Press Play Video Blog

On an Animation of a Sentence by Nathan Englander

It seems to me there are several different things going on
in Drew Christie‘s animation of a sentence from the Nathan Englander story “The Reader.”
The sentence itself runs as follows:

And with all these
headlights floating divided in his rearview mirror, Author can never tell which
belong to his reader, which pair is his beacon, a North Star, split, cast back,
guiding him on.

Your first question might be, if you haven’t seen one of
these brilliant animations literary magazine Electric Literature has been posting for years now, where’s the rest of the story? What are we to do with a single sentence?

That is the question the editors want you to ask: in
isolating these sentences in this way, they want to raise the estimation of the
individual sentence, to remind us of its part in making a story, or even a
novel. They have taken sentences from authors ranging from Jim Shepard to Amy
Hempel to Mary Gaitskill to A.M. Homes, paired them with animators, and
produced a remarkable series of small films.

The film built around this sentence is fairly simple on its
surface, a study in white lines against a black background, all vibrating
slightly, partly an effect of the medium, partly an effect of the sentence
itself (I’d like to think, though I’m probably wrong). A polar bear stands on top of a rising and descending moon-like (or maybe Earth-like) orb,
suggesting… what? The mythic importance of the polar bear for certain cultures? The isolation we all
sometimes feel, as if the world were a desert island and we were all standing
on it, waiting for a ship? The sense that we are all, somehow, crushed, that we
think we are free but we are actually stick beneath the paw of some enormous
unseen beast?

The rest of the small film, just under two minutes long, does
little to discourage or answer these sorts of questions, and in fact it expands
on them. As we move onto the open road, with a seldom-seen driver, all kinds of other concerns begin to
crowd in: what is the driver’s destination, or better put, what is the writer’s
destination? Should he be concerned that he is being followed—or, conversely,
should he be happy that he’s being followed, should he consider it part of the
natural way of things? Even the handmade scrawl of the sentence suggests a kind
of desperation, or nakedness—which, interestingly, contrasts with the sentence
itself, loaded with auspiciousness, with the ambiguity of the idea of a Reader,
or a Beacon, or an Author, or the mysteriousness of a light that directs
someone from behind. What the filmmaker has taken his cue from is the motion of
the sentence: the way it starts with a pair of long, establishing phrases and
then slowly breaks apart into smaller phrases which carry more symbolic weight
as the sentence progresses.

So: watch it again.

Max Winter is the Managing Editor of Press Play.

Raised in Fear: The Superdynamational Horrors of Ray Harryhausen

You never forget the
first time you fall in love, especially in the movies. My moment came when I was eight years old, at
a Saturday matinee in a cramped multiplex theater. Setting my sights high, the object of my
adoration was Kali, Hindu goddess of Time, Change, and Death; or, rather, a
statue of her, brought to life by the magical powers of Ray Harryhausen, the
special effects wizard who, sadly, passed away this week at the age of 92. His influence on the development of cinema is
incalculable, but in many respects he will be representative of an age that is
likely never to be reborn, a time when special effects were created with the
hands as well as the mind, with clay instead of pixels, with palpable objects rather
than streaming data. By showing us how
malleable cinematic reality could become in the hands of an artist, he
anticipated the wholesale manipulation of the visual field brought off by CGI technicians,
yet the texture, the movement, and the presence of his animated creatures belong to
an entirely different realm from that of the smooth, seamless, and ultimately lifeless
digital beings wandering somnambulistically across today’s screens.

The animated statue of
Kali with whom I first fell in love appears in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) the first Harryhausen film I’d
ever seen—certainly not his best, but filled enough with wonder for anyone with
imagination. The feelings I felt for
Kali, or at least her animated model, were different from those I felt for the
sexy slave girl Morgiana (Caroline Munro), whose I Dream of Jeannie-style costume left little to my boyish
imagination. The love I felt for
Harryhausen’s Kali was pure, a sense of reverence for something beyond me, a
power outside my understanding, a life form fundamentally different from my own,
yet no less alive. Harryhausen’s
animated figures burn with a hard, gem-like flame, a quicker pulse than the one that beats
in the rest of us. Like many of the
animator’s best creations, the statue of Kali moves all of her limbs at the
same time, particularly impressive given the fact that she’s got six arms, each
wielding a scimitar. As befits her
statuesque origins, Kali’s face never moves, but she nevertheless conveys a
distinct personality in her carefully choreographed movements: graceful yet
relentless, cool yet malevolent, hard yet supple, not unlike the goddess on
whom she is based.

Harryhausen’s creations
have an undeniable presence on the screen, often eclipsing the flesh and blood
actors with whom they perform. Yet their
life remains on a different order than that of mere mortals, and in that they
are purely cinematic. The statue of Kali
is set into motion by the evil wizard Koura, played with high camp by the
fourth Doctor Who, Tom Baker. It has
often been said that the magician Prospero from Shakespeare’s The Tempest can be read as a kind of
self-portrait, of the dramatist as maker of magic. Similarly, Baker’s Koura could be seen as a
kind of stand-in for Harryhausen himself, the wizard who brings life to
lifeless things and sets them dancing before our amazed eyes. The remarkable thing about Harryhausen’s
effects is how they never fail to convince us of their unique powers of life,
even while they remain unremittingly artificial, thing-like. Kali’s unmoving face, her claylike texture, her
blocky feet keep her firmly bound to her material origins, yet this only
makes her performance as a living thing all the more beguiling.

As with all of Harryhausen’s
creations, we know Kali is fake, but this enhances rather than diminishes her
power, since we can watch and watch and still never fully understand what makes
her move. There are documentaries that
show stop-motion animators like Harryhausen working at their painstaking craft, so that
we can more or less see how it is done, but like cinema itself, there remains
something essentially magical in what happens between the frames. Film, or at least the analog kind that moves
in frames per second, works through persistence of vision, the overlapping of
impressions left on the eye by a rapid series of photographic stills to form a
seamless illusion of movement. When we
watch Harryhausen’s animation, it is as if we see this process happening before
us, as if his creatures are embodiments of the cinematic process within the
film itself.

Each movement made by Harryhausen’s
creations is made up of countless tiny sub-movements working together to
produce a living whole. This is perhaps
most dramatically demonstrated by the famous scene in which Jason battles seven
fighting skeletons in Jason and the
Argonauts (1963). No matter where
the eye turns, it sees diverse movement: this skeleton raising a sword; that
lifting a shield; this stalking around the scene of battle, looking for an
opening; that recovering after being knocked down. Under closer scrutiny each of these figures
reveals a further host of movements, the raising of the sword involving the
lifting of the upper arm, the extending of the forearm, the extension of the
wrist, the back arching, the thigh bone connected the knee bone, etc. The more we look, the less we perceive this as
constructed by a master-craftsman and his crew: something else is happening
that ultimately evades simple cause and effect.

This “something else”
Harryhausen named “Superdynamation,” which, besides being a wonderfully
appealing branding of his distinct visual style, is also an apt description of
its peculiar appeal. The life he gave
his creatures exists in a kind of hyper-reality, their movements more dynamic
than mere organic motion. Though given a
distinctly 1960s American brand name, Superdynamation has much in common with a
visual effect that is quite ancient, one dubbed the “uncanny” by Freud. The hair-raising frisson of the uncanny is
experienced “when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive
or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one.” One need only mention the idea of a
ventriloquist’s dummy coming to life to convince us that Freud was on to
something here. Doors screeching,
windows rattling, shadows moving: these are all stock elements of gothic terror, but
there is something uniquely creepy about the “too much like” animation
perfected by Harryhausen.

Although
he created a few cute and amiable beings, monsters were Harryhausen’s métier,
and the best are those that are explicitly artificial. After falling in love with Kali I needed to
see more of her sisters, brothers, and others, scanning the TV listings for
late-night showings of Harryhausen’s films. One of my favorite monsters is another statue, in this case of Talos,
the mythical Greek man of bronze, who is set into motion in an early scene of Jason. The sound effects contribute marvelously to the peculiar power of this
brazen being, whose every movement screeches like rusty metal. His brute materiality, his thingness, is,
paradoxically, what makes him a believably living being on the screen, yet it
is also what makes him vulnerable: Jason defeats him by simply unscrewing a
plug on his heel, from which his life-blood relentlessly flows. There is something grotesque yet moving in
Talos’ slow death, like Superdynamation in reverse, motion bringing death
instead of life. It remains for me one
of cinema’s, and Harryhausen’s, great moments.

Although
I will inevitably be accused of technophobic nostalgia, I can’t help but feel
that the possibility of such magical movie moments have passed away, along with
their creator. Younger viewers who have
grown up with CGI don’t seem to have the problem with it that I do. To them the special effects of yesterday
appear “fake,” yet surely the effects of today don’t look any more “real.” I’m not sure that was ever the point. When the poet Rilke stared at an “Archaic Torso
of Apollo,” the message it spoke to him was that he needed to change his life,
to aspire to the superdynamic quality embodied in great art. The question isn’t what is fake or what is
real, the question is what quality of life does it achieve. Ray Harryhausen’s uniquely analog art wasn’t
merely alive, it was in Superdynamotion, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a
life with which digitized special effects will never catch up.

