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alwaysalreadyangry · 3 years

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most of the UK reviews i’ve read of martin eden have been a disappointment, tbh. i don’t know if this is because critics have been busy with cannes or because outlets here just don’t have the space, or because it’s kind of seen as old news. i have seen no real engagement with the politics or form beyond a couple of cursory lines, and it’s a shame because... i think it’s really rich wrt those elements?

so i am looking again at the (wonderful) review from film comment last year and it’s such a shame that it’s not available freely online. so i thought i’d post it here behind a cut. it’s long but worth it imo (and also engages really interestingly with marcello’s other films). it’s by phoebe chen.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS Jan 3, 2020 BY PHOEBE CHEN

EARLY IN JACK LONDON’S 1909 NOVEL MARTIN EDEN, there is a scattering of references to technical ephemera that the 20th century will promptly leave behind: “chromos and lithographs,” those early attempts at large-scale reproduction; “a vast camera obscura,” by then a centuries-old relic; a bullfight so fervid it’s like “gazing into a kinetoscope,” that proto-cinematic spectacle of cloistered motion. These objects now seem like archaic curios, not much more than the flotsam of culture from the moment it shifted gears to mass production. It’s a change in scale that also ensnares the novel’s title character, a hardy young sailor and autodidact-turned-writer-célèbre, famously an avatar of London’s own hollowing transmutation into a figure for mass consumption. But, lucky him—he remains eminent now on the other side of a century; chance still leaves a world of names and faces to gather dust. Easily the most arresting aspect of Pietro Marcello’s new adaptation is its spotlight on the peripheral: from start to end, London’s linear Künstlerroman is intercut with a dizzying range of archival footage, from a decaying nitrate strip of anarchist Errico Malatesta at a workers’ rally to home video–style super 16mm of kids jiving by an arcade game. In these ghostly interludes, Marcello reanimates the visual detritus of industrial production as a kind of archival unconscious.

This temporal remixing is central to Marcello’s work, mostly experimental documentaries that skew auto-ethnographic and use elusive, essayistic editing to constellate place and memory, but always with a clear eye to the present. Marcello’s first feature, Crossing the Line (2007), gathers footage of domestic migrant workers and the nocturnal trains that barrel them to jobs across the country, laying down a recurring fascination with infrastructure. By his second feature, The Mouth of the Wolf (2009), there is already the sense of an artist in riveting negotiation with the scope of his story and setting. Commissioned by a Jesuit foundation during Marcello’s yearlong residency in the port city of Genoa, the film ebbs between a city-symphonic array and a singular focus on the story of a trans sex worker and her formerly incarcerated lover, still together after 20-odd years and spells of separation. Their lives are bound up with a poetic figuration of the city’s making, from the mythic horizon of ancient travails, recalled in bluer-than-blue shots of the Ligurian Sea at dawn, to new-millennium enterprise in the docklands, filled with shipping crates and bulldozers busy with destruction.

Marcello brings a similar approach to Martin Eden, though its emphasis is inverted: it’s the individual narrative that telescopes a broader history of 20th-century Italy. In this pivotal move, Marcello and co-writer Maurizio Braucci shift London’s Oakland-set story to Naples, switching the cold expanse of the North Pacific for the Mediterranean and its well-traversed waters. The young century, too, is switched out for an indeterminate period with jumbled signifiers: initial clues point to a time just shy of World War II, though a television set in a working-class household soon suggests the late ’50s, and then a plastic helicopter figurine loosely yokes us to the ’70s. Even the score delights in anachronism, marked by a heavy synth bass that perforates the sacral reverb of a cappella and organ song, like a discotheque in a cathedral. And—why not?—’70s and ’80s Europop throwbacks lend archival sequences a further sense of epochal collapse. While Marcello worked with researcher Alessia Petitto for the film’s analog trove, much of its vintage stock is feigned by hand-tinting and distressing original 16mm footage. Sometimes a medium-change jolts with sudden incongruity, as in a cut to dockworkers filmed in black and white, their faces and hands painted in uncanny approximations of living complexions. Other transitions are so precisely matched to color and texture that they seem extensions of a dream.

