last week in letterboxd

Eternal Heart, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1929

Happiness is like another world. It takes only a small misunderstanding for it to be closed-off forever and later on, it cannot even be spoken of anymore. But it still lingers there, behind the images, and sometimes it almost becomes palpable, in a gaze hold too long, or an aborted gesture.

Vaters Garten - Die Liebe meiner Eltern, Peter Liechti, 2013

Hit me hard. So very Swiss, all that modest prosperity, the plain, bare flat, the garden bearing crops, not flowers. Patriarchy as an unequal prison: the jailor jails himself, too, though he at least has his garden to escape to. (I thought of UNA PRIMAVERA quite often; in the Swiss version, patriarchy is much less violent and probably not quite as miserable, but freedom is even further out of reach.)

The camera is always an intruder, the distance between parents and child, born from overfamiliarity, cannot be bridged, it only can be translated into different, more playful setups: by turning the parents into bunny dolls it might be easier to deal with their continued togetherness - their love, for better or worse. Liechti´s most effective idea might be the constant switching, sometimes mid sentence, between Swiss vernacular and standard German, between lived-in speech pointing towards biographical depth and language as an detached, analytical tool.

Seven Seas, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1931/32

Part 1: Convoluted, but when he stays on track, Shimizu finds some striking moments.

Part 2: That palm tree shadow shot is indeed marvellous and some of the domestic dynamics are quite interesting, but all those soapy digressions threw me off even worse than in the first one. More of Hiroko Kawasaki´s face and less of everything else, please!

To be sure, finding out that Momoyo is played by an eight year old Hideko Takamine was incredibly touching.

Sudden Death, Peter Hyams, 1995

Under the dome. The totality of action: all time is (play time is) action time, all space is action space. The bombs are right there, the bad guys too. Every kind of external motivation is dubious at best, there´s no melodrama, no pathos, not even that much body as spectacle, nothing but movement + environment + texture + one-liners.

Timecop, Peter Hyams, 1994

Runs along beautifully and there´s always exactly the right amount of Van Dammes on screen at any given moment, so in my book there are no logical mishaps here. The action is readable like the sole of Van Damme´s shoe and the locations are wonderful: The lost paradise of the present is a posh mall with a vintage feel, while the future scenes are almost exclusively set in gloomy militarist spaces. Once the Timecop has fixed time, though, it turns out that his clunky, toy-like car is the only marker of futureness and he has just miraculously grown into the bourgeois lifestyle he didn´t quite feel comfortable with in the beginning. His home turns out to always have been a castle.

Also, for mid 90s studio fare, this is surprisingly horny. Muscles and nipples. That time machine knew exactly what it was doing when it threw Gloria Reuben into a lake of all places.

The Boss´s Son at College, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933

"We are punishing you in the name of friendship!"

Starts as a pleasant, freewheeling college comedy and ends with several characters getting violently beaten into shape. The change in tone is effective, because we experience everything alongside Fuji: At first, we just can´t help but root for his irreverence, his energy, his smile, so his fall from grace is ours, too. He had been a phony all along, leaving victims left and right, and his repentance will lead to even more misery.

To end the film with almost 10 minutes of very well filmed rugby feels almost unnecesarily cruel and sardonical: everything´s broken, so lets get out and beat them. But then after the match, in the shower, the tears start to flow.

Heatseeker, Albert Pyun, 1995

Once again I´m in love with Pyun´s artificial light. Here, once we step out of the location footage into pure Pyun land, everything is flat and toxic and soupy, just like the ever-bubbling score. A technocratic delirium. The fighters not only contain technology, they represent it, and because the technology is branded, the fighters also directly represent capital. Or maybe they even become capital - in Pyun´s minimalist mise en scene, the kickboxing tournaments isn´t a mere representation or an extension of capitalist competition, but the thing itself: abstract and mostly self-same market forces beating each other to pulp. It fits that most fight scenes have no dramatic tension whatsoever. Just one execution of dominance after the other.

Chance, the sole blue collar, non technology fighter might technically defeat the totalizing order of capital, but this is no more than an accident. The real danger is the pure sensual energy of Tina Cote, her kisses, her affection, her claim on the image.

A Different Image, Alile Sharon Larkin, 1982

Two wonderful main actors, present to us in unobtrusive closeness, a perceptive eye for environment, evoking a whole world with deceptively simple means. As fiction it feels heavy-handed (especially the scenes with the guy´s best friend), but maybe that´s the only way to make things stick on such a small scale.

Children in the Wind, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1937

The way we define ourselves through the reactions of our surroundings. The feeling of absolute loss once this no longer works. Suddenly the mob of boys providing feedback is gone, we´re alone, cut off from the world, alone high up there in the tree, out there in the current, at the mercy of the river monsters.

Mirror Images, Gregory Dark, 1992

Delia Sheppard in red looks old-hollywoodish, Delia Sheppard in blonde looks like something out of a 80s fantasy film. Steamy lingerie sex easily bridges the gap.

These Gregory Dark softcore films make much more sense when one thinks of them as sexual melodramas rather than as erotic thrillers. The suspense plots are mere afterthoughts, it´s all about the need for and danger of fantasies. Again and again, they start from a place not of erotic abundancy, but of of impotence and lack. This one takes some surprising, oneiric, almost de-Sade-like turns - it´s all about fighting a cardboard wizard and the idea that sex is a drug-fueled music box.

Delia Sheppard in her car, driving towards another life, her face reflected in the rear-view mirror, pitted against the colors of the night...

Namibia Crossing, Peter Liechti, 2004

What it means to feel uneasy. The awkwardness of the whole setup - a band made up of musicians from different backgrounds coming together in free-form musical interaction while being filmed by a director trying to account for his own fascination with the "primordial" - actually might be a good antidote to glib slogans like "intercultural exchange". At the very least, Liechti, like always, fully commits to his program and finds some strong images, especially while exploring the different environments defined by each performance.

However, in the end the main argument should be a musical one and I don´t think the film managed to make it.

