Video-2 – Page 32 – Press Play Video Blog

Watch: The POV Shot in Film, Part Two (Jacob Swinney’s Take)

In Part 1 of this 2-parter, Leigh Singer’s video made us intensely aware of the way POV shots can bring you inside cinematography, making you feel a film’s visual workings more intensely than you might otherwise feel them. But what about the use of this shot as a more practical narrative tool? Jacob Swinney takes this possibility and runs with it in his take on the POV shot. In the scenes assembled here, the shot is an agent of development, moving the story and the viewer forward in a way that pops us, if only momentarily, out of that story. That departure is an illusion, though, because frequently we’re tugged right back in. When we look, for instance, out of the car trunk at Vincent and Jules in Pulp Fiction, this is an agressive narrative move; Tarantino wants the viewer to experience the story somewhat cubistically, from all directions at once. When, during the famous shower scene in Psycho, we watch Janet Leigh being stabbed repeatedly from the killer’s point of view, our sudden displacement is important–because it’s important that we humor the idea that someone besides Norman Bates is doing the killing in the film, if only momentarily. (For, in that scene, we get the victim’s POV as well.) And in a film like Her, POV shots are crucial–they give life to Scarlett Johansson’s digital muse, and give viewers a significantly probing look at Joaquin Phoenix’s grasp for companionship. It doesn’t hurt that Swinney runs the soft-rock hit "These Eyes" over these images from over 100 movies. What, after all, is the POV shot but a way of reminding us that there’s more than one way to see, tell, or experience a story–and that being reflective on these things is part of the filmmaker’s responsibility?

Watch: This Is How You Make a Low-Budget Horror Film–Err, Comedy: A Video Essay on Sam Raimi’s EVIL DEAD 2

Watch: This Is How You Make a Low-Budget Horror Film–Err, Comedy: A Video Essay on EVIL DEAD 2

To say I laughed until I cried while watching Kevin B. Lee’s video essay on the low-budget Sam Raimi horror film Evil Dead 2 would be a misstatement, since I don’t recall any actual tears rolling down my face. But: there are a lot of laughs here. In this installment of his Shooting Down Pictures project, in which Lee (the former Editor of this very blog!) chronicled his viewing of the 1000 greatest films of all time, Lee uses the director’s admittedly over-acted, mawkishly fake, chaotic quasi-masterpiece of after-dinner-theater style horror as a basis for discussion of the value of such films. And in so doing, Lee instructs us on the way this kind of film is actually made. As one fairly artificially constructed special effect is piled on top of another, the scenes we see here acquire a level of absurdity which could be said to be next to artfulness. We laugh, but we’re also genuinely unsettled at certain moments. The drive, the singular energy behind what we’re watching, the focus of the director’s animus, is what causes the disturbance. The giggles come when the car goes off the road a bit–which happens quite often in this film, and others of its type. Lee provides helpful nuggets of information onscreen along the way, such as "fake hand filled with gelatin," as a knife plunges into flesh, or "440 gallons of fake blood used for this scene," as a powerful gusher of blood erupts, wholly spontaneously. And, viewed in this light, with the seams of the film exposed, somewhat, the question is raised: what was Raimi doing here? Is it what it seems like he was doing, or something more complex? And beyond that: at what point could we say that what would seem on the surface to be the opposite of artfulness is actually pushing, perhaps in spite of itself, towards something which is poetic and profound in its own right?

Watch: The POV Shot in Film, Part One (Leigh Singer’s Take)

How do we quantify what happens when a film assumes the first person point of view, and instead of watching events unfold on camera, viewers become, in a sense, part of those events? Leigh Singer takes us through the varieties of experience possible with such POV shots in his latest video essay (which covers 74 films!). The first experience is a sense of dizziness, which can either be darkly funny, as it was in Being John Malkovich, or darkly jarring. The technique often occurs in films in which empathy is important: films as different as The Blair Witch Project or Reservoir Dogs depend upon our ability to identify with the person carrying the story to us, whether that story is presented as nonfiction or fiction. It may communicate power, in different forms: contrast the famous (in different ways) uses of first person POV in Robocop and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, both signalling the advent of disorder and mayhem, one disorder somewhat deserved, one disorder decidedly undeserved. It may be used to let us in on a voyeur’s discovery, as it does for the hero of Blue Velvet, as he spies on the horrors of the abusive relationship between a nightclub singer and a perverted small time criminal. And, then again, it may be done simply for what should be called, for lack of a better label, the "what if" factor: what if we could sit on the back of a bullet as it flew towards its destination, and then, having reached the destination, what if we went a little farther? In a sense, the use of the first person POV shot is the point at which film mingles with the other arts, whose purpose is, after all, to show us the beautiful wildness inside the human imagination: sublimated, glorified, alive.–Max Winter

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

The STAR WARS Films and Their Hold on Viewers’ Inner Lives: A Video Essay

https://vimeo.com/93984906

Most American moviegoers who are old enough to have seen the original Star Wars films in the theater, back in the 1970s and 1980s, oversized iced beverage on one side, tooth-rotting candy or dehydrating popcorn on the other, air conditioners blasting, every seat full, utter silence in the days before cell phones, have some emotional relationship with them. It may be awe at the scope of their story, with its aspiration to an epic structure (in the true sense of that word, not the recent malapropic usage that has been popular in recent years). It may be amusement at the stilted acting pervading the original series, the black-and-white themes and messages as tall as the screen on which the tales were projected. It may be disappointment at their successors, which have all been flawed in one large way or another. Regardless, it’s safe to say that George Lucas’s three original films burned themselves into America’s cultural DNA, forming a point of reference for individuals of different backgrounds, tastes, professions, and levels of intelligence. The Prince-Valiant-esque goodness of Luke Skywalker, the raffish heroism of Han Solo, the misshapen evil of Darth Vader are all as familiar to many Americans as apple pie, the American flag, or George Washington. So, too, as this personal and sharply edited video piece by Clara Darko points out, are the ideas the films express. Good may in fact triumph over evil. Self-confidence can help the ordinary human become extra-ordinary. Wisdom trumps reckless ambition. Huge things come in small, odd-looking packages with distended green ears, inverted grammatical constructions, and frog-like voices. And so on. The funny thing about these ideas is that many viewers search for them, perpetually, in films, regardless of how well-trodden they might be. Those ideas might not be sought in isolation–the same viewer might seek out both stories of dissolution and hopelessness along with tales of triumph. The person who watches eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building today might easily gaze at the adventures of dashingly dressed heroes on a desert planet tomorrow. The point about these films is what they tapped into, a yearning for myth, for story, and perhaps for closure that has proven to be universal. Darko calls her piece "All you need to know about life," suggesting that the films taught her many such lessons. And perhaps they could teach these lessons. I wonder, though, if the piece also couldn’t have been called "All you need to know about you."

Watch: The Louisiana Landscapes of TRUE DETECTIVE As One Grand Open Stage: A Video Essay

https://vimeo.com/110935908

It is entirely appropriate that True Detective takes place in Louisiana. That might sound like a tautology, somewhat like saying that it’s appropriate that A Christmas Carol takes place in London or Vertigo takes place in San Francisco. However, what I mean is something different, which is called up by Jaume Lloret’s gathering of the more gorgeous landscapes of HBO’s recent episodic masterwork, filmed lovingly by Cary Fukunaga and Adam Arkapaw. The landscape of Louisiana can be described many ways: lush, verdant, mysterious, overgrown, swampy, humid, shadowy, punishing, endless. But one simple adjective which could also be applied to it is flat. The land pushes onwards until it gets tired of pushing, and then it just keeps going. Some might view the landscape, devoid of mountains, valleys, mesas, buttes, canyons, and all the other things that form the common conception of whatever spectacular is, to be quite dull. But another way of looking at it is as a tabula rasa of sorts. Rust Cohle can unfurl his eccentric, rambling monologues into the air without fear that they will ever bounce back at him. The detectives can drive on, in pursuit of one lead or another, without ever being certain that they will find the person they are looking for. And the criminals, as well, commit their acts of violence in something of a void: our first sight of the villain in the series finds him all by himself amidst the trees and shrubs of his backyard, a tiny figure, engulfed by the natural world around him even as he tries to punctuate it, in his own cruel manner. What makes True Detective so interesting, for so many people, is not its story, which is a fairly run-of-the-mill procedural with, granted, some spooky effects tossed in. It’s not the post-Tarantino digressiveness of its dialogue. And it’s not its relationships, since the parable of the man too involved in his job to be a loving marital partner has been oft-told, as has the story of the two work partners who need each other despite disagreements. It’s that all of the story’s horrific events occur on a flat plane whose closest analog, strangely enough, is reality itself.

