Good Work, if you can get it

Over the years I have frequently found myself in the position of not being able to see a movie I want to see. Sometimes, it’s just that I can’t see the movie for free—like, I’m expected to blind-buy a DVD or blu-ray simply to watch something that is otherwise unavailable. Sometimes, when a movie is out of print (such as much of Kathryn Bigelow’s early filmography, to name just one example), not only is the movie unstreamable, but the only available disks have been priced for scarcity at $50 or sometimes even way, way more than this, like hundreds of dollars.

As a multi-streaming-service-subscriber it’s hugely irritating to have to pay more (than I already pay) to watch something that should stream for free. But worse are the films that simply cannot be had. For years, Claire Denis’ Beau Travail was one such film—unavailable and impossible to see. From the student, teacher or researcher’s perspective, this is really unacceptable in this supposed age of plenty. If it’s an obscure movie that no one ever heard of, that’s one thing. If, like Beau Travail, it’s been almost universally acclaimed and called one of the best films of the 1990s, that’s another.

Thankfully, the Criterion Collection, slow though it might be, too white as it might be, came through this year, with a beautiful blu-ray of this stunning film. I guess this means, if I wait long enough, perhaps I’ll be able to get nice (Region 1) editions of Bigelow’s Near Dark, Blue Steel and Strange Days—perhaps via Arrow Video?

Welcome to Camp

In October I watched the entire Friday the 13th film series, something I have not done since high school, adding the several films that had not yet been released before the early nineties. I was never much of a horror fan as a kid, but I’ve made up for lost time in recent years. Horror is a tremendously entertaining genre to study, and very interesting, in part because horror films are often unpretentious and can therefore be used to explore ideas without worrying about such boring niceties as taste, sense and political correctness (of course, this can be applied to genre films more broadly). For example, plenty of movies have told stories of disaffected veterans struggling to adjust to civilian life after a homecoming, but only a handful have done it as effectively as Bob Clark’s 1974 Deathdream (AKA Dead of Night), in which a family receives the news that their son has been killed in action a few days before he actually comes home. He’s a changed man, unable to relate to his old neighborhood friends or family, and a lot more interested in killing people to drink their blood than he used to be.

Similarly, endless pamphlets, comic books, after-school-specials and plenty of movies have tried to educate young people about the “problems” of drugs and premarital sex, but few craft the message as directly as slasher films. Except—are horror films really as conservative as that? Do they mean it, or is there something else going on? A side conversation…

But what accounts for the entertainment value of mainstream horror, such as Friday the 13th and its sequels? In many ways, it’s easy to say these are simply bad movies, poorly made, nonsensical, endlessly repetitive and even simply boring. It’s easier to say that all of that (except for the last) doesn’t matter in terms of enjoyment. I considered my appreciation for Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (4th of 12 movies, as of this writing).

An objectively bad movie, in terms of some of the things supposed to matter most: writing, acting, directing. And what could be more disreputable than the third sequel in a slasher series? In my Letterboxd review I used the words “campy” and “cheesy,” which are apt descriptors. Plenty of people would not even watch such a “film.” Yet it was so much fun to watch (even more so if you’re watching the whole series); it was mass camp, delightfully, an object of appreciation far beyond its designation as a cheap horror sequel.

What all of that means, it turns out, is very complicated to suss out. Camp? don’t get me started, honey. I recently read a popularly cited paper by Annalee Newitz from some time ago about the stark differences between camp and cheese, which was great, but not altogether clarifying for me what I’m doing when I watch a Friday the 13th movie.

More to come. (He said, fatefully.)

First Cow & Mrs. Miller

I really enjoyed Kelly Reichardt’s illicit cake-making caper, First Cow. Reichardt has done a lot to revise Western tropes in her work, so it’s fitting that this tale of the muddy, grubby, hard-scrabble Pacific Northwest pioneer days evokes most of all Robert Altman’s muddy, grubby, snowy 1971 revisionist Western, McCabe & Mrs. Miller. More than evokes—when early Altman regular and McCabe actor René Auberjonois shuffles by in a bit role, it’s a direct callout to that earlier film. It seems to signify that we are back in that particular world, in which Western types were subverted and matters of business (public and private) were the focus.

My description (having to do with cake) is a bit tongue-in-cheek, since nothing within Reichardt’s gentle, intimate gaze suggests a caper, exactly. Westerns are often about the blurry line between the wilderness and civilization; that’s just as true in Reichardt as it is in the key works of John Ford. But the “civilizing” force here is not the law, or the church, or the homestead but a cow. That she manages to stir up a bit of comic suspense on behalf of our milk-thieving protagonists (maybe it’s milk-rustling?) is one of the many small joys of the film.

A (Rear) Window on Film Studies

I developed a film studies class over the last few years; met twice a week for a film screening. The class was geared toward absolute beginners—people who mostly had little previous experience analyzing films and who had seen very few pre-1970s films on their own. The first film we watched was Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). I have come to see this film as a kind of gateway classic. Anyone simply watching it and paying even begrudging attention (the lowest bar to clear) can’t help but get caught in Hitchcock’s tightening net of suspense and therein learning that they can be affected by an old movie after all.

It’s a great introduction to the movie star at, perhaps, the center of Hollywood’s firmament, and one of the most important directors in film history. It’s a relatively fast-moving, highly-suspenseful mystery, full of pleasures for first-time viewers (not to mention n-time viewers). I showed it to my sons last night, aged 8 and 11, and it more than held their attention—it safely guided them into the physical experience of art-horror, little did they know (the 11 y.o. just called it suspense, which is true, it’s not a horror film, per se, but the effect is the same in places), while still being tamer than most of the live-action movies they’ve seen (Star Warses, Marvels, Zemeckises, Harry Potterses).

But what I think makes Rear Window such a great introduction to film studies is that it’s a movie about film spectatorship and the work of the film director. Psychologically, it’s about voyeurism, of course. But taking that theme further, it’s more fundamentally about looking and constructing meaning. These are the almost reciprocal tasks of the audience and the director. Any number of stories await Jimmy Stewart out his rear window, he just has to start looking and making meaning. Once he begins to be pulled into any particular narrative, he can zoom in using his various lenses of different sizes, but is he getting closer to the truth? Or is he simply constructing it in line with his own prejudices and perversions?

These questions are foundational to beginning to break apart and examine and figure out how a film creates its effects, and perhaps why it does.

Genre Ward

My name is Nathan Jongewaard (say it JUNGA-ward). When I was in film school at CalArts, my classmates lovingly teased me for my love of genre films by nicknaming me “GenreWard.” Years later, I find myself studying film more than ever and collecting books, essays, notes and disks on topics of interest. I thought it would be useful to begin organizing myself a bit. The name signifies a place to ponder my interests in media, particularly film, and to begin publishing my thoughts and notes in an informal way. I do love genre films, but the title is more about place than topic.