understand me now

Every artist I admire and enjoy has to me an immediately obvious ‘best achievement’ that I can single out immediately as the pinnacle of their expression, their best work. Whether it’s a book, a painting, a film, a performance or a song, I know.

Like with edIT it’s Ashtray, World’s End Girlfriend Singing Under the Rainbow, Wong Kar-Wai In the Mood for Love, F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby, Junot Díaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Mount Kimbie Maybes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Day-Lewis There Will Be Blood, Akira Kurosawa Seven Samurai, William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch, Gong Li Raise the Red Lantern and Hieronymus Bosch The Garden of Delights...

Which is why it’s exciting when there’s an artist I like that has a body of work that contains several points of excellence from which I cannot discern a greatest moment. Like with Gustav Klimt, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Il Botticello, Bob Marley, Jan Van Eyck, Christopher Doyle, Paul Klee, Egon Schiele, Vladimir Nabokov, Beats Antique, Haruki Murakami and Pretty Lights. I keep coming across subsequent Pretty Lights tracks that I like just as much or possibly more than whatever just previously my favourite track had been. Right now I’m struck by the great attraction and understated grace that Understand Me Now contains.

Such
a pretty experience of sounds,
what a Beautiful song.

dick laurant is dead

A crucial ingredient of Lynch’s universe is a phrase, a signifying chain, which resonates as a Real that insists and always returns - a kind of basic formula that suspends and cuts across time: in Dune, it is “the sleeper must awake”; in Twin Peaks, “the owls are not what they seem”; in Blue Velvet, “Daddy wants to fuck”; and, of course, in Lost Highway, the phrase which is the first and the last spoken words in the film, “Dick Laurant is dead,” announcing the death of the obscene paternal figure (Mr. Eddy).

The entire narrative of the film takes place in the suspension of time between these two moments. At the beginning, Fred hears these words on the intercom in his house; at the end, just before running away, he himself speaks them into the intercom. We have a circular situation: first a message which is heard but not understood by the hero, then the hero himself pronounces this message. In short, the whole film is based on the impossibility of the hero encountering himself, like in the time-warp scenes of science fiction novels where the hero, traveling back in time, encounters himself in an earlier time.

On the other hand, do we not have here a situation like that in psychoanalysis, in which, at the beginning, the patient is troubled by some obscure, indecipherable, but insistent message (the symptom) which, as it were, bombards him from outside, and then, at the conclusion of the treatment, the patient is able to assume this message as his own, to pronounce it in the first person singular. The temporal loop that structures Lost Highway is thus the very loop of the psychoanalytic treatment in which, after a long detour, we return to our starting point from another perspective.

[THE ART OF THE
RIDICULOUS SUBLIME]
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

a serious man

Despite the unexplained strangeness of its beginning and the placidly casual inconclusiveness of its ending, A Serious Man is probably my favourite Cohen Brothers film and it might be their best. The picture is as blackly humorous as it is profound and it's as measured and restrained as it is relentless. The ensemble cast is perfect; the performances all are extremely marvelous and I was as entertained and engaged as I was distressed and disturbed. A Serious Man is admirably well-written, excellently well-performed and skillfully well-executed. It's also thought-provokingly existential, artistically shot and richly told. This film's a wonderfully worthwhile experience and a very recommended one. Especially if you're serious. And if you're Jewish.

Directed by The Cohen Brothers
[Via] BTJunkie

das weisse band

Starkly solemn and unsparingly sinister, Das Weisse Band is a gorgeously shot and masterful work by an exceptional director who is potentially my favourite (Akira Kurosawa, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Aleksandr Sokurov, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Áron Gauder, Brad Anderson, Chang-Dong Lee, Coen Brothers, Daisuke Gotô, David Cronenberg, David Fincher, David Lynch, Fernando Meirelles, Fritz Lang, Fruit Chan, Gen Sekiguchi, Hayao Miyazaki, Hiroshi Inagaki, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Hirozaku Kore-Eda, Il-Gon Song, Ingmar Bergman, Ji-Woon Kim, Joon-Ho Bong, Joon-Hwan Jang, Juzo Itami, Kaneto Shindo, Katsuhiro Otomo, Kazuaki Kiriya, Kenji Mizoguchi, Kenji Yokoi, Ki-Duk Kim, Kinji Fukasaku, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Koji Wakamatsu, Kouki Tange, Mamoru Oshii, Masaki Kobayashi, Masaaki Yuasa, Michael Arias, Minoru Kawasaki, Nagisa Oshima, Nobuhiro Suwa, Pedro Almodóvar, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, Peter Greenaway, Peter Weir, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Roman Polanski, Seijun Suzuki, Shinji Somai, Shinya Tsukamoto, Shohei Imamura, Shuji Terayama, Sogo Ishii, Stanley Kubrick, Takashi Miike, Takashi Shimizu, Terry Gilliam, Todd Solondz, Toshiaki Toyoda, Tsui Hark, Werner Herzog, Wong Kar-Wai, Yang Zhang and Yasuzo Masumura notwithstanding). But back to Haneke. Das Weisse Band is a powerfully beautiful, quietly terrifying film. Haneke at his finest. Very recommended.

Directed by Michael Haneke
[Via] BTJunkie

kanani

 
Last night we attempted to watch Avatar and after about eleven disastrous dismal minutes, we simply wholly failed to deal. I heard myself say something like [as far as films go]: I always thought Americans were stupid retarded, now I know they are. And then I retracted the statement (the words) because I know that’s not a succinctly fair or totally accurate thing to say. Plus there’s a great many Americans I very much like and there’s a handful of American films I do genuinely admire, enjoy and appreciate.

Still and/but just the same:

Avatar is terrible. We neither of us anticipated much but we were unprepared for the film to be worse than our expectations (which all were openly low). Least it wasn’t as unrelentingly melodramatic, rapaciously extravagant and ruthlessly stupefying as Lars von Trier’s Antichrist was... Though if I had to choose, I’d probably choose Antichrist. [And Lars von Trier is certainly not his name anymore, I now call him LVT. Cause Antichrist is not so much a film as it is a kind of magnificently inconceivable catastrophe].

_CHAOS
REIGNS.

Today’s Favourite Song: Spinnin’ by Speech Debelle
Some Men I Love: Bertrand Russell, Viggo Mortensen, Voltaire, Bruce Lee
Tonight’s Event: Synkro at Nocturne

Fahung baadaluvang

romantic interlude

Indicative here is the conversation between Josef von Sternberg and Joseph Breen reported by Maltby:

When Sternberg said, “At this point, the two principals have a brief romantic interlude,” Breen interrupted him: “What you’re trying to say is that the two of them hopped into the hay. They fucked.” The indignant Sternberg answered, “Mr. Breen, you offend me.” Breen: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, will you stop the horseshit and face the issue? We can help you make a story about adultery, if you want, but not if you keep calling a good screwing match a ‘romantic interlude.’ Now, what do these two people do? Kiss and go home?” “No,” said Sternberg, “they fuck.” “Good,” yelped Breen, pounding the desk,“now I can understand your story.” The director completed his outline, and Breen told him how he could handle it in such a way as to pass the code. So, the very prohibition, in order to function properly, has to rely on a clear awareness about what really did happen at the level of the prohibited narrative line: the Production Code did not simply prohibit some contents, it rather codified their cyphered articulation.

[THE ART OF THE
RIDICULOUS SUBLIME]
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

properly sanctified

Maltby also quotes the famous instruction of Monroe Stahr to his scriptwriters from Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon:

At all times, at all moments when she is on the screen in our sight, she wants to sleep with Ken Willard... Whatever she does, it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her enough strength to sleep with Ken Willard. But at no time do you give the impression that she would even consider sleeping with Ken Willard. Unless they were properly sanctified.

[THE ART OF THE
RIDICULOUS SUBLIME]
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK