Video-2 – Page 18 – Press Play Video Blog

Watch: What If David Lynch Had Directed Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’?

If David Lynch had directed Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining"–let’s just stop there. In a sense, he did, just as much as Kubrick directed many of Lynch’s films. (In a sense.) It’s been said many times that there are only 4 or 5 good ideas, and they keep being passed around over and over, re-shaped, re-imagined. And the creative animus, the deranged, meticulous force of imagination that fueled Kubrick’s mind when he took a good thriller by Stephen King and made it into a horrific masterpiece could well have been flowing through Lynch’s mind when he made… anything. Except, perhaps, ‘The Straight Story.’ Or ‘Dune.’ This mash-up (though it’s a lot more) by Richard Vezina has a lot of beautiful little touches: a log truck rolling by outside the window as Jack Torrance is conducting his entrance interview at The Overlook; Dick Hallorann ending up in the tractor from ‘The Straight Story’ when he’s driving to the hotel to save the lives of Torrance’s family; Torrance watching ants gnawing and gnashing their teeth as he looks at a model of the hotel grounds… Far from just a random supposition, the question at the heart of the piece prods us to pay more close attention to the similarities between these two cinematic emissaries from the dark side of the mind.

Watch: A Jean-Luc Godard Homage in Blue, White and Red (NSFW, a little)

This homage to Jean-Luc Godard by Cinema Sem Lei focuses on his enduring use of blue, whites, and reds in the films ‘Contempt,’ ‘A Woman Is a Woman,’ ‘Pierrot le Fou,’ and ‘Made in U.S.A.’ Watching it, you might be tempted to say,Is that all there is to it? Just a collection of red, white and blue scenes? What’s the point? I could do that. Etcetera. In so doing, you might miss the point you’re looking for. Watching this little collection, one is reminded of a crucial element of Godard’s early (and to a certain extent later) style: that point where what we might consider a narrative element (the way a person dresses, for instance, as an indication of character–or a part of a setting) turns into something else entirely: a cog inside a large symbolic machine, not a shirt, not a neon letter, not a doorway, not a floodlight, but something else. You can use the word "sign," if you wish, or the term "visual vocabulary," or "visual language," but the three-way-rally exchange is the same: from the screen to the eye to the mind, lingering a little in each.

Watch: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’… Animated!

So, the most recent in the flood of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road‘ tributes is an animated piece by Vimeo user whoispablo. The work is deft, and smart, and driven here, and the earth tones used, rather than dampening the action, make it more gritty, with more of a newsreel feel. George Miller should feel proud that his series has touched such a cultural nerve–what that nerve is, specifically, remains to be seen.

Watch: Who Says Pixar Characters Have No Emotions??

Though I’ve written elsewhere about how uneasy Pixar films make me at times, after watching Lindsay McCutcheon’s rampaging, charged homage to the studio and, more specifically, its characters’ emotions, you’d think you were watching a showcase of German Expressionist dramas rather than scenes from ‘Up,’ ‘Toy Story,’ ‘Monsters University,’ ‘Wall-E,’ ‘Ratatouille,’ ‘Brave,’ and other films that show both the extremes of, yes, emotions these films express and, begrudgingly though I might say it, the personality and variety and (begrudgingly again) idiosyncratic charm Pixar’s animators bring to their unsettlingly smooth-contoured figures. ‘Inside Out‘ is coming up–this rollicking piece should serve as a fantastic primer for a movie all about a young girl and her, well, feelings.

Watch: John Carpenter, Subversive Auteur

Up until recently, I had a difficult time grasping the cult of John
Carpenter. Out of the small handful of films I had seen from him across
the past decades (‘Halloween,’ ‘The Thing,’ ‘Escape from L.A.,’ and ‘Vampires‘), I found one great film (‘Halloween’), one good film (‘The Thing,’ which felt a bit too much like ‘Alien‘ in Antarctica for me), and two pretty mediocre films (‘Escape from L.A.’ and ‘Vampires’).
Yet, many cinephiles and friends I respect kept urging me to give him a
proper chance. I spent a week or so with about half of his filmography
and I found a director who uses generic pulp for the best of all
possible uses: as a capsule for philosophy and more radical ideology. John Carpenter seems to gravitate towards the subversive, be it in the
form of critiquing American ideology in ‘They Live‘ (1988) or building an action star out of former Disney child actor Kurt Russell with ‘Escape from New York‘ and ‘The Thing’ before destroying that image with the ineffectual man of action—Jack Burton—in ‘Big Trouble in Little China‘ .

