The Film Doctor

Trailer for Damsels in Distress by Whit Stillman

2012-02-14T04:03:00.000-05:00

impunity links

2012-02-10T18:19:00.000-05:00

---Psycho Siri

---"`There is only one language in cinema.'--Hitchcock said this to Truffaut back in the day. You know, when they scream in that shower they’re screaming in Tokyo the same way they’re screaming in Paris. It isn’t the language that’s making them scream. It’s not the words, man. It’s the pure cinema that is effective. And when you’re speaking with the images, and you’re putting those images together, they way they’re supposed to be put together, then you’re speaking the language. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Serbia, or in a fucking igloo with Eskimos. You’re speaking that one universal language, and that’s the language of the cinema. And that’s holy.” --Abel Ferrara

---A Day Made of Glass 2

---"Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan. It has likely cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars Congress might not otherwise have appropriated had it known the truth, and our senior leaders’ behavior has almost certainly extended the duration of this war. The single greatest penalty our Nation has suffered, however, has been that we have lost the blood, limbs and lives of tens of thousands of American Service Members with little to no gain to our country as a consequence of this deception." --Daniel Davis

---NBC would like you to watch, please

---"The Future" by the Limousines

---Dave drove a Ford

---McWeeny's bad experience at the theater

---"a culture of impunity now pervades America’s political and business elite at the expense of those who can’t afford to properly defend themselves"

---situationist films

---the best movie posters

---"By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does." --Peter Van Buren

---Julianne Moore in Far from Seven

---Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film

---Kaufman's visual rhetoric compendium

---chez Clooney

---The inner workings

---Owen's The Conundrum

---Sofia's new ad

---trailers for This Is Not a Film, The Bourne Legacy, The Aggression Scale, Iron Sky, Red Lights, and The Story of Film

---how to hide from Google

---ravenous eating from Perfect Sense

---"So if the Big Five companies are not using their additional earnings to increase production, what are they spending their money on? The answer: They’re buying shares of their own stocks and investing in politicians to maintain the policies that led to their enormous profits over the past decade."

---lastly, "the graduate without a future" --Paul Mason

Handling death rather well: Alexander Payne's The Descendants

2012-02-07T18:37:00.000-05:00

Q: So, basically you're saying that The Descendants is one of the best films of 2011, and that The Artist is implausible bunk.

A: Yes. The Artist would be better with sound.

Q: Why does The Descendants work so well?

A: With many scenes heightened with gentle Hawaiian guitar strumming on the soundtrack and glorious ocean sunset scenery, The Descendants could resemble a sentimental Lifetime movie, but instead the film handles death (or the imminent death of its main character Elizabeth King (Patricia Hastie) who is in a coma) rather well, in part because no one in the movie knows how to confront death at all. While everyone else thinks that she will recover from the head injury, Matt King (George Clooney) learns of her "permanent" or soon-to-die condition from her doctor first, and it becomes his responsibility to tell everyone else, especially his two daughters, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), who is in college, and ten-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller).

Q: Yes, that does sound sentimental.

A: But the twist is that Matt learns that his wife was having an affair with a real estate agent before she went into the coma, so in his rage to figure out who the guy is, he turns his knowledge of his wife's imminent death into a weapon. When Alexandra tells him about it, he abruptly and spastically runs across his ritsy neighborhood and confronts his friends Kai and Mark, forcing them to tell him who she was sleeping with. When Kai initially balks at the idea, he tells her that his wife will die, and that she was "putting lipstick on a corpse" earlier during a hospital visit. The movie's unexpected switchbacks in tone between the humorous, the mournful, and the conniving (as Matt starts to spy on the agent) keeps the viewer off balance, therefore giving the movie an edge when it may seem merely elegiac.

Q: But who wants to see a depressing movie about death?

A: Well, The Descendants also emphasizes how life and death has more in-between states with modern medical science. I heard somewhere that Patricia Hastie lost 20 pounds in the course of making the movie. Payne wields the sight of her becoming more and more emaciated on life support like a blunt stick. Characters arrive at the hospital to curse her out. Curiously, The Descendants succeeds emotionally in spite of the fact that we don't know her at all.

Q: What about all of those glorious sunsets?

A: Payne sets up a nice ambiguity of the way others view Hawaii as an island paradise early on, since Matt says "Fuck paradise" in the first voiceover. What good does the myth of Hawaii do him with his wife in a coma and his children running berserk? The movie keeps finding ways to make odd connections between the land and Matt's family (including his relationship with his ancestors). Early on, he says "Somehow it feels natural to find a daughter of mine on a different island. A family seems exactly like an archipelago - all part of the same geographic expression but still islands - separate and alone, always drifting slowly apart." It becomes Matt's responsibility to reunite his family as they all grieve over Elizabeth, and somehow it all ties in with his position as the main trustee over his family inheritance of 25,000 acres of prime untouched beachfront property. He and a bunch of cousins are getting ready to sell the land and make millions, but somehow that decision gets associated with his handling of the family crisis.

Q: How?

A: I'm not sure. At one point, he says "Soon my daughters and I can just be normal citizens like everybody else, and these dead people will stop controlling our lives," but he realizes that just as he has to watch out for his daughters after being the "default" parent for years, he also has to come to terms with his ancestors who entrusted him with this land. Payne makes this theme especially effective through his use of pictures of his great great great grandparents and other relatives on various walls (reminiscent of the way Hitchcock uses pictures in films like Psycho). Over the course of the movie, and as the pictures accumulate in different scenes, one realizes that we all become pictures on some descendant's wall (if we're lucky). The dead may control the living, but also the living can easily sell out the influence of the dead. Payne shows us multiple shots of various resorts and beaches, but the underlying bleak message is that we constantly compromise and exploit what's left of paradise.

Q: So, in reply to all of the critics who claim that Payne has "mellowed" since his Election period, you find that The Descendants is careful, nuanced, and yet still quite disquieting as it confronts death head on.

A: Yeah. The last deep focus shot is masterful in its use of mise en scene, bridging the three King family members under one blanket as they sit on the couch and watch, of all things, March of the Penguins out of frame. Are we supposed to be depressed to think that's all they're watching? You can count two other scenes that involve blankets that prepare us for this one. I've not even mentioned the way Payne alludes to Benjamin's freak-out scene under water in the pool of The Graduate (1967) for Shailene Woodley's memorable moment of grief, and Clooney's astonishingly understated acting that at one point evokes Jean de Florette (1986) when he kneels down on his lawn as if beseeching the gods. Could it be that Payne actually alludes to Cary Grant in Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) when he films Clooney from the back of the head as the scene shifts in a match cut from outdoors to the hospital? (Scorsese includes an even more apt back-of-the-head match cut near the end of The Age of Innocence when Newland realizes that he's losing Ellen.) When we see Clooney lounging on his side on the beach, are we supposed to be reminded of Grant on the beach at Cannes in To Catch a Thief (1955)? Perhaps I'm reading too much into that.

Q: You probably are.

A: Shut up. All I'm saying is--observe the subtle way the film is built. Alexander Payne is an amazing director.

"You must pay for everything in this world one way or another": notes on genre and justice in True Grit

2012-02-05T11:20:00.000-05:00

I'm about to attempt to teach True Grit, so some blog posts concerning my evolving thoughts on both the Charles Portis novel and the Coen brothers' movie version seem in order. While I very much admire the novel, the more recent and highly respectful 2010 movie version does take some odd liberties with the storyline. (Why does LaBoeuf have to bite his tongue?) Some opening notes:

1) How does one compartmentalize the novel? In his essay "Charles Portis: Study of a Cult Novelist," Joseph Parry finds that "Academics may have overlooked him [Portis] because of the regional humor in his novels and the difficulties in classifying his work into a neat genre." True Grit is mostly both a semi-parodic western adventure and a coming of age story. At times, when Mattie praises her pony Mattie, the novel can resemble some sort of young adult variation on Black Beauty.

2) How does True Grit reflect the political turbulence of the period in which it was written (1968)? At one point in the novel, LaBoeuf confronts Rooster over his involvement in William Clarke Quantrill's bloody border gang during the Civil War. As he says, "I heard they murdered women and children at Lawrence, Kansas. . . . Do you deny they shot down soldiers and civilians alike and burned the town" (158)? Did Portis mean for the reader to make a connection between Rooster's shady background and war-time atrocities committed by American soldiers in Vietnam? (The My Lai massacre took place during the same year that the novel was published.)

