Tag Archives: Film

Film Studies Gus’ Notes on Remarriage Comedies

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        Notes on Remarriage Comedies aka comedies of equality or dailiness…

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     Classical comedy (cc) involves a young pair overcoming obstacles who get together for the first time. Ends in festival, feast, wedding; the old ratify the young, the young acknowledge the old, and society is assured of continuing.

    Remarriage comedy (henceforth, rem.) involves an older pair, seeking a divorce, who end up getting back together, together again. Privacy (rem) is studied as opposed to the public ( classical comedy).

Freud asks, What does the woman want? Consider inflections: peevish, exasperated, impatient. Better, rephrase as, Given male desire is figured dramatically by the Oedipus complex, What is the form of female desire?

(Note. Freud argued that the Oedipus complex was universal, applying to humans regardless of sex. Questionable.)

Rem answers, what the woman wants is education. Education means leading out the best self, not indoctrination—seeking the attainable but as yet unattained self(of both). Who has education to give?

Men do, and the form this takes in rem is that the men endlessly lecture the women. (Possible shadow: the man could be pretending to provide education but really be [ seducing ] the woman, turning her into his private toy for his pleasure.) So the creation of the new woman is the business of men. But in truly transforming the woman the man must himself undergo change—such that the couple transformed is a new birth or vision of the human.  That a man can walk in the direction of his dreams we all know; but that a woman can, and with the right man, is some of the news this genre brings.

This is accomplished in Cavell’s and Milton’s terms only through a meet and happy conversation, where “meet” means “just”: helpmeet, as in Genesis, not helpmate. These conversations (and lectures) take enormous amounts of time. The price for the woman is that no sense of “mother” applies to her: she is not one and her own is not present. (Sexuality between the two trying to divorce is a displaced issue; in cc it is central issue.)

Part of the change required of the man is humiliation. Essential to this is the fact of what I will call mutual forgiveness (a form of Gratified Desire?), acknowledgment.

The father is always on the side of the woman’s desire, unlike cc where he can be the first obstacle.

Since privacy is studied, often in a place of perspective called a green world, or in the rem genre, Connecticut; the marriage to work is beyond the sanction or church, state, or society. The real scandal is love, the outlaw status of its truth (p. 31) (Sherwood forest is a green world, as is Eden—to which we can’t quite return; and Shakespeare’s Arden). The feature of the green world allows the couple to feel that they have grown up together(p.31). An incestuous relationship is changed into one that can stand public scrutiny. Questioning this is one reason why Amanda Bonner takes their [private] marriage to court.

A constant threat to rem is that at any moment it can become melodrama. Adam’s Rib frames the Bonner’s marriage with the melodrama of the Attinger’s marriage. It is from Adam’s Rib that Cavell will derive the melodrama of the unknown woman.

*from Gus’s computer

Gus Blaisdell Collected editors William Peterson and Nicole Blaisdell Ivey will be DISCUSSING GUS Saturday January 5th 3:00 pm at Bookworks 4022 Rio Grande  Albuquerque, New Mexico

I KNOW A MAN

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In 2002, a year before his death, Gus wrote the bio below to accompany his poems included in  IN COMPANY: an anthology of New Mexico Poets after 1960

                                                                                      photo by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

Gus Blaisdell for twenty-seven years ran an “alternative to an absence,” the Living Batch Bookstore, always close to the Frontier Restaurant. He continues to teach film at the University of New Mexico. He runs a small press, Living Batch Books , that continues to present his alternative to absences. A special line of his books is called Drive, He Said, after Creeley’s poem “I Know A Man.”

Doors of Memory and Desire

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 Photographer Arnold Gassan and Gus Blaisdell 1962-63 in Denver, Colorado                  Stockyard Earth                    

                                                                                Photograph by Robert Voy Stark
NOTES ON THE FILM (GASSAN-BLAISDELL)
Tenative title:   DOORS OF MEMORY AND DESIRE.
Chippewa Poem:
You are Walking around
Trying to remember
What you promised.
But you can’t remember.
I am walking around, trying to remember what I promised, but I can’t remember.
 Can the narration run in a kind of counter-point to the images: first as, say, a description of what  will happen next visually; then as a description of what is or has just happened–  but always keeping to the tone of a specious present.
Camera catches M putting on cracked and broken shoes,
lacing them slowly, hastily, angrily. The laces break.
The foot kicks the shoes off. A hand reaches into the frame,
picks between the toes, moves out of frame.
“I have been walking, too long, too swiftly, sometimes much too swiftly
and much too slowly.”
Camera catches man as he moves towards table.
 I have been walking around, trying to remember what I promised, but I can’t remember…can’t  remember what I desired, what I promised…what it was that I desired so much that it made me  promise…whatever it was I did promise.
Perhaps this is because I’m not used to promising,
to desiring, to remembering even.

