Note: Bad Comedy

Just a few notes to remind myself how difficult it can be to find good entertainment with a netflix instant disc...

Emma (1972) I thought this British television adaptation of the Jane Austen novel would be funny, but it is acted so bloodlessly, we begin to lose interest from the first scene.

How About You? (2004) More accommodating indie film fans will find here a charming story about what youth owes to old age, and vice versa. I tried to like it, but the motifs of pot for pain, strife between sisters, and eccentric old folks were simply too bound by simple convention. I've seen it all before. Vanessa Redgrave's supporting role was entirely underwhelming.

Who's Harry Crumb? (1985) I think I just wanted to remember what it was that made John Candy so famously funny. Answer: utterly pointless physical comedy. I think I was too old for this film back in 1989.

Brewster's Millions (1985) This is the very scene where A. and I stopped the film. It becomes all to clear here that combining Candy with Pryor yields only images of both naked.

World's Greatest Dad (2004) I know better than to ever trust a film that casts Robin Williams as a 'serious' protagonist, but A. hasn't learned, so this one is his fault. As with How About You? the main problem is that the film hopes to construct something meaningful out of a thin tissue of conventions and clichés. Some are extremely old, such as Williams' entire role, which is too close to Dead Poet's Society for comfort. Others are new variations: where DPS gave us queer boy suicide, WGD offers straight boy autoasphyxiation. Who says there isn't progress?

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Movie: Frankenstein (1931)

Trailer to Frankenstein

Our lazy afternoon viewing was James Whale's 1931 "horror classic." What makes a movie a "classic?" Innovative camera work, mainly. Frankenstein has some truly incredible visual offerings: burying a man out in a creepy graveyard, complete with angel of death. A windmill out on a precipice. Arcs of electricity in a mad scientist's lab. The appearance of the monster. A scene in which the monster kills a little girl.

But perhaps the deepest lesson to get from watching Frankenstein, or any "classic" movie, is about maintaining your love of craft in a world that best appreciates convention. There are horrible character actors here: the guy playing Dr. Frankenstein's dad is just terrible, and even Boris Karloff's own performance is, for me, overrated. The story has been mangled twice over since "Mrs. Percy Shelley" (yes, that's what it says in the opening credits!), leaving us with a version in which Frankenstein's murderous nature can be explained by installation of the wrong brain, and both Dr. Frankenstein and his fiancée Elizabeth live to the end, presumably happily ever after. The evidence is clear: Hollywood made a blockbuster out of the Frankenstein story, and they very likely distorted Whale's directorial vision as well. But Whale is a professional, which means here that he fills the picture with just the conventions the audience wants, with just a touch here and there of features that might possibly challenge the viewer (Frankenstein says he knows what it means "to be God," little girl murder, Swiss wedding dances). He didn't abandon his project because he had to compromise on his vision. That's certainly a lesson for the young person.

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Monsieur Ennui

Click for Costumes

Monsieur N. is a textbook example of costume drama with nothing to say, much as in many history textbooks. This is perhaps a film about Napoleon during his last days, on the prison at St. Helena. But more accurately it should be called a film about the very dull ship of fools, English and French, that accompanied him in exile. None of these poor fools makes enough of an impression to mention by name. It suffices to say that there is a handsome soldier, an unconvincing blonde, and many rather repellant officers and aristocrats. The main lesson to learn here is not political or social in theme, but rather economic: some people made money off of Napoleon, and some didn't. It is not surprising at all who did and who didn't.

One can't help but use this sort of film as evidence against the European film industry, against state-support for the arts, against the dullness and pedantry that comes from producing the story out of institutions. Hollywood, for all its mediocrity, offers some minimum standards for entertainment value, and those alone should have seen to it that this uninteresting script never see the light of day.

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The Ecological Exorcist

Late 1970's fun

With music by Ennio Morricone, 1970s girlish beauty by Linda Blair, Richard Burton in a surprising turn as the exorcist with the tortured soul, and James Earl Jones in locust headgear, you know that at minimum this sequel is going to provide camp fun. And it does.