3) What should one think about Mattie's Old Testament sense of judgment? The entire plot of True Grit is driven by her Hamlet-like determination to avenge her father's murder. As she says early on, "I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur [Tom Chaney] was roasting and screaming in hell" (24)! Later, when she chances upon some prisoners in transport, she claims that "They had ridden the `hoot-owl trail' and tasted the fruits of evil and now justice had caught up with them in demand payment. You must pay for everything in this world one way or another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it" (40). In my 2010 post concerning the Coen brothers' previous film A Single Man, I explored how "how, even given the unknowability of fate, judgment can still be swift and deadly" in that movie. Does the Old Testament sense of morality in True Grit provide some tentative answers to the metaphysical ambiguities of A Single Man? The Presbyterian doctrine of Election has something to do with Mattie's convictions. In his editorial "Narrative and the Grace of God: The New True Grit," Stanley Fish debates the question:

"The words the book and films share are these: `You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free with the exception of God’s grace.' These two sentences suggest a world in which everything comes around, if not sooner then later. The accounting is strict; nothing is free, except the grace of God. But free can bear two readings — distributed freely, just come and pick it up; or distributed in a way that exhibits no discernible pattern. In one reading grace is given to anyone and everyone; in the other it is given only to those whom God chooses for reasons that remain mysterious.

A third sentence, left out of the film but implied by its dramaturgy, tells us that the latter reading is the right one: `You cannot earn that [grace] or deserve it.' In short, there is no relationship between the bestowing or withholding of grace and the actions of those to whom it is either accorded or denied. You can’t add up a person’s deeds — so many good one and so many bad ones — and on the basis of the column totals put him on the grace-receiving side (you can’t earn it); and you can’t reason from what happens to someone to how he stands in God’s eyes (you can’t deserve it).

What this means is that there are two registers of existence: the worldly one in which rewards and punishment are meted out on the basis of what people visibly do; and another one, inaccessible to mortal vision, in which damnation and/or salvation are distributed, as far as we can see, randomly and even capriciously. It is, says Mattie in a reflection that does not make it into either movie, a `hard doctrine running contrary to the earthly ideals of fair play' (that’s putting it mildly), and she glosses that hard doctrine — heavenly favor does not depend on anything we do — with a reference to II Timothy 1:9, which celebrates the power of the God 'Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.'"

4) Fish concludes with an appreciation for the Coen brothers' metaphysical sensibility: "The new “True Grit” is that rare thing — a truly religious movie. In the John Wayne version religiosity is just an occasional flourish not to be taken seriously. In this movie it is everything, not despite but because of its refusal to resolve or soften the dilemmas the narrative delivers up." One can claim, then, that Mattie's Presbyterian convictions supply one answer to the questions about the seeming arbitrariness of the film's and the novel's vision of justice.

I'll write more notes on Mattie's voice, her negotiating skills, the novel's use of the "innocent eye," and the differences between the novel and the Coen brothers' movie presently.

Wes Anderson / / From Above

2012-01-31T13:31:00.001-05:00

By Kogonada

alarmist links

2012-01-30T20:20:00.002-05:00

---police tase a protester

---Woody Allen's typewriter

---the climate and The Wall Street Journal

---journalists arrested: "The United States (47th) also owed its fall of 27 places to the many arrests of journalist covering Occupy Wall Street protests."

---"It's bad enough that Google can build up a massive and—if we're honest, slightly scary—profile of my activities, but it will be a lot worse when Google and Facebook and Procter & Gamble all get together to merge these profiles into a single uber-database and then sell it off for a fee to anyone with a product to hawk. Or any government agency that thinks this kind of information might be pretty handy."

---Detropia

---"It's almost like we're treating people like luggage."

---“What happens,” [Viola] Davis says, “is you destroy the artist.”

---"It’s not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it’s not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data."

---the trailer for Lock-Out

---David Bordwell deciphers Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

---"It’s wildly under-appreciated how unrestrained is the Government’s power to do what it wants."

---the iPhone economy

---"But now movies aren’t making money. That’s no secret. They’re not making money. So now we can go back to being more experimental, and maybe we can have conversations about it again, be more authentic. I think the whole Occupy Wall Street message is really about the individual. About not being judged by how much money you make. Hopefully there is more to this. Because you know what? I really like movies about human beings, I’m tired of laughing at people pooping and throwing up, and being gross, and I want to hear a new voice. I want to see something more human and charming, and I don’t want to see people try to shock or provoke me." ---Parker Posey

---The Killers

---"Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them."

---Matthew's day off

---As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

---the history and future of web protest

---lastly, the problem with joking on Twitter

The Gift by BLR_VFX

2012-01-28T16:48:00.000-05:00

The Gift, a science fiction short directed by Carl E. Rinsch

Thanks to MetaFilter.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore by William Joyce

2012-01-24T19:28:00.003-05:00

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, an Oscar-nominated short

More about William Joyce, Brandon Oldenburg, and Moonbot Studios

When homage becomes fromage: Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist

2012-01-23T20:48:00.000-05:00

The Artist left me wondering exactly how it has earned its considerable praise. Is it because the dog is so cute? The similar talking dog Arthur (with subtitles) in Beginners ruined that film for me. I don't think that I will be able to appreciate any cinematic canines for a long while. The director of that film, Mike Mills, seemed so neurotically concerned with offsetting the sad (and possibly box office poisonous) effects of the cancer and eventual death of Christopher Plummer's character, everyone in the movie has to maintain a sickly compensatory sweetness. I've seen so many cats in films like The Future and Tiny Furniture, they leave me wondering: are cute pets signs of studio anxiety? These telegenic animals come across as Pavlovian in their intended effect, as if to say "Trigger the need-to-nurture emotion now."

So, yes, The Artist is full of charm, excellent performances, and the cinematography by Guillaume Schiffman evokes the era well, but George (Jean Dujardin) and Peppy (?) (Berenice Bejo) compete with the dog in their drive to be appealing. I guess all of this winsomeness may be designed to offset the negativity of Valentin's self-destructive pride, but I had trouble believing in his arrogance. Why couldn't he try the new sound technology out, as the silent stars actually did back in the 1920s, and as the characters do in the much more plausible Singing in the Rain (1952)? Once Greta Garbo successfully made the awkward transition to sound with Anna Christie (1930), her boyfriend, the MGM silent star John Gilbert, tried and failed because his voice was too high (also his silent-movie era enhanced acting style didn't help matters). Later, Garbo attempted to save Gilbert's career much as Peppy does for George by insisting that he costar in Queen Christina (1933). (In case anyone was left wondering about this correspondence, Peppy at one point uncharacteristically says "I want to be alone.") Still, usually, when seeing depictions of people making the transition to the sound era, one finds them pragmatically acknowledging technological change.

In The Artist, George never even considers it. Instead of fully explaining why he would do such a perverse thing as throw his highly remunerative career away, the filmmakers keep finding other visual ways to make his decision appear a fait accompli. At the beginning of The Artist (in a film within the film), he says "I won't talk!" on an intertitle while being tortured, so we are primed to know what to expect. George is not only proud, he's increasingly bewilderingly stupid. Instead of giving us an adequate reason why he so stubbornly refuses to make the switch, the filmmakers show us a scene where George is clearly going down the stairs as Peppy rises up, or we see George sink into the quicksand in his self-financed flop, Tears of Love. Why is the film called The Artist? At one point, George says, "I'm not a puppet. I'm an artist!" But he's clearly a silent film star, so I guess the title was meant to be ironic.

Writer and director Hazanavicius seems content to conjure up some under-explained moody friction before turning to wish-fulfillment and George's (spoiler alert) glorious return to the limelight. Aside from the canisters of old silent films that George burns in a fit of despondency, George ultimately loses nothing. Peppy has all of his former auctioned off possessions waiting for him in a beautiful new Gatsbyish mansion. His possessions, fame, everything just waits for its retrieval at the end. He even gets his "That'll do, pig" chauffeur (James Cromwell) back.

