Manifesto

Manifesto is a manifesto about the ambition and limitations of artists’ and philosophers’ manifestos about art. Call it an anti-manifesto. The individual manifestoes are not identified because the subject is the idea of the manifesto, not any one. 

In their setting and delivery most of the theories about art-making here are presented lightly, ironically. Their earnestness is especially amusing,

Perhaps the one exception is the first. The Trump presidency — especially in the week of the Houston floods — gives an electric currency to Karl Marx’s declaration of the deadliness and death of capitalism and the call for artists to lead a revolution.  

The film is framed by that Marxist call to arms and the final manifesto, an antithetic preference for tradition over individual imagination that turns restrictive.

Still, that last episode provides the clearest representation of the beauty of life and the danger of restrictive art theory. Perhaps the film’s most touching image is the tracking shot along the Grade III students’ faces at their desks, especially the first three girls with their insecurity, uncertainty, fear. They are the future for which all the manifestos intend to prepare. 

The teacher assigns their film-scripting with a license to steal their ideas from anywhere. She cites Godard: “It doesn’t matter where you take things from, but where you take them to.” 

She seems thus to give her charges total freedom for their creativity. But as she visits each student’s project she drops another restriction. No props are allowed. You must use fixed lighting. The director may not be named. Like every manifesto, her every specific direction is a restriction, not a freeing. 

The students’ real “liberation” comes when they’re freed from their ostensibly “creative” class. Now the camera pans across the schoolyard where the children break into play, some in pairs or groups, some by themselves. They run free and physical, poised by slow-motion for our reading, Again the individual face is a rich encapsulation of life, the human condition, at its purest, most hopeful, most vulnerable. 

As an emblem of these liberated spirits the film catches the schoolyard pigeons fluttering into the sky in slow motion. Against all those manifestos it's the birds that soar, that provide the model for the human imagination and spirit. That film device is as pure as the children’s faces, the artistic strategy that does what art should do — whatever the school or manifesto — illuminate our state of living and free the imagination. 

Aptly, the film about art presents its own statement on art in a situation of restrictive theory on film — with liberation in film’s unique capacity to reveal what is normally lost in the flux of time and life. It lets us SEE what we’d normally miss. 

The various theories of art are wittily dramatized. Dadaism is propounded as a funeral sermon. The chicken soup and domestica associated with Pop Art lead to that manifesto recited as a suburban mother’s grace at a lunch table, the father and sons burdened with the interminable inventory of Pop principles. 

There are three emblems of Pop’s withdrawal from nature. The family dog is twice brought to its food — and twice leaves it! The living room is defined by a variety of stuffed wildlife, including an adult black bear, and a live crow. At the table the mother pours gravy on the desiccated duck the dad carves.  

So too the urban settings are generally monstrous, dehumanizing, or in ruins. Vorticism and abstract expressionism are propounded in a glitzy ultramodern estate by a chic CEO type. Conceptual art — where what counts is the idea not the realization — is presented as a TV news dialogue between shiny anchor Cate and rain drenched street reporter Cate. Naturally, the rain is fake. 

Punk aesthetic is as deadhead, dead-end and self-destructive as the stoned party folk. The stock brokerage, factory, garbage dump and the martinet directing a robotic alien ballet scene equally show art responding to dehumanizing modernity but with their own destructive rigidities. 
     For the surrealist ethic Cate Blanchett speaks to/through a puppet of herself, an apt image of the merging of the real and the dream worlds. The doll springs to pained life when Blanchett sticks pins into its/her head to secure the wig. Whatever the theory, the power of art inheres in its visceral impact. We know it’s a doll but the “art” is so true we wince.    

Logan Lucky

Logan Lucky here means no luck at all. Well, maybe the odd but brief illusion of good luck.

The redneck West Virginia family has a history of failure and disaster. But when the two Logan brothers, their sister Mellie and their con co-conspirators pull off a major heist, their luck seems to have changed. The Credence Clearwater song “(I Ain’t No) Fortunate Son” expresses their upbeat energy but foreshadows their doom. 

Their success promises to be short-lived. The one-armed bartender Clyde seems about to be seduced by the pretty, dogged FBI officer Sarah Grayson who won’t take “Case Closed” as an answer. Clyde (hangdog Adam Driver) is too nice, too vulnerable, too doomed, to resist her. 

