Quo Vadis, Rope, Dangerous Liasons, Gattaca & aestheticized death (spoilers)

Today I watched parts of Quo Vadis, a film I'd never seen before. I was mesmerized by all the Nero scenes; Peter Ustinov was born to play debauched Roman leaders. I was struck by how they portrayed Nero as an aesthete—jaded, childish, egotistical, and constantly in search of new experiences. In this version of the story, Nero burns Rome not only to clear the way for the creation of "Neropolis," but to aesthetically experience the tragedy itself. One bit of business that I loved was when Nero shed tears for a lost friend—carefully, one from each eye, into a special crystal vial.

While watching the film I realized how much I am attracted to this particular theme—aestheticized death and violence. Some of you know I love the movie Rope, which I've seen dozens of times. In the film, two friends commit murder to prove their intellectual and artistic superiority as Nietschean supermen (based on the famous Loeb-Leopold case). The theme also occurs in Dangerous Liasons in which John Malkovich and Glenn Close's characters play a decadent game that results in the physical death of one character and the social demise of another. This kind of aestheticized violence is what I was hoping for in Gattaca. For some reason I was expecting a dinner scene in which Ethan Hawke's biologically inferior character tried to keep up with the biologically superior dinner guests, bluffing his way through potentially career killing verbal interchanges.

The theme is the foundation of one of my story ideas in which exotic decadence is played out in a fake Asian setting. I found that in my mind I had mixed this up with my other pseudo Asian setting idea. In this short film, women fight each other in single-blow matches, an idea which probably comes from both Hero and the end of Sanjuro (or was it Yojimbo?). Here, the fight lies not in the fight itself, but in the preparation for the fight. So the women spend the beginning of each match sitting before their opponents, scrutinizing each other's dress and posture for tactical strengths and weaknesses. Then, in a single blow, it is over. One is dead and the other survives. The victor is the one who makes the best decision in sizing up her opponent. In the end, our heroine loses her first and only battle; in this game, one can never lose more than once. As we pull our from her bloodied face Psycho style, we hear her voice over: "I always thought that if I lost, it would be because I failed to see something important. I never thought it would be because I didn't see anything at all."

I think the whole thing works well as a short film. It has to look beautiful, sumptuous. I always think of it as looking like the fantasy sequence from Rampo Noir--



There wouldn't be a lot of dialogue. Just set up the macro anticipation of what will happen in the final death match. Then just put in a lot of micro anticipations: the training, the setting, the loving, tears shed into crystal, all painfully beautiful. It also works as a second short film because it expands on noise film, but not by too much. Only voice over, no sync sound. A few actors, but no acting with a capital "A." Real sets with green screen backgrounds.

Adult films + happy birthday to us

It was four years ago this month when I started work on noise film. Happy Birthday to us.

Today I was thinking about adult films (films FOR adults). I think it's because of the films that are out now. Sin City and 300 seemed very adolescent to me, like a teenage boy's view of something adult (RE sex and violence). The Spirit seems similar. Benjamin Button is out now which reminded me of Fincher's Se7en. That was another film that wanted desperately to be grown up. To me it came off as stylized, self-conscious and adolescent. Most other 'adult' films seem to be boring and talky or dramas. Films like Midnight Cowboy or The Sterile Cuckoo. So I've been wondering about what would a true adult film look like? What would it be about? What would be its tone and texture?

Santa's cheeks are rosy tears

In other posts I wrote about trying to create "impossible plotlines." I think the same can be said for "impossible tones." How can you make a movie that has an unlikely tone? Like something about Christmas that is positive yet not self-conscious and not about the "wonder" of Christmas? I got this idea from reading something by Scorsese. He said one problem of student films is that they aren't about anything. A film needs content, he said, even if it's just setting a certain mood.

Discoveries

Having found that discoveries are an important part of pushing a film forward, here are a few I've cataloged:

>Anamorph: a drunk couple fumbles as they try to get into their hotel room. The woman falls onto a door and it swings open revealing a terrifying scene.

>Ghost Rider: young Ghost Rider notices something in the wastebasket. He fishes it out and finds his Dad's medical test results.

