David Zucker made this?

You don’t get all that many right-wing, ultra-nationalistic, anti-intellectual crazy comedies, so it’s only fair that “Big Fat Important Movie” is here to even out the score. That being said, it’s one of the most staggeringly unfunny comedies I’ve had the misfortune of watching. I am, quite simply, baffled at it. It plays like a Republican propaganda movie – and if you think I am exaggerating, check out the DVD yourself. Besides the lack of humour, there is no indication that the people responsible for this turkey have read an actual book of Michael Moore’s – the person they’re ridiculing – or any other book for that matter. But then, I feel pretty sure that whoever wrote the script to “Big Fat Important Movie” considers reading to be un-American.

Thoughts on Surviving Desire

An essay written on the occasion of the release of Hal Hartley’s “Surviving Desire”, my favourite movie, on DVD.

Jean-Luc Godard’s aesthetical impact (and the impact of the French New Wave – but then, Godard was the French New Wave) has, I think most will agree, been enormous. But as a film director, I think it is fair to say that Godard has had few actual disciples.

In Denmark, only two movies have successfully sought to reinterpret the ideas of the New Wave within a national movie-making tradition, namely Knud Leif Thomsen’s “School for Suicide” (1964, ironically an anti-modernist statement), and Henning Carlsen’s “People Meet and Sweet Music Fills the Heart” (1967), based on a novel by Jens August Schade. The rest of the Danish movie-making industry has, so to speak, generally pretended that Godard never happened. Regardless of the hype, this also applies to the more recent so-called “Dogme” school of film-making.

In this attitude it has been in complete accord with the international movie industry. The fragmented aesthetics of the New Wave was embraced after Godard, but the ideas behind it were not. Perhaps because it is admittedly difficult to see where to go from where Godard left off.

In the USA, Godard, as far as I am aware, has had one actual pupil: Hal Hartley. Hartley is much more mainstream than his predecessor, and he certainly isn’t working to bring about the end of cinema. He is making films in a grey zone between entertainment, art movies, and visual poetry. But no-one, when watching a Hartley movie, will have any doubt regarding his primary influence: without Godard, there simply couldn’t be a Hartley. This goes for Hartley’s aesthetics as well as what you might call his thematic concerns.

“Surviving Desire” (1991) – not quite a full-length motion picture, not quite a short-film – takes as its starting-point a quote from “The Brothers Karamazov”, Dostoyevsky’s final novel, in which the author is discussing the nature of love. A young college professor, played by Martin Donovan, is driving his pupils to the brink of insanity because he is refusing to teach them anything. Instead, he has been stuck on the same paragraph by Dostoyevsky for 1½ months.

Jude, the professor (as in “Jude the Obscure”), is a typical Hartley protagonist. He seems to be caught in some sort of rhetorical trap and is unable to communicate precisely to other people what goes on inside him; this especially applies when communicating with members of the other sex. This rhetorical frustration takes the form of suppressed anger. Part of why Donovan works so well as an actor within the framework of Hartley’s films is that he is excellent at portraying this sort of “endless-talking-erupting-into-sudden-outbursts-of-violence”. Or outbursts of joy, for that matter. One of the memorable scenes in the film has Jude (and two other persons who appear out of nowhere) dancing in an alley at night-time, an echo of the 40’s movie musical tradition that, in much the same way as Godard’s “Une femme est une femme”, 1962, underlines why it’s impossible to make this kind of movie anymore.

“Surviving Desire” is a relatively straightforward love-story: Teacher is having a crisis, then falls in love with a pupil with whom he has a brief affair before she leaves him (quite literally) in the gutter. But it’s also an obvious allegory. The ontology of Hal Hartley’s filmic universe has 4 major components: Knowledge, Religion, Desire, and Trouble. They are, so to speak, arranged in inter-connected pairs: Knowledge-Religion and Desire-Trouble. The atheistic Jude’s obsession with the “Brothers Karamazov” paragraph is a symptom of the modern condition, i.e. the impossibility of knowing (this is signified also by the fact that his pupil’s name, Sofie, is Greek for knowledge), and the inability to act and embrace life that comes from this impossibility.

Much like Sofie, Jude’s friend Henry can be seen as an embodiment of Jude’s own psycho-drama: He symbolises the option of Faith, which is also deeply problematic; because, as Jude puts it, historically people who believe in things tend to be the ones who cause problems. But Henry presents us with another view on love: Is love, as Jude thinks, infatuation – of a singular soul-mate, that is – or is love indiscriminating, as the religious Henry believes. Is it a spontaneous soul-link – or, as Dostoyevsky has it, “active labour”?

In the streets, a seemingly crazy woman wearing red rubber boots is randomly asking people to marry her, “to love and to cherish”, symbolizing perhaps a now outdated social order in which marriage was more important than love – but perhaps also illustrating Dostoyevsky’s point that love is “active labour”? Random love, in any case, seems to be a recurring theme of Hartley’s. In “Trust” (1990), another problematic love-story of his, Matthew asks Maria, just before he is led away by the police, why she has put up with him so long – and she answers “because somebody had to”.

