagine Lindstrøm giving a track-by-track movie pitch to 2046 director Wong Kar Wai?"
It’s a link worth exploring. I’d call Lindstrøm back and ask him about it, but I don’t want to come between him and his son. *
LINDSTRØM
With Carl Craig, Gamall, and ML Tronik and TK Disco
Fri/9, 10 p.m.–4 a.m., $12 advance
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
www.mezzaninesf.com
Brutal fucking movie
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
A corpse is a corpse, of course, of course. And no one can talk to a corpse, of course. Unless, of course, that corpse is brought to you by the famous Mr. David Lynch. In this case the corpse gets up and shuffles away, walking the earth like something out of a Samuel Beckett play directed by George Romero.
My thirty-three-year practice of the Transcendental Meditation program has been central to my work in film and painting and to all areas of my life.
"Are you looking for an opening?" Look over here, if you dare, and make your entrée through a tableau of rabbit-headed domesticity complete with sitcom-style applause and a laugh track inserted at decidedly odd moments. Entrances and exits are everything in Inland Empire, which takes place in a universe so slippery your front door may no longer open into your living room but rather into a dark alleyway — and your identity might change if you step through.
So in July 1973 I went to the TM Center in Los Angeles and met an instructor, and I liked her. She looked like Doris Day.
"You have a new role to play?" Yes, you do, at the place where evil was born; your creepy new neighbor is more than happy to warn you of your imminent danger even as you stride around the ornate mansion that you and your violently jealous husband occupy. No matter, though. That new role is your big break, and your star turn in On High in Blue Tomorrows could mean you’ve finally stepped over the threshold into that magical land "where stars and dreams come true." Not coincidentally, it’s also where evil was born — and where hammy Southern accents go to die.
I call that depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It’s suffocating, and that rubber stinks.
Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 fantasy is Lynch’s almost three-hour New Nightmare, both a film and a studio lot overrun with elliptical numerical references: stages 4, 5, 6, 32, and 35; page 57. Where are we? Hollywood or Poland? And what time is it exactly? Is it 9:45 or just after midnight? Is it real time or remembered time, those two warring temporal spaces at the core of so many film noirs? Douglas Sirk–ian blue tomorrows are always just out of reach, but this is a rare instance in which the answer It’s only a movie isn’t very comforting — both viewers and characters seem trapped in a hellish real or imagined world that Lynch himself can’t or won’t explain. One thing is for certain: if you’re running along the Walk of Fame, it’s safe to say you’re in danger.
It’s so magical — I don’t know why — to go into a theater and have the lights go down. It’s very quiet, and then the curtains start to open. Maybe they’re red. And you go into a world…. It’s best on a big screen. That’s the way to go into a world.
Oh yes, Inland Empire was shot entirely on digital video. And it’s not that fancy-shmancy digital either. No, it’s crap digital. But it’s glorious crap — at once making the horror more potently ugly and profane and lending it the quality of gauzy impressionism. By the 4,000th squashed close-up of Laura Dern’s twisted face, you’re thinking there’s nothing so grotesque as a degraded image — see YouTube, tweaked-out coverage of the Iraq War. Then Lynch’s digital expressionism rallies, the incandescent flares of pixilated light at the twilight’s last gleaming. Everything is illuminated unless it’s not. A cut is not a cut but rather a buzzing lightbulb; a long shot is not a long shot but instead a menacing corridor.
I love Los Angeles.
Delivering her lines like a long-lost relative of Maria Ouspenskaya in The Wolf Man and lensed and styled to look like a cross between Jane Wyman and an evil squirrel, Grace Zabriskie plays the ultimate nosy neighbor — one who inaugurates this pleasure and boredom zone by opening a window into the leading lady’s future. Her director has a digital-video eye for combinations of lemon and gray as well as cheap Pepto-Bismol pinks and barf tones — he can make a palatial mansion look as grim as Eraserhead‘s dead living room. This is a movie about the horror of set design, the terror of lamps. Lynch can’t help but look for and stare down the rabbit hole, that spot where it’s hard to disappear, that place just down the way, the space that’s tucked back, difficult to see from the road — the lost highway that connects to the dark hallway and the innumerable nooks and crannies of negative space. As always, he fixates on the sinister brutality in pop’s lexicon; this time, instead of candy-colored clowns tiptoeing into bedrooms, it’s hearts wrapped up in clover.
It was the light that brought everybody to LA to make films in the early days. It’s still a beautiful place.
Is Inland Empire really The Passion of Laura Dern? Yes, this is Dern’s movie, her face being cut up in nearly every scene ("brutal fucking murder," as one character puts it), and Laura, what do you make of it? Are you in there? A spotlight trained on you, long and lean, running horizontally through the night in silent slow-motion, then toward the camera, then fast, then screaming like Rita Hayworth in the mirrors at the end of The Lady from Shanghai, but for three hours. Come back, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Gene Tierney and Mary Pickford, Judy Garland and Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Fontaine and Natalie Wood, Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe: Lynch wants to make you stars again! A coast-to-coast search will soon be under way for the shot-for-shot remake of Inland Empire.
And sometimes things happen on the set that make you start dreaming.
