March 2011 Archives

Chicago digital filmmaker Nelson Carvajal recently quoted the late Direct Cinema / Cinéma vérité pioneer Richard Leacock in a post at Free Cinema Now in which he defends -- for personal, aesthetic reasons -- the fashionable handheld camera technique known variously as the shaky cam, the queasy-cam and (when combined with chaotic cutting) the snatch-and-grab:

Anyone who knows my shooting style knows that I'm not a fan of tripods. To me, most static "pretty" shots that I see from other indie filmmakers represent an analogy for an elusive Hollywood-esque model of moviemaking. Ever been on a student film set and notice how much of the day goes to laboring over a shot that really doesn't grab you in the end? We go to the movies and are swept away by the big budget vistas and then for some reason we're convinced that our camcorder, a tripod and a light set will accomplish the same feel. And when it doesn't, we're surprised. But we shouldn't be. At the end of the day, it's all about the content of what we're trying to show, say or provoke in an audience. So instead of trying to mimic or recreate a sense of grandness without the necessary resources (like an outrageous Hollywood budget for example), why not create our own language for the cinema? Let Hollywood make "Sucker Punch." We'll instead focus on breaking away and discovering new ways to tell our stories.

I suppose this is why I embrace "direct cinema" filmmaking so strongly. I love grabbing the camera and just improvising as I go. It's a shooting style that liberates my senses; it awakens me.

I grew up in a time (the 1960s and 1970s) when commercial, technological and artistic conventions accustomed us to listening to music on LPs and watching movies in theaters. For the most part, we listened to one side of an album at a time (eventually, CDs -- although more easily programmable -- would play 70+ minutes of uninterrupted music, which changed song-sequencing priorities). And we saw movies from start to finish. I'm too young to remember the original ad campaign for Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" in 1960, but later on (when I got my hands on some original lobby cards -- those were the 11"x14" images displayed with the posters at the entrances or in the lobbies of theaters) I noticed it was built around the apparently novel pitch that audiences had to see the movie from the start.

Now, if, like me, you were in college (or university, as they say back East) when Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) in "Annie Hall" announced that he had to see a picture "exactly from the start to the finish," and you thought that made perfect sense, it seemed bizarre to imagine a time when people had to be encouraged to show up before the feature started: "No one... BUT NO ONE... will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance..." (It turns out Paramount had done something similar with Hitchcock's "Vertigo" just two years earlier: "It's a Hitchcock thriller... You should see it from the beginning!") As the proprietor of the Opening Shot Project, which emphasizes the importance of the first shot in setting up and framing certain films, the idea that somebody would watch a movie without having seen the beginning is incomprehensible to me. Why cheat yourself of the joys of discovery and development? Or just knowing what's going on in the story?

Camille Paglia is known for being both brilliant and wacky (possibly wacko) -- often at the same time, which is probably when she's at her most inspired. A founding contributor at Salon.com (and co-star of "It's Pat: The Movie"), Paglia spoke on the phone to Salon editor Kerry Lauerman yesterday after the news of Elizabeth Taylor's death, and offered up an extraordinary tribute. I just wanted to share some of it with you. Lauerman begins by quoting something Paglia wrote about Taylor in Penthouse in 1992:

"She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses women's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm." Paglia takes it from there:

Exactly. At that time, you have to realize, Elizabeth Taylor was still being underestimated as an actress. No one took her seriously -- she would even make jokes about it in public. And when I wrote that piece, Meryl Streep was constantly being touted as the greatest actress who ever lived. I was in total revolt against that and launched this protest because I think that Elizabeth Taylor is actually a greater actress than Meryl Streep, despite Streep's command of a certain kind of technical skill. [...]

"It's enigmatic and obvious, exasperating and beguiling, heavy-handed and understated, witty and poignant, all at once."
-- Alex Ramon, Boycotting Trends

What I like most about Abbas Kiarostami's "Certified Copy" is its slipperiness. The Tuscan textures are ravishing (it takes place over the course of an afternoon in and around the village of Lucignano -- or does it?), Juliette Binoche and William Shimell are easy on they eyes and ears (good thing, too, since the movie is practically one long conversation -- or is it?), but for me the most enjoyable thing about it is the way the story and characters keep subtly (and not-so-subtly) shifting, refusing to be pinned down. I was fearing one of those overly literalized Kiarostami "button" endings, but this time (as Michael Sicinski observes in his impressive, ambitious essay at MUBI), the thesis statement is placed at the front of the film and it gets slipperier from there:

"Certified Copy" operates almost in reverse of most thematically inclined works of art, which plunge us into a falsely desultory universe and gradually reveal their master interpretive passkey. Kiarostami's film presents a concept, fully formed and cogent, and allows the rest of the film to set to work on that concept, breaking it into Heisenbergian particles, then bringing it back into solid shape, and on and on.

