Education Forum Timey!!

I know that you guys aren't as interested in pedagogy as I am, but I thought that I might as well try.

Right now I am debating whether studying a subject in an advanced course is more worthwhile than studying it independently. Most courses of this kind require a great deal of reading/information absorption, and then you are expected to make some draw some kind of revolutionary conclusions from it.

For example, let's say that you are in a class on baking cookies. You read hundreds of recipes as an assignment (and bake a few, too). This would be the 'information absorption' part of the class. The 'conclusions' part of the class might be an assignment, perhaps to write your own successful cookie recipe.

Following this formula, we can represent the learning experience thus:

information absorption ➔ drawing conclusions

This is how I think that most classes are structured. However, it misses out on a key element that should act as a go-between, which is a development of understanding. Without understanding the information, any conclusions drawn will be faulty. So, the new flow would go something like:

information absorption ➔ developing understanding ➔ drawing conclusions

Ideally, we should develop understanding on our own, and discuss what we think during in-class discussions. I see at least two problems with this:

1. Most students would rather do other things (like mingle, sleep, or play music) rather than develop and understanding of their schoolwork.
2. In-class discussions designed to develop understanding do not often work out well, because of mixed skill levels. If some students are trying to build a remedial understanding, and others are trying to build understanding, the class will be dichotomised and a compensation (where nobody is completely satisfied) will result.

I think that by studying things independently of school, even at a higher skill level, we eliminate these two problems because:

1. The student will be self-motivated to study
2. The student will develop understanding at his or her own pace

What do you guys think? Is classroom understanding superior to independent study?

Best Songs of 2009

I'm gonna let you lovely people in on a secret, sometimes I'm totally out of my goddamned mind. The stuff I come up with to do just like for fun, who else in the world would find this nonsense interesting? Look at this big batch a crazy I'm about to unleash for example. One night I'm sitting in my room (I do alot of that) and I'm all, here's an exercise, write about songs in as long as it takes to write about them. And at first I'm like "Yeah, ok!" Italics is shorthand for sarcasm. But then the first song starts and I'm like "Oh, shit...." and then I'm doing it and I don't stop until I've done it for twenty one songs. What's wrong with me? Anyway, this is my way of paying tribute to twenty one of my favorite songs this year. Why? I don't know. I'll be twenty-one in June? I think my hand just hurt from typing. So the blurbs are only as long as I could manage them in the two to three minutes each song takes up, so some are longer, some are shorter. Also here are some other great songs I didn't write about cause I hadn't heard them yet or because they're too long. I only edited them so that they make a little sense, the rest was all in the moment. A little like Iggy Pop's writing at the mic, except not cool.

Do Make Say Think - "Do"

Gentleman Reg - "How We Exit"

Sufjan Stevens - "The Blood"

British Sea Power - "The South Sound"

Regina Spektor - "Eet"

Rain Machine - "Hold You Holy"

Grizzly Bear - "Two Weeks" I call foul on this one cause I heard it first last year on the late show and it was great then but I don't like the version that wound up on Veckatimist as much.

The Decemberists - The whole first act of Hazards Of Love.

"Laundry Room" - The Avett Brothers, though I think that someone else is bound to do a better version of it cause again I don't really like the version that wound up on record.

Everything on that motherfucking New Moon soundtrack, much to my chagrin but mostly

"Slow Life" by Grizzly Bear and Victoria Legrand, "Hearing Damage" by Thom Yorke and "Rosyln" by St. Vincent and Bon Iver.

"Big Red Machine" by Justin Vernon & Bryce Dessner - Dark Was The Night

A song that can put you on a rainy street corner with no options even on the sunniest day of the year. Beautifully simple and evocative, the out-of-tune, perpetual ostenatto that carries the song is like broken glass that tortured heroes Justin Vernon and Bryce Dessner have to walk across to tell their stories of loss. "You're running and injured, just like you ought to be"sums up the feelings of a lover jilted and an outcast on the run and it's up to us to decide whether the rain-soaked hero is at the receiving end or if he's finally taken a stand against those who would see him miserable and lost.

"Die" - Iron & Wine - Dark Was The Night

Nary a minute long and it says all it needs to. "We're not afraid to die". Sam Beam has written a multitude of gorgeous songs but none that cut to the core of every human being quite so eloquently and really understands what we contemplate whenever we look for answers. His guitar carries us and his words are timeless.

"River" - Akron/Family - Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free

Starting playfully in the middle of a percussive sound like Brian Eno used to make his subjects begin with. There are even comparisons between people and natural forces as in a Talking Heads tune. A sweet whistling choir, a playfully skittering guitar somewhere between David Byrne and Jim James, and a sweet nothing that bursts into the always-welcome chorus riff and that charmingly existential chorus following so much talk of fire and ambling candling, "you and I and a flame make three." This is a band triumphant through their darkest times, painting a picture of togetherness even as the only company they have is a candle. An ecstatic picture of intimacy painted with images of fire; the bodies are simply implicit.

"Soul Unwind" - Apostle of Hustle - Eats Darkness

A jogging build-up comprised of ominous bass tones, paranoid saxophone blasts, and a guitar lick driving in circles before the entrance of the kind of dueling choral line that Andrew Whiteman reached perfection with on songs like "Cheap Like Sebastian" from 2007's National Anthem of Nowhere. He shouts and riffs the delightfully cryptic "You got the soul unwind, soul unwind" imbuing each new enunciation with depth. When his guitar takes over, cutting like a mat knife across the rhythm, all the elements are in place, all that remains is for the volume and Whiteman's lyrical intensity to increase until the climax. Intriguingly, the only thing that goes off the rails is Whiteman's wailing vocals which he fights by singing through a distorted microphone so he can leave the ground without leaving the song. The music builds and just as it seems in danger of breaking its groove, a distorted loop rolls in like the wheels of a train and it's all over. The song has left town.

"Percussion Gun" - White Rabbits - It's Frightening

Those drums. Tribal, angry, repititive, gimmicky...whatever you want to call them, they are undeniably captivating. I know they're captiviating because the lyrics to this song are so cliched that they would appear to be some kind of post-modern comment about cliched lyrics, "I know which way to go". As I wasn't there when the song was written, all I have are the facts; broken piano, softly crooned bridge, jagged guitar, molasses-thick bass and of course those drums. Every instrument seems to have been detuned and treated to remind the listener of an old church filled with sound. Every instrument echoes and shines and their off-kilter sounds become all the more vital as the wordless chorus that finishes the song strikes like a match after the final verse.

"Breathe Our Iodine" - Jay Farrar & Ben Gibbard - One Fast Move Or I'm Gone

All I needed was that bluesy lick, the glass harmonica and Jay Farrar's total cool delivery of the ballistically minimal line "grain of sand" and I was hooked. Who cares that the rest of their Keruoac inspired record doesn't match up to this song? The organ, spitting intermittently when it sees fit, the whole affair too confident and sweltering to do much more than deliver the slick and simple repitive line for Farrar to do a vocal performance that sums up the appeal of the beat poets: too cool to care, too good to dissapoint.

"To Save Me" - M. Ward with Jason Lytle - Hold Time

Jason Lytle's dancehall/basement keys and M. Ward's newly Elvis-ified voice make a pretty good team. Ward and Lytle here create a song that acts like a gust of wind through a dance floor. Lytle's wordless vocal support and keys put the song in rockabilly mode for the spacerock set and then Ward's antiquated production and new-found brevity and wink-laden heart-throb persona make this more than a pastiche performance; this is very nearly the real deal. The dizzying licks between the chorus and verse and the reverby quality of the whole thing turn it into a rolicking homage to falling in love with a rascal, "He can strike a match and your world goes up in flames"

"Reasons to Quit" - Phosphorescent - To Willie

Matthew Houck's voice is a national treasure and I'll fight anyone who disagrees with me. He turns a fairly ordinary Willie Nelson tune into the envy of every Brooklynite, achieving the stature and gravity of a barroom crooner whose been doing this for twice as many years as Houck's been alive. There is sadness and loss in his voice as his words shift from pragmatic to poetically tragic. "Reasons to quit don't outnumber all the reasons why". The guitars, electric and not, are merely window-dressing atop Houck and his occassional harmonies. He could carry the tune on his own (which he does anyway) and no one can sell somber quite so charmingly.

