30. Catch as Catch Can: Film, Dance and Music reviewed by Pippa Hammet
Mystery solved. I won’t have to clue Louise about covert activities in the 35th floor dance studio of Ebersdorf Tower after all because Albertine has dramatically appeared and offered to end the ongoing strike she and Paco instituted in their preparations for an A&P performance-art piece, which appears to require after-hours rehearsals with our employer’s twenty-one prize felines. Murr is part of the furry ensemble: number twenty-two. So now Master Raro’s report has been confirmed and Louise duly informed.
An angry, be-robed Albertine disrupted a studio rehearsal which Sandy was conducting with Master Raro last week, asking what the two men were doing in the space and requesting the return of Murr to the lab. She claims the animal is now essential to experimental work that A&P are aiming toward the new MoMA performance space for next spring. (No mention by the two of their earlier plans for a Demon Cat movie. Perhaps U.S. relations with China have rendered that project iffy.) Louise and her in-house friends, Belle and Mme Sesostris, have been using Murr’s magical purrs nightly for youthening sessions. Can Louise give those up?
We’ll see if she and Albertine can reach an agreement. Louise may not be willing come spring to allow her “research assistants” to show something outside Ebersdorf Tower, and A&P have not been informed about the French offer for Cheryl’s non-services. (On the other hand, think of the publicity for Louise if her prize animals are certified as Modern Works of Art!) I wonder if Louise plans to introduce Albertine to Mme Beach via Skype? At any rate, my employer’s mind seems to be drifting back toward reviving the Ebersdorf Ballet, rather than dickering with Chinese entrepreneurs, planning her own Demon Cat film, or styling herself as a U.S. counterspy. Things change quickly around here.
In the meantime, I’ve had another strange Murr dream. Last Friday night I went to bed early, with Murr as usual on the bolster at the foot of my bed, staring at me fixedly. In my eventual dream-state, I found myself looking at the world through Murr’s eyes, watching Louise, Belle and Sesostris in their nightly rites, quaffing Cointreau and making new plans for world domination. And then I was watching myself (!) at my PC and on the phone, and even on my bed sleeping right where I was located at that very moment, all courtesy of Murr-Vision. Talk about an out-of-body experience! When I woke up, my real-world Murr had shifted his location: he was now lying stretched out on the pillows behind my head and watching me steadily below. I could hear his cat-breath. I was shaken.
I have always regarded myself as the human avatar for Murr, since his love for me (attested by his trainer, Paco) would presumably lead the lover to live life through his mistress. Didn’t I imagine how he must see his life through my eyes? But what my latest dream suggests is that someone (Albertine and/or Paco?) may be able to observe the world through Murr’s gaze! (If my Murr is the telepath, who is the recipient, as I was briefly in my dream? Our tom would function as that unknown someone’s animal avatar!) That’s the disturbing takeaway from my dream that has colored my life since last week. My instincts tell me that some kind of surveillance is going on beyond Louise’s electronic version downstairs, and that Murr is at the center of it. Who is watching us through those yellow cat-eyes? And what have they caught in the act?
I told Master Raro about my dream theory, but he thinks I’m just exaggerating from a simple nightmare. Maybe. Master and I subsequently went to see a Walter Reade Theater screening of With Merce, a new documentary of Charles Atlas films and videos of the choreographies of Merce Cunningham, made over a decades-long period from the late 1960s to 2009, when the choreographer died. As usual with a compilation, the excerpts from the dances were too short for more than an impression of the Atlas holdings. At least some of the complete records can serve as study guides for attempts at future stagings of the dances. Seeing Cunningham’s dancers from the 1970s was particularly fascinating. I was struck by how much emphasis was placed on ensemble choreography over solos, although Cunningham sometimes allowed himself that performance distinction, even as he greatly aged. Ensemble dance is difficult to catch on film, especially this choreographer’s group work.
