***

The Rumpus: What did you think of the movie?

Tom Nissley: I was thrilled by how short it was. I did a double take when I saw the running time on the Netflix sleeve: 1 hr, 3 min. Of course, all that meant was my wife and I could watch the commentary track right afterwards (we fell asleep halfway through, like we usually do). But I loved how fast the plot moved: we were giggling at how efficiently the opening shipwreck happened, and not (just) in a campy way.

With a movie like this, made to a different aesthetic standard than I usually look for, it can be interesting to try to separate the campy pleasures from the immediate ones. The camp is easy to spot, every time Count Zaroff strokes the scar on his forehead. But there were immediate pleasures too. The shipwreck is authentically disturbing, maybe because it happens more quickly than we expect, and even those stunt bodies falling into the water have an abruptness that makes you feel their impact. And even Zaroff, when he spouts his business about “after the hunt, then comes the love”: you don’t expect rape to be brought up so explicitly, but those were the pre-Code years. And the dogs, especially in the foggy swamp: the dogs don’t know they’re in a campy movie. There’s a moment when the hounds are climbing up a steep bank in an alarmingly powerful way and one can’t quite make it to the top and falls back while the others rush on from below him: that was probably the most moving sequence in the whole picture for me.

But the legendary man-hunting-man sequence? That’s where it just got silly: it felt like a Road Runner cartoon, but with less tension. That’s where running out of money (as apparently they did) really did some damage.

I do love that Joel McCrea, though. What a fresh-faced young man.

What did you think? What cut through the camp for you?

Rumpus: The shipwreck was disturbing? I thought it was the funniest sequence of the whole movie. It reminds me of the time my dad and I were watching an old episode of Dr. Who at my grandparents’ house and there was this part where a guy gets crushed between two robot mummies. As my dad and I were cracking up, my grandmother came into the room, saw what we were watching, and said, “This isn’t scary to you?” It’s always interesting to me how movies we once considered suspenseful or fraught with a certain emotion can seem cheeseball to us now, owing to production values and pre-Method acting.

When did this film come out? 1932? It seems to me the whole thing is about Social Darwinism, which is interesting considering what was right around the corner, historically speaking. You’ve got your blonde, civilized hero (McCrea, who I loved in Sullivan’s Travels) up against the swarthy, scenery-chewing Zaroff and his gang of Cossacks. I’m not exactly saying that this is a pro-Aryan film, but there’s a whiff of xenophobia that hangs over the whole thing like a haze.

Nissley: Yes, the Aryan-Americans vs. the forces of darkness element is hard to ignore, especially when you pair MDG with the movie it was made alongside of, with the same directors and some of the same sets: King Kong. This kind of stuff would have been red meat for the grad-school cultural studies industry I used to be part of: it’s so unembarrassed about its anxieties and obsessions that you hardly know where to begin. Regarding Social Darwinism specifically, I thought on one hand it undercuts the “survival of the fittest” idea by making man-hunting-man so disgusting, to the point that now that McCrea, the great white hunter, knows what it’s like to be hunted himself, he seems to have lost his taste for blood. But I’m sure you could shoehorn it back into Social Darwinist ideas (as I understand them) by seeing Count Z as representing a decadent, savage race that will be superseded by fresh-faced, fair-play Americans like McCrea.

Speaking of grad school and Cossacks, here’s a background detail I absolutely love. Have you read The Possessed, Elif Batuman’s fabulously entertaining book on the writers and scholars of Russian literature? There’s a great little section in her chapter on Isaac Babel in which she realizes that “Frank Mosher,” an American airman who Babel describes interrogating in 1920 after he was shot down while fighting the Bolsheviks, was none other than Merian Cooper, the creator of King Kong and, yes, The Most Dangerous Game. (It appears, in fact, that Babel was the one who saved the future filmmaker from being killed by his Cossack comrades after he crashed.) Knowing that Cooper spent months as a prisoner of the Soviets (shoveling snow on the railroad, apparently) does add some color to his portrait of this mad, murderous Russian. And by the way, here’s Babel’s description of Mosher/Cooper from his diary: “A shot-down American pilot, barefoot but elegant, neck like a column, dazzlingly white teeth, his uniform covered with oil and dirt.” Sure sounds like Joel McCrea after he washes up on Ship-Trap Island!

Another nice biographical tidbit, this time from the commentary track: “Ivan,” the mute Cossack brute in the count’s employ, was played by Noble Johnson, one of the few black actors in early Hollywood, who ran his own African-American studio, called the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, from 1916 to 1921.

I’m the kind of movie viewer who has IMDb open while I watch, and I love to make these connections outside the walls of the film, so feel free to run with them, but I’m also curious about how you watch a movie like this as a writer. Are you always looking for things you can take away–either bits of craft or actual shards of story or fact–and incorporate into the worlds you build in your fiction? Were there any raw materials you mined from this rich vein?

Rumpus: You truly are the master of trivia. I had no idea about the Babel connection, that’s amazing. I revisit Red Cavalry occasionally and assign him to students all the time. So fascinating to think that he crossed paths in such a dramatic way with Cooper, whose King Kong was the favorite movie of one Adolf Hitler (I’m pretty sure I know this thanks to the Genus edition of Trivial Pursuit). Have you read any of the propaganda Babel wrote? It’s terrifying, blood-thirsty stuff. My favorite line is “Stamp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins, Red Army fighters!”

I don’t know what “as a writer” really means anymore. I brush my teeth as a writer, I drive my car as a writer, I make dinner as a writer. I think, more broadly, your question is about incorporating influence. Every movie, book, album, etc. goes into the mulch pile to some degree. I latch on to some works more than others. The Holy Mountain by Jodorowsky, for example, was a film that deeply influenced my upcoming novel. But the more deliberate my attempts at drawing in an influence, the less influential that source becomes. Which is why I can’t seem to do research for anything I write, and sort of recoil at the very idea of research. Influences have to happen at the level of the subconscious, not as something deliberately sought out.

I’m interested in your movie digestive process as well. At least to the outside observer, it appears like your brain is full of hyperlinks. Like you’re webbing together all these pieces of information. This observation, I suppose, offers a sneaky opportunity for me to ask you about Jeopardy!. As I watched you clean up on that show, I wanted to get a sense for what was going through your head in the moment you hit the buzzer. Were there times when you hit the buzzer without actually knowing the question, and in the gap of time between when Trebek said your name and you had to speak, it came to you? Did you ever intuit that you might know the answer, so you buzzed in, having faith that your brain would catch up to your intuition?

Nissley: Hey, you’re not so bad at accessing the database either–look at you pulling out some excellent Babel facts of your own!

I know what you’re saying about being influenced by everything and nothing. I agree especially that the harder you try to incorporate something, the more it falls apart in your hands. To answer my own question, though (why else do we ask them?), one way I try to enjoy something like The Most Dangerous Game that has, for better or worse, almost no similarities to the way I tell stories is to look for material or techniques that I would never think to use on my own. A head floating in a vat? Maybe not. But the startling effect of action speeded up beyond our expectations, or the authentic animal presence of those unruly dogs? Those fragments I hope I can put aside somewhere in the storehouse to use when I need them.

