MichaelB wrote: Mon May 30, 2022 10:38 pm
This is what you wrote, reformatted in a way that people might actually find halfway readable (seriously, you really do yourself a major disservice when you upload these needlessly thick wodges of unformatted text):
Please accept my sincerest and deepest apologies once again, as I have stated above, I am a bit short on time now, have some important work to do, and it is getting a bit late here at UTC+02:00-land, however, I shall attempt to try writing a couple of words.
It is closer to a cross, in my opinion at least, both stylistically- and content-wise, between Faces, Gertrud, and Abigail’s Party, with some dashes of Ordet and A Woman Under the Influence, though of course having much that it wholly original to add and to say (and also echoing a whole other buch of arthouse directors, from Renoir, Rivette, and Sautet via Rappaport, Pasolini, and von Trier to Haynes, Jost, and Vinterberg, to name just a couple that spring to mind immediately). It is certainly much better than BeTipul, which I have also watched, which is far less about raising great questions.
Are you familiar with the works of Ray Carney, especially about Cassavetes, Dreyer, and Leigh and emphatically his specific discussion of the films I have mentioned above? In these publications, he frequently discusses the differences between fixed and free/trapped characters, situations, lifestyles, etc. (a distinction I believe he has originally applied to Henry James) in relation to both art (i.e. the way we approach it, naturally, in his case, the focus is on cinema) and life (i.e. how we choose to actually experience our identity, self, and existence), as well those between pragmatic (behaviourally-, sensorially-, experientially- and emotionally-based, to put it rather roughly) and visionary (to put it rather roughly, overdetermined- and socially-limited-based in some know-it-all high-concept pitch session and surface-depth predetermined way) modes of existence with regards to both.
I believe that his description of Beverly durring his Leigh book as being less a hostess than something much more unsettling, someone playing at being a hostess and as an impersonation of a person who has given up her identity, such as it is, to play a role, which she acts out not only in public but, more disturbingly, even in private, to validate herself, inseparable from the part she plays sporting an identity that is completely synthetic, is not covering up her real feelings and thoughts but is acting completely and utterly sincere; meaning what she says and having no reality lurking in the depths; everything is fake, or, of Cosmo in one of his Cassavetes books, as someone who devotes his life to looking good – on stage and off – and succeeding, to cite just two examples, is highly pertinent to many situations in The Bourgeoisie. He argues that these films exemplify the difference between a consciousness- and horizons-expanding and consciousness- and horizons-limiting experiences and Dasein-related immanent forms of being in both life and art and beyond (you mentioned The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, which, although content-wise is very different from The Bourgeoisie, does raise many related issue, and Carney underscores how the film engages them, those I mentioned, thoroughly).
The Bourgeoisie I believe catches up where Cassavetes, Dreyer, and Leigh left-off and is expanding on the questions, pragmatically and in a multivalent manner, on knowing oneself ontologically vis-à-vis the imaginative questions of what it really means to live with regards to both life and art (and beyond) explicitly, especially commenting, in a manner rather similar to the film I have mentioned above. on the possibilities of creating within society a truly liberated and free consciousness and being-in-the-world through exaltation and worldly abstractions truly living desire imaginatively, transgressing the compromises of society and social expression, becoming the makers of our own lives rather than existing in some zombified void. Art as life and living, life and living as art, and these two aforementioned modes of being, to avail myself of Carney once again, it tell us about life, and aspire to help us to live it, new ways of seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, and being in the world, the performative extravagance, imaginative inappeasibility, and expressive outrageousness violating expressive norms and social expectations and becoming almost crazy, to the point of social ecstasy almost.
I sincerely hope that this is the best a non-native speaker asked to provide a very brief précis can do after 01:00 and please accept my sincerest and deepest apologies once again but I hope that you will not get mad again should you consider this insufficient (in which case, please fee free to politely point in which directions do you require further elaboration), I truly am doing my best, writing this took at least an hour if not more and required me to consult several print books, and I harbour no bad will towards you or anybody else here, however, like Carney, I believe that the greatest artworks are irreducible to a couple of sentences.
From that description you do indeed make it sound halfway intriguing, although I am very much not a fan of Ray Carney, and for much the same reasons that I've been bridling at rather too many of your posts; you're both overly fond of making sweeping dismissals of art that doesn't fit your pretty narrow definitions, which isn't an especially productive tactic if at the same time you're also trying to persuade people to start sharing your own niche interests.
But you haven't yet convinced me that there's anything particularly
cinematic about
The Bourgeoisie - I note that across hundreds of words you offer no visual or stylistic description at all, and that your more detailed comparisons are with things like
Abigail's Party, which is literally an existing stage play captured on video. A terrific stage play, certainly, but not one that makes me think "this is great cinema". You assert not merely that
The Bourgeoisie is great cinema but ranks up there with the very best
ever, but I'm simply not sensing this from your description. What you're describing sounds more like a good, engrossing TV series to me.
