Martyfesto

A brief manifesto concerning marty supreme

Ridiculous. Film is my primary occupation. I have seen a hundred and sixty nine films this year. This is not a boast. I know people who have seen far more than I, I know people who have seen far less. On Christmas day, today I watched Marty Supreme. Marty Supreme is a good film. It is not a stellar one as the hype would have you believe. It has one of the greatest performances of Timmy Tim’s (as he calls himself in his remix with Esdeekid) career. It is a performance that left me feeling cheated and wronged by the filmmakers who captured it. It was a performance of the face.

Much like Marty Supreme film, these recent big budget, movie-goer films, the ones that people line up for, the ones people ignore, all kinds of movie, from good to bad, they are all about individualism. Marty builds himself a mythos of self determination at any cost, he will be anyone, cheat anyone, lie and fuck to get what he feels he is owed.

Quite commonly these films use a tried and true staple of filmmaking, shot reverse shot, it is fundamental. We see one persons face then we see another. Filmmakers would have you believe that for legebility this is the way that things must be. Marty Supreme is beautiful but we are cheated, we are lied to, we only get to see the navel of beauty, never the full figure. We do not see the human body, the depth of focus is shallow meaning we do not see what is behind the person. These talking heads float us a heaven we cannot see the walls of. The New York City that Chalamet runs through feels hollow, the electricity in his performance is not matched by the world he inhabits. A shameful thing.

Foucault views the individual as a “product of power.” He writes just before this “Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.” Marty Supreme is fascinating because while it has revealed to me what the aching scab of films failings are but has also fallen into the same pit that it illuminates. While I am talking about film, not fascism, the point still applies. The pit is one of individuality. The technical bits of filmmaking are all so that we can see the face, not the full character, the individuality it creates is not one that can be suspended for another’s grace. The only thing that exists is the character, not the setting, not the plot, merely reaction and rereaction. The rereaction being the process of reacting to the initial reaction. It becomes a tableau that while beautiful lacks the verve that makes cinema powerful. We are not watching bodies in motion, we are watching faces in stasis. We are seeing films that only are concerned with themselves. Like Marty they are only concerned with their mythology, with their performance. For a brief few seconds they may let something in but it will not be enough, a film must be open from the start.

The cinema of individualism is one that places all its emphasis, because when a film shows you a frame it is not by accident, it is created purely and expressly for you, the viewer to appreciate and if not appreciated it has failed, there are hours, days, weeks, years of peoples lives devoted to creating a singular frame, the time it takes to make a film is infinite despite this the quality of said film is not correlated. Much of contemporary films falls into this individualistic trap. It shows you the faces of the characters as if the world has fallen into place around them, not as if the characters have found themselves in the world. Cinema is a suspension of time, of space, it is a thing that amplifies emotion, pinches the optic nerve out of the skull and at its very best places you within the movie. Right now we cannot do that in our current contemporary film. Right now we are goaded, we are taunted like bulls with matadors waving their flag, waving their flag with the crying face of whatever star they’ve emblazoned there, whatever Oscar winner, stretched sixty feet wide on your cinema screen. There is great faith in a closeup, in the kind of emotion that you can itemize. There is even greater faith in the hand of Mr. Darcy, clenched with a love he has not yet recognized. I believe that film is meant to capture the entire emotional range of the performer, not just the quiver of a lip, and if showing me the quiver of the lip at least be bold enough to show me just that quiver, just that lip. Film must change. The culture of individualism is one we are all acquainted with. A man can become a star on his very phone. Men and women have made careers of their phone. Humans are becoming people who have individualized themselves to the greatest capacity possible and then turned to their phone screens and watched movies there. I too am at fault of this. To steal from Foucault’s mouth again. “One does not need to be sad to be militant.” I condemn the aesthetics of the individual, the highlighting of the visage. The juxtaposition of one face with another as if every day I do not see a face. I do not watch a movie to see just a face. I watch a movie to see all manner of things, faces included, but faces with backgrounds. I want to feel the same nervous, giddy, jubilant effort that Chalamet put into this movie from the camera. Too long the camera has been neglected. Too long cinema has turned to the actor and asked what can you do for me and not what can I do to you? Films consist of primarily three things. The setting, the character, and the plot. All else is set dressing. The issue I have found is that films no longer treat their camera’s as if they are characters, they treat them as tools and not living breathing things that require the necessary fangs of voyeurism that films feel like. For all its talk of balls, Marty Supreme feels castrated, as much of modern film does.

This is of course silly, it is miserable. Yet it persists. There is something deeply misconstrued with the state of cinema. Something I hope to see changed, by hand, by my peers hand, and by a concerted effort by those who truly care. Recently the film Sorry, Baby has stuck in my scalp like a tick. It has opened itself up to me and myself to it. It runs against the grain, it shows a range of motion that is missing from film, it shows the entire body, it grounds the character in the space that they inhabit and the plot works in tandem with all of these things. I did not watch the movie and think of film. I watched the movie and thought of myself. When I watched Marty Supreme I thought of film. Good cinema will not make you think about cinema. Empathy is not found in the character, the capture of that character by the lens of the camera, Empathy is found in the relation of that character to every other aspect of the film. The setting, where that character is, how the interact with that enviroment. I do not want to see nipples up anymore. Show me below the belt line. Give me the standing slouch. Give me more. Give me film. Give me everything.

In Alan Arkin’s Little Murders we follow an apathetic nihilist Elliott Gould as he is courted, swoooned, seduced, all manner of things by Marcia Rodd. He is depressed, he cannot love. We see it in the way he walks, the way he breathes, the complete lack of satisfaction in his disatisfaction with the world. He is a man possesed by nothing! Nothing! He delivers a monolog about mail. Very good. I suggest you watch it. He ends it by saying “Its very dangerous to challenge a system unless you’re completely at peace with the thought that you’re not going to miss it when it collapses.” I will not miss it when it collapses.

Film must change.

Nadav.