142: mode du jour

THIS WEEK: Spontaneity and Americana cosplay

At this point, I’ll see anything that is about strolling, wandering, and/or New York. So it was an easy decision to decide to go see Brave New York and Subway to the Former East Village, two documentaries by Richard Sandler, that are showing at Anthology Film Archives this week¹ as part of their Sandler retrospective. I wasn’t familiar with Sandler and his work beforehand, which is why when I almost bumped into him into the lobby, I thought he was just a regular elder East Village hipster. The movies are “free-form” documentaries and have a DIY, montage style. Brave New York is a collection of scenes from the East Village and Times Square that Sandler took over six years or so (1998-2004, I think he said) and largely features activists and unhoused people imparting words of wisdom about love, use-value, and the end of (the illusion of) an American paradise. Subway to the Former East Village were outtakes from Brave New York that Sandler later edited into a film. There was a kind of timelessness to the movies—although there was a distinct feel to the nineties scenes versus the post-9/11 2000s scenes (a distinction obviously made by people talking about 9/11 and its aftermath), it all felt like it was all happening in a simultaneous moment. What felt surprising was how much the New York of the movies didn’t feel that different from today’s New York. Obviously New York has changed a lot in the last twenty years but there are still elements of it that continue to thrive and hopefully won’t ever be lost. I appreciated that. During the Q&A, people, who were clearly filmmakers who would like to make movies like Sandler’s, kept asking questions that I think could be boiled down to: how can you make something that feels spontaneous and intimate and authentic? Sandler’s answers were kind of like, well I just did it. I was on the street, I was meeting people, I was asking them questions but a lot of them would just start talking. Obviously a question about how to be spontaneous is paradoxical, since spontaneity is about coming upon the moment, of being led from one moment to another without knowing what’s going to come from it. The only way to “plan” for spontaneity is to be incredibly open. Anyway, those questions made me realize that spontaneity is my word of the summer. I am the least spontaneous person ever and talking about deciding to be more spontaneous just exemplifies that! But I’m really trying! Right now, that really just means buying movie tickets at the box office instead of buying them online days (or weeks) beforehand. But who knows what else I might do?

Last week, friend of the Report,

terry nguyen

, and I went to see Wim Wenders’ The American Friend at Metrograph. An adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, the movie is about art forgery, homoerotic friendship, and a fear of death turned into a willingness to kill, featuring absurd American cowboy cosplay by Dennis Hopper’s Tom Ripley. A friend told me last year that he didn’t like Paris, Texas because he felt that Wenders was imitating a style of Americana that didn’t feel authentic. While I don’t share that sentiment, I did keep thinking about it throughout The American Friend, which is not shy about appropriating symbols of “Americana,” to a point that it’s basically in on the joke. (American Friend came first.) The movie, which is interested in optical illusions—all the main character’s son’s toys have a name that ends in -scope—seems to be emphasizing that what seems like “authentic” American culture, like cowboy culture, is actually the product of images. Wenders seems to be saying that the fraudulent, whether it’s art or one’s identity, is probably closer to the real than anything that might be verified as authentic. That’s the result of a global transmission of culture. What we come to own is not an object of culture, but an image of it. (Or something like that.)

The American Friend was the perfect thing to see last week because I had started working my way through Anne Friedberg’s Window Shopping: Cinema and The Postmodern (which I’m going to finish today), a book about the evolution of cinema that links it to nineteenth-century phenomenons, like the diorama and the panorama, that often appeared in the Parisian arcades that the flâneur strolled. Friedberg seems to be making two arguments: one for how the flâneur, specifically the female flâneur, the flâneuse, becomes the cinemagoer, and another for how cinema—as a form and as an apparatus—anticipates postmodernism. As in, it’s not really that there is a postmodernist cinema but that cinema is already postmodernist, avant lettre.² I don’t know why but anytime I read anything about postmodernism, my eyes kind of glaze over so I would say that is the part of her argument that I’m kind of like, um sure, but I enjoyed the book overall. It is simultaneously ultra-interesting and pretty boring. You can also tell that Friedberg, writing in the late 80s/early 90s, is fighting for her life to prove that her (very good, very well-supported) argument is legitimate, which I think weighs down the book a little. But I totally get it—three years and an approved proposal later, my dissertation still feels totally fake.

Marlowe’s guest post made me want to watch The Souvenir Part 2 again. I want to love those movies more than I did, because they’re about everything that speak to me, but I only liked them just fine. I do think Part 2 is better than the first one, though Tom Burke—so charismatic—is great in The Souvenir. Whether or not you’ve seen either movie, it’s always a good time to watch Caprice, Joanna Hogg’s student film starring Tilda Swinton.

Last thoughts: I thought Mountainhead was boring and Steve Carrell’s performance was especially bad. I can’t believe I how much I liked Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth but it was the perfect thing to listen to on audiobook last week; at one point, I just sat on couch in the dark, and listened to it while I stared into space (I never do that). It was nice to see The Phoenician Scheme early on a Friday evening and then walk home as the sun was setting; much of my teenage passion for Wes Anderson movies was based on aesthetics but I appreciate them a lot more now that I’m watching them with consideration to the ideas (about storytelling, desire, family, (other) culture(s)etc.). I also think he should start writing movies with Owen Wilson again.

1. Today is the last day…you still have a chance

2. avant lettre = before the letter; before the word or concept existed. I’ve always wanted to use this idiom.