Florian and I caught two concerts with the pianist Daniil Trifonov. At Geffen Hall with the New York Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden, Trifonov played the Scriabin Piano Concerto. I was impressed by the exploratory nature of the composition, the amount of time allowed for harmonic irresolution and the way Trifonov thoroughly explained the necessity for that kind of inquiry. At the 92nd Street Y, the N.Y. Philharmonic String Quartet presented the local premiere of Trifonov’s latest composition, his Quintetto Concertante, with the pianist joining the chamber ensemble himself at his instrument. It was clear that Trifonov has been engaging with Prokofiev’s music in his studio. The result triggered some wonderful rhythmic passages in his Quintetto, with a strong sense of musical ideas growing out of one another, like nesting Russian dolls, not at all enslaved by the Prokofiev penchant for constant disruptive surprise. (Florian calls that satiric habit “ultimately obnoxious”, but I am still sensitive to the unique wit of the Russian master.) There was never a sense that Trifonov has become enthralled by his model. He is his own man.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center has revived Lee Muyng-se’s 1999 policier from South Korea, Nowhere To Hide. Screened at the Walter Reade, it easily becomes the movie revival of the year. The director has not been heard from since around 2012, and it is surely time for a Lee retrospective at Film Forum. Lee actually lived in Queens during a period in our new millennium when he was hoping to make movies in the U.S., and he was sometimes found at Film Forum during that time, watching repertory screenings. As a result, it would be fitting for a Lee series to be organized by his old stomping ground. Cheryl and Sandy went to a showing of Nowhere with me. We three are now fans.
At one point in the movie Detective Woo (played by Joong-Hoon Park) is asked what he does in his work. He replies, “Judges judge, lawyers apologize, ministers exonerate, detectives catch.” He is out to capture a master criminal and mob-land murderer, Sung-Ki Ahn (Chang Sungmin), a figure who comes in many disguises throughout the movie, but whose principal appearance makes him look like a Russian anarchist, circa 1905. Nowhere’s theme is the social disruption that crime causes and the necessity for detectives to provoke equivalent disruptions in pursuit of the original criminal. Scene after scene shows you a suspect individual or group abruptly interrogated by Detective Woo and his crew of assistants, often armed with metal pipes for immediate corporal punishment in pursuit of the truth. (When a pipe is not handy, a folding chair is smashed against the floor.) The brutality of this investigative army is almost, but not quite, as severe as that of the assassins. The rhythm of this police procedural is simple: the pursuer harangues the pursued into confession or non-confession. Sometimes it’s an implicated woman, who screams repeatedly. Repeat. Despite the pell-mell style of these Eastern procedurals, the effect is exhilarating.
My loyal readers may remember that I find most violence in movies to be a turnoff. I remember vividly from my early masculine years of filmgoing the defensive scrotal twinge produced by the impact of flesh-and-bone on the depicted material reality around us, but such recall is not a fond one. I am sure that many of today’s youths assemble in front of movie screens for audio-visual training in types of physical danger that guarantee that rite-of-passage reflex. Even before my surgical transition to my happily feminine state today, I was desirous to sacrifice such raw sensations since they would inevitably throw me right out of any movie I was watching. Happy I am therefore to report that Lee’s depictions of physical violence are generally stylized throughout Nowhere To Hide. There are plenty of fisticuffs, wrestling matches, and firepowered explosions in the movie, but almost all of them transfer our attention to an aesthetic commentary on violence, rather than simply satisfying a sadistic-masochistic pang in the ever-eager adolescent. A cheap thrill is replaced by directorial artistry. At one point, a two-man fight is represented by a shadow-play brawl between two vigorous silhouettes. In another sequence, a detective’s visit to a thunderous nightclub is reduced to a short montage of frozen scattershots from a strobing dance floor. In yet another, the weighted tussle between two pugilists turns into a slow dance to a Latin rhythm. There is that wonderful scene early on when Woo visits a noodle shop with the killer and his moll disporting themselves amorously across the way. The pair subsequently escape without notice. The cliché underlinings found in today’s punchdrunk filmmaking are just as M.I.A. as that couple in Lee’s film.
Lee provides a distilled mixture of documentary realism with high-style cinematics. We see the gritty, brutal world of a South Korean detective at and beyond his home office, complete with regular terrorization of suspects over a seventy-day investigation in and around Inchon, South Korea. American viewers will be reminded of Orson Welles (Touch of Evil), Buster Keaton (Cops), Brian De Palma (Dressed To Kill), and something like a Disney version of Hong Kong crime dramas. The influence is less that of Alfred Hitchcock because of the absence of classic scene-setting through regular outdoor establishing shots or the evocation of interiors via studio-crafted art direction. Aside from the slow opening scene around Inchon’s Forty Steps, we are plunged into each new scene and its action with almost no preparation.
