A moment of passage into adulthood occurred for me upon the purchase, charged to a MasterCard not billed to my mom and dad, of a piece of consumer electronics. It was a Panasonic VHS deck from a Nobody Beats the Wiz in downtown Manhattan, either the cheapest or next-to-cheapest kind of VCR you could buy in 1994, in the ballpark of $50. I was sharing a 2-bedroom near the Sheridan Square stop of the 1/9 train. The console TV set in our living room was a hand-me-down from my grandmother, who that fall was being moved from an apartment in Brooklyn to a nursing home in New Jersey. We didn't have cable, though it didn't stop me from watching through terrible reception some of my favorite shows of the 90s, particularly Homicide and My So-Called Life. Mainly I watched movies rented from Kim's, a place that ought to have been preserved for exhibit at the Smithsonian. Kim's organized its tapes by director, which is really all you need to know about that VCR and what I did with it in the 1990s....
Others might experience such passages differently. On moving days over the past few years, particularly in the campusy neighborhood near us, I have been paying special attention to the presence of so many CRT television sets abandoned by the curb alongside rotting sofas and broken chairs. Sometimes the TV has been damaged, it often seems intentionally, perhaps with a hole poked in the rear. Goodwill sells CRT television sets these days for 99 cents. Ninety-nine cents for a television. That's less than they charge for a hardcover book. People still want televisions, just not that kind. Maybe there is some pleasure in destroying and rejecting the old, obsolete, abject tube, in treating it like your shit. I have not felt this. Yet I have become fascinated by the ugly heaps left behind by college kids, hoping when I bike by a dilapidated sectional or a mound of old plastic shopping bags filled with leftovers of a few years of undergrad living that there will be a CRT set face down on the lawn for me to photograph and post on twitter.
RIVERS: Yes, and halfway through making this film we went to the Republic of Vanuatu, and worked on a couple shorter films together, a kind of spin-off. We presented A Spell in Marseilles to try and get money to get it made. We won the “Best Project,” and the prize was two free flights anywhere in the world and a Panavision package.
BEN RUSSELL: They were meant to be used for the film we were pitching but at the time we were planning to shoot in Norway but AirFrance didn’t fly there or something, so we decided to make something else as well.
There are no ‘objective’ accounts of theory any more than there are ‘objective’ theories, and it seems worth indicating something of the nature of Andrew’s own bents. For the most part, his expositions of Munsterberg, Arnheim, Eisenstein, Belazs and Kracauer seem unusually detached and judicious, pointing up the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of each without suggesting that he has any particular axe to grind. His less questioning admiration for Bazin diverts this tendency somewhat; and the subsequent chapters on Mitry and Metz, however respectful, hint at a certain dissatisfaction with much contemporary theory which helps to explain the decision to end the survey with Ayfre and Agel. Arguing that the materialism of the semioticians and the determinism of writers like Michel Foucault closes off too many possibilities of exploration within the notion of ‘art as freedom’, he cites the phenomenology of Ayfre, Agel and Roger Munier as a viable route leading back to some of the avenues opened up by Bazin.
What I am calling “vulgar appropriationism” is this: the way in which pop/commercial media today often appropriate formal structures from more-or-less “high art,” or even avant-garde art, of the 20th century, and use them in ways that negates the aesthetic or conceptual radicality of those structures.
The Dissolve: When Kirsten Dunst’s character finds out she erased her memory, she regrets it so much that she sends all her company’s clients their files. Whether they want to remember or not, they suddenly have all this evidence of what they tried to forget. She makes everybody’s choice for them. How did you react to that?
Le: This is actually something my mom has taught me my whole life—no matter what happens, there’s a lot of things you can never control, because other people will dictate how things are going to happen. How you choose to react to it distinguishes each individual person’s reaction. People would act differently—maybe some would want to try to hold on and say, “I don’t care anymore. I’ve tried to forget, and I’m not going to try to remember.” And maybe other people are curious what they lost. But that’s life. We’re allowed to make mistakes and figure out why we made those decisions that we made.
Then, twenty minutes in, we drift through the window of a big-city apartment building and find a couple in bed. Should it not be clear from their appearances that they are Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) — last seen vowing to reunite on a Vienna train platform in Before Sunrise, six years earlier — the heady tone of their exchange gives them away.
“I’ve been thinking about something you said,” Waking Life Jesse says, then quotes back to Céline her statement as a twenty-three-year-old in Before Sunrise that she often feels like she’s observing her own life as an old lady. “I still feel that way,”Waking Life Céline replies. “Like my waking life is [the old lady’s] memories.” The two then discuss the compression of time in dreams, Timothy Leary, brain chemistry, and reincarnation, ending on the idea that our instincts express billions of years of collective memory, and that it’s possible “we’re all telepathically sharing our experiences.”
That Jesse and Céline are still talking their faces off in the main character’s dream extends this idea of telepathic congress. The notion is layered into Waking Life many times over, including in the part where a pair of Cineplex philosophers agree that movies are designed more for moments than for narrative. “Everything is layers, isn’t it?” one of them says.
The Phoenix Portal (2005) Single channel video, colour, sound, 16:9, 4:56 minutes
In this melancholy science fiction, a young River Phoenix from the film The Explorers (1985) opens a wormhole to contact an older version of himself from My Own Private Idaho (1991). Irrevocably haunted by the tragic death of Phoenix in 1993, The Phoenix Portal summons the paranormal power of recorded media to embalm time and seemingly reanimate the dead.
I love Bernard Berkman for his superb beard; I love him for the way he wears a corduroy jacket with jeans and a dress shirt even when playing inappropriately competitive mixed doubles. I love him for his preposterous self-confidence, shot through with the dry rot of self-doubt. I love him for his determination that his sons should like "interesting books and films"; for his jarring quotations from French cinema, and for his blithe assertion that his wife's tennis coach is a philistine. I love him for being a failing novelist, as opposed to a failed one. At least he was published. I love him for being wronged himself, while busy wronging everyone else, including the cat. I love him for being played by Jeff Daniels, Hollywood's liberal everyman. I love him for being married to Laura Linney.
For the stars of the Golden Age, it was different. They were hidden away with publicists releasing tidbits and manufactured stories. They were created and nurtured to be different than other actors and certainly very different than actors of the next generation of the fifties onward. If they started out in the forties or before, even as child actors like Elizabeth Taylor (whose appearances in movies had the same treatment as the other superstars mentioned above), they were Hollywood creations more than any actors who followed. Philip Seymour Hoffman is no Hollywood creation, he’s a superb actor who worked hard in movies for years to get to a point where he sometimes gets leads, sometimes supporting, sometimes Oscar nods and sometimes the award itself. His career is successful by practically every measure of Hollywood success but no matter what he does, he will never be John Wayne. Or Bette Davis. Or Katherine Hepburn. Or Jimmy Stewart. I don’t believe we will ever reach a time when, at the age of 90, his appearance in a movie will lead all the stories on the entertainment circuit. It just isn’t going to happen and not because of him, but because he wasn’t made that way by a studio who mythologized him from the start.
