Like Kathryn Bigelow, recipient of the Oscar for Best Director, I’m utterly speechless.  Last night the Academy decided, under pressure from the big moneymakers and unique genre films, to select the best-made film for best picture.  Going into this, I was almost certain that it was going to be Kathryn Bigelow for Best Director and Avatar for Best Film.  I am so glad that I was wrong.

To quote Jake’s succinct and neatly-put Facebook summary:

“All and all, not a bad oscars. The best film won, a woman won best director, avatar won the stuff it actually did well, up in the air went home empty-handed… Mo’Nique is awesome, maybe Sandra Bullock can adopt her?”

Last night may prove to be a turning point for the Oscars, in which discerning judgement came back into the game.  The Academy made a call not to act as the “People’s” (that’s a capital-p) award , or as the “Industry” (that’s a capital-i) award, but as an award given by a body of artists in Hollywood.  There was chatter in the bars, there was word of mouth, and there were actual opinions of the work produced in 2009.  That — not an Oscar campaign — gave out the Oscars last night.

One could make an argument that Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar was nothing if not political, but Hurt Locker’s best picture Oscar was not.  Last year, Slumdog Millionaire won out of an odd mixture of guilt and sentimentality–the same mechanism that pops in our brain when we see poor and starving children on the streets.  It had little to do with the filmmaking and much to do with triumphalism of a little film that could take down the big dogs to win the awards.

Avatar was essentially a special installation at the Universal Studios Orlando theme park.  It was a 3D visual feast, and big-screen entertainment in its fullest incarnation.  But it never attempted to identify itself within the tradition of Hollywood and the film arts; that was James Cameron’s hubris.  He complained that the press never took his actors seriously and that there was a conspiracy to belittle motion-capture technology.  You can’t have it both ways, Jimbo.

The Hurt Locker is not a perfect film.  Kathryn Bigelow is not a perfect director.  But sometimes, the Academy manages to act as a legitimate voice and point out excellence in filmmaking.  And when that happens, it’s a good night.

Friends don’t let friends trip alone.  The inexplicable terror of the otherness of time, to borrow the cocktails-at-seven phrase from Freud, has overwhelmed this television ad in many ways.  Forty-odd years later it seems like an odd relic of some civilization of indeterminable musical taste and choice in travel.  Most haunting of all might be the realization that it was our civilization.

The color has faded from time; most color film shot between the 1960s and 1980s didn’t have the chemical additions to hold the complementary red and blue tints for tungsten and daylight film.  I don’t even know how to address the sound.  All I can imagine is that it was an intentional, cartoon voice meant to …. I have no idea.

This was produced in 1968/1969 when advertising firms had begun to experiment with subliminal and unconscious advertising, and perhaps they felt that running children in various states of ecstasy could reflect the joy of the INTER-nation-AL HOUSE of PAN-cakes, as the helium-induced voice emphasizes.

It’s standard ad-fare once we get inside.  Mom is attractive and Dad is happy with the prices while the kids salivate over their late-afternoon breakfast menu.  The familiar coffee pots are there.

This is a cultural cadaver, but a fruitful one to pick over.  Let’s examine IHOP for a moment through the years.

1983

In just ten years the entire dynamic of IHOP has changed.  No more running through the fields with the mysterious balloons, no more jingles.  What has taken its place?  The Rooty-Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity.  A catchy item, an idea on the menu that stands in place for the entire experience.  Also, notice the hypnotic power of the continuing zoom-in of the plates.  Remind you of anything?

Correct!  The hypnotic spiral; we’re being hypnotized by our breakfast.  But most importantly, we’ve swapped an obviously idealized experience for an everyday collective experience.  Not only is everyone already familiar with the lure of the Rooty Tooty, but they’ve all put effort (obviously after much private discomfort) into preparing a solution to their embarrassment.

1989

Now we have been taken out of the IHOP and into a neutral area with only two signifiers:  the (gorgeous) IHOP waitress and the Rooty-Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity.  We are still exploring the conceit of people being embarrassed to order the Rooty-Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity, but the experience has been broadened to a comment on national desire.  Because we are not inside a restaurant (or any defined space), we are in a proverbial dreamworld — a collective unconscious mind.  ”They love the breakfast,” the waitress says, “they just hate the name.”  We the viewers are now members of an undefined ‘they’.  We have breakfast everyday and love the breakfast at IHOP.  It is silly yet subtle.

