Some Came Running

Anatomy of a reputation

Near the end of Midnight Movies, the seminal book on cult film he co-wrote with Jonathan Rosenbaum, J. Hoberman recalls his early attempts to run a rep cinema of sorts. In 1972, in a "bombed-out old church on West Thirty-sixth Street," he and a pal founded the "Theater of Gibberish" and screened "mostly Sirk and Fuller" pictures, mainly to facilitate Hoberman's own education in those directors' oeuvres. "We used to get listed in the Voice," Hoberman recalls, "but we couldn't advertise the Sirk films by name. One of the sixteen-millimeter distributors mentioned that they were very popular in old-folks homes, rest homes, and hospitals, so we cited that and Rock Hudson in the ads. The local Sirk freaks—all seven of them—got the message and turned up."

How times have changed. These days it seems that just about every higher-education-aspiring American young person who signs up for a single Film Studies course—or, God help him or her, actually majors in Film Studies—has a pallette load of Sirk shoved down his or her throat, and some of the manly men who follow Hollywood Elsewhere seem not to have enjoyed the experience one bit. Nor do they like being told that they don't know what they're on about. "We understand them, but we think they're shit," one commenter notes of the Sirk work.

These commenters are responding to HE proprieter Jeffrey Wells' post called "Respectful Sirk Takedown"—and boy, is that title wrong on maybe five levels—in which, spurred on by a YouTube clip from Sirk's 1957 Imitation of Life, Wells unloads on the director. The acting in the clip—which features Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner—is "awful." The dialogue has a "comical phoniness." And so on. Sirk's critical rep constitutes some kind of shell game perpetrated by elitist dweebs who aver that "you have to be a serious cineaste to recognize Sirk's genius, and that if you don't recognize it then you need to think things through because you're just not as perceptive as you need to be."

I responded to Wells' post in several, probably too many, comments. Here's the stuff, I guess, that sums up my objections most coherently:

[Well]'s putatively "respectful" takedown of Sirk is so choked with resentment that it's simultaneously self-canceling and impossible to formulate a rationale response to. I happen to think that a lot of the critical response to Sirk takes the "subversive" angle too far. I don't think, for example, that there's anything particularly "coded" about Imitation of Life; it's a completely sincere statement on race in America that works within the conventions of a Ross Hunter/Fanny Hurst melodrama. Of course because Sirk was an absolute visual master he imbues those conventions with added value, employing a mise-en-scene that often expresse[s] exquisite irony, but I don't think that's same thing as putting anything over on the audience. I agree that one ought to check out The Tarnished Angels,  There's Always Tomorrow, and particularly A Time To Love And A Time To Die to get a fuller measure of the artist.

But [Wells is] clearly not interested in having an intelligent discussion of Sirk. Tired of trouncing the Eloi, he arbitrarily decides to have a go at the "dweebs," or as he sometimes calls them, the "monks," the "cloistered" "urban" types he's got some sort of complex about because he thinks they're lording it over him or something.

What's maybe a little bit genuinely interesting about Wells' attitude with respect to Sirk's reputation, and the attitude of the meat-tossers whooping it up in the comments thread, is the "these elitists are trying to con us" perspective. Wells makes no bones about letting everybody know how "progressive" his actual politics are, but in rants like these he exhibits pretty much the exact kind of resentment that's the lifeblood of Andrew Breitbart's entire career. To backtrack a bit to the sentiments that inspired some of the observations in my above-excerpted comment, Wells cites Roger Ebert as a proponent of the kind of obfuscation that gets Wells so riled up, to wit, Ebert's pronouncement that understanding a Sirk film "takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman's masterpieces, because Bergman's themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message."

The thing is, and no disrespect to Roger Ebert intended, I believe that he's precisely wrong. I reiterate: Sirk never speaks in code, and his "conceal[ment]" is not what makes him a great filmmaker...and the early champions of the director understood this utterly. In The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris wrote, "The essence of Sirkian cinema is  the direct confrontation of all material, however fanciful and improbable. Even in his most dubious projects, Sirk never shrinks away from the ridiculous, but by a full-bodied formal development, his art transcends the ridiculous, as form comments on content." (For "ridiculous," read "Sandra Dee," and you've got a basis for a defense of at least some of what Wells finds objectionable about the Imitation of Life clip.) Not too many years later, in an appreciation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson outlined Fassbinder's affinities with Sirk, whom the younger filmmaker revered and collaborated with: "He has taken a number of tactics from the Sirk melodramas (the flamboyant lighting, designing décor and costumes that indelibly imprint a character's social strata, being patient with actors and playing all the movie's elements into them, backing your dime-store story and soap-opera characters all the way) and stapled Sirk's whirlwind into a near-silent film style which is punctuated with terse noun-verb testiness." (Emphasis mine.) I infer that the "code-talking" Sirk is the one that's taught in Film Studies classes, then, which is too bad. I don't accept that as an excuse, though. Autodidact cinephile that I am, I came to Sirk my own way, and I'm very happy I did.