But what is such a surprise is what a thoughtful and spacey little film this is. The exorcism plot is re-invented as a flirtatious debate between the fields of religion and psychology. Which is better equipped to heal the ailing mind's of today's children? Which can better explain evil? Can the Prince of Flies be prayed away, or are his wings controllable with revolutionary new biofeedback technology? The shlock horror conventions remain, but are enriched by well-cut trips to Africa, Rome and fancy Manhattan therapy labs, where we meet two characters, Richard Burton's darkly passionate priest, hanging on to hope but just beginning a great fall, and Louise Fletcher's psychiatric experimentalist, all positivist with doses of rapid advancement in science and women's liberation. James Earl Jones turns in a memorable cameo as both locust-themed wiseman of the mudcity and white-coated George Washington Carver for a savannah that just wants to control its locust populations. The inevitable conclusion here is that the ecological metaphor for life, post-Rachel Carson, did become conventional, but that doesn't mean that a stylish handling of it via convention wasn't worth the try. Theater-goers in 1977 probably thought the film preachy and not scary enough, but this true accusation does credit to the filmmakers in 2010.

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Heavy Cloud, No Rain

The Rainmaker proves mostly superstition

I can't believe this movie comes from Francis Ford Coppola, who I remember best for The Godfather. It's a totally clichéd story of a handsome young Gallant who brings together a colorful set of friends, including a nice old rich lady, a poor battered wife, a feisty little DeVito-sidekick device, and special guest start Mickey Rourke as the walking LA sleeze-symbol he must really be, for all I know. Oh, what does Gallant do, you ask, in between yawns? He wins a lawsuit for some poor devil who suffers from a severe case of coughing and acting sick and/or retarded on screen. You know it was either gonna be that or a black man mistakenly thought of as an inhuman beast. Either way, this is a John Grisham, so you better believe a couple of squishy-faced southern power attorneys had their asses handed to them! Whew!

Sarcasm is all I can offer this lazy Sunday afternoon waste of time. I'm just astounded that it's the work of a veteran director. Worse still, The New York Times' Elvis Mitchell called it Coppola's "best and sharpest film in years." Does watching the film in 2010 reveal how fast the tropes of courtroom drama become stilted, predictable conventions? Even viewed as purely a genre picture, I find the script utterly ridiculous. Mickey Rourke's smarm-made-flesh doesn't get enough screen time or any remotely cool lines. The old lady has no color to her at all -- in one scene she has only one line asking Matt Damon if he wants his sandwich (no, he's in a hurry). No, I think convention's progress is only part of the story here; perhaps another factor is the rotten star system in Hollywood that still wants to believe in Coppola and cute blond guys with winning smiles.

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Demetri Martin: An Annoying Person

Demetri Martin - Person • VideoSift: Online Video *Quality Control
- Watch more Funny Videos at Vodpod.

Demetri Martin, if you dare

I thought it would be nice to hear from a younger-generation comic. I heard he was very bright, very talented. He plays music! He does mindmaps! He dreams up whole costumed scenarios! He's appeared on the Daily Show, so maybe he knows satire too! Maybe, ooh...just maybe, he could be the nerdy, graph-sketching George Carlin for our times!

Boy, was I in for a disappointment. Martin applies all of his very real talents to jokes like this:

I like "Rock, Paper, Scissors Two-Thirds." You know. "Rock breaks scissors." "These scissors are bent. They're destroyed. I can't cut stuff. So I lose." "Scissors cuts paper." "These are strips. This is not even paper. It's gonna take me forever to put this back together." "Paper covers rock." "Rock is fine. No structural damage to rock. Rock can break through paper at any point. Just say the word. Paper sucks." There should be "Rock, Dynamite with a Cutable Wick, Scissors."

And this: (showing us a graph drawn on a pad of paper)

This is very autobiographical. This is the cuteness of a girl versus how interested I am in hearing about how intuitive her cat is. You see, the cuter the girl is, the more I'm willing to hear about the cat. "Oh really?" "Yeah, he's very intuitive." But you'll notice, at a certain point, I don't care how cute you are. I don't wanna hear about your fucking cat anymore. I hate your cat. When you leave the room, I try to get it.

Sigh. I know I am kicking a horse that won't die. And yet, I must, for my own edification, make a statement about this terrible, stultifying form of comedy.
I know I'm channeling my current reading at the moment, but I do feel that comedy gets better when it takes up the responsibility to show us our assumptions and prejudices in a vivid, challenging way. Chris Rock at his best. John Stewart, especially jokes about Fox News. George Fucking Carlin. Carlin really cared about the problem of us getting along with each other; this alone explains why he had a very cynical attitude.

Comedy must have a strong critical spirit to satisfy us as art; otherwise, it may be a simple exploration of the world we live in. Analyses of silly games that we hardly notice. Observations of completely typical sexual desire; confirmation of heteronormative gender frameworks. What about this one:

Those that say their glasses are half-full are considered optimists. Yeah, but shouldn't we be more specific about the contents of the glass? If it's a glass of shit, I'm going half-empty. I don't like shit as an optimist. "Yeah, we gotta half-empty shit glass right here."

The main purpose here is to direct our attention to an idiomatic expression, and then show that a slight change in the expression can deplete its meaning utterly. See, folks? With Martin's incredible talents, even set idiomatic expressions can be totally depleted of meaning.

Is there a word for the opposite of satire? A comedy that comforts, that says the world is doing just fine, so we might take a little time to indulge in childish questioning carefully subtracted of any social or political content? It seems strange that there not be a word for this anti-satire, this "antire" since Martin (and Carrot Top, and Gallagher, and I'm sure it goes back even further...) proves easily enough that it exists, and many find it worthwhile for its cleverness. For the safe, comfortable giggles it delivers. We see this kind of comedy in the Sunday comics, and in Reader's Digest as well. It has a democratic quality, to be sure, but more importantly a domesticating quality, a force on us to observe our lives in the smallest details, find a way to make a small transformation to our perspective on those details, and then to be satisfied that we really are thinking and living.

Well, we're not. It's piffle, childishness. It's the self-satisfied contentment of a shrinking class of ugly Americans. It answers not to what the audience needs, but what they think they want, poor devils. At this moment in my life, at least, Demetri Martin's whole persona, and the whole form of "antire" both just make me really sad.
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To Tell, To Perplex: Shutter Island

Trailer to Shutter Island

Shutter Island is the story of a man nursing the wounds of war and his lost wife, working to change his deep guilt into a pursuit of justice against the insidious creep of legal and medical institutions into our lives and over the values he fought so hard in the War to preserve.

Until the climax, that is. Then we discover that Shutter Island is the story of a man nursing the wounds of war and wife who murdered their three children by creating an alternative reality that this institution is working hard to correct, using an experimental role-playing treatment that we happened to jump in on in its opening scenes.

Ugh. This film was maddening, which I suppose I must earn it some credit. It tries to do something special by applying and then breaking movie conventions. The trouble is that the use of a massive reveal (“I’m a cop. I’m a cop. Oh wait, I’m a patient here?”) makes it very difficult for us to continue sympathizing with the protagonist, if we ever did. Now, when I was watching, I tried to keep to a vision which saw the protagonist as correct – there is a conspiracy. So when I reached the reveal, I felt foolish, and cheated. The scene with the Rachel the Psychologist-turned-Patient hiding in the cave, for example, was only a delusion of the protagonist, and shame on me for not seeing that.

But more sophisticated viewers might well have doubted that whole scene the first time they saw it, in which case they would have been frustrated by the attempt to make them have some emotions that they could tell Scorsese was preparing to undermine later in the movie.

