Video – Page 37 – Press Play Video Blog

VIDEO ESSAY: The Coen Brothers: Men of Constant Sorrow

Woe be to you if you should be so unlucky as to be a male
character in a Coen Brothers film. You will be punched. You will be yanked off
moving trains. You will frequently be plagued either by melancholy or by
ethical torment. Things won’t go well for you. And often, you won’t be terribly
likable. Take the plight of Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo.
Could a terrible kidnapping plan have possibly gone any more poorly than this
one? But, at the same time, could there be a less amiable character? The
simpering, the crying, the sneakiness, the stammering–who could stand it? Or think of Tom Reagan of
Millers Crossing. He
perpetually tries to take control—of people, of his job, of his existence—and yet perpetually gets his
come-uppance, in grand style, sometimes quite bluntly. His moment of mercy
shown to Bernie Bernbaum in the forest, when he could take a shot, and doesn’t,
is repaid by punishment, like all the best good deeds. Does he invite this bad
luck? Sure, but don’t we all, sort of? Or consider Jeff Lebowski. Just consider
him, for a moment. The peeing on the rug? The ferret in the bathtub? The blow
to the head? All wholly unasked for, and yet delivered with a vengeance. But,
and this is the million-dollar (literally) question, by who? Or what? It’s been
tossed out that the Coen Brothers are, in some sense, religious—that,
especially as shown in A Serious Man, their films are about how we humans are,
in a sense, little more than plastic cowboy and soldier figurines being moved
around in someone or something’s deranged, Old-Testament-Style shadowbox, open to whatever hurricane or other unexpected blow from above might descend upon them. But
the opposite could also be asserted, that their films show what it is like to
live in a world without a G-d, without mercy—and that what might pass for
punishment in another view is simply the business of everyday life. How the men
of these films transact that business is entirely up to them. One would think
that Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old
Men was wholly in control of his destiny, being as he is a reptilian
sociopath—but even he likes a coin toss every now and then. True Grit? Same
story, in a sense: though the men in this film have intentionality, they’re wandering
through a terrain—the West—which is famously unpredictable, famously wild. And
they’re being led by a young woman a quarter their age. And, beyond that, the
Coens have constructed the script in such a way, with such faith to the
original dialogue, that one sometimes feels the characters, male and female
both, are at the mercy of the words coming out of their mouths. Leigh Singer’s beautiful piece places us right in the middle of the Coen dilemma, in a form so exhilarating you might forget how much despair is being depicted.–Max Winter

VIDEO ESSAY: In Memory of Paul Mazursky 1930–2014

A Cinema of Real Feeling: Remembering Paul Mazursky

Paul Mazursky made movies about what was happening around
him. Mazursky honed in on the cultural climates of the
eras during which his films were produced. Whether it was the strife of marital
discourse found in the 60s and 70s (from Bob
& Carol & Ted & Alice’s freewheeling "free love" sentiment
to An Unmarried Woman’s study of sexual
liberation) or the timeless theme of searching for a renewed, meaningful
identity (Tempest, Moscow on the Hudson and, to some extent, Down and Out in Beverly Hills), Mazursky told stories of the
moment and more effectively, presented a cinema of palpable feelings.

Mazursky was, first, a prolific Hollywood
character actor; he even played Tinseltown types in several of his own films.
Perhaps it was this affinity, this affection for actors that lent gravitas to his directing of his own films. Many of his films were about the upper middle
class: people with careers, relationship problems, anxieties about the economy,
and the overwhelming dread of just being “ordinary.” And yet, Mazursky really
loved these characters. He watched them. He followed them. His camera
roved the interiors of homes and other locales with patient, observant contemplation.
Because of his delicate orchestration of writing, music, and themes, Mazursky’s work as a filmmaker set him apart from his
peers. In his time, nobody listened to or looked at this group of damaged souls with as
much bruising honesty and scathing humor as Mazursky did. In a 1978 interview
with Film Comment, Mazursky addressed this: “[Middle-class life
is] on the edge of soap opera and the edge of real; it’s alienated and
confused, almost tragic. It’s become popularized in one way or another, but I
haven’t seen it dealt with much in American cinema on a level which
communicates real feeling. I’ve seen it dealt with through humor, a bit. But
not with real feeling.” Thanks to Mazursky’s distinct body of work as director,
we all have the gift of seeing these cinematic works of “real feeling” again
and again.

