Last spring I was on a panel at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO, called "Why We Still Go to the Movies." The first thing I said (because it was the first thing I thought of) was: "Permission to stare." I wasn't thinking about any particular movie (the title said "the movies") or about the business or anything like that. I was trying to get at the essential appeal of the movie-watching experience. And, for me, that has always been about looking really closely, and paying rapt attention to what is on view. Remember how your mom always said it wasn't polite to stare? Well, it's just the opposite at the movies.
(Actually, I guess it's not technically staring because my eyes tend to be constantly looking all around the frame to see what's going on, not just fixing on one particular thing. Unless it's a creature of spectacular beauty.)
You can call it voyeurism (because that's also what it is), but it's a special kind of staged, mediated voyeurism. Even when I was a little tyke and my parents would take me to Disney movies like "Pinocchio" and "Bambi" and "Mary Poppins," I of course wanted to lose myself in a Magical World of Entertainment, but I also liked that nobody in there could see me, and that I would be allowed to vicariously experience and study behaviors, situations and emotions that I might encounter in real life, too. Later, I felt the same way about watching Godard and Truffaut and Altman and Welles and Mizoguchi and Ozu and... (And even later I'd find out that was also part of a classic child of alcoholic behavior -- an obsession with trying to figure out what "normal" is and knowing you aren't it.)
A few months ago I e-mailed a dear friend (and former film professor) some images of plants in my garden -- which is something I like to do. During the growing season, which is March to November in the Pacific Northwest, I go out there almost every day -- sometimes several times a day -- and just walk around looking to see what's changing. As I've said many times, these plants are like time-lapse fireworks to me, and I like to capture them in various stages of exploding, playing with the focus and the shutter speed, and taking advantage of changing qualities of light throughout the day, and the season.
Sometimes I share pictures from the garden, which to me (the designing, planting, growing, maintenance and photographing) is as much a creative enterprise as a novel, or a film. I casually mentioned to my friend that this, after all, is what movies -- and all photography -- are about for me: framing, capturing and creating a record of an ephemeral moment before it changes, passes, dies. When you put a frame around something you have the illusion, at least, of preserving it -- though the preserved image is not the Thing Itself, but just a fleeting perception/representation of it. Like any memory, it is simultaneously the creation of something new, and the impression of something that is already gone.
So, you know, it's all about death. I don't remember when I first realized that about myself, that my mania for framing things through a lens was at heart an attempt to take illusory control over the process of time and decay. I think I was in high school. Yeah, I've always spent a lot of time thinking about terminal non-existence. (I think I've always known, consciously or subconsciously, that death is the final frame, the ultimate context for everything -- because once that frame is complete, that's all there is. No amount of post-production can change it.)
Cinema is a more elastic manipulation of time than still photography, which can combine more than one image in the frame at a time, but can't choose how long each one lasts, or what comes before it or after it. In movies, the frame is fluid: things can come into view and go out of view -- by entering and exiting, or by changing focus, by moving the frame itself, or by cutting (or otherwise transitioning) to another shot.
"Cinema," Martin Scorsese reportedly said, "is about what's in the frame and what's out." Simple and obvious as it may sound, I believe that's one of the most important and essential definitions of the medium ever uttered. And it's not just about movies, but about life. Everything depends on how you frame and re-frame it.
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NLP teaches that too...about framing and re-framing. All depends on perspective. Anyways, I find lovely the Tom Noonan quote you got up there in the right-hand corner by the way. People say we go to movies to 'escape', to be entertained, distracted, to get away.... No. We go to get back to life.
Does NLP teach you what it feels like to be a mere notch above a Creationist or a homeopath in terms of scientific respectability?
Porky in Wackyland is a good example of examining the frame. There are so many things going on at one time it may seem impossible to understand them all, but Clampett makes it work.
John K's blog is a great resource for showing the treasures that were in Termite Terrace's frames and early Disney but that have been degraded by later Disney and Dreamworks.
I love "Porky in Wackyland" (1938), remade as "Dough for the Dodo" (using color versions of some of the same drawings, but dramatically different backgrounds) by Friz Freleng in 1949. There's a comparison here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKedQDSvfq8
Clampett won me over with that cartoon.