Director Steven Soderbergh treats his white trash subject society with respect. The convict Joe Bang (the explosives expert, of course) has two standard issue moronic hillbilly brothers, but Joe himself is a brilliant intuitive talent with a solid foundation in science and an impressive strength of character. Ironically, Daniel Craig gets an “And introducing” credit at the end — for this is an all-new appearance for the reigning James Bond.

These hillbillies include heroes. The brothers’ patriotism cost them an arm and a leg. Clyde lost his arm in one of his two army stints in Iraq. The limp Jimmy incurred in service costs him his digging job at the racetrack. His “preexistent condition” is “a liability issue.” That phrase explicitly places this comic heist in the context of the current American political debate.

That is, this film gives face and voice to the disadvantaged, frustrated, have-not and ignored society that rose up and voted for Trump. The meticulously planned and executed robbery, which seems like their miraculous stroke of luck, stands in for their happy election result. But their relief is temporary, as the institutional threat at the end suggests. Their triumph is set to prove pyrrhic.

Jimmy’s decision to return the bulk of their unlawful score establishes this class as principled, wanting what’s their due and to meet their need and no more. Nor for them the oily smugness of the racetrack management which is satisfied with the insurance payment they scored on drummed-up estimates. That victim proves more corrupt and greedy than the robbers. He evokes Trump’s career of personally profitable bankruptcies. 

Our heroes have modest expectations of success. Mellie is a hairdresser. Jimmy’s ex-wife moves interstate so hubby can set up a new car dealership. Her young daughter wins the talent pageant by dropping the Beyonce umbrella song she planned and rewarding her dad with his favourite song, that paean to West Virginia, “(Take me home) Country Roads.” Her cracking little voice spurs the crowd to sing along.  This is American community, cheesy but real. 

  Our heroes’ success requires the brothers to enlist another set of brothers, Joe Bang’s. He also deploys another class of alienated and disadvantaged, the black convicts. Their riot succeeds because the vain warden (Dwight Yoakum) refuses to admit there can be a riot or a fire in his prison. The black force is abetted by the white vanity. 

The heist site is pure Americana — a speedway during a big Nascar race. There’s the moving LeAnn Grimes anthem, unfurled field-sized flags, the showy jets above. And mainly, underneath the competition and working class ambitions and diversion a network of pipes channels all the incoming flood of money into a vault, which for once the have-nots — our gang — empties. That’s a concise summary of America: a flashy patriotism covers the siphoning of all the poor folks’ money to the rich.  

One can see how this script lured Soderbergh out of his retirement from filmmaking. The plot is a sharp piece of clockwork, including the device of breaking two convicts out of jail for the heist and returning them unnoticed after. The characters are colourful, touching, funny and engaging. The specifics of the heist with its protagonists’ rise and fall are an irresistible analogue to Trump’s failure to “drain the swamp.” Left to themselves these characters manage to overcome the social and economic disadvantages laid on them. But in the end the system brings them down. In America the underclass cannot win, even when they briefly seem to.  Crime doesn’t pay — except for the bosses.
     This film’s warmth and humanity demonstrate that the privileged elite (e.g., a mainstream film director) and the yappy liberals in his audience can after all acknowledge the needs of the disadvantaged, the ill-represented, can respect their difference and end up rooting for them. They’re at least as American as the fat cats who exploit them. But as Trump reduces his presidency to self-dealing and self-service, these poor souls who invested their faith in him can’t win. They’re Logan lucky. Low men on the totem pole.

A Woman's Life

The director’s key narrative strategy is ellipses. We don’t see the key events: Jeanne’s acceptance of Julien’s proposal, their wedding, his betrayal, her bedroom discovery, her forgiveness, Julien’s second betrayal with Jeanne’s second close friend, the husband’s retribution. Jeanne’s responses to her grown son Paul’s pleas, etc etc. We see the events leading up to them and their consequences but not those key moments. 

That’s because the events don’t matter. What matters is the system in which the woman is trapped. The 19th Century French lady is a helpless cog in her rural aristocracy, with the illusion of making a decision but always remaining the instrument and victim of the male-cantered system. 

Of course a historical film is always a reflection of our present as well as in the imaged past. If we were entirely free from this condition, why make a movie about its earlier occurrence?