The Artist is so eager to please, it licks the viewer's face wildly, just like a dog would do, but there's something too self-congratulatory about its crowds wildly applauding, its premiere fans jockeying into position, its naked appeals to our emotions, its clumsy sampling of the music from Vertigo, and the way it keeps telegraphing its techniques. Hazanavicius makes a fun reference to the famous marital montage of Citizen Kane when George's relationship with his wife dissolves, but we get to know Charles Foster Kane and his first wife well enough to understand why she gets sick of him. In contrast, the marriage in The Artist is never sufficiently explained. There's also a hint of the Citizen Kane projection scene when George first sees Doris (Penelope Miller) talk into a microphone, but again the homage just hangs there as one wonders why George is so quick to say "If that's the future, you can have it."

To recreate the silent film era, Hazanavicius fills the movie with types--the sweet ingenue, the cigar-chomping head of the studio, the fat policeman. Even Malcolm McDowell looks oddly like the wizard of Oz (Frank Morgan) in his brief cameo. Towards the end, the cheesy ministrations of a devoted canine leads the policeman to say of George "He owes his life to that dog!" with gee whiz enthusiasm. I still can't fathom why so many give in to this giddy, slack-jawed wonder.

Boardwalk Empire's visual effects, season 2

2012-01-22T17:18:00.001-05:00

The visual effects of Boardwalk Empire season 2 from Brainstorm Digital:

Thanks to Buzzfeed.

Archetype by Aaron Sims

2012-01-21T19:18:00.000-05:00

Archetype by Aaron Sims (thanks to Twitch)

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry's trailer and other links

2012-01-19T17:30:00.000-05:00

---"Dismantling Detroit"

---Michael Rigley's Network

---"The Divide" wastes no time before launching into an exasperating tale of anarchic dread. The descent into hell begins with a horde of frantic residents dashing to the cellar in the wake of a nuclear attack and grows increasingly morbid from there: Rape, disfigurement and cannibalism figure into the ensuing drama, but it's the accumulation of these incidents, rather than their specific shock value, that gives "The Divide" a lasting effect.

When the doors close and the dust settles, the resulting group enters into a power play that starts with confused attempts to ration supplies and mobilize the remaining resources. Their stability only lasts as long as it takes for masked gunmen to burst through the doors and unload a few rounds before sealing the remaining survivors into their self-made tomb. (Why? "The Divide" cleverly wastes no time with distracting context.)

---Fotoshop by Adobe

---Bond 50

---the "school-to-prison pipeline"

---the Saul Bass title sequences

---Gregg Toland, cinematographer

---"The recession we’re in has intensified a bunch of trends that were already gathering force, and already pushing people into accordion families. Those trends included a real downdraft in the capacity of young workers to find their way. That has really spread as downsizing has gathered force, as jobs have been outsourced. It’s become a much more competitive labor market, and an employer can be incredibly choosy. That leaves young workers at a disadvantage. And as much as they have a hard time qualifying for those jobs, the jobs themselves have increasingly become short-term, part-time or unpaid altogether. Now, to become a qualified professional, many middle-class American kids are going to have to spend many years in completely unpaid internships. So they finish college, or in the course of going to college, they spend years upon years working in jobs that used to pay money and don’t anymore because this market is so crowded. Well, if you’re going to spend years interning somewhere so that you get the kind of experience that will cause an employer to look at you seriously when there’s a paid position, how in the world are you going to manage if you have no income? You’ve got to live someplace. So, in households that can afford it, parents are making it possible for their kids to gather those credentials that will allow them someday – they hope – to launch at the level they’re expecting."

---a camera buyer's guide

---trailers for Advanced Style, Coriolanus, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, and Keanu Reeve's Side by Side

---"iPhones and iPads cost what they do because they are built using labor practices that would be illegal in this country — because people in this country consider those practices grossly unfair."

---"The Art of the Modern Movie Trailer"

---Why would Purell want to be associated with torture?

---shit New Yorkers say

---Lakhdar Boumediene's experiences in Guantanamo

---"Documentary Films in the Digital Age"

---an interview with Frederick Wiseman

---"How do you develop attentional literacy, the ability to be working on the right stuff at the right time and not necessarily frittering your time away, looking at Facebook and whatever else it is you do?"

---"The Revolution Will Be Graphic-Designed"

---lastly, a deleted scene from Bridesmaids

Video production class weblog: Day 13: the final cut

2012-01-18T00:20:00.002-05:00

Today, the video production class finished the DVD containing the movie Entrapment. The class will show the movie to the entire school tomorrow during the Interim presentations. So far, the buzz has been good. My significant other just now flinched at a jump scare while watching the movie, and the film has a delightfully bleak, surprising, and abrupt ending that leaves the viewer with a pleasant sense of hopelessness and Poe-esque entombment.

My notes from the past few days:

"There's so much blood!" --Jude

1) Now, on the morning of the 9th day of the production, the class is busy editing the "Making of" video, the final movie entitled Entrapment, and the blooper reel, so I can pause for a moment. We've been shooting at the manor all week, but it feels like one long day.

2) A cold mansion on a wet dark morning. The crew is in the small dining room filming a scene where Fiona hops out of a cabinet by the back door. I'm sitting in a decidedly chilly gun room that could use a fire in its fireplace. We keep the heat off to cut down on noise in the room tone. I keep recording random comments from the crew in the Moleskine:

"You still need to turn around faster," says the director.

"He turned around before she said Boo!"

"Go back in your hidey hole, Fiona."

"Are we getting enough reaction from Jude?"

"I am not a chipmunk."

"Don't use the mic as a weapon." They shoot another take. Jude grimaces afterwards.

"He wouldn't have calmed down that quickly."

I point out that the "The goal is to end up with a better movie than the blooper reel."[Later, we realize that we will have to reshoot this scene. Any shot that involves Jude and Fiona talking to each other for any length of time requires at least 15 takes, and the director wishes that she had taken more.]

Every time the crew changes places, the cinematographer grabs the camera and says "Moving!" She claims that she has some shots that she hates (but has to use anyway), and others that she loves. The class has a chronic tendency to start filming a scene without remembering to turn on the microphone.

3) In the afternoon, the sky darkens considerably as we prepare Fiona for the haunting moment when she realizes that she and Jude are now in the old photograph. It's not easy getting her to look properly freaked out, so she jabs her fingers in her eyes to make herself cry, and says "This is why I haven't cried in front of anyone since the fifth grade." I think of Kubrick tormenting Shelley Duvall for weeks and months in the midst of making The Shining. Is directing inherently sadistic?

"Later, we're going to add in a loud bang," says the director. "Look up," she says to Fiona. "Turn your body forward. Yell `Jude' and run out of the room."

The director bangs on the wall. "Do you know what to do?"

"Look bewildered and on the edge of mental breakdown?"

"Right." Meanwhile, I take pleasure in shooting footage from the bird's eye point of view from the landing over the stairs.

4) Still later in the day. The crew works very hard to finish scene 2. Bored, I doze briefly in the parlor (oddly decorated with elephants and Santa Claus figurines), but not for long, because sleepers tend to end up on film. At one point, Jude fell asleep for 3 hours, so we placed some reflecting foil on his head.

5) I keep opting for a student to lie face down in a small empty fountain (except for some rank cold dirty water) at the side of the house to help create atmosphere in an early point-of-view shot, but no one seems inclined to do it. We all agree that a catering service would be nice. Some hot chocolate?

6) "I'm not a character. I'm a scaractor," says Jude in the midst of a "Making of" interview. A football player, Jude chiefly acts with his eyebrows and his forehead with lots of squinting and rubbing his eyes. He has been working hard, but he distinctly does not enjoy the tender reunion scene that includes this dialogue:

Fiona: "Jude, you can't leave me like that again. I don't want my closest friend getting hurt."

Jude: "I won't leave you, but we have to get out of this house."

I get the impression that he would prefer to not to have to look meaningfully into her eyes. We end up having to shoot this take over and over, more than ten times, with Jude getting more exasperated throughout. I tell him this is the reason why major movie stars earn 12 million dollars a picture. Jude replies, "I would cut off my leg for 12 million, and buy myself a new one." He also says he's going to "Tebow after this." Whenever I say anything critical about Scooby Doo, Fiona says she loves the show. She finds the The Black Knight museum episode was especially scary.

