films
Well, I guess I gotta get going on my formative 10 because what has taken me almost eight months, has taken D’Arcy Norman all of three days. I find it interesting how much a formative 10 can tell you about someone, for example given D’Arcy’s first three films it’s pretty obvious he’s a science nerd 
Now me, kinda like Uli, I’m a nihilist, and it is, indeed, exhausting.
Escape from New York is a no-brainer for the formative 10, this movie may very well be the most perfectly conceived plot ever filmed, and it is without question my favorite film storyline of all time. Interestingly enough, John Carpenter is responsible for two of my formative ten, this one as well as the The Thing (which I recently blogged). Moreover, Assault on Precinct 13 would have been a shoe-in for the formative 15 and I blogged it as a kind of preview to this series many moons ago. It’s interesting that this exercise has brought into sharp focus just how important John Carpenter has been in my early years of film watching, and I’d just like to thank him for helping to make me such a huge fan of the form.
So, what now? I could talk about how cool Isaac Hayes was as the Duke of New York or how much I dug the terrorists that hijacked the Air Force 1 at the beginning of the film or how Harry Dean Stanton’s role as Brain remains one of his most memorable for me (”Unless you know exactly, precisely where it is…”) or even the crazy haired sidekick to the Duke of NY who hisses in a most peculiar way. I could do all this, and I haven’t even gotten to Snake Plissken yet. Or, I could show you a series of clips that capture the essence of this film. So, OK, dim the lights and get ready for some YouTube, roll ‘em please:
The voice over (which is Jamie Lee Curits) at the beginning of the film sets up the situation brilliantly.
And here is the hissing maniac that shows off the President’s finger (love this guy!):
Scene wherein Hauk (played by the immortal Lee Van Cleef, the ultimate badass) recruits Snake for the mission to rescue the President from the prison that is Manhattan Island:
There’s the scene where the cannibalistic Mole People come out of the ground and grab Season Hubley, this was possibly the most memorable scene of the whole film for me at the time.
The Duke of NY (A#1) (played by the late Isaac Hayes) doing a little target practice with the President of the US (played by Donald Pleasance who is genius in this film, I might add).
Couldn’t find the scene of Brain (played by the legendary Harry Dean Stanton, perhaps my favorite actor of all time) on YouTube I wanted, so I will settle for when he stabs the crazy-haired hissing freak (the character is actually named Romero).
And there are many many more scenes in this film that make it simply amazing. In fact, I believe that it is still one of the best paced and consistently compelling action films ever made. Escape from New York, arguably Carpenter’s best, and maybe the last truly great American film ever made
Image courtesy of Robjtak
Los Angeles is a fine town. I lived in its tepid embrace for over seven years, and I have to say it was probably seven of the best film years of my life. I think I saw as many movies in that time span as the occasional film viewer sees in a lifetime, it was a non-stop love affair. I met a ton of great people who were extremely knowledgeable about film, truly loved the medium, and enjoyed talking, and eventually arguing, about movies. That’s my kind of town. And while I often compared LA to New York while I was there—let’s face it NYC owns LA when it comes to Pizza and baseball—when it comes to film there is no comparison: LA kicks New York City’s ass up and down Hollywood Blvd. Enough said.
The theaters in LA are probably the best in the world, and the fact that there are still so many pristine single screen film houses standing is one of the great rewards of being the center of the movie industry for almost a century. Just thinking about Mann’s Village Theater or Mann’s Bruin Theater, or my personal favorite in Westwood Mann’s National Theater makes me long for yesteryear. There was also the Majestic Crest Theater in Westwood that was independently owned and had a full blown constellation on the ceiling you could watch shine before the feature started (it even had shooting stars that raced across the artificial sky).
And then there’s the Cineramadome in Hollywood that captured the magnificence of 70mm films like no other theater can. Of course you can’t forget Mann’s Chinese (where I saw the re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy with the unnecessary effects) and El Capitan theaters in Hollywood amongst many others. It is a veritable moviegoers mecca. What does NYC have in comparison? The Angelika? Please, that may be the single worst theater in the US, not only does it signify the downfall of that great city to shallow cafe culture and style, but it’s screens are tiny and the subway rumbles through the entire film like a bad bass line. The Film Forum is a little better, but not much. The only place to see a movie in NYC is the BAM in Brooklyn, and while I love that movie house to no end, it has nothing on even the lesser theaters in LA in terms of ambiance and single house heaven, but it does have the most innovative and exciting film programming I have ever seen in either NY or LA (and it’s film programming that this never ending post is really going to be about). But, when I really think about it, I’d have to say my all time favorite theater in LA is the Nuart, it is by no means the best theater in LA but it just reminds me so much of the Century’s Baldwin theater up the block from my house while growing up. The two don’t necessarily look alike, but they had the same candy (Dots!) and popcorn, and when I would sit down in a seat before a movie at the Nuart I felt strangely like I was home again at the Baldwin, even though Thomas Wolfe assures us we can’t ever go back there again—and I believe him because boy did he ever try and get back in his novels.
Image courtesy of MV Jantzen
Ok, but that is a long-winded way to introduce this post which has been brewing in my mind ever since I read this post at Joe Valdez’s The Distracted Globe (he watches and writes about a ton of great films) in which he was partaking in the 12 Movie Meme started by Piper at The Lazy Eye Theatre (a very fun movie blog). The logic is pretty simple, yet it struck me as quite brilliant: if you were asked to choose a sequence of 12 different double features at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles what would they be? This is an extra special find for me, because I lived about three blocks from this theater for almost two years and saw many a great double feature there. And while the seats were some of the most uncomfortable in movie house history, the programming was both intelligent and very fun. Always an argument in the way the films were paired. You can subscribe to the RSS feed of their film calendar to get a clearer sense of what I mean, sometimes it was fun just to think about the relationship the two movies being linked had in common, at times it was clear and beautiful like with Aguirre Wrath of the Gods and Fitzcarroldo or Planet of the Apes and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. But others were less clear to me at the time like Body Heat and the original The Postman Always Rings Twice or Rosemary's Baby and The Brood (a double feature I actually saw at UCLA’s Melnitz theater–another favorite of mine in LA–under the bill of Maternal Nightmares, but let me pretend here in my blog, will ya)?
After obsessively thinking about my program for the last 24 hours—because you know I had to do one—I came up with a bit of a theme. For as we know, every good film program, just like every good syllabus or amusement park, has to have a theme. Mine was Bava…Mario Bava. The reasons for Bava are as follows: a) I dig his films and b) he experimented with so many different sub-genres that it makes this particular program not only fun but wide-ranging in its potential appeal. More than that, the influences between Bava and other “great” films and filmmakers would ultimately make the program far more diverse than if I focused on my 12 favorite movies (possibly the worst approach). The restriction of sticking with Bava actually gave me a grand theme as well as a series of sub-themes to explore and experiment with through genres, directors, and actors.
So, here are the twenty films (I couldn’t stop at 12) I would choose for a month of programming at the now “New Bava Beverly.” Below are my picks with a brief rationale, or at least I think it will be brief, I mean I want it to be brief, I swear.
