Le Bonheur (Happiness) - (1965) written & directed by Agnès Varda

( I went to Suspect Video, the best video store in Toronto, to look for Agnès Varda’s 2004 “Ydessa and the Bears” but they didn’t have it. Though it is one of my favourite movies, I haven’t seen “Ydessa and the Bears” anywhere other than at a 2004 film festival. I think maybe it was never distributed. Instead, I rented Agnès Varda's “Le Bonheur (Happiness)” because I had never seen it before and because it was in colour. I popped it in when I got home just to see the what the first 5 minutes was like. It was so weird and gorgeous that I didn't turn it off.)

“Happiness” starts with a young family. Their joy with each other is obvious and they have a simple, pleasurable life. The husband then falls in love with a different woman whom he sees often in his work. The husband and the other woman begin an affair that is easy, happy and not so sordid. The husband reasons that what he has is simply a double happiness. When his wife points out, during a picnic in the country, that he seems doubly happy, the man looks suddenly troubled and confesses to his wife that he loves both her and another woman. The wife is initially hurt but then seems to quickly follow his reasoning and recover. What is best for the family is best for her. The husband and wife then have reconciliatory sex, there on the picnic blanket in the country. She wakes up before he does, leaves him and their two small children who are taking a nap close by, walks down to the lake, and drowns herself.

This is followed by alarm, an appropriate mourning period and then a gentle reconciliation of the two remaining lovers. At this reconciliation, they decide to be together. In the following scene, the woman walks to work the next day. Foreboding music only comes once in this movie, and it comes here. To me, the foreboding music sounds like a warning of moral judgment approaching. I peer around the woman in the movie’s frame as I watch her walk through the town, looking for reproach. It is a small town after all, and we are inside a fable.

But no stones are thrown. And there are no real bad intentions from anyone's side. The foreboding music is for something more sinister: life moving on easily, happiness returning. We watch one human effortlessly replace another: in a marriage, at a family picnic, in the children's bedrooms, with not a whimper of protest from the universe.

Behind the camera, Varda is a happy and curious God - as interested and amazing by a vase with flowers as she is in a family at dinner or in the strangeness of elbows as they move about during sex. I think when things comes naturally to one, one is often suspicious of those things. And here, it seems as though Varda the director is like the husband – each scene of the movie filled effortlessly with spaces and objects and people of incomparable value and importance but all taken in with equal attention and wonder. Varda would have been a very good painter.

The only review I could find for “Happiness” was a 1966 New York Times review from A.H.Weiler. Though Weiler praised Varda’s movie in some ways, he also says “Miss Varda's dissection of amour, as French as any of Collette's works, is strikingly adult and unembarrassed in its depiction of the variety of love, but it is as illogical as a child's dream”.

I wonder if people said that about Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis" (where a family's main breadwinner, Gregor, wakes up one morning to discover that he is a monstrous verminous bug) which "Happiness” made me think of - particularly at its most sinister and truthful moment. This comes at the end, after the nightmarish alienation and slow death of the now repulsive and useless Gregor. After he dies, Gregor's family leaves the house together in a state of tremendous relief and take a tram towards the country - towards fresh air. They are suddenly giddy with the future and with possibility. This is when the parents notice how their remaining child has become so beautiful, voluptuous and strong. We catch a tiny glimpse of the parents imagining a potentially prosperous new future through her. We see her in the instant before (we imagine), before she is ushered into the rotting shoes of the family bread winner.

Both fables make you feel sorry for humans - and also quite wary of them and their human natures. We all know what it’s like to feel like a cog in the system, but it is easy to forget that our homes and families are systems too. That even there, where our beauty and usefulness are often most greatly appreciated, we are so easily replaced.

Wild Ocean (2008) - from GIANT SCREEN FILMS

(I went to two screenings this week. One was at Ontario Place (an artificial island of amusements jutting out over a small section of Toronto’s waterfront). There, on the island’s Cinesphere, I saw a section of “Wild Ocean”. The other screening was an evening of short works curated by Jon Davies (including scientific and novelty films and contemporary art videos). It was called “Animal Drag Kingdom” and was screened at night outside in a downtown Toronto courtyard.)

