I sometimes find the diversity of rock music quite surprising, especially considering its pretty much homogeneous initial years and the (relative) musical unsophistication of most of its practitioners. Rock originated as a sort of dance music, developing from blues and country music, and so it is interesting to observe some of its practitioners turn towards an abstract, "pure" music more characteristic of the classical and avant-garde traditions. It is of course true that jazz has tended in this direction since the Second World War, but jazz was always, even from its beginnings, more concerned with individual creative expression over, say, youthful rebellion, which has always been at least one subtext of rock.
Recently, however, I started listening to some music from the so-called Math Rock genre. While I had been aware of it previously, it was only upon reading an interview with second-generation Math Rock band Battles that I was really intrigued; specifically, I was intrigued by the fact that one of their members, Tyondai Braxton, is in fact the son of famed avant-garde saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton. I've never been a huge fan of most of the elder Braxton's work - I saw him with his band last spring at the Iridium and the music was for the most part mundane, unsurprising, and undifferentiated, which is saying a lot for a composer of some of the world's most cryptically notated pieces - but I do, at the very least, appreciate his artistry, especially on 1968's For Alto. Anyway, I proceeded to download Battle's first LP, Mirrored, and while I was initially unimpressed with the music as a whole (the musicianship and production, needless to say, were first-rate), I have come to enjoy several tracks.
But I'm not entirely sure that the music is interesting in the same way as the band (or at least Pitchfork) would have it. In Jess Harvell's review of the album, the name dropping is furious, but this is to be expected. Here, however, there are references to two of minimalism's founders, Steve Reich and Terry Riley. The Reich reference (to Music for 18 Musicians) is not out of the ordinary, being probably the easiest minimalism reference for someone with a hipster's knowledge of music history, but taken in tandem with the Riley, we are clearly being pointed in a specific direction. And despite the later paragraphs of the review, which attribute the charm of the record to "the frenzied gibberish of Braxton's pitch-shifted and electronically processed vocals," I couldn't help but come away with the impression that we were dealing with some genuinely sophisticated music here. I don't mean to say that this music isn't sophisticated in a certain way: its use of contemporary audio technology is impressive, and all four of the core band members are certainly talented players. But ultimately mostly it all comes down to the same sort of thing done so well by prog rockers in the late 70s: compare Rush's "YYZ" with Battle's "Rainbows." You get the same sort of repetition of complicated riffs, followed by a transition to another, equally complicated riff, and perhaps a return to the original riff to close the tune. Formally, the whole thing plays out as a sequence of non sequiturs, and the music, which would be of the same formal density and coherence of the best minimalism (like Reich's aforementioned piece), is nothing more than a riff-driven quodlibet of sorts.
The problem lies more with the way rock has traditionally worked than with particular bands, which is why it's hard to find much fault with Battles for continuing in a way similar to that of their predecessors. Rock's basic structure is between alternating verses and choruses, with the occasional bridge or alternate chorus thrown in for variety's sake. There is very little space for the development of melodies within this rigid structure, much less for that of riffs or the form itself. So when rock complicates or mathematizes itself it mostly just expands on the bifurcations it already does so well. In fact, it's very difficult to imagine a system of rock motive development, or even rock musicians patient enough to develop motives rather than switch between them when it felt right. This sort of logic is pushed to its extreme in the work of bands like The Fiery Furnaces, whose most famous album, 2004's Blueberry Boat, is most famous for its inaccessibility. In their case, motives are taken almost a priori as throwaway, not because of any sort of intrinsic blandness, but rather, seemingly, because they seem to consider every idea as valuable only for a few seconds at most. What results, as attested to in the glowingly snobbish tone of Pitchfork's canonization of the album, is a sort of intellectually hollow obscurantism. Again, this isn't to say that I fail to appreciate the band's concept completely; indeed, there are many inspired moments on both this album and others. The first such moments that comes to mind are scattered throughout "Black-Hearted Boy" from the Furnaces' 2006 album Bitter Tea.