The first double bill would have to start with both James Whale and Mario Bava’s masterpieces respectively: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Black Sunday (1960). Bava’s Black Sunday is an homage to the beautiful black and white Gothic horror film classics of the 1930s. The Bride of Frankenstein is not only one of the most beautiful made by Universal Studios during this period, filled with the transcendent sets and ghastly graveyard scenes, but in many ways as wild and ludicrous as Black Sunday. The two seem a perfect fit, and frame two directors at the very height of their genius.
View the trailer for The Bride of Frankenstein here and for Black Sunday here.
Bava wasn’t afraid to dabble in sword and sandal movies, and Hercules in the Haunted World (1961) is one of the cult favorites of this genre. While not necessary his greatest film, It remains one of the most popular and appreciated films of a relatively poor lot. Bava’s trippy settings and haunting atmosphere sets the film apart from the usual cheap standards. That is, of course, until you start dealing with Ray Harryhausen’s animation in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), another sword and sandal film that may very well be the most famous and best simply because of the genius animation by Harryhausen, featuring the Skeleton fighting sequence, perhaps some of the greatest special effects ever to be filmed.
View the tailer for Hercules in the Haunted World here and for Jason and the Argonauts here.
I chose Alfred Hitchcock’s first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) because it has Peter Lorre in it, which is his first film role since leaving Nazi Germany (suggesting Hitchcock’s genius that much more given he was the first to cast him). And interesting fact here is that Lorre doesn’t yet know English so he is speaking all his lines phonetically. It’s wonderful to watch. Also, I must admit, I’m not a Jimmy Stewart or a Doris Day fan—who star in the 1950s version—and would much prefer to watch Lorre in just about anything any day of the week than suffer through another gosh, golly or shucks by Stewart. There….I finally said it on this blog.
As for Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) I think it is one of his most beautiful films, perhaps his most beautiful after Black Sunday, and the header image of this blog is proudly taken from this gem. What’s more, it is commonly thought of as the first filmed Giallo, which is an Italian term that literally means yellow. And due to the yellow covers of these pulp novels, the term was used to describe an entire genre of novels and films in Italy during the 50s and 60s. The novels consisted of sensational fiction that often brought together the thriller, horror, and sexploitation genres. This is Bava’s last movie filmed in glorious Black and White, a medium he excelled in and wouldn’t ever come close to surpassing in color except, perhaps, in Planet of the Vampires (more on that soon).
Trailer for The Girl Who Knew Too Much here.
Pulling out all stops, I went for the episode films. I would love to do some research on episodic films like the two featured here: Black Sabbath (1963) and Trilogy of Terror (1975). I was toying with the idea of including Cat's Eye or Creepshow, but I think Trilogy of Terror as a series of three shorts really comes closest to the vision of Bava’s Black Sabbath, and as an added bonus it has the psychotic African Fetish Doll–which will be a major draw, believe you me I’m fascinated by the idea of several short films within a film, and the relationship their order and organizations plays to plot and theme, just like with a good book of short stories. The American version of Black Sabbath was expurgated and reorganized, basically removing the Lesbian relationship from the Telephone episode, toning down the violence, and re-ordering the sequence of the films. Which, for many, kills the effect of the three films. I haven’t seen the Italian version yet, so until I do I’ll stick with the US version. I think these episodic films are a fun genre that isn’t played with nearly enough, so The New Bava Beverly will bring you six short films at the price of two long ones.
Trailers for Black Sabbath here and Trilogy of Terror here (not a trailer but beautiful clip from this classic).
Thanks to Bava, we can even feature one of the greatest science fiction films, Alien (1980). And while Planet of the Vampires (1965) may be of for those of a particular taste (the beginning scene is ten of the most bizarre moments you will ever spend), I still hold that it is one of the most beautiful films shot in color. Absolutely stupendous effects and lighting, not to mention the coolest space suits ever worn by any astronaut of any age. Genius. A few critics actually link the atmospheric landscape, lighting, and mood in Planet of the Vampires to Ridely Scott’s Alien (1980). And while I don’t think there has been an acknowledged inheritance on the part of Scott, watching the two films side-by-side would offer an interesting opportunity to see what these very differently paced and imagined Alien films have in common.
Trailers for Planet of the Vampires here and for Alien here.
Roy Colt and Jack Winchester (1970) is Bava’s only foray into the Spaghetti Western. And by no means one of his better films, it is a spoof on the genre and pushes it to its most insane limits. There is a fight scene between the two main characters named in the film’s title (played by Charles Southwood and Brett Halsey) that last for well over five minutes. It’s drawn out to the point of absolute absurdity. More than that, there are a few cinematic gems as Bava turns his eye to the Western landscapes of the film. The film is spoofing the by then well-established Spaghetti Western genre, and lead characters are quite similar to the acting team of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, both of whom became internationally recognized with the film that re-inspired the moribund Spaghetti Western during the 70s: They call Me Trinity (available on Google Video its entirety given it is in the public domain—haven’t seen the high quality version on the Internet Archive yet—but I strongly encourage you to watch the opening sequence of this film, it’s a blast).
No trailer available for Roy Colt and Jack Winchester. Trailer for They Call me Trinity is here.
Pushing the obscure genre boundary angle even further, Bava did a film titled Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970) which provides a kind of Agatha Christie setting and plot without the wise and savvy detective, and far more gruesome murders. The plot of Five Dolls focuses around “a group of people who have gathered on a remote island for fun and relaxation. One of the guests is a chemist who has created a revolutionary new chemical process, and several of the attending industrialists are eager to buy it from him.”
A plot line which reminded to me to some degree of of favorite of mine when I was a kid, Evil Under the Sun (1982), which also features a group of wealthy people who steal away to an exotic island and find one amongst themselves dead. And while Evil Under the Sun concerns itself with culture, deductive reasoning and detective work, Five Dolls just kills off the decadent richies, which has its benefits
No trailer available 
Bava invented the Slasher film! What else can I say here? Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971) is the proto-type for the Slasher films of the late 70s and 80s (and the more I started thinking about this today the more I thought so must The Texas Chainsaw Massacre be then too). Friday the 13th was the film it most reminded me of given the similarities in camp settings, and the fact that both film’s have a somewhat unexpected and deeply disturbing ending.
Trailers for Twitch of the Death Nerve here and for Friday the 13th here.
Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) is the classic film told from varying viewpoints that beautifully demonstrated all the complex theoretical beauty of the hermeneutic problems undergirding testimony, perspective, and narrative more generally. So, why not pair this classic with an Italian Sex Comedy done from four different perspecitves that retraces a date that has conceivably gone wrong from four different perspectives. Four Times That Night (1973) is a monument of 70s style and expression. The film centers around an apartment, and the shag rugs, turntables, and generally awesome furniture and colors is not to be under emphasized. The space of the bachelor pad and consumerism looms large in this film (as it does in the sex comedies of the 50s with Rock Hudson). Yet, at the same time, Four Times That Night flirts with a disturbing vision of how the night might have gone wrong, channeling some of Rashomon’s darker moments.
Trailer for Rashomon here and a trailer for Four Times That Night is not readily available.
