Nicholas Rombes, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing. Two Dollar Radio, 2014.
thehappinessengine.net/
therumpus.net/author/nicholas-rombes/
Rombes’ Blue Velvet Project at Filmmaker
Roberto Acestes Laing, the obscure film obsessive who has destroyed rare, single-print films by notorious directors because their truth was too severe … and the journalist haunted by his own demons who’s tracked him down for a three-day interview in remote Wisconsin … and the waitress in yellow who knows too much … and the doorway that leads into a photograph …and the missing children …
"This hallucinatory and terrifying secret history of film is so meticulously researched and gorgeously written that I wonder if, in fact, Nicholas Rombes has uncovered a lost trove of works by David Lynch, Orson Welles, Antonioni and Jodorowsky somewhere in the California desert. The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is post-modern noir at its best: beautiful and nightmarish by turns. I read it late into the night and couldn’t put it down.” — Elizabeth Hand
We all have our artistic polestars, artists whose work consistently surprises and impresses. Steve Erickson and David Lynch, are two of mine. Nicholas Rombes is another.
Like Lynch and Erickson, Rombes possesses that rare spark, which I imagine to be the combustible nature of an absolutely singular visionary. I like watching them play with fire. What’s particularly exciting for me is to be linked to Rombes’ first produced screenplay – ‘The Removals,’ which we’ll put into production this summer – and now his first published novel.
The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing– which we will publish in October 2014 – is a slippery, mysterious study of a rare-film librarian, living now in isolation on the fringe of the Wisconsin wilds, and those movies, or moments from movies, or film-stills culled from movies, that have managed to linger with him through the years. It is a gorgeous, ambient, layered story of obsession, the creative mind, and the effects of film on our lives.
Following is an interview with Nicholas Rombes.
=============================
Q: You write regularly about film, for Filmmaker Magazine and The Rumpus, and have written a couple of books about movies – Cinema in the Digital Age and New Punk Cinema. You wrote an unbelievably fantastic piece on ‘Upstream Color’ for the Los Angeles Review of Books, which is a great companion for anyone who has seen or wants to see the picture. The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is brimming with the stories, or the circumstances, or striking scenes culled from fictional forgotten films. Can you talk about your engagement with movies?
We all have our gateway movies, and mine was Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, in 1980. That was the first time I saw reality as I thought it was supposed to be, as opposed to how it was. The slow unfolding at the museum, and Angie Dickinson’s leather glove. The nurse’s shoe, Nancy Allen telling Michael Caine, “I’ve done most of the bad things you just read about,” the subway scene with the lights flashing out, the score by Pino Donaggio that takes you so deeply and dangerously into the world of the film, which turns out to be the real world, after all. Of course I first saw it as a young man, when everything and anything seemed possible.
But I love the idea of misremembering films, of forgetting the proper sequence of events, or of accidentally mixing up scenes—in your memory—of movies you haven’t seen for a long while. I saw Alien on the big screen when it first came out in 1979, and then a decade went by before I saw it again and during that time it grew and transformed into something much different than, apparently, it was, because The Shining was released the following year and somehow I got the Overlook hallways/maze and the Nostromo corridors/maze mixed up and blurred. As years went on—before I watched the films again on VHS—I imagined the hallways that Danny explores on his Big Wheel as having attributes of the Nostromo corridors, and vice versa. And there was a scene that turns out not to be in either film but that I remembered as appearing in both, which actually turned out to be from John Carpenter’s 1974 film Dark Star.
Anyway, misremembering, that was a big inspiration for The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing. Just trying to capture that weird, liminal feeling in prose. That and writing a book about movies that don’t exist, but that I wish did.
Q: You grew up near Toledo, which is an industrial town that has seen better days, and now teach in Detroit. The movies you choose to cover are the indie, lower-budget, “blue-collar” films in comparison to the regular Hollywood glitz. I’m curious whether living or working in these environments informed your writing or taste in any way?
I think we’re all shaped by where we’re from and the local conditions of home, but I’m not a believer in the idea that we necessarily seek out books or movies or music that reflect our roots. To me, movies are a chance to escape, to extend, and even to destroy the prison-house of our own thoughts and habits of being.
Northwest Ohio happened to be the fertile epicenter of a lot of Midwest proto-punk music. Brian McHale, in his book Postmodernist Fiction, has suggested that “the zone of Ohio, it would appear, is a recurrent feature of postmodernist writing.” It’s a weird state. Iggy Pop was raised and got his start in bands in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan, about an hour north, and Cleveland, to the east, was the home of Dead Boys, Pere Ubu, Rocket from the Tombs, Electric Eels, and Peter Laughner. And then, to the south, in Columbus, there was Screaming Urge. It all adds up to something, but what? A certain kind of brilliant failure.
Jim Jarmusch is also from Ohio (Cuyahoga Falls), and Permanent Vacation (1980) created this lo-fi mood that you wished you could just live in forever. But it’s not only independent, low-budget movies that can do this. Big budget studio films like Chinatown (Paramount, 1974) and so many others from the studio era can take you into another world. I think authenticity—or the feeling of authenticity—is dependent on lots of variables; the size of the budget is just one of them. There are plenty of low-budget, mumblecore-ish films that are just really boring and indulgent and bad, and plenty of high-budget, star-driven films that are wonderful.
Q: David Lynch haunts the book like a ghost. For instance, in one recollection, the protagonist recounts how he and friends mail-ordered two Lynch films to view with his college movie club. The mail-order company mistakenly includes a third tape in the package, and it is the viewing of this third film that is the focal point of the entire recollection. But by mentioning Lynch, you’re effectively casting a mood. Can you talk about David Lynch and the influence his work has had on you.
Lynch. He saved my life, literally. He’ll never know this but he did. As an undergrad I had a professor—Dr. Fricke—who, in an offhand moment in 1986, recommended two films: Blue Velvet (which was just out on VHS) and Manhattan. I didn’t know what from what. At that time, Blue Velvet meant nothing to me. David Lynch meant nothing to me. My wife and I rented it from Total Video in Bowling Green, Ohio, and watched it on our small, terrible little TV in our apartment on Buttonwood Avenue. Something happened. I can’t say what, but it had something to do with the sound. The sound of the film. To me, Lynch’s films are treacherous and evil-tending because of the sound: the roar of a candle. The wind through the pines. The electricity through a light bulb about to explode. But that’s not when he saved my life. It was twenty years later. A veil of darkness—and I mean a fucking real veil of darkness—had fallen between me and the best angels of my thought.
I drove out far into the Michigan wild and contemplated the potential rotting effect of the earth upon the body.
And then Inland Empire came out, and I saw it in Ann Arbor, and I understood in ways that may seem Viking-like and heroic (but that are not really) how important it was not to give up but to live. That, and the poetry of Olena Kalytiak Davis, dented my head and I put away those thoughts and began to write again.
Q: You also wrote A Cultural Dictionary of Punk and the 33 1/3 book on The Ramones. How has punk inspired your own aspirations as an artist?
Punk is intrinsically democratic at its most conservative, anarchic at its most open. Mostly I think it’s conservative, in the sense that it’s reactionary, musically. Against the Sixties. It’s a cliché to speak of DIY, and yet some clichés are true. The unmitigated disasters of raw pre-punk and punk, these remind us of our human-ness, our desire to create something authentic and unprocessed. The more we live, the more we realize that, of course, everything is processed. So that doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling. The feeling of being alive. Punk replicates that feeling, the one that we had as kids, before we were “meta.”
Q: You interviewed Rodney Ascher, director of ‘Room 237,’ for Filmmaker Magazine, and in the introduction you mention that his film is “an example of how the Internet, as a medium, is reshaping the study of film in fundamental ways.” For ‘Room 237’ and film study, this seems positive. In your screenplay for ‘The Removals,’ you take a more skeptical stance with regards to how social media, and technology, are essentially draining culture of its originality.
Skepticism about digital and social media, however well-crafted or well-intentioned, often comes across as just another form of nostalgia, or the off-target musings of a sanctimonious windbag who’d be better off changing the oil in his 1983 Datsunhimself rather than paying some over-pierced kid on Jackson Avenue to do it. Plus there are so many examples of historical alarmism about “new” technology that underestimated the value of that technology to creativity. And yet….this goes back to the idea of misremembering. I do think something is lost today in the easily availability of films and music, and that’s the ability to misremember, or to forget. I’m not even sure why this seems important, but it does. Maybe there’s something about the distortion that comes with memory; there’s something valuable in the imaginative misremembering of our pasts which, relentlessly documented and archived now, live on in zombie-like ways in the present. That gap between the way things really were and the way we remember them to be is closing. If I had a gun against truth I’d use it every day.- twodollarradio.tumblr.com/post/72588391237/we-all-have-our-artistic-polestars-artists-whose
Nicholas Rombes, 10/40/70: Constraint as Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory. Zero Books, 2014.
