Press Play Video Blog

GREY MATTERS: One Soul Separated: THE BALLAD OF GENESIS P-ORRIDGE AND LADY JAYE

Like high romantics everywhere, the lovebirds named Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye felt as if they were really one soul separated into two bodies. Unlike everyone else, they did something about it. After meeting in New York in 1993, the two set about becoming mirror images of one another, first with small things like matching bleached bobs, matching pop and fetish inspired fashion and slashed red anime make-up, before moving on to the hard stuff in 2004: radical, transformative cosmetic surgeries meant to make them look two matching halves of a single "pandrogynous being,"

And that is how we meet musician/artist P-Orridge (born Neil Megson, 1950) and Lady Jaye (born Jacqueline Breyer, 1969) in Marie Losier’s remarkable new film, with matching hair and fashion styles, breast implants, plumped Restalyne lips, and enhanced cheekbones.

A total break with any music-doc form, The Ballad of Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye also drops any semblance of linear narrative. It opts instead for a jangly non-stop montage of associative images, ideas and sounds to navigate P-Orridge’s five-odd decades of working subcultural fringes—from being an early performance art and industrial music pioneer, to becoming a modern primitive provocateur—and makes it all seem like falling off a log.

But the illusion of effortlessness is just that. Cinema like this, that makes poetic connections entirely on symbolic, suggestive, or subconscious levels, requires a degree of aesthetic focus and rigor you find once every few years, if that.

Losier—a 2006 Whitney Biennialist and collaborator with Guy Maddin on the short film Manuelle Labor (2007)—is up to the task. Like the artist being uncovered, her film is all about a charmingly knockabout faith in strange connections—aesthetic, interdisciplinary and maybe even spiritual.

And so it’s playful and ironically perverse that Losier starts off by disconnecting P-Orridge from his/her exotic strain of fame (damn these pronouns!), limning the artist as just another eccentric expat Brit living in Brooklyn, an arty, eccentric fifty-something guy making dinner in formal drag wear.

But Losier knows she has a secret weapon that will stop audiences fromdismissing P-Orridge as a Quentin Crisp wannabe: his adorable, reserve-melting, total adoration of Lady Jaye.

She’s an ice-blond contradiction, a fetish-styling glam girl who’s also a nurse specializing in the care of kids with incurable disabilities.

P-Orridge recalls staying at a dominatrix friend’s dungeon in the East Village when a door opened, and into the light stepped Jaye, a vision in groovy 60’s style clothes and fetish accoutrements (“my two favorites!”).

Smitten, P-Orridge prayed, “Dear Universe—If you find a way for me to be with this woman, I will sleep with her forever.”

The universe would give one of the worst conditional “yes” answers ever. But P-Orridge didn’t know that, of course.

And then, only after the Genesis/Jaye origins story, does Losier make room for biography, as hercameras roam P-Orridge’s basement. Hundreds of boxes and crates hold thousands of files of newspapers, magazines and ‘zines, while more boxes hold thousands more home, network, pirate and internet video, all of it documenting and critiquing over thirty years worth of performance, music and art-making at the interstices of international fetish, BDSM, industrial, and body modification cultures.

In this blizzard of outlier arts history—post punk, Beat and UK history bits in multiple formats mix and match to becomes mini music videos accompanying P-Orridge’s stream-of-memory narration—but two elements are especially fascinating and essential: a video of P-Orridgein the ‘80s, dressed in hyper-masculine military mufti and practically attacking an admiring crowd. Where, one wonders, did this manned-up Genesis go?

And there is a lot about P-Orridge’s mentor, William S. Burroughs, who in the late 60s went out of his way to land the young and struggling P-Orridge arts funding grants and also introduced Genesis to the cut-up method, wherein linear texts are sliced into impossible-to-predict ‘new’ works.

The cut-up defined P-Orridge’s ‘70s band, Psychic TV, and his ‘80s band, Throbbing Gristle, both way-ahead-of-their-time groups that co-created the industrial genre that led to groups like Nine Inch Nails and provided basic DNA for all electronic dance music genres. But the ultimate cut-up, of course, was the form Genesis and Lady Jaye’s partnership took.

Which most people would think the act of two very disturbed people. And so, in the spirit of cutting folks off at the corner of Freud and Rosebud, Losier and P-Orridge (it’s unclear how closely the two worked on this project for the eight years of production) offer up a video recreation.

A cute sad boy of about twelve years, dressed in British school clothes stands, in front of an institutional edifice, as P-Orridge recalls years of daily bullying, in which he was almost beaten to death.

Cut to: The real P-Orridge wearing a cacophony of contradictory fashion semiotics—Fascist S&M chic. Red lipstick. A Hitler moustache. Warhol hair. He screams, “I am so sick and tired of being told what I’m supposed to look like! This is not my body! This is not my name! This is not my personality!”

It’s an almost shockingly bare declaration of independence. But what of Lady Jaye?

During the film there’s a sense of mystery about her. She always seems to be finishing something, or leaving somewhere, of in the middle of laughing about something we don’t know about. The film has no special effects, clever editing, or odd framing, but she still seems . . it’s hard to explain . . . spectral in some way.

During a Psychic TV reunion, P-Orridge tells us she’s upset about something, but all I could see was a blur of her moving and, yes, looking pissed, but then we were on to something else.

Then the hammer fell and I wondered about that:

Lady Jaye died in 2007. Cancer. Next to her beloved after making love, or so goes the ballad.

First off, I was glad Losier didn’t cheapen Lady Jaye’s story with talking head treacle that would "explain" her. And P-Orridge, who speaks glowingly about how “we made love” or how “she looked so beautiful,” wants to keep details about Lady Jaye private and cherished at the same time that he offers her legend as a lasting image and archetype for everything he might consider pure and beautiful.

That some of Losier’s film can be read as myth-creation does not devaluate the far greater parts that are inarguable acts of music history and culturally integrated biography. But the film doesn’t forget to remain true to its title as it evokes another ballad, another musical couple walking in another park, as P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, dressed all in white, stroll through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

“I love you,” says one voice. “I know,” says the other.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. Magazines and newspapers that have his articles include Detroit Metro Times, gothic.net, Icon Magazine, International Musician and Recording World, Lacanian Ink, MusicFilmWeb, New York Post, The Perfect Sound, Salon, Smart Money Magazine, Teeth of the Divine, Venuszine, and Time Out/New York.

In Defense of UNFORGIVEN’s Little Bill Daggett

Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood’s final western, offers a stirring rebuke to the genre he has done more to popularize than perhaps any actor or director, laying bare the senseless, ugly violence of the Wild West and its depictions. This argument is made most clearly by Eastwood’s main character, William Munny, a retired assassin whose attempt at a final score descends into a murderous odyssey in which almost everyone but Munny is ultimately beaten to death, maimed, or gunned down. It is a grim verdict, but one that remains immensely popular, due in part to a ubiquity on cable that has won it many new fans over the years.

Certainly, the film’s most charismatic, if not memorable, character remains Munny’s antagonist, Sheriff Little Bill Daggett. While appreciated by audiences – and certainly critically, with Gene Hackman deservedly winning his second Oscar for the role – Daggett is generally misunderstood, unfairly branded as the film’s sadistic villain whose final punishment is well deserved. While Daggett is not softly sympathetic – in a film with no sympathetic characters, only brutes, victims, and cowards – he does attempt to create law and order in a region that has previously only seen unrequited violence. Munny’s presence, and the specters of other assassins arriving to claim the bounty of whores, are antithetical to Daggett’s vision for the town and the new house he is building, and thus justify his rough countermeasures.

We first meet Little Bill moments into the movie, after the hooker Delilah Fitzgerald is attacked by a cowboy. Coming into Greeley’s out of the dead of night, Daggett decides to horsewhip the offender and his friend until they agree to repay Skinny, the brothel owner, with several of their horses. When Strawberry Alice (played by Eastwood’s then-wife Frances Fisher) furiously protests the leniency, Daggett angrily asks her, “Ain’t you seen enough blood for one night?” Alice and her prostitutorial brethren thereafter decide to offer a bounty through their johns to entice an assassin to Big Whiskey to kill the cowboys in retribution for Fitzgerald’s disfigurement.

The opening portrays Little Bill as a cold-hearted sheriff disdainful of women and inexplicably unwilling to mete out frontier justice to the two men who slashed a woman’s face without provocation. The whores’ thirst for blood may seem morally justifiable to viewers who grew up on Eastwood films, like his revenge bonanza The Outlaw Josie Wales, but it runs counter to Daggett’s wish for law and order and his aversion to violence solely for its own purpose. While Daggett will resort to violence in ensuing scenes, this precept forms the core of the sheriff’s own code.

Soon after the attack, Skinny alerts Daggett to the hookers’ plan, visiting Little Bill where he is building a house. Even as Skinny smirks at the shoddy construction, Little Bill brags at his work, pridefully looking forward to sitting on his porch with a pipe and coffee. The symbolism of the house as Little Bill's new place in the community is obvious and provides a glimpse of Little Bill's background, suggesting he hasn’t been in Big Whiskey long but intends to plant some roots in the community and help grow it out. Daggett grimaces at Skinny's news, presuming aloud that a swarm of vicious men from as far as Texas will make their way to Big Whiskey to collect on the contract.

When the first such assassin, English Bob, arrives in town, we learn a bit more about Little Bill, getting valuable context for his approach. As Daggett’s inexperienced deputies arm up to arrest English Bob (played with nice understated pluck by Richard Harris, in one of his final roles), two deputies question aloud whether Little Bill might be scared of Bob, a frightening type of killer whose caliber none have ever encountered before in Big Whiskey. The one-armed deputy Clyde scoffs, “Little Bill? Him scared? Little Bill come out of Kansas and Texas boys. He worked them tough towns.”

This is the extent of what we learn about Little Bill’s background, but it says much about his perspective. Coming from the 1870s West, Daggett clearly experienced pervasive wanton violence in such places as Shackleford County, Texas, where bands of roving criminals often ran frontier towns. Cormac McCarthy’s description of a saloon in 1878 Ft. Griffin, Texas in the great Blood Meridian evokes this sort of society: “A dimly seething rabble had coagulated within… he was among every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker and drover and freighter and miner and hunter and soldier and pedlar and gambler and drifter and drunkard and thief and he was among the dregs of the earth in beggary…” Ft. Griffin was located in what was then one of the most lawless parts of America, and the type of town Little Bill had come from, if not that place exactly, and help explain his leadership style.

Little Bill’s first encounters with English Bob and William Munny starkly display this leadership. In two confrontations similar in their origins and outcomes, Little Bill badly beats first the suave English Bob and then Munny for entering town and not surrendering their firearms pursuant to the advertised county ordinance. The scenes further cement Little Bill’s status as the film’s heavy, but they also demonstrate his sympathetic motivations.