>Amelie: Amelie is watching the TV news. She drops a ball which rolls to hit and reveal a secret door.

>Coraline: Coraline sees a doll. She walks up to it and then notices a trap door behind the chest.

>Cars: Lightning kicks a can in disgust. It lands near Doc's garage which Lightning proceeds to enter.

Anamorph, Basic Instinct, Dark Knight, The Host

Not much happening on the noise film front. Just finishing up with school. Finally taking a break and watching a few movies.

Anamorph
There's one point in the movie where I thought, "Oh my God... they're doing a serial killer flick based on actual aesthetics." There's a copycat killer on the loose. In a lecture, the detective played by Willem Dafoe talks about photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson saying that he was trying to capture "the moment of truth." And I'm thinking, "that's how he's going to get the copy cat--the copy cat can't capture truth, he can only create a lifeless semblance of it!" But then the movie veers off into the domain of not caring and making no sense. This is the way NOT to make an ambigiuous ending. The anamorphic images, the camera obscura and giant pantograph are, in the end, just gimmicks. But I like the idea of creating a mystery in which aesthetics is part of the solution.

Basic Instinct
Watch this for free on hulu. I never saw Basic Instinct before but a few minutes into it, it became obvious that from the mysterious blonde to the psychological gobbledy gook to the Northern California scenery, this is an homage to Hitchcock. Paul Verhooven's talent lies in his ability to cartoonishly stretch believability without breaking the film. The sex scenes, for instance, were more funny than sexy but not so much that they take you out of the movie. Basic Instinct is less about erotic thrills and more about cinema in its purest form. Like a good Hitchcock film, Basic Instinct isn't about anything in particular. It simply does what cinema does best which is build suspense and jerk you around.

The Dark Knight
The newest Batman movie is similar to Basic Instinct in that they exist primarily to jerk you around. What makes The Dark Knight more distasteful than Basic Instinct (or Nolan's similarly jerk-you-around The Prestige) is its aspirations toward profundity. Beyond the plot twists and turns, Nolan wants to ask questi0ns about the human condition: What's more important--personal or global good? What is the nature of sacrifice? What is heroism? What motivates the psychopath? How do we maintain our humanity in the face of life and death decisions?

The problem is that these concerns are all driven by the film's antagonist. My friend who worked at a music store told me that his boss would swipe any money he found lying on the counter by the cash register. This was meant to be a lesson about putting money away quickly and not leaving it out in the open. The lesson my friend learned was not that someone might steal money but that his boss was a jerk. Same here. The Joker's simulated crises tell us only one thing—he is a jerk. So the movie is over two hours of watching a jerk doing things that jerk you around. I found it exhausting.

The Host

I posed the following conundrum to Maria awhile ago. There are two planes, exactly the same, experiencing the exact same engine problem. One is filled with Americans, one is filled with Koreans. The planes descend and the air masks pop out. When they land, all of the Americans are alive and all of the Koreans are dead. If you know the answer to this problem, then you'll understand why The Host is so Korean. That and the part about not being able to feed the hero when he was young contributing to his off-kilter demeanor.

Unsolvable premises

Awhile ago I was thinking that one way to give a film interest is to provide it with an unsolvable premise. A good example is Casablanca which asks the question, "how can a woman having an affair be heroic?" Another example is Unbreakable which asks, "how can you make a comic book movie that doesn't end with a climactic battle?" I do like the Unbreakable premise. How would you do it? Unsolvable premises could also be a matter of execution. I was watching bits of Spiderman 3 on Netflix instant a few days ago. The shot (that they used in the trailer) of Tobey McGuire sailing through the air grasping at the wedding ring is a beautiful image. How could you create a superhero film with images like that but cheap and without visual effects?

