C. Jerry Kutner: Cinema du WTF – Upstream Color (Shane Carruth 2013)

Cinema du WTF – UPSTREAM COLOR (Shane Carruth 2013)
by C. Jerry Kutner
Bright Lights Film Journal



A singular and highly accomplished independent film, Upstream Color is philosophical science fiction in the tradition of the French nouvelle vague, seasoned with a dash of Cronenbergian body horror. Like the SF films that emerged from the nouvelle vague – Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Alain Resnais’s Je t'aime je t'aime, Godard’s Alphaville, Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch – Upstream Color foregoes studio sets and elaborate special effects in favor of real locations and a concern with fundamental existential issues like the nature of free will, memory, perception, and time – what Raymond Durgnat once called the science fiction of “inner space.”

The body horror, reminiscent of early Cronenberg films like Rabid and Shivers (aka They Came From Within), comes from the film’s MacGuffin, a worm or grub found in the roots of orchids that secretes a drug, prized in certain circles for its psychotropic properties. If the worm is implanted in a victim, he or she becomes a virtual zombie, susceptible to any suggestion, obeying any command.

To say the film is enigmatic is an understatement. This might be the WTF film of 2013. Its complex story is told almost entirely through its visuals. There is minimal dialogue, and what there is of it is fragmentary, heard – or overhead – in bits and pieces. The visuals themselves are elliptical – we might be shown only the beginning, the middle, or the end of an action and have to infer the rest of it. Sometimes it is uncertain whether what we are looking at is literal or metaphoric. Chronology is scrambled. But the effect is not off-putting. On the contrary, this is an extraordinarily compelling film. Because we have to piece the narrative together ourselves, we pay closer attention.

Moreover, there is a sound basis for the film’s peculiarities of style. The two main characters, Kris (Amy Seimetz) and Jeff (writer/director Shane Carruth) are both victims of the worm – both brain-damaged. Consequently, we experience reality as they do.

To Read the Rest

ENG 281 First Class Trip: Cloud Atlas (Germany/USA/Hong Kong/Singapore: Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 2012)

[Michael: I'm currently working on two guest lectures for the coming week (on the Civil Rights Movement and Biotechnology/Ethics). When I come up for air I will start collecting the wave of thoughts, associations and impressions I have about this brilliant film. In the spirit of the film please share your thoughts and engage us across time/space.]



Cloud Atlas and Bound." Sound on Sight #337 (October 28, 2012)

Hemon, Aluksander. "Beyond the Matrix: The Wachowskis travel to even more mind-bending realms." The New Yorker (September 10, 2012)

McGrath, Charles. Bending Time, Bending Minds: Cloud Atlas, as Rendered by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis The New York Times (October 9, 2012)

Sicinski, Michael. "Star Maps: Wachowski/Tykwer/Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas." Cinema-Scope (2012)

Wachowski, Lana. "What it Means to Be Transgendered." Women and Hollywood (October 24, 2012)

ENG 281 Ethics/Film: Week 4 -- Beyond the Standard Feature Film

Wisconsin "Budget Repair Bill" Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Wikipedia: 2011 Wisconsin Protests

"Background Materials for John Bellamy Foster's "Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital" Dialogic (September 7, 2011)

Benton, Michael. "Bill O'Reilly and FOX News: Propaganda Fails Miserably." Dialogic (March 2, 2011)

Burke, Mike and Harriet Brown Rowan. "Wisconsin’s Uprising: A Guided Tour of the 11-Day Protest Encampment Inside the State Capitol in Madison." Democracy Now (February 25, 2011)

Burke, Mike and Nicole Salazar. "Walkouts, Bank Boycotts and Recalls: Wisconsin Protests Intensify as Union-Busting Legislation Pushed through State Assembly." Democracy Now (March 11, 2011)

Dennis, Brady and Peter Wallenstein. "Wisconsin governor urging others to take stands against unions." Washington Post (February 23, 2011)

Graves, Lisa. "A CMD Special Report: Scott Walker Runs on Koch Money ." PR Watch (February 19, 2011)

Hudson, Michael and Jeffrey Sommers. "Wisconsin Death Trip: The Plan to Steal Everything and Sell the People into Slavery." Counterpunch (March 11, 2011)

"Lawmakers Flee Wisconsin Capitol, State Police Pursue; Protests Swell to 30,000." AlterNet (February 17, 2011)

Meyerson, Harold. "Workers toppled a dictator in Egypt, but might be silenced in Wisconsin." The Washington post (February 15, 2011)

Nichols, John. "Why a Wisconsin Sheriff Refuses to Serve as Governor Walker's 'Palace Guard'." The Nation (March 2, 2011)

Rickman, Peter, Chris Larson and Kelda Helen Roys. "Outrage in Wisconsin: Thousands Flood Capitol After GOP Strips Public Workers of Bargaining Rights in Surprise Senate Vote." Democracy Now (March 3, 2010)

Zirin, Dave. "Wisconsin: Solidarity Among Workers … And Football Players." Yes! (February 17, 2011)

La Jetée (1962) from Augustus Brightman on Vimeo.

