Fassbinder

Started by pookiethecat, June 05, 2003, 10:49:24 PM

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pookiethecat

Quote from: SoNowThenWhat about that box set CC just put out?

a bit much to ask from the 'rents don't you say, especially with netflix and a new pair of pumas already in the works.
i wanna lick 'em.

SoNowThen

parents are for spoiling their children    :)


naw, you're right. i say save up and get it later tho...
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

godardian

Quote from: SoNowThenWhat about that box set CC just put out?

That doesn't technically count because it's well more than one DVD... but yes, it's beautiful. Of the three, I've only seen Marriage of Maria Braun, but it's very good, and I'm really looking forward to experiencing the whole set. It's beautifully packaged, too- very reminiscent of the Antoine Doinel box. Rough-paper (as opposed to the sturdier but more conventional packaging of the Bergman and Dreyer sets) is graphically very nice, I think.

Slightly off-topic: Speaking of Bergman and the color red- you seen Cries and Whispers?
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

Gold Trumpet

Quote from: godardianSlightly off-topic: Speaking of Bergman and the color red- you seen Cries and Whispers?

Ugh, now I have to comment. Love the movie. Bergman's development from beginner to master is in example with this movie for sure. Its just I had a film/literature professor talk about how she loved Ingmar Bergman. I got into a conversation with her and remarked how my favorite of his was Cries and Whispers and Persona. She said she never seen them. Surprising, I know. Given I had the nice dvd, I lent it to her. When she gave it back, I tried talking about Bergman's effect of furthering earlier themes of his and she just kept saying, "I love it! The use of red was so great in that! How the scenes would end and begin with the red screen? Fantastic! I loved the red in the film!" and on an on. I tried to interrupt her but to no avail. Ugh. Bad memories when this portion of the movie is signaled out.

To try to be of help to this thread, I am going to try to watch Ali: Fear Eats the Soul tonight and reply as soon as I can. Also, the forementioned Criterion box set is number #1 on my christmas list of 3 things.

~rougerum

godardian

Quote from: The Gold Trumpet
Quote from: godardianSlightly off-topic: Speaking of Bergman and the color red- you seen Cries and Whispers?

Ugh, now I have to comment. Love the movie. Bergman's development from beginner to master is in example with this movie for sure. Its just I had a film/literature professor about how she loved Ingmar Bergman. I got into a conversation with her and remarked my favorite of his was Cries and Whispers and Persona. She said she never seen them. Surprising, I know. Given I had the nice dvd, I lent it to her. When she gave it back, I tried talking about Bergman's effect of furthering earlier themes of his and she just kept saying, "I love it! The use of red was so great in that! How the scenes would end and begin with the red screen? Fantastic! I loved the red in the film!" and on an on. I tried to interrupt her but to no avail. Ugh. Bad memories when this portion of the movie is signaled out.

To try to be of help to this thread, I am going to try to watch Ali: Fear Eats the Soul tonight and reply as soon as I can. Also, the forementioned Criterion box set is number #1 on my christmas list of 3 things.

~rougerum

Certainly, there is much, much more to Bergman's film than the color... but it is very memorable and does heighten the effect. It was just SoNowThen's comment that brought it to mind... I wouldn't want to diminish it by basically saying it was pretty. It is a very lovely technique, though. It's inseparable from the actors' faces. There is also wonderful use of sound in that film.

Can't wait to hear your comments on Fassbinder, GT!
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

Gold Trumpet

To comment on Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, I didn't really like it. The idea of course was to show a couple of extreme distance in background. A physically attractive man and an older, unattractive woman. You saw her conviction in the relationship, but never really his. He seemed more of a passenger being offered nice things and on second date (literally) he is indirectly offered marriage and like the coffee and brandy, he accepts. Much of what bothered me in believability was the acting. The man playing Ali had little presence or anything else at all. Most other people just seemed to be standing around and merely say their lines. The dialogue in conveying the story reminded me of David O. Selznick's obcession with memos in deleting the 80% of conversation that was disposable in that it didn't get to the point: all the dialogue here was get to the point and acted with as much excitement as a memo. In the Criterion booklet, it is said Fassbinder wanted to bring the original story of influence from melodrama (Sirk) to  fable. I don't really get why he would do it. Fassbinder's is attempting to speak for societal problems in his own Germany. I don't see how addressing it in a fable is really going to be the best structure.