The top screen cap is from Sirk's superb 1956 There's Always Tomorrow, out very soon in a wonderful U.K. Eureka!/Masters of Cinema edition, and shortly after that on domestic DVD in a Universal multi-disc set devoted to co-star Barbara Stanwyck, which will also include Sirk's All I Desire. 

Films without continuity errors: towards a master list

"Master," get it? Huh, huh?

For context, see post directly prior to this one.

1) La sortie des usines Lumiére, L'arivée d'un train á La Ciotat, etc., etc., Auguste and Louis Lumiere, 1895-96

2) Un chien andalou and L'age d'or, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, 1929 and 1930

3) Dodsworth, William Wyler, 1936

4) The entire oeuvre of Stan Brakhage, 1952-2003

5) L'année derriere derniére a Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961

6) Wavelength and La région centrale, Michael Snow, 1967 and 1971

7) Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman, 1975

8) Stranger Than Paradise, Jim Jarmusch, 1984 (pictured)

9) Russian Ark, Alexander Sokurov, 2002

10) The Girlfriend Experience, Steven Soderbergh, 2009

Notes:

2): These Buñuel films are apt demonstrations of the adage, "When you've got no continuity, you can't have any continuity errors!"

3): I actually can't vouch for the fact that this film contains no lapses in continuity. Its inclusion is merely a ploy to get more people to seek it out and see it.

5): A similar principle to the one applied to 2) applies here. That is, in a picture of such unremitting irreality, continuity as such cannot apply. That said, I also cannot find anything in it that would constitute a supposed "error>"

10): Not just because of the specific way it was shot, but because its anti-linear editing pretty much cancels out the possibility of a conventional gaffe.

The others ought to be self-explanatory, I reckon.  

A note on Rohmer and "mumblecore"

  

Above, Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach, 1983: from left, Simon de La Brosse, Frank Zappa, Don Van Vliet, Amanda Langlet

You ever wonder why so few critics and cinephiles yoke directors John Farrow and Otto Preminger together? I mean, after all, both directors did substantial work in the film noir genre, using very similar types of plots; in Farrow's 1950 Where Danger Lives, Robert Mitchum plays a doctor who falls in love with a deranged femme fatale played by Faith Domergue; in Preminger's 1952 Angel Face Mitchum plays an ambulance driver who falls in love with a deranged femme fatale played by Jean Simmons. Beyond subject matter, the directors shared stylistic traits, including a fondness for the long take; see the bravura one-shot climax of Farrow's Danger, in a border hotel room and any number of shots in Preminger's 1945 Fallen Angel. Am I carving out a new road in film scholarship even as we speak? No, because when all is said and done, some superficial similarities aside, the two oeuvres are not, in point of fact, germane to each other.

I bring this up because, looking at the coverage of the death of Eric Rohmer, I spotted what I fear will become a trend, in this sentence from Boston Globe critic Wesley Morris' otherwise unobjectionable appreciation of Rohmer: "You could see him, platonically, in My Dinner With Andre, and completely in the mumblecore movie of your choice." Now it's entirely conceivable that Andre director Louis Malle picked up some solutions about turning talk into cinema from Rohmer, although it's also likely that he had some fairly definite ideas of his own about it as well. You will likely not be surprised that my problem is with the "mumblecore" comparison, which I find facile at best and near-obscene at worst. 

Setting aside the fact that many filmmakers saddled with the "mumblecore" rubric increasingly (and probably rightfully) reject it, let's look at some specifics. Andrew Bujalski's work seems the most overtly influenced by Rohmer's, and his subject matter, life and love among the twenty-somethings (it's worth noting here that Bujalski's characters are by and large more "bohemian" than Rohmer's), is very close to what Rohmer treated almost exclusively in his '80s work. A lot of what happens in Bujalski's films seems to be based on an inversion of Rohmer; Bujalski's characters speak hesitantly, ambivalently, while Rohmer's are full of (often quite silly) opinions and notions that they express in an almost hyper-articulate fashion. But I never think of Rohmer when I watch a Bujalski film—never. His work lacks both Rohmer's lightness and its particular profundity. His way of using the camera is almost diametrically opposed to Rohmer's. I can allow though, that Bujalski's vision (which I'm not rejecting here, incidentally) is definitely informed by Rohmer's. 

