The Czech Republic’s European Union presidency started with a bang in January with the controversy over David Černý’s sculpture “Entropa,” installed in the European Parliament and featuring Bulgaria as a Turkish toilet, Sweden as an Ikea box, and France permanently on strike. And before the country’s six months in the Brussels spotlight are up, the work of another of its artistic provocateurs, documentarian Karel Vachek, will be on view in the United States, in retrospectives of his documentaries at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Made between 1963 (the very beginning of the Prague Spring) and 2006 (two years after the Czech Republic’s accession to the EU), the films offer a wide-ranging chronicle of forty years of political and social change in one corner of Central Europe, refracted through the director’s trademark hybrid of cinema vérité, performance, and philosophy.
Vachek has been in the States twice before—once with a retrospective of his long-format documentaries of the Nineties in 2002, and once twenty years earlier when, banned from filmmaking in his home country, he moved to Jersey City. After returning to Czechoslovakia in 1984, Vachek tended high-pressure boilers and drove delivery trucks until being allowed to work as a filmmaker again after the collapse of the communist government in1989. “I leave when no one is leaving and I return when no one is returning, and I think that that is my fundamental life situation,” he says in his 2004 book The Theory of Matter.
The brilliant American film critic Manny Farber died in August at age 91. In honor of his great friend and idol, critic and Film Society of Lincoln Center programmer organized a film festival that would celebrate Farber’s life, writing, and teaching. The series, titled Manny Farber 1917-2008, is now playing at New York’s Walter Reade Theater, through November 26 (click here for ticket info). For the occasion, Reverse Shot’s Eric Hynes sat down to talk with Jones about Farber and why he and his friends chose certain films for the festival. Of course, the conversation grew and expanded to encompass not only Farber’s legacy but approaches to criticism itself. Thanks to Kent Jones for his time and candor.
. . . RS: For those of us who mostly know Manny through Negative Space, and not knowing necessarily what he taught through the years, there are some surprises. Such as, for me, seeing Two or Three Things I Know About Her on the schedule, only knowing his opinion on the film from a New York Film Festival wrap-up, which was basically…
KJ: A pan.
RS: …a pan, right—though a very Manny Farber kind of pan.
KJ: Singing the crisp image that Raoul Coutard gets . . . It seems that every time I talked to him he was telling me how—unsurprisingly maybe—he wished he could have written more about Nick Ray, that he could have done justice to him and how special those early films are. He knew Nick Ray, and I think he felt a certain personal debt to him. He felt similarly about James Agee, he kind of regretted having written that piece about Agee. In the last few years of his life he was thinking back to his friendships with people. When he was writing as part of the New York intellectual world of the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, his instinct was always to pull away from what everyone else was doing and take another look. There’s a piece that he wrote that’s in a Nation collection of art criticism where he kind of pans Matisse. As you just said, he does it in a very Manny Farber way, but he’s not somebody who’s going to write from the perspective of looking at an old master. He’s always looking at things from the now, directly. There are always surprises.
Something he said to me a couple of times was, “I really think I missed the boat on Hitchcock.” Patricia and I were talking about this recently, about how he would always make such a big deal about not liking Hitchcock, yet he taught Notorious, he taught North by Northwest, he taught and really loved Vertigo, he taught Strangers on a Train, which is a movie he writes a lot about, somewhat disparagingly, somewhat admiringly. He and Patricia called me once to tell me how thrilling it was to go back and look at On the Waterfront—I don’t remember one good word that he ever wrote about Elia Kazan. He was always going back and looking. Which is the opposite of other critics. The most famous example is Pauline Kael, who made a point of never going back and looking at things again, but that was her personality and the way that she operated, and she was working a completely different kind of critical territory. She was thinking in terms of this conversation with her audience. He was thinking in terms of a conversation with the film. That’s something very different. So she didn’t have to go back and take a second look; he did. It was ongoing . . .
Lots of events to celebrate today, including the Mets’ move into sole possession of first place (before they once again find a new way to crush my hopes), but I’d like to call special attention to this weekend’s “Remembering Arthur Lipsett” program at Anthology Film Archives, which begins this evening at 7pm EST with a program of Lipsett’s short films. A documentary called Remembering Arthur shows at 9pm.
