outlaw bikers - 1984 - Streets of Fire

Streets of Fire
Walter Hill
1984
Universal Pictures
93 minutes

Streets of Fire is a pretty okay movie by the director of the greatest street gang film of all time, The Warriors. Many of this film's features are similar its predecessor: the urban setting dominated by criminals, the emphasis on nighttime, travel by subway, dirty buildings, empty concrete spaces, large congregations of gang members. Streets of Fire is fun to watch but it lacks the constant pressure and intensity of The Warriors. Instead the film has this mix of punk and faux-50s noir asthetic of gritty streets and 'Nighthawk' type diners and Marlon Brando style bikers.

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper (1942)

The film is about a nearly famous nightclub singer and her ex-boyfriend returning to the city from somewhere where he got really good at fighting people. They become entangled with an outlaw biker gang called The Bombers, based on the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club from The Wild One. They go back and forth until a big fight scene with sledgehammers at the end of the movie between the boyfriend and Raven, the leader of The Bombers, who dresses like a Nazi officer.

Probably the best feature of the movie is a minor element, the small role played by Lee Fing, frontman of Fear. He does the cheerleading in support of Raven during the final fight scene, shouting out words of encouragement in his Fear voice.

Oh, also the film ends with a soul group performing called The Sorels, who I suspect are named after Georges Sorel.

punk - 2007 - Control

Control

Anton Corbijn

2007

Three Dogs and a Pony

122 min.

Ian Curtis was the mysteriously depressing frontman for the new wave punk proto-goth band, Joy Division. Curtis’ band, in 1977,  helped launched Factory Records, gloom rock, and the Manchester rock scene (later dominated by their polar opposites in sound and attitude, The Happy Mondays). Curtis continues to be an enigma to fans because of his darkly personal lyrics, his freaky dancing that occasionally gave way to epileptic fits, and his 1980 suicide at age 23.

Control is a black and white cinematic representation of Curtis’ backstage life, which is, in essence, a dull story that could hardly interest anyone were it not for the fact that Joy Division was great. Curtis was and is revered for his onstage presence and his songwriting talent and like many talented artists and performers, he was not a particularly interesting person beyond that. Not that that’s not enough, Joy Division was a great band and probably one of the most enigmatic manifestations of punk culture. Certainly Curtis and co, as musicians helped to extend the possibilities for what punk can be but to look at the singer beyond Joy Division is to tell a story of a young man who doesn’t get along with his wife and had an affair. The most interesting aspects of Curtis’ life, his music, are put into the background in order to fill the foreground with the dull gossip of his personal life.

Curtis’ lyrics continue to provide solace to the people who watch this movie and take in this mundane soap opera. The crisis of these biographical dramas is that they provide film studios with an opportunity to retell a story that have been already long-exhausted by the culture industry, simply because they are attached to cultural figures whose work has presence in our lives.

The film is largely focused on Curtis, with very little on the people who helped make him the ghostly embodiment of gloom punk, such as the other members of his band - who went on to become New Order and displayed their own considerable songwriting talents for decades after - or Factory Records founder Tony Wilson. The film does put a fair bit of the focus on Ian’s wife, Deborah, whose biography of Curtis, Touching From a Distance, provided the textual ground for this film. One of the consistent features of these kinds of films, consider also Pollock and Walk the Line, is the strain and anguish of being the wife of an egomaniacal ‘tortured genius’. Pollock, unlike Walk the Line or Control, lets the viewer know that a tortured genius can bring great art into the world and also be a horrible person to those who care the most about him.

Anton Cobijn directed this. He photographed the band back in the day, then began a career directing music videos like Nirvana’s Heart Shaped Box. 

Now he’s a filmmaker directing a film about the people he knew at the start of his career. Michael Winterbottom’s representation of Curtis and Joy Division in his film about Factory Records, 24 Hour Party People, is a far more compelling portrayal precisely because it restricts its representation of Curtis as the intense lead singer of an innovative band. Joy Division had this enigmatic frontman but they were one of those bands where each member had an equal share in creating a unique sound.

transcendentalists - 1987 - Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution

Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution

Paula Blanchard

Addison-Wesley Publishing

1987

371 pages

Paula Blanchard wrote a highly detailed biography of Margaret Fuller, a member of the literary, philosophical, and spiritual Transcendentalist movement of mid-19th century New England. The movement is best remembered as the group which counted America’s best loved philosophers of nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as members. Fuller is a less remembered member of the group probably because her involvement was, according to Blanchard, oriented around conversation rather than writing. Emerson and Thoreau had not only attained a certain status as American philosophers, but also their writings did much to found a uniquely American literature.  Fuller's own writings were often relatively short pieces of social criticism, many of which were revolutionary calls for increased rights for women.

Fuller's output was lighter on textual production than some of the other transcendentalist, although she was editor of one of the major organs of the movement’s thought, The Dial, a periodical where she published much of her own writing. Blanchard's text is a very detailed account of Fuller's life discussing her strict upbringing, oriented around her education, by her politician father, Timothy Fuller. her background directed her into an adult career as a strict schoolteacher who was nevertheless loved by her students.  She then went on to enter the Transcendentalist circle in which she formed non-conformist beliefs and developed a strain of social commentary which blossomed into the fight for equal rights for women in America.  Fuller’s story as told by Blanchard ends with the great woman embarking on a European tour with little money, and ending up with a family - to her death on the shoals the American east coast upon her return to her homeland.