Little Bill and the audience already know of English Bob’s deadly nature, revealed from the fear of his fellow train passengers who comment on his penchant of gunning down Chinese immigrants; Munny’s reputation as a murderer is established early by the Schofield Kid’s awe, and while Daggett does not know it initially, he correctly surmises that Munny too has arrived in town for blood. As Daggett separately pummels the two assassins, he revealingly bellows that their ilk may be tolerated down in Wichita and Cheyenne, but not in Big Whiskey. He later delineates his philosophy to the simpering W.W. Beauchamp (played in a terrific send-up of Hollywood itself by Saul Rubinek): “I do not like assassins or men of low character, like your friend English Bob,” who Daggett explains once gunned down a disarmed man over a woman (ironically only to fabricate the tale through Beauchamp). Little Bill believes that the only way to deal with assassins who embody the carnage of the west is through opposing brute force, and he uses that force to run a black-and-blue Bob out of town.

Little Bill’s past in post-Civil War Texas and Kansas informs his rule in Big Whiskey, which up to this point in 1881 has not yet been torn down by the violence so common back east. His ruthlessness and dictatorial laws, while stark, are his way of keeping the peace to create a place to put down his new house.

Of course, it is Little Bill’s violent enforcement that costs him his life in the final shootout. Facing the end of Munny’s shotgun, Daggett calls the avenging dark angel Eastwood “a cowardly son of a bitch” for killing an unarmed man (much as English Bob had once done) and for “kill[ing] women and children” before Munny guns him down, along with Skinny and most of the overmatched deputies. With Munny standing over him, Little Bill croaks, “I don’t deserve this – to die like this! I was building a house.”

When the kill shot rings out and past Eastwood’s shadowed face, the audience – myself sometimes included – cheers at the baddie getting his comeuppance, but the moral picture is far hazier. Little Bill’s last words encapsulate his sense of frontier nobility as he sought to build a community and protect it from the bloody rigors of the age. In an interview on his film, Eastwood has acknowledged this perspective: “He was a sheriff, who had noble ideas. He had a small town, and he ran it with a lot of strength… He had dreams…”

Little Bill’s tough enforcement is likely the only way to meet the challenge of the time and place, but its effectiveness inspires the same dangerous people he fights to pursue him and seek brutal revenge. Indeed, it is Daggett’s ruthless killing of Munny’s partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) to get information on Munny that leads Munny to kill Little Bill and ravage his town to a point from which the Wyoming backwater will probably never recover. Daggett was building a house, of shoddy construction maybe, but it was well-intentioned and just.

In the end, though, Little Bill is ultimately incapable of taming the world of Big Whiskey.

Mark Greenbaum's work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, The LA Times, The New Republic, and other publications. This is his first piece for Press Play.

VIDEO ESSAY: Clint Eastwood and His Iconic Side View Profile

“The human face is the great subject of the cinema. Everything is there.” – Ingmar Bergman

The craggy complexion. The stately ovate chin. Those thin lips deceptively wrapped around that charming smile. That perfect nose. Those clear greenish-brown eyes. That squint.

One cannot discuss Clint Eastwood's iconic stature in film without mentioning his face. There are other faces that have been as handsome (Newman), masculine (Gable), striking (Hitchcock), fearsome (Bronson), and symbolic (Wayne). But from a visual standpoint, none of them have been as instrumental as a filmmaking tool or signature. Most actors are cast to fill in a character from the inside out, building an individual based on the personal. But Eastwood himself is a form. An absent presence whose persona is filled primarily by the film’s themes and ideas.

Clint Eastwood’s “side view” profile is probably the most recognizable visage in cinema. On the one hand, it is the picture of a supremely good-looking and rugged individual. On the other, it is the quintessential outline of a man’s man, whatever that ideal might be: a tool that Eastwood uses to better effect than any actor could or would ever dare to try.

The first true film in which Eastwood’s profile became noticeable was in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. On casting Eastwood, Leone said, “I looked at him and I didn’t see any character… just a physical figure.” In that sense, Eastwood might have been the perfect choice for the film. With Leone’s penchant for extreme close-ups of his characters’ faces, often exposed to the extreme heat of the desert, Eastwood's rough complexion would reflect the barrenness of his environment. His “Hollywood” looks amongst his often less-than-handsome Italian co-stars would only further enhance his visual uniqueness.

With the succeeding For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood in a cowboy hat would become the image of the Western Anti-Hero: unpredictable in his actions, but always of noble intent. It would be the template that would follow him for most of his career. This profile would be passed from Sergio Leone’s “man with no name” to Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry.

But Siegel didn’t merely carry on the tradition. He also introduced to Eastwood another artist who would help shape Clint’s persona: Bruce Surtees, the renowned cinematographer called the “Prince of Darkness" in professional circles. Eastwood had strong directorial inclinations by this time. And with his founding of Malpaso Productions, further collaborations with Siegel and Surtees made them grow closer, personally and artistically.

Bruce Surtees's refined use of shadow was perfect for Eastwood’s profile. With Surtees's lighting expertise, Clint’s characters, often half-covered in black, suddenly had the additional qualities of menace (Dirty Harry, High Plains Drifter), disrepute (Tightrope), secrecy (Firefox) and struggle (The Outlaw Josey Wales, Honkytonk Man).

Clint clearly learned much from Surtees, as he applied the same techniques to his subsequent films. Who can forget Maggie and Frankie’s conversation about her pet dog while driving beneath dancing lights in Million Dollar Baby? Sgt. Tom Highway’s silhouette while leading a platoon in Heartbreak Ridge? The ominous shadows enveloping Will Munny in Unforgiven? Sometimes Eastwood used his profile in unexpected roles, such as the sleek fighter pilot Mitchell Gant in Firefox, or as the over-aged astronaut Frank Corvin in Space Cowboys. Other times he used it as emotional “filler” for a sparse storyline, embodying it with great pathos despite an economy of style or feeling elsewhere in the movie (Escape From Alcatraz).

