Personal Work
I’ve gone ahead and expunged this blog of past entries featuring my own artwork. These pieces had not received a great deal of feedback and detracted from the central focus. If you’d like to keep up with my visual art and illustration, I still post work to my main online portfolio when I can, and I am currently posting sketches to my LiveJournal and deviantArt scrapbook. Feel free to bookmark whichever link is most convenient for you.
As far as my fiction and poetry are concerned, I am choosing not to post any of this online for the time being, as I am focusing on having this work published.
Foolish Wives (1922)
This summer has not been terribly fruitful in regards to film-viewing, but last month I did catch up on my study of silent films by watching Erich von Stroheim’s classic Foolish Wives. While not regarded as his best film, Foolish Wives does showcase Stroheim’s lush visual style, mature subject matter, and the precisely manipulated persona of Euro-decadence he is best remembered for.
In the film, Stroheim plays one of a trio of grifters posing as Russian ex-pat aristocrats vacationing in Monte Carlo and looking for the next con. They find their latest mark in the form of a U.S. envoy and his young wife. They are also involved in a counterfeiting scheme, gambling with fake money to win the real stuff, which we know must end badly. Stroheim recreates Monte Carlo in rich detail, and perhaps the most memorable aspect of the film occurs in scenes as above, where we feel that we are in a real place, exotic and decaying and wholly tempting. The content has much in common with European literature of the 19th century and the fin de siècle in its obsession with decadent aristocracy and dark, naturalistic tragedy. Apparently, some critics of the time were not altogether pleased with the depiction of the naive Americans abroad, easily dazzled by the fake glamor of the sophisticated European con-artists.
As far as films go, I found Foolish Wives fairly enjoyable, if fatty in places. During the silent era, many directors were experimenting with running time, and the original cut of Foolish Wives is said to run 6 hours, though it was eventually cut by the studio down to 130 minutes. It’s hard to say whether this extra would really have been useful, though a certain rediscovered scene included on the KINO dvd illuminates the cruel pathology of Stroheim’s Sergius. Running only a couple minutes long, it was likely not included so as not to offend the audience.
Foolish Wives is at best a wonderful showcase of Stroheim’s seductively wicked Count Karamazin, a great character who offers a certain spin on the Stroheim persona. In the screenshot above, we see the scalawag eying the idiot daughter of Ventucci the counterfeiter, a move that will eventually, in the course of the film, lead to his demise. On the KINO Deluxe Collector’s Edition of the dvd is included a documentary about the life of Erich von Stroheim, The Man You Loved to Hate. Though the production values of the documentary are lacking (it was produced in 1980), it does offer a detailed look at Stroheim’s very interesting life and attempts to dissect some of his public persona. For anyone interested in Stroheim’s work, it is a fascinating and necessary resource.
Some literary articles
I’d like to keep up with more literary entries in this blog, so here are a couple of interesting articles about literature that are currently hanging out in my bookmarks.
A Reader’s Manifesto
An indictment of the excesses and pretensions of American literary fiction. Provocative, funny, and enlightening.
Have I Ever Told You About My Love/Hate Relationship With Confessional Poetry?
A great piece by Catherynne Valente on the intersection between the confessional and the speculative/fantastic.
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005): Brief Thoughts
Has it already been a month since my last post? I’ve been meaning to post about a couple films but have just lacked the desire to type anything up. So I decided to get back on the wagon this morning and post a few quick thoughts regarding a recent film in my viewing list - sadly only as recent as two months ago.
Readers of the last post will recall my fascination with Asian extreme cinema. Chan-wook Park is a talented Korean director of this genre, most well known stateside for Oldboy, the second of his so-called “revenge trilogy.” Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is the third and final film in the series. Unlike the previous two films, the protagonist here is a woman, Geum-ja Lee (Yeong-ae Lee), and the revenge plot ends up playing out quite differently. It is this twist that makes Lady Vengeance so unique compared to its predecessor and so interesting. As in Oldboy, Park enjoys telling stories through non-linear means, making the exposition at times confusing, but in the end we have a full and complete picture of what drives Lee and how she changes from a kind-hearted girl into a cold-hearted killer. Park also has a great visual sensibility, paring down the colors to black, white, and red. Though I mostly enjoyed the film, at parts I felt it went on to long and that certain segments stretched to indulgence. In particular, the poetic segments when Lee is contemplating how to finally kill Mr. Baek seemed unnecessary and could have been chopped down. While not as viscerally entertaining as Oldboy, Lady Vengeance is still enjoyable, and I plan on completing the trilogy with Mr. Vengeance next.
