Too long has this scrolling site ignored the Sacred Text. In a gesture of penance, I return to the true path. Like all Sacred Texts, this one attracts worshippers in different degrees: the Seekers, the Initiates, the Adepts, and the Exegetes. There are Heretics too. Today, I wish merely to introduce you, who may not yet be even a Seeker, to the serenity of The Way.

 

The Word, in plenty

Seekers who have become Initiates agree: Their blinding moment of conversion came when they realized that the words of the Sacred Text speak to all times, all places.

Other Sacred Texts dispense a few trinkets of wisdom (“I have a bad feeling about this.” “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” “Show me the money.”) These are tag lines, sound bites, not poetic glimpses of glory. Uniquely and universally, passages in our Text raise the spirit and cast out doubt and despair. But far from being otherworldly, they carry practical wisdom and illuminate every situation. What crisis in your life, brother or sister, would not be piercingly clarified if you were able to utter one of these lines?

It’s nice to see a smart kid for a change.

I’d say he’s so good he doesn’t feel he has to prove it.

That’s what I’d do if I were the kind of girl you think I am.

Sorry don’t get it done, Dude.

You look a little used.

Aw, I’m not gonna hurt him.

If I’m gonna get shot at, I might as well get paid for it.

Let’s take a turn around the town.

I’m glad we tried it a second time. It’s better when two people do it.

Borachone talking big.

You’d better go easy on that stuff.

Don’t set yourself up as being so special. You’d think you invented the hangover.

Aw, hell, what’s the difference? We’d all be dead by then.

Nobody’s run in here./ We’ll remember you said that.

Found yourself another knot-head who don’t know when he’s well off?

A game-legged old man and a drunk. That’s all you got?/ It’s what I’ve got.

Think you’re good enough?

Is he as good as I used to be?/ It’d be pretty close. I’d hate to have to live on the difference.

To become an Initiate, the Seeker must commit these to memory and meditate upon them intently. An Adept will be able to summon them up, half-consciously, in a range of situations–the more far-fetched, the more enlightening. One will always be appropriate.

 

The Name

Exegetes have pointed out that the figures of light in the Sacred Text do not have the usual names. They are, emblematically, called Stumpy, Dude (aka Borachone), Colorado, Feathers. He Who Is Called Chance is named John T., but even the middle initial is turned into an epithet (“T for Trouble”).

Far from being an accident, the names in the Sacred Text are there to impel the Initate into deeper mysteries. Is, for instance, Stumpy The Elder called Stumpy because of his lameness—always a sign of grace in sacred texts? Because of his inertness (as stiff as a stump)? Or because a tree, even though harvested, retains its attachment to the earth by remaining rooted? Perhaps He Who Is Called Stumpy is “grounded,” as the current saying has it.

The Text is figural, both metonymic and metaphoric. Young Colorado is son of Rocky Ryan from Denver. He Who Is Called Wheeler is a man of wagons. She Who Is Called Feathers wears feathered clothes, but also has a teasing lightness of manner. He Who Is Called Dude constitutes a crux. Is he a “dude,” an Easterner who has come west, or is he a dude because he favors fancy outfits? (See “Raiment,” below.)

The central fact is that in this text, the mystery of naming opens on to the Mystery of Being. Everyone is named something, but many are not named by their name.

 

Raiment

Once the devout Seeker has sensed the limitless depths of the The Words, the more inquisitive will turn to the images. In the opening scene of the Sacred Text, a largely wordless series of encounters in barrooms, a world is created before our eyes. It is a world of debasement, treachery, and sudden death. A contemporary text called Variety, secular but still enlightening, notes: “…gets off to one of the fastest slam-bang openings on record.”

Exegetes have long praised this eloquent passage. They note that a text so replete with Words benefits from an extended passage of muteness. Not silence, for the almost continuous music attributed to Dmitri Tiomkin provides its own wordless “commentary” on the action. This sordid, barbarous world will be redeemed; those who are left low on the saloon floor will rise three days afterward (note!) to triumph.

Serious study of the Text’s images drives the Adept to note the raiment in which the figures are clothed. The Nemesis Joe Burdette wears a bright cowhide vest, suggesting his animalistic anima. He Who Is Called Dude begins in dirty garments, earns the right to garb himself in splendor, but through weakness of soul he is once more soiled.

She Who Is Called Feathers manifests the most dazzling changes in raiment.

     

Hers receive commentary within the Text, while the garments of He Who Is Called Chance are noticed only by her.

Those things have big possibilities, but not for you.

