'A Discombobulated Mess': Book Adaptations That Broke The Hearts Of Fans
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'A Discombobulated Mess': Book Adaptations That Broke The Hearts Of Fans
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Category: cinema
Home-Cooked Spaghetti Dinners and a Glam Photo Shoot: Eight Unusual Oscar Bids
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When the actress Andrea Riseborough wrapped a 19-day shoot on the microbudget indie “To Leslie” in Los Angeles during the height of the pandemic, her hopes probably extended to positive reviews from critics and indie film enthusiasts.
But now, after a social media campaign on her behalf by some famous friends, among them Gwyneth Paltrow, Edward Norton and Sarah Paulson, she’s been nominated for an Oscar for best actress — an honor she can keep, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ruled Tuesday after reviewing the unorthodox lobbying on her behalf.
While the regulations around campaigning have become ever murkier in the age of social media, the Riseborough campaign was hardly the first to stretch the rules, which forbid, among other things, mentioning competitors or their films directly or calling academy members personally.
Here are eight memorable bids for a statuette that went rogue.
1961
Chill Wills, ‘The Alamo’
After Chill Wills was nominated for best supporting actor for his role as Davy Crockett’s buddy Beekeeper in “The Alamo,” he hired the veteran publicist W.S. “Bow-Wow” Wojciechowicz to run his campaign. Wojciechowicz submitted an ad to Variety with a photo of the film’s cast and text that read, “We of the ‘Alamo’ cast are praying harder — than the real Texans prayed for their lives in the Alamo — for Chill Wills to win the Oscar as best supporting actor.”
Variety refused to run it (The Hollywood Reporter did), and John Wayne, the film’s director and star, took out his own ad in Variety rebuking Wills that said neither he nor his production company was in any way involved in the effort. (“I am sure his intentions are not as bad as his taste,” Wayne wrote of Wills, who later blamed Wojciechowicz.) After this fiasco — Wills lost to Peter Ustinov for “Spartacus” — it became rare for actors to run their own campaigns, which have since mostly been the purview of studios and teams of publicists.
Interviews With the Oscar Nominees
1974
Candy Clark, ‘American Graffiti’
The nostalgic coming-of-age feature “American Graffiti” included some future big names like Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford among its ensemble cast, but Candy Clark, then a little-known actress, was the only one to embark on an Oscar campaign. She paid $1,700 to take out a series of quarter-page ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety — a strategy that paid off when she was the only member of the film’s cast to be nominated, for best supporting actress. (She lost to a 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for “Paper Moon.”)
1975
Liv Ullmann, ‘Scenes From a Marriage’
The Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann delivered a standout performance in Ingmar Bergman’s domestic drama “Scenes From a Marriage,” but a potential nomination was tripped up by a technicality that The New York Times likened to a situation “one usually encounters at obscure border stations in Central Asia.” Because a television cut of “Scenes From a Marriage” had premiered on Swedish TV in 1973 — the year before its American theatrical release — it was deemed ineligible for the Oscars thanks to an academy rule that prohibited the film’s being shown on television during the year before its theatrical release.
Three of that year’s eventual best actress nominees — Ellen Burstyn (who went on to win), Diahann Carroll and Gena Rowlands — took up Ullmann’s cause, even signing an open letter supporting her right to compete, but the academy stood firm. (Ullmann, now 84, did receive an honorary award from the academy last year.)
After being nominated for best supporting actress for “The Color Purple,” Margaret Avery used $1,160 of her own money to pay for a Variety ad promoting her performance. Intended to suggest the voice of her character, Shug Avery, it read: “Well God, I guess the time has come fo’ the Academy voters to decide whether I is one of the best supporting actresses this year or not! Either way, thank you, Lord for the opportunity.” Avery was criticized for the ad, which did not reflect the way her character actually spoke in the film. (She lost to Anjelica Huston for “Prizzi’s Honor.”)
1988
Sally Kirkland, ‘Anna’
Sally Kirkland took a letter-writing fiend approach in an effort to score a best actress nomination for her role as a once-famous Czech actress in the small indie “Anna.” Kirkland not only personally wrote letters to academy voters, she also financed her own ad campaign — the film had no budget to do so — and spoke to any and every journalist who asked. Her persistence paid off with a nomination, though she eventually lost to Cher for “Moonstruck.”
1991
Diane Ladd, ‘Wild at Heart’
After she was nominated for David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” Diane Ladd — Laura Dern’s mother — decided that the way to voters’ hearts was through a home-cooked spaghetti dinner. She embarked on a one-woman blitz that involved not only writing personalized letters to voters, but also inviting 20 academy members to a screening of her film, accompanied by a spaghetti dinner that she prepared herself. She might have wanted to spend more time perfecting that spaghetti recipe, though — she lost to Whoopi Goldberg, who won for “Ghost.”
2011
Melissa Leo, ‘The Fighter’
Unlike other nominees who took matters into their own hands, Melissa Leo was considered the front-runner when she began her campaign to secure a best supporting actress win for the boxing drama “The Fighter.” But she took out her now-infamous “Consider” ads anyway, she told Deadline in 2011, because she was frustrated at not being able to land magazine covers as a 50-year-old woman. The ads, which showed off her glamorous side as she leaned forward in a low-cut black evening gown, presented a stark contrast to the gritty, blue-collar mother and fight manager she played in the film (which was not even mentioned in the ad). There’s no way to say for sure if the strategy helped her chances, but it certainly didn’t hurt — she beat out her co-star Amy Adams, as well as Helena Bonham Carter of “The King’s Speech,” to claim the Oscar.
2013
Ann Dowd, ‘Compliance’
Ann Dowd received stellar reviews for the Craig Zobel thriller “Compliance,” a flop of an indie with such a tiny budget that Dowd was paid just $100 per day for her role. But she believed in her performance, and after raising $13,000 by dipping into her bank account, borrowing money from friends and colleagues and maxing out her credit cards, she mailed DVDs to academy members and placed ads in trade publications in an effort to secure a best supporting actress nomination. While the Oscar recognition proved elusive — Anne Hathaway won that year for “Les Misérables” — the media coverage of her efforts may have helped put her on the radar of directors. (And now she has an Emmy for “The Handmaid’s Tale.”)
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Favorite Films Of 2015
2015 was a fine period for me. I went to the Mumbai Film Festival, something that I’d been meaning to do for some time now. I could also go to Experimenta to meet and interact with several interesting artists and curators. I wrote a little more at this blog than I had last year and I also started a blog in French that I hope to write more for in the coming months. I watched fewer films and read fewer books than any of the preceding few years. (I had read more books and seen more movies in the first 6 months of 2014 than I did in the whole of 2015.) Yet, I had a much more wholesome experience these past 12 months. For one, abstinence made movies better, providing me the necessary mental space to deal with them more meaningfully. But more importantly, my rejection of the voracious cinephilia that I was practicing helped me better integrate the films I watched with real world experience and further disabuse myself of the notion that cinephilia is a worthy activity in itself. As a result, I could give films their proper place in my life – an act of relegation that ironically made them more valuable. I think I harmonize myself better with the world around now, which I am convinced is what any ‘-philia’ worth its salt should ultimately be about. I look forward to further cutting down on films and books the coming year.
The year was full of surprisingly good films. Besides the following list (strictly consisting of works that world-premiered in 2015), I was really, really impressed by the masterfully-directed Carol (Todd Haynes), the nervous energy-dynamics of Standing Tall (Emmanuelle Bercot), the perspective-bending Scrapbook (Michael Hoolboom), the structural intelligence of Interrogation (Vetrimaran) and the fascinating image-making and commentary of The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos). Other films I liked very much are The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-Hsien), Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg), Digging for Fire (Joe Swanberg), Masaan (Neeraj Ghaywan), My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin), My Mother (Nanni Moretti), Night Without Distance (Lois Patiño), Results (Andrew Bujalski), Sleeping Giant (Andrew Cividino) and the three cine-essays by Mark Rappaport.
1. Francofonia (Aleksandr Sokurov, France)
At a time when Daesh funds itself by trafficking cultural artifacts and Europe announces asylum for threatened art works, Sokurov’s marvelous, piercing film offers nothing less than a revisionist historiography of art itself. For Francofonia, History is not the content of art but its very skin. Museums flatten time, and justifiably present their contents as the highest achievements of a culture, obfuscating, in effect, their history as objects involved in power brokerage, class conflict and market manipulation. Sokurov’s film flips this perspective inside out, identifying art as being frequently the currency of diplomatic power possessing the capacity to purchase peace and as being instruments in service of totalitarian collaboration. Napoleon, who made art the object of his wars, perambulates in the Louvre alongside Lady Liberty Marianne, personifying the antipodal instincts of not only this emblematic institution, but also of European civilization itself. Sokurov’s complex film, likewise, holds together with great equanimity and curiosity antithetical views of museums, acknowledging simultaneously their timelessness and particular historical meaning(s). Francofonia poses questions about nationality, ownership and, really, the value of art and leaves your head whirling with its far-reaching implications, making sure that you will not approach art the same way again.
2. No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, Belgium)
The jeu de mots in the title says it all. Not only is this deeply death-marked, Ozuvian film an unordinary home movie, but it is also a film about not having a home. Composed of footage shot in the filmmaker’s mother’s Brussels apartment and recorded video-conference sessions between the two, No Home Movie contrasts Akerman’s professional nomadism with the perennial confinedness of her mother Natalia. Between Chantal’s constant off-screen presence and Natalia’s self-imposed captivity (within the apartment as well as the computer screen), between Here and Elsewhere, lies the film’s true space – a part-real, part-virtual space of filial anxiety and affection. Akerman’s matrilineal counterpart to Porumboiu’s The Second Game (2014) investigates heritage and origin as the director meditates on what she has inherited from her mother – a reflection that continuously brings Akerman back to an examination of her own Jewishness. A document of physical decline and decline of the physical (“Je t’embrasse” over Skype), the film crystallizes a collective Jewish narrative of eternal exile through the personal history of the director’s mother, while vehemently refusing to reduce the unique being of Natalia Akerman the individual. Akerman’s harrowing swansong is cinema’s own Camera Lucida.
3. Taxi (Jafar Panahi, Iran)
Taxi opens with a shot of downtown Tehran photographed from the dashboard of a car. Announcing Panahi’s first cinematic outdoor excursion since his house arrest in 2011, this shot sets up the dialectics that would define the film: home/world, individual/social and freedom/captivity. Through the course of Taxi, the spied-upon filmmaker drives around the city in the guise of a cabbie, chauffeuring clients-actors from various strata of the society, and realizing a pre-scripted scenario with them whose urgent, didactic purpose can’t be more obvious. The Iranian state has forged a private prison for Panahi from the public spaces of Tehran, allowing him a mobility and false freedom that’s regulated by its watchful eyes. Panahi turns this power dynamic upside down, transforming the private space of the vehicle into a public space for debate, discussion, instruction and critique. Watching the film, I was constantly reminded of that saying beloved of Wittgenstein: “It takes all kinds to make a world”. Panahi’s very presence in the film – his image, his voice – becomes an audacious act of political defiance, a gesture of tremendous existential courage that stares at the possibility of death floating in the air. Taxi makes cinema still matter.
4. The Pearl Button (Patricio Guzmán, Chile)
A beautiful marine cousin to Guzman’s previous film, Nostalgia for the Light (2010), The Pearl Button turns its attention from the arid stretches of the Atacama to the waterfront and ice field of Southern Patagonia. Threading metaphor over metaphor, the director fashions a typically associative, richly suggestive essay film that turns the nature documentary form on its head. Guzman’s film plumbs the depths of the ocean, trying to uncover traces of suppressed, unseen history embodied by countless “missing people” – a project that derives its impetus from the filmmaker’s bittersweet childhood experience of the sea. Despite Chile’s economic indifference to its 4000-kilometer-long coastline, he notes, the sea has been indispensable those in power, serving first as the entry point of the European invaders, who wiped out the Patagonian natives, and then as the dumping ground of political prisoners during the Pinochet regime. Guzman teases out the different values that the sea holds for him, the autochthons and the Chilean state, in effect politicizing and historicizing that which conventional wisdom takes to be apolitical and ahistorical: geography and the perception of it. The result is a film of immense poetry and horror – a horror that only poetry can convey.
5. Shift (Alexandra Gerbaulet, Germany)
The most impressive debut film of the year, Alexandra Gerbaulet’s ambitious, intoxicating Shift excavates the evolution of her hometown, Salzgitter, along with that of her family with archaeological care and scientific detachment. In Gerbaulet’s heady narration, anchored by a powerful, quasi-declamatory, rhythmic voiceover, Salzgitter’s transformation from a Nazi mining stronghold and concentration camp, through a waning industrial hub and to a nuclear waste dump parallels the gradual disintegration of the Gerbaulet family under the weight of unemployment, sickness and sexual repression. The filmmaker closely intercuts photographs and diary entries of her mother with impersonal material from popular and scientific culture, weaving in and out of both registers with ease. Gerbaulet’s film is literally an unearthing project, as the director scoops out the various historical, political and geographical layers of this war-weathered city whose tranquil current-day model housing sits atop a makeshift Jewish graveyard consisting of camp workers buried using industrial debris. “Man gets used to everything, even the scar”, declares the narrator bluntly. Shift unscrambles such a habituated view of things, observing the tragicomic tautologies in which history revisits the city. The more you dig, it would seem, the more of the same you get.
6. A Century Of Energy (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
One of my favorite films of the year is a commercial for a major power corporation made by a 106-year-old artist. Manoel de Oliveira’s last work of his 84-year long career revisits his second film White Coal (1932), a documentary about power generation at the Central Hydroelectric Plant at Ermal, Rio Ave, founded by the filmmaker’s father. The silent film is projected indoors as a string quartet and a trio of ballerinas interpret the film in the space before the screen. Oliveira moves beyond the primary purpose of chronicling the evolution of renewable energy in the past century, charting the evolution of cinema itself during this period. Splicing together shots from the older films with images of the same locations today, he synthesizes a densely dialectical film that brings into dialogue silent movies and talkies, film and digital cinema, youth and old age and power and grace. Part tribute to the legacy of his father, part meditation on his own long life and transformed perspectives, Oliveira’s film is celebration of the beauty of forms, natural and man made, whose final shot – ballerinas moving like little windmills at the crack of dawn – captures something like pure energy – a supremely befitting parting shot.
7. Spotlight (Thomas McCarthy, USA)
Thomas McCarthy’s dramatization of Boston Globe’s exposé of child abuse in the Church is a robust, smart procedural that is less about picking apart the Catholic establishment than about elucidating the epistemological processes of the Information Age. Set at the transitional period between print and online news media, the film underscores the soon-to-be-outmoded physical nature of journalistic investigation. There are no antagonists of the traditional kind in Spotlight. The only obstacles to the knowledge required to carry out the exposé are the numerous procedures, and institutional protocols that have for objective the protection or publication of information. It is telling that the entire film is about a pack of newswriters seeking information that’s already out in the open. What’s more, the film recognizes that the Spotlight team’s attempts to mount an institutional critique is itself inscribed within kindred ideological biases, operational strategies and structural iniquities of Boston Globe as an institution and that the metaphysical crisis that their story can potentially wreak amidst readers is but similar to the disillusionment the newsmen experience vis-à-vis their Protestant weltanschauung. With relatively uncommon formal and ethical restraint, McCarthy crafts an arresting film about how a society’s narratives are made, predicated they are as much on the dissemination of information as on their marginalization.
8. The Event (Sergei Loznitsa, Russia)
S
ergei Loznitsa’s formidable follow-up to Maidan (2014) furthers the earlier film’s exploration of the aesthetics and mechanics of revolution, capturing a people coming together to make sense of a political limbo. Without context or a framing perspective, the film drops us straight into the streets of St. Petersburg just after the attempted reactionary coup d’état in Moscow in 1991. Confusion and mundanity – not heroics and determination – reign as we observe the formative process of a people’s movement and the imagined/imaginary social glue that causes individuals to cohere into a group. State apparatuses compete with each other for imposing a narrative onto the events, while the very toponymy of the city becomes an ideological battleground. Working off priceless archival footage, much of which is incredibly reminiscent of the filmmaker’s own cinematographic style, Loznitsa provides an invaluable glimpse into the unfurling of history, chronicling how numerous banal, unsure gestures and actions snowball into Historical Events. If Eisenstein’s better-than-the-original recreation of the October Revolution was the abstraction of materialist history into ideas, Loznitsa’s film, taking place at the same Palace Square 63 years later, rescues history from the reductions of ideology and brings it right back into the realm of the material.
9. In Transit (Albert Maysles & Co., USA)
A remarkable American counterpart to J. P. Sniadecki’s The Iron Ministry (2014), In Transit unfolds predominantly as a series of interviews with a mixed bag of travellers on board The Empire Builder, a long-distance passenger train running over 3500 kilometers and spanning almost the entire width of the United States. The accounts of passengers seeking out professional and financial breakthroughs evoke the pioneer myth hinged on a “Go West” imperative while the stories of those aboard in search of their ‘calling’ demonstrate the essentially spiritual, even religious nature of their pilgrimage-like journey. The diversity and range of the interviewees and their interactions help the film depict the train as a miniature America, à la Stagecoach, and carve out a quasi-utopian space in which members across class, race and gender divides get an opportunity to converse with each other without personal baggage. Nonetheless, In Transit is less a cultural vision of a possible America than an existential meditation on what makes people embark on these journeys. One elderly war veteran remarks that he’ll never be able to see these plains again. To cite John Berger, “the desire to have seen has a deep ontological basis.”
10. Wake (Subic) (John Gianvito, The Philippines)
One of a piece with Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark) (2010), Wake continues its precedent’s important investigation into the ecological consequences of the presence of America’s largest military bases in the Philippines during most of the 20th century. Like Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007), Wake is guided by the spirit of Howard Zinn’s approach to history and sketches an economically-founded account of US-Philippines political and cultural relations – a history that seems to be have been lamentably wiped off from the Filipino national consciousness. Gianvito juxtaposes images from the Philippine-American war with current day images from the contaminated Subic naval base area, suggesting, in effect, the poisonous persistence of an agonizing, unacknowledged history. Wake is imperfect cinema – unwieldy and resourceful – and employs fly-on-the-wall records, talking heads, on-screen text, photographs and news clips to mount a potent critique of a historiography defined political amnesia and economic opportunism. More importantly, it is a necessary reminder that imperialism is not always about presence, action and exercise of power but sometimes also about the refusal of these very elements, that history is not only a matter of events but also processes and phenomena and that geography is always political.
Special Mention: Chi-raq (Spike Lee, USA)
SOURCE: The Seventh Art - Read entire story here.
The ten best films of … 1925
The Big Parade (1925).
Kristin here:
As all about us in the blogosphere are listing their top ten films for 2015, we do the same for ninety years ago. Our eighth edition of this surprisingly popular series reaches 1925, when some of the major classics of world cinema appeared. Soviet Montage cinema got its real start with not one but two releases by one of the greatest of all directors, Sergei Eisenstein. Ernst Lubitsch made what is arguably his finest silent film. Charles Chaplin created his most beloved feature. Scandinavian cinema was in decline, having lost its most important directors to Hollywood, but Carl Dreyer made one of his most powerful silents.
For previous entries, see here: 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, and 1924.
The lingering traces of Expressionism vs the New Objectivity
The Joyless Street (1925).
Last year I suggested that German Expressionism was winding down in 1924. It continued to do so in 1925. Indeed, no Expressionist films as such came out that year. What I would consider to be the last films in the movement, Murnau’s Faust and Lang’s Metropolis, both went over budget and over schedule, with Faust appearing in 1926 and Metropolis at the beginning of 1927.
Murnau made a more modest film that premiered in Vienna in late 1925, Tartuffe, a loose adaptation of the Molière play. The script adds a frame story in which an old man’s housekeeper plots to swindle and murder him. The man’s grandson disguises himself as a traveling film exhibitor and shows the pair a simplified version of the play, emphasizing the parallels between the hypocritical Tartuffe and the scheming housekeeper.
The film has some touches of Expressionism but cannot really be considered a full-fledged member of that movement. The lingering Expressionism is not surprising, considering that some of the talent involved had worked on Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr.Caligari: screenwriter Carl Mayer, designers Walter Röhrig and Robert Herlth, and actors Werner Krauss and Lil Dagover.
The visuals include characteristically Expressionist moments when the actors and settings are juxtaposed to create strongly pictorial compositions. These might be comic, as when the pompous Tartuffe strides past a squat lamp that seems to mock him, or beautifully abstract, as when Orgon is seen in a high angle against a stairway that swirls around him:
A restored version is available in the USA from Kino and in the UK in Eureka!‘s Masters of Cinema series. (DVD Beaver compares the two versions.) The restoration was prepared from the only surviving print, the American release version; it runs about one hour.
The other German film on this year’s list, G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street, contrasts considerably with Tartuffe. It was arguably the first major film of the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity trends in German cinema. I have already dealt with it in a DVD review entry shortly after its 2012 release. The restoration incorporated a good deal more footage than had been seen in previous modern prints, but it remains incomplete.
Once more the comic greats
The Gold Rush (1925).
For several years now these year-end lists have mentioned Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, in various combinations. Early on it would was Chaplin alone (Easy Street and The Immigrant for 1917) or Lloyd and Keaton alone (High and Dizzy and Neighbors for 1920). In a way most of these films were placeholders, signalling that these three were working up to the silent features that were among the most glorious products of the Hollywood studios in the 1920s. In our 1923 list, each found a place with a masterpiece: Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris, Keaton’s Our Hospitality, and Lloyd’s Safety Last.
This year we may surprise some by giving Lloyd a miss. For years The Freshman was thought of as his main claim to fame, perhaps alongside Safety Last. I think this was largely because The Freshman was the one of the few Lloyd films that was relatively easy to see. (Perhaps also because Preston Sturges dubbed it an official classic by making a sequel to it (The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, aka Mad Wednesday, 1947.) Now that we have the full set of Lloyd’s silent features available, it emerges as a rather tame entry compared to Safety Last, Girl Shy, or our already-determined entries for 1926, For Heaven’s Sake, and 1927, The Kid Brother. Let’s just call The Freshman a runner up.