Nelson Carvajal is an independent digital filmmaker, writer and content
creator based out of Chicago, Illinois. His digital short films usually
contain appropriated content and have screened at such venues as the London Underground Film Festival. Carvajal runs a blog called FREE CINEMA NOW
which boasts the tagline: "Liberating Independent Film And Video From A
Prehistoric Value System." You can follow Nelson on Twitter here.

VIDEO ESSAY: White Knights and Bad People

[The text of the video essay follows.]

When I watched Back to
the Future with my parents as a child, I remember my shock at seeing Marty
McFly’s mom sexually assaulted by the high school bully, Biff, in the backseat
of a car. The assault was confusing. I remember my first viewing of this
relatively tame movie as a garble of images–the backseat, the fluffy curls of
the pink prom dress, the feet poking out, the muffled screams.

Of course, this entire scene is about Marty’s dad having the
guts to punch the rapist in the face, to tell him to “leave her alone.” By the
end Marty’s mother is all smiles, relief, and pride in having chosen a man who
would defend and respect her.

My exposure to cartoon gender relations was similarly
violent. The female cartoon characters in shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs
liked to don skimpy outfits. The male characters’ eyes would pop out of their
skulls, tongues hanging out lecherously. Of course, these shows played on old
cartoon favorites. Betty Boop often had to avoid unwanted male attention, poor
Olive Oyl was constantly placed in supposedly comic situations where she was
being either kidnapped or harassed, and in Tex Avery’s Little Red Riding Hood,
“Red” is a full grown woman who must be careful of the predatory wolf who
stalks her nightclub.

When I was a child, the images of a female cartoon character
being catcalled, or a woman being assaulted, did not seem especially unusual. I
assumed that warding off male attention was met by most adult women with a
mixture of pride and mild annoyance. As I got older, I became more and more
concerned about this phenomenon. When even strong, powerful women are victimized
in films and television, a dashing hero saves the day.

Today, in the age of Steubenville, we still worry about the
ways boys and men prey on girls and women. Social organizations often still
rely on the white knight trope when they address this matter. Actors and
musicians who regularly objectify women on screen and in music videos are shown
looking sad as they pose with Real Men Don’t Buy Girls hashtag signs. In the
White House PSA on sexual assault, Daniel Craig and Benicio Del Toro are among the male
participants calling for heroic behavior.

Stepping in when someone is in trouble is certainly
honorable, but the moral lesson in these PSAs provides men with the same
options they had in Back to the Future.
Are you a Marty, or a Bif? Will you defend womanhood, or assault it?

The threat of rape is often used as a device for male
characters to become heroes, which contributes to the idea that sexual assault
is a normal part of growing up female. Rape is still seen as unchecked lust
rather than an expression of violence.
This myth has far reaching repercussions, as girls and women live in the
very real shadow of sexual assault constantly. We get inured to sexual violence
on shows like Game of Thrones, where
rape is often presented in the background of a scene, something bad, brutal men
do to helpless women.

It’s exhausting as a woman to constantly see the female body
on the brink of violation. I’m tired of the voicelessness of those bodies, by
the fact that we still need to spread awareness about how horrible sexual
assault actually is. I know I’m supposed to be grateful when people express
that they are aware, when men who seem poised to protect me when I go out, when
someone develops an app designed to help get me home safe by checking in with my
family and friends.

The way rape is portrayed today is not so different from how
it was portrayed in 80s exploitation films, where rape is intended to shock and
titillate in one fell swoop, like it often does in the current series Game of Thrones. A film like Extremities, for example, promises the
sweetest of revenges for a female protagonist, but it is the image of Farrah Fawcett
cowering and sobbing, forced to take off her clothes, while her rapist looks on
and calls her beautiful that has become the ubiquitous Hollywood rape scene,
where a gorgeous woman is exposed and shamed and, despite the fact that we are
told to root for her, we are also given permission to ogle her, to see her
through the rapist’s lens, before we see her own experience.

