So who's reading me and looking for Mizoguchi?
He has a tag now.
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You're welcome.

Looking over the responses to the show at MoMA,  people miss the most obvious points. Degas and Turner were trained and successful academic painters who later moved into near abstraction, but Degas was a painter for the age of mechanization. Turner may have ridden trains and painted pictures of them, but his process was anti-mechanical.

 "Heads of a Man and a Woman (Homme et femme, en buste)". c. 1877–80. Monotype on paper, plate: 2 13/16 x 3 3/16” (7.2 x 8.1 cm) . British Museum, London.

Degas was a painter after photography. His blurring is the blurring of motion in a photographic image. His technics is touched by the mechanization of Seurat.

Three Studies of Ludovic Halévy Standing, c. 1876-1877, Charcoal on paper, 12 5/8 x 18 7/8" (32 x 48 cm),
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 

Three Studies of Ludovic Halévy Standing, c. 1876-1877, Charcoal on paper, counterproof,
14 1/8 x 19 1/4" (35.9 x 48.9 cm), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 

He escapes the overdetermined by means of the underdetermined. He undercuts staid academicism not with relaxation but randomness. His work is never casual; it's observational and formalist. He's a conservative, and idealism can't be read into the work after the fact. He's not a painter against 19th century narrative tradition; he's not a Modernist; he's modern, with a connection to the present even greater than Manet, to the age of mechanical representation by way of Renoir (father and son), Jean Vigo, and Mizoguchi, to contemporary academic figuration, Jeff Wall and Thomas Struth, and Richter, and to abstraction by way of Seurat, to Gursky and to Richter again. Needless to say the big contemporary names stand in for the wide number of people with similar preoccupations, for whatever reason.

As I've said, Modernism is dead, modernity isn't.

"Forest in the Mountains (Forêt dans la montagne)” (c. 1890),monotype
in oil on paper, plate: 11 13/16 x 15 3/4 inches, MoMA, New York.

New and overdue tag for Degas

[The original video for Mizoguchi was deleted]
A very good film, maybe better, and a great one, at Lincoln Center. Both were digital projections. The restored Mizoguchi was difficult to watch (there are no previews on youtube). I was shocked to find out The Assassin was shot in film, given the extreme difference in texture between the interior and bright exterior shots. The framing and pacing of Hou's film owes a lot to video art. Video art, coming out of fine art, began as a struggle to come to terms with narrative by opposing it, as in Warhol or Wilson, or by trying to see motion as another physical formalism: the equivalent of Balanchine and Cunningham in dance, or Stella, from the 70's on. Warhol and Wilson work out of a fear, of time and death, things the others simply ignore.

Painting even at it's most dynamic in appearance is still static in fact: self-contained. A film is a series of images defined by their incompletion. The perfection is in the whole. Video art began as a kind of non-narrative art within implicitly narrative form, taken by its makers and audience to be more serious than movies as "performance art" was considered more serious than theater. But as time passed video and film have merged as visual arts, as visual poetry, while television has taken on the role of visual prose.

Hou a follower of Ozu; his film is arty in a sense Ozu's films weren't. A few of his shots are so strong on their own that they overwhelm the narrative. They were intended to, but they're in conflict with the ephemeral nature of projected light and time: they linger, like photographs.

Mizoguchi's films are tougher than Ozu's. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums is comfortably between so many categories -entertainment, melodrama, tragedy- as to be beyond them. It's a movie that's so good, so specific in the placement and timing of actors and camera and edits, and with that specificity feeding the engagement of the audience with the story and the form, that it deserves to be called art. Hou's film was made as art, and it is. It's a subtle difference at the highest level, the difference between being serious and wanting to be.

Hou uses digital technologies; Tarantino opposes them, while being equally academic in his relation to film and history. The only thing that bothers me is that the distinction is being forgotten. I've read nothing but praise for the Mizoguchi restoration; the only negative comment was from the man taking my ticket. He was right. A lot's been lost.
Not done with this.

New tags for old topics: Video Art/Gallery Film, Frank Stella

related: The Pictures Generation, Baldessari

Sansho Dayu (Sansho the Bailiff), 1954, Kenji Mizoguchi. The first shot.