Japanese Girls at the Harbor, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933

The space between us and a million different ways not to bridge it.

Selbé et tant d'autres, Safi Faye, 1983

"It´s lucky that you let me work in your film." (Need to follow up on that someday...)

Mr. Thank You, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1936

The bus gives us a world, makes it visible, but it also intervenes in it. On the one hand, the gaze is completely egalitarian. Those wonderful approach / retreat 180° two-shots approach everyone with the same curiosity and tolerance, the same arigato. The farmer returning from the field, the mountain girls who listen and dance to a single record for months, the poetic drunk.

On the other hand, the bus is not just a neutral vessel. Not everyone can pay the fare, and like the street it travels on, it has a direction: from the country to the city. In the end, this is the tension that structures the film: Cyclical time (the crazy guy forever wandering the street looking for his lost love) vs irreversibility. "Most of the girls who cross the mountains never come back."

In the end it turns out that the true moral center of the film isn´t Mr. Thank You himself, who just wants to "make a living on the road" and doesn´t act up when he sees a silent tragedy unfolding in his rear-view mirror, but the loud-mouthed woman who spends most of the running time making fun of a fellow traveler´s moustache.

Ein Lied, ein Kuss, ein Mädel, Geza von Bolvary, 1932

Early German sound cinema defending its prankish tenderness against the onslaught of Fröhlich-ness.

Secret Games, Gregory Dark, 1992

The very private leading lady, the vulgar best friend, the desire for another life, sex as image, the menace of abstract space... the formula is obvious, but Dark manages to give it a new turn in every film. This isn´t one of the better ones, the psychosexual stuff in the beginning doesn´t lead anywhere and the deep end in the end isn´t all that deep. What´s left is a dime-store Bunues doubling down on commodification and some interesting performances. Bill Drago casting is an almost Brechtian move.

Adorno: Kulturkritik der Gesellschaft, S. 47-71, "Spengler nach dem Untergang"

Ich war zunächst ganz selbstverständlich davon ausgegangen, dass mit dem Untergang in Adornos Essaytitel die Shoa gemeint ist. Tatsächlich basiert "Spengler nach dem Untergang" auf einem Vortrag aus dem Jahr 1938, ist also einer der ältesten in den Prismen. Zwar wurde der Text offensichtlich später ergänzt, unter anderem um einen Hinweis auf Auschwitz, aber in erster Linie ist der Untergang in "Spengler nach dem Untergang" noch der Untergang der parlamentarischen Demokratie. Adorno liest Spengler weniger als einen Historiker der Apokalypse denn als einen pessimistischen Zeitdiagnostiker. Erst im 10 Jahre nach dem Krieg entstandenen "Wird Spengler recht behalten?" (1955) fragt Adorno nach der Aktualität der Prognosen Spenglers nach der Shoa. Allerdings wirkt der spätere Text seltsam spannungsarm und fast selbst so schulmeisterlich wie die fachdisziplinäre Kritik, die in "Spengler nach dem Untergang" als unzulänglich beschrieben wird. Adorno und Spengler haben sich nach 1945 nichts mehr zu sagen.

Aus der Perspektive von 1938 hat sich gerade das erfüllt, was Adorno 1955 nicht mehr gelten lassen möchte: Spenglers Kritik am Liberalismus. Die Pointe besteht darin, dass die parlamentarische Demokratie samt der zugehörigen Gesellschaftsordnung nicht durch eine ihr äußerliche, gegnerische Kraft vernichtet wird, sondern sich von Innen heraus, infolge der ihr inhärenten Dynamiken, zersetzt. Adornos Kommentar macht sich in diesen Passagen dem Spengler´schen Determinismus allerdings vielleicht etwas zu sehr gleich. Dass die Weimarer Republik erst im Dritten Reich zu sich selbst kommt, wie auch, dass die "späten Städtebewohner" in ihrer intelektuellen Entwurzelung bereits auf die "Lager" verweisen (50), scheint mit eine allzu übergriffige Zuspitzung zu sein (die er in "Wird Spengler Recht behalten?" denn auch wieder kassiert). Dennoch ist es interessant, wie bruchlos sich die rechte Untergangseuphorie zumindest rhetorisch in eine linke Untergangsdystopie überführen lässt. Der Liberalismus ist immer schon von allen Seiten umstellt.

Das initiale Erstaunen über die vermeintliche Treffsicherheit einiger Prognosen Spenglers holt Adornos Essay freilich nicht vollumfänglich ein. Die behauptete Hellsichtigkeit bloß damit zu erklären, dass "Der Untergang des Abendlandes" im Einklang mit den Tendenzen der Macht geschrieben sei und deshalb zu denselben Schlüssen komme wie die Realität, überzeugt nicht und läuft auf einen Zirkelschluss hinaus. Eher scheint mir, dass Adorno insgeheim ahnt, dass es mit den prophetischen Qualitäten Spenglers bei näherer Betrachtung nicht so weit her ist.

Ich könnte mir vorstellen, dass Adornos bedingte Verteidigung Spenglers vielmehr etwas mit einer untergründigen Affinität beider Autoren zu tun haben könnte, insbesondere, aber nicht nur, auf der Ebene des Sprachlichen. Zwar beeilt sich Adorno, sich auch vom Stilisten Spengler und dessen "herrischen Ton" (62) abzugrenzen, aber es ist doch kaum zu übersehen, dass Spenglers Prosa im Kleinen oft zu einer Geschmeidigkeit findet, die quer steht zu den grobschlächtigen Dualismen seiner Weltanschauung. "Die intellektuelle Spannung kennt nur noch eine, die weltstädtische Form der Erholung: die Entspannung (...)" Bei diesem Spengler-Satz hatte ich sofort an Adorno gedacht und tatsächlich wird er in "Spengler nach dem Untergang" zitiert (50), genau wie einige andere Passagen (vor allem zur Kritik der Presse), die sich nicht ganz unadornitisch lesen.

