Ray Carney, the Pragmatic Aesthetic

I read a text book on film studies long ago. It explained one theoretical approach to judging film. But then it went on to explain that, under this theory, McQ with John Wayne was the ideal film. It exemplified each of the criteria it used to judge movies.

McQ was John Wayne's answer to Dirty Harry.

I don't remember the theory but it still might have been good. I saw a truly awful Soviet experimental film one time, and if there isn't a really terrible Italian Neo-Realist film somewhere, it's because they didn't make enough of them. I've seen personal films that were the work of genuine auteurs which still stunk.

I mention this because I read an article by Ray Carney explaining the "Pragmatic Aesthetic" he advocates.

It made sense to me, although I can't say I've liked most of the movies I've seen that exemplify the pragmatic aesthetic. Hated a lot of them, really liked others.

Of course, the people who made these movies did so without benefit of Carney's theorizing. He pointed to the films of John Cassavetes and to Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. Practice comes before theory---at least before Carney's theory. Cassavetes and De Sica had no problem explaining what they did and why.

Opera, pre-World War One silent film

 For a long time I've had a weird preference for pre-World War One silent films. They were made before they developed the "language of film". They tended to be crude, filmed entirely in long shot.

Then, last weekend, I was in my car. Went out to find a drive-through. The radio was on, some sort of travel show on NPR. Turned out to be Rick Steves. They had guy talking about opera.

The way to enjoy an opera is not to try to get its meaning from the words which you probably won't understand anyway. What you do is you read a synopsis of the thing before you go so you know what the story is. Then you sit back, relax and watch and listen.

It reminded me of a movie I watched, the 1911 Italian version of Dante's Inferno. It was done like every other movie of the era. Shot in long shot, with one long take per scene. And at the beginning of each scene was a long intertitle explaining what was going to happen.

 An example:

Dante imagines himself lost in a dark and gloomy wind. He sees the summit of a mountain lighted up by the sun. This is the hill of salvation which he endeavores to ascent.

We see the actor walking through the woods, lost until he looks up and sees----well, they don't actually show us what he sees. But he seems pleased.

Beatrice, the ideal of Dante, descends from Paradise into Limbo, and asks Virgil, a pious poet, to rescue and guide Dante.

And...

Virgil reveals himself to Dante, delivers him from all danger and bids him to follow him into the portals of the Inferno.

The acting was rather exaggerated as you'd expect. But for some reason, this gave it a far greater feeling of realism than if it had been filmed with sound or in pantomime.

Maybe it's just me.

Weird 1939 proto "torture porn"

Turned on a public domain B movie on Roku called Torture Ship (1939).

Based on a story by Jack London.

It looks like I watched an edited version. It jumped right into the story. The opening scene was some middle aged men hanging around in a room which turns out to be on a ship.

The opening lines:

"You guys want to get tortured?"

"Not me!"

"He can't get away with it!"

"What are we going to do?"

(I'm paraphrasing a little, but that's pretty close to the dialog.)

A mad scientist runs into legal trouble when he experiments on people in order to find a cure for criminality, so he takes some criminals on a ship where he can experiment on them in international waters.

This was apparently an abbreviated version of the movie. According to imdb.com, the first scene is the scientist explaining to reporters outside the courtroom that criminality is a glandular disorder.

Detour, Edgar Ulmer vs. William Beaudine

I'm sitting here watching Detour. Better than the other Edgar Ulmer movies I've seen. I like William Beaudine's B movies better, although I've noticed he tends to have racist jokes in them.

Beaudine had been a silent movie director and had gone to Britain to work in the early '30s before returning to Hollywood. I just watched one of his British movies. A comedy about a teacher working in a prison. He gets a better job teaching in a British boarding school. I found it confusing because some of the actors playing the teenagers appeared to be in their 40s.

"Who's that guy? The janitor?" I thought. "Good lord! They're caning the janitor!"

I didn't realize that Detour had such an implausible plot.

Frenchies try provoking Muslims

And now some French magazine is publishing cartoons of Mohammed. The drawings are reportedly offensive even if you aren't Muslim.

What exactly is the point?

“The paper ought to be condemned for what they’ve done. There’s no excuse for the reaction that it has set off but if you know you’re going to get that kind of hysterical reaction and you go about seeking to provoke it, then you yourself have to be questioned about your own motives and intentions,” Zogby said in an exclusive interview on Wednesday.

Zogby, who is the founder and president of the Arab-American Institute and author of the book “Arab Voices,” said that it’s not enough to argue that Western principles of free speech apply.

“Of course you have the right to publish this in a free society, although, France has a much more restricted free speech mandate than the United States of America,” he explained. “But, on the other hand, the question is do you take advantage of that freedom if the purpose is purely to incite and purely to provoke and, therefore, one would say that discretion is the better part of valor in this instance.”

