HopkinsCinemAddicts

Let the Dark Knight be Dark: Maturity in Batman: The Animated Series

When one looks for quality television, one rarely looks as children’s animation. Often times it is derivative, uninspiring, and all around annoying. However, when the truly great shows come around, the realization is made that children are capable of handling more mature subjects without being remarkably traumatized in the slightest. One of the true greats in the aspect was the early 90s cartoon, Batman: The Animated Series. A superhero cartoon seems to be a strange place to be talking about mature content. Superheroes are the bread and butter of Saturday morning entertainment, but Batman decided to step away from the traditional method of children’s cartooning and try something different. Instead of simple “kid-friendly” villains, the show was able to mine its source material and use villains that were willing to kill an entire city just because they wanted to. This dark material should, according to many sensibilities, be extremely offsetting to kids. Instead, the show is able to find a happy medium which isn’t super violent, but at the same time won’t pull its punches when it comes to mature topics. One of the best examples of this phenomenon comes when dealing with the character of Two-Face. He is an established enough villain that the show could have easily had him simply appear and no one would think twice about it. However, the show takes the viewer through the entire emotional journey of his creation. The audience is introduced to the character of Harvey Dent, Gotham’s district attorney and best friend to the protagonist, in the first episode, and he is a recurring character throughout the series. This means that when an explosion goes off, horrifically maiming his face and cracking his personality in two, the audience is deeply invested in his character. This kind of deep emotional connection followed by such a traumatic experience gets the audience involved, but for many, it is too disturbing for children. By including it anyway, Batman proves that kids aren’t stupid when it comes to their entertainment. The show was very popular in its day and many kids watched this episode. There were no widespread reports of kids becoming traumatized by this event. Instead, they were able to take the emotional journey with the main character of losing his best friend and feeling guilty every time they have to cross paths. In short, Batman: The Animated Series didn’t try to create programming for kids. They simply tried to make the best animated show they could, but didn’t try to dumb it down for children. Instead, they expected kids to understand what was going on, and for the most part they were successful. While not every episode is as emotionally charged as the Two-Face origin, the show asks viewers, both child and adult to rise to the occasion so that the show can best the best it can possibly be.

Different Strokes: Friendship and Emotion in Action Flicks

        There are times I go to see a film for the craft; the artistry of the director, the once-in-a-lifetime performances, or the technically beautiful design. I must admit though, these are sometimes overshadowed by the times where I get a gallon of over-priced soda and a kiddie-pool sized tub of popcorn and turn my mind off for two hours. In these rare instances and being the manly man that I am, I enjoy the heart pounding, adrenaline pumping, and testosterone filled action films. You know, the ones where the good guy really never gets knocked down and even if he does, he gets up only to beat the bejesus out of someone? A bunch of blockbusters focus on explosions, car chases, and overall excitement while plot takes a back seat (I am talking to you Michael Bay).  That isn’t to say they are not still enjoyable but this intensely Hollywood notion is, thankfully, broken with a few films that are able to intertwine an entertaining storyline broken up with intense action scenes. The most important part of a believable and involving storyline that truly has the audience invested is developed between characters, specifically for our purposes the relationships between the protagonists in two of the best action flicks; Die Hard and Lethal Weapon.

Above: Fiery explosions...the cornerstone of Hollywood action movies

        No one would argue that Lethal Weapon, a film about the pairing of an older “on-the-verge-of-retirement” officer, Murtaugh, and a homicidal, suicidal, plays-by-no-ones-rules cop, Riggs, is a “buddy cop” film. If anything, Lethal Weapon, defines the genre. To say then that the relationship between the two protagonists is anything but critical would be untrue. Throughout the film, the arguable “main” plot revolves around Riggs and Murtaugh being forced to work together to solve a drug smuggling case. The actual case though takes a back seat to the connection the film creates between the two protagonists and thus the affinity we, as the audience, feel toward them. At first glance both are very different people; very different cops. Murtaugh has “been on the force twenty years and not a scratch or a scar” while Riggs is a loose cannon, constantly disregarding rules and putting himself in harms way to get quick results. For example, during his introduction scene, Riggs is held hostage after a failed drug bust and tries distract the perpetrator by pleading to be shot. Each cop though compliments each other in skill and smarts. What Riggs lacks in structure and sensibility, Murtaugh makes up for in sage advice and clever planning. Murtaugh, on the other hand, doesn’t take necessary risks and thus doesn’t see results. 

            Die Hard is not necessarily a “buddy cop” film but to say the relationship between John McClane and Sgt. Al Powell is not touching and important would also be false. Powell, a pudgy desk jockey, is every bit different than the hard-boiled and barrel chested loose-cannon McClane. Throughout the film, their relationship parallels a distinct brotherhood between all cops. Powell immediately recognizes McClane as a brother in blue and thus an unwavering trust is created. The natural affinity they have for each other in the beginning contrasts Murtaugh and Riggs in Lethal Weapon yet both show the common cop mentality throughout.

Above: The same type six shooter as Murtaugh carries.

            The best scenes, interestingly enough, are not the fights or explosions (however much I love them) but the quiet remarks between characters. These are the scenes where the audience becomes most involved and most likely to have a strong reaction. For Lethal Weapon, a vastly important and powerful scene shows Murtaugh and Riggs after a family dinner. Riggs, after some playful banter, indirectly reveals his longing for a family like Murtaugh’s. “I [kill] real good you know…only thing I was good at.” Riggs explains. His skill in this overwhelmingly destructive force cripples Riggs emotionally and he longs for the constructive nature of family. His skill and gall as a cop, however, comes from his lack of dependence on or from others such as a family. A family, or dependence from a partner, might bring Riggs’ skill down since he will not being able to only think of himself anymore. On the other hand, when presented with a surrogate family of Murtaughs, Riggs shows more courage and fervor in protecting them and fighting for vengeance when one gets hurt. Riggs shows his emotional scars however the structure that Murtaugh is able to provide professionally and personally completely changes Riggs’ outlook on life and the beat.

           Die Hard ‘s most involving scenes are also the, by industry standards, “slowest”. Toward the end, McClane is battered, shot, and profusely bleeding. McClane asks Powell why he gave up the patrol for the desk and Powell explains that as a rookie, he accidentally mistook a teenager with a toy as a gunman and shot him. “They can teach you everything…except how to live with a mistake.” Powell explains paralleling McClane’s personal life, whose wife left him after he failed to support her during a large career promotion. McClanes most profoundly emotional moment is when he pleads to Powell to find his wife and tell her he was sorry. The entire plot revolves around McClane trying to single-handedly bring down a hostage situation from inside the building. It is clear from the beginning that he is not doing this for himself; the option to escape being available many times. Instead, McClane is trying to keep his estranged wife safe, his way of showing true devotion to her. These incredible lengths, however, are not nearly as emotional or reaction invoking as the quiet scene where McClane, realizing his slim chance of survival, tries to make final amends to his wife through Powell. “She heard me say, ‘I love you’ a thousand times, she never heard me say ‘I’m Sorry’”.

            Action films are intensely emotional. Most try to pander toward the little pyromaniac kid inside of us showing off intense explosions and shallow characters. A few, however, make us believe in the world on-screen since the emotions captured are so closely relatable to the emotions we feel in life. That, really, is what film is all about: the ablility to take a media that couples a few of our senses and thoroughly tricking us into believing we are actually there. How would you react given that situation? What would you feel? For these two wonderfully emotional and heart pumping action films we see those emotions blatantly in the character development and relationships between the “good guys”.  

Much thanks to Creative Commons and the public domain images used. Creative Commons in no way endoreses any opinions expressed in this blog. Any opinions, views, or ideas are soley of the poster. 

Kenny's Power

    Eastbound & Down ends in two weeks.  On April 8th at 10:30 pm, the final "chapter"--not episode, chapter--of HBO's antiheroic saga of Kenny Powers will somehow just stop.  I am at once delighted to see how KP will turn failure into triumph one last time, and utterly crushed to see him drop the mic and walk off the stage forever.

    My fondest memory of Kenny dates back to the show's first season.  While employed as a middle school P.E. teacher (from my childhood experience, I cannot imagine a less respectable job) after falling from Major League Baseball grace, Kenny pops a pill of Ecstasy before chaperoning a school dance.  Sporting all black down to his signature cowboy boots, he pushes his way into a dance circle comprised solely of preteens and prepares to woo his long-lost high school girlfriend, now the middle school art teacher.  "Work, drugs," he demands calmly.  Then he dances.  Then he throws up. But damn if those drugs didn't work just like he told them to--I haven't seen a portly man move like that since Bluto floated up the stairs to the Dean's office in Animal House.

    This season, KP managed to sum himself up in one perfect admission when he said to his categorically apathetic college-age girlfriend, "You think I f***in' wanna hang out with my f***in' son?  Hell no, I'd much rather be doin' cocaine and watchin' the Saw DVDs in your dorm room with ya."  He's a ladies' man and a man's man; he's a lover and a fighter; in the words of Kenny Powers, Kenny Powers is "a god damn champion."

    With ambition as unstoppable as the soundtrack that accompanies him, KP has suffered through, run away from and finally returned to face a slew of potentially career- and life-ending struggles since we met him in 2009.  And why have we been with him from the very beginning?  Because he is unbelievably entertaining. He says the most ridiculous things so often and just keeps talking until there are no more boundaries for him to cross; we have no choice but to accept how beautifully hilarious he is and forget the decorum we use to direct our own speech.  He amuses, yet inspires us with perfectly serious and accidentally revealing monologues.  He endears himself to us with the occasional poignant plea for the simple human necessities of companionship and a sense of belonging. He is at once a martyr for absurd humor and a touching failure of a train wreck whom we are shocked to care about.  He is a figure unlike any other on television: always foul, often wrong but sometimes right, Kenny Powers is the low-class American wannabe who gets by--just barely--because of his heart.

    I will be very sad to say goodbye to KP, to the raucous laughs and the Schadenfreude his misfortune and mess-ups afforded.  Perhaps I'll find a new hero to follow each week, but for now I pledge allegiance to Kenny Powers and leave you with his words rather than mine:

"In closing, I'd like to give big ups to God, Buddha, L. Ron, whoever.  Hell, maybe I just need to thank me.  If there's one thing I've learned through all my adventures and conquests, it's that some people are just wired for success.  I had no choice when it came to being great.  I just am great.  I'm not trying to sound cocky or full of myself, but Kenny Powers has a sneaking suspicion that no matter what comes his way he will always be great.  Because that's just the way s*** works sometimes.  This has been based on a true story.  The motherf***in' end."

 

A Well Deserved Tribute to One of Cinema's Unsung Heroes

            For my article this week, I would like to pay a belated tribute to a man who was lost to us early this year. This man is responsible for many classic moments in cinema, and it can be said without exaggeration, that he changed the face of movies in a significant way. I speak, of course, of the late great Bob Anderson. “Who is this Bob Anderson?” you ask, “Why have I never heard of him?” Bob Anderson was the sword master for many of cinema’s classic fights. Beginning in 1953, he choreographed everything from Moonraker to The Lord of the Rings to the Princess Bride duel that I mentioned in my last article. His most famous moment, however came when he stepped into the shoes of one of the great classic villains, Darth Vader.

            Bob Anderson was the choreographer for all of the original Star Wars fights. Every single lightsaber swing bore his signature. While David Prowse played the body of Vader through most of the series, Anderson stepped in for the lightsaber duels in both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Both of these fights were extremely grueling, especially in the Vader costume, so it made more sense to put Anderson in the suit because he was more skilled with the weapon.

            If you watch the fight from A New Hope and compare it to the fights in either of the two later films, you can see the difference in body language between the two actors. The original fight is quite blocky with both performers slightly unsure of their body movements. While it works in the scene as Obi-Wan Kenobi is quite old at this point and Darth Vader is, for all intensive purposes, a robot, when compared with later scenes it stands out as being stocky and uncoordinated.

            In comparison, the lightsaber fight in The Empire Strikes Back benefits from Bob Anderson’s technique. Instead of the blocky and stiff style that Vader was using in A New Hope, he switches to a much more fluid one handed style. He keeps the blade inside of his body line for the most part and allows Luke Skywalker to expend his energy in wild attacks. Only after seeing that Luke has tired himself out does Vader go on the attack. Many of his successful techniques come from small wrist movements which allow him to control the other blade, disarming Skywalker in the beginning of the fight and ultimately performing a literal disarm at the end. All of these moves are executed with an ease of movement that lets the viewer know that Vader is the superior swordsman. Without Anderson’s expertise with the weapon or his ease of movement, the story could have easily become muddied, and the fight would not have stood the test of time nearly as well.

            Bob Anderson was one of the many unsung heroes in Hollywood. Without these men and women, the movies that we know and love would never get made, and yet they don’t receive even half of the publicity that the actors and the directors receive. They do it for the love of their craft and nothing else. So here’s to you Bob Anderson! May the force be with you!

 Much thanks to Creative Commons and the public domain images used. Creative Commons in no way endoreses any opinions expressed in this blog. Any opinions, views, or ideas are soley of the poster.

Hooked from the Start

    "There's a hundred thousand streets in this city."

    The black screen fades into a shot of a marked-up map of downtown Los Angeles.  Standing before the window, a man in an enviable white racing jacket embroidered with a yellow scorpion speaks calmly into the phone.  A flashing pink light punctuates the darkness outside the window where his reflection is blurred by double pane glass.  As he ends the call, the television silently announces Toronto is beating the Lakers at halftime.  He picks up an enormous duffel bag and sets off into the night. A quiet beat emerges, barely distinguishable in the background.  I'm intrigued.

    The cinematography in the next scene is so beautifully suited to the plot, I can't help thinking Nicholas Winding Refn directed the film just so he could set up this one shot.  From the passenger seat foot well, a slightly canted low-angle shot shows the character dubbed "Driver" as the light from a streetlamp slowly illuminates, then conceals his beautiful face gazing intently out over the road.  By this point, I would be fine with the entire film taking place inside cars just to see what ingenious new shots the director and cinematographer came up with.  I'm engaged.

    After an appearance by Bryan Cranston, a near-botched armed robbery getaway and some expert use of headlights as light sources comes a car chase that is tenser yet more subdued than any I've seen.  Driver masterfully evades the police on three separate occasions, but each scene of evasion involves only one police vehicle at a time (a car, a helicopter, then another car).  Swapping impossible cast-of-thousands action sequences for improbable feats by a single skilled driver, the scene constructs a nuanced chase more focused on the movements of Driver's face than those of his car.  I'm enthralled.

    A radio sportscast of the Laker game, voiceovers from the police dispatch unit and that old dependable backbeat comprise the three-part soundtrack during the chase.  Each strain could correspond to a different aspect of Driver: cautious and informed, he attends to the police radio for each new development in the search for his car; talented and capable, he executes every turn to sportscasters' praise and cheers from the Laker game; ambitious and confident, he completes the job, supported all the while by the steady backbeat.  I'm obsessed.

    What do I know about Driver by the film's ten minute mark?  First off, his eyes are pretty uneven, so I'm predisposed to like him because my eyes are pretty uneven, too.  He is certainly stellar behind the wheel.   He has a great jacket.  He also has the status and the gall to enforce a strict schedule on a disorganized underworld.  He speaks with threatening conviction to criminal clients; armed robbers trust him with the success of their heist and the possibility of their incarceration; he saunters past the policeman who are following the car he's just abandoned.  But Driver's power and mystique are not what make this opening quite so striking.  It is something far simpler, requiring neither analysis nor cinematic frame of reference, that led me to watch the first ten minutes a full four times before letting the movie play through: it is just so damn cool.  And many great movies don't have even a hint of that precious, elusive cool factor.

    So watch Drive as soon as you possibly can.  Film buffs and Ryan Gosling enthusiasts alike, rejoice!

ADDENDUM: I would like to mention a few more things I noticed about the film, but I don't know what to make of yet:

            ~ The Lakers ultimately win the game against Toronto--we hear it on the radio.  The film is set in Los Angeles, but Ryan Gosling is Canadian.  Hmm.

            ~ Driver wears a driving jacket and driving gloves for his illegal job.   He wears a seatbelt only in his personal + legal professional lives.

            ~ The only drink Driver and Irene ever share is water.

            ~ I love Carey Mulligan.

 

Many thanks to Creative Commons and Flickr member Canburak for the above image.

Director's Notes 3/13/12

--Positives: Good read-through today.  Luke was even more perfect for the role of Bobby than I thought.  Should be hilarious.  Everyone present enjoyed the pizza and the Oreos.  Thought of a good opening shot for film, as well as title sequence.  Involves Thomas riding a bicycle.  

-

---Negatives:  Difficult to transcend awkwardness of gathering around a bunch of people to read from a dense thicket of stapled pages containing silly words upon silly words all written by me.  Pizza made me feel sick.  Oreos made me feel sick.  Should quit junk food.  Having difficulty deciding how much of my limited knowledge of theater directing I should bring to film.  I read in an interview with Ewan Mcgregor that Woody Allen doesn't even do rehearsals.  Coming from somewhat of a theater background, that seems absurd.  How can you get into the mind of a character without rehearsal?  That said, I probably won't have them do much rehearsal.  

 --What does gimmicky high-concept for blog post signify?  How about the devolution of syntax?  Does it represent the way my thoughts are increasingly clipped and scattered as I attempt to force the various mental and physical strands of what shall one day be a completed "Westbaum in High School" into coherence?

 --No, probably not.

--Had silliest argument of production so far.  "What does Thomas Westbaum (main character of the film) eat for breakfast?  Ian and I were saying he eats a full breakfast while Marc, the actor playing Thomas, said that he thinks that if Thomas eats breakfast at all he just eats a bowl of cereal.  Seeing as this is a shot in the opening sequence of the film I might be biased because I want him to rip open an orange or a grapefruit so we can see those tiny little specks of juice that squirt out of the fruit in high light.   

 -- Today one of my actors repeated to me a leadership acronym that he had learned in some kind of youth thing.    I won't reproduce the acronym here.  Why I bring this is up is that it really made something hit home: that the role of director is in many ways just the role of a "leader."  One who exudes leadership.  The same kind of leadership taught in conferences attended nationally by Type A high school students.  Directing can be kind of a "Type A" job at times.  I'm unsure as to what degree of professionalism I should try to give off.  Should I embrace the my own ramshackle charm in terms of my leadership style?  Do I even have any ramshackle charm, and if so, what does that mean?  Obviously a degree of efficacy and efficiency will help this film to be the best version of itself.  But I still haven't figured out exactly how to get the best performance out of my actors, or even my crew for that matter.  Guess I'm in for some on-the-job training!  

 --Filming starts April 1st.  Spring break, to put it melodramatically, will be the calm before the storm.   To put it casually, filming starts April 1st, and I'm pretty excited, and it should be nice to have all of spring break to prepare.  To put it stupidly, filming may start April 1st, but that doesn't mean that it will be a FOOLish production!  

 --I've somewhat abandoned my conceit.  Oh you've already forgotten it?  That works just as well.

 

Martin Scorsese's CASINO: A Post Mortem

This movie left a bad taste in my mouth. Why? Some theories:

1. Violence. Casino not only overaestheticizes it, not only views it as a cinematic end in itself, but also just takes a sort of futile glee in it. Martin Scorsese seems to possess a conviction that graphic bloodshed lends some credibility or verisimilitude to a film, whereas actually it contributes very little to any sort of transcendent artistic immersion, instead serving only to perpetually pull the viewer out of the movie, out of art into ethics.
2. Moralism. Is this film moralistic? Not exactly. Set in the bygone days of seedy, Mafia-controlled Las Vegas, it seems pretty sympathetic to the internal culture and self-contained law of the mob. At the very least, it presents the clans of criminal greed as no better and no worse than the cabals of local government and corporate interest. Nevertheless, there is a sort of teleological moral dimension to the film, where deceptive drug-using femmes fatales (i.e. Sharon Stone) meet an ignominious end, whereas wily yet honorable professionals (i.e. Robert De Niro), whatever their dubious careers might be, get to ride out the storm of history and survive to another day.
3. Formula. Casino starts off sparklingly unformulaic. Instead of establishing clear villains, conflicts or plot turns, the film begins as an archaeological survey of the Las Vegas criminal underground circa the late '70s. Dancing from shiny casino floors to filthy back rooms, it fills us in, with a mighty efficiency, on who's hustling who, who's on good terms with the bosses back East, who wants whose job, who gets which cut of the action. We are indoctrinated into the hierarchies and rituals of a mystery cult that we've never seen before, and it's thrilling -- especially since Scorsese presents it all with the same roller-coaster editing and lush tracking shots he perfected in Goodfellas, this movie's disturbingly similar predecessor and double. (If anything, Casino is a little more sophisticated and less theme-parky, though somewhat less vital, than Goodfellas.) From this ingenious and wholly original foundation, though, the film slips horribly into formula. Away from the forest we go, and onto the grand boulevard of narrative, whose landmarks and endpoint we can see coming from a mile away. Vain characters fall irrevocably into cocaine abuse and gradually destroy all their relationships; the narcissistic and cruel become victims of their own hubris; the FBI's vice gradually but inevitably closes in; the stupid reveal their stupidity and the smart their smarts. I won't reveal the ending to you, because the movie reveals it well enough about two hours into its three-hour run-time.