The strength of individual moments in structurally complex rock pieces, and especially their greater strength relative to that of the structures themselves, points in the direction of a barrier all formally dense rock music will sooner or later have to face; namely, the difficulty rock has in maintaining an original affect across changes in motive and formal development. Thus, the most successful pieces on Mirrored are those that proceed in a minimalistic fashion, like the lead single "Atlas." Rock has certainly produced a great number of musicians able to capture a specific affective state, and what is great about Battles is their ability to do the same with a high caliber of musicianship and a discerning understanding of timbre.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Marie Antoinette
Okay, so the Aldrich didn't pan out, but here's something else instead. Some family friends are visiting us this week, and as they were planning on heading out to Versailles tomorrow morning, I brought up Marie Antoinette (2006), which we ended up renting. I'd seen the film once previously, but it was a year ago and my memories of it were limited to a few moments (notably the spectactular wide shot of Marie (Kirsten Dunst) and her closest friends the Duchesse de Polignac (Rose Byrne) and Princess Lamballe (Mary Nighy) climbing the Chateau's main staircase the morning after a night of birthday revelries, accompanied by Aphex Twin's sublime "Avril 14th," one of a few surprisingly restrained tracks from the 2001 Drukqs album) and the aggressive use of contemporary rock music, mostly from '80s post-punk and new-wave bands. It is of course easy to see why this film got such a mixed reception when it was released.
Although this time around I did feel the rock music was overstated a little bit, as if Sofia Coppola had to find place for every single one of her favorite post-punk anthems, I was overall very receptive to what she was trying to do. And this is the obvious interpretation of the movie: it's about Marie as a girl, growing up without any economic limits and without any real parental guidance, instead of Marie the historical figure and Queen of France. Which is right and everything, but somewhat trivial - I doubt that any movie focusing on this particular queen could avoid looking at her in this way.
Instead, the music seems to be functioning as a tool of empathy, and this on two levels. First, for the audience: period music has a tendency to center films as historical and, perhaps, literary, robbing the characters of any sort of lived subjectivity and instead framing them as fugal subjects (musically, not psychoanalytically). Each character performs his specific function, furthering the Idea of the historicized story, established in its totality and unrelenting in its objectivity. A film of this sort is also the kind that would find the transposition of 18th-century Versailles into contemporary English. But in the sphere of Sophia Coppola's Versailles, the music forces us to feel with Marie - she is the classical Hollywood protagonist par excellence, apart from whom their can be no experience of this world. So when Marie and clique secretly attend the masked ball in Paris to dance savagely to electric guitars, or when they regale themselves with champagne to New Order's "Ceremony," it's for our benefit. And rest assured that Coppola knows who her audience is.
The second address of the music as empathetic tool is on another ontological level: to the actors of the film. The essential point of the casting of the central roles (Marie and her friends) is their demographic identity with the director herself: these are people she can live through unabashedly, unlike, say, an actual French fourteen year old. So, assuming the auterist cloak for a moment, if we read Coppola as determining this story as the story of every girl of privilege, for whom "the problem of leisure" is "what to do for pleasure," we must read Ms. Coppola as deploying Ms. Dunst as her counterpart in the story. For this to work, Kirsten Dunst must actually enter the story, not merely observe it, however acute this observation might be. What is called for, then, is an actual repetition of the pleasure of a young girl of privilege, not that of Marie Antoinette herself, which would of course be impossible, strictly speaking. So Kirsten Dunst is allowed to dance to music she would dance to, and is placed in the jump-cut world of her actual reality. This is a film of actors playing 18th-century royalty by being themselves in costume in Versaille's courts and gardens.
The intrusion of linguistic reality into the film is also quite remarkable. There were two instances of this, and it's interesting that they are positioned at opposite ends of the spectrum of royal: one at the most personal and private of moments, the other in the most formal context. The first was one of the other scenes that got stuck in my head from my first viewing. Marie and her daughter are playing with a lamb in the garden of Marie's retreat at St. Cloud. Marie urges her child to feed the lamb, and the little girl playing Marie's daughter responds in childish French. The total innocence of this spontaneous response, the unforced reaction of pleasure by a child in both the film and the filming - like the unflagging grip of the prematurely born baby in Stroszek - gives the moment an authentic moment of childlike experience its ground level shooting angle and handheld camerawork could never have provided by themselves.