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

VIDEO ESSAY: Wong Kar-Wai’s Lust for Life

VIDEO ESSAY: Wong Kar-Wai: Superimposed Symphony

Wong Kar-Wai, whose long-awaited The Grandmaster opens in August, is not about plot. Wong Kar-wai is about motion and emotion. As my friend Nelson Carvajal’s new video suggests, he’s about the moment within the moment, the eternal in the now. Beautiful neighbors pass in a stairwell and exchange lingering looks, or talk more softly than they need to so that they can be face-to-face. The camera (usually Chris Doyle’s) doesn’t merely record or represent: it scopes out, insinuates, measures and caresses. All is texture. Physical texture. Emotional texture. What it feels like. What it really is. What you dream it is. What you dream it was.

A woman’s swaying hips are sexy, but they’d be sexy anyway, in Wong Kar-Wai’s films or anyone’s. Ditto food: My Blueberry Nights boasts a closeup of melted ice cream on pie so lovingly composed and lit that it amounts to dessert-as-orgasm — and you know that when you’re hungry that’s just what a luscious dessert can feel like, in spirit anyway. But the sexiness, the sheer visceral tingliness, of this artist’s work transcends particular situations. Somehow he makes everything sexy: sweaty huts, cobblestone streets, peeling paint; fear, regret, misery, death. How?

By communicating exuberance at existence. His films may chart specific lusts — for sex, for love, for freedom, for murder — but all those lusts are gathered beneath a poetic umbrella: lust for life.

He’s what I called, in a 2009 Salon series about “The Directors of the Decade,” a “sensualist” filmmaker: “Sensualist directors have a respect for privacy and mystery. They are attuned to tiny fluctuations in mood (the character’s and the scene’s). But they’d rather drink lye than tell you what a character is thinking or feeling – or, God forbid, have a character tell you what he’s thinking or feeling. The point is to inspire associations, realizations, epiphanies — not in the character, although that sometimes happens, but in the moviegoer. You can tell by watching the sensualists’ films, with their startling cuts, lyrical transitions, off-kilter compositions and judicious use of slow motion as emotional italics, that they believe we experience life not as dramatic arcs or plot points or in-the-moment revelations, but as moments that cohere and define themselves in hindsight — as markers that don’t seem like markers when they happen.”–Matt Zoller Seitz

VIDEO ESSAY: Directed by De Palma

It seems that video essayists are emerging every day—and if it
isn’t a new talent crossing our radar, it’s someone whose extraordinary
work we’ve somehow missed. The latter is the case with Joel Bocko, who’s
been making video essays since 2009. It’s remarkable whenever someone
is able to establish a kind of signature with their work in this still
nascent form of online video. In the videos made by Bocko that I’ve
seen, it’s clear to me that he is a weaving artist.

In “Comedy Countdown,” his two part video on Modern Times, Bocko weaves together voiceover
tracks based on insights by three great writers: Otis Ferguson, Roland
Barthes, and Graham Greene. Even more impressive is his video comparing
Brian De Palma‘s Hi Mom!, Carrie and Scarface,
weaving together their respective bloody demises. The contrast between
Carrie and Scarface is especially evocative as feminine yin and
masculine yang: ejaculatory vs. menstrual rage. Bocko’s tastes are eclectic, as evidenced by his video essay on Marco Bellochio’s underseen
“Fists in the Pocket.”

Taken by Bocko’s work, I interviewed him via email
to learn more about how he got interested in making video essays and his
approach to the form.

Kevin B. Lee: Tell me about what you do professionally (to the extent you feel
comfortable doing so). specifically, what is your background in
filmmaking and editing? How did you get to be familiar with the
filmmaking tools and techniques that enabled you to make video essays?

Joel Bocko: I do not work professionally in film (aside from some
fleeting freelance experiences years ago), though I would like to. I
mostly learned about filmmaking and editing in childhood and high
school, first when my father had a Hi-8 home video camera and later when
I was able to use Final Cut Pro in my public high school’s media lab.
In the first instance, I was as fascinated with home movies (seeing my
family on TV) as I was by big-screen films in theater. And I always saw
the two as being linked. I used the Hi-8 technology to make a sort of
video mixtape when I was about 15, hooking up wires from VCR to the
camera and editing together clips of my favorite movies in chronological
order, from The Gold Rush to Schindler’s List, a sort of
cinematic panaroma. But with that technique there were a lot of hiccups.
When I discovered Final Cut and digital editing, the ability to time
something to the frame it was thrilling, a real lightning-bolt moment.

Kevin: How did you become interested in producing video essays?

Joel: The
roots were probably there in those early clip tapes, but the first
self-conscious video essay I recall seeing is one of your own, maybe
around ’07. I loved the idea, which seemed the logical next step after
DVD commentaries and film-clip documentaries. Nonetheless, I kept
putting off doing one of my own. “Directed by De Palma”
was my first video essay, although I didn’t consider it one at the time
(since it didn’t have narration and had a more impressionistic than
analytical vibe), and then it was two years before I created online
video content again. In 2011, I launched a chronological video series
highlighting clips from many of my favorite movies, in 32 different
chapters. It was an extension of that VHS mixtape I made as a kid. It
was followed by another impressionistic video essay on 42nd Street,
but it was not until last fall that I finally made a narrated video
essay. I think it took me so long to turn my excitement into action
because I approach filmmaking and criticism with different mindsets, and
narrated video essays combine both approaches. It’s both right- and
left-brained and thus presents a real challenge, I find.

Kevin: Based on an admittedly small sample size of three works, I sense that
“Interweaving” is a quality that distinguishes at least two of your
works, the Brian De Palma and Chaplin videos. Is this a trait you’d say
is conscious, in terms of the way you think about how to explore films in a video
essay format, or in the way you think about films in general?

Joel: Both. One precedent for the video essays is an
experimental film I made at 21, which freely cut between old home
movies, found-footage (particularly a cartoon adaptation of Wind in the Willows),
and original content shot by myself. It was scored with offbeat pop
music like My Bloody Valentine and Massive Attack, and it followed an
autobiographical theme. So this is how I think not just about video
essays, but filmmaking—and film-watching—in general. It’s a way of
seeing art, and perhaps the world: I love diverse formats and
perspectives, but I’m not a postmodernist, at least in my understanding
of the word, so I try to find some way to tie these divergences
together, to discover their links. I’m fascinated by the infamous
Lumiere/Melies dichotomy and I think great movies contain both
approaches. This goes back to being a little kid, simultaneously
fascinated both by home movies and big-screen blockbusters. When you
find films with something in common, you’re also better able to
highlight what’s different. I do this in written pieces a lot too, for
example using This Sporting Life and Billy Liar to examine a split in the British New Wave around ’63, or comparing Felix Salton’s novel Bambi
to the Disney adaptation, which tells you a lot about both authors.
Bouncing objects or ideas (as in the Chaplin piece) off of one another
sparks more creaitivity and insight, in my experience.

Kevin: How did you get the idea for interweaving three
Brian De Palma films? Was it easy to find the points of intersection
between them?

Joel: The video was created for Tony Dayoub’s Brian De Palma
blogathon in 2009. I knew many people would be covering the films I was
interested in and did not want my contribution to seem redundant. So
for one thing, I wanted to cover several films instead of just one, and I
wanted to take a visual approach. Initially I thought I’d do a
screen-cap visual tribute, and then had the idea of setting screen-caps
to a music/sound collage like a sideshow. Eventually I abandoned the
idea of using only still images (except for the first minute or so), I
guess because De Palma‘s images are so kinetic and visceral they demand movement. Scarface was always my favorite De Palma, even when I wasn’t that keen on him as a director, Hi Mom! was a very recent discovery which led me to value him more as an auteur, and Carrie I
hadn’t actually seen yet when starting the project, but I sensed I’d
like it. Before I watched it, Tony mentioned that the split-screen would
have great visual potential in an image tribute, which may have led me
to the idea of incorporating the other films into the split-screen in
the climax. The points of intersection were turned up while editing the
video rather than being pre-determined—evidence that there are definitely
common themes and motifs running through these movies.

Kevin: There are quite a few inspired
moments of connection created by the montage (sexual shame and violent
sexual expression in both Carrie and Scarface, one very
vaginal/menstrual, the other very phallic/ejaculatory). Were these
connections you had already made going into the making of the video? Did
the process of making the video yield any unexpected discoveries along
the way for you both in De Palma‘s films and in the video essay medium
itself?

Joel: As noted above, the connections were discovered rather
than expected. It’s hard to re-trace the process now, but I remember
that in addition to Tony mentioning the split-screen, Glenn Kenny had a
piece in the blogathon comparing Robert De Niro’s shower monologue in Hi Mom! to what is basically a re-enactment of that scene (visual instead of verbal) in Body Double.
That may have led me back not only to that scene in the earlier film,
which I included in the video, but also the theme of sexual shame or
jealousy. The masculine/feminine aspect arose out of the material, and
the fact that at first I was preoccupied with Carrie before finding a way to bring Scarface
in. Tony arrives at the moment when the sense of insecurity and
vulnerability is at its height—his hypermasculine machismo is both a
counterpoint to Carrie’s initial shyness and also its flip-side; he is
just as insecure and sensitive as she is, but has a different way of
dealing with this—a way (violence) which eventually becomes her way as
well (with the conversation between De Niro and
Salt serving as a kind of bridge between these two gender-coded ways of
dealing with hurt and anger). Most of the specific links, the details
like the stabbing sounds and the gunshots, or the footage of the Hi, Mom home invasion matching the security TVs in Scarface
was discovered in the process of editing. I don’t think you can plan
most of this stuff out, you just keep an open mind and antenna up and
it’s amazing what you’ll find.

