kung fu in still images

The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai 2013)

It's been months, almost half a year--time to start writing again. The much awaited new Wong Kar-wai film, certainly a comeback after the questionable My Blueberry Nights (2007), nonetheless leaves me with a certain ambivalence, a persistent ringing, if you will, which I would like to put into words. The film follows the story of the martial arts master known as Ip Man, played by Tony Leung, through the tribulations of the Chinese twentieth century. Beginning in the rivalry and attempted unification between "northern" and "southern" kung fu styles, the film takes a turn from "spring" into "winter" with the Japanese occupation of Foshan where the protagonist lives. Ip Man ends up after the war in Hong Kong, where he re-encounters Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi), the daughter of the aging northern grandmaster, with whom he had fallen in love during a beautifully edited fight earlier in the film. The familiar trope of the missed encounter even in reunion unfolds here: Gong Er has vowed not to marry and not to practice kung fu as revenge against her adopted brother for his collaboration with the Manchukuo regime. The irruption of history makes for unfulfilled possibilities, "like a chess game left in mid-match," as Gong Er says in a segment of well-crafted literary dialogue, characteristic of the film as a whole. 

Much has already been said elsewhere about the way in which the film derails conventions of the genre (e.g. Shelley Kraicer's review in Cinemascope)--this much can be taken as a given, since this is not the first time Wong slowed down and sped up the movement in a martial arts film, nor can the introduction of history and elliptical narration into such a genre be taken in this day as a sign of authorial genius. What perplexes me instead seems to be the insistence on the part of Wong in situating his signature style--with its manipulations of movement, poetic non-linear editing, its familiar pathos of nostalgia and separation--within the skeleton of a historical epic. The telltale signs of the historical film are all there: titles introducing historical personages, intertitles announcing the arrival of events and the fates of characters, a toned down color palette, the interspersing of archival footage as establishing shots for dramatic development. Such are methods most acutely found in recent "official" PRC historicals, released to commemorate important dates, such as The Opium War (1997) or, and forgive me if the comparison is in bad taste, The Founding of a Party [alternatively The Great Revival] (2011). The latter film, released on the 90 year anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, pushes the use of introductory titles to the extreme, leaving the uninitiated viewer with a kitchen sink of "important figures" whose narrative lines disappear shortly after they are introduced--no doubt an effect of having to satisfy an equally messy sink of distinguished personages in the present. The titles, in the aforementioned film as well as in The Grandmaster, seem to be an effort at nailing things down, of securing the link between free floating affects and the bare bones of a historical reality, reduced, in final instance, to a series of dates and names, and the occasional found footage which bears in its production values the signature of time. All corresponding to an official chronology of "China at large" in the twentieth century: 1937, 1945, 1949, 1951...

Anxiety of the digital? No doubt. This is certainly not the first film in which Wong Kar-wai has exhibited a fetishizing awareness of small mementos: the expiration dates on canned food in Chungking Express, a drawer of receipts in Fallen Angels, the 2046 of 2046. The architecture of numbers give at least something to hold onto in a floating world and "culture of disappearance," even, and especially if the numbers are the call signs of the ephemeral. The choice to place Grandmaster within the common chronology of the PRC seems deliberate, especially for the first film of the director that locates significant portions of the diegesis on the twentieth century mainland. The film hints at the need to take leave of the cosmopolitan provinciality of Hong Kong in order to think "China at large," even if this involves a certain complicity with the key points of PRC historiography. The desire, however, is to open up this historiography to something else that is yet quite ambiguous. "We Cantonese don't just think in terms of north and south," says Ip Man. It is with this problem in mind that I want to discuss a few of the film's aesthetic preoccupations.

                            

The Grandmaster features an overwhelming interest in group photographs and frontal mise-en-scene configurations. Characters are shown to quite literally step into photographs, which sometimes dissolve into grainy still images, and more rarely into images of real photographs taken of Ip Man and his family or disciples. Of particular interest are moments in which the grain and the creases in an old black and white photograph are superimposed directly onto the screen where moving characters are in the process of posing. Here, digital processes bring to the foreground the telltale signs of the photograph's authenticity, its direct physical relationship to reality: they freeze the present in the form of the past. The relationship between the archive and the contemporary, here, is a two-way street. The frontality of the film's archival photographs shuttle the oblique angles and extreme close-ups that dominate most of its duration into a fictional and operatic realm, while the passage of moving images into old photographs suggest a desire to fix the floating image to a discrete temporality, to a moment, any moment whatsoever but a definite one: today the image is in search of its punctum. 

The highly stylized combat sequences replete with stitched-together with slow-motion close-ups exhibit a similar temporal tension. The actual choreography of the fights (particularly between Tony Leung and  Zhang Ziyi, two actors whose martial-arts abilities are doubtful, although it is said that both went through several years of training in the making of the film) seem to emphasize single moves, or a short series, slowed down for atmospheric effect. Wong's time-axis manipulation, as in his photographs, searches steadfastly for the secrets of movement. Unlike Marey and Mulbridge, for Wong movement is always a missed encounter, and hence, each sweep of Ip Man's feet in the rain drenched street becomes the index of nostalgia. Here, the pathos is decidedly different from that of In the Mood for Love and 2046. The sights and scenes of mid-century Hong Kong are rendered in found footage, while the auras of everyday life are toned down, with a blander color palette, tending toward a far more generic mode: an elaborately decorated brothel (reminiscent of Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower), a snowy expanse, a rainy street, raindrops on a straw hat.  These are worlds taken from a range of cinematic references, and are perhaps the dream of a meeting place between lovers. But this place is always elusive insofar as the terms of the original separation shift without notice. Unfulfilled love in Wong's cinema is never simply a matrix for heterosexual frustration nor is it strictly allegory for historical divisions (Hong Kong/China), but the definition of what escapes. Here, Wong draws from a rich tradition of historical family melodramas, such as The Spring River Flows East (Cai Chusheng, 1947), in which modern historical circumstances drive a family apart. The protagonist of the genre is never one or the other character but the emotional tone of the separation itself, concretized as war or class or politics but never exhausted in it. In a pivotal sequence, grandmaster Gong challenges Ip Man to break the moon cake he holds in his hand (a cake that symbolizes da tuanyuan, completed retribution or the happy ending). In their dance to achieve the best position from which to administer the blow (here recalling the Tai Chi competition of "pushing hands"), the moon cake breaks on its own accord. If Wong Kar-wai is the master of dancing without touching, of pure and indefinite syncopation, then The Grandmaster is what happens to the cake.

