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Pads, Paws, and Claws

The Studio System: The Big Five and Little Three (circa 1927 - 1954) [via]

"Real tough guys don't need guns, they just need a positive, can-do attitude" [via]

Each method produces a distinctly styled work.  Maybe certain films would work better as sound movies.  Maybe certain sound movies would work better as silents.  Certainly, there are hundreds of films past 1960 that work better in black and white but were shot in color because that had become the default.  And many more that were shot in black and white that would probably work better in color.  But since they were filmed the way they were, attention was paid to lighting and sets and costumes to work with color or black and white so, again, it just doesn’t work to alter them after the fact.  So if filming in silence or sound, in black and white or color, are two such completely different things, doesn’t it make sense to keep them both going, to give filmmakers more options for how to tell their story?  And yes, I know that they can still do it that way if they want to, but when the industry abandoned the silents after the twenties, and black and white for major blockbusters after the fifties,  they cast the die for financial failure for anything that didn’t move with the times.

Cassettes represent a very specific window in history, having only been of widespread popularity for about 25 years, from the 70s to late 90s. They are wrapped up in nostalgia. Film depictions of cassette tapes and their decks have been surprisingly diverse.

Federico Fellini’s masterpiece 8 ½ celebrates its 50th anniversary this week, which means that on some level, a particularly meta-kind of cinema also celebrates its 50th anniversary this week. ... And it landed like an earthquake on the international film scene in 1963; unlike many other now classics (Vertigo, Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game, etc.), 8 ½ was acclaimed by audiences and critics alike right out of the gate. In fact, its influence has never let up. To give you an idea of how pervasive that influence is, here’s our list of eight things that (probably) wouldn’t exist without 8 ½.

The economics of DVDs make each release an event; with streaming, the event is replaced by a delightfully overwhelming and ever-growing plethora that rises in seemingly invisible increments. The general effect is a sort of madness, a mania of historicism that offers a seemingly endless realm of discoveries along with the sense that life itself takes second place to them. The heroic mode of the history of cinema is sacrificial: its great acolytes took on the burden of the form’s past in order to deliver their cinematic children, the next generation of filmmakers, from years of wandering in the desert, or vegetating in screening rooms—to free them to live their lives, and to film them. Ultimately, what is at stake in the mode of preservation and distribution of films from the history of cinema is the future of cinema. The refined passions excited by great movies (and the discovery of greats that are rare or obscure) are crucial to the future of the art, but with passion comes the danger of an inhibiting, obsessive devotion—a consuming passion, in both senses.

Cinephilia—as opposed to DVD collecting—is, on the other hand, quite different: I don’t collect objects and I don’t own any movies. You can watch three hundred movies a year (all in the theater on 35mm, of course) and you will never own anything except, perhaps, an ungainly pile of torn ticket stubs. Cinephilia is instead about collecting experiences, or maybe just the memories of those experiences. But since my memories fade and re-imagine themselves, perhaps I’m really only herding together a menagerie of illusions. I don’t have a relationship with objects, but a relationship with the ephemerality of the aesthetic experience.

...drive-ins aren’t simply a collection of outmoded lots fueled by the fumes of nostalgia and Teen Lust, but are a still vibrant iteration of a fascinating form of moviegoing, a series of independent businesses offering inimitable local color in the age of the multiplex, and, for those distant from urban parks showings of Mississippi Mermaid, a chance at that sublime delight of moviegoing in the open air.

If you think that your local drive-in is in trouble, you’re probably right. Find a drive-in near you and ask. You might find that 80 years of history is too much to lose due to a piece of equipment.

COPPOLA: ...Do you remember a film called Over the Edge [1979]? It was one of Matt Dillon's first films. It was about bad rebel kids in a bland community. It's a classic teen film. There's a scene where a girl dances around with a gun to the song "Surrender" by Cheap Trick. That's where the idea for that scene came from. That one wasn't dangerous—it was more cute. But for mine, that's the moment where either they're just being kids or it could go a lot darker.

From there, the action goes full throttle. Emma and Deedee hit and spank each other as the wind whips their pastel chiffon evening gowns through the air. It’s horrible, and also hilarious; I have no idea how to throw a punch, so spanking someone in the heat of the moment sounds pretty realistic to me. Emma screams that Deedee was “too busy screwing her head off” to focus on her career. “You bitch!” Deedee growls as she tries to beat Emma to a pulp with her purse.