"I'm the last dodo."
That would be a great film to do a shot-by shot analysis.
I'd love to see some of your photos!
I added a couple to the post. Even though it's generally pretty damp up here, I'm trying to plant drought-tolerant plants, and to water them mostly from my rain barrels in the summer. This year I was big into Echinacia, Achillea (yarrow), Agastache (hummingbird mint) and, as always, sedums.
Beautiful, thank you!!!
"I think I've always known, consciously or subconsciously, that death is the final frame, the ultimate context for everything -- because once that frame is complete, that's all there is. No amount of post-production can change it.)"
So, Jim, you're pretty certain that death is the end? How can you be so sure?
Well, we all live our lives with a certain set of assumptions -- that we will wake up after we go to sleep, that the sun will rise, that gravity will remain relatively constant... I see no reason NOT to think that death is the end of existence, and I have no reliable information about any other existence that could possibly help me live this one. No photos, either. By definition, death is the end of this existence, and this is the only one I've ever known. So, if there's another one, I (whatever the term "I" would mean in that context) will just have to face it if and when that moment comes. I have no memories of any previous existences, so those don't concern me. For the time being, I'm only interested in living this life. That it is finite is what gives it whatever meaning it may have.
To omg,
No. NLP teaches that to people, rightly or wrongly. I don't know much about that. I do recall hearing about "framing" and just felt like mentioning it.
However, I do know about Creationism, homeopathy and being a smart... Yeah you know, I don't appreciate or agree with those things either.
To be fair, it is indeed true that you never stated that you thought NLP had any legitimate basis, and of course you're correct that NLP does indeed use the concept of framing. Kind of an interesting comparison, actually.
Well, what would make you think that there is anything after death? Sound beliefs must be based on facts and evidence, not wishful thinking and speculation.
My impression has always been that people want to believe in afterlives because they can't imagine not existing. That's understandable enough, but it doesn't provide any intellectual justification for such beliefs. To use a failure of imagination to argue for an afterlife is self-defeating, because a) it's been long established as a logical fallacy, and b) most world religions assert that souls are created. So if you believe that a deity created your soul, then you must implicitly acknowledge that there was an eternity before your life in which you didn't exist. Then why would you find an eternity of non-existence after death to be so hard to accept?
Many people find comfort in the idea of an afterlife, but what is comforting about it? There are only about four possibilities for afterlives: 1) eternal bliss, 2) eternal torture, 3) reincarnation, and 4) neither eternal bliss nor torture, but an afterlife of ups and downs that's not that different from life itself. The first two are dull and arguably silly. The last two aren't compelling because they don't offer much on top of our lives as we have always experienced them.
(Not all religions believe in created souls. Some forms of Buddhism posit that our souls had no beginning and thus will have no end.)
When you really think about it, you'll realize that there's nothing about each of us that's ever unchanging. So why should there be an immutable soul? Our sense of self, what makes us distinctive and coherent individuals, comes entirely from a master narrative formed from all of our memories and experiences. Because these are stored in the brain, our identities depend on the brain, as does consciousness. The right kind of brain damage will change one person into a completely different person, as if his/her soul were replaced by a different one. Many neurological tests have clearly demonstrated that certain alterations to the brain affect consciousness in predictable, measurable ways. Without consciousness, we would have no sentience, which would render us no different from mindless robots/zombies/animals. Thus, there is no good reason to believe in the idea of a soul, which is an incoherent concept anyway.
Anyone who believes in souls would agree that they are connected to consciousness in some fundamental way. After all, consciousness of some sort (i.e., either waking or dreaming) is the only way that we can directly experience life. If our souls go to an afterlife, then we must have a level of consciousness in order to experience the afterlife as well. Therefore, having a soul would suggest that there is always consciousness, but we know that this is not true. If death were to be described simply in experiential terms, then it would be the complete cessation of consciousness. Put that way, we have all "experienced" something that might as well be indistinguishable from death, every time that we fall asleep. The time that we spend dreaming is tiny compared to the time that we don't dream. These are huge gaps in consciousness. So we are all much more familiar with what death is like than we can possibly realize. Death is just like falling asleep, except that we don't dream, and we don't wake from it.