"This Tornado Loves You" - Neko Case - Middle Cyclone

The guitars, themselves like wind sweeping over fields and prairies. "Their souls dangling inside out from their mouths but it's never enough," and as much as Case claims this is about a real tornado trying to declare his love for a woman it is just as easy to picture a Tennessee Williams hero doing much the same as this tornado: "smashed every transformer with every trailer." The sticky sweet sadness of the words of longing are rendered simply breath-taking by Case's one-of-a-kind voice, at once innocent and confident, full of life and at the end of her rope. She is a damsel in distress singing the raucous exploits of a man pushed to violence, death even, for love. Finally the whole thing swirls about as if the climax to some film has been found and the lovers are embraced inside the gale force winds of the natural disaster, kissing in the eye of the storm.

"West Ryder Silver Bullet" - Kasabian - West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum

Kasabian never fused the smoky mod happenings of the 60s with their very modern sneering arrogance and proficiency better than on "West Ryder Silver Bullet". Like a duet between Mick Jagger and Dusty Springfield that never happened (how could it?) Tom Meghan and Rosario Dawson sweep each other up in between honeyed strings and irascible hooks. Their love could be projected on silk sheets in a harem as smoke wafts throughout landing on the idle fingers of bored women and boorish men. That both are meant to be inmates at a looney bin makes their dreams of love and longing all the more delightfully deranged. "Oh, how I want you far too much". As they take turns calling each other 'baby' (followed perhaps not coincidentally by the sound of wailing like that of an infant and of a childish piano theme) their love blends delusion and real longing. Do they want each other? Do they want out of their straight-jackets? The shark-like hungry smiles on each's lips are palpable as they devour each lyric and the song turns modern in its percussion for the close into mist once more.

"The Outsiders" - Doves - Kingdom of Rust

Synth sounds like alarm bells, windy kick drum, and then a guitar lick like the fleeting footsteps of a pulp hero and lastly a thick bassline penetrating the cool gossamer of the rhythm like gunfire. There's talk of 'two of us', on the run, Outsiders as the title suggests, leaping with the drums, avoiding the fire from Jez Williams' bass and Jimi Goodwin's increasingly biting guitar which turns rapid fire by the second verse. When William's bass falls down like a ceiling crashing in, the steps of the two are numbered. When Goodwin's guitar joins in, it is soon over.

"Radio Kaliningrad" - Handsome Furs - Face Control

Scratching keyboard sounds, feedback, a guitar tired from just having played through a whole record, in its death throes? No, just getting started in time for its swan song. The drum machine clicks us in and the guitar rises like a phoenix delivering heartfelt reverb-and-delay-ridden notes. "My home on the other side!" Dan Boeckner's voice, that Elvis-after-whiskey-and-coffee purr, comes in and the song stands at attention. The chorus is a rocket from the Kremlin, but that wordless bridge, Boeckner's guitar doing octave-treated loops in midair. His fingers as deft as his voice. "Radio Kaliningrad, static on a broken wire". He lets his guitar take a breathe as he does before the red velvet lick starts up again. The guitar in the chorus is like the sound of metal pounding against metal, powerful and industrial, yet there is an urgency to it that matches Boeckner's voice. This is a love song, after all, if one filled with mechanized eastern bloc imagery. That much is clear as the song ends in a hale of feedback and kraut-rock keyboard flair. Perhaps Boeckner and bandmate/wife Alexei Perry have retired for the night.

"Lisztomania" - Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Two muted notes, then a few more, then some punchy drums, then a warm blanket of bass notes and then a high voice dripping whisper-soft lyrics even as their pulled upwards into a sort of whine. The dripping continues as the keyboards articulate the simple sound of longing and then the chorus is given a leg to stand on in the guitars, the bass all given the volume and the fierceness of the bass. An acoustic guitar, as if to say "second verse, different from the verse". the acoustic guitar is a higher sound, the song now soaring freely. In freefall as we're told our narrator has "Lisztomania" then the wings are pulled in and a swooping over water, the roofs of houses, the deepest canyons, both metropolitan and those in the desert. The song builds, the screaming of guitars and voices isn't really a scream at all and when they leave, the freefall resumes and it is a thing of beauty. Sublimely waiting on the wings of keyboard notes, then the drums, then a drop, "not easily offended..." and the rest of the lyrics are lost in the fall, the sound of motion obscuring them.

"In The NA" - Hidden Cameras - Origin:Orphan

Those lovely antiquated keyboard sounds met by the scraping of a novelty violin and of a chorus of "Hey"s by a group of unseen men. Then those drums. Maybe it's that I know the drummer to be a lovely person but I never tire of those deft, shuffling percussive sounds, hitting all over the kit, almost anti-drumming, never showing off. Lex Vaughn is just unbelievable. "Wouldn't need a single NA, take each NA as my own." The nonsensical word that stands in for everything, just as "In The NA" is the PERFECT pop song, giving us non-stop hooks and a verse just as irresistible and cute and memorable as the chorus. "Take control in the Na-a-a-ah" Joel Gibb's voice exploring the depths and peaks of his register in a manner approaching flirtation and pantomime. Why not? This is pop and Joel Gibb is our tourguide through the annals of its many ups and downs. Hence the mixture between quite modern sampling technique and guitars, dated keys, Lex's timeless drumming, part vaudeville, part Buddy Rich, part post-punk. Those reverbed soaked guitars under Gibb's soothing voice as he deilvers that most lovely ode to popular music "staring at the ground, with my head in the clouds"

"Laughing With A Mouth of Blood" - St. Vincent - Actor

If there's something more welcoming than the sound of Annie Clark's guitar strumming accompanied by violins rising in their key, I've yet to hear it. The bass and the drums stomp around like angry kids wanting to join Clark in the upper reaches of her heavenly register "oh I can't see the future but I know it's got big plans for me" Indeed it does, because here's her guitar and the violins again, raising her from the verse to that chorus, sweet-as-honey yet somehow full of drive and force. There is a rhythm and determination to her guitar lines and her swooning voice which lays itself seductively over the violins. The woodwinds the sound of longing, as in a musical. They want the chorus as bad as the listener. "it gets much easier..." and then a preview, the violins rising, the guitar a whisper before it all comes over, like the sun rising on a dreary valley. Everyone basks in the warmth of the chorus and just when it feels ready to spiral out of control, it's done.

"Sick Muse" - Metric - Fantasies

James Shaw's guitar, razor sharp as ever, cutting across the melody of a processed acoustic guitar, moments later Emily Haines' impudent-yet-beautiful sneer of a voice does the same, as does Jules Scott-Keyes' drums and Josh Winstead's drums. Then they come together. "Everybody, everybody just wanna play the lead," A nice metaphor for each instrument coming in short bursts, each wanting to play top dog in the rhythm, each acuitous and tough-sounding, but none can match Haines. She starts hard, loses her toughness for the lead-in and then becomes angelic during the chorus. Suddenly the band is in unison with her paralyzing plea "everybody just wanna fall in love!" Then follows a sort of pop descent into a bridge that Metric don't often fall for, but its one of the better moments on Fantasies for my money, and then they meet everyone's demand for a final enunciation of the sweetest of Haines and Shaw's choruses to date. The keyboards dance, the guitars, bass and drums ease up while still driving because the real heart is in Haines' cry for help and for love and then they all mesh together for the final fall.