You get the sense that these two women have never acted this way with another human being: so enraged, so sad, so embarrassing. The scene distills exactly what some close friendships feel like—the coexistence of resentment and affection, the lightning-quick transition between adoring someone and wanting to hurt them.

Arguably the most significant costume in the film is glimpsed during the next scene when Myra spies on Lily, a subtly leopard print headscarf, first in brown and then later red. The scarf is functional as a disguise but more importantly it becomes part of the narrative. This headscarf is central to The Grifters’ twist. Myra and Lily are soon to become irretrievably linked. Which leads us to Myra’s dress; the one that saves Lily and if the penultimate shot’s metaphor is to believed, subsequently damns her to Hell. Bridges confirms this suggestion:

‘The shot of Lily descending “into hell “ as you say was, as I recall, Stephen Frears’ homage to John Huston’s elevator shot in the black and white noir masterpiece “The Maltese Falcon”. I could be wrong but I think that’s what it was, and Richard’s colour choice worked beautifully for that shot.’

As a critic, I’m lucky to see films at studio-hosted screenings, but even those aren’t safe anymore. Last year, I got stuck beside a guy taking notes with a flashlight, which would go on and off whenever he’d scribble something. When I asked him to please shut it off, he was indignant. “How do you expect me to see what I’m writing?” he hissed. Learn to write in the dark like the rest of us, schmuck, so other people aren’t distracted by your light going on and off when they’re trying to pay attention to the movie. Colleagues of mine have gotten in shouting matches with people who wouldn’t stop checking their texts.

Welles en abîme

This clip fascinates me. It's a package surrounding a void, itself packaged around the Janus faces of Welles - cinematic boy wonder and garrolous late-night raconteur and pitchman - a tragicomic way to make the silent classics "new" somehow. The films-within-the-film are missing, represented instead by ricocheting signifiers - titles and stills. All that is left is the apparatus, where Welles, "beloved rogue," deftly employs misdirection and puffs of cigar smoke so we don't notice what we're not supposed to. 

[Also nice to see America's own Langlois, dumpster-diving savior/scholar of cinema William K. Everson, in the credits.]

Museum hours

Please keep the following information in mind as you plan your visit.

• Visitors should be aware that this is a dark installation featuring falling water. It is possible that you may get slightly wet.
• In order for the technology to work most effectively, visitors are discouraged from wearing dark, shiny, reflective fabrics, fabrics made of raincoat material, or skinny high heels.
• Children must be closely supervised at all times and visitors should proceed slowly through the installation.
• Rain Room is subject to close for brief periods during the day if maintenance is required.
• Photography is encouraged in Rain Room. Post your photos or videos on Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr with the hashtag #RainRoom, and they will appear in a live stream atMoMAPS1.org/expo1.

Only three hours from my summer stomping grounds. Trying to figure out how to get there...

Seances is a film shoot, an experience and an installation, which will subsequently become a film and an interactive work. The basic premise of Seances is that most silent filmmakers lost at least one film to a twist of fate. Ever since, these films have hovered like ghosts in search of their final resting place. And now Guy Maddin has decided to recreate these lost films. Every day, he will call on the spirits to take hold of the actors, plunging them into a deep trance that will enable them to act out the lost film of the day.

The most amazing part: the public is invited to attend these Seances of cinematic spiritualism. Cameras will be set up to transmit—live and in closed circuit—the shoot taking place inside the Phi Centre.

THE 18TH ANNUAL BOSTON FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 

Thursday, July 25, 2013  8:00 pm - 9:30 pm  Remis Auditorium, 161

The Dandelions (Du vent dans mes mollets) by Carine Tardieu (France, 2012, 89 min.). Sassy nine-year-old Rachel lives with her adoring but overprotective mother (Agnès Jaoui) and distracted Holocaust survivor father (Denis Podalydès) in 1980s provincial France. Rachel forms a bond with her eccentric child psychologist Madame Trebla (Isabella Rossellini) and a new best friend, wild-child classmate Valérie.

Proposed Cover Letters For Marina Abramovic's Summer Intern

• "Dear Marina, in addition to being familiar with Microsoft Office suite, and various social media platforms, I also happen to have the same blood type as you, which could be very convenient if you ever happened to need a transfusion."

