[...] (more…) Originally posted on:Spoutblog [...]

Ed Burns makes good movies.

- Sujewa

Sujewa –

As someone who has written kind words about Benten in the past, I’m scratching my head wondering what triggered your excessive diatribe. Was it my dig at Ed Burns that set you off?

My likening of mumblecore to the Beats has nothing to do with their aesthetics, approach, technique, etc. As I said in my first sentence, it has to do with the tendency to group artists under a single umbrella, thereby making it easier for journalists (and others) to proffer generalizations about a “movement” without actually digging deeper into the individual works.

I find it both disrespectful and presumptuous (not to mention a bit silly) of you to assume that my “questionable hype” (??) is motivated by anything other than sincerity.

So is the Mumblecore movement over now that we’re all talking about it? Wait! Don’t answer that until Andrew Bujalski makes a few more films (just to be safe)!

Hey Karina,

Yup, you are right, at least LOL (the version I saw) is unusual with those people-making-sounds clips cut in between the story. KOTM is only kind of unusual due to the nudity.

But have you tried reading Naked Lunch? Very strange book. Also, On The Road was unusual at the time - the subject matter & the story/”non-story” it tells, plus the way it was written - one long single paragraph.
By comparison, as a whole, the M-core stuff does not seem as experimental or unusual as the writings of the Beats; but yes, LOL & KOTM are more unusual than most movies & most M-core movies.

On the plus side, as Dogme 95 has done on an international scale, M-core is continuing to legitimize no/lo-budget, DV, no-star filmmaking - at least for some fest programmers, theater programmers & media outlets; which in the future can yield some very interesting films by other filmmakers - as the first wave of punk rock led to the Bad Brains, & later Nation of Ulysses, Fugazi, & probably even influenced DIY bands like They Might Be Giants, etc.

Maybe Beats & Punks are not good bunches of artists to compare to M-core, because Beats & Punks were interested in politics, activism & also issues dealing with minorities, foreigners/the others. It is this lack of concern for significant elements of the wider world (so far) by M-core filmmakers that makes me reluctant to place them on a same level of creative significance as the Beats. The Beats were very actively concerned with not only their own experience, but also people & things from other cultures, countries, including “foreign” things in their own country (black Jazz in segregated 40’s, Asian religion, etc.)- that openness & concern gives the beats, in my opinion, a generosity of spirit that M-core so far has not demonstrated.
This is not to say that “white” kids making movies about how difficult it is to commnicate with other “white” kids is not important - to me these two groups of artists (Beats & M-core) are in two different levels(Beats= local & global; self,friends & others vs. M-core=self & friends only) when it comes to what they are interestd in in this world. Jarmusch movies such as Down By Law, Mystery Train, Night On Earth are more Beat than any M-core movie I’ve seen. Although, the road trip in Puffy does remind me of On The Road a tiny, tiny bit.

One of the main differences that may account for the different concerns that Beats have vs. what M-core has may be their ages: the Beats were close to their mid-30’s or older when their stuff broke through to culture/a wider audience. M-core are all closer to mid-20’s, as Grant says on top. It may make sense to look at what M-core filmmakers do around 35 to see how they compare with what the Beats did around their mid-30’s (On The Road, Howl, etc.).

Anyway, I am all for all kinds of real indie flicks getting notice. But I am also interested in keeping things in proper perspective; and thus far the achievements of early John Cassavetes & that generation of indie filmmakers, or for that matter the Warhol generation of underground filmmakers or the early Jarmusch/Spike Lee/Hal Hartley era of indie filmmakers have not been matched by M-core or other filmmaking peers of mine (people who are making films in roughly the same point in time/right now- decade 1 of ’00’s).

It is possible that a significant amount of time needs to pass - like maybe a decade - to see what kind of influence & value a group of filmmakers might have on the medium & the industry, also the world. So this topic (how M-core relates in value to 80’s & 90’s indie film giants) will have to be revisted in 10 - 20 years.

That was a long response, sorry about that

See ya in NYC this week! Looking forward to the Gen DIY panel, possible catching Hannah, & also of course the blogger meet up.