skyfall into history

You would expect the title of the new 007 flick to refer to a hypertechnological orbital program of apocalyptic proportions, an update perhaps of the genocidal plot in Moonraker, as opposed to James Bond's abandoned family estate in Scotland. Rather than technological threat, we have the primordial stage of a cruel maternal intrigue, and all the better for it. The Daniel Craig James Bond films have always tended to displace the sexy surface of spy games toward psychology, what it means to be a man and an killer agent at the same time, except this time they got it right, and fascinatingly so. This voyage inward journeys away from the celestial surfaces of technological counter-espionage into the imperial archive: 007 and Mi6's identity crisis leads not to a retroactive justification of covert intelligence operations, but into that other world of "shadows" created by the intelligence agency, more specifically M (her majesty, mother, murder), in the first place. But let us begin at the beginning.

Maternal Betrayal. Opening sequence: M. kills James Bond. Setting: Turkey, the old underworld (struggling for admission to the EU, and the new cosmopolitanism that has no need for spooks).
Bad guy has a hard-drive with the names of every undercover Mi6 agent. 007 is fighting him on the top of a train. A second agent, Eve, across the way with a sniper rifle, is ordered to shoot even though she doesn't have a clean shot. She hits Bond and he falls into the river. Of course Bond is not dead, he is rescued by a woman.. the old story. Raoul Silva, main antagonist, who was once an Mi6 agent and was also betrayed: M turned him over to the Chinese during the Hong Kong handover. Except he got the bad end of the transference. The film's intrigue revolves around his plot for revenge. Against M (her majesty, mother, murder). James Bond, the good son, defends M to the death. Melanie Klein: "the infant directs his feelings of gratification and love towards the 'good' breast, and his destructive impulses and feelings of persecution towards what he feels to be frustrating, i.e. the 'bad' breast...The infant's relative security is based on turning the good object into an ideal one as a protection against the dangerous and persecuting object...It is characteristic of the infant's emotional life that there are rapid fluctuations between love and hate...the idealized object being a corollary of the persecutory, extremely bad one."

Relations with the mother have the advantage of being more radically uncertain than anything oedipal (which, as it goes, is pretty much the same thing every time). The confusion of love and violence. The necessity of making a decision with no foundation in law. Called upon by the Prime Minister to justify the existence of a field espionage activities in the age of tracking algorithms and satellites, M refers to a world of shadows that hides underneath the surfaces of visibility: the terror is precisely that we do not know who the enemy is. As case in point, Raoul, executing his assassination plot, bursts into the hearing room dressed in police uniforms. M's world is beneath and beyond the surfaces of information, uniforms, one in which one has to decide to "shoot or not to shoot" without probable cause. Which cannot be justified to civil society, except by the phrase: "what I see there terrifies me." But M's platonic terrortalk is undercut by the fact that here the terror is not outside, it is internal to the spy organization itself, its own history and betrayals. Good breast, bad breast, good object, bad object, good boy, bad boy. The maternal metonym becomes the only storytelling technique in a world where even spy agencies face the existential threat of austerity measures.

When M dies she is replaced by a man named Mallory. Who has his arm in a sling. A brave new world. 

The gadget and the archive. A significant sequence occurs when 007 meets Q, the technologist, in a museum, where they both look at The Fighting Temeraire, a Joseph Turner painting depicting an old Man O'War being dragged off to retirement. Obvious metaphor.

The new Q, hipster computer nerd, hands 007 his weapons kit: a fingerprint operated gun and a radio. "That's it?" says James Bond. "What were you expecting, an exploding pen?" says Q, "we don't really do that anymore." Beyond being a comical riff, the downsizing of 007's arsenal bespeaks a more radical division of labor between the world of computers and the world of the field agent, whose function is demystified of it's technological excesses: he is a guy with a gun, a grunt, murderer with a license. The thing in itself. Hence the film's drive away from the technologized universe, in which nothing is safe (because it can't be "seen") toward the archive of her majesty. 

The high tech Mi6 headquarters is destroyed by a hack into the gas vent system. M's computer is hacked through and through. The new headquarters are moved to a WWII bunker where, as it is said, "Winston Churchill worked." The film regresses (M: "where are we going?" Bond: "back in time"), into the depths of the 20th century, into the blood red sun of the British Empire. From the bunker to the countryside, to 007's family home, where the defenders are armed only with shotguns and dynamite against the enemy's helicopters. And the final blow is struck with a throwing knife..."sometimes the simplest weapons are the best ones." At a turning point of the battle, Bond blows up his own mansion, "I hated this place anyways": the final fight is lit by the red glare of Bond's burning house, of his childhood where he was orphaned, the blood red sun... This red sun makes the figures visible, as if it were the condition of possibility for the film, the entire Bond series. A haunting glimpse into the film's own historicity, and the content of Bond's identity crisis. 

What gives occasion for this radical reflexivity? It is a critique of intelligence services while appearing to support it (there is nothing in the film that contradicts what Raoul tells Bond, that they, the agents, are rats trapped in a bucket who have resorted to killing and eating each other). But more profoundly, it brackets the twentieth century and its mise-en-scene, and, in a surprisingly lucid manner, tells us that the future is the past's unfinished business. Contrast the primordial mise-en-scene of the burning house with the fallen statues at Raoul's home base, hauntingly reminiscent of the dethroned statues of the former Eastern Bloc. 

(Bad son standing in front of fallen statue on deserted island)

(A piece of Lenin's hand, from Theo Angelopoulos' Landscape in the Mist)

Skyfall hence stages the postmodern tale of maternal transference on the ruins of twentieth century dreams. Object theory would have it that the relationship to the maternal breast constitutes the distinct outlines of "objects" to begin with, objects which always have a good side and a bad side, and hence, we could say that really, the film is dealing with the twentieth century itself, as object, as something that the contemporary pair of globalization/terror cannot disavow, however desperately it tries. 

The Three Asias. The film begins in Turkey, which appears as a worn out mise-en-scene, a part of the old underworld. Bond's second mission takes him to Shanghai, and the aerial shots of Pudong glowing with light tell us that this is the new technological future (to which the UK cannot catch up). Against which Britain retreats into WWII and Empire (interesting comparison here between the last two summer olympic opening ceremonies: as response to Beijing's digital spectacle, London proffers the industrial revolution). From Shanghai to Macau: an equally lit up universe, yet with traditional "asian" architecture. Macau remains here, and has been since the days of Empire, the casino of the East.  East Asia is the place where "things happen"--it is the future that terrifies in its visibility, its unrivaled technological spectacle. It is double: glass facades of Pudong and the old East of sensuality and prostitution--Macau as Cathay. Here, we meet perhaps the most important character in the film (structurally speaking), so important that she has to be killed off before it is half over. Sévérine (Bérénice Lim Marlohe)--racially ambiguous, wearing just a bit too much makeup, black lips,  fingernails a bit too long. She works for Raoul, who rescued her from prostitution. But she's lost faith in him and fears him, and wants to be turned by Bond (who doesn't?). 

It is, of course, scout's code that all women in a spy thriller are only bad by circumstance and not by nature; they can always be rescued by the right man. She works with Bond until they are captured by Raoul. Raoul ties her up against a defunct statue, and invites Bond to a gentleman's game of who can shoot the shot glass of Scotch off her head. Bond misses, Raoul kills her. "Waste of Scotch" says Bond. Besides for showing that, for both protagonist and antagonist, women are playthings (stemming from the same mother complex), Sévérine's fate reveals what ultimately cannot swallowed in Skyfall's historical remediation. She is what has become of the old Cathay, from Orient-as-whorehouse to the a deadly, sleek, postmodern surface that nonetheless hides countless terrors within: Macau--Sévérine --Shanghai (we meet her first in Shanghai). Blurring racial identity and historical causality, she has to follow the path of all femme fatales in narrative cinema. The editing pattern of her death:

Raoul shoots.
Shotglass drops to the ground, unbroken.
Reaction shot of Bond, who says "Waste of Scotch"

Scotch, Scotland, Mother, Murder.

replication as eternal recurrence: D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (2012)

I've been neglecting this blog for a few months, but I plan to make up for lost time. There will be a series of shorter posts on films that I've seen in the last four months, but let us start with what I saw tonight: Cloud Atlas (Andy Wachowski, 2012). It will provide a good control for the other films that I have on this list, all of which meditate on the same permanent crisis; a quiet, solid-state crisis, and all the more unbearable on this account. As teaser, I'll list a few of the movies that I've been meaning to write about:

Cosmopolis 
The Dark Knight Rises 
Samsara
Condition (Die Lage) 

But let us begin with this modern day version of Griffith's Intolerance...

To the left is the poster advertising the film in front of Theater 5 at the landmark Lagoon. All five digital mise-en-scenes--let us just call them "sets" for convenience--are immediately legible. We have the Downton Abbey-esque early 20th century aristocratic mansion, the futuristic asian city of Blade Runner (but also Ghost in a Shell etc.), a dark conspiratorial installation ala Resident Evil, the open 19th century seas of Pirates of the Caribbean or Amistad, and the starry skies of Star Wars or Contact (against which Tom Hanks' face is framed, stereotypically). The film begins with the starry skies and tilts down to a post-apocalyptic campfire story which transitions into a daytime forest reminiscent of Hunger Games. If this were 1916, one could accuse this film of recycling studio sets. Here, Warner Bros. is recycling rendering algorithms. But who doesn't recycle algorithms? If there is one lesson that we immediately glean from this film, it is the homogeneity of digital images in contemporary commercial cinema--we're not talking about sterotyped plots or characters (these are as old as cinema itself) but the typology of texture and light.

80 percent of films today fit within one of these texture-types and their corresponding historical obsessions. This is lesson one of Cloud Atlas; it reveals the stagnation of the digital cinema of attractions simply by placing these historical-textural mise-en-scenes in the same film. Commercial cinema is in crisis.

Clocking at 2 hours and 44 minutes, Cloud Atlas pursues five separate stories in different historical eras:  1849, 1933, 1973, 2012, the future in a blade-runner-esque New Seoul, and a post-apocalyptic Saxon-ish village. We learn at the end of the film, inconsequentially, that the final world, or maybe the entire series, does not take place on earth.

The film flirts with the eternal return: it seems like everyone is fighting to same kinds of battles, saying the same kind of words; they all seem to have lived past lives. Each age has its own struggles against what D.W. Griffith would have called "intolerance." None of this is surprising, since all the characters are played by the same recognizable actors. And its all deja vu because each sub-plot is itself unoriginal. We've seen it before: the 70s conspiracy thriller, sci-fi revolutionary martyrdom, Amistad, psychologically driven historical epic about a composer, the present-day comedy about senior citizens in a retirement home....

And the color of the sky, too, is a cliche.

What separates Cloud Atlas from Intolerance are 96 years of film history, of which the director Andy Wachowski appears to be very aware. It is true, Griffith dealt with typologies, with generic gestures, and generic characteristics in different historical epochs (christ, the modern girl, etc.), but Intolerance took place at a time when the generic was utopian; it promised a universal language. Copyrighted rendering algorithms make the generic a foundation of capital accumulation, and what we witness is not promise but saturation: the bad kind of eternal recurrence.

The music. The theme score is original; in the film world, it is composed by Robert Frobisher, the homosexual assistant to the great composer Vyvyan Ayrs. Vyvyan thinks he has heard the melody in his dreams, that it is his own, yet learns that this is just because Robert has been playing it on the piano when he is asleep (he then tries to steal the composition). This is the concreteness of the film's deja vu; and this is why the score of cloud atlas is a replica(nt) of the film's own melody. Eternal recurrence as commodity circulation.

Which is why the film is obsessed with transcendence. Halle Berry's character in the post-apocalyptic subplot gains Tom Hanks as a guide for climbing the "mountain of evil" in order to send off a call for help into outer space. The only hope for survival is to wait for a reply from out there--and the film ends as it begins, with the camera tilting up to the night sky.

I swear I've heard this song before...

Yet I am struck by a sweet sense of melancholy, a feeling that only American cinema can provide today: the sense that I am at the heart of an empire in decline...

landlocked and intouchable

One rich invalid male seeks ex-colonial subject for full-time live-in service.Must make life livable. Such is the premise of the European blockbuster comedy The Intouchables, directed by Oliver Nakache and Eric Toledano. The substitution of the Senegalese Driss (Omar Sy) for the Algerian-born author of the true story on which the film is based, Abdel Sellou, tells a great deal about what is at stake in this feel-good film:  a mediation of neo-colonial guilt, of the "Other question" transformed into the terms of an urban white/black dynamic easily digestible to American (and hence pan-European) audiences. The Algeria-France question, not to mention the Senegal-France question, is transmuted into a American narrative schema: a poor black kid from the ghetto gets a job caring for a rich paralyzed man with a golden heart. The effect is, of course, a depoliticization of the relationship between Phillipe and Driss, and a reinscription of racist and classist stereotypes. Phillipe: being rich, white, French, and of the older generation alive during the Algerian revolution, naturally quotes Apollinaire, enjoys modern art, listens to classical music, but of course couldn't dance even if his legs worked. Driss: being poor, black, also French but from the projects, plays the comical philistine, who does not understand modern art, laughs in the theater, but introduces Phillipe to smoking weed and funk. Driss' brother shows up at the house, in trouble with the wrong crowd; Phillippe, seeing that he and his servant inhabit two inhabit different worlds, dismisses Driss. The two long for each other and are reunited. Etc. Etc. The film, on the level of narrative and affect, doesn't go much deeper than this. The film's humor and tenderness works off the magical absence of racial tensions, off the miraculous fact that Driss and Phillipe can interact with each other "like human beings," rather than as historically conditioned subjects. Let the box office proceeds pour in!

But all this is all genre convention, manifest content.  At the edge of the film's compulsory feel-good texture there is another text, a desperate allegory of claustrophobia and failure, a probing of the limits of  the neo/post-colonial symbolic. I will go as far to call it a critique. Of course there is the allegory of the crippled ex-colonizer requiring the help, even the spiritual help, of his ex-colonial subjects in order to keep living (well). But this produces a crisis  when Driss' brother shows up. The crisis corresponds with the film's discourse on art (in France, even blockbusters seem to need a compulsory meditation on Aesthetics and High Culture). Looking at a nude painting on the mantle, Phillipe asks Driss to imagine what would happen if the woman in the painting stood up and showed her true face. We take this to mean that Driss has now shown his true face, and this is is reason for his dismissal, but on compassionate, humanitarian grounds ("you don't want to be pushing around an invalid your whole life..."). Phillipe, in his immobilized position (like the spectator in the movie theater), has contemplated Driss, and now Driss has turned around, ruining his visual pleasure. Yet the reading is reversible. After all, Phillipe has concealed his handicap to his epistolary lover Eleanore by sending a picture of him before his accident; he is the one, it follows, that has hidden his face, and only now shown his true face, the face of the colonizer's privilege. It helps the second reading that soon after this exchange, we are given a shot of Phillipe from the back, looking out the window, almost matching the position of the nude in the painting.

Yet the question of the "true face" seems to be besides the point when it comes to art and the film's discourse on aesthetics. After all, the woman in the painting never turns around, and, accordingly, the cinematic image (the magical humanism that hides racist structures and colonial history), can never enact such theophanies by its own power. We are trapped within the one-dimensional representation. The painting of the nude is complicated by encounters with modern art earlier in the film. Driss cautions Phillipe against buying an abstract painting (below) for 41,500 Euros. "It's just red splotches." Driss stages the common refutation of non-representational art as skill-less (I could do this myself), which poses a problem for filmic representation too.

 The shot shows only Phillipe's head "contemplating" not only the painting but also Driss, who, wearing a leather jacket, eating a bag of M&Ms and shit-talking modern art, enters the frame of the artwork, quite literally upsetting its "whiteness," and adding to it an ideological "depth." Driss is inspired by this travesty of art to begin painting, and Phillipe is able to get Driss' splotches of paint on white canvas sold at 11,000 Euros. This is certainly a commentary on the foibles of the contemporary art market (a rather uninspiring one at that), but far more interesting is how the two instances of non-representational art intersect with the nude, the film's one instance of art that approximates classical conventions. In the juxtaposition of painting as flat surface and painting as representational medium, the filmic image is split into two radically different, and equally racialized, modes of reception (while the political still remains obscured). Is the film a two-dimensional box-office imposture or does it have a true face?

The discourse on art prefigures the film's narrative difficulties, the fracture lines in its ideological closure. There are too many things in this film that don't add up. When Driss and Phillipe get into the private jet, Driss says "are we the only ones here? We're the only ones!" This moment of homosocial intimacy, however, contains the stewardess in the background, busy at work; her presence both sutures and fractures the homosocial bonding--she doesn't count as being on the plane, but her position is metonymy for Driss' own non-belonging. After Driss is "let go," he gets a job by spouting the cultural literacy he learned in Phillipe's service (yes, that's right. If only the colonial elites had been so responsible!), but is called back by the maid when things aren't going well with Phillipe's mental health. Here is where the contents of the optical unconscious come flooding out. A question that the film has elided until now, that of how to envision the relationship between the postcolonial subject and the colonizer outside the master/slave pair, is now brought to fore. The film wants to be optimistic, though it can't but show us its true face. In a repetition of the opening sequence, Driss outsmarts the cops who want to pull him over for speeding by pretending he's taking Phillipe to the hospital. Phillipe plays the part. Wish-fulfillment. White man saves black man from being a victim of Cops. Where does Driss take Phillipe? To the Ocean--the blue sea with waves that are the archetype of the Sublime, the vehicle of colonial expansion, but also, with the twentieth century, the site of an irreducible limit, of a landlocked continental Europe. The woman to whom Phillipe is writing letters is from Dunkirk, the site of evacuation into the sea, where the Nazis conquered France and the latter capitulated. Here I think of the unforgettable final shot from 400 Blows. After World-War II, people go to the sea because they can't go anywhere else, because they're landlocked into inextricable webs, because their kind is no longer welcome on this earth. The visit to the sea in The Intouchables retains this claustrophobic emphasis, on the impossibility of Phillipe and Driss' friendship.

Driss proceeds to cut Phillipe's long beard into different trims: first a Fu Manchu, second a Kaiser mustache (which Phillipe said was his father's mustache), and finally into a Hitler mustache, to which Phillipe expresses horror. The final cut expresses, under humorous cover, the precise content of European continentality, and racialized for the contemporary moment.


After revealing these layers of the continental unconscious, there is no hope for recuperation. The only solution for a happy ending is to repeat the famous formula of John Ford's The Searchers. Driss' final gift to Phillipe is to set him up with Eleanore, his Dunkirk love, in a restaurant with glass walls. Driss leaves the restaurant, waving goodbye to Phillipe from across the glass. He walks away and disappears into the crowd; he can leave his "place" now to the white woman from Dunkirk. Behind the glass, the white heterosexual union tells us that even a crippled colonizer has a future, while the Senegalese man, like John Wayne in The Searchers (a comparison that contains not a little irony), can find no place in the world he has helped create. He gracefully disappears into the Outside, beyond the glass partition. Unlike in The Searchers, there is no door, no convenient device by which to shut out the Algerian-Senegalese-Black from the world that he has made. So the screen goes to black.

computer generated polytheism, or, the new protestant work ethic

A change of pace today--I'm going to write about the new Marvel film, The Avengers, directed by Joss Whedon. Let us look at the figures.On opening weekend, the film grossed $220.3 million in U.S. and Canada box offices, making it the most profitable debut of all time by a 50 million dollar margin. As of June 3rd, 2012, the film made $552,950,328. At an estimated $220 million budget, the film ranks #9 for most expensive films of all time unadjusted for inflation (adjusted, it sinks down to position 17). Production budgets don't include permanent investments in computer hardware, e.g. the enormous server farms necessary to render visual data. Stay for the credits, and you will see the names of five hundred computer technicians.

These figures impute a sense of the monumental, gross, weight of fixed capital that give modern day superheroes their semi-theological heft. When we are dealing with productions of this magnitude, productions for which the mathematical sublime is an advertising gimmick, we roll in the thick of it, the It of the world of capital. In the last few years, we have seen a good series of these CGI-based superblockbusters, each attempting to top the other in the counting game. It has become clear that this particular genre of CGI cinema is no longer about producing epic space by means of cinematic illusions, in the style of the old Star Wars films. They are more on the order of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance or Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra, films whose mise-en-scène rests on the creation of elaborate, monumental and monstrous sets that rival their originals (Babylon, the pyramids). Moving up on the family tree, we find a prototype in the Crystal Palace of the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in Hyde Park, a glass building that claimed to have its own atmosphere, and which, like the Eiffel tower, was built for no other reason than to show the civilized world just what capital could do. Contra Lev Manovich's thesis on the plasticity of the pixel, CGI creatures carry a certain substance to them; their very plasticity exhibits, and hides, the immense solid state capabilities of processing hardware (the black boxes into which all data vanishes), the millions of hours of dead labor absorbed by the machine, which then uses its own numerical representation as an advertising ploy. By their very immateriality, visually composted images command a weight in Value, and here I quote Marx: "The commodity form...is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race."

It is certainly not coincidental that the sensory figures produced in the millions of man-hours of digital rendering in the film in discussion are, in so many marvelous ways, Gods. The Avengers is in no way merely allegorical on this point: Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk, etc., enter into direct relations with the Gods of Norse legend. The freak accidents of technological civilization: a science experiment went wrong, a product of Army supersoldier testing, a billionaire daredevil technologist, and an underworld spy, are enlisted by the shadowy organization S.H.I.E.L.D., run by Agent Fury, to save the world from the renegade Norse God Loki, who wants to open a portal to earth so he can lead an army of alien to take over the planet.  Fair enough. Loki subscribes to a fairly outdated ideology that freedom is the curse of humankind, from which it must be freed. Human beings are meant to be slaves of one ruler, etc. A genealogy of this villain's character type would lead us back to the doctrines espoused in the Office of War Information's 1942 Manual on Motion Pictures, which essentially establishes the cinematic caricature of the freedom-hating bad guy that holds good from George Cukor's Keeper of the Flame to George W. Bush's post-9/11 address to the nation.  On the other hand, S.H.I.E.L.D's democratic credentials are doubtful given its affiliations with the intelligence underworld, and Agent Fury, if we are to look at his career back to 1940s comic books, exhibits Rambo-like characteristics. The film's particular ambivalence with respect to the democracy-fascism axis posits the coordinates of today's war on terror: shadowy organizations and questionable methods are necessary to confront unpredictable contemporary threats, particularly in a global village, in which, as is mentioned in the film, other planets have come to acknowledge the earth's technological parity, which makes the planet open to interstellar invasions. Experiments with the Tesseract, a blue glowing rock with enormous powers, enter the planet into undecidabilities  interstellar politics.

Parallel to anxieties of global integration and technological critical mass, which allows the earth to "come out" amongst the community of interstellar races and for superheroes to fight on equal terms with Norse Gods, Captain America--the jingoistic do-gooder par excellence--exhibits a particular gaudiness that deserves comment. As Steve Rogers is recalled by Fury back into the service of S.H.I.E.L.D., Fury tells him that they have prepared him his old uniform. Steve asks, aren't the stars and stripes now a bit old-fashioned? Fury replies, perhaps but sometimes we need old-fashioned. And it is true, the Captain continues to be the butt of the film's jokes. He is made fun of for his earnestness by his more cynical teammates. Patriotism is ingenuousness, but it can be put to good use. Isn't this exactly how it works? Then there's a crowning sequence where Loki forces a crowd to kneel before him and begins with his freedom-hater monologue. A man stands up and tells him that there are always men like him and that he will not kneel. The man is old enough to have lived through the War. Loki takes his energy-shooting-staff and fires at the guy, and the man is only saved by Captain America's shield. Oh my!

But perhaps more striking are the ways in which the individual eccentricities of our superheroes are subjected to the broader imperatives of "teamwork" and self-sacrifice. If it is fair to say that the recent Marvel films produce polytheistic mythologies for cultures founded on global information networks, then this film in particular attempts to unite these present-day Gods in a curious, proto-protestant formation. The polytheistic aspect of The Avengers is easy to substantiate. Each member of the defunct "Avengers Program" is functionally immortal, and their enhanced powers represent affective modalities of contemporary life given autonomous appearance: rage (the Hulk), technocracy (Iron Man), underworld cunning (Black Widow), nationalism (Captain America). These all-too-human characteristics raised to a higher power then encounter immortals of a different order; those ancient Gods who are themselves "products of the human brain." Yet the entire panoply is subjected to a higher imperative, and this is brought to attention most in the "development" of Tony Stark's character from a self-interested cocky technologist (who thinks that all problems can be solved) to someone who recognizes the necessity of self-sacrifice, as he flies a nuclear missile into the portal to destroy the alien mothership with no return ticket.

shelters, fathers, and haptic cinema

The Kid with a Bike (2011)

Le Gamin au Vélo (The Kid with a Bike) segues well from my last post. This recent film by the Dardenne Brothers’ begins in a children’s shelter where the 11-year-old Cyril has been marooned by his father. In the first shot, Cyril holds a telephone receiver tightly against his head listening to an automated message: the number has been disconnected. He refuses to let go of the receiver and makes the social worker dial again. The social worker tells the boy that his father has probably moved away, but Cyril again refuses to give up the receiver. The telephone, like the bicycle that the boy attempts to recover, remains the only if line he has to his father, and he holds onto it as a paternal umbilical cord, one that connects him to a void. 

Like Rosetta (1999), The Kid with a Bike follows species precarious life, the human beings who fight desperately for entry into social institutions--the factory, the family--from which they have been rendered extraneous. Like the factory under neoliberalism, the father, Guy Catoul, wants to "start over" and hence needs to get rid of his son so that he can enter the job market on an equal footing. Cyril is left indefinitely in a shelter, and in his search for his bike he meets Samantha, a hairdresser of moderate means. Samantha finds his bike and ends up a weekend foster mother. Shuffling between a shelter and a surrogate mother, however, does not allow Cyril peace of mind. He remains desperate to be taken in by his father and whatever substitutes for male authority he can find. Which lands him in the usual situation of criminal activity on behalf of a guy they call "the dealer."

But the film is more than this. The narrative elements can only give us the generic sociological structure of abandoned youth, not the radical experience of this abandonment. More important here are the telephone receiver, the buzzer system to the vacant apartment where Cyril seeks to find his dad (see trailer), the glass doors into which he peers--this is the architecture, the interface, of modern precariousness. Each is a black box from which Cyril solicits his father, in flesh and blood. He is not, in principle, refused entry, but he finds out that behind these interfaces there are only empty addresses and recorded messages.