• Save your nail clippings for 83 days. Mail them in an envelope with a single match.

• Send coordinates to a spot in the middle of the Black Sea, along with a time and date. Go there in a rowboat. She’ll come.

Like Finster, Sherer had grown up on a farm in rural Alabama. When he and his buddies arrived, almost immediately Sherer and the preacher wandered off to inspect the garden’s late-summer bounty, discussing how to prune grape vines and leaving Sherer’s bewildered city friends behind. Near the end of the day, Finster, who appreciated help making the wooden cutouts that were his hallmark, turned to Sherer and said, “So you’re pretty good with tools? What about a jigsaw?” Turns out the lanky kid with the New Wave haircut had grown up using jigsaws.

For the next few years, Sherer spent weeks at a time in the garden, camping out in a sweltering room inside the rickety World’s Folk Art Church, the grand four-tiered, wedding cake–shaped chapel that is the garden’s signature structure. He planted flowers, pruned vines, and dodged snakes. (After one harrowing escape, the trembling Sherer ran to warn Finster about a copperhead the size of a man’s arm. “Oh, him,” Finster replied.) The college dropout taught Finster art history from a tattered copy of Janson’s History of Art. Finster taught the young rebel about tolerance, ingenuity, and creative marketing—deliberately misspelling signs like “Seppents of the Wilderness” to amp up his kitsch appeal.

The visits served as rehab for Sherer, a refuge from the drugs and frenetic life of Midtown Atlanta. AIDS was starting to claim his friends—former classmates from the Atlanta College of Art, neighbors at Pershing Point, employees at Lefont—terrifying Sherer almost to the point of suicide. But in tending to Paradise, Sherer found salvation, if not of the eternal variety Finster espoused.

For a long time Finster didn’t suspect Sherer was gay. Once, Finster asked him to plant flowers around a little shack festooned with verses condemning sodomy. With passive-aggressive aplomb, Sherer ringed it with touch-me-nots. But the day Finster finally recognized the nature of Sherer’s relationship with his then-partner, the ever-garrulous preacher grew quiet. Finally, at the end of the day, Sherer says Finster came to him and announced, “A man has needs. I’m not sure it’s up to we mortals to sort all that out. It’s God’s work.”

...As he described his mentor nearly thirty years ago, “This is what you get when you cross an extraterrestrial with a Southern Baptist minister.”

One of my favorite museum spaces may be the inside of Joanne McNeil's brain:

As many pointed out after the Coachella performance, “hologram” is not quite the proper way to describe what occurred on stage. The projection was an updated Pepper’s Ghost parlour trick, like the kind you see in the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World®. The Musion Eyeliner begins with a projection from above facing down on a mirrored floor surface, which is then reflected on a transparent foil, angled forward away from the stage so it will appear invisible to the audience. Airport virtual assistants aren’t quite holograms either, but less complicated, these are rear projections upon flat sheets of glass.

The spectacle of an airport virtual assistant seems even more unsettling than Tupac beamed back to life from the dead. For rather than stagecraft, it is an object right in front of you, taking up space in the environment no different from an actual human being. It is easy to see why airports would favour these human-like models instead of simply broadcasting video recordings on ordinary flat screens. There’s something infectious about the hologram’s upbeat energy. One is tempted to smile back at the machine. And the novelty keeps your eyes on it. When I came upon another airport hologram more recently in Athens, I watched a small child run to it and try to reach up to grab it.

There is the pretence of a hologram as an individual—without a twin, either as a living person or as a duplicate product.

PUBLIC CINEMA DANCE PARTY!!!

Welles Welles Welles

Two sequences Brody chooses to discuss in this clip about Welles' visual imagination have long stuck in my craw/reminded me of the influence that Welles's then-recent radio broadcasting past had on his construction of son + image here. First is Jebediah visible as one source of the Greek chorus walla after the newsroom projector wheezes to a halt. Second is the lack of synchronization between CFK's bellow and his bellicose body in the "Sing Sing! Gettys!" sequence. YMMV.

