Tokyo, or something like it, in Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972
Aside from being a bit of a dick about it on Twitter, because being a bit of a dick about things on Twitter is kind of how it works for me in that format, I’ve been staying mostly clear of what the no-doubt very pleased new York Times person Adam Sternbergh has called a “film critic food fight” over the Times’ Magazine piece by Dan Kois about, you know, that whole “cultural vegetables” thing. The reason I’m steering clear of it is that it’s way too personal for me, in that it gets me too angry, as note my own characterization of Kois’s unflattering characterization of Derek Jarman’s Blue, below. There’s a difference between being a dick on Twitter and going around dropping napalm on professional bridges; and I can only hope that by the time I’ve successfully completed the steps that will enable me to walk away from this you-know-what business (if indeed I ever do, which is doubtful), I’ll have at least acquired the measure of grace that’ll make me no longer even want to napalm anything. But right now I’m stuck.
I would, however, like to address an unfortunate misapprehension that has arisen in the discussion. In his original piece, Kois describes some of his difficulties with Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Solaris. “In college, a friend demanded to know what kind of idiot I was that I hadn’t yet watched Tarkovsky’s Solaris. ‘It’s so boring,’ he said with evident awe. ‘You have to watch it, but you won’t get it.’ ” Kois relates that he then sought out the film “because the intimation that there was a film that connoisseurs knew that I’d never heard of was too much to bear” but that it was terribly removed from his “cinematic metabolism” and that he zoned out on it but when asked by his friend what he thought of it replied “That was amazing,” I said. “When he asked me what part I liked the best, I picked the five-minute sequence of a car driving down a highway, because it seemed the most boring. He nodded his approval.” Leaving aside the fact that the anecdote makes the author and his friend look like utter tools even by the lax standards we allow for the callowness of college students, and that Kois did in fact seek out and watch the film for all the wrong reasons, leaving aside the annoying habit that so many critics have of presuming that THEIR threshold of boredom is in fact THE threshold of boredom (I stole this from a critic friend who I won’t make trouble for by naming here), leaving aside the category error that elevates actual boredom, that is, irritated disengagement, as a condition necessary to high-art profundity…leaving aside ALL of that, let’s look into the notion that boredom was the condition that Andrei Tarkovsky was aiming for in his work. That’s what Andrew O’Hehir (who’s a friend, or at the very least a very friendly acquaintance) more than implies in his response to Kois’ piece in Salon, where he praises boredom as a positive value (in a way) and speaks, at the end, of “works of art that are deliberately and intensively boring, in the Tarkovsky mode.”
I believe that Tarkovsky would object to the idea that his films were “deliberately” boring. Although Tarkovsky made intensely personal films that hewed uncompromisingly to his own vision, he was very invested in engaging his audience and extremely proud when his 1975 film The Mirror, considered here in the West to be one of his most obscure, even gnomic movies, was something of a popular hit in Russia. His definition of film, as given in the title of his book of strung-together essays on the art of filmmaking, was “sculpting in time,” and thus pacing was extremely important to him. And yes, he was interested in slowing things down, and did so quite often, as in the looong shot of the three main characters in Stalker as they make their way into the “Zone,” with, among other relentlessly repetitive features, its droning, maddening click of their conveyance travelling over the railroad tracks. And this shot was possibly meant to strike the viewer as odd, or even aesthetically querulous, but still did not constitute, entirely, a form of negative engagement. I’m reminded of one of the a phrase David Foster Wallace ascribed to his sister Amy in the acknowledgements of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: “Just How Much Reader-Annoyance Are You Shooting For Here, Exactly?” and its implication that sometimes a little reader-annoyance can be a not-bad thing, at least in terms of bracing the reader. Tarkovsky’s pronouncement pronouncements [somebody get this guy a proofreading intern-Ed.] on film art were/are idiosyncratic enough to strike some as either maddening or perversely impractical, but this chunk from his essay on editing in Sculpting makes good sense: “The dominant, all-powerful factor of the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame. The actual passage of time is also made clear in the characters’ behavior, the visual treatment and the sound—but these are all accompanying features, the absence of which, theoretically would in no way affect the existence of the film. One cannot conceive of a cinematic work with no sense of time passing through the shot, but one can easily imagine a film with no actors, music, décor or even editing.” Wait, did I say “makes good sense?” Hmm. Of course, today one doesn’t HAVE to imagine a cinematic work with no sense of time passing through the frame; in the works of Michael Bay, there is no time for time to register itself passing through the frame, rather, the frames themselves are instead keeping/constituting time.
But let’s not get into that here. What the pace of Solaris and Stalker and Andrei Rublev want of the viewer is not for him or her to feel boredom, but to feel time; its passage through the frame. I have literally never been bored watching an Andrei Tarkovsky film because there is so very much to see in every single shot, and in the way every single shot relates to the next and the one before and so on. Take the scene Kois mentions, the so-called “five-minute sequence of a car driving down a highway.” It is indeed five minutes, and it does indeed for the most part depict a car driving down a highway. But it also depicts the character doing the driving, the haunted and nearly ruined ex-astronaut Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky), who has just been at the countryside dacha of Kris Kelvin and his father, describing his own harrowing experience on the film’s title planet. Actually, Burton’s not doing the driving; the car seems to be driving itself, and Burton”s talking on a car video phone, and being worried about his son who’s being restless in the car; and these shots depicting Burton and his fretful state are, yes, alternated with long shots of highway, a tunnel, and so on. And interestingly enough, a bunch of the highway signs, we notice, are in Japanese. Why would that be the case if Burton was just at a Russian dacha? We never find out; and at the end of the sequence there’s a aerial shot of what looks like 1972 Tokyo by night (above). Between Burton’s worries and the bizarre sense of displacement created by his seeming to be driving in Japan, the sequence never, for me, registers as in the least boring; rather, it’s uncomfortably tense and suffused with an anxiety that’s never resolved (as it happens, this is the last we see of Burton).
Allow me to suggest, as politely as possible, that maybe if you are bored by this, your best course of action would be to just leave it alone. Dana Stevens’ and other Kois supporters’ assertions that the piece was a “confession, not a manifesto” notwithstanding, the essay does intend to set an agenda, and right now I don’t want to articulate the agenda I believe it wants to set because it’ll look paranoid. But I’m convinced this is not an “innocent” piece. And again, if I continue I’ll just get angrier. But I just wanted to put it out there that, whatever it is that Tarkovsky wants from you, boredom’s got nothing to do with it.
I am not the perfect film audience. I can grow frustrated while watching certain films of the Tarkovsky type, but this frustration is not with Tarkovsky, but with myself. I know that I don’t do enough, or no longer do enough, to keep my attention span and focus strong. I don’t need anyone telling me that letting my mind wander while watching ANDREI RUBLEV is fine, because that’s just my deal, and everybody’s different. It’s this attitude that led a magazine writer a while back, someone who described themselves as a reader, to cheerfully announce that they would never read THE CANTERBURY TALES (“Sorry, Chaucer,” he wrote). The erosion of this sort of discipline is not something to be shrugged off. And from a critic…I remember reading a Jonathan Yardley (clearly my first mistake) article wherein he rather smugly pointed out that he’d never been able to finish ULYSSES. I think I had read the book by that point, so if I could do it, fucking Jonathan Yardley should be able to do it. Regardless, the attitude was appalling. People are supposed to want to get better at things.
Tarkovsky’s okay, but the colors aren’t as pretty as the ones in FILM SOCIALISME. Or SCENES FROM UNDER CHILDHOOD.