What did I discover? Working on this project really solidified for me that De Palma
was not just a flashy surface stylist, as I had once thought—his work
is full of deeply-felt themes and raw visual motifs, even if these
ideas and emotions are hidden by self-conscious film references or a
comic-baroque playfulness. As for the video essay format, and what I
discovered, that’s a
longer answer. I am a bit more conscious about overall structuring than
individual moments, and I had several very strong ideas informing the
video’s creation. One was that I had to build up to the climax, so I
wanted to take my time at first and include several long sequences.
There can be a tendency to want to put your own stamp on something when
“sampling” a film or song, but sometimes it’s best to allow the material
room to breathe and express itself in its own voice—take Carrie
walking down the stairs to her mother or the extraordinary “Be Black,
Baby!” sequence in Hi, Mom! However, at certain points, I really
wanted to mess with the footage, intercut it, and do new things with it,
to make the montage viscerally and kinetically my own, harnessing
De Palma‘s energy in an fresh way. Primarily with the ending, where all
the films kind of converge into one metamovie, all the pent-up sexual
energy finding its outlet in savage violence, against big groups of
people (all three films have a warlike climax). At that point I would
actually look for things to replace or swap out, like how you see Al
Pacino getting shot but hear Piper Laurie getting stabbed. There’s an
indescribable delight when you find two things that aren’t supposed to
go together and they just click. That’s the thrill of montage right
there, in a nutshell.

Kevin: How did you get the idea for interweaving the
words of three writers in exploring the works of Charlie Chaplin? What
was your process in sequencing their words, and in matching them with
footage from Chaplin?

Joel: That idea came very last-minute. I was assigned Modern Times
in the comedy countdown on Wonders in the Dark by Sam Juliano, but the
thing is it isn’t really one of my favorite Chaplins. I’m fascinated by
the themes, and I have a crush on Paulette Goddard, but I connect more
with the comedy and pathos of The Gold Rush and City Lights. Reading essays on Modern Times
(beginning with Roland Barthes’, which a commentator named Shamus
turned me on to), I was more fascinated by their voices than my own and
eventually decided I should roll with that. Jeff Pike and Greg Stevens
volunteered to send me audio clips for Barthes and Otis Ferguson, to
complement my own reading of Graham Greene, literally in the middle of
the night, when I put out a call on my blog about 12 hours before the
video was due. I edited the whole thing that night, by highlighting
certain passages (Ferguson in particular lost a lot of text), linking
them in a call-and-response form so that Barthes discusses the film’s
political outlook and Greene naysays the film’s socialism and then
Barthes makes a subtle distinction between Chaplin’s consciousness and
the film. The clips were chosen because they were interesting, without
knowing where I’d use them, and once they were imported I chose
appropriate moments from my selections. The video track was cut to fit
the soundtrack for the most part, as is often the case (even in the
visually-driven De Palma tribute, there are far more cuts in video than audio, which tends to be laid out continuously; for example, when you “hear” De Niro firing the gun at the end, that’s actually the firehose snapping in Carrie,
whose soundtrack provides the backdrop for most of the video’s climax).
That’s a very documentary approach, which I find works for video essays,
especially narrated ones.

Kevin: When you first made me aware of your work, you
didn’t refer to the DePalma video as a “video essay” because it didn’t
feature narration. Do you feel that narration is an essential feature of
the video essay? Or more broadly speaking, how would you define what a
video essay is and is not? What does it need to accomplish?

Joel: Good point. I think of video essays as being more akin to
film criticism than filmmaking, which means—to me—that they arise more
out of an analytical, intellectual process than an imaginative, impulsive
urge, although the best will balance both. Since the De Palma
video was created more in the way I’d create an experimental film, it
didn’t seem like a video essay to me at the time. When I finally created
narrated video essays it was really tricky to find my way around the
form. I tried to edit visuals first and then add narration but it just
didn’t work. So it’s a different game. Still, I think maybe these are
just two different forms of video essay—the De Palma
piece definitely has a point to make, an analysis to apply, it just
does so through juxtaposition rather than verbal articulation. I’d like
to experiment with the balance of this in future pieces; say, a video
essay that’s 10% non-narrated/visual, 90%narrated/analytical, or vice
versa, or 40/60, 25/75, whatever. I do think even the most heavily
analytical video essays need to give the visual track space to breathe;
it can’t just be a lecture unfolding simultaneously with film footage
playing as “background.” Which seems like a trap the form could fall
into, although
I haven’t seen enough yet to know if it’s a common one.

Kevin: How has working with these video essays changed
your relationship with movies? Has it sparked new paths of exploration
and interest for you as a cinephile?

Joel: Yes and no. On
the one hand, they tend to articulate pre-existing attitudes and
interests rather than shape new ones; in fact, if anything, they’ve returned
me to a more hands-on, formally-conscious, intuitive approach to film
appreciation which too much analytical writing can distance me from. On
the other hand, they have had a big impact on myself as a filmmaker
rather than a cinephile; after creating my first narrated video essays, I
created a short film which was, in a sense, a video essay in reverse,
applying a fictional narration to nonfiction material (in this case,
real snapshots and home movies) rather than vice-versa as is the case
with most video essays. How this will impact my future films is hard to
say, but I’ve always known that making video essays would be a step
toward making my own movies – which is maybe one reason I nervously
procrastinated so long before taking the plunge. But there’s no turning
back. I think the future of movies, both in terms of cinephilia and
filmmaking, is on the internet. One way or another video essays will be
at the center of that nexus. There’s still a lot to explore—I’ve only
begun to watch the many videos that are out there—and it’s a very
exciting time; death of cinema, maybe, but also a radical rebirth.

Joel Bocko is a 29-year-old writer and filmmaker living in Pasadena, CA.
He has been blogging for five years at Lost in the Movies,
recently completed the short film “Class of 2002”, and is working on a
feature screenplay to be shot on a shoestring (or credit card) later
this year.

Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, critic and video essayist. Follow him on Twitter.

“The First, The Last, My Everything” : Tilda Swinton Dancing to Barry White at EbertFest 2013

Tilda Swinton Dancing to Barry White at EbertFest 2013

Ladies and gentlemen, as far as I’m concerned, this was the emotional highlight of EbertFest 2013: Tilda Swinton, at the festival to represent her movie Julia, joined Roger Ebert’s widow Chaz onstage before a screening of Blancanieves to do a dance in honor of Roger. The song was Barry White’s “The First, The Last, My Everything.” Swinton led a conga line of moviegoers throughout the historic Virginia Theater. Awesomeness redefined. — Matt Zoller Seitz

BADLANDS: Terrence Malick’s “early, funny film”

“You know, when we showed [Badlands] at the New York Film
Festival—for the very first time—you could just hear a pin drop. No one
laughed. Now when Badlands is
screened, people laugh because . . . I guess our society has changed. But then, I
expected people to laugh at Badlands,
but when they didn’t it was very unnerving. Things were different then.”—Sissy
Spacek in the featurette documentary Making
Badlands

Often,
Terrence Malick’s cinema is pigeonholed as one of artful, beguiling, and obtuse
solemnity, and his most recent film To
The Wonder will probably do little to change that. But Malick’s 1973 debut Badlands is, thus far, the only film in his oeuvre in which humor is a significant component. Strange, since it’s
a lover-on-the-lam movie about a charming, sociopathic serial killer (Kit, as
played by Martin Sheen) and an affectless, somewhat delusional teenage girl
(Holly, as played by Sissy Spacek) that isn’t exactly an ultraviolent outré
black comedy like Man Bites Dog (1992)
or American Psycho (2000). But low-key,
dry, and absurd humor is a noticeable and well-woven element of Badlands which helps it play well with
contemporary audiences. If it isn’t a black comedy, then it is a singular and
timeless art-house crime drama infused with greyish-brownish comedy.

Malick’s
films usually have a contrapuntal nature, embodied by images,
intrinsically serious, that enhances the films’ themes: the sheer wonder of
the world contrasted with terror, fear and destruction, or a human drama dwarfed by the seeming indifference of nature. These characteristics are
evident in Badlands, but with humor
in the mix, much of which comes from Kit’s unusual behavior and Holly’s voiceover
narration. To those familiar with Malick’s other films but not with Badlands, the idea of a Malick film
being funny might seem odd. But considering that humor
generally depends on contrast or contradiction, to me it’s surprising
that Malick has yet to make another partly or completely comedic film. (Considering that Malick is reportedly a big fan of Zoolander, it seems that he still likes to laugh, even if the
majority of his directorial work doesn’t indicate that.)

*******

In Badlands, Kit says odd, tangential things like “I’ll give you a
dollar if you eat this collie” to a coworker when he finds a dead dog. He also
has a capricious collecting habit; for instance, after he deflowers Holly in
the outdoors, he carries a souvenir rock to commemorate the event, but, after
observing its heaviness, he throws it away and gets a smaller stone. And
throughout the movie Kit alternates between James Dean coolness and erratic
compulsion, making him charismatic and unnerving in equal amounts. “It
takes all types,” Kit often says, and his type is the sometime-murderous,
strangely comical Manic Pixie Dream Boy who does things like preening his hair
in the car’s rearview mirror while being pursued by law enforcers. He’s a
sociopath who can make you laugh.

