Video-2 – Page 36 – Press Play Video Blog

VIDEO ESSAY: From SLACKER to BOYHOOD: Cinematography in the films of Richard Linklater

In the late fall of 2001, in a movie theater in New York, I
fell asleep during Richard Linklater’s Waking
Life. Strangely enough, I think he might have welcomed that response. Or
at least his cinematographer’s camera would have. We’ve posted viewers’
reports of sleeping during films before at Press Play, but this was a different
sort of sleep, guided, in a sense, by the camerawork. Cinematography occupies a
strange place in Linklater’s films. While the movies are, on the one hand,
quite speech-driven, which is to say that the dialogue characters say to
each other sometimes forms the entire story, as in the Before… trilogy, we cannot
say that watching one of his films is not a visual experience as well. But it’s
a curious sort of visual experience. At the time I fell asleep during Waking
Life, I wasn’t dozing off out of boredom; it was out of comfort. Just over a
month before I saw the film, the World Trade Center had collapsed. Despite the
fact that New Yorkers were charging ahead with their lives all around me, the
air still smelled like burned flesh. I needed some relief. Sitting down to watch Waking
Life, with its delicately drawn characters floating gently through their
delicately drawn world, brought a sense of reassurance, a sense that, in
artistic works, at least, one might dwell without fear of imminent harm. All
that would take place here, after all, was that characters would talk to each
other, and the camera would watch them, or rather would display them, moving in
the flickering manner of animated figures, easily, relaxedly. The figures on
the screen would move forward in their way, and I, in my seat, processing the
film and the events taking place in the world outside the theater, would move
forward in my way, in a spirit of peaceful coexistence. There was solace, there, but there was also engagement, of a kind. This is, indeed, the
way the camera has functioned in Linklater’s films from his earliest works
onwards. It doesn’t force itself on you, and yet nevertheless it brings you in.
The intimacy, for instance, of the “You’re gonna miss that plane” scene in Before Sunset would be far diminished if
it weren’t for its sense of strange stillness, created by the sensitive use of
the camera. You could say it’s a Taoist lens—it does very little, at least
little that we notice, and yet we feel utterly immersed when we watch this
director’s films. You can feel the heat in Slacker’s
Austin; you can smell the chalkdust in School
of Rock; you can feel the night breeze in Dazed and Confused. And yet the camera here dosn’t have the aggressive, probing presence of that of a
Scorsese or an Allen or a Lynch. The cameras of Linklater’s numerous cinematographers–Lee Daniel, Pete James, Tommy Pallotta, or Maryse Alberti, or Rogier Stoffers, or Shane Kelly, or Dick Pope–share the characteristic of operating on a softer register, trying
less hard to get our attention than they might. And yet films like Boyhood would be far diminished without their sense of visual
scope, of the hugeness of the Big Bend, of the quietness of a Texas lake, of
the plainness and innocence and perplexity of a boy’s face, in close-up. Watching these films becomes an experience of gentle exchange, rather than spectatorship. And what do we, the viewers, get out of it? A sense of living differently, for an hour or two.–Max Winter

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.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

VIDEO ESSAY: Total Cinema: SNOWPIERCER

In its narrative, Snowpiercer is not a
subtle film. Its characters are broadly drawn, like figures in a myth,
or maybe an allegory. Its themes are repeated and reiterated through the
plot, dialogue, and mise en scène. This is all to its benefit, because
the complexities of Snowpiercer enrich its margins, silences, and
shadows.

