Notes on 3 seen this week: Stromboli, Magnolia, Waking Life.

1.Waking Life (banal philosophy)

A film not of banal recycled pop philosphy - the philosophy of 'the truth is
out there' - but a film ablout this phenomenonof pop philosophy. As the
protagonist says, some of it sounds sort of familiar (ie it is the received
wisdom of the age), it has 'heavy connotations' (ie it is philosophy),some
of it does not sound familiar so he could not have created it as his own
dreamwork (ie who is the dreamer, the self or the society)

The problem of Linklater. How much is the material of his films objectified.
Are the views expressed those of the management. The problem of the dream -
what is its relation to the dreamer. The problem of being Dazed and
Confused. The problem of history's judgement of those Newton Boys.

The old instant philosophy trope of the recursions of thedream, the haubting
experience of escaping one level and still being inside thedream. The
character in the fiction. The philosopher in the the thing theorised. The
predicament of reflexivity, and therefore of modernity, which Marx used to
license changing the world rather than interpreting it.

Like Resnais a cinema of ideas, a little cold, general not particular.
Like Dinner with Andre banal talk for its heavy connotations.

2.Magnolia (instant profundity)

The pace - driven by the music (and cutting) for 2/3 of the film, until some
silence. As Bresson said, 'Sound cinema invented silence'. Music used to
squeeze ( so Hollywood)  but in this case adrenalin rather than tears from
the body. Like Oliver Stone. Manipulation but I liked it.

The stories. Firstly the theme of coincidence, explicit in prologue and
epilogue, seems like it is in the wrong film. Coincidence is not so
important in the actual body of the film. And isnt this theme trite? Is
art/life made more significant by these strange relations such as we see in
Short Cuts, Lantana, Pulp Fiction, etc.

Secondly, the actual theme of the stories explicated twice in 'we may be
through with the past but it aint through with us'. The past being 'the
father'. And so a film about reconciliation or the lack of it with the
family/father. Yet this theme too, is it not just a kind of instant theme
for making significant stories, or for making significance for the sake of
it. Instant profundity and therefore artistic merit. A them for filmakers
without a narrative to tell? Like all those stories of scorned chidren,
adoptees, etc finding their real parents (eg Mike Leighs one). Of course it
a great theme of fiction.

Thirdly, raining cane toads. Comic natural disaster as deus ex machina, the
desperate way to end.

For all this I do like this film.



3.Stromboli (that terror up there)

The documentary,the record of an historical moment and passing, eg the tuna
fishing ( this is the end of the whale road and the whale).

Bergman trailing her screen culture persona into neo-realism, derealising it
with another reality. Even in this we see cultural juxtaposition as it
infects Rossellinis art and a neo neo realism. And the not so wily wiles of
this not so wicked woman. This opportunist robbed of opportunity, in the
prison of traditional culture (sexist, severe, gossipy) and in the prison of
nature ('that terror out there' - the volcano, the island that is only
volcano). Reduced to desperate awful clumsy attempts to get help any way she
can from the priest, whom she repels in the process.   A metropolitan softy
revolted by the violent relation to violent nature. And then the climbing of
that terror, the volcano. (Think Petrarch on Ventoux, Empedocles on Etna,
Wordsworth on Snowden, tourists at a lookout, Kant in Konigsberg). But first
a first diversion.

2 films with Ingrid Bergman (wonderful in both) from this historical moment.
The strange slightly wrong history of Notorious (today perhaps Hitchcocks
best film? yesterday? tomorrow?) - those Nazis in South America, that
uranium, espionage unaware of the cold war - history too close to be seen
clearly or rather history as the material for ficitivity. In Stromboli the
history is that of the document, the hard eye.

Back to the climbing of the volcano. The history of the western  Sublime is
reenacted in Stromboli - from cowering in the shadow of that terror, to the
desperate climb, to waking on the crest to 'the mystery, the beauty'. In the
end Karen (Bergman) has this moment of overcoming - Does she go back? She
cant go back - this passing moment as all moments are. And now a second
diversion.

A magnolian coincidence. After seeing Stromboli and thinking about it
together with Notorious  I read  an article by Serge Daney on Rear Window in
which he says that R. and H. represent the two kinds of cinematic voyeurism.
R's is the hard look, it tips towards the obscene, the object can, by
definition never look back. H's eyes the pornographic, its perverse, the
eyed object can suddenly look back.

In the Sublime we see the dialectic of these two relations to the thing
eyed. And that moment of history where nature is overcome, rendered safe,
rendered unable to look back. Yet as a moment, like all moments, passing.

Enough

Ross