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Phantom of the dial-up

Lillian Schwartz's animations emerged out of collaborations with Bell Labs scientists; Quebecois filmmaker Caroline Martel built her movie around the industrial films commissioned by Bell Canada. In their honor, I give you, dial-up sound 700% slower. Delicious. Creepy. Epic. Enjoy!

Sound off

Hie thee to Lillian Schwartz's YouTube channel and immerse yourself in her bad-ass artistry. Her pioneering computer animation was my number one revelation at this year's Flaherty Seminar: Sonic Truth. [Related: an ongoing visual study of computer GUI in cinema.] And now, as promised, a particularly sonorous collage of links, presided over by the beneficent image of Lillian back in the day.

• One of many links from the super-excellent sound studies blog Sounding Out!: The Treachery of Sound in Comic Books. "The most famous use of comic sound effect words is probably from the old 1960s Batman TV series—where the “SOCK!” and “BONG!” of superhero and sidekick reinforced the campy aesthetic of the program. It is telling that the Batman-theme (and the fight scenes in general) uses horn flares to emphasize those “POW!” and “BIFF!” moments. The suggestion is that the ostentatious representations of sound that these textual flare sound effect words provide are an empty signifier. There is no soundbehind that sound."
• Brainiac notes the prevalence of sonic skeuomorphism and "comfort noise" in daily life: "A car door is essentially a hollow shell with parts placed inside it. Without careful design the door frame amplifies the rattling of mechanisms inside. Car companies know that if buyers don’t get a satisfying thud when they close the door, it dents their confidence in the entire vehicle.... To produce the ideal clunk, car doors are designed to minimise the amount of high frequencies produced (we associate them with fragility and weakness) and emphasise low, bass-heavy frequencies that suggest solidity."
• "One time, a friend told me he refused to listen to music on the NYC subway because he would miss out on all the interesting conversations that take place in subway cars. He made me feel a little self-conscious, frankly; my white headphones were a sign of distinction and, dare I say, musical snobbery. But his comment made me realize that when we put our headphones on, we are doing more than setting up our soundtrack: we are tuning out the world around us, and in that act we are exercising the power to not listen to others. When we or the people around us blast their music, maybe that is what they want: to be heard. In the loudness of their music there is a subversive element, subversive because it demands to be heard. If music oftentimes reflects who we are, in playing music in public we are sharing it with others, and expressing it in a loud manner. It may seem rude, but it becomes an expression of self from which you can’t run away. When we listen to someone’s music across the subway car, we’re listening to them."
• Leah Churner asks what happened to the Hollywood musical? One of her answers: the 1970s movie brats."The following decade was even more inhospitable to the Hollywood musical—even those created by hot young directors in touch with the zeitgeist. In fact, when we examine the most repercussive financial flubs of the big New Hollywood directors in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, a pattern of musicals emerges....If a less debauched production, The Wiz was a tremendously consequential financial failure: the film was largely blamed for the demise of black-cast American movies in the ‘70s. However, as Spike Lee noted in a 1991 Playboy interview, 'the blame was put solely on “black people who failed to support this film.” Whereas, if a white film doesn’t work, it would be the director or whoever.'"
• Speaking of The Wiz, was no one else alarmed by this aspect of the upcoming Lumet retrospective at Lincoln Center? "This dynamic adaptation of THE WIZARD OF OZ features an all-star cast and toe-tapping soundtrack. Set in 1970s New York, the film stars Diana Ross as the timid Dorothy who gets swept away to the Land of Oz for a journey of self-discovery. With its spectacular Art Deco-meets-disco landscapes, costumes by Oscar de la Renta and Norma Kamali, and music by Quincy Jones, it's a treat for all ages. Nominated for Academy Awards for art decoration, cinematography, and score. The film also stars Michael Jackson as ‘The Scarecrow’ and Richard Pryor as ‘The Wiz.’ THE WIZ screens Saturday, July 23 at 10:30AM in a special Movies For Kids presentation."
• "My summer sound studies A-V list encourages you to fill your idle hours watching the “top 6″ featured appearances of the magnetic tape recorder in film, in chronological order (2 each month, with a bonus “supporting role” nod rounding out each post). Not only will “Play it Again (And Again) Sam” help you beef up your cinema buff credentials, but it will trace a little-known history, asking you to consider how the recorder tangled its thin brown plastic tape so effectively into the warp and weft of our twentieth-century lives. You’ll find that my “top 6″ list reveals much more human desire than technological determinism; the representations I examine express a complex mixture of fear and fascination, optimism and regret, change and stasis. Often a tool of the powerful, sometimes a weapon of the weak, the tape recorder was a cold war domestic product that could never truly be domesticated. As you will see in this spoiler-free three part series, interactions with the tape recorder remixed America’s workplaces, schools, homes, public spaces and private moments, ultimately shifting how the world was heard (and heard again and again)."
• Time for another film break! The brain-bending "Multiple Sidois."
• Finally, a topic near and dear to my heart, upon which I could squander hours, courtesy of The Awl: Best Movie Closing Songs, in Order. Let me know what the author or the commentariat may have missed in the comments, s.v.p. ASIDE FROM THE ABSOLUTELY SUBLIME AND TRANSCENDENT USE OF THE O'JAYS' "LOVE TRAIN" AT THE END OF THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, THAT IS.

