HopkinsCinemAddicts

Elephant Memory: The Effect and the Affected of High School

 

    Time. It’s a concept that we don’t truly understand. Time is fickle. It always seems to drag out when you want it to move faster and speed up when you want to stop and savor moments. Time is always against us. We never have enough time to do everything we want to yet we always have all the time to waste.  Elephant directed by Gus Van Sant uses time and the actions taken in a specific period of time, to outline characters in one of the most important, and possibly detrimental times, in our lives, adolescence and high school. Elephant looks at this “time” (quotations for the multiple definitions previous) from many angles, through differet characters lives revolving around a school shooting tragedy; the victims, bystanders, and shooters. This film though is not about mourning or asking why the tragedy took place. Instead it examines the psyche of the high school student, the challenges they are put through, the effect of high school, and how that affects the adolescent mind. Throughout the film we are forced to see glimpses of ourselves during that time in our lives. It’s easy to say, “Oh, well that never happened to me!” and brush it aside. Sure, the tragedy most likely didn’t happen to you, but Elephant is much more than that. It addresses who we all are, who we all were, and who, we all hope, we can be in the future.

"Lose not yourself in a far off time, seize the moment that is thine." -Friedrich Schiller

 

            The high school seems perfectly stereotypical at first glance. You have the popular jock with a beautiful girlfriend, the artsy and awkward photographer, the kid with the awful parents, the girl with her head in the clouds, etc. With a closer look though you see each character with their certain traits, certain characteristics that we as viewers pick up on and relate to. As the film progresses, the different psyches of each character become dimensional and real emotion is conveyed. We all in high school put on masks, the personas that we believed would fit nicely into the jigsaw of the skewed microcosm of society known as high school. The ones who didn’t, or the ones who couldn’t, were outcast, subjected to the torments of those whose masks were strongest and sometimes whose inner turmoil was greatest, needing the ego boost they received from putting other people down seen through the popular girls and guys and how they treat others as well as one another inside their clique.

What is most interesting about this school shooting film is its relationship to the actual shooters. As the film begins and we are first introduced to the shooters, they are portrayed as any other student, nearly invisible in the film paralleling their invisibility in their high school. As the film progresses, however, we start to see more deeply into their lives and try to better understand the motives and operations that lead to the shooting. Van Sant touches on a few key themes of media and ease of accessibility of guns. Eric, one of the shooters, plays video games that sole purpose is to shoot and kill one virtual man after another while Alex looks at guns online. They also both watch a documentary on Hitler, mesmerized, almost studying, his rise to power. As they watch the documentary, a delivery truck pulls up and brings with it one of the guns used in the massacre. It was as easy as placing an order online with a fake name and a credit card for these boys to receive all that was necessary to bring revenge to their school. The shooters, even though developed as deeper characters (one loving piano, while the other always having witty retorts) are portrayed a vengeful and bloodthirsty. One of the most shocking lines that parallels the actual Columbine school shooting was when Eric goes over the massacre plan with Alex. “Most importantly, Have fun!” was his final line before they suited up for the massacre. These boys had been pushed so far by the other students it had drove their adolescent minds to unthinkable acts of violence directed at all peers, not singling out their previous attackers. Van Sant comments on the instability of adolescents and the effect the twisted society of high school can affect their minds.

The Columbine High School Memorial

Van Sant uses many non-professional actors in Elephant to the best effect. Each character, even though outwardly stereotypical becomes much more dimensional with each actor’s portrayal. Much of the film is based on character interactions and the high school mentality. Each character is pushed from outside forces, whether bullies (Eric and the spit wads tossed at him), family hardships (John and his drunken father), or societal restrictions (the GSA and their discussion), and each character is seen dealing with those problems in the context of the few minutes before the shooting. Van Sant shows that each has their own hardships, even the popular girl and her believed pregnancy, and each have their own way of dealing with it. The film suggests that at such a fragile time in a developing mind, the pressure that cooks students in high school seems to be counter productive in creation of well-adjusted successful adults.

Van Sant and Elephant outline many political and social factors on the institution of high school and the affect it has on adolescents. Much of the time spent for a majority of student’s deals not with academia but with the pressures of social and societal life. At that time we all try to find out who we are. Elephant though comments on the inaction we as a society have taken to look at the physiological torture some students are put through on a daily basis as a result of others in high school. I hope that any readers can take from this blog not only the analysis of this film but a larger lesson that we all need to learn and teach, as best as we can, to the next generation of the golden rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. Only through universal respect can we truly succeed as a society.

 

All images used are licenced free of charge from Creative Commons. Thank you to Flikr users David Friedel and Katerha for thier images. The users do not, however, endorse any opinions in the blog. 

Why Don't the Bad Guys All Look Different From Me?: Subverting Sterotypes on Homeland

WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW

Showtime’s new series, Homeland, takes an enormous risk. In setting the show in the context of the contemporary War on Terror, the show could have easily ended up either completely jingoistic and/or incredibly racist. The topic of terrorism in this country is, at the moment, linked with the topic of racism towards Muslims. As Homeland seems to strive for realism, replacing Islamic radicals with a more politically correct villain would come off as hokey. The show instead attempts to subvert the viewer’s expectations creating a show that shows both sides of the conflict.

The show’s main conflict of a bipolar CIA agent, portrayed by Clare Danes, investigating a recently recovered POW, Nicholas Brody who is played by Damian Lewis, automatically removes some of the racial tension surrounding the issue by shifting the suspicion away from the Arabs and casting it onto a homespun white male. Damian Lewis is generally best known for playing Dick Winters in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, and generally gives off the impression of an upstanding American. By placing the doubt and paranoia of the War on Terror onto such an upstanding looking war hero, the show immediately throws the audience for a loop and causes them to question the way that they think about the terrorism issue.