"Hysteric" - Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz

The delayed notes that start the song and then return for the chorus are just brilliant, no? What do you expect from A YYY's song? Nick Zinner's guitar, right? Well its in the backseat, the bass is in charge for now. Bass in a YYY's song? Oh wait, I see. Zinner's guitar and Karen O's voice are both quiet at first, then they take off. Zinner's notes bounce into infinity, one at a time as O's voice flows forth in a cherubic call to a lover (who hasn't thought what she voices in some form). "You suddenly complete me. You suddenly complete me." The verse is a flirtation, wondering if the feelings in O's words is for real, if she should submit to them, wondering how she got here but ulimtately its not how she got here it's that she's here now and 'suddenly' she's in love. Brian Chase's dancing rhythm and that wall of sound engineered by Zinner mocks the whooshing sensation of falling in love, or at least recognizing that swelling in your stomach as love for the first time. What follows? Who knows but O's narrator is "Hysterical"perhaps waiting for what comes next. If Stuart Bogie's saxophone is to to believed, something quite lovely is just around the bend


"Summertime Clothes" - Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion

For once that blinding keyboard sound is in the midrange and the rhythm is undeniable. A dance song, sure, but not anything directly radio-ready. It's too pulsing, too nervous, too unbalanced and zany. "Sweet summer night and I'm stripped to my sheets," The nervousness made all the more clear by the lyrics. Avey Tare is too hot for his own skin and can think of nothing to cure his heatstroke than "to walk around with you". Harmless enough...hardly the stuff of love songs. The kids and neighbors speak over his wordless verse filler. This is a city street and Tare is a few stories above it until, with help from Panda Bear's harmony vocal, he leaps down the stairs and finds his girl in the throng of playful kids and people living it up on the streets below. It's hot, why not play in the spray of a fire hydrant, the motion of which the repetitive bridge mocks and I suspect the sound of dripping water is meant to give us such a sensation as well. "It's easy to sing when it wets my brain"and at once all is clear and bottle rockets go off. He is not only cured of his discomfort, he might be in love, or at the very least he is loving the hell out of walking around with 'just you, just you, just you, just you' and to join him seems like the most exciting thing in the world.


"Chinese" - Lily Allen - It's Not Me, It's You

At last a love song to match our times. Our laziness, our tivo-friendly households, our takeout crazed, cigarette-smoking selves in the modern age, sick to death of waiting in traffic. "I don't want anything more than to see your face when I walk in the door." It makes a beautiful kind of sense that Lily Allen, a modern, coquettish popstar who's spent her fair share of time in the limelight should desire privacy and the simple comforts of modern life as this age has also produced the paparazzi, press tours and gossip. So why shouldn't she want to simply enjoy "a nice cup of tea....I'll be exhausted so I'll probably sleep. Then we'll get a Chinese and watch TV." It's not that the song is simply irrefutably catchy (even with the screeching and bubbling keys and the pounding percussion) it's that Allen wears the crown of a pragmatic popstar. It isn't enough to claim to not want cars and jewels but to simply yearn for a specific kind of evening in is all the proof I could ask for. She is human and the song is quite lovely.


"The Major Lift" - Years - Years

Ohad Benchetrit's fingers, busy as ever, like in his Do Make Say Think capacity, but this time curious and playful and they're not alone. The bug-leg imitating electronic blips, live drums and guitars are charing but the tuba bursts in and all of a sudden a new ballgame. Tuba does not make a pop song or an electronic song, which makes Ohad Benchetrit a quirky and wholly welcome pioneer. The song plods along, guitar and keys eking out their existence while the horns come in like the authorities and put them in their place. It is an arrangement one can get used to. Then in the back, barely audible are the screaming guitars and the violins, the revolutionaries to the autarch horns and soon the instruments from the melody will rise in volume and meet the horns, fighting for a voice and volume, fighting to be heard, in the end they come together and after a moment of reflection join each other like brothers for that last wordless chorus and then like a gunshot, they are gone.

"What We Know" - Sonic Youth - The Eternal

That is a motherfucking bass line! That is rock music! The equally mean and knife-like guitar lines of Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore meet overtop of Kim Gordon's bass and Steve Shelleys' drums - like a field of epic battle. The guitars lay it thick on the melody, they creep around the upper end of the fretboard, they cut across the chorus like razor blades, they cut everywhere they can. "heaven's not about your reputation" go the words and then the bridge where only the guitars are heard, each trying to cut the other down to the size, but both only get louder and more aggresive. They cut each other to ribbons like greasers with switchblades and no referee. The drums, alone. They take to their corners and size each other, the bass the sound of their fury mounting. Then their back to the fight, the fray with idle jabs and nicks here and there. They both dive in and then the ferociousness continues until the last line of the chorus and the guitars become percussive. Again, again, again, again, again, trying to finish each other and finally, they both give in.

Now if anyone could tell me what the hell's 'a matter with me, I'd appreciate it. In the meantime, find these songs, buy these records and have fun listening to them until you die.

shelly says that lowercase is hip. shift buttons take too much energy.

the return of ginny to film punk!!!!!!!111!!@!!

are you excited? i'm excited. like whoaoaoaoaoaoaoaoaooaao excited!(: hehe. okay, because i have had zero contact with anyone on this planet in like a gazillion years i will brief you on my life. pretty much, it sucks. france is boring boring boring! all i do is stay at home and get callouses on my fingers and get sick and almost get hit by cars while crossing the insane amount of streets around this here place. also, school is really hard. it's like WHOAA. also my math teacher is a french woman so when she says my name she says "tee-oh-dora" and i don't realize she's talking to me because it's like high and quick and scary. i got yelled at for being st00pid. on the plus side, the market is only a few blocks away and i can conveniently drown my sorrows in orangina and eat alot of chocolate mousse/fluffy pudding. that pretty much makes up for it. shelly also wants me to inform you all that french boys are cuter. nuff said. uhmmm. people speak in french around me JUST so i don't understand them and they talk about that darn "rousse" or something like that, which means red head. XD and SOMETIMES ITS SO OBVIOUS 'cause they talk to me in english and then they're like "hahahahahhahahah -talks to friend at side in french-" "what did you say?" ".....nothing, something stuuupid." WHAT IS THIS EFFERY? i don't mind it too much here aside from the fact that it's really dirty though AND YOU GUYS AREN'T HERE. YOU KNOW WHAT'S REALLY FUNNY. french kids singing american music. LALALAL HAHAHAHAHA. it's so funny. i wish you could come watch them do these things avec moi. other good things. food. not the food at school. it's ten billion times worse than solebury. i don't eat it even though you have to pay 5.80 euros REGARDLESS. i'm afraid of getting sick. but everywhere else? SUPPERBBBB. uhm. let's see. i feel super colorful because everyone wears black and has brown hair. if i ever get to watching a movie, i'll tell you guys about it. the last thing i watched was "mr. and mrs. smith" a few days after i got here because it's the only thing that has been on in english. not the one with angelina jolie and brad pitt, though, the one from 1941. i actually liked it. i like old black and white movies haha. (: awhile ago i watched cat on a hot tin roof ("I FEEL ALL THE TIME LIKE A CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF." "THEN JUMP OFF THE ROOF, MAGGIE, JUMP OFF IT.") and OHHHH the other movie i watched in english here was "who's afraid of virginia woolf?" so. conclusion: french people like old american movies. they don't watch them probably, but i do now! ...all the time because i dont understand anything else. okay i'm good now. well i'll write tomorrow because all the kids are "en stage" or something and i cant go to school. LOTSSSAAA LOVE AND THOSE BISOUX THINGS THAT KIDS HERE CALL THE B'S, THEO/GINNY. :D POST-SCRIPT-PRE-POST-SCRIPT. PSPPS. MY GOSHH DANG PETITS MUFFINS WENT STALE.

ps. also if at any point sebastian sees this, he should know that i am very very very sorry i have not sent him a postcard yet. D: i'm a sick monstahh at the moment and have no postcards. >____<>

the purposes of education are relevance and social uprise

now i am going to be uploading songs here instead of doing work! oh no.

i'm actually sick and can barely speak coherently, so i am posting one song that i recorded a bit ago, and a song i recorded a few days ago which is ambient. i hope this is excusable. i have no idea how to sing the former, but this style seemed kinda-somewhat appropriate. maybe it's not, at all.

http://www.adrive.com/home/downloadfile/258186922
http://www.adrive.com/home/downloadfile/258186577

Sebastian's doin' good guys! I sawr it with my own eyes

This whole thing is very exciting!
I think this is the only one I have that I haven't shown anyone yet. It's still kind of in its rough stages but I think this is good because maybe you can like, give me feedback or something? I don't know. I'm not around any instruments right now. Unless you count my gourd flute. but that would be little hard to manage with the singing and all. Unless I did it as separate layers on Audacity or whatever. But that never seems to work. Anyway:

http://www.adrive.com/home/downloadfile/258103079

Love you guys,
???????

I Gotta Lose This Skin: The Madness of Bronson

The facts of the case:

Bronson is a film directed by Nicolas Winding Refn starring Tom Hardy as Michael Peterson, a real man who's still alive, a criminal who had his name legally changed to Charles Bronson. He remains Britain’s most famous and most violent prisoner, so claims the script and I’m inclined to believe them. The film’s conceit is simple: an ultra stylish trip inside the mind and life of Bronson focusing on his stays in jail where he engages in fistfights as frequently as possible. A man beats people nearly to death in jail. Not a lot to hinge a film on, I think you’ll agree, yet I loved it. Does it say something about me? The films? England? I’m going to try to figure out how we get to Bronson and why I love it so much.