This is one of the reasons that Joan’s rape scene on Mad Men is so effective is that it
portrays her quiet terror without fetishizing her body or her fear. We don’t
see her ample curves illuminated, the way they normally are. Joan’s sexuality
is a point of pride throughout the series, and the camera makes it clear that
what we are witnessing is a power play and violation. There’s nothing sexual
about it. The camera ends not on a close up of her body, but a close up of her
staring at a point just ahead of her in an office that isn’t hers, as she waits
for what is happening to stop.

Arielle Bernstein is
a writer living in Washington, DC. She teaches writing at American
University and also freelances. Her work has been published in The
Millions, The Rumpus, St. Petersburg Review and The Ilanot Review. She
has been listed four times as a finalist in Glimmer Train short story
contests. She is currently writing her first book.

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose
montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching
and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and
Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing,
she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.

VIDEO ESSAY DIPTYCH: Good Dads/Bad Dads: A Tribute to Cinematic Fathers

Good Dads/Bad Dads: A Tribute to Cinematic Fathers

I can’t remember the first film I watched with my dad Jim. However, I do remember what I affectionately
call my “Martin Scorsese summer.” I
spent three weeks in the hospital following an appendix operation and decided
to tackle the American Film Institute’s 100
Years…100 Movies from my sickbed.
My dad was a major presence during this event, only leaving my side to
go to rent the videos from the list. I
can still remember him personally recommending Fargo (1996). My eventual
career as a Cinema Studies Professor can be traced back to that hospital bed
and my dad’s trips to Blockbuster Video.

Another course on the informal side of my film education came
from my eventual father-in-law Larry. At
first, Larry resented me for dating his daughter Nicole (not for any specific
reason, simply because of that natural protective instinct a father feels for
his daughter). In order to sooth his
unhappiness, I asked Nicole what his hobbies were. She started to list them off (“Hunting,
fishing…”), and I began to feel my stomach drop. She added, “But he likes Westerns.” I had never been a huge fan of the genre, but
I would become one thanks to Larry. We
finally bonded over our admiration for John Ford’s collaborations with John
Wayne.

Despite these anecdotes, my two fathers are not cinephiles. Larry’s tastes begin with The Searchers (1956) and end with Lonesome Dove (1989). When I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for the first time, Jim was quick to
note his distaste. “If you ever have
difficulty sleeping, turn that movie on.
You’ll never make it to the part that takes place in space,” he said. My dad used to like Quentin Tarantino movies,
but I don’t think he has the patience for them anymore.

One of the last films we watched together is one of his
favorites: Robert Benton’s Nobody’s Fool (1994). The film stars Paul Newman as a crotchety,
failed father who attempts to redeem himself in the eyes of son (Dylan Walsh)
and the town he lives in. I think the
film resonates with him because it reminds him of his two fathers. Thankfully, neither of my fathers needed to
follow Newman’s trajectory towards absolution.
We shared many of the experiences outlined in Benjamin Sampson’s video essay
on good dads: the life lessons, the cultural education, the enrichment of an
accomplishment brought by their pride.

Ironically, if there is a larger lesson to be taken from Ben and
I’s diptych, it’s that bad dads are far more memorable than good dads. Many of the most beloved films of cinema
history appear in my contribution: Citizen Kane (1941), The Godfather (1972), Chinatown (1974), Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Freddy Got Fingered (2001) to name but a few. Bad dads from Darth Vader and Michael
Corleone to Aguirre and Jack Torrence emanate a magnetic, horrifying, presence
that provide filmmakers with the manifestation of a potent conflict whose
universality stems from its intimate proximity to the homestead. The
Shining (1980) continues to terrify not because an anonymous murderer is
wielding an axe in a haunted hotel, but because a father is turning on his
son. The pessimistic ending to Chinatown hits the viewer like a punch
in the gut because Noah Cross’s bad deeds perpetuate themselves without end or
punishment (a related point: most of
cinema’s bad dads gain their status because they are aggressive towards their
children, be it in the form of physical and/or sexual violence, and not because
they are neglectful). Essentially, the
influence of Sophocles’s tragedies remain as emotionally potent as they were
2,000 years ago when they were first performed.–Drew Morton

