man with a movie camera, by dziga vertov

Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera (1929) is only 67 minutes long, but at the end of it you sort of feel like you've seen everything in the world at least once. Here's a random assortment from the film's opening minutes:

It claims to be an "excerpt from the diary of a cameraman," and you do get a real sense that Vertov enjoyed running around filming just everything he could get his camera pointed at. There's a documentary impulse at work here, but it's a documentary with no subject, or rather the subject is something as vast and grand as an entire urban society.

Vertov seems to be able to find visual interest in just about anything he looks at, although this requires a certain degree of cinematic inventiveness. Indeed, the film repeatedly provides shots of the "man" of the film's title, and shows some of the extents to which he'll go to get interesting footage:

This has the interesting dual effect of causing the film to serve as a documentary of its own production (see also: Adaptation) and simultaneously, to subtly highlight some of the artifice and fiction involved in any documentary enterprise (see also: American Splendor). For these shots, in which our cameraman appears, imply the existence of an unseen second cameraman and camera, which certainly puts the lie to the idea that the film we're watching is the "diary" of a (lone) cameraman...

Beyond the slender thread of this (fictitious?) cameraman wandering around the city, there's no real narrative to speak of: in fact, the film openly declares the absence of story in its opening titles, claiming to be a (bold!) attempt to totally separate the cinema "from the language of theatre and literature." This is part of why we screened it in sequence with The Blood of a Poet (Film Club XXVI) and Meshes of the Afternoon (Film Club XXVII), films which are similarly focused on discovering and exploiting the unique properties of film as an art form. Of the three films, Man With A Movie Camera is the only one that is really a "pure" cinematic experience: there is no real way to imagine replicating even a rough approximation of this film in any other media.

Part of the reason Vertov can accomplish this is because he is a master editor. Editing is pretty much the prime element of cinema that is unique to cinema (everything else can be said to emerge either from theatre or photography), and Vertov was one of the first people to really think about the various effects that editing could generate. (His early days in filmmaking were during a period when celluloid was too expensive to shoot much new footage, and so new films were generated by re-cutting together old newsreel footage.) This film pulls out every editing trick in the book and uses that in lieu of narrative to create a kind of dramatic interest and rhythmic propulsion (it's briskly edited even by today's quick-cut standards). Of course, since this film is so concerned with the process of its own production, Vertov takes his movie camera into the editing lab:

...and even shows us a young Soviet editor hard at work:

Most "meta" film ever? Indeed, and a love letter to cinema of such sincerity and magnitude that I don't think it's been equalled in the intervening eighty years. This is an important film, a perfect addition to my "personal canon" that I worked on a while back.

Next week: another film that could arguably be said to be an "excerpt from the diary of a cameraman," Chris Marker's weird meta-documentary Sans Soleil (1983).

the blood of a poet, by jean cocteau

After a one-week hiatus from Film Club (Spring Break!), we returned with Skunkcabbage's pick to follow up Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Jean Cocteau's 1930 wonderment The Blood of A Poet.

From the title, Cocteau's film sounds like it's going to be another film about the life of a writer—it isn't, really. One could possibly argue that the film is about writing: there is, for instance, a brief moment where a some of Cocteau's own [untranslated!] writings are inserted directly into the film:

That's not the only place writing interrupts the film, either: it breaks into the narrative a number of times (especially early on) in the form of intertitles. It's not incredibly notable for early films to use intertitles, of course, but Blood of a Poet isn't a silent film, so the intertitles here aren't serving a traditional function, such as conveying dialogue. Instead they're operating in a manner one could describe, perhaps, as "poetic" (Cocteau himself refers to them as "commentaries"). So you get stuff like this:

So possibly about writing, yes, but not really about a writer: although the main character (Enrico Rivero, chosen for his "dispassionate appearance") identifies himself as a writer once, we never actually see him doing any writing, although we do see him working on some drawings:

This would seem to imply that the film is more about the visual than it is about the linguistic. It's probably not an accident that the film's opening shot has a ton of lighting gear visible in the background:

And, indeed, one way that we can enjoy The Blood of a Poet is to disregard the (disjointed) narrative and (indecipherable) allegory and to enjoy the film solely as a series of arresting and enigmatic images. Cocteau, for all his inscrutability and pretention, seems legitimately interested in giving something to the audience: using the cinema generously, by making us see things we haven't seen before. Towards this end, the film ends up being something of a special effects tour-de-force, using illusionistic makeup, cleverly constructed sets, composite shots, expressive processing, editing gimmickry, reversed film, and basically every other cinematic and theatrical trick available in the 1930s to make us see the unseeable. From a modern perspective, it's not too hard to figure out how some of the images and effects were created, but many of them remain pretty arresting:

And it's this tendency towards optic weirdness (and psychosexual ferment) that ultimately bears out the Cronenberg parallel that Skunkcabbage had in mind. At one point, early on in the film, our "poet" ends up with an extra orifice on his hand—not really world's away from the vaginal slit that opens in Max Renn's abdomen in Videodrome (1983):

And our protagonist responds to this bodily mutation with a mix of disgust...

and fascination...

and, eventually, aroused pleasure...

...which is pretty much the key three-way Cronenberg mix right there. Long live the new flesh!

Next week: short films by Maya Deren.

adaptation, by spike jonze

Adaptation (2002) is ostensibly a film adaptation of New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean's 2000 piece of nonfiction, The Orchid Thief. But it's really about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's struggle to translate the book into a film. The film brings Kaufman in as a character, and spends a good portion of its run-time dramatizing his confusion, hesitation, distraction, and doubt; as such, it's one of the most memorable, and I would say accurate, depictions of the creative process ever brought to the screen.

