Category: VOLUME 17: PSYCHOPOMP

VOLUME 17: PSYCHOPOMP

June 13, 2024June 13, 2024 ·

“Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there.”

“It is not life but its shadow. It is not motion but its soundless spectre.”

So wrote Maxim Gorky in his eyewitness account of the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe screening (1895-96), the first commercial film screenings open to the paying public. This early example of projected film, devoid of sound and colour, did not resonate with life for Gorky. Rather than witnessing the living form immortalised, he saw only its death in its technologic iteration. The very idea of seeing ghosts has, in the age of motion picture, been described in terms of televisual projection. Archaeologist and parapsychologist T.C. Lethbridge, whose paranormal projection theory attributed hauntings to traumatic events imprinted onto stone and other matter, described an experience of ghostly hauntings in 1922 in a manner uncannily similar to Gorky’s retrospective:

The whole production…was exactly comparable to a television scene. There was the same curious lack of atmosphere and the same general gray [sic] drabness … The figures were pictures projected by somebody other than myself and I was nothing more than the receiving set.

The method of cinema invokes the ghost of reality rather than reanimating it, the technology itself the vessel through which the ghost is projected to the seeing eye. The camera can be Charon, but what if cinema requires its own ferryman? There is a term for such a form of transportation, echoing throughout history and through many different cultures. A psychopomp (derived from the Greek word meaning ‘guide for the souls’) is a mythological being charged with ushering the dead on their onward journey. Its role is not to judge, to weigh a soul against a feather, only to steer spirits on their onward journey to the afterlife. Cinema is an art form still in its infancy in the grand scale of human existence, and yet because of its widespread commercialisation, cinema appears constantly on the brink of death. Every new innovation represents a threat to what contemporary audiences come to know as cinema, and the act of cinema-going. The introduction of sound, the rise of Big Telly, blockbusters, the spike in streaming both before and through the pandemic and the collapse of release windows. All have seen hand-wringing over what will become of the Tenth Muse. Like Carlotta’s Crawford-esque tough old bird dismissing showbiz uncertainty in Follies (1971), cinema is just about Still Here, a collection of neuroses that amount to diminished habituation by audiences. Cinema in its commercial form becomes the ever-dying spirit, being transported from one life to the next by consumption trends and changing taste.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

Dr Patrick Glen’s academic observations of the ‘freak scene’ in 1960s Britain, at a time when cinemas were rapidly closing and home media was on the rise, provide a fascinating insight into how one of cinema’s many deaths was transformed into its own cinematic trend. In the shadow of transitory demise, the ‘freaks’, a loose group composed mainly of students and older teenagers, were showing up in cinemas on the brink of closing, but also “in improvised settings such as basements or university halls in towns and cities across Britain.” Heading to late night screenings, wide-eyed as they watched Italian horror and arthouse on acid, these counterculture heads weren’t birthing new cinema habits so much as undertaking the dying of the old way.

This seance of cinematic experience finds itself a home in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), where a grand old cinema facing imminent closure plays its final film, the eponymous wuxia epic Dragon Inn (1967) directed by King Hu. There is clever serendipity in the mise-en-scene with promotional posters for The Eye (2002) dotted through the atrium and hallways, the film about a corneal transplant allowing a woman to see ghosts. Tsai’s camera is the ghost’s eye, the film itself a means for the viewer to transfer the departed onwards beyond death. The first spoken lines of the film from the projectionist (Lee Kang-sheng), 45 minutes into the runtime, declare the cinema to be haunted, though it is clear at this point that it’s the cinema’s final congregation who are doing the haunting, and Tsai’s structural approach to slow cinema lends itself beautifully to this. The Japanese tourist played by Mitamura Kiyonobu operates as a restless spirit, wandering through the building, attempting connections and fulfilling his desires but never quite doing so. The clunking footsteps of the ticket woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) echo through the empty stairwell long before we see her ascending the stairwell to the projection room, hidden in the upper catacombs of the old theatre, to give the projectionist a steam bun. Like a vagabond spirit she keeps returning to the room, always empty, staring at the offering she has left for him which remains untouched. The recent imprints of human activity remain in the overstuffed ashtray which she fixates on as the audio of the wuxia film rumbles on, a final cigarette still burning on the table top, billowing its ectoplasmic fumes.

Yet all are inevitably fulfilling their role of seeing this dying cinema through to its end. The most important visitation is from Chun Shih, tearfully watching his past self onscreen in the final minutes of Dragon Inn before warmly reuniting with fellow castmate Miao Tien outside. Shih, a regular lead in Hu’s films on account of his timelessly heroic stature, had made his screen debut as swordsman Xiao Shao-zi in the 1967 film. Miao, a veteran whose career received new life through his work with Tsai Ming-Liang, had played the antagonistic eunuch Pi Shao-tang. Onscreen their younger selves battled in the final showdown. Now, their old forms quietly grieve their lack of remembrance, the loss of cinemagoing. The audience’s role is not just in their shared experience, but in their utilisation of its architecture: the toilets, the seats, the ticket booth, the hallways, the dilapidated upper levels. The projectionist even takes a moment at closing time to have a go at the fortune-telling machine in the foyer. And though the film is humorously punctuated with the usual bêtes noires of cinema-going — noisy eaters, bare feet on seats, the rummaging through bags, someone sitting unbearably close in an otherwise empty theatre — won’t it be so much worse when it’s all gone? The frustratingly human experience of shared interaction diminished by the loss of the cinema. Where else could we go ghosthunting together?

In the Online Era, the Internet itself has become a vessel for the echoes of the cinematic dead. Film fanatics make use of the digital archives to bring long-forgotten texts to modern audiences. Online auctions for the belongings of stars and icons throw up peculiar trinkets and possessions. Elvis’s personal 16mm copy of Deep Throat (1972) was up for auction at Rockhurst back in 2021. And those from past cinematic eras who are yet living can become unexpected messengers from beyond. The blonde bombshell and cult figure Mamie Van Doren is having an unexpected new lease of life via Twitter, where she regularly posts stories from the Golden Age, including wild, previously unheard “truths” about the real cause of Jean Harlow’s death (herself a ghost of cinema’s past). Though it is constantly dying little deaths, there are always messengers guiding phases of film into the afterlife.

Our seventeenth issue, PSYCHOPOMP, puts its ear to the ground for murmurs of the cinematic dead, and their guides. Our contributors, having analysed the mortality of this immortalising medium, have produced pieces which find ghostly hands outstretched to steer souls through the cinematic veil.

Theo Rollason analyses the ghoulishness of digital necromancy in Minority Report and A.I. Artificial Intelligence as it pertains to memory, grief and morality.

Soham Gadre sheds vital light on the Palestinian films shown at this year’s Prismatic Ground Festival, which brought the constancy of death in the nation, both past and present, to the foreground.

Owen Vince presents the films of the late Stom Sogo as a ferryman for their creator, whose epilepsy was a driving force in pushing against the barrier of the watchable.

