A painful shadow

Sombra Dolorosa (dir. Guy Maddin)

Superstar

Short on time, once again. But nothing I have to say today could be as rewarding as a screening of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), directed by Todd Haynes and starring Barbie in the titular role.

The film plays with the high-camp rhetoric of made-for-television docudramas, noting in subtitles that the opening scene, of Carpenter's death, is "A dramatization," and employing the melodramatic voice-overs one would expect from the genre. The casting of Barbie points less to the (inconclusive) connection between the doll and eating disorders than to the ways Carpenter's celebrity status, and her image, reduced her humanity. Despite its own campiness, Superstar is a sympathetic portrait that takes Carpenter quite seriously as a performer, and that regards her death as a real tragedy.








[I should mention that this film — the screening of which is made possible by Google video — may not be available for long. Because Haynes did not legally acquire the rights to the music, Richard Carpenter was able to file a lawsuit and have the film pulled from distribution. I assume that this is still the case.]

Report on Bruce Conner

REPORT, dir. Bruce Conner
1963-1967
16mm, b&w, sound.
13 min., ~ 9 sec.
~ 18936 frames





Something has happened — the audio track tells us as much — and what we see is interrupted by a chaotic scramble of images and text taken from film leader. Conner's title is a key: it lays out one of the film's primary purposes, and refers explicitly to the film's audio track, which presents recordings of live newscasts covering the events. At the same time, it recalls gunshots.

Bruce Conner's film, at once a found-footage documentary and an act of mourning, reports on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The film often seems degraded: iconic images of the motorcade start and re-start, jump cut and broken. The mismatch between what we see and hear — or between the procession of images themselves — is jarring. We are interrupted by film-leader, blanks.






Everything centers on the film's blank spots. The filmic image — jump-cut newsreel of the Kennedy motorcade nearing Dealey Plaza — disintegrates at the most crucial moment in the film's audio narrative, the moment of murder. Images are replaced by "white expanses where we see hairs in the gate and wear and tear on the frames themselves," which, Matthew Wilder notes, are the film's "most startling moments" — they begin at the moment a voice on the audio track, having noted that "something has happened in the motorcade route," begins to describe the witnesses' panic in a tone equally panicked, breathless.

At this point, and for three minutes and twenty-three seconds, the film's diegesis is located entirely within its narration. A further replacement: the whitened screen becomes a strobing flicker of black and white frames, while the voice describes "a severe gunshot wound." Sirens, ambient sounds, sound like horrorshow Theremins. And the strobe doesn't sit still. Bruce Jenkins writes: "the rate of flicker begins to decelerate — shifting from its most kinetic and stroboscopic as the reporter from 'Mobile Unit 6' races to Parkland Hospital — to infrequent flashes, finally fading to darkness as the reporter arrives and is barred entry to the hospital."






This strobing of black and white makes the invisible blank visible, underscores its blankness, in its alternation of clear and black frames, representing both the absence of color and the absence of light. It employs the rhetoric, as Jenkins claims, of "those horror films where the monster remains offscreen and viewers are left to conjure up its unseen hideousness." As such, it is terrifying. It refuses, in its refusal to show, to allow violence to rise to the status of icon; this same act refuses to make us into witnesses, allowing the narrating newscaster to witness on our behalf. It points to erasure, and absence — not only the absence that is death, but also the inability of mourning to reconcile itself to the traumatic event.

The blanks are blindspots. As a historical document, REPORT covers the Kennedy assassination and the chaos and confusion of its immediate aftermath. The film was begun within days of the event, and updated and revised as history unfolded, as other reports (including the Warren Commission's) were begun and completed, over the next several years. According to Jenkins, eight versions were completed; only one is definitive. Or: one film was remade continually, as its author attempted to settle on a historical account satisfactory to the moment it describes. In many ways, Conner's film reports on reportage itself, on the gaps, absences, and erasures in the historical record. It investigates the contrast between history as it is lived — in the chaos of its unfolding, in its rupture — and history as it is rationalized and codified within and by social institutions.
















