Painting White in Many Ways
October 22, 2009
Reality
(Kat is coming Sunday afternoon! The excitement had to be noted.)
Saturday proved an intensely social time for the solitary little me. My first engagement was helping my friend Jan F. (from my Grinnell years) paint his old apartment in Friedrichshain. Most people might’ve said “Spend an afternoon in Berlin painting? No way!” I see it differently: activities that make me feel like a real person within a larger community are always welcome to me, and what better activity than applying white paint to not-so-white-anymore walls accomplishes this? Our chief concern was actually the fact that I hadn’t brought any “old clothes” to Germany (would you – seriously – bring along your painting clothes as part of your luggage?), so we rigged together an outfit out of a garbage bag for the day, which worked rather well in the end.
After whitifying ~1.5 rooms in Jan’s apartment, my arm grew tired and I departed for the Yellow Sunshine Diner, an excellent and affordable Berlin eating experience for the vegetarian and vegan-inclined among us, to meet Beverly and Kira. Our food was delicious – I had the Lappland Burger – and then we migrated to Café Bilderbuch in Schöneberg for drinks and dessert. A fine day overall!
Monday marked our second day of shooting for the HFF Konrad Wolf film. Again we experienced no problems (our final cut of the film is already turned in, in fact), and were even able to eat/imbibe some of the props… I will conduct a thorough analysis of our own film after its initial release on Friday, given that its premature summary jeopardizes its humor value.
Scholarly
(In between reality and fantasy, there’s interpretation. Here are a couple of academic books I’ve read in full and can discuss in brief):
Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race
This was a highly engrossing book, complicated in its argumentation but simple enough in premise: the world’s problem isn’t racism, but race as a construct, and it is specifically a product of whiteness, a Lacanian master signifier that organizes the paradoxical forces of identity (heritage: where you come from) and visibility (what do you look like, and what’s non-white about it). Using the Lacanian logic of gender difference to explore the interaction of whiteness as master signifier with non-whiteness as a closed-system of pre-determined (and stereotyped) meanings, Seshadri manages to philosophically clarify what the heck do we mean by race and how we signify it. Then she heads into her discipline – English literature – for a plethora of philosophical examples to illustrate her points. A great work of scholarship, if a bit biased toward issues primarily concerning English departments nowadays.
Mark Cronlund Anderson, Cowboy Imperialism and Hollywood Film
Anderson’s book is what I would consider a historian’s academically fueled rant against the right-wing politics of frontier westerns and their pernicious legacy across other genres. Replete with swear words and hard-line diatribes, his argument basically contends that Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History has provided an academic justification for the American imperialism of the 20th and 21st Centuries, best sugar-coated through the cinema presence of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and others. Some of his film selections proved rather interesting: he prompted me to watch Howard Hawks’ classic Red River (1948) in full and consider Mario van Peebles’ Posse (1993) an extension of the frontier myth through the semblance of re-writing the race rules of the western genre – all useful for the dissertation. I just wouldn’t recommend the work for those who want an academically disciplined, post-colonial genre discourse analysis across a broad range of national cinemas.
Fantasy
The Power of Nightmares (dir. Adam Curtis, UK 2004)
I remember watching Century of the Self a year ago and thinking it was a fairly decent intellectual history of public relations and the Freudian basis of modern advertising (not to mention commercial narrative, in general). The Power of Nightmares is kind of like that documentary mixed together with Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds (1974), the recap of what Vietnam was really about. Three hours of comparing neo-conservatives (as if they were different from neo-liberals, but I digress) to the radical Islamists in the Middle East actually proves quite interesting, since Curtis managed to snag crucial interviews from both sides, delivering a very even-handed and sober account of the web of fear and lies concocted by either party to support their political agendas. Maybe in ten years we’ll get a documentary about all the domestic damage the neo-cons have wrought too.
The Piano (dir. Jane Campion, UK/New Zealand 1993)
A heavy work of post-colonial, Freudian melodrama, complete with primal scenes, sado-masochism, and conflicts over the power over sexuality and the means of self-expression. I thought Anna Paquin’s character really held this film together, though all the actors – including Harvey Keitel in his standard “I’m naked!” scene – contributed to the high quality of this film. And Michael Nyman’s soundtrack is still one of the best modern piano scores out there. ‘Twas overall better than Forrest Gump (1994), but was probably too haunting (and too “directed by a woman”) to win the Oscar that year.
Lovers on the Road (dir. Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan, China 2008)
There’s an Asian Women’s Film Festival happening at the Kino Arsenal, so I figured I should go take a look at the offerings. It turned out the filmmaker was present for the screening, which was a short feature about a relationship on the rocks after the couple moves from Hong Kong to Beijing for the boyfriend’s graphic design career. Our female protagonist leads us through the ambivalence of passionless life transitions, which ultimately leads her to have an affair with an itinerant Japanese barista and then decide perhaps to do something else with her life (we don’t know for sure). One particularly great portion of the film involves audio interviews conducted with various (one presumes) real people who have recently come to Beijing for assorted purposes. This documentary realism provides a welcome diversion to an otherwise introverted and claustrophobic (one might say “angsty”) portrayal of relations between two fictional characters. Ah, alienation.
Apaches (dir. Gottfried Kolditz, GDR/Romania/Poland 1973)
This was/is, bar none, the most popular GDR Indianerfilm, and there are many good reasons for this. Reason #1: Gojko Mitic actually co-wrote this one, which means there are lots of scenes of him doing neat things and kicking ass. Reason #2: All the moralizing of the earlier Indianerfilme was stripped away for a basic good vs. evil scenario: evil capitalists mass-murder the Apaches because they could, and then the Apaches exact bloody revenge. Sergio Leone would’ve been proud. Reason #3: The cool thing Gojko does is firing a flaming arrow at a covered wagon, which then explodes. If I were 10 years-old and watching this thing (sort of like the logic that drove the recent G.I. Joe movie, in fact), I would’ve been mesmerized.
Pre-Production
October 17, 2009
Reality
This week marked the beginning of our film projects at the HFF Konrad Wolf. The assignment: The approximately 100 incoming students are arbitrarily divided into 10 groups of 10 to shoot a 3-minute feature with only a DV camera + accessories at their disposal. In addition, the students must work in an area that’s different from their Studiengang – cinematography students can’t do camera, acting student can’t act, etc. We were all collectively given the topic for this year’s project of “Was bisher geschah” (“What happened before now”), which understandably gave us a lot of leeway to come up with ideas. Most of the time, creative projects assembled arbitrarily seem to lead to artistic tension and inefficient action. Ours has been quite the opposite: we decided on a great idea within an hour of brainstorming (which I will disclose once the film is completed), everyone kind of naturally settled into their assorted changed-up roles, and production details were quickly arranged. Even the first day of shooting went precisely according to plan and gave us some great starting footage. I’d like to personally thank Alex, Anna, Laura, Maurice, Nick, Burkhart, Cate, Claudio and Veit for such a smooth and entertaining student film experience. If only all productive endeavors ran like this!
Tuesday was something of a “play-date” – we were let loose inside the Studio Babelsberg Filmpark and given tours of the Babelsberg facilities. This was a mixed experience for me. I’ve been working with the legacy of the Babelsberg Studios starting from their genesis under Guido Seeber in 1912 to their Weimar artistic glory to their UFA Nazi heritage to the “totalizing workshop” of the DEFA in East Germany to their purchase by Vivendi and conversion into an international filmmaking prestige location. So on the one hand, I was visiting very sacred ground for me: the origin point of what we consider to be major-league German studio cinema. This is where Murnau developed those fantastic tracking shots in The Last Laugh (1924), Heinz Rühmann flitted about in Feuerzangenbowle (1944), Alfred Hirschmeier developed sets for Silent Star (1960), Herwig Kipping tore apart what remained of the GDR in Land Beyond the Rainbow (1991), and Roman Polanski depicted Nazi-occupied Warsaw in The Pianist (2002). On the other hand, this was all very banal: here’s the building where they keep the props, there’s the television studios, here’s the fake street for some scenes from Sonnenallee (1999), there’s some retired junk from our stunt show, here’s a few Universal Studios-esque rides, there’s some paraphernalia from assorted terrible German co-productions, here’s the wall where they shot part of the Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008), there’s a set of tourists who actually paid the 18 euros to see this stuff. In many ways, the Museum für Film und Fernsehen was far more enticing. Then again, my lack of enchantment might have stemmed from the itinerant hail landing on our heads as we meandered around outside.
On Wednesday night, I had a very nice evening with Sylvia Fischer, a prospective Ph.D. student who must have visited at least half-a-dozen U.S. schools in an effort to literally change her present way of life for the (intellectually) better. We ate at a restaurant in Friedrichshain, a place with which I’m becoming more familiar by the day, and swapped tips about Berlin and U.S. graduate school respectively. I’m always happy to meet up with assorted people in Berlin, and the city fortunately makes it quite easy to do so.
