Triumph In Blog

Reflections on Jean-Marie Straub, Cynicism, and “Careful, Icarus”

Some time ago I think I threatened to release a new song somewhere–a tentative tribute to Craig Ferguson titled Careful, Icarus and fittingly so. I have actually come back to working on it recently, and I’m not totally hating how it’s taking form. I’ve mentioned before how I feel that I struggle with long, meticulously planned projects, attributing that struggle to my own overthinking and scatterbrained nature. In fact, making even the simple compositions I’ve made so far, the bulk of which are sort of meant as pastiche or just plain, uncomplicated fun, still took enough out of me creatively that I decided to abort my work in progress somewhere around 7 months ago. Not permanently, mind you; I intend to continue making music and everything else, and I like updating this page from time to time. But life under the Trumpnomics rape economy has made and is continuing to make it difficult to find inspiration. I wanted to make larger, more pointed, and more deliberate music with fancier tools and a more easily discernable style. What feelings am I supposed to tap into sitting at a desk in the suburbs all day?

This is why my hiatus from releasing music hasn’t just been wallowing around in self-pity. I have taken it upon myself, as I hope any readers have seen, to return to my once-benign hobby of film “critique,” only under a very different lens. For a couple years (prior to the genesis of TRIUMPH IN BLACK,) I barely watched or wrote about anything. My time with movies was spent instead reading about them (or doing fucking nothing, 2023 and 2024 are a haze in my mind,) and gathering new opinions and avenues for study from various critics and directors all over the discipline of film. I have always had an inkling that there was a deeper, more intellectual world of film, like in any other art form. I struggled to find a way in, a way to care about older, more alternative models of film to what few comforts I had grown used to. I consciously decided to try throwing darts at my letterboxd watchlist to fix this, and try to find out what the keys were to taking film more seriously and finding new inspiration from it. What makes film a distinct or meaningful art form?

This interrogation ended up being very fruitful very early on. My previous highest ideals about art–my own or otherwise–were shaken to an extent by my studies into film’s infancy, the early 20th century. I came to a few important truths about my approach to art and to my thinking in general, mostly regarding how seriously I need to be taking my scientific study of Socialism and the significance of realism as an artistic goal. But the biggest lessons I have taken away regarding my original goal (to get inspired,) have concerned technique. Not all of this technique necessarily transfers, yes, and a lot of what I was looking for specifically was imagery and mood. But reading into the methods of some particular filmmakers has proven very enriching.

Something I’ve thought about more very recently germane to my own work is the idea of reactivity. The idea of working not with too much of a rigid plan in mind, but accepting things that come as surprises and alter the work as it is being produced. In making my music this comes up a lot. I’ve been sort of coy about it in the past, almost ashamed to admit how much meat in the body of my work has come from seemingly “accidental” discoveries during the process of realizing my original ideas. However, I bring up my newest song (yet unreleased,) as I think my understanding of process has changed to be much more accepting of reactivity, and I find myself less frustrated by how often I change my mind about the overall sound during production.

I used to kick myself a lot more about not being able to render my visions more specifically. I still do, and it feels bad to sort of lose your original, metaphysical ideas during the actual work of the piece. But is it so wrong to let reality in from time to time? Is it worth always worshipping at the feet of the “idea,” and insisting on some kind of purity? One such person in film who has seemingly taught me better than this would be Jean-Marie Straub, of the famous Straub-Huillet duo. The other day when I was nonplussed by last years Resurrection (directed by Bi Gan,) a friend of mine related a story to me about how Straub and Huillet avoided overly-manicured shooting and allowed their films to grow and change during their production. The “lizard copy” of their film Death of Empedocles, a film intentionally made in multiple versions from a patchwork of variable-length shots, is the one version in which a specifically planned and long-awaited shoot accidentally captured a lizard skittering across the ground in-frame.

The duo decided to keep the lizard in, and use it as one of a few minor differences intended to be noticed during viewings of the multiple versions. The idea of the original variation in the first place was to make viewers keenly aware of how the small details were captured (Griffith’s “the swaying of the leaves in the trees,”) so why not simply leave the creature in the shot? What good would it be to “clean it up?” This seems like a simple example, but it ended up being an anecdote I thought more about in the context of Straub’s own obsessive realism and Marxist filmmaking philosophy. What is the larger implication of that impulse toward rigidity in our work? Not everything needs to be sedate and impressionistic, sure, but what good is it to create a representation of reality that is 100% alien from reality?

It may be possible to make something too specific. Being too neurotic about rendering things platonically perfectly as I originally dreamed them is only a recipe to piss myself off wondering if everyone else will get it, and also close the viewer off from a certain level of interpretation. Is my music meant as a signpost, and I’m playing a game with the listener to see if they can figure it out? The benefit of letting reality in through reactivity is entropy, in a sense. True randomness that reflects our physical, material existence better than any emotional recollection could, no matter how detailed or seemingly complete. This is often what we mean when we call things “sterile” critically, as in they are so zeroed-in on representing one, specific notion that was thought-of beforehand that there’s ironically no way to fully associate it with real sensation from the outside.

If that makes sense. Straub is a treasure trove of materialist interpretations of artistic process, even when he’s being a salty old bitter old frenchman, appearing to whine about even having to answer interview questions. I find that thinking about his reactive methods and the similar thoughts of many filmmakers I’ve been studying have been cathartic, and that I’m not so alone or cynical to notice when I’m making things up on the fly as I go. It may not be so wrong as I thought–ask Vince Gilligan how methodical plans turn out! With regards to the makeup of the song itself, I’ve found a lot of value in starting from samples, “musical” or otherwise in nature, that give me even the slightest possible spark of a greater potential composition, then try to construct that composition on the fly. A lot of people take this approach to great success, but much of it is mired in internet memes and social media. “Look, I sampled this viral video and vocoded it, then laid heavy bass over the top of it and now its like fake EDM or something! This would be good for an instagram reel!” I would like to avoid that kind of ephemera, if possible. I think there are endless possibilities within even the smallest free associations of individual sound bites.

