Film After Film - J. Hoberman

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Jesus Christ has less in common with any previous movie protagonist than with the greenish-purplish, pustulent, putrifying subject of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. As a movie, The Passion passes the point of no return with the eleven-minute chastisement sequence in which Jesus is lacerated, first with rods and then studded whips, until his back resembles a side of raw beef. The crux of The Passion is the experience of a crucifixion; the near continuous violence and gore is meant to excruciate the viewer. Using numerous overhead shots, Gibson assumes a fallen world and projects an essentially medieval worldview. (The crucifixion only emerged as a subject for artists with the first millennium; passion plays didn’t exist before the twelfth century.)

      As detailed by art historian Mitchell B. Merback in The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 1999), medieval Christian devotion required immersion in the Passion’s “grisly details,” while other devotional practices centered on the experience of a tortured, pain-racked body. (Merback finds analogies in medieval Europe’s contemporaneous fascination with martyrdom, flagellation, extravagant forms of punishment, and public executions.) The antithesis of a film like Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Gibson’s atavistic Christian art goes for shock rather than sublimity. The filmmaker employs extreme, even gross, horror movie tropes, as well as blatant digital effects—the Roman whip and Christ’s wounds in the chastisement sequence, as well as the final shot of 3-D stigmata.5

      From the silent era on, movies drew power from their affinity to religious ritual; The Passion inverts this equation, and redeems movie-going. The cinema is transformed from a questionable, possibly sinful activity into a source of collective identity as well as a communal rite. Entire congregations rented theaters in order to the share the experience, often bringing young children. For these religious audiences, The Passion functioned as a sermon but, unlike a sermon, the end of the screening was greeted with applause—or so I’ve been told. However gruesome its presentation, The Passion was taken as a gift from God. Evangelical leader and child psychologist James C. Dobson was not alone in welcoming this redemption of a debased popular culture: “In any other context, I could not in good conscience recommend a movie containing this degree of violent content. However, in this case, the violence is intended not to titillate or entertain, but to emphasize the reality of the unspeakable suffering that our Savior endured on our behalf.”6

      As The Passion’s sanctified violence and horror impressed a devout audience with the reality of “unspeakable suffering”, so the real-ness of Gibson’s extreme filmmaking intrigued more secular artists. Not everyone was as honest as Quentin Tarantino who, when asked by interviewer John Powers if he’d seen Gibson’s Passion, replied that he “loved it … I think it actually is one of the most brilliant visual storytelling movies I’ve seen since the talkies.”

      It has the power of a silent movie … It is pretty violent, I must say. At a certain point, it was like a Takashi Miike film. It got so fucked up it was funny … I was into the seriousness of the story, of course, but in the crucifixion scene, when they turned the cross over, you had to laugh.

      Tarantino would subsequently lend his imprimatur to exploitation director Eli Roth, author of the quasi-pornographic torture-based horror films Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005), low-budget DV productions with stylistic affinities to the New Realness, by employing Roth to contribute a trailer to his compilation film Grindhouse and by producing Hostel II (both 2007).7

      Gibson’s blockbuster stimulated other filmmakers—but not simply because of its mayhem. Movies as varied as Gus Van Sant’s crypto-Kurt Cobain ode Last Days (2005), Cristi Puiu’s black comedy The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), Julia Loktev’s structural suspense film Day Night Day Night (2006), Paul Greengrass’s 9/11 docudrama United 93 (2006), Julian Schnabel’s medical case history The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2006), Steve McQueen’s prison story Hunger (2008), Filipino director Brilliante Mendoza’s true-crime Kinatay (2009), Jerzy Skolomowski’s existential chase film Essential Killing (2010), and Danny Boyle’s self-amputation ordeal 127 Hours (2010)—many based on or inspired by true stories, and all built around a discreet experience—are examples of post-Passion anti-entertainment, aspiring to a visceral realness and being additionally “experiential” in their emphasis on real-time duration.8

      Noting their over-determined endings, film critic Nathan Lee bracketed several such movies with The Passion of the Christ, as “death trips.” No less crucial is their interest in constructing an ordeal—both on the screen and for the audience. Last Days was immediately recognized as analogous to Gibson’s project. Washington Post reviewer Anna Hornaday called it “the grunge generation Passion of the Christ,” predicting (erroneously) that it might prove “as powerful a communal and spiritual experience.” Van Sant’s suicidal rock star is only the most obvious martyr. Others include an alcoholic non-entity who dies on a hospital gurney, a would-be suicide bomber, the passengers and crew of a hijacked plane, a French fashion writer sentenced to a living death, an Irish revolutionary who embarks on a fatal hunger strike, and a Filipino hooker. In every case, their passion is presented as an object of contemplation.

      United 93, which more or less demands that its audience live through a doomed flight from take-off to crash, is the most therapeutic of these movies. The quintessential new disaster film, United 93 is explicit in its use of real time and designed for audience participation. New disaster is experiential and communal. Just as the now notorious trailer distilled the movie’s narrative arc (albeit without offering the final catharsis), audiences mimicked the action: having paid to see Inside Man, unsuspecting viewers had their attention “hijacked.” According to some descriptions in the press, the angry patrons at AMC Loews Lincoln Square banded together to yank the trailer.

      Kinatay (the title means “slaughter” in Tagalog) is the most radical of these films. The movie is crudely shot from the perspective of a twenty-year-old police trainee who, moonlighting for extra money, finds himself trapped on behalf of the spectator, in a hellish world. Over the course of a forty-five-minute, more or less real-time sequence, and before his eyes, a young prostitute is abducted, beaten, tortured, raped, sodomized, murdered, and matter-of-factly dismembered. That these atrocities are murkily rendered on HD, more often heard than seen, serves to add insult to injury, even as Mendoza’s anti-technique amplifies the horrifying spectacle of relentless degradation. Kinatay is not a movie to be lightly recommended but it is something that must be endured to be understood.9

      CHAPTER FIVE

      SOCIAL NETWORK

      Like The Passion, Kinatay draws on the lowest horror movie tropes in its grimly experiential representation of human suffering and depraved indifference. At a higher level of aspiration one finds a variety of self-reflexive attempts that use genre conventions to represent a new “social-real” of existential terror, cyber-globalism, viral images, digital will, and social networking.1

      Further examples of this new social-real would include George Romero’s horror films Land of the Dead (2005) and Diary of the Dead (2007), and Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield (2008)—the last of which, purporting to be a subjective camcorder documentation of a cataclysmic disaster, is notable for integrating the two poles of digital image-making: expensive CGI and amateur DV. More specifically, although each in its own way, Antonio Campo’s Haneke-influenced youth film, Afterschool (2008), Brian De Palma’s anti-war Redacted (2007) and Errol Morris’s investigative documentary Standard Operating Procedure (2008) explore the implications of YouTube—of self-produced movies being uploaded to the web for a potential audience of tens of thousands.2

      Jia Zhangke’s theme-park set The World (2004) and Joe Swanberg’s humorously scaled-down exercise in social networking, LOL (2006), are both revisionist versions of the globalistic melodrama, as is the more widely seen and highly praised David Fincher–Aaron Sorkin “Facebook” movie, The Social Network (2010). At once a form of neo-neo-realism and an attempt to make a contemporary new wave film, Swanberg’s low-budget production is characterized by primitive jump cuts and all manner of sound/image disjunction, as when a panicky voicemail message is heard over a montage of faces or when email messages function as silent movie intertitles.

      Utterly classical in its film language, The

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