Some more observations:
• The consensus among both German nationals and foreign students is that the StaBi (the Berlin city library) kind of sucks and could be greatly improved in a myriad different ways. Someone oughta form a committee…
• In terms of causing human discomfort, the moist cold of Berlin kicks the butt of the semi-dry cold in Massachusetts hands down, but Iowa in October is still worse than either.
• German waiters are very quick mathematicians (due to their regular dealings with split checks), and probably use much more of their brains than American waiters, whose job is nevertheless much more aggressively about both pleasing the customer and forcing them to leave the establishment.
• Dogs are people here.
Fantasy
Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (dir. Eric Brevig, USA 2008)
Thanks to the formidable resources the HFF Konrad Wolf has placed at our disposal so that we might produce and consume films, I saw this Brendan Fraser adventure flick for free and in glorious 3D. Now our blogs are not yet 3D-image capable, but in this case I wish they were, because this film can only be described in 3D terms. In effect, Eric Brevig (of Xena: Warrior Princess fame) created an almost encyclopedic homage to every major 3D trick in the book, from the “yo-yo in your face” to the “flying water droplets” to the “roller coaster” to the “suspend a floating object against a dramatic backdrop.” Rather than evolving a “new” 3D vocabulary, Brevig seems content to offer a carnivalesque array of 3D attractions nestled in a skeletal, cliché-driven plot designed to get us from one effects sequence to another. In this respect, the movie thoroughly succeeds from an effects angle, and Fraser proves himself as the sympathetic human to whom special-FX-related events always seem to happen.
I am Legend (dir. Francis Lawrence, USA 2007)
This post-apocalyptic film was quite spectacularly bad, but instructively so. The Last Man on Earth (1964) brought us Vincent Price as the doomed hero who would discover he is the villain. The Omega Man (1971) brought us Charlton Heston in a similar idiom, except less adept at the task of acting. But I Am Legend (2007) spins an elaborate escapist post-apocalyptic fantasy in which Will Smith becomes a Christ figure and unequivocally saves humanity with his selfless actions – more analogous to Byron Haskin’s 1953 Christian re-interpretation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds than to either of I Am Legend’s two predecessor adaptations of the Richard Matheson text. All of the movie’s foregrounding of a decimated Manhattan isle aside, the chief focus is just how virtuous albeit lonely Will Smith is with his dog. I don’t know what to make of it, other than as Hollywood dumping a pile of syrup on an otherwise perfectly serviceable parable about human decadence and then expecting an introspective piano score, edgy mise-èn-scene, and post-Bourne hand-held camera action sequences to convince us this is a serious work espousing something constructive. It isn’t.
Destricted (dir. various, UK 2006)
I watched some of this with Steve Wilson before I left, but the HFF just so happened to have a copy on their shelf so I got to watch the rest. Advertised as “the most controversial and sexually explicit film ever to receive an 18 certificate from the BBFC,” Destricted is a collection of seven short films from acclaimed art-film directors directly exploring pornography and sex in our times. Larry Clark (Kids, Ken Park) provides us with interviews of young men about how they grew up with pornography, and then proceeds to cast a young man paired with a porn-star for some on-camera action. Clark’s film highlights the indexical as well as the audience-performance aspects of pornography. Gaspar Noé’s film (I Stand Alone, Irreversible) is a strobe-heavy exploration of a man sexually assaulting a blow-up doll in his room. Sam Taylor-Wood’s film “Death Valley” is an actor candidly masturbating against the backdrop of, well, Death Valley. Matthew Barney strapped himself naked inside some massive machine and shaped some pottery with his member. Richard Prince distances the audience from a cliché porn flick with Boards of Canada-style ambient music and the fuzzy color distortion that one gets when one crosses film and digital video. Marco Brambilla has a brilliant 2-minute clip of thousands of images from romance and pornography cut together to overload one’s senses with the conventions of the porn industry. Marina Abramovic uses a combination of live action and animation to portray assorted Balkan superstitions involving the genitalia. All in all a worthwhile view, but only if you’ve got the stomach for both the ugly bits and the strobe effects.
Red River (dir. Howard Hawks, USA 1948)
Whoever thinks Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) is the first gay cowboy movie has obviously never set eyes on this classic. In the era when movies seemed to possess a cinematic subconsciousness and deep social subtext (Gilda, Fury, Casablanca, Some Like It Hot all spring to mind), Red River explores the macho manly activities of cattle-herding and trail-blazing from Texas to Missouri, as John Wayne and Montgomery Clift meanwhile develop one of the most bizarre, sexually repressed man-on-man relationships ever to hit the silver screen. I watched it for the clear justifications for American imperialism, but it turned out to be far more entertaining in its subtext than its principle plot.
Peppersmoke Players – Chapter 3
October 12, 2009
The Peppersmoke Players across the Seven Skies
by Evan Torner, Berlin 2009-2010
Based on Chad Underkoffler’s RPG Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies
Chapter 1 – An Actorless Play (scroll down to Fantasy)
Chapter 3 – Rehearse or Die
As one did at most rehearsals, Nell Sturfield stood around and waited. Magnus Firedancer had to change from his intricate Master of the Watch uniform to his Chaumette the Compassionate One dress, and his painstaking exactitude with this costume arrangement was holding up the entire rehearsal. Nell looked across the Peppersmoke’s bow and saw that the sun hung low in the Dome, dipping below the floating island’s horizon in about an hour. An hour of available light left, and Magnus was still screwing around with full knowledge that the physical rehearsal of the sword duel was scheduled for today. Fatima was sweating over her lines more than usual today, Remy and Duchamps had hustled from what was presumably a supply run into Agua Azul (though Vaoz knows what was in that case!), Chatterbox had sequestered himself on the mast for some pre-rehearsal libations and Captain Naftaly – having already marked the “stage” on deck hours ago – was now in her quarters composing a letter. But everyone was in costume, at least, except for Magnus.
Nell had memorized her lines days ago, befitting her status as a young graduate of the little-regarded Viridese Academy for Music, Performance and Rhetoric. Actually, she’d wanted to become a mathematician in earlier years, until she discovered the purpose for the arithmetic arts on Viridia always turned out to be warfare. Such narrow-minded abuse of her passion saddened her enough to turn her towards the career of pretending she was someone she wasn’t. This was not to say she was a bad actor. She found human affect to be putty in her hands, as she herself possessed very little. Wrath, meekness, mischief, loquacity – the expression thereof required but a practiced formula of facial, gestural, postural and vocal modulation. Since humans were inexplicably trusting creatures, intense study of these formulas produced the ability to glean undeniably positive results in the sphere of human relations. In fact, people across the Seven Skies would pay some of their wages earned from the excess of their crafts’ value to see these falsehood formulas, granted that they took a pleasing and semi-predictable course.
Of course, the tradition of theater as a means to easily separate a person from their money had only been cemented as such under the zenith of Kroy, now known as Lost Kroy. Before it became “Lost,” however, Kroy was an empire of extraordinarily instrumental purpose: to produce incalculable wealth for a select few oligarchs off nearly every societal transaction imaginable. At the time, this practice seemed in such stark contrast to the other empires that, though they were by no means benevolent, had clearly been more inefficient in their priorities. The Barathi Empire was as much eager for the sheer glory of meaningless conquest as it was for the spoils thereof, the Alliance of Viridia had some philosophical preoccupation with perfecting the art of war, and Crailwuz remained content with skimming off Kroy and Barathi profits through piracy. Kroy uniquely wanted to touch all aspects of life and transform them into gold. What the intensely competitive Kroyese oligarchs had done particularly well was transmit their own ideas of profit at any spiritual or material cost to those very people off of whom they profited, such that folk spontaneously monetized their own traditions for the sake of a comparably paltry share of the profits. Thus the theater, for example, only emerged as a ticket-selling art form when so-called “table games” had been suppressed as an asocial, uncouth form of story transmission. Table games only cost the patrons the amount they’d spent on drinks, pitting the theaters against the drinking halls during the early days of the former’s existence. Men and women would sit around the table in equal company and pretend to be someone else in a collective fantasy of their own creation. Then they may have followed this with group sexual contact; there were many regional variations. If two “players” (which is why actors were sometimes called thus – an inheritance from the previous art form) got into a dispute over an outcome in the story world, an uninvolved player would usually articulate the stakes over which they fought and pull a pebble from a cloth bag. Black or white pebbles would then tip the story in favor one or another player’s stakes, and the result would have to be improvised. “Improvise” was certainly the operative word: few table games had any lines written in advance, and even fewer could intimate the direction the story was headed.
Such practices consumed pre-Kroyese lives in entertainment that produced little profit for the Kroyese oligarchs. So the most talented storytellers from table game groups that had amassed small audiences were seduced by positions among the oligarchs as well as by the promise of being specifically employed in a field that they loved. The result was a substantial increase in production values by way of koldun and alchemical effects (and even today no self-respecting theater troupe can afford to do without a koldun) and the delegation of the audience to its role of but a single character: the dark mass of people, socially atomized as individuals from their neighbors, watching outside a metaphorical invisible wall. Assorted forms of theater took shape thereafter, ranging from opera to ad-lib comedy, from actors taking on the roles of abstract symbols and shapes to them simply playing themselves. What was important was not so much the content of the plays, but whether the audience would pay money for the privilege to merely observe it, rather than participate. Those looming changes took place over years, generations even. Yet in many respects, Nell had simply no conception of how it must have been like to play these table games with no notion of the dividing line between player and viewer.