Meanwhile, it all comes back to Jeopardy! (nice job remembering the exclamation point). What goes through my head before the buzzer? I’m trying to navigate that web of information as fast as I can. The mechanics of it are that I would try to read the clue faster than Alex and decide, by the time he got to the end, whether I knew the answer or not. One of my few strategies was not guessing at things I wasn’t pretty sure I knew, so if I couldn’t come up with an answer in time, I would just lay off the buzzer (which sometimes meant letting questions I could have gotten go by). Sometimes, though, I would be almost certain I “knew” an answer, even if I hadn’t articulated it to myself: neurologically, I guess I had navigated to the right spot in my memory, and knew the spot existed, but hadn’t accessed it yet. Usually, I was able to pull it up (once I remember desperately picturing Malcolm McDowell’s face and bowler hat while trying to pull out the words “Clockwork Orange“), but not always (like when I could only draw the first few syllables of “Savonarola” out of my brain in time). But those few seconds when you’re reading the question, trying to figure it out, and then getting ready to buzz: I’m not sure my brain has ever worked that well. I know I played a lot better on the show than I did at home, or even in rehearsals: there’s something about the adrenaline of the real game that finally pushed my brain to work at maximum capacity for a short time. There’s a thrill to operating in real time like that–it feels like the three-dimensional concentration when you have the ball in the lane in a basketball game, or when you’re part of the back and forth in a good conversation. And I think the speed of the game is one reason it’s so popular. There’s an electric flow to it that’s unlike, say, the more leisurely pub trivia games you and I have had the pleasure of playing a few times.

But meanwhile, it’s that web of information that makes Jeopardy! (and those fun facts we both pulled out about Babel and King Kong) seem less like trivia and more like knowledge. As a lot of people have pointed out, the more nodes you have on your network of knowledge, the more new facts stick, because they attach in various ways to the data that are already there. And so the main part of the fun for me of watching something like MDG is not the drama within the movie, but all the connections I can make to things outside the movie: to a good friend’s infatuation with Fay Wray, to hairstyles and fashions of another time (those high-waisted pants!), to The Man with Two Brains, to Gilligan’s Island, to the Bolsheviks and the Cossacks. And that’s why to me the DVD commentary track is perhaps the great new art form of the millennium.

That’s not always the case, though–there are other pleasures in other movies. In The Tree of Life, say, I didn’t get most of my enjoyment from thinking, “Oh, that’s Sean Penn, and just think of all the other stuff he represents.” In fact, within that movie, recognizing Sean Penn as Sean Penn was a drawback for me. But that movie wasn’t a hermetic experience either: the echoes of 2001 added to the experience for me, as did, I think, recognizing Brad Pitt as Brad Pitt, maybe because his character had enough weight to hold its own with the aura of Brad Pitt the star.

Rumpus: I can’t imagine doing anything but choking in Jeopardy!!!!! (Tell me, do you have to pronounce it with the exclamation point as well?) I figured everyone read the clue before Alex finished saying it. And since I have you on this subject, what’s the clicker like? From what I gather they’re the same technology as an old school Atari joystick.

What do you think is the difference between trivia and knowledge?

I watched The Tree of Life at home while suffering a cold, which is far from an ideal viewing experience. Oh yeah, and it was daytime, too. Even so, the cinematography blew me away, as has always been the case with Malick’s films. The way he makes plants look, the way he somehow manages to convey what the temperature of the air is in a scene. But I have to say what I most looked forward to was seeing those dinosaurs. And I wish one of them would have eaten Sean Penn. I love Sean Penn in nearly everything he does. There’s this lesser Woody Allen movie called Sweet and Low Down where I think he’s hilarious and brilliant. But between the interstellar screen saver sections of The Tree of Life, the guy just seemed adrift. I liked The Tree of Life but I was aware of myself wanting to like it, because liking it would prove to myself that I’m smart. I didn’t connect to it like I connected to The Thin Red Line or The New World. I though the scene where the whole cast meets on the beach was fairly cheeseball, like the series finale of Lost. And the “I give you my son” line annoyed me in a way that only an atheist who was raised Catholic can be annoyed. But any time Terrence Malick trains a camera on a weed, I’ll be happy to look at that all day long.

Nissley: At this point, I’ve said the word “Jeopardy” so much in the past year that it’s a little hard to reach the exclamatory. I think my usual intonation is closer to the interrobang. And yes, I think some early-’80s console experience with Combat or Missile Command is excellent training for mastering the “signaling device,” though the red button is at the top of the stick, not on the base, as with Atari.

The line between trivia and knowledge is in the eye of the beholder, but one way I think of it is that trivia is an obscure fact known for the sake of its obscurity (for example, Q: Who was on deck when Bobby Thomson hit the shot heard ’round the world? A: Willie Mays), whereas knowledge is a fact that you know organically as part of a larger structure of understanding (e.g., Q: Who is the only third-party presidential candidate since the Civil War to finish second? A: Teddy Roosevelt, 1912). But no doubt I’m just trying to paper over my own embarrassment at being a trivia champ by giving it a more respectable name. I did, after all, reveal to 10 million viewers that I know who Kim Kardashian was married to.

Now back to high art! I think I must have seen The Tree of Life under optimal conditions (although it was so long I had to go and pee in the middle, which I never do at the movies, but I figured I wouldn’t really miss any big plot points), because I just drank it down like water (maybe that’s why I had to pee). I’ve seen and enjoyed most of the Malick movies, but none have really gotten under my skin the way this one did. But “under my skin” is wrong–it felt like it was my skin. It wasn’t that I identified strongly with the story so much as the philosophy, which to my eyes expressed a sort of ecstatic sense of the world around us, and its unalterable impermanence. From what I’ve heard Malick fits his religious sense into some sort of Christianity, but I felt like I had never seen my own wide-eyed atheism embodied so profoundly before. As you said, it’s really a religion of the camera. My sister knows one of the cameramen Malick sent out to collect some of the non-story footage, and my understanding is that his mandate was pretty much: bring back beautiful stuff. I want that job.

But the Sean Penn sections, especially the laughable scene on the beach? I mostly pretend that they weren’t even in the picture. People who have told me how much they hated the movie tend to focus on those scenes, and I can’t really argue with them, except to say that I ignore them and am still left with my favorite movie (or probably anything) of the year.

I’ve never seen Sweet and Lowdown (I just can’t keep up with the Woodman), but the mention they made of it in passing in that recent PBS documentary on Allen made me want to track it down (along with a dozen other Woodys I’ve missed or half-forgotten).

Rumpus: Okay, Tom, one more for the road: This actor, who had a cameo appearance in Gravity’s Rainbow, in 2011 shared the sound stage with such creatures as Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, and Gonzo the Great.