But I don't see much of Rohmer in the work of Aaron Katz, the putative mumblecore director whose work I find the most formally advanced. An interesting, well-conceived hybrid of Cassavetes and Jarmusch, in some respects, yes. But mostly his own vision, his own ideas. 

And then there's Swanberg. I know Morris doesn't name him, but he does say "mumblecore movie of your choice." So no. No way. To hold any one of Swanberg's slop-shots against a composition from PIalat is bad enough; put one up against an image composed by Rohmer and frequent cinematographer Néstor Almendros and, you know, forget about it. And don't even start on the dialogue.

My point being, if some of these filmmakers were inspired in part by Rohmer to pick up their cameras, that's one thing and one thing only; it doesn't necessarily mean that they actually learned anything from him. And also, if you want to see Rohmer, watch Rohmer. There's finally nobody like him. 

By the way, I contributed an appreciation of Rohmer to today's Los Angeles Times; it is here, if you're interested. 

Triumphalism Of The Davids

Yesterday Instapundit founder and Pajamas Media personality Glenn Reynolds, using the byline "Glenn Harlan Reynolds," contributed a rumination on the Roman Polanski case to the Washington Examiner. Reynolds theory is that the Hollywood reaction to Polanski's arrest, being so utterly out of step with mainstream America's feelings about it, could be, in fact, one more ding in Hollywood's death knell. His logic, at least in part, is thus: "Why hand your money to a bunch of obvious moral cretins, when there are so many better things to do with it? Technologically and market-wise, Hollywood is in the weakest position it's ever been, and yet it is more arrogant than it was in its golden age...Such circumstances seldom end well."

Of course Reynolds has something like a vested interest in the demise of the rather amorphous entity he refers to as "Hollywood." He's the author of the book An Army Of Davids, whose subtitle is "How Markets And Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths." I'm not sure what his precise ties to Pajamas Media (which I'll call an "alternative content portal") are, other than that he hosts at least one show for it. But obviously he has something invested in the success of that venture, whose aim, if the visual metaphors used in some of its promo material are to be believed, is to smash what we'll call "Big Media."

But before we take on the argument cited above, there are one or two others to dispose of. 

The uses of sacrilege: On Von Trier, Tarkovsky, and "Antichrist"

On the one hand, Lars von Trier's new provocation, Antichrist, often seems hardly worth the trouble of discussing. Its opening—that is, its opening once you get past the ostentatious title cards announcing the auteur, the title of his latest opus, and the fact that this first section of the film is a, ahem, "prologue"—depicts, in luscious, satiny black-and-white, the film's unnamed central couple making violently uncontrolled love as their adorable toddler toddles out of his crib, onto a window sill, and out the window, stuffed animal in tow, falling to his death. Not only does the sequence include the requisite hardcore-sex insert shot (a staple of Scandanavian cinema since 1974's They Call Her One-Eye, I guess; here stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are doubled by Horst Stramka and Mandy Starship), but it's scored to the aria "Lascia ch'io pianga" ("Let me weep," doncha know) from Handel's Rinaldo. Underscoring the difference between know-something-ishness and blatant pretentiousness by partaking equally of both, it's a scene so silly that it practically begs you to laugh at it. And, as the sage Spencer Pratt once said, "that's the problem." 

Or, rather, that's one of the problems. By now you've no doubt heard of the putative cinematic atrocities that follow as von Trier transports his troubled couple—he's a therapist, she's a stalled academic—to their place in the woods, called Eden of course, wherein the male intends to cure the female of her grief. It's not just the sickening violence, sexual mutilation, boogity-boogity lighting effects and other shock maneuvers that rankle. It's the intellectual incoherence, the scattershot introduction of nonsensical ideas that doesn't quite camouflage the fact that all von Trier is doing is showing a lot of behavior. It's that despite all this behavior—and Dafoe and Gainsbourg don't flinch from any of it, although you might not come away from the movie believing that that's necessarily to their credit—we never really understand who these people are, their characters are so woefully underwritten, underdeveloped. It's the damn red herrings—wait a minute, their child, named Nick, had...cleft feet? What, is this movie The Omen all of a sudden?