The Udvar-Hazy hobby punk heaven

Hobby punk is the pre-digital technology of the second World War continuing into hobby products of the leisure time fifties. Hobby punk evokes the moment before technology became invisible, miniaturized into integrated circuits. In hobby punk we see individual transistors and capacitors soldered onto breadboards. It is the era of technology that existed before computer-aided design, where technology was defined by primitive, easy-to-create shapes and held together with screws, braces and solder. In the place of computer-defined curves we find hammered out-sheet metal, wood and wire. Hobby punk speaks to a particular scale and mode of production. It refers to the kind of thing that someone could make in their garage given the time and inclination using ordinary hand tools and common equipment. It is the proto-garage aesthetic, things that look barely held together because they exist somewhere between prototype and production model. Hobby punk is partially repurposed, partially customized bricolage in motion. It is covered with handwritten notations, worn, and leaks oil. Noise film is a hobby punk movie.

From the Udvar-Hazy Space & Air museum—


Target drone used for military exercises.


Hand-written notations on early computer system.


Interior of early satellite.


Exterior of the same satellite with solar panels.


Early 128k computer painted mint green.


Early prototype of one-person helicopter.


Late WWII German surface-air missle with wood fins.

The 'Our Town' conundrum

Today I watched parts of the Paul Newman version of Our Town, a play I had heard about but never seen. I just wanted to watch the end where Emily goes back in time to revisit her life as a twelve year old. Overcome by the richness of the mundane events she asks, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?" Answers Newman's stage manager, "No. The saints and poets, maybe. They do some."

This conundrum has been part of my life for years. Once I said to my friend Katie, "wouldn't it be nice to be able to travel back in time and see what things were like?" By this I meant go back in time with today's eyes, to walk around and see everything as wonderful and strange. She said no. I took it to mean that Katie, as a nature lover, had a different sense of time. Going back 20 or 30 years wouldn't make much difference to the way you saw a forest or mountain range (conservation concerns aside). I then assumed that my desire was really an urban one and that urban living created a temporal sense that potentially led to wistfulness. I even wrote a story about this. A villain is being hunted down by primitive natives. He runs toward a hill where he unveils a time machine. "Behold!" he says, expecting the savages to bow down before him in awe of his invention. Instead, the savages rip him to pieces. "I could have told you" winces our hero. "Time travel is fascinating only to city dwellers."

About 15 years ago my mom got stomach cancer which is often fatal. I asked a friend what it would mean to make the most of our time together. She said, "why don't you buy her some flowers?" When I asked Maria the same question some years later, she said, "what kind of stupid question is that?" What she meant is that the nature of our existence is such that we can only let things slip by. We do not and wouldn't want to live our lives with Emily's sense of retrospect. My mom, by the way, is still alive and kicking.

When you have children the Our Town conundrum always comes up. Everyone will tell you, "enjoy them while they're young... they grow up so fast." Yet you can't look at your kids as you would in retrospect ten years from now. Instead of treating them as people you'd treat them with fascination as museum pieces.

Noise film has strands of the Our Town conundrum running through it. The conundrum is about consciousness and how our consciousness changes things and our appreciation of events. Let's say that your leg gets chopped off. You bemoan your fate and get angry and depressed. Now let's say that you're given an outrageous cosmic choice. Your first born child dies or you get your leg chopped off. Most of us would choose the second option, of course. In both cases, you end up the same. But the second instance is easier to take. Your loss, as a sacrifice, takes on a vastly different sense of significance. Another way of looking at it is to say that our beliefs play a great role in how we respond to events. Maybe we would all be happier if we could manipulate our beliefs in such a way that we lived in peace and gratitude. But beliefs are given to us. For many things, we are subject to beliefs, not the other way around. And that is one way to think about the ending of Noise film.

Papermart.com

This belongs in my series of images that remind me of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The last scene in our film is supposed to be reminiscent of this. From Papermart in Los Angeles.

Manure

Manure, the film, is currently in production. This one fits into my 'theatrical production design' section so I thought I'd upload the photo. Most of the film takes place as exteriors shot on sets. Problem: director Polish's Astronaut Farmer was not one of my favorite films.

How can I...?

One thing that I think makes an interesting storyline is a good, unexpected, ironic thematic question. For example, what I like about the Sixth Sense is that it answered the question, "how can you make a movie about the supernatural that does not deny the supernatural, but still leaves us feeling safe and happy?" There have been a couple of "how can you make a serial killer who is lovable?" films and TV series. One thematic storyline question I like is this: "how can you make a heroic character out of someone who always appears to be compromising?"