The 'Real' Charles Bronson

The ride to Bronson:

I’m an impressionable young man. Perhaps unimpressed with my own personality, I’ve always sought direction in charismatic leading men. Lucky for me, British Pop culture is full of them. They swagger, stagger, bristle and brim with love and confidence in themselves and their stories highlight lifestyles (bad, good, destructive…. mostly destructive) that I’d never be able to get away with. First of all, they terrify me to consider them, but that doesn’t stop me from emulating them in the little ways I can. This love of mine, searching for a path and a style to stand in awe of has led me to films, books and music that I would fight to assert their genius among others. Were it not the slurring and screaming likes of Ian McColluch, Joe Strummer or Shane McGowan, I doubt very much I’d have spent as much as I have on vinyl copies of the best records by Echo & The Bunnymen, The Clash or The Pogues. I wouldn’t go deaf listening to them either. But I do. If it weren’t for the singular charm of the hero of A Clockwork Orange (and I mean Anthony Burgess, the book’s relentless purveyor of fascinating prose more than Alex, the hero of the novel), I doubt very much I’d prize it above the hopelessly bourgeois and tame required reading of most literature courses. Something must come screaming out of the gate with two cocked fists, a mouth full of profance promises and what they lack in muscle they must make-up for in style in order to qualify as a hero – a métier, to steal a phrase, this time from Volker Schlöndorff and Torben Skjødt Jensen. I found these figures just as frequently in the directors of the films whose characters I so envied. Jean-Pierre Melville for instance, despite being married, was just as appealing an outcast as any character Alain Delon played for him. He looked like Hunter Thompson plus the 3 stone Tom Hardy put on to play Charlie Bronson, though mostly in paunch rather than muscle, he wore a suit and cowboy hat, made moody and beautiful films about violence and the cult of personality surrounding gangsters. He romanticized and improved a form that most people simply tried to present. But the one thing he didn’t do was make ordinary examples of the form. The best of his three war films, 1969’s Army of Shadows, shows a man deeply troubled by violence, paranoia and warfare. The film is exceptionally dark and is one of the first films, along with Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent to stare collaboration and the lie that is wartime heroism in the face and show you just how ugly and horrifying and glory-free it all is. Shepitko is another figure I much idolize, cut down in a car accident in the middle of directing her last film like the James Dean of auteurs. Her films are stunning, brutal and are largely about outsiders, dying and breaking the rules because they are compelled to do so; they have no choice. Their bodies push them forward even as they seem to know how dangerous and futile their decisions are. Not a one of hers or Melville’s films ends on a high note, though their implications are positive with regard to the temple-like figures of their heroes. Who cares that they died? It’s how they got there that interests us. It’s what they did with their final days. All of this logic is crucial in understanding Bronson, or anyway its fundamental appeal to me as scurrilous cineaste and as pacifist become vicariously violent through art and artists.

Bronson’s life starts most probably in 1971 with the film A Clockwork Orange. Stanley Kubrick must be commended for choosing Burgess’s novel as the basis of a film; it was dangerous, one of the myriad at one time deemed unfilmable by people who seem to have nothing better to do than talk about the cinematic quality of classic novels; incidentally even the earliest films were based on novels, so I think that’s enough of that talk. We’ve seen Catch-22, The 120 Days of Sodom and Trainspotting (on which more anon) not only turn into films but films that compliment their sources and have become classics in their own right and one of these days Gilliam is going to get Don Quixote right. Nothing is impossible (though Great Gatsby has proven difficult). But what Kubrick proved is that prose can become cinematic if given the proper amount of respect (that is to say, not too much) and if you allow your images to take the place of expository description and the like. It was also dangerous because it was so intoxicating; youths took to the streets in perhaps exaggerated sprees of criminal behavior and tellingly the rip-offs began hitting theatres the very next year. It does seem perfunctory to have to tell you to steer clear of Killer’s Moon and Murder in a Blue World, but I’m going to have to tell a brutal truth at this point. Bronson has been called “Kubrickian” in its notices, which is a polite way of saying it’s a lot like Clockwork Orange. So, yes, it shares a common gene with Kubrick. The differences however are important. First of all, Refn’s style is ten times as intoxicating as Kubrick’s. The thing that bothers me most about Kubrick is the static quality of so many of his images. Large portions of Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket and nearly all of Barry Lyndon just sit there; it’s as if Kubrick stumbled upon people modeling for an impressionistic paintings with his thoroughly non-discriminating camera. The frame is too big and the actors move through so languorously that I can’t help but be drawn out of the narrative and just imagine Kubrick sitting behind the camera. I don’t deny that Barry Lyndon has gorgeous photography or that Clockwork has some very arresting images but his choreographed action is so lackluster that I can’t really be drawn in. It appears as though after 2001’s critical and commercial success, he determined that what sells is slow, unmoving shots. He wasn’t wrong; Lyndon, Clockwork and Jacket are considered classics by everyone but myself and a few other insolent cinephiles I’ve met. The Shining is a much more mobile film and thus escapes my criticism; in fact I love The Shining. But in Clockwork the stuff that stays with me is the ingenious use of close-up and imposing claustrophobia. In fact if you were asked to remember what most stays with you about Clockwork I’d put money on it being the close-up on Alex’s eyes, first with one painted in the opening scenes and then when they’re pried open during therapy. I’d also venture to guess that the scenes of Alex and his friends wailing on the old fellow in the underpass as another memorable visual; this makes sense. The shadows of the boys, the roof over their heads and the roof they form over the old man all create limits and make the movement seem more deft. There are boundaries; a never-ending frame is the ending of narrative coherence and immediacy in Kubrick films. In Full Metal Jacket for example the corridors of the basic training camp give way to open skies as the men are put through the ringer. The feeling of endlessness is perpetual and it bores me terribly, nevermind that I find part one of Jacket a less effective retread of his thesis in Clockwork. And the other thing you’ll likely come away from Clockwork with fond memories of is Malcolm McDowell. Granted Kubrick was his director but McDowell’s charisma was not exactly in short supply; find Lindsay Anderson’s superior 1968 film If…. and one discovers that it isn’t so much that McDowell was perfect for Clockwork but that Clockwork was perfect for McDowell. Usually it is a confluence between the purest filtration of a director’s style and a film centered on a highly likable scoundrel that results in the ‘film that they’ll remember me for’. Kubrick’s filmography is loaded with them, as is Martin Scorsese’s, John Huston’s, Roman Polanski’s.... Bill Murray has made a career of making films for directors with very specific visions all the better for featuring his wizened face and much welcome cynicism. McDowell, for his part, is tremendous, I just think the film fails him, but no one notices because he is so fascinating a protagonist and he carries the film from the first reel to the last. We love the loner, the outsider, the hard man.

Tom Hardy as Bronson

And despite my complaints, Clockwork was hugely important and after all without it, we wouldn’t have Bronson at all. We can trace the film’s theme of violent boys being reformed and taught about life on through to last night when I watched it (illegally) for the first time. The 70s are loaded with people not unlike Alex from Clockwork – Sonny Wortzik & Travis Bickle foremost among them. People who lived by violence and whom by the end, we learn, hadn’t changed a wit. Why were these characters so compelling, Oscar-worthy, even? Because we cannot just blow our enemies away and as the films were wont to illustrate, innocent people could be caught in the line of fire. Kubrick saw this when mockwork crimes began plaguing English streets and he tried to have the film pulled from cinemas rather than cause anyone any harm. Though he was undeniably trying to do the right thing, he didn’t. Censorship will not solve problems and it was clear that he needed the public’s favour if he were ever to make films again. Even if it was some backwards way of scaring up more publicity (a banishment is golden in exploitation cinema, after all) Kubrick was not prepared to stand by his film’s vision of violence-as-salvation which says to me that he was not the man to direct it (my opinion of the film's quality notwithstanding). What people really did want to see was the story of a boy who finds solace in ‘the old ultra-violence’ and engages in it whenever he can. The torturous therapy that cures him is just as engaging and horrifying as his crimes so we let it slide. The film becomes neutered when its hero does too. No longer chock full of rage and the urge to maim, he and the film wanders between set-pieces until the film and Alex commit suicide and are reborn. We are finally given an ending that gives us all the film promises: two giant speakers, classical music and venerable violence. It’s a disgusting moral but its also one of the greatest moments in any Kubrick film. What does this say? That style can account for even the lewdest and lowest of morals. In fact if an artist's style can make-up for, even allow for violence and cruelty, then aren’t we in the presence of a true artist? I’m not saying violence is good (I was raised Quaker, not that it all stuck) but I’m saying when a director can sell you on the ‘idea’ of violence (read: anything difficult) he has proven himself (at this time I'd like to point out that gender distinctions are arbitrary in the utmost; a director is a director, male, female, black, white, straight, gay, human. I say him in this case because both Refn and Kubrick were men but in general my use of pronouns is arbitrary and unimportant. Himself is the same thing as saying actor as far as I'm concerned. An actor and an actress have the same job, so why put gender in the equation at all, why give them awards for having been born plus or minus a Y chromosome?). And who doesn’t crack that same smile as Alex when the film closes? Does that make you murderous, cruel, violent, sadistic? No, I should think not, otherwise wouldn’t the world resemble Burgess’s vision of a post-manners England over-run by Nadsat spewing punks who are just as committed to being aesthetes as they are rapists.