So in the end, I suppose Casino is a victim of its own early qualities. From anthropological beginnings, it ultimately become just a tragic, bloated romance between De Niro’s character and the sparkling city that temporarily offered him -- and countless others -- so much, before taking it all away, et cetera, et cetera. Beneath the gloss, beneath the nighttime cinematography and neon colors and general sense of almost overpolished smoothness, there is an oddly sentimental picture, nostalgic for the faded Las Vegas of years past, back when it was supposedly a Mafia savannah, before the corporations took over and turned it into a family resort. Scorsese starts off with a dense movie about peeling back layers, but ends up with a lightweight (yet overlong) film about watching a ball fall into a hoop...

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Image found here, usable in the public domain.

The Role of the Storyteller in The Princess Bride

Rob Reiner’s 1987 film The Princess Bride has remained a favorite throughout the years. It is a tale of dashing swordfights, monsters, and true love. It is able to place itself head and shoulders above the rest because of its emphasis on the nature of stories and storytelling.

                The film is framed in terms of a story being told from an old man to his grandson. Immediately, the film sets up the idea of passing stories and mythology along to the younger generation. This concept is the basis for the oral tradition that ruled over so many tribes of the past. Before they had a written language, the only way to pass down stories was for the elders to tell them to the younger generations. Though the grandfather is using a book to tell the story, he is still the latest in this long line of storytellers.

                The characters within the story itself are also ruled by the stories they tell. For example, the character of Inigo Montoya lives to get revenge on the man who killed his father.  However, the audience does not see these events. Instead, they hear it told as a story from Inigo himself. By giving the audience the information in this manner, Inigo is created as a man whose whole life is driven by a story. Everything that he does throughout the entire film is preempted by the story that he tells Wesley.

                Wesley also exists through the story of the Dread Pirate Roberts. His reputation is based off of the exploits of the men who came before him. The name is what carries the power, not anything that he has personally done. In this way, he has to become the story instead of being able to tell his own story. Even when he returns and finds his true love, he needs to pass the title on to someone else. He is drawn to continue the story even though his role is over. When he does decide to pass on the role, it is implied that the title will fall on Inigo, a man who is no longer driven by his own story and must now find another.

                These two story driven characters come together for the first time in a wide ranging and extremely cinematic duel. They range all over the terrain, each playing with the other. The nature of the film as a story allows this confrontation to play out in this manner. Real sword fighting is quite brutal, quick, and does not last nearly as long as the fight in the film. However, as both men are living through a story that does not necessarily involve the other, they are able to play and to enjoy what they are doing. Their excitement is shared through the screen by way of the grandfather telling the story of these two men dueling. In addition, this is all being told through the eye of the director and the screenwriter who want to thrill the audience with their story. All this layered storytelling comes together to form a cohesive whole, creating one of the great fairy tales of American cinema.

 

Big Moves (and more)

    Since we’ve last spoke I made a Big Move.  With about a 16^th of my semi-considerable funds I hired myself a “producer.”  I put producer in quotes because I’m not exactly clear what a producer in Hollywood does. In my case, my “producer” just does everything I need him to do.  However, in line with the connections-based engine of Big Hollywood (I always try  to embody Big Hollywood), I’ve hired one of my best friends, Ian White, to handle the job.  While this might seem like a flimsy excuse to get one of my friends 500 dollars, he has actually turned out indispensable. In a week  I’ve gone from having barely done any work on the film (besides the screenplay), to being almost ready to begin shooting.  All it took was the power of Ian’s timely and spritely e-mail exchanges.  It turns out plenty of people would love to work on a movie!  To avoid burdening myself with working them into the complex narrative framework I’ve been sculpting with these blog posts, here are some of the achievements that just through e-mailing we have either reached or are within extremely close distance of reaching.

--Casting Ancillary Roles (mostly people who are not of college-age)

--Hiring people to record synchronous sound

--Hiring a cinematographer (mostly to help with lighting)

--Deciding once and for all one what kind of camera I will be using (SLR 7D)

--Making a concrete list of locations I will be using.

--Planning around everyone’s scheduling conflicts

--Last, and perhaps most importantly, creating a “Facebook Page” so that people can “like” my project.  (This is a meaningless but psychologically important component of the film-making process because each time I get a new “like” for the movie, I feel a tiny little surge of cyber-encouragement that keeps me motivated.)

    By the end of the weekend I will have a final version of the screenplay, and an (almost) completed shooting schedule.  One issue I’ve had with fine-tuning the screenplay is that the words have started to feel dead to me.  I didn’t have a co-writer on this project and I think I am the type of human being that would really benefit from a co-worker.  For this reason I’m really happy that a few close “writer-friends,” (if you’re reading this I’m sincerely sorry I called you a “writer-friend)” have agreed to do a final read-through/workshop of the screenplay.  I think fresh minds will help reinvigorate my attitude toward the text.  I am confident that once we begin filming the words coming out of the mouths of my actors will entirely enliven the process, but it is my hope to give them the best possible sandbox in which to play.  Part of the reason that I picked close friends as the main roles is that the way I conceive of a movie is as much in terms of shots and plots as it is in people.  The way people think and move and react and respond is truly what fascinates me and in some ways a film is just my best conduit to an artistic study of…well, like humanity.  I’ve self-consciously retreated into colloquialisms because I felt the tone was becoming too lofty, or too far shoved up my own head.  

    See, the hardest part is not getting down on yourself.  I watched Superbad the other night and thought to myself "man, there's no way I'm ever gonna beat Superbad."  But somehow I doubt that's the metric by which my film will be judged.  Because it's not Superbad and it never could be.  It's Westbaum.  Westbaum in High School.

(Cue: Link to "Westbaum in High School" Facebook fan page)

Westbaum in High School

 

 

Airing Some Grievances

    Martin Scorsese does not know how to end a movie. This has been my belief for quite a while now, and I'm usually very careful about whom I say it to.  But it's time I explained.

    There is an expectation of finality when the end of a movie approaches--not a specific type of finality, but certainly a sense that the movie has indeed come to an end.  When the audience's hopes are dashed by an artlessly ambiguous final scene that is suddenly cut off by a black screen and the end credits, one may hear a theater-wide sigh of disappointment like the one I heard (and contributed to) after Martha Marcy May Marlene.  When the screen suddenly goes black after an artfully ambiguous final scene like that of the series finale of The Sopranos, audiences at home may hope their TVs have all broken at once.  But one is never completely unsure of whether a movie has ended--never, that is, unless you're watching a Martin Scorsese original.

    His early hit Taxi Driver in 1976 features a shattering let-down of a final scene after a most dramatic climax and successful denouement: Cybill Shepherd, playing Travis Bickle's (Robert DeNiro) former obsession Betsy, exits the backseat of his cab where she just spent an entire ride looking blank but pretty in the rear view mirror as both of them contributed sparsely to a conversation that went nowhere.  After a close-up of his very suddenly very intense right eye, Travis drives away, ignoring her attempt to pay him; she disappears into a town house as he drives clear down the street. Then, without cause or warning, the film enters a brief fast-motion period where Travis readjusts and stares intently into his rear view mirror--at what we're not sure, for neither Betsy nor the town house can be visible by then.  The credits begin to roll over tracking shots from the cab of New York City streets at night. So... what happened?

    Even Robbie Robertson's amazing face can't save The Last Waltz, Scorsese's 1978 concert-based documentary about The Band, from an unsatisfying ending during which they play the only weird, circus-y song in their repertoire as the camera zooms farther and farther away from them.  This final shot makes the musicians we have gotten to see at their absolute best, the guys we have gotten to know so well throughout the course of the film seem distant and unremarkable, for they appear confined and insignificant playing an aimless song on a dimly lit stage in the middle of an empty hall. The rest of the movie shows amazing live concert footage from the packed theater alongside close-ups of each Band member recounting absurd stories from the road, and we get a powerful sense of each musician's character, his feelings about his band mates, even the way he holds himself depending on the tone of the song he's playing.  But the ending nearly ruins all the film's hard work (I say "nearly" because nothing could hope to ruin their live performance of "Don't Do It").

    Goodfellas (1990): great movie, great performances, great monologues all around.  Excise the misplaced series of photos of Ray Liotta's gangster Henry Hill looking awkward outside his Witness Protection-provided house at the very end and we're in business.

    In his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, Scorsese repeats his early mistake of placing the burden of complex communication on close-ups of eyes: we still don't know what these eyes are trying to say, we only know that this time they belong to Juliette Lewis rather than Robert DeNiro.  

    In 2006, Scorsese reinvented his style of endings with The Departed--and perhaps he shouldn't have.  Instead of seeing a few confusing seconds right at the end of the film, we must instead watch a clunky anvil of finality crash through the otherwise perfect final scene. Jack Nicholson's scene-chewing performance sets the bar for subtlety extremely low in this movie, but Scorsese's ending manages to drop it even further.  A shot of the just-murdered "rat" Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) lying dead on his living room floor pans up to show his expensive apartment's view of the golden dome of a nearby government building, a constant reminder and symbol of the political ladder he so desperately aspired to climb.  And on the railing of his balcony, crawling conspicuously across the shot of the gleaming dome, is... an actual rat.  Yikes.

    To be fair, I haven't yet seen his latest, Hugo, so I can't say whether Scorsese has learned anything in the last few years.  To its credit, Hugo did not win the award for best picture at the Oscars; that award is tainted for me, as no amount of elbow grease could ever polish away all that self-righteous Crash residue.

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.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Photo courtesy of Martin Rankin, and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

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.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Image found here, and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

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

Production Journal #4

Shooting

There is nothing more exhausting, frustrating, backbreaking, and incredibly rewarding than directing a film.  At the independent level, filmmaking is all about long periods of frustration punctuated by moments of artistic and emotional euphoria.  It took me three incredibly long days, but the film is in the proverbial can.  I would reccomend giving yourself as many days to shoot as possible, but when your cast and crew can only come together for three days, you shoot your film in three days. 

For this film, I experimented with not rehearsing anything ahead of time with my actors.  We had a little dinner party to get to know each other, so everyone would be comfortable enough to get on set and start playing off each other, but that was it.  I wanted to throw them into the space and let them settle into the material in front of the camera.  Not giving your actors a lot of time to rehearse can get them to do some really interesting, creative things, but it can also make them second guess themselves.  Two of my actors, in particular, had a problem breaking character and asking to start the scene over again.  Unfortunately, what actors often think isn’t working really is, and many times they end up ruining perfectly good takes. 

Shooting with a DSLR camera made me bold and I thought I could put the camera anywhere.  While this is msy be true, on the first day of filming I soon discovered that I, unlike my small camera, cannot fit everywhere.  A lot of this shoot was comprised of me contorting myself into various tiny nooks, car trunks, closets, and bathtubs.  My style of directing is not sitting in a chair, drinking a latté, and issuing orders; you can’t do that on a small shoot, especially when you aren’t paying anyone.  Also, how are you going to get an actor to trust you if there is always a camera between you?  But even if I could sit back and watch, I’d still choose to wrap myself up in a giant garbage bag and contort myself in a tub for a shot.   

While directing is a lot of work, I had an amazing crew and I am indebted to Abby, Andrea, Alec, Avidan, Emily, Janice, Michael, and Will, who all were essential to making the film work.  Crewing on a shoot like mine, everyone does everything.  Sometimes you run sound for a shot, sometimes you slate, sometimes you need to clean a couple gallons of fake blood out of a tub.  There is very little glamor on my sets.  The key is to believe in the end result so much that you don’t care. 

Working long days with subject material that is somewhat dark, it’s important to keep the mood on set lively.  I do this two ways, one by giving my actors and crew enough room to be creative and offer suggestions and ad-lib.  Some of the best shots in this film were the direct result of suggestions that weren’t mine.  As I wrote my script with my actors in lines, I encouraged changing things up and cutting lines that didn’t work.  I don’t have an attachment to the script, so much as I have a commitment to making the final film as good as it possibly can be.  The second way to keep people happy on set: buy them food.  After four hours of filming, they joy you get when two crewmembers arrive with Subway is unparalleled. 

This film marks the first sync sound film I’ve ever made, so I currently have a lot of video and audio files sitting on my computer that I’m nervous to look at.  I have a lot of syncing, post-dubbing, and editing ahead of me.  But, for now I’m taking a few well-deserved days off before I go through the hellish experience of post production.  More on that next time. 

Cheers,

John

Photo Credits

1. Production Still 

2. From personal collection of photos of me in trash bags

3. Flikr - Like_the_Grand_Canyon

The Tramp's Last Social Commentary

 

Two of the most well known silent film stars had deeper messages for their audiences beyond their humor and physical comedy. While Keaton was the king of the outcasts, Chaplin was the champion of the workingman. Buster Keaton was much quieter about broad political concerns. He tended to focus on the struggles of the individual. In the films that I have reviewed previously, Buster focuses on family dysfunctional relationships.  Although, he does depict himself as unemployed in his short film, The Goat.  His follies are often a result of missing the social cues.  In the Goat, there is a scene with a breadline.  Buster goes to the bread window cutting the long line of fellow jobless.  Upon learning of his mistake, he heads to the back of the line or so he thinks.  He gets behind some mannequins placed near the line.  By the time he figures out the stationary line he’s standing in is merely an illusion the bread window closes.  The breadline depicts desperate times. And the dummies are a depiction of the dehumanization of the impoverished. The line is really just an example of those who understand the system, which eludes Buster.

Chaplin on the other hand was particularly supportive of the plight of the working class, and uses his films to impart his criticism of post war and newly industrialized society. Utilizing his character “The Tramp” Chaplin would vocalize his distaste in the treatment of the lower class though his physical comedy. As one of Chaplin’s first non-silent films, Modern Times depicting the hardships experienced by the impoverished was an important message to be communicated by Chaplin.  In the film’s opening scene, sheep are squeezed together as they travel along a chute. Then, there is bird’s eye shot of men emerging from a subway, crowded together on a sidewalk rushing to their jobs in a factory.  This quick intellectual montage creates a feeling of hopelessness as the faceless crowd of workers shuffle into the factory. One cannot help but notice the comparison Chaplin has made between the sheep headed to a distasteful destiny and the workers heading to mindless, meaningless monotony. Furthermore, the only consistent sounds in the film come from the machines in the factory, while the characters are silent. Chaplin is further asserting that machines rule modern society and there is no longer a place for the individual.

In Modern Times, Chaplin is a worker on the conveyer line with two other men.  His job is to tighten the bolts on a plate before it gets to the others who have other simple tasks.  Of course as precursor to other future conveyer scenes such as Lucille Ball’s famous chocolate factory foible, this scene pans over to “The Tramp” out of sync with the others and the rhythm of conveyer belt.  He encroaches on the other workers who never seem to move from their spots. At one point later in the film, he lands on the belt and goes through and around giant gears before the belt is reversed.  Of course, there is more going on than just the work delay in section five where the Tramp is stationed.  We see the boss who unlike his workers is reading a paper and working on a jigsaw puzzle, which symbolizes more of a puzzle as to why he seems to be out of touch with anything other than production matters.  Certainly, management is not interested in the worker only the whirl of mechanical production. In a Wizard of Oz like fashion, the boss is able to see and be seen by the workers in order to speed up production at his whim.  In attempt to give his workers more time on the line, he is shown a mechanical feeding machine that can make mealtime more efficient.  Of course, the Tramp extracted from his job on the assembly line is the test candidate.  A close up of the Tramp strapped into the machine provides hilarity when it malfunctions shoving bolt into his mouth instead of pastries, and finally hits in the face with a cream pie.  The boss deems the prototype a failure-“It’s no good-it isn’t practical” as shown by the title card. After a mental breakdown and a stay at a mental hospital, the Tramp returns to the factory which has shut down; so although he is cured, he is now unemployed.  There is footage of crowded streets crammed with others who are jobless, yet another intellectual montage depicting desperate times.  Grim, gray masses move without direction.

After his dismal portrayal of factory life and workers, Chaplin shows us how he prefers life in prison to being unemployed and starving in the streets.  Chaplin makes a bold socialist statement by having the Tramp “mistakenly” lead a workers protest. After picking up a red flag that falls from a construction vehicle, he gets caught in a worker demonstration and mistaken for its leader by the police.  Once in jail, he discovers a prison is a place where he is happy and comfortable.  Although he has a few comical altercations with fellow prisoners, he stops an escape attempt and wins the favor of the guards. Unfortunately he is not able to stay in prison forever.  He repeatedly tries to break the law to get back in prison to get back to the better life.  As a perk for heroism, he is given a letter by the warden attesting to his superior character.  Chaplin is suggesting that perhaps the prison offenses are unjust.  Just in Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Miserables, the poor suffer wrongs and are incarcerated because they are poor.  Perhaps, Modern Times is the Chaplin American film version of the Hugo story as there are many similarities.

Chaplin continues to highlight the dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots.  As Gamine and Chaplin pass a department store, the night watchman is being carried to an ambulance with a broken leg.  Gamine encourages Chaplin to apply for the position.  With his letter, he is given the job.  Once all the employees have left, he brings Gamine into the store where they have the good life.   The Tramp and his love interest Gamine dress in furs and live the good life in a department store after hours.  The good times are coming to an end. In his rounds, he encounters burglars who are his former steel workers who have hit the store in hard times-“We ain’t burglars, we’re hungry”.  Rather than call the authorities as The Tramp can relate to their predicament, the group begins opening champagne. After drinking in the department store café with his friends in solidarity, he passes out.  Discovered among the fabrics, he loses his job and is thrown in jail.  Released, he finds Gamine has waited for him. Gamine has managed to build a shack so they can try to live the life they envisioned.  It looks like their luck has improved when the factory has reopened.  Their fortune is short lived when the workers go back on strike the same day the Tramp has been hired, and again the Tramp is jailed.  Again released, Gamine is transformed.  Gamine has landed a cabaret job and also gets Chaplin hired a singing waiter.  Within this turn of events is rare scene of Chaplin singing.  This film had been planned to be the first talkie, but he abandoned that idea as it was feared that a departure from the silent genre would ruin his film career.  As ever, the love birds luck disappears with an arrest warrant for vagrancy for Gamine.  The film concludes with their escape from the police and with the Tramp and Gamine free from society’s restraints to walk hand in hand into the sunset hoping still for a better life.

It was in this film, Modern Times, that Chaplin made his last appearance as the “little tramp”.  Chaplin was viewed as someone with very strong views on economic and social problems of this era.  He was well read on the subjects. He created his own economic theory, and used this film to turn his concerns into comedy. For many reasons, this is a film that is worth watching as entertainment and as a historical societal commentary.

Of Worms, Typos, and other Totems of Love in SECRETARY

Lee Holloway likes dull work.

“I want to be bored,” she insists, instantly intriguing prospective boss Mr. E. Edward Grey on the interview for the first job of her life. The mysteriously docile creature activates his fantasies of a kind of woman who would jump into a dumpster for him, whom he could care for and dominate. But more on that later. Based on a short story from Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior collection, Steven Shainberg’s high concept tale of office romance seems to exist liminally between genres in the American tradition of David Lynch and the Coen brothers. The film investigates the erotic in mundane, unexpected objects such as the typewriter, red pen and yes, typographical errors – it’s La Pianiste with slapstick! Indeed, the comedic forces behind this sincerely kinky film is what marks the difference between provocation and sensationalism.

Assuming the titular position is a youthful Maggie Gyllenhaal, who manages to rise above the stunted social intelligence of the character to give a spirited performance. Recently released from a mental institution after slitting her wrist with a kitchen knife (accidentally on purpose), Lee returns to the tedium of her home in suburbia welcomed by her overzealous mother, alcoholic father and complacent newlywed sister who lives in the pool house. To feel something in a life that is otherwise numb, Lee quickly retrieves her old jewelry box of horrors from under the mattress; digging the foot of a plaster ballerina into her thigh, the ritual is at once medieval, teenage and fetishistic. 

But Shainberg is not interested in erotic rituals on the basis of exposure – nudity is minimal in good taste. In early scenes, a milky bathtub and backyard pool hide Lee's scarred body for dramatic purposes but also emphasize her childish sexuality. Enabling her with hot chocolate and the like is Mr. Grey, portrayed by James Spader. The actor's presence almost surely sets up the expectation of eccentricity. This is confirmed as much in the introduction: the strange and ascetic arrangement of darts and red pens on his desk is juxtaposed with the ridiculous, elaborate orchid garden in the middle of his office. Here one finds an overt metaphor for Lee and Mr. Grey, both fragile and in need of attendance. (In another metaphorical aside, Mr. Grey can be seen setting mouse traps in the office only to free the captured mice.)