What
I found during my journey through his output was not a perfect
filmmaker, but almost always an interesting one. A film like
Carpenter’s ‘Prince of Darkness‘ is hampered by a low budget
and bloated running time, but it’s overflowing with Lovecraftian
nuggets (the anti-God, psychic television signals from the future) and
surreal images (the bug man, the broadcasts). Even his director for
hire adaptation of Stephen King’s ‘Christine‘ (1983) features some
of his finest work with actors, finding a real friendship between the
two male leads in one of the worst of King’s novels. Across all of his
films, there are poetic images, radical ideas, innovative musical
compositions, an idiosyncratic pace, and abrupt shifts in tone (all of
which Nicole Alvarado and I have attempted to capture within our essay)
that define his cinematic voice. He is, like his hero Howard Hawks, an
auteur.

Dr. Drew Morton is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. He the co-editor and co-founder of [in]Transition:
Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, the first
peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the visual essay and all of
its forms (co-presented by MediaCommons and Cinema Journal). [in]Transitionrecently
won an award of distinction in the annual SCMS Anne Friedberg
Innovative Scholarship competition. His publications have appeared in animation: an interdisciplinary journal, The Black Maria, Flow, In Media Res, Mediascape, Press Play, RogerEbert.com, Senses of Cinema, Studies in Comics, and
a range of academic anthologies. He is currently completing a
manuscript on the overlap between American blockbuster cinema and comic
book style.

Nicole Alvarado is an animation buff and research analyst. This is her first video essay.

Watch: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Meets Buster Keaton (Really)

Once upon a time, there were two directors. One was named George Miller and the other was named Buster Keaton. They lived many, many years apart, and their films were very, very different from each other. George Miller directed the ‘Mad Max’ films, a series of apocalyptic car chase action social commentary science fiction road movie romance thrillers (set in Australia, maybe), while Buster Keaton directed and starred in silent comedies, dependent largely on slapstick and a vast Rolodex of remarkable facial expressions. One day, a film editor named Walter Rafelsberger discovered that if he put the soundtrack to ‘Mad Max: Fury Road‘ (2015) behind a famous chase scene from a Keaton film called ‘The General‘ (1926), the two parts… just… fit! And the result is what you see above.

Watch: The Intimate Side of Alejandro González Iñárritu

It’s easy, when considering the work of Alejandro
González Iñárritu, to think he’s a master showman, an aficionado of the emotional grandstand, given to stadium-sized themes, maybe even a little maudlin. You would be justified in thinking that, in fact. It’s important to remember, though, that Iñárritu is also interested in the more shy, quiet side of emotional trauma and conflict, and how these stressors reveal themselves in the human face. Does Brad Pitt look glamorous when he’s sobbing in ‘Babel‘? No. Does Michael Keaton remind you of Bruce Wayne when he’s stomping around backstage in ‘Birdman‘ in a silly wig? No, and yet in both cases, the characters the actors play are withstanding Herculean challenges whose strain we can see in their humanized and imperfect appearance. Miguel Branco‘s lyrical and swift but also staggering homage to Iñárritu plays up a side of the director’s work which deserves longer shrift than it commonly receives: enjoy.

Watch: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’: It’s All in the Framing

We’ve looked, elsewhere, at how the use of point-of view shots made the original Mad Max movies compelling–here, in Vashi Nedomansky’s recent piece, we discover a secret of the success of George Miller’s ‘Mad Max: Fury Road‘: the editing. Or, more specifically, the framing. Each shot is center-framed, meaning that the eye’s intended focal point will always be in the center of the frame. Nedomansky has helpfully added crosshairs to make us see this a bit more clearly, along with a voice-over from John Seale, the film’s director of photography.

Watch: Who Were the Great International Noir Directors?

What
exactly is film noir? Is it a movement, a mode, a style, or a genre?
These questions have preoccupied film scholars for decades. According
to filmmaker Paul Schrader, noir began with The Maltese Falcon and ended with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.
He’d add that it was largely an American movement that applied certain
stylistic (high contrast lighting, voice over narration, non-linear
storytelling) and thematic (existentialism, the cruel mechanizations of
fate, amour fou) elements in genres ranging from melodramas to detective
films. Another film scholar might add that directors like Fritz Lang
and Billy Wilder never described their films as being "noir." They
thought they were making thrillers. Film noir? That’s a term the French
critics applied retroactively.

