26. Changes: Notes on Movies and Dance by Pippa Hammet
I like things nice and tidy at least once in a while, but in the midst of so much work for my dear boss, Louise, I’m resorting to notes for this report on trips to movie theaters and the ballet. Louise projects her whims and obsessions onto those around her, so I attempt to impose some restorative order, however arduous and brief, turning her business into my pleasure. Consciousness of necessary change can then itself bestow something like happiness. I like to think I’m aware of those around me as well, of course, how my work affects them. Sandy has been accompanying me to events, and he seems relieved now that his “podcasts” are suspended. (Louise was unable to process Mr. Yu’s reciprocal Story of the Stone recordings – from Mandarin, of course. No cross-cultural effects there, short of a transcript-translator.) Cheryl has been coaching our Master Raro in her Nekomata dance as backup partner during the Albertine and Paco strike. That should make her happy.
Louise has me crash-learning about encryption in new Quantum cybertext to facilitate her work when granted N.S.A. clearance as an electronic superspy to snoop on China. She was so happy when it was announced that Chinese surveillance of its own citizenry now extends throughout the entire country, not just lone Xinjiang. (Much more video territory for Louise, Belle, and Madame Sesostris to cover with their espionage. And more reason for the N.S.A. to employ them. The three ladies have been participating in collective breathing exercises, in memory of the Falun Gong.) Such an ingratiating governmental assignment would allow an approach by Louise to the Trumps (father and daughter) to appear in her planned D.C. Demon Cat film. And down the road a possible revival of the Ebersdorf Ballet. This means that I must continue to string Mr. Yu along with promises of eventual cultural exchange. My practical enquiries re touring (“Is there a sprung floor on the Urumqi theater stage?”) produce philosophical equivocations (“Floor is like strong leader – requires eternal deference!”) that resemble fortune cookie texts. (Can we presume Yu is indeed distributing Sandy’s recorded Firbank podcasts through the vast Ministry of Culture?) Belle has suggested that a revived Ebersdorf Ballet present a Winnie the Pooh ballet in honor of President Xi Jinping. (Belle of course claims ultimate expertise at facial recognition.)
Louise wants a screening of the great Spielberg’s Minority Report as a glimpse of the CCP’s A.I. technology for forensic prediction of anti-social acts. (And they say art doesn’t predict our future!) A&P still have Louise’s cats to tend and observe, despite the couple’s no-show for final filming. I tend to my dear tomcat Murr late at night when Master brings him home. Murr continues to supervise my sleep after he finishes his de-aging duties with our three operatives. Perhaps I indeed make my Murr happy so easily? Sandy and I are busy transcribing our notes on new movies and dance. (Sandy is such a typist!)
And I’ve also been reading the new biography of Susan Sontag (Sontag: Her Life and Work, Ecco, 2019). According to its author, Benjamin Moser, Sontag was not a happy camper. The “Life” was effortful. Moser marshals evidence of excessive willfulness, a body-mind disconnect, an over-reliance on theory, blindness to the physical world but especially to visual art, a weakened self-image, gross insensitivity to the feelings of others, enslavement to mid-cult ideas, addiction to a variety of drugs, casual and frequent dishonesty in academic and personal matters, neurotic responses to her closest relations and many lovers, uncertainty in political loyalties, vulnerability to Eurotrash, deep masochism in love affairs, filthiness in personal hygiene, frequent delusional episodes, rampant ambition for popularity and fame, suicidal tendencies, and – in the long run -- intellectual irrelevance. (Did I omit a steadily fraught relation with her son, David Rieff?)
When it comes to Sontag’s “Work”, Moser finds many of her ideas questionable and all-too-related to the writer’s neuroses. Solipsism reigned. If she was “against interpretation”, such a position allowed Sontag to avoid works of art focusing multiple meanings and to evade charges of reductionism while remaining safely impersonal in her analyses. If metaphor was to be seen not as a ready cognitive tool but as a generally ruinous misrepresentation of reality, its descriptions of individual human character could also be judged as basically untrustworthy and the writer’s own persona beyond assessment. If photography was not an instrument for truth and potential art but a form of readymade kitsch, the writer-viewer can the more easily condescend to her subject, claiming a superior vantage.
