Bill Randall

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The 2008 Whitney Biennial is on now; I may make this one, but for now here is a brief review of a Cameron Jamie video work from the 2006 installment.

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(AKA “The King & the Bird.” Sounds dull translated, but it’s better than the alternate English title “The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird.”)

Hayao Miyazaki has exquisite taste. He loves Yuri Norstein and Frédéric Back, and most of all, Paul Grimault. This greatest of French animators, fearing neither sentiment nor destruction, left his traces all over The Castle in the Sky. In Grimault’s earlier film Le Roi et l’Oiseau, the castle doesn’t fly, but the Bird does. And the lovers seem to, drawn with such a light touch. As though Bob Clampett had flown to Paris for Jean Cocteau’s poetry, one could say.

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Welcome news, Criterion’s is bringing William Klein’s brilliant Mister Freedom to DVD, along with a couple of his others, for a few ailing dollars. They call it a “delirious fiction.” It offers a gun-toting, corn-spouting superhero fighting Commies in France, all dreamed up by an expat American who found things out fighting in World War II.

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With the talk of poetry, and the Economist’s obituary of Baba Amte this week, I thought I’d write on a poet’s movie. There aren’t many. In “The House Is Black,” the poet Forough Farrokhzad elevates a charity documentary into something else entirely.

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My friend John Yost has completed his first feature film Every Good Thing to Rust, available online for free viewing. Congrats, John; you’re my hero. More so since your movie’s actually quite good. Imagine how awkward it would have been if it sucked like that unfinished cowboy movie I tried to make with Brian & JP. If you don’t know these folk, just watch the movie. I’m biased, but some thoughts after the jump.

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The first image, a dead man’s distended purple scrotum, put me off watching “The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes” for a good three years. This second part of Stan Brakhage’s’s Pittsburgh Trilogy unfolds in a morgue. It is rough going. A friend who checked “coroner” on her grad school applications had said she would watch it with me, but we lost touch. I was on my own.

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(apologies to Lynne Ramsay & the Criterion Collection, from whose film I have shamelessly thieved)

My brother and I spent our childhoods checking out Monsters of Toho Studios from the library over and over. So when a new monster took a page from Blair Witch, we met some of our oldest friends at the theater on opening night. I mean, come on: giant monsters.

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Somehow I saw The Beaver Trilogy by Trent Harris recently. A friend had unearthed a copy of this profoundly odd film, with Young Sean Penn aping a guy who impersonates Olivia Newton-John, along with Crispin Glover and the actual guy. The film’s one of those back alley masterpieces, like The Holy Mountain or El Topo, long unavailable, more imagined than seen.

Yet one could still see those films as a midnight movie, or on foreign video. Harris’ movie has never appeared on legit video anywhere, and rarely screens at festivals. I guess rights issues should take the blame. The cost of licensing Newton-John’s songs must be out of reach for such a small film. That’s a shame, and a flaw in the way rights are assessed: would that prices were scaled somehow. These laws kept the masterpiece Killer of Sheep out of the public eye for decades. They ultimately restrict profits for filmmakers and musicians both instead of protecting them.

Having heard about Beaver a while ago, I already had quite an elaborate image of it. In my mind, all the action unfolded in a parking lot at night, under harsh halogen lights. Of course, the real film didn’t resemble my notional one, and I felt underwhelmed while watching it. The editing in the documentary part seemed unduly rough, while the fictional versions felt rather flat. I suppose some letdown’s inevitable.

But they’re all well-crafted individually. Alone, any of them would hold my interest, whether as an outsider doc or Hollywood mistake. Taken together, they resonate, building something that has since lingered and grown in my mind. This film is layered. Its simplicity defies easy understanding, much like any of the three versions of this guy who so loves Xanadu.

So the three parts of the film echo one another, reverberating more loudly as they overlap and repeat. The structure doesn’t hint at Rashomon so much as Celine & Julie, that feeling of free variation. Different actors could keep performing “Olivia” to infinity, each with unique grace notes. While film actors usually define a character once and for all, Beaver’s Olivia lives on as pure potential. Crispin plays Sean plays “Olivia,” and someone new could play Crispin years from now, like a Latter-Day Hamlet.

Always interesting Harold Henderson has summed up an article in Technology Review on television news quite well:

TV “news” isn’t liberal or conservative, it’s stupid.

Written by former Dateline NBC producer John Hockenberry, it covers twelve years of missed chances as producers continually look for an “emotional core” where there isn’t one. Not Al Qaeda’s complexities; firefighters. Not politics; puppies.

His main point is that network news is doomed, thanks to the self-organizing communities made possible by the Internet. No kidding. He chronicles the inside reasons throughout the article, and make me feel glad not to work in network news. Let it die.

The vacuity of the network form, especially of Dateline, comes into fine relief near the end. Hockenberry laments one of his pet projects that got cut. He thought it innovative. In it, a porn spammer gets confronted on-camera by a miffed housewife, like a watered-down To Catch a Predator. When he mentions that dreck in the next sentence, I wonder if he can’t see the connection.

More interesting are the suggestions, not developed, that 1) ads are innovative because they respect the audience; and 2) something inherent in film/TV leads us to look for the emotional core. You can’t control the Kuleshov effect, in other words. So filmed war coverage has to be Us vs. Them. Even worse, it always becomes mythic. Which leads to the question: how different would my country and its politics look if we’d all just been reading about 9/11? Or better yet, if all the voters had seen nothing but tables of raw data the entire time?