Bullock, Tori. "La Jetee Film Analysis." Film and History (May 4, 2011)

Christley, Jamie N. "Great Directors: Chris Marker Senses of Cinema (July 19, 2002)

Dillon, Brian. "Fade away: Chris Marker's La Jetée, a half-hour futuristic film that explores time and memory, seems to conjure an entire century's romance with the moving image." The Guardian (March 28, 2009)

"Listening to La Jetee." The Current (June 21, 2012)

Perry, Canaan. "Time, Memory and Time Travel in Chris Marker’s La Jetée." Space Zoetrope (2007)

Rowan-Legg, Shelah M. "Chris Marker, Filmmaker Behind LA JETÉE, Dies at 91." Twitch (July 30, 2012)

Schefer, Jean-Louis. "On La Jetee." Passages of the Image (1991: hosted on Paul Smith's Website)

Sellars, Simon. "Retrospecto: La Jetee." Ballardian (October 7, 2005)

The Universal Clock - The Resistance of Peter Watkins by Geoff Bowie, National Film Board of Canada

Biographical Sites and Official Websites:

Wikipedia: Peter Watkins

Peter Watkins: Filmmaker/Media Critic (Official Site)

British Film Institute: Peter Watkins


Resources by and about Peter Watkins and his films:

Estrin, Marc. "Peter Watkins' La Commune." The Rag Blog (March 29, 2010)

Keser, Robert. "Edvard Munch." Senses of Cinema (February 7, 2006)

La Commune (Paris, 1871) (France: Peter Watkins, 2000: available on Google video in multiple parts)

"Peter Watkins: La Commune." Chtodelat (October 31, 2008)

Peter Watkins: The Media Crisis Dialogic (October 3, 2007)

Rapfogel, Jared. "The Cinema of Peter Watkins." Cineaste 32.2 (Spring 2007)

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "The Revolution Has Been Televised [Peter Watkins’ LA COMMUNE]." Chicago Reader (May 17, 2002)

Watkins, Peter. "Notes on the Making of La Commune (Paris, 1871)." Peter Watkins: Filmmaker/Critic (2000)

---. "Notes on the Media Crisis." Barcelona, Spain: Quaderns portàtils, 2010.

Mark Fisher: Non-film -- Steve McQueen’s Shame

Non-film: Steve McQueen’s “Shame”
by Mark Fisher
Film Quarterly

Steve McQueen’s Shame, a study of sex addiction starring Michael Fassbender, is one of the talking-point films of the awards season.



In Shame, Steve McQueen transforms New York into a non-place. Marc Augé coined the term to refer to the anonymous and interchangeable zones of transit—retail parks, shopping malls, airports—which increasingly dominate contemporary culture. We learn that Shame’s lead character, sex addict Brandon (Michael Fassbender), was born in Ireland but grew up in New York, and his migration handily captures the transition between McQueen’s first feature, Hunger, which dealt with the 1981 hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, and the new film. McQueen has pointedly left behind the heavily coded, multiply overwritten territory of Northern Ireland’s Troubles in the 1980s for the bland vistas of upscale New York in the twenty-first century. These are quite clearly high-end non-places—the apartment in which Brandon lives, the office where he works, and the hotel where he takes a co-worker for a failed liaison have the unobtrusive minimalism which still connotes expensive taste. But they remain non-places: it’s sometimes difficult to know whether we’re in Brandon’s apartment or the hotel room. Shame’s New York is as lacking in temporal as spatial signifiers. At points, the film’s soundtrack pointedly calls up an older moment, when music could capture a particular time and place. The disco of Chic and the post-punk of Tom Tom Club and Blondie that Brandon hears in clubs and bars were once rooted in a specific New York era, but they’re now as “classic” in their own way as the Bach that Brandon prefers to listen to as he jogs through the city.

Apart from his sex addiction, practically everything about Brandon is generic, depersonalized. His job, never fully specified, seems to be something in advertising or branding. This vagueness profoundly irritated Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: “every scene ladled with big dollops of cinema’s most respectable cop-out: ambiguity … Shame wears its emptiness like a badge of honor; McQueen is trying for banal blankness, and though he succeeds in that respect, you kind of wish that a filmmaker (and one with a background as an artist at that) would aspire to do more than just say nothing.” But far from being something that you might expect an artist to refrain from, isn’t compulsory ambiguity precisely a signature of so much contemporary art, which regards “saying something” as an unpardonable vulgarity, and which would far rather “raise questions” than make any kind of determinate statement? When McQueen does try to say something, Vishnevetsky complains, it is staggeringly clichéd: “’sex can be both a dehumanizing and transcendent experience’ (you don’t say!), ‘addiction can take over a person’s life’ (really?), ‘people are often motivated by past trauma’ (well, I’ll be!), and ‘we live in a culture that nourishes emotional isolation.’” At its worst, Shame comes off like a standard melodrama remade with arthouse ellipses, complete with what Rob White called “conventional therapy-speak psychology that holds childhood responsible for adult compulsions.” At its best, however, Shame isn’t “saying nothing” so much as it is telling something about nothing, about the non- of the non-place.

To Read the Rest of the Response