David Ross – Page 11 – LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

The Cool School

standardstation — "Standard Station" by Ed Ruscha, 1966.

By David Ross. Morgan Neville’s The Cool School (2008) is a propulsive, loose-lipped documentary about the birth of an indigenous modern art movement in Los Angeles. It tells the story of painters, ceramicists, and assemblage artists whose hub was Walter Hopps and Irving Blum’s Ferus Gallery at 736a N. La Cienega.

These artists – John Altoon, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Wallace Berman, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, and Ken Price – may be unknown to the uninitiated, but Frank Gehry and Ed Ruscha, who moved at the periphery of the group, give the idea. Between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, these artists led the West Coast transition from the astringency of abstract expressionism to the affectless exclamation of pop and postmodern art, and created from scratch an aesthetic and cultural posture to rival the pomp and self-importance of New York. Their inspirations were local and various: the custom car culture, the surf culture, urban detritus, plastic, glass, signage, the bright sharp aspect of the sunshine and the sand and water, the Pacific light itself. The prevailing spirit was macho, competitive, and hard-living in the Pollock vein, with women present “to service the men” and suffering the usual collateral damage. By the late-1960s, the gallery was hawking the work of New Yorkers like Lichtenstein, Johns, Stella, and Warhol, and the local scene broke up amid long repressed mutual annoyance. Hopps sold out to Blum and Blum moved New York, while the Ferus artists went on to early deaths and/or a degree of fame.

The Cool School artists played out “all of the Los Angeles prejudices,” says Shirley Neilsen Blum, a PhD. in art history who left Hopps to marry Blum.

“They were very involved with the beach and with the surf and with the road and with automobile and with the girls and with the local tavern [Barney’s Beanery]. That’s what they did. They had a lot of spare time. But the studio was a very different place. When they got into the studio, they were alone. And they were all born with the legacy of modernism. In other words you didn’t look at the external world for your subject. The subject came from you … Los Angeles is the city of light and air and reflection and scintillation of surface. They began to play with qualities of perception. Instead of what the impressionists tried to do, which was to see the effect of color on light, light itself became a palpable experience of the object itself.”

The Cool School is interested in social history rather than aesthetic analysis and doesn’t have much to say about the art itself. I would have preferred more lingering reflection on the images and somewhat less gossip and reminiscence. Postmodern art of the surface – superficiality in the literal sense – is the kind of thing I’m inclined to beat with a stick, but I have a hard time mustering my usual ire. While Warhol and Lichtenstein trafficked in crowd-pleasing irony, the artists of the Cool School were at least emotionally sincere, and their emphasis was for the most part aesthetic: they were interested less in social and political commentary than in image, reflecting their origins in abstract expressionism. None of this art seems to me particularly profound, but I can’t say that it’s entirely wrongheaded. Ruscha, the shrewdest and most ingenious artist to emerge from the cool school milieu, largely traffics in ironic conceptual puzzles, but even in his case there’s a redeeming subtlety and sense of humor and refinement of execution that distinguishes him from Warhol. He reminds me, in fact, of Saul Steinberg, another ingenious visualizer of what words mean and a particular hero of mine.

Ignoring its merely sidelong glance at the art, The Cool School is impeccable as documentary craft. Nearly all of the key figures – happily, an unguarded bunch – contribute their recollections and grind their axes, and the film pops with color and sound: vintage footage on the one-hand and a sublime soundtrack of jazz, surf music, and punk on the other. Whatever one thinks of the art – and there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical – nobody is likely to fall asleep.

The film complains that the L.A. art scene was co-opted by glamor-seeking know-nothings from the moneyed world of film. Ironically, then, it taps Jeff Bridges as narrator and indulges Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell as a spacey, possibly stoned chorus. Hopper was a major collector of contemporary art, as we all know, but all the same I would have preferred less from posturing actors and more from historians in a position to assess the Cool School and give a larger sense of what it was up to. What’s lacking is any sense of responsible external opinion.

