As I stepped out of the house into a cool, misty morning, a British racing-green MG TC wheeled round the corner, top down in the dew. The driver sported a leather aviator’s helmet with flight goggles and was also wearing a worn leather driving coat, collar secured against the tempest.
I smiled to see such a sight.
Well over a month ago, we inadvertently became a semi no-TV household. Our satellite provider mailed us a replacement ‘smart card’ for our satellite box, a five-year-old WebTV-integrated PVR which we have never used as a PVR or as a WebTV device but only as a receiver. The smart card managed to disable the device, and so the only reception we have was broadcast. Living in the center of a large city, you’d think that would mean fifteen or twenty channels but realitistically it limits reception to PBS and the local NBC and ABC affiliates. Happily for Viv, that has meant she has been able to keep up with the hypnotic ‘Lost,’ and happily for me, that means I have been able to catch a ‘Nova’ and a ‘Frontline’ here and there.
More happily for me, that has meant that the constant background noise of the TV has been replaced by the constant background noise of WCPE, and I have strongly felt my mood lift. I am frequently occupied with murderous, hateful mutterings when the TV is on constantly, an internal dialogue filled with fantasies of destruction directed at the media icons and humiliatingly-portrayed buffoons who flicker on and off stage in venues such as ‘Oprah,’ and ’20/20.’ I have been largely unaware of this dialogue until this month, when it’s vanishment occasioned reflection on the cause of my uncharacteristically charitable, forgiving, and pleasant mood.
I view with some trepidation the family negotiation that this calls for; Viv’s mood and sense of self have been ever-nurtured by the tube and I am nearly certain that she has felt as deadened and oppressed by the absence of the brainsucking spawn of hell as I have lightened and released. Where I feel as though a stinging, biting swarm of gnats, whose bites produce nightmares of hatred an torture has suddenly ceased to afflict my existence, based on past conversations, I suspect she has felt a sense of suffocating isolation, the solitude of the grave.
I would have to say this is something of a pickle.
Well, having some unexpected free time, we went back to Goodwill and found some glasses. They weren’t the ones we’d come up with initially, but they’ll do. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy picking through the glassware at Goodwill – it’s like a giant, transparent, three-dimensional puzzle, and your challenge is to find the items that match. Since the glasses are transparent, generally a bit grungy, and poorly lit, it’s quite challenging. The little kids kicking soccer balls around in the aisle behind you as you step back to get a longer view complete this transcendent shopping experience. I highly recommend it, and will continue building matched sets amid the chaos for hours, until pulled away by Viv.
Wandering the cavernous store I took some pictures of interesting gimcracks. I have assembled them here for your viewing pleasure.
This primitive spam machine comes complete with a mailing list.
At the exit, you’ll be pleased to know, the management has made a concerted effort to cater to the needs of the post-atomic hipster with these rare Polynesian craft-charms. These “primitive symbols of nature” undoutedly reflect centuries of craftsmen’s secrets and the ancient spiritual wisdom of the South Seas.
As we were browsing I happened to come upon what I will argue to be the most radical and confrontational public exhibit of art I have ever encountered in a Goodwill. The pieces were all available for sale, uncredited. I do not think I am wrong in crediting them to a single unknown artist.
The first piece I encountered, which enunciates the theme of the show, is this one. It charges radically past the boundaries of traditional collectible-sculpture aesthetics. The base features a quote from President George Bush – “The advance of human freedom – the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time – now depends on us.” Yet the still-recognizable profile of the Statue or Liberty, defiled and broken, mocks these words. Dangling from the neck are a pair of bare wires. It’s a clear reference to Abu Ghraib and ancillary torture policies such as the deliberate deportation suspects to friendly, torture-using states. Rarely if ever has a Goodwill played host to such an evisceration of a sitting American President. Buy it now, and get a gallery show!
Here, the unknown artist has crafted a loving homage to exploitation movies of the past fifty years while simultaneously managing to keep the theme of torture in the air.
