Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara at the premiere of War Made Easy
Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara listen to Norman Solomon, founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Solomons’s documentary, War Made Easy, premiered tonight at the Quad and will be playing through March 20.
Feeling Nude these days
I’ve never paid too much attention to Radiohead until In Rainbows, and now I’m obsessed with it.
Don’t get any big ideas
They’re not going to happen.You paint yourself white
And fill in the noise
They’ll be something missing.And now that you’ve found it, it’s gone
and now that you feel it, you don’t.
You’ve gone off the rails.So, don’t get any big ideas,
They’re not going to happen.You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.
Obsessed, I assure you. Can’t do anything about it.
[By the way, have you noticed the slick interface of the YouTube player? Pretty cool.]
Technorati Tags:
Radiohead, Nude, In Rainbows
Technology is not good for my social life.
In a previous post, I mentioned how YouTube tried to undermine my sense of security about my social life. Now it’s Wordpress’s turn.
This morning I was reading Andrew Hinton’s blog. Andrew has just published a great article on personas on Boxes and Arrows where he quotes some of my thoughts on the subject. So, I read a few older posts, and I notice one on Wordpress comment notification fix, which talks about a bug in Wordpress that prevents new comment notifications to be sent.
I go back to my blog and check the comments tab in Wordpress and horror! There is a bunch of true comments stuck in the moderation queue together with the usual series of comment spam. (By the way, Andrew has a link to the fix, from Mark’s blog MeAndMyDrum. It worked for me.)
Dear commenters, forgive me for neglecting you. I just thought that people had stopped commenting on my blog, not that I was not receiving notifications for your comments. I apologize. I love your comments, really.
The allure of intellectual discomfort: Alain Resnais’ Last year at Marienbad
Note: Last year in Marienbad is playing at the Film Forum in NYC through January 31. This article contains spoilers: consider yourself warned if you have not watched the movie but you are planning to do so.
The “story”
A (Delphine Seyrig), accompanied by M (Sacha Pitoëff), who may or may not be her husband, and X (Giorgio Albertazzi), whom she may or may not have seen before, meet at an opulent European hotel that may or may not exist.
- Howard Schumann, CineScene
The title of the movie specifies a time (last year) and a place (Marienbad). Yet, in the movie time and space are never stable and never reliable. Did X and A meet last year? And if they did, was it in Marienbad? Or was it perhaps in Fredericksburg, or Baden-Salsa? Are we seeing the present or the past?
The movie shows us fragments; scenes and dialogs repeat but they are never quite the same. What is real? We see people, but also mirror reflections, flashes of memories (perhaps), and actors in a play. At the same time, every word uttered in the movie is obsessively referring to the same one story.
Like the best of the avant-garde, it seems important yet one is at a loss to truly understand what it is about. Like a small handful of films and stories, it defies comprehension yet still has enough meaning to allow each viewer to conclude for himself what it may be about.
- Filethirteen.com
In traditional movies we have the reassuring certainty that, in the end, all will be revealed: every piece and lose end will magically fall into place into one, logical picture. All the discomfort and unbalance we felt while watching the movie or following the story (the very reason we stuck with it until the end) will transmute in a moment of exhilarating satisfaction: yes, it all makes sense now!
Don’t expect this to happen in Marienbad.
At the beginning, we behave like normal movie viewers. We try to figure out what’s going on (did X and A meet last year? Is M A’s husband? is X trying to hurt or save A?). By the end we realize that understanding what happened or did not happen is irrelevant.
The structure
Marienbad forces our attention away from content and towards structure. As in the game of Misère Nim (see also), one of the recurring themes in the movie, what counts is not the identity of each piece, but their organization and the rules of the game (Nim is played several times during the movie: first with cards, then with toothpicks, matches, poker chips, and domino pieces; Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay also shows A arranging rose petals in the same 7-5-3-1 scheme).
According to screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is a pure construction, without a frame of reference outside of its own existence — the lives of its characters begin when the lights go down, and conclude when they come back up.
The Oscar site
Towards the end of the movie, X explicitly refers to M as the person who may or may not be A’s husband. We get annoyed. We realize that there is no story to discover. There is no truth. The characters don’t know more than we do about themselves or the events they incessantly discuss. A doesn’t know if she ever met X, if X is somebody she should trust or run away from, or if M is or is not her husband.
What you see is what you get.
The specific identity of characters and events is not as important as the mathematical relationships between them. Characters and events are not trying to convince us they are real. They are presented as archetypes of characters and events: a formal narrative structure that applies to many stories.