7) By yesterday afternoon, the crew shot a nice action scene in which the two stars ran the length of a house (with two crew members following close behind, and the "Making of" director behind them) before a door slams and Fiona screams. The movie contains several moments where ghosts (?) bang on or slam doors (using fishing line). At one point, I slammed the front door so hard, plaster fell from around the windows. The owner (standing right next to me) was saintly nice about it, but if it had been my house, I would've kicked everyone out, especially since we were supposed to be finished the day before.

At one point, a door slowly shut by itself right after a take. We figured the Captain, the original owner of the house, wanted to be included in the shot.

8) This afternoon, I read Portis' True Grit in the parlor as Fiona repeatedly gasps hysterically, twirls around, drops the photograph, and falls on the floor in the main hallway as the cinematographer lies on the floor with the camera and the two ghosts (with lighting equipment) contemplatively chew on some brownies as they look on. Everyone is eager to finish. Jude even points out in an interview that "The promise of getting done is a good motivator," although I have heard some talk that perhaps he has been intentionally been a difficult in a diva-esque way today. Jude claims that "Acting is very hard, and people don't know how hard it is."

When asked how she gets herself to look scared, Fiona confesses that she thinks of "horrible things, like heights and terrorists." Both actors have much respect for the director, whom they call "Mein Fuhrer."

Late on the last afternoon of principal photography, we reshoot the first scene when Fiona and Jude walk into the house for the first time. Then, we keep waiting for the director to say "That's a wrap," but first she and the cinematographer have to shoot another scene of the front of the house, and then get some more outdoor room tone (nature tone?) out back. So, when she finally says the phrase in the bus, the moment ends up being a bit anticlimactic.

9) Over the weekend, the students found that mixing the sound, especially music, proved trickier and more time-consuming that editing the video. They worked until 11 every night in the classroom. Today, they just needed for Fiona to scream into the mic and then loop the scream for the last scene. As they edit, we spend part of the time studying the symmetrical composition of each shot in the new trailer for Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom. By this afternoon, the students were done and making copies. For whatever reason, (lack of competition between groups? a perfectionist director? a detail-oriented cinematographer?) the class went especially well this year. I feel fortunate to have been involved.

The Old Grey Lady and the kidnapping blonde: Page One and Tabloid

2012-01-14T13:53:00.000-05:00

What does the Old Grey Lady have in common with a kidnapping blonde? Andrew Rossi's excellent documentary Page One and Errol Morris' less successful Tabloid both explore the struggle to control increasingly fragmented narratives.

Amusingly and sometimes alarmingly, Rossi's portrait of The New York Times conveys just how insecure and embattled the prestige newspaper has become. In 2010, as Wikileaks releases to Youtube damning footage of American soldiers shooting innocent Iraqis from their helicopters, the editors at the Times wonder how to respond. They worry over the fact that Julian Assange and Wikileaks did not even consult with the major news outlets, and one senses a defensive posture in the prestigious newspaper. Weren't the The Times writers the original rowdy troublemakers back in the 70s when their story of the Pentagon Papers caused Nixon to want to persecute them? Isn't the Times supposed to be the one who shakes up the US government with its exposes, not bloggers and hackers? Even as Rossi acknowledges the need for old-fashioned journalistic skills for a functioning democracy, good war coverage, and so on, a portrait emerges in Page One of a newspaper angling to retain relevance amidst all of the abrupt changes in technology that allows people new ways to release information. The documentary moves from early scenes in which the Times is blindsided by Wikileaks, budget cuts, and layoffs to a later more conventionally flattering narrative in which David Carr, now in control, writes a brilliant expose about the sexual and financial corruption of the Tribune newspapers. In spite of all of the initial anxieties, the film ends with a comforting portrait of the journalist as hero.

Meanwhile, in Tabloid, Errol Morris tells the lurid 70's story of Joyce McKinney and her sort-of kidnapping and rape of her former Mormon boyfriend Kirk Anderson who has dumped her to become a missionary in England. In her 20's at the time, Joyce finds that her fiance has abruptly disappeared from her life due to--it appears--the machinations of the Mormon Church. She hires a private detective to figure out that he's in England. Then she arranges to steal him away to a cottage in Devon where she manacles him to a bed and repeatedly has sex with him to deprogram him from the church's clutches. Her strategy works for awhile, until she gets arrested for kidnapping. Joyce then leaks her point of view to the British Press (her story of innocent true love temporarily triumphing) which creates an international media sensation. She becomes an instant celebrity, hobnobbing with Keith Moon of The Who and overshadowing movie stars at film premieres.

So far, so juicy. Errol Morris perhaps overly relishes reconstructing this story's attendant tabloid frenzy, but there are fissures and problems. Instead of just letting Joyce and other related figures talk in interviews before the camera, Morris also inserts cheesy Michael Moore-ish footage of 1950s fantasy wives, crude cartoons of Mormons becoming Gods, and imprisoned women weeping in B-movies to illustrate Tabloid's increasingly competing versions of events. The ironic footage mocks what's being told, flattering the viewer who can now laugh at laugh at Joyce's romanticism and Mormon religious dogma. I was disappointed by Morris' tactic because the mockery makes the movie too easy for the viewer. His first brilliant 1978 documentary Gates of Heaven has every opportunity to make fun of the bizarre owners who mourn their lost pets, but he keeps any editorial angle muted. The film's lack of an attitude toward its material greatly complicates our responses to the pet owners. By doing this, the movie weirdly shifts from lampooning goofballs to considering universal questions about death and loss.

Ultimately in Tabloid, the British tabloids such as the Daily Mirror dig up a story of Joyce's former life as a kind of call girl in California who has posed for many cheap porn magazines and used ads in the newspapers to sell fantasies of domination. Morris is careful to never fully assert that these claims are true. Since Joyce is still trying to maintain her image as an innocent woman seeking to realize her dream of love for Kirk, this lurid call girl business does not suit her agenda at all, so she goes into seclusion, and even today she's suing Morris for portraying this scurrilous aspect of her story.

So, what one finds writ large in Page One also appears in micro in Tabloid: a struggle for control over the narration. Recently, Joyce has snuck into various premieres of the movie, waited until it ended, and then hopped out in front of the audience to cry out "I'm Joyce McKinney!" She then gives a speech denouncing the movie and once again attempts to impose her side of the story on the audience. Given her penchant for intrigue, Joyce actually has much in common with the newspapers she denounces. As a trickster figure, she likes to adopt different identities, perhaps to help generate better copy later? When running from English bail, she dressed up as a deaf mute and then later as an Indian in makeup. As a woman researching the Mormon church, she wore a wig. As a call girl, she catered to male fantasies as a former Miss America. As a woman investigated by Scotland Yard, she would try to pass as an innocent romantic just trying to get her true love. Also, she likes to use a hidden microphone to ferret out information about the Mormon Church. But she doesn't seem to realize that the media can exploit her far more than she can manipulate it, just as Errol Morris uses her story to create intriguing narrative gaps in his documentary.

Both movies leave behind lots of questions. Are we to believe Joyce or The Daily Mirror? How much is Morris' portrait of Joyce a product of her own deliberate media construction? And how much does Joyce's struggle to maintain her reputation parallel that of the editors doing the same for the beleaguered New York Times? The more they assert a sense of control, the more circumstances find ways to undermine them.

Interview with a student filmmaker--O. K. Keyes

2012-01-11T20:44:00.000-05:00

A Media Arts major at USC-Columbia, Olivia K. Keyes has been helping me with my video production class for several years. A devoted filmmaker, she just recently finished There Is No Silence, and she kindly agreed to answer some questions concerning the craft.

1) What suggestions would you have for someone just beginning to make movies today?

I think everyone stumbles into the film industry in their own way. I got really involved in online communities as a middle schooler, learning to use Windows Movie Maker to create little animated music videos (AMVs) for Teen Titans and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and then started making my own little videos that I posted to YouTube. But it wasn't really until I got into college and started making real-life contacts and started collaborating with others that I really started improving my craft and learning to do real networking. So it's great to make those little individual projects, but if you want to start improving then make films with your friends. Collaboration is not only a great opportunity to gain real work experience with and to network, but I've also found filmmaking is way more fun with a group of people who are just as passionate about it as you.

