1.I watched another Michael Haneke movie: CODE UNKNOWN. I thought it mostly sucked. The 2 hours consisted mostly of short scenes that had little or nothing going on it. There were definitely some good moments, one where a couple is shopping in a grocery store and fighting in a strange way, and one scene where there were all these dead cows and a guy lit his match. Those were okay. I also liked when the drums that had been shown in the beginning started beating over several scenes in a row for no clear reason. I liked that it didn't have to go anywhere but I still felt bored 45 minutes in. I didn't care if I kept watching it or not. I can say, though, that of the 4 Haneke films I've seen they are all very different, and I guess unique in their own ways from other films, and that is good to see in a director.
2. I sort of got into an argument about pot last night. I don't like pot. I've never tried it (as I know it is not for me), but I've been around many people who I've seen get dumber and/or different over the years while claiming it does not affect them and that it is not addictive. Everything is addictive. Touching your feet a certain way is addictive. Especially substances that alter your perception are addictive even if not chemically. I know lots of people who are "addicted" to pot. I'm not against perception alteration. I drink coffee. I drink alcohol. I sit in certain positions long enough to allow my head to change. I absorb light. More so I don't like pot because of 'pot culture' and the stigma associated with it. Pot is kind of like rape. I'm not going to explain why I said that. Pot people are not really people to me. They seem like parts of the furniture but still alive in human ways, and thus not true furniture. I don't trust pot heads. I believe you are a pot head if you own a glass pipe or smoke several times a week or say pot is nonaddictive or smoke pot and simultaneously like 311/Phish/Grateful Dead/any of very many other bands that I don't think non-potheads are capable of liking. At the same time I guess I don't have a problem with people smoking every now and then though it stinks and is boring, though I would question the motivation for doing so. What if instead of smoking pot people went out and stood in the front yard and didn't move for a long time? Or what if instead of smoking pot people walked and touched their head to the wall and left it there and tried not to think? I think those would be equitable solutions for boredom and more healthy and non-smelly and non-associated with so many yellowed cultural associations and would be free and might actually be progressive in the long run. I don't know why I am talking about pot.
3. While I'm going on, I do not understand journals that do not accept simultaneous submissions. Especially journals run by writers who do not accept simultaneous submissions. It's so damn hard these days to publish with so much out there and often reply times take so long, you really think authors should just send their work to you and no one else? I don't care if you have a quick turn around time: if you do, all the more so to allow work sent elsewhere: most are so slow you'll be way ahead of the pack if you want it. I think it's a pretty ridiculous expectation and completely unnecessary and against progression of the arts. I say all this because I got a rejection today from an editor at a magazine I love who I'd forgotten didn't accept them. His note on the slip said he loved my story but hoped I had best of luck placing it with one of the other places I simultaneously submitted it. Really? Is it that offensive? How dare I? I don't know. I mean, it's a writer's choice whether or not they want to send to a non-SS-accepting journal, but for the most part I don't get it.
Boy, I'm soapboxy today. I think I got too much sleep last night for once. I probably should drink some coffee and buy some paint and roll around in it.
4. Also: for Lamination Colony submissions, we are now closed to Tao Lin parodies. We have a lot to choose from already. Here are some parodies I'd like to see: GARY LUTZ, BEN MARCUS, BARRY HANNAH (good luck), JOSE SARAMAGO, KELLY LINK, NICHOLSON BAKER (good luck), DEAN YOUNG, MIRANDA JULY, DIANE WILLIAMS, ANYONE EDITED BY GORDON LISH, ANY POPULAR 'ONLINE' WRITERS, ANYONE PUBLISHED BY SMOKELONG QUARTERLY, ANYONE WHO WRITES MOSTLY 'SHORT-SHORTS,' ANYONE NO ONE HAS REALLY HEARD OF, ANYONE PUBLISHED BY FENCE MAGAZINE, HARMONY KORINE, ROBBE-GRILLET, ANYONE ON THE INTERNET, ANYONE'S MOTHER OR FATHER, ANYONE WITH WORDS.
ADDENUDUM: for this issue I also am going to have a lot of different things that are in forms no other journal would publish. if you have something odd, something that is unlike 'literature,' something that doesn't quite work but still is nice to read, please send it to me. I am not going to name examples because I want people to send me their strange. Send me stuff you found on your hard drive and forgot about. Send me pictures or drawings or XXX self-portraits or spam folder contents or recordings of yourself arguing with your mom. Make a mess. Come on.
Showing posts with label michael haneke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label michael haneke. Show all posts
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Sunday, January 20, 2008
2 Films by Michael Haneke
I watched two films by Michael Haneke last night with my girlfriend. I like sometimes to sit and watch several things by the same director, especially one as put together as Haneke. I'd only seen one of his films before, FUNNY GAMES (the original version), and liked it a lot.
First we watched CACHE. This film is about a couple (played by Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil) who realized they are being taped by surveillance cameras. The tapes are left at their house wrapped in a child's drawings, such as of a child head vomiting blood. There's a lot of interesting perspective work in the film. The first shot is of the front of an apartment in a street and it sits static for several minutes before you realize you are watching one of the surveillance tapes. There is a lot of strange, Lynchian energy in the film: particularly from the LOST HIGHWAY-esque premise, but also from the clean long shots and the stylized settings and the interspersing of short and long takes, as well as the fact that a lot of the film is left open-ended. I like open-ended films, especially mysteries. I'd rather have less questions answered and more to think about rather than "know" why everything happens. Things continue to get more strange and miscontrued as the film continues, and the way it ends leaves you even more so wondering what exactly just happened. Overall, an absorbing movie. I enjoyed it.