"The major and longest-lasting close friendship of Orson Welles’s life was with one of his earliest role models — his teacher, advisor, and theatrical mentor at the Todd School who later became the school’s headmaster, Roger Hill. By editing and arranging many of their recorded conversations at the end of Welles’s life and career, Hill’s grandson, Todd Tarbox, has given us invaluable and candidly intimate glimpses into many of its stages, especially ones towards the beginning and end of that diverse and complicated saga. In the process, he also confounds and complicates the array of “weak” and flawed father figures that populate most of Welles’ films, all the way from Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons through The Trial, Chimes at Midnight, Don Quixote, and The Other Side of the Wind, with a bracing and ennobling alternative to that pattern, an unwavering relationship of mutual admiration and respect that was a clear source of strength to both of them. The portrait that emerges is not only one of Welles that is revised and corrected from the more mythical versions that we have of him, but also a look at Hill himself that is multifaceted, sturdy, and highly charismatic." 

H.J.: By the way, I was just reading ­Garson Kanin’s book on Tracy and Hepburn.

O.W.: Hoo boy! I sat in makeup during Kane, and she was next to me, being made up for A Bill of Divorcement. And she was describing how she was fucked by Howard Hughes, using all the four-letter words. Most people didn’t talk like that then. Except Carole Lombard. It came naturally to her. She couldn’t talk any other way. With Katie, though, who spoke in this high-class, girl’s-finishing-school accent, you thought that she had made a decision to talk that way. Grace Kelly also slept around, in the dressing room when nobody was looking, but she never said anything. Katie was different. She was a free woman when she was young. Very much what the girls are now. I was never a fan of Tracy.

H.J.: You didn’t find him charming as hell?

O.W.: No, no charm. To me, he was just a hateful, hateful man. I think Katie just doesn’t like me. She doesn’t like the way I look. Don’t you know there’s such a thing as physical dislike? Europeans know that about other Europeans. If I don’t like somebody’s looks, I don’t like them. See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m ­profoundly convinced that that’s a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. ­Bosnians have short necks.

H.J.: Orson, that’s ridiculous.

O.W.: Measure them. Measure them! 
I never could stand looking at Bette Davis, so I don’t want to see her act, you see. I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.

H.J.: I’ve never understood why. Have you met him?

O.W.: Oh, yes. I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge.

H.J.: He’s not arrogant; he’s shy.

O.W.: He is arrogant. Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is ­unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It’s people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. To me, it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world—a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic.

***

O.W.: I’m the opposite. It’s a question of age. In my real moviegoing days, which were the thirties, you didn’t stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night. Like you’d go in to have a drink at a bar. Every movie theater was partially empty. We never asked what time the movie began. We used to go after we went to the theater.

H.J.: You didn’t feel you had to see a movie from the start?

O.W.: No. We’d leave when we’d realize, “This is where we came in.” Everybody said that. I loved movies for that reason. They didn’t cost that much, so if you didn’t like one, it was, “Let’s do something else. Go to another movie.” And that’s what made it habitual to such an extent that walking out of a movie was what for people now is like turning off the television set.

Lens culture

Wolf spent literally hundreds of hours at his computer, trolling virtually around the world, looking for anything weird or bizarre that had been captured by the ravenous cameras mounted on the top of Google’s special GPS-coordinated Street View camera vans.

When he found an image that fit his project, Wolf mounted his own camera in front of his computer screen, cropped the part of the Google image that he wanted, and made his own picture of that picture.

The final body of work, which he titled, A Series of Unfortunate Events, is completely composed of selected personal calamities (in progress, or about to happen) caught by random chance by the automatic cameras of Google Street View roving vans from around the world — and the results are often quite astonishing and amusing.

It’s an obsessively clever idea, like high-tech dumpster diving, or sorting through junk at a flea market to find a hidden gem. But the “legitimate” world of photojournalists took offense at his award, and it therefore created quite a bit of controversy.

Can this really be considered “daily life” documentary photography when it was captured first by chance, and then again by someone glued to a computer in a darkened room, sifting through thousands and thousands of random images in search of only the quirky ones?

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• On noise: "Nobody would dare shut you up for making noise, I make as much noise as I want all the time."

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Gallimaufry

The View: A "Back-to-the-Camera Shot" Montage from Plot Point Productions on Vimeo.

And yet, there is unity in the montage. The only thing all the spectacles have in common is that they’re all being observed by the character/s. They all share objectification – spectaclification? – since they all sit just outside the character’s immediate orbit. The character is not in their scene, but always just outside it. Only their gaze connects them, and this helps us understand why the music is a non-diegetic soundtrack to their mind: it’s the sound of them trying to figure out what their view means, at the distance they’re at, while we’re using the same music to try to figure out what our view of their view means at the [even greater] distance we’re at.

