Letters from Fontainhas

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I cannot overstate the importance of Pedro Costa in film history or current global cinema — nor can I here sum up the importance of these three films which are being given a long overdue US release by Criterion this month.  Suffice it to say that many critics have said that Costa has reinvented every aspect of filmmaking and has created completely singular, honest and beautiful works since his earliest films on 35mm to his latest landmark DV pieces. 

In discussing the earliest of these three films, Ossos (1997), Costa himself as well as many critics are preoccupied by discussing the failures of a traditional 35mm film production in acheiving the filmmaker's goal of blending into the environment of the real Lisbon neighborhood of Fontainhas and preserving the texture and natural quality of the residents and performers — all issues which Costa goes on to dramatically address in his subsequent DV films.  However, the fact remains that if not viewed in comparison to Costa's subsequent films but all precedent film history, Ossos is an undeniable masterpiece of naturalism, realism, and the rarely attempted or successful project of creating films that are simultaneously poetic and political.  Shot by the brilliant cinematographer Emmanuel Machuel (L'argent, Um Filme Falado, Casa de Lava) in liminal greys, blues and blacks with almost no artificial lighting, the film inhabits the damaged and painful lives of the residents of Fontainhas through a revolutionary collaborative and self-aware artifice of style and structure.

But this was not enough for Costa, who was compelled to become a resident of the Fontainhas and generate the material with the performers in an organic yet imaginitive two-year process that became the unprecedented masterpiece, No Quarto da Vanda (2000).  While completely eschewing the institutionalized practices of film production — shooting without lights, script, actors, crew, or even a noticible division between filmmaker and subject — Costa elevates the most impoverished material to the emotional and visual tenor of high-renaissance painting through what I consider the most original and talented "eye" in cinema today.  This is a cinema whose great depths of meaning and heights of intent are only made possible through the divestment of power structures and official culture — which, for my money, is the most important kind of filmmaking happening in the world today.

Juventude em Marcha (2006) takes this progression into a third, reflective and elegaic phase, treating the collaboratve construction of this narrative space within the real physical locations of their neighborhoods as an an epic meta-text of the everyday that is equally psychological, poetic and political.  In an extraordinary technical and aesthetic feat, Costa ramps up the symbolic grandeur of the characters while simultaneously heightening the alienating self-referential stylistic elements: what was the near lack of film lighting in Ossos, then the total lack in Vanda, is in Juventude an ecstatic use of DIY expressionistic and highly stylized film lighting acheived by the use of many pieces of reflective materials and mirrored surfaces, bouncing and cutting the natural light into eye-popping tableaus.  Juventude puts institutionalized commercial film production methods to shame twice over: the honesty and poverty of his production methods proudly become integral to and involved in the meaning of the film at the same time that he is creating images far more innovative and stunning than the biggest-budgeted, hi-tech films currently being made. 

Some have likened what Costa has done in this trilogy to the development of abstract expressionism in painting — which I would have to disagree with given that movement's all-too-comfortable repurposing as corporate lobby decoration.  If I had to find an analogy in traditional high-artistic media, I would say that Costa has done to film something like what Samuel Beckett did to the novel in his famous trilogy — stripped of institutionalized and commercial techniques, infusing dazzling gestures of prosity with what was before hidden from view by established codes of representation, the work of generating radical subjectivity can begin — if we seek it out.  You can order (or pre-order) the box set from the Criterion website.

 

Izenzaren

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Izenzaren is a Moroccan Amazigh band founded in 1972 by six musicians. Characterized by a raw and hypnotic sound based on traditional berber music featuring virtuostic banjo playing, heavy drumming and lo-fi production, Izenzaren is still present in the musical scene appearing at numerous festivals and cultural gatherings in Morocco and other countries.  While it is at this point very difficult to find information or translations about the band in English, I can only hope that with the current wave of interest in other Amazigh and Saharan bands (such as Tinariwen) they  will eventually gain the recognition they deserve.

