Two Surfaces of a Coin - Chelsea Gurlz

I saw the production technique behind Chelsea Girls, despite its withholding of varied visual information and brutal proponent of malaise, was nevertheless accomplished in execution. The sheer length of some of those takes captured on film - how many feet of film did they need, how big the mag?! I wondered if it was possible to shoot that much film in a single contained sequence of if there were hidden edits during the more frantic camera movements. In terms of performance too, acting in front of the camera for such a long period is impressive! Actors did occasionally glance at the camera - usually long, long into a take - but I actually enjoyed it, as I too had cached my stamina and saw those moments as mutual recognition of fatigue between image and viewer. Although the shots are predominantly statically positioned to the point of lethargic longevity, the cinematographic flights of fancy (zooms, focus adjustment, quick pans) created entirely fresh images with the mounted camera. They may be amateur, but they’re radical - I’ve seen uneasy shaky-cam footage, granted, but the oscillation between the stationary immobility of fixed shots and vagabond ambling of the camera movement into exotic spaces between fixed shots displays a prowess of command between exhaustion and beguilement.

With those accolades noted, I will say that I found myself mentally and physiologically - naturally - in states of ennui and torpor during scenes of the film. It wasn’t the film itself that was necessarily boring - the image, in my opinion, always garners a certain amount of aesthetic value due to the viewer’s need for value and meaning as the present image recedes into the past and a new image is demanded - but the tangential digression of my attention away from the image onto my own watching of the film. I kept thinking about how I was sitting, if my mouth was dry, if I wanted to adjust my leg positioning, when was it last I had adjusted my leg positioning, if an appropriate interval of time had elapsed that would venerate a fresh positioning in my legs to other viewers. I thought about having to use the bathroom, or needing a drink of water, or getting a drink of water and allowing it to pass through my digestion so that I could also use the bathroom. I would hope to be shown a new part of the frame. I would sometimes find myself shaken back into lucidity by the arrival of a toilet or a new piece of furniture that hadn’t previously appear in the shot. After such lengthy exposures of a certain frame of any of the hotel rooms, you have thoroughly noted every detail and require something - anything - fresh, especially when there was no/garbage sound.   

I found the Gretchen Berg’s interview with Warhol, Nothing to Lose, helpful in my reading of the film. Warhol described his methods as brushing “over the surface of things.” He seems to demonstrate a feeling of futility in gleaning deeper understanding of things beyond the surface, or at least a uslessness or borishness in doing so. This depthlessness finds kinship in the surface-based nature of mass consumer culture - items whose substantive dearth is compensated by multiplicity in purchase - an exoskeletal coruscation guise over a vacuous social interior. Warhol says that when objects are “just objects,” he “hate[s]” them,  “so when I paint I just make more and more of these objects, without any feeling for them”- for which his style is famed in his Monroe, Elvis, and Campbell’s works.  I agree our fascination in fashion and decor is both a material drapery over the human body and environment and, culturally, a high-stimulus overlay masking problematic hegemony. Chelsea Girls presents a surface. It presents actors, or at least subjects. It displays human representation on screen. This is, in quintessence, all the audience demands of the screen: a subject onto which we can psychically project our Imaginary self, and for them to construct plastic realms into which we can delve. In Warhol’s case, however, the plasticity is not a covert sorcery, but painfully overt. Warhol gives the viewer no variety, no information, no plot, no characters, no depth or dimension beyond the flat screen, at exhaustive durations, until the cinematic apparatus is no longer opaque and impeccable but transparent and worthy of critique. In some ways, a Warhol film is healthier than a film with subliminal propaganda or toxic embedded ideology. Films that seek to enforce dominant ideology often prioritize normalcy and tradition over engage in discourse - a reliance on depthlessness. Warhol says that American films “really don’t have much to say” but that their “surfaces are really great.” I would say that Chelsea Girls also displays this.

However, I do think that the film contains substance and discourse. The scene in which Hannah Hoi conducts a fascist and solipsistic radio interview offered a frightening angle on the questionable democracy of media. The argument between a woman and man in the first diptych offered many examples of dissonance in the female-male relational dynamic.  

Asparagus - Exposing How Society's Piss Smells Terrible!

Asparagus blew my mind! I know that these aren't supposed to operate as movie-review blogs, but I just want to begin by praising this film as one of the most aesthetically spirited as socially provocative films I've ever seen!

A theme that I find fascinating, even in the first two minutes of the film, is the conflation of the fantastical with the domestic banal - of boundless generation with constrictive frames. For example, an opening circular frame gives way to unhindered flora and majesty, which pans to a quotidian set of lamps, books, mirrors - and another frame, into which we dive. Another scene shows the female protagonist stood before a moving picture pan across the window - a show of unbridled and tremendous oneiric foliage, but again, limited by the frame of the window. Another example is the matryoshka lemniscate of doll houses within doll houses. This imagery provoked a sense of claustrophobic infinitum, which for me, is a true and heartfelt discourse of the tragedy of subjugation upon the human spirit.

I found the imagery in this film beautiful. It was an absolute delight. I was especially fond of the surrealistic wildlife, which Judith Mayne, in Women in the Avant Garde, described as a feature of the 'primitive' female narrator. I took the term primitive as a positive connotation - images free from meaning, unencumbered by significance - flight from the oft phallocentric Symbolic order into the Imaginary. Physically and emotionally, the fantasy spectacle felt liberating, freeing, giving hope to the plenitude of automatism. The satire of the public sphere too, laden with fucktoys and guns, made me happy. Though satire often evokes negative, even hyperbolic and sardonic imagery, which is unpalatable to some, it makes me happy - I see the absurdity of gender-relational irresponsibility everywhere in daily life and films - the culmination of even a single day's observation constitutes, in essence, an absurd and bleak landscape as is expressed by Pitt.