In an era of rapid transformation from analog to digital, how can we write about cinema in ways that are as fresh, surprising, and challenging as the best films are? In 10/40/70 Nicholas Rombes proposes one bold possibility: pause a film at the 10, 40, and 70-minute mark and write about the frames at hand, no matter what they are. This method of constraint—by eliminating choice and foreclosing on authorial intention—allows the film itself to dictate the terms of its analysis freed from the tyranny of pre-determined interpretation. Inspired by Roland Barthes’s notion of the “third meaning” and its focus on the film frame as an image that is neither a photograph nor a moving image, Rombes assumes the role of image detective, searching the frames for clues not only about the films themselves—drawn from a wide range of genres and time periods—but the very conditions of their existence in the digital age.
10/40/70′s NICHOLAS ROMBES INTERVIEWED
by Scott Macaulay
The rise of the web has led to an explosion of film writing — Roger Ebert has called it “A Golden Age of Movie Critics.” I don’t disagree with him, but I also think it’s fair to say that with the exception of comments boards and social media, the web hasn’t changed the actual form of film writing that much. A few people (Matt Zoller Seitz, for example), are exploring long-form film criticism online through engagingly edited videos. And, of course, the web has brought David Bordwell’s essential essays exploring films through the history of their technologies, styles, and audience’s perceptual abilities to a much larger audience.
Another writer who is looking at films through an original lens is Nicholas Rombes, whose “10/40/70″ series at The Rumpus examines movies through the specific scenes occurring at those minute marks. It’s a concept that might seem more akin to a conceptual artwork by Steve McQueen or Douglas Gordon. In isolating and foregrounding individual moments, it also severely reduces the amount of textual information that can be employed in a discussion about a particular title. But the tight focus paradoxically reveals worlds of meaning — some having to do with the films and some not. And, it has the effect of liberating Rombes’ writing from many of film discourse’s most boring conventions. For example, here’s Rombes on the collision of the “10/40/70″ concept and The Host:
I find myself trapped by the very constraints that I myself have set. In this 10/40/70 of a monster movie, not one of the frame grabs captures the monster, or even any terrifying monster-related action. Does this mean that 10/40/70 is ailing, and in need of a liberalizing policy? Perhaps an exemption to the original constraints that might read something like this: In the case of a movie wherein the 10/40/70 method does not yield any images of crucial importance to the very plot and essence and reason-for-being of the movie, the author is permitted to select one extra frame that reveals a visual to illustrate an element of the movie’s central story arc.I was going to just write a regular blog post about Rombes and his series, but then I decided to instead do an email interview where I’d ask him directly some questions about his approach. The interview is below and you can check out his work here.
Absolutely not. A resounding no. The liberalization of the 10/40/70 constraints would render the experiment useless. In fact, the original constraints are designed to detour the author away from the path-dependent comfort of writing about a film’s plot, the least important variable in cinema.
70 minutes into "Cleo from 5 to 7"
Why 10/40/70? Why approach film criticism from this point of view, and what prompted the concept?
When I first started teaching film in the early 1990s, we’d screen them on via VHS tapes playing on VCRs hooked up to TV sets. Pausing a film for an extended period of time to look at the composition of a frame wasn’t practical. It was only with the advent of the DVD it and large-screen projection that it became feasible, in my film classes, to pause a film with clarity and really explore the meaning of the image. This—and an essay by Roland Barthes called “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills”—really transformed the way I thought about film. It was an obvious realization, but one I hadn’t thought about too much: that films are composed of discreet images, and these images have a photographic power of their own.
The idea that constraint can produce creativity—this is wonderful and liberating, especially as harnessed by the Dogme 95 filmmakers and in films like Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark. I wondered how this might manifest itself in writing about film. This is the heart and soul of 10/40/70. Rather than pursue a pre-determined idea throughout a film, what if the film itself dictated its own terms? I was searching for a mode of writing about film that could be as experimental and unexpected as film itself. Liberation from the tyranny of writing about film with a pre-determined idea in mind. This is what I am after.
In the world of traditional screenwriting, the kind taught by Syd Field and Robert McKee, a page is a minute of screen time and minute 10 is the so-called “inciting incident.” 40 and 70 are less defined — ten minutes after Act One and a few pages before the end of the third act. Why these specific numbers, and have you developed your own unifying idea of film theory of narrative structure based on these observations?
It’s interesting that you’d ask that, because I hadn’t thought abut the correlation between film time and page time until the Blair Witch/House of Leaves column. But I certainly did want the project to select frames from near the beginning, middle, and end of most films. The other reason for the numbers 10/40/70 is purely semantic: I liked the one-, two-, three-syllable sound of it, and the way each number incorporated the beat of the previous number.
In terms of a unifying theory, what has been a surprise via the 10/40/70 method is how radically unpredictable most films are at the level of sheer image, and how resistant they are to imposed interpretation. In terms of narrative arc, it’s true, many films follow a familiar pattern. But on the level of image, you never quite know what you’re going to get with 10/40/70.
Does the 10/40/70 principle isolate and reduce, or does it find the whole within the parts?
With some films, I’m hoping that the 10/40/70 principle finds the whole within the parts. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t, which I think means it’s working like it should, as a sort of random-generator of meaning. The method works best when it isolates and reduces, so that unexpected meaning blossoms in a field of familiarity.
Do you sometimes find yourself at odds with your concept? I notice some weeks you adhere to the “strict constructionist” application of the concept, while other weeks are more expansive, drawing in broader historical and artistic commentary.
Your question cuts to the heart of it all. Yes, I fight the concept all the time, especially when the film does not yield what I expect it to yield. A good example is The Host. I very much wanted to write about that monster-tadpole. But it didn’t show up. This turned out to be good, because it forced me to address different aspects of the film, ones I hadn’t noticed before. Sometimes certain frames allow for broader commentary beyond the literal frame, and sometimes they lock you into the frame itself. This is a real tension in the 10/40/70 method that always threatens to explode. At the 40-minute mark of Out of the Past, for instance, I felt that Ann’s gaze touched on a recurring visual logic in the film, so I talked a bit about that.
How do you select the films?
Part of the 10/40/70 goal is to disrupt the intentions of the film critic or writer. So I try to select films from different genres, time periods, nationalities, so that the project doesn’t become a study of one particular film trend, genre, style, etc. Having said that, the films so far are all narrative films, and they do reflect something about me. If I could erase that element, I would. Ideally—and I’d like to try this as the project continues—the films themselves would also be selected via the 10/40/70 method. For instance, I could select the 10th, 40th, and 70th film released by date in, say, 1977. Now that I’ve said it, I’m going to have to do it.
As a result of doing this column, when you watch a film now, are you waiting for and then focusing on the 10/40/70 minute marks?
It’s always in the back of my head. You begin looking for the beauty and surprise not of a film’s plot or overall style, but at the level of image. I recently saw Square in the theater, but it was such a tight, powerful film that I soon was lost in its world, and didn’t once think about 10/40/70. I was overpowered by the film, though I resisted. I like a fight like that.
70 minutes into "The Descent"
When you go back and look at an old film, one you’ve seen before, and apply the 10/40/70 method, are you ever surprised by the scenes that come up? Does your memory ever reorder the scenes so that their actual chronology is unexpected when you go back and review them?
Yes—when I watched The Descent again for the 10/40/70 project, I had remembered the first “green light” scene coming much earlier in the film. Often a scene will throw me off balance, especially when it comes right before or after an iconic, memorable scene. It’s almost as if the most iconic movie scenes function like black holes, pulling in and absorbing the meaning of the surrounding scenes. It’s these in-between moments, otherwise overlooked, that 10/40/70 can, with chance, discover.
Are you able to extrapolate about genre, or mode of production, as a result of doing this column? Are patterns emerging?
Strange as this may sound, I’m trying not to find patterns, at least yet. If I’m lucky enough to make it to 100 columns, I plan to create a database of images. I’d have the 100 images from 10 minutes, 40 minutes, and 70 minutes, and classify them according to parameters like close-up/medium-shot/long-shot, action or static, etc. An attempt to find meaning in randomness. Old habits die hard.
- filmmakermagazine.com/10521-104070s-nicholas-rombes-interviewed/#.U38hHZ29TIU
Nicholas Rombes’s “10/40/70″ series is one of the freshest, most boundary-pushing bouts of film criticism in years, a collection of essays on films analyzing only the content of single frames occurring at the ten, 40 and 70-minute marks. Originally published, at The Rumpus, they are now published in 10/40/70: Constraint as Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory, an essential collection from Zero Books.
The book is prefaced with an apt quote from Jean Baudrillard: “As for ideas, everyone has them. What counts is the poetic singularity of the analysis.” That singularity is here in ample supply, as Rombes’s excursions venture inside and outside the frames, veering across theory, business analysis, memoir and, often, literature (Herman Melville, Sinclair Lewis and Mark Z. Danielewski all make appearances here) as these disciplines are provoked by people, objects or just ideas found in the frames.
