The man who heard voices & noise film

The Man Who Heard Voices--the story of the making of Lady in the Water--is a surprisingly good book on filmmaking. I thought it was going to be a post-mortem on M. Night Shyamalan's career but it was filled with astute observations about the filmmaking process. Also, contrary to what others have said, I thought the book painted a flattering portrait of Night. Sure he has an ego, but he also comes across as dedicated, willing to take chances, even admirable. Actually I relate to this portrait of him a lot.

Lady in the Water itself has an essential problem: it wants to be about belief and yet it doesn't require any belief from its audience. Once we see the scrunt (the grass-haired wolf) we know that we're entering into a supernatural space. No belief is required. And yet, I'm sure M. Night was trying to avoid the tired "is it real or is it not?" take on the subject. There are two formal problems at work:

1. How do you create a film with an ambiguous sense of reality without making another tired statement on simulation (e.g., The Matrix, Truman Show, etc.) or psychology (e.g., Basic Instinct, Gas Light, Occurrence at Owl Creek, etc.).

2. How do you deal with the tough problem of showing characters enter into belief? If the characters take too long to believe in the story elements (that we know they must believe in) we get annoyed. And yet, if they believe too quickly, their lack of skepticism seems unrealistic.

Curiously, both of these problems are ones I was working on in noise film. For us, the floating spinner is the "scrunt." It's supposed to look magical enough to evoke belief. And yet, unlike the scrunt, it's supposed to look like something that could possibly exist in reality.

The principal arc of noise film is Ben falling deeper and deeper into manic belief. The end itself is my take creating a satisfactory ending while still retaining a sense of ambiguity. In Lady, as in most commercial film, the end of the film tells us what is real. In the typical art film (e.g., a David Lynch film) we never know what is real. Noise film tries to end up somewhere in the middle.

Hating the Like button

Today Facebook introduced an SDK that enables your Facebook friends' "likes" to appear throughout the web. Like most things on the web we become defined by taste. The problem is that this reinforces an inflated value of opinion in which our subjectivity is defined by aesthetic preference. We are worthwhile because of our subjectivity. But that's just my opinion.

We caused the financial crisis

In the financial crisis institutions and brokers made money not by being productive but by packaging and repackaging financial instruments. It was a form of fiscal bricolage that fused economic politics with marketing. In a lot of ways, it's not so different from what we do in certain art classes. When we get away from observation and understanding, we teach students how to manipulate and leverage cultural capital in new ways.

School is people too

All of us are good problem solvers, better or worse depending on the circumstances. Learning how to read a face, for example, requires tremendous judgement. The problem is that the digital generation seems to create too neat a line between analog and digital environments. For example, students (Sean included) seem to treat school like a video game, a situation that ought to have highly circumscribed parameters. For me, school is more like reading faces—students are supposed to be making judgments about what's required and what should be done since an instructor's curriculum is often not what's stated on a syllabus.

I figured out what "the box" is

As Sean clicked away on his Nintendo this morning I realized that "the box," as in "thinking outside the box" isn't just a metaphor, it's a literal image of a game machine, computer or TV. Thinking outside the box means knowing how to think in non-video terms.

Video games teach you certain things—

• Goals don't change

• Goals are hierarchical

• All of the answers can be found within the game itself

This structures thinking in a certain way that is good for procedural tasks but leads to poor problem-solving abilities. The ability to problem solve means knowing how to function in an environment in which goals are constantly changing and being redefined. It means looking for answers "outside the box"—outside the given parameters. Add to this the nature of cinema as an emotional medium. Film works not by logic but by following the emotional arcs of characters. We reason not by critique, but through emotional identification.

Most students are about the same age as the Game Boy (or younger). All of their lives they have been carrying boxes. The digital generation's desire to think outside the box stems from an apparent desire to transcend their own upbringing.

The ubiquitous twist zoom

In the CGI Mars landing sequence in Disney's Roving Mars video there is a zoom that simulates the look of quickly twisting the barrel of a zoom lens. It's very effective and brings a journalistic sense of reality to the sequence. I noticed a twist zoom or two in Avatar also used to good effect. Then last night I saw The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009). There are about eight of these twist zooms in there. The twist zoom has become a part of the vocabulary of the hand held shot telling us that we witnessing something happening right now—even if it isn't.

Hand made sexy air brushed robots

I was watching Lost in La Mancha the other day—the documentary on Terry Gilliam's doomed film—and it reminded me a lot of working on the Jasmine theater project. In theater, you're bringing dozens of people together to work for one thing: opening night. You can feel the energy of everyone working toward a single moment. Terry Gilliam's La Mancha project was similar. Unlike virtual movies which are made in the editing, Terry Gilliam works old school. You watch as he tries to bring together a cast, crew, and production team in real time. It's like opening night is day one of production.

It got me wondering whether and how film depends on this kind of collaborative energy. If you've seen my tests on youtube, you know that I'm experimenting with simulating modernist abstraction. This kind of abstraction is based, among other things, on the control of abstract light and the precision of the machine. And yet my tests, while evocative of the mid and late 20th century, have a certain look to them. Compare the Xanadu of my mind with the actual Xanadu movie, for instance. What makes Xanadu look like Xanadu is that its imagery is based on hand-painted imitations of machine effects, a look you also see in the logo for Saturday Night Fever, the illustration of Doug Johnson, Sorayama's Sexy Robot illustrations, Steve Martin's Pennies from Heaven and Gilliam's own Brazil. Back then, the Xanadu logo looked like a glossy, machine-made take on yesteryear. Today, accustomed as we are to CGI, the logo seems to have more in common with its hand crafted deco inspirations than with technology.

As heir to the light and gloss look of the eighties Speed Racer (2008) involved hundreds of people carefully crafting light effects on the computer. The hand disappears from sight but becomes present within dozens of hand crafted surface mapping, particle and bokeh effects. For us as low-budget, independent filmmakers, the question is this: how much of the attraction of cinema relies on harnessing the collaborative energy of large groups of skilled craftspeople? Trapcode's After Effects plug ins will give you as much spit and shine as you can handle. But rendering alone is not the equivalent of bringing together a group of artists to perform on opening night.

Micro shorts & experimentation

Talking to Ben today about doing micro-shorts. I've been thinking how a lot of my work is genuinely experimental--not in the aesthetic sense, but in the fact that it always involves experimentation, as in I'm trying to figure something out. Ben's idea was to make really short films, like a minute long which suits short experiments. The trick is to get something that goes beyond the typical camera workout or "subway short"--short films that look more like technical tests or are just simple fight scenes.

Barriers to entry

I was thinking about how barriers to entry are potentially a good thing. One of the things that differentiates music from film is that in music, the barriers to entry are very low. All you need is is the idea that you can write and sing something (which seems to be everyone, especially with auto-tune). But film requires a significant investment of time and energy if not money.

I think that's one of the things that's bothering my rapper second cousin who works on beats. When the barrier to entry is low there are thousands and thousands of other artists working out there; there is a lot of 'noise.' And to cut through you have to be a good marketer (my second cousin hates marketing despite the fact that he has a degree in it.) In film it's not quite as difficult to get out there because the barrier to entry is higher. So to a certain extent, the marketing demands are not quite as high depending on your aspirations.

scale

Scale is not created by geography but by performance concerns. We are used to seeing cameras flying through space and zooming in to a particular location on earth. Yet, these shots rarely seem to have a sense of scale; they read simply as an effect. Scale comes from the way in which things are shot. One of the reason that Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009) looks small despite its big budget sets is that its shots are over-controlled. We never catch inadvertant glimpses of the locations—nothing looks improvisational. We feel locked within a set that seems to exist solely for the sake of the film and never discloses anything beyond it.

Qualities of beginner's work

>stiffness
>heaviness
>inconsistency
>grayness

Red Letter Media and Episode 1

Craig sent me a link to Red Letter Media's review of the Phantom Menace. It's extremely intelligent and entertaining but a bit misguided as film criticism. I love this kind of criticism as production theory. It sparks the creative process. It provides insights into what should have been and what could be. I do it all the time. But it's not film criticism. It's part of the creative process.

