Cable Car Suspended

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I'm very pleased with the way this Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Blog-a-Thon has gone. And it's still going: comments sections are starting to sprout discussions, and I'm expecting at least three late entries to arrive in the next couple days, so keep your eye on this site. I'm a little embarrassed to reveal that one of the late entries is my own. I'm happy with the reflection I was able to complete, but I haven't been able to finish my essay yet. This is what I get when I mix one part over-ambitiousness, two parts procrastination, two parts delightful distraction (including unexpected houseguests among other things), one part disorganization, and one part having all my notes swept by a gust of underground wind out of my satchel and onto the third rail of the BART train as I was about to head over to the Pacific Film Archive to hear Hong's q-and-a (I'm not joking, and you should have seen the look on my face when I realized what had just happened), and stir.

The thing about notes, though, is that the act of writing them down is almost as helpful a memory aid as looking at them afterward. I'm pretty sure I still have most if not all my ideas up there in my head, clamoring to get out onto an essay. And perhaps it's for the best; viewing the film once again and hearing some of Hong's answers in the q-and-a helped clarify some of the issues around his working method in general and Virgin Stripped bare By Her Bachelors in particular.

Thanks for your patience.

Intention, Perhaps

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The first Korean-made films I ever saw were actually in-flight videos on a trans-Pacific Korean Air jetliner. I don’t remember much about these videos; only that they were promoting historical sites to visitors to the country, and I wasn't even visiting the country. I was only stopping over in the Seoul airport on my way to Thailand, where I was planning to try my hand at teaching English as a Foreign Language, eating lots of vegetarian Thai food and living in a semi-tropical climate for as long as I could stand. All of which I did. (It turned out to be exactly 500 days.)

The Seoul airport was the first ground I ever touched in Asia, and the only place I ever went to in Korea. Any traveler will tell you it doesn’t really "count"- I never got my passport stamped or left the duty-free zone. But I still have extremely vivid memories of my brief time in that airport without any family or friends – traveling outside the United States without them being another first for me.

When I came back to live in this country after those five hundred days I still had a hunger to connect to the world outside of it, especially to the countries I'd visited, however briefly, in East Asia. So when the spring 2001 film festival season in Frisco rolled around, I determined to see films chosen from those countries: Iron Ladies, which I’d somehow missed while in Thailand, Land of Wandering Souls from Cambodia, and Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, my first Korean-made feature film. At the time I was unconditionally blown away by Land of Wandering Souls, a documentary about the laying of fiber-optic cables under one of the poorest countries on Earth, but my response to Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, while very positive, was more qualified. I loved the glimpses into daily life in a city I never saw for myself except through the window of an airplane, but was just starting to fumble my way around true "film festival" cinema. I still hadn't seen very many films more structurally experimental than Mystery Train or Memento yet, and though I loved the conceit of recounting the same events from differing perspectives a la Rashomon, I wasn't certain that Hong's approach, difficult if not impossible to fully synthesize on a single viewing of this film, was the correct one.

After the passage of time I came to feel that it was. Not only had many of Hong's images and lines of dialogue stuck in my memory, but reading other discussion of the film, usually on the internet, had helped to make its clear virtues stand out and any questions or doubts I might have originally had recede. I eventually started trying to catch up with Hong’s other films on DVD (up through Turning Gate), and though they all impressed me, especially the latter, none seemed to match up to what I was now considering to be the formal brilliance of Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors. The structural complexity of the film and its parallel but asymmetrical repetitions, I now felt, stressed the importance as well as limitations of human perception and perspective on defining our reality, or realities.

But, though I now owned it on DVD and had checked out a scene or two, I still hadn't rewatched the film in full. And I knew that my memory of the actual film was becoming incomplete and distorted. So when I got it in my head to run a Blog-a-Thon on a single film, it was one of the first to come to mind: a film I knew I'd liked and would want to share with others, one I wanted to see again and had easy access to, and as a bonus, one that deals directly with something I greatly enjoy about internet discussions of film but don’t feel I see much of on my own blog: the friction and reconciliation between (slightly or greatly) differing viewpoints.

Seeing the film again last Friday, and subsequently studying it carefully on DVD in the past few days, I finally realized just how much I’d misremembered it. I'd completely forgotten whole scenes and even characters like Soo-jung's brother and Jae-hoon's other love interest. I'd forgotten major aspects of even the lead characters, such as Jae-hoon's wealth (in each of the Hong films I've seen this week, morally weak but sexually successful male characters all have a trait that lets them trump more "average" guys: fame, fortune, beauty, a position of authority, or a combination thereof). I'd even gotten the basics of the structure I so admired wrong: I’d only remembered a telling and a retelling and in my post announcing the Blog-a-Thon had referred to the structure as simply "bifurcated", overlooking the fact that the parallel scenes were nested in a flashback structure and were temporally fragmented in a much more complex way.