This
video essay series takes the fairly provocative stance that film noir
became a genre. Essentially, in its golden age during the 1940s, noir
was a mode/movement that was superimposed onto other genres. In the
words of genre theorist Rick Altman, genres can start off as
"adjectives"–fragments of the style and theme might be there, but the
genre has yet to fully solidify because the filmmakers and audiences
haven’t quite gotten their heads around it yet. However, by the time
Robert Aldrich was making Kiss Me Deadly in
1955, the writings of the French critics had made it stateside (in
fact, there’s a picture of him reading Borde and Chaumeton’s Panorama du Film Noir on the set of Attack!),
and perhaps the filmmakers and audiences had finally begun to think of
noir as being a noun. When neo-noir flourished in the 1970s (thanks to
filmmakers like Schrader), the movement emerged–fully formed as a
genre–from its black-and-white cocoon.

I
write this trajectory into this introduction to the series because I
can imagine that some of my colleagues might have been troubled by a
video essay that calls film noir a genre. I am more than aware of the
history of this debate and it was covered in Part III on Pragmatics.
Part V is a shift in gears. There isn’t much in the way of an academic
argument regarding noir or genre to be found here; it’s simply a poetic
supercut of international noir films that the interested viewer should
check out (a list of films – in the order they appear – can be found
below).

What
I’m attempting to do here is to craft the video essay equivalent of an
encyclopedia entry on film noir for the undergraduate student with a new
episode each month. If you’re already familiar with the films and the
key debates, you may not find much in the way of "new" knowledge here.
My main audience–at least in terms of an intellectual presentation–is
the uninitiated. I assume the pleasures of the more advanced fans and
scholars of noir will be found in the aesthetics of the pieces, although
maybe they’ll be surprised by a "new" recommendation (in this case, I
obviously love Elevator to the Gallows!).
For those who have followed me through this five part series, I thank
you for watching, sharing, and for the wonderful words of encouragement.
For those new to the series, I welcome you and urge you to start at
the beginning.

FILMS (IN THE ORDER OF APPEARANCE, INCLUDING REPEATED CLIPS):

OSSESSIONE

BREATHLESS

THE THIRD MAN

ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS

DRUNKEN ANGEL

ODD MAN OUT

PIERROT LE FOU

ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS

BAND OF OUTSIDERS

SERIE NOIRE

STRAY DOG

RIFIFI

TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI

BOB LE FLAMBEUR

THE CRYING GAME

TOKYO DRIFTER

MADE IN U.S.A.

DRUNKEN ANGEL

LA BETE HUMAINE

SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER

BAND OF OUTSIDERS

ALPHAVILLE

JE JOUR SE LEVE

LE SAMOURAI

ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS

SERIE NOIRE

SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER

LE SAMOURAI

DRUNKEN ANGEL

TOKYO DRIFTER
BREATHLESS

STRAY DOG

ODD MAN OUT

Dr. Drew Morton is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. He the co-editor and co-founder of[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, the first peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the visual essay and all of its forms (co-presented by MediaCommons and Cinema Journal). [in]Transitionrecently won an award of distinction in the annual SCMS Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship competition. His publications have appeared inanimation: an interdisciplinary journal, The Black Maria, Flow, In Media Res, Mediascape, Press Play, RogerEbert.com, Senses of Cinema, Studies in Comics, and a range of academic anthologies. He is currently completing a manuscript on the overlap between American blockbuster cinema and comic book style.

Watch: ‘The Wire’ Is ‘The Wire’: All of the Show’s Tautologies in One Supercut

In addition to bringing the phrase "True dat" and the word "S************************************************it" into the public lexicon, David Simon’s ‘The Wire,’ as YouTube user Propolandante’s supercut shows, flooded us with tautologies. Ah, the tautology: that simple statement with a matching subject and predicate nominative: "It is what it is," "what’s done is done," "let bygones be bygones." Here, these statements are replaced by "The game is the game," "the street is the street," and other tough utterances. The tautology can be used to provoke reflection, to invite us not to make more of something than it is, but in the case of Simon’s gritty-is-an-understatement Baltimore drama, the tautology is like a strong hand, swiveling the viewer’s head around and forcing a reckoning with reality.