It's all of that and more. So my question for myself is, why the hell is this movie still working me over, to the point that I believe it's the main cause of my waking up in a completely shitty mood this morning?

Such are the mysteries of cinema. 

Oh, but I see I haven't yet addressed the title of this post. 

The Pleasure Of Being Cuckolded (Or Is That Castrated?): Notes inspired by some links between Brian DePalma's "Hi, Mom!" (1970) and "Body Double" (1984)

This is my contribution to the Brian DePalma Blogathon, hosted by Cinema Viewfinder, where it is cross-posted. Thanks to Tony Dayoub for encouragement. 

In Brian DePalma's giddy, absurdist, radical early feature Hi, Mom, Robert DeNiro plays a disturbingly disaffected young man named Jon Rubin. The character was introduced in DePalma's prior film, 1969's Greetings. He's an ardent voyeur and would-be filmmaker, and he's got an inspiration. He intends to invent gonzo porn some two decades avant le lettre by surreptitiously filming himself getting it on with woman from the building across from his own (a fantasy object he's discovered in his obsessive peeping, played by Jennifer Salt).   Of course, in order to make the scheme work, he's got to meet, attract, and seduce her first, which he does by putting on the mask of a sensitive square and inventing some malarkey about a computer date. Once he's gotten her out—they attend a double feature of David and Lisa and Porgy and Bess before going to dinner—he elicits her sympathy by relating this tale of woe:

"...reminds me of something that happened to me. I was coming home... I was living with a girl, Barbara, a few years ago and, uh, it was her birthday and I came home and I had presents and, uh, cake and candles and all kinds of confetti and crepe paper, and I was rushing up the stairs, ecstatic. I opened the door very quietly, crept in, and I heard the shower running. Well I open the door to the bathroom...and I hear some voices...and all of a sudden I open the shower curtain and there...there she is with another person...they were naked...and the funny thing about it is he had this kind of laugh, this kind of evil grin...and it really threw me and I naturally ran out of the place in a state of shock, I didn't know what to do..."

As tales of cuckolding and in flagrante discovery go, it's pretty banal, and wouldn't be worth noting had not DePalma put nearly exactly the same scenario on film almost 15 years later in his controversial Hitchcock/porn-schlock pastiche Body Double. 

Young and dumb versus old and in the way

I began writing professionally about 25 years ago. As was befitting to someone with no degree and little practical training, I started as a rock critic. And I was a man on a mission. I wanted to share my enthusiasms with the world. My first piece for the then still-fabled-as-a-"writer's paper" The Village Voice was about the first solo album by the great singer and songwriter Peter Blegvad, a work I rather optimistically deemed "The Great Lost Pop LP Of 1983." (Some might recall that Thriller was a rather big record in 1983.) And so for a couple of years I went my merry way, extolling the virtues of Tom Verlaine, They Might Be Giants, Robert Wyatt, The Golden Palominos, none of whom went on to conquer the charts as a result of my exertions (except, to a certain extent, They Might Be Giants, I guess, and yes, that is odd). I don't think I published a negative review in the Voice until Doug Simmons sent me to cover a Tears For Fears show at Radio City Music Hall. (I don't know why Doug thought they'd be up my alley; maybe on account that they'd dedicated one of the tunes on their album to Wyatt.) The twee-anguished synth rockers actually brought out that fucking chimp from the "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" video when they did that song. I slagged them, titling my review "Schlock Therapy," and so began honing my alternate critical identity as a snarkster.

I had a lot of fun in those days, but I was frustrated, too, in that way that young men and women of particular enthusiasms can be frustrated. With all the great music out there that I was trying to bring to light, why did mass taste suck so bad? Why weren't music fans beating a path to Peter Blegvad's door? I decided the reason was lack of coverage. At a panel at the 1985 New Music Seminar, I laid out a "J'accuse" to Bob Guccione, Jr. of Spin, on account of the fact that he wasn't putting the likes of Blegvad on any of Spin's covers. Jon Pareles, then of Musician and The New York Times, was not unmoved by my impassioned gibberish, but he was also kind of amused. "I used to carry a big torch for that kind of dreck when I first started writing," he told me. (I knew that—I had read his against-all-odds defense of Peter Hammill's solo oeuvre in The Voice.) He assured me that I would get over it.