 

Credit crawl

The Internet really piles up when you take off for a week to watch 80+ movies and drink and stay up all night. Here are some items that caught my eye from my lost week at the Flaherty Seminar.

• One Connecticut theatre schooled its patrons on patience with Malick. No refunds!
• The Taiwanese animation geniuses broke down the latest Ebert Twitter kerfuffle.

• Defying all expectations, the new BRITNEY SPEARS video is chockablock with knowing winks to Friday, The Terminator series [why, hullo there, Skynet!], and, well, what you see above. I love it.
• Speaking of bring-backs, nymag's Vulture kicks off its Nostalgia Fact-Check series by seeing how Heathers holds up: "Ryder is especially wonderful, so inherently likable that she makes you want to defend her horrible choices (she didn’t want to kill Kurt!) and working the quirk (that monocle, those shoulder pads, the excessive diary writing) without letting the quirk work her. Zooey Deschanel, take notes?"
• David Thomson wants us to take down the Hollywood sign: "Hollywood thinking still wants us to trust that good-looking people are good; that you will fall in love and get a happy ending; that women are seen, while men watch; that desire and dreaming are necessary pursuits that take precedence over evidence and reasoning; that justice will be done, very likely with a gun; that stories are resolved and heroes are sound; that you can understand experience just by looking (so keep everything cinematic); that shopping can make you whole and clean (think of Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman”, one of Hollywood’s fondest love-letters to itself); that, in the land of the free, celebrity is a hallowed state, instead of the madness waiting for a Charlie Sheen."
• Grantland's Molly Lambert does a reverse think piece on Bad Teacher: "Just because Cameron Diaz and Christina Applegate starred in The Sweetest Thing, the Ishtar of raunchy female comedies, doesn't mean you couldn't make a great Diaz- and Applegate-starring raunchy female comedy.... Romantic comedies that don't insult women with assumptions about their priorities and life goals are few and far between. One of the best romantic comedies in recent memory was actually Anchorman, in which Ron Burgundy learns that his pride is less important than expressing his love for a woman who is better at his job than he is. But then everybody from Anchormangot cast in other movies except for Christina Applegate. Studio executives saw it and said, 'Hey, get me the guy who plays the guy who eats the candle.'"
• Oh, haaay, Peter Greenaway!
• Cinematic scion Sofia Coppola got to collaborate on Louis Vitton's Resort 2012 collection. According to T & Lo: "the resulting collaboration looks like, well, like Sofia Coppola’s wardrobe. That’s definitely not a bad thing because she’s a stylish lady in her own right and while the collection sometimes bounces all over the place, the overall effect does feel like it all came out of one woman’s closet. It also feels a bit like you just stumbled upon the most amazing vintage clothing store in the world. It has a very ’60s and ’70s Paris feel to it; chic and urban, with some references to the ’30s and ’40s. We love the cloche hats, short shorts, cutout skirts and overall sporty feel to the collection. Colorful, fun, and girly."
• Film the blanks: "A series of prints based on famous film posters with the information deconstructed to minimal blocks of colours, leaving a surprisingly recognisable set of striking and iconic images." Here's "I've been to Vidal Sassoon" Oh so clever.

• Finally, this semi-recent contribution of four frames from Zabriskie Point to Movies in Frames made me giggle. See, almost exactly a year ago, while we were in the city essentially overnight so he could act as a judge at Meatopia on Governor's Island one Sunday, the 'Fesser tagged along with me on Saturday night to [redacted film critic]'s birthday party at [redacted filmmaker]'s sweltering loft in the way West Village/Chelsea-ish hinterlands. While we film-y types all threw copious amounts of booze down our throats, in accordance with the traditions of the tribe, the 'Fesser amused himself by playing faux-naif. For some reason the Antonioni flick was on -- for atmosphere? -- so he whiled away the time asking all and sundry, quite earnestly, why we were watching a [mit out sound] Burning Man documentary on the enormous flatscreen TV. It was awesome.