However, as you can probably guess, I don't feel weird or bad or anything but fascinated by the distorted mirror through which I've been recalling my first experience with this film. It only provides further evidence, though it might be overly "neat" for me to say it out loud, of the "limitations of human perception and perspective on defining our reality, or realities."

This reflection was a part of a day-long Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Blog-a-Thon. My second piece on the film will be published here later today.

David Gray on Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors

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David Gray doesn't have a blog ("as of yet", he says) but that hasn't prevented him from contributing to this Blog-a-Thon. I'm extremely glad he took me up on my offer to publish e-mail submissions for the event here at Hell On Frisco Bay! An offer that still stands, if any other blogless readers out there aren't wholly satisfied by leaving comments on others' pieces.

In Hong Sang-soo's Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors the image of a tram halted in mid-air during its ascent by a power outage and swaying back and forth is literally central, occurring at the halfway point of this carefully structured film. And this tram contains the titular virgin, Soo-Jung who is deciding on her way whether to meet her boyfriend Jae-Hoon at a hotel for a prearranged deflowering. As Soo-Jung stands in the interrupted tram, waiting for its stillness to break either up or down, she assists a mother by holding her screaming baby, in a beautifully constructed metaphor of her stuck life. Each of the three men in her life, all after her in their different fashions yet for the same reason, behave in childish, demanding ways toward her, and she is content to hold them as they scream.

Until this small intermediary scene we have been following the narrative of Soo-Jung’s suitor Jae-Hoon, in his soju-soaked courtship of Soo-Jung. It is the very screams of this baby that carry the viewer back to the beginnings of the same courtship, which we will see all over again, this time from Soo-Jung’s perspective.

That Soo-Jung should see Jae-Hoon as the most attractive of the men in her life is hardly surprising if her older brother is in any way a representative male. In his first appearance he comes into her room late at night and begs for a hand job until she wearily gives in. And then there is her boss Young-Soo, the man who has introduced her to Jae-Hoon. He hardly seems notice her at times, but then nearly rapes her, stopping short out of physical cowardice, not any moral compunction. Perversely and tragically, she comforts him in this brutal scene. It is after the mid-point of the film, this central metaphor, that we see both of these "sex scenes." Their placement into the narrative that Hong has been implanting in his audience’s mind through the first half of the film has a shocking effect. Scenes that seemed comic the first time through take on a much darker feel. Hong further complicates matters by giving us alternate versions of many of the scenes we have already witnessed.

Ultimately, Soo-Jung acquiesces to Jae-Hoon's pleas, and she ends the film no longer a virgin, after another disquieting scene in which Jae-Hoon repeatedly tells her that he will be gentle, while at the same time his body belies his words. Words and actions seem to constantly be at odds in Hong's film, as if the characters are constantly trying to persuade themselves that what they are saying is true. Jae-Hoon, in one of his most selfish moments, loudly berates Soo-Jung for not being interested enough in him. He raves that she has made him consider marriage, and does she realize what a monumental thing it is for him to consider marriage? Here Jae-Hoon really is nothing but a big baby.

In the final shot of the film, Jae-Hoon tells Soo-Jung that he has found his match, and she tells him she has too, but if we follow her gaze as they embrace we know this is not true. They see the world oppositely, which Hong highlights not only through their wildly different memories, but also, in a wonderful shorthand, by showing two separate point-of-view shots at critical points in the film as they each look out the window of the hotel room. Jae-Hoon sees the hotel chef walking from left to right, and later Soo-Jung sees the same chef walking back in the opposite direction. But Soo-Jung remains trapped on this motionless tram, and what can she do but wait for it to start moving again, and take her somewhere?

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors is the first of Hong Sang-Soo's films I've seen, and over the past few days I’ve seen two more, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, and Woman on the Beach, all thanks to the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. They are all fresh and still flowering in my mind, but I am eager to see more. These hurried thoughts on Virgin don’t even touch on much of what I have loved about Hong’s films, like the little glances we get of Seoul, and the great funny drinking scenes that seem to be a fixture. I eagerly look forward to reading what everyone else has to say about the film.