On one hand, Snowpiercer is an engrossing sci-fi action movie, a
great addition to the blockbuster season. Take it for that and nothing
but that, and you will enjoy most of it. But even if you manage to
ignore the various signs that there is more going on than what’s on the
surface, the film’s resolution won’t leave you thinking this is just a
bunch of summer fun. The last section of the film is provocative, and
the final scene is among the most audacious of any recent movie I know.
(I won’t tell you anything about it here, since the film is new and in
relatively limited release, but it is certainly an ending that deserves
discussion.) This is typical of director Bong Joon-Ho—when I first saw
them, the endings of Memories of Murder and Mother both sent me quickly
back to re-watch the entire movie, as the conclusions made those movies
into something more than I’d known them to be during the initial
viewing. Bong loves telling stories from within familiar genres because
genres encourage certain expectations, and those expectations can then
be exploited. Much of the power of Snowpiercer comes from the desires
our expectations command: we think we know where the story is going,
because we think we know what kind of story it is, and we want it to go
in certain directions—to stay on the track of its genre, as it were—and it seems to be going there, but then … no … and no … and no…
The effect is almost that of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt: we are
alienated from our desires, distanced into reflection, to wondering why
we wanted the journey to follow a particular path in the first place.

The distancing doesn’t wait till the end, though. From early on,
Bong uses multiple techniques to keep us from ever settling down into
knowing exactly what the film is up to. Serious scenes of violence
suddenly shift to broad humor, and vice versa. The mix of tones in
Snowpiercer is jarring at first, because it’s hard to get our bearings.
Is this an earnest political parable? Is it satire? Is it a comment on
human nature, or revolution, or maybe race or nationality? The only
answer is: Yes.

Its multitude of tones and apparent purposes are equalled by the
multitude of references to other movies (passionate cinephiles could
spend at least one viewing just looking for allusions), some obvious and
some not, as well as its own occasional meta moments, for instance a
character referring to the uprising among the people at the back of the
train as "a blockbuster production with a devilishly unpredictable
plot."

It’s a slumgullion stew, this movie, but it’s all held together by
the clear, simple movement of the plot, the quest of the characters to
get to the front of the train. It’s a focused quest, a narrow one, and
it structures the characters’ actions and the viewers’ hopes and fears.
It’s like tunnel vision—and, indeed, tunnel vision is an important
element of one of the most impressive sequences in the film. The ending
recontextualizes it all, however, and offers a new vision, one that
opens the film to ambiguous and perilous meanings, and sends us back to
wonder about our own world, the one we return to when the movie ends.
What is the engine that powers the train that keeps us on our own
tracks? What structures our own actions, hopes, fears? What lenses let
us see in tunnels but hide the possibilities beyond, the invisible
dreams in our periphery?

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

ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: Ciphers, Masks and Longing: Old Hollywood Ethos and Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey’s latest album, Ultraviolence, is filled with hazy and seductive contradictions,
affirming the glamour and seduction of old Hollywood icons, femme fatales with
Veronica Lake waves, and mobster wives with baby voices. Del Rey is certainly
not the only female singer to be drawn to these motifs. But the worldview that Del Rey constructs is
not Beyonce’s sepia-hued “Why Don’t You Love Me?”, where Queen Bey playfully
dismantles the image of the 1950s housewife.

https://vimeo.com/11465235

Nor is it Madonna’s
wink to Marilyn Monroe in her video for “Material Girl.”

Del Rey isn’t
interested in reclaiming the figure of the housewife or movie star. In fact she
takes her feminine icons very seriously.
Her video for "Shades of Cool," for example, has echoes of Marilyn Monroe’s
famous pool scene in “Something’s Got to Give,” and in “Brooklyn Baby” she
references her in lyrics, based on some of Monroe’s famous diary entries where
she wonders why no one takes her seriously.

The world of Ultraviolence is filled with reverence for a
rock-and-roll lifestyle that many feel has already come and gone, but that Del
Rey clearly appreciates for more than the sake of nostalgia. In interviews she
has explained that her songs are mostly autobiographical, plucked from times in
her life when she has felt most lost, and also the times, generally in the arms
of a lover, when she has felt most genuinely free.

One of the main reasons that Del Rey has been maligned has to
do with the fact that she is an artist who is more interested in the masks we
wear than in being a “strong female role model.” Critics of Del Rey have long
denied her authenticity (her records under her given name, Lizzy Grant, looked
and felt intrinsically different than her first album as LDR, Born To Die) as well as her agency. Del
Rey has historically been seen as a pawn of record executives, or, even worse,
as a figure that is merely empty and submissive. Pitchfork called Born To Die the “equivalent of a faked orgasm” and critics like Ann Powers
lamented that Del Rey represented “the worst parts of being a girl.”