Drew Morton is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at
Texas A&M University-Texarkana. His
criticism, articles, and video essays have previously appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Senses of Cinema, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Press Play, and RogerEbert.com. He is the co-founder and co-editor of in[Transition], the first peer-reviewed
academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies.

Benjamin Sampson is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Studies
at the University of California, Los Angeles.
His video essays on Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Orson Welles’s F for Fake (1973) have appeared in Press Play and [in]Transition. He is
currently researching the intersection between Hollywood and religious
institutions.

VIDEO ESSAY: In Memory of Gordon Willis (1931-2014)

A Master of Light, Shadow and the Human Condition: In Memory
of Gordon Willis (1931-2014)

As the tribute articles, obituaries and remembrances for the
late cinematographer Gordon Willis begin to flood in, almost all of them are
sure to lead with “Godfather Cinematographer” in the headline. Surely it’s
partly because Willis’ work in The
Godfather Trilogy is one of the most influential collections of moving images in
film history—but those headlines probably stem more from the idea that the populace of
readers will only know Willis’ name from those films. This is too bad because Willis’ equally
significant contribution to the art of cinematography goes back to his
spectacular filmography of sleeper films from the 1970s through mid 1980s. Even then, Willis
was pushing the envelope in regards to the stylistic direction of his then
peers (Vilmos Zsigmond, Conrad Hall, and Lazlo Kovacs, among others). Outside of
his collaborations with Woody Allen (Annie
Hall, Interiors, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, A
Midsummer’s Night Sex Comedy and Broadway
Danny Rose), Willis’ dynamic End of
the Road made spectacular use of the hot vs. cold lighting settings amidst
the film’s rambunctious interior settings. In The People Next Door, Willis was able to light the interiors of family
homes so that they looked real and less like a family setting you would see on
television (note how the neighbors’ house party sequence would later influence
the free-loving car key party scene from Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm). Willis wasn’t interested in recreating the real
world; he wanted to represent it as truly as possible.

In regards to The
Godfather films, well, where does one begin? There is just so much to soak
in, from the sepia tone scenes to the films’ controlled, if elegant, framing of
such violent acts as an orchestrated mass murder juxtaposed against a baptism
in a church. Perhaps more powerful than any onscreen kill was Willis’ uncanny
ability to command our attention through his long takes of characters’ faces.
Although bullets fly throughout the first Godfather
film, nothing in that movie captures our undivided attention and excitement
like that slow burning shot of Michael Corleone’s (Al Pacino) angst-ridden face
that is desperately searching for answers as he prepares to whip out his gun to
kill Solazzo and McClusky in the Italian restaurant. Even in non-violent
settings like a school campus (The Paper
Chase) or a newspaper office (All The
President’s Men), Willis’ photography keeps the mood riveting because he
allows his camera to study the faces of the screen characters; we see how their
faces twist in frustration or frown in disillusionment against the light that
presses down upon their skin. It wasn’t just that Willis had a unique visual
style all his own; it was that he was a true artist, a visual storyteller.
Willis knew that a pretty shot only had surface merits. He knew he had to let
the camera invade each screen presence by letting the shot study it, through
every prolonged take. As he did so, we became immersed in those moments. We may have
even seen ourselves in Michael Corleone’s face in that restaurant. Gordon
Willis was a great cinematographer not just because he mastered the
fundamentals of lighting design. He was a great cinematographer because he knew
how to look at us, even when we couldn’t look at ourselves.

