A Cinematic Convergence: From Bresson to...Nolan?

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—I have only one reason for this post: to wonder aloud if it's at all weird that, when I first encountered this image from Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951) a couple of months ago...

...I immediately thought of the Joker from The Dark Knight?

Bresson's Priest of Ambricourt feeling a sense of freedom, however fleeting, while getting a ride on the back of a stranger's bicycle? The Joker feeling a similar sense of freedom, in a far different context, while riding in the back of a police car? Eh? Eh?

More proof that my movie-loving mind sometimes makes the strangest connections. (By the way, yes, I am seeing The Dark Knight Rises in legit IMAX tomorrow morning. As someone who wasn't a huge fan of The Dark Knight, I'm not going into it with especially sky-high expectations or anything.)

Howard Finster's Fire-and-Brimstone Marriage of Text and Image

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Speaking of religion: Who among you knows of the artist named Howard Finster (1916-2001)?

A few weekends ago, I ventured forth into Harlem for the first time ever to check out a private new art gallery that recently opened up. How private? So private that it's basically one family's two-story studio apartment! One of my co-workers—who, it turns out, is himself an artist specializing in scanner photography (check out his site here, if you're curious what "scanner photography" looks like in practice)—decided to turn his apartment into an informal art gallery displaying some of his own works, some of the work of other artists, and cultural artifacts he has collected over the years.

Among the works of art displayed in this gallery was this:

The Devil's Vice, Howard Finster

Two things jumped out at me about this print: first, the sheer, overwhelming amount of detail packed into this canvas; and second, the fact that much of that detail was given over to words rather than images.

When it comes to movies, a lot of critics have a sometimes seemingly knee-jerk disdain for such characteristics as "preachiness," "heavy-handedness" and "didacticism." I guess many critics just don't like to preached to—but who does, right? And we all consider film a visual art more than anything else, so of course we'll vastly prefer something expressed visually rather than verbally; if a filmmaker is so clumsy as to feel the need to spell out his/her intentions for us in the audience...well, then, where's the fun in that?

Personally, I've always taken films that go the didactic route on a case-by-case basis. So yeah, sometimes such spell-it-out-too-explicitly heavy-handedness can bother the hell out of me too. Take one of the most popular, and widely praised, films of recent years, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008). This highly touted sequel to Batman Begins (2005) abounds in fairly graceless speechifying about, among other things, what morality there can really be in a world governed by chance and fate; but the speechifying matters less to me than this gnawing sense that Nolan is so insistent on putting his order-versus-chaos allegory across that he sacrifices character development and subtlety to do so. When he actually tries to turn his thinly veiled allegory into some kind of human drama, the lack of three-dimensional characterizations is thrown into sharp relief; there's nothing to care about on a human level beyond each character's preordained place in Nolan's grand allegorical scheme. The film ends up playing more lke a big-budget philosophical thesis paper than a drama with flesh-and-blood characters; thus, its many moments of overt didacticism—especially its "will one boat blow up the other" climax—stick out like so many sore thumbs.

Sometimes, though, didacticism can be done in a way that's genuinely thought-provoking and maybe even emotionally stirring. When it comes to some of the more hardcore-intellectual work of Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, sure, the same criticisms I just lobbed at The Dark Knight would probably apply. Does anyone really remember much about the characters in films like 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), Tout va bien (1972), or in more recent work like In Praise of Love (2001), Notre musique (2004) and his latest, Film Socialism (2010)? In these films, to varying degrees, his "characters" mostly spout off ideas and aphorisms, and he leaves it up to us to either take his thoughts seriously or dismiss it as "pretentious." And yet, Godard's didacticism usually evinces a curiosity and engagement with the wider world that Nolan's never does; plus, for all the chatter he includes in his films, he's far more visually inventive in the ways he expresses his intellectual obsessions on the screen (witness, for instance, the back-and-forth tracking shot in the supermarket towards the end of Tout va bien, from which the above still is taken). There's an exciting sense of exploration in Godard's later work that, even at its most inscrutable, offsets any sense of preachiness; he's trying to pin down his ideas the same time we in the audience are.