One way that the show maintains the suspicion on Brody is by revealing that he is secretly a Muslim. This revelation draws on the slight culture of fear that permeates America especially once the question of potential terrorism is brought up. The fact that Brody worships Allah automatically draws the viewer to question his loyalty. However, the show points out the ridiculousness of this suspicion when Brody is finally confronted about this practice. He replies that he found religion while being tortured as a POW and that Islam was the only religion in the area. By pointing out that there is a perfectly viable reason for Brody to be a Muslim without it meaning that he is a terrorist, the show pulls the rug out from under the audience’s feet and makes them question what they have believed up until this point.

Once actual Middle Eastern terrorists are introduced, the show continues to make the viewer question what they believe about the racial identity of terrorism. A terrorist couple is introduced, a Middle Eastern man and a white woman. The makeup of this couple plays into the concept that different races are swooping in to corrupt the fair and innocent white women. Just by being shown this couple and being told that they are terrorists, the audience generally believes that the man is the diehard terrorist and that the woman has been talked into it. However, the show inverts the dynamic, and we find out that the woman is the true believer and the man is following her out of love. He is unnerved by the concept of violence and doesn’t truly believe in the cause, but wants to make his wife happy. This inversion subverts both general gender roles as well as racial stereotypes to create an atmosphere, much like reality, in which the characters cannot be judged immediately as they appear on screen.

The show gets a lot of mileage out of subverting the audience’s expectation. This allows them to create an extremely tense environment for the show in which no one can be trusted. The people who are supposed to look like terrorists are, in fact, just people, and the most destructive act on the show was committed by the US government in their hunt for terrorists. By playing with such a controversial topic, the show brings to light a lot of what we believe in this country and proves that much of it has no bearing on reality.

 

Multiple Cities and Multiple Films: Guy Maddin's MY WINNIPEG

Let’s start off with the title, what it contains and what it elides: My Winnipeg.

Winnipeg. This is indeed, and without a doubt, a film about Winnipeg, a large-ish town in central Canada situated at the fork of the Red and the Assiniboine rivers. This wintry Manitoban capital -- ensconced in stratified layers of snow and time, rocked to sleep by its own nostalgia, simultaneously the scheming writer and captive audience of boundless lore -- is the psychic prison Guy Maddin seeks to escape and the locus of his archaeological project. (That this “archaeological” project is just one of many -- alongside disparate “psychoanalytic” and more purely cinematic ventures -- is something that I shall return to later.) Insofar as the film tries to teach us unknown facts about an unknown place (I imagine that most viewers are, like me, ignorant of the real Winnipeg), it can claim to be a documentary -- and it is, indeed, presented by something called The Documentary Channel (a CBC outlet of sorts.) And at times the film hews too closely to its straight-documentary vision, providing us with quirky customs, eccentric faces, decrepit buildings: a whole cosmos of urban truth and myth that we have seen a thousand times before, in a thousand other places, from a thousand other creators, in a thousand tourist manuals, on the lips of a thousand other good-old-days-ers championing the moribund glory of the past. It is objectively fascinating stuff, but so soaked in sentimentality that it risks lulling you just as much as it has lulled multitudes of Winnipeggers. (And lulling is not so far from boring.) But at other times, My Winnipeg strays so far from what we could call documentary realism that it risks raising another sort of ire. None of Maddin’s Winnipeg stories are presented with even the slightest bit of historiographical clarity: no sources, no provenance, no interviews, not the slightest objective slant of verifiability or falsifiability. We are essentially being made privy to nifty nostalgia for an urban spirit-world that might never have existed. While there is undoubtedly something commendable and hyper-cinematic about this -- isn’t the dream-world always a more fertile subject than the real world? -- it becomes claustrophobic as the film progresses, rattling along episodically from one set piece to another. If this is indeed a documentary, what documents can we cling to? What information can we use as a reputable foundation for our own mental schema of Winnipeg? How can we -- or Maddin, for that matter -- ever escape from the Platonic cave of shadows and illusions? Without any third-party interviewees or voices, all we have is Maddin’s poetic stream of consciousness laced to spectral half-facts -- and that can begin to feel very solipsistic after a while. And this brings us to the next word of the title.

 

My. In addition to functioning as an archaeological excavation of the multiple cities contained in Winnipeg’s interstices -- parallel cities dislocated geographically, historically, socially, financially, erotically from the banal consensus reality of Wikipedia’s Winnipeg -- Maddin’s film paints itself as a psychoanalytic project in which the filmmaker seeks to “film his way out” of his hometown, escaping once and for all from “the heinous power of family and city.” That this heinous power -- the sickly grip of despair that lurks within the rigidity of childhood -- is never adequately shown is one of the film’s major problems, one of the things that sabotages its psychoanalytic aspirations and reduces it, ultimately, to the inoffensive folklorism described above. Not that Maddin doesn’t make a game effort. He hires actors to play his family members in reenactments of crucial formative moments and brings his domineering mother into the mix (played in an excellent turn -- not as one of the reenactors but as Maddin’s “real” mother, confusingly enough -- by ‘40s femme fatale Ann Savage.) Wending his way through memory on a highly-literalized “dream-train,” Maddin hardly shies from erotically-charged, even shameful remembrances, revealing the way that local history (a sexualized labor movement of tongue-in-cheek “Bolsehevik rapists” stalking a Catholic girls’ school), boyhood development (much affection is lavished on old arenas and the stately, nude athletes that showered there) and maternal influence (his mother’s naked lap is presented as a geological force comparable with the forking Red and Assiniboine) fuse to build a psychosexual tapestry all the more consumptive for being half-remembered (and half-memorable.) And yet, the dark latent strata of love and hate are never quite unearthed. I craved the bedrock of malaise that would not only show why Winnipeg seduced Maddin in the first place but also share a glimpse of what it is that now drives him to escape. This Winnipeg is his, but he never shares enough to make it ours…