---

Heute noch einmal die Frage nach der Aktualität Spenglers im engeren Sinne zu stellen wäre absurd, gerade auch mit Blick auf neue Faschismen. Das Zeitalter der Cäsaren wird bis auf Weiteres nicht anbrechen. Trump, Putin und Erdoğan sind vieles, aber sicherlich keine "Tatmenschen", die, von der Masse losgelöst, ihre kühnen Visionen verwirklichen. Nur sehr selten tauchen Passagen auf, die sich mit sehr viel Großzügigkeit auf die Gegenwart übertragen lassen. So ist es einigermaßen einleuchtend, den politischen Islam nicht als Fortführung einer Tradition magischen Denkens, sondern als Phänomen der zweiten Religiosität einer weltstädtischen Kultur zu beschreiben.

Im ersten Band staune ich außerdem darüber, wie nah sich rechter und linker Kulturalismus gelegentlich sind: Manche Passagen ließen sich eins zu eins für einen Einführungsband in den Postkolonialismus wiederverwerten. Freilich vereindeutigt sich das alles im zweiten Band, wenn Begriffe wie Takt, Zucht und das Gerede vom "In-Form-Sein" einer Kultur ins Zentrum rücken. Adornos Lektüre legt bezüglich solcher Passagen sehr genau den Zusammenhang offen zwischen Spenglers waberndem Mystizismus und der unbedingten Identifikation mit Herrschaft. Das Gerede vom pflanzenhaften Wesen der Kultur ruft automatisch die Sehnsucht nach einem Gärtner auf.

Von heute aus fasziniert mich an Spenglers Buch eher der große Entwurf, die Totalität eines geschlossenen faschistischen Weltbildes, auch die Methode der Physiognomie. Offensichtlich und irgendwie schon auch erklärungsbedürftig ist dabei die Spannung zwischen dem hanebüchenen geschichtsphiliosophisch-politischen Gesamtprojekt und der zwar größenwahnsinigen, aber oft durchaus inspirierenden kulturkomparatistischen Durchführung.

Nimmt man Spenglers Geschichtsphilosophie beim Wort, so läuft sie auf einen Kurzschluss von Onto- und Phylogenese hinaus. Eben deshalb aber funktioniert das politische Argument nicht: Wenn es eine (wie Spengler wieder und wieder betont: unumkehrbare) Entwicklung gibt vom pflanzenhaften in-der-Welt-Sein zur abstrakter Organisation, warum soll dann am Ende doch immer wieder die Pflanze siegen? Die "Lebensphilosophie" gesteht dem Leben nicht die Freiheit zu, sich seiner eigenen Dynamik gemäß zu entfalten.

Dass Spenglers "physiognomisches Denken an den totalen Charakter der Kategorien" (59) gebunden ist, kritisiert Adorno zurecht; und dennoch unterschätzt er, glaube ich, dessen "zuordnenden Blick" (58), der von formalwissenschaftlicher Kausalität und Kontextualisierung absieht und stattdessen gar nicht zuerst Kategorien, sondern Musterbildungen fokussiert. Die Ähnlichkeit im Unähnlichen sichtbar zu mache: das ist der letztlich doch antipositivistische Kern der Unternehmung. Soweit er sich von seinem politischen Programm ablenken lässt, ist Spengler ein Nerd avant la lettre. Im Schlechten, weil er sein eigenes Bezugssystem absolut setzt, aber auch im Guten, weil er sich die Freiheit nimmt, die Welt als eine Ansammlung interessanter und dem interessierten Blick erst einmal gleichwertiger Objekte zu begreifen (anstatt hierarchische Vorsortierungen gemäß ökonomischer, moralischer oder akademischer Kriterien zu akzeptieren).

last week in letterboxd

Tension at Table Rock, Charles Marquis Warren, 1956

Moves in an understated way but arrives at interesting places. Egan´s quiet, introspective cool grew on me and the eerie song that haunts him reminded me of the one in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE.

Two in the Amsterdam Rain, Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1975

Wildly ambitious, if not fully realized. The starting point isn´t all that different from Kurahara´s 60s films: Youthful masculinity running wild without the prospect of really going anywhere. Only this time it´s set in bulky old Europe, the style is static-gothic instead of dynamic-punkish (the European art film influences are obvious: Bertolucci, Visconti, maybe even Zurlini). Unfortunately the script isn´t content with letting things develop in an organically anarchic manner, and insists on inserting Sakuda into both an amour fou and a not really well articulated international spy thriller. The love story has its moments, but it´s the latter that completely takes over the film at some point. Together with the wild overacting and some glossy, baroque flourishes this makes for a still somewhat interesting, but rather exhausting mess.

The Gun Hawk, Edward Ludwig, 1963

The classic western lived and died with the Hays Code. THE GUN HAWK announces its own lateness with regards to its genre in many ways, but maybe most strikingly so in a shot of Calhoun and his girl in bed together. The taboo is no longer in place, so the old order has to die.

Just marvelous how Ludwig transforms a bread and butter b-western template (the Sheriff vs the outlaw, both mirrored in lesser, impure versions of themselves) into a highly idiosyncratic doomsday lullaby. Starting with a beautiful title sequence that feels completely out of proportion with the rest of the film but still fits, because it establishes a primacy of music and mood... Later on that incredibly effective, towards the end almost continuous heartbeat theme... The repeated bird´s-eye-shot of Sanctuary, that mythical place squeezed into the mountains... Calhoun´s sweaty skin, his softness and vulnerability...

(What does it mean that Sanctuary is only reachable through a system of caves? Is this an epistemological journey? Or, quite to the contrary, a retreat into fantasy? Also, if Sanctuary is this special place, why does its saloon look almost exactly like the one in the non-sanctuary city?)

Love for All Seasons, Johnnie To & Wai Ka Fai, 2003

Love is only real if you work through all of its mirages. It´s 2003 and Louis Koo and Sammi Cheng are already out there romancing in the thin air of total reflexivity. I finally need to get around watching all of those To / Wai joints from their mad 2000-2003 period.

Three, Johnnie To, 2016

Cerebral cinema, To´s FEMME FATALE.

