OPEN SPACE

………………………………………………..”Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.” - André Gide……………

[This Saturday! As part of our "Vegas Highs, Vegas Lows" film series, and in conjunction with the exhibition Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas, we're screening Viva Las Vegas (1pm) and Showgirls (3pm). Not to be missed!]

Never have there been two films so ripe for reassessment as George Sidney’s Viva Las Vegas, and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. Made thirty years apart, they both reside in that basket reserved for the culturally unsanctioned. Maybe it’s due to the stain of Vegas — that fata Morgana that has traditionally made the highfalutin see red. Now, in the true era of anything goes, in which the Vegas aesthetic has established itself as the norm, it’s just possible their time has come…

Why reassess an Elvis movie? ‘Cause this one’s so damned fun! There are a few decent Elvis movies. Viva is the only great one. The King is as close as the United States ever came to producing an autochthonous deity. The lack of a worthy consort might explain the fallowness of the rest of his cinematic terrain. In Viva, Elvis meets his match, Ann-Margret. The plot of this film is a pretext for their sacred union, bringing with it the promise of fulfillment to the magical kingdom of Vegas — that ultimate flowering, refinement, end-point of the American mythos. Elvis plays an up-and-coming race-car driver, always a dice-toss away from attaining the motor of his dreams. Ann-Margret is a young goddess on the unconscious make for the proper consort. Together they will play, flirt, bicker, argue, make up, as well as sing and dance the rock-n-roll over the course of eighty-five increasingly ecstatic minutes. They inhabit a world of widescreen neon, in which every desire is attainable, and every dream has merely to be fantasized, and it’s suddenly reality — all without repercussion. Yes, this is the true American Dream.

I believe somewhere in the pages of Cahiers du cinema in the 1950’s, a proto-French New Wave director mused on the revolutionary concepts he hoped to enact in celluloid: gone would be artificial notions of plot and character not derived from action. Film was about the eternal now. Each moment would create its own reality, its own urgency. Life would be experienced by the glance, the gesture, the drama of expressions across the face, from second to second, shot to shot. If a character desired to sing, he’d sing. If she wanted to dance, she’d dance. If angry, they’d shoot to kill. If lusty, they’d go to town… Desire, thought, and action would again be one — and paradise regained. Each scene would exist for itself, build to a new shuddering climax, then be dismissed, in an endless quest for the new now now now…

This article must have been amongst the earliest of its kind to be translated from the French, and transported to Hollywood, for George Sidney, prince of the MGM musical-comedy, apparently read it and instantly put its principles into action. As an example of this New Wave genre, it has never been surpassed. Sidney was just the man for the job, having built an extensive body of work poised somewhere between primitive surrealist and naive absurdism, which had a long history of sending the literati into uncontrollable spasms of collective horror and outrage, and of gracing the faces of the average Jane or Joe with smiles of pleasure. There is something seriously strange about Sidney’s work, an unhinged yet vital deliriousness, a quality emitting from some now deep-buried, disclaimed and abandoned fold of the American Grain, which, I must admit, I find intoxicating.

Jonathan Rosenbaum once proposed Gentleman Prefer Blondes as the capitalist Potemkin, but for me this title goes to Viva Las Vegas. Though Blondes is arguably brilliantly embedded with capitalist ideology, Viva cuts to the chase by offering an unsurpassable platter of delights for our ecstatic delectation. This is the field of argument to which capitalism is best suited. Examples of what’s on offer: Elvis performing “What I Say” in a sequence that gives both Ray Charles and Bruce Conner runs for their money, the most mind-blowing first date in cinema history (not counting Last Tango in Paris), and, at the film’s climax, the most viscerally exciting auto race I’ve ever seen in a movie.

But this film is far more than capitalist apologia, for its convulsive beauty contains a religious dimension — an ecstatic vision, a mystical union of opposites, Viva Las Vegas presents such a profoundly affirmative view of the American psyche, that it suggests it’s capable of (witness the “fate” of Cesare Danova) transcending death itself.

If Viva is Vegas as utopia, the Vegas of Showgirls is a dystopia worthy of Blade Runner, or Brecht’s Mahagonny. Ambition, manipulation, corruption, the quest for power — these are the issues on this film’s agenda. Though its Vegas is as beautiful as that of Viva (in a 1995 kinda way), this work is a large and bitter pill — ultimately to your benefit, but scary for those in search of a quick and easy tease.

Showgirls follows the exploits of Nomi Malone, a dancer who seeks to protect her integrity while crawling to the top of the Vegas food-chain. Young, vital, infinitely ambitious, yet willfully naive, charming but profoundly undereducated in all but a modicum of the street-smarts she desperately wants to shed, Nomi is a mass of contradictions, a woman in severe need of Reichian analysis, in which every element of being is treated as neurotic symptom. All of her talents and symptoms will come into play as she battles her way from strip-club nymph to full-fledged Goddess of show business on the Vegas strip. Arrayed against her is a virtual network of the devious and duplicitous, all of whom want either to prevent her from attaining her rightful pedestal in the Pantheon, or gain access past her g-string. As she powers her way through power-mad would-be seducers (club and show managers, a choreographer manqué, the reigning Vegas Goddess, a sexually violent Michael Bolton doppelganger), she comes ever-so-close to a confrontation with her own heart of darkness, but like America, to which her character is an analog, Nomi will stop at nothing to protect her remaining shreds of innocence. Over the course of the film, the trail of self-deception and chaos in her wake reveals a latter-day incarnation of Inanna, Sumerian Goddess of passion, war, and destruction.

Paul Verhoeven’s audacity is seen in the way he vacuum-packs contrary elements into seemingly irresolvable structures. Dealing in a largely heterosexual eros, but in a self-consciously high-camp manner, relishing ambiguity and reveling in primal force, proffering both satirical social critique and an appreciation for the permutations of undying archetypes, and working in a style marked for its mixture of raw garishness and cold European aestheticism, it’s no wonder the works are so often misunderstood. Their aim tends both above the head and below the belt.

The difficulty of these films is compounded by Verhoeven’s open embrace of that despised form, melodrama. This isn’t a problem for his macho melodramas — Robocop and Starship Troopers — but the mode has become somehow threatening when applied to a female world view. Showgirls refers back to the genre of “women’s pictures”, now for the most part sadly defunct, which dealt with troublesome emotions — hysteria, say, or unrequited love — and were often centered around sympathetic portrayals of outsider women. They served as societal safety valves, providing catharsis, allowing for an imaginative exploration of a realm of extravagant emotionality, touching parts of the psyche now repressed. This instinctive, working-class genre has lost its currency, due, in part, to the intertwining rise of PC strictures and upwardly mobile aspirations, and their concomitant code of rigid decorum. Guy Maddin, in a recent, spirited defense, said “melodrama isn’t true life exaggerated — that would be bogus. It’s true life uninhibited, just like our dreams.” And uninhibited emotion in the classically “feminine” mode just ain’t in fashion.

In dream-like style, Showgirls (like Viva) romps through other genres (musical, soft-core porno, over-the-top exploitation film, martial-arts action) as well, in the best meta-Hollywood manner, making for a narrative and dramatic short-hand in which complex ideas and feelings are suggested with ruthlessly efficient, effortless speed. Genre play in a film overloaded with painful realities is, in fact, the most transgressive element of this radical work — and the cause of the emotional gag-reflex it has so often inspired. Ultimately, Showgirls is a “women’s picture” made for men, and therefore disturbing to just about everybody.