Great actors are remarkable in their ability to embody characters that we recognize and believe, simply by looking in our direction. But Clint Eastwood’s face is in a class by itself; astonishing in its capability to serve as both character and cinematic imprint, simply by looking away.

Credits: Thanks to Donald G. Carder (@theangrymick) and Senses of Cinema (@SensesOfCinema) for additional research material.

Michael Mirasol is a Filipino independent film critic who has been writing about films for the past eleven years. He briefly served as film critic for the Manila Times and now writes occasionally for Uno Magazine and his blog The Flipcritic. Last year he was named by Roger Ebert as one of his "Far Flung Correspondents", and continues to contribute written and video essays on film.

VIDEO – Motion Studies #18: Los Angeles Plays Itself

From now through April, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival will present "Film Studies in Motion", a Web Series curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee. This series, available on the festival's website and Facebook page, presents weekly selections of analytical video essays on the web, in preparation for Pantenberg and Lee's presentation "Whatever happened to Bildungsauftrag? – Teaching cinema on TV and the Web", scheduled for April 28 at the festival.

Week Four: Precursors: TV, Cinema, Contemporary Art

There is a a tradition of “Videographic Film Studies” that existed before the Internet. Some TV channels, like the West-German WDR, but also TV programmers in other countries, initiated an impressive variety of programmes on cinema that combined thorough analytical observations with an inventiveness of visual forms and techniques. Found footage has also been used in experimental cinema and contemporary art. Most examples of this audiovisual legacy remain either overlooked or invisible as they are stacked away in archives or private catalogues. For this reason, this episode mostly gathers fragments and snippets instead of entire essays.

Today's selection:

Los Angeles Plays Itself
Thom Andersen (2003)

Thom Anderson's features Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974), Red Hollywood (1996) and Los Angeles Plays Himself (2003) place him as a leading motion picture essayist and historian. Compiled from hundreds of clips from movies filmed in Los Angeles, Los Angeles Plays Itself explores the history, mythology and reality of Los Angeles as depicted in the movies. Originally intended as a private instructional tool for use in Andersen's lectures on film, the film was released theatrically and is frequently cited as one of the best documentaries of the 2000s.

View all Motion Studies video selections.

Volker Pantenburg is assistant professor for moving images at the media faculty of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

SIMON SAYS: The Vulgarian Frontier: On The Three Stooges’ Patently Inconsistent Comedic Genius

“The Vulgarian Frontier: Subject to Change Without Notice.” –Signpost in Dutiful but Dumb (1941)

Now that The Three Stooges, the new Farrelly brothers mediocrity, is just a day away from nationwide release, it’s very easy to misremember what made Larry Fine and Moe, Larry, Curly, and Shemp Howard’s routine so memorable. Like many Vaudevillians' acts, the Stooges’ brand of violent slapstick humor comes from a flagrantly low-brow kind of self-loathing. The fates seemed to regularly conspire against the Stooges but it somehow seemed justified because their personae were so very ugly. In fact, many of their best gags are about how unattractive they are, like when Shemp tiptoes around an old dark house in Spooks! (1953) and recoils in horror when he sees a bat with his face on it. “What a hideous, monstrous face,” Shemp says, before the bat descends on fishing wire while burbling, “Bib-bib-bib-bib.” The Stooges were never high artists but they were very good at taking themselves down a peg or six.

At the same time, one of the more dated and, yes, problematic aspects of the Stooges’ act is that they make fun of themselves by proxy, mocking many of the women that they try to woo. Being initiated in the Women Haters' Club in Women Haters (1934) is not much different than the Stooges’ scheme to get Larry married so that he inherits a fortune in Brideless Groom (1947), in that both scenarios assume that women can only be equal to men if they’re just as loutish, conniving, or fugly. Women often beat up the Stooges, but not because these guys were feminists, and wanted to joke about how ineffectual and chauvinistic their Stooge personas were. Actually, the Stooges just had really low self-esteem. So when Moe, Larry and Curly get wrangled into a car by a trio of women in False Alarms (1936), it’s telling that the most vocal gal is a thuggish-looking dullard who sees the Stooges as a meal ticket: “Come on, girls, let’s go places and eat things.”

Women were, however, not consistently used as direct reflections of the Stooges’ own insecurity. Women are more generically used as trophies, in shorts like Gents Without Cents (1944) and Pardon My Backfire (1953). This shows to go you that while the repetition of certain routines is a staple of the Stooges’ brand of humor, Fine and the Howards don't have a consistent philosophy on life or comedy. (This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, since that lack of focus is also a central part of the group’s charms–more on this in a moment.)

Besides, the Stooges never really needed anyone else to prove just how grossly incompetent they were, since their bumbling behavior was always an extension of their “hideous” looks and, thankfully, the Stooges never opted for plastic surgery. Scowls, dumb show stares, bulbous noses, and the group’s signature hair-stylings are just as integral to the group’s masochistic schtick as the vigorous eye-poking and cheek-slapping that made them famous.

Then again, the Stooges are often at their funniest when the pacing of their gags is so manic that you can hardly understand them. For instance, in Spooks!, each successive gag is delivered at a successively faster rate, until finally a giant gorilla that’s been skulking about out of sight makes a dramatic re-appearance. Additionally, some of the gags are weirdly dense and feature puns that are so cerebral that they’re practically middle-brow. In Malice in the Palace (1949), the boys pore over a map that shows in great detail the geography of the imaginary land of Shmow. Now, you can pause your dvd and pore over the details of punny made-up territories like the Bay of Rum, Igypt, Jerkola and Great Mitten. But the fact that this intricate gag was originally shown for only a few seconds makes the Stooges' anything-for-a-laugh modus operandi all the more apparent.