Keaton’s Seven Chances takes one of the most familiar of melodramatic premises and literally runs with it. James Shannon discovers from his lawyer than he stands to inherit a great deal of money if he is married by 7 pm on his 27th birthday–which happens to be the day when he receives this news. A misunderstanding with the woman he loves leads to a split, and in order to save himself and his partner from bankruptcy, Shannon determines to marry any woman who will volunteer in time. Hundreds turn up.
The result is another of the extended, intricate chase sequences that tend to grace Lloyd’s and Keaton’s features, and to a lesser extent Chaplin’s. In fact Seven Chances has a double chase. The first and longer part involves a huge crowd of women gradually assembling behind Shannon as he unwittingly walks along the street. This accelerates and keeps building, exploiting various situations and locales, as when the chase passes through a rail yard and Shannon escapes by dangling from a rolling crane above the women’s heads. Eventually the action moves into the countryside, where the brides temporarily disappear, taking a short cut to cut Shannon off, and he ends up in the middle of a gradually growing avalanche.
Seven Chances is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Kino.
Of all the films on this year’s list, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush is probably the most widely familiar. The Little Tramp character, here known only as a “Lone Prospector,” blends hilarity with pathos in a fashion that is actually typical of relatively few of the director/performer’s films overall. It is, however, how many people think of him.
The Gold Rush looks rather old-fashioned compared with Seven Chances. Although the opening extreme long shots of an endless line of prospectors struggling up over a mountain pass are impressive, much of the action takes place in studio sets, sometimes standing in for alpine locations. Both the cabins, Black Larsen’s and Hank Curtis’, are like little proscenium stages, with the action captured from the front. Yet the film depends on its brilliant succession of gags and on the Prospector’s status as the underdog who is also the resilient and eternal optimist.
The best bits of humor arise from Chaplin’s ability to create funny but lyrical moments by transforming objects metaphorically. Given the plot, some of the best-known gags arise from meals. One is the dance of the rolls, part of a fantasy sequence in which the Prospector dreams of entertaining a group of beautiful women at dinner (above), when in fact the women stand him up. Trapped by a storm in a remote cabin, the Prospector and his partner cook one of his shoes. He serves it on a platter and carefully “carves it, with the leather becoming the meat, the nails bones, and the laces spaghetti.
Many home-video versions of The Gold Rush have been released, but the definitive restoration of the 1925 version is available from the Criterion Collection.
The Golden Age in full swing
Lazybones (1925).
When people speak of the “Golden Age” of the Hollywood studio system, they usually seem to mean the 1930s and 1940s (and the lingering effects of the system in the 1950s). A look at Hollywood films of the 1920s shows that it was already functioning at full steam. Three features of 1925 display the utter mastery of continuity storytelling and style and a sophistication that matches films of subsequent decades.
Lady Windermere’s Fan may be the best silent made by Ernst Lubitsch, who has appeared on these lists before. It arguably ranks alongside Trouble in Paradise and The Shop around the Corner as one of the best films of his entire career. It’s a loose adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play, but it’s pure Lubitsch throughout.
Anyone who thinks that the classical Hollywood system was merely a set of conventions that allowed films to be cranked out with minimal originality could learn a lot from Lady Windermere’s Fan. Its completely correct in its use of continuity editing, three-point lighting, and the like does not preclude imaginative touches and methods of handling whole scenes. There’s the sequence when Lord Windermere visits the mysteriously shady lady Mrs. Erlynne in her drawing-room. The camera is planted in the center of the action, with frequents cuts as the two characters move in and out of the frame and even cross behind the camera. There’s not a hint of a mismatched glance or entrance across this complex and unusual series of shots. There’s the racetrack scene, as everyone present watches and gossips about Mrs Erlynne in a virtuoso string of point-of-view shots.
The racetrack scene ends with a wealthy bachelor following Mrs Erlynne out of the track. The camera moves left to follow her, keeping her in the same spot in the frame. As the man gradually catches up, Lubitsch uses a moving matte to hint at their meeting without showing it or cutting in toward the action.
A good-quality transfer of Lady Windermere’s Fan is only available on DVD as part of the More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931. (Beware the copy offered by Synergy, which according to comments on Amazon.com is from a poor-quality, incomplete print.)
The one title on this list whose inclusion might surprise readers is Frank Borzage’s Lazybones. I remember being bowled over by this film during the 1992 Le Gionate del Cinema Muto festival in Pordenone, which included a Borzage retrospective. I found the more famous Humoresque (1920) a disappointment, but Lazybones was a revelation. This is another case of a film that was simply unknown when film historians started writing about the Hollywood studio era. It was not discovered until 1970, when it was found in the 20th Century-Fox archives. As a result, Lazybones was, as Swiss film historian Hervé Dumont put it in his magisterial book on the director, “revealed as the most poignant–and the most accomplished–of Borzage’s works before Seventh Heaven.”
Year by year since we started this annual list, I looked forward to recommending Lazybones, and now we arrive there. I rewatched it for the first time to see if it really deserved to make one of the top ten. The answer is yes. For me, this is as good as 7th Heaven, or as near as makes no difference.
It’s difficult to describe the plot of Lazybones, since it doesn’t have much of one. Steve (played by the amiable Buck Jones) is a very lazy young man living in a rural village. He has a girlfriend, Agnes, whose mother scorns him. The girlfriend has a sister, Ruth, who returns home with a baby in tow. In despair, Ruth leaves the baby on a riverbank and tries to drown herself (image at top of section). Steve rescues her, and she explains that unknown to her family, while she was away she married a sailor who subsequently went down with his ship. She has no proof of this and knows her tyrannical mother will assume that the baby is illegitimate. Steve decides to keep her secret and adopt the apparent foundling himself.
All this happens during the initial setup. Then the little girl, Kit, grows up into a young lady. Along the way, not all that much happens. Steve, lacking any goals, stays lazy, which sets him apart from the energetic, ambitious protagonists of most Hollywood films. Kit is shunned by her classmates and the townspeople, and Steve tries to shelter her from all this. He loves Agnes but quickly loses her to a richer, more respectable man. He goes off to fight in World War I, becomes an accidental hero, and returns home after perhaps the shortest battlefront scene in any feature of the period. Kit finds a boyfriend.
What makes all this riveting viewing is its mixture of quiet comedy and poignancy. Steve is so amiably and unrepentantly loath to work that he is scorned by nearly everyone, and yet he commits an act of great kindness for which he gets no credit at all, except from his devoted mother. It is clear that these snobbish townspeople would scorn him even if they knew how he has kept Kit out of the orphanage and made a happy life for her.
The film is beautifully shot, and Borzage displays such an easy mastery of constructing a scene, particularly in depth, that it is easy to miss the underlying sophistication. Early on, Agnes and her mother arrive at Steve’s house. As Agnes waits outside the fence in the foreground, Steve tips his hat to her, in the foreground with his back to the camera. The mother passes by him toward the house, her mouth fixed in a sneer. We may think that Steve is oblivious to this, but once she passes out of the frame in the foreground, he puts his hat back on and slips it down over his face rather cheekily as he glances at her, his gesture suggesting his indifference to her opinion of him. (Note also the subtle touch of his lazily fastened suspenders.)
Borzage has mastered the use of motifs that are so characteristic of Hollywood cinema. There’s a running gag about the state of disrepair into which the gate of the picket fence around Steve’s and his mother’s house, with each person remarking “Darn that gate!” as they struggle through it. The repetition becomes cumulatively funnier because about two decades pass in the course of the film without the thing being fixed. The acting, particularly of Buck Jones and Zasu Pitts (as Ruth), is affecting.
It’s difficult to convey the charms of such an unconventional film, but give it a try and you may be bowled over, too.
A superb DVD transfer of Lazybones was included in the lavish Murnau, Borzage and Fox box (2008). The 20th Century-Fox Cinema Archives series offers it separately as a print-on-demand DVD-R. I’ve not seen it but suspect that there would be some loss of quality in this format. Besides, every serious lover of cinema should have that big black box sitting on their shelves next to the Ford at Fox one.
Returning to the more familiar classics, my final Hollywood film of the year is King Vidor’s The Big Parade.
Apart from its success and influence, however, The Big Parade remains an entertaining, funny, and moving film. Vidor’s scenes often run a remarkably long time, suggesting the rhythms of everyday life. One such action involves James fetching a barrel back to where he and his mates are staying so that he can turn it into an outdoor shower. When nearly back, he encounters Melisande, whom he initially can’t see. His stumbling about and her increasing laughter at his antics are played out at length (see top), as is a supposedly improvised scene shortly thereafter where James tries to teach Melisande how to chew gum.
A very different sort of prolonged scene is the long march of James and his comrades through a forest full of German snipers in trees and machine-gunners in nests. They begin by walking through an idyllic-looking forest, then increasingly encounter fallen comrades, and finally reach the Germans.
For years the prints of The Big Parade available were less than optimum, with some based on the 1931 re-release version, where the left side of the image had to be cropped to make room for the soundtrack. A 35mm negative was discovered relatively recently, however, and is the basis for the superb DVD and Blu-ray versions released in 2013.
Finally, I turn you over to David for some comments on films that fall within his specialties.
Eisenstein, action director
Watch this. Maybe a few times.
These two seconds, violent in both what they show and the way they show it, seem to me a turning point in film history. Here extreme action meets extreme technique. The spasms of the woman’s head, given in brief jump cuts (7 frames/5/8/10), create a sort of pictorial fusillade before we get the real thing: a line of riflemen robotically advancing into a crowd.
It’s not usually recognized how often changes in film art are driven by showing violence. Griffith’s last-minute rescues usually take place in scenes of massive bloodshed; not only The Birth of a Nation but the equally inventive Battle at Elderbush Gulch use rapid crosscutting to treat a boiling burst of action. The Friendless One’s pistol attack in Intolerance is rendered in flash frames that Sam Fuller might approve of. Later, the Hollywood Western, the Japanese swordplay film, the 1940s crime melodrama, the Hong Kong action picture, and many other genres pushed the stylistic envelope in scenes of violence. Hitchcock’s vaunted technical polish often depended on shock and bloodletting, from a bullet to the face (Foreign Correspondent) to stabbing in the shower (Psycho). The free-fire zone of Bonnie and Clyde and Peckinpah’s Westerns took up the slow-motion choreography of death pioneered by Kurosawa. Extreme action seems to call for aggressive technique, and intense action scenes can become clipbait and film-school models.
Sergei Eisenstein is celebrated as the theorist and practitioner of montage, whatever that is; but he insisted that what he called expressive movement was no less important. Just as montage for him came to mean the forceful juxtaposition of virtually any two stimuli (frames, shots, elements inside shots, musical motifs), so he thought that expressive movement ranged from a haughty tsar stretching his stork neck (Ivan the Terrible) to peons buried up to their shoulders, squirming to avoid horses’ hooves (Que viva Mexico!). In Eisenstein, psychology is always externalized, crowds move as gigantic organisms, and any action can turn brutal. (I fight the temptation to call him S & M Eisenstein.) We can trace influences—Constructivist theatre, the chase comedies coming from America, his interest in kabuki performance—but when he moved into cinema from the stage, Eisenstein became an action director, in a wholly modern sense.
Eisenstein’s first two features bracket the year 1925. Strike was premiered in January, The Battleship Potemkin in December. The first was apparently not widely seen outside Russia until the 1970s, but the second quickly won praise around the world. Potemkin’s centerpiece, the Odessa Steps sequence, became an instant critical chestnut, proof that cinema had achieved maturity as an art. Owing nothing to theatre, this massive spectacle was as pure a piece of filmmaking as a Fairbanks stunt or a Hart shootout. But of course Eisenstein went farther.