The two priests confirm this inherent abuse. The old priest coaxes Jeanne into forgiving Julien’s first affair because he wants to retire with this affirmation of forgiveness. She must serve the priest’s interest. Her mother supports his coercion and her father fails to defend his daughter’s interest. 

The young priest instructs her to an activism she knows will be disastrous — and proves her right when he intervenes himself. Again the priest places his own moral impulse, the church’s stern dictate, ahead of Jeanne’s needs. The woman’s instincts were wiser than the two priests’ commands, which in opposite ways ruin her. 

But that’s the woman’s role here — to cultivate her emotions and sentiments but not to wield any agency even over her own life. Jeanne can’t raise her son how she wants to, which may — or may not — be a factor in Paul’s adult failures. Assigning woman feelings but no power explains the film’s other structural use of time — the constant use of flashbacks. 

The film intercuts the heroine’s bleak last years with the intermingling of her early and her later years. The implication is that however harsh her misfortune and fate she continually seeks solace in memories of her brighter past. This nostalgia is less reassuring than debilitating. Remembering her happy days with her maid, Julien’s rosy courtship, her cute young son’s promise and devotion, prevents her from asserting her will against their manipulation and betrayal later. Not for Jeanne the joyful memories her mother carries from the passionate affair Jeanne discovers in her letters. Jeanne’s happy memories bring her no comfort.

In the opening scene Jeanne’s father teaches her to plant and tend her seedlings. That’s the only useful thing the sheltered -- and thus doomed — woman is taught. The film returns again and again to this gardening. The atmosphere darkens from the first sunny planting in the mud to the final pitch-dark harvest, the spirited Jeanne hardens and darkens.  

The seeds provide the same fruit in the human cycle. Son Paul proves a third-generation wastrel. Jeanne bankrupts herself paying off his debts as Julien did paying off his own father’s. Jeanne’s gift of a little steam whistle blossoms into Paul’s disastrous investment in a steamship company, one of his many doomed adventures.

The film’s thesis is clear: the men make the decisions and screw up. The woman pays the price. That is a woman’s life. The English title, by the way, is more pointed than the original: Une vie.

Her one defence is sisterhood. Maid Rosalie is her girlhood chum, whom Julien coerces into an affair. Against his demands, Jeanne insists on keeping her on when she’s pregnant, until she finds her in Julien’s bed again. Even knowing Rosalie is carrying Julien’s child, Jeanne insists on keeping her on. When Jeanne agrees to forgive him, her father gives Rosalie a farm in which she weds, raises her son, and prospers.  When Jeanne is bankrupt and desolate Rosalie asks to return to serve her, unpaid, as return for the grace she was given. When Jeanne irrationally clings to her faith in her absent and exploiting son, Rosalie suffers Jeanne’s abuse and suspicion — because she knows that is her role, not just as maid and friend but as woman.  
     The women’s relationship ends the film on a possibly optimistic note. Rosalie brings back from Paris an infant girl — supposedly Paul’s, but perhaps just another infant in need of a home — and his promise to return to Jeanne himself, after he clears up some business in Paris (a familiar story). Whether Paul returns is both doubtful and irrelevant. The film closes on the three females, the two lifelong friends and the infant. They personify the film’s positive values and generous spirit in the face of the men’s failure and abusive authority. As Rosalie assures us, “The world isn’t as bad or as good as we think.” Any hope for the future lies in the women.  

Lady Macbeth

There is no music over the end credits — and hardly any during the drama. Director William Oldroyd provides no musical relief for this bleak drama about a woman’s liberation on a remote 19th Century English estate. The tone and the tale are stark, as befits a drama about people’s struggle for and against power.

The film examines three areas of power struggle: gender, class and race.  The most obvious is Katherine’s growth from her husband and father-in-law’s “property” into a defiantly independent commander of her own body, house and fate. 

The film opens on her wedding but as we don’t see the husband it could as easily be her communion. She is isolated in her apparent innocence and submission. On their wedding night he orders her to strip, then turn to stare at the wall as he masturbates behind her. While taking his pleasure he denies her everything but humiliation. Where her mother taught her to enjoy the outdoors, her husband forbids her leaving the house.

When he doesn’t order her about his father does, an even more powerful and unfeeling brute. Both by gender and money the two men control the girl they bought along with a piece of land “not fit for a cow to graze upon.” But when both men are called away for a business emergency Katherine discovers some freedom.