Nelson Carvajal is an independent digital filmmaker, writer and content
creator based out of Chicago, Illinois. His digital short films usually
contain appropriated content and have screened at such venues as the London Underground Film Festival. Carvajal runs a blog called FREE CINEMA NOW
which boasts the tagline: “Liberating Independent Film And Video From A
Prehistoric Value System.” You can follow Nelson on Twitter here.

VIDEO ESSAY: Virtual Animals: Building the Digital Ark

[The script of the video essay follows.]

For most of us, our first encounter with a wild animal
happens through a screen: the camera has the power to bring us closer to an
animal than we are ever likely to get in the wild. It is by sight that we become fascinated with
them, by sight that we come to know them, by sight that we mourn their
disappearance.

We are currently living through the world’s sixth mass
extinction event, the first to be caused entirely by humans. By the century’s end, we are likely to have
lost half of the world’s species. Film
will not only be the most intimate encounter we have with animals: for most
species, it will be the only encounter possible.

The fewer animals we find in the wild, the more we see on
screen. The digital revolution has
enabled filmmakers to create an entirely new breed of animal, one that exists
only in the form of pixels. Absence of
flesh and blood answered by an abundance of virtual animals.

Animals have always been a central part of filmmaking, and
animals on the screen have always had a complex relationship to their real life
counterparts. One of the earliest films
made by Thomas Edison is of an animal execution. In 1903 the rogue performing elephant Topsy
was sentenced to death by electrocution after killing her trainer. Edison used the event as an opportunity to
show the power of alternating current, as
well as his state of the art film camera.
Thousands watched the event, and many thousands more flocked to the
film.

The celluloid used in film stock comes from gelatin made
from the rendered bodies of animals.
Eastman Kodak had its own rendering plant so that they could monitor the
quality of the animal product that went into the patented celluloid used by
most filmmakers. Before digital, when
you watched a film, the image on the screen was literally being projected
through animal matter.

With digital we usher in a new era in which animals might
play a different role on the screen. For
Darren Aronofsky’s animal epic Noah,
Industrial Light and Magic created 14,000 virtual animals, none of which
involved the use of live animals in their creation. Aronofsky felt it would be against the theme
of the film to put live animals in dangerous or harmful filming conditions. The result is the most breathtaking collection
of virtual animals ever assembled. The
film itself is a kind of digital ark, bringing thousands of animals to life
even while their real-life counterparts are likely to become extinct in the
coming decades.

Before Noah, CGI
artists more often used live animals on the set to serve as models for digital
versions. The process is called
capturing. In the filming of Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, four tigers were used to
create the unforgettable feline presence of Richard Parker. One of them was reported to have nearly
drowned on the set.

We know animals by sight.
By seeing we know they have souls.
Somehow, these souls survive even in their visual avatars, even when
what we are watching is not an animal at all, but a collection of pixels on a
screen.

Nelson Carvajal is an independent digital filmmaker, writer and content
creator based out of Chicago, Illinois. His digital short films usually
contain appropriated content and have screened at such venues as the London Underground Film Festival. Carvajal runs a blog called FREE CINEMA NOW
which boasts the tagline: “Liberating Independent Film And Video From A
Prehistoric Value System.” You can follow Nelson on Twitter here.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

VIDEO ESSAY: Fast-Mo: Fast-Motion Sequences in Film

I remember, as a kid, watching The Three Stooges on TV and
always feeling a little baffled to see the Stooges springing
back up from the ground at a hyper-motion, cartoonish speed; these
singular fast-motion moments usually followed a bigger gag, like one of the
Stooges being set on fire or bitten by a large animal. Still, even as a
child, it was quietly unnerving to see human beings moving faster than they . . . should.
The fast forward motion was more acceptable in cartoons like Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner, for
example. In real life, however, people don’t move like that. But in film and
television, this fast motion effect has become more popular as years have
gone by—especially when one considers how prominent time-lapse photography has
become—so there must be an important reason for that.