What my breakdown of the title leaves out is just that thing that any Maddin-lover would most expect: style. And My Winnipeg isn’t lacking. All the Soviet-style montage, wry intertitles and silent melodrama we know so well from “The Heart of the World” and Brand Upon the Brain are brought to bear on little unassuming Winnipeg. There are sequences of unabashed visual splendor that might stand beautifully as self-contained episodes, but are only with great awkwardness shepherded into the documentary and psychoanalytic narratives that ostensibly make up the meat of the film. At one point, various Winnipeg elders gather for a sinister séance, in which a lovely ballet dancer dances out messages from the spirit world. It is a sparkling, romantic dialogue of images – a telegram from 1915 edited up with all the alacrity of a music video – and while it work tremendously as a three-minute short film, it leaves you wondering what it reveals about Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg, or any Winnipeg for that matter. At another point, a montage of the whirring beauty salon of Maddin’s mother is dynamically, discontinuously edited, with sprays, purses, gossiping mouths, dusty powders flying in every direction – a whole panoply of womanly signifiers that Maddin credits with building the feminine side of his psyche. And later, a mystical hockey arena in the process of demolition – and filled while a century’s worth of ghostly players playing one final match – presents the male side of Maddin’s upbringing. All of these scenes share the same dialectical montage style, the same back-and-forth volley of faces, fetishized objects, even intertitles. But those high-melodramatic interludes seem to exist on utterly a different plane from  the somewhat banal documentary paces or the fascinating – yet weirdly unfulfilled family reenactments. Like the city of its title, My Winnipeg seems to have uncountable maps for uncountable alleys. How do these alleys cohere into a single city, or a single film? This is a question that Guy Maddin doesn’t quite know how to answer.

Young, Dumb, and Full of Ambition

     A little pearl of wisdom that I recieved last Wednesday has really stuck with me.  It came from local filmmaker Lotfy Nathan, known for his documentary "The Twelve O'clock Boyz," who was giving a talk in a class of mine called "Baltimore Filmmakers."¹

    Said Lotfy (in so many words, I'm not a stenographer):

     "The first film is the best one to work on.   This is because you still have the ambition of fulfilling your artistic vision as well as the ignorance of how insanely difficult it's going to be to actually do so."

    Now while I don't recall Lotfy's exact wording, what I do know is that the sentiment immediately made a nice little home for itself in my mind.  I was sitting there thinking: "Wow, he's right!  I am really ambitious.  I am completely ignorant of how horribly frustrating this process is going to be.  I feel great!"  Not only do I recognize my own cognitive dissonance,  I embrace it.  I have to, or else this movie I'm working on will never get made.  

    I should add that a healthy dose of naiveté is not all I took away from Lotfy's talk.  He also gave us a good deal of much more practical advice, such as the type of excel sheet I should use to manage my budget, and that I should take my cast out to dinner every now and then on my own dime.  But I think what's going to get me most through this entire project most of all is an insatiable drive to concretize what I've created in my head (and on the page).  Because while I can't exactly call this my first film (I've made at least four or five shorts so far), I have never attempted anything even remotely close to the scale of the film that I intend to complete by the end of this semester.  I look forward to the ongoing battle of Jake's Ambition Vs. What is Actually Possible.

     As far as the practical stuff goes, I'm coming along.  It has a title:  "Westbaum in High School."  It's script has a ridiculous page count: 45.   I've casted all the leads for my film: all close friends of mine, nepotism be damned. (I'll return to this subject later.)  Right now I'm working on the preliminary steps of pre-production: location scouting, script re-writes, deciding exactly which camera to use, finding someone to do my sound for me, figuring out which pizza place I should bring my cast to (ideally delicious yet affordable.)  In later posts I'll go into more detail about my processes of casting, writing, and filming, as well as updates on my logistical adventures, which might be a little bit boring but will hopefully be useful to other first-time filmmakers.  

    But for now, I'll leave you with this:  I'm fully aware that I will soon be facing challenges of which I am now completely unaware.  But all these aside, I'm feeling pretty confident.  And that has to count for something.  

 

Truly Yours,

Jake Appet

 

^1. The class "Baltimore Filmmakers" is taught by local filmmaker and DMC guru Jimmy Joe Roche. It's been really fun and informative so far.  To avoid putting another footnote on the footnote I'll mention that the DMC stands for "Digital Media Center," which is a great resource for Hopkins students who want to rent out technological equipment and work on creative projects.  This post would have been punchier without this footnote, so in a way, I'm sorry.  But I guess it's a metaphor for... uh, the messy process of filmmaking itself?  That doesn't quite work.  Anyway, see you next time!  

Let's Be Honest

        The March issue of Vanity Fair is calling Barry Levinson's Diner "the most influential movie of the last 30 years."  Maybe it is; personally, I find that The Sixth Sense was by far the most influential because it informed the majority of my fears of the dark as well as a truly excellent lyric in The Lonely Island's "J*** in My Pants."  While VF and I agree that Diner is so terrifically influential because of its realism, we diverge completely when it comes to choosing the scenes that illustrate this trait.  They choose the scenes of conversation between the six best friends in the Fells Point Diner.  I choose something simpler, more specific and, as it happens, very appropriate to the context of this blog.