I don´t have much more after a first viewing. Dense, liquid and radical. The cop way and the medical way of holding life in check, both equally corrupt. (To even has the hippocratic oath quoted just to make sure everyone realizes that Zhao Wei breaks it basically with every single step she takes.) Cinema is corrupt, too, but sometimes it might be a bit more lenient. Terrifying operating scenes.

Variation, Ko Nakahira, 1976

Not exactly what I would´ve thought a Nakahira ATG film would look like. Very somber, a travelogue of post-revolutionary depression (she) and post-revolutionary impotence (he); basically just faces, the detached drama of lighting, and the blindness of sex.

Might be thought of as the flipside of those 70s sex films in which european women travel to Asia in search of erotic fulfillment: For Kyoko, Europe provides liberation, too, but not through titillation but through sensual introspection.

Not all that much going on here, maybe, but at some point I succumbed to the flow. A Bach cello suite, mediterranean nighttime lights and a female body cautiously approaching ecstasy - sometimes it´s enough just to push all the right buttons.

An Inspector Calls, Herman Yau / Raymond Wong, 2015

A british comedy of corrupt manners haunting Hongkong cinema in 2015. Well calibrated when it comes to tone and acting, but I would lie if I said those cgi model kit sets didn´t hurt my eyes once in a while. I´ll never get completely comfortable with some aspects of digital, I guess.

Akitsu Spring, Yoshishige Yoshida, 1962

A beyond beautiful widescreen melodrama about a life suspended in the eternal immediacy of a longing made unfulfillable by patriarchy. For her, the few short days they spend together every once in a while, often years apart, are precious, every reunion an epic of intimacy. Everything else is just time slipping away without leaving behind a fully-formed biography.

For him, their time together is precious, too, but precisely because it allows him to escape from biographical time. Two ways of being miserable, but only hers is rendered in cinematographic terms. In fact, the short interludes about the man weaken the film considerable, because they distract from the repetitive, almost abstract textures of her love, the hypnotic score, the restrictive vastness of the space around her.

Still, she is no fallen woman in the Mizoguchi tradition. Mariko Okada is a woman trapped, but she´s also irreverent towards both the man who helps trapping her and towards her own suffering. Her longing has no fixed object, it´s not about the man but about being with the man and in the end she has no idea what that might mean.

Living by Karate, Seijun Suzuki, 1961

A sweet adventure tale chock full of chivalrous boy detectives, bumbling gangsters, decidedly silly pop tunes, a bittersweet love triangle that only fully comes together in the beautiful last shot (fade to pink) and a constant threat of sexual violence, played out alternately as slapstick and as melodrama.

Suzuki has a lot of fun with all of this, and he´s especially great with handling space. The headquarter of the bad guys is an almost surrealist maze of mirrors, windows and staircases, with different rooms and even stories folding into each other, and a cellar connected to a channel system. Makes one wish for a Suzuki directed Bond film.

Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee, 2008

This indeed doesn´t fully come together, and it´s hard to see how Lee ever thought that it might, given that the problems mostly begin and end with the script. He just has no idea how to bring the main black soldiers essentially fighting a double war storyline and the church massacre together in an interesting way. I appreciate the craziness of the religious stuff, but in the end it´s half-assed - Lee just isn´t a spiritual filmmaker, that international prayer montage especially feels off, like a gimmicky rehash of the fuck monologue from 25TH HOUR.

Still, this somehow grows into being an incredibly touching film, especially when Lee sticks in the village, chronicling the encounter of the black soldiers and the Italians, the forging of a fragile utopia in a space left open by receding fascism and not yet filled by the more subtle bourgeois mechanisms of exclusion.

Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee, 2020

A fratricide translated into daddy issues, but of course it´s never that simple. Even back then Tiên´s story didn´t fit into the tight black liberation academy ratio. Today the frame is wide and constantly shifting, the gold is dispersed all over the mountain and the skeletons will be too, soon. When the four bloods head for the hills, only one of them really returns. Any longing for the imaginary greatness of the past will cut you off from the world, though, and lead you down a doomsday MAGA path with nothing left to face but the empty gaze of the camera. All the others are stuck in the presence, in a mid budget epic with grand scope but not backed by a big apparatus and therefore free to roam. Lots of moving parts. In the end, nothing can keep the centrifugal forces in check except maybe once in a while a Marvin Gaye tune.

Closed Vagina, Masao Adachi, 1963

Bodies swallowed up by white and only given back once in a while, ritualistically, partially. Very young faces, faces outside of history. Can´t say a lot of it stuck with me, a better transfer might help someday.

Eclipse, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1934

Right there in the first 20 minutes two scenes of simple, poetic perfection.

Two friends in the countryside: they jump in the air, grabbing the limb of a tree and holding tight, dangling next to each other, a close up of their feet suspended in the air, then they jump back to the ground, a close-up of their feet in the grass, another jump, and the feet are in the air again... all the while they´re talking about a girl and because they´re not honest to each other everyone will have to suffer for the rest of the film.

Soon after, still in the countryside, one of the friends meets the girl in front of a mill. This time the conversation is first pitted against and then swallowed up by the relentless turning of the wheel. This goes on and on, shot after shot, a complete reversal of plot and setting. The mill is grinding, happiness is gone.

The purity of form evident in the village scenes gets lost when the story moves to the city a bit later. There are some weird tonal shifts, even some rather dull moments... and still, so much effortless control, close-ups rhythmically thrown into long shots during a very funny golfing scene, a sliding nighttime walk over a bridge, an arrested gaze, indifferent to time, when the long lost lover pops up out of nowhere...

Marthas Garten, Peter Liechti, 1997

Pretty dark behind the quirky surface, a psychotic, autistic small-town VERTIGO. Too small a playing field in the end, but this still makes me wish Liechti would´ve tried out fiction more often.