Chatterbox’s acting style drew on this hidden heritage somewhat. As a native of Ilwuz, he’d been able to partake in strange traditions nestled between the cracks and mold of the isle’s ramshackle harbors and pirate taverns. His was the art of words without scripts, dance without choreography, madness without method. This meant, of course, that he was all the rage in Ilwuz and had to be lured away with offers of stipends and starlets aplenty. Fortunately, one could give him a tense situation and he’d turn it on its ear in an instant. His ability to visualize himself as both player and audience of his own spontaneity was legendary.
Nell’s thoughts may have strayed to Chatterbox, she surmised, because the actor had landed in a heap of lines after apparently plummeting from one of the smaller yardarms. Since Chatterbox was a seasoned skysailor, this was obviously a matter of little concern: the lines and the liquor had cushioned his fall and relaxed his body respectively. The Captain was even in her quarters, so he wouldn’t even suffer a disciplinary action. She prodded his splayed form with her sheathed stage sword out of bemusement and, when he grumbled and burped, confirmed he was merely drunk and not damaged. Then she drew the blade to work through her choreography.
These moves had all originated from Magnus, as he was the most talented swordsman among them. It was what attracted her to him so many adolescent years ago, in fact. His elegant ostentaciousness, his vigorously practiced silliness, his ego’s eternal stamina – those paradoxes made him at once flamboyant, charming and deadly. Her very stage sword – a dulled, thin cutlass with an artfully curved hilt – used to belong to him before he “upgraded” to a gilded Colronan rapier with an oversized handguard. And then he’d “upgraded” to no longer needing her, though this had proved a point of contention.
But to the choreography: she pulled the cutlass a third of the way out of its scabbard, abruptly halted, and shoved it back in. Grinding her teeth, she front-kicked away from her, pulled the sword out completely and chopped at the air. Her arm jerked back intentionally as she pretended to hit something. She swung the blade once, twice, thrice, bringing it back for each imaginary parry. Then came the fun part. She thrust directly forward, shifted her weight dramatically and then twirled around completely with a full-body roundhouse kick. Nell already felt the sweat build under her god costume, though this was only the beginning.
“Nell,” came Magnus’ voice from the crew’s quarters. “Let’s do this!” She breathed a sigh of relief; they might just keep a few minutes of daylight before needing Remy’s special lanterns for their rehearsal. Magnus emerged as Chaumette the Compassionate One, a stunning blonde beauty with impossibly straight locks, a frilly red dress with gold accents and eyelashes that’d lure the soberest skysailor to his doom. Across “her” buttocks hung the reputed Colronan rapier, its hilt and guard freshly polished from efforts likely lasting ten minutes of precious rehearsal time. She was intended to stand in stark contrast to Nell’s Guillaume the Mindcrafter, after all.
Nell’s two roles in the play effectively consisted of the main protagonist – the defiant Guillaume who spurns the task given them by the goddesses in favor of an unpredictable existential quest for his own identity – and the most minor luck goddess, Laternia the Fortuitous. She was given the latter role out of sheer pragmatic concerns: Guillaume was in almost every scene and Laternia has very few lines. Her Guillaume costume mirrored the red and gold color scheme established by Chaumette’s dress. It was a kind of flowing frock coat with tails that extended nearly to her ankles, breeches, stockings and boots. All the male gods also wore a stiff neck collarpiece to keep their posture erect and their thoughts aloof. Duchamps had fitted it a little tight on Nell so Guillaume would always look slightly uncomfortable. Now that Magnus had emerged, she had to fasten it on for rehearsal.
Duchamps must have heard Magnus’ voice, because he approached them both in his ridiculous Juniper the Plentiful goddess costume, complete with hastily applied eye shadow and a dress that could barely contain the two giant fake breasts jutting from his chest. “So, ladies and gents and vice versa,” he said with reference to the copious gender reversals gathered together on deck. “The scene is thus: Guillaume, having grown bitter and disgusted at his and the other gods’ efforts to create equality among humans, has returned prematurely to the gates of Heaven to re-enter their retreat. Alas! His partner Chaumette is coincidentally the gate guardian today, and she remains a firm believer in the whole banishment scenario. The strong-willed Guillaume loses his patience and tries to fight his way in. Chaumette defeats him in single combat, but only after revealing her motive for sending the gods away to be strictly personal, as opposed to moral. Guillaume returns to the world to hatch a plot that would spite her once and for all. This time I want to reach the group scene of the goddesses at the end, which means your fight choreography is hopefully tip-top. Anything pressing on your minds before I take my dolled-up self out of the play area?” Both Magnus and Nell shook their heads, merely a sign that the content of their “minds” wasn’t up for a thorough public discussion. Their bodies already coursed with the anticipatory chemicals needed for the physical exertion ahead. Another bombastic speech from Duchamps about whatever they had said wasn’t needed. And Magnus looked, even under his poise and make-up, a tad antsier than usual.
They took their positions in the play area. Chaumette stood with her back to the soon-to-be-finished Gateway to Heaven and Guillaume stood atop the assemblage of bundled rags and accessories that would become the cloud bridge. Stiff-necked and visibly incensed, Guillaume strode across the bridge and knocked loudly at the gate.
“’Tis I, Guillaume!” Nell declared loudly in her studied interpretation of arrogant men’s voices. Chaumette turned around slowly and then mounted the side of the gate, looking over its curving archway. Then with a dramatic twirl of her dress, she vaulted over the gate onto the cloud bridge into the narrow gap between Guillaume and the gate.
“Hark!” she shouted into Guillaume’s face. “The Heavens hath barred their gates to thee. / Correspondingly reduced their citizenry. / As doth mortals among mortals with strangers and kin / And so try as ye might, thee cannot come in.” Chatterbox had straightened himself out from his fall and now the other actors save the captain gathered to watch the rehearsal. Guillaume pointed his finger within a hairsbreadth of Chaumette’s eye.
“An immortal pox on thee and thy invulnerable breast!” he exclaimed. “What have thee gained from such a test? / Bedchambers empty…”
“…I fill them with birds!” Chaumette interrupted him, clearly relishing this. “And flowers now lay on your bedside…”
“Oh how absurd!” Guillaume responded contemptuously in rhymed verse. Then he began to pace on the cloud bridge restlessly and began to pontificate aloud. “I crafted for them but a Will / It went through committee – but still! / With its revisions, the human psyche / Approached only ours of its like. / To them we imposed but three clauses / So they would not replace us with empty causes. / The First was their imprisonment in this Dome. / The Second – ‘gainst the elements they must roam. / And the Third, the most stringent by far / That they might constantly question who they are.” He paused for all-around dramatic effect.
“We have but no responsibility,” he continued. “For their blatant abandonment of equality. / The Will and clauses produced a counter-effect. / That our best intentions doth not respect. / We tried to fix it, make repairs / But they claimed we meddled in their affairs. / Out we went, Vaoz the Traitor too, / Replaced with an amorphous brew / Of aphorisms, greed and solipsistic shows / Wrought so they could rob each other’s clothes / Then hide the crime under their fragmented selves / So that generations perform soulful delves / Into why things are so unjust / And how they must withstand what they must.” Chaumette didn’t buy it.
“Your confession’s touching, not compelling,” she said. “There is much that you’re not telling. / You men will always up the ante. / Throw caution to the wind – well that’s just dandy! / Consider on our side the stakes so raised / That only your intellect dispels your competitive haze.” She shifted her weight evenly between both her lefts. A curtain of rage hung over Guillaume’s face.
“This woman denies him his rightful repose?” he said, wagging a righteous finger in her face. “Then past her guard the rascal goes.” And so began the choreography.
Nell grabbed the handle of her sword to pull it out, but Magnus skillfully pushed her wrist with his outstretched hand to return the blade to its sheath. Now they stood uncomfortably close to one another, so Nell kicked forward with her booted foot, remembering to grit her teeth at the last minute. Her boot launched Magnus into the gate, giving her the opportunity to draw her blade with an impressive metallic chorus. She chopped at his head with a surgeon’s accuracy, her face a tight mixture of overconfidence and wrath. Quicker than most would deem feasible, Magnus unsheathed his sword in a magnificent arc which batted her stroke aside. He then brought about the scabbard from his belt with the other hand; an added parrying surface against her stage sword. Something about his newly adopted stance didn’t sit right with Nell, but she was certain it was the more dramatic choice from an audience standpoint.
She proceeded with the motions: a slash at his forearm – parried, a wilder swing at his kneecap – thwarted, and an overhead tap aimed at his head – twirled aside. Her practiced ensemble of blows had been met with correspondingly practiced defenses. That much was clear. What was suitably unclear was the reason for why the rest of the choreography went overboard in the next exchange.