The other time Sophia Coppola insists on French provides the film sees the intrusion of the other extreme of Reality. Marie's first morning meal with her husband, Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzmann), as well as every subsequent one in the film up to the final dinner as Versailles is surrounded by an anonymous mob, is presided over by a cadre of court officials. One of these is responsible for the play-by-play of the ongoing meal: "premier service," "Le roi veut a boire." This is the voice of authority, always foreign and imposed upon us; indeed, it it is almost worth remarking that Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzmann don't ask for a translation of the procedure - this is their court after all, and all discourse must be in the language of the court. Aside from one or two other formal functions shown, like the dressing-of-the-Dauphine sequence, which is played more for laughs than for insight into the life of a court, this recurring motive stands alone as an intrusion of the rigidity of court life. Marie's court is one of frivolity and teenage delights - this is also why the newspapers' libel ("Let them eat cake!") and the accompanying tableau of a Marie naked in a bathtub, wearing a hideously crimson shade of lipstick, is just as ridiculous as their depiction of her in an orgy. The life and love of Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is innocent in its extravagance, and the true rigors of monarchy are essentially alien to her life.
Maybe this is the reason the film doesn't show us her beheading. A beheading, the fetishist's opposite of the coronation, the only way to remove a crown from one born wearing it, is a fate fitting only the truly royal. And while Marie certainly belonged to her milieu, she was also always never a natural fit - the eternally besieged Austrian in the French court, always slightly out of joint. Instead, her fate is the fate of Versailles, and her true destruction the shattering of a chandelier.
Although this time around I did feel the rock music was overstated a little bit, as if Sofia Coppola had to find place for every single one of her favorite post-punk anthems, I was overall very receptive to what she was trying to do. And this is the obvious interpretation of the movie: it's about Marie as a girl, growing up without any economic limits and without any real parental guidance, instead of Marie the historical figure and Queen of France. Which is right and everything, but somewhat trivial - I doubt that any movie focusing on this particular queen could avoid looking at her in this way.
Instead, the music seems to be functioning as a tool of empathy, and this on two levels. First, for the audience: period music has a tendency to center films as historical and, perhaps, literary, robbing the characters of any sort of lived subjectivity and instead framing them as fugal subjects (musically, not psychoanalytically). Each character performs his specific function, furthering the Idea of the historicized story, established in its totality and unrelenting in its objectivity. A film of this sort is also the kind that would find the transposition of 18th-century Versailles into contemporary English. But in the sphere of Sophia Coppola's Versailles, the music forces us to feel with Marie - she is the classical Hollywood protagonist par excellence, apart from whom their can be no experience of this world. So when Marie and clique secretly attend the masked ball in Paris to dance savagely to electric guitars, or when they regale themselves with champagne to New Order's "Ceremony," it's for our benefit. And rest assured that Coppola knows who her audience is.
The second address of the music as empathetic tool is on another ontological level: to the actors of the film. The essential point of the casting of the central roles (Marie and her friends) is their demographic identity with the director herself: these are people she can live through unabashedly, unlike, say, an actual French fourteen year old. So, assuming the auterist cloak for a moment, if we read Coppola as determining this story as the story of every girl of privilege, for whom "the problem of leisure" is "what to do for pleasure," we must read Ms. Coppola as deploying Ms. Dunst as her counterpart in the story. For this to work, Kirsten Dunst must actually enter the story, not merely observe it, however acute this observation might be. What is called for, then, is an actual repetition of the pleasure of a young girl of privilege, not that of Marie Antoinette herself, which would of course be impossible, strictly speaking. So Kirsten Dunst is allowed to dance to music she would dance to, and is placed in the jump-cut world of her actual reality. This is a film of actors playing 18th-century royalty by being themselves in costume in Versaille's courts and gardens.
The intrusion of linguistic reality into the film is also quite remarkable. There were two instances of this, and it's interesting that they are positioned at opposite ends of the spectrum of royal: one at the most personal and private of moments, the other in the most formal context. The first was one of the other scenes that got stuck in my head from my first viewing. Marie and her daughter are playing with a lamb in the garden of Marie's retreat at St. Cloud. Marie urges her child to feed the lamb, and the little girl playing Marie's daughter responds in childish French. The total innocence of this spontaneous response, the unforced reaction of pleasure by a child in both the film and the filming - like the unflagging grip of the prematurely born baby in Stroszek - gives the moment an authentic moment of childlike experience its ground level shooting angle and handheld camerawork could never have provided by themselves.