Furthermore, people who have been declared clinically dead but then revived minutes later have never reported any post-death experiences. "Near-death experiences" have been fairly conclusively shown to be merely hallucinations that can be seen on brain scans and reliably induced through the right kind of stimulation under the right circumstances.
There may be an afterlife after all, despite the overwhelming evidence against it. However, that evidence makes dismissal of the afterlife concept the only rational, tenable position. One can be as certain about it as one can be certain about anything; almost nothing is 100% certain anyway.
Think of life this way: Numbers have no ultimate meaning in infinity; there are no discrete values, let alone ordinal values. In the same way, time has no meaning in eternity. You could live a hundred years (or two), but your life might as well have lasted only a microsecond, if your afterlife is forever. In that light, how could life possibly be considered precious; how could the moments in your life be worth treasuring and preserving, as Jim was trying to express in his post? There are really only two possible attitudes toward life that will determine how you approach the task of living: Either you live as though there were no afterlife, or you live with certainty that an afterlife awaits you. Living as though there MIGHT be an afterlife doesn't help you all that much, really.
Furthermore, people who have been declared clinically dead but then revived minutes later have never reported any post-death experiences.
I'm one of those people. My heart stopped (fortunately while I was in the hospital) and I was unconscious for about 14 minutes, they tell me. Last thing I remember was a doctor or technician standing over me and saying, "Uh-oh..." When I woke up I started puking in a plastic bucket (they did the ol' "Pulp Fiction" adrenaline shot routine on me). I had congestive heart failure, and they couldn't get my ticker (now 100-percent battery operated) started with the defibrillator pads. I saw no white light, had no out-of-body experience, no flashbacks (maybe because my heart stopped so quickly). I don't doubt others have had different experiences, but that was mine.
Fascinating, Jim! Thank you for sharing.
This may be the single most important idea I have ever read about cinema, and, what's more, about life. Thank you, Jim.
I'll simply second that.
(And add one little thing: I think it's an idea in the back of all our heads.)
I think so, too. It's essential to the concept of photography.
Jim, you are a kindred spirit. Thanks for sharing.
Hi jim,
Have you ever een david cronenberg's amazing short 'camera' which is exactly about what you're writing here (some of your sentences are even similar to lines in it)
No, I haven't seen it. Must try to find it!
It's included on Criterion's "Videodrome" DVD, so you may have it on your shelf already.
Ah, thank you!
Great post, Jim. I believe that the mere act of framing an image is containing it so that the composition within can tell a story. Just as film is a series of images cut together to move a story forward, a single framed image has as much power to tell a story through its overlapping shapes, direction of line, balance of color and all the other elements that unify it. This is why when we look at abstract art, we try to find recognizable elements to inform us of what the artist is trying to tell us. I believe the desire to find story in everything is so powerful and instinctual, and I'm fascinated by it. I recently watched La Jetée again, one of my all-time favorite films, and was noticing the power that each individual photo contained, whether they were viewed in context or not. What an amazing example of storytelling.
I think a person's influence can live on and put their life in greater context than it had when they were alive. But I know what Woody Allen would say: "I'd rather live on in my apartment."
Anyway, I wonder if this blog will segue into a discussion of "Hereafter" once everyone's seen it...assuming the movie's good enough to provoke such a discussion, of course.
That's what's happening on Ebert's blog, not unlike what happened with his many excellent posts on "Knowing."
Jim -
I never expected this. At first glance, I thought you were examining why we go to the movies and you somehow transformed that experience into how we are all connected through this medium and through our own mortality.
Your writing here is deeply personal and resonant. It is certainly my favorite of all your entries thus far.
At the risk of being invasive, your sentiments here (and in the replies) are so nakedly candid, I was both moved and a little concerned. Is this serving as catharsis for a recent tragedy or merely prompted by topical headlines on the Hereafter in light of Eastwood's film?
Best,
Tony B.
I haven't seen "Hereafter" (though I hope to this weekend). I've been thinking about this idea, of movies as a kind of hedge against death, for many years. But, like Alvy Singer, I spend much (most?) of my time thinking about death, and have since I was about 12...
You may respond to the use of a photograph of Cecile De France. Kinda reminded me of "Red."
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