The second Haneke film we watched was THE PIANO TEACHER, which I'd heard good things about, but didn't know anything about the film other than it is about a piano teacher's student trying to seduce her. Could be material for boring over-sexualized romance crap, but this movie went any way but the one you might expect from it. There was never a moment that I wasn't fully attentive to what was happening on screen, and I was continually surprised by the way Haneke twisted what was going on, making a film that is unlike any I've ever seen. This is another thing I think Haneke has in common with Lynch: they set up an expectation (in Lynch by using noir and 50's style campiness) and continue to turn it further and further on its head, not for the sake of exploitation, but in a way that feels genuine and fresh to the screen. This film is definitely rarely what you expect of it, is not "precious" in execution, does not make you feel like you might think "shit, I am watching this because it's foreign and I'm supposed to like it," is genuinely different than most any other movie I've seen and for honest-seeming reasons, is fun to watch. The same things could be said of CACHE.
I think one of the most interesting things about Haneke's stuff (other than the excellence of his shots and development of the narrative) is the way it is edited. He very rarely leaves extraneous material in. He cuts out of scenes, especially the most dramatic ones, early, so that it doesn't have a chance to get stale or boring. You often want more. This displeases many people. Many scenes, particularly the ending shots of both films we saw, end seemingly abruptly, in the middle of the upswing. I like that. It lets the film go on after the film is over. The only times he seems to use long takes is in particularly awkward moments, or in ones that you can't quite figure out why they are there, as if he's zooming deeper and deeper into a bruise or a flat panel. Eventually the texture emerges. And then just as quickly he cuts away.
Writing could benefit from using these kind of techniques. As I've said before, I don't think there's ever been a great literature-based companion to the work of Lynch, and Haneke is probably in the same boat. But I think there's definitely something in these works to be mined: techniques that haven't been put quite to use yet in language. There are many that touch on it, such as some stuff by Robbe-Grillet, particularly JEALOUSY, which I really like, and definitely some Kafka, and occasionally in modern writers like Brian Evenson, Jose Saramago, David Markson and even David Foster Wallace (particularly in OBLIVION), but none that get at it the way I would like to.
I think I want my NEXT BOOK to be OF THIS NATURE. I've begun to think about WHAT I WANT TO DO but I don't know exactly WHERE IT WILL COME FROM. I've been relaxing the past week. No particular ideas drumming. Though watching this kind of stuff makes me feel READY TO RECEIVE, I guess, I think. I don't know why I'm saying it all like this, but okay.
First we watched CACHE. This film is about a couple (played by Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil) who realized they are being taped by surveillance cameras. The tapes are left at their house wrapped in a child's drawings, such as of a child head vomiting blood. There's a lot of interesting perspective work in the film. The first shot is of the front of an apartment in a street and it sits static for several minutes before you realize you are watching one of the surveillance tapes. There is a lot of strange, Lynchian energy in the film: particularly from the LOST HIGHWAY-esque premise, but also from the clean long shots and the stylized settings and the interspersing of short and long takes, as well as the fact that a lot of the film is left open-ended. I like open-ended films, especially mysteries. I'd rather have less questions answered and more to think about rather than "know" why everything happens. Things continue to get more strange and miscontrued as the film continues, and the way it ends leaves you even more so wondering what exactly just happened. Overall, an absorbing movie. I enjoyed it.
The second Haneke film we watched was THE PIANO TEACHER, which I'd heard good things about, but didn't know anything about the film other than it is about a piano teacher's student trying to seduce her. Could be material for boring over-sexualized romance crap, but this movie went any way but the one you might expect from it. There was never a moment that I wasn't fully attentive to what was happening on screen, and I was continually surprised by the way Haneke twisted what was going on, making a film that is unlike any I've ever seen. This is another thing I think Haneke has in common with Lynch: they set up an expectation (in Lynch by using noir and 50's style campiness) and continue to turn it further and further on its head, not for the sake of exploitation, but in a way that feels genuine and fresh to the screen. This film is definitely rarely what you expect of it, is not "precious" in execution, does not make you feel like you might think "shit, I am watching this because it's foreign and I'm supposed to like it," is genuinely different than most any other movie I've seen and for honest-seeming reasons, is fun to watch. The same things could be said of CACHE.
I think one of the most interesting things about Haneke's stuff (other than the excellence of his shots and development of the narrative) is the way it is edited. He very rarely leaves extraneous material in. He cuts out of scenes, especially the most dramatic ones, early, so that it doesn't have a chance to get stale or boring. You often want more. This displeases many people. Many scenes, particularly the ending shots of both films we saw, end seemingly abruptly, in the middle of the upswing. I like that. It lets the film go on after the film is over. The only times he seems to use long takes is in particularly awkward moments, or in ones that you can't quite figure out why they are there, as if he's zooming deeper and deeper into a bruise or a flat panel. Eventually the texture emerges. And then just as quickly he cuts away.
Writing could benefit from using these kind of techniques. As I've said before, I don't think there's ever been a great literature-based companion to the work of Lynch, and Haneke is probably in the same boat. But I think there's definitely something in these works to be mined: techniques that haven't been put quite to use yet in language. There are many that touch on it, such as some stuff by Robbe-Grillet, particularly JEALOUSY, which I really like, and definitely some Kafka, and occasionally in modern writers like Brian Evenson, Jose Saramago, David Markson and even David Foster Wallace (particularly in OBLIVION), but none that get at it the way I would like to.
I think I want my NEXT BOOK to be OF THIS NATURE. I've begun to think about WHAT I WANT TO DO but I don't know exactly WHERE IT WILL COME FROM. I've been relaxing the past week. No particular ideas drumming. Though watching this kind of stuff makes me feel READY TO RECEIVE, I guess, I think. I don't know why I'm saying it all like this, but okay.
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