Adventures in robots

This is a bit off topic but I found it really interesting. Sean started drawing a really cool robot (a). It's his attempt to copy a robot out of a book he has. I gave him some sharpened color pencils, told him to color a robot in and ended up with (b). I wanted to see what would happened if he copied one of my drawings so I made a simple, not-very-good robot (c). His version has the robot blasting something (d). I tried another robot (e). His version can be seen at the bottom (f).

Observations:

>His drawings are a lot better than mine.

>Sean's robots d and f look like an adult trying to imitate children's drawing. I think it's because there's a use of certain stereotypes like the articulated arms which I think come from men-in-suit robot costumes.

>Sean's robot f came out better than his robot d. I think it's because the source drawing is stranger. It's not a very good drawing and I had no idea what I was after. But curiously, this seemed to allow Sean to create a more interesting result.

The Face of Another (1966)

I found that symmetry tends to work best if there's sufficient depth in a shot. If not, it just looks flat. Note the Japanese-Mod decor.

This stylish Japanese film has some beautiful visuals but it's not something you'd want to watch while depressed. The story is about a man who is disfigured in an accident and then sets about to build an identity with a life-like mask. The man is bitter and vindictive and there's lots of dialogue about the soul, appearance and the nature of identity. The vibe is similar to Franju's Eyes Without a Face. The design of the doctor's office is wonderfully surrealistic. There are a lot of clear panels that are used to create richly layered images, like real-life Photoshop composites.

Japanese ghost story

Here's an idea for a J-horror ghost story. I was reading about long GOP compression, the type of compression used by HDV format. This type of compression works by taking one keyframe and basing the subsequent frames on that frame, filling in and interpolating the rest. If the source I was reading was right (I think it was in Barry Braverman's book), software is making intelligent guesses about what will come up in the next frame, predictive interpolation. In a sense, it's making up what's not there. That's where the ghost would appear, in the predictive frame. Then there would be puppets.

Puppets!

Puppets are like a bridge between theater and visual art. I liked these images from Eileen Blumenthal's Puppetry. Maybe it would be nice to do a film that was sort of like Tony Ousler doing puppets—project actor's heads onto puppets.




I also liked the mechanism of this puppet. Here, a puppet is a bridge between automatons and visual art. From Hansjurgen Fettig's Hand and Rod Puppets.

Locations

These would make great locations for something. From the art department

Exotic decadence (story idea)

When Maria and I used to talk about our backyard all of my ideas were intuitively aesthetic while hers were productive. I always wanted to cut down the big Eucalyptus, for example. It was horribly topped, way too overgrown and unruly. Maria wanted to keep it because she thought it made a good climbing tree, provided some shade and had leaves that she thought she could sell. Once she asked the tree if it was OK to cut it. The next day she found a bird nesting in the main fork of its branches. That was the answer, she thought. A few days later we checked again and the bird was gone, only feathers remaining. We figured Binky, the neighbor's cat got it. Now that Maria's gone, the Eucalyptus has been replaced by a small white crepe myrtle and a dwarf plum. The dwarf plum is ornamental and doesn't bear fruit. Maria always wanted a persimmon tree.

I have a vague idea for a film. I have the theme and some images, but no narrative. The theme: the replacement of productivity with aestheticized violence and sterility couched within imagery of an exotic Asia. Everything would be full of beautiful touches and rich meanings and yet be (literally) sterile. Some ideas for sets... turn the patio into a Chinese square with lanterns, fake Chinese writing, and exotic storefronts. Turn the garage into some kind of showroom for the entertainment of wealthy, jaded patrons. Then later, create a springtime wonderland set with delicate trees and hyperreal foliage. Images: in one scene we see a couple picking flowers off a tree. The flowers turn out to be small birds which the couple promptly eat. In another, we see a cactus that bleeds blood and cries. Courtship is conducted via an extension of Victorian flower language—only more difficult and more arcane and fraught with social consequences. In this world emotions lie buried beneath layers and layers of games, rules and traditions. In another scene we see astronomical devices to amuse and entertain guests, along with various fights to the death. The story might be the typical one about the Western male courting the Asian female, the colonialist dream. But this one ends differently— the female lead discovers that the West, in a very different way, is exactly the same. What a mournful aria she sings upon this sad revelation.