At the water park in Ontario Place, there are only three rides and really no place to swim (the fences keep you out of the lake). So after we went down all of the rides, my boyfriend and I walked around the made-for-human-amusement island. The island has beer stands and donut tents, an exhibit on cute animals and an extensive and confusingly obvious exhibit on “The Weather”. The attendants at the most promising amusement, the Cinesphere, at first didn’t let us in because we only had bathing suits on, but we wore them down.

We walked into the spherical theatre maybe 20 minutes in to “Wild Ocean”. The screen, filled up with the ocean, was enormous. It was a little disorienting to suddenly see dolphins, sharks, humans, penguins and sardines running wild. It was like the opposite of an aquarium. The movie’s narrative was about how the dolphins, sharks, humans and penguins were after the sardines.

I went alone to the “Animal Drag Kingdom” because I like animals. I sat in a folding chair 3 rows back from the free standing screen. There were about 9 videos. It was a really beautiful night.

Movies always involve seeing things through someone else’s eyes.. unless you make the movie yourself. It is very effective to see something through someone else’s eyes – even though it is always hard to tell how great or how little someone else’s eyes are connecting with your brain – or how successfully someone else’s brain is connecting with your eyes.

In "Animal Drag Kingdom", we run through a lot of eyes very quickly. We move from being an animated pig in a bonnet mourning the random hit and run of our trench-coat clad neighbour chicken - that chicken went down as tragically as Meryl Streep would have, we think (Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis' animation "When the Day Breaks") / to looking at 1960s black and white film footage of families at zoos with our 1960s professor who is doing his best to find platonic meaning in the gestures of the universal family man. If you don't know what the hell is going on, we think, you might as well start at the zoo (experimental anthroplogical lecture "Microcultural Incidents in Ten Zoos") / to being the humorously clunky or painfully indifferent camera stuck in the woman-who-is-afraid-to-die's apartment. We cannot run away when the cat vomits in front of us and the woman is talking to the psychic on the psychic hot-line because we have no legs (Kathy High's "Everyday Problems of the Living")/ to watching a family play-act a surgical procedure that turns their little girl into a cheetah. Then we are a little girl walking around her house with her new cheetah eyes. We think, things look different now that we are a little girl-cheetah waking up from play-acting surgery (Kristen Lucas's "Smaller and Easier to Handle") / to thinking we are watching an art video of a man filming himself and a crow, a crow that is tied to a tree branch, then realizing we are a director filming an animal trainer train a crow, then realizing we are watching a director train an animal trainer to train his crow, and finally realizing we are our ordinary selves and the crow is gone and there is only one man training another man, and we feel for the other man like we first felt for that crow. When the human gets the directions from his trainer wrong here, we think, we love that human's nature as much as we love that animal's nature (Guy Ben-Ner's "Second Nature").

The further we wade into shifting perspectives, appropriation and increasing instincts towards empathy, the more likely it is that we’ll get things amazingly wrong. We are sometimes warned away from an empathy that extends beyond the loyalty of our families and communities and radiates to foreign communities and onward towards animal kingdoms and plant kingdoms – and we are sometimes encouraged towards it. In any case, moving towards empathy and moving away from it is the thing that makes us most human.

And, in any case, I am bound to get a family member’s feelings as wrong as I would a dolphin’s, but that doesn’t mean that I should stop trying.

We didn’t stay for long in the Cinesphere (because we promised the attendants that we wouldn’t) but from my limited time and specific perspective, I think “Wild Ocean” was about freedom.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) - directed by and starring Melvin Van Peebles

(I had rented Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Twilight #2 at the video store. My friend Carl Wilson called just as Twilight #2 ended to see if I wanted to watch a movie. So Carl and I watched Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Neither of us had seen it before. We asked each other a lot of questions about the plot throughout the movie. If you get the DVD, don’t miss “The Making of…” documentary. Melvin Van Peebles is a pretty easy man to listen to. )

A young black orphan is taken in by a lot of black women in an arty brothel… or a sexy art performance space. The young orphan quickly becomes a man and is then named Sweetback – I think because he is such a good lover. Sweetback doesn’t talk much… or at all. He is a good performer and is also very passive. The arty space looks oddly familiar to me – as though this movie wasn’t made that long ago or made from that far away.

