Tag Archives: The Gus Van Sant Podcast

The Gus Van Sant Podcast No. 4: Lisa Purse on Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993)

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Lisa Purse on EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES (Gus Van Sant, 1993)

I was truly delighted when Lisa Purse agreed to talk to me about EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES. Lisa is a Professor of Film Studies at the University of Reading, one of the most brilliant scholars on action movies, and a nuanced thinker on questions of mediations, conflicts, identities. I wanted to have her on the podcast because I thought she might expand my thinking on EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES, and she did. In the podcast we discuss seeing the film when it was first released, seeing it now, and explore the hows and whys of changing responses. We note the context of ‘New Queer Cinema’ and the different kinds of experiments that were then taking place. EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES  is a film that refuses seriousness and we speculate that maybe neither of us was then in a place where we could recognise the value of that. We discuss how the film continues Van Sant’s interest in ‘The Road’, and discuss movement and flow, as rhythm, narrative device, formal strategy, and condensed ideation. Is it a film that’s trying to do too much? B. Ruby Rich wrote on how the film contains references to forms of collective action. Is it more of its time than we first realised? We discuss the film as a form of active allyship that is not to be sneezed at, and note the hostility of its initial reception, referencing B. Ruby Rich’s contention that with this film Van Sant fell into the category of a female director (at least for some) and therefore got treated as one.

 

The Podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The Roseane Barr clip may be seen here:

The paper bag scene may be seen here:

 

 

Lisa Purse’s latest publication is:

 

 

 

José Arroyo

The Gus Van Sant Podcast 5A: To Die For (1995)

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The first of two podcasts on Gus Van Sant’s TO DIE FOR (1995), this one with Matt Hays, journalist, co-editor with Tom Waugh of McGill-Queen’s Press’ QUEER FILM CLASSICS series, and a professor of film at Concordia University and Marianopolis College. Matt’s reviewed Criterion’s recent edition of the film for the current CINEASTE and I wanted to pick up on some of the excellent points he raises there: how is the film a turning point in Van Sant’s career? What is this shifting of gears between Van Sant’s more commercial and more esoteric works? Was the film prescient? What does it tell us about celebrity culture, the media and politics? What is the film’s view of heterosexual relations? Is there a ‘gay gaze’ on the male bodies? What does it tell us about race in America? What are the formal tensions running through the film? It’s structure has been compared to that of CITIZEN KANE and RASHOMON. How so? We agree that Kidman gives one of her greatest performances but have Matt Dillon and Joaquim Phoenix been overlooked? All this and much more can be heard here:

 

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

Matt’s article and the list of questions that arose from it:

José Arroyo

The Gus Van Sant Podcast 3: My Own Private Idaho (1991)

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We discuss one of the films that very much marked me, the image above was the image on my letterhead in the time we still used snail mail. In the accompanying podcast we discuss the film’s historical significance. Was it a ‘film that (made) history’? We discuss its relationship to ‘New Queer Cinema’. We speculate on whether the film queers Shakespeare and discuss the film in relation to Welles’ Chimes at Midnight. We comment on the significance of the casting, the contributions of River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, Udo Kier and others and what their contributions to the film might be. We also discuss in detail particular scenes, the one where the magazine covers come to life; the rhyming musical/ hustler interludes, the great campfire scene. …and much more.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The Criterion blog on Shakespeare in relation to Private Idaho + Jarman’s Tempest etc that Richard mentions in the podcast may be found here:

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8551-my-own-private-idaho-s-outsider-twist-on-shakespeare

 

More info, clips, examples, a bibliography below:

magazine sequence:

Campfire Sequence:

Time lapse:

Incest and Super8:

Still sex straight and gay:

Funerals and Endings:

I’d never seen Chimes at Midnight until now and found it a film of many pleasures: Gielgud’s speaking of the verse; Welles performance as Falstaff, surprisingly subtle in places; the compositions and look which still feel arresting; the opportunity of seeing Fernando Rey interact with Gielgud, Welles with Margaret Rutherford; and on another note: I hadn’t realised the walls of my birthplace played such a role in this film. The film is also very instructive in that Keith Baxter’s performance as Prince Hal is nowhere as effective as Keanu Reeves’ in MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, no matter how he speaks the language. Cinema is about conveying particular kinds of embodiment and Reeves is so much more effective at conveying a patrician demeanor, a rebellious disposition, the pranking and the power. Baxter, no matter how he says what he says, looks callow and inconsequential.

In Bed in Chimes and Idaho:

Camp in Chimes and Idaho:

Vandals in Chimes and Idaho

Repudiation Scene in Chimes and Idaho:

 

Aping heterosexuality:

The Brixton Ritzy, October 3, 2024

 

 

The Gus Van Sant Podcast No. 2: Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

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We found DRUGSTORE COWBOY, Gus Van Sant’s second feature, beautiful, imaginative and moving; a film that gets better with each viewing. We discuss Matt Dillon, so extraordinarily good looking and yet also so very believable as a ‘regular guy’. Tom Waits was the original casting and we talk about what Dillon brings to the role, his choices, and another possible connection to Van Sant, how he is also drawn to the marginal, the outsider; we talk about the experimental montages, clearly influenced by Anthony Balch’s Fires Open Fire (1963) which evoke a subjective state of mind, usually drug fuelled, but which also act as a structuring device and help make the film aesthetically cohesive. We discuss continuities: time-lapse photography, Super8 filming, the Pacific Northwest, subject matter of marginals, outsiders, small time crims, junkies. We both agree that we don’t like William Burroughs in the film, even though he was much praised upon its release. We discuss how Van Sant’s second feature is an announcement of a major American director with a distinctive voice, a very particular style, a visual vernacular, a contiguous world from film to film, peopled by recurring figures, a darkly comic tone

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

More info, clips, examples, a bibliography below:

Montages ostensibly influenced by Towers Open Fire (Anthony Balch, 1963) see below:

Images such as these do seem an inspiration for Drugstore Cowboy:

The film has two types of scenes that structure it: robberies of drugstores, it can be read as one long heist film; and the subjective montages, which evoke a subjective state of mind, usually drug fuelled, but which also act as a structuring device and make it aesthetically cohesive.

The first is from the beginning where he’s so eager to shoot up after the robbery that he does so in the car before even getting home.

The prank-on-cops montage

The ominous hat, ‘Hat on Bed!’; ‘I’ve now paid my debt to the hat)

Autumn leaves, childhood, hat montage at the burial; and time for change.

A scene that rhymes with the scene with the mother earlier on; bonds of affection, there, but over-ruled by drugs. ‘I wish I could win you back’. Very moving.

 

Fear of prison:

 

Beginning and end (accompanied by the use of Super 8 footage, which is beginning to seem a signature

 

Time montage and time-lapse

 

A junkie deals with the cops:

 

 

Initial Bigliography:

Cindy Fuchs, ‘Drugstore Cowboy’, Cineaste, Vol 18, Iss 1, (1990): 43-45

Nick James, ‘Intoxication’, Sight And Sound: A to Z of Cinema, Sight and Sound, February 1997, pp.26-28.

Dale Kutzera, ‘Drugstore Cowboy: Set Against Bleak Landscape’. American Cinematographer

Lucy Neville, Drugstore Cowboy, Sight and Sound, November 2002, p. 63.

Michael O’Pray, Drugstore Cowboy, Monthly Film Bulletin, Dec. 1, 1999, 56, 671.

Phillippe Rouyer, ‘Ironie du sort (Drugstore Cowboy)

Steve Vineberg, ‘Drugstore Cowboy’.Film Quarterly, Vol 32. Iss 3, (Spring 1990):27

 

José Arroyo