Though released in 2002, the film's retro props and kitsch decor diligently mystifies its tone and time period. Certainly the film's preference for the 60s pop art aesthetic and 70s wall treatments gives it a humorously insular look. Using color, Shainberg also distinguishes the two worlds Lee comes to inhabit. Her home is decidedly girly, from the pink bicycle lock on the cabinet of knives to the glittery door sign to her room, and Lee's hue is decidedly purple, which as a liminal color carries the right odd and juvenile connotations. It is also the color of a bruise, a motif for Lee's interiority and foreshadowing of her physical relationship with Mr. Grey. When she's at the office, however, she enters a more comforting, natural world. In this re-imagined garden of Eden she is discovering her femaleness as if she were the first woman and Mr. Grey the first man. The film's imagery of water, an agent of cleansing, also conveys Lee's emergence out of that stifled domesticity into a more self-possessed personhood.

The pivotal moment in which Secretary admittedly loses its innocence arrives fifty minutes into the film. Mr. Grey, having had enough of Lee's typos (no spellcheck on a typewriter after all), takes matters into his own hands. In some ways, the initiation into spanking is the first love scene of the film. Lee experiences a moment of tactile intimacy with Mr. Grey and feels paradoxically liberated. Soon she revels in submission and in having every last detail of her life controlled by him. “Just a scoop of potatoes, four peas, and all the ice cream you want,” the latter dictates over the phone at dinner time. The declaration "I'm your secretary" even becomes most celebratory in her fantasies. Lee actually endeavors to be spanked, and when she mails Mr. Grey a dead worm in provocation, it is so thrilling and aggressive an action that Mr. Grey would have to retaliate. 

Since the film takes Lee's perspective, to some extent Mr. Grey is morally illegible. By all accounts, E. Edward Grey is not sure how to be nice. Peeks into his solitary existence outside the office demonstrate how he treats his life with absolute efficiency. Resting his head on own his shoulder in one scene, he invokes sympathy for the lonely devil. Nevertheless, his wish to be closer to Lee and compulsive self-discipline eventually forces a disassociation with himself and in an act of monumental denial, he cruelly reenacts the scene of the first interview to fire Lee.

The film somewhat loses its footing after Lee's dismissal. She meets other sadists and explores the caricatured world of suburban sadomasochism only to discover that it's not the lifestyle but Mr. Grey she really covets – not that the film gives any other potential suitors a chance. Subsequently this candied implication of true love meanders into a runaway-bride parody. Rejecting the normal romantic option in her old classmate, Jeremy, a largely thankless foil for Mr. Grey, Lee returns to the office for one last test. At this point, Shainberg involves the zany inhabitants of their small town in the relationship, as they come in one by one to talk Lee out of her unmoving stance at Mr. Grey's desk. If the viewer feels marooned by this turn of events perhaps it is because Shainberg chose to dignify Lee and Mr. Grey by caricaturing everyone else in the film. They're there as comic relief and to maintain communication between the two, as it is her public declaration of love in the newspapers that convinces him of her determination. Finally, he revives her and carries her to his orchid lair (and really, there isn't a better way to put it), where he attends to her exposed figure with tender, religious devotion. The odd couple ostensibly lives happily ever after and in the last confrontation of the film, Lee looks into the lens to address the viewer as a self-realized woman.

Beat Halloween: Sidney Peterson's The Cage and The Potted Psalm

I believe there are two sorts of moods conjured up at Halloween, and they are both tied to anxiety. The first involves lust for gore, fright, heart palpitations and being generally unnerved. Films in this vein do not necessarily have to reach the gruesome, cathartic extremes of Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Hooper) or Silence of the Lambs (1991, Demme), although they may. What matters is not so much the content, but that the filmic form of that content effectively manipulates emotions. The mood (primal insecurity, agitation, pure fear) need not be connected to cannibalism. The same primitive human angst can be exploited through a variety of genres, including the slasher, psychological thriller, horror and even war films. What they share are momentary or prolonged emotionally manipulative sequences. I’m thinking of the gripping feeling Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock) evokes as Scottie, in an awkward sweaty panic, follows Madeline up the campanile at San Juan Bautista. Or, channeled through more grotesque visual language, the shots of Leatherface’s kitchen littered with animal skeletons, feathers and detritus; the icebox containing the body of his teenage victim in Massacre.

The second type of mood connected to Halloween is slightly more cerebral. The main driving question for this mood is not “What is the capacity for others to wreck violence against me?” but rather, “How far do I have to venture to detect the truly bizarre and unfamiliar within the familiar?” Anxiety is still a factor here, for we have to make the conscious decision to set aside normalcy, congruence and linear thought. If the slasher film relies on visceral responses and our most primal human fears, then surrealist and experimental films challenge our intellectual pursuit of narrative progression, reason, meaning and causality. Sometimes none of these exist, and sometimes they exist only to very small degrees. So experimental films are unnerving, not because they threaten our corporeal security, but because they problematize the conventional ways in which we think about the world.

Of the two Halloween “moods,” I believe the second is more difficult to achieve. Or at the very least, the industry has invested less time and fewer resources into its development. Hollywood is quite good at exploiting our instinctual, animal-like need for security. It is slightly less adept at illuminating the absurd. So, while films that agitate, terrorize or unnerve are not the exclusive purview of mainstream media, movies that venture —even briefly— into the surreal and avant-garde are generally treated as art cinema. Nevertheless, I would argue that these sorts of films are essential viewing at Halloween! Gore alone is insufficient. We also need a dose of the slightly strange — not supernatural, and not wholly divested from the objects and spaces of everyday life, but the distorted anatomy, jarring stop-action, and the playful conglomeration of store windows, shabby things for sale, reflected pedestrians and bifurcated vehicles. I’m advocating that all of you sit down and watch two shorts: The Cage (1947) and The Potted Psalm (1946), both by filmmaker and beat poet Sidney Peterson.

I first came across Peterson in Art Cinema, which classifies his work as surrealist. The point of that movement, according to Young and Duncan, was to "reestablish links with the 'primal mind.'"¹ I would argue there is no more appropriate time than All Hallows Eve to reaffirm such a connection.

The Cage and The Potted Psalm function as a nice pair, diverging subtly in the mood, but also complementing each other. Viewed together, they provide excursions (amusingly absurd in The Cage and somewhat more ominous, though still not ghoulishly so, in Psalm) into the unfamiliar side of seemingly normal people, interactions and material things. In The Cage, Peterson establishes a surprisingly coherent visual language reminiscent of the Soviets' Kino Eye. He warps and distorts images, spins the lens across axes of symmetry, collapses space and captures pedestrians navigating San Francisco backwards. Surveillance is a motif that permeates both shorts. In Cage it is articulated explicitly: an escaped eyeball rolls, maneuvers, appears and disappears along the California streets and around an amusement park, spawning a protracted chase. What we perceive as a narrative progression perhaps makes The Cage more digestible than Psalm, but the internal logic of Cage is also undercut by the existence of the protagonist's alternate personas, and the wrought-iron spiraling bird cage that encloses his head.

Peterson also seems to communicate a fascination with the threshold between life and death. Resurrection is suggested almost continuously throughout the film. For instance, early on, cooked ducks in Chinatown windows are juxtaposed with live pigeons. The film also constructs an indeterminate space which could arguably function as a world for the living or the dead. Cars and people move in reverse, as though sleepers moving through a dream. The carnival space becomes doubly unnerving as its visitors and rides predominately move in reverse. The physics of rotating rides and bullet-like cars tunneling through space seem simultaneously graceful and precarious, and the odd forward running march of the group chasing the detached eye connotes them as social misfits. To us, they look both militaristic and hilarious.

As weird as things get, they never stray too far from an inner documentary basis. True, a man may lose an eye, butter his bread with fresh oil paints, and inhabit different bodies, one of which buries itself in the sand. But at its core, the short investigates the possibilities of the absurd built into the textures of everyday life. A female thief who steals a bundle of onions strikes us as odd as the male companion threatening to shoot the stray eyeball with a rifle (and later a dart). The two become nearly interchangeable. They both characterize what we possibly fear most about ourselves: that we are driven not by rational thought, but by instinctual, even animalistic inclinations.

If The Cage strikes contemporary viewers as "playful," then The Potted Psalm is notably less tame. Clownish makeup, graveyards populated by tropical flora instead of the typical hemlocks, and distorted women all render gothic horror motifs slightly exotic. Whole sequences seem devoted to the "body mischievous," a theme communicated through elongated limbs, goiter-like necks and mannerist torsos. Things get stranger as the film progresses: most notably, women submerged and abandoned imply the aftermath of violence, but not the violent acts themselves. Yet, even in Psalm, Peterson exercises great restraint. He does not manipulate viewers, or at least he does so subtly, so that we feel we have come to all the conclusions on our own. At the film's closure, a woman runs a considerable length, shot at variable distances. She stumbles, yet persists, and this time the hilarity of the small steps and brisk cadence that characterized the chase in The Cage is replaced with a sense of urgency. The force that pursues her is imperceptible; the lack of dialogue or even other humanity is acutely felt. And whenever she is captured in a frame with another human form, it is only herself, superimposed and dissolving briefly on an overexposed horizon.

 

1. Young, Paul. Art Cinema. Ed. Paul Duncan. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2009. Print.

When TV Gets Spooky

TV shows and their Halloween episodes—it's a hallmark of the season, so long as the show isn't taking a hiatus that week to accommodate children being led door-to-door. One would think sci-fi and fantasy shows, shows that already delve into the edges of belief, would have a particularly easy time with these sorts of episode.

Well, yes and no. It's a gimmick, and when your show already has vampires, or takes place on another planet, how are you going to fit in children and masks and make it interesting?

A variety of ways, it turns out. I'm just going to run through a few of my favorites here.

---

Probably the most straightforward example of this trope that I'm going to discuss is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Here we've got quite a few episodes that could qualify as implicitly Halloween-themed, but the two obvious ones are “Halloween” and “Fear, Itself.”

The twist in these episodes is that, in a world of demons and vampires, the baddies stay in on Halloween. Performing evil deeds when everyone around you is dressed up all scary in order to score candy? It's cheap. And so, Halloween is meant to be a calm and relaxing night—except, of course, unless you're Buffy or one of the gang.

While not exactly scary, “Halloween” is definitely an entertaining episode with several character twists—Xander as the capable soldier, Buffy as the maiden in distress, Willow as a sexy ghost. Whatever costumes the characters put on, they become. While the plot could be more gripping, the episode is very much worth it just for the clothing and the symbolism inherent in every character change.

Then we have “Fear, Itself.” As one might guess from the title, the fear factor for this episode is greatly improved. Here, we have a college haunted house that actually appears to be haunted. The gang is split up, characters are abandoned or attacked, and a demon has been summoned. With traumatized co-eds hiding amidst the cobwebs, and characters all alone in the darkness, the episode becomes a chillingly effective success.

I'll let you, reader, find out what happens to the demon. Let's just say he goes out with a bang.

---

Our next show is Castle. (While it's a bit of a stretch to describe this show as fantastical, these episodes either refer to Nathan Fillion's stint on the cult sci-fi hit Firefly or toy with the supernatural. They're also really fun.) Take season two's “Vampire Weekend,” otherwise known as vampires, goths, and ghouls, oh my! (Okay, maybe not ghouls.) This episode begins with Castle dressed as Mal, captain of the spaceship Firefly.

“Didn't you wear that, like, five years ago?” his daughter asks him.

“So?” he replies.

“So, don't you think you should move on?”

“I like it!”

The episode continues in standard fashion: a body has been found in a graveyard, a stake driven through the victim's heart. Castle and Beckett find themselves in a subculture of black clothing and synthetic fangs, and the possibility of real vampires excites Castle in a delightfully childlike manner.

Eventually, they solve the crime, and there is no immortal life involved. The journey there, however, is endlessly entertaining. Also, for those among us with an appreciation for the more Gothic side of the clothing spectrum, highly aesthetically pleasing.

More recently is the episode “Demons,” wherein Castle and Beckett investigate a murder in what appears to be a real-life haunted house, home to several murders. There are no Firefly references in this episode, but the was-or-wasn't-it-a-ghost tension works, and the banter is top-notch. Is it the best episode of Castle ever? Probably not. But it's certainly worth the price of the candy corn you'll snack on while watching.

---

Perhaps my favorite example of this trope, though also the least straightforward, is the Farscape episode “Kansas.”

John Crichton is an astronaut, trapped for 3 years in a distant part of the galaxy, who finally makes it home to Earth. Problem: he makes it back several years too early, in 1986. Problem: his friends are aliens, very non-human looking aliens, though mainly with two arms and legs. Sometimes with bonus tentacles or blue skin, but still, the general shape is the same.

Solution? Visit during Halloween. Also, focus your plot on John Crichton's attempts to fix the timeline and John's familial relationships. Just make sure to have several sugar-related jokes, and have a cop investigate our jolly group for their suspiciously realistic masks and limited English skills.

Truth be told, this episode is fantastic. By far the best I've discussed here.

John's homecoming to Earth does not disappoint, and the difficult relations between John's parents (with one another, with a teenage John, and with our adult John) pull at the heartstrings. Even Chiana's short fling with a teenage John does not disappoint, or disturb too badly. Perhaps the one downside is that this episode comes late in the show and is thus the culmination of a lot of emotional drama. After all, who would want to start watching The X-Files on the day Mulder learns the Truth?

In other words, Spoilerphobes beware. Everyone else? Please choose this scare.

---

Obviously this list is by no means exhaustive. While not strictly supernatural, Psych's “This Episode Sucks” is as silly as it sounds, and when Dead Like Me features children and costumes, it's a bit funny, a bit sad, and a bit horrifying.

These are some of my favorites, though, and if you're as in love with TV and Halloween as I am, they are sure to make for one awesome weekend.

10 Horror Films You Probably Aren’t, But Should Be Watching

10 great, original horror films for those of you who are tired of remakes, reboots, rip offs, and other disappointments.    

Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006, Dir. Scott Glosserman) What may at first seem like a run of the mill mockumentary is actually a very smart, very funny little film that follows a team of graduate students as they document Leslie Vernon’s quest to become the next horror icon.  Wonderfully subversive, well acted, and with a fun little cameo from Robert Englund, this film isn’t really scary, but well worth watching.

Black Christmas (1974, Dir. Bob Clark) While true horror fans know this film well, it seems to have slipped through the cracks of the slasher cannon.  Before Bob Clark directed the holiday classic A Christmas Story, he painted the holiday black in this tale of a sorority house terrorized by a mysterious caller who begins murder the sorority sisters.  Combining American conventions with Italian giallo sensibility, Black Christmas is the sadistic older brother to the slasher Godfather Halloween.

High Tension (2003, Dir. Alexandre Aja) Two friends, Alexa and Marie, travel to Alexa’s country home for a vacation that turns into a nightmare when a mysterious man shows up, bent on killing everyone.  Few films are as simplistic as High Tension.  The film guns it right out of the gate and never lets up.  It’s ending may seem a little slapped together, but if you’re in the mood for 90 minutes of blood soaked tension, Aja’s French thriller will do the trick.

Inside (2007, Dir. Alexandre Bustillo) This French shocker is for everyone who thinks that American horror films have become just a little too safe and predictable.  On the eve of giving birth to her first child, a woman is visited in the middle of the night by a woman intent on taking her unborn child.  Visceral, unforgiving, and downright surreally violent, Bustillo’s breakthrough film is everything horror should be, if you can stomach it. 

May (2002, Dir. Lucky McKee) This unsettling little indie film tells the story of May, a young woman finding it increasingly impossible to interact with those around her, who decides to create her own perfect friend out of the best parts of people.  Angela Bettis gives an amazingly creepy, and surprisingly empathetic performance as the title character.

Pieces (1982, Dir. Juan Piquer Simón)  Falling into the category of "so bad it's good" films, Pieces follows a chainsaw wielding killer as he saws his way through a college campus, steal body parts along the way.  This film is the Citizen Kane of tasteless, talentless slashers.  Watch it with friends.

Pontypool (2008, Dir. Bruce McDonald) Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess, this uncommonly intelligent zombie flick changes up the formula by having the infection spread, not through blood, but through language.  Strong performances all around help flesh out this great premise and turn an interesting film into a great one.

Thirst (2010, Chan-wook Park) The director of Old Boy tries his hand at the vampire genre in this tale of a priest turned vampire.  The amazing performances of Kang-ho Song and Ok-bin Kim elevate this twisted, bloody love story into something really worth seeing.

Torso (1973, Dir. Sergio Martino) This Italian giallo slasher follows a mysterious killer with a knack for strangling American exchange students.  While the first 45 minutes are almost incomprehensible pedestrian it all comes together and the film’s final act builds more tension than most horror films can dream of creating. 

Trick ‘r Treat (2007, Dir. Michael Dougherty) This horror anthology is probably the best Halloween film since John Carpenter changed the way we think about Halloween in ‘78.  Dylan Baker, Anna Paquin, and Brian Cox all give great performances in this celebration of the holiday.  The film also introduces Sam, the Spirit of Halloween, one of the best horror villains in a long time. 

Happy Halloween.  Go watch something scary.

 

 

Zombies: Our Greatest Fears Come to Life

Zombies. The undead. The walking dead. The living challenged. Whatever you want to call them, they’re everywhere. Zombie films have been around since the beginning of cinema and are now more popular then ever. What is it about the undead that continues to fascinate and terrify audiences? Zombies are the physical representation of what we fear most: Death and the unknown. Not only do they embody the fear of what happens after death, even further than that, zombies reflect the greatest fears of each era.

 

White Zombie (1932) is given credit for being the first feature length zombie flick

 

 

The film centers around a maleficent master of voodoo in Haiti who turns a young woman trapped in a bizarre love triangle, into a member of living dead. America was experiencing an influx in immigration. The idea of strange, new people infiltrating in the country brought animosity and fear to America. White Zombie plays on that fear as an innocent American girl is put into an unbreakable trance by voodoo. The zombie in this film is your typical slow moving, non contagious zombie.

The King of Zombies (1941) is a film about a couple who crash lands at the doorstep of a Nazi Doctor who has harnessed the power of voodoo to raise the dead for his own diabolical purposes.  The America public was well aware of Germany’s cruelty and inhumane treatment of Jews during the Second World War.   Hitler was thought to have a fascination with the occult. Hitler used science in terrifying ways, such as using fertilizer products to make nerve gas.  Zombies could be produced in a terrifying rate using this mad scientist’s formula.

 

 

      Night of the Living Dead (1968) is the most famous zombie film ever produced.

This is the first time zombies are seen as hunters that could leave their environment to seek out food sources, albeit slow moving predators.  It was believe the zombies were caused by radiation given off by an exploding space probe. In the heart of the cold war, radiation given off by an atomic bomb was a very real fear for many people.  Even the Congress and Senate had a secret fallout shelter nestled in West Virginia to escape radiation from an atomic device.

 

In 2002, films like 28 Days Later and Resident Evil gave rise to the zombie apocalypse. The faster moving zombies physically represent the quickened spread of the flesh eating undead. In other words, with these guys after you, you’re screwed. These films displayed the public’s fear in gene alteration and the idea of super-viruses that could spread with such speed that escape was virtually impossible.

 

Zombies are the loss of a person’s uniqueness and humanity.  Zombies feed on other humans turning their victims into someone devoid not only of life, but individual essence.  Cannibalism is just one of the frightening elements.  In each period of time, these films capitalized on the fear that was known, but unknown so seemingly plausible.  As knowledge and experience change so evolves the zombie, the embodiment of the new fear.

 

Sources:

Film posters for ''White Zombie'' ''King of the Zombies'' and Night of the Living Dead all used in accordance to Wikimedia Commons

Candyman (1992): A Self-Conscious Slasher Film

Of course, the above title may sound rather redundant. It is difficult to think of a more self-conscious genre than the slasher film: not only have there been a plethora of obvious pastiches, but even the ostensibly serious Friday the 13^th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises often poke fun at their own favorite clichés. Every film begins with a group of sexually active teenagers who must listen to the ravings of the obligatory toothless old man (or some other familiar harbinger of doom) before being promptly dispatched ingeniously (or not, depending on how cheap the SFX are) by Jason, Freddy, or whatever other relentless killer the screenwriter has created. The heavily formulaic nature of the genre has caused it to accrue as many critics as fans; indeed, it became commonplace in the eighties for older horror authors like Robert Bloch to unfavorably compare the new outcrop of slasher films with the traditional ghost stories and psychological thrillers of former eras.

            One could argue, however, that it is within the very predictability of these films that their appeal lies. This familiarity causes them to feel more reassuring than unsettling; it is not only “the final girl” who will make it to the film’s credits – it is ourselves, the audience. The sequels sustain this sense of survival: we are familiar with the entire history of a certain slasher, all his quirks and traits, and no matter how improbable (or often contradictory) his sequel-spawned history may be, this knowledge gives us a further sense of security. Like a hardened explorer wading through familiar territory, we know that no matter how bewildering it might get for the unfortunates onscreen, whatever happens will still remain reassuringly familiar to us. Like fairy tales and urban legends, slasher films seduce their audience into a world in which routine sets of clichés and formulae are not only the commonplace fallbacks of lazy screenwriters but are actually embraced by the audiences themselves: a world in which Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees become modern bogeymen and in which every victim’s death is seen as a memorable milestone, hailed at once for the originality of its execution and the predictable place that it occupies in the film’s overall plot structure.

            Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) is a different sort of slasher film, however; one that is self-aware but not comedic; a movie that explores the mythic space that urban legends and slasher tales inhabit, focusing on why these tales absorb our imaginations so deeply and suggesting that there is some mysterious draw even greater than the comfortable familiarity that these gruesome fairy tales have. Based on “The Forbidden,” a novella by British author Clive Barker, its titular supernatural antagonist resembles neither the wise-cracking Freddy Krueger nor the silent, masked killers in Friday the 13^th or John Carpenter’s Halloween. Rather, Tony Todd plays the character of the hook-handed Candyman with an intense, seductive charisma, transforming him into a monster who functions both as a supernatural killer and as an almost allegorical embodiment of all that seduces and terrifies us in the slasher mythos, or even in horror fiction in general. Barker’s work both in literature (The Books of Blood, The Hellbound Heart) and in film (Hellraiser) constantly connects the twin emotions of terror and desire as two related impulses and the dynamic found in Candyman between the film’s heroine Helen (Virginia Madsen) and her terrifying antagonist is no exception. The most compelling moments in the narrative are Helen’s encounters with Candyman – those enigmatic interchanges in which he implores her to “be his victim” and asks “what is blood for if not for shedding?” The point of his appeal is that there is a certain glory in being counted as a legend: if Helen becomes a victim of Candyman, she will become – as he terms it – one of those tales “to frighten children, to make lovers cling closer in their rapture.” She will become immortal like him precisely because she, too, will become a legend of terror. To attain the status of legendry, “the blessed condition” as Candyman terms it, is perceived as a higher spiritual state, the cost of which is, in his eyes, far outweighed by the reward. She will no longer be merely a curious audience; she will, in fact, become a horror tale herself.

            The beauty of Bernard Rose’s film is that it can be enjoyed in the same manner as any other slasher film, for like all the others, it charts the familiar territory of hook-handed killers, flattering us with our knowledge of grisly urban legends while delivering a healthy amount of gore and scares. But for those who choose to contemplate the titular villain’s mysterious seductions more deeply, it holds perhaps the key to what it is that makes many of us not only enjoy Horror but even wish to create our own tales of terror. Candyman is not only an avenging ghost: he is a legend, a horror story himself. Stories are immortal, therefore Candyman himself is immortal – and, moreover, being a legend as well as a ghost, he is an immortal being whom lovers and children both revere, fear, and yet all the same enjoy whispering of. Any lover of Horror can understand how this “blessed condition” could be perceived as quite seductive.

            And, if the opportunity to unravel the philosophy of Horror is not enough to entice the reader to watch this film, then let me also add that the ending of this film gives an entirely new (and rather eerie) meaning to the common slasher film cliché of the “final girl”…

Why We All Need a Good Scare Every Once in a While

We spend most of our lives in our comfort zone. We seek safety, and it shows when you think of how easily we all fall into our respective routines.  What this safe sphere is may be distinctly unique to each person, but each is inherently the same: full of consistency, security, shelter, and control. But let’s face it. With this routine comes monotony, conformity, and tedium too.  So that’s why every once in awhile you need to be bold and brave, and step outside your comfort zone.

 

And what’s a better way to do so than with a good scare? I’m not suggesting you take a stroll alone on Greenmount Avenue later tonight or even go base jumping. I’m merely asking that as a part of your Halloween celebrations this year you watch a scary movie, one that truly terrifies you.  It doesn’t have to be a horror film (like our sense of safety and security, fears are quite subjective), just one that tackles something you’re scared of. It could be Snakes on a Plane for all I care!

 

There’s no safer place to test your limits than with a film:  it’s a short, finite period of time, you can watch conveniently from almost anywhere you want, it can be a shared or solitary experience, and if it becomes too horrifying to handle you can always close your eyes for a while. But most importantly, the magic of cinema makes watching a scary movie the best way to push your limits, because no matter what film scares you or what happens in it, in the end it will always just be a movie. You can still take a giant leap outside of your comfort zone knowing that with just a click of a button you'll be right back in the security of your routine.

 

We live our lives in fear of fear, but is there a more satisfying moment than facing a fear, the rush of adrenaline that comes with that accomplishment? It’s a feeling of invincibility, and even if it doesn’t last long it’s still affecting. We don’t come across many moments where we can exhibit bravery in everyday life, but facing a fear is one of the most profound ways. Suddenly the safety of the comfort zone seems even more protective after being so incredibly frightened, and there’s the temporary break in the monotony of routine. So this Halloween I ask you to watch a scary movie as more than a holiday tradition (you should still watch Hocus Pocus, but maybe on another night), but as something that is entirely terrifying, something that faces your fears to give you a scare, and will remind you of the power that is the fantasy of film. 

 

GINGER SNAPS and Hell in a Handbasket

As the decades keep ratifying the truism, “High school is hell,” filmmakers too continue to find adolescence a rich playground for the supernatural. The cinematic landscape of the new millennium is positively rotting with juvenile gore and romanticized horrors. But perhaps one can extract a modicum of truth out of such teenage populist delights this Halloween. John Fawcett's 2000 film Ginger Snaps, for one, makes a bloody lycanthropic mess out of feminism. The film is equal parts teen comedy and camp horror, exploiting the werewolf metamorphosis as a metaphor for puberty.

Meet Ginger and Brigitte, sisters on the precipice of adulthood. Hobbies include making suicide pacts and slideshows of their gruesomely staged deaths in their dungeon of a bedroom – clearly humor tempered by a thousand paper cuts. Late bloomers, the two dread the thought of menstruation for it would mean yielding to conformity and venerated womanhood. Menstruation disgusts and embarrasses them but also threatens their sense of identity as misanthropic outcasts, which they gladly play up as students. When Ginger finally gets her first period, a werewolf attacks her the same night to make the transformations run parallel. Ginger begins to take on masculine qualities, becoming sexually aggressive and physically abrasive, sprouting a tail in the process. She learns how to wield her newfound sexual confidence to disrupt the the social hierarchy at school and racks up a body count along the way. Consequently Ginger comes to resemble the archetype of the monstrous femme fatale, which in turn is the manifestation of the historically male fear of being overtaken by a woman; she might as well have sprung fifty feet.^[1]

The title of the movie itself is a pun of a binary opposition between femininity and masculinity, wherein the domesticity evoked by baked goods is contrasted with the machismo Ginger develops once she “snaps.” Qualities of feminine power – being nurturing, tender and positively aggressive – are seemingly rejected in this story by Ginger's dubious transformation, but subtly reaffirmed by her mother and younger sister. It is, after all, the gleefully ignorant mother who takes to investigating the girls' behavior and actually discovers the truth. Brigitte, the more introverted sister, also demonstrates power through her unwavering devotion to Ginger. Overcoming her social inertia, she even enlists the help of others to save her sister. Indeed, it is through her triumph that those growing pains of youth finds the most cathartic articulation.

____________________________________________________________________________

¹ See 1958 cult classic, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

Image courtesy of the author.

Funny Games

Anna: Why don't you just kill us?
Peter: [smiling] You shouldn't forget the importance of entertainment.
                     Funny Games (2008)

----------

The setting was Shriver Hall, Halloween 2009. I sat back in my seat as a member of The Johns Hopkins Film Society, after weeks of promoting a spooky holiday double-feature, and prepared for what was to be my least favorite screening of my undergraduate career. Though I've loved decorating my new post-grad apartment with glossy skulls and pumpkins, Halloween is not my holiday. I don't like being voluntarily frightened. I don't enjoy feeling nervous. I don't like things taking me by surprise. And, though I appreciate some Diane Arbus-style forms of the grotesque, scary things freak me out.

The way I appreciate a film is inseparable from my experience with the clothes in it. So the paralyzing fear I felt during our first screening of the night - Funny Games, the 2008 English-language remake of the 1997 Austrian psychological thriller by the same name - began first and foremost with the choice of costumes. The clean white golf polos on our villainous duo immediately brought to mind Malcolm McDowell & co. in A Clockwork Orange, sans bowler hats but with an equal amount of premeditated evilness. Paul and Peter's achingly friendly attitudes at the start reminded me of Alex's cordial, composed, practically relaxed forms of violence. (Plus, anyone catch the biblical reference in their names? Creepy.) Their highly stylized characters from the start struck me and sickened me before I even knew what was to come.

And after sitting and squirming through the entire thing, I decided that what it all boils down to is this - the thing that makes Funny Games so terrifying (and, admittedly, so successful) is just the opposite of theatrical: it's the fact that it could happen.

Think about it compared to our other beloved scary movies. Scream is so foolish, if only for the Ghostfaced Killer mask alone. How can you take something like that seriously? If it had a knife, maybe. But the movie is practically a spoof of a horror film in itself...and the mental image of Drew Barrymore screaming and crying on the phone in her little bob hairdo makes me laugh just thinking about it.

Halloween could happen, I suppose. But what are the chances that everyone in your town will just happen to be out that night, leaving no one to answer their doors and lend you some help? Oh and also, what about your cell phone? Get your iPhone out and call 911, problem solved. (Although the isolation of being in 1978 without a cell phone is frightening on its own for some people, I'd imagine.)

Nightmare on Elm Street, The Exorcist, Poltergeist, The Ring, Zombieland, and most other thrillers require some sort of belief in the magical or paranormal. Something alternate that isn't quite real or logical is causing trouble, mixing up the "usual" we've come to know and expect. Some elements of the story may be possible, but as a whole these films are simply so much less believable because they constantly remind you, in some way, that they can only exist in an alternate reality - the movie theater.

But Funny Games. It's thought of everything. Our main characters are a family of three plus family pet - and, though the only totally likable character is the little boy, the cozy family unit still gives us a sense of stability to be broken. The film drops the family in an "ordinary" rich neighborhood (aka The Hamptons), where luxury, comfort, and security should be high. And what happens when you pay the steep price for a getaway so you have a place to go when you don't want to connect with the world? Two men, slickly groomed and dressed in eerie white, force themselves into your home, drown your cell phones, torture your family, have a laugh, and over the course of 24 hours painfully pick off one loved one after the other. For fun. (And then the tall one joins the cast of Boardwalk Empire.)

I recently thought of Funny Games again when I went to the theater to see Martha Marcy May Marlene. There on the screen is the same luxurious isolation, the same dread of something/someone being after you, the same fear of evil invading your comfortable home and trapping you there in a sort of hell - with the complex addition of pondering whether your hell and your home are one in the same. (Or if any of it happened at all - but that's a discussion for another day.) But more strikingly, I thought of the film again after following the trial of a New England pair who stalked a family of four, invaded their home, and ended up torching the place with a mother and two daughters inside. The courts have just convicted the second man of committing the crime (they've got him on 17 counts, including six capital felonies), but they're waiting to sentence him. So the "story" of Funny Games can happen and, recently, has happened. It's existing horror. And what defense do we have against it?

But really, a movie that thrills you, makes your heart pound and your palms sweat, runs through your head long after it's over, haunts you in the safest of places...isn't that the best scary movie of all? Because I saw this film ONCE two years ago and I still wake up at 3am sometimes thinking about it, I figure it's definitely one worth talking about.

Happy Halloween.

Production Journal #3

Pre Production

Conceptually, pre-production is probably the least glamorous portion of the filmmaking process.  In reality, there is in fact, no glamorous portion to the filmmaking process, particularly at the college or independent level.  But I can understand the allure of the bustling film set, or even the romantic notion of crafting a great screenplay on a typewriter in the early hours of the morning.  No one romanticizes about breaking down that screenplay into structural components and turning it into a shooting script.  

This is something you must do if you have any hopes of running a smooth set.  You need to walk onto set, knowing what you want.  You also need to be able to throw everything you were thinking about away, but that’s a whole other subject.  I start by taking each scene, and breaking it down into shots, the way I see the film being made in my head.  Camera angles, lenses, movements, things of that nature all come into play.  While making my shooting script, I’m also making a storyboard of sorts.  A storyboard is basically a pictorial version of the shooting script; it looks a lot like a comic book.  Unfortunately, I can’t draw.  It illustrate, here’s me with a self-portrait. 

So, instead of drawing my scenes, I create video storyboards.  I take my camcorder, go to my sets, and walk through the scenes shot by shot.  This is a very odd ritual to watch, my roommate was lucky enough to get to watch me attempt to have a conversation between three people in my kitchen all by myself.  Video storyboarding is helpful for two reasons. First, you get see what the shots could potentially look like, just like you would in a storyboard.  Second, you get to feel out the space you will be filming in.  Obviously you won’t always be able to set foot on your set before filming, but you can find substitute spaces that help you get ideas.  I am shooting in my apartment, so I didn’t have to travel far. 

All of this is theoretically supposed to get your ready for your first day of filming.  And it does.  But that won’t stop you from feeling totally unprepared.  Someone once told me “the realities of filming become really real really quickly”.  While I cannot actually successfully speak this sentence aloud, I agree with its sentiments completely.  The realities of film hit you immediately, the first being: you need equipment. 

Today, you can shoot movies on pretty much anything.  Chan-wook Park, the director of Old Boy, shot an entire short film called Night Fishing on an iPhone.  The story is almost always more important than what you film it on.  That being said, if you can make your film look nice, no one is going to complain that you didn’t film your movie with something you found in the dumpster behind a 7-Eleven.  I’m filming my movie with the Canon 7D and 1D Mark IV.  The 7D is pictured below, and the Mark IV looks very similar.  These are DSLR cameras, capable of shooting 1080p at 24 frames per second.  They may be small, and while they certainly have their disadvantages, they deliver a great image.  They are also small enough to give you the creative freedom to put the camera pretty much anywhere, and are less intimidating to actors. 

So, this Friday, I picked up my equipment for my shoot over the weekend.  Because I felt like being an idiot, I forgot to notify any of my crew to help me move any of the equipment back to my apartment.  Thankfully, the folks at the Hopkins Digital Media Center are awesome a couple of people clocking out helped me carry everything back.  When I got home, I took every single piece of equipment out and made sure it worked correctly.  There is nothing more frustrating on set than having equipment not work properly, and taking an hour or two to double check everything can save you so much grief.  

So now I’ve got my shooting script and my video storyboards as guidelines, and I’ve got all my equipment ready for my first day of shooting.  We’ll talk about how that goes next time. 

Cheers,

John

Photo Credits

1. Photo from personal collection of sad, self-taken photographs

2. Photo from Scott.Symonds (flickr)

Hang Up Your Guns and Drive All Night: Finding Unlikely Connections Between "Drive" and "Shane"

After a solid month of making due with TV movies and Netflix, I felt compelled to treat myself to the true movie theater experience. I'm certainly glad that I decided to go when I did, otherwise I would have missed out on seeing Drive, an unexpectedly neat film (not surprisingly directed by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn). Drive definitely has a European feel to it, characterized largely by its emphasis of atmosphere over complex dialogue and plot, as well as featuring an infectious soundtrack comprised of hypnotic techno beats. In addition to the contribution of a strong European influence, the dark and urban nature of the permeating atmosphere combined with a disenchanted and disenfranchised loner for a main character, lead some reviewers to liken Drive to Scorcese's Taxi Driver.

While I am aware of the similarities between these two films, I actually see more fundamental and ultimately more interesting links connecting Drive to George Stevens' Shane. This connection may initially seem odd and a little off, considering that one is a 1950's Western, while the other is a current-day heist flick. Even so, I found myself surprised at how the two films almost mirror each other in the form of a few key elements.

One key element is the particular plot structure that ties together Drive and Shane across a daunting sixty-year time span. Both films present a basic storyline built around the involvement of a mysterious loner in the affairs of a family besieged by some sort of trouble. More specifically, this storyline is fleshed out in Shane to include a wandering gunman (the title character) coming to stay with a family of peaceful farmers that is in the middle of a bitter territorial dispute with a raucous group of cattle ranchers. Drive adapts this same premise in its depiction of The Driver, a movie stuntman by day, getaway driver by night, who finds himself drawn into the legal problems of the family living next door to him. This simple storyline propels the expositional and building action in these films and culminates in a violent climax that leads to an open-ended, interpretive finale; both Shane and The Driver must engage in a final showdown with the bad guys in defense of the dependent family before they ride/drive away in a wounded condition, presumably never to return again.

As previously mentioned, the fate of Shane and The Driver once they leave their respective dependents behind is left unexplained in keeping with the already ambiguous characterization of both men. Of course, in order for the storyline adapted by both Drive and Shane to work to its best advantage, a certain type of lead character is required. This required character is expected to not only possess distinguishing personality traits, but also embody larger themes that give the film its extra shades of depth beyond a bare-bones plot.

Shane and The Driver can once again be matched together in that both leading men fit the above qualifications down to the letter. These men are kept shrouded in mystery from their first appearance on screen to their last. Nothing is ever revealed to their fellow characters or to the audience regarding a pre-movie background; each man is devoid of a history as he appears before the viewers in his present state. Instead, these men are meant to be defined solely by their occupations: Shane is a gunfighter and The Driver is a driver for hire (as further emphasized by his identification being his occupation in place of an actual name). These two men are highly specialized in their respective areas of work, both of whom exist on the fringe of acceptable society. It is only after they attempt to engage in normal human relationships that their characters are allowed to grow.

This growth in the originally one-dimensional characters of Shane and The Driver coincide with the development of two important themes: the price of protection and inescapable isolation. Character transformation is especially related to a growing need felt by these solitary men to protect the people who have brought warmth and human companionship into their lives. For example, Shane discovers a desire within himself to discard his former life as a rootless gunman and live peacefully with the farmers that he has grown close to, particularly to a mother and her son. However, the need for his protection as a gunfighter against the hired guns of the cattle ranchers quickly outweighs his own personal desire. Similarly, The Driver must become the bigger man and help the criminal husband of the young mother and son he has grown to care for shake off his ties to ruthless mafia bosses. The Driver then becomes further embroiled in underground activity (despite his good intentions towards the family he wishes to protect), which creates a heartbreakingly irrevocable separation between him and the innocent people he loves. In both situations, the lonely lives of these two men are enriched by compassionate contact with others only to be forced to later revert back to their former isolation in the wake of their helpful efforts.

The Role of Character Perspective and Conceptual Continuity In Rob Marshall's Chicago and Nine

 I always wondered why some people find it so hard to enjoy musicals either on the stage or on the screen. Such people would have the film director extract the meaning and plot from a musical in order to turn it into a film devoid of dance and song. I have encountered several individuals whose aversion to musical interludes derives from an inability to reconcile singing and dancing with their fixed views of cinematic reality. I’m more interested in how directors choose to intertwine the show tunes with the narratives. I say that getting hung up on whether the characters in musicals realize they're divulging plot in song is as ridiculous as asking if characters in a film notice that there's a guy following them around with a movie camera. There are film directors who endeavor to accommodate those that would ask such nonsensical questions, using creative concepts to justify sudden outbursts of song. In both of his musical films: Chicago, a film about a wannabe vaudeville star, and Nine a movie about a filmmaker in desperate need of inspiration, Rob Marshall  portrays the musical interludes as figments of the protagonists’ imaginations in order to make sense of the narrative . Despite having similar concepts, song and story are entwined more successfully in Chicago than in Nine. Whereas musical numbers are seamlessly incorporated into the storyline of Chicago, the musical performances in Nine seem somewhat detached from the narrative.

The opening shot of Chicago, a slow zoom into an extreme close up of Roxie Hart’s eyes makes it clear that the her whimsical perspective drives the plot. With the first scene taking place in a jazz club, Roxie wistfully watches Velma Kelly’s sultry stage performance in her medium close up. As the camera cuts back and forth between Roxie’s longing looks and Velma Kelly’s vaudeville act, the camera’s close proximity to Roxie’s face and her transfixed gaze signify Roxie’s single-minded obsession with the glamor of vaudevillian fame. A hard cut from Velma’s captivating performance to the familiar extreme close up of Roxie’s unblinking eyes proceeds the shot in which Roxie begins to sing “All That Jazz,” literally taking Velma Kelly’s place on stage. This brief demonstration of Roxie’s fantasy reveals Roxie’s desire to be on the stage and sets a precedent for scenes that interweave song and plot throughout the film.  

As Guido contemplates how to begin his film, the film studio transforms into a projection of his creative mind. An extreme long shot displays Guido and his cameras facing the silhouette of a set elaborately decorated with stone arches. Symbolizing a moment of inspiration, one of Guido’s favorite actresses (Claudia) appears to him and gives him a kiss, after which the set is no longer dark but gradually filling with color. A warm yellow glow highlights and gives definition to the arches before women adorned in sparkling, seductive costume appear like set pieces in the stage of Guido’s imagination. The majestic traveling shots of the set lit spectacularly with a mesmerizing blue light and the presence of these women juxtaposed with a close up of Guido and his camera signify the evolution of Guido’s creativity. While the image of the camera clearly draws the connection between Guido’s musical fantasies and his filmmaking aspirations, transitions between song and action in later scenes are not as invisible as those in Chicago.

            The musical performances in Chicago do not intruded on the dialogue but tend to blend the concept of the stage with the reality of the narrative.  The scene that best demonstrates the perfect coexistence of musical performance and plot is the one in which Velma desperately pleads with Roxie to perform on stage with her if they both become acquitted. When Velma Kelly begins her appeal to an indifferent Roxie, a light shines in through the window, resembling a spot light as it follows Velma. The appearance of the “spotlight” in such a non-theatrical space (the prison recreation room) indicates that Roxie believes her current surroundings are a stage and that Velma’s attempts to befriend her are one big act. After Velma notices Roxie’s obvious disinterest, all signs of the recreational room fade into darkness; the spotlight hones in on Velma’s face while her dialogue gradually develops into song. The disembodied voice of the figurative Master of Ceremonies gives a title to Velma’s “Act of Desperation” before her prison garb is exchanged for a more vaudevillian costume and the recreation room is filled with theatrical neon lights. Still sitting neutrally at a table in the center of the room, Roxie becomes audience to Velma’s theatrics. Though Velma and the gloomy rec room have transformed, recognizable elements of the prison remain (like the balcony leading to the inmates’ cells). These familiar elements and Roxie’s position at the table remind the viewer that she and Velma have not left the prison, and that the musical performance is Roxie’s own theatrical interpretation of reality.

            Unlike those in Chicago some of the musical performances in Nine appear disjointed from the narrative despite their obvious relation to the plot. Even though “Be Italian” is a powerful, high-energy song that gives insight into Guido’s personality and issues with women, its placement in the scene seems unnatural. Before the number begins Guido recalls when he and a small group of little boys pay the local prostitute, Saraghina to give them a private show on the beach near her hut. The music begins as Saraghina accepts the money, but she neither sings nor speaks at any point and time in Guido’s physical memory; the only time Saraghina speaks is on Guido’s mental “stage.” Whereas Velma Kelly’s words to Roxie led into a song, the lack of dialogue from Saraghina fails to bridge the gap beween the spectacular vocal performance and Guido’s childhood recollection. A shot of Saraghina verbalizing her advice in the memory before the start of the song could have solidified the connection between the two spaces. This would not be necessary if the scene were to merge the location of the main action with Guido’s fictional world instead of maintaining two distinctly separate spaces: the film set and the beach. The contrast between the theatrical space and the realistic memory becomes even more apparent with the noticeable desaturation of Guido’s memory; the vibrant red costumes and dazzling lights seem to clash with the grayscale flashback. The viewer ultimately feels as if the “Be Italian” musical number (like other songs in Nine) is merely inserted but not interwoven with the entire scene. Such scenes in Nine, which lack the seamless combination of action and song, detract from the beauty of the film while also creating an emotional distance between the audience and the characters successfully avoided in Chicago.

 

Production Journal #2

Casting and Writing

Casting a student film is remarkably different from casting a professional one.  Working with a budget of whatever is in your pocket, you rarely, if ever, have the money to pay actors.  My pockets are on the small side and so paying actors is not an option.  Holding an open casting call for an unpaid student film is daunting and often unfruitful, so I decided to do what many young filmmakers do: I cast my friends.  

Casting your friends has pros and cons.  It changes the filmmaking dynamic, but usually not in a bad way since you have an established level of trust to work with.  However, for this film I cannot speculate on this, as I obviously have yet to shoot anything.  What I can speak on is its effect on writing.

I approach writing scripts for my own projects differently than I do scripts that I write when I know that I will not be imminently making the film.  And that’s probably not great from a writing perspective, but it’s practical from a filmmaking perspective.  When writing screenplays on spec, I have free reign to write about whatever I want, with as many locations, characters, or special effects as I want.  When I write for projects that I will be making, I have to take into account my budget (or lack there of), what actors I have access to, what locations I can shoot in.  All these things put limitations on the writing.

For example, one feature-length script I wrote with dreams of selling one day is a post-apocalyptic western.  In that script, characters ride on horseback through open plains, gunslingers wield a wide array of firearms, and I burn down not one, but two houses.  I do not have access to any horses or guns, and I can’t think of even one person who would let me burn their house down.  So when I write, I work with what I’ve got.

Which brings us back to casting.  I wrote the outline for the film and knew that I needed four actors: three men and a woman.  Instead of writing a final draft of the screenplay and then finding actors, I first sent emails out to people who I wanted for the parts.  Once I had my actors confirmed, I went to work on a first draft. This allowed me to write the script with them in mind.

I’ve done stage work with one of my actors, another I have seen act several times, and another is my roommate; I’ve seen him lie before which is basically acting.  Having an idea of their acting styles, I was able to shape dialog and mannerisms in ways that accentuates their strengths.  The female part was harder to cast.  The part requires little acting, as she is dead when the film begins, but I needed an actress who could put a lot of trust in one of my actors.  I ended up casting that actor’s girlfriend.  So it all worked out.  

Under these circumstances, writing the script was not difficult.  Especially using Final Draft.  Pardon the shameless plug, but for screenwriters it is truly an invaluable tool.  So I sent the script to my actors and now I’ve got a couple days to get my act together before I meet with all of them and we start to break things down and set shooting dates.  

My next big task will be to turn the screenplay into a shooting script.  This is difficult and tedious, but saves lots of time on set.  The big difference between a screenplay and a shooting script is that in a screenplay, the camera is never mentioned, nor anything else outside the world of the film.  A shooting script breaks down scenes into shots and adds technical components, like camera angles.  I will discuss my shooting script and other preproduction nonsense next time.  So look forward to that.  

Cheers, 

John 

Buster Keaton’s Southern Idealism Rewriting a Lost Childhood

 

Buster Keaton is in no sense of Southern gentleman.  He spent most of his early life between the Midwest and the East Coast on Vaudeville tours and later settled in New York, and finally in Los Angeles (1). However, in his two of his most famous films The General and Steamboat Bill Jr. Buster not only treats southern culture with reverence, but also paints his heroic protagonist as Southern gentlemen. In The General, Buster goes to great lengths to stay extremely accurate to costuming, sets, and historical facts surrounding one victorious feat for a Southern train operator during the Civil War. Steamboat Bill Jr. has a northern protagonist returning to his southern roots as to pilot a steamboat in order to impress his father. In both cases, a misfit engineer in the Deep South has to complete a seemingly impossible task in order to impress a father figure and win the girl in the end.

Perhaps Buster was motivated by the demand for southern romances or was paying his respects to a pioneer of American film with an appreciation for southern landscapes and one of his personal heroes D.W. Griffith. Although one could tie Buster’s infatuation with the South to less of an aesthetic and more of a reflection of his deep seeded issues with his father.  As violent as Buster’s father was on the stage where he used Buster as a prop, he was much more of a destructive force at home with his crippling alcoholism. Buster could never live up to his father’s standards, even after he became wildly successful in film and continued to support both parents. Buster’s father would trivialize the film industry despite his son’s talent and popularity, as well as the revenue that allowed him to retire early (1). One would think that Buster would idealize the north and technological improvements, like the movie camera that rescued him from the vaudeville stage and brought him to his stable adult life. Instead, Buster is preoccupied with the Deep South, and a pattern of reliving and rewriting his past through characters in his films.  Perhaps with his herculean feats and having the losing force triumph bring him satisfaction his real life cannot provide. 

In The General, Buster plays a train engineer named Johnnie Gray in a small southern town during the Civil War. In order to impress his sweetheart and win the approval of her father, Johnnie decides he will enlist in the military along side her brother. Even though Johnnie fights his way to be first in line, he is deemed ineligible because as a train engineer he is more valuable to the South. However, Johnnie is not told why he is rejected so he begins to compare himself to the other men in line. He sees tall, short (none shorter then him however), old and young men all receive their draft cards. This scene is one of many self-deprecating ones that draw attention to his inadequacies in height and anxiety towards his own masculinity. After trying to fool the man behind the counter with everything from pulling his hat down over his eyes, pretending to be someone else, and by attempting to steal someone else’s card, he is quite literally kicked out of the office. Deemed a coward by his girlfriend and her father, he returns to his engine in shame. Later on, northern spies hijack his train and kidnap his girlfriend who has been somehow left in the train boxcar that they are hijacking.  At first he chases them on foot and on bike.  The handcar scene is the most revealing of the emphasis of his puny size. His small stature will not allow him to move the handcar by strength alone until he propels his body in the air to use all his weight to bring down one side of the pump.  And to add insult to injury once he gets the car moving it goes backwards.  When Johnnie finally gets to another train he can use in the chase, the engine disconnects from the cars carrying the reinforcements to help rescue his girl. He is now alone and against the entire Southern army.  After finding cannon along the way, he finally catches up with the captors. He loads the cannon attached to the back of the engine and fires it at the hijackers in the train in front of him; only to see the cannon ball fly a few feet in the air and land on the floor of his engine. Despite the failure (and not so subtle jab at his masculinity) he loads the cannon again with more gunpowder but accidentally aims it at himself. Realizing his mistake and in complete and utter terror, Johnnie disconnects the cannon, tosses a plank of wood at it. He turns and runs to hide on the front of the train. While rounding a corner, the cannon fires and miraculously hits just behind the enemy train.

After crossing northern lines, he escapes detection and ends up under the table where the entire was strategy is laid out. He rescues his girl. Somehow he manages to steal another engine after purposely disconnecting the car carrying the enemy soldiers.  Similar difficulties that faced him in his pursuit reappear to create another comedic chase. Johnnie rushes back and successfully warns the confederates of the attack. He ends up caught in the battle. He accidentally fires the shot that sends the northern troops into a retreat. He is promoted to lieutenant for winning the battle and causing a captured northern general to surrender. He discovers that the man he knocked out initially stealing the train is a general who he then escorts to surrender. In the end, he gets the girl, wins his soon to be father-in-law’s respect, and more importantly demonstrates his value to the cause despite his statue.

 Steamboat Bill Jr. places more weight on the father’s perspective and his negative characteristics rather than emphasizing Buster’s shortcomings. Steamboat Bill Jr. depicts Keaton as a similar character as his character in The General.  Willie Canfield (Buster) is an outcast in his southern hometown who tries to please his father, a steamboat pilot. His father is a strong, violent brute with a temper. The film begins with Bill learning of Willie’s return. Bill pictures his son as this bigger, stronger, picture of himself. Willie is below average height and weight. Although Buster introduces this film with a critic of his physical flaws, his focus is to highlight the father’s character flaws. At the train station, Bill mistakes a few tall, strong, men for his son. Conversely, Willie mistakes sophisticated intellectual types to be his father which may be a jab at his own father. When Bill learns that Willie is his son, he is repulsed and deeply disappointed. At this poignant moment, the camera pans to Willie jumping around with his ukulele trying to calm a crying baby. This whimsical display distracts the viewer from the tragic parallels between the father’s perception of son and his Buster’s relationship with his father. When Steamboat Bill tries to take Willie back to the boat, Willie tries to go back to Boston on a bus. Bill pushes the bus driver who tries to help Willie. He drags him to his car. In the car, Bill socks Willie most likely for trying to leave. Bill is rough with Willie throughout the rest of the film, sadly similar to Buster’s experience own father who tended to knock him around both on the stage and off (1). Bill also criticizes Willie’s style, forcing him to shave off his mustache and update his dress. In the gags, the barber shaves him in an instant without harm, but scares Willie in the process. At the clothing shop, Willie tries a variety of ill-fitting hats from Chaplin’s bowler to Buster’s signature porkpie hat, each time ending with his father tearing them off and throwing them in a fit of rage until they settle on a non-descript brimmed hat (which is swept away immediately after they leave the store). Again, Buster uses a silly gag to mask the much deeper issues between him and his father.  Buster’s father does not approve of his decision to go into film just as Bill chastises Willie’s choices. Bill continues to physically abuse Willie, as well as verbally berate him for being unable to pilot the steamboat well. In the end and after a freak storm floods the town, Willie single handedly saves his father, his girlfriend, and others using the steamboat. He finally wins his fathers approval.

Although Buster Keaton has been quoted saying he made movies just to make others laugh (2), it seems they serve a much more personal purpose. Although Buster’s story was one of a success, it was in no way a fairy tale. As depicted in his films, The General and Steamboat Bill Jr., Buster was only able to achieve a sense of approval from a father figure on the silver screen. It makes one wonder if Buster’s emotive yet seemingly stoical expressions would be as profound if he were not such a troubled man. 

 

 

Bibliography:

1. Keaton, Buster, and Charles Samuels. "Ch. 1." My Wonderful World of Slapstick. New York, NY: Da Capo, 1982. Print.
2. Kline, Jim. "Funny Sublime: The Uncanny Genius of Buster Keaton:." The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal 16.2 (1997): 45-57. Print.
3. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons: United Artists Screen Shot

From a Whisper to a Scream: On the Artaudian Cruelty of LA PIANISTE

Emerging from her “cage” at the Vienna Conservatory, Erika Kohut now enters a prison of a different make: the apartment she owns with her mother. They have a confrontation over what forty-something Erika has done earlier in the night – namely shopping for frivolous clothing – and hair-pulling and ugly histrionics ensue before mother and daughter reconcile to take their nightly place in the bed they share. In this title sequence, director Michael Haneke presents the microcosm of their relationship, bipolar and incestuous in all but deed. Adapted from the novel by Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek, La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) carries the fragrance of an old novel, but the film's motifs of ritualized sexual violence and voyeurism come across as a contrarian gesture. Marrying the contemporary and classic in an incisive study of brutalized passions, Haneke explores man's urge to direct his own suffering.

Isabelle Huppert inhabits the eponymous part of Erika, a woman whose personal and professional lives are thoroughly dedicated to control and the pursuit of perfection. Huppert has a history of playing self-contained women and here she is in fine form as a Viennese specimen of severity whose transgressive desires seethe underneath a mask of icy poise. Operating on the principles of classical tragedy, Haneke paints two distinct and opposing artistic tendencies within her, worrying the tension between the chic and the abject.^[1]

The film chronicles her suffering, which begins with small acts of rebellion in the form of sexual compulsions. Erika's identity is fractured by disparate roles; At home, she simultaneously plays the infantilized daughter and the surrogate husband for her mother. Outside of her conservatory and home, she is a lurker, a voyeur with latent violence directed towards others and herself. Indeed, Erika is something rarely seen in cinema - a beautiful female pervert. This uncomfortable tension is acknowledged even within the film, at a sex shop on one of Erika's furtive excursions where her very presence disturbs and shames the male customers and breaks them out of the fantasy. Erika is seemingly repulsed by her femaleness, cutting her sex as a hobby. Thankfully Haneke doesn't predicate our empathy on the provision of backstory. One simply reacts to the shocking but plaintive truths of what she's doing and to the questions of why or why not. The character cannot be so easily consumed by the viewer, who must activate his or her fantasy in the detangling of her motivations. It is not clear, for example, whether Erika, the middle aged piano teacher, has fallen below expectations of fame and fortune because she lacks the talent or because she has purposely thwarted her ambitions out of spite for her mother. One does get the sense her artistic drive has curdled when she browbeats her admiring students. Her self-loathing in this respect perhaps manifests most clearly in a subplot where she sabotages the potential career of a female student with an equally domineering mother.

Haneke, in his infinite perversity, sets up the love triangle between Erika, her mother, and the rakish student, Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel). While Walter's eagerness provokes Erika, Freudian principles of transference help explain why Erika cannot feel or respond to the latter's conventional expressions of love.^[2] He even changes a public performance of a Schönberg piece to one of Schubert's just to impress her (and that is quite a difference – jumping from the Modern discordance to Romanticism).^[3] Walter pursues her ardently, initiating a game of seduction meanwhile failing to (or refusing to) recognize her bizarre symptoms of illness. For an instant he is a paragon of mythic muscularity, the white knight to liberate the repressed heroine but, alas, the film is decidedly anti-love.

For Erika has an uncompromising idea of love, in which art is to be confused with real life. Music is the predominant metaphor for love in the film, and the recurring scenes in which Erika gives rigorously precise note-by-note analysis of a piece of music serve as reminders of the fact. Walter, while attractive to her, is not the perfect lover because he does not play music they way she expects, which is to say with complete dedication to the art. Walter uses music to seduce Erika, who does not want to be seduced and possessed in the same way she is possessed by her mother. Her rigid rules for sexuality in turn convey the Romantic paradox of applying Apollonian order to Dionysian emotions. “Feelings won't defeat my intelligence,” Erika states to Walter after an unconsummated sexual encounter. Later she gives Walter explicit “instructions” by letter expressing her desires to be beaten and gagged. Alternatively infuriated and disgusted, Walter is curious enough to keep playing. Subtextually, Erika controls Walter's pleasure in the same way the director controls the emotions of the viewer. Haneke is a formalist and he shoots meticulously, so his presence is felt less in the stationary camerawork and more in the actions of the characters. Haneke identifies with Erika and projects those active, masculine characteristics onto her, but Haneke does not turn her into feminist statement. Erika is not so much aware of her behavior as she is reacting defensively to protect her selfhood.

When Erika's wishes are granted in the traumatic climax, the scene is devoid of sexual gratification. Walter's transformation from the precocious admirer to the abusive savage is shocking. “Not as you imagined?” Walter mercilessly posits, and with this statement Haneke seemingly implicates the viewer seeking vicarious thrills from a movie about sadomasochism.

In the end, life goes on and the contemptuous young man abandons the broken older woman as the viewer similarly walks away from the film. With Huppert's indelible parting look of agony and her final tragic gesture, Haneke draws back the curtain over his theatre of cruelty.

---

[1] Refer to the Apollonian-Dionysian axis. " Fredrich Nietsche, Raymond Guess, Nietsche: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge: University Press, 1999.

[2] Freud describes transference as "...re-experiencing emotional relations which had their origin in…earliest object-attachments during the repressed period of…childhood." Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989.

[3] For curious minds, the two pieces in question are Schönberg's Opus 33b and Schubert's Scherzo from the Sonata in A Major.

Image courtesy of the author.

Scribbled in Blood: The Ghoulish ABC's of David Lynch's Short Film THE ALPHABET

I mentioned the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in my previous post (on the topic of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) and it seemed to go over well -- at least in the eyes of an approving commenter named Paul -- and so I've decided to do it again, this time in the service of David Lynch's 1968 experimental short "The Alphabet." In the epigraph to his philosophical fantasy "The Library of Babel" (go ahead, click the link, read it, you'll thank me), Borges cites the 17th-century Englishman Robert Burton:

"By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters..."

--- The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sect. II, mem. IV

In "The Alphabet" -- created when Lynch was but a 22-year-old art student with a feverish imagination, not yet the grey-bouffanted eccentric of popular lore -- we witness the nightmarish exaltation of not just 23, but indeed all 26 letters of the English alphabet. But despite that arithmetic discrepancy, the game is roughly the same: Lynch takes a set of arbitrary, innocent symbols, and, through artful variation, sharpens them and loads them with miasmatic ill-will. The half-animated, half-live-action short (viewable on the web) superficially resembles an elementary-school instructional video of sorts -- sing-song voices chant the letters of the alphabet, which float onto the screen in various witty animations -- but it doesn't take long for those letters to transcend their communicative function and become, instead, the twisted talismans of some malicious intent. Like the falling droplets in an ancient Chinese water torture, the letters ignite a latent madness buried beneath the clean animated surface of the film's beginning. Abstract shapes embark on odd pilgrimages, fuse with other shapes, bristle with sickly restlessness, converse with a bare-breasted corpse-woman, and so, unmoored and queasy, we tumble into a world of live-action red-pierced monochrome. The film ends with a grotesque girl-creature writhing in bed, incanting the letters of the alphabet as if they were the pet names of the Devil himself, before finally vomiting forth a spattering of blood: the elements of speech transubstantiated into the particles of disease...

This typographical nightmare also marks the beginning of David Lynch's career-spanning obsession with sound design: bird-like yawps unsettlingly evoke both the vulnerability of birth and the anguish of death, while desolate wind (or machinery?) sounds imbue the flat animations with all the vastness of an uninhabited dystopia. But even as "The Alphabet" sees Lynch experimenting for the first time with sonic atmospherics (experiments which he continues to perform to this day), with dis-continuity editing, and with other temporally-encoded aspects of film language, the film also functions as a last hurrah of sorts for David Lynch the painter/collage artist. Educated as a visual artist of the pigment-on-canvas variety, Lynch was famously (or not-so-famously, I don't know, I'm a bit of a cultist) inspired to take up film when he saw one of his paintings flutter in the wind -- coming to cinematic life, as it were. This origin story -- one for the ages, I think -- is manifest in his very first film ("Six Men Getting Sick"), which come across, essentially, as an Abstract Expressionist sketch graced with the breath of life. "The Alphabet" retains much of this animated-collage aesthetic, but also -- significantly -- contains one of Lynch's first forays into live action, with all that that implies (mise en scène, editing, actors, cinematography, makeup...) As such, "The Alphabet" can be fruitfully read as a document of a young man in a state of aesthetic (and professional) transition, veering towards cinema, but refusing to accept its strictures point-blank, choosing instead to reshape the medium into something of his own making -- something morbid, something inscrutable, something darkly comic, in short, something Lynchian. 