The other time Sophia Coppola insists on French provides the film sees the intrusion of the other extreme of Reality. Marie's first morning meal with her husband, Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzmann), as well as every subsequent one in the film up to the final dinner as Versailles is surrounded by an anonymous mob, is presided over by a cadre of court officials. One of these is responsible for the play-by-play of the ongoing meal: "premier service," "Le roi veut a boire." This is the voice of authority, always foreign and imposed upon us; indeed, it it is almost worth remarking that Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzmann don't ask for a translation of the procedure - this is their court after all, and all discourse must be in the language of the court. Aside from one or two other formal functions shown, like the dressing-of-the-Dauphine sequence, which is played more for laughs than for insight into the life of a court, this recurring motive stands alone as an intrusion of the rigidity of court life. Marie's court is one of frivolity and teenage delights - this is also why the newspapers' libel ("Let them eat cake!") and the accompanying tableau of a Marie naked in a bathtub, wearing a hideously crimson shade of lipstick, is just as ridiculous as their depiction of her in an orgy. The life and love of Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is innocent in its extravagance, and the true rigors of monarchy are essentially alien to her life.
Maybe this is the reason the film doesn't show us her beheading. A beheading, the fetishist's opposite of the coronation, the only way to remove a crown from one born wearing it, is a fate fitting only the truly royal. And while Marie certainly belonged to her milieu, she was also always never a natural fit - the eternally besieged Austrian in the French court, always slightly out of joint. Instead, her fate is the fate of Versailles, and her true destruction the shattering of a chandelier.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Starting Again
Okay, so I've obviously been horrible about keeping this blog up, but I figure that's excusable because of the pressure of my last semester of college. From this point on, however, I plan on exerting some effort to keep it going on a regular basis.
Besides having a few halfway completed posts from last year that I'd like to finish (one on the problems of artsongs, for example), I plan on keeping a Paris Cinema blog - pairing my thoughts on films I've viewed with images of the cinemas the films are shown in. This city is home to a remarkable number of cinemas, and I would love to explore them more comprehensively than I have. Perhaps the best thing about them is the range of what plays here: aside from new releases (of which Paris has one of the best selections in the world), there are always several retrospectives going on and always at least a few restored prints circling around. This blog will at the very least give me the excuse to keep track of all that.
And there's plenty to be frustrated with missing. Already I missed the tail end of the Atom Egoyan retrospective at the Pompidou - just for not paying enough attention. And the Cinematheque Francaise is running a Preston Sturges retrospective in July, so I don't want to miss that.
Well, that's the plan. I'm going to try to go see Robert Aldrich's "The Choirboys" (1977) (know to the French as "Bande de flics") at the Cinematheque tomorrow, so we'll see from there.
Besides having a few halfway completed posts from last year that I'd like to finish (one on the problems of artsongs, for example), I plan on keeping a Paris Cinema blog - pairing my thoughts on films I've viewed with images of the cinemas the films are shown in. This city is home to a remarkable number of cinemas, and I would love to explore them more comprehensively than I have. Perhaps the best thing about them is the range of what plays here: aside from new releases (of which Paris has one of the best selections in the world), there are always several retrospectives going on and always at least a few restored prints circling around. This blog will at the very least give me the excuse to keep track of all that.
And there's plenty to be frustrated with missing. Already I missed the tail end of the Atom Egoyan retrospective at the Pompidou - just for not paying enough attention. And the Cinematheque Francaise is running a Preston Sturges retrospective in July, so I don't want to miss that.
Well, that's the plan. I'm going to try to go see Robert Aldrich's "The Choirboys" (1977) (know to the French as "Bande de flics") at the Cinematheque tomorrow, so we'll see from there.
Monday, September 18, 2006
Babbitt and Phenomenology
This is going to need a lot more in depth investigation than I can give it now, but it strikes me, upon reexamination of Milton Babbitt, that something other than what he describes is going on here.
I popped a CD of his piano music, the scholasticly titled Babbitt: Piano Music Since 1983 with Martin Goldray on piano, into the CD player. The reason I did this was to freak out a few of my musically untrained friends - we had just been listening to Mikel Rouse's Failing Kansas, a highly recommended musical theater work, by the way, and one of them commented on how frightening the Counterpoetry technique (more on this later, perhaps) was in its evocation of the voices of schizophrenia. Babbitt, of course, sounds like random piano noise or, as my friend described it, "stalking music." This is the sort of comment that an advocate of this music (wherever they may be nowadays) would dismiss as uninformed and, to an extent, and superficially, they would be correct.