Read the full article here.

Provoking people is a simple enough thing to do. A moron in Los Angeles did it far more effectively than these French intellectuals. Cartoons of Mohammed have been done to death. None of them are funny or clever.

Jeff Sparrow wrote recently in Counterpunch.com about the movie, The Innocence of Muslims:

...Twentieth century race-baiters knew all about goading their victims into a certain response, and then using that response to justify a fresh pogrom. Not unexpectedly, German far-right extremists (who have some historical experience with this strategy) are now planning fresh screenings of the film.

Sparrow pointed out a historical analogy that had occurred to me as well:

In 1857, Bengali soldiers (known as ‘sepoys’) shot their British officers and marched upon Delhi. The Great Indian Rebellion became very violent, very quickly. The rebels massacred prisoners, including women and children; the British put down the revolt with a slaughter of unprecedented proportions.

Now, that rebellion began when the troops learned that their cartridges, designed to be torn open with their teeth, would be greased with beef and pork fat, an offence to the religious sensibilities of Hindus and Muslims alike. Had Twitter been an invention of the Victorian era, London sophisticates would, no doubt, have LOLed to each other (#sepoyrage!) about the credulity of dusky savages so worked up about a little beef tallow. Certainly, that was how the mouthpieces of the East India Company spun events: in impeccably Dawkinesque terms, they blamed ‘Hindoo prejudice’ for the descent of otherwise perfectly contented natives into rapine and slaughter.

But no serious historian today takes such apologetics seriously. Only the most determined ignoramus would discuss 1857 in isolation from the broader context of British occupation. In form, the struggle might have been religious; in content, it embodied a long-simmering opposition to colonial rule.

That’s why those who pretend the protests against The Innocence of Muslims came from nowhere merely reveal their own foolishness.

He referred in this quote to an anti-Muslim quip Richard Dawkins had re-tweeted.

Princes William & Harry

An Italian magazine is doing a 26 page spread of topless photos of Prince William's wife. The royal couple is already suing a French magazine for publishing the same pictures. French laws are somewhat more strict.

TMZ reports that the French publisher has hinted broadly that she has even better pictures of the royal couple that they had the good taste not to publish. Yet.

Now, California has a paparazzi law. According to a news report:

The law will allow photographers to be found liable for invasion of privacy if it is proved that they trespassed or used telephoto lenses to capture images of people engaging in personal or familial activity....

Does it specifically ban only telephoto lenses? Because there's a pretty good alternative to a telephoto lens. You take pictures with a large format film camera or an extremely high definition digital camera using a normal lens, then you enlarge the part you want. Same effect as a telephoto but it's still legal if what I read is correct.

It's fine with me. They can publish what they want. I never liked the Royal Family.

Prince Harry is now in Afghanistan. The Taliban launched an attack on the base he's in. They said they were going after that idiot Harry. Two Americans were killed and several wounded. All because Harry wants to be in a war.

And what was he doing naked in Las Vegas? Is he coming and going from Afghanistan at will? That other one---the Brit king who abdicated to marry a divorced American socialite---deserted the British Army when the Nazis invaded France.

Muslim-hating scumbags endanger actors

Okay, so apparently there's a porn director involved in the production of the movie, The Innocence of Muslims, the anti-Muslim movie that's triggered protests across the middle east. It was filmed in front of a green screen. The actors had no idea it what it was---they were given just a few pages of script at a time and the anti-Muslim dialog was crudely dubbed in after the fact.

I don't know if the Arabic language version is dubbed or subtitled. Either way, it's not going to be obvious to Arabic language viewers that it was dubbed in this way. The actors in the movie have their faces in this thing being shown all over the world. They certainly didn't agree to this.

As I said before, it's reported that the makers of this thing tried to draw Muslims to it when it was shown in a theater in Loa Angeles. They handed out fliers at mosques and gave it a title they imagined would attract them to it for some reason. No one showed up. So they posted the Arabic language version for You Tube.

They got exactly the reaction they wanted and endangered the lives of the actors in it. I said before that I didn't want the scum who produced and directed this thing to be harmed, but to hell with the bastards. If they wanted to attack Islam, they should have acted in the movie themselves or found like-minded actors willing to do it. One of these scumbags was pictured in the news in disguise, a scarf wrapped around his face, while the actors' faces are splashed all over the internet around the world.

It's also being reported that the porn director supposedly involved in this thing was apolitical, had no thoughts about Islam, and was most likely duped into it and didn't know they were going to redub it. And he may have had nothing to do with it at all. The convicted fraudster who produced the movie was also convicted of identity of theft and has a number of aliases. It's very likely the producers used the guy's name without his knowledge or consent.