In Leigh Singer’s dazzling new video, he explores the
visual rhetoric of the fast motion effect by grouping films together by shared themes and visual motifs. There are the pistol-slinging cowboys
of the Wild West in The Ballad of Cable
Hogue juxtaposed against the kinetic, gun-wielding rabble-rousers of Baz
Luhrmann’s updated Romeo + Juliet. Also,
there is the meta-grouping of film clips from Funny Games, Click and Caché. Each of those films visually
demonstrates the power of the fast-forward effect via an actual remote control. In Funny Games the remote control is used
to undo a fatal act, in Click it is used
as a time travel device, and in Caché it
is used as a plot-fueling investigative device to discover who has been sending
mysterious surveillance videotapes. (Note: what other video supercut
appropriately mixes an Adam Sandler comedy with a Michael Haneke film?) As
Singer’s video blazes (fast) forward to the tune of Gioachino Rossini’s
“William Tell” overture finale, it becomes clear that Singer is fascinated with
how silly we look when we’re depicted in this fast forward motion. If slow
motion dramatizes the moment, then fast motion injects a comic surge to the mise-en-scène.

Curiously enough, after a couple of viewings, I personally found the
video to be deceptively powerful in its implications of the way we process the
concept of time, especially with cinema. When speaking of the moving image in
cinema, film historian Ivor Montagu once said “No other medium can portray real
man in motion in his real surroundings.” The cinema itself is an art form that
manipulates time in more ways than one. For one thing, it freezes time: actors
are immortalized and live forever on movie screens big and small. Yet, at the
same time, it makes our perception of time decidedly pronounced. When we watch a movie, we’re subconsciously convinced that we’re seeing actions
happen in real time. But it’s not real time. The motion picture itself is
moving at a rate of 24 (or these days 30) frames per second; those are 24
captured moments—24 instances of actions or feelings that have already
happened. Still, this notion of time we won’t get back is remedied by
having at least captured some of it on film. Likewise, that fleeting concept of
speed, or the future even, is validated and realized by the fast-motion visual
effect. In our own lives, time is something we really can’t control; it passes
by with a relentless fervor. Therefore, the fast-motion effect is a
demonstration of tremendous power. If the cinema is our duplicate (or projected)
reality, then the fast motion effect represents our god-like ability to
manipulate time’s reality. It’s a unique opportunity. The kinetic speed of
the fast-motion effect is a universal touchstone; it transcends language and
culture barriers. It’s a visual representation of the voracious thirst driving life. It pushes us forward, even when we’re afraid to take that leap, because
in life, there is no rewind button.–Nelson Carvajal

Leigh Singer is a freelance film journalist, filmmaker and screenwriter.
Leigh studied Film and Literature at Warwick University, where he
directed and adapted the world stage premiere of Steven Soderbergh’s
‘sex, lies and videotape’. He has written or made video essays on fllm for The Guardian, The Independent, BBCi, Dazed & Confused, Total Film, RogerEbert.com
and others, has appeared on TV and radio as a film critic and is a
programmer with the London Film Festival. You can reach him on Twitter
@Leigh_Singer.

Nelson Carvajal is an independent digital filmmaker, writer and content
creator based out of Chicago, Illinois. His digital short films usually
contain appropriated content and have screened at such venues as the London Underground Film Festival. Carvajal runs a blog called FREE CINEMA NOW
which boasts the tagline: “Liberating Independent Film And Video From A
Prehistoric Value System.” You can follow Nelson on Twitter here.

A Video Essay On Jim Jarmusch: Dead Men & Ghosts, Limited

The secret of poetry lies in treading the middle path between the reality and the vacuity of the world.
—Basho
trans. by Robert Hass

Of the various Jim Jarmusch films I’ve seen, three have nagged
at me, haunted me, teased me until I came back to them again and again. I
was a student in New York City when Dead Man was released, and I saw it
in the theatre, having read a review, having heard Jarmusch’s name
whispered or echoed somewhere, and I wanted to see what the fuss was. I
didn’t know what to make of it then, but if I knew anything at all about
the film, I knew it was beautiful. Ghost Dog was easier to apprehend on
a first viewing (in Boston, if I remember correctly), a film that is,
for Jarmusch at least, relatively conventional in its narrative
progress, its episodes clearly linked together through cause, effect,
motivation. The Limits of Control is the most abstract of the three, a
film to dream to. Indeed, when I first watched it (late one night at
home in New Hampshire), I drifted in and out of sleep. This seems
appropriate, perhaps the perfect first encounter with such an enigmatic,
oneiric movie.