Finally, as a grand finale I’m pairing Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) with Bava’s Rabid Dogs (1974). Both of these films might be seen as prime examples of the increasing escalation of violence in cinema that characterized the early 70s. The graphic and realistically filmed rape scenes in both films makes them both highly controversial and extremely hard to watch. Both are characterized by an acute claustrophobic aesthetic, and mark the dark visions of masculinity gone animal. Rabid Dogs marks an interesting moment in Bava’s films, wherein he firmly moves outside of the fantastic/gore/absurd sub-genre pieces to a stark, realistic film about violence. It marks a bitter, dark ending to his career—it’s actually his penultimate film—which in many ways reflects how he felt about his work’s reception over the years. It’s his final masterpiece, and a difficult one to manage given how terrible its ultimate vision of the world becomes when stripped down to the raw free of fantastic effects and far out visuals.
Trailers for Straw Dogs here and for Rabid Dogs here.
OK, that’s it. I did it, and I’m all fired up about it!
A couple of months back I happened upon the American Museum of the Moving Image’s Moving Image Source, which is an online publication featuring articles about film, television, video games, actors, and more. The posts are written by critics and scholars from around the world, and the wde range of writers who all bring various perspectives to the online journal captures a certain amount of wonderful unpredictability. You never know what the next article will be about, and I like that a lot.
In fact, It has been a ton of fun reading the articles, and my only complaint is that I wish you didn’t have to login to comment; I just can’t seem to get up the inertia to fill out another sign-up form. That said, I spent an hour or two on the site tonight fling rom article to article, and while I have a bigger post brewing about Annette Insdorf’s article “Seeing Doubles,” I got quickly pulled into a series of interesting articles through simply browsing the last two months worth of articles, which amounts to 44 posts—wow! that’s an impressive amount of good content being solicited by and published through a museum site on a regular basis! Is there another museum that is doing anything half as ambitious in terms of openly publishing scholars and critics?
Well, while I’m at it, below is the tale of the tape from the two hours tonight I spent reading articles about everything from queer cinema to black exploitation cinema to avant garde and the mashup to The Wire and Balzac. Now there’s some range I can dig on.
I really enjoyed Sam Adams retrospective look at Derek Jarman’s career titled “Look Back in Anger.” Particularly the discussion of the complex poetics of the politic in his The Last of England (a film I saw back in the early 90s at a Jarman retrospective at the Nu-Art theater on Santa Monica Blvd in beautiful Los Angeles, a magical theater where I saw many a great film—I actually saw a midnight showing of Spider Baby there—but I’ll return to the Nu-Art in some other post). Adams points out the poetic ambivalence in this masterpiece beautifully with the following quote:
The Last of England, known at one point under the working title Victorian Values, was a blunt attack on Thatcher’s promise to restore the mores of an earlier time. But the movie is not reducible to a one-sided polemic. Jarman’s vision of a bombed-out Britain, a landscape of industrial wreckage and blood-red skies, is founded on an unspoken and only briefly glimpsed ideal of an unsullied past, most poignantly realized in the footage of Jarman’s grandparents, filmed before he was born. In mourning a past Jarman never knew, the movie surpasses even the party of Thatcher in its idealistic vision of a bygone time, even as it rages against the country’s rightward drift. No wonder one of his Jubliee collaborators called Jarman “a radical Tory.”
Also, Ed Halter’s “Recycle It: A look at found-footage cinema, from the silent era to Web 2.0″ is an interesting discussion of the history of re-mixing and re-using found-footage is awesome. The article has some great links to various historical footage and resources, and it even links out to the Duvet Bros. classic re-mix Blue Monday, which Halter describes as follows:
A masterwork of this postpunk moment is the Duvet Brothers’ Blue Monday (1984), which sets images from the Thatcher-era miners’ strike to the tune by New Order, turning the forlorn synth-pop love song into a lament for a people’s broken relationship with its government.
An excellent overview for thinking through the political, social, and avant-garde roots of the mashup.
Additionally, there is an entire series of articles being publishing on the Moving Image Source about The Wire. And given my marathon viewing of all five season in June and July, I indulged in the scholarly press Nelson George’s discussion “Across Racial Lines” is an interesting article that examines the art of writing race in the TV series The Wire, and argues, rightly I think, that it may very well be the single best protracted discussion of race in a mini-series since Roots.
Dana Pollan’s article “Invisible City” compares The Wire to the literary universe of a Balzac novel, a comparison that is both accurate and useful for thinking about the series. I think the discussion of Balzac and The Wire hits the mark, and gets at the de-centered, vibrant universe that characterizes that series. Unlike Pollan’s initial comparison in this article which juxtaposes the final scene of Straw Dogs and the final scene in season 1 of The Wire, a relationship that is completely lost on me–and I am a huge fan of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. An example which highlights some of the less impressive tone of the writing in several of these articles. They’re often trying to throw in these relations, allusions, and connections that sometimes work and sometimes fail, but rarely have a kind of animated voice behind them. A site like this is invaluable, but it also illustrates some of the key differences between blogging and critical and scholarly writing, and I can’t say the latter might benefit from some stronger opinions, zealous affectation, and a few more far out comparisons.
There’s also a series of video clips that provide a voice-over analysis of the title sequence for The Wire by Andrew Dignan, Kevin B. Lee, and Matt Zoller Seitz. The first video “Extra Credit, Part 1″ starts out kind of stilted and unimpressive for the analysis of the titles for Season 1, but get increasingly looser and more compelling by the time you hit the second and third season titles analysis. And by the fourth and fifth they’re on top of their game. You can find all of them here, and they are well worth watching. The authors hit the mark on numerous points about the show as told by the titles, and bring some fascinating readings of the various details packed int the credits that are easily overlooked. I love this example of a very close, well argued visual reading of the title sequence, great stuff.
On a recent post about Clash of the Titans, Andy Best made a comment I’ve been coming back to over and over again since. The comment was the following:
And by the way, Jim, keep on plugging D&D, that game was solely responsible for getting me to read and develop in the face of school being boring and oppressive.
This idea immediately propelled me up into the attic, rifling though boxes in the insulated heat to find my copy of the Monster Manual, one of the greatest books of the 1970s. I found it, and I have been re-reading it for the last week or so, rather than reading Capital, Volume 1 as I have been promising myself. But I don’t really feel too bad about my choice, for this book is blowing my mind and framing Andy’s comment about reading and developing in ways I hadn’t imagined. In fact, it’s forcing me to re-visit why this book has remained quietly lodged in the ether of my psyche like a psionic Thought Eater for almost thirty years.
I started with the explanatory notes that introduce the logic of the Monster Manual, basically laying out how to read this book. These notes act as a kind of legend for deciphering the very particular vocabulary around the monster profiles, defining terms such as damage, alignment, % in liar, hit points, etc. The very first definition of this manual is pretty wild, it’s a brief explanation of the term “monster:”
The term “monster” is used throughout this work in two manners. Its first, and most important, meaning is to designate any creature encountered — hostile or otherwise, human, humanoid, or beast. Until the encountering party determines what they have come upon, it is a monster. The secondary usage of the term is in the usual sense: a horrible or wicked creature of some sort. Thus, a “monster” is encountered during the course of a dungeon expedition, and it is discovered to be an evil high priest, who just might turn out to be a monster in the other sense as well. Note, however, that despite this terminology, human (and such kin as dwarves, elves, gnomes, half-elves, and halflings) always use the matrix for humans when attacking, even if such humans were encountered as “monsters” in the course of an adventure.