2) Who are your three favorite directors at work today and why?

I love Sofia Coppola, Akira Kurosawa and Christopher Nolan. As a female in the male-dominated film industry, women like Sofia really give me hope that I can also be success in my craft. I loved The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, not only because of the masterful directing, but the fact that there's a definite feminine touch to her films and an intimacy with characters that I feel female directors are often advantaged to tap into. Basically any film by Kurosawa is a masterpiece in my book. However, if I had to pick a single film that stands out, I'd go with Rashomon for it's use of non-linearity, lights and darks and in particular its use of silence. Having studied Japanese for two and a half year now and traveled there twice, I am amazed by the influence of culture on film, and Kurosawa's use of silence is so effective because of its position of power in the Japanese language. And finally my mainstream film director crush, Christopher Nolan. From Memento to Batman to Inception, I am amazed at his films. However, his reinterpretation of the Batman series (my favorite comic book series since the age of 4) a film noir-action flick proves that he is able to translate any story to a modern audience, a skill that many of today's directors could really learn from. Originality is not always in the story but in how you tell it.

3) What are the classic traps that novice filmmakers fall into?

I think it's really important to get all the film cliches out of your system while you're still a student and not losing any money. However, there are things you might want to watch out for, such as, opening with an alarm clock, having a dream sequence or show every little movement of your character. Your audience knows that if you cut from a scene in a bathroom to a scene in a car that you walked out of your house, no need to show it. Give your audience more credit. And another useful piece of advice from my film professor at USC, "Don't show what you tell and don't tell what you show." One last note: Rehearse your films before your film them. Like a theatrical play needs a dress rehearsal, a film needs a run-through. Just go through the whole thing shot for shot with a little point and shot or camera phone, and it'll make the actual day of filming go so much smoother.

4) What do you think of film school classes ? Are they really needed?

I'd say film school is more about networking than learning the craft. Granted, I've always liked an academic setting and I like being challenged in my assignments. However, the way the internet is today, you can build your own online community and network and raise your own funds on something like Kickstarter. The other thing that film school gives you is free access to a variety of equipment that the average American would probably not be able to afford. I've learned to work about 5 different cameras and 3 different audio systems as well as 2 editing platforms while at USC, and my tuition fees are nowhere near the total of those programs and equipment.

5) What are some of the best places you like to visit on the web that relates to filmmaking?

I'm a huge fan of vimeo. Imagine a YouTube without Rebecca Black and dramatic chipmunks, and that's vimeo. It allows me to network with not only local filmmakers here in Columbia, but also other ones across the world. It's always exciting when some random guy from Germany likes one of your films! However, I do still visit YouTube frequently, since that's where most videos go viral from and publicity is a great way to network, as long as you go viral for something of good quality and not because it's junk, which sadly is what the kids these days like to tweet about. Speaking of Twitter, I do follow a lot of my film professors as well as other filmmakers on Twitter as a means of networking. However, my newest discovery is Tumblr, a twitter-meets-blogging social network site, and there a lot of talented and creative people who are starting to network there as well.

6) How do you network on vimeo?

Well, I'm just starting to get the hang of it, but what seems to work best is having every type of social media and then link them all together through one. I'm my case, I prefer Tumblr as a way of meeting new people who might be interested in my work, while some prefer Twitter or Facebook and others like Youtube. I think it really just really depends on your target audience. I'm looking for people to critique my work, so Tumblr and vimeo tend to have more in the way of constructive criticism whereas YouTube and Twitter often suffer from immature teenager comments. I've also started commenting on other people's works on vimeo and in return they'll give feedback on mine. And while it's nice to get complimented, there is nothing more valuable than a good critique.

7) You mention several social media websites where you visit for networking purposes. Are there any websites where you go for information?

I actually follow the SC Film Commission updates pretty regularly since they notify you of state competitions and potential grant money. It's also more localized. So if they mention a workshop, then it's going to be within driving distance. They also have a great registrar of people with equipment and talents that I didn't know you could find in SC. For example, there's a registered stuntman living in Charleston just waiting to be in your next action short.

8) Describe a typical day at work on your current film project.

Well, I'm still a student, so I don't get the leisure of focusing on one project, but am actually split between three, nearly constantly. However, I'll take the time to talk about my current production crew I'm working with called GoShinjuku!, which is a collaborative team of USC media arts (and film studies AND computer engineering) majors. Our team leader Matt Laborde earned a grant last year to fund five anime-style, live-action shorts. We shot one over the summer called The Welder and we're working on next one called The Way of the Broken Thumb (title inspired by this test shot here). I work mostly in pre- and actual production. I usually sit down and plan out the film shot-by-shot via storyboards and set up the shooting schedule. I also do all the camera work for our shorts. I do edit my own personal works, but I really prefer the actually filming part of production the best, although everyone tells me that my organizational skills and trouble-shooting on set would probably make me better suited for a production manager. But we'll see what happens. I'm young and still have a lot of films to make and thumbs to break!

9) Any favorite recent low-budget independent films?

If we're talking in terms of on vimeo, I really love this little film Moving Day by Jason Wingrove. But if we're talking about recent big picture releases, then it would have to be the recent 2011 Sundance Audience Award winning Circumstance that absolutely blew me away, and I highly recommend it. It gives you an inside look inside the rebellious youth scene in Iran through the window of two teenager girls dealing with all the confusion of falling in love. Also, Winter's Bone (2010) is one of my favorite all time low-budget independent films. I love everything about it from Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of Ree to the gritty, handheld cinematography that manages to find a softness in the harshness of the film.

Anyone interested in keeping up with O. K. Keyes' work can follow her Tumblr blog or Twitter feed.

Video production weblog: Day 6--the bodies above the ceiling

2012-01-10T20:27:00.000-05:00

Now on the evening of the sixth day of the video production class, the students just finished their first long day of shooting at a very old manor that once presided over 5000 acres. Some notes from my Moleskine:

1) "My father did get some hog's guts and they will bring them Wednesday unless we need them sooner. I'm not sure of the amount or variety of the guts but if we aren't going to use them we need to let him know so he can dispose of them." --an email from Fiona, one of the stars of the film.

2) They may be in the midst of making a horror film that veers perilously close to Scoobie Doo, but the class does have a fashion sense. On the day devoted to the preproduction work of storyboarding and writing, we visited the local Salvation Army to purchase ghost outfits. Ava found a corpse bride-esque white dress, Jude purchased a suit for $11, students often used the word "sketch," and for a moment we considered including some ruby slippers in the film somewhere as a Wizard of Oz reference. The movie will have a running gag of references to the song lyrics of "Hey Jude" as well as the song's melody played on the piano in a lower key. We also worked on the legend of the manor that may serve as a hook:

3) During the Civil War a family of four called the Whitakers lived in this house. When Sherman’s men came through the area, the Whitakers knew they had to protect their children. They hid their daughter Ava and their son Jeremiah in a crawl space in the ceiling, and pushed a bookshelf underneath it to ensure their children wouldn’t be found. The parents had intended to return to the house and free their children, but they were killed during the soldiers’ raid. After about a month, Ava and Jeremiah were assumed to have starved to death. However their bodies were never found.

4) [From today] After reviewing the storyboards and watching the Arbogast murder scene of Psycho, we have arrived at the house. The weather is cold and wet, but not exactly raining. The crew has just moved from the main hallway to the parlor, and they're setting up lights. Two of the crew members wear ghoulish makeup, and one (the corpse sister) will carry a boom mic for much of the afternoon.

"What kind of speed are we going?" asks Fiona.

"We can see their shadows a little bit."

"We both have shadows. I do have a soul, still," replies Jude, who wishes to be called Broseph Chillson.

"This house does give me the creeps."

