Boop-oop-a-doop

Sometimes I like to add supporting shorts to my viewing schedule, and this usually means digging into some cartoon DVD box sets. For a while I've had a Betty Boop collection on my shelf that I bought in the US last year and never got round to giving much attention, but the other night, I needed something to lighten things up after watching Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jesus, so I dipped into a bit of Boop. I'd noticed that Betty's merchandise has been enjoying a bit of a revival, but I'm not sure how many of her new fans have actually had chance or inclination to view her actual films. It turns out my boxset doesn't include much of the earliest stuff, when Betty was actually a dog, or her first appearance in human form in 1932's Any Rags. But there are examples of beautiful, innovative animation in each cartoon, in contrast to the slightly less progressive sexual politics: having said that, it's probably easy to poke disapproving fingers in the direction of Betty Boop: she is a scantily clad cabaret perfomer, barely aware of the effect she's having on the slavering males who interpret her openness as availability. She is almost always held in the centre of the frame to emphasise that she is an object of clear and transparent spectacle, but on the other hand she is granted a level of independence and romantic (i.e. "sexual") appetite. She is a character in her own right, rather than a Minnie Mouse or a Daisy Duck, who exists as only a slightly modified version of a much more significant male other. Either way, Tuesy and I had some fun trying to untangle the innuendos and implications of the cartoons - is avuncular sidekick Grampy really just devoted to Betty out of pure friendship, or is he expecting something in return when he tidies her entire home following a particularly rambunctious party in Housecleaning Blues? And whose is that baby?......

I don't know enough about Betty to blog about her at any length, but I thought I'd go through one of the shorts that stood out to me in a bit more detail rather than attempting a complete survey. So, these are initial thoughts that may be subject to modification at a later date (surely that's what blogging is for, though...).

Betty Boop's Rise to Fame (1934) begins with a reporter interviewing Betty's creator, Max Fleischer about his star actress, with Fleischer illustrating her talents with clips from three of her earlier outings. In live action inserts, we see Fleischer himself drawing Betty and bringing her into hip-swivelling life before our eyes.

It's unlikely that Fleischer himself animated Betty, or even that anyone could do that kind of work single-handed, but positing him as a lone artist with singular life-giving powers was a common trope of early cartoons, as Donald Crafton makes plain in his superb book Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928:

"Part of the animation game consisted of developing mythologies that gave the animator some sort of special status. Usually these were very flattering, for he was pictured as (or implied to be) a demigod, a purveyor of life itself."

You can see this in James Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906), where the frame incorporates Blackton's hand drawing a series of chalkboard caricatures, and Winsor McCay was a major presence in his own cartoons, either in live action sections showing the animation process, or in the priceless moment at the end of Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) where he enters the frame to hitch a ride on the back of his pet brontosaurus. Crafton puts it beautifully when he states that appreciation of early animation was dependent upon "vicarious participation in the ritual of incarnation." That is to say, audiences were included in the processes of construction and always invited to contemplate the artifice of animated characters, even if they were being presented with an exaggerated or mythologised version of those processes.

Fleischer exerts his control over Betty at every turn, but the diegesis suggests that, once drawn, she is independent of the artist. This is that neat compromise between a depiction of the animator as a powerful being, and the need for his creations to seem to have a life of their own. Fleischer sets out a series of backgrounds for Betty to dance in (each one recalling one of her earlier films), proscribing the spaces in which she can perform. When Betty dances the hula, a cutaway to the reporter's hand shows his pen gyrating like a curvy butt. Her sexuality spills out from the cel into the real world, an effect to which Fleischer himself, as Betty's good "Uncle Maxie" seems to be immune: he administers and sets the boundaries for the allure she will inflict on others, but keeps a professional distance. It is his spell that is being cast, and Betty is his intermediary.

The film concludes when Betty, harrassed by the Old Man of the Mountain and his somewhat tentacular beard, flees the frame and escapes by jumping back into the safety of Uncle Maxie's inkwell.

Again he offers a paternal protection from the dangerous sexual opportunities to which he had introduced her in the first place. Pimp. In other Betty cartoons, the relationship between creator and creation is not as explicitly obvious as in this portmanteau piece of her greatest hits, but its a tidily condensed statement of how things work.

Betty Boop article at Bright Lights Film Journal.
You can see some of her work at Vintage ToonCast.
Better-than-most history at Wikipedia.