“I’m convinced this is not an ‘innocent’ piece.” I’ll say. Sometimes a confession is a confession, and sometimes it’s a manifesto. What I find crushing is the utter lack of self-respect it takes to write such a thing and see it published. A proclamation of your own inability to tolerate anything more meditative than TREME is very sad, but not as sad as the implicit invitation to the reader to come out of the closet and admit that he/she feels exactly the same but has been afraid to say so for fear of looking stupid (how about the comments? like the guy who is thrilled to say, in public, at long last, that his mind wandered during…NEW YORK, NEW YORK!). The reality is that you can count on such a proclamation about once every six months, but the people who are making them always behave as if they’re the first ones who’ve dared it. This particular “think piece” brings back fond memories of William Bennett’s infamous statement: “I say too bad about foreign films. If they can’t make it, tough. I stopped going at the same time I threw away my black turtleneck…I went to those Bergman things and felt bad, and felt good about feeling bad, and the 80s was good medicine for that.”
Part of what Tarkovsky’s films demand—and Kois seems incapable of doing—is to be viewed as aesthetic objects, rather than conveyers of data. A moment like the highway drive in SOLARIS, or the ride into the Zone in STALKER, is very boring if you’re thinking “Right, so now they went from point A to point B, I get it, why are you taking so long to show it?” But a lot of what the deeply nature-loving Tarkovsky is getting at is how much there is to look at in a moment where nothing human is happening. When Solonitsin walks through the field in THE MIRROR, one first registers “A guy is walking through a field.” And then the shot holds, and gradually (if you keep looking) the eye expands past the people to take in the patterns of the wheat, the grain in the wood fence posts, even the texture of the rough muslin dress that The Mother is wearing. These moments are full to bursting with objects of aesthetic contemplation—I find that by the time Tarkovsky does cut away, I’ve become so absorbed in some beautiful detail that I want the shot to go on even longer. But to absorb that requires that one looks to see, rather than watching to extract a little nugget of plot that you can apply to the next nugget of plot. If one’s willing to do it, it’s as mind-expanding as a good acid trip. But Kois, like most of these proud philistines, seems allergic to mind-expansion.
Kent – I must have blocked that out. I had to Google “William Bennett” and “black turtleneck” to find out in what context Mr. “Death of Outrage” could conceivably have been blabbing about Bergman. Turns out it was part of his “argument” against public funding for the arts. Of course.
I’m glad someone else did the Googling; I was about to ask whether it was William “gambling addict/moral philosopher” Bennett or William Bennett from the UK noise group Whitehouse. Either one could have been plausible.
I haven’t read Dana Stevens’ comments, but from Glenn’s description I think I may share her reaction. In my eyes Kois’s piece doesn’t exhibit the kind of upward snobbery people are attributing to it. There’s an implicit sense in his piece that it’s productive to group movies by Reichardt, Tarkovsky, Jarman, Hou, and the Dardennes as meaningfully similar, which makes me suspect he’s an extremely inattentive viewer. But I don’t think he’s arguing that anyone who claims to like these artists is lying to seem fancy, which is the typical philistine argument. He doesn’t use the words “pretentious” or “elitist,” for instance. What he says is that he’s grateful to have watched a lot of this stuff but that they aren’t to his taste, which really doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. My own views on these movies, many of which I revere, jibe better what Kois wrote than with a lot of what was written in reaction to him (“deliberately and intensively boring,” et cetera).
Is he pulling the wool over my eyes?
I personally do find SOLARIS boring, in that I don’t find its ideas, plot, characters, or visuals of any interest on any level. But, like Mr. Kenny, I certainly wouldn’t claim that this was Tarkovsky’s intent – it’s just that, for me, he failed at his intent. To claim there is some virtue in the boredom I experienced, as some (not here) have done, strikes me as perverse.
Another thing that has baffled me about this debate is the absolutism; I dislike SOLARIS (to simplify) because I find it boring, but I found THE SACRIFICE engrossing – despite some minor reservations about certain aspects of the movie, I wasn’t “bored” for an instant. So whose side am I on? Am I on the “pro-boring” side because I liked one slow film? Am I on the “anti-boring” side because I didn’t like another? Is THE SACRIFICE insufficiently boring to be discussed in this context? Am I allowed to say that, say, a handful of the scene/shots in WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES wear out their welcome, but that the majority of them are exciting? I don’t know what critics I’m supposed to be rooting for here.
For me, the five-minute highway sequence, which I adore–and which, I’m sorry to say, one of the audio commentators on the Criterion DVD offhandedly identifies as one of the weaker sections of the film, as if this were somehow self-evident–is Tarkovsky’s provocative and even polemical “replacement” for an extended depiction of space travel, which I suspect is one of the many ways he wanted to counter something like “2001”, which he disliked, with something more earthbound but no less mysterious. Where it occurs in the story is fairly close to where, in a more conventional narrative, Kris Kelvin would be traveling over an extended period to Solaris. In any case, that’s the way I’ve always liked to read this sequence, which I believe makes its length and even its intermittent monotony an essential part of the film’s narrative.
Mirror – for all its so-called obscurity – seems to me to be one of the most watchable of art-film, it has a warmth and narrative drive which Tarkovski’s other movies lack and that is probably why it was received so well on release in Russia. I don’t feel there is anything in the movie which is deliberately obscure, although knowing much more now about Tarkovski than we did in the 1970s ensures the audience can fill in any gaps the movie might leave.
I love the Tokyo/Space drive scene. Lovely.
I’ve always thought the driving/travel sequence in Solaris was an endurance test designed to warn audience members “it’s not going to get any flashier, folks” (and I have found the scene confoundingly boring every time I have watched it), but I’d just like to add that it seems that Tarkovsky’s films really need to be seen in the immersive confines of a theater to be really grasped. Home video and all the attendant distractions don’t cut it with his images.
JBS, there is no such thing as the “pro-boring” and the “anti-boring” people. They’re idiotic categories based on a non-idea. To say that you like one movie by Tarkovsky and don’t like another instanty places you light years ahead of Eric Kois.
Sutter, I think the Kois piece is no different from the usual “how could they presume to take my money with their esoteric elitist claptrap” thing. It’s just pitched from a different angle. As in: “some people like that kind of stuff, and I have no problem with them, because after all, I could be wrong here at The New York Times.”
Jim, sorry, I forgot to include the context in which Diamond Bill made his joyful pronouncement.
Sorry, I substituted “Eric” for “Dan.”
Glenn,
Thank you for this characteristically eloquent, accurate post. And glad
that it elicited Rosenbaum’s astute deduction about Burton’s drive as a surrogate depiction of space travel, not to mention Kent’s shooting this
particular Kois fish in his particular barrel.
@ Sutter: What Kent said. For me, the clincher—where Kois really shows his hand—is the completely dismissive, contemptuous description of Derek Jarman’s “Blue” that I talk about in the comments thread of the post below this one. The “do you BELIEVE these weirdos?” tone of “it’s available on DVD—‘enhanced for wide-screen TVs, thank goodness.” Oh, the hilarity.
Also, you ask about the provenance of Stevens’ comment: Sternbergh cited it in a complimentary tweet to Stevens, I presume she made the comment in the Slate “Culture Gabfest” (Jesus) in which the Kois piece is discussed; here’s the link: http://www.slate.com/id/2295827/
It features Stephen Metcalf, you should be aware.
Just an addendum on Jarman’s ‘Blue’, in case it is not common knowledge. ‘Blue’ was transmitted as a radio play on BBC Radio 3 at around the same time as it was released as a film. There is an apocryphal story that the BBC offered to send out plain blue postcards, so their listeners could get the full effect of the film…
I wonder, too, whether a taxonomy of ‘boring’ cinema might be an idea. In addition to usual suspects such as ‘slow’, ‘repetitive’ and ‘incomprehensible’, one could have ‘inconsequential’ (which would include wonderful films like Passer’s ‘Intimate Lightning’ and Rozier’s ‘Du côté d’Orouët’) and ‘counter-intuitive’, where the narrative (such as it is) simply fails to go in the direction that you, as a viewer, think it should. I’ve found that this last makes you resent the film while you’re watching it but find it highly enjoyable in retrospect: for me, prime examples include Godard’s ‘Alphaville’ and Akerman’s ‘La Captive’.
