Mark Cousins' The History of film: An Odyssey

No, I think he said he wouldn't get in the mud, show grey (?)

Slightly bizarre to relate the Chinese director's fall and then talk about Polanski!

not sure doing ALL EGYPT ALL CHINA ALL INDIA POST-WAR JAPAN in these 10 min bursts works quite the way he wants it to here: it's a bit reductive (writing as a veteran of the world music wars)

he said ford wasn't interested in visual atmospherics, something like that -- just a weird thing to say

WHAT HAPPENED WITH THE SCORPION!?

I think he said Kurosawa would embellish his films w/visual atmos but then compared the types of atmos and said a director like Ford wouldn't engage with heavy rain and sticky stuff, i think.

not sure yet how this is all working, he is not encasing it in a 'beginnings of world cinema' like i thought he might. xp

god this is a mess -- i want see all these films (now!) but MC's high-speed identity-posture riffle through world politics is all over the place, a flurry of incompatible cliches

(except: did he not bother mentioning ray, sirk and anger were gay?)

totally fair enough to contrast how ford and kurasawa deploy visual atmosphere -- i just thought he put it in a weirdly dismissive way

ok, he REALLY REALLY needs to be anchored by having to elucidate the specifics of a technique: "the 50s were swollen with the desires of their time, and something had to give" falls apart a bit when it turns out that the "desires of their times" means sex (also a desire of other times than the 50s, i feel confident in suggesting)

(lean and anderson also gay: this also not mentioned)

sure -- he is complementary of Ford elsewhere, maybe not this time..

Its all over the place, he is v excited to basically show a film prog where its just not about US cinema and only that. There is an arg about sex and the cinema right at the beginning and end, but then he went on about Pather Panchali for about 10 mins, when he should've spent more time on Devi. xp

One other thing I shd mention is the films they broadcast after these broadcasts -- it shd be Pather Panchali now instead of god knows at what hour on Film4.

Mash is ok i suppose.

It should be that Mexican one with the scorpion! I want to know what happened next!

haha well, bet that won't turn up on youtube either.

tempted to liveblog MASH now

maybe on a difft thread as MC won't get to it for another three eps

We could have compared to what MC will say in three weeks.

Morning after: the worst ep so far when it should've been one of the best. My prediction upthread of this one falling apart seems to be reality now and I don't like it one bit, and the more auteur-ish it gets the worse it will be.

> it shd be Pather Panchali now instead of god knows at what hour on Film4.

the monday film (00:50 in this case) is always repeated first thing on thursday (11:00). (which is just as useless. but, hey, video recorders...)

re Xie Jin, what he said was (something like) "In film, no one's career has had such amplitude, not even Polanski's" -- amplitude being the correct mathematical term for the range from highest to lowest value, of course, but a VERY peculiar word to reach for, and yes, a strangely unimaginative comparison... i wanted to know what "incorrect neo-confucianism" actually meant during the cultural revolution, that the maoists sentenced Xie Jin to cleaning the studio toilets

in other words, if johnny guitar was a swelling desire confounding and [stupid word alert] "subverting" eisenhower-esque norms, what swelling anti-social desire did "two stage sisters" manifest that needed punishment

i was actually quite pleased when he mentioned the bandung conference and the non-aligned movement -- plus defined "first world" versus "third world correctly, and knew that the "second world" was the communist bloc; clearly bandung doesn't get discussed enough, in or out of film history! -- but then his notion of anti-colonial sensibility was "smashing the bauble" of hollywood, which in ref the bauble-loving nation that gives us BOLLYWOOD is pea-brained (he tried to cough this problem away, but it won't go away just by coughing)

i also perked up when he started talking about lindsay anderson, obv (i was wondering if he was going to use ideas from my book!)* <-- if he'd compare-contrasted anderson's mandarin leftist disenchantment with the "masses" as he saw them into satyajit ray's or chahine's deep empathy/sympathy (or sirk's ditto, for those trapped in the more suffocatingly conformist reaches of the american middle class, or indeed whatever deviation it was the red guards felt that xie jin exhibited, this might have set up an interesting dialectic, for the emergence of a post-war and post-colonial dialectic (anderson was born in bangalore, of course: and belonged, if uneasily, to a layer of empire that was a lot less socially distant from eg the nehru's born-to-rule caste than modernising liberation rhetoric was able to acknowledge) <-- were any of the non-US directors in question (whatever their politics) actually of working class or peasant class backgrounds?

*he didn't >:(

"incorrect neo-confucianism" <-- don't think this was the actual term, btw

("an interesting dialectic, for the emergence of a post-war and post-colonial STANCE", i mean)

the monday film (00:50 in this case) is always repeated first thing on thursday (11:00). (which is just as useless. but, hey, video recorders...)

lolz didn't we talk about recording off Film4 two years ago. Still to get a DVD recorder.