  In the scene where Katherine first discovers her power all three areas of struggle converge. She finds the estate labourers tormenting her black maid Anna, stripped and slapped about on a sling on the scales. Privileged in gender and colour, the men can freely debase her. When Katherine stops the torment she asserts her power in her husband’s earlier terms: She commands the men face the wall while Anna retrieves her clothes and flees. 

  Katherine’s relationship with Anna provides the key to the heroine’s ambivalent development. When she stops Anna’s humiliation she may seem to be sympathetic to her despite their difference in class and colour. But her sympathy is qualified by the sexual arousal Kathrine feels from the scene, especially when the coarse groomsman Sebastian estimates Katherine’s weight by sweeping her up in his arms. Though she fights him off and reasserts her authority over him, her sexual awakening leaves her vulnerable. When he visits her bedroom later her initial resistance gives way to their sexual attraction and she pushes him onto her bed.

From then on Katherine is dominated by her sexual liberation. She is like the dog, straining against her leash because “The bitch has been pent up too long.” She is the exuberant aggressor in their sex scenes, regardless of their class difference which scandalizes the estate and the community. In contrast, the cat agilely negotiates her interior empire, leaping for the spoils left her but remaining scrawny and hungry.

Anna’s gender connection to Katherine gives way to her submission to the castes of colour and class. Her sympathy for her adulterous mistress is frozen by her fear of disruption. In the tub she brushes her mistress violently. When the father-in-law interrogates Anna about the missing wine, Katherine sits by silently, letting Anna be humiliated over the wine Katherine drank. 

Anna is rendered mute by her punishment in that scene. The father-in-law orders her to leave on her hands and feet, reduced to a dog. Not the sexually liberated one associated with Katherine, but the humiliated beaten servant. When Katherine revolts against her father-in-law, she orders Anna to sit and eat with her, violating her every instruction. She keeps Anna from going to the locked door to help or to admit the dying old man. Anna never speaks again, not even when she is challenged to deny Katherine’s final claim that Anna and Sebastian committed her murders. 

Having disposed of her two tyrants, Katherine is visited by a black woman and her young grandson, fathered by Katherine’s husband and formally declared his ward. Their presence is a new obstacle to her affair with Sebastian. After they murder her husband, his horse and then his ward, Sebastian can’t sustain his lover’s will. His class and its submissive conscience compel him to admit his and Katherine’s guilt. 

By now Katherine’s new-found heat reveals a commanding cold. Affecting grief and innocence, she claims Sebastian and Anna committed the murders. When the boy’s grandmother consoles her, Katherine’s story holds sway. Anna and Sebastian are carted to the gallows. 

Like Shakespeare’s tragic heroine, this Lady Macbeth is destroyed by her own attempt to transcend the limitations and disregard imposed upon her. She frees her heat, then to survive reveals the brutal cold of the woman prepared to exploit her sexuality, class and colour to survive. in this story a bitch in heat becomes a cold-hearted bitch. But the backdrop of privilege that has abused and restricted her at every turn shows her rather the victim than the villain in this transformation. 
     Her success is bittersweet. She appears to have “won.” But her lover and maid are doomed, her servants have left and she is pregnant alone. In the last shot Katherine resumes the posture assigned her throughout her career in “her” house, formally perched, corseted and alone, on a hard seat in her husband’s cold sterile estate. Having shaken off her shackles she remains imprisoned in her husband’s estate, like the useless land he bought with her.  

Detroit

This film propels Kathryn Bigelow to the forefront of American directors. It is a powerful, superbly constructed, insightful and circumspect demonstration of today’s most tragic truth — what we hoped was Obama’s America turned out to be not post-racist but neo-racist.

Though it centers on the 1967 Detroit riot and police abuse of African-Americans, seeing it after Charlottesville makes the film sadly prophetic.

As Christopher Nolan did in Dunkirk, Bigelow thrusts us into the action pell-mell, shooting everything in frenzy and close-up, not pausing to explain or reframe. She allows no rest, no detachment, no relief. Again we feel the impossible confusion and suffocation of war, this one however urban. What the dialogue tells us is less important than our visceral experience of the victims under siege and the police scared into brutishness.  

The film frames that tumultuous action with calm stills. The prologue is artistic renderings of the history — paintings of the southern blacks’ movement north for civil rights and jobs and the whites’ consequent evacuation of the cities for the ostensibly purer suburbs. If they escaped Jim Crow the blacks couldn’t escape the prejudiced legal and social systems, endemically systematized. 

