You know what is my problem and frustration right now! That I created out of what really were cherished but im-mouldable ashes of my family life and created a garden for myself elsewhere. Independently. As always I did. Never having to ask for help (kinda always knowing none would be given). A Monster Calls in a parallel universe. What I didn’t realize was that there was an American pie in the sky Commander who ultimately had a key to the garden gate and who could switch off the oxygen anytime. No individual malice, simply an architecture still standing gone woefully wrong for those 'outside the box'. Foundations always flawed that no-one was ever brave enough to question. Not that I chose the wrong place for my garden of neuron and nature just the financial structure bears no relationship to the organic. Tick all the boxes and that key is harder to grab. But you need to know the boxes to tick. Equally, ticking them authorizes access to that key. People either assume that you know or they care not that you don't.
You are not going to like this NYC but what the heck do I care any more...my 'friend' keeps tellin' me to write. So that is what I shall try to do....stay tuned.
Initially I was angry at Richard Brody's review of Detroit in The New Yorker. Re-reading realized that it was all very well argued. What it lacked was something that has been a quandary of cinema all my life. The fact that all cinema is a representation of life. The first audiences of Lumiere's 1895 train ran for the exits in Paris in Étonnement . The fiction was absolutely real to them. They weren't idiots: it would be as if an amazing hologram of an alien invasion was somehow projected onto Times Square New York akin Orson Welles.
Even the greatest documentary film makers inevitably can't get it 'right' or indeed 'wrong'. Life will always get them. Fred Wiseman opts for no manipulative music and as much footage as possible. Yet always it will be an edit of reality. I (and YOU) could have had Google glasses from the age of whatever. Recording everything. But what about the other dimensions? The Rashomon angles? There is only a 'relative' truth.
I once compared Jean Luc Godard's efforts to Quantum physics. Wasn't crazy! As soon as you try to pin something down it no longer is to be. The more documentary festivals the better in my opinion. And yet: 'tis the same trouble I have with photo journalism in exotic war torn or not zones. With no disrespect but you can go and suffer a little and shoot your camera and you will inevitably return with something that everyone over their lattes says wow! Salgado is an amazing photographer more than most. I was very angry when someone who clearly cared about photography said to me at a major photo opening that S had 'sold out'. Well: the guy needs to make a living. What is fascinating about Salgado (see the doc- no 'sold out' comments- see reality impinges;) is that he not only photographed, he created reality by creating a forest of trees where once there was only barren land. THAT is nothing short of amazing. Antonioni painted grass but Salgado grew trees!
Back to my dialectic with Brody. I agree. And I agree that the power and manipulation of the cinema image is problematic. Isn't it akin to music? I mean you can rant and bang the instrument of choose. It has a dramatic effect. But you can compose/play something that isn't the reality yet becomes one through sheer force of talent and audience reception. Many great compositions went the wayside in their day that being said. I believe Detroit is an example of that displacement. It is a manipulative use of cinema. Would a documentary have the same effect? !
Joshua Oppenheimer totally nailed the quandary in The Act of Killing. Almost. When he asked the perpetrators of unspeakable acts to 'don' costume and re-enact the parts they played in the atrocity's of his childhood. Not sure that I could hug as he did, however. Real for Oppenheimer though. Life is a constant manipulation and wizardry of lies. New York is simply unbelievable. It is a cinema screen of lies. I am sure it is the same in Moscow, London (I know) etc. But everything is magnified in NYC let alone America.
I feel deep sympathy and sorry for Bernie Madoff's sons and wife. Everyone assumed they must have known. America is totally based on assumptions. That will be the country's ultimate narcissism and dare I say it: ultimate downfall. There's a scene in Gone Girl where Amy's husband is accosted by a stranger at the donut/coffee 'help find her' center. He agrees to a 'selfie' photo (very reluctantly). He quickly asks the said gal to erase. She is the bitch from hell thereafter for 5 sec. Next thing: the photo is all over the media claiming what an uncaring, arsehole husband is he. THAT is America.
I know/we know- De Niro is Madoff. You see the follicles of his nose and clever perspective reflection of son's death news in his glasses- yawn-hey I used that trick decades ago:) It works, though. Like actors upon a stage that you know isn't real something starts to happen inside our heads. Godard knows that and quick as a flash moves on. Most movies don't. They are (in Brody's argument) totally manipulative. Hate to quote an artist cliche but Picasso's art is a lie that makes us realize the truth is ever so true nowadays. Or should be so. You tell the truth (mostly dead or wounded) in the NY Post or whatever and people read and they move on. Few ever really listen. React. Object. Question. Camus' certitude of the daily round.
The lives of New York (nay America) are build upon and around that certitude of breakfast TV's assertion of life. Credit score and the credit card is all. Pay off your card every month but we know that you won't so that you will inevitably make us loads of money. Madoff was a crook/confidence trickster but no more so than many many many other Americans and the most cherished financial institutions of America. I mean how many Craigs List 'send a cheque' scams can one put up with. The police aren't interested. Murders happening everywhere. I could go on with the wholesale money laundering operations of one major American bank in South America over deacdes and few say boo to a goose. Not sure how to end all this....well I don't have to it isn't The New Yorker after all...;) Does fictional cinema manipulate us in a way that real life doesn't? I would argue yes. In a good way, depending on the product, a subliminal dialectic is born and we as humans may exit a cinema or a home screen and maybe question our life that little bit more.
I need to pee…'tis midnight and a monster calls...maybe I'll be alive to finish tbc
What makes Godard one of the most innovative movie directors of all time is that he saturates and interrogates the fictional moving image with cinema language to such an extent it neither becomes fiction nor reality. The habitat of a third dimension. You (and Godard sneakily) wants to immerse in Georges Delerue's Camille theme in Le Mépris (Contempt) then tossing you back upon the sea you are in a documentary. And then not. It's akin to art. Is Picasso's Guernica one of the greatest paintings? I would argue not. It has an enormous power but that power derives not from a multitude of rippling consent and dissent but from a singular tragedy, albeit abstracted. Visconti's use of music in Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) is not Godard. But Tancredi's theme never resolves abstracting rather than immersing and manipulating you into the screen image. Can documentary be art? Sometimes though rarely. Is Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Our Daily Bread akin to sitting in front of a Rothko or Strindberg's painting Inferno. No. Or Kevin Jerome Everson's films? Some would argue yes.
Poetry is a little the same. Some immerse and we are totally transformed. Others detach us and we weep. And sometimes the strangest most banal things in life totally crumple us. The crooked thrift shop flower frame in Dallas Buyers Club. The framed pressed flowers that Frank gives to Marla and is later reprised in Rules Don't Apply. Is that manipulation or dislocation?
....we could go on but the blue sky beckons.
who knew that a dog called Rex and Bruno could crumple me.........
