“You asked me if that piece could be in the issue.”
“How could anyone even think to do a Cinema of Scandinavia and leave the palindromists out?”
“B., I can’t pay you for an analysis of a film no one will ever be able to watch.”
“I don’t want to take it elsewhere, Arvide, but I will.”
“It’s OK if you do. No hard feelings.”
“I’ll do it. I swear.”
“I understand. Godspeed.”
“What about college? Roommates? Remember when we said we would be brothers forever?”
“That wasn’t said.”
“I said it. And you nodded.”
“I really don’t recall nodding.”
“I wrote it down.”
I frantically search my man bag for the paper.
“Again: not proof.”
“You’ll be sorry when this comes out and changes the way we watch movies.”
“I’ll be very happy for you.”
“That’s such an asshole thing to say.”
WITH LITTLE ENTHUSIASM, I resume my teaching duties (the school had hired the pathologically wrongheaded film critic David Manning to fill in for me during my absence). The students remain characteristically uninterested. Cinema Studies is deemed a gut course in zookeeper school. You get to watch movies, is what they think. I attempt to disabuse them of that notion. I screen movies with zero entertainment value. I show Synecdoche, New York for the simple reason that it is an irredeemable, torturous, tortuous yawn. But I would be remiss if I didn’t also screen challenging movies that are tedious but important. If you hope to have any chance of following a film such as Tobleg’s masterful Thyestes/Obliviate, the film I am screening today, you need to pay attention. Six students out of fifteen have shown up. I will schedule a test next class to punish the truants. T/O is a difficult film to watch, not only due to its graphic and unrelenting depiction of human cannibalism, including a detailed (and educational!) description of the proper field dressing for human meat as well as several tantalizing recipes, but also because of Tobleg’s use of horizontal space on a vertical plane. That is, the film is shot entirely from beneath glass-floored rooms. This calculated ploy to frustrate the audience is off-putting to some of the less adventurous cinemagoers among us, but the truth is, if you give yourself over to it (and you must!), a strange exhilaration unlike anything else in one’s audiencial experience comes to pass. And it raises questions about the limitations of conventional points of view. The movie is seen from the bottom of characters’ shoes, which prove to be invigoratingly emotive. Tony Scott of The New York Times wrote a somewhat derisive review (why is the proudly anti-intellectual Times even reviewing a Tobleg film?) mockingly entitled “Acting from the Sole.” I think Tony is a nice enough fellow and I’m sure a very smart guy for a hack, but Tobleg deserves better than quippiness. The truth is, the acting from below (Tobleg trained the shoe actors for months in the technique before principal photography began) is startlingly poignant. I have been brought to tears on every viewing of the film. And each time, I see something new, a new show, a new shoe show. But of course my students are having none of it, this room full of zookeeping Tony Scotts. And the truth is my heart is no longer in this type of education. For the new me, it is either barefooted hayseed children from the South or the whole world as my students. This is why I spend my off times scouring junk stores, yard sale bins, and garbage cans, searching for the films of the next Ingo Cutbirth. It’s not a scientific process, but mine is not a scientific field. One would not expect Joyce to write utilizing the statistical method.
Over time I do accrue boxes and boxes of film: 8 mm, Super 8, 16 mm, Super 16, and one Super 37, for which the only projector exists in Qaanaaq. It takes three months to project them all (minus the Super 37, which I unspool, thumbtack to the wall of the Sylvia Plath Memorial Indoor Running Track in the third subbasement of New York’s famed Barbizon Hotel for Women and run past with a magnifying glass seven times). In the end, sadly, there is nothing of note. Many, many birthday parties and travelogues. The cinematography is not particularly noteworthy. The acting, such as it is, is atrocious and wooden. One short, apparently made by a group of middle school boys, seems to be some sort of homemade vampire movie. It is derivative, and, to be frank, the boy playing the university vampirologist was not the least bit convincing, either in his Eastern European accent or his simulated old man shaking hands. When I arrive at the very last film, 10th Birthday Party for Bobby, I find myself depressed; Bobby is not an interesting boy.
The immensity of the loss of Ingo’s film hits me perhaps for the first time.
The world is not lousy with lost masterpieces, as I had, in my naïveté, believed. I sit on the floor and watch Balthazar’s urn dance, then march, then hang its head, then supplicate. Olivier programmed the donkey to do a somber and tasteful dance. I believe he said it was a mourning dance from Ghana. The funeral march, slow and lugubrious, plays out to “Funeral March of a Marionette” by the brilliant and undersung Charles Gounod (I relate, Charles!). The head hanging is to The Kingston Trio’s version of “Tom Dooley” and is profoundly moving. I would weep if I had any tears left, but alas. The supplication is to “Camptown Races,” for reasons that remain unclear to me.
I WANDER THE film criticism district, formulating theories, grinding axes; it keeps me sane in these insane times to return to my roots, to praise those films and filmmakers worthy of an audience’s attention, to destroy those filmmakers who loose self-satisfied garbage onto the world. Consider Stranger Than Fiction, I say to my imagined lecture hall full of cinephiles: a wonderfully quirky film starring William Ferrell and the always adorkable Zooey Deschanel. The work done here by director Marc Forster (who directed the unfortunately misguided, misogynistic, and racistic Monster’s Ball) and screenwriter Zachary H. Elms is stellar in that all the metacinematic techniques work, its construction analogous to that of a fine Swiss watch (no accident that a wristwatch figures so prominently into the story!). Compare this to any mess written by Charlie Kaufman. Stranger Than Fiction is the film Kaufman would’ve written if he were able to plan and structure his work, rather than making it up as he goes along, throwing in half-baked concepts willy-nilly, using no criterion other than a hippy-dippy “that’d be cool, man.” Such a criterion might work if the person making that assessment had even a shred of humanism within his soul. Kaufman does not, and so he puts his characters through hellscapes with no hope of them achieving understanding or redemption. Will Ferrell learns to live fully in the course of Stranger Than Fiction. Dame Emily Thomson, who plays his “author,” learns her own lessons about compassion and the value and function of art. Had Kaufman written this film, it would have been a laundry list of “clever” ideas culminating in some unearned emotional brutality and a chain reaction of recursional activity wherein it is revealed that the author has an author who has an author who has an author who has an author, et chetera, thus leaving the audience depleted, depressed, and, most egregiously, cheated. What Kaufman does not understand is that such “high concepts” are not an end in themselves but an opportunity to explore actual mundane human issues. Kaufman is a monster, plain and simple, but a monster unaware of his staggering ineptitude (Dunning and Kruger could write a book about him!). Kaufman is Godzilla with dentures, Halloween’s Mike Myers with a rubber knife, Pennywise the Clown with contact dermatitis from living in a sewer. He is a pathetic—
Something goopy and wet plops onto my forehead. I wipe it off and discover my hand is covered in bird feces. This, I am sad to say, is no longer an atypical experience in this horrible city. The pigeons—flying rats, I’ve humorously dubbed them—have taken over, and we humans are at their mercy. We are their toilets. The