Besides, being flagrantly nonsensical suited the Stooges, as in an earlier part of Malice in the Palace where the group tries to eat meat that they're convinced was once a cat or a dog (whenever they prod the food with their flatware, a pooch and a puss respectively yelp and hiss). Or how about when Moe inadvertently destroys a car's horn in Pardon My Backfire and the horn spontaneously exclaims, "They got me," as if it were dying? If nothing else, the Stooges are at their best when they're charging out of left field. Their jokes aren't exactly avant-anything, and their sense of humor certainly isn’t consistently surreal. But with 200+ shorts at their backs, it's safe to say that the group's longevity stems from the variety of ways they contrived to hurt themselves. They kept enough variety in their gags to make even the sleepiest of their shorts feature one or two gut-busters. Pretty impressive for a bunch of guys that couldn’t even stand to look at their own reflection.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, The New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

VIDEO: The Hardcore History Lessons of Koji Wakamatsu

WARNING: This video contains explicit sexual and violent content and is intended for mature audiences. Parental discretion is advised.

Koji Wakamatsu—known as the Godfather of the pink movie, a genre of Japanese softcore exploitation films that started in the 1960s—has made over 100 movies, and is enjoying the most acclaimed period of his career thanks to two recent films that have much more on their mind than sex. Both films, United Red Army (2007) and Caterpillar (2010), are available on Fandor. This video essay explores how these films amount to hardcore history lessons: Wakamatsu uses low-budget exploitation filmmaking techniques to cast a critical eye on Japanese history during periods of prevailing militant ideology, as well as a brutally honest assessment of human nature.

Originally published on Fandor. Read a transcript of this video.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

BULLY: The Conversation

The recent documentary release Bully is an up-close look at 5 families of children who have been the victims of bullying. The film attempts to examine the problem from several different sides. The film has been the subject of much interest and debate since it came out; here, writers Simon Abrams and R. Kurt Osenlund offer their own takes.

Simon Abrams:

How did this happen, Kurt? When Bully came out, all anybody could talk about was the ratings controversy that its distributors drummed up for publicity's sake. Somewhere, Kroger Babb and Dave Friedman are smiling down on Bob and Harvey for having sold their film's steak based on its sizzle and not its substance.

Then again, as we have both written, there isn’t much meat on Bully's bones, is there? Director Lee Hirsch and co-writer Cynthia Lowen's 2012 documentary is so myopic that its scope only leaves room for a very narrow representation of bullying in heartland America. The film features problematic latent assumptions about bullying and how it should be handled in real life that I strongly dislike.

For instance, one parent insists, "we're nobody" when he complains that changes haven't been made in his kid's school system strictly because of political reasons. I understand what this father means to say: parents and kids are being ignored because American schools are beholden to powerful and apathetic people of influence. But this footage speaks to bigger concerns in Bully's vision of victimization. Firstly, the way that Hirsch lets this man babble suggests that the filmmakers find more than just pent-up frustration in his ranting. Hirsch and Lowen suggest that the man is right for thinking that the school system is corrupt. You sat next to me at the Bully press screening I attended when some moviegoers were doing everything short of booing and hissing at footage of one school's disinterested vice principal. Hirsch's message couldn't be clearer: school administrators are to blame because they're hypocrites and are quick to turn a blind eye.

Another thing I found frustrating about the aforementioned father's insistence that he's "nobody" was how his rap speaks to the film's emphasis on Middle American kids and parents. I wouldn't be surprised if Hirsch had deliberately steered clear of urban schools. It's easier to pull your audience's heartstrings when you flatter them by focusing on “real” salt-of-the-Earth types. They're honest, simple people, Kurt, don't you see? They don't have no book-learning or influence to fall back on. They're nobody!

Feh.

There are so many loaded assumptions about bullying and blame in Bully that I really had a hard time narrowing down to one emblematic example. It's especially disappointing to see that neither bullies nor any parents of bullies are given a chance to speak. Presumably, there weren't many that wanted to talk, but again, that's not on the screen. And that's where I think you and I find ourselves agreeing: what this movie puts on screen and how it puts it there are two different things. The film's unearned, faux-heart-warming message is just so solipsistic that I want to buy Philadelphia Weekly critic Sean Burns a beer for tweeting that he wanted to stuff Bully into a locker and steal its lunch money.

R. Kurt Osenlund:

Simon, your last point about Sean Burns's tweet is perfect, because it highlights how this movie isn't capable of changing any bullies' minds, and it also scoffs at the notion that we critics who hated the film are, naturally, the real bullies. I am sick to death of so many subpar documentary films coming down the pike, and accruing praise simply because the director wields a camera and a noble cause—as if the discussion the film starts will account for the film's own shortcomings. Though I haven't seen Tom Sadyac's I Am, I think it's safe to say Bully is the worst offender of this type, since, in addition to actual filmmaking that isn't about to turn many heads, it continually sets up a conversation it isn't equipped to have.

Whether ballooned by the media or not, bullying is a hot-button issue right now, and I, for one, at least expected this film to better address what headlines would call “a national epidemic.” But, as you stated, Hirsch is only interested in a convenient, meat-and-potatoes cross-section, where families are more than ready to open their doors, hearts, and mouths for a flashy film crew that rolls into town. It's just one example of the many shortcuts Hirsch takes, others being the oft-discussed issue of a lack of bully presence, and the decision to point the finger at an oppressive administration, embodied by a “horrifying” assistant principal who, unless I missed something in my press notes, has got to be acting for the camera.