There are interesting ideas, *spoiler* like how the couple of course meets resentment and pressure from the community but after being away and time passing, they become more accepted but start to drift. They drift because they can't just rely on each other and start to bring the pressures and norms of their own cultures and asking the other to give up something indirectly because of it.

Even with all of this, I'm still glad I bought the disc and do still want that box set and to watch more Fassbinder.

~rougerum

godardian

Quote from: The Gold TrumpetTo comment on Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, I didn't really like it. The idea of course was to show a couple of extreme distance in background. A physically attractive man and an older, unattractive woman. You saw her conviction in the relationship, but never really his. He seemed more of a passenger being offered nice things and on second date (literally) he is indirectly offered marriage and like the coffee and brandy, he accepts. Much of what bothered me in believability was the acting. The man playing Ali had little presence or anything else at all. Most other people just seemed to be standing around and merely say their lines. The dialogue in conveying the story reminded me of David O. Selznick's obcession with memos in deleting the 80% of conversation that was disposable in that it didn't get to the point: all the dialogue here was get to the point and acted with as much excitement as a memo. In the Criterion booklet, it is said Fassbinder wanted to bring the original story of influence from melodrama (Sirk) to  fable. I don't really get why he would do it. Fassbinder's is attempting to speak for societal problems in his own Germany. I don't see how addressing it in a fable is really going to be the best structure.

There are interesting ideas, *spoiler* like how the couple of course meets resentment and pressure from the community but after being away and time passing, they become more accepted but start to drift. They drift because they can't just rely on each other and start to bring the pressures and norms of their own cultures and asking the other to give up something indirectly because of it.

Even with all of this, I'm still glad I bought the disc and do still want that box set and to watch more Fassbinder.

~rougerum

You didn't really care for Far from Heaven (another Sirk homage) for similar reasons, if I recall...
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

Gold Trumpet

Kinda and not really. I think the acting, as in Sirk's and Hayne's movie, was muted to a point to fit the rules for a genre. Unlike those two movies, I don't really feel much romanticisim or any attempt to find romanticism at all within it to just get the movie believable on the level of melodrama as with those two. Tougher images are here. Tougher images that may be suggesting a better context for the movie to operate with.

Also, Neon Mercury has asked me for a mini review of Far From Heaven in the Ask The Gold Trumpet thread. Look for that later on in the day to say me speak on an entire different plateau than just failure of conviction in drama or anything like that.

~rougerum

SoNowThen

Soooo...

I just watched Love Is Colder Than Death, Fassbinder's 3rd film I believe, and his first in the crime trilogy.

It's amazing. Amazing I mean in that rough around the edges, spare crime thriller sort of way. And the Wellspring DVD looks great. This is the kinda movie that young cinephiles like us should be making.

I will now be for sure buying the BRD Trilogy in the new year, along with Beware Of A Holy Whore. Let the Fassbinder marathon begin!!!!!!!!
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

godardian

The revival of this thread (thanks, SoNowThen!) reminds me; I keep meaning to dupe my many recent blog entries re: Fassbinder. Here goes...


From the earlier phase in his career- just as he was letting the Douglas Sirk influence seep in- The Merchant of Four Seasons. A struggling fruit vendor (he has a street cart) returns from the horrors of the Foreign Legion into the seemingly more pleasant but equally imprisoning arms of his family and their economic aspirations for him. Nobody quite captures the creeping futility of modern life (or, as Blur pointed out, that it's rubbish), quite like Fassbinder.

As we recognize from our own lives, everyone in Merchant of Four Seasons is caught between their need to be human and their need to get ahead; there's a gorgeous moment where the fruit vendor's wife (played to melting-ice perfection by Irm Hermann, who also played what may be the quintessential Fassbinder role as the mute secretary in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant) is catcalled by a passing driver, who has mistaken her for a hooker. As she turns to her verbal assailant, the camera frames her against a shop display window containing a "bride" mannequin arm-in-arm with a gaily dressed "fashionable bourgeois lady" mannequin; the way that these characters are mere products, molded to roles they might not even be able to articulate, is summed up beautifully during this one brief sequence.