Alex Mooney shows how wrangling with the half-finished posthumous performances of River Phoenix and Heath Ledger manoeuvred the directors’ visions for Dark Blood and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Ben Flanagan re-evaluates the lifespan of Super Mario Bros. in the distribution and home video market, asking in the performance studies tradition when exactly is a film ‘alive’?

Kenny Nixon discusses how an umbrella term like ‘late style’ can be applied to a filmmaker like Clint Eastwood.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

MINORITY REPORT

June 13, 2024 ·

Theo Rollason

A new invention, certainly one of the most curious of our fertile era, was produced last night at 14 Boulevard des Capucines … We have already collected and reproduced the spoken word; now we are collecting and reproducing life itself. One will, for example, be able to see our loved ones move about again, long after we have lost them. (Le radical, 30 December 1895).

You married the most, most, most, most, most genius man in the whole world, Kanye West. (Robert Kardashian, 2020)

Detective John Anderton spends his days in the future, solving murders that haven’t happened yet. By night, he sinks into the past. In his cluttered apartment, where cereal boxes talk to him and neuroin inhalers litter the floor, John makes his way over to his computer desk. His hand wavers over a set of clear disks: “Sean at home playing with toys,” “Sean 5th birthday,” “Sean at the beach.” He takes this last one and inserts it into the machine. Projectors fizz to life, coloured light fills the room, and Sean appears. “Hi daddy,” waves the holographic image of John’s son, and steps out of the two-dimensional wall-screen projection, into the room itself. Sean wants to show off his running skills. “Keep your knees up like that,” grins John encouragingly. “Keep your knees up like that,” echoes the recording of John playing from his speakers. He knows this one by heart.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

John takes another hit of neuroin and selects another disk: “Lara and John.” He closes his eyes as the high washes over him. When he opens them, a woman in a ghostly white dress has appeared. “John, put the camera down,” she mock-scolds, but she’s smiling. John gets up and walks towards her, so close he could touch her. “Sweetie, why don’t you put the camera down,” she repeats, “and come and watch the rain with me?” Now John’s smiling too. He physically flinches as the image is abruptly replaced by a text notice: END OF FILE. Lara has left him, Sean is missing, presumed dead, and John is alone.

This scene, from Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report, is a remarkable demonstration of the spectral nature of the moving image in the digital age. Then again, the cinema has always been haunted, even since before it was the cinema. At the end of the 18th century in Europe, for instance, the magic lantern — an early image projection device, and precursor to the motion picture — was put to use in the phantasmagoria, the so-called ghost shows, public entertainments in which spectres were conjured to terrify audiences. The early shows resembled séances, where showmen would promise to bring back the spirits of audience members’ dead loved ones.

This kind of morbid marketing stuck around into the early years of cinema and beyond. In Georges Méliès’ trick films, devils, skeletons and ghouls dash about the screen, and people materialise out of thin air. But the presence of the undead could be felt in even the most mundane movies. The first press reviews of the Lumière Cinématographe in 1895 already picked up on the challenge to mortality posed by the medium itself. “When this apparatus is on sale to the public,” read the verdict from La poste, “death will cease to be absolute.”

Cinema’s promise of resurrection is uncanny, but it can also be cathartic. Spielberg had already self-reflexively approached this theme in 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The narrative similarly concerns the loss of a son, Martin, who has contracted a rare disease and now lies in suspended animation, much like Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) — or perhaps like the apocryphal tale that Walt Disney himself is cryogenically frozen in time, awaiting sufficient developments in medicine so as to be brought back to life. Martin’s place is taken by David, an android boy who struggles to earn his adopted parents’ love. When Martin unexpectedly awakes, David is cast out on a journey to become a real boy. This is Pinocchio for the age of mechanical reproduction — indeed, in one of the film’s most horrifying scenes David is confronted with a stockroom of mass-produced, Disneyfied Davids. He was, we discover, a simulacrum of another missing son, that of his tortured creator. David throws himself into the sea.

Two millennia pass, and David is discovered by his mechanical descendants, now evolved beyond human comprehension. They read David’s memories, which flash across their faces as moving images. Finally, they watch on some sort of screen as David is reunited with his mother — or, at least, a reproduction of her — and at last finds peace. Artifice, virtuality, cinema — whatever you want to call it, Spielberg understands that this is a space to play out desire and loss. But in Minority Report, which likewise imagines a film-as-memory interface as means of posthumously reuniting parent with child, Tom Cruise’s John finds no catharsis in this possibility. Quite the opposite: John’s virtual resurrection of his son is his repetition compulsion, the lonely and painful reliving of his trauma. His screen watching becomes synonymous with his drug usage; he’s addicted to both.

We like to imagine early film audiences as poorly adjusted to the rapid-fire image of the cinema, as gullible Victorians fooled into thinking the train might really crash through the screen and into the auditorium. Except — whisper it — we ourselves want so very badly for our images to come to life. From John Anderton’s position in front of the hologram, his wife and child appear in three dimensions, strikingly lifelike. But Spielberg positions us at an angle; unlike John’s front-on perspective, we see the trick for what it is. Light melts off the image, uncannily warping Sean’s figure. As John approaches Lara, the camera circles around him, and the holographic image becomes a convex surface, literally hollowed out of the human presence John desperately craves. We see it’s an illusion, he knows it’s an illusion. And yet, all the same, John mimes along to his conversation with Sean, and he approaches Lara as if to take her in his arms. John knows the train isn’t coming towards him, but he can’t help but hope it might. Film’s promise of life after death is too important for him. Anything to bring his son back, even just for a moment.

Maybe it’s no surprise that John treats moving images like they’re in the room with him. His job, after all, is all about accepting films for the real thing. Minority Report’s plot concerns the existence of the precogs, three psychic mutants whose powers of prophecy allow the Washington, D.C. “Precrime” unit in the year 2054 to prevent future murders. In the Philip K. Dick story Spielberg’s film is based on, precognition comprises of the precogs “babbling” to one another. In the film version, precognition goes from the linguistic to the visual — the precogs’ forecasts manifest as moving images, projected onto a giant screen.

Metacinematic motifs abound at Precrime HQ. John Anderton’s job comprises of “scrubbing the image,” analysing the precogs’ visions to determine the perpetrator of the crime. He is a director, instructing his team to “capture” images, before arranging them into a coherent narrative. The lights dim as he begins his work. The precogs function as both his screenwriters and fleshy projectors. He has producer figures who appear via video link and who must give him the go-ahead to start a given project. He even accompanies his work with a score: Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. (Anderton waves his hands about to control the images by gesture; for Spielberg, the job of the director is somewhere between conductor and surgeon.) In the film’s opening scene, he is essentially tasked with making a trailer for the murder his team is about to prevent. The ethical dilemma of Minority Report concerns the virtual image and its relation to the real — is the film that Anderton constructs representative of reality?

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

Minority Report is a film about screens and eyes, about what we see and how we see it. Its world is saturated with moving images: video calls, self-updating newspapers, cereal boxes with animated cartoons. In a VR arcade, citizens indulge their deepest, darkest fantasies: sex, success, murder. “Actual” murders appear on all manner of surfaces; precog Agatha’s recorded vision of the drowning of one Anne Lively — who turns out to have been her mother — travels from screen to screen throughout the film. And, most memorably, public advertisements use iris scanners to invasively personalise their content to viewers; “John Anderton,” calls an affable voice in a shopping mall, “you could use a Guinness right about now!” (All of this feels decidedly less sci-fi than it did in 2002.)