The Steps sequence was probably the most violent thing that anybody had ever seen in a movie. A line of soldiers stalks down the crowded staircase. A little boy is shot; after he falls, skull bloodied, his body is trampled by people fleeing the troops. Another man falls, caught in a handheld shot. A mother is blasted in the gut, and her baby carriage, jouncing down the steps, falls under a cossack’s sword. A schoolmistress who has been watching in horror gets a bullet in the eye–or is it a saber slash? The sequence ends as abstractly as it began, if “abstractly” can sum up the horrific punch of these images.
The film is much more than this sequence, of course, but every one of its five sections arcs toward violence, and each payoff is shot and cut with punitive force. The mutiny itself is a pulsating rush of stunts, unexpected angles, and cuts that are at once harsh and smooth. The whole thing starts with a rebellious sailor smashing a plate (in inconsistently matched shots) and ends with the ship confronting the fleet, a challenge rendered by percussive treatment of the men and their machines.
In Strike, Eisenstein rehearsed his poetry of massacre, along with a lot of other things. Instead of rendering an actual incident, as in Potemkin, here he portrays the typical phases any strike can go through. The plot starts with injustices on the shop floor, escalates to a walkout, and then—of course—turns violent, as provocateurs make a peaceful demonstration into a pretext for harsh reprisals. Throughout, Eisenstein experiments with grotesque satire and caricature. The workers are down-to-earth heroic; the capitalists are straight out of propaganda cartoons; the spies are beastly, the provocateurs are clowns. Every sequence tries something new and bold, and weird.
The most famous passage, well-known from his writings if not from actual viewing, is the climax. Here a raid upon workers in their tenements is intercut with the slaughter of a bull. Montage again, of course, but what isn’t usually noticed is the remarkable staging of that police riot, with horsemen riding along catwalks and fastidiously dropping children over the railings. For my money, more impressive than this finale is the earlier episode in which firemen turn their hoses on the workers’ demonstration. The workers scatter, pursued by the blasts of water, until they are scrambling over one another and pounded against alley walls. This is Strike’s Odessa Steps sequence, and for throbbing dynamism and pictorial expressiveness–you can feel the soaking thrust of the water–it has few equals in silent film.
For Eisenstein, the bobbing, screaming head in my clip was the “blasting cap” that launched the Odessa massacre. Is the woman the first victim of the troops, or is her rag-doll convulsion a kind of abstract prophecy of the brutality to come? Yanked out of the actual space of the action, it hits us with a perceptual force that goes beyond straightforward storytelling. Kinetic aggression, making you feel the blow, is one legitimate function of cinema. Eisenstein is our first master of in-your-face filmmaking.
After many tries, archives have given us superb video editions of Potemkin and Strike, both available from Kino Lorber. Potemkin’s original score captures the film’s combustible restlessness. Strike seems to have been shot at so many different frame rates that it’s hard to smooth out, but the new disc makes a very good try, and it’s far superior to the draggy Soviet step-printed version that plagued us for decades.
Chamber cinema
Every so often a filmmaker decides to accept severe spatial constraints, creating what David Koepp calls “bottle” plots. Make a movie in a lifeboat (Lifeboat) or around a phone booth (Phone Booth) or in a motel room (Tape) or in a Manhattan house (Panic Room) or in a remote cabin plagued by horrors (name your favorite). In the 1940s several filmmakers were trying out a “theatrical” approach that welcomed confinement like this; Cocteau’s Les Parents terribles, H. C. Potter’s The Time of Your Life, and of course Rope are examples. Today’s filmmakers are still exploring “chamber cinema.” The Hateful Eight is the most recent instance, with most of its chapters set in Minnie’s Haberdashery.
Typically, the chamber films in any period aren’t “canned theatre” like the PBS or English National Theatre broadcasts. Chamber films push the camera into the space, often showing all four walls and letting us get familiar with the rooms the characters inhabit. But this requires not only a carefully planned setting but also a good deal of cinematic skill in smoothly taking us to the primary zones of action.
Carl Dreyer was one of the earliest exponents of chamber cinema. He had seen initial examples in German Kammerspiel (chamber-play) films like Sylvester (1924) and had made a mild version himself in Michael (1924). Dreyer took the aesthetic to new heights in The Master of the House (1925).
Long before Akerman’s Jeanne Dielmann, Dreyer gave us a film about housework. Ida’s husband Victor is unemployed, so while he loafs and drifts around town, she struggles to keep things going. He pays her back with scorn and abuse. The plot is structured around two days, which yield a before-and-after pattern. At the end of the first, Ida leaves Victor, and a month later, his realization of his mistakes is revealed by his behavior in the household. The drama comes not only from the characters’ conflicts but from the way they handle everyday things like butter knives and laundry lines.
Rendering the household in all its specificity obliges Dreyer to rethink continuity filmmaking. He lays out the geography of the home by shooting “in the round” and cutting on the basis of eyelines and frame entrances. (He displays the same confidence in the “immersive camera” that Lubitsch displays in Lady Windermere’s Fan.) He trains us to notice landmarks, to associate bits of action with particular areas of the apartment, and to sense the characters’ changing emotions in relation to small adjustments in composition. The film is an exceptionally fluid, assured one, and it prepares for more daring Dreyer experiments to come: the fragmented interior spaces of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the creeping camera of Vampyr, and the intensely theatricalized late films Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud. Little-known at the time, The Master of the House has come to be regarded as one of the most quietly perfect of silent films.
The most lustrous edition of The Master of the House is the Criterion release. It contains an in-depth interview with Danish film historian Casper Tybjerg and a visual essay that Abbey Lustgarten and I prepared. Criterion has posted an extract from the essay. More about this release is here.
In connection with the eleventh edition of Film Art: An Introduction, to be published in mid-January, we have added ten new online Connect video examples. These include one based on clips from the Blu-ray of The Gold Rush, which the Criterion Collection has kindly allowed us to use. We discuss two contrasting styles of staging used for comedy effects in the isolated cabin set.
The Dumont quotation is from his Frank Borzage: Sarastro à Hollywood (Cinémathèque française, 1993), p. 108.
Lea Jacobs and Andrea Comiskey have examined the complicated early distribution of The Big Parade in their “Hollywood’s Conception of Its Audience in the 1920s,” The Classical Hollywood Reader, Steve Neale, ed. (Routledge, 2012), p. 97.
Eisenstein’s aesthetic of expressive movement, and its relation to montage, is discussed in David’s The Cinema of Eisenstein. On Dreyer’s “theatricalized” cinema see his The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, and this essay on its sources in 1910s tableau filmmaking. Eisenstein’s exactitude in matching gesture to sound and cutting is demonstrated in Lea Jacobs’ Film Rhythm after Sound, reviewed here.
Lev Kuleshov’s second feature, The Death Ray, doesn’t make our top-ten list for 1925, but as a bonus we include its poster (by Anton Lavinsky), which must rank among the most beautiful of that year.
SOURCE: Observations on film art - Read entire story here.
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SOURCE: Film on Huffington Post - Read entire story here.
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Notes From Experimenta 2013
By the time I got to know the details, I’d already missed half of this year’s Experimenta, India’s most prominent experimental film festival founded by Shai Heredia in 2003. This year’s edition was impressive not only in its expansiveness, being categorized into competition section, country focus, artist talks, live performances and artist profiles, but also given that it was entirely crowd-funded, which surely calls for some cheers. I congratulate Experimenta and wish them bigger successes in the years to come. Here are some notes on exactly one half of this year’s fest.
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
(Curated by Anuja Ghosalkar)
MOUNT SONG (Shambhavi Kaul, India, 2013, Video, 9min)
Shambhavi Kaul’s elusive, melancholy and richly atmospheric film starts with images of storm inside an artificial jungle. We don’t see the storm, just the idea of a storm, which is befitting for a film that traces the elements that constitute a sensorial experience, as when watching a film. Gliding through what looks like haunted, dilapidated sets for a Chinese martial arts movie, Kaul’s film preoccupies itself with pure form, such as the amorphous outline a wisp of synthetic smoke, visceral, staccato edits between shots and the mysterious interplay of light, dust, colour and camera movement, under the veneer of an abstract genre piece located somewhere between Masaki Kobayashi and Tsui Hark.
BURNING STAR (Joshua Gen Solondz, USA, 2012, Video, 4min)
Modest in scope yet hypnotic in effect, Solondz’s 4-minute animation in colour is admittedly a dedication to the artist’s father who apparently wanted him to “make a more colorful work”. Colourful, it certainly is. We see a twelve-sided star, alternatively imploding and exploding in dazzling primary colours, with spiky patterns that complement its periphery moving towards and away from the star’s pulsating core, which serves both as the visual and true center of the symmetric image. The soundtrack dominated of what sounds like radio interference, reminiscent of Peter Tscherkassky’s work, attains a musical regularity that makes the film easy to groove to.
PLAY LIFE SERIES (Ella Raidel, Germany, 2012, Video, 11min)
Raidel’s four-part study of performativity in the visual media begins with a rigged-up sword fight between two actors suspended on ropes in the woods – a scene that is soon revealed to be a part of a film shoot, prompting us to reflect not only on the artificiality of the fight, but also the film crew itself. This Brechtian gesture of exposing the inescapable element of performativity that marks all filmmaking becomes the organizing principle for the rest of the film, which emphasize the artificiality of earnest forms – melodrama, music videos and even everyday confrontations – by creating an ironical distance between them and the audience through the presence of a film crew – hardly experimental.
PARTY ISLAND (Neil Beloufa, France, 2012, Video, 9min)
Performativity and ritualized interaction are also at the heart of Beloufa’s raunchy video work that is set in an artificial, back-projected beach, where a bunch of actors stiltedly playing vacationers go through the codified rituals of vacationing, socializing and seducing. More interesting than its ham-fisted, part-Surrealist illustration of the sexualization of images and the subliminal representation of sex through phallic imagery are its formal pleasures – its tableau-like arrangement of actors in a claustrophobic setting, the equally suffocating chopped, restrictive images, the double framing of actors through geometric shapes, the intuitive, tactile editing pattern and the intriguing interaction among multiple visual planes.
BLACK POT AND MOVEMENT (Chaoba Thiyam, India, 2013, Video, 13min)
A simple, direct and even schematic equivalence characterizes Thiyam’s modestly but precisely named film – that between the fabrication of the eponymous black pot and the formulation of a new movement by a pair of dancers. However, like its title, Thiyam’s sepia-tinted film is entirely materialist in approaching this comparison, striking an equation between the pliant material using which the pot is made and the equally malleable bodies of the performers. The juxtaposition between the rhythm of repetitive labour and dance movements also attempts to collapse the gap between the artist and worker figures – a chasm that artists have always struggled with.
ASHURA (Köken Ergun, Turkey, 2012, Video, 22min)
One of the more assured and less academic entries in the programme, Ergun’s compilation of vignettes from Ashura Day – the annual commemoration of the martyrdom of Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Mohammad, in the Battle of Karbala by minority Shia population in the outskirts of Istanbul – is a sketch of collective mourning, a reflection on the cultural regulation of expression of grief. Through an unforced collocation of theatrical religion and religious theater, the film demonstrates how heightened, artificial, popular forms become the most cathartic form of communal grieving and, in a general sense, how art’s purpose of embodying and representing collective apprehensions still remains central.