And so I did, up to a point. I learned that critic's weren't marketers, for one thing, and couldn't function as such. I also learned that there wasn't a whole hell of a lot that one could do about mass taste, particularly if you didn't really share it. The best you could do was write honestly, champion stuff you loved/believed in, and hope that you'd attract the attention of like-minded individuals with which you could conduct at least some kind of virtual give-and-take. 

Of course this was not the only approach a critic could take. A critic could also just say "fuck it," and, to show that he or she was not entirely alienated from the zeitgeist, embrace popular taste. It didn't hurt that the '80s and '90s were ripe with highbrow theorizers putting together substantial toolboxes for just such a product. In popular music criticism, the invention of this not-quite-but-might-as-well-be straw man called "rockism" (which holds, among other things, that admiration for such artists as listed above is a particularly pernicious form of elitism) achieved the aim of letting practitioners of such writing believe that they "mattered" again.It is the anti-rockist, pro-mass taste arm of popular music criticism that enables a thumbsucker in The New York Times, for instance, to refer to the eldest Jonas Brother as "the brooding auteur" of the group. Nice work if you can get it. 

What I'm getting at, in my roundabout way, is why I can't quite join Roger Ebert and Jeffrey Wells when they lament the paucity of young people seeing and/or enthusing over Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. Ebert's August 6 post has the portent-filled title "The gathering Dark Age," while Well's more, shall we say, straight-from-the-gut rumination is called "Eloi." Both combine a frustration with their inability to shape mass taste with a disdain—more measured and mournful in Ebert's reflection, more fear-and-loathing filled in Wells'—for these kids today, with their loud hair and long music. 

I grant you—as the Rolling Stones once sang, things are different today. I saw In The Loop a couple of weeks ago and thought it was just splendid—hilarious, kind of chilling, boasting a script of magnificent structure and content. 

And coming out of the theater, I thought, "You know, in the '70s, there's a good chance this would have been a major studio film, something like Network or The Hospital, featuring major movie stars in pretty much all the roles. It would have gotten nationwide distribution and marketing support and been up for a lot of awards. Now it's an import from an indie and it's gonna play maybe 50 theaters top nationwide before it goes to DVD, pay-per-view and cable."

What would The Hurt Locker's place be in the '70s movie landscape? That's a tougher question. I suspect, to be quite honest, that it might have ended up as one of those tough, under-the-radar B pictures of a not-quite-one-thing and not-quite-the-other ilk, sorta like Rolling Thunder. I'm not quite sure.

And I'm also not quite sure just why Ebert and Wells feel that the film's middling profile among the 17-and-under crowd says such dire things about the lack of intellectual curiosity among contemporary teens. If I recall specific scenes and individuals of my own adolescence accurately—say, the long-haired kids who mocked me for carrying around books of Buñuel scripts before repairing to behind the football field to smoke dope while listening to Deep Purple's Made In Japan on a portable 8-track player—I can conclude that intellectual curiosity wasn't all that much in vogue back in the day, either. Add to that the fact that The Hurt Locker was never aggressively marketed to a youth demographic anyway and you finally don't really have too much to complain about.

Unless, that is, you just like complaining, wallowing in your own impotence, and concluding that said impotence is actually tied in with the soon-coming demise of Western Civilization itself. Ebert and Wells' posts come hot on the heels of a controversial bunch of pronouncements by walking smirk Bill Maher, who has assembled not-unconvincing pieces of evidence to support his assertion that America is a "stupid" country. Here's the thing, though—America might be a stupid country, but so's every other damn country in the world. Paris Match's cover last week was of Sharon Stone flashing her tits—how fucking smart is that? 

I'm not arguing for a quiet acceptance of the status quo, nor, for that matter, for an anti-rockist analog one can apply to film criticism, wherein post-Derrida-theory can be distorted in order to posit that G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra is actually Teh Awesome. What I'm saying is, a man's gotta know his limitations, and the limitations of his discipline...and then do all that he can nevertheless.(That goes for a woman, too. But I didn't want to spoil the Magnum Force evocation.) Tearing one's hair out and venting about how stupid everyone else is may have some short term therapeutic effect, but doesn't get much done. The kids of today didn't invent dumb. They inherited it. 

Against the grain

Sonny Bunch of The Washington Times, who interviewed me a while back on the subject of film grain and its place in video representations of cinema, has been blogging from the SIlverdocs documentary film festival. Where he met up with one of the giants of American documentaries, and put the grain question to him. The answer Bunch got might surprise you, and it just goes to show you can never really tell with these things. Find out here. 