Either way, all of the pre-reveal scenes are made ambiguous or even paradoxical by the reveal. For example, is Dr. Cawley a good man or a bad man? Certainly he’s not quite as anti-lobotomy in the end as he implied in his expository entrance scene.

The story architects would probably say, “Exactly, dude. The scenes and the message of the movie turn out to be ambiguous because life is ambiguous. Mental institutions are creepy, but ultimately necessary. The kind of guilt and confusion that poor Teddy suffers from is real.”

Grrr… But, but…shouldn’t the movie give Teddy the power to overcome his guilt and confusion, to find meaning in his life again?

“It does! Teddy gets a glimpse of the real truth, but he just can’t deal with it, so he chooses to embrace his fantasy again, but this time with the knowledge that he will undergo a lobotomy. Hence his final line, ‘Which would be worse, to live as a monster, or die as a good man?’ He is taking charge of his life again by dying a good man.”

Hm. Okay. But I still think that the film suffered from slow pacing and overly forceful tone. To me this is more than a formal weakness, but an indication that the storytellers are more interested in the scenes as a clever intellectual game than they are about any serious comment on how the human mind actually makes and breaks its connections to the world.

“Oh really,” I can hear Scorsese say. “Well, pray tell, my young friend, what is your story, and what forms does it apply to make a ‘serious’ comment. Hm?”

Uhhhh….dammit, I don’t have one. I’ll write one then!

“Well, okay then. I look forward to it.”

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Con Air (1997)

Inciting Incident on Youtube: I wouldn't be surprised if this goes offline

I watched this film on my last night in London, absolutely wretched that I could not pay attention to anything else in the hostel common area. Terrible as it is, it brings a joy to the simple manipulation of convention. It reminds us that hack story telling is often great story telling. The values that underlie this film at first seem offensive, but in the end it maybe has nothing at all to do with law or society or gender, and only to do with the love of action filmmaking, period. Mysterious!
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Song at Midnight

Embedded from Archive.org

Finally, months after I advised one of my students on a project to write about the 1937 film Song at Midnight 半夜之歌, I watch it myself. The sensitivity of the writer for the film s/he is writing about is best made evident to the reader if the reader has also seen that film. That doesn’t mean I didn’t do a good job grading my student’s paper without seeing the film; it does mean that if I had watched the film I could do better. I realized my student was a sensitive reader early on in the project and recognized this in the final paper; now after watching the film I realize more deeply how and why the student reacted to scenes in the film. It’s better if you watch the film. So to help me remember that in the future, and to pay homage to my student DZ, I offer the following as a response to both the film and DZ’s work.

Song at Midnight is a fantastic dream of a modern Chinese tragic hero. As a youth he learns the great art of speech, figured here as song. He also learns to be moved, the value affect, emotion, connection: love. But love and song and his very being are attacked! Who, what, why? Recovery seems an option, but then...oh horror! Oh desolation! How could it be? My face, my face in the mirror is not human any more. Like Sima Qian, who faced the (possibly worse) abjection of castration, the hero here is willing to find his humanity again after a terrible trauma: 我愿意学那 “刑余的史臣” I am willing to study that "History minister who was the remains of his punishment."

How to do this? First, tell your story. The phantom must find a supporting character to offer an autobiography. Life, song, love, tragedy: aren’t you moved? Can’t you join with me? But the attachment is not strong. The phantom thus finds the strength to stand again on his own. He meets his enemy, and destroys him. But the society that nurtured his enemy now turns against him, and he is destroyed by the crowd. As with Iranian film, this film features scary, violent crowds of people in scene after scene: humanity as swarm, flock, feeding frenzy.

So Song at Midnight, like Phantom of the Opera, gives us a misunderstood martyr, a tragic hero whose ending shows up the cruelty inherent in us as a society that cannot welcome difference. It is a sad meditation on the difficulty of revolution, change, difference.