BLOOD EARTH (Kush Badhwar, India, 2013, Video, 40min)
Squarely located in the now-too-recognizable genre in Indian documentary of partisan filmmaking against the repercussions of globalization, Badhwar’s film is an account of the reactions of the residents of Kucheipadar village in Odisha to the acquisition of their bauxite-rich land by mining corporates. Shinsuke Ogawa it isn’t, but Blood Earth’s documenting of the often-glossed-over fault lines in a popular movement gives it a transparency frequently absent in its contemporaries. Its best moments, however, are completely apolitical: a protracted, fixed-camera shot of a room full of noisy, convening villagers that results in strange visual patterns over time and a Daïchi Saïto-esque tracking shot of roadside plants that delightfully takes the film for two minutes into a non-representational realm. Winner of the Adolfas Mekas award of the fest.
A+ (Nobu Adilman, Canada, 2012, Video, 6min)
Commissioned by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, Adilman’s charming, humourous and even suspenseful short video, scored to a guitar solo, presents us glimpses from the meticulously maintained, hand-written film-viewing diary of super-cinephile Moen Mohammed spanning the year 2011 (inferred from an entry on Trash Humpers), consisting of movie names, year of release, director name and grades. The result is not only a straightforward documentation of the tastes of one Antonioni-loving, Godard-disliking film buff, but also an indirect snapshot of the boons of new millennial cinephilia which facilitates the viewing of such a vast, variegated repertoire of films within a short period of time.
TRAVELS ABROAD (Karl Mendonca, USA, 2013, Video, 7min)
Mendonca’s petit film diary was shot in 8mm apparently over six years (go figure!) and charts the filmmaker’s return home from New York to India. We see the filmmaker’s ride back home through the eyes of an outsider, his (grand?) parents and his trekking into the local woods presented in a typical home video aesthetic, sometimes presented in time lapse. Marked by circular motifs, Travels Abroad is a self-proclaimed exploration of themes of migration, identity and belonging, but, in actuality, it never rises about its home movie banality and accomplishes little more than what any everyman equipped with a video camera flying back home would have shot.
PULSE (Anuradha Chandra, India, 2013, 16mm, 15min)
A sketch of Rotterdam in 2008, Chandra’s 16mm project presents out-of-focus, low frame rate, time lapse images of the city and its environs that are abstracted till the limits of perceptibility. Owing to high exposure times, people, vehicles, seasons and the time of day are abstracted out and the residual record of static structures underscores the strongly geometrical nature of urban constructions. These images, frequently dominated by a single saturated colour, carry a tension between movement and stasis. On a level, Chandra’s film is an Impressionistic portrait of a city (with pointillist images) that explores how far a geographical entity can be visually abstracted so as to retain its identity.
DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (Joe Hambleton, Canada, 2012, Video, 8min)
One is reminded of Chris Marker, especially the melancholy Level Five (1997), while watching Hambleton’s refreshingly widescreen structural film that employs a repeating element – the camera looking through the windshield of a car rolling on a highway before slowly zooming out and refocusing onto an object fixed to the car ceiling – while a voiceover recites what sound like diary entries of a gamer wandering internet message boards. We are in the far future, it would seem, and the current day objects – joysticks, electronic toys and other curios – in the car appear like shards from a past. The result is a meditation on memory, a reflection on how geography and everyday objects bear the trace of history.
ANOTHER COLOUR TV (The Youngrrr, Indonesia, 2013, Video, 9min)
The Youngrrr Collective’s simple and amusing critique of the isolation of the middle class from history would perhaps have been more effective as an installation, wherein the contrast between the two sections of the screen we see – a mute assortment of various local TV telecasts serious and frivolous and the reverse-shot of a middle-class household hooked to soap operas, ‘reality’ television and religious sermons and literally imprisoned within the frame of the television – would have been even sharper when placed face-to-face. Nevertheless, by locating tawdry television productions alongside their passive consumption and internalization, the film brings to surface the artificiality of the family’s time together and the ideological-mediation of their private conversations.
NEW HARVEST (Pallavi Paul, India, 2012, Video, 11min)
A discordant combination of talking-heads interview of a politically dissident poet, educational documentary about the desire of scientists to alter nature’s rhythm of day and night and morsels of letters real and imagined between two writers shot in digital video with harsh light sources that form deep chiaroscuros, Paul’s project revolves around things utopian – ideal yet impossible – images unmade, roads not taken. The segments or the fragments of narratives within each are linked by a dream-logic which suggest a impossibility but seem to look forward to a future where these dreams might be realized. The outcome is a set of vague stabs at anarchist political hopes.
ARS MEMORATIVA (Scott Miller Berry, Canada, 2013, Video, 20min)
Ars Memorativa – Art of Memory – refers to the methods and techniques we use to remember things, but in Berry’s four-part examination of audiovisual media as incubators of personal memory, it also points to cinema as the preeminent art of memory, of remembrance. Amalgamating analog and digital video, celluloid and audio recordings, whose scratches, smudges and crackling noises, in their own way, act as traces from the past, the film partly ruminates on the purpose of cinema as an authentic document, as evidence of a person’s existence. Berry’s film is a modest reflection on how home movies, music records and photographs, after a person’s passing, develop the quality of preserving the history of the person’s life.
SPECIAL FOCUS: JAPAN
(Curated by Chris Gehman)
GESTALT (Takashi Ishida, Japan, 1999, 16mm, 6min)
With a beguiling organ-driven soundtrack, Gestalt impresses us with the transparency its of intention, as the title makes clear, and the single-mindedness of its approach. Ishida’s delectable study in 16mm of the malleability of our perspective of space, apparently achieved by continuously repainting the walls of a room, founds itself on the interaction of various geometric and non-geometric motifs that make the space appear alternatingly two and three-dimensional. The effect is to continually keep altering our impression of the room space, and in critical theoretical terms, to undermine the artwork’s interpellation of the viewer as a subject and to destabilize the Albertian perspective on which his/her relationship with the image is based.
A FEATHER STARE AT THE DARK (Naoyuki Tsuji, Japan, 2003, 16mm, 17min)
In the dream-like way normally unrelated objects segue into each other, Tsuji’s hand-drawn illustration of a made-up Creation myth reminds one of the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse, and perhaps even the works of Dali. Tsuji’s method involves drawing with charcoal on paper, photographing the result, erasing the plate and redrawing the next frame. The result is that the each frame carries a trace of the previous and, consequently, the film chronicles its own history, its own making. Tsuji’s drawings are unrealistic, disproportional, undignified and composed of fluid forms that throw his method into sharp relief. The outcome is closer to sand animation than traditional drawing
YELLOW SNAKE (Nobuhiro Aihara, Japan, 2006, Video, 10min)
Pitched between non-representational and traditional 2D animation, Aihara’s purposefully unwieldy video work, made 5 years before his demise in 2011, consists of two distinct visual planes – a periodic flux of semi-representational figures (bottles, fingers, planets, doughnuts) progressively growing in size to give an appearance of coming out of the screen (and hence the appearance of three-dimensionality) and a realistically drawn two-dimensional yellow hand with a pointed index finger that keeps poking into this swarm of monochrome objects – laid over a discordant soundscape. Mischievous and gleefully indulgent, Yellow Snake, if not anything else, is a reflection of the artist’s own playful relationship with his drawings.
MY TOWN (Tomomichi Nakamura, Japan, 2007, Video, 17min)
A mélange of even wider variety of animation techniques marks the quasi-Cronenbergian My Town, which draws from low-resolution photography, stop-motion animation, commercial anime drawing and video game graphics on which rudimentary pencil sketches without much foreshortening are overlaid, which, in essence, inscribes two-dimensional objects in three-dimensional space. Nakamura’s part-science-fictional part-fantastical narrative seemingly about a virus outbreak, an ensuing nuclear war and the eventual wiping out of humanity is distinguished by its soundtrack – a combination of drum beats, electronic music and low-frequency noise – and its cinematic approach to space – its simulation of film camera and its depiction of flat objects in three-dimensions.
SPACY (Takashi Ito, Japan, 1981, 16mm, 10min)
Intermittently stitched together from hundreds of photographs taken inside a gymnasium exhibiting these very photographs, Spacy is a structural study of cinematic space that creates a mise en abyme of photographed spaces into and out of which we move until we are no longer sure of which ‘level’ we are in. Despite the rapid stream of images shot at us, our focus remains firmly fixed at the geometric center of the image around which the configuration of represented space changes continuously. This trait, along with the absence of any vertical camera movement and the many levels of space negotiated, places the film alongside contemporary First Person Shooter games like Doom.
ZONE (Takashi Ito, Japan, 1995, 16mm, 13min)
Ito’s intense and claustrophobic piece, positioned between postmodern music videos and generic horror, shows the reanimation to life of a headless man wrapped in gauze and tied to a chair in a room populated by mirrors, a bandaged toy truck, a masked figure with light sources on him and framed photographs of eerily empty locations. Rife with movement – pleasing lateral tracking shots, time-lapse photography, reverse video and stop-motion animation – Zone plays on Kracauer’s idea of cinema as resurrection of dead objects from the ghastly stillness of photography. Ito’s psychologically motivated film is closer to classical Expressionism than his earlier structural work.
JAPANESE KITCHEN: THREE STORIES (Tabaimo, Japan, 2000, Video, 9min)
A more traditional style, closer to commercial Japanese animation, marks the three-episode Japanese Kitchen, which presents sketches of a housewife trying to imitate recipes shown on daytime television. The manner in which the banality of the situation is superimposed over chilling body horror – beating small men and women in a mixer to produce babies, deep frying the male brain and seeds that have people crawling out when soaked in water – betrays a trace of populist horror cinema, television and literature. Tabaimo’s tongue-in-cheek triptych – commissioned for television whose audience is the very subjects of her film – proposes tantalizingly easy and morbidly humorous solutions to the demographic problems of Japan.
INCH-HIGH SAMURAI (Tanaami Keiichi and Nobuhiro Aihara, Japan, 2007, 16mm, 8min)
One of Aihara’s last films, Inch-High Samurai is admittedly a tribute to and a re-imagination of a popular manga series the directors used to read as kids that presented the adventures of a Samurai measuring an inch in height. The difference is that this film taps directly into the libidinal foundation of the manga and crystallizes the sexual and violent forces brimming beneath. Hyper-kinetic, raunchy and decidedly over-the-top, the film opens with drawings of various body parts floating on the sea from where the little phallic Samurai begins his extremely telescoped set of frenzied adventures that is, quite literally, the stuff of wet dreams.
CHILDREN OF SHADOWS (Naoyuki Tsuji, Japan, 2006, 16mm, 18min)
A ghastly spin on Western fairy tales, especially Hansel and Gretel, Children of Shadows is a tale of survival and growing up that is constructed with fluid, curvy and continuous forms that facilitate and highlight Tsuji’s charcoal on paper approach. The artist uses his POV like a moving camera and negotiates a three-dimensional space even when he abstains from providing a stable reference as in traditional drawings which makes it tougher to judge location or proportion. The movement of characters is slowed down, as though traversing an oneiric space, there is an affinity for closed forms and the humour is black and the drawings joyfully vulgar.