The Mayne reading helped me unpack the paradox, or at least multiplicity, of the film. Those might not be the correct terms. Mayne describes it as a "refusal of divisions." The fellatio conclusion of the film, for example, could be read as a passive act of service or an active sexual statement (I would decode it as the latter). The opening defecation scene was strikingly strange to me - is it a disregard for the phallus - is it the production of 'phallic' power? The lines between activity and passivity are blurred - it speaks to our failure as a society to have codes granting females sexual agency! Under phallocentrism, the 'receiving' of the active penis is a passive act - where can women find sexual assertion under amid our sexual lexicon?

I agree with Mayne that over the course of Asparagus, the female protagonist finds active agency. The theatre scene, in which she unleashes the frenzy of her Pandora's box into the theatre, bridges the divide between the audience and the screen. This is essential, in relation to apparatus theory - cinematic hegemony has positioned the audience to identify with active masculine imagery and view femininity with voyeurism. Masculinity has depth, Renaissance perspective (as is shown through the Anemic Cinema-style whirling circles on screen before the character opens her box. Similarly, after actively engaging the theatre audience, the character actively addresses the phallus. I love this eding scene! The phallus is garnered so much influence and power in our society, the most magnanimous phallus! - but the phallus desires! - it stands tall because it is still at a distance from completion, orgasm, pleasure - and that is the ultimate agency of the character's mouth: she loads the gun, she completes the phallus, alchemizes it into golden magic, gives it meaning and purpose.

Also, the claymation in the theatre scene is incredible! A hundred different antsy patrons  fidgeting endlessly! I can't even image planning the separate human movements for each character, frame by frame!

I read online that Asparagus was shown in tandem with Eraserhead for two years on a midnight circuit - what a trip that would have been!

The point is, the film is loaded with gender-dynamic discourse, it's masterfully crafted,  we need stronger female occupation in cinema (duh) but moreover we need more overt and confrontational feminist works such as these. This blog did not neatly distinguish between my reaction to the film's content, my emotional reactions, and my thoughts in relation to the readings - my reaction was, simply, strong and complex. All I can ever ask for is a film about which I could write endlessly and never fully surmise my experience watching and digesting. Thanks for sharing this gem.

Home Movies, the American Dream

My favorite film shown in this week's screening was The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra! I was greatly impressed with the sophisticated design of 9413 on such a low budget - its mere $97 purse boasted in the title sequences, framing the film to audiences as an anti-industrial, independent triumph of low-budget avant-garde cinema. From the beginning, it was kept in mind that 9413 was, for all intents and purposes, a home movie. (I read ([on Wikipedia] that it was actually all shot in an apartment that they had painted black and used a single light bulb to illuminate the set). The miniature cityscapes shot in double-vision superimposition, the strobe lighting, the expressionist tendrils and backgrounds - minimal, but well-crafted, spectacular weight and visual appeal never out of mind. I especially loved the finale: the elysian ascent of 9413, on an angelic track, passing by increasingly abstract backgrounds. The acting too was comical and scathing - the gibberish talking of the Star Actor, the wagging finger of The Hollywood Hand, the recurrent stair clime to **Dreams** - even now, almost 100 years later, I found the reductio ad absurdum telling of Hollywood industrial practices - the de-individualization of the Hollywood-hopeful, the empty promise of Hollywood dreams, the authoritarian Hollywood industrial command, the flatness behind the cult of the movie star - still relevant and an accurate portrayal often lemented regarding the Hollywood industry.

I laughed a lot during 9413. I felt sorry for the young aspiring actor being repetitively trodden-upon by the system. I also mourned the loss of the actor as he was lost behind masked guises, and his rise to stardom demise of his individuality. But it was funny, especially his vapid mask. It's so funny.  






In relation to the Horak essay, I think that 9413 embodies the amateur do-it-yourself spirit of the American Avant-Garde. With the advent of cheaper film and cameras that allowed for handheld and on-location shooting, such as the 16mm Cine-Kodak, aspiring artists were able to make moving pictures themselves without having to rely on larger production bodies. 9413 reflects this production mode two-fold through its famously thin budget and its overt criticism of capitalist industrial film practices. Horak points to Dr. Caligari as an often-cited inspirational catalyst for American Avant-Garde. This can be seen plainly in 9413's allusion to expressionist mise en scène. What I couldn't discern during screening was whether this style was a continuance of the expressionist style, (9413 airing only 9 years after Caligari), or a form of appropriation or co-option.  I found Horak helpful in answering this question, as he describes an almost postmodern air about the American Avant-Garde movement - a somewhat cannibalistic response to the various artistic movement in Europe. 9413 appropriates the expressionist vibes of Caligari, I'll argue, in order to posit an argument relating to the delusion of the Hollywood/American dream. As we have discussed earlier, the demented mise en scène of Caligari was to relate subjectivity, the world as perceived by a madman. Hollywood, too, is viewed mystically, feverishly, optimistically, incorrectly. Thus, 9413 is an intertextual satire combining homage to European stylistic modes to criticize an American industrial mode, positing it's own production mode, the amateur force of the American Avant-Garde, as autonomously promising. 

When reading Rees, I found a certain parallelism between 9413 and the futurist movement. Rees credits the Futurists as the first cohort to seek to make films independently themselves, which is later scene in American AG production ideology. Rees also describes the Futurists' desire to culminate the arts under cinema. 9413 indeed combines miniature sculpture, absurd performance, cultural criticism, formal film technique, found footage - to do what no other artistic medium can.