I began to think of the three films together. They appealed to me
significantly more than Jarmusch’s other works, significantly more than
most movies. The reasons could, of course, be personal and
idiosyncratic, but perhaps there was something there, some line of
thought, some mix of imagery and style. Certainly, they share concerns
and motifs: questions of wisdom and wandering, art and death, repetition
and revision. They let genres become ghosts. They propose that white
men are the scourge of reality. I knew the only way to begin an
exploration would be with a movie of my own, made from pilfered pieces,
because while I could analyze with text, it held no appeal: too dry, too
awkward, too much like a manual on taxidermy. I knew I couldn’t script
it, either; I just needed to dig into the sounds and images, to see what
stuck, to trust a certain intuition in juxtaposition.

“Dead Men & Ghosts, Limited” is the result. Its great flaw is that I was awake when I made it.

Matthew Cheney’s work has been published by English Journal, One Story, Web Conjunctions, Strange Horizons, Failbetter.com, Ideomancer, Pindeldyboz, Rain Taxi, Locus, The Internet Review of Science Fiction and SF Site, among other places, and he is the former series editor for Best American Fantasy. He is currently a student in the Ph.D. in Literature program at the University of New Hampshire.

VIDEO ESSAY: Lars Von Trier: Cinema’s Dancer in the Dark

In my writing group, a friend describes the way that, when
you edit a piece of writing, you should look for hot spots, places where the
strength of emotion is so great that heat radiates outwards. These are the
places that jolt the heart, that cause a vibration in your spine.

In Lars von Trier’s body of work there is nothing but this
kind of heat: piercing, exhilarating, painful, heartbreaking. When you watch
von Trier, every part of you wakes up, even parts you don’t like very much. A
von Trier film is a visceral experience. You can see this in Nelson Carvajal’s
brilliant video essay: a clamor of sounds, an array of confusing images,
panicked cuts. In a von Trier film you aren’t allowed to look away: not from
suffering, not from sex, not from heartache, not from desperation, not from
human evil, and not from the pain of lost innocence either.

In many of von Trier’s earlier works, like Breaking the Waves and The Idiots, overwhelming emotion is
evoked through quick, jerky camera movements and raw acting. In his Golden
Hearts Trilogy, von Trier is particularly interested in looking at the purity
of altruism, while his more painful films often beg the question of whether
there is anything noble in sacrifice at all.
Some feminists criticize the way von Trier depicts his heroines, his
obsession with their suffering, but von Trier’s films never struck me as
misogynistic, as some critics claim. His heroines are complex and authentic.
They make choices with conviction, even when those choices end up being the end
of them. In short, von Trier’s female characters are given permission to have a
kind of existential hunger that few “strong female characters” are ever able to
explore.

In recent films, like Melancholia,
Antichrist and Nymphomaniac, von Trier commands this same intensity as in his
earlier movies, while focusing more on languid scenes that showcase the horror
and beauty contained within the natural world. In von Trier’s universe, human
beings are brainy and removed from this landscape, yet also inextricably bound
up in it, constantly coming into contact with their animal selves, naked,
lustful, hungry. At the start of Antichrist a couple makes love to
classical music, while their baby falls out a window to his death. In Nymphomaniac,
a character muses about Fibonacci sequences and the intellectual pleasures of
fly-fishing, in between scenes of animalistic intercourse. And in Melancholia
all the scientific study in the world can’t save humanity from a star quietly
hurling itself into the earth.

While von Trier’s heroines are often presented as
Christ-like figures, he is less invested in exploring the fall from grace than in showing the messiness of the human experience and what happens when
Icarus flies too close to the sun.

