To the First Person Ever to Appear in a Photograph

It’s amazing to think that of all the people on the Boulevard du Temple that day, you were the only one standing still long enough for Daguerre’s machine to catch you.

Who's Paying Attention to Iran?

Well, everyone is these days, politically. But Iranian cinema doesn't seem to be getting the attention it once did.

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto

Artist Isao Hashimoto has created haunting yet austere video art work mapping the 2,053 nuclear explosions that happened between 1945 and 1998. See it after the jump.

Proximity to Power

Although I will never watch a TV show with the words "Real" and "Housewives" in the title, Dahlia Lithwick's review of the new season made an interesting point about one of the most pervasive and annoying facets of life in DC.

How to Deal With Rejection

Dear Mr. X----,
Thank you for your email rejecting my story, "Y----," for publication in your magazine, Z------. Unfortunately, your rejection letter does not suit my needs at this time. I must therefore insist that you publish my story.

I wish I could respond to your submission in a more personal way than this form letter, but I receive many rejections, and it is, unfortunately, impossible to personally respond to all of them.

Best of luck in your rejection-letter writing endeavors. I look forward to seeing my story in print.

Sincerely,
T-- V---

Bada Shanren

In the current Freer exhibition Masterpieces of Chinese Painting, one artist stands out, as he always has for me. Bada Shanren and his wild, almost abstract brushstrokes seem to fly in the face of of the more controlled work of his contemporaries, at least to this untrained eye. See more here.

Thomas Chimes

Since I was a kid I've run across this mysterious portrait of Alfred Jarry whenever I've visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The painting was made long after Jarry's death by Thomas Chimes (1921 - 2009), a somewhat mysterious figure who studied at the Art Students League, then abandoned New York to spend his life painting in Philadelphia.

They call her Special K

Kuzhali Manickavel (Special K to her fans)is a talented young Indian writer with a fantastic - and very funny - blog. She is one of those rare talents who seem to have no filters between her creativity and the page. For people like me, who find writing a slow slog, and often find ourselves self-editing perhaps a bit too much, she is a breath of fresh air, and someone to be admired.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto: Katsura Photographs

Samira Makhmalbaf's Cinema of Cruelty

A boy missing parts of both legs hires a developmentally disabled older boy to carry him around like a horse. The actors playing the characters are nonprofessionals who actually suffer from the maladies we see on screen. The legless boy turns out to be such a sadist that by the end of the film he has his "horse" trussed up in a saddle and bridle, with a bit between his teeth and horseshoes nailed to his feet, and is renting him out to the local kids so they can ride him around for kicks.

In Praise of Lam Suet

Let's take a moment to praise the long-suffering Lam Suet. Round of body, square of head, Lam has has been reliably typecast as the fat guy in some 116 movies since 1982. If someone is going to take a bullet in the butt, or have to be dragged away from a bowl of noodles, it's Lam. Among the names his characters have been given over the years are: Piggy King, Fatty, Fat Lok, Fat Lo, Fat Ball, Big Mouth, Fat Tong, Fat Bo, Big Head (twice), Fat Seven, Fatty (at least twice), Bun Man, and, early in his career, Pudgy Triad Member.

Johnnie To's Vengeance

When I saw Hong Sang-soo's latest film, Like You Know it All, it immediately put me in mind of the Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi, who's been painting the same arrangement of bottles for decades. You can look at a painting from the 50s and one from the 90s and see very little variation. It's the meditative attention to this small set of objects, and the subtle differences in the way he arranges and paints them, that mesmerizes. Hong, I realized, is becoming like that. He essentially makes the same film year after year, with slight variations. It just so happens that I don't mind watching that film over and over again.

If Hong is a still life painter, Johnnie To is more like a chef at a restaurant you frequent.

Film Comment Poll

Below are my picks for Film Comment's best-of-the-decade poll. I'll be interested to see the final tallies. The most interesting part for me was picking a top twenty from 1999. I hate to be one of those people eternally lamenting the declining of quality cinema (I'm looking at you, Denby), but in retrospect it seems like a much better year for movies than 2009.

Audiences, Surprised and Surprising

As a person who works in a museum, I found last night's episode of Project Runway (which, yes, I watch) pretty intriguing. The designers were sent to the Getty Museum to be inspired by its collection. Their choices - which were, for the most part, things I would probably ignore - were surprising.

