quarante et un minutes pour le 3 decembre

fast track associations
appear on parade
appear on parade

Going on nine months under shelter-in-place, finding occasion today to celebrate 90 years of a filmmaker who has changed how we view cinema, how we view the world, how we view the world through cinema, how we view cinema through the world.

Stuck in semi-isolation from the world, noting firmly that it is NOT in accord with my desires, my mind jumps haphazardly from one thing to another. The isolation feels huge to me, but I have no illusions that my own perceptions are the world. My problems are tiny compared to the hundreds of thousands in my country alone who have died, and the families left mourning in their wake, and those who have recovered forever physically changed. Even as a new administration waits in the wings, their imminent arrival heralded by optimism and delight that finally there will be functional adults in charge, my anger remains at the administration that for the sake of raw power has allowed so many to be ground beneath the greed and stupidity of a homicidal septuagenerian toddler they allowed to take charge.

"And now there's Nazis again," laments a new favorite artist in a routine captured last year, through the same screen through which I take in news, entertainment, socializing. How sadly timely, then, the first episode of Histoire(s) Du Cinema, which posits (among many, many other things) that the explosion of World War II in 1941 was reality's revenge on cinema. How random and ugly the hate raging so strongly in the world that such forces are given such free reign to diminish our progress, to shit so wetly on our world, to undermine our imaginations, to deny the reality of the epidemic taking so many lives and livelihoods.

Forgetting about extermination is part of extermination itself.

The venues of pulp escapism are no help. Comic books are mired in their own capitalistic crisis of imagination - les Grand Deux, Marvel and DC, are both accepting their current lot as IP farms for big studios, the comics serving as placeholders, keeping their characters on ventilators to support their most important iterations on screen.

The King in Black, le Roi en Noir, began His invasion of comics yesterday, the first issue in the main book of a crossover that takes in damn near all of the heroes in the Marvel universe. A lifelong fan of comics, I want to be fired up by this thing, and I look at previews in vain for anything that will stimulate my imagination. All I see in the first nine pages are the beats of the same story - a massive threat from outer space approaching earth, the world's heroes gathering to counter it, the first waves of defense crumbling in the face of the oncoming threat.

I'm tantalized enough by the basic premise - that the main character among the heroes is steadily reformed villain/anti-hero Venom, a conflicted human given superpowers through his union with an alien symbiote that covers his face and body in a shiny black alien skin. The main villain, the titular King, is Knull, the alien monarch of such symbiotes.

On paper it's a richly evocative, sci-fi goth horror action epic, a grand war waged dans les ombres, and I look across sample pages for anything to hook me deeper in. I honestly can't tell from what I read if Donny Cates is a good writer or not (much as Matt Fraction's voice was completely drowned in the similarly far-reaching FEAR ITSELF crossover in recent memory). The script hits the same beats as universe-wide crossovers before it - the forces of INVASION! seem to have made a stop into Hot Topic before attacking Earth this time 'round, but there's nothing in what I see to suggest that anything is different in this current story that will once again change the face of the Marvel Universe forever. (Parenthetically, I note that Al Ewing's sterling IMMORTAL HULK book has a single-issue crossover with KING IN BLACK - it's a beautifully written, self-contained episode, but it would have worked with any other villain in the place of the symbiotes.)

plus ça change, 

plus c'est la même 

chose

And I feel my age as I recall my past (nostalgia = our pain), remembering the moment in 1983 when a comic changed me, when Ororo flew down from the sky to rejoin her teammates and shocked them, me, le monde, with her appearance. Her long white mane shaved to a mohawk, clad in punk/BDSM leather. A woman with superpowers in ink, showing this regular human boy in flesh and blood what and who it was.

As little as twenty years ago a writer now retired in disgrace dared to take Pekar's maxim that you could tell any story in words and pictures to the internet, and for a while a berserk imagination ran riot in comics as this man and those he inspired breathed life into the medium. More specifically, into the work of the Big Two.

But a dear friend reminds me that mainstream comics are now in a "shut up and play the hits" headspace, and I fully understand the market forces that are forcing that condition. And recognize all too well the fingerprints of faceless committee that turn that all-is-possible medium into so much

I can not shake the feeling that we're in a time when we need wild creativity to take us outside ourselves, and sketch out new possibilities. These necessities are intangible, and thus completely foreign to the MBAs in charge of what we see. I'm hoping the administration revving up to take center stage next month (no matter how grossly the current diva continues to make its curtain calls insisting that The Show Must Go On) will take to heart the necessity of these intangibles, that it realizes that a better future is not just a childish daydream of its youngest constituents.

I yearn not for a past in which wilder flourishes were possible. I yearn for a present where such flourishes occur with regularity, exploding from flatscreens and magazines, eating away at the fabric of our dull reality to form doorways into better worlds. Where they blow fresh air in our faces, allowing us, even masked, to truly breathe.

And so I'm watching Godard, and much of it flies right past me, but I savor the incredible poetic ideas that detonate cleanly in my head, delighting that this man remains alive and active and even now is finding ways to bend the medium. I've read that he's working on two different projects right now, and can't wait to see them.

It amazes me how radical even his simple, direct gestures are. I muse how powerfully it would hit if, five minutes into Avengers Endgame, the audience were confronted with white text on a black background, no sound

Could anything dropkick the audience into the story faster? It's such a basic idea that it's amazing no one does it. It would be the first thing the suits would cut from the movie.

Contempt remains, a dense and powerful story of The Dream Factory and those caught within it. A thrilling portrait of a brilliant artist pissing away the tall Hollywood dollars, and not a terrible place to start, if you're looking.

Bon anniversaire, sensei. Et merci.

WEEK END

It is a vindictive and unpleasant film, representing Jean-Luc Godard at his angriest and least playful. It starts as gentle as it's ever going to get, with an unhappily married couple travelling out of town to care for a sick relative (mainly to ensure their presence in his will). They encounter increasingly violent and chaotic conflict en route (including a memorable traffic jam that seems to stretch for miles), until they wind up in the middle of several revolutions from which their material comforts are no longer any defense.

A friend I saw it with said that it was the closest Godard's come to making a horror film, and I can't disagree. It's as pissed off a response to capitalism as anything this side of von Trier - it's like Godard imagined his fellow Frenchmen becoming Americans, and pursued the fancy to its logical ends. Perhaps to one observing the French middle class in the mid- to late-1960s such a notion wasn't too much of a stretch. Sadly, Godard's misanthropy extends to the revolutionaries who take over the final reels of the film, who are depicted as assholes at best and cannibalistic rapists at worst. Such vivid anti-humanism only dilutes his polemics - you can feel Godard's contempt for not being able to name the authors of the texts that his characters read from, word for word.

It's a film that makes Pasolini's Salò seem optimistic by comparison. At least there some sort of perverse love bloomed from the wreckage of the film (even if just two soldiers dancing in a clumsy embrace). Here a wife devours her husband's flesh and asks for seconds. Godard offers no comfort here, or any solutions. The film, in the end, comes off as petulant and childish as his fight choreography.