Ruscha, by the way, is making his entire catalogue raisonné available online. As far as I know, this is an unprecedented experiment in public access and self-canonization. See here.

For more Libertas coverage of fine art, see here, here, here, and here.

Posted on October 10th, 2010 at 11:08am.

Anna Karina, Godard’s Irony & Declining European Birthrates

By David Ross. In preparation for my film course (see here), I watched Godard’s A Woman is a Woman (1961) for the first time in years. [See the first 10 minutes of the film above.] I remembered the film as a wearisome deconstructive exercise brought to life only by Anna Karina in the lead role. The film was as tedious as ever, and La Karina as irresistibly kittenish. She poses, pouts, and purrs, in what may be the single greatest act of seduction – seduction of the camera, seduction of the audience – ever filmed. Of course, Karina manages to seduce none of the characters onscreen despite dogged effort. This is Godard’s little joke, or maybe part of his point.

What a cold and aloof ass Godard must have been to persist in his ironic games instead of allowing himself to be seduced, as Degas allowed himself to be seduced over and over again. Godard’s camera is busy making political and aesthetic points when it should be, as it were, making love. Karina and Godard married during the shooting of A Woman is a Woman. I suppose a man can be excused a certain sobriety with respect to the woman he sleeps with every night, but he cannot be excused an imperturbable irony. Godard’s clinical distance is an embarrassment to the male imagination and a travesty of what’s owed to a woman on her honeymoon. What a shame that at the height of her beauty and charm Karina wound up in a string of pretentious, sporadically brilliant Godard films and not in a string of delightful romantic comedies directed by someone like George Cukor or Billy Wilder. She might have been another Audrey Hepburn.

Oddly enough, A Woman is a Woman put me in mind of Mark Steyn. Karina’s character Angela desperately wants a baby, but she can find nobody willing to impregnate her. I couldn’t help construing or misconstruing this as an allegory of Europe’s plunging birthrates and demographic death spiral, of which Steyn is the poet laureate. Here’s a typical exchange between Angela and Émile Récamier as Brialy:

Angela: I want a baby
Brialy: You’re being unreasonable.
Angela: I want a baby
Brialy: Stop this madness
Angela: You’re being mean.
Brialy: I don’t like that tartan skirt on you.
Angela: Good. I’m not trying to please anybody. I want a baby.
Brialy: Stop this madness.
Angela: I’m going to the Zodiac [a strip club]
Brialy: Go and strip then. You disgust me.
Angela: Jerk. We can’t live off your lousy income. You’re such a coward.
Brialy: I’d rather be a coward than fool
Angela [sadly]: Why am I a fool for wanting a baby?
Brialy: Shut up or I’ll leave.
Angela: Where would you go?
Brialy: I don’t know. Mexico.
Angela: You’re crazy,
Brialy: No, you’re crazy.
Angela: I want a baby.

The camera then cuts to a Paris boulevard, where a man-in-the-street reporter type accosts a young man:

Reporter: Excuse me, could you sleep with this young lady so she can have a baby?
Pedestrian: It’s not a good time. I’m a bit busy today.

Procreation, as Steyn argues constantly, is an affirmation of continuity with both the past and the future (see here for a typical riff). It is a matter of believing in a narrative of history and choosing to participate. Modern Europe – where the non-immigrant birthrate is far below replacement level – seems to construe the future as somebody else’s problem, as something for state bureaucrats to work out while one holidays in Ibiza. Does Godard’s comedy pick up on something then latent – now patent – in the European zeitgeist? Perhaps not – perhaps so.

Posted on October 3rd, 2010 at 12:28pm.