Nissley: You’re going to end this with a stumper? Do I at least have until daybreak to answer it, like Joel McCrea? I can see you stroking your forehead wound now…

Well, I’m pretty sure Jason Segal’s not name-checked in Gravity’s Rainbow, but I haven’t taken my kids to The Muppets yet, so I have to think of who might still be alive that would have been big enough for Pynchon in the early ’70s. How about Kirk Douglas?

Okay, I looked it up: none other than “Judge Hardy’s madcap son,” Mickey Rooney. Well played. How about this in return? What actor, who had a slightly more pivotal cameo in The Moviegoer, is also the “actor / who died while he was drinking / he was no one I had heard of” in Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” (and was Ron and Nancy Reagan’s best man)? (At least if IMDb is to be believed.)

Rumpus: I have no fucking idea.

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I’ve been writing this column off and on for a few years now and I thought I’d shake it up a bit by turning it into a dialogue. My first exposure to film criticism was watching

Ryan: I was happy you picked The 400 Blows because I’d only seen Truffaut’s Jules et Jim and Fahrenheit 451. It’s one of those movies I’ve always felt I should have seen by now, so thanks for motivating me to see it.

I thought I’d toss out a quick summary of the film for the benefit of those who haven’t seen it. It’s about a boy named Antoine Doinel growing up in France sometime in the mid 20th century. His bombshell mom is having an affair, his dad is constantly exasperated with him, and his teachers hate his guts. Over the course of the film he and his best friend Rene get into a lot of trouble. Things get grim for Antoine. He goes to jail and then to an institution for delinquents. Anything you’d add to that?

I kept thinking of how the sadness of The 400 Blows doesn’t really come from the mere fact of bad stuff happening to Antione. It’s more that his parents and teacher come down on him so severely for mischief that seems so unremarkably normal, if not inspired.

Aimee: So, I picked it also because I recently finished Kafka on the Shore, a book that is, in part, about how art almost sits in waiting for an available listener/viewer/reader to come in and join. And one of the characters went to a movie theatre and saw The 400 Blows and I realized I’d never seen it and wanted to.

About the summary– it also feels intensely to me like a film about solitude. By the end, he is totally alone, mostly in a painful way, but also it’s unclear. Will he find his way? Is he at the end of his road, or not? He’s a resourceful kid. I was struck by how nicely he set the table for his parents– not what I see in most kids without prompting.
And yes– his mischief is not special, not extraordinary. I thought the sadness also came from his awareness of not really being wanted.

Ryan: I read Kafka on the Shore soon after it came out, but I’d forgotten the reference to The 400 Blows. Antoine would fit quite nicely in a Murakami novel, right? I agree with you about the loneliness, but there’s also this great friendship in the film with Rene, his partner in crime. I think the saddest moment for me was when Rene tries to visit Antoine at the delinquents’ home and is turned away. I also got a kick out of how Antoine was obsessed with Balzac, to the point of making a shrine. He’s the kind of kid who seeks a sort of psychic community in art, and the scenes where he goes to the movies with his parents seemed like a reprieve from the general suckiness of his home and school life. Which I suppose is kind of magical to think that this film is itself something that might help someone forget their troubles for awhile.

I’m really curious about this idea of how art can sit in waiting. This idea feels cut from the same cloth as something you wrote years ago in your essay about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (an essay I routinely give to my students, by the way). You talked about Murakami getting to a point where he didn’t know where the story was supposed to go, so he had Toru, his main character, simply sit on a bench and wait for something to happen. I think about this observation a lot as it relates to my own work. Do you feel that The 400 Blows was waiting for you to enter it?

Aimee: Yes, you’re so right about Rene, and that very sad moment. Why is he turned away, do you think? Because he’s a kid? And true, about the movies– apparently Truffaut himself found total refuge in going to the movies, too.

Art sitting in waiting– in Kafka, he was talking really about how a character opened up to art and suddenly liked Beethoven, something which shocked him. And I know for myself I often will find something wonderful that years before I found impenetrable. Like we have to live our way up to certain works of art, and others we will never understand. With 400 Blows– I think since I know it’s a huge milestone in cinema, it did feel like it was waiting there until I (or any other viewer) would open it up. Did you feel that at all?

There’s an amazing scene where Truffaut lifts up above the city and shows just patterns of walking– kids running into a store, and adults almost goosestepping to work. There’s such a quietness to the scope– he never pushed on his dramatic scenes, but I found that sudden distant shot really powerful. It felt like there wasn’t a lot of judgement there– just watching as we go about our spinning circles. What scene or scenes felt particularly memorable to you?

Ryan: I think Rene was turned away because the adults in charge were just assholes, really. They wouldn’t allow Antoine the pleasure of friendship. I think a lot of unjust things happen to us when we’re kids that we don’t realize are unjust until later, and some of us make movies about it. The 400 Blows feels like an act of revenge.

I’ve had that experience too, of a work of art suddenly opening up for me after being inscrutable. This is how it was with the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, which I’d seen on a lot of Best Albums of All Time lists. Knowing it was widely revered made me keep coming back to it, even though the first few times I listened to it I found it wimpy. Then, during one of the periods when I was out of work, I put it on and was incredibly moved. I’ve always had a knee-jerk reaction to the canonical, especially when it comes to books. Not something I’m particularly proud of, actually. Music and films, less so. I guess because I grew up being wary of English teachers who didn’t seem as invested in books as I was, who had to assign books that avoided controversy. Film was a different story because I had no sense of “cinema” as opposed to “movies” until I was a teenager discovering the “Foreign” section at the video store. But I find it’s harder for me to approach a work of art that comes with the baggage of a big reputation.

I loved that walking sequence, too. But the one scene that stuck out for me was where Rene messes with the clock to trick his father into leaving so Antoine won’t be found. There’s a shot with a cat in the background, and it’s obviously an edit because suddenly the cat has changed position. I love little things like that. And I’d venture to say Truffaut did too, as he makes this point in Jules and Jim when Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine is delighted to point out flaws when she goes to the cinema.

I’ve read that Truffaut denied this film was autobiographical, particularly when it came to the parents. That sort of denial never feels entirely legit to me, though I think I understand where it comes from, out of a resistance to treating art as an algebra problem. Would you agree that it’s possible for art to be emotionally autobiographical without being factually so?

Aimee: Ah! That’s funny about the cat and Jules and Jim.

I absolutely think art can be emotionally autobiographical– I think it actually has to be in order to work. And factual is sort of beside the point. My sister once quoted her friend Elizabeth MacCracken as saying just that– that ‘write what you know’ means ‘write what you know emotionally’ which seems spot on to me.

I’ve wondered about Pet Sounds– don’t think I’ve really heard it yet (have listened but poorly) but that’s motivating. I did feel it with books, too– I think it takes awhile to figure out that the classics are classics because usually they, too, are lively in a somewhat subversive way. I mean, Moby Dick? I figured I’d hate Gatsby and Ulysses and only in grad school did I really look at those books and feel amazed at how playful they were, how much joy there was on a sentence level. Even if I didn’t understand most of Ulysses, I was stunned at how much fun he was having.