GOD BLESS AMERICA (Tadasu Takamine, Japan, 2002, Video, 12min)
Takamine’s God Bless America gives us the artist and his female assistant sojourning inside a red-walled studio while working on a massive lump of clay present in the center of the screen and the room. We see them pass 18 days working, eating, socializing and having sex in time lapse while the clay head is moulded in such a way that it appears to sing the titular hymn in real time. If this construction of twin time frames within a single film derives from music videos, the integration of the work of art into lived-in space derives from architecture, where it becomes an object to be experienced intuitively by habitude instead of through active contemplation.
ARTIST PROFILE: JACK CHAMBERS
(Curated by Lauren Howes)
HART OF LONDON (Jack Chambers, Canada, 1970, 16mm, 79min)
Stan Brakhage called this final film of Canadian visual artist Jack Chambers, who died of leukemia in 1977, one of the greatest films ever made. Chambers’ predominantly found-footage film exhibits touches of Brakhage’s own work, especially Dog Star Man (1961-64), in its use of roving secondary exposure, image overlaps, negatives, faster frame rates and high-velocity montage and its partly phenomenological approach to images. Opening with footage of a deer hunt – an event that would haunt the entire film – the first section of Hart of London is scored to the sporadic sound of the elements of nature and engages with visuals of architecture and everyday life in London, Ontario, superimposed with a negative that results in stereoscopic images at certain points, and, at times, abstracted away from photorealism to the point where we only observe black dabs on a white screen. Towards the midpoint, the film moves away from superimposition towards montage as the primary technique for meaning creation. It is from hereon that the film crystallizes its exploration of the cycle of life. Images from a slaughterhouse are intercut with those of a baby, dead sheep fetuses are juxtaposed with a human newborn. The architectural marvels of the first segment are responded to in the second by destruction and demolition of buildings, which become as much a spectacle as the former. On one level, the film is certainly an indictment of human egotism, which places humanity at the center of the universe and deems it as being the prime mover of all things. But it is also a meditation of humanity’s ceaseless capacity to learn, endure and survive and the film abounds with symbols of birth, rebirth and resurrection. This view of humanity from a detached, godlike-perspective takes the film closer to the oeuvre of Artavazd Peleshian, whose ultimately hopeful view of life, Hart of London echoes, however less emphatically.
ARTIST PROFILE: PANCHAL MANSARAM
(Curated by Shai Heredia)
INTERSECT (Panchal Mansaram, India, 1967, 16mm, 6min)
Panchal Mansaram was already established as a collage artist when he came to cinema and this transition is evident in the approach to his material in Intersect, which mashes footage shot during his interactions with Satyajit Ray, Ravi Shankar and Marshall McLuhan with excerpts from TV and radio commercials. “East and West are becoming like each other” goes one stray audio bite. Evocative of the many fine experiments at Films Division – yet not as pointed or as rigorously thought out – Intersect was completed after Mansaram’s emigration to Canada and reflects the director’s own transnational status – an autobiographical element which he explored further in his mixed-media installations.
DEVI, STUFFED GOAT AND PINK CLOTH (Panchal Mansaram, Canada/India, 1967, 16mm, 16min)
An assortment of impressionistic vignettes from the city of Bombay – a place that Mansaram calls “collage in motion” – strung together by the pervading presence of the beautiful lady of the title, her stuffed goat and a piece of pink cloth, this 16mm quasi-Nouveau Realist project tries to comprehend a city partly through its extraordinary human specimen, decrepit objects and familiar images. Some passages of the film, scored to a mix of flute, trumpet and percussions, seem straight of a René Magritte tableau in the way they piece together completely dissociated commonplace objects, even though this disruption of everyday logic seems less like an ideological intervention than a gleeful vagrancy of a mischievous imagination.
REAR VIEW MIRROR (Panchal Mansaram, Canada/India, 1966-2011, 16mm, 13min)
45 years in the making, Rear View Mirror spans the entire career of Mansaram as a filmmaker and opens with the voice of the artist reciting a piece of autobiographical information. Seen through the eyes of two young tourists entering a city on a horse cart, the film unfolds as a kind of ‘re-entry’ into and ‘looking-back’ at his life in India, especially his early years in his hometown of Mount Abu in Rajasthan, suffuse with reds, yellows and browns. The images of the convivial atmosphere at the local fete is complemented by sundry images – spiritual and profane – from the city linked together by the director’s characteristic sense of humour.
ARTIST PROFILE: AKBAR PADAMSEE
(Curated by Lalitha Gopalan)
SYZYGY (Akbar Padamsee, India, 1970, Video, 6min)
Bombay-based abstract artist Akbar Padamsee made his transition to cinema with the help of ace cinematographer K. K. Mahajan and was apparently held in high regard by Mani Kaul. A product of the short-lived Visions Exchange Workshop (VIEW) founded by Padamsee as a platform for enabling interaction between painters and filmmakers, the soundless animation Syzygy begins with basic geometric figures moving on the screen in regular patterns. With mathematical regularity, these figures morph into word grids and number lines representing distances, which in turn, gradually, give way to more complex intersection of line segments – mazes, meshes and networks. The resulting images bear similarity to the works of Mondrian and Kandinsky and serve to illuminate emotional correlatives to purely aesthetic forms such as the sense of spaciousness and liberation offered by a diagonal line slashing across a matrix of verticals and horizontals. Despite its ostensibly stream-of-consciousness approach, all the images have a regularity, harmony, and balance which throw light on Padamsee’s structured and perhaps even classicist thinking process.
SOURCE: The Seventh Art - Read entire story here.
Comic-Con: The end of an era, and other highlights
Kristin here:
Long-time readers of this blog may recall that in 2008 I went to Comic-Con for the first time. I can’t recall exactly what led me to take the plunge. It may have been that by that time it was evident that the con had grown into a major opportunity for Hollywood studios to publicize their upcoming blockbusters to their core audience and I wanted to witness the process in person. Until this year, I hadn’t returned to Comic-Con. I was motivated in part by the fact that this was the last big promotional event for a film in the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit franchise. I had briefly discussed Comic-Con in relation to LOTR in The Frodo Franchise, but I had not witnessed any of the appearances of cast and crew promoting the first trilogy. This was my final chance, the end of an era.
I blogged about my first visit four times. I wrote about the LOTR/Hobbit presence on the Frodo Franchise blog. On this blog I gave an overview of the Comic-Con experience, analyzed why Hollywood poured so many resources into an event nominally about comic books, and posted a conversation between Henry Jenkins and me. Henry, who had helped found the area of fan studies back in the 1990s with such widely cited publications as Textual Poachers, was also a Comic-Con newbie that year, and we shared our reactions. (This year Henry was on a panel, “Creativity Is Magic: Fandom, Transmedia, and Transformative Works,” one of a number of panels on fan culture. I missed it because I was in line for Hall H. More on that below.)
A friend of mine who has a press pass assured me that they were not as hard to obtain as I had feared, so, based on my collaboration on this blog and my position on the staff of TheOneRing.net, I applied. To my delight, I was granted one, so I set out to cover Comic-Con more officially.
Going to Comic-Con alone isn’t nearly as fun, and I was lucky enough this year to meet up there with my friends, Professors Jonathan Kuntz and Maria Elena le las Carreras and their irrepressible daughter Rebecca, who are always terrific company.
Preview night
On the Wednesday evening before Comic-Con begins, there is a preview. This means that people with various special passes can get into the big exhibition hall where most of the booths are set up. These range from dealers in rare comic books to the biggest entertainment companies, like Warner Bros. and Lego. Many of them offer unique items only for sale or give-away at Comic-Con.
Many attendees have realized this, and they buy tickets that include the preview evening. The floor was much more crowded than when I attended the preview night in 2008. There were lots of lines with people trying to get those unique collectibles.
Others were there to look at comics. Yes, there are still plenty of comics at Comic-Con. There are dealers offering rarities, as in the image above. There are comics publishers with their latest offerings.
A particular favorite of ours is Fantagraphics, which specializes in reprinting comics. They’ve launched a set of hard-cover volumes of Walt Kelly’s syndicated Pogo strips. They also, I discovered, are doing a series of Don Rosa comics, also in hardback. In fact, when I was strolling around the booth, I realized that Rosa himself was signing autographs until 8 pm. It was then 7:59, so I grabbed volume 1 and was the last person to get my copy signed. By the way, it includes “Cash Flow,” one of the Uncle Scrooge stories I mentioned in our first blog entry on Inception. Volume 1 hasn’t actually been published, but it’s available for pre-order on Amazon.
The big moment of my evening, entirely by chance.
My first press conference
Once you’re granted a press pass, your name is put on a list made available to the exhibitors and publicists planning events. Companies big and small send you announcements about signings, press 
conferences, swag available at booths, parties in downtown venues, and so on. Many of these events promote video games, graphic novels, and television, but one sounded intriguing to my film interests: a press conference for Penguins of Madagascar, an entry in Dreamworks’ animated Madagascar franchise. The odd thing was that the event was scheduled in the morning at 11:15, fifteen minutes before the DreamWorks panel in Hall H. If we came to the conference, we couldn’t get into Hall H–unless the PR people reserved seats there for us. The big attraction was that some of the voice talent, including Benedict Cumberbatch and John Malkovich, as well as the two directors would be there.
I showed up and got a front-row seat off to the side. The room filled up (right).
The event itself started somewhat late, and two gentlemen who were not Benedict Cumberbatch or John Malkovich appeared and answered some questions. (I would give their names, but the usual signs put on the table in front of guests were not in evidence.) We were approaching 11:25. John Malkovich and another gentleman appeared. Another couple of questions were asked, and someone announced that Benedict Cumberbatch’s plane had gotten in late the night before and besides we had to leave to make room for the next event scheduled in the room. We were not escorted to reserved seats in Hall H, where I hear that Benedict Cumberbatch did appear.
I can only trust that this is not how most press conferences turn out. Perhaps I will be invited to another one and find out.
Bill Plympton in person
Given that I had no option to go to the Hall H DreamWorks Animation presentation, I sought out an alternative among the several items offered during the noon slot. I had had my eye on a panel which had as its guests the well-known animator Bill Plympton, as well as Jim Lujan, the co-director of the feature-length Revengeance, in progress. David and have long been fond of Plympton’s work, especially his laugh-out-loud classic, Your Face (1987), which was nominated for an Oscar. It’s just a series of distortions of a man’s face as he sings an utterly wimpy love ditty (above).
Plympton continues to be remarkably prolific. He has worked on fourteen episodes of The Simpsons, including doing twelve couch gags. Now he has a feature, Cheatin’, which will be shown for a week starting on August 15 at the downtown independent in Los Angeles. (Earlier this year it played at Slamdance, but I can find no theatrical release date.) You can see a short appeal animated by Plympton for the film’s Kickstarter appeal; its quite informative about the animation techniques used. The campaign itself is over, having raised $100,916, exceeding the goal of $75,000.
Apart from clips from Revengeance, Plympton also showed a brand new short, Footprints, a charming tale of a man’s search for a mysterious house invader. It will be shown on August 14 as part of the Hollyshorts Film Festival, which will honor Plympton with the Indie Animation Icon Award. The film was entirely hand-drawn in black and white and then colored digitally.