No doubt, as the fate-strapped actress Nikki Grace, Dern makes an exquisite corpse. Oh, wait — she’s actually Susan Blue, Nikki’s alter ego and the character she plays in her latest film, a Southern potboiler that also stars Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) as Billy Side. Susan wanders through her fever dream screaming desperately for Billy, who always seems to be around the next darkly lit corner but rarely materializes. As the giant talking bunnies say, it all has "something to do with the telling of time." Of course, Nikki and Susan might have just fused into some kind of Lynchian-Freudian beast. The infamous Lynch psychofugue. It’s an assumption borne out by a third Dern personality, a ball-busting broad with a mysterious bruise on her lower lip who permanently totes a rusty screwdriver.
What struck me about O.J. Simpson was that he was able to smile and laugh.
Dern’s performance is like a disco ball in a hall of mirrors; it’s rarely clear which character she’s playing, but she’s never less than entirely committed. One minute she’s a kittenish starlet, long legs stretched out across a sun-drenched gazebo. The next she’s a haggard has-been with a busted lip, climbing a set of dingy steps into a dark office, where she tells the man seated there — who is he exactly? And who’s he talking to on the phone? — about how she once thwarted a rapist by plucking out one of his eyeballs.
I don’t necessarily love rotting bodies, but there’s a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal?
"Hey — look at me and tell me if you’ve known me before." This line repeats throughout Inland Empire, and yeah — there’s definitely David Lynch déjà vu at work here: Mulholland Drive‘s twisted Tinseltown, Twin Peaks‘ slutty-girl world, Blue Velvet‘s dark suburbia, Wild at Heart‘s seedy glamour and endless Dern worship. Plus the inevitably singular moments: Where, before or since, has a splattered bottle of ketchup foreshadowed a murder? Committed on the exact square foot of cement that encases Dorothy Lamour’s Hollywood Boulevard star?
I love seeing people come out of darkness.
Just as it’s tempting to view Mulholland Drive‘s semiuseless dude passages as a simple opportunity for Lynch to spank Quentin Tarantino, this time around his humane take on Eastern Europe might be a genial yet hostile retort to Eli Roth. The director himself won’t say anything about his movies or their influences — he’ll never fess up that Mulholland Drive is essentially Carnival of Souls moved from Salt Lake City to showbiz central, even if one of Inland Empire‘s most terrifying moments echoes the zombies-running-at-the-camera shock tactics of Herk Harvey’s 1962 cult classic. (The scariest Dern close-up adds more voltage to the peak jolt of Takeshi Shimizu’s video version of Ju-on, which goes to show, what comes around goes around.) Inland Empire‘s new capitalist whores might be talking with or back to the ones in Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-Ever and Ilya Khrjanovsky’s 4, a recent movie with an amazing sound design overrun by Lynchian subsonic rumbles.
Fellini had me sit down. He was in a little wheelchair between two beds, and he took my hand, and we sat and talked for half an hour…. That was Friday night, and Sunday he went into a coma and never came out.
Inland Empire is more than long enough to have some dodgy or cringeworthy moments, which include a fair amount of bad acting by models, the jarring soundtrack misfire — rare for Lynch — of Beck’s "Black Tambourine," and a final lip sync of Nina Simone’s "Sinnerman." No one can double for the late Dr. Simone! But Dern, her dirty strands of hair looking like facial wrinkles and bruises, can double over endlessly. By the time she’s on Hollywood Boulevard, caught between a young female junkie and a homeless untouchable calmly discussing how to get the bus to Pomona, she’s suffered a shattering fall from the confines of her lavish, hermetically sealed estate in the recesses of the Inland Empire (both the one in her zip code and the one in her mind).
I went to a psychiatrist once.
"You gotta swing your hips, now. Come on, baby. Jump up. Jump back. Well, now, I think you’ve got the knack. Now that you can do it, let’s make a chain, now. (Come on baby, do the Loco-motion.) A chug-a chug-a motion like a railroad train, now. (Come on baby, do the Loco-motion.) Do it nice and easy, now, don’t lose control: a little bit of rhythm and a lot of soul. So come on, come on, do the Loco-motion with me."
So I say: Peace to all of you. *
All the sentences in italics are from Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, by David Lynch (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006).