Cyril, however, does not lament when confronted with information terminals made to exclude him. He navigates these territories with tactical cunning. After being told that his father has moved out of the apartment, Cyril buzzes the apartment building's medical ward and tells them that he hurt his leg. They let him in and he runs up to his father's empty room. Mere information, e.g. the reality principle effected by the words "your father has moved," does not faze him. His tactics are not those of empty words but of touch: he touches the material world he navigates; he needs to feel them with his own hands and see them with his own eyes, yet sensory reality interests him little: it is resistance, an obstinacy of matter that bars him from the places where his father is not. Cyril's touch is one that is sensuous but does not admit to sensuality, nor sentimentality. He meets Samantha as he tries to escape the social workers; he latches onto her waist and refuses to let go: this is the gesture of an inexplicable, desperate, touch, an "I need you" that is entirely haptic yet does not become a desire. And it is perhaps for this reason that Samantha comes to love Cyril and admit him into her life.

In a parallel manner, the Dardenne Brothers' cinematography and sound design are those of a haptic cinema, a cinema that wants to make us touch. It is characteristic for their camera to follow their subjects up close, and their subjects move as if they were trying to escape the invasive grasp of the camera's presence, which seems to threaten them not so much with its visual power as with its physicality. The camera that is too close then makes contact through the intimate, magnified, sounds of skin against clothing, teeth on food, feet on pavement. The aesthetic is one of bodily immediacy, and a body that resists the world in its mere sensory aspect, in the bare fact that it exists and dares to do so. Even in the film's tenderest moments, as when Cyril and Samantha (after Cyril has frustrated all his father fantasies and submits to her motherness) eat sandwiches in the park, we are reminded of Cyril's precarious, bare, life. Between his genuine smiles and increasing comfort with Samantha, he retains the appearance of an animal who is liable to escape at any moment. There is nothing idyllic about this sequence (and to this extent, the screenshot I have here is misleading), nonetheless, it hints at the possibility of a maternal affection that is felt out, with no guarantees. Samantha's boyfriend, dismayed at the child's unruliness, and perplexed at why she would take him tells her to make a choice: him or me. She chooses the boy, whom she cannot be certain loves her, who in fact betrays her very shortly after--running off to commit a robbery for "the dealer"/substitute father. But he returns to her because there is nowhere else to go, he returns out of mere helplessness, out of the need for shelter, and she takes him in, knowing that the cops are after him. It is made clear that this is not an act of unconditional maternal forgiveness. It is a social contract. "I want to stay with you full time" he says. "Kiss me" she says. The kiss on the cheek seals a new social bond, but one that has no shelter under a paternal metaphor, or any law of filation.

And the bicycle. It is impossible to make a film about a bicycle today without referring it somehow to Ladri di Biciclette. And in fact, we have in both films a father, a boy, and a bicycle. In De Sica the bicycle functions as a device to discern the relationship between father and child amidst social topography of postwar Rome. The bicycle disappears into the impenetrable webs of city life, and father and son disappear into a crowd of urban poor. Le Gamin au Vélo ends as the father disappears and the child rides his bike down the street and off screen. The bike, rather than referring the father to work and societal viability, refers the boy to the void that is his father. Like the telephone receiver, it is the concretion of what has abandoned him, and he holds onto with dear life. Yet, when the boy rides his bike into the film's end credits, his illusions of paternal authority have been ruptured, at least for the time being: what we have are instead precarious sensory assemblages and their lines of flight: kid-bike, Cyril-Samantha. The brief stint of orchestral music in the film's final image tells us that there might still be in all of this, if not a future, then at least a hope.

The Polisse-The Future-The Child

So this French version of Cops wins the Jury prize at Cannes, and I'm perplexed as to why. Perhaps I'm not being fair, but let me explain and diagnose. Maïwenn's Polisse is in a sense an archival film. Its screenplay was constructed by rifling through the case files of the Paris Child Protection Unit, yes the unit that arrests pedophiles. With a kind of reality-TV aesthetic, the film unfolds several months in the life of the members of the CPU. The film's only narrative cue is the arrival of Maïwenn herself as a photographer assigned to the unit by the French government; predictably, the photographer doubles the presence of the film camera, and functions as authorial signature (which the trailer above seems to emphasize). The reality TV cinematography is marked and disorienting: staccato cutting, liberal use of the zoom function, and sustained diegetic sound establish an "on-the-spot" feel that nonetheless is reminiscent of a well-worn televisual repertoire, e.g.The Office and Arrested Development


In a sense the film's jarring form is justified by its diegetic motifs. After all, the world of child molesters is very much a harsh one, and the film seeks to capture both the numbing violence and the anger that these officers experience in their job. The form blocks sentimentality and produces in the spectator the same nausea and disgust one would confront "in the field"--and successful it was at convincing at least five people to walk out of the theater at the late-night screening where I saw the film. There is, however, a deeper dimension to both the film's form and its content (and their zone of indiscernability) that I wish to register here, one that articulates an interesting if disturbing link between the portable cinematic apparatus and apparatuses of State power. My comments, of course, are meant to be broadly applicable.