One could go on inventing categories, of course. I’d like to see one for Linklater’s ‘Slacker’ and another for the Uruguayan film ‘Whisky’: friends of mine found both of these very boring. (In the case of ‘Whisky’ – to which one might add the films of Otar Iosseliani – is it possible to be TOO deadpan?)
Apologies: that should be ‘Intimate Lighting’…
Well said, sir. Slow, yes, but not at all boring.
I feel like a mention of Deleuze’s “L’image-temps” (Cinéma 2) is in order here. Essential reading. I don’t remember (if/what) he had (anything) to say about Tarkovsky in that volume, though…
“Just an addendum on Jarman’s ‘Blue’, in case it is not common knowledge. ‘Blue’ was transmitted as a radio play on BBC Radio 3 at around the same time as it was released as a film. There is an apocryphal story that the BBC offered to send out plain blue postcards, so their listeners could get the full effect of the film…”
I might be misremembering here, but I seem to recall that at least one incarnation of “Blue” (the CD release, probably) is actually different from the others, with some different music and certain passages read by different actors.
Woah—it’s Jonathan Rosenbaum! Hi, Jonathan Rosenbaum! (please insert voice of GZA in COFFEE AND CIGARETTES). I love the idea of the long drive as a replacement for the standard space travel scene—that goes a long way towards explaining the fascinatingly truncated and eccentrically presented shot in which Kelvin actually does go to space. Much of what SOLARIS seems to be “about” is the loss of the natural world, and the way men go mad when their connection to the earth is severed. So a lot of what the drive does is break the connection between the world of the dacha and the world of the ship. The former is filled with culture (those busts!) but surrounded by nature, and therefore can support decent humanity. The latter is entirely man-made, full of man’s imaginings (the books of art, the Visitors, and the station itself), and is therefore a place where men go mad, having nothing but the products of their own minds to rely on. The boredom/annoyance one feels as the highway rolls on and on is exactly what the moment should produce, ideally growing into a sense of real existential horror at the sight of an environment that goes on and on without a single blade of grass. It’s point isn’t just polemical, of course—by following the dacha with such a long, unbroken stretch of grey concrete, a longing for nature is created in the viewer that can finally be fulfilled at the movie’s conclusion. Uh.. spoilers?
Props to the Fuzzy Bastard for identifying a crucial difference in approaches to film. Until a certain time in my life, I approached films, and art in general, as conveyers of data, and whenever a film lingered on something after I had “got” it, I grew impatient with it; they were wasting my time! There was no film, I maintained, that couldn’t be twenty minutes shorter.
To make a long story short, somewhere between a showing of RUBLEV at the DIA and BARRY LYNDON on VHS (as well as a second viewing of FACES, which I had rejected the first time because every scene went on past the “point” of the scene), I realized the obvious. I’d hypothesize that many of us start by approaching art as conveyers of information to “get”, and that somewhere along the line, we realize that it’s not about “getting” or “extracting” something from it, but about experiencing it, surrendering to Flow.
Some of us, of course, never make that transition– which is such a sadness.
Does my experience mirror those of others? Was there a film or films (or book or music) that galvanized you from “film-as-information-and-don’t-you-waste-my-time” to “aesthetic experience”? Or am I somewhat unique in my adolescent philistinism?
Given the various interpretations of the possible purpose of “the long drive” sequence – it makes me think, why is it so short?
“Allow me to suggest, as politely as possible, that maybe if you are bored by this, your best course of action would be to just leave it alone.”
Hear, hear. And this is what gets to the heart of it – if, “as a film critic,” you are able to admit to yourself and to the world at large (or at least the NYT readership) that you just don’t get something, you might be better off just not saying anything. It’s not an “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all” thing; I’m saying it seems like Kois just doesn’t understand ANYTHING about Tarkovsky’s intentions, and he admits as much. If you can’t first meet the art on the level it’s operating, your conclusions about its intent/worthiness/quality are completely useless. I’ve always said it’s fine if you don’t “get” these kind of movies, just don’t use that as a reason the movie’s no good.
Because, in the end, the patience/stamina/receptive qualities you have for “this kind” of cinema is either there or it’s not. You can develop it, of course, but it’s going to be a tough row to hoe if you hear the description for “Blue” and don’t automatically think it sounds like the coolest thing ever (I’m still waiting, eight years after hearing about it, for an actual theater in whatever town I’m in to show it; don’t think it’ll have the same effect at home).
Incidentally, I’ve tried twice to watch Solaris, and I’m fine with not writing about the fact that I don’t like it very much (although weirdly enough, I adore the long driving sequence), because I don’t really have a strong, objective, critical reason for it. I’m sure I’ll take another run at it someday. On the other hand, I’m still trying to find the words to express how awesome “The Mirror” is. “The Mirror” is sort of the flip side to what I was saying earlier – I don’t get it, but that hardly stood in the way of loving it.
Tom – I’m right there with you. For me, I was 16 when Gus Van Sant’s “Gerry” came out. I know that period of Van Sant is sort of a hot-button issue for cinephiles, but whatever, I loved the crap out of it. Blew my mind. Changed movies for me forever. I owe it everything.
Glenn, I think this is a fair and interesting response. And of course well written. I don’t share your fears about Dan Kois’ secret agenda, whatever you think that was. I think what he wrote was lazy and conventional and a bit smug, and the whimsical, personal, throwing-up-my-hands tone masks a fundamental muddledness. Any “anti-art” agenda was basically just background or oxygen, and unconscious from his point of view.
Your piece is mainly about Tarkovsky and mine wasn’t meant to be at all. That said, I think you’re incorrectly inferring my attitude about him from a line that was basically meant as a crack or throwaway aimed at the general readership. In my phrase “works of art that are deliberately and intensively boring, in the Tarkovsky mode,” you can put scare quotes around “boring” if you like, or replace it with “challenging in a way many people receive as boring.” Another thing here is that I’m using the term “boredom” in a broader vernacular sense that some people will get and others will find overly vague or just wrong, where you’re insisting on a more restricted definition, viz. “irritated disengagement.”
In any case, I definitely didn’t intend any verdict on Tarkovsky’s accomplishment, or any diagnosis of his intentions. He’s only in that sentence because he was Dan Kois’ exemplar of intolerable artiness; Dargis’ use of Chantal Akerman is probably a better example. For the record, “Andrei Rublev” is the ONLY Tarkovsky movie I find boring (well, maybe “The Sacrifice” a little, need to see it again), and I still like it. As for “Solaris,” it’s one of my favorite films. I vividly remember watching it for the first time – on the big, big screen of the Castro Theatre in SF – and hoping it would never end. I find the highway/Tokyo scene completely mesmerizing. (I love Jonathan Rosenbaum’s reading of it, above.)
I don’t have any problem, actually, in describing some art-cinema type movies as boring, or “intermittently monotonous,” in Rosenbaum’s phrase, in a way that’s often worth it. I don’t think that boredom is actually poisonous (Richard Brody’s word), even if my case connecting the 1970s cultural boredom that led to punk and the “boredom” of a three-hour, slow-moving film was pretty darn tenuous. Ceylan’s most recent film definitely bored the dickens out of me in places. I was tired and it’s slow and all that. But much of it is amazing, it’s really stuck with me, I’m eager to see it again, etc.
It’s that kind of reaction that makes me want to extend an olive branch to Dan Kois, who did say he was glad he had seen “Meek’s Cutoff” and that he found himself thinking about it a lot afterward. I mean, it’s not to his taste and he didn’t enjoy watching it, but *the movie did its work on him anyway.* No harm, no foul, I say. (The harm may come in, as others have said, when he congratulates himself for the bold maverick position of having utterly conventional taste.) My larger point, though, wasn’t about any of that. It was about how vastly much more boring the culture that is officially and compulsorily non-“boring” actually is. (e.g., You were way too nice about that X‑Men movie, man. Topic for another day.)