Back in 2010 I interviewed Rombes about the project, and we discussed some of the unexpected results of his chosen formal constraint, such as the fact that the monster in Bong Joon-ho’s The Host doesn’t make an appearance in any of the three frames. Here’s Rombes from our interview:
Filmmaker: Do you sometimes find yourself at odds with your concept? I notice some weeks you adhere to the “strict constructionist” application of the concept, while other weeks are more expansive, drawing in broader historical and artistic commentary.In addition to the 10/40/70 essays, Constraint as Liberation contains three additional pieces found at the beginning, half way and end points. These essays travel from film theory — particularly a reclamation and re-radicalization of Andre Bazin as the patron saint of a surveillance-age, DV-enabled long-take realism — through personal memoir (strange inter-personal occurrences surrounding the watching of a David Lynch film and Rombes’s fixation on the visage of French theorist Julia Kristeva).
Rombes: Your question cuts to the heart of it all. Yes, I fight the concept all the time, especially when the film does not yield what I expect it to yield. A good example is The Host. I very much wanted to write about that monster-tadpole. But it didn’t show up. This turned out to be good, because it forced me to address different aspects of the film, ones I hadn’t noticed before. Sometimes certain frames allow for broader commentary beyond the literal frame, and sometimes they lock you into the frame itself. This is a real tension in the 10/40/70 method that always threatens to explode. At the 40-minute mark of Out of the Past, for instance, I felt that Ann’s gaze touched on a recurring visual logic in the film, so I talked a bit about that.
Rombes talks about the book in an excellent, wide-ranging Bomb Magazine interview with Andrew Gallix. Here they discuss the role of the DVD player in not only Rombes’ practice but in The Removals, a screenplay he’s written for Grace Krilanovich to direct.
AG: Post-VCR technology has transformed film theory, but has it also influenced film practice? Was this something you took on board when writing the script for The Removals, directed by Grace Krilanovich?
NR: Yes, in the sense that I still don’t believe we’ve acclimatized to the radical displacement of actually seeing and hearing ourselves broadcast back to us, as film made possible only a little over a hundred years ago. This displacement—or removal—of ourselves from ourselves was first made adjustable by the VCR and other early forms of image playback technology. The Removals is a thriller in the sense that it’s about the revenge of this second or third or fourth copy or iteration of ourselves on ourselves. Robert B. Ray has written elegantly—in How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies—about how film theory, especially in the US, suffered a blow to the imagination by adopting a vague sort of social sciences approach to hermeneutics. One of his suggestions is to view film theory as a form of radical experimentation. What would happen, say, if I adopted the editing style of film X as a method of inquiry? The overall goal is to find something new and unexpected, not just in the film itself, but in the writing about the film.
One of Rombes’ points in the book is that the “10/40/70″ markers have multiple metaphoric meanings, one simply being their inevitable allusions to youth, middle and old ages. Indeed, the final beauty of Rombes’ conceit may be this final revelation, where life itself is just another form of cinema:
AG You suggest that the true, ultimate long take may be human perception itself: “a lifespan unfolding in real time, punctuated by cuts and fade-outs that take the form of blinking and sleeping and forgetting.” What’s at stake for you in film criticism is far more than just film criticism, isn’t it? I’m thinking especially of passages where you apply the 10/40/70 method to your own memories: “There was yet no logic. No 10/40/70. No sense that images could be tamed only to be let loose among their tamers.” Could you comment upon that last quote, which reminds me a little of Raymond Queneau’s definition of Oulipians as “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”?- Scott Macaulay
NR There was a deep sadness that accompanied the writing and assembling of the book, and your question touches on the nature of that sadness, which I think has to do with realizing that theory—whether it’s 10/40/70 or any theory—is an attempt on some level to structure and impose some sort of narrative coherence on our very selves and memories. Our brains are the most vicious total cinema machines of all. Our continual efforts when awake and when sleeping to work out the past, to smooth it into layers of meaning, must certainly wear the gears down until we can’t even hear or feel them moving. Forced into a high level of concentration we come to realize that it’s not films we’re talking about, but ourselves. Our fingerprints are already over everything.
10/40/70 #37: Marnie
This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine Marnie, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1964):10 minutes
Marnie (Tippi Hedren), visiting her mother, suffers one of her red-flash anxiety attacks upon seeing red gladiolas on a table. “I never could stand gladiolas,” she says as she walks over to replace them, which this shot captures. Released in July 1964, the film’s shooting schedule (slated to begin November 25, 1963) was delayed in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, and indeed the film itself is haunted by a sadness and humorlessness that in some way absorbs the national mood at the time. (The film was shot in studios in California at various locations around the U.S.) That tension is evident in Marnie’s face, which rarely shows a smile. The red she approaches with terror in this frame and throughout the film is not just a visible sign of her childhood trauma (she murdered, at age 6, a man she saw fighting with her mother the prostitute) but also, a weird way, Presidential blood. And for audiences at the time living at the height of the Cold War (the Cuban Missile crisis had occurred just two years earlier) red wavers a dangerous, unstable, coded sign for the other Red. And then there is the little neighbor girl, Jessie, peering from behind the doorway, a substitute Marnie who sort-of lives with Marnie’s mother. This frame captures Marnie caged by three gazes: the little girl’s, her mother’s (off-screen right) and the camera’s. In other words, Marnie is right where Hitchock wants her, just like he wanted all his screen women: pinned and tormented by the the relentless Gaze.
40 minutes
Having just come from the racetrack, Marnie and the wealthy publisher Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), the man she will marry soon, are on their way to visit Mark’s father, whom Marnie is about to meet for the first time. This catches her by surprise, and she worries that she’s not dressed properly for the occasion. It’s a small moment that reveals the complex power dynamics at play in the film, for just as Mark exerts control over Marnie by throwing her off balance with small but authoritarian gestures like this, so too Marnie has her own secret knowledge, her own trap to spring to Mark after their marriage, as he has little awareness at this point of the depth of her madness. “At the opposite pole to this nature of darkness,” Michel Foucault has written, “madness also exerts a fascination because it is knowledge.”
And there also is the gravitational pull of Sean Connery to account for, who was the face of James Bond, having appeared in From Russia with Love that same year, and Dr. No previously. It is perhaps not possible to watch Marnie while forgetting that it is Sean Connery—not James Bond—playing Mark Rutland and this fact casts the film with an aura of artificiality that only strengthens the dream-like quality of the film. Of all of Hitchock’s films, Marnie is the most bold when it comes to functioning as a traditional narrative film that pulls us in through the classic strategies of invisible editing, while at the same time exposing its own artifice. Hitchcock’s post-1960 films for the most part stubbornly refused the visual anarchy of the French New Wave and hand-held cinema vertité which informed another film released in 1964, Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night. In shots like this, which depended on rear-camera projection, Hitchcock doesn’t seem to be seeking realism so much as a symbolic, elegant expression of realism.
70 minutes
On their honeymoon, on a cruise, Mark discovers that not only does Marnie not want to sleep with him, but she doesn’t even want to be touched by him. “Don’t—please don’t,” she pleads with him at this moment. In the trip-wired logic of the film, Marnie exists at this moment as the female “hysteric” in need of being cured by the same beast that wrecked her: a man. But she also exists, if less clearly, as the coming woman of the new Age of Aquarius, resisting—and let’s just be frank—being fucked by a man. For the whole film is really a giant narrative equation trying solve the problem of: why doesn’t Marnie want to have sex? But while it’s tempting to see the movie as a yet another Hollywood male fantasy, it’s also true that the sheer power of Hedren’s iron-willed performance is so overwhelming and focused that we can’t help but identify more strongly with Marnie than with Mark. For Marnie has some serious problems, which means, in other words, that she’s recognizably human in all her flaws. She is us, and despite the narrative momentum towards her “cure,” she can no more be cured than being human can be cured.
The difference between Marnie in 1964 and Marnie in, say, 1967, is that in 1964 her combustive personality is still repressed, controlled, in the same way that Hitchcock’s visual style remained controlled in the face of the coming anarchy of the New American Cinema, epitomized by films like Easy Rider (1969). Even as he was a hero and an inspiration to the directors of the French New Wave, especially Truffaut and Godard, the tightly controlled formalist universe of his films stood in contrast to the restless “mistakism” of the new wave. In an essay published in Cahiers du cinéma just before the release of Breathless (1960), Godard wrote:
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of film-makers. Those who walk along the streets with their heads down, and those who walk with their heads up. In order to see what is going on around them, the former are obliged to raise their heads suddenly and often, turning to the left and then the right, embracing the field of vision in a series of glances. They see. The latter see nothing, they look, fixing their attention on the precise point which interests them. When the former are shooting a film, their framing is roomy and fluid (Rossellini), whereas with the latter it is narrowed down to the last millimetre (Hitchcock). With the former (Welles), one finds a de ́coupage which may be loose but is remarkably open to the temptations of chance; with the latter (Lang), camera movements not only of incredible precision in the set but possessing their own abstract value as movements in space.Marnie is perhaps the closest Hitchcock ever got to matching form and content in a film, as Marnie’s repression (her caged body language and the position of her left arm and hand in the 70-minute frame) is mirrored in the tightly controlled montage of the film’s visual style. Some of these techniques, which were already becoming anachronistic by 1964, included extensive use of rear projection and matte shots, which have a weird, double-effect on the film. These formal strategies, by 1964, called attention to themselves as artificial, and were just a few cultural moments shy of becoming camp. “The center cannot hold,” Joan Didion wrote in 1967 and in Marnie you can see and feel its disintegration, burning through the screen, as the black hole gravity of the late Sixties destroyed all the old forms, only to make them new again.
Constraint as liberation, knife-wielding film scholars, and the human brain as total cinema machine.
Still from the ten-minute mark of The Foreigner, 1978, Amos Poe.
There was a time when movies lived up to their name. They moved along and, once set in motion, were unstoppable until the end — like life itself. What you missed was gone, lost forever, unless you sat through another screening, and even what you had seen would gradually fade away or distort along with your other memories. I recently happened upon a YouTube clip from a film I had first watched in 1981. I thought I knew the scene well, but it turned out to be radically different from my recollection: the original was but a rough draft of my own version, which I had been mentally honing for more than three decades. Such creative misremembering — reminiscent of Harold Bloom’s “poetic misprision” — is now threatened by our online Library of Babel.
According to Nicholas Rombes, who is spearheading a new wave of film criticism, movies surrendered much of their “mythic aura” when they migrated from big screens to computers via television. Indeed, since the appearance of VCR, spectators have been able to control the way movies are consumed by fast-forwarding, rewinding, and — most importantly, at least for digital film theorists — pausing. If such manipulations run counter to the magic evanescence of the traditional cinematic experience, Rombes manages to recast the still frame as a means of creative defamiliarization and re-enchantment. In 10/40/70: Constraint as Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory, he freezes movies at ten, forty, and seventy minutes. The resulting motionless pictures take on the eerie quality of Chris Marker’s 1962 masterpiece La Jetée, famed for its cinematic use of still photography. But soon the frozen frames Rombes burrows into start to move again — and in mysterious ways. They are rabbit holes leading to subterranean films within films.
In the bowels of an appropriately warren-like cinema, I met up with Rombes, whose criticism, artwork, and fiction are taking on the shape of a beautifully intricate Gesamtkunstwerk. Over several (too many?) espressos, we mapped out the treacherous critical terrain he excavates in this latest book. The danger “of staring too long into frozen images” and the fear of being swallowed up by gaps between frames were visible in his eyes.
Andrew Gallix For you, digital film theory is an attempt to retrieve something — “traces of something that was always there, and yet always hidden from view.” From this perspective, the 10/40/70 method has led to a significant discovery: the importance of what you call “unmotivated shots” — shots that do not strictly advance the storyline but, rather, contribute to the general mood. You go so far as to say that such moments, when directors seem to be shooting blanks, are “at the heart of most great movies.” In The Antinomies of Realism, critic and theorist Fredric Jameson argues that the nineteenth-century realist novel was a product of the tension between an age-old “storytelling impulse” and fragments through which the “eternal affective present” was being explored in increasingly experimental ways. Can we establish a parallel here with your two types of shots — plot versus mood? Are these unmotivated shots the expression of a film’s eternal affective present, perhaps even of its subconscious?
Nicholas Rombes This opens up a really fascinating set of questions about cinema’s emergence coinciding with the height of realism as both an aesthetic and as a general way of knowing the world. I’ll backtrack just a bit. In his 1944 essay “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” Sergei Eisenstein explored the relationship between Dickens-era realism and montage in cinema as pioneered by D. W. Griffith, specifically in his use of parallel editing. Eisenstein quotes Griffith explicitly acknowledging that he borrowed the method of “a break in the narrative, a shifting of the story from one group of characters to another group” from his favorite author, Charles Dickens. And that tension between the ever-present affective experience of watching a film or reading a book and the internal world of narrative time is beautifully explored in Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. He draws a distinction between “story” (events, content) and “discourse” (expression). I prefer Chatman to Jameson here only because there is a boldness and a confidence to Chatman’s structuralist rendering with its charts, diagrams, and timelines. But yes, the messy correlation between the informational mode of a film still and the affective mode is a mystery. For me, a sort of enforced randomness — selecting the seventy-minute mark, no matter what — is an investigative tool for prying open this mystery. The element of chance is key. This method of investigation is opposed to hermeneutics, insofar as it approaches the text backwards. That is, rather than beginning with an interpretive framework, it begins with a single image I had no control over selecting. Whatever I’m going to say about the image comes after it’s been made available to me, rather than me searching for an image to illustrate or validate some interpretation or reading I bring to it.
AG The seventy-minute-mark screen grab of The Blair Witch Project (1999) just happens to be “the single most iconic image of the film,” but such serendipity is rare. In the case of a monster movie like The Host (2006), for instance, the 10/40/70 method fails to yield a single picture of the creature. As a result, your approach tends to defamiliarize films by pointing to the uncanny presence of other films within them — phantom films freed from the narcotic of narrative:
Such moments could be cut or trimmed without sacrificing the momentum of the plot, and yet the cast-in-poetry filmmakers realize that plot and mood are two sides of the same coin and that it is in these in-between moments — the moments when the film breaks down, or pauses — where the best chances for transcendence lie. [...] It is in moments like these that films can approximate the random downtimes of our own lives, when we are momentarily freed from the relentless drive to impose order on chaos.
As this quote makes clear, your constrained methodology is “designed to detour the author away from the path-dependent comfort of writing about a film’s plot, the least important variable in cinema.” It is often a means of exploring the “infra-ordinary” — what happens in a film when nothing happens, when a movie seems to be going through the motions. One thinks of Georges Perec, of course, but also of Karl Ove Knausgaard, who recently explained that he wanted “to evoke all the things that are a part of our lives, but not of our stories — the washing up, the changing of diapers, the in-between-things—and make them glow.” When such in-between moments lose their liminality, do they become “moments of being” (to hijack Virginia Woolf’s expression) during which a movie simply is?
NR I think they do, and I very much like that phrase from Woolf. At the heart of this is the notion that films — all films — are documentaries in the sense that they are visual records of their own production. In a narrative film, for instance Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013), we have a documentary record of so many things: the actors playing their roles; the landscape, whether natural or constructed; and of course filmic technology itself, insofar as the film is created with equipment that, in recording the narrative, is also leaving behind traces of itself. This is much easier to see in older films that are historically removed from us (i.e., a Griffith film “looks” filmic and reminds us of the technologies of, say, 1906 or 1907) or films that call for immediate and sustained attention to the process of their production (again, The Blair Witch Project). And, in that sense, as documentaries, I like to think that no matter how controlled, how airtight, how totalizing their efforts to minimize chance are, there will always be gaps, fissures, eruptions of the anarchy of everyday life. Even in something so small as the accidental twitch of an actor’s face, or the faint sound of a distant, barking dog that “shouldn’t” be in the film but is, or the split-second pause in a actor’s line and the worry that crosses her face that suggests she is really thinking about something else, something far apart and far away from the movie at hand. And so that’s one of the things I’m hoping to capture in pausing at ten, forty, and seventy minutes, though any numbers would do.
AG What was experimental in the context of the nineteenth-century novel has long been deemed conservative in the field of film. This, you argue, is due to “the near-total triumph of montage,” which “mutilated reality” through its depiction of “fractured time.” But Eisenstein-style dialectic montage is now the “dominant mode of advertising and a tool of media industry” — think “fast-paced cutting and MTV.” This led, by way of opposition, to the rise of neo-realist “long-take aesthetics,” ushered in by digital cinema, paradoxically a technology once thought to “represent a final break with the real.” Could you talk us through this?
NR The single-shot films of the Lumière brothers, though most lasted less than a minute, contained no cuts: they were continuous, real-time shots. These early films are often discussed as “actualities,” which is not helpful in that it suggests that cinema evolved out of this into its “inevitable” status as narrative/fiction, a supposed higher-order form of storytelling. Although it’s been an enormously productive way to think about early single-take cinema, it’s also created a binary that privileges so-called artifice (“art”) over so-called naive representations of reality. For André Bazin, long-take aesthetics, based in the Lumière films, are in some ways a moral act, one that had the radical potential to reveal, rather than to obscure, God’s created world. In his 1955 essay “In Defense of Rossellini,” he wrote:
[T]o have a regard for reality does not mean that what one does in fact is to pile up appearances. On the contrary, it means that one strips the appearances of all that was not essential, in order to get at the totality in its simplicity.
