Prince’s legacy as a Pop music icon is undisputed. His influence on popular culture is endless. In addition to being one of the greatest entertainers of all time, he was a groundbreaking songwriter, musician, arranger, composer, producer, and entrepreneur. Prince was also the ultimate disruptor. In a career that spanned five decades, Prince challenged systems, spaces, and sounds. In the process, he disrupted widely held notions about what it meant to be a black artist, activist, and, ultimately, a black person in a society that remains at odds with its own concepts of blackness, freedom, and equality. Through analysis of his music, lyrics, and individual acts of protest, this panel seeks to expand the discussion of Prince’s legacy by examining his role as a disruptor.
I know nothing about the artist (Jessie Ware) or her song ("Step Into My Life") or this dancer (Eric Schloesser). The tab has been open so long I can not recall the algorithmic alchemy that brought me to it and left me exhilarated.
His face. Its high-angled cheekbones. Deep-set hooded eyes. Joaquin Phoenix's mullet from To Die For, but make it fashion. The fluid drape and sickly color of the slightly oversized jacket. The break of his dark blue trousers. Those shoes.
Then there're the long takes and low angles of the camera, starting with the shoes, moving up and out, creating a rhythm and indulging a bit of bricolage business on the benches. All that blows apart at the chorus, leaving us lying on the ground, looking up at this sullen, whirling colossus. The camera stills, letting him dance out of the frame without following. Disco strings and horns and bass and lewd pews surge up as the bridge returns us to the first shots, but runs them backwards and forwards, the dancer leaping and spinning and flipping and sliding until the chorus again intervenes. He brings a bright green bowling ball to his lips, kisses it, taking the sacrament of Jesus-les-pins. Illogical unmotivated cuts abound.
The camera faces him from the lane, revealing the previously unseen reverse of the alley, a blip of blue. And then it comes, at 3:14, with 20 seconds left. A smirk breaks the straight line of his lips on one side only. Perfection. The camera catches a vapor and reacts with a series of super short shots as he bowls.
Does he strike? No idea. The camera abandons the 180-degree rule altogether as he turns away, starting again from his shoes and backing up and out into a wide shot, his body blocking our view as he slouches toward us, hands in pockets. The final two shots eschew matches on action almost entirely. Returning to the eternal return of brightly colored balls for the fourth and final time here, the crouched-down Stedicam rises up on its knees as he dances out of frame in the background. Cut. The camera gazes down from the ceiling like a mirror ball as the dancer slides into disco home plate. Take that, baseball, he's safe: a prone pietà. His back-arched body and splayed fingers cut across the strict verticals of the floorboards on the bias. The music stops.
It's so good. Yes, the video does invoke Christopher Walken in Fatboy Slim's Spike Jonze-helmed "Weapon of Choice." But it shows off not with traveling mirror shots but in the modesty of its setting. There's something, too, to this solitary dancer's line, often seen from exceedingly low angles, that recalls Chris of Christine and the Queens in "Tilted," although they tend more toward dancing ensemble.
Happenstance put ongoing movie club and classroom watching in fruitful collision. Last of the Mohicans teed up The Age of Innocence, previewing next week's A Room with a View. In hindsight, the Merchant Ivory seems much less mannered/overdetermined than the contemporaneous adaptation work of our two homegrown auteurs.
And how to communicate to those not yet born the 90s essence rare of Ms. Ryder onscreen and in the culture?
Each Tuesday evening for the last little bit, I synchronously screen a 90-minute or shorter feature on the Criterion Channel for whichever of the students in my honors college enrichment group shows up. Often that means as few as two plus me, but it doesn't matter because it is making me choose new-to-me films in a way I otherwise don't, having long ago lost my sense of urgency after decades of no library late fees as an academic (and a video store employee before that). I narrow my choices down to a few titles and decide right when we start, sending the students a link to the film via Zoom. And then, off we go! Having folx with whom to talk about the film afterward feels like getting away with something.
All this is prelude to saying that this past Tuesday we watched Zhang Yimou's A Woman, and Gun, and A Noodle Shop, which transplants the Coen brothers' Texas-set debut feature Blood Simple to 19th century China. It spins like a top.
The divine Jessica Walter in full Brooklyn bloom in Bye Bye Braverman (1968, dir. Lumet) bodes well for widow's peak doppelganger Parker Posey's grande dame scene-stealing future roles. I have been racking my brain trying to figure out where in time and space the memory of seeing Sidney Lumet speak on stage at some festival somewhere is situated. I do remember being in the balcony. Also, being transfixed by the sheen of his immaculately polished cordovan-color cowboy boots. It was kind of Lumet to give the cheap seats a little visual interest.
Granted, I was feverish. But these two Taiwanese-dialect melodramas presented by Harvard Film Archive were a trip. The first (above), The Husband's Secret (1960), had plot elements that reminded me of aspects of Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 (Kazuo Hara). No, there're no live births, but there are nightclub hostesses carving out communal living spaces and arrangements in parallel to the de/predations of their sex work. The second (below), from 1965, May 13th, Night of Sorrow, rang some Mildred Pierce bells, sans pancakes, with its story of a sacrificing older woman working in a low profession--nightclub singer--to provide a younger woman, her sister, with all the advantages. Said kid sister is embarrassed by her sib's work, a snob and an ingrate, and, well, you know how these dynamics play out. There's a man, misunderstandings, a murder.... (The actress shown wearing glasses in the fourth shot was an amazing physical comedian, forever prat-falling into the glassworks at the plant where she and kid sister work as newly hired scientists and pulling unbelievably elastic moues and eyerolls.)
