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Thursday, May 17, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

The watch list for any academic 
film course almost always rounds 
out to something like: a Chaplain 
comedy, some Technicolor musical, 
four impenetrable foreign films, 
two other silent-era juggernauts 
and Citizen Kane. Which is fine 
— in order to begin to form an 
understanding of how cinema has 
developed and grown and evolved 
in the past hundred years, it’s 
absolutely necessary to revisit the 
timeless classics time and time 
again.
Now, without disputing the 
all too well-deserved status of 
something like “Le Voyage dans la 
Lune” or “City of Lights,” there’s a 
simple question to be asked: How 
beneficial is it to force yourself to 
enjoy something just because of 
the cultural weight it holds? It’s 
essentially an a question of pleasure 
versus purpose; when I sit down to 
read a book, do I try to wade my way 
through Tolstoy, or do I reread “The 
Lightning Thief”? How great can 
something truly be if the process of 
experiencing it isn’t?
In my own personal experience, 
I’ve found plenty of both. I’ve 
sat down to watch classic films 
that I end up loving as truly great 
entertainment, and I’ve stood up 
from watching certain undisputed 
classics to find that the only thing I 
watched in the previous two hours 
was the same two gifs on the front 
page of Reddit. It’s difficult because 
as someone who likes to believe 
they are fan of cinema, to walk away 
from something like “Tokyo Story” 
feeling like I could have dozed off is 
disappointing — more for me than 
for the movie itself.
Which brings us to the French 
New Wave.

I wanted personally to challenge 
myself with learning more about 
cinema’s past, and everywhere 
I looked pointed to this seven to 
eight year period beginning in the 
late 1950s. It’s probably the most 
paradigm shifting movement in 
cinema in the past seventy years. 
It’s probably an era that would 
be mentioned by any accolade-
encumbered director were they 
to be asked about influence and 
produced a great swath of truly 
entertaining pieces of work that 
will burn the whole point of writing 
this column to the ground. 
Along with my decades-late 
judgment for a slate of undisputed 
classics, I hope to provide enough 
historical context for the films so 
that I can fully understand the 
implications of the movement. 
While the main point of this series 
is to look back on these films with 
a modern eye, learning about their 
place in the history of the art form 
is just as important. It’ll be my first 
time viewing most of these films 
as well. Putting it all together, my 
goal by the end is to have created 
something that is as readable as it is 
informative. A lot of the resources 
related to the topic already written 
online read like textbooks, so let’s 
hope this never reaches that.
In order to best understand the 
impetus for such a significant shift 
in the world of cinema, I found a 
good starting point in Alexandre 
Astruc’s 1948 essay “The Birth of 
a New Avante-Garde: La Camera-
Stylo,” an almost prophetic essay 
published ten years before the 
New Wave exploded onto the 
international stage. In his essay, 
Astruc writes about the “tired 
and conventional everyday films” 
which “put our sensibilities in 
danger of being blunted,” a rather 
irate comment on the rote and 

predictable nature of early post-war 
cinema. Largely, this comes from, as 
Francois Truffaut would later write, 
cinema’s plague of underestimate; 
the majority of studio productions 
going to market at that time were 
reproductions or recreations of 
stories already told in some other 
medium, mainly literature and 
theater. It wasn’t until the New 
Wave that cinema began to develop 
its own language as an art form, 
Astruc even writing in his essay 
that “from this day onward it will 
be possible for cinema to produce 
works which are equivalent in 
their profundity to the works of 
Faulkner and Malraux.” It was the 
New Wave that first transformed 
cinema from “nothing more than 
a show” (Astruc) that sold tickets 
and filled auditoriums to an artistic 
medium capable of competing with 
the best. Astruc called this new 
era of cinema the age of “Camera-
Stylo” (or Camera-Pen) in reference 
to the authorship filmmakers were 
beginning to take over their pieces 
of work. Film would no longer be a 
second thought.
It’s difficult to point exactly to 
the first film of the movement, as the 
“French New Wave” designation 
was created retrospectively. After 
a bit of research, I found that 
a good place to start is Claude 
Chabrol’s 1958 film “Le Beau 
Serge” (“Handsome Serge”), as it 
is the first of the major films by the 
New Wave’s six major directors. 
“Serge” is the story of a successful 
Frenchman, Francois, returning to 
the town of his youth and reuniting 
with his childhood best friend 
Serge, a burned-out drunk who 
never left.