TK, a special Sonic Truth-related link dump!

Shudder speed

Too many tabs open for far too long. Time to show and tell. Starting with the "Running Up That Hill"/"Sign o' the Times" mashup above. (via) Savory!

There's also a lot of deliciousness to be had from this Four Tet mixtape.

And I had forgotten the giddy fun of Bellflower, which I saw late one night at the Independent Film Festival of Boston this spring. (via)

The cinetrix has mostly stayed the fuck out of the ongoing fray vis-a-vis critics, vegetables, and whatever. The exception being finally reading smart Geoff Dyer's 2009 Guardian piece on Stalker. Particularly love this idea:

It would be interesting to compile a list of the first words spoken in films and run the results through a computer. In this instance they are spoken by the wife: "Why did you take my watch?" The film's only just started, she has just woken up and, from a husbandly point of view, she is nagging. No wonder he wants out! But of course we're also getting the big theme introduced: time. In effect, Tarkovsky is saying to the audience: "Forget about other ideas of time. Stop looking at your watches, give yourself over to Tarkovsky-time, and the helter-skelter mayhem of The Bourne Ultimatum will seem more tedious than L'Avventura."

And this bit of cheek:

After the Stalker leaves, his wife has one of those sexualised fits of which Tarkovsky seems to have been fond, writhing away in a climax of abandonment. He, on the other hand, like many men before and since, has gone to the pub. He's not there to meet his mates - this is not Distant Voices, Still Lives - but the people he's taking into the Zone. From the bar they can hear a train, can hear that lonesome whistle blow. So there are hints, here, of a heist movie - the Stalker being lured back into the Zone for one last job - and of a sci-fi western (ie "eastern"). They leave the bar, begin their journey into the cinematic unknown.

On the whole, though, much more fun than probing the critical omphalos is reading the Boston Globe's Ty Burr's weekend movie picks from last Friday, reproduced here almost in its entirety:

I have no idea what this movie is about other than Ryan Reynolds lightly smirking his way through a plot that combines the DNA of the dogfight scenes in "Top Gun," the Cantina sequence in "Star Wars," and the pick-up scene in "Superman," and manages to insult all three. Even "Top Gun," which is difficult. Kudos to Mark Strong for playing the part of a parboiled maitre'd with a pencil-thin moustache and an attitude. Double kudos to Blake Lively for her impersonation of a plank.

Servicey!

Finally (for now), this New Year, I resolved to give up reading comment threads. I slip up sometimes, but talk about an enhancing quality of life decision! Only two sites are exempt: The Hairpin and its brother blog, The Awl. Which brings me to the latter's Movies Written or Directed by John Hughes, in Order. 

 (via)

TTFN

Flaherty 2011: Sonic Truth

Greetings, kids, from Colgate University, where the annual Flaherty Seminar (#flaherty11) has been rolling since Saturday night. Les Blank is here. Sam Pollard is, too. The theme around which this year's programmer, Dan Streibel, has built the week has so far manifested itself in Singapore, on Market Street, on the bayou. There have been sing-alongs, contra dancing, a bonfire, a performance on the ondes Martenot, and a revelation: Lillian Schwartz and her computer films of the late 60s/early 70s. Holy SHIT, people. Her films "duetted" with those of the excellent Jodie Mack.

Plus, Caroline Martel is here. Heart her.

There's also a thread of tribute to the recently deceased Ricky Leacock running through the programming this week, including examples of his shooting from the mesmerizing Jazz Dance (1954) and wonderfully hokey 1947 folk music revival doc To Hear Your Banjo Play (treat yourself and check out its credits). And did I mention the barbecue? It's about to start and I could sure use a beer -- I haven't been to bed before 3 a.m. in days and need to start cutting through the caffeine that's been the only thing keeping my systolic system from utter collapse.

I leave you with what greeted us at the start of the first full day of screening: Marvin Gaye seducing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game, directed by Sam Pollard.

To ourselves... new paganism... omphalos.

He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his
winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh
wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.

Happy Bloomsday, all! And a special shoutout to elated Bruins fans today:

--Hockey!

They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them. Quickly
they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and
clamour of their boots and tongues.
Which is to say, YES!