Links - November 2011

These are some links to interesting or thoughtful pieces that I enjoyed this month:

Ways of Seeing: on the profundity of a simple gesture in 3 Godfathers (John Ford, 1948)

Film: Ab Initio: on the artistic evolution of D.W. Griffith as seen in his 1911 film Hearts and Swords, before his move to feature films yet after his early "morality play" shorts

The Criterion Contraption: on the modernist masterpiece L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)


Checking on My Sausages: an overview of some artistic objections to Pixar's films (the only ones I have ever read, actually)


Sounds, Images: a visual overview of a strange-looking film I've never seen, Reckless Kelly (Yahoo Serious, 1993)

Pierrot le fou (1965)

Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
A few things I learned/observed in Godard's tenth feature film...

A man and a woman engage in an affair in which they embrace modernity and violence while neglecting the conveniences of modern living for the principles of revolution.

The landscape is scarred by text.

Sometimes cinema is montage.  Editing can find realities that cannot exist alone in an image but do exist through juxtaposition.

Blocking actors in space does not have to be a humorless affair.

In the silent era, a shot like this would be cropped in-camera.  In modernity, it is cropped via architecture.

Absurdity is important.

You Disappeared Rather Mysteriously

"You disappeared rather mysteriously the other night, but I attribute this to your life of crime in the movies."


taken from Groucho Marx's 1961 letter to Peter Lorre concerning the James Joyce novel Ulysses.

Stellar (1993)

Stellar (Stan Brakhage, 1993)

Paint on 16mm celluloid.

Cinema Haikus #001-#004

Burden of Dreams (Les Blank, 1982)

Pull a ship though the

Jungle and you can swallow

Indigenous spit

[cinema haiku #001]

Exiting the Factory (Louis Lumière, 1895)

As subjects pass by

Are documentary film's

Questions still looming?

[cinema haiku #002]

Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)
Fonda is tall and
Can carry a speech like Abe's
American myth

[cinema haiku #003]

Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
Celebrity crazed
Country of musicians sell
Ideals for records

[cinema haiku #004]

A Corner in Wheat (1909)

A Corner in Wheat (D.W. Griffith, 1909)

Mise-en-scene is the term for the totality of what goes into a cinematic image.
It can be elusive of subtle, forthright or obvious, but it exists and is the essence of cinematic expression.


Characters in space.

While cinema is movement, it can be defined by motionlessness in the same way 

music can be defined by pauses or silence.

The Living Beast (198?)

The Living Beast (John Carpenter, c. 1985?, lost)

11.12.2011

John Carpenter’s lost film

had a 100 foot tall

Natasha Kinski and

tiny models of Toronto.

the terror was large

but sought to be small

in the real story of a giant.

           army involvement

finds her living out on a hill

bathing in the great lakes

getting smaller at the end

and she goes up the fire escape

through the open window

and then that famous shot

of the statue head looking out

as she kisses the man

a werewolf hand reaching up

            and she stabs.

                                                                                      cut to credits.

Yi Yi (2000)

Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
I have only had the opportunity to see two of his films, but based on the unique strength and extraordinary power of those two films, I would call Edward Yang a cinematic master.  I hope to have opportunity to see the rest of his work, but if A Brighter Summer Day (1991) ever gets a decent DVD release that I can enjoy alongside Yi Yi, that may be enough.  There is enough in these two films to last a while.

Yi Yi (2000) was Edward Yang's last film and as such it works as his crowning achievement.  It is not an epic, at least, not a conventional one.  It is a small story of a family, but a full story, where every ellipsis will eventually cross back over itself and every detail has repercussions.  Part of his mastery is the ability to take mundane scenes and fuse them with significance that may not be conscious, but is certainly felt somehow.  A child is an outsider within his own family function, an event that seems a little too neat and planned to be real.  The characters are stuck like the helium-filled balloons rising up to the ceiling.

Even mundane events can set up the color scheme for the film, and visually express everything the audience is going to see the rest of the way.

Sometimes I wonder if Yi Yi is the last great film of the 20th century or the first great film of the 21st.  It feels like the fulfillment of traditional narrative filmmaking.  Yang's thematic material is traditional (generational conflict, death, infidelity, distrust, coming-of-age), his technique is not obtrusive or ostentatious and he completely avoids self-reflexivity.  He is the sort of filmmaker who may get overlooked for how accomplished he is because his brushstrokes are so carefully hidden.  But if you look carefully (and you know how to find them), you will see them.  For me, I saw them immediately in the recurring motifs he implemented and in his accomplished use of landscape.

Sometimes a reflection can show the longing heart of a character.

Sometimes reflections can trap the character within his own world.

Yang is a master of characters within spaces and utilizes sound to only deepen this.  In Brighter Summer Day he used the soundtrack cleverly to lay out the geography of the town.  In Yi Yi, sound can create distance by having a character hear what occurs off-screen, add detail that the image cannot reveal, or prophesy an upcoming event.

Every setting paints the context of a character. 

By utilizing long shots, Yang gives the close-ups he sparingly uses more emotional power.  His lighting is natural, often motivated primarily from without rather than within.  It all depends on where the character thinks they find happiness.  When a character is at work, they are usually caught in-between worlds.

Geometric patterns break down the space while obstructions prove to be just as prevalent as reflections.

Daily routine is very much a part of Yang's films, as he utilizes even the same framing for multiple scenes within a given setting so that when the routine is broken, either by obstruction or diversity of image selection, it is immediately felt by the audience.  Sometimes it is the uncommon sight that gives us narrative information often reserved for dialogue.  But why waste a powerful moment to engage the audience by having characters talk about it?

The characters cannot always see clearly what is right in front of them.

The space is finally stripped down so much the only place the characters can look is straight ahead.

Mon Oncle (1958)

Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958)

appearances/fountain fish/gibberish/mumbo-jumbo

Tati brought the silent comedy back but added a soundtrack.  Two planes of humor running simultaneously (or divergently).

The Ship 'Terra Nova' Leaving Harbour (1910)

The Ship 'Terra Nova' Leaving Harbour Towards the South Pole (unknown director, 1910)
I love watching the early actualities.  This is a later one from the fantastic British Film Insitute's YouTube page with hundreds of uploads of early films from their collection.  In this one from 1910, three edits are visible for the compression of time.  Step out of a contemporary mindset and just be swept in by the sheer beauty of seeing movement on screen.

Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend

Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend
09.10.2009

where did you go
Edwin S. Porter
when they made
your dreams
into the dreams of America?

What is Cinema?

Image + Sound + Intent = Cinema

It is a basic formula, one that could be clarified further, yet I like the simplicity and inclusivity.

But cinema is not a basic formula.  It is a form of expression.  Expression has shades, varieties, colors.  A formula makes complexities easier to grasp and codify, but they do not inspire.  To write the formula as a traditional sentence, I might choose this:

Cinema is Imagination.

Now, I find that inspiring.