For a woman to be perceived as “submissive” or “docile” is
the ultimate feminist insult, even though these words are often strangely
unspecific, related to being gentle, soft-spoken, quiet, or even just being
disarmingly pretty, or liking or wanting male attention. Songs demanding better
treatment and female empowerment existed before the girl power anthems I grew
up on in the late 90s and early 2000s. In
the 60s, Aretha Franklin demanded respect . . .

. . . and Carole King and
Joni Mitchell urged us to listen to women’s stories; artists from Madonna,
Beyonce, Christina Aguilera, TLC to Lil Kim, Missy Elliott, and Nicki Minaj
often explicitly sing about double standards in the music industry and in the
bedroom. While they all define it in a different way, each artist explicitly
urges women to seek empowerment above all else.

Del Rey doesn’t play into this script. Catherine Vigier,
whose essay The Meaning of Lana Del Rey is
often discussed when pop culture critics lament the influence of Del Rey on the
Millennial generation, claims that one of the reasons Del Rey is so controversial
is that she is a woman who is clear that she doesn’t know what she wants, in a
world where feminists argue that knowing what you want is the ultimate and
definitive feminist act.

But is Del Rey’s desire to play with the many masks she is
given inherently anti-woman? In recent interviews Del Rey has made it clear
that she is less interested in talking about feminism than space, a quote that,
like many of Del Rey’s quotes, could lead to a thousand different interpretations.
In truth, Del Rey’s influences are mostly moody depressives, icons like Kurt
Cobain, whose vulnerability was read as “sensitive,” rather than “vacant.”

Unlike many current female artists, like Lily Allen, and
popular comedians, like Amy Schumer, whose social commentary is laid thick with
sarcasm, there is something about Del Rey that is disturbingly earnest.

Her constant need for
sex is more akin to The Rolling Stones’ howl for “Satisfaction” than Samantha’s
need to get laid on Sex and the City.

Del Rey is closer to a character in a Mary Gaitskill
collection: she is a submissive, like many of Gaitskill’s narrators, who seek
out fantasies and are ultimately calling all the shots, rather than an empty
headed, meek ingénue like Anastasia in Fifty
Shades of Grey.

Though some insist that Del Rey’s nostalgic styles are
inherently anti-feminist, female sexuality in pre-code and even post-code
Hollywood,was, in reality, filled with saucy, sexually assertive women, vixens
and femme fatales who played up their sexual charms joyfully—Barbara Stanwyck,
Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Josephine Baker, as well as the ever delightful
Mae West.

Playful banter remained a mainstay in classic Hollywood
cinema, where female wit was both smart and playful, a way to reel a guy in or
keep the men at bay. Heterosexual banter often sizzled on screen because it
managed to highlight sexual tension between equals.

Del Rey is certainly more Marilyn Monroe than Mae West, but
her self-described “gangster Nancy Sinatra” image is also one that is much more
about the female gaze than the male one. Del Rey is obsessed with the way women look at men, about
the desire to be desired. In the video for “Blue Jeans”, for example, we watch
Del Rey watching her lover undress, her face sinking into pure pleasure as he
gently slides his fingers into her mouth.

In her video for
“Ride,” Del Rey is in constant pursuit of pleasure, her little red sneakers
walking tentatively on pavement, her hands thrown back in the air, while riding
on the back of a motorcycle.

If she lives for the
men she loves, as many criticize, it is also those men who are cheering for her
in the spotlight. Is the desire for male attention inherently anti-feminist,
as some theorists claim? For men like The Fonz on Happy Days, The Situation on The
Jersey Shore, and Barney Stinson on How
I Met Your Mother, their entire sense of identity is based on their ability
to pick up chicks. Indeed, the same is
true in many commercials. Take, for instance, the Axe body spray commercial,
predicated on the idea that male power is derived from the ability to score
with a hottie.

