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The Vancouver Art Gallery has published a beautiful book tie-in to their current exhibition Grand Hotel: Redesigning Modern Life.... It also includes an essay by me [ed., Karina Longworth], on hotels as spaces for class passing and sexual adventure in the Fred and Ginger musicals, particularly Top Hat. [via]
Inception (2010) + Paprika (2006) [via]
Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, both well-known for documenting the Civil War on glass-plate negatives, routinely cropped, burned, dodged, and manipulated their photographs to create more compelling scenes. Sometimes figures would be added in to portraits to help “complete” the story as was the case with Brady’s portrait of Union army generals. Gardner’s Home of Rebel Sharpshooter and Harvest of Death are both exact prints of the original glass plates. The manipulation here is plain old-fashioned. Gardner moved the bodies around for a better composition (Harvest of Death) and made use of some appropriated props (the “rebel” is resting near a union gun).
After a fashion, they do attempt to assimilate into European ways. "There's a very famous photograph of an American girl walking through Rome, wearing a peasant skirt," says Roth, who adds that that photo provided part of her inspiration for Cate Blanchett's character, who initially dresses like a "Marymount College girl," with gloves and a belted coat, and eventually evolves into a more worldly look, wearing vintage clothes all along the way. As for Paltrow, Jones says, "In the beginning she wears things that are carefree and bohemian, and as the movie becomes more serious, her style becomes streamlined and a little bit more severe." But for the most part, "The shapes of the skirts Gwyneth wears are long and full; once we established that that's what we wanted, we looked in every corner for the period clothes, and recreated some things from prototypes."
"The essayistic," Lee quotes a member of the collective Otolith Group, "is dissatisfaction. It's discontent." There are several points in Lee's essay -- inspired, in part, by his recent trip to the Flaherty Seminar -- at which I balk, but I prefer to let them sink in for a bit, and reapply them to the many classics of the form Lee quotes from. To make that easier, Criticwire has gathered links to every one of the film's Lee cites in his credits, most of which are available in full online.
Cinetrix, here. I was at the Flaherty Seminar along with Kevin B. Lee this summer, but I found several of the Otolith Group's pieces more problematic and facile the further I got from the immediate experience of them. Still, I learned about Fred Moten from them, so...
Related, at least in my mind:
To be fair, I hadn’t been educationally reared in the theory tradition. My background was all formalism and historicism, which is another way of saying that my undergrad professors had taught me to “close read” a film and figure out the historical things that made it what it was, but steered clear of theory. This meant that in my first weeks of grad school, I was making serious frenemies of Althusser, Lacan, and Derrida, whose French punning scarred me so badly that I shamefully still can’t return to it. Non-theoryhead-cheatsheet: these were guys who wrote about a.) how society works and/ or b.) how our own psychology/ subjectivity works.
I hated it. Not because it was hard, per se (I’d loved Calculus 3, and that was hard), but because it all seemed so knotted, esoteric, masculine. It felt like every guy who’d ever mansplained me, only he was French and using words that no one—not even SAT tests—ever used. It was Your Dad Talking About Investments + Your Boyfriend Talking About Fantasy Baseball to Your Friend’s Husband Explaining How Arcade Fire is the Linchpin of Modern Rock power.
To answer that third-year’s question: clearly, no, I was not a theoryhead. I wanted to bash my head against my theory book and go back to actually consuming the culture to which these dudes' theory was deemed so critical in unlocking. Part of the problem was the syllabus (according to this list, apparently no non-white, non-Western non-dude dude had ever “theorized” anythin) and part of it was the teacher, and my lack of experience, and general first-year paralysis.
Amy! (1980) Directed by Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen Duration: 30 minutes.
