When Spike Lee’s 25th Hour and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (both of which could be viewed as allegories for the differences between pre- and post-9/11 New York) opened, they were both everything from hailed as genuinely powerful masterpieces to accused of making a mess out of elements that couldn’t possibly “come together.” One tries to fashion a man’s last day before prison into a meditation on facing the future, and the other a revenge story into connecting with the historical past.

Do they succeed? In my opinion, yes, both with their respective minor complaints. But both could be seen as playing with peoples’ lives as a method of extracting something from life and history. Neither of the stories ever happened; they’re both artists stretching characters’ lives in order to fit into certain philosophical ideas. But isn’t that what cinema is? The subjective contortion of others until their existence says what you want it to?

This sort of basic conception of film is why I found Michael Snow’s *Corpus Callosum to be such an entrancing wake-up call; it seems both affirm these repetitive contortions and transcend them somewhere in the space between its recognition of them and its personal asides.

Those asides have been accused by some as just being silly, pretentious nonsense that doesn’t amount to anything; as if Snow had nothing to do other than try out some of his new filters and gadgets. But in my mind the details of the movie are not only necessary but a lot of fun. They contradict each other in ways that hint at our abilities to change reality and reluctance to face it that come with new technology.

The most exhilarating example of this was the scene where the family was being instructed to get something to eat, and it kept disappearing. With this level of self-consciousness about the course of events that unfold, you’d think it would be rendered an insignificant experience, but no; at the same time, we’re shown something we’ve never seen before in a movie and something we’ve never seen before in real life. That is about as alive with possibility as movies get. It’s like we’re exposed to an alternate dimension of mental process, and given an infinite number of toys and labels to play with. The film refuses to confine itself to one world or one mental impulse, and its dance across these levels is purely unique and compelling.

Beyond the digital manipulations and games, there seems to lie a dissection of why it was made, why we're watching it, why we all exist, etc. (it's everything Adaptation was purported to be). The only two places the film really exists in are the offices in which the film appears to have been edited and in the room where the family goes about their familial duties, the boy watching the TV, which is only an empty sky, which is, in, a way, what we're watching (hoping what we’ve seen so many times will mean something to us), while his parents give birth, switch identities, have affairs, and such. It could be accurate to say it isn’t so much about what people do as the energy that circulates between people, and what that energy becomes once it’s worn and faced its own existential crisis. The family never expresses itself but the room surrounding them changes according to a) whether it wants to and b) whether it feels intellectually comfortable doing so.

The last bit with the man and woman going into the cinema and watching the infinitely tangential cartoon with the guy's legs stretching is a perfect resolution (though I missed about the first 5 minutes). Snow seems to be saying that no matter how much there is that we can't know we keep going back to inquisition to repeat the same useless, silly motions over and over again (the cartoon was made something like 50 years ago, and one of the reasons the movie never seems intellectually condescending is because Snow acknowledges his own repetition). The film is a triumph because within the silliness and the contortions we come out feeling like we've woken up to the looping nature of our own lives, like we know something new about ourselves.

1.11.03

baaab