INLAND EMPIRE
Opens Fri/9
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
www.inlandempirecinema.com
The devil wears Nolan Miller
TRASH TALKING BIO, TAKE ONE There are so many exquisite moments in steward Desmond Atholl’s tell-all that tells all. This ain’t no roman à clef, in other words; it’s a cutting, richly detailed, tension-filled diary of overseeing the Marlo Thomas–Phil Donahue household. Neither my favorite chapter title (“Free to Be … Me Me Me”) nor my favorite existential dilemma (“Each day as I rode up the elevator, I wondered, ‘Will I be greeted by Joan Crawford or Joan of Arc?’ “) comes close to my favorite anecdote, spilled in the ominously titled Chapter 26, “Who’s Got the Cookies?” Seems Marlo’d gathered her posse (which included Gloria Steinem) for a cruise on the couple’s yacht, the Mugsy (named after Marlo, of course). An oversight by the chef results in a snack smorgasbord that omits Marlo’s favorite dessert. “Nooooooo cookieeeesssss!!!” she screeches at Atholl. “No fucking cookies?” His reaction: “I had an irresistible urge to laugh, overwhelmed by the absurdity of the situation. Standing before me was an adult woman throwing a temper tantrum over some forgotten cookies…. I had visions of her floating through the sound, screaming to the seagulls, the fish — any creature that would listen — about her lost cookies.” After reflecting on his knee-jerk desire to spank her, he punch-lines by referring to the That Girl star as “that cookie monster.” And mighty tasty too. (Eddy)
TAKE TWO For anyone who’s been kicked while down, been laid low by an overbearing boss, or simply had to cope with some behemoth beeyatch, That Girl and Phil is the dog-eared paperback to keep by the bedside. Laugh yourself to sleep — or into a tumescent fantasy state over what you might poison-pen someday. My fave excerpt centers on Atholl’s primo turf — party planning — his sympathy for Thomas’s put-upon hubby, and a post–yacht cruise soiree for staffers on the 20th anniversary of Donahue. A disagreement over whether to sufficiently water the guests with cocktails turns into one of the volume’s more memorable tiffs:
“D-E-S-M-O-N-D!!!”
It wasn’t difficult to locate the source of the scream. Marlo was in the dining room glaring at the buffet, her face pale and contorted. “How dare you serve cold cuts in my house!” she exclaimed. “It’s just so low class and common! And white bread and pickles! And, my God, meat lasagna!! Fucker, you’ve done it again!!!”
Tired of her constant abuse, I replied, “Miss Thomas, please do not use the F word in my presence. It is not a word I am accustomed to hearing. In fact, I find it quite offensive. Phil requested this buffet, and these were his explicit instructions.”
Marlo pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen and loudly announced so that all the help could hear, “Take no notice of Phil! He knows nothing about being graceful! And never, never serve cold cuts in my house again! Even if the guests are common enough to eat them!”
Later, waiters hired for the evening express astonishment that the hollering hoyden could really be that beret tosser they had seen on TV. Atholl’s response: “Television is just a fantasy. This is real life!” Drama queens, start your sheep. (Kimberly Chun)
TAKE THREE I was a Borders book-shelving slave, making certain that Fiction, Mystery, and the all-important Film-TV-Radio sections maintained a sterile, organized-by-robots appearance. I did my time in the pre-Amazon, halcyon early days of the business, before it even chain-snaked out of Michigan, back when there were a mere two or three stores. (Oh woe, the lost income opportunities.) Somewhere up near the top of my overstuffed grab bag of Borders memories is the day the hardcover version of Atholl’s That Girl and Phil arrived. Anytime I was literally on my knees with a new batch of Leonard Maltin guides, I could reach over, and there was that girl — looking like she was going to jump out of her skin and race mad-skulled toward me! Nothing cured the Borders boredom of shifting the same books a few inches up and down the same shelves better than a quick look at Atholl’s huffily related tales of cold-cut and cookie rages and a glance at photos of his subject in full-on maniac mode. The only thing funnier: the day one of Paul Harvey’s mass-market paperbacks arrived with a printing error so extreme that the cover photo made him look like his face was melting from nuclear fourth-degree burns. And that, my friends, is the rest of the story. (Johnny Ray Huston)
Time-traveling flirtation of the day, week, month…
Lucio Battisti circa 1970 and 1971, I have a big crush on you. When time travel goes into effect, please meet me and some friends within the fucking great and gorgeous music of your Amore E Non Amore and Umanamente Uomo: Il Sogno.
Kirby Dominant
KIRBY DOMINANT
Starr: The Contemplations of a Dominator
(Rapitalism)
In a moment when Bay Area hip-hop is synonymous with hyphy in most people’s minds, it’s radio-shock savvy of Kirby Dominant to throw down a solo effort that follows no trends while his Niggaz and White Girlz project with Chris Sinister continues to generate word of mouth. Though its cover art features the same fuchsia hues of Niggaz and White Girlz — according to the man himself, fuchsia is the current signature color of the Rapitalism label — there is no denying that Starr: The Contemplations of a Dominator finds its creator on what he’s described as "some Jack Pollock shit," throwing different ideas and sounds at your head and seeing what sticks.
The first thing that does is the leadoff track, "Shenanigans," on which Dominator taps into an Irish atmosphere derived from time spent in Saskatchewan — but make no mistake, the guitar riff–driven result is no Leprechaun in the Hood pure silliness, and he steps far outside any record collection you’d find in a house of pain. Tapping into various space scientist and chemist cadences (much like Kool Keith in Dr. Octagon mode) to formulate what he deems musical style number 1,576,384,979, Dominant mocks faux producers with no range and knowledge, informing them that "Gil Evans would stab your ass with a toothbrush."
From there he journeys through the warm soul of the title track, lowering a voice that can be as mischievous as early Q-Tip in order to target MCs with no vocabulary whose rhymes are "fermentin’ like orange juice in prison." Going "solo like a nigga at the rodeo," he moves through "Come Outside" to a rock jam coda and then pays tribute to homegirl Joni Mitchell during "The Power of Stephen Padmore’s Shirt." On "So Right" he even gets so loose mentally that he turns instrumental, collaborating with Roy Hargrove to create a trumpet-inflected epic. In the near future Dominant plans to spread the new wave thuggin’ gospel further with Bloody Tuxedos, and he’s even venturing into classical music with Ensemble Mik Nawooj. Starr proves his wild wordplay can comfortably occupy and redesign any space between those wildly different zones.