In short, in her journalism Sontag regularly elevated existential issues to idols, her evoked intellectual realms confused or productive only of a repeated lament for a Hegelian unhappy consciousness. Despite the support Sontag gave her protégés, her brave defense of Salmon Rushdie, and her personal risk when reminding the world of Sarajevo’s tragedies, this writer noted the gnarl of the conundrum rather than its curl. There is a type of mind that emphasizes the dread of change, a “sensibility” that takes diversity, variation, and flexibility of thought as imminent threats. Such writers recommend fear and trembling rather than evoking states of grace. In Sontag’s case, perhaps it was all those journalistic deadlines and word limits. As another period would have described her, Sontag was a woman “strung up to every tone” but insensitive to any chord of harmony. If she were with us still, she would undoubtedly be deploying the fashionable new term “cultural genocide”. No wonder Sontag turned to writing inclusive fictions after her journalistic version of exclusionary polemics.
You can open Moser’s book at any point for incriminating detail. So steady is the indictment, the reader can feel one is attending Moser’s own authorial exorcism, the biographer warning himself of potential equivalents of Sontag’s weaknesses and tics in his own writing through casting her as subject-avatar. At the conclusion of his book, Moser claims his subject was significant for what she represented to others, beyond any singular accomplishment. The public image conquers some readers, if not all. Sontag was always fascinated by acting, and there happens to be a popular work in the theaters at this moment that creates something of a like effect to this biography: Joker, the movie with Joaquin Phoenix. The two lives – public intellectual and failed party clown – are portrayed as equivalently unfortunate. Both characters are burdened with difficult mothers. Sontag had poet Joseph Brodsky as a model; Joker has a talk-show host. Both stories reach climaxes with mayhem in urban landscapes -- the public intellectual as theatrical director under live gunfire, the lower-class comic who is repeatedly slapped down. Change is horrific for both. Real humor on page or screen is hard to find in Sontag or Joker. I will read Moser’s 2009 biography of Clarice Lispector, Why This World, when I work up enough courage. But I digress. Here enumerated are mes pensées:
One. In the new film Judy, Renee Zellweger is as wonderful as everyone says as an aging Judy Garland – although she is far from the singer or actress that Garland became. The chief weakness in the movie is its cliché reliance on close-ups. It is very in-your-face. You yearn for long shots to put things in perspective. (At one point, Garland gets into a closet with two of her children. So do we.) The movie’s visual weakness reminded me of the new Edward Liang ballet at New York City Ballet, entitled Lineage. It, too, is in-your-face, every dance point driven in with a rubber hammer. I’m afraid Liang has studied the collected works of Peter Martins too closely. That is his immediate lineage. There is a rush in this ballet that goes nowhere. Its understated climax is equivalent to the way Judy ends (no, oh, please, no) with “Over the Rainbow” for punctuation. Whatever happened to delicacy of touch that is not a form of overstatement?
Two. The new movie Monos is (along with Happy as Lazzaro and Transit) the best cinema I’ve seen this year. An overview of guerilla warfare in Southern climes, the film features adolescents, both male and female, as Spartan warriors, and the director Alejandro Landes turns his work into a study of movement qualities – military, natural, and filmic. The movie begins in the high mountains (higher than the cloudscapes), progresses (or regresses) to jungle warfare, and ends airborne in a helicopter over an urban sprawl. Landes grades movement the way colorists grade tones and intensities in painting and cinematography. You are there for military drills, siege conditions, hunts for food, and cascades down rapids. You are there for imprisonments, magic mushroom visions, and escapes that become vicious circles. Change versus stasis constitutes the drama. The obvious comparison to the film’s use of movement motifs would be certain comedies of Buster Keaton. It’s that analytical, and every visual nuance registers. I saw the film twice and was even more fascinated the second time. Monos also has an extraordinary score by the British musician Mica Levi. You may remember what she did for the sci-fi film Under the Skin.
One of the surprises of Monos is that the lead male character Rambo is played by a young woman (Sofia Buenaventura). The ploy is more successful than the use of gender ambivalence in the latest Lauren Lovette premiere at New York City Ballet, The Shaded Line. In Monos, the fluidity of sexual partnering among the youngsters is made even more piquant by male-female confusions. In Lovette’s ballet, costuming Georgina Pazcoguin as a man merely makes an ideological point: the imposition of imputed masculine fetish upon yet another ballerina on our stages. Landes evokes mystery. Lovette evokes gender studies. Lovette wants to keep company with the likes of Pam Tanowitz and Angelin Preljocaj. In Line she has succeeded, alas. Obviously, the ballerinas at NYCB have become desperate for new material when they provide their sisters with works like this.