        There is a scene halfway through the movie that, though very brief, allows all the virtues of Diner's overt quotidianness and subtle honesty to crystallize into a glittering little geode of relatability.  Eddie (Steve Guttenberg), the literal-minded, happily aimless, slightly adenoidal groom-to-be and Billy (Tim Daly), the unhappily aimless, romantic yet resilient grad student who has come home to be Eddie's best man, walk into a movie theater whose marquee reads "ANOTHER BERGMAN CLASSIC."  For anyone who feels like I do about The Seventh Seal, we suspect this might not be such a thrilling cinematic experience for the pair.  It will be especially bad for Eddie, who balks at all things evasive or amorphous--and whose side the audience is secretly encouraged to be on, from the opening scene in the diner with the roast beef sandwich to his ingeniously spastic dance with the oddly-shaped stripper late in the movie.

        A close-up in the theater shows Eddie and Billy in the audience, their faces lit by the bleak whiteness of the monochromatic Bergman classic.  With his eyes fixed on the screen, Eddie frowns--more out confusion than displeasure--and asks, "What am I watchin'? Movie just started, I don't know what's goin' on."

        "It's symbolic," Billy replies.

        "Who's that guy?"

        "That's Death walking on the beach."  Billy seems apathetic, but his face looks almost appreciative next to Eddie's 

        "I been to Atlantic City a hundred times, I never saw death walk on a beach."

        Yes!  Thank you!  To understate it immensely: Ingmar Bergman is not for everyone.  I love Max von Sydow and I love the occasional chainmail muscle tee, but come on.  I am sure many people in the Film Department and beyond would consider that an unenlightened remark, but I am also sure that a great many Diner viewers had the same reaction to this scene that I had.  But regardless of anyone's fondness for allegorical Swedish cinema, The Seventh Seal with all its symbolism is such a perfect foil because Diner is free of symbols--nothing in the movie is charged with meaning anything, it just is.  When we watch this movie, we watch people--Eddie, Billy, Boogie (a delicate pre-boxing, pre-reconstructive surgery Mickey Rourke), Shrevie (Daniel Stern), Fenwick (Kevin Bacon), Modell (Paul Reiser), the annoying old guy buying a TV (Herb Levinson, the writer/director's uncle)--just existing, to no particular end.  I don't know how I could aptly describe the plot while still doing justice to how engaging and satisfying Diner is.

        There is one other metacinematic touch that bolsters the movie's realism: the inspired character of Methan (Tait Ruppert, a local Baltimore kid), who appears only twice and says only quotations from Sweet Smell of Success.  As we're watching it, these expertly crafted lines delivered in a precise, intense monotone make the movie going on around the polished interjection seem all the more like real life. When we've finished it and, say, have a blog post to write, we realize how organic all the dialogue in Diner is.  However many moments in the movie were ad-libbed, there was still a script that captured what happens in conversation between guys and their friends, their parents, their girlfriends, their wives, even their useless, pretentious brothers like Fenwick's.  I feel as if I could saunter into the Fells Point Diner anytime and, as Shrevie says, "bullshit the entire night away" with those six lost soon-to-be-men.  I only wish I could.

A Pleasant Halftime Surprise

                While most people who watched the Superbowl last Sunday were interested in the actual football game being played, a significant portion turned in just to watch the commercials. These ads are an annual tradition in which each company attempts to be the funniest or the weirdest in order to get their product stuck in the consumer’s mind. However, viewers this year were faced with a commercial unlike all the rest.  Chrysler released a commercial, which played during half-time, which went in a completely separate direction from all the rest.

Instead of showing babies in slingshots or the cast of Star Wars enjoying Superbowl commercials (my personal favorites out of the traditional ads), this ad, directed by David Gordon Green, instead took a much more serious angle as Clint Eastwood talked to the audience about the hard economic times facing the country and Detroit in particular. The ad asks that the American people stay strong and look towards the future instead of focusing on the downsides of the present, a sentiment that feels more at home in a political ad instead of a Superbowl commercial. The ad has many similarities to Ronald Reagan’s famous “It’s Morning in America” campaign, also delivered at a time of economic downturn.

The commercial is also remarkable in that the only time Chrysler is mentioned is at the very end when their name shows up on screen. The title of the company is never spoken, instead showing images of their cars and of normal people. By shooting the commercial in this manner, the ad feels much more universal and less like an advertisement. While most of the commercials are attempting to create so much product recognition that you can’t help but remember the name of the company, Chrysler instead decided to step back and allow the ad to speak before mentioning that they had made it. This style of advertisement is, in some ways, more interesting as it causes the viewer to pay more attention in order to figure out what the ad is for.

The ad itself is very risky if only for the costs involved. For just the airtime, Chrysler had to pay $12.3 million. That is in addition to the cost of actually making a commercial, a figure which the company has yet to release. Does this commercial merit the extreme expense that it took to make it? Will it cause enough of an upswing in sales to cover the cost? My gut points towards yes if only because it reminded people of their own domestic companies. While the other car companies may make fantastic products, buying from Chrysler supports the economy of the United States, not Germany or Japan. By having the commercial narrated by Clint Eastwood, an American icon, Chrysler was able to create an atmosphere of patriotism that can be very powerful in the proper hands. In addition, by creating a commercial that was the least commercial of all of them, Chrysler is being praised by many people around the country. This, in essence, gives them more advertising space as people talk about their ad more and more.

