A Memorable Fancy

I usually do not respond to being tagged in memes, but I thought I’d play along with this one. Chick Young tagged me with this movie theme, started by Lazy Eye Theatre. The challenge is to come up with a 12-day movie marathon, more or less. At first, I thought this was too much like planning an Intro to Film class, and it resembled work a little too much. I was thinking in terms of elements like cinematography and editing, and exposing people to obscure or overlooked works. Then I killed that, and decided to simply go with movies I want to watch, which is hard to boil down to 12 movies. I didn’t consciously choose a theme, but I notice that one does run through many of these selection – that of obsession.

1. Chungking Express (Kar-Wai 94)

I still find this quickly made, frenetically edited, disjointed pair of “love” stories refreshingly energetic and adorable.

2. The Crow (Proyas 94)

This is one of my favorite films. I was never a fan of comic books growing up, but a friend dragged me to this film when it came out, and I was hooked. I saw it three times at full price, and once at the dollar show before buying it on VHS, and then DVD. Admittedly I haven’t seen it years, so I am not sure how it will hold up now, but the romantic appeal of coming back from the dead to avenge the murder of your fiancée appealed to me at the time. One peculiar note: when I saw this in the theater initially, there was a piece of dialogue between Sarah and Eric Draven in the apartment after she is looking for him and he appeard in silhouette. When the movie went to the dollar show, that dialogue was gone, and has not reappeared on DVD or anywhere else. If possible I would show that version. Does anyone else know what I’m talking about?

3. In a Lonely Place (Ray 50)

I have to include a movie with Humphrey Bogart, and I think this is one of his best performances, in a well shot, impeccably written story.

4. Husbands and Wives (Allen 1992)

This is a tough one, because this is my favorite Woody Allen film so far, but something like Deconstructing Harry might fit the theme better. H&W is an incredibly subtle exploration of the dynamics of married life and the largely unspoken tensions that go with it. (btw, if you are interested in the Woody Allen viewing project, I set up a site to record the films Molly and I have seen).

5. The Woman Next Door (Truffaut 81)
Again, a difficult selection, as The Man Who Loved Women would probably fit better, but I really enjoy the interplay of the two main actors in this film. Of Truffaut’s work, I really like the Antoine Doinel series, but if I am going to pick one film, I think this is it.

6. I Am a Sex Addict (Zahedi 05)

By coincidence, Neflix sent me both this and The Man Who Loved Women at the same time. I think it was trying to tell me something. I like Caveh Zahedi, and this film is honest and self-reflexive enough to be both entertaining and strangely cathartic.

7. Waking Life (Linklater 2001)

One of my favorites. I have seen this many times, and as hard as it is to sit through, especially the first time, I think it relly holds up well. A tapestry of visual and philosophical artistry.

8. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Winterbottom 2005)

It’s this or 24 Hour Party People. These are both highly self-reflexive, postmodern in the best sense of the term, and adapting a novel like TS is a noble enterprise, ably done by this this director in a way that is layered and witty without quite being pretentious. Coogan is great in both.

9. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry 2004)

I still think this is Gondry’s best work. I like the ambiguity at the end, and the mesmerizing editing and cinematogpraphy.

10. Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais 1959)
Such a beautiful film. I was thinking Last Year at Marienbad, but I just saw that recently in the theater, and it was more demanding than I remembered. Both visually poetic works, tough.

11. Mr Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Errol Morris leads the viewer to like this strange man, and then throws everything in question by leading up to the holocaust denial, leaving the viewer with questions about truth and knowledge and belief. I like all of Morris’s work, but I think this is really his breakthrough work into the more complex philosphical work he has been doing lately. Fog of War would work too if this is not available (I still haven’t seen Standard Operating Procedure!).

12. The Big Lebowski (Coen Bros 98)

I can still watch this movie over and over and laugh every time. This is probably the only movie I can do that with. I had No Country for Old Men here but I deleted it in order to go with the dude, because, well, the dude abides.

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I am beginning to wonder what this selection says about me, and I welcome analytic readings of my selections. I can take it.

