Lawnmower Inferno

So this week Lovefilm engineered one of those unexpectedly felicitous double bills, serving up Lawnmower Man alongside Inferno, a documentary about the disastrous and abortive shooting of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Enfer. What turned out to link the two was SFX, with both films using lurid colours and lysergic patterns to communicate a loss of innocence: in Lawnmower Man a holy fool becomes a megalomaniacal cyberbeing, while in L’Enfer a husband is beset by surrealistic visions of his wife’s infidelity. Seeing the two in tandem, I was struck by the fact that, effectswise, they’re essentially coming at things from opposite angles: if Lawnmower Man’s animated sequences see computers clunkily attempting to replicate organic forms, one of the most moving things about Inferno is watching Clouzot’s team inventing ingenious and laborious analogue processes that produce results now reminiscent of nothing so much as the presets available in digital playback and editing software... Ripples, meshes and mirror images, hallucinatory composites and freakish colour schemes are conjured from rotating arrays of lights, sheets of water, layers of plastic and cellophane, sequins and ungents, wires and mirrors. Determined to turn a lake blood red, but unable simply to hit cmd+i, Clouzot dickies with the colour timing, has the make-up department paint the actors a cadaverous grey-green and commissions two sets of costumes - one for each side of the colour wheel.

 In both cases, and even more than in the typical effects-led film, there’s an excessive, flagrantly artificial quality to the SFX sequences. Not content to humbly serve the story, they demand attention on their own terms, as technical achievements. As if acknowledging this, Lawnmower Man’s title screen offers the option to watch just the computer-generated bits, skipping the film that frames them altogether. With L’Enfer, meanwhile, it’s almost as if Marcel’s hallucinations (which are the only scenes that take place in colour) literally refused to be integrated into a finished film, the flimsy narrative architecture designed to support them buckling under the weight of their sensory charge. While the documentary does a decent job of interweaving a sketch of L’Enfer’s plot with the story of its production (a story climaxing with the shock resignation of leading man Paul Reggiani and Clouzot’s subsequent heart attack) these contexts start to seem irrelevant faced with the sheer charisma of the surviving footage. I found myself wishing that they’d just given us a menu of these fragments to watch in whatever order we pleased rather than subordinating them to the (albeit fascinating) history of the project - which desire led to me capping and gif-ifying the bits of it I have.

In this respect, these films also highlight the weird irony of the DVD, a storage medium that allows for random access but which (at least in the case of DVD movies) masquerades as a film strip, surrendering images in a linear sequence. You could argue, in fact, that both movies fail because they attempt to tell A-B stories about things that are inherently non-linear: if it’s no surprise that Lawnmower Man can’t turn the internet and the videogame into material for compelling non-interactive entertainment, it’s perhaps strangely apt that Clouzot couldn’t work a profusion of rushes, alternate takes and freestanding optical experiments into a viable feature film: after all, Marcel’s paranoia can itself be understood as a state of narrative crisis, whereby the proliferation of terrifyingly plausible possible pasts and futures foils any attempt to reach a definitive understanding of what has happened or might happen. Trawling tumblr suggests that both films are fated broken up and strewn, contextless, across a thousand microblogs - but maybe that’s poetic justice?

Lawnmower Man images from:

http://www.virtualworldlets.net/Worlds/Listings/LawnmowerMan/LawnmowerMan1-Falling.jpg

Tacit Snow

As an appendix to an earlier post plus an aperitivo for forthcoming attractions, saw Queen Christina the other weekend, wherein Garbo, gazing mesmerized out a window, mutters 'the snow is like a white sea, one could go out & be lost in it... and forget the world' while the audience - who has no visual access to the snowfield - gazes mesmerized at the gazing b/w Garbo's face's snowy surfaces & declivities. Not sure I've seen her in anything else but she's amazingly magnetic for the film's entirety - tho pretty much everyone else is formidably hammy & stilted, which could account for it.

(Garbo lapped by all-but Pughesque collar from here)

White, Christmas

Decrypting faces rendered in bwgreyscale was involved in a lot of what I did over christmas, somehow or other. 

Fassbinder's Veronika Voss arrived courtesy of lovefilm and in defiance of seasonal postal hitches on the 24th. Among the extras there's an interview w/ the cinematographer, Xaver Schwarzenberger, who  chats guturally about wanting to achieve a graphische as opposed to malerische type of B/W (much guttural rumination about the predisposition of French cinematographers towards the latter, more painterly approach). Voss - played by Rosel Zech - is a washed-up Zara Leander-esque actress frozen out by the post-Goebbels industry.  Zech's jowels and the wedginess of her nose phase in and out of emphasis w/ the flux of the light (which is always metacinematically  strained through windshields, raindrops or panes, interrupted by ceiling fans or deflected by mirrorballs) making her look anything between milkily 16 and a haggard 60.

 I was reminded of the many and ingenious proboscisectomies via airbrushing, lighting and angling performed on Erin O'Connor back when M&S ad ubiquity was but a twinkle in her sunken & girder-browed eyes, before her nose's weird convexity became shorthand for hi-fash sophistication/perversity of taste (she remains my favourite of the post-supermodel crop of Flemish and Anglo-Irish gawks incidentally). Things seem to have come full circle lately because her nose is kinda under erasure on the M&S duro-bags, which look like an oblong band of tippex has been applied to them, a reverse of Alec Guinness' Semticization in the David Lean Oliver Twist (which was on the other day, and beautiful) or Nicole Kidman donning that dopey prosthetic schnozz to win an Oscar/my eternal enmity for crimes against Woolfy.

Tempted to do a phallic women thing/quote Sterne here - not going to though, don't worry.

So M&S's bag designers used a pic of Erin with bangs tho, which I discovered was also a self-branding tool employed by my grand-paternal great-grandmother and her half sister circa their days on the music hall stage. We spent boxing day poring through a cache of photos that will most likely figure prominently in the study of bobs and bangs between Cleopatra and Louise Brooks that I very much hope to someday publish.  Depicted is Dorothy (the half sister) who can be differentiated from my dad's dad's mum by way of the absence of a chincleft. The same hair and nostrils and dimples, framed by different costumes and stages, stay constant across a couple of decades, though she's especially hard to age in undated photos because she seems to have specialised in little-girlish roles long into her (and the century's) 20s.

The span of time the photos covered, in fact, is probably about the same as that which the compilation of Jaime Hernandez's Locas stories I got for Christmas covers. I won't yet try to articulate my love for this book (except to say it'll surely vex my NY resolution to love my fellow man more than printed media) but one page is reproduced above from a point in the series when Hernandez'd been drawing the character Maggie for a decade and a half. He's got so good that he can do nine panels of her hardly moving but looking utterly alive and self-identical (which impression I hope is only heightened by the pixelisation, which at least precludes plot spoilers) despite being rendered in two tones and scarcely more penmarks.

(Guinness Fagin from smh, Erin profile from a Karl Lagerfeld shoot back before he'd fete insipidities like Emma Watson, my mum's Erin bag from my mum's closet, 9x gesticulating Maggie from J. Hernandez's Locas, Dorothy as flower child and Scotch dragoonette, graphische Vosses from Veronika Voss)