It’s easy to see why Bazin came under such withering assault by the post-structuralists in the 1960s and 70s, for whom words like “essential” were anathema, and for whom reality itself was always already a construct. And yet, a society gets the technology it deserves, and Bazin could only praise the long takes he was given — those in the films of Orson Welles, for instance, or Theodor Dreyer. This was an era when the typical motion picture camera magazine only held enough film for a ten to twelve-minute shot. So I would say that we have come full circle. Films like Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) show that narrative film can be made without any montage.
Still from the forty-minute mark of The Foreigner, 1978, Amos Poe.
AG One of your sources of inspiration was Roland Barthes’s 1970 essay, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills.” Do you share the French critic’s view that a static movie frame is neither a moving image nor a photograph?
NR Yes. One of the things Barthes suggests in that essay is that a “still is the fragment of a second text whose existence never exceeds the fragment; film and still find themselves in a palimpsest relationship without it being possible to say that one is on top of the other or that one is extracted from the other.” With digital cinema all sorts of wonderful complications come into play: in what sense, say, are film frames “frames” in digital filming, processing, and projection? And what’s the ontological status of an image that exists as ones and zeros? But no matter what the technology, the idea is the same: a “stilled” image from or of (in the case of a still versus a frame) a motion picture exists at a weird threshold, and, Barthes suggests, we might as well say that it’s not the paused image that’s extracted from the film, but the film itself which is extracted from the paused image. That’s the secret world I hoped to enter through intense scrutiny of an individual frame. This secret world, however, is perilous, and my own experience dwelling for so long in these film frames is that the tug of motion is sometimes still alive in them, perhaps like a cadaver that suddenly shudders for a moment with a trace of life. I found the experience altogether unsettling and even frightening.
AG Have you ever considered applying the 10/40/70 method to movies you’d never seen before? What kind of result would that produce, in your view?
NR I very much like this idea — sort of like flying blind. Without the context of having seen the movie to appreciate not just its plot but its texture and mood, the 10/40/70 method would coerce me into focusing even more on the formal qualities of the three frames in question. This would be especially true if it was a film that I not only hadn’t seen, but also had never even heard of before. Stripped of context, I wonder if the frames would assume something more akin to the status of photographic images, truly “stilled” in a way that’s impossible if you’re already familiar with the film.
AG Could you comment on the pleasing congruence between theory and practice — the “frozen moving image” being, as you point out, “the ultimate long take”? Something similar happens in the “Intermission” chapter, where your text mimics the split edit technique under discussion. In fact, one could argue that the 10/40/70 method itself produces a series of textual approximations of split edits. Is this continuity between writing and film a quest for a cinematographic writing style?
NR The theorists who’ve meant the most to me — such as Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Laura Mulvey, Robert B. Ray, bell hooks, Eugene Thacker — perform their ideas through the shape and tenor of their prose, and that’s something I’ve aspired to, especially in 10/40/70, where the split edits between formal analysis, personal reflection, and theory hopefully generate, if only in flashes, the same sort of feeling you get when a film suddenly bares its teeth and shows you that it wasn’t what you thought it was. But I will also say there is a dark gravity at work in certain of the film frames, perhaps because portions of the book were written during a very low point for me. The film frame — motionless — doubling as a long take was an idea born of desperation, of staring too long into frozen images.
AG You quote André Bazin, for whom the power of a movie image should be judged “not according to what it adds to reality but to what it reveals of it.” Do you agree that this would provide an excellent description of your own analytical method, which is all about revealing something as yet unseen? On at least a couple of occasions, you acknowledge that there is “very little to say about [a] scene that is not outstripped by the scene itself.” On others, however, you adopt a more hands-on approach — by projecting a scene from The Passenger (1975) onto Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), or by splicing together a movie and a novel — as though the 10/40/70 constraint were no longer enough.
NR Well, I do think some films theorize themselves and suffer from the words we use to untangle them. I’ve gotten in some terrible rows with colleagues about this over the years. In fact, one of the sections I deleted from the book described a knife fight between a fellow graduate student and myself at Penn State in 1992. It was about Wild at Heart (1990). After a long night of arguing and drinking Yuengling, I said something like, “that movie doesn’t need your theory because it’s already theorized itself,” then there was some unfortunate language that escalated into an actual, awkward fight with knives. Some film moments are diminished, rather than enlarged, by the words we bring to bear on them. As I’m answering this question I’m reading a novel by Jeff VanderMeer called Annihilation, and there’s a moment when the narrator realizes the enormity of the mystery she’s trying to understand: “But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you.” For me, during the writing of 10/40/70, that shadow was the realization that the constraints I established were weak and insufficient against the tyranny of interpretive intention.
AG Your book is, among many other things, a rehabilitation of Bazin — what is his significance today? Could you explain what you mean when you claim that his “total cinema” is the “end point” of digital cinema?
NR Bazin was interested in excavating the desires that fueled the invention of moving images — desires that he suggests were based on a passion to create an utter and complete replication of nature. In his 1946 essay “The Myth of Total Cinema,” he suggests that what energized this desire was “the recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time.” He says that the myth (i.e. the desire to replicate reality entirely) preceded the technology that made it possible. The tricky thing here is Bazin’s use of the term myth, which he doesn’t seem to equate with “false.” Instead, he almost suggests that this myth is achievable, as in his point that the flight of Icarus remained in the realm of myth only until the invention of the internal combustion engine. In this regard, Bazin occupies a fascinating and precarious place in film theory. While his approach has something in common with the later “apparatus theory,” which historicized film production, he decidedly didn’t share their assumptions about the ideological contamination of cinema’s very technology, instead framing that ideology within the larger and more important (for him) question of human desire and aspiration. By linking total cinema to a terminal, or end point, I’m wondering if we have achieved, on a symbolic level, Bazin’s notion of the recreation of the world in its own image. Doesn’t the surveillance state suggest this? On a practical level — and linking straight back to Bazin’s terms — it’s possible to have a camera, or multiple cameras, capture in a continuous, uninterrupted shot an object or a place and to keep recording this for as long and longer than you and I shall live. This one-to-one replication, to use Bazin’s term, of reality that unfolds contiguous with time itself, stretching decades with no interruption, with no need for interpretation, was not possible in Bazin’s era, except as a theory.
Still from the seventy-minute mark of The Foreigner, 1978, Amos Poe.
AG You suggest that the true, ultimate long take may be human perception itself: “a lifespan unfolding in real time, punctuated by cuts and fade-outs that take the form of blinking and sleeping and forgetting.” What’s at stake for you in film criticism is far more than just film criticism, isn’t it? I’m thinking especially of passages where you apply the 10/40/70 method to your own memories: “There was yet no logic. No 10/40/70. No sense that images could be tamed only to be let loose among their tamers.” Could you comment upon that last quote, which reminds me a little of Raymond Queneau’s definition of Oulipians as “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”?
NR There was a deep sadness that accompanied the writing and assembling of the book, and your question touches on the nature of that sadness, which I think has to do with realizing that theory — whether it’s 10/40/70 or any theory — is an attempt on some level to structure and impose some sort of narrative coherence on our very selves and memories. Our brains are the most vicious total cinema machines of all. Our continual efforts when awake and when sleeping to work out the past, to smooth it into layers of meaning, must certainly wear the gears down until we can’t even hear or feel them moving. Forced into a high level of concentration we come to realize that it’s not films we’re talking about, but ourselves. Our fingerprints are already over everything.
AG At times, the book does become darkly autobiographical. This appears to be the case towards the end of the piece on Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968) and clearly is throughout your Lynchian “Intermission” and “Epilogue,” which often read like short stories. The screenplay you’ve written, The Removals, seems to be, if the teaser is anything to go by, about the gap between life and art, which all the major avant-garde movements of the twentieth century aspired to bridge. Please tell us about the interaction between criticism, autobiography, and fiction in your work in general, and your forthcoming novel, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing, in particular.
NR I’m reluctant to talk about this, so forgive me if my answer is a bit elliptical. There are certain things that have happened to me that don’t seem possible, but that bear witness to truth. The terrible knife fight is one. Criticism, autobiography, and fiction are linked by the desire to uncover what lies beneath and, as you suggest, to fatefully go into the gap between art and life. Once you enter this gap you use every genre and mode of writing to close it, only to realize that in the process you’ve created something new, something in between life and art, and it’s so fragile you dare not talk about it. The Absolution of Robert Acestes Laing is about the frightful consequences of what happens when this gap decides it doesn’t want to be bridged and strikes back.
AG Your constraint-based approach was directly inspired by Dogme 95, but what about the Oulipians: how much of an influence were they? Were you, for instance, aware of the Oucinépo, launched by François Le Lionnais in 1974, which was later renamed Oucipo (Ouvroir de Cinématographie Potentielle) and appears to have done precious little? Could you also talk to us about other sources of inspiration: Laura Mulvey, certainly, but perhaps also Douglas Gordon’s art installation, 24 Hour Psycho?
