https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5I2vEcVC_I

Re: the question from today’s class (“Does Nick Cave have a sense of humor?”), I present to you the music video for “Nick the Stripper,” a 1981 song recorded by the band that he led at the time, The Birthday Party. I feel pretty certain that no one who had a hand in creating this video could possibly not have a sense of humor. (Fun fact: the clip was edited by John Hillcoat, who later went on to direct the films Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, The Proposition, The Road and Lawless, all of which are connected to Nick Cave by the screenplays, the scores/soundtracks, acting roles or – in the case of the first film – all three.) “Nick the Stripper” is 100% absurd, the title indicating How to Poke Fun at Yourself and Your Purported Goth Image 101. Had I just a little more chutzpah I would find an excuse to show this in school, gleefully terrifying my fellow students with this nightmarish (and in all likelihood, heroin-soaked) vision of London set ablaze by wayward Australians, but instead I’ll settle for terrifying you as you watch from the comfort of your home or perhaps elsewhere in public, wherever you happen to be with your viewing apparatus.

Should you find yourself wondering, “What other bizarre music did this weird band make and why haven’t I heard it yet?” I can point you in the direction of “Junkyard,” which will certainly be one of the most entertainingly strange (and possibly excruciating) TV-show performances you’re likely to see (from anyone, in general), and “Fears of Gun,” from a concert filmed not long before the band imploded in 1983 and during which, to the delight of the audience members pawing at him, Nick Cave is dragged partway off the stage and he sinks backward into the crowd. This results in a) Cave rejecting the assistance of a bunch of roadies and b) the other members of the band not actually attempting to help in any way. You may notice the sound of Rowland S. Howard’s guitar fading out briefly during the incident but the playing eventually resumes, a reminder that the show must go on, even after the frontman has potentially lost control of his senses and/or judgment.

The narrative of Under the Skin unfolds a lot like the scene from Weekend that we watched last week: we see result after deadly result of the Female’s (as the IMDb refers to her) inhuman machinations before the end when we finally see what she is, the form that has forced her to inhabit her human skin and do the deadly things that she must (until she meets the deformed man, Adam, anyway). Arguably the moments of violence, like the disintegration of one victim’s body, are more disturbing than the brief glimpses Godard gives us of the corpses in the Weekend road accidents, but what’s even more shocking is the potential for nonhuman, extraterrestrial beings to have the feelings and reactions we ascribe solely to “human” people and that some human beings are predators devoid of empathy or other traditionally human emotional characteristics. Perhaps that makes the sex scene between the Female and her Scottish sort-of-savior particularly discomforting: he thinks he is having physical and/or emotional contact with a being who looks human – and almost is one – but actually is not.

My favorite shot in Under the Skin is the image of the Female, asleep in the cabin in the woods, juxtaposed against the lush greenery of the forest. The shot reminds me of Maya Deren’s short film At Land (1944), in which her body is present (usually recumbent) in unusual spaces like on a long table at a dinner party. We’re aware of the strangeness of a woman lying down or crawling through environments in a manner that is not socially acceptable or even logically possible, but what’s even more surprising is how a shot of a woman’s entire body becomes less about her physicality and more about the setting it is in and how the blurring of time/space and real/unreal creates meaning in what we are seeing. Throughout most of the film the Female’s figure is sexualized, but in the forest shot we see her becoming one with nature, perhaps dreaming of being a living, breathing human. I’m sure that some viewers can’t get more out of the experience of watching Under the Skin than the titillation of Scarlett Johansson’s physical form, but there is so much happening beneath the surface of the character (or at least so much to interpret in our projections) – going on under the skin of the film.

When we discussed the image of the Woman’s eye as “meat,” that immediately reminded me of another Scarlett Johansson film that was in theaters last year, sometime between Under the Skin and Lucy: the Jon Favreau-directed comedy Chef. Johansson’s character is a one-dimensional object of lust for the main character, a cute co-worker whose amount of screen time directly relates to how needed and/or wanted she is by men. (She’s needed to run things efficiently in the restaurant; she’s wanted for a brief fling with Favreau that has no pesky emotional baggage or character development.) There’s a shot of Johansson in which she is not merely a prop; she is literally propped up on her elbow as she watches Favreau cook, waiting for the moment when she gets to taste the meal and reassure him that he’s a master of his craft. She is meat carefully arranged and served on a couch-plate, a thigh to feed the hungry eye of the audience.

