Welcome to The Hobbyhorse’s inagural collection of capsule spotlights! I have always had a great appreciation for criticism that takes a break from the typical review format and embraces a more concise, impressionistic approach to get to the formal and aesthetic heart of why what is being discussed is worth seeking out. This will be a regular series and to give you an idea of what to expect I will salute two of the best practitioners of the form and two of the publications regularly publishing great work in this spirit: for the former: Jonathan Rosenbaum and Robert Christgau; and for the latter: The Drift’s Mentions and Screen Slate.
Now, without further ado, I’m very excited to present four capsules by four brilliant writers which, staying true to The Hobbyhorse’s core interests, cover two books and two films. Enjoy!
—Adam Moody, Founder/Editor
Classical Period (directed by Ted Fendt, 2018)
I knew my first bit of writing for The Hobbyhorse had to be on a film that engaged principally with the literary, the strand of this endeavor that I know far, far less about. For that reason and many more, Classical Period seemed like an ideal choice. A compact film that, by virtue of its limited scope and expansive interests, embodies the strengths of a kind of ultra-niche cinema that this sort of publication excels at evangelizing. It is the second feature film by Ted Fendt who is perhaps best known for his critical and translation work about and with Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet. While his previous trilogy of short films and first feature, Short Stay (2016), deal with subject matter more familiar to the American independent film firmament, Classical Period, at least superficially, has elements much more in common with these influences. It principally follows Cal (Calvin Engime), a young man living in Philadelphia, and his interactions with a small circle of peers, who are all unfailingly invested in the arts, to the point where it is more or less the only thing they discuss. The focus of the film is Dante's The Divine Comedy, with the centerpiece of this 62-minute film being a twelve minute-long group reading and discussion of Canto V of Purgatorio, but within its limits the subject matter sprawls: the Alexander Romance, the architectural failings of Frank Lloyd Wright, the English Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion, and so on and so forth. Fendt only offers a little bit of overt character insight, most notably with Evelyn (Evelyn Emile), Cal's friend, who in an unexpected moment pushes back at his eagerness to offer up his own insights.
Classical Period acts in many ways as a sort of rueful comedy, a reflection of the pitfalls inherent in the desire to disseminate academic information to any willing ears. But just as key is the inherent fascination with these topics, and, as captured in warm 16mm, the transformative nature of delivery on both the giver and receiver. By working so closely with footnotes, citations, and explanations, Fendt explicitly argues for the vitality of deep study as an engaging form in and of itself, one which takes on the structure of its environment and purpose, whether it be a solitary note-taking session or a passive-aggressive tête-à-tête. Through it all, a brilliant, erudite light radiates.
Ryan Swen is a freelance film critic, a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and has written for Reverse Shot, Criterion, Film Comment, and Hyperallergic among other publications. He hosts the podcast Catalyst and Witness and co-hosts the podcast 24 hours don’t make an ideology.
Warlock by Oakley Hall (published by NYRB Classics)
A six-shooter of a book, Warlock is told through revolving points of view that continually unsettle the narrative tropes of the western in search of a hero that cannot be found. There are the expected gunfights, yes—including a fictionalization of the shootout at the O.K. Corral—but as the novel progresses, the struggle of the striking miners in the titular town looms over with the final, fatal, confrontation between the principle male characters: Clay Blaisedell, Tom Morgan, and Johnny Gannon. While Hall’s West is very much a (white) man’s world (and, one senses, he means to show us it is all the worse for that), the primary female characters, Miss Jessie and Kate Dollar, are not stereotypical women-of-the-West—as if Joan Crawford's Vienna from Johnny Guitar (1954) were split in two. All of these characters speak and muse in a fatalistic, philosophic register that takes on the weight of prophecy. Set in the closing days of the so-called frontier—when the tools of genocide used against (in this case) the Apache lie all around, ready and willing to be turned against those now occupying the land—the book makes a compelling case that the United States will end how it began: in blood and fire.
Ian Maxton is a communist writer and critic. His work has been published in Always Crashing, Boston Review, Protean, and elsewhere.
