Workers; Nobody's Daughter

More delights from the Gezici Festival...

Nobody's Daughter
I was surprised to see this make the Cahier du Cinéma's Top 10 list -- it wasn't a bad movie, but I didn't think it was especially revelatory. Admittedly, it was hot and stuffy in the theatre so I did doze off, but only for about 10 minutes. The movie seems to me to be about a young woman and her illicit relationship with a professor. It's told in an interesting, looping sort of way while I wasn't particularly impressed at the time, in retrospect there is something intriguing about its circuitous approach to narrative. The same problem comes up again and again, with no seeming way forward. I guess maybe I need to rewatch it? I feel like it never quite cohered for me; I missed something.

Workers
I love love loved this movie. A truly remarkable film. Extremely subtle and understated, but somehow never dull. The filmmaker will just plonk a camera down on the sidewalk and shoot a storefront for 10 minutes, and yet, it holds your interest. Gorgeous shots, a wonderful use of color, and a sense of seeing what life is like for other people.
  The plot is so understated that it's barely discernible, and involves several threads of narrative, some of which overlap, and others which don't. There are essentially two main characters, a caretaker who tends to a rich woman (and a few other members of that household's staff), and an older janitor at a lightbulb company (and a young woman he has a relationship of sorts with. What kind exactly, we don't know.). I don't want to say anything else about it, because watching events unfold in minute shifts is one of the film's particular delights. But broadly speaking, we can say that it's a film about relationships between people, and employees and their bosses, and revenge. Occasionally melancholic, it is also hilariously funny at moments, and bittersweet at points. But overall, absolutely delightful. In fact, I would say that it is the one that belongs on a top 10 list...

Thou Gild'st the Even

Original (Turkish) title: Sen Aydınlatırsın Geceyi

The bizarre title is from Shakespeare's "Sonnet 28," though I still don't really know what it means. The movie, unfortunately, is not that good. It's kind of interesting because it's just so totally weird; an absurd plot where meaning is glimpsed, dream-like, from time to time. Little things are "off" right from the get-go; the main character walks through walls, another person appears to be a giant, a guy can apparently actually shoot out of his finger guns, a woman can stop time, another guy is continuously wiping away bloody tears, another woman is invisible most of the time. Why? *Shrug* Why not? The plot is not much more reasonable; basically, there's a guy who is kind of depressed, he falls in love with a woman but they have some problems, and, well, a bunch of other random stuff happens. Sometimes the absurdity is comical or charming, but it can also seem pointless. At first I was interested, but after awhile I got restless and felt like I was wasting my time.

To the North, by Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen is not very good at endings. It's kind of a fascinating phenomenon, in that it seems borderline pathological; a horror of completion. But it's also frustrating, in that it can really mar an otherwise fantastic book, like To the North, whose ending just stinks. Was it a cliché at the time, I wonder, or is she part of the process of making it one? I don't know, but I don't like it. So let us pretend it did not happen and act as if the book were simply unfinished, and the last few pages lost.

To the North is essentially a romance novel; the story of two very different women, Emmeline and Cecilia, and their love affairs. It's remarkable in that both women are quite unavailable emotionally; Emmeline because she just never really seems to be there in the first place and is a kind of fascinating emotional blank, and Cecilia because she is astonishingly self-absorbed and completely illogical. And yet, they manage to forge these odd connections with two men who seem comparatively normal (though it must be admitted that Bowen is rather less interested in them, and thus, so are we. It's not ideal, but at least they aren't demonized, just sidelined). The ups and downs of their interactions are not at all like those of typical love stories, and it's ultimately very hard to say whether the phenomenon described is love, or whether the relationships are successful, or what is going on at all. The more you think about it, the murkier it seems, which is, I think, rather brilliant. I liked the book mainly because I found Emmeline strangely riveting. Ready to listen but astonishingly unresponsive, in love (maybe?) but uncommitted, abstract but somehow real: she's just a really interesting character study, which often seem to be the point of Bowen's books, in the grand scheme of things. I thought Emmeline was both more persuasive and more complex than the odd outsiders that people Bowen's other novels, and perhaps that's why I liked this book more than I have her others, though I enjoy all of them.

The real reason to love this novel though, as is generally the case with Bowen, is the language itself. Bowen's prose is basically perfect, as far as I'm concerned. She gazed at Julian, wishing he were a clock. It is unsurprising that  critics fixate on Bowen's Irishness, because her writing is exactly what you imagine stereotypical elegant English novels to sound like, except even more so, and with a kind of tense edginess to it. It almost seems like caricature at moments, but it's nearly impossible to tell. Regardless, the two paragraphs about a bus on pg 46 might be some of the world's most delightful writing on public transportation. Definitely a book worth reading.