But it is also a beautiful picture of failure. Stylishly ugly, the phantom is the original emo, as A. says. I shall wear all black. Nobody likes me, so I will stay over here in the dark. I will sing my song, alone or to one person who just might understand. Oh, my woe! My tragic woes!

A. had another insight worth noting, as well: since this version of the phantom story pushes the female lead from second to third place, and introduces a second male character who forms a strong homosocial bond with the protagonist phantom, then the whole story becomes excessively involved with what DZ properly calls “the male gaze.” Much better to have filmed the entire film from the point of view of the unwitting female character, with whom we would have no trouble identifying as she faces first the horror of hearing of her lover’s death, then the strange songs, meeting his doppelganger, and final revelation of his tragic injury. That would make for a very different movie experience, but one that also emphasized the perplexing feeling that modern life so often leads us into, especially in such historical turning points as Shanghai in 1937.

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Progressive Bourgeois

Seems Like Old Times

I only watched the first few minutes of this film before it became apparent that neither Goldie Hawn nor Charles Grodin, and least of all Chevy Chase, do anything that is remotely funny to me. Still, I might have continued to watch because this is the story of a progressive bourgeois family that serves to re-inscribe the rules for behaving in the public sphere by focusing closely on what we owe to each other in our home life.

Formulated this way, the film does much the same work that Yang Jiang's essays about her childhood in a progressive Confucian home where her father was a lawyer, her mother a housewife with a social conscience, and their home a kind of salon and half-way house where free expression and help for the disadvantaged were the main motives driving daily life.

But it was after all a bad film, which is why A. wouldn't consent to watch it through. Homework viewing, perhaps?
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Renegade (2004)

Renegade: the Ahayuasca trip

Thanks to D. for introducing us to Renegade, which we watched again just the other day.

The film is incredibly fun, through and through, at least for anyone who likes graphic novels or entheogenic substances (preferably both).

I'd like to use it as a teaching tool in a theory class sometime. I'll explain the term "episteme" and the larger patterns of French thought using mostly just the above scene alone.
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Thoughts on the Grotesque

Gummo (1997) a film by Harmony Korine

I happened to watch the movie Gummo just after I had finished the novella Yellow Mud Street 黄泥街 by Can Xue, and I was really struck by how both advance a portrait of grotesque communities. Both have horror elements that are buried deeply in the scenery -- trash, mess, odd growths like black mushrooms, fat albinos with no toes, maggots that appear everywhere, pots of dried up spaghetti, stands of fruit that immediately rot and drip into the drains. Both focus on how misdirected and now anarchic communities aim to live, but are only able to do so in a limited way -- blistering in heat, prey to insects and larger predators.



There is a strong element of black comedy to both stories as well, without which the pieces would be unambiguously negative overall. Little boys curse each other, but they are still clearly little boys. An old man learns to eat black spiders, but hey, he's eating, right? There is an ambiguous idea that life is beautiful in all its forms, even if it is grotesque after experiencing a great disturbance.

This disturbance is also clearly evident in both works. In Can Xue, it was Maoism, including state industry, collectivization, and the use of mass communication to make every speak a common, if empty, rhetoric. For Korine's Xenia, Ohio, the trauma is a tornado that had passed through 20 years before -- the audience is left to wonder just how metaphorical to take that 'tornado.'

Since I had also recently watched a TED Talk on coral reef devastation and the tremendous crisis facing world oceans, I have begun to think of both Yellow Mud Street and Gummo as having an ecological element. The grotesque element that stands out the most in both stories is nothing more or less than the force of life to continue along even after tremendous trauma. After a devastating tornado or pollution event, the life that first returns is always the most grotesque possible, because it must feed off of the waste that is left behind. And this is ambiguously beautiful -- it is beautiful that life will always go on, and it is terrible that the healthiest path of life is so seldom offered.
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Movie Review: "Molloch" (1999)

"Moloch" directed by Aleksandr Sokurov

The Negation of the Anti-Hero

If you remember Casablanca, you'll recall that Rick is a man who begins the film dead on the inside. His heart is broken, he is an alcoholic, he's perfectly neutral, and he doesn't stick his neck out for anybody. But as the film progresses Rick rediscovers his own life again and goes on to take a roll in the war.