Law/Justice/Wisdom
Judgment, discernment, discrimination. sophistication The ability to perceive and to communicate nuance, to describe what has not been named -categorized- previously. It is not creation but observation and description.

This is the root of what Kant might call genius. Genius is wisdom. It is non-cumulative. As a capacity/ability it can be learned but not taught. The record of past acts of wisdom is only that.
Technocrats are experts: craftsmen within the limits of their own knowledge. An honest technocrat is self-deprecating (Politics requires a vulgar definition of the world.) Fascism is politics without irony.
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Interesting reading the Times. Television critics are sharper more quick witted than most of the book or film critics. They don't take their jobs as seriously. The old line was that the best newspaper writing was in the Sports pages. Sports are trivial. Olberman started at ESPN. Jon Stewart was a stand up comic. Frank Rich is a theater critic. Observation begins with an ironic awareness of the self. Stand-up is ethnography, not sociology. David Graeber on the beginnings of sociology as the study of modern man by himself as disembodied, denatured.  Self-ethnography makes people nervous. Nervousness/comedy. Edmund Leach is a model of ironic awareness compared to this generation of academic dimwits. Marshall and Bernie Sahlins.
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Idiot Henry Farrell on determinism in Marx. If Ayn Rand rewrote Anna Karenina replicating the novel in her own words it would have the same meaning as Tolstoy. The 20th century was the first century where ideas preceded craft. The culmination of moderism in ideology. In language it's always a mistake to follow. "In the manner of..." Science is predicated on it. Marx was a writer.
Beethoven the first composer to fail by overreaching, but there's less arrogance in Wagner's bombast than in Wen Ho Lee's shy clockmaker smile. The face of a bombmaker.
Intellectual over-determination and moral under-determination (moral passivity.)
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Zhang Yimou's Hero. Remember A Touch of Zen. An epic that felt independent of Hollywood. Wirework has a theatrical beauty that Hollywood would never have developed on its own. It's too mannered, too recognizably fake.

You can call culture a market of ideas, except that the market as such is only one example of the capacity for invention.
Remember the Irish-Bulgarian bartender on whether or not Manhattanites will take over the neighborhood. "I hope not. I like the diversity." Interestingly with the changes in the country over the last generation the standard issue Americans aren't as offensive as the ones who take themselves seriously.

Again[?]
Sincerity reverses ends and means.
Saying "I love you" will not get you laid. Saying it well, might. A gesture is only distinctive if it is seen that way by others. The sincerity of the American singer-songwriter or indie filmmaker is based on a misunderstanding, and the "insincerity" of Hollywood is a misnomer. Moral seriousness and high purpose are best left for others to discover.
Kelly was more serious than Astaire, Ozu more serious that Mizoguchi.

Kenji Mizoguchi was one of the best and perhaps the greatest director in the history of film.

Film by its nature is about absence, the shadow of the thing no longer -if ever- here. Most film, however, ignores the obvious, claiming to be about presence: of the story, of the characters and the objects in the frame. Indeed what is most interesting in the greatest film -and what is at the heart of all American film- is the presence of the dream, the presence of the illusion, in all innocence. This is also true, of course, of the worst film.

"All technical refinements depress me. The perfection of photography, the big screens, the stereo sound, all of it makes possible a servile reproduction of nature; and that reproduction bores me... The artist's personality interests me more than the copying of an object." Jean Renoir

The most wonderful thing about Renoir, or Mizoguchi, or Ford, was their ability to make illusion itself profound. By contrast Crimson Gold, like most serious films fights the illusion, fights the effortless narrative of film mechanics, so as to avoid the banality that any intellectual now recognizes -has recognized for 50 years- as a very American/Capitalist form of false consciousness. Crimson Gold is about absence. But then its makers do not claim to be innocent, so we sense a purpose when a camera is placed—as an eye—to look at an object or event; we sense the gaze of the lens carrying a moral weight that we do not experience often in American visual culture. It was the genius of Renoir and Mizoguchi and Ford to have carried that complexity, not without intellect or thought, but also not without a certain casual, and in a sense common, popular, grace.
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2021.  Barthes and photography.