As long as we’re making Tarkovsky distinctions, I’ll admit that while STALkER, THE MIRROR, and SOLARIS are three of my favorite films ever, I’ve never been crazy about NOSTALGHIA or THE SACRIFICE (though the latter does grow on me with repeat viewings). Much like Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsin, Tarkovsky often seems at his best when censorship prevents him from windy speechifying. I notice that no one’s bringing up NOSTALGHIA much here—are there others who feel the same?
+1 on El Fuzz’ bullseye – after so much flowing flora and walkin’ in the rain to open SOLARIS, shouldn’t a five-minute drive through a traffic-pulsing Everycity (what I called Exhibit A in a piece I wrote many years ago), and prior to a liftoff into the heavens, AND that drive being “auto-driven” by an interrogatee who’s still deeply troubled by his experience up there, ipse loquitur already?
Ever since I first saw THE SACRIFICE back when Maxwell’s had a film series, and then walked those long Hoboken blocks back to the PATH train in utter silence, I have always experienced my favorite director bar none as transfixing, not boring. So much of the power behind the spell Tarkovsky’s work casts over me is that sense of life being experienced in real-time – though, come on, how many cuts are in that driving sequence alone? – and not just some sort of narrative sequence of events, obviously, but the reveries, reflections, aporia, you name it, that encompass life as we live it. Kois might just as well call “real life” boring, and maybe he does. Is that also Tarkovsky’s fault?
All I know is, if you asked me to carry a lit candle across an empty pool, I bet I could do it on the first try.
After a test screening of STALKER Goskino higher-ups asked that the film have a more dynamic beginning to which Tarkovsky replied: “The film needs to be slower and duller at the start, so that viewers who walked into the wrong theater can have time to leave before the main action starts.”
There you have it from the man himself. The slowness – or boredom even, or whatever you want to call it – is sometimes something of an intentional endurance test, to weed out the Kois among us.
For me, being able to sit through, and genuinely appreciate, these (putting it politely) deliberately paced films often depends on the inherent dramatic tension in the situations. For some reason, I find Kubrick almost always compelling but I usually struggle through Tarkovsky. I really liked Ivan’s Childhood and the bell-making finale of Andrei Rublev, but I found Stalker to be almost fiendishly boring. True, I saw it 25 years ago, but these days I find it even harder to stay awake through a film that doesn’t hold my interest than I did in my youth. I did find the candle-across-the-pool scene in Nostalgia to be absolutely gripping.
My love of Harris Savides’ cinematography makes those Van Sant films more compelling for me than they might be otherwise. But while I revere There Will Be Blood and The Son, I simply couldn’t abide Police, Adjective.
Not that anyone asked.
Sadly, my strongest memory of The Sacrifice is what I hope was only a poorly translated subtitle – when the people in the house learn of the apocalypse, and one of the women says something like “It’s all my fault!”
Ah, I see, Glenn: it’s not that Tartovsky is boring, for he was undoubtedly a towering genius and that is simply not possible. Nope, it’s that the viewers who find that endless friggin’ sequence boring are, instead, ignorant fools who simply don’t appreciate the incredible [insert superlatives here] that Tartovsky is bringing to his films. [slaps forehead] But of course! What a *fool* I’ve been!
Every artist dances on the spectrum between obscure and pandering; the question each artist has to ask him or herself is, “Where on that spectrum do I want to be?” Michael Bay, as you note, is pandering to the action-without-thinking crowd so fiercely that some–myself included–find his movies actually, physically painful. I had a headache after taking my son to the second “Transformers” movie. On the flip side are Tartovsky and Joyce and, yes, to a certain extent Wallace, who are waaaaay over on t’other side. And I submit that Tartovsky is so far over on the “obscure” side of the spectrum that it topples over into “boredom” for the vast majority of people.
But let’s be honest here: just because some people find Tartovsky boring doesn’t mean that he isn’t; nor does it mean that he’s not a towering genius (any more than the fact that 99.9% of humanity find “Ulysses” boring beyond belief means that Joyce is a bad writer). It just means that *some people find Tartovsky boring*. And frankly, I don’t think that means a lack within those people; I think it just shows that Tartovsky made a decision to be way out there on the “obscure” end of the art spectrum, and that means you’re going to appeal to a lot less people. That’s all.
But stating or implying that there’s something missing in those folks who do hate that car-driving sequence is silly.
@ Andrew: Thanks for the generous response and clarification. The varying reactions to the “b” word do make one want to stipulate that so much depends on how the word is meant. I’ve previously cited J. Hoberman’s evocation of a boredom that transcends boredom. Andy Warhol’s boredom is different from Tarkovsky’s slowing down of the pulse rate. And so on. Once we clarify that, we’re left with two questions: what is the function of a critic and/or of criticism, and is to what extent should the critic feel put out by being asked to grapple with “difficult” works of art? In other words, why is it significant that Dan Kois feels less and less patient with this sort of thing, and why should the reader care? HE is the one saying things like “as a film critic;” well, as a film critic, aren’t there just a few more things on the table than his own fucking holy subjectivity? When I repeat Warshow’s phrase concerning the direct experience, that doesn’t mean your direct experience is the only goddamn thing you write about, does it?
As for your insistence that there’s no sinister agenda involved, let me read into evidence Exhibit A, that is, the very same Slate “Cultural Gabfest” in which Dana Stevens asserts that Dan didn’t really mean anything bad, that it was just a confession, not a manifesto. It is then revealed that the discussion of the Kois article is taking place as a substitute for a discussion of Godard’s “Film Socialisme,” which was on the table, but which podcast participant Stephen “ ‘THE SEARCHERS sucks” Metcalf managed to miss. The film’s title is pronounced by other podcaster Julie “Memo From” Turner in an ostensibly comic exaggerated French accent, and from that point on the eyeball-rolling is audible. Metcalf’s actually gloating over the fact that not having seen it means he doesn’t have to engage it; everyone involved gives off this awful meant-to-be-so-witty-and-cosmopolitan-and-just-us-Park-Slopers sense of “Wow, really dodged a bullet there,” as if Godard’s very existence constituted some awful imposition that was gonna distract them fatally from whether or not “Super 8” is appropriate for a pre-schooler of some other such burning issue. And then Stevens compares the Godard film’s cruise sequence to David Foster Wallace’s essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.’ The two works bear about as much resemblance to each other as (to quote a favorite old Thurber line) Calvin Coolidge does to the MGM lion; but hell, they’re both set on cruise ship. (Is it just me, by the way, or has Wallace become the default reference for people who invest a lot in being considered highbrow even though they don’t generally like anything that’s highbrow? There’s no other reason for Stevens to compare the two except by way of pointing out, “Hey, don’t get down on me for not ‘getting’ or liking Godard, I’VE READ DAVID FOSTER WALLACE.” And she’s hardly the only person to pull this. I have some idea of how Wallace would react to this mini-trend, which tends to manifest itself very strongly among Slate contributors, but I’ll keep it to myself.) And that’s pretty much when I had to be restrained from throwing my computer out the window. These are the people who believe they define the terms of the cultural conversation, Andrew. I think there’s a very definite agenda at work in their reflexive hostility to the very idea of a Godard film in 2011.
@ Douglas Moran: I’ve tried to be as upfront as possible about my own prejudices and tendencies to be unreasonable. I’ll thank you not to put words (such as “towering genius”) in my mouth. All you’re saying in your comment is “No, YOU’RE wrong,” and you’re welcome to that opinion. Hell, you’re even welcome to just steamroll over all the textual evidence I’ve picked apart, it makes you so happy. You’re not, however, welcome to misrepresent my own opinion.
Anyone for tarte au chocolat?
I am reminded of two things from the “Lord of the Rings” movies, actually:
In the first film, during Our Heroes sojourn in Lorien, Cate Blanchett was saying something to Frodo and … speaking … very … deliberately. I leaned over to my friend. “I wish she’d get on with it!”
“Elves are immortal; they can take their time.”
“Yeah, well *I’m not*!”
The second item is from the second film, during the Entmoot. Merry and Pippin are growing–yes!–quite bored, and Merry complains about it. Treebeard explains, “It takes a loooooong time to say anything in Old Entish, and we never say anything unless it’s worth taking a loooong time to say.”