5) As the day goes on, I tend to wander off and read Will Hermes' Love Goes To Buildings on Fire in a foyer where the windows have reddish mold down by the oriental rugs. I keep waiting for Hermes' description of the Talking Heads playing their first gig at CBGBs in the 1970s New York music scene: "Chris Frantz, a young drummer, and his girlfriend Tina Weymouth, a painter, moved into a loft at 195 Chrystie Street with a friend from the Rhode Island School of Design, David Byrne. Their plans: uncertain."

6) For part of the afternoon, I vaguely lay on a sofa in the gun room and stare up at a painting of some labradors as the students endlessly shoot the opening scene on the front porch. It takes a long time in part because they keep having to wait for traffic to die down on Home Avenue (across the football field-sized front lawn) since this film is supposed to take place in rural isolation.

7) From the screenplay:

Jude: Okay, now I definitely don’t want to go in there.

Fiona: Don’t you want to see where they were hidden?

Jude: Do you really want to see two dead bodies?

Fiona: No, but you’re pathetic. A small helpless girl like me is willing to go in an empty house, but a tall brawny guy like you is too scared to even step onto the porch?

Jude: That about sums it up.

8) By the end of today's shoot, the cinematographer was reported to have danced on the driveway because she liked the spookiness of the tilting shot that moved from Jude and Fiona on the front porch up to pale Ava and Jeremiah framed in the upper window ("like an old photograph"). Tomorrow, we will return at 9 am, and once again shoot all day.

sketches from Portlandia and other links

2012-01-07T21:17:00.000-05:00

---The Bloody Olive

---sketches from Portlandia

---"The Conversations: Alexander Payne":

"It's not surprising that my reaction to The Descendants vacillates between admiration and annoyance; that's been my reaction to nearly every Payne film. I went into this conversation loving Election while harboring a lot of ambivalence about his oeuvre as a whole, and my opinion hasn't been changed by this latest work, nor by revisiting his filmography. He's an interesting and contradictory director, though, a curious blend of the humanist and the cynic; he often just mockingly eviscerates his characters, but he's also proven himself capable of much more nuanced portraits that reveal the beating, fallible human heart beneath the caricature. That's Payne at his best: when he sets up a character like Tracy Flick, or Sid in The Descendants, who seems to be little more than a target for his derision, until he peels away the layers and locates the humanity, the sadness, the unexpected complexity of these seemingly simple characters. The moments when he achieves this delicate balancing act are the bright spots in an uneven but undeniably intriguing career."

---Maria Bustillo's "What Makes a Great Critic?"

---Geoff Duncan's "Why 2012 Is Starting to Look Like 1984"

---extreme weather and climate change

---"The more people tweet, the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet."

---Dragon Tattoo's opening title sequence

---Buck 65's "Superstars Don't Love"

---a history of found-footage horror movies

---"In a sense, Inglourious Basterds is a form of science fiction. Everything unfolds in and maps an alternate universe: The Movies. Even Shosanna's Parisian neighborhood bears a marked resemblance to a Cannes back alley, complete with a club named for a notorious local dive. Inflammable nitrate film is a secret weapon. Goebbels is an evil producer; the German war hero who pursues Shosanna has (like America's real-life Audie Murphy) become a movie star. Set to David Bowie's Cat People title-song, the scene in which Shosanna—who is, of course, also an actor—applies her war paint to become the glamorous "face of Jewish vengeance," is an interpolated music video. Actresses give autographs at their peril. The spectacular climax has the newly dead address those about to die from the silver screen." --A. J. Hoberman

---Audrey Hepburn's screen test for Roman Holiday

---trailers for The Flame Alphabet, The Dark Knight Rises, and Upside Down

---Crazy Diamond: The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story

---"In the digital era, is the play still the thing?"

---lastly, Raiders of the Lost Archives

Video production class weblog: Day 4--the antebellum mansion

2012-01-07T09:11:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the video production class began preproduction for their larger short film with the working title Entrapment, and they have a little over a week to make it. In comparison to previous years when students obliged me to drive all over town to visit various locations, this class chose one: an antebellum mansion that once presided over 800 acres. The picturesque house sits on top of a hill that overlooks a large lake surrounded by old trees festooned with Spanish moss. The story for the film basically concerns two teenagers who visit the place on a dare at dusk, but then have trouble getting out.

On Friday morning, as one group finished editing the action short now entitled Indiana Joe, I worked with the rest in coming up with more ideas, images, and lines of dialogue for the horror film. We watched trailers for The Strangers and the upcoming Silent House for ideas. We also visited the mansion in the afternoon, and it should work well for our purposes. The house has its own legend which concerns a man hiding himself and his valuables in a secret ceiling hideaway up above a closet in the middle of the main floor when the Yankees came through. The house's owner also assured us that even though she didn't believe in ghosts, she didn't want our shoot to interfere with the Captain (of the Confederate Army) who has been seen spectrally walking around the place. She also pointed out his cane in a little nook of the main hallway. If she ever sells the place, the new owners would have to agree to keep the cane there as a kind of ancestral duty. She is being exceedingly nice to let us shoot there for 2 to 3 days next week. Perhaps, on the side, the students should shoot a found-footage video about a film class that suddenly vanishes in the midst of setting up the lighting in the attic on the last night of the shoot. Five years later, someone finds a memory card in the rubble of the abandoned garage . . . .

Will Entrapment end up being any good? I don't honestly know. The class has produced careful work thus far.

Video production class weblog: Day 3--student filmmaking cliches and tips

2012-01-05T22:14:00.001-05:00

Today's class went very well in part because a former student named O. K. Keyes shared much of her filmmaking expertise and experience with making documentaries (I plan on posting an interview with her later). She included in her presentation a list of student filmmaking cliches:

1) alarm clocks
2) bad dialogue
3) graveyards
4) tortured artists
5) dream sequences (ironically, our class was working on a dream sequence today)
6) time lapses (better to use a montage)
7) zooming
8) overacting
9) one joke films
10) transition effects (solid cuts, even smash cuts are better)

OK stressed the importance of drawing storyboards for brainstorming, structuring her films, and checking off completed scenes during the shoot. She also uses her iPhone both for framing shots (using the phone's regular camera feature) and shooting rehearsal footage a day before the real shoot. Our class should invest in a Zoom Handy Digital Recorder and a V-MODA headphones to improve our use of sound.

What's the best camera? A more affordable T3i Canon Digital SLR.

Where can one find good legal music on the internet? From Kevin MacLeod's free music archive.

In the afternoon, the class collaborated on a story idea involving two teenagers who dare each other to enter an old house. We jotted down possible bits of dialogue, props (a rocking chair, taser?), and ideas for scenes and characterization on the whiteboard. The narrative may include a Civil War legend, staring spectral children, and a young man's inability to make a noise when he screams. We will continue to develop the story tomorrow.

Other suggestions for class equipment? Ways to use the iPhone for filmmaking? (Scott Johnson of @irregulara just recommended "focus remote, slate, logging, sun position/location, storage and depth of field calculations, and shutter remote." Britt Parrott of @brittp uses it for "location scouting, continuity, fill light, and audio.") Internet resources? More student video production cliches?

Video production class weblog: Day 2--The Dead Must Walk

2012-01-04T21:45:00.000-05:00

After a morning discussing screenplay writing techniques, shooting brief screen tests of the students with something like 3 point lighting, taking inventory of the equipment, and coming up with a studio name ("December 21 productions"), we broke for lunch. I had to go to a meeting in the early afternoon, leaving the class to start shooting an action video in my absence.

When I returned, I found a photo of Indiana Jones on the screen, a student wearing a red cape standing on the edge of the class window, and everyone else huddled out on the lawn around the camera. They had already shot some footage of my assistant W acting like a teacher. He stands before a photo of Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer from Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and, using a pointer, intones about how his nose is staring at her lips, but she's not concerned. Also there appears to be a dead chihuahua on her head distracting from the composition. He's basically mocking my image analysis of compositional weights, the dominant, the secondary contrasts, etc. from the day before.

Meanwhile, in the movie, our hero, a student, falls asleep at his desk. When he awakes into a dream, the classroom has strangely changed since Taylor Lautner appears in the back wearing a fedora (actually a life-sized cut-out photo of him found in the girl's dorm. I was thinking that Taylor should show up in every shot in the dream, but no one liked that idea). For some reason, our hero runs out of the classroom, escaping out of the window, dashing across the lawn, and jumping up on a six foot concrete post along a Gothic pointed metallic fence outside. Then, the "teacher" runs out after him, snarls, points his pointer at him in frustration, before pulling out a gun, and then follows our hero. Standing high on the post, our hero whips a leather whip out from his carrying bag, cracks the whip over his head majestically, and then dodges a bullet from the "teacher" by leaning back in a Matrix-like way.

