Still pulling together my notes from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, dealing with end-of-semester student freakouts, and prepping for the Independent Film Festival of Boston (which starts tomorrow, although I won't get there until Friday this year). Here are some recent pieces, film related and not, that I enjoyed reading when I should have been grading.
- How to read costume on film: "Communication via costume can be employed to break the fourth wall, even if this device remains largely the preserve of avant-garde or antiplot films. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, though intrinsically a comic book adaption, plays with many forms of narrative interpretation. The ‘seven evil exes’, Scott’s conflict throughout the story, all bear a hidden number to denote their position within the villains’ hierarchy. An obvious example is Lucas Lee, ex number two, with two ‘Xs’ embossed on his belt. This is a message for the audience. Just another way that costume can enrich our viewing experience by reaching out and gently tapping us on the shoulder."
- Molly Young strikes again! "His shoulders are broad and his smile dazzling. Yet there is also something of the psychopath about him. Rob Delaney, comedian, recently tweeted: "I bet Bradley Cooper & Jared Leto text photos of women they've murdered to each other & have a good laugh". Over 100 people retweeted Delaney's speculation. Never mind Jared Leto for now. Whence Mr Cooper's creepiness?"
- Bordwell on Benning: "Twenty Cigarettes yields something different from the Screen Tests I’ve seen. Using the cigarette as a constant feature, pulling smoking out of its usual place in our habits and social exchange, denying the tradition that shows smoking as connoting attitudes and emotions in people onscreen, Benning enables us to watch, across some ninety minutes, faces that aren’t dramatizing themselves or sending signals. No stars, these folks, let alone superstars. No narcissism either." Smoke 'em if you got 'em.
- Mitt Romney, Men in Black fan. "When asked if he had a sense of timing for an announcement, he said, 'I have a sense, and I'd tell you. But I don't have one of those magic pens like they had on "Men in Black," where I could wipe out your memory.'"
- Yuri Tsivan's elegant reading of Vertov. "To return to an earlier point in this discussion (and to jump ahead to a later point in Vertov's career), there are quite a few statements (or slogans) of this kind planted across Man With a Movie Camera. That Man With a Movie Camera tells its story unaided by intertitles does not mean that our reading eye is left without work. Posters and street signs shout at us from almost every corner. Smaller inscriptions of different varieties—documents, instructions, or epitaphs—swarm Man With a Movie Camera like so many buzzing insects. We tend to pay no more attention to them than we do in real life, but this is our mistake: the film not merely transmits these words, it transforms them into stand-ins for the absent intertitles—so much so that one review included in this book even accused Vertov of cheating."
- In honor of Ebertfest, Roger Ebert's recent TED Talk about losing his voice.
- Via nymag.com, a clip from the documentary about Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, The Swell Season, which "follows the duo and their bandmates on the road as they meet their public. The film begins to show the slow tears in the fabric of Hansard and Irglová’s relationship — both with each other and with their newfound public identities.
- It's a petit planète after all. "In PASSENGERS, Marker has once again tracked his fellow human beings at their most unguarded and banal—nodding off after a hard day’s work, gazing blankly out the window and listening to an iPod, reading a book or a text message—and captured almost iconic images that linger in memory long after you have left the gallery. Anyone who has lived in a major city and taken the subway has seen these images before—but perhaps has never seen them before as images. The girl languidly resting her head against the window does not only exist in the Paris Métro—I have seen her in the subway in New York, I have seen her in a film that Marker made almost thirty years ago in Japan."
- Space is the place. "Nicholas de Monchaux, an architecture professor at Berkeley, dives into the archives to find out how the world's most high-tech garment was imagined, designed, and manufactured. What he finds is surprising: When you think of the Apollo spacesuit, you probably think of it as a piece of technology, but it's also, Monchaux writes, a piece of couture. In fact, the Apollo spacesuits were designed and manufactured not by a defense contractor, but by the consumer clothing company Playtex."
- Philip Roth drops science on the seventh art. ""Had I been away twenty years on a desert island, perhaps the change in intelligent society that would have most astonished me upon my return is the animated talk about second-rate movies by first-rate people which has almost displaced discussion of any such length or intensity about a book, second-rate, first-rate or tenth-rate. Talking about movies in the relaxed, impressionistic way that movies invite being talked about is not only the unliterate man’s literary life, it's become the literary life of the literate as well.""