Houellebecq

By David Ross. With John Updike, J.G. Ballard, and David Foster Wallace gone to their reward, I have settled on Richard Wilbur, Thomas Pynchon, and Michel Houellebecq as my favorite living authors, though not without reservations. French debauchees with middling literary talent at the sentence level are not my usual cup of tea, but Houellebecq is such a savage hater of modernity, such a mordant, devastating analyst of European ennui. He understands that the collapse of our master narratives leaves us only a few squalid makeshifts in place of the old meaning of life, and he definitively presents, like a head on a plate, the spectacle of rootless, mindless, affectless post-Christian Europe (see here for my previous comments). I appreciate his honesty, his disgust, his discerning sense of cultural calamity.

The Paris Review has published a long interview (see here) that includes several comments worth pondering. It has often occurred to me that Houellebecq is fundamentally conservative. Certainly his critique of European post-modernity (post-humanity?) aligns him with a certain kind of conservative anti-modernism, including my own. Houellebecq gives this account of himself:

Paris Review: They say that you are on the right politically because in The Elementary Particles you seem to be against the liberalism of the sixties. What do you think of that interpretation?

Houellebecq: What I think, fundamentally, is that you can’t do anything about major societal changes. It may be regrettable that the family unit is disappearing. You could argue that it increases human suffering. But regrettable or not, there’s nothing we can do. That’s the difference between me and a reactionary. I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done. You can only observe and describe. I’ve always liked Balzac’s very insulting statement that the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the changing of values. He’s exaggerating in an amusing way. But that’s what I do: I show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values.

Houellebecq is indeed a chronicler of “the disasters produced by the liberalization of values,” and his books, I would say, belong to the literature of trauma. His rigorous amorality and joyless pornography are likely to appall conservatives, but the impulse to “observe and describe” – and sometimes satirize – must not be confused with acceptance or even celebration of a society reduced to hedonism and social atomism. Disporting with Thai prostitutes is to make the best of a fallen world, or perhaps to rub one’s own face, not unpainfully, in the impossibility of something more or better.

Another important self-insight:

Houellebecq: It may surprise you, but I am convinced that I am part of the great family of the Romantics.

Paris Review: You’re aware that may be surprising?

Houellebecq: Yes, but society has evolved, a Romantic is not the same thing that it used to be. Not long ago, I read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I am certain that if you took, on the one hand, an old-order Romantic and, on the other hand, what de Tocqueville predicts will happen to literature with the development of democracy taking the common man as its subject, having a strong interest in the future, using more realist vocabulary you would get me.

Paris Review: What is your definition of a Romantic?

Houellebecq: It’s someone who believes in unlimited happiness, which is eternal and possible right away. Belief in love. Also belief in the soul, which is strangely persistent in me, even though I never stop saying the opposite.

Houellebecq’s identification with ‘the great family of romantics’ is a sly bit of self-understanding. He belongs to what I call the school of thwarted aspiration, following in a line that includes Wordsworth, Byron (in his primary mode), and Tennyson. In this tradition, the poet yearns desperately for transcendence but lacks the imaginative energy or ingenuity to realize his desire (“I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done,” as Houellebecq says). The thwarted poet may ponder the psychology of his own failure (Wordsworth passim); descend into insincerity and evasion (“Hide me from my deep emotion, O though wondrous Mother-Age!” cries Tennyson); adopt some consolatory strategy (Wordsworth’s feeble embrace of the “still, sad music of humanity”); or harbor an implacable, sullen resentment against the limiting order of nature (Byron, George Sand’s Lelia). Houellebecq embodies a combination of these poses. His libertinage affords both escape and consolation, though this consolation, like Wordsworth’s, is always self-conscious and melancholy; his libertinage also functions, much like Byron’s, as a protest, a gesture of disrespect and disobedience – a poke … well, not in the eye.. What makes Houellebecq unique as well as perplexing is the near-complete submersion of his romantic aspiration (“I never stop saying the opposite”), which speaks to the impossibility of enacting or even expressing a romantic program in the postmodern context.