Posted by Brecht under Film, Opinion | Tags: Ann-Margret, Elizabeth Berkley, Elvis, George Sidney, Paul Verhoeven, Showgirls, Vegas Highs Vegas Lows, Viva Las Vegas

[Hello all. A small group of us have been having the occasional post-screening discussion in response to the Jarman retrospective now on. As I noted yesterday, none of us have been quite sure how to gauge our encounter with Derek Jarman. Weighing in below are Brecht Andersch, our projectionist, and Stephen Hartman, film-loving psychoanalyst! (You may remember them from our summer of Alexanderplatz). If you have thoughts, we'd love to hear them.]

Stephen Hartman:

So fond of techno am I that I have always refused to listen to—I’m sure I’ve even said “hated”—opera without knowing much about it. Then, recently, a dear friend set out to convert me. We spent a wonderful evening listening and comparing. As I write now, my new heroine Régine Crespin is belting out Verdi. Alas, me…a convert?

Unfortunately, diving back into Derek Jarman after many years had the opposite effect. Where I was once an Act Up boy overwhelmed by the poetry of The Garden and in tears at the New York premier of Blue (which, I hope, will still reduce me to rubble), I left Caravaggio mildly interested, The Last of England bored, and The Garden all but obtunded. People change. And the films and music that give us identity age. I embraced Jarman in the 1980’s because the lush sensibility mixed with righteous indignation and a certain academic veneration of beauty had operatic strength. Why now, I wonder, does Jarman’s vision seem dated dull? Postmodern without punch? Operatic in its hysteria but without a unifying beat?

There are so many magnificent images. Yet, in the way they knit together, something seems lacking, unmetabolized. It was, of course, a very different time. People were dying of AIDS everywhere with no end in sight and WMD’s were circling around the American southwest on train tracks, set to launch at any moment. It was a jittery time: melancholic even in advance of death. Jarman captured thanatos well—if not with a kind of aesthetic hyperbole that could be hypnotic or off-putting relative to your anger at the unassimilated thud of yet another death.

At some point, though, the fat lady sings and there is resolution. I’m afraid that for Jarman, at least in the films we have seen so far, the tragedy is still pending. I’m going to try to go back to that time of waiting for the inevitable. But it is rubbing me the wrong way now that my heroes are the ones armed with hope rather than despair.

Brecht Andersch:

While I must confess my previous encounters with Jarman’s work didn’t make me a fan, and this extensive retrospective has not been a conversion experience, I’ve nevertheless found some elements in the work to admire and enjoy, such as:

1) This is an artist of confidence and audacity - Jarman is a man full of feeling and passion, and whatever fears he faces regarding the difficulties of expressing a complex and thorny vision are met face-on and dispatched.

2) His work is deeply personal - each film seems to tell a version of his own story, or provide an update as to how events have affected the development of his vision. Many of my favorite filmmakers, writers, and artists work in this mode.

3) The filmmakers he emulates and to whom he pays repeated homage are artists I admire immensely: Michael Powell, Cocteau, Pasolini, Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos. At one point in The Last of England, a rapid-fire montage of black and white imagery alternating with shots dominated by red or blue (in a manner clearly influenced by Anger and Markopoulos) is immediately followed by a homage to the ending of Pasolini’s Salo: two soldier/terrorists dance near a fire burning in the middle of the street, machine-guns slung over their shoulders as they waltz…

4) Jarman has a bold and unusual sense of color and film form in general, and the results are often beautiful. One technique he employs repeatedly is to blow up super-8 Kodachrome to 35mm. As a lover of this now almost defunct “home movie” stock, I find it very exciting to encounter its deep, saturated reds and blues on the big screen, though, as I’m also something of a film purist, the pixels acquired from the video intermediate of The Last of England are a bit disconcerting. More to my taste is that super-8 Kodachrome moment in Jubilee—blown up directly to 35mm—in which a ballerina performs, out-of-doors and nearby a fire. Through deft in-camera editing and graceful camera movement and zooms (Jarman no doubt operating the camera himself) Jarman becomes his dancer’s partner, and the film and the world come alive…

5) Jarman is unyieldingly honest, his work over-stuffed with contradictory impulses and ideas. Just when I’m ready to write him off as an unredeemable chiliast, for example, he makes a whole film—Wittgenstein—dedicated to the story of a man who must learn to live with all of life’s roughness and confusion. As alluded to above, each of Jarman’s films is a chapter in a too-early concluded spiritual autobiography, and this kind of rigorously honest self-appraisal—in a quest for a deeper encounter with Self—is extremely attractive to me.

Posted by Suzanne under Film, Opinion | Tags: Caravaggio, Derek Jarman, Jubilee, The Garden, The Last of England, Wittgenstein

[We're a lot about Derek Jarman on the blog of late. It's been for many of us in the theater a process of discovery and rediscovery, and if the conversations I've participated in and overheard are a good barometer, even for those who are more familiar with Jarman's oeuvre it isn't as much meeting an old friend as re-encountering a familiar stranger you're not quite sure what to do with. James Mackay, who produced numerous films with Jarman, writes here about the production of The Angelic Conversation, the first feature they made together, detailing especially the development of Jarman's signature use of lo-fi film mediums including Super 8 mm and video. Mr. Mackay has also sent some fantastic snapshots taken on location during the shooting of The Angelic Conversation. We'll be screening that film this Saturday at 3pm. Enjoy.]

The first I heard about Derek Jarman was at an exhibition of Expanded Cinema at the ICA in 1974. They were showing a three-screen version of In the Shadow of the Sun. I didn’t meet Derek until much later, however, at the London Filmmakers Co-op in the late 70s, when I invited him to show some of the many Super8mm films he’d made. That night Derek showed some twenty films, projecting them himself from two small Bolex projectors he’d brought with him, and accompanying the films with a selection of music from commercial audio cassettes - like a DJ really. He kept the audience enthralled for almost three hours.

During the prep for that show we’d discussed the merits and disadvantages of working in Super8mm, especially the problem of fragility, and when we met again it was mainly to talk about preservation of his S8mm films. At the time however Derek was also very excited about the two features he had in development - Caravaggio and Neutron - and every time we met he would read aloud from each revision.  Using my contacts in Europe, I was able to raise funding to have a 16mm negative made from the Super8mm original of In the Shadow of the Sun. This was Derek’s first magnum opus and the result of four years of filming and many layered composites.

As we spent more time together I was slowly drawn into the production process, from script consultant to development producer on Caravaggio. However, as that film was proving difficult to get off the ground Derek continued to work on other projects with the more accessible medium of Super 8 mm. TG Psychic Rally in Heaven (1981) was our first film conceived to be shot on S8mm but then completed on a more distributable format, in that case, 16mm. This was followed by a series of films mixing S8mm and 16mm. Our first foray into large-scale production started during a session at the ICA, where we were preparing a selection of Derek’s early S8mm films for a run in the cinema by transferring them to video. We were doing this by projecting the S8 films onto a white wall and reshooting them with a video camera. Halfway through the second day we started to get a bit bored with this process and began to experiment with a large tarnished mirror and the projectionist, Steve Randall. Derek projected the image on to Steve and the mirror while filming the scene with the video camera. This was an exciting new departure, and the material we filmed that day was the first step in making The Angelic Conversation.