What this kind of dismissal forgets is the phenomenal side of the music: music never exists purely in its writing, in the mathematics or theory underlying its presentation, but only in its presentation. Now, when we're talking about Milton Babbitt - who has written at great length and with great passion in defense of the specialist composer, he whose music can only be understood by those of equal musical training - we forget about this aspect, both because he tells us too, and because it's easy to be lazy about music that is truly difficult to understand when the composer gives us a way out, even if this way out (as difficult as it may seem) does not actually speak to the true difficulty of the work.
The true difficulty of this music, then, is not the structure underlying it. This is relatively easy to understand: anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of combinatorics could make sense of Babbitt's theoretical writings, and there is none of the aura of the occult that we find in the Boulez of say Pli selon pli. Even the aural recognition of these structures in the music, though perhaps daunting, does not place us in contact with the essence of the musical here. As Kyle Gann puts it in his essay on his aesthetic, "It was becoming dessicated, a kind of exercise of constantly active attention. All music had become expressively interchangeable."
Milton Babbitt is no stranger to the power of the musical in music, no more than was, say Bach. In fact, Babbitt's earliest experiences with music, which impressed him enough to eventually draw him away from mathematics, were of jazz and popular music. The Babbitt we hear in the theoretical writings is not the same Babbitt we hear in, say, Philomel. We can hear emotionality in this music if we allow ourselves to. Babbitt speaks almost sentimentally about the piece in a 2000 interview for OHM, saying that, among other things,"Philomel" is very near and dear to my heart."
What is needed is a reevaluation of the work of Milton Babbitt in terms of its musical affect, a phenomenological reading of the extremity (Schoenberg's revolution pushed to its ultimate, translucent conclusion) that forms the basis of his work. What seems like musical arrogance can perhaps be reinterpreted along the lines of the way Bach's music (think of the Mass in B Minor) is heard by millions of non-experts - it is at no point an exercise in fugual technique, although it could not exist apart from this.
What this post doesn't deal with, you will notice, is what such a reevaluation will tell us about the status of Babbitt's corpus. Is he a composer worth remembering, after everything? Perhaps so.
(Slavoj Žižek notes that "someone who contructs his poems in a 'rational' way, for instance, is a poetic fist-fucker"; that is, he sustitutes for the phallus, the organ that is 'inspired' independently of the human will, the fist, the organ of greatest human control, manipulated into its tightest configuration. Note also that this says nothing of the quality of the fistic altercation, to use a phrase of Dickens.)
I popped a CD of his piano music, the scholasticly titled Babbitt: Piano Music Since 1983 with Martin Goldray on piano, into the CD player. The reason I did this was to freak out a few of my musically untrained friends - we had just been listening to Mikel Rouse's Failing Kansas, a highly recommended musical theater work, by the way, and one of them commented on how frightening the Counterpoetry technique (more on this later, perhaps) was in its evocation of the voices of schizophrenia. Babbitt, of course, sounds like random piano noise or, as my friend described it, "stalking music." This is the sort of comment that an advocate of this music (wherever they may be nowadays) would dismiss as uninformed and, to an extent, and superficially, they would be correct.
What this kind of dismissal forgets is the phenomenal side of the music: music never exists purely in its writing, in the mathematics or theory underlying its presentation, but only in its presentation. Now, when we're talking about Milton Babbitt - who has written at great length and with great passion in defense of the specialist composer, he whose music can only be understood by those of equal musical training - we forget about this aspect, both because he tells us too, and because it's easy to be lazy about music that is truly difficult to understand when the composer gives us a way out, even if this way out (as difficult as it may seem) does not actually speak to the true difficulty of the work.
The true difficulty of this music, then, is not the structure underlying it. This is relatively easy to understand: anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of combinatorics could make sense of Babbitt's theoretical writings, and there is none of the aura of the occult that we find in the Boulez of say Pli selon pli. Even the aural recognition of these structures in the music, though perhaps daunting, does not place us in contact with the essence of the musical here. As Kyle Gann puts it in his essay on his aesthetic, "It was becoming dessicated, a kind of exercise of constantly active attention. All music had become expressively interchangeable."
