So, if I’m reading a biography about one of the most memorable directors of the French New Wave, I’d better make sure to watch some of the films, eh?
“À bout de souffle” seemed like a good place to start. You probably know it as “Breathless”, and it was Godard’s breakout film from 1960. From this remove, it can be hard to see how revolutionary it was. I wasn’t watching a lot of the films that existed before it. Heck, people were still getting fussy about hand-held camera on the TV show Firefly in 2002. So the technique still isn’t that acceptable. The excuse given in the book “Everything Is Cinema” was that it was filmed as a documentary - a fictional story ‘captured’ as it was acted out. Both the book and the interviews on the DVD (which, I’m guessing constitute some of the primary material for the book anyway) make a point of how skipping all the rigging, cables, and crew allowed them to casually record without too much planning. They ignored how films were supposed to be made.
On the other hand, it’s also a film known for its jump-cut editing well before rock videos started doing it. The whole thing is recorded without sound, which meant overdubbing in the studio.
In the book, Brody has a remark that startled me when I first read it:
“[Antonioni’s next step was] to show a society of mass culture and media, of technology and ostensible progress, and to consider the transformations in individual consciousness that were taking place in this new world”
Cause - you know - I wish I could do that. It wouldn’t take too long to come up with a list of SF writers who do that. Maybe it comes through when those films are made, but… Wait! There’s more:
“Rossellini believed so strongly in the freedom of individuals that he could not make sense of the idea that […shouldn’t this be ‘of’?] people who could be alienated from themselves by the mass media, which he considered merely to be a form of rhetorical persuasion that should be rejected by claims of reason.
Yes, that’s right, Rossellini! it should be ‘rejected by claims of reason’. So explain to me why it isn’t.
This is one of those subjects where I can be pretty sure a lot of ink has already been spilled. I don’t see what sense I can contribute to it today. But we can leave it at this: The jump cuts, when I pay attention - you see, they’re not even noticeable to me under normal viewing conditions - are brilliant. The scenes are not necessarily even in the order they were shot, as film running through the sprockets usually demands. Or, might I add, the sequential instructions of computer code. That overdubbing is a concession to convention. If you’re going to chop up the frames and rearrange them however you want, then why even have dialogue? Why have events in sequence? Why not ‘ensembles of imagery’, like the junk in a junk shop, which probably could tell a story, but lies around in piles instead?
Posted in film-and-TV, books, media-studies, writing-craft | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:22:00 GMT
Friday night, ABC showed Lemony Snicket’s ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’. I work at a bookstore, and when the books first came out, some of my coworkers predicted greatness. I’ve never read the books myself - no reason really, they’re small and I could finish them quickly.
But the movie is quite another thing altogether: It has this unique look and feel that somehow remains oddly Victorian while including plenty of anachronisms. And the color! Nothing is quite normal about the surroundings - at one point it reminded me of infrared film.
In some sense, this is just another Jim Carey movie - he has a tendency to ham it up and steal the scenes, but it doesn’t dominate to quite the same extent as some other movies I could mention.
Posted in books, film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:19:00 GMT
Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samouraï” (1967) caught my eye on the video shelf Saturday. I started to watch it last night, and now I’m trying to finish so I can return it.
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:34:00 GMT
In French, “Les Bas-fonds” and Japanese, “Donzoko” - packaged together in the Criterion Collection. Both adaptations of a Maxim Gorky play.
I tried to watch them all the way through, but I couldn’t make it. I took the French version more seriously, but the Japanese version felt like a bunch of raw material for other Kurosawa films. I’m disappointed in myself for saying this, but: It’s just not my kind of art. A more modern version of the same thing - with superb acting and set design - would be much more engaging. I didn’t feel the story going anywhere, and frankly… It’s not supposed to. I must have been too tired to pick up on the subtlety this time around.
I got into a little discussion with Lacey, one of the clerks at the store. I didn’t have to reveal my snobbish preference for art films - it shows. I was returning “Walkabout” and I told her how good I thought it was. When she saw I had a Kurosawa movie, she mentioned that she had only seen “Rashomon”. A good film, I can agree - but a strange one nonetheless. It is easily the only Kurosawa film that a random person has seen: “Ran” is also a likely candidate, since it’s more recent and it won an Oscar. I told her to watch “Kagemusha”, which I like much better than “Ran”. What I didn’t say was that Kurosawa has a reputation for these period pieces - “Seven Samurai”, “Hidden Fortress”, and “Yojimbo” - but, some of the best films are contemporary - “Stray Dog”, “Ikiru”, “The Bad Sleep Well”, and “High And Low”. Predictably, action comes across more clearly in a foreign film. Action is a crowd pleaser - Hollywood knows. And, that’s precisely why I can enjoy such a film, but not respect it as much. Cheap thrills.