Seems like were two separate topics that he ws trying to insert -- one ws the rise of world cinema, another was sex and cinema -- and it led to a lot of incoherence. If MC said "in the 50s there were two trends, etc" then he could've organised it better (?) The 10 mins on Ray were spent on Pather Panchali. Great as that film might be (and it is) I didn't know how it fit with the rest of his agenda. He could've discussed it w/neo-realism, he certainly should've mentioned that 30s Indian film alongside it, same for that Brazilian film from the 50s discussed yesterday. Same for the Bunuel. These eps are spread as timelines but he is v good at jumping across, and there was much less of that yesterday.

Could see how he might have wanted Freud to operate -- but wasn't Freud an obsession with a lot of film makers in 40s noir?

And incidentally I don't think Indian cinema is allowed to show bedroom scenes NOW, its incredibly conservative. Not something that Ray ws able to do much about, i think.

This has led to a orgy of short film watching over the weekend:

http://www.ubu.com/film/farrokhzad_house.html

[reposted from julio's LJ comments thread]

i really REALLY enjoyed r cousins last night [=on saturday night] -- i was home late-ish, so i missed the first ten mins and had to while time away till the repeat re-watching species

which taught me that his weak spot is getting started, really: the intro doesn't get any better, and he was piffling on about the "classical" and the "bauble" too much (ie at all) in that first ten mins -- but as soon as he gets into zone of the paying his main attentions to the visual*, he has my attention (and he did a real good job firing me about the italians, who've honestly always been my blank spot in the 50s and 60s)

putting tati third after bergman and bresson delighted me

(haha he said "authoritative" when he meant "authoritarian", of bergman's horrible dad)

*this actually happens when harriet andersen gazes out of the frame at us, in summer with monika, and gazes and gazes and gazes: cinema looking into the abyss of the buffs and perves and rubes

argh, spoilers. does he need to keep showing the ends of films?

otm. I watched last week's episode and then the next day The Passenger turned up from Netflix. Didn't really spoil it, tbh, but still.

As he is talking about modernisms and new waves i don't think revealing endings is at the top of his mind, and its not as if the endings of Tarkovsky films are understood in any way.

Last night's => much like my film going life, scarily enough...

Just a couple of points: I think he is too to quick to define the cinema of a country and then unthinkingly went into the cinema of a continent (Africa), whereas I would have preferred him to define Senegalese cinema as a thing in itself. Hopefully he'll be more specific as other African film makers emerge.

The end of Nostalghia should have been compared to compositions in glamorous ads -- probably outside his remit but I suspect that's where a lot of it went. Wanted some confirmation.

There was a lack of image matching: Jancso to Tarr, or Farrokhzad to [insert name of Iranian film maker here].

cage said the point of his music -- well, some of it -- was that there was "no best seat"

maybe the point of modernist ("modernist") film is that it doesn't matter if you see the end first: it's not shaped or driven by plot denouement

that said, i was out and missed the entire ep

Its on more4, if you watch that kind of thing.

interviewer: do you believe in a beginning, middle and end?

jean-luc godard: yes but not in that order

have missed the last cpl of these, hoping to catch up, but i am still kind of sulking abt that horrible comparison, mentioned upthread, between ford and kurosawa and their attitude to spectacle (cue vague invocation of 'innovation').

when i first took an evening film studies course, at Birkbeck College in the late 1980s, i was p much alone in having any kind of interest in, or knowledge, of film theory. most of the other ppl on the course - quite a gd cross-section - all wanted much more of a history lesson than they got, so i'm sure that this series will serve as a valuable teaching aid for a long time - which is why, imho, threads like this serve a gd purpose, to interrogate the 'standard work'.

i am so incredibly behind watching this that i think i will have to set aside a weekend to catch up.

though im annoyed at the bit i caught last week or so when he ruined the passenger's ending, which i still havent gotten round to watching.

he ruins the beginning and middle of a lot of stuff too tbf

well yeah. he assumes that of course we have all watched all these/this many films so there is no reason not to talk about endings. but i think after a certain no. of years, revealing endings seems okay to do. if i had read that guardian piece a few months back about spoilers - where they show a pic from the last scene of planet of the apes - without having already seen the first planet of the apes, id prob be a bit pissed off.

you might have fallen to yr knees and shouted about them blowing it up

i'm super behind w/this but part of what's frustrating about the spoiler debate isn't that it's argued or okay or whatever but that it's just usually unnecessary; he showed the *key shot* of ordet while talking about dreyer, and it really added nothing; all he needed to do was show a shot of ordet. you can make a case for not going all out on concealing a twist if it would prohibit you from discussing a film, but it can feel cavalier if you're just galloping through and dropping in endings when you could be using something else as easily.

there has to be a bit of a statute of limitations on spoilers though

the bible? jesus dies! (except not) <-- forgivable
that cock m.kermode telling you the scariest bit of "the ring" in the intro to its first ever showing <-- less so

s/b first ever BBC showing

a lot of intro writers for books, dvds and other critical editions seem incapable of not spoilering like crazy, i'm assuming it's cos description is a cheap way of meeting yr word count tbh.

but the obvious lesson is never look at crit of stuff you don't want "spoiled".

like whenever i get a penguin of something i've not read before, i read the intro last. also whenever i want to watch something made in Hollywood that i've never seen before, i make sure i haven't watched m. cousins wanking on about non-classicalist baubles first.