Schild neben Dach über Denkmal

Wenn es um problematische Statuen geht und um die Frage, wie mit ihnen umzugehen ist, fällt mir stets das Wagner-Denkmal im Tiergarten ein. Das wurde in den 1980ern, um den natürlichen Verfall zu verlangsamen, mit einer Plexiglashaube überdacht. Anlässlich der Restaurierung vor ein paar Jahren wurde neben Statue und Dach ein (inzwischen glaube ich leider wieder verschwundenes) Schild aufgestellt, mit folgender Aufschrift:

"Das Schutzdach wurde über dem Denkmal errichtet, um es vor Umweltschäden zu schützen. Diese mit großem Aufwand betriebene Maßnahme wird sinnlos, wenn das Denkmal mutwillig beschmiert oder beschädigt wird, weil solche ,Verzierungen' wiederum nur mit Schäden für das Denkmal entfernt werden können" (hier ein Foto)

Ganz ausgezeichnet ist schon der sehr Berlinerische passiv-aggressive Tonfall, auch einzelne Formulierungen wie vor allem "mutwillig" und die Anführungszeichen um "Verzierungen" sind super, vor allem aber gefällt mir die Argumentationslinie: Die Statue ist nicht um ihrer selbst schutzwürdig, sondern aufgrund der Überdachung, die sich nicht mehr "lohnt", wenn die Statue anderweitig beschädigt wird. Beschützt werden muss die Schutzmaßnahme.

Vielleicht könnte man ja das Schild, dachte ich mir damals einmal, ebenfalls überdachen, um die Sinnhaftigkeit solcher Maßnahmen zu unterstreichen. Oder ein zweites Schild mit der Bitte, der Aufforderung des ersten nachzukommen, weil sonst das Konzept, der Bevölkerung Maßnahmen der Restaurationstechnik argumentativ näher zu bringen, in eine Krise geraten würde.

Die Idee, dass alle Denkmäler "für immer" stehen sollen halte ich für ebenso unsinnig wie den mancherorts jetzt ernsthaft aufgebrachten Vorschlag, einfach gar keine mehr zu errichten, bzw pauschal alle zu beseitigen. Auch mit Forderungen, die darauf hinauslaufen, den empirischen Denkmalbestand immer möglichst exakt mit dem "Stand der Erinnerungskultur" abzugleichen, kann ich mich nicht anfreunden. All das läuft darauf hinaus, den Symbolwert von Denkmälern absolut zu setzen. Dabei verweist eine Statue nicht nur auf Geschichte, sondern hat auch eine eigene. Ich wäre vielmehr dafür, Denkmäler möglichst großzügig mit einem Netz aus Dächern, Schildern und ähnlichen Objekten zu umgeben, die zwar formal auf das Ursprungsobjekt verweisen mögen, sich aber tatsächlich nur noch aufeinander beziehen. Geschichte nicht als ewig sprudelnder Quell von Identität, sondern als ein diskursives Artefakt neben anderen.

last week in letterboxd

Love and Death at Fuji Speedway, Toru Murakawa, 1972

Every attempt to turn this into something dramatic and thrilling fails in almost comical way. The big motorcycle race is basically a kid shoving toys through a world made of toy blocks, and later on it takes a while to even register that a scene with lots of mugging, mean stares and weird framing is meant to represents an attack on the main couple.

Luckily, in between the awkward plot points, this sometimes finds a different beat and turns into a relaxed, trippy, and towards the end melancholic sex film that sometimes feels more like francoesque eurotica than pinku. Two people dancing on stairs, playing silly games on the beach, closing themselves off from the world only to recognize that in the end they might come up a bit short in doing so.

The Eiger Sanction, Clint Eastwood, 1975

Playing the silly material completely straight is a feature, not a bug. A scene like Eastwood chasing a tits flashing Brenda Venus through John Ford land for several minutes can only work in a very special cinematic realm between the sublime and the ridiculous.

Still a bit clunky between the spectacular helicopter shots, yes, but then again it´s a film about men and mountains.

The Power of the Press, Frank Capra, 1928

The plot is rolling by on autopilot, but this is mostly about Fairbanks Junior´s youthful charms and people doing things with cigarettes anyway. Those banter scenes in the newsroom could´ve, and probably should´ve been the whole film. Still, very pleasant throughout.

Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood, 1997

Not only the president, the filmmaker too is trapped in a fiction of absolute power: Everything is subject to his gaze, he is placed behind the mirror, but while indeed the whole world is given to him, its darkest secrets condensed in a primal scene, his position of comfort at the same time hides, even stems from impotence. The closet in which Eastwood´s thief hides was meant to provide substitute satisfaction for someone else. When it comes to cinema, visibility and helplessness are inextricably tied to each other (as are, in this special case, loneliness and political rage). Maybe that´s why the thief had retreated into the world of painting long ago. Painting is soft rather than absolute power, as a painter he can smooth over the bruises on his daughter´s face; as a filmmaker, he used to capture her: make images that only announce his own absence.

Sexkarussell - Via Erotica, Frits Fronz, 1968

My second Fronz film - clearly not another BARON PORNO, but a charming serving of erotic skim milk nonetheless. The title song promises wild sex, hot sex, everyone wants it, you can´t hide from it, sex, sex, sex... And then it´s just a bunch of very low-key dirty jokes (with punchlines!) about women who maybe, who knows, might be willing to flash their boobs under circumstances yet to determined. When they do, the film mostly cuts away very quickly, not so much because of modesty, but because no one here seems to know what could possibly be done next.

There´s a decidedly goofy innocence to it all, like a second childhood of cinema. The promise of sex makes the images giddy, someone wears glasses the wrong way and therefore the image is upside down, too. Also: some energetic dubbing and Fronz playing around with an ornamental bedframe.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Clint Eastwood, 1997

A satirical ensemble drama isn´t really a good fit for Eastwood, but he invests enough in single scenes, especially the ones with Spacey and Lady Chablis, to make the whole thing work.

The Last of the Fast Guns, George Sherman, 1958

The hero is a drifter turning on 30, slowly getting tired of just being a black cipher thrown into the world. The man he´s searching for left behind his old life and plenty of old money to vanish in Mexico. The bad guy was born in Europe and lived basically everywhere. Even the Mexican woman is no "flower of the land", but points out her big city past. A tale of displaced souls that starts with an open grave.