Fuller seems entrenched in the Transcendentalist movement, which led her to the cause of women’s rights and to become a pioneering mind in early American feminism.  I don’t know much about this volume’s author, Paula Blanchard, aside from that she has written biographies of other great women, such as the Canadian painter Emily Carr and American author Sarah Orne Jewett.

cults - 2011 - Martha Marcy May Marlene

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Sean Durkin

2011

Fox Searchlight Pictures

102 minutes

A lot of movies out there seem, upon viewing, that they’re someone's application to the filmmaking profession. So many movies are just dull and display a competent filmic structure without being interesting or insightful or meaningful in any way at all. Martha Marcy May Marlene is such a film. it's about a young woman named Martha who fled a dull and colourless hippie cult that set up its commune somewhere in America. I can only assume that the reason why such a film was produced was to serve as a stepping stone to better things in the industry for all involved with its production.

I'm not clear on how the social group Martha fled is a religious cult. There's no religious element to their beliefs and in place of spirituality they express a selection of mainstream self-help lifestyle cliches about not smoking and realizing one's potential, all emanating from a guy named Patrick who I guess, is their charismatic leader. Patrick really has no interesting ideas of his own and its difficult to understand his appeal to a group of followers. He's a grubby guitar player who evokes Charles Manson, but Manson was purported to be hypnotically charismatic to the people who followed him, and at least had an apocalyptic vision of the future with himself ensconced as its high priest. Here the Manson figure, Patrick, is just a boring man strumming away on an acoustic guitar.

The group invades homes and at one point kills a man. This is their dark side, and its watered down Manson family stuff. The Mansons invaded Bevery Hills mansions and killed as a beginning stage to bringing Manson’s psychotic vision of ‘Helter Skelter’ into reality. Patrick’s group invades homes just to goof around in them for a bit while they’re empty, and they kill a man because he wanted to call the police on the group when they invaded a home that was currently occupied. Of course, it’s not nothing to kill someone, but it’s not exactly a meaningful cult killing either - since this is a movie supposedly about the dangers of cult life, it is completely devoid of the gripping and hallucinatory depravity of the Manson murders.

Marlene flees the 'cult' and calls her sister who comes and gets her. Her sister and husband are yuppies and they don’t seem to understand eachother, a disconnect that doesn’t have to be the result of a consciousness born out of cult conditioning. Regardless, Marlene begins acting strangely around them and they get annoyed with her, mostly because Marlene won’t say anything about her experiences so they don’t know why she’s so weird.

Marlene shows signs of having experienced trauma all through the movie. She doesn't talk about it and her Sister doesn't ask what happened until the end of the movie which is really what propells things forward. The younger sibling can act weird and have outbursts and elicit only anger from her sister and husband rather than sympathy or understanding. Her sister and Marlene drove for apparently three hours to get to their home and without talking about anything.

My understanding is that people who leave cults on their own volition typically want to talk about it, because they had a realization that there's something wrong with their way of life and what to let others know what's going on to the people they've left behind, but also because they left their social situation behind and need to be consoled into believing that they made the right decision. Marlene can flee from her cult but she can't talk about it, right now I'm watching the final scene of the film and its so obvious that the car they're riding in is going to get smashed by a cult's car while they once again film Marlene's expressionless face. Expressionless faces are what tie the disparate scenes of this film together.

What’s unfortunate about this movie is that it doesn’t truly convey what’s so threatening about life within a charismatic cult where psychological and physical abuse is present. The cult members are clearly dangerous, but they aren’t really organized around a set of beliefs that drive them to cause a destructive renewal of the world, nor are they directed towards violence (against the self and others) by a fanatical devotion to their spiritual leader. Instead, they were caught committing a fairly banal (as far as crimes go) street crime, that is breaking and entering a private residence, and then kill to cover it up. The realities of the worst of the world's religious cults are immensely more bizarrely dramatic and shocking portals into the most vicious spaces of the human psyche than are Patrick and his white t-shirt dullards.

surrealism - 2001 - Surrealism: Desire Unbound

Surrealism: Desire Unbound

Jennifer Mundy (ed.)

Princeton University Press

2001

349 pages

Surrealism: Desire Unbound is a collection of essays published to accompany an exhibition held at the Tate Modern London in Fall/Winter 2001 and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in early 2002. The book and exhibition focuses on how love and the associated sense of desire (the sexual and the emotional) are, to the Surrealist artists and writers, liberatory forces unleashed through their poetry, image-making, and object-building practices.

This book contains twelve essays including some by major figures in the fields of art history and  art criticism such as Hal Foster and Dawn Ades (a major scholar of Surrealism) that focus on various aspects of desire in regard to the work of the Surrealist movement. Foster, just to note one example, discusses fetishism via Freudian theory as it may be read into Hans Bellmer’s bizarrely sexualized dolls.

Much of the book is made up of full-colour images of Surrealist works of art and accompanying straightforward expositions of how different Surrealists tackled this problem of desire.  Hence certain Surrealists are represented more than others, with their overlord, Andre Breton, as the most heavily represented of the group. One essay (Love of Books, Love Books by Vincent Gille), for example, noted how each of his major works of literature (L’Amour Fou, Nadja, Arcane 17) were inspired by a different love affair. Hans Bellmer’s doll sculptures are, of course, featured prominently in Desire Unbound, as are the gender play of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp via the ‘Rose Selavy’ photographic persona (discussed, in particular, in Dawn Ades essay ‘Surrealism, Male-Female’. One section of the book titled Lives and Loves reads as celebrity gossip of the Surrealist avant-garde, detailing all of the love affairs and sexual relationships between different members of the group, and some of the art that came out of these pairings. The catalogue does highlight the contributions of women to the group although a LOT of the book is focused on men and their desires.