From the liner notes of "Legends of Berber Music":

In the field of Amazigh (Berber) music, the experience of the group Izenzarn presents certain characteristics. The emergence of this group occurred in the general context of the social changes in the post-colonial Morocco. The emigration (rural migration in the Moroccan sociological terminology) became an irreversible phenomenon.

The rural society settles in the town and is confronted at the same time with the violent process of integration and assimilation and with the social problems resulting from the arbitrary management of country by the makhzenian Mafia. This situation requires the invention of new forms of poetico-musical expressions (or the adaptation of the old forms) to express at the same time the nostalgia of the origins and the anger towards the abusive policies. Also, at this times, Anglo-Saxon musical groups (such as the Beatles) as well as Moroccan groups (Nass el Ghiwan, Jil Jilala, etc.) impose their rhythms and influence the development of musical groups known as popular. Mixing modern and traditional instruments, these groups interpret songs, inspired by the ancestral tradition or expressing the current sensibilities of a generation coming from the first wave of the rural emigrants.

Founded at the end of the Sixties by a group of young people from newly urbanized families, Izenzarn is among the first Amazigh groups to modernize and radicalize the Amazigh song. After tribulations under different names, a first album is recorded in the year 1974. Thus starts the first season of the group, characterized by love songs such as: Wad ittemuddun (traveler), Wa zzin (Oh! beauty), etc, or nostalgic and traditional songs: Immi Henna (My gracious mother)... In the beginning of the Eighties, Izenzarn embraces more protesting themes: ttuzzalt (dagger), ttâbla (plate), tamurghi (grasshoppers)...

The protest in Izenzarn's songs is characterized by the challenge of the dominant speeches:

Iggut lebrîh idrus may sellan igh islêh
Plenty of speeches And yet Nobody listens to the reason

and the harsh description of the reality:

Nettghwi zun d teghwi tmmurghi gh igenwan ikk d lhif akal
We are like grasshoppers taken between the skies and the dry grounds.

This reality is a world of fear, oppression and torture [tawda gh will ugharas (fear in the paths), izîtti wuzzal (iron bars), ur nemmut ur nsul (neither alive nor dead)]

The success of the group is due to its strange musical style and the poetry of its songs that presented already at the end of the Seventies the germs of a revolution in the modern Berber poetic creation.

After a disagreement, the group had split. Two groups dispute the name: Izenzarn Iggut Abdelhadi and Izenzarn Shamkh. But, it is the first one that imposed itself due to the emblematic image of its main singer, Iggut Abdelhadi.

Fear in a Handful of Dust

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Today I am sitting on my deck, reading, and thinking about the social philosophy implicit in the United States' use of radioactive elements in the bombardment of Fallujah — chemical warfare and environmental contamination as slight variations on Colonialism's eugenic aspirations.  This article from the BBC will be yet another reference in the ever expanding chapter on decorporation in the physical body as a horrifyingly acute and painful illustration.  Of course this is nothing new, as the issue of birth defects caused by the use of depleted uranium in US weapon systems has been debated and decried since the first Gulf War in 1991. 

Praising with Faint Damnation: the Critical Response to "Inglourious Basterds"

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(This entry is reposted from my old blog, Decorporation Notes - September 7th, 2009.)

I’m afraid that in the admirable quest for a subject of cinematic criticism, we’ve settled instead on a suitable subject for the criticism of mass spectacle.

The conspicuous success and consumption of Tarantino’s media events is certainly worth discussing, but to do so in terms of cinematic intent is like discussing the acting technique of a ventriloquist’s dummy: Tarantino has succeeded in pantomiming meaning with enough unconsciousness to suspend the audience’s and critic’s disbelief long enough for them to believe they are watching a film — but so, for that matter, did WALL-E.  If we actually believe a single frame of Tarantino to be intentional, where, then, were the moral debates over his use of Samurai history in Kill Bill? The attention drawn to the very difficult lives of real undercover law enforcement agents following the release of Reservoir Dogs?