In the
film, Holly’s toneless, diary-esque voiceover narration augments the
story and provides insight into the minds of Kit and Holly, but there are also a
number of moments in the narration that are humorous. At one point, while Kit is trying to
catch fish in a river as Holly looks on, she narrates the scene like so: “We
had our bad moments, like any couple. Kit accused me of only being along for
the ride, while at times I wished he’d fall in the river and drown so I could
watch.” At another point, as Kit and Holly’s stolen getaway car drives across a
barren landscape, Holly narrates, ““Kit told me to enjoy the scenery and I
did.” There is a deft quality to these remarks, and they’re only made funnier
by Spacek’s naïve and deadpan delivery. The comments also lend pathos and likeability
to Holly, a character who could have easily become an irredeemable, underdeveloped
cypher in the hands of a less imaginative writer and director.

Another comical aspect of Badlands is its ironic plot. For
instance, after Kit murders Holly’s father (Warren Oates) and immolates his
body along with Holly’s home, do Kit and Holly hideout in a cabin or hotel room,
or a crony’s place, like wanted criminals have done in so many crime movies?
No—they go off and live a “domesticated,” Swiss
Family Robinson existence in the woods. And later, when Kit flees from the
authorities alone in his car, does he run for long? Nope—he stops, builds a
preemptive monument to his surrender by piling rocks on the side of the road and
gives himself over to the cops, peacefully. Then Kit manages to charm his
captors and holds court amongst law enforcers and armed soldiers in an airport
hangar before being taken to jail. And if the story’s resolution isn’t quite a
social commentary, it is an ironic acknowledgement of a truth: frequently,
sociopathic individuals or characters become celebrated standouts in our culture.
(Don Draper, anyone?)

*******

Distinguishable filmmakers tend
to have stylistic quirks earlier in their career that go missing from
their later works. Along with Badlands,
the screenplays that Malick wrote or co-wrote for Pocket Money (1972), Deadhead
Miles (1973), and The Gravy Train
(1974, aka The Dion Brothers) show
that he was once a filmmaker who integrated a type of comedy into his work similar to the humor of writers Flannery
O’Connor or Walker Percy. Also,
the early to mid 70s was a period in American cinema in which many
up-and-coming filmmakers were making idiosyncratic, off-the-wall movies influenced by the European Art Cinema of the 60s as well as countercultural
tastes and sensibilities. The artistic inclinations of Malick’s younger self
seem to have been amenable to that trend. Consequently, Badlands is symptomatic of the New Hollywood zeitgeist.

Malick must follow his muse, which
probably involves making more films that are grand, serious and abstract, but I
can’t help but wonder what it would be like if he made something akin to Badlands that generated laughs from
viewers while being enigmatic and impressionistic, and maybe with someone like
Bill Murray. To echo Oscar Wilde, life is too important to be taken so seriously,
and I hope that a talented filmmaker like Malick who is interested in the
bigger questions will once again recognize that sentiment in one of his movies.
Or, he could at least make a cameo in Zoolander
2 like he made a cameo in Badlands.

Holding
degrees in Film and Digital Media studies and Moving Image Archive
Studies, Lincoln Flynn lives in Los Angeles and writes about film on a sporadic
basis at http://invisibleworkfilmwritings.tumblr.com. His Twitter handle is @Lincoln_Flynn.

Nobody Gets Out of Life Alive: THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE

“Nobody gets out of life alive. The world’s so full of
crap a man’s going to get into it sooner or later, whether he’s careful or
not.”–Hud

Originally an advertisement for professional bloodletting
services, the red stripes of barber poles still remain today, despite the fact
that hair is the only thing modern barbers remove from their clients’ bodies.
The Man Who Wasn’t There begins with a languorous opening shot of a spinning
barber’s pole. Since the film is a Coen brothers neo-noir, it’s safe
to assume there will be a different kind of bloodletting before the film
is over.

The year is 1949, and the barber we are about to meet is Ed
Crane, played with a perfectly calibrated laconic calm by Billy Bob Thornton.
He is an existentialist anti-hero, as if Bartleby the Scrivener had chosen an
alternate career path and became tragically enmeshed in a blackmailing scheme
gone wrong.

Ed is an absence punched into the fabric of the film, a
black hole around which it orbits. His primary response to the world is one of
violent underreaction. He is inert with passivity, an American buddha, beatific
with a placid glow of naivete and repression. He’s like an unspoken thought.
This film chronicles his unfortunate late-blooming experiments with taking
action and his resulting demise. The process of his destruction commences the
moment he goes from being an unexpressed thought to an utterance, the moment he enters the world through
activity and decision. And his destruction is also the vehicle by which he
realizes himself.

In the noir cosmos, it is normal for a timid character to be
lured out of a safe but unsatisfying zone of normalcy by mirages of wealth and romance. This is what happens to Ed when
he gets suckered into a swindle that involves becoming a silent partner in a dry
cleaning business. He acquires the money for this by blackmailing his wife’s
boss, with whom she is having an affair. The plan appears to have a perfect
symmetry. He would seem to be able to enter his dream of wealth while getting
revenge against his rival with a single action. He wants to reach goals he has
unthinkingly and hastily stumbled upon in a manner that involves little to no
effort. We know it is not going to end well.

Like many of the Coen brothers’ characters, at no point does
Ed gain an understanding of how he works. The one aspect of his revolt against
his life is his inappropriate attachment to the gamine Birdy, played with a
compelling subdued clarity by Scarlett Johansson. Their
relation is one of genuine friendship, but Ed himself has no idea that his
intentions are also amorous.

This is because he can’t see himself. No learning curve is
possible in this world, only the transformation of circumstances. The rules of
the film’s universe dictate that the ultimate sacrifice must be paid for the
crime of wanting to be a dry cleaner. He mutely picks his moment to enter the
stream of phenomena from the suspended animation of seemingly prosperous, happy
post-WWII America, and he is briskly swept away in the acrid waters of brutal
existential comedy. It isn’t that he is dispatched following a
naively lazy attempt to escape from his life, but that his existence doesn’t
begin until the elaborate process of his undoing has commenced.

Some people find it disturbing that in Coen brothers films,
the characters don’t often have clear realistic referents and appear at first
glance to be stereotypes, playthings created only to be sadistically ground
up in the gears of a machine in which unfortunate patterns of human behavior, bad
decisions, bad luck, and stupidity converge to mete out a punishment so
arbitrary and so astronomically out of proportion to the crime that one can
only laugh. I’ve never understood this objection. Placing doltish,
unrealistically drawn, powerless
characters in an uncertain, comically brutal universe is what the Coen brothers
do best, and it’s what makes their films so entertaining, thought provoking,
and appealing.

The fact that the brothers were faculty brats who went
respectively to NYU and Princeton and sometimes make cartoonish movies about
dim-witted people has led some to the misguided conclusion that they are
condescending to their characters. Dave Kehr, writing about Raising Arizona, opined that “the distinction between satire and sincerity doesn`t mean much to the
Coen brothers, who treat everything that passes before their camera with
the same smarmy condescension…. The elaborate, self-conscious stylistics serve only to proclaim how much
more sophisticated the Coens are than the bumpkins they have chosen to
populate their movie. At the same time, the empty technique invites the
audience to share the Coens` sense of superiority….” Coming to this conclusion requires ignoring the glaringly burlesque fable-like atmosphere that permeates their
films, and falling into the trap of looking in vain for realistic characters
and settings to emotionally identify with, when the films are working with
totally different dynamics and materials. The Coen brothers clearly have a real
affection for their stylistically rendered characters, and this is reinforced by
the degree to which other people love these characters as well. The Coens
create the characters not to be mocked, but to be destroyed with extreme prejudice. The brothers
seem to be poking fun at creations they love. In the process of
humiliating, damaging and annihilating these figures, they render them in an extremely vivid
and often hilarious way.

Though today the Coens are widely critically lauded and
their films are usually discussed in a way that comprehends the spirit in which
they were meant, their work is still polarizing.
It seems that gleefully subverting conventions never seems to lose its power to
piss people off. Some critics found their first films grating and insincere,
especially critics at the more genteel publications which might not have been
ready for the Coen dynamic, which usually incorporates slapstick, noir, brutal
violence, and wry humor into an entertaining but disorienting mélange. Even the
inordinately perspicacious Pauline Kael held up the first two Coen films beside a template of expectations which rendered them somewhat
illegible to her. On Blood Simple: “[T]he reason the camera whoop-de-do is so noticeable is that there’s
nothing else going on. The movie doesn’t even seem meant to have any
rhythmic flow; the Coens just want us to respond to a bunch of ‘touches’
on routine themes. (These art touches are their jokes.) Blood Simple
comes on as self-mocking, but it has no self to mock.” Critics might be able to accept stylized
wry brutality and black humor, but to be accepted it must be served with a large
side order of transcendence, and that is a dish that is not usually available
on the Coen menu.

When filmmakers don’t
leave clear markers as to how sincere or sarcastic they are, critical anxiety is generated, and this can cause us to miss how much obvious joy is being taken in playing with genres and dynamics.
This has sometimes resulted in a pattern of priggish critical harrumphing that
continues in some quarters even to this day. Rather than letting the sincere
and sarcastic elements work together in a thought-provoking manner as a kind of
essay, the ambiguity is sometimes mistaken for ridicule. Some critics have assumed
that the tradition of realistically drawn, emotionally relatable characters and
settings is being smugly dismissed. After all, it’s the critic’s job to provide
a grading system to determine how well filmmakers provide this traditional
service.