She Shoots Straight

On the rare occasions when I get chance to revisit some old Hong Kong action movies, I'm transported back to my late teenage years, when I was freer to indulge in the guilty pleasures of this stuff. Watching Cory Yuen's She Shoots Straight (1990), I was reminded of the times when Hong Kong provided me with a route into a range of cinemas from around the world. I had been a pretty conservative film viewer, preferring my movies to be fast, slick and immediate, but I did make an effort to check out some films which I was always told were classics: I seem to remember Bergman, Tati, Hitchcock, Godard and Kurosawa being a few of my starting points. Once I discovered Hong Kong action films, I found their frenetic eclecticism startling enough to set off a domino cascade of explorations in international film, leading into more interesting, challenging and esoteric quarters. But even if I don't get chance to bathe in its craziness very often, I've never lost a residual affection for Hong Kong action cinema's golden age and the way it shook me out of a complacent viewing position. We often think that "world cinema" (a phrase I'm far from being keen on - it evokes an ethnographic fascination with foreign things and, when used in the UK, ignores the fact that Hollywood movies are also "world cinema") gives us a window into faraway lands and cultures. That may be partly true, but it is a view that is obscured by the cultural specificities of the industry from whence it came, and the audiences for whom it was designed. So, while She Shoots Straight is a formulaic addition to the action movie genre, it goes about its business in a manner that may be disorientating for viewers unfamiliar with the way they used to do things in Hong Kong (of course, you'd never guess it from the packaging and marketing that tends to elide these differences wherever possible).

Joyce Godenzi, a former Miss Hong Kong winner (1984) and wife of Sammo Hung, stars as Mina, a police officer who works alongside her new husband (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), much to the annoyance of his sisters, who are also jostling for position and recognition in the same force. Beginning with the wedding, followed immediately by a dramatic intervention in the attempted kidnapping of a princess, the film bolts together inseparably the twin imperatives of family drama and action adventure. There are plenty of sequences of bodies stretched to their acrobatic limits, and just as muscle and sinew are at full-stretch, so are the emotions.

At the core of the film is a twenty-five minute section in which Mina's husband is viciously slaughtered by a criminal gang, followed by an excruciating birthday party for his mother, throughout which Mina tries desperately to put on a brave face and keep his mother from finding out the true reason for his absence. Next comes the funeral, which the gang attacks by placing a bomb in the coffin, leaving Mina requiring surgery, which she has to endure without anaesthetic because, as she learns for the first time, she is pregnant with her late husband's child. Finally, her insensitive boss arrives to crack jokes and shrug off the tragedy. This cavalcade of torment clearly serves to set up the final section of righteous vengeance, as Mina hunts down and crushes the gang. But if the husband's death is just a narrative device to provide a motivation for some combat scenes, does it have to be laid on so thick, with screaming and crying and wallowing, synthesised music?

Well, this film, along with many others like it, offers a synthesis of body and emotion. Bodies are put to the test, held taut and poised, faces fixed in grimaces or ferocious determination, while an outpouring of emotion accompanies the physical release of punishing combat. This intertwining of physical and emotional tensions is most starkly expressed in the actual pains endured by stunt performers (usually the stars themselves for added authenticity), lingered over with slow motion or repeated shots. Fighting here is a cathartic explosion of rage, but it is firmly established as a powerfully felt spectacle rather than one that can be observed with awed detachment. There is always a danger, I suppose, that the emotionalism is too stark or forced, that it is distancing rather than engaging. It took me a while to acclimatise to the histrionics of this kind of emotional action cinema.

The final showdown is between Joyce Godenzi and Agnes Aurelio. Just prior to their confrontation, Mina's bereaved mother-in-law is callously wounded, refuelling the drive for vengeance, but putting the emphasis on conflicts between women for the protection of the family (Mina is pregnant, remember). Each fighter is out for revenge for the other's killing of a loved one. They kick at each others breasts, legs, bellies and groins, singling out each other's womanly attributes for especially violent attention, perpetuating the fetishistic aspects of the female-focused martial arts film, but re-articulating the central themes - by protecting her unborn child, Mina will honour the wishes of her mother-in-law and the memory of her husband (who wanted a child far more urgently than she ever had: we saw him earlier making holes in a condom!). But this is not an unproblematic restoration of order. Everyone ends bereaved. The film ends abruptly when Mina beats Agnes into unconsciousness and tosses her onto the back of a motorcycle. The end credits roll over a montage of the happy couple, the husband's death and funeral. If you're accustomed to Hollywood action movies, you'll find this unnerving. Where is the nod-and-wink, gift-wrapped happy ending of vanquished foes and nursed bruises, shrugging off the preceding mayhem and getting back to normality? How did this silliest of genres come to be taking things so seriously? It's all part of the intensity, the heightened emotions that filled the films from this period, produced at a breakneck pace that fostered this kind of immediate headrush of bodily and emotional display.

(If you must see it out of context and in poor quality, you can see the fight between Joyce Godenzi and Agnes Aurelio on YouTube here.)