I love this definition of “monster.” It becomes a kind of catch-all phrase for anything that is unknown or foreign, whether or not it’s human. A fascinating frame that resonates with the logic of the Age of Discovery and Exploration wherein those initially encountered in the New World narratives were always monstrous, deformed, and somehow other than human, despite their humanness. The moment between the encounter and the determination of what was encountered is a fascinating one—how long does it last? How does the very idea of the monster become something else entirely with this first and most important definition of monstrosity—which is really a definition of something that can’t be immediately understood.
So, this definition pushed me to look further into the idea of monstrosity, something that fascinates me anyway. And I found a book of essays called The Horror Reader that offers up a few theories of monstrosity. One of them is from Aristotle, which suggest that “Anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way a monstrosity, since in these cases nature has strayed from the generic types.” Aristotle then goes on to draw a parallel between monstrosity and females as departures for the male norm. And such a definition of monstrosity, women, and birth seems to be at the very heart of of the Horror genre. From Mary Shelley’s monstrous conception of <em>Frankenstein</em> to Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Cronenberg's The Brood (1979). Maternal monstrosity and this idea of the progeny as somehow different from the parents, becomes tied up with the actual imagination of the woman as the imaginative producer of monstrosity, a deformed birth, as Marie Helene-Huèt points out, becomes the manifestation of a woman’s “unfulfilled desires and hidden passions” (The Monstrous Imagination 88).
An idea which reminds me of one of the single most compelling moments of monstrous births framed as a public warning and divine testimony to the danger of America’s first true radical: the antinomian preacher Anne Hutchinson. A woman whose philosophy posed a grave and immediate threat to the Puritan “City Upon a Hill.” (As a side note, the trial of Anne Hutchinson is perhaps the most compelling read of all Puritan literature, and frames her genius in the face of intolerance and tyranny stunningly, you can read an excerpt here.) After Hutchinson is banished for the danger she represents to the social fabric, the Puritan governor John Winthrop reports publicly that she has given “monstrous birth” to “twenty-seven several lumps of man’s seed,” which becomes a way of justifying her exile and offering a divine punishment for her unholy difference—her ideas and radical spirit are physically manifested as monstrous.
Thanks to Gardner Campbell this meandering through the monstrous can take on epic proportions given a series of ideas that a recent reading of another Monster Manual in its own right, namely Book II of Paradise Lost, proffers the imagination. Particularly when Sin describes the incestuous birth of her son and brother Death:
Alone, but long I sat not, till my womb
Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown
Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes. [ 780 ]
At last this odious offspring whom thou seest
Thine own begotten, breaking violent way
Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain
Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew
Transform’d: but he my inbred enemie [ 785 ]
Forth issu’d, brandishing his fatal Dart
Made to destroy: I fled, and cry’d out Death;
Hell trembl’d at the hideous Name, and sigh’d
From all her Caves, and back resounded Death.
I fled, but he pursu’d (though more, it seems, [ 790 ]
Inflam’d with lust then rage) and swifter far,
Mee overtook his mother all dismaid,
And in embraces forcible and foule
Ingendring with me, of that rape begot
These yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry [ 795 ]
Surround me, as thou sawst, hourly conceiv’d
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me, for when they list into the womb
That bred them they return, and howle and gnaw
My Bowels, thir repast; then bursting forth [ 800 ]
A fresh with conscious terrours vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find. [Link.]
How is that for monstrous birth, “odious offspring,” and “inbred enemies”!
Yet, I digress, for monstrous maternity is just one, albeit a particularly rich and telling, way of how we deal with fear, uncertainty, difference, power, and subversion. The Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual makes the idea of everything undetermined somehow monstrous (which makes the idea of birth and monstrosity even more telling and fascinating). A kind of general, sweeping idea of paranoia at the idea of otherness. And idea that makes the secondary definition offered by the Manual, or the more traditional idea of the monster as a “horrible and wicked” creature somehow wanting. And interestingly enough, in the very next sentence after offering this more popular definition, the uncertainty of what is or is not monstrous creeps back into this explanation, imbuing any clarification with a deep ambivalence.
Thus, a “monster” is encountered during the course of a dungeon expedition, and it is discovered to be an evil high priest, who just might turn out to be a monster in the other sense as well.
The evil high priest is only a “monster,” seemingly given his human affiliation, because he is unknown. But as soon as this definition of monstrosity is established, it is immediately qualified by the idea that this priest may very well turn out to be a monster in the “other sense.” The horrible, wicked sense? Or the undesignated sense of otherness that looms far larger than such a definition can control or maintain, yet at the same time beautifully opens up. Here the idea of monstrosity is not so much premised on the physical difference between things: some kind of unholy lack of resemblance. Rather, the monster may be monstrous in some “other sense,” some invisible sense that is not necessarily easily to determine. What does horrible and wicked look like? How do you determine these characteristics? Are they physically defined?
It reminds me of one of my top three films of all time: John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Perhaps one of the greatest situations in all of cinema, The Thing is rooted in an idea of monstrosity you can not immediately see. The monster (or is it the alien?) takes the shape and attributes of its victims down to every last detail. The distinctions are impossible to determine though visual or social interaction. Making the moment when they come up with a blood test one of the most compelling scenes in cinema of all time for me.
The physical blood test provides a reprieve from the ultimate horror and monstrosity, namely the idea that there is no way to truly distinguish between what is monstrous and what is not. It has no easily determined shape or form, it could be any of us—the great contribution of Invaders of the Body Snatchers (1955). A kind of general malaise of monstrosity that is indeterminable, but ever present.
And all of this from the first, “clarifying” paragraph from a manual dedicated to the idea of monstrosity. A work of art in every sense of the word, it is without question an imaginative fount of wonder. And while I’m easily sidetracked by the definition of monster it tries to provide, there is no question how deeply this book forced concepts on the mind of a hapless ten year old that created a certain sense of confusion. What does it mean that a Manticore has the alignment of Lawful Evil and a Centaur that of Neutral Chaotic Good? How do I hold these seeming antithetical ideas in harmony to make sense of this monstrous world? I remember working though this with a friend who was far smarter than me, how took the occasion to suggestion that the words lawful and evil aren’t necessarily contradictory. What a valuable lesson.
Yet, it was the profiles and images in the Monster Manual that made me want to understand this strange moral world of monsters. I would spend hours reading the descriptions of the monsters, determining their point system, and obsessing over the illustrations, all of which suggests the way this kind of text introduced a whole new way of imagining in relationship to numbers, text, images, and often maps as well. The Monster Manual is a truly unique work of the imagination, and I can’t tell you how fun it was to re-visit creatures like the Lurker Above, the image of which falling on an unexpecting victim always intrigued me how powerful this monster was.
And there was Mimic, a monster that can “perfectly mimic stone or wood” but cannot stand the sunlight. I just loved the image of the Mimic posing as a treasure chest, while at the same time cocking its fist prepared to knock the unassuming adventurer flat out.
And there was also the Mind Flayer, who crazy tentacled head, and psionic brain eating abilitie downright frightened me.
And a personal favorite were the more quotidian Lizard Men—who were always a personal favorite, especially since I paid my friend’s brother a dollar a figure to paint my Lizard Men lead figurines, it was worth it.
So, Andy, I think I have an idea of what you meant by your comment, and in fact it is funny how much re-reading this stuff brings back so much of that original wonder in the face of all things monstrous.