While looking at that image of Johansson in Chef, I am also reminded of a shot from the Roberta Findlay film Angel on Fire (1974), which I have been reading about in conjunction with a proposal that I have been writing for another class. My research deals with representations of women’s bodies in films directed by women, a topic that I initially restricted to 1915-1955 but which eventually expanded to the 1960s and 70s because of my interest in how portrayals of the body change in the era of low-budget sexploitation and pornography. Our perceptions of film and the female bodies in them change, I think, in the case of Findlay’s career since she not only directed but also photographed her films (and she edited Angel on Fire), putting her in control of the images produced. The character in the shot above is supposed to be pregnant and the camera stands in for her fiancé as he listens to her announce the news of her condition. Findlay simultaneously exposes and covers up the pregnant woman’s body, a combination of eroticization and her new role as a mother. Do the politics of the body work according to the same rules when body parts are on display in porn? Is it “feminist” porn because the story is written, filmed and put together in post-production by a woman, or is there more that has to be involved with regard to plot and characterizations?

In our last class I was thinking about a lot of different films, far too many to tie them together in one coherent post. Therefore this post will be a mixed bag of assorted clips, each of them relating to our Monday discussion in some way.

I mentioned Herbert Ross’s Pennies from Heaven (1981) in relation to the Tsai Ming-liang film that we watched part of, The Hole (1998). (You might want to watch the first minute of this clip first, since it’s not included in the video I embedded above and there’s dialogue that sets up the “Pennies from Heaven” number.) I realize that all musicals incorporate some level of fantasy in musical-number scenes – it is considered totally normal for characters to stop what they are doing and break into song – but what makes both Pennies from Heaven and The Hole different is that the drama in the non-musical portions of the narrative is so stark and sometimes tragic, while the musical parts are incredibly and almost overwhelmingly stylized, using vivid colors in the costumes, makeup and set design to heighten the contrast between the two types of storytelling within each film. The act of lipsynching, utilized in both films, also puts the focus on the characters’ dreams of finding some kind of paradise thanks to big-budget fantasies that temporarily ease the pain of daily life.

In thinking about uses of time in film, I find myself remembering Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? (2001), which tells the story of a watch salesman who meets a woman for a brief moment, selling a watch to her and in the process finding out that she is moving to Paris, and this tiny slip of an encounter obsesses him so that he makes it his mission to change every timepiece so that he will always know what time it is where the woman is, in Paris. The film also makes constant reference to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), which you’ll notice in the trailer because Jean Constantin’s score for the Truffaut film plays throughout it, in addition to showing a scene from What Time Is It There? in which Lee Kang-sheng’s character watches The 400 Blows on TV. There is also a scene – perhaps a couple of scenes, I can’t quite remember – in which Jean-Pierre Léaud, the star of Truffaut’s film all those decades ago, pops up in a cameo. Besides paying tribute to that specific moment in time in cinematic history, What Time Is It There? has its own unusual sense of timing for shots, sometimes letting the camera linger, most notably in a shot of a prostitute stealing Lee Kang-sheng’s watches from his car after they have had sex (and he has fallen asleep), the shot staying fixed on the woman as she lugs the heavy case full of merchandise down the street until she is out of sight. (You can see the scene here from the 1:36:52 mark until 1:38:05.) There are also two narratives occurring simultaneously since the film tells the stories of both the watch salesman and the woman with whom he is infatuated, weaving back and forth between their individual lives in Taipei and Paris.

Ideas about time become even more complicated when dealing with documentaries. 20,000 Days on Earth (2014, dirs. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard) is a partly fictionalized day-in-the-life portrait of musician Nick Cave, a totally unreal setup because Cave visits so many different locations across England, France and Australia, always by car, that it makes no sense how it all could have transpired in the time frame of one sunrise to its resultant sunset. I only wish that I could find a clip online from the beginning of the film (I have the DVD – if anyone’s interested!), which organizes the chosen “important” events and memories in Nick Cave’s life into a countdown collage of moments from birth to his current day on Earth, compressed into about a minute and a half. A series of scenes throughout the film show a Nick Cave archive (designed for the film; it’s not a real place) where Cave can sift through photographs and other objects that trigger his memories à la Deleuze (moving along the y-axis, you might say…) and catalog his personal and professional histories. At the film’s climax, a Sydney Opera House concert set on that twenty-thousandth day is intercut with shots from concerts that happened throughout Cave’s career, tying memory, experience and the passage of time together as continuous influences on the world of right now. (The y-axis affects the linear progression of x-axis actions.) Every moment in the film’s one-day period is marked by the ghosts of the past.

Finally, as far as road movies are concerned, Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road (1976) is foremost in my mind. (The original German title, Im Lauf der Zeit, translates to “In the Course of Time.”) This short clip gives you a pretty good sense of what most of the film is like: the landscape is as much a character as the humans themselves, and music fills in the space left empty by the lack of language. These two men (played by Rüdiger Vogler and Hanns Zischler), who have been thrown together by chance, often communicate through silence. They allow the environment and the soundtrack of records and radio music to speak for them. Time becomes drawn out as these characters make their way across Germany, Vogler’s projectionist character stopping his van at each town’s near-deserted and falling-apart movie theater. And given Kings’ running time of two hours and fifty-six minutes, the experience of seeing the film in a theater (as I did at MoMA last month) creates what feels like a bond between all the moviegoers, as though we had all been on a journey even though we never left our chairs. The passage of time is a constant concern in Wenders’ films, as in the thirteen-minute phone scene between Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas (1984), which recounts the entire history of their marriage, and in the angels and humans considering the meaning of mortal existence in Wings of Desire (1987) and Faraway, So Close! (1993). Perhaps time doesn’t heal enough, as Wings’ female protagonist, Marion, wonders; maybe time is the disease. (And while we’re thinking about Wings of Desire, I also like this bit of analysis from a Criterion Collection essay on the film, which connects to readings from past classes regarding objectification, voyeurism and visual pleasure.)

After our last class when we discussed the Linda Williams essay on “film bodies,” I went back to the section on “Structures of Fantasy.” Williams includes a chart of which categories certain films fall into depending on pornographic/horror/melodramatic content and the perceived intended/expected audience, and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) falls into the horror category with the assumed audience of teenage boys. The interesting thing about Dressed to Kill, besides the fact that it was nominated for three Razzies (including Worst Director) in the very first year that the awards were given out, is that it steals so gleefully from Alfred Hitchcock films, possibly more so than in any other De Palma film. (I’ve seen quite a few of those sex-and-violence-driven De Palma thrillers – Sisters, Body Double, Passion, etc. – so I feel able to make that statement.) Dressed to Kill is primarily influenced by Psycho, but there is a famous scene set in a museum that swipes so many elements from Vertigo that De Palma ought to have been arrested for theft. Everything from the setting to Pino Donaggio’s score to Angie Dickinson’s Kim Novak-esque outfit is meant to evoke Hitchcock’s film and the cat-and-mouse game played by Dickinson and Ken Baker is supposed to excite the viewer as much as it does Dickinson. The blend of desire and unease is part of the thrill of the chase both for her (the participant) and for us (the spectator). The quality of fantasy exists here because De Palma places the two characters in a soft-focus bubble of Hitchcockian homage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUyibRxVr1g

Talk about a “quest for an object of desire” (as Laplanche and Pontalis might say)!

Unsurprisingly for a De Palma film, a female character suffers as a result of expressing her sexuality (although the question of whether Dickinson had any choice in either consenting to or refusing the sexual encounter is up for debate). This not-so-clandestine taxicab interlude between strangers brings greater sexual satisfaction to Dickinson’s character than anything she has experienced with her husband – De Palma depicts this with a “bad sex” scene at the beginning of the film – but as we know from Linda Williams’ list, Dressed to Kill is a horror film. Draw your own conclusions.

There was a mention of “positive racism… which is still racism” in class yesterday. One of the most complicated examples of that is Fred Astaire’s tribute to dancer Bill Robinson in the “Bojangles of Harlem” number in the film Swing Time (1936). The entire musical sequence is supposed to be a show of love for Robinson but everything about the scene is rooted in caricatures, seen most egregiously when Astaire appears onstage in blackface and wearing clothes intended to evoke Harlem. Alastair Macaulay wrote about the number in the New York Times a few years back and, in judging form versus content, described the footwork as “rhythmically imaginative.” This is certainly true in the second half of the scene, which involves shadows projected onto the wall behind Astaire. But how can anyone, even a great fan of Astaire as a performer, feel comfortable watching him perform black identity? He is black only for as long as the number lasts, and afterwards he can wash the makeup off, removing the mask – his masquerade – of blackness. Swing Time is considered one of Astaire’s finest films; as a child who grew up with a sizable collection of 1930s-60s musicals on VHS, I have been familiar with (and a fan of) Swing Time for almost my entire life and I always loved it for the inoffensive songs and dances (“Pick Yourself Up,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “A Fine Romance,” the intimate two-person spectacle of “Never Gonna Dance”). It wasn’t until I was older that I realized how problematic “Bojangles of Harlem” was and still is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4UUkui545I