NR Oulipo has always been a low-frequency inspiration, although I didn’t always know it. I think I was first introduced to them through Brian Eno and Brian Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, and then worked my way back to Georges Perec. Oulipo must have been somewhere in the back of my mind when coming up with 10/40/70, but it was much more, as you say, the Dogme 95 movement that served as a direct inspiration. It seemed more outrageous to me, more difficult to get a handle on in terms of sincerity and irony. 24 Hour Psycho— yes, but also, now that I think about it, there was a more obscure and personal inspiration. Our children and their friends went through a phase when they were maybe eleven or twelve (this would have been in the early 2000s) when they used the term “random” in a sort of complimentary way. I distinctly remember my daughter Maddy saying, from the back of the car, “that’s so random, Dad!” in response to something I had said. It signaled to me — and I remember very strongly feeling this — that I was, for that one brief moment, in her world, that I had accidentally and momentarily become “cool” because what I had said was “random.” And the movies and video games and even music they were attracted to had elements of this feeling of randomness: sampling, the choose-your-own-adventure-first-person-exploration video games like Metroid Prime (2002) and TV shows like Lost (which debuted in 2004) and which had this feeling of randomness, chance, and risk.
AG You discuss the essentially random nature of the 10/40/70 constraint, but say nothing of the conscious choices that were made while composing this work. How did you go about selecting the films and their order of appearance in the book?
NR This is embarrassing, but prior to the book I had worked out what I thought was an arbitrary method for selecting films. This involved using the IMDB database of all films released in a certain year and having various acquaintances select one from each. But there were so many problems with that, not least of which is that for, say, 1997, there are over forty thousand movies listed, and what are movies anyway? Is a direct-to-TV movie a movie, or is a movie released directly to VOD a movie, or what about a movie made for TV but thought of as a motion picture — like Spielberg’s Duel (1971)? And there are thousands of porn titles listed there, too. And then there were other methods, including a Lev Manovich-like algorithm that used a database and random generator to select films. But finally all these seemed too impersonal and involved — a sort of fakery, a false sheen of objectivity. So I used the limits I had at hand: my own collection of films, which didn’t always represent my tastes because many of them I had purchased simply to illustrate a technique in my film class. My one strict rule was that once I selected a film, I’d write about it no matter what, no matter what it revealed, or didn’t reveal.
AG Perhaps you could say a few words about other similar projects like “The Blue Velvet Project” or “The 70s”?
NR The original idea for “The Blue Velvet Project” was to purchase a 35 mm print of the film, digitize it, and work on each frame, but of course there’s no way to do that in a lifetime, as there are close to 1,500 frames in just one minute of film time. This idea eventually morphed into the project that ran at Filmmaker for one year, where I stopped the film every forty-seven seconds, seized the image, and wrote about it. A goal there was to take a film I was familiar with and devise a method of writing about it that would, as much as possible, dispense with interpretive intention and to subject myself to the film’s interrogation. With “The 70s” I’ve opened the call to anyone who wants to send me a frame grab from the seventy-minute point of a film, partly to see whether there is any weird correspondence, affinity, or secret knowledge passed back and forth between films at seventy minutes.
AG Post-VCR technology has transformed film theory, but has it also influenced film practice? Was this something you took on board when writing the script for The Removals, directed by Grace Krilanovich?
NR Yes, in the sense that I still don’t believe we’ve acclimatized to the radical displacement of actually seeing and hearing ourselves broadcast back to us, as film made possible only a little over a hundred years ago. This displacement — or removal — of ourselves from ourselves was first made adjustable by the VCR and other early forms of image playback technology. The Removals is a thriller in the sense that it’s about the revenge of this second or third or fourth copy or iteration of ourselves on ourselves. Robert B. Ray has written elegantly — in How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies— about how film theory, especially in the US, suffered a blow to the imagination by adopting a vague sort of social sciences approach to hermeneutics. One of his suggestions is to view film theory as a form of radical experimentation. What would happen, say, if I adopted the editing style of film X as a method of inquiry? The overall goal is to find something new and unexpected, not just in the film itself, but in the writing about the film.
AG Would you like to try your hand at directing some day? Perhaps you could ask Grace Krilanovich to write a script for you.
NR I have all the props to be a director: an eye patch, a Colt single-action Army revolver, and an ascot à la Dom DeLuise in Blazing Saddles. If I directed a film it would be incoherent, but hopefully in the way that Robin Wood uses that term in his great book Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan.
AG Your earlier work, Cinema in the Digital Age, highlights the ways in which digital films were haunted by their analogue past. Do you think this is still the case?
NR Perhaps not so much as I thought when I wrote that book, and in fact I’m working on a new edition which will address just this question. I bring, as someone born in the 1960s, a certain generational perspective to the analogue/digital transformation, as it unfolded in real time for those of us from that era. But my university students today were born in the 1990s and came of age in the 2000s, on the digital side of history. Also, the haunting that I described, especially in self-consciously digital films, such as those from the Dogme 95 movement, seems to be characterized by suppression. It’s in the efforts to suppress vestiges of cinema’s analogue customs — mise-en-scène, depth of field, shot reverse-shot, etc. — that digital cinema, paradoxically, reveals traces of those very customs. In their absence, they remain. In Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998), for example, efforts at ugliness are undermined by our own weird form of metatextual tmesis, which Barthes described as skipping or skimming around in a text, rather than reading it word-for-word. In the sort of tmesis I’m thinking about, we as the audience sporadically fill in the empty spaces and derail The Idiots’ digital attempt to break free from analogue aesthetics: we substitute blank ugliness with mise-en-scène and we credit shaky camera movement. In this sense it may be that it is the spectator herself who haunts digital cinema.
AG Punk is another important point of reference we have failed to mention so far. You have written a book about The Ramones’s classic debut album and A Cultural Dictionary of Punk 1974-1982, as well as edited an anthology devoted to New Punk Cinema.
NR I’m almost ashamed to talk about punk, as I was drawn to it because it repelled me. I wanted to learn more about what this thing was that came along, then destroyed and made laughable the music that I loved. I read Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces and then Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming, and I suppose, to be honest, I wanted to write heroically, as I felt they had. My goal in the 33 1/3 book, devoted to the first album by the Ramones, was to bring to bear upon that material a highly rigorous, almost exaggerated academic method and tone to try to capture what I felt was the cold, removed, distanced feeling of that album. For A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, I switched gears, and will be ever grateful to my editor David Barker (then at Continuum Publishers) who gave me full permission to drive the bus off the cliff, as it were, to see what the crash would look like. So there’s an alter ego in that book — Ephraim P. Noble — who despises punk and who writes some of the entries. But it’s also a heavily researched book, and I hope that it succeeds in drawing connections between the deep tissue of punk and other cultural forms that it corresponded to in coded ways.
AG To return to 10/40/70, does Zeno’s (the bar which casts a Lynchian shadow over the autobiographical “Intermission” chapter) really exist? It seems too good to be true, given that the Greek philosopher — a digital film theorist avant la lettre— is known for his paradoxical arguments against motion.
NR Zeno’s seems too good to be true, but it exists, and was a favorite watering hole for those who wished to get drunk on more than theory in grad school. There was a woman there who tended bar whose face really was melted like wax and who would say things under her breath in a language I didn’t understand, but that someone — a linguist we used to hang out with — said was Coptic. I haven’t been back there for twenty years, but I remember it was one of those bunker-like places beneath an old building, very dark, and the space was difficult to understand. Was it an enormous room, or simply a room that, by its lighting, seemed enormous? Sort of an interior version of the Zone from Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979).
AG Has Detroit — where you teach — influenced your work?
NR I’m sure it has — both the city and the place where I work, the University of Detroit Mercy, which has been supportive of all my work, no matter how much it has strayed. The university was founded by the Jesuits and their mode of intellectual inquiry about the created world has inspired and sustained me. I was hired in the mid-1990s as an early Americanist in the English department, having written my dissertation on the late eighteenth-century rise of the gothic novel in the United States. I still teach and do research in that field, but the connections I sensed between the messy dialogism and heteroglossia of the early novel — especially emerging out of a Puritan context, as it did in the US — and similar dialogic noises that punk made, felt natural to me and worth pursuing.
And I drive each day through parts of the city that still bear physical scars of the 1967 riot — or insurrection, as it is called by many in these parts. It can be a strange and exhilarating feeling, like looking at sedimentary rock with its exposed layers of time. Where other cities, through gentrification, “urban renewal,” and the like, have eradicated traces of their past, unless they are pleasing to look at, Detroit retains an almost documentary-like record of its violent past, though not by choice. There is such a strong feeling in Detroit that you have to push very hard through history to be and to exist in the present, and this constant state of adjustment gives people here, I find, a very high sense of alertness and clarity.
