The Work's aesthetic: anti-illusionism, the hostile/scopophilic audience, self-forgetting as Grail, and the late turn to entertainment

pivotal · UNDATED (JOI's filmmaking years; the Work reviewed 11-20 Nov YDAU)

• When: UNDATED as to making; the appraisals are Hal's, Joelle's, and Mario's across 11-20 Nov YDAU (Hal binge-watches the cartridges in the E.T.A. viewing rooms)
• What: Where event 10 catalogues, the present scenes anatomize the aesthetic. JOI worked against realism: he "had no interest in suckering the audience with illusory realism," using "rank amateurs" reading "with an amateur's wooden self-consciousness off cue cards" to "strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting" (scene 179, on Accomplice! and the Bresson/Brecht method; Cosgrove Watt his DeNiro-to-Scorsese lead). Critics noted "the frequent presence of audiences inside Himself's films," "always either dumb and unappreciative or the victims of some grisly entertainment-mishap" (scene 172). Joelle's verdict on the early oeuvre: "Technically gorgeous... But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness," "the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication" — yet with buried "flashes of something," and, in Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, a hidden moral thesis reading the four-minute Bernini "Ecstasy of St. Teresa" shot as "self-forgetting as the Grail," "the mediated transcendence of self" (scene 150) — the very ambition his final opus (event 16) will chase. Hal reads The American Century as Seen Through a Brick as an attack on the "myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive" (scene 135). Late, JOI abandoned anticonfluentialism, "so desperate to make something that ordinary U.S. audiences might find entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting that he had had professionals and amateurs alike emoting wildly all over the place" (scene 179). Texture from the archive: JOI thought sneaking the family's dog into the Hayden opening of Kinds of Light "just a good one on the Hayden" (155); filmed a mounting blizzard from a spindle-backed chair with "nondigital cameras" (179); recruited passersby Kenkle and Brandt off the T at 0200 to be black-veiled attendants in Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony (167); Mario ran tokens for the God/Devil Tarot-poker shoot of Pre-Nuptial Agreement in the Back Bay (183). Hal's private thesis: "one way of looking at the film-obsession's endurance is that Himself was never really successful or accomplished at filmmaking" (179) — a claim Mario disputes. The endnote apparatus names the slapstick's ancestry: his "Picaresque" register points to "the comic-Surrealist tradition of Bay Area avant-gardeists like Peterson & Broughton," whose "Potted Psalm" mother-and-Death material and The Cage's "cranial-imprisonment and disconnected-eyeball stuff are pretty obvious touchstones in a lot of Himself's more parodic-slapstick productions" (n331 p. 1072); indeed "J. O. Incandenza loved this film [Peterson's The Cage — 'mostly about a peripatetic eyeball rolling around'] and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could" (n366 p. 1077). [Rich for the Entertainment question; resolves nothing about the Work's worth.]