(The economy of b-movie storytelling: in an early interior scene I was irritated by the loud jangling of his spurs - a completely unnatural sound, every time he moves around, he basically sounds like a walking christmas tree; but it completely makes sense in the end!)

The Last Days of American Crime, Olivier Megaton, 2020

As someone who has written positive reviews for not one but two Olivier Megaton movies I´m sorry to report that THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME is, for the most part, just as bad as everyone thinks it is: a vaguely nostalgic monstrosity, not so much a second-rate THE PURGE as a third-rate STRANGE DAYS, and also an unwelcome throwback to 90s Tarantino ripoffs. It´s not completely without energy, to be sure, and with its garish,at times rather inventive color scheme, Michael Pitt´s and Anna Brewster´s vulgar power acting (Ramirez is a terrible bore, though), and a general in your face attitude when it comes to imagemaking it probably is more interesting as an aesthetic object than several of your festival favorites. At least, it aspires to some kind of totality of style. Still, things drag terribly, and it only gets worse towards the end when the heist finally starts and the famous bad action kicks in. Plus, some of the worst musical cues in recent memory (the one during the first sex scene...). In the end you´re stuck with 149 extremely brainless minutes.

Man from Del Dio, Harry Horner, 1956

A fascinating film. The tortured, inward turn of 1950s westerns is evident in the dense, layered framings and the noirish lighting, but Quinn isn´t really a psychological entity. Neither is he a man solely defined by his actions, though. The different, diverging forces he encounters (love, prejudice, alcohol, a sense of honor, loneliness) seem to bypass his consciousness almost completely, directly impacting his physiognomy, stripping away all of his outward poise until he is a creature of nothing but reflex. And in the end not even that. Katy Jurado´s clearly defined, expressive frame provides a clear contrast.

Then there´s his dance with the town drunk, a beautiful poetic moment I wouldn´t have thought the film would arrive at or even be interested in.

The Wrong Missy, Tyler Spindel, 2020

American mainstream comedy really isn´t in a good place right now, so even the not exactly major pleasures of a low-brow hangout ensemble movie centered around a great, freewheeling stunt performance feel like a breath of fresh air. Unlike FATHER OF THE YEAR, Spindel´s first Happy Madison film, THE WRONG MISSY displays a bare minimum of technical competence, and this really is all a film like this needs, because everything else is performance. It´s just so relaxed and generous, trenched in joyful vulgarity. Democratic moviemaking: the bad jokes have just as much right to exist as the good ones, everyone needs a release once in a while and if Rob Schneider insists on tagging along without being able to create even the resemblance of a decipherable comic character, let him. There´s still a bit too much plot in the third act, but when Vanilla Ice finally shows up, we´ve entered a state of grace.

Also, luxury hotels always were a great setting for comedies, the world forgot but Happy Madison didn´t.

Fury at Showdown, Gerd Oswald, 1957

Eccentric little western, hold a bit back by Derek, who is never more than adequate (I´d only seen him in swashbucklers before, which probably are a better fit for him). Nick Adams, who plays his soft-faced brother, is very good, though, and by placing him next to Derek, the latter´s actions automatically acquire more meaning. For most of its running time this basically consists of the both of them walking up and down a single street, criss-crossing between four or five buildings, kept in check by prying eyes ("yes, we´ll stay in town, where you can see me") and intricate deep-focus framings. They gradually acquire additional degrees of freedom, but in the striking last shot it´s just a horse, and not the hero vanishing towards the horizon.

A wonderful scene has Derek talking to a former flame while she takes a bath in a river, establishing the intimacy between them in an understated matter-of-fact way rarely seen in american films.

Hard Scandal: Sex Drifter, Noboru Tanaka, 1980

Generation conflict in roman poruno land: the sex of the young is a question of expressivity, violent and romantic, a flourishing of late, punkish pinku style, while the sex of the middle-aged is a question of technique, a desperate hunt for orgasms that basically belongs into the realm of hardcore pornography and is filmed almost that way, too.

Often quite nasty and aesthetically not as fully realized as earlier Tanaka films, but it takes some unexpected turns and has a great eye for location. The world is either an eternal happening or a dusty mound in front of a run-down apartment building. There is nothing in between.

Stranger at My Door, William Witney, 1956

Starts with a blast and maybe the rest is just about registering the shockwaves. There´s just so much going on, a complex and ever dynamic web of projections and counterprojections, fluently moving between discursive interiors and intimate, nightmare-like bursts of action. The image you have of someone never quite fits, the woman bearing forbidden fruits might still not be open to your advances. In some cases, though, it might just turn out to have been a self-fulfilling prophecy after all.

The pastor, quoting the bible even in the marital bed, tries to lay down some ethical ground rules, although in the end he is just as helpless as anyone else. In fact, he is the one who introduces the horse, an unruly metaphor if there ever was one (shades of WHITE DOG?). Generally it´s amazing how effortless Witney turns objects into metaphors, from the obvious ones (the horse, the half-finished church) to smaller stuff like the melon or the shutter in the bedroom that is repeatedly closed down and opened up again throughout the film.

My first Witney, and clearly not my last. Never bet against Tarantino, I guess.

Kabukicho Love Hotel, Ryuichi Hiroki, 2014

On sex work, and even more so on sex and work. Not every transaction is clear-cut when it comes to our bodies, but there´s always some kind of trade-off involved. As long as it needs an object, desire already is commodification of desire. Ecstasy is still possible (and necessary), but in no way does it equal freedom. The only thing one can do is to sometimes make the pain palpable, in lingering closeups that hit out of nowhere.

I love the filmmaking more than the film, this time. The balance of small-scale observations and large, overdetermined story arcs feels off (too much of the latter, basically). A boring objection, but does Toru really have to accidentally run into both his sister and his girlfriend in the same night? Maybe the bigger problem is the focus on Toru itself: a decidedly dull presence in the eye of the storm.