The spiraling hypnotics of the food still remain, but other subliminal touches have been added too: notice how many times the waitress (she really is beautiful, and not in the ‘let’s put girls in bikinis in this!’ commercial way¹) repeats the word “breakfast”.

Present Day

We have reached the age of immediate gratification, of food pornography.  ”Come hungry, leave happy.”  Nothing could be put simpler.  For a restaurant, this is the bare minimum that attempts to communicate a near categorical imperative.  (Hospitals should be so wise:  ”Come sick, leave happy.”²)

We’re a long way from the balloons in the field because it would be such a hassle to get up and drive there.  There’s something inexplicably terrifying about having to actually wander out there and wait in line.  The collective unconscious has sat on the couch and is quite happy there.

And ordering in sounds so good.

______
¹I can’t believe I have a crush on an IHOP waitress from 1989.  I would have been three years old.
²Note the language!  You’re not leaving well, you’re leaving happy.  You could still be sick and dying, but if you’re happy…

Video artist Amy Greenfield was recently informed that Youtube would be pulling her work from their website. She was told that “her works, which contain some artistic nudity, did not conform with YouTube’s ‘community standards.’ Under YouTube’s policies, ‘Films and television shows may contain [full nudity]; however, videos originating from the YouTube user community must abide by the YouTube Community Guidelines and are not permitted to include such content.’” Though Youtube has now reversed their decision thanks to efforts from the EFF and the National Coalition Against Censorship, I fear the issue is far from over. I found out about the story through BoingBoing, where one reader identified only as pjcamp commented: “I’m having a hard time telling the difference between artistic nudity and busty.pl[.]” I’m having a hard time deciphering “busty.pl,” but what intrigues me about pjcamp’s comment is how magnificently it manages to miss the point completely.

Youtube isn’t protecting anyone from “busty.pl,” though it might appear so. What’s happening, instead, is that Youtube is continually serving the interests of “films and television shows.” These, to be sure, aren’t your films or the tv talk show you and your friends record every Sunday night: “films and television” shows are films and television shows from networks, studios, and distributors that have a serious financial worries about how their media is viewed. Since Amy Greenfield wasn’t one of those, her work got axed–though, presumably, if it had been from the film Young Adam starring Ewan McGregor, Youtube wouldn’t have thought twice. That’s what is dangerous about Youtube: its interests couldn’t have less to do with you. The question is not one of moral censorship but rather of financial censorship: Youtube isn’t barring nudity, they’re just not allowing it if you aren’t distributed by Fox Searchlight. It’s a question, all the same, about what we’re allowed to see.

There are always films that fall through the proverbial cracks in every filmmaker’s viewing library, well-known and applauded films that we have claimed to have seen but actually have on our I’ll-eventually-sit-down-and-watch-it list.  We all have these lists, myself as much as anyone.

Which is why last night, thanks in part to the wonderful advent of Netflix, I decided to start crossing a few films off the list with weekly double features of missed works. It certainly didn’t hurt that my girlfriend was out of town and I could unapologetically choose which films to watch.

I’m approaching these posts as impressions more than appraisals.  I’m not going to write up synopses or review the filmmaking.  The films that I’m going to watch are classics that have just passed me by — I’m choosing the ones I’ve heard are magnificent, and it follows that they are going to deliver on the promise. For this first week’s double feature, I chose to kick things off with a triple feature: Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park.

Badlands (1973)

I liked Badlands, and I think what hit me most was stealing a glimpse of Malick before he became the enigma.  The early work of filmmakers is encouraging because you’re allowed to see how their styles and obsessions developed.

The tactile, film-school shooting style of the opening looks and feels like a great microfilm:  taking a tiny plot and carefully, almost invisibly inverting it to create a macronarrative.  All three of the films I watched did this (in very different ways).  This is the quality that most student films (which this technically was, since Malick began it while still at the AFI) strive for but miss. In fifteen minutes, a (believable) romance is sealed.  Well done.