Violence and boys-behaving-badly mark a good many great films as well as a good many bad films, but it’s fairly easy to spot the good ones from the lousy ones. Ken Loach’s excellent Looks and Smiles gives us two youths brawling as they can’t find work or much else to do. Their fights, in traditional Loach wide-angle observation, are hypnotic, to be sure, and gain added power by their taking place in one instance just outside a rock club. And what is Punk and its younger brother Post-Punk if not the same kind of energy given purely aural form? The appeal of the Sex Pistols I would argue is much the same as the appeal of Clockwork, albeit for different ends. In fact, the whole notion of punk rock feeds the notion of the charismatic fighting man against the system. Charlie Bronson takes on the system in a very literal sense except he has no message he just has himself. Punk Rock out of context makes the struggle of the centuries most angry lyricists and fills the ears of kids who can’t really understand what it was like to live under Margaret Thatcher. And there is a power embedded in those songs to be sure. They bring you to life with their immediacy; you too can feel like Bronson, bursting with energy, looking to fight someone albeit for different ends. To quote Tymon Dogg in his collaboration with the Clash, “I gotta lose this skin I’m imprisoned in.” And if the fact that the skin on Bronson’s face seems ready to fall off following his final confrontation with the guards, he’s almost succeeded. His arrogance and his quest for fame in what is plainly a no-fame game, mirrors the opening to the first song on the first Echo & The Bunnymen album, Crocodiles. “Anybody watching my film?” asks Ian McColluch brashly yet coolly on “Going Up” another way of saying ‘straight to the top’ which is what Bronson wants to do himself and what we hope he achieves. Bronson, like McColluch, like this film that bears his name, is an actor in need of an audience.

Briefly, however, we can chart the rise of charismatic criminal from Long Good Friday (Bob Hoskins as pugnacious overlord of a violent empire, at his most sensitive just after cutting a man’s throat), on to minor scenes in Ken Loach’s oeuvre as in My Name is Joe and Raining Stones (in a rare moment of absolute sympathy, Loach shows the church granting absolution to a man who beat a loan shark with a tire iron and caused his fatal car crash; he even treats the accidentally-on-purpose murder as the grounds for a sort of miraculous turn of events), then onto Danny Boyle’s beloved (by me especially) Trainspotting wherein junkie’s and pub pugilists are just as infatuating as they are terrifying, David Fincher’s Fight Club (Fincher himself a graduate of the grimy British school; his debut Alien³ is incredibly English and features a cast of uniformly bald and often insane criminals known to fight each other, all precursors to Tom Hardy’s Bronson) which makes a temple out of Brad Pitt’s bleeding and muscular figure; Guy Ritchie attempted the same kind of stylistic coup but failed with his 2000 film Snatch. That Pitt’s admittedly engaging performance wasn’t given center-stage probably had a lot to do with why the film is nowhere near as good as it could have been; it’s too busy for its own good. Richie and the others were onto something, though: style + plus enthralling leading man = something….

The Appeal of Bronson:

Really, what we can say is that these films all hint at what makes Bronson so captivating to a certain audience. Fight Club, Trainspotting and Looks and Smiles all offer redemption to their heroes; Bronson doesn’t want your pity, your salvation or your narrative coherence (it's not hard to follow but miss the opening and you're in for a treat). Bronson is as effective as the director and star are to you. Nicolas Winding Refn meticulously crafts every disgusting interior, stages every lavish angle, picks every piece of music with the utmost care; the film is his style, his obsessions, given life. He wrote it, he directed it, and so everything but Tom Hardy is his. Tom Hardy is, like McDowell to Kubrick before him, playing Refn’s character, putting on the make-up chosen for him, saying the dialogue written for him, but there’s simply no way you can think of Bronson as anything other than Tom Hardy’s best performance to date. Hardy plays a hard man, a career criminal who doesn’t like the crime so much as he likes paying for it. He is a pillar, a statue, all gorgeous sinew and hilariously non-sexual eroticism (to a point). He delivers every line with just the right combination of awe, conviction and fury. He is simple yet undeniably complicated; what makes a man so violent? There’s nothing in his past that quite explains it, even if they do show you that it was clearly a problem from the start. But really the enigma of the character is welcome. Do we care how Alex got to be so violent? No, but do we want to see him run riot through wasted streets? Absolutely. Tom Hardy’s Bronson is the appeal and the horrors of violence, of having no filter between the id and reality. He wants to fight, has to fight and practically bursts out of his skin trying to get someone to fight ("Gotta lose this skin"). We, too, want him to fight; it’s the film’s fucking conceit, after all: a deranged man who looks like a cross between Zeus and Jan Hieronimko from Vampyr beating the hell out of everyone and anyone he pleases. And the success of such a spectacle, as anyone who’s seen the trailer for Bronson can tell you, is how stylistically it’s carried out. Of course watching a man fight another man is not necessarily cinematic. With Refn, known in Denmark as l’Enfant Sauvage, behind the camera however the spectator is allowed to beg for him to kidnap another guard and wait for a fight. There are a number of moments in the film that attest to the power of both Refn’s style (standing in for the style of our best directors) and Hardy’s performance and the spectacle of his many brawls. Think of it this way, Bronson the character, Tom Hardy the actor and Nic Refn the director represent the same urge in the viewer. The more we want to see Hardy act like a nut, the more we want to see Bronson fight people, the more we want to be overwhelmed by Refn’s crazed style, the more the film wins you over; the film’s powers are in essence three-fold but they are equal. We want the violence, we want Hardy to go off the rails, and we want Refn’s style to go unchecked. Refn proves as much with the few lulls in the three powers at work. The first when Bronson is sent to an insane asylum and drugged to drooling; Hardy can’t do much with the character, Refn’s scenes of the asylum are funny, to be sure, but they lose their appeal just around the time Bronson has his fill of the place and strangles a fellow inmate. The same can be said when Bronson is called ‘sane’ and let out, one of the film’s few diversions from fact. Hardy’s performance is allowed a touch of nuance and Refn shows us that the real world can be just as soul-crushing as the inside but what it does more than anything is remind us how much we, and Charlie, wish we were back in prison. The stint we all do on the outside could even be said to be a fantasy: someone like Bronson can’t make it on the outside and he knows it; Refn also can’t control every aspect of the production, either; we expect things on the outside that we don’t of solitary confinement in this or that prison. Suburban living (even the perverted kind that Bronson does) does not suit him. Here we get treated to a New Order song as if to remind us that things are just as bad as they were in Trainspotting; indeed Bronson has an addiction just as strong as Boyle’s junkies. He’s soon fighting dogs in dark halls and robbing jewelry stores (Robert Carlyle’s Begbie in Trainspotting does the same thing) before he’s finally back where we want him. It’s proof that someone like Bronson can’t and shouldn’t be let outdoors and there’s no proof in the story that what we’ve just seen isn’t just the flaws in even considering his release. After all, wouldn’t it just be like a lunatic to classify himself ‘sane’ to prove how insane he really is?