In this way, von Trier’s power comes not simply from making
us empathize with another’s pain, but also allowing us to feel the dizzying
hope of free fall: from that moment before we give up, when all we can do is
reach.–Arielle Bernstein

Nelson Carvajal is an independent digital filmmaker, writer and content
creator based out of Chicago, Illinois. His digital short films usually
contain appropriated content and have screened at such venues as the London Underground Film Festival. Carvajal runs a blog called FREE CINEMA NOW
which boasts the tagline: “Liberating Independent Film And Video From A
Prehistoric Value System.” You can follow Nelson on Twitter here.

VIDEO ESSAY: Rough and Ready: The Return of the Microcinema

Earlier this week, Google
released an app called “Previews” for Google Glass users. The app allows users
to view a film’s theatrical trailer by simply looking at that same film’s
theatrical poster in a theater lobby. This immediacy, this growing interest in
instant access, is another advancement in our culture’s shift from the group
experience to the singular experience, in regard to the cinema. Believe it or
not, there was a time when a moviegoer might go up to the box office cashier
and simply ask: “What’s that movie about?” And get an answer!

In a diabolical twist of fate, the
technological wizardry provided by Google Glass, smartphones and tablets have
in fact put mainstream moviegoers back into archaic roles. Specifically, these
personalized smart devices are removing viewers from their respective, physical
audience groups and positioning them to heavily rely on their own digitized
versions of a Kinetoscope. The Kinetoscope was an early motion picture viewing device that
allowed only one viewer at a time to watch a film through a peephole.
Kinetoscopes were all the rage in 1894. Today, we have the same thing—except
it’s in the form of an iPhone, or a computer.

For all of the gadgetry and instant
gratification that comes with such technological advancements, there has been
one constant in the movie-going world: the limited access to the experimental
(or underground) film catalogue. Sure, one can search for and watch a Stan
Brakhage small-gauge short film on YouTube, for instance, but that is not how a
Brakhage film should first be viewed. It would be like watching Star Wars
on your phone before having seen it in a theater. And while a Brakhage film
doesn’t necessarily require an IMAX screen or stadium seating, it does come
alive in a special way when it’s projected on a screen by a—dare I say
it?—small-gauge film projector. Why is this? Because that film projector comes
from the same technological arena that gave birth to Brakhage. It’s one thing
to watch a cute cat video (that was more than likely recorded by a smartphone)
embedded on someone’s Facebook page. It’s an entirely different thing to watch
an 8-minute impressionistic work that was filmed, spliced and then further
manipulated on physical celluloid, sitting in a dark room filled with equally
engaged and fascinated cinephiles.

While the access to this catalogue of
experimental film is hindered by the limited places of exhibition to actually
watch them, some cinematic havens exist. These “microcinemas”—as they have
affectionately been called since 1994—aren’t as common as they once were, but
they are still championed by small circles of artists and curators in certain
pockets across the country. In Chicago,
Illinois, there is a wonderful gem of a microcinema called the Nightingale (http://nightingalecinema.org/), located in
the city’s Noble Square neighborhood. Earlier this winter, I visited the
Nightingale for one of their special exhibition programs, where they showed
films that were thematically linked to the writings of Studs Terkel. Artists
read excerpts of his writings to an eager audience between each of the films.
It was quite a sight to see. The level of engagement between orator and
listener, between abstract film work and viewer, was truly special. The
Nightingale was offering an alternative to the instant gratification culture:
it gave viewers intimate gratification instead.

And in a time of such technological haste
and overt content consumption, the microcinema offers up an old-school
rhetoric that invites moviegoers to look back on films that challenged norms,
to look forward to the new works that are breaking the traditional narrative
structure, and to open up an offline, in-person dialogue with their fellow
cinephiles. It’s the kind of feat that no Google Glass app has yet to achieve.

Nelson Carvajal is an independent digital filmmaker, writer and content
creator based out of Chicago, Illinois. His digital short films usually
contain appropriated content and have screened at such venues as the London Underground Film Festival. Carvajal runs a blog called FREE CINEMA NOW
which boasts the tagline: “Liberating Independent Film And Video From A
Prehistoric Value System.” You can follow Nelson on Twitter here.