These films are 50+ years old.

Then again I always read the intros off Penguin paperbacks first.

if you're going to spend all this time interview robert towne, WHY NOT GET HIM TO TURN THE WASHING MACHINE OFF DURING THE INTERVIEW (or you know, slap an even louder musictrack over it so we can't hear him AT ALL: he's not saying anything very interesting)

thought this was a weak ep on the whole -- nice to see so much of charles burnett of course -- but the dialectic of radicals versus "assimilationists" was pretty ropily handled, pseudo-countercultural preening obscuring a much more ambivalent and tangled identity-pol story -- nothing like enough on formal content of films, as opposed to symbolic poses (at least till he was talking to burnett)

the "see the world upside down" trope got old fast (arising out of a very over-extended DO-YOU-SEE section on someone's children's book): haha at his response to hopper's the last movie ("but the stupid critics thought it was a fiasco": THOSE STUPID CRITICS!!), and, wel, obviously hopper was never that well behaved, but in what contentful sense beyond drug intake is he a radical (i've never seen the last movie, so am prepared to be schooled on this)

don't like him saying stuff like "an article in the new yorker said" w/o naming the writer (kael?) -- realised as i watched the clip that i will never love "chinatown", and wonder if i could ever formulate my resistance... (he uses the word "amplitude" AGAIN about polanski...)

there's really an excellent thesis to be written -- maybe it already has been -- about the countercultural response to film, and how incredibly sentimental and old-fashioned it WAS, once you got past its taste for sex and drugs and violence... there could hardly BE a more old-fashioned manipulatively ending film than "the graduate" (YOUTH IS FAB, old people understand nothing especially LOVE or ART)... of course kael was half-writing it at the time, and her aggressive support of directors like altman (and the "assimilationists") hinged on her own sense that the counterculture vanguard WASN'T making film better, it was falling for "far out" spectacle laced with preachy and self-regarding hippyish moralism

(to be fair cousins wasn't repping for petulia or el toro or the strawberry statement this week, those arguments do seem to have been won...)

Was kind of exasperated by this ep, didn't really have the strength to type up anything. Really pissed at the Dennis Hopper bit -- I always thought he was a real waste of time who got a bit lucky w/a few roles and the comeback in Blue Velvet. All a bit MC5 posing with their K-47s.

Apart from Burnett I liked Schrader, especially when he said how he'd like a return to existentialist cinema and then a second later exclaiming it would get old.

There was some gd formal content w/Taxi Driver and Malick, too. What this needed was a story to be told in parallel w/ other 70s films from other scenes and countries. This series has led me to watch quite a bit of experimental film, the best of which comes from Hollis Frampton. Tough, rigorous framing that is also (at its best) witty, the image and the idea often came together with a set of emotions. MAYBE he could've tied that with Chantal Akermann's work -- instead of restricting his geographical boundaries, which was a problem if you talk about narrative cinema of the time he was focusing on, but he needn't have left it as a weak lament.

Last week's one was a 'rest of the world' trip and I don't think this division (he's going backpacking again next week) really works.

oh yes, the peanut shells as locusts! i liked that bit

oh and the thing on "north lighting" in the godfather, i enjoy when he discusses stuff like that

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helke_Sander

w/Akermann I'd say another key film is Sander's The All-Around Reduced Personality (from the late 70s). Love that one, v lucky to catch a screening of it at the Goethe Instiutt a few years ago.

i saw the last movie a looong time ago, when it was revived at the nft in the 1980s - my main memory of it is that the 'opening titles' didn't appear until abt twenty minutes into the film, which i guess was sort've radical. but yes, hopper was in many ways quite an 'inside' figure, someone trained in old school studio system filmmaking under ppl like henry hathaway, who hopper wld later be toughly sentimental abt. hopper, warren beatty and of course bogdanovich all played great hommage to american or american-based filmmakers from 'the golden age' of the studio system - and even someone like john carpenter, much more of an outsider maybe, fantasised about having the same kind of career as howard hawks - or an sentimentalised, idealised version of that kind of career. i guess we all want to be assimilated by 'the thing' (hollywood) at some level or other.

this is all without seeing the episode in question.

9am: thinking of turning the sound off at the intro :-)

pm I mean

oh sod it clashes with x-factor plus i am only a third of the way into my wine

ah, its a toughie, there is always the 1am repeat.

Man I love Fassbinder's scruffy intense face screen