While on literary subjects, I want to say a word about Jonathan Franzen. Several years ago, I tried to read The Corrections. It was so shabby and brainless l that I could manage only ten pages. The Atlantic has come around to my view and takes a vicious clawed swipe at Franzen (see here). Is The Atlantic morphing into a conservative New Yorker? Maybe so. More and more it seems to be filled with politically incorrect raised hackles. I will have to pay more attention. I look forward to a similar article on Dave Eggers, the most foppish and ridiculous of literary impostors.

The Boston Globe, finally, has this fond piece on David Markson’s library and the strange afterlife of authors’ book collections. Markson, who died in June, was a legitimate loss. His novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) has a gradually waxing reputation as a minor masterpiece. David Foster Wallace listed it among his five direfully underappreciated U.S. novels (see here). It’s been on my reading list for fifteen or twenty years. Markson’s death has prompted me to jump it to the top and I hope to read it soon. I primarily know Markson as a scholar and advocate of Malcolm Lowry, in which capacity he did yeoman’s work.

Posted on September 30th, 2010 at 10:19am.

Lessons in Darkness

Volkshalle2 — Albert Speer's proposed "Volkshalle" for the Nazi capitol.

By David Ross. Nazism was history’s most despicable moral perversion and criminal conspiracy, but too often the examination of Nazism goes no farther than moral condemnation. This posture is perfectly understandable, but it does nothing to further the understanding of Nazism as a philosophy and historical development. The difficult thing is temporarily to relax the impulse to condemn and to bring a degree of detachment to the analysis of Nazism as a system of thought. As one who frequently teaches literary modernism – Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis – I must constantly address a certain kind of romantic conservatism, and this naturally raises questions about fascism and Nazism. I tell my students something like this: “Its not enough to call Nazism evil, though certainly it is evil. You have to consider the nature and logic of its evil. You have to engage its ideas.” At this point, I usually insert that I am myself Jewish, which lowers eyebrows somewhat. Two deeply thoughtful documentaries, one German, one American, attempt just this kind of work and make for important lessons in the history ideas.

Peter Cohen’s The Architecture of Doom (1991) examines Nazi aesthetic theory and the Nazi obsession with art generally. Nazi artistic taste (a mélange of alpine-oriented romanticism and grandiose neo-classicism) was often kitschy and crass, but the Nazi cult of beauty was remarkably passionate and central. Hitler began as an artist, as everybody knows, but it’s less well known that he remained the most extraordinarily obsessed aesthete, buying and stealing works of art by the thousands and involving himself at every level with what may have been his greatest dream: the architectural recreation of Germany on a scale of classical magnificence to rival ancient Rome. The film’s crucial recognition is that Nazism’s aesthetic program partially or even largely drove its political and military program. Nazism did not conceive its program of conquest as an end in itself, but as a means of implementing the cultural and aesthetic renaissance that was Hitler’s chief fantasy. Likewise, the film clarifies the connection between Nazism’s aesthetic program and its campaign of hygiene, eugenics, euthanasia and genocide. Adulating the classical ideal suggested by the sculpture of antiquity, the Nazis conceived their murderous activities as a program of ‘beautification’ in the literal sense. The goal, according to Cohen’s film, was less to create a pure race than a physically beautiful race. The Nazis considered racial purity an indispensible basis of this beauty, but they did not necessarily consider this purity an end in itself.

olympia4 — From Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia" (1936).

This aestheticism does not in the least mitigate the Nazis’ vast crimes, but it does force us to move beyond the reassuring notion that Hitler was merely a maniacal sadist, a kind of Jeffrey Dahmer with a propaganda machine and vast army at his disposal. The scarier proposition is that aesthetic ideals we ourselves may share, or at least not entirely deplore, were mixed up in the vile stew of Nazism, and that ‘beauty’ itself may become a dangerous absolutism. Is our own culture implicated in this dynamic? Obviously we are not about to launch a racial genocide, but our popular culture may want to rethink its own extraordinary emphasis on physical perfection. Though this emphasis is not likely to lead to a renewal of the gas chambers, it may someday lead to a program of genetic selection and manipulation of the kind envisioned by a film like Gattaca. Mass-murdering the living is far worse than manipulating the unborn, but both programs share the dangerous premise that human beings are fundamentally stone to be carved, clay to be shaped. In this respect, The Architecture of Doom should give us pause.