“Thy style amuses me, nothing more.” Chaumette taunted. Guillaume breathed deep and heavy already, but his voice displayed a veritable fresco of overblown confidence.
“Then I’ll swap to another, one I adore!” he said and then proceeded to thrust at his opponent’s belly. And that was when the fight took a turn toward the unknown.
Magnus parried the thrust, but blocked her attack to put her in a position from which it was physically difficult to perform her next maneuver. Nell enacted a startling recovery and swept the sword at her assailant’s feet, hoping to knock him off-balance. Magnus pulled his hardened sheath in the way of the blow and unfairly cut toward her exposed arm. Her wrist overextended to block his attack. This was beginning to resemble a real fight, in which one party tried vigorously to exercise situational dominance over the other. She abandoned the thrusts for an experimental strike at his chest to ascertain how “real” this fight was. Not only was the strike repulsed with one of Magnus’ iconic arching counter-strokes – confirming her hypothesis that she now faced an ambiguously deadly opponent as opposed to a character-motivated set of pre-determined maneuvers – but he had put her on the defensive by responding with a series of twirling rapid slashes at important body parts. Magnus hadn’t cracked even the remotest of smiles under all that female make-up, which mean both that he was defending a cause of some emotional importance and that he felt completely justified in disrupting his own choreography to do so.
It came to Nell all at once. While they had been at the academy together, Nell and Magnus had attempted the formidable task of maintaining a potentially long-term sexual and emotional relationship in spite of the fickle passions of youth. To do this, they had both awkwardly initiated each other into the realm of sexuality, and then awkwardly vacillated between being and not being committed to each other afterwards. Yet all the unpleasantness and inconsistency of their early romance produced the unexpectedly positive side-effect of giving them an understated, smoldering stage chemistry. Though they’d experimented with other potential life-partners on assorted occasions, their own deep collective history of trauma of triumph continued to help and haunt them in the present. And this present battle had its roots in that highly-charged soil.
The catalyst must have been this morning’s breakfast. Magnus had been crunching loudly on a pickle freshly procured from a briny jar. Nell had entered the tiny eating alcove and, seeing the ultimate pickle in his mouth, decided to boldly punish him for curtailing her breakfast options. Without a word, she had leaned forward and bit off the end of the pickle, coming ever close to a spiteful mockery of a kiss. Magnus angrily chewed the remainder of his breakfast before he chewed her out.
“What was that?” he had exclaimed. “Ten years and you still don’t respect my boundaries!”
“How’s your pickle?” Nell asked rhetorically in clear reference besides the food he had just eaten. “My piece seems smaller than ever. Is it shrinking?” She’d then walked out for dramatic effect.
Now she was suddenly in the middle of an unscripted battle with a humiliated ex-lover who had begun raining down blows on her barely sufficient defenses. Unfortunately, Remy, Duchamps, Fatima and Chatterbox did not know the choreography well enough to have figured out yet that Magnus’ trademark wrist spin feint was actually being used to deflect Nell’s attention from a hefty slash at her neck. She thanked Vaoz for her stiff collarpiece as she felt the blow glance off the cheap costume piece. The battle had moved with some alacrity outside of the stage area, raising Duchamps’ eyebrow. Ordinarily, Chaumette would have said “That’s enough of thy quotidian tricks!” by now, to which Guillaume would’ve ignited his sword with blue flame from Remy’s magic and stated: “Then an unexpected addition to the mix!”
Instead, Nell cried: “Magnus, have you gone mad? Somebody disable this lunatic!” Then she quit the battle in favor of a brisk sprint toward the ship’s bow; Magnus hiked up his dress and pursued her. Duchamps grabbed his truncheon from Vaoz Knows Where in his dress, moving to intercept the wild swordsman. Fatima dove for whatever weapon her pile of ordinary clothes would yield her. Remy began tracing symbols in the air. Chatterbox dropped behind the main mast.
The events of the next five seconds quickly resolved the situation. Fatima drew her musket and drew a bead on his position. Magnus almost effortlessly disarmed Duchamps by sweeping his saber over his head as he ran. Fortunately the baton landed in the hands of Remy, who was suddenly a blur of wild motion. The koldun’s immediate interdiction of Magnus’ path forced the swordsman to stop, blowing his dress at a funny angle to boot. Remy spun the baton to generate a small wind. Then Magnus was bowled over from behind with a hastily assembled pile of heavy lines. Chatterbox blinked as Remy zipped the cords around the man almost instantaneously, restraining him for the remaining duration of the afternoon. At this point, Magnus channeled his physical aggression into a tirade of profanity and abuse leveled at Nell, who was gasping for breath at the other end of the Peppersmoke. The other players stood awestruck at the wreck that was today’s rehearsal.
“What’s he saying?” Fatima asked Duchamps about Magnus’ hostile utterances as he struggled against his bonds.
“I don’t know,” Duchamps replied. “Something about a pickle.”
Weather Forecast: Dark Room, Glowing Screen
October 11, 2009
Reality
Imagine me in an auditorium listening to assorted bureaucrats tell us about our further studies at the HFF Konrad Wolf at Potsdam-Babelsberg, and then listening to professors introduce their specialties as well as high-quality past student films. Well, that was pretty much my week from 9:00 – 5:00 with little in-between. I feel bombarded with HFF film material, but I’ve also gathered many bits of interesting data about the school in the process. There are 550 matriculated students total at the HFF, and our entering class constitutes 100 of those. Of those who graduate, 80% will eventually work in television, and those 20% who work in film will likely never find full employment. The revered, top programs at the HFF seem to be the Production Design people (who have a 100% employment rate after their studies and are largely responsible for those fantastic Babelsberg sets over the decades) and the Animation people, who produce amazing work in cell and computer animation. In general, we have the latest technology in the media field and a vast institutional support system designed to train filmmakers to then go on the festival circuit with their films. This school knows what it does, and takes a very materialist, German craftsman-like approach to do that thing very well. We’ll see how we fare in media studies.
This week has been marked by a constant flow of a social life that had only existed in fits and starts earlier. On Wednesday night, all the media studies folks from the year ahead of us invited us out for a round of drinks at the Griebnitzsee Bahnhof, where I got to meet the committee that’s organizing the SehSüchte Student Film Festival in April. I’m very excited to be a part of that process in particular – I will be the editor of the English text publicity, such that I can keep the strange sounding sentences and the spelling of “Stop” with two “p”s to a minimum. On Thursday night, I met up with Florian Leitner, an author and media studies scholar whom I met a year ago at the Film and History conference. He took me to a very nice cocktail bar in Kreuzberg, and then to a Turkish diner where I had the best lentil soup I’ve ever tasted – an excellent evening! Friday night saw us media studies people (we maneuver as a pack) heading out as a group of 11 to Simon-Dach-Strasse in Friedrichshain. Let this be a lesson to all who read this: never go out as a group of 11 to a busy party street on a cold night and expect to find a table indoors. An hour after we’d met up, we finally crammed ourselves around a back table in the smokiest bar I’d ever been in and then chatted about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize and why Germans don’t marry (Political Science Answer: the society more or less actively discourages it). Two of the media studies people even got into one of those bar-none debates about religion, which was cute – it reminded me of college. Then on Saturday I met with Beverley Weber – who’s soaking up the Berlin experience for a month while working on her book – and toured Kreuzberg’s Bergmannstr. and Oranienstr. to good effect. I also visited Kira Thurman’s place in Prenzlauer Berg, which means I saw what amounted to a rainy block of that section of town. I think I’ll return when the weather permits me to.
More short Berlin experiences and observations:
* I’ve now been offered drugs on the street twice: once at the Kottbusser Tor U-Bahn station in Kreuzberg and once near the U-Bahn station at Eisenacherstr. in Schöneberg. Both had next to zero subtlety about the offer, which made me also surmise that they were police anyway.
* Fireworks were set off yesterday night over what looked like Südkreuz – a few giant explosions illuminating the sky over the Yorckstrasse S-Bahn station as I stepped off the train. Two high-school girls waited patiently until making sure they were over before exiting the platform. God only knows what the event was.
* Some extremely intoxicated dude was singing the Atzen label’s hit song “Das geht ab” and started petting the heads of nearby bystanders. I dodged it, but saw a fight nearly break out between someone whose head wasn’t open for petting.
(Note: I plan on having the next Peppersmoke Players chapter up tomorrow. It’s looking to be at least 50% longer than the previous two, as I had trouble ending the scene. So it goes!)