Glenn, if you enjoy learning the cinematic equivalent of Old Entish, and enjoy watching movies in that language (Tartovsky, e.g.), that’s fine. But don’t dump on other folks who don’t, is all I’m saying.
Um, Douglas, Kois started it. Go yell at him.
Yeah, that Tartovsky is pretty dull. But Tarkovsky is awesome.
“I am reminded of two things from the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies, actually…”
Yeah, I bet.
See also re “byline picture:” http://www.ultraculture.co.uk/6996-calling-all-young-mums-from-leeds.htm
Glenn: naw; I commented here on your thoughts, and I commented on Salon on Andrew’s thoughts. That’s enough for me, I’m thinking.
Spressatura: And your point is … what, exactly?
This is not Tokyo, this is Moscow!
I’m confused: is Moran calling Tarkovsky “Tartovsky” supposed to be a joke or does he really not know the man’s name? These are the sort of things I wonder about.
Glenn – Thanks for the response. I just have to question your judgment in listening to one of those Slate podcasts in the first place! I actually like Dana, but I wouldn’t have expected that group of people, or much of anybody else, to have much that was interesting to say about Film Socialisme. I’d listen to you and Richard talk about it (I think).
What you bring up, though, is interesting: The way people act embarrassed, or put upon, by the persistence of difficult works of art in an age that has done its best to purge them. It’s the flip side of the thing I complain about, when readers go apoplectic on a critic who trashes a much-loved pop film (Avatar, Inception, et al.) and ruins its all-important RT rating. This is what makes me reach for my Adorno/Debord quotations, thereby boring everyone. I can only conclude that many people, perhaps most, find the totalizing Catholic Church of pop very comforting, and do not wish to be reminded that there are heretical eddies and crosscurrents to be found here and there.
Part of it, I’m sorry to say, is the Internet – or at least the corporate Internet, like Salon and Slate and MSN, where we’ve all become so reactionary and the numbers get smushed in our faces as never before. Everyone understands that talking about Godard or whatever is a buzzkill, clicks-wise, and the path of least resistance is always to steer away, in big ways and small, from stuff that doesn’t attract a large audience. (Salon didn’t run a release review of Film Socialisme, so I’ve got no leg to stand on here.) That may help explain the nervous laughter: We’re going to talk about this scary-serious-puzzling thing for just a second, ha ha ha! Don’t get bored! We’ll move back to something you already know what to think about!
In fairness there are occasional “Dogtooth” moments, where some way off-the-radar phenomenon briefly becomes acceptable fodder for the media conversation. (Didn’t love the movie, but also would never have imagined it as a potential “hit.”) Critics help identify something, and a modest public responds. Whaddya know, just like in olden times.
@ Reini Urban: Sorry, it’s not Moscow. See Tarkovsky’s diary (reprinted in “Time Within Time,” Verso/Seagull Books, 1993), the entry for 14 October 1971: “We came back from Japan on the 10th. Utterly exhausted. And with my nerves shattered. […] We filmed a certain amount for Berton’s drive through the ‘town.’ ” Also see the prior entry, for 19 September, prior to embarking for Japan. (Incidentally, while the diary stipulates the spelling “Berton,” as do the credits in the booklet of the new Criterion edition of the film, the extant subtitles still spell the name “Burton.”)
Also I think we can go ahead and exercise our collective intentional fallacies here, whether or not Kois intended his piece to be a manifesto, to my eyes, doesn’t much matter. I don’t know the guy personally but it comes off with a very definite agenda (this isn’t just a personal blog post, it was published as a “think piece” in the New York freaking Times) to me whether or not it was specifically intended as such. In any case, I hope this next paragraph doesn’t come off as hopeless “tooting my own horn” for the sake of what it’s worth.
I started getting interested in “cultural vegetables” when I was around 16 or 17 (I’m 25 now). Due to my interest in film, my lack of interest in doing homework, and my public libraries dutifully stocked collection of Criterion and other/foreign/art/cultural vegetable DVDs, it was how I discovered Fellini, Kurosawa, Tarkovksy, Antonioni, hell even Stan Brakhage. This was stuff I discovered on my own time, through reading online, looking at lists, and just being generally interested in this sort of thing. It opened up a whole new world for me and was something I did entirely on my own, outside of school, and for (wait for it) entirely my own pleasure. It wasn’t intentional, it just kind of happened accidentally (and wonderfully)
When I got to film school, not only was I exposed to academic film studies, but also a ton of other groundbreaking work (I took a class devoted entirely to the New German Cinema, American Experimental Film, Postmodernism in Film and Media, Documentary history. It was to my surprise that after sitting through something like say, Un Chien Andalou, Meshes of the Afternoon, some Herzog or Fassbinder, that the general response from my classmates (most of whom, it should be pointed out were Film Studies majors like myself) was “boy, total Yawnz0rz” followed by some snickering and/or “geez that was depressing”. Not for one or two films, but for most of the stuff I can remember watching in a class.
Some people ended up actually thinking about the films and turning around to them, a lot didn’t. What it did illustrate to my eyes was a lack of engagement by a lot of my fellow students as to any basic understanding of “why might I be watching a film like this for class” or (god forbid) “why is _____ (insert filmmaker here)using this particular aesthetic strategy which is not what I’m used to, is it effective or ineffective, if I think it’s ineffective (or effective), can I back that up with any specific reasoning?” (other than I was bored). At a certain point I wanted to say to some of these people “if you are going to school to study film, wouldn’t you like to be challenged a little bit?”
So I can assure that (at least from personal experience) that the attitude Kois expresses is very much alive and well. Which is again, what bothers me about the piece. Plenty of people (including people who commented on this post) have had plenty of well argued reasons for liking or disliking films. But Kois’s piece just demonstrates a complete lack of engagement with these films couched in “aw shucks, guess I’m just an average Joe like the rest of us” language, coupled of course, with a healthy dose of snark (which it seems, no cultural think piece can be without these days). Just to add one last note, I can remember watching Marker’s Sans Soleil in a class and thinking it was absolutely beautiful and haunting but had no real idea what it was “about” or “trying to express” (at least not until I watched it a few more times). So, there’s that kind of engagement too.
Ryan: “Moran” just has trouble with Russian names in general, is all; my apologies. Tarkovsky Tarkovsky Tarkovsky, okay? My step-sister is married to a man named Dherin, and I get that wrong all the time, too. It happens; cut me some slack.
Thanks, B, and no, I don’t take that for horn-tooting.
The funny thing is, my own interest in “cultural vegetables” (GOOD CHRIST HOW I HATE THAT TERM) began VERY early indeed…as a result of my parents encouraging me to look at things such as The New York Times and Life magazine, where Richard Schickel was a critic! I’m from a pretty hardcore working class background—my dad was a route man for National Foods, which distributed Wise Potato Chips and other like yummy snacks in Jersey—and both my folks were very determined that their kids would have the opportunities that they didn’t, for instance, the means to go to college. I liked reading, and I remember very early on being hooked on the NYT Arts and Leisure section and getting VERY EXCITED every year when the full-page ad announcing the lineup of the New York Film Festival was announced. I also remember reading Schickel’s Life review of “Tristana” and his description of Buñuel as “the old athiest” and marveling that atheists got to be old. Forgive me—I was pretty doctrinaire Irish/Italian-American Catholic, and 11 years old to boot. From there is was a short jaunt for me to be begging my Aunt Peggy of the Brooklyn Kennys to take me to see “Discreet Charm” in its initial NY run at…I don’t remember which theater. The Beekman? The weird thing was, I turned into SUCH a cinephile/bookworm that my parents worried that I was disturbed (they were right) AND I never managed to graduate college either, which I’m sure the thrifty brave clean and reverent Dan Kois did. And here I am talking to you, as that guy on “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel” said.
It’s really too bad that his name wasn’t… in the title of the post… or something… so you could have checked.