- Sujewa

Sujewa,

Cut it out. You’re being an annoying prat.

More substantively, just because someone analogizes Mumblecore to the Beats doesn’t mean every single aspect of the Beats apply to Mumblecore. How could it? We’re in a very different historical moment, the people are different, we’re talking about a generally different medium than the literary Beats worked in. It’s an impossibility. Since Mumblecore is heavily influenced by Cassavetes, who has a lot of similarities to the literary Beats, the analogy isn’t out of left field.

Even more substantively, I find Mumblecore a lot more interesting than the Beats, whom I find severely underwhelming and massively overrated. I find Mumblecore taking precisely a tack towards the greatest of American literary traditions - the ambiguity and close attention to social situations of Henry James and Edith Wharton, Fitzgerald and the clear-eyed view of American life of Richard Yates.

actually, “burritoboy,” what’s fucking annoying is someone equating “mumblecore” to james, yates, et. al. you can’t be serious; yet sadly, yes, you are.

i don’t think sujewa is being unnecessarily harsh here. (leave that to me.) he’s asking questions; one can only assume why some take such offense to this (insecurity?). i do think the interview was slightly hype-y, but that’s not a bad thing– obviously andrew and aaron have something to sell. i think they may have overstated the case a bit (sorry, but you guys do come across as “omg, no one’s ever done this before!” to which i would reply, “um, no, that’s not really true”), but that’s the sign of any salesman.

“More substantively, just because someone analogizes Mumblecore to the Beats doesn’t mean every single aspect of the Beats apply to Mumblecore. How could it? We’re in a very different historical moment, the people are different, we’re talking about a generally different medium than the literary Beats worked in. It’s an impossibility.”

if it’s such an “impossibility,” why was the analogy made in the first place? again, i think andrew and aaron overstated the case, but they obviously believe in “mumblecore,” so it’s to be expected. i don’t think hyping something equals insincerity. it *could*, however, mean that perhaps one isn’t especially receptive or keen on skepticism.

personally, i’m not much of a fan. i’ve seen a few of the films (even saw funny ha ha way back in 2004). i *do* think there’s quite a bit of narcissism going on and a pointed aversion to events/people outside the filmmakers’ cozy bubbles. i think this is one of the ways in which “mumblecore” differs from cassavetes: cassavetes made films about other people (e.g., shadows, killing of a chinese bookie, love streams)– not just about himself or people remarkably similar to him. another difference is that cassavetes’ characters are all going through some sort crises: lelia’s racial rejection, the forst’s disintegrating marriage, mabel’s breakdown and her husband’s betrayal, cosmo’s murder and double-cross, etc. “mumblecore” is like someone’s very ill-informed take on the man’s work. “oh, like, he just, like, turned on the camera and, like, caught his friends sitting around and, like, talking about stuff and it was all, like, totally improvised.” cassavetes stretched beyond himself and his comfort zones. his characters spoke and acted as if they knew what they were doing– they didn’t. they faked it and fooled themselves worse than they fooled anyone else. you come away from a cassavetes film thinking about the characters critically; there is no such critical insight offered in “mumblecore”– it is a completely surface movement. and anyway, how *can* there be? there’s no conflict, no ugliness, no darkness, nothing weird or unsettling. “mumblecore” characters are one-note, bland, passive-aggressive, privileged, and well-kept. it’s basically the same character in different hues of pasty skin. a bit like marie antoinette for the emo/scene crowd. it’s a great paean to consumerism: crush on someone, hook up w/ them, get bored w/ them, throw them away. yeah, cuz people are like neat little toys. sure, i guess that’s “revolutionary.” funny, i thought mtv already had that whole white, middle- to upper-class post-collegiate, consumerist demographic nailed.

one thing i like about “mumblecore,” though, is that it’s inspired me to make my own film about working-class twentysomethings who come from broken homes, are riddled w/ stress about work and money, and deal w/ their resentment and anxiety w/ violence, drugs, sex, etc. enough of this precious, coddled, mediocre, middle-american jive. the thought of having swanberg, et. al. be the “cinematic voice of my generation” chills me to my core. please, not all of us are self-obsessed, blinkered, spoiled d-bags.