Even with the small rental section we maintain, it’s impossible to know all the films. Over the months, there is some turnover in the stock, too. Lacey and I compared notes until she was interrupted with a genuine customer - money in hand and everything. She thinks I watch a lot of movies, but I demurred: Hardly as many as I would like to watch, and frankly, who has the time? As long as there is still a store, I can take advantage of that resource. That I don’t work IN the store means I can’t pass any of that experience on to the paying customers, and that is a bit of a shame.
Posted in film-and-TV, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:22:00 GMT
Tonight I watched Nicholas Roeg’s “Walkabout”, part of the Criterion Collection. It’s a beautiful and startling movie, a meditation on the natural versus the artificial in our surroundings.
It has a quality like some films I vaguely remember from my childhood - some of the films that we were shown in elementary school: Visual storytelling.
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:12:00 GMT
Last night I was supposed to stay home and refrain from spending money. I was going to sit on my money for a while, and make sure I got all my bills paid on time first. Well that went out the window, and not for nothing - it was one of the most enjoyable evenings I’ve had in a while.
I figured the crowds would keep my visit short, but then it wasn’t particularly crowded out at the bars. The heat and humidity weren’t too terrible. I wandered into Asylum to have a whiskey. One bar stool was available - I could see someone had just signed for their bill. My friend Carina was bartending, and she came over to clear the spot for me when she saw me waiting to pounce. She took away the empty glasses, wiped off the bar with a rag, then something new and unexpected happened:
She produced a squeeze bottle of ketchup from behind the bar and proceeded to draw me a heart outline in ketchup on the bar!
Then, she introduced me to the people sitting nearby and ran off to pour more drinks. (50 cent Lite Beers for much of Saturday afternoon - progressively more expensive as the night wears on.) People looked at me, then looked at the ketchup heart, then back at me. “What’d you do to get a ketchup heart?”
Um… “Nothing that I know of.”
(I lied: It’s just nothing specific, and was just as surprised as they were…)
One guy to the right of me must have had a few drinks already, because he repeatedly tried to request his own ketchup heart, but Carina skillfully ignored this aspect of his order. He got more lite beers. He had trouble figuring out why he couldn’t have a ketchup heart too, but it was too much strain to produce a coherent argument as to why he should. He went back to wondering what made me so special as to deserve one.
The guy to the left of me - Andrew - had his copy of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” out. When somebody asked him how he could concentrate enough to read in a crowded bar, I had to step in with moral support: “I’m amazed I didn’t bring a book of my own… I find I can concentrate on reading with any distractions until I’ve had a couple drinks - then it’s too much work to filter out the noise”. We got to talking about “No Country For Old Men”, (see what I wrote earlier here…), the faithfulness of movies to books, and the metaphysical discussions he’d had with his friends about one particular scene in the movie - do _we_ see the villain, or do we see what the sheriff imagines? And, he’s never seen the man. I wonder now if this is important? Cinematic storytelling often shows you something incorrect as an indicator. How should that dread be presented?
At some point barhopping April showed up to call out my name from across the bar, run over and give me a peck on the cheek. She didn’t stay long.
The juke-box was playing some of the standard Asylum fare. We had a laugh over the Supreme Court’s ruling on the DC gun ban when we heard the M.I.A. song with the Clash sample and the prominent shotgun sound effects.
The fog of alcohol always confuses things. I stayed long enough to shoot a few games of pool with Andrew. I demonstrated an incredible ability to come from behind - that can upset opponents who think you are thereby toying with them, but Andrew was a pretty relaxed guy - it didn’t seem to bother him.
Meanwhile, upstairs, Carina let somebody write something on her back in pen - it was something to encourage customers to be polite while ordering. It was largely visible because of the “tank top that wouldn’t stay down”. I know I have some T-shirts that I wish were longer, but for girls, short shirts are the fashion. A definite sexism rules the roost wherever people feel free to express themselves… You can develop a tolerance for it, whether you’re the object of drunken desire, or just a bystander. Some people might say I’m in the wrong place, but I have the feeling more people like me should be there. A half dressed blond girl serving beer can really bring out the worst in some of these people… But, that half-dressed blond girl is a friend of mine, and I don’t feel guilty for paying attention. When time permits, we’ve even had some thoughtful conversations. That, my friends, is a good way to get through life. And maybe that’s how come I got a ketchup heart, and you didn’t.
Posted in bar-scene, film-and-TV, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:44:00 GMT
My half-hearted attempt to watch every Andrei Tarkovsky movie continued with Solaris. I saw a bit of it on TV of all places. A while back I spotted it in mid stream on a local UHF channel that plays a lot of foreign news and movies. And then there is the Soderburgh Version which I saw in the theater when it came out. At about that time, I read the book, and so it was just a matter of time before I rounded out the experience by watching the Russian Movie.