Fantasy
Inglourious Basterds (dir. Quentin Tarantino, USA/Germany 2009)
As a German film historian, I felt like I needed to see this because A) it was shot at Babelsberg studios, B) it takes a controversial, B-movie-style tactic of Nazi representation for an A-list feature, C) it contains a great deal of spoken German as well as some of Germany’s big-name stars playing, uh, Nazis, D) there is apparently a surfeit of homage to German film history, which means that this will quickly amount to the “mainstream” perspective on my subject area in due course, E) I wind up seeing all Tarantino’s work eventually and F) so many people have recommended I see it. As a keeper of the bizarre (and a bizarre keeper at that!), however, I always feel a little dirty after I see a Tarantino movie. It’s as if he’s shining a blindly venerating light on the zones where we film historians scuttle around in the dark, basically demonstrating that he’s had a first-class film education through his lifetime and, well, doesn’t really know what to do with it now. This is not to say I didn’t like the film; there were many moments of extended suspense and laudable sound/music design, etc. But Tarantino is also a man with a distinctly amoral aesthetic and message to propagate, effectively mirroring the withering ambivalence that we media consumers exhibit these days toward all things. This is a thermometer that tells us how and why we cheer for barbarism, but not a guidepost to point us to a culture that may not need to do so.
The movie itself is a work of immediate textual irony in that it stands against both its title and its paratexts (trailers, posters, etc.): the Inglourious Basterds barely turn up in the film, and though it is a violent film, it is not what I would call “action-packed.” Rather it is a relentless talkie – much like Deathproof (2007) – with endless dialogue scenes either ending in horrific violence or foreshadowing horrific violence to come. It is a film effectively about language above all else, both in terms of language as a marker of social distinction (think of the scenes involving Landa as well as the deathtrap tavern) as well as a thin mask for some horrible emerging truth, which may be Tarantino’s remotely insightful statement on the Holocaust here. More importantly for him, it’s also very much about the language of cinema, but as film geeks talk about it more than as auteurs like Godard, Lang, Ford, Hawks or anybody else would address it as such. Tarantino’s strategy is to talk a scene to death and throw in some film references throughout to make it appear as though he’s given it a lot of thought. I wouldn’t know: rather than visually referencing the films of Riefenstahl or Pabst like, say, a memorable shot from one of his favorite films of theirs, two characters just talk about them. Whereas some recent fringe feature films (Son of Rambow, The Fall, Hamlet 2) have opened up new critical vistas in my imagination and offered interpretative frameworks for said vistas, Inglourious Basterds seems to produce more banal answers than ask interesting questions … even though it is excessive and overwrought in precisely the way that his target audience knows and loves. I wouldn’t mind elaborating my points given further discussion.
The White Ribbon (dir. Michael Haneke, Austria/Germany 2009)
One of the perks of being at the HFF is getting movies funneled into us for free. Michael Haneke’s latest film The White Ribbon, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, is the second major treat (after seeing I Was 19 on 35mm) that I got the first week. The premise: A small town in Austria in 1913 is suddenly plagued by a series of mysterious accidents and deaths that expose the abusive, repressed underbelly of 19th Century continental European society. Haneke draws directly on the spare visual tradition of black-and-white German-language novel-to-film adaptations, including Schlöndorff’s The Young Törless (1966), Fassbinder’s Effi Briest (1974) and Haneke’s own The Rebellion (1993) to reveal an emotionally damaged, soulless community that offers few easy solutions to its problems. An absolute masterpiece of framing, lighting, production design and direction of young actors. People rave about this film for all kinds of reasons, but I stand firmly on the fact that it’s a 2.5 hour movie that you wouldn’t mind going on for another hour or two.
Fearless (dir. Ronny Yu, China 2006)
I had heard that this film is to date the top-selling non-English foreign film to circulate in the United States to date. Jet Li returns as Huo Yuanjia (whom he played in Fist of Legend), the founder of his beloved wushu martial art form, and plays out a version of his biography heavily interpreted through the lens of Jet Li’s own silly kung fu oeuvre. Though an intense battle in a darkened restaurant makes for an exciting action centerpiece, the film is on the whole quite sentimental and more than a little nationalistic (I’m thinking in a similar way to that which made the Bollywood musical Pardes unwatchable). All that is good about the style and content here is effectively borrowed from Fist of Legend and Fong Si Yuk, but the film possesses neither the edgy choreography of the former or the tongue-in-cheek quality of the latter. Thank goodness Jet Li’s made a few other movies since this one, so it would not be his last.
My Name is Nobody (dir. Tonino Valerii/Sergio Leone, Italian/French/West Germany 1973)
Possibly the most referential western of all time, My Name is Nobody came out during the last rays of sunset on the genre – Pauline Kael declared it “dead” a year later in ’74. Leone and Valerii effectively shot a buddy comedy grafted onto a mournful iteration of a Leone and/or Peckinpah western. The utterly weird combination of Terence Hill and Henry Fonda as our chief protagonists never really settles into any kind of groove, and there’s a shoot-out in a hall of mirrors that’s much more The Lady of Shanghai than “western” material. I would still give it a B+ for effort though: there are at least three jokes on the Nobody riff, including “Jack Beauregard – Nobody’s gun was faster.” Ha!
Whoa
October 5, 2009
Reality
I have titled this blog entry based not only on Keanu Reeves’ favorite expression, but also on my sudden feeling of being stunned in the middle of the action.
A re-cap of my weekend: I celebrated my 27th birthday on Friday, first by going over to Luisa and Ming’s place in Kreuzberg for a nice lunch where we discussed a future mini-film festival that we’ll hold in their apartment. It was extremely wonderful to be engaged in an intense discussion about film, politics and what have you with several earnest professionals who know what they’re talking about. I then made myself a cake and then went to Hilary Bown’s apartment with Kira to play classic Monopoly. Now I categorically hate Monopoly – we might as well record 30 of our dice rolls on a chart and see who wins – but coupling it with late-night drinking made it alright. On Saturday and Sunday, I got out to La Foccaceria in Mitte – a great, cheap pizza place – and to the Brandenburg Gate to watch the “Riesen” (“Giants”) get dressed by about 20 puppeteers for their march through Berlin. (Since there were way too many people there for the puppets, I left after they crossed through the Brandenburg Gate… which was itself a spectacle, since I didn’t know if the guy in the diving suit would make it).
Now for the “whoa” part: our orientation program at the HFF Potsdam today. Ever since I arrived in Berlin, I’ve been given a handful of unstructured weeks in which to A) get settled in my apartment, B) waste time at the LABO trying to get a visa, C) write some fiction and D) structure my dissertation research. As of today, that unstructured time is officially gone. For the next three weeks, I belong to the HFF, which means I’m now “sneaking in” my research at night. Our orientation program began with a stunning “country boy” rendition of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” performed by one of the students, followed by a pep talk from Stefan Arndt (Run Lola Run, Goodbye Lenin!) in which he basically said “I never went to film school – I just made films. Use this film school opportunity to watch and make films!” Then we were all introduced in our different fields – film direction, production, film and media studies (my area), cinematography, acting, music composition, etc. – and handed these nifty tote bags. After we met with our respective faculties, we then returned to the auditorium to be divided up into 10 groups – irrespective of our respective fields – that in 3 weeks time will each complete a “introductory film.” I’m only slightly nervous about the fact that our group primarily contains people from film direction, production, screenwriting and film studies, and nobody from cinematography, editing, sound, or film music. This may influence what film we wind up producing. We were given a tour today of the facilities and of all the state-of-the-art film technology that the HFF now has to offer, so only tomorrow do we have to think about the film we’re going to make. But still: it was quite funny to suddenly show up and be asked to make a film in three weeks with a group of complete strangers.
Nevertheless – and I think this is the larger point – these people soon grew (over the course of one day!) to be more than just strangers. I think there’s just under 100 people in our entering class in total, which means our departments aren’t that big and everybody is very collegial with one another. Add to that the fact that I’m like an exotic animal, being an American who speaks very good German and has a hyper-acute knowledge of East/West German film history, and Bam! I found myself in conversations with people the entire day. I shared some music with one student, bantered with the media studies professors about recent films, and gave a group of my peers a crash course on the historical significance of Konrad Wolf’s I Was 19. That is to say, I am suddenly academically at home as well. BUT being academically at home is exhausting to say the least, so I’d better hit the sack for the next day of intensive introduction to the top film school in Germany…
Fantasy
Never Drive A Car While You’re Dead (dir. Gregor Dashuber, Germany 2009)
Possibly the greatest animated short I’ve seen in a long time, Never Drive a Car While You’re Dead should be up for an Academy Award – except those only exist to praise Pixar these days. The premise? A guy in a crappy apartment – vaguely resembling Cahit’s from Gegen die Wand (2004) – tries to commit suicide, but feels compelled instead to play his piano. This piano quite literally drives him into the nightmarish hellhole neighborhood he lives in, which has been shaped by neo-liberal capitalism and Baudrillard’s “apocalypse of the Real,” resplendent with violent penguins, Siamese twin prostitutes, and assorted suffering people. A group of like-minded people follow him to his own grave, at which point he wakes up, tries to commit suicide and (I’m giving away the twist) poetically fails. This film had an understated, well-executed soundtrack, an animation style drawing from both classic Thames cartoons (e.g. Count Duckula) as well as MTV, and a fiercely sarcastic message that it manages to maintain throughout the piece. I think it’s amazing that they showed us such a bleak product as an introduction to the HFF, but it’s bold, aggressive and has a clear message. Bravo!