I know I'm already inviting charges of cynicism, but this movie elicits it relentlessly, and I'm disheartened that so many major reviewers chose to ignore their better judgments' whispers of “bullshit.” Without a frame witnessed, the film already has that maddening Weinstein PR push, which, as you said, aims to squeeze every last ticket sale out of a who-cares controversy that roped in celebrities and villain-ized the MPAA (cuz, y'know, they're just as insensitively bureaucratic as the damned school systems).

Just in case I haven't offended anyone enough, I'll say that I did not find this film's events, as presented, particularly troubling. I sympathized (even empathized) with young Alex, and I thought the (unexplored) implications of Ja'Meya's school-bus vengeance incident were provocative. But virtually every scene, save a heated town hall meeting, feels rife with the strain of manufactured drama, and without a single visible conflict, the storyline with out lesbian Kelby, who's surrounded by supportive family and friends, seems downright idyllic. Hirsch's poor instincts for meaningful footage and subject matter are compounded by his insensitive shots, which at many points begets a feeling of outright exploitation. I know one shot contained not one, not two, but three redneck-y instances of an eight-point buck—one inked on a man's arm, one emblazoned on his shirt, and one physically mounted to the wall. And perhaps you, Simon, can tell me what the director's intention was in shooting poor Alex walking around the playground with wing sauce smeared all over his face.

Simon:

Well, Kurt, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that Hirsch and co. were ever really trying to change bullies' minds. I think Bully, like so many other activist docs, is very self-congratulatory. It’s representative of a subgenre of documentary filmmaking that I think recently found very good expression in The Art of the Steal. Steal’s narrative is so dense and well-researched that I can easily forgive it for its filmmakers' biases and the lapses in argumentative logic that those biases create. Some other superior examples of inherently problematic but effective muckraking docs include Inside Job or almost any of Joe Berlinger's documentaries. But I admit, I’m usually wary of how people are presented in such films as being emblematic of a cause or more generally how their lives are re-packaged into narratives.

Bully is as odious as it is both because its creators are very myopic but also because what they do show us feels, as you wrote, manufactured. It's the same reason why Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope, Morgan Spurlock's new doc about the San Diego Comic Con, is so irritating. Spurlock took real-life people and turned them into generic narrative mosaic tiles that, when put together, give you an equally unimpressive cumulative effect. He makes the courtship of two young nerds the counterpoint to the failure of an aspiring bartender/hopeful comic book artist, which in turn is the counterpoint for a successful comic book artist's story of finding work at the convention. I don't mind that these characters are performing for the camera after a point. What I mind is how Spurlock makes these people’s stories trite and uninteresting.

Similarly, I'm frustrated by the way that Hirsch and Lowen don't acknowledge that Ja'Maya, a bullied student that took a gun to school and almost was sent to jail for a very long time, essentially went from being a victim to a bully. The continuation of the vicious cycle of victimization and bullying is hinted at when the Evil vice principal that we've both already alluded to reprimands a student by saying that he shouldn't stoop to the level of his bullies. If he does, then this kid becomes just as bad as his bullies. Why isn't Ja'Maya held to similar standards? I think Hirsch and Lowen's pseudo-fly on the wall approach, which is presumably where the wing sauce scene you mentioned comes from, is craven, in that sense. If they’re trying to make an activist doc, one where the cause is presumably supported by human examples, being a fly on the wall is coy at best and at worst is, as it is here, crassly manipulative.

Kurt:

I remember you bringing up that same point about Ja'Maya after our screening, Simon, and I think it's a very interesting one. I don't know how well portraying the girl as yet another predator would have served this film's purposes (that seems like material for a far more broad and objective look at bullying phenomena), but that it's not even addressed is indeed more evidence of Hirsch's tendency to glaze over elements so he can bag half-realized stories. Which I think speaks to your point about the lack of opposition being a problem. I, too, saw The Art of the Steal, and was very impressed with the sheer breadth of its detective-like story, however clearly biased it was. The difference is, Don Argott tried like hell to get his film's very specific villains to participate, and virtually all of them refused. So he made the best movie he could with his mountain of material, and risked letting the argument skew more sharply toward his own politics. Hirsch's villains, in general, aren't exactly in short supply. I don't think it would have killed him to find a creative way to incorporate the participation of some sort of bully, if only to introduce an antagonist's mentality and reach toward understanding.

Perhaps changing bullies' minds was not part of Hirsch and company's objective. But in making a film about this topic, in this time, I damn sure think it should have been part of it. I don't know how realistic it is to think that a documentary film is going to affect the daily decisions of an eighth-grade jerk, but I believe it's imperative to at least strive for that result. This movie's platitudes, manipulation, lack of focus, and lack of follow-through weaken its impact and mar its opportunity to actually make some kind of difference. Sean Burns was cracking a joke, but it's not a good sign that this movie could actually fire bullies up instead of incite them to change.

I certainly have deep sympathy for the families in the film who lost their children. But right from the opening scene, with shattered parents David and Tina Long, I felt even more sorry for other families who've suffered the same tragedy, and no doubt turned to this film for a reflection of themselves. What Hirsch shows instead is one clichéd and cloyingly staged scene after another—real-life family turmoil that reeks of directorial coaching. It all boils down to the birthing of a grassroots anti-bullying movement, which, if the director had waited for it to develop, would actually warrant worthwhile documentary coverage. But, no—Hirsch uses it as a commercialistic coda, complete with a hashtag and a URL that'll make Twitter followers out of every tear-eyed viewer. And that, unfortunately, is the message I was basically left with: that Bully, like Harvey Weinstein's press releases, is an advertisement.

R. Kurt Osenlund is the Managing Editor of Slant Magazine's The House Next Door, as well as a film critic & contributor for Slant, South Philly Review, Film Experience, Cineaste, Fandor, ICON, and many other publications.