Stephen Hicks’ Nietzsche and the Nazis (2006) delivers a whopping 166 minutes of philosophical disquisition in the attempt to explain the nature and impetus of Nazism. Unlike the graceful cinematic art of The Architecture of Doom, Nietzsche and the Nazis has the feel of a college lecture filmed on the cheap. It cuts between still photographs and Hicks himself speaking against a variety of nondescript backdrops, while the text itself is at best workmanlike. And yet Hicks, a philosopher at Rockford College in Illinois and author of a book likewise titled Nietzsche and the Nazis (2006), makes a lucid and thoroughly intelligent case that Nazism was not a function of economic conditions or social psychology or personal pathology – the usual notions – but of certain strands in the history of philosophy, and that it enacted ideas that were deeply embedded in the German culture and the German philosophic tradition. Hicks mentions Hegel, Fichte, and Marx, but gives primacy to Nietzsche, whom Hitler revered. Continue reading Lessons in Darkness

My Film Course

By David Ross. Constructing literature courses is relatively easy, because literary history is so coherent and clearly marked – its nodes are so inarguable. You can no more bypass Austen or Dickens in a course on the British novel than you can bypass London on a trip to the UK.

Film, which I will teach for the first time in the Spring, is different. Unlike poetry or even the novel, film is a living form. It continues to unfold and redefine itself, and it forces one constantly to reconsider what seemed fixed. Bergman, for example, may be the greatest director of all time, but his kind of filmmaking – let’s call it filmed theater – seems everyday less relevant, while Godard, who cannot compare as a directorial talent or philosopher, seems to have put his finger on the future. Whom to prefer? Did Mssrs. Lucas and Spielberg reinvent American mythmaking (Mr. Apuzzo’s view, if I’ve understood him correctly these twenty years), or did they infantilize our popular entertainment (my view)?

And what of those beloved heirlooms of Hollywood’s golden age that are neither entirely art nor merely entertainment, and that, in any case, nobody younger than fifty has particularly bothered to see? Are they historical artifacts, national treasures, charming baubles, or inadvertent masterpieces? In teaching them, do we chronicle the American Spirit or do we dumb down the curriculum? In general, is film high art or popular art – a belated expression of the old Renaissance aspiration, or a symptom of capitalist energy and mass consumption?

woman — From Godard's "A Woman is a Woman."

Designing my course – “Film and Society” – was a two-tablet headache due to the unanswerable questions above. I was not sure what a film course should be, because I have only a confused idea what film is and what it’s for. In the end, I treated film as high art on the model of literature, not because this makes the most or best sense of film as a medium, but because students have so little exposure to the old Renaissance aspiration, and because no opportunity to complicate their sense of the sufficiency of Avatar and Twilight can be passed up. At the same time, one must make certain concessions (Miyazaki for example) in order to avoid civil unrest and student evaluations drenched in one’s own blood (see here).

Not long ago, I described Into Great Silence (2005), a documentary about life in a Carthusian monastery in the mountains of France, as “one of the more difficult and beautiful films ever made, and perhaps film’s most sincere and respectful attempt to portray the life of religious devotion.” It occurs to me that Ordet (1955), even more so, knows how to bend its Medieval knees (to borrow a phrase from Yeats).

I would have liked to teach the Tykwer-directed, Kieslowski-penned Heaven (2002) in conjunction with A Serious Man (2009). The films are fascinatingly obverse. The former concerns a seemingly compromised woman who experiences a mysterious and miraculous beatitude; the latter, a seemingly righteous man who suffers endless punishment.