Three. At the New York Film Festival, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a fleet wonder at three-and-a-half hours. Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing is substantive once again. She takes the script’s repeated pattern of criminal assassination (identification, assignment, extirpation) and does infinite variations on its satisfying achievement. My favorite is the killing in Little Italy, a compact masterpiece of cool preparation and chaotic delivery. Thanks to Schoonmaker, you are watching something like a visual equivalent of musical form. Sandy points out that film editing on this level is a form of choreography.
Four. Also at the Festival, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Adam Driver plays the nicest guy in the world who just happens to be a terrible husband. It happens. But the movie is stolen by Laura Dern as a L.A. counselor-divorce lawyer. Dern’s witty body language is alone worth the price of admission. The film’s script is very funny about the resistance married couples have to breaking up. And the way advisors make money from such doubt. As though change is all that difficult.
Five. Again at the Film Festival, Motherless Brooklyn, Edward Norton’s impressive film (his second as director, his first as screenwriter) featuring his own performance as a private detective with Tourette’s syndrome and a compulsive-obsessive disorder. The movie is eloquent on the power plays that have shaped and reshaped New York City for better and worse over the decades – and the human cost (re-location of residents, rampant graft, architectural desecration) that modernization has levied. There is a stunning recreation of a 1950s Pennsylvania Station (opened 1910, demolished 1963) at one pivotal plot point, and a convincing version of a smoky Harlem jazz club. My favorite moment in the film is a staged slow dance by Norton and the actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw in that club, with maximum period atmosphere achieved with the simplest of means to a jazz version of “Daily Battles”, a song composed for the movie by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.
Six. Again, a Festival choice: the dance documentary Cunningham. Sandy and I agreed that the chief reasons to see this 3-D movie are the 2-D archival clips of Merce and the dancers of his early company. The 3-D itself is not revelatory. Indeed, the blur of the dancers’ movement -- filmed at 24 frames per second -- is only emphasized with the added dimension. Deployed hands and feet become near-invisible. Worse, a decision was made to lower the lighting in several later excerpts from repertory works rendered by performers of the Compagnie CNDC-Angers, France. What represents a darkling atmosphere in Winterbranch does not help in other dances. The choreographer was an expert at sustained temporal alteration – the choices here (with 3-D and reduced lighting) work against perceiving such process. It also doesn’t help that most of the excerpts are very short. Or that the director insists on comparisons of Cunningham’s poetry to nature studies. Twice, we are asked to stare into a pool of 3-D water. Cunningham’s Summerspace has just been revived at NYCB. It needs an on-site Cunningham ballet master if the company is serious about this work’s place in repertory. From the unidiomatic evidence of the one performance I caught, there is no such institutional commitment. NYCB should perhaps stay clear of modern and postmodern dance in the future. Enough with exotic imports seen through a glass darkly.
I’ve just reread Sontag on film in her volumes of collected essays. Manny Farber she’s not. (Interestingly, Sontag and my favorite Parker Tyler are caught in separate portraits by Gregory Markopoulos in his 1966 New York film gallery, Galaxie. In it, Tyler deploys a sketch by Tchelichew. Sontag sports stills of Garbo and Dietrich.) Sontag’s interest in a formalist cinema pushes her toward an analytical distance in her discussions of individual movies. They now read as thin, perhaps because the writer is self-armored against interpretation. Among her responses to the art of dance, I have not reread the Artforum essay on Lucinda Childs; there she may have been too close to her subject. Florian informs me that when asked about her reaction to ballerina Suzanne Farrell, Sontag reportedly claimed that she had not been so struck by a female performer since her first glimpses of Ingrid Bergman on the screen. There was clearly a susceptibility in this writer to genius and beauty in certain women.
I had a dream last night that Murr had become Susan Sontag’s cherished pet. The emotion of the dream was intense jealousy, as though the dream-Sontag had stolen a lover from me, and I was powerless to influence the alliance. I awoke to find my Murr staring at me from the foot of my bed. He wasn’t purring, just faithfully alert. I was reassured. My sleep was dreamless thereafter.
P.H.
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