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Cinema studies

Prompted by encountering the above images on Fette, this post kicks off with a brief reminiscence of a conversation on the lawn between screenings at the Flaherty Seminar. Apparently, toning down the sound of shepherds pissing was a necessary tweak prior to the PBS debut of Sweetgrass. 

Top, screen capture from Woody Allen: A Documentary, 2011, directed by Robert Weide, which aired on PBS November 2011 and featured an excerpt from Everything You Want to Know about Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), 1972, directed by Woody Allen, in which the 4000 X-sized breast terrorizing the countryside had been pixelated. Via. Watch the uncensored breast. Bottom, uncredited photograph of Woody Allen, giant breast, and crew on the set of Everything You Want to Know about Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). Via.

Two excellent film history posts by David Kalat, both on TCM's Movie Morlocks.

Giving it up for cinema originator Louis LePrince: "Some of Louis Le Prince’s films from 1888, three years before Fred Ott sneezed, still exist, and his designs for a camera and a projector also exist, as do some of the actual machines.  However, his sudden disappearance from the scene in 1890 removed him from the game."

Setting the record straight on the persistence of vision: "There is a neurological phenomenon that could be termed “persistence of vision,” but it has nothing to do with how we perceive movies.  After a visual stimulus, like a flash of light, the retina does produce an afterimage—but this retinal afterimage is not triggered immediately.  It does not continue from the original retinal reaction, as is presumed by the “persistence of vision” theory, but actually kicks in a little more than 1/50^th of a second later.  As we have already seen, in the span of 1/50^th of a second, the image has been removed and replaced at least once already, before the retinal afterimage has even had a chance to be involved in the process at all.  Furthermore, there are two retinal afterimages, the second of which is a negative version of the first—and both afterimages are sized differently from the original stimulus.  If the positive retinal afterimage had anything to do with the illusion of cinema, the negative one would surely cancel it out and ruin the effect.

Put simply, the conventional explanation for how movies work is just wrong."

Chris Fujiwara focuses on the zoom lens in a great piece that originally ran in Hermenaut 13 back in 1998:

The institutional use of the zoom in documentaries and TV news mirrors its underground use in home movies/video and pornography. Filmmakers zoom in on event-fields not subject to their prior control, like sporting events and impromptu encounters with politicians, celebrities, and suspects on live cop shows. But the opportunism with which the zoom greets reality is also a subjection, a submission. In zooming, the filmmaker confesses a powerlessness to intervene other than optically in an event whose flux s/he is doomed merely to follow. The filmmaker always lags behind the event: The zoom compensates for this delay, but it also registers it.

Matthew Battles on "Naming the Cinema," including these sweet column inches [above] from the NYT in 1898.

Gustavo Turner calls shenanigans on Sundance's decision to enshrine 1994's Reality Bites as an "indie classic."

It's interesting that Sundance, the ultimate example of an art organization co-opted by corporate media, will try to revive Reality Bites as an indie classic, not only because it's neither really indie nor, arguably, a classic, but also because the movie is so ostensibly critical of artists being co-opted by corporate media. The conflict between maintaining personal artistic integrity and selling out is at the core of Reality Bites from its opening scene. It's also at the core of the film's behind-the-scenes story. In fact, a probing, warts-and-all documentary about the making of Reality Bites would be a much better time-capsule artifact for the Sundance project than the film itself.

Sounds like a case for the Zigzigger's Michael Z. Newman, whose Indie: An American Film Culture I fondled at the MLA book exhibit in Seattle last week and fully intend to have our library order from Columbia University Press [excerpt here]. Go, thou, and do likewise.

Since J. Ho's shit-canning was announced, I've kept a tab open with Matt Singer's post on the lessons for film critics from his class with Hoberman. [The cinetrix also studied with the man, albeit not film criticism. Which means, if you'd like to know what it's like to watch Dances with Wolves and The Doors simultaneously, say, or about the myth of the spat-upon American soldier, I can regale you, thanks to Hoberman.] Some of the ones I especially liked:

On the fundamentals: 
“Ask yourself the question, ‘What do people want to know about a movie that they’ve never seen?’”

On plot:
“Plot synopses automatically ruin a review.”