Now for the tagging. To make it look systematic, I will choose fellow Detroiters whose blogs are not normally film related. I now hereby tag Molly, Kim, Hilary, Doug, Archonoclast and Kerouac. I know that’s six, and that’s why I don’t teach math.

I have decided to remove flickr photos and del.icio.us posts from the RSS feed for this blog. If you want to see these things, subscribe to my friendfeed.

If you read more than two blogs on a regular basis, I don’t know why you’re not subscribing to the RSS feeds for them, so you can get them all in one place. I use google reader for the hundreds of blogs I read, because i like how it’s organized and the sharing features are pretty cool,  but I think even “live bookmarks” on Firefox or Safari would help you organize your blog reading, rather than clicking on your bookmarks all the time to find that a blog has not been updated, or has been updated a hundred times while you were sleeping.

Here’s an idea for an unintended (nevermind) use of  whosi: create groups and add feeds to them. I created a “name” called “Film Scholars” and added the trusty Dr Mabuse’s Kaleidoscope site. I was going to add everyone else in my film blogroll, but I didn’t because I’m lazy and I want to see what other people add. What I’m thinking is that if people add sites to the group, we could have a huge, collaboratively-built RSS feed of blogs of film scholars. One could also create groups for anything this way.

A few more notes about whoisi. I’m still a little creeped out but intrigued by the concept. I looked at the “About” section, which points out some interesting things, like the fact that it is cookie-based, so you don’t have to log in to follow people.  It is collaborative, like a wiki + and RSS feed. And he uses the word “frak.” There’s some definite potential here.

Back in May of 05, I wrote about distributed identity, and posted links to a number of sites with which I share information about myself, such as last.fm, flickr, etc. I mused about exhibitionism and sharing, but the problem then is that if anyone were actually interested, for some reason, in following my activities, they would have to go to each service and subscribe or return repeatedly. What was missing was a place to aggregate them, and now a few have come around. Doug alerted me to friendfeed, which includes all kinds of data. I have also looked at swurl, which seems to do the same thing, but I haven’t really investigated it yet. Both are remarkably simple to set up, involving little more than typing in your public username for each site (which means for me typing “emarsh” over and over). Friendfeed also has a facebook component, which I haven’t used yet, but which might be a good way to alert friends to new blog entries and other events.

On the flip side of this phenomenon is Whoisi which also lets you track people, but perhaps in a different way. It’s basically a search engine to which one can add people and associate their names with sites. On the one hand this is an intriguing way to build collaboratively a database of individuals. On the other hand, it may be a sinister avenue for outing people’s anonymous blogs, or slandering people by assoicating their names with unsavory sites.  There’s nothing for me yet, and I don’t think I’ll create anything, but this site has some interesting, if unsettling, potential.

I’ve been working on Kracauer’s early writings, trying to think of his concepts of distraction and the loss of individuality attending the rise of modernity in terms of networked communication and video distribution. As a sort of residue of this work, I began thinking about internet use more generally, which spawned the following snippets, stripped of specific theoretical references.

Today’s spectator is still largely anonymous, but trackable,
not as easily able to disappear into a crowd. The internet user always
leaves a trace, whether through cookies or IP logs and referrals. The
user has become a string of numbers, coordinates indicating preferences
and likely paths, interests defined by interactions across sites. Often
nameless and faceless, the typical internet user still has an identity,
pieced together in code through browsing habits.

The loss of individuality is double-edged. Users of networks become bits of data as their habits are aggregated and used for predictive purposes, such as in gmail’s use of keywords in meails to generate ads, or netflix’s recommendation engine, which relires in part on other “Raters Like You” . The cult of self-expression prevalent in blogs and social networking sites seems to be a counterpoint to this anonymizing function of the web, but the ease with which one can hide such things as race and gender, and the rapidity with which one can delete an entire online existence suggest that identity online is still fleeting and superficial. I wonder to what extent this reflects offline, or face-to-face, realtime, interactions as well, or if these things can ever again be usefully or realistically separated.