In the end, Chrysler was able to make a very inspiring ad at a time when no one was expecting it. They surprised everyone and created something that will be remembered long after the excitement over the Ferris Bueller commercial has passed. By tapping into the American people’s sense of comradeship, they have ingrained their name into the minds of everyone who was watching at the time, a record breaking 111.3 million people. Whether they have the best intentions for the ad or just financial ones, one has to be impressed by the artisanship and individuality that the ad represents.

 

Fireworks and Tears: The Play of Artifice and Subtlety in THE LEOPARD

There is a scene midway through The Leopard (recently shown, in digitally restored splendor, at the Charles Theatre), in which Burt Lancaster -- playing the aging but dignified Prince of Salina -- stands on a balcony as the results of a crucial plebiscite are read out. Though the drama and fanfare are great, the results are predetermined (rigged, in fact): Salina’s isolated Sicilian village is voting to join Giuseppe Garibaldi’s unified Italy. The old aristocratic order will be swept away, replaced by a new cosmos of democratic compromise, political greed, and populist sentiment. As a pompous local functionary reads out the results, Salina languidly, mournfully smokes a cigar, wearing an expression halfway between resignation and worry. All of a sudden, as the reading of results draws to a close, a massive torrent of fireworks explodes in the sky behind Salina’s head. The placid composition of a man in the center of a frame is suddenly turned into an opulent, colorful portrait of political fervor spectacularly unleashed for all to see. A lesser movie, or a lesser director, would have lingered on this exquisite shot until every ounce of wonder was wrung out of it. We would have seen the fireworks from many angles, we would have seen Salina’s face twist as he reacted to them, we would have seen people clamoring in the streets. But such is the assurance of Luchino Visconti’s direction, and such is the inherent expressiveness of Lancaster’s leonine face, that no such dwelling is required. We barely have time to register a shot that must have cost huge resources to realize, before Visconti cuts away, and we are back in the social comings and goings that make up the bulk of the film.

The reason I lavish so much description on that one shot -- beyond the fact that it has haunted me, in the best of ways, since seeing the movie -- is that it is emblematic of a fundamental and highly fruitful tension in The Leopard. Visconti’s film is rightly known as one of the most extravagant, maximalist productions of all time, but shots like the one described above reveal a dimension of subtlety, of sparseness and minimalism that forms the true emotional core of the film. Though huge amounts of money and beauty and power are constantly paraded before the frame, what we realize by the end of the film is the impermanence of it all, the way it pales in comparison to the drama of a single tear or a single kiss. The Leopard is defined by the play between putting everything out there for us to see and keeping everything beneath the surface.

Lancaster’s character -- meant to be construed as the noble but fading leopard of the title -- is the prime locus of this tension. He himself is a man with sharply delineated interior and exterior lives. On the outside, he is a paragon of all that was great about the old aristocratic order. With discipline and benevolence, he ushers his small Sicilian fiefdom into the modern age, relinquishing power here to gain it there, stating time and again that, “If we want everything to remain as it is, everything will have to change.” But underneath that surface of control, he is a man tortured by the thought of his own mortality, tortured by a sort of moral relativism that leads him to discern that no political order is better than any other, that both the leopards and lions of the past and the jackals and hyenas of the present think themselves “the salt of the earth” and that all are governed by basic human needs for affirmation, validation, sex, money and peace.

For the bulk of the movie, Salina -- not to mention Lancaster himself -- is an excellent actor, playing the dignified role that everyone requires of him, regulating the passions of his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon, playing a sort of vapid, opportunistic pretty boy) and Tancredi’s lusty flame Angelica (Claudia Cardinale, playing an equally vapid/opportunistic femme fatale of sorts.) But at the risk of spoiling the most transcendent moment of the movie (on par for me with the ship-in-a-tree moment in Aguirre, the Wrath of God), I want to close off this post by describing the single moment when the Prince of Salina’s poise unravels: By the end of the film, the flames of revolution have mostly extinguished themselves. A new political system is in place, but all the social functions of courting and entertaining and pleading remain the same. A huge ball is being held and all the characters convene in their lushest, most aristocratic vestments. But this occasion -- which formerly would have provided Salina with the quintessential stage for his lucid conversations, Machiavellian manipulations, and soothing reassurances -- becomes almost unbearable for him. Fleeing from this pageant of obsolete narcissism, Salina steps into a side room and gazes on a melancholy painting of a man dying. Analyzing the conditions of the man’s death in the painting -- who susurrounds him, how he is dressed, etc. -- Salina reflects aloud on the aesthetic shape of his own future death.

At first, he seems to be an archetypal aristocrat through and through: even as he ponders the extinction of his own élan on earth, he is fixated on appearances, protocol, the handing off of power. But as soon as he is left alone in the room, the camera focuses, statically, viciously, lovingly, on his weathered, once stately, now mournful face. Tears start to well in his eyes, slowly, imperceptibly -- and unlike at the scene with the fireworks, the camera does not move. It lets us see every detail of his crying, the way the tears gather at his eyelids and flow down the wrinkles and crevasses of his face. When it really matters, when the stakes are human, universal, and almost abstract in their timelessness, The Leopard becomes a film of the utmost sympathy and generosity.

Production Blog #6

All Over But the Crying

Artistic projects are never finished; they are abandoned.  Well, I’ve finally abandoned my short film after a long, exhaustive editing process.  I’m writing this as my film is burning to a DVD and I feel a bit like a parent on their child’s first day of school, fighting the instinct to grab it back before it get into the world, saying “Maybe he’ll be ready next year”. 