I also love how when Antoine meets the psychologist, he’s suddenly a chatterbox. It’s really sad, actually, because everyone has been saying how inscrutable and difficult-to-read he is, and then as soon as someone just asks, someone he doesn’t think is a hypocrite, he opens right up. And he is in fact highly observant and insightful. I found that scene really powerful.

Which books did you knee-jerk react against, canon-wise?

Ryan: I think the best thing I’ve heard about the idea of emotional autobiographicality (Is that a word? It is now) was from John Irving. One time one of his kids was asked whether John Irving was Garp. The boy thought a moment and said something like “My dad’s not Garp, but my dad’s fears are Garp’s fears.”

Pet Sounds really is worth sitting down with, though you might have to just smile politely through “Sloop John B,” which still sounds dippy to me. As for canonical books, I remember being assigned to read Huckleberry Finn in eighth grade, and being prepared to hate it because that was pretty much my attitude about every sucky book we got assigned. This was a period when my reading habits were bouncing between straight-up genre pulp like military potboilers and curious forays into The Inferno and Catcher in the Rye. And I remember getting into a conversation with a friend of mine about Huck Finn and almost accidentally, against my will, getting really excited about it. What I guess rankled me about English class in general was the way these books were slammed onto your desk with sort of a “try to figure out the three distinct reasons why this is brilliant, pipsqueak” attitude. I don’t believe in classics that get an automatic free pass, I believe they have to earn their status one reader at a time. I guess I’m arguing against pedestals here. By the time I got to grad school I had adopted an attitude of all-inclusiveness, that I would throw myself at the mercy of any book assigned to me. That meant Gatsby, Lolita, The Brothers Karamazov, Pere Goriot (go Balzac!) all opened up for me. But damn if Hardy’s Jude the Obscure didn’t make me want to shoot myself.

I love that scene where Antoine explains himself, too. He’s being so honest, and it was easy to imagine myself, if I were in his situation, behaving the same. It’s so refreshing to see a character completely put all his cards on the table and demand that we see him as he is. And you know, of course, that there are other Antoine Doinel films. I’m curious to see what he’s like when he’s older.

Aimee: Hadn’t heard that Garp quote before, but that fits with MacCracken’s exactly.

I know what you mean about the English class difficulty– hard on teachers to move past that, but Flannery O’Connor critiques it really well in her Mystery and Manners book, in an essay on the teaching of literature. She also hates the ‘hunting’ attitude, the theme-searching, which makes it more of a treasure hunt than an exploration and understanding.

Never tried Hardy– but I don’t think I’d like it much either! But maybe I’m just having the same old prejudice here– hard to tell.

I am curious about the older Antoine, too, but I also like the ambiguity of the end, where we really don’t know if he’ll be okay or not. I was so struck in that explaining scene, at how at ease he looked. He wasn’t a kid who took any time at all to open up. He was happily forthright, moving his hand over the table, expounding. Up until that scene, I think he’d been largely silent, unavailable to the viewer, too.

There was another moment that was so visually striking (there are tons) but when he’s listening to his parents complain about him, and we see the whites of his eyes vividly and clearly in the dark, as he is lying in his bed– these blinking bright dots of white on the screen. Maybe it links up to the psychologist scene to me, as another moment of registered awareness. But it’s done so quietly, without any overexplaining on Truffaut’s part.

It’s fun to discuss! Thanks for the opportunity to finally see it and talk about it.

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Week 1

I showed Edwin Porter’s 1903 short “The Gay Shoe Clerk.” It’s basically a quick gag–a young woman and her mother appear in a shoe store. As the clerk is sizing the young lass, he takes the opportunity to fondle her foot. Oh dear! The mother hits the clerk with her handbag. The end.

What makes this film foundational is the editing. We see a medium shot of the clerk and shoppers in the store. The perspective then shifts to a close-up of the man fondling the woman’s foot. It’s the sort of edit we take for granted, and we don’t question the continuity–we know the foot belongs to the woman we were just looking at. What I hoped to demonstrate was that the early experiments with film editing resulted in a cinematic grammar that we have internalized without paying it too much notice.

We then moved on to the Porter film that caused audiences to literally leap out of their seats, the first blockbuster, The Great Train Robbery. The bad guy at the end points his pistol at the camera and pops off a shot. Is the bullet going to come out of the screen and strike you dead? Better duck!

After Porter I screened George Melies’s “Le Voyage dans la Lune” from 1902. This is the classic rocket-hits-the-moon-in-the-eye movie. Take a look.

So sorry, I meant this:

From this film class staple we jumped ahead a couple decades to Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Junior. I love watching silent slapsticks because I love thinking about the ways humor can be timeless. As much as I admire Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, Keaton remains my favorite of the silent comedians partly because what he did was so counterintuitive. Where Chaplin’s face conveyed everything you needed to know about what his tramp was thinking and feeling, Keaton–famously nicknamed Old Stone Face–was about as facially expressive as a light socket. Which meant that he drew his audience into the screen, rather than delivering from it, providing a blank canvas onto which we might project ourselves. Watching Sherlock Junior right after the Porter shorts revealed how sophisticated audiences became. There’s this wonderful sequence in which Keaton, playing a projectionist, climbs onto a movie theater stage and literally enters the movie that’s playing. All this happens within a dream. Add to this a crazy funny motorcycle chase and boy howdy do you have a movie!

After a great discussion we took a break and reconvened to discuss Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.” What does this story of pillaging Vikings have to do with the films we watched? Nothing, nothing at all. I just love that story and will teach it any chance I get. The “blood eagle.” Damn.

Week 2

All right so we sort of laid the foundation in the first class. Now I wanted to push the envelope a bit. First up was a film I’ve blogged about here before, “Un Chien Andlou” by Luis Buñuel. After that I screened the Spanish director’s L’Age Dor. While Buñuel’s short exhibits no agenda besides letting irrationality take the reigns, L’Age Dor feels very much like a political film, a sneering, shaming assault on the conventions that keep society humming along at the cost of those being ground under the heels of wealth and privilege.

I’d argue that’s most shocking about the film–and what had it banned and out of circulation from 1933 to 1979–isn’t the toe-sucking scene, but the final few minutes of the film. In a direct reference to Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, we see four libertines departing a castle where, we’re informed, an orgy has just taken place. And holy crap if one of the libertines isn’t the spitting image of Jesus Christ. Watching this film again in a room full of students I was struck anew by the audacity of the filmmaker. To draw a parallel between Christ and de Sade, and further, to end with a shot of scalps nailed to a crucifix… wow. Just wow.

And it’s interesting to think about how Buñuel reached for that catalogue of evils for inspiration in 1930, and 45 years later Pier Paolo Pasolini went to the same well for his unfathomably brutal Salò: 120 Days of Sodom. The two films bookend the 20th century, the first a premonition, the second an autopsy. Luckily for my class, I spared them the Pasolini.

As if to lighten the mood (but not by much), we discussed George Saunders’s “Sea Oak” in the final hour of the class. Good old Aunt Bernie.

Week 3

We backtracked a bit this week, into German Expressionism, specifically Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. There’d be no Shutter Island or Careful without Caligari. Watch out for Cesare!