In this disturbing diptych, the same artist now tackles the effects of torture – and, it must be noted, makes a glancing reference to Western ideas concerning Islamic jurisprudence. Taking as their starting place a Norman Rockwell painting, the unknown artist has, shockingly, dismembered the child. The infant gazes in shock at the stumps of their forearms while a doctor gazes helplessly on. Only on closer examination do we realize that the beloved professional is himself the victim of dismemberment. Too shocked to acknowledge his recent loss, the now-missing hand is clenched in fruitless determination about the physician’s very emblem: his stethoscope. America’s turn toward the dark side has removed trust, self-awareness, and competence from the domestic landscape, the sculptor argues.
In what this critic found to be the most disturbing piece of the show, the artist trangresses the boundaries of gender, sexual orientation, and what is delicately known as “the furry barrier” with this image of what is presumably the artist’s prescriptive remedy to the degradation and impotence of the preceding works. Like Jimmy Stewart in High Noon, the figure stands at the door to the church, ready for action. The fact that this sheriff is not so much a cowboy as a cow, beteated belly unleashed in what can only be described as the mother of all wardrobe malfunctions, outs the radicality of the artist’s approach. The fact that the cow is also dressed in a gay man’s fetish uniform, featuring chaps, puts us all on notice: the gay furry cow sherriff is a-comin’, and she is pissed!
It’s clobberin’ time, friends. Are you right with the Goddess?
Fortunately, hir mercy is a fountain, or rather hand-pump, that flows from the heads of angels, and surely our hands will be free from chaps for the rest of our days, ever and ever, amen. May the heavenly angel of hand-lotion (or hand-soap, emphasizing the clean-hands thesis of this critique) remain with you unto the end of your days.
As noted, when we left the Goodwill, each of these items remained available for sale. Hurry!
Lessee now.
What got done today? Not that much.
I did pick up a cheap amplifier, but declined to wrestle the octopus of my A/V stack tonight. I discovered a friend had recently Switched, and left him a message of congrats. I also found that another old friend (an old friend from Seattle, mind you) is a MeFite. Here’s hoping he comes to the March 5 meetup. I also learned another old friend is having a wingding on the 5, but think that it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to combine the MeFi thing with the other event, which is really a shame.
I goggled to see an article in the NYT of a web-meme parodying “The Gates.” Not so much that the times would cover a quirky response to Christo’s work. Christo’s stuff nearly always provokes someone to imitate him in an ironic way; the imitations generally reinforce the success of the project they are intended to deflate or lampoon. What is striking is that it’s the first time I can recall the Times covering a web meme at the time of the meme’s rise (which, predictably, came as the large-scale Gates were unveiled last week).
Last night, Viv and I watched two well-reviewed films from 2004 on DVD. Our double feature opened with Shaun of the Dead and closed with Garden State. I didn’t really know what to expect – both films have been so appreciatively mentioned by both pros and acquaintances, I suppose I expected a letdown from one or the other.
Shaun is noticeably the tighter of the two; what a script! The film is almost in appropriately well-constructed. It stands out among its’ shambling forebears by its’ really quite remarkable slickness, from cinematography to story. I was amused to note that our double feature apparently self-organized around writer-performers; Shaun is played by the film‘s co-writer, Simon Pegg.
Garden State stars the film’s writer (and director), Zach Braff opposite Natalie Portman. At first I was a bit put off by the classic first-movie story base. He’s an actor, estranged from the folks, who comes home for his mother’s funeral. Then as the film picks up the pace, which mirrors the lead character emerging from a haze of antidepressant meds, I was more and more involved with the film. Portman, in particular, is a strongly engaging on screen.
Viv was unaware that Braff, who also stars, had both written and directed the film. She liked both films very much.