Some white cops enter and watch the end of a performance that Sweetback is part of – they watch from a distance. They are digging it – everyone is. The show is about a dyke’s dream of becoming a man. Two women, one in drag with a beard and a dildo, and one with bride of Frankenstein hair, perform a loving courtship in the middle of the space’s red-carpeted room. The audience, seated on chairs, circles them intimately. A tall man, in a pale blue fairy godmother gown, tells us that even dykes have dreams. With some distraction tricks and lighting effects, the dyke’s dream comes true and the woman in drag becomes Sweetback the man, with a real beard and a real penis. The loving courtship is then consummated.

After the show, the cops ask the boss of the space, Beetle, if Beetle can give them “one of his boys” for them to take downtown. On account of a recent murder, the cops want to bring in some suspects so they look good to their superiors. We’ll bring him right back, they say. In exchange, the cops offer continued good relations and a bit of dope. Beetle considers, then suddenly sees the camera and glares at the camera’s intrusion – or glares at whoever the camera is supposed to be.

Sweetback is so well-liked by everyone that when the cops take him to an abandoned field (with another “suspect” they pick up) Sweetback is freed of his handcuffs by one of the cops. “Oh sorry about that Sweetback” the cops says to Sweetback, noticing eventually that Sweetback is getting jerked around as they hit the man who does not yet “look like a sniper” whom Sweetback is handcuffed to. The cop frees Sweetback and then returns to beating the other man. Sweetback looks out to the distance for a while and, after an incredibly long moment, eventually turns and hits both the cops with his half open handcuffs. Everything is stilled, the movie framing only Sweetback as the only man standing. After another moment, Sweetback returns to beating the cops at his feet. After this, hell breaks loose.

The black community is internally torn by Sweetback’s actions and is also turned upside down while cops look for Sweetback. People are angry at Sweetback for causing all this trouble, but excited, too, that Sweetback is still alive. The longer Sweetback escapes the reach of the cops, the more excited people get. During this time, there is some self-protective love-making that Sweetback engages in with ex-girlfriends, racist bikers and non-communicative hippies.

Also during this time, a lot of conversations take place - between Sweetback and people offering to help Sweetback, between Sweetback and people who are not offering to help Sweetback, conversations between the cops and the press, the cops and the cops, between the religious minister and the people, the religious minister and Sweetback - between the cops and Sweetback’s friends. During most of these conversations, the talkers talk right into the camera, the camera standing in for the “listener” or for Sweetback - since Sweetback is most often the one being talked at. It creates the effect of feeling, as a member of the movie audience, that you are in the position of the person who is being talked at. The movie could have been called “Things People Have Said To Me (Sweetback) and To You!”

The effect works so effortlessly within the traditionally structured narrative that I didn’t even notice it at first. It’s pretty impressive to stretch the rules of a traditional narrative to include the audience in this way without actually breaking the narrative. It is especially impressive when the effect is both subtle and effective, where the silence of the main character most clearly mimics the silence of an audience.

It also works to create empathy for almost all of the characters – for the audience to be put in this position of being yelled at, or turned away, or treated as a villain or an insider or as a friend.

It is not the most obvious choice to make a movie about a revolution where the main revolutionary never speaks, but it sure makes for a sound revolution. "Run Sweetback, Run!" the band Earth, Wind & Fire sing/ scream at Sweetback over and over again from the musical score as Sweetback makes his way out of the city, across the fields and into the desert. If Sweetback saves himself and makes it to Mexico, he might one day return.

Backyard (1984) – directed by Ross McElwee, starring Ross McElwee and Dr. Ross McElwee

(I had the south on my brain – I felt like sitting in the south, outside, for a bit. I thought of Ross McElwee, who made the pretty great “Sherman’s March”. I poked around the library and found another movie of his whose title also refers to a specific location in the south, “Backyard”. )

Ross McElwee, returning from a northern college, is back at the family home in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has brought his moving picture camera with him.

The movie begins with a still picture of the Ross McElwee, who is the director of “Backyard”, and his father, Dr. Ross McElwee. The doctor is wearing a pale southern suit and has graying hair. Ross is wearing running shoes and has a beard. They look good and kind of like the same white man playing two very different parts. Ross is holding his camera in the picture. He’s holding it like some people, in still pictures, hold a fish or a gun or a baby – like an important piece of information. The two men are, ever so slightly, leaning away from each other.

Over the still image, Ross tells us that his father disapproves of his career path - a career path that involves that moving image camera. I think about the doctor sending his son off to college in the north and then the son returns with a camera - a camera that is, for the most part, pointed directly at the doctor’s face. It is hard to match up values sometimes.

After the still photos, we move in real time around the house, the backyard, the country club, the hospital. Ross films himself and other people who work or reside around these places. There are banal activities, racism, celebrations, rides on golf carts and work. There is not much talking or explaining so we mostly get to know people by what they do.

The doctor goes to work a lot. At work, he cuts into people’s bodies and fixes their organs. It is hard to argue against the value of that career. When the doctor comes home, he sees his son sitting in a chair filming his backyard.

There is the African American couple, the Staffords. Lucille Stafford cooks and cleans for the McElwees and Melvin Stafford takes care out their backyard. We see them working more than the doctor works since “the backyard” is where they work. The Staffords seem more comfortable being filmed that the young white people who periodically show up in he frame, whose working lives are not shown but who often request sandwiches. I think they are students.

There is a neighbour seated on a chair in a thicket behind a fence. He is wearing a suit. His self-appointed job is to keep himself hidden and his eyes on a house in the distance. He is anticipating a mid-day break-in. There have been a few break-ins around the affluent neighborhood in the backyard and he thinks he might catch the criminals if he waits. His job is the one that, technically, most resembles Ross’s job.

It is not an easy day in the south, but it is intimate and complicated and quiet and interesting. All of these good things were established right away in the first moving image scene of the movie. In this scene, Ross films himself, alone, playing the family piano. The piano is out of tune and Ross plays it kind of badly. It is not like he has his tongue sticking while he tries to make an ugly face - it is him trying to be good and failing. It's pleasurable and even strangely soothing to watch him play with sincerity and mistakes and without frustration. It is not an apologetic scene - just one with a lot of information about Ross and maybe of what is to follow. If there is bad behavior or human mistakes caught with his moving picture camera, it will not be too surprising if some of them are his.

Robin Hood (2010) - directed by Ridley Scott, starring Russell Crowe

(My friend Lauren Bride invited me to the movies. She suggested “Robin Hood” or “Babies.” We decided on “Robin Hood” because it was summertime. At the theatre, when I saw Russell Crowe’s head on the poster, I was a little disappointed. He always plays the mightiest of virtuous white men, sort of like Doris Day but not as funny and more prone to unwanted and overly serious advice giving. I might have picked “Babies” had I known. How could such a can’t-play-anything-but-a-virtuous-man play Robin Hood? I also somehow made the mistake of picturing the time period being 1990s, and the stage, Hollywood - the time of Kevin Costner and well-laundered cloaks. So I was a little startled when the movie opened in the deep past. I think probably no one else was startled. Throughout the movie, Lauren and I whispered jokes to each other. When we walked home, we didn’t mention the movie. We talked about other things.)

I had no thoughts about this movie – other than an attempt at historical accuracy and a grittier aesthetic doesn't add much to this big story that keeps collectively getting better (this movie excepted) 600 years after its origin. Also, it's a war movie (?) starring a virtuous and victorious Russell Crowe (?).

But a month later, on an airplane, after reading an article on perceptual illusions, I fell asleep and had a dream that David Foster Wallace and Russell Crowe were on a panel together. Russell Crowe had his Robin Hood outfit on and his hat in his hands. He looked nervous. He had lost some weight and was finally sweating in all the wrong places. He kept looking at David Foster Wallace, and then, back at the audience. David Foster Wallace was relaxed and in jeans, looking out into the seated crowd. Neither of them were talking. The less they talked, the more nervous Russell Crowe got. Russell Crowe wanted to defend himself, to tell people he was a virtuous and good man, but no one was asking any questions. We all just sat there. It was different from that time I saw Russell Crowe on Oprah, when he gave her a book for her Oprah’s book club, “The Magus”.