Other films on my recent list:
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Foolish Wives (1922)
The Dark Knight (2008)
Three Extremes (2004)
If you’ve been reading this blog regularly since its beginnings in 2006, you might be aware of my recurrent interest in extreme Asian films, going all the way back to my assessment of three Asian horror films. I’ve also written about the influential classics In the Realm of the Senses and Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and the more recent Oldboy (I may eventually work on a write-up for Sympathy for Lady Vengeance as well). Working slowly through this ongoing wave of Asian filmmaking, I decided to watch Three Extremes, an anthology of three short films from 2004 that received favorable reviews (if tepid ticket sales on release). While anthologies can be too varied and inconsistent, Three Extremes manages to be mostly consistent and even sometimes surprising.
Just try not to think about what’s in the dumplings….
Dumplings, by Hong Kong director Fruit Chan, is perhaps the most directly engaging and entertaining of the three. The plot concerns a middle aged ex-actress’s attempt to stay young in order to please her inattentive, philandering husband. She visits a witchy woman who crafts dumplings from the flesh of aborted fetuses. Though the moral implications of cannibalism are worrisome, the effects are desirable. The only catch is that she must continue eating the dumplings to retain her youth. Matters are complicated when the witch-woman botches a black market abortion and the dumplings are discovered to produce unintended side effects. The final scene is perhaps the creepiest and most memorable.
All tied up and no place to go.
Chan-wook Park of Oldboy fame directs Cut, a high concept revenge piece. The film opens with a movie-within-a-movie, then cuts to a director and his crew watching the scene on a monitor, the first of many surprise twists. The director drives home only to be attacked in the dark and to awaken to his wife tied up, ready to be tortured by a vengeful former extra, jealous of the director’s wealth and fame. All this seems simple enough, until more curious twists are thrown in and the tension mounts. It’s difficult to describe the entire film without giving much away, but I can say the constant element of surprise is both a strength and weakness of this film. While it makes for an interesting watch, it doesn’t amount to an engaging story. Whereas previous Park films are marked by strong characterization, here it is too rudimentary to really offer much insight. It also feels like Park was making things up as he went along, rather than finding a cohesive narrative, which would have given the film more impact.
Twin contortionists! Dark secrets! Perverse overtones! Dream-worlds! What more does this film need?
If Dumplings is the most entertaining and straightforward story in the anthology, then Box, by Takashi Miike is the prettiest and most oblique - it’s certainly my favorite film of the three. The story concerns a young woman, a successful yet isolated novelist, tormented by a series of dreams of a dark past that may or may not be real. As a child she was one of a set of twin contortionists, adopted and mentored by an older man, a circus performer who teaches them the craft. Her sister is killed when she jealously locks her inside a box and accidentally starts a fire. It is never clear whether the mentor, too, was killed, or if alive he still follows her. His image melds with that of a potential lover, a man from the publishing company. The difficulty of the film is separating reality from dreaming, and I have my own theories as to which is which, but the ambiguity is somehow more enjoyable, so I won’t ruin the experience. Box, with its female protagonist, Gothic tone, and use of dream logic (illogic, rather) is more in line with Miike’s Audition than Ichi the Killer and highlights the variety and flexibility of his direction.
All three films also highlight the visual beauty of Asian extreme films and are on this level just lovely to watch, even the more garishly written Cut. The visual invention of the torture device, illustrated in the screenshot above, show some of what I mean. And the color schemes of Dumplings and Box are notable as well. The latter is perhaps the strongest visually, due to the interesting contrast between the cold winter of the present setting and the bright, warm realm of the past, evoking both the warm and connection that our heroine felt for her sister and the fire that destroyed her. versus her current sense of isolation.
Though the three films presented in the anthology are not entirely consistent, fans of Asian extreme cinema should enjoy the individual visions offered in Three Extremes. If anything, it offers a satisfying taste of what these directors have to offer.