Which film is more ambitious? It’s hard to say. Both appear to be restricted by genre. In the case of Shaun, a good part of the film’s charm derives from the postmodern way the film frustrates zombie-movie conventions. It does so with a knowing wink at the audience, and as such, it’s hugely enjoyable. But the film’s finely-honed structure, which unfolds with the precision of a Stoppard play, is deeply at odds with the traditional shambolic nature of zombie films. You can get quite drunk while watching Romero’s Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead and you’ll effectively miss nothing, including the biting social satire that drives both of Romero’s seminal zombie flicks. But if you try that with Shaun of the Dead for a first or second viewing – well, you might at times find yourself as overwhelmed as the titular hero is by his day-to-day life before the zombies.
Garden State is affecting, and yet sort of, well… cute. The careful imposition of a structure on the garden-variety prodigal’s return does successfully distinguish this from other indie films about our culture’s absurdly extended adoration of adolescence, and the performances are uniformly fine. But despite my having enjoyed the film, the (possibly intentional) emotional blankness of the film left it somewhat less resonant than I suspect the filmmaker hoped for. Portman’s performance is what made the difference, lifting this film from okay to good.
Last night, Spence, Viv, and I attended the first of four Silent Movie Mondays at the Paramount this month. The film was F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise. The film’s plot tells of a married village couple. The husband is tempted into an affair by a seductress from The City, and she encourages him to murder his wife. He sets out to do so, but doesn’t carry through the plot, and they are reconciled.
The film was, for me, odd. There are passages of great beauty and innovation throughout the picture. Overall though, as much as I admire Murnau’s filmmaking, a particular clunkiness that affects nearly all of his work remained present.
Over the past few years, the Paramount’s silent series has really done a great job bringing Murnau’s best-known films to the screen, and I have seen, I think, every one that they have chosen to exhibit. Each one displays great visual inventiveness and distinctly underdeveloped, nearly symbolic characters. These ciphers are generally deployed in order to propel plots that can more accurately be described as theories about the human condition.
I’m too ignorant about the context of this style of drama to speak knowledgeably about it, but I suppoes, to an extent, it’s what we mean when we use the word ‘melodrama.’
At any rate, it was worth seeing.
On the way to Draginfish to meet Viv, I passed a young woman sporting a striped scarf and white iPod headphones who I think was Samantha. She was walking toward the Market, directly facing the setting sun, and so I would have appeared as one of a host of anonymous silohouettes.
Also worthy of note was the amazing service we recieved at the bar at Dragonfish – the funny, middle-aged man tending the facilities appeared to place our orders via telepathy, so swiftly were they placed and filled.
Viv and I watched Napoleon Dynamite tonight. It inspires four comments:
Dear friend Spencer Sundell, who of late has taken to squirrelling away tins of obscure 8mm film rarities, dropped by an earlier entry to update us on the works of Georges Méliès.
I myself remain locked in my tower of Google research on a couple of posts, and so this much juicy gum-flappin’ begs to be promoted from comment to guest post. Hope you don’t mind, Spanky!
In my (much) earlier comment, I stated I thought the aforementioned print of Méliès’ “Conquest of the Pole” was complete. I was mistaken.
(Another correction is warranted: “Conquest of the Pole” [Á la Conquête du Pôle] was actually released in 1912, one of four he produced that year (three of which survive).
In fact, my Super 8 print is the US version which, while the most commonly seen, is indeed shorter than that originally released by Mssr. Méliès.
True Méliès geeks will be interested, if not jubilantly astonished, to learn that a tinted and toned 31 minute print (!!) with German intertitles was discovered ca. 2000 at the Filmarchiv Austria. This is far and away the most lengthy and, certainly, authoritative print of “Conquest of the Pole” known to exist. Alas, the chances of seeing this print are pretty slim for us common folk. (It will also be joyous news that still more prints of films hitherto thought lost were discovered in 1999 at Moscows Gosfilmofond. This means that about 40 percent of Méliès’ 510 films have been recovered — a true miracle given that Méliès himself burned all of his negatives in a fit of depression and anger ca. 1924, not to mention that 80 percent of all silent films are believed lost. For more info, see here. )
But there is a so-called “French version” that is more available that includes an additional 2-3 minutes of footage not seen in the US version. The longest sequence shows several other polar craft being wheeled out for our viewing pleasure. A few of these craft are then shown attempting to begin the voyage to the Pole, all crashing, exploding, and failing spectacularly. There are a few other additional shots scattered throughout, most notably a slightly extended treatment of the man who clings to the rope attached to an ascending balloon (from which he falls only to explode after being impaled on a church steeple — a bit that survives in the US version). A few additional shots are also included the actual journey to the Pole.