[If Marienbad were a shape, it would be a triangle. The story is about a character triangle (not quite a "love" triangle). The Nim game is based on a triangular structure of pieces. The prospective view of the garden as well as the stylized shrubs show a series of repeating triangles. Triangles are as rigid and unforgiving and the atmosphere throughout the movie.]
The meaning
Perhaps the ultimate puzzle film, with dizzying time shifts and flashbacks, real or imagined—or are they shifts into the subjunctive? Possible solutions have included the Orpheus-Eurydice myth; a visualization of the process of psychoanalysis; or the whole as a kind of stream-of-consciousness of a single mind, encompassing truth, lies, and visualized whatifs.
The Reeler
There is no limit to the interpretations of this narrative structure:
- Marienbad represents the making of a movie, or any art creation from the characters point of view. There are many repetitions and reshootings. The story changes in the course of the production. The characters don’t know nor can choose what is true or false about themselves and what their next move would be. Thy are trapped in a story structure that limits their motion and their destiny.
- From a Buddhist perspective, Marienbad is a representation of our limited mind trying to make sense of our life and what is happening to us by creating rigid and dualistic structures (the Self, the Truth, the unidirectionality of time). Eventually, we’ll learn that there is no self, there is no truth, and reality is fluid and contradictory. In our path of liberation, we will get rid of the rigidity of habits and repetitions and find our way towards the pure freedom of seeing things as they are, in all their uncertainty and contradiction.
- This movie is about death and our fear of death. A tries to delay as long as she can the inevitable end, when she has to leave her trapped but reassuring reality and follow X towards the unknown.
And so on.
The accidental spectator
For me, the film represents an attempt, still crude and primitive, to approach the complexity of thought and of its mechanisms. I have found that in each descent into the unconscious an emotion is born.
– Alain Resnais
In art, sense and meaning are created by the interaction between the object and the viewer. Is the Monna Lisa art if nobody is looking at it? Art exists in the encounter between an object and a creator of meaning.
As in a very complicated and multi-level cloud, each of us can see different things in a painting o art installation. Yet, art is realized not in the content of our interpretation, but in the process of connecting and finding meaning.
In commercial movies we are passive spectators of something happening in front of us; we are puppets whose reactions and emotions are manipulated by the director puppet master. We become voyeurs waiting to learn what somebody else has already figured out for us.
Marienbad irritates us because it’s an unforgiving representation of passive consumption. Marienbad infuriates us because, without warning, forces us to be as creative as the director and writer themselves: we have to create the meaning that is hidden (or we perceive hidden) in the scenes, dialog, locations, brightness contrasts, geometric compositions, dynamics.
We feel cheated by the effort required. I’s hard. It’s boring. It isn’t satisfying. Yet, this movie and the experience of watching it hunts us for days.
Thank you, YouTube!
It’s true, I’m in a reclusive mood right now, and I’m not cultivating my friendships as I should. Yet, this seems a bit of a overstatement, dear YouTube. I swear, I do have some friends. I’m pretty sure I can prove it, too.
Can Dance a Little
Do you feel discouraged? Do you think that your life is a failure? Are you ready to give up?
Some people buy motivational books and read motivational quotes when they feel demoralized. I’m glad they can find solace in those books and quotes. I can’t. I’ve always found motivational stuff depressing and unhelpful, but I’ve found something that works much better for me: I love reading about famous people’s failures.
I found an inspiring collection of notable failures browsing the Self-Efficacy page created by a group of Emory’s researchers (self-efficacy is a concept developed by psychologist Albert Bandura, which describes our belief in our own ability to reach a desired outcome; it turns out that self-efficacy perception is a good predictor of our success).
This quote, in particular, made me laugh aloud:
After Fred Astaire’s first screen test, the memo from the testing director of MGM, dated 1933, read, “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.”
And you may also be interested to know that Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because ‘he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.’ Charles Schultz “had every cartoon he submitted rejected by his high school yearbook staff “and Walt Disney wouldn’t hire him.” Lucille Ball was told by the head instructor of the John Murray Anderson Drama School, “Try any other profession.” Robin Williams was voted “least likely to succeed” in high school. August Rodin’s father once said, “I have an idiot for a son;” he was described as the worst pupil in the school and rejected three times admittance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. And, of course:
Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4-years-old and did not read until he was 7. His parents thought he was “sub-normal,” and one of his teachers described him as “mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in foolish dreams.”
Don’t you feel better already?
The point is: perhaps what keeps us from succeeding is our fear of failing or a false believe that if we were really good we would succeed sooner, faster, and most of the times. And our belief that if somebody tells us we are bad, we must be bad.
So, if you feel a failure, rejoice: perhaps you are on the 999th step of the 1000-step invention of the light-bulb.
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