Also, I’ll cut you all the slack you like. All the slack I have to give is yours for the keeping. But, for future consideration, when making arguments against a highly respected artist in a given medium it might lend your arguments some credence if you spelled his name correctly.
[rolls eyes] I apologized and corrected my error. What more do you want; me to bow down like a courtier in “The King and I” or something? Good lord, Kelly.
Man, Kelly is going all Honey-Badger-Versus-Cobra on poor Mr. Moran. Which, I have to admit (albeit not without some shame at my own pettiness and venality) is kind of entertaining, but does distract from the more important issues here, e.g., why aren’t you all writhing in hilarity at my “Memo From Turner” joke, etc.
And I basically made the same point Ryan Kelly is making way earlier when I asked if anyone was interested in tarte au chocolate. TARTe, get it? Where’s my medal?
I obviously offended him. Maybe he just really loves Kartovsky–or whatever the hell the guy’s name is–and goes ballistic on anyone who expresses less-than-full admiration? I dunno.
But Gleeeeeen! He’s pickin’ on me! If you don’t help, I’m tellin’ Moooooom!
@Fabian: The rest of the commenters must have deemed your artfulness too esoteric, foreign-sounding, and abstract, I suppose.
Separating the wheat (Tarkovsky films) from the chaff (intellectual dishonesty), is that without much self-awareness, Kois shows that there’s a difference between not understanding a movie and choosing not to want to understand it. Kois could have opened up a dialogue with his college friend when he first watched (and half slept through) Solaris, and he might have potentially learned something. Instead he shut down any further involvement with the film, wrote it off, and years later maintains this anti-intellectual stance as if it’s a source of pride. He agrees to watch movies to this day that have glacial pacing, and convinces himself and others that he has sophisticated tastes in doing so. Is using the argument “I may not know much about art but I know what I like” a valid starting point for any cultural critique? Though I, and many others, love “boring” Tarkovsky films, there’s isn’t really a need to defend his works. Essays, books, and documentaries, by Tarkovsky himself and many others, are plentiful on the subject of said films, some of which Kois could have picked up at any given time to expand his understanding or lack thereof. He chose not to.
On a more serious note, I don’t understand how to combat things like this article. Even an open-minded reader of the NYTimes, who only read the initial article and has never heard of Tarkovsky, will now forever link Tarkovsky’s name and work with the article’s label of “agonizingly boring but fake intellectuals will claim it’s good”. It’s obnoxious to meet otherwise reasonable people, profess enthusiasm for a work, and then see eye rolls and vague, secondhand dismissals. There’s nothing one can really say without coming off like a boring-for-boring’s‑sake faker. There is already a definitive take on the work. To me this really in the maddening issue with this kind of “informed” philistinism.
I dunno. After the opening section where Kois compares his aspirational viewing to that of his six-year-old daughter’s, there really isn’t anything left to say to that either, is there?
@ Nick: Yes, exactly. And that’s why what Kois and his friends–“smart” people, “kind” people, “good” people all–are engaging in is ultimately pernicious. “No agenda” my ass. Kois won’t retweet any of this, nor will Stevens bring it up on any “cultural” “gabfest.”
Is no one willing to speak out on behalf of poor “Phineas and Ferb”???
I actually laughed at the Memo From Turner joke, if that helps.
Nick, I think you have nothing to fear. Articles like Kois’ come around periodically, create a tempest and then vanish.The Times readers you worry about weren’t going to invest the time in these filmmakers’ work anyway. Ultimately, the artists survive. They always do.
“On a more serious note, I don’t understand how to combat things like this article.”
Nick, how old are you? Because if you’re in your 20s or 30s, you might want to write the Times, as a representative of the demographic they have been so obsessively targeting with such bilge, and let them know how disgusted you are. If you’re too old, tell your younger friends to chime in.
It seems to me that the quality of Solaris is only tangential to this conversation. The real issue is why we’re unable to accept that intelligent people may disagree with us and how we can no longer express our opinion on a film (or any bit of art/culture) without it including our opinion on those who may disagree with us.
So if Mr. Kois is lamenting that a boring and opaque (to him) film like Solaris has been elevated to the level of high art by a phony cultural élite that “doesn’t really get it” wasn’t he simply contributing to this charade by disingenuously stating that he liked the film. Wasn’t it his duty to go back to his friend and tear down his entire pro-Solaris case (which doesn’t sound like it was that strong to begin with).
Disliking a film that’s considered among the greats is an interesting experience that everyone has. And how we deal with that is worth investigating (I usually react with initial befuddlement, followed by self loathing, and finally joy at putting together a good argument for myself. Genuine non-conformity is its own reward). But rationalizing that all those who disagree with you must simply be fooling themselves seems like a bizzarely adolescent reaction.
While I consider myself a fan of Tarkovsky, I don’t think Kois was wrong for disliking Solaris. I think he was wrong for thinking he was wrong for disliking Solaris.
For me, the point is not that Kois dislikes, finds boring, or thinks generally unappetizing any of the films he mentions in his article. The point is that he’s promoting an idea of film, and, more broadly, art reader/viewer-ship that, to my mind, actually does violence to what appreciating art is, or should be, about.
So long as you hold onto this idea that you have simply been born with the quantity of proclivities, propensities, and idiosyncrasies, which you collectively refer to you as your personal “taste”, and view this quantity as completely arbitrary, having nothing whatsoever to do with the shaping matrices of history, culture, and personal experience, then the appreciation of art can only ever be about – I hate to say it – consumer satisfaction for you. I find this sad, because, for me, it should really be about what new experiences, and, especially, new ways of experiencing, perceiving, and thereby understanding the world the work opens up for you. But this guy Kois just asks himself whether he “gets anything out of it” as if a work of art were just a dietary supplement…
Robert – Well, he’s also wrong for sort of pridefully not understanding Solaris and using that as a reason it’s not very good. I mentioned previously that I am not at all on the same wavelength as that film, but I’m not going to take to the New York Times to declare it, or, frankly, that I’ve reached a point, “as a film critic,” where I’d be fine with casting out to sea an entire aesthetic approach to the genre to which I am theoretically professionally committed. Even if I did have the ability. Professional critics who dismiss blockbusters outright aren’t going to cut it as week-in, week-out, see-’em-all film critics in the current cinematic climate, but I don’t see how anyone benefits by having someone who openly states that engagement with the form just isn’t worth his time anymore.
Going back to an earlier point, I’m 25, and I too went to film school, mostly surrounded people who wouldn’t know Tarkovsky from a hole in the ground and never saw a foreign film unless it was assigned for class (and God forbid they go to one in new release). I roomed with a fellow film major who didn’t understand why I put on Citizen Kane one day for pleasure. Another film major roommate, at my urging, watched Gerry, and didn’t care for it. When I asked him later, he admitted he was on the computer during most of it, but didn’t see any reason why that should affect his experience.
Film school, to say the least, was not the academic paradise Scorsese and company had promised.
Kent – I am definitely taking your advice and writing to the Times. I guess I could have figured it out for myself, but I didn’t know the younger demographic’s voice mattered so much.
I’m sympathetic to Kois. I too have lost much of my adventurousness in seeking out challenging or “boring” movies as the decades have worn on, and my tolerance for them has declined. This bothers me a great deal. I fear that I feel this way because I am not a true cinephile, that I don’t truly love film. If I did, a film’s content would mean nothing to me. I would be content- no, thrilled – to watch, not anything, but whatever a film artist had assembled for me and to follow it where it led. I couldn’t be bored because, if I really loved movies, a film could never be boring.
Kois is asking a reasonable question: “Life is short and why should I seek out experiences I know I’m not going to like?” He’s run the experiment. He’s seen the Tarkovsky’s and the Bela Tarr’s and the whoever else’s. He knows how he’s going to react. So he says, sincerely, “Thank you for your well-meant efforts to expand my life, but I have no more time for your directors.” Kois is asking, “How far to I have to go to meet this art, exactly, before I decide the work has put itself out of reach and I give up?”
