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Garbage or Gold

As with most Manohla Dargis reviews, I can't tell if this is an intellectualized excuse for absolute garbage or actually a series of brilliant and radical films:

Among Mr. Levine’s most striking strategies is to turn the plastic editing tape that holds or splices the images together into an aesthetic gesture. Commercial film editing is usually meant to go unnoticed, to serve an illusion of seamlessness that in turn serves the narrative. In this work the bubbled and ragged bits of editing tape, which look very much like scraps of hastily applied cellophane, contribute to the artisanal aspect of the individual shots and the work as a whole, as well as its maker’s outsider status. You feel his presence, his body and emotional engagement, in each jagged edit and tremulous shake of the camera: this is truly handmade art, created outside the realm of industrial film production.

It reads to me like the ham and baloney I used to pad papers in my student days:

Tsai Mingliang opts for the more optimistic, ‘inexhaustible variety of life,’ sort of meaning. The hand reaching down in the final scene to draw up The Woman Downstairs (Yang Kuei-mei) to The Man Upstairs (Lee Kang-sheng) seems intentionally reminiscent of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, except this time it is Man and Woman who are succored by an omnipresent, omnipotent, omnifabulous Grace Chan. Perhaps The Hole is the story of Pandora’s box as filtered through Kafka: humankind may have opened a box of modern ills that turns some into cockroaches, but Hope remains in the form of a Grace Chan song -- or a Tsai Mingliang film.

Dargis, of course, is a minor over-intellectualizer next to her boss, critic A.O. Scott, my sworn nemesis. But that's another post for another day.

About J. Ott

John Ott is a writer, filmmaker and futurist. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.