Lucidno
| The collective intelligence both behind and within Golub exists in several forms. It is present in the collective execution of Leon Golub's painting, including the constructive critiques offered by Golub's wife (fellow painter Nancy Spero) and the various kinds of assistance given to Golub by students. It is present in the direct route traced by the film from the work of art to the audience, completely bypassing the detour offered by art criticism, and significantly refusing to define a moment when the painting is "complete" which exists in isolation from its first appearance in a public space. It is present in the continual series of links made between the social and political world that inspires Golub's work and the social and political world that receives it, with Golub himself functioning more as a conduit between these realms than as a final reference point. And, finally, it is present In the fact that Golub is itself a collectively made film, a collaboration of filmmakers Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn with the artist.
A feeling for a specific community in all its interactions and complexities is part of what makes Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding so special. Like his only previous feature, the black and white and more episodic Killer of Sheep, Burnett's film is set in Watts, the Los Angeles black ghetto which comprises the whole of his fictional universe. It is a universe that he treats with an alertness, an affection, and an understanding which are in some ways comparable to the humanistic insights of the Italian neo-realists and their successors (it is worth noting that Olmi is one of Burnett's favorite filmmakers), but in a manner that is perhaps freer of polemics than the early films of De Sica, Rossellini, and Fellini. If some of the actors lack a certain professional polish, they more than make up for it in personality and charisma, and the film loses none of its charm, its feeling for behavioral nuance, or its power when there is an occasional slippage from performance to presence, as there is in Renoir's Toni (an important precursor to Italian neo-realism which is equally close to the spirit of Burnett's work). A similar tradition is evoked in Gus Van Sant's low-budget Mala Noche, adapted from a novel by Walt Curtis and set in Portland, Oregon, although here the notion of a particular subculture is not apparent within the terms adopted by the film. For people like myself who often feel oppressed by minority-film categories such as "black films," 'Jewish films," and even "independent films," which tend to foster their own ghettos as well as validate those which already exist, it isn't very helpful to call Van Sant's personal effort a "gay film" or an illegal alien film." It's far better to say that the film's working-class hero (extremely well played by Tim Streeter), who works as a grocery store clerk in Portland's skid row, happens to be gay, has an unrequited crush on an illegal Mexican immigrant named Juancito (Doug Cooeyate), and ultimately has a brief affair with Juancito's friend, another illegal alien. Strikingly shot in high-contrast black and white, with off-screen narration, post-synchronized dialogue, and a short-take editing style —four stylistic attributes which might all be related to the film's austere budget (although black and white film stock has recently become more expensive in the U.S. than color) — the film benefits from its absolute freedom from clichés, a freedom which, one might add, low budgets also make possible. One of the most Interesting attributes of Peter Thompson's Universal Hotel/ Universal Citizen is its rare capacity to suggest both isolation and interaction with others within the same striking form. Like Thompson's only previous film work, Two Portraits (minimalist portraits of the filmmaker's parents), this work comprises a diptych: not two films to be shown simultaneously side-by-side, but successive works whose meanings partially arise out of their inner rhymes and cross-references, their dense interweaving of objective and subjective elements. As Thompson puts it, Universal Hotel/ Universal Citizen deals with three main themes: "the emotional thawing of men by women, the struggle to disengage remembrance from historical anonymity, and unrecoverable loss." In the first film, Thompson describes his Involved research about medical experiments in deep cold conducted on a Polish prisoner and a German prostitute by Dr. Sigmund Rascher at Dachau in 1942; photographs culled from seven archives in six countries, as well as a subjective dream set in the Universal Hotel, form the main materials. In the second film, the filmmaker's off-screen meetings with a Libyan Jew and former inmate of Dachau who works as a smuggler in Guatemala yield a complex personal travelogue that leads us not only to the Universal Hotel (a real place, as it turns out), but also to the public square in Siena that appears in the beginning of the first film. Thompson's family proves to be as relevant to this investigation as his aloneness with his ideas over years of reflection: the mysterious coalescence of disparate strands in a varied life is one of the many by-products of this sustained and haunting historical meditation. Ross McElwee's Sherman's March might be regarded as a quasi-comic investigation into certain related themes — above all, the interrelations between the historical and the personal — within a more specifically American context. While Thompson's principle historical reference point is the Holocaust, McElwee's is the American Civil War, and while Thompson's geographical itinerary takes him to at least three separate continents, McElwee's trajectory essentially proceeds from Cambridge, Massachusetts to his home in Charlotte, North Carolina and to points further South. Originally plotting a route which traces the one made by the Union General Sherman during the war, McElwee redirects both his efforts and the film-in-progress in relation to his project of finding a girlfriend, which leads him to the subtitle, A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South during an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. It is significant to note in this connection that the American South is perhaps the portion of the U.S. where both old-fashioned military and old-fashioned romantic codes are held in highest esteem, with the Civil War continuing to function, after a fashion, as the main nostalgic reference point. In the course of alternately emulating and satirizing these codes, McElwee offers a provocative and surprisingly comprehensive portrait of his native region, from nuclear installations and survivalist strongholds to contemporary cultural and sexual attitudes. Even more comprehensive and analytical Is Jon Jost's film essay Plain Talk & Common Sense (Uncommon Senses), a kind of sequel to his Speaking Directly: Sortie American Notes made fourteen years earlier, which might be called Jost's second State of the Union address. Like Its predecessor, it is composed of several different and relatively autonomous didactic sections — in this case, a prologue, ten sections, and a postscript — each of which has its own mode and form of address. |
But while Speaking Directly was overtly autobiographical — beginning with Jost's own material conditions (including his two years in federal prison for draft resistance in the mid-'60s, and the conditions of his career as a low-budget filmmaker), and eventually expanding to a detailed political critique of the U.S. In the early 70s — Uncommon Senses mainly inverts that process, beginning with a general critique, then working his way towards its more personal implications, and finally winding up with his own solitary figure. In the 70s, the targets of his critique were a good deal more visible, both to himself and to the public. Today they are harder to get at, and require new modes of perception — reflections about not only how the U.S. is constituted, but equally how local understanding of it is constructed. One of the factors Jost confronts head on is the notion of multiplicity — a notion which virtually all ambitious American writers have relied on when writing about their country, from Walt Whitman and Carl Sandberg to John Dos Passos and Thomas Wolfe to Allen Ginsberg and Thomas Pynchon, using the rapturous catalog as their organizing principle. Considering the seductiveness and contagiousness of this compulsive list-making, it probably isn't so surprising that few American artists have ever tried to examine this habit as a rhetorical and ideological impediment, a mode of discourse that conceals and mystifies in the process of supposedly showing us "everything." Part of the originality and importance of Uncommon Senses is that it proceeds to do just that — to critique list-making even as it employs this technique.