Here at UMW we have been going through a CMS Review. It has been a pretty interesting project, and while I only tangentially involved, I have been following the basic rhetorical thrust of the sales pitches from companies like Desire2Learn, BlackBoard, and Angel (well be getting in-house demos of Sakai and Moodle next week).
As any faithful reader of the bava may have already guessed, I’m not particularly a fan of Course Management Systems. But, at the same time, I am beginning to understand the perceived need for them in higher ed. I find it interesting that most of the questions in a CMS review center around issues of the gradebook and quiz functionality, which seems to really highlight—as Jerry would argue rightly, I think—that these systems are predominantly about administrative management of courses rather than teaching and learning. Fair enough, I should just swallow my medicine then, right? Maybe, and I’m trying to become more amiable and compliant. I really am, I swear.
But humor me for second. This evening I was thinking about a particular strand of NYC movies such as The Warriors (1979) Times Square (1980), Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), C.H.U.D. (1984), Alphabet City (1984), Crocodile Dundee (1986), Bright Lights, Big City (1988), State of Grace (1990), New Jack City (1991), and several others. While these films represent a wide range of genres, they have something in common in my mind which is a filmic framing of New York City as a wilderness, a frontier of crime, violence, and more generally fear. A vision feeding upon the perception of New York City during the 60 and 70s —with the white flight to the suburbs—as a reflection of the state of general “decline” of urban centers (we can understand that decline in a whole host of race and class-inflected ways). Just think about the title of the film Fort Apache, The Bronx, which alludes to John Ford’s Western classic starring John Wayne titled Fort Apache (1948) (though Ford’s film is far more sympathetic and complex a look at the Native Americans than Fort Apache, The Bronx is of the inhabitants of the South Bronx), it is a self-defined frontier film relocated back to the cities of the East Coast. During the late 70s, throughout the 80s, and into the 90s (when the process is just about complete), a new battle for a return of “civilization” in America’s “once great” cities emerges. It is the rise, in several different forms, of the “urban jungle” film, a space that must be exposed, condemned, and re-conquered—and film was one place this happened.
Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier does a phenomenal job of examining the details of “urban renewal” as deep-rooted shift in both the political economy and culture of U.S. cities during the late twentieth century. The very language of the process of gentrification of urban areas has taken on the frontier imagery of the West: urban pioneers, urban homesteaders, urban cowboys, etc. Films like those above trace this shift in myriad ways, and capture the cultural impact of re-framing American cities as frontiers of crime, violence and difference that need to be both civilized and assimilated, which more often than not means the undesirable element of any given city need to be made invisible, hidden from public view, which C.H.U.D. does a wonderful job at suggesting with the transformation of the displaced populations of NYC living under the city in old Subway tunnels (also known as Mole People, a reality compounded in the 80s when President Reagan put the majority of America’s mentally ill patients from clinics, hospitals, and treatment centers around the country on the streets) into monsters that were created by the very government that tried to hide them (I love this movie!). And there is more to say about each of these films, I mean Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee is just the kind of rough and exotic cowboy needed to fight the rampant crime in NYC, and ultimately he liberates the city and himself from the violence that often characterizes any frontier (frontier, in my mind, proving a a very different linguistic formulation than the more nuanced and complex idea of a borderzone which examines the flow of fluid identities through space). And I could talk about all these movies at length, but that is another post, or series of posts, about New York City gentrification in the movies. Suffice it to say, you can read movies as social, political, and cultural traces of the re-imagining of the urban centers as frontiers that need to be subdued, and which are re-claimed and occupied by the middle and upper-classes during the late 90s and 00s.
So what the hell does any of this have to do with educational technology and CMSs? Everything, in my mind. Course management systems as we know them today emerged roughly 10 to 15 years ago (with the watershed year being 1997) as a means of creating virtual learning environments. The very logic of these environments was to create applications that could manage the administration, delivery, and discussion based components of a course online. About this time the CMS became ubiquitous in higher ed as a possibility for managing document distribution, rosters, forums, etc. Companies like BlackBoard emerged as all-in-one solutions for managing courses online due to the relative difficultly of using the open web in the late 90s given the unilateral nature of content delivery, limited access to the web, and the general difficulty designing and maintaining one’s own space. Course management systems fit a need, they were designed for a learning environment that posed a high threshold of difficulty for two-way participation.
Yet, over the the next ten years the web becomes a far more conducive space for dynamic interaction and participation, while at the same time internet penetration throughout the Western world becomes more and more ubiquitous. At the same time applications that offer similar functionality as course management systems begin to emerge at a fraction of the cost of centralized, proprietary systems. And the interest in emerging technologies with different approaches begins to appear, the early interest in learning object repositories and metadata might be understood as a foil to the parallel interest that emerges a bit later on with blogs, wikis, RSS, etc.—with the ease and simplicity of the later seemingly winning out over the labor intensive and static model of the former (I am treading on unfamiliar ground here, so feel free to fire away). So what we have here is a failure to communicate the emergence of a frontier in educational technology, the space of harnessing the possibilities for teaching and learning on the open web that are no longer limited to the logic of an outdated system like the CMS that provides a controlled space for basic interaction online around course materials given the apparent limitations of the early web. Yet, the logic of such a system morphs into a logic of institutional control, security, and convenience. What changes is not the actual underlying technology of CMSs as outdated systems of delivery and management centered around a course, but the general sense that the internet is a dangerous place (which it is) and teaching and learning needs to be cordoned off from that (which is questionable). The design of CMSs don’t change over this period of time, but their logic and raison d’etre does. And while the power of tools such as blogs, wikis, and RSS for creating engaging, interactive spaces for collaboration and discussion made simpler with syndication technology like RSS is amde more and more apparent, the rhetoric of fear, terror, and a protected and centralized space for teaching and learning becomes vocalized more and more.
So, what happens? The companies that make the CMSs gentrify the frontier, they try and assimilate the power of these tools within a controlled space that is safe, closed, and convenient. It is two pronged attack exploiting fear and protection of the students and teachers along with a promise of a centralized convenience and peace of mind. So, like the artists that moved into SOHO and the Lower East Side of NYC in the 60s and 70s, their pursuit of an affordable and diverse alternative to mainstream logic ultimately paves the way for capital to roll in and develop and gentrify these neighborhoods, eliminating most, if not all, of the original spaces that made them interesting and compelling to begin with. This is the lot of educational technology right now, those professors, IT folks, and instructional technologists who pioneered the field of educational technology on the open web over the last decade are watching their work be incorporated into a machine that is selling them back the fruits of their experimental labors as a shiny product that elides the very context of its relevance. Course management systems are the sterile environments of gentrified and wealthy cities like New York’s Manhattan that has very little left of its original luster, and what can be discovered comes at a cost that is prohibitive to the everyday citizen. The machine is, indeed, using us!
Are there alternatives? Is such a move irreversible? I don’t know, but when I read Barbara Ganley and trace her thought I do have hope for different models of thinking about teaching and learning within a digital framework. There are new frontiers emerging, and I want to be on them.