Hey, Sheriff, you forgot your pants.

But these may be interpolations by later hands.

 

Disputed passages

Like all Sacred Texts, this contains stretches that excite puzzled commentary. What, in the opening scene, is Wheeler supposed to “tell his men”? Why so many flying insects at night? Why is He Who Is Called Chance once, and only once, seen awkwardly grappling with his rifle, trying to hold it while he shrugs into his jacket?

There is the curious verbal slippage in the song sung by He Who Is Called Dude. He sings of “My three good companions—my rifle, pony, and me.” To the heathen mind, this is a flagrant error. You can have a rifle and a pony as a companion, but you can’t have you as your companion. Can you?

To doubt the Sacred Text at this point is to underestimate the subtlety of the Authors. Recall that the tale told by the song is a dream (“It’s time for a cowboy to dream“). As in other venerable texts (e.g., Bible, Ramayana), dreams are to be taken as warnings, prophecies, or hints as to the true meaning of the story. And so it proves here. We know that He Who Is Called Dude is a divided man: Borachone and pistolero, drunk and deputy. The singer, as we’ve seen, has an untamed side that bursts out into violence against nearly everyone, including his Savior, He Who Is Called Chance.

Hence the split identity of the rider in the song. He is a me, but he also has a me. And around the bend, waiting for both of them, is another divided figure, a woman called “my sweetheart darling.”

There are Exegetes who would see in this passage the source of another worthy text, Western Redundancy Playhouse Theatre, but exploring that would take us too far afield.

More obvious is the Text’s great cosmic sign: The sun rises and sets on the same horizon.

     

No further proof is needed of the miraculous nature of this narrative.

 

Heresies

I do not refer to callow efforts to dishonor the Text (e.g., “I think we need a few more scenes in the jail”). Instead, I mention simply the most important efforts by believers, often Adepts, to sow petty doubts. There is, for instance, the efforts to replace the canonical status of this Text by later, more derivative ones (El Dorado; Rio Lobo). Uneven and fragmentary, they have never achieved widespread recognition of Sacredness. Other heresies claim our text itself is derivative, and one offers the biggest challenge to the devout.

I refer of course to the Heresy of the Spittoon.

In the Genesis section already mentioned, Nemesis Burdette flips a coin into a spittoon, and He Who Is Called Dude, needing to buy drink, stoops to retrieve it from the rancid vessel.

Only the intervention of He Who Is Called Chance saves He Who Is Called Dude from this act of degradation. This passage has a parallel later in the Text, when another nemesis must fish a coin out of a spittoon.

The reversal in power is also a step in the redemption of He Who Is Called Dude.

But Adepts have noticed that in Decision at Sundown, a text attributed to one Budd Boetticher and dated 1957 (the Sacred Text we have is dated 1959), a sheriff refuses to accept the money of the protagonist and drops the coins into a spittoon.

     

Consider another passage in another Boetticher-signed text of the era, Buchanan Rides Alone (confirmed to be from 1958). Here the protagonist, prosaically named Buchanan, disarms a young gunslinger and drops the boy’s bullets into a spittoon.

The vessel, offscreen below frame, announces its presence by the tinkling sound made by the falling rounds.

Heretics have hinted at plagiarism, especially in the light of a reference in another text of the period, Ride Lonesome (dated February 1959, two months before the appearance of our Sacred Text). Here a nemesis tells of a poster “gun-tacked to every tree and stump (!) between here and Rio Bravo.”

While undeniably puzzling, these correspondences do not point to plagiarism. There may have been an earlier, Ur-version of our Sacred text, that has simply not survived. In moments like these we must put our faith in the Authors.

 

Recurring formulae

Finally, we must return to the Word. Seeker, Initiate, Adept, Exegete: All acknowledge the Text’s verbal echoes. As with Homer’s wine-dark sea and Vergil’s pious Aeneas, formulaic tags recur in our tale, but with more variation than in classic texts.

Our first business is business.

We have important business …. Me and my friend we make our business alone.

I’ll tell you what I’m a lot better at, Mr. Wheeler. That’s minding my own business.

I figure why is not my business./ You’ve got peculiar ways of choosing what is your business.

You think I’ll ever get to be sheriff?/ Not unless you mind your own business.

As if to signal to the devout the importance of every word, the Text provides its own meta-commentary. As a French exegete has said: “Discourse cleansing discourse, backchat ruling over chatter and chitchat.”

I’ll go outside so you can talk more freely.

I guess I talk too much.

He’ll keep talking till we get out of here.

Can’t you talk plainer than that?