The Man Who Wasn’t There might prove off-putting if
approached with this conventional set of expectations. But it’s funny,
thought-provoking, and mesmerizing if you let its themes and questions, and its
gorgeous, silky black-and-white cinematography work more in the spirit in which
they seem to have been created: as a wry, poetic thought experiment within a
technically impressive formal genre structure. The Man Who Wasn’t There offers
the stability of being one genre rather than several at the same time, but it
doesn’t offer a stable railing of seeming emotional truth. It works by keeping
the viewer continually off balance, so the only stability is to be found by
continuing to ask questions.

The Coen brothers’ warmer, more wildly entertaining films
like Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, and Fargo do provide opportunities for
the traditional dynamic of emotional identification. But even their sweetest
and most uproarious films also contain their trademark opposite pole of
punishing nastiness. Allowing these contradictory polarities to work
simultaneously to some degree is a large part of what gives their films a
unique sense of tension and unpredictability.

There are many things that critics agree the Coens do well,
including themes of friendship, theatrically arresting violence,
humor, suspense, elaborately complex, perfectly choreographed set
pieces, perfectionist music editing and overall technical panache. Not least
among the things they’re known for is unforgettable dialogue, often done with
in a comically inappropriate literary style. They’re fond of voiceovers,
usually from unreliable narrators such as H.I. in Raising Arizona. Their films
use a contrast between the narrators’ blinkered perspective and the
considerably broader perspective accorded to the camera. The voiceovers are
dramatic monologues competing with the images rather than explaining them. Ed’s
voiceover in The Man Who Wasn’t There is eventually revealed to be a men’s
magazine article about his journey to the electric chair. It is, literally, an essay.

The movie begins with Ed talking about how little he talks.
“I just cut the hair.” Disparities between subjective narratives and
the gaps of knowledge between characters fuel some of the tensest scenes of
conversation in the film, as when Ed is first speaking to the menacing Big Dave Brewster,
played by James
Gandolfini, with his trademark Tony Soprano blend of menace and
affability. We are not sure how much Big Dave knows or what he’s capable of, as
he is speaking to Ed as though in confidence about some other blackmailer. He
slowly reveals how much he does know, which is everything, and then asks him in
mounting rage, “What kind of man are you?” before attempting to beat
him to death. Ed semi-accidentally kills him in self-defense with a lucky jab
of Big Dave’s cigar cutting knife straight into the jugular. The shot of Ed
being strangled by Big Dave is done from outside the room, behind glass he is
being pressed against. The glass, our view of the scene, cracks joltingly during the struggle, and
this marks the first start of the machine of Ed’s fate. The scene
ends with the ticking of a clock.

Not all the verbal narratives in the film are unreliable.
The Coens are not nihilists. Several pieces of information are framed as if they were
objectively the case. The first comes from Ed’s lawyer’s private detective, who
reveals that Big Joe was faking his war hero resume. He turns out to have been
just a bar room brawler with an anger management problem. The other comes from
the piano tutor Ed contacts to evaluate Birdy’s level of talent, and whose evaluation is unusually
frank. Neither piece of truthful information is particularly important in the
film.

The film’s basic dynamic involves simple reversal of the passive
and the active. Instead of shaving his wife’s legs for her and cutting other
people’s hair, at the end of the movie Ed is the one being shaved, with
orderlies scraping away the hair on his leg to ensure a good contact for the electric chair. He is not even being
executed for any crime he committed, but he doesn’t mind. He’s in the driver’s
seat.

Drew Gardner’s books include Chomp Away (Combo, 2010), and Petroleum
Hat (Roof Books, 2005). He tweets at @chompaway and lives in New York
City.

Are Animated Gifs a Type of Cinema?

Well, are they? I’m
inclined to argue that they are. Indeed, I’ve already done so, in two posts I
wrote a couple years ago elsewhere: “How Many Cinemas Are There?” and “Why Do You Need So Many Cinemas?” There, inspired
by comics scholar Scott McCloud’s ultra-lean definition of comics (“sequential
art”), I proposed that cinema be thought of simply as “moving images.” Making
that mental leap expands the cinema to include not just feature-length films
and shorts, but also television shows, music videos, YouTube videos, video
games, flash animations—and animated gifs. (I even argued that cinema should
include certain “non-electronic” forms, such as flip books, magic lanterns, and
shadow puppetry.) I won’t rehash that whole argument here; instead, I want to
look solely at animated gifs. Are they cinema?

Admittedly,
I don’t know anyone who is arguing that they aren’t. But I also don’t
know anyone (with one exception) who’s arguing that they are. Indeed, no
one seems overly concerned with the matter. But I think it makes sense to
examine the relationship between animated gifs and other forms of cinema, as
well as to try describing the format’s unique cinematic aesthetic. Here are a
dozen reasons why.

1.
They’re often taken from cinema, as people extract smaller moments from longer
films. Here’s a famous example:

This
gif basically consists of two shots, roughly two-and-a-half seconds, taken from
Star Trek: First Contact (1996).

2.
If that’s all animated gifs were, then they would be truly derivative
works—very short video clips (with a reduced color palette). But animated gifs
can be used to create new works, by combining moments from different films. For
instance, you might often see those two shots in the Picard gif followed by a third:

Or:

These
examples edge us closer to the world of video art, or earlier experimental
films that derived their effects from juxtaposing footage from different films.
These Picard gifs remind me of the moment in Bruce Conner’s classic 1958
film A MOVIE where the submarine captain looks
through the periscope (4:17–4:19):

.
. . to spy a pin-up model reclining on a bed (4:19–4:24):

(You can watch A
MOVIE here, which is where I took these screen captures from.)

Both
A MOVIE and these animated gifs employ some common cinematic principles.
The cuts create an eyeline match, which make it appear as though the
characters are looking at one another, and obey the 180-degree
rule (meaning that if you draw a straight line between their eyes,
our perspective stays to one side of it). (Incidentally, the juxtaposition in A
MOVIE works better than the above images might suggest, because right
before the cut, the submarine captain is shown twisting the periscope from left
to right.)

I’ve
seen a different version of the Picard vs. Chunk gif:

.
. . and I’d argue that it doesn’t work as well as the first one we considered:

.
. . which better matches the eyelines, and obeys the 180-degree rule.

This
suggests that animated gifs possess an aesthetic similar to cinema’s.

3.
Besides combining shots taken from different films, animated gifs can also
juxtapose different types of cinema, such as live-action and animation:

.
. . or even live action and video games:

This
second example suggests that we might also consider video games a type of
cinema—though we need not get into that now.

4.
Gifs can also composite different types of footage within the same image.
Here’s a particularly notorious one that I’ve written about at the lit blog HTMLGIANT:

Here
we have two different pieces of television footage combined in a single image.
And leaving aside the (deliberately offensive) content, we can see another
potential for the form. Composite editing is by no means unique to gifs;
Georges Méliès discovered double exposures soon after filmmaking was
invented—see for instance Un homme de têtes, aka The Four Troublesome
Heads (1898), viewable here. But gifs, being a natively digital format,
might more easily encourage such recombination. (Méliès is their milieu?)

The
Picard vs. Chunk gif above, in fact, contains composite editing. Here’s a screenshot
taken from the scene in The Goonies (1985) where Chunk originally
performed the Truffle Shuffle:

Whoever
made the gif removed Chunk from that setting, and placed him front of another.
I’ve spent more time than I care to admit scrutinizing scenes in The Goonies
and First Contact, and I still can’t tell where that second background
hails from. Here’s a capture of the shot in First Contact that follows
the close-up of Picard firing:

(Of
course the footage behind Chunk might not even have come from First Contact,
but some third film.)

Still
more work has been done on this gif. The bullet tracer effects have been added.
And we can now see why Chunk is facing right in that one gif—that’s the way he
was facing in the original shot. This suggests that the right-facing gif came
first, after which someone changed it by turning Chunk to face in the opposite
direction. (Since anyone who can view a gif can, in theory, also edit it, gifs
are arguably a wholly populist form of cinema.)

Look
again at the first Picard gif, at the very top of this article, and compare it
to the others. You’ll see that its first shot is different: it’s been extended
by rolling the footage backward, then forward. (In First Contact, Picard
moves only forward in that shot.) If we wanted to, we could now take that
extended footage of Picard and paste it into the left-facing Chunk gif.

5.
Another way that gifs differ from their sources is that they often reframe
shots—which is part of why it’s difficult to determine where Chunk is standing.
The shot has been whittled down to focus on just him. The shots of Picard
firing have also been narrowed; compare the gif with these screenshots:

And:

Because
animated gifs are lower resolution than film—not to mention often postage-stamp
sized—they benefit from focusing the viewer’s attention on a single central
image. Picard + Tommy gun = all that’s really needed.

This
might suggest that gifs have a different aesthetic than filmmaking, but I’d
argue it’s more a matter of desired effect. In First Contact, the focus
of the shots is certainly Picard’s attack on his Borg foes, but the scene
occurs within a richer environment. The scene takes place roughly an hour into
a film in which most of the action is set aboard the Enterprise, which is under
siege from the Borg. Picard lures two of those aliens onto the ship’s holodeck,
trapping them in a simulation of a hard-boiled detective novel. The movie needs
to portray a convincing-enough environment in order to keep its audience
immersed in the somewhat outlandish fantasy. Along the same lines, when
watching The Goonies, it’s important that viewers understand that Chunk
does the Truffle Shuffle outside a house in Astoria, Oregon.