Derek Jarman, Ken Reynolds. On location for The Angelic Conversation, Somerset. Photo: James Mackay.

With Agfa selling off its colour stock cheap - £2.5 for a cartridge, including processing - it was decided that our new project should be something more ambitious than a short. The combination of low-cost stock and Derek’s preferred shooting speed of 6fps meant that a little stock went a long way. There were to be two central characters. Derek had met Paul Reynolds at the Bell in King’s X and somehow I found Phillip Williamson. The idea was to create a free-form love poem with these two young men at its center.

We filmed the sequences for the new work gradually over the course of a summer. As our resources were very limited - neither of us had any real income at that time - we could only afford to film one or two days at a time. Derek chose all the locations. I devised the smoke and flares. Ken Bolton or another friend would drive and as there was only room for four, with a driver, Derek, & myself there was space for only one of the principal actors on each location shoot! The only time the actors were filmed together was for the bed scene in Derek’s Charing X Road flat.

Other scenes, with extras, were filmed in the ICA cinematheque. A video-only sequence was filmed in Derek’s flat. After each shoot the film was sent off for processing. As soon as it came back we would borrow a U-matic recorder from the British Film Institute on the other side of Charing X Road and then video the films off the wall. It all sounds a bit amateurish but we were deadly serious. (more…)

Posted by Suzanne under Film, Guest Writer | Tags: Derek Jarman, James Mackay, The Angelic Conversation

[Taking a cue from Michael Buitron at Leap Into the Void (via MAN), rather than marking the 19th annual (but now somewhat invisible?) "Day Without Art" by shrouding an artwork or going dark for the day, I leave you with these wonderful stills from some of Derek Jarman's earliest Super 8 mm films, with thanks to producer James Mackay, who provided them. Jarman was probably as well known for his very public homosexuality & his outspoken demand for gay rights as he was for his films. He died on February 19, 1994, of complications from AIDS.]

Derek Jarman. Still from Fire Island, 1974, S8mm. Courtesy James Mackay.

Derek Jarman. Still from A Journey to Avebury, 1971, S8mm. Courtesy James Mackay.

Derek Jarman. Still from Studio Bankside, 1970, S8mm. Courtesy James Mackay.

Derek Jarman. Still from Ashden’s Walk on Møn , 1973, S8mm. Courtesy James Mackay.

Posted by Suzanne under Film | Tags: 5439 people still die every day from AIDS, A Journey to Avebury, Ashden's Walk on Møn, Day Without Art, Derek Jarman, Fire Island, Studio Bankside

We have a fantastic pair of Jarman films this Saturday for your holiday weekend, and I have to say that, for my part, I can think of no better method of recovery from over-familial holiday indulgence than a good dose of hours in the Wattis theater watching movies. Plus, nearly four hours with Tilda Swinton? Who would refuse?

The line-up is: The Garden (1pm) and Wittgenstein (3pm). Gina Basso tells me the pairing is partially a matter of print-traffic timing and partly an oblique reference to “home”. Many readers will know that philosopher L. Wittgenstein also took a foray into architecture, designing a house for his sister, with architect Paul Engelmann, at the sister’s behest. Jarman, on the other hand, was a gardener as well as filmmaker: when he was diagnosed HIV-positive, he bought a fisherman’s cottage in Dungeness, Kent, and spent the years from 1986 until his death in 1994 designing and building the garden which surrounds it, and where the The Garden was shot.

Thanks to one Lady Vervaine for this picture I lifted from Flickr, of Jarman’s real garden (LV describes the picture as a recreation of an important scene in the film, so if you’re here Saturday, look out for it).:

There’s also a cool Flickr set of the whole garden here, by someone named Angus Fraser. I was surprised to see the pictures, as in my ill-traveled American ignorance I never think of any part of England as looking so inhospitable & bleak as a Southern California desert. There’s a lot of rock, stone, and cactus here, and it’s illuminating to note that Jarman set his film here as a garden of Eden. And keep an eye out for the greying hull of some sort of small ship, set against an awfully blue & wonderful sky.

As to Wittgenstein, this is Jarman’s depiction of the life and philosophy of. IMDB describes the film thus:

A dramatization, in modern theatrical style, of the life and thought of the Viennese-born, Cambridge-educated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), whose principal interest was the nature and limits of language. A series of sketches depict the unfolding of his life from boyhood, through the era of the first World War, to his eventual Cambridge professorship and association with Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes. The emphasis in these sketches is on the exposition of the ideas of Wittgenstein, a homosexual, and an intuitive, moody, proud, and perfectionistic thinker generally regarded as a genius.

Original screenplay by literary critic Terry Eagleton was heavily reworked by Jarman during production.

A review of the film is here (at my favorite cinema blog, Only the Cinema) and here you’ll find a review of both screenplays, which were published together by the British Film Institute.

If you want to do a little prep but don’t feel like trying to get through the Tractatus after your turkey and stuffing, you can watch a nine-part mini YouTube course (a bit weird) re Wittgenstein on language & logic here.

And here’s a short clip from the film itself, which gives a great sense of the mood, the style, the discomfort, the themes, AND Jarman’s humor, all in under two minutes:

We’ve been promising roundtable discussion on the Jarman films, and will give you a dose of it starting early next week with a lovely essay by James Mackay, producer of many Jarman films, and further conversation as the week continues. Come join us in the theater and talk a bit with us here on the blog. You can find all the postings on Jarman (including a week’s worth of music videos) here.

Posted by Suzanne under Film | Tags: Derek Jarman, The Garden, Wittgenstein

The last of my week of Derek Jarman music videos. Jarman made this video for Throbbing Gristle’s “TG Psychic Rally in Heaven” in 1981. Fair warning, it’s quite violent and explicit in language & content.

I think Jarman’s broken flashes of images complement TG’s challenging, avant-garde music.  Peter Christopherson, who played what we could call the percussion for the band, later went on to form the band Coil, which Jarman employed for soundtracks to many of his films.

Posted by Megan Z under Film, Videos | Tags: Derek Jarman, Throbbing Gristle

More Jarman videos! This is one of several he made for The Smiths, Ask, from 1986.

Derek Jarman’s films and The Smiths’ songs share similar motifs; this video is a prime example. Both reflect on a fractured world. While Morrissey croons, “If it’s not love then it’s the bomb that will bring us together” Jarman’s video depicts romantic encounters in front of an abandoned warehouse. The skeleton dance partner makes the entire scene into a dance macabre: the youth celebrate but the world falls to pieces.

Posted by Megan Z under Film, Videos | Tags: Derek Jarman, Morrissey, The Smiths

For your dose of intense and stunning war images, here’s the video Jarman directed for Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English (1979).

Posted by Megan Z under Film, Videos | Tags: Broken English, Derek Jarman, Marianne Faithfull

A week of Jarman vids, continued! Jarman made three videos for the Pet Shop Boys: Rent, It’s a Sin and a set of projections for the band’s live shows. Today I have posted the video for Rent but I encourage you to seek out the others, as they are phenomenal as well.  I love the lyrics of this song, they are so to the point.