It is worth considering some of the more general codes of social etiquette that govern the production and reception of independent films In the U.S. One important factor is the degree to which many films are deemed independent by default rather than according to the intentions of the filmmakers. Without mentioning any names, we know that there are certain figures associated with the avant-garde and other marginal forms of filmmaking who regard this kind of work merely as a necessary way-station, and who are fundamentally interested in making commercial, narrative 35-millimeter films. But because they are not (yet) in positions where they can sign Hollywood contracts or their equivalents, they need the support of other independents in order to enlarge and enhance their reputations. For filmmakers of this persuasion, a recent popular term like "New Narrative" functions as a veritable godsend, because it allows these filmmakers to plant each foot in a separate camp and be, in effect, two places at once. It provides a theoretical pipeline leading from the margins to the center — or such, at any rate, is their apparent assumption. But a more generous reading of the same phenomenon might point out that generic labeling that differentiates serious experimental work from "unserious" commercial work often has more to do with the institutional structures that support both kinds of work than with the films themselves. Categories play a major role before and after the making of a film — when the filmmaker is trying to raise the money to finance it and when the critic, curator, or programmer is seeking to situate it within a larger body of work. The expediency of these categories shouldn't, however, mislead the spectator into assuming that the work can only function in relation to its generic descriptions. In my experience as a teacher of experimental film, for instance, I have often discovered that certain films regarded as "difficult" according to institutional discourse, such as the films of Leslie Thornton — films which confound many viewers who are said to be experimental film "experts" — offer fewer problems to ordinary students than to most professional" film critics, who have to locate or rationalize their interests differently. One of the many factors that is currently helping to abolish (or at least seriously challenge) the long-cherished distinctions between "high art" and "popular art" that have been instrumental in establishing an institutional approach to the American avant-garde cinema has been the relative accessibility of video in its various forms and formats. I'm thinking, for example, of the remarkable influence of music videos over the last several years on the American cinema as a whole, an influence which is equally visible in independent as well as industry films. The fragmentation of American network TV, with its constant interruptions of commercial breaks, news flashes, and other forms of discontinuity, has led to increasing amounts of narrative fragmentation in all sorts of work; it is equally apparent in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones epics and in such independent films as Adynata, Born in Flames, and Who Killed Vincent Chin?, all of which operate according to principles of constantly shifting the focus of attention, almost as if a hand were nervously tuning a TV channel selector. (The fact that all four of the latter films include substantial sections of TV footage obviously helps to naturalize and rationalize this process.) In a curious way, American TV — and music videos in particular, as an apotheosis of the medium — literalizes one of the metaphors most associated with the U.S — the melting pot. A typical rock video runs blithely through the history of art (including the history of cinema) as if it were a shrunken preserve, wholly graspable and assimilable within a matter of seconds, and what makes this history appear to be immediately accessible is the principle of the melting pot (or the meltdown): anything thrown into the pot automatically becomes part of the stew, so theoretically nothing Is out of place there — even if, by the same token, nothing has a place of its own there, either. The same ambiguous status is both enjoyed and suffered by all the recent American independent films I have been discussing. The discrepancies between the respective sizes of the American audiences for these dozen films is partially a matter of their relative accessibility — one would not expect films like Lived in Quotes and Adynata to have as much exposure as films like Sherman's March and Born in Flames — but equally a matter of luck and/or the right connections. As of this writing, Talking to Strangers has not had a single New York screening. Universal Hotel/Universal Citizen has barely shown at all outside of Thompson's native Chicago, and neither Uncommon Senses nor My Brother's Wedding has received a fraction of the attention that it merits. Indeed, with the possible exceptions of Born in Flames and Sherman's March (both of which have been seen fairly widely on TV), all of these films are still looking for their audiences, and, when they find them, still talking to strangers. Jonathan Rosenbaum |