VIDEO – Motion Studies #17: Harun Farocki and WDR

Week Four: Precursors: TV, Cinema, Contemporary Art

Today's selection:

Cinéma Cinémas (1982-1991, Antenne 2)
Harun Farocki: Workers Leaving the Factory (1995, excerpt)

A major figure in the genre of essay film and video, Harun Farocki combines a precise formalist analysis of images with exhaustive research into the history behind those images. Farocki does not merely use archival images to tell stories of modern society, but shows how images convey unexpected stories and meanings, often unintentionally by their creators. In this clip from Workers Leaving the Factory, he uses the first film ever shown on screen to launch into a visual exploration of how factories have been depicted throughout the 20th century, and what those images say about our relationship to industrial labor.

View all Motion Studies video selections.

Volker Pantenburg is assistant professor for moving images at the media faculty of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.

10/40/70: The Fury (1978)

This experimental film column began its life at The Rumpus, and we are very excited to see it continue here. The column freezes the frames of a film at the 10, 40, and 70 minute marks, using these points as the foundations for an essay.

10 minutes:

Chicago. High school students Gillian (Amy Irving) and her friend La Rue (Melody Scott Thomas, whose first role was as the “young” Marnie in Hitchcock’s Marnie in 1964) (which I wrote about here) walk down the lakefront, quizzing each other in preparation for their upcoming finals. This frame comes near the beginning of a long take (one of many, although not the longest), lasting approximately 1:20. The shot is completely gratuitous and completely beautiful, the quality of soft light serving as a subtle reminder that the people who crowd the frame exist separated from us by only a thin membrane, the membrane of the film. (On why he chose the film’s cinematographer, Richard Kline, De Palma has said “I liked the way he had lit some of his films.” Three years later, in 1981, Kline would serve as DP on Body Heat, imbuing it with the same sort of radically disarming softness.)

The hundreds of extras who pass through the frame during that one minute and twenty second long shot—as well as the ten or so extras in this frame—are part of the filmic world of The Fury, too. There is a sort of choreographed anarchy to the frame, a sly knowledge that what appears to he happening naturally and spontaneously (random people crossing in and out of the screen) is a carefully staged part of the film. In this way, The Fury—like the best of De Palma’s other films such as Sisters, Dressed to Kill, and Body Double—is the product of both a carefully controlled aesthetic and an openness to chance and randomness. We watch this extended crowd scene along the lake with a kind of double vision, with the knowledge that the people crowding the frame are following instructions and only pretending to act naturally, while simultaneously suspending that knowledge and permitting ourselves to forget that they are all just extras. In other words, the sequence is a metaphor for cinema itself.

40 minutes:

Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglass) and his girlfriend Hester (Carrie Snodgrass) are on the run from the ruthless Ben Childress (John Cassavetes), who has kidnapped Sandza’s son for his telekinetic powers, which Childress hopes to harness into psychic weaponry, perhaps for the government. Sandza and Hester sleep in Hester’s van overnight on the roof of a building in Chicago. This shot comes near the end of a zoom-in after a time-lapse shot that lasts several seconds showing the passing of the night. “It’s the kind of shot you’ve seen done many different ways in many different films,” De Palma has said, “but what made this so effective was the subtlety of this pathetic little truck with the characters inside right in the middle of this huge city.”

Around the same time The Fury was released—in the spring of 1978—President Jimmy Carter held a news conference. The very first question he was asked was this:

Mr. President, whatever the reaction to your economic speech here today, it seems clear that this administration faces a continuing image problem. You, sir, came into office with an image of freshness, with promises of efficiency and reform, and above all, with promises to run an open administration, close to the public. But after 15 months, the polls seem to indicate declining public hope in your administration. . . . Whether these charges are fair or unfair, sir, are you concerned by this dramatic shift in image, and if so, how do you hope to redress the situation?

There is something eerie about the gray flatness of the shot at 40 minutes: the asphalt blotched from nighttime rain, the dark car and van windows like portals into the sort of evil dreamed about in Robert Bolaño’s novel 2666, the uncanny, flat geometry of the screen, segmented into frames within frames. All this adds up to something more than what’s in the frame, as if the whole terrible sense of economic determinism of the 1970s (declining public hope) were somehow encoded in that blank space. There is something pathetic and wanting in cars left overnight on a parking garage roof, the visual equivalent of the sad-looking sweater Jimmy Carter wore during his 1977 “Report to the Nation on Energy” speech.

70 minutes:

Gillian is in her bed at the Paragon Institute, her mind, like an antenna, tuning into the psychological tribulations Peter’s son Robin has suffered in his room down the hall, where she will soon venture. The shot could be a deformed, dream-logic doppelgänger of a similar shot from Halloween (which opened five months prior to The Fury) showing the babysitter Annie’s murdered body, as if Annie were still alive. Although cast as a teenager in The Fury, Amy Irving was 24-years-old during the film’s shooting, and in moments like this you can see it, the true beauty of her age. Part of the film’s weird spirit perhaps derives from watching Irving as Gillian transform from the passive woman-who-is-looked-upon into an active, righteous destroyer of men, as if the whole corrupt conspiratorial system (the Watergate scandal was still a fresh national scar in 1978) could be brought down with a determined grip of the hand. It is fitting that a director who, at the height of his career was so often accused of degrading women in his films (there is even a book entitled Misogyny in the Movies: The De Palma Question) also made films where women lay bloody waste to the representatives and symbols of patriarchal power.

