Video Essay – Page 16 – Press Play Video Blog

Watch: A Video Essay About Albert Maysles’ Larger Than Life Film Subjects

If you were going to teach a child about the Berlin Wall, it would probably be best to start by showing them one stone and explaining the story behind it. If you wanted to teach someone about Heironymous Bosch’s great painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights," you would go forward detail by detail, rather than trying to take in the whole painting at once. If you want to understand Beethoven’s Fifth, go after it note by note first. Similarly, the late Albert Maysles went after the details of his subjects’ lives, and magnified them, and in so doing showed us more about their enormity than twenty dense biographies might show, whatever those books scholarly attributes might be. In this touching and respectful video essay by Nelson Carvajal, we can see that what Albert Maysles was after in his documentaries was the details–he wanted a way to show the vastness of his subjects’ accomplishments, from Muhammad Ali to Vladimir Horowitz to Paul McCartney, and so he showed us the facial expressions, mannerisms, turns of phrase, and quirks of movement which characterized their off-camera moments, their time out of the public eye. In teaching us about their humanity, he showed in what sense they could be called greater than human.–Max Winter

Watch: What Makes Spike Jonze Movies Unique? A Video Essay

Despite the fact that the look of his films often takes a
back seat to bizarre stories and quirky characters, Spike Jonze has
crafted a uniquely whimsical visual style over the course of his four
feature films. Making the most out of simple elements such as lens
flares, floating camera movement, centered framing, and wide-angle close-ups, Jonze creates an atmosphere that appears to be lifted straight from
the pages of a fairytale storybook. His camera is fascinated
with the mundane; intently exploring fabrics and materials, finding
beauty and significance in the obscure and unnoticed. Dust particles
floating in a beam of sunlight become hypnotic. The delicate plaster of
marionettes feels as lifelike as human flesh. The matted fur wrapped
around a child strikes us with an overwhelming sense of marvel and
nostalgia.

In his first two films, Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation
(2002), Jonze used a much more subdued sense of whimsy to express the
playfully dark atmospheres. His two most recent works, Where the Wild
Things Are (2009) and Her (2013), are saturated with the whimsy
aesthetic, mirroring the wonderment and childlike fascinations
associated with the films. Jonze utilizes the aesthetic in order to
stitch together worlds suitable for his equally whimsical characters.

Films used:
Being John Malkovich (1999)
Adaptation (2002)
Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
Her (2013)

Music:
"Igloo" and "The Moon Song" by Karen O

Jacob T. Swinney is an industrious film editor and filmmaker, as well as a recent graduate of Salisbury University.

Watch: 29 Movies Shaped by (and Preceding) Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Persona’: A Video Essay

The influence of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona is legion. Using 29
other films, this essay positions his masterpiece in terms of what came after
it and what went before. It shows how Bergman visualized his central theme of identity
by way of reflections, splitting the screen, and shadows.

Films Referenced in This Piece:

Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

Orphée (Jean Cocteau, 1950)

The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998)

Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959)

Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Don’t Look Back (Marina de Van, 2009)

Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Performance (Nicolas Roeg, Donald Cammell, 1970)

Stardust Memories (Woody Allen 1980)

Old Boy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)

The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieswlowski, 1991)

The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1976)

Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar, 2002)

The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1993)

Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002)

Les Biches (Claude Chabrol, 1968)

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)

Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1987)

Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009)

The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)

Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (Victor Fleming, 1941)

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Watch: A Video Essay That Breaks Down the Beatles Film ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ Shot By Shot