My syllabus is still germinal. I would, of course, appreciate any advice. One thing to keep in mind is that the course is already busting a seam. Adding necessarily entails subtracting.

The Palace of Art

The Mystery of Picasso (1956, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
8 1/2 (1963, Federico Fellini)
Russian Ark (2002, Aleksandr Sokurov)
Hero (2003, Zhang Yimou)

Masculin/Feminin

A Woman is a Woman (1961, Jean Luc Godard)
Woman of the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara)
My Night at Maud’s (1969, Eric Rohmer)
Annie Hall (1977, Woody Allen)

God in the Dock

Ordet (1955, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)
Fanny and Alexander (1983, Ingmar Bergman)
A Serious Man (2009, Coen Brothers)

The Smell of Napalm in the Morning

The Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir)
The Battle of Algiers (1965, Gillo Pontecorvo)
Shame (1968, Ingmar Bergman)
Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)

Earth Abides

Derzu Uzala (1975, Akira Kurosawa)
Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky)
My Neighbor Totoro (1988, Hayao Miyazaki)
Maboroshi No Hikari (1995, Hirokazu Koreeda)

Utopias and Dystopias

Smiles of a Summer Evening (1955, Ingmar Bergman)
Raise the Red Lantern (1991, Zhang Yimou)
Koyaanisqatsi (1982, Godfrey Reggio)
The Lives of Others (2007, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

Brave New World

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Cache (2005, Michael Haneke)
Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, 2007)

Other films I seriously – yearningly in some cases – considered, but in the end could find no place for:

La Ronde (1950, Max Ophuls)
Diary of a Country Priest (1950, Robert Bresson)
Secrets of Women (1952, Ingmar Bergman)
The Earrings of Madam de … (1953, Max Ophuls)
Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961, Agnes Varda)
Woman of the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)
A Clockwork Orange (1971, Stanley Kubrick)
The Sorrow and the Pity (1972, Marcel Ophuls)
Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984)
Wings of Desire (1988, Wim Wenders)
Lessons in Darkness (1992, Werner Herzog)
After Life (1999, Hirokazu Koreeda)
Heaven (2002, Tom Tykwer)
Grizzly Man (2005, Werner Herzog)
24 City (2008, Zhang Ke Jia)

Posted on September 14th, 2010 at 11:22am.

Le Corbusier and the Annihilation of Culture

By David Ross. Genocide gets plenty of publicity, and rightfully so, but there must be a word – and the attention that goes with it – for the willful annihilation of culture. It’s terrible to kill, but also terrible to sever and expunge and leave people naked and shivering in a void. Among the perpetrators of what we might call ‘civilicide’ or ‘sociocide,’ Mao is without peer, having reduced one of the great civilizations of history to childlike incapacity, to the extent that it can barely produce a readable book (so I’m told). Le Corbusier (1887-1965) ranks second to Mao, only because he desolated a narrower field of expression and did so without force. When you look at a city or a building and find it aggressively repulsive and comprehensible only in terms of self-inflicted punishment, you are almost certainly right to blame Le Corbusier.

I work in a building inspired by Le Corbusier. It is a concrete beehive that rejects windows and public meeting areas, travesties the other buildings in its vicinity, and spurns all decoration and organic flow of space in favor of the repetitive, numbing geometry of the cube. I compare this to the charming irregularity and understated delicacy of Bulfinch Hall (1818) at Phillips Academy, Andover, where I began my long dalliance with literature, seduced, perhaps, by the building itself. It was designed by Charles Bulfinch, the greatest architect of colonial Boston. The difference in the two buildings is not merely aesthetic, but functional in the largest sense. I suspect we would think better and learn better in buildings that exemplify graceful thought and mastered education. People have a way of living up to their buildings, and buildings have a way of teaching what we must live up to.

Theodore Dalrymple offers these strong words on Le Corbusier. As usual, Dalrymple is right about everything.

Posted on September 12th, 2010 at 1:06pm.