The Falcon’s Trail (dir. Gottfried Kolditz, GDR 1968)
Well, it turns out I watched White Wolves too early, as it’s the sequel to this film. White men find gold in the Black Hills, and so the evil capitalists maneuver to try and take the land away from the Dakotas. Kolditz’s first foray into Indianerfilm territory only sort of succeeds: he doesn’t include as many stunts with Gojko Mitic as Konrad Petzold but, man, does he go out of his way to depict an outright massacre of the Dakotas by the white men! This is a recurring trope throughout the DEFA Indianerfilme that we always find ourselves somehow vicariously experiencing some massacre of one tribe or another. This reminds me of Quinn Slobodian’s article on “corpse polemics” and the fascination among the West German tabloids for the grotesquely murdered and mutilated African bodies.
Cool Thing Gojko Does: Mount and ride a bareback horse.
The other major detail is also the crazy war dances performed which harken back to Kolditz’s musical training and serve as a precursor to the crazy alien dances in In the Dust of the Stars (1976).
Fatal Error (dir. Konrad Petzold, GDR 1970)
Okay, instead of gold, this time the white men find oil on the Shoshone’s land and conspire to take it away. The Shoshone are bribed with, of all things, alcohol to make them weak (the same trope is used in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Bouncer Vol. 6 The Black Widow) so they can simply be cheated and murdered.
Cool Thing Gojko Does: Actually, this is more Armin Mueller-Stahl’s movie (good thing his cowboy grew up with the Shoshone), but Gojko does take on drunk Shoshones armed with flaming torches who want to set fire to the oil tower on their property.
I Was 19 (dir. Konrad Wolf, GDR 1968)
Of all things, the HFF Konrad Wolf spends the first day – ta da! – showing us a film by Konrad Wolf. This was good, because I’ve seen the film plenty of times earlier and was able to see it through new eyes on a 35mm print of middling quality. I was most impressed this time with the way in which Konrad Wolf’s autobiography and his unified film vision sometimes come into conflict. He toys with details that he remembers from his past, but such details intrude on otherwise more seamless cuts and more transparent characters. Still, there are few better films to use to discuss the Russian invasion of Germany ca. late April 1945.
Wedding Boxes and Bauhaus
October 1, 2009
Reality
Before I dive into any more long-winded exegesis, here are a few more fun things I’ve observed over the past few days (in digestible bullet point form!):
• Many of the musicians who play in the subway cars for money rely on some sort of pre-recorded musical back-up these days. Case in point: a violinist who wore a backpack with a giant hole where the speaker poked out.
• Americans are treated far better by Germans now that Obama is president. No B.S.
• If an American walks into a German Starbucks, they put on some hits from back home… from about 2-3 years ago. But most Germans don’t go to Starbucks because it’s too expensive and the coffee’s not that great.
• If you’re in you’re a male teenager, it’s your God-given right, even duty, to horse around dangerously close to the edge of the S-Bahn tracks. Just observing.
I took several important steps within the past several days that make me feel more like a real citizen of Berlin rather than some weirdo pretender (though I am admittedly a weirdo). One was to get a library account – took 3 minutes and was totally painless except for the 25 euros I shelled out for the year… The second was to actually think about the menu for the week, make a list, and go grocery shopping at the Turkish open-air market on Großgörschenstrasse, Lidl and Netto for the things I will need to eat later on. I will be baking myself a cake on Friday, because it happens to be my birthday, and I can’t get good donuts here. The third was to have my semester ticket start, which means I can use the buses, S-Bahn and subway as much as I want without having to continuously count up the change in my pocket or put it on my bank card. What a relief to be able to decide to go somewhere and not have to debate with my sore-ass legs about whether it was really within walking distance from my apartment! Borrowing books, finding some order in one’s eating habits, and being pre-paid to travel around on a whim – I guess that’s citizenship to me, no thanks to the Ausländerbehörde!
Fulbrighter and filmmaker Luisa Greenfield was to join me at the Berlin screening of Ulrike Ottinger’s The Korean Wedding Chest at the Akademie der Künste am Hanseatenweg last night, so I showed up unreasonably early (as is my wont) and plopped down in front of the theater. An older couple sat near me and smiled at me, which of course prompted a conversation about who I was, etc. Then after the man had left to get her a tea, the woman asked me if, as a German film scholar, I knew a director named Hans Jürgen Pohland. It turns out I did: he made the jazz drummer semi-documentary/feature film Tobby (1961), which I watched in order to be remotely informed about a paper on a panel I chaired earlier this year. Anyway, she revealed that her husband, Siegfried Hofbauer, wrote the screenplay that Pohland barely used anyway. Hofbauer then went on to work as a production designer on Volker Schlöndorff’s Academy-Award winning The Tin Drum (1979) and still worked as a jazz musician and painter in Berlin. I thought it was amazing that I was one of the few people from the U.S. who’d likely seen the film and was sitting across from its screenwriter! So he came back with the tea and we talked film for awhile, particularly about how Tobby (the drummer) then got into some major-league drugs and the film was likely the high point of his career. Then Luisa showed up and we talked more film before, during and after the screening. Ottinger’s comments about her own film were incredibly insightful, and I’m now determined to see that which I haven’t seen of her oeuvre. She’s way better than Herzog, and for good reason: she took courses from the likes of Pierre Bourdieu, Louis “I Accidentally Strangled My Wife” Althusser, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Her films are symbolically anthropological, for lack of a better description. More below.
Anne Hector and I met up the next morning to go to the big Bauhaus exhibit at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, which was jam-packed with tourists of all ages. Squeezing through loud tourist groups while trying not to knock over valuable pieces of early 20th Century art, Anne and I managed to have a good time looking at some of the original Walter Gropius pieces as well as Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer and the rest of the Bauhaus scene. I’m convinced I would’ve either gotten along great at the Bauhaus academies, or I would’ve hated it the first day and thrown a fuzzy amorphous shape at their form/color studies! My trail then led me once again to the HFF, because it was October 1st. Why October 1st, you ask? Well, I’ve decided in October – December to devote each month to a particular genre I’m researching for my dissertation: October’s for westerns, November’s for science fiction, December’s for musicals (since, heck, it’s Christmas Time!). So I easily picked up several western DVDs to take home and watch, surprised at how little of a hassle it was to do so. I think I’m going to like it at my host institution; it seems designed around film geeks.
Fantasy
The Korean Wedding Chest (dir. Ulrike Ottinger, Germany 2009)
Ottinger’s previous films, particularly Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia and her China series, explore encounters between our so-called “modern” world and more traditional ways of life. Her latest film (NOT her upcoming vampire comedy with Elfriede Jelinek Die Blutgräfin (2010)) does exactly that: nestled in the mega-city of Seoul lies a wedding industry so seemingly “traditional” it boggles the mind. Seoul quite literally opened itself up to her so she could document one family’s journey through the engagement process to the wedding. As one would expect, there’s a lot of coaching by women who work in bridal shops, who seem to be the real keepers of this tradition. A married man myself, I asked myself where Kat and I might’ve gotten the money together to have even a remotely “Korean” wedding (actually, I also cried part way through because of recollections of our own wedding — I’m presently a lonely husband waiting until the end of the month…) No answers present themselves: these events offer none of the flexible glamour of the American wedding. Like any wedding, all of what transpires is carefully scripted to pull off exactly the right photo/video documentation of the event. That being said, Ottinger’s film succeeds in defying this convention and instead showing all the human bits of imperfection at the seams of these highly traditional, scripted affairs. You should see it for the colors alone.
White Wolves (dir. Konrad Petzold, GDR 1969)
A proper Gojko Mitic Indianerfilm, White Wolves is a fantastic mess of celluloid best watched by either a crowd of very cynical people or 5 year-olds. Here’s the plot: the Dakotas have been driven from their lands by General Mining Industries run by the evil capitalist Mr. Harrington. Harrington’s so evil that he hires bandits to steal his own money from himself so he doesn’t have to pay his miners, and then continuously blames the attacks on the renegade Dakotas. Mitic’s happy Dakota wife is, of course, melodramatically killed by the bandits, and so he takes merciless revenge on the bandits. Now on to the important aspects like…
The Cool Gojko Mitic Shtick: At one point, he gets a hold of a box full of dynamite sticks, which he uses in combat by throwing them at people and shooting them in the air with his rifle.
The Strong Woman Scene: Most of these Indianerfilme have at least one scene to show they’re not totally misogynistic, and White Wolves is no exception. The sheriff’s wife manages to trick a guard holding her captive into going into the saloon, at which point she steals his wagon.
The Heavy-Handed Communist Scene: The workers flat-out don’t believe the Dakotas stealing their money nonsense – in fact, no one but the villains believe it throughout the film – and demand their fair wages. When the villain tries to ply them with cheap liquor, they turn it down outright.