Last night I saw a coming attraction for the re-make of Prom Night (2008), which seemed so shiny and new compared to the original. In fact, while watching the trailer I found it to be a sign of the times of Hollywood for a couple of reasons: first, it seems an excellent example that the American film industry has given up all pretenses to having an original idea and has settled upon cannibalizing its own history; second, this particular remake (and this from the trailer alone) signifies just how polished and obsessed we have become with luxury, appearance, and all things empty. Now I know this is what people from the 50s and 60s would say about the 70s and 80s, but they’re wrong!
The trailer got me thinking about the original Prom Night from 1980 (the only one that’s true in my heart) and just how different the texture of that film is from the trailer I was assaulted with. The 1980 version of the film was a Canadian production (as was My Bloody Valentine (1981) another favorite slasher film of the era) filmed on location in Toronto, and it captures a really gritty and evocative image of a more modest and thoughtful moment in both cinema and culture. Take, for example, the trailer of the 2008 version, the students are all primped beyond belief (even the punks), it takes place in a fancy, rented-out ballroom, and the students all have $300 dollar a night hotel rooms. Compare that with the 1980 version: the prom is in the school’s gym, it’s a happening disco party, there are no limos in sight, and the dress has the undeniable flare and sexiness of the 1970s. It may seem odd to some that I would be hearkening back to the late 70s and early 80s for some sense of propriety and measure in terms of fashion and invidious consumption, but I’m convinced the decade we have been living through makes the late 70s and early 80s look like the Great Depression by comparison.
Take a look at the trailer for Prom Night (2008):
Now compare it with the Old Gold Prom Night (1980):
Which one do you want to watch? And while you could argue that the original Prom Night is a b-movie and we really shouldn’t be wasting our time trying to defend some exalted idea of when it is by its very conception second rate. However, that’s where you’re wrong. The 1980 version of Prom Night has one of the best opening scenes of any teenage slasher flick ever. It’s a powerfully poetic sequence tracing a group of kids playing a Gothic version of hide and seek (”The Killer is Coming”) in an old, dilapidated school that creates a really dark and scary setting. The very first shot of the scene (which you can watch below thanks to YouTube) frames the Gothic roots of this opening scene quite beautifully. How can you honestly re-make this film? It is impossible in this day and age, primarily because this Gothic structure is either long gone or has been turned into million dollar condos that the kids from the 2008 version of the film live in
When talking about films I saw as a pre-pubescent adolescent, I think one of the most important would have to be Ray Harryhausen’s Clash of the Titans (1981). Now technically, keeping inline with the logic of discussing film, I should have said Desmond Davis’s Clash of the Titans because he was the director, and ever since the 50s and 60s we have gotten in the habit of attributing films to an author, which usually results in naming a director (it can be a problematic habit that I posted about in some detail here ). But Clash of the Titans is not Desmond Davis’s film, it is Ray Harryhausen’s film, and it is sadly his very last film before he retired, effectively closing the chapter on a very rich and personalized contribution to cinematic special effects.
This film holds a special place in the pantheon of formative films for me, and it needs to be contextualized a bit with some details of my experience back in the early 80s with movies, theaters, and long and lazy Summers. This film was released on June 12, 1981, and I saw it soon after that and it was amazing for some very specific scenes that I will talk about shortly. But it wasn’t until the Summer of 1983 that I really was able to “see” this movie. You see, the theater up the block from my house, the Baldwin Century Theater, was one of a classic chain of single house theaters that represents for me everything that was amazing about movie going. It was a huge auditorium by contemporary standards, and by 1983 it was in serious financial difficulty given that movie theaters on Long Island had already begun literally splitting these single screen cathedrals in half to show two films simultaneously. The logic of the multiplex was beginning to supplant the single house theaters all over the country, signaling the end of a movie theater experience that had been around since the depression (the Baldwin Century Theater was built in 1933).
As a result of the larger trend towards cultural sterility and alienation, the Baldwin Century Theater’s economic struggles led the management to experiment a bit with imagining itself as a re-run theater. For the Summer of 1983 they got prints of pre-released films like Clash of the Titans and Star Wars (more on Star Wars in another formative 10 post) and showed them for the entire Summer for 75¢ a pop. That was an admission fee that even an eleven year old could easily afford, and it resulted in my sisters and I going to the theater regularly for almost two months. We must have seen Clash of the Titans and Star Wars twenty times that Summer, and watching the two films together like that was, in retrospect, an interesting juxtaposition of the future and the past of special effects in cinema. What’s more, by this stage of the theater’s rapid decline the management seemed to understand they were finished, so neighborhood kids who were just a little older than me, and that I knew, were effectively running the movie house. It was almost as if it were a fun place for kids to go and hang out, and while I never watched either of these films all the way through after the fourth or fifth time that Summer, there were scenes from each I never missed.
And that brings me to the actual film, which was by no means a great film if one were to examine it in terms of narrative or acting. And while there was no shortage of great actors in the film, including Laurence Olivier as Zues, Maggie Smith as Thetis, and Burgess Meredith as Ammon, the actual screenplay and narrative thrust were not remotely adequate to the British thespian firepower at hand. These actors were just names on a card that meant nothing to an 11 year old (and having seen the film lately the acting is by no means remarkable), what was memorable however was Ray Harryhausen’s fantastic creatures. The film brings to mind for me a phrase Tom Gunning used to define the very beginnings of film: “the Cinema of Attractions.” This concept refers to early years in cinematic history, roughly from 1894 to 1908, when film was in an almost constant state of transformation, and its logic wasn’t so strictly dominated by any one particular sense of narrative or formative style. To quote Gunning:
[Cinema prior to 1908] did not see its main task as the presentation of narratives. This does not mean that there were not early films that told stories, but that this task was secondary, at least until about 1904. That transformation that occurs in films around 1908 derives from reorienting film style to a clear focus on the task of storytelling and characterization.
Rather than using film for outright entertainment purpose, the “cinema of attractions” offers the viewer something different: “the chance to take a journey somewhere else-a place to which he will likely never physically travel…films sought to transport the viewer through space and time, rather than to simply tell a story,” as Lila E. Stevens points out in her discussion of documentary film here. And while Clash of the Titans is anything but a documentary film, and I am admittedly re-appropriating Gunning’s phrase to define the earliest moments of cinema for my own nostalgic purposes. That said, I do think that the a number of the formative films in my life have consistently represented a series of scene-based attractions that overpower the the narrative to focus on a moment that captures the dynamic qualities of the medium as a space for wonder. And it’s for this reason that I claim privilege to extend the scope of such a term, or at the very least an excuse for commandeering it.
The narrative of Clash of the Titans seems to be the occasion for Ray Harryhausen to transport the viewer to a fantastical time and place with his animated creations that themselves mark a point in time that seems irretrievable beyond the celluloid it was captured on. And for me remains one of the most formative films in my early career as spectator for this very reason. I wasn’t at the time so concerned with the some structuralist approach to narrative and story, I was eleven and fascinated by the visual magic that was in motion on the large screen before me. Kinesis in the raw! How can I forget the animated vulture carrying Andromeda’s spirit to meet Calibos in the Swamp of Despair. Or Calibos himself (a Harryhausen original), whose mangled, hybrid form became the symbol for me of the Satyrs I would later read about in Greek Mythology, or the goat-footed balloon man whistling far and wee in e. e. cumming’s “In Just Spring.”