Fassbinder sidestepped the pedantry of so many social-problem films by always attempting the big picture, taking the role of the observer over that of the judge, and it works. There's real narrative pleasure to be had from witnessing the insidiousness of conformist values passed, in a bitter cycle, from person to person, causing sisters, wives, brothers, fathers, and mothers to brutalize one another in subtle ways. The real onus of all the misery seems to be placed upon the fruit vendor's intellectual, independent, cosmopolitan, and generous sister, who is too absorbed in a book at her brother's hour of most dire need, a time that a sage word or even a listening ear could have altered the course of his downward spiral.

Less successful but also beautifully made is Chinese Roulette, which was released in 1976 (midcareer). The plot is simple: A disabled, spoiled, all-seeing child confronts her parents and their lovers (one of the lovers is Anna Karina, the spectacular screen apparition familiar from so many Godard films) at their country house, where she pits them against one another in a "game" of only barely concealed malignancy. The film is 3/4 great, but there are patches where Fassbinder's coolly decadent style becomes almost a parody of itself; there are arch, brittle exchanges that recall nothing so much as the "Sprockets" sketches from Saturday Night Live. Well worth a viewing, but not Fassbinder at the top of his game.


No, that designation belongs to the absolutely essential BRD Trilogy, recently released by Criterion in a deluxe four-disc package (including one disc of supplements).

The films each explore the "economic miracle" undertaken in postwar (West) Germany as the country struggled to piece back together some sort of identity and goal, to wake up from and forget a national nightmare of incomprehensible proportions. Each of them witnesses this miracle through the experiences of a female character. And each of these films vie with one another for sheer gorgeous perfection.


Maria Braun was the peak of Fassbinder's perpetual collaborations with Hanna Schygulla (and his last film shot by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who later parlayed his work with Fassbinder into worldwide renown as a perennial Scorsese collaborator). Maria is a war bride who had exactly one night and half a day with her soldier husband before he leaves to fight, and who for the first half of the film staunchly holds onto the hope that he's made it through Germany's WWII defeat alive, though all evidence and common sense point to the contrary. When her husband does miraculously return apparently unscathed, Maria immediately commits a crime of passion for which her husband takes the jail sentence, leaving Maria to wait for him again.

All of this waiting leaves Maria torn between the stasis she desires and the inexorable momentum of the world around her. Germany must get up and go, start moving things forward again, making money, and Maria- a pragmatist who prefers taking action to pining- becomes a razor-sharp, extremely successful businesswoman, an identity she tells herself she'll discard in a second once the real goal- a married, comfortable, conventional bourgeois life with her husband- can be reached. Of course, years at war and in prison leave her husband unprepared for life in a home bought and paid for through the remarkable accomplishments of a woman he no longer really knows (or knows him), and the film's climax depicts the inevitable explosions of repressed truths, Maria's and her husband's concretely, and and the nation of Germany allegorically.

The entire trilogy has a classic sheen to it, stylistic extensions of Hollywood moviemaking, though with very different ends in mind; it takes Hollywood's "dream factory" aesthetic ideals to pierce the complacency of blind patriotism and false identity; Fassbinder knows that manufacturing dreams, whether on screen or in life, has a steep cost that needs to be counted.
Maria Braun is the least artificial (and therefore, in some ways, the least interesting) of the three films, but that Fassbinderian distance is still there, in the framing, in the visual and narrative perspective which allows us to see the characters' complex imprisonment, in the tension between form- cinematic beauty, the luxurious image, the concocted space of the mis-en-scene- and painful, even brutal content.

Veronika Voss- "BRD 2"- is a black-and-white marvel, predating Woody Allen's Zelig and the Coen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There in painstakingly mounting a black-and-white world- the look of classic Hollywood, where light and shadow reigned- in service of a singularly modern vision.

Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech) was a Third Reich-era movie star who, in the postwar years, is a morphine addict, imprisoned by her prescribing doctor and desperate for a taste of her former fame and public approbation. She attempts to seduce and impress a sports writer as a publicity detour in her bid to get back in front of the camera; she also slyly, in true junkie-con style, saps him of cash in an elaborate scam.