"Moloch" shows us this reverse story of the anti-hero Rick. Hitler is the negation of an anti-hero, someone who probably began life off-screen perfectly moral and alive. But his desires and fears have made him a monster, dead on the inside.

People who destroy life do so because they are afraid of their own deaths. Any child who has a momentary fright in contemplating death may respond by killing an insect or a small animal and taking succor in the control over life and death. This is how evil might begin. Thus Sokurov films the vulnerable, underwear-clad Hitler of the everyday in a state of child-like fear of his own death, nearly all the time.

But the real damnation of the killer is that in the end even perpetrating destruction will not ward off the ghosts of the mind. "Death is death," reminds Eva Braun, helpfully. Like Rick's Ilsa, she knows the whole time the true source and purpose of life, knows it down in her bones. But poor Eva has no Rick to work with, and eventually her efforts to liven Hitler only bring up her own worst fears.

Pretty nice example of classical plot structure with negation of the anti-hero!
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Movie Review: "The Sun" (2005)

"The Sun" was a good way to introduce ourselves to the minimalist, detail-obsessed films of Alexander Sokurov -- so thanks to Minnesota Film Arts for showing it at St. Anthony Main, February 2010.

Sokurov's Emperor Hirohito is not only humanized in this film, he finds redemption, if in a limited way that leaves him assailable for his true weakness: weakness of will, anxiety of spirit, and dreamy preference for leisurely study and cool contemplation. Hirohito is a true nobleman where his job called for either a savior or a butcher.

The actor who plays Hirohito, Issey Ogata, has an amazing technique. All of his facial features and especially his mouth and front teeth are applied very deliberately to create the sense of a careful, intelligent, and ultimately ordinary man.

What to say of Sokurov's unique vision? It's something like a documentary of daily habits, a virtuosic sequencing of mundane and ritual behavior -- eating breakfast, reading a book, chatting with his servants, waiting for General McArthur to return, greeting his wife -- sequences that contain turning points. A surprisingly naive, yet resigned man faces up to his life, thus learning to really live in the end.
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Job Talk: Korean Culture

An example of this genre of film, popular in the 1950s in S. Korea

Today I encouraged my class to come down to a job talk for a new position opening up at my school, teaching Korean literature and culture.

Dr. Travis Workman,Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA. "Traces of the Postwar: Violence and Memory in South Korean Cinema." February 18, 4:00 p.m. 306 Folwell Hall.

Overall, the talk was chock full of interesting close readings but also what Ouyang Xiu would call "lofty and obscure" at times -- it's not that he was incomprehensible, but that he didn't do enough to hold the audience's attention. There weren't enough sticky spots, to use Yang Jiang's phrase. This was mainly a factor of his nervousness, though, I realize.

Actually I'm quite sympathetic, especially since it became clear over the course of the talk that he does have some genuine insights into the nature of the connection between family and domestic spaces on the one hand and the state and political allegory on the other hand. That in a nutshell is what I am working on as well.

Raw notes, for my own purposes only:


"Traces of the Postwar: Violence and Memory in South Korean Cinema"

I will show three clips or so in the middle.

The Korean war rarely appears in commercial melodramas. State violence <-> Film, narrative. Not necessarily war films, but rather post war melodrama. Not direct representation, but indirect. Spectral present in the post war condition. "The Hand of Destiny" 1954. Occlusion of violence, intimacy and personal ethics instead. Late 1950s, "Hell Flower," 1958. More complex historical consciousness. Experimental film: "Stray Bullet," 1961. (In)visibility of violence.