The US and “French” versions of the entire sequence at the Pole itself does seem to be roughly the same (despite some odd jump cuts that may or may not be due to damage incurred in the decades since the film’s release). However, the French version includes a slightly longer version of the expedition’s triumphant return, very much harkening to Méliès’ “A Trip to the Moon” made some 10 years prior.
For those who may wish to see the surviving “French version,” I suggest seeking out the excellent home video anthology, “Ballerinas in Hell” (Unknown Video), which also includes the only home video editions of several other landmark Méliès films. It was originally released on VHS, but can be found from a few purveyors in a DVD edition — get ’em while you can!
For those interested in renting or owning a 16mm print of the French version, visit the EmGee Film Library/Glenn Photo Supply at http://emgee.freeyellow.com/ — but activate your pop-up blocker before you do. Carpe diem — word has it the place is going out of business sooner rather than later. A tragic thing: EmGee/Glenn has the largest and widest-ranging 16mm film rental/purchasing library on Earth. They seriously rock.
(And no, I get no kickbacks on any of that — I’m just a film geek like you.)
If anyone cares to read about Georges Méliès, I recommend the following books:
“Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès” by John Frazier (G.K. Hall & Co., 1979). The grail. Hopelessly rare, but absolutely superlative. It never even shows up at Bookfinder.com (which is saying something), and I only found a copy thanks to the Univ. of Washington graduate library. The first half or so is finely written bio-history. But the real treasure is the last half-plus, which consists of a film-by-film chronology of dang near every film he made, providing detailed scenarios, production details, and even info about which film archives have the surviving prints. Amply illustrated throughout. +/- 240 pp.
“A Trip to the Movies. Georges Méliès, Filmmaker and Magician (1861 – 1938)” by Paolo Cherchi Usai (International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1991). Hideously expensive if you can find it (especially since it’s only 185pp.). But Signore Usai is one of the foremost silent film scholars in the world. As in Senior Curator of the Motion Picture Dept. at the George Eastman House. That said: I’ve never actually held one of these in my hands. So okay, caveat emptor.
“Marvellous Méliès” by Paul Hammond (St. Martin’s Press, 1975). Despite some weaknesses, probably the best of the more-available (and affordable) Méliès books, it is a somewhat rambling bio/history of Méliès and his works. Includes a selected (though extensive) filmography (albeit with titles and years only). Does include some misconceptions resolved by later scholarship, though that’s not really the author’s fault. Extensively illustrated throughout.
“‘Georges Méliès, Mage’ et ‘Mes Memoires par Méliès'” by Maurice Bessy and Lo Duca (Prisma Editions, 1945). Another expensive one, alas, but the other grail for Méliès freaks. Published only en Francais, it consists of writings by the aforementioned authors, as well as lengthy excerpts from Méliès’ own memoir. Fortunately fer us dum Inglish talkerz, it is profusely illustrated throughout with stills, very rare original sketches by Méliès, and other fine treasures — which is what makes it worth the steep price you’re likely to find. The editions I see around online are all very expensive (tho lovely) hardbounds, but I know a softcover was published (because I’ve seen in the Univ. of Washington library).
FWIW, I do not recommend the recent Elizabeth Ezra book, “Georges Méliès: Birth of the Auteur” — unless you really like ponderous, Masters-thesis-type film crit yammer.
Okay. Enough. Go outside and play.
— Spencer Sundell
We saw The Aviator with Spence last night. It was… OK.
The subject, Howard Hughes’ life as aviation-industry obsessive, is of intrinsic interest to me, and there’s a link filled post in gestation, prompted by many questions I had as I watched the film. But after sleeping on it, despite DiCaprio’s worthwhile performance, there’s no way that this should be the film that wins Scorsese his best film Oscar, even if it leads the pack this year. Even though Gangs of New York was a terribly flawed film, it had the power of obsession, and images from that film echoed around in my head for over a year after seeing it.
In The Aviator, Scorsese is fundamentally forced to rely on CGI visualizations of the key visual expressions of Hughes’ obsessiveness; thus, no full-scale reconstruction of 19th century Five Points, only digital ghosts of the Spruce Goose and the amazing in-flight sequences from Hell’s Angels. Unfortunately for Scorsese, I found the CGI to be sadly weightless and unconvincing. As much as it thrills me to have been granted the chance to fly with Leo-as-Howard in the H-1 and the H-4, in the external shots of these planes in flight, I was reminded of the physical unreality of the planes seen onscreen.
Too smooth, the perfectly even silver skin of aluminum airplane dope the CGI emulated exceeds even the factory-fresh finish of any plane from that era. Shots of the real Spruce Goose on its’ taxi run in Long Beach harbor show weight and mass behind the wake and spray the plane kicked up. Undoubtedly, the film’s CGI artists knew the imagery, and it’s very likely that there are frame-matches for well-known stills of the event on-screen.
But this problem – of accurately integrating CGI-based images into real-world photography in ways that capture the effects of mass and weight on the environment of the object – is the non-anthromorphic equivalent of the uncanny valley. It’s not unsettling to note these problems as one watches the imagery; but it just looks wrong, and distracts from the sought after illusion. Viv commonly critiques this observation of mine, saying that she doesn’t see the problems, and she probably represents the vast majority of moviegoers. But over time, as we become educated in the ways in which CGI fails mimesis, more people see the problems.
Remember the first time you saw Titanic, or Jurassic Park, or Twister? Flipped into one lately in the tube? Looks a whole lot more fake now than it did originally, huh?
I think, in the end, this is part of my concern. Films like Jackson’s LOTR trilogy and The Aviator are intended by their creators as works with a longer half life than even Titanic. Reliance on CGI, as long as the imaging techniques are in motion, shortens the effective lifespan of these films as accessible, ambitious works of art for a mass audience.
Right. Well, I gotta go. More on The Aviator soon.
A 747 took a leisurely tour of Amsterdam yestereen. Courtesy Viewropa.
The framing on some of the shots is delish. Keey an eye peeled for the minicar.
(Crossposted from Tablet’s Siffblog, soon to become Tablet’s Filmblog.)
In late November, Viv and I were happy to attend a Cinema Seattle preview screening of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s newest film, A Very Long Engagement. The film stars Audrey Tatou, who also had the lead in Amèlie. The film concerns a young woman’s search for her fiancé, missing in the trenches of the First World War. Based on a novel, the film is long and ambitious, and generally succeeds. The nostalgia that Jeunet winked at in his depiction of a lovers’ Paris in Amèlie is in full flower. Nearly every frame of the movie tenderly dotes upon the glories of France. Picturesque country farmhouses, the magnificence of Paris in the early twentieth century, and the valor and inventiveness of the French poilu on the lines on the Great War unspool with self-assurance.
All this viewing en rose would be insufferably – ah – cheesy in the hands of any other exponent of Gaul. When he resurrects a demolished Parisian public market, or one of the city’s four great train stations on screen, it’s like a visit from a loved one who perished in flame and fire. Americans may not be familiar with the landmarks, possibly undermining the appeal Jeunet is shooting for. As for me, I’m a certified cheese-monkey, and gleefully nibbled every stinky slice.