There's a tangled "thriller" plot, and the film has very strong shades of those most memorable B&W bastions, Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard. As usual for Fassbinder, however, the real plot is something else, something to do with those who enforce repression, escapism, and forgetfulness (Veronika's doctor, the public health minister), those who can't seem to stop themselves digging up what's being repressed (the sports writer, who obsessively leads himself and his long-suffering girlfriend to a discovery of the real, degraded nature of Veronika's current life while also unearthing a number tattooed upon the inner forearm of another of Veronika's doctor's patients: A concentration camp survivor who, like Veronika, takes the morphine to forget, though for a pointedly different reason), and the one trapped- by herself, by the people around her, and by the mood of the time in which she lives- in that purgatory between trying to remember and trying to forget: Veronika herself.

Lola was released, chronologically speaking, in the middle of the trilogy, though it is labeled "BRD 3" in the titles and is the only one of the films that announces itself as part of a trilogy. It's an almost insanely giddy cinematic pleasure to follow the brilliant black and white of Veronika Voss with the "jellybean colors" (in the words of profoundly gifted cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger, who also shot Voss and is interviewed extensively on the supplemental disc) of Lola.

It's well known that Fassbinder worshiped at the similarly jellybean-colored altar of Douglas Sirk- were it not for Fassbinder's enthusiastic and oft-quoted adulation of Sirk, the entire late-seventies body of critical/feminist theory devoted to viewing Sirk afresh and developing a new appreciation of him might never have been- and Lola is undoubtedly his most Sirkian film in both form and content.

Our first glimpse of the titular character (played to glamorously frenetic perfection by Barbara Sukowa) is in a mirror (a recurrent visual motif in both Sirk and Fassbinder) as she prepares for the evening's show. Lola is a performer and prositute at a cabaret owned by the land developer Schuckert, to whom the postwar boom has been most kind and whose property more or less includes Lola herself. Armin Mueller-Stahl is von Bohm, the town's new zoning commissioner, a somewhat prudish man of integrity who likes to think of himself as modern and a friend to Germany's new "economic miracle." He will do business with the land developer, but won't go to his whorehouse. So, when von Bohm and Lola fall in love, he's unaware of her actual occupation. A love triangle develops, or rather, a love square, with Lola, Schuckert, and von Bohm as the three melodramatic points, and Lola's more practical concerns- financial independence, economic security- as the silent fourth corner.

I'll go out on a limb and submit that of all of Fassbinder's visually impressive, ultimately melancholy works, Lola could very well be the most beautifully sad; beautiful because the film is a hermetically concocted, plastic world in which every object, color, light source, and person seems decorative, something more than itself, and sad because this world is a prison to those who, knowingly or not, create, occupy, and perpetuate it.

After tracking down a copy of it from the library a while back, I finally obtained my own sure to be cherished copy of Christian Braad Thomsen's out of print (and priced accordingly) book, Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius. Thomsen, who also provides audio commentary on the Lola disc (sounding like a Danish Sean Connery) is a filmmaker/critic and was a friend of Fassbinder's; therefore, his insights are at once juicy, informative, and reasonably objective; the book is a combination biography and detailed chronlogical filmography via essay. Add the absolutely gorgeously designed booklet accompanying Criterion's trilogy release and you have a virtually complete goldmine of information/background on what may have been the most proliferative filmmaker of all time; both (especially the Criterion booklet) are also remarkably rich in on-set photographs and stills.


...and then from a little later on...

The Fassbinder gorge continued with Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven. It's hardly a famous work, but it's a really fine effort- better than Merchant of Four Seasons or Chinese Roulette, as good as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

Mother Kusters (Brigitte Mira) is an old woman whose husband dies rather ignobly when, after he learns that he and his coworkers will be laid off, kills his boss, then himself. Mother Kusters and her grown children barely have time to acknowledge the news before the vultures- the media, the Communists and, eventually, anarchists who believe Father Kusters's act made him and his family one of them- begin circling, and the needs of their own harried, desperate lives kick in.