No peace treaty after 1953. so "post war" is a problematic term. Films, 1953-1961. Trauma and hope for family reunion a common theme in the cinema. The melodramatic form: Kim's characteristics..."Cinematic Reconciliation." Latter two films were working against the grain for the day. Aesthetic of romantic intimacy and familial belonging. (Violence and social conflict). Melodrama also a staple during J Colonial Period. 40s-50s directors were under Chosun, monitured by J Colonial Gov't. Chae Ying-yu (sp?) 1944, J propaganda film. 1946, "Hurrah, Freedom." Is his career somewhat ironic? Continuity between propaganda, commercial melodrama. cf. "Madame Freedom," etc. director____. "Children of the Sun" -- propaganda. Defense ministry work.

"The Hand of Destiny." A character's gradual break with communism and embrace individual ideals. Counterespionage agent. Romance turn away rom communism. Save her man from the N Korean commander. The romance between two spies gives aesth quality of J colonial films. Opposes N/S K identity. One capable of feeling, one is completely cold and calculating. And faceless. Scene. Face vs. Faceless. Faceless v. Romantic scenes.

The Hand of Destiny (Unmyeong-ui son) (1954)

Director : Han Hyeong-Mo
Production Company : Han Hyeong-Mo Production
Date of Theatrical Release : 1954-12-14
Running Time : 85 min.
Opening Theater : Sudo Theater
Genre : Anti-Communism

Romance converges with political allegory. cf. "Military Train," 1938. Not seeing the faces creates a paranoid effect. Vs. Camera gets intimate in romance scenes. Melodrama technique. Affective force. First onscreen kiss in K. cinema. The humanistic bond between two characters. Opposed to Communist ethos. K. McCarthyism. Manichean universe. It's a post war film from only two years after. The colonial relationship with the USA never appears. No national division. Gender, class relations. All this comes later.

"Hell Flower." Pays closer attention to the characters on the ground. Their personal decisions. Oppositional identities. Culture of US bases and black market around them. Domestic poverty. Econ conditions. Amer occupation. New subject positions. S = moral sentiment. N = ideology. A comedic tone to prostitution: Korean women prostitutes work near the bases. Gang can use the allure to steal goods. A gratuitous dance. A distraction. Satire of base culture. [Reference to a volume on this subject] After all it's still a melodrama. Innocence, experience, virtue, corruption, evil. Crazy plot: Sonia the object of anxieties about the tenuousness of memory. In contrast to Judy, Sonia's strategizing...prevents her from having shared history. impossible dream of escape. Life before doesn't bolster her. Visibility v. invisibility. Clip: "Even you give me an embarrassed look." Nostalgia redeemed at the end when Dong-shik invites Judy to come back to the countryside. Judy and her boo both die. DIsinterest with the past is a strategy for survival. Viewer is implicated in this problem of what can be said, what not. Judy's memory of violence is not visible. Film is flipped -- it can show, but it doesn't. Tension: screen and intuition. unvisualized. unsaid. nostalgia and narrative present. There is a momentary disruption.

"Stray Bullet," One of the best films from S. Korea. Very aware of the war going into the present. The problem of visibility. Knows its a film. Neo-realist attention to economic crises. Formal dimension of cinema's relationship to the past. Two scenes. 1. Self-reflexivity on commercial cinema. 2. Characters remember, but we don't see it. We see them dreaming, hallucinating. Waking dream space of a terrified mother. How to respond to the present, the visible? Quick cuts. Mediation. The war comes into the post war. His tooth -- upset. Get me out of here!

I read Hell Flower and Stray Bullet against commercial melodrama. Challenge perceptions.

Questions. They must have been familiar with film noir and American melodrama. Why Women? Women in 1950s, social conservatism, gendered anxiety about losing something from the past. Is Stray Bullet maybe not generically a melodrama? A comment on the difficulty of producing a memory that isn't melodramatic, perhaps? Is it invisible because their is a refusal to exploit the wound? Is it to resist the wound at that time? Address the question of how to articulate or represent war memory. Looking to not commercialize the war wound. It always seems to become sensationalized. Is cinema particularly the media where this can happen? The image, which need not use language. Privilege for exploring the problem of memory. And film noir -- shadow, black and white.