It’s still a struggle to get away from cynicism. I find that Careful, Icarus is becoming much different than I imagined and it’s assuaging the feeling I described at the start, yet I still have much more to learn. As a matter of fact, a conversation between Straub, Pierre Clémenti, Miklos Janscó, and Glauber Rocha from 1970 just struck me today as a sort of impetus to write this little update. The round-table between these great Marxists of filmmaking concerned the state of the film “industry” and how film will continue as an international consortium into the 21st century. Yes, it is the interview where Straub famously said “cinema will only begin when the film industry is dead,” as a riff on Rossellini’s own assertion of cinema as dead. Godard would go on to say the exact same thing!

In the discussion, Straub and Rocha touch on something less specific to film and more about writing, describing a certain tendency in leftist intellectualism toward “paternalism.” Rocha asserted that so-called intellectuals condescend the public by claiming that certain works of art are too “challenging” for them, but that this seemingly simple observation reinforces a notion that only the bourgeois are able to comprehend film fully. To separate film into “arthouse” and “normal” is to submit to a dichotomy handed down from Hollywood and from bourgeois distributors and producers, where cinema exists in discrete spheres that are deeply esoteric. Straub consents by referring to critics and producers alike as “pimps” in this sense.

Now, this is an interesting perspective. Considering what I once wrote in “Artists Only,” it would appear that I’ve expressed this same bourgeois attitude: attack the public for being stupid, reinforce academic elitism and assume intellectualism is reserved for, at least, the petit bourgeois. In a sense, I both do and do not regret my rhetoric in the face of this new perspective. I did and still do agree with Rocha, as a Marxist, that obviously the people at large are capable of understanding all types of film at all “levels” of intellectual “challenge.” The thing that makes this assertion seem airtight is that proletarians are not exposed to or encouraged to seek out certain types of film that have come to be “challenging,” the dreaded “arthouse” cinema, due to the influence of the Hollywood system and its cohorts to make those types of film harder to find and less avidly written about. Were there some way that all films could be shown in equal capacity with all respects paid–blockbusters and nepo baby crap showing side-by-side with Marxist film, or long film, or minimalist film, etc.–the attitude toward what is and is not “challenging” may change entirely, and the conception of spectacle as an ideal might begin to erode.

“If people were able to choose between a film by Rocha and one by somebody else, someone who came up through the industry, if they were really able to choose, so that Rocha’s film had the same publicity and was shown in accessible cinemas, who knows what would happen? We don’t know. Because it’s never been tried.“ ~~Jean-Marie Straub, 1970.

I wrote “Artists Only” as a way of expressing my shame in the American people, and I don’t rescind my thoughts. Americans are not proletarians and we are diametrically opposed to intellectualism on principal. We are 100% divorced from material reality, and often think only in terms of our own feelings. I’m not sure if, even in the hypothetical reality Straub described, we could really make it to even the contrived, sort of fetishistic interpretation of “intellectual peasant film-viewing” Rocha describes in that interview, but I inevitably find it a little facetious:

“For example the other day on TV I saw a discussion where intellectuals were saying that Pasolini makes films which are very difficult for the public. After that some Milan workers spoke, and their criticisms were much more perceptive than those of the official intellectuals. Even when they were saying things like: ‘I wasn’t too keen on Gerson’s performance, or Maria Callas’ voice, I liked the script’ … You see the people know how to speak.” ~~Glauber Rocha, 1970.

But the larger point is that I may be too quick to fall back on my own American cynicism when making these observations about the state of art, not just film. To look to hard into the past or present is to miss the future, certainly, and a lot of my own pessimism about the hogs in the American public not wanting to engage with art may indeed stem from my own inherent, chauvinistic conception of some art as “more art-y” than other art. I believe this is an indiscrete judgment to make, and the only way we could really assess the value of all the many alternative processes and models of art would be to give all things equal opportunity somehow, and that may be what is truly impossible in America.

My shorthand for this belief is that I try to immediately disavow things that seem, superficially or literally, like commercials or committee products. The only thing I can say for sure is that art can only be approached at all if it has some sense of real work put into it by real artists who care to capture or express something, for whatever reason. Maybe it would serve me not to just be reactive as I make music, but as I write, so I may consider all the real cases and examples I’m aware of before I shoot my mouth off saying everyone in the country is retarded and a lost cause?

Then again, relitigating my own previous opinions and work forever is a narcissistic lost cause in and of itself. For now, I would like to use the inspiration I’ve gathered from reading these discussions and thoughts, and from confronting so many images and depictions of reality, to make something that feels more authentically mine. In a twist of fate, it might make things feel more unique to my enigmatic genious mind if I let more external factors in and ask myself why I should or should not incorporate them into the total work. What reason is there to try to chase some kind of “perfection” after all, what does it even mean? My own concept of that could change from day to day. Taking in more and more alternative thoughts and impressions from film has taught me a lot about the value of “going with the flow,” and funnily enough I think it may be the key to becoming more principled in general.

In fact, I choose to use that as my overall defense for anyone reading this who might be at this penultimate sentence and wondering “why did none of that make sense, and what is he talking about?” Perhaps I found it best to let the stream of consciousness flow and maintain an honest, free association of ideas do the talking; that is how I think in reality, after all!