If you really want to steal from the rich and give to the poor, it's good to remember that your trial probably won’t come for a long time - if ever. You'll have to be patient with being misunderstood, even by people you love. You may be glorified for the wrong reasons and disrespected at all the right parties. Understanding someone can take a very long time.

But it can be interesting to be misunderstood, and being misunderstood lets you be more flexible. Flexibility is important if you want to be an effective element in the big story rather than the respected author of your own story. It can be really fun to see how much one can affect the big story, becoming any character that proves most useful. And fun to observe what story we all begin to understand collectively.

When I woke up from my David Foster Wallace / Russell Crowe dream, there were a lot of people in line for the airplane washroom in the back and no one in line for the one in first class. A stewardess sent me back when I attempted to go to the one in first class, rolling her eyes at this move that had been tried a million times before. Sometimes it's harder to change the big story than to be a hero of your own making.

The Elephant in the Living Room (2010) - by Michael Webber, starring Terry Brumfield and Tim Harrison

(The closest cinema to where I'm staying in San Francisco is called Roxie Theater. Roxie Theater was playing a movie I hadn't heard of: "The Elephant in the Living Room." I looked around but it seemed like all the other nearby cinemas were playing movies for kids. I thought: maybe June is when kids watch movies. So I went around the corner and bought a ticket. It was being presented by the United Film Festival as part of their "Animal Rights" program. The director of the festival and the director of “The Elephant in the Living Room” sat down in the narrow line of blue seats with the audience when the movie began. )

The narrative of "The Elephant in the Living Room" is sort of: “There is a lion in my backyard - and it is getting bigger!” It focuses on people who keep animals like pythons and tigers in their homes, and what happens when the pythons and tigers grow larger than the people. Sometimes the people dump the animals in the suburban wilds. Sometimes they keep them.

We mostly see Ohio. We mostly look at two characters: The Man with a lion, and The Officer from the state. The Man, a big soft spoken one who looks a bit like his lion, was given the baby lion when he had a broken back and depression. He says the love helped him to survive. But then the baby lion grew up and became a big lion in a small cage. And then they were stuck there, the lion in the cage and The Man who made the cage.

The Officer, with the mustache and the baseball cap, is sincerely hoping to untangle the love/cage problem for the lion and The Man - and for Ohio. He is brave and kind and he is good at his job. He really wants to do the right thing. He catches cougars found in peoples' backyards. He tries to find better places for them. He buys the most poisonous snake at the Underground Snake Convention so that no one else buys it. But snakes make a lot of babies and he cannot buy all of them. The Officer is exhausted. Cases like these have just been increasing every year since the mid 90s and he doesn't know why. (My theory - that monkey on "Friends" is to blame).

The Officer doesn't see an end to the problem. The few exotic animal santuaries in America are mostly over capacity. He is starting to question his role and what side he is on. We see a pleasing shock in his eyes when a new idea occurs to him - maybe, he thinks, he should not try to capture the dangerous animals in the suburban wilds. Maybe he should let them run free.

I thought of the movie The Matrix Reloaded (Matrix #2) - the humans being kept in cages by computers and the growing number of humans who escape, then are hunted down by the computers. I had recently picked it out of a sale bin at Walgreens. The bin was under a helium balloon that said “Papa Navedaz!"

The Matrix2 doesn't work so well. I think it is because everything started off with too much value. When everything has equal value, it's hard to know what to focus on. Like, here are the proper names in the movie: The One, The Architect, The Key-maker, Zion, Trinity, Morpheus, Persephone, The Oracle. That is a lot of value! Midway through, I had a real longing for some garbage – or at least a mortal. I wanted The Farter, The Fuck up, The Mistake, The Girl Who Couldn’t Fly.

You have to be a real magician to take only value and double it. Sometimes it is easier to make a movie that begins with lowlier proper nouns and then move them towards value. "The Elephant in the Living Room" starts in the middle of nowhere and moves towards value. Apart from some seriously problematic music choices, the movie is funny and sweet and occasionally brushes against epic. It is really interesting to see men working together to solve the old love/cage problem as though it is a new problem. Since we are only starting from Ohio and not from the olden times, it looks kind of like a problem that men have only just discovered. It is as though, from this perspective, we are watching a mass male entry into the nurturing arts and its complications. They are beginning with snakes and tarantulas. It's a hard-won pleasure to catch a glimpse of The Man's heart of gold or see that The Officer may in fact be "The One". And it is a surprise when we can see the vague but convincing outlines of a possible apocalyptic scenario (where these animals first take over the suburban wilds and then, all of America) - originating in Ohio! At least more surprising than seeing one originate in place called Zion.