Twentynine Palms

[This post contains major spoilers for those who haven't seen the film.]

What am I to make of Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms (2003)? It consists mostly of a couple (David and Katia) based in a motel but exploring the surrounding desert in their Hummer. They argue, buy an ice-cream, swim in the pool, have rough sex, fight in the street, kiss and make up, before being attacked in the desert. David is beaten and raped and, clearly more than a little unsettled by the experience, stabs Katia to death in the motel. The last shot is of David's corpse sprawled in the desert while a traffic cop radios for help, trying in vain to convince headquarters to give a damn.

Dumont claims that the film is an experiment in building tension through a lack of dramatic action, and that the film's sense of escalating menace is constructed in the spectator's mind in response to the films longeurs. This is an interesting proposition, implying that we are so conditioned to expect violence to be encountered in the barren landscapes of America(n cinema) that its absence arouses suspicion, but it is rather disingenuous. If the film aims to document the quotidian minutiae of a couple, with all of their bickering, musing and sexual grappling before smashing it all sideways with random acts of unforeseen violence, then that mission is undermined by a series of portents and correspondences that pepper the film. While it is not obviously signposted that David will end up stabbing Katia to death, in retrospect the structured build-up to this conclusion is certainly in evidence.

The spectral premonition of sexual abuse haunts Twentynine Palms in David's controlling subjugation of his partner in most of their couplings, most troublingly when he holds her underwater to go d(r)own on him. His gurning, groaning orgasms are echoed by those of his rapist. Are we supposed to read this as some kind of poetic justice for David's own barely-suppressed sexual aggression? Earlier in the film, he expressed little sympathy for a victim of abuse on the Jerry Springer show, which is either a cynical commentary on the distancing, dehumanising effects of trash TV, or a character note to inform us that something is not fully functioning in the empathy division of David's brain.

The violent conclusion might lead us to look for clues as to why it happened. Are the attackers a group of disgruntled dog owners? Are they marines from the nearby military base? The military motif, symbolised by the Humvee they drive (Darren Hughes has argued that it's all about the Hummer), crops up more than once. Before stabbing Katia, David has made a messy attempt at shaving his head, mirroring an earlier conversation in which Katia contradicted herself by saying that she found soldiers very handsome, but she would leave her lover if he cut his hair so short. This was obviously a moment that teased a jealous nerve in David, and its difficult now not to see it as yet another structuring device with its reference to an earlier sequence. A scene of each character locking themselves in the bathroom is also repeated:

Katia eventually charges out of the bathroom and leaves the motel room, at which point David grabs her arm to create the illusion that it is he who is throwing her out. When the scene is mirrored at the end of the film, David emerges with murderous purpose, issuing the scream that we have heard him give throughout the film - during sex, while being rammed from behind by an SUV, and finally while slaughtering his girlfriend.



The violent denouement is also foreshadowed by David's aggression towards Katia throughout the film. Wild, grunting sex is one thing, but we see him hit her several times, and a shot of him creeping up on Katia in the pool is clearly designed to suggest the claim he wants to stake on her body. So, I don't think I'm being a naive prude when I feel that this is not a picture of an everyday couple going about the typical couply routines, but a deliberate sequence of narrational cues building up a suggestive picture of a man waiting for an external influence to tip him over the edge into bloody madness.




I find his films engrossing and beautifully composed (yes, that's a cop-out piece of mitigation, thanks), but I find myself instinctively reacting against Dumont's sensationalism, and his suggestion that I need to see a violent movie in order to demythologise the artifice of the usual movie violence. But he shares with Michael Haneke an interest in everybody's voyeuristic fascination in depictions of graphic violence. Everybody's, that is, except for his own. His apparent nihilism is not ours, and his attempts to force spectators to construct their own terror and then torment themselves with it ignores his own role in engineering and administering it. Compare (OK, it maybe an unfair comparison, but indulge me here) this to Christian Mungiu's masterful generation of terrifying suspense out of bureaucratic procedures in 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days (2007), where the threat of discovery looms large but is never fully realised. Which deployment of spectatorial engagement is more productive and revealing: Mungiu's depiction of how a repressive environment causes people to internalise systems of surveillance and police themselves, or Dumont's cyclical exercise in sex-n'-death button-pushing (with the added implication that you devised and pushed those buttons yourself)?


Further Reading:

Manohla Dargis, "Twentynine Palms."

Marcy Dermansky, "Moan and Groan."

Errata, "Twentynine Palms."

Darren Hughes, "The New American Old West:Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms."

Michael Koresky, "Urge Overkill."
Nick Wrigley, "The Polarizing, MagnificentCinema of Bruno Dumont."