On editors:
“Work with them for the good of the piece. Don’t have ego. Don’t compete.”

On digressions:

 “The longer the em dash, the weaker its impact.”

Palate cleanser! The New Girl and Jean-Ralphio sing "Tonight You Belong to Me" from The Jerk. Don't hate.

O.G. book blogger pal Sarah Weinman cuts through the Kael kvelling of late and brings us the other New Yorker film critic of that era, Penelope Gilliat:

But history, with its typical capriciousness, edited out some deeper truths: Gilliatt was a fine writer in her own right, her voice distinct but nothing like her co-critic’s. Where Kael forever showed how she “lost it at the movies,” delineating her taste with unbridled passion, Gilliatt's enthusiasm came through in elegant turns of phrase crafted with the same care she took with her fiction. To crib from the screen, Gilliatt was Glenda Jackson to Kael's Barbra Streisand, and their two wildly contrasting approaches to film criticism made the magazine a must-read in a way that Kael couldn't sustain by herself. Kael’s heyday came when she was sharing a chair with Gilliatt, and the magazine’s film section suffered from the younger critic’s controversial 1979 departure.

Wim Wenders plays Cinephile Supermarket Sweep at Criterion's offices.

REWIND THIS!

Mark Olsen looks past Midnight in Paris to 1988's The Moderns [currently streaming on Netflix]:

Instead of idealizing the past from a contemporary point-of-view, The Moderns uses the past to point to the present. In only a single shot (given a certain emphasis from its inclusion in the film's original trailer), the camera moves across a crowd of nightclub revelers to land on a bar populated by totally-'80s punk rockers in leather jackets, and rockabilly kids with clothes trimmed in Day-Glo. Just as Sofia Coppola included a quick glimpse of modern-day Converse high-tops in a montage of 18th-century shoes in Marie Antoinette, The Moderns looks to draw a line of continuity forward to what would have been the film's contemporary subcultural demimonde, as a way of saying, "This is about you, too."

Philly-based film pundits [including FOC Matt Prigge] take to the You Tubes to tackle the burning question, "Who is the meanest film character you've ever rooted for?" Well?

The preliminary program for the SCMS convention in Boston this March has been posted, if you're into that kind of thing. I, for one, am counting the days until I can dine with my fellow panelists at Wahlburgers.

The kids at TONY pull together the 50 best uses of songs in movies. Although I'm sure the absence of "Sister Christian" was an editorial oversight, right, guys? [RELATED]

Finally, Sam's Myth has "been posting some favorites and some mixes over at Cinema Sound, culminating in a two-part mix of 2011 film music. Part One is mostly ambient/electronic, to be enjoyed at night on a drive or while working or relaxing. Part Two is mostly orchestral in nature."

Red carpet reads

You know the drill: Some lowercase "e" entertainments that have shot across the bow. 

Anne Helen Peterson continues to kill it with her scandals of classic Hollywood movies columns. On Natalie Wood:

Wood didn’t have tragedy mapped on her body the way that Marilyn Monroe or Judy Garland did. The signs of her struggle were far less obvious, in part because her rise was less mercurial, her handling of stardom somehow more balanced. She was a survivor, as cliched and Hallmark-movie-of-the-week as that sounds, and at various points in her career wielded more power than any of her male co-stars. She wasn’t a tremendous talent. She couldn’t really sing or dance. But she was a sex symbol for twenty years in a time when "sexual" was simultaneously the best and the worst thing a girl could possibly be, and she lived to tell the sad, screwy tale. And that, more than playing opposite James Dean, more than working herself into a true frenzy of repressed sexuality inSplendor in the Grass, evidences true talent. Not as an actress, per se, but as the makings of an image that will continue to endure.

And on Cary Grant:

During this first period of success, Grant had been living, on and off, with an actor named Randolph Scott. Grant and Scott had met on the set of Hot Saturday, where both men played suitors to the same leading lady. The two hit it off immediately and shared an apartment until Grant’s first marriage in 1934. After Grant’s divorce, it was 24-hour bro-time, and the two rented a sprawling seven-bedroom Santa Monica beach house, widely known as the “Bachelor Hall.”