But
the animated gifs we’ve been looking at aren’t concerned with that kind of
world-building, being much more concentrated on a narrower and more immediate
effect. Their makers probably wanted us to recognize the source material (they
took footage from very well-known films), but the focus is relocated to the
comic juxtapositions. Cutting out most of the background helps the viewer to
get the joke. Viewed in this light, I’m surprised the Picard/Chunk gif’s
original author bothered editing Chunk into a matching background. The other
gifs work fine without going to that degree of trouble. (Indeed, you might
argue that the shift in setting heightens the joke.

6.
Here we have a hint of a way in which gifs possess a different aesthetic than
feature-length movies, or at least operate differently given similar concerns.
Someone makes a gif where Picard seems to be shooting Chunk. Then someone makes
one where Picard seems to be shooting Doc Brown. What’s next? Well, someone
could make yet another gif where Picard seems to be shooting another popular
1980s movie character—but aren’t returns already starting to diminish? To keep
the joke alive, we need something unexpected. So someone makes a gif
where Picard seems to be shooting at a Tiny Tunes character. Or at the
ducks in Duck Hunt.

I
haven’t seen it myself, but I imagine someone’s made a gif where Picard appears
to be firing at some documentary footage—video taken from a real-life shooting.
Or even footage of the Twin Towers collapsing.

Makers
of full-length movies definitely have to work to one-up each other. But that
cycle might be accelerated in the world of gifs, where the impact is much more
immediate.

7.
Along these lines, we can see that animated gifs are often greatly concerned
with emphasis, by:

Isolating a particular moment;
Focusing on a single element within the shot;
Creating a startling juxtaposition (through either
composite or montage editing).

Gifs
also tend to emphasize movement. When I told a friend that I was writing this
article, she argued that “animated gif” was redundant, because the only gifs
people care about are animated ones. I nonetheless decided to keep “animated”
because it is possible to make static gifs, and I don’t want to argue that
static gifs are cinema. (Cinema is moving images.)

But
my friend was right. Who wants to see a static gif? In fact, it seems to me
that the best gifs often involve a flurry of motion, or remain static
until a crucial moment, which usually comes at the end of the loop:

And:

Gifs
select footage and emphasize it. They focus attention.

8.
That’s not all that animated gifs can do, however. Some are longer, and as such
closely resemble short films. For instance, here’s an animation that traces the development of the NYC
subway system:

Once
again, I’m reminded of an existing film: Ray and Charles Eames short movie Atlas
(1976), which presents “A Sketch of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.” (You can watch it
here.)

To
be sure, these are different works. The NYC subway gif lacks sound (music,
voice-over narration). But the presence of sound isn’t essential for cinema.
(The five-minute-long Eames film presents its animation twice, and the second
time it drops the narration.)

Animated
gifs arguably benefit from their silence, which becomes another way to focus
attention on visuals themselves.

9.
We’re gradually constructing a case that the value of gifs stems from their
poverty of resources—from the limitations inherent in the format. Along these
lines, gifs possess unique cinematic value due to their brevity.

The
earliest films, made by the Lumiere Bros. and Thomas Edison, usually ran at
least thirty seconds long. Since then, the movies have mostly gotten longer.
Now animated gifs are exploring another side of cinema—movies that run under
thirty seconds, and often under five. If they are cinema, then they rank among
the shortest movies ever made.

10.
Gifs also explore the opposite end of the spectrum: infinity.

While
some gifs present what amounts to a scene, others employ the form’s looping
quality to create an endless ongoing video. Here’s a famous example, taken from
a
mid-90s internet meme:

The
gif version of this video forgoes the original meme’s accompanying music
(“Ooogachaka, ooga, ooga . . . “). But its dancing baby will dance forever

11.
All of this suggests that animated gifs have their own cinematic purpose. Hence
their effectiveness as erotic artworks: gif makers can distill crucial moments
from larger pornographic films, enabling people to watch them on repeat.

In
her recent Salon article, “Better Than Actual Porn!“, Tracy Clark-Flory
ponders whether pornographic animated gifs are more like short videos or longer
photographs. I’d argue that they exist on a spectrum between those two forms,
capable of moving more toward one side or the other. The above Picard gifs are
more like short videos. But the NYC subway gif and the dancing baby gif are
arguably more like enhanced photos. (The subway gif is like an enhanced
diagram.)

The
important point, however, is that animated gifs are novel—similar to, but not
exactly the same as movies as we’ve known them. They are, in other words, a new
form of cinema. (Clark-Flory comes to something of the same conclusion when she
writes that gifs are becoming an alternative form of pornography, but aren’t
replacing videos or photographs.)

12.
Cinematic viewing habits are changing: more and more movies are being watched
online. Folks still go to the cinema, of course, and they still rent DVDs. But
they also watch movies on their cell phones and laptops, which is where
animated gifs thrive. In this way they might be modern-day versions of the Kinetoscope
or Mutoscope:
a private form of cinema limited to a particular type of device (although it
probably won’t be long before gifs start popping up on electronic billboards).
This is yet another way in which gifs resemble the movies as we known them, and
yet diverge, providing a new incarnation of the familiar.

In
summary, animated gifs partake in the broader aesthetic of cinema, even as they
use their formal limitations to craft effects that we experience in
non-traditional film environments. I have no doubt that they will eventually
come to be regarded a unique form of movie-making, just as gallery-bound video
art eventually was, and that certain gifs will be singled out for their
aesthetic and historical import. Already I’d claim that there’s value in
preserving and teaching some of them, such as Picard vs. Chunk and the
Fresh Prince/9-11 one . . .

And
it probably also won’t be long before feature-length movies start borrowing
effects from gifs, the same way that the recent spate of “found footage” films—Paranormal Activity (2007), [Rec]
(2007), Cloverfield (2008), Chronicle (2012)—have drawn key
aspects of their aesthetic from YouTube. And while writing this I encountered
the only other argument I know of that animated gifs are a type of cinema: Twohundredfiftysixcolors, Eric
Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus’s feature-length compilation of 3000 gifs,
scheduled to screen on 18 April at
Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center. (I’m planning to attend.)

Your
thoughts on all of this?

A.D Jameson is the author
of the prose collection Amazing
Adult Fantasy (Mutable Sound, 2011), in
which he tries to come to terms with having been raised on ’80s pop culture, and the novel
Giant
Slugs (Lawrence
and Gibson, 2011), an absurdist retelling of the Epic of
Gilgamesh. He’s taught
classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lake Forest College,
DePaul University, Facets Multimedia, and StoryStudio Chicago. He’s also the
nonfiction / reviews editor of the online journal Requited. He recently
started the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. In his spare
time, he contributes to the group blogs Big
Other and HTMLGIANT. Follow him on Twitter at @adjameson.

Raised in Fear: The Self-Help Horror of Todd Haynes’ SAFE

Todd Haynes works well in a variety of genres, but his most distinctive films are those that were once described as “women’s pictures,” before the inane phrase “chick flick” gained currency. Widely recognized for his reverent tributes to the classic women’s picture, like Far From Heaven, and most recently his five-part HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, Haynes has also extended the possibilities of the genre by combining melodrama with horror. In Safe (1995), Haynes crafted an entirely unique take on the women’s picture that is also a scathing satire set in an imaginary 1980s California haunted by self-help gurus, deep ecologists, and toxic chemicals.

For all its originality, the film’s narrative owes much to the made-for-TV movies that once permeated the airwaves, films like The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, The Best Little Girl in the World, and Brian’s Song that have been called “disease-of-the-week” movies for their morbid fascination with newsworthy illnesses. What makes Haynes’ use of the genre so effective is its constantly shifting narrative perspective and tone: as viewers we feel encouraged to laugh at the privileged San Fernando Valley characters and their “white people’s problems” one minute, fear for their health and sanity the next, and finally identify with their plights, however absurd they might appear. The woman at the center of this women’s picture is the appropriately named Carol White, played impeccably by Julianne Moore in her first starring role. Barely articulate, Carol is trapped in a world in which men tell all the stories, and she finds herself mercilessly shifted from one interpretation of her problems to the next.

I know the kind of narratives that Carol White is fed, having grown up in a house littered with self-help books. Though my family was relatively well off, had many friends, had reasonably happy and healthy kids, and anticipated a seemingly secure future, an examination of our bookshelves would have suggested otherwise. I’m Okay—You’re Okay, Games People Play, Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am?, When I Say No I Feel Guilty, and Love, by Leo Buscaglia, among others, were my mother’s daily reading. Sadly, after years of such fare, nobody in our family was “okay,” there were a lot of games played, no one told anyone else who they were, people said no frequently and apparently felt guilty about it, and there was relatively little love, at least of the touchy-feely bear-hug variety preached by Buscaglia. For the latter, however, I am actually grateful, since I always saw the games we played as another kind of love, however dysfunctional. After a while the self-help books became a family in-joke, and we laughed at the gap between their prescribed versions of happiness and the peculiar version our family had somehow created, despite all of the advice we’d been given.