While the students shot all of this, they forgot to turn on the external microphone after telling a guy on a tractor across the street to stop making so much noise (a good example, I said, of aleatory conditions, and why Hitchcock preferred to shoot in the studio). So, after they realized that there was a lack of sound in the playback, they shot the whipping scene again, this time with the whip pulling the gun out of the teacher's hand. A neighborhood woman drove up and asked if we were engaged in some hazing incident. The whipper on the post said no. Then, we had to stop, but the students plan on finishing the scene with a car running over the hero tomorrow morning.

It seems to me that the class has been indulging in a bit too much easy irony thus far, but that could perhaps be my fault. Could they write and shoot something serious? Should we have unacknowledged zombies as part of the mise en scene in the major 10 minute film? Perhaps we'll watch some of Children of Men to give them ideas tomorrow.

Video production class weblog: Day 1, 2012

2012-01-03T20:04:00.000-05:00

Still tired from a supremely unrestful Christmas-family-visiting driving tour of the midwest, I began teaching yet another two week video production class today with six students, a nice Sony Alpha camera with two external microphones, two new iMacs for editing, and cold sunny weather.

I am lucky to have two alumnae (who went on to major in film) assisting me this year at first. The guy (who I will name W) cautioned my students at one point to not always trust my advice because I was clearly wrong about my recommendation for him to specify what exactly was his contraband substance smuggled in stuffed animals in his longer film. We showed off one of his shorter pieces entitled "A Boy and his Bear, an existensial [sic] tale" which concerns a young man who grows excessively emotionally involved with a stuffed bear. In order to prep the class for camera techniques, we watched Curtis Brownjohn's clever summary video. We also viewed "Amy" from last year's class, a short about a woman who makes her imaginary friend jealous before killing her new boyfriend in an abandoned caboose. After some screams in the dark, we later see her strangling the imaginary friend (in other words, air) at dusk with bloody hands in the movie's Fight Club-esque climax.

So, I don't know. Much of video production seems to me a matter of wrangling some semblance of pseudo-plausible acting as the editor wrestles with weird gaps and switches in the room tone. Can we get enough coverage? Can we avoid another dull medium shot at eye level? Will the lighting equipment (bought at Lowe's and Hobby Lobby) work at all? Will the script's cliches overwhelm us next year? Students have taken me inside of an igloo, to back alleys with melting snow and fake blood, to the basement of the town museum where black-robed figures fight with metal pipes, and to the woods around the lake where a real policeman kindly volunteered his time to interrogate a fictional murderer. All too often, I have stood in strange people's living rooms and wondered about our peculiarly passive protagonist as he ate popcorn and stared at the TV. The local townspeople are amazingly nice and supportive even when we stage a gunfight after a botched robbery in a jewelry store for hours as dusk falls. At one time, during exams, students made a movie where a jealous stalker killed a boyfriend with a baseball bat in front of the very same feed store where a real murder, a beating with an axe handle, took place in a couple years. Could they sense something in the air?

Regardless, we are having oddly cold weather in this otherwise balmy winter. In order to practice shooting something, my new class jumped out of a fire window of the classroom to make "Escape of the Swaggernauts," a sketch which involved Star Wars credits at the beginning and the music from Mission Impossible. Tomorrow they plan on shooting an action film with a whip. Who knows? This class may work out.

commodified links

2011-12-30T23:08:00.000-05:00

---Fincher's reasons for making his films (not including his music videos)

---Louis Godfrey's survey of Occupy Wall Street footage:

"the occupation of space is what is at the very heart of the Occupy movement, to use public areas – parks, plazas, university campuses – as the primary tool of redress, by asserting that they are commons. The concept of the commons is, according to Peter Linebaugh in The Magna Carta Manifesto, “The theory that vests property in the community and organizes labor for the common benefit” - an idea that dates back to 1215 at Runnymede and the limitations placed on the power of King John. The commons are more than just public spaces, but they are those liberties – trial by jury, Habeus corpus, etc. – that are essential to the individual use of those spaces with agency and purpose.

The antithesis of the commons is the commodity. Ever increasingly our public spaces are serviced and maintained by private entities, and open to general use in highly regulated increments requiring prior approval, and often for monetized purposes. Accordingly, officials now view public spaces as they do any asset that can be commodified, and deploy law enforcement to protect them accordingly. “The insanity of the commodity arises from its inherent contradiction or double bind: on the one hand it is useful, convenient, or commodious, on the other hand it is bought and sold for profit and gain,” Linebaugh writes. “Guile replaces plain dealing.”

---how to film a revolution

---the end credits of Being There

---Joel Bocko's Blog 11

---the precocious Maria Popova

---"Note what the president does not say: that indefinitely detaining an American suspected of terrorism would be unconstitutional or illegal."

---filmmaking power apps

---anatomy of a scene in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

---“For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders--every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.”

---trailer for Prometheus

---hyper-networked revolt

---Catherine Grant's favorite film studies resources

---time to make a feature film with your cell phone

---the overture of Melancholia

---Andrew Dubber's "Music journalism is the new boring": "You’re a lazy, complacent, boring failure."

---"Many analysts – including the US military – predict that oil supply will fall short of demand in the next few years. This will lead to shortages and high prices, which will continue the economic slowdown, and high unemployment. Of course, this is on top of whatever financial crises are already waiting in the wings. We must get the transition to a renewable energy economy started in earnest, if we are to limit climate change impacts, and prepare for lower supplies of fossil fuels. The longer the 1% delays the transition, the harder it will be."

---Terry Gilliam's 10 tips for directors

---Keyframe's year in video

---Urban Outfitters: bookseller

---Share or Die

---Spiegelman's 15 delightful internet films

---David Lynch in four movements

---lastly, the key to understanding Young Adult: Hello Kitty

The fierce cyberpunk waif: 11 notes on Lisbeth Salander of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2011-12-26T12:49:00.000-05:00

“At the center of all of this howling evil is the strangely relatable Lisbeth Salander, a damaged, vengeful, brilliant, androgynous cipher… She is the reason that people can't put these weird books down” ---Vogue

1) Writing for The Daily Beast, Louise Roug points out that "The charisma of the Salander character is ultimately the reason for the extraordinary success of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels." But who is Lisbeth Salander? Why does her character, as played by Rooney Mara, eclipse Daniel Craig (journalist Blomkvist) so much in the new David Fincher version? Why does she effortlessly steal the movie? Fincher notes how Salander "oddly prizes herself in not coming to any conclusions," preferring the data cloud to any biased opinion, so I will, in the spirit of Salander's research techniques, limit myself to the evidence at hand. Some quotes:

2) According to her state dossier in Larsson's novel, she is described as: “introverted, socially inhibited, lacking in empathy, ego-fixated, psychopathic and asocial, and incapable of assimilating learning.”

3) Again, from the novel: “[Blomkvist] couldn’t figure out Lisbeth Salander. She was altogether odd.” As he notes later, "Salander was an information junkie with a delinquent child's take on morals and ethics."

4) One of Salander's Principles from the novel (in her words): "a bastard is always a bastard, and if I can hurt a bastard by digging up shit about him, then he deserves it."

5) According to Katie Roiphe, "One could argue that Larsson’s world of rapists, murderers, sadists, conspirators, and assorted sickos is not an entirely balanced portrayal of reality circa now, but there is something about Lisbeth Salander that rings true. In the extremes and luridness of her experience, she somehow embodies the modern woman’s most intimate contradictions, her more ordinary straddling of power and weakness, her irrational internal admixture of fierce warrior and abused waif.”

6) "Lisbeth Salander = Lizard Salamander?" ---Roger Ebert on Twitter

7) One can imagine other actresses who tried out for the role, such as Scarlett Johansson.