Keep in mind, though, that this is neither the mid-career Lynch of macabre '50s-infused Americana (vide Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) nor the later Lynch of recursive Hollywood melodrama (Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire), but rather the early, flagrantly grotesque art-horror of Eraserhead -- all oozing secretions and bodily perversions and aimless torment and pancake makeup. As a disembodied, bloody-gummed, eyeless face aptly intones near the end of "The Alphabet": "Please remember that you are dealing with the human form." Indeed, this is one of Lynch's main preoccupations, addressed obliquely but relentlessly not just here but throughout his whole oeuvre. He probes the fragility of the human mind and body, its frail architecture, its mutations, its laughable deformities, its perpetual susceptibility to infection by foreign shapes, objects and dreams. Just as Betty/Diane is seduced, corrupted and ultimately driven to bodily madness by the Hollywood image-factory of Mulholland Drive, so too is the nameless bedridden girl in "The Alphabet" tormented to the point of blood-spewing hysteria by abstract letters that colonize her mental space like so many microbes. It is, after all, no accident that gruesome head wounds feature as a recurring trope in almost all of Lynch's films...!

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Photo courtesy of jvoves's Flickr. Cropped and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

Production Journal #1

Who the hell are you and what the hell are you doing?

These are two questions I recommend asking yourself daily.  They are much harder to answer than you’d think.  I will attempt to answer these questions the best I can, at least insofar as they pertain to filmmaking.  So here it goes. 

Who the hell am I?

I’m not going to bore you with a biography; of no use to anyone.  But I do think it’s good to find out where I’m coming from, as opposed to just trusting that I know what I’m talking about because I convinced someone to let me write for this website.  I’m going to let you in on a secret: I very rarely know what I’m talking about.  But, any 20 year-old who claims to know what he’s talking about is a liar.  So at the very least you know I’m not that.

I’m a third year film student at Johns Hopkins University.  I spent my first year here discovering that I wasn’t going to make a student film that would change the world.  Even if I believed a student film could change the world, I didn’t want to make it.  I spent the first half of my second year asking myself what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be.  I spent the second half of that year deciding that was a stupid question.

I made my first short film last year.  It was a three-minute ghost story, but in reality, it really was just an excuse to drown someone in a tub on film.  And since I am an overachiever, in the span of three minutes I drowned not one but two people.  Was the film great? No.  Was it bad?  No.  Was it a lot of fun to film?  You bet it was.

It was so much fun, in fact, that I sought out an internship as a cinematographer’s assistant.  So for the next three months, getting up at 5 a.m. for ten to sixteen hour shoots became a way of life.  The food was bad, the hours were long, the pay was nonexistent, but the experience was invaluable.

What the hell am I doing?

I have no idea.  I’ve got it in my mind that I’m going to make a movie this semester, but right now that’s about it that is set in stone.  At the moment, I’m at the glorious stage in the process called brainstorming. 

Now, everyone’s process for brainstorming is different.  Mine involves taking about six-dozen half-baked ideas, throwing them against the wall and seeing which ones stick.  Then I take those ideas, throw them in the oven and let them cook a little while longer.  After that comes the taste testing.  This is when you remind yourself how terrible a cook you are.  Out of all the ideas you’ve sampled, there is going to be one that doesn’t make you want to vomit.  That’s the one.

The rest of these journals will deal directly with the writing, planning, shooting, and editing of this short film.  It will be an adventure.  Until next time, enjoy this picture of a cat.

Cheers,

John

Cops and Robbers: Playing the Game on the Big Screen

As a longtime fan of gangster movies, I find it odd that I just saw White Heat (1949, dir. Raoul Walsh) barely a week ago for the first time. Admittedly, I was never in any rush to see this film because I felt that I already had a solid handle on the genre, particularly in terms of its 30's/40's form. After all, if you've seen one James Cagney gangster film, then you've seen 'em all. However, I can honestly say that I was wrong about this one. I profess that I was cleansed of any preconceived notions I had retained from previous experience as White Heat delivered a ripe plot built around a deceivingly simple premise: "coppers" versus robbers.

Instead of being the typical gangster picture that focuses on the rise and fall of a charismatic gangster, White Heat offers the viewer the opportunity to witness an intelligent cat and mouse game that shows an even distribution of strategic game plays between the police force and the gangsters. In fact, through its characters and carefully laid plot devices, White Heat seems to resemble a more recent gangster movie, Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006) -- my apologies to those who prefer the original 2002 version from Hong Kong, Infernal Affairs -- rather than its own fun yet predictable contemporaries. Both White Heat and The Departed appear to be unique in that they forego the strict chronicling of one gangster's trajectory in favor of featuring the intricacies of the struggle between both sides of the law.

A key tool that aids the otherwise under-represented cops in this fight is the important means by which they gather vital information on Cagney's Cody Jarrett and his gang. In this case, the "means" comes in the form of an undercover agent named Hank Fallon, played by Edmond O'Brien. Going deep undercover as convicted criminal Vic Pardo, Fallon is tasked with becoming close friends with the mentally unstable Cody Jarrett in order to discover how Jarrett gets his stolen cash laundered. Getting close to Jarrett requires Fallon/Pardo to not only earn his trust, but to keep it as well. While trust is initially gained through the single act of Fallon/Pardo thwarting a hit on Jarrett's life in the prison workroom, the maintenance of that trust involves greater commitment. Fallon's commitment undergoes particularly hard testing as he later goes on the run with Jarrett and becomes a witness/accessory to many of Jarrett's crimes, up to and including murder.

Just as Fallon is powerless to prevent himself from being thrust into incriminating situations while working as a mole, Leonardo DiCaprio's undercover policeman in The Departed, Billy Costigan, faces a nearly identical ordeal (for the sake of a direct comparison, Matt Damon's gangster mole in the police force will be excluded from this discussion). Both Fallon and Costigan find it necessary to fully immerse themselves in the shady business of the head gangsters they eventually hope to take down, showing that they are not above using deception and morally questionable behavior to achieve their desired ends. The unorthodox methods exhibited by these undercover cops creates close competition on a more equal playing field between the cops and the gangsters; Fallon and Costigan constitute a larger refusal on the part of the cops to be pigeon-holed as one-dimensional representations of law and order. A noteworthy difference between the two moles is how their final fates are decided according to the acceptable dictates of movie story-telling of their respective time periods: Costigan never returns to being a cop and is killed before he can see himself restored to his rightful identity, while Fallon rejoins the police just in time to shoot Jarrett before the movie ends. Despite this wide disparity between the years 1949 and 2006 regarding the moral ambiguity of cops (1949 allows for no question of police morality, while 2006 keeps the issue open-ended and ambiguous), both films display the cops relying heavily on an undercover agent to drive much of the action against the gangsters.

Perhaps even more impressive than the employment of Hank Fallon as a mole is the general use of stealth and deceit in the careful plans executed throughout White Heat by both Cody Jarrett and the police, led by Philip Evans. Schemes are concocted regularly on both sides; some attempts are successful, while others are foiled. Success rates notwithstanding, all of the schemes managed to maintain my interest in the film in the absence of straightforward violence. For me, Cody Jarrett's most impressive moment comes early in the film when he willingly goes to jail for another man's crime with a light sentence, because it gives him an alibi for his own crime that would surely earn him a seat in the gas chamber. Jarrett's clever evasion of the law through his false surrender is one of two intellectual peaks for him, the other high involving a "Trojan Horse" gas truck (an overused yet consistently effective ruse) near the very end of the film.

As for the cops, I found their various techniques to be more entertaining as they are responsible for creating a majority of the tension. One particularly simple tactic involves a tracking system that allows Evans and his cops to tail Cody's mother, Ma Jarrett, as she drives back to Cody's motel room. The police start by splitting up into three cars, A, B and C, that spread out onto different streets while continuing to drive parallel to each other and communicating over the radio. This parallel driving and communication system creates a dragnet that prevents Ma Jarrett from losing the three-pronged tail by turning onto an adjacent street. The entire scene consists of cuts between shots of Ma looking over her shoulder and shots of each of the pursuing police cars. Tension builds as faster cuts show the cops closing in until Ma finally escapes by pulling a reckless maneuver.

After this initial defeat, Evans devises a more sophisticated tracking system that relies on the intersection of oscillating waves coming from modified radios to pinpoint the route and final destination of Cody Jarrett. In another interesting departure from most gangster films, I didn't experience the trip solely from Jarrett's point of view, but rather I also watched the police chart the progress of his "Trojan Horse" based on the wave readings back at headquarters. This time the tension that comes with the fateful movement of the gangster towards his end is felt on both sides as the police once again compete with the gangster in clever design and for recognizable screen time. A similar sting operation scene is rigged in The Departed, which features obviously more advanced camera surveillance and cell phone communication. Even though the gadgets may always be at the mercy of the next upgrade, the game remains the same: the cops chase and the robbers run.

Revenge, Wrong that Appeals to a Sense of Right in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

Through the use of exaggerated violence and blaringly eccentric characters Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds spawns a hypothetical world in which an American guerilla unit called the Basterds mercilessly executes WWII Nazis in retribution for their heinous acts against European Jews. If anyone watches Inglourious Basterds expecting to see a historical account of WWII and the Holocaust then they have missed the point of the film entirely. The purpose of this film is not to educate but instead to bring satisfaction to anyone who has ever been disturbed by the atrocities of the Holocaust—for anyone who would have liked members of the Nazi party to receive a punishment one thousand times more severe than the vile acts committed against the Jewish people. The film’s opening scene incurs the audience’s sympathy and disdain in order to draw the audience into an elaborate tale of revenge, which allows viewers to indulge themselves in a desire for violent retribution outweighing the moral ambiguity of the Basterd’s brutality, the viewers’ instinct to respect humanity, and their tendency to revile human mutilation.

In the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds the brutal murder of Shosanna’s family and Colonel Landa’s despicable attitude toward Jews demonstrate the cruelty of the Nazi regime, creating a basis for the film’s theme of violent retribution. A beautiful panoramic view of Monsieur LaPedite’s small dairy farm begins the scene. The wide open space, copious amount of vibrant green grass, and multitude of grazing dairy cows make this shot a picture of freedom, serenity, and prosperity. Though everything about this picture seems perfectly balanced, the dairy farmer’s dark stone house is out of place in such a bright setting; its gloomy walls and shadowy doorway break the optimistic mood of the image, foretelling the impending doom of its hidden inhabitants.

The arrival of Colonel Landa a.k.a. the “Jew Hunter” also disrupts the serenity of the shot, signifying an end to freedom and tranquility as well as a precursor to death. Col. Landa’s black coat and dark green Nazi uniform make his approaching figure ominous amidst the cheerful landscape. Although the film does not show the German occupation of France in detail, Col. Landa’s unannounced and unwelcome presence symbolizes the invasion and the abolished independence, peace, and opulence of its Jewish citizens. The cut away shot to Col. Landa and LaPedite’s handshake, with Landa’s hand positioned firmly above the farmer’s, displays Landa’s domineering nature and suggests that Landa’s courteousness is an act. The change in location, brought about by Landa’s desire to get into LaPedite’s home, completely destroys the vitality of the scene as the green pastures and light are left outside the dreary abode.  When Col. Landa speaks, his smile and seemingly gracious demeanor cannot fool the audience when he clearly asserts his “pride” in his success as a Jew murderer and agrees with propaganda linking Jews to rats. During Colonel Landa’s elaborate speech about the imprecise cause of Jewish repulsiveness, his hat, adorned with a black band and skull, sits on the table, looming in the background and forewarning his eventual discovery and murder of the Dreyfuses hiding beneath the floorboards.

When the camera view slides down to reveal Shosanna and the rest of her family forced to “abandon dignity” under the floor, the audience is able to sympathize with the Dreyfuses and despise Landa even more for his insensitivity. The shallow depth of field in this medium shot with Shosanna in the foreground brings her helpless form in focus while the rest of her family are nothing but blurs in the background. The tightness of the shot, shallow space, and the close proximity of the family demonstrates how the Dreyfuses are trapped in their situation like animals uncomfortably quartered in a cage. Since viewers cannot prevent the Dreyfus’ demise at the hands of Col. Landa, they are as helpless as Shosanna who silences herself with her hand for fear of discovery. The clear focus on Shosanna makes her the film’s protagonist and also initiates a connection between her and the audience. The distorted view of the remaining Dreyfuses foreshadows their imminent deaths. When Col. Landa brings in his men for a surprise attack, the ominous music builds to a crescendo as bullets from the Nazis’ guns create holes in the floorboards, and a billowing cloud of woodchips obscures the audience’s view of the Dreyfus’ tragic end. While a close up of Shosanna’s terror-stricken face covered in her family’s blood as she hastily escapes the dairy farm is the only concrete evidence of the carnage, the image is a prevalent reminder of the Nazis’ ruthlessness. The sight of Col. Landa’s smug face at the scene’s end incites a need for vengeance. The “murder, intimidation, and terror” exhibited in the opening scene support the Basterd Lt. Aldoe Raine’s subsequent claims of Nazi inhumanity, convincing the audience that the Nazis deserve no mercy and “need to be destroyed.”

Ultimately, Inglorious Basterds speaks to viewer who shares Lt. Aldo Raine’s sentiment—that a Nazi should never be allowed to “take off  [their] uniform,”—but rather remain easily identifiable so that they may neither be absolved from blame nor able to escape the repercussions of their actions. As the film trailer’s typography purports the film is a war movie like no other because it allows the audience to indulge in thoughts of violence while maintaining a clear conscience. This is not a film for people who want to see the honorable heroics of its protagonists, or for people who want to woefully reflect on the horrors of the Holocaust. Why should viewers continue to endure the pitiful sight of innocent people tortured and dehumanized in concentration camps, when they can see the perpetrators of these crimes struck down and exterminated in a similar fashion? If the Basterds were honorable, they wouldn’t be “inglourious,” nor would their unethical actions reflect the viewer’s appetite for bloody justice, a craving that Inglorious Basterds satisfies like no other war film could.

 

 

 

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle Fundamental Physical Comedy Pitted Against the Agile Acrobatic Buster Keaton in The Bell Boy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    At the tail end of the 19^th century, Joseph “Buster” Keaton tumbled into a life of stunt work at the tender age of three joining his parents as the third member of their Vaudeville act, The Three Keatons. After being tossed around stage as his father’s prop, Buster quickly learned how to take a pratfall, as well as developing other skills of stunt etiquette. At the age of twenty-one, Buster left the family business in order to transition to the meteoric silver screen.  Buster was immediately apprenticed to silent comedy veteran Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle as a fellow funnyman with vaudevillian beginnings. Arbuckle had been in the film industry for ten years prior to meeting Buster and was at this point, the lead actor, head writer, and director of short films for Paramount Pictures[1]. 

    The Bell Boy (1918) was one of the first couple of silent shorts where Buster and Arbuckle worked exclusively side by side. Although Buster sees more screen time in this film than usual, he still plays second fiddle to Arbuckle. Buster and Arbuckle both two inept bell boys with various responsibilities ranging from the mundane, carrying luggage and mopping the floor, to the utterly ridiculous, artfully barbering and managing a horse drawn elevator gone awry. Essential to silent comedies of the time, there is also a romantic interest (played by Alice Lake) that both Buster and Arbuckle initially fight over, but then work together using an elaborate scheme to woo for Arbuckle. In this case, Buster and the hotel clerk, Al St. John stage a bank robbery so Arbuckle can heroically intervene and in doing so, sweep the girl off her feet. Of course, at the time of the feigned robbery a gang of brutish criminals actually hold up the bank.

    This silent film, like Arbuckle’s other shorts, exemplifies his distinct comedic presence while showcasing the skill of his counterpart Buster. The heart of Arbuckle’s gags was in his robust, clumsy nature and the bizarre agility of his pratfalls. He believed in using simple and often predictable visual cues rather than complex ones for the sake of what he believed was the dim-witted moviegoer[2].  The first couple stunts consist of Arbuckle and Buster taking a fall after an unfortunate placement of luggage later followed by a similar tumble over a bucket of soapy water (a gag that resonates throughout the film). When a strange bearded patron checks into the hotel, Arbuckle offers him his barber services.  In this sequence Arbuckle armed with comically large scissors and a straight razor transform this mystery guest into a dead ringer for Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant, then with a few snips he becomes Abraham Lincoln, and with a close shave finally Keiser Wilhelm (each caricature followed by a title slide leaving no doubt which painfully obvious historical depiction is which.) Meanwhile Buster and St. John are tumbling all over the heavily soaped floors.  The most impressive stunt which takes places in the elevator, is one of the only opportunities Buster is able to show off his acrobatic prowess other than a brief moment of jumping over the bank walls to elude the criminals. The emphasis is still placed on Arbuckle as he repeatedly tries to push Buster back into the elevator car with a 2x4 before his head is crushed between the two floors. When the car falls back to the ground floor, the love interest is propelled into the air after stepping on the unfortunately placed board. Buster jumps onto Arbuckle’s shoulders and crawls up the wall to retrieve the girl from the moose head perch. Arbuckle catches the girl and then leaves Buster to fend for himself. Using the 2 x 4 as a springboard, Buster defies gravity and manages several masterful feats eventually crashing and knocking over St. John who has tried to saw the board in attempt to save him. After the arduous rescue from the moosehead, Arbuckle and his love interest Miss Cuticle who is the hotel’s manicurist skip the hotel’s work day to take a romantic carriage ride. At this point, the movie might have ended since Arbuckle is cozy in the carriage and gets a kiss from Miss Cuticle.

    In order to further secure his love interest affections, Arbuckle devises a plan to which he can emerge as a hero by foiling a robbery.  The plot takes a departure to the absurd as Arbuckle enlists the aid of Buster, his bellboy counterpart, and hotel clerk, St. John. Director Arbuckle demonstrates his comedic sensibility in this next scene.  Buster in league with St. John are behind the hotel counter preparing for their scheme by throwing pick axes, shovels and all manner of tools from a seemingly endless arsenal.  Once outfitted, our two bungling burglars head to the bank where they encounter the real criminals. Delayed by the encounter, Buster and St. John fly around the bank like gymnasts.  Of course, you might wonder how they will finally reconnect with Arbuckle who seems to be doing quite well on the dance floor with Miss Cuticle. Arbuckle ventures into the bank we assume to check on the progress of his wayward friends. And after another scuffle, and two ceramic pots to the face, Arbuckle sends the buglers out of the bank by ripping a door off its hinges and throwing it at the lot of them. After an elaborate chase scene, they are apprehended in the hotel lobby and Arbuckle is rewarded with glory, a cash reward, and the affection of the girl he was attempting to impress.

    This film is very important to Buster's history as this one of the first films where Arbuckle lets Buster assume a major role. Arbuckle excels by using his stature in simple rough and tumble gags with little to no deviation (except for a brief bizarre nod to pop culture icons in the barber shop scene).  Seemingly limited by straight-man role, Buster still wows with the aerobatic feats and stupendous stunts all the while carrying a slightly melancholy expression that hints at something more. Although Arbuckle and Buster have distinct comedic styles (taking note that Buster's is still developing and Arbuckle had the last say as writer and director of the film) they seamlessly complement each other by providing the audience with separate but necessary visual elements. While Arbuckle has found his niche in silent comedy, Buster will go to create more complex and profoundly athletic stunts while further developing his signature stone face expression and soulful eyes that continues to captivate audiences, commanding their attention to hang on every hint of a smile, frown, or sigh.

---

Bibliography:

[1] Keaton, Buster, and Charles Samuels. "Ch. 1." My Wonderful World of Slapstick. New York, NY: Da Capo, 1982. Print.

[2] Telotte, J. P., Arbuckle Escapes: The Pattern of Fatty Arbuckle's Comedy , Journal of Popular Film and Television, 15:4 (1988:Winter) p.172-179

Photo Credit:

Dr. Macro

---

On the Doorstep of a Hidden World: Masks and Sacraments in Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT

A mask affords its wearer a rare privilege: he can ingest images from the outside world without projecting any back. He can nourish his imaginative life without letting anyone else register his thoughts, his reactions, or even his identity. He can become a different person with the mask on, then return to his same old self when he takes it off. In such a way, a mask acts as a sort of liminal device -- a portal that allows the Self to travel unscathed into secret worlds by concealing the face that would otherwise link that Self to its usual obligations, relations and consequences. But a mask is not innocent -- its privileges can tempt and corrupt, and its very presence often signals that a line has been crossed, that something has been done or seen that could not have been done or seen by an unmasked agent.

