By “gorgeousness,” I mean not only her face—its echo of every blonde siren the cinema has ever known—but her singing voice’s matter-of-factness, combining fatigue and rancor and nervous energy, like Jean Seberg’s French in Breathless. A song passes quickly—four or five minutes. Once it ends, I can replay it, or I can try to communicate its pleasures to someone else, or I can decide to stop talking about the private dimensions of aesthetic experience; I can decide never again to ask my imaginary interlocutor, “Does Debbie Harry’s voice and image submit your body to a tension that isolates you in a chamber of bliss and suffering?”
This daisy chain of solipsistic desire and leering innuendo — in which no one listens to anyone else, or listens only in order to advance his or her position or to betray someone later — courses through the remainder of the movie like an electrical current, accumulating more bad vibes en route and tarnishing everyone but Cheung. Assayas records this feverish process in compulsive, twitchy camera movements as restless and neurotic as the characters, refusing to distance himself stylistically from this behavior, allowing it to turn his attention and ours as relentlessly as a series of tidal waves. In this context, where no one is fully in control but everyone is driven, evil in an everyday environment is no longer represented by Irma Vep and her gang but by the film crew’s thwarted energies and desires and their effects, creeping inexorably into one social situation after another.
Joan of Arc from Alex McQuilkin on Vimeo.
Projected in two adjacent channels juxtaposing images of Maria Falconetti as Joan of Arc in Carl Dreyer’s 1928 Le Passion de Jeanne d’Arc with images of myself. On the left, Falconetti’s face fills the screen and close ups of her expressions guide the viewer through her condemnation to the shearing of her hair and finally through her slow death at the stake. Her movements are channeled into the right frame through my own body, as I cut off my long blonde hair, shave it down to a bristle and mimic Falconetti. The liturgical music of Richard Einhorn underscores a voice-over in which my own voice wavers between historical fact and confessional revelation.
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Jeux des reflets... from David Cairns on Vimeo.
A New Haven “townie,” Sitney found his way into libraries and film screenings at Yale starting at age 10 by being presumed to be a professor’s child. Later he would earn degrees there in Greek and Sanskrit and a comparative literature Ph.D., but he had already become enraptured by avant-garde film. The prodigious 15-year-old Sitney created his own newsletter-turned-journalFilmwise, leading to his editing Film Culture, traveling with avant-garde cinema showcases, and co-founding Anthology Film Archives. He continued the odyssey begun four decades earlier in Visionary Film with Eyes Upside Down, examining filmmakers like Marie Menken (who he considered Visionary Film’s most significant omission) and Su Freidrich through Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings.