I was charmed to notice that the “City of the Future” sequence is film of a freeway in Japan. It still rings with a sort of futurism - or an alternate futurism. Not so different from Code 46 using current-day Shanghai to represent the future. I guess to a typical Soviet citizen, places like Toyko must seem impossibly futuristic - especially if you restrict yourself to the freeways. I have to wonder sometimes about a future that alternates between rural dacha and urban expressway. I don’t much care for a future of riding around in cars at 60 miles per hour, passing uncountable tower blocks, merging and splitting. Although, I may once have considered it cool. And, last summer I did it briefly in Houston. That sequence could have been spliced into Solaris just as effectively. And my last word is: ‘City of the Future’ it may be - but is this the ‘Sweater of the Future’ he is wearing? Or any number of similar remarks. Which brings me to this…
What is ‘Science Fiction’, anyway?
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 22 May 2008 03:35:00 GMT
On the heels of New Ways Of Watching, I found a link to the Internet Archive’s September 11th Television Archive. Yes, that September 11th.
The most startling thing about the Greil Marcus book “The Shape Of Things To Come” was a batch of quotes that began the Introduction. Some of them were direct responses to that day, and others were uncanny parallels from other sources. It’s chilling in a new way to read from Moby Dick: “The ship! Great God, where is the ship?”
We have here a deeper sort of patriotism: As the book proceeds, we meet a number of characters, real and fictional, who say “This nation you speak of sounds terrific - We shouldn’t wait another minute to create it!” It’s almost as if the history of America so far is only the design phase. Some testing, perhaps. And a lot of voices crying out “When is it going to get here?” and “Where is this great America you speak of? We’d like to live there.”
As soon as I started reading, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would seek out the television coverage. It’s been years now, and part of me wants to have a sinister laugh at the expense of the news producers, and their vapid morning-show ‘lifestyle’ segments. But another part is curious how to correct the nonsense inherent. Inherent because they’re so desperate to share what they know as soon as they can - even if it turns out to be wrong later. Sooner rather than Righter.
Some other time perhaps… I’ll give a fuller account of my day. But know this: I watched as little TV as possible. I was as caught off guard as they were. I never would have been watching at the critical moment - when they had to break in - that I can watch today in the archives. The news came to me word-of-mouth, and I even saw some smoke rising from some unknown point on the horizon. There was plenty of panic to go around that day, but it didn’t touch me. A kind of luck, if you want to put it that way. I thought people were overreacting, and mostly I was right. I get the world we live in a little better since that day: It’s a delicate balance. Where were you expecting to go? Drive out onto a gridlocked highway? DC isn’t even all that crowded. Most people could have just soldiered on. I only left work because my girlfriend’s coffee shop closed and sent her home. Whatever danger there was to me would be the same at home as at work. Nobody could say what they were running from. Most likely, they were going to pick up their kids who would be turned out from some middle school in Manassas or Germantown for the day. By the millions.
But Wait, There’s Another Reason…
I didn’t even consider this at first, but I’ve been reading the Charles Perrow book “The Next Catastrophe”. His thesis is that we worry too much about defense (too much, I said…), and that we could reduce our vulnerability to all kinds of disasters accidental or deliberate by spreading out the danger.
He considers at least one case of a railroad tank car leaking chlorine gas. When workers at a chemical plant have to evacuate, they can no longer monitor other dangerous processes. You could see a cascading failure. When you consider it, emergency responders are often heroes precisely because they rush in without all the information. And, like I’ve been saying, how do you know what to tell everybody else? What’s the best advice when you don’t even know what leaked, or exploded?
And let’s not forget that we put dangerous industries - threats to our health and existence - in private hands. Is this what you would call “Homeland Security”? Allow fierce cost-cutting and sham drills at a power plant to ‘maximize shareholder value’?
Posted in ontology, film-and-TV, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 11 May 2008 22:13:00 GMT
On my sister’s recommendation, I borrowed “No Country For Old Men” from work yesterday. I had a feeling I’d pick it out at some point, but she seemed eager to discuss it when she told me she had seen it.
Of all the things I could say about this movie, I’ll start with this: I like the look of West Texas in 1980. In the documentary that comes with the movie, somebody remarks that it was harder to make it look like 1980 than it would have been to make it look like the 19th century. And, I believe it. It has a lot to do with the day I browsed around some ‘antique’ shops in Harlingen, Texas last summer. Our time does not produce as many antiques - we produce ‘collectibles’. Or, that is to say, we produce disposable crap that sometimes acquires a cult following and fetches a high price on Ebay.