Posted by Megan Z under Film, Videos | Tags: Derek Jarman, Pet Shop Boys

Hi, it’s Megan. We’ve got a Derek Jarman film series on right now, continuing through November and much of December. Some of you will know that, especially early in his career, Jarman made a lot of music videos. All this week, I will be posting some of my favorites.

To complement Jarman’s rebellious attitude, I thought I’d start off the week with the rebel Marianne Faithfull. Jarman created this video for her song “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” (1979). It’s a beautiful and haunting video. As an added plus, she’s a babe.

Posted by Megan Z under Film, Videos | Tags: Derek Jarman, Marianne Faithfull, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan

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[A special election-week Collection Rotation by San Francisco-based artist & curator Chris Sollars, whose experimental documentary C RED BLUE J will be screening in the Wattis theater Nov 4. All works collection SFMOMA & listed in detail at the bottom of this post.]

At Home in Red & Blue Brother Sister America

Growing up, my sister Jennifer was Red and I was Blue, between the colors of objects in our rooms, beds, clothes, and backpacks. Looking back, I think it’s strange that growing up during the 70s and 80s Reagan’s Republican America appropriated Socialist RED from the USSR.

The opening dream of my recent film C RED BLUE J was a playful way to study the color red used in politics: A Red Phone rings and alerts us of the Enemy—the British Red Coats, The Red Man (not Karl Marx, but he is next), Soviet Red, Red China—and is intercut with a Red finger painting from my childhood, Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds, and Red USA Olympic Athlete Jackets. The USA Formal Athlete Jackets, ironically, are from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, boycotted by the Soviet Union. I almost think it was a conscious decision to appropriate the “Enemy’s” color as a way to diffuse or re-appropriate it.

In the title C RED BLUE J,  C is for Christopher, J is for Jennifer and the RED & BLUE is between us. It also is a play on words: to See a Red Blue Jay, something you would never see but could imagine. Here to coincide with the election I am using C RED BLUE J as a model and method for selecting works from the SFMOMA collection.

I’ve squeezed some of my favorite artists from the collection into the mix. Gordon Matta-Clark, Hans Haacke, Pipilotti Rist, Phillip Guston, Robert Gober, and Edward Kienholz. New favorites from recent visits include Untitled [Man holding eagle with spread wings] and Tim Gardner’s Untitled (S with Mt. Robson). (Not only is “S” holding a Mt Beer can in front of a mountain, the beer is a BUScH!)

I’ve included Nauman’s Study for Hologram, in part because of his influence (along with William Wegman’s)  both on my work and my voice in C RED BLUE J.  There my voice is presented by cutting back and forth between close-ups of my eyes and mouth while talking. Here, Nauman’s Study suggests to me ideas of self-censorship in America. Friedlander’s House on Highway and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (one of my favorite works of all time) have changed for me, both from reconsidering the construction and deconstruction of my childhood homes, and since the housing market collapse. It’s great that these works are so accessible and constant but continuously shifting and changing in meaning as the world does.

The personal narrative in this sequence of works is further activated for me through the inclusion of children. Boys and Girls as Brother and Sister add a playfulness to the RED & BLUE pairings. This also allows for my sister and I to be included in the series of works selected from the collection.

Enjoy,

Chris Sollars

[Works, in order of appearance: Mathew B. Brady, Untitled (Portrait of a Brother and Sister) ca. 1850; Ellsworth Kelly, Blue/Red-Orange, 1970-1972, © Ellsworth Kelly; Bill Owens, 4th of July Parade, Livermore, California, 1970s, © Bill Owens; Hans Haacke, Blue Sail, 1964-1965, © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Unknown, Untitled [Baby on Red Velvet Chair] ca. 1870; Ann Hamilton, Indigo Blue, 1991/2007, © Ann Hamilton; Barry McGee, Untitled, 1996, © Barry McGee; Thomas Frederick Arndt, Inauguration Parade, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1989, 1989, © Thomas Frederick Arndt; Tim Gardner, Untitled (S with Mt. Robson), 2002, © Tim Gardner; Pipilotti Rist, Stir Heart, Rinse Heart, 2004, © Pipilotti Rist; Philip Guston, Blue Light, 1975, © Estate of Philip Guston; Shiro Kuramata, Cappellini, Manufacturer, Revolving Cabinet, 1970; Rineke Dijkstra, Odessa, Ukraine, August 4, 1993, 1993, © Rineke Dijkstra; Bill Owens, Tidy Bowl, Walnut Creek, 1979, © Bill Owens; Anna Atkins, Ceylon, ca. 1850; Edward Kienholz, Tomorrow’s Leaders Are Busy Tonight, 1961, © Edward Kienholz Estate; William Heick, Thomas, Red Arrow Dump, 1949, © William Heick; Robert Gober, Rat Bait, 1992, © Robert Gober, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; Gerhard Richter, Spiegel, blutrot (Blood Red Mirror), 1991, © Gerhard Richter; Robert Gober, Newspaper, 1992, © Robert Gober, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; Karim Rashid, V-Soul, 1999, © Karim Rashid; Emmet Gowin, Elijah and Donna Jo, Danville, Virginia, 1971, © Emmet and Edith Gowin, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; Bruce Nauman, Study for Hologram, 1970, © 2008 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Lee Friedlander, Colorado, 1967, © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Lee Friedlander, House on Highway, 1975, © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting,1974, © 2008 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Unknown, Untitled [African American Woman with Two White Children], ca. 1860; Alexander Girard, Salt and Pepper Shaker for La Fonda del Sol Restaurant, New York, ca. 1960; Unknown, American, Untitled [Man holding eagle with spread wings] * n.d.]

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Chris Sollars‘ work revolves around the reclamation and subversion of public space through urban interventions, the results of which are integrated into mixed media video installations. Chris is also director and curator of 667Shotwell, which he started in 2001, during the wake of disappearing San Francisco art-spaces. The recently completed C RED BLUE J is an experimental documentary featuring his sister, who works for the Bush Administration, his Born Again father, and his Lesbian mother to illustrate the complications of division during the 2004 Presidential election.

Posted by Suzanne under Collection Rotation, Film, Guest Writer | Tags: C Red Blue J, Chris Sollars, Democracy in America, SFMOMA RedBlue Study, VOTE

On November 4, we’ll be screening two democracy-themed projects by Bay Area artists. Chris Sollars’ documentary C RED BLUE J explores the red state/blue state divide of 2004, as Chris juggles his beliefs with those of a sister working for the Bush administration, a born-again Christian father, and a lesbian mother. I Want You (Auditions) is Tony Labat’s new work, culled from footage of the original I WANT YOU performances. I asked them to interview each other for the blog & they typed their conversation together in real time in Tony’s studio Weds afternoon. Chris & Tony, thanks! and xxxooo, SS

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2:00 PM Chris leaves his house at 21st and Shotwell. Tries to go to the Mission post office to mail a DVD of C RED BLUE J to Kentucky and Portland, Oregon.

2:03 PM At the post office.  Only two postal workers and all self-service equipment disconnected and missing. Worst post office in the city and possibly the country.