After this masterpiece of psychological horror, we discussed Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” for an hour. I’ve taught this story before, and like to begin by drawing little stick figures of the characters on the board, then drawing the hideous machine with its harrow and designer and bed of cotton. Great fun. And moreso than the two weeks previous, the film and the story fit together nicely this round. Each about control in some way, each perhaps a warning from the early years of the 20th century that the world was about to become an even more frightening place.

Related Posts:

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• The Eyeball #41: Talking with Aimee Bender About The 400 Blows

Fifty-five miles north of Seattle, just off Interstate 5, on a seven-acre tract of land that included a pasture, two ponds, and a forest contiguous with dozens more acres of woodland, was my childhood home. For decades the previous owners of our property had used one of the ponds as a garbage dump, tossing appliances, household trash, and dairy farm equipment down the hill beyond a rowdy patch of rhododendrons. For thirty years my father cleaned up the property, making frequent trips to the garbage dump and clearing swaths of brush, which he piled in great mounds and delightedly set ablaze. I played in the overgrown ruins, digging through layers of moss and underbrush to unearth glass bleach bottles, cutlery, ceramic cold cream containers, spools of barbed wire, even the hood of a Mercedes Benz. I stashed these treasures in an old Darigold refrigerated train car which I referred to as my “lab,” where we also kept hay for our sheep. I spent summers eating fruit and berries that grew on our property and reading science fiction novels in the trees. Sometime during junior high I started meditating in the woods, though I didn’t know to call it that. I would cross the yard, step through the border of Douglas firs, and find some soft, needle-carpeted spot to stare into space and let my mind go empty. Everything I now think about nature and technology rests upon these formative experiences in a zone between what is grown and what was once manufactured, between the wild strength of a sapling and the relentlessness with which rust returns an artifact to the soil.

When my parents sold the property in 1999 in the same month I got married, I grieved. I understood their rationale for moving but lamented their leaving the acreage where so much of my imagination had taken root. By this time I had embraced an urban life in Seattle. In retrospect, my move to a city had always been a foregone conclusion. Around age ten I came upon an illustration in a magazine, of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, her body composed of gears and cables, monitors and spools of print-out paper. This captivating image was captioned “Alice in Technology Land.” I asked my mother what technology meant, and while I can’t remember her response, I do remember thinking it was a profound concept I would need to pay attention to the rest of my life. By the time I was twenty-five I had picked bulbs in tulip fields and managed a customer database in an office park. I’d watched lambs being born and stock prices spike into hundreds of dollars per share. It’s the places where what we erroneously call the “natural” and “man-made” worlds comingle where I felt most at home.

When I was an undergraduate ice cream man peddling Fudgsicles in the suburban grid I fixated on a mathematical object, the hypercube, also known as the tesseract. A hypercube is a four dimensional object represented as a cube within a cube. These two cubes are in flux. As the inner cube grows, the outer cube contracts, until they trade places. The cube that was once the content becomes the context, and vice versa. I had been fascinated by this figure since a high school math teacher woke me from my usual fifth-period nap by drawing it on the board.

Hypercube (click to see it in action)

During the requisite sophomore phase of Salvador Dali appreciation, I bought a print of the surrealist’s Corpus Hypercubus, which depicts Christ crucified on the net–or unfolded geometrical extraction–of a hypercube. This image led me to believe that certain human constructs—religion and media in particular—had overpowered the experience of being an individual body in the throes of perception to the point that these constructs, rather than our individual, perceptual selves, were the frames within which we comprehended and measured reality. What was a television set sitting in a house if not one recontextualizing cube within another? When I hear of meteorologists getting stopped in the street and blamed for storms, or of virtual goods in video games being purchased with actual money, or when I read Don DeLillo’s prescient White Noise in which a family’s sense of urgency during an environmental catastrophe is framed as a struggle to comprehend sudden, unmediated reality, then I feel as if the screen has passed through my body and can no longer be contained by my consciousness. Rather, my consciousness operates within the machinery of the representational.

While keeping the hypercube in mind, I was also obsessed with a diagram of three concentric circles I drew in my notebook whenever the ice cream sandwiches ran out. The center circle I labeled “technology.” The middle circle I labeled “humanity.” And the outer circle I labeled “nature.” The content of technology could not exist outside the context of human invention. The content of humanity could not exist outside the context of nature. Hence technology, regardless of whatever destructive properties it might possess, was a natural phenomenon. Our notion of the “artificial” was itself an artificial distinction.

What if we were to combine these models, then? What if this nested model of nature, humanity, and technology were granted the dynamic, recontexualizing properties of a hypercube? Might we then imagine a reality in which humanity encompassed nature within consciousness? Or in which technology became the contextual framework for humanity? This led me to the works of writers like Bill McKibben, Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Sven Birkerts, and Jean Baudrillard.

In the alarmingly titled The End of Nature McKibben compares a day in the woods to a day’s worth of cable television, pitting the inanities of infomercials against the sublime pleasure of skinny-dipping beneath the stars. Postman, in the years before the raging hardon of the World Wide Web, laments the tendency of digital culture to turn us into distracted, agitated, dumbed-down creatures. Baudrillard, whose works inspired the popular Matrix franchise, spoke of the negation of the concept of reality, of life that passed through a series of simulations with no originals. McLuhan, the giant in the field of media studies, informed my emerging comprehension of the Internet by suggesting that the content of any new medium is an old medium. And Birkerts, in his book The Gutenberg Elegies, defined the battle lines between the literary culture I loved and the digital culture that was exerting a greater pull on my attention. Most of what I attempted to absorb in these and other works went over my head, and I oriented my understanding to what was artistically interesting rather than what struck me as particularly applicable. I kept circling around questions about the White Noise mindfuck of the televised, as office towers where the next decade’s technologies percolated rose amid salmon streams and vine maples.

As a kid in the woods I fantasized about what I would do to survive the wake of global nuclear catastrophe and I have been haunted throughout my adulthood by the intertwined threats of climate change, overpopulation, and pollution. I can never remember a time when it hasn’t been an article of faith that humanity’s technologies are capable of destroying life on earth and that this process is well underway. The suspicion that planet earth is completely, irrevocably fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it is a sentiment my generation has become cozy with. It’s the comforting pessimism I reached for to protect my heart from sinking completely as I watched streaming footage of oil streaming into the Gulf of Mexico. The we-put-a-man-on-the-moon confidence in technological solutions gets dusted off once again in order to once again be proved misplaced. We find ourselves perplexed that, while our faith in the redemptive potential of our ingenuity remains unshaken, we’re impotent against global market capitalism’s unyielding demand that we make more things cheaper in order to make fewer and fewer people wealthier. We sense that this is killing us and yet privately we know there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. We’re like an insane psychiatrist attempting to devise for himself a cure.