During the panel there was a contest for a T-shirt. The question was: What is Bill Plympton’s middle name? Despite a plethora of cell phones, laptops, and tablets in the audience, no one could come up with the right answer. A second question was put forth: what was Plympton’s first theatrically released film? “The Tune,” came a cry from the audience. It was Sam Viviano, art director of Mad Magazine; he walked off with the shirt. Plympton then sheepishly confessed that his middle name is Merton.
Plympton’s films have been hard to find online, but this fall they will become available on Source HD: “It’s the entire catalog, everything I’ve ever done.” That includes about 60 shorts. As a result of this online exposure, he says, “I expect that when I come back to San Diego next year they’re going to have to give me one of those huge 2000-seat rooms.” I hope so, and I hope it will be filled–but not so jammed that I could not get a seat.
Plympton offered all attending his panel a free autographed drawing. I went to collect mine at his booth in the exhibition hall and found him drawing (right), as he must constantly be doing. Note the Cheatin’ poster behind him at the left and the usual bustle of Comic-Con in the background. He paused to dash me off a delightful image of his famous Dog character. (An animator who doesn’t use cels has to be really fast at drawing.)
Plympton DVDs are not all that easy to find, though you can get them and other merchandise at his website’s shop. If you don’t know his work, it’s time to start catching up.
A new experience: The Indigo Ballroom
Seeking to accommodate more fans without violating fire regulations, Comic-Con has expanded into nearby buildings. One of the facilities utilized this year was the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, just across from the Convention Center on the Hall H end. That’s where the DreamWorks press conference sort of took place. Its biggest room was the Indigo Ballroom. I’m not sure it had 2000 seats, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
My colleagues at TheOneRing.net have been presenting panels on the Hobbit series for several years now. In fact, my visit to Comic-Con in 2008 was as a participant on one of those panels, speculating much before the fact on the shape that the Hobbit project would take. At that point the cast hadn’t even been chosen. I suggested that Wisconsin’s own Mark Ruffalo would make an excellent Thorin. I still think he would have, but Richard Armitage has gained a large fan following in that role. I’m not sure that at that early stage Martin Freeman was everyone’s favorite candidate for Bilbo, but he soon became so–including mine. The man is a born hobbit.
That 2008 panel took place in a relatively small room in the Convention Center. In more recent years, the TORn panel has been joined by such luminaries from the filmmaking team as Richard Taylor. It has gained such a following that this year it was booked into the Indigo Ballroom.
Then we learned that George R. R. Martin was booked into the same room in the time-slot directly before TORn. (I’m sure you all know who he is, but for the few who don’t, I’ll just say, he’s the author of the “A Song of Fire and Ice” series, of which Game of Thrones is the first book.) We were all convinced that Martin’s session would be jammed and furthermore that an overlap in fandoms would mean that the audience there for Martin would stay for the TORn panel, excluding those who showed up just before the TORn session. There was much discussion as to how TORn staff not on the panel (like me) could get in and be sure of a seat. How many seats could be reserved? We didn’t know.
I determined to support my colleagues and attend the TORn panel. The question was, how many sessions would I have to sit through to make sure I could get a seat? (Rooms are never cleared between sessions at Comic-Con, since doing so would take too much time and would mean that people in one room for a session would not be able to get in line for the next session in that room. Hence the strategy of sitting through multiple panels in the same room to guarantee a seat at the one you really want to see.)
I arrived early in the afternoon in the middle of a session about some show on Comedy Central. This finally ended and the George R. R. Martin panel began. To my surprise, it was only about two-thirds full. I learned later that Martin often attends Comic-Con. Moreover, this time he wasn’t talking specifically about Game of Thrones. The session was billed as “George R. R. Martin Discusses In the House of the Worm.” The title in question is a new comic-book series that Martin is involved with. (Above, William Christensen, publisher at Avatar Press, interviews Martin.)
I had expected to sit through Martin’s session merely waiting for the TORn one to begin. I had read Game of Thrones, widely assumed to be heavily influenced by The Lord of the Rings. Game of Thrones was entertaining, but by the end I found it repetitious. I figured that the series could only become more so, so I quit there. I haven’t seen the TV episodes. Yet Martin turned out to be quite entertaining. He is a long-time fan, and his reminiscences about fandoms during the 1960s and onward were fascinating. He’s a lively, knowledgeable, and entertaining speaker with a wide experience in both reading and creating fantasy works in those days. His presentation made me wish that I liked that first book better.
The next session was “An Unofficial Look at the Final Middle-earth Film: The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies.” (Actually in the program the title said “Final Middle-Earth Film,” but I’m sure my colleagues did not make that capitalization error when they proposed the panel.)
The panel consisted of, from the left, Chris “Calisuri” Pirotta, a TORn co-founder; John Tedeschi, long-time staffer; Cliff “Quickbeam” Broadway, frequent contributor to the site; Kellie Rice, staffer and half of the “Happy Hobbits” fan duo; and Larry D. Curtis, another long-time staffer and frequent contributor. Chris and Cliff were among several TORn interviewees when I was researching The Frodo Franchise.
TORn has made annual appearances at Comic-Con, usually speculating in expert fashion on what might be included–or not–in the next film. Staffers comb the previous films, trailers, Peter Jackson’s production diaries, publicity photos, and cast and staff interviews, seeking for clues. While presenting their findings, they point out things in the earlier parts that people might not have noticed or may have forgotten.
The first line in the Powerpoint image above refers to widespread fan annoyance that Bilbo seems to have been pushed to the periphery of his own story in The Desolation of Smaug. This is a topic of frequent comment on the website. The TORn panel was held on Thursday, two days before any of us had a chance to see the first teaser-trailer’s premiere on Saturday in Hall H. (More on that below.) Although there are shots of Bilbo in that trailer, they mainly show him staring offscreen and reacting. I was left hoping that this is not an indication of more sidelining of our protagonist. In Tolkien’s book Bilbo decides to sit out the Battle of Five Armies and gets knocked unconscious early in the fighting; given that he’s our point-of-view figure, the battle is mainly told through other characters describing it afterward. No one expects Peter Jackson to stay true to that action and sacrifice the chance for another epic battle scene, so maybe Bilbo will get to do his share of fighting.
This year’s celebrity guest made an appearance at the end and took a few questions: Jim Rygiel, multi-Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor for The Lord of the Rings (and more recently Godzilla and The Amazing Spider-Man):
Whether the panel members were right in their speculations will not be known until December 17 (in the USA). Right or not, it was an entertaining and informative session.
What were they really there to see?
There are many rooms devoted to Comic-Con events, not to mention the various open-air booths and attractions set up in open spaces near the convention center. Room 25ABC is fairly large, but it’s considerably smaller than the Indigo Ballroom, 23ABC, and of course, Hall H. I was not alone in being puzzled as to why the panel “Fight Club: From Page to Screen and Beyond,” was scheduled in 25ABC at 7 pm on Saturday evening. Sure, the topic was an older film, and the panel was largely devoted to a forthcoming graphic-novel sequel to the story. Still, the participants included David Fincher, making his first Comic-Con appearance. I can only suspect that Fincher was a late addition to the panel’s line-up and it was too late to change the venue.
The result was that anyone determined to hear what Fincher had to say was bound to line up for the panels just before the Fight Club one and sit through them in order to see it. I decided to line up for “Disney’s Gargoyles 20th Anniversary” at 5 pm, having no idea what the Gargoyles are, and “Publishing 360: Building a Bestseller” at 6 pm, having no intention of trying to build a bestseller.
I got into a line that looked fairly short and was defined by lines of tape laid down on the carpets in the broad corridor outside 25ABC. It turned out to be one of those Disneyland-style ribbon-candy set-ups, where the line folds back on itself time after time, and you end up walking in one direction, turning around to walk in the opposite direction, only to realize that there is another group of people doing the same thing ahead of you in the same line. Fortunately most people seem to stick to the rules pretty closely, perhaps being aware of the wrath they would call down upon themselves by attempting to cut ahead of others.
I ended up about ten people back in line when the room was full. I never did learn what the Gargoyles were, but I suspected some people behind me had been hoping to get into that panel and were not there for the Fincher event. Indeed, as it became clear that no seats were going open up, a small number of people departed, leaving me about six people back from the front. It was looking good for me to get into “Publishing 360.”
At this point, from behind me I heard “Pardon me, but are you Kristin Thompson?” or words to that effect. Thus I met Ryan Gallagher, one of the stalwarts of The Criterion Cast, which describes itself as “A podcast network and website for fans of quality theatrical and home video releases.” (It is not officially associated with The Criterion Collection.) I recognized his name because he has sent many a reader to Observations on Film Art. Ryan’s latest podcast is a preview of Comic-Con, and I expect he will add one looking back on his experiences there.
What are the odds, I thought, and still think, that with 125,000+ visitors to Comic-Con, I would end up in line next to someone who recognized me? Turns out Ryan had been in line for the Gargoyles panel, so after a brief conversation, he departed. Eventually I was among the first into the room for the “Publishing 360″ panel, though there were people already there who didn’t leave, and I suspect the audience for Gargoyles doesn’t overlap all that much with the audience of people longing to write a bestseller. The procedure for building a bestseller, by the way, seems to consist primarily of getting the best agents and editors in the world. Aspiring writers, take note. Before the session began, I located an unoccupied electrical outlet and recharged my recorder. (This is a serious business at Comic-Con. The convention center is full of cell phones, tablets, and cameras dangling from outlets.)
The panel as pictured above consists of, from the left: moderator Rick Kleffel, Doubleday executive editor Gerald Howard, Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, David Fincher, and three artists and/or editors from Dark Horse Comics, which will bring out the Palahniuk-penned ten-part sequel starting in May, 2015.
A lot of the panel was about the graphic-novel sequel, of course. The main bit of new information about the film was that although it didn’t do particularly well at the box-office, Fincher finally got 20th-Century Fox to give him figures on how many DVDs were sold. Sales totaled around 13 million, so Fincher reckons the film must have made a profit in the long run. Probably the quotation from Fincher that will be remembered is: “My daughter had a friend called Max. She told me Fight Club is his favorite movie. I told her never to talk to Max again.” Fincher may not have been to Comic-Con before, but he knows how to please the fans.
Check out the Film website for an audio recording of the panel.
Hall H: Getting in
Hall H tends to draw much of the attention accorded to Comic-Con in the media. It’s the largest venue, with 6500 seats–including a large number reserved for representatives of the studios presenting publicity events there. That’s a big venue, but compared to the roughly 125,000 people attending the con each day, it’s not big enough. Although not everyone at Comic-Con wants to get into Hall H, most days the lines snake down and across the street, along the sidewalks. (A video moving along an entire Hall H line at a walking pace was posted on Youtube last year. It runs for over fourteen minutes, despite the fact that the people toward the front of the line are walking forward past the camera; if they were standing or sitting still, it would have run even longer.) In previous years the only way to guarantee getting into the hall for the first events of a day was to get there the previous evening and stay in line overnight. Short departures were possible if someone held your place, but basically you were there for the duration.
I was lucky enough to benefit from the innovation of a new policy on Hall H admissions. Color-coded wristbands would be handed out as the line formed, pausing at 1 am and resuming at 5am. The first portion of the line got a red band, with other colors for the next portions. The purposes were 1) the management could gauge how many people were lined up; 2) those in line could know whether they would get in or not; and 3) for the first time some people could leave for longer stretches of time than required for a rest-room break, as long as someone from their group with the same color wristband remained.