Versus/Onion Interview

Here is an interview with me in the Onion AV Club about our screening last week of Versus. Watching it again, I noticed a whole bunch of awesome things I had forgotten about, not least of which was Kitamura's bizarre notion of narrative structure: There is virtually no plot until the second half of the film, when the bad guy enters with a delivery of exposition. Then it gets right back to the interdimensional zombie/yakuza fighting.

Kitamura's innovation struck me the next night, when I made the mistake of watching The Fast and the Furious 4: Fast and Furious, which is supposed to be about car chases, but contains far too few of those, opting instead for endless, lengthy dialogue scenes that contain nothing but exposition. For a movie like that, how much do you need, really?

Contrarianism-ism

I'm fully aware that Slate's bread and butter is, along with explaining things, a peculiar brand of tepid, middle-brow contrarianism. I sometimes think their writer's guidelines consist entirely of: "Pick a thing, then disagree with it a little bit." So when someone pointed me to this article by Grady Hendrix about Chinese cinema, my first reaction was along the lines of "meh." But the more I thought about it the more its biases bugged me, so here we go.

Chinese Films Withdrawn from Melbourne

Jia Zhangke and two other directors have withdrawn their films from the Melbourne International Film Festival because of the festival's decision to include a documentary on Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer. dGenerate Films has posted a translation of Jia's official statement on the matter, and Richard Brody provides some context.

The End of Oshima

I have to wonder if, when he made Gohatto, Oshima knew it would be his last film, because its final image - of Takeshi Kitano hacking down a cherry blossom tree - so perfectly distils his lifelong rebellion against all things traditionally Japanese.

Although the retrospective continues for a couple more weeks at the AFI Silver, Gohatto was the last screening at the Freer, and its ending was even more appropriate, since it took place smack-dab in the middle of the National Cherry Blossom Festival.

For Further Research: Oshima and Math

It occurred to me after seeing both Three Resurrected Drunkards and Sing a Song of Sex this weekend, that the plots of both revolve around numerical imbalances. The eponymous three drunkards in the first film keep running into problems because there are only two Korean spies trying to switch identities with them, which in the other, the four male students are chasing after three female students (and a fourth who is unattainable.)

I'm sure there is a screenwriting manual somewhere that advises that imbalance is what sets plot in motion, but I've never seen this put into practice to mathematically before. Unless I'm totally wrong.

Watching Three Resurrected Drunkards with Two or Three Minds

About halfway through watching Three Resurrected Drunkards I began to wonder if it was the right choice for the opening film of the Nagisa Oshima retrospective. This is because, at that point in the film (which is already deliberately, provocatively nonsensical), Oshima essentially pulls the rug out from under the audience’s feet with a structural gag that, without revealing too much, goes on for a while and, to the inattentive observer, could appear to be a projection error.

I was sitting in the back of the theater, and after a couple of minutes people began making their way back to tell me there was a problem. I had to repeatedly reassure them that what was going on was intentional. Some of them became desperate. “How long is it going to go on?!” shouted one distraught soul. “Why is he doing this?!” agonized another. More than a handful of other people didn’t bother complaining and simply walked out, probably convinced that they never need to see another Oshima film. I began to fret and wonder if I shouldn’t have opened with something easier to digest. Washington audiences, more, I’ve noticed, than audiences in some other cities, crave certainty, and they were clearly not going to get it from this film. I began to dread the comments I would have to face in the lobby later.

Things settled down when it became clear what Oshima was doing, and afterwards the comments were actually mostly positive. A Korean friend thought his treatment of Korean-Japanese relations was quite brilliant. Others made connections to Godard and Hard Days Night, and appreciated the political use Oshima’s radical aesthetic experimentation was put to.

After it was all over and I had some time to think, I realized that I had been watching the movie with too much of my film programmer mind engaged – I was too worried that Oshima’s project of challenging the audience was too alienating, that people weren’t ready for it, when I should have been appreciating his cantankerous audacity. Because, as a film fan, I loved it, kind of in the way the masochist loves the pain of the slap. Oshima had created an extra-cinematic experience, forced people to question what they were seeing, caused some of them to make the decision to get out of their seats in anger and confusion to seek answers.

So I changed my mind. Three Resurrected Drunkards was the perfect opening film. Now those who can take it know what they’re in for, and the timid can stay away.