[NOTES: In my emphasis on the role of the blank in Conner's film, I've focused exclusively on the first part of REPORT. This is not to suggest that the film's second chapter lacks interest. As Jenkins notes, the shorter second section investigates — through layering of newsreels, commercials, and audio — the mythology surrounding Kennedy: it is "an astounding exposé of the ways in which the media creates meaning, constructs messages, and ultimately controls information" that "implement[s] Barthes' advice that the 'best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn."

Bruce Jenkins' article, "Exlosion in a Film Factory: The Cinema of Bruce Conner," published in 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II, is an invaluable resource on Conner's filmmaking in general, and particularly on REPORT.

Stan Brakhage's lecture on Bruce Conner, published in Film at Wit's End: Eight Avant-Garde Filmmakers also includes excellent commentary on the film. Brakhage provides a detailed explanation of REPORT's genesis and the different shapes it took over the years of its production, as well as a thoughful discussion of the emotion elicited by particular segments.

Conner's REPORT is not currently available.]

More — More! — Maddin-Mania!

Dearest reader:

You're still thinking about Guy Maddin, aren't you? I thought so! So I'll feed your hunger for more with links to some shorts, filled to overflowing with hypnogogic montage, subliminal edits, and subject matter both lurid and risque!

— - — - —

"Zookeeper Workbook"

Maldoror, or is it? Some things are put in the mouth for safekeeping: lightning rods and tiny crabs, finger-rings for fingers. A tyger is made in the space where light is not. Q: What does a eunuch eat? A: Anything he wants! // [This film is obviously related to Maddin's "Maldoror: Tygers," which I've never seen. The treatment for that film, published in From the Atelier Tovar, entangles Comte de Lautréamont's character within Shakespearean webs of enchanted and misdirected desire.]

— - — - —

"Fuseboy"

"Boiler room boys" put their fingers places they should never go, enduring dares and daring danger! Nightmares turn to passions, as metaphors turn literal! And are those Cocteau's rubber gloves, attempting a pass through the camera lens? // But oh! those "sockets of fire!" // ["Fuseboy"'s soul-mate is "Sissy Boy Slap Party," the title of which is so utterly self-explanatory as to render further exposition of its humid harem themes not only redundant, but reductive. Watch an extended cut — the third of three versions — of the latter here.]

— - — - —

"Rooster Workbook"

"This little montage sequence was meant to be part of a longer film called Love Chaunt of the Chimney, but this latter film — an adaptation of Herman Melville's short story "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo," shot in 1997 — was completely lost, except for a few excerpts, when vandals torched my editing studio. When my editor John Gurdebeke and I decided to edit the few minutes that survived, we found that the spirit of the original feature-length film survived in the shorter piece — lots of ennervating sexual submission to the cock's crows, lots of filthy ash writhing — and that we just saved viewers a lot of time by submitting to fate and grieving no more over the loss of the feature" — Guy Maddin





[NOTE: All links are to YouTube, which means that these films might only be available for a moment or two.]

on Brand Upon the Brain!

Dearest reader:

I'm often afflicted with amnesia. So I can't remember if you've seen Brand Upon the Brain!, Guy Maddin's newest film. I can't recall if you've ever even heard of Maddin, or if you have already been infected with the brain-fever his movies spread. No matter — I'm going to talk about the film; you'll have to decide if you want it spoiled, or if you've seen it yet. I'll leave a dotted-line trail, as of breadcrumbs, to tell the wary where to wait, or skip ahead to safety.

In a sense, I'm ill-equipped for the task I've set out for myself here: I always need to watch each of Maddin's films twice, once to allow myself an overview of the ways its threads of plot, motif, and image work together to form its whole, and again to actually see the film, guided along by an Ariadne's thread of hindsight that keeps me from losing my way. They're too fevered and hallucinatory for anything less. Nonetheless, I charge ahead, knowing I do so half-blind...

Brand Upon the Brain, like Maddin's other films, eludes easy description. Like Careful it is, to use his own words, an "opera without singing." An especially operatic opera, certainly.