The film is structured as a mystery. After the war’s end, Tatou’s polio-lame slip of a girl marshals facts and finds clues to the fate of a group of condemned prisoners among which was counted her beau. As she closes in, Jeunet flashes back to the trenches. The prisoners are all soldiers who have either deliberately or accidentally been shot in the hand and found guilty of the capital offense of self-mutilation. The method of execution chosen is to send the group into the teeth of German fire, alone and unarmed.
The film explores the personal stories of each of the men. The trenches themselves are rendered, as one might expect from Jeunet, with broad scale and muddy, half-flooded relish.
Jeunet intends to offset his nostalgia by slamming us into the trenches, looking at the cost of the Great War. He effectively relates the brutality and filth of the experience. Yet, Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen and City of Lost Children gleefully explored fantastic, failed worlds in which the brave face of beauty still managed to face the day, and his trenches are reminiscent of these dystopias. Therefore, the horrors he presents are blunted and easily taken for fantastic exaggeration. Unfortunately, he does not help his cause when a German biplane appears over the lines in a crucial plot point. The plane is verbally identified as a specific model of German machine with an unmistakable resemblance to a certain animal, which I won’t name so as not to spoil a minor plot point. The airplane seen on screen appears to be a postwar model, and is clearly not the plane spoken of.
It’s a quibble, surely; but in a postfilm appearance, Jeunet emphasized the verité of his trenches, the lengths to which he and his crew went to achieve an historicist presentation of the halls of mud. If that was indeed his primary goal (something I am skeptical of) he’s failed. I think it’s a forgivable oversight.
The plot’s structure is clearly mythic. Our heroine journeys to each of the cardinal directions, departing on each quest from each one of the great train stations of Paris: the Gares du Nord, du Sud, de l’Est and de l’Ouest all make appearances. She journeys to a farm called the End of the World. Eventually, a character descends to the underworld before returning to the surface of the Earth.
From this unlikely set of elements – a nostalgic look at things past; a missing-persons mystery; a gritty war film; and myth – Jeunet has constructed a lovely, sad, and hopeful film that may well appeal to audiences that first saw his work with the justly celebrated Amèlie. As for me, well, I loved it.
I must note, however, that I am a certifiable Francophile, even against my better judgment. As I watched the film, curious, misplaced feelings strongly akin to patriotism stirred in me. Furthermore, I deeply admire Jeunet’s films, even the generally dismissed Alien: Resurrection, and so I would say I am likely to find something to admire in anything he does.
BLOG EXTRA
Moving beyond review and analysis of the film itself, Jeunet was present at the screening we attended. I was able to ask him two questions.
First, as the film is set in early twentieth-century Paris and the plot is structured around a mystery, the work of French comics author Jacques Tardi came to my mind as I watched the film. Tardi drew two celebrated comics characters, both investigators, much admired in French comics criticism, and insofar as they have appeared rarely in English, here. One, Adèle Blanc-Sec, is a turn-of-the-century detective, a sort of cross between Madame Curie and Sherlock Holmes. The other, Nestor Burma, is a gumshoe in Paris between the wars – he’s no stranger, in fact, to investigating mysteries that originate in the trenches.
I asked Jeunet to what extent Tardi had been an influence on this film He as much as acknowledged it, saying, “Well, you know,Ii wish there had been some way for Tardi to work on this film, but it did not work out. You know, we are good friends, and he, like me, has a special feeling for this period, for the First World War, but unfortunately we couldn’t find a way to work him in. And you know for a long time I have wanted to do a film of Adèle Blanc-Sec, but after this, I cannot. It’s just too close!”
I followed up by asking to what extent Jeunet or the story’s original author may have been consciously aware of the similarities in the film’s structure to the myth of Orpheus. There was a pause while he and the translator worked out that I meant the myth, rather than the Cocteau film Orphée. Once this had been determined, there was a moment of gear grinding. His eyes widened and he blew an acknowledging pouf of breath in to the mike as I said, dryly “I’ll take that as a no.” He then nodded his head and said, “No, that’s smart! That’s very interesting!”