Dispatches from the Gezici Festival

Expect a lot of short updates over the next week, because the Gezici Festival is in town! Hooray! I've got tickets to another 7 films, I think? So lots of movies this week. Last night, I went to:

This is Martin Bonner

A pleasant film, though a somewhat meandering one. Travis is a guy who has just gotten out of prison and is trying to start a new life. Martin works for a faith-based program that helps prisoners transition; he has in fact just moved to Reno, and seems to need some help transitioning himself. As the film progresses, we learn more and more about his life (and all the things that went wrong in it). It's an understated film, but the parallels between the two men are interesting, and both actors are so immensely likable that the film manages to be engaging, despite not having much of a plot arc.
  I'm glad that prisoners are getting more screen time these days, and in more thoughtful representations (I haven't gotten around to posting about it, but yes, I totally dug the first season of Orange is the New Black). This movie isn't especially superb, but it's the kind of quiet, contemplative independent film that can be quite pleasant on a Sunday afternoon.

The Impeccables (Kusurzular)

Meh. The story of two sisters staying in the home of their grandmother (who, we learn, died several months earlier). Clearly something is not right, and as the film unfolds, we gradually find out what brought them there, and why they resent each other so much. I guessed it pretty quick, so the movie was a bit flat, because it wasn't a convincing exploration of a relationship between two women, it was two women going through the paces of unfolding a cliché. Though I did think both women played their roles quite well and seemed very talented; it's a pity they didn't have a better film to showcase their abilities.
  One thing that is kind of amusing/interesting is that at different moments, each of them totally snaps off and starts screaming at the other. Turkish women are remarkably good at this. If you've seen it in person (and I have), it's pretty dramatic: they can go from zero to sixty, regular indoor voices to shrieking, in seconds. I don't know if it's something about the language that is particularly conducive to it, or it's a cultural thing, but oooweee! It's the kind of thing that makes you immediately go "ok, ok, ok, fine, whatever you want, whatever will make you stop." Not to generalize (I'm totally generalizing), but I think white American women are so socialized to be quiet that they just can't muster that kind of volume, especially on such short notice. Maybe American women of color can pull it off, sometimes? But the Turkish version is especially impressive because it's so high pitched, which makes it especially hard on the ears. I find it absolutely enthralling.
...but it doesn't really make this movie worth watching.

Nostalgia for the Light

The real star of this thoughtful documentary is the footage, which is absolutely incredible. But the premise is not less fascinating; a contemplation of the skies over Chile and the ground under it. Juxtaposing the continuing search for the bodies of those who "disappeared" during the Pinochet regime with astronomical research, the film offers a lyrical reflection on space, time, and human knowledge.

The skies above Chile are remarkably clear, and the soil is very dry, making both highly amenable to exploration. What lies in between, however, is much more murky. What struck me about the film is the way it presented both archaeology and astronomy as studies in history, a process of reading traces that strangely spatializes time, but offers a sort of arid clarity. In contrast, the realm of socio-political history is messy, and in the particular case of Chile, deeply complicated by efforts of those in power to obscure it by hiding physical evidence. It is precisely by producing physical remnants--detailed maps of the camps, or the heartbreaking search for bodies--that people strive to give it concreteness. And those tangible objects speak their history in all kinds of ways. There was this moment where someone points out that Pinochet did not need to build concentration camps; in one case, at least, he could use barracks that had been constructed for 19th century miners. Which, the speaker notes, attests to the labor conditions of those miners...

It's not a cheerful film, and it must be admitted that it's occasionally a bit ponderous and repetitive, but it's nonetheless a very interesting movie, and decidedly worth watching.

Distant Reading, by Franco Moretti

In the rather frenetic world of literary criticism, theoretical speculation enjoys the same symbolic status as cocaine: one has to try it.
--Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders

I don't always agree with Franco Moretti, but I usually enjoy reading his books, and this one was no exception. Not only because of his writing style, which is lively and straightforward, but also because it is generally interesting and often exhilarating to watch someone puzzle over completely new approaches to literary studies. Distant Reading is a collection of pieces from the last ten or fifteen years, with brief headers added to them to explain their position in his intellectual trajectory, or to explain why he thinks he was wrong. This is a remarkable, and extremely admirable aspect of the book: Moretti's willingness to say that he was incorrect. One might wonder why go to the bother of reprinting them then, but I think there are two very good reasons to do so: 1. though parts of the essays (particularly the now-infamous "Conjectures on World Literature") have been rather thoroughly refuted, other points he makes hold true, and remain original and important. 2. they attest to a process, and helpfully illuminate certain dead-ends of study -- here's what doesn't work (something I always wondered about in the hard sciences, when friends complained that their hypothesis had proven false and therefore they couldn't publish a paper from it--wouldn't it be helpful to let others know not to try this approach?). As Moretti puts it, "Once you have been really proved wrong, the argument is no longer about you; it’s about a world of facts that everybody agrees to share (and respect); about hypotheses that have an objectivity of their own, and can be tested, modified, or indeed rejected." This is the most delightful thing about this book (and Moretti more broadly): he is brave enough to just suggest some ideas for general consideration, even ones that might seem kind of out-there. Sure, it takes some ego to do that, but to me at least, it doesn't come across as an arrogant move; he seems genuinely interested in furthering knowledge, trying out new approaches, throwing out hypotheses and seeing what happens. There is this wonderful sense of exploration and possibility and willingness to experiment, which I absolutely love.