Young Colorado says that Nemesis Nathan Burdett is “talking now” through the Deguelo tune./ I guess we made him talk after all.

Me, I just talk all the time./ You most certainly do./ You’ll get used to that. You’ll have to. Either that, or start talking to me.

Now I’m running out of breath. You talk if you want to.

Like all Sacred Texts, for all this talk of talk, this one knows that the ultimate truth lies beyond words.

Just stop talking. Just let it be.

Good advice.

Before I followed the Way, the spittoon was a spittoon. As I began to learn the Way, the spittoon was more than a spittoon. When I had learned the way, the spittoon was once again a spittoon.

Addendum 15 April 2012: This humble guide to the Text has aroused further passion among Exegetes. Three have pressed even more fiercely the Heresy of the Spittoon, claiming that it derives from a much more ancient text than the Boetticher-attributed ones mentioned above.

     

Antonio of the Red Palace writes:

Regarding the scene involving the spittoon, I think it’s a shout-out to another one from Sternberg’s Underworld. You know, that one involving an equally “Borachone” character (Rolls Royce Wensel) being humiliated by “Buck” Mulligan. Interestingly, the “hero” (in this case Bull Weed) stands for the weak one. 

Even in both films, the female character is called Feathers. ¿ Coincidence? 

The Exegete declares a heartening willingness to believe, as all Seekers must, that There are no coincidences. From David Cairns, Sifu of Shadowplay, Exegete Extraordinaire of many other texts, comes further observations:

Like Antonio of the Red Palace, Shadowplay Sifu displays admirable historical awareness and interpretive ingenuity. But there is still room for disputation about sources and the path of influence. Here is Lea Jacobs of the School of the Badger to open another avenue:

The earliest version of the coin in the spittoon that I know is Underworld. Charles Furthman, brother of Jules [scribe who co-penned Rio Bravo], worked on the adaptation [of Underworld]. So I have always assumed the bit was “in the family.”

It is a measure of the spiritual power of the Sacred Text that it so stirs the imagination of the devout. And in truth, this scrolling blog’s little guide should have pointed out the strongest evidence for the Spittoon heresy (as well as the philological question of “Feathers”). These Exegetes are hereby thanked for extending the already vast commentary on the Text. But let us remember that the earlier text in question is regarded by many Adepts as itself derivative.

In Underworld, the nemesis who flings a ten-dollar bill into the spittoon is called “Buck” Mulligan–a transparent trace of literary lineage. For what readers text do not recognize the reference?

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Let us not forget that this literary “Buck Mulligan” has the proper first name Malachi, usually translated as “God’s messenger.” This surely changes our understanding of the blowhard who mockingly offers the ten-dollar bill to Rolls Royce; for he starts Rolls Royce on his path toward sobriety and self-respect.

For such reasons, Ulysses is most fruitfully read as a gloss on Underworld.

Nonetheless, consultation with wiser heads than this chronicler’s yields a change in the Canon. Henceforth the Heresy of the Spittoon will be known as the Cuspidor Crux.

Addendum 21 April 2012: Another Adept, Simone Starace, has disclosed more evidence for the Cuspidor Crux. She points to a passage in the secondary writ,  Joseph McBride, Hawks on Hawks (1982), p. 131:

JMB: There are several things in Rio Bravo that are similar to Underworld, which you and Furthman also helped write.

HH: I stole two things, the dollar in the spittoon and the girl’s name, Feathers.

Simone adds that on page 159, according to McBride’s filmography: “Hawks claimed to have contributed to the script of Underworld.” The palimpsest thickens.

Independencia (Raya Martin, 2009); set photo by Alexis Tioseco. Our comment here.

 

DB here:

I received the newest Cinema Scope after we had posted our book roundup last week. Awkward timing, but I can still alert you to this splendid effort. In the tradition of Cahiers du cinema (every film magazine wants to be Cahiers), this enterprising Canadian journal has celebrated a benchmark issue with a compendium–issue 50 devoted to 50 filmmakers (all under 50).

It’s a gimmick, but a good one, and of ancient lineage. Cahiers and other French journals established an admirable tradition of obsessively gathering brief entries on filmmakers under a thematic rubric. (The organizing principle: alphabetical order.)  In this contribution to the tradition, Mark Peranson, Andrew Tracy, and the rest of the Cinema Scope équipe have outdone themselves.

We get, of course, critics aplenty, and they offer short, sharp takes: Kent Jones on Maren Ade, Scott Foundas on Wes Anderson, Andrea Picard on Liu Jiayin, Shelly Kraicer on Pema Tseden, Chuck Stephens on Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and many more admirable matchups.