One take on film criticism is not to describe what would have made a better movie. Instead, it's to try to understand the film in a broader context that aims to enrich our understanding of a work. This can lead to creativity, but does not rely on a reworking of what a filmmaker has already done.

In this vein, I realize that I do have a "film criticism" of the Phantom Menace and it is this: Certainly, the Phantom Menace is filled with problems, but these are problems that stem from aspiration and process. The prequels are Lucas' attempt to make something along the lines of a David Lean film. In trying to show how "an empire becomes an empire" he bit off more than he could chew. This desire to integrate the macro of politics and the micro of human interaction is a lofty goal made more difficult by Lucas' determination to integrate experimental visualization and process into the work. Yes, the Phantom Menace is like a collage that doesn't make sense, but this is a result of the way that Lucas has tried to turn filmmaking into a bricolage-like process created in the editing. The PM wasn't script-driven, it was created via an action-oriented approach in which Lucas tried to reconcile the formal concerns of the images with the plot concerns of the Star Wars back story. If there are holes in the plot, it's because Lucas wasn't able to successfully navigate this difficult improvisation.

The stories of Lucas making an experimental film some day are a smoke screen. In fact, he aspired to integrate experimental filmmaking--the aesthetics of expressionism and improvisational abstraction--into the prequels themselves. The failure of the PM then, is NOT that he was unable to stick to a formula as the Red Letter critique suggests. Instead, it's that he was unable to improvise a successful resolution to the many visual, plot and character conundrums he created for himself. He tried to rewrite the formula of filmmaking itself but was just not skillful enough to pull it off.

Albondigas soup

Yesterday I hired Sean to do some scanning that I had been putting off for years. At .15 cents a copy, it's a great deal for me and a great job for him. He was super happy he made $15. I started playing around with the images and made a couple of pages for my comic book (the final versions will have more characters and word balloons). These took a life of their own. I'll probably use them for a sequence in which the protagonist, in a hypnotic reverie, reminisces about velvety abondigas soup. What struck me about the images, however, are a number of parallels between what I'm doing at school and what I've been thinking about film.

1. These pages are essentially the final project for Art 200. They are multi-modal compositions that incorporate images from Illustrator and Photoshop. I never made the connection before between multi-modal photo montages and my multi-modal approach to film, but there you are. BTW, the photo of the woman is an authentic old school waxy color xerox from the early eighties.

2. Ever since my dissertation I have been wondering about the "in-between" nature of the computer. I wrote about how abstract expressionist painting disclosed anxiety and process. Painting, as an analog medium doesn't allow you to go back and correct things so "mistakes" became fixed into the substance of the work. The computer, on the other hand, is a simulated world in which nothing is fixed. Layers of imagery exist without commitment leading to a tepid, floating quality. Yet there is an approach that exists outside or between authenticity and simulation and it is this: we bring into our use of a medium our understandings, our perceptions and knowledge. When I'm arranging these pages, I frequently put things at slight angles. These aren't a simulation of hand paste-up. This approach is based on my past experience of doing layout by hand. I'm trying to achieve a slightly off-balance, thrown-together look that echoes my experience and observation doings things in the analog world.

3. One way I make these things is to create obstructions for myself. I just start throwing together pretty much any image into a composition. I then try to work myself out of the mess I created. Sometimes I can't do it. At other times I am. This process of trying to rescue and recover work leads to a specific kind of performative quality.

4. I keep writing about how I dislike artiness. These things do look arty, but for me the resemblance is superficial. I think it has to do with why one does things. I think I dislike artiness when it looks like the use of visual signs to give things the authority of art.

Qualities of performance

It's a little embarrassing. I didn't know I was such a by-the-book modernist when it comes to performance. Here are the qualities of performance I always seem to be looking for—

1. Struggle, working oneself out of a series of difficulties, disclosing the struggle of something coming into being, the struggle of an incongruity with the world. We become embedded in and must work our way through history and the presence of things past.

Practically everything I've written about in this blog is about this in some way. Noise shows the struggle of its inception; we learn as we go. Our mistakes determine the outcome of the film. The film is correction-in-motion. It takes the uncinematic and struggles to make it cinematic enough, mostly just hanging by a thread. Brando struggles through obstacles.  My disaffection for films like Goodfellas in which the cinematic virtuosity is astounding, but it  lacks any sense of wonder or experimentation. It is an ostentatious showy blonde of a movie. The handheld camera in Episode II telegraphing, knowing ahead of time where to focus during the Clone Wars sequence.

2. Becoming engaged with the earth and the elements: weather, aging, chemical process. We, our tools and processes become subject to things and do not make all things subject to us.

This is the problem of Beowolf. We see Beowolf standing there on the ship and yet he is unblinking, impervious to the rain. This makes him seem less heroic, not more. He becomes an object, not a person persevering through the rain which was added only later in post. The characters in episode II talking calmly on helicopter-like gunships like they're on the subway, the only clue to the fact that they are flying is fan-driven hair. The work reveals something about its process whether shot on 3 chip or CMOS or film. The use of faux film techniques evokes the desire to return to a world where we are subject to the earth. Yet, because these effects are digital, they once again become aestheticized as an effect.

3. The lack of self-conscious artistry and overstyling. Being in the moment vs. seeing creation in terms of aesthetic or psychological or social decision-making.

My dislike of conventions that falsely convey authority. Episode II—the overly art-directed Clone Wars, the contrast and composition too perfectly control. Heaven's Gate. Dave McKean.

4. Life and expression—something comes across in the public sphere having a lively quality.

The character has inner necessity. They do things congruent with their speech. It doesn't matter whether actors/animators work inside out or outside in. There just has to be a sense of life, of doing things that make sense, of being a part of a moment happening for the first time. Life is the post position that looks like the pre-position.

5. Observation trumping artsy-ness potentially leading to invention. Understanding and knowing instead of recycling or the unimaginative use of tropes.

Abuses of the shaky cam as trope. The problems with Stealth. and its self-conscious performance.

Heidegger, performance and Brando

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw mind... In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. —from Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought


The question: why does digital technology seem to be un-motivating when it should be the opposite because it makes creativity so easy? I suspect this has something to do with the way that digital equipment turns artistic activity into a series of aesthetic decisions. At one time, putting together a clean audio chain required a certain kind of skill. In analog electronic audio, there is a constant mechanical battle against buzz, analog oscillators that don't hold their tune, radio interference and noise. In today's world, however, the computer offers so much control that noise becomes an aesthetic decision. Without the constraints of an analog medium, we are left with the music of the imagination. The problem of digital music, then, is that it frames everything in terms of psychology. "The only limit is your imagination." But that's a BIG limitation. It's not possible to create art that discloses a struggle against the earth. We are so removed that we can only wrestle with the world. The solution is to therefore turn to the quality of a performance. We do not need to literally use analog means to express analog consciousness.

This corresponds to my negative orientation toward "arty-ness." Arty-ness discloses imagination, psychology and subjectivity. Arty-ness is the aural or visual chatter that occurs when art becomes aesthetic. This is the art created by a world made subject to the artist. By its nature, the analog-ontological sensibility, on the other hand, is defined by the fact that the artist is made subject to things.

The art of an artist made subject to things is exemplified in the performance of someone like Brando. This is modern acting, the method. In his mumbling, Brando discloses the struggle of mind vs. the earth. In Streetcar, when he speaks while eating a fruit, he remakes Demosthenes for modernity. The post-Adler approach to acting, acting with a ragged edge, is exemplified by its rawness. It is abstract expressionism for the screen.

The question is why this approach still rings true for us. By now, approaching acting as being-in-the-moment should be an anachronism. Yet it is the approach seemingly necessitated by the scrutiny of the camera lens and by the depth of experience we have reading human faces. And watching Brando in The Godfather—speaking through a raspy throat—remains as compelling as it did 40 years ago.

Another discovery

On V: the original miniseries Part II, there is an interesting discovery sequence.

The food service girl steps on gum. She stops to take it off and rests her hand on the wall. She then realizes that her hand is on a time bomb.