The Venetian mask that rests, cold and silent, on the pillow in this still from Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut has its eyes wide open but sees nothing because it lacks a wearer -- it is an object welcoming to secret images but incapable of imagination. Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman's character sleeps with eyes shut, swaddled in bland blankets, dressed in a conjugal nightie, ring-hand facing out. She is vulnerable and incapable of travelling into the outside world, but her mind is active, and the film dwells on the erotic dreams that occupy her sleep. Her epistemological quest is inward-driven; she investigates her inner desires. But the mask, which her husband picked up on a secret foray into New York's sexual underworld, speaks to a knowledge-seeking journey of an entirely different sort: a hunt for a secret world outside that bed, a world accessible only through the secrecy and deception of the mask's wearer. This still, with all its implied dichotomies between presence and absence, blindness and sight, warmth and coldness, sleep and wakefulness, passivity and activity, encapsulates both the thematic richness and the viewing experience of Kubrick's film. Everything is there if you just look for it, but you won't necessarily see more by staring straight ahead with eyes wide open. Commit to closing your eyes and wandering through Kubrick's dream-world and you will see plenty.

Eyes Wide Shut, released in 1999 and based upon Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story, is of course Kubrick’s final work,¹ released just months after his death. Grossly mismarketed as an "erotic thriller" ², enveloped in the real-life gossip-storm of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s (rumored) carnal dysfunction, weighted with the ambiguous expectations we reserve for the posthumous work of geniuses, and generally just derided for trying to confront sexuality in earnest, the film suffered, even and especially before its release, from unfortunate extratextual baggage. Thankfully though, all that baggage falls by the wayside once you actually watch the film. All that remains is cinema itself — the traces in time and space of a mind's probing, of its seductions, its frustrations, its dead-ending paths and unexpected acts of generosity. Whose probing, though? And whose mind? Do the film's obscure investigations belong to Kubrick, or to his characters, or to us, the viewers? The answer is both simple and complex: as in all detective stories -- and this is, despite the lack of guns/badges/detectives, a detective story -- the engines of narrative fuse our curiosity with that of the artist and with that of his creations. Eyes Wide Shut is a dream-universe that we are all citizens of; and all of us alike -- director, viewer, protagonist -- fast become consumed with finding the secret world that lies hidden within that world...

The film — which traces the nocturnal travails of the sexually malnourished and existentially unmoored Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise, in an elusive performance) — is 'problematic' in the best sense of the word. It refuses to be easily read — not in a wan Bartleby-esque fashion, but rather in a vaguely Borgesian way³, a way that multiplies symmetries and symbols and patterns, suggesting that meaning (whatever that means) is both ever-receding and ever-present, glimpsable but not inhabitable. As Bill begins to wander -- emotionally and geographically -- away from his wife Alice (played by Kidman as a woman with a rich erotic imagination and a barely-tapped reservoir of marital resentment), the film vacillates in tone between upper-class picaresque (Bill's wanderings as satirical voyage peppered with insinuating piano players, lascivious widows, gentle whores, and sleazy shopkeeps) and philosophical allegory (Bill's wanderings as subjective investigation into the darkest depths of desire, power and knowledge.) What the film is most emphatically not, though, is a sexy, straightforward jaunt through the sexual underworld of New York City. (Indeed, the city seen on screen is quite obviously not Manhattan; whether you want to call it "a dream-vision of the Upper East side" or just "London posing as such" is up to you.) And there is little in the way of linear story; instead, we follow in Bill's shadow as he circles -- like a blind but hungry falcon -- closer and closer to a hidden world of sex and death.

Gradually, the comedy-of-manners falls away, and we, like Bill, are drawn in, wide-eyed, by the pull of the sacred unknown, by the promise of a sexual unleashing accessible deep within the core of civilization. And so we arrive at the film's Gnostic centerpiece: the infamous orgy sequence, a mesmerizing scene where faces are hidden and skin is uncovered, where blue-bloods, capitalists and prostitutes don Venetian masks for oblique sacraments of sex and power. Sumptuous tracking shots follow Bill through a vast mansion as naked bodies thrust and writhe all around him in devotional silence; the soundtrack features an Orthodox liturgy played backwards to surreal effect; a high priest waves a censer; the blind and hungry falcon stops circling and alights at the center of his path and opens his eyes to see and eat. The formal virtuosity of the scene -- not to mention the heady brew of sex, power, wealth, revelation and mystery -- is enough to suck the air out of any room, enough to send cold tendrils of awe into any cinephile's brain, just as much as the similarly ornate final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. As in 2001, there is a pervasive mystical ambiance, a sense of historical objects repurposed for timelessness, but -- and I really never though I would say this -- the orgy sequence of Eyes Wide Shut is perhaps even more ambiguous than the Louis XVI sequence of 2001. Are we witnessing a ritual of Dionysian wildness or rather an Apollonian intervention, the imposition of social and religious protocol onto the pre-social gestures of sex? What should we make of the utter lack of pleasure or emotion in the sex? Like Bill, we are left wondering what we have learned; reaching the secret world only leaves us with more questions: who is behind the masks? Is there another deeper secret world that orchestrated this one?

Eyes Wide Shut does not answer these questions, but neither does its narrative end with that morbid central sequence. The blind and hungry falcon -- having ever-so-briefly seen and tasted -- is cast back out into the world and finds himself circling outwards again, in concentric loops that return him, not without some melancholy, to the frustrations of the everyday. Bill re-acquaints himself with his professional and married lives but has to live with the corrupting and dangerous knowledge of what he has seen. And so the final third or so of the film traces the aftermath, the return to equilibrium, the frayed edges of Bill's consciousness stitching themselves back to reason, the compromises he must make to survive his brush with the sexual ineffable. Narrative circumstances force him to step away from the seductions of the secret world embedded in networks of power and wealth, and instead to focus on the secret world of married domesticity -- a different but no less mysterious type of sexual covenant. The return to this covenant will require a new set of maskings, unmaskings, sacramental rituals, and threshold-crossings, but perhaps I should save that for another post...!

----------------------------------------------------------------
[1] His script contributions to A.I. Artificial Intelligence don't count; that film has Steven Spielberg’s grubby, sentimental fingerprints all over it — although it is occasionally possible to catch a glimpse of Kubrickian visual wit within the self-indulgent morass.

[2] A disreputable, not to mention inaccurate, genre christening that calls to mind Skinemax-y assignations much more than existential dream-longings.

[3] I am not referencing Jorge Luis Borges just for the fun of it. Aside from similarities in structure (an episodic, circling way of building narrative without ever quite building plot) and form (decadent, florid imagery dead-ending in banal obviousness, while the ineffable instead jumps out, in blunt and concise language, from the interstices of the everyday), there is also rich thematic overlap -- dare I say a shared metaphysics? -- between Borges's short stories and the world of Eyes Wide Shut. Both Kubrick and Borges fixate -- with trepidation and awe -- on the emergence of a raw, erotically-tinged secret world within the consensus reality of daily social functioning, a secret world that protagonists are pulled towards at great personal risk but can never quite understand. Both artists traffic in implication, in temptation, in that one glimpse of the infinite that barely lasts a second but that will perhaps haunt you forever. Consider, by way of an example, Borges's story "The Sect of the Phoenix," which describes a global mystery cult whose ominous secret, transmitted through the ages but never spoken aloud (nor even spelled-out in the pages of the story), is thought by many readers to be none other than the 'secret' of sexual intercourse. Here, as in Eyes Wide Shut, we see sex recast as a sub-world within the world, a secret society both obvious and unfathomable.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Photo found on btsergio's Flickr account, and copied in accordance with this Creative Commons license.

Urban Indian as Exile and West Baltimore's The Wire

“It reflects a life that is not true for all Indians, but typical of many.”

So begins the narrative voice-over in The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961), which presents a refreshingly original portrait of American Indians, situating them in a Californian urban milieu, away from their parents and grandparents on the reservations. Over the course of this semester, I’ve looked at a variety of movies concerning peoples historically underrepresented in film art. Constructions of ethnic minorities consistently have as much to do with previous media portrayals and stereotypes as they do the real people. In that sense, films with minority characters share certain conventions of the genre picture (and indeed, many genres incorporate ethnic tropes, including the Italian of the Gangster, or the African-American servant or performer in classic Hollywood or melodrama).

It is interesting to note that 50 years after the release of The Exiles, its particular image of the urban Indian  remains radical. The level of realism is startling: I appreciate its authenticity, and its dedication to a particular subculture rarely explored by the camera lens. According to the 1990 census, 63 percent of Native Americans lived in urban regions.[1] Yet, the construct of Indian as “noble savage” or frontier warrior persists in the nation’s cultural mindset, reinforced by the canon of Western films and America’s collective foundation myth. For most of white America, the Indian is of the continent — and yet, crucially, only particular parts of the continent are recognized as his domain.

The reservation is understood as the Indian’s arena. Even if it is somewhat marred by the history of forced migration and prejudice, there is a resurgence of pride in the reservation as emanation of the Indian self. The magazine section of the Times frequently runs ads for Native American Universities: “If I stay on the Res, I’m more likely to graduate.” The reservation provides a convenient domain for historians and anthropologists to think about the Indian, for there, he is identifiable by tribe, costume, language and rituals.  The “res” simplifies Native culture, segmenting it from the mainstream, in a sense controlling for interference and cultural mingling. But once the American Indian enters the city, abandons “authentic” costume, and internalizes Euro-American constructions of private ownership and anonymity, he becomes indistinguishable, almost invisible to the untrained eye.

The transition into the dominant culture is probably partial (no one can disavow an entire life experience), and certainly gradual. Ultimately, though, urban life presents a dilemma for the American Indian, who experiences ethnic misclassification, and a sense of disconnect from his heritage. The Exiles is extraordinarily compelling in its ability to communicate the ambivalence of the urban Indian experience. Such is the sentiment expressed by Homer in The Exiles: “My people roamed all over the place…I would rather be in that time than now.” It is important that Homer distinguishes between the two systems of Indian life in terms of time and not space. 

Over a decade after the making of The Exiles, the American West Center at the University of Utah asserted the dilemma faced by the urban Indian in these terms: “The city is an alien place…[It] demands of the individual to disavow his heritage to become a truly urban citizen.”[2]

Donald Fixico frames the problem as an issue of insufficient information: “People who know very little about American Indians…have very little to base a viewpoint on about urban Indians. They have to rely on stereotypes,” which have been overwhelmingly negative. I am cognizant of the fact that there is a level to Yvonne’s attitudes and desires that I will never fully grasp. For instance, what future does she envision for her unborn child in Los Angeles? Why does she subject herself to Homer, a husband who rarely acknowledges her presence, or leaves her to live vicariously through solitary excursions to the movies? What are her motivations and aspirations as she watches her husband and Tommy walk through the alleyway after a night on Hill X with the women they picked up in a bar? There is no way to read the expression on her face with the system of equivalencies exploited by Hollywood.

 

In trying to qualify my response to the film, I repeatedly came back to The Wire. As I watched Season 1 this week, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of fondness for the characters from West Baltimore. True, I don’t belong to this particular subculture, enmeshed in urban warfare, drug addiction and drug trafficking, bombed-out low-rises, imposing high-rises, poverty and slick Roc-A-Wear and Baby Phat wardrobes, but these characters speak a dialect that’s ubiquitous in the Baltimore's schools. It’s fascinating to hear it spoken on the screen: the show’s creators captured the spontaneity, the diction, the wisdom hidden beneath the layers of archaic-sounding syntax. These actors speak the cadence I heard from the moment I entered Baltimore’s school system in August 2001. Coming from New York, I remember thinking this the strangest place. What language were these people speaking? Baltimore seemed like an island, severed from the realities I had taken for granted on 207^th Street in Manhattan: the subway, Dominicans, Asians, the populated playground, and people in general.

The general absence of human bodies in the street and the alien nature of the speech I did hear presented a weird environment for an outsider. But I guess I became accustomed to it eventually, because watching The Wire today, I felt solidarity with the West Baltimore speakers captured on film and projected on screen — however violent their language, however amoral and degenerate their behaviors. I think this supports the universally validating power of cinema: the recording of real Indians, their accents uncensored and uncorrected, lends an authentic quality and asserts the urban Indian’s realness. It recognizes a distinctive presence in the world.

 

 

 “It’s cool up there, you sing your own tribal songs….you know… anything you want to do… you know”

One of the most interesting scenes in The Exiles follows Homer and Tommy to Hill X, the spot overlooking the LA skyline where the city’s Indians gather and reenact their cultural rites and rituals, modified to fit the urban environment, the particular demographic shift of the Indian populace, and the physical remoteness of the reservation. The modified powwows serve a younger generation of reservation "exiles," integrated into the metropolis. While not particularly young in years, these men and women resemble adolescents. They enter the semi-spiritual peak of Hill X as rambunctious American teens, blasting horns and revving engines. They convalesce, chant, dance, beat the drum as Indians by night, and in the morning, abandon the Hill, returning to the mainstream. The scene they leave behind is once more ambivalent: the land is dusty and beaten flat by tires; empty bottles and refuse clutter the clearing. It becomes clear from the image of the Hill that the urban Indian presents a unique and challenging blend of identities. His values with respect to ownership, environment, and family are an ambiguous mix of two cultures that our media has, for so long, presented as irreconcilable.

---

[1] Fixico, D. Lee. (2000). The Urban Indian Experience in America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

[2] “Seattle Indian Center Plan,” February 3, 1972, in Mary Ellen Sloan, “Indians in an Urban Setting, Salt Lake County, Utah (1972),” Occupational Paper No. 2, American West Center, University of Utah, 1973, 6.

Speed Freaks: The Car Chase as an Audience Fantasy

            Cars are cool. This mantra has been the focus of countless action pieces throughout cinema. Cars are cool, and the audience likes to see them go really fast. The car chase has a special place in cinema because it is, to an extent, the most relatable action scene in any action film. Most people have not ever been in a fight. Most people have never fired a gun. Certainly most people have never walked away calmly while things blew up behind them. However, most people know how to drive, and, as a corollary to that most people know what it feels like to drive fast. They have never been in a high speed chase, but they know the feeling of flying down the street. Thus, when a car chase is shown on screen, the audience is able to physically relate to the action shown on screen.

Bullitt, the 1968 thriller which contains one of the most famous car chases ever, works extensively on this principle. The chase begins very slowly with both contestants stopping at traffic lights, looking both ways before they go through intersections, and even remembering to put on a seatbelt before the exciting things start happening. The slow pace and attention to actual driving allows the audience to ground themselves in reality before the big chase starts. These are all things that the audience has done before. They know what it’s like to drive in a city. Steve McQueen’s car is almost definitely cooler than their car, but in the end it’s mostly the same thing.

Once the action starts, the sense that these men are driving through a city continues through the entire chase. From the very first moment where the hit men take off with squealing tires, Bullitt is stuck in the intersection as people won’t let him make the left turn. He misses turns and has to reverse in order to get back on track. He behaves like normal people do when they drive through a city; he’s just doing it at a much higher speed than the average person. The audience is able to recognize his behavior and thus they empathize with him through this action scene. Every driver knows the feeling of missing a turn or being stuck due to other drivers not allowing them to turn. These mistakes allow the audience to feel like the person driving the car could easily be them.

While the car chase strikes a familiar chord with the audience, it also serves to allow the audience to live out their fantasies and expand their horizons. As Bullitt speeds through the streets of San Francisco, he is launching off of the terraced hills that dominate the streets. This makes the chase more exciting as cars go flying through the air, as well as creating a situation that exists very specifically in San Francisco. People who have driven through the city know the feeling of going up and down the hills and know that they have to be careful in order to make sure that the car doesn’t go airborne or bottom out on the steep terraces. Bullitt is able to perform these dangerous stunts that the people in the theatre have only thought about doing but are too worried for their safety as well as the condition of their car. For those who have never driven in San Francisco, the film offers several point of view shots in order to immerse oneself in the experience of driving through the city. For either party, this car chase allows them to experience something that would only previously be possible in their minds.

The car chase as an awesome fantasy is used to great extent in the 1996 Michael Bay film, The Rock. Once again taking place in San Francisco, this car chase focuses less on immersing oneself in the car chase and heightening the common experience of the audience. Instead, it focuses on the fantastical elements of the Hollywood car chase and creates a situation that the audience wishes that driving was like.

The chase begins fantastically with the main participants, Goodspeed and Mason, encountering high end, really cool, cars right outside of the hotel in which they’ve been staying. The chase that follows is full of implausible incidents which serve to make the chase that much more exciting. The audience is treated to cars crashing through water bottles, other cars, and shop windows without seeming to get a scratch. Parked cars seem to be filled with c4 and nitroglycerin and explode into gigantic fireballs when the other cars crash into them. None of these elements can happen in a real car chase, but the audience accepts them as they make the chase even cooler. By departing from the real world, Bay is able to celebrate cinemas ability to look cool and move fast without the trappings and constraints of reality.

This chase also focuses much more on the participants as compared to the silent drivers of Bullitt. Mason seems full of one-liners as his humvee wreaks destruction on anything and everything that gets in his way. He doesn’t seem fazed as he drives away from several cop cars. Goodspeed, on the other hand, is much more nervous about what is going on. Though he performs death-defying stunts, he has to think about what he’s doing before he actually does it. Goodspeed represents the audience in this chase just as Bullitt did in his own film. Goodspeed is able to perform all of the cool driving stunts that the audience wishes they could while at the same time not being the typical testosterone fueled action hero. Goodspeed doesn’t own the cool car and he’s not technically a field agent. However, when the time comes to act, he is able to rise to the occasion. After the chase ends, the camera circles around Goodspeed as he delivers his final one-liner, cementing his role as cool even though he started out as a man completely out of his element. In his ascension from normal to cool, he has brought the audience with him as his position as the audience stand in has not changed.

The car chase is absolutely one of the most dynamic pieces in cinema. It often showcases cars that the audience wishes they could afford doing things that the audience wishes they could do. It showcases the ability of cinema to enhance reality in order to make things more exciting, and in that enhancement, it takes the audience along with it. But in the end, the reason that the car chase is so popular and enduring is one thing. They’re really cool.

 

The Works of Satoshi Kon, and the Impossible Pursuit of Perfection

Fans of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan would find watching Satoshi Kon's 1998 animated film, Perfect Blue, something like a case of retro déja vu. The similarities between the films are not a coincidence – Aronofsky was not only aware of Perfect Blue, he had even purchased the rights to it when making Requiem for a Dream, in order to exactly re-create the bathtub scene for his film. While Black Swan is not a remake of Perfect Blue, it draws heavily from the same themes – duality, madness, and the desire to reach a stage of impossible perfection.

 Perfect Blue is the story of Mima, a pop idol who wishes to leave her idol profession and branch into acting. This seems to please no one – her ex-pop idol manager is extremely protective of her, and disapproves of the roles she is offered and how she is treated by the directors of the television show Mima is cast in. The one most upset is Mima's number one fan, who stalks her every move and runs a website dedicated to Mima. In order to succeed and distance herself from her idol past, Mima agrees to appear in a violent rape scene, and then to pose for nude pictures – which brings her both success and misery.

 As she questions whether she is following the right path, she begins to hallucinate a double of herself – the Idol Mima, still fresh-faced and innocent, who taunts her for her mistakes and insecurities. Mima begins to sink into delusions and madness – she begins to read the blog on her website (which are not even written by her) in order to remember what she did that day. The scenes from her television show begin to merge with her real life. The Idol Mima pops up everywhere she goes. When the photographer from her nude photo shoot is stabbed to death, Mima can't remember whether or not she is the murderer.

Mima struggles with the duality of her image and her self, unable to reconcile her past as a pop idol, and her future as an adult woman in charge of her acting career. But unlike Nina in Black Swan, who destroys herself in order to achieve perfection, Mima finds that she is the victim of her manager, Rumi, who has been living vicariously through Mima. The climactic ending sequence is a grotesque and physical battle of the Mima's – and while it is revealed that Rumi was heavily manipulating Mima's life, it does not explain away how Mima continues to see Rumi as a ghostly specter of herself. In the end, it is implied that they are both disillusioned – but Mima has been able to reconcile her personality split, while Rumi could not.

 In the search for her identity, reality for Mima becomes mutable and fluid, a jungle of mirrors and images, a cobbled-together world of illusion, constructed experiences, false narratives, and deception.

 Satoshi Kon continues to play with the theme of distorted reality and narrative in his 2001 film, Millennium Actress. The film follows the life story of Chiyoko Fujiwara, an actress whose career spanned for decades in Japanese cinema, as she is interviewed by her biggest fan, Genya Tachibana. A scene towards the opening of the story is an early hint of the merging of reality and film that is to come – the audience watches as a young Chiyoko climbs into a spaceship which begins to liftoff. The camera then cuts out to reveal the scene is actually a video that Genya is watching, and as the spaceship rumbles into space, the room around Genya begins to shake. For a brief moment the film world and the real world are one – until it is revealed that it isn't the spaceship shaking the room, but an actual earthquake.