The epilogue states the fates of the various characters. The whites escaped conviction. That’s what white privilege is all about — they win the loopholes. The blacks found what compromises their conviction allowed, like the brilliant singer who skips out on his group’s Motown success to sing in a neighbourhood church choir. His experience prevents him from entertaining whites again. The civil courts give token acknowledgment of the guilt and justice the white legal system denied. 

None of those consequences erase or forgive the arrogant and sadistic bigotry of the white cop Krauss. He is just a boy, trigger happy, but with centuries of racism in his veins and culture — and the confidence the colour gap bequeathes him. In an early conversation in the police car he seems to understand and sympathize with the blacks’ predicament — but then he gets the chance to shoot one. The die is cast. 

To Krauss the torture of his prisoners is a game. Sadistic and brutal but a game, the way a toy gun in the minds of the frightened National Guard and police swells into a mortally dangerous sniper, to be caught and punished at all costs — especially to the innocent blacks. One cop hasn’t learned the “game,” though, so he kills instead of just pretending to. That’s what happens when a game is played on people to whom it is far from a game. So too the white girls' playful flirtation leads them into a horror. 
      When the National Guard knowingly withdraws from the abusive police scene Bigelow makes an important point. Civil rights has to be a national concern and not abandoned to the local politics and prejudice of the states and municipal authorities. That was the source of Lyndon Johnson's success -- and its reversal part of Trump's current project. More correctly, one National Guardsman releases a black captive. There are here also good cops and bad cops, good blacks and bad blacks, though the battle is clearly between white power and black subservience.

So far this is the best American film of the year — and by far the most important. I would say that even if Charlottesville had not happened last weekend and President Trump had not been exposed as the personification of American racism, hypocrisy and ignorance. All that only validates Bigelow’s vision. 
But all the Oscars of the eve won’t amend America’s racist history and its continuing  choke-hold on the nation. That will take a wide and profound social reform of which America has yet to prove itself capable — or even willing.  

The Little Hours

Why film a ribald Boccaccio romp now? There’s absolutely nothing at all even remotely like it in the multiplexes now. Everything today is Current or Special-Effect Future. So why not a little dabble in the historic. For a change. 

That’s reason one, and a hint at writer-director Jeff Baena’s willingness to take a risk. In the film biz, remember, sequels and rehashes are the sincerest form of flattery — not to mention the safest investment.  This film, though, is a unique riff on the medieval not a rip-off.

  It’s also an interesting experiment. Can you set a story in medieval Italy but keep the dialogue contemporary colloquial (e.g., one nun’s “Shut the f— up!”). Spoiler alert: yes, you can and it works with refreshing brio. 

After all, Boccaccio didn’t write in any archaic lingo but in his period’s colloquialism. That’s what Baena does here. The apparent anachronism is true to the original’s currency. Its the quote may suggest, it’s also great fun.

Which is another reason to revive Boccaccio today : to spring delightfulness upon the dour. 

In one plot line a handsome young servant escapes a sadistic lord’s revenge for sleeping with the lady of the house. In the other he pretends to be a deaf mute so he can secure work in a convent, where the ladies have vented their frustration by tormenting the male gardener. At the end three nuns rescue their man from the lord’s dungeon and return him to his manifold functions at the convent. 

The fired priest and the mother superior resume their enriched love as well. Amor vincit omnia. Love (secular, that is, really) conquers all. Especially the cold-hearted prigs. 

That bawdy folk-tale works as a corrective to the stolid religiosity of the Dark Ages. One fruit of the Renaissance was to recover humanity and the values of earthly existence, responsibility and pleasure from the repressive throttle of the medieval church. 

The archbishop here represents the period’s religious orthodoxy. So in his own service does the presiding priest. But the latter is distinguished by his humanity, his instinct to  forgive, and his capacity to love more fully than in the ethereal abstract. 

And that is what makes this medieval joke so bitingly current. Reviving a Renaissance ribaldry suggests we have yet again the need to fight off the Dark Ages. The monster is back so we need to revive its opponent. This hearty embrace of love and individual liberty implies today’s need to deflate an unsympathetic, repressive, non-compassionate religiosity. Of the latter, examples in the Trump presidency abound. This film summons Renaissance humanism to fight that monster again.