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"There are many, many nouns for the act of looking – a glance, a glimpse, a peep – but there's no noun for the act of listening. In general, we don't think primarily about sound. So I have a different perspective on the world; I can construct soundscapes that have an effect on people, but they don't know why. It's a sort of subterfuge. When you photograph something it's a direct appeal to their most conscious sense and so they know that they're being a affected by what they see. Sound kind of sneaks in the side door."

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Watching these films, you realize there’s a simple reason Rogers was without peer as both a dancer and a comedienne.  Timing.  Where most good comedic actresses (and dancers) hit their lines at just the right moment, Rogers seemed to anticipate the next line by the slightest fraction of a second, while in actuality perfectly retaining the rhythm of the exchange.  She somehow implied she had already read her partner’s mind and was beginning to embody a response, before taking any action.  Just as she did when dancing with Astaire.

CLOSE-UPS  By 1963, more than 90 percent of US households have a TV. It’s an obvious place to advertise movies—and the new TV ads influence theatrical trailers. Widescreen vistas don’t look as good on smaller screens, so tighter, more condensed shots begin to appear.

One of several movies on this list whose creation was tumultuous enough to merit a whole book, “Tootsie”‘s gestation took about four years from start to finish, making for plenty of trade journal fodder throughout. The starting date for production was pushed back from February to April of 1982, a delay necessitated by a multi-month quest to come up with the right makeup and look for Dustin Hoffman in disguise as female actress Dorothy Michaels. On the set, Hoffman clashed endlessly with director Sydney Pollack. “For whatever reason, I think Dustin feels that directors and actors are biological enemies, the way the mongoose and the cobra are enemies,” Pollock told “The New York Times” in 1982. “I think if he would give a director half a chance, and not assume that the director is trying to kill him, he would see that most directors want exactly what he wants, which is the best possible picture.” Nearly a dozen writers pitched in, but bad feelings most strongly lingered between Hoffman and the late Larry Gelbart, who quipped of the experience “Never work with an Oscar winner shorter than the statuette.”

So Twilight Sparkle does the only thing she can to save Equestria – she follows the bad pony into the mirror. And, just in case you've ever wondered what an interdimensional wormhole looks like, here's your answer: it's like a million children have vomited Haribo into a branch of Claire's Accessories, but with more weird photobombing pig things....
Next, in a scene that definitely wasn't added because Hasbro knows that a lot of the My Little Ponies: Equestria Girls revenue will come from adult male brony fetishists, Twilight Sparkle gets down on her hands and knees and lets her dog mount her. Silly Twilight Sparkle! On this planet we put string around our dogs' necks and … no, wait, that's playing into the bronies' hands too. Disregard.

JP: Who and what do you see as your key creative influences and points of reference (cinematic and beyond) and why?

AB: Oh, who knows, I don’t remember anymore. As a kid you live in constant thrall to your influences and they’re always on the tip of your tongue. They’re all still in there now but they’ve just become like reflex. My ways of thinking about movies are, for better or worse, deep seated enough that I don’t bother to check on the fundamental principles anymore for continued soundness…

Successful films are made over and over again for the purpose of profit, generally at the expense of creative ingenuity or original storytelling. To wit, these franchises often derive from other media (and vice-versa): comic books in particular, but also videogames, action figures, young-adult fiction, board games, and television shows. They may be collated into roughly five types:

• Literary – franchises that originated in literature or printed media
• Comic – a subset of literary franchises, but this type warrants emphasis given that comics by and far make up the bulk of cinematic franchises
• Toyetic – franchises that originated as toys, specifically action figures, board games, videogames, or theme park attractions
• Televisual – franchises that originated as television shows or cartoon series
• Filmic – franchises that originated as a film and were made to proliferate primarily in cinema if not additionally in other media

When a franchise is successfully transitioned into cinema, it inherits greater renown and profit; when unsuccessful, the result is a sort of cinematic orphan, pitiable in its stunted resemblance to its more imperious blockbuster brethren. It is this sort of film that we deem the failed franchise, and the breadth of these is far-reaching.

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Love loves to love love.

Happy Bloomsday! (June 16 is also the day two kids impulsively got off the train in Vienna almost 20 years ago.)