The Battle to Reside
September 29, 2009
In the darkness before the darkness before dawn
In the isle of desolation amidst a city of color
A few figures, shadows and backpacks, congregate
A few form a haphazard line extending back from the gate
This gate of the LABO is the absolute border of the country
This gate demarcates our courteous selves
From their mechanism of human reduction and
From our stampeding hive selves, desperate
But all is now quiet as the sky re-casts itself from black to gray
But all is silent, though we all know a little broken English
More vehicles drop off more shadows, the line grows
More vehicles drive by their early shifts, perplexed drivers
Wonder about the line, its curvature along the industrial river bank
Wonder about the Ausländer, Fremden, Farbigen, Amis
No reasonable person save s/he who needs a living
No reasonable anonymous group should be up at this hour
Lights flicker on behind the gate; the dawn is drowned
Lights flicker on to slip silhouettes on forgotten shadows
All are of one mind – the page with the stamp is needed
All are well-informed – only here, only now, only when first
And the gates open
And the flood patters forth
At least 30 meters down the cement walkway to the door
At least 100 desperate shadows suddenly illuminated
Trampling desperately, cattle running to feed
Trampling desperately, the line’s composition changes
Now it’s a smashed amoeba up against a tower of cement and glass
Now it’s time for the shadows to hurry up and wait
The sun’s time has come, its beauty covered by a train
The sun’s arrival is heralded by few anymore, let alone by the shadows
More conversation – civilization resumes its “civil” root
More conversation – mutual vipers flick tongues in ignorance
Rumors fly: some have been standing there since 3 a.m., you need to get your visa before you can register for classes, only 50 people were given numbers last time, this is the 4th time I’ve been here, when they open the doors you have to squeeze in, they’re denying Egyptians for some reason, Americans have it easy, Americans have it hard, our late friend’s Irene’s going to join the line, this is ridiculous, this is stupid, I thought the Germans were supposed to be efficient, what kind of visa do you need to stay? we ran out of days three days ago, I have a child – coming through, you should see the bathrooms in there, are we even in front of the right door?
Cantankerous, an official warns us to back away – they need to get in
Cantankerous, a surly Polish woman scoffs at this absurdity
“The ones who’ve been working are us!” she barks
“The ones who are making it worse – that’s all of you!”
Pronouncing his German very slowly and loudly makes him understood
Pronouncing his syllables for the 25% who know the language
The rest look around for broken English translations
The rest mock and jeer and call and mob; the only right they have now
We are to be let in a few at a time, so we don’t crush our way in
We are to let those lucky few with appointments through, the ones with papers
So many stones have been laid in the basket of our visas, yet
So many blasted hopes have been laid at the LABO’s threshold
7:00! Yet another surge, the waves like in concerts crashing against security
7:00! Yet more shouting from the German official, letting a few in
A guard with his back to us puts his arms across the door
A guard lets those few who ran first to get their prize
Hatred swells in the mass: against them, the guards, the officials inside
Hatred swells in the guards: against the unruly students, some of them scientists
Half-an-hour later, the crush subsides, hope shoved to another dark morning
Half-an-hour later, guards mop the sweat from their brow, cursing the hordes and their
Inconsiderate outright forthright savage uncouth unprecedented impolite forceful
Impudent adolescent murderous screaming bloodthirsty thrashing crushing breaking
Dark skin American clothing headscarves shifty eyes hairy ears bushy eyebrows
Greasy hair unwashed faces grabbing hands strange accents broken English
It isn’t their fault – talk to the boss, get him to hire everyone back, make extra hours
It isn’t their fault – people need visas to eat and the visas eat the people
This is what Ordnung looks like.
The Bedeviled Medium
September 29, 2009
Reality
Saturday brought a stormy conclusion to the Kamera als Waffe conference, which might have been expected given the topic of Nazi propaganda cinema within a larger historical context. But first the uncontroversial papers: Kay Hoffmann (University of Stuttgart) presented Roel Vande Winkel’s paper on the Nazi newsreels made to export, and how foreign audiences wouldn’t just accept the German newsreel dubbed into their language (ironically like the Germans’ present means of consuming the world’s TV/film culture), but required new perspectives on propaganda events. Rainer Rutz presented on the fascinating magazine “Signal” that the Nazis produced for European sales, combining images of well-groomed soldiers taking some hot-bodied time off and blonde beauties bathing on captured French beaches. Martina Werth-Mühl from the Bundesarchiv told us not to use YouTube to watch these newsreels, but received resounding applause when she suggested a reduction of price per newsreel at the Bundesarchiv might be to everyone’s benefit. Judith Keilbach argued that the use of propaganda footage in television documentaries generally reproduce the same effects of their original intended purpose: to demonstrate Nazi dynamism and power in elaborately staged war spectacles.
Then the moment of controversy struck when Michael Kloft, the main historical film producer for the ZDF (Das Goebbels Experiment and 29 others), took the podium and said, effectively, that he uses Nazi newsreel footage because it was the footage taken at the time, and it educates the children visually about a time period that is fast losing all of its eyewitnesses. His talk produced visible tension in a room where the medium of television had clearly already been consigned to the 11th circle of Hell. Thus once Kloft was done with his speech, several very eloquent arguments about the “Gleichwertigkeit” toward Nazi footage since the introduction of television in the 50s were posed against Kloft’s flippant remarks. You could tell that among these history professors, a kind of ferocious anger concerning all of the facts they had to make their students unlearn every year thanks to television was promptly unleashed. We ended up staying past the end of the conference to conclude the very intensive discussion with the question of whether television can be allowed to become an “open” medium like film, where the eyes and ears are permitted to wander in a space and evaluate the “rough edges” of history on their own terms.
On Sunday morning, I had breakfast at the famous Café Bilderbuch – my third visit since I’ve arrived – on Akazienstrasse. The café has a reputation thanks to its Viennese style décor, classy music selection, newsletter-styled menus and, of course, excellent coffee and meals named after storybook characters. There I sat and wrote most of what is to be the next chapter in the Peppersmoke Players series. It gives me something to do with my hands, after all.
After the usual laundry and dishes labor befitting Sunday, I found some time to attend Kino Arsenal yet again for a series of underground 8mm films made in eastern bloc countries. Claus Löser – journalist, film historian and curator of the exhibit – was present to introduce the films, as was one of the filmmakers Ramona Köppel-Welsh. The crowd itself was interesting: a mostly silent bunch of maybe half-a-dozen Poles, two Russians, two Germans and myself. I think the language barrier was significant enough that only the Germans and I had a conversation after the film. The nice thing about the Kino Arsenal, of course, is that they give you free wine and pretzels afterwards, so Claus, Ramona, the Germans and I stood around for a time and chit-chatted about the GDR and the United States. Ramona, it turns out, was invited to Los Angeles in 1993… during the L.A. riots. That gave her a lasting impression of the States I maybe wouldn’t envy but, hey!, it was probably a more accurate picture of our divisions than most visitors get.
I’ll finish the “Reality” section of this blog with a brief summary of Monday, when I visited a personal Mecca: the Filmmuseum Potsdam. Located in a beautiful building with horse statues leaping from the walls near the train station, the Filmmuseum Potsdam is a repository for, well, all things DEFA (with a spot of UFA and Pro-Babelsberg here and there). Seriously, though: every major film and a good chunk of the minor ones had some sort of artifact or remnant on display in the museum, from the concentration camp outfit used in Jacob the Liar to the bow Gojko Mitic fought the white Americans with in Falcon’s Trail. Even the counterfeiting kit from the Oscar-winning The Counterfeiters was there in all its faux-1940s glory. At the end of the tour, I went to sign the guest book and noticed a lot of people complaining about the overflowing presence of DEFA materials over UFA and other materials. “Bah!” I said, and wrote a proper defense of the East German studios right there in the guest book.
Blog entries to come:
• A poem on my surreal and awful experience at the Ausländerbehörde
• Several short reviews of academic books I’m reading for my dissertation
• Peppersmoke Players Chapter 3 – Rehearse or Die
Fantasy
Naked Lunch (dir. David Cronenberg, USA 1991)
Boy, what a trip! Similar to Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka (1993) as a kind of tribute to a whole surrealist author’s body of work, Naked Lunch is a film about the destabilization of the armored male subject through the psychic/psychotic transformative experience of writing. This time around I noticed several things: the rampant homoeroticism (complete with talking anuses), the Orientalism (kind of done Madman style: a stereotyped “chinaman” and Moroccan “exoticism” are both foregrounded at different points), the utter fakeness of the sets, Peter Weller’s droll mumbling as Bill Lee (see Ralph Fiennes in Cronenberg’s Spider for the same), and the dissonant soundtrack created by Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman. Now I kind of see the Naked Lunch story as kind of a cross between Camus’ L’etranger and Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle: the former due to the narrator’s utter lack of Self becoming grounds for a murderous act, and the latter because there’s a sort of extraordinary sexual journey that Bill Lee goes through without actually having sex with anybody (e.g., Fridolin and his night wanderings).
Vivre sa vie (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France 1962)
Twelve scenes that show Godard’s contempt for conventional Hollywood narrative that’ll leave you breathless. The movie was rather dull this time around, but maybe it’s because I’ve worked extensively with One Plus One, Tout va bien and Alphaville, which I find to be much better executed films (and don’t all revolve around Anne Karina’s visage).
