GIANT Guest-post: Kati Nolfi on “Please Give”, Catherine Keener, and the Holofcener oeuvre
“Oh my God!” and “This is horrible!” clucked and gasped the audience of Please Give. They were responding to the film’s many cynical and self involved remarks. It wasn’t as antisocial as a Todd Solondz film, but people are unused to women representing and speaking their ugly truth on film. Nicole Holofcener’s movies show angry, bitchy, unhappy characters—usually women—in unflattering lights, such as laughingly wondering if you can fuck in a wheelchair, or hoping for the death of an elderly person. But unlike other directors who show the worst of human relationships—Neil Labute, for example—Holofcener has compassion for her characters. She and her actors create multidimensional portraits of women, mostly white and upper class. When she attempted to deal with race in Lovely & Amazing, it was awkward. For all the flaws and missteps in Holofcener’s movies, they address class when most films do not. There is honesty in these movies about how class separates people, how we hang out with our own kind, though sometimes I wonder how critical she is being. And her women, as horrible as they may be, are respected as whole fallible humans.
{[(Dis)Em]Bodies}: Dore O.’s Alaska
Alaska is large and cold and slightly crazy. The film Alaska by Dore O. is small and cold and also slightly crazy. Dore O. is a German artist and an experimental film maker. Alaska is from 1968. It is a wordless film with a simple, droning soundtrack that sounds as if it is a piece for violin and refrigerator hum. (Possibly the hum is the result of age.) It may be about Alaska. It may be about the north. It may be about swimming in cold water.
It cuts between images of water, images of stippled walls, and images of a beach. And people on the beach. And all the people are out of focus or cut in two.
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HAVE YOU SEEN BEGOTTEN?
I think you might like it. Here’s the trailer.
Since the DVD of Elias Merhige’s amazing film is kind of rare now, I believe, you can watch the whole film here. If you’re feeling like being altered now. Happy Memorial Day.
OH, THIS IS DEPRESSING AND I CAN’T LOOK AWAY FROM IT
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvxwf1jxdaM
And in ever so slightly better times…
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V14PfDDwxlE
FEAR THAT MAKES THE HEART BEAT FAST
mother of tears
I had a vivid nightmare—it involved a member of my nuclear family turned into a little person with a suction cup mouth. The mouth had tiny teeth around the inner rim. The family member was coming to hurt me and grab me with its little hands. I thought Why did he ever buy the new mouth? because I knew that installing that on his face was what had changed everything. And I had to go up a narrow tower staircase and close a trap door behind me.
I woke up raining sweat. I was literally vibrating. The feeling of authentic fear was also a kind of exhilaration. Related to the feeling of having escaped.
(Is there a word, perhaps a German word, for the vertigo one feels when waking up from a dream and realizing it wasn’t real? That is, the terrible disappointment of waking from a dream of finding millions of gold doubloons buried just under the dirt of your back yard and realizing you’re still broke—or the glorious relief of waking from a nightmare of losing limbs or being humiliated, only to realize it never happened—or the guilty rush of waking from a dream of murder to think: Whoa… I got away with it. Because I’ve had all of those.)
I realized I hadn’t had that feeling in a long time—hadn’t had a nightmare that felt so real it scared me. I saw my heart beating fast through the skin of my chest. People pay money for that feeling. Then I realized I hadn’t been scared, genuinely scared like with a quickened heart rate, by a book or a film in recent memory.
Do you lose that susceptibility as you age (and read/watch more)? Because I know it happened to me more often as a young reader. Off the top of my head I tried to make a list of Shit that Actually Scared Me:
Books to Movies
Has anyone seen Disgrace? I remember being pretty affected by the book.
Identity Loss
(This is another short reaction to the films in this list. I have now had a chance to see 13 of the 50. When Blake first posted to the list, I had seen four. The first two on the list are on my nightstand. A few others I have found at Seattle’s Scarecrow Video. Some are proving very difficult. Any help procuring the Dore O movie Alaska would be appreciated.)
Another recurring theme from the films on the list is that of identity loss. A film from the last post (Cure) and a film I watched a few days ago (The Night of the Hunted) both had contrasting kinds of identity loss.
Here’s John Clute’s The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror on the subject:
In horror…[Identity Loss] works as a confirmation of the self’s purchase on the present tense of the daylit daily world; it is a marker of Belatedness made visible or to come; it is a signal that the abandoned past (over the last two centuries, most of our pasts have been abandoned) is catching up with us.
Cure’s antagonist has rejected his own identity. When questioned (by those who attempt to help him when they find him wandering aimlessly, by the police who suspect him of murder), he claims no memory of anything. He claims to make few new memories, asking his inquisitors their identities even after they have introduced themselves and never being sure just where it is he is. He claims that all the things that were once within him are now on the outside; that he is a shell.
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An Open, Earnest Letter to People Who Like Gruesomeness in Books & Film
This is your brain on fear. As it turns out, Hippocampus isn't fat camp for Latin nerds.
Dear People,
I’m the pain in the ass who makes deciding on a movie en masse impossible. But is it violent? How violent is it, if it is? Do animals get murdered? Do children get murdered? Eventually we’ll decide on a bonehead comedy or a beautifully shot Icelandic film about rafts in the gloaming.
Evidence of why there hasn’t been a good American film in 20 years
This is a half-scale, all CG simulation of the ‘elevator of blood’ from The Shining that I did just for amusement in spare hours. I never expected it to look exactly like the real thing. The RealFlow fluid sim uses only about 1.6 million particles and therefore appears thicker and ‘blobbyer’ than an actual water-like liquid at this scale. I think at least ten million particles would begin to look convincing, but since this took about a month to calculate and render on on I-7, 3.2gh quad core, it isnt practical to attempt more particles without a far more powerful and prohibitively expensive computer.