Kois described his experience of a certain type of artwork honestly and he has been unjustly smacked around for it because it wasn’t the right experience. Lots of post-modern work stakes its claim as art based only on the experience it provokes or the intellectual ruminations it stimulates (I don’t mean the filmmakers mentioned in the comments). If you’re only allowed to admit your positive responses to a work, if you’re written off as hostile or insulting by the people who matter most when you confess your failure to have the experience a film or a piece of art desires to bring you then all our discussion of these things really is just pretension.
Nick: The issue isn’t Kois’ experience. It’s that he (or the New York Times Magazine) felt that his experience as described would be of value or interest to anyone else. What’s the intention? To make you feel less guilty? Mission accomplished, I guess.
I freely admit that I have terrible taste in food. No gourmet meal I’ve ever eaten makes me remotely as happy as almost any greasy taqueria or burger joint. (Hence my need to drop 60 pounds last year, which I nonetheless did merely by consuming smaller quantities of crap, plus exercise.) If the world’s ten greatest chefs prepared their respective pièces de résistance for me, odds are I’d have to force at least half of ’em down. But I’m not gonna write a lengthy thinkpiece about how I’ve grown weary of eating my literal vegetables. Because who the hell freakin’ cares, you know?
@ md’a: Thanks. Your input is genuinely appreciated.
And to expand a bit, NHOOS, I don’t want to confuse the issue here. I wrote about Tarkovsky because his name seemed to attach itself to a larger discussion of “boredom” in art cinema, but I don’t really care that Kois doesn’t like “Solaris.” The point is that Kois wants to be taken seriously “as a film critic” (his words) and makes this demand at the same time as he blithely announces his intention to abrogate a good deal of his responsibility as such, AND while strongly implying that life and discourse would be a whole lot more fun for everyone if we just went along with his “nothing to see here in the art-film section” ethos. That’s it.
I’m insulting HIM? No. Okay, yes. But he insulted me (and quite a few other people) first.
I don’t know why it’s so difficult for some people to simply shrug and walk away when confronted with something that’s just not for them (without resorting to the suspicious, affronted, vaguely petulant tone Mr. Kois employs in his article). I’ve noticed this tendency in people I know. I can understand that (particularly for people who consider themselves modern, educated, etc) there’s an implicit feeling of being left out of the cultural conversation when you see something of great acclaim and it leaves you cold. But I think it’s a mistake to confront any major work with the expectation of accessibility or even “entertainment”. And I don’t believe it undermines the egalitarian nature of art to suggest that art is for *anyone*, but not necessarily for *everyone*, which seems to me an important distinction.
Also, if one doesn’t understand something they’ve seen (and there’s no shame in that), I think it behooves one, especially if one is a professional reviewer, to occasionally consult with secondary critical materials before damning something of considerable reputation. Someone brought up “Ulysses” earlier. I was baffled and more than a little stupefied when I read that book for the first time, as many people would be. But I sought out a bunch of critical writings, re-read “The Odyssey”, read “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, and then finally returned to it. I still think there’s something about Joyce’s style that I’m just sort of allergic to, but I was at least able to have a firmer grasp on its structure, allusions, technique and overall intent. I don’t LOVE that book, but I DID engage with it, which is what a work like that deserves (not to mention, it’s the least I would do if I were about to make bold claims in a major publication).
Anyway, speaking of secondary sources, and speaking of Tarkovsky, I though I would mention that Geoff Dyer is coming out with a book-length appraisal of “Stalker” next year called “Zona”. Dyer is one of the best, most versatile essayists out there, so it should be interesting. Here’s a taste, from The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/feb/06/andrei-tarkovsky-stalker-russia-gulags-chernobyl
This whole issue of the driving sequence just recently came up over at the AV Club, and I was surprised to learn that anyone would have a problem with it or find it boring. A lot of people debated intentionality, as if that mattered as to whether you should enjoy it or not (according to some, Tarkovsky didn’t like it and it’s only long to justify the expense of getting the footage in Tokyo–and therefore anyone who digs it is therefore somehow mistaken in doing so). I was mezmerized and delighted by it in high school, and seeing it again for the first time recently, 20+ years later, felt just the same. As one commenter aptly put it, it’s the visual equivalent of “Hallo Gallo.”
On another note, a certain programmer for a certain prestigious institution–who and which shall remain nameless–was once talking about Gerry with me. I referred to the driving shot in the beginning of that as a Tarkovsky homage, and he immediately scoffed, sneering “Gus van Sant was influenced by Bela Tarr for Gerry, not Tarkovsky. You can read it in his interviews!” I was so dumbfounded by his lack of ability to step outside of that that I don’t think I even said anything back. Not that it would have mattered.
The other unfortunate result of conversations like this is that the lines get drawn incorrectly. It becomes a battle between those who do like slow and contemplative cinema and those who don’t. When in fact, the difference seems to be between those who see criticism as an ongoing conversation and those who see it as a declaration of taste. This view, the Kois view, seems to simplify the entire conversation to “Snobs” vs “Morons”. It’s a pointlessly reductive thing to assign motivation to others’ opinions instead of fully defining ours. Put it another way: I’d rather have a 3 hour conversation with someone who hates Solaris (a position I disagree with) but challenges my reading of the film with intelligence, than with someone who agrees with me, but bases their love of the film on the fact that they don’t get it so it must be deep. Kois seems to have never come to terms with the fact that he’s allowed to both dislike films that are regarded as art and possess thoughtfullness. And his reaction seems to have been to eschew both.
Don’t know if it was discussed here, but there was a similar debate (although with a slightly different bent) about two months ago, kicked off by Nick James in the April issue of Sight and Sound (his article is not online), see here for an interesting take:
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=891
Scott, thanks for the heads-up on Dyer’s book, and the link to his STALKER essay. As usual, Andrei Arsenovich is his own most eloquent defender of his methodology, in re: boredom and much else besides, as quoted by Dyer in this essay: “If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.”
“Special intensity of attention,” “cultural vegetables,” must we split hairs?
Mike:
Then I guess I’m confused … at what point does one earn the (moral-critical) right to say “Auteur X is wearing the Emperor’s Clothes” and/or to have such thoughts published for outsiders’ consumption?
The piece in question wasn’t about “Auteur X,” Victor. That would entail actual criticism. It was essentially a declaration of a lifestyle choice pertaining to an entire subcategory of cinema. Very different animal.
Another personal example. I don’t watch much avant-garde/experimental/short-form stuff, and I genuinely do feel guilty about that. Every so often I see something mindblowing, like Peter Tscherkassky’s “Outer Space” or Martin Arnold’s “Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy” (or, arguably, huge sections of THE TREE OF LIFE), but for the most part aggressively non-narrative cinema just doesn’t do much for me. I consider that my failing. But even if I didn’t, I see no point in writing 2000 words justifying my decision to ignore the Wavelengths program at the Toronto Film Festival. That just seems inane, not to mention pathetically self-serving. And it wouldn’t be even remotely the same thing as mounting a knowledgeable, well-considered argument that, say, Ernie Gehr is a fraud. (NOTE: I’ve never seen any of Gehr’s films, sadly. I’m sure he’s awesome. “Side/Walk/Shuttle” has always sounded like something I might dig.)
Likewise, if I were into opera, I might state a passionate case against Verdi’s RIGOLETTO or whatever. But does the world need an ostensibly sorrowful thinkpiece about how, after years spent fruitlessly trying to get into opera, I’ve finally decided to give up and just play MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY on repeat? I’m thinking maybe not.
First: I want to thank Glenn for highlighting the homo- and AIDS-phobic aspect of Kois’ piece. His queer/AIDS slurs are what should be inspiring letters to The New York Times. Glenn: reading what you wrote made this queer cinephile feel less alone.