Riding the New Wave: film 
hunks, cameras and pens

FILM COLUMN
MUSIC REVIEW

LAURA DZUBAY
Daily Arts Writer

STEPHEN SATARINO
Daily Arts Writer

“Tranquility 
Base Hotel & 
Casino”

Arctic Monkeys

Domino

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

Tranquility 
Base 
Hotel 
& 
Casino is nothing like anything 
Arctic Monkeys has done before. 
It is, however, like things other 
bands have done. It’s particularly 
impossible not to be reminded of 
David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust in 
the face of this concept album, full of 
science fiction, rockstars and droopy, 
whispering vocals. Early in a first 
listen, it’s easy to wonder whether 
Arctic Monkeys are trying to pick up 
a mantle that most modern musical 
culture has already abandoned.
Luckily, the album proves to be 
a feat of its own, coming into itself 
with an array of darkly whimsical 
space rock. “Golden Trunks” is 
pleasantly choral, and the layered 
but catchy pop of “Four Out Of Five” 
is only bolstered by 
creative images like 
“special effects of 
my mind’s eye.” The 
lyrics 
album-wide, 
while 
generally 
strong, aren’t quite as 
consistently airtight 
as they have been 
on some of Alex Turner’s previous 
work, but they do play a crucial role 
both in creating some of the album’s 
central confusions and in helping to 
untangle that web later on.
The 
pesky 
question 
of 
genuineness also bubbles up a few 
more times throughout the album’s 
11-track span: After all, the band isn’t 
quite old enough yet to be washed-
out and mopey, but in many of the 
songs here, they are anyway. But 
one has to give the layers of the 
music due credit, and between the 
sweeping, hypnotic backgrounds 
and loungey vocals, there is a 
genuine message here that promises 
that Arctic Monkeys is nowhere near 
done being edgy, creative and above 
all — exploratory.
One of the things that Tranquility 
Base does right is that it grounds 
itself as a concept album and as a 
work of science fiction, it completely 
hits the mark. The album is colored 
with the aloof skepticism that, 
beneath the surface, characterizes 
science fiction as a genre. It’s a lush 
dive into imagination coupled with 
an on-guard wariness of the future.
The album also makes good 
use of its chosen vantage point: A 

hotel and casino on the moon. The 
setting of outer space invites a range 
of perspectives, from the inward 
to the literally astronomical, and 
in the midst of a dreamy, druggy 
environment — a fitting canvas 
for space — Arctic Monkeys make 
an effort to explore them all. 
Sometimes this is to a fault — songs 
like the dread-infused “She Looks 
Like Fun” teeter on the verge of 
being muddled and directionless, 
and “One Point Perspective” is so 
incomprehensible that even the 
narrator himself admits, “Bear 
with me, man, I’ve lost my train 
of thought,” by the end. However, 
this same lyric also confirms the 
album’s self-awareness: For the most 
part, the sprawling confusion feels 
intentional, ultimately leading up to 
a jointed and unified end.
The meaning of the album can 
perhaps 
best 
be 
accessed 
through 
its 
final 
track, 
“The Ultracheese.” 
The 
preceding 
tracks 
are 
often 
showy or occupied 
with 
themes 
of 
entertainment, 
from music to cinema, but this 
is where the trajectory finally 
becomes clear and the work climbs 
to a genuine end. Revelations like, 
“I’ve still got pictures of friends 
on the wall / I might look as if I’m 
deep in thought / But the truth is 
I’m probably not,” expose the gaps 
in the narrator’s own dramatic, 
attractive façades of fame. This final 
narrator questions the authenticity 
of past friendships and laments the 
doomed simplicity of “Just trying 
to orbit the sun / ... Just trying to 
be kind to someone,” allowing the 
album to stretch back toward a kind 
of societal truth linked with humble 
self-acknowledgment.
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino 
may be bereft of a lot of the 
unapologetic verve that made earlier 
records like AM so electrifying and 
fresh, but it replaces this sentiment 
with a new (and more helpful) axis 
from which to understand the band. 
Although the album does sometimes 
veer into the sort of nettling 
pretension that makes fellow artists 
like Father John Misty stand out in a 
bad way, it is held together by a well 
crafted and ultimately clever story of 
fame, alienation and spectacle.

Arctic Monkeys 
journey to space