At the same time, the comparison between theory and cocaine might have a more unfortunate accuracy as well. The speculation is interesting, yes, but occasionally seems untrammeled to any sort of... reality. When you're talking about global literature, in particular, it's very easy to paint in extremely broad strokes and make sweeping generalizations, and very difficult to provide concrete evidence for them. Sure, you can make a graph of the number of novels published in a year and the amount of words in the titles of those novels, and marvel that the shapes of the two appear to be in inverse relationship (more books, shorter titles). But correlation--or graphs of the same shape--does not equal causation. I am extremely skeptical of some of his claims about the way Chinese or Brazilian literature developed, precisely because he often relies on other critics (distant reading!) rather than an intimate knowledge of the texts. But he doesn't seem to account for the fact that critical approaches are themselves shaped by accepted paradigms, hence people discussing 'peripheral' literature often consider it in terms dictated by the 'center.' So, while Moretti is arguing that it's the novelists who write texts trying to shoehorn local ideas into imported form, I'd suggest that the real problem may well be critics trying to shoehorn those local ideas into their own preconceptions.  If that's the problem, Moretti's fail-safe -- if a critic is wrong, the insights won't be born out in other critical works -- will not detect it. Though there's not much sign that he's even checking: the evidence Moretti cites, too, is often flimsy or just scant. In the "Conjectures," for instance, he cites one phrase from the introduction to one Polish novel as shorthand for including ALL of Polish literature in his system. That's just poor scholarship. Sure, we can't read everything. Maybe this kind of scholarship needs to be a team effort. Elsewhere Moretti cites his research assistant by name (indeed, he is extraordinarily generous with specifically naming others who deserve credit, which is wonderful) -- perhaps he needs to hire more of them.

Secondarily, as I discuss in more detail in a paper I'm working on (which, if it gets accepted, won't appear for another year at least, what with the way academic publishing works...ugh), there is a very real question, I think, as to what kind of questions such research seeks to answer, and whether this is really what literary scholars are trained for. Moretti is the first to admit that he doesn't have the mathematical chops to know much about data analysis. As a biologist friend of mine noted after seeing Moretti deliver a lecture on analyzing titles a few years ago (which appears in essay form in this book), he could farm out these data sets to some graduate students in statistics, let them play with it for a day and see what they come up with. Because his use of data isn't actually that impressive. Though I suppose this is precisely his argument: that we should be training humanities scholars to work with this kind of data (instead of schooling them in the art of close-reading). But...isn't that what we have sociologists for? I mean, maybe we need more joint programs in sociology and literature, or this is exactly why so many places are hiring in digital humanities, but to me at least, it does seem like what he's talking about is a slightly different discipline. More broadly though, he is essentially trying to figure out why literary traditions develop the way they do; why some techniques catch on and others don't. I'm not sure it's possible to answer that question: how, maybe, but why? 

I suspect that part of the problem is that Moretti wants to retain a strong link between history and culture, and a strong sense of political engagement. Whereas I believe in both of those ideals but think that systematizing them tends to be reductive and deny precisely what is most interesting and powerful about literature. But I'm still puzzling through all that myself. 

And that's ultimately what makes Distant Reading so rewarding: not the content of its claims, but the way it makes you (or me, rather) think about a set of questions in a new and different way. I am curious to read The Bourgeoisie as well, but in less of a hurry to do so, which is actually kind of telling, and suggests that Moretti might be onto something in his predictions about where the field is going...

Blackmail

Much as I would have loved to be having a turkey dinner, I had to settle for seeing a restored version of Hitchcock's 1929 silent film Blackmail, accompanied by live (improvised) piano music. I'll feast tomorrow with friends.

For the first ten minutes of the movie, I thought oh boy, I forgot how hard it is to understand what's happening in silent films. The narrative can be really confusing when you don't have any dialogue to help you make sense of it. But then it shifted, and everything became perfectly clear, and remained so for the rest of the film. What was most amazing about the movie was how on the one hand, it was told like a silent film, ie, very exaggerated and expressive faces, and a kind of condensed feeling, where ideas are expressed in a very economical way. But on the other hand, it is so very recognizable as a Hitchcock film. Certain trademark visual stylings, but also something about the narrative, double crosses and paranoia and reversals of fortune. It was so neat to see how his way of storytelling worked in a somewhat different mode, and in some ways even seemed more appropriate to it. Now I want to rewatch his later films and think about whether they bear traces of techniques honed in an earlier time.

The music was neat -- although improvised on the spot, it was quite suited to the film, which is to say that I frequently forgot that it wasn't simply a part of it. Except for one moment, where the pianist played a few snatches of "A Woman is a Sometimes Thing," which kind of yanked me out of the story.

In any case, unsurprisingly, it's an excellent film. Definitely see it if you have the chance.