Block that metaphor!

I understand that everybody's allowed their own interpretation of, like, stuff, but I have to admit I'm a little bemused by some of the reviewers who seem to believe that my casting as a rather unsavory internet escort reviewer in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience constitutes some kind of smackdown of the entire film criticism racket. "Is that what you really think of us, Steven?" asks Scott Collura at IGN. Kirk Honeycutt says my casting constitutes "a clear shot at the critical profession." And there's more.

Like I said, everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I think Mr. Soderbergh himself is on to something when he calls such readings "a little narcissistic." (There's also the fact that, like, whaddya think I am, stupid? You think I would have participated in this project if I thought it was Soderbergh's elaborate payback for my panning The Good German?) Now it's true that many of the cast members of the film have roles therein which correspond to what they do in real life. Trainer, journalist, and so on. Now it's also true that there are really guys who review escorts on the internet. Now consider, for a moment, the reaction you might get, were you to dig up one of these guys, and ask him to play a particularly villainous version of himself in an somewhat major motion picture.

I bring this up largely because of a real-life case that I was directed to by New York magazine writer Vanessa Grigoriadis, which you can read about here. Given that GFE was shot last October, I almost feel like I have to pat myself, Steven, and screenwriters Brian Koppelman and David Levien on the back a little bit. It appears we created a portrayal that was not only accurate, but somewhat prescient as well. 

A point, conceded, up to a point (Updated)

In the extremely contentious comments thread to the post "The Cinema of Contingency: Notes on Swanberg," Don Lewis of Film Threat, a Swanberg defender, states, "I think that Joe's point in a lot of ways...i[s] that the camera is only capable of capturing truth...[A]nd maybe the truth is, the camera makes you lie?" Don was addressing my criticism of a take in Swanberg's Hannah Takes The Stairs in which lead actress Greta Gerwig appeared to be staring at something which was clearly not part of the space in which her character was existing. Don continued, "Is it possible to NOT be conscious of the camera? I mean, isn't this the question posed by several people over the years?"

Well, yes, it is. And it is a question posed quite frequently in the work of Jean-Luc Godard. There are more than a few moments in his early films with then-wife Anna Karina in which she looks directly into the camera, as if in search of encouragement, succor, or some just plain answers. As in, for example this screen grab from Godard's 1964 Bande a Part. 

Do I believe that Swanberg's aims and methods in the here and now have much to do with Godard's aims and methods in the early '60s? That's actually a tough one, but I'm going to commit myself to "no." Nevertheless, I do see Lewis' point as one worth grappling with. So. Let's continue grappling. 

UPDATE: Tom Russell has posted his lengthy comment in response to "The Cinema of Contingency" on his Son of a Seahorse blog, and I recommend it highly. In other news...hey, Mom, I finally made it into The New Yorker. Sort of. The magazine's Richard Brody puts in his two cents on the Swanberg perplex in his New Yorker blog, and as it happens, he is firmly in the pro camp, which may well be a source of some...well, I won't presume precisely what, for Swanberg champion Craig Keller, who's no fan of Brody or his Godard biography. Strange bedfellows, indeed. In the meantime, over at Spout, Karina Longworth drew some analogies between Swanberg's work and Steven Soderbergh's upcoming Girlfriend Experience, which made this GFE cast member go all "What you say?"

Some e-mail correspondents have promised further commentary, although a couple wonder whether "it's not too late." Craig's prediction that the fiery comments thread on my initial Swanberg post would soon "euthanize itself" may be true, or may not be. In the meantime, I'm still making notes on the below-gushed-over Henry Cow box for a future post (sure to be a traffic builder!) and going through Watchmaker Films' wonderful DVD presentation of Eagle Penell's The Whole Shootin' Match for a piece for the Auteurs. So I'm a bit otherwise engaged. Brody's citation of Philippe Garrel—a filmmaker I worship—as a director "whose work Swanberg's resembles," in that "Garrel film[s] his own stories, starring himself, his families, and his friends" is extremely provocative. To my mind, it's an object lesson that seemingly similar methods can yield wildly different results. Also that the vision one ends up depends—not ultimately, but quite a bit—on the vision one begins with. I believe Garrel's conception is considerably more, er, profound than Swanberg's. But I might table the discussion, at least from my end, until about a month from now, when Swanberg's latest feature, Alexander The Last, premieres at SXSW and IFC's Video on Demand. Perhaps I shall be pleasantly surprised.