The Fury is a key marker in De Palma’s gradual movement away from avant-garde films into the more coherent cinema of the 1980s and 90s, films whose visual logic conformed more closely with classic-era cinema, such as Wise Guys, The Untouchables, and The Bonfire of the Vanities. In a way, De Palma’s story is similar to other “movie brats” whose early work (Lucas’s THX 1138, or Scorsese’s It’s Not Just You, Murray! or The Big Shave) gave way to a style that aligned itself with more mainstream fare, even as their films transformed the mainstream. Taken in this light, The Fury, like its protagonist Gillian, seems aware of its presence in time and of the way that the moving images of the past exist—radically and simultaneously—right alongside those of the present. Gillian’s face in this frame bears the expression of someone who is seeing the past unfold before her eyes. In other words, the expression of someone watching a movie.

Nicholas Rombes can be found here. For more entries from the 10/40/70 series, check here.

VIDEO ESSAY: The #1 Textbook on Film, Now with Video

Walk into just about any introductory film studies class in the United States and you are bound to find students holding a copy of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art: An Introduction as part of the syllabus. Since it first came out in 1979, the film has been an essential film studies resource, as well as an innovative one: it was the first intro level film textbook to use actual frames from movies rather than publicity stills in order to give an accurate illustration of film technique on screen. For the new tenth edition, Bordwell and Thompson have taken the book into the new dimension of online video.

Through a partnership with the Criterion Collection, Bordwell and Thompson, with the help of filmmaker Erik Gunneson, have produced an hour-long series of twenty online videos called Connect Film. The videos, meant as companions to the Film Art textbook, explore major concepts of mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing and sound, through films mostly from the Criterion Collection: Breathless, Seven Samurai, Shaun of the Dead, M. Hulot's Holiday, M and several others. They also explore concepts in computer animation through a couple of independently produced animated films, My Dog Tulip and Sita Sings the Blues. A full list of the videos can be found on Bordwell and Thompson's blog.

The complete set of videos will be released this summer along with the publication of the new edition of Film Art. They have made one video available, an analysis of eliptical editing in Agnes Varda's Vagabond, embedded at the top of this entry.

It's worth noting how they adopt a simple, modular approach to the video. It opens with a brief synopsis of the story illustrated with still images instead of moving film footage. As a video essayist who generally prefers to use moving rather than still images, I was struck by this decision to go the opposite direction. It's notable how the montage of still images moves briskly alongside Thompson's narration, with specific images accompanying the points being made in her voiceover. To do this with moving footage would have required more length and spacing out of the narration, in order to let the moments play out.

But this introduction is really intended to set up the central section in which eliptical editing is featured and analyzed in a sequence lasting a little over two minutes. It's worth noting how the sequence is left intact without editing, commentary or annotation, a contrast to most online video essays I've seen. The commentary on the sequence is saved for the final third of the video, where Thompson's commentary is again accompanied by still images, this time from the sequence. Here it's particularly interesting that stills are used in place of footage as Thompson describes actions rather than having the footage illustrate them. This approach benefits Thompson's analysis as some of her obsrevations are underscored by the expressive qualities of a freeze frame: the quality of Mona's smile while in the tent, the "No Tresspassing" sign, the friendly expression of the supposedly vicious dog. This approach also seems carried over from Bordwell and Thompson's extensive use of still images in textbooks; in this sense, longstanding techniques are made anew in the video medium.

To see how differently one can approach the format, watch the video essays I produced with Thompson on La Roue and Variety back in 2009 as part of my Shooting Down Pictures project. In these videos her voiceover runs through footage of the films. In those instances the technique I used, which one could term "interwoven", "immersive" or "invasive" (depending on how positive or negative a connotation you want to append to it). could be more justified as the commentary is directed more towards the film in general rather than focusing on a specific sequence. The approach used in the Vagabond video has an admirable cleanness and precision that preserves the audiovisual integrity of the scene and also establishes an observational distance between the narrator and the work.

The exciting subtext that lies beneath the analysis above, and beneath the very fact that two leading film scholars have produced a formidable body of video work, is that the line dividing filmmaking and film analysis is collapsed and the areas of theory and practice are integrated as never before. This perspective, that film students and enthusiasts are filmmakers and vice versa, is espoused in vivid terms by Bordwell and Thompson themselves, in the first chapter of the new edition of Film Art, as quoted from their blog:

Films are designed to create experiences for viewers. To gain an understanding of film as an art, we should ask why a film is designed the way it is. When a scene frightens or excites us, when an ending makes us laugh or cry, we can ask how the filmmakers have achieved those effects.

It helps to imagine that we’re filmmakers too. Throughout this book, we’ll be asking you to put yourself in the filmmaker’s shoes. This shouldn’t be a great stretch. You’ve taken still photos with a camera or a mobile phone. Very likely you’ve made some videos, perhaps just to record a moment in your life—a party, a wedding, your cat creeping into a paper bag. And central to filmmaking is the act of choice. You may not have realized it at the moment, but every time you framed a shot, shifted your position, told people not to blink, or tried to keep up with a dog chasing a Frisbee, you were making choices.

If you take the next step and make a more ambitious, more controlled film, you’re doing the same thing. You might compile clips into a YouTube video, or document your friend’s musical performance. Again, at every stage you make design decisions, based on how you think this image or that sound will affect your viewers’ experience. What if you start your music video with a black screen that gradually brightens as the music fades in? That will have a different effect than starting it with a sudden cut to a bright screen and a blast of music.

At each instant, the filmmaker can’t avoid making creative decisions about how viewers will respond. Every moviemaker is also a movie viewer, and the choices are considered from the standpoint of the end user. Filmmakers constantly ask themselves: If I do this, as opposed to that, how will viewers react?

These are words well keeping in mind for all the video essayists, film scholars and movie fans out there.

In addition to the videos I made with Kristin Thompson, you can also watch a video essay I produced based on David Bordwell's review of Oxhide II.

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.