In his essay about pop culture references in television comedy, Matt Zoller Seitz wrote: "'Krusty Gets Kancelled' is one of the greatest of all "Simpsons" episodes, but if it were a poem, it would need to have nearly as many footnotes as 'The Waste Land' -- and the further away from its original air date we get, the truer that's going to be."

A reader sent him a provocative 2000 Hermenaut essay by Keith Gessen called "'Simpsons' at the Gates: Intimations of the Coming Barbarism." In it, Gessen argues (somewhat facetiously, but not entirely) that the "loss of a referenceable reality will, in all likelihood, eventually destroy our civilization..." He recalls correcting his aunt when she insists that Cary Grant starred in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" (1954). He's correct that it was James Stewart, not Grant, in the picture, but the thing is, he's never actually seen "Rear Window." He'd seen a "Simpsons" episode that referenced it. This troubles him:

"In that case I'll get in touch with Chic Sale." -- Groucho Marx, "Animal Crackers" (1930)

"Adam 1-3's incipient negritude will come as a pleasant surprise to his honorary Aquarium parents, Ralph Bunche and Ida Lupino."
-- Firesign Theatre, "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers" (1970)

The awesomely prolific Matt Zoller Seitz (no, he's still got just the two kids, but he's been writing a lot of good stuff lately -- mostly in his capacity as the new TV columnist for Salon.com) recently asked the musical question: "When a comedy builds a lot of its identity around pop culture references, is it hastening its own irrelevance?" -- or, "Will future generations understand 'The Simpsons'?" (I think the term "ask the musical question" is a pop culture reference, but I'll be darned if I can find out where it originated.)

Matt writes of watching one of the great "Simpsons" episodes ("Krusty Gets Kancelled") with his kids and laughing at references that pre-dated their pop-cultural awareness (like, back before Arnold Schwarzenegger was a governor):

The kind of faulty reasoning that Stanley Fish writes about so incisively in the New York Times ("So's Your Old Man") derails meaningful discussions in politics and film criticism all the time, and it's so transparently bogus that I wonder how people keep getting away with it. I've railed against it in Scanners many times over the years, but Fish dissects it beautifully here:

We saw it in spades a while ago when Democrats lamented the incivility of public discourse and blamed right-wingers for proclaiming over and over that President Obama was a foreign Islamic usurper working to undermine American values. The right replied by rehearsing the litany of things said by democrats about George Bush -- he was a tool of corporate interests, a warmonger and an enemy of civil liberties. So what gives you the high moral ground, those on the right asked, when you were equally vile in your accusations?

I want to say that this is a bad move (and a cheap trick) because it deflects attention from the substantive claims being made and puts the spotlight instead on propositional consistency. The better move (by either party) would have been to insist that Obama or Bush was in fact those things and to back up the assertion with the marshaling of evidence. The better move, in short, would have been to take a stand on truth rather than shifting the focus to a calculation of reciprocal fairness. What gives someone the high moral ground is that he or she is right, not that he or she is fair.

It's a wrap for the 2010 Muriel Awards, but although the winners have been announced, there's still plenty of great stuff to read about the many winners and runners-up. ('Cause, as we all know, there's so much more to life than "winning.") I was pleased to be asked to write the mini-essay about "The Social Network" because, no, I'm not done with it. (Coming soon: a piece about the Winkelvii at the Henley Gregatta section -- which came in 11th among Muriel voters for the year's Best Cinematic Moment.)