What’s more Refn’s film nicely dovetails with a kind of ‘American’ theme, the same thing that Boyle’s film was criticized for at the time of its release. It’s a rags-to-riches story, sort of. Bronson’s cooing that he’s going to “make a name for myself” is hardly news, but it’s simply the way he plans on doing it that really sets him apart. At his most ambitious, he wants to be an underground fighting sensation, but normally he just wants to get naked and beat the merciful shit out of everyone in the prison system. Really more of a rags-to-rags story isn’t it? And this makes a kind of sense as Refn is himself an outsider so his view of the English justice system and the way they punish criminals in films is at odds with the natives’. So instead of taking on the institutionalization of criminals in something resembling an orderly fashion (let’s not forget his hero is a criminally unbalanced psycho/sociopath who deserves every second of his sentence) he simply uses it as a springboard. To be fair, his portrayal of the prison system is no more or less incendiary than that in Steve McQueen’s perfect Hunger, about the hunger strikes in the Maze prison in the 1980s, except that instead of quelling a revolution, the guards in Bronson are stopping a one-man show. So, in essence, Bronson gets everyone, even his final no-nonsense warden, to play his game and listen just like the imaginary audience he tells his story to. And in the same way, Refn gets you to play his game, letting you soak up his style like a piece of bread in English stew.

To prove Refn’s capability as a stylician (my word) take the climactic stint in the art room. The plot comes nearly to a halt as Bronson holds his art teacher hostage in a cozy carpeted art room (the real Bronson is in actuality a fairly talented artist and has won awards, so his kinship with Strummer and McColluch and even Refn and Kubrick is a little more assured). He paints the face of his hapless hipster art teacher until he resembles a Magritte. It’s a nakedly show-offy gesture by both the character Bronson and Refn but unlike, say Quentin Tarentino, neither man relishes in their creation in the same way. If we compare this to Brad Pitt’s “This might be my masterpiece” line that closes Tarentino’s masturbatory (though fun) Inglourious Basterds, Refn emerges the more thoughtful and less arrogant auteur. Tarentino may not actually believe his movie is his finest achievement to date, but the implication is right there in the dialogue and I choose to believe he does. After all, the man hasn’t made a film that doesn’t feel like it was written with action figures in over ten years. Refn takes a slightly different tack. He concludes his most stylish film to date with his most stylish gesture to date and Bronson admits that the painting was simply one part of him, something he was encouraged to do by the art teacher whose face he paints. This isn’t all that Bronson has in him, like the film itself in relation to its creator, it was something that simply needed to be done. Is Bronson the best film Refn’s ever done? Well it certainly isn’t from a narrative standpoint, but this was not the point of Bronson, as I’ve illustrated. So just after we take a moment to see that this was an exercise, Hardy turns off the artistry, screams, “alright, he’s had enough,” and lets the guards rush him with batons and riot gear. 'He' is also us. Enough artistry for artistry’s sake (that is to say a gesture out of context, something that is brilliant, sure, but says nothing of the film's theme), let’s do what we do best. The guards swarm in; Bronson, dressed in black paint, waits at the bottom of a staircase (that great cinematic symbol of absolutely anything the filmmaker/critic wishes) and then 'the man' charges at him. He loses the fight, so does Refn; his film isn’t being hailed as anything other than a stylish Clockwork Orange disciple. The establishment, I feel fine saying, is wrong in this case. You cannot keep Bronson down, you cannot help but love Hardy’s performance and any punk with a head on his shoulders should be able to see what a gorgeous and truly awesome piece of art Bronson is; better, I feel, than Clockwork.

A final point. When the film premiered in the UK, Refn had recorded Charlie Bronson himself saying that he endorsed the film because it immortalized him; he was sorry, sure, but he got what he wanted so he wasn’t exactly repentant either. Refn’s recording of the voice of his inspiration (illegal in the UK as the man still sits in HMP Wakefield) points out that Refn believes in his work in a way that Kubrick did not. Take the final (ok, one's penultimate) scenes of each film. In Clockwork the speakers are rolled in and we get a fantasy of rape and violence in Alex’s mind, his urges restored. Refn has the speakers brought in by armed guards to show that Bronson is still a dangerous criminal and he hasn’t changed because he hasn’t needed to. Society cannot force him to be complacent and any attempt to do so is both futile and unjust. If his painted face and Lennon-like sunglasses are any indication, he is an artist of the violent, his body one glorious muscle, his final act in the film is to take the powers that be in hand and go down fighting. Alex cannot fight at the end of the film; he’s been rendered immobile and is a tool of the system, even if internally he’s won his own battle (the book’s ending is not in total harmony with the film’s ending). Refn’s style and his apocalyptic worldview cannot be contained in a hospital bed; they need to be put in a cage like Bronson in order to be stopped (not that I want that). So what does this mean? Well, despite the film’s similarities I don’t think of Bronson as imitation or even homage, I think of it as Clockwork the film done right. All the mistakes, every dull frame of Kubrick's film, have been corrected and the film does right by the hero and sticks to its guns (pun intended). Bronson feels like a schizophrenic diary read happily by its owner, Clockwork feels like someone not up to the task wheedling the truth out of someone it pities. In the end Bronson may be the more sadistic of the two but it also has the benefit of being released at a time when it has none of the power that Clockwork had. It has nothing or no one to fight with, which is a shame because I think Refn and Hardy could tackle the censorship board easy. I think Bronson won’t be seen as the superior or the more bold film but I believe it is both as it removes all but the faintest of morals from the script, leaving much more up to you to decipher rather than to have Bronson say “I learned my lesson well”. There’s no need for it. Clockwork was openly political but it got both its politics and its memorable dialogue from Burgess. Bronson speaks for itself eloquently and is the sort of gorgeous freakshow I live to see. Real horrorshow.

potential music blog

hey everyone!

i'm wondering if anyone would be interested in starting a blog:

where we could post songs we wrote/are writing, recodings, or (as cutie has been doing) videos of us playing.

maybe it could even just be for creative works? poetry/art/etc.. i don't know if film punk is meant for this. should we just use film punk?

the inspiration for this:

i have a playlist of songs that my friends have recorded, and right now it has 123 songs total. it's wonderful to have and to listen to your friends singing and writing. i think everyone would agree that it's wonderful to have around

and you're all so far away D: except for holly & twohair..

so, does anybody else favour this? post suggestions in the comment box.

thank you everyone

love,
shelly

My Favourite Films Volume 13: Murderous Maids

When you watch movies as frequently as I do, as frequently as if it was your job, it takes a good deal more than good to make an impact on you. You need a story just a little out of the realm of popular fiction, you need characters who are compelling and different from those of age-old fiction, you need odds that are great but crucially they need to amount to something greater than the usual emotional catharsis. You need something more than what just anybody can do. You need something to just come roaring out of silence and not give you the chance to compare it to anything else. That doesn't happen all that often but it happened when after a long time putting it off for no real reason I watched Jean-Pierre Denis' first film after a nearly 15 year hiatus from making feature films, Murderous Maids. Filling in the blanks in the true story of the Papin Sisters, an infamous footnote in pre-war French history, Denis' mix of true crime, psychological horror, romance and historical drama is spellbinding and had me glued to the spot in ways that so few films have.

Murderous Maids
by Jean-Pierre DenisThe Papin sisters were doomed to lives of hardship. From the day their mother dropped the eldest two, Emilia and Christine, at a convent, their alienation from normality was assured. Emilia used to hold out hope that their father would come for them but that faded soon enough and before long she'd given herself to a life steeped in the faith taught to her by the sisters. Christine lost a sister and a friend when Emilia became a nun and as soon as she was old enough entered into the field of indentured servitude as a maid. With her earnings she would spend enough on herself to survive and the rest would go her little sister Léa, who soon became the only thing in the world Christine cared about. The story proper starts in the 1930s. The Papin's mother keeps a house for them while Léa is at school and Christine works. Léa worships Christine and looks forward to becoming a maid as well to take the financial burden off of her mother but Christine is aghast at the prospect of her sister going to work, especially in a job she knows to be grueling and thankless. When their mother decides that 14 is old enough to start working and sends Léa to train, Christine is furious. Her demands and protestations amount only to ensuring that they work in the same household once Léa has been properly groomed. Christine’s battle to hold Léa’s attention and favour over their mother and her own troubled relationships lead her to begin showing signs of mental fatigue. Voices and loud noises creep in and cause her great pain and distraction while she works. It isn’t long before her abnormal behavior and suspicions cause her and Léa’s dismissal from the household they work in.

