Let the Right One In - % % % % %

OK, obviously not featured by Vogel, I am still watching other films, and I streamed this one as my Saturday afternoon comfort film.

I don't even know where to start. The sound is outrageous! The background sound is amplified over the dialogue at times. It's incredible. It's as if one were underwater and occasionally bobbing up and catching clear bits and slipping away again.

Incredibly shallow focus complements the sound design. It's gorgeous and creepy.

I'm not sure that the boy who befriends the vampire girl really does learn to stand up to the bullies, but rather he learns to not be afraid of them. He accepts their violence without rage or revenge. But allows his girlfriend of the night, not a hooker but a vampire in this instance, to fight his enemies for him.

I'm also not cool with the resolution to the bullying being spoiler alert them getting a violent comeuppance. This is a film that asks us to understand the challenges of Oskar's mother raising her son alone and the challenges of Eli needing blood, and therefore victims. How can we not sympathize with semi-murderous little boys trying to prove themselves? There must be a reason for their cruelty. Just as there are reasons for the main characters' murderous behavior. Even Oskar fantasizes about murdering at the beginning of the film, so I can't blame the other boys enough to want them dead. So the continuation of the friendship at the end after the gruesome murders of an innocent man, investigating the death of two of his closest friends, and these boys feels sad for Oskar. I don't know what would have been a better ending, but there is one out there. Perhaps what would be better is an ending in which Oskar learns to live on his own and without murder as a complication and crutch. I don't think every film needs to have a happy ending, but maybe someone can tell me what Oskar's decision means or comments on within 70s Swedish society. Perhaps I don't know enough about the contextual society to understand Oskar's continuing allegiance with Eli.

I love their relationship. It is brilliantly written. The two are so awkward around each other at first and unsure of how or what to communicate. They are both so lonely. Oskar is so frightened and needy, and Eli is sad and aloof. But the progression of the two towards each other is delicate and the change in Oskar as he comes to understand that Eli "is not a girl" is remarkable. It is so subtle and then powerful. He becomes the protector for a moment. And in that moment when faced with the reality of the violence he runs, rejecting his safety blanket-hunting knife. It seems in this moment that Oskar has rejected violence, but no. He just can't do it himself.

But I can't think of the last time I've seen such amazing acting from two children. And the setting of 80s Sweden is super cool looking.


My questions for others who have seen the film: Do you think his dad is gay? Why do they call him a pig?

PS. I think I've realized why the film treats bullies with such vengeance and why the relationship between Eli and Oskar continues. And why Eli's caretaker is with her. And it's that this is a horror film. The most frightening thing possible is that one might only have sympathy for their own murderous actions and not for others. The truly frightening world is one in which survivors of torture would enable and commit far worse acts against their bullies. And find joy and relief in those heinous moments. And love in their selfish cruelty. Eli starts out sad and forlorn for having to murder, but finds a purpose in the end for her violent cravings. If one can have love, one may do anything and justify anything for the love of another. And that is truly terrifying.

And I've gotten a submission for the question of why the little boys call Oskar a pig. It stands for Parent Is Gay. I don't think it's a winning answer, but it's a contender.

Check out the May edition of Sight and Sound magazine for a great article on this film.

I have one challenge to the article. In it, Mark Kermode argues that sex isn't the source of the horror, but I would argue that sex is more important than he gives it credit. The one particular moment of unabashed sexual curiosity ends in a dead end. Eli doesn't have genitals, but rather a shriveled up, kind of scab where one's vagina would be. Oskar wants to see her naked but discovers this oddity about Eli. They will never consummate their relationship and this, I suppose, makes their departure together more tragic. She can never be what he needs and she needs something so destructive only doom must follow.

Kermode also discusses some elements of the source material that are not included in the film. There is apparently a greater emphasis on transgenderism.

opening quotes - my thoughts & ramblings

“Your order is meaningless, my chaos is significant.” — Nathanael West

***But what if my order is chaos? How's that for you Mr. West? Also, without some kind of structure, how can one really analyze and assess anything? Hmm... Externally imposed order is foolish, in that it is impossible to accept an external order. Your brain won't do it. So I agree that it has no meaning for whom it is imposed upon.***

“I like my movies made in Hollywood.” — Richard Nixon

***This from the man who later, in his autobiography Beyond Peace (1994), claimed: "Hollywood is sick... Its values are not those of mainstream America." So I don't think he really liked movies much at all, or really knows much about mainstream America either. OR understands the concept of values or morals, for that matter.***

“Only the perverse fantasy can still save us.” — Goethe, to Eckerman

***I'm not sure that I've got a handle on what Goethe is talking about here. I do agree that fantasy is a large part of progress towards the saving of humanity, but I think there's more to it than perversion. Challenging assumptions, sure that part of
perversity is important, but the part of perversity that involves reenacting Pasolini's Salo is not OK.***

“Behind the initiation to sensual pleasure, there loom narcotics.” — Pope Paul VII