Kaufman—at least the character Kaufman, as we see him in the film—struggles with a handful of distinct challenges in the adaptation process. One of them is that Orlean's book doesn't have a strong narrative arc, and furthermore, being highly meditative and reflective, the book doesn't have a lot of material in it that translates well to a visual medium. (The end product uses a lot of voice-over, and explicitly debates the merits and drawbacks of voice-over at more than one point in the film.)

Another problem is that Kaufman seems to have varying additional agendas for his screenplay that go beyond merely wanting to adapt the book successfully. He repeatedly says that he wants the finished film to be a genreless film "about flowers," that will have the end effect of showing audiences how "amazing" flowers are. ("Are they amazing?" Kaufman's fictional agent asks him at one point, to which the fictional Kaufman responds, despairingly, "I don't know.")

In addition to that, Kaufman wants the screenplay to be a work of realism. The desire for a truly realistic fiction, one that shrugs off the various artifices of fiction in favor of the "real stuff" of life has been an obsession of experimental writers for well over a century—it's clearly articulated as early as Zola—but it's no less a grail today than it ever was. (I'm not immune to the pull: nearly all of my own fiction written over the last ten years has been organized around this impulse.) Kaufman declares, early on in the film, that he doesn't want to write something "artificially plot-driven," without "sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like one another or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end."

And this raises yet another problem, namely, the demands of commercialism. The hypothetical adaptation that the fictional Kaufman proposes (within the space of the actual adaptation) sometimes sounds amazing (I, for one, might go to see a genreless movie about flowers) but also runs the risk of being an enormous mess, and looming constantly in the background is the threat of not only creative failure but also commercial failure. The danger that Kaufman might be taken off the project or that the project itself might entirely fail is never really stated outright, but it's underlined constantly by the inclusion of Kaufman's fictional twin brother, "Donald," who is crashing with Charlie and writing a screenplay of his own.

Donald's screenplay is for an unbelievably trite thriller called The Three. Trite, yes, yet also seemingly far more bankable, and towards the end of the film Charlie elicits Donald's help to finish the Adaptation screenplay, and the entire narrative lurches nauseously towards a passably commercial finale. There's some very sharp satire embedded here about the kinds of stories that a massive capitalist industry like the film industry is willing to invest in telling.

Ultimately, Kaufman seems to want to celebrate the power in the creative process: writers, after all, have a literally infinite number of ways to tell a story. At one point, Kaufman makes a decision that the film needs to incorporate a history of life on earth, and, indeed, the finished film dutifully provides this as a montage:

And yet this near-omnipotence is held endlessly in check, not only by the accompanying neurosis and crippling self-doubt, but also by the strictures of capitalism, the existence of a "professionally skeptical" financing system that determines which stories get told (or at the very least produced, or distributed). In its sharp-eyed analysis of this point, the film has a real tragic dimension to accompany its comic moments and metafictional playfulness.

Next week we continue with reflections on the art of adaptation with Skunkcabbage's pick, The Hours. His write-up on Adaptation is here.

american splendor, by berman and pulcini

American Splendor, a film about autobiographical comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, sets its first act in 1970's-era Cleveland, and in this way it completes Film Club's triangle of films about the 1970s (the other two points are Dazed and Confused (Film Club XXI) and The Virgin Suicides (Film Club XX)). Like those others, American Splendor has value as a reflection upon the Americana of that period, but it's interesting in other ways, too.

American Splendor could have ended up as a rather run-of-the-mill biopic, or even an exemplary one: the material of Pekar's life is certainly engaging enough, and Giamatti is a gifted interpreter of the "character":

But directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini are significantly more canny and ambitious than that. They seem to have a keen sense of the fundamental strangeness of the endeavor of making a biopic in the first place, of the distortions and misrepresentations that will inevitably emerge from the process. They exploit this strangeness by pairing the biopic narrative with documentary material, bringing in the "real" Harvey Pekar to provide commentary and reflection on the events we see unfolding in the biopic material:

Pekar's an especially interesting figure to be doing this kind of thing with, given that what the film is adapting in its narrative segments is not so much the "raw material" of Pekar's life, but rather the creative work that Pekar has produced over his lifetime. The film ambitiously shoehorns some of this material in as well, forming a third representational layer:

Pekar's comics work is autobiographical, yes, but the production of any autobiography involves its own degree of highlighting and omission. That's accentuated in Pekar's creative output, of course, because he's working as a writer in collaboration with artists, whose stylistic "takes" on the Pekar "character" only serve to further obscure the "real" Pekar. The film seems distinctly aware of this point, exploiting it strikingly:

An even more dizzying example comes at the point in the narrative where a California theatrical company does a stage adaptation of American Splendor:

What we're watching here is a cinematic re-creation of a stage re-creation of a comic book re-creation of a real experience—four distinct layers of representation, for those of you keeping score. The fact that Pekar spends a lot of the movie railing against "phoniness" and "Hollywood bullshit," and striving to create a body of work that represents the trials and tribulations of "real" everyday life is perhaps a crowning irony. And the fact that he succeeds to such a remarkable degree, in spite of the artifice inherent to the technologies and techniques of representation, is perhaps a crowning triumph.

There are a few possible choices here for follow-up films—both David Lynch's Inland Empire (2007) and Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life (1998) have a similar awareness of the vertiginous hall-of-mirrors that can open up between narrative and reality. (I also considered the harrowing documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003).) But the film that best exploits this tension, to my mind, is Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2002): next week's pick!

Skunkcabbage's write-up is here.