Calibos was a memorable villian, not because of anything he did or said, but because of how he looked and how he moved, how he was animated. Much the same can be said of Pegasus or the three-headed dog Cerebus or the growth hormone spawned Scorpions. But without question the greatest single scene in Clash of the Titans that may in and of itself be responsible for the impression this movie has had on me for all these years is when Perseus encounters and beheads Medusa. Now I fully understand that Harryhausen’s greatest single contribution to special effects in film comes almost twenty years earlier in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) with his animation of the fighting Skeletons scene (I’ve linked to this work of genius below). Acknowledging that, his animated gorgon will forever hold the honor of his greatest work for me. Not so much because I can’t objectively see that is far less complex and innovative than the fighting skeletons, but rather it was a ten minute scene that embodied the idea of movies as a series of attractions, each of which are often far greater and more powerful than a narrative whole.
Medusa Scene from Clash of the Titans
It is the narrative that we are ultimately trained to appreciate when we come to study in school, but the scenes of attraction are likes lines of visual poetry that contain those moments of pure and utter imaginative magic. It was the Medusa scene in Clash of the Titans that turned me on to Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels and got me playing Dungeons and Dragons. It was this scene that ultimately encouraged me to read Edith Hamilton’s classic work on Greek Mythology, and it was this scene that made me re-think the far more contemporary special effects I had been introduced to years before in Star Wars (the Sand People had a somewhat similar effect on me as Medusa had–which is interesting for me to consider). It was also this scene that made me think having a quiver of arrows strapped to your back was possibly the coolest thing in the entire world, not to mention having snakes for hair or being able to turn others to stone with a dirty look.
So, when I talk about Clash of the Titans it’s not so much about a movie as it is about a series of scenes that were meticulously handcrafted in their effect on my psyche. Medusa as a character may even be laughable to all those CGI babies out there, but it suggests one possible aesthetic of many, and a very individualized one with the distinctive marks of its creator. A form of craftsmanship in special effects (a world that has changed drastically) that we aren’t likely to see ever again. And while I may be wrong with this sentiment, the fact that Hollywood is re-making Clash of the Titan—which is slated for a 2010 release date—may allow me to think more closely about the transformation of special effects in cinema over the last thirty years, along with Harryhausen’s place in this history.
Interestingly enough, Harryhausen didn’t retire in 1981 because he was ready to stop animating, but because he was pushed out of the business. No one was interested in his work anymore given the rise of George Lucas’s visual effects house Industrial Light & Magic, the shop that revolutionized special effects in a little film you might have heard of called Star Wars (1977). Which, I imagine, has to be my next formative 10 post given how this one leaves off with a certain amount of unfinished business. But before I end it, here is the Skeleton Fight scene from Jason and the Argonauts, just in case you have haven’t seen it before. Just the way they come out of the ground is simply amazing. Though, you may want to get the DVD, or wait for it to come out in a single screen theater near you. Enjoy!
I had the great pleasure of re-watching one of my favorite films of all time recently with Shannon during our lunch hour. We saw the The Ultimate Director’s Cut version of The Warriors (1979) released in 2005, which I had not yet seen —and I must say the digital transfer of the film is quite beautiful. Walter Hill takes a couple of strange liberties with his classic though, which add nothing in my opinion.
The first is an appended introduction read by Hill that presents the story of a band of ancient Greek soldiers trapped deep in Persia. They had to travel 1,000 miles through hostile territory to get home. Drawing an overt relationship between the mythical Coney Island gang and the the storied struggles of antiquity. Secondly, this version adds several comic book like transitions between scenes which unnecessarily reinforce the unreal elements of this near future urban jungle film. And while they did not cut or re-edit any scenes, the intrusive introduction and comic book animations are rather facile in their not so subtle insistence on Hill’s inspiration for creating the film (which in many ways seems more like a retrospective reading to me). The video below features two brief examples of the additions:
Shannon suggested my annoyance with the added features may have everything to do with an unhealthy attachment to the “original” or “true” version of the film I saw back in the 80s, and an essentialist insistence on some kind of purity….fair enough–she’s probably right, as she so often is. That being said, how do additions like these add anything to the narrative by so awkwardly insisting on these roots? I’m not sure, but the film itself stands up beautifully regardless (this print made me once again realize what a cinematic masterpiece many shots in this film are), but given the choice I would much rather see a print like this without all the slick comic transitions and overly earnest Greek frame —does everything have to be explicit to the point where the director feels the need to actually leave his reading on the frames of the film post-facto? The trend in Hollywood to cannibalize itself for ideas and inspiration seems to be moving forward at a breakneck pace, for like Escape from LA (that duck) The Warriors is set to be re-made in LA by none other than Tony Scott. [Wince!]
My bitching and moaning aside, seeing this movie again has inspired me. So much so that I will finally start the formative ten series I promised a while back, which will not follow any particular chronological order, strict posting time line, or generic logic. The Warriors is definitely part of my formative 10, and there were a few things that struck me watching it this time around that might help me think about why this movie was so remarkable to me growing up.
First a quote from a footnote in Frederic Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic, which while a bit dense when tracing a theory of cognitive mapping and the idea of imagining global space in cinema (I imagine the real point of the book ), has a bunch of interesting readings of some great movies. I particularly liked Jameson’s reading of Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), which might be a very interesting film to re-watch these days to think about the questions of media, power, control, and psychotropic conspiracy. He also has a great reading of the paranoia films of the 70s, with an intriguing discussion of filming the spaces of power and capital using Pakula’s All the President's Men (1976) as a fascinating example. Anyway, the footnote in question is a throw away thought Jameson had, that I found interesting:
I have here omitted gang war films, which, at least during a certain period might well have been read as visions of internal civil war, see, for example Escape from New York (Carpenter, 1981), The Warriors (Hill, 1979) Fort Apache, the Bronx (Petrie, 1981). On my view these films shade over into what is called, in Science-Fiction terminology, ‘near future’ representations and this distinctive genre in its own right, its form and structure sharply distinguished by the viewer from ‘realistic’ verisimilitude or immanence. (The Geopolitical Aestheic, Pg 83 note 15)
I think this quote initially struck me because it references three movies that I loved. And more than that, it gathers them together as a particular genre with the suggestion that they may reflect a vision of “internal civi war” in urban centers like NYC. In fact, it is the idea of an internal civil war that Jameson suggests here, that has informed the way I think about much of the urban jungle films made from the 70s and 80s through the 90s and up and until now. They often reflect a kind of struggle at work within the invisible underworlds and subcultures of any given city, that is akin to a city at war with itself, factions of power (wealthy developers, the agents of gentrification, the minions of capital) versus those being marginalized, displaced, and disempowered.
In fact, this struggle brings me to one of the most important and powerful elements of The Warriors, and what I firmly think marries a revolutionary message with an unbelievably cutting edge and imaginative aesthetic that reflects the times. The gangs make this movie, when I first watched the Warriors in the early 80s (made available for multiple viewing for the entire family thanks to the VCR) we were all intrigued by the gangs and their crazy get-ups. There was something for everyone: the Turnbull ACs were the skinheads; High Hats played Soho artist thugs; the Gramercy Riffs married Black Panther militarism with some impressive kung-fu (long before the emergence of WuTang); the Baseball Furies whose psychotic face paintings were only outmatched by their Yankee pinstripes and Louisville Sluggers; and we shouldn’t forget about the Lizzies who were a band of badass chicks who my four sisters immediately related to and started imitating. The gangs’ outfits, their territorial presence, and the fact that the beginning of the movie brings them all together in one place, frames the hopeful, revolutionary moment of this internal civil war, just in case you forgot, let’s review Cyrus’s speech to the nine delegates from all of the cities gangs in Van Cortland Park.