Admittedly, Finster's art isn't fueled by that same sense of exploration. A Baptist pastor from Georgia, Finster often claimed that God, through visions, implored him to spread His word through his art; in that way, much of his more than 46,000 works are essentially fire-and-brimstone expressions of his faith. And yet, one look at the portrait above and one gets the sense that he is so passionately committed to that faith that he'll even go so far as to include large amounts of text, scriptural or otherwise, in his canvases in order to get the Word out. One could consider this the visual-art equivalent of the kind of talky didacticism in Godard's films or The Dark Knight, and one might even dismiss it wholesale as crude and un-artistic. For me, however, there's a certain purity of intent to Finster's art—his posters, his sculptures, his self-built Paradise Gardens—that rises above its simple means and becomes almost transcendent. It's his zeal that moves you, whatever the method.

 Here's another example of his art, this one in the shape of an American flag:

Oh, and for those who think they've never seen Howard Finster's work before...remember this album cover...

...and this one?

Yep, Finster designed the album covers for both R.E.M.'s 1984 album Reckoning (the band's second) and Talking Heads' 1985 Little Creatures. In the former, he collaborated with lead singer Michael Stipe, and it looks sparer than many of the Finster paintings/sculptures I've seen; the latter seems more echt-Finsterian in its denseness. Rolling Stone magazine named the Little Creatures cover the best of its year. The more you know...

You can get more information about Finster, by the way, at this ancient-looking website. He seems quite a character; I look forward to delving even more into his work in the future.

The man himself

Beyond Inception This Weekend: An Unofficial Triumvirate

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Though it was by far the biggest box-office attraction of the weekend, Inception was hardly the only film I saw. In fact, the three other films I saw (I would have seen more—I was planning to catch up with both Winter's Bone (2010) and Alamar (2009) in addition to the rest—but social events, fatigue and minor computer issues prevented me from indulging in my usual weekend movie binge) could be said to form an unofficial triumvirate addressing what it is I missed from Christopher Nolan's mind-bending epic.

1. From Shadows (1959): a sense of humanity.

I'm finally making an effort to explore the work of legendary independent American filmmaker John Cassavetes, and in this initial encounter with his groundbreaking debut feature, I was surprised to find myself feeling more genuine exhilaration throughout this modestly scaled, wonderfully acted/improvised and poignantly evocative work than throughout the loud, graceless spectacle of Nolan's film. Obviously, comparing Nolan's narrative contraption to Cassavetes's low-key human drama is an apples-to-oranges comparison if I've ever seen one, so of course I won't say one is automatically superior to the other. But with Shadows, I felt like I was basking in a relaxing oasis of humanity after, merely hours before, sitting passively through an inelegant, if occasionally awe-inspiring, narrative machine. In other words: Wow, there are honest-to-God people in this movie that I actually care about!

2. From I Am Love (2009): a sense of visual beauty.

Wally Pfister once again does some handsome work for Nolan in Inception, helping to impart a sense of scale to the writer-director's grand visions with his shot selections and framing choices. But there is only so much even the most imaginative cinematographer can do in bringing a film to life for a filmmaker who simply isn't all that great at thinking in pictures. On the basis of I Am Love, Italian director Luca Guadagnino has what Nolan lacks: a distinctive eye for using images to tell a story. With the help of his cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, he turns standard melodramatic boilerplate into one lush visual wonder after another: Settings glow and brood depending on the mood of the moment, Tilda Swinton's skin gleams in the sunlight in an approximation of visual afterglow, and the dully lit environment of the upper class contrasts vividly with the ravishing brightness of the outdoors. All of this isn't merely for the sake of "blowing your mind" with eye candy; it works beautifully in concert with the film's narrative of one repressed woman's sexual awakening. It's expressive, not just impressive.

3. From The Circus (1928): a sense of humor.

Not that I think Inception suffered from its general humorlessness; as Roger Ebert said in his most recent blog post addressing critical reactions to the film, he "didn't crack a smile while watching the film because Nolan didn't call for one." But when, in isolated moments, Nolan does see fit to inject some humor into the film—mostly from Tom Hardy's smart-ass master of deception, though Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page share one throwaway moment of comic gold involving an impromptu kiss—the momentary cracking of a smile feels almost like someone farting during a church service. It felt almost wrong to laugh amidst the solemnity.