I first came across Lipsett’s work at, of all things, a Godspeed You! Black Emperor show (I know, I know, but you were 20 once, too), where instead of having an opening band GY!BE asked Jonas Mekas to present (and herald with a bugle) a small collection of Canadian experimental films, Lipsett’s among them. Along with earlier viewings of Valse Triste by the now late Bruce Conner, Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger, and T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G by Paul Sharits, they were some of the first experimental films I ever encountered. As an impressionable young man they arrived as revelations, and Lipsett’s films, Free Fall and his most famous work, Very Nice, Very Nice, stood out most disturbingly and, therefore, profoundly. Instead of the structural rigor and narrative comedy of Conner’s found footage films—where the apocalypse is offset by slapstick and pathos—Lipsett presents collages of found and originally captured moments (often by frenzied camera work) as overwhelming barrages of cultural chaos, with images frequently machine gunned to the viewer in violent bursts of flash frames. Lipsett, the story goes, initially assembled audio samples from jazz records, scientific interviews, radio entertainments, and religious services into dark, unsettling montages while working as an animator for the National Film Board of Canada (my own former employer) and then created images to accompany these strange soundscapes. Ranging at their most extreme from horrific images of war to lulling anodynes of advertising to rediscovered grotesqueries of the natural world, the images become when destabilized in their new, anarchic environment—for example, in 21-87—as much free-form abstract textures as the bizarre clips of evangelist sermons (“the body of our lord Jesus Christ” over a shot of a man engulfed in flame), paranoid confessions (“when I get on the bus I have the feeling everybody’s looking at me”), heavy breathing (in tandem with amusement park patrons admiring themselves in funhouse mirrors), and electronic gurgles. When combined, image and sound evoke disarming associations at times explicitly political, at other times purely sensorial. Lipsett’s films are environments and rarely stories, which is why they almost always end abruptly, without warning, their studies of human faces caught unawares and placed into relief by an avalanche of unloosed detritus (acrobats, masks, ceremonies, department stores, aerial test runs, atomic bombs, racetracks, cities, eyes) tuned into at this pioneering filmmaker’s frequency and left open for us to pursue according to his inspiration.
These cacophonic, end time parades of human ritual, longing, and folly have been imitated to the point of parody (The Critic did a pretty good job sticking a fork in the avant-garde’s self-serious cliches), but remember—along with Conner, Lipsett in the early-60s was this style’s originator. As one of experimental film’s most forward looking and forgotten filmmakers (George Lucas apparently references his films in Star Wars, but so what? Someone on Wikipedia, please insert more info about the man himself instead of Lucas’ shallow admiration of him, as if he’s only important therefore) Lipsett remains consistently engaging and endlessly minable, his films valuable lessons in cinema as sensitizing and immolating agent, and frightening flickers of wonder in their own right.
1. Even though Vivre sa vie may leave its heroine, Nana (Anna Karina), used and dead, crumpled in a heap in the streets, on the heels of forcing her into prostitution, it still may be an even more fitting filmic tribute to the actress behind the role’s beauty than the lighter, more palatable A Woman Is a Woman or Band of Outsiders Though to highlight the ways in which this somber, geometric, slippery film accentuates her porcelain charms serves only to acknowledge the female objectification at the heart of movie watching (and western culture at large) that Godard attempts at disassembling in this, his third feature. Vivre sa vie is a movie that seems done to Nana/Karina, except perhaps in her famous dance.
2. Has there ever been a greater jump in facility between films than what Godard exhibits from Breathless to A Woman Is a Woman to Vivre sa vie? The only comparable leap amongst his contemporaries would have to be Rivette’s move from the paranoid Nouvelle Vague-isms of Paris Belongs to Us to his revision of historical filmmaking as pageantry in The Nun (also starring Karina, incidentally) both of which exploded into the completely unhinged masterwork L’amour fou.
One helluva cock-tease, Godard’s dance with the pop cultural zeitgeist famously failed to deliver a completed version of the title track (corrected by an unapproved end scene overlay), dedicating as much screen time to oddball agitprop dioramas as it does to Mick and Keith. Godard’s preferred title, One Plus One, more honestly reflects the provocative equivalency of his project, and anyone actually paying attention to what he’d been doing up to and during the period can’t have expected a sober, unproblematized documentary recording. Furthermore, this was 1968, and there was simply too much going on outside to spend an entire film stuck inside a recording studio.
The dramatic tableaux that interrupt the studio documentation are similar in their cheeky audacity to set pieces from Weekend and La Chinoise, and establish a decidedly un-Stones-like (but very Godardian) atonality. But though this back and forth between the Stones and various anarchic skits has its appeal (as does the film’s top-quality color-stock sugar high), it is Godard’s subtle deconstruction of the supposed straight-up side of the equation that truly resonates. For though the camera is in studio and recording as the song comes together, it’s not necessarily trained on the Stones.
Cluttered with equipment for both music and film recording and artificially catacombed by rolling dividers, the studio would seem an unlikely space for a tracking shot. Yet that shooting strategy, dominant throughout the film as it unites interior and exterior, documentary and fiction, process and provocation, effectively democratizes a space primed for star-making and gazing. In the early going, the Stones seem just as primed, with Mick Jagger mugging for the fly-on-the-wall camera like a wannabe Belmondo, and Keith Richards shambling with a bit more shoulder-shruggery. But at the most photogenic moment of the sessions, with the whole band and assorted gal pals gathered round the mike for song-long background vocals, the camera tracks around the perimeter of the room, toward the singers and then away, passing behind dividers and dwelling on technicians, crew, and workmen whose matter-of-fact disengagement contrasts sharply from the dandily dressed rock stars shouting falsetto woo-woos across the room. Privy now to both sides, and with each come upon so even-handedly, it’s suddenly absurd to see one without considering the other, to not anticipate something more beyond the moving frame. No matter the subject or the star, the camera (and by extension we) privileges whatever it sees and seeks.
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