In a sense we’re all on some point in a sort of Kubler-Ross continuum when it comes to the death of our species on planet earth. Fringe Christian dominionists scoff in denial at the overwhelming scientific proof the human race is changing the temperature of earth while simultaneously insisting that it is our divine right to do so. I’ve heard Tea Party rallies chant the word “bullshit” in response to inquiries as to the veracity of climate science. While those on the politically conservative side of arguments about climate change cultivate their scoffs in protective, willful ignorance of a problem too terrifying to confront, those on the left pull the old religious tools of guilt and the assumption that human beings are ultimately sinful as they scold. On the bargaining side of this ideological divide, I’ve been shamed into using only one napkin at Whole Foods, to which I bring my own bag made of recycled plastic bottles. I’ve also heeded the admonitions of rock stars who want me to use a different kind of light bulb.

What I’m prepared to argue is that this scoff and scold dichotomy is destructive, and both positions are based on certain assumptions rooted in our inability to think within the contextual framework of a dynamic nature/humanity/technology hypercube.

For the climate change deniers, theirs is a rebellion against their own neocortexes in which their capacity for rationality presumably lies. It is a natural, burrowing reaction that allows these people to not become paralyzed in an increasingly alarming, maddening, confusing civilized world.

Those on the progressive left, who have come to grasp the empirical reality of our changing planet, simply apply the same narrative template of victim vs. antagonist they apply to any number of problems involving groups and classes of human beings. In a fit of anthropomorphizing egotism we’ve managed to project our own victimhood complexes onto the entire planet. The environmental movement, broadly speaking, has relegated earth to its own category of aggrieved minority, even granting it its own “day.” But self-loathing isn’t going to return the climate to mellower temperatures. Farley Mowatt, whose Never Cry Wolf became a film I watched with some reverence as a child, once said that if he had the chance to press a button and erase human beings from the planet, he would not hesitate to do so. Alan Weisman’s fascinating nonfiction book The World Without Us imagines what would happen to the planet in this very scenario. How long would our buildings stand? How long would it take before our bridges collapsed and our subways filled with flood water? The subtext of many works of post-apocalyptic speculation is to symbolically punish civilization for its transgressions against this category of reality we call nature. Human selfishness and greed are extrapolated into the most dystopian futures we can envision. But could it be that these compelling warnings fall short in their accusations? Might it be that instead of being too greedy and selfish, we, as a species, are not being greedy and selfish in the right way?

If we can agree that technology exists within the realm of human invention and that humanity exists within natural law, and that therefore technology is natural; if we can dispose of the naturally artificial distinction between “natural” and “artificial,” then we can argue that whatever happens to the planet bears no moral value outside that which is relative to our health as a species.

Consider the classic idealized American landscape painting of the Hudson River School of the 19th century, the Albert Bierstadts and Thomas Morans. The vast canyons and meadows touched by shafts of sunlight, the glistening brooks, the abundant foliage and meek little cabins set amid breathtaking Arcadian splendor. What makes such a landscape beautiful? What makes it beautiful is that it looks fit for human habitation. In the art world of flesh eating bacteria, all the paintings depict necrotic human limbs.

I confess to having a rudimentary at best science education, but I profess to be an expert on how to use language, and the language of the progressive environmental movement is hobbled with assumptions. First, we conceive of “the earth” as a place outside the sphere of our daily lives. We speak of “saving the planet” as if the planet is not in our living rooms, our bodies, our cars, our computers and roads. More laughable is the idea that our products can be “earth friendly,” one of the most patronizing phrases ever slapped on a roll of toilet paper. The word “sustainability,” which has gained currency in recent years represents something between the denial and bargaining stages of the Kubler-Ross process of grieving, applied to a planetary scale. What can “sustainable” mean when the history of our planet involves several eras of mass extinction?

The question isn’t whether the planet is changing. The question isn’t whether we’ve caused that change. Those questions have been answered. The real pressing question is why. Not why in the scientific sense, but why in the philosophical sense. To what end are we changing the planet?

Environmental thought can be divided into three broad categories with an emerging fourth—preservationism, restorationism, conservationism, and inventionism. These ways of thinking about our planet with their attendant strategies can overlap, intermingle, and inform one another. Taken as a progression, they can be viewed as stages in a process of defeating the denial, fear, and self-loathing that understandably characterize how we feel about our earth.

The philosophy of environmental preservation, in seeking to keep “unspoiled” nature as it is, draws a distinct line between humanity and nature. Beautiful landscape paintings serve as preservationist pornography, both inviting us to imagine ourselves situated within their frames while disgusting us with the implication that our entry would spoil the “natural” splendor on display. Conservation seeks to manage resources in order that they not be completely depleted. Meanwhile, the restorationist philosophy seeks to restore to its former condition land that has been spoiled by human beings. Examples of successful restorations, such as once-dead lakes that now teem with fish, reward our faith in our own ingenuity and make us feel a little less hopeless that our ecosystem is irreversibly screwed. Restoration ecology ceases to make sense when it presupposes a static state to which a landscape can return. If nature is a system of fluctuations, of an endless negotiation between eros and thanatos, of forest fires caused by lightning, pandemics, and volcanoes paving what once was jungle, then to what “natural” state can a meadow, a river, a mountain top be restored? Perhaps restorationism’s motives are at their most noble when biodiversity, nature’s way of hedging its bets, is the ultimate goal.

In the last twenty years or so, a new idea called inventionism has flickered on the edges of environmental philosophy, explored in such places as a collection of essays published in 1994 called Beyond Preservation: Restoring and Inventing Landscapes. Inventionism suggests that we must graduate from a purely reactive orientation to environmental catastrophes and geo-engineer ourselves a more biologically diverse planet. We must apply the full intellectual breadth and philosophical depth of our nature-made brains and, in effectively managing the environment of planet earth, learn how we might terraform other planets and spread life broadly beyond our star. I happen to believe that we live at the pivot point when civilization, for too long organized by warring religions, is beginning to slowly cast aside those distinctions in order to realize our new purpose, to become stewards of life that will teem elsewhere in our universe long after our shadow has faded.

For now, though, we struggle, confused about the things we call nature, humanity, and technology. Our passivity is our enemy, and the old ignorant scoff and righteous scold paradigm promises the same inertia. If we can begin to think of the earth, the human race, and technology as one, if we can obliterate these old distinctions rooted in dogma and consider that we are the way the earth is figuring out how to keep the seasons coming in their dramas of ice and flowers, then perhaps we can begin to look at the wilderness not as a place from which we’ve been exiled, but as something that we can compose.

***

Delivered Summer, 2010, Port Townsend WA

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Here’s part 1:

…and part 2:

When I was in grad school, this guy put Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass on my reading list, which led me to Street of Crocodiles, which is of course the source material for the Quays’ film. Years later I was delighted to find myself on the faculty of Goddard’s MFA program with Victoria Nelson, a Schulzian whose superb and heady The Secret Life of Puppets has this to say about the adaptation presented above:

“…Street of Crocodiles draws on the central images of the stories to re-represent the magical, industrialized Gothic universe of Schulz’s Drohobycz. With nothing whatever in it identifiably “American,” this nonlinear narrative is a virtually perfect re-creation of eastern European style and mood.

