Some good fun for this Saturday: Matt Zoller Seitz trash talks some famous films. Such an exercise is amusing partly because most of the films he includes are solid enough in their "classic" status that saying nasty things about them seems more appropriate and balanced than it would against some poor, inoffensive effort that would otherwise disappear into the oblivion of time. And isn't there something in us that wants some balance against pure reverence? I mean, even the works of art that I absolutely revere, I do so partly with the hope and trust that somewhere somebody exists who detests them. Where's the fun in loving what is incontestably loveable?
Or maybe it's just that I pretty much agree completely with Seitz's reservations about these movies, so it makes it easy for me to celebrate his takedowns. If someone were to put 10 movies I love up to such an attack, I'd think the person an ignorant fool, blind to the wonders revealed to such a sensitive, perspicacious soul as I...
The ever-wonderful Matt Zoller Seitz has written a great feature for Salon.com -- "Directors of the Decade: The Sensualists". Actually, this is one of ten features Seitz is writing for Salon about "Directors of the Decade", but for me this is the group that matters most, because it includes Hou Hsiao-hsien, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, and Wong Kar-Wai, some of my absolute favorites, though I had never thought of them as a group before. Or maybe I have -- I've been thinking a lot recently about why Lynch, Malick, and Mann in particular appeal to me so deeply. (I love some of Wong Kar-Wai's films, too -- 2046, In the Mood for Love, and especially Happy Together, though My Blueberry Nights proved nearly unwatchable and Ashes of Time, in either version, left me cold. Hou Hsiao-hsien I hadn't really thought of in relation to the others, and I'm least familiar with his work, having only seen Flight of the Red Balloon and The Puppetmaster.)
Here's how Seitz defines the group:
The sensualists are bored with dramatic housekeeping. They're interested in sensations and emotions, occurrences and memories of occurrences. If their films could be said to have a literary voice, it would fall somewhere between third person and first -- perhaps as close to first person as the film can get without having the camera directly represent what a character sees.
Yet at the same time sensualist directors have a respect for privacy and mystery. They are attuned to tiny fluctuations in mood (the character's and the scene's). But they'd rather drink lye than tell you what a character is thinking or feeling – or, God forbid, have a character tell you what he's thinking or feeling. The point is to inspire associations, realizations, epiphanies -- not in the character, although that sometimes happens, but in the moviegoer.
You can tell by watching the sensualists' films, with their startling cuts, lyrical transitions, off-kilter compositions and judicious use of slow motion as emotional italics, that they believe we experience life not as dramatic arcs or plot points or in-the-moment revelations, but as moments that cohere and define themselves in hindsight -- as markers that don't seem like markers when they happen.
Bingo -- if I could sum up the mix of aesthetics and worldview that most appeals to me, that reflects and extends my own take on how it feels to live, I doubt I could come up with a better description than Seitz has. Indeed, it reveals succinctly what I most favor in art. That's not, of course, to say that all other approaches are wrong or don't work or whatever, but that the fastest, surest way I've found toward the pleasures of recognition (of life, of living, of being and time) and the evocation of emotion (without what feels to me to be sentimentality) is via exactly what Seitz describes.
Today we have the privilege of speaking with Courtney Summers, author of the upcoming YA novel CRACKED UP TO BE and blogger extraordinaire. Courtney’s debut novel takes a familiar concept and turns it upside down. Here’s the blurb from Publishers Marketplace:
Courtney Summers's CRACKED UP TO BE, in which the popular girl decides to quit being popular and find herself but her friends work hard to stop her making "a big mistake," to Sara Goodman at St. Martin's, by Amy Tipton at FinePrint Literary Management (World English)
DH: Welcome to the blog, Courtney, and big-time congratulations with balloons and chocolate cake! Your blog post on the sale was full of excitement and humility (and I love your grandma!). But there’s so much more we want to know. Let’s get started!
How did you get the idea for CRACKED UP TO BE?
Courtney: Thank you so much! I'm really excited about all of this, but I have to disclaimer my answers by letting your readers know I've never been interviewed before. :)
I got the idea for CRACKED UP TO BE by asking myself a lot of questions about identity and perceptions. I was really interested in writing a character that struggled with and bucked the expectations projected on her based on where she fell on the social ladder. After that came all the fun of figuring out why she was struggling and why she wanted to buck them . . . so that's how it all started!
DH: I love your spin on the popularity issue. Your main character is intriguing. What’s her name and how did you come up with it?
Courtney: Her name is Parker. It came to me like snap, which was really lucky as it doesn't usually happen for me that way--and it probably never will again! I'm used to searching through name after name after name, waiting to feel a “click.” That can sometimes take hours. Or days.
DH: Yes, and when you’ve hit upon the right element, you just know it. Speaking of elements, you live in Canada; where is your story set and how did you choose that setting?
Courtney: The story is set in a fictional town in America--it just seemed to fit. I must admit that settings are usually pretty static in my novels anyway, as opposed to novels where they play a larger role. Once I've established where everything's happening, it's like, "Okay! Moving on..."
DH: How much of yourself is in your characters?
Courtney: Very little, I think. I hope! I have fun trying to shape characters that are as far removed from me as possible for a variety of reasons, the most important being that I'm tragically boring. I also love trying to understand the motivations of a person that, in real life, I might not understand (or want to).
DH: I like that concept. It reminds me of watching people in the mall or on the street and making up histories for them. You must get ideas all the time. How do you latch onto an executable story?
Courtney: I wish I knew! Every idea that turns into a novel is sometimes preceded by several that . . . don't. It drives me crazy! I'll get 50 pages into something that'll fall to pieces spectacularly and I'll be like, cries. I never see it coming until it happens, either. So I spend a lot of time writing with one hand and crossing my fingers with the other. Sometimes I write desperate letters to my ideas:
Dear idea,
PLEASE become a fully realized novel.
Love, Courtney
DH: It’s so hard when an idea or a full-fledged story doesn’t work out! But once you have locked onto an idea, what is your writing process?
To view this interview in its entirety, click here.
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0 Comments on Directors of the Decade as of 1/1/1900
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