Sixty thousand soldiers, and only 20,000 police in the whole town. This is a call for organized civil war, this is a grass roots movement to take over New York City, the disenfranchised of NY who “got the streets” realizing their power, an coming together under the great Cyrus who realizes the problem of the past, “the man turning them against one another.” It is a remarkably revolutionary moment in this movie, Cyrus as a political revolutionary hearkening back to the major political figures and orators of the 60s titans like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., [[Robert Kennedy|Robert] and John F. Kennedy with some engaging rhetoric like “Miracles is the way things ought to be!” (which makes this video featuring the speech from Cyrus on top of images of Obama that much more intriguing).
There is also Cyrus’s insistence on counting, math, and the power of numbers, not to mention his ability to succinctly put his finger on the gangs’ historical problems of the past rooted in their limiting logic of turf, property, and those 10 square feet in front of them. What this scene also does brilliantly is recognize that figures who foment political transgression and social organization must ultimately be assassinated. I think this scene alone ranks this as one of the best films ever, as reference back to the real violence of the 60s (despite all the peace and love talk) and the mathematical argument that the street people could be more powerful than the institutions. An entertaining and revolutionary scene all at once, informed entirely by the uniquely different gangs that coalesced into a larger force of self-aware power.
But let’s face it, that self-awareness doesn’t last, and the struggle to get back home to Coney frames a majority of the action, the run-ins with various gangs, and the compelling narrative thrust to make it back to home base safe and in one piece. There are many great scenes along the way, and I could list a whole ton of them, but in fact Jameson’s idea of internal civil war, and the emergence of an organized network of disenfranchised working together to rule New York is in many ways a truly poetic moment. And while I’ll focus on that currently, I guess in the end the reason why I saw this movie so many times to reflect on that scene so often has everything to do with the gangs and their identities, reflected in everything from their race, ethnicity, gender, clothes, credibility and carriage. So before I end this one, let’s remember why we watch The Warriors again and again, it’s all about the gangs, as the trailer knew all too well at the time of its release.
I had the great pleasure of re-watching one of my favorite films of all time recently with Shannon during our lunch hour. We saw the The Ultimate Director’s Cut version of The Warriors (1979) released in 2005, which I had not yet seen —and I must say the digital transfer of the film is quite beautiful. Walter Hill takes a couple of strange liberties with his classic though, which add nothing in my opinion.
The first is an appended introduction read by Hill that presents the story of a band of ancient Greek soldiers trapped deep in Persia. They had to travel 1,000 miles through hostile territory to get home. Drawing an overt relationship between the mythical Coney Island gang and the the storied struggles of antiquity. Secondly, this version adds several comic book like transitions between scenes which unnecessarily reinforce the unreal elements of this near future urban jungle film. And while they did not cut or re-edit any scenes, the intrusive introduction and comic book animations are rather facile in their not so subtle insistence on Hill’s inspiration for creating the film (which in many ways seems more like a retrospective reading to me). The video below features two brief examples of the additions:
Shannon suggested my annoyance with the added features may have everything to do with an unhealthy attachment to the “original” or “true” version of the film I saw back in the 80s, and an essentialist insistence on some kind of purity….fair enough–she’s probably right, as she so often is. That being said, how do additions like these add anything to the narrative by so awkwardly insisting on these roots? I’m not sure, but the film itself stands up beautifully regardless (this print made me once again realize what a cinematic masterpiece many shots in this film are), but given the choice I would much rather see a print like this without all the slick comic transitions and overly earnest Greek frame —does everything have to be explicit to the point where the director feels the need to actually leave his reading on the frames of the film post-facto? The trend in Hollywood to cannibalize itself for ideas and inspiration seems to be moving forward at a breakneck pace, for like Escape from LA (that duck) The Warriors is set to be re-made in LA by none other than Tony Scott. [Wince!]
My bitching and moaning aside, seeing this movie again has inspired me. So much so that I will finally start the formative ten series I promised a while back, which will not follow any particular chronological order, strict posting time line, or generic logic. The Warriors is definitely part of my formative 10, and there were a few things that struck me watching it this time around that might help me think about why this movie was so remarkable to me growing up.
First a quote from a footnote in Frederic Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic, which while a bit dense when tracing a theory of cognitive mapping and the idea of imagining global space in cinema (I imagine the real point of the book ), has a bunch of interesting readings of some great movies. I particularly liked Jameson’s reading of Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), which might be a very interesting film to re-watch these days to think about the questions of media, power, control, and psychotropic conspiracy. He also has a great reading of the paranoia films of the 70s, with an intriguing discussion of filming the spaces of power and capital using Pakula’s All the President's Men (1976) as a fascinating example. Anyway, the footnote in question is a throw away thought Jameson had, that I found interesting:
I have here omitted gang war films, which, at least during a certain period might well have been read as visions of internal civil war, see, for example Escape from New York (Carpenter, 1981), The Warriors (Hill, 1979) Fort Apache, the Bronx (Petrie, 1981). On my view these films shade over into what is called, in Science-Fiction terminology, ‘near future’ representations and this distinctive genre in its own right, its form and structure sharply distinguished by the viewer from ‘realistic’ verisimilitude or immanence. (The Geopolitical Aestheic, Pg 83 note 15)
I think this quote initially struck me because it references three movies that I loved. And more than that, it gathers them together as a particular genre with the suggestion that they may reflect a vision of “internal civi war” in urban centers like NYC. In fact, it is the idea of an internal civil war that Jameson suggests here, that has informed the way I think about much of the urban jungle films made from the 70s and 80s through the 90s and up and until now. They often reflect a kind of struggle at work within the invisible underworlds and subcultures of any given city, that is akin to a city at war with itself, factions of power (wealthy developers, the agents of gentrification, the minions of capital) versus those being marginalized, displaced, and disempowered.
In fact, this struggle brings me to one of the most important and powerful elements of The Warriors, and what I firmly think marries a revolutionary message with an unbelievably cutting edge and imaginative aesthetic that reflects the times. The gangs make this movie, when I first watched the Warriors in the early 80s (made available for multiple viewing for the entire family thanks to the VCR) we were all intrigued by the gangs and their crazy get-ups. There was something for everyone: the Turnbull ACs were the skinheads; High Hats played Soho artist thugs; the Gramercy Riffs married Black Panther militarism with some impressive kung-fu (long before the emergence of WuTang); the Baseball Furies whose psychotic face paintings were only outmatched by their Yankee pinstripes and Louisville Sluggers; and we shouldn’t forget about the Lizzies who were a band of badass chicks who my four sisters immediately related to and started imitating. The gangs’ outfits, their territorial presence, and the fact that the beginning of the movie brings them all together in one place, frames the hopeful, revolutionary moment of this internal civil war, just in case you forgot, let’s review Cyrus’s speech to the nine delegates from all of the cities gangs in Van Cortland Park.
Sixty thousand soldiers, and only 20,000 police i