New wave on the tracks
› johnny@sfbg.com
Hip-hop’s maze is infinite in size, shape, and perspective, but sometimes MCs get trapped at an impasse and start repeating each other like a gaggle of parrots. During times like that — times like now — it takes imaginative minds to break through and open new verbal doors. That’s what the two-brained Bay Area rhyme machine known as Kirb and Chris does on Niggaz and White Girlz (Rapitalism), a mixtape-turned-CD that launches the sound of new wave thuggin’: loops of ’80s hits and obscurities coupled with hard and hilarious truths about sex and race in America.
"We liked to go to the new wave clubs and do our thing," Kirby Dominant says when asked about the inspiration behind the concept. "We’d go out during the week and then on Sunday just compose what we went through, whether it was little chicks fuckin’ with us, kissin’ on us or dudes tryin’ to downplay us. We wanted to come through and fuck with taboos and myths and stereotypes. It’s not necessarily something we take to heart — I’ll fuck anything that moves, first of all, I don’t care what color it is."
Before they began recording, Kirb and Chris tried out the title Niggaz and White Girlz in social situations to see what kind of reactions it provoked. "A lot of people in our crew were, like, ‘Dude, that’s fucking ignorant,’ " Dominant remembers. "I’d say, ‘But if I called it Niggaz and Mexicans, you wouldn’t say anything, huh?’ "
"Or Niggaz with Niggaz," Chris Sinister adds.
Dominant claims some black-on-both-sides (or in clear jewel boxes and on the outs?) big names were up for cameos — until they heard about the subject matter. "I’m not going for these rappers saying they aren’t fucking white girls," he says. "I’ve been on tour, and there ain’t no fuckin’ black girls in Canada. I’m not believin’ it. I’ve been to those towns!"
The truth is calling the shots on Niggaz and White Girlz, and it’s open season on any gender or color that just can’t get enough. Dominant and Sinister sprinkle a ton of pop culture references on top of what one of the album’s characters calls a "Rick James and Teena Marie love" theme that could have been just a gimmick: Hill Street Blues, the Cosby kids, New Kids on the Block, Vampire’s Kiss, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Malcolm Little are all recruited for dissing or boasting purposes.
But dig beneath, and you’ll find track after track that takes post–P.M. Dawn new wave rap in unexpected directions. The keyboard stabs of Gary Numan’s "Down in the Park," for example, are an ideal sonic setting for Sinister to live up to his last name with a realist tale of the hustling that takes over city rec areas at night. Inspirational and even kind of spine-chilling, "In You" keeps Bono’s histrionics on "With or Without You" to a minimum, allowing Sinister and Dominant to spin candidly detailed morality tales with different endings about a greedy promoter and a woman turning tricks to support a habit. "Human" gives Dominant an opportunity to provide the frankly hilarious sequel that LL Cool J never made for "I Need Love." On "Money" the duo get hot but not counterfeit, and DJ Ice Water is at his coldest in revealing what the B-52’s "Legal Tender" has been all along — a prototypical money-stacking rap track, complete with synths and hand claps.
Some of the more obscure musical sources on Niggaz and White Girlz give Kirb and Chris the chance to lay down tracks on which the new wave sound is wholly submerged. "Change Your Mind" might be the album’s hottest cut, with Dominant mocking the "foul quotations and little heart murmurs" of MCs who have a fear of the kind of music made by, say, the Talking Heads. But the most mind-blowing moment is "Doorstep, Girl." There the duo flow over Morrissey — specifically, the Smiths’ single-mom scenario "This Night Has Opened My Eyes." Sinister, whose mother, Diane, gave him a copy of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis when he was young, taps into his own version of Moz’s melancholic and literary approach to lyric writing, addressing a girl who "turned my open heart into an abyss."
"Before the album I really got my heart broke," Sinister says when asked about his words. "I think the best thing is that Kirb really told me, ‘Man, just talk about what’s goin’ on.’ "
"A lot of times, people in hip-hop, they try to tell their whole life in one song," Dominant says. "I study songs, and I’m, like, ‘How come you can’t write a song about just waking up in the morning and how the sun looks while your girl’s still asleep?’ "
Misery and comedy live next door to each other on Niggaz and White Girlz. The many skits that Kirb and Chris create don’t just shame all the wack between-song scripts that have stunk up too many recordings since gangsta crashed Prince Paul’s party — they’re better and more perceptive than most sketches by comedians. On "Don’t You (Take All My Money)," Ice Water scratches and scribbles over the voice of a woman who says, among other things, "Y’all wasn’t playing when you said ’80s dance music shit!" According to Dominant, the woman’s cameo came from club hopping on the block during a typical 16-hour recording session. "We were at Hyde Street [Studios], and I was, like, ‘I need chicks.’ "
"Literally, we pulled those girls out of the club and got them in the studio," Sinister adds.