Here’s where it becomes unclear whether Grant was just making fun of nosy gossip columnists or actually bisexual. The two had women over all the time — but hey, George Clooney also has many, many (vetted) girlfriends, and Tom Cruise has been married three times. Gossip columnists warned that the couple had “taken things too far”: while other stars posed for fan mag spreads with their wives, Grant and Scott reveled in homosocial domestic bliss.

Chillaxing on the diving board!

Doing a little light reading!

But perhaps my favorite movie content on The Hairpin of late was the War Horse illustrated review by longtime horse-lover Lisa Hanawalt. Just a nibble of the equine excellence:

• If you explain how important something is to a horse, it will understand you and do that thing!

Over on brother site The Awl, "Mission Impossible": I Don't Understand How Tall Everyone Is

Tom Cruise and Jeremy Renner are the same height.

Ving Rhames is six feet tall.

Simon Pegg is taller than Tom Cruise.

Or is he.

Slow-clap props to Onion AV Club's Scott Tobias for this grade F review of the movie attached to one of the most noxious trailers I've seen in ages: 

it will always be “too soon” for Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, which processes the immense grief of a city and a family through a conceit so nauseatingly precious that it’s somehow both too literary and too sentimental, cloying yet aestheticized within an inch of its life. It’s 9/11 through the eyes of a caffeinated 9-year-old Harper’s contributor.

Slate recently ran an article on Vachel Lindsay that never once mentioned The Art of the Moving Picture. Guys, did you know the brother wrote poetry? 

Ideographtastic: The 1990s and 1980s film alphabets.

Via The Gibsonian Institute, this 1986 promo for an ill-fated Neuromancer adaptation,

Vote for your favorite Focus Features on Facebook in honor of its 10 anniversary.

Costume drama fans who've ever wondered, "Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? If so, when did American accents diverge from British accents?" Wonder no longer!

Finally, props for selecting the following as one of 2011's most memorable movie moments:

This extraordinary exchange, between the cheerful 80-year-old subject of Bill Cunningham New York and its director, Richard Press:

Press: So I’m going to ask you two very personal questions you may or may not want to answer. It’s completely up to you. Have you ever had a romantic relationship? In your entire life?
Cunningham: [Laughs delightedly.]Now do you wanna know if I’m gay?
Press: Yes.
Cunningham: [Laughs.] Isn’t that a riot. Well, that’s probably why the family wanted to keep me out of the fashion world. They wouldn’t speak of such a thing. [Pause.] No. I haven’t.
Press: Never in your entire life.
Cunningham: No. It’s never occurred to me. I guess I just was interested in clothes. That’s the obsession. It’s probably a little peculiar.
Press: Is that something you regret?
Cunningham: No, I wouldn’t even think about it. No, I don’t regret it. There was no time! I’m working night and day! No, it was—in my family, things like that were never discussed. So it hasn’t been in my head, on my mind, I wouldn’t have known a thing about it. So they needn’t have worried. Years later I surmised that that must have been in the back of their minds.
Press: But you’ve had good friends.
Cunningham: A few people that I’ve known, yes. Oh, you mean—
Press: Just friends.
Cunningham: Oh yeah, yeah.
Press: Antonia was a dear friend.
Cunningham: Oh, I love those kids!
Press: And Suzette.
Cunningham: Yes. I suppose you can’t be in love with your work, but I enjoyed it so much that I didn’t—yeah. But hey, listen, I am human.
Press: Exactly.
Cunningham: [Laughs.] You do have body urges or whatever but you control it as best you can.
Press: And the other question is, and again you don’t have to answer this, but: I know that you go to church every Sunday.
Cunningham: Oh yeah. [Lowers head.]
Press: Is religion—is that an important component of your life? [Cunningham begins quietly weeping for 20 seconds. Outside the apartment, a horn honks.]
Press: We don’t have to talk about this.
Cunningham: Yeah, I think it’s a good guidance in your life. Yeah, it’s something I need. Yeah, I guess maybe it’s part of your upbringing, I don’t know. Whatever it is. You do whatever you do as best as you can work things out. I find it very important. [Laughs.] As a kid I went to church and all I did was look at women’s hats! But later, when you mature, for different reasons.

 

2012

...is going like this so far.

How's by you?