 Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures We know quite well the analogue that compares the state in which we watch films to the state in which we dream in sleep. Cinema = Dream, the formula goes, and for those who haven’t acquired the labyrinthine art of lucid dreaming, cinema makes a convenient substitute. Both inspire in us the belief that lucidity is an imperative, and the evanescent web of dreams in particular invokes our struggle with the subterranean cognitive faculties of total recall. A dream barely retained at daybreak or upon waking can often be vague, mesmeric beyond recall, prophetic without explanation; sometimes a photograph of a face half-remembered or words spoken in mute on the blank pages of an unopened book. Cinema, on the other hand, is something like a dream completely remembered and thoroughly digested: characters, dialogue, setting, and story compacted into a swift narrative in marked contrast to the infinitesimal cadences of real time. If the proof of the synthesis of the dream-life and real time is the meta-dream of the cinematic, then Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a film of grandiose mechanics and mnemonic architectures, introduces cinema itself as a powerful allegory for the possibility of shared dreaming.
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1977 was the year the Sex Pistols released their first and only studio album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols”, and the same year The Clash released their self-titled debut (just a year after The Ramones had released their own self-titled debut). 1977 was also the year Elvis Presley died, when disco was at its peak, and hip hop was brewing out of the percussive riddim vat of soul, funk, disco, and dub breaks. Meanwhile, across the Pacific in South Korea, three Seoul-based brothers, still heavily under the influence of late 60s psych rock, released their first album as Sanullim (산울림, translated as “Mountain Echo”). Sanullim is something of an anomaly in rock history. At a time when vintage rock was dying and new cultural tropes were diversifying the palette of pop music, Sanullim appeared on the margin in a country whose pop music landscape, heavily censored by the authoritarian bureaus of Park Chung-Hee, mainly consisted of traditional trot ballads and dance-pop music. Sanullim’s heavy bass lines, thunderous drums, chromatic fuzz guitar-work, and psych-image lyrics were a revival shock in a system which had gone dormant since the early 60s scene singlehandedly engendered by Korean rock godfather Shin Jung-Hyeon.
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One of the peripheral reasons why I’ve grown to prefer fútbol to the other major spectator sports popular in the U.S. of A. (baseball, basketball, and American football) is the minimal presence of commercials during playtime. This is not to say that there are no advertisements during a typical fútbol broadcast (broadcasters have to devise ways of surreptitiously inserting audio-based or augmented reality ad spots), but the complete absence of time-outs (only one 15 minute half-time is given between the two 45-minute halves) allows “the beautiful game” to flow uninterrupted in the chess-box machinery of its strike-and-defend zones and counter-strike strategies. The continuous unpredictability of fútbol, in short, engages us to closely study its pensive, circular physics.
Nevertheless, the lack of commercial time during a game does not necessarily prevent the inherent commercialization of the biggest sports event in the world: the FIFA World Cup. The past month has already seen a cash-money face-off between the biggest sports gear companies on earth, as they duel in their very own World Cup of Commercials. No, these commercials probably aren’t as big a deal to the average fútbol fan (as say the commercials which take up a sizable percentage of the Super Bowl telecast are to the average tuned-in American), but this year there have been some impressive productions. Watch them after the jump.
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If Martin Scorsese had stopped making films after the 90s, he’d still prove an invaluable part of cinema history on the basis of his current film preservation efforts. Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, which works to “help developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures,” has gone a long way in preserving and promoting little seen, almost lost films from a wide range of countries. Since 2007, the World Cinema Foundation has been involved in the restoration of a select handful of films for special screening at the Cannes International Film Festival. The 2008 edition of the series saw the restoration of Kim Ki-young‘s The Housemaid (하녀/Hanyeo, 1960), a landmark in Korean cinema. The Korean Film Archive, which was largely responsible for initiating and completing the restoration of The Housemaid, has gone ahead and restored 4 other films by Kim Ki-young in a special DVD boxset, the Kim Ki-Young Collection.
Kim’s comeback as a major auteur of world cinema began in earnest in 1996 when the Tokyo International Film Festival screened 5 of his films for the first time in many years. Retrospectives at the Busan International Film Festival in 1997 and at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1998 followed suit. When Berlin invited Kim to attend the retrospective, the director was already utilizing his newfound fame to prepare for a new film which would serve as the culmination of a career criminally under-appreciated for decades. Sadly that film never materialized, since Kim and his wife Kim Yu-bong (his long-standing supporter and producer of almost all of his films) died in a fire at their home before they could ever board the plane to Berlin. Fortunately for the world, Kim’s legacy lives on in the efforts of joint ventures like the World Cinema Foundation and the Korean Film Archive.
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It is impossible to conclude even a minute comprehension of Pedro Costa’s cinema without addressing the formidable influence which the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet had on Costa’s recent constructions, and particularly on the structuring of his masterpiece, Colossal Youth. The French film-making duo — whose works are identified under the combined authorship of “Straub-Huillet” — is responsible for some of the most stringent, challenging films in the history of cinema. Indeed, the “difficulties” that are sometimes ascribed to Pedro Costa’s work, and especially the frustration, discomfort, or even “monumental boredom” experienced by some in watching challenging films like In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth, are very nearly the same difficulties which have been attributed to Straub-Huillet’s films. Jean-Marie Straub, a combative and loquacious Alsatian (and a professedly Marxist thinker), first came on the scene as a colleague and friend of the Nouvelle Vague directors — Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, et al — who did not himself make a film until 1963, some years after the Nouvelle Vague had made its mark. Straub by then had already met Danièle Huillet when they were film students at the Lycee Voltaire in Paris in 1954. Their partnership — intimate and professional — would last until Huillet’s death in 2006 (notably, the year of the release of Costa’s Colossal Youth, in itself a testament to the Straub-Huillet oeuvre and to the radical solutions the duo proffered to forestall the “death of cinema” Rossellini had once declared).