“Surviving Desire” is a film in which all certainty in matters of existential knowledge has been reduced to zero. People randomly quote from books that they carry around with them as if their lives depended on having the right quote at hand; they endlessly discuss matters of faith, love and philosophy, they argue and yell and dance whenever things boil over. No emotion is entirely pure or long-lasting: The spontaneous dance routine performed by Jude in the alley after he has landed himself a date ends rather strangely with a gesture clearly intended to give the impression that Jude is suspended on a cross; the Law of Hartley, you might say, is that formulated by Bruce Springsteen: with every wish, there comes a curse. The portrayal of love in an urban setting also reminds one of another musician, Bob Dylan’s lyrics in “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”:

In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations
Draw conclusions on the wall
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all.

Dylan’s love is mystical – in the religious sense – and capable of embracing contradictions. In Hartley’s universe, this mystical love has entered a crisis. It is no longer possible to tell the difference between love, infatuation, and desire.

At the core of it all is the problem of Desire and the Trouble it invariably creates. Knowledge (trying to create order) and Faith (withdrawal from life) are merely two ways of approaching this problem.

A characteristic scene has Jude hanging up the phone in a phone-booth immediately after Sofie has agreed to go on a date with him. In this way, he artificially creates a happy ending; knowing that love can (and very possibly will) go wrong, he chooses to hang up and hang on to the moment rather than risk it and continue the conversation. In a single moment, it is made clear that Jude’s love is not active – it’s an ideal, outside time and change.

“Surviving Desire” is highly entertaining in spite of the heavy themes, it’s funny and emotionally draining for anyone who’s had the same problematic experiences in love matters as Jude – but it’s also deep stuff, and the intellectual implications are boggling. Since I watched “Surviving Desire” on a worn-out VHS copy 7 or 8 years ago, it’s been my favourite movie – in sharp competition with “Trust” by the same director. “Surviving Desire” has now finally been released on DVD by Hartley’s own company, Possible Films, and tonight I had the pleasure of watching it again. Go buy it.

Bunken, 4

Blot så I kan se, at jeg ikke overdriver: Bunken af indkøbte dvd-film, jeg enten mangler at få set eller har hjemkøbt med henblik på at gense. Filmene står dobbelt.

Bolvangar Lights

Senest hjembragte litteratur: Per Øhrgaards “Goethe – et essay” samt “A Concise History of Costume” af James Laver. Hvorfor – tænker du måske – købe et bind om kostumer gennem tiderne? Og jeg blir dig svar skyldig.

Og så er jeg igennem Philip Pullmans “Northern Lights” – første bind i “His Dark Materials”-trilogien og den bog, som filmen “The Golden Compass” er baseret på. Pullmans bog har vundet en del priser, bl.a. Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award i 2005 – og Lindgren er da også en oplagt parallel. Det er – synes jeg – en god børnebog.

Der er også nogle, der har hyldet bogen som et litterært mesterværk, hvad den bestemt ikke er. Men den ér elementært spændende, der er masser af mystik og okkulte undertoner (bogen er en slags gnostisk allegori, og der er endda en kirkelig konspiration med), og selvom figurerne er klicheer, er det svært ikke at blive lidt begejstret for hovedpersonen, Lyra. Beskrivelserne af snelandskaberne, det arktiske mørke og auroraen er med til at give stemning. Af personlige grunde gjorde “Northern Lights” betydeligt indtryk på mig – nok til, at jeg vil give opfølgeren “The Subtle Knife” en chance.

Tidligere indlæg om Lyra. Trailer til filmen:

Bunken, 3

Bunken af film, jeg har købt men endnu ikke fået set, har forlængst antaget karakter af en støt voksende BORG, der truer med at overtage lejligheden. Det vil ikke ske uden kamp – så selvom det er som at skovle et ocean væk med en teske, har jeg i dag forsøgt at gøre endnu et indhug. Dagens film:

“El ataque de los muertos sin ojos” aka “Return of the Evil Dead” (1973):

“The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant” (1971):

Samt “Venus fra Vestø” – som, har jeg besluttet mig for, er af en sådan kvalitet, at jeg godt kan tillade mig at blogge imens.

Sidst læst:
De Sade: “Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man”
Platon: “Ion”

Kærlighedssange, 2

Jeg har aldrig interesseret mig for hverken Eurythmics eller hendes solo-projekter – men Annie Lennox’ “Love Song For A Vampire” ligger mere eller mindre fast på min mp3-afspiller, og jeg har hørt den et utal af gange. Fra Francis Coppolas “Dracula” (1992), til dato en af de bedste vampyrfilm, der findes.

Resident Evil: AfterLife

Coming in September.

Bel Ami

Jeg har anmeldt Another World Entertainments nye udgivelse af “Bel Ami” for film-sitet uncut.dk.

Hamlet 2

I’m a diehard Steve Coogan fan – and I’m willing to watch just about anything as long as Coogan’s in it. I start drooling when I think of the upcoming “Alan Partridge: The Movie“. This being said, I think that Coogan has so far been funnier in his various tv shows than in his movies – with the very amusing “Tristram Shandy” interpretation “A Cock and Bull Story” as an exception – and last night’s movie, “Hamlet 2″, didn’t really change this impression. It was funny, but you know it could have been funnier – if it had been less movie-like and more in the loose format of Coogan’s television shows. I did, however, enjoy “Rock Me Sexy Jesus”, the hit song from the musical sequel to “Hamlet” (starring Jesus) that Coogan’s character stages in the film – and which contains cryptical references to Jesus’ “swimmer’s body”. Also, Elisabeth “Cocktail” Shue is great in a small role, starring as herself. She is the one heard laughing in the audience early in the video.

They’re back!

Endelig, endelig, endelig:

Forventet premiere i 2011.