The Brothers Quay

I agree with Vicki that this adaptation is all about capturing mood, so after I screened the film I asked the class to write an adaptation that captured the feeling of what they’d just seen. Then I read a bit of the source material. Reading Schulz I’m always astounded by the translation. I can’t read Polish, and I have no idea how faithfully this adheres to the original language, but goddamn if Celina Wieniewska’s translation doesn’t knock me out every time. Here’s an excerpt of what I shared with the class:

“While in the old city a nightly semi-clandestine trade prevailed, marked by ceremonious solemnity, in the new district modern, sober forms of commercial endeavour had flourished at once. The pseudo-Americanism, grafted on the old, crumbling core of the city, shot up here in a rich but empty and colourless vegetation of pretentious vulgarity. One could see there cheap jerry-built houses with grotesque facades, covered with a monstrous stucco of cracked plaster. The old, shaky suburban houses had large hastily constructed portals grafted on to them which only on close inspection revealed themselves as miserable imitations of metropolitan splendour. Dull, dirty and faulty glass panes in which the dark pictures of the street were wavily reflected, the badly planed wood of the doors, the grey atmosphere of those sterile interiors where the high shelves were cracked and the crumbling walls were covered with cobwebs and thick dust, gave these shops the stigma of some wild Klondike.”

Now that I’m in the position to do so, I assign the hell out of Bruno Schulz. One of my students, Jennifer Babson, a talented writer based in Germany, traveled to Poland recently and mentioned Schulz to anyone who’d listen.

Jan Svankmajer

From American twins consumed by Eastern European moods we moved to a film by an actual Eastern European, the Czech director Jan Svankmajer. While the Brothers Quay’s stop-motion adaptation of Schulz exists within the shadows of a boxed-in world, Svankmajer’s “Picnic with Weismann” takes place in a spacious, tree-ringed field, where a number of inanimate objects pursue an afternoon of leisure. Take a look.

The film elicited some laughs, particularly during the plum-eating routine. Unlike “Street of Crocodiles,” this short adheres to something of an easily recognizable structure. It’s basically a long joke with a punchline. Not all of Svankmajer’s films are quite this whimsical, though even Lunacy, which is based on de Sade and Poe, has its knee-slapping moments. After screening this short I asked the class to again write an adaptation of what they’d just seen.

Our third and final film was Norman McLaren’s “Neighbours,” for which the Canadian won an Oscar in 1952. Take a gander:

My least favorite of the three shorts I screened, I’m always a bit put off by the heavy-handedness of the capital-M Message of this short.

Norman McLaren

McLaren worked under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada, that great purveyor of classroom films (and namesake of ambient music fixture Boards of Canada), which nowadays makes its entire archive available on the web. McLaren’s work is also collected in a hefty 6-disc boxed set that I have just begun to dig into.

Our triptych of films began with two Americans enraptured by Eastern European melancholy, on to a visual joke by a Czech animator, and finally to a sincere Canadian who urged us to all get along. I still feel like I’m figuring out how to teach a film class. Next week, for our final session, I’m going to hit the class with a little Maddin and Deren. I’m considering making popcorn.

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• The Eyeball #35: Un Chien Andalou

In previous weeks we viewed films by Buñuel, Brakhage, and Anger, moving westward from Spain to Colorado to Los Angeles. This week we hopped across the Pacific to Japan, where we encountered Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, quite possibly the most psychedelic movie ever to come out of Asia. This week I came prepared. I brought my students beer.

Here’s a really straight-forward description of the film. It’s about seven high school girls who venture to the home of one of the girl’s aunts. The house is haunted. Supernatural events go down. The girls die one by one.

Here’s a better description, written by Grace Krilanovich, whose The Orange Eats Creeps is my favorite book of 2010.

And here’s a trailer, ala YouTube.

After cracking our Fat Tire Amber Ales, we settled in for 88 minutes of glorious pop freakout horror. At no point is this film actually scary, which I think has to do with pacing as much as the craziness of the special effects. Some of the edits are so abrupt, throwing you from one scene of contrived yet inspired ridiculousness into another, equally contrived and inspired and ridiculous scene, that the net effect is just fun. The dippy pop music, the expository dialogue, the trick shots just for the hell of it, it all accumulates in such a wonderful mess. And yet watching it for the second time, the film looked even more meticulous.

When the lights went up I asked my stunned students to write something from the point of view of one of the film’s non-human characters. A couple people chose Blanche the cat. One woman wrote something from the point of view of the chandelier. Brilliant.

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Kenneth Anger in 2008

We started with Lucifier Rising, a 29-minute film informed by Aleister Crowley’s belief that we live in the Aeon of Horus, an era of deep spirituality and child-like wonder. The film was shot partially against the backdrop of pyramids and the Sphinx in Egypt and just exudes a strange sort of cheap grandeur. This opening section is interspersed with mesmerizing footage of an erupting volcano. Before long the film changes location, to the British aisles, where Marianne Faithful makes an appearance as a sort of pilgrim figure. The film alternates between scenes set in Stonehenge and Egypt, with a middle freak-out section featuring a wizard running in a circle in a fog of incense. In the end, flying saucers show up, to which I say: rad. What makes the film truly remarkable, however, is the soundtrack, supplied by Bobby Beausoleil, the convicted murder and Manson family member. It’s an inspired, atmospheric acid freakout, with shades of Mahavishnu Orchestra and a ripping solo in the middle. You read that correctly: convicted murderer. I believe Beausoleil was the one who wrote “Political piggy” in blood on the wall after the Hinman murders.

The film elicited a few chuckles, and the class seemed to enjoy the writing prompt I provided after the film, to “invent a ritual.”

Then we moved on to Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and the class started to squirm. Where Lucifer Rising seems to encompass the whole world and its history, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome gets claustrophobic very quickly. A multi-hued progression of shots of mythic figures doing little but posing and drinking from a goblet, then laughing hysterically, the film began to test our patience about midway through. We did get a laugh when Anais Nin appears with a birdcage on her head. After the film when I pointed out that this figure was Anais Nin, I was met with some blank stares. You know, Henry Miller? Tropic of Cancer? Delta of Venus?I was starting to feel like a jackass.

The writing prompt I provided after this film was to write about a room in which characters behave unexpectedly. They gave it their best shot and those who offered to read their work came up with some cool surrealist material. But overall I got the feeling that I hadn’t done that great a job with this session of the class, that I’d basically given them all a bad trip. So I promised them that next week I’d bring something that wasn’t quite so heavy.

Which brings up an interesting question. I tend to be attracted to a certain darkness in cinema and I suppose I associate “experimental” film with this darkness. The three filmmakers we’ve considered so far have all been drawn to the subject of evil in some capacity. In coming weeks I’m going to approach the question of what experimental cinema that isn’t drawn to darkness looks like.

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• The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren
• The Eyeball #38: HOUSE
• The Eyeball #35: Un Chien Andalou
• The Eyeball #34: The Thorn in My Heart

I’d decided to start our session with a film created without a camera, Brakhage’s “Moth Light.” Here’s a crappy version on YouTube that doesn’t really do it justice:

My students were intrigued. We discussed how one’s mind tends to supply a “soundtrack” that syncs to the visual rhythm of the film, which I demonstrated by drumming on the table with my fingers. Watching this film again I started thinking that this must be sort of what it’s like to look at the world from the point of view of an insect, its lifetime compressed into mere days, a mad scramble for food amid blades of grass and blasts of pollen and leaves.