Martin’s writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.

Patchworked from the scraps of a long century, this composite view seems to bristle against a story of individual formation. It feels like a strange time for an artist’s coming-of-age tale adapted with such sincerity, especially when that central emphasis on becoming—and becoming a writer, no less—is upended by geopolitical and ecological hostility. At first, our young Martin strides on screen with all the endearing curiosity of an archetypal naïf, played by Luca Marinelli with a cannonballing force that still makes room for the gentler affects of embarrassment and first love. Like the novel, the film begins with a dockside rescue: early one morning, Martin saves a young aristocrat from a beating, for which he is rewarded with lunch at the family estate. On its storied grounds, Martin meets the stranger’s luminous sister, Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), a blonde-haloed and silk-bloused conduit for his twinned desires of knowledge and class transgression. In rooms of ornate stucco and gilded everything, the Orsinis parade their enthusiasm for education in a contrived show of open-mindedness, a familiar posture of well-meaning liberals who love to trumpet a certain model of education as global panacea. University-educated Elena can recite Baudelaire in French; Martin trips over simple conjugations in his mother tongue. “You need money to study,” he protests, after Elena prescribes him a back-to-school stint. “I’m sure that your family would not ignore such an important objective,” she insists (to an orphan, who first set sail at age 11).

Anyone who has ever been thrilled into critical pursuit by a single moment of understanding knows the first beat of this story. Bolting through book after book, Martin is fired by the ever-shifting measure of his knowledge. In these limitless stretches of facts to come, there’s the promised glow of sheer comprehension, the way it clarifies the world as it intoxicates: “All hidden things were laying their secrets bare. He was drunk with comprehension,” writes London. Marcello is just as attentive to how Martin understands, a process anchored to the past experiences of his working body. From his years of manual labor, he comes to knowledge in a distinctly embodied way, charming by being so literal. At lunch with the Orsinis, he offers a bread roll as a metaphor for education and gestures at the sauce on his plate as “poverty,” tearing off a piece of education and mopping up the remnants with relish. Later, in a letter to Elena, he recounts his adventures in literacy: “I note down new words, I turn them into my friends.” In these early moments, his expressions are as playful as they are trenchant, enlivened by newfound ways of articulating experience. His writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.

One of Marcello’s major structural decisions admittedly makes for some final-act whiplash, when a cut elides the loaded years of Martin’s incremental success, stratospheric fame, and present fall into jaded torpor. By now, he is a bottle-blonde chain-smoker with his own palazzo and entourage, set to leave on a U.S. press tour even though he hasn’t written a thing in years. His ideas have been amplified to unprecedented reach by mass media, and his words circulate as abstract commodities for a vulturine audience. For all its emphasis on formation, Martin Eden is less a story of ebullient self-discovery than one of inhibiting self-consciousness. There is no real sense that Martin’s baseline character has changed, because it hasn’t. Even his now best-selling writing is the stuff of countless prior rejected manuscripts. From that first day at the Orsini estate, when his roughness sticks out to him as a fact, he learns about the gulf between a hardier self-image and the surface self that’s eyed by others.

WITH SUCH A DEEPLY INHABITED PERFORMANCE by Marinelli, it’s intuitive to read the film as a character study, but the lyrical interiority of London’s novel never feels like the point of Marcello’s adaptation. Archival clips—aged by time, or a colorist’s hand—often seem to illustrate episodes from Martin’s past, punctuating the visual specificity of individual memory: a tense encounter with his sister cuts to two children dancing with joyous frenzy; his failed grammar-school entrance exam finds its way to sepia-stained shots of a crippled, shoeless boy. These insertions are more affective echoes than literal ones, the store of a single life drawn from a pool of collective happening.