For a good apocalyptic movie scenario, you really need at least a few elements without so much consistent value . The good ones are like a magnifying glass on the thriving life, boredom and absurdity of a regular day. To our delight or pain, we watch as things randomly, and with great speed, move in and out of meaning, value and existence. It is like a bird lands on your shoulder just as the convenience store goes up in flames - you don't know what the fuck is going on, but you know something is happening. Our human brains lag behind the action, working hard to make meaning from the chaos. It is what we do best.

Whatever Works (2009) - written & directed by Woody Allen, starring Larry David

(I had run out of Woody Allen movies to watch. As far as I could see, there was one left, there on the video store shelf, “Whatever Works”. It didn't look good: the prematurely balding Larry David in a “what can you do?” shrug on the cover. Not a trace of pleasure on his face. I had vague memories that a pretty teenager-woman who looks off into outer space was also involved. All one can really think when contemplating the box without much information is, “Please, Woody Allen, please don’t let this movie be about how that man who has a facial expression kind of like yours ends up having sex with a late teenager even though he is initially unwilling.” This is not the kind of story that reliably gets better the more you tell it. The DVD case looked as desirable as a half smoked cigarette on the sidewalk. I picked it up. And when I walked home with it under my arm, confident of a little bit of pleasure, I thought - how bad could it be?)


One might put the Larry David doll next to Woody Allen doll on the shelf, if one was trying to clean up and organize one's collectibles – even though the Woody Allen doll was made with plastic and hand-sewn doll clothes in 1977 and the Larry David doll was made with rubber in 2009. But it turns out that if you put the Larry David man in a Woody Allen movie, it is very hard not to pay attention to their flaming differences.

As someone said - don’t judge the performer, judge the performance. But if I judge the Larry David performance in this Woody Allen movie, everyone loses. If I judge the performer, Larry David, then Larry David wins. Who knew? When Larry David is playing Woody Allen, he plays a physicist genius who is wise to (through his superior intellect) the meaninglessness of the human condition - as though, in the 21st century, only a genius (and a physicist??) could entertain a vision of this nature. The meaninglessness that LD as WA has to contend with is epic and profound. He also fights with imbeciles, homophobes and religious fundamentalists. He does his best to cope.

The character's stance as enlightened-nihilist-filled-with-despair seems like it's from another time, like, another time from a long time ago, especially in forced comparison to the Larry David who created Seinfield and Curb Your Enthusiasm, a man who gleefully pours sugar on his meaningless breakfast cereal and rubs his hands together with delight before digging in. When LD is the LD character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, he fights with children, kindly doctors and Ted Danson – all of whom are a little bit smarter and more morally developed than old LD. It is the others who do their best to cope with him while he dances to escape their frustrated clutches and exasperated glares. LD as LD passionately takes up positions on matters of the pettiest nature. His joy in this endeavor cannot be hidden and his pleasure at playing the villain is transparent. Seeing Larry David play the Woody Allen character reminds one that the Woody Allen character is always the hero, no matter how flawed.

Man-impressions aside, the most damning problem regards the old fourth wall. In the opening sequence the LD as WA points out the camera to his dumber-than-him friends and talks about the viewers at home watching them. Of course, no one else can see the camera except for this genius. Now, playing the (now simple) breaking-the-fourth-wall game with LD can make a director look pretty silly. Maybe WA talked directly to the camera while inside a fictional narrative while LD was in diapers (or at least.. um, in business school) but somewhere around 2009, on the set of Curb Your Enthusiasm, near the end of the season, LD as LD strolled past the forth wall and the fifth while whistling a bad tune and waving at Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol didn't wave back. Larry David kept smiling.

Maybe if LD walked around talking about what a genius he was, he wouldn’t have run into a problem like being in this movie and making Woody Allen look bad.