****
The first question was cut during the editing process. I eventually worked part of it into the introduction. Here it is, for the record:
AG In the Preface, you claim that films surendered much of their “mythic aura” when they migrated from big screens to computers via television. This “demystification” — that represents yet another stage in Schiller’s disenchantment of the world — is largely due to the fact that movies have lost their relentless forward momentum. Since the “advent of VCR,” spectators have been able to control the way films are watched: they can fast-forward, rewind, and — most importantly for digital film theorists — pause. The “ability of even the most technically handicapped users to capture video and film frames” runs counter to the traditional “fleetingness” of the cinematic experience — “the impossible-to-stop movement of images across the screen, the ways in which the audience remembered and misremembered certain moments”. Do you agree, with the likes of Mark Fisher or Simon Reynolds, that what we have lost in our digital age is loss itself?
NR I think it’s the feeling of loss, rather than loss itself, perhaps something akin to what Steven Shaviro describes as affect that doesn’t merely represent, but structures subjectivity. Lately, though, I’ve taken my deconstructive cues more from literature and film and less so from theory, so my responses will reference those sources a bit more than the usual theory suspects. A super-abundance, or plague, of meaning. That’s our curse. It’s not just cinematic images: our data centers, digital archives, cached pages, cloud storage — these suggest a weird distorted image of the surveillance state. It is not we who watch films, but films that watch us. My feeling is that this is expressed best through genre, horror specifically, perhaps because of all of cinema’s dirty genres, horror has always been about scopophilia (Laura Mulvey) more than anything else. Theory can be found, today, in the haunted images of the V/H/S films, the first three Paranormal films, and several Ti West films (especially The Sacrament) because the horror genre gives permission, somehow, to theorize not just space within the frame, but the nature of the frame itself. The V/H/S/ horror anthologies, for instance, remind us every twenty minutes or so (or whenever a ‘new’ tape is inserted) of the embodiment of horror in its precarious, unstable situation as its medium shifts from analogue to digital. - bombmagazine.org/article/1000132/nicholas-rombes
![]()
Does the digital era spell the death of cinema as we know it? Or is it merely heralding its rebirth? Are we witnessing the emergence of something entirely new? Cinema in the Digital Age examines the fate of cinema in this new era, paying special attention to the technologies that are reshaping film and their cultural impact. Examining Festen (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), Timecode (2000), Russian Ark (2002), The Ring (2002), among others, this volume explores how these films are haunted by their analogue past and suggests that their signature element are their deliberate imperfections, whether those take the form of blurry or pixilated images, shakey camera work, or other elements reminding viewers of the human hand guiding the camera. Weaving together a rich variety of sources, Cinema in the Digital Age provides a deeply humanistic look at the meaning of cinematic images in the era of digital perfection.
![]()
![]()
Thirty-Three and a Third is a series of short books about critically acclaimed
and much-loved albums of the past 40 years. Over 50,000 copies have been sold!
"Passionate, obsessive, and smart."—Nylon
What could be more punk rock than a band that never changed, a band that for decades punched out three-minute powerhouses in the style that made them famous? The Ramones' repetition and attitude inspired a genre, and Ramones set its tone. Nicholas Rombes examines punk history, with the recording of Ramones at its core, in this inspiring and thoroughly researched justification of his obsession with the album.
Excerpt:
When I sat down to write about the album's opening song, "Blitzkreig Bop," my first line was "This is the best opening song to any rock album." Then I decided that sounded too creepily fanatic and more than a little disingenuous, since I haven't heard every rock album ever made, and I took it out. But then I went downstairs to the turntable and played it and midway through ran back upstairs and put the line back in even before the screensaver clicked in. Here's why: "Blitzkrieg Bop" succeeds not only as a song in its own right, but also as a promise kept. The songs that follow live up to the speed, humor, menace, absurdity, and mystery of that first song, whose opening lines "Hey ho, let's go" offer not so much a warning as an invitation to the listener, an invitation and a threat that the song isn't a fluke or a one-off, but that it sets the stage for an entire album that will be fast and loud.
![]()
The 70s
by Nicholas Rombes
In Roberto Bolaño’s novel Antwerp, there is a mysterious passage:
As we move deeper into the twenty-first century our world seems evermore bifurcated between the known and the hidden, and this visible divide characterizes our own psychotic state. On the one hand, as the Snowden documents show, we are all of us watched by groups whose names we don’t even know, for purposes that remain obscure. And yet we also still live in the last shadows of postmodernity whose defining feature was a habit of relentless deconstruction and demystification, extending deep into film itself, which is now so overloaded with extras, remainders, making-ofs, that a film’s aura–if there ever was one–has completely evaporated.
It is our responsibility, more than ever before, to search for the mystery, the illusion in film. Like one of the photographs in Bolaño’s novel, their very ordinariness disguises their strangeness. It is a decidedly romantic endeavor, and thus a dangerous one.
And so, let’s assume there are secrets in the common images of film, or more precisely, in the individual frames (if frames is even what we can call them in this digital era) and that the method of discovery must be based on constrained disorder. Constrained, because the 70-minute mark is our entry point, no matter what. Disordered, because what will appear at 70 minutes is not something that we are intentionally searching for, so that we are left open to surprise, which is something I hoped to capture in 10/40/70, forthcoming from Zer0 books in March.
The 70 Minute Mark
- www.berfrois.com/2014/05/the-70-minute-mark-nicholas-rombes/
![BVframe2]()
“Blue Velvet Project” Creator Nicholas Rombes
And so we begin our year-long journey through Blue Velvet, stopping every 47 seconds. Although released in the U.S. in September 1986, the film lingered at the dark edges of the imagination until the spring of the following year, when it was released on home video by Karl-Lorimar. The rapid ascendency of the VCR and the proliferation of rental stores (in 1980 there were only approximately 2,500 rental stores in the U.S.; by 1987 this had increased to over 27,000) meant that Blue Velvet found its way into the very same sort of leafy small towns as Lumberton. The titles (by Van Der Veer Photo Effects) in their cursive elegance recall a by-gone era, and echo the fluid titles of classical-era films such as George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947). Dennis Hopper’s name—itself a tangle of associations serving as cultural knot points in American culture, ranging from his first film Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to Easy Rider (1969) to Apocalypse Now (1979) — appears against the undulating blue velvet curtain that frames the film’s narrative. The same year as Blue Velvet he would star in Hoosiers playing Shooter, a reverse-image doppelgänger of Frank Booth.
For a complete archive of the project, click here.
stage.filmmakermagazine.com/27535-the-blue-velvet-project-1/#.U38pJZ29TIU
filmmakermagazine.com/50240-blue-velvet-project-creator-nicholas-rombes/#.U38oXJ29TIU
Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, Wallflower Press, 2009.
Does the digital era spell the death of cinema as we know it? Or is it merely heralding its rebirth? Are we witnessing the emergence of something entirely new? Cinema in the Digital Age examines the fate of cinema in this new era, paying special attention to the technologies that are reshaping film and their cultural impact. Examining Festen (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), Timecode (2000), Russian Ark (2002), The Ring (2002), among others, this volume explores how these films are haunted by their analogue past and suggests that their signature element are their deliberate imperfections, whether those take the form of blurry or pixilated images, shakey camera work, or other elements reminding viewers of the human hand guiding the camera. Weaving together a rich variety of sources, Cinema in the Digital Age provides a deeply humanistic look at the meaning of cinematic images in the era of digital perfection.
Nicholas Rombes, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, 1974-1982. Continuum, 2009.
Neither a dry-as-dust reference volume recycling the same dull facts nor a gushy, gossipy puff piece, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-1982 is a bold book that examines punk as a movement that is best understood by placing it in its cultural field. It contains myriad critical-listening descriptions of the sounds of the time, but also places those sounds in the context of history. Drawing on hundreds of fanzines, magazines, and newspapers, the book is—in the spirit of punk—an obsessive, exhaustively researched, and sometimes deeply personal portrait of the many ways in which punk was an artistic, cultural, and political expression of defiance.
A Cultural Dictionary of Punk is organized around scores of distinct entries, on everything from Lester Bangs to The Slits, from Jimmy Carter to Minimalism, from 'Dot Dash' to Bad Brains. Both highly informative and thrillingly idiosyncratic, the book takes a fresh look at how the malaise of the 1970s offered fertile ground for punk—as well as the new wave, post-punk, and hardcore—to emerge as a rejection of the easy platitudes of the dying counter-culture. The organization is accessible and entertaining: short bursts of meaning, in tune with the beat of punk itself.
A Cultural Dictionary of Punk is organized around scores of distinct entries, on everything from Lester Bangs to The Slits, from Jimmy Carter to Minimalism, from 'Dot Dash' to Bad Brains. Both highly informative and thrillingly idiosyncratic, the book takes a fresh look at how the malaise of the 1970s offered fertile ground for punk—as well as the new wave, post-punk, and hardcore—to emerge as a rejection of the easy platitudes of the dying counter-culture. The organization is accessible and entertaining: short bursts of meaning, in tune with the beat of punk itself.
Rombes upends notions that the story of punk can be told in a chronological, linear fashion. Meant to be read straight through or opened up and experienced at random, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk covers not only many of the well-known, now-legendary punk bands, but the obscure, forgotten ones as well. Along the way, punk's secret codes are unraveled and a critical time in history is framed and exclaimed.