As with the ghostly projections in John’s home and the haptic images he manipulates in his office, what’s stressed here is digital moving-image culture’s increasing immateriality. The screens in Minority Report are transparent, their content seamlessly transferable from one empty surface to another. In the case of the holographic advertisements there is no screen — or rather, the screen is the world entire, anticipating the screen-bodies of the advanced Mechas in A.I. But perhaps just as important is that, Anderton’s small workplace audience notwithstanding, these are all profoundly solitary modes of consuming moving images. From nostalgic home movies to targeted advertising, the collective viewing of the cinema gives way to the individualised and individualistic viewing of modern life.

The most chilling manifestation of this is glimpsed in Precrime’s version of mass incarceration. Those arrested by the project, to prevent the homicides they did not yet commit, are “haloed,” placed in suspended animation, sent to a panoptic containment facility where they are interred indefinitely. To the outside viewer, screens wrapped around their faces play their alleged crimes on demand. On the inside, as the creepy warden explains, “It’s actually a kind of rush. They say you have visions. That your life flashes before your eyes. That all your dreams come true.” In short, the experience simulates the central aspects of popular cinema at present: spectacle, nostalgia, wish-fulfilment. Purgatory is reimagined as an eternal movie played to an audience of one. It’s here that John Anderton finds himself when he is inevitably accused of murder, and it’s here that numerous critics have speculated that he stays for the remainder of the film; John’s happy ending — in which Precrime ends and he finally gets to watch the rain with Lara, now pregnant again — may be no more than his haloed fantasy.

We’ve been surrounded by ghosts since the invention of machines for capturing and displaying movement photographically, with each development potentially deepening our imagined connection to the departed. In 2016, Jang Ji-sung lost her daughter Nayeon to cancer. In 2019, Jang was reunited with Nayeon; using a VR headset, she was able to see, talk to and even touch a reanimated rendering of her daughter in real time — a private moment captured as public spectacle for the South Korean TV documentary Meeting You. A year later, Kanye West shared his birthday present to his then-wife Kim Kardashian online: a hologram of her deceased father, celebrity lawyer Robert Kardashian. Zombie Rob was lambasted for the ways in which it blatantly manipulated Kardashian’s voice and image to suit West’s own agenda.

Such digital necromancy — or perhaps just ghoulish kitsch — is moving into the private sphere, too. 2021 saw the popular genealogy site MyHeritage introduce its DeepNostalgia feature, which allows users to animate photographs of their dead relatives using machine learning technology. In 2022, they added the feature Deepstory, which additionally enables users to create a video in which these animations speak a script submitted by the user. There’s now a whole growing field of grief tech, or thanatechnology, that helps people build avatars of themselves or loved ones that can be called upon after their deaths to stage encounters that never happened in life.

We’re clearly well beyond Minority Report and back into the realm of A.I., in which David settles for an artificial declaration of love, an elaborate reconstruction of his mother designed to provide comfort in the face of loss. How would John Anderton react to such an offer? Can these staged interactions provide a space for healing, or are they merely modern phantasmagoria, masking the rawness of grief beneath layers of technological showmanship? And what happens when the photographic image is supplanted by animation and our memories become malleable, subject to the whims of algorithms?

In Minority Report, the moving image is a cursed thing, a tool of the surveillance state and the profit-hungry corporation, and a reminder and harbinger of death. Film traps John Anderton in the past, in the trauma of Sean’s disappearance, and possibly in a fantasy of redemption too. And it traps the precogs in the past and future, in memories of murders long-ago and soon-to-come. In the film’s final shot, the camera slowly weaves its way through a scene of nostalgic, pastoral bliss: the three precogs, released from their enslavement to the Precrime operation, sit in a sunlight-dappled cottage reading books — paper books, I should say, to match their woollen jumpers and wooden floors. This is, a voiceover by Cruise confirms, “a place where they could live out their lives in peace.”

Saccharine, critics called it. Schmaltzy. Typical Spielberg. But look closer, scrub the image, and you’ll notice that Agatha, sitting apart from the other precogs, holds in her hand a small, clear disk — a screen — on which plays the vision-memory of her mother’s drowning. Spielberg keeps things ambiguous: does this offer catharsis, or is Agatha doomed to virtually relive the loss again and again? The moving image might help heal us of our ghosts, but it won’t let us forget them.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

A STONE’S THROW

June 13, 2024 ·

The Cinematic Image as Life, Death, and Inspiration: A Reflection on Palestinian Films at the Prismatic Ground Festival.

Soham Gadre

During each presentation at the fourth and latest edition of New York’s Prismatic Ground film festival, which focuses on experimental and documentary cinema, the founder and organiser, Inney Prakash, made it a point to note that the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli, British, and American governments was ongoing. It certainly pervaded as a dark cloud over our movie viewing but there was a sense that the movie viewing itself could serve as a balm to our souls. Art could be a source of healing and energy that we would need to continue to resist amidst the endless news of dismembered children and tortured men and starving women suffering from the policies and weaponry we pay for with our own tax dollars. Many of the films presented at Prismatic Ground, through a consciously curated assemblage by Prakash himself, were from Palestinian filmmakers and about Palestinian people, many of whom have been martyred, or if they were still alive, saw only the spectres of where they once lived. In a way, these films both healed and hurt. As David Cronenberg recently said in an interview, “I’m often watching films in order to see dead people. I want to see them again, I want to hear them.” How cinema connects life and death was constantly on my mind during this festival.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

The first sequence in Antoinetta Angelidi’s Idées Fixes/Dies Irae (1977), which played as part of a greater retrospective on the Greek experimental filmmaker’s work, is a nearly seven minute long still shot of a garden path. Halfway through, two ghost-like figures in full black garb suddenly appear side by side on the path and begin to walk, swinging their feet as they do so. For a while, it is unclear whether they are walking towards the screen or away from it. At some points, they seem to go nowhere. This is precisely the point. In the Q&A, Angelidi described the scene as a contemplation and examination of the geometry of the film plane. When we look at cinema, we assume a three-dimensional image, but in reality, as the image is projected onto a flat screen, it is in fact always two-dimensional. The way our brains interpret imagery in film fills the gaps between image and reality. We know the locations and places in films are three dimensional so we see the figures in a cinematic frame as moving in three dimensions.

Razan AlSalah, Palestinian visual artist, experiments with these concepts of 2-D vs 3-D movement by using flat pieces of imagery prominently and scans over them repeatedly in her stunning documentary A Stone’s Throw (2024). She focuses on her father Amine, who was separated from the family for nearly 30 years because he was working in a UAE work camp called Zirku Island. AlSalah did not have any access to this secretive camp, instead utilising a flattened aerial image of it on Google Maps. As the digital eye zooms in and across the brown rectangular structures and grey block sites, there is a lifelessness in the image. Overlaid is a script that reads over rather preposterous 4 and 5 star reviews of the island. Do these people exist, are their comments sincere, coerced, or sarcastic? How many of them are still alive?