Watch: The Sublime Presence in Michael Mann’s Films: A Video Essay

It’s hard to say what it is that’s surging beneath so many of Michael Mann’s films, what gives them their energy. It could be that he comes the closest to the sublime of any American director. For those keeping score, the word sublime is often used to describe something that reaches heights we did not expect, beyond excellence. But what the term means for artistic works is quite different: it describes a force, somewhat inexplicable, that moves forward and dwarfs everything else around it, that is near-frightening in its intensity. And that’s what we have here, in Michael Mann’s films, which Tom Kramer has managed to get at with this video piece. It’s there in the shimmering tension between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat. It’s there, believe it or not, in Colin Farrell’s momentary love in Miami Vice. Certainly the poor tormented soul at the heart of Manhunter faces it as he goes about his disturbed criminal-profiling craft. And, of course, it pervades The Last of the Mohicans, both in the characters’ relationships with each other and in their facing of the vast, complex mass of untamed America. It could be said that Mann coats his films with too much style, too much visual slickness–and that’s evident in Kramer’s piece too. But, on the other hand, that sense of visual craft could also be said to ameliorate the near-atomic power always simmering within Mann’s subject matter, always threatening to overtake all else.

Watch: For Mike Nichols (1931-2014): A Video Essay

There were three big “Mike Nichols moments” in my life. The first was the universally shared one: watching The Graduate for the first time. I was a teenager and an interest in sexuality, excitement, and a nose for mischief were at their height. Watching Dustin Hoffman sleep with an older woman and then run off with her daughter, all to the tune of Simon & Garfunkel, even had me sweating as a so-called Generation Y-er. Visually, the film was doing interesting things with its pans and sudden zooms. They weren’t cheesy. They were oddly endearing. And to think that this film was made in the 1960s was all the more impressive. The next moment came when I saw Closer in the theatre back in 2004. I was well versed in the Nichols film canon (Primary Colors, Working Girl, etc.) and was expecting warmth and light at the end of the tunnel for this story of four miserable people who kept fucking each other over, literally and figuratively. But it never came. Yes, as per many Mike Nichols films, it was brilliantly acted. But this film was relentlessly blunt. It was cold. Was this really a Mike Nichols film? Yes, Nichols had made groundbreaking films in the past, but none that ever told America’s Sweetheart to “fuck off and die.” It had such a startling affect on me that when I re-watched some of his films (Wolf, Silkwood), I ardently searched to find even more tangible nastiness in some of those characters. I wanted to not like some of the fully realized, compassionate characters from those past films simply so I could connect them back to the characters of Closer—and ultimately give myself vindication as a viewer. But I couldn’t. I could never dislike Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry as much as I disliked Jude Law in Closer. But that’s okay. Nichols was showing me that he handled every type of person equally. By the time Nichols made Charlie Wilson’s War in 2007, it was obvious that Nichols really wasn’t interested in the dynamic movements of the camera; contrast that to The Graduate, which has something going on in nearly every frame. Nichols was basically creating a cinema of the theatre. He was going back to his roots. His camera was much more calm in the last feature films. He was just watching his players, smiling behind the camera. This speaks directly to the third Nichols moment for me, which happened a few years ago. I was on the “L” train in Chicago, headed downtown, listening to a podcast of Radiolab on NPR. The segment was on the origin of laughter. It opened by playing some archival audio of Nichols and Elaine May laughing hysterically as they attempted to get through a comedy bit. It was such an infectious sound, so hearty and real, that I kept playing it over and over. I was so obsessed with the clip that I found myself researching Nichols’ early comedic past, of which I was not too informed. I was shocked to learn that his original improv troupe (the Compass Players) was the predecessor to what would eventually become the Second City improv powerhouse of Chicago. Nichols was closer to my roots that I even realized.

At the end of the day, what these three moments signify was that Mike Nichols was always a filmmaker that kept surprising me. I never had him figured out. There was always a fascinating development or a piece of information about his life that was waiting to be discovered. I put this video essay together with a heavy heart. Aside from seeing such recent artists who have passed (like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams) in the clips, the overwhelming fact that there were going to be no more films or pieces of theatre created by this great storyteller was piercing. But then I just remember that great laugh of his from that comedy sketch outtake. Something tells me that he still has some surprises waiting for me.