The film is the most perfectly crafted vision of a nightmare.  Malick never goes for the easy blows that most horror films relish; there’s more terror in following the inexplicable to its inevitable end.  Martin Sheen’s Kit is a maniac who manages to sound like he’s giving real common sense advice every time he defends himself.  Sissy Spacek’s Holly is bizarrely, horrifyingly, passive.  What’s best about the film, is that it never injects any morality or ethos into the narrative.

I wasn’t crazy about Holly’s voiceover.  (I can hear the objections being screamed now.)  I cannot say that I know anything about the making of the film, but I felt it as tacked on at the last minute.  Whenever a character pontificates or meditates on the past events, beginning a sentence with “Little did I know…”, it reads as two-dimensional and clichéd. The voiceover improves through the film, and works for the ending.   Still, Malick’s wonderful voiceover in Days of Heaven leads me to appreciate his learning curve.

As with every Malick film, the acting is wonderfully understated, especially in the moments that normally permit chewing the scenery.  Warren Oates!  Best actor of the beginning of the 1970s.  This film along with Two-Lane Blacktop seals the deal.  And I’ll be honest: I’ve never really liked Sissy Spacek before, but I thought she was great here.  Martin Sheen, pre-Apocalypse Now, plays the best sociopath written into a film to date, most convincing when he shows the slightest bit of uncertainty and then overcompensates for it.

It’s not Malick’s masterpiece, but, like Polanski’s Knife in the Water, and Scorsese’s Mean Streets (which premiered along with Badlands at the 1973 New York Film Festival), it’s a great first film.

Scarecrow (1972)

I didn’t intentionally set out to watch two films from the same year. Scarecrow is a small gem.  It’s Old Joy thirty years ago, only with arguably deeper and more interesting characters.  Two losers hitch their way across the country: one’s a meek, make-em-laugh personality (Al Pacino’s Lionel), the other a strong douchebag with a permanent chip on his shoulder (Gene Hackman’s Max).

The first ten minutes are mindblowing.  The film opens with a long shot of Max walking through a field, climbing through a barbed wire fence, falling down an embankment, and coming to the side of the road.  He meets Lionel waiting there for a hitch, and as friendly as Lionel is, Max doesn’t want anything to do with him.  No cars come, and they’re waiting there all day.  We see all of this in less than fifteen shots.

Pacino playing comic relief is a rare sight and he does it flawlessly; and his slow progression towards disillusionment and tragedy makes for a great performance.  Hackman plays angry while avoiding all the normal tropes, and the film passes quickly.  It’s never hunkered down with larger-than-life emotional scenes.  It is a good note for directing actors: remove an actor’s conventional reactions to common situations and you have something instantly interesting.

The last thirty minutes are very “and now, the bad stuff happens”.  I’m not going to talk about the last thirty minutes in detail because we live in the society of spoiler alerts and the surprise of events should carry an emotional burden. I will say that everything that happens with Lionel’s family in Detroit, his chance to reconnect with the young son he’s never met, is earned and warranted.  The prison sequence after Max gets them both arrested, on the other hand, feels forced, although it’s both powerful and raw.

Gosford Park (2001)

Can we talk about how unflinchingly pitch perfect this film is?  There is never a moment of dialogue, never a shot, never a prop, never a reference, never a song, never a casting choice, never a sound cue that’s out of place.  This is easily Robert Altman’s best film.

The comparisons to Renoir’s The Rules of the Game are both apt and warranted– although I don’t believe, as some of the critical chatter out there suggests, that Altman, Bob Balaban (so marvelously deadpan in every role), and the inspired Julian Fellowes set out to create a remake.  Yes, both films rest on a shooting party consisting of wealthy aristocrats as plot, the eve of World War II as setting, and the aristocracy’s relationship to their servants as subject–but the films differ in how they employ the shared content. The Rules of the Game is concerned with what’s happening outside of the shooting party, while Gosford Park explores its characters and careful plot within the confines of the shooting party.