More cute stuff

Print cute pinhole cameras for free. Download from Corbis.

Heroic yuckiness

I think what I like about the ending image of the current version of Star Wars redux (astronaut being connected to tubes) is its heroic yuckiness. It's something I don't recall seeing in film before before—the feeling of something that's both heroic and repulsive. I think the idea comes from having been to the March air museum in Riverside a few weeks ago. What struck me was how small and fragile the vintage fighter jets looked. Somehow I imagined that being in a small plane would be like being in a car where you feel snug and secure. But when you see those old jets you can sense the vulnerability of the pilot. All that separates you from the wind outside is a thin piece of glass, sheet metal and cables. Part of it is the primitiveness of the device—rivets, hydraulics, pounded sheet metal. What I expected was something that looked like today's aircraft—design first, then metal. But these planes looked as if they were designed around how metal could be shaped; cones, tubes and sheets pounded together by hammers—and not that well.

In film, warcraft are either romanticized—or made literal, in which case there is no way to turn the machine into metaphor. Even The Right Stuff, which tried its hardest to show what it's like to be "spam in a can," was unable to adequately and phenomenally convey vulnerability and claustrophobia. The emotions were acted and described, but never made present.

Star Wars redux—a better version

This is based pretty closely on an earlier post

We hear the rumble of what sound like B-17s in the distance. A boy runs up to the camera craning his neck toward the sky. We look overhead and can barely make out a formation of hazy planes slowly flying into the distance. Fade to black.

In a scrubby desert, children run from a Quonset hut school house. School's over. Only one boy seems to notice the thin wisp of smoke in the distance. The boy walks toward the smoke. An old man with a metal contraption on his head watches from the distance. The boy finds a small sputnik-like satellite that has plunged into the ground.

It's night. The boy is looking at the satellite which sits on a table partially disassembled. It looks like some kind of strange receiver that picks up noisy sounds and images. He spends some time looking at a poster of an aircraft with five wings and ten engines. We look more closely at the device.

Images flash by. We see more strange aircraft. Then more schematics. Gradually, we see images of organs and other medical images that meld with technological schematics. Then we see the boy again, but now he's grown up. He looks at the poster on his wall. This time, it's a valentines-style heart mounted in a port hole on a rocket ship. The text reads, "A wary eye discloses pious travail."

Now we're in a warm romantic scene in the desert. The young man and his mother stand there with a sleek rocket in the background. They bid each other goodbye then he walks off into the distance. We now see him being prepped for his flight. His head is shaved. Hundreds of tubes are stuck in him. Tubes come out of his mouth. His eyes are covered with a strange mechanical device. Everything shakes as he blasts off into space. His lips curl into a smile.

THE END

Backstory

This really short film is about technological change. The extrapolated technologies are baroque. The financially strapped military tries to take advantage of an overage of jet engines by putting more of them on their old plane bodies. But it gets worse and soon, there isn't enough money for even that. So they start creating feints. They test fly fearsome aircraft in order to strike fear into their enemy's spies. But many of these aircraft feature hollow bombs and non-functional weapons like those fake car panels used by car companies when they road test new car models. Then their technologies became aestheticized. I think Benjamin said that in capitalism, violence becomes aestheticized whereas in Marcism, aesthetics becomes violent. In the film we're seeing the end of an era of baroque, aestheticized violent war machines. Then someone comes along with the idea of using cyborg technologies. And gradually, live humans are used to guide and regulate the functioning of space craft. The ending is supposed to evoke surgery, medical technology and one-man Japanese suicide subs. Unlike noise film, I'm not exactly sure what this one means. It's simply supposed to be a poetic meditation about how technology changes.

There are also new things to learn to shoot. A bunch of kids. An opportunity to shoot an emotional scene with two people. Maybe some hanging miniatures. A couple of small set pieces. It's do-able, but yet it can look big.

(above: WWII one-man Japanese suicide sub)