The film's ideas sleep furiously: images are all staccato. They pant and they tremble. They hold their breath in anticipation. Voices float in from on the aerosphere, carried by emotion's waxy wings. They cackle and crumble — they crackle. Vaseline makes memories spit-slick and blurry. Searches are mounted to find them. Others — coated and covered over with paint.




Along the way, "nectarine" changes its meaning, is lapped up with gusto. Color fleetingly flashes — it flickers. (And, as an aside — it is forgotten by many who see it!) Rules are drawn, and designs dreamt up. Desires are disguised; others are pursued under the guise of others, of brothers. Gloves are there for the kissing, for undressing. Secrets yearn to be told. Rage rages, gasps are gasped, sotto voce. Rumania blushes on bellies — a map. Certain designs are dashed like hopes. Scientists invent inventions, while matriarchs rule, and repress, at telescope's reach. Vampires run rampant, if wingless...

— - — - —

[This is where I start to really read the film's "last pages" aloud... O! reader! take care to be cautious!]




Brand Upon the Brain! wants for easy coherence, but nothing about the film really wants it, either. Subplots multiply, but are often uneasy in their relationships with one another. ("One memory leads to another," the silent film's intertitles tell us, without articulating the joints between one memory and another.) Threads wind their ways together, becoming a tangle rather than knot. That's true of all of Maddin's films, even those that last less than a few minutes.

Within Maddin's fevered and nightmarish scenario, an orphanage is ruled by those with designs on the brains of their wards. The vampiric wardens steal "nectarine" with signet-rings from the brain-stems of the children, using the orphans to ensure eternal youth. Allusions abound, and the whole of it — this subplot, at least, though it is only one among many — can be read as allegory of the rhetoric employed by opponents of stem-cell research. I'm tempted to offer such a reading.




But such a reading seems overly simplistic. Maddin — remarking on the film's framing device, of an adult recalling his childhood ("A remembrance in 12 chapters") — suggests a more complex relationship between film and reality, referring to "the faulty models of the universe one constructs while trying to make sense of the world." And the film's status with regards to the world is further embodied, and further complicated, in the fact that it presents itself as autobiography. In an interview, Maddin explains further:

At the dawn of memory, one makes some wildly incorrect models of the world — these result in the almost narcotic magic of every new sensation being received incorrectly. Cause and effect are often flipped; new phenomena loom up hyperbolically and misleadingly; mysteries deepen instead of clearing up; everything is dreamy and wondrous! Truths are made more emotionally truthful by the mistakes and untruths.

To take up this approach is to reread the film's allusions less as allegory, as a one-to-one palimpsest of map and world, and regard them instead as points of departure, as occasions for invention. To reread the film thus is to see it as a variation or play on the rhetoric employed by those who oppose stem-cell research. Less a manifestation of the unconscious mind than a form of discourse analysis that revels in — rather than, say, critiques — a hidden and fabulistic level of the discourse, turning it not against itself but into its own ends.

— - — - —

[Here, my words become once again safe, even for the most skittish among you, O reader, readers, mine!]


The Village Voice describes the film as, if I may be allowed a loose paraphrase, just another Guy Maddin. There's truth to this: recurring motifs and themes from elsewhere in his oeuvre recur here as well. The characteristic lurid tone remains lurid. Repression and desire play between one another — and the latter bursts forth from its fetters — as before. What is queer about his cinematic vision is queer once again. But these repetitions are worth repeating, and as Maddin repeats them.

And though it may be that Brand Upon the Brain! is not his best — that award would be shared by Careful and Archangel, as well as the shorts "Heart of the World" and "Sombra Dolorosa" — "another Guy Maddin" is, as those in the know know for certain, no minor thing.

— - — - —

The savviest among you have by now already turned to the interview with Maddin linked above. Those that haven't should! For, there, our swooning auteur announces a future project, and confirms a rumor. The rumor, that he is working with John Ashbery, is exciting enough — and doubly so in its truth. But even more exciting is that the project will borrow its structure from Raymond Roussel's New Impressions of Africa, and thus promises this: that parenthesis will enclose parenthesis, and so on, ad infinitum.






[ADDENDUM: Watch the trailer here.]