In a later scene, a photograph of a group of Palestinian men gathered around the Mediterranean coastal endpoint of the Kirkuk-Haifa Oil Pipeline with the intention of blowing it up is examined. The pipeline was built by the Iraq Petroleum Company, co-owned by various entities with headquarters in London, England. As one of the first groundworks of the West to establish a foothold in the Middle East, it helped to usher in the expulsion of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba, the same which forced Amine to flee to Lebanon. AlSalah’s camera moves up and down the series of pixelated black and white squares that make up the photograph, turning Angelidi’s geometric theorem of the planar cinematic image into one that gives it dimension — the depth of inspiration, hope and revolution.

A Stone’s Throw also includes 16mm footage of Haifa, near the border of Israel and Lebanon, along with Google images of the same. In the post-screening Q&A, AlSalah mentioned how difficult it was to get access to that area to film because of the various restrictions the Israeli government has placed on crossing the borders between Lebanon and Israel. The sequence of AlSalah’s father, carrying two bags, is replayed, both forward and reversed, and dissolves into a shot of the Haifa coast. On the audio is the voice of AlSalah and several other narrators including the famed Palestinian author and martyr Ghassan Kanafani who was assassinated in Beirut in 1972 along with his 17-year-old daughter by a Mossad car-bombing operation. Over a camera that pans through illustrations of martyrs on walls, Kanafani describes how the resistance of Palestinians must be defined through “Something more powerful than arms. Something bigger than material force, we need to unleash the imaginary, we need something irresistible, something that nuclear weapons cannot change. Something like a Palestinian child throwing a stone.” It boils down to the image. Weapons are only a path to death, but the cinematic image is a channel between life and death, one that can be traversed up and down on the plane itself but can inspire the forward or backward trajectory of people.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

Kamal Aljafari’s cinema is imbued with the minute experience of Palestinians. He uses the camera in radically invasive ways that both obscure and reveal terrifying details of seemingly monotonous day-to-day lives under occupation. When I first saw An Unusual Summer (2020), it stunned me in its ability to turn surveillance camera footage into an odyssey of crime and prejudice sans the sensationalism of news coverage. It was a Israel-Palestine conflict film turned noir. UNDR (2024) is much more direct. Here, surveillance is by air, the camera almost always floating from above, observing the terrain and people of Palestine performing daily chores. The landscape panoramas are stunning, showing lush greenery of olive groves and majestic steppes of Palestinian homes on the hillsides. It’s a great moral shame that these ethereal images and the tranquillity they depict are immediately rendered tragic and melancholic in the context of history. The shadows of the helicopters on the hills and valleys and even on the Temple Mount harken a dark allegorical religious reference to angels of death — Mal’akh ha-Maveth in Judaism, Azrael in Islam and Christianity.

When we consider death or the deceased on screen, we lend ourselves to make declaratively detached statements on Palestinians and their home. These are rendered moot by Carol Mansour’s Aida Returns (2023). In this film, her mother, born and raised in Jaffa in what is now occupied as south Tel-Aviv and expelled during the 1948 Nakba, returns there as ashes. A hopeful documentary that tosses away the metaphorical speculation of ghosts and spirits in favour of the real, tangible experience of a last act, it documents a story that is so familiar and told over and over by many other Palestinians. Mansour’s mother says “we thought we would get to go back.” The lies told and the promises broken render this connection and longing to home similar to the longing a soul has to return to its creator. “They can fight us with everything except memory,” a friend of Carol’s remarks.

In Michel Khleifi’s Ma’loul Celebrates its Destruction (1985), several Palestinians gather near Haifa once a year to remember the homes they once had. The stories told and paintings featured in the film come from memory. Several Palestinians who were expelled from their homes point to a painting remembering who’s house is whose and what their daily lives were like. So much of Palestinian history is of things erased, people left behind, homes destroyed. But so much of it is also about collective love and joy and companionship of a people and their allies. These memories, of ghosts and time, of the journeys from life to death, are celebrated as much as they are mourned. The term martyr is very special to Palestinians and Muslims in general as it connotes the existence of life and ability to affect our world even from the afterlife. It operates much deeper than our casual definitions and understandings of it in the West. Ghassan Kanafani speaks in related terms in A Stone’s Throw, relaying that “life is not all material, there are such things as imagination, thought, principles, values, emotions, sensations, impressions, and we experience these all collectively.” Seeing the works of brilliant artists, along with others at Prismatic Ground, proved Inney’s comment about cinema being a balm and energizer to be true.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

P.S. WHEN YOU ARE GOING TO DIE

June 13, 2024 ·

Innocent, aimless, determined, real

Owen Vince

Think of Arnold van Gennep. Belgian, round eyes, drooping mustache. In 1909, he coined a concept that would come to congeal in our terminally-online vocabulary, however divorced from its original (ethnographic) context. I’m talking about liminality. Properly speaking, liminality describes a ritual ‘separation’—a moment of transformation in which an individual detaches from the community of the living and passes, however briefly, into the realm of the dead.

Now, think of Stom Sogo (born Osaka, 1975; emigrated to New York and San Francisco before returning to his homeland in 2004; dying—tragically, prematurely—in 2012, aged just 37). What is recalled of his brief but frenetic career is a rebellious avant-gardism that swallowed and spat out the broadcasted and subjective materials of contemporary life. Big talk, but you won’t see his name everywhere; he is screened only rarely. Today, Duncan Taylor suggests that Sogo exists “as a kind of digital ghost, with low resolution copies of his art floating around [the] internet”. If his works are haunting, they also haunt.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

He was also epileptic and – among other things – his cinema was an attempt to crack open the perceptive experience of epilepsy, and to throw it back toward his audience; to create things that (in his words) “taste sweet first, seizure second”. Not surprisingly, his techniques privilege lossiness, artifacting, blow-outs, rips, distortion, noise, rephotography. He tore scenes from everyday life — faces, street scenes, views from train windows—and remixed them with popular broadcasting (cooking shows, commercials, talk TV) through a welter of mediating effects. Real life—which is also ‘banal’ life, everyday life—becomes very strange in the process.

Properly speaking, this connects Sogo with other post-war avant-gardists—Jonas Mekas, Anne Charlotte Robertson, George Kuchar, Ed Pincus—who operated in an impressionistically diaristic mode: sidestepping the traditional frameworks of narrative cinema (sentimental plots, character-driven acting, mise-en-scene) and replacing them with the remixed datum of routine experience. For Kuchar, that was a filled toilet bowl, rain falling outside his window, his body in a mirror. For Sogo, this means hanging out, riding trains, pounding the streets, conversation.

But more than this, Sogo wanted to distort the barrier between reality and spectatorship even further; to pummel-grind his footage until the tether that connected it with ‘life’ was stretched impossibly thin. Watching his films, you struggle to subdue the wall of images that rushes toward you. And if there’s something spectral about all of this (ghostly apparitions haunting the frame, dissolving on contact), then it seems confirmed by Sogo’s own reflections about his work: “I wanted to show a flower that might be growing or dying”; “everything gets old in different levels. Flower got decayed, and film got fucking scratched”; “I show you something so cool that changes our dead life”. Often, this meant producing images that are un-beautiful; roughshod.