But, that catch: writing in the hopes of being read, as Martin does (as most do), means feeding some construct of a distinctive self. While the spotlight of celebrity singles out the destructive irony of Martin’s aggressive individualism, Marcello draws from Italy’s roiling history of anarchist and workerist movements to complicate the film’s political critique, taking an itinerant path through factions and waves from anarcho-communism in the early 1900s to the pro-strike years of autonomist Marxism in the late ’70s. In place of crystalline messaging is a structure that parallels Martin’s own desultory politics, traced in both film and novel through his commitment to liberal theorist Herbert Spencer. Early on, Martin has an epiphanic encounter with Spencer’s First Principles (a detail informed by London’s own discovery of the text as a teen), which lays out a systematic philosophy of natural laws, and offers evolution as a structuring principle for the universe—a “master-key,” London offers. Soon, Martin bellows diatribes shaped by Spencer’s more divisive, social Darwinist ideas of evolutionary justice, as though progress is only possible through cruel ambivalence. Late in the film, an image of a drunk and passed-out Martin cuts to yellowed footage of a young boy penciling his name—“Martin Eden”—over and over in an exercise book, a dream of becoming turned memory.

In Marcello’s previous feature, Lost and Beautiful (2015), memory is more explicitly staged as an attachment to landscape. Like Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, Lost and Beautiful plays as a pastoral elegy but lays out the bureaucratic inefficiency that hastens heritage loss through neglect. Rolling fields make occasional appearances in Martin Eden, but its Neapolitan surroundings evoke a different history. Far from the two oceans that inspired a North American tradition of maritime literature, the Mediterranean guards its own idiosyncrasies of promise and catastrophe. Of the Sea’s fraught function as a regional crossroads, Marcello has noted, in The Mouth of the Wolf, a braiding of fate and agency: “They are men who transmigrate,” the opening voiceover intones. “We don’t know their stories. We know they chose, found this place, not others.” Mare Nostrum—“Our Sea”—is the Roman epithet for the Mediterranean, a possessive projection that abides in current vernacular. Like so many cities that cup the sea, Naples is a site of immigrant crossing, a fact slyly addressed in Martin Eden with a fleeting long shot of black workers barreling hay in a field of slanted sun, and, at the end, a group of immigrants sitting on a beach at dusk. Brief, but enough to mark the changing conditions of a new century.

Not much is really new, however: not the perils of migration, nor the proselytizing individualists, nor the media circus, nor the classist distortions of taste, nor, blessedly, the kind of learning for learning’s sake that stokes and sustains an interest in the world. Toward the end of the film, there is a shot of our tired once-hero, slumped in the back seat of a car, that cuts to sepia stock of children laughing and running to reach the camera-as-car-window, as if peering through glass and time. It recalls a scene from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, which leaps backward through a similar gaze, when the weary angel Cassiel looks out of a car window at the vista of ’80s Berlin and sees, instead, grainy footage of postwar streets strewn with rubble in fresh ruin. Where human perception is shackled to linearity, these wool-coated and scarfed seraphs—a materialization of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”—see all of time in a simultaneous sweep, as they wander Berlin with their palliative touch. Marcello’s Martin Eden mosaics a view less pointedly omniscient, but just as filled with a humanist commitment to the turning world, even as Martin slides into disillusion. All its faces plucked from history remind me of a line from a Pasolini poem: “Everything on that street / was human, and the people all clung / to it tightly.”

Phoebe Chen is a writer and graduate student living in New York.

#martin eden #film

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theatreakasuna-store · 5 years

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Given the massive role Komushi ( his death ) played in shaping Sasori, arguably the reason Sasori began & became obsessed with human puppets as opposed to the prosthetics he had started with, it’s wild the sheer lack of him in the fandom related to Sasori

But anyway points I don’ t think I’ve gone over enough in my hc about Sasori & his pre-Akatsuki relationships.