Open Letter

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To the guy who decided it would be a good idea to loudly cough the word *boring* on his way out of the theatre in the middle of the Story of Marie and Julien Friday night:

It might please you to learn that, within a few minutes of your departure, the clarity of your critique had sunk in to each and every one of us in the audience. That, though we'd been too blinded by our allegiance to the ideal of "art cinema" to recognize it on our own, your analysis spurred us to realize that "the Emperor Had No Clothes", and to walk, one by one and two by two, out into the lobby of the Pacific Film Archive, where Susan Oxtoby herself reassured us all that never again would the PFA make the mistake of programming a film like it.

Well, I'm afraid that none of that actually happened. There were a few chuckles after your departing remark, and then we all remained in our seats, enjoying, or perhaps (as I didn't have the wherewithal to conduct a survey) being bored by the rest of the film. This does not make us more virtuous than the people who, in case you thought you were being terribly original, walked out of the film before you did. But it certainly doesn't make you any better or smarter or more "with it" or honest than us either.

To be sure, this is a challenging film, and I'm not all that surprised no Frisco Bay film programmer had wanted to bring it to us before. To be truthful, I'm not certain what I'd have made of its first hour or so if I hadn't seen its elder cousin Celine and Julie Go Boating last month. Both films are mysteries where the mystery is little more than hinted at during the first half of the film, which, on a single viewing apiece for me so far, I take as instead the terrain for helping us get to know the characters and the nature of their relationship. In each case the first half is the foundation for the truly astonishing material that comes in the second half. In the case of Celine and Julie Go Boating the title characters are so naturally appealing that I didn't care at all that I wasn't getting a sense of narrative driving the film. In the case of the Story of Marie and Julien that's slightly less the case, but I was no longer a Rivette virgin and it was probably my trust that the director would at some point take me into some extraordinary realm like the one I'd so loved in Celine and Julie Go Boating that prevented the sense that I might have been "missing something" (or that the director, or the rest of the audience might have been) from taking hold. It didn't even occur to me to look at my watch (though Rivette had placed all those clocks on the screen) or be bored; I was, as one character put it, "waiting." Which paid off in a big way, delivering a third act as emotional and suspenseful as a great Val Lewton film, while following Rivette's tradition of guiding his audience a step closer to an intellectual understanding of the nature and "rules" of character, drama and cinema. I'd be sorry you had to miss it, if only you hadn't been such an ass about it.

But most of all I'm confused as to how you could possibly choose a sex scene with Emmanuelle Béart to be the moment to walk out on. What's wrong with you, man?

Everybody (in the audience) Is A Critic

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I feel a bit presumptious participating in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania blogger Andy Horbal's Film Criticism Blog-A-Thon. Though I have an inner urge to write about films, I must admit that the few times I've been described with the word "critic" I've had to supress a wince. Not that I feel I'm "above" such a label, quite the contrary. The critics I most admire seem able to carve a deeply insightful (whether I agree wholeheartedly or not) critical response to practically every slice of moving image they come across. I don't feel nearly as able to do such a thing. I strongly identify with something Jonas Mekas wrote about himself: "Maybe I am more a tinker than a thinker." I'm not exactly sure what Mekas meant by it when it was published May 29, 1969 (he proves himself quite a thinker discussing Arnulf Rainer in the very next paragraph) but in my writing I often feel like an untrained dabbler, most comfortable chiselling diligently at a tiny, underworked corner of knowledge. Most times when I feel tempted to make a grand pronouncement on the "big picture" issues of cinema, I feel like I'm just saying something that countless people before me have already said less clumsily. I'm mostly content to let others do the critical "heavy lifting" for me. It's one reason why I try to include so many links in each post I write at this site.

But there are lots of differing definitions of the word "critic". WordNet-Online has three. The first is "a person who is professionally engaged in the analysis and interpretation of works of art" and it doesn't seem like me at all- I earn my living working in libraries, perhaps helping facilitate others' analysis and interpretation, but not doing any myself. Definition #3 is the one the saying I riff on in the title of this post stems from: "someone who frequently finds fault or makes harsh and unfair judgments." Not me at all; I normally err in the other direction. But look at the second definition: "anyone who expresses a reasoned judgment of something." That's me. Not always, of course. Sometimes my judgments come purely from emotion, not reason (hopefully I can at least tell the difference.)

But if that's me, isn't it everybody else in the movie theatre too? I'm not trained in psychology, but I'm not one of those who believes that some, most or any people really turn their brains off when they watch a movie. Of course, people have different tools to help them analyze films at different levels. When I was a young child I didn't have the interest in or the ability to differentiate adult actors' faces from each other; I could only recognize types, which put me at a disadvantage for understanding a film with more than one brown-haired adult male character in it, for example. But I tried to use reason to figure out what was happening based on what I could understand. Many moviegoers may not understand the difference between what a film director and a screenwriter is (some days I'm not so sure I've got as firm a grasp on it as I think I do) but if that limits the types of rational analysis that can be performed when watching a movie, it certainly does not cease such analysis.

