Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, Hail Mary
“Wait which Bazooka Joe comic is he adapting? Oh that’s a good one”
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017)
Directed by Stephen Nomura Schible
Starring Ryuichi Sakamoto
I’m hesitant giving this a lot of weight when it comes out so airy and reassuring but I don’t think I’ve come across a real deal encourager on the same wavelength as Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson—which is probably closer—like Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda. Especially experiencing it now when it feels like patterns of my own creativity have narrowed, when I have a greater clarity on how art clearly makes me feel better, but where the obstacles are still brick walls I might never break. But I’m hesitant because I don’t want to come off like a Dad without children and with a mysteriously offline wife and use this as a teeter-totter for a philosophy I should probably be monetizing. Which is something you see in the lamer but popular read of a movie like this one and Paterson from a set of life coaches online trying to pitch art the way start-ups pitch a table that replaces going to a convenience store but works worse than a vending machine. A pretty ignorable aspect of how discourse runs now but where I’m also worried if I’m just as fraudulent in how I’m going to talk about this and what it ends up meaning to me as I objectify it.
A documentary chronicling an artistic recovery after throat cancer treatment and how this recovery grows from what the artist leaves behind and still discovers through the pursuit. Both isolating Sakamoto as a composer and how his work comes from opinion and a perception both eagerly political and calmly pastoral. How the work doesn’t follow the set pattern but finds engagement through an artist’s readiness in accepting inspiration through the tempos of labouring on ideas they have to manifest through any example of pace. Film scoring always in the architecture of a deadline and meant to enunciate another art’s moods. The personable compositions given over to a looser structure that’s laborious in terms of time spent but given a greater allowance as it makes ill-defined inklings into a performable act.
It’s really a portrait of an artist as a really cool guy. Watching how the mundane procedure of making something leads to a cosmic satisfaction a person can’t really measure. Seeing someone with these instincts still operate as a concerned and available person to what’s happening in the world and that becoming an influence instead of dismissed as a distraction. The transcendent qualities of their music never divorcing them from the basic sympathy of other experiences that an artist can at a certain point ignore wholly. As you grow older and constantly see the sociopathic depths that occur in the same occupation, how acts you’ve followed are now falling off the edge of the stage, how they’ve loosened a standard they clearly didn’t abide by, the basic decency comes off as more of a miracle than it should. The only red flag waving being the accepted attitude that The Revenant looks like a really cool movie*.
Watching this with not just the want but the hope to emulate the schedule and attitude. My auxiliary context I’m trying to make readable—the pains that are really just annoying because you can’t avoid them at all in this very obvious time that feels more melodramatic depending on the hour—best distilled with the fact I don’t know anyone who could invite me to a trip to Antarctica and record the sound of the purest sources of water crackle down into ice and ocean. I’m content which might be a euphemism for quiet but my artistic and personal ambitions are in check even when I strive to be better. My artistic development is one I keep closer to me because that closeness garners a strength I don’t want to lose yet. Not a strength above people but one where I can at least find something else here. My life with or without art just to exist without having the need to compromise my morality and to find a way to drift from the uglier attitude that multiplies more than subtracts in the atmosphere surrounding me. The stuff that actually makes you feel lonely. It’s only when certain people reach out that I feel like I have three heads or at worse a commodity. A favour I know I’ll lose more than gain and where I’m not even worried too much about money but where it came from. Getting the drunk pitch or self-help spiel that accelerates the transfer from metaphysical purpose to monetary gain that I’m trying to get out of as I’m politely falling into it. Them thinking they can mould you into a drone because you’re quiet even when you’re not looking forward to the prospect of making the world worse and understand their politics are horrendous. Even with the enjoyment of books and film doesn’t cross a mind as a thing you can reach for when trying to talk to someone but one of estrangement**. Genuine concern and interest feels a lot more far away than it should be. You want that ship to Antarctica to port sooner than never.
But art and the labour of it makes me feel less lonely and seeing something like Coda gets me excited in a way that musters up the idea I’m not necessarily doing anything wrong. This and Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running being these reminders and—even when by the end of that book you’re like “come on, man”***—gentle reassured documents taken in during quarantine that I’m (and we’re) not too far removed from being at least one of these guys. It’s really simple in how you see people of a similar temperament get by fine and have the time to focus and feel immeasurably better. Experiencing someone return to the piano after undergoing something that could’ve killed them and smiling as they touch the keys again. Figuring out why you love the process through the practice and procedure of it. Not having to concede to a direct purpose when it gives off an unbeatable joy.
Hail Mary (1984)
Written and Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
BASED ON THE BIBLE
Edited by Anne-Marie Mieville
Starring Myriem Roussel, Theirry Rode, Juliette Binoche, Philippe Lacoste
A real oddity in terms of what is controversial and what is worth talking about in terms of what we talk about now that was until last month available with a Criterion Channel subscription. Maybe the marker of what the last stage of World Cinema ends up being. Definitely hated by The Pope and for some deranged reason the guy—fifty-five years old making sure he frosts his tips everyday—who made those Guardians of The Galaxy movies I look at like I’m looking at the wall when I’m eating breakfast. The Pope I can understand and in some ways miss the input on. What was the last movie that caused this much of a fuss in terms of the content? Not even Gasper Noe making a movie about electrifying children gets press like that anymore. But Groot guy hating this thing is maybe the chalk line I’m going to point at here because that represents a pretty nice dissonance in what we have to show for ourselves. Here we have a religious movie with too much nudity essentially and specifically gazing towards the representational body of the Virgin Mary and how from that body came the Son of God. Lingering on the form but also to the point where it’s a vehicle a soul travels in with the fault of upholding a very traditional aesthetic of beauty. But still too much of a naked woman and something people got mad at for that reason (are they mad about the science course?). Now or at least last year, we had people complaining because Martin Scorsese doesn’t like Marvel movies and you had Rocket Racoon dude pleading to Marty as his AXE styling gel and sweat from his brow mix and go into his eyes to go see the third Thor movie. We had to come to terms with that as discourse about art as adults and one lamer attitude still won out through endurance. This film feels a lot tamer in one way but also out of the consideration you have to wonder where the line is now. The ship to Antarctica isn’t coming today but it might come tomorrow.