The impersonation of cinemaWhat better way to attract critical attention that to convincingly pantomime the film genre that is ostensibly concerned with the greatest moral problems of humanity? In terms of cinema, I believe the equation in Inglourious Basterds is boringly simple: Tarantino has merely shifted his aspirations in the decidedly horizontal spectrum of establishment positions — and he is celebrated winkingly for his un-self-conscious ability to regurgitate formulas of dialog, plot, camera movement and montage, and, of course, his complete lack of any compunction towards the deepest cynicisms of his age

It is fascile to analyze the events of the funding, production, distribution, marketing and mass viewing of this strip of celluloid without bringing to bear the economic and social mechanisms that allow for such things to happen, and which profit by them.  And in this regard, to single out this film for critique on the basis of it’s historical content is to believe that the filmmakers, actors, cinematographers, art directors et cetera actually meant “Nazi” when they uttered the word, made the costume, or wrote the press release.  The so-called “inversion” or “rewriting” of history in the plot might be worth discussing if the filmmakers were intending or even capable of referencing reality instead of titilating themselves and the audience with their willingness to destroy understanding and meaning through their reflexive reflexivity.  Reviewers may wish to discuss the “fantasy” of Jewish people taking revenge on living Nazis — going along, as it were, with the joke: the Nazis and Jews being pantomimed here could be replaced with any aggressors and victims of historical incident, granted that the history is still politically or emotionally charged enough to illicit post-ironic glee in its dismissal as a purely rhetorical device.

The real fantasy, I feel the need to quip, is the idea of audiences encountering a film in the cinema that actually deals with the moral, ethical, political or emotional problematics of the Jewish (or any other) genocide and its representation.  Of course, such fantastic films are very real, just not commonly given value or representation in the mass media.  In avoiding the discussion of such films, I can only conclude that reviewers are skirting the much more complex matter (not reducible to upturned thumbs or a star-based quantification scheme) of why and how certain objects of mass spectacle arise, are given pseudo-critical attention, and praised with faint damnation.

Therefore (surely you saw this coming) the most glaring oversight in any discussion of Inglourious Basterds is the figure of Jean-Luc Godard, recognized as the filmmaker most preoccupied with the holocaust — presumably because to enter into the complex cinematic significance of the Histoire(s) or In Praise of Love would be to remove the irresistible shininess of the glare of mass spectacle from this slight, pathetic and barely-willed piece of fake-blood-strewn shit Tarantino has most recently withered from his hyperactive anus.  I shivered as I saw once again, the words “A BAND APART” appear at the beginning of Basterds, and was reminded of the quote by Godard, “Tarantino named his production company after one of my films. He would have done better to give me some money.”

Here are some more fantasies: perhaps the budget of Basterds should have gone towards the American broadcast or distribution of the Histoire(s).  The thesis of Godard’s Histoire(s), it has been many times said, is that the history of film, and in some extension, mass media, has been forever changed by it’s failure to show the atrocities of the camps while they were operating.  I am tempted to give Tarantino the credit of reinvigorating this failure for a generation who is already ignorant of it’s historical antecedents (filmic and moral) — but again, I would still be participating in the pantomime.  The primary moral dilemmas on display in the theater on the night I saw Basterds concerned the valuation of art in America.

Pop formalism being the order of the day — fascinating critics and mass audiences alike — we can all masochistically applaud the death of film culture presented to us in the beige, recycled composites of the International New Waves via the American “Mavericks” (There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men) or the callous (and sometimes bigoted) reduction of social allegory to an easily subvertible, vapid genre technique (Slumdog Millionaire, District 9).  In this climate, I see very little to be remarked upon in Basterds as a film, or Tarantino as a filmmaker — the “self-reflexivity” and “genre-blending” he utilizes is as remarkable as his use of color film or sound.   Why, however, we believe that it is to be considered a film at all — a discrete object of culture — is worth discussing.  And in that discussion, perhaps his faint damnation of war criminals could be adequately reviled.