Dominant: "All we did was play the song and put them in the studio and let them talk over it. Whatever we liked, we took."
Sinister: "We could do outtakes of the shit they were sayin’. And that was a beautiful woman too."
A top contender for funniest skit has to be "Fuck You and White Bitches," in which a Goapele-loving young woman gets heated with Dominant because he took a girl named Becky to see Revenge of the Sith. "It got really strange, because I swear to God, when Kirb was doing that skit with her, she really started feelin’ it," Sinister says, referring to the skit’s actress, the cousin of one of Dominant’s ex-girlfriends.
"You know the part when she says, ‘I bet she can’t ride a dick like I can,’ and the white girl goes, ‘You wanna bet?,’ " Dominant asks. "That was my uncle’s idea."
"At first it just ended, but my uncle was, like, ‘You should add "You wanna bet?" on that shit,’ " he says to general laughter.
Creativity is a family affair in the world of Kirb and Chris. "No one could have made this album but us," Dominant says. "How many hood-ass niggas are you going to find listening to the B-52’s and knowing about them who can rap?" *
KIRB AND CHRIS
With C.L.A.W.S., Matthew Africa, Ryan Poulsen, and Special Fun Ambassador Cims
Sat/13, 9 p.m.
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell, SF
$8
www.kirbandchris.com
www.rapitalism.com
Alexis Tioseco’s Favorite SEA Films of 2006
Alexis A. Tioseco, editor-in-chief of the superb site Criticine, contributed a manifesto/essay to the Guardian’s 2006 film issue. He’s also compiled an annotated list of favorite films from Southeast Asia, which cites a number of emerging filmmakers, including the intriguing Edwin. Here’s Alexis:
With the space limited to me, I’d like to run my list a bit differently, writing strictly about Southeast Asian cinema (lord knows it gets overlooked enough), and listing a feature, a short, and an older work for each major SEA filmmaking country: Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore (I cheat with Malaysia but that’s ok).
Still from A Very Slow Breakfast, by Edwin
Guillermo Del Toro on eggs, ghost sightings, lucid dreaming, Catholicism, the “supranatural,” uterine imagery and more
Now is the time to see Pan’s Labyrinth — and to read Sara Schieron’s interview with the man behind the movie, Guillermo Del Toro.
Guillermo Del Toro
Gleamy-eyed as Santa Claus and every bit as generous, Guillermo del Toro recently visited SF to discuss his latest film, Pan’s Labyrinth. Already seen by droves of festivalgoers, Pan’s Labyrinth is worthy of profound praise. Both Del Toro and his movies have developed a reputation for converting skeptics to affectionate believers – perhaps this has something to do with his genuine (and apparently altruistic) interest in the world. He’s disarming in his curiosity. (Note: Had Del Toro not said, “Don’t chicken out,” the personal bits that follow would so have been cut.)
DVD-Arrr! Jason Shamai’s Mexico City Pirate Diary…Uncut!
One highlight of this week’s 2006 Film opus is Jason Shamai’s tale of DVD buying and watching in Mexico City. Here it is, sans the cuts required for it to fit into the newspaper:
When I got to Mexico City’s main ceremonial drag, where national parades and military marches are flanked by the Art Nouveau-style Palacio de Bellas Artes and the most striking Sears department store building you will ever see, it had transformed into a full-on tent city: blue tarp, camping tents, and thousands of political cartoons (ranging from the dryly satirical to the scatological) flowed east for at least half a mile and filled the Zócalo, the city’s vast central plaza where people had already been camped for weeks. Just a few days before, Mexico’s highest electoral court had confirmed National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderon as the country’s next president. His opponent Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), who challenged the cleanliness of the election that had him losing by a little over half of a percentage point, had asked that his camped-out supporters stay right where they were until they could force a vote-by-vote recount. The recount had been denied and Calderon was now certain to replace outgoing president Vicente Fox, but AMLO’s supporters were still there in their virtual city within a city.
Scent as identity: A conversation with Perfume director Tom Tykwer
Tom Tykwer’s film version of the cult novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer hits screens this week. Sara Schieron recently talked with the director:
Peter Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer has inspired a lot of musical adaptations. German band Rammstein and Portugese band Moonspell have both called the book an influence, and Kurt Cobain, who named the book as his favorite, wrote the song “Scentless Apprentice” in reaction to it.
Tom Tykwer directing Perfume
The novel’s musical associations in mind, it’s not just coincidence that put Tom Tykwer in charge of the film adaptation. A composer as well as a writer/director, Tykwer is most recognized in the US for his techno-paced action drama Run Lola Run. His newest film, which takes place in 18th century France, follows a pace better suited for the Berlin Philharmonic. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a chiaroscuro painting set to music. As much about love and identity as it is about legend and fame, it inspires questions. Tykwer let me ask him a few — beginning with one that provoked a high-pitched, giddy laugh.
Super visions: the year in film
› johnny@sfbg.com
The end of each year brings a blitz of polls tabuutf8g the best movies and music of the past 12 months. These monster projects spit up a ton of fun lists, but in terms of science or revelatory truth, they range from suspect to useless. In contrast, the Guardian‘s annual end of the year film issue gives ideas and opinions precedence over bogus math. Antiauthoritarian up through the last second of every December, we’ve discovered that if you collect commentary from a varied group of imaginative people, certain patterns of creative resistance emerge that are a lot more revealing than any number one spot.