I am not immune to this malaise

When I was in grad school in the nineties I didn't have a scanner so I used to go to the computer lab to scan everything I needed in batches. When I needed a font like Bodoni, I would go to a lab, type out the word in Bodoni and then save it as a Photoshop file so I could take it home. Even in the late 90's at CSUN I used to drive 30 miles to ITR to burn backup CD-ROMs. Today it's almost too easy to make things. There's something very un-motivating about having Garage Band sitting on every Mac. Without any significant investment of time, energy or money—without cost—creativity becomes an ever-present possibility that exists in an always-out-of-reach future. Creativity then becomes a purely aesthetic effort divorced from financial and other decisions. It's almost like creativity works better when things aren't too easy.

Demosthenes, transparency + transcendence

Demetrius, the Phalerian, tells us that he was informed by Demosthenes himself, now grown old, that the ways he made use of to remedy his natural bodily infirmities and defects were such as these; his inarticulate and stammering pronunciation he overcame and rendered more distinct by speaking with pebbles in his mouth; his voice he disciplined by declaiming and reciting speeches or verses when he was out of breath, while running or going up steep places; and that in his house he had a large looking-glass, before which he would stand and go through his exercises.  —Demosthenes, by Plutarch


Perhaps there are two ways to think of performing through an obstruction. One approach is transcendent. We transcend the limitations of a medium with our virtuosity. Like spectacular visual effects, photographs that look like paintings, and Michael Jackson. In the other approach, there is no transcendence. We struggle with tools to produce form that never becomes transparent and still maintains its ragged edge. Contemporary theorists would likely think of this as a worn-out cipher for authenticity, the honesty of materials and modernity.

Maybe we can look at Demosthenes in two ways. In the received view, Demosthenes learned to transcend his speech impediment by filling his mouth with stones. But perhaps the "distinct" speech he learned didn't refer to a clarity of pronunciation, but a clarity of expression. Perhaps he didn't overcome his stammering but learned to use it for rhetorical effect.

Light, glass, gears, plastic + performance

I mentioned yesterday that kinetic light pieces fascinate me when they are done mechanically, but are highly uninteresting to me when done via software (e.g., a screensaver). I wonder if this has something to do with the "performing through obstruction" idea that I was thinking about last year.

I'm sure Wilfred felt his Lumia was possible only because of the machine. But I suspect his devices were like vacuum-tube based computers; the idea and the potential far exceeded the hardware. I wonder if Wilfred's machine was simultaneously expressive and obstructive? The machine made Wilfred's work possible but the process of combining light, glass, gears and plastic to simulate the floating quality of modern painting via light was bound by numerous engineering concerns. Perhaps it is this tension that makes the work interesting.

This reminds me of John Knoll's description of his experiences with optical printing. Knoll has spoken of the tension-filled dance that accompanied an optical print run in which a number of elements had to be combined. Perhaps the charm of technologies-on-the-edge is not that they evoke technological mastery, but that they disclose a lack of it. The machines are doing things for which they are ill-suited. It is the tension between control and a lack of control that generates a performance. This may explain why certain computer-based effects are so unsatisfying; the match between concept and machine is so well aligned, that the performance is lost. This is the phenomenon of the screensaver—the perfect realization of machine-based abstraction, yet artistically empty.

This idea seems consistent with my love of misusing technologies. My friend Ward made fun of me saying, "Not everything is a transistor radio that you can turn into a bubble machine." But maybe that's why I keep trying—because it is in the ability to expressively use a mismatched technology (performing through an obstruction) that a performance arises.

Maintaining conflict

Last month I wrote about the problem that occurs when dialogue doesn't match actions. I think the problem comes in extending conflict. Conflict is interesting. But it can be hard thinking of a good reason to keep the conflict going. It therefore makes sense why chase scenes are popular. They work because they extend conflict. What doesn't work is when you say, "leave me alone" and then you just stand there waiting to be accosted (unless that is part of the character, of course.) An old dramatic adage says that in a scene, each person needs to want something. But it might be just as reasonable to say that in a scene, there ought to be conflict, logically extended.