8) Richard Brody claims that "What Fincher captures is the inner sense of a pair of minds—Lisbeth Salander, the genius punk survivalist hacker, and Mikael Blomkvist, the intrepid investigative journalist—that run faster than others. The relentless pace of the movie, its mercurial combination of amazingly precise and crystallized shots, is like the inside view of a souped-up biomorphic CPU."

9) “Horrible things happen to her. And she wanders home. And she sits there. She lights a cigarette, and she fumes. And you don’t know what’s going on in her head. The next time you see her, she’s got a Taser and a 30-pound chrome dildo, and she’s got a plan,” says David Fincher. “You don’t need her to say, ‘This is not right what’s happened to me, and I have to make it right.’ You see her at the hardware store, buying tape and zip ties and black ink.”

10) Monika Bartyzel writes: "Fincher’s Lisbeth is not Larsson’s. She is sexualized, softened, romanticized, and less empowered. Whether he intended this or not, it’s what countless critics see in the film; they don’t mind it – in fact most like it – but they’ve recognized it and have written about it.

There seems to be a relief that Mara’s Salander is a more relatable person, that classic “female” tropes like softness and vulnerability are visible. It speaks to society’s overwhelming discomfort with the unclassifiable, whether it’s a person’s sexuality, a terrible people who does good things, or the motivations of a young woman who has been horrifically mistreated, mentally and physically, for decades.

Yet the entire point is that Lisbeth doesn’t seem real to the regular Joe or Jane walking down the street. Even those closest to her don’t truly understand her. She’s got the double-whammy of an autistic mind and a hellish life with experiences we can’t begin to fathom. We’re not supposed to understand her, or lust after her. As A. O. Scott noted in his review: “We see all of Ms. Mara and quite a bit less of Mr. Craig, whose naked torso is by now an eyeful of old news. This disparity is perfectly conventional – the exploitation of female nudity is an axiom of modern cinema – but it also represents a failure of nerve and a betrayal of the sexual egalitarianism Lisbeth Salander argues for and represents.”

11) Lastly, to once again quote Larsson's novel: "[Salander] had never brooded over whether she was straight, gay, or even bisexual. She did not give a damn about labels.” Perhaps that's the one secret behind Salander's appeal: she not only resists classifications, labels, and categories. She refuses to acknowledge them.

nondisruptive links

2011-12-18T13:10:00.002-05:00

---2011: The Cinescape

---"nondisruptive" cell use

---What doomsday movies mean:

"We know our bubble is about to burst, that our artificial prosperity is corrupt and unsustainable. And even if somehow, somehow, the greedheads change their ways and the temperature of the Earth doesn’t rise and the polar ice caps don’t melt and oil remains plentiful enough to drive back and forth from our houses in the suburbs, we’ll still be haunted, like Curtis in Take Shelter, by the thought that something bad is about to go down. And we’ll seek out doomsday movies to see how it all plays out. The end of the world has barely begun."

---when the NYPD targets the media

---Sense of Flying

---Peter Mountford once sold furniture to celebrities:

"Personally, I wanted everything in the store. I wanted the objects and I wanted the people. I wanted to eat them all up, gnaw on their bones. At first, I didn’t care about it all, thought it a lot of silliness, but soon enough I was fantasizing, actively, daily, about owning those gorgeous Italian wine glasses, they were $50 each, and about the house where I’d put my immense and uncomfortable sofa. I imagined the parties on my private beach, shaded by the French marquee that no one else in L.A. owned. Or, no one except Bridget Fonda.

While driving home to the apartment I shared with two roommates in Silverlake, I’d pick out the famous guests that would come to my beachfront house, pictured myself drinking a martini in the setting sun as the sea breeze rippled through my white suit. These things had never seemed relevant before. Now, I felt mortified by my sensible late ’90s Volvo, my cheap cellphone. Somewhere nearby, someone was sharing a platter of immaculate sushi with Sarah Michelle Gellar, who’s a year younger than me and prettier in person, while I was consuming starchy blocks of Trader Joe’s faux-sushi. What I needed, evidently, was a Maserati, a beachfront house in Malibu. What I needed was a better pair of sunglasses, and a life appropriate to those glasses. Until then, I was not alive, I was auditioning for life.

Updike wrote, “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face,” but after living in L.A. for a while, the proper reply became obvious: With a mask like that, who needs a face?"

---Seaman had his Twitter account suspended due to what?

---the worst movie posters of 2011

---"This used to be funny, but now it’s really just terrifying. We’re dealing with legislation that will completely change the face of the internet and free speech for years to come."

---"Film the Police"

---Magic and Light, Chapter 2

---"Maybe a hundred years down the line, nobody will look back at climate change as the most important issue of the early 21st century, because the damage will have been done, and the idea that it might have been prevented will seem absurd. Maybe the idea that Mali and Burkina Faso were once inhabited countries rather than empty deserts will seem queer, and the immiseration of huge numbers of stateless refugees thronging against the borders of the rich northern countries will be taken for granted. The absence of the polar ice cap and the submersion of Venice will have been normalised; nobody will think of these as live issues, no one will spend their time reproaching their forefathers, there'll be no moral dimension at all. We will have wrecked the planet, but our great-grandchildren won't care much, because they'll have been born into a planet already wrecked."

---ninja attack nuptials

---"Americans can be arrested on home soil and taken to Guantánamo Bay under a provision inserted into the bill that funds the US military," but "it is never easy to veto a defense authorization bill"

---trailers for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, The Divide, Jack the Giant Killer, We Are Legion, and The Dictator

---Tiso's "You and Mark Aren't Friends"

---Lastly, "In a world where the society of the swarm is beginning to devour the society of the spectacle, celebrities have nothing to offer a people’s movement that does not begin with the abnegation of their celebrity."

A. O. Scott picks Pulp Fiction and other links

2011-12-13T06:49:00.007-05:00

---A. O. Scott picks Pulp Fiction

---how Elvis Costello got banned from Saturday Night Live

---Chaos Cinema Part 3

---celebrities on the subway

---Chinese Army in Texas

---Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence: a Plagiarism":

"I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, moon landings, zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was born with words in my mouth—`Band-Aid,' `Q-tip,' `Xerox'—object-names as fixed and eternal in my logosphere as `taxicab' and `toothbrush.' The world is a home littered with pop-culture products and their emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet mysterious to me—I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo before Bogart, and “remember” the movie Summer of '42 from a Mad magazine satire, though I've still never seen the film itself. I'm not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we've both supplemented and blotted out our natural world. I can no more claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance as either artist or citizen, I'd probably better be permitted to name it.

Consider Walker Percy's The Moviegoer:

`Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.'

Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for `real' to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.

Whatever charge of tastelessness or trademark violation may be attached to the artistic appropriation of the media environment in which we swim, the alternative—to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of irrelevance—is far worse. We're surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of them."

---The Dark Knight Rises and hooded prisoners on a CIA plane

---what indefinite detention looks like

---the ParaNorman and Perfect Sense trailers

---Brian Eno's oblique strategies

---Jenny Turner's "As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes"

---"One of the greatest fears is that with the disappearance of the Arctic sea-ice in summer, and rapidly rising temperatures across the entire region, which are already melting the Siberian permafrost, the trapped methane could be suddenly released into the atmosphere leading to rapid and severe climate change."

---"Raiding the Lost Ark: A Filmumentary"

---an interview with David Graeber:

"Well, if you look at the size of US deficit it corresponds almost exactly to the real saw military budget. If you look at graphs showing the growth of the US deficit, and the percentage of it held overseas, and the US military spending—basically, you see almost exactly the same curve. So basically, foreign governments and institutional lenders are buying US treasury bonds and paying for this enormous military spending. So, who are the guys doing it? Well during the cold war it was especially West Germany, now, apart from China, the most important are places like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Gulf states. What do these states have in common? They’re all covered in US military bases, or under US military protection. The US is borrowing the money to create these military bases from the very countries that the US military is sitting on top of. In the past, such arrangements were called ‘empires’ and the money sent over was referred to as ‘tribute.’ Now apparently you're not allowed to use that language, so it’s called a ‘loan.’ Nonetheless, that link between the military and the core of the financial system remains, it’s the thing we’re not supposed to think about."

---"The great contemporary terror is anonymity."