The “Bojangles” problem also makes me think more critically about “Shine on Your Shoes” in The Band Wagon (1953), in which Astaire shares the dance space with Leroy Daniels, who got the role because he actually was a shoe shiner in real life. Daniels’ character can only be present in the space because he is performing a service for a white character. Not only that, Daniels has to do what was so often asked of black film characters: he has to act pleased to serve Astaire. (By the end of the scene Daniels is thoroughly delighted to have the opportunity to brush the dust off Astaire’s clothes.) Daniels was not even billed onscreen for his efforts, identifiable only as “Arcade Shoeshine Man” among the film’s list of uncredited characters and bit parts on the IMDb. MGM lets him be Astaire’s onscreen partner, but at the same time those Powers That Be deny Daniels an equal amount of credit for his contribution to the number.

In the late 1950s, Anthony Perkins (or “Tony Perkins,” as the teen magazines called him) capitalized on his boy-next-door image by recording a few jazz-pop albums. Listening to those recordings (besides the song posted above, I’m also partial to “But Beautiful” and “I Remember You”), I find the difference in Perkins’ pre-Psycho and post-Psycho careers all the more fascinating. Even more interesting is the movie of his that came out mere months before Psycho, a comedy called Tall Story in which Perkins plays a college basketball player wooing fellow student Jane Fonda (in her film debut).

On occasion I hear my classmates talk about whether they “buy” a certain storyline or character in a film. In this instance, can we buy Perkins as a goofy, lovesick college boy since we’ve seen Psycho and perhaps some of his other unsettling performances? (See: Five Miles to Midnight, Pretty Poison, Psycho II/III/IV, etc.) As Marion Crane says in Psycho, “sometimes just one time can be enough,” and that was certainly true in Perkins’ case when you see how he was typecast. Since I spent my teenage years as a sort of aficionado of his movies and I heard some classmates ask what other roles Perkins did in his career, I can recommend a few in particular: the Civil War drama Friendly Persuasion (1956), for which Perkins got an Oscar nomination for playing Gary Cooper’s son; Fear Strikes Out (1957), the true-life story of a baseball player battling bipolar disorder; a pair of romantic dramas from the early 60s, Goodbye Again (1961) with Ingrid Bergman and Phaedra (1962) with Melina Mercouri; and, as was mentioned in class, the Orson Welles film The Trial (1962).

If I could make a case for Anthony Perkins as an auteur of acting, I would say that he should be lauded for making the most of lighthearted romantic comedy leads, various kinds of characters in period pieces of different genres, the psychological depths he had to plumb for Psycho, then all the bad retreads of the Norman Bates character that came afterward. And, to bring the post full circle, there was the Broadway musical Perkins sang in, Greenwillow, which he was rehearsing in New York in between shooting scenes for Psycho. (A stand-in played “Mrs. Bates” during the shower sequence.) The song “Never Will I Marry” might not be a classic of the American stage, but it’s to Perkins’ credit that he makes it so affecting, as you can see in this TV performance from 1985.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xr_msBoi6I

For the past week I have been thinking about Busby Berkeley and the “I Only Have Eyes for You” scene from Dames (1934). To me it is the ultimate in surreal Busby Berkeley experiences. Countless replicated visions of Ruby Keeler swarm the screen, the leading lady’s face copied over and over in a dizzying array of patterns. (And that shot of Keeler’s face that focuses in on her eyeball – talk about extreme close-ups!) The nature of the strange scene, as a dream within the framework of the musical sequence supposedly happening onstage, reaches a level of bizarreness eclipsed only by “Lullaby of Broadway” from Gold Diggers of 1935 (almost like a short film separate from the rest of the picture).

Considering both the readings for last week and for our upcoming class, I also find myself thinking about the “Eyesight to the Blind” scene in Ken Russell’s Tommy (1975). One could certainly make a case for Russell as an auteur. In this scene the image of an iconic movie star, Marilyn Monroe, is co-opted for the masks worn by acolytes of a cult. This group and their leader have turned the hypnotic power of a star’s face, persona and history of substance abuse into a religious experience that can heal all kinds of ailments – all intended to help the main character, who cannot see, hear or speak. (Is Marilyn’s face an Idea or an Event, as Barthes wrote about in his essay “The Face of Garbo”?) I must also point out that the first shot in the clip is the first time that we see Roger Daltrey in the film; it’s a close-up that announces, “Here he is! The star you want to see!”