The central thematic crisis of the film seems to be that of "the Child," its status and futurity in the contemporary world. What lines are there between children and adults? How does the law regulate this relationship? Polisse depicts the desperate attempts of law enforcement agencies to maintain an adequate distinction between the adult and the child by rigorously enforcing standards of child abuse ("any sexual interaction between a parent and a child is rape" as one of the officer says). The crisis of the child is exacerbated by the presence of immigrants both old and new in a Paris of multicultural anxieties.  The Child Protection Unit, after receiving a lead on a certain uncle in a Romanian trailer park who enlists children as pickpockets and prostitutes, enacts a raid on the entire encampment, arresting all the adults and taking the children to a "shelter." In a hauntingly ambivalent sequence, the children are photographed with nameplates and made to board a bus--the topoi here are unmistakable. Yet, Maïwenn appears to be unwilling to entertain the significance of the graphic match between child protection and the concentration camp, so the sequence ends with the bus driver turning on music and the children miraculously forget recent history as they begin to dance. This is too not an unfamiliar image--discos are, after all, made for forgetting. But it becomes less innocent when disco music is used to justify the actions of the police.


It is this forgetting that ensures that there will be no posterity. First of all, there is the breakdown of the bourgeois family, that institutionalized imposter in the history of cultures. There are no nuclear families in the film, only pedophiles and romances "on the force." In perhaps the most allegorical sequence in the film (if one chooses to allegorize), a fourteen year old rape victim has a stillborn baby. She asks "what will happen to him?" "Will he be buried with all the other babies?" "Yes." "Individually or all together?" "All Together." The police place the corpse inside a cooler and take it to the lab for DNA tests. Futurity enters into the cold laboratories and hallways of the State, which alone ensures the continuation of the Nation. This is the state of exception in which the film places us. The center of the film's anxiety is that children do not understand themselves as children: one makes naked videos of herself on the internet, another matter-of-factly states that she gave a blowjob to have a thief return her smartphone. Yet, for all this crisis in the definition of the Child, agencies of the State are given even wider purview to define and enforce what it sees as proper relationships. One cop, Iris,  sees a woman shaking her baby from the coffeeshop. She stops the woman and takes her in for questioning, since this seemed abnormal behavior. During the interview, the woman admits that she jerks off one of her boys so to quiet him down. Iris tells her, here, that any sexual interaction between parent and child is rape. In another instance, Nora, who herself appears Algerian, interrogates a Muslim man; fed up with his condescension towards her on account of her gender, she threatens to charge him for accessory to rape after his daughter's arranged marriage is consummated. It is undeniable that in each instance there is a "justice" at stake--one that in fact may very much be worth defending--but this justice, in order to make itself known, in order to mark the territory of its guilt, is made to enter increasingly dark corridors of exceptionality. The Child is the state of exception, the place in which the future cannot simply be allowed to "take place."


Let us now go to the place of the authorial signature, which in this film very much does function as a kind of navel or severed umbilical cord. In the middle of a citywide search for a mother who kidnapped her baby from day care, Joey Starr's character (Fred) confronts the photographer-director, chiding her for "snapping away" with her camera, and challenging her as to what kind of truth the camera could capture. He tells her that the camera can never "do justice" to "what we do." There is no answer. In a sense, "what we do" exists beyond cinema; it is exceptional, and contra Bazin, the truth of "what we do" does not "lay itself bare like a suspect confessing under the relentless examination of the commissioner of police." Perhaps films about the police can never make the police confess...another instantiation of the age old dilemma: "who polices the police?" The exceptionality of "what we do" with respect to the mundane powers of cinema will be repeated again and again in the film through its repertoire of citations. During the manhunt for the woman-kidnapper, someone suggests that the woman has dyed her hair so that nobody recognizes her, and the rejoinder: "what do you think this is? a Western?" No it is not a Western. "What we do" is real, not a movie. The film's citation of Le Mepris in a game of charades seems to echo this point--this is a film about the excess of the real to the dream factory, with the one catch that the real is policework. The breakdown of the holy family means that the great burden of social reproduction is shifted onto our men in blue, who must wrest all children away from the icky interiorities of the oedipal triangle and put them in shelters... at least in France they have the funding for shelters.

A final two sequences merit discussion. As the police interview a father who "loves [his daughter] too much," but has "connections" such that he can afford to act pompous, Fred becomes enraged and punches the man in the face. The guy says "you'll pay for this" and Fred replies "no one saw anything...this camera didn't see anything."  The man replies, "yes I know, the camera sees what you want it to see." Of course cameras at police stations see what the police want them to see, but this is not quite the point. Fred is enraged because the man dares to openly say that he likes young girls in a blasé mode and "on camera" as if here were not aware of the gravity of the charge. It is not that he refuses to confess to the commissioner of police; it is rather than the man openly confesses without the weight of guilt, before the camera. Which reveals the fact that guilt, like "what we do," cannot be recorded by cameras. On the contrary, guilt must be inscribed, as Kafka said, on the body of the guilty until the body is made into a bloody pulp, until it has been entirely metamorphosed into the inscription of its crime. The pedophile's lack of internalized guilt, itself a effect of his corruption, makes it that Fred must produce this guilt through violence, and thus Fred (and perhaps us too) wants to beat the man to a bloody pulp, then draw and quarter him before the crowd. To this process, to guilt such as it is consecrated in the most ancient sense, modern media are fundamentally indifferent. Hence, the film  never gives us a chance to register guilt, to make images confess. The film's haptic cuts crowd the sensorium; it never gives us time to think--to think about what? guilt. It is in this sense that the raid on the gypsy encampment can only produce a graphic match with the camps before the disco music begins.


And the film ends in a graphic match, uncharacteristically in slow motion and to non-diegetic music, between two falling bodies. On one hand, there is a boy (who had previously been a victim of molestation). doing a mid-air flip at a gymnastics competition. On the other hand, Iris has decided to jump out a window pursuant to a restructuring of the police department. She falls, he flips. She falls, he flips. An adult who dies, a child who completes his flip, two forms sent flying through mid air, one towards death the other towards the future. But there is nothing. Only the most abstract of forms.