Every actor–not to sound hyperbolic–is perfect.  I recognize I’ve said that about each film, but Gosford Park wins the award for best ensemble (which, as it turns out, it did quite a few times during the awards season).  There’s no weak link.  It is a dream team of English actors: Clive Owen, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren, Emily Watson, Maggie Smith, Kristen Scott Thomas, Charles Dance, Kelly Macdonald, Derek Jacobi, Stephen Fry.

[A brief side note/tangent that I have to get off my chest: has anyone else in the world seen the 1996 sci-fi epic Space Truckers? Charles Dance plays a weird half-human/half-robot guy in a really bizarre sex scene that involves electronic appendages.  It all came rushing back to me in an unfortunate Proustian moment when I recognized the actor.]

Anamorphic cinematography can be so beautiful and seamlessly integrated into a film.  The anamorphic in Gosford Park is anti-Wes Anderson.  Anderson’s gorgeous films are shot so that every image bends to cram painstakingly arranged subjects.  It’s intentional and arranged. Here, you almost forget about the cinematography; every scene was filmed with two cameras, simultaneously, so that actors never played for a camera.  Everyone was simultaneously recorded with wireless microphones.  Nothing seems arranged, but the anamorphic lenses allow enough information into every frame and set-up (not to mention light to allow for deep focus) that the dialogue and plot fits into it.  It would have been very easy to let this film slip into a theatrical talk-fest.  That’s a mumblecore choice, where the formal filmmaking takes a backseat to the talking.  Not so here.  It’s quintessentially cinematic thanks to great editing, superb direction, and wonderful cinematography.

The only thing I can hold against it is the extent to which Stephen Fry’s Inspector gets pushed to the side.  I streamed it on Netflix, so perhaps there were more Fry-heavy scenes on the DVD that were cut from the finished film, but I felt that once the Inspector arrived he disappeared just as quickly.

*     *     *

That wraps up this first installment.  I have no idea what I’ll be watching next, so leave some suggestions in the comments and if I haven’t seen them I’ll check it out.

There’s something unexpectedly vital about the video that blooms out of Nicks’ decision to use layered live audio where most music videos just stick the studio recordings on top.  It’s not the take-away show idea, either, which from the very start was a familiar idea–a stripped-down concert video.  This is something new entirely: edited like a music video (which is to say, edited heavily), recorded like a take-away show, you get pulled in to the reverie of the song–eternal, omnipresent, out of time and space, whether you’re on the beach or in a park or getting in your car or following a toddler in a devil-jumpsuit down the stairs, the way a good piece of music lingers under your breath for a day, or a week.

Shutter Island, dir. Martin Scorsese (2010)

As Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo approach Shutter Island by ferry, what strikes us is the sky: it goes on forever in a way that anyone from Boston knows is impossible, and the artificiality of the colors and the actors makes it clear that this isn’t Changeling or Schindler’s List. This is the past of film, not a film of the past, and it’s clear that Scorsese is taking his cues from Samuel Fuller’s camp experiments as much as Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological obsessions, tossed with a dose of Hiroshima Mon Amour.

The film itself is unerringly harrowing, composed of uneven realities interwoven with hallucinations and dreams that are puzzling without being gimmicky. The only mystery here lies not in DiCaprio’s identity but in his non-identity: why can’t he be what he is now? The film posits that DiCaprio’s own trauma has become inseparable from the trauma of the 20^th century: his drowned children are the same children that lie in the Dachau snow. Yet by the end of the film, when all has been “revealed,” Scorsese has done such a good job rendering any revelation arbitrary that it rings more like a parody of a reveal than a true moment of enlightenment.

One of the film’s best moments comes when DiCaprio—fighting with an escaped inmate in the wave of a devastating storm—hears a brief exegesis on the hydrogen bomb. “Why would I ever want to leave here?” asks the violent psychotic. “They have H-bombs out there.” One of the most powerful poles of the 20^th century—the bomb itself, the object that turned everyone paranoid and had everyone hiding under desks, next to filing cabinets. It’s from these 20^th century sciences of destruction—clunky and creative, the American wartime avant-garde—that Shutter Island takes its potency.