Komushi was the first person Sasori tried to “ repair ” by bonding his medical knowledge with puppetry. At the time this was unheard of & it was something Sasori had been spending a lot of his free time working on. When Komushi lost his arm Sasori saw the perfect opportunity to take his studies for a test run. This wasn’t approved by the council but Komushi was naturally extremely supportive of it & Sasori simply couldn’t see anything wrong with trying as it would ultimately help Komushi who had lost his arm. They did this together & Chiyo was shocked by it because, yes, it had worked. The only problem was Sasori didn’t have approval to do it. He did it without permission, on his own, in his workshop with the only other person approving of it beside himself being Komushi which neither of them had the authority to decide.

Keep in mind please that Komushi & Sasori were both literal children. At this time Sasori was AT MOST 13 years old & Komushi the same. The dangers of Komushi having a prosthetic arm filled with poison missed them both which what lead to the extreme tragedy. Though Sasori was incredibly intelligent & far-seeing he over looked Komushi’s clumsy nature in the hopes of helping him improve as a shinobi with a powerful prosthetic arm. This was one of those moments where sentiment overshadowed logic.

Initially however this was a great success. Chiyo was impressed & so was Komushi’s mother who was over-joyed that Sasori had saved Komushi from a difficult life of trying to adapt with a missing limb.

Had Koumshi had lived longer all four of them planned to take this to the council so these powerful prosthetic limbs could become a regular part of Suna’s medical & military arsenal. Koumshi however accidentally poisoned himself with the arm setting off a perfect storm of events that lead to Sasori becoming obsessed with human puppets.

This is also another layer of the disconnect that built up between him & Chiyo & Sasori’s uncertainty to her feelings toward him. In a way, you see, Chiyo, as a member of the council had to shall we say investigate Sasori. Not only that but as a human being when something happens & you cant fix it you naturally look for answers & ask questions & even look for some place to throw blame so on top of this again I’m sure there was an expression of disappointment upon Komushi’s death given Sasori wasn’t there & he may have been the only one who stood a chance of saving him.

Although the reality of this is slim. Even if Sasori had been there Sasori has explained himself the antidote was extremely complex & even he had difficulties with it. Also take into account that when Kankuro was poisoned it was a minor scratch & caused days of suffering, Komushi surely directly ingested much more than a drop worth. In fact it seemed to have been enough to erode his skin & from what we understand Komushi died after maybe only an hour or so. It wasn’t long enough for Sasori to even arrive. By the time Sasori got the Komushi was dead.

ANOTHER important thing to note was that with his dying breaths Komushi begged Chiyo not to let Sasori be blamed for what happened. I think obviously these last wishes went unfulfilled because of course Sasori came under investigation. This was terribly worsened by the fact Sasori had taken his body & made him into a puppet. I wouldn’t say this was in any way “planned” & thats why we have the gut wrenching scene of Komushi’s mother’s anguished screams, her clinging to Sasori & begging that he fix Komsushi, that if he could fix his arm then surely he could fix his body too.

This caused a bunch of outstanding issues. One was a final break in Sasori’s sanity, a final solidification of Sasori’s disillusion with the worth of human life & its fragility, strongly followed by contempt for his village & their practises & another being Sasori’s research beginning to focus on human puppets as a result. At some point here Sasori realised how much potential human puppetry had, the kind of things he could harness & unlock with it. He was driven to learn more.

In the meantime the council wanted to hold Sasori entirely accountable for Koumshi’s death & further punished for the abomination of coveting his body into that of a puppet. Chiyo was the main force behind stopping this. As a member & as someone present for these events Chiyo was able to stand in Sasori’s favour. This was however kept pretty hush-hush, as was the entire incident outside of the council & the Kazekage. Sasori didn’t even know how hard Chiyo went to prevent a punishment from befalling him. Chiyo’s relationship with Komushi’s mother was also severely damaged as a result such she had to stand against her to protect Sasori.

Most of what Sasori knew however was that the higher ups of his village had the audacity to be pretty pissed off with him & to think he was worthy of blame. He was also under the impression Chiyo felt similarly based on the rift that had already formed between them & the fact Chiyo took it upon herself to investigate him.