Upon completing a project, any humble artist will look back on a project and reflect on what could have been improved upon or altered meaningfully.  Now, I will never call myself an artist, but as a college film student, I do look back reflect on all the stupid, stupid, stupid things I did.  Someone once said that we are in the business of creating greater and greater failures.  Well this is definitely my greatest failure yet, and I think it’s a good idea to review some of bigger lessons I learned the hard way. 

Being a director and a director of photography at the same time is like being on a date with two women simultaneously, and neither date is going well.  I am, in fact, exactly one person and, probably because I am a man, I multitask poorly.  Whenever I am setting up a shot and getting the composition exactly right, I’m losing time with my actors, making sure they can connnect to the choices their characters are making and understand their actions.  When I'm working with my actors, I can't be communicating what I need to the crew.  It’s exhausting and unfair to both the cast, and crew, and to me.  If possible, this will be the last film where I occupy both roles.

There is no "make my film look better" button.  On set, it’s easy to get into the “Oh, I’ll fix it in post” mindset.  And a lot of times, you can, especially if you oversee, or in my case, perform, both shooting and editing.  If you have a cohesive idea of what you want, you can usually get close to that.  For example, some of the stuff I shot at night is supposed to take place in the day.  Even being inside, during the day, sunlight bounces around and makes the image bluer than if you shot just with artificial light.  You can add this blue in color correction to make shots look like they took place during the day.  Unless you totally forgot about the giant window in your shot and that shows that it’s clearly night outside. Oops.  This being said, sometimes what you shot is just crap.

Checking your equipment periodically is always a good idea.  I recorded roughly 180 different tracks to use for post-dubbing purposes.  Basically recording sounds to get exactly what I want and syncing it up to the video and no one knows the sounds were recorded seperately.  Unfortunately, I never checked the audio files outside the recorder so, while they sounded fine on the recorder, they were incredibly quiet when I imported them into my Final Cut Project.  So the majority of what I spent a solid six hours recording was essentially useless.  The price for stupidity is always high. 

Don’t edit films to your favorite music.  It’s common for me to listen to a song and thing Oh man; I want to use that in a movie.  You might think it’s a great idea, that it fits the film perfectly, and that’s awesome, but I’m telling you it’s a bad idea.  It’s a bad idea because you will never, ever want to listen to that song ever again after you’ve cut a film to it.  It’s one thing to listen to a song on a loop; it’s another to listen to the same seven-second section a dozen times while cutting it into a scene.  So long “Jesus Flag American Fish” by Cuckoo Chaos; it’s been nice knowing you.

So now the film is as finished as it will ever be.  I didn’t prepare any real cathartic final statement to wrap all this madness up, but I’ll give it a shot.

Filmmaking is arduous, thankless, deprecating and filled with frustration, heartache, and disappointment.  It’s also inspiring, enlightening, elevating, and filled with laughter, excitement, passion, and love.  If you look at the first list and get excited, you’re a masochist.  If you look at the second list and get excited, you’re an idealist.  If you look at both lists and can’t wait to get started, you might just be a filmmaker. 

Go make movies.

Cheers,

John

 

Clever Kids: The Depiction of Precocious Children in David Slade's Hard Candy.

As a child I got a thrill out of watching movies that featured kids outsmarting adults. I could never forget the ingenuity of Macaulay Culkin’s character in Home Alone (1990) or how his spectacularly booby trapped house and quick thinking foiled the plans of two hardened (albeit dimwitted) criminals taking advantage of the Christmas season. I also loved watching Lindsay Lohan take on a dual role as twin sisters swapping lives and sabotaging their parents’ affairs in The Parent Trap to the point where I had to watch the movie almost every weekend.

With the exception of films like Home Alone and The Parent Trap—family friendly movies whose plot focuses on crafty children—most films give children a secondary role. Sometimes children bridge the emotional gap between two prospective lovers in romantic films; other times children are seen but not actually heard, serving no greater purpose than to be part of a family unit. For this reason, even now as an adult, I am still drawn to films that show children asserting their authority or even films that capture the brilliance and a child’s awareness of the world. A film that truly alters the balance of authority between child and adult is David Slade’s Hard Candy (2005).

Hard Candy, a film about a 14-year-old vigilante who confronts and psychologically tortures an unsuspecting man, whom she believes to be a pedophile, demonstrates a non-adult character taking charge and behaving in an atypically mature manner. The film plays on the audience’s preconceived notions about children being helpless without supervision. When I first watched the movie (having been completely clueless about Hard Candy’s premise), I assumed I was going to be sitting through a film about some unfortunate girl enduring a traumatic experience at the disposal of the villainous pedophile Jeff. The opening scene plays up the young girl Hayley’s supposed naiveté in order to make her control and maturity more effective later in the film.