Second: Kois’ desire to be taken seriously as a film critic is completely undermined by his cavalier/phobic dismissal of cinema from the margins which does not cater to his “be-my-type-of-movie-or-else” sense of entitlement. Devoting oneself to an art form and desiring to be an intelligent explicator of its examples means a) frequently treading into difficult territory and b) demonstrating an instinctive willingness to question one’s opinion, especially when one has a negative experience. Kois is a perfect example of what Samuel Beckett warns about the at the outset of “Waiting for Godot” (a boring play if there ever was one. Didi and Gogo never leave and Godot never shows up!! What a waste of an evening). Dan Kois is a person who blames on his boots the faults of his feet.
“I see no point in writing 2000 words justifying my decision to ignore the Wavelengths program at the Toronto Film Festival. That just seems inane, not to mention pathetically self-serving.”
That’s really well put, Mike.
You should see SIDE/WALK/SHUTTLE. An amazing experience.
Re: Andy’s comment earlier, “I was surprised to learn that anyone would have a problem with it or find it boring.”
Really? I find this extremely hard to believe. Unless your attitude was that anyone who had gotten that far into the movie had already passed the boredom test.
Yes, I guess that’s kind of it. I guess it would be better to say I was surprised to find that what I thought of as a highlight was getting attacked. It would seem if you weren’t into that, you probably wouldn’t like the whole movie, and why would you single that scene out for approbation? Like saying you don’t like dogs particularly, and singling out a cute puppy to prove your point.
Hi Kent, for the record I’m 28. I’ll take your advice and send the NYTimes a letter expressing my disappointment with the article and its editors’ choice to run it in the first place.
The more I re-read and think over the article (an effort which seems severely lacking in Kois’ supposed aspirational film viewing), the more it bothers me that Kois justifies his current perspective by citing a past conversations with a dumb college friend. “’[SOLARIS]’s so boring,’ he said with evident awe. ‘You have to watch it, but you won’t get it.’ […] When he asked me what part I liked the best, I picked the five-minute sequence of a car driving down a highway, because it seemed the most boring. He nodded his approval.”
Anyone who has attended college or gone to certain types of parties has probably encountered people similar to this friend. They try to lord their cultural experiences over others as a means to show superiority. Kois has made the first step in understanding that he doesn’t need to feel insecure around these people. He still fails to understand though—by now using his friend’s old views as cudgel to bludgeon anyone who claims to like SOLARIS—that he still only understands appreciators of such films as either sophists (Kois’ friend) or wannabes (Kois). Are there not other options? Kois is still not free of letting his friend’s callow views affect him.
I am by no means an all-knowing genius of aesthetic authority, nor is any of us, so there’s plenty in the Kois piece that I can sympathize with; I don’t think he’s a monster for putting the notion of “aspirational viewing” on the table, because I’ve been in many situations where I’ve gone to see a particular film that I suspect probably won’t be in my aesthetic wheelhouse, but that I am sufficiently intrigued by the attendant conversation to roll the dice on. I would argue that aspirational viewing is a GOOD thing, and something maybe even potentially worth writing a NY Times mag piece about, as long as it comes from open-mindedness rather than the closed-minded conclusion reached by Kois (sing to the tune of the Lumberjack Song: “I’m a philistine and I’m OK…”)
Kois is a dilettante at best, and the limitations of his taste are such that I don’t think he has any business making a living writing about movies. (I mean, if Todd Haynes’ fluid, smoothly marvelous MILDRED PIERCE is too abstruse for you, it’s probably time to rethink why you’re even watching any of this stuff.) Kois’ epiphany – that he should embrace his inability to digest art films – might make most of us want to hurl, but if he’d written it on a personal blog, would anyone care? I guess what I mean is: this is just a dude learning something true about himself and changing his mindset accordingly. Just because that mindset is antithetical to ours doesn’t mean he should be burned at the stake. The fact that the NY Times mag published such a bloggy, inconsequential piece is a bit weird, but it doesn’t indicate an “agenda” other than that of a philistine’s guilty introspection.
Glenn’s exhortation to “just leave it alone” seems to be what Kois is, by the end of the piece, ready to do. Should he have been given such a high platform for this mundane self-discovery? No. But I don’t see why that makes him a suitable target for attack.
And boredom? Boredom is subjective. Many acclaimed art films have bored me, and many have excited me. Ditto for commercial films. I’m not sure that anything more insightful can be said on the topic of boredom. It is what it is. If you’re bored, you can’t engage with what a filmmaker is trying to do, even if you’d like to. I don’t know. This is a terribly unprofound comment but the emotional pitch of this discussion is a bit mystifying to me.
“I would argue that aspirational viewing is a GOOD thing, and something maybe even potentially worth writing a NY Times mag piece about, as long as it comes from open-mindedness rather than the closed-minded conclusion reached by Kois (sing to the tune of the Lumberjack Song: “I’m a philistine and I’m OK…”)”
This.
I’ve been an aspirational viewer my whole life. To this day, I rush out to see any film that gets raves from critics I respect, even if I feel almost certain that it isn’t my thing. (I’m looking/screeching at you, TRASH HUMPERS.) Seems to me that’s the only way one’s taste will ever expand beyond the instantly accessible. Sometimes it doesn’t work—I’ve been trying to like Manoel de Oliveira since THE CONVENT played NYFF ’95, and have never succeeded (except for his lovely doc OPORTO OF MY CHILDHOOD). But sometimes it does. SOLARIS did nothing for me 20-odd years ago, when I was first devouring the canon; I rewatched it recently and found it utterly hypnotic (and not even a bit boring). That reversal didn’t happen by magic—I clearly *learned* how to watch SOLARIS, over a period of many years in which I kept struggling with works that challenged me. (That process is ongoing, and never won’t be.)
So, yeah, I can easily imagine a terrific piece on the subject of aspirational viewing (a term I quite like). But it wouldn’t be one that draws the conclusion: Nah, screw it. Not because that’s the wrong conclusion (though I think it is), but because it’s ultimately destructive rather than constructive.
An apt passage from Ruskin’s “Of Kings’ Treasuries” – “Very ready we are to say of a book, ‘How good this is – that’s exactly what I think!’ But the right feeling is, ‘How strange that is! I never thought of that before, and yet I see it is true; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, some day.’ But whether thus submissively or not, at least be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. Judge it afterwards if you think yourself qualified to do so; but ascertain it first.”
Everybody’s probably given up on this thread by now but this column
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/18/movies/the-pack-mentality-in-spring-films.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1308334121-oc4U8yIpwGCVVAq8hkaDjg
seems to me at least as insidious as Kois’ thingie. The bar-lowering “film criticism” isn’t helped at all when the basic thesis is supported only by a lot of cherry-picking.
@Tom: No matter where Cieply lays his hat, the rule is, whenever he attempts anything besides straight reporting, it’s run-for-the-hills time.
I’m not sure what gave me the heartiest chuckle, the Kracauer reference, the quote from Stephen Ujlaki, “dean of the Loyola Marymount School of Film and Television” (“A number of scholars, he noted, have been examining the notion that the human evolutionary advantage, particularly in tough times, is the collaborative impulse”), or the penetrating observation that in “most studio films this season, the value system mimics peer loyalty in a small military unit: When push comes to shove, it’s the few of us against all of them.”
Is everyone really that desperate for a group thumbsuck?
Yeah, I don’t get what it is about Cieply. He seems to have some kinda Lamont Cranston thing going. I remember back in the day at Première when a colleague commissioned him (Cieply) to do something about the semiology of summer movies or some such and he (the colleague) was super-stoked about how great and ground-breaking the piece was gonna be, and it came in and I read it and I was like “Are you fucking kidding me?” but apparently I was in the minority. When he (Cieply) ducked over to the New York Times I honestly felt Première had dodged a bullet. Shows how much I know!
on Boredom (and Cinema)
Not only was an issue like pacing “extremely important” to Tarkovsky, it was the scaffolding of a larger philosophical and theological project. But why can’t we see that? I think the larger point in contention –the issue of boredom versus entertainmen…
Brylee Oshea
Great blog article.Much thanks again. Want more.