2:09 PM Chris rides past construction at Mission and Cesar Chavez (Army) on the sidewalk where Tony Labat recorded immigrant workers from his studio across the street. The workers are no longer here but there is an ISO container with pipes attached.

2:11 PM Chris rings the Buzzer for Tony’s Studio and enters the building.

2:13 PM Tony offers Chris a beer and sits down to complete an email. Chris picks up the California Biennial Catalogue. It includes imagery of Tony’s surveillance of immigrant workers, a video still of a tank passing on a train (Blur 2007), and a photo of Tony standing next to a Wax Museum sculpture of Fidel Castro.

2:15 PM Tony “NO MORE JFK!” I am coordinating my flight with a gallery I am showing at in January and the last time I flew into JFK it cost me five grand for holding a Cuban passport and an American green card.

2:20 PM As Chris types Tony unloads a clip from his Black pellet gun, firing around the studio.

2:25 PM The phone Rings. Chris laughs…Tony shouts “TIMMY what do you think of Chris? Chris and I are think-tanking for this writing about both our projects for SFMOMA.”

2:57 PM Chris is just making up the time-lapse, but that’s okay, that’s the nature of time…impressed by his skills at typing, I’m a one finger (or two) typist…the phone rings it is Jennifer Locke…she is letting me know that she has cleared the problem with my check from St Mary’s College…Chris has a nice little gallery…Jennifer says “don’t say little.” Why? “Because he may be a little sensitive about size.” Am I getting my money? Yes…it was a mistake so it was a good thing you called me…Thanks Jennifer…

3:06 PM Chris asks about my sketch for an installation, he thinks that it looks like a voting booth…I find that very ironic…

3:07 PM Chris, Why did you make C RED BLUE J?

3:10 PM Just like political debates, before addressing the current question I will first address the comment made earlier, “Little”:  The exhibition space of 667 Shotwell is compromised by existing in a private home.

3:11 PM Interrupted by Tony swinging a dirty towel around the studio swatting flies. Caliber and quality of works: from democratic dinners voted by and prepared by the People with Jerome Waag, the whole backroom of 667 Shotwell turned into an XMAS present to sit on Santa’s lap (with Pat Rock as Santa) Brian Storts, or the 50cent beer machine in the same room a couple years later by Rock and Storts, and most recently the show 10 year itch of SF underground music (videos, outfits, posters by John Dwyer, T.I.T.S, Numbers, Erick Landmark, and Mike Donovan of Sic Alps amongst others. “Little” in size, but busting at the seams.

3:18 PM OK Tony is now done with that towel. Anyway a lot of the music in C RED BLUE J is by John Dwyer and I integrated it into the film since I was listening to his music all during the past four—

3:20 PM But Chris…Why did you make C RED BLUE J ?

3:21 PM Probably as a way to cope with my sister… “Jennifer” working for BUSH. Turn it into something positive. To have a window into her life and ideology and to look at how she could work for HIM after the way we grew up. Mom is a lesbian. I always thought it ironic or fitting that here I am an artist in SF and she is working for Bush in DC… couldn’t be much more split than that. Family is often where we are confronted with opposing Political discourse.

3:23 PM RING Tony: Did you vote for Obama? You did already? Oh come on…

3:24 PM Felipe: “Chris, you have a nice ass”

3:25 PM Tony speaking in Spanish so as to hide his conversation from Chris…NUMERO UNO… Miami… XMAS… get Mom to LA… Fantasy…

3:25 PM “Havana to Miami, No way …then I am involved with Homeland Security again..”

3:31 PM Tony puts in the DVD for I WANT YOU.

C The HD makes them look as good as politicians on TV. Did you change the order in the editing?

T The order happened naturally. I wondered if it was going to have to be edited, but the order was so organic and natural I stayed with it.

C This gives new meaning to SPOT Light.

T The performer can’t see us, just the light and that darkness. And the X on the floor.

C It also almost feels like an interrogation. How was the project publicized?

T It was listed online, on Facebook, Craigslist, and with posters. This generation is protesting more online than in the streets. I wanted to create a space for this NEED to demonstrate. Narcissism seems to be the nature today. In front of the camera but without the voice.

C I keep thinking that as our world becomes more and more digital I need to stay physical too. Tell me a little more about the I WANT YOU process.

T Part one: private auditions in front of the judges. Part two: I took myself out and the audience became the judges, American Idol/The Gong Show style. Part two became the spectacle. When I watched I kept thinking of what lines would be good for the posters. And was the audience rewarding the performance or the message? Part three will happen Monday Nov 3, when the posters of the winners go up all over town.

C Your film is totally inclusive. The good, the bad, the ugly; it also reminds me of the structure of the Democratic Convention when they invited average workers to speak their concerns, no matter how scripted.

T The posters come from the idea of common man propaganda. They use the voice of the everyday, like the participants. Similar to Joe the Plumber. Joe the Plumber is symbolic, but it didn’t work because it is Fake. Not a Joe, not a plumber.

C The symbol is effective though…

T But once Joe became tangible there was disappointment. Same with Sarah Palin: the “Hockey Mom” who then shops at Bloomingdales.

C Hypocrisy.  I WANT YOU is also similar to your work as a performer on the Gong Show. You went from participant to host. What year was that?

T 1978

C What month? (Chris is thinking that his sister was born that same year.)

T Ehhh?

C What season? Jennifer was born in June.

T In the Fall.

C Tony, watching I WANT YOU, I can’t help but think about performance and being on stage. I moved here in 1999 from the east coast, and one thing I wanted to ask you about is Performance. I myself feel like I make Actions, not… “I want to Perform”. For example, at an event put on by Brian Storts in March 1999, I wanted to intervene, and not be on stage. A lot of the artists I was meeting at that time were putting on performance events. One after the other…Perform…My audience for my actions has always been in the streets. It might not be as prevalent as it was in 1999, but why all this performance art in San Francisco?

T Wow…That’s IRONIC. I came to San Francisco in 1975 to study out here. Chris Burden, Tom Marioni, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, and I, I think we all were against “the stage.” Theater vs performance. In Studio 9 at SFAI in the 1970s there were all of these performances going on. At my core was a desire to deconstruct and investigate this apparatus, “the stage.” It was around this time I went on the Gong Show. I saw the Gong Show as a bridge between performance art and TV/theater on stage. What would it be like to have Karen Finley or Tony Labat on the Gong Show. Total subversion of the stage. I wanted to consider the potential of these other venues/ platforms or spaces. Karen and myself were using the stage as a platform. The stage is a pedestal. Just like in sculpture. Here in the film the stage and X marks the spot, becomes a soapbox/platform.

ON THE TV: A person bound in brown with tape around body is placed on the X on stage. There is a total breakdown with this. And The person starts screaching and screaming. The person walks to the edge of the stage and the crew comes back to keep the individual from falling off. The bound person falls to the floor and continues to thrash back and forth with screeching.