And everyone judges films. How many "big" film websites have recognized this and provided anyone happening to stop and look at a film's page the opportunity to rate it? Have you ever asked someone's opinion on a film, only to have them tell you, "I don't know"? Doesn't such a response pretty much imply that a person has too many opinions about a given film, rather than too few? And, of course, these opinions are constantly expressed. Let me for a moment step away from my pontificating to provide a concrete example from my primary area of expertise: the Frisco filmgoing scene.

The setting is the Castro Theatre last night, where the Silent Film Society hosted another highly successful event: a screening of the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille-produced original film version of Chicago (though there's evidence to suggest DeMille actually directed it but gave Frank Urson the credit.) The house was packed tightly enough that I had to find a seat way in the upper reaches of the balcony, where I had a much better view of a couple film cans labeled "the Flowers of St. Francis" than I had of the Baker-Mehling Hot Five providing the flapper-era jazz accompaniment for the film. No matter, I heard the band and saw the screen fine, and from my lofty position perhaps felt a little more prone to pay particular attention to reactions of the audience between me and the screen. It's a fun if occasionally over-telegraphed film and it certainly seems like it could be a pre-code DeMille to me: a morality tale in which the sinners are more irresistible than the saints.

Normally I find I can't stomach trial sequences. They've knocked the life out of many an otherwise enjoyable film from Mutiny on the Bounty to, well, Chicago. I've never been able to get past my dislike of film trials and appreciate what everyone else seems to love about something like Anatomy of a Murder. But the trial scene is surely the heart of this Chicago and its best sequence. I should probably exempt silent film trial scenes from my blanket scorn, as they so naturally rely on visual storytelling that they're more likely to overcome the problems so many talking trial scenes cannot (I'd supply details if it didn't feel like a subject for another post entirely.) the Passion of Joan of Arc and the Unholy Three are a rarely-compared pair that more than overcome, and gloriously. In Chicago, Urson/DeMille play up the scenario's farcical aspects perfectly by having everybody burlesque to a degree rarely seen in even the most overacted silent film. Throughout the film Phyllis Haver's performance as Roxie has been ramped up a notch in intensity over her costars Victor Varconi, Eugene Pallette, etc. But now, wearing a scandalously leggy, virginally white dress, she launches into the realm of parody and brings everyone from the flustered prosecuting attorney to the lecherously leering jurymen to the gumsmacking public along with her. The ludicrous acting styles are all the more effective for being incorporated into a quick-cut pattern of editing helping to give the sense of a courtroom about to explode. When she completes her dramatic testimony as if a beginning drama student hamming for her first audition, the Castro audience broke into a huge round of applause.

Now, who knows just what inspired hundreds of different people to spontaneously begin clapping in the very middle of a film whose creators were long-dead. For many this may have been a mainly emotional response, or a rational one far different from the one I found myself experiencing. There's really no way to tell if, like me, people were starting to wonder to themselves if the filmmakers were making a subversive commentary (criticism!) of silent film acting in general here at the dawn of the sound film era. The film does include a newspaper headline playing off of the first big semi-talkie, the Jazz Singer ("Jazz Shooter"), after all.

What I do know from the applause is that as a group this audience liked that scene. A lot. Almost certainly better than any scene appearing prior to it, and probably better than anything after as well (though plenty of enthusiastic hisses and cheers erupted during the film's coda of comeuppance). Is calling these kinds of mass responses (or the ones described here and here) real film criticism a stretch? Maybe. But if so, does this or this or this still get to be called criticism? How about this or this?

Thanks, Andy, for spurring me to write this piece for your Blog-A-Thon. It turned out better than I expected, and I don't feel quite as presumptuous any longer (though I'm not tempted to re-edit the beginning paragraph at all- sometimes my posts are like journeys through a writing experiment, and I feel like preserving that feeling.)

A final note for the day for my Frisco Bay readers, especially fans of silent films accompanied by top-class musicians: though the Berlin and Beyond festival at the Castro has not released its schedule yet, it seems that on January 15th Dennis James is slated to perform a score to a new restoration of a Bavarian silent called Nathan, the Wise, featuring Werner Krauss (of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) in the title role and Max Schrek (Nosferatu) to boot.