The story is, as to be expected from Fassbinder, one of overall futility and defeat, either of the external or the self-inflicted variety. Still, the character of Mother Kusters, if not the smartest, brightest, or most aware of Fassbinder's human creations, is certainly, in her way, among the wisest, simplest, and most honest, the one with the least mixed sympathetic qualities.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

classical gas

I've only seen parts of "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul", but I'm very interested in this director.  Could someone give me a quick short list of must see films by Fassbinder?
Btw, is "Pioneer to Ingolstadt" any good?  It sounded interesting, but everyone on Netflix said it was horrible, while still enjoying other Fassbinder films.
Anything would be greatly appreciated.

godardian

Quote from: classical gasI've only seen parts of "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul", but I'm very interested in this director.  Could someone give me a quick short list of must see films by Fassbinder?
Btw, is "Pioneer to Ingolstadt" any good?  It sounded interesting, but everyone on Netflix said it was horrible, while still enjoying other Fassbinder films.
Anything would be greatly appreciated.

I think the two to start with would be The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Fox and his Friends. Next down would be Ali (all of it).

Criterion's recent "BRD Trilogy" with The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and Lola, is also must-see Fassbinder. I recently saw Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, not very widely known but very, very good.

Those are all from later in his career, when he started to become obsessed with Douglas Sirk and really incorporate his style as an influence. I bet SoNowThen has some recommendations on the earlier stuff.

He made a huge number of films. I haven't come close to seeing them all. The titles I just mentioned are all available on DVD, though.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

classical gas

thank you for the recomendations.

i was wandering what, for you, was his main appeal?  what did you find unique about him (i've heard he led a unique life, if i'm thinking of the same person)?  i'm looking forward to watching his films and don't doubt that he is great, i'd just like to know what kind of subject matters he dealt with (like bunuel and lynch deal with dreams, PTA with family, Scorsese with crime, bergman with god and relationships and so on).  i'm always interested in obsessions of certain directors, if you could help.

godardian

Quote from: classical gasthank you for the recomendations.

i was wandering what, for you, was his main appeal?  what did you find unique about him (i've heard he led a unique life, if i'm thinking of the same person)?  i'm looking forward to watching his films and don't doubt that he is great, i'd just like to know what kind of subject matters he dealt with (like bunuel and lynch deal with dreams, PTA with family, Scorsese with crime, bergman with god and relationships and so on).  i'm always interested in obsessions of certain directors, if you could help.

I guess that right off the top of my head, I'd say he's obsessed with human nature and its manifestation in social hierarchies and mechanisms. Because he sees a tremendous amount of futility and cruelty in these and views it rather objectively, he's often considered a depressive, cold director. I find, though, that he has a lot of empathy with his characters. He's more interested in a person "outside" of a society and what that society does to them- and what they're willing to give up to join it.

Thus we have the two lovers in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, both "independent" women of different classes, brought together and torn apart by a lack of emotional independence in one of them and a lack of financial independence in the other. Or the marriage in The Merchant of Four Seasons wherein both husband and wife do care about each other in a way, yet are stifled by familial and economic expectations of the marriage, which they're unable to distinguish from their own needs and desires. Or the young, working-class gay man (played by Fassbinder himself) in Fox and his Friends, who is only really accepted (and exploited) by the chic, affluent gay community of his town after he wins a large amount of money in the lottery. Or the widowed woman in Mother Kuster Goes to Heaven, who just wants some justice done to the memory of her dead husband, who killed himself and a boss after discovering he and his co-workers were going to be laid off, and instead is used as a pawn by those (the media, the Communist party, her grown children) who claim to want to help her.

And so on.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

SoNowThen

So I just saw Beware Of A Holy Whore, Fassbinder's movie on movies. It's like a shrapnel grenade exploded in 8 1/2, like Day For Night on acid. It's not as good as either of those, but it's fucking crazy. CRAZY.

It's pretty cool. I gotta buy it eventually.

Godardian, have you seen Whitey? I'd like to blind buy that too. Then I'll have all the early work (crime trilogy), the main middle chunk (Whitey and Holy Whore), and the late melodrama (BRD).

sa-weet

incidentally, he says that Holy Whore is his favorite work.
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.