The façade of Hayley Stark’s innocence begins with a close up of an inappropriate chat dialog between a 39-year-old photographer Jeff aka “lensman319” and Hayley. Neither character is seen but the nature of the conversation is cause for concern. Hayley’s suggestively promiscuous yet childish screen name, “thonggrrl14” coupled with her flirtatious comments make her seem like the stereotypical teenage girl who carelessly draws attention to her age while trusting a complete stranger with her inner thoughts and personal information. While reading  lensman319’s texts insisting that he and Hayley “finally hook up” and Hayley’s suggestion that he “film [her] with [his] vidoecamera” before “doing it,” I could not stop myself from wondering if she either had ever seen Primetime or was just plain stupid. Needless to say, after seeing Hayley’s character for the first time, I was thoroughly convinced that she would fall into the trap of

In the subsequent scene, the first meeting of Hayley and Jeff, Hayley is the epitome of puerility, and Jeff the calculating and personable pedophile.  If I wasn’t already disturbed by this little girl so eager to get in a stranger’s car and drive to the man’s house alone, the intimacy established with back-to-back close-ups of Hayley’s and Jeff’s faces made me extremely uncomfortable.  The first shot of Hayley is a close-up in which she turns around; her soft features, round face, round eyes as wide as a baby’s, and slightly confused expression as she asks, “Jeff?” give evidence to her apparent youth and naiveté. A close up of Jeff follows; his smiling face and open demeanor are inviting to Hayley even as he inspires suspicion in the viewer. Even though Jeff is rather attractive –with his stylish hair, chiseled face, and boyish charm— his predatory looks, the way he undresses Hayley with his eyes, and his wolfish grin make him seem like a lecherous old creep.

The cuts between Hayley and Jeff ‘s close-ups reveal the difference in their height since Hayley’s head is almost always tilted up and Jeff’s is always at a downward slant.  A long shot of Jeff’s tall figure is a startling contrast to Hayley’s petite frame and size.  This difference in stature symbolizes Jeff’s authority and draws more attention to Hayley’s childishness. Just as Jeff typically dominates the frame in his non-close-ups, he seems to be entirely in control of the situation. As is typical of his type, he engages Hayley in conversation making sure to only speak about topics that interest her, boy-bands and teen novels—things that would be trivial to any grown man. For a brief moment a flier with the face of a smiling girl and the word MISSING come into focus, standing out on the wall just opposite of where Hayley and Jeff decide to sit. The appearance of the missing girl’s photo led me to believe that a similar fate would befall Hayley. Everything suggested Hayley’s eventual demise, and I had no way of knowing how wrong I was until everything takes a strange turn at Jeff’s home.  

After Hayley manages to get Jeff drunk in his own home, her demeanor becomes sadistic. With Hayley’s childishness sentiment exchanged for a cold mask of indifference and sadism, Jeff becomes the target of the viewer’s sympathy.  While the close-ups are still a factor in this scene, Hayley’s eyes are no longer round and her mouth becomes a thin disapproving line, proof that she was putting on a face the entire time in the café. Having tied Jeff up in a chair she insults him for believing she would be dumb enough to “chase him to the next drink.” When Hayley says, "Just because a girl can pretend to be a woman doesn't mean she's ready to be a woman," she let's both Jeff and the viewer know that her logic is sound and she's aware of how things should be. Her verbiage becomes more complex and less moronic as she explains her true intention to discover what secrets Jeff may be hiding in his home.

 Hayley proves her intelligence as she admits to intentionally behaving like a trusting young girl, who would foolishly believe that “anyone could know so much about her.” The balance of power has clearly changed. The few long shots, show Jeff—his height stolen by the low position of the chair—now appearing shorter than Hayley who stands confidently before him with her hands on her hips.  This reversal of stature is also apparent in the close-ups with  a discombobulated Jeff, staring up at Hayley with a confused expression and Hayley looking down at Jeff.  Jeff’s growing uncertainty and anxiety comes out in his voice as he asks Hayley, “What are you going to do to me?” Overwhelmed by the drastic change in events, I couldn’t help but see the irony in Hayley’s response, “Anything I want!” With Hayley’s dubious nature revealed, and the ambiguity of Jeff’s involvement with the missing girl, Jeff becomes the prey and Hayley the predator. 

 

Killing in the Name of Boyle

Recently I came across a thought-provoking quote taken from an old interview given by director Danny Boyle (a particular favorite of mine).  In this quote Boyle mentions that he, along with fellow directors Martin Scorsese and John Woo, initially intended to become a priest (a Protestant minister in Woo's case) before directing his career path towards film-making.  Boyle goes on to relate the two seemingly disparate professions by claiming that they both involve heavy drama and the duty of lecturing to an audience.  Honestly, Boyle's comfortable comparison of film-making to preaching didn't immediately resonate with me as a viewer who typically likes to let sleeping dogs lie when it comes to religious symbolism in film.  However, the more familiar I've become with the works of the (almost) priests-cum-directors (having only just seen John Woo's The Killer and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver this year), the more willing I am to explore the remarkably dark violence in their films under the cast of a new, "divine" light.

My experimental attempt to find religion leads me to a reexamination of the first movie from Danny Boyle that I expressly remember falling in love with: 28 Days Later (2002).  Although marketed to the mass public as another gory, zombie apocalypse flick, 28 Days Later instantly impressed me as a film that transcends its narrow genre.  Revisiting this film now allows me to apply my new-found knowledge of director Boyle's strong Irish Catholic background and devotion, and as a result, give a credible explanation of how this zombie film touches upon quality subject matter.  For example, an important distinction can easily be made between 28 Days Later and all other zombie apocalypses filmed to date by explaining that 28 Days Later focuses almost exclusively on the "apocalypse" angle of the genre.  In other words, while most zombie movies prominently feature the mindless flesh-eaters as they munch their way through the remainder of the human population, Boyle's 28 Days Later is a marked departure in its unique emphasis of a post-apocalyptic absence of life, whether it be human, animal, or the animated undead.