You might recall that last summer I compared the editorial, directorial and storytelling challenges of a modest character-based comedy ("The Kids Are All Right") to a large-scale science-fiction spectacular based on the concept of shifting between various levels of reality/unreality -- whether in actual time and space or in consciousness and imagination. (The latter came in at No. 13 in the Muriels balloting; the former in a tie for No. 22.) My point was that, as far as narrative filmmaking is concerned, there isn't much difference. To illustrate a similar comparison this time, I've used a one-minute segment out of "The Social Network" (Multiple levels of storytelling in The Social Network). You might like one picture better than the other for any number of reasons, but I find their similarities more illuminating than their differences:

I've expressed my admiration for Carter Burwell's Mahleresque orchestrations of American hymns and folk tunes in his score for "True Grit." Watching the first part of the movie again, it struck me that the movie itself is a sort of cantata for tenor, baritone and bass voices. Certainly Charles Portis's language (which sounds like Coen dialog, after all), and the way it's delivered -- the tempi, rests, rhythms -- are decidedly musical, as the lyrics always are in Coen movies.

Evidently, that's one reason they wanted to make the movie -- and if you compare some of the very same lines in the 1969 film with the 2010 film, you'll immediately hear the difference between speaking and singing. Henry Hathaway tried to make the words sound as conversational as possible; the Coens go for Baroque -- high stylization that's not quite horse-operatic, but in an American vernacular that's like Bach transposed to "Deadwood."

Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) may be the youthful contralto soloist (despite her age, she's no soprano!), but she's surrounded by male voices in the lower registers (which helps to make Josh Brolin's countertenor Tom Chaney all the weirder and funnier). Near the top of the film there's a series of duets, particularly musical in character, beginning with Mattie's post-hanging interrogation of the sheriff, her first encounter with Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges, in outhouse for additional resonance), and her negotiation with Colonel Stonehill. The film's deep-vocal culmination, perhaps, is an an off-stage solo by JK Simmons as Mattie's lawyer, J. Noble Daggett (definitely a bass).

Just another example of the many ways the Coens' movies are as much fun to listen to as they are to watch.

I enjoyed Darren Aronovsky's "Black Swan" as a kind of lurid 1970s drive-in exploitation horror movie (more "Carrie" than "The Red Shoes" or "Repulsion") that wears its multifarious influences on its head like a tinfoil rhinestone tiara. (In fact, as I've said before, I found the Oscar-winning performance by Natalie Portman to be its weakest feature, though I ambivalently concede that, in the long run, it probably works in the film's favor: she's so exasperatingly one-note that when, at last, she becomes the Black Swan it's not only a catharsis but a relief.)

But what, do you think, is the key to Nina's late-blooming transformation? After all those missed opportunities to let loose, to grow up, what finally tips her over the edge? The drugs, the sex, the mom, the ballet director, the rivalry, the Dying Swan (Winona Ryder)? I haven't seen much discussion of that. Maybe it's obvious, but the answer, I think, is when her partner (and off-screen baby daddy, Benjamin Millepied) drops her on her patoot. And not just because it gives her a much-needed bump on the noggin at the same time -- though that, psychologically speaking, no doubt helps, too. What she finds, perhaps, is something like what the Japanese call "wabi-sabi," the understanding that "nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."

All through the picture, Nina is obsessed with achieving "perfection." In the end, she believes she's found it, albeit with a shard of mirror glass puncturing the illusion of seamlessness. But, of course, the flaw -- the risk, even the failure -- is what finally lifts her performance beyond the calculated sterility of "perfection" and makes it... perfect.

For many years, record producers and engineers have spliced together the best takes of pop vocals and orchestral performances to create the version that is finally released to the public on disc or download. I don't know why it never occurred to me that sound editors for movies wouldn't do the same thing with dialog, but I hadn't thought about it until I watched the extras DVD for "The Social Network" the other night.

Obviously, various takes of performances are cut together in editing, and the dialog is often looped in post-production for any number of reasons -- to smooth over the differences between takes, to change line readings, or simply to compensate for inadequate sound quality from the original recording. But the David Fincher editing team of Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall (recent Oscar-winners) and sound designer Ren Klyce (my new movie hero, alongside Skip Lievsay).

First of all, the editors get a lot of material to work with. But let's clear up the whole "99 takes" thing. It's not what it may sound like. Fincher did 99 takes during the shooting of the opening scene, for example -- but he didn't simply make the actors do the same thing 99 times in a row. As Wall and Baxter told Vanity Fair: