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Schrader once wrote a book called Transcendental Style in Film, which focused on such great filmmakers as Ozu, Dreyer, Rossellini and Bresson. The transcendental style was developed, according to Schrader, "to express the Holy": it is characterized by an austere, formalist rigor; a deep respect for objects and light; and a reflective pace and silence-gathering, indwelling calm, often in the face of narratives about intense suffering. Schrader himself has directed seven feature films, which, while fascinating, generally suffer from an unresolved tension between his transcendental-cinema formal leanings and his penchant for sensationalist content.
okay useful summary
Painters love Lynch. His compositions are exquisite, the frame divided into stylized pools of shadow and light. Then there is his signature color sense, that brownish-blue acidic palette that seems to derive most from art photographers like William Eggleston and Cindy Sherman. In Wild at Heart, however, his inclination to create memorable autonomous images sometimes leads him off in a static, uncinematic direction. Like Fellini, Lynch is too uncritically fond of the Absurd, and cannot resist showing off his collection of miscellaneous grotesqueries: his close-up of flies buzzing on vomit, his obese topless dancers, his rich man on the can surrounded by harem girls. There's no discrimination between true perversity and silliness. Of course, Lynch might say that this silliness is intentional, that he wants a polyphony of moods from the transcendent to the inane. The trouble is, the moods get jumbled. Miraculously adaptable as the Angelo Badalamenti score is, too much stress is placed on music to key the change of emotions. The ear adjusts, but not always the heart.
One thing that gave Blue Velvet an eerie edge was its daring slowness, its willingness to space out-like the Dean Stockwell party where the plot drifts away and we simply watch the spook carnival unfold. Wild at Heart has much shorter, choppier scenes, and less vivid places: I wonder if Lynch's television work, with its episodic hopping about, has not had an adverse effect on his cinematic rhythms.
agreed tbh, did not like it
[...] "sublime" may in fact be the operative term, if we use the recent definition provided by French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard: "An inevitable sadness coming from the inconsistency of all things, it is also the exaltation of thought passing beyond the limits of what can be presented."
you know i love a lyotard quote
One needs to take with a grain of salt the contemporary critical tendency to validate a work of art by calling it "dark," "darker" or "darkest." Understandably, defenders of Naruse want to stake out a separate territory for him, but perhaps we do him a disservice by exaggerating his pessimism. In any case, is "pessimism" even the correct word, if all that we mean is a rejection of that sugarcoating of conventional cheerfulness? Freud once said that he was trying to bring his patients from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness. Naruse's characters certainly know about ordinary unhappiness, but to the degree that they regularly fight clear of hysterical misery and hold on to a dazed integrity, finding momentary compensations, satisfactions and trade-offs along the way, I find his movies rather comforting-not to mention satisfying, in the way of all such poised, well-executed art.
[...] it is Dreyer who eloquently lamented the absence of a consistent visual approach in Danish film, and who wrote: "What one feels regarding the photography of this film is first and foremost the absence of an artistic will that sets up a goal for itself and consciously works toward it."
brutal
And the films themselves were sexy. I don't mean to say that the actors took their clothes off, they didn't, but what was sexy was the extremely fluid way the movies were put to-gether. The sound track of soul songs had something to do with it, but even more so the long hand-held tracking shots that followed in "real time" someone walking down corridor after corridor, or the merry-go-round shot that metaphorically described an attitude toward the cosmos as much as did Godard's swirling coffee cup. The shots took us over like a wet dream. It was as if Hitchcock's 360-degree turn around the lovers, Stewart and Novak, in Vertigo, that saturation of love and impossible yearning and doubt and fulfillment, had started to infiltrate all of Sobert's images. It was a lover's cinema. The filmmaker was in love with the world, or was amused and saddened by it, so obviously that he had only to point his camera anywhere, it seemed, and it would fill up with feeling.
<3
The original title of Divided Loyalties was Industrial Keys. The young Orpheus is awakened rudely to a world in which industry holds all the keys, and even personal life has a manufactured, industrial quality, as Adorno would say. Warren Sonbert's films have always had a trace of sociological inquiry, and in Divided Loyalties one can almost make out the beginnings of a critique of modern society: from the furs and tuxedo set at the opening of San Francisco's opera season, to the mangy train tracks of the Chicago Loop, to factories and impersonal glassed-in elevators. Collective action is also treated sardonically, in the gay lib parade sequences, as one more illusion or pretense to be punctured (we see a cemetery after a gay be-in). However, the mosaic technique as Sonbert (unlike Vertov) uses it does not take responsibility for direct political or social statements that can reasonably be attributed to the filmmaker. Indeed, we can assume nothing but a pileup of ironies which imply, in the worst circumstances, a shrug of indifference.
A frightening emptiness dogs these films. Perhaps their real program is spiritual [...]
im intrigued
One ex-Kaelite willing to talk on the record was screen-writer-director Paul Schrader. "Pauline Kael was my mentor. She got me into this business. I was going to a religious school, Calvin College, and my college and my church for. bade films-therefore I got interested in them. I took some film courses at Columbia. One night at the West End Bar I was vociferously defending Pauline's book I Lost It at the Movies, and Paul Warshaw, Robert Warshaw's son, said: "Would you like to meet her? She lives nearby. So he brought me over to Pauline's apartment on West End Avenue. We got to talking. I hadn't seen many films but I had strong opinions. It went on so late that I ended up sleeping on her sofa. The next morning she said to me, 'You don't want to be a minister, you want to be a film critic.' And: 'If you ever want to go to film school I can arrange it? Not only did she help me get admitted to UCLA Film School though I didn't have the proper requirements, but thanks to her recommendation I also began reviewing for LA Free Press.
aww
Thierry Jousse, editor of Cahiers du Cinema, wrote a piece in 1994 called "The Killers of the Image" in which he tried to understand the long-range consequences of such filmmaking:
Take, for example, Oliver Stone's film, Natural Born Killers. It's a child monster, a maelstrom of images, a whirlwind of colors and sounds, a sort of hash of gestures and movements, a magma of sensations and music. Can we speak here of the shot's composition? We need to find a new word to denote these incessant passages of images, simultaneously subliminal and convulsive—of electrons as much as projectiles. But decidedly, they're no longer composed shots. They're a space where everything is on the surface, like in a baroque sphere; where images never stop arriving, speeding into the eye and sliding over each other, in place of the old cinematic way, where the eye takes the road in order to scrutinize the shot. ... It's a video environment, a big live show as well as a self-cannibalization of cinema by the media, or a sacrificial ceremony with the immolation of the frame and the invocation of new images.
Jousse goes on to say that the use of such images in Stone's and Tarantino's films approaches the sensation of a drug, a "film-trip." He likens the irresponsibility, the lack of consequences, in Tarantino's films to a cocaine high. "You could call it a stylistic exercise, but it's also the same sensation procured by cocaine, a drunkenness of the intelligence verging on the absurd, a feeling of superiority detached from reality..." Ironically, Tarantino does not shun dialogue; in fact, his movies impress with their snappy talk. But the talk is designed to bounce back at us with a stylized, "off" quality, a tinniness further detaching us from reality, the way you hear words when you're high.
ooo
Reason, which is essential to keep the machinery in motion, necessarily contains its other. When you start to think, you cannot stop short at purely reproductive thinking. This does not mean that things will really work out like that, but you cannot think without thinking that otherness. The general stultification today is the direct result of cutting out utopia. When you reject utopia, thought itself withers away. [...]