In line with this, Shutter Island recognizes that it was in the Holocaust that the 20^th century found its most terrifying and emblematic manifestation of all its potentiality. Everyone in the film looks like a Nazi, and whether or not they are is irrelevant. Within the first half hour we’re struck by flashbacks showing gaunt faces and barbed wire, paperwork residue of the Nazi machine floating serenely in a concentration camp office that looks, replete with filing cabinets, eerily functional and familiar. Mad scientists and totalitarianism: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union…and to complete the triumvirate, we need FDR and the United States, don’t we? Where was our Holocaust, our Gulag? That’s what Detective DiCaprio is looking for—the place where the United States caught up with the 20^th century.

Fish Tank, dir. Andrea Arnold (2010)

There are movies I see every once and a while that remind me why I watch in the first place. If that seems clichéd, let me assure you that Andrea Arnold’s second feature, Fish Tank, is not. Here is what we hope for and rarely get: urgency without manipulation, intimacy without bland sentiment, shock without exploitation.

The camera never leaves Mia, our reckless, British, 15-year-old protagonist. She aimlessly wanders her white trash environs, never in school, drinking and getting into fights with anyone she finds. The first thought we have is not that she’s troubled, but, rather, what the hell else is there to do? Her slutty peers are no better, and we sympathize with her further when we’re introduced to her trashy mother Joanne, dancing half-naked in the kitchen, punctuating her steps with slaps to her children.

Mia’s escape, too, is dance, but this isn’t a Lifetime movie, so it doesn’t play out as we fear it might. Her mother’s new boyfriend, Connor, takes an interest in her ambitions, but doesn’t seem to be only interested in that. We root for their friendship with great reservations. Mia gets a boyfriend, too, of sorts, but he’s not the man of her dreams nor is he a bad influence. He gives her attention, and that’s good enough.

This is the kind of movie you expect, because of its intensity, to be a brisk 80 minutes, but it’s over 2 hours. The tone changes rapidly, as aimlessly as Mia herself, and things get heavy at a certain point, out of left field. It begins like a Dardenne picture but develops an arc. I didn’t mind.

It takes risks and succeeds; why not cast a teenager you see at a train station screaming at her boyfriend? And why not end the film with a moving, hiphop dance to Nas’ “Life’s a Bitch”? I wouldn’t expect Fish Tank to work, if I saw it on paper, but it does. Along with Ballast and Wendy and Lucy, this film’s arrival indicates that the Western avant-garde has finally re-awoken. Thank god.

38 percent of all catastrophic home-fires (the ones that burned the house to the ground) in the United States in 2007 were started from grease/oil fires.  Something that starts from a small pot can expand with fierce terror to literally burn your life away.

The moment of ignition, the pfoof!, is important because humans have been programmed with an Oh Shit trigger that comes in the face of immediate and terrifying uncertainty (like accidentally creating a fire).  But this trigger often makes us forego what could be the simplest fix for self-preservation.  And the simplest fix for a grease fire?  Lids.  Cover the pot, remove from heat, and wait.

I’m just as guilty as the rest because a few days ago I did create a grease fire and didn’t take the simplest fix (nor, thankfully, did I burn my small apartment, with my girlfriend and I still inside, as well as the entire apartment building, into ash).  I hit the Oh Shit Trigger and somehow my mind flew back to 6th Grade science and I poured an entire bag of flour over the pot.

Did it put out the fire?  Yes.  Did it stop the flames from engulfing my home?  Yes.  Did it cause an extra twenty minutes of clean up before I could restart the process of cooking the beef stew?  Yes.

The very existence of the lid, the singular device to put out the fire, is at once both comforting and disconcerting.  We’re hardwired with survivalist instincts with quick, healthy dashes of adrenaline and panic to force us to regress back into the neolithic cerebellum region and, simply, survive.  The lid in the grease fire is something different, something more evolved.

Lids are everywhere, especially in filmmaking.  But in the long road of learning to make films, a director tends to either forgo or forget them entirely.  More often than not the kitchen becomes covered in flour and you acutely forget what you set out to cook in the first place.