It’s easy enough to take The Beatles for granted: Oh, them. Of course. I’ve heard it all. Hey Jude. Help. Let It Be. Here Comes the Sun. Sure. They’re great. Whatever. Part of the reason one does this so easily is that their music is engrained within many listeners’ ideas of what constitutes good music, whether the listeners know it or not. We compare every soulful ballad with "Hey Jude." We compare every punk anthem, believe it or not with "Revolution." And, as time passes, it begin to seem as if this is not by accident: we become ever more aware of the ways the band shaped its image with the express purpose of permeating the music of an era, of making themselves into legends. This is no less true of such great Beatles films as Yellow Submarine, Help!, or A Hard Day’s Night; they set a high bar for the films of their type that followed, such as Pink Floyd’s The Wall or Tommy, and it’s not clear that these films have ever measured up. In his most recent video essay for Fandor, Kevin B. Lee uses cinemetrics, a technique he’s used before, to better understand the way the opening sequence of A Hard Day’s Night works; is it true that the opener shows the band seemingly at war with an ocean of fans, or is something else going on? Lee uses frames (labeled cleverly as "Beatle Cam," "Paul Cam," or "Fan Cam") to show the screen time given to all of the different players in the sequence–and in so doing, he teaches us something about the way the film is put together. While it might seem as if the struggle between the band and its admirers is perpetual, in fact the fans take up a fraction of the screen time the band takes up; the worshippers’ presence here is slight but powerful. In examining the film this way, Lee gives us a very significant insight into the way the band constructed the larger-than-life, eternal impression it made on fans worldwide.

Watch: A Video Essay on How To Be a Cinephile

Am I a "film nerd," or cinephile? Possibly, or probably. My earliest experiences of film were at a very young age, with Fisher-Price filmstrips you could watch in a small viewer, and which I tended to watch over and over. Fast forward a decade or so, and foreign films entered in: Ingmar Bergman. Federico Fellini. Werner Herzog. And, very importantly, Truffaut. This open-hearted video essay by Shannon Strucci instructs the viewer on how to be a cinephile; this part of what will be a multi-part series focuses largely on the work of Francois Truffaut, starting with his work as a critic for Cahiers du Cinema and moving forward to his immortal film work. I could not be happier about the deference Strucci shows to The 400 Blows, a film I have always found fascinating from beginning to end–and which, if I’m allowed to indulge a cliche, "speaks" to everybody, to universally felt moments of pain and triumph. There are times, after all, when all you can do is run, as Antoine Doinel does–either into the distance or into the ocean of film itself.

Watch: David Fincher’s Eternal Return in ‘Gone Girl’: A Video Essay

Ah, the eternal return. History repeats itself. We think we change, but we don’t. You think someone may surprise you with unpredictable behavior–and then they don’t. Gone Girl is a perfect film to demonstrate this historical and, at bottom, psychological tendency; the most consistent thing about both Nick Dunne and Amy Dunne is their duplicitousness, and we keep seeing it over, and over, and over again throughout the film. And, as Jop Leuven points out in this brief but pointed video essay, the film’s visual structure mirrors this repetition; we see the same shots, with slight variations, repeated from the beginning to the end of the film. Amy lying on a pillow. Nick standing in front of a picture of his wife. Amy opening a door with mock innocence. And onwards. David Fincher is a master explorer of the works he adapts; he gets under the hood, assesses their potential, and, after a little bit of tinkering, takes us through them with such brio that the work he is adapting is utterly transformed. His adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s brilliant novel is no exception, as this video proves.

WATCH: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Cinema of Self-Awareness: A Video Tour

In Shakespeare studies, the term anagnorisis means a moment of self-recognition, when a character becomes blazingly aware of his or her place in the world, and of his or her relationship with other characters, after a long period of denial. Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello are practically bursting with anagnorisis; the central figures of these plays cannot withstand the truth about themselves and, watching them, we cannot withstand it either. The films of Alejandro González Iñárritu have anagnorisis to spare, as well. It does not always have to be tragic: Riggan Thompson’s (Michael Keaton) flight in Birdman is an example. However, in the films of this director, more often than not, anagnorisis signifies the shouldering of a weight one did not think one could bear: see Richard’s (Brad Pitt) moment of reckoning with his wife’s injury in Babel, or Jack Jordan’s (Benicio del Toro) tragic glance within himself in 21 Grams. Edgar Martinez’s beautiful video flight through Iñárritu’s work calls up these moments and thrusts them out for our attention. When presented in such an open manner, it is hard not to recognize Iñárritu’s strength as a storyteller, whatever what one might think of him as an overall filmmaker.