What is so sinister about self-help narratives is the way they hold up a single answer to complex problems, a singularity belied by the multitude of books offering differing, even contradictory solutions. This is the plight of Carol White, who begins to suffer from what appears to be an allergic reaction to the toxins in her environment. A visit to the hair salon results in a nosebleed from the chemicals in her perm; a mid-afternoon commute sets off a coughing fit from automobile exhaust; a visit to the dry-cleaners puts her in the hospital. At one point an educational video tells her that she is suffering from the vaguely-defined “environmental illness: that means that, for reasons not yet known to us, certain people’s natural tolerance to everyday substances is breaking down, usually as a result of some kind of chemical exposure.” Later she reads a flier that describes the disorder in more apocalyptic terms: “Are you allergic to the 20th century?”

Carol addresses her respiratory problems and chronic fatigue with a variety of fad diets and treatments until discovering “Wrenwood,” a retreat from the world’s illnesses run by HIV-positive self-help guru Peter Dunning. Though set in a bucolic desert valley compound ostensibly designed to help environmental illness sufferers reduce their “load” of twentieth-century toxins, Wrenwood’s residents are, in fact, overloaded with a variety of conflicting therapeutic narratives that cause Carol to unravel during her alleged healing process. Although many at Wrenwood tell stories of becoming sick from exposure to chemicals and unsafe environments, Dunning’s therapy ultimately shifts its focus from environmental to personal causes. In one disturbingly calm scene where he subtly badgers a recalcitrant patient to say what brought on her illness, he retorts: “The only person who can make you get sick is you, right? Whatever the sickness, if our immune system is damaged, it’s because we have allowed it to be.”

Like most of the explanations given by the film’s various experts, this is perhaps true, but only partially. It might explain Carol’s illness, or it might not: maybe she is only suffering from an exaggerated sensitivity to her surroundings as a result of the boredom of her privileged existence, or maybe she does have a real physical reaction to a genuinely toxic environment. The ambiguous pathology of her illness is brilliantly encapsulated in the striking visual symbol of a black couch delivered by mistake in place of the teal one Carol ordered. After a morning at the gym, she returns to her immaculate home. The living room is shot with a wide, deep focus, similar to the interior shots of Kubrick’s The Shining. Recessed lighting lends a chilly, bluish light to the scene, a visual cold enhanced by the furniture’s rigidly symmetrical arrangement. After a phone conversation in which she describes each member of the family as being “fine,” the camera draws back slowly, creating suspense for the unveiling of what we can’t yet see lurking outside the frame. As Carol turns to the left she utters a horrified “Oh my god,” her gaze transfixed as the camera cuts to reveal an enormous black sectional couch, like an interior decorator’s version of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. For the privileged Carol White, this is as much an existential crisis as it is an aesthetic one, to such an extent that later in the film Carol claims to fellow sufferers of environmental illness that her “totally toxic” couch was one of the triggers of her own breakdown.

Throughout the film the nature of that breakdown remains ambiguous, but there is no shortage of narratives to fill that diagnostic void. Safe resembles other horror films focused on female protagonists, such as Rosemary’s Baby and the vastly-underrated Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, which dramatize the isolation that results when real terrors are written off as merely “women’s problems” by arrogantly authoritative men. In a conversation between Carol and other environmental illness sufferers, one victim says: “My doctor thinks I’m nuts. He thinks the whole thing is completely in my head. That’s what my husband still thinks,” and this is what Carol, too, experiences for much of the film. But Safe’s brilliance lies in its acute understanding of the horror that can emerge when the male experts actually do start listening to you, offering what seem to be definitive solutions to complex problems. Another woman remarks: “It is in your head. It’s in all our heads. It makes you crazy. She’s right. It ends up in your head because it affects the neurological.” What “it” is remains unexplained, but the film subtly implies that it might be the cure itself, self-help rhetoric infecting the mind until all is reduced to a meaningless rhetoric of “feelings.”

Poignantly, Carol White never really discovers who she is or what her illness is. Every time she attempts to speak about herself, her words turn into clichés, self-help versions of selfhood that invariably miss the mark. The film ends in a tiny, space-capsule-like safe house where Carol has isolated herself. She stares at the mirror and tries to speak the words “I love you” with conviction, but fails, perhaps because the words are not her own, but merely quoted from the pages of I’m Okay—You’re Okay, or Love, by Leo Buscaglia, PhD.

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

42: A Conversation Between Odie Henderson and Steven Boone

Odie Henderson: Well, Mr. Boone, once again, we’re engaging in a Black Man Talk. After American Gangstas, Tyler Perry, and Django Unchained,
we’re now setting our sights on the Jackie Robinson biopic, 42. This
time, however, the talk is being conducted live via Internet Chat. Let’s
get this party started.

Steven Boone: Odie, among other great things, you invented the term “lookeehere
moment.” You never gave me a precise definition, just plenty of
illustrative anecdotes, but I’ll take a crack at it: The lookeehere moment is
that instance in which a stressed-out African-American male succumbs to
pressures of (usually coded, passive-aggressive) racism and… snaps. 42 felt
like a suspense thriller based around whether or when Jackie Robinson is going
to have a colossal lookeehere moment. “Now, lookeehere, umpire….!”
What do you think?

Odie: That’s a good definition of the lookeehere. If I were to venture a
definition, I’d say it’s the Black version of the moment where Popeye finally
decides to stop taking shit and eat that can of spinach. I wondered if 42 would
allow Robinson to have his lookeehere moment, or if it was going to treat his
abuse as some form of Noble Negritude.

Steven: Exactly.

Odie:

I should note that the real Robinson does NOT get a moment of genuine
anger in The Jackie Robinson Story, the 1950 version of the timeframe 42
covers. I’d like to think it was because Robinson was not a seasoned actor, but
it’s probably because that moment would have been too realistic for White
audiences to deal with back in the halcyon days of Father Knows Best.

Steven: Absolutely. They weren’t even quite ready for Sidney Poitier. (Btw, A Patch of Blue employs similar suspense around the prospect of miscegenation.
That movie’s kissing scene stopped my heart.)

Well, I think it’s safe to say we both dug this movie, but why? It is
so damn corny. It seems too cornball for even the likes of Ron Howard and Ed
“ante up and kick in” Zwick. Why does this film work so well?

Odie: Chris Rock once said that Black folks will know we’ve truly overcome
when we’re allowed to fuck up just like White folks do. That is, the individual
will get blamed rather than the entire race. Cinematically, I think we’ll know
when a Black character is given a corny-ass, pure Americana treatment in a
biopic.

Watching 42, I felt that this was our very own cornpone treatment—and
dare I say those corny movies like Pride of the Yankees are damned
effective–and I loved it for that reason. We may not have overcome on the
screen, but for a brief moment, I saw the old movies I loved get colorized.
Finally, a bone of equality thrown our way. The love story is corny, the sports
movie is corny, the gruff mentor is a cliché, etc. This can describe the
majority of movies of this ilk.

And those exact reasons are why I love movies like this. We’re asked
to love and suffer with Jackie because he wants the American Dream, which is
here symbolized by Baseball. Not because pursuing the dream is a privilege, but because it’s a right.

Steven: I know what you mean, re: the purposeful corniness. George Lucas
employed some of that rationale for his long-gestating film about the Tuskeegee
Airmen, Red Tails. He said it was the kind of film you’d see all the time
during Ho’wood’s Golden Era, just, as you put it, colorized.

Odie: It’s about damn time. Those movies endure.

Steven: I think Tyler Perry, for better or worse, is doing some of that work,
too.

Odie: Perry’s problem, as we’ve discussed before, is that he’s stapled to
Jesus. If he had the chops of Cecil B. DeMille, he could corner the market on
Biblical epics.

Steven: I could see him doing St. Louis Blues. I’ll never forget that scene
where Nat King Cole as Handy regains his sight at the keyboard, thanks to his
faith in Jesus. (If I’m remembering it right.)

Odie: Perry wouldn’t be able to resist having Madea on top of Nat’s piano
singing “Makin’ Whoopee.”

Steven: Absolutely.

Odie: Were you surprised by the time devoted to the love story in this film?
Ruby Dee played Robinson’s wife, Rachel, in The Jackie Robinson Story, and
while she wasn’t completely ignored, I felt Brian Helgeland wanted to give
equal time to the struggle and the strength behind it. The two leads (Chadwick
Boseman and Nicole Beharie) have amazing chemistry. I loved the looks they gave
each other. This is the most credible Black romance I’ve seen in years.

Steven: Yes, it was like a tonic. Black love is so toxic in American mainstream movies.
The fact that I was so shocked to see a Black couple so effortlessly devoted to
each other onscreen is sad. I see it in real life. Why have I so rarely seen it
up there on the screen?

Odie: I think it still terrifies some viewers. We’re too conditioned to
onscreen broken families, trifling men and gold diggers. Regular Black love is
“unrealistic,” to use a word I’ve heard regarding the Robinsons’
relationship in this film.

Steven: Well, you know me. I see a perfectly correlative relationship between
Ho’wood history and American street reality. We have been living out the images
of ourselves for a long time. Helgeland is doing a lot of triage on that there.

His script is quietly subversive in ways similar to Mann’s Ali.

Odie: The scene I can’t get out of my head is when Alan Tudyk’s Ben Chapman
(the coach of the Phillies) keeps taunting Robinson at the plate. Brian Helgeland
lets that play out for an eternity, with Tudyk saying “nigger” enough
times to earn him a lifetime contract at Death Row Records. Tudyk sings it,
plays on the word, does a stand-up routine with racist Black jokes,
practically. He got on my nerves so much I was ready for a lookeehere moment.
Helgeland plays on that tension, and then Rachel Robinson says, “Look at
me. Please look at me.” She is telepathically willing Jackie to turn to
his soulmate, to lean on her for strength.