The film pays specific tributes to Kurosawa (Ikiru playground, Seven Samurai rain), Carol Reed (The Third Man’s ending), Stanley Donen multiple-level chases (Charade), and evocations of crime-scene chaos (Bonnie and Clyde, Straw Dogs). The economical use of a bicycle headlight beam juddering from one spot to another unpredictably along a city street makes the tension in the lead-up to the final fight close to unbearable.
Over and over, Lee uses an allegro shot and editing formula for compact exposition. His film art catches details that suggest temporal terms: past, present, future. We see a locale, let’s say those famous Inchon Forty Steps in the film’s opening murder scene, set to the Bee Gees song, “Holiday”. An overhead shot down to the steps represents a static, indeed cinematographic past. Into the shot there hops a little girl. She brings the immediate present into view through her abrupt movement. Then, to climax Lee’s temporal survey, she looks up at the camera. A rain shower is coming: the future! Lee’s single overhead shot thus ends with a punctuation – indeed, a prediction. We have traversed past (a perdurable setting), present (child’s play), and the future (the coming storm), all within one set-up, one short piece of film choreography. With the resultant cut to the next image (rain clouds), we confirm the completed cycle by turning to a new situation (the sky) and the moving present (roiling storm clouds). Sometimes the next editing cut itself takes us into the future, but for Lee the photographic stasis and the movement in the dynamic of his frame inevitably predicate a future, including a micro cause-effect narrative impetus. The visual power of Nowhere To Hide resides in such a continuum of imaginative suggestion through the incursion of vivifying movement. (Life itself is disruption, at least in this film.) It is as though such movie motion is Lee’s imp of the perverse out of Poe. We encounter the arc of a living continuum through filmic controls. This could be called “thinking in film terms”.
The most brilliant scene in the movie is staged in a barber shop outside of Inchon proper and introduced by Chopin piano music via Muzak. Woo’s young assistant Kim accosts a suspect in a barber chair. But things go horribly wrong as the possible miscreant grabs a child as hostage and the shop becomes a chaotic standoff, Kim pointing his wavering pistol at the panicked suspect, who holds the helpless boy before him as a shield. Outside, Woo observes all this mayhem through a shop window and enters to attempt to defuse the situation. The scene thus describes a double disruption – first, the accusatory Kim’s challenge; then Woo’s attempt at placation. (The use of a lollypop in the mouth of the hapless child is a master-stroke.) Lee fleetly and economically documents a distilled anarchy in this sequence. The chaos ends with a killing.
Throughout Nowhere To Hide, such humble folk materials (a mob-related death in a barber shop) are elevated to the level of film artistry. One way this is achieved is through the acting. Joong-Hoon Park’s Detective Woo is a parody of a parody of a contemporary type (his shoulders roll, his eyes roll), but he finds ways to enrich his characterization. When he watches through that barbershop window, our man turns sideways in profile at the realization that he will now have to intervene to try to salvage the situation, with a mixture of inured acceptance of sudden danger and a controlled excitement before its risk. The performer’s moment is very James Cagney.
And then there is Director Lee’s ability to analyze the subject of his film – invasive, investigative disruption – into movie basics. He makes techniques we have all seen before – still shots, slow motion, dissociative editing, solarization – take on new resonance when marshalled toward the director’s personal theme and its variations. Lee can play loosely with the large narrative direction of his movie because individual sequences are so tightly organized toward communicating his unique truth. The viewer feels confident that we are headed somewhere, even if the procedural takes seventy cinematic days to catch the criminal.
A film like Nowhere makes today’s big comic book franchises look weak-kneed in their grasp of physical reality, possibilities for stylization, and reliance on narrative formula. As Manny Farber would say, the box office successes of our time have become bloated. So much that passes for Pop today is a thin, hyper-activated form of failed folk expression, what James Agee called “pseudo-folk” back in the 1940s. The New York Times should rename its current Arts section, “Pseudo-Folk Arts”, so desperate are its editors for relevance, so clueless as to where the pulse beats.
Which returns me to my nocturnal obsessions with my pet Murr. How can I raise my nightmare of feline surveillance to the level of high art?
Perhaps from now on Louise, Belle, Sesostris, and I should invent and perform a fictional version of our affairs in the immediate presence of our tomcat-spymaster. That way, Murr can watch and convey our pure artifice to whomever is watching our manufactured virtual reality. It means that under no circumstance should Louise return our puss to A&P. Murr must continue his function as someone’s camera obscura. And our artistry in creating an alt-reality in his report will give us Everywhere to Hide! Maybe we’ll set our script to Scriabin. Just a thought.
P.H.
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