This sort of thumbnail catalogue works best when encapsulation is kept to the scale of American menu squibs, or even fortune-cookie apothegms. The phrases don’t have time to turn gently, so they careen. Tony Rayns on Jia Zhangke:

With a sensibility pitched at the exact mid-point between Robert Bresson and Arthur Freed….

Christoph Huber on Paul W. S. Anderson:

Brit-born Paul W. S. is the elder, least pretentious, and most consistently amusing Anderson of the current director trifecta: its termite artisan.  

Michael Koresky on Kore-eda Hirokazu:

He’s at his best when there’s the least mess.

It’s not all praise, either. Adam Nayman contributes a vinegar-doused write-up of Paul Thomas Anderson,  although he likes one cut in There Will Be Blood. Alex Ross Perry finds that Fincher’s latest work is uninspiring, but at least now “he can screw around all he wants.”

As if this weren’t enough, filmmakers (another Cahiers tradition) add their voices, and images, to the chorus. So there are Weerasethakul on Lucrecia Martel, Ben Rivers on Bertrand Bonello, James Benning on Sharon Lockhart, and Albert Serra on Zhao Liang, among others.

One purpose of such a Baedeker’s is to alert you to new work. I counted a dozen directors I hadn’t heard of, and another four or five whose films I hadn’t seen. But this kind of enterprise has long-range impact too, especially right now. Cinema Scope 50-50-50 is a bracing psychic antidote to the usual complaints about today’s empty, worthless cinema, and its inferiority to the dazzlement on view on HBO and AMC. For a recent example of this litany, see Wolcott, who yearns for the days of  An Unmarried Woman. Projects like the Cinema Scope celebration lift your eyes to the horizon. You can start to believe in cinema’s future.

Are these directors marginal? Not really. The fretful, wayward margins can, when they hit critical mass, become a mighty phalanx. That’s what happened with auteurs in studio Hollywood, art-house movies in the 50s and 60s, new and young cinemas thereafter, etc. The future often lies on the periphery.

We get all this, along with the usual provocative columns by Cinema Scope regulars Peranson, Picard, Rosenbaum, Möller, and Stephens; a sort of storyboard for a new Benning project; Denis Côté musing on his Bestiaire; Hubler’s encyclopedic tribute to Sherlock Holmes movies; an interview with Hoberman (“The decline of the Voice has been going on longer than the death of cinephilia”), and much more. Even the ads are intriguing.

Sooner or later, you know you will obtain this. Why not now? A mere $5.95 Canadian, almost exactly the US price, at least today. This issue is so new that it apparently hasn’t been registered on the website yet, but go there anyway. You might as well subscribe.

Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2011).

Mysteries of Lisbon (2010).

DB here:

Once Fassbinder said something to this effect: “One is always misunderstood. If you spend time clearing up misunderstandings, you’re dead.” Usually I think this is good advice. Now, though, a filmmaker whom I admire has, in publicity for a film that I admire, misunderstood me. So I’m squawking, mildly.

I met Raúl Ruiz only once, many years ago during his visit to our university here in Madison. We’d programmed At the Top of the Whale and Life Is a Dream. One afternoon we were sitting in the Student Union looking out over majestic Lake Mendota, and he started to muse. “I see a boat on the lake. Three men are in the boat. One is planning to kill the other two, but we don’t know which one it is.”

This was only one of many forking paths our conversation took. Over dinner that night Ruiz was at pains to explain that there was nothing new in Postmodernism that we couldn’t already find in the Spanish Baroque. That was pretty persuasive. He talked as well about his two production courses at Harvard. “In one, we shoot a drama as if it were a TV quiz show. In the other, we shoot a quiz show as if it were a drama.” In sum, typical Ruiz ebullience and passion for rethinking forms.

Earlier this year my name got linked to his in an unexpected way. In an interview, Ruiz mentioned that a Swiss magazine had claimed that Mysteries of Lisbon didn’t conform to “Bordwell’s Paradigm,” and he agreed. Alerted to this interview by Adrian Martin, I shook my head and thought, I don’t know what Bordwell’s Paradigm is, so how can anybody else? I suspect the label has to do with my characterization of classical Hollywood cinema, but who knows?

Since then Ruiz has signed a discussion of Mysteries of Lisbon that expands on the same theme. You can read it here. It starts off with a bang:

The American professor David Bordwell considered that all narrative strategies that can be applied to modern films are based on a certain notion of verisimilitude (or narrative evidence).