This year, for example, it’s apparent that (perhaps spurred by the YouTube boom?) television is on the upswing. Critic Chuck Stephens, Brick writer-director Rian Johnson, and "Midnites for Maniacs" programmer Jesse Ficks all sing its praises, while A Sore for Sighted Eyes, by TV Carnage mastermind Derrick Beckles, a.k.a. Pinky, takes found-footage montage to areas of derangement Sergey Eisenstein, let alone today’s Hollywood directors, couldn’t conceive. Speaking of great derangement: Jason Shamai contributes a pirated-DVD diary that’s one of the best pieces of movie writing I’ve read this year.
The varied new currents of Mexican cinema, surveyed here by Sergio de la Mora, show up on a number of people’s lists of faves. Over the next few years more and more people will be recognizing the visionary talents of a tight-knit community of young filmmakers in the Philippines, including Raya Martin, who contributes to this issue. Alexis A. Tioseco, whose excellent Web site Criticine is in perfect sync with the movement, has written a sharply observant and keenly sympathetic manifesto about it, also included here.
In the United States troubled dudes (analyzed in these pages by Cheryl Eddy and Max Goldberg), bad mamas (well rendered by Kimberly Chun), and fucked-up families (pinpointed by Dennis Harvey) ruled the best low-budget features and worst moneymaking hits. That is, when a visiting journalist named Borat wasn’t giving new meaning to the phrase high grosses by lampooning the ugliest American behavior in the last days of the Bush era.
Locally, some of my favorite films were made by this issue’s cover stars, David Enos and Sarah Enid Hagey, who frequently collaborate and star in each other’s work. Enos has drawn a comic for the issue; it gives readers a hint of the perceptive scrawls and deadpan hilarity that characterize the one-of-a-kind male portraiture in his animated shorts, which often focus on musical figures (The Dennis Wilson Story, Leonard Cohen in Alberta, Light My Fire). Hagey’s movie The Great Unknown features a funny performance by Enos as an undersung auteur. In her Lovelorn Domestic, she lights each scene to create an eerie glow and portrays a silent wife with a giant, beaked head who mercilessly pecks her protesting beloved’s eyes out. If Hagey’s recent movies and Enos’s self-published comics and books (Pock Mark, On the Grain Teams) are any indication, they — along with their Edinburgh Castle Film Night cohorts Cathy Begien and Jose Rodriguez — are just beginning to tap into big talents. Look for them in the future.
Super visions: The Guardian year in film
Cinema 2006: Top 10s, rants, raves and gushes
Johnny Ray Huston’s top 10 viewing experiences
Dennis Harvey on fucked up families
Chuck Stephens: cinematic patriot acts
Sergio De La Mora on the further reaches of Mexican cinema
Jason Shimai’s Mexico City pirate diary
Alexis A Tioseco surveys the New Phillipine Cinema
Max Goldberg: A great year for boy-men!
Girls and monsters
› johnny@sfbg.com
Impish skittering insect fairies, horned Jean Cocteau–<\d>spawned romantic beasts, lascivious frogs that make Jabba the Hutt seem schooled by Jenny Craig, and murderous monsters with hands on their eyes — no doubt about it, the baroque and neo-Raphaelite splendor (or Splenda, since it’s largely CGI-based) of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth leaves the majority of 2006’s unimpressive prestige movies looking drab and mechanical. But as Del Toro’s rich pageant attempts to shove what feels like 12 dozen solemn manifestations of Cate Blanchett aside in order to make a valid, exciting run for the Academy Awards, it’s important to realize that the director’s vision, while creative, has a definite antecedent: one of the least-known greatest movies of all time, Víctor Erice’s sublime 1973 The Spirit of the Beehive. Like Erice’s movie, Pan’s Labyrinth is an allegorical look back at Francisco Franco–<\d>era Spain, as seen through the eyes of a little girl.
Del Toro has admitted that The Spirit of the Beehive has seeped into his soul — though not, to some detriment, into his filmmaking style. Its influence is evident even in the architectural emphasis of his movie’s title, which trades Erice’s honeycombs for a maze. Within the movie itself, however, this labyrinth overtly evokes Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, as young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) races through corner-laden leafy and stony passages away from the murderous clutches of her stepfather, Franco minion Captain Vidal (Sergi López). Her fight for life traverses the film’s narrative — a much larger labyrinth that ultimately connects her imagination to the lives of others.
The bittersweet outcome of that struggle won’t surprise anyone familiar with Shakespeare, not to mention Del Toro’s past movies or his enlightened, enthusiastic love of John Carpenter — a rare Hollywood director who doesn’t think a pigtailed child with an ice cream cone is above the ruthlessness of the streets. In Del Toro’s 1997 mutant cockroach thriller, Mimic, an orphan in the sewers meets a fate similar to that of a sewer orphan in Bong Joon-ho’s upcoming The Host, the only movie to outdo Pan’s Labyrinth as a politicized genre entry at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Both Bong and Del Toro measure the sins of the world against a girl’s heroism, and while they’ve learned about the power of spectacle from Steven Spielberg, they haven’t swallowed his saccharine formulas — or pursued his nationalist and reactionary political tendencies.