***From the opiate of the masses itself.***

“By the displacement of an atom, a world may be shaken.” — Oscar Wilde

***If just one may make incredible harm, perhaps the work of one can make comparable benefit to others.***

“Film is the greatest teacher, because it teaches not only through the brain, but through the whole body.” — Vsevolod Pudovkin

***And this is why I am currently torturing myself and others by making narrative films. Documentaries generally preach to the converted, but narrative/fiction films might fool people into seeing them without knowing the content of the film. Like I got suckered into going to "Dreamcatcher", a film so awful, I'd never have spent money on it if I'd not been tricked by the trailer.***

“The cinema implies a total inversion of values, a complete upheaval of optics, of perspective and logic. It is more exciting than phosphorus, more captivating than love.” — Antonin Artaud

"'Don't go on multiplying the mysteries,’ Unwin said, ‘they should be kept simple. Bear in mind Poe's purloined letter, bear in mind Zangwill’s locked room.’
‘Or made complex,’ replied Dunraven. ‘Bear in mind the universe.’" — Jorge Luis Borges

Film as a Subversive Art: Self-subversion, by Chuck Kleinhans

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Film as a Subversive Art - with Amos Vogel

From Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16 (2003)
An hour-long filmed profile of Amos Vogel, 82-year old New York resident and Austrian emigre, founder of the New York Film Festival and America's most important film society, Cinema 16.


From The Sticking Place, www.thestickingplace.com

And some others' opinions on Vogel:

"Vogel's New York–based Cinema 16 boasted thousands of members during its existence in the '40s and '50s, long before the rise of film festivals and art houses. His provocative, even controversial, programming combined films by respected auteurs with experimental and political fare. In the '60s, Vogel took this spirit to the new Lincoln Center by helping found the New York Film Festival, and in 1975 published his seminal tome Film as a Subversive Art, a book he calls "the culmination of the efforts of a lifetime."

Part movie guide, part philosophical treatise, Film as a Subversive Art analyzes and champions works that challenge viewers and thereby precipitate new ways of seeing society and existence. For Vogel, films could provide more than mere entertainment; intelligent programming could be a means of consciousness-raising; he screened "anything that made people question an existing value system, that opened up people's minds to other possibilities," Vogel tells the Voice. "The aesthetic and the political have always been joined. To me the avant-garde, whether they knew it or not, was always part of a radical view of society and of the human psyche." "

" .Some sections bear the stigma of faded taboos – subversion, as Vogel himself acknowledges, remains a movable feast. For example, Vogel’s hopes for the ‘porno-political’ and what he calls ‘erotic realism’ look quaint, as does his lament at the lack of on-screen ejaculations. The book is certainly blotchy, partial, sometimes sententious. Nevertheless, Film as a Subversive Art, in this facsimile edition, now resembles nothing so much as an archaeological find. At the time it was presumably intended in part as a sourcebook for other programmers; now that independent (and particularly 16mm) film distribution and exhibition have been almost obliterated, it is a guide to an invisible city. Cinemas as subversive spaces, thriving on their suppressed sociality – places we go together to be alone, as Jean-Luc Godard, one of Vogel’s avatars, once put it – are in perhaps terminal decline; film has receded into an increasingly amorphous moving-image culture, in which viewing is more fundamentally solitary. Between the lines Vogel’s book is testament to a history of screenings and cinema-going as much as it is to the films themselves. While Vogel’s contemporary Manny Farber produced his best insights in microcosm, with his elegant decompositions of individual films, Film as a Subversive Art provides a kind of complementary aerial perspective: a scattergun survey of vanished filmic vistas."
Mike Sperlinger freize, Issue 94 October 2005
-Carnival of Anarchy

Film as a Subversive Art

I am embarking on a new project essentially for a paper for my Theory & History of Cinema class, but also because I am methodical and curious. From an early age, I have known the satisfaction of methodical inquiry. I am one of those kids who read the encyclopedia. Fortunately ours was not many extensive volumes, but it is a big book. What I am now proposing is nowhere near as expansive a quest.

I am preparing to write a paper on Amos Vogel, spectatorship and why we are such poor cinema audiences. The film industry is going down like a sinking cruise ship and it just keeps hoping that by adding rides, like 3D and crazy explosions, that they will be able to forestall the inevitable. It breaks my heart to see old movie theaters like the Uptown or the Annex just sit empty and decrepit.

I am hoping to be able to discover a unique experience that people would come out for and enjoy like an indie rock show at the Empty Bottle. Brew and View at the Vic is close, but it's filthy and the movies suck. I wonder if a cine-club is possible and exciting for others. I love watching films and then chatting about them with cool peeps. I want to save the filmviewing experience from solitary, mediocre DVD or worse, streaming, home viewing.

To that end, I will be watching as many films from the brilliant Amos Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art. Hopefully you'll be inspired to watch some weird films and we'll collectively be inspired by the more than 20 year-long running film club, Cinema 16, created by Vogel in 1947 in New York. (I'd also like to think that Chicago is an amazing enough city in which to pull this off.)

I'm open to suggestions and will now enable posting from others. So send me your thoughts and let's save film and society too!