Milton Babbitt is no stranger to the power of the musical in music, no more than was, say Bach. In fact, Babbitt's earliest experiences with music, which impressed him enough to eventually draw him away from mathematics, were of jazz and popular music. The Babbitt we hear in the theoretical writings is not the same Babbitt we hear in, say, Philomel. We can hear emotionality in this music if we allow ourselves to. Babbitt speaks almost sentimentally about the piece in a 2000 interview for OHM, saying that, among other things,"Philomel" is very near and dear to my heart."
What is needed is a reevaluation of the work of Milton Babbitt in terms of its musical affect, a phenomenological reading of the extremity (Schoenberg's revolution pushed to its ultimate, translucent conclusion) that forms the basis of his work. What seems like musical arrogance can perhaps be reinterpreted along the lines of the way Bach's music (think of the Mass in B Minor) is heard by millions of non-experts - it is at no point an exercise in fugual technique, although it could not exist apart from this.
What this post doesn't deal with, you will notice, is what such a reevaluation will tell us about the status of Babbitt's corpus. Is he a composer worth remembering, after everything? Perhaps so.
(Slavoj Žižek notes that "someone who contructs his poems in a 'rational' way, for instance, is a poetic fist-fucker"; that is, he sustitutes for the phallus, the organ that is 'inspired' independently of the human will, the fist, the organ of greatest human control, manipulated into its tightest configuration. Note also that this says nothing of the quality of the fistic altercation, to use a phrase of Dickens.)
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Two Films (by Bresson)
Over the past couple days, I've watched Michael Haneke's Le Temps du Loup (Time of the Wolf) and Robert Bresson's much older Pickpocket. I was interested when I heard Isabelle Huppert, in an interview included on the DVD, note that many people compare Haneke's pacing with that of Bresson. Superficially, this claim is very valid - they both keep camera movement to a minimum, in general, and tend to rely very heavily on shots of very long duration. However, and Huppert notes this as well, although to make a different point, the uses to which they put these stylistic choices are very different.
Haneke is stretching us to the breaking point - this goes hand in hand with the realism that he seems to be directing his actors to. A very good example of this is in the scene when the central family of the film first arrives at their vacation home in the French countryside. They unexpectedly encounter a family of what appears to be middle class standing, judging by their clothes. This second family has taken refuge in the house and they violently resist the intrusion of the owners. The scene in its entirety deserves a more thorough treatment than I want to offer right now, but it does contain a moment of strange (realistic, perhaps) potency.
The father of the family living in the house responds to the other father's attempts at a peaceful reconciliation by shooting him, by what feels like raw impulse. The specific event I want to focus on is the reaction of the wife, played by Huppert. Her face is blank; she does not immediately scream or freak out, unlike the wife of the shooter, who becomes immediately hysteric, repeating over and over to her husband, "You killed him!" Huppert's character instead looks off in disbelief and, finally, vomits.
What Haneke is offering us, then, is not a psychology as much as a physiology. We do not hear her voice her anguish, but we cannot avoid seeing it. For Bresson, however, there is nothing we cannot avoid. The entire epiphany of the film (as well as the subtle foreshadowing towards it) is easily missed - and that's what gives it its epiphanic quality. The crux of the difference between Haneke's and Bresson's work lies here, and this is perhaps where Huppert is justified in qualifying the comment about their resemblence. For her, Haneke is equal measures Bresson and Hitchcock. This is true in several senses.
First, Le Temps du Loup is structured as by the MacGuffin: the entire setup of world-wide catastrophe is just a device, later almost forgotten, to bring us to the point of seeing the futility of these characters' lives and, by extension, to recognize the West's immense privilege with respect to the majority of humanity.
Second, there is the immense build-up in tension to the final revelation. The quality of the revelation is, more than anything else, what distinguishes this film from Hitchcock and Bresson, but in formula, it resembles Hitchcock. The whole film is a building up to the final scene (excluding the train coda) where we find the young boy trying to burn himself for the sake of the community of survivors. This triggers another character, who is on watch, to come to his rescue and comfort him. This particular character has previously been characterized as xenophobic and unforgiving - these characteristics are perhaps not overridden in these final moments of tenderness, but they are certainly put to the side as Haneke presents us with the movie's first human (in a positive sense) moment. And with it, as a sort of justification for the entire film, perhaps, he lets us know that he does place faith in humanity.