I tend to start thinking of lots of seemingly unrelated things while watching a Brakhage film. They’re memory triggers, evokers of dimly remembered vignettes from the toddler years. I catch myself and a scolding internal voice tells me to pay attention, but the more Brakhage I’ve seen the less this voice intrudes.

Stan Brakhage

From there we moved on to more “representational” films by Brakhage, if I may be allowed to even use the word. The class was a bit disappointed, I think, by “Duplicity III,” which was created in 1980 and features images of children dressing up and performing at a Halloween pageant interspersed with superimposed footage of trees, dogs, and a deer. It reminded me a little of the short films from 1970s-era Sesame Street, albeit a Sesame Street film brought to you by the letters L, S, and D.

“Duplicity III” provoked feelings of half-remembered scenes from childhood, so that became the writing prompt: Half-remembered Scenes from Childhood. More than one participant wrote about their dad. We moved on to the finale of the class, “Murder Psalm.”

Composed of found footage from educational films and cartoons, negative images of what appear to be headlights on a freeway, closeups of television, and scenes from an autopsy, “Murder Psalm” is a provocation, an anxiety-inducing comment on cruelty and its biological impetus. That’s my take on it, anyway. A girl is splashed by a ball that’s thrown in a bird bath. An animated mouse frantically runs down a city street waving a billy club. Department store windows display the words “LIFE” and “Maternity.” A cadaver lays on an examination table, its cranium emptied of its brain. Washes of pink and gray, barely discernible images of horses, a wagon wheel. Disembodied hands point to various places on an anatomical model of a brain. The little girl, dressed like Little Red Riding Hood, runs through a menacing forest. The film makes only the sense that the viewer brings to it. Watching it again, it struck me how much trust Brakhage invested in his audience, how unshakable his faith must have been in our visual intelligence.

The film provoked strong reactions in the class. I asked them to latch on to an image or a sequence and use that as a starting point for a piece of writing. One woman chose the strange black dots that moved, almost insect-like, in pairs, producing a wonderfully rigid poem. Another student drew a parallel between the concavity of the birdbath with the red ball floating on it and the hollowed-out skull of the body on the examination table. The class ended with a lot of lively discussion, with me feeling that our experiment had been a great success.

Next week’s class is going to be all about Kenneth Anger and rituals.

Here’s another clip, just for fun. (But if you want to experience these films in a decent way, check out By Brakhage Vols. 1 and 2 from the Criterion Collection.)

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What better place to start than Un Chien Andalou? You know it as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1929 16-minute… what should we call this? Masterpiece? High water mark of surrealist cinema? Inspiration for a Pixies song? Just watch it:

I have screened this film for two sets of students in the past two weeks and each time we get to the eyeball scene the audible gasps arrive on cue. The disc I own includes a couple bonus features, including an interview with Buñuel’s son Juan-Luis. Juan-Luis describes the process by which Dali and his father generated ideas for the film. They lobbed ideas back and forth and shot down any idea that seemed too obvious, hoping to subvert rationality as thoroughly as possible.

So instead of a man dragging a train, why not have a man dragging two pianos? And what to put on those pianos? Jump rope? No, bad idea. Dead donkeys. Great idea!

Watching this film over the years while I’ve worked with writing students inspired a writing exercise which I’ve revised a bit and which I presented at Hugo House this week. It’s a list of 17 incomplete sentences. The object is to complete each of the sentences three times, and to go down the list as quickly as possible. For instance:

1. A woman walks into a detective agency and says ___________.

Complete three times, then move on to the next one. And so on, through 16 more incomplete sentences.

Every time I conduct this exercise I ask for a show of hands as to who used the word “husband” in some way for prompt #1. Invariably about half the hands shoot up. Here’s another one.

2. A woman sees her alcoholic father for the first time in 20 years. He gives her ____.

A lot of times participants in this exercise will complete this sentence with some mention of a bottle of hard alcohol. I have a theory as to why that is.

When we need an idea, we turn to our subconscious and put in a request. Our subconscious, not wanting to get up off the couch, looks around for something within arm’s reach. In the example above, when one reads alcoholic, one’s subconscious immediately tries to find something that will fit the word. And so it reaches for obvious: “a fifth of Jack Daniels,” “a beer,” “an AA book.”

But what happens when we tell our subconscious to try again? That’s where things start getting unique. By the third completion of an unfinished sentence, the examples being thrown around the room are wildly original. The subconscious rises to the challenge. And what surprised me the first time I conducted this exercise was how the first completions of sentences in the middle and end of the exercise tended to diverge from person to person, as well. The exercise seems to demonstrate how the subconscious quickly warms up and starts playing ball once it understands it is expected to provide original ideas.

I’m going to teach more classes in coming weeks. Next week I’m going to screen some Stan Brakhage. I’m still tweaking the writing exercise for that one and will blog about it here.

Related Posts:

• The Eyeball #40: Unreal Fiction and Film, Part 1
• THE EYEBALL: What I Watched This Weekend, Yojimbo
• The Eyeball #42: Talking to Tom Nissley About The Most Dangerous Game
• The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren
• The Eyeball #38: HOUSE

Whether this film will become a new Iron Man franchise I neither know nor care. The trailer makes it look like any other bullshit comic book movie, and I have no plans to see it. Now compare that trailer to this one:

I watched The Thorn in My Heart late at night when I wasn’t patient enough to really watch a movie. There were numerous points when I considered turning it off, but I couldn’t stop watching what is essentially a home movie made by one of our more inventive craftsmen of cinema. The documentary looks at the life of Gondry’s aunt Suzette, who spent her career as a schoolteacher in rural France. We listen to Suzette crack up to the point of tears telling a story about her late husband, meet her son, a gay train enthusiast, and soon we’re plunged into old family wounds and resentments. I think it’s hard to watch this documentary and not start making associations about one’s own family. There’s honesty here where there could have been exhibitionism, joy where there could have been mawkishness, and just enough Gondrian quirk in the form of animated sequences and dippy tech music to glue it all together.

So on one hand Michel Gondry is making bigass movies with recognizable stars, expensive effects, and snarky dialogue, and on the other he has ventured further inward to the origins of his creativity, his family. If he continues to pursue the former to finance the latter, I say good for him. The thing I’ve always loved about this director is his resourcefulness, his willingness to find lo-fi solutions to what could easily be achieved digitally. Case in point being his video for the Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be.” (I’d embed it, but YouTube disabled embedding for it. So you’ll have to search for it yourself.)

Related Posts:

• The Eyeball #42: Talking to Tom Nissley About The Most Dangerous Game
• The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren
• The Eyeball #38: HOUSE
• The Eyeball #37: Kenneth Anger
• The Eyeball #35: Un Chien Andalou