On Language

Landscapes: The Wideshot

Landscapes at their best should be as tracking shots. The viewer's eye the camera -- moving from one point of emphasis to another, unable to grasp the composition as a whole with one simple glance. By doing this you are introducing time to what was simply space.

View of Toledo in a Storm, 1600/1610 by El Greco

The Shining, 1980 by Stanley Kubrick

Legacies

TRON: Legacy (2010)

Last year's TRON: Legacy marked a large step in our cinematic culture. It signified a loss of reverence for the images of the Hollywood vernacular. The question no longer concerns the ethics of exploring the boundaries outside the frame, but rather the boundaries of life and death (time and space) as they exist in the lexicon of our language of images.

We as filmmakers and as a culture have long since been able to see anything we want on screen. Any desire we wish to project can indeed be projected in light and shadows. What has stopped us from exploiting our seemingly limitless grasp of the computer generated image is an arbitrary sense of reverence; an ethical barrier that has, for instance, prevented us from remaking Gone With The Wind in glorious high definition with a cast of computer generated dead celebrities. These images are deified through memory. A fourth generation nostalgia attached to a period in time and a sense of aesthetics.

TRON: Legacy is a step in the right direction. A film that, without remorse, has resurrected a person that existed in a series of finite spaces (frames), and ceases to exist today outside of memory (however repeatable those frames may be). The Jeff Bridges of the past is pit in a duel against his present self, a self that now preserved ceases to age. A battle between a memory and a memory of a memory; essentially a mirror of Hollywood's duel of ethics. The comfort found in the inevitability of aging in our Hollywood relics ("the ethical") vs. the possibility of an ageless, imortal movie star ("the unethical"). The cinema has allowed us to defy the laws of nature, but we are now allowing ourselves to defy our misplaced sense of ethics concerning a reverence for the antiquated. Unwritten guidelines rooted in an invented nostalgia.

When we lose this reverence for the image we can break the image; opening it to deconstruction. The creation of a 'cinema of paradox.' Real/synthetic, aging/ageless, mortal/imortal, etc. Images that at one point existed simply as images (juste une image) now contain an inherent plurality, because of the paradoxes they suggest (une image juste). The cinema in coming years will find itself as a reference point for intersecting histories. A visual accumulation of all that preceded it, as well as the memories and nostalgia, invented or otherwise, that an audience will unwittingly project back towards the screen. The culmination of which is memory projected onto its signifier.

On language

Shot Reverse Shot

           (Some Like It Hot, 1959)

Shot                                                                              Reverse Shot

Establishing an object in a finite space.                Establishing an object in an implied space and
The  movement of the subject and                       time based on the image that preceded it. In

the camera suggest time.                                   reality both space and time are discontinuous

                                                                        in the service of  creating the feel of a          

                                                                        continuous reality. Students of Méliès, more

                                                                        so than human nature. 

              

In Review

A collection of notes from my notebook about films I saw once.

World's Greatest Dad (2009)

Bobcat Goldthwait is a filmmaker interested in asking questions both consequential and otherwise. 2006's Sleeping Dog's Lie asks the latter. World's Greatest Dad however tackles something very large and universal. The idea of creating histories, which suggests, more importantly the existence of multiple histories. Goldthwait acknowledges that history belongs to time not simply to a finite space; that it is ever evolving; that our histories belong to a larger social discourse.

From there he goes on to discuss the ways in which society will ultimately fetishize that history, which delivers it all the more to discourse, all the more to time, because we attach ourselves to objects from that history based on an arbitrary worth tied to nothing more than a sense of belonging. A moment is finite, a moment remembered, or more specifically a moment tied to an object is infinite.

Where Mr. Bobcat fails is in his attempt to fit his grand ideas into a plausible narrative language. So much in the film happens simply because it has to. The words in 'Kyle's' 'diary' effect society so deeply, not because they are beautiful, but rather because they need to in order for the plot to continue. Lance's confession occurs because the film needs to come in at ninety minutes, not because what we have seen up to that point had been building (psychologically or otherwise) to necessary catharsis. Goldthwait know his cinema history. He knows that films in which a character holds a deep dark secret must ultimately end in a confession, and so he ends him film as such, but does so without emotional context.

What ultimately ends up on screen are many thoughtful ideas, but ideas in the hands of a filmmaker not yet capable of adequately translating them.

Setups and Payoffs

Cease to look for payoffs and you free yourself from the language of traditional cinema and open your film to multiplicity and plurality. 

Pierrot le fou (1965)

Leprechaun (1993)

In 1993's Leprechaun directed by Mark Jones, mentally handicapped Ozzie inadvertently has his face painted blue, in what is surely the setup for some ensuing hilarity (not that the moment in and of itself isn't 'gaggy'). However as the film progresses that payoff never materializes. Thus, in retrospect, nor did a setup. No cause without effect. 

This as a result brings to mind a question of authorial intent, and without much delving into the visual history of the cinema it is clear that the physicality and combination of colors are a direct intertextual reference to Jean-luc Godard's Pierrot le fou. This recontextualization of image ironically (or perhaps not so) evokes the notion of juste une image/ une image juste, a concept coined by Godard. 

Seemingly every other image in Jones' film could be describes as juste une image, simply an image in a long 'image stream' meant only to give way to new images. All fitting neatly into a coherent cinematic language. A language that presents itself as a realistic continuation of time and space, but is in fact a fallacy.   

With une image juste an image is, in addition serving a function within a film, an allusion to a larger context; what Michel Foucault described as "a node within a network." This particular image in Jones' film exists both within the film, but also within a larger social and cinematic discourse, and as a result opens itself up to a plurality. It contains narrative meaning in Leprechaun, but also pulls into itself all meaning derived from Godard's image as well as any emotions and personal history the audience has with said image. It renders the cinematic image into a photographic one. An image unto itself, removed from time, or perhaps more specifically the rapid succession of images.   

Mark Jones deserves credit for creating an image that not only gives way to more images, but also allows us to project our own subjective meaning onto the projected image. The significance of this scene therefore exists more in the space between the projector and the screen. The space occupied by a beam of light, dust and a multitude of personal narratives. 

Pierrot le fou is the set up to Leprechaun's payoff within the context of Leprechaun's image stream.

'No Greater Love' in Miami

This past weekend I attended The John Paul II Film Festival in Miami. Out of my 'wheel house' to say the least.

The first film I caught was Michael Whyte's No Greater Love which is a documentary in (nearly) the purest sense of the word, that (observes more than) follows a convent of nuns in Britain's Notting Hill. The sisters, who have taken a vow of almost complete silence, move through the monotony of their day to day routine as the camera merely observes with an impartial reverence not necessarily for the work they do, but for the methodical mechanics of their bodies. We watch in long, unedited durations, as hands make communion wafers, backs ring bells, and throats swallow food. Each frame is full of movement, and sound wether or not the camera reframes or the sisters speak.
Additionally, very little judgment is made in terms of the importance of one event over another. Whyte photographs (in what Bordwell may refer to as a 'narrative' style) the funeral of an elder nun the same way in which he presents the gardening of green beans. In doing this Whyte plays with our conditioned sense of narrative rhythm, which in turn creates a film that is, much like life, constantly poised on the verge of climax. With a camera that judges all equally, any emotional resonance is purely subjective. If the film does indeed climax, in the traditional sense of the word, it is because of your own personal narrative, not through any manipulation of montage and song. This technique is indicative of a courageous fimmaker who has not yet given up on his audience. A filmmaker not in love with God, but in love with images.
The combination of Whyte's 'narrative' framing and the tenants inherent to documentary itself bring to mind the notion of pure cinema, or at least something very close to pure cinema. However, at the same time there exists an ever present awareness of the camera (e.g. zooms, visible editing), which then evokes the notion of selective framing, micro/macro-editing, etc. What this film ultimately does is remind us of the impossibility of a pure cinema.


The last film I was able to see was St. Bernadette of Lourdes. It is a re-telling of the story of St. Bernadette with an all child cast as if it were a elementary school play. The only reason I mention this film has to do with the extremely 'digital' look of its cinematography. When most are asked to picture the Virgin Mary the first thing that comes to mind is usually an artist's rendering from a painting, a statue, stained glass window, etc., but in St. Bernadette we are given a depiction of Mary in a purely modern medium; digital high definition. Though I know I am giving this film a bit too much credit, it has, for some at least (mainly the scores of children present at the screening), re-contextualized the way they view religious imagery; casting a very modern gaze on something so steeped in antiquity. Wether or not this choice was motivated artistically or economically is ultimately irrelevant.

Carney via Matisse

Yesterday I visited the MoMA for the first time, which happened to coincide with a traveling exhibit of various paintings and sculptures by Henri Matisse.

Having never really taken the time to study Matisse in my life leading up to this visit, I found myself forced to glean talking points from sparse texts and conversations between roaming art teachers and their husbands. What I, potentially incorrectly, overheard is that the focus of Matisse's early period concerned itself with breaking down the human form into basic, thick, deliberate lines and colors.

Application:
Parring film down to its 'essential elements' (space, light, time, etc...) and then building onto these elements interactions between people and other people as well as people and their environment, without building those interactions towards a narrative climax brings us closer to what Ray Carney describes as pragmatic art, an art that finds its value in the mundanity and repetition of daily living.

Er go, seemingly the only way to achieve a pure pragmatic form is to strip film of its defined narrative grammar. A film constantly poised on the edge of conclusion (much like life) without climax is the closest we can come to a sincere form, as it does little to manipulate what already exists within the confines of that existence.