The Third Man (dir. Carol Reed, UK 1949)
Speaking of well-executed films, Carol Reed’s nihilistic classic put its hooks back into me after I watched The True Glory for the first time on Friday. An incessant zither soundtrack backs this film noir story set in the dark streets of Vienna, where sharp lines such as “death is at the bottom of all things” are delivered so non-chalantly that they make this sort of filmmaking look easy. My theory is that Reed, along with Billy Wilder, did his time during the war with the allied propaganda, thereby earning the right to be totally sarcastic about the peace afterward. Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (1948) and, more to the point, Sunset Boulevard (1950) both peel back the post-war consumer society to reveal a disturbed undertone of fractured identities and incoherent culture.
Ein-Blick (dir. Gerd Conradt, FRG 1986)
Conradt set up a camera to take 1 frame per second for 12 hours, and then recorded East Berlin from West Berlin. Every time anyone looks at the camera, he freezes frame for just a moment. The film gives you a good overall impression as to what a day in the life of a security camera might be like, except with more exciting motion and lighting.
Z mojego okna (dir. Józef Robakovski, Poland 1978-2000)
Another stationary camera set-up, this film is translated to roughly “Outside My Window.” Indeed, Robakovski basically took footage from outside his window for 22 years, recording people running errands, assorted state parades and ultimately a five-star hotel being built that cut off his magnificent window view. What struck me about this film was that, unlike Conradt’s, it wasn’t anonymous surveillance. The filmmaker expresses in a voice-over the story of every person whom he spies on, revealing an urban environment that’s actually more like a community than most U.S. cities.
Trabantomania (dir. János Vetö, Hungary 1982)
A music video for a Hungarian band Trabant, Trabantomania is not so much about the East German car – the Trabant – as it is about showing us silly footage of dolphins and seals, and of the band sitting around in a messy apartment. You still get a definite impression of the interdisciplinarity and intertextuality that underlie such experimental films.
Zestokaja bolezu musicia (dir. Igor and Gleb Aleyinkov, USSR 1987)
This abrasive picture is about this guy who gets on a subway car, two security officials proceed to sodomize him, then leave. I liked the high-contrast film filters used. It looked a little bit like Aronovsky’s π (1998).
Lesorub (dir. Yevgeny Yufit, USSR 1985)
This amusing film is about bodies against snow, mostly wrestling with each other, but sometimes doing perverse things with a dummy. This one’s probably my favorite of the short films.
Sanctus, Sanctus (dir. Thomas Werner, GDR 1988)
In 1988, Thomas Werner and a lot of the East German 8mm scene walked in a May 1st parade, passing Erich Honecker, Egon Krenz and all the party cronies at the time. The soundtrack is a beautiful church hymn that at once mocks and commemorates the GDR within a single musical line.
Konrad, sprach die Frau Mama (dir. Ramona Koeppel-Welsh, GDR 1989)
An anxious picture if I’ve ever seen one, Konrad, sprach die Frau Mama (ich gehe weg und du bleibst da! – Struwwelpeter) has been released on our Counter-Images DVD at the DEFA Film Library, but it was much better on the big screen. Disturbing images of little children weren’t what almost got Koeppel-Welsh thrown in jail over this picture, but rather a little footage of the Berlin Wall shot from a hospital window. The realm of the politically/culturally forbidden past 1961 usually centered around the thematization of the Wall, and this film proved to be no exception.
Night of the Nazis
September 25, 2009
Reality
I decided it might be a good idea to get out of the apartment and do something remotely academic before my brain shrinks with age (my birthday’s six days away… and I have no plans yet). The Deutsche Kinemathek was having a symposium called “Kamera als Waffe” (“Camera as Weapon”) on the propaganda films of World War II, so I cast in my lot and registered for it, thinking I might meet some interesting people there. Turns out I was right.
The first day (Thursday), I grabbed a coffee at the beginning of the conference and stood near another gentleman, who asked me in which room it was to take place. We struck up a conversation and we were nearly inseparable for the rest of the night. He was Herr Göres, a former GDR customs-agent-turned-journalist who had worked for Den Tagesspiegel among other newspapers. He was also one of the most outspoken people in the audience, who’d make loud comments to people sitting next to them (i.e., me) during other people’s academic talks… as if it were a press conference or something. The summary of the papers were as follows: Rainer Rother, director of the Berlinale, introduced the whole shebang. Klaus Kreimeier depicted war propaganda newsreels as a kind of sensory-motor means of warfare, inciting people toward war activities through the creation of a coherent fantasy world with all the clichés. According to Kreimeier, the films were shot with a “secret screenplay” in mind, not as documentation. Miriam Arani showed us some gruesome pictures and told us about how the Germans pretended dead Poles whom they killed were dead ethnic Germans (kind of like The Gleiwitz Case). Klaus Hesse, a big guy at the Topographie des Terrors, showed us some private photos of propaganda photographer Arthur Grimm that illustrated German occupation in Poland as a kind of civilized police activity – all staged for the cameras. There’s a kind of collapse between public and private sphere there. Then Karl Prümm introduced Feldzug in Polen as a symphonic newsreel designed to make the invasion of Poland itself seem like a work of art.
On the second day (today/Friday) Ralf Forster from the Filmmuseum Potsdam demonstrated how the newsreel production process was a well-oiled, highly modern machine that, well, more or less delivers on the “camera as weapon” thesis. Matthias Struch provided an array of clips to show how authorship and individual directorial signatures could be found in the films of Walter Frentz, Hans Ertl and Heinz von Jaworsky. Dirk Alt highlighted a few newsreels fragmentarily shot in color and why WWII wasn’t generally shot in color. Hans-Peter Fuhrmann elaborated on the acoustic dimension of the newsreels and how music and/or sound effects frame the works’ sense of realism. Brian Winston introduced The True Glory as a very effective piece of indirect propaganda: acknowledging the negative and cynical sides of reality before turning to its myth-making, collectivist project.
After tonight’s screening, I had the pleasure of having a beer with Mr. Winston, Kay Hoffmann and another very nice woman who worked heavily with documentary film. It turns out that this is THE Brian Winston who wrote Misunderstanding Media as well as Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries, and who produced this classic Paper Tiger analysis of TV news. So now that I understood that I was gossiping with one of the luminaries of documentary ethics and Communication Studies, I realized that when he talked about “Ricky” needing to get his autobiography out, he meant Richard Leacock, and when he referred to “Bobby” or “Stuart,” he meant Robert Flaherty and Stuart Hall respectively. He’s currently working on the documentary on Flaherty, which caused a lot of discussion about Nanook of the North (1922) and Louisiana Story (1948). I learned maybe more in that one hour than in several Kamera als Waffe conferences, but so it goes.
Naturally, I remain without a student U-bahn pass and I’m cheap so I hoofed it back to my apartment from Potsdamer Platz after the beer. My 30-minute nighttime journey on foot revealed the following items of note:
• A row of aggressive prostitutes near the Bülowstrasse U-Bahn station (but I was on the other side of the street)
• A hookah bar covered in a pale haze that was sucked outside as soon as someone opened the door.
• An older man with an open bottle of Baileys who nearly wandered into traffic.
• A local barber shop has a lot of activity behind its steel doors at night, meaning I think it’s a front for something else
Ah, the City of Sand.
Fantasy
Feldzug in Polen (1939/40, dir. Fritz Hippler)
Fritz Hippler, that lovely cutting-room documentarist who later put together the anti-Semitic montage The Eternal Jew (1940), worked together with Herbert Windt, composer of the score for Triumph of the Will (1935), on the first major documentary about the German blitzkrieg victory in Poland. With enthusiastic marches, maps with big arrows on them, and exciting house-to-house fighting footage that may or may not have been staged, the film shows us how the Wehrmacht kicked the living tar out of the Polish army. The general dynamic revolves around A) the continuous victory of the advancing German army and B) the continuous retreat of the cowardly-but-threatening Polish army, conspicuously eliding the presence of both German casualties and the nuances of Polish defeat (something about concentration camps?). In my humble opinion, it reminded me of a music video: structured more around its own self-gratifyingly simplistic narrative and the foregrounded symphonic music than around documentation of an event or the commemoration of something significant in detail.
The True Glory (1945, dir. Carol Reed)
An epic piece of propaganda filmmaking that kicks the living tar out of Feldzug in Polen, The True Glory provides a picture of the WWII battle on the western front toward victory told entirely through voice-over by real troops and General Eisenhower. It is, in a word, gripping. Ken Burns’ The War (2007) shows the message hasn’t changed a bit from when the U.S. and the UK hadn’t even defeated Japan yet: the war was hard and fought by regular people called to do a great, global act of goodness requiring epic bravery, etc., etc. The point is that, after this film, you feel both educated about the basic military history of the UK/American/Russian victory and certainly feel very good that all those Nazis are conquered, even though the Nazi Germans are not necessarily portrayed in a negative light. Another key difference from Feldzug in Polen: the bodies of American and British soldiers are depicted, which forces how “hard” the war was. See this to see from where Saving Private Ryan (1998) effectively culled its most powerful material for the first 20 minutes.