Thank you, please note that before noticing your reply, I have made a few edits to this text, so, you might want to revisit it in order to re-arrange this one. Re your technical note at the start, I am doing my best, though please kindly be considerate of the fact that English is a second acquired language for me (and one out of many at that) and that my native one is a non-IE tongue at that. Now, you mention not being that fond of Carney, in which case, assuming that you are familiar not just with his content-related theories but with his visual/stylistic/formal ones as well i.e. that it is not really about being in control about beforehand-knowledge and is more focused on faces/bodies, verbality, interrogating, managing, and scrutinizing the self and identity, letting-go and figuring things out, acting-based, life-changing learning, and such, which you seem to be indeed, I hence assume that you can guess beforehand what I find great visually-, formally-, and stylistically-wise about this work. And I shall assume that you will pretty much disagree with my assessment of it as great. Different strokes for different folks, though, and I would assume that this is neither the time nor the place to rekindle/resurrect and restart this age-old endless debate once again here. I can tell you that the cinematography and camerawork are highly multivalent and, as with Cassavetes, Dreyer, Leigh, etc. as described by Carney, almost never privilege the viewpoint of a single character while meaning is derived virtually wholly from acting, voices/tones, bodies, faces, etc. rather than from anything external to these, though whether you think this is good or bad is another story. My definition of an art film is quintessentially the same as Carney’s rather than that used by more auteurist-formalist camps and I do indeed find films such as
Abigail’s Party and the one under discussion to be vastly more interesting than supposedly and ostensibly more so-called “cinematic“ ones such as e.g. the two you have mentioned above. Nevertheless, the acting and writing I can assure you are as good as anything one finds in the very best of Cassavetes, Noonan (another director whose work is rather similar to this one, by the way), Leigh, Dreyer, etc. And I would add that it pretty much predicted the societal phenomena I have outlined above, which is pretty prescient. Life imitating art and the two are strongly linked, analogous to Cosmo, these people do not understand that they are in an Eitan Zur film, they think that they are in a Hollywood movie, the message is the medium and the medium is the message while the plot of this work breaks and freezes its very own self. And I know of nothing other like that in all of cinema and trust me that I know the medium through and through, root and branch, and lock, stock, and barrel.
Please let me add that I am not making any of this up trying to cheat the gullible nor am I being disingenuous, lest somebody here contemplate incredulity. This work has been discussed by academic-level critics/scholars here writing in Hebrew as placing challenging demands on the viewer and has having much less to do with traditional television and being much closer to classics of Israeli experimental avant-garde modernism such as the works of
Yaakov Shabtai,
Yosef Haim Brenner, or
S. Yizhar in literature and
Hanoch Levin or
Joseph El-Dror in theatre. Online, searching for its name in Hebrew, one can come across a great many complaints against it that are almost identical to the ones that were levied against Cassavetes, Dreyer, Leigh, Noonan, Renoir, etc., e.g. that it is too slow, “boring,” “verbose, chatty, and talky,” “lacking in plot,” “that nothing important ever happens in it,” that it is not “entertaining” and is even “depressing,” that it commits the inexcusable transgression of not being a big-budgeted action thriller, that it is “pretentious/elitist/inaccessible,” that its characters are “annoying,” “impossible to identify with,” and such, which is a fancy way of saying that it does not pander to the audience and that it is too confrontational and critical (ignoring that art is supposed to expand consciousness rather than reinforce it), that it is “ugly,” “cheap, formless and disjointed, a slippery and insecure awkwardness, unpolished, unprofessional, amateurish-looking,” and “not really cinema but uncinematic filmed theatre,” and so forth. Earlier I mentioned that this never got released on DVD/BD and you would simply not believe the temerous hostility I received when trying to advance this cause a couple of years ago in some forum, these people do really wish this work to be forgotten, they really do believe that art films which they claim nobody actually likes and that only exist to make some feel superior take up time, resources, and space from their beloved “normal movies.” The similarities with Cassavetes do not end here: According to some interviews I have read with Zur, he (plus his co-screenwriters and actors which he has explicitly included as co-authors in his creative process i.e. he treats cinema as a collaborative artform, like Cassavetes, Leigh, von Trier, etc., and this is a very facial-bodily/tonal/verbal/linguistic nuances- and acting-based work indeed) has essentially followed the Cassavetes/von Trier method of art as life rather than merely about life, namely, of using it to live through and coping with personal demons and asking ever-evolving, open-ended, and changing questions about what he does not understand about himself/his life rather than about what he already knows instead of coming with some predetermined fixed idea.
Sfumato and the radical alterity of the self and identity is another commonality between Cassavetes and Zur. It is ontological rather than sociological, Leigh rather than Loach, there is nobody “else” to blame here, just you and me, neither good nor evil, characters have no motivations, hidden selves, skeletons in the closets, dark and dirty secrets to hide, etc., nor even a fixed identiy or sense of self, in the common Hollywood sense here, there is no true and false self neither is there a “detective and keyhole” method, the only masks people wear here are the ones that became so attached that nothing lies underneath. This I find more interesting than endless camera-movements for no apparent reason.