FILM IS A FINE ART

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Gus Blaisdell SITE Photo by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

 Writings of Gus    *note to the department

 
Film is a fine art – those like music and painting that are goals or ends in themselves- – and a liberal art, the study of those reflective and critical skills necessary to freedom. Film must not be taught in isolation from the humanities and the other arts; nor must it be taught in isolation from history and politics. Given that this newest of our arts draws on so many other major arts in our culture – – on drama, opera, poetry, painting, literature – – it is reasonable to consider any of the humanities or the arts as film’s academic home.Today new voices are demanding to be heard, seriously challenging the canon and the curricula based on it. Given film’s appetite for the arts and its individuality or autonomy as a new art, film is as naturally crossgrained as it is “interdisciplinary”: it offers a radical focus for questions of cultural plurality (it is international in scope, naturally crossing cultural boundaries and declaring both similarities and differences between cultures). Film also questions stereotypes and other social constructions, for a stereotype is indeed a “social construction”, and it can be questioned. Film focuses such challenges, projects and screens them, and discovers the mechanisms in our culture that enables some voices while silencing others, that allow some subjects while relegating others to the margins. Moreover, if our culture has shifted from the word to the image- – I don’t believe this but I entertain the hypothesis- – then why be wail the fact when a film curriculum can obviously reverse this direction. In my experience of teaching and learning from film, movies motivate texts, lead naturally to reading and writing. I require my students to read a great deal, and texts central to our culture and of real difficulty; and even though I have only one assistant for the several hundred students in my classes I also require them to write.Film is presently uncanonical. Those whose work contributes toward a curriculum in any subject know that we cannot in advance design what we can only discover in practice. But film’s uncanonical nature is one of its great assets. We do not know what it can bear and to date we do know that putting it together with the best that a culture can produce is an unending and critical apposition, one worth serious, humanistic study. Unlike scraping the hulls of years of interpretations, film is in the process of discovery and revelation where interpretation is concerned.One principle of my teaching takes its inspiration from Henry James admonishing aspiring writers to, Yes, write from experience. But before that there is something even more important:  “become one upon whom nothing is lost.” But given the nihilisms and fashionable skepticisms of the day don’t we begin by believing that if we are anything at all then we are ones upon whom, if not everything, then surely most important things are lost? Then teaching might be inspired to recover from this despair the self that is best; and learn again how to have a voice in one’s own experience; to stop the incessant voice of rediscover and readmit voices lost and denied.In exposing my students to the best in the other arts and humanities, and to the best in film, it is my hope that these first impressions might prove of sufficient force that they would one day return to the films and texts. By not providing film the best environment we can, we are missing opportunities as teachers and we are missing them at the sacrifice of our students. My fantasy? If students arrive with literacy in images film can help to teach them other articulations, the critical challenge of finding words, the best words, for something, like any masterpiece, that we know is better than anything we can say about it – that this piece of music, story, poem, play or movie offers what any art, liberal or fine, promises: a view of immediate reality, even one that competes with it on the best terms.  Moreover, film offers a student a critical reflective voice in his own experience, surely a place to begin education.  If we deny the student this voice we are as teachers missing one of the great opportunities our democratic culture offers, an art that appeals to the many and can in its greatest instances hold its own with similar achievements in the other arts. I shall end by quoting from some private correspondence from my friend and mentor Stanley Cavell: (should film be denied admittance to a serious, humanistic study and there be no honorable reasons for its rejection – – I can see none – then such denial) “expresses an indifference to the education of a region of our students’ interests and sensibilities that not only directs a significant portion of their times of choice and conversation but which, among all such current times, is the region most likely to persist throughout their lives, whatever their careers.” My fantasy is that film, our new art, is bidding fair and should be heard in its bid for equal treatment among the liberal and the fine arts.

Film requires for its study a socially and intellectually coherent and expansive place rather than one defensive and cultish. If there is any institution in our democracy which denies that there is but one game in town, it must be the university. It is a church permitting, even encouraging, heresy, a constant redress of what we believed were our basic values.
 
*comments welcome

GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED

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Writings on Lewis Baltz, John Gossage, Evan Connell, Frank Stella, Terry Conway, Guy Williams, Hitchcock, Wim Wenders, Kubrick, Joel-Peter Witkin, Thomas Barrow, Stanley Cavell, Robert Creeley, Plato’s Phaedrus, Ross Feld, Rachel Whiteread, James Baldwin, Allen Graham, Don Dudley, Carroll Dunham, …and then some…

GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED

Cover photo by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

CONTENTS:

Editor’s Preface: by William Peterson

Foreword: by Stanley Cavell

Introduction:  “On Slipping Across: Reading, Friendship, Otherness” by David Morris

On Photographs:

  1. Absorbing Inventories: Thomas Barrow’s “Libraries Series”
  2. Afterworld: Photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin
  3. BLDGS: Photographs of Lewis Baltz
  4. Space Begins Because We Look Away From Where We Are: Lewis Baltz, Candlestick Point
  5. Buried Silk Exhumed: The Lewis Baltz Retrospective, Rule Without Exception
  6. From Obscenity in Thy Mother’s Milk: John Gossage’s “HF!” Portfolio
  7. Thirteen Ways of NOT Looking at a Gossage Photograph

On Movies:

Passion Misfits Us All: Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas

  1. Death’s Blue-Eyed Boy: Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket
  2. Still Moving
  3. Highlighting Hitchcock’s Vertigo with Magic Marker

 

On Painting:

  1. Frank Stella’s The Whiteness of the Whale
  2. Passion and the Pine Breeze: The Paintings of Terry Conway
  3. Guy Williams: On In: Outside
  4. Original Face: Allan Graham’s Moon 2
  5. Poem: Omoide No Tsukimi

 

On Reading & Writing:

  1. A Gloss Annexed
  2. Vatic Writing: Evan Connell’s Notes from a Bottle . . .
  3. Tell It Like It Is: The Experimental Traditionalists
  4. Rebus
  5. What Was Called A Thought Echoed in Sight: Yvor Winters’ Centennial
  6. Poem: Occasional Loquats: For Janet Lewis
  7. For Robert Creeley on his 70th Birthday
  8. A Nobler Seduction
  9. Slipping Across

Fiction: Radical Philosophical Reclamation & Wrecking, The TLP Hotel (4 Excerpts)

Shorts & Excerpts from Correspondence

Envoi: by Ira Jaffe

Chronology: by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

Bibliography