 Pushing the suspicious lack of abundant zombie predators and human fodder in 28 Days Later further into the realm of religious allegory, one can even speculate that this movie serves as an updated representation of the Old Testament flood, which supposedly cleansed the world of nearly all its inhabitants.  In the film, a "flood" of disease wipes our modern world clean of civilization, leaving death (constituted by the occasional appearances of the roaming undead) and an all-consuming emptiness, as conveyed to the viewer in the striking opening scenes.  From a high-angle/heavenly standpoint, the viewer experiences a series of extreme long shots that altogether show the progression of a lone survivor (played by Irish actor Cillian Murphy) as he slowly makes his way through the abandoned streets of London.  Instead of being submerged in floodwater, the city is smothered by a blanket of deafening silence that is maintained throughout the duration of these poignant long shots/takes.

Meanwhile, Murphy's lone survivor doesn't amble aimlessly around town for too long before eventually assuming a greater responsibility outside of his own survival.  This responsibility is comparable to that which was bestowed upon Noah by his Holy Father.  Just as Noah was charged with choosing who would survive with him in the Ark, so too does Murphy's character decide who will live alongside him and who will fall prey to the zombie's lethal bite.  More specifically, Murphy's character unleashes a hungry zombie within the bowels of a military compound (functions as the Ark, or the last standing refuge of humanity during the scourge) in order to kill the corrupt men hiding there.  Fast-paced cuts and dim lighting make it practically impossible to distinguish between the wild zombie and Murphy's rampaging young man as they jointly indulge in an unchecked killing spree throughout the compound.  Both the zombie and the young man appear to equally represent executing agents of the cleansing "flood"/disease through their gratuitously bloody slaying of the wicked soldiers.

Interestingly enough, the gruesome crusade of Boyle's blood-splattered Noah is closely matched in terms of its violent display of righteous fury by the actions of Robert DeNiro's Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.  Underneath the surface view of Bickle being nothing more significant than a paranoid vigilante, exists the possibility of Bickle being another divine crusader charged with carrying out tough justice against the "scum" of New York City.  One can potentially suggest that Bickle embodies a New Testament Christ-like figure in his attempted life sacrifice to free the prostitute Iris from her pimp and from her sins.  Evil and sin are once again fought with grotesque violence implemented by a lone purveyor of "divine" justice.  Of course, this "divinity" is ultimately administered by the omnipotent director--especially often by fire and brimstone-minded Catholics like Boyle and Scorsese--as he channels it through the dramatic scenarios he imagines and directs.

Production Journal #5

Editing 

I always give myself at least a week between filming and editing.  When you’re shooting film, this buffer is built in to your schedule because you need to wait for your film to be processed and digitized at a lab, but when you’re shooting digital, there’s nothing to stop you from immediately hopping into the editing booth.  So even though the film just sits on my hard drive for a week, I let it sit.  There are two reasons for this.  The first reason, this is the one I tell everybody, is because it’s virtually impossible to look at what you’ve shot objectively when you shot it hours earlier.  You need a breath of fresh air before you come back and look at what you’ve got.  My second, and more palpable reason for waiting a week, is that I’m scared shitless that I’ve screwed everything up.  

Editing is a strange, purgatorial experience.  When you’re writing, the possibilities are endless, and working on set everything is organic and kinetic and has life, but when you’re editing, to a certain extent it feels like the film is already made and you’re just pulling it apart and piecing it together.  This is, of course, not true.  And while it may give you vertigo to go from sitting in a tub filled with fake blood to sitting in a small dark room with large computer monitor, you need to be equally creative at doing both.

The first thing you need to do when editing digitally is transcode your video.  While this might seem unnecessary, as the Canon 7D and Mark IV, both save the to .mov files, which is an incredibly common file type that can be read by Final Cut Pro, it is actually a crucial step.  All .mov files are not created equal.  Video files need to be read by something called a codec that decodes encrypted digital information, in this case it turns the digital information into video and audio.  There are dozens of different codecs for .mov files, and while the one used for the Canon camera files can be read easily by virtually every media player, it’s a disaster to edit with.  So you have to transcode.

Transcoding takes a very long time, it works at a ratio of about 1:1, as in it takes a second to transcode every second of video.  While you can batch files together and let this run overnight, I like to stay in the room while my files transcode, not only because I enjoy the sense of progress, but also because if one file has a problem, the entire process stops nothing gets transcoded until you fix it.  So the first four or five hours of my “editing” process were spent reading a book looking up ever so often to make sure things haven’t gone awry.  Nothing went wrong. 

My fears during the filming have been realized and I’m finding myself unable to wake from the nightmare that is sync sound.  To put it plainly, I’m finally being forced to reconcile all the mistakes I made while I was bumbling around, not knowing what the hell I was doing.  For example, I completely forgot to tell the PAs to call out the scene and take number before slating, so I now have a huge collection of audio files, and I have no idea what video files they match.  Oops. 

Some of the recordings are so low that they’re unusable, but others seem okay.  For now I’ve decided to not worry about it.  I organized all my clips by scene, which makes the whole editing process just so much more enjoyable, as you don’t have to constantly hunt for clips.  I’ve been going through and picking my favorite takes, and crudely editing them together, just so I have everything in the right order.  Once I’ve got my favorite takes in the right order, then I go back and snip them to the proper size and make everything fit.

So what else do I have look forward to besides long hours in a tiny editing suite?  Post dubbing and foley.  Once I’ve done the best I can with the unholy mess of audio that I collected during filming, I have to go back and add additional sound effects and music.  This additional audio is often the difference between you having a very pretty home movie, and something you can ostensibly call a film.  But more on that next time.

Cheers, 

John

Photo Credits

1. Flikr - SirronWong

2. Flikr - Average Jane