This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A.E. Stallings (published by FSG)
Good formal poetry, like a pair of patent leather dress shoes or a well-knotted tie, should awaken a kind of low-grade masochism in the reader. The gentle prodding of a well-composed, metrical line is second to none — “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,”; “Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,” — in dragging my mind out of activity and into a pleasant, forced complacency. The verse of A. E. Stallings, with its roots in Classical literature and other Anglophone poets like Philip Larkin, is full of these lines. This Afterlife, a volume of selected poems released last year before her election as the Oxford Professor of Poetry this past June, serves as a consecration of and development upon the aesthetic programmes of these influences. Like them, Stallings is at her best when there is a wry sense of removal to her subjects and imagery. In “Asphodel,” a meditation on the titular flower’s role as a symbol of death in Homeric literature ends with “[…] a strange fragrance. It was sweet, / Like honey—but with hints of rotting meat. / An army of them bristled at my feet.’” Many of her best poems like “Tulips” and “Arrowhead Hunting” work in spite of ‘obvious’ rhymes and metres. Stallings has a keen ear, which was developed as early as her first collection in “A Postcard from Greece” in which a car crash is rendered in vivid, propulsive detail. On occasion, this sonorousness creates a mood of overwhelming silliness, as in the cloying alliteration of “Handbook of the Foley Artist'' and “Sea Urchins,” a procession of rhyming, pseudo haiku that overdevelop its central image until it becomes underwater kitsch. This is not, of course, to say that the poems Stallings writes in less obviously conventional forms share this problem. “First Love: A Quiz” uses its multiple-choice namesake to shocking effect in evoking sexual assault, and her poems about motherhood — especially in the short, alien lines of “Ultrasound” which reads like a tender recapitulation of Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” and the dream vision of “Lost and Found” — feel totally realised from the line down to the smallest clause. The poem which best represents Stallings’ work as a whole is “The Rosehead Nail,'' a sonnet celebrating the discrete, vanishing beauty of craftsmanship: “He was a God / Before anachronism.”
Colin Mylrea lives in Ottawa. His poetry and prose has been previously published in Still Alive, minor literature[s], and NY Tyrant.
Torque (directed by Joseph Kahn, 2004)
Some films have the misfortune of being dismissed solely based on their contemporaneous reputation. Case in point: Joseph Khan’s Torque, which was released three years after the original Fast and the Furious and was all but discarded as a knock-off of that franchise, with the unique distinction being that the action was driven by motorbikes instead of NOS-fueled muscle cars. Admittedly, the plot to Torque is nothing to write home about: a hotshot biker (Martin Henderson) finds himself wanted by both sides of the law when a hefty drug stash goes missing and he’s framed for the murder of a rival biker’s brother. Will our hero clear his name before the end credits roll? You almost certainly already know the answer, but the fun to be had is how Kahn, a seasoned music video director, brings us to that destination. Style as substance is the name of the game here, and not a single shot goes by that isn’t primed for maximum exhilaration. Super-saturated color grading, hyper-kinetic editing, a remarkable use of reflective surfaces, and more split-diopter shots to make Brian De Palma blush, Torque is visually firing on all cylinders all the time, and arguably the closest an American action film has come to matching the transcendent work of Hong Kong legend Tsui Hark. Two decades later, the Fast & Furious films have all but devolved into an inflated sense of self-importance while losing sight of what made them enjoyable to watch in the first place. Torque remains a dazzling one-off that satisfies demands and takes care of business in a brisk 84 minutes. When your film features two characters desperately attempting to outrun a burning fuel line connected to their vehicles through the busy streets of Downtown Los Angeles, or even just the sight of Adam Scott shoving a giant prop key into the assumed POV of a car’s ignition as a crafty means of forced perspective – all in the span of 12 frames of film – you know you’re in good hands.
Jake Tropila is a Los Angeles based film writer and editor with a BA in Film Criticism and Media Theory. He currently writes for Film Inquiry and podcasts for Optimism Vaccine.
The director of TORQUE and two other wonderful feature films is Joseph KAHN, not (the Wrath of) KHAN !!