Undeterred, Christine begins looking for another house in need of two maids but such circumstances don’t come along every day. When her mother’s boyfriend makes advances on Christine one day, what little safety she may have felt in her home vanishes. She settles for a job working in the Lancelin household which already has one maid. Luckily for Christine that maid is fed up with her conditions and leaves over a torn stitch a few days into Christine’s tenure, leaving a space easily filled by the younger Papin sister. Now that the two live in the same bedroom Christine tries desperately to get Léa to see the world for what it is and dream of more than mediocrity. She gets her sister to hate their mother as well and soon they only talk to each other. While away at a hunting party with the Lancelins, Christine sees something dangerous in Léa’s eyes when they’re alone. They seem to invite her near but Christine won't let herself be drawn in. That night she doesn’t sleep, but stays up furious and scared by the pleasure she feels when close to her young sister.

I have unfortunately never seen his early work, but it's tempting to conclude that Jean-Pierre Denis’ break from feature films must have taught him an awful lot about how to master them. The story of the Papin sisters has been dramatized before but I’ve never seen it done like this, never balancing innocence and guilt so evenly. His film crosses so many lines unceremoniously that you hardly notice that what you’re so riled up about would seem scandalous if you saw it happen first hand. He builds a repressive, tormented atmosphere by simply painting a realistic picture of life in France for those living in poverty and showing that it isn’t simply that the sisters are poor that does this to them. What brings out Christine’s demons is the pain of broken expectations. She starts the film by saying that she’s waited on her father her whole life. Emilia’s insistence that their father will rescue them evaporates when Emilia herself sees that there is no hope and dons her nun’s habit and abandons Christine and Léa to the mercy of their selfish mother. Christine has hope for Léa and tries to engender some of it in a young sister who cannot see beyond what confronts her everyday; her dreams of owning fine things makes Christine angry, for she’s been planning a better life for her sister for all of her own miserable existence and the thought of her sister being seduced by the finery of the catty women she slaves away for is to her a sort of betrayal. Léa's future is what keeps Christine alive and temporarily sane. When that dream life slips further and further out of Christine’s grasp and Léa doesn’t fight for it, her own life becomes even more of a mystery. Her love as a sister becomes a need for pleasure, for something certain. She cannot provide her sister with a better life so she gives her the sexual attention that she seems to beg for in her big, innocent yet ultimately unreadable eyes. And when even that fleeting but damned solace is threatened, the act that has been promised since the opening finally comes. I was so swept up in the promise of their happiness that I begged for everything to turn out well when I knew it couldn't, when I knew it was 'wrong'. I wanted their cries for help to be heard. I can’t help but feel that it’s a perfect film when the director can make you wish for things that on any other day you’d find reprehensible, unforgivable. And because Denis was able to turn the most repulsive of stories, a descent into madness with many hard discoveries along the way, into something so engrossing and so heartfelt that I was moved to the point of speechlessness, he shows complete mastery of the form. One cannot help but feel deeply for Sylvie Testud, who as Christine ignites the screen with her subtle facial ticks and immovable presence as she submits to madness at the hands of her employers; she screams for respite with the same fury that she quietly refuses to take orders that she feels belittle her. Her hold on her own life and mind becomes more tenuous as the film goes on and Testud makes us feel every slip of her fingers.

Perhaps Denis’ greatest accomplishment is that he does what he does free of frill or artifice. Murderous Maids simply progresses in a slightly fragmented straight line. Told as a series of interactions between Christine and the rest of the world (and occasionally her own inner turmoil) the film shows us her hopes rising and falling. His shots are fleeting and his editing swift but everything is clear as crystal and nothing is superfluous (there is no music, for instance to draw you from the dialogue, which is the first time that I've really noticed that the drama and horror is all right there on the faces of the lead actors. If you feel something, it is because of his direction or the performances of Sylvie Testud and Julie-Marie Parmentier). And because the story is told so straight-forwardly, only showing us what is necessary to understand the conclusion (in other words, what’s missing from the case files), it’s astonishing that Denis wrings so much beauty and passion from the story. He tells it virtually as a reenactment but the performances and the situations he creates are so heartbreaking that it’s as if he’s spent much more time lingering over embraces and filling our heads with the inner monologue of the characters than he has. And his sparse style would predict major filmmaking trends for the decade that followed; the same no-frills, distant-yet-claustrophobic feel can be found (to much different ends, of course. Denis didn’t so much inform them as predict them) in films as different as Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River and Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah. He’s such a capable storyteller that he needs only his brilliant actors to draw you in with the telling of a story. It’s in those few moments, those perfectly lit glimpses into the few intimate gestures that the Papin sisters shared that Denis shows us that it didn’t matter that they were capable of murder. All that matters is that they understood that love is what is most important in the world. Removed from it, as they were, it’s no wonder they acted the way they did. Christine lived a life with virtually none in it so that her affection was contorted into something so hideous is not in the least surprising. What’s surprised me is how completely I felt for her as she was persecuted by everyone, even herself.

My Favourite Films Volume 12

When I first started reviewing movies I was a bored high school senior looking to thumb my nose at the established school curriculum and teach friends of mine about how zombie films are just as relevant as great pieces of literature in explaining the zeitgeist of the date of their release. David Cronenberg's Rabid, I would argue is just as rich a text as The Yellow Wallpaper when examining feminine roles in society. But then, my theories haven't exactly been adopted by the masses and taught at Ivy League schools, have they? So while the jury is still out on the relevance and/or sanity of some of my ideas, I would like to say that examining the history and thematic content of horror films is important. Texts don't have to be pedagogical to be informative, they can can in fact be pulpy and comic. And in order to appreciate their impact, one must examine their inception and their relation to other art works at the time. Which brings me to Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête or as you'll know it Beauty and the Beast. It has been called the greatest cinematic fairy tale and I wholeheartedly agree but I'd like to posit that it is also a fairy tale for adults because no matter how fantastic it gets, it's purpose is never outside of the ordinary. It is a film that even now, sixty three years after it's release at the time of my writing, has the uncanny ability to excite, mystify and enchant. It seems fitting to start this by miming those oft-repeated signifiers of the fantastical as the director himself does at the opening of his film: Once upon a time...

La Belle et la Bête

by Jean Cocteau

Belle is a poor country girl who lives to serve her father and (less favourably) her two piggish sisters. Her brother, Ludovico is 'a scoundrel and proud of it' and spends much of his time gambling and drinking with his friend Avenant. Avenant has had designs on Belle for sometime but she refuses his frequent proposals of marriage because she will not leave her father's side. He has fallen on hard times and his latest investment, cargo of some sort being transfered in a number of ships, has apparently dried up as none of the ships showed up. Creditors are breathing down his neck so when news that one of those ships has finally shown up, he rushes off to get it. Belle is happy to see her father in high spirits again, her sisters are happy because the wealthy lifestyle they've been faking can finally become a reality again, and Ludovico is happy because he's racked up serious gambling debts and needs his father's earnings to pay them off. Before departing, their father asks if they would like anything brought back from his trip. Belle, wanting to be humble, asks only for a rose, a request that though pure of intention (her sisters ask for a monkey and a parakeet) will wind up changing everybody's life.

The news of the ship turns out to be a wash as creditors have seized the cargo by the time the poor man arrives to collect it. He doesn't even have enough money to stay at an inn so, defeated, he rides home in the dark...or attempts to, I should say. Somewhere in the forest he happens upon an estate that looks to have fallen into slight disrepair, majestic though it seems. In fact there's something downright spooky about it; doors open for him before he reaches them and the entry way is lit by a row of disembodied arms supporting candelabra. The hands guide him to a dinner table set with finery and he is half-shocked, half-relieved when more arms serve him wine and food; he's so at ease in the strange place that he falls asleep. When he awakes, to the sound of an animal's roaring, not unlike a lion, he runs for the exit. Finding no master of the house present, he seems ready to leave but remembering his promise to Belle, he plucks a rose on his way out. This brings the master, a six foot tall beast with a lion's face and the clothes of a lord, around at once. He tells the old man that because he has stolen the rose, the thing he loves most, he shall now have to die unless one of the daughters he mentions feels like taking his place. Before the man can protest, the beast sends him off on an enchanted horse back to his house. When he's through explaining the terrifying detour to his children, Belle is determined to make up for her error. She leaves under cover of darkness for the beast's castle and prepares to accept her punishment.