Bresson, on the other hand, is not so obvious with his moments of revelation. Their foundation is the subtle changes in phrasing and expression, the gap between the characters of his film and the humans we know them to be - how else to explain their cryptic behavior but to introduce a human element? It is Michel's task in this film to discover what being human in such a world would mean. For the viewer, as well, his humanity only makes sense in the last moment, with the delivery, the only realistic delivery in the entire film, of the final line. For Bresson, the plot truly matters in a Hitchcockian sense, as it is the experience of each moment of Michel's life, not just the circumstances they allow to be set up, is crucial to understanding of the epiphany.
Haneke is stretching us to the breaking point - this goes hand in hand with the realism that he seems to be directing his actors to. A very good example of this is in the scene when the central family of the film first arrives at their vacation home in the French countryside. They unexpectedly encounter a family of what appears to be middle class standing, judging by their clothes. This second family has taken refuge in the house and they violently resist the intrusion of the owners. The scene in its entirety deserves a more thorough treatment than I want to offer right now, but it does contain a moment of strange (realistic, perhaps) potency.
The father of the family living in the house responds to the other father's attempts at a peaceful reconciliation by shooting him, by what feels like raw impulse. The specific event I want to focus on is the reaction of the wife, played by Huppert. Her face is blank; she does not immediately scream or freak out, unlike the wife of the shooter, who becomes immediately hysteric, repeating over and over to her husband, "You killed him!" Huppert's character instead looks off in disbelief and, finally, vomits.
What Haneke is offering us, then, is not a psychology as much as a physiology. We do not hear her voice her anguish, but we cannot avoid seeing it. For Bresson, however, there is nothing we cannot avoid. The entire epiphany of the film (as well as the subtle foreshadowing towards it) is easily missed - and that's what gives it its epiphanic quality. The crux of the difference between Haneke's and Bresson's work lies here, and this is perhaps where Huppert is justified in qualifying the comment about their resemblence. For her, Haneke is equal measures Bresson and Hitchcock. This is true in several senses.
First, Le Temps du Loup is structured as by the MacGuffin: the entire setup of world-wide catastrophe is just a device, later almost forgotten, to bring us to the point of seeing the futility of these characters' lives and, by extension, to recognize the West's immense privilege with respect to the majority of humanity.
Second, there is the immense build-up in tension to the final revelation. The quality of the revelation is, more than anything else, what distinguishes this film from Hitchcock and Bresson, but in formula, it resembles Hitchcock. The whole film is a building up to the final scene (excluding the train coda) where we find the young boy trying to burn himself for the sake of the community of survivors. This triggers another character, who is on watch, to come to his rescue and comfort him. This particular character has previously been characterized as xenophobic and unforgiving - these characteristics are perhaps not overridden in these final moments of tenderness, but they are certainly put to the side as Haneke presents us with the movie's first human (in a positive sense) moment. And with it, as a sort of justification for the entire film, perhaps, he lets us know that he does place faith in humanity.
Bresson, on the other hand, is not so obvious with his moments of revelation. Their foundation is the subtle changes in phrasing and expression, the gap between the characters of his film and the humans we know them to be - how else to explain their cryptic behavior but to introduce a human element? It is Michel's task in this film to discover what being human in such a world would mean. For the viewer, as well, his humanity only makes sense in the last moment, with the delivery, the only realistic delivery in the entire film, of the final line. For Bresson, the plot truly matters in a Hitchcockian sense, as it is the experience of each moment of Michel's life, not just the circumstances they allow to be set up, is crucial to understanding of the epiphany.
Alright, so I'm starting this blog with the intention of examining aesthetic issues, specifically as applied to contemporary music and film. One of the most important issues right now, I think, is the question of elitism in music: that is, to what extent do the intellectual pretensions of artists prevent them from communicating to an audience (or expressing themselves if the idea of communication in art isn't to your taste)? What would a progressive artwork that still manages to be politically relevent look like? And how, in all of our sophistication, do we manage to still say something?
This is something of the tone this blog will take. I'll probably start by looking at a couple of Michael Hanecke's more recent films and will probably come to the music of James Tenney, which I've just gotten interested in, in the coming days. And there's always phenomenology, as the title of this blog might suggest to some of you.
Until then.
This is something of the tone this blog will take. I'll probably start by looking at a couple of Michael Hanecke's more recent films and will probably come to the music of James Tenney, which I've just gotten interested in, in the coming days. And there's always phenomenology, as the title of this blog might suggest to some of you.
Until then.
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