I’m not talking about actors arriving late on set, running out of time on a shoot, low lighting, bad sound, or any of the common problems in filmmaking.  No, I’m speaking of the Big Kahunas — the frightening possibilities that can break a director’s spine in seven places.  Running out of film on a shoot.  Losing an actor the day before filming begins.  Forgetting developed film in a taxi.  Breaking a hard drive with the sole copy of the data within.  Directors get panicked easily.  Becoming a skilled director is all about is learning to (quickly) dissect the problems before reacting to them; to think to reach for the lid.  Cover, wait, and move on.

A short film usually takes about a year to make, start to finish; a feature takes perhaps three from script to final cut.  That’s a large window for some fires to pop up in.  And they will.  Learning to remember the lids saves a film from the abyss of rash decisions and pathetic compromises.  Never become the director crying on the curb. I’ve seen this happen twice.  (None of them have been Company directors, thankfully.)  But knowing where you keep the lids . . . now that’s the real challenge, isn’t it?

]]> http://sainteliotandco.com/blog/lids/feed/ 0 http://sainteliotandco.com/blog/cabinets-of-curiosities/ http://sainteliotandco.com/blog/cabinets-of-curiosities/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:45:08 +0000 Matt Paley http://sainteliotandco.com/?p=1902 Yesterday, NPR.org’s picture show blog featured the work of Kate Stone.  I knew Kate at Bard, but had missed her thesis show; boy, am I grateful to NPR for cluing me in to what I’d missed.

In her most recent work, Kate explores a space with her camera, prints the photos, reconstructs the space in three dimensions, and then re-photographs the scene.  In At The Seams, Kate disassembles and reassembles strangers’ houses, leaving doors poking out of the floor and fans reproducing across empty rooms.  In Wunderkammer (which translates to ‘cabinet of curiosities’), the stuffed animals at a museum seem to step right out of their displays. There is a wonderfully self-reflexive quality to the images, as Kate reconstructs what we imagine her experience to be exploring the spaces for the first time; there is also the entrancing quality of the uncanny, most powerful in the images least tampered with, those that reveal just a hint of Kate’s touch.

But there’s something else operating here: signs of construction—seams, folds, the way the glossy paper reflects the lighting—remind us that the images are handmade.  These aren’t spaces manipulated digitally: they are built, and it is the building that transforms Kate’s photographs into inhabited memories. In At The Seams, the titles of the photographs—such as not a single word, anna, or you should have come around the back—hint at something private between Kate and the owners, something learned in the space.  We are looking at dollhouses.

We are reminded, too, that the original spaces are themselves constructions.  In At The Seams, we begin to see the houses as homes.  In Wunderkammer, the constructed unreality of the museum comes to life, straight out of the curator’s dreams.

Check out Kate’s website here.

Fresh off the heels of the romantic and alluring The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Joshua Safdie has teamed up with his brother (and fellow Red Bucket Films mate) Ben Safdie on Daddy Longlegs, also known by the title Go Get Some Rosemary. The film’s two titles are indicative of the film’s own dual identities. If you watch the trailer available now via Apple and then watch what’s on the Red Bucket website, you’ll see two different films.

The first looks undeniably earnest without crossing into tearjerker territory, and nods to the type that Ronald Bronstein’s performance is already garnering. Yet it seems mostly familiar, fiting the mold of ‘indie film’ as it exists as a genre: catchy twee pop, hip silliness, a warming message. The second film, though, looks more harrowing, honest, and brave; most affectingly, the trailer is longer unaccompanied by intrusive music.

We don’t need Manohla Dargis to tell us the reason the film looks so different on Apple than it does on Red Bucket’s site: money. Via Red Bucket, the film has more in common with the Dardenne Brothers than Wes Anderson. But if the Anderson market already exists, why not exploit it?

I wonder whether or not this repackaging matters. Marketing fill theaters: after that, isn’t it the film that matters? And if the film remains the same (despite how it’s sold), I’m hesitant to nail IFC to the cross just yet. They may simply help the film reach a wider audience–regardless of what that audience thinks they’re going to see.

Daddy Longlegs (Red Bucket’s own Sundance Trailer)