The first time I saw his films was in 2022, where they featured at London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF). In that wide, high hall in Woolwich—a former factory, I’m told, though it shows little of its industrious past today—we sat on the floor, on scattered chairs, and let Ya Private Sky (2001) and Silver Play (2001) slither-crash over us. I’m not sure what I thought at the time, but the image of these frazzled, buzzing images—gnarly in their digital decay—hung around in my mind for days and weeks afterwards. There was nothing polite in them; nor was there anything else that really looked like them. They seemed chewed up; impossible.

Sidebar. This all might bring to mind Hito Steyerl’s oft-repeated consideration of the “wrecked data” of images that, “shak[ing] off servitude and meaning”, appear suddenly “dead”; escaping the stiff container of explication, before passing into derangement. Really, their beauty is in their derangement, not their composition. There’s no Mekasian field of flowers here. The overall effect with a film like P.s. When you are going to die (2003) is muck; a kind of brackishness peculiar to Sogo.

There’s death here. But this is death as something processual and emergent—not as an ending. Sogo takes us to a place where meanings seem unhooked from the things that (struggle to) signify them. Nor is it abstractive; Sogo shows us decontextualized scenes, seemingly without order, the kind that you might find in your camera roll: a woman and a man hanging out in a room, the view from a train window, a mall. Life.

But he’s not leaving us there (the train carriage, the mall). Sogo wants to take us further, to another place. But, how do we know we’ve actually entered this other place? Sogo provides a hint. P.s. opens with a TV test card. Now sound enters the mix; a tonal rising. The card begins to flip. It shutters off. This is a beginning, an ending. Images flash and flicker in quick succession recalling the old adage that, upon the verge of death, a person glimpses flashbacks of their life; we’re at a threshold.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

Now Sogo cuts to the inside of a car, a wobbling camera which—with its groping, muddy field of view—drinks up houses, trees, soft hills. Now, he gives us a heavily artifacted shot—low angle, shifting—of a street. Two (now three) people are talking; Sogo tilts the frame within the frame, creating an off-centered trapezoid whose “lost” edges pass into an unseen beyond. Now, a grainy dissolve; a blue-lit strobing room—zoomed-in, up close. Bands of superimposition give way to a road at night, a freeway. Darkness, light.

Put another way, Sogo leads us through the ‘real’ world—of cars, streets, houses, lights—and, with his jarring, blown-out acts of mediation, takes us on an estranging journey into a netherworld that sits on ‘top’ of our own. We need to be on guard, to intuit—if we can—the scenes that flow toward us, the spectator. These dislocated formations might seem reminiscent of Hollis Frampton (in whose Surface Tension [1968] we see a man standing by a clock, a sped-up street scene, a fish seeming to swim through waves), but where Frampton gave us structural ‘clues’ to divine their overlapping linkages, Sogo abandons us at the edge of understanding.

But the clue is already there, isn’t it? Mortality, death. Really, we are walking between realms, inhabiting the so-called liminal space—an image and its “elegiac aura”—between living and un-living.

Sogo’s music follows suit, veering between clarity and monstrousness—it is a repetitive, insistent, shifting bricolage of sounds that are chipped, gnarled, distorted; often quite discordant, sometimes softly pulsing. Voices, too; diegetic and not. With Periodical Effect (2002) and Take this Tablet (2004), these effects can be aggressively dialed up, bridging connections between Sogo and Japanoise (best embodied by the likes of Merzbow and Hijokaidan). P.s. can be gentler, reassuring; even if that reassurance can quickly lapse into atonality. By 3 minutes 50 seconds into this quite lengthy (for Sogo) film (17:47), we’ve hit our first wall of dismal noise. The images keep pace, strobing and pulsating. Traffic scenes, man speaking, woman walking along a road in a short skirt, the stairs of a mall escalator, a hand in the darkness. They recycle, repeat, jolting back and jumping forward.

Because of the low-resolution in which many of Sogo’s films are found sequestered away on the likes of YouTube and Vimeo, it can be hard to say how precise the ‘actual’ works should be. To what extent does the quality differ between the original and the rip? Sogo’s methodology invites these questions; after all, his images are often already ripped. What difference does one more tearing-apart make?

While Sogo’s films happen in the moment of their shooting—the rushes that he gathered—they come alive at the editing table, where he made vivid use of rewinds, superimposition, slow motion and so on to scramble the pieces together. And if certain scenes resemble a kind of secular filmmaking, of home movies captured by weekend hobbyists, then this is intentional. Sogo discovers the sublimity of these scenes in how he splices and—at times—shatters them together. It recalls an interstitial reflection in Don DeLillo’s Underworld:

It is unrelenting footage that rolls on and on. It has an aimless determination, a persistence that lives outside the subject matter. You are looking into the mind of home video. It is innocent, it is aimless, it is determined, it is real.

The middle “act” of P.s. gives us a moment which looks precisely like the “home video” that DeLillo describes, but Sogo also exceeds it; transforms it. His camera looks down on a city block, a street, at night; he captures the arrival of a fire truck – with its peels of wavering light – and the bodies of the firefighters who subsequently enter the building, and the bodies of the block’s residents who loiter on the sidewalk, pressing close, looking up. It is a “real” moment – a real slice of life – but Sogo pushes the footage further, zooming to the point of his camera’s distorted maximum, shifting his focus from left to right, up and down. At such a zoomed extreme, the image breaks down; introducing scraps of murky artifacting, visual incoherence. It feels like a home movie; it also feels like a home movie that has been consciously estranged (innocent, aimless, determined, real). This same treatment is given to a romancing couple, and to his friends as they hang out – chatting (their voices distorted), smoking cigarettes – on a nighttime city stoop. This is real life; Sogo pushes it to a point of abstraction.

In this way, the real ‘meat’ of P.s.is the everyday transformed into something “fucked up”, as Sogo himself might put it offering an intimation of strangeness reached through materials that seem outwardly banal – the kind of stuff that wouldn’t typically be considered cinematic. Having passed through the chaotic intermingling of death, Sogo gives us life; a thing that is both ordinary and beautiful. His penultimate shot is steady: a piece of wall, and a space beyond it, through which people pass as they shop, commute, hang out. Finally, a little brightness that pushes through barely open curtains. Darkness. Light.

Returning to liminality, I’m still struck (though not surprised) by how much digital traction the idea has gained. You might locate its source in the popularization of ‘backrooms’ memes, r/liminalspace, an image that is almost—almost—“cursed”. There are those who call them “images with elegiac auras”, which—again—brings forth the imaginary of mourning. What works for a series of strange, empty, ill-lit rooms also works for the elegies of Stom Sogo, where his films are laid on our eyes like death-poems, or as texts beyond death (having gone and—through their convulsive dissociations—come back to us). Whether van Gennep would have enjoyed them is a matter of conjecture. He died in 1957, just in time to watch the postwar avant-garde flicker into life. Sogo—its latter-day remnant—made sure that this ‘flicker’ became an explosion.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

SUPER MARIO BROS.

June 13, 2024June 13, 2024 ·

Credit: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution

Ben Flanagan

The film was dead: to begin with. Mortal images are captured, projected onto a wall for a time, and then forgotten about. What else should the life-span of a film be? A film may only be alive during production. In distribution, life may take the form of a festival run, or a heavy marketing campaign. It dies when the conversation does. Occasionally, a repertory screening, or a boutique Blu-ray will memorialise, and hope to pass a film’s spirit to the other side, its absence reckoned with through the wish of canonisation. The final resting ground can only be on your shelf.

A changing home video market seized upon this. Since the pandemic era, there has been increased interest in special edition releases of restored and rediscovered films on physical media. Often, these are presented in 4K (claimed as the highest resolution the human eye can register), and presented alongside a host of features, housed in expensive packaging. These sets become a crypt for a given cult object. In this respect, the archivists, remastering authors, and boutique distributors are psychopomps, who do not judge as they guide a film from distribution hell to a nerd’s shelf. Between established labels like Arrow and Indicator, and upstarts like Radiance and the many ‘partner labels’ on Vinegar Syndrome, the time is ripe to summon ghosts. Effectively, any old shit can warrant a special edition release. And why not? Does a pauper not merit a tombstone?

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

These premium packages become a stand-in for communal moviegoing. They totemise, for example, ritualised screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) in which audiences would participate in the film by quoting and singing along, dressing up. Even a corny Emma Watson-Ezra Miller staging of this phenomenon in The Perks of Being A Wallflower (2012) couldn’t lay it to rest. It has taken Disney’s crackdown on repertory screenings of the Fox catalogue, along with the persistent popularity of cult contenders The Greatest Showman (2017) and The Room (2003), to slow down Richard O’Brien’s creation. A cult hit is forged, instead, in 2024, through clipping, meme-ing, or word-of-mouth posting, such as in the digital-nightmare-horrors of Skinamarink (2022) or We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021). Cult films seem ever more omnipresent because they are readily available, leaving a residual feeling that the ‘underground’ is no longer a prerequisite for cult status. Is Shin Kamen Rider (2022) a cult film? It’s so accessible, on Amazon Prime, that the danger of discovery is lost. If last year’s Blackberry or Bottoms constitute the mainstream, then perhaps cult objects should be considered those which reside on the depths of streaming services. Think Confess Fletch (2022), rather than a ready-made film maudit like Babylon (2022), whose paltry fanbase invariably describe it as ‘ahead of its time’. Is this as close as we can get to the Showgirls (1995) trenches?

And no trench is as deep as Super Mario Bros. (1993). This year, it was given the deluxe treatment in what may be the ultimate example of re-release as psychopomp: an elaborate 4K UHD re-release aimed to stage manage a film’s reputation to the other side of ‘Cult’. Can it be seen as a new Showgirls? Can the force of packaging take it there? The box might sit open in a forgotten browser tab. A voice calls to buy it. Perhaps purchasing the box will release the cenobites. Opening it certainly will.

The arguments against Super Mario Bros. are well-trodden: the dated sets; the weird obsession with dinosaurs; how it’s nothing like the Nintendo game character or its Sunshine world; how Mario and Luigi’s surnames are Mario, meaning Bob Hoskins plays someone called Mario Mario. Eventually, these flaws become features. There is so much sensual pleasure to be found here. The establishing shot of the brothers’ apartment gives a King Vidor pan past a photo of an old Italian man (Cranky Mario?), across a wall adorned with three plungers proudly mounted like swords, past a surreptitiously open bathroom door revealing the perfect porcelain throne, past a television blaring an abduction conspiracy doc, and settling eventually on Mario, hard at work in his office.

As he and Luigi (John Leguizamo) bicker through a Laurel and Hardy act down into Dinohattan, a carnivalesque world where Luigi’s new beau Daisy has been kidnapped, the entire cast populate those sets with exuberant gestures that are part vaudeville, part Colombian march. Fisher Stevens and Richard Edson bring a weirdo energy as Koopa henchmen. These two dirtbags, lanky in zoot suits, stick out against the late 1980s Brooklyn sidewalk like Robert Altman figurines. In their dunderhead, hipster acquiescence to the cod-scientific authoritarianism of King Koopa (Dennis Hopper) — resulting in their newfound interest in political theory — they predict the ‘dimes square’ phenomenon. Fiona Shaw minces. Rival plumber Scapelli (Gianni Russo) degenerates until the actor is replaced by a literal Monkey, in a return to the primal simplicity of the ape. Hopper cackles as he chants ‘Goomba,’ his lizard-like poise and bad suit a reflection of Rudy Giuliani’s ‘master of the universe’ attitude towards the city.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

You have to credit the husband-and-wife director-duo of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, two British directors giving their version of an American fantasia in which the maker’s unfamiliarity with the country is apparent, a tradition that stretches from Hitchcock, to Michael Winner, to this year’s Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, directing a wannabe-pre-packaged cult object). No American filmmaker would be brave enough to stage the sequence in which the Marios are dragged through a violent police department, depicted as part office, part science lab, part concentration camp. Thrown before the check-in officer, they look up at him from way below his desk. In the reverse shot, an anonymous shapely leg ending in a black leather heel rests upon the officer’s neck, suggestively pulling S&M aesthetics in conversation with oppressive authority as Helmut Newton or Howard Hawks might.

All of this unbridled creativity was hampered, as ever, by studio notes. Weeks before shooting began, Disney snatched the US distribution rights and rectified the script. Perhaps they envisioned something more like The Wizard (1989), an extended commercial for a Nintendo product they hoped to acquire. As the industrial, dusty sets had already been built, the new elements were staged in a clearly inappropriate space. This conflict is all over the finished product, contributing in large part to its flop status.

In 2021, the ‘Morton-Jenkel cut’ of Super Mario Bros. was uploaded to the Internet Archive. It assembles once-lost VHS sequences alongside a restored version of the film. Perhaps the fact that it was ‘viewed 71,028 times in under a week’ went some way toward convincing the good people of Umbrella Entertainment to invest in creating a new box set. Its contents are a feast of grave goods: the script, a book of essays, a reprinted magazine, stickers, art cards, posters, and, of course, the film restored into 4K UHD alongside more extras and alternate cuts than are worth listing here. Among home entertainment producers and physical media collectors alike there is scepticism as to how much art cards actually provoke a consumer to pick up a Blu-ray, but that point may be moot. Umbrella match the glut of Super Mario Bros. with the ultimate glut artefact. Having the monument on one’s shelf, in one’s home, valued at $150(AU), is a tribute to the notion of cult itself.

In 2022, Korean label Nova released an A.I. upscaled version of another 1993 classic, Green Snake. Tsui Hark’s Wuxia of warring serpent siblings similarly finds ecstasy through actors personifying animals to carnal ends. There are plenty of reasons to fear A.I.’s use in film restoration, but given how unlikely we are to receive a true remastered version of this or Tsui’s other great Hong Kong films, one becomes ambivalent of how else to carry such a film on to its afterlife. Replete with steamy, monsoon-pale watercolours, it’s a film that inspires make-believe. And similarly, from the shambolic car chase, to the liberal use of flamethrowers and literal sparks that fly, to the chintzy depiction of future tech through maps and photo messaging, Super Mario Bros. feels so vividly like the product of human beings. Mistakes were made, but they are so unmistakably human, and if anything is worthy of the box set tombstone, surely it’s something which displays such signs of life.

There’s nothing more self-aggrandising than a critic’s Madeleine moment. With that in mind, Super Mario Bros. is one of the first films I remember seeing, on a VHS in 1997. Its novelisation was the first book I checked out from my primary school library. I don’t know why these are so vivid to me, but the fact that this title stuck around the hippocampus means it will probably be one of the only films still in my mind by the time my brain has succumbed to dementia or whatever in decades to come. Bergman, Fellini, Ozu will be gone. Morton and Jankel will remain. Perhaps the film itself is a psychopomp. Maybe when I finally open the box set, the Mario cenobite will crawl out of my Blu-ray player and drag me through a green pipe into the pits of dino hell. Chance would be a fine thing.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

June 13, 2024 ·

Kenny Nixon

“I’m private, I guess, and I’ve found it’s a great pressure to be known.” – Clint Eastwood, Conversations With Clint Eastwood (Kevin Avery)

2012’s Trouble With The Curve opens on a then-83 year-old Clint Eastwood in dialogue with his penis, attempting to coax pee out by berating it with gruff, raspy words. Following a pleasurable piss, he clumsily ambles into a coffee table in the middle of his room, and proceeds to kick it across his house while calling it “bitch”. Cut to: inside the refrigerator as he opens the door and grabs an open can of Spam, utilizing a fork to eat it straight out of the container. Eastwood has been making films addressing his status as an aging cinema icon since Unforgiven (1992) – what critic Amy Taubin called “the first film of Clint Eastwood’s old age”. Clint was not in the director’s chair for Curve, but all films with Eastwood are about “Clint Eastwood”. His is a career spent trying to find unflattering angles of one of American film’s most famous purveyors of violence and taciturn masculinity. In contrast to icons like Chaplin whose late period of melancholic solipsism and leftist politics left audiences befuddled, Eastwood has only grown more prolific and more successful as he has aged, directing 23 films with 4 Best Picture nominations since Unforgiven won in 1993.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

“Late Style” is something that this very publication has discussed, and it is worth quoting that piece here to explain why it is a phrase that has seeped into contemporary film discourse in a more pervasive way than ever before:

“Its prevalence as a turn of phrase is no great breakthrough, but a symptom of a film culture that venerates the old, while the Young Turks suffer and fail.”

The term “Late Style” comes from Adorno, a vague, mediated phrase in between the German words Spästil (late style) and Alterstil (individual old-age style), and its use varies; Adorno used it in his essay fragments discussing the third period of Beethoven, where, in his words: the late work “breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art”. Current American film is filled with elder statesmen well into their own late periods: Scorsese, Schrader, and Coppola, now all over the age of 80, are still making films. European giants such as Manoel de Oliveira worked until his death at 105. Jean-Luc Godard continues to posthumously innovate after his death at 92. Resnais and Rohmer were still making films in their late 80’s. All of these directors figure prominently in the discourse of what exactly is cinematic Late Style.

Eastwood is an entirely different proposition. A healthy distance from the New Hollywood brats, and certainly not working in the European traditions, he was, and still is, a consummately popular filmmaker. He’s audience-conscious to a fault, Kevin Avery’s Conversations With Clint Eastwood (2011) reveal a man who definitely keeps receipts on box office numbers and critical reviews alike, with the famous example of Pauline Kael’s continual negative scribes causing Clint to get a psychoanalyst to look at her review of The Enforcer (1978) in order to figure out exactly what her problem was (the analyst concluded she was attracted to him). In that same book, Avery puts a question to Eastwood about Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda being unable to find serious work due to their age, with Eastwood conceding that when an actor is a certain age “I don’t think you can base the protagonist of a film on him because there’s no identification factor there.” This was in the early 80’s and now reads like bullshit given his career since then, but proves that Eastwood was wary of the danger involved in aging out of what people know him to be, and his resulting adjustments have become his late style.

The issue with a catch-all theory of Late Style is that no matter if you die at age 60 or at 105, your last works are your late style. What constitutes late for Eastwood? Is it when he draws attention to his age by getting stuck with a younger sidekick in the buddy cop flick The Rookie (1990)? What about even earlier, where the man made famous through on-screen violence drinks himself to his first film death in Honkytonk Man (1982)? Both feel inadequate, but if we take Taubin at her word, is it fair for a ‘late period’ to be over 30 years? Edward Said says Late Style “has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradictions between them” and that this tension “is the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained from age and exile”. Replace “the artist” with “Clint Eastwood” and that reads as if it is a synopsis of Unforgiven. But does it adequately explain Space Cowboys (2000), or The Mule (2018)?

In Trouble With The Curve, Justin Timberlake plays amateur scout Johnny Flanagan, who previously had a hotshot baseball career of his own. Known for his 100mph fastball, he was scouted by Gus (Eastwood) back in the day, but against Gus’s advice, he kept chasing velocity and injured his arm, ending his career. Current day Major League Baseball is facing an epidemic of younger pitchers blowing out their elbows even before they get their beaks wet in the league, with this problem largely attributed, as in Trouble With The Curve, to a league-wide chase after the arms who can throw the hardest in spite of the clear injury risk involved. This epidemic has had me thinking a lot about Jamie Moyer. The left-handed pitcher from Sellersville, Pennsylvania began his professional career in the middle of the Reagan administration and threw his final pitch just as Barack Obama was wrapping up his first term, coincidentally the same year Trouble With The Curve was released.

Moyer was a late bloomer, an early career plagued by inconsistency until elbow surgery in the early 90’s caused him to rethink his whole approach and find his ethos: say no to velocity. His fastball that previously hit the high 80s during his early days now sat between 80-84mph, a good 10mph below the league average that only went up during the course of his career. This move prolonged his professional life in a way the MLB hasn’t seen since. At age 39, when most athletes are considering retirement, he became the best pitcher on the record-setting 2001 Seattle Mariners. A signature languid, disguised delivery aided what would normally be called a late career renaissance, but he was never as good as he was from age 35 onwards, even winning a World Series as a key member of the 2008 Philadelphia Phillies. At the time he retired at the age of 49, he had faced almost 10% of all MLB hitters in the League’s history. Is what Jamie Moyer did Late Style? Here’s Hall of Fame Third Baseman Chipper Jones on the subject, after Moyer shutout his Braves in 2010: “The guy is eighty-seven years old and is still pitching for a reason. He stays off the barrel of the bat. He changes speeds, changes the game plan, keeps you guessing.”