I’m suddenly very amused by the Goofs Page on IMdB. There are a lot of nit-picky anachronisms, but let’s be serious: I wasn’t worried about the tail light design on the back of one of the trucks being introduced in 1982. You’re really hoping for a kind of ‘bulk effect’ in period pieces; A flavor or patina. Certainly, nobody in this movie could be seen talking on a modern cell-phone, but when it comes to dish detergent logos or area codes on the phone bill printout… It’s fiction, after all. Who’s to say we can’t fudge some of the arbitrary details. Each correct detail - Glass milk bottle, vs. a weak anachronism - a logo on that bottle for a dairy that didn’t exist at the time - is what really counts. They’re not going to be riding around in hovercraft, so if the truck model evokes a time near enough to 1980, than I think the filmmakers have succeeded.
I was fond of the Sheriff’s soliloquies. His chatty introduction, recalling the good old days when most lawmen didn’t even carry a gun. In conversations he would drift off - he even remarks “sometimes my mind wanders”. And, at the end when he tells about a dream he had of his father. On the one hand he seems like a taciturn guy - very businesslike, but we see several examples of him talking at length. We hear of the killer that he has no sense of humor. “Bad compared to what, exactly… the Bubonic Plague?”, but I noticed that the Sheriff hardly displays humor either. And is it my imagination, or are they supposed to seem similar? I was confused watching the previews a while back because Javier Bardem looked like a younger Tommy Lee Jones, and they have a similar voice (but different accents, to be sure). Notice that although the three main characters never encounter each other directly, both the killer and the sheriff drink from the milk bottle in Moss’s trailer, and are shown gazing at their reflections in the TV. It feels like a deliberate painting of them with the same brush - two sides of the same coin, perhaps? “I got here the same way the coin did.”
[More Later…]
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 10 May 2008 22:34:00 GMT
Well, it’s another beautiful day outside, and I’m stuck in the basement. It’s not a bad place to be when it’s blisteringly hot outside - but today is perfect.
Yesterday I watched the Jet Li / Jason Statham movie “War” It was fun. Maybe too much fun. There was a documentary split into separate episodes covering the big action scenes, and I watched those studiously. That added some extra dimension to the enjoyment. There is a lot of graphic violence, but Jet Li often plays the Assassin with a conscience. That’s nice, but in a movie it can be tedious.
I read a story the other day about Hulu.com - a website where you can watch TV shows. There are a bunch of other sites like this, but Hulu is mainly NBC and Fox shows (apparently all from the same studio - more on that later). The content is not comprehensive in the least. They have the usual suspects like “Simpsons”, “Family Guy”, and “House, MD” but there were a lot of other shows I don’t regularly watch, but was mildly interested in - I just never manage to see them. Or, I missed my chance.
If I wanted to watch every episode, I could get a DVD of early seasons… I won’t bother with “Arrested Development”, “My Name Is Earl”, or “Bones”. But - look here! - they’ve got some recent episodes of “Monk”. I used to watch Monk when it was on Monday nights on ABC before the football game. It moved around a little, so it was hard to catch, but I liked it. I knew that it was picked up by the USA network, but since I don’t have cable, I’ve been missing out. While I would hate to watch too much television (let’s not forget the effect Clay Shirky had on me …), I do like to watch two or three shows in a week. The reruns are probably too much - It’s nice to have one predictable block of TV viewing in any given night, not the constant monitoring of an entire evening ‘just in case’ something good comes on. Interestingly, Monk is back on NBC now. I saw one episode a week or two ago. I don’t even remember which night it was on. TV networks have a bad habit of running irregular crap I don’t want to see (I’m pointing at you American Idol!), then being forced to toss in repeats of something random later. That’s how I saw most episodes of “House”, but it feels like they don’t give a damn about me.
I might have talked about this scheme at some point, but Hulu is providing these shows mainly to gather statistics. The web is a much more reliable way of figuring out what people actually watch. There is, of course, no guarantee that I really watch the videos I stream. I can pause it any time I like, but perhaps I will forget to pause it, run off to do something else, watch it a second time… And that will count as two viewings. This is not to say that Hulu is completely without commercials. The page itself is devoid of any advertisements - which surprised me - but, the shows have very short commercials, which didn’t disrupt the flow too much. With TV, I know there is enough time to go to the kitchen during a commercial, so I feel odiously synchronized to the beat of their drum, but with these 10 and 30 second interruptions, and the ability to pause at any time, I feel much more relaxed and in control. One of the nice things about watching a video is that I can ‘harness’ a chore to the entertainment - switch back and forth between work and play. When I watch TV, I have to give away too much of my attention to get anything else done. Surely, some people would think my switching back and forth destroyed the enjoyment - but we’re talking about mindless chores like washing the dishes, which are a perfect opportunity to let my mind unpack the video I’ve been watching. If, on the other hand, I spend three hours focused on a movie or two, I’ll be overwhelmed by the story and images, and I won’t be motivated to spend an equal amount of time afterwards occupied with a chore.
Posted in film-and-TV | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 04 May 2008 13:47:00 GMT