Charlie Chaplin's films, of course, operate the other way around: They are designed to be funny and entertaining, but that doesn't prevent them from having their serious moments. Somewhat like what Nolan tried to do with the Cobb/Mal subplot in Inception, Chaplin introduces a romance-tinged emotional thread in The Circus to provide some pathos along the way: He falls in love with the stepdaughter (Merna Kennedy) of the circus troupe's abusive ringmaster (Allan Garcia), but then finds himself filled with jealousy when the stepdaughter becomes enamored with the new tightrope walker (Harry Crocker). I'll leave the sublime resolution of this thread for you all to discover for yourselves; suffice it to say, it involves an act of selflessness that is melancholy yet uplifting—in short, profoundly moving in ways Nolan can only, well, dream about.

Yes, folks, this is exactly the kind the movie in which, as the popular ad slogan goes, "You'll laugh! You'll cry!" And it's that kind of wide-ranging emotional experience that I often crave from the cinema. For all of its visual and narrative wonderments, that scintillating variety of emotions is something I sorely missed in Inception.

Trying to Reconcile My Two Minds on Inception

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

[POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD]

For better and for worse, Inception (2010) is probably the film its writer and director, Christopher Nolan, has been working toward his entire career to date—a folly comparable in ambition to, say, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927) or Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), among others. It's the kind of shoot-the-moon effort that demands to be marveled, if nothing else, for the fact of its mere existence...and the even more astonishing fact that such an intellectually ambitious film exists as a big-budget, heavily hyped Hollywood summer blockbuster. A cerebral, philosophical epic exploring the intersection between reality and dreams, with whole sections taking place within mental landscapes? If Nolan hadn't scored such big hits with his two Batman movies, it would be hard to imagine that any major studio would have risked granting him $200 million to pull off such a cut-from-original-cloth, difficult-to-easily-summarize endeavor. But he did, Warner Bros. granted him the large budget, and now Inception—based on a script Nolan had been working on for over a decade now—is here for all of us to watch, contemplate and passionately argue over.

I know I'm still arguing about it...with myself.

In an attempt to try to evoke my experience of watching Inception at midnight Thursday night, allow me to explore the two minds in which the film leaves me.

***

Mind No. 1

As its characters kept delivering the mumbo-jumbo Nolan had written for them, I began to realize that the detractors of Inception have missed the point in complaining about the overly explanatory nature of the dialogue. For one thing, the people that are involved in this operation of trying to plant an idea into a billionaire's brain are professionals in their respective fields—so wouldn't it make sense that their way of talking to each other would be overly technical? Especially since much of the first hour involves master idea thief Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) explaining the nature of his vocation to young mental "architect" Ariadne (Ellen Page)? Complain about the supposed woodenness of the dialogue all you want...but in context, it makes perfect sense given the situations and characters.

This brings me to a larger point about this film that some of those detractors are, I think, missing: Inception is not a "dream film," not in the sense that, say, David Lynch's frequent forays into his irrational subconscious are. For about an hour, at least, Nolan's film is meant to be a rather clinical deconstruction of the genesis of ideas and dreams, not necessarily an embodiment—a laying of the groundwork for the narrative blowout that follows.

And what a blowout it is! Its final act—in which Nolan juggles five different dream planes into one exhilarating cross-cutting mélange which might have made D.W. Griffith proud—is a stunning achievement of editing and narrative construction. But even during the set-up, there are plenty of instances of mind-blowing imagery to provide plenty of eye candy. (Ever seen a town literally fold upon itself, allowing its inhabitants to leisurely walk up and down the way Donald O'Connor ran up walls in Singin' in the Rain? Or what about people floating through zero gravity while engaging in combat? You'll see that here.)

Amidst the action fireworks, Nolan is aiming for both philosophical and psychological grandeur: He's trying to explore the ways dreams plant their way into human subconscious and fester, but he also wants to explore how human psychology affects the way people dream. It's a laudable ambition, especially for a major Hollywood blockbuster—and once in a while Nolan hits upon an idea that will resonate deeply. Perhaps its most successful thread, in that regard, revolves around Cobb's trauma over his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), whose death haunts him to degrees that causes causes roadblocks to pop up in Ariadne's carefully imagined dream worlds. As a visualization of the way people hold onto mental scars, unable to let go of the past, it's pretty potent, and it provides at least a signifier of emotion to latch onto in an otherwise antiseptic environment.