The only sins I see here is Hail Mary’s effect on anime and me being able to recognize it. Anne-Marie Mieville’s editing a clear influence on Hideaki Anno’s work and what his imitators end up taking from him. Those black out title cards that offer a sensation while lunging you out of the artifice in a way where the visual mimics music as it is heard and read. The textural allusion to mythology in a modern context where it becomes a kind of fashion. How high school settings exist in void and students playing a sport are framed in surveillance angles. Pastoral establishing shots far away from the actual action. Godard’s legacy might be complicated because of the persona but if his students are these dorks—Anno’s influence still feels charged enough to still have his own ticks—then that might ease someone’s mind one way or the other with either their distaste or asterisked praise of the work. Deserved in how you say it.
I’m not always on board but once you get through the long quotes and citations, I’ll see something I can actually grasp. A recent one being Made in U.S.A which sans the Marianne Faithful scene and the ending is kind of a waste of time and a butchering of a Richard Stark Parker novel I’d naturally enjoy reading more. But the ending—a clear and deliberately isolated conversation expressing an anxiety very relevant in a future where fascism came back—something always on my mind as you look at the news and how certain people react to it. Here I like how the angels are jerks. Resembling a depressed father and a little daughter getting off a plane and taking a taxi to tell Mary she’s expecting and bullying Joseph—who sees this cosmic revelation as an assault on his desires and destined masculine drives—to protect her and not be a meathead.
Antagonizing in a similar fashion as the latter Angels of Evangelion—though not as emotionally devastating as those angels appear with terrorized passion towards deteriorating and depressed characters who can no longer accept those appeals—but also signifiers that start appearing more in the late stages of the New Wave. Spectres of the world recorded before. How film glosses up even tarnished portraits of people and their inherently human problems and can’t help making them enticing in a romantic fugue. The nostalgia in Wings of Desire (also referenced in an anime) in form and performance yearning for purity and the fallacies that make up the conception of love film makes massively popular. The observer in The Dekalog and Kieslowski’s floaty (not a dig) approaches after coming to terms with the chaotic coincidences mapping out experience. The turn Hollywood takes in making these motifs maximally saccharine in approach with City of Angels (“We were made to fit together”), Michael, and Meet Joe Black and Ok Soda trendy in Dogma and A Life Less Ordinary. Losing the authentic emotions of these ideas as they maybe symbolized something outside of story and towards the status of the art and artist and how cinema and the world it records has fundamentally changed. Seeing The New Guards of Cinema grow older and get nostalgic as a new stability in living still alienates.
We’re in another Late Period but the one in the 90’s—I’m not sure how to really qualify—doesn’t necessarily feel like the greater leap but one where the analog of culture has reached a kind of apex. In the process of watching these movies now at home—some veneer of trying to make it theatrical as I go to a darker room—I can’t help thinking of the mindset of the world as I was entering it and how these directors felt preparing to leave it. Hail Mary—for the purpose here an early example in the mid 80’s—has a radicalism inherit in the post-modern project of re-representing The Nativity but circles around or spirals back to repeating the familiar image of a nuclear family that’s been refined rather than dismantled. Maybe refined in a way where it is not a second coming but a reboot of Christianity as an established concept that upholds a lot of what France determines as culture. But where exactly does that lead? So much of the world I came into had an aware subversive quality to the suburbs but so much of that hides the rerun values still present. A normalcy still has some stakes in the morality and fear that comes with the safety of a house that looks like the house next door. And that attitude doesn’t just sustain an American image but an international one. Putting ourselves in the same boxes. We didn’t have the fullest catalogue of culture that we do now but at that moment we were comfortable enough to look back at what was “accomplished” and lionize it further.
There is a struggle in how radical the form takes and what it ends up meaning in the same way so many of these filmmakers lent themselves to grander revolutionary concerns but still ended up being able to relax in a world that didn’t change much. Embracing and respecting culture while detesting it in their art as they fell back into the pattern of certain roles and structures still and always problematic. But we’re also now in a world where we have to maintain the values of Spider-man movies that make drone warfare cool so we don’t come off as smug. Again I’m not sure where the line is.
Next Time we’re going to lighten things up. I don’t mean for these things to come out this way but it just happens and I need to have some more fun. So we’re looking at Happy-Go-Lucky which sounds like a really good time and….Kes…? Not sure what that one is about but the kid has a hawk for a friend.
Also a smaller recap of Normal People’s shortest episode where I have to explain “I talked to Mark” heterosexuality.
The End Notes:
*But that’s also—just thinking about it and other than being a cinematographer—the best movie job you could fall into. Being a film composer probably rules. But I’ve also only seen The Revenant on a really crappy bootleg for some reason. Just the worst quality imaginable. And of course old people don’t turn off smooth motion. They jack up the brightness because they can’t understand darkness is part of the thing they’re seeing. They think a good television is one that turns every image into a kaleidoscope. If there is another thing that makes me feel like I’m on Mars it’s that.
** and this is not some Studio 60 “my parents don’t understand who is on first because my brother is in Afghanistan” shit. I don’t know what it is necessarily but man. You can talk to me about…The OA?
***The finish line of that book he reveals he couldn’t talk to a lady runner in the early days of his routine because he was “too shy” and look I get it, but we gotta get it together brah.