In Del Toro’s case, this means the Mexican-born director repeatedly returns to Spain under the Fascist reign of Franco to construct fantastic but critical parables in which children represent resistance. In this regard, Pan’s Labyrinth is a sister film to 2001’s The Devil’s Backbone, with Ofelia serving as a solitary counterpart to the boys of that film’s haunted school. It’s a mistake — made by at least one pan of Pan — to attribute the film’s fairy-tale quality to sexism on the part of its director; without question, Del Toro is paying homage to Erice’s Spirit, perhaps the greatest movie ever made about a child’s — not just girl’s — consciousness.<\!s>
PAN’S LABYRINTH
Open Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
www.panslabyrinth.com
HUDSON RIVER
Do you know where you’re going to — have you ever seen Mahogany? What am I showing you? Well, for a start, that the facsimile of the Motown story presented by Dreamgirls is phony with a capital P. By the time Berry Gordy and Diana Ross reached their particular shared impasse on the road from Motown to Hollywood fantasyland, she was almost fatally eager to fold a twiglike body into the two-dimensional shallowness of fashion. In contrast, in Dreamgirls the ridiculously sweet and naive Ross type played by Beyoncé Knowles is still wholly unaware that she’s shoving others out of the spotlight and yet also healthy, poised, and ready to share supposedly deep insights about her life. As for Jamie Foxx’s Gordy clone, the story soft-sells the producer and label head’s bad reputation — and misunderstands his genius. Most songs here may be Broadway ready, but in terms of melodicism and rhythm, they wouldn’t pass muster as Supremes B-sides.
Thank god, then, for Jennifer Hudson. The surprise of Dreamgirls isn’t that her Candi Staton–rich and deep singing steals the movie; everyone knows going in that she’s going to tell them — yell at them! — that she’s not going. But she does more than that, making good on the “you’re gonna love me” part of her show-stopping lyric with an overall performance that has more nuance and naturalism than those of the experienced actors around her. (Johnny Ray Huston)
DREAM GIRLS
Opens Fri/15
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
To sing like a mockingbird: A conversation with Nathaniel Dorsky
In conjunction with an upcoming screening at San Francisco Cinematheque, Nathaniel Dorsky recently discussed his ideas and work with fellow filmmaker Michelle Silva of Canyon Cinema; Canyon is the sole distributor of Dorsky’s exquisite personal films, which are not available on video.
A shorter version of this interview, with introductory notes, can be found within this week’s issue of the Guardian.
Michelle Silva: First I want to ask about your recent book Devotional Cinema. I think it’s some of the most thoughtful and introspective writing on the human experience of cinema and the physical properties we share with the medium — such as our internal visual experience, metaphor, and the art of seeing. What’s great about the book is that it’s accessible to people who aren’t well versed in cinema, but who might be interested in a deeper understanding of their own senses.
Nathaniel Dorsky: The basic ideas for the book were originally formulated because I was hired to teach a course on avant-garde film at UC Berkeley for a semester. I didn’t want to teach a survey course on avant-garde cinema; I didn’t think I could do that with real enthusiasm, I thought it would be a little flat. I decided that what was most interesting to me about avant-garde film — or at least the avant-garde films that I found most interesting — was a search for a language which was purely a filmic language.
Still from Nathaniel Dorsky’s film Threnody
Not something limited to film, but a purely filmic language that also had human value to it. There are various filmmakers who’ve explored human cinema language, or cinema human language, which is something other than using film to replicate a written language form, whether it be the novel or the poem. I was interested in something that was actually intrinsic to the nature of cinema, expressive as cinema, and at the same time expressive of our human needs and human worth.
Mexico City, mi amor
› johnny@sfbg.com
If you live in the city and you’ve been blessed, you’ve had the experience of meeting a lover on a favorite street corner, in an open square, or by a favorite vista or shadowy and partially hidden place. The opening scenes of Julián Hernández’s Broken Sky tap precisely into this hide-and-seek game for grown-ups — and the heightened expectations and disappointments it can create. Plaintive college student Gerardo (Miguel Ángel Hoppe) has the rare type of exaggeratedly masculine-feminine features — eyes wide and almost crossed — that are made for melodrama. As he waits over and over in different settings for the arrival of his boyfriend, Jonas (Fernando Arroyo), a variety of excited emotions flutter across his rapt face.
This dance of expectation and eventual pleasure is just one of the urban pas des deux within Hernández’s second feature. Broken Sky might very well be a four-way chain of pas de deux pieces, tracing the gradual breakup of a first love. At its very best, the movie creates something hauntingly, intuitively perceptive from these portraits of everyday urban movement. Near the end of the film, when Hernández and cinematographer Alejandro Cantú return to one such repeated pattern — Gerardo’s movement around an apartment bed that once had a magnetic force for Jonas and him but now only seems to repel them from each other — the effect is heartbreaking.