La Belle et la Bête is an incredibly important film for a number of reasons. It represents that rare time that the concept of 'love' is given the proper fantastical treatment. In reality, the notion is just as silly to think of as would a far-off kingdom where your dreams come true and Jean Cocteau, I believe, realized that there was a good deal of power in his story. To let yourself be seduced by the world of La Belle et la Bête is to be persuaded that the idea of romantic love is very real. It's no wonder Walt Disney and a generation of bottom-line chasing television executives would use the story (originally by Lepince De Beaumont) ad nauseam for the next 60 years. Subsequent adaptation and most straight fairy tales have nothing of Cocteau's wonderful command of the story. For not only does the movie tell a beautiful story, the telling is just as remarkable. The images of the beast's castle are all amazing; the effect shots of the arms that 'dress and arrange Belle's hair' remain impressive and haunting. Everything in the castle is lit and shot imaginitively, making everything appear just as otherworldly as they're described. The beast himself is actually pretty well-executed. Jean Marais' face and visible appendages are covered in fur and it is rather conspicuous, but at the same time he has a dignity and frightening quality (an otherness that comes across in the full commitment to the make-up) missing from Lawrence Talbot or Will Randall. He needs that bit of dignity of course because we have to fall in love with him long before Belle does. Her trip home would be nothing but a detour through the first act again without the weight built in of his mental state. Cocteau can be forgiven for not making him a bit scarier (it was 1946, after all, there were only so many ways to make a beast) as we ultimately have to sympathize with him, but I like him all the same. Marais characterization is pretty excellent and there is a bit of the sexual fury one might expect in such a character. Nowhere near as vile as Walerian Borowczyk's take, Marais instead appears in front of Belle's door, his fur smoking (part of his legend stipulates it does so whenever he kills something), covered in blood and roaring like a lion. That stuff works doubly well because it mirrors the kind of romantic situation that so often crumbles under scrutiny. How often does the perfect man turn out to be an abusive brute? Tennessee Williams would got a lot of mileage out of the same dichotomy. So did the makers of poetic realist films, a retroactively labeled genre of movies that ended with the onset of World War 2, largely because the makers of those films fled to safety. Movies like Les Bas-Fonds, Le Jour Se Leve, Pépé le Moko, Le Quai De Brumes and La Bête Humaine all fetishized lost men prone to violent outbursts whom women tragically fall in love with. Marcel Carne's Les Enfants Du Paradis was seen by some as the genre's swansong, but I like to think of La Belle et la Bête is the more fitting concluding chapter in the saga as it flirts directly with fantasy, instead of just romantic love, and gives all of those lost men and sad girls the happy ending they never got, while also explaining why they were never supposed to work. It has much of the genre's template (tragic romance, temperamental hero, obscene amounts of hair-light) except that for once the female is the center of attention, though she's often upstaged by Marais. It was the poetic realist film that embraced all the previously posed "what ifs" and second to Jean Renoir's Le Grande Illusion, it is more enjoyable than most of the classic poetic realist films (to clarify, I don't count Renoir's Le Règle De Jeu among those films, as it's completely alone in a genre of its own making). To see the sombre stories of the pre-war era come to a charming and transcendent post-war conclusion was a relief that French audiences needed. To see a character they liked and wanted to succeed fall victim to society and die before finding happiness was not an option now that such a tremendous tragedy had befallen the people of France; those characters, given such life by people like Jean Gabin and Marcel Dalio weren't just in the cinemas, they were on the streets and they needed a happy ending.

The 1946 release date brings with it implications that can't help but colour the narrative for better or worse. Nazism had just fallen, and the non-existent (or at least not filmed) kingdom of heaven that the prince offers Belle certainly carries more weight than just a typical fairy tale ending. As a gay man in France who'd just seen thousands of homosexuals murdered by a fascist regime, Cocteau was more than aware that dreams are not to be trusted. In fact before he started making films, he was well-known for a novella he'd written about 'deviant' sexual behavior that caused an uproar when it was first published in the 30s. He wasn't exactly in the fairy tale business at the start of his career. We can then see the brute man, hairy and violent yet elegant as an object of fantasy for both men and women (he never actually kisses Beauty, he simply stomps outside her door and holds her hand). Marais and Josette Day (who portrays Belle) both look as Aryan as can be and so a world where they can live with their dreams fulfilled is kept distinctly out of the realm of possibility (they exit in a cloud of mist or gas before their dream is fulfilled). Though Belle and her sisters have nordic builds and complexions, their father and Ludovico are typed like two Jewish men. Outsiders resigned to their lot in life, they live vicariously through Belle's experience with the beast, the king of deviants, who lives in a secluded and wonderful place, who, though bitter and lonely, is in thrall to no one and preys on deer to his heart's content. Marais' longing and distraction when he sees the stag is one of many excellent moments where he shines in his performance, even from behind all that make-up.

There's a cruciality to Marais portraying his three roles. As Avenant, he represents a handsomely mounted argument to leave her father (most likely to die) and become servile to his masculine wiles; in essence collaborating. As the beast, he is the world's forgotten and aberrant, living in exile, the problems of her dying father not really of any interest to him; tormented, persecuted, mocked, sexual, animal. As the prince in the conclusion, the answer supposedly to Belle's dreams, he is a strange compromise. They make reference to the fact that the prince is just a more attractive version of Avenant, which can be read a number of different ways, not the least of which is to simply be thankful for what you have. Avenant and the beast were in front of her for a long time and her indecision lead to a hybrid of the two, supposedly the best qualities of each. Of course that they then ride off into the clouds to a magical kingdom where she'll 'reunite with her father' (has he died?) and where 'her sisters will carry the train of her gown'. Romantic love perfectly fulfilled - she has her beast and her handsome french men in one elegantly dressed package - thus given the same magical quality as paradise, the same mystical place that thousands died believing they were headed to in the conflict whose death toll was still being calculated when La Belle et la Bête hit theatres. It's no coincidence that her dream is born out of the simultaneous death of both Avenant and the Beast. Cocteau's ending is thus a double-edged sword; we believe in the happy ending awaiting Belle behind all that smoke and the end titles because that is how fairy tales end and because we want her to have happiness but we also know that the idea of love being granted to a poor farm girl is just as ludicrous as anything else in the story and she may as well be headed for a mythic afterlife.

Of course, La Belle et la Bête isn't all morbid subtext. Cocteau's script is one of the most clever of the era. Cocteau doesn't get the credit he deserves for his wit (he was often called in to write the dialogue of other films when they lacked that extra something). The opening is a riot, with the deluded pauper girls trying to arrive at a party in a dignity befitting a wealth and class they no longer possess. Ludovico's comments to them are deft and hilarious pretty much throughout. Whenever Avenant interacts with the sisters, hilarity generally ensues as when Ludovico first urges Avenant to slap his sister, then staunchly defends her honor as soon as he's done it. His slightly drunk characterization is just as effective and believable as Marais' various turns and provides much needed respite from the shrewish sisters and the grave scenes with the beast. In this film is one of the earliest instances of dead-pan, Arrested Development-type humour I can remember seeing anywhere. Just after Belle's father comes home and announces they might once again be wealthy, Ludovico tries to turn the argument against Avenant, who moments earlier proposed to Belle. Belle's deadpan response after both men's histrionic accusations is perfectly executed and it's really very interesting to see such a well-worn, modern comic trope given the same kind of treatment it receives today to the same effect. I could see Jason Bateman delivering the same line just as well. Which brings me to my original point, that fuzzy monsters and romantic castles in the sky aside, this movie is as much for adults as for children. The richness of Cocteau's images and his dialogue has not subsided in the intervening years and I could see them captivating a child just as easily as they do aged critics and cranky cinemaphiles. I know of a good many twenty year old girls who adore the film because of its dream-like míse-en-scene and romantic storyline. The film has a nearly universal appeal (Philip Glass's opera, written to be performed as the film is projected, speaks to that) because it's such an engrossing story, with razor-sharp writing, broad comic gestures that anyone can appreciate, a romance with a million different interpretations waiting to be discovered and because, no matter what's really going on, who doesn't love a fairy tale with happy ending?

Cleaning Out My Desktop

Fake Criterion covers I designed a few months ago with photoshop.