Hofnarr

"Punching up"- vs "punching down"-comedy - diese Unterscheidung hält sich leider hartnäckig im popkulturellen Diskurs. Sinn ergeben hat sie zuletzt vermutlich zur Zeit der Hofnarren: Die waren tatsächlich in einer Weise in eine einzige, hegemoniale Hierarchie eingespannt, die ihnen genau diese beiden Option eröffneten. Ein Hofnarr kann die Macht, die ihn zum Hofnarr degradiert, bestätigen, indem er den Druck, der auf ihn ausgeübt wird, nach unten weitergibt; oder er kann sie unterlaufen und damit das Risiko eingehen, unter die Räder zu kommen. Er kann das aber nur, weil er eingespannt ist in ein statisches System, weil seine Sprecherposition vorfestgelegt ist: er ist an den Hof beordert worden, um die Herrschenden zu amüsieren. 

Komiker_innen heute hingegen befinden sich im Zustand kommunikativer Freiheit. Sie stellen ihre Sprecherposition selbst her, immer wieder neu in jeder einzelnen Performance. Sie agieren, ob sie es wollen oder nicht, in einem amorphen Raum fluider kultureller Zuschreibungen, in dem eine hegemoniale Hierarchie schlichtweg nicht existiert. Die real natürlich durchaus existierenden ökonomischen bzw soziokulturellen Ungleichgewichte ändern daran nicht das Geringste. Die Differenz ist eine kommunikationstheoretische. Jede Performance bringt eigene In- und Out-groups hervor, jeder Witz, der nicht auf die direkt Anwesenden zielt, hat etwas von punching down, und punching up ist nicht punching up, sondern Anbiederung..

last week in letterboxd

Piano Blues, Clint Eastwood, 2003

Eastwood is anything but a natural interviewer, and it´s kind of touching that he doesn´t try to hide that at all. Generally, this is about letting the music speak for itself, though.

Hello, My Dolly Girlfriend, Takashi Ishii, 2013

In the 90s, Ishii used to make rather awesome stylish thrillers with a kinky edge. Here he´s back at his pinku beginnings, and all that´s left is the kink. Not necessarily a bad thing, but unfortunately HELLO, MY DOLLY GIRLFRIEND also shows that the conditions for cinematic kink have changed quite a bit in the last few decades. It feels very much of one piece, at least: a dark, demented, digitally ugly tale of masturbatory misidentification centered around a blurred vagina that might or might not exist. Form fits content, but it´s also painfully slow and mostly shot in a small number of crummy locations. Basically the gutter version of AIR DOLL and in the end just as tiring.

Space Cowboys, Clint Eastwood, 2000

Eastwood fully embracing his sentimental side, not shying away from the weaker part of an often perfunctory script (the Marcia Gay Harden storyline especially is a disappointment), or, even, from a terrible NSYNC theme song - at least he has the good sense to overwrite it with Sinatra in the end. Also, it´s too long and still feels rushed during the space parts. Still, this comes out stronger than some of his more ambitious films, because often enough all the trappings are stripped away and there´s nothing left but a few battered faces pitted against the end of history, lost not so much in space as in a shared, by now largely aimless, contentless and in a few precious moments almost benevolent narcissism.

Als Landwirt, Stefan Hayn / Anja-Christin Remmert, 2007

About being a farmer in the present day in central Europe, the last human element in a system structured by constantly increasing efficiency enhancement. The takeover of technology and bureaucracy is slow but relentless, evermore limiting all degrees of movement, and also gradually expunging the traditional imagery of farming. Nothing is self-explanatory anymore in the relationship of farmer and nature. (It probably never was, but at least sometimes it looked that way.)

Changeling, Clint Eastwood, 2008

She used to be on roller-skates, right there at the center of the network, smoothing over glitches in the communication system. But she´s part of another system now, Eastwood´s system, her blood-red lipstick shining through the maze of big city corruption, insisting on a primal pain that points towards another, equally primal evil. So we have to leave the city and head out there into the California desert, pitch-black cars pitted against the glaring sand, the bones are buried next to the tree trunks, while Jolie herself can´t take her skates (and not even her lipstick) into the asylum.

Really a shame that I missed this in theaters back then, maybe Eastwood´s most beautiful film. At one point I started to think of Kurosawa´s HIGH AND LOW and couldn´t shake the connection from then on. Another conservative humanist encountering / negotiating the limits of his discourse. The class-dynamics are largely muted, here, but there´s the descent into the "female underworld", the final face-to-face-confrontation that solves nothing... The period classicism is just a ruse, or maybe a defense mechanism, because in the end form is helpless against the chaos.

Vixen, Yasuzo Masumura, 1969

The first image: Ruriko Asaoka´s hands stretched out towards the camera, her fingers kneading a tabletop, sending cunvulsions, spasms through her arm, and then through her other limbs, leading to a full body miniature performance piece, Ruriko alone with the camera, biting into the tabletop, bending over a white chair, rubbing her chin against her knee, her bruised leg turning into a mysterious object, a bodily entity in its own right.

A body in perpetual motion, twisting and turning even when alone, or rather especially when alone: later on she has another solo number, transforming herself into some sort of bizarro mermaid, wriggling through bedsheets and on the floor of her apartment. When a man enters the picture, she either throws herself at him, pins him down with hands and legs, towards her skinny torso with its pronounced ripcage - a ravenous, glutton nakedness; or she tries to get rid of him, by all means necessary. (She was also raped, before the movie starts; it´s rather terrifying how fast this is forgotten.)

The film Masumura constructs around her feels rather bare-bones, although there are the usual allusions towards the war trauma and capitalist corruption. But in the end it´s all about Ruriko and the men: not a story of seduction, but of physical push and pull. One man falls for her, on first sight, another one rejects her, also on first sight. The rest is mechanics.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Frank Capra, 1936

He only knows how to express himself with his tuba. When the instrument is taken away from him he lashes out against everyone, both verbally and physically, closes down the opera house, discovers, in a moment of grace, the beauty of the echo, starts a populist revolution, finally stops speaking altogether, only to discover, in the very last shot, another use for his mouth: kissing Jean Arthur.