At least, that was how it was described in the online announcement. Those charged with distributing the bands and keeping order informed us that “a majority” of the group had to remain. To what degree that was enforced, we never learned. Fortunately that worked for Jonathan, Maria Elena, and I, since Rebecca had formed a “Hall H-line” group on Facebook and assembled a bunch of friends to camp out in line together. We adults, with our less flexible bones, departed for dinner and some sleep at our hotel. The next morning when we came to rejoin our group, the people in charge of keeping order asked if we had been to the rest room. Yes, we had. That and other things. Apart from everything else, the parking garage under the convention center has to be cleared after 10 pm, so the Kuntzes had to leave to get their car out. Clearly some clarifications of the guidelines are in order, but based on our experience the new wristband policy has improved the Hall H-line experience considerably.
The announced wristband-distribution schedule also had to be adapted. In the past, the Hall H line has started forming in the late afternoon or early evening, depending on the popularity of the first event scheduled for the following morning. Jonathan presciently went and got in line at 2:30 pm, and he was far from the first. Our party gradually grew as other members arrived, and inevitably groups ahead of us also swelled. Soon the line was very, very long. (A small portion of it is pictured above; the line had taken a U-turn a few hundred feet behind us, off right here.) Somewhere around 6:00 the wristbands started to be handed out, and small groups were escorted across the street to line up in the relatively luxurious area on the grass near the entrance to Hall H. There were white canopies overhead and the inevitable red plastic barriers dividing the area into rows approximately one reclining person wide. Those further back in line were less fortunate, having the sidewalk to call their bed. Our group of young stalwarts settled in for games, sleep, and an endless supply of trail mix and donuts. Rumor has it that anyone who arrived after about 9:30 pm didn’t get in. The last wristbands were handed out at around 2:30am. Presumably the handout did not pause at 1 am as planned, since clearly everyone who was going to get in when the hall opened was already there.
The next morning we received a call from Rebecca saying the group had been moved into the “chutes,” a process which had started at 7 am. These are slightly narrower strips of grass with the same plastic barriers; the chutes are opened one at a time, allowing the people in each to go in before the next chute is opened. More people are moved into the emptied chutes, and the process continues until the hall is full.
Although the handlers had said we would be let in at 9:30 for a 10:00 start, they got the process going at 9 am. By 10 we were all seated and ready for the Warner Bros. extravaganza to begin. There I am, wearing my vintage licensed Fellowship of the Ring T-shirt and the crucial pink wristband:
Expensive flash
Warner Bros. had two hours in Hall H on Saturday morning to promote their films. The full program is not announced in advance. People were assuming that The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies, as the biggest item on tap, would be saved for the end. That turned out to be correct.
The event started with curtains sliding back to reveal a long, panoramic screen on either side of the big central one. This surrounded about the front half of the audience in a U-shaped set of images. Warners installed these screens at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars; naturally no other studios were allowed to use them.
Some short presentations opened the program, beginning with Zack Snyder coming onstage. He introduced Ben Afleck, Henry Cavill, and Gal Gadot, none of whom spoke. We saw a very brief clip from Batman vs. Superman. The two lead characters’ first meeting had them glaring at each other with glowing eyes, white and red respectively. (Naïve me, wondering why if they’re both good guys, they don’t just join forces to fight evil.) My main impression was that Batman looks like he’s wearing a small tank turret on his head. The fans were apparently pleased with what they saw.
The moderator then introduced Channing Tatum, who stood below the screen as a montage of footage from Jupiter Ascending was shown. This made no impression on me, and I have no memory of it, except that the big action scene looked pretty conventional.
The event really got going with a much longer promotion with George Miller talking about Mad Max: Fury Road. This used the side panels to good effects (above). David and I have been fans of Miller and the Mad Max series ever since Mad Max II (aka The Road Warrior in the USA) appeared. It was a treat to hear him talk about the new film, though what he said is pretty much what he has said in other interviews: there’s little CGI in the film, he storyboarded the whole thing rather than writing a script, it’s an attempt to do a continuous chase sequence for an entire film, etc.
Miller presented a montage of quick scenes from the film. It looked good but familiar. There’s Max, chained up on the front of one of the villains’ vehicles, as were some of the captives in The Road Warrior. A lot of the minor characters recall those of the same film. The digital image looked brighter and sharper than the previous films–not necessarily a good thing, since the three first films were muted, conveying a sense that everything and everyone was coated with dust. Unseasonal rains in Australia forced the new film’s shoot to move to Namibia, which looks like it stands in for the Outback pretty well. We must trust that, just as the first three films were significantly different from each other, this fourth film will have a unique flavor not apparent in the footage shown.
This was, by the way, the second preview I’ve seen recently of a film that imitates the awesome (in the old and literal meaning of that word) dust-storm in this well-known National Geographic clip online. And why not, though CGI can never equal the real thing in this case.
Hall H for Hobbit
Quasi-Spoilers ahead:
The second half of Warners’ slot was given over to The Battle of Five Armies. An opening blast of music accompanied the appearance from left to right of a panorama of images from all three Hobbit films:
Even this fairly comprehensive view of the screens leaves out two or three images on the far right. The most revelatory of these shows Galadriel, Elrond, and Saruman at Dol Guldur, rescuing Gandalf. The panorama stayed up throughout the presentation. (A rather juddery pan around the whole things can be seen on Youtube.)
Steven Colbert, widely known as a devoted and highly knowledgeable Tolkien fan, MCed the panel, dressed in his costume from the third film, in which he has a nonspeaking bit part. He expressed his love for Tolkien and the films and showed the brief scene in which he appears. Then he introduced the impressive ten-person panel Warner Bros. had managed to assemble:
From the left, Colbert, Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, Benedict Cumberbatch, Cate Blanchett, Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lilly, Luke Evans, Lee Pace, Graham McTavish, Elijah Wood, and Andy Serkis
Of course, most of us couldn’t see them this clearly with the naked eye. Seated about a third of the way back in the auditorium, my view was as shown in the image at the top of this entry. Peter (that’s he in the lower left corner) looked mighty small in reality, but in Hall H three large screens magnify the proceedings for the crowd. (Similar video screens are used in the other very large auditoriums, notably the Indigo Ballroom.)
One highlight was the first screening of the long-awaited teaser trailer. This was released online two days later; the best place to see a large, sharp image that starts streaming almost instantly is on Peter’s Facebook page. I have to say that it looks pretty promising, apart from the continued presence of the distracting and tedious Azog and Bolg.
I won’t give a complete run-down on this panel, since a good video of it has been posted on Youtube (with the two screenings of the teaser trailer cut out). Much of it consists of typical star chit-chat. The most interesting thing said came from Peter. There has been considerable speculation among fans as to whether the filmmakers will stick to the book and let some characters die during the battle. Peter stated that the grim parts of the book are being retained and implied that several characters will indeed die. (This should mean that here will be much lamentation among the “hot Dwarves” aficionados.)
There has also been much speculation as to whether Peter Jackson or anyone else will be filming other adaptations of Tolkien’s work. This question wasn’t addressed during the panel, but the obvious answer is no. The production and distribution rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were sold by Tolkien and his publisher Allen and Unwin to United Artists in 1969. Rather than placing a time limit on the rights, as is customary, they sold them in perpetuity, and any control over the use of those rights forever passed out of the hands of Tolkien and subsequently of his estate. His son Christopher Tolkien has objected to the films that have been made, and he quite possibly will find a way to prevent any sale of film rights relating to the other books, even after his death. The Silmarillion, which takes place primarily in the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth, is, I think, virtually unfilmable. The most filmable single work, The Children of Hurin, is unremittingly grim and would be unlikely to attract any support within the industry. Apart from all that, Peter probably has no desire to prolong the franchise, either as a director or a producer.
In short, we have almost certainly seen the final “Middle-earth” presentation at Comic-Con. I’m glad I was there to see it. The franchise as a whole will undoubtedly have a presence at Comic-Con for years to come. Weta Ltd. has become a major force in the world of film and its future seems assured in a way that it did not a decade ago, when Peter Jackson’s projects were its main customers. Weta Workshop now has taken over making the collectible figures not only for Peter’s work but for other films, and it develops its own original projects for collectibles, television, and publishing. Its booth this year (below) was considerably bigger than the one I saw in 2008. (See the top image here.) It was doing very good business every time I passed by. The full-size Smaug head (above right) attracted considerable attention.
It’s still the case that the vast majority of Comic-Con attendees are not in costume.
All photos down to the one of George R. R. Martin, plus the two of lines for Hall H and the Smaug head on the Weta booth were taken by me.
My camera failed me during the Fight Club panel, so I have borrowed one from Anie Bananie’s Tumblr site, “David Fincher Stole My Life.” The photo of the panoramic screen with the Mad Max image is by Albert L.Ortega for Getty Images and illustrates the Variety story linked as “Warners installed …” in the second paragraph below it.
I mentioned that I was at the con with my friends Jonathan, Maria Elena, and Rebecca. Jonathan and Rebecca provided all the photos taken inside Hall H. (That’s Maria Elena’s TA James Shetty beside me in the green shirt.) Rebecca took the photos of the TORn panel, and Jonathan the ones directly above and below.
Many thanks to Jonathan for booking me a San Diego hotel room while I was in Egypt this past spring, and to Rebecca and her Facebook group for heroically camping out and holding our place in the Hall H line.
The San Diego Convention Center: an escalator’s point of view
SOURCE: Observations on film art - Read entire story here.
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Ellipsis #74
Paradies: Glaube (2012) (Paradise: Faith)
Ulrich Seidl
German/Arabic
Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Faith (2012), the second film in the Paradise trilogy, could be seen as a complement to its predecessor Paradise: Love (2012). While in Love, Klara (Margarethe Tiesel) tries to overcome a spiritual crisis through sex, here Anna Maria (Maria Hofstätter, in an intensely physical performance that rivals Tiesel’s brilliant portrayal) supplants physicality with Faith. What the previous film did with love, Faith does with religious belief, charting one person’s attempt to find Faith in a world that increasingly thwarts it. More precisely, the film refracts this quest through an Existentialist prism, producing a portrait of the search for meaning through Catholic values in a world where they have been rendered invalid. Like Klara, Anna Maria discovers that Faith, which is considered a private commitment, is invariably shaped by the social and political systems they are practiced within. Seidl’s film subtly plays with our judgment of the central character and dodges any easy association of her character with her belief system. The contradiction between her catholic principles and her demeanour with her estranged Muslim husband (Nabil Saleh) is less an indication of the fickleness of her Faith than a demonstration of the difficulties of having Faith in our times. The film has been characterized as a comedy in some critical quarters and that very classification speaks volumes about our Enlightened epoch, in which irrational faith can’t be anything but a fodder for laughter. Seidl’s clinical detachment – typified by his head-on compositions where characters come across as subjects in a behavioural study – from Anna Maria’s rituals is genuine neutrality rather than condescending irony. For an unprejudiced eye, all her actions – be it the self-flagellating routine or her insistence that non-Catholics are leading a sinful life – would appear as gestures as valid, understandable and worthy of empathy as Klara’s attempts at finding love.
SOURCE: The Seventh Art - Read entire story here.