T The museum staff didn’t know how to handle this person…when to end or stop it. This person became a liability. Is this person in torture or is this performance? What do we do? The only way to end it in this context was, after several minutes, for me to say “thank you” and she stopped…I don’t know who it was. It seemed as if she wanted it to stop but was dependent on the context of the situation for it to end. It could have gone on for hours. This trust between performer and audience is similar to Acconci’s early works. Potential energy, possibility, and the “what if”…What if this energy is transferred… (more…)

Posted by Suzanne under Film, Live Art, Magazine, Profiles + Interviews | Tags: C Red Blue J, Chris Sollars, I WANT YOU, Tony Labat

Just a quick reminder that tonight’s screening of Huang Shuqin’s Woman Demon Human will be on beautiful 35mm sans subtitles! Which seems like a lot of fun, and kind of a don’t-miss opportunity, whether you understand the language or you don’t.  Considered China’s “only genuine feminist film”,  Woman Demon Human stages an unorthodox biopic of famed Beijing Opera star Pei Yanling, whose career was noted for her portrayal of male roles, especially the male underworld god, Zhong Kui.

For a quick gloss on both the narrative and the why of a screening sans subtitles, see Gina Basso’s post of last week.

Rediscovering the Fourth Generation: Woman Demon Human
Huang Shuqin, 1987, 106 min.
35mm, screened in Mandarin
7:00 p.m., Phyllis Wattis Theater
$5 general; free for SFMOMA members or with museum admission
(requires a free ticket, which can be picked up in the Haas Atrium).

Posted by Suzanne under Film | Tags: Rediscovering the Fourth Generation, Woman Demon Human

Greetings readers, this is Gina Basso, Public Programs Associate and semi-regular OPEN SPACE contributor. I’m about to delve right in to my first ever post….here I go…

You may have read Megan Brian’s post last week about the print traffic woes getting films from the China Film Archive for the films scheduled in the Rediscovering the 4th Generation series currently underway. And the saga continues: one of the films arrived sans subtitles (Mandarin, anyone?). Despite the myriad ways to handle such a predicament, we decided the print would have to be replaced with a subtitled DVD (thanks Facets Multimedia!) for two of the screenings. But don’t worry! the print didn’t come all this way for nothing and we’re showing it anyway, on October 30, in Mandarin, NO subtitles! Once you know the story, just relish in the opportunity to see a visually stunning work that captures the vivid colors of the costumes and the make-up, and the performative elements of Chinese opera.

Woman Demon Human is the only film in this series to be directed by a woman, Huang Shuqin. It’s an imaginative bio-pic of famed Beijing Opera actor, Pei Yanling, who was best known for her portrayal of male roles and who stars in the film, playing a fictional version of herself, Qiu Yun. (Didn’t Richard Pryor do that in Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling?) With the opera as its backdrop, the film follows the rise of the young opera star as she experiences love, loss, tragedy, and the trappings of gender conventions. In fact, the real drama lies backstage where tears flow, tempers flair, and performers share gossip with hushes, whispers, and knowing looks. The backstage scenes convey the frenetic energy of the opera’s inner-workings, from the laborious process of applying make-up and getting into costume to the “limbering up” (stretching and contorting)— painful reminders of the physical lengths the performers must endure for their art.

Qiu/Pei’s defiance of traditional roles in the face of public ridicule is at the heart of the story, and  the catalyst that allows her to sink more deeply into her art. Cutting her hair short - “she looks more boy than boy” remarks a character - she raises suspicions from those who gasp at her will to no longer play female roles and to be “nobody’s bride.” Cross-dressing in Chinese opera is age-old (Yuan Dynasty), but it’s more common for men to adopt female roles (dan). This female-to-male reversal illuminates Pei Yanling’s real-life controversy as an opera performer. In the film, her onstage performances as the mythical Zhang Kui, the underworld god and vanquisher of ghosts and demons, act as a meta-text for her life off-stage, mirroring her desire to chase the ghosts haunting her life and challenging traditional customs in modern opera. Director Shuqin also uses the literal mirror, not only as a way to suggest the character’s identity formation, its fragmentation and merging of multiple selves into one, but also as a device to move the story along. Woman Demon Human spans Pei Yanling’s career from the late 1950s to the 1980s and each chapter in her life is signaled by her pondering her reflection in the mirror and seeing two selves - in costume as Zhang Kui and without. As she gazes into the mirror you’re whizzed off into the next dramatic epoch.

Posted by gina under Film | Tags: cross-dressing Chinese-opera stars, Huang Shuqin, Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling, Musée Mechanique, Pei Yanling, Rediscovering the Fourth Generation, Woman Demon Human, Yuan Dynasty, Zhang Kui

[Hi. I'm Megan. I work in the education department and thought I'd introduce myself as I'll be a semi-regular contributor. I was interviewed here when I co-curated the staff art show, and have already written a little for the blog. It's a pleasure to meet you.]

We have a new film series on this month, Rediscovering the Fourth Generation, which includes four films from the post-Mao era in China. Gina Basso, our public programs associate, has been coordinating this series since July, working closely with a distributor in China to make sure the films got here on time. So when the prints still weren’t here a week before the first screening, and Gina couldn’t get her Chinese contact on the phone, everyone started to worry. As it turns out, it was Golden Week in China, EVERYONE was on holiday, and we had no way of knowing if the films would turn up.

After a few frantic days on the phone, we located the prints at SFO and had them rushed over, however by this time it was only one day before the first screening. Paul Clipson, our projectionist extraordinaire, generally has a week to look through the films, checking the prints to make sure they’re in good condition and learning each film’s personality. Last week he just had a day. To add panic to panic, the four films arrived in SIX boxes, sealed with thick metal wire, which Paul had to cut open with wire cutters. Those six boxes revealed over forty short reels, meaning that each film was divided up into at least ten sections which, of course, were all labeled in Mandarin. Paul spent the day matching Mandarin characters to each other in order to put each film together.

When I got a chance to see the prints and shipping materials I was fascinated by their personality and how tactile they were. Growing up in the digital age, I haven’t had much opportunity to see real film, especially real film in real canisters that have just traveled across the globe. The steel boxes and canisters are a reminder of the tangible and human aspect of film.

On Saturday Rick Danielson and Brecht Andersch, our projectionists for the day, arrived. I felt a wave of relief as the first scene began. The saga of putting together this film series reminds me that, as Paul put it, “Art isn’t convenient. The impracticality is part of its magic.”

Posted by Megan Z under Film | Tags: Rediscovering the Fourth Generation

And so at last we bid our beloved friend Franz Biberkopf goodbye. It’s been a long but wonderful month watching, thinking, and talking together with everyone about all things Berlin A & RWF. Farewell Mieze, farewell Lina, farewell Franzë, Cilly, Ida, Pums, Meck—look, even in a blogpost I’m loathe to wish “fare well” to those awful villains Rheinhold & Luders!—

Dominic & I both want to thank all of our round-table-ees: Brandon, Cynthia, Julian, & Stephen, as well as Brecht our projectionist, Dana Ward our Cincinnati correspondent, and everyone else who’s been along with us in the theater on Thursdays and Saturdays, and in the comment boxes all along the way.