*Jamie Moyer at 49 for his last team, the Colorado Rockies*

We now have three definitions courtesy of Adorno, Said, and Chipper Jones. Adorno focuses on breaking the bonds of one’s art, but in looking at films like True Crime (1999) or Mystic River (2003), I think one would be hard pressed to make the argument that Eastwood has broken any bonds involved in his art. Said says in aging, an artist becomes less ashamed, and their “mature subjectivity” becomes less interested in resolving the contradictions inherent to one’s youth. While aspects of this map well onto Unforgiven, Eastwood’s screen presence in old age is defined by an all-encompassing shame. Eastwood’s late characters are in some sense failures, where the wrinkles on his face and elderly gait of his walk give the sense that they are load-bearing for wrongs committed in past lives. Million Dollar Baby (2004) may look like a traditional weepie, but it savagely depicts Eastwood desperately taking advantage of a lower-class woman’s athletic talents to try and relive past successes that we aren’t sure ever existed. Gran Torino (2008) is another of the rare Eastwood films where he dies in the end, where the sun is barely seen until he has passed away, and where Eastwood has his fortune read by a Hmong Shaman, who says to the lonely old man “you have no happiness in your life.” With Gran Torino, Clint actually set the record for the oldest leading man to reach #1 at the box office.

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!

The Chipper Jones definition has a simple wisdom in tune with how Eastwood discusses his work. The answer to longevity is, like Jamie Moyer, to misdirect and say no to velocity, where old age doesn’t provoke these trite maxims about a found inner peace, but instead complicates long-held ideas and sacred iconographies, biting around the edges of one’s own persona. Eastwood’s presence on screen or name above the title has a unique effect of obscuring just how strange his films, especially in the 21st century, really are. Of course he’s interested in masculine, reticent, American dignity, but as he has aged he’s found it in increasingly strange places. There’s an airline pilot, capable of saving the lives of hundreds but unprepared to navigate the subsequent Langian media trap in Sully (2016), or a cop-loving Paul Blart figure forced to become Antigone in Richard Jewell (2019), or remaking Close-Up (1990) with three army washouts re-enacting their own European vacation, selfie-sticks and all, only to later violently re-create their own heroic act, in The 15:17 To Paris (2017). He turns a biopic of a conservative American hero in J. Edgar (2011) into a gay melodrama worthy of Fassbinder, the streets of South Boston into Dostoevky’s Saint Petersburg for Mystic River (2003), and an airport-paperback style plot into a meditation on the metaphysics of loneliness with Hereafter (2010). Even when he is not acting, he is an artist whose choices are always more off-kilter than he is ever given credit for, a dexterous ability to “stay off the barrel of the bat” and maintain the high-wire act involved with being immensely famous and inexorably strange, even alienating.

The aspect of Eastwood’s late style most in line with Said and Adorno is the proximity to death, which by all available evidence, will be the only thing stopping Eastwood from continuing to make films (Trouble With The Curve again: “He wouldn’t do well without his work”). Death is foundational to Eastwood’s late filmography: the murders in Mystic River, the assisted suicide in Million Dollar Baby, or war casualties ricocheting onto the home front in American Sniper (2014). There are no happy families in an Eastwood film, always signifying a kind of spiritual death, so many of his characters have dead wives and estranged children. Forever a cowboy in old age, since The Man With No Name to be Clint Eastwood is to stand apart from society, what has changed from Unforgiven onwards is the nagging sense that life just won’t leave him alone.

The apotheosis of Unforgiven’s “one last job” ethos is 2021’s Cry Macho, a late style urtext if there ever was one. Eastwood plays Mike Milo, a widowed, alcoholic former rodeo rider who is inexplicably hired by his former employer to track down his estranged son (Eduardo Minett) in Mexico City. From Absolute Power (1997), to Space Cowboys, to The Mule, Eastwood has gotten a lot of mileage out of placing himself within plots that would better fit a younger version of him. Narrative traps are evaded comically easily: a police roadblock conveniently has a dirt road right before it; Minett and Eastwood coincidentally stop right outside of a clothing store when they need a quick change; their car breaks down but Minett found another that even has the keys in it, etc etc. Plot matters little, the film exists to watch Eastwood amble through its world, exchange simple wisdom about masculinity with Minett, ride horses, heal animals, and relax by the setting sun.

We are firmly in the Seven Woman (1966)/Rio Lobo (1970) late style territory of Ford and Hawks, beautifully artificial obstacles in service of works that feel unfinished, out of touch with a viewing public, and repetitive in the context of one’s career. If The Mule, like a late Rembrandt, is suffused with doubt about the self in spite of its “smell the flowers” ending in prison, Cry Macho casts off that doubt with an ending that functions as a feint. Clint completes the job and rides away, but instead of riding into exile Searchers-style, he reprises an earlier scene. The finale has him once again slow-dancing with the Mexican restaurateur whom he formed an attachment with in the film, a sunlit haze cloaking the proceedings, almost like a dream. Practically, it makes no sense. Mike Milo doesn’t speak Spanish, and there is a near 40 year age gap between Eastwood and the actor Natalia Traven, but if these are things that bother you, you probably turned the movie off a long time ago. The Moyer-style changing of speeds here is simply the fact that it is possible for an Eastwood character to find exile and Eden in the same place, although it has taken him a whole career’s worth of crooked roads to feel like he has earned it.

Something funny about the various convergences between film and sport is that a lot of critical discussion about a director’s body of work often reads in a similar manner to a commentator discussing an athlete’s career. Think of times people refer to filmographies as if they formed a neat arc. Inevitably there’s a “youthful” and “energetic” debut that progresses into the “prime” of a director’s career with a string of major works, leading to a tailing off in the quality of the films but always “mature” and “assured” works nevertheless. One thinks of what Nicholas Ray once said to Buñuel, who listened in horror as Ray told him that in order to be a success in Hollywood, your next film must have a bigger budget than the previous one, otherwise you start sliding backwards, industry-wise.

Director’s careers never form as neat of an arc as we’d like to impose on them, and much of the discourse surrounding late style is a simple fetishization of an accumulated elderly wisdom rather than Actually Looking at what’s on screen. As Sinatra got older, he used to end his performances by crooning: “And may the last voice you hear be mine…” Pretty corny, but he knows he’s speaking to an audience that made him into a symbol of a time period, and emblematic of certain feelings his voice evokes. Whether it is using Sinatra’s Fly Me To The Moon at the end of Space Cowboys, or Trouble With The Curve’s triumph over the evils of statistical analytics, or Cry Macho reusing a scene to imagine paradise, Eastwood has gotten cornier as he has aged, but this exists alongside the subversions of his persona, the weirdness of his script choices, and a whole popular body of work we are unlikely to see ever again in American cinema. At this point, Eastwood, like Jamie Moyer every time he pitched, is an anachronism. He has made and remade himself on screen for decades, but he is not the isolated composer of Beethoven’s Third Period that Adorno describes, or the literally exiled Chaplin of A King In New York (1957). In spite of the fates of his characters, or the strangeness of his films, Eastwood remains a recognized figure who knows exactly who he is talking to. For truly late style, ya gotta earn it.

*Some Comments Under An HBO Promotional Youtube Video For Cry Macho* (2021)

Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!