"An expansive, erudite, and hugely entertaining guide through the dark alleys and glittering byways of punk—in music, film, literature, politics, fashion—A Cultural Dictionary of Punk is essential reading for anyone fascinated by one of the most influential artistic movements of our time."
—Elizabeth Hand
At a cursory glance, Rombes's compendium has the form of a dictionary, covering punk bands from the Adolescents to the Zeroes, but scratch the surface and you'll discover a profoundly weird document, where the notion of "punk" expands to include discussions of Angela Carter, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Barry Hannah—although even Rombes admits the last is stretching the point. The tone veers from the academic to the confessional: "How can you hesitate about a song that has saved you more than once from the black depths you are prone to fall into?" Rombes asks in an entry concerning the British band Wire. There are several forays into the fictional, including stories about imagined versions of Patti Smith and Joey Ramone, as well as entries written by "Ephraim P. Noble," who is almost certainly a fictional alter ego. If it were touted as a definitive guide to punk culture, the dictionary's omissions would be glaring—but this is something altogether different: a personal investigation into the significance of punk rock, an attempt to inject critical studies with "a big dose of chaos and anarchy" and thereby create a compelling cultural narrative.—Publishers Weekly
Rombes, the author of works on punk musicians and cinema, here examines punk as a cultural movement through A-to-Z entries drawing upon fanzines, magazines, and newspapers to place media and artists in the context of history. In the author's own words, he has "allowed the content of the entries to determine their shape, format and tone." The result is an eclectic examination of the punk movement as well as the cultural and historical issues surrounding it. The book concludes with a postscript analyzing the end of the punk movement in 1982. BOTTOM LINE: The author's love and knowledge of the punk era shines throughout the work. There are several other books on punk, but this one's focus on the general historical and cultural perspective of the movement, as well as its accessible and informal style, makes it a worthy addition to the literature. An excellent overview of the era for any library.—Library Journal
—Elizabeth Hand
At a cursory glance, Rombes's compendium has the form of a dictionary, covering punk bands from the Adolescents to the Zeroes, but scratch the surface and you'll discover a profoundly weird document, where the notion of "punk" expands to include discussions of Angela Carter, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Barry Hannah—although even Rombes admits the last is stretching the point. The tone veers from the academic to the confessional: "How can you hesitate about a song that has saved you more than once from the black depths you are prone to fall into?" Rombes asks in an entry concerning the British band Wire. There are several forays into the fictional, including stories about imagined versions of Patti Smith and Joey Ramone, as well as entries written by "Ephraim P. Noble," who is almost certainly a fictional alter ego. If it were touted as a definitive guide to punk culture, the dictionary's omissions would be glaring—but this is something altogether different: a personal investigation into the significance of punk rock, an attempt to inject critical studies with "a big dose of chaos and anarchy" and thereby create a compelling cultural narrative.—Publishers Weekly
Rombes, the author of works on punk musicians and cinema, here examines punk as a cultural movement through A-to-Z entries drawing upon fanzines, magazines, and newspapers to place media and artists in the context of history. In the author's own words, he has "allowed the content of the entries to determine their shape, format and tone." The result is an eclectic examination of the punk movement as well as the cultural and historical issues surrounding it. The book concludes with a postscript analyzing the end of the punk movement in 1982. BOTTOM LINE: The author's love and knowledge of the punk era shines throughout the work. There are several other books on punk, but this one's focus on the general historical and cultural perspective of the movement, as well as its accessible and informal style, makes it a worthy addition to the literature. An excellent overview of the era for any library.—Library Journal
Nicholas Rombes, The Ramones' Ramones (33 1/3). Bloomsbury Academic, 2005.
Thirty-Three and a Third is a series of short books about critically acclaimed
and much-loved albums of the past 40 years. Over 50,000 copies have been sold!
"Passionate, obsessive, and smart."—Nylon
What could be more punk rock than a band that never changed, a band that for decades punched out three-minute powerhouses in the style that made them famous? The Ramones' repetition and attitude inspired a genre, and Ramones set its tone. Nicholas Rombes examines punk history, with the recording of Ramones at its core, in this inspiring and thoroughly researched justification of his obsession with the album.
Excerpt:
When I sat down to write about the album's opening song, "Blitzkreig Bop," my first line was "This is the best opening song to any rock album." Then I decided that sounded too creepily fanatic and more than a little disingenuous, since I haven't heard every rock album ever made, and I took it out. But then I went downstairs to the turntable and played it and midway through ran back upstairs and put the line back in even before the screensaver clicked in. Here's why: "Blitzkrieg Bop" succeeds not only as a song in its own right, but also as a promise kept. The songs that follow live up to the speed, humor, menace, absurdity, and mystery of that first song, whose opening lines "Hey ho, let's go" offer not so much a warning as an invitation to the listener, an invitation and a threat that the song isn't a fluke or a one-off, but that it sets the stage for an entire album that will be fast and loud.
The 70s
by Nicholas Rombes
In Roberto Bolaño’s novel Antwerp, there is a mysterious passage:
Look at these pictures, said the sergeant. The man who was sitting at theImages that are heavy and loaded with menace and meaning, but what sort of menace, and what nature of meaning? Joyce Carol Oates once said that “the formal artist is the one who arranges his dream into a shape that can be understood by other people.” But what if that arrangement is hidden, or secretly coded?
desk flipped through them indifferently. Do you think there’s something
here? The sergeant blinked with Shakespearean vigor. They were taken a
long time ago, he started to say, probably with an old Soviet Zenith. Don’t you
see anything strange about them? The lieutenant closed his eyes, then lit a
cigarette. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, said the voice . . . “A
vacant lot at dusk” . . . “Long blurry beach” . . . “A cement box by the side of
the road” . . . Restaurant windows, out of focus . . .”
As we move deeper into the twenty-first century our world seems evermore bifurcated between the known and the hidden, and this visible divide characterizes our own psychotic state. On the one hand, as the Snowden documents show, we are all of us watched by groups whose names we don’t even know, for purposes that remain obscure. And yet we also still live in the last shadows of postmodernity whose defining feature was a habit of relentless deconstruction and demystification, extending deep into film itself, which is now so overloaded with extras, remainders, making-ofs, that a film’s aura–if there ever was one–has completely evaporated.
It is our responsibility, more than ever before, to search for the mystery, the illusion in film. Like one of the photographs in Bolaño’s novel, their very ordinariness disguises their strangeness. It is a decidedly romantic endeavor, and thus a dangerous one.
And so, let’s assume there are secrets in the common images of film, or more precisely, in the individual frames (if frames is even what we can call them in this digital era) and that the method of discovery must be based on constrained disorder. Constrained, because the 70-minute mark is our entry point, no matter what. Disordered, because what will appear at 70 minutes is not something that we are intentionally searching for, so that we are left open to surprise, which is something I hoped to capture in 10/40/70, forthcoming from Zer0 books in March.
Guidelines:
1. Select a film.If all goes well, the end result might be a “new” film made from the frames, or a secret history of how films speak to each other at the 70-minute mark. - www.berfrois.com/2014/01/nicholas-rombes-70/
2. Pause the film at the 70-minute mark, and take a screen grab.
3. Between now and February 17, e-mail the image to me and the name of the film: nrombesudm [at] gmail [dot] com
4. If you’d like, you can also send a commentary about the frame.
5. At the end of the project, I will put all the submitted images/commentary together in one document, which will be published at Berfrois near the end of February.
The 70 Minute Mark
- www.berfrois.com/2014/05/the-70-minute-mark-nicholas-rombes/
“Blue Velvet Project” Creator Nicholas Rombes
And so we begin our year-long journey through Blue Velvet, stopping every 47 seconds. Although released in the U.S. in September 1986, the film lingered at the dark edges of the imagination until the spring of the following year, when it was released on home video by Karl-Lorimar. The rapid ascendency of the VCR and the proliferation of rental stores (in 1980 there were only approximately 2,500 rental stores in the U.S.; by 1987 this had increased to over 27,000) meant that Blue Velvet found its way into the very same sort of leafy small towns as Lumberton. The titles (by Van Der Veer Photo Effects) in their cursive elegance recall a by-gone era, and echo the fluid titles of classical-era films such as George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947). Dennis Hopper’s name—itself a tangle of associations serving as cultural knot points in American culture, ranging from his first film Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to Easy Rider (1969) to Apocalypse Now (1979) — appears against the undulating blue velvet curtain that frames the film’s narrative. The same year as Blue Velvet he would star in Hoosiers playing Shooter, a reverse-image doppelgänger of Frank Booth.
For a complete archive of the project, click here.
stage.filmmakermagazine.com/27535-the-blue-velvet-project-1/#.U38pJZ29TIU
filmmakermagazine.com/50240-blue-velvet-project-creator-nicholas-rombes/#.U38oXJ29TIU