 The merging of reality and narrative continues as Chiyoko tells her story to Genya and his cameraman, and the flashbacks become not only her interior reflections, but an interactive experience. Genya and the cameraman become part of the flashbacks, watching and commenting on Chiyoko's actions and experiences. Yet there are even more layers to this constructed reality, as her recounting of her life becomes the recounting of her film roles, with no distinction between the two. The narrative becomes an epic of not only her story, but the story of Japanese cinema, of Japanese history, and Japanese history as told through cinema. She journeys through time and space in order to achieve her goal – to reunite with a painter, in order to return a key he lent to her with a promise to meet again.

It proves impossible for her to meet her painter again. Yet the story of Chiyoko's chase is more thrilling and fulfilling than any outcome where she and her beloved painter could be reunited. The narrative of her life story is what gives it meaning, even as it seems to be foolish to chase an impossible goal. On some level, Millenium Actress and Perfect Blue are both about the same thing – the impossible pursuit of perfection, and the toll it takes on an individual. Perfect Blue presents a pessimistic outcome – the complete fragmentation of Mima and Rumi's identities. Millenium Actress is more optimistic, presenting the impossible pursuit as more personally enriching than the goal itself. Both films present challenging and complex narratives, and are excellent examples of animated films that are not just for children. 

People on the Fringe: Gypsy Culture in Angelo My Love

    There is something fascinating about delving into the world of a sociocultural Other. And indeed, white America has for centuries enacted such an imaginary process, projecting itself onto alternate groups and peoples located on the fringes of society. The process of projection has involved both revulsion and attraction: the savage has functioned primarily as foil and scapegoat (i.e. the Other of didactic Puritanical stories), but also as an exotic entity, impossible to characterize, explain or fully comprehend. Both constructions expose entrenched prejudices, and neither contributes much in the way of new insights about the people themselves.

    The captivity narrative, while declaring savagery and civility to be incompatible and irreconcilable, also conveys a subtext about the complementary nature of indigenous life. The fact that some Puritan prisoners of war preferred to stay with their captors suggests that the world of the Native imparted certain benefits, particularly for women. These advantages, whether material, spiritual, or psychological, were either inaccessible or nonexistent in the civilized (patriarchal) life of the settlement. Implicit in the captivity narrative was the idea that indigenous life satiated a certain social hunger and filled a spiritual void left by Christian civility and codified European traditions. How would “mainstream” society cope with the Native? The answer lies in exclusion — through physical separation and rhetorical devices. The discourse on native peoples has consistently positioned the American Indian beyond the periphery of the colonial settlement (lurking in the forest, or beyond the butte, dunes or hills), or safely contained on reservations, far from the burgeoning cities and sprawling homesteads.

    The gypsy, in contrast, has been less widely articulated or addressed in America’s historical conversation with itself. Though ostracized through policy, the American Indian has at least been acknowledged in America’s cinema culture. Certainly, the characterization of the Native American has been far from ideal. He is rarely afforded the same level of character development as the white frontiersman, and his language is systematically dismissed as unintelligible (a notable exception is John Ford’s The Searchers, in which Ethan’s knowledge of Comanche partly humanizes his antagonist, Scar). The historical practice of casting white actors to play Native American roles further solidifies Hollywood’s seeming prohibition on nuanced, authentic American Indian performances. And yet, even the most bigoted cinematic portrayals of the American Indian allow for a conversation about how the Native is represented in the movies and the American consciousness. One can hope that as audience sophistication increases, so too will sensitivity to racialized portrayals of the Native.

 

    What does this mean for the gypsy, whose portrayal in American movies is not merely negative, but actually nonexistent? The gypsy is an invisible entity in the space of mainstream cinema, which perhaps should not be surprising, given the limited space he occupies in our collective national consciousness. Given this reality, Robert Duvall’s film Angelo My Love (1983) is essential viewing for anyone interested in the treatment of underrepresented peoples in cinema. His luminous commentary on gypsy life depicts the Roma neither as pitiful victims nor grotesque menaces, but as human beings who are at times exuberant, and at times melancholy. Though we may occasionally perceive their language (a hybrid of English and Gypsy) as jarring, and their gesticulations, dances, and affectations as eccentric, we accept their actions and attitudes as rational, given the context. It is the camera that allows us to see into the crowded apartments, decorated with their plush plastic couches; the masses at the Feast of St. Anne; and the men and women gathered around the campfire near Albany, following Patalay’s acquittal at the Kris. Thus, it is cinema that facilitates our receptivity to the gypsies, whom we might otherwise dismiss as inconsistent with familiar laws, social structures, and behaviors. We come to appreciate misdemeanors as pragmatic choices, necessary given the gypsies' position at the city's social and economic periphery.

    The gypsies’ relationship to mainstream society is a complex arrangement, verging on mutualistic. Their status as Other arises not from systematic exclusion by a non-gypsy majority, but from the gypsies' conscious efforts to keep their culture intact. They are ostracized to some extent, yet they are not completely disconnected from the services and institutions that constitute the fabric of mainstream society. In fact, the gypsies partially integrate themselves into the dominant culture —at least on a superficial level— to ensure their economic survival and, to a lesser extent, their children's literacy and education. Paradoxically, the gypsies work to maintain a distinction between their world and the conventional mainstream. Nowhere is this more evident than when Angelo's mother delivers her ultimatum following Angelo's recovery of the family's ring. Throughout the film, Angelo is characterized as a small adult man. He blurts obscenities, exerts complete control over his body, mesmerizes women with his suave demeanor, and embodies the same machismo as his uncles. Yet, he is moved to tears like a small child when his mother says, “You can be Gypsy or Gadjo [non-Roma]— but not both.” The finality of the statement suggests that commitment to discreet elements of gypsy culture is insufficient; what is necessary is the complete repudiation of the mainstream culture, including its rules, logic, and values.

    The film does not simply dichotomize Gadjo and gypsy cultures. True, the rules, moral codes, and rituals enacted by the gypsies within the context of nuclear families, the wedding and the Kris occasionally seem alien, patriarchal, and even clientelistic. And yet, by integrating scenes in which Angelo socializes with non-gypsies, including an inept grade school teacher, an elderly Puerto Rican woman, and the child country music star Cathy Kichen, Duvall connects Angelo's world to a familiar social milieu.

    A wonderful aspect of Angelo My Love is the unapologetic performances by its cast members. Of course, the men and women in the film are not really actors at all. They are not "performing" so much as they are conveying shared experiences, internal crises, and identities. The film text is as much an episodic narrative as it is an anthropological study of New York City's Roma community in the 1980s.

  The film maintains an interesting balance between Old and New World, conveying something about the adaptability of this formerly nomadic people transplanted from Europe. Even during the Kris (trial), Frankie, the de facto judge (reminiscent of a mafia Godfather), and Angelo vacillate between English and the Roma mother tongue. Sentences and soliloquies meld syntax and vocabulary from both languages; a perpetual high-energy rhythm links them together in an almost continuous vocal flood. This mode of discourse conveys the resilience of the people, seemingly referencing their migrant heritage, which likely required rapid adaptation to new environments, cultures, and resources.

    We also learn of the ethnic and cultural variation that exists within the New York gypsy community, perhaps most clearly encapsulated by the Greek/Russian rivalry that provides the ongoing conflict for the film and context for the theft of Angelo’s father’s ring.

    Finally, the costumes and modes of transport in the movie should not be dismissed, for they reveal something about the interconnectedness between gypsy and Gadjo cultures. Whereas the Amish completely reject "English" electricity and cars, the men in Angelo rely heavily on vehicles to pursue enemies, transport their families to religious ceremonies, and court women. The language of cars is ubiquitous: Angelo and Michael hail a taxi to pursue Patalay, Angelo "drives" partway to upstate New York (seated on Frankie's lap), and lacking cash for a cab becomes the justification for Angelo's failure to take Patricia out on her birthday. This sort of motif reveals something striking about the gypsy culture, at least as it is portrayed in Angelo. There is a high degree of devotion to ritualism, folklore, superstition, cultural pride and family honor, yet a reliance on the modes of contemporary Gadjo life. Still, the gypsies maintain a notably ambivalent attitude toward the mechanisms, bureaucracy, and institutions of the dominant culture. As Angelo's mother asserts (and Michael echoes), "Maybe you'll go [to school] today and not tomorrow."

    But perhaps the most interesting conflicts in the film emerge within the gypsy community itself. As Angelo, Frankie and Michael watch Patalay and his fellow Russians singing around a campfire, Angelo observes their ugliness, horrified. Indeed, his statement articulates a reality we've come to appreciate throughout the film (shots of Patalay often fixate on his grotesque fleshy nose; those of Millie linger on her crooked teeth and aged skin). The ideal physical appearance —a handsome face and smooth skin— becomes emblematic of Angelo's clan (and the Greek gypsies, by extension). Angelo's discourse on beauty reveals something interesting about the construction of masculinity in the larger gypsy culture and among the Greeks, in particular. However, we cannot help but wonder whether Angelo's self-proclaimed beauty is not merely a transient sign of youth. His appearance, too, may be susceptible to the physical disfigurement and moral decay that marks Patalay.

Women in Television: Lovers, Mothers, and... Oh. Take 2.

As I wrote last semester, Fox's Fringe is a sci-fi procedural following the investigations of the FBI Fringe unit. Made up of Special Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), a half-mad scientist named Walter Bishop (John Noble), and Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), Walter’s genius son with a history of petty crime, the Fringe team look into crimes of the strange and fantastic. Essentially, picture a quirkier X-Files, with parallel universes rather than aliens. Each of the three seasons has thus far twisted the show in an intriguing new direction, but while season 2 seemed to be where the show found its rhythm and established Olivia as a complex character and independent agent, season 3 has since fallen into tired and unoriginal gendered tropes.

While by no means a feminist utopia, seasons 1 and 2 of Fringe establish Olivia as a pivotal actor. Take season 1's “Ability,” where she must come to terms with her own superhuman mental abilities in order to stop a bomb, or season 2's “Jacksonville,” where she must do the same in order to save a building full of people. As William Bell (Leonard Nimoy), the head of Massive Dynamic, states, Olivia is the “guardian” of our universe, a gatekeeper and protector. While this position is in many ways established by her history as the test subject of two powerful men, Bell and Walter, she nevertheless holds a key position wherein she must act, and she does so over and over. In season 2, Olivia is the only one to have heard William Bell's warnings and is thus the only one capable of acting on them. When it comes down to a a choice between catching the season's Big Bad or saving Walter, Olivia is the one who decides.

Olivia's characterization further establishes her as a multifaceted person who acts, rather than a female object merely acted upon. Yes, the show brings in a sister and a niece to feminize her. Yes, her story starts off revolving around a man. But that is not where her story remains. Olivia spends much of the first half of the second season coming to terms with injuries from a car accident and a trip across universes, a condition based not in her gender but in her humanity. Later, when a building in New York is about to be pulled to another universe, Olivia is the only one who can find it, and in order to do so, she has to confront not her past as a little girl but her past as a test subject. This is not to say that Olivia's portrayal is absent of gender essentialism. As “Brown Betty,” an episode near the end of season 2, demonstrates, the writers conceive of Olivia as someone who fights for this universe because she cares for others, with true love as one of her primary motivations. Granted, this episode is essentially a fairy tale told by a very under-the-influence Walter, but the key themes echo the character interactions in the rest of the show. Olivia starts as a girlfriend first, using her professional skills in support of that role, and at the end of season 2, she partners with other child test subjects to bring them to the parallel universe—to get Peter back to be with him. This motivator, however, while stereotypically female, remains merely a facet of Olivia's character rather than the key aspect.

For the first third of season 3, Olivia is a prisoner in the parallel universe with the alternate Olivia having taken her place in ours. Gender-wise, this season unfolds much like the previous one in that both Olivias do their jobs and do them efficiently, with family and love as aspects of their characters but not the aspects. Olivia has visions of Peter but these are to tell her that she's in the wrong universe; the alternate Olivia develops a relationship with Peter, but she does so as part of her infiltration into our universe.

And then both Olivias return home.

I titled my first blog entry here, “Lovers, mothers, and... Oh” to draw attention to the fact that, no matter what else women in television may have going for them, they are almost always eventually reduced to someone's girlfriend and/or mother.

Apparently, Olivia Dunham is no exception.

After being kidnapped, tortured, and convinced by powerful drugs that she's the other Olivia Dunham, Olivia returns to our world and has a difficult homecoming—not because of the various traumas she's endured, not because she just left a mother dead in our world, but because Peter undertook a relationship with the other Olivia. With the exception of a single episode that at least acknowledges the disconnect she feels from her own life, Olivia spends a good five episodes pining after Peter and wondering how he feels about her. Of course it's possible, even probable, that she continues to have trouble readjusting, but we never see this. We never even see her sister or niece. Remember “Ability” and “Jacksonville”? Contrast that with season 3's “6B,” where she and Peter avert a similar disaster by appealing to romantic love and loss. Now that Olivia has a vibrant romantic interest, that is all her character becomes.

Things are no better for the other Olivia. After spending two months on a stressful undercover mission in a completely different world, she comes home in love with Peter and pregnant with his child. Although this pregnancy is potentially lethal for her and she almost aborts, a kidnapping and accelerated pregnancy come together to take that choice away from her. In a climactic birthing scene, she begs another male figure in her life to do anything to save this child, including sacrifice her, and it is pure luck that both child and loving mother survive.

Even Olivia's role as protector of our universe is undercut. It doesn't actually matter what Olivia does, we learn. Rather, Peter is destined to step into a doomsday device, and the Olivia he chooses will be the one whose universe survives. From this point forward, Olivia is no longer an actor in the narrative. She is an object for Peter to take or reject, and the idea that one or both might not even want to be with him becomes unthinkable. That Olivia, after all, would destroy her universe. And with so much of the story devoted to this love triangle, it seems unlikely that the show would suddenly swerve in another direction.

There is no will here for these two women, not on a narrative level. There is a woman, lover and mother, but an independent and fully developed character? She got lost somewhere around the episode where, ironically enough, a young woman's dead body became a literal marionette for her male admirer.

---

There is nothing wrong with a woman who loves her partner or a woman who has a child, and there's nothing wrong with such a storyline. When it becomes a problem is when these plotlines are taken for granted. Women want love, women want babies—the thinking goes—and so women do these things, without any attention to how this particular character might react to that situation while, simultaneously, to the other situations in her life. Such a reduction not only makes for offensive television, it makes for boring and recycled television. I've seen this plot, I know how it goes, and so have the millions of other viewers slowly trickling away from Fringe's plummeting ratings.

Over the course of the first two seasons, Olivia Dunham developed into a complex character with a life, with family, with a history, with her own personality. I miss that Olivia, rather than the one who smiles at Peter over corpses. I miss that Olivia, rather than the one who wonders not how to reconnect with her entire universe but, rather, only whether Peter loves someone else.

Ex-Con Romance: Straight Time and Revanche

     A decade before his role in Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman played a tough-talking ex-con in Straight Time (1978). With a thick head of hair and a walk that means business, Hoffman’s character flirts with women, jokes with men, and ruthlessly attacks anyone who dares to disappoint him. Fresh off a six-year prison stint at the start of the film, Max tries to pick up a woman working at a head hunter agency. Dialogue, editing and costuming chart the rise and fall of the characters’ relationship throughout the film.

     Positioned in center of the frame as he takes a typing test at the head hunter agency, Max wears a beige jacket, crisp, white shirt, black tie and khakis. The protagonists’ attire and placement in the frame highlight the importance of his task. In order to go “straight,” Max must get a job. The woman proctoring his test, Jenny (Theresa Russell), grabs Max’s paper as he tries to keep typing after time has run out. Jenny’s assertive move reveals the woman is no push-over. Dialogue quickly signals a playful twist in their interaction. After Jenny’s boss reprimands her for a phone-related mishap, Max asks Jenny: “Does she really like you as much as she seems to?” Featured in a medium shot, Jenny laughs and says: “I guess so.”

     Though initially placed in separate shots, Max and Jenny are increasingly positioned in two shots as they converse. This change in editing features Max and Jenny as a unit, foreshadowing their eventual romantic relationship. Dialogue reveals Jenny’s acceptance of Max’s troubled past. When the protagonist admits he just got out of prison, Jenny asks: “And how long did you hold that position?” Smiling in a medium shot, Max replies: “Approximately six years – no vacations.” Natural lighting suggests the sincerity of the characters’ interaction. Max seals the deal when he boldly asks Jenny:  “If I get this job, can I celebrate by taking you to dinner?”

     Costuming reveals the effort the characters’ put in to their first date. Max wears brown jeans and a brown dress shirt with a hip pattern; Jenny wears a crisp blouse with tight-fitting bell bottoms. Dialogue also emphasizes the growing connection between Max and Jenny. The protagonist admits he often imagined a “scene just like this” while in prison. “I never thought I’d be sitting here with knots in my stomach,” he confesses. The lengthy take of Max discussing his jail time in a medium close-up showcases the man’s vulnerability as he opens up to Jenny.

     The ex-con proves he can make the most of any awkward situation. When Max doesn’t have enough to cover the tip for dinner, he tells Jenny: “I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll go out with me tomorrow night, I’ll let you help me.” A close-up shows the characters’ hands touching under the table as Jenny slips Max the money. Camerawork reveals that romance is in the air.  

     In a later scene, a following shot captures Max as he enters Jenny’s house and walks to her bedroom. The shot reveals a shift in the couple’s relationship. Casually entering Jenny’s home in the early morning after he has been out all night using her car, the ex-con proves he has all the power in the relationship.  While the close-ups and two shots during the couple’s ensuing sex scene suggest a strong sense of intimacy between the characters, their bond is clearly beginning to deteriorate.

     During their next interaction, the lovers are consistently featured in separate, medium long shots. The characters’ distance to the camera and to one another exposes their feelings of mistrust and detachment. That Max is drenched in sweat following his gun theft is a far cry from the fashionable way he was dressed during the couple’s first date. Max tells Jenny: “I’m doing what I do. If you can’t take it…then I’ll just walk out the door.”

     The long shot of Jenny vomiting by the side of the road after she hears of Max’s bloody bank robbery signals the end of their relationship. Max’s efforts to go “straight” have failed; the ex-con must leave Jenny behind and face the consequences of his latest crime.

     The protagonist (Alex) in Revanche (2008) may not have hair like Dustin Hoffman, but he does have two things in common with Max from Straight Time – he’s a tough-as-nails ex-con engaged in unhealthy relationships with women. At the start of the film, Alex (Johannes Krisch) is in love with a hooker, Tamara (Irina Potapenko). The characters are always framed by vertical lines – a doorway or the walls of a shower – during intimate scenes. These framing devices showcase the couple’s romantic acts as spectacles. This technique also makes viewers highly conscious that they are watching these spectacles.

     Early on in the film, natural lighting streams through the window while the couple eats pizza naked on Alex’s bed. The lighting and the characters’ state of undress emphasize the profound trust Alex and Tamara have in one another. However, Alex’s criminal past does influence the way he treats Tamara. At one point in the film, Alex points a gun at her face. She asks: “What is this?!’ He says: “It’s not loaded.” They repeat the exchange; Alex bursts out laughing the second time he says: “It’s not loaded.” Tamara slaps him. Alex responds by lifting her up and tossing her on the bed, repeating: “You were scared” as he keeps laughing. Dialogue demonstrates the man’s sadistic side.

     Alex’s assertive statements also reveal his arrogance at the start of the film. “Nothing can go wrong,” Alex assures Tamara of his plan to rob a bank. “I go in, they give me the money, and we split,” he says. Unfortunately, a cop accidentally kills Tamara as he fires at the couple’s car when they speed away from the bank. The second half of the film follows the disturbing relationship between Alex and the cop’s wife (Susanne).

     The ex-con repeatedly uses aggressive language with Susanne (Ursula Strauss). However, multiple long shots showcase the woman watching Alex chop wood at his grandfather’s farm. The protagonists warns her to stop coming to the farm and visiting his grandfather. “Cake, music, dance, tra-la-la. I don’t want it,” he says dismissively. The camera slowly zooms in as the characters face each other. Dialogue signals a major shift in their relationship. “Then come to my house,” Susanne counters. “I’ll be alone tonight,” she says softly.

     Their first sexual encounter highly contrasts those between Alex and Tamara. Neither character is completely naked; dim lighting and the dinner table they comingle on make their act devoid of any emotional significance. That their second sexual encounter occurs on the small bed in the woman’s unused nursery (she had a miscarriage) is quite unnerving. The characters’ naked bodies appear unnatural against the powder blue wall paper covered in yellow teddy bears.

     The final interaction between Alex and Susanne is structured in a shot/reverse/shot pattern. That the characters are featured in separate shots as Susanne finally learns of Alex’s involvement in the bank robbery is an ironic touch. Their lives couldn’t possibly be more intertwined, yet editing exposes the complete emotional disconnect between the two. As Susanne breaks off their fling, she asks Alex: “What will you do now?” Alex replies: “Stay here if they don’t catch me.” Their final conversation sets one thing straight. Susanne will keep Alex’s crime a secret, and the ex-con won’t be telling anyone about his affair with the married woman.