Robert Houllahan and The Low Anthem
by Matt Paley
Beautiful. Robert Houllahan, our friend over at Cinelab, just had his video for The Low Anthem’s new single, Ghost Woman Blues, featured on NPR.org (see it here), and it’s something special.
The Low Anthem recorded their (soon to be released) album Smart Flesh in a big, cold, empty warehouse (actually an abandoned pasta sauce factory) in Rhode Island last winter. Rob hunkered down with them, with some 16mm and some 35mm, and set about documenting the experience.
I remember Rob showing me the footage, a few months later — it was easy to visualize a nice landscape piece coming out of it, with that beautiful New England winter quality of light — but I don’t remember Rob telling me what he intended to do with it.
I’m a little surprised how cohesive it all feels, now! When I saw the footage for the first time, I saw it as a diary of the light in the warehouse — and it is, still — but not an expression of a sound or a feeling. But I hadn’t listened to the music yet (Oh, that music!)
The occasional bursts of color are lovely, as are the often different speeds of the film. The imperfect sync on the performers, too, lends a floating, ghostly, out-of-time quality to the images — Rob isn’t encouraging us to feel any immediacy; we’re watching from far away — and he cuts to them at just the right times, because he knows we’re aching to see their faces.
But what’s really killer about the video is how he doesn’t linger on those beautiful tableaus. Many of them don’t get the time they deserve; Rob’s a restless (to the point of irresponsible) editor, and it’s not what we’ve been trained to expect. Yet the images do become distinct moments, and are given appropriate gravity, with his consistent fades to black. It’s a really surprising technique, and with the hurried editing, it pushes the video towards a different feeling, somewhere between really long takes of landscape footage (the way I might have done it) and really choppy MTV (the way most music video artists would have done it). The contrast serves that feeling, that slipping away, that they don’t make em like they used to that Rob is talking about.
The Little Imperfections
by Adam Hirsch
They came out about a week ago, but if you haven’t already watched them — you should. In an absolute stroke of brilliance, The New York Times Magazine decided to get fourteen A-list actors in front of a camera for short, silent single-take scenes. It’s called “Fourteen Actors Acting“. (Click the link to follow to it.)
For all of you that went through film school — especially working with a Bolex and 16mm B&W Reversal — a lot of these will feel familiar in the best way. They’re just like those exercises and assignments you had to suffer through while trying to get a grasp on the medium, the ones you overexposed or had your actor-friend drop out at the last minute only to be replaced with your roommate’s drunk friend — only these are perfect little exercises, perfect little displays, and fourteen actors — including Matt Damon, James Franco, Chloe Moretz, Natalie Portman, Javier Bardem and Tilda Swinton — who all seem to understand how less translates to more.
They can remind you why you like this crazy stuff in the first place.