Sorry for the wait, I’ve been trying to catch up to everything…
Movies:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008): At the halfway point of Benjamin and Daisy’s lives, a weary wound heals through the great victory of moving in together. Or at least, that’s what it looks like to me, when watching this on the television while we build a new shoe rack. It’s a relief for everyone involved really, when you’re just too busy for existential despair, too distracted by furniture to remember that time flies, whether forward or in reverse.
Maggie’s Plan (Rebecca Miller, 2015):
Ethan Hawke as a ficto-critical anthropologist barges into the New School with an accidental sexiness that spills crumbs throughout—women keep hoping there might be more where that came from, but alas. The disappointing discovery of this lack drives Greta Gerwig’s character (who plays an administrator that works with graduate students) to apply the nitpicking of her career to their romance, engineering a reunion with his ex-wife (Julianne Moore), or rather, the cruel return of a used good.
There’s an at-times endearing, but pathetic way that academics (a demographic of hired professionals not necessarily including smart people) mine love as material for an essay or a book. Miller nails her depiction of this niche phenomenon of sticking around for too long, or standing too close to the wreckage for the sake of study. In the film, this is problematized as “being a control freak.” Maggie’s Plan, however, drops this argument—and the possibility that co-parents and ex-partners could rethink family or parenthood—for a more sentimental finale on single parenting and soulmate-finding that slaps a dreary bow of tradition (the “right guy,” or “the newborn,” as the deliberate end of a chapter) onto an otherwise striking knot still tightly coiled.
All These Women (Ingmar Bergman, 1964):
This film precedes Persona, and unlike that film, the artist (a cellist) stands with back to the audience, their psyche a locked door. Bergman, intending to riff off of Fellini’s 8 1/2, approaches the impenetrability of the artist’s mind through the detestable character of a critic who’s taken it upon himself to write a biography of a cellist who’d rather not have his method revealed to the public as dirty laundry. Mistresses tiptoe and waltz about, being played like cellos by the musician’s hands, and rather obviously, the sexually lacking and brutish critic conceals his envy with prose (via an obnoxiously huge, overcompensating quill). Bergman’s attempt at humor (stray bullets shooting statues in the head, actors slipping across tile floors) is more impressive for its audacity than any measurable success, as the film doesn’t really congeal into any thesis, nor does it really strive to do so. Instead, it’s best appreciated for how it signals a rough phase of preparation.
Ahead of Persona, All These Women functions as a map of working techniques, like the diffused light spilling through multiple entryways in a hallway and the airy body language flatly framed to recall the silent comedy, that later appear in Persona (for example, in the two-dimensional frames of the early sequence in the hospital). More importantly, the film surgically purges the impulses and pitfalls that plague other tales of artists, whether from the position of critic or fan, or with disproportionate emphasis of autobiography, or with a mythical secrecy maintained by physical distance. In Persona, each of these is not upended but instead altered with precision: We see shards of the actor Elisabeth’s (Liv Ullman) repressed trauma in lucid cross-cuts—the outlines of shadows against the curves of jaws and hallways delineate a sharp boundary between the artist and the world without demanding the evasive question of what is or is not reality.
Bergman never fully submerges into the subjective, biased view of Elisabeth from the perspective of her nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson), only teases it so much as to draw a line between their two neuroses, placed side by side rather than in a nesting doll structure where one consumes the other: The fetishization of the former as a celebrity by the latter, and the narcissistic treatment of the latter by the former, who feeds off of the nurse’s projections for artistic inspiration, unable to face her own faults directly. Crucially, an actual critic never physically appears in Persona, since in All These Women Bergman completed an exorcism of this figure beforehand.
It seems to be a necessary omission, since the throughline of following this character as protagonist leads to a totally fruitless conclusion: The cellist’s house explodes with expensive, bombastic fireworks set off by the critic’s clumsiness, and the cellist then dies, still only seen as only a silhouette. The critic, joined by the mistresses (who Bergman groups together as an unhelpful bunch when it comes to understanding art better), stages a gaudy and insincere funeral, in which only the corpse’s feet visibly protrude from the coffin. With the critic preemptively mocked as a false mediator between the public and the artist in life and even after death, Bergman’s meditations in Persona achieve a greater clarity.
Books:
Just some jotting downs on two books I’m reading very slowly. Samuel Delany’s About Writing has been such a needed comfort. And with each little inch I make through Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (one to two pages a month, at most), together the books have made a little nest for me. Both involve direct, embarrassing and challenging self-study without the crafty flourishes of introspection that in fact mask honesty. The appearance of these in writing is rather blatant. “Workshop junkies,” for instance, as Delany calls them, “are very polite in listening to your criticism—often, they even take careful notes. […] That is the price they pay to get the praise that is the all-important commodity for them. But they’re not writers because they don’t write—and haven’t written for years; though they desperately yearn for the approval that sometimes comes with having written. […] All they are doing is maneuvering themselves into position to receive pats on the head.”
Freud’s definition of psychoanalysis’ function also comes to mind (I actually find these basic statements really useful since I’m trying to deliberately commit quotes to memory these days. This is probably rudimentary stuff, but I’m just sharing notes here): “Psychoanalysis removes the symptoms of hysterics on the basis of the presupposition that those symptoms are substitutes—transcriptions, as it were—for a series of psychic processes beset with affect, wishes, and strivings which, through the operation of [repression], have been denied the possibility of being dealt with by psychical activity capable of reaching consciousness.”
Gerhard Richter, 23. Feb. 01., 2001.
Recent writings:
For Reverse Shot’s Connected series, I wrote on Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday (and Caroline Gollum responds with her own reflection on William Inge’s Picnic).
Screen Slate is regularly publishing reviews of accessible, streaming films. I’ve provided a brief review of the South Korean erotic film Madame Aema (the first in an eleven-part series), which you can find over at the Korean Film Archive’s Youtube channel.
I’ve contributed an essay on one of the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s Filmmakers in Focus, Payal Kapadia, and her trilogy of shorts. We also did a talk moderated by BFMAF programmer Herb Shellenberger, and I think Payal’s insights regarding her filmmaking process here are essential.
Over at Notebook, a review of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and an essay on Charlie Kaufman’s Netflix film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, as well as his debut novel Antkind.