***

Mind No. 2

I use the word "signifier" above, however, for a specific reason: That thread may signify an emotional thread, but that doesn't mean it delivers genuine emotion. I found myself unable to emotionally connect much with, really, any of the characters in this film...and I highly doubt that Nolan did, either. Because, if his previous work is any indication, human emotion simply isn't in his artistic arsenal.

With the possible exception of his Insomnia (2002) remake, Nolan's films are generally concerned less with people than with narrative gimmicks and intellectual/philosophical allegories. They aren't really about the human experience—or, at least, if they are about humanity, they go about trying to access it in ways that end up shining a light more on Nolan's cleverness and pretensions than on anything you or I would recognize in our own daily lives. Nolan may have hit upon killer gimmicks in Memento (2001) and The Prestige (2006)—gimmicks that could be argued to support the human stories being told in both those films—but the limitations of his techno-geek approach to cinema became painfully evident in perhaps his most financially successful effort yet, The Dark Knight (2008). An utterly soulless affair, stubbornly lacking in resonance or poetry of any kind, the film presented a relentlessly conceptual allegory about chance and free will in a world seemingly without morality—one in which all the characters, however energetically performed by its actors, were imagined as mere stick figures in a glorified thesis paper.

Inception, alas, contains more of that same soullessness, but this time blown up to elephantine proportions. The thing about the Cobb/Mal thread is that while it contains some of the film's most interesting ideas about the connections between dreams and human psychology, it also exudes barely any emotional affect. In context, the thread plays merely like a calculated attempt by a clever filmmaker to provide an emotional through-line for the film; it never actually delivers the real McCoy. Because of that, the ostensible catharsis of its supposedly operatic climax never quite hits home the way Nolan seems to want it to do. And there certainly isn't much to latch onto with the film's other characters: they are barely given personalities at all, conceived as mere mouthpieces for Nolan's reams of technological/psychological babble.

Now, I don't demand that every single movie give me a reason to "care" about the characters in them. Stanley Kubrick, for one, was never particularly interested in giving you reasons to warm to the people he depicted onscreen; he left it up to the viewer to find something in these people with which to personally identify. But Kubrick took at least a passing interest in exploring the humanity of his characters; Nolan's chilliness seems less like a directorial strategy than a mere inability to imagine human beings in the first place...and when he tries to muster up some kind of genuine feeling, the results generally feel insincere and secondhand. Nolan's attempt to explore one man's grief over a lost wife in the context of his puzzle-box narrative here looks especially thin alongside Martin Scorsese's far more powerful look at deep psychic wounds in Shutter Island (2010).

And then there's the matter of Nolan's conception of dreams, which some have faulted for being too literal-minded to approximate the way dreams actually operate. I wouldn't presume to know better than Christopher Nolan how we all dream; dreams are such a beautifully mysterious thing that psychologists are still trying to explain it, decades after Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Mystery, alas, is the one thing that is missing in Nolan's linear, prosaic, puzzle-box approach to imagining his dream worlds in Inception; there is precious little of the wonder and illumination that dreams at their most feverishly unhinged can inspire in all of us (and that you regularly see in Luis Buñuel's or David Lynch's surreal cinematic visions). Nolan is too calculated and precise an artist to inspire a milieu of mental freedom...but then, perhaps that was never his aim. Instead, he has used the premise of dream worlds to add more layers to what is, when you get right down to it, a standard (read: clichéd) heist movie. Apparently, Nolan's subconscious consists entirely of a diet of James Bond flicks, with the occasional stray high-minded reference to Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1930), Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and other superior reality-versus-illusion dreamscapes.

***

Neither masterpiece nor disaster, Inception is basically a big-budget rock-'em-sock-'em action picture disguised as an intellectual exercise. I can't say that I (yet) love it the way its most ardent defenders do; the experience of watching it left me more in a state of glacial admiration than anything else. As mind-numbing and unpoetic as it is, however, I think its intellectual substance is still worth taking seriously; plus, viscerally it works like gangbusters. There has certainly been nothing like this in megaplexes so far this year, and for that alone, it deserves to be seen and respected.

The right and left sides of my brain remain unreconciled...which is quite possibly more than I can say for the right and left sides of Christopher Nolan's artistic mind, which has always been more left than right.