It seems kind of sweetly fitting to close with this last post in from Dana Ward, who didn’t quite make the summit with us:

———

“…What a shame for me that just as I had calibrated the pace of my reading with the bundles of your viewing, I was ‘laid low’, (to use a favorite phrase of Döbin’s) by a monstrous toothache. I abandoned writing and reading for distractions more befitting one in constant pain and deprived of sleep: cooking the softest of possible meals, watching copious amounts of baseball, and, if awoken by the nagging tooth, wandering about in the yard, staring at my neighbor’s mimosa tree, damp and sparkly in the sunrise, Codeine just starting to numb me up some. So this is an interruption story. And a boo-hoo story, but don’t cry for me! During most of these hours I was thinking of Biberkopf. I thought a lot too about Döbin’s Berlin, of the myriad intimate tragedies derived from enforced economic stratification, a stratification that’s so like our own, and how these wounds make a polity available to the most malign cures, how National Socialism exploited all that pain. Perhaps it’s redundant to say so. But that causality, obvious as it is, felt unbearable in its revivification as I paced in the yard waiting for my molar nerve to scream itself hoarse.

Its ironic that just as I entered into a few days of mild phantasmagoria, Döbin’s novel had arrived in a similar state. The juxtaposition of set pieces was growing more disturbing. Franz’s vision of the slaughterhouse was seen through a lens of creepy paternalistic gangster benevolence, as if to say “sorry little piggies, it’s just business”. He was almost Ronald Reagan! Then his uber-maudlin Job lament, which, in its Christianized bathos was like a tonal prophecy of something out of Kerouac. It was that evening, not long after the disembodied voice revealed itself as Satan, that the toothache arrived and I left behind the book.

At work I’ve kept up with the discussion on the blog, and wished terribly that I’d been reading along. I’ve got a root canal in the morning, and my neighbor is outside right now trimming branches away from her mimosa, scaling back my little narcotic totem which I hope I won’t need for comfort at dawn, as I should be asleep. So I’m down here halfway to the top of Mt. Everest. Sorry I didn’t get to the top with y’all. Once I’ve made it to the summit and back down again, maybe later we’ll all compare notes on the view.”

Posted by Suzanne under Film, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Film School, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema, same time next year?

[Another illuminating post from Brecht Andersch, our projectionist and Berlin Alexanderplatz expert-in-residence, as we wind our way down:]

Hanna Schygulla has said that Fassbinder told her he identified profoundly with all three main characters of Alexanderplatz; “I am Biberkopf, Reinhold, and even Mieze, too.” He had discovered the novel at the age of fourteen, and it served as a mirror to this budding genius, reflecting back the splits within his own psyche. He used his experiences as petri-dish experiments in order to acquire both self-knowledge and an understanding of his world, and his findings became increasingly disturbing: humans, through their own natural needs - love, security, self-protection, etc. - were, consequent to their acquiescence to the powerful, or to the power of the collective, the source of their own oppression. The only answer lay in further, deeper self-knowledge - but how to achieve this in a nation of “Stupidheads” (with whom he by no means disassociated himself), in which the previous two generations (to which his parents and grand-parents belonged) had been participants in mass-murder? His solution to this conundrum was to make films (often for television) which would deliver shocks to the psyche, by means of stirring up subconscious energies, which would be forced to emerge as psychic boils in need of painful laceration, or, for those more self-aware, a forcing of the viewer into direct confrontation with Self.

Franz, Mieze, and Reinhold are all aspects of the collective German psyche. Franz, our sometimes squishy-soft and sweet every-man, does everything in his power to prevent true self-knowledge, which eventually leads to setting his two loves (the halves of his split personality) on collision course. That these two are so oppositional in nature - Mieze, a pure spirit of sorts, “gentle as a feather”, whose self-willed innocence prevents her from assuming responsibility for herself - and Reinhold, who has given himself over to an evil psychotic misogyny (he has an anvil tattooed to his chest because “someone must lie on it”) - indicates a failure of integration, a collective psyche at war with itself, and, deep inside, a center that cannot hold. The later crimes of Germany, and fascism in general, like Mieze’s murder, have their root causes in failures and/or refusals to see. The response to the trauma of WWI - an attempt to stay “strong” (one of the many charges repeatedly hurled at Franz in the dream-play Epilogue), a wide-spread holding on to a simplistic and self-pitying national identity/ideology, would cause Germany to fall prey as a collective to its latent psychoses.

[Continue reading this post: (more…)

Posted by Suzanne under Film, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Film School, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema

[Or, the other side of the mountain. The BA roundtable/support group on the last round of Fassbinder's epic masterpiece. We'll wind down our discussion over the next few days. Ms. Heidi at Engineer's Daughter says everyone deserves a t-shirt; I'm like to agree that all of you readers do too.]

————

Brandon
Well, we watched Berlin Alexanderplatz.

I found everyone’s responses last week to be, to varying extents, trying to come to terms with the violence Franz displays against Mieze. The violence and initial recuperation took place at the very end of our screening. Even if indeed some of the bloggers may have been “tip-toeing” around it, everyone (including commenters) seemed to be trying to situate the crisis in terms of Franz’s character. Was it jealousy that provoked his outburst? Does Franz have enough of a subject position to really comprehend “jealousy” and act accordingly? Is Franz’s brutality derived from an abandonment complex, a repetition compulsion?

The epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz, “My Dream from the Dream of Franz Biberkopf”, far from providing reductive, controlled answers about Franz, instead infinitely complicates those (and other) issues. I find it so compelling, about the finale, that at the very moment that the film departs from the detached narrative frame, we go into the interior of Franz’s psyche. What we find there is Franz, yes, but moreover we find all the others. And part of what all the other characters of the film reappear to enact is a detailed history of brutality, with reference to Western civilization from ancient (say, biblical) to contemporary (and contemporary with Fassbinder, not “Franz”) times; but very specifically what we find in Franz Biberkopf’s psyche is a history of German violence.

Throughout the film there are several rebirths by blood. The rape of Minna which somehow restores “Franz Biberkopf” after prison, the Abraham/Isaac sacrifice motif, the “new” old Franz who emerges only after his arm is severed; Franz himself is sacrificed over and over again in the dream. Franz, who has meted out violence throughout the film and laughs loudly at reports of violence done to others, is now the object of violence. He is crucified, humiliated over and over again by Reinhold, slaughtered in a slaughterhouse/concentration camp, and is even the medicalized object of the psychiatrists.

What strikes me about these sacrifices is that the “rebirth” for which sake they are supposedly committed is very simply the entry of Franz Biberkopf into the repetitive worldlessness of laboring. It’s as if the central problem for Franz, both at the beginning of the film (what “work” will he do) and throughout (”what can you do with one arm?”) really is an inability to work, both in the sense of “function” and “labor for wage.”

It is obvious for anyone who has seen the last two episodes and epilogue that there is far too much to say, and that the tone of reconciliation I’ve displayed in this post is actually impossible. I really look forward to other observations and trajectories!

Julian
I suppose I’ve found the question of whether Franz “can have enough of a subject position…to act,” to be somewhat circular. Franz is a character in crisis, but I am not convinced that his crisis is best articulated in psychological – as opposed to political, moral, or ethical – terms.

Can Franz act? Of course he can. I imagine Fassbinder answering this question in the epilogue. During a flight of madness in Buch mental facility, Franz is confronted with Ida, who is cringing and limping as if she is being beaten. Distressed, Franz asks her, “What is causing your pain? Who is beating you?” She replies, “You are Franz. “You are beating me. “You killed me.”