What are the limitations of a melodrama? The 1950s audience, more open and able to experience the war, has something which is not represented directly. If its political allegory, what limitations might it have? Benjamin on the Trauerspiel -- the limitations of the capacity to represent the allegory as a result of the history of the form. Absolutist states. Benjamin's interest is in figuring out these limitations. The melodrama traces to the colonial period. State/korea as family. Or as a kind of sentimental love relationship. (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) Resolutions have difficulty engaging with politics. Stray Bullet feels like a more political film.

Form allows you to fit into a censorship context, perhaps. Just as in the USA with noir. Able to critique our society beyond the Cold War.

The trace being part of the dream of the present.


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Brainstorm: Can I Write a Movie?

Back-of-Envelope: Notes from Convo with an Artist (1/17/10)

Things you need to know or do to write a movie, courtesy of my friend RAA over the phone (this is just a preliminary note tab, of no interest to readers, most likely):



Scene directions. Camera angle, etc. only if it is critical. ex, it was a "Victorian House." not gingerbread, etc.

Keeping budget in mind. How much for yours, RAA? $50-100 million, was what he was thinking. Wow!

Reading scripts. Read, read, read. Scenario Magazine. Look for the Silence of the Lambs one. There's a reason it won the Oscar for best script, you know. "Get the personal ones out of the way so you can move on." Read Horton Foote, Texan. To Kill a Mockingbird. Tender Mercies. The Trip to Bountiful. RAA: "Slow Dancing in the Snow," Three big MN pieces. "The Boy Who Could Talk to Whales" ; "Drill"

Must be in shorthand, not like the old days.

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Chinese Film in Off Hours

The Horse Thief 盗马贼

It's finally hit me that another way I could increase my familiarity with modern Chinese film and literature is to watch older films online. Many of these films are too slow, some how too involved in the business of drawing Chinese characters for Chinese tastes, to draw Adam in.


This film The Horse Thief, for example, I just learned about in a Danwei.org post on its director, Tian Zhuangzhuang 田壯壯. Tian is interesting for being a successful "Fifth Generation" director who has returned to the screen since being banned.

Another film that I'm watching at the same time is Er mo (links to 56.com), which was screened last night at the Bell Auditorium as part of the People's Republic of Cinema series.

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Fantastic Film

A revised draft of my AAS paper (links to a Word ".docx" file) is done. In other news:

Cave of Silken Web (1967)

This was our last film before spring break in the "fantastic" class. This is just good campy, fun from 1960s Hong Kong. I think it manages to bring to mind both Peking opera and the original Batman series at the same time. This sort of makes sense when you realize that all the percussion sounds are doing basically the same thing as "BLAM! BING! BOING!"
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Princess Iron Fan (1942)

My advisor P. showed an excerpt of this old war-era Chinese cartoon to his class:
It's actually pretty engrossing, even if you don't speak Chinese. Archive.org also has the complete film for free download, and there are English subtitles also available.

When I saw it, I was immediately reminded that Mao Zedong made a reference to Monkey in an agitprop piece from the same year the movie came out. He must have been drawing on the movie's popularity at the time! Mao wrote,

As for the question of how to deal with the enemy's enormous apparatus, we can learn from the example of how the Monkey King dealt with Princess Iron Fan. The Princess was a formidable demon, but by changing himself into a tiny insect the Monkey King made his way into her stomach and overpowered her.

若说：何以对付敌人的庞大机构呢？那就有孙行者对付铁扇公主为例。铁扇公主虽然是一个厉害的妖精，孙行者却化为一个小虫钻进铁扇公主的心脏里去把她战败了。

From the Liberation Daily 《解放日报》, in Yan'an, September 7, 1942.
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