POX: Working Filmmakers

I'm not sure what you're looking for...
I like his aesthetic a lot--real-time long takes, frontal camera set-ups that rarely move that allow characters to wander in and out of frame, busy but not too layered or overwhelming sound-mix. I like that his characters interact with larger political and cultural situations without being contrived archetypes devised to represent x/y positions. I like the role that music plays in his films--expressively, narratively, culturally. He's often compared to Bresson (yeah, yeah and so is everyone else...) which makes sense in some formal terms (sound, off-camera action, mixed-up causal order) but he's a lot looser--his films are scripted but feel improvised (without a lot of "improvisation" signifiers).

What don't you like about him? Which films of his have you seen?

i don't really like directors who have 'an aesthetic'. his films (i've seen two, inc 'platform') tend to use this style for every scene, no matter the possible dramatic content (which he tends to minimize).

I like that his characters interact with larger political and cultural situations without being contrived archetypes devised to represent x/y positions.

they don't so much interact with it as exist in a contemporary political/cultural situation. they all demonstrate an identical blankness to whichever context they're in. it's like a parody of antonioni. characters don't need to rep x/y positions in order to have something to say.

poor you!

That list will obviously be different tomorrow, it's very spur of the moment...

*Clearly I would not class this as white news.

and surely the whole auteur thing is about saying x-director is good *because* he's an auteur. because he repeats himself, he has a consitent aesthetic. or what have you, put more kindly.

*white-noise?

This is undoubtedly a case where we're both exaggerating to make a point. Obviously I know it's impossible to completely avoid passing a judgement of "worth" when discussing films. But, to put it bluntly, it's always going to be of dubious worth to me because I am not the person assessing the worth. Even someone whose tastes align with mine 99.5% of the time will still diverge every now and then, and if all they're offering to my understanding of a movie is that they like/dislike it, it's all "bzzzt, bzzzt" to me. One of the reasons I think nearly everyone here would agree that amateurist is the most (not "one of the..." but very literally "the most") interesting ILX poster on the topic of film is that he transcends the C/D bit and tries to understand a film's character, not just its worth.

And you know that auteurist-informed connoisseurship isn't about saying directors are good/bad so much as it's about getting a read on a director's slant. Or at least it's supposed to be, ideally. It's probably unfair to hold the fact that any given theory's most ardent supporters are likely to be stridently narrow against the theory itself.

* white nose candy

x-post

spot on

unless you were an academic, why would you go to the bother of divining a director's slant (in the majority of cases this takes a lot of ingenuity) unless you felt the work had some merit in the first place? otherwise you end up with ridiculous books like sarris' 'the american cinema'. that book is *all* about worth, based on the main criterion that a director should be consistent. i like am's stuff a lot, but i usually feel he is trying to understand his own reactions to a film, rather than attempting a scientific experiment.

Yeah, even The American Cinema has entries that are of no currency with me... like the one on Jerry Lewis that essentially boils down to "sometimes the French go too far; if only they liked Preston Sturges more."

Maybe very basic, doctrinaire auteurism, but I don't see anybody doing that there. Despite the myriad problems with auteurism, I don't think it's problematic to note formal and thematic continuities among a director's films and discuss how they function in relation to specific films or even other filmmakers.

I mean, I think I know what you're getting at when you say you don't like directors with an "aesthetic", but most directors who have made more than, say, four films have indentifiable stylistic approaches and thematic interests beyond what you see as a flashy, cartooned aesthetic.

I can understand disliking his approach and the apparent continunity of Jia's films, but you're simply wrong that he uses the same style for every scene regardless of dramatic content. Certainly there's a tenstion between movement and stasis in all his films, but it's not as rigid as you're suggesting.

they don't so much interact with it as exist in a contemporary political/cultural situation. they all demonstrate an identical blankness to whichever context they're in. it's like a parody of antonioni. characters don't need to rep x/y positions in order to have something to say.

I think Jia's characters function very differently than Antonioni's. There's certainly a 'blankness' in the two filmmakers' characters, but to my mind Antonioni was still attempting to get at character psychology just via externals. While there's some of this in Jia's films, his films tend to be more concerned with groups of people, the progression of time, milieu, etc... His characters may not actively engage to "whatever context they're in" (i.e. "saying something"--what are you looking for here?) but they are all effected by and cope with economic and cultural changes in China.