In your discussion of the epilogue I find more to agree with, especially in your observation that Franz’s central problem may be “an inability to work.” It’s a reading that helps me understand why Franz’s encounters with Communism and Syndicalism, ideologies in which labor is anything but “repetitive worldlessness,” are so fraught. I’ll watch that playground debate with renewed attention next time.

Episode thirteen I had a hard time with. After Mieze’s murder – an enervated fairytale starring Reinhold as the ambivalent Big Bad Wolf – I thought the last episode veered into TV cliché: in particular Meck’s confession and that final scene, where the sad pimp “goes mad” and kills the bird Mieze gave him (the stunted symbolism is Franz’s, but still).

By contrast the epilogue was wonderful: psychotic, crass, bizarre, gaudy, and macabre. Where Brandon saw it as a history of violence I saw it instead as a flash-forward, to the war, the Holocaust, the bomb, the GDR, gay liberation, sex clubs, televised boxing, Kraftwerk, Elvis and disco. The appearance of Margit Carstensen (her of Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant), as an angel of death, was a treat. I can’t imagine a better, weirder, or more profound ending.

Perhaps from the top of this “Mount Everest of Modern Cinema,” it might be fun to look back at where we began. It’s a long way down!

Stephen
Wow! This has been an amazing ride. Thanks to Dominic and Suzanne for organizing the film and discussions. I agree with Brandon that the epilogue launches the psychological investigation of Franz into the public realm.

I can’t resist commenting on the scene where the three psychiatrists are debating whether to treat Franz. We have a well-meaning, if not naïve, psychoanalyst intent on Franz’s submission to the talking cure to address his mental block, a nay-saying, smug, pharmacologist who wants to zap him with ECT to reign in psychosis (and then relax into his newspaper), and a vain nose-hair trimming behaviorist who argues that trash is trash, so why bother? (It could be the scene at any HMO). None of them is ready to entertain Franz’s experience. No one thinks about the social construction of Franz’s condition. No one really takes responsibility. This debate among “critics” precedes the most outrageous, campy, hallucinatory shenanigans yet to come in the film.

The three doctors could just as well be commenting on the film’s narrative/visual arc. They would reserve “two thumbs up” for the costume drama that preceded the epilogue, and they would like to return Franz to an agreeable if not gauzy frame. They are also, in the diagnoses of Franz, cynically noting—but passively accepting—Germans’ strategy to account for the holocaust (and Americans Hiroshima). How dissociated and barely capable of assuming responsibility for the horror is the post-war industrial giant—blocked, medicated, why bother…wouldn’t a Hollywood ending be nicer than the glossy operatic mess we are forced to deal with when we allow ourselves to fall apart? “Come close to the light and see death so that you can become human,” says the reaper Martin Luther / Abe Lincoln impersonator. Try as he might, this is something that Franz can’t yet do, saddled still with the burden of his own guilt and Reinhold’s off-loaded evil. (He is barely getting by in Bush America). Our every German dies before he can be cured for our sins.

Cynthia
I want to take what Julian says regarding episode thirteen to revel in its soap opera qualities. But also because, as someone points out, B.A starts with a murder and ends with a murder. If the epilogue is chaotic, impressionistic, “bizarre, ” the episodes leading up to it, pound the same problems between authorities and power, impotence and murder, playfulness and aggression, etc. Episode 12 begins with Mieze washing underneath Franz’s bedclothes, right at his groin. We bask in Mieze’s ways of being the playful coquette. Never so clear as to what she wants or how far she will go. Following, she makes an appointment to go to the countryside with Meck, eventually finding Reinhold in the place she fell in love with Franz (the soap opera narrative line). But she is not sure how to lure information out of him. “How long have you known Franz? Reinhold asks, “is he still yours… Who am I? Who is this Mieze? She tackles him. Is Franz so enigmatic to her that she may sleep with Reinhold to find out about him? It appears she will go all the way for his information, although she says, “okay Reinhold. Let go of me…you’re lying on me so heavy again.” Reinhold is like a political oppressive body, one can get up temporarily, only to be seduced and overtaken again.

It’s hard to separate the psychology of individuals from group psychology, of how people just fall into line; as Mieze says, “everything’s getting dirty.” Reinhold exchanges information for sex and so when he does not get what he bargained for, and because he doesn’t “assault women,” he lamely suffocates her. Before this happens: Mieze is laying on Reinhold, licking his chest. I am reminded that Franz has both Mieze and Reinhold in his heart. Reinhold so poignantly says, “I was just considering what you are doing to me.” It is the tragedy of B.A. that people cannot take this question to its furthest point, cannot recognize how social and political forces are acting on them, how their own autonomy is being divested with meaning, and more simply how the other impacts them.

I want to reemphasize the gross value of this, in both an economic and political sense (of trading dead, lifeless, objects, “goods”) and the psychological sense of losing oneself, the intolerance (we see in Franz/Reinhold) of their desire and the delay in the fulfillment of those desires. In both the case of Franz and Reinhold, they must snuff the Other out. And while the murder of Mieze is elaborated in episode 13, we see its tricky progression, Reinhold is even more impotent, in a way, than Franz. He annihilates Mieze with the same questionable cluelessness/cruelty as Franz does with the bird. This is the more dangerous form of murder, we’ll see in the larger political movement, of a numb form of annihilation, as individuals conform to group illusions ‘to create the pure man.’

Dominic
I finished the book. There is no epilogue, but the final phase of the novel that corresponds to Fassbinder’s epilogue begins on page 319 (in the Continuum paperback). The story of the epilogue is very much carried over from the book, and Franz’s madness is similarly represented as a terrible clash of all the forces that have brought him to this point. And he dies, and is reborn. There are also the intimations of war we see in the film (by the way, Julian’s idea that Franz’s dreams the post-war world made the whole epilogue make sense to me). A major figure in Döblin’s last 50 pages is a personification of Death. In the film the figure who comes closest to this role is Fassbinder himself. The book is every bit as compelling as the film. But I find that Döblin’s ending is hard to take. His introduction (which I read out at the first screening) foretold that Franz would emerge the other side of his suffering with an understanding of the meaning of his life. What is this understanding? It’s an awareness of the need for solidarity with others. And the awareness comes through work. Franz gets a job.

Suzanne
“Mieze, Mieze, Mieze” and “bitte, bitte, bitte” are the refrains I keep hearing in mind since Thursday’s screening. At a complete loss for a method, in a just a few words’ time, of encapsulation of my experience of the last overwhelming round of BA, I’ll name a few of many moments still very present with me now, on Saturday morning, and let us get on into the comment boxes. These are: the long shot of the just-strangled Mieze lying limp on the forest floor, like a lost blond doll or child; Mieze curled up in the too-small wooden box they buried her in, looking so much like a sleeping, but cold, but dead, but dirty, child-prostitute-doll, the gold-dust effect we’ve seen previously only in the whore-of-bablyon sequences (and when Franz is playing cards with Satan) sparkling over her face and shoulders; Franz on his knees in the dirt in the opening street-scene of the Epilogue underworld/fantasy, trying to embrace the as-if-just-dead body of Mieze; and Reinhold’s embodied, sensual and gentle embrace of his gay prison lover, so different from the dead (and deadening) suffocating grasp of Mieze that Cynthia describes above.

Posted by Suzanne under Film, Opinion | Tags: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder, Mount-Everest-of-modern-cinema