But who will have the patience to reach that moment? At nearly two and a half hours, Broken Sky would have benefited from a rigorous edit that not only reduced its run time by 40 to 60 minutes but also removed the voice-over passages that provide virtually its only dialogue. (This suggestion is from someone who can comprehend, let alone appreciate, the languid rhythms and unconfined eros of Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul — in other words, it isn’t the conservative miscomprehension of a New Times–era Village Voice.) By even occasionally imposing heavy-handed and pseudopoetic narration on the proceedings, Hernández seems to doubt his core instinct that the words of pop songs, the semiotics of T-shirts, and the looks on Gerardo’s and Jonas’s faces are — aside from a classroom lecture on Aristophanes — all that is needed to tell their story.
That’s a shame, especially because the director has an extraordinary collaborator in Cantú. Together their camerawork charts, colors, and most of all cruises Mexico City with a flamboyant fluidity equal to that of Diego Martínez Vignatti’s cinematography for Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven — another recent movie from Mexico that (along with Ricardo Benet’s News from Afar and Fernando Eimbcke’s Duck Season) trumps the efforts of better-known contemporaries who’ve ventured to Hollywood. Like Battle in Heaven, Broken Sky contains enough 360-degree pans to make even Brian de Palma spin-dizzy. However, compared to Reygadas’s baroque nationalist allegory (or the urbane sensuality of Night Watch, Edgardo Cozarinsky’s recent hustler’s-eye view of Buenos Aires society), its young love narrative seems trite. Strip away the potent combination of Hoppe’s puppy dog pathos and Arroyo’s pout, and the message seems to be that you should never wreck your relationship for a dude with a tacky rat-tail hairdo.
Had Hernández’s presentation remained mute save for the lyricism of ballads and Dvorak-or-disco-beat instrumental passages, Gerardo’s and Jonas’s archetypal qualities might be as convincing and layered as their embodiment of — and struggles against — the callow surfaces of contemporary gay life. That latter friction took on black-and-white overt outsider form in the director’s first full-length film (after almost a decade of shorts), 2003’s Jean Cocteau–influenced A Thousand Clouds of Peace. Shot in color, Broken Sky resides closer to gay mainstream consumerist codes, while still critiquing them via a defiant romanticism. In a sense, its extended length could be seen as a direct antithesis to the increasing length of gay porn movies in the DVD age, with each protracted chapter straining toward a skipped heartbeat instead of an orgasm.
Quoting Marguerite Duras at the outset, semisuccessfully treating a twink’s misbegotten nightclub hookup as the stuff of epic tragedy, and taking even more time than Duras might to tell a simple story (not to mention one that involves characters she would’ve found silly), Hernández can’t be accused of lacking audacity. He knows how to ravish the viewer — an excellent quality in a director who loves to choreograph love. The fact that Broken Sky’s title credit doesn’t arrive until nearly an hour into its action — or stasis — more than hints he’s influenced by Apichatpong’s revelatory Blissfully Yours, but unlike that innovative director, he’s still working, conflictedly, within the framework of contemporary gay identity and its attendant commercialism. He and João Pedro Rodrigues (O Fantasma; Two Drifters) are the standout moviemakers in this restrictive realm, but as of now, lacking Rodrigues’s devil-may-care imagination, Hernández will have to settle for number two — with a Bullitt T-shirt. SFBG
BROKEN SKY
Dec. 1 and Dec. 3–7
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
(415) 621-6120
The harsh truth – and lies – of the camera eye: A talk with Turner Prize nominee Phil Collins
Today in London, Turner Prize nominee Phil Collins held a press conference in which people who’ve appeared on TV discussed their experiences — specifically, how their lives were damaged or altered by their participation in “reality” shows. British newspapers and television are already reporting on the conference, part of the second installment in Collins’s country-hopping series The Return of the Real, and one aspect of his entry in the Tate Britain exhibition.
Phil Collins
Last week, I talked on the phone with Collins, allegedly one of the ten most important artists in the world, according to Flash Art. I know I count him as a current personal favorite, partly due to his Baghdad Screentests (2002), a rare example of Andy Warhol-influenced, attracted but not embedded contemporary reportage. It sets silent video portraits of young men and women to some of Collins’s favorite pop songs, with the pensive men sometimes inspiring swoons ranging from “Well I Wonder” to “I Feel Love.” The relationship between image and sound is a basic and yet rich one: the songs can resonate as personal expression by Collins, as commentary on the oncoming Bush-sanctioned bombing and occupation, and (only perhaps, and if so, only occasionally) as an imagined first-person voicing of the the subjects’ unspoken thoughts. This type of meta-commentary on mediated image dates back to at least 1999 in Collins’s art. That year’s How to Make a Refugee steps into and back from a photo shoot depicting a family from Kosovo.
Replacing the profound stillness of Baghdad Screentests with hired (and increasingly tired) movement, Collins’s answer video to a relevant ’60s film, They Shoot Horses (2004), stages a dance marathon in Ramallah, Palestine; his video triptych from the same year, The Louder You Scream, the Faster We Go, tweaks the music video form by taking artistic license with songs by unsigned acts, turning them into soundtracks for visions of elderly ladies’ dance classes and a hand job update of Warhol’s Blow Job.
Still from dunya dunlemiyor, a video installation by Phil Collins