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

Watch: 222 Heartbeats, Over 100 Films, From TRIP TO THE MOON to E.T. to BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN to GRAVITY and Onward

Watch: 222 Heartbeats, Over 100 Films, From TRIP TO THE MOON to E.T. to GRAVITY …

This rambunctious and rapacious video tribute to film history, featuring flashed images from over 100 films from Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat up to the present day, with a thumping heartbeat under its visuals for added intensity, is a sprint for the bases, derived from research which "Wandering Gio" details here. In fact, this piece is a tributary of a much larger piece, spanning the same time period, but with over 200 films included and at a much greater length. The current piece is just under five minutes long, and does truly take us from a man pointing a gun at an audience in The Great Train Robbery to the shower scene in Psycho to the rearing of the beast’s head in Alien to Anthony Hopkins’ mask in Silence of the Lambs up to Sandra Bullock spinning through space in Gravity. What’s interesting about watching a piece like this, beyond trying to see how many films you can identify out of the assemblage, is noting which films trigger the strongest reaction, nostalgic or otherwise. We all develop our own relationship with the flickering screen, after all, whether celluloid or digital, don’t we? As the poet Frank O’Hara famously said:

Mothers of America

let your kids go to the movies!

get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to

it’s true that fresh air is good for the body

but what about the soul

that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images…

Watch: Darren Aronofsky’s Cinema of Extremities: A Video Tribute

When watching this brief but dense video homage to Darren Aronofsky’s work by Edgar Martinez, one is reminded that Aronofsky never does anything by halves. The emotions he portrays are massive, embedded within timeless stories, and yet he manages, through his kinetic, sinewy style, to render these emotions with powerful detail, never short-changing their complexity. With The Wrestler, for example, Aronofsky managed to bring numerous unexpected shades to what could have been a cartoonish turn for Mickey Rourke–but at the same time, Rourke’s literal and figurative muscle was an unmistakable force in the film; part of the thrill of watching was following Rourke’s thrashing around his stage bounded by ropes, trying to correct there what he couldn’t fix outside those ropes. Black Swan displayed another aspect of Aronofsky’s work addressed here: relentless movement, a flow, for lack of a better word, that might make a film seem like one continuous, unpunctuated sentence, rather than a series of connected phrases. And Requiem for a Dream drew its energy from its daring–not trapeze-act daring, but a sense that the film was daring itself to go farther and farther into its portrayal of degradation and humiliation. There’s a tremendous amount of visual darkness in this tribute, which suits a director who seems to be constantly swimming in darkness and, at the same time, encouraging his viewers: come on in, the water’s fine.

Watch: David Bowie’s Film Roles: A Video Essay

Seeing David Bowie appear in a film is always a vaguely unsettling experience, and Drew Morton’s video essay about the musician’s movie work takes us on a transfixing tour of that experience, inside and out. Bowie’s presence on camera is shaped as much by his carriage as by what we know about him. It can be said without too much exaggeration or nostalgia-laden reputation inflation that Bowie is one of the more original and enigmatic figures to record rock music in the last 50 years–he has cultivated an unearthly quality and perspective in his work practically from its outset. (There’s a reason "Space Oddity" was performed on the ISS, after all.) And in films, he projects an aura that does make it seem, at times, as if he had been teleported into the film from … elsewhere, to inject a factor of unpredictability into the work and, possibly, to stir recognition in older viewers, giving the film they’re watching a certain boost in credibility with a pop-culture wink. In the older films, like Labyrinth or The Man Who Fell to Earth or The Hunger, Bowie’s exotic, vaguely androgynous quality is all we see: his rock heritage is worn on his sleeve and empowers his performance. In the more recent The Prestige, Bowie’s performance was more buttoned-up as he played Nicola Tesla, but at the same time, the casting choice made perfect sense. Who better to play someone with as wild and untamed an imagination as Tesla’s than Bowie, the man who once dressed himself up as Ziggy Stardust, a man who communed with aliens? As Bowie’s musical career continues to develop, watching him in films like the ones sampled here should help to give well-deserved breadth to his accomplishments.