Breezy, Clint Eastwood, 1973

Eastwood at his most tender and perceptive. A 70s love ballad constantly negotiating its own implausibility, accounting for all of its inner and outer resistances. Beautiful dog close-ups, too.

Unorthodox, Maria Schrader, 2020

When Esty drives with her new-found art school friends to Wannsee, she mentions that several members of her family died in Auschwitz. A young Israeli woman answers: Same where I come from, but it´s no big deal today, we have other problems now. It´s not clear if the show even realizes what it it is that it´s doing in this scene: once again, it´s the Jews who are assigned the task of absolving Germany from the Shoah. Anyway, it´s more than a mere slip: throughout the four episodes, every single allusion to history, to the industrially organized mass murder of Jews by Germans, is used for a single pupose: to keep Esty (and in one scene her husband) in place, to keep her from starting a new life in Berlin, a city that is now supposed to be a save haven for Jews - who are persecuted by other Jews.

I don´t want to go too far into this. Shira Haas is an amazing actress and I certainly don´t want to take away anything from anyone who identifies with this story (which easily could´ve been told without ever leaving New York, btw), so I´ll just leave it at that: Whatever else it might be, UNORTHODOX also is the perfect spiritual sequel to JOJO RABBIT.

American Madness, Frank Capra, 1932

Not so much an anticapitalist film as a film about structural transformation of capital: money shouldn´t be stored in the vault and in our accounts, says Walter Huston, it should be out there, in the world, it should be put back into businesses. Later on he gets his wish: the money vanishes, first by way of a heist (a nice detail: the corrupt clerk hiding in a locker), later in a steady flow of small withdrawals. Money on the move - but not, like Huston imagined, in the sphere of production. Like the film itself, the money never leaves the realm of the bank, the sphere of circulation. It´s all about money following money, and the only thing that´s left to decide is the direction of the flow.

I´d screen this togehter with Dwan´s THE INSIDE STORY, another sphere of circulation comedy. The differences are stark: Dwan treats the liquefaction of capital as a problem of engineering, which also means that everything has to resolved within the realms of traditional mise en scene. Capra, on the other hand, is a social alchimist, using whatever means necessary to reach his goal.

Jersey Boys, Clint Eastwood, 2014

“I'm not drawn to the old neighborhood, my life never revolved around the old neighborhood. I don´t give a fuck about the old neighborhood.”

A nostalgia film destroying the foundations of nostalgia. Popular music never was an authentic expression, it´s always born from economic and narcissist impulses. If you buy into its phony promises, like Frankie does, you´re already trapped, doomed to live your life as the copy of a truer version of yourself that never existed. The eternal boyish looks, the eternal lounge singer.

It helps that all those Four Seasons hits, while not without charm, are first and foremost pretty weird. The fake aging in the end is weird, too, weirder and more effective than the de-aging in THE IRISHMAN. (Also, as much as I love Scorsese: If he had been assigned this project, never ever would he have been able to make a film as radical as this one.)

Miracle Woman, Frank Capra, 1931

A love story, involving a minister´s daughter who turns her spiritual despair into first-rate showmanship by way of performing phony miracles from the inside of a lion´s den - and a blind man who overcomes his cynicism with the help of a ventriloquist doll. Also, a nightly beach scene smooth as silk. In a word: too good to be true, I still can´t fully believe that this movie really exists, I must´ve fallen under some sort of spell.

White Hunter, Black Heart, Clint Eastwood, 1990

Might be interesting to compare the last scene - the beginning of "principal photography" - with the ending of Duras´s LE CAMION, or other modernist films that lay bare the material reality of their own textuality. In those, the becoming visible of the camera always amounts to an opening up, a release; while here, Wilson´s journey ends with a retreat into cinema, not only into its images, but into its apparatus. A necessary retreat, but also a tragic one. In the end, the boundaries between art and life - cemented by power relations and symbolized by an act of violence - can never be overcome. When it comes to cinema, photography is always principal.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Frank Capra, 1933

As I hadn´t seen this in almost 20 years, I was a bit suspicious of my remembering it to be basically the best thing ever. But it really is.

The outpouring of style in the first part... On the one hand, the framings are always clearly delineated and intricately layered, on the other hand there´s an outward, expansive drive, an energy that pushes against the limitations of the frame; like de Mille superimposed over Sternberg. At one point, single scenes start folding into each other, an evermore amorphous flow, almost a continuous montage sequence. And yet, all of it always remains tied to Stanwyck´s perception. Or rather: it´s being imprinted onto her. Stanwyck´s shivering body during the train ride - I don´t know if I´ve ever seen a more sensual image.

The mass execution in front of Yen´s palace also serves first and foremost as a wake-up call for Stanwyck. But now, things change. Yen removes the mayhem from her (and our) sight and makes room for another order of images, a spectacle of faces and gazes, a sexual melodrama that moves, against all odds, so close to utopia that in the magnificent last shot, the reflections of ecstasy almost become visible in Stanwyck´s hair.

By now I melt before Capra´s images, I´m wax in his hands.

The Rookie, Clint Eastwood, 1990

A strange one. Eastwood seems to amp up the ridiculousness precisely because by this time he wasn´t really comfortable anymore with this kind of material. Meaning he goes all in not despite but because of a lack of conviction.Yet it never fully switches over into farce, and the biggest emphasis is placed on small stuff like the two protagonists being uneasily stuck together in the car after escaping the explosion. The car chase in the beginning, on the other hand. is a blueprint for many blockbuster action scenes from the late 90s / 00s, especially those directed by Bay (shiny, clunky objects thrown into high-speed traffic). Lots of energy, but it doesn´t really go anywhere.

I guess the biggest misstep is the casting of Sheen, who seems to be in a different movie than everyone else. In some ways this might even be the point, but I guess I still would´ve preferred almost every other young 80s star in the role.

Given all of that, this looks fabulous throughout and the jazz score adds nice, surprising touches. A 35mm print might win me over completely one day.