Sometime in all this nonsense Chiyo put herself to work & began developing a Jutsu that would allow one to transfer their own life into that of a puppet. Later she told Sasori she created this jutsu for him which Sasori was naturally shocked by. I always found this interesting because at the time naturally one would assume that what Chiyo meant by this was that she wanted to give life to Sasori’s parent puppets however this was always odd because there was two of them & one of her & I always wondered how that would have worked.

However now I really don’t think that Chiyo developed this jutsu with “reanimating” Sasori’s parents in mind. Only one puppet can be brought to life with one life. I think the reason Chiyo made this was for Komushi. Reasoning that if she brought back Komushi all this would end. However these events progressed far too fast & a complete lack of communication & understanding on all ends only made things so much worse therefore Chiyo could not save Komushi or Sasori.

Sasori’s need to continue researching human puppets put him constantly in an awkward position as the council um’ed & er’ed about whether it was allowable. It teetered with no official stance other than “we dont like this” due to the fact this was a time of war & was pushing Suna to its limits & though this was gruesome & inhumane they also had to take into account the advantage of human puppets & Sasori’s research as a whole. However Sasori was in hot water again with Hiruko’s death. I detailed before that Hiruko was not a native sand shinobi, he was from a neighbouring allied village who was wounded on the battlefield & brought to Suna, the nearest & most equipped village to treat him. The problem was however that Hiurko mysteriously died & when he did Sasori was fast to claim his body for research materials. This lead to the belief that Sasori had killed him to supply himself with a new test subject perse & the fact is this time its actually true. Sasori was tasked with helping Hiurko get back to health as he was part of Suna’s medical team along with Chiyo ( Side headcanon that pretty much all Suna’s puppet ninjas doubled as med nins. Reason being puppeteers & med ninjs functioned similar on the battle field so it made sense to combine them & Chiyo had used her medical skill to introduce poisons to puppets ages prior. ) however the damage done to Sasori & his regard for human lives was piratically irreparable at this point. Sasori’s obsession had set in & he could never go back to being a medical ninja again. He could not go back to ‘saving lives’ when he had an overwhelming sense of that being pointless. Hiruko died because Sasori wouldn’t put in effort to save anyone knowing that everyone dies sooner or later despite his best efforts. So he figured Hiruko could battle forever as a human puppet. A needed resource. This time though the council couldn't ignore it or excuse it. They believed Sasori had truly taken a life to supplement his research & they feared he would begin doing this with innocent Sunagakure citizens & the risk was too high, particularly as Sasori’s behaviour had become too strange to ignore. He had already became unruly & defiant & completely focused on his puppets. This time Chiyo had to side with the council & the Kazekage against Sasori. Thats when Sasori left.

IN GENERAL, the point I’m trying to make here was that Koumshi is SO MUCH more important to Sasori’s story then I’ve ever seen him given credit for. I also wanted to confront the “impression” that Koumshi’s death was a planned act on Sasori’s behalf bc being real when I watched that ep when it first came out I was a bit confused as to how to interpret events as well. It does seem to heavily suggest this was a purposeful act & I might have thought that too if I only had that episode of Sasori’s history alone to go with. However when I blend it to the other things we know about Sasori I think rather the suggestion of it being planned was suppose to indicate that this is how everyone else interpreted Sasori’s actions. Add that with all Chiyo’s guilt about everything being her fault & their initial interactions leading to Sasori’s death, with Sasoris absolute hatred toward his village.

Sasori was a stoic of an extreme degree. Chiyo even explained to Sakura when she criticised him that none of this was his fault, that all the fault lied with her & the sand village. She then later went on to confirm that perhaps Sasori wasnt entirely the emotionless monster he allowed & helped himself to be portrayed as. He allowed himself to take the last hit that saved them both.

#⊰ ° ⧗◞ HEADCANONS ⊱#no one:#me again with all this shit: :)#long post

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