Thanks to them, the most unbridled fictions are acceptable and accepted. And this very verisimilitude, it is said, is averse to any straying from a guiding line (what is commonly called the action’s guiding arrow), with its variations in intensity and its turbulent twists and turns.

This theory, which depends on a certain number of rules often abusively attributed to Aristotle, finally became what purists hastened to naively call “Bordwell’s paradigm”–the whole of narrative strategies that stem from impulse, from the presumption of verisimilitude.

What is called “modern drama” or “bourgeois drama,” or even “the Ibsen Shaw postulate” has given rise to this superstition. In modern drama, structure and construction dominate, even beyond the poetic incoherence or the irrelevant facts it supposes. The author is an architect who builds shelters for fictions, various events which, and only because they are protected from the rain of the improbable, become credible and relevant.

Each of these fictions, of these mobile structures, is guided by a narrative arrow. But beware, only one per fiction: William Tell is a well-told story because only one arrow cuts in two only one apple, but the battle of Azincourt is not because Robin Hood and his people’s swarm of arrows does not enable one to read the time on the narrative clock, veiled as it is by clouds of arrows, each guided by its independent little intrigue. “Clouds and not clocks” would say Karl Popper.

In modern drama, the proliferation of truncated facts is not acceptable because it makes us stray from the notion of causality which is inherent to that of verisimilitude, and without which there would be no story.

Promoting a film by citing an American professor may not be the height of shrewd marketing, but put that aside. Peering through the haze of this rather awkward translation, I’m inclined to say that Ruiz mistakes my claims. I’ve said in several places that narrative, prototypically, requires causality. But that isn’t the same thing as claiming that such causality is realistic in nature, or that causality is the main attraction of narrative. Mainstream cinema, including Hollywood, often uses certain kinds of verisimilitude as an alibi for formal experimentation. And I’ve celebrated filmmakers like Eisenstein and Ozu who break away from narrative causality.

It’s ironic that on the same day I post a blog entry arguing that realism gets short shrift in studio cinema of the 1940s, I find Ruiz claiming that realism is my guiding light. If  I disapproved of the “disparate, truncated, labyrinthine and baroque” aspects of narrative, I wouldn’t have said this about Mysteries of Lisbon:

This being a Ruiz film, there is as well a tangible pleasure in the artifice of storytelling. The film acknowledges that all the handy coincidences, buried pasts, multiple identities, and revelations of kinship are there for our delectation. . . .

This recounted history is only the first of a cascade of flashbacks, issuing from several characters, and these gradually show deep connections among persons tied to Pedro’s past. Secondary characters in one story become protagonists of another. The young hero is gradually displaced as the center of the action by war, secret romances, rivalries, duels, and infidelities. Like Pasolini in his Trilogy of Life, Ruiz is happiest when opening up a plot detour that will eventually become a new main road.

You can read my whole account, from last year’s Vancouver International Film Festival, here.

I think that Ruiz and I might disagree about how much Mysteries owes to psychological causation, and about whether labyrinthine trails can converge, let alone become highways. Both of us use metaphors of linearity, so maybe our disagreements are basically about whether the detours and paths are truly dead ends. Maybe I think his plotting is tighter than he does. Still, I expect that we’d agree that much of the pleasure of the film is its delight in apparently capricious digression.

Anyhow, my squawk is mild because it’s a pleasure to be misunderstood by a grand filmmaker. What Fassbinder didn’t say was that artists’ misunderstandings can be productive, leading to the creation of new artworks, and perhaps ideas about them.

If my remarks on Mysteries of Lisbon don’t make you thirst to see it, Manohla Dargis’ review surely will.

Goodbye South, Goodbye: Kao confronts Flathead while the women tune out.

DB here:

The newest issue of Film Comment includes an essay I wrote on the relations between academic film studies and cinephile criticism. It’s online at the Film Comment site.

Two things: The header (“Never the twain shall meet”) risks misleading you. The essay argues that the twain can and should meet. Secondly, the essay refers to stages of a long take in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye, but neither the Web version nor the print version uses the images I suggested as illustrations. So here, in frames from a 35mm print, I present two phases of this gloriously dense scene. I discuss Hou’s staging principles in Chapter 5 of Figures Traced in Light, with comments on this passage on pp. 234-236.

As a followup, and weirder: The Way Hollywood Tells It is now available as an audio book. How it handles the pictures I don’t know. But you can listen to a sample here.

If the scene has a climax, this is probably it. As the punching bag swings, Flathead wriggles out the window.