When men alter their
body hair, douse themselves in cologne and use “pick-up artist” techniques,
they are seen as active, free agents, in charge of their own destiny, but when
women like Del Rey paint their nails, don pretty dresses and talk about boys
they want to love, they are dismissed by many men and women as being
empty-headed and unserious.

The Bechdel test, the idea that female characters in a movie
should have at least one scene where they are talk to one another about
something other than a male romantic interest, is often cited as a means of
figuring out whether female characters are allowed true agency. If one uses
this test as a guideline for romantic and sexual obsession for heterosexual
women, it automatically reduces the complexity of their characters. This idea
plays itself out all the time, especially in films targeting teenagers. Male
teen lust is portrayed as natural, and learning to approach women is seen as a
way that young men can build their identity. In contrast, teenage girls and
young women who are interested in romance are often portrayed as foolish,
unintelligent, or “boy-crazy”.

For all her sauciness, Mae West would have failed the
Bechdel test. Throughout her self-made career she was often portrayed as the
single female being admired by a gaggle of men eager for her affection and
approval. She is obsessed with
seeing herself as an object of great desire, which she doesn’t see as being
antithetical to being seen as an individual who can get whatever she wants with
her fiery wit and her insistence on being taken seriously.

Del Rey insists on a different kind of seriousness: she
really wants her despair to be seen as human, for her conflicted desires to
reach the same level of gravitas that we afford male leads. One of her favorite
icons, Marilyn Monroe, wanted the same thing: to be taken seriously for her
intelligence, for her viewers to look beyond the mask—that baby voice, that
golden coifed hair—and see the person underneath the artifice.

Unlike Monroe, whose desire to be seen for her humanity over
her status as “sex icon”, went largely unrecognized in the era she lived, Del
Rey’s status in a post-third wave feminist world is constantly discussed. But perhaps Del Rey’s image is charged
precisely because viewers haven’t changed as much as we think we have since the
40s and the 50s, when a post Hays code world supplied a crib sheet for what
desirability looked and sounded like. In her article, “Pretty When You Cry,”
for Pitchfork, Lindsay Zoladz claims there is in fact something subversive
about Del Rey’s insistence on sadness, her refusal to wear a happy face; in a
world where people often demand female exuberance, Del Rey refuses to placate
audiences with a smile and a wink.

While I grew up on the angry rock anthems
of artists like Fiona Apple, Tori Amos and Alanis Morrissette, I also take Del
Rey seriously when she says she doesn’t find feminism particularly interesting.
Despite how drenched in femininity her persona is, Del Rey is much more
interested in being an icon, period, than a female icon, and her gritty image
on Ultraviolence is all about
swagger. In “Ultraviolence” she croons The Crystals’ uncomfortable lyrics, “He
hit me and it felt like a kiss,” and sounds like a breathy Bill Withers
beckoning a lover, “If it feels this good being used / you just keep on using
me / until you use me up.” In this same song she also references the
novel Lolita, which Del Rey has often
cited as a source for inspiration.

In the end, Lana Del Rey could care less about your girl
power anthems and political charges. Ultraviolence
is about the contradictions in the human experience—lust and sadness and
existential need and desires that don’t have easy answers and won’t be fixed
with better public policies. The world of
Ultraviolence is important not because it necessarily has specific
political aims, but because it is about the messiness of the human experience
and how, no matter how many power ballads we write, true satisfaction, for men
and women, is still often mysteriously elusive.

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

***A special thanks to Serena Bramble for the Monroe/West/Bacall and Knowles/Mitchell/Dietrich medleys posted above!***

VIDEO ESSAY: The Coen Brothers: Men of Constant Sorrow

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

VIDEO ESSAY: In Memory of Paul Mazursky 1930–2014

A Cinema of Real Feeling: Remembering Paul Mazursky

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

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

VIDEO ESSAY: White Knights and Bad People

[The text of the video essay follows.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Dads/Bad Dads: A Tribute to Cinematic Fathers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIDEO ESSAY: Virtual Animals: Building the Digital Ark

[The script of the video essay follows.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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