Steven: It’s fucking beautiful.

I saw you rocking in your seat during Tudyk’s taunting.

Odie: Oh, had I been in less polite company, I would have yelled out
“KICK HIS ASS, JACKIE!” The Warner Bros. logo would have fallen off
the screening room door.

Steven: Hahaha. I do wish, as I shout-whispered to you in the screening room,
that Steven Spielberg had directed Helgeland’s crackerjack script. But it would
have been TOO overpowering. Or Sam Raimi (whose baseball scenes in For Love
of the Game snap, crackle, and pop). But Helgeland does a decent Spielberg
imitation, that creeping camera, the shafts of light.

Odie: The cinematography does an excellent job of setting mood with light
and shadow. Don Burgess’ lighting brings us closer to the internal acting being
done by Boseman—you can see him working out his game plan/side hustle at all
times. Unfortunately, that damn score by Mark Isham overshadows some finely
underplayed moments. In addition to Spielberg, Helgeland is also channeling
Barry Levinson, whose The Natural is clearly one of his influences. Baseball is
like church, and most baseball movies aim to give some form of religious
experience. Randy Newman’s score in that film is beautiful and just as
bombastic as Isham’s, but is applied with a smaller trowel.

Steven:

Agreed. If the studio has any mercy, they should at least release a
cut of the film on Blu-ray minus the score. I guarantee you, this is far more
intense and poetic film without that absolutely unnecessary weep music.

Odie: I liked what you said about the score being “more oppressive than
Jim Crow.”

Steven: At least during Jim Crow there was some variety.

But, back to that almost-lookeehere moment on the field. Helgeland doesn’t
just stop there. He follows Jackie into the clubhouse hallway, where he has a
private breakdown. The residual sunlight coming down from the field is eerie,
heavenly, theatrical. It’s a beautiful theatrical moment, and then Harrison
Ford steps in, as Jackie’s mentor, and makes it iconic. This is like the Angels
in America of racism, for that moment.

Odie: The claustrophobic staging is a wise choice. The narrow proximity of
the hallway walls juxtaposed against the sunlight, that literal light at the
end of the tunnel. Ford steps in, and rather than turn this into some kind of
“Great White Father” moment, Helgeland’s script lets Robinson have
the first and last words. “NO!” he immediately tells Rickey as he
tries to approach him. 42 lets him have this moment without immediate response
from his boss.

Speaking of Indiana Jones, Mr. Ford turns in an excellent supporting
performance here. I bought his Branch Rickey, and even more so, how the film
uses him almost as a reverse Sidekick Negro. This is Branch Rickey’s story too,
but rather than depict him as some saint passing out crumbs of bread to the
cullud folks, it represents him as a man whose distaste for injustice ran
parallel to his business acumen. The Sidekick Negro teaches the White
characters Soul™ to help them loosen up. Branch Rickey does the opposite,
teaching Robinson to tighten up by harnessing the power of the lookeehere
moment into a vengeful vanquishing on the field of sports battle. As Black Bart
says in Blazing Saddles, “Once you establish yo’self, they got to accept
you.”

Steven: Yes, Branch Rickey here is no Father, just a friend. He starts off
invoking the power of the green, like Oskar Schindler, but he doesn’t proceed
down the typical savior path. Helgeland is careful to make it clear that Rickey
is only doing what everybody should be doing, and which he failed to do out of
fear when he was younger: Play fair. The movie’s white male characters are fun
to watch. They’re all wrestling with their beliefs and trying to figure out
what a man is in this new context. They are starting to see that siding with
racists is basically toadying for bullies.

Odie: Helgeland clearly has no time for the systemic idiocy of the Brooklyn
Dodgers teammates’ racism. The speech he gives to Christopher Meloni (one of my
favorite actors) is a wicked slap in the face. Meloni tells his players that
Jackie’s the first one–and not the last. They’re coming, they’re good, and
since they haven’t been lulled into a comfortable, assumed position of
privilege, they’re HUNGRY. They’re coming, and they’re better than you lazy
bums are, so I’d be worried about being good enough to win rather than your
teammate’s skin color.

That was an “Odie woulda shouted AMEN in the Ghetto Theater”
moment.

Steven: A lot of this movie’s charm and power comes from small moments between Jackie
and his teammates. These aren’t extensively drawn characters, but they are so
well cast, seeming not at all like actors slipping on the shoes of historical
figures. My favorite is Lucas Black, the kid from Sling Blade, as Pee Wee
Reese. Black is one of the most likeable American screen actors we rarely see.
He’s perfect to play the one guy brave enough to embrace Jackie in front of a
hostile, racist crowd. That moment, and an earlier moment where another
teammate simply patted Jackie on the shoulder, sucker-punched me with emotion.

Odie: The film treats these moments with a subtle beauty (at least until
Mark Isham shows up with that hyperactive orchestra). I agree the team is well
cast, with Hamish Linklater, the brother from The New Adventures of Old
Christine, and Lucas Black as stand-outs. All the actors make credible
ballplayers, actually. Helgeland puts us right into the action, and his mythic
camera angles of Robinson stealing and sliding into bases are suitably
reverential.

Lest we forget Andre Holland, who plays real-life Black sportswriter
Wendell Smith. Helgeland botches his early narration by having him use
“African-American” (Black folks in 1947 would have asked “What
the hell is that?”), but he makes a good sidekick for Robinson. Having
Robinson relate to both Black and White characters was so refreshing I wanted
to cry. Equal time is given to both worlds, something that should be normal in
movies but rarely is.

Steven: The exchanges between Holland and Robinson seemed so lifeless to me,
though. The tensions and sympathies were there in the script, I feel, but their
moments together were where I definitely felt the need for a post-1968
sensibility guiding the execution. And Rickey’s sidekick was such a stock
hyperventilating nerd that I imagine even Smithers from The Simpsons would be
like, “Goddamn. Man up!”

Odie: I’m with you on Rickey’s bespectacled worrywort of a sidekick. But I
disagree about Smith and Robinson simply because Smith gives 42 one of its
themes when he tells Robinson to be prepared, to see that slow pitch coming.
Granted, their dialogue would have benefitted from being punched up, but I
guess I accepted it for what it was.

Steven: As for Helgeland’s direction: He’s got some great instincts, but—and
I know I’m being a spoiled backseat driver here—a truly dynamic scene-maker
like Spielberg would have choreographed the shit out of the “nigger
nigger” scene and the fanboys-chase-the-train scene. Helgeland, like
Levinson, is more of a screenwriter, leaning on world-class cinematographers to
make scenes look good but not naturally fluent the way a Spielberg or a
Zemeckis would be. The tradeoff is that those cats probably would have softened
certain blows that Helgeland strikes without restraint. They would have cut out
a few of those “niggers.”

Odie: That train scene, with the two children chasing after their hero’s
train as he departs, would have been a home run off Spielberg’s bat. Maybe I
impressed more of my own feelings here, but the look in that kid’s eyes after Robinson
hands him the ball choked me up. I knew what that felt like; it felt like
raindrops hitting the earth after a long drought. You could almost see that kid
thinking “I too can be a baseball player!” Or even better yet,
“I could be President of the United States.” Thank God the kid in
that scene eventually became a baseball player instead! Had he been dreaming of
the Presidency, that scene would have been followed by some White kids beating
him over the head with the fake Presidential seal he glued to his fake podium!

Steven: Oh hell yeah. This movie’s intent is clear in that scene: to show
black kids something different. It doesn’t have to be slick, clever,
eye-popping–just show black kids what it’s like to have a dream; to meet a
hero who embodies that dream; to pursue it without a self-defeating attitude
and to make it. We have been drowning in fatalism for 50 years.

This film is calculated to endure. Also, to get heavy rotation in the
schools. What you said about the fake podium is actually pretty sad. Because
it’s true. This country we live in is haunted by millions of broken dreams, so
many of them black.

Odie: I’m hoping to see more correctives like this, and from minority
artists telling stories of THEIR dreams.

To close out: As you know, I’m
a huge fan of Jackie Robinson. He broke the minor league color barrier in my
hometown of Jersey City, on a field I got to play on decades later. As a little
hoodrat, I didn’t think anything of importance happened in my ‘hood, but within
walking distance, a hero who looked like me did something profound. You want to
talk about the notion of believing one could do anything? I got that notion
after I learned about Jackie Robinson’s Royals game against the Jersey City
Giants. I wasn’t around when they erected that statue of Robinson down at
Roosevelt Stadium, but I went to see the unveiling of the Pee Wee Reese and
Jackie Robinson down at Coney Island. Considering that the last time I was in
Coney Island, I got peed on AND my head busted open (both on rides, I should
add), revisiting the joint could only have happened for something as
emotionally big for me as Jackie Robinson.

Steven Boone is a film critic and video essayist for Fandor and Roger
Ebert’s Far Flung Correspondents. He writes a column on street life for
Capital New York and blogs at Hentai Lab.

A globetrotting computer programmer by trade and movie lover by hobby, Odie Henderson has contributed to Slant Magazine’s The House Next Door since 2006. Additionally, his work has appeared at Movies Without Pity (2008) and numerous other sites. He currently runs the blog Tales of Odienary Madness.