Boner's October of long-ass films.

[Boner M]

One of my least favorite insta-critiques of any film is 'too long'. Granted it's one I've levelled far too many times in bleary-eyed festival-going mode, and it generally speaks to an unwillingess to engage with what I deem to be the flab of certain films, rather than a lack of editing-room discipline on the part of their makers. It's therefore important to keep in my that the 'ideal' 2-hour running time is largely an arbitrary commercial designation, and than many of Cinema's Great Artists have used the sprawl of 3+ hour durations as integral features of experiential immersion (Tarr, Akerman) or panoramic social surveys (Wiseman), free-form essays (Marker, Godard), or just ol' fashioned epic narrative filmmaking (lots of people).

In other words, I'm using the next month to readjust my sense of movie time. I'll watch and review the following films, w/r/t their use of duration, sprawl, or possibly bloat.

Celine & Julie Go Boating (Rivette, 1974) - 193 mins (rpt)
Milestones (Kramer, 1975) - 195 mins
Route One/USA (Kramer, 1989) - 255 mins
Les Vampires (Feuillade, 1915) - 399 mins
World on a Wire (Fassbiner, 1973) - 212 mins
Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (Lang, 1922) - 297 mins
A Grin Without a Cat (Marker, 1977) - 240 mins
The Falls (Greenaway, 1980) - 195 mins

I'm giving each of these only one intermission, w/ the exception of the Fassbinder & Feuillade, which were a mini-series and serial, respectively.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_hddLTkUVdoI/TAI0l7j4woI/AAAAAAAABF4/3bVV76Puf_U/s1600/Congregation+with+candles.jpg

[Winston*]

You should add The Human Condition.

[Boner M]

You should add The Human Condition.
Already seen the first part, will see the next two eventually. I've limited myself to stuff in possession that I have/will put off watching for too long because of the length.

[Ivan Drago]

No The Best of Youth?

[Boner M]

No The Best of Youth?
Seen it relatively recently, liked it a lot.

[Skitch]

The Cure For Insomnia.

[B-side]

Cool. Definitely watching.

[Boner M]

Cool. Definitely watching.
Feel free to contribute, btw.

[MadMan]

Good luck and godspeed.

[B-side]

Feel free to contribute, btw.

This seems like as good a reason as any to try and force myself to finally watch The Travelling Players.

[Boner M]

This seems like as good a reason as any to try and force myself to finally watch The Travelling Players.
Always been meaning to see that. Finally getting a DVD release next month as part of Artificial Eye's 5-disc Theo A. set.

[dmk]

Or watch Innocent Saturday two and ¾ times.

[Boner M]

Or watch Innocent Saturday two and ¾ times.
So sorry I missed it. I think I was sleeping and/or puking.

[soitgoes...]

Abel Gance has a few great films that would be perfect for this too.

[Yxklyx]

Where did you get a hold of the Fassbinder series?

[Russ]

Too bad you couldn't get Ken Jacobs' Star Spangled to Death (1957-2004, 431 minutes), one of the most remarkable films I've ever seen.

[transmogrifier]

For me, the ideal length of a movie is 109 minutes.

[TripZone]

Feuillade <3

Fitting to watch him alongside Rivette. The Best of Youth is bad and you should feel bad, though. I wish you good luck my sweet prince.

[Yxklyx]

I would suggest not watching The Falls all in one go since it's more an encyclopedia than a "movie".

[Boner M]

A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/a-grin-without-a-cat.jpg

I regret that I didn't take notes during my viewing of this, mostly because of my cursory knowledge of the politics/era(s) that Marker covers, without many concessions to the uninformed. But it's so easy to get caught up in the propulsive thrust of his extended archival montage that it's hard to find any time to reflect. Marker opens the film with footage from Eisenstein's Potemkin with narration detailing his personal memory of the film, and the subsequent references to France's Popular Front throughout the film become somewhat ironic considering how the aesthetic correlative to the various iterations of that movement was frequently identified as Bazin's 'democratic' frame, itself the flipsode of Soviet montage theory. There's a melancholy to the film's prolonged depiction of the failure of the various movements via monochromatic clips that call attention to themselves as images - remnants of a past that are made to look even more distant and alien (the electronic drones on the soundtrack reinforce this). But there's also a humour; most notably in the footage of Castro fiddling with the mics, depicting how easily convictions can fall by the wayside in such spontaneous moments. Marker's final postscript dedicates the film to the various individuals who themselves were dedicated to recording revolutionary activity. As ever with Marker, we're once again reminded that images are never merely images.