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The standing paradox of the camera-eye — of the frame which it creates and through which we inquire and learn of a spectacle — is that it permits freedom to gestate in a contained space. By ‘freedom’ I refer to that unmistakable sensation of plurality which the cinematographic spectacle invokes. The spectres of Cézanne (to borrow Derrida‘s treatment of Marx) have marched a long way in initiating the break in the cinematographer’s art, the rupture where such an event — the seeping through of freedom into the prison of the frame — could take place. From the perspective of film history, the first (or most visible) indication that Cézanne’s work on the limitations of the canvas would continue and spill over into kinema occurs in the filmography of Robert Bresson. Bresson is to the cinematographic arts what Cézanne represents to the fine arts: the breaking with tradition through an increased minimalism of means. Both artists had begun their careers steeped in the knowledge of classical standards, had questioned and blown up what those standards meant, and had pushed the realm of their respective art into passageways that urged asceticism and clarity in place of vapid ornamentation.
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While attending the 11th Annual Jeonju International Film Festival (which concluded this past Friday, on May 7th), I came into late contact with the cinema of Portuguese director Pedro Costa. Costa’s name has been bandied about by diligent, discerning cineastes since the beginning of the decade as the arrival of a visionary filmmaker whose cinema demands the strictest attention to its atomic motions and a similar participation in its latent unfolding. The recent 4-disc box set release by Criterion of Costa’s three major works, Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2006), was enough to solidify Costa’s growing status as a master filmmaker in the international scene. Costa’s work has been often described as “severe and…uncompromisingly difficult,” and though I expected the worst, I came away from his films overwhelmed with a heightened sense of the mythos that lies at the heart of the actual and the real — the transcendent reality which is already contained in the concrete. The cinema of Pedro Costa is indeed “colossal,” and though its progression has been a labor of glacial speed, its achievements are as far reaching as the giant steps of those who’ve practiced the unacknowledged art of vigilant forbearance.
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Après le cubisme, Le Corbusier theorized that white concrete monoliths filled with cells of humane and effortless space would solve the quandary of 20th century urban sprawl. The Immeubles Villas were the answer to the gaping Q of Parisian slums, which grew like a fungus on the arthritic carcass of the city. Quantities would be dissolved by qualitative associations of free-jazz walls and unregulated terraces. The marriage of white-blood-celled machinery with the greenery of fields was vital. The masses would be accommodated in cells cubed by systemic purity and stacked as high up as the body or spirit or the building that housed these could handle. Purism, he called it. Le Corbusier was stoutly anti-Cube, because — forsooth — he believed space should be cubed by animate matter, by “mathematical lyricism,” and not by perspective. “Space and light and order” was the bespectacled raven-like one’s motto, the elements of a real and practicable architecture unrestrained by theory nor indivisible as a phalanx is indivisible, hived with inseparable organic units.
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The 21st Century Utopian may be broadly defined as the upstart or autodidact pragmatist who coins new uses for old technologies. If the classical utopian deduced large-scale, neoteric social-structures from a standpoint of practical idealism, the 21st century utopian prefers to start small and build microcosmic solutions from the ground-up. All utopians share a zeal for recreating a social order perceived by them to be damaged, in a spirit of ethical hygiene commensurate to the problems of diversity and social consciousness. This good-natured zeal, however, can often lead to grand delusions that shirk an immediate responsiveness to the problems of the present.
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 The interiority of sound: with its many rooms, and sea-caves, and dwellings in the dusk — where no light can travel, in the farthest recess of an oceanic body — philosophically the habitation for imageless phenomena, is described by Hegel as such: “the expression of [a] double negation, i.e. sound… an externality which in its coming-to-be is annihilated again by its very existence, and … vanishes of itself.” The first negation is the inherent emptiness of sound: loose, intangible, and fluid, as it passes forth from vacancy to space; the second is the necessary emptiness — or spaciousness — of the organ that receives the sound, through which sound passes forth in vibrations. The reception of music is inward, and the human ear is but another instrument in the production (i.e. intelligibility) of music, of sound-sculpture and acoustic imminence. Il Conte d’Ayala Valva, Giacinto Scelsi, born of noble blood in La Spezia in the year 1905, had intuited the double negative of sound one day while playing a single note on the piano over and over again, shortly after suffering a nervous breakdown likely prompted by the spiritual cancer which the Second World War had left behind, and the decision of Scelsi’s wife to leave him permanently.
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Sanullim is something of an anomaly in rock history. At a time when vintage rock was dying and new cultural tropes were diversifying the palette of pop music, Sanullim appeared on the margin in a country whose pop music landscape, heavily censored by the authoritarian bureaus of Park Chung-Hee, mainly consisted of traditional trot ballads and dance-pop music. Sanullim’s heavy bass lines, thunderous drums, chromatic fuzz guitar-work, and psych-image lyrics were a revival shock in a system which had gone dormant since the early 60s scene singlehandedly engendered by Korean rock godfather Shin Jung-Hyeon. [Read More]
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The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. [Read More]
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