WATCH: A Video Essay on Shadows Through Cinema History

Shadows are a natural part of any given scene in a film–when the subject or an object interrupts a light source, an area of darkness is created. But what happens when the shadow itself becomes the subject? What happens when the darkness on the face of a character is something more than just the absence of direct light? These types of shadows can communicate a variety of different tones and ideas.

In ‘No Country for Old Men,’ Sheriff Ed Tom Bell opens the motel door to engage in what would be the climactic final shootout in a more traditional western. The door slowly swings open, revealing the shadow of an iconic cowboy on the opposite wall. We see what Bell needs to be–something he simply cannot. In ‘Raging Bull,’ the weight of Jake LaMotta’s imprisonment is expressed through the exaggerated, intruding shadows in his cell. His mental imprisonment becomes as apparent as his physical captivity. In ‘There Will be Blood,’ a train moves across the sunset, creating a ripple of shadows on the face of the observing Daniel Plainview. A train, the vehicle that both brought his son home and took him away, obstructs the direction of his progress.

While many shadows in cinema are simply a complement of lighting, the very deliberate and thoughtful shadows in this video convey everything from fear to empowerment–from the empty to the iconic.

Films used:
Nosferatu
Frankenstein (1931)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Raging Bull
Psycho (1960)
The Big Combo
Scarface (1932)
Rumble Fish
Sin City
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
No Country for Old Men
Django Unchained
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Lawrence of Arabia
Punch-Drunk Love
Unbroken
The Thin Red Line
The Tree of Life
To the Wonder
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Forrest Gump
Drive
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Jennifer’s Body
Unforgiven
The Big Lebowski
Skyfall
Apocalypse Now
Batman (1989)
The Dark Knight
Under the Skin
Inglourious Basterds
Only God Forgives
Strait-Jacket
Batman Returns
Man of Steel
Blade Runner
Pulp Fiction
Dallas Buyers Club
There Will be Blood
12 Years a Slave
Black Swan
V for Vendetta
Memento
Inside Llewyn Davis
Kill Bill Vol. 1
True Romance
The Departed
Panic Room
The Aviator
The Hurt Locker
Double Indemnity
The Man Who Wasn’t There
Shutter Island
The Godfather Part II
Lincoln
Batman Begins
Magnolia

Jacob T. Swinney is an industrious film editor and filmmaker, as well as a recent graduate of Salisbury University.

WATCH: Why DOES Quentin Tarantino Do Close-Ups in ‘Pulp Fiction’? A Video Study

https://vimeo.com/98882600

To say that Quentin Tarantino revels in exploitation is not an insult. One can exploit for one’s own gain as well as for the sake of a work. In ‘Pulp Fiction,’ Tarantino exploits everything there is to exploit. He exploits a wallet. He exploits a briefcase. He exploits running shorts. He even exploits John Travolta! He takes these images and figures–which aren’t real by the film’s end, having become refigured by his crazed imagination–and milks them for whatever he thinks their particular power might be. And afterwards, the images, people, actions acquire a rare charge, possibly symbolic, possibly merely electric–the kind of electricity generated when a director reaches out and touches the surface of the viewer’s imagination. And for this purpose he uses… the
close-up shot. Mark Fraser’s video montage shows us these close-ups in detail and, seen this way, their purpose becomes abundantly clear and immanent.

WATCH: A Video Essay on Wes Anderson’s Use of Red and Yellow

One can say that Wes Anderson is a master creator without implying that he is superior to other filmmakers. He is masterful in showing us that he is creating something, actively, onscreen–and moreover that we are creating it with him, in our reactions to it. He does this without seeming pretentious, overall. This video by Rishi Kaneria whips us through a cavalcade of Anderson’s films, showing off Anderson’s fascination with the colors red and yellow throughout the director’s work. Trying to assign a significance to the deep red of the carpet in the halls of the Grand Budapest Hotel, or the yellow of the Tenenbaum siblings’ tent, or the red of the curtain behind the awkward but confident Max Fischer is absurd. The deepest signficance is in the color itself–that Anderson has chosen it, and that he has left his mark on viewers’ retinas; the fact that it has personal significance for him should be all the "meaning" we need. Frustrated by this explanation? Don’t be. Watch this ever-so-brief but highly dense supercut, and enjoy.