[B-side]

This seems like as good a reason as any to try and force myself to finally watch The Travelling Players.

It's tough for me to think of a director more confident and ingenious with a camera than Angelopoulos. He guides your focus around points of interest with such precision and acuity, but without forcing your gaze. His frame is usually very open; engaged with the surroundings of characters just as equally as their human counterparts. This is because, in Angelopoulos' films, even if they have a "protagonist," this lead doesn't exist in a vacuum. They are simply a point of focus amidst the broader Grecian political spectrum. Greece's history is tainted with war and various occupations; the backdrop of The Travelling Players. An acting troupe travels and stages productions of Golfo the Shepherdess and are constantly swept up and subsequent observers to the political turbulence of the era. Gunshots and air raid sirens disrupt each production, carrying the troupe away and into lonely streets with the ever-present threat of different militias. We take the role of a simple observer of history, but swept into the military action only when the troupe is. Like in the cinema of John Ford, wars are not only fought with weapons, but opposing battle hymns. Music is a galvanizing force in each individual sect, displayed in several scenes in which discord is sewn through opposing songs, and in one scene, for example, where friendship is underlined when three friends wander down a railroad track, eventually forming a chorus of whistles as one of them prepares to head back to war. As Angelopoulos is uninterested in action catharsis or intimate melodrama, dramatic scenes are viewed from his usual distance. If this distance, and the confusion that was birthed in my feeble mind from the timeline jumps, are sometimes alienating, they're surely not without purpose. Much of the dramatic context is left to the viewer to delineate. The soft, angelic blues of Greece and its seas evoke such a fantastic sense of warmth and nostalgia through Angelopoulos' lens, and his vessels are one with their community -- communities in which various centuries of conflict and political upheaval exist side by side -- for better or worse.

[Boner M]

As expected, this'll continue into November.

WORLD ON A WIRE

http://www.slantmagazine.com/images/film/worldonawire.jpg

On paper, it seems too good to be true: a four-hour cyberpunk mini-series from Rainer Werner Motherfucking Fassbinder. Turns out that's only sorta the case; when World on a Wire is at the top of its game, it's as good as dystopian sci-fi gets, and when it's not, it's merely an effective paranoia thriller. As ever with Fassbinder, genre is a loose pretext; just as Sirkian melodramatic narratives were used in many of his mid-period films to explore issues of class, sexuality and race, WoaW is less a straightforward sci-fi narrative than a rumination on the ethics of creating and consuming fiction. The protagonist is Fred Stiller, the successor to the leader of the 'Simulacron' project - Henry Vollmer - who dies under mysterious circumstances. Stiller is first seen at a corporate party wearing shoulderpads to look more masculine, establishing both his social insecurity as well as his status as a totem of pure id. The Simulacron, we learn, is a supercomputer that stores an entire virtual world that serves as a model from which market activity can be predicted. The people within the Simulacron experience their reality just as those outside do, and the more time Stiller spends on the project, the more convinced he is of the arbitrariness of his own reality, leading him down the same path of madness as Vollmer.

As per one character, the people within this world on a wire are merely "figures dancing on a TV screen"; that Fassbinder specifies the medium he's working in alerts one to the meta-fictional aspects of the story. Though cinema-going is a relatively passive activity, watching TV offers obviously greater control for the viewer in the form of channel-surfing, secondhand viewing, etc. As David Foster Wallace posits, "any experience will be transferrable to image and marketable, manipulable, consumable... We will, in short, be able to engineer our own dreams". Thus, the Simulacron - especially regarding its function within the marketing world - is a thinly veiled stand-in for the idiot box itself, and Stiller's feelings of guilt and inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish between these two realities forms can be read as an absurdist take on the predicament of the couch potato, aptly authored from above by a devotee to the Seventh Art. But more intriguingly, it's also Fassbinder coming to terms with the fatalism frequently essayed in his films prior and since - the latent feelings of guilt over a body of work of common man plights and martyred women. Just as the heightened dystopias throughout Fassbinder's filmography allow for audiences to grapple with their own values and utopian ideals, WoaW reveals an artist bracingly grappling with his own status as an engine of fate.

[TripZone]

Ooh, nice. Saw that restored version digitally projected.
Didn't really consider the TV meta-narrative, well-observed.